WALT DREAMED HIS BROTHER’S DEATH AT FREDERICKSBURG. General Burnside, appearing as an angel at the foot of his bed, announced the tragedy: “The army regrets to inform you that your brother, George Washington Whitman, was shot in the head by a lewd fellow from Charleston.” The general alit on the bedpost and drew his dark wings close about him, as if to console himself. Moonlight limned his strange whiskers and his hair. His voice shook as he went on. “Such a beautiful boy. I held him in my arms while his life bled out. See? His blood made this spot.” He pointed at his breast, where a dark stain in the shape of a bird lay on the blue wool. “I am so very sorry,” the General said, choking and weeping. Tears fell in streams from his eyes, ran over the bed and out the window, where they joined the Rappahannock, which had somehow come north to flow through Brooklyn, bearing the bodies of all the late battle’s dead.
In the morning Walt read the wounded list in the Tribune. There it was: “First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore.” He knew from George’s letters that there was nobody named Whitmore in the company. He walked through snow to his mother’s house. “I’ll go and find him,” he told her.
Washington, Walt quickly discovered, had become a city of hospitals. He looked in half of them before a cadaverous-looking clerk told him he’d be better off looking at Falmouth, where most of the Fredericksburg wounded still lay in field hospitals. He got himself on a government boat that ran down to the landing at Aquia Creek, and went by railroad to the neighborhood of Falmouth, seeking Fer-rero’s Brigade and the Fifty-first New York, George’s regiment. Walt stood outside a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahan-nock, somebody’s splendid residence converted to a hospital, afraid to go in and find his mangled brother. He took a walk around the building, gathering his courage, and found a pile of amputated limbs, arms and legs of varying lengths, all black and blue and rotten in the chill. A thin layer of snow covered some of them. He circled the heap, thinking he must recognize his brother’s hand if he saw it. He closed his eyes and considered the amputation; his brother screaming when he woke from the ether, his brother’s future contracting to something bitter and small.
But George had only gotten a hole in his cheek. A piece of shell pierced his wispy beard and chipped a tooth. He had spit blood and hot metal into his hand, put the shrapnel in his pocket, and later showed it to his worried brother, who burst into tears and clutched him in a bear hug when they were reunited in Captain Francis’s tent, where George sat with his feet propped on a trunk and a cigar stuck in his bandaged face.
“You shouldn’t fret,” said George. “I couldn’t be any healthier than I am. And I’ve been promoted. Now you may call me Captain Whitman.” But Walt could not help fretting, even now that he knew his brother was alive and well. A great, fretting buzz had started up in his head, inspired by the pile of limbs, and the smell of blood in the air, and by ruined Fredericksburg, all broken chimneys and crumbling walls across the river. Walt stayed in George’s tent and, watching him sleep, felt a deep thrilling worry. He wandered around the camp, and as he passed by a fire in an enclosure of evergreen branches piled head high against the wind, he met a soldier. They sat down together by the fire, and the soldier told Walt hideous stories about the death of friends. “He put his head in my lap and whispered goodbye to his mama,” the soldier said. “And then he turned his eyes away from me and he was dead.” Walt put his face in the evergreen wall, smearing his beard with fresh sap, and thought how it smelled like Christmas.
Ten days later, Walt still couldn’t leave. He stood by and watched as George moved out with the healthy troops on Christmas Day, then idled in the deserted campground, watching the interminable caravans of army wagons passing and passing into the distance. Near at hand, some stragglers crossed his line of sight—a large young man leading a mule that pulled a wagon, on top of which perched a fat man cursing in French. When all were gone, and the campground empty, Walt went up to the brick mansion and made himself useful, changing dressings, fetching for the nurses, and just sitting with the wounded boys, with the same excited worry on him as when he watched George sleep. Back in Brooklyn a deep and sinister melancholy had settled over him. For the past six months Walt had wandered the streets with a terrible feeling in him—Hell under his skull bones, death under his breast bones, and a feeling that he would like most of all to lie down under the river and sleep forever. But in the hospital that melancholy was gone, scared off, perhaps, by all the shocking misery around him, and it had been replaced by a different sort of sadness, one that was vital, not still; a feeling that did not diminish his soul, but thrilled it.
When Walt finally left Falmouth, it was to watch over a cargo of wounded as they traveled through the early-morning darkness back to Aquia Creek, where they would be loaded on a steamer bound for Washington. With every jolt and shake of the train, a chorus of horrible groans wafted through the cars. Walt thought it would drive him insane. What saved him was the singing of a boy with a leg wound. The boy’s name was Hank Smith. He’d come all the way from divided Missouri, and said he had a gaggle of cousins fighting under General Beauregard. He sang “Oh, Susannah” over and over again, and no one told him to be quiet.
All the worst cases went to a hospital called Armory Square, because it was closest to the boat landing at the foot of Sixth Street. Walt accompanied them, and kept up the service he’d begun at Fal-mouth—visiting, talking, reading, fetching, and helping.
And he went to other hospitals. There were certainly enough of them to keep him busy. Their names were published in the papers like a list of churches—Finley, Campbell, Carver, Harewood, Mount Pleasant, Judiciary. And then there were the public buildings, also stuffed with wounded. Even the Patent Office held them; boys on cots set up on the marble floor of the Model Room. He brought horehound candy to an eighteen-year-old from Iowa, who lay with a missing arm and a sore throat in front of the glass case which held Ben Franklin’s printing press. Two boys from Brooklyn had cots in front of General Washington’s camp equipment. Walt read to them from Brooklyn papers his mother sent down, every now and then looking up at the General’s tents rolled neatly around their posts, his folded chairs and mess kit, his sword and cane, his washstand, his surveyor’s compass, and a few feet down in a special case all to itself, the Declaration of Independence. Other wounded boys lay in front of pieces of the Atlantic Cable, beside ingenious toys, in sight of rattraps, next to the razor of Captain Cook.
Walt could not visit every place all in a day, though he tried at first. Eventually, he picked a few and stuck with those. But mostly he was at Armory Square, where Hank Smith was.
“I had my daddy’s pistol with me,” said Hank Smith, sprawling in his slender iron-framed bed. “That’s why I got my leg still.” It wasn’t the first time Walt had been told how Hank had saved his own leg from the “chopping butchers” in the field hospital, but he didn’t mind hearing the story again. It was spring. The leg was still bad, though not as bad as it had been. At least that was the impression that Hank gave. He never complained about his wound. He’d come down with typhoid, too, a gift from the hospital. “I want my pistol back,” he said.
“I’ll see what I can do.” Walt always said that, but they both knew no one was going to give Hank back the pistol with which he’d threatened to blow out the brains of the surgeon who tried to take his leg. They had left him alone, then, and later another doctor had said there wasn’t any need to amputate.
“Meanwhile, here’s an orange,” said Walt. He pulled the fruit out of his coat pocket and peeled it. Soldiers’ heads began to turn in their beds as the smell drifted over the ward. Some asked if he had any for them.
“’Course he does,” said Hank. In fact, Walt had a coatful of them. He had bought them at Center Market, then walked through the misty, wet morning, over the brackish canal and across the filthy Mall. The lowing of cattle drifted towards him from the unfinished monument to General Washington as he walked along, wanting an orange for himself but afraid to eat one lest he be short when he got to the hospital. He had money for oranges, sweets, books, tobacco, and other good things from sponsors in Brooklyn and New York and elsewhere. And he had a little money for himself from a job, three hours a day as a copyist in the paymaster’s office—he’d given up, for the present, on seeking a fancier appointment, put away in a drawer the letters of introduction to powerful personages from Mr. Emerson. From his desk in the paymaster’s office, he had a spectacular view of Georgetown and the river, and the stones that were said to mark the watery graves of three Indian sisters. The sisters had cursed the spot: anyone who tried to cross there must drown. Walt would sit and stare at the rocks, imagining himself shedding his shirt and shoes by the riverside, trying to swim across. He imagined drowning, too, the great weight of water pressing down on him. (When he was a child, he’d nearly drowned in the sea.) Inevitably, his reverie was broken by the clump-clump of one-legged soldiers on their crutches, coming up the stairs to the office located, perversely, on the fourth floor.
After he’d distributed the oranges, Walt wrote letters on behalf of various boys until his hand ached. Dear Sister, he wrote for Hank, I have been brave but wicked. Pray for me.
Armory Square was under the command of a brilliant drunk named Canning Woodhull. Over whiskey, he explained to Walt his radical policies, which included washing hands and instruments, throwing out used sponges, and swabbing everything in sight with bitter-smelling Labarraque’s solution. He had an absolute lack of faith in laudable pus.
“Nothing laudable about it,” he said. “White or green, pus is pus, and either way it’s bad for the boys. There are creatures in the wounds—elements of evil. They are the emissaries of Hell, sent earthward to increase our suffering, to increase death and increase grief. You can’t see them except by their actions.” The two men knocked glasses and drank, and Walt made a face because the whiskey was medicinal, laced with quinine. It did not seem to bother Woodhull.
“I have the information from my wife,” Woodhull said, “who has great and secret knowledge. She talks to spirits. Much of what she hears is nonsense—do not tell her I said so. But this bit about the creatures in the pus—that’s true.”
Maybe it was. Woodhull’s hospital got the worst cases and kept them alive better than any other hospital in the city, even ones that got casualties only half as severe. The doctor stayed in charge despite a reputation as a wastrel and a drunk and a nascent lunatic. A year earlier he had been removed by a coalition of his colleagues, only to be reinstated by Dr. Letterman, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, who had been personally impressed by many visits to Armory Square. “They say General Grant is a drunk, too,” Letterman said in response to the charges against Dr. Woodhull.
“The creatures are vulnerable to prayer and bromine, and whiskey and Labarraque’s. Lucky for us.” Woodhull downed another glass. “Ah, sir—there is the matter of the nurses. Some of them are complaining. Just last Tuesday I was in Ward E with the redoubtable Mrs. Hawley. We saw you come in at the end of the aisle and she said, ‘Here comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and unbelief to my boys. I think I would rather see the evil one himself—at least if he had horns and hoofs—in my ward. I shall get him out as soon as possible!’ And she rushed off to do just that. And you know how she failed to eject you, how she always fails to eject you.” He poured again.
“Shall I stop coming, then?”
“Heavens no. As long as old Hawley is complaining, I’ll know you’re doing good. God bless her pointy little head.”
Two surgeons came into Woodhull’s makeshift office, a corner of Ward F sectioned off by three regimental flags.
“Assistant Surgeon Walker is determined to kill Captain Carter,” said Dr. Bliss, a dour black-eyed man from Baltimore. “She has given him opium for his diarrhea, and, very foolishly, in my opinion, withheld ipecac and calomel.” Dr. Mary Walker stood next to him, looking calm, her arms folded across her chest. Her blue uniform was immaculate, a studied contrast to Woodhull’s stained and threadbare greatcoat, which he wore in winter and summer alike.
“Dr. Walker is doing as I have asked her,” said Woodhull. “Ipecac and calomel are to be withheld in all cases of flux and diarrhea.”
“For God’s sake, why?” asked Dr. Bliss, his face reddening. He was new in Armory Square. Earlier that same day Woodhull had castigated him for not cleaning a suppurating chest wound.
“Because it is for the best,” said Woodhull. “Because if you do it that way, a boy will not die. Because if you do it that way, some mother’s heart will not be broken.”
Dr. Bliss turned redder, then paled, as if his rage had broken and ebbed. He scowled at Dr. Walker, turned sharply on his heel, and left. Dr. Walker sat down.
“Buffoon,” she said. Woodhull poured whiskey for her, handed her the glass, then took a rag and began to knock the lint from her second lieutenant’s shoulder straps. It was an open secret in the hospital that they were married in all but name.
“Dr. Walker,” said Woodhull, “why don’t you tell Mr. Whitman about your recent arrest?”
The woman sipped her whiskey and told how she’d been arrested outside of her boardinghouse for masquerading as a man. Walt only half listened to her talk. He was thinking about diarrhea. It was just about the worst thing, he had decided. He’d seen it kill more boys than all the minié balls and shrapnel, and typhoid and pneumonia, than all the other afflictions combined. He’d written to his mother: War is nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory. Those who like wars ought to be made to fight in them. And sometimes, up to his neck in sickness and death, he did believe that the war was an insufferable evil, but other times it seemed to be gloriously necessary, and all the blood and carnage and misery a terrible new beginning that was somehow a relief to him.
“I did my best to resist them,” said Dr. Walker, “and I shouted out, ‘Congress has bestowed on me the right to wear trousers!’” She held out her cup for more whiskey, and shook her head sadly at Walt. “But it was to no avail.”
In the summer, Walt saw the President almost every day. He lived on the route Mr. Lincoln took to and from his summer residence north of the city, and walking down the street, soon after leaving his rooms in the morning, he’d hear the approach of the party. Always Walt stopped and waited for them to pass. Mr. Lincoln dressed in plain black and rode a gray horse. He was surrounded by twenty-five or thirty cavalry with their sabers drawn and held up over their shoulders. They got so they would exchange bows, he and the President, Walt tipping his broad, floppy gray felt hat, Lincoln tipping his high stiff black one, and bending a little in the saddle. And every time they did this Walt had the same thought: A sad man.
With the coming of the hot weather Dr. Woodhull redoubled his efforts to eradicate noxious effluvia. He ordered the windows thrown open, and burned eucalyptus leaves in small bronze censers set in the four corners of each ward. The eucalyptus, combined with the omnipresent acrid reek of Labarraque’s solution, gave some of the boys aching heads, for which Dr. Woodhull prescribed whiskey.
“I want a bird,” Hank Smith said one day in July. Walt had brought several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, mixed them with ice and water, and delivered the delicious concoctions to the boys, along with the news from Gettysburg. Hank was uninspired by Meade’s victory. He was in a bad mood.
“I’ve been here forever,” he said. “And I am going to be here forever.” He had been fighting a bad fever for a week. “Nonsense,” Walt said, and helped him change out of his soaked shirt, then wiped him down with a cool wet towel. The shirt he took to the window, where he wrung out the sweat, watching it fall and dapple the bare ground. He laid the shirt to dry on the sill, and considered his damp, salty hands. In the distance Walt could see the Capitol, magnificent even under scaffolding.
“I want a bird,” Hank said again. “When I was small, my sister got me a bird. I called it after her—Olivia. Would you help me get one?” Walt left the window and sat on a stool by the bed. The sun lit up the hair on Hank’s chest, and called to Walt’s mind shining fields of wheat.
“Did you read my book?” Walt asked him, because he’d finally given Hank a copy, inscribed to my dear dear dear dear boy. Walt had had a dream, a happy one at last. Hank, transformed by Walt’s words, had leaped out of bed, wound gone, typhoid gone, had shaken Walt by his shoulders, and had shouted “Camerado!” so loud the Capitol dome rang like a bell, and all the boys all over the country had put down their guns and embraced each other in celebration of that beautiful word.
“I fingered it a little. But a bird, wouldn’t that be fine?”
“I could get you a bird,” Walt said after a moment. “Though I don’t know where from.”
“I know where,” said Hank, as Walt helped him into a new shirt. With a jerk of his head Hank indicated the window. “There’s plenty of birds out in the yard. You just get a rock and some string.”
Walt came back the next day with rock and string, and they set a trap of breadcrumbs on the windowsill. Crouching beneath the window, Walt grabbed at whatever came for the crumbs. He missed two jays and a blackbird, but caught a beautiful cardinal by its leg. It chirped frantically and pecked at his hand. The fluttering of its wings against his wrists made him think of the odd buzz that still thrilled his soul when he was on the wards. He brought the bird to Hank, who tied the string to its leg, and the rock to the string, then set the rock down by his bed. The cardinal tried to fly for the window, but only stuck in midair, its desperate wings striking up a small breeze that Walt, kneeling near it, could feel against his face. Hank clapped and laughed.
Hank called the bird Olivia, though Walt pointed out that it was not a female bird. The female of the species was dun and dull, he said, but Hank seemed not to hear. Olivia became the ward’s pet. Other boys would insist on having him near their beds. It did not take the bird long to become domesticated. Soon he was eating from Hank’s hand, and sleeping at night beneath his cot. They kept him secret from the nurses and doctors, until one morning Hank was careless and fell asleep with him out in the middle of the aisle while Dr. Woodhull was making his rounds. Walt had just walked on the ward, his arms full of candy and fruit and novels.
“Who let this dirty bird into my hospital?” Woodhull asked. He very swiftly bent down and picked up the stone, then tossed it out the window. Olivia trailed helplessly behind it. Walt dropped his packages and rushed outside, where he found the bird in the dirt, struggling with a broken wing. He put him in his shirt and took him back to his room, where he died three days later, murdered by the landlady’s cat. Walt told Hank that Olivia had flown away. “A person can’t have anything,” Hank said. He called Olivia a bad bird, and growled for a week about his faithlessness.
At Christmas, Mrs. Hawley and her cronies trimmed the wards, hanging evergreen wreaths on every pillar, and stringing garlands across the hall. At the foot of every bed, they hung a tiny stocking, hand-knitted by Washington society ladies. Walt went around stuffing them with walnuts and lemons and licorice.
Hank’s leg got better and worse, better and worse. Walt cornered Dr. Woodhull and said he had a bad feeling about Hank’s health. Woodhull insisted he was going to be fine; Walt’s fretting was pointless.
Hank’s fevers waxed and waned, too. One night, Walt came in from a blustery snowstorm, his beard full of snow. Hank insisted on pressing his face into it, saying it made him feel so much better than any medicine had, except maybe paregoric, which he found delicious, and which made him feel he was flying in his bed.
Walt read to him from the New Testament, all the portions having to do with the first Christmas. “Are you a religious man?” Hank asked him.
“Probably not, my dear, in the way that you mean.” Though he did make a point of visiting the Armory Square chapel, whenever he was there. It was a little building, with a quaint, onion-shaped steeple. Walt would sit in the back and listen to the services for boys whom he’d been seeing almost every day. He wrote their names down in a small leather-bound notebook that he kept in one of his pockets. By Christmas, he had pages and pages of them. Sometimes at night he would sit in his room and read the names softly aloud by the light of a single candle.
Hank dropped off to sleep as Walt read, but Walt kept on with the story, because he could tell that Hank’s new neighbor was listening attentively. His name was Oliver Barley. He had been tortured by Mosby’s Rangers, staked spread-eagled to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet. Whenever Walt came near to try and speak with him, Barley would glare at him and say, “Shush!” And sometimes if Walt and Hank were speaking too loud, he’d pelt them with bandages sopped with the exudate from his hands. It was Walt’s ambition to be Barley’s friend, but the boy rejected all his friendly advances. Yet now he was listening.
“Do you like this story?” Walt ventured, stopping briefly in his reading.
“Hush up,” said Oliver Barley, and he turned away on his side. Walt might have gone on reading, but just then Dr. Walker came by and asked to borrow his Bible. She said she had news from the War Department.
“What’s the news?” he asked her.
“Nothing good,” she said. “It is dark, dark everywhere.” She wanted to read some Job, she said, to cheer herself. She took Walt’s Bible and walked off down the ward, putting her hand out now and then to touch a boy’s leg or foot as she passed. When she opened the door to leave, some music slipped in. It seemed to be borne along to Walt’s ears by a gust of frigid air. Voices were singing: “For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over.” Walt kissed Hank’s sweaty head, then followed Dr. Walker off the ward. He followed the song to an invalid chorus in Ward K, led by a young nurse who accompanied herself on a melodeon. The gas was turned down low, as if to heighten the effect of the candles held by all the singers. There were deep shadows all up and down the ward. Walt retreated into one of these, and put his head down and sang along.
Sometimes when he could not sleep, which was often, Walt would walk around the city, past the serene mansions on Lafayette Square, past the President’s house, where he would stop and wonder if a light in the window implied that Mr. Lincoln was awake and agonizing. One night he saw a figure in a long, trailing black veil move, lamp in hand, past a series of windows, and he imagined it must be Mrs. Lincoln, searching forlornly for her little boy, who had died two winters previous. Walt walked past the empty market stalls, along the ever-stinking canal, where he would pause, look down into the dirty water, and see all manner of things float by: boots and bonnets, half-eaten vegetables, animals. Once there was a dead cat drifting on a little floe of ice.
Walking on, he would pass into Murder Bay, where whores uttered long, pensive hoots at him, but generally left him alone. He would peek into alleys that housed whole families of “contraband.” On one occasion, a stout young girl had come out of the dark, pushing a wheelbarrow in which another girl was cuddled up with a small white dog in her lap. The little dog was yipping fearfully, but the girls were laughing. Walt traded them candy from his pocket for a gleeful ride in their wheelbarrow, the two of them pushing him along for a few yards until he fell out into the filthy road, laughing hysterically, the little dog jumping on him and catching its paws in his beard.
Walt would cut back along the canal, then across, sometimes watching the moon shine on the towers of the Smithsonian castle, and on the white roofs and white fence of Armory Square—the whole scene so expressively silent in the pale weak light. He would walk among the shrubs and trees of the Mall, sometimes getting lost on a footpath that went nowhere, but eventually he would cross the canal again and walk up to the Capitol. There was the great statue of General Washington, the one that everyone ridiculed because he was dressed in a toga. (It was said that his sword was raised in a threat to do harm to the country if his clothes were not returned.)
Walt liked the statue. He would crawl up into its lap and sprawl out, Pietà-like, or else put his arms around the thick marble neck and have a good wrenching cry. At dawn, Walt would stand outside the Capitol, writing his name in the snow with his urine, and he could smell the bread baking in the basement. He had a friend in the bakery who loaded him down with countless hot loaves. Walt would walk back to Armory Square, warmed by the bread in his coat, and sometimes he’d have enough so that every full-diet boy in a ward would wake with a still-warm loaf on his chest.
“They want to take my leg,” Hank told him. It was early May, and still cold. “I ain’t going to let them. You’ve got to get me a gun.”
“Hush,” said Walt. “They won’t take your leg.” In fact, it looked like they would have to. Just when Hank had seemed on the verge of good health, just when he had beaten the typhoid, the leg had flared up again and deteriorated rapidly. Dr. Woodhull cleaned the wound, prayed over it, swabbed it with whiskey, all to no avail. A hideous, stinking infection had taken root, and was spreading.
“I saw my brother last week,” Walt told Hank. “Marching with Burnside’s army. It was on Fourteenth Street. I watched for three hours before the Fifty-first came along. I joined him just before they came to where the President and General Burnside were standing on a balcony, and the interest of seeing me made George forget to notice the President and salute him!”
“Hush up!” said Oliver Barley.
Hank raised his voice a little. “They’ll take his leg, too. Or both his legs. He had better keep a good watch on them.”
“Yes,” said Walt. “The Ninth Corps made a very fine show indeed.” Hank gave a harrumph, and turned over on his side, clearly not wanting to talk anymore. Walt went looking for Dr. Woodhull, to discuss Hank’s condition, but couldn’t find him in his office. There was a pall of silence and gloom over all the wards. News of the horrible casualties accrued by General Grant in his Wilderness campaign had reached the hospital. Dr. Bliss and Mrs. Hawley were having a loud discussion as she changed dressings.
“Trust a drunk not to give a fig for our boys’ lives,” said Mrs. Hawley.
“He spends them like pennies,” said Dr. Bliss. “This war is an enterprise dominated by inebriates, charlatans, and fools.” Bliss gave Walt a mean look.
Walt asked if either of them had seen Dr. Woodhull. Neither of them replied, but the young man whose dressings were being changed told Walt that Dr. Woodhull had gone out to the dead house.
Walt found him there, among the bodies. There were only a few, just the dead from the last week. Dr. Woodhull was weeping over a shrouded form, Dr. Walker standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder. Even from across the room, even with decay thick in the air, the smell of whiskey that emanated from Woodhull’s body was overpowering.
“I knew him not,” Woodhull was saying, “but I knew him well!”
“Canning,” said Dr. Walker. “They’ll be sending us more boys. You need to come back, now.”
“Oh, Vicky,” he said, dropping tears on the head of the shroud, so that the features of the dead boy became slowly visible beneath the wet cloth. The boy had a thick mustache, and a mole on his cheek. “There’s such an awful lot of blood. You’d think they could do something with all that blood. A great work. Oughtn’t something great to be coming?”
Dr. Walker noticed Walt standing by the door. “Mr. Whitman,” she said. “If you would assist me?” Walt put his arm around Dr. Woodhull and bore him up, away from the body and out of the dead house. They put the doctor in an empty cot, in a half-empty ward.
“Oh, darling,” said Woodhull, “I don’t even want to think about it.” He turned over on his side and began to breathe deeply and evenly.
Dr. Walker took a watch from her pocket and looked at it. “A wire has come,” she said. “They’re moving a thousand boys from the field hospitals.” Then she leaned down close to Woodhull’s snoring face and said, “You had better be well and awake in five hours, sir.” She straightened up, adjusted her hat on her head, and uttered an explosive sigh. “General Stuart has died,” she said to Walt. “Did you know that? Shot by a lowly infantryman. I had a dream once that Stuart came for me on his horse, with garish feathers in his hat. ‘Come along with me, Mary,’ he said. ‘Not by your red beard, General Satan,’ said I. ‘Get thee behind me.’” She paused a moment, and they stood together looking down at the serene Dr. Woodhull. “Do you suppose I did the right thing? Would you have gone with him?”
“No,” Walt said, “of course not.” But really he thought that he might have. He pictured himself riding west with General Stuart, to a place where the war could not touch them. He imagined the tickly feeling the General’s feathers would make in his nose as they rode to the extreme edge of the continent. And he thought of the two of them riding shirtless through sunny California, of reaching out their hands as they passed through vineyards, and of picking fat grapes from heavy vines.
“I got to get out,” said Hank. A week had passed, and the wounded from Spotsylvania had stuffed Armory Square to the gills. Hank’s leg was scheduled to come off in two days. In the dead house, a pile of limbs edged towards the ceiling.
“Settle down,” said Walt. “There’s no cause for alarm.”
“I won’t let them have it. You got to help me get out. I won’t make it if they take my leg. I know I won’t.” Hank had a raging fever, and tended to sink into delirium with the sunset.
“Dr. Walker is said to wield the fastest knife in the army. You’ll be asleep. You won’t feel it.”
“Ha!” said Hank. He gave Walt a long, wild look. “Ha!” He put his face in his pillow and wouldn’t talk anymore. Walt walked around the wards, meeting the new boys, then went to the chapel, where there were many services.
That night, unable to sleep, Walt made his usual tour of the city, stopping for a long time outside of Armory Square. He found himself outside of Hank’s window, and then inside, next to his bed. Hank was sleeping, his arm thrown up above his head, his sheet thrown off and his shirt riding up his hairy belly. Walt reached out and touched his shoulder.
“All right,” Walt said. “Let’s go.”
It was not a difficult escape. The hardest part was getting Hank’s trousers on. It was very painful for Hank to bend his knee, and he was feverish and disoriented. The night attendants were in another ward; they saw no one on their way out except Oliver Barley, who glared at them and then rolled over in his bed, but raised no alarm. They stole a crutch for Hank, but he fell on the Mall, and the crutch broke under him. He wept softly with his mouth in the grass. Walt picked him up and carried him on his back, towards the canal and over it, then into Murder Bay, where Hank cried to be put down. They rested on a trash heap teeming with small, crawling things.
“I think I want to sleep,” said Hank. “I’m so tired.”
“Go ahead, my dear,” said Walt. “I shall take care of you.”
“I would like to go home,” Hank said as he put his head against Walt’s shoulder. “Take me back to Hollow Vale. I want to see my sister.” Hank slowly fell asleep, still mumbling under his breath. They sat there for a little while.
If this heap were a horse, thought Walt, we could ride to California. “Never mind General Stuart,” Walt said aloud, taking Hank’s wet hand in his own. “In California there is no sickness. Neither is there death. On their fifth birthday, every child is made a gift of a pony.” He looked at Hank’s drawn face glowing eerily in the moonlight—he looked dead and returned from the dead. “In California, if you plant a dead boy under an oak tree, in just five days’ time a living hand will emerge from the soil. If you grasp that hand and pull with the heart of a true friend, a living body will come out of the earth. Thus in California death never separates true friends.” Walt looked awhile longer into Hank’s face. His eyes were darting wildly under the lids. Walt said, “Well, if we are going to get to California soon, we had best leave now.” But when eventually Walt picked him up he brought Hank back to the hospital.
“You will wash that beard before you come into my surgery,” said Dr. Woodhull. Walt stank of garbage. He went to a basin and Dr. Walker helped him scrub his beard with creosote, potassium permanganate, and Labarraque’s solution. Walt held a sponge soaked with chloroform under Hank’s nose, even though he hadn’t woken since falling asleep on the heap. He kept his hand on Hank’s head the whole time, but he could not watch as Dr. Walker cut in and Dr. Woodhull tied off the arteries. He looked down and saw blood seeping across the floor, into mounds of sawdust.
“That is America’s choicest blood on the floor,” Walt said to Dr. Woodhull, but he and Dr. Walker were too intent on their task to hear him. Walt fixed his attention on a lithograph on the far wall. It was torn from some book of antiquities, a depiction of reclining sick under the care of the priests of Aesclepius, whose statue dominated the temple. There was a snake-entwined staff in his hand, and a large friendly-looking stone dog at his feet. Every night for a thousand years, it said, the sick and despairing sought healing and dreams at the temples of Aesclepius. Walt closed his eyes and listened to the saw squeaking against Hank’s bones. He put his hand on Hank’s head and thought, Live, live, live.
Hank woke briefly.
“They got my leg,” he said. “You let them take it.”
“No,” said Walt. “I’ve got it right here.” The limb was in his lap, bundled in two clean white sheets. He would not let the nurses take it to the dead room. Walt passed it to Hank, who hugged it tight against his chest.
“I don’t want to die,” Hank said.
Walt packed his bag and sat on it, waiting at the station for the train that would take him back to Brooklyn. When it finally arrived, Walt stayed sitting on his bag, not even looking up at the train when it sat waiting noisily by the platform, and when the conductor asked him if he would board, he said nothing. When the train was gone again, he got up and went back to Armory Square. It was night. Hank’s bed was still empty. He sat down on it and rummaged in his coat for a pen and paper. He wrote in the dark:
Dear Friends,
I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few lines about the last days of your son, Henry Smith, of Company E of the 14th Missouri Volunteers. I write in haste, but I have no doubt anything about Hank will be welcome.
From the time he came into Armory Square Hospital until he died there was hardly a day but I was with him a portion of the time—if not in the day then at night—(I am merely a friend visiting the wounded and sick soldiers). From almost the first I feared somehow that Hank was in danger, or at least he was much worse than they supposed in the hospital. He had a grievous wound in his leg, and the typhoid, but as he made no complaint they thought him nothing so bad. He was a brave boy. I told the doctor of the ward over and over again he was a very sick boy, but he took it lightly and said he would certainly recover; he said, “I know more about these cases than you do—he looks very sick to you, but I shall bring him out all right.” Probably the doctor did his best—at any rate about a week before Hank died he got really alarmed, and after that all the doctors tried to help him but it was too late. Very possibly it would not have made any difference.
I believe he came here about January of ’63—I took to him. He was a quiet young man, behaved always so correct and decent. I used to sit on the side of his bed. We talked together. When he was bad with the typhoid I used to sit by the side of his bed generally silent, he was oppressed for breath and with the heat, and I would fan him—occasionally he would want a drink—some days he dozed a great deal—sometimes when I would come in he would reach out his hand and pat my hair and beard as I sat on the bed and leaned over him—it was painful to see the working of his throat to breathe.
Some nights I sat by his cot far into the night, the lights would be put out and I sat there silently hour after hour—he seemed to like to have me sit there. I shall never forget those nights in the dark hospital, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and the wounded lying around and this dear young man close by me, lying on what proved to be his death bed. I did not know his past life so much, but what I saw and know of he behaved like a noble boy—Farewell, deary boy, it was my opportunity to be with you in your last days, I had no chance to do much for you, nothing could be done, only you did not lie there among strangers without having one near who loved you dearly, and to whom you gave your dying kiss.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I have thus written rapidly whatever came up about Hank, and must now close. Though we are strangers and shall probably never see each other, I send you all Hank’s brothers and sister Olivia my love. I live when at home in Brooklyn, New York, in Portland Avenue, fourth floor, north of Myrtle.
Walt folded up the letter and put it in his shirt, then lay down on his side on the bed. In a while, a nurse came by with fresh sheets. He thought she might scold him and tell him to leave, but when she looked in his face she turned and hurried off. He watched the moon come up in the window, listening to the wounded and sick stirring in the beds around him. It seemed to him, as he watched the moon shine down on the Capitol, that the war would never end. He thought, In the morning I will rise and leave this place. And then he thought, I will never leave this place. He slept briefly and had a dream of reaching into Hank’s dark grave, hoping and fearing that somebody would take his groping hand.
He woke with the moon still shining in his face, and started to weep, deep racking sobs which he tried to muffle in the pillow that still smelled powerfully of Hank’s shining hair. Someone touched his shoulder, and when he looked up he saw Oliver Barley kneeling by the bed, haloed in moonlight from the window, with his hands, still wrapped in bandages, raised before him. He reached out again to touch Walt’s shoulder, but this time he struck him hard, a shove that must have made his wounds ache wildly. “Be quiet, you,” he said. “Just hush up.”