SIXTY-FIVE

Loren had been sitting beside his son Evan in the room behind the doctor’s surgery when the men from the village defense team brought in the wounded and the dead. The place had been exceptionally quiet up to that point, just a sweet spring evening with the sounds of new life bourgeoning outside the window: night birds, insects. Loren had been reading Huckleberry Finn to Evan by candlelight. The young man remained unconscious but did not show any gross signs of infection or fever. His brow was dry. From time to time he sighed or shifted slightly in bed. Then the others came from the battlefield about an hour or so after nightfall and the old carriage house turned clinic erupted in a commotion of cries, weeping, prayer, groans, and shouted orders, as the dead were laid out, the wounded were sorted, and the laboratory prepared once again for surgery. Loren left Evan and offered his assistance. Three New Faith women arrived claiming to have nursing experience and set to tasks at once. The doctor and his wife and son donned their scrubs, arrayed their instruments, and fired the autoclave. The candle stands and mirrors were deployed along with fresh linens, grain alcohol antiseptic, opium suppositories, cloth dressings, and bottles of intravenous fluids. And then the surgeries commenced.

They would be at it until sunrise. In the event, the doctor was able to save three of the seven wounded, including a seven-year-old girl who survived the amputation below the knee of her shattered leg. A teen with a head wound died as soon they brought him to the table. Others did not survive their blood loss, trauma, and shock during arduous ordeals under the knife. Loren, who was physically large and strong, was given the task of holding down the patients on the table, as the opium anesthetic did not render the patients completely unconscious, lest the dose kill them outright. Their agonies could be heard over much of the east side of the village, and people began to venture from their homes and collect on the street before the doctor’s establishment to see what was going on. Among those who had ventured down from the Congregational Church’s parish house was Jane Ann Holder, who was enlisted at once in helping to care for the surviving children in a new postoperative ward set up in the infirmary on the second floor above the surgery, unaware that her own son lay in the ground-floor back room recuperating from his own ordeal.