The Brightest Day, the Darkest Night, page 21
A strange case the three of them – no care for the gentility of their looks or attire. Their garments, like his own, festooned with the blood of the two score of men he had amputated that morning, she and her daughters holding steady the atrophied limbs for the bite of his surgeon’s saw.
He tensed himself as Louisa approached him. ‘Cross swords with the Devil,’ he whispered under his breath, awaiting the opening thrust.
SIXTY-NINE
‘Men need guns, not basins and beds!’ Dr Sawyer answered his matron bluntly.
‘It is ridiculous!’ Louisa stormed. ‘Two basins for dressing the wounds of three hundred men … the better of which has a hole in the bottom stuffed with rags! We are reduced to using the tin cups from which we eat and drink for bandage wetting. It won’t do! It just won’t do, Doctor!’
‘Sister! The Quartermaster-General will not divert funds from buck and ball to wash-hand basins!’ Dr Sawyer replied, explaining how ‘My nights, when not in here, are futilely spent in writing letters of request to General Headquarters for more supplies for the wounded. I fear my words are falling on deaf ears,’ he said, with an air of resignation. ‘Very deaf ears.’
‘Then I myself will go to General Headquarters,’ Louisa declared.
Dr Sawyer smiled. He relished the idea of the sparks that would fly between the General, any General, of whatever reputation, and the young Irish nun bristling before him.
‘Of course … if you must, Sister,’ he said, disguising his delight. ‘I’ll send a guard to accompany you.’
‘I must … but I have no need of protection,’ Louisa replied firmly. ‘The Archangel of God will be my guide and protector.’
‘Well, Madame?’ General Bickerdyke, in truculent humour, barely raised his head to acknowledge Louisa’s presence.
She didn’t speak. Waited till he looked up at her.
‘Well?’ he demanded, angered by her silence. ‘Devil got your tongue?’
He had a war to run and who did they deem themselves to be. These fanatics in strange garb who were swarming the hospitals, baptising on every side?
Louisa didn’t flinch, stood there, hands clasped in front of her.
‘We have a growing army of sick and wounded and …’
‘Rebels, mostly, I’ll warrant!’ the general unceremoniously interrupted.
‘Rebels or Federals, Catholic or Protestant, drummer boy or general, I do not ask. They are not soldiers when they come to us – simply suffering fellow creatures. Our work begins when yours is done. Yours the carnage, ours the binding up of wounds!’
General Bickerdyke sat back, set down his nib and studied her. He had heard much of the ‘Sisters’, mostly Irish and with no husbands. Who, when they took charge of them, ran the hospitals with sabre-like precision.
‘What do you do with all your beggings, Sister?’ he asked in an accusatory manner.
‘Some day you may know, General!’ Louisa answered and turned to go.
‘Stay!’ he ordered. ‘You’re Irish?’
‘I’m human!’ she answered, ‘and so too, could you be … General!’
He flushed slightly but she did not break stare with him. Brusquely then, he pulled out a piece of vellum and scratched the date at its head.
‘Well, go on then, Madame … spell out your needs but don’t come bothering me further!’
So she listed her demands while the general scribbled furiously. He kept his eyes down as he struggled to keep pace with her and so, did not catch the smile that lighted hers.
‘Flour … Ice … Coffee … Cups … Basins …’ She paused, thinking what would Dr Sawyer say now?
The general, thinking she had finished, made to flourish his name and rank at the bottom of Louisa’s list of ‘beggings’.
‘… And beef! All at the usual commissary prices,’ she added, almost beneath his hearing.
He snorted in disbelief. By all that was holy, she had temerity, this Lucifer bonnet!
‘… And beef!’ he exhaled, ‘all at commissary prices? By jove! There … !’
He held out the paper to her. ‘Good for three months at army terms – a reduction of one-third on market prices,’ he said with the smirk of a smile, and added, ‘But you already know that, Madame!’
‘Indeed I do … sir!’ Louisa answered and took the paper from him. She studied it, a frown coming on her face.
‘What now?’ he exploded.
‘Oh!’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Thank you kindly, General, but I almost forgot … to ease the pain of the wounded … a couple of jiggers of whiskey … sir.’
A month later he was wheeled in, delirious with pain, his right shoulder shell-torn, wanting only to die. She assisted at the amputation, and then nursed him for weeks through a tortuous recovery, which often pendulumed between life and death.
When he first regained consciousness, she was leant over him, dabbing his temple with ice-cold water.
‘It’s you!’ he said, as if still haunted by delirium.
‘Yes, General,’ she answered, laughing.
‘… And is this the begging ice?’ he asked.
A month on, after he was released, Louisa received an envelope. In it a cheque for two thousand dollars.
‘For the beggings,’ was all the accompanying note said.
SEVENTY
‘Smallpox!’
The word ran like contagion through the hospital.
Dr Sawyer summoned Louisa. ‘Sister, we have two cases in those admitted today. Their wounds are otherwise light which, in many respects, is an unfortunate circumstance.’ He looked hard at her. ‘But they are our boys. How can you safely accommodate them?’
Louisa understood what he was saying. To bring smallpox into an already overcrowded hospital was to invite in catastrophe. The disease, highly contagious, would spread like fire among the weak and the infirm.
‘They will be as wheat before the reaper,’ the doctor said, echoing her thoughts. Isolation was called for, but where?
‘I will take responsibility for them, Doctor,’ Louisa answered. ‘We will accommodate them in our own quarters away from the mass of the patients. Sister Mary and I will improvise.’
The doctor left it to her.
She told Mary and Ellen of her decision. ‘Mary and I will sleep on the floor next to your bed, Mother – for all the sleep we ever manage. We will take turns to watch the men. The lay nurses will not want contact with them and who is to blame them? They have their families to protect.’
‘No, Louisa!’ It was Mary. ‘They will be in my care. You have the administration of the hospital to see to – and you, Mother, cannot risk infection, you work so close with the doctor.’
What Mary said made sense – that she and Ellen were both more valuable to the overall function of the hospital than she was. Still, Ellen was uneasy about Mary’s plan. She wanted to share the risk, halve the risk, of Mary contracting the disease.
In the ward the men were in consternation until word went around that the two poxed soldiers would be cared for, away from the general body of patients, by Sister Mary.
On hearing the news, one Pennsylvanian – a rough old Dutchman – caught Mary by the hem of her habit, as she passed.
‘Sister! Sister! Listen to me!’ he wheezed at her. ‘Do not protract your visit with them, for fear you carry the contagion back to others.’ And he yanked at the folds of her habit to emphasise the gravity of his message.
Mary waited until he let go, said nothing, and then went on her way to prepare the room.
SEVENTY-ONE
‘Foreign Devils!’
The insult was thrown at Mary by the younger of the two with smallpox when first she came to tend them. It did not bother her. The young man from ‘up New England way’, as she subsequently found out, had probably never seen a nun before. To many like him, dark stories about nuns and nunneries had been told as a child. Just as you would tell stories of ghosts or pookahs, she knew, to frighten young listeners into obedience, or staying in bed once put there!
New Englanders, those from her own state, Massachusetts, were the most prejudicial.
To Abner Seaborn, nuns were aberrations. Foreign devils in strange garb. He repeated the well-worn quote to her that nuns were ‘Mournful prisoners in their convent doomed by unhappy love affairs to lives of sinful indolence.’
‘The Puritan Streak’, Louisa dismissed it as, fed by lurid novels such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, in whose pages could be found stories of infants born to devilish Romish liaisons between priests and nuns. The infants would then be murdered and buried in convent basements. The myths perpetuated by this novel – published a quarter of a century earlier – and many since – still lived on.
The young man spoke again to Mary, ‘I’m a Christian man and I don’t hold with no Romish practices. I know all about them!’
‘What do you know about them?’ Mary asked patiently.
‘I heard a good and holy man – the Reverend Lyman Beecher – preach that, “The Catholic Church holds now in darkness and bondage nearly half the civilised world. It is the most skilful, powerful, dreadful system of corruption to those who yield to it, and of slavery and debasement to those who live under it.” And it frightened me so, that I remembered the Reverend’s words by heart,’ Abner Seaborn said, proudly.
‘Oh!’ was Mary’s only reply, not that she thought her own Church lived out the Christian teachings as Christ would have wanted, anymore than did the Reverend Beecher think it. She wondered what the Lord would say on Judgement Day about the Catholic Church’s silence on another kind of bondage? That which bound one person in servility to another. Or the Church’s abetting of it by deeming the black people to ‘have no souls’?
‘If they have no souls as the Church says, then how could they ever be saved?’ she had wondered to Louisa.
‘Oh, they have souls but misguided ones,’ Louisa had argued, ‘they need to hear the word of God.’
‘But if the only word of God they hear is that they are less than human and bound to be bound, then how will they ever listen to it?’
‘This war will change all that,’ Louisa answered. ‘The war is the word of God speaking. When the black people are freed, they will fall to their knees in thanksgiving.’
Mary thought the war more the word of Mammon speaking, than the word of God.
Whatever about souls, and those without, an the word of Mammon, Abner Seaborn had fever. The smallpox had seemed to over-run him quickly. Even so, when she tried to open his shirt, dampen his fire with the cold poultice, he slung her hands away.
‘Begone, Lucifer!’ he shouted at her. ‘You ain’t gittin’ my Christian soul!’ And he called on all the biblical demon-slayers he could muster to defend it from the ‘Winged Whore’ who had come to seize him.
Mary waited, until his rantings tired him. First, she mopped his brow, dampening his eyes until they closed, then dapped the raging pulse in his neck, all the while whispering to him, ‘Hush now, little Abner Seaborn – you’ve a big voice for a little man.’ Then she opened his shirt and daubed his boy’s hairless chest. ‘But you’re a brave little man to be out here fighting this big man’s war.’
She shouldered him over, starting with his back. He was only a child, maybe fifteen, she thought. He should still have been running around a New England farm, getting into mischief, being scolded by a loving mother. A fall, bruised knees, would yield an embrace. Arms around his small boy’s shoulders, the miscreant safely folded into forgiving skirts.
She looked at those shoulders now, too slight for a gun, and covered with angry pustules. Gingerly, she applied the poultice – bread-soda – all she could get. It had warmed in her hands from contact with him. She dipped it into the small billycan of water – the best ration doctor would allow. Its temperature was barely less than that of the poultice. Still, she wasted not a drop in the wringing out of it.
He murmured something.
‘There now, little fellow! There now!’ Mary answered, as she re-applied the sodden bread-soda, wondering what good it would do.
‘Your God is my God – your devils, mine too!’ She prayed over him for a speedy deliverance to the archangels and martyrs he had earlier summoned against her. Then she resettled the shirt on his back.
‘He won’t come out of it, Sister … will he?’ the other man, a Sergeant Doherty, asked.
‘I don’t suppose he will, Sergeant,’ she said, seeing his eyes fix on her answer.
‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘I’d be better entirely if I was out there, charging a Rebel breastworks, taking a sight o’ them with me when I go, than malingerin’ in here!’ he said defiantly.
She laughed. ‘That you would, Sergeant Doherty, but you’re staying put here.’
‘But … !’ he started to argue.
‘No buts,’ she said firmly. ‘And I hold rank here!’
Afterwards, she wrung out the poultice as best she could. She would need it again. Provident in all things, the water Mary also kept. Water, even used water, was better than none.
SEVENTY-TWO
Abner Seaborn did not recover, nor did he make his peace with ‘the devil in the Lucifer Bonnet’. Mary stayed with him to the end, desperately trying to soothe his demons of disease and distrust, with water and words.
‘Tell the bees, Mother! Tell the bees!’ he called, clutching her, mistaking her for another.
‘I will, Abner, I will, son,’ she answered in character, not knowing what he meant.
The sergeant knew. ‘It’s an old New England custom. To tell the bees when someone dies. They drape the hives in black.’ He paused a moment. ‘Every darn hive in New England must be draped by now – and in old Ireland too!’
Now, Mother Seaborn’s hives would be added to those thousands already draped.
He had not expired as gently as Mary had hoped. Rather did all his bodily functions collapse at once. Like a tree, cracked and felled by a raging fire.
Afterwards they took his body, covered it with lime to kill the contagion.
By then Mary was running a fever.
SEVENTY-THREE
Ellen was in a panic. ‘Mary … not Mary!’ she said to Louisa. ‘We must do something … Otherwise …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t admit her fear out loud that Mary must soon follow Abner Seaborn unless they could arrest the disease taking hold.
Serum, she needed serum. In vain she enquired of Dr Sawyer.
‘I will go anywhere – walk night and day to get it. Only tell me where!’ she pleaded.
‘I cannot, Mrs Lavelle,’ he replied. ‘I simply don’t know. Maybe at Richmond – Chimborazo – one of the other hospitals. The Surgeon-General dispenses what small supply of crusts he gets.’
‘Crusts?’ she queried.
‘Yes … crusts!’ he answered again. ‘They take the scabs of the pox from those already infected and use them as an antidote.’
‘But where does he get the crusts?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dr Sawyer responded. ‘Nobody enquires too much.’ He paused … ‘There are stories.’
‘Tell me, Doctor! Tell me!’ she demanded. ‘My child is dying … and you would let her die rather than betray some military confidence.’
She found Dr Licoix.
Ten miles she had trudged. Dr Sawyer had not told her much. Enough so she could track down the dapper doctor with the gruff moustache. It was oversized for his mouth, so that you could not see his upper lip move when he spoke. As if the sound came out of some pink burrow, thatched with hair.
He was cautious of her at first. Who was she? Who had sent her? What did she know?
She convinced him that her errand was one of mercy only, for her own daughter. That she was not employed by any agency to spy on him or his work – and swore herself to secrecy, if he would only help her.
Dr Licoix would – but for a price.
‘I have the money,’ she said.
It was a strange set-up. For a doctor, he was well off the beaten track. A tumbledown shack with weathered fences and a garden patch where something must once have grown. There was no sign, nothing to signify the occupant was a practitioner of medicine.
At a distance apart from the house by some fifty yards or so, stood two other shanty-type shacks. These were almost secluded from view by a draping copse of mixed bushes. Aloft from one of them floated a white flag. Her heart lifted – a hospital. Within it what she most desperately needed for Mary – the smallpox antidote.
Dr Licoix seemed in no hurry. Said not a word as he set off towards these buildings. The mahogany medicine case, carried in his right hand, caused his upper body to tilt slightly to the right. With his left hand he fumbled in his pocket, as if checking that he hadn’t forgotten something. She followed him in silence across the divide between the house and the hospital.
As they approached she could hear rising murmurings of sound from within the two buildings. Not until they were through the clearing and almost there did she notice the padlocked doors.
The back of Dr Licoix, labouring under his load, moved ahead of her. Nothing she could discern in his tilted gait, suggested that this was anything other than usual. Unease at the whole situation gripped her – the house, its condition, the hospital buildings in front of her – the little lop-sided doctor with the too big moustache.
Ellen steeled herself for whatever might come. She was here for Mary. That was all that mattered. Already had she witnessed what harsh horrors war – ‘humanity stripped away from itself’ – could confront her with.
‘Roll up your sleeve!’ Dr Licoix ordered the young negro boy.
The child, eight, maybe nine years old, did as he was told. Not once, not twice, but six times the needle punctured the boy’s arm, drawing tears from his eyes.
