The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 103

But n.o.body he talked to ever had.

54.

SKIRMIs.h.i.+NG.

As rain fell again in sheets, General Robert E. Lee picked up his bloodied army and limped slowly back into Maryland. Meade didn't have to let him get away. The Army of the Potomac was hurt badly too, with more than twenty-three thousand casualties, including some eight thousand dead or missing, but the Northerners were flushed with victory and far stronger than Lee's men, who were slowed and hampered by a wagon train of wounded stretching behind them fully seventeen miles. But just as Hooker had failed to act in Virginia, now Meade failed to act in Pennsylvania, and there was no pursuit.

"Where does Mr. Lincoln find his generals?" Symonds muttered to Rob J. in disgust. But if the delay frustrated colonels, the enlisted men were content to rest and recover, and perhaps write home the extraordinary news that they were still alive.

Ordway found Lewis Robinson in one of the farmhouse hospitals. His right foot had been amputated four inches above the ankle. He was thin and pale but otherwise appeared in good health. Rob J. examined the stump and told Robinson it was healing well and that the man who had cut off his foot had known his job. Clearly Robinson was happy to be out of the war; there was a sense of relief in his eyes that was so profound it was almost palpable. Rob J. felt that Robinson had been bound to be hit, because he had feared the possibility so. He brought Robinson his sopranino cornet and some pencils and paper and knew he would be all right, because you didn't need two feet to compose music or play the horn.

Both Ordway and Wilc.o.x were promoted to sergeant. A number of the men had been promoted, Symonds filling the regimental table of organization with the survivors, handing out the ratings and ranks that had belonged to the fallen. The 131st Indiana had received eighteen percent casualties, which was light compared to many regiments. A regiment from Minnesota had lost eighty-six percent of its men. That regiment and several others were wiped out, in effect. Symonds and his staff officers spent several days recruiting survivors of the ruined regiments, with success, bringing the 131st's strength up to 771 men. With some embarra.s.sment, the colonel told Rob J. he'd found a regimental surgeon. Dr. Gardner Coppersmith had been with one of the disbanded Pennsylvania units as a captain, and Symonds had lured him with promotion. A graduate of a Philadelphia medical school, he'd had two years of combat experience. "I'd make you regimental surgeon in a minute if you weren't a civilian, Doc Cole," Symonds said. "But the slot calls for an officer. You understand that Major Coppersmith will be your superior, that he'll run things?"

Rob J. a.s.sured him that he understood.

For Rob J. it was a complicated war, fought by a complicated nation. In the newspaper he read that there had been a race riot in New York because of resentment over the first drawing of names for the military draft. A mob of fifty thousand, most of them Irish Catholic workingmen, set fire to the draft office, the offices of the New York Tribune, and a Negro orphanage, fortunately empty of children at the time. Apparently blaming Negroes for the war, they swarmed through the streets, beating and robbing every black person they could find, murdering and lynching Negroes for several days before the riot was put down by federal troops freshly returned from fighting Southerners at Gettysburg.

The story wounded Rob J.'s spirit. Native-born Protestants loathed and oppressed Catholics and immigrants, and Catholics and immigrants scorned and murdered Negroes, as if each group fed off its hate, needing the nourishment provided by the bone marrow of someone weaker.

When Rob J. had prepared for citizens.h.i.+p he'd studied the United States Const.i.tution and marveled at its provisions. Now he saw that the genius of those who had written the Const.i.tution was that it foresaw man's weakness of character and the continuing presence of evil in the world, and sought to make individual freedom the legal reality to which the country had to return again and again.

He was fascinated by what made men hate one another, and studied Lanning Ordway as if the lame sergeant were a bug under his microscope. If Ordway didn't spew hatred every now and then, like a kettle running over, and if Rob J. didn't know that a terrible unpunished crime had been committed a decade before in his own Illinois woods, he would have found Ordway among the more likable young men in the regiment. Now he was watching the litter-bearer grow and blossom, probably because the experiences Ordway had had in the army represented more success than he had ever before achieved.

There was a spirit of success in the entire regiment. The Indiana 131st Regimental Band showed dash and elan as it went from hospital to hospital, giving concerts for the wounded. The new tuba player wasn't as good as Thad Bushman had been, but the musicians played with pride, because they'd shown they were valuable during battle.

"We been through the worst together," Wilc.o.x announced solemnly one night when he had had too much to drink, fixing Rob J. with his ferocious walleyed squint. "We strolled in and out of the jaws of death, sashayed on through the Valley of the Shadow. We stared right into the d.a.m.ned eyes of the terrible critter. We heered the rebel yell and hollered back."

The men treated one another with great tenderness. Sergeant Ordway and Sergeant Wilc.o.x and even sloppy Corporal Perry were honored because they'd led their fellow musicians to pluck up wounded soldiers and carry them back under fire. The story of Rob J.'s two-day marathon with the scalpel was repeated in all the tents, and the men knew he was responsible for the ambulance service in their regiment. They smiled warmly to see him now, and n.o.body mentioned latrines.

His new popularity pleased him inordinately. One of the soldiers of B Company, Second Brigade, a man named Lyon, even brought him a horse. "Just found him walking riderless by the side of the road. I thunk of you right away, Doc," Lyon said, handing him the reins.

Rob J. was embarra.s.sed but elated by this evidence of affection. True, the mud-colored horse wasn't much, a skinny and swaybacked gelding. Probably he'd belonged to a slain or wounded rebel soldier, because both the animal and the bloodstained saddle bore the CSA brand. The horse's head and his tail drooped, his eyes were dull, and his mane and tail were full of burrs. He looked like a horse that had worms. But, "Why, soldier, he's beautiful!" Rob J. said. "I don't know how to thank you."

"I figger forty-two dollars would be fair," Lyon said.

Rob J. laughed, more tickled by his own foolish yearning for love than by the situation. When the d.i.c.kering was over, the horse was his in exchange for $4.85 and the promise that he wouldn't bring Lyon up on charges as a battlefield looter.

He gave the animal a good feed, patiently picked the burrs from his mane and tail, washed the blood off the saddle and rubbed oil on the horse where the leather had chafed, and brushed the gelding's coat. When all that was done, it was still an extremely sorry-looking horse, so Rob J. named him Pretty Boy, on the outside chance that perhaps such a name would give the ugly animal a modic.u.m of pleasure and self-respect.

He was riding the horse when the Indiana 131st marched out of Pennsylvania on August 17. Pretty Boy's head and tail still drooped, but he moved along with the loose, steady gait of a beast that was accustomed to the long ride. If anybody in the regiment didn't know for certain which direction they were heading, all doubt disappeared when Bandmaster Warren Fitts blew his whistle, lifted his chin and his baton, and the band began to play "Maryland, My Maryland."

The 131st recrossed the Potomac six weeks after Lee's troops and a full month after the first units of their own army. They followed the late summer south, and the mild and seductive autumn didn't catch up with them until they were well into Virginia. They were veterans, chigger-wise and battle-tested, but most of the action of the war at that moment was in the western theater, and for the 131st Indiana, things were quiet. Lee's army moved along the Shenandoah Valley, where Union scouts spied on it and said it was in good condition except for an obvious shortage of supplies, especially decent shoes.

The Virginia skies were dark with fall rains when they came to the Rappahannock and found evidence that the Confederates had camped there in the not-distant past. Over Rob J.'s objections, they raised their tents right on the former Rebel campsite. Major Coppersmith was a well-educated and competent doctor, but he didn't hold with worrying about a little s.h.i.+t, and he never bothered anybody about digging latrines. He wasn't subtle about informing Rob J. that the time was over when an acting a.s.sistant surgeon could make medical policy for the regiment. The major liked to run his own sick call, una.s.sisted, except on days when he might be feeling poorly, which wasn't often. And he said that unless an engagement turned into another Gettysburg, he thought that he and one enlisted man were enough to apply dressings at a medical station.

Rob smiled at him. "What does that leave for me?"

Major Coppersmith frowned and smoothed his mustaches with a forefinger. "Well, I'd like you to handle the litter-bearers, Dr. Cole," he said.

So Rob J. found himself caught by the monster he had created, trapped in the web of his own spinning. He had no desire to join the litter men, but once they became his main task, it seemed foolish to think that he would simply send the teams out and watch to see what happened to them. He recruited his own team: two musicians-the new ba.s.s horn player, name of Alan Johnson, and a fifer named Lucius Wagner-and for the fourth man, he drafted Corporal Amasa Decker, the regimental postmaster. The litter teams took turns going out. He told the new men, as he had told the first five litter-bearers (one now dead and one now an amputee), that going after wounded involved no more danger than anything else connected with war. He a.s.sured himself that everything would be all right, and he placed his litter team in the rotation schedule.

The 131st and a lot of other units of the Army of the Potomac followed the trail of the Confederates along the Rappahannock River to its chief tributary, the Rapidan, moving along water that reflected the gray of the skies, day after day. Lee was outnumbered and outsupplied and kept ahead of the federals. Things didn't heat up in Virginia until the war in the western theater turned very sour for the Union. General Braxton Bragg's Confederates struck a terrible blow against General William S. Rosecrans' Union forces on Chicamauga Creek, outside of Chattanooga, with more than sixteen thousand federal casualties. Lincoln and his cabinet held an emergency meeting and decided to detach Hooker's two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and send them to Alabama by rail, to support Rosecrans.

With Meade's army deprived of two corps, Lee stopped running. He split his army in two and tried to flank Meade, moving west and north, toward Mana.s.sas and Was.h.i.+ngton. So skirmis.h.i.+ng began.

Meade was careful to keep between Lee and Was.h.i.+ngton, and the Union Army fell back a mile or two at a time, until they had given up forty miles to the Southern a.s.sault, with sporadic fighting.

Rob J. observed that each of the litter-bearers approached his task differently. Wilc.o.x went after a wounded man with dogged determination, while Ordway showed an uncaring bravery, scuttling out like a great fast crab with his uneven gait, and carrying the victim back carefully, holding his end of the stretcher high and steady, taking the strain on his muscular arms to compensate for his limp. Rob J. had several weeks to think about his first pickup before it occurred. His trouble was, he had as much imagination as Robinson, and maybe more. He could think about getting hit in any number of ways and circ.u.mstances. In his tent and by lamplight he did a series of drawings for his journal, showing Wilc.o.x's team running out, three men bent against a possible headwind of lead, the fourth carrying the stretcher in front of him as he ran, a flimsy s.h.i.+eld. He showed Ordway coming back, carrying the right-rear corner of the stretcher, the other three bearers with tight, scared faces, and Ordway's thin lips bent into a rictus that was half-smile, half-snarl, a largely no-account man who had finally found something he was very good at. What would Ordway do, Rob J. wondered, when the war ended and he couldn't go after wounded men under fire?

Rob J. drew no pictures of his own team. They hadn't gone out yet.

Their first time was on November 7. The Indiana 131st was sent across the Rappahannock near a place called Kelly's Ford. The regiment crossed the river at midmorning but soon was bogged down by intense enemy fire, and within ten minutes word came to the ambulance corps that somebody had been hit. Rob J. and his three bearers went forward to a riverside hay field where half a dozen men huddled behind an ivy-covered stone wall, firing into the woods. All the way up to the wall, Rob J. expected the bite of a projectile into his flesh. The air felt too thick to suck up into his nostrils. It was as if he had to force his way through it by brute strength, and his limbs seemed to work slowly.

The soldier had been hit in the shoulder. The ball was in the flesh and needed to be probed for, but not under fire. Rob J. took a dressing from his Mee-shome and bandaged the wound, making certain the bleeding was controlled. Then they put the soldier on the litter and started back at a good pace. Rob J. was aware of the broad target his exposed back presented at the rear of the litter. He could hear every shot that was fired, and the sounds of bullets pa.s.sing, tearing through the tall gra.s.s, thunking solidly into the earth near them.

Amasa Decker grunted on the other side of the litter.

"You hit?" Rob J. gasped.

"Naw."

Feet thudding, they half-ran with their burden, sliding after an eternity into the shallow defilade in which Major Coppersmith had set up his medical station.

When they had given over the patient to the surgeon, the four bearers lay on the soft gra.s.s like fresh-caught trout.

"They sounded like bees, those minies," Lucius Wagner said.

"I thought we was s.h.i.+t dead," Amasa Decker said. "Didn't you, Doc?"

"I was scared, but I figured I had some protection." Rob J. showed them the Mee-shome, and told them its strap of cords, the Izze cloths, would protect him from being hurt by bullets, according to the Sauk promise. Decker and Wagner listened seriously, Wagner with a small smile.

That afternoon, firing almost ceased. The sides were at stalemate until around dusk, when two entire Union brigades crossed the river and swept past the 131st's position in the only bayonet charge Rob J. would see in the war. The 131st infantry fixed its own bayonets and joined the attack, whose surprise and ferocity allowed the Union to overrun the enemy, killing or capturing several thousand Confederates. Union losses were light, but Rob J. and his bearers went out half a dozen more times for wounded men as evening fell. The three soldiers had become convinced that Doc Cole and his Injun medicine bag made them a lucky crew, and by the time they had come back safely for the seventh time, Rob J. believed in the power of his Mee-shome as strongly as any of them.

That night in their tent, after the wounded had been tended to, Gardner Coppersmith looked at him with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "Glorious bayonet charge, wasn't it, Cole?"

He treated the question seriously. "More butchery," he said, very tired.

The regimental surgeon regarded him with disgust. "If you feel that way, why the h.e.l.l are you here?"

"Because this is where the patients are," Rob J. said.

Still, by the end of the year he had decided he would leave the Indiana 131st. It was where the patients were; he'd come to the army to give good medical care to soldiers, and Major Coppersmith wouldn't allow him to do that. He saw that it was a waste of an experienced physician for him to do little more than carry a stretcher, and it made no sense for an atheist to live as if he were seeking martyrdom or sainthood. It was in his mind to go back home when his contract ran out, the first week of 1864.

Christmas Eve was a strange affair, sorry and touching at the same time. There were services of wors.h.i.+p before the tents. On one side of the Rappahannock the musicians of the 131st Indiana played "Adeste Fidelis." When they were done, a Confederate band on the far bank played "G.o.d Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," the music floating eerily over the dark waters, and then started right in on "Silent Night." Bandmaster Fitts raised his baton and the Union band and the Confederate musicians played together, the soldiers of both sides singing along. They could see each other's fires.

As it turned out, it was a silent night, no gunfire. For supper there had been no festive birds, but the army had provided a very acceptable soup with something in it that may have been beef, and each soldier of the regiment was given a tot of holiday whiskey. That may have been a mistake, for it whetted thirsts for more of the same. After the concert, Rob J. met Wilc.o.x and Ordway, weaving in from where they had killed a jug of sutler's rotgut at the edge of the river. Wilc.o.x was supporting Ordway, but he was unsteady himself.

"You go on to sleep, Abner," Rob J. told him. "I'll see this one into his tent." Wilc.o.x nodded and walked away, but Rob J. didn't do as he had promised. Instead, he helped Ordway away from the tents and sat him against a boulder.

"Lanny," he said. "Lan, boy. Let us talk, you and I."

Ordway considered him with half-closed drunkard's eyes. "... Merry Christmas, Doc."

"Merry Christmas, Lanny. Let's talk about the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner," Rob J. said.

So he decided that whiskey was a key that would unlock everything Lanning Ordway knew.

On January 3, when Colonel Symonds came to him with another contract, he was watching Ordway carefully filling his knapsack with fresh dressings and morphia pills. Rob J. hesitated only a moment, never taking his eyes off Ordway. Then he scribbled his signature and signed on for another three months.

55.

"WHEN DID YOU MEET ELLWOOD R. PATTERSON?"

Rob J. thought he'd been very subtle, very circ.u.mspect, in the way he had questioned the drunken Ordway on Christmas Eve. The interrogation had confirmed his picture of the man, and of the OSSB.

Sitting against the tent post, with his journal against his drawn-up knees, he wrote the following: Lanning Ordway began going to meetings of the American party in Vincennes, Indiana, "five years before I was old enough to vote."

(He asked me where I had joined, and I said, "Boston.") He was taken to the meetings by his father, "because he wanted me to be a good American." His father was Nathanael Ordway, an employed broom maker. The meetings were on the second floor over a tavern. They would go through the tavern, out the back door, up a flight of stairs. His father rapped the signal on the door. He remembers that his father was always proud when "the Guardian of the Gate" (!) looked out at them through a peekhole and let them come in "because we were good people."

Within a year or so, when his father was drunk or sick, Lanning sometimes went to the meetings alone. When Nathanael Ordway died ("of drink and pleurisy"), Lanning went to Chicago to work in a saloon off the railroad yards on Galena Street, where a cousin of his father dispensed whiskey. He cleaned up after sick drunkards, spread fresh sawdust every morning, washed the long mirrors, polished the bra.s.s rail-whatever had to be done.

It was natural for him to search out a Know Nothing chapter in Chicago, like making contact with family, because he had more in common with the American party regulars than with his father's cousin. The party worked to elect only public officials who would hire American-born workers in preference to immigrants. Despite his lameness (from talking to him and observing him, I believe he was born with a hip socket that is too shallow), the regulars learned to call on him when they needed somebody young enough to do important errands and old enough to keep his mouth closed.

It was a source of pride to him when, after only a couple of years, at the age of seventeen, he was brought into the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. He intimated it was a source of hope too, because he felt that a poor and crippled American-born youth needed the connections of a powerful organization if he was going to amount to anything, "with foreign Roman Catholics willing to work every American job for almost no money at all."

The order "did things the party couldn't do." When I asked Ordway what he did for the order, he said, "This and that. Traveled about, here and there."

I asked if he had ever run across a man named Hank Cough, and he blinked. "Of course I know him. And you know that man too? Imagine that. Yes. Hank!"

I asked where Cough was, and he looked at me strangely. "Why, he's in the army."

But when I asked what work they had done together, he put his fore-finger under his eye and ran it down his nose. And he staggered to his feet, and the interview was over.

Next morning, Ordway gave no sign that he recalled the questioning. Rob J. was careful to stay away from him for a few days. In fact several weeks pa.s.sed before another such opportunity presented itself, because the sutler's supplies of whiskey had been bought out by the troops during the holiday season, and the Northern merchants who traveled with the Union forces were afraid to replenish their whiskey in Virginia, for fear that the product might be poisoned.

But an acting a.s.sistant surgeon had a supply of government-issued whiskey for medicinal purposes. Rob J. gave the jug to Wilc.o.x, knowing he would share it with Ordway. That night he waited and watched for them, and when finally they arrived, Wilc.o.x merry, Ordway morose, he said good night to Wilc.o.x and took charge of Ordway as he had done before. They went to the same boulders, away from the tents.

"Well, Lanny," Rob J. said. "Let us have another talk."

"About what, Doc?"

"When did you meet Ellwood R. Patterson?"

The man's eyes were like icy pins. "Who are you?" Ordway said, and his voice was completely sober.

Rob J. was ready for hard truth. He had waited a long time. "Who do you think I am?"

"I think you're a G.o.dd.a.m.ned Catholic spy, askin all those questions."

"I have more questions. I have questions about the Indian woman you killed."

"What Indian woman?" Ordway asked in genuine horror.

"How many Indian women have you killed? Do you know where I'm from, Lanny?"

"You said Boston," Ordway said sullenly.

"That was before. I've lived in Illinois for years. A little town called Holden's Crossing."

Ordway looked at him and said nothing.

"The Indian woman who was killed, Lanny. She was my friend, she worked for me. Her name was Makwa-ikwa, in case you never knew. She was raped and murdered in my woods, on my farm."

"The Indian woman? My G.o.d. Get away from me, you crazy misery, I don't know what you're talkin about. I warn you. If you're a smart person-if you know what's good for your welfare at all, you son of a p.r.i.c.kb.a.s.t.a.r.d spy-you'll forget anythin and everythin you may think you know about Ellwood R. Patterson," Ordway said. Lurching past Rob J., he walked unevenly into the darkness, moving as fast as if he were being fired upon.

Rob J. kept one eye on him all the next day without seeming to watch him. He saw him drill his team of bearers, saw him inspect their knapsacks, listened to him warn them they must be very chary of using morphine pills, because the regiment was just about out, until the army came up with more. Lanning Ordway, he had to acknowledge, had turned into a good and efficient sergeant of the Ambulance Corps.

In the afternoon he saw Ordway in his tent laboring over a paper, pencil in hand. It took him long hours.

After retreat, Ordway brought an envelope to the postal tent.

Rob J. made a stop and then went to the post office himself. "I found a sutler this morning with some real cheese," he told Amasa Decker. "I left a hunk of it in your tent."

"Why, Doc, that was kind," Decker said, very pleased.

"I have to take care of my litter-bearers, don't I? You'd best go and eat it before someone else finds it. I'll be happy to play postmaster while you're gone."

That was all it took. Directly after Decker hurried off, Rob J. went to the box of outgoing mail. It took him only a few minutes to find the envelope and slip it into his Mee-shome.

It wasn't until he was alone in the privacy of his own tent that he took out the letter and opened it. It was addressed to: Rev David Goodnow, 237 Bridgeton Street, Chicago, Illinois.

Dere Mr Goodnow, Lanning Ordway. Im in the Indiana 131, you recawl. Ther is a man here, askin kwestians. Doctur, name of Robit Col. He wants to no abowt Henry. He talks funny, I bin wachin him. He wants to no abowt L. wood Padson. Tole me we rapt and kilt that injun gurl, that time in Illnois. I kin tak kare a him, lots a ways. But I yuse my head an let you no so you kin fine owt how he fine owt abowt us. Im a sgt. Wen the war ends Ile werk for the Odder agin. Lanning Ordway.