They fitted the thing, took measurements, discussed adjustments. They left and came back another day and made him stand again and strapped it on. Bobby stood beside him—he might have been a tree trunk—and Bobby did not make clever jokes.
They gave him crutches and made him hobble about on the thing and his stump hurt like hell. He could hardly bear to look down and see his own damaged body. The act of standing made the room swirl around him in brilliant lit windows and white sheets and rows of beds and he thought he might fall down, but Bobby was there.
Finally they declared the thing done, set it beside his bed, and went away, and Jonathan got back in his bed and did not look at it again. It was a hateful thing.
Bobby came by to clean and dress his stump. He unwrapped the bandages, looked over the truncated limb as if he was evaluating horse flesh. “Mmm, my. This don’t need no cleanin’. This here looks good and healed-up to me.”
“You let me know when they start giving medical degrees to darkies. Then I’ll be happy to let you treat me.” The November wind made the windows rattle, and the sound chilled Jonathan right through.
Bobby smiled, sat down, uninvited, on a stool beside Jonathan’s bed. “Don’t need no fancy school to tell some things.”
Jonathan rolled his head over, looked into Bobby’s dark eyes. The black man was the only regular thing in his life. “That a fact? So what can you tell me, Dr. Sambo?”
“I kin tell you you bin layin in dat bed for a long damned time. Lot longer den it take for one shot-off leg to mend up.”
“That a fact?”
“Yassuh. Seen plenty a boys come and go, in da time you been layin here. Boys hurt wus den you.”
Jonathan rolled his head back, looked up at the ceiling. He knew every crack, every fleck of chipped paint. It was the landscape of the last part of his life.
Bobby was telling him a true thing. He had seen them too, the young men so grievously injured, seen them come and go while he remained, staring at the ceiling.
“Those other boys, they must have someplace to go,” Jonathan said.
“I tell you true…” Bobby said. He leaned closer and his voice was nearly a whisper. “You best find someplace too. I done heard the doctor talkin to Cap’n Tompkins yesserday. He say dere ain’t no reason you should still be here. He say da provosts, dey makin everyone in town give a bed to a hurt man, ain’t no room for one ain’t hurt.”
Jonathan closed his eyes. Of course, this would happen. He had known all along that it would, someday. He could not stay in that bed for the rest of his life, unless somehow his life were to end that day. But that did not seem likely. The only two things he could hope for—to remain fixed in that bed, or to die there—and neither one a possibility.
He was terrified. More frightened than he had been leaving his home for the uncertainties of war. More frightened than he had been looking down that hill—he now knew it was called “Henry House Hill”—into the swirl of battle, or standing in front of the charging Yankees, bullets plucking at his clothing. None of it was half so frightening to him as the prospect of standing up, tucking the crutches under his arms, hobbling out that door.
“You got no idea what kind of hurt I’m going through,” Jonathan said, and Bobby said, soft, “You think a nigger don’t know nuttin ’bout hurt? You think a boy sold away from his mammy, five years old, don’t know nuttin ’bout feelin sorry fo hisself? Missuh Jon’tin, you gots to go home.”
He was quiet for a long moment. He could feel Bobby’s presence beside him. Finally he spoke. It was just a whisper. “I can’t.”
Bobby replied, and his voice seemed to come from some place beyond the room, “You gots to. An I’se goin to help.” Then he stood and walked away.
With that exchange, everything, for Jonathan, changed. Where before there had been deadness, nothing, there was now terror. Where there had been no thought of the future, there was now obsession with it. And from that obsession, no clear idea emerged of where to go, what to do. Jonathan felt sick to his stomach. His missing leg ached.
Where will I go? He had no money, no home. Certainly the army will give me something? Don’t they owe me wages, at least?
He thought of Robley. Where was he? In camp, no doubt. Jonathan did not follow the military situation, could not bear to think on it. But it was not possible for anyone in possession of his hearing to know nothing of what was going on. It was discussed constantly, and in all quarters. So Jonathan knew that the combined armies of Beauregard and Johnston were still encamped in and around Manassas, that they had done little since the Great Battle.
In October, Jonathan heard there had been some fighting at a place called Ball’s Bluff and the Yankees had been licked again, but he did not know if the 18th Mississippi had been part of that. Beyond that, nothing.
I could go to Robley… His brother tried to be the strict disciplinarian. Sometimes Jonathan thought Robley tried to fill in where their father was deficient, in that regard. But he was not unkind. Far from it. He could go to Robley, beg his brother’s forgiveness, ask for money enough that he could set up somewhere. Get a job. Surely there were things a one-legged man could do? Clerk, bookkeeper. He wrote a good, fair hand, had a head for numbers.
The whole thing overwhelmed him, made him sick with fear.
He thought of Robley, the last time he had seen him. How very angry he was. And Jonathan knew it was not just his and Nathaniel’s defiance that angered him. It was that Jonathan and Nathaniel were going into the fight, and he was not, and he wanted to, as much as his brothers, but his sense of duty would not allow him to walk away from Hamer’s Rifles.
Jonathan heard, subsequently, somewhere, that those troops at McLean’s Ford had in fact got into the show, late in the day. So Robley got what he wanted in the end. And if I had stayed put, made Nathaniel stay put, we would have been together and got into the fight just the same…
And that led to another thought. How do I know that Robley’s all right?
Jonathan sat up on his elbows, waited for the spinning in his head to stop. “Hey, Bobby…”
Bobby, across the room, looked up. He set down the bandages he was rolling, ambled over. He moved fast even while looking as if he was not.
“Yassuh?”
“Is there a way that a fella can find out if someone was killed or wounded in the Battle of Manassas?”
Bobby rubbed his chin. “I do believe they gots lists of all the boys was killed or hurt, down ta da Mechanics’ Institute. It’s where dey gots da War Department, ’cross from de capitol.”
Jonathan lay back again, nodded his head. He had to do it. Stand up, walk out the door, go and see if Robley Junior was still alive, or dead or wounded all this time. He had just compounded the terror. “Will you help me get there?”
“Sure enough,” Bobby said with tempered enthusiasm. He went off to get permission to leave, then came back, helped Jonathan sit up, swung his remaining leg over the edge of the bed. Every movement caused his head to whirl, so long had he remained supine.
Bobby helped him strap on the hateful prosthetic, supported him and helped him on with his pants, a cast-off pair of uniform trousers.
Bobby sat him down again and while he fought for equilibrium the black man pulled his shirtsleeves over his arms, buttoned the shirt down the front. He pulled Jonathan’s shell jacket out from under the bed, shook it out.
“Let me see that,” Jonathan said. Bobby handed it to him.
Jonathan held the jacket in both of his hands. He examined the gray cloth, the brass buttons with “Mississippi” stamped on their faces. They had called him “Mississippi” before they knew his name, because of those buttons.