John did so, thinking, this man will help me if I need it, this man with Caleb’s eyes. Caleb. A cluster of hospital tents emerged from the ground. Then a bugle sounded. John stopped and swung around. He almost expected Orlett and Cray to come galloping across the battlefield.
“Baird! Where the hell have you been?”
An elderly man in a smock drenched with blood strode through the tents toward them. John lowered the soldier to the ground and slipped away. Behind him he could hear the same man shouting. His voice carried through the dawn stillness, then stopped.
John kept as low as possible to the ground, fearing that the uniform might not be enough of a shield. From a safe distance he saw Union troops gathering into lines, saw other buildings that had been turned into makeshift hospitals. The dead and wounded lay everywhere in the grass. He had to take several detours to avoid others who were searching the battlefield, but then he realized that he was almost invisible. At least no one seemed to find his wandering presence unusual. Whatever soldiers had been posted as lookouts must have been ordered to concentrate their attention closer to where the confederates held the line. He had been so focused on his own doings that it came as a sudden shock to think that the battle might be renewed. A periodic crackle of rifle fire served as a sharp reminder. He kept low, and trusted to his instincts to alert him to the overseer’s presence.
The day grew warm, then hot. He dispensed what water he had found in the canteens of the dead to the suffering wounded, those who had fallen outside of the disputed ground, and carried several other fallen soldiers to hospitals. The whole time he kept Daney’s fiery eyes before him, but they kept turning into Caleb’s unseeing ones with the dirt showering down. And as that grave filled, it became a black depth of water from which the bodies of Daney and her girls and the other women slowly surfaced. He could shut the image out only by concentrating on the one face that, more than all things, had brought him this far. He sometimes wondered if he would have been able to escape the South if not for his hatred of the overseer.
In the afternoon, the heavens opened. For an hour the rain poured down so that the battlefield indeed seemed like a river bottom crowded with sodden bodies. He took shelter in a canvas tent in which two wounded soldiers lay; neither moved, but he could hear their breathing. The air stank of rot and chemicals. The rain beat heavily against the canvas and then, all of a sudden, stopped.
When he emerged, he saw that he was very near to the field hospital where he’d walked with the doctor at daybreak. It was midday. There’d been no sign of the overseer or the mulatto. Several civilians, including some women dressed in fine clothes, had appeared on the battlefield. Mostly they just held their hands up to their noses and gazed around, wide-eyed. It seemed, by the time that he approached the hospital again, that Orlett and Cray must have left Sharpsburg or been killed. The idea both disappointed and relieved him. Despite his hatred, he remained uncertain of his ability to kill, knowing that Caleb, right about so many things, could be right about that too. And besides, he knew the overseer would not be easy to kill; that much evil couldn’t be overcome without a struggle. He wondered if he possessed the courage and the strength to do the job. But one thing was clear enough: he could do his part for the future that Daney had predicted.
When he walked across the barnyard, he saw the doctor, bent over a body, holding a long strip of dirty bandage in one hand. Just beyond him, caught suddenly in the re-emerging sunlight, was a sloppy, sickening, waist-high pile of arms and legs. For a moment, the doctor looked stunned, defeated. He blinked at the long, growing line of waiting wounded and seemed unable to move. He lifted a gore-covered hand and brushed it over his thick beard. A small cluster of flies buzzed near his face. Then he turned and made a sweeping gesture toward a group of civilians standing a few feet away, their hands over their mouths.
“Go on,” he said wearily. “If you’re not going to help, then clear out of the way. For Christ’s sake, this isn’t a circus. Clear out.”
But his voice had grown increasingly weak. He stared at the limb in his hand as if surprised to find it there, then tossed it on the pile and shouted, “Next!”
John offered his assistance and the doctor immediately put him to work.
“Good man. I need you to keep a firm grip on the patient. Here, at the shoulders. Have you ever seen chloroform used before?”
“I’ve seen how it’s done.”
“Not too many drops,” the doctor said, demonstrating with a cloth. “Like this, over the mouth and nose.”
John nodded. A soldier was led forward and he helped him onto the table.
“It’ll be fine,” John said low to the terrified, powder-burned face while keeping a firm grip on a shoulder with one hand and administering the anaesthetic with the other.
“Good man,” the doctor said. “That’s it.”
Time vanished, became a steady succession of torn flesh and broken bone. The stench was awful. It seemed to be a part of the hot sun; the flies seemed to breed out of the light and heat. The doctor no longer put his knife down or even rinsed it; he held it between his teeth as John calmed another soldier and applied the anaesthetic. At some point, the doctor asked him to put pressure on the patient’s arteries, and he did so, calmly, buoyed by his usefulness and the doctor’s confidence in him. The work kept the painful memories away as well as the tension of the immediate future. Not once did he see the overseer’s doglike grin hovering in the air, nor did he feel the letters burning on his cheek.
Darkness came. Candles flickered around the table as the stars emerged. The air was colder but still putrid. Now the doctor’s fatigue was clear; his hand became less sure, the knife cuts ragged. John could not bring himself to point these errors out, but he found that when he lightly coughed or shifted his body, the doctor seemed to come awake and realize what he was doing. Once, when John saw that the doctor was cutting away a great deal more tissue than usual, he had no choice but to speak before the damage was done.
The doctor shook his head and ran his bloody forearm across his eyes.
“Could you lower the candle,” he said. After a brief pause, he sighed and went on. “Thank you. You’ve just saved this man a great deal of grief.”
John did not think that he’d ever felt so alive. Despite the blood and the stench and the fatigue, despite the pitiable pleading of some soldiers to have their limbs cut off, he was almost euphoric. From time to time, meeting the doctor’s dark eyes in the candle glow, he almost believed he was helping Caleb. As the hours passed, this belief deepened, until at last he could not keep his past or his purpose back; both rushed at him in sudden waves that he tried in vain to fight off. He paused, listening. A continuous low rumble spilled out of the night—the sound of troops on the move. All at once his own stillness seemed wrong, a terrible mistake. He was meant to go forward. It was the only way that the brutal memories would not overtake him, the only way that the overseer and the mulatto and his own parentless past would not strike the decisive blow. He had a disturbing sensation that the overseer, too, would move in the night. He couldn’t explain it; it wasn’t a matter of reason, it was a stirring in his blood, a prickling along his nape. He looked one last time at the doctor. He was exhausted and bloodied, yet he kept on. The doctor was white and from the North, he already had freedom. So what was he driving himself for? The doctor’s will suddenly seemed even more miraculous than his own. For a few more moments John remained at the man’s side; it seemed, oddly, the safest place he’d ever known. But the overseer was on the move. He could see him riding. And the image fired his dormant hatred. The letters burned. When the doctor stepped over to the pile of bloody limbs, John quietly slipped away.