I Shall Be Near to You: A Novel

 

BUT NOW I am walking a graveled path between white clapboard buildings laid out all neat behind the big main building, looking more like a courthouse than a hospital. My old hurts don’t seem so bad when there’s a row of horse carts waiting out front, every one of them lined with bloodstained canvas.

 

‘Where you taking me?’ I ask Mrs. Chalmers, saying the first words since we left camp. I ain’t as mad as I was, but she is right to move careful around me like I might get rattled any second.

 

She stops in the middle of the path and takes my arm before I can pull away from her.

 

‘Judiciary Hospital takes the worst of the wounded,’ she says. ‘The ones who can’t make the journey any farther than this.’

 

Nurses and two butcher-aproned men gather round a just-drove-in horse cart and there’s moaning as the men heave a boy in blue onto a waiting stretcher like he ain’t nothing but a sack of feed.

 

‘That’s the surgeon’s ward,’ Mrs. Chalmers says. ‘The ambulances drive straight there if they’ve got a particularly bad case.’

 

We walk past. Right outside the door the nurses carry that boy through there’s a garbage pile big enough to fill one of them waiting carts, covered with swarming flies. The nearest horse swishes its tail, sending the flies buzzing just above, and I see it’s a mound of bloody rags and parts. The parts are the worst, looking like hands I’ve held or arms that’ve wrapped around me, and that is what might happen if we ever get called to battle. I blink and something rises from my cursed weak stomach so I’ve got to stop and bend over, my hands on my knees.

 

‘I don’t know what foolishness you told Captain, but I had stitches once when I was twelve,’ I say. ‘Ain’t never liked doctors and such since then.’

 

The sights call up Doc taking the fish-hook-looking needle out of a drawer and saying, ‘Now hold still, Rosetta,’ like I could stop from shaking. Jeremiah squeezed my hand, the first time he ever held it, talking like he would to a scared horse, saying ‘Easy,’ and ‘It’ll be over soon,’ and ‘You’re doing fine, there’s a brave one,’ nothing but nice things. I wanted to listen, but the needle poking my skin and the thread pulling made me carry on and feel sick like throwing up.

 

I keep my head between my knees like Doc made me do back then, remembering how Jeremiah helped me from the table, how I wanted him to stay even after he led me to the cot.

 

Mrs. Chalmers’ hand on my arm startles me.

 

‘Let’s keep walking,’ Mrs. Chalmers says. ‘Keep walking and we’ll be right past. We won’t go in this way.’

 

She pulls on me, saying I’ll get used to these sights or some such nonsense. It can’t look right, a soldier being sick and a lady in skirts herding him along. I swallow and straighten up, wishing Mrs. Chalmers ain’t got me in this bind.

 

‘Oh, look,’ she says, and points off in the distance. ‘Isn’t it something?’

 

The Capitol rises like the sun from the trees, its unfinished dome jabbing at the sky.

 

It’s a sight I never thought to see, but I tell Mrs. Chalmers, ‘That dome don’t mean a thing to me.’

 

Her mouth drops open, and she says, ‘Oh, you can’t mean that. Without the Union, what do any of us even have?’

 

She is trying to get my mind on something different or maybe remind me of what we soldiers are supposed to be fighting for, but I ain’t having none of it.

 

‘I don’t see how it would change my farm one bit if the Confederacy is its own country or not,’ I say as we make our way down the long row of buildings, gravel crunching under our feet.

 

‘But don’t you see? We’re all tied up together in this. It is for the betterment of each of us if this war earns the slaves’ freedom, if the evil of slavery is wiped clean from this country. And then surely no one can say women ought to be property as well and we will have our freedom next.’

 

‘That may be,’ I say, thinking how I ain’t pegged her for a Quaker, ‘but I don’t hold with slavery either, and I can’t see how freeing the slaves will change things for women one bit. I ain’t waiting for anyone else to give me anything. You don’t have to either.’

 

I am too peevish to tell Mrs. Chalmers how it ain’t so easy as all that, how sometimes getting what you aimed don’t feel like freedom.

 

 

INSIDE THE WARD is just as white as outside. Rows of cots with the whitest sheets since Mama’s clothesline fill each side of the long hall. Most every cot has a soldier in it, only a few of them sitting up.

 

I stay on the strip of brown carpeting down the middle of the hall, keeping my dirty boots off the whitewashed floor. Mrs. Chalmers talks in a low voice to a man in a white uniform. He has full side whiskers standing out from his face and he nods, pointing down the ward, and she steps off, carrying her basket.

 

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