The sun is well up when Will drags me out of my blankets, saying, ‘Sergeant asked for volunteers to guard the hospital. I put us forward.’
‘I ain’t good for any of it,’ I moan.
‘We have to find Sully,’ he says, like he knows just what will get me moving.
It is late morning by the time we walk up to a farmhouse, a red H flag flying out in front. It was a good farm before all this, that much is plain. But now there ain’t a thing of farm about it except the house and its wide porch and the whitewashed barn and its weathered gray plank fences with crescent moons chewed into them. Men are all around, spilling out of the house, the open barn doors. Complaining, coughing, crying, sprawling, filling any shade, lying under tents put up quick. The boys outside ain’t the worst ones but they don’t look good. Wounds need tending. Letters need writing. Prayers need saying. The smells of fever sweat and old meat hang over the whole farm. I cover my nose. Boys lie in crooked rows, faces streaked with dirt and gunpowder and blood, lined with pain, eyes wide with fear or closed tight against it. Men too hurt to be hungry. Men too sick to get to the outhouse in time. Black smells. Black thoughts.
I search for a face I know and catch myself looking for one I ain’t ever seeing on Earth again, except maybe in the echo of some other face. I have to stop myself or there ain’t hope for me being useful.
Will is up the stone steps to the house. He walks through the door left open to catch any breeze and I make myself go after him. He turns from the dark hall and its stairs, all of it stained with blood that ain’t ever scrubbing out, and pokes his head into the parlor, moving closer to sounds I don’t want to hear ever again. I’m scared of seeing more hurts I can’t fix. This ain’t the right place for me, but Will is here. I’ve got no one else to follow.
He steps into that parlor, says something. A voice answers. His footsteps move away into another room. Inside it ain’t a proper house no more. The rooms and all the furniture are being used for the wounded. Taking up every bit of floor are boys and men, weeping and moaning worse than the boys outside. In here, surrounded by yellow walls, it is close and hot even with the doors and windows flung open, whatever drapes there were pulled down for bedding or maybe bandages.
A shadow moves in the corner, makes me jump out of my skin. A soldier stands up from a wooden chair, moving to a man calling for water. I nod and follow Will into the next room, what was the dining room.
Boys lie on the floor in rows, one along each side of the narrow room and one down the middle, making me think of the Judiciary Square Hospital. Most of these boys are missing something. Feet. Legs. Arms. Hands. Jaws. Or else those parts are shattered so bad, they’ll be missing soon. There’s whimpering and moaning and rasping breaths and praying, all of it calling up things I can’t bear, how there weren’t a thing to be done for Jeremiah.
Down the long side of the room, Will talks to a lady kneeling to pass a hand across a boy’s forehead, her skirts puddling around her. I stop in my tracks when I see who it is.
That thought don’t but last a moment. This woman ain’t Jennie. She might be my Mama’s age. She straightens up and moves to the next soldier with a stiffness, the way she holds herself apart telling me this house ain’t hers.
I march down that row of weeping wounds and dirty bandages, right to Will and that woman, my feet pounding, making the wood floor creak. He is speaking to her. She has a wide face, round cheeks, dark-circled eyes.
‘He’s with the surgeon,’ the woman tells Will, and that is all I need to hear.
‘You’ve got to give me something. Something to do,’ I say right over Will, hoping my stomach will hold for the work.
She looks at me straight on, an eyebrow raising. Then she stoops over the next soldier and says, ‘I’ve been working alone. The surgeons are kept in constant work.’
‘I can work alone,’ I say. ‘Just tell me what needs doing.’
‘There are rooms full of needs here,’ she says. ‘And the barnyard out there.’ She checks the soldier’s bandage. He groans at her touch and she lays the back of her hand to his forehead. She grabs supplies from a basket behind her, her own arm wrapped in gauze below her shoulder. Her sleeve, her deep blue dress, is blood-stiffened, stained to almost black.
‘We’ve only got our canteens,’ I say.