The Tinsmith Read online

  But Anson looked at this man’s face often enough over the next frantic hours that its features became vividly fixed in his memory: large, slightly bulbous eyes, a full, wet mouth, the bottom lip jutting out a little, and pale skin that yet had a curious dark cast to it, much the way that the moon, Anson thought, no matter how bright, always suggests the presence of darkness. Regardless of that impression, which did not so much unnerve as intrigue Anson, the youth’s grace was striking. With surprising ease, he carried his wounded comrades either slung over his shoulders or cradled in his arms—and when he placed them down, his care was most evident. His expression, tight with exertion, never altered. Nor did he attempt to communicate. There was an odd deference to his behaviour that reminded Anson of something he’d seen before, and recently, but he could not place it. The youth, waiting for Anson to dictate by a nod of the head where he should lay the latest wounded man down, suddenly gave an involuntary shudder under the intensity of Anson’s gaze and ducked his head. Then, placing the soldier gently on the ground, he raced back into the smoke and fire flashes, without even a rifle for protection.

  Caught up again in his duties, Anson forgot about the tall soldier. The noise and smoke continued unabated, with troops rushing forward in columns and falling back again in bloodied fragments, the frantic motion accompanied by sporadic cheers and the terrifying peals of the rebels’ yelling. Several times, the yells cut so sharply through the din that Anson expected a grey wave bearing faces fierce with the lust to kill to roll over him. But always the yells faded, the grey wave broke elsewhere, and the tall, calm, long-limbed soldier brought in another fallen comrade.

  Some men, Anson knew from previous battles, shirked a more dangerous duty by helping the wounded—fit soldiers who accompanied the fallen out of the fight often found reasons not to return, or at the very least they returned as slowly as possible. This tall soldier, however, always rushed back to the lines with his fighting blood fully up. Perhaps he killed rebels with his bare hands. He appeared capable enough; his hands dangled thick and knot-tight at his sides. And by nine o’clock, during another strange lull in the battle, Anson knew that this fight was terrible, often a hand-to-hand affair. One soldier said that he lay on the ground beneath the powder smoke and shot at the legs of rebels as they passed a few feet in front of him. So perhaps the tall soldier did kill without a rifle. And yet, there was that faintly familiar humility, that long shudder, as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. Anson couldn’t dismiss it entirely. He kept expecting to see the shudder again.

  Oddly enough, however, once the shooting and shelling had stopped over the broken landscape and the cries of the wounded for water echoed dismally through the woods and across the pasture fields and orchards, the tall soldier had vanished.

  Anson gathered the remainder of his supplies into his kit and stepped out of the hollow. The trees in the near woodlot were smoking, splintered sticks through which a staggering figure sometimes emerged. The ground flowed with torn smoke. A wounded horse neighed miserably as it kicked two legs at the sky. The cry of “Water! Water!” never stopped. Blue shadows crawled like flies toward the rear, some grey shadows among them. Most of the tall stalks of a vast cornfield nearby were gone, the stubs scorched black, the few leaves spattered with blood.

  After helping to load some wounded onto a wagon, Anson left orders for the other ambulance-men regarding where to concentrate their efforts, then trudged for a half-mile under the risen sun to his bloodier labours at a barnyard northwest of the hollow. It was a strange, disorienting journey, with every twenty paces over the shelled earth bringing a new assault on the senses. Passing an orchard of broken-limbed trees, Anson suddenly breathed in the powerful aroma of ripe peaches. But just as he was enjoying the experience, the peach scent faded, replaced by the foul stench of death rising off a mangled horse. Twenty paces on, close to a trim little farmhouse, several swarms of bees poured like smoke out of a cluster of wooden box hives. Everywhere the collision of nature and war struck Anson with a gloom that made his steps feel more weighted down than usual.

  The battle in his part of the field raged until early afternoon, then slackened. His regiment was out of it by then; he heard reports that more than half of the men had been killed or wounded, including many officers. While labouring in the barnyard, Anson was aware of the guns continuing to pound in the south, toward the little creek. From time to time, he’d look up from an operation to see a flash of orange light on the horizon. Occasionally, individual cracks of rifles, sounding closer than the thunderlike roll of the artillery, pierced the still fields around him and kept help from those wounded still lying in the zone between the armies, which, as far as Anson could tell, had reached a stalemate. Even in his situation, with the surgery relentless, Anson felt the tension in the air; the imminence of renewed full-fledged fighting was palpable. But here in the north, in the churned fields and broken orchards around his barnyard, the big guns remained silent as the afternoon dragged on and the yellow sun climbed free of smoke threads and burned hotter, increasing the wounded’s desperate thirst as well as Anson’s sense of helplessness; he simply could not do enough to ease the suffering.

  As the daylight dwindled and the sun hung bloodily in the smoke of the last fighting, Anson noticed that the palm of his saw hand was blistered. Blood, intestine, and brain splattered his apron. His supply of Latin verbs ran dry.

  He stood in a barnyard of flattened grass and operated on a door wrenched off a nearby house and laid out upon four oak barrels. His catling knife, bone saw, and other instruments sat on another barrel just to his right. Twenty feet away, William Childress, another assistant surgeon, bent over a body, his right arm rising and falling in the fading light as he cut through an arm or leg bone—the grating sound, low and dull, remarkably akin to that of wood being sawn, filled the barnyard and made everyone present temporarily unaware of the artillery and musket noises still coming from the south.

  Several dozen wounded soldiers lay on the heavily trodden ground, forming a loose line leading up to the operating table. These men were either still in shock or medicated for pain—they posed little problem, though occasionally one resisted the surgery so strongly that hospital stewards were needed to hold him down on the table. It was the others—the slackers, the lightly wounded, members of the Quartermaster corps—whose open-jawed curiosity created a disturbance. Their silent, morbid gawking weighed down Anson’s arm each time he explored a wound, poking a finger deep into torn tissue to remove bits of cloth or dirt or, if he was fortunate, a lead ball or other piece of killing weaponry.

  The wound before him was bad, the kneecap shattered and the tissue shredded. Anson chose a spot several inches above the wound and fastened a tourniquet. He picked up his amputating knife from the basin of bloody water and as rapidly as possible cut through the tissue to the bone, then peeled the flap of skin back. Aware of all the eyes of the waiting wounded turned to him, he took up his saw and, placing the blade firmly against the bone, moved his arm back and forth in a steady rhythm.

  Around him he heard a sudden commotion as another ambulance wagon arrived, blood dripping through its floorboards. A voice from inside cried, “O Lord O Lord O Lord” without pause. The horse neighed loudly. Someone shouted, “Whoa! Whoa there!” Shadows spread over the ground. The smell of blood and chlorophorm blended with the musk of manure and earth. There came a sharp cry, then a low groan. The dull sawing sound, steady as bee hum, persisted in Anson’s ears, as if divorced from the motion of his arm. He paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes, then wiped his hand on his bloody, gore-covered smock and returned to his task.

  Finally, with the useless leg dangling from his hand, he turned toward the ever-lengthening line of wounded. Men of all ages, from hardly-more-than boys to grey- and white-bearded veterans, lay or sat on the ground in loose clusters, their shirts either open or off, their eyes heavy. Several soldiers couldn’t keep their jaws from opening and closing in rapid succession; they resembled baby ro
bins waiting to be fed. Far beyond the clusters of wounded, a burst shell threw up smoke and earth. Anson’s stomach lurched. There’d be little rest this night. But, God knew, there’d been little real rest since he’d enlisted and left behind his somnolent bachelorhood and drowsy practice of mostly sore throats and mild catarrhs and the occasional broken bone, almost always clean, from a fall off a horse or a barn roof. For one thing, there’d been too much to learn, too many vile city diseases to fight, too many new ways to remove flesh and bone and muscle in order to preserve life. And for another thing, there’d been too much death. That was the worst of it. At home, it was easy to believe in the natural course of God’s plan—birth, youth, age, and finally a kind of gradual sunset out of the mortal condition. Even when a baby was stillborn, or a woman died in childbirth, or someone met with a cruel accident, the event was rare enough not to violate the natural laws. But war . . . it hadn’t just violated, it had destroyed the past fifteen years of Anson’s comfortable abidance in the unquestioned verities of continuance. In any case, how could there be rest during a rebellion, when one side of the body was attacking the other?

  He looked down at the lower leg in his hand, as if his thoughts alone had severed it from a body and put it there. And yet he did not doubt the necessity of the fight to keep his country together. No, that was without question. Even so, it was wearying, unpleasant work.

  He flung the leg onto a pile of limbs and heard it land with the usual splat, as if he were piling fruit. The sound sickened him anew; it was always a harsh reminder of how infrequently he could keep the wounded whole. Heavily, he turned back to the damaged body on the table and sutured the arteries, his needle pulling the silk thread tight.

  “Next!” he called and waited for another wounded man to emerge from the horrified lineup.

  Darkness fell at last. The battle sounds ceased, replaced with a steady, echoing lament of suffering. Lanterns bobbed in the fields as hospital stewards and stretcher-men continued to search for wounded. Anson worked with his back to a great gambrel barn, its four sloped roofs giving it a queer, giant bat–like quality whenever he turned and faced its massive bulk. If not for the powerful, comforting scent of alfalfa wafting through its hayloft window, the barn would have seemed a gruesome observer of Anson’s surgeries. Instead, he used the scent of hay, faint though it was, threatening to dissolve completely in the mingled musk of chloroform, blood, and manure in which he stood, to carry him home to his grandparents’ farm. There, at harvest time, many men had worked in the fields, swinging scythes.

  This peaceful reverie of reflection never lasted more than a few seconds. Eventually, Anson would look up to see his half-dozen fellow surgeons bent over in the barely sufficient light of sperm-oil candles held in the unsteady hands of exhausted assistants. Sometimes he would be called over by a colleague to consult on a particularly difficult operation, but mostly the surgeons worked independently, with Josiah Rawley, the regimental surgeon, patrolling from candle to candle when he wasn’t busy cutting into flesh and bone himself.

  Meanwhile, out in the dark fields, the sharp cracks of pickets’ rifles kept help from reaching those soldiers who had fallen in the contested ground between the armies. But without the constant shrieking and pounding of shells, the worst of the killing was over, and Anson’s body responded. Several times he dashed from the operating table and relieved his bowels in the pasture, where at least the spread manure made his foul contribution less apparent. The cramps intensified as the night wore on, and the energy spent in these evacuations soon brought back his fits of violent coughing.

  Once, returning to the table where an anaesthetized man with an arm fracture lay in readiness for amputation, Anson encountered Rawley, the barrel-chested career army man whose silver-grey beard and pallid skin gave him a ghostly appearance in the candle flickers.

  “For heaven’s sakes, Baird, don’t be so dainty, man!” With a sweeping motion of one arm, he indicated the black, fetus-curled figures of the wounded nearby. “This is no time for niceties. Go in your breeches if you have to!” Then he slapped Anson on the shoulder and, with a broad smile, said, “It’s always you bachelors who are so fussy. You need a good woman to take care of the manners for you.”

  Though Anson was not sure how a woman could make his diarrhea any less unpleasant, he took his superior’s point—with the ever-increasing miasma of odours (blood, shit, smoke, vomit, chloroform), no one was going to remark on his excretions.

  And it was true: with each hour, more stragglers came in from the great battle, many suffering from shock and loss of blood. Some managed remarkably to reach the hospital under their own power, while others were helped in either by comrades or by one of those men deputized for the duty. As such men were mostly drawn from the ranks of shirkers or were soon needed to help out as nurses, the fresh supplies of wounded inevitably dwindled toward the early hours of the new day.

  By then, the piteous cries of stranded soldiers, for water, for their mothers, or for death, decreased. Anson clutched his stomach and leaned on the operating table with his other hand. In the candlelight, his hand appeared savage, pale skin showing under the blood smears and gore; it looked as if he had cut it off and forgotten to toss it on the nearest stack of limbs. But his feet troubled him the most. They were swollen and aching, and no matter how he adjusted his weight, he could find no relief.

  Then the rain began, lightly at first, sending up a gentle chorus of patters among the tree leaves and on the barn roof. But quickly the light shower became a downpour and operations had to be performed inside the barn. Now, as he sawed into bone, his shadow loomed grotesquely on the beams and stables and stacked hay. His arms, black and several times larger on the planks, moved with a creeping, spidery motion that he could hardly bear to witness. Anson knew that others noticed this as well and likely couldn’t draw their eyes away. Each time he laid his amputating knife against skin, he imagined he was cutting into a huge indrawn breath.

  Finally, he lost count of the amputations and of those who perished on the table before he could begin. Some had already died before they were lifted into place. Other waiting wounded were regularly pulled out of the line as corpses. In the brief pauses between operations, Anson heard the sound of digging just outside. At one point, Samuel Cossins, another assistant surgeon, appeared in the gloom and shadows with a chart in his hand. He wearily but methodically checked every wounded man—and there were hundreds sprawled in the barn—seeking their identification for possible use in his growing registry of graves. Anson almost envied him his miserable work, for at least it did not involve this relentless sawing of bone.

  The rain fell softer, the thin drops tapping the boot-slopped ground outside the open barn door. With difficulty, Anson fished around in a gaping thigh wound, seeking to ligate an artery to stop the bleeding. Blood gushed over his hands. He swore beneath his breath and continued to reach with the silk thread; it was like trying to set a hook inside the belly of a fish. Finally succeeding to tie a loop around the artery with one end of the thread, he left the other end to dangle out of the wound. Later, he would be able to check to see if the loop had rotted loose by pulling on the dangling end. When the loop pulled away, if a blood clot had formed and closed the vessel, his efforts would have succeeded. If no clot had formed, there might follow an even worse, secondary hemorrhage. This had happened once to another surgeon at Bull Run, and the patient had died.

  Anson wiped his bloodied hands on his apron and briefly shut his eyes.

  et, si quid cessare potes, requiesce sub umbra.

  huc ipsi potum uenient per prata iuuenci,

  hic uiridis tenera praetexit harundine ripas

  mincius, eque sacra resonant examina quercu.

  He opened his eyes and looked around. There was no sacred oak in sight, nor swarms of bees humming from it; not even Virgil could have imagined himself away from such misery. Wounded men so crammed the interior of the barn that if he’d taken two steps in any direction, he would have t
rodden on one of them. Their shock-pale faces crowded close as mushrooms. He felt the piteous gazes of what seemed to be an entire regiment.

  Near daybreak, in an effort to keep himself going, Anson walked into a corner of the barnyard where a hospital cook had a large pot boiling over a low fire. He asked for a cup of coffee and a piece of salt pork, and after drinking and eating, he decided to stretch his legs by going for a walk—he could not remain near so many dead and dying for another minute and still keep his freshness and alertness for the surgeries. A little time to himself might translate into a cleaner, more efficient procedure with an improved chance of recovery. Perhaps a walk might even ease the aching in his feet. Quietly desperate, he swallowed two more opium pills. Then he selected a large tree on the lightening horizon as his destination, stepped cautiously around the sleeping and moaning forms on the earth, and tried to clear his mind.

  From what he’d heard, the battle had been a victory, even if, from his vantage point, it didn’t look like one. Some of the wounded had grumbled that they could have whipped the rebels for good if they’d been allowed to, but most felt that they’d given a fine account of themselves and that the Republic had won the day. The uneasy night, pitch-dark but for a scattering of watch fires and horrible with the cries of the wounded, had not created a victorious atmosphere, nor had the clusters of grimy-white hospital tents that had sprouted like mushrooms in and around the barnyard.