March Read online

  I straightened, finally, took a last deep breath of outside air, and laid my hand against the great door. There were bits of board nailed up where the beveled lights had been. I supposed they had been shot out or shattered in the battle for possession of the island. Inside, in what had been the elegant oval reception hall, men huddled, wounded and wet. Some lay flat upon the floor, some half-propped against the walls. One man’s head was pillowed on the plinth that held the Bound Prometheus, and his face had the same wracked expression as the carved countenance above him.

  No one, it seemed, had got across the river with a full kit. Some had pants, but were missing shirts; others were attired the opposite way, having lost the lower half of their costume, but retained a coat. Some were entirely nude. Of these, a few shared Turkey rugs pulled up to cover them. Others, without such comfort, shivered so hard that it seemed likely they would shake the house off its foundations. I gave my own black frock to one of these wretches.

  Because cries issued from the room that had been Mr. Clement’s library, I expected that the worst cases were within, and that I would find our surgeon there. Dr. McKillop is a short, stocky man with muscled forearms as hairy as a Barbary ape’s. He was turned away from me, working on the wrecked arm of Seth Millbrake, a wheel-wright from Cambridge. I noted that even the back of McKillop’s coat was blood-spattered, indicating the work he had accomplished whilst I’d tarried to wallow in my own exhaustion and despair. I resolved to think better of him. At his feet lay a forearm, a foot, and a leg, sheared off at the knee. McKillop lifted his boot from this gore-slicked floor and commenced to use its sole as a strop for his scalpel.

  Seth was pleading with the surgeon, as such men always do, to save his limb. But the missile had shattered the bone near the elbow, splintering it into a score of white needles now sewn all through the shredded muscle.

  My resolution regarding McKillop was tested within an instant when the surgeon, turning to wipe his knife on a piece of rag, noticed me. “March! About time! Get over here!” he barked, as one might call to an errant dog. “Hold his shoulders,” he instructed, and I did, concentrating on Millbrake’s face so that I would not have to watch McKillop’s ferreting. Millbrake’s eyes were all pupil-black with agony and fear. His tremors shook the table he lay upon. I brought my head close to his ear and whispered the words of the psalm: “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress ...” Just then, McKillop’s instrument hit a vessel and a spurt of warm liquid flew into my eye. I could not let go my grip on the writhing body to wipe it away, so I went on: “He sent forth his word and healed them... ” I tasted iron as the blood trickled down the side of my nose and found my lips. Millbrake went limp under my hands then, and I thought that he had fallen into merciful unconsciousness. But when McKillop lifted his hand from where he had pressed it down upon the spurting vessel, I saw that the fluid flowed without pulse, and realized that the man’s life had ended. McKillop grunted and turned to his next patient, who had taken a ball in the stomach. He plunged a finger into the wound and felt around in a desultory manner for a few moments. Then he withdrew his hand, shrugging. “When balls are lost in the capacity of the belly one need not amuse himself by hunting for them.” Fortunately, the wounded man was unconscious and did not hear the grim sentence the surgeon had just passed. As McKillop moved on to attend to a man whose skull was stove in like a crushed tin mug, I lifted Millbrake’s half-severed limb, which was twisted most unnaturally, and arranged it on his breast, then set the other arm across it. “Philbride, over in the corner there,” McKillop said without raising his eyes from his work. “Shrapnel in his breast. Nothing I can do. He was calling for a chaplain. Better make it quick.”

  A farm boy would never have mistaken haystacks for tents. But they hadn’t sent a farm boy to scout the Virginia shore. Philbride was a mill-town lad, accustomed to made roads and brick walls and a vista no wider than a street. At night, in thick fog, his fear had filled a harvested field with an enemy company; sentryless, seemingly, set there as if in answer to our general’s desire for an easy victory. Poor Philbride. He knew that his erroneous report was the crumbled footing on which our whole day’s edifice had collapsed. But it was not the only mistake, nor even the gravest. And that was what I whispered to the youth, who could scarce draw a breath and whose sweat, despite the cold night air, pearled on his pale skin.

  I wish his eyes had grown less desperate, his shallow breathing deeper as I spoke. But I cannot say so. “Will of God,” “bosom of our Saviour,” perhaps these were the words he wanted. Perhaps it was in the hope of such preachments that he had called out for a chaplain. Instead, what I told him was the plain truth: that today’s business was neither God’s work nor his will, but a human shambles, merely. I would have gone on to say that it was no matter, that one botched battle did not make a war, and that the cause we served was worth the price paid, here and in perhaps a hundred other places in the days to come. But all I had done that day had gone ill, and my ministrations to that boy were no different. He sat up suddenly, desperate for breath. His pierced lungs, it seemed, couldn’t draw air for him, so I just held him there, his mouth gaping like a landed fish, while his skin turned slowly to the color of oatmeal.

  Afterward, I went in search of some container to haul away the litter of amputated limbs, the presence of which, I judged, could only work on the fears of the wounded. That chore accomplished, I looked for water to clean off the blood. Finding the ewers empty, I gathered as many as I could carry and, picking my way through the ruined men, made my way to the well house.

  Even in candlelight, even after twenty years, even with her back turned, I recognized her. She was bending to fill pitchers from the well bucket, and there was something in the curve of her back, the sway at the waist, and the way she came slowly erect. As I had stood outside on the steps, gathering my courage to enter this place, it had fallen into my mind that Grace might be the slave the private had mentioned. I wanted it to be so. I dreaded it be so. At the moment I recognized her, longing and dread collided with a force that made me clumsy, so that a ewer slipped in my hand and I fumbled to keep hold of it. She, of course, could not have entertained the possibility of seeing me. So that when she turned, all she saw was yet another in the roll of the wounded, a coatless soldier without token of rank, whose blood-spattered visage spoke of some grievous hurt.

  “Let me take those, soldier,” she said, reaching for the ewers. That silvery voice, so distinctive. “You are kind to try to help, but you shouldn’t be walking about with your wound untended.”

  “I’m not wounded, Miss Grace. I was helping the surgeon with an amputation.”

  Her head, tied just as I remembered in an elaborate rigolette, went up like an animal, scenting. She raised the lantern that held her candle and looked at me, hard. “Do I know you, sir?”

  “You probably wouldn’t remember me—” Even as I said the words I realized how ridiculously they rang. How would she not remember the foolish youth who had been the source of her agony?

  “My name is March ... I was here in forty-one ...”

  “Mr. March! The teacher!”

  I could not tell, in the dark, if she intended irony by addressing me so, or whether the warmth in her voice was genuine. “Forgive me, I did not expect to see you a soldier.”

  “I am serving as a chaplain.”

  She raised her chin in a slight nod, as if that fit her memory of me, and held out her hand. I took it, noting as I did so that it was chapped and calloused.

  Something must have shown in my face, for when she drew back her hand, she looked down at it self-consciously. “So many things have changed here, Mr. March. Some of them you see for yourself Others are less evident. Perhaps we will have time to speak of it, if you would care to, but now the wounded men are thirsty ...”

  “Of course,” I said. “We both have much to do.” I let her go and went to my own duty, which was to bring comfort where I could. I was sitting i
n the oval entrance hall sometime toward dawn, my back propped against the stairwell, when exhaustion finally claimed me. I had taken the hand of a gravely injured man, and I held it still when I awoke. But it was cold by then, and rigid.

  Grace was standing over me, pouring from a jorum of coffee. I closed the eyes of the dead man and stood stiffly, every fiber of my body complaining. As I steadied myself on the stair rail, I noted that the wood was rough under my hand. Grace ran a finger over the ruined banister. “My doing, I fear: I brought Mr. Clement’s horse in here, during the fighting,” she said. “He chewed the banister, as you see, and then of course the army found him anyway, and took him as contraband...”

  She looked away then, and I wondered if she was aware that her own status was not unlike that of the horse: she, too, might be considered contraband of war. I accepted the tin mug she held out to me, drank the scalding contents, and passed it back to her so that she could serve another man. In the gray light—for it had rained hard all through the night, adding to the misery of the many men without a shelter even as cheerless as this house—I studied Grace’s features. She had aged in twenty years, certainly; there were fine lines etched around her eyes and mouth, and hard times had robbed her skin of its bloom. But she was handsome, still, and I could see the eyes of the men following her as she moved from one to another.

  There was much to do that morning. We buried those we had recovered from the toll of the battle’s dead, laying them side by side in a shallow grave, each man with his name and unit inscribed on a scrap of paper placed in a bottle and tucked under his blouse, if indeed he still wore one. Before noon, the ambulances arrived on the Maryland side to fetch the wounded to Washington, so I lent my hand as stretcher bearer to move the men down to the boats, over the protests of my aching muscles. It was a labor of many hours, made miserable by the incessant rain and mud. I had no boots, so the viscous stuff tugged at my bare feet with a thirsty suck, and soon the skin was rubbed red raw. Across the river, as the day wore on, the hungry mules pulled in their traces, wrenching the wagons back and forth. The moans told the effect on those lying within. When the train finally set out, we had left with us only the walking wounded and those so gravely injured that McKillop had deemed they wouldn’t last the journey to Washington.

  By daylight, some things were evident that darkness had concealed. It was clear that the ruined state of the house was not a matter of a few weeks at war. The signs of long decay were everywhere. The tobacco fields were overrun by tare and thistleweed; the plants, which should have been harvested for drying, stood blackened by frost. The pollarded fruit trees that had hedged the kitchen garden were sprouting unpruned; the long-stretching bean rows, once trim as a parade line, were leggy scraggles, while many beds stood unsown. I realized that the ruined gristmill I had passed in the darkness was the selfsame structure that as a going concern had so vexed Mr. Clement. Some calamity, clearly, had overtaken this place. I longed to learn more. But I was pressed hard all that day and into evening, and when I glimpsed Grace, she, too, was about myriad duties so that we had no chance to speak. The next day, our colonel came to make an assessment of our condition, and told us that we were left with no more than 350 effectives in a unit that had numbered more than 600.

  McKillop proved himself a good judge of the men’s condition, as most of those he had marked for death were indeed gone within those two days. In the afternoons I helped to bury them with what ceremony conditions allowed.

  I was coming from the corner of the field we had staked out for a burial ground when I saw Grace, walking on the terrace with a frail old man on her arm. I say walking, but in fact the progress the pair made was achieved in an odd gait for which there is no name. Augustus Clement-I cannot say I recognized him, but rather knew that it must be he-no longer had the posture of a man. His head was cocked forward and to one side, like a rooster’s, his ear almost set down upon his collarbone. Grace held his left arm in a firm grip and supported him further with a hand around his waist. His right arm seemed fixed to his side from shoulder to elbow, but the lower arm flapped wildly, his fingers fanning the air. He progressed by raising one knee almost waist high, swaying there for a long moment, then placing the toe tentatively onto the ground before letting the heel follow it, deliberate as a dancer.

  Because they could make no very rapid progress, I soon came abreast of them and offered a greeting. Mr. Clement could not raise his head, but turned his body sidelong, his cloudy eyes groping to see who it was that spoke to him. There was a blankness to his expression, for it seemed that the muscles of his face were as palsied as the rest of him. Grace leaned down to his ear and spoke soothingly. A strange sound, a kind of donkey bray, issued from his slack lips. A bubble of saliva formed itself into a thread and dribbled down his chin. The flapping of his hand became more violent. Grace drew forth a handkin and wiped his face. “Mr. Clement is very agitated because of all the confusion here,” she said. “Forgive me, Mr. March, but I believe I had best return him to his room.”

  “Can I help you? He seems so very frail.”

  “I would be obliged,” she said, and so I took my place on the other side of the trembling body, and together we brought him within. She had made up a bed for him in the breakfast room, for it was long since he could negotiate the stairs. When we got there, after our tortuous progress, and Grace eased him down upon his couch, he gave a ragged sigh of relief I held the basin as Grace bathed his face, and by the time she was done he seemed to have fallen into a doze.

  Grace took the cloths and basin and withdrew to what had been a small butler’s pantry. There was a narrow pallet upon the floor, and this, I thought, must be where she now spent her nights. When she was done arranging his toilet things, she straightened and stared out a small casement window. The light was fading on the neglected fields, and the thistleweeds threw long shadows.

  “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck...” She gave a deep sigh. “Mrs. Clement loved that poem, Mr. March. She had me read it until I had it by heart. I am glad she is not here to see what a wreck we are become.”

  Grace turned from the window and came back into the breakfast room. “She died, you know, the autumn of the year you were with us. The mourning was very correct, but really, I was the only one for whom her death changed anything.” She sat then, upon a ladder-back chair. I imagine she often sat so, keeping vigil over the old man. Her back was very straight. She gazed at the hands folded in her lap, turning them over, as if their workworn condition still surprised her. It seemed that she wanted to say more, so I sat down also, in an armchair that I assumed was Mr. Clement’s accustomed place. It must have been months since she had had anyone to whom she could speak freely, for once she began on the tale, it poured out, a litany of loss.

  “It all went on, just as it always had. I know that Mr. Clement’s daughter begged him to give me to her, to work at her plantation on the James. She claimed, quite rightly, that there would now be too few duties for me in this house. But Mr. Clement refused her and she departed here in a great huff. I expected to take up the duties of one of our house servants and have that unfortunate relegated to the fields, but nothing of the kind happened. If Mr. Harris suggested it, Mr. Clement did not heed him. I was left alone, to fill my hours as I wished. So I did what I always had done. I read, Mr. March, but with the difference that I chose volumes according to my own desires rather than Mrs. Clement’s. So it was for more than a year, until the following fall. Mr. Clement had gone ahead to his daughter’s plantation, where a family celebration was to be observed. His son was to follow on the eve of the gathering, and he decided he would bring a brace of wild turkey for the occasion. He went out alone, and did not come back. It was Mr. Harris who found him. Apparently, he had got his boot tangled in some honeysuckle thicket and his fowling piece discharged into his face. Mr. Harris carried the body home here and I tried to tell him that it would be best to get it in its box before the master returned. But he said he wouldn’t
do anything until he knew Mr. Clement’s wishes. Well, of course Mr. Clement rode back here in a distraught state and insisted on seeing his boy. I had done my best, but that didn’t amount to much.” She looked at me then, and I could see the condition of the corpse just from the memory of it in her eyes. “He sat up all night by the body. The next morning, I noticed a tremor in his hand. I thought it was exhaustion, merely. But it was the beginning of his long decline.

  “Mr. Harris did not stay here long after. He got a better offer and he took it. His ties had been to the young master. I think he really loved the boy, in his way. He certainly spent more time with him than Mr. Clement, who made it cruelly plain that his own son bored him. It was Mr. Harris who praised the boy when he mastered some aspect of farm work. I think you know that Mr. Clement never troubled to conceal his contempt for estate matters or those whose minds they occupied. You could not have known how it galled Mr. Harris, that morning of his return, when he came into the kitchen for refreshment and learned from Annie that you had been dining with Mr. Clement every day. He himself had never been invited to do so. Not once, in nine long years of service. So, I suppose you could say that Mr. Clement had no right to the man’s loyalty.

  “In any case, the place has never been well run since the day he left. The replacement Mr. Clement hired was a swindler: he made off with a year’s profit. The next man was a brute—” She stopped for a moment, dealing with memories that were evidently so bitter she could not give them voice. “Mr. Clement dismissed him after two of our best hands, Mose and Asa, ran off Until that time the Clements had never had a runaway. By then, the place had a name for mismanagement, and the only person Mr. Clement could find to take it on was a man who spent all night drinking applejack and all day sleeping it off. That was the year Mr. Clement started selling people, to make ends meet. The speculator wanted to sell me: I overheard him say that a “yaller girl” like me would be worth more than any other three hands down in New Orleans. But Mr. Clement wouldn’t hear of it. He sold Justice and Prudence instead. The day the speculator took them, Annie went to the river. Mr. Clement always maintained that she slipped on the rocks, but it wasn’t so. She just walked out into the channel until the water closed over her head.” I felt a hard lump form suddenly in my throat. Grace stood, abruptly, and busied herself lighting the lamp against the gathering dark. Before the wick flared, I dashed the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand. “As soon as we got word that the Union army was camped across the river in Poolesville, half the remaining hands ran off. That left but three of us, and the other two left here a fortnight ago, during the battle for the island. ”