The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 4

4

Sound returned slowly, like the emergence from a fever dream. Weybridge heard the pop of rifles. The percussive boom of the Confederate artillery. Then shouts of the Vermonters as they raced toward the fence, and the subsequent, inevitable cries of human beings when their bodies were ruptured by musket fire, wounds far worse than the carbine bullets—at least according to the surgeon Weybridge had befriended at Cold Harbor. The round balls sometimes glance off the bone, he’d said, unlike the conoidal ones. Minie balls? They shatter bone.

And there was the voice of Eustis Marsh, and this was not a memory. The lieutenant was with him now, looking down at him, oddly angelic, speaking, telling him not to move. The air was alive with the smell of burnt powder, and there was that smoke that reminded him of morning mist, a gift of the changing seasons. At home, it foreshadowed the fall, the kaleidoscopic fire in the trees before the leaves fell to the forest floor. The deep red of the maple, the yellow of the alders, the rusty orange of the oak.

“Captain?”

He looked into Marsh’s eyes. Then he followed the lieutenant’s gaze.

Two fingers on his hand, his left hand, the one redder than wine or the reddest of those autumnal maples, were hanging by threads. But it was when he looked down at his right leg, instinctively aware that something was wrong there more than he was gutted by pain, he grew nauseous: as bad as the wound was to his hand, it was the leg that was going to leave him dead in this meadow beyond the brush. He saw bone, pulverized pieces from a chess board, each the color of melting candle wax, the fragments and chips amidst a pulpy stew of tendon and muscle and flesh. And there was the blood, a geyser. His heart was pumping his blood into the grass, watering it like the downpours of the past week, and literally killing itself by killing him.

“Cord it, cord it,” he heard himself whispering—Wasn’t he trying to shout? Why was his voice so frail?—but even in the softness there was a panic that was unfamiliar to him. He didn’t usually panic. But he knew that if Marsh didn’t wrap a tourniquet around what remained of his thigh, he’d be dead in minutes.

The lieutenant, however, was a step ahead of him. Wasn’t he always? The farmer, resourceful as ever, was ripping off the shoulder strap from his canteen and using the wool like a rope, pulling it taut around his thigh. Then he took the ramrod from his rifle and twisted the twine tight, not caring in the slightest that for the first time Weybridge was feeling real pain. Had he grimaced? He had, he had. But already the tourniquet was slowing the fountain to a trickle.

“Captain?” Marsh asked. “You with me, sir?”

He nodded. Suddenly he was cold, so very cold, a seeming impossibility in September in the Valley, with the sun high and his uniform heavy as blankets in this heat. Another shell rocked the ground and dirt rained down upon him. Upon Marsh.

“Good Christ, never a litter nearby when ya need one,” Marsh was grumbling. Then, as if talking to himself, he murmured something about dragging him back into the woods, and how it wasn’t going to be pretty.

No. Of course not.

The grass beneath his leg had grown swampy, and Weybridge was feeling weak. Sleep was beckoning, but it wasn’t sleep, it was death. Oh, but to close his eyes against the pain. To just shut his eyes and slip away…

Marsh tucked his mutilated left hand into his shirt and grabbed him under his arms. Hauled him back off the grass, each step a dagger up Weybridge’s leg that made that warm sleep impossible. A knife blade from the heel of his boot up to his hip that elicited gasp after gasp. Blade. In what he was beginning to feel was the delirium of a dying man, the word fashioned for him an image: he was a plowshare and Marsh a plow horse, and together, as he was dragged through the field, his body was cutting furrows, turning the soil and preparing the earth for a new planting.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

They reached the edge of the woods and there two other soldiers from the company lifted him off the ground. One stood between his legs and one, along with Marsh, hoisted him by his upper back and cradled his head. There again were the buckthorn and saplings. He felt his skull in the palm of a man’s hand. He was an infant. He might have succumbed to that comfort, but he couldn’t. He didn’t dare. This was not the start of his life; more likely, it was the very end. He couldn’t even imagine how they would cross the Opequon.

And yet behind him life continued. The battle lingered, even as the sound receded or, perhaps, he slipped deeper into whatever was coming next. Heaven? Maybe. There was no hell, not in his cosmology. At least not after life. There was, he had seen, hell aplenty among the living. But heaven was no tangible inevitability, either.

He had lied to his wife, to his parents, and certainly to his small boys about his lack of faith, not wishing to burden them with his skepticism. The college where he taught had been founded to train young men for the ministry, and the evangelical roots there remained strong—and so he lied to other members of the faculty, too. His very presence in the church he attended every Sunday with his family was a charade. Doubt was not his friend, but it had always been his secret companion.

Despite the pain that grew worse with each step, he closed his eyes and the world grew black, the woods muffling the combat, and in his mind he saw his Emily, her moonstone eyes and small, soft lips, and he gave in.

Gave up the ghost.

Even those who did not believe should know the poetry of what King James had wrought.

It was as if he were sinking, sinking, beneath water that could be hot, healing springs.

They had ripped the doors from a rebel house and set them upon hobby horses to fashion a row of makeshift operating tables in the hospital tent. Weybridge stared up at the two surgeons who were examining his hand and his leg. Eyes on one that suggested a frog’s. Round spectacles on the other. They were working shirtless, and the blood of other men adorned their arms and chests like war paint. He had no recollection of how he had gotten here from the Opequon, how they had crossed the water, only that the pain now was, for reasons he could not parse, less excruciating. Shock, he supposed. He’d seen enough fighting to know about shock, and he was grateful.

One of the physicians saw he was awake and looked at him in surprise. “Captain,” he said deferentially.

“Doctor,” he replied, but he was not sure the word was audible. The canvas ceiling was swarming with flies, black dots flailing against the fabric as they attempted to escape. And, yet, if the insects had had the intellect to fly only six or eight feet to the west, they could have fled: someone had cut a hole and created a flap to allow in additional light so the surgeons could see. What was it that Marsh called bugs that big? The word was close, so close. Gallinippers. Weybridge had told the lieutenant that there was no such word, that he’d made it up. Then, the next day, he heard another soldier use it, slapping a mosquito that seemed the size of an acorn off his bare arm.

His head lolled to the left, and there was a tin pail filled with water and saws, and, near it, another of those piles he had seen too often and come to detest: the mounds of human limbs. The bare feet, the spider-like hands.

On the table beside him—on another door beside him—a soldier was out like a snuffed candle, but Weybridge could hear the bone saw. Another doctor was shearing off the young man’s arm above the elbow. Weybridge turned away and there, on rafts of straw just outside the tent, were half-dressed corpses, not yet bloated. He couldn’t see their faces, but they were men from either his company or one of the other companies that had crossed the Opequon beside his. They, like him, were Vermonters. Were Vermonters.

He tried to ask if they took the hill, but the words were soft and, he feared, mangled. But a young hospital steward beside the surgeon had understood.

“Oh, Captain, we licked ’em! We got the hill. Them rebels fit like hell, but then they fell back—again,” he said. The steward was little more than a boy. His face was but freckles and a teenager’s pimples. Still, this was good news. Outside the tent, in the grass beyond the dead, he heard wounded men cursing and groaning.

The surgeon put his knife in his mouth, freeing his hand to feel Weybridge’s forehead. Weybridge knew it would be cold and clammy to the touch. Then the physician lifted Weybridge’s mangled fingers off his chest, and there was a sudden stiletto of agony up his arm and he grunted, pig-like, a reflex, and the physician was more gentle when he lowered the hand back to the table. Both surgeons leaned over his right leg, one studying the tourniquet Marsh had created from his canteen loop and observing, “Whoever did this saved your life.”

Weybridge nodded. The one doctor still had his knife in his mouth. He was a pirate. A bloody, sunburned pirate. Finally, the fellow took the blade from between his teeth and said, “We’re going to give you chloroform.”

“The leg?” Weybridge asked.

The one with the spectacles lowered his ear to Weybridge’s mouth, and Weybridge managed to repeat the two syllables.

“It can’t be saved,” the surgeon told him matter-of-factly, and Weybridge saw in his mind those heaps of bloody flesh, those awful, putrescent piles of limbs. His leg would be among them. He thought of his boot with the hole in it. How he had carried on this morning, as if a boot with a hole were a trial beyond endurance.

“My hand?” he pressed.

“We’ll worry about that later.”

Later. A euphemism. They were unsure it would be an issue that any of them would ever have to deal with.

The orderly handed one of the surgeons a glass bottle with a stopper and a white strip of cloth—a shirt, once—and the physician said, “This is chloroform, Captain. When you wake up, we have opium pills.”

But would he awaken? There was so much he wanted to say, so many things to tell Emily and the boys. He wanted time to stop so he could write or dictate a letter, he needed Emily to know that she was in his thoughts if, indeed, these were his last thoughts. My love is as a fervor, longing.

No, that was wrong. He was off by a word.

His mind flipped the pages of Emily’s collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but he couldn’t find the poem, it was gone. And time was the afternoon breeze that was wafting into the tent, and he was weary, wearier than he’d ever been. Already one of the surgeons was reminding the other that because of that very wind, they could not be stingy with the dose. The doctor dunked his hands in a bucket of water and dried them on his pants. And then he was uncorking the beaker and pouring the liquid onto the rag, and Weybridge saw the cloth was about to be draped upon his face and nose, and he took a deep breath, briefly surprised at how little odor there was, but the moment didn’t last, because within seconds the world was black and he fell into the deep murk of dreams.

There were climbing roses. This was the first thing he saw. He blinked, and the world came into focus. Not roses. Wallpaper with roses. A curtainless window, the glass intact. A bedroom. Not the one he shared with Emily, not one he had ever seen before.

Outside the window, the sky was pale, overcast. He couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon.

He felt a straw mattress with his right hand and then the edge of the mattress, and beside that, a hardwood floor. There was no bed, and the room was bereft of furniture. Commandeered as firewood, no doubt. He ran his tongue over his lips, and could feel how badly chapped they were.

He heard the sounds of horses racing past, dozens, and the rattle of cavalry kits.

“Captain?”

The voice was opposite the window, and he rolled his neck. There was a private he didn’t recognize sitting with his back to the wall. When they made eye contact, the soldier crabwalked across the wood.

“I see you’re waking up, sir.”

Weybridge nodded, and the private took a pill from his pants pocket and said, “Doctor told me to give you this and some water if you waked up.”

If I waked up…

The words lingered inside him, even as the soldier continued to chatter and uncorked his canteen. The private put the pill in his mouth, supporting his head just enough that he could swallow it with a small gulp of water from the canteen.

“It’s opium, sir.”

Weybridge murmured a one-word question—“Where?”—stretching the single syllable into something like a sigh. His body reeked. He smelled urine and sweat.

“Rebel house. The regimental hospital seemed too far, and the colonel didn’t want a captain out in a tent in the grass. We’re in the nicest bedroom.”

Such were the privileges of being an officer. His head still in the soldier’s palm, he looked down at his body. He was covered by a wool blanket, and for a moment he was confused. There was no protuberant bump where there should have been a right foot. His eyes studied the utter flatness beside his left one, and reality unfolded before him: yes, they had cut off his right leg just above the knee. He remembered his hand, his left hand. He pulled it out from beneath the blanket, an effort that demanded more strength and coordination than he had anticipated, but it was swaddled in gauze, most of it stained yellow and red, and he wondered what was left there.

He mouthed the word water, and the soldier gave him another sip, much of which he coughed back onto his chest and the mattress, and then he lay back and once more his eyes and the young soldier’s met, and then, before he knew it was happening, he was falling back into the warm embrace of sleep.

In the roiling sights and sounds that swamped his mind, he often lost track of what was real and what was imagined, what was occurring in this bedroom (and outside that window) versus what was but a dream. In his more lucid moments, he wondered if his nightmares might, in fact, have been memories: the sergeant from Burlington yelling that he wanted the field of dead rebels before them to extend all the way to Richmond. The Confederates had their mouths open and their mouths closed, some still had their boots and coats, and others were shoeless and shirtless. Their legs were akimbo, their arms—invariably—were spread wide, as if they were angel wings bearing them skyward to a heaven that he himself was unsure was more than a fairy tale. Their eyes were mostly open, some in resignation and some in surprise.

Sometimes he was back on the mattress on the floor, and that soldier (or someone) was spooning him broth or giving him water. Was that young hospital steward indeed in the room one time (or more, many more times), lifting the blanket and dropping carbolic acid onto the stump (which Weybridge still had not seen), unwrapping and wrapping the gauze and cotton on his left hand? Yes. He was convinced of this. The surgeon with the spectacles, too. Said something about how he wished they had better quarters for him.

He had heard the words infection and gangrene, inflammation, unsure whether the steward or the surgeon was talking to him or to someone else, and while he feared it was his own wounds he was smelling, he detected also in the room the aroma of rosewater, which must have been a delusion.

There was the stench of his own excrement.

There was, occasionally, the sound of muskets and cannon fire.

And horses and humans, of tin kits and wooden wagons.

And the thrum of voices, close but spoken from above the flat surface of a pond, while he was below it.

We can’t take him. Ambulance ride alone will damn well kill him. All we got left are them gutbusters.

Well, he can’t stay here.

Why the hell not? Does it matter if he dies here or Harper’s Ferry? We got to go. Whole goddamn army’s heading deeper into the Valley.

Harper’s Ferry. The Union garrison.

He opened an eye and tried to focus: there was that young soldier who gave him opium and water and broth. Another private beside him, heavier set, his cap still on his head. When they discovered he was watching them—though they couldn’t understand how little he really comprehended through the fever, the miasma of pain, and the medicine they were giving him for that pain—they became silent. Instantly.

“Captain. What do ya need?” one asked.

He shook his head. They couldn’t give him what he needed.

“On that plate? See, there? Them pills? Take one when the pain gets bad, sir. And that there canteen is full.”

His desire to dictate a letter to Emily returned. He curled the fingers of his right hand around an imaginary pencil or quill and mimed the motion of writing. It was an exertion that exhausted him fast, and he tried to blink away the drowsiness. He closed his eyes, telling himself it would be for but a few seconds.

But then there was silence and sleep. More sleep, a magnet that tugged him from the room and the straw mattress that had become his castle keep. More dreams. The whinny of horses. The sound of the drums. A bugle.

When he awoke again—Had it been hours? Days?—he sensed that he was alone. He looked around: he felt more alert than he had since that moment when he was telling Eustis Marsh to cord his thigh, cord it, because it was his only chance.

As he suspected, there was indeed no one there. Not a soul.

“Private?” His voice was a croak. He repeated the word, hoping to sound commanding. It carried into at least the next room, perhaps further, and there was even a hint of an echo.

Which was worrisome. Nothing like having your instincts, when they were harbingers of bad news, corroborated by fact. The house was still. Outside, he heard nothing but birds and what he supposed were squirrels in the tree outside the window. The army was gone, and they had left him here to die—or the private and steward who were supposed to stay with him had chosen to disobey orders from a commanding officer. He envisioned the one or the both of them running like hell down the road to catch up to their company, where, doubtless, they would tell everyone that Captain Weybridge had passed.

Which, actually, was the proper course of action, if he viewed their predicament objectively. Two privates against Mosby’s Rangers in the small hours of the morning? Two privates against a contingent from Virginia’s Sixth Cavalry? Not a chance. He’d heard a rumor that John Mosby and George Custer had actually hanged a few of each other’s captured men, allowing the corpses to dangle from tree limbs like Christmas decorations.

He saw the canteen and the pills and some hardtack.

He stared into the ivory ceiling. He was not angry that the soldiers had left him alone. But neither was he resigned. He was frightened. Death was coming, but it was not here yet, and it seemed clear that he would have to face it alone.

Sitting up was heavy sledding. But he did it, and now his right arm was a buttress. He removed the blanket with one hand, his left still wrapped, and decided he was not yet ready to unravel the dressing on his thigh. His stump. The colors were reminiscent of a child’s drawing of a sunset, all streaks of yellow and red. But it was dry. The arterial ligatures had held. The splint was made of two pieces of dark wood, and when he studied them, he decided that once they had been parts of table legs. Sanded and stained.

Even if he unraveled the dressing, however, what would be the point? He had no ticking or bandages to replace the fabric, and he was unsure how he would reset the splint with one hand. He recalled someone tending to the stump and the splint days ago. Or had it been weeks? There were still leaves on that tree outside the window. It was days. Only…days.

His forehead, when he pressed the back of his hand against it, was cool and dry. No fever so, perhaps, no infection. At least not a bad one. Certainly not blood poisoning. Not poisoning in his bones.

He gripped the canteen between his left elbow and his rib cage, pulled out the stopper, and swallowed another pill with some water. He bit into the hardtack.

He waited, but for what he was unsure. He couldn’t stay here, but neither could he leave. After all, he couldn’t walk. He was not sure how he could even fashion a crutch.

He slept on the mattress on the floor and crawled to the corner by one of the room’s two windows to shit and pee, but even those journeys grew infrequent when the hardtack was gone and the canteen was empty.

And so he made a decision. His only chance at survival was capture, even if that meant the horrors of a Confederate prison camp.

But it was a dice game, because if he were found first by any of Mosby’s rangers, they’d likely kill him. So, he needed to be seized by regular army. Early’s soldiers.

But even if it were Mosby’s guerrillas and they executed him, at least it would be a quick death. Quicker, anyway. Better than this slow hell.

He recalled the expression a West Pointer had told him one night, a phrase the other officer had heard from an ancient French general who’d given a lecture there because, fifty years earlier, the old man had served under Napoleon. The term was the mistress bullet.

A French soldier saves a bullet to kill his mistress? That’s despicable, Weybridge had said, disgusted.

No, no, the West Pointer had corrected him, you have it all wrong. The French gave it that name because it was the bullet you saved for yourself when all hope was gone. The last bullet. Death with dignity. This was the bullet that would do for you the things your wife never would: that’s why they called it the mistress bullet.

Well, he had no bullet. He had no pistol. And he still hoped not to die, in any event.

And so, if he could find the strength, he resolved that he would go to the other window, the one further from his excrement, and call for help.

Twice at the window he had cried out, his elbows on the sill.

Perhaps a third time. He was unsure.

The efforts had left him exhausted, and he passed out, returned to the reveries and hallucinations that marked his days and nights, and blurred the light and the dark into a morass of dusky, confounding visions. Some of it, he hoped, was the opium, but in his heart he feared it was madness.

And then, a day or so after he had swallowed the last pill, the pain became constant. The dressing on his left hand was long gone, as was his pinky and the ring finger there. The strips of flesh that linked them to his palm had just rotted away, the digits disappearing into the bedding or mattress. The middle finger was badly broken, and if he lived long enough for it to heal, which was unlikely, it would be forever deformed, a finger that hooked away from the thumb like a tree limb stretching for sun.

Sleep was fitful, his pants had grown sodden, the pain was remorseless. If he had a gun, he had now reached the point where he would end it. Why wait for the reaper? His throat was parched, and it hurt like hell the last time he had called from the window. He was no longer sure anymore whether that was yesterday or the day before. Or, perhaps, even the day before that.

Or hours ago. He just didn’t know.

He tried to focus on Emily and on his sons. He envisioned the college and Middlebury. The heart-shaped common. He thought of David Copperfield and decided Charles Dickens was wrong: there was nothing linear about memories. They were a stew and the mind blindly dipped a spoon into them, and whether you came away with potato or meat had nothing to do with the order in which the ingredients were tossed into the pot.

In the night, he heard barred owls, their cries so human: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? The owls, he imagined, had the faces of pale old men, their expressions vivid and bemused. In the day, he heard the caw of crows. There was the crawk of the raven, more guttural than a crow and with a distinct rolling r, and he considered whether the sound was only in his head and he had summoned the raven from Poe. He loved Poe. He might still, if he ever had the chance to read him again.

No, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t live to share Poe with his boys.

Nor Dickens.

And the loss left him despairing. His eyes welled, and with his right index finger he caught a few tears and dabbed at his chapped lips, his dry and swollen tongue. Dreams, when they came to him, were cruel, because either they were nightmares—the hail in December was comprised of Minie balls, which he couldn’t evade because he had but one leg; the turkey vultures, gliding against sapphire skies, swooped down upon his left hand and gnawed at the fingers that remained—or they were beautiful recollections of Emily or his boys picnicking beside the Otter Creek, which left him equally tortured upon waking.

It was only when he saw the strange woman in the doorway, her face lit by a candle in a lantern, that he knew, finally, the delirium was ending and that he was, finally, dying.

Or, perhaps, had already died.

Death had come not with a hood and a scythe, but with a bonnet and tallow.