The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night. Brendan Graham
blue eyes entreating her, that she had not the heart. Before she had thought it out any further she had said ‘yes!’, the words of Sister Lazarus pounding in her brain … ‘Impetuosity, Sister, will be your undoing. You must guard against it!’
The rest of that day Louisa allowed no excuse to bring her within the company of Jared Prudhomme.
Somewhere, somehow, Mary, in her own quiet way, had managed to forage a few gills of whiskey, some for everyone in the hospital. Not that she was in favour of the pleasures – or dangers – of ‘the bewitching cup’, herself.
‘Blessings on ye, Sister – your mother never reared a jibber,’ or some other such well-meant phrase, greeted the dispensation of the whiskey. Some had to be helped drink it. One soldier, half his neck torn away, tried to gather up the precious fluid in his hands each time it seeped from his throat. Being a fruitless endeavour, he finally abandoned it. Instead cupping the amber-coloured liquid directly back into the gaping hole itself.
‘A shortcut, ma’am,’ he gasped to Mary, the rawness of the whiskey snatching the breath from him.
Another dashed it on the stump of his leg to ‘kill the hurtin’.’
Overall, Sister Mary’s whiskey produced a tizzy of excitement among the men. Americans, North and South toasted ‘the Irish, on whichever side they fight’, while the Irish toasted themselves, St Patrick, and the ‘good Sisters’, in that order.
The day, aided by the whiskey, invoked a kind of nostalgia in all of them. Some dreamed of the South – magnolia-scented days, fair ladies and the Mississippi. Some dreamed of the green lushness of the Shenandoah Valley. Others again sailed to further waters and valleys – the Rhine, the Severn, the Lowlands of Holland.
The Irish dreamed only of Ireland.
Ellen thought of the Reek, St Patrick’s holy mountain.
‘Do you remember how once we climbed it to look over the sea for a ship to America?’ she asked Louisa and Mary.
They both nodded.
‘I was afraid you wouldn’t take me with you,’ Louisa said. ‘That after finding me, you would leave me. I prayed so hard to St Patrick.’
Ellen remembered too when she had returned to Ireland to collect them. Her money had been running low, with staying in Westport, waiting for passage to America. She had herself, Patrick and Mary to look out for first. Rescuing the girl from the side of the road had been an impulsive charity, one she had already been beginning to regret. But a ship had come before she was forced to take a decision about ‘the silent girl’, before they had named her ‘Louisa’.
‘Little did any of us then know what lay before us in this far-off land,’ Mary reflected.
‘We’re still split apart from each other here,’ her mother answered, thinking of those not present. Only this time it wasn’t the famine, or ‘the curse of emigration’, or some other external force. This time it had been her own fault; her own fallibility that had scattered them. She was fortunate to have found again Mary and Louisa, or rather to have been found by them. But always her thoughts went to Patrick and Lavelle.
Of them there was no sign.
She knew they were out there somewhere, either with the Union Army of the Potomac, or with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
A chill crossed her. They would have seen combat by now. She looked around the room. She always looked when a new consignment – the flotsam and jetsam of each fresh battle – arrived. Each time she looked, dread was in her eyes and in the back of her throat, and in the petrified pit that was her stomach. Now, as her gaze took in the men about her – a torn-out throat, a hole through a nose, like a third, sunken eye, a lifeless sleeve or trouser leg – she would have been happy to see them there. At least know that they were alive.
In her care.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Mother.’ It was Mary. ‘Trust in the Lord!’
‘Oh, I do, Mary! Believe me, I do – but sometimes I just wish I could help Him a bit more!’
‘You are … by helping those whom He has put in your way to help,’ Mary answered.
‘Mrs Lavelle!’ – it was Dr Sawyer.
The mound of amputated limbs had grown so high outside the ‘saw-mill’ window that they now tumbled from the top and were strewn on the ground like disarrayed matchsticks. The doctor wanted some order – these scattered limbs retrieved and a second mound started beside the first one.
Three months prior she would have fallen faint at the prospect. Now, she never flinched, nor did Mary and Louisa, who came to help her.
Ellen began to gather the legs and the arms. She tried to avoid picking them up by the hand or the foot. Did not want to touch the fingers or toes, have that intimacy. This proved impossible.
At times there was only the bare, half-hand, or the foot, where the surgeon had tried to save most of the arm or leg.
Then she began to recognise them. Couldn’t help but remember the stout arm of Jeremiah Finnegan, or the worm-infested leg of that sweet young Iowa boy, now with gangrene set in. Somehow, it wasn’t so bad if the rest of the body was alive, back inside the hospital. From some of the limbs, fresh blood still oozed so that they were warm and living to the touch.
It wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be allowed to accumulate here like heapfuls of strange fruit, burning in the sun until the blowflies and maggots came. Those over which the maggots already crawled, she picked up with her apron, then shook off what worms remained on her, once she had deposited the putrid limb. Other limbs had corroded to the bone, caked by the sun, stripped clean by flesh-eating things.
To distract her mind she recited the Breastplate of St Patrick:
‘Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ within me,
Christ on my right hand,
Christ on my left hand,
Christ all around me,
Christ in the heart of all who think of me,
Christ in the mouth of all who speak of me,
Christ in every eye who looks at me,
Christ in every ear who listens to me.’
Even the words of the prayer seemed to take on an incongruity, far removed from their intended bidding.
‘Christ on my right foot,’ she prayed while handling a foot, pierced through like a stigmata. She remembered the poor wretch who had, in a state of fear, pulled the trigger of his rifle before raising it to the enemy and shot himself.
‘Christ on my left foot.’ She had it all out of kilter. But did it matter? She cast the stigmatic foot onto the mound, watched it slide down again in some crucified dance.
‘Christ with me,’ she intoned, invoking again the protection of the saint’s breastplate.
And the stench, the yellow dripping stench: powerful, unavoidable, permeating her clothes, her pores, the follicles of her hair. She thought she would drown in its noisome pool, it oozing over her whole body, closing out air and decency.
She redoubled her prayer but the drenching slime slid into her mouth, over her tongue and down her throat like the melt of Hell.
When they had finished she went straight to Dr Sawyer, gave him her mind about how ‘the great Abraham Lincoln couldn’t even run a decent abattoir, let alone this war or this country!’
That evening the regular cries for relief and ‘Sister! Oh Sister!’ were broken by a new sound. That of someone scratching out a tune on an asthmatic fiddle. Where the instrument came from nobody knew