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My love my fair-haired boy …’
They were all her fair-haired boys, all the crippled, the crutched, the maimed and the motherless. Some called her ‘Mother’ – and even when they didn’t, she knew she was their mother in-situ, the comforting words, the tender touch.
‘If not in life we’ll be as one,
Then, in death we’ll be …’
She did not mean to sadden them with thoughts of death but to comfort them. Death indeed would come to many here … maybe to Hercules O’Brien … maybe by the hand of Ol’ Alabarmy, his dancing partner. Perhaps death would dance with the shy Rhinelander. He had danced with her, as if it were the last waltz on this wounded earth. Or death could call time on the young fiddle player from East Tennessee. Or even, Ellen kept her eyes on the beautiful boy, to Jared Prudhomme, in love with her Louisa … and she with him.
How, Ellen wondered, could anything other than the boy’s death solve Louisa’s dilemma?
‘And there will grow two hawthorn trees,
Above my love and me,
And they will reach up to the sky Intertwined
be …’
She was singing not to death … but to hope. Hope that after death love might still survive, but hope none the same.
‘… And the hawthorn flower will bloom
where lie,
My fair-haired boy and me.’
The boy came to her, held her arms, looked deep into her eyes. ‘Thank you, Mrs Lavelle – Mother! Everything will be all right now – you’ll see!’
She didn’t know how to reply to him. Just squeezed his arms … let him go slowly, a certain sadness creeping over her. Maybe it was the song.
Then the Tennessee fiddle player called for a ‘last fling of dancing’ – ‘I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her’.
Ellen was glad to be shaken out of her thoughts and as well didn’t want to send the men to sleep, morose about tomorrow. Though, even jigs and reels sometimes didn’t prevent that. She remembered Stephen Joyce wondering to her once about ‘how the Irish could be both happy and sad – at the same time!’
She entered joyfully into the spirit of the dance, lilting the tune, swinging and high-steppin’ it with her boys; Hercules O’Brien roaring at the top of his voice, reminding them all to ‘Dance, dance, dance all you can, Tomorrow you’ll be just half-a-man!’
Then a new sound – the stentorian voice of Dr Sawyer cutting through the din. ‘Stop it! Stop it at once!’
He looked the length of the hospital at them, withering them with his gaze, reducing them back to what they previously had been – men of rank, diseased and disabled.
‘It’s madness, sheer irresponsible madness! Sister,… you are in charge here?’
Louisa stepped forward: – ‘Yes, Doctor.’
‘These men, half of them at death’s door and look at them – lungeing about like lunatics … limbless lunatics.’
The men huddled back at his onslaught.
‘Feckless nuns and jiggers of whiskey – against my better judgement from the start. This won’t go unanswered!’ And he turned and marched out, killing all joy.
‘You won’t best us!’ Hercules O’Brien shouted after the retreating figure. ‘Even if it’s our lastest Paddy’s Night … it was the bestest.’ Then he turned, went down to where Ol’ one-armed Alabarmy now stood, all crumpled and defeated.
All watched as Hercules O’Brien bowed to his foe.
‘Thank you, sir, you’re a gallant soldier.’
Then Ellen, Louisa and Mary watched, the splendour rising in them, as each of the lame and the limbless, the Southron and the Northman, bowed to each other, offering gratitude for the frolics now finished and solicitude for whatever the morrow might bring.
In turn then the men thanked Ellen and the Sisters – especially Sister Mary for ‘The jiggers of whiskey and one helluva party for a nun!’
Those that could fight would want to be up and bandaged by five o’clock. That meant four for Ellen and the others. If they weren’t called on during the night and Ellen suspected they might well be. Dr Sawyer had been right … up to a point, and damaged limbs could only take so much. Still, they settled the men down as best they could and changed any dressings, oozing from the evening’s exertions.
And it was all worth it. The night’s fun was worth it.
The fiddling was furious, the band of fiddlers flaking it out. Ellen recognised them. There was Hercules O’Brien mummified for death. His head bandaged; blood plinking from his bow.
There too, was Ol’ Alabarmy thwacking his bow madly across his instrument. Where was his other hand? Grotesquely, the fiddle stuck out from Alabarmy’s neck, there being no other visible form of support. And Herr Heidelberg, atop a giant barrel. Like the others, he held a bow. To it was fixed a bayonet. When, each time, he drew his bow across the strings, it sliced a collop of flesh from his face. She cried out to him, but he seemed not to hear.
Ellen and the boy, Louisa’s boy, were in front of the fiddle band, dancing ‘The Cripples’ Waltz’ but the timing was wrong … all wrong. The fiddle band played one tune, they danced to a different one, the boy whispering loudly to her to ‘Listen! Listen, Mother! D’you hear it – in the floor – the skulls?’
She didn’t know what he was talking about. But he persisted at her to ‘Listen!’ Again calling her ‘Mother.’
Then, at last she could hear it. The amplified sound of their feet exploding on the floor, driving up her legs, shivering into her body.
‘It’s the skulls!’ he whispered, with a mad glee that she had at last understood him. ‘That’s what gives it the sound – the skulls, goat skulls and sheep skulls and … and … listen to the walls!’ he then demanded, pulling her close to the wall, pushing her face against it until she could feel the wild music entering the hollowed-out eyes and ears … and the slit of the nose. Coming back louder than when it went in. They did it in Ireland he told her. Buried the skulls of dead animals in the floors and the walls. To catch the sound of the wicked reels and the even wilder women who splanked the floor to them.
The music came thick and furious. She recognised the tunes – ‘I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her’, then ‘Pull the Knife and Stick It’.
The only dancers were the boy and her. She wanted to ask him about Louisa … about … but he kept telling her to ‘listen!’, like she was the child. She obeyed him, the skull sound all the time rapping out its rhythm like a great rattling gun. It got louder and louder, until frightened, she looked at the floor. There, reaching up from beneath, were hands without arms and arms without hands.
If she could only dance fast enough, she could avoid them. Keep one step ahead. She shouted at the Cripple Band to play faster. But the faster they played the more Herr Heidelberg’s bayonet slashed his face, the more the bow of Hercules O’Brien splinked blood onto his face, his tunic, and his instrument. Ol’ Alabarmy smiled dreamily through it all.
The boy seemed not to notice, not to see. Only to hear. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’
She tried to fight him off – make him see. He must be blind, crippled as the rest of them. Now, he caught her roughly by the shoulder, again trying to face her towards the wall.
‘No!’ she shouted, trying to get away from him. Trying to keep dancing, keep ahead of the jiggling hands.
‘No! No!’ she shouted, more vehemently, trying to wrest her body free.
‘It’s time, Mother – four o’clock!’ Mary said, gently but firmly shaking her shoulder.
FIFTEEN (#ulink_e97b742f-d533-526c-b8fb-010aa62453d8)
When Louisa awoke, the clarion calls of war were already summoning men to be ready for death. Before he would go out today, the boy had last night asked her to ‘Place my name, company and regiment on a piece of paper and pin it to my breast.’
She prayed, her daily prayers – the Sign of the Cross, the Morning Invocation of the Light, the Lord’s Prayer – for him. Not that death should pass him by, for that alone was the Lord’s domain, but that if it came, it should be quick and clean. Not lingering and painful, his youthfulness ebbing away, his beauty distorted.
Louisa knew he would be fearless, be raised in courage because of her. She smiled – boys to men do quickly grow. She rose, dressed, put on her headdress, remembering.
‘The White Bonnet Religion’, the soldiers called her faith. White bonnet, black bonnet, no bonnet, Louisa wondered what it was religion had to do with what would happen here today? Yet, the vast bulk of those who would line up to kill each other lived by some religious code. The politicians who, from afar, waged this war, also waged it with the absolute conviction that God was on their side. They had spoken with Him – and He had told them!
It had always seemed such an obscenity to her, lining up God in the ranks.
Beside her, Mary also prepared for the long day. In perfect prayer, Mary would be. Not distracted by the thoughts which flitted in and out of Louisa’s own head. She loved Mary so. Mary was her window to God. Amongst all the Sisters, all the doctors, the heroes of battle, Mary was the most perfect human being Louisa had ever known. A constant reservoir of love to all who came within her sphere. And Mary’s love was infinite.
‘I have no right not to dispense it freely,’ was how Mary saw it. ‘It is not mine not to give. I am His river.’
Mary looked at her adopted sister and smiled. Mary could see beneath, Louisa knew, into her very soul. That was the way with her. Louisa wondered what Mary would find there this morning? Whatever, there would be no judging of it.
Neither spoke. Nor was there need to.
SIXTEEN (#ulink_8840abe2-638d-50e2-9f39-ef64f3bb1cbc)
The hospital was already alive with movement – an air of excitement. Those who could, mad for action. Mad to fight for America.
‘America!’ Hercules O’Brien began the day. ‘Wide open spaces and narrow minds. If it ain’t American it ain’t good! In ascending order, Irish, African, German, Jew.’
‘But cannon fodder is different, Hercules,’ ‘Souper’ Doyle, a Confederate from Co. Galway, answered. ‘The off-scourings of the world is good enough for American buck and ball. Didn’t you hear the officers colloguing with each other, how “Irish Catholics were a resource of fodder for enemy cannon that couldn’t be ignored?” Well it’s our America now, whether the Northern Yankees like it or not. We’re no longer lodgers in someone else’s home!’
Souper Doyle resented how his name had followed him here to America. What harm if his people had ‘taken the soup’, changed, for a while, to the ‘English religion’, for food to keep body and soul together during the worst of the Bad Times. Sure hadn’t they changed back again, when the winter of Black ’Forty-Seven was over! But the name had stuck … the Doyles were ‘soupers’. Thomas Patrick Doyle had hoped that when he left Godforsaken Galway behind, he would also leave there all references to soup. So he had taken a purseful of coin and the passage money to America from the recruiting officer who had come to Ireland, seeking ‘stout-hearted fighting men’. The man with the drawling accent had promised them ‘Glory’ … during the war, and a ‘grander life in a free America’ … after they had won it!
‘Souper!’
He winced now as Hercules O’Brien addressed him. Souper Doyle wondered, that if he ever got out of this hellish army in one piece, if he could find some place far out in the west where there was no damned Irish? Where he wouldn’t be known, and change his name? Hercules! Now there was a grand name … a grand, stout-hearted name.
‘Souper!’ the current owner of that name called out again.
‘You Rebs will need a flag of truce to get back to your lines.’ Then turning to the nuns asked, ‘Is there not a flidgin’ of white among the lot of you Sisters to make a truce flag for the Rebs?’
Louisa came to the rescue, running to their quarters and salvaging a well-washed winter petticoat from its out-of-season hibernation. It wasn’t white – a cream-coloured flannel – but it couldn’t be mistaken for what it was.
When he saw her return with it, Jared Prudhomme insisted he be the flagbearer. Vowing devotion to her faded thrown-off, he fixed it atop his bayonet.
‘May it and the Lord keep you safe,’ Louisa whispered to him.
Mary then gave the Rebel band her blessing, putting them, as Alabarmy pronounced it, ‘Under the one Sister’s protection and the other Sister’s petticoat!’
Out they went then, the small band of Johnny Rebs. The boy, good-as-new from his wound, proudly bearing Louisa’s petticoat aloft, led them. Then Ol’ Alabarmy, defiant as ever, proclaiming his one arm ‘good enough to pull a trigger on nigger-jiggin’ Yankees.’ With them, the Tennessee fiddle player, his asthmatic fiddle strapped to his knapsack – and Souper Doyle. ‘One of our own, misleadin’ himself,’ Hercules O’Brien bemoaned.
‘The mighty great man in a little man’s body’ as the men called the diminutive sergeant, should not yet have been ready enough for more action but he had seemed hell-bent on returning to the fray. Now he came to Ellen, awkward in his own way.
‘Blessings on you, ma’am, for the tender touch – and the mighty craic. I hope you find your husband!’
And he pressed into her hand a letter.
‘Read it after I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and tell her I forgive her.’
She started to say something, saw a strong man’s tears well up in his eyes, fighting not to fall.
‘Better be dead than finished,’ he said, and went.
Ellen watched after him, knowing she would not see him again. Something about the small way he carried himself.
Like hedgehogs in March they went, sniffing out if the world had changed during the long sleep into spring.
They waved the Southerners off, the nurses … and the nursed who could walk. Then the Union soldiers, Hercules O’Brien among them, went out to their own side.
Two thoughts struck Ellen. The first that what she was witnessing seemed to deny the very essence of the work she was doing – healing. If it was just patching them up to go out again, have another chance at death, what was the weary point of it all?
Her second thought was that their leaving freed up some space. For the inevitable mangled fruit that would be harvested from today’s reeking plain.
She had taken no more than a dozen steps inside the hospital when she heard the gunfire. Just a small fusillade. Men jerked up in their beds.
‘It’s the Rebs!’ one whispered – and all knew. ‘Our boys got the Rebs!’
She ran to the door, Louisa already ahead of her, turning her head back, a stricken look upon her face. They careered across the short distance to where the crumpled group of grey-clad bodies lay. Ellen saw Louisa’s petticoat on the ground, tossed this way and that by the eddying breeze.
It was Louisa who reached them first, pulling his body from under the others. Holding his golden head on her lap, talking to him, calling him ‘Mr Prudhomme!’ Straining to hold back unSisterly tears. Frantic for any visible sign of life.
There was none.
She sat there. Stunned beyond words. Only, ‘Mr Prudhomme! Mr Prudhomme!’ Cradling his stilled youth. Then, bent to his ear, whispered words the world could not hear. Words, she hoped the heavens would.
Mary gathered Souper Doyle in her arms, the neck reefed from him, his chest punctured. She tried to stem the hole in his throat with her hand. It was to no avail. He had seemed such a lonely man, didn’t mix much with the others. She knew what they said about him. Had spoken quietly to a few of them. That it wasn’t Christian to call him that. To judge.
‘Thomas,’ she said, gently. ‘The Lord is waiting. He will not judge you.’
He tried to respond. Made some distressing gurgling sounds in his throat … and died.
Mary waited with him, praying for the eternal repose of his soul and asking forgiveness for those whom Souper Doyle could no longer forgive.
Likewise, Ol’ Alabarmy – ‘long gone’ – when Mary reached him was finally home.
The young fiddle player lay on his back, beneath him his instrument … smithereened into the last silence. He was still alive, barely. Ellen knelt beside the boy, lifting his head against her breast.
‘We’ll get you back inside, fiddle player,’ she said, more in desperation than in hope. He rolled his eyes up at her.
‘No, lady,’ he said quietly.
‘Rosin’ up my bow – I’ll be at the crossroads and I hope the Devil don’t take me the wrong way!’
‘The Devil shouldn’t have all the best music,’ she answered grimly and got him to listen as she said an Act of Contrition into his ear.
‘You never let up with the white bonnet religion?’ he smiled.
‘Nothing else makes any sense,’ she said. ‘Are you hurting?’
