Читать книгу The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night - Brendan Graham - Страница 23

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?’

‘Not in that way,’ he answered.

‘What then?’ she asked, anxious of any final comfort she could bring him.

He didn’t answer her immediately. Then, in a moment, raised his head to her. ‘If my mother were here with your son …’ he said, forming the words so slowly, so deliberately, that she would not mistake them, ‘… she would surely kiss him.’

And he kept his eyes open, fixed on her face, as she leaned down and gave him the tenderest mother-kiss.

Ellen just sat with him then, rocking him to herself, thinking of her own son and a mother in East Tennessee.

Beyond her, Ellen saw Louisa still sheltering the golden head of Jared Prudhomme.

‘He is dead – the beautiful youth!’ she heard Louisa say, in a far off voice. ‘Dead!’

She watched, as Mary went to Louisa, knelt beside her sister, and made the Sign of the Cross on the boy’s forehead.

‘He is home, Louisa, death exalts his face,’ Ellen heard Mary say.

Mary then came to Ellen. ‘The Lord is good, He will receive them all,’ she comforted and gave thanks that the young fiddle player had died ‘in a mother’s arms’.

Where Mary saw hope Ellen saw only hopelessness.

‘No young man believes he shall ever die,’ she said to Mary.

America was losing its young to this war … and in losing its young was losing its old.

‘The young are beautiful,’ Mary answered. ‘He takes them first to himself.’

‘Yes …’ Ellen said, looking at her daughter. ‘The young are truly beautiful.’

She herself felt old, unbeautiful. War killed all that was beautiful. Plucked out singing youth from life. Silenced it. Diseased men’s hearts and minds, eating up what measure of goodness there once was there. Poxing the soul as well as the body. The land would wait till it was ready – nurturing below its terrible fruit until the sons of sons had forgotten. Then there would be rivers of blood, seasons of storms, Lucifer rising.

Then would the land wreak its revenge.

With the men, Ellen and the two nuns helped lever the dead bodies onto the rude planks that would be their coffins. Until they were upended again from them – returned to the land.

Louisa’s petticoat now lay where she had placed it, on the boy’s breast – a mocking testament to safe passage. Ellen put her arm around Louisa’s shoulder, trying to salve the frantic heart within.

‘God decrees,’ Ellen thought, but didn’t say it.

Inside, Dr Sawyer summoned them, addressing Louisa.

‘It was against my disposition, Sister, that I agreed to Confederate soldiers being sheltered here. Events have proven me correct. We cannot be responsible for any but our own. Let the Rebels gather up their dead and wounded – and we ours!’

Displaying no hint of her private emotions, Louisa answered him. ‘It is not the Christian way. All men are brothers. In war, in life … and in death. The Lord is neither North nor South. Who are we to dispute with the Lord, to say mercy to this one because he is in blue uniform … no mercy to this one because he is in grey?’