The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

‘Nine … years … of … age …?’ she drew out the words one by one. ‘Nine years of age?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the child confirmed, as if there should be any doubt in her mind.

‘Private Edward Long – Illinois – at your service, ma’am,’ he added, looking up at her.

‘Yes!’ she said, ‘but what are you doing here?’

‘For to get mended … again,’ he said, with all the innocence of childhood. ‘I got clipped by a minié ball.’

‘Where?’ she asked, and saw him hesitate. There was no obvious sign of injury on him.

He threw his eyes down to the ground.

‘I’m not saying, ma’am … but another one went in front of me and shot my drum.’

Then she understood. He had been grazed by a bullet on his buttocks and manfully wasn’t about to reveal that fact to any female. She resisted the urge to pick him up, cradle him in her arms.

‘All right, soldier!’ she said, ‘follow me – we’ve a special private place here for the brave musicians who lead our boys into battle.’

Off she set, him falling in behind her, trying to keep pace, swinging his arms up and down, all four foot six of him.

‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked, when she got him down to the end of the ward.

‘At home!’ he said, matter-of-factly.

‘Does she know where you are?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered, ‘she sure does. Me and all my six brothers joined up to fight. Four is dead now. Just me and Jess and Billy-Bob left.’

She looked at him. ‘You should go home, Edward,’ she said gently, thinking of his mother.

‘Oh, but I will, ma’am, when I git my furlough. I’ll be going home for a month.’

‘Why not stay there … with your mother?’ she persevered.

‘I couldn’t do that, ma’am,’ he said, his baby blue eyes fixed on hers, ‘until we whip the Rebs and send them home!’

She gave up. He was the youngest she had seen. Most of the American boys were about eighteen, the foreign soldiers older. Many, though, of the homegrown farm boys who enlisted were much younger.

‘A hundred thousand fifteen-year-olds’, Dr Sawyer had told her, ‘barely out of knee-britches and learning to kill! The fresh flower of manhood, thus brutalised by an old man’s war.’

She had seen them come in, stretchered and corpsed, some as young as twelve. But never before a nine-year-old.

She heard Louisa calling her, squeezed both his arms. ‘Wait here, soldier, you need the doctor to fix you up,’ she said, to spare his blushes.

‘What about my drum?’ he asked. ‘Can he fix my drum too?’

‘I’m sure he can,’ she smiled, and hurried to where Louisa and the commotion of some new arrivals beckoned.

The little fellow had grit, real Illinois grit. She doubted there was much the matter with him. They’d see to his bum and his drum. Send him home to his mother. Maybe this time she’d keep her little drummer boy at home in Illinois. If she could afford to feed another mouth as good as the army could.

Later, she sat deep into the night, keeping the last vigil with some frightened soul admitted earlier and for whom nothing could be done. Nights such as these were the darkest hours, when her God would seem to have deserted her and she would pray instead to Science. That it would deliver its yet most infernal machine, and in one hellish blow strike down the massing millions of men. Be so terrible a holocaust that it would stop everything. Then, the pitying cry of some farm boy, or some veteran’s curse, demanding her to be present, would draw her back from the abyss.

One such night she could bear it no longer. Stole away from her watch, went into the night. The land was flat here on the plains of Virginia – some rolling hills to break the monotony, the misty Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, behind them. It was a rich land, far better than what she had known in Ireland. No bare acre here but gentle farmlands where wheat could be harvested, peaches plucked, a pig or a rooster raised. Until they were commandeered for hungry marching bellies, by one side or the other … or stolen by marauding men, cut adrift from their regiments and the mainstream of battle. She walked to the copse of trees, now bathed in the glimmering moonlight of her adopted land. Sad for all that had been visited upon it. There in the sheltering trees she found a horse, black as Hades, gashed above the foreleg, watching over its fallen master. The man, a captain, was beyond repair. She prayed over him, went deeper into the twining trees, the horse hobbling behind her. Ahead some snuffling sounds.

Following the sounds, her eyes made out the low shapes of hogs, feeding on the ungathered dead.

She ran at them, shouting, the night-horse her ally. Grudgingly they gave ground, snorting and bellowing their way further into the undergrowth.

She scrambled onto the horse’s back, fearful they would return before she had raised help. The horse bore her bravely, terrible images assailing her mind. Images of the famished dead back in her own land, Ireland … ravenous pigs and dogs. Her own neighbours, every last hope of food gone; the cabin pulled down around them, so no one would witness their last indignity; the dog whose head she had cracked as it defended its food. Somehow, it all – the spectre of famine back again and the Hades horse – decided her. No longer would she remain a spectator, waiting. She would rise herself, go out and find Lavelle and Patrick.

And she would go South. When the time was right.

ELEVEN

‘Niggerology! That’s what’s causing all the trouble!’ Jeremiah Finnegan roared. ‘That’s why all of yous in here is bent and broken. Niggerology!’ he roared again.

Ellen ran down the room to where the man was lying, head back, face to the ceiling.

‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die roarin’!’ he yelled, before she could reach him.

‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah!’ she said sternly. ‘Stop that! You’re not helping any by shouting your head off.’

She caught him by his remaining arm.

‘But it’s true, Miss Ellie – it’s true! Look at me – all I’m fit for is to be roarin’!’

‘I know, Jeremiah, I know,’ she said more gently, looking at the half-man on the ramshackle cot; over one eye, a wad of cotton wool to cover the blank hole where his eye had been. Taken clean by a minié ball. Then his arm and his leg with cannon fire, as he fell.

‘I have only my roarin’ so that people can know me. I can’t see. I can’t walk. I can’t hold a lady to dance with. I’m eternally bollixed!’ he said defiantly.

She couldn’t but help smile at the man’s description of himself. With his one good eye he caught her smile – and kept going. ‘But I can ring the rafters of Heaven and Hell! Damn their heathen eyes – the niggers – and those what supports them!’

What could she say to him? ‘But you’re not eternally damned and neither are those “niggers”, as you call them,’ she whispered, rubbing her palm along his remaining arm.

‘Ticket’ Finnegan – as they called him back home in the County Monaghan hinterland, always wanting to be off, get his ticket to America … to anywhere out of the humpbacked hills of Monaghan – calmed to her touch.

‘I’m not afraid of dying, Miss Ellie,’ he said, still remonstrating with her. ‘But I won’t die easy, whimperin’ me way out like those Rebs over there. I came into the world roarin’ and I’m goin’ out of it the same way!’

‘I’m sure you are,’ she answered.

He was a fine block of a man; had a good few years on most of the boys that both armies had gobbled up. Now, like all around him, he had been cut down in his prime. It was a shame, a crying shame.

‘Is there anyone you want me to write to?’ she asked.

‘Divil a one – bar the Divil himself – to say I’m comin’!’ he said. ‘Just sit a while and talk the old language to me!’

She looked around the room. Everywhere, a chaos of bodies. Most of them incomplete. Most needing care and comforting – before or after the surgeon’s saw.

Ticket Finnegan hadn’t long left, probably less than most.

‘All right!’ she decided, and began to talk to him of the old times and the old places.

‘Tír gan teangan, tír gan anam – A land without a language is a land without a soul,’ he whispered as she spoke to him in the ancient soul-language of the Gael.

How true it was, and she thought of the ‘niggers’, as Ticket – and most of the Irish – called them. Most too, like him, believed the black people had no souls, were just ‘heathens’. So what then, if the heathens were also slaves?

Demonisation and colonisation.

The same thinking had demonised and colonised the Irish. Depicted them as baboons in the London papers; blaming the Almighty for sending down a death-dealing famine on them. When all He had sent was a blight on the potatoes. It was the English who had sent the famine. Stood by. Did nothing. Let a million Irish die. But what harm in that? Sure weren’t the Irish peasants only heathens … had no souls, only half human, somewhere between a chimpanzee and Homo sapiens … the missing link? Now she saw those self-same Irish peasants here being blown to Kingdom Come for Uncle Sam and they couldn’t see that it was the same old story all over again. Slavery had taken the black people’s language, their customs and traditions, their music. It had taken their country away from them – this new one – as well as those previously stolen from them. Slavery had tried to take their souls. Ellen O’Malley hoped it hadn’t.

Now she talked to this half a man, in the voice previously reserved for her children – a kind of suantraí or lullaby-talk. ‘I ain’t never been baptised!’ he said, surprising her. When she said she would send for a priest, he glared at her. ‘I don’t want no priest mouthin’ that Latin gibberish over me!’ Then his look softened. ‘Would you do it for me, Miss Ellie – you’d be as good as any of them … you and the Sisters?’

She called Mary and Louisa to be witnesses, and fetched a tin-cupful of water. Then, his head in her arm, like a new-born, she sprinkled on it a drop of the water. Having no oils with which then to anoint him, she moistened her thumb against her mouth. With it she made the Sign of the Cross on his forehead, his ears, over his good eye and on his lips saying, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghos … There now, you’re done … ready for any road.’

He was soothed now. His pain must have been intense. A miracle he had survived at all. Better he hadn’t. He shook free his hand from hers, reached over to where his other hand would have been. Forgetting.

‘I still feel it there, Ellie, but sure it’s only the ghost of it … only the ghost of it! If only I could wrap it round a lady’s waist,’ he said wistfully.

She took his hand again. ‘Will you pray with me, Jeremiah?’ she asked, still in Irish.

‘Sure isn’t what we’re doin’ prayin’?’ he replied, the good eye darting wickedly at her.

And she supposed it was.

‘I can feel the Divil comin’ for me, even after you sprinklin’ the water on me,’ he said, gripping her hand more tightly. ‘He took the one half of me and now the wee bollix is comin’ for the other half!’

He raised up his head, as if to see. ‘G’way off to fuck, ye wee bollix ye!’ he roared, startling her and the whole ward into silence. They were all well used to death by now – in its many guises. The sudden rap, the last rattle of breath, the gentle going – and those who roared!

She said nothing, just gripped his hand.

He raised his head again. ‘Who made the world?’ he shouted at them all.

‘Gawd did,’ a Southern voice called back.

‘Who made America?’

‘Paddy did!’ the Irish roared back, as Jeremiah Finnegan handed in his ticket. Leaving both God’s world and Paddy’s America behind him.

She waited a few moments. Disengaged her hand, shuttered close the one mad eye on him.

‘He died roarin’, ma’am,’ a gangrened youth in the next cot said.

‘That he did, son! That he did!’ she said, to the frightened boy.

TWELVE

Mary watched Ellen move among the men. The transformation in her mother since first she and Louisa had found her was nothing short of miraculous. Ellen’s hair tied back from her face, accentuating her finely chiselled features, seemed to strip away the years. Modesty prevented Mary from ever using a looking glass but now, involuntarily, she put a hand to her face, fingering the high cheekbones, the generous span of mouth, the furrow between lips and nostrils. Upon her own face, Mary found replicated every feature of her mother’s. She smiled as she watched Ellen go about her duties with an enthusiasm that further belied her years. In her plain blue calico dress – its only adornment a neat white collar – Mary’s mother had a word for everybody.

‘God never closes one door but He opens another,’ Mary said to Louisa, marvelling how, after their banishment from the convent, the three of them had found such a fulfilment in their work here on the battlefields. Such an all-enveloping joy at being together again after all those years.

‘Her heart still longs for Patrick and Lavelle,’ Louisa answered. ‘She will not remain here forever, Mary.’

‘Oh, I know, Louisa …’ Mary answered, ‘but whatever the future holds, I will always hold dear these memories, these beautiful moments, of Mother bending to comfort a departing soul, writing out a letter to a loved one … of just being restored to us. I would happily depart this world with such images graven forever on my heart.’

Louisa, too, had witnessed the change in Ellen, the re-blooming; the coming of joy. All of which was a source of similar joy to Louisa herself!

She could not love Ellen more. Their time together here had been restorative for each of them in its own way. It was a privilege to serve those fallen in battle, to bind up their wounds – a rich and rewarding privilege. So, that when word had come down, from the Surgeon-General’s office, through Dr Sawyer, asking her to accept the role of matron, Louisa had wholeheartedly accepted.

She now spoke to her sister. ‘Well, before you take your leave of us, Mary, we have a St Patrick’s Day celebration to organise!’

Not that St Patrick’s Day was anywhere near in the offing. Nor that this mattered to those Irish currently under the care of the Sisters. Now, in the midsummer of 1862, the Irish had decided that ‘this little skirmish’ here in America should not prevent them from celebrating the national saint’s feast day … even if some three months after the declared date of March 17.

‘To show these foreigners, North and South, how to have fun,’ Hercules O’Brien put forward to Louisa. ‘We had a great St Pat’s … beggin’ your pardon, Sister, St Patrick’s Day, during winter camp when there was no fighting … but that was only among ourselves … and sure it’s now we need a diversion.’

After repeated ‘spontaneous’ entreaties from a number of the men – carefully orchestrated by O’Brien – Louisa had acquiesced. As matron, she warned that any celebration would have to be both ‘orderly and circumspect’. She received every assurance it would … ‘be as quiet as a dormouse dancing’. Somehow, Louisa felt remarkably unassured by this assurance, as Jared Prudhomme’s blue eyes beckoned her to him, for the third time that day.

Jared Prudhomme, proud to be from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was ‘the man side of seventeen’, he told Louisa, when three weeks prior, he first came to them. He was tall, possessed of piercing blue eyes and with a beauty of countenance not normally bestowed on mortals. That he was dishevelled from battle, his blond hair unkempt about his face, did not in any sense diminish from his striking appearance. It was, Louisa had decided, because of some inner light of character which shone from the boy, and which was unquenchable.

She went to him. As on the two previous occasions today, she would be polite, not overstay with him, as she had when first he fell under her care. Then, though his shoulder wound had not been serious, due to a delay in getting him to hospital, he had lost a copious amount of blood. She had nursed him back, dressed his shoulder. One day, while leaning over him, their faces close, he had said, ‘You have the scent of the South on you … it reminds me of so much!’ She hadn’t answered him and then he was apologetic. ‘Did I embarrass you – I know you are not as other ladies?’ She had raised her head, looked at him, smiled. He had no guile. ‘Thank you,’ she had said and left it at that.

Then, one morning, she had arisen, found herself rushing her prayers. At first, she couldn’t quite fathom it but something about it bothered her. When she had reached his bedside, he had greeted her with his usual smile and she felt bathed in the light of his company. Leaving him, she realised that her earlier undue haste at prayers was not just to do her rounds but to get to him. When next she tended him, she was conscious of this feeling, her fingers betraying her as she peeled back the dressing from his bare shoulder.

‘I am unsettling you,’ he said in his quiet, direct way, ‘and I would rather fall to the enemy than cause any such emotion in you.’

This had discomfited her further.

‘Yes!’ she said, continuing her work. ‘It is an uncommon feeling …’ She paused, her words landing soft against his skin, her breath moistening the broken tissue.

Now, today, as she went to him, a faint tremor of apprehension came over her.

‘I wanted to ask you before everybody else … and maybe I am already too late,’ he began. ‘Would you dance with me tonight – for St Patrick?’ he added in quickly, upon seeing the look come over her face. ‘It is my last night, before going out again … and I would go more lightly having danced with you,’ he pleaded.

She looked at him, mended now, his face aglow at her. She had intended giving him a further talk about how ‘All must be included in a Sister’s love’ or that ‘Sisters, in spirit and in substance, must be faithful to their vows as a needle to the Pole.’

He looked so young, so fragile, his 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,