* * *
At Christmas, Mrs. Hawley and her cronies trimmed the wards, hanging evergreen wreaths on every pillar, and stringing garlands across the hall. At the foot of every bed, they hung a tiny stocking, hand-knitted by Washington society ladies. Walt went around stuffing them with walnuts and lemons and licorice.
Hank’s leg got better and worse, better and worse. Walt cornered Dr. Woodhull and said he had a bad feeling about Hank’s health. Woodhull insisted he was going to be fine; Walt’s fretting was pointless.
Hank’s fevers waxed and waned, too. One night, Walt came in from a blustery snowstorm, his beard full of snow. Hank insisted on pressing his face into it, saying it made him feel so much better than any medicine had, except maybe paregoric, which he found delicious, and which made him feel he was flying in his bed.
Walt read to him from the New Testament, all the portions having to do with the first Christmas. “Are you a religious man?” Hank asked him.
“Probably not, my dear, in the way that you mean.” Though he did make a point of visiting the Armory Square chapel, whenever he was there. It was a little building, with a quaint, onion-shaped steeple. Walt would sit in the back and listen to the services for boys whom he’d been seeing almost every day. He wrote their names down in a small leather-bound notebook that he kept in one of his pockets. By Christmas, he had pages and pages of them. Sometimes at night he would sit in his room and read the names softly aloud by the light of a single candle.
Hank dropped off to sleep as Walt read, but Walt kept on with the story, because he could tell that Hank’s new neighbor was listening attentively. His name was Oliver Barley. He had been tortured by Mosby’s Rangers, staked spread-eagled to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet. Whenever Walt came near to try and speak with him, Barley would glare at him and say, “Shush!” And sometimes if Walt and Hank were speaking too loud, he’d pelt them with bandages sopped with the exudate from his hands. It was Walt’s ambition to be Barley’s friend, but the boy rejected all his friendly advances. Yet now he was listening.
“Do you like this story?” Walt ventured, stopping briefly in his reading.
“Hush up,” said Oliver Barley, and he turned away on his side. Walt might have gone on reading, but just then Dr. Walker came by and asked to borrow his Bible. She said she had news from the War Department.
“What’s the news?” he asked her.
“Nothing good,” she said. “It is dark, dark everywhere.” She wanted to read some Job, she said, to cheer herself. She took Walt’s Bible and walked off down the ward, putting her hand out now and then to touch a boy’s leg or foot as she passed. When she opened the door to leave, some music slipped in. It seemed to be borne along to Walt’s ears by a gust of frigid air. Voices were singing: “For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over.” Walt kissed Hank’s sweaty head, then followed Dr. Walker off the ward. He followed the song to an invalid chorus in Ward K, led by a young nurse who accompanied herself on a melodeon. The gas was turned down low, as if to heighten the effect of the candles held by all the singers. There were deep shadows all up and down the ward. Walt retreated into one of these, and put his head down and sang along.
Sometimes when he could not sleep, which was often, Walt would walk around the city, past the serene mansions on Lafayette Square, past the President’s house, where he would stop and wonder if a light in the window implied that Mr. Lincoln was awake and agonizing. One night he saw a figure in a long, trailing black veil move, lamp in hand, past a series of windows, and he imagined it must be Mrs. Lincoln, searching forlornly for her little boy, who had died two winters previous. Walt walked past the empty market stalls, along the ever-stinking canal, where he would pause, look down into the dirty water, and see all manner of things float by: boots and bonnets, half-eaten vegetables, animals. Once there was a dead cat drifting on a little floe of ice.
Walking on, he would pass into Murder Bay, where whores uttered long, pensive hoots at him, but generally left him alone. He would peek into alleys that housed whole families of “contraband.” On one occasion, a stout young girl had come out of the dark, pushing a wheelbarrow in which another girl was cuddled up with a small white dog in her lap. The little dog was yipping fearfully, but the girls were laughing. Walt traded them candy from his pocket for a gleeful ride in their wheelbarrow, the two of them pushing him along for a few yards until he fell out into the filthy road, laughing hysterically, the little dog jumping on him and catching its paws in his beard.
Walt would cut back along the canal, then across, sometimes watching the moon shine on the towers of the Smithsonian castle, and on the white roofs and white fence of Armory Square — the whole scene so expressively silent in the pale weak light. He would walk among the shrubs and trees of the Mall, sometimes getting lost on a footpath that went nowhere, but eventually he would cross the canal again and walk up to the Capitol. There was the great statue of General Washington, the one that everyone ridiculed because he was dressed in a toga. (It was said that his sword was raised in a threat to do harm to the country if his clothes were not returned.)
Walt liked the statue. He would crawl up into its lap and sprawl out, Pietà-like, or else put his arms around the thick marble neck and have a good wrenching cry. At dawn, Walt would stand outside the Capitol, writing his name in the snow with his urine, and he could smell the bread baking in the basement. He had a friend in the bakery who loaded him down with countless hot loaves. Walt would walk back to Armory Square, warmed by the bread in his coat, and sometimes he’d have enough so that every full-diet boy in a ward would wake with a still-warm loaf on his chest.
* * *
“They want to take my leg,” Hank told him. It was early May, and still cold. “I ain’t going to let them. You’ve got to get me a gun.”
“Hush,” said Walt. “They won’t take your leg.” In fact, it looked like they would have to. Just when Hank had seemed on the verge of good health, just when he had beaten the typhoid, the leg had flared up again and deteriorated rapidly. Dr. Woodhull cleaned the wound, prayed over it, swabbed it with whiskey, all to no avail. A hideous, stinking infection had taken root, and was spreading.
“I saw my brother last week,” Walt told Hank. “Marching with Burnside’s army. It was on Fourteenth Street. I watched for three hours before the Fifty-first came along. I joined him just before they came to where the President and General Burnside were standing on a balcony, and the interest of seeing me made George forget to notice the President and salute him!”
“Hush up!” said Oliver Barley.
Hank raised his voice a little. “They’ll take his leg, too. Or both his legs. He had better keep a good watch on them.”
“Yes,” said Walt. “The Ninth Corps made a very fine show indeed.” Hank gave a harrumph, and turned over on his side, clearly not wanting to talk anymore. Walt went looking for Dr. Woodhull, to discuss Hank’s condition, but couldn’t find him in his office. There was a pall of silence and gloom over all the wards. News of the horrible casualties accrued by General Grant in his Wilderness campaign had reached the hospital. Dr. Bliss and Mrs. Hawley were having a loud discussion as she changed dressings.
“Trust a drunk not to give a fig for our boys’ lives,” said Mrs. Hawley.
“He spends them like pennies,” said Dr. Bliss. “This war is an enterprise dominated by inebriates, charlatans, and fools.” Bliss gave Walt a mean look.