She cleaned the bedpans, changed the sheets, stuffed the mattresses with clean straw, soaked cotton balls with camphor. Scrubbed the bloody operating tables clean with sand. Still, the smell was intolerable. The reek of excrement and blood. She longed to be outside with the filthy clothing once more, but she proved to be a good aide and the surgeons liked her. She did basic stitching and fever-soothing. She refilled their bedside basins and slopped out their chamber pots. Put her arms under their shoulders and shifted their weight. Patted their backs while they hacked up lungfuls of dark phlegm. Slopped up the mess from their terrible diarrhea. Held cups of cool water to their lips. Fed them oats, beans, thin soup, yellow horse fat. Gave them rhubarb for the fever. Ignored their desires, their catcalls. Ice baths were prepared for the soldiers who had gone mad. They were plunged down deep into a freezing tub until they were unconscious. She held their heads underwater and felt the freeze move up her wrists.
Some of the soldiers whispered obscenities when she approached. Their language was vile. Their erections were angry. To quiet the men, she told them that she was a Quaker, though she was nothing of the sort. They begged forgiveness from her. She touched their foreheads, moved on. They called her Sister. She did not turn.
Lily helped the surgeons with emergency operations: she had to sharpen the edges of saws to hack off limbs. The saws had to be sharpened twice a day. The men were given rubber clamps to put in their mouths. She held down their shoulders. They spat the rubber clamp out and she shoved it back in. She held bags of chloroform over their noses and mouths. Still, they screamed. Huge wooden tubs were kept under the tables to collect the blood that leaked down. Limbs sat in the buckets: arms next to thighbones, sawed-off fingers next to ankles. She mopped the floor and scrubbed it with carbolic soap and water. Rinsed the mop out in the grass. Watched the ground turn red. At the end of the evening she walked to the rear of the building to vomit.
Few of the soldiers stayed around for more than a day or two. They were sent to another hospital in the rear, or back to the battlefield. She had no idea how the men could fight again, but off they trudged. Once they had been engineers, quartermasters, butlers, cooks, carpenters, blacksmiths. Now they went off wearing the boots of the already dead.
Sometimes they returned just days later and were dumped into the long burial trench in the forest floor. She put camphor in her nose to temper the stench.
Lily inquired after her son, but tentatively, as if probing the flesh of a wound. She knew that if she saw him, she would, most likely, not see him for very long. Thaddeus Fitzpatrick. His short stocky body. His freckled face. His very blue eyes. She described him this way to strangers: it was as if his whole body had been built around his eyes. His father, John Fitzpatrick, had long ago disappeared. She had been forced to take his name. New names didn’t mean all that much anyway. They belonged to the namers. In St. Louis, where she had worked as a maid, she was known as Bridie. Change the sheets, Bridie. Sweep the ashes, Bridie. Comb my hair, Bridie, dear. A woman’s name could swerve. She was Lily Fitzpatrick now. At times, Bridie Fitzpatrick. But she thought of herself, still, as Lily Duggan: if she carried anything, she carried that. The sound of Dublin in it. A name that belonged to the Liberties. The grayness, the cobbles. In America you could lose everything except the memory of your original name.
Thaddeus was named after her own father, Tad. She had raised him by herself, first in New York and then St. Louis. A small handsome boy. He had learned to read and write in school. He showed an interest in numbers. At twelve, he began an apprenticeship as a fence-builder. Her very own son, sinking fence posts. She had a dream of him moving out on the prairies. Going west. Deep snowfalls. High cedar trees. The broad meadows. But the war kept him rooted. He was going to fight tyranny, he said. Four times he had lied about his age in order to join up. Four times he had been returned in his hand-sewn uniform. Each time a little more cocksure than before. A vitriol to his gallantry. As if he didn’t understand it himself. Once, he had hit her. With a closed fist. He turned on her and opened a deep cut above her eye. His father’s son. He sat brooding at the kitchen table. Never said sorry, but quieted down for a week or two, until the anger pushed him out the door again. His shoulders tightened out the uniform. The trousers were so long that he dragged them in the mud.
There was music in the streets of St. Louis. Trumpets. Mandolins. Tubas. Fifes. Men in bow ties along the Mississippi, beckoning boys to war. Other men decked out in ceremonial swords and sashes. Glory. Manhood. Duty. Break this stranglehold. Awaken this nation to its proper Destiny. Out to Benton Barracks with the Boys! They offered seventy-five dollars for enlisting. He somehow thought that it would be a fortnight’s war, a young man’s lark. He put on his haversack and thrust himself amongst the Union soldiers. Right face. Left wheel. Right, oblique, march.
Drummer boys beat a pace. Regimental pennants flew. The First Minnesota. The Twenty-Ninth Iowa Volunteer Infantry. The Tenth Minnesota Volunteers. Snatches of a song were heard on the air. The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena, it matters little now, Lorena, life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.
She had never put much faith in God, but Lily prayed for her son’s safety and so prayed never to see him in the wagons. And in praying never to see him, she wondered if she was dooming him to the battlefield forever. And in praying to bring him home, she sometimes dwelt on whatever terrors he would carry back with him, if he came back at all. Circles within circles. Patterns on a cross.
She stepped out from the ward, down the staircase, into the night. She disliked the immensity of the dark. It reminded her too much of the sea. She listened to the call of the katydids. Their repetition seemed a better form of prayer.
SHE HAD COME, in the early days of 1846, all the way from Cove. Seventeen years old. Eight weeks on the water. The sea wallowed and heaved. Lily stayed in her bunk most of the time. With the women and children. Their beds were stacked close together. At night she heard the water rats scuttling in the hold. The food was rationed, but she was able to eat courtesy of Isabel Jennings, the twenty pounds sterling she had been given. Rice, sugar, molasses, tea. Cornbread and dry fish. She kept the money elaborately stitched in the heel edge of a bonnet. She carried a shawl, a calico dress, one pair of shoes, several handkerchiefs and thread, thimble, needles. Also the blue amethyst brooch that Isabel had slipped into her hands that late afternoon of rain. Pinned beneath her waistband so that it could not be seen. She huddled in her bunk.
The wind was demented. Gales battered the ship. She was terrified by the pitch of wave. Her head was bruised from the bunk frame. Fever and hunger. She wandered up on deck. A coffin was being slid from the side of the boat. It landed and broke in the water. A leg disappeared. Her stomach heaved. She went down below again into the stinking dark. Days piled into nights, nights into days. She heard a shout. A sighting of land. A heave of joy. A false alarm.
New York appeared like a cough of blood. The sun was going down behind the warehouses and tall buildings. She saw men on the wharfside in the ruin of themselves. A man barked questions. Name. Age. Birthplace. Speak up, he said. Speak up, goddamnit. She was sprayed with lice powder and allowed entry. Lily jostled her way along the waterfront among the stevedores, police officers, beggars. A stench rose up from the oily harbor. The brokenness. The rawness. The filth. She had met only a few Americans in her life — all of them in Webb’s house in Dublin, specimens of great dignity, men like Frederick Douglass — but in New York the men were adherent to shadows. The sloping Negroes were bent and huddled. What freedom, that? Some still wore the branding marks. Scars. Crutches. Slings. She passed by. The women along the docks — white women, black women, mulattos — were rude with lip paint. Their dresses rose above their ankles. It was not at all what Lily had wanted the city to be. No fancy carriages pulled by drays. No men in bow ties. No thumping speeches along the waterfront. Just the filthy Irish calling out to her in all manner of disdain. And the silent Germans. The skulking Italians. She wandered amongst them in a haze. Children in rags of unbleached cotton. Dogs on the corner. A mob of pigeons descended from the sky. She moved away from the cries of teamsters and the cadenced call of peddlers. Pulled her shawl around her shoulders. Her heart shuddered in her thin dress. She walked the streets, terrified of thieves. Her shoes were filthy with human waste. She clutched her bonnet tight. Rain fell. Her feet blistered. The streets were a fever. Brick upon brick. Voice upon voice. She passed dimly lit lofts where women sat sewing. Men in top hats stood in the doorways of dry-goods stores. Boys on their knees set cobblestones. A fat man wound a music box. A young girl made paper cutouts. She hurried on. A rat brazened past her on the pavement. She slept in a hotel on Fourth Avenue where the bedbugs concealed themselves beneath a flap of wallpaper. She woke, her first morning in America, to the scream of a horse being beaten with a truncheon outside her window.