A Soldier's Book

Joanna Higgins

• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781579620097
• eBook ISBN:
  9781504024006
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In the spring of 1864 all prisoner-of-war exchanges between the North and the South had been halted. For captured soldiers, being condemned to the increasingly overcrowded prison camps was tantamount to a death sentence. A Soldier's Book opens as Ira Cahill Stevens, a young Union soldier, is on his way to the notorious Andersonville prison camp. Day by day, Ira shares the horrific details of a world that is growing ever more barbaric and absurd, with its "dead lines, " starvation, cruelty, filth, and false rumors of exchange. Yet even in the face of terror and despair, Ira remains hopeful, and with the help of an impromptu family of fellow soldiers, he struggles to survive, only to witness each friend picked off by death or insanity. A powerful and historically accurate novel, A Soldier's Book leaves the reader not only with a richer sense of the Civil War but of the resiliency of the human spirit.

Thirteen

A surgeon studies my hand. He is taking so long I am stiffening up, by this warm kerosene lamp. Want to cry like a fool. Why? Because he is too close and is taking so much care. He is rendering me into a weepy girl.

A reb, I tell myself. Think of Gus. Think of Willy. This fellow don’t care a bean for you.

None of it does much good. The way he’s acting you’d think we were blood brothers.

Ira, he says, and the sound of my name spoken by this rebel wreaks havoc on me. What did they do for this at Charleston? he asks.

Now I shame myself with tears.

After a while I can talk. Cauterizing. Carbolic acid. They almost cut.

He pretends not to notice the weepiness. Glad they didn’t, he says. He draws in a breath, lets it out. Looks again at the black knuckles, the swollen-tight-and-about-to burst skin.

Looked worse before, I say. You could see the gangrene.

I’m afraid we’ll have to cauterize again, he says. But with some clean compresses and decent food, you might be out of the woods soon.

I chance a straight look at him to see if this is a joke. It don’t seem to be. He is a thin man. Homely, you would say. Don’t have much hair, his skin is sallow and bunchy and oily, all wrinkled around the eyes and blue-black there. His skull under that frail hair looks knobby. Yet so much life seems to be pouring from his hand directly into mine.

I tell myself to fight it. They only betray you, the rebels. Yarmony could have told me straight out and not fooled with that hedgehog story.

He releases my hand. Don’t give up now, he says.

I leave the shed blind to everything.

These sheds. Had us all in a frenzy of speculation earlier when we saw them from the rutted road. They have pine-branch roofs and board walls on three sides. Was something to behold.

Still is.

I go into our ward and lie face-down on pine branches, smell their pitchy smell.

Marinus says What’s the matter?

Hate him, I say.

Who?

That surgeon.

What did he do?

Looked at my hand.

Marinus sighs. He tells me I’m a mess, but I should hate the fellow if I want. It’s good entertainment.

I ask if he cares about anything. He says No he don’t.

So why are you here? I ask him.

He tells me not to try to figure everything out.

We have a regular sally going and it’s good. Marinus, I say. It’s better when we talk, ain’t it?

Not much, he says.

And that’s the end of it.

I awake to some clanking and clatter. It appears to be an orderly with a bucket of steaming soup.

We sit up. We don’t believe a fraction of it. Not even when we raise mush-tins and smell the tomatoes.

Clear we have gotten into the wrong batch.

I try a joke. Do you think they’ll give us some bounty for joining up?

He says So how do you feel about him now?

Who?

That surgeon.

I don’t say a word then.

Don’t get besotted, he tells me. As with that priest of yours.

Do you remember his name, Marinus? I have forgotten.

Arma virumque cano, he says.

No, I say. That wasn’t it.

It means I sing of arms and the man.

Don’t seem much to sing about.

Tell that to Publius Vergilius Maro.

Who’s he?

Was. A poet.

You’re feeling sparky, ain’t you. So he liked war, did he?

Liked to imagine the heroic scale of things, anyway. But he died of fever when he was fifty-one. I’m fifty-one.

But you’re not going to die of it.

Marinus is quiet.

Open your mouth, I say.

He raises his upper lip slightly.

It’s not bad, I say, lying.

Look again, he says.

I can’t see any blood.

I’m going yellow.

Only a little bit. It might be mild.

Might. But then again—

Let’s think of right now, I say. Let’s do like Gus would do. Think of right now and don’t go no further.

A foggy drizzle beads the overhanging branches, drips down. But we are dry. We have a roof. Pine branches to sleep on. A blanket. It may be October or it may be November, but we are dry and with full bellies. Warm. Things are sliding away. The priest’s name. Gus’s last name. And Louie gone, too. Maybe Charleston. Maybe pulled from a well-hole. Maybe run from the burial grounds. What kind of footprint will I be if I can’t remember a damn thing.

Unless a crazy madman footprint. Needles prick me from behind the eyes, then in legs, arms. Hand.

I smell the branches. Touch the blanket. Listen for what I can hear, the music in it, the plinking of drops, the rustle of branches under me, their turpentine smell. Then I am with Dr. Strother again and he is holding onto my hand, willing life into the dead heart of it.

I make a fist, open it. The fingers rise more or less in the right way. I make a fist again. Several days of cauterizing, clean compresses, and good food have worked this miracle.

So, Dr. Strother says. The word is a tired exhalation.

My throat too tight, I say what I have been practicing all week to say—that I want to help him.

How? he asks. He is testing each joint slowly and with great care.

An orderly, I creak out. I am seeing the oak bins, again, the prescription case, the red show globes. I have worked, I say from this dream, for an apothecary.

Impossible, it seems, that I have spoken such a mouthful of a word, something so ponderous and belonging to the other world.

He asks if I can define mercurous chloride.

I cannot, it seems. Those words off sitting in some distance and beckoning. You know me! But I don’t. Know only that I should.

It is a—I take a guess … purgative. Then know I am right. Not for diarrhea, I say.

Oh? he says. What would you prescribe?

I am taken aback by his bantering tone. Does he prescribe that too? Words spin through me, remnants of my lost life. I pick one. Paregoric. Then others. Camphorated tincture of opium. Quinine … sulfate.

You’re right, he says, not looking up from the hand. Finally he surrenders it and gives our talk full attention.

Am I principled? he wants to know.

He repeats the question, substituting the word honest.

I don’t know what to say to that. I cannot tell him a part without the whole. I tell him everything. The pharmacy. Gabrielle. William Bonhoffer. J. L. Casey. The Pinkerton detectives. The reports. The running away. So no, I say. I am neither principled nor honest. I am a thief and a liar. In truth not much of a fellow at all. I don’t amount up but all the same might be of some use. I tell him about Abraham Sommers and how I wanted to sign too, for food.

He don’t seem to hear this part. You acted, he says, out of love. Not for personal gain. You were being loyal to that.

I know what Marinus would say to this. He would say Lo, the mind at work twisting and burrowing a way out!—or some such. But that is what the doctor’s words seem to me to be doing. Twisting and tweedling a way out.

I say It was wrong, what I did.

Do you know, he says, that we have some of those drugs here, now?—I am quite sure of it.

I go quiet, reddening, face, neck, ears. Loyalty, he goes on. One hardly knows these days. He rubs the loose folds under his eyes with fingers of both hands. I know he needs to be back in the wards, working. He does not stint on the work, stays long after the other surgeons all leave for their quarters. He often sleeps in one of the sheds.

Words come. I give them to this man. You have my loyalty, I say.

His voice is parched. Scratches out. He says he believes me. We shake hands on it. He’s about to leave but goes to a cupboard and pulls out boots, jacket, and gray shirt. See if these fit. If not let me know. Then he is gone.

I look at my new uniform. Touch the good cloth, warm to my hand. Begin undressing.

Head-Quarters, Military Prison. Florence, South Carolina. October 30, 1864. I, Ira Cahill Stevens (enlisted as Jim Kiefer), Private, a paroled prisoner of war, do hereby pledge my word of honor that I will not violate my parole by going beyond one-half mile from the hospital limits.

I sign this document in the presence of a rebel lieutenant colonel and several other officers. I am wearing my new uniform and boots, too big for me. My right hand feels stiff and unpracticed as I form the letters of my name, sinking into the remembered shape of it. Ira Cahill Stevens, a paroled prisoner of war, but no rebel getting back to his regiment because of it. I walk out into sunshine, fitting myself into this new person. A paroled prisoner not going home but somehow, it seems, already there.

It holds, the happiness.

We hardly know what the reb sergeant is going on about. He jokes one minute, bullies the next. He looks and acts like a tipsy fellow. Woods, he’s saying now, and cross-cut marks on trees, and if we run like rabbits we’ll surely pay for it. He is skinny as us. Has a frayed, sand-colored moustache that curls down over his mouth. Everything about him quivers or twitches. Eyelids. Chin. Face. Moustache. Hands. Even his skinny legs. He is taking us on a tour of the hospital grounds, telling us to pay close attention. He flings himself around to face us every so often. Struts and gives way to some kind of bellowing oratory.

God save us from these weasely sergeants. I do not trust small men in power. Lieutenant Davis was not small, nor was Yarmony. Dr. Strother is thin but not weasely. This sergeant must believe he is one of God’s chosen in the Promise...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page