Union Mail

by Robert Albert Kapler

I

A few days before he planned to desert, Sergeant Phillips ducked through the flap of his tent to check on the mail-loading detail. It was a cool April morning, and dew clung to the trail like a carpet runner. He walked through pine trees, fallen cones cracking underfoot, until he came upon the back porch of a tiny log cabin being used as a mail depot. He tiptoed up and cocked an ear. From the voices around the corner, it sounded as if his men were planning a going away party for Private Fisher’s foot.  

 “Afore he goes under the saw, we might even, ya know, present him with a token. Maybe a silver diaper pin to hold up his empty pant leg!” The voice was Barnard’s.

Moving along the wall, Phillips leaned out at the corner to steal a look. Barnard and Knapp were stretched on mounds of mail sacks, smoking cigars and smoothing their mustaches as if the war were but a rumor. Small string-tied bundles of mail, each from a different camp, lay around them like Christmas presents.

Knapp, the Irishman, lifted a knee in delight.  “That’s the stuff! Or one of them pegs what the pirates hop on.”

Barnard blew smoke around his snaggletooth and pointed his cigar at Knapp. “Hell, yes, and for good measure, I’ll stick a blue parrot on his shoulder!” He guffawed crudely and called back to an old man standing near the wagon. “What’ll ya bring, George?”

Phillips craned his head a bit more to see George Henry, bone-chested, black as coffee, standing off to the side with his arms crossed, foot tapping. “Private Fisher needs a Bible. That’s the only true comfort for a man.”

“Aw, button yer lip,” Barnard sniffed, flicking an ash. “Nary a word can’t be uttered lessen George starts talking Bible.”

It looked like George Henry was impatient for the laggards to stop the foolish talk, get off their duffs and load the sacks so that he could hitch up the horses.

But I’m already gone, Phillips thought.  I don’t give a snake’s behind if they sleep on the job or knit doilies or stick ribbons in their ears. He was going to light out of camp in two days—nine months before his discharge. Still, gazing at the hopeless lot, he felt a pang of remorse. Without his fatherly guidance, Johnny Reb would surely bugger their arses. 

As Phillips strode around the corner, Barnard catapulted to his feet. “Morning, Sergeant. Just a short break.”

“What’s all this talk then?”

Knapp climbed slowly to his low height. “Sergeant, we’ve come up with a winning gesture for the poor private. A kind of send-off for his foot, ya might say, complete with food and spirits.”

“No, you haven’t,” Phillips said, shaking his head. “It’s not something that asks to be made light of.”

“Surely but that’s the point, Sergeant. We were thinking we might get Fisher’s mind off his foul prospects and the messy procedure that awaits.”

“He’d sure appreciate it,” Barnard added, his face angelic except for the tooth.

Phillips fixed the men with a sideways stare. “Why don’t we just leave that to the private?”

 “So yer saying he himself must bless our scheme?” Knapp said, clamping a hand around the throat of a sack.

“No. I’m saying don’t even mention it to him. And, boys, pull that wagon over here where the ground is drier before you start loading it. Let’s try not to wear out the horses before we even start the mail run.”

A low trundling sound echoed off the trees, and they turned to see a flatbed wagon coming through a break in a stone wall down the way. The rig was pulled by a single horse carrying a Union soldier leaning over its mane, chin drooping over chest straps. The spring seat was empty. The horse stopped about ten yards from the group, shook its head and snorted. 

Knapp ran to the wagon and stood on a spoke to see over the bed gate. “Three in here,” he yelled back. “One’s still alive.”

Phillips turned to Barnard, who had gotten to his feet. “Don’t just stand there. You and Knapp find a gurney and get the live one to the infirmary.”

Though the horse had already halted, the man on horseback said “Whoa” and jumped down, out of breath. He bent deeply and rested his hands on his thighs. One hand waved over Phillips. “Ambushed again! Taking corn and potatoes to Camp Ahab. Jumped us at the silo by the tracks. Two men dead, two horses dead. Loggins is alive but most of his shoulder is gone. They were ahead of me when I heard the shots. Prolly the same outfit what hit your mail run a few months back.”

Phillips’ felt his left eye twitching again. To hide it, he turned his head and nodded. “I don’t want to leave with Johnny Reb waiting out there.  We need a couple of marksmen.” He turned to George Henry. “I’ve got to report to Captain Hershey. You haul over some feed and fetch them horses. Tell the others to wait for me.”

Phillips took his leave, hurrying until he came upon two lines of sleepwalking pickets heading out on patrol. Impatient, he cut sideways through them, nearly running into a horse carcass with a pair of buzzards perched on its swelling neck. Nearby, two men wearing kerchiefs were digging a pit. He held a hand to his belly, which had become a knot of chain since Vicksburg. With the cuff of his other arm, he wiped his eye and moved it to his nose to keep out the stench. Soon he was passing the mess shed, ripe with the smells of pine wood smoke and onions. Farther on stood the officers’ quarters, a row of tents with wooden floors and wash basins, not the common pup tents the mud troops called home. Finally, he stood at the captain’s cabin, a former blacksmith’s shed with a double front door, a tin roof and a wavy glass window.  

Phillips knocked and a gruff voice called him in. He entered to find Captain Hershey pouring tea from a yellow porcelain pot into a matching cup, all of it on a small wood service cart.  Without looking at Phillips, the captain sat down behind a polished desk and took a sip from his cup. As the sergeant stood at parade rest before him, he pulled a bit on the end of his mustache. Phillips noticed a gilt-framed degree on the wall behind the captain. 

Somehow Hershey and that little cup are going to make it through the war just fine, Phillips thought.

“We just had another ambush,” the captain said, touching the cup to his lip. He was a stodgy man with pale skin, pale hair and eyelashes too light for his dark eyes, like bits of coal pressed into a plucked chicken. 

“I’m aware of that, sir. I was just going to ask if we could get an escort for our mail run, considering the attack that just now occurred.”

“But first I need an account of the first ambush, your ambush. This young private …”

“Fisher, sir.”

“Yes, Fisher, or Fisher’s folly as they say. He was sent to Washington after the ambush. I don’t understand why you let him back in the platoon. He was still on medical status.” 

“Well, when he showed up he looked right as a clock to me, Captain,” Phillips said. “I didn’t see any limp. In fact, Fisher did the work of two men. He said he had gotten back his active status.”

“What about the transfer papers?”

“I don’t handle that. Somehow he got himself transferred back.”

“With your approval?”

Phillips’s scalp tingled. He hated Captain Hershey, hated his little yellow tea cup and thin mustache and thin lips and the way his eyebrow raised when he made a point. In Phillips’s mind, the captain was to blame for the Fisher debacle. Rebel units had been slipping across the James River for weeks to tap Union telegraph lines and blow rails or rob supply wagons. It was a miracle the postal wagons hadn’t been hit earlier. One moonlit night he and Knapp were doing the return run and glimpsed Johnny Reb pulling a raft piled with rifles across the James. When he shared this intelligence, the Captain waited until the next afternoon to dispatch an infantry unit.  And worse, he denied the mail runners an escort. 

“I didn’t approve nor disapprove. Captain, you know as well as I do there wouldn’t be a Fisher’s folly if we’d a gotten what we asked for.”

“Asked for? What’s that?”

“Well, you … Sir, beg your pardon, but I stood right here not three months ago, after sighting the river crossing, and asked you for a patrol escort. I said we’re sitting ducks out there. My point was that mail carriers can’t hide when perched on the seat of a flatbed. But you said we’re soldiers first and mail carriers second and we should protect ourselves.”

“That’s not my recollection, Sergeant. My recollection is that we both came to that conclusion.”

Phillips wanted to laugh in his face. “At any rate, I never withdrew the request.”

“Request? I don’t remember a request.” A feigned look of perplexity.

“The conversation, sir.”

“Did you put your request in writing? That’s the procedure.”

How hard could it be? Knock him over, a good kick to the throat. Instead, Phillips listened to his stomach moan like a buckshot dog.

The captain, cup raised to his lips, looked toward the source of the intestinal sound. “I must report to the regiment on this situation,” he said. “Tell me again how it happened—Fisher’s folly.”

“Yes, sir, I will, but maybe we should first discuss the attack that just now happened and how we might …”

“Tell me about the first incident.”

“I mean, we’re loading up for another mail run.”

“Answer the question.”

Phillips cleared his throat. “We were ambushed on the way to Petersburg. My guess is that they wanted the mail for intelligence on our food and other supplies because, well, they don’t have any.”

“I appreciate the speculation,” the captain said. “Now relate what happened.”

Fighting off another murderous urge, Phillips began. “We stopped to eat lunch in a clearing. I didn’t realize that Fisher had taken off his boots until the shots started from the trees. A miniball lopped off his left heel and another hit one of the horses. I got Fisher onto my own horse and galloped off. I recall Knapp throwing mail from the wagon to lighten the load.

“Three rebs on horseback gave chase and sent a few more shots our way. Barnard returned fire with his pistols. We high-tailed it six miles back to camp. As we rode through the gate, the wounded horse went down; he had caught one in the neck. Fisher lay in the infirmary a couple weeks and was transferred to the Army hospital in Frederick. Apparently, he hobbled out and got himself attached to the Post Office Department in Washington as a mail sorter. Somehow or other, he was transferred back here. Had signed orders, which I read. Said that his foot had mended.”

“But obviously, that was hogwash,” the captain said.

“Obviously, sir, what with the surgeon now planning to cut off the whole business.”

The captain’s eyebrow rose. “And when did you learn of the gangrene?”

“I was standing in the mess line one day when I smelled a peculiar odor. Fisher was in front of me, and I noted that he had cut several holes above the heel of his left boot. I asked to see the foot. When Fisher declined to remove the boot, I brought over a few men and did it for him. That’s when I saw the rot, sir. I had seen it once before, after Vicksburg.”

Captain Hershey stood, keeping one hand on his gun belt. “Soon as he’s able, have him discharged. His ticket’s been stamped.”

“We could really use an escort, Captain. Reb ain’t going away.”

“We can’t send an escort for every damned mail run. We’re in a campaign! But from here on out you’ll keep a better eye on your men.”

Phillips was about to say something but that eye had gone to twitching again. “Yes sir.”

II

The next mail run to Petersburg went off without a snag, though the men were on edge, eyes always up and scanning the trees. Phillips tied his chestnut mare to the back of the buckboard and rode next to Knapp on the driver’s bench, his Springfield musket propped between his legs.  Barnard lay in back with the sacks. The men did not stop to rest but made the return run as soon as they had unloaded and reloaded. It was early evening by the time they rolled into camp. Phillips went to his tent, washed his face and decided to give the letter to his wife another go. He was sure the censors would butcher it, but he had no idea what was secret and what was not. 

Dearest Bea,

Here I am, Your Own Jacob, alive though a little Worn from driving a mail wagon through lots of Mud Trenches that our optimistic Captain calls roads. I hope these lines find you and My Boy Charlie well-fed and in fair health.

What I’ll call Camp Able is not big, maybe 40 acres. It’s just an old soybean farm with a main house, a barn, a silo, and a few other sheds and shacks. The barn is our supply depot and one shed has been converted into a mess, complete with a brick oven. Off that is the surgical bay. Our mail depot used to be a slave cabin. We pitched our tents in two low fields, which we’ve pretty much tromped to mud.  The boys have taken to hanging laundry on lines strung between the pups. Sometimes, when the union suits & shirts flutter around in the wind, it looks like a ghost ball. 

We’re squatters. The Second Army Corps borrowed this land from a widow who still lives here with her two children and a maid-servant. An emancipated darkie named Amelie serves as cook, maid, business manager, and baby sitter. Her husband was killed during the Battle of New Bern.  Another former slave named George works for me on the mail runs. The widow told me that a teacher from town taught her daughter and Amelie to read and write, side by each. Apparently, George learned by reading his Bible, but Amelie is backfilling a bit …

Exhausted by the effort, he lit a candle at his writing stand and lay in his cot. He began to think of an excuse that would explain his early discharge. But after twenty minutes, he had come up empty. 

He went out of his tent and wandered down a footpath. In a few minutes, he was gazing up through the gathering dusk toward the farmhouse perched on a rise. It was a two-story salt box with full-length porches on both levels. Through the branches of the trees out front, he spied Mrs. Aikerson on the upstairs porch tending to her boy, Gerald. On the porch below, Amelie moved about in her usual efficient manner. Even from that distance, she cut a healthy figure. He decided to pay a visit to see if she had the items he had requested. Amelie was the only soul in camp who knew he planned to light out. And she was the only one he would surely miss. 

Climbing the porch stairs, he found she had moved to a rocker, from which she shelled peanuts into two buckets, one for the shells. Seeing him, she smiled, held a finger to her lips and stood. She gestured for him to follow and opened the shuttered parlor door. They entered to find the girl, Donna-Lea, sitting on a divan, darning a sock. 

“Miss Donna-Lea?” Amelie said. “Sargeant Phillips needs to borrow a measuring cup and some baking soda.”

“So? What’s that got to do with me?” She was a pretty girl with soft brown hair and giant green eyes that often became slits of judgment. 

“Well, Miss, we’ve been keeping the pantry locked for security. Could you be a dear and ask your momma for the key? She’s upstairs with young Gerald. I need to talk to the Sergeant about our supply list.”

Coyly shooting them a sideways glance, Donna-Lea dropped her sewing, rose and slowly trudged toward the stairs. She is as disagreeable as her mother is pleasant, Phillips thought. 

“I’ll leave you two here to catch up,” she said, smiling slyly over her shoulder. “Donna-Lea the maid will go and fetch the key and then return to her darning.”

When they heard her steps recede and the bedroom door open, Amelie moved close to him. She stared up into his tired eyes.

“I got what you asked for,” she whispered. “Bedroll, map, canteen, knife, looking glass. And some food—jerky, hard biscuits, even a few apples. It’s all in the woodshed behind the last stack on the right. Inside a flour sack.”

“Thank you,” Phillips said in a low voice.

“You still set on walking the whole way to Philadelphia? Why not take your horse?”

“That’s government property. I may be a deserter, but I ain’t no horse thief.” 

“What’s that going to matter? If the Rebs don’t find and kill you, the Union Army will. You think they’re just going to forget about you lighting out? You’ll either be shot or swung from a tree.”

“Everyone knows this will be over soon.”

“Maybe so, but that won’t matter, no sir, not a bit. And if they do put you in prison, what are you going to tell that boy of yours? You think he wants his pa called a deserter?”

They heard Donna-Lea fussing upstairs—closet doors and drawers opening and closing, feet stamping. “I am looking on the bureau!” A second later Donna-Lea was coming down the stairs. 

“Next time, you get this thing,” she said, handing over the key to Amelie. “You’re supposed to be the servant.”

Gerald’s little ginger head appeared between two balustrades on the landing. “Hey, Mister Sergeant, you bring me some licorice?”

Phillips ruffled the boy’s hair and gave him a sprig of candy.  Gerald ran off as Amelie led the sergeant to the pantry. Inside, he laid a hand on her face, turned, and walked out of the house. She followed him, watching him descend the porch into the moonlight. She fled down the stairs and caught up, grabbing his arm.

“Stop! Stop! Talk to me, please!”

Phillips' eyes darted to see if anyone had heard. A pair of sentries came into view down the trail. As they grew near, they looked curiously at the soldier and black woman. She withdrew her arm and backed off. When they had passed, she raised her eyes, tears glistening.

 “Listen,” she said urgently. “I know folks they call conductors. They’ll take you up North at night. You know who I’m talking about.”

“These are colored people?”

She nodded.

“They’re going to take a white deserter up North? Doesn’t sound likely.”

“So that’s it?” Amelie said. “You got what you wanted from me, now you’re off?” 

He looked into her wet eyes and felt remorse like a shot in the stomach. He wanted to kiss her, to tell her that he would be back for her one day. But that would be just a fool’s fantasy. He had no idea what was going to happen to him. 

The question hung in the air as he turned and faded into darkness.  

* * *

“Sarge?” Phillips lifted his tent flap to find George Henry holding up a lantern. The wavering light illuminated the tattered Bible he held in his other hand, stuffed with folded paper and clippings.

“Private Fisher’s asking for you, Sarge. Says he wants you to come to his party.”

“Give me a minute,” Phillips said. 

* * *

The hospital tent stank of tobacco, urine, feces, kerosene and blood. Three lamps hung on posts. In the flickering gloom, Phillips could see the shapes of men, a few sleeping, most staring off or lying with an arm draped over their eyes.  He followed George Henry between two rows of cots. They came upon a whimpering figure who was little more than a bandaged shadow. 

George Henry leaned close to the sergeant. “Caught a bolt in the forehead from a cannon strut. Couple weeks back. It’s still inside him.”

They passed another man bandaged from the waist up, lying on his side. 

“That’s Loggins,” George Henry said. “The soldier who got ambushed today.”

 “Over here! This is it!”

The voice came from another line of cots laid end to end on the far wall. Fisher had his head propped against a pillow. Knapp and Barnard were spooning a platter of flapjacks and apple dumplings into several mess kits balanced on the seats of two cane chairs. Their disobedience was blatant. 

“This is from our own Captain Hershey,” Knapp said. “He had the cook fix it up, despite the late hour.”

Barnard and Knapp went back to recounting the ambush that landed Fisher in the hospital. “I’m sure I took down at least one,” Barnard said, making his fingers into a pistol and narrowing his eye. “But I coulda done more damage with a rifle.”

“Second Army Corps already has enough long guns,” Knapp pronounced. “But our pistols are for shit. By Jiminy, we can throw a 14-pound mortar ball a country mile, but our pistols couldn’t find a mark on a herd of buffalo.”

“We need more patrols,” Fisher said through clenched teeth, “not more weapons. The mail carriers need some protection, that’s what.”

Knapp speculated that the bullet which took Fisher’s heel probably came from a Cook’s carbine, .58 caliber, considering the size of the missing chunk. Barnard said that Johnny Reb was still using plain old muskets and miniballs, and the two bet a double-eagle to settle the matter.

“Neither of you doorstops can prove your claim,” Fisher said, “lessen you go back to the scene and find the nugget. Now there’s something I would truly like to see!”

Everyone laughed, even Phillips. Fisher craned his neck. “Say, who’s lurking in the shadows. That you, George Henry?”

George moved into the light. “Hope you don’t mind my sticking by y’all.”

“Why should I mind?” Fisher said. “What’s that you got?”

“A Bible, Private, Thought I’d read you a little of it.”

Barnard said: “A darkie that can read! Hah! What next?”

“Miss Amelie is schooling me, all nice and proper.”

Knapp said, “George Henry is a preacher, he is. Knows the good book coming and going.”

“No fooling! Who’s your …” Fisher gritted his teeth as a wave of pain washed over. “Who’s your favorite prophet?”

George looked down at his feet and scratched his neck. “I reckon that would be Moses, sir.”

“Moses! That’s the feller with all them commandments, ain’t he?”

“Yes sir. He the one led the Israelites out of slavery.”

Fisher’s eyes were wide and glistening. “But I ain’t no Isrealite and we ain’t wandering in no desert.”

“That’s true. But if you look at it sideways, Second Army Corps is kind of like Moses’s tribe, and Moses is like a quartermaster. Like Lieutenant Pendleton.”

“A quartermaster! Don’t that beat it!”

“Sure. Moses was the best quartermaster there ever was. He had to find food and such for his people in no more than sand. Had to petition God himself.”

“Just don’t be reading that book at me,” Fisher said tightly. “Ain’t no quartermaster going to persuade your God to save my leg.”

“He’s gonna save it for you, Private. Come Judgment Day you’ll be a whole man again.”

Fisher stared at him, eyes shining. 

“Enough talk,” Knapp said finally. “Let’s tuck in.”

Primed by months of field gruel and salted shank, they ate greedily. After a while, Knapp produced a bottle of Old Overholt whiskey he had been hiding in a tin can. “I’ve got tins in just about every camp up in the siege line,” he said to no one. 

As the bottle passed, Knapp and Barnard delivered energetic renditions of  “Ode to Adelaine” and “Cigars and Cognac, With These We Bivouac.”

Oh, we’ll take that mountain afore sunrise,

With guns ablazin’ till the buzzard flies.

Though our sweethearts pine with hearts so true,

It’s cigars and cognac that will see us through.

“How’s it feel down there?” Knapp said, waving at the leg.

“Not as bad as it’s gonna!” Fisher barked. Pushing his glistening face into a heroic smile, he took a long pull. 

Fisher handed the bottle to Phillips. He drank some even knowing it would make his gut ache more. When Knapp had his turn, he swung the bottle toward George Henry, but Barnard swiped it from him. 

“Sorry,” Barnard said. “Nothing personal.”

“That’s all right. I don’t drink spirits anyhow.”

“You know, Barnard, you are an asshole,” Phillips said.

Barnard shrugged. “I just don’t drink from the same bottle as the colored.”

A silence descended. Then, slowly, Knapp began singing “John Brown’s Body.” No matter how he tried, Phillips couldn’t stop himself from joining in. 

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

But his soul goes marching on.

When the last voice had died down, Barnard gathered up the mess kits.

“Anyhow, it was Captain Hershey what sent this stuff,” he said. “I don’t want no credit.”

“You got some credit with me, corporal,” Fisher said. 

Barnard picked up the tray and began whistling the refrain to “John Brown’s Body.”

“Let’s be on our lonesome, Corporal Barnard,” Knapp said. “This place gives me the willies.” He paused. “Sorry, private. Best of luck to ye. We’ll sing our songs again, we will.”

Fisher, somewhat drunk, snapped off a half-hearted salute. He watched Knapp and Barnard amble away, and turned his wan face to Phillips, who thought it an excellent moment to take his leave. He had attended the party. Now it was up to the surgeon and God.

“Tomorrow,” Fisher said, “I’d like it if you stayed with me until I go into surgery.”

“Why sure,” Phillips said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t even need to ask.” 

As he walked back to his tent, Phillips thought he might’ve lit out that very night if not for his promise to the young soldier. 

III

The next morning, Phillips crossed the inspection ground. The hospital tent stood in eerie stillness, until the moans of wounded men began again, distant and muffled, and then close and insistent. Inside the tent, he came upon a stubble-jawed nurse leaning on a post, smoking a pipe. 

“Help ya, Sarge?”

“I know where I’m going,” Phillips said.

He walked between the beds. When he reached the bed of the artillery loader who caught the bolt in the head, it was empty. So too was Fisher’s bed, causing the briefest sense of relief that both men had died during the night. 

“He’s already over in the surgical shed,” the nurse said. “But I guess you know where that is.”

Phillips opened the door. The bay was little more than a skylight, a portable sink, and two large tables circled by curtains. Fisher lay on a table while the doctor and an attendant stood at the sink behind the curtain, washing their instruments.

“Hey, Sarge,” he said in a shrill voice. “I’m ready for my medicine.”

Phillips glanced at the doctor for a cue to leave but was paid no mind. As quietly as possible, he closed the door and stood there in shed, outside the bay.

The doctor barely looked up. “If you’re going to be in here, you’ll need a smock,” he said, and then turning to the attendant: “Fetch him one.”

“I just stopped by,” Phillips said, sticking an arm into the armhole of the smock held behind him by the attendant. He entered the curtained space while the attendant wheeled in Fisher. The soldier was luminous under the skylight. “Hell, this’ll be over in no time.”

“I was just thinking,” Fisher said. “I should’ve listened to you, Sarge. You told us to keep our boots laced. Goddamn, you told us!”

“Ain’t no time to take that on. Anyway, I doubt the boots would have done you much good. That was one fierce shot.”

“But, Sarge, the day I transferred back, you never asked to see the wound—I wished you had ordered me to show it. I mean, why didn’t you? Why didn’t you order me to?”

“Sorry,” Phillips mustered. “Sorry I let you down.”

The surgeon and attendant came through a part in the curtains. The attendant was pulling a small table on wheels covered with silver tools—scalpels, clamps, and spools of catgut. The saw had an ivory handle and a bow-like frame, across which was stretched a ragged blade. The surgeon leaned close to Fisher. His manner softened as he murmured to his patient. Fisher listened and nodded, and then nodded again.

“That’s the vinegar,” the surgeon said, straightening. “Give him the mask, Whalen.”

The attendant affixed a rubber mask attached to a short, perforated hose that ran to a glass container inside of which rested a clump of gauze. 

“Good luck, son,” Phillips said. 

Fisher was watching Whalen buckle the straps across his chest, across his hips. 

Phillips began removing his smock.

“It would help if you stayed,” the surgeon said. Before Phillips could respond, he raised a hand, replacing the shoulder of Phillips’s smock. The surgeon spoke to him in the same comforting murmur he had used on the boy. “Chloroform is a good friend, but in a case like this, it’s unreliable as an anesthetic.”

For the first time, Phillips saw the bloated face, pewter pork chop sideburns, eyes like poached eggs, exhausted beyond repair. What on earth keeps you together? he thought. But he said: “How is this case different?”

“Normally we do this procedure within a day of the wound, when they’re still a little bit in shock. It’s been months since this boy was hit. He might start fighting, and then we’ll need another set of hands.”

Phillips had an impulse to grab him by the collar. Why must it be me? Why can’t you let me alone? He wanted to light out of camp that instant, walk away and keep going until he reached Philadelphia. He searched for the words to convey this outrage to his nervous system, but none came. After a long moment, he retied the smock.

When they turned toward Fisher, Whalen had the patient’s leg propped on something that resembled a large galvanized bed pan. He was swabbing the leg with a pungent yellow sponge.

The surgeon scrubbed his hands at the sink. “First we cut away some tissue to create a flap of skin,” he said over his shoulder. “Then we cut deeper and tie off the veins and arteries. Then we saw.”

“I don’t need the specifics, Doc,” Phillips croaked.

“I’m afraid you do,” the surgeon said. “When I start tying off the cardio vessels, you two must keep that leg still or he could bleed to death. Fix the tourniquet, Whalen.”

Whalen removed the mask from Fisher’s face and got close to Phillips’ ear. “Don’t worry too much about what you hold onto,” he said. “Just do what I do and keep your eyes on the leg.”

The next hour went by slowly. The room filled with an odor that was a mix of ether and rotting flesh. Breathing from the table came heavier and more rapid. Then a moaning began, with the surgeon’s low commands as a counterpoint. 

“Give him the mask again, Whalen. Keep it still, Sergeant,” as if the appendage had already become a foreign object. “Tighter, Sergeant. Hurry up, Whalen.”

Fisher began to writhe and arch his back. A kind of panic overtook Phillips. His eyes darted around the room looking for a safe place to land, anyplace but the patient’s leg. But an unseen force kept his eyes on the object. 

“Hold him!” the surgeon ordered, straining at the saw. “Put your muscle into it!”

And then, after what seemed an eternity, the plop into the bed pan. 

* * *

Inside his tent, Phillips watched the afternoon light pass into shadow. He lapsed into a restless sleep. He was in Vicksburg, riding his chestnut mare, Carousel, along the edge of a peach orchard, looking for his detachment. He heard the rifle shot before the horse went down, almost rolling on top of him.  He got away on foot, roaming among the trees and bodies, each with its own cloud of flies. Down one row he spotted a straggler, a boy, no more than eight. He was kneeling and digging in the dirt. Phillips approached. 

“What are you doing, son?”

The boy ignored him and kept digging. Phillips pushed the boy aside. It was just a hole, six inches deep. At the bottom lay a pair of eyes, nerves and muscles hanging like wet streamers. He pulled the boy around. Slick blood flowed from tiny sockets. Phillips woke in a cold sweat to the cawing of crows. George Henry was standing over him, reading the twenty-third Psalm, about crossing through the valley of death.

Phillips sat with a start, feeling haggard. “What are you doing?” he barked. “Why don’t you let me be?”

George Henry kept reading. Phillips rose and knocked him back through the flap. The Bible flew from George Henry’s hands and landed splayed, papers scattering across the path. The black man got on his knees and began gathering up the book and its contents.

Phillips sat down next to him. He picked up and unfolded a paper. On it the words “George Henry” were written dozens of times, filling the page. He handed it over.

 “I’m sorry, Sarge,” George Henry said, slipping the page into his Bible. “It’s just that Private Fisher has taken to you. Way I figure it, he’s in awful bad humors and needs a father to quiet them down.  And you are it. You didn’t ask for the job, but you’re the only daddy he’s got in this here camp.”

Phillips sat there looking off at a spot on the ground about ten feet away. Finally, he fixed his gaze on George Henry. How could he explain that he had borne too much? That he was all wrung out, a spent husk? But how could he be that which he wasn’t? How could he desert his men? Their eyes met for the briefest moment.  Phillips dropped his head and nodded his ascent.

George Henry got to his feet and reached into a satchel leaning against the tent. He handed Phillips a small bottle of whiskey.

“Corporal Knapp left this,” he said. “You ready to go, Sarge?”

“Where?”

“Why, to see the private.”

Still sitting, Phillips snatched the bottle and took a long pull. “Yeah, I reckon,” he gasped. “Thanks for the which-what on Fisher.” 

* * *

Phillips knelt and put a hand on Fisher’s shoulder. The private’s breath came in shallow bursts. George Henry raised his Bible and began reading. “… For he is the father of light, curer of all evils …”

That night Phillips took up his pen. He tried to write in the voice of a man his wife might recognize. 

Wish I could tell you more, Bea. There’s so much churning inside that I can’t get out. All I can say is, I hope to carry on until my duty is done. In the meantime, please ask brother Seth to put an arm around Charlie, share a few tips on Tiddley Winks, maybe play Batball with him, and generally point him toward the Right Way until his Pa comes home.

And when you see me riding past the old elder tree, make no fuss. Give me a little nod, that’s all. Treat me as if I had taken a load of sorghum to the market in Ephrata. Maybe if no one acts different, we can pretend I never left.

About the author

Robert Albert Kapler began his career as an award-winning newspaper reporter. He later worked as a government relations executive for nonprofits, rising to become director at a national organization. For the past nine years, he has served as a defense investigator in Washington, D.C. Superior Court, and he spent three years as a federal contract investigator. His short fiction has been published by Gargoyle and Gulf Stream, among other journals. His first play, Live Oak, took top prize in the First Coast Playwriting Contest.  He is seeking representation for his debut novel, a literary crime saga titled The Feeder. Mr. Kapler lives with his family in Maryland. When not working, he sails the Chesapeake on his 28-foot sloop, Ramble On. 

About the illustration

The ilustration is Union Army Mail Wagon, 1864, by an unidentified photographer. In the public domain, via the National Postal Museum.