An Endless Array of Broken Men

by Edison McDaniels, MD

The surgeon leaned toward the corner, pressed his tongue against his lips, and spat. It was reflex mostly, something he did without thinking whenever the need presented itself, which was often. The gob of matter splattered against the wall, joining the smear of tobacco juice already there. He gave no thought whatsoever to this, turned his head back to the task at hand. His attention had never wavered from that task.

“Capital saw.” He held the beefy muscle of the young soldier’s thigh back with the fingers of one hand, the other arm outstretched in wait for the saw. His hands and forearms were streaked with the blood of a score or more of men. They looked raw, almost skinned.

Tiny, the surgeon’s assistant, was a heavyset kid in his early twenties, though he looked some younger. His experience put a lie to his youthful appearance however. He had spent the better part of two years — the worst part of a lifetime — with the field hospital, at the side of Dr. Josiah Boyd. As if by confirmation of this unfortunate fact, his apron was smeared with the sufferings of the day as he held pressure over an artery along the inner thigh, just below the patient’s groin. Maintaining that hold with one hand, Tiny rummaged in the cold water of the basin beside the makeshift table until he found the bone saw. He had done this by sight earlier in the day, before the first dozen or so amputations, but the basin’s water had turned a deep crimson red and so he had to feel his way. He located the saw with little trouble however, recognized the feel of the ebony handle. It was a shape he could never forget, his hand seemed to have conformed to it over the years. He quickly worked the thing around in his hand until he had hold of the rough blade, its jagged teeth against his fingers.

He placed the saw handle first in the palm of the surgeon.

The soldier on the table, a young man of no more than twenty, lay on his back. He was heavily under the influence of a chloroform-soaked towel, which looked not unlike a death shroud laid as it was over the man’s face. Normally, if there was such a thing as normal under such bloody circumstances, there would be a second assistant to deliver the chloroform and see that the man didn’t stop breathing under its influence. But assistants were in short supply this day, only the wounded were in abundance.

Josiah Boyd, the surgeon, had been working at a feverish pace since the first light of dawn nearly a dozen hours earlier and it seemed to him that he had made not a dent in the line of boys awaiting his services. At times, he worked so fast and the boys spent so little time before him, it seemed he was operating on the same man over and over again.

They cut the soldier’s trousers away and Boyd filleted his right thigh hastily to the bone at a point midway between the man’s hip and knee. He took up the bone saw then and laid the business side of it against the lower end of the soldier’s bare thighbone, where he began to run it back and forth. The blade’s teeth bit at the glistening bone with a feel of grit and tiny flecks of bone dust and blood peppered the air as he worked. It took a bit more force than Boyd supposed it should and he made a mental note to have Tiny replace the blade before the next patient. When he had about sawn through the whole of the man’s femur, the final remnant of it snapped with the audible pop of a dry twig. Working quickly, the surgeon dropped the saw back in the basin and stuffed a wad of lint against the bleeding bone stump.

“Artery forceps, thread,” Boyd said. He turned to spit again in the resulting brief interval.

Major Josiah Boyd was an old forty-eight. His hair had decidedly thinned up top and he hadn’t shaved in a long span of days. He was of lanky build and sallow complexion, possessed a long drawn-out face almost ghoulish in its particular bony detail, with cheekbones that sat high under his eyes. The cheeks themselves, hollow and sunken, looked dark and ominous. His lower jaw had been twice broken and evidently poorly set. It jutted out obtrusively and his teeth came together but poorly, and then at an angle somewhat off the expected so that the whole of his face looked skewed. His hands were large and his fingers long and spindly in the manner of a great spider. He was overall an ungainly fellow, undignified in appearance.

He was as good as they came once his blade parted skin.

Despite the lint, the stump of bone was still bleeding and Boyd worked fast. Beside the sawn through bone an artery the diameter of his little finger pulsed hard with each beat of the soldier’s strong heart, it looked not unlike a large worm writhing through the innards of the man’s leg. Tiny grasped the vessel in a pair of forceps and Boyd passed a cotton thread under it. His thin, nimble fingers cinched the suture tight around the vessel and tied it. He took a second length of cotton thread and tied the vein beside it.

“Scissors.”

Tiny reached into the soiled basin again, found the scissors, and laid them in the surgeon’s outstretched hand. Dr. Boyd divided the vessels an inch or so below where he had tied them, just above the raw stump of bone. Blood from the lower part of the man’s leg ebbed out of the cut vessels below the ligatures and joined that of dozens of other men on the floor of the church. Boyd dropped the scissors in the basin.

“Bone file.”

The surgeon took the thin, flat piece of metal and worked the roughened side against the sharp edges of the bony stump. When he was satisfied with the appearance and feel of the bone, he tossed the file back to Tiny. Next, he took up an amputation knife — its long, single sharp edge made it look as though he might use it to slice a ham — and proceeded to cut through the remaining muscle and flesh on the back side of the soldier’s thigh. He took care to fashion a flap of skin and muscle that could be laid over the bone.

Once detached, he tossed the useless leg out an open window, where it joined the pile of discarded limbs already there.

Dr. Boyd removed the wad of lint from the end of the sawn bone. Satisfied the wound was not oozing too much blood, he flapped the skin up and approximated the edges with more cotton stitches placed about one inch apart. He dressed the incision with a cap of plaster and then Tiny and a negro stretcher bearer fanned the man to encourage purging of the chloroform from his system. A quick whiff of liquor of ammonia served finally to bring the man around to consciousness, where upon he began to groan urgently. Judging the man was fairly over the effects of the chloroform, the surgeon placed a few drops of laudanum on the poor soul’s tongue. Tempted to take a swig of the opium concoction himself before returning the bottle to the pharmacy cart, Dr. Boyd held his hands out before him — palms up — and observed their slight tremor. Seeing this, understanding it would only get worse, he glanced furtively about and stooped to conceal himself as he downed a swallow of the precious poison before casually pocketing the small bottle for later use.

He motioned he was finished with the man. Two stretcher bearers stepped forward and lifted him with only a bare afterthought of gentleness, grabbing him under his butt and armpits. The man howled in pain as they carried him out behind the church and deposited him near an old shed beside the other poor unfortunates that had preceded him.

Josiah Boyd turned away from the writhing man. Another boy, apparently no different from the one that had just vacated his table, already awaited him. As Tiny draped the same chloroform soaked towel over the soldier’s face, Boyd stepped up and probed the boy’s wound with a stiff finger, feeling for sharp splinters of bone and the ball that had done the damage. The boy winced and grimaced, not quite under the effects of the sleeping concoction yet.

The surgeon withdrew his finger.

“Scalpel.”

The evening of the second day of battle and the hospital, one of ten the two armies had by then set up, was inundated with broken men. Founded in an aged Lutheran church, it was a two story structure with a vestry above and a nave of pews below. This place was two miles distant from the good ground where good men were falling like so many cattle to the slaughter.

In the chancel, beneath large, now empty windows that funneled the light needed for surgery, the church’s large wooden front doors had been laid over sawhorses. So it was that when Dr. Boyd passed from the nave to the vestibule he looked out into the somber light of dusk without obstruction. A three foot high stone wall enclosed an area of perhaps a thousand feet square. A thin, smoky veil had drifted across from the distant battlefield and hung everywhere over the churchyard. It seemed to cast a pall of immeasurable suffering over the place. Boyd supposed hundreds of men crowded the yard, though by his reckoning not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a three day-old corpse in July so that the dirt itself was hardly anywhere visible. One could not move but that all felt it and thus rose together in a hellish contortion of pain and agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water or delivering prayers to a God that had already forsaken them. They screamed and shouted and groaned in an unending litany of torment, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters that were not present. The predominant color was blue, though nauseations of red intruded big and little throughout. Men lay half naked, piled atop one another in pitiful scenes of support. Bloodied heads rested on shoulders and laps, broken feet upon arms, torn guts held in by tired hands. One boy’s head was wrapped in a dirty undershirt, another in the rag of a woman’s yellow dress. A boy clad in confederate gray, the only rebel among them as far as Boyd could tell, lay quietly in one corner, his arm rigid before him with a finger extended to the heavens. His face was a singular portrait of contentment among the misery. The white of two or three score of broken bones, dirtied with the passing of hours since injury, jutted through ripped skin. Limbs were splinted with all manner of devices: muskets, tree branches, bayonets, lengths of wood or iron taken from barns and carts. One individual had bone splinted with bone: someone had lashed the dried femur of a horse or some other long dead animal to his busted shin. Arms and legs, swollen and blue, dotted the landscape with men seemingly attached only as an afterthought. Boyd looked with astonishment at the writhings of a man’s gut, thought it worm-like in its workings, understood it to be a fatal wound. Another man lay blind to all of this, his eyes ghoulishly subtracted by a minie ball that had enfiladed him, passing from one side of his face through to the other. Over and over the man moaned “I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” in a tired, pitiful voice that Boyd had heard all afternoon from within the depths of the church turned hospital. Others lay about in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard and the stink of blood mixed with human waste produced a potent and offensive odor not unlike that of a hog farm in the high heat of a South Carolina summer. Swarms of fat, green blowflies everywhere harassed the soldiers to the point of insanity. The steady buzz of these flies was a noise straight out of hell itself, a distress to the ears.

A few volunteers from the town — a teenage girl, a lame boy, a woman of middle-age, a minister with bible in hand — moved carefully among the human wreckage. They delivered water and offered prayers and condolences. Two assistant surgeons recorded the men’s injuries, along with their names and home towns. They offered the men laudanum against the pain, as well as hope that someone would help them soon.

But there was too much work to be done in this churchyard and soon was a day or more away. For too many of them, time would be their only salvation.

“Merciful God in heaven,” Boyd said, turning to go back inside. He had seen enough, heard too much.

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” The words burned a place into Boyd’s mind even as they echoed out into the hot air of evening.

Major Solomon Hardy, Boyd’s counterpart, had stood behind Boyd without the man’s knowledge, had taken the scene in as well. He took the chewed nubbin of cigar from his mouth, said “Aint no God in heaven what ever had nothing to do with this. This is the work of the devil.” He paused, then added, “and he wears gray.” With that, Hardy replaced the cigar in his mouth, chewed on it a bit until he was apparently satisfied he had the taste of it, and went back inside.

Boyd had an anxious moment then. He was not a calm man, rather was more delicately strung. He had seen his share of hell on this earth — oh yes, his share and more — and found the scene before him less than tolerable. A wave of near panic gripped him and he slipped the bottle of laudanum from his pocket. He secreted it to his lips and took a small swig. He leaned back against a wall and waited a long moment for the crisis to pass before he sighed resolutely and stepped back inside the vestibule. He crossed the nave to the chancel and the makeshift operating room upon the alter. A large wooden cross hung from the ceiling over the tables and Boyd looked up at it for just a moment. He found little comfort in the Christian symbol however, muttered something about it only being a piece of wood after all, and turned to watch as Hardy probed the belly wound of a colonel at one of the two operating tables.

After a long while during which he looped a finger around a piece of the officer’s gut and pulled it up and through the hole in the skin, Hardy looked up. His cigar dangled firmly at one side of his mouth.

“Goddammit Boyd, these men aint gonna sew themselves up.”

Boyd stared at the piece of pink gut, as if hypnotized by its writhings. He was thinking about the man in the yard, about how he could put the whole of his hand in that man’s gut. “A mortal wound…” he mumbled.

“Boyd, you hearing me?”

“He aint dead.”

“What?”

“The man in the yard, he aint dead.”

“What man? They all gonna be dead you don’t get tuh operating.” Hardy pulled a lead ball out of the dark hole and stuffed the loop of bowel back inside the colonel’s belly. “Stitch.”

Boyd didn’t move.

“Dammit Boyd.” Hardy picked up the first thing he could get his hands on and threw it at Boyd. A Capital saw, used for sawing through bone in an amputation. The heavy handle struck Boyd a glancing blow in the shoulder. The small force of it seemed to wake him though and his eyes showed this.

“I’m sorry, where was I?”

“You best look after them over yonder.” Hardy pointed toward the pews, toward the terrible humanity congregated there.

Boyd walked off in the indicated direction and a stretcher bearer picked up the saw and tossed it back in the bloodied basin beside Hardy’s table.

Wearing a butcher’s apron that to the uninitiated looked as if it was crusted with the entrails of a dozen animals (and that to the initiated looked much the same), Boyd stooped over the first pew and eyed the soldier there. A mere boy really, he lay sprawled on the bench, one foot having apparently fallen off, its leg tugging uneasily at the body and gravity threatening to topple all to the floor. His eyes were wide and gazed straight up to the ceiling. His hand was clasped against the side of his neck and a large amount of blood pooled on the pew underneath him; indeed, it had crept some distance along the bench like spilled molasses. The hand fell away as the surgeon reached for it.

Boyd looked upon the boy’s open, dead eyes and wondered for just a moment if hell might not be an endless array of young, broken bodies twisting in the fetid stillness of a hot, humid air and waiting for the likes of his scalpel.

Outside the Lutheran church where the Union surgeons Hardy and Boyd worked at their morbid trade — the former chomping continuously on a dead cigar, the latter surreptitiously sipping now and then from a bottle of laudanum and spitting from a wad of chew in his cheek — a young soldier lay in the dirt. He was a corporal, Wooster was his name, and he had been shot through the thigh about a third of the way between hip and knee. All the tortured night he lay propped against the church sidewall agonizing over the sounds coming from within. He observed as the wounded came and went from this house of worship, understood the men to be no better off coming out than going in. He watched the pile of discarded limbs grow by the hour and decided he couldn’t tolerate the addition of his own leg to it. He would rather to have died upon the field than have to continue life without his leg. As far as he was concerned, the thing had been a part of him for his entire twenty-three years, through both good and bad times, and he wasn’t yet ready to part with it. He’d die first.

About midnight, as the corporal contemplated how he might make this fact clear to the surgeons, a spot of luck happened upon him, or perhaps it was just the odd side of providence. Slipping in and out of consciousness — the combination of blood loss, fatigue, and worry had taken its toll — he opened his eyes to see a familiar face sitting across from him. He wondered where the man came from, certain he hadn’t been there a moment before, though he had to admit that in his sickly state a moment could be anything from a few minutes to an hour or more. As he gathered his senses and recognized the man, he stirred and made himself heard above the din of moans and fevered cries around them.

“Capt’n Chase?” His voice wavered slightly, like that of a child awaking from a nightmare.

“Wooster? Wooster that you?”

“Yes suh…Corporal Wooster…suh.”

The captain, who had broken his wrist and had waited all that afternoon and half the night for it to be set and splinted, rose and crossed the brief distance between them. He bent to a knee beside the soldier, cradling his injured wrist with his good hand.

“How are you Wooster?”

“I’s tolerable suh.” Wooster grimaced, sweat beaded his forehead and tiny flecks of dirt were visible in it. “Me leg suh…is…is it bad?”

Chase looked at the wound, an ugly, jagged hole a few inches below the man’s groin, on the inner side of his thigh. The pant leg had been largely torn away, probably by the corporal himself. Chase had seen the dance of men shot in battle. He had watched such men urgently rip the clothes from their body in search of the entry wound, a prayer they weren’t gut shot on their faces. The corporal’s thigh wound was crusted with dark blood and the skin around it mottled and blue. A fresh trickle of blood appeared and a blowfly wiggled out of the hole and took flight as the captain watched. At least there was no bone visible Chase thought, wincing all the same. He had seen more than his share of busted up limbs, thought this one could go either way.

“Well? What ye think suh? They gonna take me leg?”

“Not sure Wooster, I’m no surgeon.”

The corporal sat more upright, wanted to emphasize his message. He reached a bloodied hand out to the officer and grabbed his blouse at the shoulder. He left a smear of blood as his hand slid down the arm before finally gaining a purchase just above the elbow. “Please suh, don’t lets ‘em take me leg. I caint give ‘em me leg.”

“Relax man, it’s not certain.”

“I caint go home wit no leg, caint walk up to me mom half a man. Please, ye gotta help me…suh. These men they is butchers…they’ll do it just to say they done it I tell ye, do it because they don’t know nuttin else. I been watching ‘em suh.”

Chase grimaced as the man grabbed and squeezed his bad arm. The pain was tolerable though, nothing compared to what those around him must have had. He felt a momentary embarrassment to be mixed among these brave men, falling in battle as they had. He himself had been thrown from his horse after it stumbled on the road. He was a half mile in the rear when that happened and couldn’t catch up with his unit before they faced off against the enemy. He understood he’d failed them at a crucial moment.

He looked into Wooster’s eyes and thought them accusatorial. They burned through him the way a hot stick of iron might burn through a piece of leather, branding him. He felt shame and in that instant determined he would help the corporal, he would see that the man kept his leg. He didn’t quite know how he’d do this, but he didn’t much care either. Wooster was a brave fellow, had done a good thing this day, had fallen in glory. Chase wouldn’t stand idly by and watch this good man butchered against his will.

“I won’t let them cut your leg off, corporal.”

“Thank ye suh…God bless ye suh.” Wooster slumped back. Before too long his mind slipped into a merciful unconsciousness and he slept the fretful sleep of those damned by circumstances beyond their control.

Solomon Hardy and Josiah Boyd worked through the dark night by candlelight, perhaps encouraged by the large wooden cross suspended from the ceiling above their heads. If this served to buoy their spirits however, they kept it to themselves. Whether in a hospital or a church, men still bled the same irritating and unfortunate red. And like some twisted version of the Midas touch, everywhere the two doctors touched seemed to turn that unfortunate blood red. It coated everything.

Someone had secured several large sheets to the overhead cross by way of obscuring the operating theater from the men. This was a merciful act, and though it did nothing to shield the wretched cries of those concealed behind it, at the very least it offered some form of absolution to those present in that house of worship. A large window behind the altar, the glass long since lost, provided a breath of fresh air all the long night.

By about two-thirty in the morning, Boyd was exhausted and the work disagreeable enough to make him wish he’d taken an education in the clergy or the law vice surgery. He had been up since six the day before, stopping only once for a supper of cornmeal and beans. Hardy too worked at his usual feverish pace and had been on his feet some fourteen-plus hours. As Boyd’s latest patient was lifted from before him, the surgeon tilted the board and the blood thereupon ran like a river over the edge and onto the floor. He rubbed his forehead and spat between his feet, the brown tobacco juice having long since stained the spot an ugly brown. Boyd preferred the brown to its alternative, blood red.

As he waited for his next patient to be set upon the table, Boyd leaned against the wall at the rear of the church and felt in his pockets. His surgeon’s apron was utterly crusted with the blood and innards of those he had lately ministered to, but he ignored all of this. He closed his eyes and contemplated quitting for the night. He was tired through and through, to the very marrow of his bones. He felt slightly tremulous, flushed by a sense that no matter how long or how hard he worked, there would always be one more patient waiting for his knife, or ten more, or a hundred more. It all seemed so pointless. Once again, he had the curious notion he had been operating on the same man over and over again all the livelong day and night. The battle, nigh the war, was a cruel hoax that would drive him insane.

He withdraw his hands and turned away from Hardy’s table. He put his hands out before him and watched his fingers dance restlessly on the air, as if playing an unseen piano. His gut twisted and the room spun around him for a second or two. He leaned hard into the wall then, opening his eyes and looking up at the cross above his head. He didn’t say a prayer, rather he reached for a more earthly comfort, a small brown bottle nestled in one of his pockets. It contained laudanum, the potent mixture of alcohol and opium. Poison to the mind. Boyd had come to believe in it as his own personal savior.

Boyd’s first personal lesson with laudanum had come two years before, not long after First Manassas. Following a minor skirmish, he’d encountered a single Confederate soldier propped under a birch tree. The war was in its early months, and he had yet to see the horrors to come. Lying there with his foraging cap on his head the boy had looked almost normal and Boyd had first thought he was just sleeping. His posture struck the surgeon as somewhat odd though and removing that cap, Boyd had discovered a hole in the youth’s forehead big enough to set a plum in. As he knelt there contemplating the soldier and his severe wound, the soldier opened an eye.

And spoke.

“I is Thomas Ellerby,” the boy had said, “My folks has…a plot fuh me up…up on Sumter Ridge, South Carolina.”

Apparently, Thomas had understood he was dying and wanted to get this information out there straight away. The surgeon had still believed in the compassion of a higher God then (later he had realized compassion had no place in the affairs of man), and had tried to make the boy comfortable. He dressed his wounds.

Then he waited for Thomas to die.

“How old are you, Thomas?”

“I woulda…been twenty next…next month, suh,.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve got a boy just twenty myself,” Boyd had replied. The silence of the next few minutes was broken only by the sound of the boy’s labored breathing. A wet, frothy sound, as if the boy was trying to breath through a soaked rag caught in his throat. A sound both melodious and grisly and in the months and years since, Boyd had come to recognize it as the sound of death approaching. It was the sound of a man’s lifeblood draining from him.

Not much later, Thomas had made one other request.

“Suh, I wish youse would…tell my folks…that I…that I died well.”

“I can do that, Thomas.”

“Thank you…suh.” With those final words, Thomas had drawn a last wet breath, relaxed, and died.

It was the last time Boyd had ever wanted to know the name of one of his patients. As he’d stared down on Thomas’s corpse, Boyd’s hand had by chance brushed the front of his own trousers. He had placed a bottle of laudanum there the day before, had intended to return it to the medicine box, had apparently forgotten. He pulled that brown bottle out and stared at it a long moment. He kept going back and forth between it and Thomas’s wounded face, between the bottle and that plum-sized hole above Thomas’s right eye. He’d wondered how a man thus injured could speak, wondered if he might not have imagined the whole thing. This had got him nowhere though, for if he’d imagined the conversation with the soldier then he was crazy. And if he had not, then it seemed to him the whole world must be insane. He hadn’t been quite sure which of these ideas he preferred and he felt caught in between, as if trapped by the dead gaze of the confederate. That gaze, and the dilemma it supposed, was too painful to contemplate for long on his own, and so he had gulped the contents of the brown bottle. The euphoria that followed broke the stranglehold of the dead youth’s gaze, though it didn’t exactly offer up a solution to his dilemma. Not then, not since.

Not now.

Standing now in the ruins of an old church in the middle of the wounded countryside, Boyd had to admit that Thomas Ellerby had died well. In fact, separated from that moment by two years and an education in hell, he had to admit the boy had died just about as well as anybody he’d seen die since.

And he had seen a lot of men die since.

He cursed under his breath and spat again, this time sending most of his chew to the floor. He uncapped the brown bottle and turned it up to his lips. The sip he took was somewhat larger than usual.

When he turned back to his table, his anxiety had dissipated and his fingers no longer danced on an imaginary piano in the air. Boyd was once again ready to take on the world, one broken man at a time.

For Josiah Boyd, hell was twenty-four sleepless hours, every one of them scalpel in hand, standing under a cross in a nameless church atop a dusty hill after a pointless battle. For too many good men, this was where the world ended.

The surgeons in that place worked at their unpleasant task with a fever matched only by the fervor of those that inflicted their wounds. That camp of wounded was filled with men of both sides and the surgeons used the men, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, alike, making no distinction as to the color of a man’s uniform; the life-blood being all the same. The men waited their turn with an eerie patience, as if their fate had already been decided and it was the duty of those present in this time and place to carry it out. Arms and legs were parted from each in turn and the pile of disarticulated flesh grew at a hideous pace — eight or ten feet high. The men moved on and off the tables with nary a word, except for the occasional groan that couldn’t be suppressed. Indeed, there was little to be said at such times, each participant in the drama knew his place and the universal language of blood spoke for all.

On that sleepless morning, Josiah Boyd was the embodiment of exhaustion. The blood and sinew that soiled his front apron was now a full day old, and he hadn’t had so much as a latrine break in hours. The muck on the altar floor was two parts blood, one part shit from exploded bowels, and one part tobacco juice; Boyd spat frequently. The mothy taste of the chewed tobacco obscured the overwhelming stench of broken bodies and rotted flesh, allowing him to keep working in that seething hell.

Except for the ever present hum of flies (they were everywhere, a constant distress), it was mostly quiet then; no sounds of battle breaking the dawn stillness, only an occasional random shot. Outside the church turned hospital, those who had survived the night awaited their turn at the surgeon’s table. They were a quieter lot now, had seen the two extremities of their fate in those that had gone before them.

They would live or die, it was beyond their making now.

Inside the church, the man on Boyd’s table was dead, an overdose of chloroform. He stared at the man’s face as if to read the message there, saw only pain and the anguish of a life poorly ended, thought: it is a mistake, an aberration, not the way things are suppose to go. But then, none of this is the way things were suppose to go…

“I need to sleep. I’m…so tired.”

“Major, there’s one more urgent case. Just one more urgent case for now,” Tiny said.

That was a lie of course. Boyd knew there were another thousand urgent cases out there, and beyond those another thousand, and beyond those…

“Hardy?” Boyd inquired, referring to the other surgeon. Solomon Hardy was ever a thorn in Boyd’s side, but also the one man who shared his misery.

“Went to bed an hour ago.”

“Damn. Well…very well.” His voice held only resignation.

They brought him in. A corporal with a nasty upper thigh wound. The leg beyond was largely mottled and blue, but Boyd noted a pulse in the foot. A good sign, but useless if the bone was broken. Need to probe it.

Boyd understood this without thinking, was working off instinct now. He stared into the corporal’s face, a hint of dusky gray, eyes mostly absent and faraway. Before too long the man would be beyond help and this too Boyd understood without actually thinking it. It was what he did, he was an operator, a surgeon. His job was to save lives, to make men whole again.

Too often, these two things were mutually exclusive.

Tiny prepared to administer the chloroform. As he placed the rag over the man’s mouth and nose, the corporal’s hand came up and grabbed his. The wounded man’s eyes were suddenly very alive, wide and darting back and forth between the two medical men. It was if he had pulled back from the edge, had been resurrected.

A tired looking captain with a slinged arm stepped forward from the nave. He clasped a hand over that of the corporal’s upon the assistant’s hand.

“What y’all intend to do?” the captain asked.

“What is this?” Boyd said.

“Let go my hand,” Tiny said.

“Don’t wanna sleep,” the corporal said. His voice was surprisingly strong.

“You aint gonna take this corporal’s leg.”

“Captain, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tiny said.

“Aint nobody gonna butcher me,” the corporal said.

“I know enough to know that you butchers aint taking this man’s leg off.”

“Listen to me you sonofabitch,” Boyd said. “I been operating damn near three days with not but four hours rest. I don’t know who the dang you are and don’t much care. You best get out of my hospital, Mister.”

“Name’s Chase, Cap’n, 21st Pennsylvania.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Boyd said.

“That man, his name is Wooster. He needs that leg.” Chase placed a hand on the corporal’s shoulder.

“Yeah, well, they all do,” Tiny said.

“But he wants his leg.”

“Please…” The corporal’s voice trailed off and the sentiment hung in the air of the church, unfinished but obvious to all.

“I’m guessing you want to live too,” Boyd said looking at the corporal. He turned to the captain. “You get out of here now, let me probe this man’s wound and do what I need to do.”

“I’m not going anywhere sir.”

“Suit yourself.” Boyd didn’t wait for an answer, turned to Tiny. “Drop the chloroform.”

“No…chloroform.”

“Corporal?” Boyd said.

“He said no chloroform.”

“I heard what the hell he said captain,” Boyd shouted. “I just don’t know if he knows what he’s saying.”

“He can handle it.”

“This’ll hurt like hellfire.”

The corporal reached up and put a hand on Boyd’s arm. “Ye goes ahead, doc. I cain handle it if’n ye cain.”

Boyd, who had had a strong education in reading the faces of men, looked at the corporal’s dirt smeared face and saw the man meant to do this thing awake.

“I been lying here better part of a day, doc. I knows esactly what’s a coming my way. Ye cut if’n ye needs tuh, but…” The corporal stopped there, racked by a spasm of some sort.

Boyd looked at Tiny, who shrugged his shoulders, then away from the corporal’s face, not wanting to see the expressions to follow. He pushed a finger into the bloody hole on the thigh, stirred it around, wasn’t particularly gentle. Understood speed was more important than gentleness. The captain swallowed heavily and the ball of his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

“Knife,” Boyd said.

The captain was quick to withdraw a six shot Colt revolver from the sling on his arm. He stood beside the corporal, opposite side of the table from Boyd, and brought the weapon to bear on the surgeon, no more than a foot in front of Boyd’s face. “If it even looks like you’re sawing his leg off, I’ll blow your brains all over that cross up there.” He gestured with the barrel of his gun as he spoke.

Boyd didn’t move his head, though his eyes briefly deviated upward. He stared at the weapon, had never looked down the likes of its black barrel before. It loomed like a cannon before him and he wondered what it would feel like to die at that moment, wondered if his tired-to-the-bone fatigue would follow him into the next life. He looked past the barrel to the captain’s eyes, saw the fire burning there, felt the burden of his education again. It was clear this man meant business. After a moment, Boyd turned his head and spat a dirty gruel on the floor of the church. His finger was still in the wound and he gritted his teeth, said again, “Knife.”

The corporal stirred at the end of Boyd’s finger, restless at the feel of a man probing his innards. His leg tensed, the muscles spasming against the finger. The man’s breathing was barely audible. He was holding his breath.

Boyd twisted his fingers in the man’s wound, said, “Breathe dammit, I need to hear you breathe you son bitch.”

Tiny slapped the knife into Boyd’s hand.

The captain cocked his revolver, a loud click that somehow summed to more. It was the entire war coned down to an instant…

“Goddammit, I told you, you aint taking this good man’s leg off!”

“I’m not here to cut off legs, I’m here to save lives…I need to get the ball out.”

The captain didn’t say anything, but neither did he put the revolver away. A single nod then.

Boyd took up the knife and first sliced then ripped the corporal’s trousers. The manure smell of a shit assaulted him then and he chewed briskly at the wad of tobacco pouched in his cheek. He probed again the wound, two fingers to get the measure of it. The corporal was jumpy now, anxious like a man going to his execution.

Boyd turned away from the table, spat, took a deep breath, and turned back. Fingers still buried in the corporal’s flesh, he made a two inch cut in line with the bullet hole. He cut deep, nearly to the bone, and fresh blood welled up, dark and venous. There was a wet, sloppy sound — something like they all used to make as boys groping for pollywogs in the mud — as the surgeon’s fingers probed around in the slippery muscle and fat. The corporal cried out, bucked, tried to get off the table. Tiny laid his considerable weight practically on top of him though, and all the soldier succeeded in doing was flailing his arms with no purpose. The corporal pissed and the warm liquid felt like blood as it washed over Boyd’s hands and filled the wound. It ran over the edge of the table, down the front of Boyd’s apron, and finally to the floor.

There was a crack in the captain’s steely resolve and the revolver aimed at Boyd’s face wavered like the weight on the end of a wilting branch. The branch strengthened again a moment later though. “Go on,” the captain said, though it was clear by both his voice and appearance he had lost some of his previous enthusiasm.

Boyd finally got the metal ball between his index and middle finger. He worked the thing out, moving it first along the bone, then worming it between the muscle and his fingers. When it finally came out, it felt heavier than the ounce it weighed. Boyd dropped it on the corporal’s chest.

“Here, a souvenir.”

Now passed out, the corporal didn’t hear the words.

The captain lowered his revolver. Boyd sewed up the skin loosely so the pus he expected would form would have a place to get out. As he looped the large needle through the corporal’s thigh, the captain collapsed to the floor as if suddenly boneless, landing face down in the muck.

“Maybe he’ll drown there,” Boyd said when he finished sewing. He walked around the table, stepped over the unconscious captain, and walked away.

When he got to his tent a long minute later, Boyd’s hands were shaking so badly he could hardly get the bottle of laudanum to his mouth.

A scant four hours of sleep and Boyd was up again. He made a brief foray to a nearby stream, hoping to refresh himself in its cool waters. In the morning light, he bent to the stream and immersed his hands. He let the cool water play between his fingers a moment before he brought his hands to his face. He rubbed them there, his eyes closed and his head heavy on his neck. For one utterly peaceful moment he felt refreshed.

Then he opened his eyes.

And screamed.

In the misty light of the mid-morning, the shallow creek ran red with blood. Gazing up the creek toward its distant source, Boyd imagined a dozen or more bloated bodies fouling its waters somewhere over the small rise before him. He began to wipe furiously, first at his hands and then his face. But whatever had fouled the waters of the creek had fouled him as well, and as the water dried, it left an uneven crust of pale red here and there upon him. He ran the several hundred feet back to the church turned hospital all but hysterical. Once there, a negro aide named Abel tried to calm him.

“Doc Boyd, you gots tuh stop it, suh,” Abel said, tugging on the surgeon’s hands.

“I gotta git this off me,” Boyd mumbled, then gibbered something like “the blood, I gotta git it off me.” He repeatedly scraped his fingers over his face and his nails peeled the skin and drew blood. He flung the negro aside and Abel fell over a soldier asleep on the floor.

“Git out my way,” Boyd said when the man came at him again.

“What blood?” Abel asked and eyeballed the surgeon. He didn’t see any blood, except a few red drops from the man’s own scratchings. “What duh hell’s matter wit ya, doc?”

In his apparent madness, the surgeon finally pushed past the aide and stole into the pharmacy box. In the end, only the bitter taste of laudanum sliding down the back of his throat soothed him.

The day proved to be a very long one.

It was late evening when Boyd left his last patient to the stretcher bearers and retired to the relative comfort of his field tent, pitched a hundred feet from the church, within earshot of the wounded. After a supper of biscuit and cold bacon (he didn’t bother even to skim the lard off), he collapsed onto his cot and drank more than half the bottle of laudanum he’d stolen from the med wagon. The opium and alcohol left him with a giddy feeling, and he at once felt as if the walls of his tent were expanding outward. The world began to spin around him and he closed his eyes, losing all orientation to his surroundings in doing so. He opened them just short of bringing his supper back up for another look, then reached out to steady himself with a firm hand on either side of his cot. He lay like that for some time, more or less adrift in a sea of his own making. This wasn’t entirely unpleasant he thought, certainly preferable to the hideous wails of those he had cut on that day and all the days before this one. In this condition, he was finally able to close his eyes and find a fitful sleep.

At some point in the middle of the night, the exact time was lost to him since he had no timepiece, he found himself awake in the terrible darkness of his tent. He hated the night, always had, and wondered now what had awakened him.

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd have mercy I’m kilt!”

The words bellowed as if the night itself had spoken to him. They were followed by a low moan and Boyd knew at once he would see no more sleep this night.

“Damn,” he said, and pulled himself to a sitting position. His body ached and he crossed his hands and rubbed at the muscle of his upper arms. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, the blind man called out repeatedly with the news he was kilt. Boyd decided he had best to do something about the man or go insane himself.

He felt around for the bottle of laudanum but found he had neglected to recap it earlier and it had spilled while he slept. He could already feel the shakes coming on and he cursed again, a vigorous string of profanities this time. He groped for his boots in the darkness.

He was bent over with one boot on and the other at mid-foot when he realized someone was standing in his tent. He saw the shoeless feet of the man first, then slowly ran his gaze up the intruder’s body. All the while he found himself blinking and scrunching his eyes, trying to bring the shadow into focus. He couldn’t quite do it though, and a moment later the presence was gone.

Boyd neither saw nor heard the man enter or leave. Was the man there at all? He couldn’t be sure.

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd, have mercy I’m kilt.”

The word Gawd had a hideous sound to Boyd’s ears. A prolonged crescendo-decrescendo musical quality to it. All of the words together served to remind him of his mission that night and he rose from his cot. The world nearly toppled about him, but he steadied himself and took a few tentative steps before finding his measure. Outside the tent, he found a thin mist had descended on the makeshift hospital. Its eerie tendrils lazed this way and that, as if enveloping the corpses and near corpses alike in a wispy veil of cotton. It was no lighter outside than it had been in the tent and Boyd found himself disoriented in the cacophony of sounds that seemed now to come alive.

An occasional cannon boomed in the distance (Union he knew, the Confederacy had no such ammo to waste in the middle of the night). Frogs chirped and crickets whined in the brush around him. He heard the haggard breathing of the not quite departed and the wet breathing of those too long invalided and in the midst of their death rattle. The place smelled of burnt wood, of pungent sulfur.

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd have mercy I’m kilt!”

Boyd thought the words the worst he had ever heard. They echoed in the mist and so each utterance seemed to do double duty. The surgeon found himself wishing he had finished the job the blind man was so certain had already been done. In the thickening fog, he was uncertain as to which direction the lunatic voice came from. He turned this way and that in the yard and finally decided upon a tack calculated to bring him upon the mad rants as quickly as possible.

He stepped out briskly, the mist gently parting and then rushing back on itself to fill the hole as he moved. He had never seen a fog move quite so fluidly, and he was reminded of water devouring all in its wake. Or blood pooling on the floor of his operating room, he suddenly realized. As quickly as it occurred to him, he put this last out of his head and groped his way forward. He stumbled, lightly at first. Then he tripped and fell headlong to the dirt. As he did so, a foul odor rose to meet him and he vomited. He groped in the dirt and found that he had tripped over an arm. He reached out to it, perhaps intending to discipline its owner, but the owner would be forever unknown. As he took its hand, the cold, lifeless limb came away too easily. “Amputated. Goddammit.”

About this time he first heard a sound he was vaguely familiar with, something from deep in his memory, his childhood perhaps. He couldn’t quite cull the memory forward though. A wet, sucking kind of noise and he was finally distracted from it by the litany again.

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd have mercy I’m kilt!”

He struggled back to his feet, determined to find the bastard and kill him if necessary to shut him up. He felt the lack of opium acutely now, and his entire body shook in disorganized, random tremors. His gut boiled and he had need of a latrine ditch just then. He held his bowels for the moment, though this simple act seemed to bring on a curious wave of salivating — so much so he couldn’t swallow it all and he began to drool. He took two more steps and tripped again, this time over a disarticulated leg. The extremity was moldy and black with fungus, but he still recognized it for what it was. It gave off the strong cheesy odor of rancid meat.

Too strong an odor actually. The place reeked of dead matter.

Boyd covered his lower face with a piece of cloth and stood. His nose then told him what had at first escaped his eyes. Lying before him, in several neat piles that collected into one horrific mass, were the disembodied limbs of hundreds of soldiers. As the mist rose and he gazed over this field of decay, it seemed to Boyd that every limb he had ever amputated was there. Worse, he understood what the wet, sucking sounds were. Not sucking, he told himself, but smacking. And chewing. And ripping. A vision from his childhood flashed through his mind.

A vision of his family’s hog farm.

A vision of the hogs at feeding time.

And then, there they were. A score or more of wild hogs feeding on the unburied, discarded limbs. The dead arms and legs were no better than fodder for the hogs. They snorted and rooted about, ripping the flesh bare to the bone, then crunching the bone as well.

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd have mercy I’m kilt!”

Twisting back and forth in the cold wind, Boyd screamed. A terrible and agonizing noise barely human. He shook violently and his bowels finally opened. His breath came in harsh, shallow gasps and he realized the litany that had haunted him through the night…was his own:

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd have mercy I’m kilt!”

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd have mercy I’m kilt!”

“I’m kilt, I’m kilt, oh Gawd—“

Boyd tensed a final time, relaxed abruptly, and the litany stopped.

Dawn of a new day. Three men — the surgeon Hardy, the assistant Tiny, the aide Abel — stared hard at the man on the cot. They watched as his fevered body relaxed and fell back upon the damp and soiled bedding.

“Well, dat’s it din. Aint no more tuh be done,” one of them said.

“Now he belongs to Christ,” another said, making the sign of the cross before him.

“Son bitch,” was all Hardy said.

Before packing up and moving the wounded to another hospital, Boyd was buried with the remains of several other casualties in a shallow grave by the tiny creek that ran a few hundred feet behind the church. The grave proved to be too shallow however, and within hours wild hogs had overrun the place and captured the putrid scent of the remains.

The creek turned red with blood as they fed.

Note: This story received honorable mention in The Seventeenth Edition of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (2003), edited by Ellen Datlow. It was also the impetus for my audacious novel, Not One Among Them Whole, which is available in trade paperback and ebooks, including the Kindle, Nook, & Kobo.

About The Author

Edison McDaniels is a practicing surgeon & wordsmith, who writes short stories, novellas, and novels when he’s not incising skin. Read more about him at www.surgeonwriter.com and look for his fine & intense works of fiction at the Amazon Kindle store.

His latest novel, Not One Among Them Whole, is available for the Kindle and as a trade paperback from Northampton House Press.

Join his fan page on facebook at www.facebook.com/McDaniels.author. He invites you to follow him on twitter as well, @surgeonwriter.

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