Johnny Reb
Into the ward of the clean white-washed halls,
Where the dead slept and the dying lay;
Wounded by bayonets, sabres and balls,
Somebody's darling was borne one day.
He was somebody's darling, somebody's pride
Who'll tell his mother how her boy died?
How will his mother know where her boy lies? (Marie Ravenal de la Coste)
When they carried in the latest transfer from Alton I didn't give anything for his chances. I'd gotten very good, by that last spring of the war, at predicting who was going to survive and who was not, and this skeleton in dirty butternut was too far gone. Well, he'd die in comfort. At least we could give him that much, and I signaled to Robert and picked up my shears.
"Is there a name?" I would need it for my records, and to write the letter, if any family could be found.
"Harper. 5th Texas Cavalry." The stretcher bearers clattered away, hobnailed boots heavy on the heat-warped wooden stairs.
Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, stank. I began cutting away what was left of his uniform and told Robert to start on the boots.
"No!" The dry-throated croak stopped us.
"What did you say?" I was astonished that he was conscious, to say the least, and I put my ear as close to the scabbed and swollen mouth as I could, holding my breath at the stench rising from a frame that had probably not seen soap or water for months.
"Don't… cut off m'boots. Need…'em," he whispered.
Not where you're going, Johnny Reb, I thought, but no matter. It would cost us nothing to humor what would probably be his last request, and we carefully eased them off the thin legs. They had once been good boots, calf-high and of fine leather, but now the soles were worn through and they were cracked and cut in many places. We dropped them under the bed and went back to work stripping him.
He was caked with his own filth, but it at least wasn't bloody, a good sign that, whatever other diseases were ravaging him, camp fever hadn't yet set in. Once the uniform was discarded we began gently soaking off the dirt and dried blood, spreading salve on the rat bites and on the crusted-over shackle marks. After his body was as clean as we could get it we turned our attention to his head. His hair might have been black. It might also have been a flaming orange, for all we could tell.
"Razor, Robert." I trimmed it all off, as close to the scalp as I dared, and the ragged beard as well.
At least this one's old enough to have a beard, I reflected, and watched the fleas scatter as the matted locks fell onto the coarse muslin. We dressed him in one of the Sanitary's blue-striped nightshirts and moved him to a clean bed, and Robert gathered up the now-grimy sheet and its contents to take to the burn pits. He stood for a moment, looking down at our patient, and his lined face held a touch of pity.
"What d'you think, Miz Pat'son?"
Robert had been my ward attendant in the Eastern theater for almost two years, and he came with me when I transferred to St. Louis. When we first met he was known as Fletcher's Cato, but like many contrabands he wanted to leave behind the name the slavemasters had bestowed on him. I offered him my father's, and he was Robert Simmons now.
It was a good name for a good man. Before I knew him well I wondered how he would treat wounded Rebs, but I soon learned he cared for all without regard to the color of their uniforms. And he still prayed, every day, something I'd given up after Fredericksburg.
"He'll be gone by tomorrow, Robert. There's just not enough of him left to put up a fight."
I pulled the mosquito netting around the still form and bent to retrieve the discarded boots. Something was shoved between the lining and the leather of one of them, distorting it. I slid my fingers past the torn stitching and pulled out a tattered strip ripped from a Confederate battle color.
I stared at it for a moment, wondering not for the first time how men could set such store by piece of cloth. I doubted I would ever know the answer to that question, but even though it was beyond my power to comprehend, when the lad died I would see that it was placed in the winding-sheet with him. I sighed and tucked it under his pillow.
Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, made a liar out of me, that day and again the next, and I awarded a measure of respect to this white-faced boy who battled Death so quietly and yet so stubbornly. Early May in Missouri is already muggy, but Robert and I managed to find a cross breeze for his bed. We coaxed sips of broth and cool drinks down him and changed his dressings but otherwise left him to his struggle while we nursed the living and shipped out the dead for burial in the ever-growing military graveyard. He was one of so many, and there were barely enough of us to care for them.
When the prison camps, North and South, began vomiting up their loathsome mess of sick and dying men, the Sanitary Commission called for volunteers for special nursing duty. I was glad to take up the offer, wanting to get away from a brigade assignment that was becoming too routine and too political now that combat had actually ended.
I would go where I was needed most, and right now that seemed to be the low fever ward of this sprawling hospital on the west bank of the Mississippi. Our patients included both Union men and Secesh, and we brought those we could back from the brink. Those we couldn't, we nursed with compassion and eased their pain as they waited for the release no parole paper could give them.
It was on the third night that the young cavalryman finally woke. I was making my last rounds for the evening when some slight movement caught my attention, and I paused by his bed. His eyelids fluttered open, and I drew in my breath sharply.
Staring up at me from the sweat-soaked pillow were my boy Will's eyes.
Girly eyes, his brothers used to tease him, deep blue with long black lashes that would have been much more fitting on a daughter. Oh, he had to fight about that, always, and it made him into a scrappy little rounder. I'd paddle him for one brawl and he'd go right back out and get in another, usually with somebody bigger.
"Ma?" It was the barest thread of sound, soft as a baby's cry.
"Yes, son?"
How many boys had I called that as I kept watch in the dark still hours of the night? Other women's children, but never again my own darling youngest, who was blown to bits on a miserable piece of Southern hillside one April day with not enough of him left to find and bury. Missing, the letter said, but in my heart I knew the truth, and I howled like a wounded animal until the neighbors came running, fearing for my sanity. The next day I locked up the house and took the cat over to my cousin Albertine's, and rode the cars to Philadelphia where the big new Sanitary Commission hospital was recruiting nurses.
"I'm thirsty, Ma." I came back to myself, and to my patient, and lifted him up while I fed him a few swallows from the jug at his bedside.
"Is that better?"
"Yes'm. Ma?"
"Yes, dear?"
"Why's it so quiet?" Those eyes flickered from one side to the other, searching.
"Everyone's asleep, dear. Try to get some rest."
"Yes'm." I bathed his face and turned the pillow to give him some relief from the sticky dampness, and he settled back down and drifted off into what I cautiously judged to be a normal sleep. I rose and slowly walked to the window.
Women should not outlive their children. It is a perversion of the natural order of things, but one I'd become hardened to over the past three years as I followed the Army's tail down through Virginia's bloody landscape. I closed my eyes against the flickering of the campfires across the river, remembering the tangled cries of the Wilderness wounded, burned to death where they fell, unable to drag themselves out of the smoldering undergrowth and us not able to save them.
And I thought of the young men gone under the ground in places their families had never heard of, falling in nameless swamps with a Minie ball in their guts or coughing their lives out alone and untended in some field hospital. I was sick with old wars and new sorrow, and this boy was just the latest in a muster-roll of patients that by now numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.
Well, I would forget this one too, in time. Meanwhile, there was plenty of courage in that emaciated body, I could see, and it would help him to soon get well enough for transfer to the convalescent ward. I had only to keep him quiet and clean, and get as much nourishment into him as I could. Not a particularly difficult task for an experienced old hand like me, especially with him as weak as a kitten.
Had I still believed in God, I might have heard Him laughing.
Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, formed his lines of battle next day over the sago pudding. Sago is a staple in the low fever diet – it's wholesome and lies easily on troubled stomachs. It's also almost tasteless and, well, baby food.
"Ain't you got nothin' fit for a man t' chew on?" It was amazing the amount of scorn he was able to inject into his voice, given his condition. I was tempted to call up the heavy artillery, namely Robert, but decided that this show of spirit was a hopeful omen. I brought some cinnamon and barley sugar from the stores cupboard and sprinkled it over the offending dish.
Then, since I didn't raise three sons without learning a few tricks, I fed it to him myself so he wouldn't scrape off and eat only the sugar. That matter settled, we returned to our afternoon routine, at least until one of my nursing assistants, a butter-faced nincompoop named Despard, came running to tell me that the boy was up and trying to walk.
"Put him back in bed!"
"Oh, Mrs. Patterson!" She was almost weeping. "He won't listen to me!"
I hurried back upstairs to the ward. He was clinging to the back of a chair and swaying like a sapling in a strong breeze when we arrived.
"Just what do you think you are doing?" I barked.
"I ain't spent six months in that dirty Yankee camp to have some ol' woman hide m' clothes on me. Where are they? I want m'pants!" he snarled back at me.
"Your pants have been burned," I told him, "Along with every other stitch of your clothing except your boots. You are one very sick soldier, or can't you tell by the way you have to hang on to that chair?"
His eyes were blazing and his mouth and chin were set and angry. He was truly a formidable sight – for a whey-faced, spindle-shanked, half-starved youngster in a too-large nightshirt.
I addressed him in my most icily commanding tones. "We have dedicated a considerable amount of precious resources and the past three days to keeping you from slipping over into the hereafter, young man. You may not care if you live or die, but we do – so you get back in that bed, or I'll have you trussed up like a Christmas turkey!"
He glared at me and I could tell he was calculating his chances. But Robert was at my shoulder, big and grim, and the boy chose the better part of valor. He crawled into bed and flopped over onto his back, scowling up at the ceiling, his fingers flexing nervously in a way I would come to know quite well.
It was my first skirmish with Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, but not my last. As he grew stronger, they became louder and more frequent, until the Irish ward sergeant on the first floor used to reassure visitors, "Tis nothin', just ould Ma Patterson in a donnybrook wid' her Johnny Reb."
I was winning – so far.
I should have realized he was a troublemaker when I saw the scars on his wrists and ankles. Alton was no Sunday school picnic, but from all I'd heard, prisoners who behaved themselves were not singled out for unduly harsh treatment. This bull-headed young rowdy had obviously been clapped in irons more than once, and I found myself sympathizing with the camp commandant. One particularly trying morning I was goaded into demanding, "What would your mother think, if she saw you acting this way?"
"My ma's gone. So's my pa. I got no one left but a sister, an' I ain't heard from her in more'n two years. I reckon everyone who's ever loved me is dead." His face closed against me like a slammed door.
I knew I had to come up with a way to handle him, if only because his health was improving daily and I was afraid he was going to start wearing me down. And that would be highly prejudicial to good order and discipline, not to mention my peace of mind. I was lying in bed that night when I thought of something my late husband once said ruefully about our youngest, after yet another run-in with the schoolmaster had gotten him expelled.
He can be led, but not driven.
Perhaps a change in tactics was called for. It was worth an attempt – after all, I'd tried nearly everything to keep Trooper Harper in bed short of land mines. "Thank you, David," I murmured out loud, and drifted off to sleep planning my campaign.
I personally waited on him at breakfast the next day. He glanced up suspiciously at the tray in my hand.
"I ain't eatin' no more of that slop!" he informed me. I believed him – he'd thrown his bowl at an orderly the day before and the toss was pretty accurate, for someone flat on his back.
"Eggs," I said calmly. "And toast. With blackberry jam."
He hoisted himself to a sitting position. "Fried eggs?'
"Soft-boiled." I placed the tray across his legs. There were two eggs and I'd cooked them myself. The toast was delicately browned and spread with a generous spoonful of jam.
"I don't see no coffee," he groused.
"You might get some tomorrow – if you're good." And I walked away to let him chew over that along with his meal.
After rounds were done, I reappeared at his bedside with Robert. "You're going out on the porch," I told him, and before he could say anything he was scooped up and carried there. It was a favorite spot for those patients well enough to sit up, a long, covered gallery that ran the entire front of the building, and that morning the humidity was tempered by a soft breeze. Robert tucked a blanket around his knees and pulled up a chair for me. Then, at my nod, he left the two of us alone.
I reached into my apron pocket and pulled out the sock I was knitting. It is my habit never to be idle and besides, if I had something in my hands it would keep me from throttling the boy if he turned sullen on me.
"You," I stated, my eyes on the yarn and needles, "have got to be one of the most selfish and inconsiderate young men I have ever met."
He said nothing, but I could feel him seething. I continued evenly. "There are forty-two patients in this ward, and five attendants. Three of us seem to be spending most of our time fighting you. That leaves only two people to care for the other sick men."
I glanced up, and the mutinous look on his face flickered briefly. He dropped his eyes.
"You c'd discharge me an' then you wouldn't have t' bother."
"If I discharge you now, you won't last a week," I said. "You know you're in no shape to care for yourself. And as much as I would like to be rid of you – " he blinked, startled at my frankness "– I will not permit all of our hard work so far to be wasted."
He shifted uneasily in his chair as I knitted on.
"So I have been asking myself how you can help us get you well again. Do you have any suggestions?"
Whatever he was expecting, it wasn't that, and he was speechless.
"Is there a way we can persuade you to take your meals and medicine without raising such a ruckus?"
He stared at his hands, twisting and twining in his lap.
"Or perhaps you could just stay in bed when you're supposed to? I think you may soon be allowed to get up two or three times a day, if one of us is there to help you, and walk a few steps. But if you push yourself too hard you'll have a relapse."
"I don't like bein' treated like a baby!" he burst out angrily.
"How old are you?" I asked. "Nineteen? Twenty?"
He hunched his shoulders, scowling.
"You have an entire lifetime ahead of you, son. Will you give me six weeks of it, to try and get you back on your feet? That's all I'm asking for."
He remained stubbornly silent but I could see that he was thinking it over.
"Six short weeks in exchange for the rest of your life – doesn't seem like much, does it?"
Still no answer.
I pressed him. "Is it a bargain?"
He muttered something under his breath.
"I didn't hear you, Harper."
"I said all right, dad-gum it!"
"Shake?"
He glared at me for a moment and then a reluctant grin pulled up the corners of his mouth. His thin fingers gripped mine.
"You're takin' a lot on trust, ma'am," he told me.
"I don't think so. I've noticed that you Southern boys pride yourselves on keeping your word." I tucked the sock back into my pocket and stood up. "Would you like to stay out here for a while? If you're too tired –"
"Please let me stay."
He said please. I kept any hint of triumph from showing on my face and left him alone.
Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, was as good as his promise. Oh, there were lapses. He still tried to get up and walk when he thought no one was watching, and one day he made it as far as the stairs before he went crashing to the floor. I favored him with my opinion on contrary, pigheaded, ungrateful idiots.
"Do you want to die here?" I added.
"Wouldn't be the first time some Yankees tried t'kill me," he sniped, as Robert picked him up and placed him back into his bed.
"It might have saved me a lot of trouble if we'd succeeded," I had my hand on his pulse, which was racing. "Mind you, it could still happen."
"I stopped bein' scared of you all after our first fight. I reckon you heard o' Pittsburg Landin'?" He challenged me. "The bluebellies called it Shiloh."
It was hitting below the belt, but I said it anyway. "Yes. My son was killed there."
And regretted it immediately when I saw his stricken look. He collapsed back onto the pillow and was still, except for the nervous movement of his fingers.
"I'm sorry, ma'am." The husky whisper finally reached me. "I'm truly sorry."
Knowledge of my loss seemed to make him a little more tractable, with me, at any rate. He still bucked Robert, and to a certain extent Despard as well, although fighting her was not unlike fighting a soggy handkerchief. He would rare up to fire a volley in her direction and then give up, baffled. She was such a meaching sort of creature, poor woman, and some lingering shred of Dixie gallantry prevented him from exploiting his undoubted tactical advantages.
"Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if she'd been with me in the Valley," I remarked to him one day. "Particularly the time we were overrun by Ashby's cavalry."
The boy's eyes widened and he and I each had the same vision of Corinna Despard, who had the vapors when she saw a spider, confronted by a gang of Rebel horsemen. He tried to turn a laugh into a cough, not very successfully.
"Ah well, I shouldn't make fun of her. She works hard. At least she's not like some of these romantic young ladies who think nursing means gazing soulfully at a wounded hero and fanning his brow while he reads poetry to her."
"How come we don't have none o' them, Ma?" he asked innocently. "You been holdin' out on us?"
"I know better than to let a pack of girls loose around you, Harper," I said. "You'd try to sweet-talk one into smuggling you out of the hospital under her crinoline."
A wicked gleam came into his eye as he considered the possibilities, and I cuffed the back of his head. "Don't even think about it, you little devil."
As the weeks went by he improved steadily, driven by that fierce will that would have done more harm than good if we hadn't been able to curb him occasionally. As I had promised, by July I was certain that there was no sound medical reason to keep him with us any longer. Not that he would be missed, of course. The entire ward would be glad to see him go.
Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, had established an observation post on the porch, and after morning rounds I joined him. He was in one of the rocking chairs, a light rug over his legs, gazing out over the yard. I came up behind the chair and patted him on the shoulder, and felt a foolish little ripple of gladness that he no longer shrugged such gestures angrily aside.
It was a clear, sunny day. Someone was putting a unit through company drill in a field nearby. From the road came the soft clank of scabbards and stirrup irons as a troop of cavalry passed by, the guidons snapping in the hot Missouri wind. A band was playing, off in the distance - an Indiana regiment, from the sound of it.
"If I ever get to be an old woman, and if one day I happen to hear someone a-tapping out Hell on the Wabash, I'll probably get right up and reach for bandages and my canteen," I said wistfully. He put his hand up to rest on mine.
"Don't reckon I'll ever forget, neither. None of it was glory an' most of it was hell, but – I'd'a done it again."
It seemed as good a time as any to tell him. "You'll be leaving us on Monday."
He twisted his head to stare at me, astonished. "I'm bein' discharged?"
"Not so fast, my young Lazarus! You can barely walk yet. You're going to be leaving the fever ward, is all."
"Where to?"
"Oh, a very nice convalescent floor with a very nice lady in charge. She'll spend a few more weeks fattening you up, and then I don't see any reason why you can't get your parole and go home."
He couldn't have been happier if I'd handed him Texas with a ribbon around it.
I called in some favors and got him assigned to Mrs. Kean. She was a sweet, elderly Bostonian with pink cheeks and fluffy white hair, and she never had problems with her men because defying her would have been like slapping your grandmother. I thought my patient would respond well to her brand of gentle charm, and besides, she was a coddler. It would make a nice change for him, after two months with me.
The day they came to carry him off, he reached out and crumpled a corner of my apron into his fist. "I'll be back t'see you, before I go," he promised.
"I doubt that," I said. "You'll leave this place so fast we won't see you for the dust!"
"Honest, Ma!" He grinned cheekily at me. "Besides – you've still got m'boots."
Spending time with him after his transfer to another nurse's ward would have been a breach of unwritten hospital etiquette, so I stayed away, contenting myself with the occasional bit of gossip collected and passed on by Robert. Harper, 5th Texas Cavalry, had surrendered without firing a shot to old Mrs. Kean and was eating out of her hand, he reported, and would be paroled soon.
Too soon, I thought a fortnight later when I saw a lean young figure in shabby cast-offs climbing the stairs to my ward. They really should have kept him another month – he was still so thin, and if the journey back to Texas didn't wear him out his own burning, restless spirit would. But I was in no position to interfere, and besides, I knew he wouldn't thank me.
"Come for your boots?" I asked him.
He ducked his head and smiled, suddenly shy. "Come t'say good-bye, Ma. I got m'papers and I'm leavin'."
Robert appeared with those precious cavalry boots and the boy's face lit up. He tossed the clumsy Army shoes to one side and pulled on the boots, smoothing them up over his shins and gazing down at them pridefully. They were important to him, like that ragged scrap of flag he cherished, a symbol of something I would probably never understand, but vital somehow.
"I want t' thank you for takin' care o' these for me."
"Don't thank me – it was none of my doing." Robert had gotten them re-soled, and then worked on the leather with saddle soap and great care until they were again soft and supple.
"Thank you, Mister Simmons." He hesitantly extended his hand and Robert shook it with grave courtesy.
"It was my pleasure, Mist' Harper."
I beckoned him to one side. "I want you to take this."
I pressed a small roll of bills into his palm and, as I expected, he balked.
"None of that! There are thousands of you Southerners trying to get home right now. Seems to me a few Union greenbacks will smooth the way just a bit."
His jaw began to jut in that familiar stubborn way, but I spiked his guns. "If the war had ended differently, and it was one of my sons starting out on such a journey, don't you think I'd be grateful if some Secesh woman tried to help him?"
I closed his wiry fingers over the money.
"It's only a couple of dollars. Take it and don't argue with me, Johnny Reb! And if you should ever find yourself in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, remember to stop by #10, Market Street. I'll cook you the best supper you've ever eaten."
"Yes'm." He was silent for a moment, searching for words. "I want t'thank you for – for everythin'. I know I wasn't a real good patient."
"Careful," I warned. "That almost sounds like an apology."
He had the grace to blush.
There was nothing more to say, really. I took his face between my hands and kissed him; once on his forehead and once on each cheek. I felt his bony young arms go around me and he held me in a strong embrace for a moment. Then he broke away and ran down the steps to the yard.
Two other paroled men were waiting for him, and that was good, I reflected. There was a certain safety travelling in numbers, although if I knew anything, my Yankee dollars were going to be shared out among them and that skinny Texas roughneck would likely as not skimp himself.
He waved as the three of them passed through the gate, and I stood and watched the boy with my son's eyes walk away, up the long white road towards the West.
The Federal Military Prison at Alton, Illinois, opened in February, 1862 on the site of a former state penitentiary. Originally approved to house 1,750 prisoners, over the next three years 11,764 captured Confederate soldiers would pass through its gates. The recorded death count was 1,534. Estimates of the unrecorded deaths range from one to five thousand. At least forty-six of the dead were from Texas regiments and are buried in a cemetery that now lies under the waters of the Mississippi River.