The Long Winter

The hospital

December 2, 1863

News comes through the ward the way bread does, torn into pieces and never whole. The talk is Meade came across the Rapidan to catch Lee before winter set in, and both armies dug in facing each other across a little creek called Mine Run. The boys built works and laid in the cold for days, daring the other side to come on. Then this morning the word is the Yankees slipped off in the night and left their campfires burning so nobody’d know.

Two armies staring at each other for a week, digging graves out of dirt, and then one just… ain’t there.

Every time somebody from the line comes through I ask after the 27th. The answer always starts with the same little quiet before the words. “There ain’t much left.”

The hospital

December 18, 1863

Cold makes the wound talk louder. When the air turns sharp, both shoulders burn deep like the ball is still in there hunting a way out. I can’t lie flat. I can’t tote what I used to.

There’s another trouble I hate to put on paper, down low in my belly where the marching and hauling has torn a weak place. I am ruptured, and it gets worse when I stand too long. A man feels shamed writing such a thing, but this book is for the truth.

I used to think bullets were a soldier’s worst enemy. Now I know it can be the slow breaking of the body.

The hospital

February 3, 1864

I practice loading left-handed. It’s slow and clumsy, like learning to write all over again. The surgeons talk like I ought to be grateful just to be breathing. I am. But grateful don’t fill the hole where my strength used to set.

Sometimes I dream I’m back at that railroad bank. In the dream I never fall, and the line holds, and the day turns out different. Then I wake up and my shoulder tells me what really happened.

The hospital

April 28, 1864

Talk is the army will move when spring dries the roads. Big movement, big fighting, the kind that leaves no man untouched. They say there’s a new Yankee general now named Grant who don’t quit when a day goes bad.

I’ve made up my mind. I will get back to the 27th. Even if it’s only to carry cartridges in my left hand and dig with a shoulder that burns. A sane man would take this wound as his ticket home. I reckon I ain’t a sane man. I just can’t abide them boys going into it without me.

Maps from the printed book