The Death of a Confederate Colonel

It was nearly the opium hour.

Emily glanced at the grandfather clock standing against the far wall of the ward.

8:35.

She poured water from the thick pottery pitcher into a row of cloudy glasses.

One of the doctors would arrive at nine, and she’d measure out the twenty drops each soldier could have. She knew they were running low and that the opium tincture would be wasted on the boy whose stump was already granulating, but she would insist anyway, and the doctor would give in.

“—and I’m still angry that you didn’t even write about your wound.” The girl’s voice took on a coquette’s pout.

It was the blond girl who came in the evenings to sit with the young colonel who had lost his foot. A girl who was much too young and much too pretty even to be in the ward and who could never pretend to be one of the plain, over-thirty, and married nurses. This evening she wore a pale pink gown festooned with silk flowers, and pink ribbons that gathered her golden curls in a silken hairnet. Her dainty rose-colored slippers twinkled beneath her hoop as she sauntered up and down the aisle and talked to the wounded colonel.

“It wasn’t a serious wound,” the young officer, the youngest colonel in the Arkansas Fourteenth, by the name of Boland Miller, protested happily. “I was having a perfectly splendid time just before I got hit in the thigh. It was only a nick, but it knocked me flat.” He spoke with a mixture of chagrin and merriment. “And before I could get up, something banged into my foot. I thought somebody tripped over me in the advance, and I didn’t know until they picked me up that the cannonball had taken off my boot. But it never did hurt much, and I’m no trouble at all, am I, Mrs. Winthrop?”

She looked at him and smiled as she poured the final glass. Then she glanced again at the clock.

8:40.

As soon as a doctor came, she could leave. She felt dizzy with fatigue, and she remembered she hadn’t eaten since morning.

“—so what I think I’ll do is show you how fit I am right now. Let me hold your shoulder, and I’ll walk a few steps for you.”

Emily brought her attention back to the young couple.

Boland Miller was sitting up and about to swing his legs over the side of the cot.

The girl’s pink skirt billowed in the candlelight and reminded Emily of an elaborately frosted cupcake.

“Colonel, I don’t think you should get up until the doctor comes and tells you you’re sound enough to—” she began as she walked toward him.

But he stuck his legs straight out with the expression of a happy toddler. The thick white bandage on his stump and his remaining foot in its thick gray sock were almost the same length.

“I think you should wait,” she said.

“Now, Mrs. Winthrop, you know I’m one of the healthiest amputees in this whole hospital. I’ll probably be discharged by the end of the week.” He raised himself, balanced on the socked foot, and when the girl stepped to his side, he threw his arm over her shoulder. “And with the prettiest crutch in town—” He winked at Emily, “I could almost go dining and dancing at The Eagle House tonight.”

“Why don’t you wait another few minutes? A doctor will be coming in just a—”

“Watch this, Mrs. Winthrop.” He looked from Emily to the girl, who was smiling at him the way she would have smiled at a schoolboy walking atop a fence. “I’ll lean my weight on you for a second and then hop this leg forward. Ready?”

“Ready.”

She was a tall girl, almost his height, and Emily could tell she’d be able to support him.

“OK. Now!”

He pressed against the girl and gave a short jump.

“See that, Mrs. Winthrop. I told you I was ready to go dancing.”

He leaned on the girl and hopped again.

But as his foot touched the floor this time, he screamed a high, short scream. His arm flailed loose from the girl, and he collapsed across the cot.

“Oh, God!”

“What is it?”

Even in the dim candlelight Emily could see the crimson stain that burst instantly on his nightshirt as if someone had thrown a fistful of red dye at his leg.

“What is it?”

“Oh, God!”

His eyes twisted shut, and he grasped his thigh near the bloodstain as another gush of scarlet poured into the material from the underside of the cloth.

The girl tried to maneuver his head onto the pillow, but he screamed again. “No! Don’t.”

His fist clutched harder at his leg, but more blood spread. The cloth seemed to have dissolved into it.

Emily hurriedly laid back the sodden cotton.

Above Boland Miller’s knee on the inside of his thigh, blood gurgled in a mounded fountain that sank, then bubbled again. His leg wound that had almost healed was obviously open again, and his blood was pumping through the gash.

Emily dropped the soaked cloth of his nightshirt, and without willing it, plunged her hand into the blood fountain. Her fingers sought the line of the cut and dipped through it. The thick red liquid and the muscle that closed on her fingers were warm. She felt the bone and the cul de sac of the wound. His heartbeat pulsed out another spout of blood, and she pressed hard.

He moaned.

But the geyser of blood didn’t spurt again. Her blind fingers must have stoppered the artery.

“Go see if the doctor is coming yet,” someone said, and Emily didn’t realize she was the one who had spoken until the girl backed away down the aisle toward the door. Emily caught a glimpse of the pink gown splattered with crimson blossoms that for an instant glistened like red silk roses.

She looked down at the young colonel. Both his legs, the shirt, and the cot were bathed in blood, but no new stream was feeding the scarlet pool.

“The doctor will be here in a minute,” she said. “We’ve got the bleeding stopped.”

He opened his eyes by measured degrees and cleared his throat. “I guess I did get up a little sooner than I should have.”

She glanced away from his face to see the plump black coat and vest of the doctor, who reached the side of the cot and scowled.

“What’s going on here?” His red face peered at Boland Miller. “Get some water to wash this wound so I can see something. And bring some of those candles over here.”

Two ambulatory soldiers came near the bed with tapers they’d taken from the wall sconces. Another of them carried the pottery pitcher of water.

The doctor frowned at Emily. “What do you think you’re doing? Take your hand away from there.” He brushed at her with the motion of shooing an insect.

“His artery may be cut.”

“I’ll be the judge of whether or not there’s damage to an artery.” He put his hand on her wrist.

But she tensed her hand, and he glanced at her, surprised.

As he grasped her wrist more firmly, she clamped the nails of her other hand into his fingers. “He may bleed to death.”

The doctor’s scowl furrowed deeper into his brick-hued forehead, and he may have flushed a darker crimson, but the light was too uneven for Emily to be certain. He nonetheless pulled his hand back as he said angrily, “Pour some of that water over this leg so I can see. Hold those candles closer here.”

Emily was conscious of the water that ran cooler than the flesh and muscle around her hand, conscious of the thinned blood and water dripping through the canvas of the cot onto the floor. The doctor’s thick shoulder brushed against her, and she could feel without seeing it that his hand beside hers was separating the folds of the wound as if they’d been the flaps of a pocket.

Her pulse beat into her head, and she realized she was holding her breath.

“Mm-m-m-m,” the doctor hummed.

His cheeks puffed and deflated, and Emily felt his plump fingers exploring the interior of the wound as if the thigh had been detached, laid out for study.

The candles, so close that she felt their heat on her face, sputtered, and the pendulum of the clock ticked loudly.

At last, the doctor withdrew his hand.

He flicked a large red bandana from his coat and wiped his fingers, removed his pinkie ring, which Emily hadn’t noticed he’d been wearing, and polished the blood from inside the band. The blood didn’t show against the red of the bandana.

“It’s too deep for anyone to operate,” he said in a low voice.

“What does that mean?”

He didn’t look at her or at the colonel as he put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “It means that the shattered bone wasn’t healed and has snapped. It severed an artery.”

A solemn tick sounded very loud, and Emily couldn’t decide if she was hearing the grandfather clock or the measured drip of water and blood from the sodden cot. She realized that her fingers had gone dead with the pressure.

“It’s too deep inside the muscle for us to be able to sew it up.”

“Perhaps when Dr. Samuels gets here—”

“He’ll say the same thing.” He carefully adjusted the ring back on his finger.

“But he could give an opinion.”

“Dr. Samuels has gone to Fort Smith,” he said almost smugly. “He’s part of the medical team examining General McCulloch’s body, and he won’t be back for days.”

Before Emily could say something about doctors tending the dead rather than the living, Boland Miller interrupted. “How long do I have to live?”

The doctor looked at him severely. “As long as Mrs.—” He paused to come up with her name. “As long as Mrs. Winthrop holds her finger on the cut.”

Boland Miller may have nodded, or it may have been the candlelight that gave the illusion of a nod.

Emily’s entire hand had lost its feeling.

She glanced up to see the ruined crinoline skirt—the blotches already having turned rust brown—the round red face of the doctor, and the nightshirted soldiers holding dripping candles.

She couldn’t distinguish the tick now through the thudding inside her head. Had someone stilled the pendulum of the clock?

Her hand had deadened to the elbow. She couldn’t seem to pull enough air into her lungs.

Perhaps Dr. Samuels would be back from Fort Smith sooner than anyone thought.

Could she stand beside the bloody cot with her finger corking the colonel’s blood until he returned?

“Mrs. Winthrop.”

She heard her name as if someone had whispered it from a long distance away.

“Mrs. Winthrop, I guess it’s all right for you to remove your hand now.”

She focused on his face. The animation and the color were gone as if they’d been the first parts of his body to drain away.

“No, I—”

“It’s really all right, ma’am,” he said faintly.

“I—I can’t.”

Yet as she said the words she felt herself sway. Black squares began to edge in from the corners of her sight, began to multiply and merge.

She tried to blink them back.

She had to keep her numb fingers in place or Boland Miller would die.

She tried to concentrate on standing, but she wasn’t certain her shoes were on the bloodied wooden planks of the floor.

The checkered blackness accelerated, flowed across her vision. The darkness thickened and swallowed her.

She didn’t feel herself fall.