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Not that the women of Albany County were not grateful; instead they were envious, which took its form in criticism.
The idle talk of other people always perplexed her; her mind was usually occupied by things that no one else thought of: the structure of the pelvis, the fast beat of a healthy fetus heart, or the slow meander of an unhealthy one, or a baby who had failed to breathe. She could never bring herself to care about ordinary things, like whose pie was better at the Sunday potluck, or whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise, or what anyone was saying about an early winter or an early thaw or if the wheat would blight this year due to the heavy rains, or if the latest couple to
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Years in the company of women in agony had conferred on Mary an aura of wisdom; she inspired respect and trust; it was this, Thomas thought, that made him feel so young.
Boyish, happy, his face shone with generosity. He seemed incapable of guile, incapable even of finding her ambition extraordinary. As if the entire world were an open place, holding out its arms to everyone. As if munificence were the normal course of things.
No one had ever told her that grief was a leveling of all emotion, that life would stretch before you, colorless and endless, devoid of any hope.
It is the inescapable rule of caregivers that they have to be available despite how they themselves might feel.
Always astonishment, the world over, when one is affected by upheaval. We are bored by the familiar, but terrified by the unfamiliar.
Love and war, it seemed, worked by the same rules. One had to hurry, before the fires flared out.
It was the unwritten rule of assembling armies that a third of their population would be lost to disease within the first month. Most had arrived with nothing, not even arms. And they were a hungry lot. They’d taken to slaughtering the cattle penned beneath the stunted Washington Monument when they weren’t parading up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Grief was such an avid stalker, surprising him when he least expected it.
“What the commission should have said is that this place is an apocalypse.”
She was shouting now, her voice carrying down the narrow hallway, penetrating the old timbers of the hotel that had seen murder, adultery, generosity, desperation, and grief, but never such ragged disappointment.
What was striving for if all you learned was that your stubbornness led you places you never wanted to be in order to do things you never thought you would do?
On the way back to Georgetown, she wondered what ambition was worth, and whether her family would love her if she failed.
By midnight on Thursday, four days after the battle, Dr. Stipp had made full inventory: 254 wounded, most with extremity wounds from slow-moving musket balls that had entered their bodies but not exited. A few of the balls had managed to break bones: the right elbow joint of one man, the right shoulder of another, the femurs of perhaps half a dozen poor souls who had suffered torturous rides in two-wheeled jitneys that pounded into every rut and pothole in the ruined roads, two with missing jawbones, one with a broken hip, one whose feet had been crushed by a runaway wagon, and a dozen flesh
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He, along with everyone else, had not feared this moment in the way they ought to have done. And now the boy’s leg was rapidly taking on a bluish aspect.
Over the last month, he had seen her employ this elixir of womanhood, a trick that transformed misery into pleasure and made the men do things they would not otherwise do: walk when they wanted to rest, live when they wanted to die. But in that moment of intoxication—a second, a minute?—he began to believe he could do the job; he told himself that what he was about to do was little more than basic butchery.
By the end of the four years the war would take, he would perform this operation in under five minutes, his record being nine legs in one hour in a drafty barn in Gettysburg beside a welling stream that would flood one stormy night and carry away all his surviving patients. In the end, he would perform 607 amputations, though he would lose count at fifty and cease caring at a hundred.
Her life would be certain. Safe. And with time, the noise of the saw might diminish, and she would no longer hear boys crying for water, for their mothers, for release.
Mary yearned to hear the wail of a newborn, a sound as unlike the scrape of the saw as a symphony was from cannon fire. Women labored until there was life. If that wasn’t reason, then what was? But women waged war, too, and it took little between women to make one another miserable; sisterhood sacrificed when desire scalded the veins.
but this was the first time Mary had seemed young to Stipp. The young were always so certain they knew what was best.
Neither was aware of the other in the consoling way that friends are not; only the crickets spoke. Grief as the proof, the revelation.
Who would have thought that hell would be so immediate ? High-pitched screams, astonished, brittle gasps.
Of course those two would have found one another; they were each other’s echoes.
Grief of that sort should not be roused indiscriminately; discretion was the gift he had given her in her sadness, she would give him the same.
“It is just a fact, Mary. And we might as well say these things.” He did not say, Because death hovers in the wings. Stalks the wards. Prowls in the night.
Futility, to govern one’s children. Futility, even, to try to save them.
For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.
How women defeat one another; how need defeats women.
“You want to be a surgeon? To be a surgeon is to look a man in the eye and tell him the truth. If you can’t do that, then get out of here. Go home.” He was shouting now, his fury echoing the thunder rising in the distance.
But still, what Lee and Jefferson Davis didn’t understand was that to destroy a union founded on freedom was to declare all of humanity’s endeavors foolhardy. To fail at this would be to fail at God’s work. Lincoln began to march back and forth along
God’s work, then, and whether God existed or not, he would act as if He did, on faith, for he could deduce no other reason in the end for man’s existence.
Lincoln simply could not understand a man who could not see his own fallibility.
Their slaves’ skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.
Days later, the citizens of Washington would remark that the Potomac had turned the color of rust, but would not make the connection until news of the enormous numbers of casualties came pouring in.
Dante, Mary thought. But which circle of hell was reserved for the hopelessly useless? “Mary.”
She slipped into that place deep inside her that was more prayer than thought.
What had Lincoln said? Are you willing to risk yourself? She did not know he had meant her sanity.
knife goes into a body and something is either repaired or it isn’t.
This is the way of love and catastrophe. Everything is evident.
After the carnage, real love had suddenly seemed to be not so much likeness of mind as responsibility met, and a promise, however foolishly entered, kept. “It
She did not need James’s microscope anymore to understand that life existed or did not exist based, at least in part, on the goodwill of man.
