He Wore a Purple Heart Inside a Gray Uniform
John C. Mannone
After
the Battle
of Antietam, September 17, 1862
Will had lost a lot of valiant
blood and slips into shock. Medics carry him across the Potomac, gray water
rippling in a stiff breeze. That same bluster flaps the canvas of a field-tent
where the medics triage him; he waits in and out of sleep with an aching pain
in his arm. They move him to a makeshift hospital, a converted retail building
in a small West Virginia town, when the waning gibbous moon has barely risen
and the nighthawks begin their lament. The doctor, apron’d in blood, saunters
over to see him.
“Who you with,
Corporal?”
“Thirteenth Virginia, Sir.” Will
shifts his body trying to ease his discomfort. “I survived the volleys in the
West woods but took lead in the Cornfields.”
“That’s a nasty wound, Son.”
The
doctor’s eyes betray his understatement that the nurse senses. She remains
silent and moves behind Will, who is lying on a stretcher; she shakes her head
almost imperceptibly from left to right, right to left, a few times. She had
seen that same look of fear in so many other young soldiers but none so
intensified as from those who had fought in Sharpsburg, which some call
Antietam.
Will winces as the doctor probes
his left arm. The uniform had been cut away and the blood-soiled sleeve tossed
in a bin with the other torn and tattered remnants of uniforms darkened with
blood. And in the other corner, there’s a pile of gangrenous flesh and severed
bone.
~~~
It’s a month later in
mid to late November, and Will, now an amputee, is on his way home. A medical
discharge. He thinks out loud so he’ll better remember when he writes his
thoughts on paper:
I sink as I
march through the woods; wish the ground to
swallow me. Musket smoke still hangs in my nostrils. I lift my eyes to pray,
and the air is crisp with sweet pawpaw leaves and syrup-colored maples. I see a
tanager in the pines; hear the oriole’s pure, liquid whistles, rich flute and
piccolo, flutter-drums of passion, and the beating of wings.
But the buzz around those carcasses maggot my
thoughts. I
am running now, away from there, away from the cornfields scattered with ears
pressed to the ground; hair silked with blood; bodies husked in gray and blue.
I am running away from the fields littered with death as I feel my own reaper
close behind swinging his scythe. My arm already severed to my shoulder bone;
my limb thrown among the other arms and legs onto piles, only its ghost remains
to taunt me.
But today, I am coming home.
~~~
From afar, Will’s mother sees
her son ambling through the fields. She runs to him. With an awkward moment on
how to embrace him with a missing arm, Will throws his one good arm around his
mother. He kisses her gently on the cheek.
“I’ve missed
you, Momma.”
“I’ve missed
you, too, Will. Been praying for this day; your coming home.”
“Where’s
Betty Lynn?” he says, his eyes growing wide.
“She’s not
here... I’m sorry, Son. She ran off and got married to a banker from Richmond.”
“She what?”
“We’ll talk
more later.”
“No, Momma.
Tell me now.”
“She left a
letter for you. I put it on the dresser in your room.”
They both go
into the house and Will works his way up the loft to his old room. He sheds his
backpack and undresses. He sees the letter, but doesn’t open it. He just stares
at it. It now made sense why he didn’t receive any more letters from her after
the first few months of his enlistment.
His side is hurting, so he
fishes out some whiskey the doctor had given him, then lies down for a moment.
Trying hard to quell the cacophony of thoughts and assuage the pain of loss,
not just of his arm, he lies down on propped-up pillows, and takes another
swig, and falls into half-stirred dreams.
Will mumbles in his sleep;
tosses, and ruffles sheets, writhes, his face distorting in the late afternoon
shadows of that bakery shop commandeered and converted to a hospital in
Shepherdstown, WV just across the Potomac. The narcotic-infused whiskey sloshes
with his delirium. And the cannon roars in the near distance of his nightmare
rattle his sore ribs from when he was thrown hard to the ground from the cannon
blast that shrapnel’d his arm. That laudanum-laced whiskey left a bad taste in
his mouth when they braced him for the saw. There would only be a slight
dulling to the excruciation of amputation. He yells out, “No. No, no!” as the
tool razor-toothed into his flesh.
Will awakens to his own screams,
beads of sweat dripping fear all over his face; his shirt drenched.
His mother,
startled, comes running, a thin shawl draped over her shoulders. “Will!”
“I’m okay,
Momma.” His voice perhaps is not very convincing. “It was just a bad dream.”
“Let me know
if there’s anything I can do for you, Son.”
“I will.”
But even wide awake, his nightmare continues.
Will sits up
at the edge of his bed in the farmhouse he grew up in trying to lose himself in
childhood memories until the sun cracks the darkness. As he hopes and dreams,
he can see a few slants of gold light bleed in, the windowpane transforming
from black to the gray hue of morning, not quite blue. It’s a new day. It’s Thanksgiving
morning and the cock is crowing. Will jumps out of bed, throws on some clothes,
and scurries down to make breakfast with his mother.
The letter remains in shadows,
unopened.
THE END
