Work for both Warren and me intensified, but for different reasons: his was to supply soldiers with food, medicinals, bedding and shelter, while mine was concocting herbal remedies and working at the hospital. In my spare time I cobbled together maps of the area and safe houses heading north. One of my long held goals and responsibilities to the Union was to find out about the conditions of the nearby prison holding our soldiers. Reports from my contacts were grim at best and my job was to figure out a way to smuggle in food and medicines and maps for escape. I knew that if I could work in the adjacent hospital at Westerly, I could eventually gain access into the prison to see for myself what was needed by the men. I could report the number and most importantly the names and health of the prisoners, get a reading as to their general conditions, and learn of specific needs. But nothing, not one thing could have prepared me for the sights I saw first in the hospital. The only thing worse viewing would have been the corpses on the battlefields with the exception that those bodies could no longer feel pain. Many of the patients with whom I worked were in such great pain that they wished for death to come to them.
I knew there was no way around it. I had to work in the hospital over the course of weeks and months so I that I could be trusted to gain access to the prison. My contacts up the line were depending on me. I knew it would take a long time and I had to be remarkably patient which was a characteristic I hadn’t yet developed.
My days centered on my visits to the hospital with all the herbal remedies I could concoct. I also found that if I stuck with a routine each day, my loneliness abated. Besides my exhausting hospital work, I collected herbs as they came into season, and anticipated summer harvests of herbs in the fields and on the plantations surrounding Marsh Station. Shepherd’s purse and yarrow made effective poultices for wounds, and I knew that those hardy herbs would be abundant in the surrounding countryside. In fact, Lucy had put together a troupe of volunteers – mostly women and children who were willing to harvest and process the plants —thus creating an apothecary for the hospital. A ready store of infusions, tinctures, decoctions, and oils would be essential for the next three seasons, should the war continue on that long. Sometimes women traded tinctures among themselves to lessen their work load and have on hand what was needed for their families. At my request, Lucy put out the word that herbs dried or fresh, were needed donations for the hospital. So women grew a little extra or found them on their own and new bundles arrived daily for preparation in the hospital apothecary. That’s where I got my foothold and then, because of the demand for care, I assisted Westerly’s staff in the stinking wards of the hospital.
My own herb garden was coming along nicely; dried pungent bundles of mint, chamomile, and fennel began to fill entire beams in my kitchen. Herbal medicine was not outside of the passel of tasks and skills that women developed from an early age. It was my mother’s way and her mother’s mother as well. The subtle differences of the plants and learning which parts were useful and which were poisonous, was a womanly knowledge commonly passed down in most families just like favorite recipes.
For centuries, and back beyond written history holy people all over the world, men and women alike, had collected the knowledge of plants and experimented again and again to find out which plants were effective and safe. Herbal knowledge became kin to a secret language passed between healers. Whether shaman or doctor, medicine woman or midwife, the healers gathered their knowledge of plants over time, as it was perfected tincture by tincture. Season after season produced the perennial plants offered up by earth and nature as a gift to anyone who had the will of experimentation coupled and the drive to yield to intuition. Healers were highly regarded throughout time. During the scarcity of War when all foundations from the past stood weakened from shock and deprivation, a woman with a firm knowledge of proper harvesting techniques and herbal medicine was essential to the health of her community.
My understanding of herbals was nearly as valuable to the Rebels as my espionage was to the Federals. I took for granted the power of herbal medicines until my experience in the War. I’d grown up watching my mother and grandmother pick up plants and study their characteristics while we walked our dogs down to the river.
“See the heart shaped leaves, Annie?” My mother would ask. “That’s Shepherd’s Purse or Mother’ Hearts…good for bleeding,” and she’d stop to pick the plant and show me which parts of the plant to use. “It can be used as a wound wash or to treat dysentery.”
From a young age, gathering herbs to dry in the attic or making poultices to heal cuts or calm stomachaches for family members was as natural a part of my life as combining flavors to enliven a Sunday dinner.
By midsummer, Lucy’s large kitchen became a kind of classroom where I had taught a dozen volunteers how to boil and infuse the precious plants that were so helpful in healing the wounds of war. I knew that the hospital apothecary could not keep up with the demands of the hospital with waves of men coming in wounded and sick from the field all the time, so Lucy’s friends were essential to creating supplies and medicines of all sorts. Among these herbs was horsetail, an herb that was very good for stubborn coughs and respiratory problems, a common ailment of soldiers brought on by dampness and we’d had plenty of that.
With Lucy’s help and the organization of her women friends, I’d only have to make a request for cloth, boiled jars, or freshly picked herbs, and the items would appear overnight as if she had rubbed her magic lamp and emerged as a genie who granted my wishes. So, not only did I wish loudly, but I wished for supplies in great quantity, hoping that the treatments would win the trust I needed from the hospital administrators and also the prison warden. My new challenge was to find a balance in healing Rebel soldiers in order to, ultimately, help weak Federal prisoners.
Many of the men of war with whom we worked were mere boys, their young, frail bodies had been lying in fields of blood and dirt and then carted over thick tracks of mud and ruts to Westerly Hospital. The herbs could improve circulation, or speed the healing process of a wound, but they couldn’t touch the deep fissures that kept those men from being whole again. It couldn’t restore a lost limb, only heal the stump. Our medicine couldn’t restore the men’s minds to wholeness but it could ease their discomfort, albeit temporarily.
The spring of 1862 was memorable for its rain and the resultant mud. Water ran through the streets carrying field mud from one end of town to the other. For weeks the streets were impassable channels of oozing filth. One afternoon, headed towards Beard’s Mercantile, I remember seeing a carriage stuck up to its wheel hubs. Its poor horses were up to their knees in soupy brown-gray mud. It was difficult to comprehend how soldiers could survive in such weather day after day. Canvas tents provided little relief from the river that fell from the sky and dripped from green canopies with rhythmic thuds. In the forests of Virginia where many of the Union troops camped, thick vines descended from the trees as if Medusa was letting down her hair.
It was midweek and I had finally finished my rounds at the hospital for the day and at the end of each long shift we removed the ribbon on the bottom on our dresses to soak them. The wide ribbons protected the hems of our dresses from the filth of the floors. Putting the soft fabric in a basin of water, the blood thinned, releasing itself to the water until the basin was murky.
I caught myself checking my unexpected reflection in the bowl. Blood and water were everywhere, not as a rite of purification or baptism, but more like dams of heaven and humanity bursting their veins in retaliation for a race gone wrong…the human race, I thought. How had we come to this? What would become of us?
“We’re the only species to systematically slaughter one another and then cheer in celebration afterwards,” I said to myself in a whisper. I watched the blood ooze from the fabric thinking of the sights and smells of my shift. My belly felt twisted; my eyes burned. My limbs reacted: I shook with exhaustion. I felt cold and wrung out. Keeping my feelings squelched down deep inside me, I had treated the open, gaping wound
s of men whose suffering was beyond imagination, but whose memory stays with me even today. No one, should ever have to suffer the level of pain and indignity those men did.
From bed to bed and man to man I had moved about since mid-morning, checking for a slow rise in the chest of each man who lay before me, faces waxen with pain and disbelief in a world gone mad with despair.
One man had grabbed my arm as I reached over him to apply a poultice to his shoulder. “I’m begging you,” he whispered, catching my eyes in his. “Poison me, please. It’s my only hope of escape, Ma’am. I’m shattered in three places and I know poison has set in. I heard them talking about it last night. I always feared it would be like this. Please, Ma’am be merciful. Help me go.”
“There now. Shhh, close your eyes. Take a breath.” I looked at his heavy lids, lined in agony, but softened against my fingertips. I knew as he did that the hours he had left could stretch into torturous days and I made a mental note to consider bringing a few rhubarb leaves with me next time. I’d have to be careful not to let those toxic greens mix with any of the healing herbs I’d dole out to the other men in the ward. Could I do it? Would I?
“Go to your favorite childhood place. Do you see it? Breathe it in and dream there,” I told him.
Barely seeing my reflection in the burgundy basin again, the twilight of afternoon descending, I pulled away from the memories of the day.
One of the other nurses approached me. Josie had a sweet southern accent with a bit of a drawl. She always wore a flowered apron, setting off her blond braids which she wore atop her head.
“Annie,” she said. “You’re not looking well, honey. Can I get you a cup of tea? Maybe you should sit here and rest. It’s been a tough one today, hasn’t it dear?”
“It’s been dreadful, but no, I’ll pass on the tea, thank you. I just need to get away from here for a while. We did have some tough cases today, didn’t we?”
“You bet, darlin’, but not much different than any of the other days here. Why if I didn’t know that there was something better on the other side, where most of these boys are headed, I’d be ashen pale myself.”
Donning a rain cape and hat, I picked up an umbrella and basket and called back to Josie who had moved down the corridor to find another nurse, “Keep the kettle on, I’ll be back.” It was just our way of saying we’d return.
Leaving the building, I wondered aloud “Will this rain ever end? It’s been raining for weeks, I swear.” It had been raining for weeks, a steady drumbeat of water as if the heavens were weeping for all the lost ones, robbed of their days. Waters rose high in the creeks and rivers. Muck was everywhere. New England’s mud season seemed timid by comparison. Humidity hung in the air like thick wet sheets left out at night. And, in all that glum mess, Marsh Station’s most unsavory residents, its tramps, were flushed from their transient homes in the fields or along the river. Most of the homeless were men who had lost large parts of themselves to the war. Whether emotional or physical, they seemed to have come away, not altogether mad but chinked with holes in the fabric of their souls. I’d see a few men now and then, ragged, bleary eyed, their skin thick with dirt, and their minds made dense and twisted from the horror of war.
Walking on the edge of town, I was making plans to find more herbs, bake more bread and pray real hard that the sun would return to dry out the soil and help my plants along. Planning these things kept my mind off the dank day and the drips finding their way beneath my cape. By the time I had turned up the street to my house, my dress was soaked clear through and my hat was a mass of heavy fabric jiggling atop my head and water was running in rivulets down my back; my hat’s brim had become a catchment. I entered the house and quickly began to remove my wet things when the screen door opened behind me and I heard someone enter.
Expecting to see Warren or Kate, I turned and was shocked to see a man, a stranger, standing two or three feet away from me looking and smelling like last year’s hay. As quick as a lash he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me to him. All I could do was to let out a muffled scream.
“Got ya now you sweet thung,” he gurgled from some cavern in his throat. Reeking like a wet chicken coop, I gagged on his smell and pulled from side to side trying to loosen his grip in the dark room.
“No, no. Get away,” I screamed at him.
It worked long enough for me to try to grab for an iron skillet atop the wood stove, but it was just a few inches out of my reach. I pushed away from him with a solid shoulder, and lunged again for the skillet knowing it was my only defense. He reached out to grab for me but his hands slipped down my wet dress. The old boy slid down to the wooden planked floor holding tightly to my skirt as I stretched for the heavy pan. With momentum I pulled the handle back and then down letting the skillet crash into the bent face of my attacker, fully finding my voice as I did so.
“Get out, get out, let me go you son-of-a bitch,” I screamed, hoping to get help from someone…anyone.
For a moment he let go and then clung fast again to my skirt trying to pull himself up to a standing position by yanking on the cloth. Still holding the skillet, I used two hands and raised it over my head, coming down on him with greater force than the original blow. As the pan met the top of his head, and he fell backwards to the floor, I heard a loud rip and looked to see myself standing in only an underskirt to the middle of my thigh and my attacker unconscious on the floor still clutching the rest of my dress. Standing in shreds, my wet hair fallen and dripping, I stood frozen, looking around wondering what to do. I would have cried from relief, but I expected the man on the floor to move and I wanted to be ready.
Just as I was pondering my next move, standing over him with the skillet poised, the screen door opened and there stood Warren, his coat buttons polished, but his boots thick with mud. He stood looking at the sight before him taking it all in. Rain water beaded off his jacket like pond water on the feathers of a mallard. He’d removed his hat which dripped onto the floor. Looking up at me and then back to the unconscious creature on the floor, he caught my eye and began to chuckle then covered his mouth with a fist, trying to stifle his laughter in disbelief of what he’d seen.
I was upset, angry, scared and cold.
“So nice of you to visit,” I stated. Then adding sarcastically, “Sir.”
With that Warren stepped inside the house over the unconscious body of the bum splayed on the kitchen floor and picked the heavy skillet out of my hand setting it back on the stove.
“We should give the cavalry a few of these lethal weapons to see what they could do with them,” he said grinning at me.
Turning to the bum on the floor, he lifted him from the underarms and dragged him out the door and somewhere on the porch where he dropped him with a loud “wump.”
Reentering the kitchen, he pulled out a chair to have me sit down. I held on to the back of it long enough for Warren to light a lamp. Then I reached towards him and Warren pulled me to him, our shadows painting the walls.
“You fought him off, Annie. And you definitely won. Good job my dear,” he said softly in my ear. “Shhhh, it’s okay now.” He patted my back tenderly.
My hands eased in alongside his body and around to his back. I couldn’t imagine ever letting go. Closing my eyes, I heard the rain. The constant din of rain had suddenly turned into a comfort. I stood there with water dripping between us, I didn’t care; all I needed to do was cry. I wept like a child, then I sobbed.
Warren stroked my dripping hair and pulled me even closer as if telling me of his caring, his concern, and his love for me. I cried harder. I was not just crying from the attack, I was crying out months of my fears, my loneliness, I cried out my tedious responsibilities. I cried for the men I had seen in the hospital that day and all the days, for the young man who begged me to bring him a gift: death.
I cried with thick punches of breath between gasps that shook me again and again, catching in my throat.
I cried for the mothers of sons, the wives an
d daughters of those who were once whole. I cried for a world gone mad in a grim spring where even the flowers would have to put off blooming. I cried for a life on hold. And I cried because I couldn’t tell Warren who I really was, but had to work at keeping my lies in line.
When my sobbing slowed, he held my hand and opened the stove with his other hand, adding a log to the nearly burned out embers. We watched the flames rise and warm us, then he pulled me into his chest again and stroked my hair and back, kissing my cold wet knuckles still tucked in his palm.
Then, gingerly as if I was a rare flower whose petals might fall if mishandled, Warren bent down to my ear and whispered to me, “Tell me where your tub and some dry clothes are and I’ll heat you a bath.”
“It’s down the hall in Kate’s room, straight ahead. Thank you, Warren. I’m so glad you’re here,” I said. Then I asked, “I didn’t kill him, did I?”
“No, he’s alive all right, but he’ll have a pretty good size lump for a few days, that’s all.” Tenderly, he turned me around and sat me down in a chair, pulled the curtains and locked the kitchen door. He put another chair under the door handle for added security.
It seemed a long while as I sat staring straight ahead of myself trying to make sense of what had just transpired. I wondered where the man had come from, how long he had been following me. I had no sense whatsoever that he had been following me and I was mad at myself for that. I realized that I had been caught up thinking about the conversations that haunted me from the hospital, but that was no excuse. I couldn’t risk being stupid even though I had been thinking about one of my charges in the ward who had an unusual look of peace and comfort on his face when I last checked on him. He died within the next hour.
In my exhausted state I had given Warren vague directions on the things he had asked for to prepare a bath. He loaded the stove with more wood and then he pumped water into several large pots that hung on the wall behind the stove. While he went off looking for my tub, I lit another lamp and stared at it as a moth flitted near its chimney.
In half an hour, I was easing into the steaming tub set out in the middle of the kitchen while Warren went off down the hallway to find some dry clothes. How could I have known then what he would find there?
Bringing in the blanket from my bed, he set it on the chair and walked to the cupboard. With a bottle of brandy in hand and the day’s twilight fading, Warren poured me a glass and then poured himself one as well. I remember he looked troubled, distant somehow. Sitting down, next to the tub, Warren sipped his drink. I was thinking that he was uncomfortable with the wounded man on the porch or by seeing my body this way.
I thought I’d feel uncomfortable in my nakedness, but the water’s warmth relaxed my fears.
“You are one mighty tough lady,” he said pouring me a glass. I sipped the the mellow liquor. Removing his jacket, he gathered up a cloth and dripped hot water down my back. After rolling up his sleeves, he massaged my neck turning sinew into taffy.
Taking in the comfort of the warm water and the brandy, I said, “Too bad this tub is only big enough for one of us.” Looking up at him, I smiled and slipped deeper into the water.
Warren grinned too, and then he rose from his chair to check the porch.
Reentering and adding more water to a large pot he said, “He’s still there, out for a while. I’ll go into town in a bit and get him in a cell. He’ll be off the streets for a long while. I’d bet on it.”
“Are you expected to return tonight? I’d feel better if you’d stay here, just to be sure.”
“With Stuart busy due to General Lee’s new appointment, I don’t think any of the boys will miss me. Besides, I left word where they could find me.”
“You did what?” I said sitting up in the tub then looking down at myself. I covered my breasts as best I could. “You expected to spend the night here? Or, just out?”
“Not exactly Annie. I was just thinking I’d be away until late in the evening. I was hopeful, I have to admit,” he paused, grinning slightly at me. “Look Annie, I know you’ve been through a lot today: working in the hospital, getting stuck in the rain, and then this,” he said pointing towards the porch. “I just want to be sure that you are safe and that you will sleep well tonight. I will sleep on the living room floor, or in Kate’s room.”
“Not in Kate’s room,” I said. “Sorry, but it’s off limits. I’m just a little surprised; I guess that you expected to stay. You expected to stay here, didn’t you, not somewhere else, yes?
“No where else, Annie.”
Easing up from the tub I said, “I see you brought in a blanket but could you please get me a few towels in the hallway closet?”
Exhausted, I wondered what to do next. I wanted Warren to stay, but what if I had an unexpected visitor? A spy? My life offered up such odd circumstances: if he slept on the floor, he’d be sleeping in the place especially reserved for Union spies. I wasn’t expecting anyone. In my state Warren seemed worth the risk.
I knew what I wanted to do…what I truly wanted to do. I wanted to drop everything and have Warren as my lover. I wanted to turn my world over to him, far away and start a future away from war. With Warren a Confederate officer, everything was far more complicated. A slip on my part, the wrong phrase, an inconsistency in a story and he could leave my side as a lover and turn me in as an enemy. And, if I was honest with myself I couldn’t justify using our relationship simply to further my espionage efforts. I was in love with the man. He too, was on the slide into love. I could tell by his looks, his touch, in his eyes. I knew it. With the war going on, and one battle raging into another, falling in love with Warren reminded me of winding through secret passages in a cave, where one maze of chambers connected to another and another keeping the traveler wondering if there would be a way out.
Brandy and the bath blurred the hard edges of my thoughts. What a struggle it was coming out of a steamy tub to wrestle with my convictions and with my feelings —in head and in heart —and I didn’t have the energy to do either one very well that night. I rose from the tub unashamed as Warren entered the kitchen with a towel outstretched and wrapped it around my body, then helped me to step over the high edge of the tub. He caught me around the waist and hugged me to him, leaving a kiss on my cheek. I smiled and then went off to my bedroom to find something to wear while Warren prepared a pot of hot tea.
I had to find out more about him. I only knew that he returned to the ‘Officer’s Barn’ at the end of each day, but I still wasn’t sure where, exactly, it was. It had to be a place where he’d tie flies by lamplight at night and trade them while others played banjos and harmonicas.
Thoughts swirled through my mind like gnats over a pond. And why had he chosen a blanket to wrap me in? Was it because it was the first thing he saw or had he gone into the trunk and found the uniforms? How could I have been so stupid asking him to find me something to put on? I should have remembered the uniforms at the bottom of the trunk. Then, there was always the possibility that he hadn’t seen them or if he had, that he didn’t really think about why I would have them.
Brushing the knots from my hair, I decided that despite everything, I wanted Warren to stay with me that night, to sleep by my side, to comfort me. It must have been my exhausted state, but I cared more about Warren as a man then as a member of any damn Confederacy.
June 2, 1862: After the battle of Seven Pines ended in a deadlock, General Robert E. Lee was appointed the Confederate Army’s new field commander.
CHAPTER ELEVEN