The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night. Brendan Graham

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       SIXTEEN

      The hospital was already alive with movement – an air of excitement. Those who could, mad for action. Mad to fight for America.

      ‘America!’ Hercules O’Brien began the day. ‘Wide open spaces and narrow minds. If it ain’t American it ain’t good! In ascending order, Irish, African, German, Jew.’

      ‘But cannon fodder is different, Hercules,’ ‘Souper’ Doyle, a Confederate from Co. Galway, answered. ‘The off-scourings of the world is good enough for American buck and ball. Didn’t you hear the officers colloguing with each other, how “Irish Catholics were a resource of fodder for enemy cannon that couldn’t be ignored?” Well it’s our America now, whether the Northern Yankees like it or not. We’re no longer lodgers in someone else’s home!’

      Souper Doyle resented how his name had followed him here to America. What harm if his people had ‘taken the soup’, changed, for a while, to the ‘English religion’, for food to keep body and soul together during the worst of the Bad Times. Sure hadn’t they changed back again, when the winter of Black ’Forty-Seven was over! But the name had stuck … the Doyles were ‘soupers’. Thomas Patrick Doyle had hoped that when he left Godforsaken Galway behind, he would also leave there all references to soup. So he had taken a purseful of coin and the passage money to America from the recruiting officer who had come to Ireland, seeking ‘stout-hearted fighting men’. The man with the drawling accent had promised them ‘Glory’ … during the war, and a ‘grander life in a free America’ … after they had won it!

      ‘Souper!’

      He winced now as Hercules O’Brien addressed him. Souper Doyle wondered, that if he ever got out of this hellish army in one piece, if he could find some place far out in the west where there was no damned Irish? Where he wouldn’t be known, and change his name? Hercules! Now there was a grand name … a grand, stout-hearted name.

      ‘Souper!’ the current owner of that name called out again.

      ‘You Rebs will need a flag of truce to get back to your lines.’ Then turning to the nuns asked, ‘Is there not a flidgin’ of white among the lot of you Sisters to make a truce flag for the Rebs?’

      Louisa came to the rescue, running to their quarters and salvaging a well-washed winter petticoat from its out-of-season hibernation. It wasn’t white – a cream-coloured flannel – but it couldn’t be mistaken for what it was.

      When he saw her return with it, Jared Prudhomme insisted he be the flagbearer. Vowing devotion to her faded thrown-off, he fixed it atop his bayonet.

      ‘May it and the Lord keep you safe,’ Louisa whispered to him.

      Mary then gave the Rebel band her blessing, putting them, as Alabarmy pronounced it, ‘Under the one Sister’s protection and the other Sister’s petticoat!’

      Out they went then, the small band of Johnny Rebs. The boy, good-as-new from his wound, proudly bearing Louisa’s petticoat aloft, led them. Then Ol’ Alabarmy, defiant as ever, proclaiming his one arm ‘good enough to pull a trigger on nigger-jiggin’ Yankees.’ With them, the Tennessee fiddle player, his asthmatic fiddle strapped to his knapsack – and Souper Doyle. ‘One of our own, misleadin’ himself,’ Hercules O’Brien bemoaned.

      ‘The mighty great man in a little man’s body’ as the men called the diminutive sergeant, should not yet have been ready enough for more action but he had seemed hell-bent on returning to the fray. Now he came to Ellen, awkward in his own way.

      ‘Blessings on you, ma’am, for the tender touch – and the mighty craic. I hope you find your husband!’

      And he pressed into her hand a letter.

      ‘Read it after I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and tell her I forgive her.’

      She started to say something, saw a strong man’s tears well up in his eyes, fighting not to fall.

      ‘Better be dead than finished,’ he said, and went.

      Ellen watched after him, knowing she would not see him again. Something about the small way he carried himself.

      Like hedgehogs in March they went, sniffing out if the world had changed during the long sleep into spring.

      They waved the Southerners off, the nurses … and the nursed who could walk. Then the Union soldiers, Hercules O’Brien among them, went out to their own side.

      Two thoughts struck Ellen. The first that what she was witnessing seemed to deny the very essence of the work she was doing – healing. If it was just patching them up to go out again, have another chance at death, what was the weary point of it all?

      Her second thought was that their leaving freed up some space. For the inevitable mangled fruit that would be harvested from today’s reeking plain.

      She had taken no more than a dozen steps inside the hospital when she heard the gunfire. Just a small fusillade. Men jerked up in their beds.

      ‘It’s the Rebs!’ one whispered – and all knew. ‘Our boys got the Rebs!’

      She ran to the door, Louisa already ahead of her, turning her head back, a stricken look upon her face. They careered across the short distance to where the crumpled group of grey-clad bodies lay. Ellen saw Louisa’s petticoat on the ground, tossed this way and that by the СКАЧАТЬ