HOMAGE to CHARLES JENNINGS of the 28th CONNECTICUT

Pine Island Cemetery, Norwalk

This morning I noticed this headstone in Norwalk’s Pine Island Cemetery, whose first incumbent joined it in the early eighteenth century. There are not a few Civil War veterans slumbering among its merchants and oystermen. They, however, came home to die, years or decades after the conflict. This poor bastard, however, bought the farm aged twenty-eight, almost exactly 162 years ago, in what must have been a sweltering Union hospital in Memphis. Having had the rotten luck to survive his wounds on the battlefield, he presumably died a protracted and horrific death from infection.

I was reminded that years ago I wrote a story about a similarly luckless bastard in a Union Army hospital in Tennessee. It first appeared in Blue Mountain Review. It’s reproduced below. Please read it and consider the last days of Charles Jennings of the 28th Connecticut Regiment.

AN EPISODE BEFORE LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN

His friends told him how lucky he was, that he had the lucky wound, just a bullet in the wrist and his war was over with a pension and a medal and stories to tell in the tavern and maybe a fuck with the landlord’s daughter for free.

But that lucky wound was inflicted by a ball of lead weighing an ounce, flying just under the supersonic, its soft metal flattening in its course almost to a disc at impact, blasting apart skeletal and nervous and vascular anatomy, fragments spreading like high-speed shrapnel, cracks fissuring up the bone like backwards tributaries. The ball carried with it fragments of his heavy woolen coat and filthy linen shirt, crawling with e.coli from months in the field in which hygiene had consisted of wiping his fingers on the grass after he'd dragged them through his anus, so that hours after his friends had clapped him on the shoulder on the unwounded side and cursed him good-naturedly for his good fortune, the lucky wound turned green and stinking and his arm blew up almost to burst his sleeve.

He cursed and gibbered and sang and the surgeon came over and said here boy bite on this and stuck a dowel between his teeth and two orderlies sat on his chest and a third held his legs and the saw bit through his elbow and off came his rotting forearm. It was his left, no loss they said, you're right handed anyway

Shortly the surgeon and the orderlies moved on to the next man, leaving him to live or die as God intended or nature allowed. The battalion moved on to join the column. For the balance of the afternoon he slept and sweated and when he awoke raved and wept. But sometimes he fell silent and stared at the stump wrapped in bloody rags.

Later that day the fever broke for a moment, whether to come again anybody’s guess, and he raised the stump in its scarlet bandage and looked at it for a long time. He knew something was wrong. Not in the way of other men in the tent who didn’t yet understand why they couldn’t jig on legs that ended at the knee. It was something different.

He got off his cot. He didn’t fall though if he had nobody would’ve noticed or had time to care. He’d been in the army long enough to know where he had to go.

There were two paths from the surgeons’ tents. One for corpses, carried on stretchers towards the war graves with some attempt at decorum. The other for amputated limbs, piled in carts, arms whose fingers still twitched as though playing castanets, the morning’s legs going green, the afternoon’s still tense and springy as though for a race. The amputations were dumped into a pit where two darkie freedmen stood, bandanas across their faces against the stench, now and again sprinkling quicklime and waiting for day’s end to bury the surgeon’s successes.

That’s where they found him. The darkies knew that white men could do whatever they wanted most of the time but when something like this happened they also knew saying nothing would be a lot worse than saying something.

The surgeons had left with the battalion. But the army had decided that a pharmacist from Galena was worth a medical corps commission so that was who came spilling down the sides of the pit with an orderly behind him.

In front of him was a one-armed man digging through a pit of stiffened ownerless limbs. He was on his knees. The process was awkward. Not only did he have only one arm to work with, but he frequently lost balance and had to twist as he fell to protect his stump. Yet he always pushed himself up and kept going.

Legs had no interest at all for him, the pharmacist saw. Nor did many arms. Some he disregarded. Others he lifted and examined briefly before tossing them aside. He was obviously looking for one in particular.

He was just a Galena pharmacist but he had been in the war from its beginning two years ago. He had seen this before.

The limb pit wasn’t deep-dug so it was broad. The one-armed soldier was near its center and the pharmacist knew it would do no good to shout to him as though to a drowning swimmer from the shore.

So gingerly the pharmacist walked out to meet the one armed man. He hadn’t been squeamish in his Illinois dispensary in peacetime and his years with a saw in the wounded tents certainly hadn’t made him so. His only concern about pitching face forward into flesh in the early stages of decomposition was breaking his spectacles. He had only the one spare pair and who knew when his wife in Galena could send him another, so he trod carefully, one foot ahead of the other, arms outstretched like an acrobat at the circus he and his wife had seen on their trip to Springfield in the last year before the war.

The severed limbs shifted and twisted whenever he put weight on them. Once or twice he swayed dramatically. One time he almost fell when he stepped on an arm lost at the shoulder just the wrong way and it flipped up as though it wanted to drag him down.

But it didn’t. The one-armed man in his hospital nightshirt picked through body parts as diligently as a housewife comparing smelts. The shirt was filthy now. The soldier’s stump rags were sodden and leaking bright red. As he worked the pharmacist could hear his breath was labored and included a rattle that meant his lungs were filling.

He tapped the soldier on the good shoulder. The man stopped and looked up with fever-bright eyes.

“Sorry, son,” said the pharmacist from Galena. “We’re pretty good. But we’re not that good. We can’t sew it back on, even if you find it.”

The one-armed man nodded. “I know. I’m just looking for my wedding ring. I don’t want to die without it.”

The older man took off the spectacles clipped to the bridge of his nose. He didn’t wear a coat when he worked in the wounded tents so he had to keep his handkerchief up a shirtcuff that was usually bloodsodden by noon but today was barely speckled. He polished his glasses longer than he needed to and wedged them back into place. He hadn’t worn them when he was courting his wife, ashamed of his weak eyes, but after they were married she told him the dents on his nose gave him away, and she hadn’t cared at all. He adjusted them a couple of times and told himself that it was just coincidence that he was using his left hand.

The pharmacist waved to his orderly and the darkies at the edge of the amputation pit. One of the darkies had an old musket and lifted it awkwardly. The orderly had taken out his flask and was rubbing it, empty, against his forehead for comfort. “We’re fine!” said the pharmacist. “We’re just fine! This may take a while so you just settle.”

The one armed man was still looking at him. “All right, son,” said the pharmacist. “Let’s get started.”