Late September 1865 / City Point, Virginia
Ding ding ding.
He found himself lying under white sheets with very little idea of how he had gotten there. It was the morning he woke up. A piercing, repetitive noise broke like thin glass over his consciousness. It was the sound of a dinner bell. He heard rolling carts, the jingle of dishes rattling against one another. His head felt tight, and he didn’t know why.
He seemed to have been there for some time.
People nearby were talking. Everything was painted white: the walls, the center posts, a wooden roof overhead. A hot breeze moved down the aisle between rows of beds.
He looked down and saw that his coverings were neat and unbloodied. His hands were laid on top of the sheets as if carefully placed there one by one. The bed was too short for him. They always were. On all the beds were men; most of them were bandaged, some had crutches. The low murmur of conversation went on and on. He saw that he did not have his clothes on, but instead a sort of nightgown. He could smell vinegar and boric acid.
A young man came walking down the aisle and stopped by the foot of his cot. The boy’s hair was as spiky as a porcupine’s, and he paused with a deep lean forward to look closely into the tall man’s face. Canvas curtains at the far end lifted and fell with the breeze.
He slowly pieced together the fragments of his present situation. He was in a field hospital somewhere. He was still in possession of both arms, both legs, a pair of feet, and a pair of hands. He could see out of both eyes. His head felt as if it were encased in a bucket. He quietly regarded the young man standing at the foot of his bed. He wondered if he were some relation to him.
After a moment he said, “Who are you?”
A pause of astonished silence and then, “Oh God, you’re talking.” Tears came to the boy’s eyes, and the tip of his nose became bright red. He said, “I am a nurse.” He came to stand at the bedside as if he could not believe his eyes. He put one hand on the tall man’s shoulder. “Wait, I am going to call the doctor.”
“Very well. I won’t go anywhere.” He drew up one leg. He couldn’t understand why the nurse had tears in his eyes. He saw that the men on the beds were eating their dinner, reaching for more from the cart.
The boy hurried away. Shortly he came back with a man whose thick dark beard straggled over his collar and the lapels of a soiled corduroy coat. Both hands hung from the man’s cuffs like lead weights. His nails were thick with dried blood. He had something in his fingers. A feather.
“Well, well,” he said. “This is a pleasant surprise.” Then he paused and looked carefully into the wounded man’s light-colored eyes. He came to sit on the bed and the nurse hovered behind while the man on the bed watched carefully to see what this man with the feather was going to do.
“I’m Dr. Jameson, and I want you to look at this.” The man in the corduroy coat held up a quill pen. “Watch it,” he said. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes.” He moved his head from one side to the other as if stretching against a collar that was too tight. The bucket on his head made scraping noises. It hurt. The doctor took hold of his chin and jaw and then let go.
“Don’t move your head, just your eyes.”
“All right.” His eyes tracked the quill as it moved up and down and then sideways.
“Good!” the doctor said in a bright tone. “Excellent!” Then the doctor reached out carefully and put his hand over the tall man’s left eye. “Now do the same.”
And so he did, first one eye and then the other, watching the feather dip and wave.
He heard a pleased murmur from the nurse, and the doctor said, “Very good. Now, do you know where you are?”
“No.”
“What was the last place you remember?”
“The last place I remember.” He repeated this in an undertone and then turned his head with great care to look down the long center aisle; he saw men sitting up in bed to spoon food into their mouths, speaking to one another in low tones, three others who had ranged themselves around a companion’s bed to play cards, men with bandages, men who slept deeply or perhaps were on the last slide down to death. One patient nudged another and nodded toward the little group at the wounded man’s bed.
He reached up to touch his head bandage, but the doctor gently pressed his hand down.
A bright morning came back to him where water-light reflected from a nearby river or canal in some city and in all that reflected light he and another person were loading saddles onto a wagon. He didn’t know where that was. Then a dark night in which he flew into the night sky under a great balloon and saw a fire burning in the distance. A town under his feet, far below. But maybe he shouldn’t mention this.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I remember loading saddles, but I don’t know where that was.”
The doctor nodded as if this were to be expected. He asked, “What is your name?”
He was caught in a frozen moment of mortification and not a little fear. Jesus God, what if I don’t know my own name? I have to know my own name. Then the word lieutenant came to him.
“I am a first lieutenant,” he said. “Company C, EightiethNew York Infantry.”
The nurse said, “Doctor, he has just now come to himself.”
“Very well, Lem, we’ll wait a little.” The doctor let out a long breath. “Luckily Sergeant Chaney came and identified him.”
The man on the bed processed this word by word. “Identified me,” he repeated in a low voice. After a moment he asked, “Do I have any other wounds?” His face was a drawn architecture of cheekbones and eyes deep in his head, his skin the color of biscuit dough.
The doctor patted his forearm. “No. An older bullet wound, well healed, is all. But you know about that.”
Do I? He didn’t. But the doctor was talking.
“What you have here is a diastetic linear skull fracture. A fracture that passes through parietal lines. We had to stitch a V-shaped flap of your scalp back on, but it has all knitted well and you are on your way to health, I assure you.”
“Good.” His hand went up to the bandage and once again the doctor gently pressed it down.
“Do you know what happened?”
“I expect you should probably tell me.”
He listened with a grave, intent expression as the doctor described the explosion, the great number of wounded, the dead. Five thousand pounds of gunpowder in that barge, and the rebels had hit it with hot shot. That was his entire life, those things sailing into the air. Knives and forks, blankets in streaming rags, personal diaries blasted to confetti, stables, cavalry tack and gear. Also a telegraph clearinghouse and all the telegraphy supplies—combination instruments, many miles of wire, five hundred cups of battery, all the new Clark relays blown to fragments. Men at the center of the explosion were atomized and remain forever unaccounted for. Farther from the center were those who were grievously wounded, those who died within days and those like him who lost all identity, lost their clothes, were struck by enormous boat chains and door hinges, by tools, by broken china, in an instantaneous event where anything and everything became a deadly missile.
“What did I get hit with?”
“A piece of anchor chain. It was a glancing blow, luckily.”
“How did they know?”
“The piece of chain was embedded in a tree along with your cap.”
“I see.” A moment’s reflection; then he thought about his clothes. He said, “I must have bled all over everything.” He wanted to get dressed as soon as possible, but if his clothes were all stained and bloody he needed to find different ones.
“You absolutely cannot get up for another two days.” The doctor rose. “Absolutely.”
He lay awake all the long night as candles or lanterns passed up and down the aisle, doctors and male nurses attending to some crisis. He lay awake, and after a while he felt a great surging of happiness because it was very good to be awake and alive. To look around and see things and to know what it was he was seeing. And then it came to him that his name was Jean-Louis Chenneville. It was as if something had fallen into its proper slot with a click. DitJohn for les Américains.
In the days to come, he understood that he was in the great field hospital Grant had set up just outside of City Point, Virginia, on the James River. A model of its kind. They brought him some clothes. They were stacked neatly beside his bed.
John looked at them. He realized the nurse, Lemuel, and the doctor and who knows who else had cared for him and fed him and done all that was necessary all that time of semi-coma. It was a sobering thought. Gratitude was part of that thought.
As soon as the doctor said he might get up he slowly fought his way into the clothes. He was not sure if they were his or not, and they were too loose, but they were the right length and he was hard to fit. He pulled on the uniform trousers and blouse. It took some time to do this. They were his, then, cleaned, but still with some blood specks here and there. His body was very white and thin, his hands soft, unused, and apparently his own clothes were too big for him. He found this deeply disturbing. In three years of fighting, it had been burned forever into his mind that if you were not strong and unceasingly alert you would not live. He could not shake this. Nor would he ever.
The young male nurse brought him a large pair of brogans, which fitted well enough. John braced himself on two canes and went out slowly into the hospital grounds to see the trees throwing their yellow leaves and to feel the cool nip of the wind. He fought for balance with a grim, fixed expression and managed to make it to the entrance of the hospital grounds and back again.
Last he remembered it was early spring, or late winter of some year. He had arrived, like it or not, back into this world. While he had lain for months, half-conscious and drifting, carefully fed and tended as he floated in some bright pallid neverland, Lee had surrendered, Lincoln had been assassinated, and the great Union Army had gone home. They left behind only the troops of the occupation and the wounded. The war was over.
The 80th New York had gone without him, and he alone of all his company was in this field hospital with an empty past. Speech returned to him but not coherent memory. He recalled a great deal as he lay on his bed, but he could not put things into order. He ate anything and everything they brought to him, determined to fill out his uniform and his civilian clothes again.
One day a sergeant came to him with a sheaf of discharge forms in his hand and tried to fill one out for him: his age, place of birth, height, coloring. The height and coloring were easy enough, but John’s frustration was bitter and infuriating when he could not remember the rest. He could not even read it. Finally the sergeant said, “Never mind, sir, it’s all right, just fill it out yourself when it comes back to you.” He gave John a hearty slap on one shoulder and went on down the aisle from one patient to another, filling out the forms for them.
The doctor came down the aisle with a jaunty walk, greeting patients. “When can I leave?” John asked. “I have my discharge, and it’s a long way home.” He held it out, blanks and all. He lay outside his blankets in trousers and shirt; they almost fit him now.
“Yes,” said Dr. Jameson. He examined the blank spaces. “Where is home?”
“It is, I now distinctly remember, someplace north of St. Louis. When can I start?”
“Soon.” The doctor listened to his heart. “When you stand, lift your head; don’t let it fall forward. Keep your back straight and your head level.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Now. Your uncle Basile from New Orleans has been sending me telegrams, letters, very concerned. Basile Chenneville. Do you remember him?”
John made a silent internal effort, called up a face much like his father’s. “Yes.” He ran his hands down his upper arms, feeling their slackness. He was turning into a boneless pudding. His feet were long and white and without calluses.
“And so I have emphasized to him that you are not to be troubled with anything untoward or negative, but your mind should, as it were, glide down the stream of health and healing undisturbed.”
John was suddenly alert. “There is bad news. What is it? I want you to tell me.” He sat on the side of the bed with his head bent down while the doctor unwound his head bandages and then unrolled fresh ones. John touched the left side of his head and felt raised scars and bristly hair.
“Indeed, there is not.” The doctor was firm. He rebandaged John’s head. “Now, we gathered together what of your possessions survived the explosion. Your camp box and baggage suffered water damage as well as fire, but there’s a few things inside. They made you a new camp box and put into it all the, well, remnants.” He tucked in the ends of the new bandages. “Are you Creole? Do you speak French?”
“Not New Orleans Creole, St. Louis,” John said and paused. “St. Louis was all French, once. I’m from one of those old families. Yes, I speak French.”
“Do you recall that language?”
“I do,” said John, and despite this confident statement he had to sort through his head as if it were stocked with shelves and he could not find the right one. “Read something of my uncle’s letter. Anything.”
“Yes, well, I copied something here, mmm, luckily I read French fairly well . . .” The doctor took out a slip of paper and read, “Bien entendu . . . mmm . . . ne le derange pas nullment mon neveu . . .” Then looked up at his patient with the glaring head wound, tall and broad in the shoulders and slightly unbalanced.
“Ah oue.” It seemed to supply to John a sort of spring, tripping him over into French. “Nous sommes parents de mom pere.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you don’t lookFrench.”
“You’re forgiven.”
Dr. Jameson nodded with a pleasant smile. He was thinking of the report he would make on this interesting skull fracture, this surprising recovery from a semi-coma. Complete recall of two languages, speech unimpaired, balance improving daily, no outbursts of temper, etc. He would include in this report his gratitude to head volunteer nurse Mrs. Stillwell for her organization of those with nursing skills and so on. Then he went on his rounds, leaving John with the conundrum that if there was bad news, he was not to hear it.
John got dressed again in a series of careful, thought-out movements, but he did better this time. The young male attendant hovered at his back, making little anxious helping gestures in the air.
“Leave me alone,” John said. He took up his two canes and kept his spine straight and his head level. He went outside thinking this over, this business of not being dérangé, not being upset by bad news. He concentrated on walking from one side of the hospital grounds to the other. Great chestnut trees scattered their leaves upon his wounded head; colors of citron and lemon and amber.
His other injury had never bothered him. It was a clean small-caliber hole. And then the memory came back to him; they had fished the ball out with tongs. When he tried to place the incident he remembered absolute chaos; all their artillery and provisions wagons jammed up in a muddy road and lines of march falling apart, and a Rebel sharpshooter somewhere in the woods to the left. He had been knocked down by the bullet’s impact. It was a place called Todd’s Tavern. That must have been before the barge blew up.
And before the barge blew up, he had gone up in a balloon somewhere. This troubled him. He wanted it to be real. Also it made him apprehensive that he might be subject to imaginings or false memories.
He asked for his possessions, and they got them out of a great tent stacked full of abandoned gear. They brought him the whole lot: a newly made camp box, greatcoat, knapsack, rifle, revolver, pommel holster, and civilian clothes. On top of his box, he saw his tall riding boots. They had both been slashed wide open from top to instep. They must have done that when they brought him in. The boots were hard to get off, and they had many wounded and little time. He knew he must have gone to some trouble and expense to have them made, but he couldn’t bring the circumstances to mind and briefly regretted the ruin of a good pair of riding boots. He threw them in the trash barrel outside.
Inside the camp box he found a hard and shriveled leather folder. It was blackened on the edges from a burning, and inside were fragments and sometimes whole pages of letters.
It took a few moments for him to make sense of handwriting; handwriting itself. He finally understood that the black letters were all on one plane. On a flat surface. They came up out of a kind of obscure matrix and took form.
Finally there it was. First Lt. Chenneville to board the Intrepid for limited tethered flight over Yorktown there to observe and report . . . His relief was enormous. He sat on his cot in his drawers, holding the scorched paper in both hands. He was suspended in thought for a long time. Such pleasing fires. The swaying great hot-air sack named the Intrepid lifting into the dark sky on an order of physical properties heretofore unknown. All Yorktown below him and something alight on the docks.
And there too was the small portrait of his sister Lalie. It was in a folding case, framed in gilt, a daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were going out of fashion, but the newer ambrotypes had none of their mystery nor their beauty. They were washed in a gold solution, which gave them depth and fine detail and their sitters a haunting immortality. He looked at it, searching out her voice and manner, hidden in the blacks and golds. Then he put it back in its moleskin bag. He couldn’t concentrate on handwriting for more than a short space of time and closed the box. After that he slept again, for the entire day and the night afterward.
The next morning he lifted a straight razor to his jaw, and his hand shook so that the blade glittered. He tried anyway, but he cut himself, and so laid the razor down. He took up his two canes and went in search of a barber. The young male nurse finished filling pitchers of water on John’s row and then hurried after him.
John sat in a chair out in the sun while an orderly shaved him and then clipped his hair down soldier-short, on doctor’s orders. The clippers ran like teeth over the long scar. John shut his hands together with a tense precision as if pain were a mathematical problem, as if he had just solved it and the solution did not include making a noise if he could help it. Sweat ran down his face.
The male attendant stood at John’s shoulder and watched with interest. He unfolded a shawl and tucked it around John’s shoulders. It was cream-colored and in several different decorative weaves. John had no idea where it had come from. The orderly insisted on rebandaging his head, looping clean strips of linen around his skull.
The young attendant waved a hand. “Don’t you worry, sir. I’ve had plenty of head injuries. Men hauled in here with their brains hanging out, and before you know it, they’re playing the piano and reading Deuteronomy without missing a word.”
“What about dancing?”
“Schottisches only. Regulations. No jigs, no high kicks.”
John gave him a brief smile and remembered that the young man’s name was Lemuel. He was very thin and had thick, mud-colored hair. John slowly took the mirror that the barber handed him and looked at his own face for the first time in a long time.
It was himself; eyes hollowed and deep and the light irises glittering out of two caves of shadow. His upper lip thickened and broad like a boxer’s that had been hit too many times. His skin was devoid of color, and the band of his shirt collar was too large. He handed the mirror back. He was doing much better. He knew his own name now and remembered things. When they brought him in, the stretcher men didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know who he was either, but now he possessed, like treasures, his own name and the place where he was from.
“It will all come back,” said the barber and nodded in an encouraging way.
“I intend for it to come back,” John said. He lay back against the shawl, frail, transparent. “Where did this shawl come from?”
“Your uncle sent it,” said Lemuel. “Sent all manner of things. Saved them for you. Wasn’t easy.”
“Why wasn’t it easy?”
“People make off with things around this place, especially now, since about everybody’s gone home. Except the bad cases like you.” Then the young man caught himself and gave John a hearty slap on the shoulder. “But you ain’t a bad case no more! Hey?” He poured a handful of nuts into John’s palm. They were pecans and smelled of cinnamon and brown sugar. “Here, you need to eat more.”
The next week, on one of his lurching walks about the grounds, John came across the boy just outside the main staff office tent. The tent was an enormous thing of billowing white canvas. Young Lemuel was being thrown about like a jointed doll by a huge corporal. There was a lot of shouting going on.
John was down to one cane now; he stalked up to the struggling figures and grabbed the young attendant by the shirt collar. He jammed his cane into the corporal’s chest to shove him back. He was far taller than either of them.
“What the hell is going on here?” he said. “I can’t stand yelling. Stop yelling.”
“Sir!” the corporal said and came to attention. “This ratbag was caught with a box of pralines from the volunteer tent!”
Lemuel hung like a piece of washing from John’s big hand as his shirt collar slowly tore loose from its band. “Well, what of it?” said John. “Let him have the Goddamned pralines, would you? Anything for some peace and quiet. We are all sick and wounded around here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
The corporal bit his lip and gave one short nod. He stared hard and cold at the boy. “Keep it up,” the corporal said in a low voice. “And see what happens.”
John let go of the young man’s collar and said, “If I were you, ratbag, I would stay out of sight for a while.”
Lemuel scrambled away into the grounds, disappearing behind a patient tent as if he had evaporated.
In the ensuing days, John sat in a chair in the chill sunshine and thought through everything: his name, his rank, his family and their names. Where they all were or were not. He was not married, he was sure of that. His father was dead of a heart condition, and after that it seemed his sister had married and his mother had gone to live with the New Orleans Chennevilles for some reason. Or was she dead too? Maybe she had died and he had lost the memory.
This stopped him. It was an alarming thought. Then a young woman’s face came to him, and in this recalled image she was lit by sunlight from a tall window, but he could not remember her name, only a wrenching loss that he could not put words to, and so he got to his feet and began walking again as if he could leave that loss in the chair behind him, a tall man like a dark shadow walking until evening, relentlessly moving from shadow to shadow until somebody said, “Sir, sir, it’s suppertime, you should rest now.”
Then came a letter from his uncle Basile Chenneville.
He spent an hour at it. It said that he, Basile, could not leave family and business in New Orleans to come to Virginia for him, but if John would hire an attendant to accompany him to St. Louis then Basile would come upriver to meet him at Temps Clair.
A view of a great river sprang up in his head; the plantation called Marais Temps Clair was their home, and it was three miles from the village of Bonnemaison. Bonnemaison itself was fifteen miles north of St. Louis in that blessed land between the rivers where it was always fair weather, where brown floods of water rushed toward those seas that lay at the bottom of the world.
Get to Harpers Ferry, Basile wrote, and then take the Baltimore and Ohio passenger cars to Wheeling, then an Ohio River steamboat to St. Louis. Temps Clair, it is yours now—the place needs you. Have been communicating with your doctors weekly. Are you in want of funds? Tu a besoin de piastre? I will send all you need, dear Jean, cher neveu—how many nights we have prayed for your very life. Your mother, I fear, is not well; we hope for a full recovery, but she sends loving regards.
His alive and living mother sent loving regards. He dropped his head back and watched the unmoving blue skies of Virginia, and relief overtook him. It was a silky feeling of broad, inclusive happiness that brought images of the rolling great Missouri River and, for some reason, three big horses named The Corbeau and Sheba and Blackjack. He sat there in the sunlight until it faded.
John was to stay at the Robidoux House when he arrived in St. Louis. His uncle Basile Chenneville had more money than God, but he chose to stay in a place where he could speak French instead of at, say, the fashionable Planter House, where he would have to deal with English-speaking waiters, or worse, the Irish, and even worse than that, American food. Vegetables boiled for hours. Flour gravy on everything. In his dialectical French, salted with ancient words that few used anymore except people like the Robidoux family, Basile could order services, make demands, dine well, and bargain with far more facility.
So John hired Lemuel for thirty-five dollars a month. They were going to be among crowds, both aboard a steamboat and then in the city of St. Louis. He needed a person wise in the ways of that semi–criminal netherworld of riverfronts and city streets. John had never thought of southerners as city people, but the byways of Richmond were plagued with gangs, they said, desperate war orphans and a criminal element one would expect only in big northern cities. Lemuel had apparently graduated from that hard and starving school. However, John was not interested in hearing his story. He was trying to recover his own.
He still needed the cane, and still his right hand shook when he lifted the straight razor. He could not write well yet, but it would not be long, because he wouldn’t quit until he could.
One last visit to the doctor; the man’s stethoscope lay beside him unused, since by now he knew John’s heart and lungs were in top condition, no problem there. Lemuel stood demurely behind John with John’s coat over his arm.
“You’ll sign my release, then,” John said.
“Of course. Remarkable recovery.” The doctor signed the form. “You are a determined man. Now, are you sure about this journey?”
“Yes, my uncle has carefully written out instructions for every step of the way. He’s afraid I can’t tell a steamboat from a shithouse, but I appreciate his concern.”
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