occasionally moan. The second night he had slept less heavily, and once he woke, fell back to sleep quickly, hardly aware of his injuries, for the moment.
The third night he was fully awake, fully aware of the pain in his side where the minie ball had puckered his flesh, and where a fall had broken his arm in two places; and it was then he saw the woman.
She stood at the far end of the tent talking to one of the patients there, a young dark-haired man whose left leg had been shattered by shot, and then later amputated. The man's condition was fair because he was young and in good health overall, and he was expected to leave the hospital in a week or so. The man was far luckier than many other of his comrades here, Foster thought.
A woman in this hellish place was an odd sight, Foster realized, for all the nurses, save one, were male, mostly marines assigned to this duty. Perhaps this woman was one of the civilians from a nearby farm or town, come to visit the wounded, come with gifts of food, come to cheer them up.
He shifted his head slightly, closed his eyes when the nausea hit him, then once he was all right, looked to his right. A boy, surely no older than fourteen, lay curled on the cot. A smell of pus and urine came from him. Foster, too long accustomed to the sharp smells of battlefield and hospital now, scarcely noticed the stench. On the far side of the boy — Foster thought the lad's name was Willy — slept an overweight man with a reddened countenance.
A drinker, Foster thought, and envied the man his liquid escape. Now, though, the drinker snored heavily, spittle bubbling on his plump lips. Foster didn't know what was wrong with the drinker, but he'd been there the longest of any of the patients, and he did not seem likely to leave any time soon.
To Foster's left lay an old sergeant; the man must have been all of fifty or so, but he looked elderly now. His skin was grey, and hung in folds upon his body where he had lost so much weight. Since Foster had been there, the sergeant had not opened his eyes; his breathing, scarcely audible, never varied. Across the narrow walkway between rows of cots Foster could see others similar to him: men with bandages on heads, across their eyes, around stumps of arms, and legs, swathing torsos.
During the day some of them talked — those in less pain — but at night it was bad. While some slept, oblivious to their pain and the anguish of those around them, most of the wounded suffered more through the long dark hours. Few spoke at all, but Foster heard much groaning and sobbing and cursing and whimpering, while others wordlessly tossed in their fevered states; occasionally a plaintive voice prayed to die.
At the end of the tent, just a few feet away from the woman, stood a tall movable screen. It had once been white cloth, but now was spotted with red and yellow and black, from all the patients who had faced the surgeon's desperate ministrations behind it. A sturdy table upon which operations were conducted sat behind that barrier, and one modest cabinet which stored the surgeon's meagre supply of drugs and tools.
The woman glanced up now and saw Foster watching, and she smiled, and he thought how beautiful she was, quite the loveliest he had seen in a long time. Her waist-length hair, caught at the nape of her slender neck, appeared to be a reddish gold, or so it seemed in the dim light. He could not see the colour of her eyes though they seemed dark. Her lips were red and full, her skin pale, but that was the way of many of our Southern ladies, he reflected. She wore a gown of good cloth, a sober grey in colour, much like the uniforms of Foster's army.
Or the uniforms that we once had, he thought, as he noted the appearance of each of the patients. Some still wore the remnants of their uniforms — the grey with butternut trim, but most had only discoloured rags, and even those with nearly whole uniforms had added a colour: the men wore grey and butternut and blood.
The woman was bending over the young amputee now, holding his hand. Foster looked away. Perhaps she was a sister or the man's fiancee.
He fell asleep soon after that, and when he woke again, the woman was gone.
The next day the young man died.
The doctors came by that afternoon and examined each man. They told Foster that he must rest more and spooned down some awful-tasting medicine. His meals that day were several mouthfuls of a thin gruel over which a chicken had been passed for flavour, or so he suspected, and in which floated a few wild onions. It was all that his stomach could tolerate.
That night he felt much worse than he had the night before, the pain radiating out from his side, coursing down his legs until he thought his limbs were on fire; his arm throbbed each time he took a breath. He forced himself not to think about his condition, forced his mind to other matters, such as his family.
His family waited for him at home in eastern Tennessee, and, God willing, he would be with them soon. He wished he could get a letter home to his wife, but no one had come by, asking if he wanted to write letters, no one in the tent had pencil or paper for him to use. So he wrote the letters to Sarah, and to his parents, in his mind. Each night he revised the letter from the previous night; he concentrated on each word, each phrase. He thought it was the only way to keep the pain at bay.
He was not always successful.
That night he slept fitfully, and once he woke — or perhaps it was simply a dream — he saw the titian-haired woman again, and this time she was at the second cot from the door, and she had somehow crawled up on to the body of the sleeping soldier there, and she seemed to be leaning over his chest and whispering to him. Her hair hung in long burnished folds, and all Foster could see through that curtain was the tips of her breasts pushing at the confines of her gown. He blinked, his vision blurred, and when he awoke, the man in the second cot — an Irishman with flaming red hair — lay alone.
The next day as Foster struggled to sit upright he thought of his dream the night before. How curious it had been. He'd never dreamed anything like that before; never. And what did this most peculiar dream mean?
Perhaps it meant, he thought with what passed for a grin, he had been too long without a woman.
He saw that a man across from him was awake and spooning down the gruel the nurses brought them, and he decided that he would visit a little.
'John Francis Foster,' he said when he had caught the other man's attention.
'Webster Long,' the other said.
They exchanged information on their individual companies and their fighting experiences real and exaggerated, and that last battle which had sent them to the hospital. Long, a private who'd volunteered as had Foster, had lost an eye to a bayonet and his head was nearly encased with dressings so that Foster couldn't tell what colour the man's hair was. Long had a fair moustache, though, and pale blue eyes. Foster shifted slightly, wincing at the jab of pain.
