Legends

“Fredericksburg resembled Sodom. Buildings had been set ablaze by the retreating Federals, the emporium lay gutted, its furniture and wares littering the planks of the sidewalk and the dirt in the street. What was left of silken gowns that had been cut up for handkerchiefs and towels hung limply from placards projecting over the entrances to stores. Mad women from the asylum, in sooty shifts and bare footed, picked through the debris, collecting pocket mirrors and colored ribbons and fine ladies hats imported from Paris France, which they pulled over their matted hair. Two of them were struggling to carry off a Regulator clock. I was surely one of the last to cross the bridge because the engineers began to unfasten the pontoons behind me. On the other side I wandered from campfire to campfire, past dispirited troops dozing on the ground, past pickets sleeping on their feet. I must have become feverish because much of what happened to me subsequent to the retreat across the pontoon bridge is disjointed and fuzzy in my head. I seem to remember great lines of woebegone soldiers trudging back toward Washington, the wounded piled three and four deep in open carts drawn by mules, the dead buried in shallow graves where they succumbed. When I came awake, I don’t know how many days later, I found myself on a cot stained with dried blood in a field hospital. Doctors decided I was suffering from hypochondria, what your fancy doctors call depression nowadays. A gentleman with a kindly face and a soiled white shirt open at the throat was sponging my chest and neck with vinegar to bring down the fever. We got to talking. He told me his name was Walter. Only later did I discover him to be the celebrated Brooklyn poet Whitman, scouring the field hospitals for his brother George, who’d been listed as wounded in the battle. Luck would have it, he’d found him in the same tent as me. One morning, when I felt stronger, Walter put his arm around my waist and helped me out of the tent into the sunlight. We sat, only the two of us, with our backs to a stack of fresh pine coffins. I remember Walter staring at the heap of amputated limbs behind the tent and opining, Fredericksburg is the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth’s wars. After some while orderlies appeared from the tent carrying three stretchers with corpses on them and set them on the ground to attend burial. The dead men were covered with blankets, with the toes of their stockings sticking out and pinned together. Pushing himself to his feet, Walter walked over to the bodies and, squatting, lifted aside the blanket from one and looked for a long, long time at the boy’s dead face. When he sat back down next to me, he pulled a notebook from a pocket inside his jacket and, licking the stub of a pencil, began to write in it. When he finished I asked him what he’d written and he read it off and the words stuck with me all these years.” Lincoln shut his eyes—to keep back tears (so it seemed to Dr. Treffler)—as he dredged up Walter Whitman’s lines. Sight at daybreak,—in camp in front of the hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,) each with a blanket spread over him—I lift up one and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow,—’tis strange! (Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!).

Lincoln, drained of arrogance, looked at Dr. Treffler as he recited in a sing-song whisper, “A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em—I can’t recall the rest.”

“I believe you, Lincoln. I can see that you really were at Fredericksburg.” When he just sat there, his chin on his chest, breathing unevenly, she said, “Shalimar.”

“What?”

“That’s the name of the perfume I’m wearing. Shalimar.”

1994: BERNICE TREFFLER LOSES A PATIENT