Thrust: A Novel

My most clever, creative cousin,

Pay attention. I have a story.

A story about severed limbs.

In fact, this is a soldier’s story.

I do not believe I ever sufficiently thanked you for building me my leg. To put this another way: I will spend the rest of my life devoted to you for doing so.

As I write this, I am sitting next to a pond watching swans. A single swan swam right up to the edge of the pond to stare at me — and such a stare! One thinks of swans as beautiful, demure, winged things. But this gaze! My god. As if she knows something of what we have done to the world. I would call it silent rage if not for the indulgent error of that anthropomorphism. It was the stare of that swan that gave me the mind to tell you, at last, exactly what happened the night I lost my leg.

Some history. In the summer of 1863, when I was twenty, a Union burial excavation in Pennsylvania made a discovery of sorts. In addition to the soldiers they expected to find, they unearthed something unexpected: the body of a woman soldier.

Not unexpected to us, of course — we women soldiers, I mean. We were all well aware that hundreds of us were fighting alongside the men, for the same reasons they did: for family, for country, for money, or for that reason no one likes to mention in good company, for freedom. No, not the freedom of a nation, but of an individual. To enter the war as a man was to feel free from the burden and binds of womanhood, freed into being and motion from marriage and sex and domesticity and reproduction. War was a form of useful work in a way breeding and caretaking and cooking and cleaning will never be. We used different names. We altered our marks. We bound our breasts and erased our figures easily without corsets or skirts. We trained with all the other citizen soldiers, away from our hometowns, with scowls and dirt on our faces.

I was not a soldier, rather a field nurse. But my first year as a field nurse was filled with soldiers and their injured bodies.

My dear friend and the bravest soul I ever met — Frances, who was wounded twice serving with the 1st Missouri Light Artillery — was with me when I was shot. The bullet struck me between breast and shoulder as I stood outside in the woods near a field hospital. The blood shot out in a splash — I could see it, and then I could not, and then I passed out. The rest of the story, there on the field, is Frances.

What I remember most about Frances was not her skill with a rifle, which was considerable — she took out the bastard who shot me down — but the curve of her cheekbone when she set her face near the rifle, the way she never flinched or even closed an eye when she took a shot, the way her shoulders — broader than a man’s — barely moved from the kickback. I do believe I have a permanent shoulder bruise from bracing my own rifle butt against my shoulder and taking its pounding. I could shoot well enough, but shooting didn’t like me.

She killed the man who wounded me. She brought me safely back to the field hospital. She made sure I was attended to.

I’ve never met anyone who kissed me more perfectly than she did, her tongue not jammed in bluntly but curious and sly. I’ve never met anyone who came harder than I did with Frances.

Frances returned to the field.

My leg happened later that night.

I had a fever dream. I woke up twisting in my own sweat, with no pants, with a man — a doctor, a soldier, some man wearing the bloodied and filthy white garb of a field doctor — pressing his hand to my mouth and his weight on my frame, trying to shove his cock into me. With my good hand and arm and shoulder, I did what any soldier under attack would do: I clocked him hard to the side of the head. He fell to the floor. It looked to me like I may have broken his jaw. A soft jaw, perhaps, the bone of a man who had turned his softness inward into hate. You’ll regret this, he hissed at me. You’ll regret this for the rest of your life. Then he pulled something from his pocket, which must have been a rag soaked in chloroform. Everything went dark.

When I came to, I was on the operating table, bound at the wrists, gagged at the mouth. Standing over me, a doctor and some young male assistant — a boy who looked to be among the walking wounded, who was probably threatened if he refused to assist. I struggled as much as I could, but I was drugged repeatedly. It must have sounded and looked like an emergency amputation, like a normal procedure in that place filled with moaning and bleeding, with the bodies of mostly men making all manner of noise, some begging for death. Where had the nurses gone? Men and women?

The next time I woke, days later, I had one leg ending in a foot and one ending in a knee.

I always wanted that leg back — the leg they took from me. I wanted to hold it, swaddle it, coo to it. I even asked after it, but most of the amputated limbs were burned quickly.

I lost my leg because I hit a man in the face for trying to fuck me after I’d helped to heal the wounded. No one in the war had ever threatened me, attacked me sexually, or even stared at me in any way that ever said anything but “brother in arms.”

It’s a myth what people say about those of us who are amputees: that we did not receive anesthetic during operations. That we just had to “bite the bullet” during surgery. Very few did. More than eighty thousand were injured. Most received chloroform or ether by means of medical technology. (You know where the phrase “bite the bullet” comes from? Bullets were found on battlefields with teeth marks in them. You know who bit them? Pigs, rooting around in the blood-soaked mud of a battlefield.)

I will visit your statue’s limbs. Of anyone, I will love them the most.

When your Big Daughter is finally Erected, I will worship her at her feet.

Frédéric, if you should ever find me gone, look for a gift soon after. The gift is an important object between us. Take good care of this gift. Objects that can no longer be re-created retain power in a profound way that keeps us human. If you lose me, remember to stay human. Remember to invest your colossus with presence in time and space — a presence that someone will be drawn to as if it carried singular magic.

I am eager to try your contraption.

I am eager to receive you in my Rooms.

With a desire that obliterates lust,

Aurora