By the Red Glare: A Novel

| PART I |

November 1864

| 1 |

The Lunatic

The tree to which Jim Wells was chained stood dead-center in the front yard of his father’s sprawling plantation in Greenville. For nine years the declivities of earth surrounding the tree had provided shelter for young Wells. His father had put him there. Mr. Wells told his wife it was the safest place for their deranged son.

Each winter, Jim clawed with his fingers deep recesses around the base of the towering oak, giving the habitat the appearance of a fortress with moats on all sides. His mother gave him two thick, coarse blankets. He burrowed like a mole into the earth and formed with the dirt-encrusted coverings a seamless wedge with the ground. The oak stood fast against the wind when it blew in a more or less angular direction. When it swirled and twisted like a snake around branches and trunk, the wind bit into his flesh. Then he curled into his body.

The temperature of the soil remained at a near constant throughout the harsh months. With other natural provisions—twigs, bark, leaves fresh in autumn, decayed by late November—and his mother’s care with the blankets (she scrubbed them once a week), Jim made a home for himself. When rain or snow fell, Jim’s father unhinged him from the tree and, tugging with both hands on the far end of the chain, dragged his howling son some twenty-five yards through mud and slush, and then kicked the boy’s legs and buttocks until he squirmed under the house. Release from the dark place came when the sun emerged from hiding. Mr. Wells unlocked the hovel he’d built with his own hands and pulled Jim back over the same terrain to his abode.

Jim liked the smell of earth. He liked its taste. Not in mouthfuls, but with gentle laps of his tongue he savored the fecundity of dirt. With his molars he cracked nuts. He studied the chiseling jaws of squirrels.

The only creature on the plantation that showed Jim any human kindness was Rachel, a half-wit slave born on the plantation eighteen years earlier. She dipped water from the well and brought him the ladle every night after Jim’s father and mother went to bed. It was risky, she knew, for she had seen what happened to slaves who disobeyed their master. Mr. Wells had made it clear that he alone would feed the boy. That meant that Jim might miss a meal and go thirsty if his mutterings agitated his father. But on those nights when Jim went hungry and he stabbed at his parched lips with a dry tongue, Rachel sneaked under cover of darkness to the tree and pulled scraps of bread from a pocket of her dress and tilted the ladle to his mouth. They sat facing each other, each wondering in dumb silence at the similarity of their features. Except for the difference in the color of their skin they might have passed for siblings. And even that difference was slight: her complexion was light; his was tawny and leathery, the result of perpetual exposure to the elements. Both were of medium height, thin but muscular. The marvel of their being in physical proximity was that Rachel’s features—the sheen of her dark eyes, the sleekness of her neck, the hue and texture of her skin, even the scar that his father’s foreman had carved with the whip years earlier and that ran from her left shoulder to just below the scapula—had a calming effect on Jim. In her presence, he was content.

On spring evenings when Mr. and Mrs. Wells sat in their rockers on the veranda of their spacious home, Rachel crouched behind a row of shrubs and watched. When Jim’s moans interrupted his parents’ conversation, his father went into the house and returned with a short leather strap. Mrs. Wells pleaded with him not to be too rough. Brutality made her squeamish. He assured her that the strap served only as a corrective measure.

From her place of hiding, Rachel cringed and whimpered each time the leather strap scored Jim’s flesh.

Yet no matter how painful the strap might be, it was nothing in comparison to the long and tasseled whip with which Mr. Wells’s foreman taught rebellious slaves their Christian duty of submission. How devilish Negroes could be, how inured to the punishment required to enforce obedience. Too often, Mr. Wells thought, he’d had to stand by his foreman straining his voice to declaim Scripture above the lash of cord and striping of flesh.

When the beatings occurred, Jim sat like a toad at the base of the tree and watched impassively. Until Rachel was caught. That evening, Jim provoked his father. Stop grunting like a pig, Mr. Wells said. He hit Jim four times with the strap, then told the cowering boy he would go without food and water until morning. Later, when the couple retired for the evening, Rachel came with her pocket of crusty bread and ladle of water. Before she lifted the ladle to Jim’s lips, Mr. Wells jerked open the front door. He raced to the tree and backhanded her. She fell unconscious into one of the holes Jim had dug. Jim howled. The strap cut into his back.

The next morning at sunrise Mr. Wells stood beside the whipping post with his Bible in hand while his foreman strung Rachel up and stripped her blouse from her shoulders. Her body trembled. Mr. Wells began the reading—Slaves, be obedient to them—as the whip fell and opened a gash beneath her neck—that are your masters according to the flesh—another stripe, then dripping rivulets of blood—with fear and trembling in singleness of your heart—the third lash gaped the wound and Rachel yelped as blood pooled at the waistline of her skirt—as unto Christ; not with eye service, as men-pleasers—the whip struck her neck and her head jerked backward—but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.

Jim could not watch any longer. He stuck his head in one of the holes and clawed until his head was covered with dirt. He imagined sinking his teeth into his father’s neck, as he’d seen wild dogs do to each other.

Mr. Wells raised his hand for the whipping to stop not long after Rachel fainted. The foreman expressed his fear that other slaves would learn nothing from such merciful treatment of the girl. Mr. Wells ignored him. He was grateful that Rachel had not wailed as much as others under the whip. Caustic sounds made by the beaten irritated him. Their exaggerated cries accosted his ears with a ringing sensation that caused him headaches and exhausted him before nightfall. Would these dark creatures but heed the sacred word, Wells lamented, he would be free of such troublesome duties.

Except for his son’s redemption, Wells desired most that his slaves would attain a purity of heart that compelled them to do the will of God day in and day out. He dreamed of a world in which there were no whips, no need of corrective procedures, or of the divine call to enforce discipline. Sometimes he wondered whether his failure to be a more devout master was at once the cause of his slaves’ recalcitrance and of his son’s lunacy: God’s punishment for the sins of the father. Indeed, was it not the duty of the master to be a father to all subordinates on the plantation?

| 2 |

The Steward

Joseph Crawford needed opium. His amputees pleaded for it. Chloroform served well enough for surgery, but it was no match for prolonged pain and the putrefaction of dead flesh. The overflow of wounded sent from hospitals in Richmond, Petersburg, and Augusta to the Columbia hospital taxed the pharmacy’s supplies as well as the resolve of the wounded. Joseph prayed for a delivery of the narcotic as he entered the ward in Rutledge.

In spite of all the blood spilled on these floors since he had arrived nearly two years ago, the place still had the feel of a college campus. Not even a governor’s orders could wholly convert halls of learning to wards of healing any more than a surgeon could reattach severed limbs or implant the will to live in soldiers haunted by the cries of the dead.

Joseph removed his coat and shook off the chill of the November morning as he listened to a nurse recount the night’s activities. Blevins is worse, the young woman said. He couldn’t remember her name. He thought she was one of many who volunteered at the hospital the day after Jefferson Davis spoke to the city from the front porch of the Chesnut home nearly six weeks ago. That October morning, several hundred people filled every room and hallway of the house, stood three abreast on the stairwell, and spilled out onto the front lawn. Even now Joseph could see the president grip the rail of the front porch with one hand and shake the other fist in the air as he thundered: I say to my young friends here, if you want the right man for a husband, take him whose armless sleeve and noble heart betoken the duties that he has rendered to his country, rather than he who has never shared the toils, or borne the dangers of the field.

The next day, more than thirty women appeared at the hospital. Joseph wondered how many were there to find husbands. Whether they came for love or duty, he did not care. He was grateful for their service either way. More grateful yet that they worked under the strict supervision of Louisa Cheves McCord. Hers was the only name he recalled day after day, hers the only face—other than those of his dead wife and child—imprinted on the canvas of his memory.

Joseph said, Blevins was fine last night. What happened?

The woman’s shoulders drew inward and she lowered her head like a turtle seeking the protection of her shell. She couldn’t be more than eighteen, Joseph thought.

I’m not accusing you of negligence, he said. An increase in the severity of pain during the night is not unusual.

Mrs. McCord says I do well with the soldiers. Her voice suggested an even younger age than Joseph had guessed.

Of course you do. Now tell me what happened.

The nurse explained that Blevins became restless late in the night. She checked on him. He made no particular complaint, only of general discomfort. But two hours before dawn he began to rant mindlessly. He wrapped himself in his sheets, then struggled to extricate himself, and repeated the procedure. His pulse quickened. To the touch, his flesh was clammy.

And the arm? Joseph asked.

I changed the bandage. He complained about that, so I checked to make sure it was not wrapped too tightly.

Joseph looked at the woman’s thin face, resisted the impulse to ask her why she hadn’t removed the bandage again to examine the stump. He knew how difficult it was for some of the women to look at these mangled bodies. That they even made the effort was, in some measure, meritorious. He thanked the woman for her help and walked down the corridor.

In the room Blevins and three other soldiers lay on their respective cots. One of them, a man with a grizzled beard, stared vacantly at the ceiling. His left leg had been amputated above the knee two weeks earlier. He had not spoken since the operation.

Two others faced each other, propped on elbows, playing cards. A cigarette dangled from the mouth of the younger one.

Blevins looked through pallid eyes at Joseph.

How are you, son? Joseph asked.

Hurts, he croaked, and with his right hand reached across his body to stroke the phantom arm.

Blevins had told his story to Joseph more than once, as if the retelling itself might enable him to make sense of all the horror he’d seen. He’d joined a regiment in Tennessee a month before his seventeenth birthday so that he could march with his older brother. They fought together under General Bragg at Chickamauga, where the elder took a bullet in the neck and died looking into his brother’s mud-caked face and gurgling his name.

Fourteen months later, a bullet shattered Blevins’s forearm as he fought under Lee at Petersburg. A field surgeon sawed off the arm at the elbow. The following evening, Blevins slept in the Richmond Hospital. It was the first night in two years he’d not slept on the ground.

Initially the procedure appeared a success. Blevins was among those healthy enough to endure transport to Columbia. With the few convalescents who were able, he hobbled the half-mile from the depot to the hospital.

Blevins held his hand above the stump. Feels heavy. And hot, like fire shooting through.

Joseph removed his coat and examined the wrap for seepage. Lately, he’d done more than his share of bandaging wounds. In the early months of his appointment, his primary responsibility was to administer the running of the hospital. With the exception of the surgeons, all other personnel answered to him. He made purchases for the facility, took care of the hospital stores and of the dispensary, put up prescriptions, saw to the burial of the dead, made sure their graves were marked. Only occasionally did he assist in the dressing of wounds. In the latter months of 1864, however, the demand for patient care had overwhelmed his administrative duties.

With care Joseph unwound the bandage. He winced when Blevins sucked air through his teeth. Joseph had never been able to adopt the surgeon’s calm detachment in the face of human suffering. At each grimace from the patient, the steward felt the need to apologize.

The stump looked awful. Hard and swollen, it discharged a thin, gleety liquid colored with blood and little masses that looked like clumps of grits. Over the course of the night, the limb had swollen to twice its normal size. The skin was tense and almost translucent, purpled veins prominent on the surface. Sweat dripped from Blevins’s body. His pulse was weak. He struggled to breathe.

Stay with me, son, Joseph said. I must go for Dr. Thompson.

Blevins’s voice shook. I’m dying, ain’t I, sir?

You’re not dying, Joseph said. I’ll return shortly.

In the hallway, he asked another nurse whether she’d seen Dr. Thompson.

He was called to Hospital Three before dawn, she said.

Tend to Blevins, he said. The arm needs repair.

Joseph ran from Rutledge Building two blocks southward to College Hall, where Dr. Thompson spent most of his time. The hall had been converted to the third campus hospital in August of 1862, under orders from the medical director of the Confederacy to increase accommodations by 300. Buildings on the south side of campus—Rutledge, Legare, Pinckney—had their own surgeons-in-charge and division surgeons, as did those on the north side—DeSaussure, Harper, and Elliott.

Like Joseph, Thompson initially was an administrator, assigning daily operations to division surgeons, and then only at his own post. Exigencies of war augmented his duties and his frenetic movement from one hospital to the next.

Joseph hoped Thompson would not be in the middle of another surgery when he arrived. Blevins’s slim hope of survival depended on immediate care.

Minutes later, Joseph found the doctor. Elbows propped on his desk, head resting in the palms of his hands, he appeared to be asleep. Blood stains covered his white coat.

Sir? As if by some trick of ventriloquism, Joseph conveyed in a quiet and soothing voice a sense of urgency.

Thompson’s shoulders jerked. His head slipped from the perch of his hands. He rubbed his eyes and brought Joseph into focus.

Forgive me, sir. It’s Blevins.

The arm? Thompson’s voice was dull with fatigue.

Gangrene has set in.

Thompson shook his head. How many times have we seen this, Joseph? I’ve come to expect it of our amputees.

Yes, sir. Joseph moved forward to help the elder man out of his chair. Of all the surgeons he’d met and worked with the past two years, he preferred Thompson. They worked well together. When Thompson gave orders, he never spoke with condescension or a tone of impatience. The surgeon’s manner quickly earned Joseph’s loyalty. Staff members and volunteers learned never to question Thompson’s decisions or methodology in Joseph’s presence. A pharmacist had done so in May of 1863—behind the doctor’s back—in an attempt to impress a nurse. Joseph overheard the conversation and summarily dismissed the man from his position.

The men walked briskly toward Rutledge. Side-by-side, their physical differences were accentuated. At just over six feet tall and with a long stride and erect posture, Joseph dwarfed his companion. Thompson was of average height, but with shoulders hunched as if he were contending against a stiff wind, his gaze directly on the ground before him, he seemed much smaller. While Joseph’s thin frame was well-proportioned, suggesting wiry strength and agility, Thompson looked frail. Joseph’s thick brown hair provided such a stark contrast to Thompson’s gray head that the difference between their ages seemed greater than the twenty years that separated them.

Thompson lifted his head and looked at Joseph. Is it your impression that we shall have to take the arm at the shoulder? he asked.

I believe so, sir. Joseph knew the doctor had made his decision already. Not that Thompson, like many Confederate surgeons—particularly those in the field—preferred amputation as the most expedient measure, but he trusted and had listened carefully to the results of Joseph’s examination. Joseph appreciated the doctor’s confidence.

Our supply of chloroform? Thompson asked.

We need more.

Opium?

I hope for another shipment today.

They turned into Rutledge and raced up the stairs. With a precision that Joseph admired, Thompson examined the arm, then told the soldier what had to be done.

Reckon this stump wouldn’t have done me much good, no ways, Blevins said. Only his agnostic eyes betrayed the attempt at bravery.

Joseph applied the rag of chloroform. When Blevins was unconscious, the surgeon took his scalpel in hand and began to cut through flesh and tissue. For the bone, he would need the saw.

| 3 |

Sawbones

Dr. Thompson braced himself with a foot on the edge of the table and thrust a finger into the open artery. Joseph marveled at the speed and efficiency with which Thompson had amputated the upper arm. All other space in the room occupied, Joseph placed in the window sill the nine-inch stump, then once more pressed the rag of chloroform to Blevins’s nose.

Thompson jerked his head in a vain effort to divert runnels of perspiration that clouded his vision. His finger slipped. Blood spurted like a fountain and painted the doctor’s shirt.

The lower torso bucked. Joseph had seen enough convulsions to know that these were involuntary. He knew also that later that night he would be visited by dreams. Intermittent at first—often a reprieve of many weeks between disturbances—lately they’d begun to recur with savage regularity. Severed limbs. Blood-pooled floors. Befouled sheets. Disembodied voices, as though emissaries from beyond the grave were seeking to convert Joseph, make him an apostle of dark visions.

From the doorway came the voice that Joseph had come to detest: Man, how dare you open that wound alone, and without the necessary preparations.

Dare, indeed. The only unwarranted dare in the room was LaBorde’s challenge to a superior surgeon. Take off your dandy coat, roll up your sleeves, and help, Joseph wanted to say. He wondered whether Louisa McCord had sent for the professor. Emergency procedures had become so routine that it was not uncommon for all the surgeons to be simultaneously engaged. LaBorde would have to do.

Enough, said Thompson, with a nod toward Joseph’s hand.

Joseph lifted the rag and looked at LaBorde. The professor still had on his long coat. Could he not be bothered with blood and viscera? Could these effete professors do nothing more than pontificate in a classroom?

LaBorde approached the table. What may I do? he asked.

Thompson struggled to stanch the flow of blood. He shook his head wearily. Joseph watched as the surgeon’s hands trembled. Fatigue had worn him down. He was not fit to operate.

Can you sew him up? asked Thompson.

If you guide me, said LaBorde. I’ve not done this since medical school.

LaBorde shed his coat as Joseph pulled from a nearby drawer the necessary instruments: clamps, needle, ligatures. He laid them out, grabbed towels from a wooden bin, dropped to his knees, and began to clean the floor.

As he mopped up the blood, Joseph silently berated himself. LaBorde was no villain. He had done as much for the Confederacy as any man. And he was no dilettante. Thompson had told Joseph the professor’s story. By means of a capacious intellect, Maximilian LaBorde had achieved much. Graduated from the South Carolina College at the age of sixteen; thereafter studied law; soon turned his attention to the study of medicine and took his degree from the Medical College of Charleston at the age of twenty-two; literary tastes prevailing, established and edited a weekly paper, The Edgefield Advertiser, and at the same time opened and attended to the oversight of a drug store. The man’s energy and industry were boundless.

When Joseph first arrived in Columbia, he’d admired LaBorde. His reputation as Professor of Belles-lettres at the South Carolina College could hardly be exceeded. Yet what had come to irritate Joseph was the professor’s proprietary regard for the college. He’d never wanted it closed, not even in March of 1862, when only nine students under the age of conscription were left. Twice LaBorde refused the request of General Beauregard to use the college as a hospital. The general went to Governor Pickens, who ruled in the Confederacy’s favor. LaBorde never ceased to show his displeasure. He complained to anyone who would listen that the army allowed horses, cows, hogs, goats, and sheep to roam the campus, destroying grass and trees, marking the turf with their dung, defiling the air with their odor. Joseph didn’t care to see cow paddies and other animal excrement on the lawn either—he detested the stench—but he believed that no man should stand in the way of the Confederacy’s needs.

Thompson had encouraged him to be sympathetic to LaBorde’s devotion to the college. Since the departure of the students, the man had been deprived not merely of his vocation, but of his living. No professor at the college had received a salary since the summer of 1862. The legislature’s assurance that salaries would be paid retroactively in full at the conclusion of the war now seemed as uncertain as the Confederate economy itself. LaBorde had reason to be disgruntled.

Joseph shook his head, told himself the professor was not the cause of his vexation. It was the war he hated. The war and these mutilated bodies. And the most insidious effect of all: the endless reach of war’s tentacles. It wasn’t just soldiers, but fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, friends, horses, cows, sheep, dogs, rabbits, all creatures—even the earth itself—that withered in its clutch.

When he finished cleaning the floor, he stood and watched the doctors. LaBorde worked smoothly. His dark eyes gleamed. Whatever he lacked in experience, he made up for with compassion and scientific fascination.

As the professor closed the main artery with more than a dozen ligatures, Joseph recalled his own numerous readings of J.J. Chisholm’s A manual of military surgery for the use of surgeons in the Confederate Army. The book was holy writ for practitioners. Joseph had read various sections so many times that he could practically quote long portions of text. In fearful anticipation of having to operate in an emergency, he’d committed to memory Chisholm’s remarks on certain surgical procedures. Between the ideal prescribed and the reality of LaBorde’s skill there was no discord. Each movement of the surgeon’s hand brought to the forefront of Joseph’s memory the precision of instruction: In ligating the vessels, tie every artery which bleeds, or is likely to bleed. It is not derogatory for a surgeon to apply ten, fifteen, or even twenty ligatures to a stump; it shows that he understands his profession; experience has taught him the great trouble and annoyance of reopening a stump to find a bleeding vessel, when he has but little time to attend to the urgent demands of the wounded. The rule is, neglect no small artery.

Neglect was the cause of Blevins’s dilemma. Not Thompson’s neglect, or LaBorde’s, but that of the field surgeon who first treated the wounded man, and later that of Richmond physicians. Yet even they could not be blamed entirely. Triage was necessary in hard times. Surgeons and staff worked night and day to care for the wounded in a regressive order that began with the most severely wounded who still held a dim hope of survival. Those beyond the pale were left to die, small doses of opium their sole comfort. Joseph had heard reports of a Richmond nurse who used a pillow to smother a patient who had no hope of recovery. His bed was needed for another who might survive. There was a time when rumors of the nurse’s action would have enraged Joseph. Not now. Such were the brutal demands of war.

Thompson and LaBorde continued their work. In spite of their expertise, Joseph knew the outlook was grim. Few survived a second amputation.

More chloroform, said Thompson.

Joseph reapplied the rag. Thompson held the limb and supported the skin flaps while LaBorde sewed them together, careful to keep the stringy segments of flesh in apposition.

Opium, Joseph thought. Blevins would be begging for it by nightfall.

The stitching completed, both surgeons assisted Joseph in bandaging the wound. Using strips of isinglass-plaster they covered the length of the stump to leave exposed the angle where the ligatures escaped in order to allow for drainage.

Joseph would change bandages frequently over the next several days. Fuming nitric acid was the most effective cleansing agent. Painful, to be sure, but of greatest benefit to the convalescent in the long run. How strange it seemed to Joseph that the mineral pulled from the earth to make explosives for the Confederacy was also used to heal.

You gentlemen have saved another young man’s life, Thompson said.

We did what we could, said LaBorde. What happens now is providential.

Of course, thought Joseph. Let the Almighty decide which of these young men to kill. How convenient this theology of warfare. Men march blithely into battle believing the choice of life or death rests with God alone.

Thompson said to Joseph, Perhaps a shipment of opium has arrived on the morning train.

I’ll check, sir. Joseph left the room. He was grateful for Thompson’s interjection. It gave him time to fume privately. Besides, there was no arguing with someone who assigned every human event—catastrophic or otherwise—to God’s design. Such a man surely believed his every bowel movement was controlled by the prestidigitating finger of God. He had grown sick of the piety that spilled like venom from the tongues of the devout. Was such devotion, he wondered, true to the hearts of these people? Or was it simply a means of absolving themselves of the terrible burden of human error?

How would such people finally resolve the conflict between the justness of their cause and providential design if God led them to their doom?

| 4 |

Drapetomania

Two nights after Rachel’s whipping, Mr. and Mrs. Wells rocked quietly on the porch. Mrs. Wells laid her knitting needles and yarn in her lap and looked at her husband. I saw on your desk a letter from Dr. Parker.

Wells pulled a Meerschaum pipe from his mouth and brought the rocker to rest. You read it?

"Of course