Little Sister

My first duty was to gather up amputated limbs in the kitchen. I was fourteen. I trembled, clutching them to my breast. What is this place? Who have I become?Last fall our wheelbarrow held potatoes.

July 1, 1888, I see men returning to walk the battlefield. Twenty-five years ago today General Reynolds commandeered my grandmother’s house in Gettysburg, where I had lived since my widowed father fell in the Battle of Malvern Hill. “Sophia Coffey, will you stay as a nurse’s aide?” he had asked, and “Little Sister of Mercy” I became.

Burying those limbs in tall weeds, I found a soldier, 11th Alabama, unconscious. His body torn by canister shot, a fragment in one lung. Where is God’s mercy, I almost said aloud, when a man, blue uniform or butternut, can drown in his own blood? All night I kept him seated upright by embracing him. We saved him, our only wounded Confederate, though he lost a hand and an eye. While I changed his dressings and fed him, he talked about his daughter Lily, almost my age. I heard the nurses say he would go under guard to Point Lookout Prison, a death camp; and what I did then I do not repent of. Though I had heard the sermons, Divine Providence on our side, I smuggled that man my father’s clothes. At first he wept and would not accept them, but one night he kissed my forehead and walked away. This morning in Gettysburg I saw a man with a leg of his pants pinned up and a port-wine birthmark on his forehead. Unmistakable. William Breitbach, the 94th New York. He did not know me and I said nothing, after thirty years the child being so well hidden in the schoolmarm. I remember how he lay delirious on the parlor carpet’s floral design, awaiting surgery because his whole right side had taken grape shot in the Wheat Field. As I knelt beside him tightening a tourniquet he picked up a scalpel from the floor and began stabbing himself. I caught his wrist but took the blade’s point in my palm. The room darkened and my grandmother’s statues of saints faded though I did not faint. William’s eyes opened. “Little Sister, remember how we camped out and built fires and one time a pine cone exploded and scarred your arm? Oh, you were brave.” He howled and wept till the morphine held. I answered, “Yes, and I love you, dear brother” over someone else in the crowded house crying, “God is not here. God is not here.”

I live alone in these rooms.