Brendan Graham - The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

‘No!’ she shouted, trying to get away from him. Trying to keep dancing, keep ahead of the jiggling hands.

‘No! No!’ she shouted, more vehemently, trying to wrest her body free.

‘It’s time, Mother – four o’clock!’ Mary said, gently but firmly shaking her shoulder.

When Louisa awoke, the clarion calls of war were already summoning men to be ready for death. Before he would go out today, the boy had last night asked her to ‘Place my name, company and regiment on a piece of paper and pin it to my breast.’

She prayed, her daily prayers – the Sign of the Cross, the Morning Invocation of the Light, the Lord’s Prayer – for him. Not that death should pass him by, for that alone was the Lord’s domain, but that if it came, it should be quick and clean. Not lingering and painful, his youthfulness ebbing away, his beauty distorted.

Louisa knew he would be fearless, be raised in courage because of her. She smiled – boys to men do quickly grow. She rose, dressed, put on her headdress, remembering.

‘The White Bonnet Religion’, the soldiers called her faith. White bonnet, black bonnet, no bonnet, Louisa wondered what it was religion had to do with what would happen here today? Yet, the vast bulk of those who would line up to kill each other lived by some religious code. The politicians who, from afar, waged this war, also waged it with the absolute conviction that God was on their side. They had spoken with Him – and He had told them!

It had always seemed such an obscenity to her, lining up God in the ranks.

Beside her, Mary also prepared for the long day. In perfect prayer, Mary would be. Not distracted by the thoughts which flitted in and out of Louisa’s own head. She loved Mary so. Mary was her window to God. Amongst all the Sisters, all the doctors, the heroes of battle, Mary was the most perfect human being Louisa had ever known. A constant reservoir of love to all who came within her sphere. And Mary’s love was infinite.

‘I have no right not to dispense it freely,’ was how Mary saw it. ‘It is not mine not to give. I am His river.’

Mary looked at her adopted sister and smiled. Mary could see beneath, Louisa knew, into her very soul. That was the way with her. Louisa wondered what Mary would find there this morning? Whatever, there would be no judging of it.

Neither spoke. Nor was there need to.

The hospital was already alive with movement – an air of excitement. Those who could, mad for action. Mad to fight for America.

‘America!’ Hercules O’Brien began the day. ‘Wide open spaces and narrow minds. If it ain’t American it ain’t good! In ascending order, Irish, African, German, Jew.’

‘But cannon fodder is different, Hercules,’ ‘Souper’ Doyle, a Confederate from Co. Galway, answered. ‘The off-scourings of the world is good enough for American buck and ball. Didn’t you hear the officers colloguing with each other, how “Irish Catholics were a resource of fodder for enemy cannon that couldn’t be ignored?” Well it’s our America now, whether the Northern Yankees like it or not. We’re no longer lodgers in someone else’s home!’

Souper Doyle resented how his name had followed him here to America. What harm if his people had ‘taken the soup’, changed, for a while, to the ‘English religion’, for food to keep body and soul together during the worst of the Bad Times. Sure hadn’t they changed back again, when the winter of Black ’Forty-Seven was over! But the name had stuck … the Doyles were ‘soupers’. Thomas Patrick Doyle had hoped that when he left Godforsaken Galway behind, he would also leave there all references to soup. So he had taken a purseful of coin and the passage money to America from the recruiting officer who had come to Ireland, seeking ‘stout-hearted fighting men’. The man with the drawling accent had promised them ‘Glory’ … during the war, and a ‘grander life in a free America’ … after they had won it!

‘Souper!’

He winced now as Hercules O’Brien addressed him. Souper Doyle wondered, that if he ever got out of this hellish army in one piece, if he could find some place far out in the west where there was no damned Irish? Where he wouldn’t be known, and change his name? Hercules! Now there was a grand name … a grand, stout-hearted name.

‘Souper!’ the current owner of that name called out again.

‘You Rebs will need a flag of truce to get back to your lines.’ Then turning to the nuns asked, ‘Is there not a flidgin’ of white among the lot of you Sisters to make a truce flag for the Rebs?’

Louisa came to the rescue, running to their quarters and salvaging a well-washed winter petticoat from its out-of-season hibernation. It wasn’t white – a cream-coloured flannel – but it couldn’t be mistaken for what it was.

When he saw her return with it, Jared Prudhomme insisted he be the flagbearer. Vowing devotion to her faded thrown-off, he fixed it atop his bayonet.

‘May it and the Lord keep you safe,’ Louisa whispered to him.

Mary then gave the Rebel band her blessing, putting them, as Alabarmy pronounced it, ‘Under the one Sister’s protection and the other Sister’s petticoat!’

Out they went then, the small band of Johnny Rebs. The boy, good-as-new from his wound, proudly bearing Louisa’s petticoat aloft, led them. Then Ol’ Alabarmy, defiant as ever, proclaiming his one arm ‘good enough to pull a trigger on nigger-jiggin’ Yankees.’ With them, the Tennessee fiddle player, his asthmatic fiddle strapped to his knapsack – and Souper Doyle. ‘One of our own, misleadin’ himself,’ Hercules O’Brien bemoaned.

‘The mighty great man in a little man’s body’ as the men called the diminutive sergeant, should not yet have been ready enough for more action but he had seemed hell-bent on returning to the fray. Now he came to Ellen, awkward in his own way.

‘Blessings on you, ma’am, for the tender touch – and the mighty craic . I hope you find your husband!’

And he pressed into her hand a letter.

‘Read it after I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and tell her I forgive her.’

She started to say something, saw a strong man’s tears well up in his eyes, fighting not to fall.

‘Better be dead than finished,’ he said, and went.

Ellen watched after him, knowing she would not see him again. Something about the small way he carried himself.

Like hedgehogs in March they went, sniffing out if the world had changed during the long sleep into spring.

They waved the Southerners off, the nurses … and the nursed who could walk. Then the Union soldiers, Hercules O’Brien among them, went out to their own side.

Two thoughts struck Ellen. The first that what she was witnessing seemed to deny the very essence of the work she was doing – healing. If it was just patching them up to go out again, have another chance at death, what was the weary point of it all?

Her second thought was that their leaving freed up some space. For the inevitable mangled fruit that would be harvested from today’s reeking plain.

She had taken no more than a dozen steps inside the hospital when she heard the gunfire. Just a small fusillade. Men jerked up in their beds.

‘It’s the Rebs!’ one whispered – and all knew. ‘Our boys got the Rebs!’

She ran to the door, Louisa already ahead of her, turning her head back, a stricken look upon her face. They careered across the short distance to where the crumpled group of grey-clad bodies lay. Ellen saw Louisa’s petticoat on the ground, tossed this way and that by the eddying breeze.

It was Louisa who reached them first, pulling his body from under the others. Holding his golden head on her lap, talking to him, calling him ‘Mr Prudhomme!’ Straining to hold back unSisterly tears. Frantic for any visible sign of life.