Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Soon enough Nora learned that Fannie was a root-and-herb healer, with ways that reminded her of her own grandmother. In the kitchen she looked at the drying plants hung upside down and the bark rolled into crisp scrolls. Then she went to the woods with a flour sack and returned with curly dock and butternut, fleabane and witch hazel and pleurisy root, which she dropped at Fannies feet.

“Wonderful,” Fannie said, inspecting Nora’s treasures. “We have this in common too.”

How lucky they were, Nora soon thought, to have found each other. Because Fannies patients could pay her only with eggs or a loaf of bread, occasionally a couple of coins, she couldn’t pay Nora for her help. But she gave Nora that clean-curtained room and a kitchen where the two of them could dry their herbs together. There, using a book of Indian medicine as a first text, Fannie taught Nora to read. And within a few months, she’d found Nora work as a night-watcher: not in Corktown, but among prosperous Protestants in other parts of the city.

Nora moved from house to house then — a little girl with diphtheria, an old woman with cancer of the breast, a baby scalded by boiling water — spelling the families of the sick. She was with them until they were better or dead, she was often the last to see someone alive. Smells and sponges and chamber pots, hemorrhages and death; none of it frightened her. Every member of her own family, but for her two lost brothers, was dead.

In the mornings, after a stint of watching, she returned to her small neat room at Fannies house and closed the curtains and slept. It suited her to work all night, until she could sleep without dreaming. She never dreamed about Ireland, or her grandmother, or the fields where they’d gathered herbs together; she never dreamed about her parents or her sisters or the rain. If she dreamed it was disaster, Grosse Isle come back to torment her again: the dank and crowded tents, thick with the gray mist of souls departing their anguished bodies. Why should she have to live that again? Or see, as if once were not enough, her brothers, her darling Denis and Ned, being lowered when she was too weak to save them down the side of the ship.

Better, surely, to give herself to her useful work and to enjoy her home, her friend, and the pleasure — still new to her — of books. Periodically Fannie would urge her to marry; her own marriage had, she claimed, been a happy one, and she didn’t want Nora to miss those particular joys. But Nora had no desire to marry young, as their neighbors commonly did, and bear a dozen children only to watch half of them vanish before they took root in the world.

Her life was quiet, it had its satisfactions; and so she was surprised, after a dozen years had passed, to find herself suddenly longing for children of her own. At the market she had a favorite greengrocer, Francis MacEachern, who was kind and modest and had excellent vegetables. On a peculiarly warm late April day, when both of them were old enough — they were thirty-six — to smile at the sun’s heat after the dank and freezing winter, Francis said, “You have very handsome eyes,” and asked if he could take her out walking. They took a boat across the river to Windsor, where they walked along a path framed by enormous hedges. A flock of finches passed through one, streaming between the woven twigs on invisible and secret paths. A year later Nora and Francis were married.

For two years they lived in Francis’s bungalow near the market. Nora helped him at the stall, spending each morning there even during the months she was carrying Michael. In the corner she’d taken for her own she spread the ginseng and wild ginger she gathered, the fresh soft elder leaves with their flowers and the roots of yellow dock. When the war came, no one expected Francis, a middle-aged man with a brand-new son, to volunteer. But the fighting went on and on, regiments were raised and mustered in and destroyed; one summer day a general stood in the square before a sullen crowd and begged yet again for more men. Francis and Nora left their stall and went out to listen. A man was calling, “Glory! Glory!” The crowd grumbled and called back, “Rich man’s war!” Francis stroked Nora’s hand and the copper-crowned head of the son they’d named for her dead father.

Their rent had gone up and Nora had not been able to help out as much as she wanted after Michael’s birth. In August, despite Nora’s fierce objections and her arguments that somehow they’d find a way out of debt, Francis took the bounty offered by a wealthy gunsmith and joined the Twenty-Fourth Infantry. Two months later, when the curtained room at Fannies came free again, Nora went back to her old life.

Yet, as she’d later tell both Elizabeth and Andrew, everything about that life was different: because of Michael. She hadn’t imagined, after losing Denis and Ned, that she’d ever again love a person like that. But now, when she was helping Fannie, she carried Michael in her arms or let him play at her feet. She wrote to Francis every week, describing Michael’s progress: He said Ma-ma, he stood by himself, we had to cut his hair. For a while she got letters in return; then the letters stopped. She waited, and waited some more. When the bounty money ran out she went to the new hospital up the road, looking for work that might also bring her news of her husband.

She couldn’t work as a ward nurse unless she lived in, and she couldn’t live in because of Michael. Instead she signed on again as a night-watcher: one ward, nine at night to five in the morning; fifty cents plus one meal per shift. Scores of men poured in from hospitals in the east and south. Some were still recovering from injuries suffered at Gettysburg or Chickamauga; others had been hurt more recently. They had wound infections that refused to heal, or fevers they’d caught down South, or consumption that had flared up in the crowded camps and prisons. Nora asked them if they had news of Francis. Even among the soldiers she nursed from his own regiment, no one did.

Eight long, low wards, connected by a covered walk, flanked the hospital’s two-story central building. From the pane of glass set into the wall of the small nurse’s room, her own ward was visible all the way down to the walk: darkness turned the space into a tunnel. Twice each hour she walked the narrow lane between the two ranks of trim iron bedsteads. She didn’t see the doctors making their rounds, nor the faces of the men removed to the operating room and returned later, minus an arm or a leg; those were events of the day. She didn’t see the volunteer ladies, gaily dressed and bearing little hampers of fruit and jellies. The quarrels in the kitchen were not her problem, nor the difficulties in the dead-house, the continual failures of the laundry, the contract surgeon fired for drunkenness — all that was over when she came in and took, from the exhausted ward nurse, the day’s summary of admissions and procedures. Her job was to comfort wherever she could, to ease the dying and cover the dead. Back home, she twined Michael’s red hair around her hand and kissed his cheek and then slipped between her own sheets before she slept.

The beds filled, emptied out at the end of the war, refilled more slowly with invalid veterans transferred from all over Michigan; two of the hospital’s wards — one Nora’s — were designated a government Soldier’s Home. The men she cared for then were missing an arm or leg or more; a few were blind and some broken down by injuries to their lungs or bowels; some had fevers that would not be cured and others were exhausted or starving or penniless. Some left by way of the dead-house. The stronger ones, taking shelter while they tried to ready themselves for the world outside, were restless at night. Nora read to them.