Counterpoint Characters

*This is a scene that I was already toying with writing for my novel and when we talked about Counterpoint Characters, I realized what an opportunity it might be. Hopefully it works. And hopefully it makes sense even though it comes about 200 pages into the novel. Sorry it's so long and takes awhile to get into.*

It was a good farm before all this, that much is plain. But now there ain’t a thing of farm about it except the house with its sleeping porch and the barn with its weathered grey plank fences chewed into crescent moons. All around, spilling out of the house and the open barn doors are ragged men, sprawling, filling any shade, lying under tents put up quick to make more. The boys outside, they ain’t the worst ones but they don’t look none too good, they got wounds needing tending and from the looks of it some of them need letters written and prayers said. I can’t help myself. I am looking at their faces, looking for a face I know I ain’t ever seeing on earth again and then I catch myself or there ain’t a hope for me doing a thing more in this day.
Will he is already up the steps to the house and seeing him walking in I think on how I ain’t been inside a proper house since I left home. Course, soon as I make my way up those steps and inside that door I see how even this don’t count as a proper house, not when the rooms and all the furniture are being used for boys and even the hall floor is already stained with things that ain’t ever scrubbing out. The moaning inside, it is worse than the noise of the boys outside. In here, in the darkened house, it is close and hot and there is crying and from somewhere at the back there is a sound worse than crying and shrieking put together. Will, he is moving down the long hall, moving closer to those sounds I don’t want to hear ever again, poking his head inside the rooms opening out from it. I ain’t looking inside, there ain’t a thing I want to see inside one of these rooms, this ain’t the right place for me but Will is here, and he is the only thing I got to follow.
The last room, right where I’d be putting a sitting room if I were thinking on making a fancy kind of house, that’s the room Will turns into. I walk to the doorway and stand myself inside it, looking in. It ain’t the surgeon’s room, it ain’t where the screaming is coming from, I can tell now that is across the hall at my back. This room, it ain’t got much furniture left in it, just walls and two tall windows open and looking out over fields, and some chairs pushed to the corners. The boys are lying on the floor in rows, one row along each side of the narrow room, and one row down the middle, putting me in mind of the Armory Hospital. Most all of these boys here are missing something, legs or arms or hands or feet, or else those parts are shattered so bad it don’t take much looking to know soon they’ll be missing too. There is whimpering and moaning and praying too, but I try to put it out of my mind so it don’t call up things I don’t want to think on.
Will, he has walked halfway down the long side of the room and he is talking to a woman who is kneeling to run a hand across one of the boy’s forehead and she is the first woman I seen being womanly and wearing skirts anywhere near the battle and it makes me stop in my tracks to see a woman like that here. A buzzing runs through my head and shivers down my back and I think she is Jennie Chalmers and I almost hope for it to be her.
That thought don’t but last a moment and then I am seeing how this woman ain’t a thing like Jennie. She might be my Mama’s age, and she is short, even when she straightens up and moves to the next patient. I see her dark hair pulled back in coils at the back of her head, and I am thinking my hair used to be like that, I wore it like that on my wedding day, and then I am walking quick down that row of awful bandages and dirty wounds, walking right to Will and that woman. He is talking to her only I don’t hear the words I just march myself to Will’s side and I look at her wide face and round cheeks and her dark-circled eyes and then I am just talking right over Will.
You got to give me something, I say. I got to have a something to do.
She looks at me straight on, an eyebrow raising letting me know this lady if she ain’t ever been a teacher then she missed a calling.
I’m working alone, she says, and she stoops over the next soldier. The surgeons are kept in constant work.
I ain’t got to work with no one, I say. Just that if you got things you know need doing, I got the need to be doing them.
There’s a room full of needs here, she says. And the barnyard out there. She is checking the soldier’s bandage and when he groans at her touch she presses the back of her hand to his forehead.
We only got our canteens, I say.
We want to be helping, Will says. Better than what else we got to do.
She looks at us again and lets out a short breath through her nose, like a sheep before it charges. You, she says, pointing at Will. You take both canteens and give those boys in the yard water. They must be thirsty and there hasn’t been a spare moment for me to see to them. And you, you stay here. These boys need bandage changes and water. There’s water there, she points to a sidetable, pushed against the wall by the doorway. I’ll leave my supplies, she adds, pointing at a basket of bandages and lint. Then she lifts her skirts and steps past us, saying, From the sounds of it, the surgeon must be needing my aid.
You need anything, you come get me, Will says.
I can do this, I say and I take my canteen and give it to him. I got to be doing something.

***

Across the soldier’s shallowly rising chest, the woman looks at me hard. The man, he is young, a bandage wound around his head.
He hasn’t woken since being found, she says. Every time I look on him, he is even more wan than before.
I must look at her blank because she says, He’s getting pale, and then she presses her hands together and bows her head, her lips barely moving and the words coming in a whisper. So sudden I don’t even feel it coming, there are tears spilling out of my eyes and I bow my head to hide it but all I am doing is thinking how I ain’t even thought to say these words and the tears come fast.
She finishes saying the last rites and it is silent so long I think she has moved to another patient, but when I look up, she is looking at me, like she is finding something in me. I keep looking back at her. I don’t like the looking, so I say,
You got kin fighting here?
Every man fighting here is my brother, she says.
I see she’s got a way of making me go silent. You been a teacher? I ask.
A small smile curves her lips and she says, Is it that plain?
You got that way about you, I say.
I suppose we all get marked by our past, she says and then she is looking at me hard again. I take my eyes away, shuffle to the next patient and crouch back down, checking his bandage, trying to smile, offering water. We make rounds like that, checking the boys lying in each room of this house, each room with its furniture pushed along the walls, making room. All the tables been dragged to the room the surgeon is using, but I ain’t let to see that room.
Sometimes I go through all the rooms never seeing her, and I know she is in with the surgeon doing things I can’t even begin to think on. Sometimes Will comes inside, his eyes searching for me like he ain’t believing I am still in here, and then soon as he sees I am, slipping back out. Or he comes looking for supplies, which the woman doles out from chests she’s got by the main door, finally leaving them open for either one of us to dip into as we need.
It is almost dusk now and the boys are twisting and curling on their thin beds of blankets, like coming lonely dark is already making the hurt greater.
When I come across her again, I ask, You ain’t got kin here, how you get the Army to let you come?
I don’t take no for an answer, she says. Or they finally had enough need of aid, they’d take even mine, she smiles, but it ain’t a joke. Maybe I shamed them enough. Or they saw I could do what I said.
You got a name, I ask.
Clara, she says. Clara Barton. And you?
Ross, I say. Ross Stone.
You aren’t fooling everyone, you know, she says.
I ain’t sure what she’s meaning and my hands just go still over the soldier whose arm I’m binding. I wait to feel my heart jumping, but it don’t and I see I ain’t nervous at all if she sees what I am so I just up and say, I don’t got to fool nobody no more. I don’t got to be staying here now, but I ain’t got a thing else to do.
And soldiering is the thing you want to do? she asks. Is it your best service to offer?
I ain’t ever been so free as I been here. There ain’t a person I got to ask now, waiting for a no to turn to a yes, I say and it is the truth. And then I see how there ain’t a place else for me to go but with this army and there ain’t a name I can be but Ross Stone.