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Time for my next post!

Travis~ A surgeon and an orderly come by in the afternoon. I’ve seen the surgeon strutting around and babbling orders like he’s in charge of the world and I don’t like the look of him. He stops by my bed, takes me in with one glance, then looks at the flag robbed on the wall next to me. I immediately shoot out a hand to grab it.

“Boy,” he barks at me, “whatcha’ doing with that flag?”

“It’s mine,” I say to him. “I’m a flag bearer.”

“Soldier,” he says with a mocking smile, “you gotta give me that flag. It’s no good to you anymore.”

I don’t want to give it to him. Tree told me to keep it unless I was dead or dying. I’m pretty sure I’m not dying and I’m definitely not dead.

“You won’t get him to give it to you that way, sir,” the orderly says gruffly. He grabs hold of the flagpole and gives it a little tug.

“No!” I yell. “No, please, don’t!”

The surgeon grabs my arm, but just as he was about to speak I heard a voice from the doorway.

“Is something wrong?”

Hannah’s coming toward us, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling that bright smile.

I’m trying to catch my breath. “They want to take the flag, miss,” I gasp, “I can’t give it to them.”

The orderly looks disgusted and shakes his head at me. “Don’t listen to him, Miss Hyland,” he says. “Doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He isn’t even old enough to be in the army.”

“Yes I am!” I say indignantly, raising myself up a little. “I’m eighteen going on nineteen!”

That’s a lie, of course, but I’m not going to tell them that I’m underage. Hannah already knows that it’s a lie and I’m hoping she doesn’t say anything. She’s standing at the foot of my bed observing us. The orderly takes hold of the flagstaff again.

“Just give us the flag and we’ll take care of it. I’ll make sure it gets back to you.”

He tries to tug it out of my hands, but I won’t and can’t let go. I’m gripping the flag so hard that when he pulls I come up with it.

“No, please, I can’t! I can’t!”

He lets go and I drop back down onto the pillow, breathing hard. “They gave it to me, they told me to keep it. I can’t let anyone else have it.”

Hannah pushes both the surgeon and the orderly aside. “Leave him alone. I’ll see to him. It doesn’t do you any harm if he keeps that flag anyway, does it?”

The surgeon goes grumbling away, off to annoy some other doctor or nurse. The orderly trails awkwardly after him.

“Thanks, miss,” I say to Hannah.

“Don’t call me ‘miss’,” she says as she takes the flag back and props it up. “My name’s Hannah and that’s what you should call me.” She grins, then sits down next to me. “How are you feeling?”

I’m feeling pretty bad, but I don’t tell her that. “I’m feeling fine,” I say. “Could you spare a little water?”

She can, of course, and I drink my fill. When I finish, I ask,

“Who was that surgeon?”

“Dr. Hicks,” she says sourly. “The head surgeon. None of us like him but we need him because he really is smart and knows a lot about what he does. Only trouble is, he’s kinda inclined to amputate when he can and leave everyone else on their own.”

“What?” I say, startled. “Well, that means he’ll leave me alone, doesn’t it?”

She stares down at the floor for a moment. “I don’t know,” she says with a heavy sigh. “I hope not, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just a girl, and nurses don’t have a say in anything. We have to do whatever we’re told, no more, no less.”

I lie there thinking about that. I resolve to get to my father however I can, which means I won’t die here and I don’t care what the surgeon says. I’m going to find my father. 

Next post:

Travis~ Hannah and I get to know each other better every day. I’m not looking forward to the day I have to leave hospital and leave her, too. She helps me to write letters home to my family. She talks to me whenever she has time. She brings my breakfast every morning. She changes my bandages. She makes sure the flag never leaves its spot beside my bed.

Hannah has the funniest tongue-in-cheek way of talking. She’ll say something sort of slyly and give me half a glance to see what I think. Then she might wink and laugh or say something else.

Hannah tells me that she lived in the south but moved to Pennsylvania a couple of years ago. Pennsylvania is a nice place to live. I remember marching through it on the way from Hartford to Washington. Shallow, rolling hills, lots of sun and sky and wind. Green everywhere. It looks different that Connecticut, but just as nice.

Then again, Virginia looks different that Connecticut as well. It’s a whole different shade of green. If there wasn’t a war going on I’d find it downright pretty.

As I write more letters home, Hannah becomes a main focus of them. I tell Mother and my sisters all about her, how nice she is and what she’s like. Mother asks questions about her all the time. My middle sister, Eliza, who’s thirteen, teases me in almost every letter I get from her. I don’t mind. I like to hear from them regardless of what they say.

But I’m still waiting for word of Father. When I’m not thinking about Hannah I’m thinking about him. It’s been so long not since he left that anything could have happened. He could have been wounded and brought to a hospital somewhere. He could have been taken prisoner. He could still be fighting. I could even have fought him at some point. What an odd thought that is. But I don’t think he’s dead. He’s not one to die so easily.

Hannah understands how I feel about him. She sits and listens to me rant about it but tells me that she can’t help me. She’s just a nurse. And there’s not much I can do about it, either. I’m just a private soldier in the Union army, and Father could be anywhere from here to Texas.

It’s upsetting to think about him and what might be happening to him. Sometimes pictures creep into my head. I imagine him in a prison stockade, starving. Or I imagine him lying wounded on a battlefield with no one around to help. Maybe the worst image is him dying of pneumonia or malaria in camp. So many soldiers die that way, from sickness.

I keep my tintype of him in my pocket and look at it all the time. It was taken before the war, a long time before, when I was too little to remember. It’s the only picture of him that exists. He’s smiling, and holding a baby in his arms. The baby’s me.

Wooo I just got a great idea! Tell me if I controlled this too much, or if you were planning on doing something else. 

---- 

Lucy ~ After the nurse hears my story, she smiles.

"Well then, it looks like you're a pretty independent young lady."

I return the grin. "Yeah, I guess so."

"So, what are you going to do now?" She asks, getting out some bandages and a splint.

"I don't know. I think I'll stay in the army, still trying to disguise myself." I nod at the scissors as she afixes the metal stick to my arm. "Mind if I use those?"

She shrugs. "Well . . . those aren't really good for cutting hair. If you do it at a wrong angle, you'll either make your hair stop growing or make it take forever to do so."

"Oh, okay." I shrink back. While the nurse wraps my arm in bandages, I wonder if my infantry will go look for me. I doubt it, and it feels like I'll have to go look for them myself.

After my arm is in a cast, she gives me a drink of water and stands up. "I'll check back on you later."

"Okay." I sit up and look around me.  There are injured soldiers everywhere, either bleeding or broken or infected. A sad result from the war. And I have no idea who will win in the end. 

After digging back down into my bed, I see another soldier being carried in on a stretcher. He's older than most, and he's uttering words as he's put on a cot, the one next to me. As he lies down, I can barely hear him.

"I hope they're okay," he whispers, "especially Travis."

---

I didn't want to mention any injuries and/or features due to controlling charries too much. 

Aaaaaand—the next post!

Travis~ Still no one has heard anything about Father. I’ve asked anyone I can, but I don’t know where he is or how to find him. When they ask where he might be, all I can say is “Somewhere in Virginia” and that isn’t enough for them to help. But I give them his name and appearance in hope of them coming across him somewhere. No one has found him yet.

Now I have another reason to want to stay at the hospital. Hannah’s family is coming sometime soon, and if they’re anywhere near as nice as Hannah I want to meet them. But I don’t know if I’ll be here long enough. I might be sent home to recover more, and not be allowed to re-enlist. Or I might be sent home after I recover. I don’t like either way.

Hannah got a letter from her brother this morning. She’s incredibly happy. She hasn’t heard form him in a long time and she was so excited to read it to me that she could barely get the words out properly. She had us both laughing.

I know what it feels like to get a letter from someone you haven’t seen in a long time. Every day I wait for a letter from Mother or my sisters. They can’t write to me every day, of course, but I wish they could! I miss all of them. At night I remember my warm bed in the loft above the kitchen, and how, in the evenings, my littlest sister Lucy would climb up and sit on my knees while I read to her from Dickens or a book of children’s stories. Sometimes my other sisters, Eliza and Martha, would come up too. We’d all sit crowded together, talking and laughing and reading aloud. Before Father left, he and Mother sat down in the kitchen by the fire and listened to us, and talked about their own things. After Father was gone, Mother didn’t stay up any more after dinner. She went to bed early and left Martha in charge of the rest of us. But we did talk much. No one felt half as cheerful with Father gone.

I wonder what they’re doing now, with both of us away and maybe never coming back. I wonder if Lucy’s getting any taller. I wonder if she still remembers me.

In a few days, I get another letter from them. If was five pages long, and each of them had written a section. I read them all over and over. One was a note from Lucy, written in a scrawling script:

Deer travis

i furgot to rite a letur till now. i mis you. my cat died yesturday but i hav a nothur won. its nam iz johnny becuz eliza sed thats fathur’s nam. mothur mises you to. she sais cum home quik.

Luv,

LUCY.

Despite all the misspellings, I could tell she had worked hard on it. After that was a letter from Eliza:

Dear Travis,

Lucy was so excited to write to you, you can’t even imagine it. She had never written a “real letter” before, and she did it all herself.

Anyway, like Lucy said, “mothur” does miss you more than you think. She used to check the casualty list every day for both you and Father, but now she makes me do it because she couldn’t stand reading one of your names. Do me a favor, will you? Don’t die. Because I don’t think I could stand it either.

How is Miss Hannah the Great? Still the center of your attention? You said she’s originally from the South—isn’t is weird how all different people are on both sides of this war? My goodness, everything’s too complicated to think about.

How asked for some news from West Hartford. Well, here is some: I went to Dr. Ferguson’s house the other day to get some ointment for one of Lucy’s cuts. You remember him, don’t you? The doctor who gave you rock candy when you had typhoid fever seven years ago? Well, outside his door was a line of young men, all limping or carrying their arms in slings or coughing. I had to wait for an hour at the end of the line until they finally left. Once I got inside, I asked Dr. Ferguson what that was about. He told me that those men had been drafted by the U.S. Army and were all giving him reasons why they couldn’t go to fight. The reasons were mostly made up. He showed me a piece of paper titled “Certified Cowards” and then a list of men and their “afflictions”. You wouldn’t believe the reasons these people came up with. “Stiff shoulder” “Weak ankle” “Defect of sight”. Next to one that said “Weak lungs”, the doctor had written “Walks ten miles a day, works in an iron factory 12 hrs., can lift two fifty pound weights at one time.” Weak, lungs, hm? Certified Cowards indeed.

Well, so long until my next letter-writing moment,

Eliza

I chuckle at the “Certified Cowards”.  I might be underage, but at least I wasn’t disgraced like that.