The hospital was not really a hospital. It was a dainty little thing, built in a style that the Americans called Queen Ann. Once it had been called Germaine’s School for Girls, but that had been before the revolution. The only remnants of the hospitals academic past were the girls who had stayed to become nurses. Girls like Molly Rhine and Frances Hearing who hated the war because it had taken their brothers, and hated the red coats, the enemy forces, because they were morally obliged to save them- if they could.
Of course Conrad was not in the state to know that he was hated by all of the nurses, except the ones who were secretly loyalists. He was not in the state to do much at all- except wait to die.
He had never really thought about dying. Conrad had joined the army because that was what his brothers had done. Initially, the whole fighting and dying part hadn’t worried him. He had been worried about having to share a tent with four men at a time and having to smell them and change in front of them and awkwardly watch them change in front of him because there was hardly space to politely turn your head.
Jeromy Sanders, a boy who like he, had probably lied about his age on the papers, was one of his army mates. He’d been from the countryside near Effingham and had talked with a strange lisp that might have been caused by his oddly shaped front teeth.
Conrad had been changing out of a sweat stained shirt and into his new red coat, carefully scanning the brass epilates and matching buttons when Jeromy’s head had first popped through the slit of the tent.
“Don’t let me bother you. I’ll probably see you naked a million times before this is all over” Jeromy had said with that strange lisp of his. Conrad had blushed. He had been surprised he did so- now that he was a soldier with his own coat. He hadn’t thought that soldiers could blush.
Jeromy was dead now. Conrad had watched him die, and he had been shocked that he hadn’t been able to feel anything. He hadn’t had time to feel anything, not without dying himself. So Conrad had turned Jeromy’s head downward into the mud- into the mud so he couldn’t see his face, and trudged on.
Now as Conrad lay in the hospital that was not really a hospital, he did have time to feel, and the emotions struck him as the bullet had. Suddenly he was aware of everything at once. The agony he felt, not in a specific place, but woven into the fabric of his being. The course gauzy bandages he felt that were wrapped around his body. In the corner of his mind he felt the presence of the nurses, girls who had traded in their knit academy socks for bleak white uniforms.
Conrad could hear the pair of them talking about him. He wasn’t sure how he had heard them because he knew he certainly wasn’t conscious, but he heard them. Heard their hushed whispers and felt their sideways glances in his direction.
“Those army Generals. They do the only surgery they know how to. Amputation. Poor fellow. If he wakes up, he will live his whole life without a leg”
And now Conrad knew that one of his legs was missing and suddenly, in a way that was different from Jeromy’s death- he felt nothing at all.
Instead of feeling, he thought of his childhood, and a fairy tale about a tin soldier with a missing leg that his Nan had told him when he was small. He thought about the summer that he had spent loving Clara Olson’s cousin. A girl of fourteen, who at the time had been two years older than him. Her name had been Frances Hearing and all of the other boys had agreed that she was an exotic creature because she was from the colonies and didn’t wear a bonnet and didn’t mind swearing. Conrad had spent the whole summer, not talking to Frances, but staring at her silhouette in the windows of Clara’s house. Once he had seen her open the windows to smoke a pipe that was obviously not hers. He had been staring, and when she saw him she had waved.
It was then that Conrad had decided that one day he would marry Frances Hearing, but that had been the summer when he was twelve. Before the first frost had fallen she had taken a ship back to the colonies to rejoin her family in the wild place where girls swore and smoked.
Slowly the bandages around his mouth were unravelled and a bitter tasting liquid was pored through it.
“I can make it go away.” A soft female voice said. “All of it. If you want to. It would be peaceful. . All have to do is imagine the world as an ice crystal. Perfection. Smooth places. All you have to do is imagine yourself out of it.”
From the faraway place that his mind was in, Conrad thought that he nodded. More bitter liquid was poured into his mouth and he felt hot raindrops on his face, on the places the bandages did not cover. No- not raindrops-tears.
In the hospital that was not really a hospital, a girl named Frances Hearing sobbed over the body of a dead British soldier. A friend of hers, Molly Rhine, put a hand on her shoulder. The girls had done the same thing many times before, but that was when they had both been classmates, and the things they had been sobbing over were exam papers and not dead bodies.
Molly had not cried since her brother had died four months ago, but Frances still felt too much.
“Oh Fran it happens” Molly said mopping up her friends tears with the white kerchief in her pocket.
“I know Molls. But this one was different. He felt so familiar. He was unnerving- you know. Just staring at him made me feel incomplete.”
Frances continued to stare at the bandage wrapped, one legged soldier and wondered if she had seen him before. No that was impossible. He simply reminded her of a story she had read once
Iron Ore 