Crimson Harvest

First, Thomas heard. His ears were filled with a high ringing. Other sounds clamored for his attention, but they frustrated him with their incomprehensibility. He found himself reminded of being a child, ears plugged up as he swam underwater, his siblings shouting and playing around him. The cacophony now crowding his ears warbled in a nightmarish parody of the voices of his long-ago playmates. Cutting through the racket a rhythm screeched – screak-screak, screak-screak –like fingernails on blackboard.

Then there was pain. His entire body ached, but most especially the arm and eye on his left side. The pain was such that Thomas was nearly sick with it. It slithered from his eye socket into his skull and wormed its way from his shoulder into his bowels. Thomas writhed weakly in his agony, following some useless instinct that did nothing to relieve him. Indeed, his pathetic struggles only exasperated his suffering, and he only writhed the more for them.

He became aware of the stench of spent gunpowder burning in his nostrils, underlaid by a powerful odor of human excrement. The stink was as awful as any Thomas had ever encountered, even for one who has lived in war camps whose lavatories were no more than open air ditches which thousands of men squatted over or pissed in throughout the passing of a single day.

Screak-screak. Screak-screak.

The infernal rhythm grated upon his nerves, gaining substance as Thomas’ mind staggered into reality. The warbling in his ears resolved into an assortment of groans and cries of despaired men. Sharp cracks and deep booms split the air from time to time, which Thomas recognized as the shots of rifles and the coughs of cannons. In the near distance, a bullet whistled as it found a rock to strike. Orders were shouted, and a series of deafening booms roared in response.

He endeavored to open his eyes. His left stubbornly remained closed, obscured by some kind of cloth, but Thomas successfully slit his right eye open. He observed that he was in a building of some kind, lined with pews and tables. A cross flanked by stained glass windows stood at one end of the room, and an open doorway through which hazy sunlight streamed stood on the other. He was in a church, then. Or rather, a church that had been commandeered by the Union’s army and temporarily converted into a field hospital.

Screak-screak. Screak-screak.

The screeching emanated from the church’s sun-filled entry, within which his blurry eye observed neat rows of bodies. Most were covered with blood-stained, cotton blankets. Some wore their blankets from the bottom of their feet to the crest of their heads, faces covered. Those whose faces were shrouded remained still; the rest squirmed among them like maggots on meat. In the yard just beyond the doorway, Thomas’ blurry vision made out other crimson figures, vaguely demonic as they labored at some grotesque business. They struggled with a man laid prone on his back, holding his limbs down as they assaulted him.

A man in a bloodstained apron – a physician – hacked away at this poor soul’s leg with a bone saw. Attendants stood with the physician, holding his subject down as he stole the better part of the man’s right leg. The patient struggled, the cords in his neck popping as he thrashed first one way and then the other. Someone had jammed a piece of shoe leather between his teeth, gagging his animalistic snarls. Thomas turned his head, squeezing his one eye shut.

Screak-screak. Screak-scr-

The victim’s snarls crescendoed into a high-pitch scream, then abruptly halted. Thomas turned back in time to watch as an attendant heaved the stolen limb just beyond the view afforded him by the doorway. Another was pouring whiskey onto the now-unconscious victim’s stump, which bled freely. Meanwhile, the first attendant had procured from somewhere an iron pan. Heat waves rolled from the iron, warping the air surrounding it. With no warning or ceremony, the attendant pressed the pan into the bleeding stump, which hissed and popped as it cauterized the raw flesh. Even unconscious, the man’s whole body shuddered, the heel of his remaining foot tapping an urgent dance on the table upon which he was laid. All the while, the physician stood bent at the waist, his hands pressing against his bloodstained knees, exhausted.

God save me from this hell, Thomas thought.

The physician pushed himself up unsteadily, turning his face up to the sky as he gulped enormous breaths of air. He produced from one of his jacket pockets a soiled kerchief and patted at his sweaty pate. One of his attendants placed a hand on his shoulder, saying something. Thomas couldn't hear what passed between them, but the physician shook his head and gestured vaguely towards the church entrance. The attendant’s gaze followed the gesture. He locked eyes with Thomas.

The attendant called to his abettors, and as one they marched towards Thomas. They snaked their way past the rows of injured and dying, stepping over bodies both alive and dead. Thomas’ breath became labored. His heart took on an irregular beat.

“Come on boys,” one said, “Pick ‘em up. Nice and easy now.”

“Please, no,” Thomas begged. “Let me alone. There ain’t nothing wrong with me, choose another!”

“Hush, boy,” they said. “Doc’s gonna help you. He’ll do what’s needed to keep you alive.”

They hefted him up, ignoring his pleas and his weak struggles. When his begging failed to provoke mercy, he screamed at them. As they stepped from the church and into the open air, he was temporarily blinded by the summer sun. When they laid him on the table, Thomas quit both screaming and begging and fell back to praying.

Tears in his one working eye, Thomas squinted into the overfatigued face of the bloodstained physician. Thomas had intended to repeat his pleas, to tell the man that he didn’t need help. All they needed was to send him home. But before he could utter a word, his eye fell upon the pile of discarded limbs that lay behind the physician. Arms and legs, hands and feet – they were piled as tall as a man and nearly as wide. The fruits taken from a hard day of labor.

Thomas squeezed his eye closed and sobbed.

“Tsk.” The physician poked Thomas high on his left bicep. “I’m sorry, son. I can’t suture nor cauterize this. The limb is spoiled. We’ll have to remove it.”

Inarticulable, Thomas begged both God and man for mercy. The physician took up his bloody tool. Rough hands groped at Thomas’ limbs, pressing him down. When the blade’s teeth kissed his arm, Thomas screamed for his mother. He was cut off as a foul bit of leather was forced into his mouth. He nearly vomited through the gag as the physician’s instrument thrust its first obscene stroke against him.

He was still conscious to hear it bite into the bone.

Screak-screak. Screak-screak. Screak-screak. Screak-scr-