ROME
Catherine Kim
I. Now: Rome, Georgia
On Saturday, August 17, 1872, Robert Battey removed Julia Omberg’s ovaries. The surgery was conducted on her kitchen table, in her child-hood home on West First Street in Rome, Georgia. A lynch mob waited outside, ready to hang him if she died.
Or so the story goes, has gone.
Today, it is possible to visit the Omberg home, which sits directly behind the city hall. The house’s modest facade is mostly preserved from those postbellum years: slender columns, plain white triangular pediment, red brick facing. On the front lawn of city hall stands a monument to Robert Battey. The stone obelisk has four sides, each emblazoned with one of his virtues. Modesty, of course, but also Originality, for Battey’s operation was the first to remove healthy ovaries, leading to hundreds of such operations before the 20th century.
Both Battey and Omberg lie in the Myrtle Hill Cemetery, a fifteen-minute stroll west on Broad Street. The cemetery sits on a hill, at the confluence of the three rivers that partition the city like an ancient triskele. These waterways bore the shipments of cotton that were once Rome’s lifeblood. From the cemetery’s crowning point, the vista stretches unobscured, a recon officer’s dream: the six other peaks of Rome, the Appalachian foothills to the north, and the leafy bowl of the Etowah Valley to the east.
Battey’s body rests in the Battey Mausoleum, while Omberg has a simple stone marking the years of her birth and death. Hundreds of Confederate graves surround them, flanked by separate sections for the Union soldiers, Blacks, and the town’s founders. Wild myrtle, the Flower of Death, covered the hill until the ladies of the garden club replaced it with the more genteel crepe variety.
The story of Battey and Omberg seems familiar and tragic, representative of gender power dynamics of the nineteenth century, and perhaps the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries as well. A male physician operates upon a woman, for a dubiously framed illness. His case notes and publications tell his story, whereas she is only his patient. Otherwise, her name appears in census records, taxes, and on her death certificate.
There are these truths, but also glimpses of others.
II. Then: Helen
The first truth: at the time of her surgery, Julia is the head of house-hold. She is thirty years old. Also in the home on West First Street are Julia’s younger siblings: Kate, age nineteen; Nicholas, age fifteen; and Helen, age thirteen.
This arrangement, beginning in the remote hazy years before the war, suits them all.
Helen, the baby, has no memory of their mother, who died giving birth to her. Julia teaches Helen to wash her face, to dress herself, to answer adults with a curtsy and smile, eyes cast demurely down-wards. At dinner, Julia reminds Helen to sit straight in her chair, elbows off the table, and to chew with her mouth closed. Julia has Helen trace, with her nail-bitten finger, the block letters of the Dixie Primer, A through Z, ending with &.
As the war siphons men to be soldiers, reverends leave their congregations to minister near the battlefield. The carpets of the churches are untacked from the floor, rolled, and piled like logs in the corner. The prayer books are removed from the backs of the pews and stacked neatly in the parsonages. The pews are unbolted and repurposed to float pontoon bridges across the river. Church naves now store haversacks, canteens, tent canvas and poles, and ammunition, while others are converted to hospitals.
So that they remain mindful of God, the Ombergs read aloud from the Bible in the evenings. Hesitantly at first, Helen narrates her preferences: stories of hunger, miraculously satisfied.
Helen’s favorite passage: beginning with five loaves and two fish, Jesus feeds five thousand, with twelve baskets left over. Enough to feed the starving population of their town almost twice over.
As her finger follows the verse across the scritta, Helen recites the familiar words solemnly.
But feral thoughts intrude. Helen imagines tearing her loaf with dirty hands, then cramming the bread into her mouth, like a soldier on the roadside. How was the fish cooked? Jesus and his disciples, being men, likely had Mary or Martha or the other women figure it out, just like the Ladies Auxiliary. The fish – Helen imagines an enormous channel catfish, dense white flesh adhered to the spine–has been fried in butter and salt. After she finishes – head, eyes, fins, and bones–she licks her fingers afterwards and wipes her hands on her calico skirt, finally sated.
Helen’s second favorite passage: the prophet Elijah flees into the wilderness, like a deserter. He falls asleep in the sparse shade of remaining trees, thinned for firewood and supply wagons and cannon chassis. He prays to be relieved of his misery, to die in his sleep rather than shot in dishonor.
But he awakens, his body intact, his rifle dry and loaded, shoes still on his feet. Next to a jug of cold fresh water, bread bakes on coals. As it steams, the rich yeasty scent fills the campsite. Helen imagines Elijah wearing filthy butternut, his temples gaunt and his hair unkempt. As he tips the jug to his cracked lips, escaping drops of water bead silver on his beard, then darken the front of his uniform.
Alone in the wilderness, Elijah does not need to share the bread. He does not have to slice it and divide it among four people, like their family, although Julia always cuts the thickest slices for her younger siblings and the thinnest for herself. He can eat until his belly has swelled, he can sleep without hunger gnawing him awake.
The food renews his stamina and hope, for he walks for forty days and forty nights to safety, to his town, to his farm, to his family.
Helen’s third favorite passage: the Lord commands the prophet Elijah to travel far from his home, to a forsaken land plagued by famine. Like the Confederate soldiers, then the Union soldiers, then the bushwhackers who have swarmed through Rome.
Like locusts, they ravage the fields and empty the silos. They take the cattle, the ponies, and the hogs.
Tell the widow to feed you, God tells Elijah.
Like Julia, the widow begs for mercy. I have nothing baked, she tells Elijah. Only a handful of flour in a jar and a cup of oil in a jug. The earthenware jar and jug echo cavernously, their insides already scraped to near-emptiness. I am gathering the firewood so that I may prepare it for myself and my son – my younger sister Kate, my brother Nicholas, my baby sister Helen.
We have nothing, the others have already taken everything.
Don’t worry, says Elijah. The flour and the oil will be forever renewed, and you will never starve again. The soldier eyes Nick, now ten years old: you know how to hunt and fish, surely. He then tells Julia, You can root in the fields; there is enough scattered grain on the threshing floor to feed a family like yours. Your neighbors will care for you. I know that I would care for mine.
In return, I will not dishonor you, or your sisters. You are only children after all. Despite his privation, he still has the predator’s ferocity and strength. His eyes gleam yellow, like a wolf’s. After he has eaten, he asks Julia to trim his hair and to wash his dirty uniform, which afterwards hangs dripping and heavy on the line. Standing shirtless in their yard, he uses their father’s razor to shave his chin. When his uniform dries, he dons it and his kepi.
Now pink-cheeked and mild-mannered, he transforms from wolf into a well-behaved brindle mastiff, something ordinary and harm-less. On their doorstep, he thanks them, as if he had paid a call, as if he had grown up in their town, as if he will see them at church next Sunday.
As he politely bids them good-bye, Helen suddenly understands something about the nature of men.
First Kings, chapter seventeen, verses eight through sixteen. Helen reads the passage aloud again and again, trying to decipher what she has glimpsed in the story of the prophet.
Her siblings protest. “Perhaps enough Elijah for today, dearest,” Julia says gently.
III. Then: Nick
During the day, the parlor sits unused. The upright piano remains covered and untuned; since Mother died, Julia feels too guilty to indulge in this simple pleasure. The air stands hushed and breathless, and the heavy velvet draperies are drawn against the sunlight.
But in the evenings, the Ombergs gather in the parlor to read aloud. The west-facing windows allow a breeze from the Etowah River, and the setting sun illuminates the room through dusk. After they read their chosen passages, they pass the weighty leather-bound Bible to each other using both hands.
The girls sit side by side on the sofa and Nick in the rocking chair. Like Helen, Nick does not remember their mother. But he does re-member Father, who owned a mercantile. At the day’s end, Father addressed Nick with the gravity of the judge, as if his son were much older. “Tell me, Nicholas,” Father might ask, with the slight lilt of his native Norway, “a customer requests a pound of coffee and a pound of sugar. The coffee is $1.25 per pound and the sugar is ten cents per pound. How much do you charge?” Or, “Your income is $410, and your estate holdings are $4000. How many taxes do you owe for this year?”
If Nick answered incorrectly, especially as Father gave him odd pricing and lengthening inventory, Father would fix him with bright blue eyes. “Tenk igjen.” If Nick answered correctly, as he usually did, Father would give a single puff of his pipe and nod approvingly. “Correct.”
After Nick quickly calculates the cost of three candles, five yards of homespun cottonade, seven yards of calico, a bushel of cornmeal, and a side of bacon, Father actually smiles. “You have a head for numbers, as they say here.”
As his children read in their high clear voices, Father sat in his rocking chair – the one that Nick sits in now – and listened, hands folded in his lap, eyes closed. His head might begin to nod, his breath would slow and deepen, the chair would cease rocking. But if they stopped reading, he would start and awaken. “Please continue,” he would command them quietly. “Light a candle.”
Nick’s father preferred the stories of clever men. Naturally, these are Nick’s preferences as well.
Nick’s favorite passage: King Solomon divines that a baby belongs to the woman who wishes it to live, rather than the one who wishes it to die. Solomon’s genius is that he pretends that he has decided. He then observes the women closely, gauging their reactions to make his decision. (Father assures Nick that the fact they are harlots is unimportant).
A time to keep silent and a time to speak.
It is 1860, and Father runs for councilor of the first ward. Knowing people is good for business, he tells his children. Especially for a man like your father, a foreigner in Rome. A town where being born outside of Floyd County is difference enough. On election day, the children stand next to their father in their Sunday clothes and wave miniature flags of the Union.
Do you support secession? demands his rival.
I love America, replies Father. My children, our neighbors, and God. I love peace and low taxes.
Despite the disadvantages of his Norwegian accent and lack of slaves, Father wins. (Also, his rival has irritated many by penning their strayed cows in the town’s stockade). Yet the following year, the quiet men lose: the Georgia delegates vote for secession, 166 to 130. Father shakes his head.
War is bad for business, he tells his son. At least for decent men.
Nick’s second favorite passage: Joseph, a spoiled shepherd’s son, holds little promise. He may be talented. (He was likely excellent with numbers, comments Nick’s father). But, he is also quite irritating. He likes telling his brothers about his grandiose dreams. In these visions, his brothers kneel subserviently before him in the forms of wheat, or celestial bodies. Their father enjoys the rivalry and fuels it through expensive gifts, not anticipating that the brothers will snap and sell Joseph to a passing caravan.
Yet Joseph does quite well as a slave. He is powerless, but also in proximity to more wealth than in his pastoral youth. Remembering his brothers’ offended reactions to the grain and the stars, Joseph de-scribes his dream interpretations more tactfully to the Pharaoh. His sensible advice regarding grain surplus projections earns Joseph his freedom and power. Eventually, he reunites with his family.
Nick remembers the first time he heard the story of Joseph. The slave who became a savior of his family and thousands of people.
Could there be a Joseph in Rome? Nick asked Father.
No, Father told him. People would need to fear something more than a Black man. People would need to believe that a Black man could save them from that thing.
But for our neighbors, the Black man is that thing.
Nick’s third favorite passage: Daniel advises tyrannical rulers. Their bizarre and ancient names have an incantatory potency: Nebu-chadnezzar, Evil-Merodach, Belshazzar, Darius, Cyrus. Despite their power, the kings are prone to cryptic and vivid nightmares. During their despairing rages, the kings threaten to execute their advisors. But Daniel can’t leave. For there are no other jobs for defeated Jews such as himself.
Despite his precarious position, Daniel stubbornly delivers bad news. The king will crawl on all fours like an animal, insane and humiliated. A boulder smashes a statue to bits, its beautiful golden head a metaphor for the kingdom. A disembodied hand writes on the wall: doom is nigh.
Daniel not only perseveres, but thrives under each new regime. No one kills him for stating the obvious and forbidden: the kingdom is lost. The sacrifices have served no greater purpose. Nothing gained from the advisors and their children thrown to the lions, the dead fathers immobilized in graves which mar the fresh green grass.
Perhaps Daniel, like Nick, once believed in security. Perhaps Daniel considered the possibility of love in the new world order. But if so, there is no record of it. Daniel, all-seeing and eternal, does not regret the passing of these ancient kingdoms, their songs and languages, the blessings of mad rulers who have since passed into obscurity.
Daniel’s frozen heart is invulnerable.
Unlike Nick’s, who now clerks for another dry goods store, once a rival to Father’s. Sometimes, as Nick weighs the sugar, or measures out the lengths of fabric, he hears Father’s voice admonishing him gently: careful.
At these moments, Nick’s breath catches.
When he first began reading his favorite passages, before the war, Nick liked to imagine himself as Solomon, or Joseph, or even Daniel, watchful and persistent and lucky.
In later years, as he reads with his sisters in the parlor, Nick prefers to think of Father. Dozing, soothed to sleep by the voices of his children. Or rather, the impression of Father, for Nick can no longer recall his face clearly, or the timbre of his voice.
IV. Then: Kate
Even as her younger siblings have become guarded, Kate has slowly transformed into something else.
To others than her family, she appears tame, at least at first. They see a girl of twelve who folds her hands in her lap. She speaks only when spoken to, and then in a just audible voice. She wears her plain brown hair pulled back from her face, neatly parted down the center of her scalp. Although she is too young to wear a corset, she sits perfectly upright, as if already preparing herself for stays.
Yet her eyes glance down for only a moment, before leveling an unblinking gaze. It is this stare that leaves others vaguely unsettled, as if a wild creature had just taken their measure.
When her childhood friend Mary Agnes complains of the chaotic state of affairs at the Battey home, Kate listens intently. Mrs. Battey nurses and has three children under three, along with four young boys who are useless with chores. Now that the Yankees have left, and the Blacks with them, Mary Agnes and her mother must cook and wash and sew and garden. They must tend to this baby and that one.
I do not know how they manage to have so many children, Mary Agnes complains to Kate as they sit on the Omberg’s back porch. For each one of Father’s leaves, there is a new baby. This is the first moment in weeks that I have been able to steal away.
The next day, Kate presents herself at the Battey home. She comes to the front door, as she did when Father was alive. But this time, she holds a basket. Mrs. Battey answers, a snuffling baby in each arm. A yellow-green stain streaks diagonally across her apron. A dark lock of hair has escaped her controlled chignon and lays limply on her fore-head. Her usual composed and authoritative face seems a mask on the verge of dissolving.
Next to her mother, Mary Agnes hoists another wailing toddler upon her hip.
“Kate, I cannot join you!” cries Mary. “It is all cattywampus here.
The babies cannot keep anything down.”
“That is not why I am here,” Kate assures her friend in her soft, measured voice. She inclines her head and regards them steadily. “Good morning, Mrs. Battey,” she says. “I have come to make myself useful, if I may.”
By noon, Kate has rinsed and wrung the soiled diapers and hung them on the line. She has peeled the potatoes, bursting with eyes, and set them in the iron pot, along with the remnants of spoilt carrots, softened parsnips, and bitter greens. She has mopped the kitchen’s rough floor and swept the cottage’s first story.
She does this while skillfully weaving around the shouting Battey boys, perpetually in motion. Imitating the war cries of battle, they run in and out of the kitchen, thunder up and down the stairs, and charge through the front and back doors.
That day, Kate leaves with her basket full of vegetables from the Battey’s large but untended garden.
The next day, Kate brings home candles. The next day, thread, fol-lowed by fabric, and then whatever else can be spared from the Battey’s substantial storeroom.
“Katherine Omberg, you are heaven sent!” exclaims Mrs. Battey. “I would like to keep you forever.”
“I will stay until your help returns,”Kate say sin her quiet way, the way of someone much older. “Which they will, eventually, although you may need to pay them.”
Her bright blue eyes hold Mrs. Battey’s brown ones for a second too long, and Mrs. Battey must look away. Not for the first time, Mrs. Battey thinks of how odd this Omberg child has become, through all of the troubles. Something not a young girl, in a young girl’s body.
In the evenings, after she labors both at their home as well as the Battey’s, Kate collapses exhausted onto the parlor sofa.
There is something peculiar in it, though. Kate also exudes satisfaction. As she sprawls on the couch, she resembles an indolent soldier more than the genteel lady she was raised to be. Julia eyes her sister’s splayed legs under her calico dress, but says nothing about this. Instead, she says, “You first, Katie,” then passes her the Bible.
At first, Kate chose parables of selfless behavior. The Good Samaritan travels the dangerous stretch of road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the Way of Blood, the Sherman’s March. He comes across a man of the tribe who scorned him, a man who has been beaten and robbed and left unconscious. The Samaritan tears his own clothing to bandage the bleeding wounds. He pays two pieces of silver to the innkeeper: take care of this forsaken man.
Kate cannot remember when it happens. When Kate recognizes that she would not pay two pieces of silver for a Yankee left for dead on the side of the road.
She stops reading this parable, along with those of the selfless women in the New Testament: Martha, the Marys, the women who would wipe Jesus’ feet with their hair and expensive perfume. The reverend used to read the stories of these examples and exhort his listeners to repeated sacrifices and humiliations.
Now, Kate prefers to read Judges aloud. The wicked, brought to task and violent death. As she reads, Kate’s soft voice becomes steelier. The fierceness that merely flickered, barely detectable, now animates her face. Although Julia reminds her to be decorous, Kate lingers on the verses where enemies meet their deserved ends: stabbings, decapitations, crushing by millstones.
During these performances, Helen holds her knees and stares wide-eyed at Kate, the prophetess. Nick stops rocking in his chair. Julia pauses her stitching. Despite herself, she imagines the golden idols and the frenzy of worshippers, and God’s annihilating wrath.
Kate’s favorite passage: the judge Deborah holds court under a palm tree, while citizens queue for advice and judgment. After a vision from God, Deborah calls for General Barak and commands him to muster ten thousand troops. You can defeat the enemy captain at the river, if you hurry, she tells him.
But Barak is afraid. Will you come with me, Deborah?
Of course. Victory is ours, she tells Barak.
God’s and mine.
Deborah’s words would be quiet, but her tone autocratic and her command unmistakable. Kate imagines that this might sound like Mrs. Battey talking to Dr. Battey.
The enemy captain flees, seeking shelter in the simple tent of an ally. Yet the ally is not truly an ally, for his warrior wife, Jael, takes a tent peg and drives it into the captain’s head.
Kate admires Deborah, dignified and formidable, like a president of the Ladies Auxiliary, like Mrs. Battey on the best of days.
But Kate wishes she could be Jael, who has hammered a six-inch stake of iron into a skull with a rock. All while smiling reassuringly at the doomed captain.
I feel sorry for the enemy captain’s mother, Nicholas always says.
That is sad, acknowledges Kate, patting her younger brother’s hand gently. But it’s better that she did something. Jael. Otherwise, the war would have dragged on and on.
After a semblance of order comes to Rome, and Julia no longer secretly worries that it is truly the End of Days, she finally allows Kate to read the Book of Revelation aloud. Like her reading of Judges, Kate savors the dramatic. With gusto, she narrates how the Whore of Babylon sits on the back of a seven-headed dragon, drinking the blood of innocents. The skies rain fire while the angels blare deafening trumpets. The mountains crumble, thundering, into the sea. Falling stars plague the earth. Rogue horsemen breathe sulfur and smoke. The earth quakes as the armies cross the plains, battling until the fields writhe with wounded.
Julia suspects that Kate’s passionate performances might be better suited for a camp revival rather than a Presbyterian home like theirs. However, Kate clearly enjoys herself, as do Nicholas and Helen, and, secretly, Julia.
One evening, Julia teases Kate about her choices. I would have thought you would have preferred the other stories of brave women instead of the Revelation. The stories of Judith, Esther. The midwives who saved the Hebrew babies from murder.
Oh, Kate says. I suppose they were brave. But so much of those stories are about tricking the men with their beauty. Pretending to be obedient. Sneaking around.
I like the stories where the women don’t pretend, Kate says.
Sneaking and tricking are more like real life, Julia points out.
Yes, I suppose you’re right, Kate replies, pleasantly.
V. Then: Julia
The second truth: at the time of her surgery, Julia is addicted to morphine.
In the earliest of her memories, she burns as if standing in August sunshine at noon. But she actually lies in her dim bedroom, curtains drawn against the light. As Julia sweats through her nightclothes, Mother sits at her side and lays cool clothes on Julia’s forehead. The muted sunshine silhouettes Mother’s head. Her shadowed face is young and beautiful and perfect, as yet unlined from the additional burdens of her siblings.
As Julia coughs violently, fine sprays of blood fleck the sheets. Jewel, says Mother. Drink this flower juice.
Miraculously, Julia’s cough ceases, followed by a blissful peace. Mother and daughter fall into a deep sleep, their arms around each other: this is what God’s love feels like.
The forgotten memory resurfaces when Julia is fifteen. She holds the squalling Helen. Blood fills the baby’s cheeks, and her eyes and fists are screwed tight. Julia gently bounces the infant in her arms. “I love you,” she whispers in its ear. She tries not to sound frantic. But the small body remains tensed, rigid with anger. So Julia steps onto the front porch, still holding it.
Outside, the humid air settles instantly upon her skin. Sweet sweet sweet, chirps a warbler, and the fragrance of sugarberry trees envelopes them. To Julia’s relief, the baby’s screams diminish into subdued, hiccupping sobs. In mutual exhaustion, they regard the familiar view from their front stoop – the Lanham house next door, the Brysons across the way, and the Underwood cottage.
At first, Julia mistakes the piercing light for an errant ray of sun-shine. But it quickly expands, like flame consuming paper. The tidy yards thick with camellias and drift roses begin to vibrate, arranging themselves like the jagged granite of the Etowah Gorge.
Pain pierces Julia’s temple like one of Jael’s spikes. As she gasps, the baby, alarmed, begins to wail again. “Father!” Julia cries back to the open door. “Help me!” Her voice echoes, as if she calls under-water.
Eventually, Julia understands that such symptoms may occur in the days before menstruation. But the bleeding doesn’t come. In-stead, her belly spasms, and she doubles over in pain. So she does not frighten her siblings, she hides in her darkened bedroom, burying her face in the pillow. She refuses food and water.
Father inquires at the Pemberton’s pharmacy: one grain sulphate of morphia in an ounce of water. “One swallow should suffice,” the druggist instructs. “Only a quarter of an ounce.”
Minutes after the first swallow, Julia can consider the pain. Now, it sits apart from her, as if she could touch it. There, but of no con-sequence. As the headache slowly disintegrates, an ease steals over her. Julia marvels at the precise dry ticking of the mantel clock and delicious caress of the cool sheets. When Kate opens the door, her blue eyes wide with anxiety, Julia’s heart surges with affection.
“Better?” lisps Kate.
“Much better,” replies Julia, drowsily.
She dreams. She sits on a grassy bank next to a pond, under the shade of willow trees. Miraculously, Mother sits next to her. A quiet resurrection, unwitnessed by anyone except Julia. The guards at the tomb sleep, the water laps gently at the pond’s edge. The speckled backs of trout glisten beneath the water’s surface.
Julia lays her head on Mother’s shoulder. Without speaking, she tells Mother, you would be proud of us. Helen grows without the breast. Nicholas is gentle, blessed like the meek. Kate does not quite understand that you are gone. But she sees how Father and I suffer, and she tries to be good. I am teaching her to read and to be a proper lady. I keep house as well as anyone.
Mother strokes Julia’s hair. I know.
Julia awakens to Helen’s cries, their volume now magnified by the open door: Kate peers in. “What day is it?” Julia asks, groggily. “Sunday,” says Kate. Even as only minutes passed at the water’s edge, two days have passed in Rome. Sunlight, harsh and ordinary, shines through the curtains. Julia breathes the bedroom’s stale air, and a pang of loss ripples through her.
So when the castellated cliffs return the following month, fol-lowed by the blinding headache and the intense pains in her abdomen, a secret voice rejoices. With a single swallow, she can see Mother again.
With each monthly recurrence, Julia’s anticipation of morphine’s bliss grows to equal her pain. The simultaneous joy and suffering make her vertiginous. Julia knows that after she takes the morphia, her eyes turn glassy, and her speech becomes languorous as if she had just awoken. But she also knows that if she holds her head upright and shoulders back, that if she is quiet and neat, her muted demeanor will be attributed to reasons other than opium eating.
Grief for Mother’s loss, then Father’s. Melancholy for her poor prospects for marriage and her own children, the eligible young men now buried on the battlefield. Neurasthenia for her impoverishment.
Julia still does not menstruate. But one day the cramping intensifies, followed by knife-like pain in her lower belly. When her bloody bowel movement comes, she welcomes it. Even the most hard-hearted, Julia tells herself, would acknowledge that this is a reason to ingest more morphia. And so she does.
The relief is temporary, for as the morphine fades, she experiences a despair that is more profound than when Mother died, or Father. With growing certainty, she understands that her inflamed state will exist until she lies in Myrtle Hill. Her skeleton, twisted and enervated by pain, will resurface after burial like Cherokee bones.
During her molimenal days, Julia pins up her dark hair in rolls alongside her ears. She secures it with Mother’s tortoiseshell combs. She pins her mother’s brooch to her dress, she smooths her starched skirts. No one could appear more proper, Julia tells herself, even as she asks herself if she has become an opium eater.
No, she answers. For your family needs you, and you have taken precautions. No one knows the steps you have taken to make it difficult for yourself: placing the bottle in a high corner, access requiring a chair stacked with books; sealing the bottle with wax after each use. Marking the bottle’s meniscus of pills with a grease pen and the date: do not go above this line.
But, you need to scribble reminders to yourself of even simple tasks to be done. This works until you begin to lose track of the days, which slip by at an increasingly rapid pace. As your siblings read in the evenings, you drift off. Much like Father before he died, except your stupor is new, the depth correlated with the amount of morphia you have ingested that day. Woozily, you ask Helen to repeat her last recitation, which she does patiently, worriedly.
You no longer have an appetite, pushing the spring peas and chicken to create the illusion of food ingested. Your eyes accidentally catch Nicholas’s as he stares at your full dinner plate, and you realize you have fooled no one.
You try to go without in the morning, for it is easiest to run to the outhouse during the day, when you can see your way. At noon, your withdrawal sweats can be attributed to your vigorous labors. During the day’s chores, you can turn partially away from the constant low hum of the craving which sits on your left shoulder, whispering in your ear.
Your thoughts no longer turn to God. Instead, you dream of purchasing another bottle of morphia. In these fantasies, which begin to seep into your thoughts as you knit, or wash, or cook, or pray, or dream, you gulp the bottle’s contents in one sitting. Delicious, the sensation covering you like the clear waters of the pond.
Silently, you have handed the bottle of morphia grains and the strongbox to Kate. As Kate looks at you, puzzled, you instruct her sternly: do not allow me to access this between attacks. Hide the funds.
Kate nods in understanding, then gives you the same sharp gaze that so unsettles others.
Your mother no longer appears beside the grassy bank to comfort you. In her absence, you read her disappointment and God’s dam-nation.
Over breakfast, Kate says, “Dr. Battey has returned. He has opened a practice in town.” She speaks softly, as if it were only gossip. Yet Kate has never been casual, and Julia hears the simultaneous suggestion and the command.
“Perhaps I will pay a call,” Julia replies.
VI. Then: Robert Battey
The third truth: Julia officially becomes Battey’s patient when he re-turns from service as a surgeon in the Nineteenth Georgia Volunteer Regiment.
Until the Civil War, Battey’s medical training is typical for a southerner of means: medical school in the northern United States (Philadelphia, in Battey’s case), where instruction consists of lectures, followed by further training on the European continent (Paris, in Battey’s case). At the Collège de France, Battey attends hospital teaching rounds. Claude Bernard, the famed physiologist, urges his students to experiment. Jean Martin Charcot shares preliminary insights into hysteria, the debilitating mental illness affecting both women and soldiers.
When Battey returns to Rome, the childhood home of his wife Martha, he is anxious to establish himself. He is particularly hopeful for his new surgical approach to the vesico-vaginal fistula, a condition which results in repeated urinary infections and leakage of urine into the vagina.
Existing practice has been shaped by James Marion Sims, who operated upon enslaved women in Alabama two decades earlier. Leery of the volatile nature of ether and the toxicity of chloroform, Sims avoided anesthesia. Although he believed that the slaves have high pain tolerance, Sims administered opium post-operatively. (Opium is well known to be safe). Despite his high complication rate, the popular press lauds him to be an innovator and hero. Sims relocates to New York to reach more affluent clientele and establishes the first Women’s Hospital in the United States. With the onset of war and the unpopularity of his pro-Confederacy views in New York, the fifty-two-year-old Sims moves to Europe. There, when not spying for the south, he operates on celebrities such as Empress Eugénie Napoleon.
Perhaps Battey hoped to emulate Sims’ fame and fortune. How-ever, Battey cannot avoid active service. In 1861, he is thirty-one years old, an age similar to that of today’s graduating surgeons. By now, he and Martha have seven children, the oldest of whom is ten years old, and the youngest, an infant.
The Nineteenth is attached to the Army of Virginia. Battey is a surgeon at the Battle of Seven Pines, on the outskirts of Richmond. For two days, 73,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fight at close quarters, with cannon, bayonet, and Minié balls. Unlike the previous generation of spherical bullets, which could exit and enter the body cleanly, the conical Minié flattens upon impact. Bone shatters into fragments and dust. Tendons, ligaments, and muscle shred into stringy ribbons.
Heavy casualties result: almost 14,000 men are injured.
Battey is not prepared – how could anyone have been? – for the dire conditions at the improvised field hospitals, converted from barns and houses, or tents and open-air tables. The nature of the Minié, trailing the detritus of once-living tissue, means that surgeries focus on preserving life: amputations.
The injured are lightly anesthetized with chloroform or ether while their limbs are detached with bone saws, which resemble the tool used for tree branches. As Battey operates on each patient, he hears the cries of the others outside of the tent. By evening, his right shoulder aches from the repeated back-and-forth. As the bone nears its breaking point, it is quicker and easier to snap it rather than to continue sawing.
Candles are lit, for the queues of wounded still snake through-out the camp. The surgeons operate through the night, their stooped shoulders shrouded by smoke, fumes mingling with blood’s metallic scent.
After two days, his eyelids involuntarily closing with fatigue, his spasming hand no longer able to grip the saw, Battey falls onto his cot. In the second between lying down and dreaming, he sees the jumbled heap of amputated limbs. The legs and arms of mismatched lengths and calibers, the skin of hands and feet tinted in varied colors, the hair gold or brown or red or black, want assortment into some-thing whole. Instead, these discarded pieces await removal by the one-horse cart and burial away from the wild hogs that root just out of pistol range.
At first, he prays to forget; he assumes that this assignment will be short-lived, as everyone assumes that the war will not last the year. But his tour leads him through hospitals across the south, and he re-lives these and other nightmares. After Seven Pines, Battey is placed at the Fairground Hospital No. 2 in Atlanta. (Atlanta is followed by Vineville, Lauderdale, Rome, Selma, Macon). There are not enough matrons, nurses, orderlies and stewards, so the healthier patients are dragooned to serve in their place. Human excreta overwhelms the wards: an orderly suggests dyeing the sheets dark colors, to dis-guise the stains that cannot be removed by washing. Lavender, char-coal, lime sulfate, and the sickly-sweet counterpoint of carbolic acid do not quite mask the rotting odor of gangrene or the fetid dysenteric stool.
Battey can do nothing about these conditions. But dutifully, he continues to round upon the rows of soldiers, many country boys previously unexposed to infection. Mercifully, those newly exposed to measles and smallpox succumb quickly, without mess. Although cholera is also swift, the profuse vomitus and diarrhea often splatter upon the neighboring cots. Battey instructs these patients to be sequestered in their own area, to at least minimize the retching to one corner of the hospital. For this section, he requests floors be mopped several times a day instead of once, and for sawdust to be scattered upon the floor.
As he walks the rows, the men sometimes plead with him.
The younger soldiers may ask for simple things, like food. Even in the early days of the war, supplies were low, but fighting has extended for months, then years. Supply lines are repeatedly ruptured, and the surrounding farms untended. The hospital stewards send men to scavenge the already-scavenged fields. The salted beef and pork are often rancid and spoiled, biscuit in the form of hard tack must be dipped in coffee to make it digestible.
I have already asked the matron, Battey’s patients tell him. But perhaps the doctor knows otherwise?
The older soldiers know better than to ask for food. Instead, they ask for pain relief. When medications are on hand, the surgeons dis-tribute them liberally, along with the other pharmacopeia of the era, which can fit onto a single typed line: opium and its derivatives, laudanum, morphine, paregoric. Also: quinine, chloroform, calomel, a mercury derivative. But time moves slowly for the bedbound, and even more slowly for those in pain. So sometimes they also try to draw Battey into conversation, passing the hours until they can return home, or God sees fit to take them elsewhere.
The surgeons respond differently to these requests. Somesilently inspect the seeping bandages, healing flaps, and the suppurating wounds, giving the briefest of replies to the soldiers’ questions. For what else is there to do, when cutting is no longer an option? They round as quickly as possible, then exit the contaminated wards. Out-side, they can breathe the fresh, miasma-free air and be thankful for their intact limbs and disease-free lungs.
Others, like Battey, will deliberate at the bedside. He observes but does not comment upon the shadowed dehydrated eyes of the dysenteric men. If their glances meet, he may nod. Where is home? he asks, attempting to draw their dying thoughts to happier places.
He understands that this may be all that he can do. Perhaps it is futile. Maybe it is something.
Beaufort, Franklin, Selma, Tebbs Bend, Tallulah, Natchez, Rome. Battey inspects the young man’s face more carefully. He does not recognize him. Still, he grasps the young man’s hand. Friend! says Battey. I thought I knew every face in Rome.
The young man, his blue eyes sunken and ringed with dark shad-ows, smiles weakly. Sir, just outside. Farm boy. Tom Perry. My kin are in town. Neighbors to the Ombergs.
Of course, of course, says Battey. He recalls the councilor with his funny accent. The mercantile owner.
The men talk of Rome. Where the fishing is best; Perry prefers to fish for largemouth bass near the Old Antioch Cemetery in Georgia. Battey likes to sit amidst the trees bordering the Coosa, close to town but as peaceful as any mountainous farmstead. The men talk about hunting on John’s Mountain; Tom tells Battey about shooting a bear four years ago, when he was fourteen. Fed us through the winter, he tells Battey proudly.
If you are going back there soon, Perry says. He pulls a carefully creased letter from underneath his cot. To my mother.
Yes, says Battey. I will return soon, on leave. I will hand-deliver it.
He does not say, as he used to say, when he was four years younger and newly minted, Nonsense. You will deliver it yourself.
Later that afternoon, when the young man dies, Battey pauses work to walk alongside the body to the cemetery. He stands alongside the grave as the orderlies shovel the earth over the shrouded corpse. He bows his head as the reverend recites the prayer. By now, both men know it from memory. Battey tries to muster his faith that God listens.
If, worn with pain, disease, and grief, This feeble frame should be,
Grant patience, rest, and kind relief; Good Lord remember me.
And oh! when, in the hour of death, I bow to Thy decree,
Jesu, receive my parting breath; Good Lord, remember me.
That evening, he receives a letter from Martha. The letter is more solemn than usual, perhaps because she is heavily pregnant. Martha tells him that their slaves have left but then returned, forced by lack of resources elsewhere. Although they continue to live in the home, they disappear then reappear at irregular intervals. No one is certain about the rules of engagement. Although she still has their cows, the fences have already burned for firewood.
Worst, the bushwhackers roam freely through the town. Deserters from both armies, who sense opportunity in the waning days of the war. “I had expected that when the Yankees left, I would get some sleep at night, but it is worse than ever,” Martha laments. “Our people are doing so badly.
“They killed Mr. Omberg last. He was out in the yard, and he and Mr. McGuire heard somebody cry out. When they ran to old Mrs. Quinn, the men were hanging Mr. Quinn. When Mr. Omberg asked them who they were, they replied, ‘Friends.’
“They walked up to him and took all his greenbacks, then shot him. He lived until today. Getting him buried was difficult. Every-body stayed cooped up in their homes for fear of being shot, but presently the men ventured forth, made a coffin out of pine boards, and laid him away.”
Here, the angle of the writing changes slightly, as if Martha had paused then returned to her letter. She writes to him of the children, who despite the surrounding horror, continue to grow. Your babies remember you, she insists. She promises to write again, when she feels more cheerful.
Battey carefully folds the letter. He picks up his pen and dips it in the inkwell. He hesitates between convention and truth, encouragement and despair. Should he encourage his wife to be brave? The end days of the fighting approach rapidly, the desired outcome for war’s end rather than victory. Should he tell her that just today, he met a boy from Rome?
What a coincidence, he could write. I just spoke of Mr. Omberg today.
No. Exhausted, Battey puts his pen down. He will write his cheerful exhortation in the morning.
Tonight, he will weep for the Perry boy, and Omberg, and all the soldiers who have died after he has laid hands upon them.
VII. Vicious and Obstinate Ovulation, Ended
When Battey returns to Rome, he secretly resolves never to lift a saw again. Instead, he thinks, I will return to my original passion: assisting the gravid and their after-repairs. He is assisted by the town’s citizens, who are eager to embrace marriage and birth. The churches, restored from their war-time roles of armories and hospitals, are now lit for evening weddings. During the conflict, Rome lost almost a third of its population, but the number steadily begins to climb. With a mixture of joy and relief, Battey attends women during their pregnancy and labor.
Except, of course, Julia Omberg. Compelled by her family tragedy as well as his wife’s insistence, Battey continues to treat Julia despite having nothing to offer her.
Battey does not place much stock in the witchy herbs of midwives, but at least these do not waste the body like opium. Surreptitiously and reluctantly, he recommends them to Julia. Battey tries penny-royal, the flowering purple flowers lining the roadside like thistle. He instructs Julia to crush the flowers and stir them in tepid rather than boiling water to preserve its active ingredients. When this fails to induce bleeding, he tries tansy, the tightly bunched golden flowers resembling gold uniform buttons. The white flowers of the rue are more difficult to find and toxic to cattle, but Battey obtains enough of the foul-smelling leaves to try in another tea.
Julia worsens. Epileptic fits now accompany the monthly head-aches, the rectal and gastric bleeding. Her wrists and knuckles swell. Helen and Kate must brush her hair and dress her, for her fingers fumble at the buttons. Battey has no choice but to increase the morphia.
The fat melts away from Julia’s cheeks and her temples hollow; she has now reached the stage of addiction where death comes from inadequate caloric intake.
Ovariotomy. When the idea first bobs to the surface of his consciousness, Battey pushes it away. But stubbornly, it resurfaces after each frustrated house call ending with a teary Julia, a worried Nicholas, a frightened Helen, and a frightening Kate, who glares at him with each failed attempt.
“Can you offer nothing else besides morphine?” she asks him, her soft voice edged in anger. “For we can go to Pemberton’s ourselves.” “Kate,” reprimands Julia gently. “He does all that he knows.” Her bony swollen hands pick at the lace on her handkerchief.
Clearly, it is not enough, Battey thinks helplessly. “We may end the molimen, and it spernicious symptoms, by removing the ovaries,” he finally offers. “I have just removed the diseased ovary from a colleague’s wife. She reports improvement on all fronts.”
Julia replies instantly. “Yes.”
Battey regrets his words as soon as he has said them. Removing a woman’s reason for existence is a perversion of the natural order. He hesitates. “It will result in certain sacrifice of your sexual character.” To his surprise, Julia laughs. It is the first time he has heard it.
“Sexual character,” she repeats. She laughs again.
“Spinsterhood,” he adds. He thinks of his own ten children. “The lack of the maternal experience.”
Julia thinks of her mother’s death in childbirth. She remembers her younger siblings’ tantrums. She imagines Dr. Battey’s ten children, informed by Kate’s descriptions of children’s cries emanating continuously from alternate corners of the Battey home.
Julia laughs again, but out of politeness, does not elaborate. In-stead, she dabs at the corners of her eyes with her handkerchief.
Slightly startled at her response, Battey continues. She may bleed to death. Septicemia is possible. Given her morphia habit, adequate pain management without oversedation will be a challenge. Through some unforeseen complication, she may become even more debilitated.
None of it dissuades Julia in the least.
“This will reverse the wasting?” Kate enquires. “The morphia use?”
“I cannot promise,” says Battey. “But we will try?”
“We will try.”
Battey consults his colleagues. Strategically, he consults men who might tolerate this violation of sacred womanhood: Yankees. The Gynaecological Society of Boston consider Battey’s radical suggestion at their June meeting. Dr. Bixby politely expresses doubts. He re-ports an overlapping case of hysterical monthly convulsions without menstruation. Yet, he notes, “A change of climate exerted a wonderful influence upon her general health.”
Otherwise, the men offer overwhelming support. “If he were sure of the diagnosis, namely, that all the suffering she complained of was owing to ovarian irritation, he should certainly favor the operation proposed by Dr. Battey,” comments Dr. Hazelton. “After all, the ovaries seemed to play the most important role in the sexual organization of woman. The motto of the Society should be Propter Ovarium, rather than Properter Uterum.”
Dr. Holbrookconcurs. “The removal of the ovaries in the human female would be but carrying out a principle so often enacted upon the lower animals, and almost invariably without any detriment to their future well-being.”
Battey and Julia decide to proceed, undeterred by the sweltering heat that August, and the grumblings of rival practitioners who in-form Battey that they will not hesitate to prosecute him should Julia die. (In 1872, Rome still has fewer than four thousand citizens, and Battey is confident of his place among them). After the war’s end, there is no longer a free-standing hospital in Rome. They agree to conduct the operation in the Omberg’s home, where she may recover in comfort.
Battey recruits several seconds: Dr. Hoyt, whose skill with chloroform has led to fewer deaths from toxicity, and the Holmes uncle and nephew, George and J.B.S, whose own panels are filled with women who suffer from paroxysms of depression and pain.
Julia proves difficult to sedate. She now uses 60 mg of morphine a day, and her anxiety drives her awareness until the absolute edge of chloroform’s safety. But once she lays still, Battey works quickly, his speed informed by his war days. With the scalpel, he draws a crimson line across her abdomen, through the globules of yellow fat and fibrous sheath underneath. What did he expect to find? Not what he does: a perfectly normal uterus in size and texture, ovaries unblighted by endometriomas or adhesions. On the ovary’s slick surface, a tiny spot of blood, the sign of ovulation.
For a moment, Battey hesitates as he holds almond-size organs between his fingers. It is one thing to remove a destroyed limb, an-other to crush this tiny, perfect thing. But then he finds his resolve and ligates the pedicle. With miniature scissors, he gently clips the stumps and allows them to disappear back into the abdomen.
When Julia awakes from the chloroform, the first face she sees is Battey’s. In congratulations, he gives her a swig of brandy, which she sips delicately, like tea. When she completes this, he hands her the swallow of the fluid ounce and a half of morphine, the amount that he knows she needs.
Her recovery is slow. Over the following weeks, she drenches in perspiration, and her pulse accelerates to over one hundred. A rash spreads from her wound across her abdomen. Battey irrigates her pelvis and drains urine from her bladder with a catheter. He and Kate take turns laying cold wet cloths on Julia’s forehead and gently rubbing her belly with turpentine. They hold glasses of water with lime juice and milk to her lips. They mix enemas of soap and water and administer them apologetically.
Kate brings the rocking chair from the parlor to the kitchen, so that he may nap between these ministrations. Battey and Kate eye each other as he holds the morphine to Julia’s lips. By now, she takes two grains per day, the equivalent of 120 mg of morphine.
“You promised that you would try,” Kate reminds him fiercely.
“When she is healed,” Battey says.
On the twenty-sixth day, he begins to reduce the morphine.
For the first time since the surgery, Kate changes her clothes. She pins her hair and covers it. She dresses as if for Sunday service. “I will return shortly,” she tells Nicholas and Helen. “I only need to make a few brief calls.”
Her first stop is Pemberton’s. “My sister has survived,” she tells the druggist, who looks at her languidly, his pupils the finest of pin-pricks. Sampling his own product, thinks Kate. She enunciates loudly and slowly to his haze. “Should she come call, Dr. Battey instructs you are not to dispense morphine. Or laudanum, or any of that sort.”
It is only several blocks to Jacob Kuttner’s dry goods. The merchant offers her a friendly nod. “How is your sister,” he asks. His accent reminds her, a little, of Father’s.
“Very well,” Kate says. “So well, that she may come. And you are not to give her morphine.” She adds, belatedly, “Dr. Battey’s orders.”
Kuttner looks at her, amazed. But he, like others in Rome, are no longer much surprised by Kate’s directness.
It is mid-September, and the heat has cooled. Kate can walk briskly across town to the Five Points and be home for lunch. As she enters the pharmacy, the heads turn: Kate is the only white woman. “My name is Katherine Omberg,” she tells the wary druggist. “I have a particular request. My sister’s physician has requested that you are not to dispense morphine, or laudanum, or any of that sort.”
“Ma’am, do you think she would come here?” he asks.
“I have already visited the white pharmacies,” Kate tells him. “You understand what people may be driven to do.”
By now, the entire town knows of Julia’s slightly scandalous surgery and her miraculous survival. The women visit, expressing curiosity, and pity, and concern. They bring casseroles of sweet potatoes and squash, hummingbird cakes and freshly fried apple fritters. “How do you fare,” Mary Agnes enquires, sympathetically laying her laced glove on Julia’s starched sleeve.
Julia, polite as ever, tilts her head. She briefly entertains giving a direct answer, like Kate might. Julia could describe the drenching nightly sweats and irritability, the disorientation to the day and hour.
Or, she could speak more positively. Dr. Battey believes my present symptoms are due to menopause rather than withdrawal, Julia could share. The diarrhea that has necessitated bed pans has slowed to a formed bowel movement. Now, after I finish Bible study, I realize it has been an hour since my last thought of morphine.
At any rate, Kate informs me that morphia is an impossibility, and should I seek it on my own, none will give it to me.
I harbor no resentment, though. Kate has long been my older sister.
Julia imagines her friend’s horrified face if she confessed these
thoughts. So Julia only smiles sweetly. “I look forward to attending services again, and walking with my dear friends in this wonderfully cool weather.”
“Of course,” Mary Agnes clucks. “It will be so nice to have you back.”
Always, Battey hovers nearby, checking in daily, then weekly. As Julia continues to improve, his worry transforms, slowly, into exultation. How many women have suffered like Julia, continue to suffer, when this solution was just before them. So that others may perform the surgery, he describes it in detail.
I recommend some improvements, he writes. The vaginal approach, where the skin is thinner than the abdominal. Ether, rather than chloroform. The necessary tools: the Sim’s speculum, a stout volsella, slender rat-tooth as well as old-fashioned bullet-forceps, a pair of long-scissors. Throw the contaminated ligatures away, he urges. “When Mrs. Battey drops a ligature silk upon the floor and picks it up, I shake my head at her, and tell her to put that in the fire.”
When Battey speaks to the Georgia Medical Association the fol-lowing year, any of his remaining reservations have fallen away. “I have invaded the hidden recesses of the female organism and snatched from its appointed seat a glandular body, whose mysterious and wonderful functions are of the highest interest to the human race,” he says grandly. “Nay, an organ endowed with functions, the integrity of which determines the very existence of the race itself.”
The audience stands and gives him a thundering ovation.
VIII. Rise
Gradually, Julia and her siblings reconstruct their lives in Rome.
The town’s appearance changes daily from the new building. New rail tracks are laid daily, and the bridges refortified. Merchants build warehouses to accommodate the bales of cotton in transit along with other goods: silks and laces, Brussels carpets, parlor furniture, even pianos. Newspapermen keep them informed, mail carriers and telegraph operators transmit messages. The city constructs waterworks and gas houses and telegraph wires to accommodate them all. Hotels house the men and their wives who flock from the countryside for this reliable work not subject to the vagaries of farming.
The Omberg home on West First is conveniently located to the city center and the rivers. The Ombergs decide to take in boarders of the proper sort. Kate prefers the men who come with their wives, for the women will keep the rooms tidy. Although these families are not of the sort to keep the Ombergs company before the war, Julia befriends them easily.
“There is something wonderful,” she comments to Kate, “about seeing people again. Even if they are not friends.”
Mrs. Battey encourages Julia to attend the Ladies Memorial Association meetings. (She knows better than to ask Kate). Predictably, the association has been quite successful in its recovery and interment of the Civil War dead, and then afterwards, memorialization of their sacrifices. Not only does a monument stand at the peak of the hill, but freshly painted markers indicate the graves.
Julia declines. “It is all we can do between church and boarders,” she tells Mrs. Battey. “We are not what we once were.”
Julia’s life has taken on a predictable rhythm. After preparing breakfast for the boarders and laundry with Kate, she walks to the church. The choir sings three times a week, but Julia likes to play the piano daily. After several months, she can reach ten keys. Although she could practice at home, she prefers the hall’s high bright light and the reverberation of music in the airy space. Despite her activity, she gains weight. Her eyes no longer recede into her skull, and her cheeks fill.
Kate pens a story: her heroine, a Georgia woman who meets Sher-man during his March to the Sea, suffers but perseveres during the war. Kate sells each copy for fifty cents. The Atlanta Constitution re-views are favorable. “It will be recognized as a story of more than average interest and power.”
The reverend accedes to Kate’s unusual request to read her writing aloud in the church hall on a Thursday evening. (Julia’s faithful accompaniment of the choir every Sunday, and the peculiar celebrity stemming from her surgery, make it difficult for him to refuse.) During her performance, the church hall fills with more congregants than during his sermons. The reverend, squelching a tinge of jealousy, reassures the sisters that Kate’s performances may boost church attendance.
There is not a single day when the Ombergs decide to stop reading the Bible in the parlor, but a slow accumulation of absences prevent it:choir practice for Julia, a shift at the mercantile for Nicholas, a stroll with friends for Helen, a performance for Kate.
With the zeal of the apostle Paul preaching the gospel, Battey travels to other cities to describe his experiences. He even performs op-erations there in order to train his colleagues. Eagerly, the physicians embrace this alternative to opium and the even riskier alternative of hysterectomy.
Some remain confused about the indications. In an early example of a celebrity physician profile, Dr. Yandell of Louisville asks Battey to clarify. “Under what circumstances do you think the operation demanded?”
“In the case of any grave disease which is either dangerous to life or destructive to health and happiness, which is incurable by the recognized resources of our art, and which we may reasonably expect to remove by effecting the change of life,” replies Battey. “Ovarian neuralgia. Ovarian insanity. All had exhausted the available resources of art to no useful purpose.”
“What have been the results?”
“In my first case (now three years ago) the restoration to health is eminently satisfactory. She is fully relieved of the convulsions, the violent periodical congestions, the hematoceles, the pelvic abscesses, etc. for which I operated.”
When Battey proposes the first women’s infirmary in Rome, the council quickly agrees. He purchases the old McEntee House, the first hotel in Rome, on the north side of Broad Street. Martha Battey’s considerable organizational skills are key in raising awareness and funds, and for this and her general popularity, the facility is named the Martha Battey Hospital. The Batteys can afford ten beds, not quite enough to house the increasing numbers of women who flock to Rome for the Battey’s Operation.
If the women are lucky, the surgeries may be performed by Battey himself. Otherwise, the Holmes uncle and nephew can step up, for they have embraced this quick solution to the ills that plague their patients. Other physicians refer their family members for correction. One physician’s wife suffers from “violent menstro-mania” and undergoes the procedure to the satisfaction of her husband, who writes to thank Battey, who quotes it in a scientific report. “The menopause is complete. I am very sanguine of a perfect recovery of mind, as soon as she is accustomed to the great change from the operation.”
By this time, Battey is a professor of obstetrics at the Atlanta Medical College. He co-founds the American Gynecological Society and later, becomes its president. He continues to update the receptive public to his star patient’s progress. Although he does not name Julia, she is easily identified by her description: the first to undergo the cure, as well as her morbid conditions of amenorrhea and hystero-epilepsy (as opposed to ovaralgia or violent menstro-mania as suffered by the physician’s wife). With the unembarrassed ebullience of an American, Battey describes his patients’ states of postoperative states of health in the British Medical Journal: “perfect health,” (Julia), “good health,” “comfortable health.”
Sims himself offers his enthusiastic endorsement: “Judge, I have searched diligently the annals of medicine, and when I consider that Battey, in a small country town in Georgia, selected out a lady from the best society of his town and extirpated her ovaries, unsupported by any precedent or by any authoritative medical judgment, I find nothing in the whole history of medicine that compares with it in moral heroism.”
Finally, Battey thinks.
Finally, some good.
IX. Fall
The final truth: Julia Omberg lives to the age of eighty.
The Ombergs learn of Battey’s later troubles at his funeral.
The service in the Methodist church overflows with Battey’s children and grandchildren, his nieces and nephews, his neighbors, his patients. Julia cannot recall when she last saw so many gathered in a single place, since the patriotic rallies before the war. The minister reads his sermon, then his testament to Battey’s war record, his eminence in gynecology, his dutiful service as a father and husband.
Mrs. Battey’s voice trembles slightly when she confirms this. “From his first day that he practiced, he advised not to prune his practice based upon fee,” she says from the pulpit, and the Ombergs nod in agreement. “He only did what he thought was right, to help others. His suffering, brought on by those who thought him self-serving, has finally ended.”
The siblings exchange puzzled glances.
As the coffin is escorted to the Battey Mausoleum at the Myrtle Hill Cemetery, Julia learns what Mrs. Battey meant.
Mary Agnes is the one to tell her, of course. Unasked, she sniffs that Mother was indiscreet, but it is something everyone knew, anyway.
“Except me,” says Julia.
Mary Agnes regards her childhood friend, and a recognition dawns on her face. “Ah, of course no one told you. It would be. Quite rude.”
Inevitably, the medical community’s enthusiastic reception of the Battey’s Operation and its rapid dissemination is countered by re-ports of its failures. It does not work for epilepsy, nymphomania, melancholia, and moral insanity. (Father never said it was the cure for all things, sniffs Mary Agnes.)
As the refutations accumulate, the surgery’s risks are finally high-lighted. Approximately one in five women die, most often from infection. (Not as fastidious as your father in discarding silk sutures that have fallen on the floor, no doubt, soothes Julia).
“What wounded him the most was the attacks from his friends.” says Mary Agnes, now openly weepy. “Dr. Jackson, who Father had mentored from his younger days, accused Father of being irrational and reckless. Dr. Wells has always been jealous of Father’s success, claiming credit for the procedure. It is hardly Father’s fault that the Hospital for the Insane was planning operations for fifty of its in-mates.”
Involuntarily, Julia takes a sharp breath. “Fifty?”
Thankfully, Mary Agnes, already upset, has not heard her. “After all,” she says, glancing sideways at her friend, “you would know how much he helped.”
Julia nods, slowly. She does.
“His health was broken, after that. For it is no small thing. To have the world cast you out and call you names, like charlatan and woman-hater.”
“I am so sorry, Mary Agnes.”
But they have reached the cemetery’s entrance. Attempting to compose herself, Mary Agnes straightens her shoulders and tosses her head back. “It doesn’t matter. Mother will have the last word. She is convincing the Georgia Medical Association to raise a monument.” She reaches out and squeezes Julia’s arm. “I must catch up with her,” she tells Julia, then hurries ahead.
The chill has come early this November. The fall storms have swept the trees bare of leaves, which now carpet the ground and crunch underfoot. The Ombergs stand at the crowd’s periphery, catching a few words carried by the whistling breeze. Loved. Admired. Proud.
The crowd disperses. Many thread their way among the now-weathered markers to pause at the graves of their loved ones. The Ombergs gather at Father’s grave, further down the hillside. They contemplate the headstone’s worn face.
Her siblings know that Julia’s favorite biblical passages have always been those promising peace after turmoil. The wind whips across the lake, and waves crash over the surface of the boat. Panicked,Jesus’ disciples awaken him. He sleeps deeply,and he is annoyed at being disturbed. Don’t be afraid, he reassures them groggily. Although why did you have to wake me, with your panicked cries and requests to be fed and your constant needs for instruction?
He lifts a hand, and instantly the waters calm.
A similar incident happens later, when Jesus wishes to be alone. When he returns to the shore, the boat has drifted from the water’s edge. No matter, he thinks. He walks on it in quiet enjoyment, his feet splashing as if through puddles, like a child. For once, and for all the suffering that is coming, he can enjoy himself.
But today, at Father’s gravesite, Julia recites the story of Job.
Of course Job praises you when his life is easy, Lucifer points out.
But will he continue to do so when everything is taken away?
God shrugs, and with that, Job’s home, sheep and camel and cattle, ten children, and health vanish. Weirdly, his wife remains, perhaps not as important to Job as the animals. Denounce God, she cries. Because what kind of God would do this to you?
Much less to me, because they were my children too. My home, and although I cannot own property, my sheep through you. Not that anyone mentions how I suffer.
Also strangely, Job’s friends remain with him. They give unhelpful advice. You must have deserved this, they tell him. And your children must have also. For being proud, bragging that you had finally discerned the ovary’s role in menstruation. For lacking empathy, prof-ligate in your prescription of morphine and creating addicts of your patients. For committing the sin of simply being an idiot. Oophoralgia is not a true medical condition, but a tautologic construction.
You all know nothing, says God. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Naamathite, Elihu the Buzite. Job. What can you know? God asks. For you lived before microscopes and antibiotics and antiseptic technique, genetics and biochemistry and machine learning.
I only know, Job replies, that there is no reason for the suffering in the universe.
As a human, I take pity on dust and ashes.
You can do that, God agrees.
As Julia recites, the Ombergs hold each other’s hands, unified and comforted in their lack of understanding.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND SOURCES
Julia Omberg’s dependence upon opium, a common problem among women as well as veterans after the Civil War, is documented in Robert Battey’s publications. Nicholas Omberg’s murder by bushwhackers is noted in Martha Battey’s war-time correspon-dence with her husband. The characters of members of the Omberg family and their relationships with the Battey family are unknown. At conferences and other publica-tions, Robert Battey, James Marion Sims, Thomas Spencer Wells, and other gynecolo-gists discussed the value of “Battey’s Operation.”