Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [73]
With nothing to even ease the pain, Garfield lay silent as Bliss searched for the bullet inside him. Pressing the unsterilized probe downward and forward into the wound, Bliss did not stop until he had reached a cavity three inches deep in Garfield’s back. At this point, he decided to remove the probe, but found that he could not. “In attempting to withdraw the probe, it became engaged between the fractured fragments and the end of the rib,” he later wrote. He finally had to press down on Garfield’s fractured rib so that it would lift and release the probe.
Although the probe was finally out, Garfield had no respite. Bliss immediately began to explore the wound again, this time with the little finger of his left hand. He inserted his finger so deeply into the wound that he could feel the broken rib and “what appeared to be lacerated tissue or comparatively firm coagula, probably the latter.”
By this time, Purvis had seen enough. With a boldness that was then extraordinary in a black doctor addressing a white one, he asked Bliss to end his examination. Ignoring Purvis, Bliss removed his finger from the wound, turned once again to his bag, and calmly selected another probe, this one made of flexible silver. Bending the probe into a curve, he passed it into Garfield’s back “downward and forward, and downward and backward in several directions” while Purvis looked on, unable to stop him.
• CHAPTER 13 •
“IT’S TRUE”
It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow that
it finds solace in unselfish thought.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
Lucretia was packing her bags in her hotel room in Elberon, New Jersey, preparing to meet James for their trip to New England, when General David Swaim knocked on her door. At one point during the Civil War, when Garfield had been too sick to walk, Swaim had literally carried him home. Now, he held only a telegram in his hands, but his words made Lucretia’s heart miss a beat. There has been an accident, he said. Perhaps she should return to Washington.
Lucretia took the slip of paper and slowly read the message that her husband had dictated to Rockwell in the train station:
THE PRESIDENT WISHES ME TO SAY TO YOU FROM HIM THAT HE HAS BEEN SERIOUSLY HURT—HOW SERIOUSLY HE CANNOT YET SAY. HE IS HIMSELF AND HOPES YOU WILL COME TO HIM SOON. HE SENDS HIS LOVE TO YOU.
Looking up at Swaim, she said, “Tell me the truth.”
As Swaim attempted to tell Lucretia the little he knew, Ulysses S. Grant appeared at the door. He had been staying in his son’s cabin just across the street for the past two weeks, but, still nursing a grudge, had done nothing before now to acknowledge the president and first lady beyond a stiff bow and tip of his hat. “I do not think he can afford to show feeling in this way,” Garfield had written in his diary just the week before. “I am quite certain he injures himself more than he does me.”
As soon as Grant learned of the assassination attempt, however, the hard feelings and wounded pride of the past year were forgotten. Taking Lucretia’s hand in his, the former president and retired general was at first “so overcome with emotion,” one member of Grant’s party would recall, “he could scarcely speak.” Finally, he was able to tell Lucretia that he had brought with him something that he hoped would give her a measure of comfort. He had just received a telegram from a friend in Washington who was certain that the president’s wounds were not mortal. From what he knew of the injury, Grant agreed. He had known many soldiers to survive similar wounds.
Although he did not stay long, Grant’s words and, perhaps even more, his kindness were an emotional life raft for Lucretia, something to cling to until she could see James. Hurriedly finishing her packing, she left the hotel with Mollie to catch a special train, made