But that dream had haunted him for years now. And when he had learned the wet-plate process, discovered that the rotten-egg smell of sulphur was part of it, the dream had come back to him as vividly as an old memory. That had been years ago. Now, with the coming war, he found himself thinking of the portraits of demolished buildings, and the woman’s voice, telling him he would be great.
He would have to set up a special war fund. The president had given him a pass to make portraits of the army on the field, but had stressed that Brady would have to use his own funds. As Lincoln told Brady, with only a hint of humor, the country was taking enough gambles already.
Small price, Brady figured, to record history. He was, after all, a wealthy man.
1861
Julia had hoped to join the picnickers who sat on the hills, overlooking the battlefield, but Brady was glad he had talked her out of it. He pulled the wet plate out of his camera, and placed the plate into the box. The portrait would be of smoke and tiny men clashing below him. He glanced at the farmhouse, and the army that surrounded it. They seemed uneasy, as if this battle weren’t what they expected. It wasn’t what he had expected, either. The confusion, the smoke, even the heat made sense. The screaming did not.
Brady put the plate in its box, then set the box in his wagon. Before the day was out, he would return to Washington, set the plates and send portraits to the illustrated magazines. The wagon was working out better than he expected. The illustrations would probably earn him yet another award.
The cries seemed to grow louder, and above them, he heard a faint rumbling. He checked the sky for clouds and saw nothing. The smoke gave the air an acrid tinge and made the heat seem even hotter. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face. He grabbed the camera and lugged it back to the wagon, then returned for the tripod. He was proud of himself; he had expected to be afraid and yet his hands were as steady as they had been inside his studio.
He closed up the back of the wagon, waved his assistant, Tim O’Sullivan, onto the wagon, and climbed aboard. O’Sullivan sat beside him and clucked the horse onto Bull Run road. The army’s advance had left ruts so deep that the wagon tilted at an odd angle. The rumble was growing louder. Overhead, something whistled, and then a cannonball landed off to one side, spraying dirt and muck over the two men. The horse shrieked and reared; Brady felt the reins cut through his fingers. The wagon rocked, nearly tipped, then righted itself. Brady turned, and saw a dust cloud rising behind them. A mass of people were running toward him.
“Lord a mercy,” he whispered, and thrust the reins at O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan looked at them as if he had never driven the wagon before. “I’m going to get the equipment. Be ready to move on my signal.”
O’Sullivan brought the horse to a stop and Brady leapt off the side. He ran to the back, opened the door, grabbed his camera, and set up just in time to take portraits of soldiers running past. Both sides—Union and Confederate—wore blue, and Brady couldn’t tell which troops were scurrying past him. He could smell the fear, the human sweat, see the strain in the men’s eyes. His heart had moved to his throat, and he had to concentrate to shove a wet plate into the camera. He uncapped the lens, hoping that the scene wouldn’t change too much, that in his precious three seconds, he would capture more than a blur.
Mixed with the soldiers were women, children, and well-dressed men—some still clutching picnic baskets, others barely holding their hats. All ran by. A few loose horses galloped near Brady; he had to hold the tripod steady. He took portrait after portrait, seeing faces he recognized—like that silly newspaper correspondent Russell, the man who had spread the word about Brady’s poor eyesight—mouths agape, eyes wide in panic. As Brady worked, the sounds blended into each other. He couldn’t tell the human screams from the animal shrieks and the whistle of mortar. Bullets whizzed past, and more than one lodged in the wagon. The wagon kept lurching, and Brady knew that O’Sullivan was having trouble holding the horse.
Suddenly the wagon rattled away from him. Brady turned, knocked over the tripod himself, and watched in horror as people trampled his precious equipment. He started to get down, to save the camera, then realized that in their panic, they would run over him. He grabbed what plates he could, shoved them into the pocket of his great coat, and joined the throng, running after the wagon, shouting at O’Sullivan to stop.
But the wagon didn’t stop. It kept going around the winding, twisting corners of the road, until it disappeared in the dust cloud. Another cannon ball landed beside the road, and Brady cringed as dirt spattered him. A woman screamed and fell forward, blood blossoming on her back. He turned to help her, but the crowd pushed him forward. He couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.
This was not romantic; it was not the least bit pretty. It had cost him hundreds of dollars in equipment and might cost him his life if he didn’t escape soon. This was what the history books had never told him about war, had never explained about the absolute mess, the dirt and the blood. Behind him, he heard screaming, someone shouting that the black cavalry approached, the dreaded black cavalry of the Confederacy, worse than the four horses of the apocalypse, if the illustrated newspapers were to be believed, and Brady ran all the harder. His feet slipped in the ruts in the road and he nearly tripped, but he saw other people down, other people trampled, and he knew he couldn’t fall.
He rounded a corner, and there it was, the wagon, on its side, the boxes spilling out, the plates littering the dirt road. O’Sullivan was on his hands and knees, trying to clean up, his body shielded only because the carriage wall made the fleeing people reroute.
Brady hurried over the carriage side, ignoring the split wood, the bullet holes and the fact that the horse was missing. Tears were running down the side of O’Sullivan’s face, but the man seemed oblivious to them. Brady grabbed O’Sullivan’s arm, and pulled him up. “Come on, Tim,” he said. “Black cavalry on the hills. We’ve got to get away.”
“The plates—” O’Sullivan said.
“Forget the plates. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“The horse spooked and broke free. I think someone stole her, Mat.”
O’Sullivan was shouting, but Brady could barely hear him. His lungs were choked and he thought he was going to drown in dust. “We have to go,” he said.
He yanked O’Sullivan forward, and they rejoined the crowd. They ran until Brady could run no longer; his lungs burned and his side ached. Bullets continued to strike around them, and Brady saw too many men in uniform sprawled motionless on the side of the road.
“The crowd itself is a target,” he said, not realizing he had spoken aloud. He tightened his grip on O’Sullivan’s arm and led him off the road into the thin trees. They trudged straight ahead, Brady keeping the setting sun to his left, and soon the noises of battle disappeared behind them. They stopped and Brady leaned against a thick oak to catch his breath. The sun had gone down and it was getting cool.
“What now?” O’Sullivan asked.
“If we don’t meet any rebs, we’re safe,” Brady said. He took off his hat, wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve, and put his hat back on. Julia would have been very angry with him if he had lost that hat.
“But how do we get back?” O’Sullivan asked.
An image of the smashed equipment rose in Brady’s mind along with the broken, overturned horseless wagon. “We walk, Tim.” Brady sighed. “We walk.”
1861
Julia watched as he stocked up the new wagon. She said nothing as he lugged equipment inside, new equipment he had purchased from Anthony’s supply house on extended credit. He didn’t want to hurt his own business by taking away needed revenue, and the Anthonys were willing to help—especially after they had seen the quality of his war work for the illustrated newspapers.
“I can’t come with you, can I?” she asked as he tossed a bedroll into the back.
“I’m sorry,” Brady said, remembering the woman scream and fall beside him, blood blossoming on her back. His J
ulia wouldn’t die that way. She would die in her own bed, in the luxury and comfort she was used to. He took her hands. “I don’t want to be apart from you, but I don’t know any other way.”
She stroked his face. “We have to remember—” she said. The tears that lined the rims of her eyes didn’t touch her voice. “—that this is the work that will make you great.”
“You have already made me great,” he said, and kissed her one final time.
1863
Brady pushed his blue-tinted glasses up his nose and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. The Pennsylvania sun beat on his long black waistcoat, baking his clothes against his skin. The corpse, only a few hours dead, was already gaseous and bloated, straining its frayed Union uniform. The too-florid smell of death ripened the air. If it weren’t for the bodies, human and equine, the farmer’s field would seem peaceful, not the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
Brady tilted the corpse’s head back. Underneath the gray mottled skin, a young boy’s features had frozen in agony. Brady didn’t have to alter the expression: he never did. The horror was always real. He set the repeating rifle lengthwise across the corpse, and stood up. A jagged row of posed corpses stretched before him. O’Sullivan had positioned the wagon toward the side of the field and was struggling with the tripod. Brady hurried to help his assistant, worried, always worried about destroying more equipment. They had lost so much trying to photograph the war. He should have known from the first battle how difficult this would be. He had sold nearly everything, asked Julia to give up even the simplest comforts, borrowed against his name from the Anthonys for equipment to record this. History. His country’s folly and its glory. And the great, terrible waste of lives. He glanced back at the dead faces, wondered how many people would mourn.
“I think we should put it near the tree.” O’Sullivan lugged the top half of the tripod at an angle away from the corpse row. “The light is good—the shade is on the other side. Mathew?”
“No.” Brady backed up a few steps. “Here. See the angle? The bodies look random now, but you can see the faces.”
He squinted, wishing he could see the faces better. His eyesight had been growing worse; in 1851 it had been so bad that the press thought he would be blind in a decade. Twelve years had passed and he wasn’t blind yet. But he wasn’t far from it.
O’Sullivan arranged the black curtain, then Brady swept his assistant aside. “Let me,” he said.
He climbed under the curtain. The heat was thicker; the familiar scent of chemicals cleared the death from his nose. He peered through the lens. The image was as he had expected it to be, clear, concise, well composed. The light filtered through, reflected oddly through the blue tint on his glasses, and started a sharp ache in his skull. He pulled out, into the sun. “Adjust as you need to. But I think we have the image.”
Brady turned away from the field as O’Sullivan prepared the wet plate and then shoved it into the camera. Sweat trickled down the back of Brady’s neck into his woolen coat. He was tired, so tired, and the war had already lasted two years longer than anyone expected. He didn’t know how many times he had looked on the faces of the dead, posed them for the camera the way he had posed princes and presidents a few years before. If he had stayed in New York, like the Anthonys, everything would have been different. He could have spent his nights with Julia.…
“Got it,” O’Sullivan said. He held the plate gingerly, his face flushed with the heat.
“You develop it,” Brady said. “I want to stay here for a few minutes.”
O’Sullivan frowned; Brady usually supervised every step of the battle images. But Brady didn’t explain his unusual behavior. O’Sullivan said nothing. He clutched the plates and went in the back of the black-covered wagon. The wagon rocked ever so gently as he settled in.
Brady waited until the wagon stopped rocking, then clasped his hands behind his back and walked through the trampled, blood-spattered grass. The aftermath of battle made him restless: the dead bodies, the ruined earth, the shattered wagons. Battles terrified him, made him want to run screaming from the scene. He often clutched his equipment around him like a talisman—if he worked, if he didn’t think about it, he would stave off the fear until the shooting stopped. He tripped over an abandoned canteen. He crouched, saw the bullet hole in its side.
“You stay, even though it appalls you.”
The woman’s voice startled him so badly he nearly screamed. He backed up as he stood, and found himself facing a thin, short-haired woman wearing pants, a short-sleeved shirt, and (obviously) no undergarments. She looked familiar.
“That takes courage.” She smiled. Her teeth were even and white.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. His voice shook and he clenched his fists to hide his shaking. “Are you looking for someone in particular? I can take you to the General.”
“I’m looking for you. You’re the man they call Brady of Broadway?”
He nodded.
“The man who sells everything, bargains his studio to photograph a war?”
Her comment was too close to his own thoughts—and too personal. He felt a flush rise that had nothing to do with the heat. “What do you want?”
“I want you to work for me, Mathew Brady. I will pay for your equipment, take care of your travel, if you shoot pictures for me when and where I say.”
She frightened him, a crazy woman standing in a field of dead men. “I run my own business,” he said.
She nodded, the smile fading just a little. “And it will bankrupt you. You will die forgotten, your work hidden in crates in government warehouses. That’s not why you do this, is it, Mr. Brady?”
“I do this so that people can see what really happens here, so that people can travel through my memories to see this place,” he said. The ache in his head grew sharper. This woman had no right to taunt him. “I do this for history.”
“And it’s history that calls you, Mr. Brady. The question is, will you serve?”
“I already serve,” he snapped—and found himself speaking to air. Heat shimmered in front of him, distorting his view of the field for a moment. Then the tall grass and the broken picket fence returned, corpses hovering at the edge of his vision like bales of hay.
He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. The strain was making him hallucinate. He had been too long in the sun. He would go back to the wagon, get a drink of water, lie in the shade. Then, perhaps, the memory of the hallucination would go away.
But her words haunted him as he retraced his steps. I will pay for your equipment, take care of your travel. If only someone would do that! He had spent the entire sum of his fortune and still saw no end ahead. She hadn’t been an hallucination: she had been a dream. A wish for a different, easier life that no one would ever fulfill.
1865
The day after Appomatox—the end of the war, Brady dreamed:
He walked the halls of a well-lit place he had never seen before. His footsteps echoed on the shiny floor covering. Walls, made of a smooth material that was not wood or stone, smelled of paint and emollients. Ceiling boxes encased the lamps—the light did not flicker but they flowed cleaner than gaslight. Most of the doors lining the hallway were closed, but one stood open. A sign that shone with a light of its own read:
MATHEW B. BRADY EXHIBIT
OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER:
UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR
(1861–1865)
Inside he found a spacious room twice the size of any room he had ever seen. It had skylights in the ceiling and doric columns creating a hollow in the center. A camera, set up on its tripod, had its black curtain thrown half back, as if waiting for him to step inside. Next to it stood his wagon, looking out of place and ancient without its horse. The wagon’s back door also stood open, and Brady saw the wooden boxes of plates inside, placed neatly, so that a path led to the darkroom. The darkroom looked odd: no one had picked up the sleeping pallets, and yet the chemical baths sat o
ut, ready for use. He would never have left the wagon that way. He shook his head, and turned toward the rest of the room.
Three of the long, wide walls were bare. On the fourth, framed pictures crowded together. He walked to them, saw that they were his portraits, his work from Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. He even saw a picture of General Lee in his confederate gray. Beneath the portrait, the attribution read By Brady (or assistant), but Brady had never taken such a portrait, never developed one, never posed one. A chill ran up his back when he realized he hadn’t squinted to read the print. He reached up, touched the bridge of his nose. His glasses were gone. He hadn’t gone without glasses since he had been a boy. In the mornings, he had to grab his glasses off the nightstand first, then get out of bed.
His entire wartime collection (with huge gaps) framed, on exhibit. Four thousand portraits, displayed for the world to see, just as he had hoped. He reached out to the Lee portrait. As his finger brushed the smooth wood—
—he found himself beneath the large tree next to the Appomatox farmhouse where the day before Lee and Grant had signed the peace treaty. The farmhouse was a big white blur against the blue of the April sky. He grabbed his glasses (somehow they had fallen to his lap) and hooked the frames around his ears. The world came into sharper focus, the blue-tint easing the glare of the sun. He knew what he had to do. Even though he had arrived too late to photograph the historic signing of the treaty, he could still photograph General Lee one last time in his uniform.
Brady got up and brushed the grass off his pants. His wagon stood beside the farmhouse. The wagon looked proper—dust-covered, mud-spattered, with a few splintered boards and a cock-eyed wheel that he would have to fix very soon—not clean and neat as it had in his dream. The horse, tied to another tree, looked tired, but he would push her with him to Richmond, to General Lee, to complete the exhibit.
Three empty walls, he thought as he went to find his assistant. He wondered why his earlier portraits weren’t mounted there. Perhaps the walls awaited something else. Something better.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 52