by Tim Bowling
The gentleman grinned, exposing his sharp incisors. “Humpback? I believe you’re referring to one of the metal canisters.”
“Hunh?”
The gentleman sighed. “It’s not a hump. It’s one of the tanks for draining blood. Or for pumping the . . . ah . . . continual life into these distinguished fallen.”
Monkey-face shrugged. “Wal, whatever it is, that feller said he’d pay good for officers brung into his tent. And I aim to git that money.”
The gentleman, still grinning and holding the pistol out, said, “It seems we are working for the same fine establishment. And as I am not on commission . . .” He pocketed the pistol. “You may remove this hero from the field. But I warn you, there are competitors less patient than I. You would be wise to find a more . . . ah . . . persuasive weapon.” He made a graceful sweeping gesture with one arm. “I’m certain a man of your obvious discernment can find something amid the armoury here gathered.”
Monkey-face spat. Then, putting the knife between his teeth, he bent and took up the dead officer by the armpits.
The incident’s open, naked demonstration of money lust appalled Gardner, but not for long. When he reflected on his own considerable worldly ambitions on this battleground, he couldn’t exactly condemn others who also sought to improve their fortunes. After all, the fighting was over and the dead could hardly complain. With undiluted resolve, Gardner returned to the tripod, ducked under the cloth, and focused. Two dead Rebels, one’s head leaning on the other’s chest; he could perhaps come up with a title about dead brothers.
Dead Rebels? Gardner suddenly remembered. When he stepped out from the cloth and saw that Gibson had not left the wagon with a fresh plate, he looked to the south where he had hidden his “treasure.” Human crows wandered everywhere, picking at corpses for one reason or another. Some negro gravediggers chanted low, in an unmelodic rhythm; above the sound, Gardner could hear each spade thrust in the earth. Where exactly was that line of dead Rebels?
Then the photographer saw a soldier bent over the bodies. Though Gardner stood fifty yards away, the soldier seemed closer; he was wrapped in the bright sunshine, carved by it into prominence, like the image on a print. And he was dragging a body out of the line!
Gardner took two quick steps forward as a shout formed and then died on his lips. Behind him, he heard the tarp draw back. A fresh plate! Now, of all times. Gardner looked at the camera, at the two Rebels posed fraternally on the gutted earth. Suddenly the awful reek of death washed over him, as powerful as the collodion on the plate. He swallowed deeply and almost staggered against Gibson as he rushed up.
“What is it, Alex? You canna be woozy like I am, man. It’s a regular ether bath in that wagon. I almost passed out on this one.”
“He’s taking the corpse!” Gardner pointed, his mouth open.
Gibson put a hand over his eyes, as if he couldn’t look at the world anymore except through some kind of lens. He shrugged.
“What of it? You’ll never get Brady to print that one anyway. He probably won’t even print the dead Federals.”
“Brady? He’s no ee the only one who can make and sell prints. You might be willing to work for him all your born days, but I dinna come to this country to be taken for a fool. What’s the point of following the army if you’re just going to let Brady make all the money off your talents? Wake up, Jim. We’ve got enough here to make a start on our own. Whatever Brady won’t print and sell, all the better for us!”
Gibson handed Gardner the plate. “All right, captain,” he said, referring to the honorary stripes Gardner’s friendship with McClellan had earned him. “But you’d better hurry with this one before it dries.”
At that moment Gardner knew James Gibson was with him and his fortune was made. It had taken only the saying of it.
Gardner dove back under the cloth. The world flipped upside down again. When he later returned to the light and started counting out the exposure, he could see, across the bereaved and scavenging, across the dead and wounded, the tall, long-limbed soldier carrying a body on his back toward the woods. By the time Gardner had whispered fifteen, the soldier had vanished into the trees.
• • •
The stench worsened as the sun climbed. The droning of flies made a steady, sombre chorus over the fields, but it was loudest inside the enclosed space of the wagon, which sat in the heat-crinkled air like a block of black ice that melted without getting smaller. Gibson complained mightily.
“I canna keep the sweat from dripping off my forehead onto the plate. And when I can manage that, the damned flies get crawling all over it. You’re just lucky, Alex, I can bring you anything worth using.”
He liked to exaggerate, did Jim Gibson, but Gardner knew too well the delicate and frustrating problems he faced. So Gardner offered to sensitize a plate while he let his assistant take a study of some colonel’s dead horse. Gardner soon regretted his generosity. Being inside that wagon was like being on the surface of the sun itself. He’d never known such breath-smothering heat. Sweat gushed out of every pore of his body, and he’d have almost preferred the stench of the festering flesh outside than the giddying fumes of the collodion. If the fumes weren’t bad enough in themselves, they attracted so many flies it was nigh to impossible keeping them off the plates. Gardner’s respect for Gibson grew immensely as he struggled to keep his dripping head away from the plate while savagely shooing flies away with his hands. Had they reversed roles for the day, Gardner doubted they’d have managed even half of the studies that they eventually made. Of course, he wasn’t about to let Gibson know that. Fortunately, when he pushed past the tarp with the plate and walked dizzily to the camera, Gardner found his assistant in even worse shape. He had one hand over his nose and the other on a flask of whisky pressed to his lips. When he’d done drinking, he gave Gardner a ghastly, white look and said, “If it’s all the same to you, Alex, I’d prefer the wagon. I dinna know how ye can stand it. It’s like swallowing great gobs of pus out here.”
By the time the two photographers reached the slaughter along the pike road near the whitewashed little church with the thatched roof, they had their system worked out. Soon enough they didn’t even talk anymore. The light poured over the bloated corpses and smashed limbers, and the white church shone like a gull’s wing against the black woods. A bonny day for photography. But Gardner knew he’d be a cold and heartless man if he hadn’t paused amid all that carnage and considered the truth of what lay before him: brave men had died horribly, boys from modest backgrounds mostly, farm boys and fishermen and workers on both sides, dying for their beliefs while Brady’s fine friends nibbled on squab and made grand noises about sending the Rebels back to Richmond. Gardner almost hated himself then for his excitement—nay, his joy—under the cloth. And yet, he thought about what his images might mean to a public far removed from the war’s reality, and that spurred him on. Mostly he didn’t even have to embellish; the dead were affecting enough, even if, as the day wore on, only Rebels and horses remained on the field. The burial parties worked quickly. Often Gardner had to ask them to take a break while he made his exposures, for any movement would blur the image. They obliged, no doubt out of curiosity at the photographer’s presence, but not for long. Gardner couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t a ground well suited for lingering.
Gardner did not think of his stolen corpse again until later in the afternoon, when, recrossing the battleground of their first studies, which still resembled a massive broken tabletop left uncleared after some giant’s hideous orgy of feasting, he and Gibson stopped once more at the fenced barnyard surrounded by greasy tents for some fortification. Little had changed. The surgeons still cut into bodies, the wounded lay about in solid piles of moaning agony, the graveyard with the plank headboards had grown just outside the fence beyond the cooks’ tent. A few women, looking strange in their feminine apparel, placed cold cloths on foreheads, dispensed water and food, and generally comforted as best they could. Their courage and sense of du
ty so moved Gardner that the raspy voice at his ear startled like gunshot.
“Have you just come from out there?”
Gardner turned and recognized the bearded surgeon he had observed on his earlier visit. If the man had looked ravaged then, he seemed little more than nerve endings now. The torn sackcloth of his face, the eyes swimming in blood, the forearms so gore-caked that he might have just dipped them in a vat of guts: Gardner could hardly believe the surgeon possessed the strength to speak. He pointed weakly toward the battleground. Gardner nodded, half afraid the wake of air from his small gesture would knock the surgeon down.
“The tall soldier. The one who was helping me. You didn’t see him?”
The urgency in the man’s voice alarmed Gardner. He could hardly tell what answer the surgeon hoped for, but Gardner gave him the truth.
“I did. At least I believe so. I was some distance away.”
The surgeon grimaced and clutched his stomach. “Excuse me, sir. One moment.” He opened a small bottle, shook a pill into his hand, and quickly swallowed it. “What did you see exactly?”
The question took Gardner aback, but he saw no reason not to answer. “I saw him carrying a body into the wood.”
The surgeon grabbed Gardner’s elbow. His grip reached to the bone. “That man has done noble service. He has saved many from a lingering, painful death. If you are asked about him, I urge you . . .”
A cry of pain from behind spun him around. When he turned back and looked in Gardner’s eyes again, he spoke in a hoarse whisper.
“Don’t mention to any officer that you saw him carrying a body. By my oath, I ask this out of humanity . . . and . . . justice. If you believe, sir, in what the Union stands for, I urge you . . .”
“I don’t understand. Why would an officer ask me about him? Many soldiers are carrying bodies today.”
And then, with a jolt, Gardner recalled what body it was, and the manner of the death, and he was almost ashamed to admit that he saw his chance and took it. But the camera was not a toy, no more than a bible was a plaything to a preacher. And this surgeon, his weary, pained face, would make a wonderful study. Gardner struck a bargain.
“Agreed. But I have a single condition. If at some point I wish to make a study of you, you will pose for me?”
Already the photographer felt he had trapped a kind of ghost in his camera—something in this man seemed to flow out of him. He conceded listlessly to Gardner’s bargain and they shook on it. The photographer wondered how he could ever forget that firm handshake of blood and pus. The surgeon did not appear to notice Gardner’s lingering gaze, however. Only when he turned away did Gardner see that the surgeon held a severed lower leg in his other hand—it seemed to lead him like a child back into a nightmare.
Gardner was to get his study two days later, at a different field hospital, a mile to the south of the previous one. Apparently the bearded surgeon had moved as well, and stood awkwardly amid a group of half-collapsed canvas tents barely covering several dozen wounded. Smoke rose from a nearby cook fire. Gardner heard a rough snoring. A light breeze blew the usual death stench over the ground and tents. By then, the photographer had heard tell of an investigation about that mutilated corpse. Apparently, the dead man had been of much use to McClellan and Pinkerton in their gathering of information about the enemy. It was, according to rumours Gardner had heard, a delicate matter, given that Maryland had not yet committed to either side in the conflict. But no one asked the photographer anything. And the truth was, by September 21, Gardner was so puffed up with the success of his venture, and so inured to the misery and carnage all around him, that he gave little thought to that one farmer’s corpse.
And yet, when he bid the surgeon be still as he ducked under the cloth, Gardner was certain that, just over his study’s shoulder, peering out through a thin pillar of smoke, stood the very soldier whose actions had motivated the bargain he had struck with the surgeon. But when Gardner stepped out from the cloth, no soldier remained. And he half-doubted, despite all his subtle craft, that the exposed plate would capture anything but a flattened cornfield running away beneath a blank and pitiless sky.
III
September 19, the battlefield at Antietam
In the middle of a charred, broken field a hundred yards north of a barn serving as a Union field hospital, Horace Greaver swatted impatiently at a buzzing cluster of flies. If only the blasted lazy fools from the Quartermaster corps, he thought, would stop bringing in useless corpses, this day looked promising and profitable indeed. Dozens of corpses had been brought from the battlefield to the side of his large, black tent, and the fetid air told him many more would be arriving. Ah, but these lazy fools . . .
“If they don’t have a coupon,” Greaver said, “I don’t want them. This one’s no good to me. Take it back where you found it.” He pulled the brim of his worn bowler down over his bespectacled, watery, bloodshot eyes and turned away from the slack-jawed teamster’s assistant.
“Back? But I just drug it from clear over there, by the crick.”
“Did you even look for a coupon first, as I instructed you?” Greaver drew an invisible tiny square in the air before the man’s eyes, then angrily snatched it away. “Don’t waste my time. If you can’t be bothered to look for coupons, then at least bring me officers. Preferably Union. But Rebels too, if the rank’s high enough. The higher, the better.”
Greaver pulled a watch and chain from his vest and squinted at it. The truce for exchanging wounded had been on for nearly an hour. Soon he would set about exchanging the dead Rebel officers he’d managed to recover for any Union officers that his Confederate counterpart had collected. While it wasn’t impossible to collect a fee from a grieving Southern family for the safe return of their hero’s preserved body, it was altogether easier to restrict such dealings to the North.
He returned to the naked corpse set up on a few bare planks propped on two large wooden barrels. With the last of the blood already drained through the jugular vein, Greaver set about raising the carotid artery. He drew an imaginary line from the chest to a point midway between the jaw and mastoid process, all the while contemplating the exchange fee he might reasonably demand from the Rebel embalming surgeons. He could receive up to $80 per corpse for an officer in the North, so perhaps he should demand half that amount for any Rebel officers, should their embalmers run out of Union corpses for trade, of course. That would likely happen, since it was hard to imagine any Rebel being as organized and efficient as he was. Why, he had at least ten men out searching the battlefield, with Tomkins, that cool devil, acting as a manager. Just let the Rebels compete with that!
Greaver wiped a drop of sweat off his broad, fleshy nose, removed his glasses, and puffed on the lenses before placing the glasses gently back on. Then he turned the dead captain’s head to one side and, from the opposite side, made an incision about an inch and a half long just above the clavicle bone, near the juncture with the sternum. After cutting through the muscle, he found the small gap between the sternal head and clavicular head of the mastoid muscle, separated the fascia, and pushed the muscles to one side till the vessels appeared. He worked quickly and coarsely. Time was against him. The black seconds whirred inside the steady fly hum. But delicacy, in any case, was not required. Roughly he dissected the sheath of the exposed artery, inserted the needle underneath, and raised it to the surface. Then he slid a thin sliver of wood under the artery to hold it in place while he used two pieces of thread to tie a loose surgeon’s knot.
Damned glasses! Greaver removed them again and mopped his brow. The day was warm. He thought about stopping for a glass of water, but the dead were stacked like cord wood by the tent and, just as he paused, another of his hired workers approached through the haze bearing yet another corpse. Horace muttered into his sparse whiskers but could not repress a feeling of exultation. There was much money to be made in this work, as he’d predicted. And even more money than if he’d won a commission from the army to provide all th
eir embalming services. It gladdened him that now he’d failed in that attempt, since to work independently would prove far more profitable.
He neatly looped his glasses over his ears and bent to take up his bulb syringe. The artery hadn’t emptied of blood yet, due to the suddenness of death, but Greaver didn’t have time to waste on cosmetics—if the skin looked too flushed, so be it. Preservation was more important. He grinned as he inserted the drain tube into the internal jugular vein and started the draining. His solution, which he had perfected just before the battle, worked wonderfully. Indeed, it was a joy to insert the injection needle into the carotid and work the bulb syringe, shooting the perfect strength of bichloride of mercury through the vessels. A few pints at most for a private, a few quarts for an officer, and the body would remain as natural-looking as if asleep; and it would remain that way for no less than two weeks. Beyond that, Greaver guaranteed nothing—so much depended on the weather.
He hummed a little as he worked, forgetting all about the temporary employee approaching over the battlefield. Only, at a subtle sideways glance, Greaver saw that it wasn’t one of his hired men; it was a Union soldier he’d never seen before, a very tall one. Greaver shrugged inwardly and returned to the corpse. Finding its blood flush in the cheeks satisfactorily low, he rubbed his hands on a cloth, pretending a greater busyness than was required. He did not yet address the man standing a few feet away, who had just lowered a body to the ground. Instead, Greaver took the captain’s few personal effects—some letters, a college ring, a small photo of a child—and placed them in an open, zinc-lined coffin. Taking a pencil stub out of his vest pocket, he carefully wrote the deceased’s name on the lid, along with the address of his parents—somewhere in Pennsylvania, this one—not too far to travel, as the crow flies. Greaver intended to lift the captain and place him in his coffin, just to gain a further advantage by making the newcomer wait. But the man’s stillness disarmed him; the soldier just stood above the body, gazing at Greaver with unblinking, bulging eyes. Usually, if you made a prospective seller wait long enough, you established more authority when it came to prices, but Greaver had a good instinct for people—living and dead—and this seller wanted something more than money. Even so, Greaver had a very intimate relationship with time, and no man had the power to hurry him.