The Tinsmith

by Tim Bowling

  When the doctor clutched his stomach and said he needed to go into the field a moment, John slipped away. The sun was well up. It was already hot. His face dripped sweat. The battlefield became a buzzing blur as he searched among the fallen. The bodies had begun to bloat and turn black. He gagged on the putrid air as he looked into the dead faces and as he negotiated the shell holes. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a thin man in a clean suit approaching gingerly, a white cloth held over his mouth and nose. His hands were white-gloved and he wore a bowler. John stood motionless as the man stopped a few feet in front of him and lowered the cloth.

  “You’re searching for a comrade?” He sighed. His lips were wet and pink and he seemed to hold his breath as he spoke. “A sad duty. Very sad.” He dabbed the cloth to his shining brow. Little beads of sweat hung off the ends of his elegant moustache. “But perhaps,” he said almost shyly, “you’d be willing to ease the suffering of others even as you carry out your duty?”

  When John did not respond, the man removed a small white card from his breast pocket and offered it.

  “This is a coupon. If, in your searches today, you should find any soldiers with this card on their persons, you can earn a considerable sum by transporting the soldiers to that tent, just there.”

  He pointed to a small, dark encampment in the near distance.

  “My employer, Mr. Horace Greaver, is a respected surgeon of the embalming arts.”

  John blinked, his hands twitched at his sides. The man, who had lifted the cloth to his nose again, lowered it and winked.

  “A soldier must always think of his family at home. I’m sure you are no different. Wouldn’t you like to be able to send more money to your beloved parents? Or, perhaps”—he smiled and the pink tip of his tongue emerged from between his pink lips—“your sweetheart? Listen.”

  He stepped closer. His voice was hushed.

  “I tell you this in confidence. The work’s more than I can handle alone. There are so many valiant dead. Such a sad day.” He bowed his head briefly. “But why should a soldier not benefit from it? The sadness is a fact. But so is life. And life requires industry and imagination. I can tell at a glance that you are intelligent. I tell you this in strict confidence.” He leaned forward, his chin seemed to be propped on the air of decayed flesh. “Officers. My employer will pay handsomely for officers. North or South. If you transport them to that tent. And tell him that Tomkins sent you.”

  John did not fully understand, but the thought of the money appealed to him. If it turned out that he could not find the overseer’s body or that the sack of money was not on it, he would be happy for the . . . a sudden thought stopped the others.

  “Are many bodies being taken to that tent?” he said.

  “Oh, yes, there are others doing this work. It is a competitive venture indeed. But you are not, I can tell, a young man to shrink from competition.”

  John considered. Perhaps the overseer’s body was at the tent? He turned away from the man without a word and headed south, his eyes scanning the ground for the overseer just in case. Within five minutes, he came upon an elderly Confederate soldier lying on his back. His face was fine-boned, and powder burns had darkened the neatly trimmed white moustache. His large, brown eyes fluttered. As John bent closer, the soldier’s lips moved, struggling to form words.

  “Are you a soldier?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The mouth opened again without sound. The eyes closed, opened.

  “A federal?”

  “Sir?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Not if you’re a soldier.” The old man’s eyes remained open. “You’ll understand. I won’t recover from this fight. I do not wish to survive if I cannot fight. Please.” His lips hardly moved. His blackened skin ran in rivulets of sweat. A fly crawled along one eyebrow. “Please.” A tear formed in his open eye.

  John looked around. No one was within a hundred yards. He could do this. This was not the same as what he’d faced with the overseer. This was more like the feeling he had standing beside the doctor. But as he moved his hands toward the old man’s throat, the horrifying image of Orlett’s doglike grin appeared on the face. Nigger. Goddamn ignorant. John hesitated. He watched the old man’s eyes close and not open. Then he knelt, gently pushed his arms under the old man’s back and legs, and lifted. The corpse was light, easy to carry in a cradled position. He hurried toward the embalmer’s tent.

  • • •

  An hour later, not far from the field hospital, he found the overseer in a neat line of dead Union soldiers. Jubilant, John searched the body. But the sack was not there. As he stood dumbfounded over the corpse, he had an overwhelming sensation that someone was watching him. Fearing it was the mulatto, he looked around wildly. Two hundred yards away sat the same single black cart and horse. A man stood near the cart, some kind of black object in front of him. John could feel the intensity of the man’s stare; it burned two circles of heat into his brow. He thought quickly. If the overseer’s body disappeared, others might believe he had simply left the area. The mulatto, especially, might believe it, he might leave to search. Without a corpse, John realized that he’d be safer. And the man staring at him would just think that he was carrying off a dead comrade for a private burial. Other soldiers were doing just that, either for themselves or for one of the embalming surgeons. And civilians also wandered over the broken field. His actions could not be regarded as suspicious.

  He bent again to the overseer’s body but reeled back in shock as his eyes locked on the face. It still wore its living grin. John waited for the taunting to start, but only the drone of flies rose from the bloated lips. He waited longer than was safe. The man by the cart would be growing more suspicious; he might even decide to come closer to investigate.

  At last, John took the overseer onto his back and headed for the woods hunched darkly on the horizon.

  PART FOUR

  I

  July 1881, Crescent Slough, British Columbia

  Standing on the small black wharf just upstream from Dare’s cannery, Anson knew almost immediately which of the three skiffs approaching over the darkening water had his old friend at the oars. It was the lead boat, the one putting so much distance between it and the others, the one that drew the last few crimson shreds of light around it. As the skiff came close enough to the wharf for figures to be distinguished, as the smooth, steady power of the oar strokes replicated the most efficient machine in the cannery behind him, Anson saw that the years had not greatly diminished his friend’s strength. Dare pulled without pause, his shoulders level, his head raised. Anson could hear each quick grunt that accompanied the stroking, a natural sound, as of the day itself winding down with the light. Then the oars stopped.

  As the skiff glided the last few feet to the wharf, Dare stood, still as tall and lean as Anson remembered. Sweat glistened on his sunburned forearms. He wore a white cotton shirt, the thick sleeves pushed up, crushed like the petals of great flowers around his biceps. A wiry, grey-flecked tangle of beard hid most of the lower half of his face but focused attention on the eyes. They seemed even larger than Anson remembered, darker and worn, as if two mixed handfuls of river and blood were continually breaking apart and being replaced. Except, Dare’s face also possessed a curious repose. Anson sickened at the contrast; it spoke too clearly of grave-grass pushing through the bars of a cradle.

  He had expected the years to alter his friend’s appearance. The deep lines on the brow, the grey flecks in the grizzle; these were predictable enough, almost comforting in the way they bound the man to his kind. But the alarming condition of the eyes! It seemed that at any second they’d break apart and no amount of river or blood could be gathered to return them to sight.

  Anson’s relief that the gunshots had not deprived him of their reunion quickly evaporated. At the edge of the wharf, a groan made him look away before speaking, down into the skiff. Thomas Lansdowne lay stretched along the thwart. His shirt was ripped open at the chest, and a chu
nk of the fabric served as a tourniquet around his upper right arm. He was conscious and moaning, but his eyes flickered constantly and his face was pale. Thin shafts of light cut across his body. Already a cloud of mosquitoes had begun to drip onto his exposed skin.

  Anson locked eyes with Dare and all the finer distinctions between past and present dissolved into one long, continuous moment.

  “John?”

  Dare didn’t smile. This close to him, Anson could see the deep lines etched into his sunburned face and the tightness of the skin pulled over the cheekbones. The eyes, however, possessed some spirit yet.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood. I got him here as fast as I could.”

  “Leave him there. I’ll come down.”

  Anson lowered himself into the skiff and quickly studied the wound. It was a large spatter but clean, and no vital area seemed compromised. Unfortunately there was no obvious spot where the lead had exited the body. Even so, the situation was not hopeless. At Antietam and for years afterwards, the arm would have had to come off below the shoulder, but now, with the proper attention, things might go better, though there was always a risk that the wound might prove fatal. So much depended on the degree of the fracture and, of course, on the patient’s strength. Thomas Lansdowne, Anson reflected grimly, had been in a weakened, worn-down condition of late.

  The Englishman moaned. His blue eyes opened for a few seconds, glassy, apparently unseeing. Anson was sorry he did not have anything to give him for the pain.

  “I’ll send for some whisky,” Dare said with unnerving prescience, then, without using his fingers, he emitted a high, piercing whistle.

  The sound startled the hovering gulls and set off an even wilder chorus of shrieks.

  Meanwhile, the plashing of other oars sounded nearby. Soon the tiny, still scene of Antietam, like something captured in a daguerre­otype, would be invaded. Anson felt a rush of disappointment that he and Dare would not be given time for a reflective reunion, that they would have no immediate opportunity for a detailed talk. And yet, somehow the fact did not surprise him, was almost a natural extension of the haste and suffering they had known on the battlefield so long ago.

  But Dare’s face showed no sign that he, too, was disappointed. It flared, as always, with an attendance on the welfare of others.

  “I brought him here because I knew you’d be here,” he said.

  Anson nodded as he stood. “Yes. I’ve had some experience with gunshot wounds.”

  Dare didn’t appear to notice the irony. He clenched and unclenched his huge hands, which hung fish-scaled and brinish at his sides, and slowly turned his head in all directions. When the elderly Chinese, thin as a heron’s leg, drifted over the wharf, Dare instructed him to bring some whisky. The Chinese drifted away.

  “I’ll carry him to the house.” Dare stepped toward the wounded man.

  Anson gently touched Dare’s elbow. “I left my bag at Chilukthan. We’ll have to go there.”

  Dare’s eyes turned downriver but not his head. His corneas were as blood-streaked as Thomas Lansdowne’s arm.

  “I’m not welcome there,” he said.

  “That much I know. But I’m not asking you to come to the house, just to the wharf. Besides, the circumstances . . .”

  Dare turned to face the incoming skiffs. When he turned back, his face was blank.

  “He’s already killed one of my Indians.”

  “Killed? Who?”

  “The bullet was meant for me.”

  The last daylight trembled on the water. Only a bent sabre of red showed in the west. The seagulls began to fly inland, silently, in a loose formation. Anson shivered. If Thomas Lansdowne died or even lost his arm . . . Suddenly Anson realized why his old friend would be especially unwelcome at Chilukthan now.

  “It wasn’t your shot?”

  “My shot?” Dare spoke with the same uninflected tone he’d used at the height of battle, as if matter-of-factness was the only sane way to face what couldn’t be faced. “Not first. Not even second.”

  Anson searched Dare’s eyes for the truth; it was like seeing a long way down a country road at dusk—there was a great calm but also the pressure of darkness coming in, a sense of things disappearing that might not return at dawn. Anson didn’t need to ask what had happened—Thomas Lansdowne had shot the Indian by mistake, had shot again, and would have kept shooting unless someone had stopped him. But for Dare, the first shot had done the damage. His presence on the river almost certainly wouldn’t be abided after such violence, especially given the knowledge of his blood.

  The elderly Chinese returned with the whisky and a blazing oil lamp. Its frayed glow, lowered into the skiff, cast the scene in sharp relief. Thomas Lansdowne was very white, trembling the whole length of his body. Anson looked up from him and down into the first of the other skiffs as it glided past. The dead Indian—a man of early middle age—lay on his back, his face a pulpy mess half blown away. The silent, implacable manner of the woman at the oars—husband and wife usually fished together—was somehow more disturbing than screams. A dozen silver salmon lay beside the body like an offering. Anson watched the fish slip out of the oil light’s glow before he took the whisky bottle and knelt to the wounded man again. He managed to pour a little liquid between the trembling lips, then a little more. This close, he couldn’t help but note the resemblance between father and daughter: the strong nose and brow, the distance between the eyes, and, more than anything, the proximity to death.

  “Quickly, John,” he said.

  In minutes they had left the slough mouth and joined the current of the main channel. With the tide not against him, Dare pulled the skiff along at a tremendous pace. His breathing was level but oddly rasping. The powerful muscles in his neck and arms moved rhythmically. Anson, seated beside the wounded man, keeping firm pressure on the wound, took a slug of whisky for himself, then gazed upward. There was no moon, but the stars had begun to emerge in the blue-black, most of them as faint as scales on wood.

  A heron rose off the bank with a loud squawk and winged slowly away, as if dragging the slabs for two graves through the air. The smell of the river suggested the same final heaviness. With a chill, Anson recalled the gravediggers working the bloody Antietam ground after the sudden, heavy rain. Then he saw the corpse again, vivid, gore-spattered. Thomas Lansdowne floated away into the soft edges of the coastal dark, replaced by Dare’s defining act. The blood glistened at the groin. The terrible rictus came alive in a grin. Anson closed his eyes, but Dare’s old words still reached him: “He did not deserve to live. He was evil.”

  Anson opened his eyes. Dare had paused in his rowing. He seemed to be studying Anson’s face. That unsettling, uncanny prescience! Anson fought it off. He spoke clearly and calmly.

  “They know, don’t they?”

  Now the silence gathered from all sides. The seconds passed. In the shimmering oil light, it appeared that a smile came to Dare’s face, but that couldn’t be; the situation did not call for amusement. When Anson looked again, the expression was gone.

  “What is there to know?” Dare said evenly, his arms akimbo, resting on the oars.

  “Why, who you are. They know who you are.”

  “Who I am.” Dare spoke the words with a slight pause between each one. He straightened up, his knuckles tightened on the oars.

  This should not have been so awkward. After all, Dare had asked Anson to come, he had summoned him for help. He knew the answer. But it appeared that he wanted to hear it spoken aloud.

  “They know you’re black, John.” Suddenly, Anson felt no reason to use the name he had given his friend at Antietam. The artifice seemed pointless now. “Some Southerner saw you in Victoria and—”

  “I never knew my parents.”

  Dare blinked slowly, as though his eyelids were crusted with salt brine. He seemed to speak to himself.

  “The overseer told me they were white. That I was born of white trash and only raised as a nigger.”

  He
held the oars so tightly that his two fists were against his chest.

  Anson swallowed dryly. The glass of the whisky bottle was cold in his palm, but he didn’t raise the bottle to his mouth. White? Both parents? The idea staggered him. He had looked past the colour of Dare’s skin for so long that it simply never occurred to him that there was any question of his mulatto ancestry. Dare was black, an escaped slave who looked white. And Anson had saved him. To doubt these facts was worse than to lose faith in God; it was to abandon everything, to find nothing in life but deceit and shadows. He gave another drink of whisky to the gasping Englishman, who seemed even paler than before. Then Anson forced himself to address Dare’s last statement.

  “Did you believe him?”

  Now Dare did smile, a slow unwinding of skin that revealed the slightest glimpse of teeth.

  “For a time. Then I knew it didn’t matter. Not if I owned myself. That was all I had to do. The owning’s what matters.”

  Anson tried to assess the conviction in Dare’s tone. What struggles he must have endured to reach so blunt a philosophy! Yet Anson couldn’t deny the stark truth of it. Was the North’s ambition in the war any different? He decided to address the situation at hand.

  “I don’t see that this changes anything, John. Even if you’re white but they believe you’re not, that’s trouble enough. These people want you gone. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s why I’m here. To help you stop them from getting their way.”

  Dare made small circles with one oar by slightly moving one fist. Water dripped off the blade. “Yes. It was why I cabled.”

  “Was?”

  His nostrils flared. Several mosquitoes settled on his upper lip, but he did not brush them away; they sat there like a crooked stitch. Or another scar. The rough, whitened edges of an earlier one showed just above his beard on the right side; it looked as if Dare had been scratching desperately to get at the old wound but without success.