The Spirit Photographer

by Jon Michael Varese

  And so Joseph had never mentioned the prospect of her coming with him again. The woman who had saved him—the woman whose name he did not even know—had made quite clear what he could say, and what he couldn’t.

  There was no need, Joseph thought, to reveal this other Isabelle to Edward Moody, for what would be the point in claiming ownership over someone who had never belonged to either of them? For now, it was enough to inform Moody that Isabelle had been his savior, and that from the moment he left Boston, he had forever sworn to repay her.

  “In Canada, every day,” he told Moody, “I vowed that I would return to pay her whatever thanks I could. I would educate myself, become an honest man, and do as much good as I could in this world … not so that she would have me, but so that I could honor what she had done for me. I would repay her in doing that at least, if I could not repay her directly.”

  Then the war had come, and Joseph had gone off to fight, and when the war was over he learned that she was gone.

  “She seemed to have vanished,” Joseph said, “and try as I might I could not find out what had happened to her. I knew how much she wanted to stay in Boston, and that there was only one thing that would have forced her to leave.”

  “And you determined that I had wronged her,” Moody said.

  “That is exactly what I determined. And so I went to Cincinnati to study photography, resolving to come back to Boston, and work my way into your good graces. To find out exactly what chicanery you were up to, and if possible, get to the bottom of what happened to Isabelle.”

  “And the photographs?” Moody said.

  “Yes, I would do my own thing with the photographs … if it would lead to getting the information that I wanted.”

  Moody rested a clenched fist over the negative in his coat pocket.

  “No,” Joseph said. “I never took my hand to that.”

  The train coursed over the uneven Connecticut landscape, exhaling gray coughs of smoke from its engines. Joseph’s deviousness was undeniable, but it was a deviousness that stemmed from history. Edward Moody could never pretend to understand the scars that Joseph bore.

  “My jealousy blinded me to your character,” Joseph said. “I’m sorry that I misjudged you.”

  Moody looked out the window. There was no telling what he was seeing. But one thing was certain—Edward Moody would hate him. Moody would hate Joseph because he had dared to love Isabelle too, but all the more so because Joseph could do what he did without shame. For Moody, there was shame in it, and fear of discovery, and though that is partly what had fueled him, it had been his very destruction as well. Yes, Edward Moody would truly hate Joseph Winter, but at the same time Moody would be forced to find Joseph irresistible. Joseph represented a connection that Moody never could have had, and so now it was also certain that Moody would never let Joseph go.

  “You have still not told me what we’ll find in St. Louis,” Moody said.

  “There is nothing for us there but a boat,” Joseph replied. “St. Louis is merely a connection.”

  “And then?”

  Joseph reached into his coat pocket, producing a pencil and a scrap of paper. He laid the paper flat upon his knee and re-inscribed the familiar words:

  NO—I HAV RETURND.

  “Fanny’s message,” Moody said.

  “Isabelle’s message,” Joseph corrected.

  And when he said this, the train windows shuddered.

  “The message leaves all questions unanswered,” Joseph said. “You can be sure there is more to this message than what it seems to say.”

  Joseph then drew the pencil close to the paper again, and underlined the last three words.

  “I have returned,” Moody murmured.

  “Yes, she has returned, but where?”

  Moody whispered the words again, slower this time. The words beat with a life of their own.

  “If she has returned, Edward, she has returned to the place she’s come from.”

  Moody thought for a moment. Isabelle had told him so little about her past.

  “And this is one of the few things you do know about her,” Joseph said. “You know from where she came.”

  Then the lost detail rushed upon Moody.

  “Bellevoix—” Moody said.

  “Precisely,” Joseph replied.

  “But that’s no more than the name of an old plantation—the place from which her mother escaped. Isabelle never told me where it was, and to this day I have no idea. All I know is that the mother was recaptured, and that Isabelle was recorded as stillborn.”

  “Ah,” Joseph said, “but I do know where it was—and perhaps still is. There is no man—black or white—who could have lived in Louisiana in those days and not known of Bellevoix. It was amongst the greatest of the downriver sugar plantations, owned by the cruelest of masters.”

  “So you have known this all along!” Moody exclaimed.

  “It’s true,” Joseph said, “that I hid this knowledge from you too. But I didn’t understand its importance until Fanny delivered the message. I don’t know what we will find there, but I am certain Bellevoix can tell us something.”

  Joseph once again glanced down at the piece of paper, and now underlined the first part of the phrase.

  “No,” Moody said.

  Joseph underlined the phrase again.

  And Moody repeated the word: “No.”

  “Remember,” Joseph said, “how much your existing knowledge has guided your thinking. During the delivery of this message, you were concerned with answering your own questions. But the spirits’ messages— especially written ones—are often tangled. Incomplete and obstructed.”

  Moody continued staring at the piece of paper on Joseph’s knee.

  “She was not telling you ‘NO,’ Edward. She was giving you a location. She was letting us know that if we want to find her again, we must return to the place from where she came.”

  “Bellevoix …” Moody whispered. “But where is this place?”

  Joseph underlined the first two letters on the paper one last time.

  “New Orleans,” Joseph said. “Isabelle has returned to New Orleans.”

  XVI

  JOSEPH HAD ANSWERS—answers to questions Moody had never dreamed of asking—and Joseph’s history had helped Moody fill more cracks in the broken windows. To hear of Isabelle’s secret role as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, of the dangerous work she had done, and of the vital part she had played … all of this added more detail to the portrait of Isabelle that Moody had years ago locked away. Now, at last uncovered, that same image had been enhanced—like the rouged cheeks and gold buttons on one of his old hand-colored daguerreotypes.

  But it wasn’t all beautiful, as he had tried to forget. He was ashamed of his thoughts—of undressing her when he was alone. Of imagining his hands running over her body … of the way her lips and eyelids tasted. She was a real thing to him then, and the idea of losing her was not something that had crossed his mind. She came to the gallery. He saw her. He loved and desired her more every day.

  But what was he to her? He thought that he knew.

  And then he had done it—forced himself upon her, no better than one of the others. Until she slapped him, he hadn’t realized what he had done. “No, Edward,” she had said. “Please, no …” But he hadn’t listened. He had disgraced himself, and she’d never trust him again.

  Had he driven her away? Had he been the one to do it? No … of course not. She had forgiven him! Even as he blubbered before her like a fool. He did not understand how well she understood him. He was too selfish, too patronizing, to realize how deeply she could see.

  “The photograph captures the fleeting moments of life,” he had once told her … that same day in the meadow, before the honeybee had crawled up her skirt. “And it preserves what the mind sometimes cannot,” she had responded. “It is the reminder of what we may forget.” The logic had surprised him. It was—unromantic. He was the scientist, the teacher, the man of k
nowledge, the pioneer, but from the first she had demonstrated a kind of inexplicable authority. Now he was remembering. When she had listened to him talk about chemicals or lighting, he had sometimes felt as if he were telling her things she already knew. Yes, she had listened to him attentively, devouring all he had to say, but it had often been with the earnestness of a mother listening to a small child.

  And so, when he wrote to her during those horrible days after Antietam, he knew that she would be listening—though from where, he did not know. At that point she had been silent for close to ten years, yet he had never stopped talking to her, never stopped telling her things. The letters, which he wrote and kept in that same box with her goodbye letter, were like little talismans that preserved their feeble connection. He did not think of the ugly moments. The dreams of her return were much, much greater.

  But after Antietam, he could no longer believe.

  Not after he had seen the scores of men being brought back to the encampment, their arms and legs missing, snapped from their bodies like twigs, their lives abandoning them as they cried. Not after he had seen what could happen to a man’s body … how easily guns and cannons could turn a person into something monstrous. There was a boy, a dead drummer boy. Someone had wheeled him back to the encampment. The delicate form could not have been more than seventeen years old. His flaxen hair and porcelain skin would have singled him out as an angel, were it not for the missing arm, and the filthy, shredded skin beneath his shoulder. People would tell his mother that his rewards in the next life would be plentiful. But how could there be anything—in this world or the next—that would welcome such horror and mutilation?

  After the gunfire had stopped, and Brady sent him out to take photographs, Moody found the slopes of the hills playing host to piles of dead men. The bodies were at rest now—fallen and lifeless—but the stench of their decay still fought against the perfume of crushed corn stalks. The horse carcasses rose from the ground like mountains. Everywhere, men’s blood had drenched the fallen corn … the grass, the ragweed, and the clover.

  A young private lay on the ground, his body mangled and twisted, his fingers still gripping a framed picture of his loved one. She had been with him in that final moment, when the last river of blood had trickled from his mouth. “How beautiful,” one of the papers might later say, “that even in the ultimate throes of his life, his darling could be with him.” But it sickened Moody to think of how powerless—how useless—that picture had been. What did it matter? The imagined comfort of a loved one? What could it possibly have meant amongst so much carnage and senseless death?

  Isabelle would have had something to say. But she was gone, and now he had nothing.

  20 September 1862

  My Dearest Isabelle,

  We have just returned from photographing the battlefield, Mr. Brady being intent on having us capture the scene before it alters. I have never in my life been so repulsed by what I saw, and my deepest regret about today is that I surrendered myself to an effort to make permanent all the ghastly horrors of this battle. What awfulness it was to look through the camera and try to maintain focus on the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes! It seems iniquitous that the sun looking down on those slain, blistered faces should be the very same sun that caught their features upon the glass. It seems a crime that the sun blotting out all semblance of humanity from their bodies is that same sun that now gives them perpetuity forever. But so it is.

  My subjects today did not make appointments for their sittings. They were photographed as they fell, their hands clutching the grass around them, or reaching out for help that never came. The red light of battle is faded from their eyes, but their lips are still set with that last fierce charge which loosed their souls from their bodies. The ground upon which they lie is torn by shot and shell, and the grass trampled down by the tread of hot, hurrying feet. Little rivulets that can scarcely be of water are still trickling along the earth like tears over a mother’s face. It is a bleak, barren plain, and above it bends an ashen sky; there is no friendly shade or shelter from the noonday sun or the midnight dews.

  I cannot shake from my thoughts the one side of these pictures that the sun did not catch … the one phase that has escaped our photographic skill. It is the background of widows and orphans … mothers, sons, daughters … torn from their natural protectors by the remorseless hand of battle. This war has made thousands of homes desolate, and has forever quenched the light of life in thousands of hearts. Imagination must be the one to paint all this desolation, for I cannot—broken hearts cannot be photographed.

  Nor mine. When you did not come back, I thought I would perish from grief, but I found ways to keep you alive, and the photographs did more than the letters. Every photograph I took led me to wonder what you would think of it, for I know how you loved them, and would have wanted to see them all. From somewhere you must have been listening when Mr. Brady told me I had an almost unnatural talent, and that he would entrust me with the most important of his projects, and that they would turn me into a man of means. You loved this, I felt it, because I loved it too. We were together in the photographs—every one.

  But this—this atrocity—I do not want you to see. I do not ever want you to see this, and would give anything if I could wipe it from the slate of my own memory. I cannot look through the lens of the camera again. I can never make another picture without seeing the eyes of a dead man. And so now I tell you what you already know, which is that I will forsake photography forever. I will do the remaining work I have to do for Mr. Brady, but after this … after this war, I am finished. I cannot bear the agony of the photograph. It has become something repulsive to me.

  You will not resent me for this, for you have already said your goodbyes. I must say my goodbyes now too. It is what was deemed to be.

  Edward

  That was the last letter he wrote to her in an effort to banish her from his memory. After all that time had passed, what Moody really needed to do was to forget. The next evening, he went to see the black whore who lived on the outskirts of Sharpsburg. The soldiers all knew about her, and told their stories about her around the fires, and Moody had always listened, ashamed. But now his shame was gone, because everything was gone, and Edward Moody had nothing left to lose. He was wretched—so wretched that the woman pushed him away. But that angered him, and he slapped her, and took her.

  In the days following Antietam, the woodcuts began appearing in the papers—reproductions of the photographs that Moody and Brady’s other men had taken on the battlefield. The illustrations duplicated those that Moody had captured, but without the singular horror that the original images revealed. Here and there the newspaper artists had added their own touches—bending a knee slightly higher to make the pose appear more lifelike, or turning a face so as to expose more of its features. The effect was a kind of washing over of the original images—a tidying up of the inhumanity, a rinsing away of some of the blood. While appalled, Moody could take only so much offense at this, for he and the others had also been guilty of adjusting the bodies where they lay.

  “This one is most affective,” Brady said some days after Moody had returned. “The grass almost seems to be cradling him.”

  “Yes, well—we placed him like that,” one of the photographers replied. “The angle of the body accentuates the gentle slope of the ditch.”

  “Trench,” Brady corrected. “We might call this one a trench. Ditch has a hardness that is somewhat off-putting.”

  He studied the small image for a little while longer and then said:

  “Mr. Moody, what do you think?”

  It was only a tiny thing … a carte de visite of a fallen soldier, so precious that it could fit into the palm of your hand. It would be sold, with hundreds of others like it, as a souvenir at Brady’s exhibit.

  “It’s a ravine,” Moody said.

  And the great Brady lit up.

  “Ah, yes—a ravine! You are a true poet, Mr. Moody.”

>   Moody did his best to suppress his discomfort. He was, to his own dismay, remaining a conspirator to the end.

  Then the other photographer chimed in.

  “Call it a ‘little ravine,’ Mr. Brady. That would provide some relief from the gruesomeness of the image.”

  Again Brady was impressed, for the words needed to be perfect. Printed on the back sides of the souvenirs, the captions would mean the difference between mournfulness and horror.

  “Yes … yes!” Brady enthused. “A ‘little ravine’! A Confederate soldier, dragging himself to a little ravine, before his death. There’s something quite lyrical about it.”

  The description of that particular photograph underwent many more revisions during the next hour, though Moody refrained from contributing to them. He had grown too disgusted at the idea of profiteering from the dead to help stamp Brady’s products any further. The widows and orphans who haunted him as much as dead soldiers would see no more of his participation when they read the reverse sides of their souvenirs.

  BRADY’S ALBUM GALLERY.

  No. 554.

  CONFEDERATE SOLDIER,

  Who, after being wounded, had dragged himself to a little ravine on the hill-side, where he died.

  The Photographs of this series were taken directly from nature, at considerable cost. Warning is therefore given that legal proceedings will be at once instituted against any party infringing the copyright.

  The exhibit opened in New York to great acclaim, as no one had ever seen anything of its kind before. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” the Times reported. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” The article described the little placard outside Brady’s Broadway gallery, inviting passers-by to come upstairs and view “The Dead of Antietam.” Inside, throngs of people examined the battle photographs—some with handheld magnifying glasses, perhaps searching for someone they knew. “Of all objects of horror one would think that the battlefield should stand preeminently repulsive. But on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws us near these pictures, and makes us loath to leave them.” Those with more intense fixations could take the Dead of Antietam home with them, for Brady was offering carte de visite souvenirs, “priced attractively at 25 cents each.”