Gob's Grief (16 page)

1

“
YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER’S IMAGE
,”
SAID CAPTAIN BROWER.
This wasn’t exactly true. Will and Sam Fie looked alike in the face, but Will was a much bigger boy. He stood six foot three in his socks, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and he wasn’t the least bit fat. Sam was three years older, but had had to leave off beating on his little brother by the time Will was twelve. Will would catch the punches easily, and Sam’s fist was like a crab apple in his big hand. “If you’re half as brave as him, we’re lucky to have you.”

“I’m not,” said Will. Captain Brower thought he was joking. Will was strong, and stubborn, and often obedient, but if bravery had been one of his qualities, he would not have been frightened to stay at home. He would not have been afraid to open the door to his bedroom when his mother brought the news of his brother’s death upstairs. The door had shaken as if assaulted by a strong wind, and Will had not wanted to open it because he thought, just for a moment, that a door could bar such news from your life.

Captain Brower was in Syracuse to help recruit replacements for those who had fallen, like Sam, at Bull Run. He had written a letter, saying that he would like to venerate in person the parents who had raised such a boy as Sam Fie. But before Brower could visit, Will had proceeded to Syracuse with a forged letter, in which his mother expressed her love for Sam’s captain. Here was her other son, whom she could not dissuade from going to the war. She vouched for Will’s age, and asked Captain Brower to take good care of him.

In fact, she had spit on the Captain’s name and his offer to visit, calling him a murderer, and saying, “How dare he show his face here?” Over meals that for Will were at first a hard chore and then a deep misery, she’d accuse Captain Brower of having sent Sam to his death. Then she would pound her fist against her heart, and put down her head to cry while Will and his father stared at their cooling meat. They would remain that way for so long that Will imagined they might sit like that forever, a miserable tableau vivant. Some enterprising fellow might come along and cut away a wall of their house, so curious people could pay a dime to file by and peep in on them. There would be a sign:
Toll of War in Onondaga County, New York—September 1862.

Will had departed from his parents’ house late at night. His mother lay asleep on the green sofa upon which she had made it her custom to grieve until exhausted. He looked at her breathing noisily through her open mouth, and debated whether he ought to kiss her goodbye. As he leaned down he thought better of it—she might wake, after all, and inaugurate some sort of hideous, tear-soaked scene. He turned away from her and imagined, as he walked through the door, that Sam’s ghost went past him, taking his place in the house as surely as he was taking Sam’s place in the war.

Captain Brower shook his hand, and then embraced him. Will was mustered into the 122nd New York Volunteers, called the Third Onondaga by its local-minded members. He sent his bounty money home to his parents, along with a short note. “Now I am one of Father Abraham’s three hundred thousand. Goodbye.”

Six dead men without shoes—their feet are swollen and their swollen chests have burst the buttons on their shirts. Behind them is a broken wagon, hooked to a dead horse. In the distance stands a church where pacifists once gathered to worship.

*     *     *

In Maryland, on the way to Harpers Ferry, where the Third had been called to help put an end to General Lee’s frolicking, Will saw his first Reb, a dead one who lay where he’d been killed outside a church at Burkittsville. Wounded were moaning inside the church. “What a hymn!” said Jolly Forbes, a long-faced boy who was one of the few who would associate with Will.

Company D had welcomed Will initially. A cry of “Sam’s brother!” had followed him wherever he went, and total strangers embraced him and wet his thick neck with tears. “It is good to see you, my friend,” was a common refrain. “I am not your friend,” was Will’s unvarying reply. So great was their love and respect for Sam’s memory—there were at least a dozen men who claimed he’d saved their lives—the men of Company D might have let this rude behavior slide, and loved Will for all that he was sullen and he wanted no friends. But he was actively boorish, and proved himself in no time to be a great ruiner of fun. He would knock a man down for cursing in front of him, and if he came upon a bottle of whiskey he would break it. While they were encamped outside of Washington, some man’s cousin had attempted to sneak in a barrel of whiskey. She had dressed it up in a little white frock, put a white bonnet on it, and heaped it with soft blankets. Soldiers in the know cooed over it, reached into the perambulator, and pretended to stroke its chin. Jolly Forbes came by and looked in. “Madame,” he said, “that is the
handsomest
baby I have ever seen.” Will was behind Jolly, and when he saw what it was, he reached in, grabbed it out, and dashed that baby to the ground.

Where Sam had saved men by the dozen, Will put them by the dozen into the guardhouse with his tattling. Begging Sam’s forgiveness, they cursed loudly against the Devil-sent prig. Will was thrown out of the Tiger Mess, where Sam had been a member. The other members wrote out a dishonorable discharge on a gigantic piece of hardtack.
Expelled for crimes against good-naturedness
, it said. In the end, he had only Jolly and assorted other rejects to mess with.

At the church, two men were busy around the dead boy. A photographer was yelling at his assistant in French. Will knew enough French to understand that the fat little photographer—he was only about five feet tall, and shaped just like an egg—was very displeased. He wanted the assistant to turn the dead boy’s head into the sun, but the boy was ripe and the assistant was sure that to touch him would be bad for his own health. The photographer stomped over, reached up to grab his assistant by the neck, and threw him down into the dead boy, whose arm flopped over in a friendly embrace. The assistant scampered away, howling as if the corpse had bitten him. The round photographer bent down and began very carefully to compose the Reb’s limbs. He stretched out the boy’s arm above his shoulder in the grass, and opened his hand. The photographer looked up and scowled at Will. “Your goggling eyes!” he said. “What are you looking at?” Just then, Captain Brower came up alongside in the passing column.

“Walk on, Private,” he said to Will. “There’s no time for dillydallying.” Will looked a little longer at the dead boy. He was wondering how Sam had fallen, if he had looked the same as this swollen, flyblown boy. He turned and gave the Captain a stiff salute, then continued walking.

Not fifteen minutes from the church, they passed the battlefield of South Mountain. Dead Rebels were stacked shoulder high along the road. Will wondered if this construction was the work of the round Frenchman. He looked down at the ground as he passed the corpses, afraid to meet their staring eyes. He thought of Sam’s body again. There would have been a funeral, back in Onondaga County, which Will had missed. Later, Will would have a dream in which he climbed a wall of bodies as high as the moon. Every body was Sam’s, and every mouth as he passed it whispered, “Aim low, Brother!”

Jolly dropped back in line to walk with him again. He held up his canteen to the orderly dead before he took a drink of water. “To your health, boys,” Jolly said.

They are swollen in this picture, too. It almost makes them look healthy, such big barrel chests, such thick legs—their clothes can barely contain them. They lie along a fence in various positions. This one has got his hands thrown over his shoulders. That one has got his hand on his belly. Where are their shoes?

The Third Onondaga was ordered away from Harpers Ferry just as they reached it, drawn down off the mountain by General McClellan’s sucking, gluttonous need for reinforcements. But they arrived too late to participate at Antietam. Will spent the night of September 17 helping carry in wounded. If they were not too fragile, he could carry them one under each arm. The darkness was a mercy—it was easier to venture among the dead when you could not see them. At dawn, he was squatting by a small fire, drinking coffee with Jolly. The sun came up and seemed to shine specifically on a house near a line of battered woods. The walls were laced with cannonball holes, but a merry white column of smoke was still rising from the broken chimney.

“Sometimes,” said Jolly, rolling his tin cup between his hands, “I worry that there is no purpose to anything. It would be the very worst news, I think.”

“God has abandoned that field, at least,” Will said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder to point at the heaped dead of the Irish Brigade. It was his shame that he lacked faith. But it made a sort of wicked sense to him that the universe should be an orphan, its own only parent, raised on a diet of self-taught, ignorant cruelty. He worried that there was nothing beyond the tangible world, that there was nothing beyond death but oblivion. On the way to Harpers Ferry, he had imagined his own death, trying to decide if he wanted to linger or go in a flash. These thoughts were his dispiriting occupation since he had become a soldier. He feared God, even though he was secretly certain there was no such fellow, and worried that some punishment greater than a joyless life might be in store for him.

“I think I shall be melancholy for a while,” said Jolly, putting his elbow on his knee, and his chin in his hand. He looked very much like Will’s brooding mother, in that posture. Will was just about to leave when a spindly corporal came to fetch him and bring him to Captain Brower’s tent. Will found the little French photographer there with the Captain. They had filled up the tent with cigar smoke.

“Here’s the boy I had in mind for you!” said Captain Brower. He introduced Will to the photographer, who was called Carnot, but Will privately dubbed him Frenchy.

“I know him,” said M. Carnot. “I know his goggling eyes.” He barked a few questions at Will in French. The Captain said Will knew French—was this true? Could he read? Was he a disciplined worker? Were his hands steady? Was he a Catholic boy?

Will answered slowly, once in French, and then again in English. He knew his French from a distant neighbor lady back in Onondaga County, to whom his mother had sent him for lessons because she was sure it would civilize him, though his father said it would sissify him. Of course he could read; he liked to think he was as disciplined as anybody; his hands were steady and he was not clumsy. “I am not a Catholic,” he added belatedly.

“Excellent,” said M. Carnot. “I am through with superstitious idolaters. You’ll do.”

Captain Brower clapped Will on the back.

“Pardon me, sir,” said Will. “Has some business been transacted?”

Some had. Will had just changed hands. M. Frenchy needed a new assistant, his last one having been bayoneted on the previous day by a wounded Reb when he approached, hesitantly, to rearrange the seemingly dead boy’s limbs into a more dramatic pose. Will would make an ideal assistant, the Captain was sure, because of his French, and because he was industrious and smart. Will had the same feeling as when he’d been kicked out of the Tiger Mess. He got no certificate this time, but he had the distinct impression he was being thrown out of Company D.

This wasn’t precisely the case. Will would still eat and sleep and fight with his company, but he was also to serve as assistant and bodyguard to the extremely well-connected M. Frenchy, who had letters from on high, through Sedgwick and McClellan all the way up to Stanton, giving him permission to put himself in the way, taking pictures of the field. Frenchy called himself an artist and a scientist; his aim, he said, was to quantify and qualify the brutality of war.

Packed bodies in a sunken road. Try as he might, Will could not resolve them into separate boys. They lay in a dead tangle, arms and legs thrown over each other. It struck him that they would embrace each other forever. Will put this picture high on the north wall of the house.

Will carried photographic equipment and helped arrange the dead, always looking away from their faces as he moved them. Some were stiff. Frenchy had screamed at him when he balked at forcing a fallen cavalryman’s arm into a more pleasing position. Will broke the poor man’s shoulder, crossing his arm over his chest, and he wondered that the whole Rebel army did not come pouring down on him, for so abusing their dead. When he was not posing the bodies, he was helping to bury them. Will put the cavalryman by himself in a deep grave lined with hay. Frenchy cursed the burying, because his precious dead were vanishing into the ground.

The Third joined the lazy pursuit that toddled after the fleeing Rebels. As they traveled, Frenchy taught Will the photographic process, screeching at him when he wasted a plate. He spent hours in Frenchy’s cramped wagon mixing collodion from guncotton and sulfuric ether and alcohol, then coating the mixture onto glass plates. Frenchy scolded like a harpy, and whenever Will did something that displeased him especially, he would emit a furious, resonant honk, like the noise of a calliope. But he also spoke generous praise—his assistant was learning quickly. Pressed for time, he brought a plate back to Will in the wagon, and let him develop it while he took another wet plate and went to make another picture. Will removed the plate from its holder. He held it over a pan and poured developer over the glass. The developer reeked like a cocktail of vinegar and blood, and he almost dropped the negative when a violent sneeze shook him. Leaning down, and squinting in the dim yellow light of the lantern, he could see the image, rising out of the glass as if up through water.