Gob's Grief (17 page)

A boy with his legs all twisted up impossibly: someone has stolen his hips and replaced them with a little stretch of earth. His hand is cupped behind his ear, as if he is straining to hear some news. Will put this one on the east wall, where it would catch the light of the rising sun.

At Fredericksburg, Frenchy was made busy by the carnage below Marye’s Heights. It was December, and bitter cold. Frenchy was lost in a wilderness of borrowed coat—his own was still wet from a fall off a pontoon bridge into the Rappahannock. He swam like an otter, and had looked like one, with his wet brown hair and shiny black eyes.

With his head in his camera, Frenchy was blind to danger. It was Will’s job to keep an eye out for sneaking Rebels. A truce had been called, to gather the dead and wounded, but Will did not trust them to keep it. A profusion of boys was strewn on the ground, none of them closer than a hundred yards to the stone wall against which Burnside had thrown them.

“Did you ever think you’d be a
photographer?”
Frenchy asked from under the camera hood, saying the word with great reverence.

“No,” said Will. When he was a boy, he had wanted to become a sailor, because he and Sam had been great admirers of
Typee
, and had imagined a scummy pond behind their house to be the wide green bay of Nukuheva. Later, Will thought he would be a doctor, for no good reason except that to doctor was not to farm like his father. Now, he thought he might have been growing up all this time merely to be a brick in a wall of corpses.

Frenchy pulled his head from the camera and made a confession to Will, to whom he was beginning to show something like affection. It was his hope, he said, to take a picture of a soldier at the precise moment of his death, because he believed the departing soul, invisible to a human eye, could be seen by the camera. Soon after his confession, Frenchy found a squirmer on the cold field, but by the time he’d moved the camera and made it ready, the boy was dead.

Will was much in demand that whole day through. In the late afternoon, when the light had grown too bad for taking pictures, he took up a pick to open the frozen ground for graves, and worked at it till his arms and shoulders burned. He wanted to weep from exhaustion, but there were always more dead to bury, some of them naked because ill-clad Rebs had crept forth from the lines to steal their clothes in the night. When he stopped working, he could barely raise his arms to feed himself. He found Frenchy in a hospital tent, with his camera set up by the bedside of a blond-headed boy who looked for sure to be a goner. Will’s hands were a mess of blisters. Frenchy gave him a plate to develop, but he dropped it, which earned him a cursing so thorough Will had to resist an urge to knock the little man down. Frenchy nearly got ejected from the tent, for all that he brought out his omnipresent letters and waved them like a little set of battle colors. He took up his vigil again, and sent his assistant away.

Will went back to Company D. They’d been held in reserve for most of the previous day, having seen just a smidgen of action when they were called up in support of a battery below Fredericksburg. Despite the shells bursting over their heads, their only casualty was a boy who had been overcome with excitement and accidentally shot himself in the knee. Jolly was having his dinner with a few other members of the Leper Mess. A tall thin fellow named Lewy Greeley, who was unpopular on account of his incessant proselytizing, was lamenting his fate. “This is the worst regiment ever,” Lewy said, stabbing beans with a spoon. “We see no good action and are overrun with godlessness. I think I will go off and join the 110th.” He meant the 110th Illinois, a regiment composed entirely of Methodist ministers. He nattered on about them incessantly, about their somber uniforms and pious behavior: they sang booming hymns as they loaded, primed, and fired. God was with them in precisely the way he was not with this here assembly of lawyers and farmers.

“I’ll cut you a new mouth to whine with, if you don’t shut up,” said Jolly, who was not known for making idle threats. Will sat back on his heels, picked out hot beans with his fingers, and raised them slowly to his mouth. “Did you see the sky last night, Tiny?” Jolly asked him.

“I did,” Will said. There had been a fantastic display, the night after the battle. The northern lights had come south to blaze in the sky above the Union right. Will had lain on his back to watch, holding to his eye a cracked lens pilfered from the wagon, thinking it would be fine to take a picture of such a thing as that festive sky.

“Do you suppose it was a sign? Do you suppose it was God waving his hanky for the Rebs? Perhaps it is our purpose to lose.”

“We were good Christians today, then,” said Will.

“No,” said Lewy Greeley. “Not ever.”

A catalogue of expressions—fear, sadness, rage, surprise, tenderness, even what appears to be a broad smile, this last on a head connected only by strings to the neck it once rode upon. A catalogue of parts—arms and legs, trunks and bellies, ears and noses, a flat section of skull. The hair is still attached, but the rest of the body is nowhere to be seen. It might be a muskrat, crouched in the grass. The whole west wall is a catalogue of parts and faces.

In May of ‘63, Will drifted across the Rappahannock with a few other members of Company D. Lewy Greeley was there, and so was Jolly. It was just before dawn. They were going over to clear out some intractable sharpshooters who were making it impossible to lay down pontoons for a bridge. Lewy was twitching with excitement. Months of idleness in winter camp had made him a nervous creature. A few times, at night on picket duty, he had fired blindly at the enemy lines. That morning, he could barely contain himself. Inhospitable Rebs were firing at them already, though their visit was supposed to be a surprise. Lewy kept trying to stand up in the boat. A wag in a neighboring boat had stood up and shaken his ass at the Rebs, then crouched down again without taking a hit. “Let go, you big ape!” Lewy said to Will, tearing his sleeve free of Will’s fingers.

“Stay down, Lewy,” said Jolly. “It’s positively unhealthy up there.”

Lewy paid him no mind. He stood up in the boat and said, “Look at me! I am a
marine!
” A bullet took him in the head. He fell down and was still, and made no noise, but his blood rushed out from him, and pooled around their knees.

“Ah, Lewy,” said Jolly. “You were too much of a bother for this world.”

The Rebs offered up a few more volleys, but left the bank with hardly any fight at all. Will sat by a fire, ostensibly guarding the engineers as they worked, but really he was looking at Lewy’s body, wrapped up in a coat upon the riverbank. He wished he had a picture of him, because he had discovered he could better empathize with a picture of a dead boy than with the dead boy himself. Looking at the pictures he could wonder, What did the boy see as he died, where were his thoughts? If he had a picture of Lewy’s body he might have wondered if Lewy, in the half-second during which he took his bullet, thought of his Methodist regiment, and hoped to join them in Heaven though he could not join them on earth. If he could have chosen a word and spoken it as he died, what would it have been? Did a color fill his mind as he expired? With a picture, Will might have tried to imagine how it felt to be wounded like Lewy, he might have held a hand up to touch his own pulse beating in his temple. As it was, he was filled with a stony, gray feeling, and found he was already forgetting what Lewy looked like.

Lewy Greeley, carefully arranged. He looks noble in a way he never did in life. He lies with his arms folded over his chest, his little face serene and pretty in a patch of morning sunlight. He might be dreaming. Will put him on the north wall, with all the other boys from Company D.

“I’ve failed!” Frenchy said, sitting by his wagon a few days after Lewy’s death, after Company D and the rest of the Army of the Potomac had scurried back over the Rappahannock in the wake of the great disaster at Chancellorsville. Frenchy had been cross because the wounded, dying, and dead were left on the other side of the river where he could not photograph them. He had retreated to a hospital tent and taken up a post next to a boy who was clinging to life despite the amputation of both his legs, and repeated assaults by the bloody flux. In his delirium, the boy thought Frenchy was his mother. Previously, Frenchy had wandered away for food or drink, or fallen asleep, at the critical moment, but this boy wailed piteously if he left his side, so he was there for the death. “Miserable, hideous failure!” Frenchy said.

It was a very pleasant night, with the moon shining out full. He’d come stomping and cursing through the moonlight to where Will was sitting by the wagon, thinking back to the other side of the river. There’d been plenty of fighting, even at night when Will was free to join it. The beautiful moonlight had settled over everything, though it seemed to Will that it should recoil from boys whose heads decided to go every which way at once, from open bellies and naked bones.

Frenchy cast the plates on the ground at Will’s feet, breaking a plate in half. Will took the pieces up and held them to the moon: there was the boy from the hospital tent, his terrible wounds preserved forever. Will found himself wondering if it was not the opposite of mercy to have preserved them so. The boy in these pictures would always be in pain. His face was a blur—he seemed to have a multiplicity of mouths, all of them calling for his mother. But in the last picture, the broken one, he was still. “It was just as he went,” said Frenchy. “I know that it was, but there is no exhalation, there is nothing but air about him.”

Will left Frenchy to his misery, and walked off with the broken pieces of the last plate in his two hands. He wandered aimlessly through the camp and out of it, thinking that he held in his hands proof of the nonexistence of souls. He thought of Sam, how he had been friendly when they were small, aside from the occasional beating, and how he had been distant when they were older, how they had fallen out with each other over something unspoken and unknown, and how there was no hope of reconciliation between the living and the dead. He sat down on the ground and hung his head. There was a burning behind his eyes, and his belly contracted violently, as if it were trying to retch. He felt his mouth turning down, very slowly, at the corners. He remembered how ugly his mother always was in her weeping, and he tried hard not to cry. Nonetheless, he wept, and as only a boy of his size and strength could, great sobs, his chest heaving with the strength of three lesser chests. It made him afraid to think that everything he was could vanish into an abyss when he took, as he felt he must, his mortal wound. And it made him unbearably sad to think how everything that Sam was had simply ended.

Will had wandered into a graveyard full of Union dead. He’d buried some of them himself the previous winter. After he’d quieted down from his sobbing, he sat there a while, and thought he must have fallen asleep, because he was sure he was dreaming when gaily dressed women drifted into the graveyard. There were seven of them. Four carried lanterns, which they set down in a great square pattern. They put their heads together and whispered, and seemed to be waiting for something. Soon, a little man came tiptoeing into the graveyard. He bowed to them and took out a fiddle from a case, then started to play a jig. The ladies began a sprightly dance upon the graves of the Union dead.

They did not see Will in his dark uniform, did not see how, with their dancing, they turned his sadness to rage. The piece of plate, when it came flying out of the darkness, must have seemed like a judgment from whatever god guards the dignity of the dead. It struck a woman in the hip—in her petticoats or her flesh, Will could not be sure. She shrieked and the ladies dispersed, leaving their lanterns behind.

A boy with a hole where his chest ought to be. He is arranged on his side. His big serious eyes look directly at the camera. His left hand is stretched out, his hand is open as if in supplication, as if to say,
Give it back.
He is the fourth image from the right, in the second row from the bottom, on the south wall.

“My mama says I should remember that I am fighting to preserve the best government on earth,” Jolly said. It was dinnertime on the evening of the second day at Gettysburg. The Third Onondaga had taken up position too late, again, to have seen action. Other regiments made fun of them, saying their ugly faces scared away the elephant. Will thought it must be his mother’s doing, this safety. Her towering grief would not allow him to be hurt—it was of such a nature that even fate must be afraid of it. “But my father, he says we must help the slaves even if the Union goes all to smash.” Jolly held up two letters, one from his mother and one from his father, in either hand. “What do you think?” he asked Will.

“I don’t know,” Will replied. He took the letters from Jolly’s hand and put them behind his back, passing them from hand to hand a few times before he told Jolly to pick one. Jolly chose the left hand, and Will handed him back the letter. Jolly opened it and looked at it, rubbing his eyes wearily.

“Well?” said Will.

“Well, I am fighting for the slaves,” said Jolly. They sat alone for a while, before they started making their dinner, a coffee beef stew. Jolly had taken off his shirt and rolled up the sleeves of his long johns, because of the heat. They were the only two members of the Leper Mess left, the others having died or deserted or been absorbed into more respectable associations. They spent a little while crushing hardtack for their stew. “God save me from this cracker,” Jolly said, struggling to break it. Will crushed his easily into a fine powder, and made dumplings with water from his canteen. These he set gingerly into the stew, amid pieces of beef and vegetables. Jolly leaned over the pot to pour in a cup of coffee, and then they took turns sprinkling in crushed cracker to thicken the stew. “Oh, it will be delicious!” said Jolly, but when it came time to eat he said he was not hungry, and gave his portion to Will.

After their meal, they lay down in their dog tent, not sleeping though both were exhausted from their recent march—they’d gone twenty miles a day for three days. “I think sometimes it might not be real,” said Jolly. Will’s guts were making a racket, complaining about the stew. “When I was a boy my mother told me the whole world was just the dream of a sleeping bear, and that we had to be careful not to be too horrible in our behavior towards one another, because we might shock the bear into wakefulness, and he would go about his day, and we would be no more. That was blasphemy, I know. But couldn’t a war be God’s conscience fretting with itself? Maybe he has put himself down for a nap, but his digestion is poor, and it has troubled his dream. All our history might be no longer than such a nap, don’t you think? His troubled conscience has dreamed a war. I worry, anyhow, that we will wake him. Do you think we will wake him?”