May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel (28 page)

We better get over there, Finny says.

But there’s the camera and all the glass plates already in their sleeves to consider. They’ll be worth five dollars apiece if they’re even a little clear, ten for the really good ones. And since the half dozen other cameras posted around the square all seem lost in the middle of the throng, not on the edge of it looking in the way Ethan is, he might just be able to corner the market.

Fin—how’re we gonna get these pictures out of here? Ethan asks.

I’ll carry’m, Perfessor, he says.

It’ll be nothin’ at all for the three of us, Smitty adds.

Not that … it’s just that they’ll only be worth a dollar apiece if we don’t develop ’em first. And then we still gotta take …

And his voice trails off as he realizes the foolishness of missing out on this opportunity for such a trivial matter. All right, gimme a hand here, he says, and they get quickly to it.

It’s not the first time Finny has served as Ethan’s
assistant
of sorts at an assignment. Mr. Hadley still ran the shop and took most of the portraits, but Ethan brought in twice as much money by taking pictures that newspapers and periodicals could convert to dot image engravings on their front pages as a means of selling more copies. And this would be as big a story as there had been in months, and as big a payday too—but first things first.

Which one are we goin’ to, the one on Sixteenth or the one up on Twenty-Fifth? Ethan asks, looking at Smitty.

Harry’s probably up at the one on Twenty-Fifth already, Smitty says. He told me that if he didn’t show up here for the rally it’s ’cause he’d gone straight to the recruitin’ station.

And now Ethan and Finny stop their work and look at Smitty for the verdict. Through no fault of his own, Smitty—Walter Smythe—is mostly Scottish, with a little bit of Welsh mixed in there somewhere. He’d been their friend since he settled in Red Hook with his widowed mother a few years after Ethan arrived. And though there had been some moving about, different jobs, and even Smitty’s marriage to pull the old friends apart, baseball and Saturday evening visits to Feeny’s had overcome all obstacles so far. But this one was potentially the most difficult of all, and one that they hadn’t resolved the night before, when they all decided to enlist.

Harry had been the one to say that they should all go up to the recruiting office on Twenty-Fifth Street, where he’d heard about an all-Irish regiment, and Smitty hadn’t resisted, joking about how
I spend all my free time with a buncha Micks already, what’s a few more
. But he and Ethan and Finny even were concerned that they wouldn’t let Smitty in and that they’d end up in entirely different regiments.
Christ, it’ll be
the first time anyone got thrown outta someplace fer NOT bein’ Irish
, Harry’d answered. And they’d left it at that.

You know Smitty, if you go first, and they give you a hard time, me an’ Finny an’ Harry can just go with you to the office on Sixteenth, Ethan says. And that finally settles the matter.

Sure enough, Harry’s there waiting for them when they arrive, their arms full of glass plates and the box camera and tripod. Harry’s talked to one of the corporals standing guard at the door and knows everything there is to be done, how they’ll stand in the same line so they get put in the same squad, how there won’t be any problem for Smitty being Scottish
but maybe it’s best he doesn’t mention it right off either
, how the war’ll almost certainly be done before their ninety-day enlistments are even up. And it’s an easy enough thing to have the doctor look at them with shirt off, listen to a breath or two, check the eyes and look at their tongues, then nod to the recruiting sergeant who tells them where to sign, and that’s that. They are to report for duty in three days and that’s when they’ll get their uniforms, they’re told. But that doesn’t stop Ethan from setting up the camera across the street and taking a couple of pictures of the lads of the new Sixty-Ninth New York,
sure to be the meanest, toughest regiment in either army in this here war!
they say. And it’s on to Richmond one and all, with maybe a night at Feeny’s to celebrate their leaving and to talk about how they’ll teach them Rebs a lesson they’ll not soon forget.

If we can get these pictures developed and sold off, Ethan says, we can start th’evenin’ with a steak dinner. I’m buyin’.

And Ethan and his
three
assistants, civilians for just a few more days, are soon off for the ferry. Then
On to Richmond!

They had gone off on their frivolous adventure three months before to the sounds of marching bands and cheering crowds. Their departures were made as conspicuous as possible, with entire regiments sometimes marching right up Broadway in the middle of the day, just to be seen by adoring crowds. Now they came stumbling back, some by train, some by ship, but all with different looks upon their faces.

For Marcella, Catherine, and Mrs. Carlisle, it was a most depressing sight. After the debacle at Manassas Junction—what the northern press was calling the Battle of Bull Run—it had become clear that this was not going to be as simple a procedure as originally anticipated, and now New Yorkers were getting the chance to see what the face of war looked like up close. They tried to welcome the boys home as cheerfully as they had sent them off, but there was something missing in their cheers.

“So many of them are wounded,” Catherine said with grave concern. “Look at all the bandaged heads and splints and crutches.”

She covered her open mouth with her hand and tried to hold back her tears. Marcella put her arm around her friend and tried to comfort her, knowing that Catherine had been the most optimistic of all of them that a successful campaign would somehow encourage President Lincoln to free all the slaves. It seemed a preposterous notion now.

“These boys are at least free from their enlistments,” Mrs. Carlisle added. “Their suffering is over.”

And time for the next batch of recruits to take their turn
, Marcella thought.

The three of them watched quietly as the exhausted men marched slowly past. Someone along the sidewalk recognized the regimental flag from a newspaper account and shouted out for all to hear: “That’s the Sixty-Ninth! Those are the boys that took on that
Stonewall
Jackson!”

A cheer went out from the crowd and a few of the men acknowledged them. According to press accounts of the battle, two legends had emerged. The “fighting” Sixty-Ninth New York had shown the most courage on the field amongst the Union Boys in Blue, and the General who had led the Rebs that stopped them had picked up a nickname that papers both north and south could not resist. The men of the Sixty-Ninth—almost all of them Irish, the paper had said—seemed bolstered by the crowd’s enthusiastic welcome. Their steps livened somewhat, and they marched in unison now. One of the men within the lines, a sergeant it looked like, broke form a little and shouted, “We’ll be back at ’em. Right, boys?”

And the men around him shouted in approval.

“We’ll be signing back up tomorrow if they’ll let us,” the sergeant said. “Those Rebs’ve not seen the last of the Sixty-Ninth!”

It was the sort of braggadocio Marcella generally despised, but there was something reassuring to it now. And as she and Catherine and Mrs. Carlisle watched the last of the regiment march past, she knew that she had to find a way to do her share as well. She broached the subject at dinner that evening, and Mrs. Carlisle’s and Catherine’s reactions were yet another confirmation that she’d made the right decision in leaving her father’s house.

“What a wonderful idea,” Mrs. Carlisle said after Marcella simply mentioned wanting to get involved in The Cause more. “What do you think we should do?”

“We could organize the ladies to write letters to President Lincoln urging him to emancipate the slaves,” Catherine said.

Dear, sweet, passive Catherine
, Marcella thought.

“Oh yes, you should bring that up next Friday,” Mrs. Carlisle confirmed. “And I have a friend in Washington who just might be able to deliver them to the President personally!”

Marcella only smiled as the two of them planned out what they could say in the letters and how the Ladies Abolition Society might carry on this new phase of The Cause. And she could see how, in one manner at least, she had surpassed both of them. Despite the treasure that was their friendship, they were society women through and through, and too accepting of their limitations.

“I mean to become a nurse,” Marcella blurted out. “I mean to volunteer to take care of the wounded.”

Mrs. Carlisle’s eyes went wide, and Catherine seemed frozen by the very thought of the idea. But neither of them contested what Marcella had said so much as sought to understand how she would carry it out. And she hadn’t fully thought through the details in the time between that afternoon and this very moment.

“Does this mean you will be leaving us?” Catherine asked after Marcella had talked about going to the local recruiting station tomorrow to inquire about the matter of nurses. There was a look of such genuine concern for losing her that Marcella thought about the expression on Pilar’s face when she left the house in November. And the thought now of leaving behind the two friends who had replaced her family seemed almost too much to bear, even for a woman of her strength.

“There will certainly be hospitals
here
,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “Look at all the wounded men who were in the carriages at the end of each regiment. Surely they’ll need care.”

And Marcella smiled at the thought of it.

“I will inquire about them tomorrow,” she replied.

“Oh … the thought of all that blood!” Catherine added with a shiver.

Ah, dear sweet, Catherine
.

In reading Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of the universe, Ethan’d always believed what was understood to be at the center of them, namely that time and space were constant: a minute was always a minute, a mile always a mile. But the more time he spent in the army, the more opportunity he had to question Sir Isaac’s premises entirely.

A typical day might begin with the bugle call before dawn and some time to chow before morning drills. They’d punch their bayonets through countless effigies of dirty Reb bastards, then learn to turn about-face and quarter-left, then quarter-right and half-left and half-right and about-face again, until they’d dug half-foot holes with their feet right where they stood. They’d simulate marching in columns of four and stepping into columns of two for battle, then have another go at the Reb effigies, in case they hadn’t taught the bastards enough of a lesson on the first go-round. In the afternoons they’d pack up their gear and tents and march in step, left-right, left-right, with a drill sergeant marching alongside calling out the same, in case anyone forgot which foot they were on. Five or seven or ten miles they’d cover, marching from point A to point who cares, where they’d stop and set up their tents, only to take them down again and pack up and march back to point A, left-right, left-right, all the while with the sergeant there to remind them lest anyone forget. Of course there was to be no talking along the way, what with the concentration necessary to not march left-right, left-left. And time and space seemed to alter in ways Newton’d never imagined possible, a minute becoming an hour, a mile becoming ten.

Having all re-enlisted together after that disastrous first ninety-day hitch, with the Fightin’ Sixty-Ninth now part of the newly formed Irish Brigade, Ethan and Harry and Finny and Smitty at least had each other to help pass the time. But after a month or two in Washington, time having faded from such puny units of measurement by then, Ethan wrote to Mr. Hadley back at the photography studio in Brooklyn, telling him that he’d be better off taking pictures than bothering with all the drilling and the marching. He’d meant it as a joke of course, but Mr.
Hadley promptly sent a box camera and all the necessities with a letter explaining that he was sure he could make more than that investment back with whatever pictures Ethan could take of
The Front
. Harry and Finny and Smitty laughed as much as Ethan did to hear the training fields of Washington described as
The Front
, but he purchased as many glass-plate negatives and developing chemicals as he could find and started taking pictures around the camp during the evenings and on Sundays. Harry and Finny and Smitty found their way into most of the early pictures, but they eventually figured out that they could charge as much as a dollar apiece for soldiers to have their portraits taken, and thus came the business side of the venture.