The Tinsmith (7 page)

He heard the drummers begin to call the troops to the day. Their rippling rhythm straightened the gravediggers up and stirred the able-bodied soldiers, who rose like spirits among the dead and wounded. Despite the preparations, Gardner heard rumours from hopeful soldiers that Lee had indeed retreated in the night. He found Gibson and said, “Let's start here. We'll just go back, take a few studies of dead soldiers and that unfortunate property owner, then go up to the front with the burial parties. I'm sure we can ask them to stop their work long enough to get our exposures.”

Gibson grumbled something about wasting time, but Gardner ignored him. Maybe it was the whisky, or the rapidly improving quality of the light, but his confidence was riding high. Conditions could not have been better. No man in the country—certainly not that half-blind Brady back in New York waxing his moustache tips—was better qualified and ready for this chance. Except maybe Gibson and Timothy O'Sullivan, but they were both taking Gardner's orders here. He knew, as well as Robert Owen himself had ever known the devilish machinations of the leisured classes, that he had enough time for everything if he just put himself in harness and set to work.

Even so, Gardner started that ripe morning in haste. Gibson, now that he'd had his fortifying coffee, proved every bit as eager, and together the two men were like children after butterflies in a meadow, except these butterflies were already pinned and still. Gardner decided right away to use only his stereo camera. That way, the gallery would have the most options for selling prints—stereo views, cartes de visite, and the big Imperials Brady's nobs liked so much. And Gardner didn't intend to take more than a single exposure from each angle; there was just too much ground to cover.

As soon as he'd settled on his first study—a Reb officer flat on his back with the brains spattered over his blackened face and his belly swollen like an observation balloon—he set Gibson to sensitizing the plates. Gardner knew it would be at least seven minutes before his assistant threw back the big tarp and scrambled out of the wagon, so he had just enough time to pick up a nearby rifle and stick it in the officer's open hand. He couldn't get the officer's fingers closed around the stock—they were too stiff—but it was a useful touch nonetheless.

The sun crept over the nearby tree line now, gushing light over the field, so Gardner fixed the camera and aimed it at the body. Then, with a long breath to calm himself, he stepped under the cloth and focused.

And there the dead officer was, black-faced and swollen, his dirty grey uniform open at the breast, the rifle in his hand. Only, of course, he was upside down, and it seemed for a few seconds that the dead officer floated out of a torn cloud, a terrible vengeance in his cold rifle.

Gardner ducked out from the cloth just as Gibson stepped backwards from the wagon with the plate fixed in its wooden holder. He shut the door and hurried over, his face tense.

“Come on, man!” Gardner urged, knowing full well that even an extra second could dry the collodion and render the plate useless.

“Do you want me tripping, Alex? I canna go any faster.” His voice was a strained rasp already, and Gardner thanked the Lord for it. Say what he would about the man's cussed cantankerousness, James Gibson cared as much as Gardner did about getting the job done.

Gardner took the plate holder from him. Then he moved the focusing frame out of the way and put in the holder—it took him a little longer than usual to attach it to the camera, his hands trembled so. But he drew another deep breath and slid the front panel out of the holder, exposing the plate to the inside of the camera. Now came the moment of truth! He removed the two lens caps and he almost swore that he could hear the light flooding through—it was like a torrent of water every time, though he knew well enough that he heard only the blood pounding in his temples.

If the battlefield had been still earlier, it was frozen now as Gardner counted out the exposure. One, two, three . . . slow down, easy . . . four, five . . . go even, Alex, boy . . . eight, nine. Those fifteen seconds were the longest of his life. When the last number finally passed his lips, he replaced the lens caps and the holder's front cover. Then he looked up.

“Jimmy! Are you set?”

It was a foolish, unnecessary question, but Gardner put it with a smile. In fact, he couldn't wipe the joy off as he strode to the wagon.

“Don't be so daft, man,” Gibson said. “Just give me the plate.”

Gardner handed it over carefully. “We'll have to sink them all in glycerin till tonight. There's no ee time to heat them now.”

“Aye.” Gibson plunged back into the wagon, yanking the tarp behind him. Gardner could hear his assistant cussing a blue streak as he tied the tarp strings to his ankles, but he wasn't worried. Gardner knew that safelight couldn't be any safer even if he himself was the man working in it. Besides, he had to move the camera.

So an hour passed, unchanged but for the increased activity in the field. Several burial parties—a few consisting of negroes—dragged Gardner's potential studies away and placed them in shallow graves; individual soldiers out searching for comrades sometimes found them, picked them up, and moved away soberly to find whatever better resting places might be available. The photographer rushed from one body to another, all the while thinking that everything was happening too fast, that he couldn't delay going to the front lines any longer—there were bound to be even better studies there—but how long before the routine procedures of the army destroyed them? In his excitement, he took little interest in the activity around him.

Sometime before noon, however, Gardner witnessed a strange scene. A dozen yards to his left, a man in a fine suit and bowler, his hands in white gloves, was being threatened at knifepoint by a monkey-faced little fellow naked from the waist up. The two stood over the dead Rebel officer whose study had begun Gardner's day. Cautiously, he moved closer.

Monkey-face's lips pulled back to reveal mostly gums. A lock of oily hair hung over one yellow eye. He held the knife in his fist. “You git yore dad blamed paws offa this one. It's mine. Touch it again and you'll be dead on the ground too.”

The gentleman yawned as he reached into his breast pocket and removed a small pistol. His neat moustache quivered slightly. He held the gun straight in front of him, his arm fully extended.

“I strongly suggest, my good man, that you find another officer.” He sniffed, and scowled. “There are certain to be plenty for all. But this one's now the property of the Horace Greaver Embalming and Fine Casket Company.”

Monkey-face brought the knifepoint so close to his face that it seemed he planned to put his own eye out. He squinted. “Greaver, you say? That the feller with the humpback? In the tent yonder?”

The gentleman grinned, exposing his sharp incisors. “Humpback? I believe you're referring to one of the metal canisters.”

“Hunh?”

The gentleman sighed. “It's not a hump. It's one of the tanks for draining blood. Or for pumping the . . . ah . . . continual life into these distinguished fallen.”

Monkey-face shrugged. “Wal, whatever it is, that feller said he'd pay good for officers brung into his tent. And I aim to git that money.”

The gentleman, still grinning and holding the pistol out, said, “It seems we are working for the same fine establishment. And as I am not on commission . . .” He pocketed the pistol. “You may remove this hero from the field. But I warn you, there are competitors less patient than I. You would be wise to find a more . . . ah . . . persuasive weapon.” He made a graceful sweeping gesture with one arm. “I'm certain a man of your obvious discernment can find something amid the armoury here gathered.”

Monkey-face spat. Then, putting the knife between his teeth, he bent and took up the dead officer by the armpits.

The incident's open, naked demonstration of money lust appalled Gardner, but not for long. When he reflected on his own considerable worldly ambitions on this battleground, he couldn't exactly condemn others who also sought to improve their fortunes. After all, the fighting was over and the dead could hardly complain. With undiluted resolve, Gardner returned to the tripod, ducked under the cloth, and focused. Two dead Rebels, one's head leaning on the other's chest; he could perhaps come up with a title about dead brothers.

Dead Rebels? Gardner suddenly remembered. When he stepped out from the cloth and saw that Gibson had not left the wagon with a fresh plate, he looked to the south where he had hidden his “treasure.” Human crows wandered everywhere, picking at corpses for one reason or another. Some negro gravediggers chanted low, in an unmelodic rhythm; above the sound, Gardner could hear each spade thrust in the earth. Where exactly was that line of dead Rebels?

Then the photographer saw a soldier bent over the bodies. Though Gardner stood fifty yards away, the soldier seemed closer; he was wrapped in the bright sunshine, carved by it into prominence, like the image on a print. And he was dragging a body out of the line!

Gardner took two quick steps forward as a shout formed and then died on his lips. Behind him, he heard the tarp draw back. A fresh plate! Now, of all times. Gardner looked at the camera, at the two Rebels posed fraternally on the gutted earth. Suddenly the awful reek of death washed over him, as powerful as the collodion on the plate. He swallowed deeply and almost staggered against Gibson as he rushed up.

“What is it, Alex? You canna be woozy like I am, man. It's a regular ether bath in that wagon. I almost passed out on this one.”

“He's taking the corpse!” Gardner pointed, his mouth open.

Gibson put a hand over his eyes, as if he couldn't look at the world anymore except through some kind of lens. He shrugged.

“What of it? You'll never get Brady to print that one anyway. He probably won't even print the dead Federals.”

“Brady? He's no ee the only one who can make and sell prints. You might be willing to work for him all your born days, but I dinna come to this country to be taken for a fool. What's the point of following the army if you're just going to let Brady make all the money off your talents? Wake up, Jim. We've got enough here to make a start on our own. Whatever Brady won't print and sell, all the better for us!”

Gibson handed Gardner the plate. “All right, captain,” he said, referring to the honorary stripes Gardner's friendship with McClellan had earned him. “But you'd better hurry with this one before it dries.”

At that moment Gardner knew James Gibson was with him and his fortune was made. It had taken only the saying of it.

Gardner dove back under the cloth. The world flipped upside down again. When he later returned to the light and started counting out the exposure, he could see, across the bereaved and scavenging, across the dead and wounded, the tall, long-limbed soldier carrying a body on his back toward the woods. By the time Gardner had whispered fifteen, the soldier had vanished into the trees.

•  •  •

The stench worsened as the sun climbed. The droning of flies made a steady, sombre chorus over the fields, but it was loudest inside the enclosed space of the wagon, which sat in the heat-crinkled air like a block of black ice that melted without getting smaller. Gibson complained mightily.

“I canna keep the sweat from dripping off my forehead onto the plate. And when I can manage that, the damned flies get crawling all over it. You're just lucky, Alex, I can bring you anything worth using.”

He liked to exaggerate, did Jim Gibson, but Gardner knew too well the delicate and frustrating problems he faced. So Gardner offered to sensitize a plate while he let his assistant take a study of some colonel's dead horse. Gardner soon regretted his generosity. Being inside that wagon was like being on the surface of the sun itself. He'd never known such breath-smothering heat. Sweat gushed out of every pore of his body, and he'd have almost preferred the stench of the festering flesh outside than the giddying fumes of the collodion. If the fumes weren't bad enough in themselves, they attracted so many flies it was nigh to impossible keeping them off the plates. Gardner's respect for Gibson grew immensely as he struggled to keep his dripping head away from the plate while savagely shooing flies away with his hands. Had they reversed roles for the day, Gardner doubted they'd have managed even half of the studies that they eventually made. Of course, he wasn't about to let Gibson know that. Fortunately, when he pushed past the tarp with the plate and walked dizzily to the camera, Gardner found his assistant in even worse shape. He had one hand over his nose and the other on a flask of whisky pressed to his lips. When he'd done drinking, he gave Gardner a ghastly, white look and said, “If it's all the same to you, Alex, I'd prefer the wagon. I dinna know how ye can stand it. It's like swallowing great gobs of pus out here.”

By the time the two photographers reached the slaughter along the pike road near the whitewashed little church with the thatched roof, they had their system worked out. Soon enough they didn't even talk anymore. The light poured over the bloated corpses and smashed limbers, and the white church shone like a gull's wing against the black woods. A bonny day for photography. But Gardner knew he'd be a cold and heartless man if he hadn't paused amid all that carnage and considered the truth of what lay before him: brave men had died horribly, boys from modest backgrounds mostly, farm boys and fishermen and workers on both sides, dying for their beliefs while Brady's fine friends nibbled on squab and made grand noises about sending the Rebels back to Richmond. Gardner almost hated himself then for his excitement—nay, his joy—under the cloth. And yet, he thought about what his images might mean to a public far removed from the war's reality, and that spurred him on. Mostly he didn't even have to embellish; the dead were affecting enough, even if, as the day wore on, only Rebels and horses remained on the field. The burial parties worked quickly. Often Gardner had to ask them to take a break while he made his exposures, for any movement would blur the image. They obliged, no doubt out of curiosity at the photographer's presence, but not for long. Gardner couldn't blame them. It wasn't a ground well suited for lingering.