The March (34 page)

What was interesting was how the man wore disguises. He put on something and pretended to be that person. He was like an actor in the theater where the costume you wear is the person you are. He had appeared back in Barnwell as a Union soldier though he was a Southern white-trash Reb. Both of them were, the dead friend, too, who had to be dressed as the Reb he really was before Mr. Culp could take the picture. And then after the picture was developed, and Mr. Josiah Culp was dead, he decided to be him, Mr. Culp, in his own suit and coat and hat. Calvin had gone along with all of this with a degree of fascination despite himself. At times, in public, he’d seen this pretend Mr. Culp who knew nothing about photography as more the photographer than the real Mr. Culp. And that was because the man really seemed to believe he was Mr. Culp. All of that was clearly interesting and also clearly mad. For only a madman would have conversations with a picture in his pocket, as that was what had become of his dead friend in his mind, not a body in a grave but a picture in his pocket. And he talked to it almost as much as he talked to Calvin. And so nothing was what it seemed, and all of it was crazy. And that gave Calvin some confidence in his ability to control things. There was some errant spirit in the man that made him maybe not so single-minded a menace as he first appeared.

Now, as they came along on the road to Goldsboro, they stopped for the night at an abandoned farmhouse. Though the sun had set, they could still hear the sounds of battle in the dusk: cannonading carried by the east wind over the fields and rivers.

You see, Calvin, why I said this road? We’d be up to our necks in hellfire, we gone after the other column. That is some damn battle they’re having, like they have finally run into an army equal to theirselves.

Some moldy fodder for Bert in the barn, Calvin said. But nothing for us in this pantry. Whoever these people, they been gone awhile. Place is picked clean.

I know my Gen’ral Sherman, Arly said. That is his feint to Raleigh we’re hearing. I ’spect it’s more’n he bargained for. But anyways he’s not there. He’s up ahead enjoying hisself thinking of Goldsboro where he means to alight like the eagle on the flagpole.

We’re down to the last bag of cornmeal and ’bout a spoonful of lard if I can get this stove to fire up, Calvin said. How you know where he is?

Gen’ral Sherman and me have the same quality of mind, Arly said. I need only think of myself as him and I know what he will do.

And you of such a low rank, Calvin said. Don’t seem fair, somehow.

Arly took another swig from Mr. Culp’s last jar of sour-mash whiskey. Calvin, he said, were I not pleased with our progress I might take offense at your freeman’s talk, but you’d best not try me.

What are you going to do with your photograph of the General? What then?

Why, it will be a recognition on my part of him, and on his part of me. It will be a meeting of the minds. It will not be just an ordinary photo like you have been gathering. This will mark an occasion to make history. This will be a photograph the likes of which the other Mr. Josiah Culp couldn’t have dreamed of. I am an inspired soul, which means it will be not just me taking that photo but God as he instructs me.

You and God know the lens to use? The exposure time? How to coat the plates and where to set the camera?

We leave you to attend to those small matters, son. That is the kind of menial work your race is fitted to.

THIS NIGHT ARLY
decided to make his bed on the floor in the empty upstairs. The laths showed where pieces of the wall had crumpled away, and he had to find a spot to lay the blankets down where the floorboards weren’t broken. There was a rot smell of old wood, and it was colder than downstairs by the stove where Calvin was, but it behoved a man to keep to the natural order of things.

He lay down with his arm around Calvin’s box of lenses. This was an extra measure of caution, because Calvin knew that without Arly riding with him as his Mr. Culp he would not live five minutes as an independent nigger businessman in God’s own country. Guerrillas still rode and took care of what had to be taken care of. Calvin could hitch up Bert and run away, but without being able to take another photo how could he fancy himself Mr. Culp’s chosen boy? It may be the slavery of the future, tying down a free black by his white airs. And I have devised it.

Arly was not aware, in the midst of his thoughts, of having fallen asleep. But when he found himself awake some time had clearly passed. It was not just that the light was different, the moon casting a milky sheen everywhere in the room including on him. No, but the sound. A peculiar whispering chuffing sound, and a clinking, but mostly the sound of human presence you can sense even though no sound was made. He went to the window and looked out on a sight he could hardly believe: it was a whole army on the road passing by at a quick pace, a ghost army it looked like, though real enough in its blocks of companies and the guidons and the occasional officer cantering by. Every mother’s son of them leaning forward under their packs and looking at the road. And no one was talking for the effort of making a night march, and if there was a gap the following companies came along at a trot. What is this, Arly thought, these Yankees are going the wrong way! He pulled on his boots and ran downstairs. From a back window he saw they were coming across the fields too, streaming around the house front and back like a river overflowed of its banks. He lamented what he saw—Yankees tromping over these lowlands in the arrogance of their numbers. But then it dawned on him: of course, this is General Sherman returning to the fray back there where our boys have put the scare of God into his other column—damn! Yes, that’s what this is about. Well, Gen’ral, ’pears you have made a mistake to have to go backwards like this, who was already practically wining and dining yourself in Goldsboro. Will, Will, I am truly sorry you can’t see this, we got an army still raising hell yonder in Bentonville, we are putting the great Sherman to the test, and there’s to be many a dead Union boy before it’s over.

Then Arly thought he saw the General himself in a cavalry contingent riding past in the field—maybe fifty men on horses, and someone at their head flinging the reins to his left and right who he thought was Sherman, all right, like a mad rider under the moon making for the battle. Arly had seen only that photo of General Sherman, he had never seen him in the flesh, but he was convinced, as the horsemen disappeared over a rise, that it had been Sherman without a doubt. Don’t you worry none, Will, he said, smiling there in the dark, it’s all right, it’s all right. You and me will just go on to Goldsboro while he cleans up his mess back here, and we’ll be waiting for him to take his portrait picture, assuming a course no one has kilt him in the meantime.

CALVIN, WRAPPED IN
a blanket behind the stove, had heard the entire conversation. Arly went back upstairs, and soon enough he was snoring away. And then after another twenty or thirty minutes the last of the marchers had passed and everything was quiet again, but Calvin could not go back to sleep.

If I was a Rebel soldier given to disguises what would my purpose be? It would be to get out from behind Union lines, to get back to my own to fight again or to get out of the war altogether and go home. But that’s not his thinking. He couldn’t have planned to costume himself as Mr. Culp. As we came along he did it as the opportunity arose—it was an idea that had popped into his crazy head. So what was the idea? From all of his constant chatter day after day, it is nothing but to catch up to General Sherman on his march and take a photograph of him. Why? To make his mark in the photography business? That don’t seem likely given how little he cares for the art of it. He started out knowing nothing and he knows no more now than he did then.

In this war every man is on one side or another. Even a crazy man. If I am crazy, I am still for the Union. If he is crazy, he is still a white-trash Johnny Reb.

Calvin felt a chill remembering that back in Georgia, at the camp in the pine trees, where General Sherman had his headquarters, Mr. Culp did not need but a minute to persuade the General to pose for his picture who even called his entire staff to pose with him. Mr. Culp had said to Calvin, As a photographer you get to know human nature, and one thing about human nature is that it is the most famous people who think they are not getting enough of the world’s attention. So they want their picture taken and put on display, or their portrait painted or books written about them, and no matter how much of this is done it is never enough for some of these people, except maybe for President Abraham Lincoln, who is an exception in this as in just about everything. Because Mr. Culp had taken his picture, too, before leaving Washington, and it had been an effort to get the President to sit down for it, and he wouldn’t have, had Mrs. Lincoln not insisted.

By now Calvin was pacing back and forth with the blanket wrapped around him. His train of thought left him terribly unsettled. He had been too forbearing. This madman had sent Mr. Culp to his grave. He had taken that pistol and pointed it at them and stolen Mr. Culp’s clothes and his name. And now he is become a madman in a contest in his mind with the General of the Union armies, William T. Sherman, whose picture is to be taken.

But his opportunity, if it comes, will be mine, too. I will tell them of that carte de visite in his pocket that proves him as a Reb before he can do whatever it is he intends, or what he intends by way of carrying out God’s intentions. Whatever it is, it must not be allowed. Even if it is just what he says it is. Even if he wants to take a picture of General Sherman because it is just his simple craziness, he must not be allowed to take it. I am the photographer, not him. Making photographs is sacred work. It is fixing time in its moments and making memory for the future, as Mr. Culp has told me. Nobody in history before now has ever been able to do that. There is no higher calling than to make pictures that show you the true world.

Mr. Culp had put him in his will, and now when he got back to Baltimore the studio would say on the window: Culp and Harper, Photographers. It angered Calvin that his camera now could be used for the purposes of someone who didn’t know any better, someone like this crazy smart-talking white-trash Reb. Calvin said to himself, If Mr. Josiah Culp and me had come through Barnwell a day earlier, or a day later, we would not have met up with this madman. And Mr. Culp would be alive and we would still be going about our work just as always. Oh Lord, and now this is where I am and there is no way out of it.

Calvin heard the beginnings of a whimper rising in him, but he cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. I’ve got my side, too, he thought.

VII

T
WO DAYS AFTER IT BEGAN, THE BLOODY BATTLE AT
Bentonville was over. Having doubled back on the Goldsboro road to bolster Slocum’s column, both corps of Howard’s right wing were methodically deployed and the Confederate general, Joseph Johnston, was persuaded the initiative was no longer his. Finding his forces outnumbered and fighting furiously just to maintain position, he prepared to withdraw. In this he might have been encouraged by the aggressive flanking maneuver of General Joe Mower, who without orders led a division of his troops through a swampy woods and threatened to cut off Johnston’s means of retreat, a bridge over the Mill Creek. Sherman learned of the attack in his field headquarters some distance from the front lines and, fearing that Mower was overextended, ordered the daring General to return to Union lines. This weakness Joe Mower has for swamps, Sherman said. Show him a swamp and he wades right in. He’s a great fighter, as you’d expect of someone descended from crocodiles.

It was raining heavily the night the Rebel forces pulled back and made their way north. Sherman’s army was given no orders to pursue and so it encamped where it was, the soldiers wrapping themselves in their blankets and canvas half-tents and lying down in the mud.

Under the incessant pounding of the rain, the Medical Department continued its work. Led by the moans and cries for help, volunteer details roamed through the woods picking up the wounded, loading them into ambulances and wagons, and distributing them among farmhouses and plantations commandeered for surgeries on the road back to Averasboro. Wrede’s surgery was set up in a small Catholic church. A rubber sheet was laid over the altar table. The wounded lay in the aisles or sat slumped in the pews. Candles and smoking torches threw the scene into flaring or waning light. Some of the men had been lying out there unattended for two days. Their wounds were already purulent. The nurses tried to deal with the stench with masks made of bandages. When men no longer able to withstand the pain of their wounds begged to be shot, and Wrede concurred that the case was hopeless, they were taken out in the darkness and accommodated. The attending priest, an elderly man, had appeared, and he knelt in the last pew near the door and prayed. Later, whenever he saw a man in the throes of death he rushed over to give last rites, not bothering to ask for an affiliation any more than Wrede asked whether the patient was Union or Confederate. The old priest wrung his hands and wept, and by midnight an exhausted Pearl, too, could not stop crying. She finally sank to the ground and sat beside a soldier and held his hand as he breathed his last. She kept holding his hand after he was dead, until Stephen Walsh gently lifted her to her feet and took her to the rectory house, where the boy David and Albion Simms had been put to bed, and the priest’s housekeeper showed her to a room and put a blanket over her when she fell asleep.

DAVID HAD BECOME
fascinated with Albion Simms and in the morning, once the wagon trains were under way, he sat beside the framework box and listened to the song:

Oh the coo coo

Is a pretty bird

And she wobbles as she flies

But she never sings her coo coo
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.
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