The Tinsmith (8 page)

Gardner did not think of his stolen corpse again until later in the afternoon, when, recrossing the battleground of their first studies, which still resembled a massive broken tabletop left uncleared after some giant's hideous orgy of feasting, he and Gibson stopped once more at the fenced barnyard surrounded by greasy tents for some fortification. Little had changed. The surgeons still cut into bodies, the wounded lay about in solid piles of moaning agony, the graveyard with the plank headboards had grown just outside the fence beyond the cooks' tent. A few women, looking strange in their feminine apparel, placed cold cloths on foreheads, dispensed water and food, and generally comforted as best they could. Their courage and sense of duty so moved Gardner that the raspy voice at his ear startled like gunshot.

“Have you just come from out there?”

Gardner turned and recognized the bearded surgeon he had observed on his earlier visit. If the man had looked ravaged then, he seemed little more than nerve endings now. The torn sackcloth of his face, the eyes swimming in blood, the forearms so gore-caked that he might have just dipped them in a vat of guts: Gardner could hardly believe the surgeon possessed the strength to speak. He pointed weakly toward the battleground. Gardner nodded, half afraid the wake of air from his small gesture would knock the surgeon down.

“The tall soldier. The one who was helping me. You didn't see him?”

The urgency in the man's voice alarmed Gardner. He could hardly tell what answer the surgeon hoped for, but Gardner gave him the truth.

“I did. At least I believe so. I was some distance away.”

The surgeon grimaced and clutched his stomach. “Excuse me, sir. One moment.” He opened a small bottle, shook a pill into his hand, and quickly swallowed it. “What did you see exactly?”

The question took Gardner aback, but he saw no reason not to answer. “I saw him carrying a body into the wood.”

The surgeon grabbed Gardner's elbow. His grip reached to the bone. “That man has done noble service. He has saved many from a lingering, painful death. If you are asked about him, I urge you . . .”

A cry of pain from behind spun him around. When he turned back and looked in Gardner's eyes again, he spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“Don't mention to any officer that you saw him carrying a body. By my oath, I ask this out of humanity . . . and . . . justice. If you believe, sir, in what the Union stands for, I urge you . . .”

“I don't understand. Why would an officer ask me about him? Many soldiers are carrying bodies today.”

And then, with a jolt, Gardner recalled what body it was, and the manner of the death, and he was almost ashamed to admit that he saw his chance and took it. But the camera was not a toy, no more than a bible was a plaything to a preacher. And this surgeon, his weary, pained face, would make a wonderful study. Gardner struck a bargain.

“Agreed. But I have a single condition. If at some point I wish to make a study of you, you will pose for me?”

Already the photographer felt he had trapped a kind of ghost in his camera—something in this man seemed to flow out of him. He conceded listlessly to Gardner's bargain and they shook on it. The photographer wondered how he could ever forget that firm handshake of blood and pus. The surgeon did not appear to notice Gardner's lingering gaze, however. Only when he turned away did Gardner see that the surgeon held a severed lower leg in his other hand—it seemed to lead him like a child back into a nightmare.

Gardner was to get his study two days later, at a different field hospital, a mile to the south of the previous one. Apparently the bearded surgeon had moved as well, and stood awkwardly amid a group of half-collapsed canvas tents barely covering several dozen wounded. Smoke rose from a nearby cook fire. Gardner heard a rough snoring. A light breeze blew the usual death stench over the ground and tents. By then, the photographer had heard tell of an investigation about that mutilated corpse. Apparently, the dead man had been of much use to McClellan and Pinkerton in their gathering of information about the enemy. It was, according to rumours Gardner had heard, a delicate matter, given that Maryland had not yet committed to either side in the conflict. But no one asked the photographer anything. And the truth was, by September 21, Gardner was so puffed up with the success of his venture, and so inured to the misery and carnage all around him, that he gave little thought to that one farmer's corpse.

And yet, when he bid the surgeon be still as he ducked under the cloth, Gardner was certain that, just over his study's shoulder, peering out through a thin pillar of smoke, stood the very soldier whose actions had motivated the bargain he had struck with the surgeon. But when Gardner stepped out from the cloth, no soldier remained. And he half-doubted, despite all his subtle craft, that the exposed plate would capture anything but a flattened cornfield running away beneath a blank and pitiless sky.

III

September 19, the battlefield at Antietam

In the middle of a charred, broken field a hundred yards north of a barn serving as a Union field hospital, Horace Greaver swatted impatiently at a buzzing cluster of flies. If only the blasted lazy fools from the Quartermaster corps, he thought, would stop bringing in useless corpses, this day looked promising and profitable indeed. Dozens of corpses had been brought from the battlefield to the side of his large, black tent, and the fetid air told him many more would be arriving. Ah, but these lazy fools . . . 

“If they don't have a coupon,” Greaver said, “I don't want them. This one's no good to me. Take it back where you found it.” He pulled the brim of his worn bowler down over his bespectacled, watery, bloodshot eyes and turned away from the slack-jawed teamster's assistant.

“Back? But I just drug it from clear over there, by the crick.”

“Did you even look for a coupon first, as I instructed you?” Greaver drew an invisible tiny square in the air before the man's eyes, then angrily snatched it away. “Don't waste my time. If you can't be bothered to look for coupons, then at least bring me officers. Preferably Union. But Rebels too, if the rank's high enough. The higher, the better.”

Greaver pulled a watch and chain from his vest and squinted at it. The truce for exchanging wounded had been on for nearly an hour. Soon he would set about exchanging the dead Rebel officers he'd managed to recover for any Union officers that his Confederate counterpart had collected. While it wasn't impossible to collect a fee from a grieving Southern family for the safe return of their hero's preserved body, it was altogether easier to restrict such dealings to the North.

He returned to the naked corpse set up on a few bare planks propped on two large wooden barrels. With the last of the blood already drained through the jugular vein, Greaver set about raising the carotid artery. He drew an imaginary line from the chest to a point midway between the jaw and mastoid process, all the while contemplating the exchange fee he might reasonably demand from the Rebel embalming surgeons. He could receive up to $80 per corpse for an officer in the North, so perhaps he should demand half that amount for any Rebel officers, should their embalmers run out of Union corpses for trade, of course. That would likely happen, since it was hard to imagine any Rebel being as organized and efficient as he was. Why, he had at least ten men out searching the battlefield, with Tomkins, that cool devil, acting as a manager. Just let the Rebels compete with that!

Greaver wiped a drop of sweat off his broad, fleshy nose, removed his glasses, and puffed on the lenses before placing the glasses gently back on. Then he turned the dead captain's head to one side and, from the opposite side, made an incision about an inch and a half long just above the clavicle bone, near the juncture with the sternum. After cutting through the muscle, he found the small gap between the sternal head and clavicular head of the mastoid muscle, separated the fascia, and pushed the muscles to one side till the vessels appeared. He worked quickly and coarsely. Time was against him. The black seconds whirred inside the steady fly hum. But delicacy, in any case, was not required. Roughly he dissected the sheath of the exposed artery, inserted the needle underneath, and raised it to the surface. Then he slid a thin sliver of wood under the artery to hold it in place while he used two pieces of thread to tie a loose surgeon's knot.

Damned glasses! Greaver removed them again and mopped his brow. The day was warm. He thought about stopping for a glass of water, but the dead were stacked like cord wood by the tent and, just as he paused, another of his hired workers approached through the haze bearing yet another corpse. Horace muttered into his sparse whiskers but could not repress a feeling of exultation. There was much money to be made in this work, as he'd predicted. And even more money than if he'd won a commission from the army to provide all their embalming services. It gladdened him that now he'd failed in that attempt, since to work independently would prove far more profitable.

He neatly looped his glasses over his ears and bent to take up his bulb syringe. The artery hadn't emptied of blood yet, due to the suddenness of death, but Greaver didn't have time to waste on cosmetics—if the skin looked too flushed, so be it. Preservation was more important. He grinned as he inserted the drain tube into the internal jugular vein and started the draining. His solution, which he had perfected just before the battle, worked wonderfully. Indeed, it was a joy to insert the injection needle into the carotid and work the bulb syringe, shooting the perfect strength of bichloride of mercury through the vessels. A few pints at most for a private, a few quarts for an officer, and the body would remain as natural-looking as if asleep; and it would remain that way for no less than two weeks. Beyond that, Greaver guaranteed nothing—so much depended on the weather.

He hummed a little as he worked, forgetting all about the temporary employee approaching over the battlefield. Only, at a subtle sideways glance, Greaver saw that it wasn't one of his hired men; it was a Union soldier he'd never seen before, a very tall one. Greaver shrugged inwardly and returned to the corpse. Finding its blood flush in the cheeks satisfactorily low, he rubbed his hands on a cloth, pretending a greater busyness than was required. He did not yet address the man standing a few feet away, who had just lowered a body to the ground. Instead, Greaver took the captain's few personal effects—some letters, a college ring, a small photo of a child—and placed them in an open, zinc-lined coffin. Taking a pencil stub out of his vest pocket, he carefully wrote the deceased's name on the lid, along with the address of his parents—somewhere in Pennsylvania, this one—not too far to travel, as the crow flies. Greaver intended to lift the captain and place him in his coffin, just to gain a further advantage by making the newcomer wait. But the man's stillness disarmed him; the soldier just stood above the body, gazing at Greaver with unblinking, bulging eyes. Usually, if you made a prospective seller wait long enough, you established more authority when it came to prices, but Greaver had a good instinct for people—living and dead—and this seller wanted something more than money. Even so, Greaver had a very intimate relationship with time, and no man had the power to hurry him.

He stepped over to the corpses on the ground and picked out the next one for the table. Wearily thinking of how much he'd have to sweat to lift the corpse onto the table, he decided to approach the tall soldier instead. Before speaking to him, Greaver noticed the stripes on the uniform of the corpse the tall soldier stood over. In fact, Greaver noticed the stripes even before he noticed the grey fabric surrounding them.

“A Reb colonel,” he said, unable to keep the impressed tone out of his voice. To mask it, Greaver lowered himself stiffly to his haunches and considered the old, white-whiskered face. It would be a pity to trade such a noble corpse back to the Rebels. Perhaps it would be worth the risk to do the embalming himself and find some way to recover his fee from the family—no doubt they'd appreciate Greaver's skills more than most, given the regal bearing of their patriarch.

The embalmer stood, straining with the effort. Suddenly the sky darkened as clouds scudded across the sun; the air tasted of rain. Greaver lowered his eyes and the same unblinking gaze burned into him. The soldier was well over six feet and wore a uniform tight across his broad chest and shoulders. The uniform was torn in many places, like the shirt of a scarecrow that hadn't scared off many crows. The powder burns were so thick on the soldier's face that they almost seemed the beginning of a beard, and one of his cheeks was roughly scraped. And he was young, perhaps twenty or so. Only he didn't seem young at all. He gave the impression that he'd been walking battlefields to sell corpses ever since the beginning of time. Greaver shuddered as the soldier nodded toward the corpse at his feet and said, “I'll trade.”

Trade? Greaver scowled. What on earth did the man mean by trade? Perhaps he had lost his wits in the fight. Best just to humour him.

“Put him on the table,” Greaver said.

The soldier picked the body up as if it was a sack of dust and placed it on the planks. Then he stood by as Greaver made a closer inspection. The colonel's hand, when held to the light, was most intriguing—the inner flesh of the fingers had not turned opaque yet. The embalmer reached into his vest and removed a small mirror; he positioned it over the colonel's mouth. No breath blurred the glass. Greaver pressed his ear to the colonel's chest. Nothing. He must have taken his time dying, since the battle had ended almost two days ago now.

“Freshly dead.” Greaver narrowed his eyes at the soldier. As the man seemed too dense to understand the implication, Greaver added, “
Very
freshly.”

The soldier's blank expression did not change. His arms hung loosely at his sides. Greaver noted the large hands—they twitched every few seconds. They were obviously hands that could do great damage. But, after all, what did it really matter how the colonel had died? If this soldier had finished him off, he'd probably just done the Rebel a favour.