The Tinsmith (5 page)

“What in tarnation was . . .”

“Shh! Listen!” Anson said.

The pounding of hooves surrounded them. Anson whirled. Voices shouted the air into fragments. Then a dark mass exploded a few feet to the left, a terrible long screeching neigh ripping down the sky.

“Don't shoot, you damned fool!” someone ordered.

Anson stared toward the clusters of grimy tents, each one full to overflowing with wounded. In fact, much of the overflow still lay on straw inside the barnyard fence rails, very much in the horse's path. They'd better shoot it, Anson thought, scrambling toward the tents, or it's going to trample somebody.

A torch blazed up, rolled like a burning eyeball through the dark. Someone shouted for it to be doused. A few swinging lanterns emitted a dull yellow light. In its muted glow, the powerful charger reared up, kicking its front legs. The shadowy forms of men flung back and forth.

Then Anson saw it. Briefly but vividly. A rider lay along the horse's neck, his bare head a shifting stain against the white hide. Then the horse and body plunged into the surrounding dark once more.

Seconds later, a shot rang out, crisp, resonant, like a single toll of a church bell. The living dark grew placid. Slowly, out of the silence, crawled the familiar groans of the wounded, for whom a runaway horse meant nothing, not even a chance to put them out of their misery. Anson heard low voices not far off, and walked painfully toward them on swollen feet.

A group of soldiers stood loosely around the regimental surgeon. Even in the dim lantern light, Josiah Rawley's gaunt face glowed savagely. In his hand he held a pistol—his arm rested across his chest with the pistol set on his opposite shoulder. It was a curious, statuelike posture, but Anson could see how exhausted his superior was.

“I gave an order not to shoot,” said a young major, stepping up to the surgeon.

“My apologies.” Rawley lowered his arm from his shoulder. “I didn't hear the order.”

Startled, the major simply nodded. Then the whole group turned its attention to the dead horse.

“Sir.” The major addressed Rawley in a grave tone. “I think you'll want to take a look at this.”

Anson followed a few more paces into the darkness, then knelt beside the surgeon over a body on the dew-damp ground.

The light came on, grey and thin. The lantern shone less vividly by the minute.

The dead man was not in uniform. He lay flat on his back, one arm tight against his side, the other flung out, as if to point at the terrifying approach of death. His cloth shirt hung in shreds over his chest and his breeches were down around his thighs, the long leather belt almost completely detached from the waist. In both his clenched hands sprouted clutches of horsehair. Anson recognized the wild, laughing grin that covered the man's scratched and bloodied face. It was as terrible a death mask as he'd ever seen, but the body contained a grimmer secret: the man's genitals had been hacked off—only a bloody stump of gristle remained.

“Like somethin' a Indian would do,” a soldier said calmly. “Only we ain't in Indian territory.”

After a brief examination, Rawley determined that the man had died of severe blood loss. Then he suggested that the major take the matter up with someone higher in the chain of command.

“This man's a civilian,” Rawley said grimly. “He had a contract for gathering up dead horses.”

They all looked at the fallen charger, which had collapsed into almost a perfect kneeling posture, its eyes shut as if in a gentle sleep. But blood drenched both flanks and spotted its neck, destroying all thoughts of gentleness.

No one spoke for a moment. Their breath hung faintly between them. Then a man with a long, thick beard parted in the middle stepped into the light. He did not wear a uniform. Instead, his thick chest appeared between the open sides of a long woollen coat that reached almost to his boot tops. When he spoke, his voice resonated with a heavy Scots brogue, which nevertheless contained a curious jocular quality. Overall, he gave the impression of the sun breaking through a dark bank of cloud.

“It'll be a fine day. If ye don't mind, major, I'd like to do a study of the horse before ye take it away. I canna think who has the contract now, but if the animal could only be kept like this . . .”

The man lowered himself to his haunches and squinted through a gap between the thumb and forefinger of one hand.

“What are you on about, man?” Rawley bristled.

“Aye, if ye can give me a few hours, I'll just bring the wagon up.” He stood and backed slowly away from the horse, his hand still over his eyes.

“You have no authority to be here,” Rawley said. “'This is a hospital and civilians are suffered here only when I . . .”

The Scotsman turned. Calmly, he said, “My authority comes from General McClellan.” He held out a small card, one of the fashionable cartes de visite.

Rawley squinted at it in the oyster-coloured pre-dawn light.

“Photographer? For the army?”

“That's right.”

Rawley seemed on the verge of either spitting or yelling. “And what blasted use to the Republic is a photograph of a murdered slave owner's dead horse? I suppose you'll be wanting the corpse left here too.”

The Scotsman smiled. He had a broad, strong face. The skin around his eyes crinkled as he stroked the forked ends of his beard.

“Nay, that won't be necessary. There's no ee much of the sublime in that. If he were a soldier? Nay, not even then. I dinna ken the public is ready for something quite so terrible.”

“Baird, we have work to do.” Rawley turned and stomped off.

After a last wondering look at the dead man, Anson followed.

At his back, he heard the young major give orders for the body and horse to be left.

Once again, Anson resumed his operating. Somehow the murder renewed his strength, made his commitment to life even stronger, his sense of duty to the Union even more important. Certainly the daylight improved the accuracy of his incisions.

Even so, the tall soldier's reappearance early in the morning reassured him.

“Ah, John,” Anson said cheerfully. “Come to lend a hand again? Good man.”

The soldier's face hovered in the air, the cheeks, brow, and jaw blackened with dirt, no doubt from burial detail.

But the detail must have rattled him, for his composure was gone. His large hands trembled, he glanced up regularly in alarm, and he did not speak at all. From time to time, he lightly touched the wound on his cheek and paused, as if remembering something. His lips were flecked at the corners with dried spittle and he kept holding his bare forearms out before him and turning them slowly over, as if searching for a wound that hadn't broken the skin. But he helped as best he could when called to it, and Anson was generally too preoccupied to worry over the tall soldier's altered behaviour.

•  •  •

The morning of the 19th proved very fine, clear and warm. Most of the able-bodied troops had assembled in readiness for an advance or attack, but that still left a small army of wounded in the tents and farm buildings and on the ground near the operating tables. Along with everyone else, Anson learned of the enemy's departure from the field. The marching and wheel-grinding audible through the night and past daybreak were exactly what they sounded like—a retreat. But Anson did not know whether that meant victory for the Union—he could hardly think so, given the carnage. Nonetheless, the retreat encouraged him. The last thing he needed was a fresh supply of wounded.

A pungent, putrid smell of rot consumed the day. The thousands of dead soldiers still lying in the field bloated and turned black. Their bowels emptied. And since most of the men also suffered with Anson's malady, the air became diarrheic, thick and foul enough to seem almost solid. The civilian onlookers soon retreated—at least most of the fine ladies and gentlemen picnickers did—those who had crowded the hillsides to watch the battle two days before.

But when Anson, unable to sleep and unable to remain amid the suffering, again headed for the large tree on the horizon, he noticed that other civilians had embarked on work of their own. He stopped a short man in a bowler hat rifling the pockets of a dead Union soldier.

“You! What are you doing there?”

The man straightened up, his white-gloved hands empty. He grinned wolfishly, then dabbed a lace handkerchief to his nose.

“The smell is very loud today, sir. Very loud, indeed.”

Anson looked at the dead soldier. His young face was almost coal-black. A mass of flies crawled over his smashed torso. The boots had been removed from his feet.

“What were you doing to this man?” Anson tried to put anger into his voice, but the effort left him spent. He barely maintained his balance.

“Oh, I was touching him only in his service, I assure you. He might be one of the sensible ones with a coupon, you see.”

“A coupon?”

The man lightly brushed a fly away from his pink mouth and pointed to an ordinary-looking wagon a short distance behind him. His reedy voice carried an odd mixture of enthusiasm and pride. “For the embalming. If he had possessed the foresight, for the sake of his loved ones back home, to have purchased one of Mr. Greaver's coupons, then his corpse would have been preserved and shipped home in a lovely zinc-lined coffin.” He kicked at the body, raising a handful of flies. “But alas, he did not avail himself of the opportunity when it was presented to him. Others, no doubt, were wiser, more considerate of their families.”

Anson followed the man's gaze over the rolling, ravaged fields. Clusters of negro contrabands were busily recovering corpses for burial. A few dozen feet away, a long line of dead Union soldiers appeared like a festering snake on the torn ground. Two civilians stood over them. Some kind of black apparatus—like a survey tripod, only bulkier at the top—was set up nearby, a few feet from a delivery wagon draped in a tarp. Anson recognized the burly, bearded Scotsman from earlier. What had he said he was? A photographer?

Remembering daybreak's runaway horse, Anson turned and walked back in the direction of the barnyard. It took him several minutes to find the spot. When he did, he discovered that the mutilated corpse was gone, though the charger remained in its gentle kneeling posture, its flanks and head swarming with flies, their buzzing as loud as bee-hum. Anson wondered if the Scotsman had taken the study he'd wanted. Sadly, he knelt and stared into the horse's face. Somehow its closed eyes seemed dimly alive with terror still. No doubt some investigation of the murder would follow, now that the Rebels had retreated. Anson breathed deeply and the effort set off another violent bout of coughing. He raised his hands to his mouth. His own blood mixed again with the dried blood and pus of the hundreds of wounded he'd tended over the past two days.

When he recovered, Anson sensed that he was not alone. He stood and, looking through watered eyes, saw the blurred image of a soldier. In a few seconds, the image solidified.

“John?”

The soldier said nothing, merely stared hard at the air. Though blood had spattered his face and his torn uniform resembled a splotch of stains, something more than fatigue and sadness haunted his eyes, something Anson knew he did not feel himself. It wasn't fear, but an unequivocal plea for assistance.

“Is there something wro . . .”

Before Anson could finish the question, two officers rode up swiftly. The older man, a sergeant with a spare, dark face and a neat goatee, dismounted carefully, as if exiting a rowboat. Bloody muslin bandages swathed his right shoulder. He grimaced as he studied the ground around the charger. Then he said something inaudible to the younger man, an unwhiskered, red-cheeked lieutenant who immediately swung down from his horse with fluid ease.

“I did leave orders, sir. Obviously they weren't followed.”

The sergeant turned.

“What do you men know about this?”

Anson wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “Sir?” His voice came out in a croak.

“There's supposed to be a body here. Of a civilian. He'd been killed in a . . .” The sergeant paused, as if aware of the absurdity of his forthcoming phrase, under the circumstances. “In a gruesome fashion.” His eyes roamed the field briefly. He cleared his throat and spat.

“It was here,” Anson said. “This morning.”

“Hell, I know that. But why isn't it here now?”

“Perhaps a burial party picked it up,” the lieutenant said.

The sergeant grunted. “Christ. As if I don't have better things to do than to care who killed a goddamned farmer who was fool enough to stay around here during a fight. Have his niggers been rounded up, at least?”

The lieutenant nodded.

“Probably some reb killed him for his boots. They sure as hell didn't leave any on our boys.” The sergeant squinted hard at the tall soldier. “Are you wounded, son?”

“He's on medical detail,” Anson said quickly. “I'm a surgeon.”

The sergeant frowned.

“After the battle,” Anson continued. “During it, he brought many wounded into my aid station from the front lines.”

“Is that so?” The sergeant appraised the tall soldier coldly from head to foot. “That's the best fit they could find for you, is it?”

The tall soldier's chest strained at the fabric of his uniform; several long tears in the sleeves and the thighs of the trousers exposed his skin.

“He used most of his uniform for bandages,” Anson said. “This was the best replacement we could find.”

The sun burned fiercely. Shadows lay bunched at the officers' boots; they seemed to stand in pools of blood. The creak of a wheel sounded nearby. Anson watched the photographer's wagon bump over the battlefield like a wounded crow. Sunlight glinted off a few buttons and bayonets of the dead. A group of ragged contrabands bearing shovels over their shoulders trudged between the bodies. Anson could easily picture the weary endurance etched in the sweat-slickened faces of the runaway slaves, their skin as black as the earth that crumbled off the shovel blades.