The March (23 page)

But he also felt that he must not leave Columbia before he made as many negatives of the ruined city as his supplies allowed. It was not only that pictures were the photographer’s means of livelihood. Once he moved on, history would know of the city’s disaster only what he had photographed. Time goes on, Mr. Culp often reminded him. Time goes on, things change from moment to moment, and a photo is all that remains of the moment past. Even now, with the air still a smoky haze two days after the fire, folks were out poking through the rubble so as to salvage what they could, load what they found into their handcarts or up on their backs, and move off in respect of their intentions. It was like the storm was over and now they were coming out into the open to size up the damage and see what could be done about it.

There were no horses left in Columbia, no mules, the army had taken everything these people owned, and Calvin was aware from the way folks looked up as he passed that it was the fact of a white man sitting beside him that kept them from appropriating Bert. Without Bert to pull the wagon, there would be no picture-taking. But a black man taking pictures would not have been tolerated in the first place. The pretense that he, Calvin, was only assisting the white man was necessary if there wasn’t to be trouble where folks were already in no mood. So, endangered as he felt himself to be, he needed this madman as much as the madman seemed to need him, though for what mad reason it was impossible to say.

All told, though, it was a delicate matter making photographs according to his own lights with the madman unable to do anything about it except if he truly lost his patience. Who knew what would happen then? But Calvin decided he was not afraid. As with a deep breath, he drew strength from the situation. In the guise of his servitude he, Calvin Harper, was running things. And the madman pretending to be Mr. Culp, why he wasn’t even as good as an assistant.

FOOD WAS HARD
to find, but about two in the afternoon stores of rice and molasses and cured meat were coming in from the country where the army hadn’t foraged, and while Calvin waited on the street Arly was able to get in line with Josiah Culp’s Federal dollars in his pocket, at a market that had set up in a parade ground all gouged out and trodden upon and blackened with the remains of campfires. But this was one of the less devastated parts of town. The bare trees here were a natural, unburned brown. Except for a few old men it was mostly women in line, peering urgently ahead to satisfy themselves that there would still be something to buy when it was their turn. Arly, in gentlemanly fashion, endured with a smile the pushing and shoving of the ladies, while in his heart he was thinking that as a race they lacked the nobility that came so naturally to their men who were away fighting on their behalf.

It was chilly out here this afternoon though the sun shone. He was getting awfully hungry for something besides the dried-out sweet potatoes, which was all that was left in the back of the wagon. Was he in uniform he could have marched right up front there and taken what he wanted without bothering to pay for it. He was eager to load up on provisions and be on his way. The urgency was that he had the plan firmly in his mind, and with God as its deviser it would not do to linger. There is glory ahead for us, he thought, and he touched the pocket where he carried Will’s photo.

In the meantime, he considered the possibilities of bedding this or that lady, though with mostly sorrowful judgments that they were an unappetizing lot, dreary and haggard, their faces swollen up from their tears, some of them with snot-nosed little creatures at their sides whining and pulling on their skirts. But still he smiled, turning this way and that as the line moved slowly forward, to see who was behind him as well as in front—maybe to spot one with a little flesh on her like it was nothing to be ashamed of, or a profusion of auburn tresses like that Ruby back in Savannah.

It was during these ruminations that he spied Emily Thompson. Hey, Will, he muttered. Look there. Is that your Nurse Thompson? Or am I seeing things?

If it was her, she wasn’t a nurse in blue no more but a lady in black with no coat and her hair parted in the middle and pulled tight down over her ears. She was coming along toward him and towing a child’s play wagon by its rope, leaning into the task because in the wagon, as far as he could see, was a good amount of provender: a sack or two of meal, poultry still in its feathers, foodstuffs put up in jars. When he saw two small boy helpers pushing the wagon along with their outstretched arms, he decided after all it couldn’t be Nurse Thompson. But, not to take any chances, he pressed the derby firmly on his head to hide his red ringlets by which she might remember him, and pulled his coat collar up around his stubble.

She passed right by him without even a glance, the sun on her face showing how worn she looked with fine crow’s-feet from the corners of her eyes and tear streaks dried black on her cheeks and her lips pressing her mouth into a thin line.

Arly had two thoughts at this point. The first was that it definitely wasn’t Nurse Thompson. The second was that he never thought she was that pretty anyways.

He looked at the long line ahead of him, and back again at Emily Thompson as she left the square and crossed the street, and he made a calculation. Moments later he was up beside Calvin on the wagon.

I don’t see any vittles, Calvin said.

You will, mister. Just git this dumb-ass mule and go where I tell you.

Arly had been inspired to satisfy two appetites in one fell swoop. Aloud he said, Being as bodily hungers are no concern to you anymore, you won’t care if I test her out like you should have done when you had the chance.

Say what?

I’m not talking to you, Calvin. There she is, around that corner.

She had turned in to the spacious yard of a manse that had seen some fire. The front was scorched, the roof shingles half torn away, and tree vines out front hanging black and limp like dead snakes.

Calvin brought the wagon to a stop by the front gate. Emily was at the foot of the porch steps, and Arly was about to leap down and make his approach, thinking it didn’t matter if she recognized him or not, since this wasn’t the army no more and there was nothing she could do about it, when a black woman of some girth opened the door and was followed out by at least a half-dozen children. Then the door swung open again and even more children came out, till there must have been twenty or thirty of them crowding around and gazing at what Emily Thompson had brought from the market.

That there’s a hell of a lot of children, Arly said. Damn. What am I supposed to do with such a hell of a lot of children?

He watched as some of them came down the steps, each one taking something—a chicken, a goose, a jar, a sorghum crock—and marching it into the house. The sacks of rice were carried off by the black woman.

These were awful solemn, strange children. They didn’t make any noise.

Emily stood with one hand to her forehead and the other at her waist. This seemed to Arly a most attractive gesture, suggesting resignation or despair or submission to what fate had brought her, or was presently to bring her, if he could think of how to go about it. But while he was thus bemused it was Calvin who had got down from the box and dragged the big camera and tripod from the wagon. What was the damned nigger doing?

Arly watched as Calvin went up to the woman, spoke to her for a minute, and then backed away and set up the camera maybe twenty feet from where she stood. Arly thought it was time to take command. He strode into the yard with the assured gait of a master photographer, the flaps of his Josiah Culp coat floating up behind him.

What in goddamn hell are you up to, Calvin? he whispered. At the same time, he smiled at Emily Thompson and tipped his hat, though not enough to give her a good look at him.

I’m doing what I do, which is to see things, Calvin said. I see this woman and these orphan chiddren.

Is that what she said this is, a damn orphanage?

What else could it be, if you have the sense to look with your own two eyes?

You being sassy, Calvin? I won’t even bother burying you like I was kind enough to bury your Mr. Culp.

You can go ahead and do what you want, Calvin said. But I judge twenty seconds in this light. And he slammed the plate carrier into the camera.

While Calvin busied himself now, arranging the subjects the way he wanted them, Arly, to maintain his dignity, put his head under the black hood and pretended to be adjusting the lens. But from there in the darkness he could study Emily Thompson in privacy. She was a figure on glass. She was looking straight at him, her arms around the children at her sides. Behind her on the porch steps rose more ranks of orphans, standing stiffly according to Calvin’s instructions. You must stand perfectly still, Calvin said in a loud voice. Like soldiers at attention. And up at the back was the black woman, with one of the meal sacks on her shoulders. That, too, was Calvin’s idea.

But the sight of Emily was what held Arly’s attention. An unaccountable feeling rose in him that, had he been able to understand it, he would have recognized as compassion. He was disturbed to see, miniaturized on the glass, a woman looking into his eyes so as to negate all his operative calculations of self-interest. She was distraught, and for a moment, before he knew to wipe the image from his mind, she evoked in him a reflection of himself stupidly leering at her from under the black hood.

All right, Mr. Culp, Calvin called. They are ready for exposure!

And Arly felt that she was staring back at him as if she knew exactly who he was. Take your photograph, Emily seemed to be saying. Take us as we are. We are looking at you. Take it!

HAD HE SAID
anything but what he said, had I been given the chance to change my mind, had he told me how much I was needed, had he tried to convince me that there was some attestable humanity in all of this, I would have stayed. I would have continued with him. Two
A.M.?
Not an hour at which calm and rational decisions are likely to be made, he said. His watch in his hand and this—Emily in the doorway and dressed in the black mourning she had worn the night she rode from her home, at her feet her portmanteau—this, like everything else subject to diagnosis. I was overtired, possibly hysterical, and acting rashly. What was to be done? A sedative? Brandy? A caress? The pained, wondering look in those widened exquisitely ice-blue eyes. Had he neglected me? I wanted to touch my hair, arrange my dress. I felt ugly and grown old. On his tunic were the darker stains of Union blood. He’d been making notes. You must not reduce life to its sentiments, Emily. I have just seen a man with a spike protruding from his skull. Imagine! Propelled by a bursting fire of some sort, an explosion, with such force as to drive into the brain. And yet the patient smiles, he converses, he has all his faculties. Except the one. He remembers nothing, not even his name. You must tell me what that means. It means he is fortunate, I said. A smile. No, he is quite unfortunate. It means we know something we didn’t know before. The doctor still teaching. What was the use? Dear Lord, what was the use? Independent of my state of mind, my own brain’s faculty of observation judged the new beard a success: it was a strong black manly beard, very handsome. Yet when he approached me and put his hands on my arms I was repelled. Please, I said as I removed myself from his grasp. Of course, I knew I was going from something to nothing. I knew what comes of principled feeling. It is a cold, dark life, the life of principled feeling. It is my brother Foster’s life in the grave. But I wanted to go home, if it was still there, and to walk the rooms and remember what the Thompsons had been, and reread the books and hold again the things I held dear, and live alone and wait there for that army of which this army on the march is just the fanfare. I had not yet seen the orphan asylum. I had not seen the children alone but for the black woman. I wanted to go home and sit and wait. I would say goodbye to dear Pearl. I would admit to Mattie Jameson for the last time that I was indeed Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville. I do not reduce life to its sentiments, Dr. Sartorius. I enlarge life to its sentiments. I cannot stand this march any longer. I cannot forgive what has been done here in the name of warfare. I don’t know how you can abide it, how you can condone it. I do not condone it, he said. Yet you are part of it, you belong to it, and so you are complicit. You are the aspect of them by which they persuade themselves they are civilized. His face flushed with anger. I knew I was saying something terribly unfair. I wanted to destroy my feelings for him. I wanted to destroy any affection or regard he might have for me so that he would not stop me from going. Yet I wanted him to stop me.

Dear God, please help me, even now, if he were to come back and seek me out, I would run to him. I would.

I

W
HEN HUGH PRYCE, WHO HAD COME OVER FOR THE
London
Times,
applied for a correspondent’s credentials with the Army of the West, he found himself interviewed by no less a figure than General William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman hated journalists—they had the nasty habit of describing what the army was doing so that anyone, including a secesh general, could read about it in the newspaper. But most of all he hated English journalists. Your damn cotton markets have financed the South, he said to Pryce. If I hadn’t taken Atlanta when I did, Parliament would have come into this thing. Never mind your letter of employment, for all I know you’re a damned spy. You’ll file no dispatches while this army is on the march.