The Tinsmith (11 page)

The little man lifted his pencil off the notebook. “This soldier who brought you the body? Describe him.”

Greaver wracked his brain. The soldier had been extremely tall, his uniform ripped. What else? His eyes bulged. He was threatening, unbalanced. But already the embalmer's image of the man had faded, as if the rain had washed it away. He sighed heavily.

“He was tall, well built. His uniform was ripped. I didn't trust him, gentlemen.”

“You didn't?” the older officer said. “Why not?”

Oh, dear, Greaver thought, this is not going at all well. These men will not like to hear how my business is conducted. “Yes, you see, I offer payment for the bodies brought to me. But he did not want money.” The embalmer scrambled to defend his practice. “It is, ah, a small expense for the privilege of preserving our soldiers and sending them home to their families.”

The younger officer wrinkled his nose. A touch of red came into his fair cheeks. “There appears to be no end to your noble deeds on behalf of the Republic.”

Greaver was not bothered; he had grown used to people's distaste for his profession. But he had expected the army to appreciate the comfort he provided; it was no small thing for a soldier to head into battle knowing that, if the worst befell him, he would not lie in a mass grave away from home. Greaver stood a little taller. In the near distance, he saw the photographer tinkering with his tripod again. Yes, a portrait taken in the field, if not too expensive, might prove very useful for business.

With dignity, he said, “If that is all, gentlemen, I have much work waiting for me.”

The younger officer suddenly pulled his sabre out from the sheath at his side and placed the tip only inches from Greaver's nose.

“You filthy scavenger! You goddamned greedy sonofabitch!”

“Lieutenant,” the older officer said calmly but did not move.

The otterlike man chuckled. He stepped forward as the younger officer lowered his weapon.

“He didn't want money, you said. What did he want?”

Greaver, swallowing rapidly and trembling, could not hear any birdsong. A sort of low moan drifted over the fields. He slowly opened his eyes, which he'd closed desperately on the snake-head of the sabre's tip.

The bearded man stood there, grinning broadly, his stance wide and steady beside the little man. “A very tall soldier, did you say? In a ripped uniform?”

The little man nodded. “Do you know something about this, Alex? You've been out here since the battle.”

“Aye, Alan, but my head's been mostly under cloth, you see, and the world's a tad topsy-turvy then.”

He spoke rapidly, gave a forced laugh. Eyes wide open, Greaver gazed at him. Why, he did know something. But what was there to know? It was all very confusing, and Greaver hated to be on shifting ground. He waited. The photographer pulled at the rough ends of his flowing beard. Finally, he shrugged.

“I've seen a lot of soldiers, tall and short, living and dead. I canna remember one that's special for any reason that might interest you in your work, Alan.”

The older officer grunted. “I believe we've wasted enough time here, Pinkerton.”

“Perhaps.” The little man's eyes narrowed. He looked slowly around him, his gaze settling on Greaver's coffins. Then, as loudly as he had yet spoken, he said, “Did you remove the papers from the body?”

Greaver blinked. His lips parted. All the shadows on the ground rushed toward his feet.

After ten seconds, the photographer burst into laughter.

“Nice try, Alan. I believe it would have worked too, if the man wasna telling the truth.”

The little man did not smile. “And I believe you're wanting fresh plates, Alex? I believe you're wanting the use of the telegraph?”

The photographer sighed. “Yes, but you canna blame me for my good nature now, can you?”

“Time and place. I'm sure you've heard the expression?”

Then he and the two officers turned and strode away, the little man moving his feet almost as rapidly as he moved his eyes.

“Well, now, doctor,” the photographer said once the others had gone and the sound of horse hooves broke the silence. “A curious business?”

Sweat blurred Greaver's lenses once more, but he did not remove his glasses. Everything confused him so much more than life and death. Cold skin, sunken eyes, no smudges on a hand mirror, no sound in chest or wrist. Incision, raised veins and arteries, drain, inject. Into coffin. Name, address. Collect fee. Why should a man attempt to see clearly except in the execution of his talents? Greaver studied the blurred image before him. A curious business? Did he mean embalming, or the missing body? And taking photographs of dead soldiers—that seemed the opposite of providing comfort to the bereaved. Why should this man, this photographer, be free of suspicion? Ah, only because he did not do the necessary, unpleasant work of actually preserving the dead in their material form.

Uncannily, the photographer picked up the train of Greaver's thoughts.

“You canna expect others to understand, doctor. When you work with the dead, in such a place as this, you might be accepted, but not loved.” He leaned back, made a square over one eye with two fingers of each hand. “The army survives on intrigue. They might even be in the business of making it happen. Never mind. I was wondering, doctor, if you'd mind posing for a photographic study?”

Greaver brightened, Already, the pounding of the horse hooves had faded. He unlooped his glasses and puffed on the lenses. Wouldn't Tomkins be impressed! A carte de visite, in the field, preserving a corpse! It was a surprising and marvellous world, full of opportunity, once the shadows sped away from your feet and you could listen to the lovely flow of liquid through a syringe, hour after hour. After wiping his lenses clean, Greaver looped them over his ears, and the world dazzled, all of it zinc-lined, at his service.

He licked his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, gracefully cleared his throat. “Perhaps, sir, we could come to some sort of a bargain.”

The photographer held his grin still for several seconds. Then he laughed so loud that Greaver was certain the dead still out in the fields all sat up to enjoy a final earthly joke.

VI

September 21, near Sharpsburg, Maryland

Three days after his fight with Orlett, when the worst of the shock had worn off, when he was able to blot out the images of the blood-coloured fringe of hair around the overseer's leering face and drown the desperate lie flung from that foul mouth, John returned to himself. He lay in a square, sagging tent crowded with groaning, gasping men on their way to death, judging by the stench of it that pressed against his eyes and lips, a stench as bad as what he remembered hogs giving off as they squealed before the knife.

At first, he could not tell where he was or who the dying men were, but by lying still and listening, he soon understood his situation. The accents and uniforms told him he lay among wounded soldiers of the South, and he assumed that he was still near home, where the great battle had been fought and where the overseer, Orlett, had died. But the why of his situation remained a mystery. He was neither a Rebel soldier nor even wounded. He lay motionless in the ceaseless fly drone and watched the grimy canvas over him brighten and darken with the hours.

That gradual change—and the play of shadow as the kind-faced, sad-eyed man moved among the groaning forms, dispensing whisky and pills and soft words—took him further back, to the beginning of his memories. Outside Daney and Caleb's shack, that huge pile of sawdust, soft, with some wood chips in it, layered in it like the feathers in a goose. A pile he had to tilt his head back to see the top of. In the rain, watching that pile turn from yellow to almost blood red. Then, holding some sawdust in his hand taken from inside the pile. Its paleness like his own. He'd stare at the dust in his hand, trying to capture exactly when the colour changed. But the blood red just happened, as if he'd closed his eyes. The sawdust would be heavier, just a little, like rape seed. He'd stick his hand back into the pile, plunge it deep to where the dust was still yellow and dry and light. If it rained hard enough and long enough, the whole pile changed and he'd sit beside it, drenched, breathing in the sweet, wood-scented air, blinking up to catch the flight of a trilling oriole—its song behind his eyes—but he couldn't hold it like the dust. He couldn't feel it that same way. Only the dust . . . the colours changing . . . the weight . . . his hand plunging deeper, till it came out like Caleb and Daney's, darker than any blood, even the hog's blood in the barn, but spreading over him like that hog's blood, like the light over the fields . . . 

Now a shadow passed, hovered. A broad hand, slightly damp, lowered to his forehead, a kind voice asked if he'd like some water. He closed his eyes, and it was Daney instead, her smell—of sweat and earth, the moist wool of the shift she'd made for herself, and the tang of okra.

•  •  •

She sat on a plain bench in the dirt-floored, rough-lumbered shack with mud stuck in the chinks of the walls, shelling peas into a tin pan and laughing at Lute, the yellow hound at her feet, sighing and whining in his sleep, sometimes waking enough to snap at the flies circling in the syrup-thick air. Daney's laugh was deep and rich—the way a river would laugh if it could, Caleb always said. Daney laughed more than the other slaves, but it wasn't always an easy laugh. John hadn't known when he first understood the difference, when he had learned that a laugh could be a weapon too. Daney always said she could bear anything so long as her children were not taken from her. And she never used her laugh as a weapon inside the family. Not once. She was a stout, strong, yellow-skinned woman with a wide gap between her front teeth. Her hands were quick, small skillets of melted butter. Her bosom was large and soft from many years of nursing, and she had a way of turning and looking over her shoulder just exactly when you didn't want her to see what you were doing. Caleb adored her. He said, “You g'wan, you talk to Daney, she knows,” more than he said anything else. But Caleb didn't say much. He was starless black and tall, and the bones showed sharp in his long face. He liked nothing better than to take the young children on his knee and sing them songs about grasslands and lions that had been sung to him by his grandfather.

John did not stay with Daney and Caleb in their shack in the slave quarters a half-mile down the dirt road to the fields. He did once, but that was a long time ago, when he could sit by the sawdust pile and watch it change. For years he had stayed at the big house in a neat, pine-scented room off the kitchens and had done the tasks of a house servant, but he worked hard in the fields and barn too when needed. Some said the master kept him at the house exactly because he was so light-skinned, they said the master felt embarrassed having such a bright nigger living with the darkies; it might seem to the other white folks that he didn't know and respect the difference. Once Jabeth the freedman snickered out of his wrinkled, peanut-shaped face and said that maybe the master's embarrassment meant a lot more than skin colour. But Daney had shut him up fast. She had laid her sewing by and crossed her bare forearms and said that she'd been on this farm a long time and there was no goings-on she didn't know about. Later, she told John that he'd been bought and brought to the farm from Baltimore when he was but a baby and nobody knew who his father and mother were. Later still, when he was old enough, she told him that his parents were probably sold at auction the same time he was, and probably into the South to work on a cotton or tobacco plantation. It did no good to think about it, but it was important to know the truth so you wouldn't get any wrong ideas about what being a slave really meant. She said, it doesn't matter how easy your life might be now, but when you're a slave you'd better know change will come, and most times it's hard. But it was no good thinking on it too much. Weren't she and Caleb always so good to him and the master as kind as could be expected? He ought to be grateful that he hadn't been sold into the South too. He should thank the Lord every day that his lot was as good as a slave's could be. Even when he was hired out at times, and only ever a few miles away—to Sharpsburg or Shepherdstown—didn't the master choose good situations where a slave could learn woodcraft and tinsmithing and other useful skills? Yes, Daney insisted, he ought to be grateful that things weren't a lot worse.

By then, by the winter of 1859, John was sixteen and not a boy anymore, and he could listen to the talk of the white folks and the blacks too and know that nothing caused more excitement than the possibility of a war breaking out. Sometimes it was all anyone talked about. John understood that it made the white folks angry and nervous; they mostly didn't see how any good could come of it. The master sometimes asked him after such long and heated talks if he wasn't happy with his lot, if Daney and Caleb and the others weren't happy too. Didn't he treat them well? Hadn't he always done so? They wouldn't have any reason to run off, would they? As time went on, the master asked such questions more often, and he grew increasingly agitated, his voice almost pleading, his eyes wet. His skin looked like a china doll's with cracks. And the tracks were always glazed with tears, the thin lips always trembling, the sparse white hairs on the tiny, bony chin a sign that the master wasn't looking after himself proper anymore.

For his part, John did not know what to think about a war. When he listened to Daney and some of the other blacks, he could feel their excitement and hope for freedom inside himself, a kind of warmth, as of a change from winter to spring. Daney said that a war would change everything for the better, that it would lead to the promised land. And she laughed more. All the black folks were happier, even after a new overseer was hired and punishments for misdeeds, such as not working hard enough or fast enough, were increased. Some of the free blacks in the area, though, were sullen. Jabeth said that if he'd known freedom was coming he would have just waited and not spent his hard-earned wages on something that he was going to get anyhow. But Caleb didn't like the talk or even Daney's laughs. He said there was nothing that important that ever came easy, and if those fool niggers thought the white folks was just going to fold their hands and bow as the black folks packed their belongings and walked away, well, he wasn't that much of a fool. And besides, where was there to go? Daney said he was just getting old and tired and it was a good thing she had enough life in her for both of them when the time came, as it surely would. Caleb never argued about that. If Daney said a thing would happen, he didn't question it.