Will had departed from his parents’ house late at night. His mother lay asleep on the green sofa upon which she had made it her custom to grieve until exhausted. He looked at her breathing noisily through her open mouth, and debated whether he ought to kiss her goodbye. As he leaned down he thought better of it — she might wake, after all, and inaugurate some sort of hideous, tear-soaked scene. He turned away from her and imagined, as he walked through the door, that Sam’s ghost went past him, taking his place in the house as surely as he was taking Sam’s place in the war.
Captain Brower shook his hand, and then embraced him. Will was mustered into the 122nd New York Volunteers, called the Third Onondaga by its local-minded members. He sent his bounty money home to his parents, along with a short note. “Now I am one of Father Abraham’s three hundred thousand. Goodbye.”
Six dead men without shoes — their feet are swollen and their swollen chests have burst the buttons on their shirts. Behind them is a broken wagon, hooked to a dead horse. In the distance stands a church where pacifists once gathered to worship.
* * *
In Maryland, on the way to Harpers Ferry, where the Third had been called to help put an end to General Lee’s frolicking, Will saw his first Reb, a dead one who lay where he’d been killed outside a church at Burkittsville. Wounded were moaning inside the church. “What a hymn!” said Jolly Forbes, a long-faced boy who was one of the few who would associate with Will.
Company D had welcomed Will initially. A cry of “Sam’s brother!” had followed him wherever he went, and total strangers embraced him and wet his thick neck with tears. “It is good to see you, my friend,” was a common refrain. “I am not your friend,” was Will’s unvarying reply. So great was their love and respect for Sam’s memory — there were at least a dozen men who claimed he’d saved their lives — the men of Company D might have let this rude behavior slide, and loved Will for all that he was sullen and he wanted no friends. But he was actively boorish, and proved himself in no time to be a great ruiner of fun. He would knock a man down for cursing in front of him, and if he came upon a bottle of whiskey he would break it. While they were encamped outside of Washington, some man’s cousin had attempted to sneak in a barrel of whiskey. She had dressed it up in a little white frock, put a white bonnet on it, and heaped it with soft blankets. Soldiers in the know cooed over it, reached into the perambulator, and pretended to stroke its chin. Jolly Forbes came by and looked in. “Madame,” he said, “that is the handsomest baby I have ever seen.” Will was behind Jolly, and when he saw what it was, he reached in, grabbed it out, and dashed that baby to the ground.
Where Sam had saved men by the dozen, Will put them by the dozen into the guardhouse with his tattling. Begging Sam’s forgiveness, they cursed loudly against the Devil-sent prig. Will was thrown out of the Tiger Mess, where Sam had been a member. The other members wrote out a dishonorable discharge on a gigantic piece of hardtack. Expelled for crimes against good-naturedness, it said. In the end, he had only Jolly and assorted other rejects to mess with.
At the church, two men were busy around the dead boy. A photographer was yelling at his assistant in French. Will knew enough French to understand that the fat little photographer — he was only about five feet tall, and shaped just like an egg — was very displeased. He wanted the assistant to turn the dead boy’s head into the sun, but the boy was ripe and the assistant was sure that to touch him would be bad for his own health. The photographer stomped over, reached up to grab his assistant by the neck, and threw him down into the dead boy, whose arm flopped over in a friendly embrace. The assistant scampered away, howling as if the corpse had bitten him. The round photographer bent down and began very carefully to compose the Reb’s limbs. He stretched out the boy’s arm above his shoulder in the grass, and opened his hand. The photographer looked up and scowled at Will. “Your goggling eyes!” he said. “What are you looking at?” Just then, Captain Brower came up alongside in the passing column.
“Walk on, Private,” he said to Will. “There’s no time for dillydallying.” Will looked a little longer at the dead boy. He was wondering how Sam had fallen, if he had looked the same as this swollen, flyblown boy. He turned and gave the Captain a stiff salute, then continued walking.
Not fifteen minutes from the church, they passed the battlefield of South Mountain. Dead Rebels were stacked shoulder high along the road. Will wondered if this construction was the work of the round Frenchman. He looked down at the ground as he passed the corpses, afraid to meet their staring eyes. He thought of Sam’s body again. There would have been a funeral, back in Onondaga County, which Will had missed. Later, Will would have a dream in which he climbed a wall of bodies as high as the moon. Every body was Sam’s, and every mouth as he passed it whispered, “Aim low, Brother!”
Jolly dropped back in line to walk with him again. He held up his canteen to the orderly dead before he took a drink of water. “To your health, boys,” Jolly said.
They are swollen in this picture, too. It almost makes them look healthy, such big barrel chests, such thick legs — their clothes can barely contain them. They lie along a fence in various positions. This one has got his hands thrown over his shoulders. That one has got his hand on his belly. Where are their shoes?
The Third Onondaga was ordered away from Harpers Ferry just as they reached it, drawn down off the mountain by General McClellan’s sucking, gluttonous need for reinforcements. But they arrived too late to participate at Antietam. Will spent the night of September 17 helping carry in wounded. If they were not too fragile, he could carry them one under each arm. The darkness was a mercy — it was easier to venture among the dead when you could not see them. At dawn, he was squatting by a small fire, drinking coffee with Jolly. The sun came up and seemed to shine specifically on a house near a line of battered woods. The walls were laced with cannonball holes, but a merry white column of smoke was still rising from the broken chimney.
“Sometimes,” said Jolly, rolling his tin cup between his hands, “I worry that there is no purpose to anything. It would be the very worst news, I think.”
“God has abandoned that field, at least,” Will said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder to point at the heaped dead of the Irish Brigade. It was his shame that he lacked faith. But it made a sort of wicked sense to him that the universe should be an orphan, its own only parent, raised on a diet of self-taught, ignorant cruelty. He worried that there was nothing beyond the tangible world, that there was nothing beyond death but oblivion. On the way to Harpers Ferry, he had imagined his own death, trying to decide if he wanted to linger or go in a flash. These thoughts were his dispiriting occupation since he had become a soldier. He feared God, even though he was secretly certain there was no such fellow, and worried that some punishment greater than a joyless life might be in store for him.
“I think I shall be melancholy for a while,” said Jolly, putting his elbow on his knee, and his chin in his hand. He looked very much like Will’s brooding mother, in that posture. Will was just about to leave when a spindly corporal came to fetch him and bring him to Captain Brower’s tent. Will found the little French photographer there with the Captain. They had filled up the tent with cigar smoke.