“I’ll cut you a new mouth to whine with, if you don’t shut up,” said Jolly, who was not known for making idle threats. Will sat back on his heels, picked out hot beans with his fingers, and raised them slowly to his mouth. “Did you see the sky last night, Tiny?” Jolly asked him.
“I did,” Will said. There had been a fantastic display, the night after the battle. The northern lights had come south to blaze in the sky above the Union right. Will had lain on his back to watch, holding to his eye a cracked lens pilfered from the wagon, thinking it would be fine to take a picture of such a thing as that festive sky.
“Do you suppose it was a sign? Do you suppose it was God waving his hanky for the Rebs? Perhaps it is our purpose to lose.”
“We were good Christians today, then,” said Will.
“No,” said Lewy Greeley. “Not ever.”
A catalogue of expressions — fear, sadness, rage, surprise, tenderness, even what appears to be a broad smile, this last on a head connected only by strings to the neck it once rode upon. A catalogue of parts — arms and legs, trunks and bellies, ears and noses, a flat section of skull. The hair is still attached, but the rest of the body is nowhere to be seen. It might be a muskrat, crouched in the grass. The whole west wall is a catalogue of parts and faces.
In May of ‘63, Will drifted across the Rappahannock with a few other members of Company D. Lewy Greeley was there, and so was Jolly. It was just before dawn. They were going over to clear out some intractable sharpshooters who were making it impossible to lay down pontoons for a bridge. Lewy was twitching with excitement. Months of idleness in winter camp had made him a nervous creature. A few times, at night on picket duty, he had fired blindly at the enemy lines. That morning, he could barely contain himself. Inhospitable Rebs were firing at them already, though their visit was supposed to be a surprise. Lewy kept trying to stand up in the boat. A wag in a neighboring boat had stood up and shaken his ass at the Rebs, then crouched down again without taking a hit. “Let go, you big ape!” Lewy said to Will, tearing his sleeve free of Will’s fingers.
“Stay down, Lewy,” said Jolly. “It’s positively unhealthy up there.”
Lewy paid him no mind. He stood up in the boat and said, “Look at me! I am a marine!” A bullet took him in the head. He fell down and was still, and made no noise, but his blood rushed out from him, and pooled around their knees.
“Ah, Lewy,” said Jolly. “You were too much of a bother for this world.”
The Rebs offered up a few more volleys, but left the bank with hardly any fight at all. Will sat by a fire, ostensibly guarding the engineers as they worked, but really he was looking at Lewy’s body, wrapped up in a coat upon the riverbank. He wished he had a picture of him, because he had discovered he could better empathize with a picture of a dead boy than with the dead boy himself. Looking at the pictures he could wonder, What did the boy see as he died, where were his thoughts? If he had a picture of Lewy’s body he might have wondered if Lewy, in the half-second during which he took his bullet, thought of his Methodist regiment, and hoped to join them in Heaven though he could not join them on earth. If he could have chosen a word and spoken it as he died, what would it have been? Did a color fill his mind as he expired? With a picture, Will might have tried to imagine how it felt to be wounded like Lewy, he might have held a hand up to touch his own pulse beating in his temple. As it was, he was filled with a stony, gray feeling, and found he was already forgetting what Lewy looked like.
Lewy Greeley, carefully arranged. He looks noble in a way he never did in life. He lies with his arms folded over his chest, his little face serene and pretty in a patch of morning sunlight. He might be dreaming. Will put him on the north wall, with all the other boys from Company D.
“I’ve failed!” Frenchy said, sitting by his wagon a few days after Lewy’s death, after Company D and the rest of the Army of the Potomac had scurried back over the Rappahannock in the wake of the great disaster at Chancellorsville. Frenchy had been cross because the wounded, dying, and dead were left on the other side of the river where he could not photograph them. He had retreated to a hospital tent and taken up a post next to a boy who was clinging to life despite the amputation of both his legs, and repeated assaults by the bloody flux. In his delirium, the boy thought Frenchy was his mother. Previously, Frenchy had wandered away for food or drink, or fallen asleep, at the critical moment, but this boy wailed piteously if he left his side, so he was there for the death. “Miserable, hideous failure!” Frenchy said.
It was a very pleasant night, with the moon shining out full. He’d come stomping and cursing through the moonlight to where Will was sitting by the wagon, thinking back to the other side of the river. There’d been plenty of fighting, even at night when Will was free to join it. The beautiful moonlight had settled over everything, though it seemed to Will that it should recoil from boys whose heads decided to go every which way at once, from open bellies and naked bones.
Frenchy cast the plates on the ground at Will’s feet, breaking a plate in half. Will took the pieces up and held them to the moon: there was the boy from the hospital tent, his terrible wounds preserved forever. Will found himself wondering if it was not the opposite of mercy to have preserved them so. The boy in these pictures would always be in pain. His face was a blur — he seemed to have a multiplicity of mouths, all of them calling for his mother. But in the last picture, the broken one, he was still. “It was just as he went,” said Frenchy. “I know that it was, but there is no exhalation, there is nothing but air about him.”
Will left Frenchy to his misery, and walked off with the broken pieces of the last plate in his two hands. He wandered aimlessly through the camp and out of it, thinking that he held in his hands proof of the nonexistence of souls. He thought of Sam, how he had been friendly when they were small, aside from the occasional beating, and how he had been distant when they were older, how they had fallen out with each other over something unspoken and unknown, and how there was no hope of reconciliation between the living and the dead. He sat down on the ground and hung his head. There was a burning behind his eyes, and his belly contracted violently, as if it were trying to retch. He felt his mouth turning down, very slowly, at the corners. He remembered how ugly his mother always was in her weeping, and he tried hard not to cry. Nonetheless, he wept, and as only a boy of his size and strength could, great sobs, his chest heaving with the strength of three lesser chests. It made him afraid to think that everything he was could vanish into an abyss when he took, as he felt he must, his mortal wound. And it made him unbearably sad to think how everything that Sam was had simply ended.
Will had wandered into a graveyard full of Union dead. He’d buried some of them himself the previous winter. After he’d quieted down from his sobbing, he sat there a while, and thought he must have fallen asleep, because he was sure he was dreaming when gaily dressed women drifted into the graveyard. There were seven of them. Four carried lanterns, which they set down in a great square pattern. They put their heads together and whispered, and seemed to be waiting for something. Soon, a little man came tiptoeing into the graveyard. He bowed to them and took out a fiddle from a case, then started to play a jig. The ladies began a sprightly dance upon the graves of the Union dead.