They did not see Will in his dark uniform, did not see how, with their dancing, they turned his sadness to rage. The piece of plate, when it came flying out of the darkness, must have seemed like a judgment from whatever god guards the dignity of the dead. It struck a woman in the hip — in her petticoats or her flesh, Will could not be sure. She shrieked and the ladies dispersed, leaving their lanterns behind.
A boy with a hole where his chest ought to be. He is arranged on his side. His big serious eyes look directly at the camera. His left hand is stretched out, his hand is open as if in supplication, as if to say, Give it back. He is the fourth image from the right, in the second row from the bottom, on the south wall.
“My mama says I should remember that I am fighting to preserve the best government on earth,” Jolly said. It was dinnertime on the evening of the second day at Gettysburg. The Third Onondaga had taken up position too late, again, to have seen action. Other regiments made fun of them, saying their ugly faces scared away the elephant. Will thought it must be his mother’s doing, this safety. Her towering grief would not allow him to be hurt — it was of such a nature that even fate must be afraid of it. “But my father, he says we must help the slaves even if the Union goes all to smash.” Jolly held up two letters, one from his mother and one from his father, in either hand. “What do you think?” he asked Will.
“I don’t know,” Will replied. He took the letters from Jolly’s hand and put them behind his back, passing them from hand to hand a few times before he told Jolly to pick one. Jolly chose the left hand, and Will handed him back the letter. Jolly opened it and looked at it, rubbing his eyes wearily.
“Well?” said Will.
“Well, I am fighting for the slaves,” said Jolly. They sat alone for a while, before they started making their dinner, a coffee beef stew. Jolly had taken off his shirt and rolled up the sleeves of his long johns, because of the heat. They were the only two members of the Leper Mess left, the others having died or deserted or been absorbed into more respectable associations. They spent a little while crushing hardtack for their stew. “God save me from this cracker,” Jolly said, struggling to break it. Will crushed his easily into a fine powder, and made dumplings with water from his canteen. These he set gingerly into the stew, amid pieces of beef and vegetables. Jolly leaned over the pot to pour in a cup of coffee, and then they took turns sprinkling in crushed cracker to thicken the stew. “Oh, it will be delicious!” said Jolly, but when it came time to eat he said he was not hungry, and gave his portion to Will.
After their meal, they lay down in their dog tent, not sleeping though both were exhausted from their recent march — they’d gone twenty miles a day for three days. “I think sometimes it might not be real,” said Jolly. Will’s guts were making a racket, complaining about the stew. “When I was a boy my mother told me the whole world was just the dream of a sleeping bear, and that we had to be careful not to be too horrible in our behavior towards one another, because we might shock the bear into wakefulness, and he would go about his day, and we would be no more. That was blasphemy, I know. But couldn’t a war be God’s conscience fretting with itself? Maybe he has put himself down for a nap, but his digestion is poor, and it has troubled his dream. All our history might be no longer than such a nap, don’t you think? His troubled conscience has dreamed a war. I worry, anyhow, that we will wake him. Do you think we will wake him?”
Will had no answer. In the silence, Jolly took his hand and put it over his chest. Jolly’s heart was fluttering. “Is it beating?” Jolly asked him. “Am I alive?”
“Yes,” said Will, and took away his hand.
“Sometimes I wonder.”
The images look like portraits of ghosts. They are pale where living people are dark, dark where the living are pale. When the sun passes through the glass negatives, it is like a visitation from beyond, the way they shimmer and glow. At night, when he goes into the unfinished house with a lantern, the backing darkness makes ambrotypes of the images, and the dead take on the tones and shades of the living. It makes sense to him that it should be so, that the dead should be more solid, should look more real at night, and that the day should make ghosts of them.
Frenchy had new hope, which stemmed from a new plan and a new technique. He had determined that he’d failed to capture the boy’s departing soul because his medium was insensitive. He needed a better collodion — hadn’t Fox-Talbot’s calotype process been similarly insensitive, hadn’t it also been defective? He was gone for two weeks in June, consulting with a learned gentleman in New York. When he returned, he had a new collodion formula. It was the same as the old one, except he added three drops of a liquid from a mysterious-looking blue bottle. The liquid looked and smelled like whiskey, and Will was tempted to smash the bottle.
Will and Jolly got separated in the last day’s fighting at Gettysburg, of which the Third had more than its fair share. Will got called away by Frenchy, whose mule had died in the quartermaster-seeking overshots of the Rebel artillery. Will himself pulled the wagon while Frenchy screeched at him to hurry. Ambulances and sutler’s tents were meeting their ends all around him. Will and Frenchy fled down the Baltimore Pike until they came to a place of comparative safety, where they waited amid a crowd of other fugitives. Frenchy’s powerful letters of recommendation helped him to appropriate a new mule. By the time Will got back to the Third’s position on Culp’s Hill, it was almost night. He spent the evening looking fruitlessly for Jolly.
On the Fourth of July, Will ventured out into the rain with Frenchy. For the first time, they saw many boys from the Third dead on the field. There was a boy, one of the first Will had met, who as they waited in the train to leave Syracuse had asked Will to do him a favor. “Hey, Goliath,” he’d said. “Give me a boost.” Will had hoisted him through the window, thinking for a moment he’d had a last-minute change of heart and was going to desert prematurely. There were women clustered around the train, come to bid goodbye to the boys of Onondaga County, and all the boy had wanted was kisses. Will held the fellow by his boots as he puckered his lips up obscenely and meshed them wetly with the wanton lips of three, five, and then ten different women. In the end, Will had dropped him on his head, and so lost his first friend in the regiment. He was a little fellow, whose lips were wide and thick. On reflection, Will understood how he might feel pressed to kiss excessively with them. Now they were gone, torn away by a bullet or a fragment of shell. Each time Will stepped in wet, soft places on the field, he worried that he’d trodden upon those sensuous lips.
Frenchy had just scolded Will for moving a pile of dead into convincing “as they fell” positions — he was supposed to be looking for the dying, not playing with the dead — when Will uncovered a living Reb. The Reb opened his gray eyes and began to squall when Will grabbed his arm. “Don’t bury me!” he said. “I ain’t dead, you son of a bitch!” It was a marvel, though, that he was alive. His belly had been opened, and his guts were spilling promiscuously from the wound. “Go away,” he said to Will, once it became clear to him that Will was not going to bury him. “Ain’t it enough that you killed me? Why don’t you leave me in peace? My granny is coming up to get me. She’ll be here soon. She doesn’t care for greasy Yanks, and one who shines and stinks like you would offend her.”
“I’ll take you to the doctors,” Will said.
“No,” said the Reb. Frenchy came waddling up excitedly.
“You beautiful boy!” he said to the Reb.