“Leave me be,” he said. But they wouldn’t. Will cleared away the bodies from around the boy and Frenchy gave him sips of whiskey from a flask. As Frenchy set up his camera, the boy put down his head and seemed to sleep, so while Frenchy wasn’t looking Will picked him up and carried him back to a hospital tent. The boy woke and began to scream horribly, and Frenchy screamed horribly, too, honking and honking as Will hurried away with the prize. Will held the Reb tight, lest something vital spill out further and drag along the ground. By the time he had reached the hospital, the boy was silent and dead. Will put him down on a door set on two saw-horses, which had lately served as a surgery table. Had Will felt anything leave as he walked? Had a spirit passed through him? It would have felt like a chill, he was sure. But he had felt nothing. He sat there for a long while, not wanting, anymore, to assist Frenchy in an enterprise that now seemed stupid and vile and immensely rude.
No matter, though. Frenchy was dead, when Will went back to him, shot through the chest as he was taking a picture. Jolly had been his subject, dead now, too — though Will was certain that he had been mostly alive for his portrait. Jolly had no obvious wound on him. Will thought he must have died of sadness and uncertainty, but when he looked closer he could see that Jolly had been shot in the thigh. He’d crossed his legs demurely, as if to hide the wound. His brow, when Will laid his hand on it, was still warm, but even as he knelt there it grew cold. For a little while he knelt with his hand on Jolly’s head, thinking of his friend dying all night long. Will’s eyes were closed. He was waiting for someone to shoot him. He wanted to say something but seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, every word he ever knew. His mother intruded into his mind, then. She dragged her green sofa onto the battlefield and reclined upon it. She gathered Jolly into her lap and cried out, “Where is it written that a woman has got to bear such a load of heartache?”
Frenchy’s camera had fallen over, but the plate inside was safe and whole. With the plate closed up in a box, Will walked to where the new mule had taken the wagon, a few hundred yards away. Under the yellow light, he poured the developer over the plate and waited for the image.
There is Jolly’s long face, his lips turned down in a frown. His eyes are open. His head is resting on his arm. He is pointing at nothing. He has wrapped his mouth around a piece of grass. Something is rising from him. It looks like a bit of dark mist in the shape of a wing.
In the Wilderness, and at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, the Third saw the elephant abundantly, and it trampled them. Frenchy would have had many opportunities to take his world-changing picture. Brave or foolish behavior got Will back into the Tiger Mess — he saved some lives and became better liked. He wanted friends, all of a sudden, as immediately and as intensely as he had not wanted them before. He would still smash your whiskey, but that became something they could overlook in the dwindling fraternity of Company D. The boys all got in the habit of writing their names and the addresses of their families on slips of paper, which they pinned to their shirts before they went into battle. Will had a slip pinned to his shirt, but it was not his parents’ address — he didn’t want even his dead body to go back home. Instead he’d written, Sam, here I come.
Will had many near misses. It seemed that bullets wanted to touch him. He got grazed on his arms and legs, along his scalp. He lost an earlobe. But he never got a serious wound, though he felt at last that he was ready for one. Jolly’s picture, which he kept in his knapsack by day and under his head at night, cheered him. Such a spirit-shape might rise from him, when his bullet finally found him. Such a spirit-shape as rose from Jolly might have risen from Sam, might abide in some place free from the heavy cares of the war and the world.
Generous Frenchy had made up a sort of will, which he would have changed, no doubt, had he lived after his assistant betrayed him at Gettysburg. He’d left instructions with Captain Brower. In the event of his death, Will was to have his cart and all it contained, as well as a big brass key, with an address at which one could find its lock. Will sold the cart. The new mule went back to its former owner, from whom Frenchy had bullied it. Will kept only the key and Jolly’s negative.
After the war, Will went to Brooklyn, where his key opened up a musty photography studio on the fourth floor of a building in Fulton Street. The rent, he discovered, was paid through the next two years. He walked among the props — marble columns, rich draperies, painted backgrounds depicting mountains or the sea. He stood for a while under a massive skylight, looking up at the gray sky. In a dark corner, beneath a gigantic rubber blanket, he found neat tall stacks of negatives, hundreds and hundreds of them, all taken during the war, some of which he’d developed himself. Frenchy had been sending them back to this place.
Will built the glass house on the roof. There was a derelict greenhouse up there, whose clear panels he tore out and replaced with the boys by the church, the boy with no hips, the catalogues. All the hundreds of negatives became four walls and a roof. Finally, there was Jolly’s picture — it went over the door in what Will thought must be the position of honor. Will put it in place, the last panel, and the house was finished.
It still lacked an hour till dawn. He went inside without a light and sat in the middle of the house. It was likely and certain and necessary that something would happen when the sun came to shine down on him. But what? Would the white ghosts assault him? Would he hear Jolly’s voice whispering a question? Would the mist that might be Jolly’s spirit depart from the plate and settle over Will like manna? Maybe ghosts would crowd the house, and maybe Sam would be among them. Maybe Will would fall asleep under their images and dream their vanished lives.
Maybe nothing would happen. Dawn was in the sky, now. The sun was just starting to peep over a neighboring building. Will closed his eyes and he waited.
2
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1867, WILL SAT IN THE AMPHITHEATER OF the Bellevue Medical College with his head clutched between his hands, staring fixedly at Dr. Gouley, a lecturer in morbid anatomy. Dr. Gouley was a sweet-looking man whose gentle voice belied the gruesome content of his lecture. “The skin of the child,” he said, “was dry and hard and seemed to be cracked in many places, somewhat resembling the scales of a fish. The mouth was large and round and wide open. It had no external nose but two holes where the nose should have been.”
“Are you all right, Will?” asked his neighbor, a small young man named Gob Woodhull. As there were no proper seats left in the crowded amphitheater, they sat next to each other on the steps. “Are you going to have a fit? The way your eyes bulge, it worries me.”
They had met a month before, after Will had collapsed in the hospital hallway. When he came back to his senses, Will was in a bed in Ward 10, surrounded by noisy consumptives. Little Gob, for all that he looked like a fifteen-year-old in store-bought whiskers, had picked him up in the hallway like a child and carried him to bed. “It’s a divine affliction, what you have,” he said.
“It’s not,” said Will. He could barely see, and he felt cold, though it was hot in the ward. No, it wasn’t divine, what he had. They were from the glass house, these attacks of sympathy that culminated in shaking, foaming fits. Medical school was the last place he should be, in his condition, because the sad natural histories of disease became personal to him. His mind would come loose from its moorings and drift on tides of turbulent fancy, so he found himself becoming the sufferer, or someone who loved the sufferer, and he would contemplate their troubled, failing lives until the fit came along, inevitably, and put an end to it. He’d collapsed in the hall on account of a young German mother, recently delivered and now afflicted with a debilitating fistula that made her smell so horrible her family had turned her out of the house. He hadn’t cared so much for other people’s trouble in the past. Even his own mother’s agony had occurred at a distance remote from his heart, but the house had changed that.