Free The Tinsmith by Tim Bowling Page B

that you saw him carrying a body. By my oath, I ask this out of humanity . . . and . . . justice. If you believe, sir, in what the Union stands for, I urge you . . .”
    â€œI don’t understand. Why would an officer ask me about him? Many soldiers are carrying bodies today.”
    And then, with a jolt, Gardner recalled what body it was, and the manner of the death, and he was almost ashamed to admit that he saw his chance and took it. But the camera was not a toy, no more than a bible was a plaything to a preacher. And this surgeon, his weary, pained face, would make a wonderful study. Gardner struck a bargain.
    â€œAgreed. But I have a single condition. If at some point I wish to make a study of you, you will pose for me?”
    Already the photographer felt he had trapped a kind of ghost in his camera—something in this man seemed to flow out of him. He conceded listlessly to Gardner’s bargain and they shook on it. The photographer wondered how he could ever forget that firm handshake of blood and pus. The surgeon did not appear to notice Gardner’s lingering gaze, however. Only when he turned away did Gardner see that the surgeon held a severed lower leg in his other hand—it seemed to lead him like a child back into a nightmare.
    Gardner was to get his study two days later, at a different field hospital, a mile to the south of the previous one. Apparently the bearded surgeon had moved as well, and stood awkwardly amid a group of half-collapsed canvas tents barely covering several dozen wounded. Smoke rose from a nearby cook fire. Gardner heard a rough snoring. A light breeze blew the usual death stench over the ground and tents. By then, the photographer had heard tell of an investigation about that mutilated corpse. Apparently, the dead man had been of much use to McClellan and Pinkerton in their gathering of information about the enemy. It was, according to rumours Gardner had heard, a delicate matter, given that Maryland had not yet committed to either side in the conflict. But no one asked the photographer anything. And the truth was, by September 21, Gardner was so puffed up with the success of his venture, and so inured to the misery and carnage all around him, that he gave little thought to that one farmer’s corpse.
    And yet, when he bid the surgeon be still as he ducked under the cloth, Gardner was certain that, just over his study’s shoulder, peering out through a thin pillar of smoke, stood the very soldier whose actions had motivated the bargain he had struck with the surgeon. But when Gardner stepped out from the cloth, no soldier remained. And he half-doubted, despite all his subtle craft, that the exposed plate would capture anything but a flattened cornfield running away beneath a blank and pitiless sky.

III
    September 19, the battlefield at Antietam

    In the middle of a charred, broken field a hundred yards north of a barn serving as a Union field hospital, Horace Greaver swatted impatiently at a buzzing cluster of flies. If only the blasted lazy fools from the Quartermaster corps, he thought, would stop bringing in useless corpses, this day looked promising and profitable indeed. Dozens of corpses had been brought from the battlefield to the side of his large, black tent, and the fetid air told him many more would be arriving. Ah, but these lazy fools . . . 
    â€œIf they don’t have a coupon,” Greaver said, “I don’t want them. This one’s no good to me. Take it back where you found it.” He pulled the brim of his worn bowler down over his bespectacled, watery, bloodshot eyes and turned away from the slack-jawed teamster’s assistant.
    â€œBack? But I just drug it from clear over there, by the crick.”
    â€œDid you even look for a coupon first, as I instructed you?” Greaver drew an invisible tiny square in the air before the man’s eyes, then angrily snatched it away.