The Tinsmith by Tim Bowling

his forehead and one stuck like a hardened tear to one eyelid over one slightly bulbous eye. But the tall soldier did not brush the flies away.
    From far inside the earth Anson could hear the contrabands’ shovels turning the bloodied ground. Then the scraping sounded across the horizon and he looked for the source of it without success. But when he brought his gaze back to the tall soldier at last—who still hadn’t brushed the flies away, who wore them just as a scarecrow wears its stitches—Anson heard the scraping again. And he knew it for the terrible longing that it was, not for the peace of the dead but for the struggle of the living.
    The sergeant scowled. “We’d better find that body, lieutenant. Or find out for certain what happened to it. There’ll have to be a report.” He spat again, then nodded at Anson while raising a hand to his bandaged shoulder. “Perhaps this was some of your work. I don’t wish to keep you any longer from continuing it.”
    Now Anson himself couldn’t move. But it was a kind of exhilaration that paralyzed him. He forgot the ache in his spine and in his swollen feet because now he understood more than the guilt of the tall soldier standing at his side. In the foul, clotted air of the slaughter of two great armies, Anson suddenly tasted and swallowed the truth, which wasn’t only a window flung open on the battle’s murk and smoke and blood, but a window flung open on the depth of his own commitment. And when he finally moved closer and looked into the soldier’s eyes, his open, unblinking eyes set in the scarred and dirtied face, the man’s expression had truly become a reflection of Anson’s own. All at once, Anson saw that he and the soldier were not separate at all, except that one face—in the slightest jutting of the lower lip, the slightest bulging of the eyes, but more in the sheer terror of the expression—was negroid, another link in the war’s great dragging, breeding chain. Now the abstract cause assumed a living form. And that form needed protection.
    Without analysis or logic, with the deepest call of instinct, Anson understood that he had been chosen to provide it, if not by some divine power, then by the ineluctable and curious justice of circumstance. The dead Latin stirred in his blood, sprang to life on his tongue. But it was plain English he uttered.
    â€œLet’s go, John. We have work to do.”

II
    September 18, the battlefield at Antietam

    Alexander Gardner studied the mutilated body for a moment, and stroked the forked end of his beard as he considered whether such a gruesome corpse—and of a civilian too—could be of any artistic or commercial use to him. It would be one thing to display photographs of dead soldiers in a New York gallery, quite another to exhibit a large stereo view of some farmer who’d had his manhood hacked off. Then again, war was war, business was business, and there was no telling what the public might stomach, or, indeed, even relish. As for art, well, Gardner understood the perils of playing that game too cannily. Best get to work and think about art, the public, and the other incidentals later.
    He lowered himself to his haunches and made a small frame by placing his hands around his eyes. A disbelieving voice sounded from above him.
    â€œYou canna be serious, Alex. For Christ’s sakes, man, leave it alone.”
    â€œJim, you surprise me. I dinna peg you for a maidenly sort.” Gardner flashed his assistant a big grin, just so he wouldn’t take offence. He knew James Gibson was a touchy one, but he also knew there was no one he’d rather have with him in the field. Gibson was a gifted man with the camera, and no mistake. And he could work quickly with the plates too, which was even more important. His assistant didn’t know it yet, but Gardner aimed to take most of the studies; he had to be the one behind the lens.