OTHERS WERE DRAWN to the music as well, and when Pearl came to the door she had to stand on tiptoe to see who was playing. She said to Walsh, What do you call it when the woman wedded to your papa is not your mama?
She would be your stepmother.
So I am my pap’s chile, but my step—
Mother’s—
My stepmother’s—
Stepchild.
Stepchild. Is that a natural thing? A step chile with a step mother?
It happens, Walsh said. It’s better than nothing.
Well, that poor crazy woman in there playing her music? Can you see her? Come here to where I am. You see? Thas her, Miz Jameson, and she is my step mother, Pearl said, nodding, to affirm the relationship. My step mother, who still know to play the piano. Used to hear her all the time. It made me angry. Black folks dying back in the quarters and she playing the piano like it didn’t mean nothin. Wouldn see me, look right through me, my step mother, the wife ma’m Miz Jameson.
Moving next to Pearl at her invitation, his shoulder touching hers, Stephen Walsh instinctively understood that she would have no idea of the effect on him of their closeness. He had not wanted to admit to himself how young she was, this brilliantly alive girl whose glance made him catch his breath. She had found him tagging after her and had accepted him with a smile, as a child accepts a new acquaintance immediately as a fast friend. She was confiding in him now as a grown adult would never do under the circumstances. In what terrible state of vulnerability had this war left him that he was so instantly drawn to her? So that there actually flashed through his mind the possibility that he could survive the war and have a future life as a husband to her.
In his own childhood Stephen Walsh had learned to live alone in his mind. He was the child of drunks, and had grown up learning self-sufficiency in the streets of Manhattan, working out his own rules of honor and integrity from his life as a street rat, sweeping out saloons, and delivering pails of beer. He was configured as a stoic, but it was as if from choice, as if the raging excesses of his family and the brutalities of his schooling had played no part in the formation of his character. He had come to the attention of the Jesuits, enduring their education just until he learned the titles of the books that one should read for the rest of one’s life. And then he was gone into the university of the autodidact to find his own titles.
He was a sturdily built, square-shouldered nineteen-year-old with thick black hair, a heavy brow, solemn eyes, and a firm jaw. Any officer would judge Stephen Walsh a reliable soldier who would comport himself as he should. But at the moment this entire structure of character, insofar as it was self-aware, was awash in longing and loneliness. He had never paid much attention to music, even when he had to march to it. But he was listening now, and feeling this waltz as a daring summons that he must answer. Almost despising himself, he remained close to Pearl, pretending to be as unaware of their persons touching as he thought she was.
He had joined the army as a substitute for an uptowner, for which he received three hundred dollars. He thought of that money now. He had banked it with the Corn Exchange on Laight Street.
SHERMAN WAS AWAKENED by his own cry. He’d fallen asleep in an armchair. He was fully dressed. A bed had been turned back for him. A throw covered his knees. He stood abruptly, and immediately felt a chill. Where the devil was he? Wrapping the throw around his shoulders, he went to the window and flung open the drapes.
First light. He waited.
Slowly, reluctantly, Columbia composed itself from graying packets of gloom. He was looking over a garden wall to a street of stand-alone chimneys and charred trees. Then, in the first icy glimmerings of the new day, what he saw of the city seemed like a plan for it, as if Columbia were just going up, the streets measured out in brick footings, with the occasional risen stone wall, and heaps of ash and lumber as building materials strewn everywhere.
So is the South chastened, he said aloud. Though I didn’t do this, I can’t deny I am glad it is done.
He’d been up most of the night conferring with his staff and writing his orders for the campaign for North Carolina. He checked his watch. Five A.M. Rifles should be unstacked, the lead divisions fallen in, the trains assembled. At this moment he heard the distant sound of bugles. Shouts. He nodded, he had an army again.
But it was too quiet in this house. He wanted to be mounted and out of here within the hour. And he wanted this place blown up. Where in hell was Moses Brown with his breakfast?
Sherman found the stub of a cigar and lit it. Again he pondered his plan. Slocum’s wing was to the west of Columbia. The wings would rejoin in Winnsboro. The combined wings to feint to Charlotte, but take Raleigh. And then it would be like a vise on Lee, Grant squeezing him from the north, and I from the south. And when he leaves his entrenchment to contest with me, as he should, Grant will have Richmond.
Puffing his cigar, Sherman raised his arms and held out the throw like the Winged Victory. He laughed and made a circle around the room.
But there were logistical problems. He’d been advised that at least a thousand blacks had assembled for the march. No sooner had he found a way to get rid of the horde in Georgia than here was another to take its place. There was no reasoning with these people. Where did they think they would live? In what promised land? And there were whites among them now, some of them Union sympathizers who could not stay here and expect to remain alive. But we are an army, not a benevolent aid society.
And it had been necessary to send off letters by courier to Secretary Seward and General Halleck, the Chief of Staff, before they heard the news from someone else. He made it clear that it was the Confederate General, Hampton, in retreat, who had ordered that cotton burned. Helped by the wind, the Rebs themselves had burned Columbia. Though of course he, Sherman, knew he would be blamed. I did not visit this Pompeii upon them, he wrote. But if I am to be the Foul Fiend I don the costume readily if it will quake them in their boots and cow their traitorous hearts. We will be finished with them presently, these secessionists, and that will be the end of them and their damned war.
But where was Moses Brown with his breakfast?
IX
CALVIN SET UP THE CAMERA TO MAKE A PHOTOGRAPH of the old town bell lying askew in the rubble of the spire that had held it. People had gathered to watch, so Arly had to speak out of the side of his mouth.
Why you wasting my time on this, Calvin? he said. I got an army to catch up to.
This is that famous bell, Calvin said. This is the bell they rang every time another state left the Union. He chose one of the brass lens tubes from the lens case and screwed it into the camera box.
So it gives you pleasure as a black man, don’t it? Arly said while looking around at the folks and smiling. He and Calvin had worked it out that he would take the picture after Calvin had done all the work. It was Calvin who decided where to put the camera, which lens to use, and how long to expose the plate. All Arly had to do was stand beside the box and remove the lens cap and, after being told how long to hold it off, clamp it back on.
Whether it pleasures me or not, it is part of the historic record, Calvin said. This bell now fallen here in the dirt is like what has happened to the Confederacy. It is like the ruin of the old slaveholding South is laying there, so I got to photograph it, just like Mr. Culp would.
After Calvin stuck his head under the black cloth and satisfied himself that everything was ready, he stepped back, slid out the plate carrier, and nodded. Arly made a big fuss about pulling up his coat sleeves and adjusting his derby. After a solemn glance at the crowd, he stepped up beside the camera, lifted Mr. Culp’s watch out of Mr. Culp’s vest pocket, and held it at eye level. Wait till the sun comes out from that cloud, Calvin whispered. Expose for fifteen seconds.
Calvin had shown him how not to move his arm but just with a flex of the wrist to uncap the lens, hold steady, and then, with a reverse flex, recap it. This Arly now did, adding a little triumphant yelp of his own devising when
the cap was back on, because he had noticed people wanted some indication that something had happened, whereas otherwise it was hard to tell.
Calvin joined in by applauding lightly. Sliding the wood casing back in, he removed the plate and carried it hurriedly up the back steps into the wagon.
Arly readjusted his coat and smiled again at the observers. Friends, if it seems like magic to you, you are exackly right, it is magic what my camera can make from the light of God’s day. Who will step up for his portrait? Everyone needs a picture for his mantel. A portrait by Josiah Culp is a better likeness than any painter could paint. And if it is the cost that worries you, a cart dee visit is most reasonable, and you have a photo of yourself forever from these historic times.
There were no takers, the gloomy crowd slowly dispersing.
NOT A FEW minutes gone by, and still in the middle of all the ruination of Columbia, Calvin reined the mule to a stop and got down and went around the back to bring out the tripod again.
Jesus, what is it now? Arly said, putting his hand inside his vest to the pistol. You aren’t wanting to try my patience, surely.
Mr. Culp has taught me to look at things, and that is what I’m doing. Most people don’t really look at what they’re looking at. But we have to. We have to look at things for them.
And what are we looking at now? Arly said.
Down the street? Those granite steps that don’t lead to nothing. A church was there. And what’s left is only that back wall with the bull’s-eye window you can see the sky through.
Trouble was, Arly might have the pistol but this Calvin knew he could keep on doing what he was doing and no harm would come to him. He knew Arly needed him even if he didn’t know why. He had his wits about him, this boy. He was not what you would call uppity, but he had an edge to him, all right. Without saying anything, he let Arly know how he felt about things in a quiet, cold kind of way. Not that he could say anything about it, being a nigger. But once it was over with Mr. Culp, Calvin had stopped smiling. You didn’t see those white teeth no more. He was still the smooth, tan-faced nigger with a shaved head and big brown eyes, but he went about taking his pictures like the business had been willed to him.
When Calvin had gone down the street and put his camera where he wanted, some black children appeared, climbing over a pile of rubble, and they hunkered there among the rocks to watch him.
Arly sat up on the wagon and waited. He took the carte de visite out of his coat pocket. Nothing had changed since the last time he examined it. Will was still sitting in a C.S.A. tunic, ramrod straight as a proper soldier, though with that strange look in his eyes, like he had seen something alarming on the horizon. Culp had affixed a brace to the back of Will’s head to keep it upright. And the chin strap on the Reb cap was what kept his lower jaw from going slack.
You wasn’t this stupid-looking in your life, Arly said to the picture. You had an intelligence, though you did require instruction on a daily basis. But, anyways, I made you a promise to report on your bravery to your kinfolk, and that I will certainly do. And they will have this pictorial of you with the rifle crossways on your lap in case there was any doubts in their mind. And though you are sitting there no less dead than you are in your grave, with the earth filling your mouth, they will see you in this pose and think you were alive at this moment of the picture-taking. And even if you don’t look alive to me, to them you will look alive enough given what, as you led me to understand, they thought of you in the first place.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED was that after they took that picture of the dead man in the wrong uniform, his crazy friend waved the pistol around and directed Mr. Culp and Calvin to drive up the hill to the village cemetery, where he proposed to inter the body. Calvin knew he was to do the digging and took off his coat and jacket and rolled up his sleeves. But he hadn’t expected that the crazy soldier would put Mr. Culp to work. I can do this without help, Calvin had said, but it was no use. And so there was Josiah Culp, who had just about adopted Calvin Harper back in Philadelphia, when he had come out into the street where Calvin had been staring in the window of the Culp Photography Salon, and taken him in and treated him almost like a son, including him on this expedition and teaching him the trade that would secure him in a free man’s self-employment for the rest of his life—well, there he was, this poor man, spading up the soil over his shoulders, doing the work of a Negro. And maybe that was the idea behind it, because Mr. Culp had strong opinions and might have seemed arrogant as a certified Union photographer with his name in gilt letters on the wagon. Given that he and the soldier had right off gotten into disputation, it could have been a kind of lesson for him, or so it seemed, because the soldier said, That’s the way, that’s the way, Mr. Photographer, a sly smile on his face.
It was a bitter-cold morning in that village, but Mr. Culp was drenched in sweat. It rolled out of his hair down his neck. His shirt was soaked and sticking to his back and belly. Calvin didn’t like the way Mr. Culp looked. His lips were a bad bluish color, and he was heaving and panting. Calvin called up to the soldier that Mr. Culp should stop, he was not a young man, but the soldier just pointed the pistol and said, I don’t mean to spend all day here. And he looked around with some apprehension, although no one else was to be seen and even if there was they wouldn’t care. After Sherman’s army had been through a place there was nothing strange about people digging a grave.
As Calvin feared, it was too much for Mr. Culp. Maybe the shame of it contributed something, or maybe he was in a sickly state to begin with, but four feet into the ground this funny look came over him and he clutched his chest and twirled around his shovel as if he wanted to fit himself snugly into the grave he was digging and down he went. Calvin grabbed him and held his head. Culp pointed a finger at Heaven as if he wanted to take a picture of it, and a wild look came into his eyes and he gasped for breath and tried to speak. But then his back arched and he went stiff and gurgled a bit, and right there, in the cold, damp grave, he died in Calvin’s arms.
The crazy soldier just scratched his head. He said to Calvin, Let me have his trousers. The galluses, too. You’ll have to take off his boots first.
With Mr. Culp laid out in long johns in the grave he had dug, Calvin climbed up and shoveled some dirt on his corpse and said nothing aloud but just stood there. Then he and the soldier took up the dead man in the wrong uniform and laid him down in the grave over Mr. Culp.
I’m sorry you got to share these quarters, Will, the soldier had said. But in a time of war you just got to make do.
THERE WERE SEVERAL things on Calvin Harper’s mind as he drove through the ruins of Columbia, stopping here and there to make a photograph. No less than Arly, who was beside him wearing Mr. Culp’s coat and hat and pistol, he wanted to catch up to the Union forces. He would find a way to let the military know there was a madman loose. Maybe some army court-martial would consider the circumstances of Mr. Culp’s death.
But he also felt that he must not leave Columbia before he made as many negatives of the ruined city as his supplies allowed. It was not only that pictures were the photographer’s means of livelihood. Once he moved on, history would know of the city’s disaster only what he had photographed. Time goes on, Mr. Culp often reminded him. Time goes on, things change from moment to moment, and a photo is all that remains of the moment past. Even now, with the air still a smoky haze two days after the fire, folks were out poking through the rubble so as to salvage what they could, load what they found into their handcarts or up on their backs, and move off in respect of their intentions. It was like the storm was over and now they were coming out into the open to size up the damage and see what could be done about it.
There were no horses left in Columbia, no mules, the army had taken everything these people owned, and Calvin was aware from the way folks looked up as he passed that it was the fact of a white man sitting beside him that kept them from appropriating Bert. Without Bert to pull the wagon, there would be no picture-taking. But a black
man taking pictures would not have been tolerated in the first place. The pretense that he, Calvin, was only assisting the white man was necessary if there wasn’t to be trouble where folks were already in no mood. So, endangered as he felt himself to be, he needed this madman as much as the madman seemed to need him, though for what mad reason it was impossible to say.
All told, though, it was a delicate matter making photographs according to his own lights with the madman unable to do anything about it except if he truly lost his patience. Who knew what would happen then? But Calvin decided he was not afraid. As with a deep breath, he drew strength from the situation. In the guise of his servitude he, Calvin Harper, was running things. And the madman pretending to be Mr. Culp, why he wasn’t even as good as an assistant.
FOOD WAS HARD to find, but about two in the afternoon stores of rice and molasses and cured meat were coming in from the country where the army hadn’t foraged, and while Calvin waited on the street Arly was able to get in line with Josiah Culp’s Federal dollars in his pocket, at a market that had set up in a parade ground all gouged out and trodden upon and blackened with the remains of campfires. But this was one of the less devastated parts of town. The bare trees here were a natural, unburned brown. Except for a few old men it was mostly women in line, peering urgently ahead to satisfy themselves that there would still be something to buy when it was their turn. Arly, in gentlemanly fashion, endured with a smile the pushing and shoving of the ladies, while in his heart he was thinking that as a race they lacked the nobility that came so naturally to their men who were away fighting on their behalf.
It was chilly out here this afternoon though the sun shone. He was getting awfully hungry for something besides the dried-out sweet potatoes, which was all that was left in the back of the wagon. Was he in uniform he could have marched right up front there and taken what he wanted without bothering to pay for it. He was eager to load up on provisions and be on his way. The urgency was that he had the plan firmly in his mind, and with God as its deviser it would not do to linger. There is glory ahead for us, he thought, and he touched the pocket where he carried Will’s photo.