I

THE RIGHT WING OF SHERMAN’S ARMY, GENERAL HOWARD’S Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps, marching west from their landing at Beaufort, and the left wing, Slocum’s Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps, following the Savannah River in a northwesterly direction, the secesh generals would not know if it was Augusta they were to defend or Charleston. In fact, Sherman’s target was Columbia, and despite Morrison’s personal resentment of the man, he could not gainsay the genius of his strategy. It was a double-pronged feint, and though by now the secesh knew Sherman for the trickster he was, they could not amass their forces until he declared himself.

But what the Confederacy had by way of recompense was this hellish Carolina swampland and the weather to go with it. The rain poured off Morrison’s hat brim, a curtain of water through which the lighted pine knots men carried to see their way through the bogs were like glimmering stars. Up and down the half-submerged road were the shouts and curses of teamsters, and officers giving commands, and though he was a major with the cockade visible on his bedraggled shoulders, there was no deference to his rank on this night, everyone, enlisted man and officer, too engaged in the struggle to move forward to give a damn for him or his orders.

Morrison led his horse by the reins. Even where the road had been corduroyed, the weight of the wagons pressed the logs into the muck and another layer of rails had to be put down. And more than once he passed teams, one of whose mules had a hoof stuck between the logs, a poor braying creature ready to pull his own leg off. Where a wagon foundered, the entire train was halted and dozens of men were rallied to unhitch the team and empty the wagon of its cargo before they could lift the wheels out of the muck. Morrison found it preferable to wade off-road through the swamp and enjoy the cold mud seeping into his boots. He had letters from Sherman and General Howard to General Joe Mower, who commanded the vanguard division of the wing. But he couldn’t find Mower’s headquarters.

Bearing right, Morrison moved laterally in hopes of reaching another, possibly more navigable road. But swamp turned to stream and stream to brush-clogged marsh, and in the darkness he could not be sure he was moving in a straight line. He could feel brambles tearing at his legs as he waded on through the slop, his horse balking behind him. The brush gave way to cypresses, a thick stand of them, whose snaking roots he could feel, slippery and treacherous, under his feet. I will drown now, he said, but stumbled forward eventually to find footing on the narrow bank of a high-running stream, a flood channel of the Salkehatchie, where he pulled himself up and then his mount after him, the creature shivering and shaking, its legs bleeding from the scratches on its shanks.

Following the bank for some hundred yards, he came upon a company of engineers laying a pontoon bridge across the channel. The engineers had anchored their platform boats and were bridging the boats with cut lumber, and at the near end were laying planks crosswise for footing that still had the house paint on them. This would be another road for the corps when the river was taken. The engineers’ hammering and shouting were lost in the clamor of the rainfall and the unmistakable sound in the distance not of thunder but of field cannon, nighttime in this fourth year of the war no longer an agreed upon intermission between engagements. Morrison looked beyond the stream and saw only more swamp. So up ahead, how far?—a half mile, a mile?—the skirmishers were advanced to the Salkehatchie proper, where on the far shore Reb brigades were lodged behind their earthworks.

Not many more minutes of his search had to pass before Morrison was as weary and miserable as he had ever been. He wondered with some bitterness why he, a major, had been made to serve as courier, except that Sherman had it out for him. When, back in Savannah, he had told the General that Secretary Stanton had arrived, Sherman had said, You’re better at sending than receiving, Morrison, and gave a kind of laugh to go with it. But Morrison had not liked it that even in jest he was being blamed for the news he had brought. He had served honorably and well, and was now paid for it with this wet, cold hell that could kill a man only more slowly than a bullet.

Someone was calling him, but as he looked around he saw no one. Then a chunk of tree limb landed at his feet with a splash and bounced as if it had not fallen but been thrown. He looked up and there, in the branches of a giant elm, he was able gradually to discern several men, some wrapped in blankets. One of them was smoking a pipe with the bowl inverted and the embers, as they glowed, brought the boughs and trunk into dim illumination. Morrison identified himself, shouting up through the rain, and understood that he had found the headquarters staff he had been searching for. In the highest crotch of the tree, standing like a sailor on the prow of a ship, and looking through the night toward the sound of battle, was General Mower, the man whom Sherman’s letters were urging to turn the Salkehatchie resistance without delay. Sherman had planned for a smooth juncture with Slocum’s wing on the high ground at the South Carolina Railroad, near the town of Blackville, and time was of the essence.

Morrison handed the dispatches up to the officer on the lowest limb and was invited to climb up and find a perch. Overweight and not terribly agile, Morrison didn’t even want to try. He slumped down with his back against the tree, his rear end going numb with the cold.

II

RAIN HAVING MADE THE ROAD IMPASSABLE, THE ENtire train was halted. Wrede lit a lamp and, setting his instrument case across his knees, used the time to write letters. To whom? He had mentioned a brother, also a doctor, back in Germany. Emily was uneasy. The rain against the tarpaulin was a loud roar. Through the open flap she could see the mules standing heads bowed in dumb submission. The wagon was atilt to the right, where the wheels had sunk in the wet sand. She could not get comfortable except by lying down on the pile of quilts and duvets accumulated for the use of the wounded. She lay on her side, her legs drawn up, her hands beneath her head so as not to actually have her face touching the rank quilts, some of which were stiff with dried blood.

The time was past when she felt the exhilaration of her adventure. She watched Wrede, who was hunched over his letter oblivious of the world, of the war, and of her. His powers of concentration were unnatural. At such times as this he was established in her mind as a total stranger to whom she was enslaved. How desolate, how lonely she felt. In the excitements of her boldly chosen vagrancy she had not thought about the future. Now it loomed ahead of her as a darkness, as a night of unceasing rain. Dr. Wrede Sartorius was not a normal man. She could not imagine him domiciled. He lived in the present as if there were no future, or in such a state of resolution that when the future came it would find him as he was now, as finished in his soul as he was at this very moment. Nothing fazed him—he had a preternatural calm. He was constantly sending to the Army Department of Medicine papers on surgical procedures he had devised, or improved courses of postoperative treatment he had discovered. He regarded the thick manuals of army medicine as virtually useless, and had a regal disregard of any and all advisories that came down from Corps. He was, finally, a man who needed no one other than himself, either professionally or, God help her, in his personal life. She could not imagine his becoming melancholic or nostalgic or unhappy, or giddy or foolish or anything temporary like that. He was an isolated, self-sufficient being who lived in his own mind, unneedful of anyone else. And, while he had shown her affection and had brought her like a teacher into his interests, she seriously wondered if she were to die in some attack, would he gaze upon her lifeless body as a bereaved lover or would he do an autopsy to see the effect on her tissues and organs of the grape or minié balls that had killed her?

Why am I so resentful? she wondered. But she knew the answer. It came to her as a moment’s internal cringing sensation that made her press her thighs together. It was not as if in her girlhood she’d been a fantasy-ridden romantic destined to be shocked by the reality. She was an educated woman and had read enough to know of the reality that there was a bodily mechanics to love. But she had given herself in devotion. And she had felt only that she had been inhabited.

Yet beforehand he had not been without concern for her. As she lay there undressed, her eyes closed, she felt the weight gone from beside her on the bed. He had made a determination. She heard him open his instrument case. To spare you pain, he said, standing above her, I will do this small procedure. You will feel only a slight sting. And she felt his fingers dilating her, and then it was just as he said and there was no blood to speak of. And of course it was a solicitous and commonsense thing to do, but so of his medical mind as to make her feel more like a patient than a loved one. But then the inhabitation. And at the moment of his crisis she made the mistake of opening her eyes, and in the light of the hearth fire his face was hideous, contorted by a stunned and mindless expression, the eyes frozen in a blind stare that seemed to her an agony of perception as if into a godless universe. And when he made his guttural, choking groan she held him to her, feeling him shudder into her, and holding him not in passion but in concern for him, that he should suffer so, though of course it was not suffering, was it, but only something in contrast to what she felt, which was . . . inhabited.

And since then—was it just a few nights ago?—he had been somewhat remote, seemingly glad to be occupied with preparations for the renewed march, giving his quiet instructions to everyone, including her. And now she felt surely there was no future with this man. She was an encumbrance, a Southern refugee whose only justification was as fill-in nurse for the absent staff he would have preferred. And she had never felt so desolate, not even when her father had died, for it was in her own home, with familiar things around her, and she had not yet realized that the life she had known was over and that in no time at all she would find herself a ruined woman in an army wagon, with the rain like gunfire against the canvas, somewhere in the God-soaked floodplains of South Carolina.

IN THE NEXT wagon back, Pearl studied the sealed letter she had removed from Lieutenant Clarke’s dead hand in Sandersonville. Making up her mind that the letter was addressed to his family with the same last name, she was then able to work out the sound of the letters, except that the “C” at the beginning and the “k” seemed to have the same sound and she didn’t know why there would be two different letters for it. The “e” at the end gave her trouble, too, she couldn’t imagine what that was for. But anyways, she thought, I can read most of the letters in this name, so I can read them if I sees them elsewheres. But even though she held the letter at several different angles in the light of the kerosene lamp, try as she would she could not will herself to understand the rest of the words, there were three more lines of them, and she could not work out what they meant to say.

Mattie Jameson was asleep on the stack of folded stretchers. She was all curled up, with her hands under her chin, she was like a child in the womb. More than once Pearl had seen miscarried children, and that is the posture they all had, the way she was lying now, the wife ma’m. And in all the hard traveling with this army it was as if she was riding on a cloud, sleeping her life away most of the time, even now with the rain making a roar so that you could hardly hear yourself think. And when she was awake and Pearl tried to give her something to eat she wouldn’t do more than bite into a biscuit or take a sip of coffee. And she did not talk, not a word, and looked at Pearl sometimes as if trying to remember her name.

It seemed to Pearl, though she wasn’t sure, not having the opportunity to study the wife ma’m’s face that closely at the plantation, that her hair was grayed at the temples where it was all wheat before. She had it pulled back and string-tied behind the neck, and it made her look like an older woman, though Pearl knew for a fact that she was years younger than the pap. But her face was weary and soft, and there was no light in the skin. The pap was an old man when he passed on, sixty years on him if a day, and the wife ma’m couldn’t be anywheres near that, though she was trying, wordless and grieving as she was, like she had died too and was sleeping all the time to prove it.

When, after he died, Pearl had told her in case she was thinking of going home that Fieldstone was burnt to the ground, that’s when the wife ma’m had gone so quiet, staring into her own self.

Pearl looked around—it seemed too close in the wagon in this moment. She pulled off her tunic and immediately felt the wet wind coming in under the tarpaulin. She thought of the plantation where she had been born and had lived all her life till now, and thought of the sun on her head and the fields she loved. And then she was angry at herself. Thinkin that is not bein wholly free, girl. Not that I be free tendin to this wife ma’m who never paid me no mind, like I am her slave still. Hey, Miz Jameson wife ma’m, she shouted, wake up, wake up! And she leaned over and shook Mattie by the shoulder.

Awake, Mattie blinked, sat up slowly, and held her hands over her throat. She heard the drumming of the rain and felt the chill of her awakening. She pulled her shawl about her shoulders and only then was aware of the child Pearl staring at her.

You up now? Pearl said.

She nodded.

All right then, put you in mind of where you are. You see the cases here, these bottles an such? You are in this medicine wagon here with Porhl, your massah’s natural chile. An if you can’t speak, tell me you know that with a nod of your pore head.

Mattie nodded.

Thas right. An we are with Gen’ral Sherman, an his army gonna do in what’s left of slavholdin. Say you know that.

Mattie nodded.

An it the goodness of some people that they took you along just as you ast ’em. You ’member?

Mattie nodded.

Right. An I know why. You lookin for brudder one and brudder two. Ain’t it so you follow this army to hope it comes on these boys a yourn? Speak up, lady. Ain’t it so?

Yes, Mattie whispered.

Yes. An you will run wif your arms in the sky ’tween the armies an stop the shootin an pluck those boys away an save their skins, ain’t that right?

Yes. Mattie squared her shoulders and folded her hands on her lap. Yes.

Well, you a crazy woman to think so, but you are a mother an thas de way mothers think. It a mother’s craziness, an I s’pose there is worse kinds. But now you must stay awake and be goin to sleep only when it is the time for sleepin. You know why?

Mattie shook her head.

You see my uniform tunic? I am doin nursin for the Colonel-surgeon who tried to save Massah’s life. I can roll bandage, I can give ’em water when they thirsty, the mens, and so on. I am useful to this army that feeds me and takes me along ’cause I got no other home in this world right now. You hear me?

Mattie nodded.

Well, so in the same way you see, wife ma’m, you will make yourself useful to them, it bein a matter of your duty since you are taggin along, ’cause they need every kind woman they can find to tend to these broken mens.

What can I do? Mattie asked, almost in a whisper.

You will ask Miz Thompson next time we make camp an she will have enough for you, you needn’t worry ’bout that. Whatever Porhl can do you can surely do. But there’s one more matter, since I am lookin after you in your weak state and sorrow, an you know what that is?

No.

Well, it’s what you wouldn’t think of for all the time I was a chile in your house. You can teach Porhl to read. Startin here, Pearl said, holding out Clarke’s letter.

Mattie reached for the envelope, and Pearl put it in her hand. Their eyes met.

Now don’t you go cryin on me, Pearl called out, but to no avail. The tears flowed down Mattie Jameson’s cheeks. She was shaking her head and biting her lip, and Pearl, not knowing whether to comfort her or shout at her, was suddenly overtaken by the surge of feeling in herself as, unsummoned, and unwanted, the tears welled from her eyes as well.

III

JOHN JUNIOR AND HIS BROTHER JAMIE COULD SEE IN the openings between the logs the first of the moving shadows far off amid the swamp trees. Then there were more and more after that, and soon in the mist of the first light it was an army of them slogging forward with the water to their armpits and their rifles held high and their shoes and cartridge boxes hung from the tips of their bayonets. Hold your fire, the Lieutenant said, running up and down the line. Hold your fire, he said in a hoarse whisper, as though the Unions, though too far off to shoot at, could hear his every word.

Cavalry had been drawn off to cover the flanks, but there were so many Yanks and only a thousand and a half Rebs to stop them. Oh Lord, Jamie said. He was cold and shivering, his lips were blue, and he was like as not to piss his pants. The brothers had not slept much in the night for the skirmishing going on up and down the river. They were hungry too, having eaten the last of their hardtack the previous day. John Junior, who was a year older, took on the role of military expert for Jamie’s scared sake. Don’t you worry none, he said, these works as good as a fort. They’ll never get up here—we man the bluff, and we got artillery and they ain’t. Can’t set a fieldpiece in swamp.

Moments later John Junior was able to poke his brother in the ribs, for the guns had opened up, the shells whistling overhead and crashing out there in the water, bringing trees down and blowing men into the air. But still they came, some behind floating logs, which they used to steady their rifles as they fired to keep the cannoneers’ heads down. They got their sharpshooters out front, John Junior said.

We’re gon die. I don’t want to die, Jamie said.

Shush, s’posin Daddy was to hear you talk like this.

Well, he ain’t here, is he, so I can say what I please.

Think of somethin that’s pleasurin so’s you don’t act such a coward.

Like what?

I dunno. Somethin. Like back home how we spied on the slavey women when they washin theirsels in the creek.

Yeah.

See ’em naked and they none the wiser.

Yeah.

That Pearl, that white one. I will have to fuck her ’fore some nigger gets to it.

Yeah.

She the prettiest a them.

Yeah.

Little tittles jes a comin out. Not big baloozas like them mammies. Lord, I never seen such big ones as some of ’em have, not even on our momma.

You spied on our momma?

Naw, I jes sayin from outward appearances an all.

You spied on our momma! I’m gon tell her.

Tell her what?

You peeked at our momma naked, John Junior. Oh, boy.

Shut your mouth or I’ll do you in ’fore the Yanks get to it. You can die sooner easily as later.

Jamie thought about this and was quiet. You said they wouldn’t, John Junior.

I was lyin, you snivelin little bastard.

You said—

You ain’t no Jameson, nosir. Lookit them tears—Jesus, he turnin into a girl ’fore my eyes. You is goin to die, you little runt, and me too, so shut your face and be a man about it. Or after you dead the Yanks will fuck your ass.

You lyin!

Nosir. That’s what they do to crybaby boys. You want that, why you jes go on bawlin. Yessir. That’s jes what they’ll do.

THE MAN DOWNSTREAM of Stephen Walsh took a bullet, seemed to throw his rifle away, and lay for a moment floating on his back, his hands clutching at the shoes strung around his neck. Then he was gone. Who was it? Wading to the spot, Walsh felt around, bending his knees and searching in the water with his free hand. Nothing. In this flood-tide swamp in the dim light of the early morning the only sign of the dead man was the reddish water, an oily patch of it slowly eddying and thinning away with the current.

All right, soldier, someone behind him said. Keep moving.

The ranks of men pushed forward through the chest-high swamp. It was a resistant thing with a life of its own, and in Walsh’s mind it was not Union or Confederate but its own nameless kingdom and, as far as he could see as he pressed forward in the kind of plod it demanded, it went on forever. He felt no fear, only the grim despair that had filled his breast from the day he took the three hundred dollars to lay his life on the line. As he had marched across Georgia, burning houses and tearing up railroad tracks, it seemed to him he was fighting an insane war. To see the smiles on the faces of freed slaves coming out to meet the troops was no recompense. He had read in their eyes the angry moral knowledge that cannot be consoled. He did not know if he could have stood the burden of their life. To be lost on earth so, as on an island of godless predation.

Around him the water burst in small vicious snaps. They had artillery, too, the balls coming over with an eerie shriek. He could not help himself—when he heard this sound he turned his back and flinched. But around him men did the same. And then the trees would crack and fall into the water behind them. He heard over the water a round cursing of General Mower as the designer of this fool advance. Goddamn you, Mower, I’m a sitting duck out here! Goddamn you too, Sherman, and goddamn this whole goddamn war! But Walsh knew it was not like the generals to invest in heavy losses. He assumed that this frontal assault was the diversion, and the flanking movement downriver or upriver was the effective action. So that when the secesh position was turned they would abandon their lodgment. I am to trust in God that it will be soon, Walsh thought, and laughed at himself for this uncharacteristic surge of piety. Because the swamp was filling with dead men, some floating by entangled in tree limbs.

As the light filtered through the cypresses, Walsh saw the men as boats. All together, advancing through fire and water and visible only from the waist up, they were an armada gliding forward with a side to side head-dipping motion as they held their rifles aloft. Here and there one would be stopped, like a ship shelled, its rigging a shambles. Walsh was not tall, at a sturdy five seven, and most of the time was concerned to keep his torso above water. But when he waded into a downward slope he was grateful for the increased depth, with only his head and raised arms available for a bullet. When he rose up again, the water pouring from his tunic, he felt he was there for a sharpshooter’s bullet.

Feeling something bumping into his side, he turned and found a detached head, bearded and blue-eyed, its expression one of wounded dignity, and with strings of integument and vein trailing from its neck. For a hideous moment, before he could push it away, Walsh felt it was appealing to him as if, given even this experience, life could seem still to be desirable.

IV

THEY WERE A DAY AND A HALF IN THE HIGH GROUND between the Salkehatchie and Edisto rivers while the army moved on. Wrede’s surgery was one of three set up in the field. Hospital tents held forty of the wounded, but there were nearer eighty needing treatment. Wrede was the only surgeon in the corps who did resections in the field. He was doing one now, a suppurating fractured long leg bone. The accepted view was that resections usually led to postoperative complications. Amputation was a cleaner and more successful procedure with a higher survival percentage. The soldier might lose a limb, but he had his life. Wrede knew this was nonsense—he had seen too many amputees die at the hands of his colleagues. Now, as Emily attended, she became aware of the audience of other surgeons, assistant surgeons, and army nurses who had gathered around the open-air operating table. It was early morning. The sky was a bright blue, the sun glimmered through the treetops and the air was fresh and bracing, but the scene was otherwise grim, with men lying about on their litters calling for water, cursing God, screaming in pain. Yet the doctors had left their patients to observe Wrede Sartorius at work.

He’d incised the leg in two places and tied retractors above and below the infected bone. He applied forceps to the major arteries. Passing the threaded needle under the bone, he brought it around and attached it to a flexible chain handsaw. The marvel was how quickly and decisively he worked. Emily, at the head of the table, watched his hands. They seemed to her creatures with their own intelligence. In only moments, it seemed, Wrede displayed the offending bone section aloft in forceps. The rejoinment and closure were effected to the murmurs of the onlookers, and the leg was lightly bandaged and placed in a box splint. Emily had been holding the chloroform bag over the patient’s nose and mouth. She was now instructed to remove it. Wrede was asked questions. He quietly answered them, though she could tell that he felt it was a waste of his time. They are still using collodion dressings on wounds, he had said to her one day, which almost assures inflammation. I have written papers arguing for light and air as the healing agents, but they do not listen. They do things the way they’ve always done them, because that’s the way they’ve always done them.

Soon enough he was on to the next procedure, and the other surgeons had returned to their work. Emily only then became aware that as many glances had been directed at her as at the operating table. Had she caught one of the doctors with a knowing smile on his face? Or was it more like a smirk? How intolerable this all was.

In the meantime, the service companies had arrived and coffins were unloaded from the quartermaster wagons. The corpses were laid out at the edge of the field in the shade of the trees.

Pearl held Mattie Jameson tightly by the elbow as she led her along the rows of bodies. There were Southern boys there in their tattered grays and Union in their torn and bloody blues. Mattie considered each one, it didn’t matter what the uniform. She looked on them in solemn study. It was as if she were trying to understand death. She would frown and shake her head. Some of the faces were swollen and broken and bloodied beyond all recognition. Others were clear and unmarked and frozen, their teeth bared, as if they had died trying to bite someone. Why should they look like that? Mattie thought. As if death puts us back to animals. Yet my John with his eyes closed died like a human at peace, almost as if he was glad to be dead, his hand folded on his breast and only his nose grown a little longer.

When the two women reached the last body, Mattie began to cry. Pearl didn’t understand. It was a Union dead. Now, wife ma’m, she said. You can see for yourself the brudders ain’t wif these fallen mens. So why are you weepin like some pore mama of a dead boy? You ought to be thankin God your babies an their little army are high-tailin it fast as they can to get outen the way of Gen’ral Sherman.

V

RIGHT IN THE DAMN MIDDLE OF THE BRIDGE THE MARE stopped. Arly threw the reins across her back. Gitup, he shouted, move, goddamn you! She did not respond. Arly stood up to see her better in the darkness. The left front hoof was lifted, she would not put it down.

Behind them the wagon train was halted. He heard the protests going back along the whole bridge and beyond the bank into the forest. The shouting echoed through the cypress trees, and suddenly the air over his head was filled with screechy bats. If there was anything Arly hated, it was bats. Get away, get away, he said, waving his arms wildly and hopping around, his feet drumming on the boards.

Cavalry splashed by on both sides of the bridge. An officer reined up.

What’s the trouble, soldier?

Arly knelt by the mare. ’Pears her leg’s busted, sir.

What’re you carrying? the officer said, pointing to the wagon.

One wounded.

Get him out.

By now teamsters from the wagons just behind had come up to see what the trouble was. Arly lifted the back flap and said, Will, we got to move you. Can you get up? Don’t lift him by the arm, Arly said to the men. That’s what’s the matter with him.

Will could hardly stand. He was holding his bad arm, which seemed to have stopped bleeding. But the whole front of his tunic was wet with his blood.

The mare was unhitched and steadied on the downriver edge of the bridge. The officer tied his mount’s reins to a stanchion, jumped onto the pontoon, jammed his pistol into the mare’s ear, and fired. Her good leg buckled and as she went down she toppled into the water.

Arly put his shoulder under Will’s good arm and held him up that way. Will smelled of his sweat, he was bathed in it.

A good dozen teamsters rocked the ambulance side to side, and with a mighty heave they shoved it into the river as well.

All right, said the officer, let’s get moving.

ARLY AND WILL rode now in a commissary wagon filled with sacks of flour. Can’t get more comfortable than with your back against this, Arly said, punching a sack into shape to suit him like it was a pillow. A whitish haze filled the air.

Where is this, where we going? Will said.

Well, we’re back with Gen’ral Sherman, Arly said. You knew that.

It’s dark, Will said after a moment.

Well sure, it’s nighttime.

I b’lieve I’m dying, Will said.

Aw now, that’s the way you talk with the least little hurt.

No, it don’t hurt no more, Will said, so it must be so.

Arly could hear him breathe.

I’m thirsty.

Shit, Arly said. He crawled to the front of the wagon and negotiated a canteen from the driver.

The water made Will perkier. At least they can’t execute a dead man, he said, and gave a weak chuckle that ended in a cough.

That’s so, Arly said. He was beginning to wonder if Will truly was dying. The boy seemed so much older all of a sudden. Like he had managed to bypass Arly in age and get on to where men were old and wise and giving instructions.

Can you remember Coley’s Mill? Will said.

Say what?

Where I’m from. Coley’s Mill, up by Asheville.

Is that right? You know, I’m from over the Smokies there in Gatlinburg.

More’n a few Kirklands in town, Will said. But ours is the biggest place. You tell them, O.K.?

Who?

My momma and daddy. Be best if you catch Daddy sober. Tell ’em Will fought an died for the C.S. of A. Can you do that for me?

Well, sure, if it comes to that, but it won’t, you know. Besides, if you die how you going to see your sweetheart Miz Thompson and make your case. I mean, when we find them she will be the one to nurse you along, won’t she? So it wouldn’t pay you to die just now and miss her smiling at you and putting her soft hand behind your neck and lifting your head for a drink of good brandy, or, even better, some laudanum or other sop’rific to ease your mind. See as how even I have picked up on the nomenclature? I should consider after all of this to try medical college for myself. I mean, I have always been good with my hands. Except it is prob’ly not God’s plan because it is not a secure enough thought in my mind to be his thought. And it sure ain’t God putting your dying thoughts into your mind. It is some Devil pretender just to make your ride in the wagon a little bumpier. Hell, there ain’t nothing wrong with you that Miz Thompson can’t fix up with a smile.

Will was silent.

I didn’t tell you before, son Will, but though God has given me his signs, he’s always meant ’em for the both of us, as we have been together since the morning they put you into the penitentiary across from me. That was God’s doing too, as you must know. And I swear to you I feel the mystery of his ways beginning to come clearer. Any day now, I b’lieve we will hear what God has meant for you and me to do in this sad war and what his reason was to take us out of Milledgeville and set us to traveling with the wrong army. There is a mighty purpose that we are meant to fulfill. And if you think I am being too high and mighty—I mean, I know yo’re inclined to the skeptical—need I remind you that God’s messengers in the Bible tended not to be of the upper classes, and Moses hisself had even killed a man. So if God now chooses us poor excuses for soldiers, well that’s his way, maybe he thinks if he can redeem us he can redeem everyone. I mean, even you would agree the human race is something of a disappointment to him, ’cepting, of course, such angels as your Miz Thompson and perhaps that bucktooth whore you cuddled with in Savannah. But for the most part God had so much expectations for us and we have not turned out right. We are his chief blunder. I mean, bats are his blunder, and ticks and horseflies and leeches and moles and cottonmouths—they are all his blunders, but the greatest of those is us. So when I tell you that I feel the moment is almost upon us when his intention for us is revealed, I want you to believe me. In fact, I already have some idea of the kind of thing he is thinking. You want to know what it is? Willie? You want to know finally what we may be called upon to do?

When Will didn’t answer, Arly said, You fall asleep, son?

Arly went up front to the driver’s box, where a kerosene lamp was strung from the center tarpaulin pole. I’ll unhook this fer a moment, he said. Just to check on my patient back there.

And it was as he had thought: in the light of the lamp Will’s eyes were closed and his eyelids and cheeks were white from the flour dust sifting through the air, and with that clear, untroubled boyish look on him, almost a smile on his whitened lips, he had to be having some sweet dream, perhaps of Miz Thompson, and of course, being Will, not of loving her up but maybe standing with her in a church before the preacher. And with me, Arly thought, the best man beside him ready with the ring.

VI

AS VANGUARD FOR GENERAL SLOCUM’S LEFT WING Kil Kilpatrick’s riders, composed of cavalry and mounted infantry, some five thousand of them, crossed the Savannah River and made their way north, torching villages as they went. In most places the resistance was minimal. Kilpatrick accumulated treasures on the march until he had his own personal train of wagons filled with booty—silver services, fine bed linens, glassware, bottles of liquor, hampers of wine, as well as baked goods, cured meats, eggs, jams, dried fruits and roasted nuts, coffee beans, and other delicacies for the palate.

Cantering into the village of Allendale one afternoon, he smelled something delicious and raised his hand to halt the column behind him. An aroma of cooking meat seemed to be coming from a house set back from the street in a park of live oaks. The house was empty, but he found in the outhouse kitchens a half-darkie in a chef’s hat preparing dinner for some slaves. The slaves, sitting at table when he strode in, jumped up in alarm. What is this? Kilpatrick said, peering into a great pot where there simmered a stew with chunks of meat hanging off the bone, greens and turnips, cloves of garlic, and spices of such subtlety as to propose to him the civilized joys he had forfeited by coming to the defense of his country. Le lapin, said the chef, a French Creole who gave his name as Jean-Pierre. Goddamn, Kilpatrick said, slurping some of the stew from a ladle. You all, he said, turning to the frightened slaves, you all are free. You, he said to the chef, raise your right hand. And right then and there he inducted the bewildered Jean-Pierre into the army, conferring upon him the rank of Sergeant of the Mess. With all the rights and privileges thereof, Kilpatrick said. I’ll have a plate of that now, Pierre, and then we’ll be on our way.

The owners having fled, Kilpatrick commandeered a handsome landau from their stable and the bay stallions that went with it.

FROM TOWN TO town it was a new young black woman Kilpatrick took to ride with him each morning and share his bed at night. He liked the best house in town for his billet, and in the house the best bedroom with the softest mattress, and the downiest pillows and warmest blankets, some of which he would take with him upon breaking camp. In his entourage also was a nephew of his, Buster, an obnoxious ten-year-old towhead despised by the staff officers. The boy lorded it over everyone, a fact that Kilpatrick tolerated with amusement. He doted on the boy and gave him reading lessons when he had a spare moment.

At the Little Salkehatchie River crossing at Morris Ford, two miles from the town of Barnwell, Kilpatrick’s column ran into a force of three hundred Reb cavalry. Kilpatrick ordered up a battery of light guns. Under cover of the barrage his mounted infantry waded the boggy river, shooting straight ahead with their repeater rifles. The secesh troops held their works until their flanks were turned, whereupon they vanished into the woods.

When the Union riders reached Barnwell, they found it undefended. Only women and children were in residence, and they were advised by the kinder officers to leave town as fast as they could. The troops were turned loose. Ragingly hungry, they ransacked homes, riding down fences, pillaging what they could find, looting the pantries, sitting themselves down in the kitchens and demanding dinner from black folks, some of whom were delighted to oblige, while others were frightened into obedience. Kilpatrick chose for his headquarters Barnwell’s one hotel. Hands behind his hunched back, he gazed from a window as plumes of smoke began to appear over the town. Watch what happens, Buster, he said to his nephew. Not many boys will ever see a sight like this—it’s better than a July 4th. Sure enough, flames were soon rising over the town as the volcanic hearts of black smoke. Thin tongues of fire shot skyward as the lovely late afternoon turned to dusk. Buster was so enthralled that, while Uncle was enjoying the spectacle, he got up on a chair, took a candle from its sconce, and went about setting fire to the window draperies. One of the officers shouted, and in another minute Kilpatrick’s staff were cursing and stomping out the flames as the General stood there laughing. Not just yet, Busterino, he said, we’ve got some celebrating to do first.

While the town burned around them, Kilpatrick ordered up some musicians and black dancing partners and gave his staff a Jean-Pierre–catered dinner that went on into the night. Buster was sent off to bed but at one point in the early morning he was roused from his sleep by the shrieks of a woman. All he could see by the firelight coming through the window was the rising and falling white backside of his uncle Kil in the next bed. Uncle grunting and the spurs on his boots jingling and the bed creaking and the woman, whoever she was, yelping—all of it together was like a horse and rider at the gallop, and Buster, wide awake now, knew this was the getting-women-naked part of the evening that always happened after he was put to bed. But he had never seen it this up close before.

Then after a while everything stopped and it was as quiet as it had been noisy and Uncle Kil jumped up from the bed and pulled up his trousers by the galluses. Seeing the boy awake he grinned, his teeth ashine in the flickering light. That, Buster, was nothing but your uncle Kil showing you what it means to be a man. And soon as that pecker of yours puts out some hair, he’ll see to it you learn the lesson for yourself.

At dawn Kilpatrick emerged from the hotel to gaze over a gutted village. The streets were razed, only smoking piles of lumber and standing chimney stacks to indicate the Barnwell that was. His troops, though clearly worse for wear, rode at a slow gait past him, their brigade commanders saluting him as he stood half dressed on the hotel porch. Kilpatrick yawned. He called over his adjutant and, using the man’s back as a desk, wrote a quick note to Sherman, who was riding with General Howard’s right wing not a half day’s march to the east. I have renamed Barnwell Burnwell, Kilpatrick wrote, and sent the note off by courier.

Unlike the majority of Sherman’s troops and officers, Kilpatrick did not have a particular animus for the state of South Carolina. He fought with a hellish impunity wherever he was. He was a reckless tactician and had from the beginning of the war gained a reputation as a dangerous fool, with a death rate in his commands far above that of other generals. Behind his back they called him Kil-Cavalry. Yet there was about this short, somewhat malformed officer the charismatic audacity of a classic warrior. Men followed him almost in spite of themselves, and women found him irresistible. A few inches shorter and he would have been dwarfish in his proportions, with his wide-shouldered torso and his rounded back. When he rode, he gave the illusion of being top-heavy and about to slip out of his saddle. He was something of a dandy even in the field, perhaps to make up for his ungainly shape and his facial features, which were rude and emblematic of his combative nature. His wide-set eyes gave no indication of a thoughtful sensibility, his nose, hooked and fleshy, pointed to the wide mouth of a sensualist, and everything was framed in scraggly red burnsides that disappeared under a broad-brimmed hat worn at a rakish tilt.

He was far from the kind of officer Major Morrison would respect, who rode into his rest camp that afternoon with a summons from General Sherman. Without ceremony Kilpatrick grabbed the note from Morrison’s hand, and in short order he and his personal guard of six horse soldiers were off at a canter.

Ordinarily in this situation Morrison would have expected a call to ride with them. But he was too tired to take umbrage. In fact he felt ill. When he’d dismounted to report, his legs had nearly gone out from under him. In any event he knew what Kilpatrick would be told: Sherman was marching north with the joined wings to Columbia. Kilpatrick would demonstrate south, toward Augusta, in the manner of a vanguard.

Kilpatrick’s forces were arrayed on a road that ran beside the tracks of the Charleston & Augusta line. As far as Morrison could see in either direction, details were at work prying up the rails and laying them in bonfires made from the ties. He thought of this as an inverse industrial process. The rails, when red-hot, were removed from the fire and bowed and twisted. It was a relaxing duty for the cavalry, and the men’s voices came through to him as burble of camaraderie. This put him in uncomfortable mind of his self-knowledge. Morrison had never had comrades. Even at the Point he had never been able to establish himself as one of a band of men. He was always off at the edge of things, tolerated, perhaps, but not included. There was something about him that he’d long ago resigned himself to—an inwardness that had left him lonely throughout his life and, at his worst moments, petulant.

Pillars of smoke rose in a line above the track, smaller and smaller into the distance—almost, he thought, like the puffs of a working locomotive. On the other side of the track was an open field of some two hundred yards, and then a forest of scrub oak and pine. To his back, a rolling farmland with dried-out, yellowed cornhusks lying withered in the winter sun. In either direction, Morrison knew, pickets were posted for any signs of Reb movement.

He had started out in the morning grateful for the sunny sky but as he gazed into it now it seemed to him a shimmering malevolence. He found a field chair before headquarters tent and, still holding his mount’s reins, sat down heavily. He didn’t know what was wrong but he felt awful. He unbuttoned his tunic, which seemed to him too tight. There was some sort of repetitive rasping in his ears, which he slowly realized was the sound of his own breathing. Feverish, he dozed, with the sounds and sights of the camp transmuted into the voices of his parents and the room he had lived in as a child. He awoke and almost instantly closed his eyes again. This happened over and over. He would awake with a start, look around with a high degree of clarity, seeing his horse nibbling the grass, the officers’ black servants going about their tasks, everything quite sanely observed, and in another moment he was back in the fantasia of feverish illusions—people barking at him in a language he couldn’t understand, rearing horses with the horns of unicorns, and that awful buzzing sound of a sawmill that was his own breath. I am fully aware of what is going on, he said to himself, I am ill with a fever. At the same time, he couldn’t seem to shake himself awake.

YOU’LL COME WITH US! These were the words that resounded within Morrison as an order given over and over again. You’ll come with us! Who had said that? He was aware of riding close quarters in a phalanx of horsemen, his feet in the stirrups pressed momentarily into the flanks of other mounts. He couldn’t see clearly—the morning sun was directly in his eyes. Yet he had unsheathed his officer’s sword and held it low along his leg, and with the reins wound twice in his left hand. He was not a natural horseman and rode bent low over the pommel. The road was sodden, and gobs of mud flew onto his face and affixed themselves like leeches. But then, unaccountably, the terrain went dry and the dust from the riders ahead rose as a cloud and he felt his mouth coated with dust, he was breathing through his mouth, spitting and wheezing and tasting the grit of the land. Yet the effect was to darken the sunlight, and he could see up ahead the roofs of a town.

And then they were riding down a street and all at once the purposive charge was in disarray, with horses rearing and men shouting and horses and riders going down around him. Morrison could not ride forward or turn. The hideous Rebel shriek was in his ears. In this roiling entanglement of blue and gray, men were pulling one another from their mounts. His eyes closed, Morrison raised his saber and swung it at what or who he didn’t know. He felt it cleave flesh and bone. Why didn’t these people understand he was not well? Someone had an arm around his neck. Morrison held tightly to the reins and felt himself going down backward. As he tried, fitfully, to wield his saber in a chopping motion over his shoulder, it flew out of his hands. His eyes opened and he was transfixed by the hoofs of his horse flailing the air. Then its head filled his vision, terror in its rolling eyes, a scream issuing from its open jaws. He caught a glimpse of the sun in the moment before he hit the ground. He felt his leg crack, and was gasping in pain at the moment his spine snapped under the weight of his screaming horse and the breath was pounded out of him.

VII

WHEN THEY CAME OVER THE BRIDGE AND INTO THE village, Arly got down from the wagon and pulled Will out by the arms and ducked under him and stood up slowly till he had the boy slung over one shoulder.

The smoke from the burned houses and barns hung ghostly low over the road. Hell, Willie, Arly said, you wouldn’t want to breathe this air, it ain’t nothing but smoke and cinder. Like to burn your throat away.

Arly stepped to the side of the road and let the wagon go on.

Whatever was left of the town was dimmed in a blue haze on this cold dry morning. Women, some with babies in arms, watched in silence as the wagons passed. A dreariness of creaking wheels and the stolidness of a rolling army following its fighting troops was all there was to see. The train was like the back end of a parade, the band long passed. The lowing of the cattle as the army drovers led them across the bridge and through the town was the music now.

Arly turned in a circle until he saw it well enough through the haze. It was at the east end of the town, past some razed houses to where the land rose. It was a low hump of land with the stones poking up any ways but plumb. There’s nothing to burn in a graveyard, is there, Will? he said. You can knock down a few stones is about the worst you can do.

He set off with his burden, oblivious to the stares of the people he passed. He wore the hated uniform, but they were too stunned to do much of anything besides stare. Some didn’t even do that, just glancing up as he passed and going back to their thoughts as they kicked through their rubble.

Will was thin enough in his life, but a set of dead bones was another matter when folded over your back. And he was beginning to put out a smell. Arly didn’t know what he would do about a burial. He had no spade, he was tired and hungrier than he could remember, and he shouldn’t let the army get too far ahead of him. But if he didn’t bury Will, who would?

Arly’s mind was secured with a feeling of sorrowful righteousness. I won’t deny I took you outen that hospital right there in Savannah where a doctor might have kept you from bleeding to death, he said to the dead boy slung over his shoulder. But how likely was it we wouldn’t shortly be back in two cells awaiting only for the coffins to arrive before they shot us for spies or some other damn thing?

A house gutted but for the sagging porch attracted his eye for the divan out in the front yard. Arly kicked open the wrought-iron gate, stumbled forward, and dropped the body on the divan. He propped it into a sitting position and sat down beside it, taking some moments to recover his breath. He found the stub of a cigar in his breast pocket and put a match to it.

I made a calculated wartime decision, Will, he said. But who can know for sure that God wasn’t behind it? We are his instruments, alive or dead, and I expect your risen spirit is listening to me now up by his side there and knows better than I what will be.

As if in answer, the body toppled sideways against Arly and the head settled in his neck. Sighing, Arly put his arm around it. And the two of them sat that way in the quiet of the burned air under the blackened trees, neither the dead man nor the living inclined to move. Arly didn’t doze, exactly, but his eyes did glaze over, and the cigar dropped out of his fingers onto the grass. It was in this somnambulist state that he observed a wagon drawn by one mule pull up and a man in a brown coat and derby, and a nigger to help him, establish themselves right there outside the gate in the business of photography. Out from their wagon they pulled a big wooden tripod and set that up. Then they dragged a camera box out and affixed that to the tripod. And then, while the man in the derby busied himself picking out a lens and screwing it onto the front of the box and aiming the camera and looking at the sky and aiming the camera again and looking at the sky again, the nigger was running back and forth to the wagon and bringing out boxes with stacks of metal plates. Oh yes, they were getting ready to make a photograph, they were. Arly had come awake, but he didn’t move or open his eyes wider than he needed to see what was going on. The wagon had a black tent mounted on the bed and steps leading up the back, and the sideboard had printed on it Josiah Culp, U.S. Photographer. In smaller letters it said Carte de Visites. Stereographs.

Arly waited till this Josiah Culp put his head into the black hood behind the camera, and then he waved.

Don’t move! came the muffled shout, so Arly got to his feet and allowed Will’s trunk to drop sideways to the divan.

Josiah Culp came out of his black shroud, his arms raised in despair. I had it, I had it! Why did you move? Sit back down there, if you please, it is perfect, it’s the image I’ve been looking for.

How do you know what you been looking for if you only just seen it? Arly said.

You know it when you see it. It leaps out at you. It speaks to you. Please, he said, pointing to the divan.

He was a portly man in a regular suit and vest and topcoat thrown open over his belly. He was so fussed about his missed photograph that he only now noticed Will’s odd folded position on the divan, with his feet still on the ground. What is the matter with your comrade?

Nothing he frets over, being dead.

He’s dead? You hear that, Calvin? The other one is dead. Yes, I see the stains on his tunic. Of course. That’s even better. Sit back down there with your dead comrade, sir, and put your arm around him as before and look at the camera. The light this morning is not as good as I’d like it, but if you will hold still for a few moments I am going to make you famous.

I don’t suppose you can keep a black man, mule, and equipage like this without you sell your wares, Arly said, walking out to the street.

Here, what are you doing? Josiah Culp said. Arly was peering into the back of the wagon. It looked something like an army-hospital wagon in there, with its cabinets and boxes of supplies. Cooking utensils were hanging from a length of twine strung widthwise. And did he smell provisions? He climbed inside and lifted a tarpaulin and found a peck of sweet potatoes and bags of sugar and coffee and a dead chicken plucked of its feathers.

Get down from there, sir!

All sorts of things. He found a folded tent and a pick and shovel and a pile of uniform tunics, both blue and gray. He found rolled-up shades with backgrounds painted on them. He unrolled one: it showed a painted pond with ducks and painted trees such as had never been seen on the face of the earth.

But what came to Arly as a revelation was a photo—the top one in a stack of glass photos in a crate. It was mounted on black cloth and framed in silver. It showed Union army officers posing in front of their headquarters tent. He took it to the light. The caption read: General Sherman and His Staff, Georgia 1864. Sherman had to be the one who was seated. He was staring straight ahead at the camera.

Yes, Lord, Arly whispered. It has come to me now.

He replaced the picture, rummaged around another minute, stuffed each of his pockets with a sweet potato, and jumped to the ground. He was encouraged to see Calvin, the young black man, smiling appreciatively.

You a freed slave, Calvin? You sure got yourself a nice suit and hat.

Yessuh. I am learning the photography trade from Mr. Culp.

I suppose he profits handsome from the generals wanting photos of theirselves.

Not just the officers, Culp said. I photograph enlisted men as well. Every man wants his picture taken. It ameliorates the pain of separation for the families, for the loved ones, when they have a portrait of their soldier.

Well, you got a good thing going, all right, Arly said. ’Meliorating.

A carte de visite is most reasonable. But profit is only the means to an end. I am a photographer licensed by the United States Army, Culp said. Why do you suppose that is? Because the government recognizes that for the first time in history war will be recorded for posterity. I am making a pictorial record of this terrible conflict, sir. That is why I am here. That is my contribution. I portray the great march of General Sherman for future generations.

If the money don’t mean that much to you, why not pay me if a photo of me is what you want?

Culp laughed, showing a mouth of chipped teeth. Now I’ve heard everything!

Leastwise you won’t have to pay him, Arly said, gesturing to the divan.

You are fortunate that I’m willing to make your picture without remuneration. I agree to give you a copy. I will agree to that, but the rights in the photo will be mine. Now, please, while the light holds sit yourself down as before, with your arm around the dead man.

Arly withdrew from inside his tunic the loaded pistol he had found in the photographer’s wagon. He held it out at arm’s length, as if to feel its heft, and looked down the barrel at Josiah Culp. I am in mind of a different picture, he said.

VIII

SHERMAN SAT ON A LOG, WAITING FOR MEN FROM Howard’s Fifteenth Corps to lay a pontoon bridge across the Broad River. It was a clear cold bright morning, somewhat breezy. Not a mile to the north lay his prize, Columbia, the capital of the secessionist treason spread out on the plains like a plum cake ready to be eaten, a woman ready to be taken. Oh Lord, he did remember Columbia, where, as a young officer, he’d known several families. Some lovely ladies lived there. And one in particular, years younger, not much more than a child, a lithe little beanpole but with a glance that made his knees tremble. Would she be here still? Ellen, that was her name—the same as my dear Mrs. Sherman. Ellen Taylor. A married woman by now, a widow perhaps, no longer lithe and with a bevy of children pulling at her skirts.

He could see the grand statehouse the city fathers had been intending, a handsome half-finished classical structure in granite. Very appropriate to a community that thought so well of itself. With what a sense of security they must have kept abreast of the war up North. To be the author of it and yet safe from it. He could see the ruins of the railroad depot from which the smoke still rose. The streets were abustle with a population only too aware of the blue army gathering in its immensity to the south. The streets were crawling.

Taking up his his binoculars, he saw Confederate riders on the roads going north out of town. Negroes were clustered at the depot, plundering the cars of sacks of grain and God knows what else he could use. Calling over his adjutant, he ordered a section of Howard’s twenty-pounders to lob a few shells to disperse the looters. And a few over there for good measure, he said, looking again at the statehouse, which flew the Confederate flag.

An hour later he was marching with his staff at the head of the corps on the road to the city. The wind had picked up and some of the mounts were skittish with it, losing their gait, lifting their nostrils to the air. And then, all at once, it seemed he was in the city’s market square, the elderly mayor coming out of the crowd on foot to greet him and assure him that there would be no acts of resistance from the citizens of Columbia. Sherman, seeing the quiet crowd of onlookers, raised his voice in answer. And for our part, Mr. Mayor, he said, looking out at them all, let me assure you that we intend no injury to your citizens or their property. We will linger here only to relieve you of those matériels and facilities of which you no longer have need.

At that moment Sherman smelled smoke and, standing in his stirrups and looking out over the heads of the people, saw down a side street of commercial buildings that a stacked row of cotton bales was on fire. One of his generals quickly gave orders and a company of troops was dispatched to put out the flames. In an unexpected and touching amity, they were soon working side by side with members of the city’s fire brigade.

Later, as Sherman had found a house to his liking several squares from the statehouse and set himself a headquarters there, he dictated orders for the destruction of the arsenal and all other military, railroad, and manufacturing facilities, as well as those public buildings not of municipal but Confederate government. He then readied himself graciously to receive the inevitable petitioners. But the first applicant at his door, a nun in a flowing black habit, aroused in him an uncharacteristic defensiveness. She was Sister Ann Marie, the abbess of a convent school for girls, and she wanted his authorization for a guard. You needn’t worry, he said. You’ll be quite all right. If that is so, the abbess said, then you can have no objection to putting it in writing. The Army of the United States does not war on convents, Sherman replied, and made to escort the Sister to the door. She did not move. In exasperation, Sherman dashed off a note of authorization and thrust it into her hands. With her departure he found himself once again in the state of unease that he had come to feel in cities. But he felt a misgiving now that was quite specific. What was it? Something in the room was whistling, and he realized it was the wind blowing in through the old, ill-fitting windows. It sounded to him something like the keenings of women. He stared at the sheer curtains curling upon themselves in their fluting, and twisting to and fro like a dance of dervishes.

STEPHEN WALSH HAD seen the burning bales of cotton, stacks of them bound for shipment and extending the length of a block. His company, marching on an adjoining street, fell out to spell the troops on fire brigade, manning the hoses and the hand pumps under the direction of the local fire captain.

After thirty minutes the fire was under control, and soon there was no sign of it but for the blackened humps of the ruined bales and spirals of smoke blowing away in the breeze. Fires die, like living things, Stephen thought. The animation is fervent and the death dramatic. I am done, defeated, you are looking at my death, the smoke seemed to say.

The troops resumed their march, striding off to the applause of the townspeople.

But it had smoldered in the heart of the bales, that fire, keeping to itself till the night came down and the wind came up. It had kept its own counsel, biding its time, and when the propitious moment came, out it flamed, spewing into the night sky and tossing its tufted torches into the pollinating wind.

Who had first lit a match to those bales? Walsh thought most likely the retreating Rebs. If they could not have their cotton, neither would Sherman. So it had always been the cotton, the cotton to build the South and now, given the stupidity of these people, the cotton to burn it down.

For Columbia was an inferno, whole streets aflame, home after home collapsing thunderously into itself, its wood sap hissing and cracking like rifle fire. The sky, too, seemed to have caught fire.

Walsh, assigned to guard the gates of a convent school, realized the blaze was advancing. Flaming clods of cotton had lodged in the garden trees. It was no longer safe here. He threw open the doors. Hurry, Sister, he shouted. The girls were in chapel, kneeling at their rosary. Up up, Walsh said, we’ve got to get them out of here. The abbess’s name was Sister Ann Marie. She glared at him and, after what he thought was an unnecessary moment of deliberation, clapped her hands and got the students lined up in the front hall, each beside a satchel on the floor. So she had known, and had prepared.

Come along, come along, Walsh shouted.

Somehow, despite the infernal roar of the blazing city, the Sister’s unforced voice was clearly heard: We will not run but walk in place behind this good soldier. We will not cry. We will look only at the ground as we walk. And the Lord God will protect us.

And so Walsh led them out of the convent, the attending nuns on either side of the column and Sister Ann Marie bringing up the rear. They were a procession of incongruous order, twenty-five or thirty children hemmed in by their teachers and seeming, in their silent humility, as if on an ordinary school excursion.

WALSH WAS ANTICLERICAL and a resolute skeptic, but that was of no matter to his lieutenant. I want a couple of Papists, the Lieutenant had said when the order came down. Walsh, you and Brasil, step out.

Brasil, a cheerful gawky fellow with a receding chin and a perpetual glint in his eyes, was delighted. They’ve called me a Papist since the day I joined the damned 102nd, so who in the name of sweet Jesus is deservin of a night on the town if not Bobby Brasil. And after five minutes at the gate he wished Walsh a good evening and was gone.

The convent girls had been at their evensong, but outside only drifts of it could be heard for the wind blowing through the trees. It seemed to Stephen Walsh, too, that the wind was rushing the darkness along, so quickly was the light going. He had thought he smelled smoke, and looking up he saw a moment’s red flash in the sky. This will be a night, Walsh said to himself.

But it had come on as he would not have dreamed, and as he led his charges through the streets he realized he held his rifle at the ready. The world was remade, everything become something else—the sky a shimmering bronze vault, billows of thick black smoke the clouds. He turned a corner and found the street blocked by flaming timbers. The Sister came to his side. Do you know where you are taking us? she said. I was told, if it came to that, to the buildings out there on the hill, Walsh said, pointing. Yes, the South Carolina College, she said. We will go around this way.

And for a few moments all was composure again as they detoured along a clear street, until two of Walsh’s compatriots appeared out of a door, jugs of whiskey in their hands. Seeing the procession and finding it to their liking, they staggered alongside, loudly considering the possible merits of the taller girls. The Sister’s glare escaped them, and as the students quickened their pace so did they, laughing and suggesting their own merits. Wearers of his own uniform, they did not in the first moments appear as more than an embarrassment to Walsh. But some of the girls were crying and pushing up against one another in their haste to get away, and Walsh, turning, saw that one of the drunks had opened his trousers and exposed himself. Didn’t your Jesus have one of these? the drunk shouted. Walsh stood aside and urged the nuns to move along past him as he stepped into the path of the two men. Sister Ann Marie loomed up, her face an imperious demand for action. Do not watch this, Sister, Walsh muttered. Move on, move on. The two men were laughing and swaying in front of Walsh, one of them holding out a jug and swinging it, either as an offering or as a threat, Walsh didn’t take the time to consider. He kicked out at the man’s parts and, as the other came at him, managed a sideswiping bayonet slash to his hand. In a moment the two of them were on the ground, howling, and the jugs were smashed and the liquor splashing down a trough in the cobblestone had caught fire and ran like a fuse in the direction of the fleeing women.

It was the trailing edge of Sister’s habit that Walsh saw alit. She was turning in circles, trying to see behind her. He ran to her, knelt, and clapped at the cloth and crumpled it in his hands. But it was difficult, she had panicked, not wanting to be touched. You’re making it worse, Walsh shouted. Finally she stood still and closed her eyes and held her crucifix tightly so as to endure a man’s hands on her person. He was allowed to smother the flames, which had gone up above her ankles. He rubbed the charred cloth between his hands till every spark was gone.

Are you all right, Sister?

I am, thank you, she said, not looking at him, and as the students arranged themselves in their column she placed herself amid them. Please, let us go on.

Rounding a corner moments later, they all had to stop and cower on the sidewalk as cavalry rode by. But the troopers, their faces coppered in the light of the flames, were joyous. They controlled their panicked mounts with whoops and hollers. Some carried torches, the flames blown back by the wind, and as they rode down the street Walsh saw one torch fly up and crash through a window.

At this moment Walsh realized he could not comfortably hold his rifle.

THE MAGNITUDE OF the fire had caught General Sherman by surprise. He rushed half dressed out of his chosen headquarters, a manse on the suburban edge of the city, and several minutes later his aide, Colonel Teack, found him some blocks away, where he had joined a group of firefighters and was not giving orders but taking them like any enlisted man. Sir, this is not proper duty for the General of the Armies, Teack shouted, and actually touched Sherman’s arm. Sherman was breathing heavily, and there was clearly on his soot-covered face a moment in which he did not recognize Teack. Then he nodded and allowed himself to be led back from the fire. A canteen was brought to him, and he bent over and poured the water over his head. A towel was proffered by his man, Moses Brown, and after he dried his face and dropped the towel to the ground, but still hatless and in his shirtsleeves, he said, Teack, can you tell me what in hell is going on? And he wandered off, Teack following.

It was hazardous going. Flaming walls fell flat across the roadways. Unidentifiable, seemingly immaterial pieces of cotton fire floated in the heated air. His troops were everywhere drunk. Some stood in front of burning houses cheering, others lurched along, arms linked, looking to Sherman like a mockery of the soldierly bond. It was all in hideous accord, the urban inferno and the moral dismantlement of his army. These veterans of so many campaigns, who had marched with him hundreds of miles, fought stoutly with nothing less than honor, overcoming every conceivable obstacle that nature and the Rebs could put in their way—they were not soldiers now, they were demons laughing at the sight of entire families standing stunned in the street while their houses burned.

In a park square under flaming trees, Sherman gazed on a grand dreamlike ball, soldiers and nigger women dancing to the music of a regimental band, or at least the members of it who were still capable of playing an instrument. Some old darkie was up in the band shell leading them. The General was speechless. He became aware of his own bedraggled costume and could think only of brushing himself off, tucking in his shirt, squaring his shoulders.

Down another street he was for the moment relieved to see soldiers working to put out a fire, but turning the corner he found some troops using their bayonets to puncture the fire hoses and drive off the firemen. They were not besotted, either, these men.

Nobody recognized Sherman, nor did he interfere with anything he saw, possibly understanding that, in this state of anarchy, challenges to his authority might arise. He looked at Teack and Teack nodded, knowing, as all officers did, that rank must not be invoked when it is not likely to be heeded.

Where is Major Morrison? Sherman said, looking around.

Sir, you remember. He was killed at Aiken.

Oh yes, right, right.

Teack, at six and a half feet, towered over Sherman, and when he stood in attendance tended to stoop, as a parent to a child. He had twice turned down a brigade command and the promotion that went with it, such a proprietary responsibility did he feel to protect Sherman and ensure his renown. His self-assigned guardianship he had assumed back in the bad days of Sherman’s bouts of irresolution and hysteria after Bull Run. Teack had seen him at his worst, curled up on the ground in his tent, his knuckles in his teeth and terrible whimpering sounds coming from him. The General had asked to be relieved of command and withdrew from the field for a period of rest and recuperation at home in Ohio.

Teack was a laconic Westerner, and where Sherman was careless of his dress, he, by contrast, and as if to counterbalance him, was something of a stickler for deportment. On the march he wore the cavalryman’s gloves and boots, a blocked hat and a saber. He tended daily to his long drooping mustaches, a man who believed his vanity was a strength. In truth, while he admired Sherman for his grand strategies and tactical brilliance, he was secretly scornful of the Shermanic temperament he had undertaken to protect from itself. He felt there was something of a woman in the General’s volatile moods. You never knew what to expect from an ego that could preen with self-satisfaction or slink like a whipped dog according to its own internal weather. Teack was sure that William Tecumseh Sherman was something of a genius and he derived a pleasurable energy in close company with that quality of mind. But as a steadfast professional soldier who had seen everything and was surprised by nothing, he also felt superior to Sherman. Now, for instance, the General mumbled, Christ, what are we doing in this war but consuming ourselves, and Teack was embarrassed for the man.

They were standing in front of a stone mansion that seemed oddly indifferent to the yellow light in its windows and the flames leaping out of its chimneys. Well, Sherman said, I suppose I will need a brigade of Slocum’s to come in from bivouac and bring this city under control. These drunken troops—he waved his arm vaguely. They have to be punished. I will know which units they are from and who their commanders are.

Was that an order, or was the man just thinking out loud? Teack couldn’t tell.

They stood looking at the burning mansion. You know, Colonel, Sherman said, when I was posted here maybe twenty years ago, I fell in love with a girl who lived in this very house. Of course it was not to be, but hers were the softest lips I have ever kissed.

In another moment Sherman was wandering off the way he had come, his hands held behind his back.

Teack let him go.

AFTER THE GENERAL had turned a corner, Colonel Teack withdrew a flask from his tunic and took a long swig. The heat of the burning house was like the summer sun on his face. It felt good.

It seemed to him an exemplary justice come to this state that had led the South to war. Earlier in the day he had seen a company of Union soldiers who had been among the hundreds imprisoned right here in the city’s insane asylum. The condition they were in appalled him. Filthy, foul-smelling, their skin scabrous, they were hollow-eyed creatures shambling to parade in a pathetic imitation of soldiering. You saw the structures of them through the skin, the bony residue of their half-human life, and you didn’t want to look at them. The capital city of the Confederacy had treated these soldiers not as prisoners of war but as dogs in a cage. General Sherman had seen these men and had wept and now all he could think of was the Southern belles he had kissed.

He had sworn to wreak terror, hadn’t he? His orders were being followed. All these riotous, drunken arsonists, these rapers and looters—here were some, coming out of this fine house now, their arms filled with sacks of silver plate, loops of pearl and watches on fobs hanging from their hands—what were they but men who needed a night of freedom from this South-made war that had disrupted their lives and threatened still to take them? Now they stopped a moment to throw some torches in the windows. A soldier glanced at Teack to see his reaction and, when none was forthcoming, smiled and snapped a salute.

If these acts of vandalism are performed as vengeance, Teack thought, why, that is an efficiency of which an army should be proud.

What had brought on the almost universal drunkenness was the pillaging of a distillery on River Street. The Colonel found this out by following the trail back as men staggered by him with buckets of whiskey in their arms. It was a large brick building with loading platforms on which soldiers lay passed out. Inside was a bit livelier. The men had a nigger girl down on the floor and were taking their turns on her. They were pulling another one down from a ladder that she was trying to climb, kicking and screaming. Teack refilled his flask from a butt of bourbon and went on his way.

AT THE MAIN building of South Carolina College, three regimental surgeons had set up their dispensaries. Had they been ten they could not have met the demand. It was difficult keeping order in the entrance hall as civilians pushed against one another and cried out for help. These were whites from the city, people with burns or sprained or broken limbs. But several Union soldiers had been killed, and many more wounded, in an explosion. Sherman had ordered Columbia’s store of powder and shells to be thrown into the river, and something had gone wrong. The wounds of these men were horrible and occupied the surgeons for much of the afternoon.

Two nurses, army sergeants from the Medical Department, were newly assigned to Wrede Sartorius and they had taken over in the surgery, leaving Emily Thompson and Pearl to mop the bloodied floors, sack and remove the medical detritus, wash the towels, and carry in the bandages and splints and dispense the medicines. Emily thought it better that Mattie Jameson be stationed in the supply room where she could be spared the worst.

After the emergency had been dealt with, civilian patients were led into Wrede Sartorius’s examining room. The injuries he tended were of no great interest to him. For the most part the townsfolk were in states of shock and confusion. He prescribed cups of brandy, or laudanum in weak solution. He was made irritable by this seemingly endless procession of frightened people. It was left to Pearl and Emily to wrap them in army blankets, administer their dosages, and escort them to an upstairs floor where they could rest on cots set up in the classrooms.

AS THE FIRES raged through the evening, more and more people arrived at the gates. Blacks and whites were at first put in separate rooms to await a doctor. But the college was refuge, and by midnight both blacks and whites were camping out in the hallways.

Additional buildings had to be commandeered for the emergency, and more medical units set up there. Stephen Walsh could see from a hall window that two of the college buildings had caught fire. There were figures on the roofs beating at the flames with blankets. He saw them silhouetted against the red sky. What hell was this? Surely not the composed Hell of the priests and nuns. Their Hell was comforting. It meant there was a Heaven. This hell, my hell, is without ascription. It is life when it can no longer tolerate itself.

WALSH’S LEFT HAND was swathed in bandages. He felt that it was appended to a cocoon. Or perhaps a wasp nest. The dressing on his right hand left the fingers free. Only the palm was burned, though the hand stung as badly as the other. He felt defenseless in these bindings. He wanted to tear them off with his teeth. In the morning, no matter what, he would rid himself of them and return to his company.

He hadn’t heard what she had said, that nurse, such was the bedlam of wailing and crying. But very fine-looking she was, and he had dipped his head and squinted to indicate that he was looking at her lips for no other reason than to read them.

In this gymnasium turned into a waiting area, there were more patients than there were litters for them, and people lay on the hardwood floor with folded blankets for pillows or sat, like himself, with their backs to the wall.

But she had been so gentle, leading him off to a side room as if he were her special charge. She had held his hands by the wrists in a pail of cold water and then applied the unguent. Bending to her task she invoked the power of the private act. Her light brown hair fell in ringlets on either side of her face and somehow the war was a very distant thing. Her effect on him was stunning. Marching with Sherman he had thought nothing approaching human intimacy would ever again be possible.

You got a name? she had said.

Stephen Walsh.

She looked at him. Her eyes were hazel, with lights of green. In their gaze he felt his soul was being studied. I am Nurse Jameson, she said, as if daring him to deny it.

How do you do.

Fine. But you ought to know better’n to play wiv fire, Stephen, she said. And then she had laughed.

HE WAS STILL thinking about her. The elisions of her speech, the unschooled and unselfconscious way she moved and held herself, suggested the racial truth that Nurse Jameson was a black girl, freed, and enlisted for the Union.

He was not shocked. He’d been months on the march and the fact of fair-skinned Negroes no longer surprised him. In this strange country down here, after generations of its hideous ways, slaves were no longer simply black, they were degrees of white. Yes, he thought, if the South were to prevail, theoretically there could be a time when whiteness alone would not guarantee the identity of a free man. Anyone might be indentured and shackled and sold on an auction block, the color black having been a temporary expedient, the idea of a slave class itself being the underlying premise.

But there was something more elusive about this Miss Jameson. She had been talking to him in her soft lilt of a voice, teasing him a bit, but glancing at him with eyes that for just an instant would glaze over in bewilderment. And the seriousness with which she had gone about treating his burned hands, her concentration—the slow, careful attention she brought to the problem—suggested to him a person who had only recently been given independent responsibilities.

Now he was shocked as he found himself considering if, despite her nurse’s rank, this dazzling girl was not that far removed from childhood.

He wandered down the crowded hallway, hoping he might catch sight of her again.

IN THE EARLY hours of the morning, Emily Thompson was called to assist when a black woman was brought in unconscious on a stretcher. The woman’s garments were half torn off and she had bruises on her chest and arms. One eye was swollen shut. Her face was battered. She was lifted to the table and what remained of her clothing was removed. After examination, Wrede decided first to repair a vesico-vaginal fistula, and directed the nurses to position her on her knees with her head and shoulders lowered.

Emily had to both hold up a lantern and pass to Sartorius the instruments he called for. She was made queasy by the awful procedure. Wrede’s hands were bloody, his eyes unblinking in their concentration. She looked for some recognizable emotion from him. Was it to be expressed only in the work of his hands? Must it be deduced? God knows what horrors this girl has endured. Emily could not bear to look. But not even the most private regions of the human body were beyond this doctor’s blunt investigation. Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede’s science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered.

The operation concluded, one of the sergeants said, Uh-oh. The woman was expiring. Terrible sounds came from her throat. They held her, and she stiffened and slumped in their arms.

Wrede shook his head and, with a gesture indicating that they should remove the body, threw off his apron and, with barely a glance at Emily, left the room. His departure, having given her the clear impression that death was a state that did not interest him, left her openmouthed with shock.

Emily fled to an unoccupied alcove window on the top floor. She sat there to regain her composure. She told herself the man was overburdened, a brilliant doctor working week after week in the field. His nerves were strained—how could they not be? The responsibilities of every day on the march were bound to affect anyone. But another thought occurred to her that she would attribute to her own exhaustion, to the hours of unremitting work and the horror of a city burning. It was that Wrede Sartorius, the man to whom she had given herself, was not a doctor. He was a magus bent on tampering with the created universe.

Outside, lit by the red night sky, a crowd of the newly homeless filled the front yard. Army ambulances couldn’t get through. Emily saw women in the throng who were so familiar in appearance and deportment as to make her think she knew them. The way they carried themselves, their carriage, bespoke family. They held their children pressed to their sides and stood quietly waiting amid the restiveness around them. They were women of her class, the same whom she had lived among all her life. And they had lost everything.

My God, she whispered. Why am I not out there with them?

THE STATE ASYLUM had caught fire and now some of the inmates were here in the college. They were frightened. They wandered through the halls, with their long hair and filthy clothes. They didn’t know where they were. They moaned and screamed. The surgeons sedated those whom the keepers could hold down. Troops were brought in to restore order.

After the maniacs were herded into the basement, their cries could be heard on the floors above. Patients waiting for treatment looked to the army doctors and nurses for some assurance that there were still civilized controls in the world, that all was not fire and madness and death.

Mattie Jameson was folding towels in the supply room where it was relatively quiet behind a door at the end of a short corridor. In the way of someone performing a simple and repetitious task, she was thinking of something else. With her head at a slight tilt and a smile on her face, she was at Fieldstone on a winter evening early in her marriage when John had no urgent matters to keep him away and they sat in the coziness of her sewing room with the drapes pulled against the chilly night, a fire in the hearth, and each of them in a chair reading. And they didn’t even have to speak, so natural was their intimacy. All at once she was still a young woman with a firmness of flesh and a secret pride in John’s hunger for her body. Though she had borne the two boys, she was still almost as lissome as she had been as a bride. She wanted nothing more from life than to please this forceful man, whom she imagined in her giddier states of mind to have descended from lions.

Mattie’s grief for her lost life and fears for her boys’ fate had devolved into a blessed state of dreaminess, so that when, finally, the agitation in the building caught her attention, it seemed to her something she could tend to as she had tended to her babies when they cried out in their sleep.

EMILY THOMPSON, RETURNING to the main floor with her mind made up, and rehearsing what she must say to Wrede Sartorius, was immediately diverted by the sight of Mattie walking among the patients and crouching before them and touching their foreheads and speaking to them softly in a manner to soothe them. Emily stood back in some astonishment.

She had heard from Pearl something of the life on the Jameson plantation and, like Pearl, she had become accustomed to looking out for this woman, who invariably said, every time she saw Emily, Are you not Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville? What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson’s mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable.

How fascinating this was. At one camp, Emily had asked Wrede to examine Mattie. He did, and discussed the condition afterward. This is a dementia, he had said. Yet if you were to see into her brain I am sure you would find no pathology. Some mental diseases, you do the autopsy and diagram the lesions. There are crystallized growths. Suppurating tumors. You see changes of color, soft yellow deposits, narrow canyons of eaten-away matter. But with some diseases there is no sign at all—the brain is in physical health.

Emily said, Then it’s not the brain but her mind that’s afflicted?

The mind is the work of the brain. It is not something in itself.

Then an affliction of the soul, perhaps.

Wrede had looked at her, regretting her remark. The soul? A poetic fancy, it has no basis in fact, he said, as if he shouldn’t have had to tell her.

As Emily watched her, Mattie, having talked and smiled her way down a corridor lined with patients, veered into a room and disappeared from sight. What was she doing? Emily, in pursuit, found her in a classroom fitted out as a studio. The gaslights here were dimmed. Patients sat disconsolately in the few chairs, their heads bowed. One wall was mirrored. An upright piano stood in a corner and that was what had caught Mattie’s eye. An elderly man, seated on the piano stool and reading his Bible, sensed her standing behind him. He swiveled on the stool and found her gazing at the piano with a rapturous expression on her face. And so he rose.

Mattie sat down and stared at the keyboard in that way of pianists who see it as a universe. Then she placed her fingers on the keys and began to play. It was a Chopin waltz, and though she played it hesitantly, shyly, she did so secure in the illusion that she was home at her own Bösendorfer grand.

Emily didn’t know who the composer was, but what she heard was a lilting theme of great refinement. The music evoked in her breast intimations of a civil life. It was almost a shock. Then, as Mattie Jameson grew more confident and the music became bolder and more expansive, Emily was brought back to her own resolve. She was looking at her reflection as lit in the soft light of the gas lamps. Do we have no souls? What is this I hear if not a soul given as music? I am hearing a soul, she said to herself. And immediately she ran off to gather her belongings.

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.

In the meantime, he considered the possibilities of bedding this or that lady, though with mostly sorrowful judgments that they were an unappetizing lot, dreary and haggard, their faces swollen up from their tears, some of them with snot-nosed little creatures at their sides whining and pulling on their skirts. But still he smiled, turning this way and that as the line moved slowly forward, to see who was behind him as well as in front—maybe to spot one with a little flesh on her like it was nothing to be ashamed of, or a profusion of auburn tresses like that Ruby back in Savannah.

It was during these ruminations that he spied Emily Thompson. Hey, Will, he muttered. Look there. Is that your Nurse Thompson? Or am I seeing things?

If it was her, she wasn’t a nurse in blue no more but a lady in black with no coat and her hair parted in the middle and pulled tight down over her ears. She was coming along toward him and towing a child’s play wagon by its rope, leaning into the task because in the wagon, as far as he could see, was a good amount of provender: a sack or two of meal, poultry still in its feathers, foodstuffs put up in jars. When he saw two small boy helpers pushing the wagon along with their outstretched arms, he decided after all it couldn’t be Nurse Thompson. But, not to take any chances, he pressed the derby firmly on his head to hide his red ringlets by which she might remember him, and pulled his coat collar up around his stubble.

She passed right by him without even a glance, the sun on her face showing how worn she looked with fine crow’s-feet from the corners of her eyes and tear streaks dried black on her cheeks and her lips pressing her mouth into a thin line.

Arly had two thoughts at this point. The first was that it definitely wasn’t Nurse Thompson. The second was that he never thought she was that pretty anyways.

He looked at the long line ahead of him, and back again at Emily Thompson as she left the square and crossed the street, and he made a calculation. Moments later he was up beside Calvin on the wagon.

I don’t see any vittles, Calvin said.

You will, mister. Just git this dumb-ass mule and go where I tell you.

Arly had been inspired to satisfy two appetites in one fell swoop. Aloud he said, Being as bodily hungers are no concern to you anymore, you won’t care if I test her out like you should have done when you had the chance.

Say what?

I’m not talking to you, Calvin. There she is, around that corner.

She had turned in to the spacious yard of a manse that had seen some fire. The front was scorched, the roof shingles half torn away, and tree vines out front hanging black and limp like dead snakes.

Calvin brought the wagon to a stop by the front gate. Emily was at the foot of the porch steps, and Arly was about to leap down and make his approach, thinking it didn’t matter if she recognized him or not, since this wasn’t the army no more and there was nothing she could do about it, when a black woman of some girth opened the door and was followed out by at least a half-dozen children. Then the door swung open again and even more children came out, till there must have been twenty or thirty of them crowding around and gazing at what Emily Thompson had brought from the market.

That there’s a hell of a lot of children, Arly said. Damn. What am I supposed to do with such a hell of a lot of children?

He watched as some of them came down the steps, each one taking something—a chicken, a goose, a jar, a sorghum crock—and marching it into the house. The sacks of rice were carried off by the black woman.

These were awful solemn, strange children. They didn’t make any noise.

Emily stood with one hand to her forehead and the other at her waist. This seemed to Arly a most attractive gesture, suggesting resignation or despair or submission to what fate had brought her, or was presently to bring her, if he could think of how to go about it. But while he was thus bemused it was Calvin who had got down from the box and dragged the big camera and tripod from the wagon. What was the damned nigger doing?

Arly watched as Calvin went up to the woman, spoke to her for a minute, and then backed away and set up the camera maybe twenty feet from where she stood. Arly thought it was time to take command. He strode into the yard with the assured gait of a master photographer, the flaps of his Josiah Culp coat floating up behind him.

What in goddamn hell are you up to, Calvin? he whispered. At the same time, he smiled at Emily Thompson and tipped his hat, though not enough to give her a good look at him.

I’m doing what I do, which is to see things, Calvin said. I see this woman and these orphan chiddren.

Is that what she said this is, a damn orphanage?

What else could it be, if you have the sense to look with your own two eyes?

You being sassy, Calvin? I won’t even bother burying you like I was kind enough to bury your Mr. Culp.

You can go ahead and do what you want, Calvin said. But I judge twenty seconds in this light. And he slammed the plate carrier into the camera.

While Calvin busied himself now, arranging the subjects the way he wanted them, Arly, to maintain his dignity, put his head under the black hood and pretended to be adjusting the lens. But from there in the darkness he could study Emily Thompson in privacy. She was a figure on glass. She was looking straight at him, her arms around the children at her sides. Behind her on the porch steps rose more ranks of orphans, standing stiffly according to Calvin’s instructions. You must stand perfectly still, Calvin said in a loud voice. Like soldiers at attention. And up at the back was the black woman, with one of the meal sacks on her shoulders. That, too, was Calvin’s idea.

But the sight of Emily was what held Arly’s attention. An unaccountable feeling rose in him that, had he been able to understand it, he would have recognized as compassion. He was disturbed to see, miniaturized on the glass, a woman looking into his eyes so as to negate all his operative calculations of self-interest. She was distraught, and for a moment, before he knew to wipe the image from his mind, she evoked in him a reflection of himself stupidly leering at her from under the black hood.

All right, Mr. Culp, Calvin called. They are ready for exposure!

And Arly felt that she was staring back at him as if she knew exactly who he was. Take your photograph, Emily seemed to be saying. Take us as we are. We are looking at you. Take it!

HAD HE SAID anything but what he said, had I been given the chance to change my mind, had he told me how much I was needed, had he tried to convince me that there was some attestable humanity in all of this, I would have stayed. I would have continued with him. Two A.M.? Not an hour at which calm and rational decisions are likely to be made, he said. His watch in his hand and this—Emily in the doorway and dressed in the black mourning she had worn the night she rode from her home, at her feet her portmanteau—this, like everything else subject to diagnosis. I was overtired, possibly hysterical, and acting rashly. What was to be done? A sedative? Brandy? A caress? The pained, wondering look in those widened exquisitely ice-blue eyes. Had he neglected me? I wanted to touch my hair, arrange my dress. I felt ugly and grown old. On his tunic were the darker stains of Union blood. He’d been making notes. You must not reduce life to its sentiments, Emily. I have just seen a man with a spike protruding from his skull. Imagine! Propelled by a bursting fire of some sort, an explosion, with such force as to drive into the brain. And yet the patient smiles, he converses, he has all his faculties. Except the one. He remembers nothing, not even his name. You must tell me what that means. It means he is fortunate, I said. A smile. No, he is quite unfortunate. It means we know something we didn’t know before. The doctor still teaching. What was the use? Dear Lord, what was the use? Independent of my state of mind, my own brain’s faculty of observation judged the new beard a success: it was a strong black manly beard, very handsome. Yet when he approached me and put his hands on my arms I was repelled. Please, I said as I removed myself from his grasp. Of course, I knew I was going from something to nothing. I knew what comes of principled feeling. It is a cold, dark life, the life of principled feeling. It is my brother Foster’s life in the grave. But I wanted to go home, if it was still there, and to walk the rooms and remember what the Thompsons had been, and reread the books and hold again the things I held dear, and live alone and wait there for that army of which this army on the march is just the fanfare. I had not yet seen the orphan asylum. I had not seen the children alone but for the black woman. I wanted to go home and sit and wait. I would say goodbye to dear Pearl. I would admit to Mattie Jameson for the last time that I was indeed Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville. I do not reduce life to its sentiments, Dr. Sartorius. I enlarge life to its sentiments. I cannot stand this march any longer. I cannot forgive what has been done here in the name of warfare. I don’t know how you can abide it, how you can condone it. I do not condone it, he said. Yet you are part of it, you belong to it, and so you are complicit. You are the aspect of them by which they persuade themselves they are civilized. His face flushed with anger. I knew I was saying something terribly unfair. I wanted to destroy my feelings for him. I wanted to destroy any affection or regard he might have for me so that he would not stop me from going. Yet I wanted him to stop me.

Dear God, please help me, even now, if he were to come back and seek me out, I would run to him. I would.