Tim Bowling - The Tinsmith

As the darkness continued to lift, Anson Baird, an assistant surgeon in the Union Army, knelt in a shallow, broad hollow off a rutted dirt road. Uneasily, he unpacked his rolled muslin bandages and small glass bottles of chloroform and whisky, but no matter what tasks he concentrated on, he found it hard to leave the dream world of the night entirely behind.

It had been as black a night as any he’d ever known. At some point in the early hours of the morning, in a steady, dripping rain, the crack of a picket’s rifle had forced him to climb stiffly out of his bedroll and peer into the darkness. But he had seen nothing except the bundled black forms of the soldiers sleeping—or trying to sleep—nearest to him. In fact, the night was so dark that Anson could barely recall the terrain—a bucolic valley of limestone ledges, the Potomac River to the west, a winding creek to the east, a long and dusty turnpike running away to the south, past several farms and a small, square, whitewashed church. Ordinary enough, except for the two great armies bivouacked less than a mile apart with only that dusty turnpike running between them.

Anson shuddered. After a year’s volunteer service, during which he’d experienced the brutal realities of several battles and hundreds of operations, he was no longer simply a sleepy country doctor, fond of the Georgics and prone to fanciful thoughts. And yet, now, he could imagine that turnpike stretched taut in the dawn air, like a dew-dripping thread with two massive spiders poised at either end to advance their terrible appetites toward one another. The startling, grotesque image properly belonged to the vague dream world of broken sleep, not to a real night on the real earth where a man, if not for the danger of being shot, could walk out across a rolling pasture to an orchard, pluck a ripe apple or peach from a bough, bite down, and taste the tang of juice on his tongue.

A wave of homesickness washed over him—for his quiet little practice and his solitary bachelor ways that a year’s military service had almost reduced to phantasms, memories that some other man had once lived as sensual experience. Almost. For Anson still held in his palms the smooth curves of the small mahogany globe his late father had given him upon Anson’s earning the two-year medical certificate from Haverford College, he still breathed in the wet fur of the Labrador retrievers that always shared his parents’ home, each successive dog named Fetch because his father sought always some foil against mortality, and, finally, he still saw the glorious, broken-cloud spill of apple blossom along the deeply grooved lane he had walked so often as a boy to visit his grandparents.

Family. History. The simple comfort of such continuance. For what other reason should a man leave his home to bloody his hands and trouble his senses in the service of his country?

The last of the darkness had almost dissolved, and now Anson could see more clearly. Stretching away along both sides of the hollow, the deep columns of men prepared for battle. Many soldiers used the fronts of their uniforms to wipe the heavy dew off their muskets, while others adjusted their knapsacks, putting the canteen and haversack well behind, to give free access to the cartridge box. Closer to him, Anson watched a skinny private named Orson chew furiously on a piece of hardtack. Other men smoked. Behind the troops, horses whinnied continuously and the mules employed to haul the artillery wagons brayed just as often. The animals doubtless wanted their morning feed, but Anson suspected they wouldn’t get it. The sight of mounted orderlies galloping along the lines with orders for their regiments confirmed the imminence of battle.

With a sigh, Anson stood and tightened the flannel band around his waist. It didn’t help his nerves that he was still stricken with the common plague of the Army of the Potomac—what the soldiers called “a case of the shits.” Ever since the swamps and miasmas of the Virginia fighting in the spring, he had been forced to minister to his own intestinal sufferings. But no matter how large the doses of calomel or how many opium pills he swallowed, no matter how much the flannel band fought off the infecting cold, he rarely knew any relief. A dozen times a day he had to bolt for the nearest ditch, the cramps almost crippling him in his hunched progress. It hardly inspired faith among the similarly plagued to see their surgeon, a man of thirty-five years, old enough to have fathered many of them, caught in the ignominious throes of the malady. But then, Anson knew what most of the soldiers thought of medical men: “quacks” was a mild epithet, and “butchers” a more common one.

He turned and saw his orderly wringing his hands, as if to drain a sponge. Even in this dimness, Anson could tell the young man’s lips were trembling.

“It will be all right, Felix,” he whispered, leaning close. “The worst is the waiting.”

The orderly did not turn. “No. It isn’t.”

To Anson, such a small slap of truth felt like a hard blow, for he had not expected it. Fear, and any kind of battle experience, made all platitudes of comfort banal—he supposed even as simple a boy as Felix understood as much. Anson chose to settle into the safest place: himself.

“Laudo, laudas, laudat, laudamus, laudatis, laudant.”

He had begun to call up his Latin during the long hours of surgery following his first battle. The simple memory work helped keep him awake, and, besides, the classical age possessed a rare calm—its violence, ennobled by its poets, somehow put this War of Rebellion into a more comfortable perspective.

Sharp cracks of musketry sounded somewhere to the west. Now in the grey air, the patchy ground fog broke at the soldiers’ legs. Some of the men pointed to the sky ahead of them. Anson looked up. Not far beyond the southern edge of the woodlot, a thick river of coal-black smoke rolled straight heavenward, ominous in its motion; it seemed almost like a living creature. The rebels had likely set some farmhouse or barn on fire for tactical purposes. Anson dropped his eyes to the woodlot, a few rods ahead of the troops. Beyond that colourful stand of oak, hickory, and beech—a stand no more than a hundred yards in length—lay a gentle, bucolic landscape of head-high corn fields, low pasture fences of stone and Virginia rail, and several farmhouses and barns nestled against abundant orchards. And less than a mile away to the south, if all the rumours were accurate, waited tens of thousands of rebels.

An officer barked orders. The musicians’ brass and drums shivered and rattled in preparation. All at once the pearl sky flared and ripped. Shells crashed to the earth like cord upon cord of wood being unloaded. The motion was sea swells. The soldiers shifted, foot to foot, their taut faces already drained of colour. Anson watched one heavily bearded man open the case of a cameo locket, whisper into it, then snap it shut with an almost fierce resolution. But his movements, and all others, were weirdly silent now. The men rippled slightly, like grass underwater. Some sloughed off their knapsacks entirely, and in doing so seemed tiny, even more vulnerable. How many lead balls might those knapsacks have deflected or slowed to a less deadly impact? Anson shuddered and made to turn away from the line.