By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  Mr. Pinkerton? She tapped her pencil against her lips, flipped back through her notebook. Tell me about the balloon battle, she said. Tell me about Malvern Hill.

  Malvern Hill.

  She gave him a soft, sympathetic look. If you can, Mr. Pinkerton. I know it was a long time ago.

  Fifty years.

  Yes.

  A steward in his pressed whites came to the door, glanced in, went on his way. William studied the columnist there in the silvering light, deciding something. Margaret’s ghostly double. A faint scent of salt air and whitewash reached him, the tang of oil rubbed into the millwork. What did he remember? Fifty years ago someone, somewhere, had been singing a low hymn. There had been crying in the twilight. Hogs feeding on the dead all night as the wounded wept and called for water. Then the skies opening in the early dawn, the rain coming down, him wading hip-deep through the grass and his trousers cold and soaking.

  There had been boys, huddled at the mouths of tents.

  Terrible eyes.

  He told her, It wouldn’t stop raining. Wheat was in the shock, oats ready for harvest, corn waist-high. We’d been retreating back up the peninsula all week. They call it the Seven Days Battles now but that isn’t accurate. At the time it just felt like we were running. We called it the Infernal Week. We didn’t know where anyone was. It seemed half the time we were just afraid of falling behind the Confederate lines. We kept hearing they were coming up and coming up but we didn’t see much of them. But we’d pass wounded on the side of the road, boys with their feet shot off, men with their arms in slings. So we knew someone somewhere was fighting. Malvern Hill was the last of it. After that the Confederates fell back.

  You were assigned to the Balloon Corps?

  William frowned. No. Well, during the battle, yes. I’d been a despatch rider all week but because of my light weight I ended up in the balloon. We went up to try to get a sense of what was going on. We had a direct line by telegraph with the General’s headquarters and we sent them our observations but they didn’t help much. I think we helped the howitzers locate their targets some. The heavy Parrott guns looked all wrong to us. But our batteries had the high ground, wide sweeping fields of fire. It was nearly a perfect day of killing. He went quiet for a moment, then said, The Hill was bisected by a long Quaker road. There were two streams down below where the forest broke and these funnelled the Confederate forces into a narrow assault. It was only just a mile wide or so. It made for a slaughter.

  She shivered. I think I’d be terrified to go up in a balloon.

  Scared the tar out of me too.

  What happened to your balloon when it broke loose?

  When it what?

  Broke loose. Didn’t your balloon break loose? Wasn’t there a free flight over the Confederate positions during the battle?

  No.

  There wasn’t a free flight?

  No.

  She studied him but did not say anything for a moment. Glanced at her notebook, pale brow furrowing. It must have been a very confusing time, she said.

  Not that confusing.

  I hope the war in France isn’t as terrible. For our boys over there, I mean.

  William smoothed the blanket on his knee, his big hands gnarled but still strong. He said, The war for the Union cast a long shadow. I’d guess maybe every war does. But used to be you’d meet a man who’d fought in it and there was an understanding between you.

  Mm.

  I don’t know. I think when a man comes back from a war the rest of his life is already written. Whatever happens. It’s all a long descent from that place. Most of us are glad to be leaving it. Some of us don’t ever really get to. It doesn’t much matter. You live with it.

  He saw in his mind’s eye two boots standing upright in a thick stew of mud. The leg bones sticking from the tops where the body had been sheared away. He heard again the heavy slucking noise as the corpses were rolled from the muck.

  There were things that happened in that time, he said slowly. Things that never made sense then and never made sense afterwards. My father never got over some of it. Maybe he never cared to. I know I never did care to dwell on it.

  My grandfather disappeared at Shiloh, she said after a moment. There’s a grave for him back in Kansas but no one’s in it. My grandmother never gave up hope that he would come back someday. Just walk up to the door and knock on it. When the railroad came to buy out her house she refused. She didn’t want to leave, in case he couldn’t find her.

  There was always talk of deserters, William said. It happened.

  She smiled. The O’Malleys down the street from us knew a family whose husband returned from the war six years after the surrender. They had all of them given him up for dead. I think my grandmother thought about that often.

  Well.

  She died at Shiloh too, my father used to say.

  A lot of boys died and weren’t ever found. Sometimes there just wasn’t—

  She leaned forward. Yes?

  It’s nothing.

  Please, she said. Go on.

  He paused and then he said, Sometimes there just wasn’t enough left of a person to collect up and bury. On the peninsula the torpedoes were the worst of it. The Confederates used to bury cannon shells using a friction timer under the roads. You’d step on them and be ripped in half.

  Awful.

  But it was the exploding shot that would obliterate a man. There’d be nothing left of him. Just a cloud of blood. He paused, looked at her. I’m sorry, he said. You spend a lifetime not talking about it and then start in on a young lady like yourself.

  Don’t be, she said. I’ve heard worse. Is that what happened to Mr. Spaar?

  Who?

  Ignatius Spaar.

  William smiled vaguely, waited.

  The balloonist. You were with him during the campaign? His body was never found.

  A shake of his grizzled head. I’m sorry, he said. I never heard of the man.

  She peered down at her notes in confusion. You flew with him, sir. You stated as much in an interview with the New York Sun in eighteen seventy-three. You said—

  I know the article. It was a fabrication.

  A fabrication?

  The man who wrote it was fired.

  The columnist adjusted her hair behind one ear. You know the article but you’ve never heard of the man?

  His face hardened. He said, I’d say somebody somewhere got the facts wrong, and the confusion got written down instead of the truth.

  I don’t understand, Mr. Pinkerton. Are you saying he didn’t exist?

  William cleared his throat, he glanced impatiently at his pocket watch.

  Mr. Pinkerton?

  I’m saying the man is a ghost, Miss. You can write that down in your little book.

  Of course his father did not die. They stumbled up Malvern Hill in the settling twilight and filed past the Union pickets quiet and grim and no one stopped them. It was the last day of June eighteen hundred and sixty-two. They moved past the cannons upturned on their wheels and glaring sphinx-like through the gloom as if to challenge any who would pass and they wended their slow way through the campfires burning low and miserable in the damp. Malvern House was dark with only a few candles burning in the windows and as they approached a sentry waved them back and warned them off and they found their way to a nearby tent and laid William’s father out for the night. Spaar had already slipped away in search of his aeronauts. In the morning William and Ben rose and took William’s father up to the porch of Malvern House and William stood with his hand on his bare head feeling the heat beginning to rise out of the ground and he watched his father shiver in his blanket there with his eyes yet closed. Ben’s great bulk creaking there in the chair. There were ninety thousand Federals in that camp and by noon of that day all were in the lines. William knew Lee would be coming up fast and that an assault must soon begin and he felt sick at the sight of his father and went out to find Ignatius Spaar in the hope he might be of some use.
/>   Spaar found him. William, he called. How’s the Major?

  William tipped his cap, squinted. You find your balloons yet?

  The aeronaut looked dishevelled, tired, a sheen on his waxen skin where the sweat stood out. His blue cap was stained with a pale dust. He looked like a snake oil salesman down on his luck and fierce. Don’t you worry, lad, he said. He’ll recover. I reckon we’re in a strong position here. The rebels won’t get close to him.

  William nodded.

  Spaar was leading him down towards a copse of trees where an older man stood examining the sky and this man palmed his kepi from his head and rubbed it at the nape of his neck and watched them approach. A small man, lean as a rope and looking just as strong, long Gaulish moustaches sweeping down from his chin, his skin baked to leather as if he’d been nailed for weeks to a fence in the sun. William liked the look of him at once.

  Good lord, the man muttered. This bloody heat.

  I was told the corps’s disbanded, Spaar said as he approached. We out of iron shavings?

  Shoot. Folk do like to talk.

  It ain’t true?

  William’s shirt was plastered to his back and he could feel the sweat trickling down his ribs.

  Not hardly. Intrepid’s near to ready. How’s Thaddeus?

  Still sick.

  The fever?

  Spaar ran a hand over his mouth, nodded. No telegraph yet, I see.

  The older man shrugged. Whole crew got eaten up by the reserves. We had to abandon the poles back at Gaines’s Mill along with a load of shavings. That’s what your folk are talking about, I’d wager. But we’ve got plenty of iron back at Harrison’s Landing.

  Spaar turned to William. This is Clovis Lowe, he said. Keeps folks in line around here.

  Some, Clovis grunted. You’re the new floater?

  The what?

  I haven’t told him yet, said Spaar.

  Ah.

  What did he call me?

  You think he’s ready? Clovis asked.

  William stared suspiciously at the two of them. Ready for what?

  He followed Spaar’s gaze across the field towards a rocky stream, a war balloon filling under the trees there, and even as he watched a wind caught the balloon and it twisted and rocked dangerously and there were men shouting and running and then it righted itself like a buoy in a current and its envelope continued to expand.

  The hell with that, he said. I’m not going up in that.

  Spaar looked at him and grinned a ruined grin.

  It had been christened Intrepid and stood as tall as a five-storey building with a gas envelope of thirty-two thousand cubic feet. Its wicker basket had been reinforced to the weight of five grown men and could carry a telegraph operator two miles into the air. The Confederates feared it more than a Federal battery and had launched sniper assaults by night and sabotage attempts by day in their efforts to burn the thing to scrap. Still it hovered like a dark globe of silence above the battlefields in its infernal machinations and the soldiers would lift their eyes skyward and see it in all its wrongness and feel the hand of dread come upon them as if it were an omen and not built by the hands of men. William had felt it himself on days while the batteries boomed into smoke and men lay dying in the corn and he stood now close to it in wonder and watched Spaar set a hand upon its webbing.

  The net lifted and lifted, trailing over the ground like a thing alive, a jellyfish of gas. William watched it sway at its tether. He glanced uneasily at the corps men working the tubes, holding the cables fast, smoothing out the canvas underlay as the balloon filled and filled. Six men with heavy brooms were sweeping the site clear of debris. Two enormous wooden gas generators on wheels with nozzles and thick tubes attached sprawled across the grass to a small central box attended by a Negro in shirt sleeves and from there the gas poured along a third tube into the envelope itself.

  Spaar drew him forward, past the hulking sentinels set at watch with rifles at the ready. They walked down through the long grass to the balloon.

  I can’t go up in that, Mr. Spaar.

  Spaar laughed. The basket was four feet in length and two in width and had been painted in brilliant red and white stripes. White stars lined the rim. He let his fingers crawl across its edge.

  I mean it, sir. I’m no good with heights.

  Spaar held his hand on the basket. The rivers of scars across the knuckles, the weird waxen colouring of the skin. I know what you’re afraid of, he said. You think it’ll be like standing at the edge of a bridge or a cliff. It’s nothing like that. You’ll see.

  There was a strange odour to the envelope, a brownish whiff of gas in the air. Sweat ran down William’s ribs.

  I can’t do this, sir, he said.

  You can. You’re half as heavy as anyone here. I need someone light. I need to get altitude fast.

  William was shaking his head.

  Listen, lad. The reason you get shaky at the edge of a high place is because your centre of gravity is below you. You lean out and you feel like it’s pulling you down. An aerostat is nothing like that. Someone called something to him from near the generators and Spaar looked back at the balloon and nodded and then he stepped back and studied William. In an aerostat, he said, your centre of gravity is above you. When you lean out, the pull on you is to swing you back under the envelope. Your body understands instinctively. I never heard of a man getting sick from the height.

  All I’m saying is these men better not stand under the basket.

  Well. They got hats on.

  And he grinned.

  The man Clovis came over with one hand in his greasy hair and he nodded at the two men. There’s no part of me that likes this, Ignatius.

  I know.

  Thaddeus will spit in his coffee when he hears you’re going up.

  I’ll talk to him.

  Especially on the one cable.

  So get me another.

  Clovis grimaced.

  Spaar shrugged. You tell your boy I’ve gone up on less. We’ll use the flags to signal. Keep a runner close. They’ll start the attack soon.

  Clovis nodded. He reached into his pocket and took out a revolver and handed it to Spaar. You won’t need this, he said.

  But it’s nice to have.

  Yes.

  There were men holding the guy lines of the balloon steady and Spaar climbed up onto the crates and started to hoist himself into the basket when he paused and looked down at Clovis. You see any of that back pay yet? he asked.

  Clovis smiled.

  You see the paymaster, you tell him I’m looking for him, Spaar called over one shoulder.

  And swung up and in.

  Clovis took William’s elbow, helped him up. Then he stepped back and shouted instructions to the groundsmen.

  William felt his guts shift. It was like stepping into a boat, the soft wicker floor belling down under his weight and slewing sideways and him gripping white-knuckled the edge of the basket. It was not more than two feet deep.

  Spaar had one hand on the ballast bags and was double-checking the knots and he looked at William crouched in the bottom of the basket, both hands out for balance. Listen, kid, he said. When we start to go up the Confederates will start in with their shooting. Don’t mind it. Once we clear five hundred feet they’ll stop.

  William swallowed. Five hundred feet?

  But we’ll make that height in minutes. Don’t worry.

  Wonderful.

  Hold on now.

  William was already holding on. What will they be shooting at us with? he asked.

  Spaar grinned. Everything they got.

  Jesus.

  Never mind it.

  But they can’t hit us?

  Well, Spaar said. They haven’t managed it yet.

  The aerostat was enormous and bull-necked and strained against its ropes and William felt a sudden lurch as the basket shuddered under him and began to drift upward. After only a few feet it caught and held again and Spaar was leaning over the edge checking
the balance of the basket and then he called down his okay to the groundsmen below and they loosed the ropes and all at once the balloon began to rise for real. He could hear the screel of the windlasses letting out and then that had faded and Spaar was standing with one hand on his black hat and the other at his hip and his feet planted wide like a sailor at the stern in a rolling wake.

  You can stand up, kid, Spaar called.

  William was staring at the gaps in the wickerwork of the basket. His fingers poked through and gripped the pliable walls and the walls rippled under his grip.

  You sure this is safe? he said.

  Spaar grinned. He took hold of either side of the basket and jumped heavily against its floor and the basket lurched and swung and William cried out.

  Oh it’s safe, Spaar laughed.

  There was no other sound. They had ascended no more than fifty feet when William got to his knees and was astonished to find his dread gone. The air was cooler, less humid. The balloon crackled and snapped like a flag in a wind and William closed his eyes, felt the slow rocking of the basket. They rose higher. When he looked down he could see the languid circling of the vultures riding the currents, the ripple of heat coming up off the earth in an eerie distortion of the light. He had seen nothing like it in his life. Overhead all was endless grey in a haze of high cloud and he stared at the shifting wisps like tendrils of fog and felt himself grow light-headed. It came over him without warning and in a rush and then there was a hand on his shoulder and he stumbled and it was Spaar, drawing him back in.

  His heart was hammering.

  Looking up’s the danger, Spaar said softly. Look at me. William. I said look at me. That’s how you lose your balance up here. You keep your eye on the ground.

  William thought of his father shivering on the porch of Malvern House. He bit into the side of his mouth and tasted blood. He could see the brickwork of that building on the hill, the maw of its chimney.

  When do the guns start? he asked.

  Spaar looked around. They should have started, he said. He shrugged. I guess they can’t shoot at us without giving up their positions. I guess we got lucky today.