John Spaulding

The white train emerges from a dark curtain of tall fir trees with its coat of light snow. The white train appears as though newly escaped from the jaws of night. The white train steams out of the forest into the clear white meadow, melting the fresh snow around it. The trees are towering. Ancient giants. A whole section seems to have been logged. Over there the folded arms of soldiers who gather in small groups. We cannot see leaders or individual faces. Horsemen far away. On their way to the revolution perhaps. In the dining car, behind the velvet curtains— blood puddings and sea pie, clear soups and small marrow. Already today the chef has cooked three luncheons while crossing Poland; the starched waiters managed without spilling a drop. Dozens of dirty white napkins heap on hampers like miniature Alps threatening to fall. But now the train has braked and stopped. Small boys fog the windows with their warm breath as they watch the soldiers with silver sabers who order everyone off the train, into the new snow.

We are the knife people, iron men, coat people and he-lands-sailing. Souse eaters, house makers, husbands of kine and goat and swine, farm builders and keepers of kettle and scummer, word scratchers, corn stealers and bad sleepers. As if towns could build themselves. As if stumps jumped from the ground or flesh of beasts fell into trenchers. As if paradise prevailed on earth. To come to rich moulds and lush plantings, long-necked trees and tongues of land, to redd the wild for the unborn. To reck not the peril. Suffering snakes that may fly, wolves that may ravish. Kingdom of sachem and sagamore. Kingdom of corn and thorny promise. To satisfy our appetite of spirit, our thirst of property. To seek not the opera of war but belittled by the possibilities to stand silenced by the task before us— these be my sudden and undigested thoughts.

He could have stayed in the city, photographed the cheese and oyster boys after the war, opal-colored orphans or ladies of unfortunate standing, back when tall buildings still believed in America, back when concrete was still a thing of splendor. Instead he went West to rehabilitate his grief. Always the white sky. Always the dark figures lost in an immense world full of danger and disaster, starvation and storms of mosquitoes thick enough to snuff out candles. Provisions lost in a blazing sun that watched constantly. Twice hit by shell fragments, once by tuberculosis. Dead at 42. The fortunate thing about his camera was its ability to stray— to put things in that didn’t belong, like footprints in the sand. Here is the photographer and his party exploring the great canyons of the West while their clothes dry on the line.

1. Somewhere Indians are walking across America. One is a woman caught in stride between two white birches, her eyes on the ground, her mouth biting open a word while the wind shreds the lake behind her. 2. A boy wakes alone in cold New England air. From his window he watches his father’s breath mix with the steam from cows’ urine. A white blanket of sheep has unrolled across the hill, and the yellow dogs who ran and ran have now disappeared. 3. A glass necklace floats on her white breast just as she herself floats inside his lens while he watches from under the dark hood— her small black eardrops hang perfectly still, her long white neck and cleavage ready to be frozen forever by the touch of his finger. 4. As the deer ate from the deep lawn and the fish jumped near the willow trees, the big white ferry paused briefly before sliding back again across the lake, completely unaware of its brightness and its beauty.

Once in moonlight when I had not slept for three nights, when there was no food and a long rain had stopped, and some had slept outside in the rain you could see the streaks it had left on their skin, once in the eighth week of my captivity, alone in the moonlight outside on the ledge, I looked up and felt the stars move strangely back and forth, a slow rocking, as though the Lord were rocking us somehow back and forth, and I was not afraid but tears came anyway as I remembered my children so far away, the way children can call you back in through your thoughts and keep you awake like hearing the stars ring all night long. And when you watch animals die, when deer die you notice it, how they don’t cry out— I could see it in my mind’s eye— they don’t cry out but lie there, eyes open, and then they are dead outside of themselves they are dead but inside themselves they have joined the earth where they have always been rocking and rocking.—And so I was able to sleep a few hours before our next remove, miles and miles beyond the Great River, though I had lost track of our place in the world.

In the spring time the stars began looking for him By summer time they had found him By autumn time they had wounded him so that the orange and red of his blood began to leak from the sky onto the leaves of the trees By winter time they had slain him so that his white fat began to melt and drip falling as snow all over the land And then he would begin to rise again first as sap in the trees stretching higher and higher until his back ached but knowing he would not stop until his black fur was hidden deep among the unborn behind the dark wall of the night sky

(Civil War Photography by T. O’Sullivan, 1866) Raisin-black blood dries on their faces. Thick wool clothes. Lumps of bloated bodies lying on their backs. Mouths open. Chins pointing to the sky. As though blown over backward. Or turned. Fingers swollen. Boots and rifles missing. Coats and jackets pulled up exposing gray shirts, bloody underwear. The sky drifts toward sap green. No fences. No stone walls.

When the soldiers came in their dirty blue shirts I was kneeling in the garden in the rain. That year only a few ramblers were left and the trellis had collapsed from the wind. Still I was glad for the water and darkness that clotted the air; the days had seemed sour to me in spite of the glory of the vegetables wandering into fall, the fat swollen apples and the wild roses creeping under the lilac. And there, as the men approached, I stood up near the two willow saplings sprouted from posts but driven in, the larger one, by the neighbor boy when he entered service, the smaller one when he returned home. I could see the street from where I stood, as though wrapped in gauze, heavy with the nests of caterpillars. (Next week a man with rags tied to sticks would dip them in kerosene and burn the worms that would then drop squirming onto his arms, his hair, the street.) And then I thought I was lying at the bottom of a pond edged with grayish leaves and looking up to the surface. I saw leaves, raindrops shattering the sky like splinters of glass drifting toward my body; noises seemed echoes as I continued to distance myself from what had happened. After that a disbelief, perhaps I had had a stroke, hit my head, or fallen asleep and woke to flies banging against my face. I saw edges of myself being flattened by rain, could smell the earth too and thought of the years of rot that made the smell, the rot of my father and his father and all those who had gone before and how we eat the root of the earth and then turn into rot ourselves just as pieces of dirt were grinding away between my teeth and tongue, my bit of gristle being stirred into earth’s stew. I began to raise my head and noticed for the first time the bunting, red, white, and blue, hung out for the parade.