After Shiloh, with smoke still scumbling the air, the Harper’s artist paced away from the sunken road where a full brigade had been strafed and decimated. The flies had begun to swarm, lighting on the eyes and open wounds of the fallen, the stench already gut-wrenching, heartrending, as were the groans of injured pack animals weighted down by tack and baggage, as well as that last shadow beasts can divine, but the artist spread out his charcoals and chalk on a blue blanket and leaned against the trunk of a smoking blackjack pine. The Rebel rear guard occasionally launched a volley, as Federal cooks gathered wood to ready the mess in case any survivors could muster a hunger. Stroke by stroke, the draftsman began his sketch, three peaches slowly forming, their delicacy almost sexual, shade and shadow, amplitudes unblemished, colors of dawn fire and sunset, the fuzz nearly palpable enough to make the skin itch, scent so nearly visceral my tongue and lips went moist whispering, Peach. An Illinois corporal peering over the artist’s shoulder broke his silence to say, “Fellow, can’t you see all them soldiers blown apart or in pain right here? How the hell can you ignore the horses, the jack mules, that wagon yonder still in flames? Peaches, what the hell?” But the correspondent kept his focus, summoning the delicious, the elegant repose in earshot of the surgeon’s tent, the work of the saw and the miserable screaming, where the faces of casualties were twisted and hideous. Orderlies splattered in blood rushed about weeping. An officer with an eye badly patched oversaw the burial detail spading dirt into the trench already filling with scrapped bandages and grisly limbs. “‘Still life,’ we art makers say,” was the sketch artist’s answer, “meaning both ‘motionless’ and ‘not yet dead,’ though the phase after ripeness is not so lovely, and the pit clenched in the fruit’s core is redder than carnage, rougher than your musket balls, a full bore .54 caliber, if I reckon correctly.” And then he looked from the soldier’s angry eyes to the empty sky before he resumed. “Peaches, maybe, are what I need to see, what my weary heart yearns to remember. Better than any green shoots or delicate petals, better than family toasts and a sister deft at the piano, I know the bloodbath we inhabit, sir, against which I can offer only a fragile moment as counterpoint to our surround. Here’s the reason, I would imagine, the French call such compositions, whether fruit or meat or a vase of mint sprigs and zinnias, nature morte. The merest feast of grace, all there is, as there is no remnant God, no other rebuttal to trust, while even Pity wears a mantel of feeding flies.” Just a witness, I held my tongue but had no more appetite for the taste of his beautifully rendered fruit. And the corporal’s retort? “Mister, get yourself a rifle, see if you can still puke out them jackass lies.”
Copyright © 2017 R.T. Smith. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2017.