The Embalmer's Black Wagon
A Novel of the Civil War's Undertakers

About this book:

In the spring of 1861, the war comes not with glory but with the smell of arsenic and the creak of iron wheels on muddy turnpikes. Silas Vance, a former surgeon turned itinerant embalmer, pilots his black canvas wagon through the swelling chaos around Washington, trading in the only currency that matters: the preservation of sons for the mothers waiting in Northern parlors. With his apprentice Thad at the reins, Silas moves from blacksmith's sheds to railway depots, injecting poison into veins to cheat the summer rot, each body a contract, each coffin a promise kept.

History remembers the battles; *The Embalmer's Black Wagon* remembers the business of the dead. From the measles camps of Maryland to the killing fields of Antietam and Gettysburg, Silas Vance navigates a landscape where typhoid claims more than Minié balls, where a father's gold buys a son's journey home, and where the line between mercy and commerce blurs with every injection. This is the Civil War stripped of romance—the rail hubs clogged with pine boxes, the embalming fluids that turn flesh to marble, the quiet men who stitch the fallen back together so grief can have a face to kiss.

Meticulously researched and atmospherically rendered, this is a novel of the war's unseen architecture: the undertakers, the ice wagons, the lead-lined coffins, and the ledgers that tally the cost of a nation's rupture. For readers of *Cold Mountain* and *The Things They Carried*, here is a story that follows the dead northward, mile by grim mile, asking what we owe the fallen—and what it costs to deliver them home.