Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “If you had only told me then,” said Addison in a voice thick with grief.

  “Then what?” said Laurence. “He’d still be dead. That’s what they don’t understand.”

  As he stood up, Laurence slipped on the mud and had to grab Addison’s sleeve. The new blue uniform was coarse and stiff. “No matter what I said, they’d both be dead,” he added.

  “You’re right,” Addison admitted after a moment. He turned his back on Laurence and pushed out of the brush, holding the branches so they did not slap his companion.

  “Sometimes you can’t be the hero and live,” said Laurence bitterly. He took the branches from Addison’s hands, waiting for the other man to answer. But Addison said nothing as they walked past the tents to the fire where the soldiers were swapping pages with one another, trading for ones they liked better. Only Gilbert sat alone, fiercely polishing his brogans with grease.

  “Sunday morning, we’re going pig hunting,” Addison whispered before they rejoined the others.

  “Who, you and Gilbert?” Laurence asked. “I thought he was going on picket.”

  “No, you and me,” Addison said. “In honor of Pike Rhodes.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You’ve never hunted before, have you?” Addison said after they had crept past the dewy tents and into the brush beyond. The air was cool and still and every sound they made intruded on the quiet, bruise-colored world. But Laurence dutifully scoured the dim forest with his eyes, looking left and right for pigs.

  “One time, my father tried to organize a fox hunt, like they have in England, but he couldn’t get the right hounds,” he said.

  “I reckoned.” Addison sighed. “You go about it wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t look. Listen. You can’t stare down a pig.”

  Laurence closed his eyes obediently. He heard a spring trickling nearby, and the ticking sound of leaves.

  “What are you doing?” Addison hissed, already ten paces ahead of him. “Keep walking, but keep your ears open, too.”

  The veil of dark lifted shade by shade as Laurence followed his friend deeper into the woods. Soon it would be dawn and reveille would call them back to camp, but for now there were only the trees sharpening their branches on the faint light and a few birds that scuttled through the canopy.

  The dimness reminded him of his house on winter Sundays, when the drapes would stay shut against the chilly dark and everyone spoke in muted voices. On such mornings, his mother would read to him and his sisters from the Bible while they squirmed and longed for the noon meal, usually ham and stewed cabbage that would grow translucent and cold before Laurence could finish eating it. His father always presided at mealtime, quizzing them on the stories of the Old Testament.

  “Who was David’s downfall?” he once asked, sipping from a heavy pewter cup.

  “Absalom,” Laurence answered, remembering the unfaithful son.

  “Bath-sheba,” his father corrected him, thumping the cup for emphasis. His mother sighed and rubbed her temples.

  “His own pride,” she said to her plate.

  “By golly!” A great crashing sound followed Addison’s cry, and a sow appeared, her skin the color of milk after strawberries have rested in it. She plowed through Addison’s bowlegs and started huffing right toward Laurence. Falling on her with a heavy ooof, he buckled his arms around her belly as she kicked and dragged him across the roots of an oak tree. Her back hooves dug into his chest, and she began making the ugliest noise Laurence had ever heard. He roared to cover it.

  “Hold her now,” Addison said. He loaded his musket and aimed at the sow. Laurence shied from the dark hollow of the gun, and the pig would have escaped had one hoof not tangled in the buttons of his uniform. Moss and dirt flew everywhere, landing on Laurence’s open mouth.

  “Hold her,” Addison commanded again, and this time Laurence obeyed, his fingers digging in the furrowed throat. The bullet entered the sow’s face, splitting the forehead between her small eyes. She shuddered and her violent squalling halted abruptly in a slow sigh, like air escaping a tin can. As the heat left the slumped body, Laurence continued to hold the sow until a dark, reeking puddle leaked from her hindquarters and then he flung himself away.

  “I forgot to warn you about that,” Addison said, smirking at the fresh brown stain on Laurence’s coat.

  Laurence stood, scrubbing at the stain with a handful of leaves, his palms stinging from the sow’s coarse hair. The pig twitched a little, and Addison gave her head a final whack with the butt end of his musket.

  “You caught her.” He punched Laurence’s arm. “You’re the bulliest pig catcher I ever seen. You can quote me on that to your pa when he tries to pull strings for your promotion.”

  “I don’t want to be promoted,” Laurence said as Addison handed him his haversack and musket and knelt down by the pig. “I don’t want to be an officer.”

  Addison sliced the sow’s throat. Blood spurted out, pattering the leaf-strewn forest floor like a sudden rain.

  “It’ll be best to gut her now,” he muttered as the stream of blood slowed, “even though Loomis won’t like it. We have a far piece to haul her.”

  He shifted on his haunches and cut a line down the sow’s belly.

  “Why won’t Loomis like it?” asked Laurence. The tall, genial Alfred Loomis was now a denizen of their tent and had become their default cook, disguising their meager rations with fresh herbs he found in the forests and fields around camp.

  “Never slaughtered a hog before?” Addison looked up, his knife pausing. “Generally you boil them first to get the bristles off and then you work on the innards. Keeps the flavor rich. But I ain’t dragging this thing two miles with the guts still in it. Now hold the skin open, if you will, sir.”

  Laurence crouched beside the maw of sow intestines, his hand slipping on a bloodied nipple as he pried the skin aside. The ribs creaked apart with the slow complaint of long-shut doors. Inside, the steaming guts were black and red, and Addison was doing his best to saw them out in their entirety, but the loops of intestine kept slipping off and battering his wrist. Laurence gave one bark of laughter before he saw deep in the cavity beneath the sow’s flank the sleep-eyed bodies of half a dozen piglets curled against one another. Addison’s knife cut the veiny sack around them and a bluish water spilled out.

  Laurence gagged, unable to tear his gaze away. The fetuses each had perfect, unhardened hooves and blank pink skin.

  “Don’t breathe through your nose,” Addison advised, still carving. Just then, guts came out, sliding across Laurence’s knees, their weight slippery and hard at once. He swore and shoved them off.

  “Why not be an officer, Lindsey?” Addison demanded, his voice ugly. “Can’t watch ’em die?” He was cutting the fetal pigs away from their mother now, and they tumbled to the earth, still curled and breathing. Unwilling to answer, Laurence let the sow’s ribs fall shut and wiped his hands against the pine needles. Red crescents curved under his fingernails. Nearby, a crow scraped its throat into call.

  Standing up, Addison took his musket and gently began to crush the heads of the fetal pigs, one by one, letting the wet brains spill out. After a moment, Laurence joined him, pressing down until the small unfinished skulls popped and the trembling life exited the bodies. Above the quiet of their work, a metallic chorus of crickets commenced singing.

  When the soldiers were finished, the fetuses no longer curled around one another, but splayed apart, like petals torn from a flower.

  “We can toast these up for a first course,” Addison said, tossing them back inside the carcass. Laurence nodded dully. An intense weariness had replaced his nausea. He picked up his end of the sow and they began dragging her toward camp. Behind him, he heard the crow flap down to the steaming pile.

  “You never answered my question,” Addison commented after a few minutes. Laurence regarded his friend’s blood-spattered profile.

  “Who’d want to be in
charge of that bunch of fools?” he said with false levity.

  “Those fools are going to be the best goddamn soldiers in the Army of the Potomac.” Addison turned on him, his face serious. “I didn’t see one of them shirk at Bull Run. Not a one.”

  Laurence thought of Woodard and Spider but said nothing. They dragged the pig in silence for a while. “It’s not just that,” Laurence added hoarsely. “I’d be above the rest of you.”

  “So? You always have been. Even with what happened to Pike. You’re probably the only man in the company who can swim, and it was your knowing too much that got you in trouble. But as an officer, being different wouldn’t hinder you like that,” Addison said, readjusting his hold on the hooves. “I told Davey so.”

  “I’m not that different,” Laurence said, thinking of the ants in his bedroll, the dirt chucked in his face.

  “What I mean is, you’re just not our kind. We don’t understand you so much as we understand each other. Gilbert, I would have known what he would do every day of his life, even if I just met him here in Virginia.” Addison looked up at the trees, giving a soft chuckle. “You’re like a gentleman stranger.”

  “Is that what I am?” Laurence tried to laugh, but the noise that emerged from his throat was more like a ragged sigh.

  Reaching the rim of the forest just as the bugler began reveille, they scanned the camp. Gilbert was out on picket and Alfred Loomis sat alone in front of their fire, darning his socks, in what had become an almost-daily ritual. His feet were too big for the standard army footwear, and he refused to learn a proper stitch, making clumsy black loops that tore almost immediately.

  Addison and Laurence pulled the sow toward their tent. The dusty ground flattened behind them, two furrows pushed up on either side. A slow parade of half-dressed soldiers rose from their fires and began to follow.

  “Damn if it ain’t a real porker,” said one of the drummer boys.

  “Shot right through the forehead,” another soldier added admiringly.

  Addison and Laurence ignored them both, their heads high.

  “How’d you catch it?” Loomis asked as they reached the Sibley.

  “Lindsey here just stared her down. I’ve never seen a hunter like him. The way he caught her was a caution. All eyes,” Addison finally pronounced for the soldiers pulling on their coats and boots. Laurence lowered his head, noticing a splash of brain on the butt end of his musket. He wiped it clean on the grass.

  “That so,” Loomis said calmly, placing a few stones in the hollows of the campfire. “I don’t suppose it was your idea to gut her, though, was it?”

  Laurence shook his head.

  “It wasn’t your idea to destroy the tender flavor of this fine game by asking me to boil it hacked open like this?” Loomis went on, and then instructed two of the camp’s drummer boys to fetch more water from the stream.

  “I’ll bet there’s not a man here who would refuse this fine game, no matter how you ruin it with your cooking, Loomis,” said Addison, casting a proud glance around. The gathered soldiers cheered and laughed, and a few of them thumped Laurence on the back and congratulated him before they hurried off to roll call. In return for a good piece of meat, Woodard would make their excuse known to Davey.

  “There’s a surprise inside for you, Loomis,” said Laurence, getting into his role. He stood with one hand on his hip and grinned as Loomis pulled open the sow and found the fetal pigs inside.

  “That almost makes up for it,” Loomis said with a twist of his lips, and tossed them on one side of the fire.

  When the boys came back with the water, Loomis sent them off again to borrow another company’s massive cooking pot. The morning grew hotter, and Laurence could hear the other soldiers answering at roll call. He had never missed it before, and he wondered what Captain Davey would say when he saw the hog, if he would believe Laurence was the one who had caught her.

  The boys returned, dragging the black iron pot, which Loomis filled halfway with water. Then he took a pair of tongs and lifted the hot stones, dropping them in until a great steam billowed out. Somehow, the sow seemed lighter as Laurence helped Loomis carry her to the pot and ease her in. Watching the water rise, he asked Loomis if he thought the meat would be enough for the whole company.

  “Enough,” Loomis repeated, looking hard at Laurence. “How much do you think they need?”

  Laurence blushed and looked down. In the boiling water, the sow flesh whitened, and Loomis moved it slowly around with his tongs.

  “Just catching it was enough,” Loomis said in his gentle bass. “Although, you know, Addison’s been tracking that sow for weeks by himself.”

  Surprised, Laurence turned to Addison, but the other man was halfway down the path to the stream, his shadow lengthening like a sail behind him.

  “Don’t tell him I said so,” Loomis added.

  “No,” Laurence said, both grateful for the gift Addison had given him and relieved that he had passed his test. He breathed in as Loomis let another hot stone fall, hissing, into the water. The steam smelled like the dense air that filled the kitchen at Greenwood when Grete cooked up bones for soup. Laurence felt his empty stomach twinge with hunger and something deeper releasing itself with the white clouds rising.

  “Smells like home,” he said, and breathed in again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Emerging from his bedroll to the cold yellow air of the tent, Laurence coughed and rubbed his temples. Winter sickness had swept through the camp since November, leaving no one untouched except Addison, who remained singularly robust while the rest of the soldiers became as thin and rheumy as old men. Laurence counted himself lucky to be suffering from a mild cough. Measles had struck the Third Vermont, and today he was going to visit a recently recovered soldier, Morey Aldridge, an Allenton boy, the son of a shipbuilder, and the man his sister Lucia was engaged to marry.

  Morey Aldridge. Laurence imagined him a male version of Lucia, bright and empty-headed, a dandy who polished his boots daily. Morey Aldridge would find Laurence too serious, no doubt, and write to his sister about how he intended to cheer her brother up. It would become a weekly ordeal, Sunday afternoons with Morey, so that they could get to know each other better, and become like real brothers.

  Laurence glanced down at his mother’s letter. Please go meet Mr. Aldridge when you have the time, she wrote. He is so looking forward to making your acquaintance. The letter was a month old, and Laurence had found one reason or another to put off the visit until today. He wondered why he dreaded meeting someone from his own society. Beside him, Addison and Gilbert snored loudly, and Loomis was curled into an awkward ball, only his beard poking from the blanket. These were his brothers, men who rarely read books or parted their hair in the latest fashion, but who understood him better than anyone.

  Over the winter, their routine together had changed. Drills were shorter; nights in the tent stretched to a huddled eternity. They were always cold, always hungry, and they became domestic, bickering over the placement of their few possessions, developing an ever greater fixation with the intricacies of mealtime. Nights when rations were poor, they talked about catching another pig and building a smokehouse to make bacon and ham. This fantasy lasted through entire sodden meals of hardtack stew. Loomis and Gilbert could haggle for hours about the best wood for smoking or the correct temperature for the fire, then resume the conversation the next night as if nothing had been decided.

  Laurence had a difficult time explaining such humble camaraderie to his family, so he stopped writing as many letters home. Even Bel’s little sketches of frost, flowers, and other familiar household items seemed to belong to another time. But he collected them dutifully in the flaps of his torn-up book and carried them everywhere.

  The bleating notes of reveille filled the air, and Addison bolted awake, his blue eyes landing on Laurence.

  “Sunday, ain’t it?” he asked.

  Laurence nodded.

  “Praise the Lord for this half day of
drill,” said Addison. He threw off his covers and rose.

  “I’m going to see my future brother-in-law today,” Laurence said. “Want to come?” Addison’s easy way with people would make it more bearable.

  “Can’t,” Addison said, and lifted the flap of the tent, revealing a dull gray day. “Davey promised he’d let me take Furlough for a ride.”

  When they woke, his other tent mates also declined the offer, so after drill, Laurence set out alone for the Third Vermont’s quarters. A muddy path led him through pitted pastures and bare, silvery woods, ending at a small sea of Sibley tents, sunk into the ground like their own. He couldn’t help thinking that the Third Vermont’s camp looked shabbier than his regiment’s, but the men were just as lively, and when he asked how to find Morey Aldridge, a young recruit immediately offered complicated and colorful directions, which sent him to the latrines first, then to the officers’ quarters, and finally to the tent Morey Aldridge shared with two other soldiers.

  The trio sat outside it around a low fire, playing a silent game of cards. Uncertain which was Aldridge, Laurence called out the name and waited. At first, there was no response; then the largest among them raised his head. His mountainous shoulders took a long time to twist in Laurence’s direction.

  “Looks like you got a visitor, Aldridge,” said one of his companions.

  Morey Aldridge’s gray eyes widened at the sight of Laurence, but he nodded slowly. “You must be Lucia’s brother,” he said. “I can see the resemblance.”

  His face was full of crags and shadows, his mouth a straight, severe line of red, as if someone had drawn it with a ruler. Measle scars dotted his neck and chin. Laurence hovered for a moment, staring, before he realized his rudeness. He introduced himself and was about to sit down among them, when Aldridge held up his hand.