Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “You need to be more careful,” he said to the contraband, his voice almost drowned out by a man screaming in the doctor’s sagging tent. They had run out of ether at noon. A nurse had announced it to the waiting line of wounded, blinking in the glare as he wiped his hands on a bloodstained apron. Then he gave the soldiers a single canteen of whiskey and told them to share.

  The contraband glanced up, and Laurence suddenly noticed the fishhook scar beneath his left eye. His eyes traveled down the man’s shirt, his string-hitched trousers, and finally to the right foot, wrapped in rags and swollen slightly, tipped to one side like a boat on a high wave.

  Another scream ricocheted from the tent. The few trees in the field shuddered and darkened.

  “Do you know me?” Laurence asked, breathless.

  “Suh?” The voice was low, resonant as a drum.

  “Have you seen me before?” Laurence asked, pressing him.

  “No, suh. I ain’t never done nothing to you, suh.” Waving one hand to scatter the flies from his eyes, the contraband went back to digging.

  “That’s not what I mean. Do you remember asking if I was the friend of a friend?”

  The hole hummed with the black music of insects.

  “I ain’t got no friends, suh.” He lifted another pile of limbs, pitching them high, so that Laurence had to retreat a step or stay in the path of their reeking trajectory.

  “What’s your name?” Laurence asked, thinking of the starless night when he and Johnny Mulcane had gone back to collect the shivering slave. The three of them had stumbled into one another as they walked back, their bodies touching, pulling away.

  “My name Nathan, suh.” But the man shook his head as he said it, as if he did not believe his own words. Laurence felt his throat tighten. The most recent amputee was carried from the doctor’s tent and laid on the grass. His right leg was missing below the knee, and, for the lack of bandages, the doctor had tied the stump with corn husks, which crackled now as they touched the earth.

  “I thought I remembered you,” Laurence said, bending over to set on the ground the only thing he could think of to offer the former runaway—a small sketch of lilacs that Bel had sent him. The delicate, feminine lines of the flower seemed to stretch beyond the paper and touch the dirt beyond. “I apologize.”

  The contraband shook his head again and went back to widening his grave. A sheet of flies shifted over the sawed-off stumps, and for a minute, the dark, humming cut in the earth was the only thing moving in the entire field. After watching it a few more moments, Laurence walked away into the silent expanse of dead and wounded men. When he looked back, the sketch was gone and Nathan’s dark arms drew purple stripes in the air as he threw shovels of soil down over the bloody limbs, faster and faster, as if there were not enough dirt in the world to cover them.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The smell of fresh blood was like rain. It lingered in the cool autumn air, thickening with every breath. Laurence kept staring up at the sky beyond the orchard, trying to see if the night clouds themselves had reddened, would loose the spilled blood back down to the ground. But the smell did not come from the sky; it crept earthward, through the cornfield, over ditches and the beetled turf to the cove where they lay under the crack of shells.

  Loomis stretched out on one side of him, Gilbert and Addison on the other, their foursome separated by a brier patch from the rest of the company. Davey would not object—there was nothing they could do now but wait for the shelling to stop and morning to arrive, and then rejoin the brigade.

  It had been Loomis’s idea to come this far, inching on his elbows and stomach. He was a consummate frontiersman and disliked crowds, continually promising that when the war ended, he would take his wife, Sallie, and their two boys out west to California. Or to Texas, where they could build a sprawling ranch. No more Vermont winters, he said. No more waiting for a brief four months of summer, when everything had to be sown and reaped in rapid succession. He had been talking about it for hours in a steady drone.

  “It’s getting worse,” commented John Addison. The shadows of the apple trees drew jagged streaks down his face, like a watery ink. Laurence looked at him without recognition, and Addison punched him hard in the arm. “Wake up,” he commanded. Laurence managed a ghastly smile.

  “I think we’re winning.” Gilbert always thought they were winning, even though the secesh had defeated them in nearly every battle.

  “Put the paddock right behind the ranch house, and five or six horses,” Loomis was saying when a shell hit close and made leaves lift up and slap their faces.

  “Will you just shut up?” Gilbert brushed the leaves away. “It’s bad luck to—”

  “It ain’t—” Loomis began, when a shower of grape skimmed just past his ear, so close that if he hadn’t turned his head to retort to Gilbert’s accusation, it would have been knocked off. As it was, Loomis howled and gripped the affected ear. The briers behind them broke with a crash and a shocked rabbit sped out. With catlike swiftness, Gilbert caught the animal, holding it just below the neck.

  “Are you all right?” Addison yelled as Loomis ducked away from them, opening a locket to kiss his wife’s stern profile. He nodded, unable to speak.

  The rabbit strained in Gilbert’s scarred hands, its walnut-colored eyes so large, they held the reflection of the distant moon. The long feet thumped the earth.

  “Should let it run,” said Laurence, wanting to hold it himself. He reached out to touch the warm ridge of skull between the rabbit’s ears.

  “Why? It’s mine,” Gilbert snarled, and tightened his fingers around the squirming animal, making the soft eyes bulge.

  “You’re hurting it,” Laurence protested just as another shell came down, this time so close, he was sure he was killed, until he felt Gilbert’s body jerk beside him, saw the hands flex and the rabbit’s furry neck snap and go limp.

  The animal slumped to one side, its fat, leaf-fed body making a small hill. Gilbert was screaming, pinned by the cannonball that had landed on his right heel. The moon died out in the rabbit’s eyes, the cannonball rolled and settled on the flesh it had crushed, and somewhere Gilbert’s call echoed off the trees and fell among them again. Or maybe it was the sound of other men in pain. Laurence could not tell by that point. The sky was so full of thundering artillery, and the hissing and splintering destruction of the trees, and the fallen apples and the rising groans of the dying, it could have been any sound or all of them put together that made Gilbert’s anguish reverberate like a wave crashing against the rocks, once, twice, before it was pulled away.

  Bile in his throat, Laurence sat up to help Addison shift the hot projectile off their friend’s leg, then rolled Gilbert on his back as he continued howling. Loomis shook his big bearded head. “What happened?” he asked, as if he were half-blind and not half-deaf.

  The smell of fresh blood was like a wet wind, and Laurence tried not to breathe it. Gilbert’s ankle had shattered, the jutting bone glistening like a cracked egg. Biting his lip so hard that a trickle of blood ran through his teeth, the wounded man held back a scream until it emerged as a harsh, repeating gasp. Out of the corner of his eye, Laurence watched Addison lift the rabbit and toss it back into the brier patch, watched the thorns snag the body and hold it aloft.

  * * *

  When the rain came, it made the men stir again, the dead and the living. The cornfield sang in whispers and groans.

  This was after a long stillness. After Laurence looked away from his friend and back to the apple trees, seeing the moon sink into a grail of branches. After the briers bowed under the weight of the rabbit until it touched the dirt.

  Gilbert’s lashes fluttered but did not open. Far off, a man was pleading to be released from beneath the dead soldier on top of him. When the rain came, he stopped calling for help.

  * * *

  Hours later, Laurence reached out to touch Gilbert’s face, pale, sprinkled with soil, the eyes sunken. His cheek was as cold as a door
handle in morning. Laurence shouted to Addison for help, although the other man was only two feet away. The rabbit hung upside down now, ears pointing into the dirt. The veins in its ears drew a branching map of rivers. Addison crept off in search of the captain. When he came back, his face was sharp with anger. “Nothing we can do,” he said, shrugging, “’cept keep him alive till dawn.”

  “I ain’t gonna die.”

  The eyes opened. They held the moon for a moment. Then the clouds masked it away.

  “My ranch won’t have a single flake of snow fall on it,” said Loomis.

  Addison rooted through the haversacks. The rustle reminded Laurence suddenly of the runaway slave settling down in the hayloft, clutching his burlap hat. The slave had eyed them until they retreated down the steps, Johnny first, then Laurence, the rank, unwashed smell of the hired man drifting up behind him. Every man in the Army of the Potomac stank like Johnny Mulcane now.

  The accordion looked dull in the rain-polished world, like a stone pulled from the lake water, allowed to dry on the high beach. Addison jabbed Gilbert in the ankle, making the wounded man howl.

  “Tell a song you love or a song you hate.”

  No answer but the ticking leaves, Loomis whispering about his ranch.

  “Tell me.”

  “‘Annie Laurie.’ That was Pike’s favorite,” Gilbert said, his voice eggshell-thin.

  “I ain’t playing Pike’s song.”

  Shadows fingered their faces. A wind rose up, scattering the leaf-gathered rain. Laurence was cold, colder than he had ever been in his life, even in winter on Lake Champlain, when the bitter breeze tightened his ribs.

  * * *

  Once, when Johnny Mulcane found Laurence rooting through his bag of tools, he had slapped the boy with the flat of his hand. Laurence had never told, because he thought if he did not speak of it, he might not remember himself. And he had forgotten, for years.

  “Tell me a song.” Addison jabbed the ankle again.

  A smile ghosted the ugly, bitten lips. “‘The Vacant Chair,’ I never could stand that one.”

  * * *

  In Johnny’s bag of tools, Laurence had found a rabbit’s foot, the white fur burnished by touch. “What is it for?” he’d asked the hired man, still curious even as he held his stinging cheek, as tears squeezed from his eyes.

  “For luck,” Johnny had answered, striking the boy a second time.

  Music rose, maudlin at first, then fading to a sweet, mournful loveliness. The briers released the rabbit and sprang skyward, thorns tufted with fur. Gilbert’s face relaxed, the lines of pain and outrage erased. A sparrow coasted into the thicket and huddled there. Johnny Mulcane loved strawberries. He stole them from the gardens of the neighborhood, staining his fingers a deep, embarrassing pink. He couldn’t help it, even after Bel’s father caught him and punished him by withholding a week’s salary. He couldn’t help it; they would find him crouching in the ice shed, pressing the red fruit to his lips, kissing his theft before he swallowed it, the leafy stems littering the sawdust.

  Another song and another, and far off they heard men singing from where they lay in the filth of the spent battle. The rebels had their own words, and they clashed and mingled in the night sky, and some voices died out almost as soon as they began. Laurence’s uniform welded to him, a wool skin reeking of the sheep it had come from. He couldn’t remember the last time he had bathed, or washed his hands, or tasted fresh meat. He tried to eat an apple, but it was wormy, the center mottled with holes.

  After awhile, the land lifted the sun back over the east and the spreading light revealed the outlines of things—a leaf-stripped orchard, a pocked cannonball, and Gilbert still alive, his chin streaked with blood. Addison stopped playing, lifting his cramped fingers to his mouth and blowing on them with short, harsh gusts.

  * * *

  Davey’s order came to move from Sharpsburg to another location. Loud and stumbling, as if they had not lived through the same bitter night as the rest of the men, Spider and Woodard appeared, sipping from their canteens. As the stretcher dropped with a rattle against the rooty earth, Davey came up behind them and stood with his stomach thrust out, uniform buttons caked with mud. His cap was yanked low over his eyes.

  “I heard you the whole night. Did he stay awake?”

  “Yes,” said Addison, carefully stowing the accordion away.

  “Then he won’t die, for he has already passed through the valley,” predicted their captain. Burrs had knotted in his beard and he tugged at them, wincing. “Go on now, and let the others take him.”

  “Sir,” said Addison. “You would put him in the hands of drunkards now?”

  Spider giggled. Woodard gave a snort of protest, swaying unsteadily, knocking a laden apple bough so that its fruit hammered the ground. He and Spider had been given the office of stretcher-bearers because they were the worst shots in the regiment, but Woodard refused to admit it.

  “I ain’t got a choice,” said Davey. “We have to move.” One of the apples rolled toward Gilbert’s head and Addison stopped it with his foot.

  “Let Lindsey and me take him, at least to the field hospital,” he offered, toying with the apple. “We’ll catch up.”

  “I can’t spare you. Which means you ain’t got a choice, either,” Davey said quietly. “Move.”

  “Captain,” Addison said. His hands balled into fists.

  “We can’t leave him—” Laurence began.

  “Move,” Davey ordered again, interrupting Laurence, although he only looked at Addison. Time slowed, Addison’s knuckles going white, Laurence holding his haversack, Woodard about to speak, his thin mouth opening, then clapping shut. Then Loomis broke the silence with a grunt.

  “He’ll be all right,” he muttered, and fell in behind the others, shouldering his musket.

  Davey nodded and put his hand slowly down on the butt end of his pistol. “Lindsey, Addison, move.”

  A fly descended to Gilbert’s smashed ankle, filling its soft black bottle. Laurence stared at Addison, but he wouldn’t return his gaze. His hair was full of sun, his eyes washed the color of old stone. Daylight drifted through the trees, bringing their brightness back to them. The fly careened off toward the brier patch, where the dead rabbit lay, already covered in ants. As the insect flew with slow, dizzy gluttony through the tufted thorns, something in Addison seemed to shrink. He lowered his head and spat on the grass. Another moment passed.

  “Go,” whispered Gilbert, and he let slip away the stiff mask that he had been using for a face since he was shot. Laurence saw death lurking beneath the curling hairs of his eyebrows and beard, and he watched as Addison, seeing it, too, and repulsed by it, sprang toward the others and fell in behind them.

  “Laurence.” Davey used the name of the boy who had led the runaway through the dark, feverish and impossibly cold, who in the act of trying to save the freedom of another had succeeded only in taking it away. A string of gunfire ratcheted beyond the orchard. Laurence’s chin sank to his chest and he stepped carefully over the cannonball and into line, lifting the long weight of his musket. Ahead of him, Addison stood so still, he could not have been breathing.

  Davey gestured to the stretcher-bearers to commence their work and ordered the rest of them forward. Gilbert cried out as Woodard hauled him onto the narrow board with clumsy arms. But if the others heard it, they did not turn, skirting the blond remains of the cornfield without speaking or looking back.

  January–February 1863

  Chapter Eighteen

  Winter had bent the garden into valley and drift. Snow filled the bright air between branches until the whole understory of flower and bush became root, and Bel could see all the way to the farthest hedge of her father’s acres. She named it Wilderness Plain in honor of her cousin Laurence, whom she imagined would see a vast untouched desert in the covered garden and would set off like an explorer to find whatever secrets were hidden in its soft dunes.

  Bel often went out alone into the gard
en. It was the only place she was allowed to go unchaperoned, and she could hear the tramplings and winter-loud voices of Allenton beyond, a society that became at once closer and more isolated during the long cold months. It started with spontaneous skating and sleighing parties, and then came the official rigors of Christmas and New Year’s calling. Painted sleighs coasted down Main Street and Pearl with the breakneck speed of young men and the dignified slide of the elders, all coming to a crunching halt outside the Pomeroys’, or the Mays’, or the Lindseys’. The morning after one of the great houses had a party, the drive in front would be flat and stained with the manure of the waiting horses. A lady always lost her hat or glove, and a drunk young man always misplaced a sunken pile of the contents of his stomach, and everywhere there fluttered the unidentifiable remains of a party—colored bits of paper, threads of an unraveling coat, even a page of Christmas hymns abandoned. It took a full day for the red-faced coachman to restore it to order.

  Today, Greenwood was all preparation for the first social event in Allenton after the exhausting New Year’s calls, which sent the men all over town partaking from the wine and sweet-laden tables of waiting lairs of women. Twelfth Night was Faustina’s yearly tradition, complete with an enormous fruitcake made from Martha Washington’s recipe for “Great Cake,” and a king and queen who would order the evening. Despite the disapproval of Allenton’s most puritan residents, who would rather Christmas revelry be abolished altogether in favor of a simple church service, the event’s popularity grew each year, and each year Bel was allowed to stay up a little later.

  Sprigs of evergreen hung from the windows of Greenwood, affixed with scarlet bows that sagged under the previous night’s snow. Bel spotted her father circling the house now, knocking the powder free with the pole he used to hang their flag in summer. He could have asked a servant to do it for him, but Bel suspected he was also escaping the indignant tirades of her mother as she prepared for the evening.

  For all her gaiety once her Twelfth Night was in motion, Faustina hated throwing parties. Days of baking, cleaning, and decorating generated in her a unique form of rage. She would mutter to herself as she arranged towering piles of pears and apples, as she tied up the mistletoe into a kissing ball (which, of course, no one else could tie properly), as she shook the curtains Mary had already washed, hunting for spots or tears. Faustina’s voice would tighten and thin like pulled taffy and she moved with the jerky, overdetermined steps of a marionette. She alternately chastised her family and servants for being in the way and for not helping enough, so Bel and her father often left the house together on guilty errands, seeking the peace of the frozen country, the raw, uncomplicated wind that in winter had no smell but its own clarity.