Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  It was a symptom, he had decided, of winter on the Potomac, which was neither fully cold nor fully warm, but a damp gray season that was somehow more dispiriting than its frigid, snowy counterpart in the north. The season had a vacuity that allowed the past to fill Laurence’s mind, sensory and strange—reviving the lavender smell of his grandmother, the green park where they fed the birds together, the light prick of a chickadee’s feet landing on his thumb. He would fall asleep comfortable and wake freezing, with rivulets of fallen rain flooding past his cheek, his hands stiff, aching when he flexed them.

  They were numb now and he beat them against his thighs as he skirted the muddy pools that gathered in the rows between tents. Several of them were filled with piss and excrement. He looked up only when he heard a voice in the neighboring row call out, “‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit.’” The voice paused. “‘And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit.’ And do you know what was in the smoke?”

  There was no answer, where before there had been the murmur of a reply, from three dozen men, then two, then one, then a handful of stragglers who no longer sat obediently on the ground, but stood askance, their hands in their pockets, as if they might depart at any time. Tonight, there was no one outside Gilbert’s tent but the Preacher himself, casting a long shadow over the mud. Laurence hid behind a flap of canvas and watched as Gilbert spoke to the emptiness, nodding and stroking his black beard.

  He had hardly seen the Preacher since their first day in camp. Gilbert clearly had no interest in reviving their old camaraderie, and he kept to the little tent except when he came out to preach to his dwindling audience. It had been so long since their fight on picket, but now Laurence found himself measuring his former opponent like a boxer, seeing how his shoulder muscles had thinned, how his good leg was strong but the other as useless and weak as an old man’s. His face, too, looked breakable, as if his newfound passion had scoured off the old violent weight, leaving behind only the emptiness he spoke to and the emptiness that listened back.

  “Locusts,” he was saying as Laurence turned away, splashing in a puddle and cursing softly as the scummy water soaked his calf. Locusts were the size and shape of bullets, Gilbert would go on to explain, making disastrous leaps of logic that always ended in a final question, shouted to the night: “‘For the wrath of the Lord is come, and who shall be able to stand?’”

  As he reached the edge of camp, Laurence thought he heard that same cry echoing across the rainy wind. In front of him, three tents formed an enclosed triangle that someone had labeled with the crude sign THE THETER OF WAR. The missing A was scrawled in above, but its author had made no attempt to join the letter to the word from which it was missing, and the A floated like a star above the others. Now in its fourth night of production, the opera had quickly become the most popular thing in camp, and Laurence’s curiosity had finally gotten the better of him when he saw men carrying their invalid friends to it on stretchers. He jostled his way into the tents, which were already packed with blue uniforms.

  A curtain made of gray blankets covered the back of the theater and hid the actors, although the cloth occasionally wagged and emitted loud curses, spoiling its mystery. In front of it, the crude stage was only deep enough to hold one low table, over which was draped a moth-eaten green curtain. Trying to look supremely disinterested in the proceedings, Laurence shoved through the crowd. As soon as he found a square of space behind his old New Hampshire tent mates, the lamps were snuffed. He stood in a blackness as dense as the hold of a ship.

  Finally, one candle flickered and he heard the whisper of a skirt crossing the rough wood. The sound made a few men sigh audibly, until a lifted flame traveled up the moth-eaten blue taffeta gown, sunken at the hips and strained at the waist, past a conspicuous rib cage and over two lopsided but nonetheless prominent breasts to reveal Lyman Woodard’s painted cheeks. The sighs turned to groans and then expectant silence. While the gown drooped from his narrow shoulders, Woodard’s blond hair curled perfectly from beneath a crepe bonnet. He paced and wrung his hands for a dramatic minute before he settled on the single piece of furniture, making Laurence realize it was supposed to be a bed.

  “THE CRIME OF AMNON,” boomed a voice from behind the curtain. It belonged to Ellroy. Woodard blinked his sooty lashes and began to sing “When This Cruel War Is Over” in a grating falsetto. When he reached the chorus of “weeping sad and lonely,” the spectators started to shift and hiss. One spat a mouthful of tobacco at the green curtain.

  The audience reaction appeared to Laurence to be part of the art of Ellroy’s opera, for Woodard kept sawing away at the song until another fellow threw an empty canteen at his head and everyone laughed. This was the signal for the next thespian to appear, Ellroy himself, garbed in a butternut Confederate soldier’s uniform and Union cap. His ensemble produced a second round of hisses, and many of the drinkers raised their canteens, taking long swallows and licking their lips in anticipation.

  “Hello, sister,” said Ellroy, toying with the saber at his hip.

  “Hello, Amnon,” squeaked Woodard, bounding up from the bed and adjusting his slipping right breast. Ellroy took Woodard’s place on the wooden table.

  “I am sick, Tamar.” He lounged and coughed. “Make me some cake.”

  “Yes, brother.” Woodard nodded vigorously, as if the crowd might doubt the affirmation in his words. After Tamar rustled back behind the curtain, Laurence heard a clanking, like a stove door opened to stoke a fire. He wondered at the choice of the story, and supposed it was a prelude to the political plot of Absalom, for the shaming of Tamar was really a lesser tale than the one of David’s favorite son.

  “Get on with it,” a man in the crowd urged the prostrate Ellroy. The captain grinned. Rain pattered against the tent walls.

  “Bring me the nourishment in the bedroom, so that I may have it from your hand,” Ellroy said to the curtain behind him. At this, the clanking ceased and Woodard’s Tamar appeared, bearing a tray of hardtack. She proceeded to the bed and held out the tray.

  “From your hand,” growled Ellroy. The men around Laurence tensed, then leaned forward. Watching Woodard lift one square of hardtack from the tray and offer it to Ellroy, he felt his own heart quicken.

  A raucous moan rose from the audience when Ellroy grabbed Woodard’s wrist and pulled him on the table. Woodard’s petticoats flashed, revealing his thin, bare calves. The tray fell with a clang. Crackers shattered everywhere as they hit the stage.

  “Show more leg,” said the burly New Hampshire man.

  “Come, lie with me, sister,” said Ellroy, pinning the petticoats with his butternut thigh.

  “No, my brother. Do not shame me,” whispered Woodard. The candle near the curtain was snuffed by a hand and then they heard only the noises of the men straining against each other. Beneath them, the table moaned, threatening to break.

  Repulsed, Laurence was about to push his way out of the crowd, when the right wall of the tent tore in half. In the gap stood Gilbert Rhodes, ghosted by moonlight. He was clutching with his free arm the letters, ambrotypes, and good-luck tokens that had rested inside his quarters to be prayed over and blessed. His black eyes were dulled by the lack of light, but his voice rang out over the hushed men.

  “‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.’” Rain threaded silver down his face. Dropping his cane and the keepsakes, he raised his arms in the most ancient of gestures—arms straight, palms flat—both the surrender and the embrace of the world. The cane clattered on the dirt, followed by letters, cameos, and portraits of wives and sweethearts cascading down.

  Woodard and Ellroy untangled themselves just as the table shuddered and broke beneath them, and for a moment Laurence thought that Gilbert had won, that they would all file out, peniten
t, from the filthy tent. They would go on to live as brave soldiers and good brothers and husbands, never again looking in the direction that the stage had taken them. But then a canteen was lobbed from the crowd, hitting Gilbert on the shoulder. Although he flinched, he did not lower his arms.

  “Get out!” someone shouted, and his cry was taken up by the others.

  When the canteen bounced back into the crowd, the crippled Davis plucked it up and threw it harder against the Preacher’s chest.

  “Get out!” It became a chorus.

  Gilbert coughed but did not move from the gap in the canvas. Another canteen caught him across the cheek, making it bleed. Then a piece of the shattered table cracked against his temple. He staggered, his eyes rolling back.

  “Leave him alone!” Laurence yelled, but his words were swallowed by the crowd’s angry chant. “Leave him alone,” he repeated, seeing Pike’s face falling down through the stream, hearing the boy’s sweet voice rising above those of the contrabands. He pushed through the men toward Gilbert and took his own share of the flung canteens, slipping on the spilled letters. Catching the Preacher’s tumbling body, he hauled him from the tent. Gilbert’s once thickly muscled torso felt like a bag of sticks now, light and easy to lift. A fight broke out behind them as the men started scrambling for their fallen keepsakes.

  After staggering down two rows of tents, Laurence paused to breathe. Gilbert blinked, moaning. “‘Babylon is fallen.’”

  Laurence hushed him. “They might come after us,” he whispered, pulling the Preacher upright. Gilbert hopped on his good leg.

  “My cane,” he said. “I carved it myself.”

  “We can’t go back. It’s too late, Gilbert.”

  “It’s always too late, ain’t it?” He stared at Laurence with the old accusing eyes before swiveling and trying to hop back in the direction of the theater.

  “I would have saved Pike if I could,” said Laurence, refusing to let go of the other man. “Why could you never believe that?”

  It started to rain again.

  “My uncle Johnny”—Gilbert slumped forward, his surge of strength gone—“he taught me to carve. He could whittle a stick into anything God made.”

  “I never knew,” Laurence said softly. He had tried to forget about his uncle’s hired man.

  “He said your father once asked him to carve a swan and give it to Mrs. Faustina Lindsey, secret like.…” Gilbert paused.

  The clouds completely masked the stars. No reflection shone in the puddles of mud and filth. They stumbled through them, Laurence holding Gilbert to keep him from falling.

  “And when he did, she threw it in the fire. She let it burn while he watched. The bird he had taken a month to carve and had made so pretty because he loved her—he watched it burn until it was ash.” The last words dribbled from the corner of Gilbert’s mouth and he began sliding down, losing consciousness again.

  Laurence let him crash to the earth, seeing the fire and his aunt’s perfect hands, seeing the triumph in Johnny Mulcane’s ugly face after he slapped Laurence across the cheek for prying into his things. Gilbert splayed against the mud, his uniform filthy, mouth agape. Because he loved her—Laurence could see the phrase falling with the rain, letter by letter.

  Bending down, Laurence gathered Gilbert roughly in his arms and lifted him, cradling the Preacher’s flopping head against his chest. There’s nowhere to escape to, he thought, looking up at the ceiling of clouds, their soft shapes pushed north by unseen currents. The Theater of War. A cold, wet gust swept over the camp. The men behind him were still bickering with one another over the lost possessions, but their words splintered against the walls of rain, and he could not understand what they meant.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  A square of light fell across Laurence’s bed every morning, drifted to the floor in the afternoon, then ascended up the musty side of Lyman Woodard’s cot, resting on the soldier’s face until it died with the advance of evening. For the first three days in the southern Vermont hospital, Laurence had not been aware of the path of the light, only that in the morning he felt calm and serene, by afternoon jittery, and, by nightfall, gripped with the certainty he would die. He wept in his sleep and when he woke in the dark room, where other men sighed and sobbed their lovers’ names, he was sure death had already taken him away.

  The Vermont winter was thick with snow. It ghosted up the side of the window, rounding off the lower corners. On the fourth day, Gilbert, who lay across the row, knocked the pane free of the white weight, and Laurence suddenly noticed the outlines of the square of light. There it was, lying like a capsized sail over his body; there, it slipped to the floor. After years of living outside, he had forgotten that the sun could be broken like this.

  Then it snowed again, and Gilbert no longer tried to knock the drifts away. Ever since the night in Ellroy’s tent, the Preacher had gone silent. Even after they had been moved from Camp Convalescence to the tidy Brattleboro hospital their governor had established for ailing Vermont soldiers, his lips still moved in prayer, but he uttered nothing aloud, and he let his hair and beard grow long and shaggy. Laurence took to watching him, guessing what he was praying, and Gilbert didn’t appear to mind, as if all along he had expected their old enmity toward each other would one day fade to simple curiosity.

  Laurence himself was content with the slow, quiet days in the hospital, and he looked forward to seeing his mother and cousin, who had set out from Allenton as soon as the railroad tracks were cleared. Woodard, on the other hand, grew more restless by the day. He missed his brief theatrical glory and wrote copious letters to Ellroy, which were never returned. He talked loudly about starting his own dramatic company when he got back to the regiment, but no one listened. Both he and Laurence had suffered a second, worse bout of stomach fever, and Woodard, shrunken and yellow, was more like a scarecrow than ever. Just as he was relating his ideas for a Cain and Abel opera, Laurence’s mother and cousin arrived at the threshold to the ward to visit him.

  Pattie Lindsey hitched herself up like a general and peered down the long gap between beds. Raising his head to be recognized, Laurence was suddenly aware of his shoulders protruding sharply beneath his shirt, the dark scribble of beard on his chin. His mother’s eyes swept past him and he sank back.

  “Laurence Lindsey,” she boomed.

  “She’s looking for you,” Woodard hissed. “Why don’t you wave?”

  “They’re not looking for me,” Laurence muttered as he struggled to sit up again. “They’re looking for who I was.”

  But on a second search, they spied him, his mother and his cousin, who walked lightly behind, and he saw how they, too, had been changed by distance and time. His mother had swelled to twice her former weight and she thrust her ample chest ahead of her like a battering ram. Her face had the military glow of a well-oiled cannon, but her eyes were somehow smaller, as if she had to peer through the wall of her own lavish flesh.

  Bel’s transformation was more pleasing. The childhood symmetry of her features was gone: A larger, adult nose carved a wide gap between her eyes, but the eyes were bigger, too, and the pale blue of cornflowers. Her red mouth had become sensual and expressive, twitching uncertainly as she absorbed the soldiers’ hungry glances.

  “Laurence,” she said, a half step behind her aunt, and they assaulted him with kisses, Bel’s shy and retreating, his mother’s possessive, slightly wet. And so began a brief interlude of bliss, where he forgot his suffering and enjoyed the pleasantries and Grete’s sauerbraten, his favorite dinner. For three days, it was like a dream—they showed up each morning with a new hamper full of food, the first day cooked by Grete, then, afterward, purchased from the inn where they were staying, and they talked long into the afternoon about Allenton, about his days at Camp Convalescence (greatly abridged), about the war still raging while they reunited in that brief cove of peace.

  Their visit made Laurence remember the old days at Greenwood, the wilderness-seeking missions he and
Bel would make through the garden and down to the lake, where the whining saws of the lumberyards mixed with gull cries and the lapping waves. Virginia, rich and overgrown, had none of the clarity of the winter lake on which they had skated and played, and he realized how much he missed it, and his cousin, too.

  He began to think that Bel was sweet on him, and he basked in her attention, giving her fond looks when his mother was not watching, touching her sleeve. She never pulled away, and she laughed eagerly at his feeble jokes. When Mrs. Woodard came that Sunday to visit her son, Bel held Laurence’s hand while they listened to her long-winded, embarrassing stories about Woodard’s youth. Every time Mrs. Woodard said something especially outrageous, they squeezed hands, all their bottled mirth going out through their fingers. It was like the old days—only Laurence felt an undercurrent of desire surging beneath their affection. He let his eyes linger on her pale winter forehead, on the sweep of hair pinned at the base of her neck. Once lighted from within like summer wheat, it had darkened to a deep honey blond.

  “You have your mother’s hair,” he told her when Pattie Lindsey excused herself to visit the outhouse. It was their last day together, and they were leaning close so they could speak without the whole ward hearing. “It’s lovely.”

  “Thank you,” said Bel, patting it. “Since I started putting it up, it gets full of knots by the end of the day, just like hers.”

  “Bel—” he said urgently. “Would you let me take it down?”

  His cousin’s mouth twisted. “It takes me forever to pin it again,” she protested.

  “Please.” He tried to grip her hand, but she pulled it away crossly.

  “Stop it, silly. I don’t want the bother of putting it back up.”

  They moved apart. Bel fussed with her pins, as if Laurence’s request alone had managed to undo them, and he realized she did not comprehend what he was asking, that one does not discover innocence until one has lost it, and that Bel was innocent, while he was not.