Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “Anyway,” she said, returning to her previous topic. Her raised arms made her breasts strain against her bodice. She had no idea she was a woman now. “My father has just finished the railway station down by the waterfront. When you come home—”

  “When I come home,” he echoed, laughing.

  Lying on the next bed, Lyman Woodard made a noise in his throat.

  “Hush, dear. You’re shouting,” his mother said as she returned.

  Bel looked confused and fisted her hands in her skirt. “You’ll come home,” she said finally, breaking the silence. “And when you do, Grete has promised to cook such a feast, you won’t be able to eat for three days after. She speaks of it all the time.”

  “Does she,” grunted Laurence, suddenly sick of her patter. “What about Johnny? Where is he now?” he asked, his voice harsh as the image of the hired man rose in his mind. Johnny with strawberry stains on his wrist. Johnny watching his swan burn to ash. Across the ward, he saw Gilbert’s praying lips go still.

  “Johnny was fired last fall,” said Pattie in a tight voice. Did she know about the swan? Laurence wondered. “He couldn’t leave off the spirits, and your uncle had to let him go.”

  “He was ashamed,” Laurence said to himself, although his mother and cousin bent closer to hear. “I understand him now.”

  “Do you?” Bel asked anxiously, but his answer was cut off by his mother.

  “I think you need some good rest.” Pattie Lindsey’s cure-all, whether it was for grief or illness or pain, was to shut her children in their rooms and make them wait it out alone. Laurence had so many memories of his ceiling, days that stretched into weeks, the games he would play across his sheets.

  “I brought you a book as a going-away present,” Bel said. She unearthed a faded gilt-edged tome from the hamper. It was the Lais of Marie de France. “My tutor,” she added, reddening, “taught me how to read them in French. He’s enlisted in a Vermont regiment— perhaps you’ll meet him.”

  “That was thoughtful of you,” said Laurence. “But it’s a book for children, and anyway, I can’t carry it back with me.”

  “You could give it away.” Bel’s disappointed advice made Laurence’s mother scowl. A full-blooded New Englander, Pattie Lindsey disapproved of waste of any sort.

  Laurence accepted the book with reluctance, letting it lie like a weight on his lap, unopened. He refused to meet his cousin’s eyes, knowing that she had planned to give this message to him, a reminder of their old lives, that she was trying to convey to him that she was on his side, no matter what. He could feel his eyes prickle with tears, and in order not to weep in front of them, he glared stonily at the dusty rafters.

  “I think you need some good rest,” his mother repeated. “We’re going to leave you now, dear,” she said loudly.

  “Good-bye,” he whispered to the room, and did not turn his head to acknowledge the kisses planted on his cheek by his mother first, then Isabel, then his mother again, who said with a rush of all the tenderness she had kept inside, “My dear, dear boy.” Laurence almost wept then, but he saw Gilbert staring straight at him and he only sighed.

  “Good-bye,” said Bel one last time. She spoke to the direction in which he gazed and not to Laurence himself. He watched as they retreated in a blue-and-white parade down the row of beds, not looking to the left or the right, and he knew that they would have come again if he had asked, but he had not asked because their part in his life was over. Home was no longer the sound of their voices, of doors shutting and opening in the big house, or the jays lifting their cornered wings above the yard. Instead, it had become an abstraction he carried to keep himself whole, a sheaf of letters going brittle as the ice that shatters during the first spring storm.

  * * *

  The square of light had fallen between the two beds when Gilbert’s kin descended to take him back to their small farm outside Allenton. His mother, a crow-haired, stringy woman with savage hands, sat down immediately beside her son and began to knit. If the occasion arose, she spoke in quick outbursts, her strongly accented English erupting from a mouth so similar to Gilbert’s own, it surprised Laurence when he heard it.

  His pa, silent and stern, was the kind of man who wore so many layers of underclothes, his wrists poked from their cuffs like chicken bones. He had Pike’s freckles and tipped ears, although he had long since lost the boy’s incredulous look, eyeing the world instead with the grim gaze of someone who sees in spring not the promise of the earth but the threat of floods. Two boys not older than eight completed the Rhodes clan. They played out obscure adventures in the dust beside Gilbert’s bed, speaking with the hushed and coded confidentiality of children.

  Gilbert stood up as soon as his mother sat down. He hopped furiously around the room to show them how he could power his own locomotion. Swish, stamp, tap, first one leg, then the other, then the cane.

  “But cain he walk?” Gilbert’s pa asked in his sonorous voice. The mother did not reply, for he spoke to some invisible confidant over his left shoulder. Gilbert hopped a few more steps. The boys did not look up from their playing.

  “Don’t seem worth thirty dollars a month to lose his limb,” his pa continued, giving a curt nod, as if the invisible confidant had confirmed his opinion.

  “Pa,” said Gilbert’s mother. Her needles paused in their knitting, poking through the thick yarn at right angles.

  “It don’t,” insisted the older man.

  Gilbert spun on his single foot, facing his father. He spoke for the first time in weeks, the Preacher’s heraldic violence receding behind the old protesting tone of the angry son.

  “I didn’t do it for no thirty dollars. I did it first because of my brother, and then because of my God, and then because some men are free and some ain’t.” His voice was rusty from lack of use.

  “What’d they turn you into, one of them fool ablishinists?” His father folded his arms across his narrow chest.

  “No. That’s just what I believe.” Gilbert rubbed the scar at his temple, where the board had struck on the night of the play. His beard was matted and thick. “There ain’t a man alive who deserves to belong to other men. Nigger or no, they belong to the Lord.”

  The long ward had fallen silent and the patients propped themselves on pillows and elbows to hear better. Ashamed, Laurence tried not to listen. He practiced making his button vanish behind his ear, up his cuff, beneath his cap. It was the last of the expensive silver ones his mother had insisted on sewing on his first gray coat.

  “Have you all your things, Gilbert? It’s a long ride up to home.” Gilbert’s mother set down her knitting and stood up between her husband and her son. She perched an ugly bonnet atop her head and began to tie the wilted ribbons.

  “You gave up your leg for a passel a niggers.” His pa spat on the wooden floor.

  “Sir, we don’t allow spitting in here,” said a plump gray-haired nurse from the far end of the ward.

  “He looks like a wild man, my son,” Gilbert’s mother murmured to herself.

  Lyman Woodard broke in, blushing as he spoke. “He’s right. He’s absolutely right. As long as slavery exists, no man is truly free. It is worth fighting for—not for us, but for our children.”

  The two young boys glanced up as if their names had been called. They had drawn two armies in the dust.

  “This is my child,” Gilbert’s mother said. “He cannot even walk no more.”

  But Gilbert was staring Woodard down, and Laurence suddenly realized that he had not once looked at Woodard since the night of the opera, even though they had lain ten feet apart all this time. He knew then, although he had not seen it, that Woodard had thrown the board that knocked Gilbert down, and Gilbert knew it, too.

  “Thank you,” he said in a surprisingly humble voice. “But my pa don’t understand that kind of talk. I got all my stuff right here, Ma,” he added. “Let’s go.”

  “You can walk home.” Gilbert’s pa turned his back. The boys glanced up again,
their faces made tear-shaped by shocks of black hair. “See if you can walk.”

  “No! He is my son. He is my first son,” Gilbert’s mother whispered at her husband, jabbing her knitting into his chest. His father stepped back and shook his head, letting his large hands curl into fists. The younger brothers’ eyes swiveled from their father to Gilbert and then back again.

  “I never stopped being a God-fearing man,” Gilbert said in the direction of his brothers. “I never stopped.”

  The square of light had climbed to Woodard’s bed. He was bathed in gold rays, and he sat straight up, like a boy who has just been wakened. Gilbert’s pa watched him and not his son, and Woodard, for once, stayed quiet and resolute.

  “All right,” the older man said to the room with an air of finality. “Let him come.”

  They left in a grand and painful silence, first the father stalking out, then the mother, carrying all of Gilbert’s possessions except the musket, which was willingly borne by his two young brothers. Gilbert followed, stumping and swishing along without waving good-bye to Laurence or any of his pards, his pant leg pinned at the calf, the cane knocking in hollow rhythm to his exit. Just as his friend crossed the threshold, Laurence dropped the button. It went skittering across the floor and into the corner where the boys had been playing. He did not retrieve it.

  Down the long ward, no one spoke for a long time, except for the single busy nurse, a dove-shaped woman who had been sorry for Gilbert and now began trying to talk it out in her mournful coo, declaring how awful his pa was for saying that. Most of the men didn’t answer her, turning their heads to the windows or to books they pretended to read. Still angry at Bel, Laurence had given the Lais of Marie de France to the whole ward. Now the patients made up their own fairy tales, mixing their war in with the old French stories, and one of them said to the nurse, “Even the kings have a hard time of it.”

  Miffed by their apparent lack of compassion, the dove wrenched the sheets from Gilbert’s bed, revealing the old stained straw tick beneath.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” commented Woodard as she bustled away.

  “No,” Laurence answered. “We all should have.” He should have told Gilbert good-bye; he should have told Bel he was falling for her—because the moment would pass whether he spoke or not, and it would be too late.

  Woodard sighed a long gust like a horse about to be saddled. The square of light was dying around him and he resumed his old pallor.

  “It’s not your fault, Woodard,” Laurence said, annoyed. He could still see the button glinting in the dust. “You did the right thing.”

  “It’s just another time I didn’t,” his comrade continued.

  “Of course not. You—” Laurence was about to speak of the night in Ellroy’s tent, but Woodard stopped him.

  “One time in Allenton, I was supposed to help a runaway slave, and I found him too late.”

  “Too late?” Laurence asked.

  “A fellow from Georgia claimed him,” explained Woodard. He turned to Laurence with his hopeless, empty eyes. “I couldn’t try it again. I couldn’t lose another one.”

  “We all have fellows from Georgia,” Laurence said, not allowing himself to wonder if it were the same runaway they all had let slip through their hands. “Anyway, stop suffering about it. You look like you’re enjoying yourself too much.”

  Woodard made a noise in his throat and turned his bony back on Laurence. “You think you’re fighting for the same reason you enlisted,” he accused his pillow. “But I bet you ain’t sure you believe in it anymore. Do you?”

  “I believe in freedom more than ever,” Laurence said coolly.

  “And if there was a chance you could run away, go out west, find a girl, instead of sitting sick on a bed or waiting to die on a battlefield, you wouldn’t do it?” Woodard’s voice rasped like a razor down a stubbled cheek. “Ain’t that freedom?”

  “It is,” Laurence admitted, letting the vision enter his mind. His own dream would take him to London or Paris, some dense European city that smelled of bread and ash. And the girl? He tried to imagine a foreign beauty, but her features would not coalesce. The nurse returned to Gilbert’s bed with fresh linens clasped tightly to her chest. “That’s one freedom,” he added. “The other is the chance to die for what you believe in.…” But his voice trailed off as he said it, and he watched the woman spread new sheets over the tick, erasing his comrade’s presence.

  “Like Gilbert Rhodes,” Woodard said bitterly. The nurse tucked the ends under and hurried off, singing in her low, unpleasant alto, “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Take it back,” Addison was saying when Laurence rounded the corner and strode down the lane of tents. The April day was soft and fine, and now that he was back in Virginia, his health was fully restored. Returning to his regiment had felt like a homecoming, even though many things had changed in his absence, most significantly the loss of Sergeant Hamilton to chicken pox. The day after he was buried, Captain Davey had promoted Addison in his place. Since then, his friend had adopted the pained but earnest glare of a boy given jurisdiction over his schoolmates, and he policed the camp with aggravating vigor.

  “I made you all promise not to forage,” Addison ordered the slump-shouldered Spider, who had a chicken slung beneath his arm. “And I aim to make you keep that promise.”

  “I swear it was running wild in the woods,” Spider pleaded. “You caught a pig that way, and you can’t let me have a little bird?”

  “A bird that fat and that stupid ain’t running wild.” Addison jerked his head at Laurence. “Now you take us to the place you stoled it from and we’ll help you give it back.”

  “Let me keep it.” A blade of sunlight illuminated one of Spider’s green eyes. “I said I wouldn’t do it again.”

  “That’s not good enough,” answered Addison. “Come on, Lindsey. Spider’s going to show us the countryside.”

  He plucked a burr from his wool coat and let his thumb stray to the wooden handle of his new weapon, a government-issue revolver. Laurence sighed, wishing he hadn’t turned the corner just then. He had been studiously avoiding Addison ever since he’d returned, because he couldn’t bear to watch the new strict and moral self replace the one he remembered. Addison hadn’t even been interested in what had happened to Gilbert. He had tightened his jaw and stared at the sloping Virginia horizon as Laurence recounted the tale of the Preacher, the Theater of War, and Gilbert’s awkward homecoming. When Laurence was finished his story, Addison had grunted and said “Just as well. He’d have lost his life soon enough.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” Laurence had demanded then. “You’re not the same anymore.”

  “Are you?” Addison had countered furiously, then stalked off, his once-jaunty gait replaced by a new, stiff-kneed stride. Since then, they had hardly spoken to each other, except through Loomis, who conveniently retained his deaf ear to all things, particularly dissent among his friends.

  “Shall we?” Addison asked with his old lazy smile, although his eyes were hard.

  Laurence nodded reluctantly.

  “Lead on,” the sergeant said to Spider, who hissed angrily through his teeth and started off toward the nearby pinewoods.

  In Addison’s defense, Loomis had told Laurence that the conditions in camp had been terrible before their friend was promoted. The remains of men’s rations had littered the ground between the tents, the latrines had been overfull, and, because many of the contrabands had died from the epidemics of pox and typhoid, there’d been no one to shovel or haul in their place.

  Loomis said that when reveille had sounded every morning, the drumbeat had been drowned out by hundreds of fellows waking and coughing as if their lungs would bust. When Addison had joined Captain Davey in running the camp, it was he who had worked hours on end while Davey grieved, unaware that Addison had suffered his own loss. Loomis said he wouldn’t even have known,
but he was there the moment Addison got the news, a little yellow letter that couldn’t have had more than twenty words scrawled on it.

  “My sister was alone in the house for two days after Ma died,” he had said quietly, refolding the letter. “She didn’t tell anyone for two days.” And then he’d explained that after his father the blacksmith passed on and he left for war, his mother could no longer keep the shop and had moved to a small farm outside Allenton. There, she and his sister could grow enough vegetables to get through the winter, but their nearest neighbor was two miles away, and his mother, a city dweller by birth, had never learned to make country friends.

  “My sister’s only eight years old,” he’d added, and then the matter was closed, Loomis said. No matter how he tried to bring it up again, Addison had refused to listen, trotting off to search for violations of his strict rules. Lately, most of the infractions had been Spider’s and Woodard’s; they smuggled whiskey into the camp, making a tidy profit, and often drinking a large portion themselves. Addison hadn’t figured out how to catch them yet, and Laurence supposed this was why he was being so severe about the stolen poultry.

  As they walked softly now on the carpet of orange needles, Laurence pulled up the rear, watching his sergeant’s straight shoulders rise and fall. The air was sweet with the smell of pitch.

  “This path looks worn,” commented Addison.

  “Maybe it’s an old Indian route,” said Spider.

  “Or an old smuggler’s route.” Addison scuffed the needles with his boot.

  “Or a rebel spy route,” offered Laurence. “They could be spying on us.” He wondered why he came to the defense of Spider, whom he generally despised.

  “Or a counterspy,” Addison said mildly. “You been telling the rebs some secrets, Lindsey?”

  “Everything I know,” said Laurence. “Which isn’t much. Although I heard a rumor that we were going to march soon.”