Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  Everybody in his company ignored this strange bout of energy. Only Laurence flicked periodic glances beyond the fire to measure the sergeant’s progress, as if he knew he were alone in his curiosity and wished to hide it. Stretching out his long legs, he yawned and let his blond hair fall into his eyes, half-listening to the rest of the men, who were talking about their general. They had all seen him riding the day before in the old patched coat of a private, his hat askew and beard uncombed. Grant, one said, was not a gentleman, and that’s why he was the best kind of soldier.

  If Grant was in charge all this time, we wouldn’t be fighting on the same battlefield as last year, said a veteran who wanted to scare the new recruits into understanding they knew nothing about war. I don’t know anymore if I’m sleeping on roots or bones.

  Addison kept digging, stopping occasionally to wipe his forehead with his sleeve.

  As their talk slowed, Loomis pulled out the locket his wife had given him long ago and kissed her image inside. Another fellow flapped his bedroll three times before lying down. The newer men, just down from their small towns in Vermont, began to form their own superstitions that very night, touching a letter in a breast pocket, whispering a name.

  The sergeant’s stone finally loosened, and he pried it up with his bayonet so that it rolled toward the flames. It bounced awkwardly, hollow and scratched across its yellow-white face.

  This is what we all are coming to, said Addison, rising unsteadily. And some of you will start toward it tomorrow.

  The skull bumped against a stick blackened by the fire. Bending forward, the sergeant pulled it back from the blaze and let it rest with the sockets aimed upward at a cream of night clouds, the toothy jaw slack and swallowing.

  * * *

  When the companies entered the thicket, the captains drove them to the intersection of two roads. The dusty lanes ran through an endless forest of thorn trees, chinquapin, and dwarf chestnut, burred across the land like the hair of a newborn, thick and tangled with its own shadow.

  Gunfire shattered the stillness. Songbirds made sharp cries before they vanished, diving into hollows and caves. Addison looked instantly lonely, as he always did in battle, the rest of the world receding as he focused forward, his nose thrusting horselike into the wind. Behind him, too tall for this skirmish, Alfred Loomis stooped to save himself, his back bowed to an invisible ceiling.

  Light blared through the stunted trees, peeling cool morning from the air and replacing it with the heat of a windowless room. The branches cracked like glass beneath their feet, and Laurence remembered suddenly the taste of blackberries, their laden sweetness filling his mouth.

  When the firing began, their close formation was torn apart, the sergeant in the middle, Loomis looping left through a stand of new birch, his paddle-sized feet slipping on the mossy stones. The three friends knew one another so well that when Loomis drifted out, the others glanced to where he headed, the lone dead tree, jutting like a finger from a fisted hand.

  Ahead of them, the soldiers on the front line fell slowly, with grand and ridiculous gestures, their arms flopping out to conduct a wild orchestra, or swimming slowly down through the leaves. Addison’s line would be next. A bullet sailed into the hollow of the dead tree behind Loomis’s head, just missing him. He gave a sigh of relief. He did not see the angry swarm of bees that hurtled out of the hollow by the hundreds and aimed like an arrow of rain against the back of his neck.

  At the first stings, he spun around, batting their bodies away with his cap until his hands swelled. Soon the insects covered his ears and the slick crown where his hair was falling out. Howling with pain, he straightened from his safe crouch and began to sprint in the direction of the enemy. The others called out in warning, but he did not hear.

  He ran with his arms open, embracing the bushes as they whipped his chest. A shot in his stomach, then another, broke his stride and he dove forward until the branches swallowed him. Following their quarry, the bees sang a hymn of exhausted anger that, against the crack and whine of bullets, sounded like praise.

  It would be nightfall before the two remaining soldiers began looking for their friend. By then, his face had swollen tight as an egg, the features nearly erased. He could have been anyone, husband and father to a thousand orphaned sons perched on a flour barrel in the general store, baking their shins against a winter fire, running to answer the knock on the door.

  * * *

  The signal rose through the forest, a low three-note whistle of the dove. It meant found. As night fell, rebels had started to fire at the searchers, their own men among them, making branches glow in sharp relief, then vanish.

  Bats lost their patterns of flight and slammed into tree trunks with hollow, popping sounds. One fell on Laurence’s neck, and he swiped it away, hissing through his teeth. He had found his friend by his socks, where the brogan split and peeled aside and an irregular net of black thread shone through. There was no face left.

  He sat back on his haunches, balancing his rifle across his thighs. The air weighed hot across the dead leaves and, far off, he could hear a narrow creek trickling over root and stone. Earlier, Captain Davey had ordered them to fill their canteens there. They’d held the silver lips down in the gravel bed and waited as the slow, silty current entered them. Laurence had stayed longer than the others, hovering over the cool vein, searching for the reflection of his face. He whistled again, three low notes.

  When Addison staggered in, he stepped on the body’s flung right hand and skidded to a halt. He stared into the hole below the ribs, where ants were marching over the intestines in a relentless line. Every time the wounded man breathed in, the ants would waver and lose their footholds, only to regain them again. The earth around the torso had darkened to mud and the corpses of bees lay scattered across it, like drops of rain that would not sink.

  Loomis, the sergeant said, although he knew the man could not hear him. Then he unhitched his revolver and aimed straight into the body’s half-shut mouth. Laurence watched him dully, holding a narrow chain, the hinge of its locket split open by a minié. One half had fallen somewhere into the field of dead bees and the other bulged like a cheek between his finger and thumb, the woman’s face inside cracked across the eyes.

  Addison fired. It was louder than the whole war, that sound. The line of ants faltered, but only for a moment, less time than it took for him to turn away.

  * * *

  When the minié hit Laurence in the shin, he thought he could walk anyway and was surprised to have his leg collapse beneath him. He rose again and fell again, swaggering like a drunk through the brush. It was the second day. The regiment had moved on, past the intersection, through an open field, and into more unyielding thickets. Addison had left him behind because Davey was wounded, shot in the thigh.

  Laurence.

  The name burst into light above the chestnut tree. It was not to be believed. His leg was absent beneath him, his right hand split across the palm.

  Later that day, the regiment swept back past him in retreat, and he thought he saw Addison running, his cap lost, his bronze hair streaming like a banner. He could not be sure. The woods were the bleached color of locusts, of a manic season.

  Laurence.

  It was not to be believed. Addison injured beside him, holding his bloody cheek. Yesterday’s face scarred to a mask by bees.

  Toward evening, the fires came. They were lovely at first, a tingle in the bushes, a flicker of candles in a darkened church.

  At first, Laurence tried to drag himself backward to the ragged Union line, but the burning blocked him with a shimmering wall. Mottled with holes, the underbrush took the smoke and raised it skyward. The light followed. He dug a channel of earth around him with his one good hand and waited. Addison must be looking for him, riding through the fire on a borrowed horse.

  Laurence.

  Screams pitched from the men who were burning alive. His hand throbbed. The leg was still absent, a weight he dragged behind him on
a chain. He dug deeper, watching a soldier scramble up a tree, the flames licking after him. Somewhere the corpses of bees turned to ashes above a fresh-dug grave.

  The whistle, the signal for found, never came. He stamped at the fire with his one good foot. Smoke seared his eyes, dry and stinging. He breathed it in, let it enter him, while his good hand spread a caked mud of dirt and spit across his skin.

  Dipping and waiting, the shapes of buzzards loomed high above the fire. He remembered a boy saying it was bad luck to look away from a buzzard before it flapped. The birds made high circles on the night. The yellow flames went white, roaring in his ears. He heard the trees yield and break, their branches swinging down to be consumed.

  Laurence, I’m here.

  It was not to be believed. The air was like day. He stared skyward as the fire crossed his circle of earth, felt the heat in his boots as it touched his feet, playing over them.

  The buzzards spun higher, riding an invisible current, wings stretched, motionless. His nails cracked as his toes began to burn.

  Flap.

  * * *

  It was not a ghost standing above him, but the shape of a man, the very breadth of darkness in the bright rings of fire. His bare skin wore the sheen of coal before it burns. Ridged across his naked body were scars of chains, of lashes up the back. The fishhook mark of his lost tribe curled beneath his left eye.

  Without saying a word, he kicked at the soldier with his good foot, motioning for him to rise. After awhile, the sharp pain woke Laurence and he got to his feet, stumbling into the forest, his eyes shielded by one sooty arm. Burning leaves coasted to the ground around him. He turned. The man had vanished. His knees gave way and he would have caved in, but a falling limb knocked him between the shoulder blades, the blow like a heavy fist beating him onward. He kept walking.

  When he reached the narrow run of water that ran through the woods, he tripped on a root and tumbled with a hiss into the stream. The red haze of the sky went loose above him, like a bandage wearing off a wound. It unraveled slowly, peeling back layer by layer until the screams returned, the heat of the fire around him, the bright stars of sparks lighting the moss. He could feel one half of his face lifted away.

  He burrowed deep in the muddy bank. A damp, crumbling hair of roots cascaded over his eyes. He waited, listening to the screams belly through the woods and vanish, the crash of charred trees. His mouth tasted of soot and blood. Slow water dragged his scorched clothes away from him, his skin tightening where it was touched by flames.

  When he reached for his face, the side that rested on the earth was familiar, the curve of cheek, the bristle of lashes. But the side exposed to the sky sifted like char, the eye sewn shut by fire.

  He struggled to remember the name of his rescuer, but the name meant nothing, two syllables that drowned in the stream. As a minnow swam against his one good hand, he could feel the cold, intricate lace of its fins, its mouth opening and closing against his thumb, trying, failing to swallow him whole.

  * * *

  Morning played over the dying fire, sweet-songed. He was lying on the forest floor with a hundred other bodies, gathered for burial. The sound of the shovel chinking in the earth reminded him of an old guilt, a hole in his life that would never be filled.

  He could go now. The men still alive murmured of a distant train. But he was ready to go without the rails his father had laid for him.

  Laurence.

  Then his body was taken from the others, stabbed by a thousand knives of sunlight.

  The Canadian had come to carry him, a man he had hated for his narrow, hawkish face, for the way he would not be defeated by anything. And he hated the man again for saving his life. He tried to fall, but the man would not fall. The forest vanished, replaced by fields, and they were still running, the Canadian’s steps ragged and jolting. Let me go, he tried to say, his voice overcome by the approach of the train, a metal cloud, a storm bringing wind but no rain.

  * * *

  The train ride was a separate dream, one where he could not move or speak except through the humming clack of the wheels over the tracks. The country outside the window streamed into a single swath of green. The man on his right was dead and his hand kept hitting Laurence’s side, as if he were trying to remind him of something.

  The ceiling of the train was a scratched pine color. When the car moved around the curve, the wooden floorboards joined the moaning of the men. The hot air smelled of smoke. Watching over him was the Canadian who had saved him from being buried alive, holding his red-soaked arm. Live, he urged again and again, his strange accent shortening the word.

  For a long while, he thought that he was already dead. But when the train stopped at its final station with a resounding hiss of steam, he felt his guardian’s hand on his chest, fumbling in the breast pocket. Live, he said as he inspected the cool metal of half a locket, the portrait inside.

  Solemn as a priest, the Canadian tossed the woman’s broken face to the floor. It got stuck in a crack, someone’s mother and wife staring up at them all until the conductor opened the doors to the car and the bright light blinded them.

  * * *

  Laurence.

  Only much later, when the train shuddered to a halt and he was carried to a still place where birds crossed the square of sky behind his bed, only when he knew for certain he was not still in the ring of flames, did he recognize who was calling him.

  For a long time, her name remained a kind of forgiveness he could not utter.

  When he finally answered her, a door flew open to an empty house, moss on the windowsill and dead bees lying in the hearth. A staircase led to the second floor, each step breaking as he took it. Heat filled the attic room, its single window wearing a flap of oilcloth, yellow and ancient.

  Isabel, and the boards made hollow sounds as he crossed them, the spiderwebs softening the corners where beams reached like dark arms. When he pushed the oilcloth aside, the yard unfolded below him, green and rippled by wind. Sunflowers bloomed in the garden, and the welt of sky above bore clouds the color of milk that spilled not rain, but snow, drifting gently down over the warm air, white flakes sinking everywhere and his hand reaching out to hold them as they melted.

  Chapter Forty-one

  “Yes,” she said, kneeling beside him. The room was filled with the bass murmur of men. Her smile wavered as she stared steadily onto the half of his face that looked back at her.

  “You … calling … me?” His voice stayed underwater, the bubble breath of the fish.

  “Yes,” she said again, turning her honey-colored head to glance over the sea of beds. Soldiers were strewn like shipwrecked sailors across them. A filtered sun shone into the room, the yellow of melted butter. “I should tell your mother and father.”

  “I don re … memger—” he began, and she placed a finger on the half of his lips not covered by bandage. After a few hours, the damp linen would go lucid and she could see the hole where his eye had been burned away. The socket fixed a stare on the ceiling, while the healthy eye shifted restlessly about the room, unable to focus.

  The soldier did not yet comprehend he was missing his right leg and the fingers of his right hand. Only the thumb remained, poking like root from its bandage. For hours, the girl had watched the thumb twitch, the stump of the lost leg rear up, making a wave in the sheets, while the good limbs slept peacefully, unmoving. The patient still smelled faintly of the ash that the cooks swept from the stove.

  The balding, moonfaced surgeon was fond of relating the story of this soldier to the other surgeons and nurses. He had lost so many to ordinary deaths from infection and disease that when a fellow survived like this, he had to tell it to the world to believe it. He called the soldier “Shadrach,” after one of the survivors of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. A man who could die and live for his convictions, the surgeon claimed.

  So few had lived through the fires in the Wilderness, a thick woods outside Chancellorsville. Most had perished that night, and the res
t in the remaining days, when they lay on the forest floor, waiting for the ambulance to reach them. Shadrach had lived through every horror the battlefield could offer and then the train ride to Washington, largely due to the ministrations of another casualty, who had stayed with him all the way from Chancellorsville.

  The guardian angel was a Canadian who had taken a bullet in the arm on the first day of the battle, and then disobeyed orders by staying and searching for Shadrach, bringing him personally to the hospital. He now worked as one of the invalid nurses in the ward and was due to return to his regiment as soon as his arm was fully healed. “Jean d’Arc,” the surgeon called him in his joking way, for the Canadian had also come from the fire. The brusque Irishman could never remember anyone’s name unless he issued it himself. His appellations were not particularly clever, but because every soldier feared and respected the man with the ether and cases of sharp metal tools, they were all accepted without protest.

  Once Shadrach was safely in the ward, Jean d’Arc wrote to the patient’s family in Allenton and discovered that his mother and cousin were already in the capital. The Canadian found them at the Willard Hotel, one of the most illustrious of the temporary residences of Washington, run by two Vermonters. Pattie Lindsey and her young charge would breakfast at an enormous buffet of fried oysters, steak and onions, and steamed fish, gliding past the important personages of Washington on the way to their polished table in the corner.

  The Willard’s lavishness had made Bel simultaneously nervous and excited, for she had never seen such poise or finery in small-town Allenton. Aunt Pattie was of the mind that one must be quite fortified for one’s duties, and she fixed herself plates so gargantuan, Bel heard a southern woman whisper to her friend about the insatiable appetite of the Yankees. In the afternoon, they would visit hospitals, breezing through the Patent Office and other improvised wards where the wounded lay in postures of suffering and quiet acceptance, their naked flesh sometimes exposed to Isabel, who would blush and look away.