Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  The girl would blush at little now, after three weeks in the heart of the busy hospital off Ninth Street. The opulent velvet room at the Willard was sacrificed for a hard cot in the basement, where the female nurses were discreetly placed far away from the wounded. The girl’s aunt had fallen ill with fever almost immediately after seeing her son, but she refused to leave the building while Laurence was in such a delicate condition. Consequently, Isabel and her uncle George traded shifts between another basement room of the hospital and the ward upstairs. Below, Aunt Pattie alternately coughed and dreamed and wept, while on the top floor, Shadrach had lain silent until now.

  It brought tears to the surgeon’s eyes to see the three of them gathered around Shadrach’s crippled form. He was certain the boy would never wake again, and he looked disbelieving when the girl told him that her cousin Laurence had spoken to her.

  “Shadrach, I mean,” she said softly as she led the surgeon to the bed. The soldier had drifted off again, his burned lashes making a sooty curve above his cheek.

  “Are you sure now, Miss Lindsey?” asked the surgeon, bending over him like a robin reaching for a worm.

  “He said my name,” she answered simply. She resumed her perch on the stool beside the bed. “He said Isabel.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  Every day, the vigil changed over Shadrach’s body. Isabel and her uncle switched at noon, crossing each other on the stairs, their bodies swollen with lack of sleep, eyes meeting, locking, looking away. In the anxiety over his wife and son, Uncle George no longer paid much attention to his niece. He spoke to Bel only of deliberate things, asking her how well the hospital was supplied with bandages, how many wounded had come in that day, how long her aunt had stayed awake. He bowed his head like a penitent as soon as he passed her.

  Upon reaching the ward, George would raise his chin, stride in, and shut the window behind his son, scaring the sparrows that gathered on the sill. The once-handsome man insisted on watching Louis, the invalid nurse, change the dressing. He did not flinch at the sight of Shadrach, but peered with tender interest at where the fire had melted his son’s skin against his ribs and shoulders. He lightly touched the white dust that bloomed over it and the flecks of soot that were buried in the soldier’s cheek. Shadrach’s empty eye socket shone back at them, a yellowed cave of pus. The boy was beyond the ugliness of the maimed, who peopled the ward like a new race, the slow shufflers and awkward lifters, their skin knit back together by the amateur hand of man. He was just a shell for the little spirit left in him, hollow and cool to the touch.

  On the morning that Shadrach woke and spoke to his cousin, the Canadian’s rough hands finally stopped trembling. He understood that Isabel’s uncle tolerated his presence because he had saved his son. He understood that his place had been carved by his rescuing, that as long as he continued to save the boy, this slot remained for him. Consequently, he had quailed at the daily changing of the dressing as a student who dreads a test he knows he’ll fail. Shadrach’s father was a firm believer in work’s ability to elevate the worker, however, and he observed Louis with grudging praise, day after day. For a while, they both believed in Shadrach’s recovery, cracked jokes, and spoke to the sleeping soldier about his imminent return to Allenton. But on that afternoon, the invalid nurse knew the patient would never see his home again. When he lifted the bandages, he noticed immediately that the skin that had once tightened to a raw pink sheen was loose, giving way to dark patches of gangrene.

  “Tell me again how you saved him,” the father said in a hoarse whisper as Louis heaped the used bandages in an old chamber pot. This was their other conversation, repeated over and over. The man knew the story so well, he would interrupt like a child who guesses what is coming on the next page but must hear it all anyway, this tale he knows the end to.

  “He was lying in the creek bed with his face down—”

  “Before that—”

  “The fires?”

  “Yes, the fires.”

  “The captains left alive thought no one could survive the fires that swept through the trees. The flame was high and bright and we heard the men screaming as they died.”

  “But my son—”

  “But your son was lying in a creek bed with another body beside him—”

  “And the body—”

  “And the other body was burned beyond recognition. I thought it was his sergeant, but they found him a mile away, shot through the head. I don’t know who it was. Some say a contraband, others—”

  “Someone saved my son.”

  “Someone saved him,” Louis repeated bitterly, changing the story because he was tired of the father’s wish for the savior to remain unknown and therefore grander in gesture. “I saved him. He was half-buried when I found him. I carried him from the forest, and when no ambulances came, I carried him farther, until I could find a train to take us—”

  He laid the fresh bandages across the seamed skin of Shadrach’s ribs.

  “Someone saved my son,” continued the father. “A man who respected him. And you will stay as long as he stays.” This was a command not to remain. The nurse met the father’s eyes across the deflated body.

  “As long as we both shall live,” he said.

  “Do you love her? Then go when this—” He gestured to the body but did not finish. Shadrach slept peacefully on the cheek that was not burned. Louis refused to answer.

  “A man like me can reward you in many ways,” the father said, threatening, his voice the low growl of a dog that knows it will be beaten but fights anyway. “What do you need?”

  “A chance,” said Louis, starting in on the face. He gently peeled off the bandages, revealing the featureless gap between the patient’s eye and mouth, the nose sunk to a black coil. The father sucked in his breath.

  “What else?” he said. The smell of the body was terrifying and rich.

  “Another,” said Louis.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Because many of the wounded men could not walk, much less bear their own plates, Louis, two other recovering soldiers, the homely spinster nurse, and Isabel carried trays of coffee, soup, and sandwiches around the room to the hungry. Mealtime was a chaotic affair, because the large dumpling of a German soldier always wanted twice his share, while the duck-faced New Jerseyan had to be cajoled into taking a single bite of bread. The stomach cases were the worst. They looked on, their mouths watering, strictly forbidden to consume anything but broth and coffee. Bel made a big to-do of fixing their coffee just how they liked it, black, or with milk or sugar, so they would not feel left out.

  On the day after her cousin first spoke to her, she reluctantly left him sleeping after mealtime and descended through the floors of the hospital to the basement. She passed her uncle on the way up. They nodded to each other. No change. She knew he would watch Louis lay on fresh bandages, and then Louis would leave father and son and meet her in the alcove behind the stairs.

  It was their secret place, discovered one day when they hid together from the spinster nurse, who had become enamored of Louis and followed him everywhere. They laughed in helpless silence as she stomped up and down the steps, her skirt tightening around her ankles, petticoat unraveled at the hem. Then, somewhere in the dark, their hands had found each other, and then their mouths. Bel never guessed a man’s lips could be as soft as butter forgotten on the table in summer. Blind, and in hushed whispers, they arranged to meet there the next day, and the next, until the rendezvous became fixed in their schedules. Bel dreamed all morning of holding the knobs of Louis’s spine, feeling her shoulders made small by the pressure of his cupping hands.

  But first she had to attend to her aunt. First, the day had to reach its midpoint in the chilly basement. Aunt Pattie claimed one damp gray room below, and Bel’s uncle kept a fire perpetually going in the narrow grate. It was a dismal place, its white paint peeling, the rats scratching through the cabinets, and the kind of insects that live in the dark underground always crawling up
the walls. Today, Aunt Pattie was a mound of cheese-colored sheets and a cold, sweaty face that brightened when she saw her niece.

  “Dear girl,” said Aunt Pattie, the motor inside her voice diminished to a slow hum. “How is my son?”

  “He’s sleeping,” Bel said, and lowered herself to the stool by her aunt’s bed. “As if he were pricked with a needle that would make him sleep a thousand years.”

  “Goodness,” said Aunt Pattie with a chuckle that broke into a cough. Her fever had caused her to lose weight, and the old lines of her face were visible again. She looked like an aged doll. “I don’t know if I’ll last that long.”

  “Oh, Aunt. You could last forever.” Bel’s back ached from sitting so many days by her cousin’s bed. She shifted to find a more comfortable position on the stool, and her eyes fell to the Bible on the table. “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked.

  “In a minute, dear,” said Aunt Pattie with a wave of her bare hand. The rings she always wore were gone. “I want to tell you something.”

  Bel shifted again, lifting her skirts. She could smell the sourness of her aunt’s body, and remembered how perfumed Aunt Pattie used to be, always drifting into the house drenched in lilac cologne. “Yes?” she asked.

  “I’ve been watching that spiderweb up there.” She nodded to the corner above the doorway, where an elaborate gossamer web held the bodies of several dead insects.

  “I can get it down,” Bel offered, but her aunt shook her head.

  “I always thought that it was accident—that the flies flew into it out of stupidity or poor eyesight. But I’ve been watching them, Bel. You should see how fast they fly into that beautiful thing.” She paused. “As if they’re trying to break it, or, at the very least, scar those perfect, perfect strands.”

  Sensing an oncoming lecture, Bel stared stubbornly at the floor. Her aunt was going to say that she didn’t approve of the way Bel was working, that her rough hands were unbecoming of a young lady of her station.

  “They can’t bear it,” Aunt Pattie concluded finally. “It’s too lovely. So they die because of their jealousy. And after awhile, all the rips and scars do their work, and the web is ugly, just like they wanted.”

  “Are you hungry, Aunt Pattie?” Bel asked, hoping to change the subject. “I could see if there’s anything left in the kitchen.”

  Aunt Pattie continued as if she had not heard her. “The first time I saw your mother, I realized I had never understood what human beauty was. It wasn’t an accumulation of pretty, external things, but some interior difference between people—like the way Greenwood is lovelier than our house, because I wanted something from Paris, and your father built something for Allenton.” She sighed. “And as many suitors as I had in our little town, the whole world could have fallen in love with Faustina Gale.”

  Bel saw her mother dancing with Louis at the Twelfth Night party, her beautiful head tilted back to laugh.

  “I’m sorry now that I was so jealous of her.” Aunt Pattie’s voice was rusty-sounding and thin. “That we didn’t become better friends.”

  “You still can,” Bel said, a sadness welling in her. She didn’t want to understand her parents’ lives like this.

  “I’m glad you’re still young enough to believe that,” said Aunt Pattie. “I worry how this war is aging you, dear Bel. When I was young, I had only to worry if my husband was in love with his brother’s wife.” She smiled. “Hardly a concern worth noting in these times.”

  Bel felt as if her heart might stop. The swan locket lay cold against her collarbone. “I think you need some sleep, Aunt Pattie,” she said as she struggled to stand. A leg of the stool pinned one of her petticoats.

  “Sit down, girl. You didn’t know, did you?” Her aunt turned her face to the wall. “Of course not. Everything changed once you were born and they had a child of their own. But when your father first went away to school, it left George and Faustina alone for the first time on their family farms outside Allenton. They roamed everywhere together. George hadn’t met me yet—so how he could not fall in love with her?” Aunt Pattie grunted. “It didn’t matter. After they spent a winter pretending it wasn’t true, your father came home and married her, as the Gales and the Lindseys had always planned, in the spring of Faustina’s eighteenth year.”

  Bel sat down again, remembering her mother and uncle arguing behind the Chinese screen at Twelfth Night, remembering all the times she had seen them together fighting or laughing, the energy in both their eyes when they were in the same room. Her aunt went on, her voice hard, as if she were delivering a punishment.

  “When George started courting me a year later, I fell foolishly in love with him. I thought he would get over her, and he did, eventually. But it took years—years I could have spent with that Canadian fur trader who doted on me, or that sickly young man from Boston who would have died and left me a fortune. I could have had anyone in town except a Lindsey boy, but that’s whom I wanted.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Bel demanded.

  Aunt Pattie’s eyes fluttered shut. “I only meant to apologize, my dear. I only meant to say I was sorry we weren’t kinder to each other. Now that my son is dying, I don’t want any anger in our family.”

  A silence fell over the room as Bel registered the last statement, wondering if the fever had overtaken her aunt, if nothing she said were true. She watched a stillness pass over her aunt’s features and knew that the older woman had drifted into sleep.

  “He’s not dying,” she protested dully, but Aunt Pattie did not answer except to snore slightly.

  Just then, a knock on the door startled Bel, and George Lindsey bustled in behind a tower of logs. He set them down with a clatter, then turned toward his niece.

  “Well, was she awake? She said she had something to tell you.” His gray beard had whitened, rounding his jaw like a snowdrift. Grape-colored shadows gathered beneath his eyes. Uncle George always smelled of cigars, and lately of stale sweat, an odor that made Bel think of Johnny Mulcane.

  “Not really.” Bel tried to smile. How long had her uncle been in love with her mother, and when had it ended? Since their days in the hospital, she had seen him display such tenderness to his wife, he could not still be pining for Faustina. Every time she came downstairs, he was bending over Aunt Pattie, whispering to her and smoothing back her hair, or reading her stories in a fond voice.

  “Is something wrong?” He looked genuinely worried. They stared at each other across the gray light of the basement, each searching the other’s face. Bel wondered then if the swan locket had been given to her mother not by some unknown suitor but by Uncle George—if it was their secret that had drifted from it the night she and Louis sat in the hayloft together. She could show it to him right now and know for sure.

  As she hesitated, a fly careened lazily into the spiderweb above the door. The threads held fast as the black insect struggled to break free. It wasn’t beautiful, that silver trap, when something was dying inside it.

  “She was telling me about how she fell in love with you,” Bel answered finally. “I think she misses you when you’re gone.” She did not touch the necklace that hung beneath her clothes. Before living at the hospital, she would have done it, would have insisted on laying bare the truth, but now the world of Greenwood hardly mattered. It was a memory she had set aside with her own girlhood, to be revisited later, if only she could remember how to go back.

  George leaned over the bed where his wife rested. Aunt Pattie’s damp eyelids quivered slightly but did not open. “I’m here now, Patricia,” he said, and kissed her.

  Bel stood up from the stool and swayed toward the threshold, her body weary. Her wrists ached from drawing pictures of the wounded and carrying trays and helping the nurses make the beds for the incoming men. Her hands were chapped and scraped, but she didn’t care anymore. She wanted Louis to be proud of her, to know she was as capable as any man’s wife.

  “Good-bye, Uncle,” she said softly, closi
ng the door. He was busy heaping wood in the grate and did not hear her above the chink of logs.

  Bel hurried up the stairs to meet Louis in their hiding place, the dim alcove that smelled of plaster and left a film of dust on both their clothes. The tutor was already in the shadows, holding his wounded arm, which bothered him daily. The rebel bullet had hit him just above the elbow, and carrying Isabel’s cousin the fifteen miles to the nearest train had worsened the injury.

  Bel entered the gloom and stood inches away from him, raising her eyes to his. There was a single crack of light in their universe, where the back of one stair had loosened. Looking through it, Bel glimpsed the sturdy heels of the spinster nurse descending, heard the limp of a soldier climbing to his ward. Louis’s lips met hers, lightly at first, then pressing hard, until their teeth clashed together, until she could feel the rough hairs of his unshaven face. He groaned and let his injured arm fall on her shoulder. The minutes burned around them.

  She could never tell him what her aunt had said, for what would he think of her family then? Besides, it was one of their rules never to talk during this time. Conversation wasted the precious minutes in its polite rounds, and all the news of the hospital was apparent anyway: Weevils had gotten into the flour, Bel’s aunt was finally healing to the painful cure of calomel, the fat German was buying food from the New Jerseyan with bribes of tobacco, and Shadrach was dying.

  In her mind, Bel hardly called him Laurence anymore. Her cousin had become the child of all the ward—and hers and Louis’s in particular—mute and always in need. If she did not listen for his breath, he might leave her, and so her trysts with the tutor always ended with her pushing away from him and running up the stairs, smoothing her hair as she went. Usually, she was greeted by the changeless silence of Shadrach’s face, but today it might be different—today he might say her name again. The cool air of the alcove still on her skin, she entered the ward and tiptoed to her cousin’s bed, trembling. He was just waking, as if it were finally morning in his mind, his good eye fluttering open to find her having never left his side.