by Maria Hummel
The blue dimness made the older woman look like a fish trying to hide, its body immobile against the current. Her once-rosebud lips had grown flabby and showed the effort of breath, puffing and sinking back. The rats must have come without Uncle George knowing, because the plate of food Bel had brought down the night before held a constellation of black droppings.
“Have you come to dine?” asked Bel’s aunt, waking and seeing Bel hovering above her, the plate in hand. Her face was open and expectant. Clearly, she did not remember her confession.
“No, I fear you’ve already had some other guests.” Bel set the plate on the table beside the bed. “I came to tell you that I persuaded Laurence to eat three spoonfuls of soup, and a crust of bread, I think.” About the stories, she would say nothing, for they were hers to hear and hers to own, for staying with him while the others could not bear it.
“You think?” Aunt Pattie shifted her head sideways. The dose of calomel had thinned her hair, and Bel could see her aunt’s pink scalp.
“Well, I’m certain about the soup,” she said, suddenly uncertain. “The bread, I left for him, and when I came back, it was gone. I thought he was being stubborn. You know how he can be stubborn.”
“You’ve come to tell me you think he’s getting better,” said Aunt Pattie. “That soon he’ll be able to walk down here and see me, and then we can all go home.”
“Yes,” said Bel, her voice trembling. Her aunt had spoken with a strange bitterness.
“Well,” said her aunt in a gentler tone, turning her face away from Bel. “I would like to see him tomorrow. George is enlisting some boys to help me up the stairs. I am tired of this room, and I won’t be kept away from my son,” she said with an air of defiance. “I’ll go to him if he will not return to me.”
* * *
When Bel repeated her aunt’s command to Louis, breaching their contract not to speak to each other in the alcove, he nodded and said, “She knows.”
“Knows what?” Bel asked. The dark air smelled like chalk. She pressed closer to Louis.
“That he is about to leave us,” Louis said simply. Bel could feel his shoulders rise into an apologetic shrug.
“How can you say that?” she demanded, shoving her face into his shirt, feeling the buttons bruise her cheek. “You saved him.”
“I can’t save him.”
“You already did.”
“It was selfishness. I knew that way, I would see you again.” He took her elbows and pushed her gently away from his body. “And I don’t deserve any sort of praise.”
Bel felt the tilted end of the days they had balanced between them, the fulcrum their few stolen minutes in the alcove and the hope that Laurence might live.
“You say you hate slavery, Isabel. The worst kind of slavery is to keep a man alive, suffering, when he cannot ever walk again, or look at his reflection without weeping,” continued Louis, his voice a soft rasp. She strained to see his face and couldn’t, only the measure of darkness between them. “Don’t make me do it much longer.”
“But he woke yesterday. He spoke to me.” She was pleading now, pushing against the current of his threat.
“If you insist, I’ll leave tomorrow. My arm is almost healed, and my company needs me,” he said, his face unseen, his accent suddenly thick and foreign. Bel shoved the stranger’s hands from her and began backing out of the alcove.
“He told me about all his friends,” she said. Her skirt swept the damp, crumbling plaster. She heard a cricket sawing its leg in the false night behind her. “Why would he do that if he didn’t want to live?”
Louis did not answer, but when he came out into the light, he was cupping the cricket in his hands. It sang through the cage of his fingers as if it did not know it was trapped. Frowning, Bel turned away and began walking up the stairs, her steps steady as a drum tap. When Louis opened his hands, the insect sprang back toward the dark, where it became a voice again, bodiless and grating. He listened for a moment, letting his head tip against the cold wall, knowing she would not wait for him.
Chapter Forty-six
Later, Isabel would remember the single day she did not meet Louis behind the stairs as the end of one part of her life—the part where the future was intertwined with a desperate hope that everything might be the same again, one day, restored like a shelled house to its former grandeur. Louis came to change the dressing alone, quickly, as his strength was needed in the raising of Aunt Pattie. Their eyes met above the shallow breaths of the body between them. The nurse was wearing the shirt Bel had sewn for him, and she saw for the first time the mole high in his black hairline, the thickening of the beard across his face. His not-quite handsomeness seemed distant now, an abstraction of the man she loved and not the man himself. How young I must look to him, she thought suddenly, and stared down at her soft, unveined hands. And yet, although only seventeen, she felt like an old woman. A breeze from the window blew over her, and a sparrow landed on the sill, bright-faced and timid.
“Stay,” she said quietly to Shadrach’s half a face, although she meant it for Louis. The other men of the ward were playing cards or reading, their knees jutting up in their sheets. Laurence had spoken only a few times, moved only in slight shifts of his amputated limbs, and only when she was watching over him. Had she dreamed it all? The other soldiers never turned their heads, even the Illinoisan in the sling right next to him. What’s the use? she thought. What could possibly be the use of keeping him this way when they had their memories of a brave, thoughtful boy who never got in trouble for anything, even for trying to save a runaway slave? Somewhere, that man might be free now, one of the emancipated hundreds who streamed into Washington, carrying his small bundle of possessions. If he were, did that mean their part in the war was over?
Since their failure in childhood to rescue the runaway, Bel had thought of abolition as the one thing that continued to unite herself and her cousin, beyond his misplaced passion for her, beyond her sisterly refusal. Slavery was their last wilderness, the place they had to rename together. And yet now she saw in the faces of Ruth and Lucy, in the pained waiting of the whole city for the war to be over, that slavery would go on long past emancipation. Even the noblest soldier could not overturn the consequences of that institution. The endless suffering terrified her. Staring down at the masked body of her cousin, she felt as if she were balanced on the edge of a cliff, considering how long the leap would take.
Shadrach shifted, sketching a loose arc with his one good hand. The sheet creased beneath his thumbnail. The motion made Bel notice how his wrist resembled her own, the bones on either side jutting out as if there weren’t enough flesh to hold them. They were not princely wrists, but the ugly, functional appendages of soldier and nurse. And they were the same ones she had seen moving across her father’s drafting desk as he drew his plans. The same for the good hand, the same for the crushed. She’d always known that blood tied their families together, but what about the deep, unrelenting structures of bone? Did it matter which man her mother had loved long ago? She could never feel alone again.
Louis began to change the dressing, letting her watch for the first time as he peeled away the onion-colored bandages to the husk of skin beneath. Shadrach’s chest was a pattern of blood black rivers. Bel gagged and turned away from her cousin’s ragged breathing. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, running from the decision Louis was asking her to make.
She did not stop until she reached the basement, where her uncle was orchestrating the raising of his wife. Like all the endeavors of a group of men, the procedure had to be copiously plotted and calculated before it could begin. George, the surgeon, and the other two invalid nurses were estimating the number of steps it would take to lift the woman, the radius of their turns on the landing, the amount of space they would have left in the doorways. It seemed like hours before Louis joined them and the collected men began to ease Aunt Pattie from the bed.
Isabel followed the caravan lifting her aunt up three flights to the high ward. Illne
ss had softened the large hull of the woman’s body and made her flabby, difficult to hold. Even her husband wore the strained face of a man who wished he might be anywhere else but upon that narrow stair, lifting his wife higher, step by grunting step. She rode in their arms, imperturbable and silent. That morning, Bel had helped her into a dress the pine color of the Green Mountain Boys, and Aunt Pattie bore a resemblance to a snowcapped hill in springtime, her wisps of white-blond hair drifting skyward, a green cascade of cloth sweeping the floor. The men began to adopt the rhythm of the Irishmen who laid the Lindsey rails: swing, step, lift, swing, step, lift, up one flight, past the alcove where Bel had hidden daily with Louis in a brief, trapped eternity of touch. He did not meet her gaze.
At the next landing, Bel slipped ahead of them and ran up the steps to the high ward. She could not walk fast enough past the bed of the German, past the new boy with the stomach wound, the Maine soldier ill with dysentery, past the one-eyed man, to the bed where her cousin lay.
Shadrach’s good arm stretched toward the window, his palm open. Two mud-colored sparrows dipped over the hand, feeding on the chewed lump of the crust she had left him the day before. So ordinary, these messengers. Their beaks stabbed into his palm, stabbed again. He was watching them, his head swept toward the window. The bandage had slipped, revealing the ash where hair had once covered his temple, the featureless stretch of his cheek and chin, melted to one. The two halves of the face were separate, like a broken plate that will no longer fit together, some piece flung so far, it will be missing forever. So ordinary, the afternoon absorbed the birds as they flew away. His good eye was fixed on a distant place.
She heard the commotion of her aunt arriving, the sound of the men’s boots scraping the floor. Their strained faces appeared at the threshold. She hovered in front of the body, protecting it from the awkward ship approaching, her aunt’s forehead slick with sweat, blue gaze wide as the blind’s. The ward fell into a deep silence. Even the hiss of cards stopped. Even the man who moaned in his sleep, and slept constantly, paused to breathe. Bel touched the dry ridge of skin where her cousin’s ear had melted against his head. It fell away like a leaf. The procession neared, jostling the iron ends of the beds. She met the eyes of her uncle, stunned, like someone had driven a nail through them, and then those of Louis, steady, as if he already understood how it could be that the one time they weren’t listening, the answer came. Her aunt’s mouth was just opening, her son’s name rising like a keen over the waiting sea of stranded men.
Isabel waited to refuse them all, to say it was too late.
Chapter Forty-seven
He was on the train again, his father’s house, only this one was filled with bodies, the wounded and dying, their arms bandaged by corn husks and the strips of a neighbor’s uniform. In the next car, he could see the hospital where his cousin waited, her long hair pinned beneath her cap, the way she stood with her knees arched back. There was so much light in there.
But now there was someone calling him from his own car, swaying in the square open door where the fields blurred a yellow-green. Tall and big-eared, he had the long black beard of a sage waiting to go gray. He was climbing a ladder, his grasshopper body springing toward the top of the train, where one could ride in the open wind. There were others above; he could hear them beating their heels on the wooden roof and singing. He could hear the high sawing sound of an accordion. Dust fell through the car, and he went to the opening to take hold of the rungs. The rusty metal flaked away in his hands. He hesitated.
The fields yielded to mountains, parting for the train like the frozen blue crests of a wave. He could smell snow somewhere deep in them, in a mossy cave, or a cleft of boulders pitched against each other for a hundred thousand years. As he started to climb, he saw the grinning faces of his friends above, and a cloud behind them, heavy and winged, like a white bird coming to meet him.
Chapter Forty-eight
It was nearly nightfall when the young man emerged from the hospital for his daily pipe. The building had been quiet all day with the death of one of its well-known inhabitants, the son of a railroad magnate from Allenton, Vermont, who survived the fires at the Wilderness, only to die a few weeks later in a clean white bed. A liveryman across the street paused in his repair of an old saddle to watch. From the stories of his wife, a hospital cook, he recognized the young man as the nurse who never stopped working in the wards, whose gift with the sick had become legend. According to the gossip, he was also in love with the cousin of the burned soldier, and he had long kept the boy alive for her.
About an hour before, the young woman in question had stood under the same blue wooden sign for the hospital, hardly old enough to be allowed out unchaperoned, but dressed in the severe garments of a spinster. Her face, though lovely, was marked by the strain of so much loss. She would be the kind of woman to cede her beauty quickly to age if she didn’t escape the daily sight of suffering, yet she stood by her uncle with the air of a prisoner about to be locked away for years.
Two hacks halted in front of them. One would take the girl and her invalid aunt, one her uncle and the coffin that held the soldier’s corpse. They would ride the train north again, through the flat terrain of the coast to the high, rolling state from which they came, and bury him. The aunt was stuffed like deflated dough into a hack, and the girl followed, staring up at a window on the third floor that was mobbed daily by sparrows. At the same moment her head wrenched back with the momentum of the hack’s exit, the window opened, scattering the birds, and the nurse stood there, looking down at her. Around his neck he wore something small and silver.
The liveryman’s old busybody of a wife came trotting across the street after the hacks pulled away. She claimed that Old Sawbones had been trying for weeks to convince the commanding officer of the Canadian’s regiment to allow him to stay on at the hospital as a surgeon-in-training and not to fight again. The officer refused. But just that afternoon, the dead soldier’s father had gone to the U.S. Army office and paid the three hundred dollars that released the sons of rich men from the draft. He said if he couldn’t save his own boy from this foul war, then he might as well save someone else’s, and he named the Canadian as the beneficiary.
The commanding officer agreed to the following terms for Louis Pacquette: As long as the war lasted, the Canadian had to work at the hospital, but the day the sides made peace, he could be mustered out honorably with the rest of the regiment, continue his studies, and one day return to Allenton a surgeon. What a dream for a poor tutor, what an American dream, the liveryman’s wife had said proudly. She lowered her soft, sagging cheek to be kissed and bustled back across the street.
Now it was evening, the day drained to shallow pools of light that lingered on rooftops and in windowpanes. The Vermonters were gone, and the nurse stood with his legs splayed slightly, his weight on his heels, and prepared his pipe. Carriages shuttled past, creaking on strained springs.
If the liveryman had not returned to his work just then, he might have seen the curious reddish color of the tobacco the nurse loaded in the bowl and lighted. It had the consistency of paper that had been splashed by rain and dried again, and it burned without leaving an ash.
Praise for Wilderness Run
“Maria Hummel’s poetically rendered debut novel contains the stuff of great fiction … vivid … intriguing.”
—Lisa Robinson Bailey, The Independent Weekly
“Wilderness Run has many pluses, including realistic battle scenes and some lovely writing … dramatic.”
—Melissa MacKenzie, Rutland Herald (Vermont)
“A gripping debut, shot through with poetry and violence, Wilderness Run traces the demons that divide us, whether as a nation or in our hearts. At turns radiant and shocking, understated and unbearable, Wilderness Run proceeds with the force of a coming locomotive.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Some Ether
“A gifted poet has immersed herself in the history of her home territory to write a
mesmerizing first novel. Maria Hummel’s Wilderness Run is the work of a prodigious new talent.”
—David Huddle, author of The Story of a Million Years
“Hummel’s debut … is gracefully and evocatively written.… Hummel creates solid characters while capturing the day-to-day reality of military life during the Civil War … well-paced, elegant prose … poignant.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Imagine Cormac McCarthy meeting Alice Hoffman and you have Maria Hummel’s graphic, blood-and-bone battle scenes woven through the softer focus narrative musings of her characters, sons and daughters growing up quickly under separation and fire.… Riveting and poignant, impossible to put down, painful and sweet, difficult to ignore. Ambitious in metaphor, Wilderness Run is anytime, the War is every war, the loss is always personal. Maria Hummel’s debut novel is worthy and unforgettable.”
—John Valentine, The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, North Carolina
WILDERNESS RUN. Copyright © 2002 by Maria Hummel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: November 2003
eISBN 9781466879836
First eBook edition: July 2014