Wilderness
Page 2
He began his journey late in the year, when the sky seemed a mirror of the ocean: flat and gray and stretching out to a horizon where darkness presided. The old man did not know he was going until he rose one morning and gathered his things—the old Winchester that had served him so well these long years of exile, his walking stick, his blanket roll and haversack—and set off southward down the dark, wet, cold, and windswept beach.
He lived beside the sea in the far northwest corner of these United States, and in the nights before he left he sat before his tiny shack watching the ocean under the nightblue sky. Seagrass sawed and rustled in a cool, salty wind. A few drops of rain fell upon his face, wetting his beard and softly sizzling in the fire. This light rain but the after-rain of the last night’s storm, or perhaps the harbinger of harder rains yet to come. The shack creaked softly with the wind while the tide hissed all along the dark and rocky shore. The moon glowed full from amidst the rain clouds, casting a hard light that slid like grease atop the water. The old man watched ivory curlers far to sea rise and subside noiselessly. Within the bounds of his little cove stood sea stacks weirdly canted from the wind and waves. Tide-gnawed remnants of antediluvian islands and eroded coastal headlands, the tall stones stood monolithic and forbidding, hoarding the shadows and softly shining purple, ghostblue in the moon- and ocean-colored gloom. Grass and wind-twisted scrub pine stood from the stacks, and on the smaller, flatter, seaward stones lay seals like earthen daubs of paint upon the night’s darker canvas. From that wet dark across the bay came the occasional slap of a flipper upon the water that echoed into the round bowl of the cove, and the dog, as it always did, raised its scarred and shapeless ears.
Their shack stood at the edge of the dark forest just above the high-tide line and beside a slow, tannic river. The door, only an opening in one wall covered by an old piece of faded blanket, looked out upon the gray ocean. The old man’s tiny house was but one room with a packed earth floor and walls of wind-dried driftwood of various shapes and thickness. It was bone white and silvery in its coloring and ill suited in every way for providing home or shelter. The leaking roof was fashioned partially from scrap board he had scavenged from the mill outside Forks—he’d towed the boards north up the coast behind his boat back when his boat was sound and had painted his roof red with river mud that had long since faded to a general rust color. The door, when there had been a door, had been nothing more than long pieces of driftwood and chunks of tree bark held together with a craze of baling wire.
Off to one side there had once been a lean-to built from the same lumber, but the old man had fallen through it one night before the dog came, when he was out of his mind with drink and sorrow. He’d knocked the whole shelter over with his weight, chopped it apart in anger, and his carpentry skills were not such that he could later fathom how to set it all right again. The salvaged wood now lay pieced together tilewise on the riverbank, serving as a sort of dock for the old man to clean fish upon and stand free of mud when he washed.
The rocker in which he sat was a found item, having washed ashore one fine spring day five years ago and needing but minor repairs to its caning. The old man sat every evening to face the watery horizon and watch the sun fall, when he could see it for the rain, and to listen to the way the forest behind him hushed as light bled slowly from it.
All along the shore, behind the cabin and down the banks of the river, stood the dark wilderness, tumbling in a jade wave to the shore. Numberless green centuries of storm and tide had stranded massive logs of driftwood against the standing trunks so they lay in long heaps and mounds. Strange quiet citadels of wood, sand, and stone. Natural reliquaries encasing the dried bones of birds and fish, raccoons and seals, and the sad remains of drowned seamen carried by current and tide from as far away as Asia. Seasons of sun over long, weary years had turned the great logs silver, then white. The endless ranks of wood provided the old man’s home with a natural windbreak in storm seasons, and he spent many nights awake, listening to the mournful sound of the wind at play in the tangle.
A fire burned from the little stone-lined pit before the cabin the night before he left. Yellow flames danced up into the dark, and the burning wood shivered and popped upon bright embers that shone like tiny, pulsing hearts lit bright. As he sat rocking and watching the flames at their work, the old man did not yet know that he was going, and yet, hunched before his fire, he could feel something within him shift. Beside him, the dog sensed his despair and knew what the old man did not and knew that he would soon try a thing and fail at it and that they would soon be traveling. The dog also knew they would not return. It knew these things the same way a dog knows well the heart of the man it loves and understands it in better ways than the man could ever hope. The old man patted the dog’s head absently, and the dog looked up at him a moment before settling its chin upon its forepaws and closing its eyes.
The old man sat and rocked and tried not to remember his younger days when he was a married man and soldiering was the furthest thing from his mind. He tried hard not to see his wife, his infant daughter. After a while, the breath that escaped his bearded lips was hot, and he covered his eyes with his right palm and left it there until it was over.
Far to the west, where the night was fast upon the ocean’s rim, the clouds had blown back and the old man could see stars where they dazzled the water. He breathed and rocked before the fire. His thoughts, beyond his control, went from painful recollections of women and family to worse remembrances of war because it had been his experience that one often led to the other—stoking its fires until there was not a man who could resist and, upon yielding, survive as a man still whole.
The old man began to tremble, though the wind was still mild and the rain still warm. He could not help but see, once again, war’s sights and hear war’s sounds and know, once more, war’s hard gifts that are so difficult to live with after war. And then the old man closed his damp eyes again and thought of the blue door he had found on the northward beach that morning.
He’d risen midmorning, after a late night spent waiting out the storm, and went downstream to wash. Checking his lines at the river mouth where it fanned darkly into the ocean, he found a single butterfish struggling weakly on his handmade hook. He watched it from the sandy, crumbling bank—a bright little teardrop shape hung quivering in bark-colored water. The old man hauled it in and cleaned it, fried and ate it all, without much thought and with no joy whatsoever. He threw the dog the innards and what he could not himself finish and watched it eat, after which it wandered off into the forest to scare up whatever else it could. The old man carefully washed his plate in the river, dried it on an old rag he kept for that purpose, and replaced it neatly on the table near his cot.
His breakfast finished, he set to doing chores about his home. He used a hand axe to split shingles from likely-shaped chunks of driftwood and used these to mend his roof. He worked slowly, carefully, favoring his crippled left arm that would never straighten from the angle in which it had healed while he lay wounded in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania after battle there in May of 1864. The previous night’s storm, though mild, had set the shack to trembling and blown rain sideways through the walls. He patched the walls with mud and handfuls of thick moss, and after finishing the job, the old man took up his rifle and set off north along the beach. The dog appeared out of the forest and ran ahead through the surf where it was shallow and fast and cold, then cut back toward the forest to stand atop a high dune, shaking head-to-tail so water flew from it in sprays of silver. It was part Labrador and part something else, and it stood waiting for the old man—a patch of black and gold and red against the dark forest behind.
Without realizing it, the old man walked soldierwise with his rifle at right shoulder shift, his tough palm cradling the butt plate and his steps measured and even as though to conserve strength for a day’s hard marching. He walked a beach lit bright by sudden sunlight escaping the close-packed clouds and felt the hard wind sweeping in off
the water. He tasted salt, could feel the wind scouring his flesh and crackling in his beard. He drew his lips back as though such wind, such salt and raw fierceness, might bleach clean his river-stained teeth and kindle heat in the hollow, cold places within him.
With the tide rising, the old man was forced up amidst the tide-stacked driftwood and he picked his way carefully, mindful of the waves and his balance. The great silvery logs lay crosswise and askelter like huge breastworks against the battle line of the ocean, the onrushing attack of the tide. Climbing over and around them got the old man to thinking of battles despite himself. How they’d rush screaming and hollering through some field, some forest or farmer’s woodlot, where musket smoke hung from the branches in pale tatters like strange moss. How they’d go down on their knees in fallen leaves or dew-slick grass, firing blindly and fast. No skill to it. No time for aiming. Driving powder and shot down the barrel and pulling free the rammer and fitting the firing caps and raising the pieces to their cramped, bruising shoulders. Kneeling there, sobbing and loading and screaming and firing and loading again, hearing the shouts and cries and sobs of those everywhere around. The great, rolling, throaty percussion of cannon and the sharp crackle of riflefire swelling up and up like an orchestra in the throes of some grand flourish. And that sound rolled together into a single noise, a solitary booming wail of a sound that had no correlation to any other sound the world makes or that a man makes upon it.
Until the Wilderness, he had hardly been touched by battle, and he had seen his share. The old man, who was then a young soldier named Abel Truman, had only been scratched and bruised, had never gotten sick, and was thought by many to be a lucky man. Men took bets on how Abel would fare that day. They shifted their places about to march near him, as though his good luck might shield them. In the end it rarely did. And while other men died everywhere all around him at Malvern Hill, while other men fell rudely shocked into their deaths in the green cornfields at the base of Cedar Mountain and in the cool, piney shade of the West Wood beyond Sharpsburg, Abel Truman was not touched until the Battle of the Wilderness, and then it had been very bad.
The old man sat resting on a silvery log. The tide was falling in the early afternoon and the ocean lay gray and foam-cluttered, touched on the horizon by steel clouds shot through with shafts of pale sunlight that stood like great, clean columns on the heaving swells. In the shallows were otters at their play. The dog padded about, sniffing after the strewn purple dung of raccoons and chasing those gulls that landed nearby. After a time, the old man took out a little sack and from that a brown twist of dried venison. He sat eating in the sun, letting it warm him through. He sat eating and trying to empty his mind to the moment, but once started, he could not turn himself from memories of his war.
Too many times to count he’d felt hot metal go buzzing past. The little winds that followed, sharp and cool. He’d felt them come plucking hard at his sleeves and pants legs as though to gently steer him from his path. Holes blown through his canteen and four good hats lost as though borne back by strong wind. Abel had even seen bullets mid-flight—small and dark and fat as horseflies. He remembered one in particular: how he whipped his head around in time to follow its path into the wide, sunburned forehead of Huntley Foster just behind him. A man who had found his way through Second Manassas and Antietam and Chancellorsville and who had wagered good writing paper on Abel’s luck. The moment of Huntley’s death in front of Culp’s Hill: a sharp, flat crack and a look of bottomless surprise on Huntley’s face. His mouth fell open in mute astonishment as though he recognized the moment for what it was, and a silent question formed in his liquid eyes, as though he’d ask of Abel something and would have his answer. Huntley had fallen back with the ball mixed in with the contents of his skull, a wide tongue of blood laid across the bridge of his nose. When Abel made his way back later, he found Huntley in a bank of fallen leaves. The boy’s eyes were open, now questioning someone else, and his pockets were all turned out, his shoes and writing paper gone.
Abel had seen many men die just so and worse. Scores of men. Men whose bodies were dashed apart like waves against stone. He thought of Gully Coleman. He thought of David Abernathy and tried hard not to think of poor Ned.
Now, an old man sitting in the sun taking his lunch, Abel thought that if he concentrated hard enough, he could call them all back to memory. Each man who died in his sight and whose face he knew. Recall them and let them live again, even if only for a moment and only in his mind. Abel breathed, feeling the steady work of the cool air within him. He sat thinking that if he could call these men back, he would ask of them many, many things.
Abel Truman sat with his right hand open on his thigh, his left arm cocked tight against his ribcage, and the sun on his face. His crippled arm throbbed, as it often did. He wondered why he was left behind. Why, after his daughter’s death and his wife’s and all those good men and boys he marched with. Not to become an old man on a beach where no one ever came. Not just to live steeping in pain and memories of pain, he reckoned. Not unless God were even crueler than he’d proved himself to be.
And, because it was a day for such things, Abel conjured an unwanted vision of his daughter, who was when she died still too young for them to have settled on a name for and so went unnamed to her tiny grave. He had risen early that morning and lifted her from the cradle he’d built for her. It was well before the war and he was still whole and he held her in his strong left hand while with his right hand he reached to move the blanket from her face. It was a blue paler than the swaddling. A darker blue around her lips and darker still about her eyes, and she was so cold. Behind him, Elizabeth called his name. He turned, and in so turning dropped the child to the floor.
Even now, sitting in the sun on this dark beach, the gorge rose up Abel’s throat to remember the look on his wife’s face. The shock of realization and, finally, the pale, outraged blame that darkened like a bruise until it rotted her with hate.
Abel felt the sun against his eyelids, saw heat pounding redly through the thin panes of flesh that separated his eyes from the air and closed him from all the rest of the world. For no reason at all, he suddenly remembered Elizabeth’s voice when it still loved him—deep and throaty, not what you’d expect from her small frame—and how she’d sing quietly small, sad songs of her own composition that he sometimes thought might break his heart. He remembered her white skin and her strong fingers and her square face. The brown, sun-dazed hair that stuck to the back of her neck when she sweated, and the way that she stood when she stood next to him.
The old man opened his eyes. Such remembering was hard on him. He blinked wetly, sighed, and looked over at the dog. It sat looking from the venison in Abel’s hand to his face and back again. Slowly, deliberately, Abel put the twist into his mouth. The dog cocked its head and popped its jaws. Abel chewed and gave the dog a look and the dog sighed. Drool dripped from its underjaw. After a while, Abel stood. He looked down at the dog. “You are pitiful,” he told it. He looked to sea, then reached into the bag and tossed the dog a piece of meat before continuing up the beach.
He walked a long time with the tide falling and the sound of rattling pebbles and the pungent iodine stink of the waves. Bits of fishing net, broken boards, jade-colored glass floats drifted over the ocean from Japan, and a stove-in cooking pot that Abel knelt to examine before tossing away again. At one point, he thought he saw two figures on the beach far to the north. He waved, but if they saw him, they did not show it, and when he looked again they were gone.
By and by, the old man came upon a pale blue door lying abandoned in the sand. It had a rusted knob and a rusted knocker and it lay athwart the high-tide line as though to shut something away beneath the cold black sand. Abel walked around the door while the dog sniffed at it, barked once, and scrambled off to chase gulls.
He squatted beside the door and touched its weathered surface. Flies rose from the wet weeds and went exploring the air around his head. For all the sweet reek
of tide and rot, the door, baking in the sudden afternoon sun, put Abel in mind of pitch pine, maple leaves, green trailers. Tree bark.
How the mind works, by what strange paths it pursues memory. The old man smiled, remembering how it had been in his soldiering days to boil any dark liquid and call it coffee. Roasted corn and apple cores and peanut shells. Withered potatoes and crushed acorns. Tree bark. The only requirements were that the drink be dark-unto-black, scalding hot, and ungodly strong. Abel could taste the brew suddenly, so sharp was his memory of it, and he remembered the little pouch of coffee he’d found in the haversack of a dead Union boy in the Wilderness. He remembered how rich and pure and good that real coffee had smelled, and how, on smelling it and then finding amongst the other possibles a wondrous handful of real white sugar, he’d ignored the pain in his newly ruined arm and broken down to cry like a child.
How the mind works when presented, without warning, with sights and sounds and smells and doors.
The old man frowned, staring at the door lying on the sand. He did not see it but saw, instead and for just a moment, the blue front door of the home his wife and he had once made—framed by two little windows lit softly from within by lamplight. And then he was gone from there and stood instead in the dark, cool shadows of the Wilderness watching a tow-haired boy with both eyes shot away destroy his left arm with a lucky pistol shot. He stood instead on that old, red ground they’d fought and refought for. Ribcage curves stood from the grass like strange plantings while gray skulls grinned eyeless and mute from brown leaves like stones.
Parts of the Wilderness had been afire that night, and the air was thick with the stink of burning sweet woods, scorched hair, and stale powdersmoke. Burning horseflesh raised a pall of greasy black smoke against the starlight. Other flesh burned there too that night to raise a stench more shocking still. And the dark that night was hot and orange.