Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  He found her on the floor beside the cradle with the paint can upended on the floor, the paint thrown in broad splashes against the walls and ceiling. His wife, Elizabeth, crouched naked and alone in a shallow pool of it as though huddled against a backdrop of sky. Her face was turned from him, hidden by her hair. Even then he did not cry out in astonishment, grief, but only stared in dumb amazement before crouching quickly to brush feebly at her legs as though he could sweep the paint from her with a wave of his palm. It was warm from her heat. It slicked his hands, felt heavy on his skin, as if his skin could not breathe. Abel panted. He looked out the window to a daytime moon hanging pale and cool above the trees. He looked at it a long time, fixing it in his mind so that later he would be able to remember clearly, at least, one thing. He did not speak and he did not tremble because he came to the quick realization that this thing, this scene, was only one in a long and mighty chain of events he felt rather than saw stretching so far along the arc of his life he figured the end must meet itself somewhere again to forge a perfect circle of misfortune. A single moment, this. A single event and not even the worst. A little paint. They could stand that.

  So Abel Truman feebly brushed sky blue paint from his wife’s bare legs and said her name and when she turned to him he reared up, slipped in the paint and fell back, then reared up again. There was paint smeared across Elizabeth’s face and there was no way to tell how much she’d drunk. As he stepped back, Abel kicked over the second can, the white paint, and the lid came open. It spilled, thick and slow, into the blue, running it cold and paler than a dead child’s face.

  She began laughing then. Rocking back and forth on her hard, red heels with her head thrown back and her white, smooth neck exposed. She shook and was utterly silent. Her square, mannish face stood transfigured with grief-dumbed mirth. Abel said her name. He said it again and again and Elizabeth hushed and turned slowly toward him.

  He ran. Abel remembered running, nothing else. He must have run back to town through the mill smoke and sawdust and setting springtime sun where someone must have fetched the doctor and the constable. He must have told them about her, perhaps even led them back to her, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember any of it clearly, nor could he remember confessing to dropping the child or the doctor assuring him the child had been dead well before then. Abel had stopped remembering when he saw what she’d done to herself and he didn’t begin again until First Manassas when he stood on Henry House Hill, watching them come in all their gleaming color and glory. Everything between had been a blur of begging, wandering, of lying in drink. But Abel knew all the while that his wife had died not from grief or madness but from hate. Hate for him and what he had done, and Abel knew her hate was such she’d tried to cover it, then douse it, with paint.

  He remembered all this, bound and dreaming there beside the intersection. He remembered thinking before he saw her face that they could bear a little paint. That they could stand it. But it was more than them alone and it was more than paint and it could not be borne. It could not be set right. Not by him and not by her and not by them together. In the end it was the vast, bottomless silence that could not be filled with any sound save rifle fire, save cannon. It was the teapot thrown across the room in outraged frustration and desperate sorrow that could not do what paint or a bullet could. It was scalding water on a puncheon floor when he had found a little spot of blood that he could not clean and that she had found anyway and tried to cover with paint. But it wasn’t paint that was needed. Abel wandered for years not knowing what it was and only realized on the Plains of Manassas what she knew all along: that what was wanted, after all, was fire.

  May 4

  That morning, on his long, weary way back to camp from picket duty, David Abernathy saw Abel Truman still lying bound and gagged in the mud beside the intersection. His tent-mate had been there for a full day now, and David wondered how much longer they’d leave him. He stood shivering in his torn, wet clothing, trying to decide what to do. O. W. was an ass of a man, and having decided that, David took his knife out and started forward until Abel caught his eye and in so doing warned him off. David knew him well and could tell how it was with him by the lines about his eyes and the set of his chin beneath the filthy beard and the filthier rag. David nodded and put the knife away and Abel closed his eyes, then slowly opened them again. David passed on toward camp.

  He found Ned sitting pantsless on a low, sawn-off stump before their common tent, sewing a patch onto the knee of his weather-colored trousers. His bare legs were pink and grimy in the morning light, and as David approached, he looked up blinking. Ned stood and carefully set his sewing down on the stump, touching and smoothing the cloth lightly with the flat of his hand and looking at it there a moment in the careful, fascinated way he did all things.

  “Ain’t it a pretty mornin’?” Ned asked, waving his hands through the light. “You can’t hardly tell no more it rained at all.”

  “You weren’t stuck out in it all night,” David said, stacking his rifle with the others, Ned’s and Abel’s and a few more, off away from the fire. “You can tell.”

  Ned licked his lips then pursed them and looked back down the street toward the thicker woods. “Abel still out yonder?” he asked.

  David nodded. Ned had kept their fire going and he crouched near it to hold his hands toward the flames. Closing his eyes, he felt the skin slacken, begin to itch as alien warmth seeped in.

  “I told him he shouldn’t start in with O-Dub,” said Ned. “Dog or no dog, and that man hates a dog anyways. O-Dub.” He looked over at David sadly. “I told him he shouldn’t ought to drink like that neither. Path’ll lead him straight away from the Lord in no time.” Ned sniffed and nodded forcefully to himself, then stood looking at David as he straightened from the fire and began cleaning the panes of his spectacles on his decaying shirttail. “I took him water last night while you was out on picket,” Ned went on. “Way he looked at me, ’minded me of my daddy.” The boy stared thoughtfully into the middle distance where dark trees hoarded shadows and stood shivering in a cool morning breeze.

  David smelled tobacco. Somewhere, distantly, breakfasts cooking. Ned’s small fire snapped and growled quietly, and David bent over it again as Ned settled back down to his sewing. After a few minutes silent work he looked up blinking. “There was mail come yesterday,” he said. “You was already out when they called you up, so I went on and took it in for you. Little package what I put on your blanket.”

  David took a quick breath. With the toe of his split-soled shoe he moved a soot-blacked pebble back and forth through the dirt. “Ned,” he said softly. “Did you see where it came from?”

  Ned looked at him, his hairless face round and vacant. He wet his lips and worked them around. “I can’t make words out,” he said, lowering his eyes. “You know that.”

  “I thought Abel was showing you.”

  Ned looked back up at him, grinning. “That’s right,” he said, his head bobbing, eyes far away. “I can print my name now and read it back, even if it’s someone else what writes it.”

  David sighed and nodded. “You say it’s in the tent?”

  “What’s that?”

  “My mail. The package.”

  Ned grinned again. “That’s right. Come in yesterday. I put it in on your blanket. Come from your homefolks, I reckon.”

  The day was warming as the sun climbed, and David grinned and shook his head. “All right, Neddy,” he said, unbuttoning his coat and turning toward his tent. “You need anything, yell. Otherwise, I’m going to rest up a little.”

  The package lay in David’s corner of the tent atop the messy folds of his moth-chewed blanket. Even in the dim light, he could tell his brother’s hand. He sat on the ground beside it. After a few moments, he reached out and touched the brown paper wrapping with his fingertips. A loud crackling under his cold, unsteady palm. David sat for a long time just lightly touching the paper. Finally he picked it up, eased the string to one side,
and tore the paper on one corner to look inside.

  When he saw the new shirt he began to laugh, but his laughter was silent, and when it was finished it left him gasping for air. Right away, he recognized the material she’d used, and in that moment of recognition he thought his heart would surely break. Would doubtlessly cease beating. David Abernathy shut his eyes and kept them closed for one long moment with the deep, green glass pain jangling fast through his temples. A quick, dark solitude behind thin panes of flesh. When his heart did not stop or fall apart, when it kept to its old, tired schedule, David wondered idly if there was anything at all left that could shock a pause into the rhythm of his blood save fire, cannon, gore.

  There was a letter inside—a folded square of pale blue paper that he eased out without opening the package further because he was not yet ready for that. Pursing his lips, he read the letter slowly for his brother’s poor penmanship and worse spelling. Halfway through, the hand that held the paper began to shake, and the one that still touched the package balled into a white fist that squeezed and relaxed and squeezed and relaxed again like a weary bone-and-muscle heart. When he reached the postscript recounting rumors of Sherman’s route through Georgia, David set the letter aside. He lifted the package with both hands as though it was a holy relic and pressed it hard against his face to breathe once more and finally his mother’s scent captured in the cloth.

  The thin cotton kept within its fiber and its weave something of the handmade smells of home and home life. Old cooking smells of buttered corn and boiled cabbage, of great bleeding flank steaks and potatoes, carrots, onions, all smothered in gravy and served on thick platters engraved with blue Chinese scenes of cherry blossoms, fog-wrapped pagodas, strange, umbrella’d maidens. He could smell fresh blueberries and cold milk. And there was, also, his mother’s smell: matronly, womanish, and as distinct as her florid signature or her sharp, cool whisper at prayertimes and candlelighting. Her scent was as though woven into the shirt and now a part of it and never to be separate from it ever. When he took it away from his face the paper crackled in the dark of the tent, and through the rip in the corner David fingered the buttons. They were carved from a wooden dowel pin, painted sky-blue by her own hand with paint gotten from who knew where or how, and sewn to the face of the shirt by strands of her own steel-colored hair for want of proper thread. His mother’s hair served as thread for his soldiering shirt, such was the strength of the Yankee blockade.

  David Abernathy’s tired, starved heart fell to aching, and with one great gulp of air he pressed his face once more to the folds of paper that still held it and began a hot, rough weeping that set the rags to flapping restlessly on his thin frame.

  “That’s a hell of a handkerchief,” said Abel as he stooped to crawl into the tent.

  David looked up. Abel crawled over onto his own blankets like a mud man, with his eyes red-rimmed and his stiff hair standing to. He swayed a little on his hands and knees, and after a moment looked back out the tent and spat wetly through the door. Rolling over atop his blankets across from David, he lifted his chin and asked, “What in the hell is all that, anyway?”

  “Mama sent it,” David said softly. “Brother wrote a letter too.” He sniffed and ran the back of his hand under his nose. Green pain washed like a slow, gentle tide behind his eyes. “Says he figures Sherman’ll make a try for Atlanta here pretty quick,” he said absently, waving the letter through the stale half-dark.

  “Let him,” said Abel, shrugging, trying to settle onto his blanket and having a difficult time of it for aching joints and cramped muscles. “I don’t give a good goddamn anymore.” He stretched and winced and finally settled onto his back, then looked over at David again. The younger man’s face was thin and pale and blank where it angled toward the mud-spattered canvas wall opposite him. The panes of his spectacles reflected nothing yet did not show his eyes.

  Abel flexed his arms about, trying to work feeling down their length. “What else?” he finally asked, motioning toward the letter.

  David blinked. “Old Johnston’s back in charge over there now, he says,” he answered woodenly.

  Abel shook his head. “I don’t give a good goddamn who’s in charge over there, and that ain’t what I meant.” He filled his cheeks with air and blew. “I mean, what’s happened? With your homefolks?” He nodded to the letter again.

  David looked up. Abel could see his eyes suddenly behind the round panes of glass as they searched out his face, lingered there a moment, then drifted off to the side once more. “Mama died,” he said softly. “Last month, he says.”

  “Ah, well,” Abel said nodding. He said nothing more but shifted around atop his neatly folded blanket until he was partly comfortable. Lying on his back with his fingers laced behind his head, he let out a long, satisfied sigh. After a time, he sniffed and said, “What’s the package?”

  Again, David’s eyes went roving to settle, finally, on the paper bundle. “Give over your knife,” he said, sniffing and reaching out. Abel handed him his little knife and he pried the blade open with a dirty, broken thumbnail, then slid it under the string to cut it, refolded the knife, and passed it back.

  David shook the shirt from the paper and held it up. It was, generally, the color of cold oatmeal and was chased with bright, swirling designs of scarlet, turquoise, yellow, and orange like something from a Turkish folktale, like some pasha’s bright daydream. It made Abel’s eyes swim and his head hurt so he looked instead out the open tent flap with a broad grin.

  David held the shirt open before him, staring at it gravely. He studied the cloth, bright and garish even in the relative dark of the tent, then looked at Abel where Abel lay smiling and looking away studiously. David turned back to the shirt. “Jesus-by-God,” he murmured. “When I first looked, I figured she’d just used it for the collar.”

  “Your mama?”

  “Letter says she passed on just after she finished it.”

  Abel nodded sagely. “Maybe that’s just as well,” he said.

  David looked sharply at him, and Abel propped himself up on one elbow with a wince. He nodded to the shirt. “Otherwise, she might have gone on and fixed you up some pants to match,” he said.

  David stared at him. Abel returned the look and held it. After a moment, they began to chuckle softly together and then both began to laugh out loud and were still laughing when Ned ducked into the tent. He was still pantsless and was grinning happily around a mouthful of wet dough.

  “What in hell did you find to eat around here?” asked Abel, frowning.

  “Ashcake,” said Ned around the food. There was a wet gray dollop of tooth-moistened dough clinging to his chin, and the little cake in his hand drooped with teeth marks. “Been in my pocket and I didn’t even know it,” he said, holding out the biscuit to Abel, who raised a hand palm outward and shook his head. Ned swallowed thickly, then looked over at David where he sat holding the shirt. Ned’s eyes widened in his moon face, and his gullet jerked once then twice. “Well,” he said, admiringly. “Well, ain’t that a pretty thing?” His voice was soft with wonder and he blinked again, an expression not just of his eyes but of his whole face. “We all gettin’ new uniforms?” he asked hopefully.

  “Just old Abernathy here,” said Abel. The other two looked at him and he nodded. “That there shirt makes it official,” he said. “Our boy’s done gone into politics.” Ned stared at him, and David’s eyes narrowed. Abel looked at Ned. “He just got word. He’s been called to Queen Mab’s Court. That there’s his uniform of office.”

  “Jesus, Abel,” said David, grinning and shaking his head.

  Ned looked back and forth between them, trying to decide, trying to judge them by their expressions. His lips moved soundlessly and his brow wrinkled as though he was trying to recall some fact or bit of trivia to prove or disprove Abel’s statement. After a few moments of this he finally pursed his lips and nodded. “That’s off crost over the ocean and all, ain’t it?”

  Abel and David began
laughing again, long and loud and uproarious. Ned looked back and forth between them then shook his head disgustedly and ducked to leave the tent. Abel called after him to put some damn pants on before he caught a chill, and Ned waved a hand as he stepped out.

  “What was it, anyway?” Abel finally asked, curling a forefinger to the corner of one eye. “Curtains?”

  “You think my mama’d keep curtains this damned ugly?” asked David, lifting up the shirt again. “No sir. This here was the table-cloth.”

  Abel set in laughing again, and David removed his spectacles, pinched his temples between thumb and middle finger. “It’s been in the family for years,” he said, gasping with mirth and pain. “Belonged to my grandmother before my mama got it.” He filled and emptied his cheeks with air. On the other side of the tent, Abel twisted around on his blankets as laughter set his sore muscles to protesting, which made him laugh all the harder, the weary lines around his eyes deepening as he thrashed about. David looked at him. “When I was just a little chap,” he managed haltingly, “I got sick all over it.”

  Their laughter rose then fell and gradually tapered away. David rubbed the bridge of his nose and knuckled his eyes while Abel sat up, dragged the back of his hand over his mouth, and massaged his wrists where they were rope-burnt. He didn’t want to look at his feet or ankles just yet, so he filled his lungs with air, blew, then looked over at David. “You got the headache again?”

  David nodded wearily, lifting his hand and letting it fall again. After a moment, he wrapped his spectacles back around his face, careful to tuck the arms in behind his ears. He opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again and bent his head to listen, his expression suddenly sharp and alert.