Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  “What?” asked Abel.

  David raised his hand again and stared off into the middle distance. Then he got up onto his knees, stripped the old, ruined shirt from his body, and pulled on the new one. The cloth was stiff and uncomfortable, and he rolled his shoulders about to settle into it. “Something’s happening,” he said. “I reckon we’ll be moving out.”

  Abel opened his mouth. “How the hell …” But before he could finish, he heard the long roll sounding out on the camp intersections. Outside, Ned whooped with shock and excitement.

  Abel watched as David worked the sky blue buttons. He shook his head wonderingly. “You’re really going to wear it?”

  David ignored him. “Maybe this’ll be it this time,” he said. He looked over at Abel, where he still lounged on his blanket. “You think? Maybe they’ll give it up.”

  “Shit,” said Abel, shaking his head and waving a dismissive hand through the air. “They got it going good, now. I don’t reckon they’d stop it even if they knew how.” He looked hard at David, then finally grinned tiredly. “Which means, you want to wear that damned thing, you better keep your ass down.”

  Chapter Three

  Inarticulate Hearts

  1899

  Abel Truman crossed the river half a mile inland where the narrow channel was bridged by a rotting nurse log. Green saplings stood in ordered rows along its surface as though planted so, and the old man was careful in crossing not to tread upon them. For its part, the dog, when it caught up, crossed through the water in three long bounds to stand dripping and panting on the opposite side where Abel stood watching. “I don’t know what you’re grinnin’ about,” the old man told it. “You’ll be fending for your own damned self.”

  They cut back through the forest to the ocean. Before leaving the brown river behind to start south along the beach, Abel paused to look back at his little shack. His home for twenty years. He could hear the wind whistling softly through the loose planking. Ashes stirred in the fire pit. The empty rocker moved soundless in the wind as though his ghost had returned already.

  He carried his rifle and walking stick, and an old blanket slung soldier-style from left shoulder to right hip. He wore a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low on his forehead and a sharp knife at his belt. A few biscuits, a little rubber-stoppered bottle half full with sugar, and another full of salt lay wrapped in a cloth and tucked into his haversack along with Glenn Makers’s almanac wrapped in a good India rubber ground cloth. In his pocket was the bullet Hypatia had cut from his arm all those years ago and the crucifix hung from its cord near his heart.

  Abel kept his eyes down as he walked, and he breathed evenly. A fit old man, he tried not to think of all the miles ahead of him—all the rolling country filled with people and tilled fields and painted houses, rich barns, cities of vast industry. Roads and lanes and byways and rivers and forests uncountable. He tried not to think of what he might find beyond the mountains. Instead, he conjured images of his long-dead wife, her grave site and their child’s. After a time of walking, Abel put all this away from him and concentrated on his feet and the immediate world around him.

  Thick mist clung to the forest at his left, and a cool wind slowly tattered it. The tide lay far to sea and the sand was crossed and re-crossed with the rolling, wheel-like tracks of hermit crabs and the precise, pencil-thin prints of oystercatchers. The smell of beached kelp and broken shells, of damp sand that had never been dry and rock pools astir with tiny fishes, was as heavy as the sound of crashing surf was constant. And wind never-ending. Abel walked the day long and in the evening, when there was still yet light, made his camp on a narrow shelf of land that was protected on three sides by huge, wind-scarred boulders and on the fourth by the ocean itself. For a time, he squatted to watch the sun sink and set long fingers of cloud orange and red against the sparking dark.

  It was warm with no rain and little wind, and he knew this place well enough not to have need or want of fire. Exploring a little around the stones in the fading light, Abel found small petroglyphs carved here and there upon their ancient surfaces. Old, old fashionings of whales stretched leaping from waves of granite. Crude human faces with mouths yawning in terror, shock, outrage, grief, and joy. Countless luck-bringing clamshells scratched into the stones, and little manlike figures crouched and ran and hunted through the cold, gray rock. All of it quiet evidence of long-dead tribes who in ages past whaled these waters, hunted these forests, carved these stones, and who were now as lost as the individual stories told by these cold, flat scratchings.

  The wind rose with the tide and came moaning over the rocks to fill with sound the pauses between the ceaseless slap of waves on sea stacks and the quiet, bubbling rush of tidal pools filling and emptying and filling again. The wind set the old man’s sleeves to flapping. He put his good palm against the cold rock face and traced with his forefinger the chiseled grooves of a leaping orca, wondering what strength the act of carving had imparted to the whaler. Abel squatted beside the stone as the sun went down, wondering what he might carve had he time and strength. What fortune such creation might bring. Would he trust his heart’s own desire to cold rock? Or some other thing whose shape would remain unclear until the carving was complete and that would endure until the breaking of the earth? Finally Abel stood and picked his way back down to his campsite.

  The sun sank beyond the quivering rim of the ocean. Sheets of coppery light trembled up the sky to fix the sea stacks to their silhouettes like lonesome picket guards beyond the pale of the camp-fire. Abel settled down with his back against a stone and wrapped his blanket around his legs. He breathed the good, tart scent of India rubber. After a time, the dog came up the beach like a flake of shadow split from the darker night that gathered in the forest behind them. It stood in the sand downwind of him and swung its head this way and that to collect his scent, then, finding it, came up onto the shelf and sat nearby. Abel smelled the dog’s supper on its breath—the thick scent of heat and blood. “What did you get?” he asked it. “You get yourself a little gull?”

  The dog lay down by taking short little steps with its forelegs, and Abel sneered. “Now I suppose you’re just going to go on to sleep, ain’t you? Never even crossed your mind to bring me nothing.” He sighed dramatically and, as the dog watched, reached a twist of venison from his pocket. The dog pricked up its ears as he chewed and Abel shook his head. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. The dog barked softly, cocked its head, and pawed the ground. The old man took another bite and tossed the remainder to it. “You’re pitiful, you know that?” he said as the dog gulped down the dried meat.

  Abel settled down and lay on his back to look at the stars. The moon was a silver coin and Mars, just there, a small dot pale as a freckle in the western night. He studied the stars, how their rarefied light glistened. Raising his arm, he traced Orion’s belt and outflung arms and touched the dippers as his father had shown him when he was a boy. Abel moved his shoulder so he could reach to touch some few other constellations, but such movement sent ripples of pain through his left arm and he swore softly and settled down again.

  The tide rolled slowly in, attended by the rush and clatter of the seabed, but the forest behind was still and quiet. The occasional call of a far-off owl and the creak of the trees in a high, soft wind. Out on the water, algae glowed weirdly green under the moon and stars, the faint band of the Milky Way.

  The light that night was such that when Abel looked he could see the shadows individual trees cast along the beach and out onto the water and upon the carved stones at the headland. The solid black shadow of the forest itself, as though the forest was a single thing and not composed of many and much. Abel raised his arm again and his hand seemed strangely aglow, insubstantial so that he wondered was he man or ghost. Wondered for a moment if he, indeed, had fallen dead in the Wilderness and had all these long, blue years since been nothing but a form of dream or dreaming.

  Abel lay back. He closed his eyes against the brightness
of the night and listened to the constant sound of the ocean at its labors. Underbrush crackled softly as deer explored the slopes above the beach. Abel closed his eyes and tried hard not to see her, to keep seeing her. He tried not to see either of them, but it came back, like it always did, in the fall when the air grew crisp and the leaves began to turn, then die and fall.

  His child was dead, his wife followed soon after, and that happy portion of his life in a house beside a lake with a family ended that morning well before the war came because he had to bury his daughter in a grave too small and commit the wife to a sanitarium in up-state New York where her grief was such it finally killed her. Abel locked the house—for all he knew it still stood—and left that place because he could no longer take being there. His own grief was nothing but suffering, then passing through sorrow, rage. A black gall. Nights steeped in drink. Days of hungry wandering. Begging, petty thievery, and a single wretched night of a full moon passed out facedown in some churchyard’s grass. And when war did come, Abel Truman found himself in North Carolina with a regiment of Tar Heels for no other reason than that was where he had happened to be. And then all the rest had happened, and finally, ten and twenty years in a one-room shack on the shore of the cold, gray Pacific, and his life was blown. Passed him by like a slow, tannic river easing out to sea. He’d eked out a meager life beside the waters and when he felt he’d finally had enough he’d walked into the ocean and the ocean had cast him back.

  The old man woke to the sound of the dog growling softly. It was still dark, and the tide was up like a dreamlike and unsteady floor. Ragged chains of waves curved southward down the beach. The dog was beside him, hackles raised, its growl low, deep in its chest. Its battered ears stood cocked, and Abel could feel it tense with straining excitement.

  “What?” he asked. “What’re you—” And then it came again. Far off, miles away and inland, a long, choked howling as of a single wolf in the low country where wolves did not often visit. The old man sat up against the rocks, frowning but with a curious thrill prickling his skin. This was not singing. Even though the moon had risen to hang silver and bright in the cold sky, this was not singing. This was longing and fear and pain such as Abel had never heard from an animal before. It howled again, and the moon fled behind a cloud as though chased. The howl stretched out over the vast, rolling wilderness, echoed along the inland waterways, and fell softly on the dark tide, leaving in its wake a sudden silence slowly filled by ocean sounds and wind. The dog whined and paced round about the old man’s sleeping place as though it had heard something that much disturbed it.

  Abel sniffed and licked his lips then and suddenly fell into a harsh coughing that went on and on. He swore softly, and when it was over his throat was raw. He listened hard for any other distant sound the wolf might make or for others to answer, but there was nothing, and the night fell quiet once more. Abel spat. A rank taste and hot. The dog settled back beside him. Pulling the blanket close, Abel reached out and unconsciously twisted his fingers into the soft blond fur behind the dog’s ears. It sighed quietly and closed its eyes and Abel eventually fell back to sleep and dreamed no more that night.

  The next morning was overcast and cold. A wet mist clung to the lower trunks of spruce and pine and cedar and hemlock. Bigleaf and vine maple thrust up from underbrush, colored bright by spikes of brilliant purple foxglove and ghostly, floating blossoms of cow parsnip. False hellebore like stalks of corn in miniature, and occasionally the slender red slashes of madrone trunks stood curved and twisted from the forest understory. The dog went crashing through the thickets and a junco chitted at it from its hiding place and Abel paused to squint into the general, fog-shrouded gloom until he spied it perched upon a spruce branch, half hidden amidst the soft needles. The bird stared at him, its unblinking eye bright in its dark hood, sang once more, then darted back into the forest and was vanished.

  The brown trunks of the forest behind him ran to ground straight and orderly as though the whole of it was of a single piece: one great, confusing mosaic of green and shades of green and cool blue darkness that never saw the light of day and never would. A step into that green, and longitude would fall away. Compasses would read strangely or not at all. The Indians would call him a fool. The old man would hunger, he would fall. His body would be torn open by one of the greater predators—wolf or cougar or bear. Tiny creatures living beneath the fallen leaves and needles—beetles, worms, other, smaller things for which Abel had no names—would harvest from his bones the soft parts of his body. They would curl in the shells of his ears and spin webs across his mouth. Abel knew what became of the unburied dead in a wilderness. The particular way that bones became polished over time, yellow-brown like parchment. Ribcage, skull, and leg bone. Abel shuddered and walked more quickly down the beach, head down, wind blowing past his shoulders.

  By early afternoon the threatened rain had not yet come, and the sun had burned away the morning fog. The rain clouds drew back to the horizon in luminous gray clumps that promised a hard wind to blow them back. The air still smelled of rain, but now the sun beat down upon wet stones and Abel smelled a soft electricity in the air as the rocks dried and the tide rolled out. He made his way carefully around a rocky headland, stepping slowly from stone to stone to stone and bracing himself with his walking stick. The wind was strong and the dog some distance behind, chasing gulls and splashing in the surf.

  When he’d gotten far enough around the rocks to see the next stretch of beach, Abel paused, then stopped and crouched. He glanced back toward the dog, saw it was still making a fool of itself in the water, and then looked about for a smooth, flat boulder. Finding one, Abel crawled onto it and unlimbered his rifle.

  The deer clustered around a small creek that ran seeping from the forest onto the wet sand. The sand there was very brown, with the water cutting a shallow trough before running out fanwise across tide-kicked pebbles to the surf. There were some half-dozen black-tailed deer bent drinking from it, and Abel squinted down the barrel at each in its turn until he was satisfied he had found one lamed, or perhaps merely old. It stood apart from the others with a dull pelt and a certain hesitation to its movements as though it ached deeply. Abel pursed his lips, turned his head to spit once for luck, then fired.

  The deer’s head snapped to the side. It bucked up once, then fell to the sand half in the seep as the others leapt into the dark forest and away. Abel spat again, nodded solemnly as though in silent acknowledgment, then stood and started toward his kill. Behind him, he heard the dog’s nails scrambling for purchase on the rocks. As he stepped from the stones onto the beach, Abel called over his shoulder, “You wasn’t no kind of help, so don’t think you’re getting a good goddamned bite.”

  The deer was dead by the time Abel reached it. Parenthetical tracks were stamped into the wet sand all around. The dead doe was soft-eyed, with a creamy patch of fur at the base of her throat and two old scars along her flanks where the fur had never grown back. Abel wondered what had been at her and how she got away. He wondered was it barbed wire or something that had once hunted her. He sniffed, spat, stopped wondering, and bent to work.

  He knew there were any number of things he should be doing, and were he home or bound that way, the old man knew that he would do them. As it was, Abel was loath to waste any part of the deer but knew there was no way to carry all the meat. Shooting the deer had been like an instinct. He’d not fully realized that he had shot and killed it until he began dressing it and felt the warm blood in his palm. He fisted his strong right hand around the blood, squeezed and watched it run out onto the sand as if it were his own. The dog sat to watch. Abel opened his hand and set his tongue to his fingertips. Heat and gamey salt and life but recently faded. He closed his eyes and breathed. The sand was red. The deer’s eyes were closed and soft. Abel laid his red hand upon her flank. He closed his eyes again and waited to see if the deer would come alive again. After a while, he sniffed and looked skyward where a fat October moon had risen over t
he tree line as the sun slid toward the westward wall of ocean. With blood on his hands and the tide murmuring behind him, Abel knelt in the sand and stared at the pale, risen moon like a primeval hunter quick with awe.

  Finally, he took off his blanket roll and haversack and dropped them to the sand. The dog circled about with its head down and ears up. Its nose worked furiously, and the old man took up his knife and pointed it at the dog for emphasis. “Don’t even think about it,” he told it.

  In the end, he cut just enough meat from the deer’s thigh for his supper and for supper the next evening, then drug the carcass off into the forest. The deer was heavy with death and hard for him to handle with his crippled arm. Abel’s legs felt good and strong as they always did, but his chest and shoulders burned with the effort of the last few days. He laid the deer in the forest, covered it with a layer of soft sword fern, and stood over it a long time, trying to think if there was anything else that needed doing. “Goddamn it anyway,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He walked out of the trees and stood looking out at the surf where a sea stack resembling a great phallus stood from the waves. Abel sucked a tooth and walked on down the beach.

  Later that evening, he built his fire near another creek in a little ring of soot-blacked stone that he had used for that purpose on other trips. Abel put on as much dry wood as he could gather and let it burn down until the coals glowed like orange gemstones in the black sand. Cutting the meat into thin steaks, he laid them sizzling on the coals. The old soldier sat cross-legged, humming a slow, sad song to himself as he watched the fat come bubbling up along gristle lines. Off to sea, the sun slowly slipped behind far distant rain clouds, shedding an even light along the horizon like a soft, dull bruise.