Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  For his part, the officer sat his horse and looked over their lines through his field glasses, pausing now and again to jot notes onto a pad balanced on his thigh. And still no one moved until, with a shout that sounded like pain, Gully rose to his knees and fired his piece. Others joined him, and David watched the grass breaking up all around the horse’s legs, yet the officer did not flinch and the horse did not sidestep.

  Gully had reloaded his musket and was rising to fire again when Virgil grabbed the barrel and, with a snarled curse, forced it down. Across the field, the officer calmly put the pad and pencil away, set his thumb to his nose and waggled his fingers at them all, and then, without hurrying, rode back into the screening brush and was gone.

  Men began to hoot softly and craned their necks about to watch as Gully and Virgil wrestled and beat upon each other in the loose soil behind the earthworks. David nudged Abel’s shoulder hard enough to wake him, and Abel snorted and opened his eyes. “You’ll want to see this,” David told him. “Old Gully’s about to get himself a beating.”

  Still on his back, Abel looked over as the two men rolled around on the ground. He drug a palm down his face and shook his head as though to clear it. “Goddamn,” he said softly. “But I get so tired sometimes I dream I’m sleeping.”

  David pushed his tongue into his cheek and nodded. Gully’s nose was bloodied, and blood stained the front of his suitcoat. From across the field came the sound of bugles and fifes followed by a chorus of cheers that rang and echoed and did not seem to fade. They looked up over the earthworks. Their pickets were coming in, holding their hats to their heads and running fast—they could see Ned moving through the grass, his legs a blur, a wide, excited grin splitting his face. Across the field, dark figures marched forward in ruler-straight lines dressed for battle. They crossed from the dark of the wood to the bright of the field and the light came splashing brilliantly as it broke upon their rifle barrels and bayonets. Abel leaned and spat.

  “Yonder they come,” said David softly.

  Chapter Five

  The Branches Above Them

  1899

  When the whistle blew, Silas pushed the heavy iron door closed with the blade of his shovel and stepped back from the furnace. The boiler rattled as though the heat was something wanting out, while all around the yard and at the outbuildings the machine sounds of the mill at work tapered to stillness. The gray wind was soft, punctuated by the coughs and sighs, the weary soft moans and the low, tired voices, of men coming off shift.

  Skimming the sweat-damp gloves from his hands, the boy looked about for the others but did not see them amongst the multitude of flanneled backs moving slowly out into the yard and onward to the rude lane leading to town where taverns and feed stores, barber shops and land offices, rose shabby and mudspattered and sad from the jade forest beside the sea. Silas watched them walk under the trees where leaves hung brightly dying and farther on, past the town and into the forest itself, where their homes waited. Little cabins out in the green, little shacks on little plots that produced stingy fists of cabbage and hard little potatoes that tasted all wrong. Filthy children squatted in the mud while goats held high court on ragged stumps. Tiny door-yard flower gardens withered slowly in the constant forest dark.

  Silas walked alone through the bay of the mill and out onto the sagging dock that thrust into the harbor from the far side of the warehouse. The sky a metal plate whose color foretold a greater darkness yet to come. A faint yellow at the seams where they lay joined and dark over the earth. Night was already falling beyond the Olympics and the peaks were shadow-drenched, huge. Waves slapped the pilings beneath him. A magnificently mustached bolt puncher crabbed his skiff across the darkening shallows. He tied it off to an iron ring set into a log afloat near the conveyor, then stepped with rude grace from skiff to floating log to floating log to shore and was gone.

  The boy walked to the end of the dock and sat with his feet dangling over the water. Fish and oil smells. Sawdust and smoke and the sweet fragrance of new-cut wood. The spoiled, acrid stink of machine oil. Ocean scents older than time. An exotic reek. Rain plunged in gray streaks. A foamy scum churned along the shore.

  Silas sat with his hands open, palms up, on his thighs as though he’d catch and hold the falling rain. Scabbed-over burn marks peppered his brown forearms with intricate patterns while a dull brown fringe tatted his overalls at the bib. He rested his chin on his chest. The rain was cool, and he smelled its cleanliness and tasted in it the ocean and the sharp, pitchy, dark flavor of the forest from which it had risen cloudward days past. Silas sat watching the rain strike the salty harbor. The shadow of a big coho hovered in the water, its gills splayed and redly atremble, while it finned against the gray swells to stand in place over the sunken remains of rusted-out machinery, dropped tools, and saw-chewed stumps and board ends. And slowly the fish tilted slightly surfaceward as though to study the boy and the solid world above where the boy, in turn, sat studying it.

  He had just begun to sing himself a little fishing song that Oyster Tom had taught him when he heard them on the dock behind him. He quieted, and the air he’d gathered for the song came streaming from his lips. The salmon jerked like a stabbed muscle and vanished in the dark water. Silas swallowed, stood, and turned.

  There were three of them, and they came hooded, faces covered by varicolored sleeves of flannel cut with frayed triangular slits for their eyes. Two of them carried little clubs of the sort used by fishermen to brain dogfish and spiny rock cod, while the third stood unarmed but for a fat ring of turquoise upon his right fist, and Silas knew that it was Farley.

  It had grown cooler still. Silas watched their breath come steaming through their hoods, appearing and vanishing and appearing again on the damp air. He smelled whiskey. From somewhere off on the far side of the mill the yard dog began barking.

  “You fucking Indian,” one of them finally said. Silas thought it was the man with the ring, but it didn’t matter. All three came forward together.

  When Charley Poole and his son Edward found him, Silas was still on the dock. He lay on his face with his left hand hanging down as though reaching for something lost in the heaving, rain-stippled water below. He lay in a small red pool that spread from his face and dripped between the boards to the harbor. The boy lay with his eyes closed. He lay absolutely still but for the small breaths that troubled his chest.

  Charley Poole covered his mouth with his palm to see him lying so while Edward ran out onto the creaking dock. Himself not much more than a boy, he crouched to touch Silas’s shoulder. A little bubble of blood filled and emptied repeatedly in his left nostril and a portion of his cheek was laid open to reveal a delicate white line of bone beneath his eye. They’d poured their liquor out onto him, and the boy stank of whiskey and violence and dull animal fear.

  Edward was distantly aware of the rain tapping between his shoulders, a soft hiss as it hit the water. He watched for a moment the boy’s blood mixing with the rain upon the planking, then, taking a deep breath, Edward carefully lifted the flap of skin with his finger-tips and pressed it back. Thick as a drunk man’s lip, it flopped open again after but a moment. Silas moaned softly.

  Behind them, Charley had fallen to his knees at the end of the ramp, his hands clasped fast beneath his chin, face tilted earthward and his salt-and-pepper hair wet and ropy. His prayers were silent, yet his lips moved quickly in recitation.

  Edward touched the boy’s shoulder and softly called his name. Silas groaned and Edward glanced back and said, “Father, I need you here,” then slowly, carefully rolled Silas onto his back, cradling his head with splayed fingers and gentling it to the worn silver boards.

  Charley came up the dock and knelt beside them. He filled his cheeks and blew, then touched his fingertips to that part of Silas’s black hair that was matted and gummy with blood. Swallowing, he took a corner of his shirttail to wipe the bubble from his nose. Looking at Edward, he nodded and said, “He’s alive. I prayed it so.” Hi
s voice in hushed harmony with the hissing rain that fell upon the harbor swells. “I saw how he was,” Charley said. “Saw him close to death and prayed him back. Praise Jesus.” Charley bent his head again in quick and earnest prayer.

  Edward looked at his father a long, silent moment. His lips moved, and he finally nodded and said softly, “I know you did, but he’s hurt bad, yes? I need you to go to camp. Get Tom. Find Tom and have him bring the boat around. Father? Can you do that?”

  Charley Poole opened and closed his mouth and looked at the boy lying so still, so stained by blood and hurt and rain. “Prayed it so, I did,” he murmured.

  Edward took him by the shoulders and ducked his head to catch his eye. “Father? Can you do that?”

  Charley nodded quickly, then took another long look at Silas before running off across the yard and into the mist the rain had chased off the harbor and into the trees. Edward watched him go, then removed his work-thinned shirt and carefully tore a sleeve from it. He sopped blood from the boy’s face and ears and neck and Silas groaned softly through torn lips and two broken teeth.

  There came a soft splashing and Edward looked to see that the blood hung in an inky cloud in the gray harbor water. A gathering of dogfish swam below them. Silent but for the splashes, they tore at the underside of the water as though they understood it showed them something hateful of the world above. Their ever-open eyes were black, their mouths agape and their backs speckled.

  It was fully dark by the time Charley and Oyster Tom arrived with the canoe. Edward had managed to drag Silas to a little stretch of beach not far from the yard, and when he heard their oars, he called into the shadows until their shapes resolved from the liquid dark.

  The long, hollowed-out log from which they’d crafted their canoe came rasping onto the sand. Oyster Tom struck a match to light the little hurricane lamp that hung from the great, curved prow. The flame flared briefly orange upon his ancient face, scouring the dark from the old scars that plagued his cheeks and setting his white hair aglow against the darkness round about him. The old man lifted the lamp from its hook and held it aloft to look at Silas lying limp in Edward’s arms. Shaking his head, he sucked a tooth and turned away.

  Oyster Tom wrapped the boy in an old piece of blanket while Edward and Charley took their places bow and stern. Blowing the light from the lamp, they set off over the dark harbor. Across the water, where the town of Wheelock spread along the shore, were strung electric lights and wavering lamp-flames like signals from another world. The lights winked silently now and again as townsfolk passed before them. The rain had stopped, and thin reflections came across the choppy water like wavering sepia lines upon an old, untrust-worthy map. Distantly they heard men at their pleasure laughing and calling from the streets. The hollow stamp of hooves upon packed earth and clattering on the boards. The sad, lonely discordance of a piano man badly playing at a ragtime. The Indians’ course was plotted west then north and took them around the lighted town then off again into the darkness past the harbor where the ocean was, and the vast, cloud-struck sky, the forest and the long, stony, unending beach.

  But there were also white sand beaches north and south of town, and back from these stood crumbling cliffs of stone and clay that tide and wind destroyed and recreated seasonally. Against the northern cliffs and sprawling off into the black forest there sat a tiny Indian settlement for itinerant workers. Canvas shelters trembling in the wind. Rude shebangs of cast-off planking, of branch and packed moss and fern. Little tents of stained bed linen rife with fleas. Wan cooking fires glittered here in weak reflection of Wheelock’s lights, and quietly under the constant grumble of surf and tide, a plaintive, wet coughing as of a weather-colored tribe taken sick from day labor and hunger.

  They beached near the picked-clean carcass of a sea lion. Someone had taken the skull to decorate his shelter or to use in what prayers he would pray and left behind a broken cage of ribs that curved with a flourish from the sea foam, sand, and bladderwrack. Footprints uncountable lay about the bones where starving folk had broken off sections to hold over fires, sucking from them what warmed marrow they could and soaking the remainder for soup. They carried Silas to their shelter, three good walls and a leaky roof constructed from bits of broken, saw-ruined scrap board snuck back from the mill. They lay the boy down at the back where it was driest, where the wind came least, then set about their diverse tasks.

  Edward left to gather what driftwood he could find for their fire while Oyster Tom undressed the boy to his tattered underclothes and, humming softly an old song he knew about the Two Men Who Changed Things, searched with careful fingertips along the boy’s body for broken bones and deeper hurts. For his part, Charley Poole knelt in prayer just outside the shelter where the rain had begun again. He looked to the dark clouds where he knew heaven should be, and rain ran in streams from the cups of his closed eyes. The Haida in the tent across the way cackled through rotten teeth, mimicking Charley and shouting in the coarse aspirates of his mother tongue. But the Haida was weak and foul with dysentery, and Charley paid him no mind. When the Haida finally withdrew to the dark of his tent, Charley set his palms on his thighs to better support his back, closed his eyes again, and began to quickly move his lips in silent devotions.

  After the fire was kindled, water was drawn from the seep at the base of the cliff and set to boil in a little pot set upon the live coals. Edward crouched beside Oyster Tom as he ministered to Silas. The boy was awake now, and Tom looked him in the eye and nodded. Silas swallowed. His tongue worked around the inside of his mouth and presently he spat a pair of teeth onto his chin like little forlorn chips of bone. The wound in his cheek would not stay closed—it kept flapping open, shedding blood and showing the bone beneath. When he asked, Oyster Tom told Edward he could find no broken bones but worried for the blood the boy had lost. The old Indian hummed and sang and stroked Silas’s hair. Outside, Charley mumbled into the rain. Finally, Oyster Tom bowed his head, nodded to himself, then stood to leave the shelter.

  He returned a short while later with a small leather bag retrieved from the bentwood box beneath the seat of their canoe. Oyster Tom took from it several little squares of clean linen and pressed these into the boy’s mouth. He bid him bite down as best he could to staunch the bleeding sockets, then took from the bag needle and thread. Passing the tip several times through the flames, he threaded the eye with a steady hand. The thread dark and coarse, fibery as ship’s rope. Rain tapped fast and hard against the roof. Oyster Tom looked the boy in the eye again and Silas nodded and Tom pressed the flap of skin to its place beneath the boy’s eye and bent to sewing. The boy’s hands fisted and opened in the blankets and when Tom had finished he passed the bloody needle back through the flames. Then he bid Edward hold Silas’s head and arms, and Edward did so as the old Indian lifted the boy’s shirt.

  The boy hissed in pain and Edward saw a wound he had not noticed before. A dull, red arc described his left breast, bisecting the nipple and tacky with drying gore. Silas sniffed a wet little boy’s sniffle and closed his eyes as Oyster Tom cleaned around the lips of the wound, then rethreaded the needle and sewed the nipple back. The boy moaned and struggled and after a while passed out.

  When they’d finally finished, Edward watched Oyster Tom where the old man sat smoking his pipe and staring out at the wavecut ocean. Finally, Edward asked what they should do. Charley’s prayers droned from the dark outside the shelter, and Oyster Tom took the pipe from his mouth to study the bowl as though he’d consult the dull glow within. After a few moments, he said that they must go. He said that Charley would not be coaxed from his prayers before morning, and that the boy needed rest at any rate, so they would leave with the sun. And then he stood and walked off alone into the rain, out into the forest where the dark was deepest.

  At daybreak they left that place. They loaded their few and paltry possessions into the canoe and pushed off into the muttering surf. Behind them, a fight broke out for their abandoned shelter. Quina
ult and Tillamook, Nuu-chah-nulth and Haida come south from Canada—all gathered for the dangerous, poor-paying work around the lumber mills here and farther south at Forks and Aberdeen, all rewarded with sickness, fingers and worse lost to saws or crushed by chains, casual beatings—pitched into each other for four pieces of miscut board and a scrap of rotting blanket. Charley saw the Haida who’d mocked him fall face-first to the sand but did not see him rise. After a time, they turned from the scene, faced north, and went their way.

  Silas slept to the slap and rock of wave and tide while the others bent to paddling and watched the shore. In the evening, they made their camp upon the beach and Oyster Tom vanished into the forest. He carried no gun, only a little skinning knife, and was gone less than an hour before returning with two fat ground squirrels for their appetites.

  The next day was much the same—the long, dark beach, the gray ocean, their propelled momentum across the swells—and as they settled around the fire that night, they heard a long, drawn-out howling that echoed down from the foothills. “Wolf,” murmured Edward, and Charley nodded fearfully while Silas slept. Oyster Tom merely looked at them and slowly shook his head. He told them he did not think it was a wolf but maybe something more or something less, and told them it was better not to think on it because the beast might follow their thoughts back to camp and attack them in their dreams.

  So it was that two days later on their northward journey home, Edward stood to shade his eyes from the sun and peer shoreward. Frowning, he pointed with a shout, but Oyster Tom had already seen and set his oar to turn them from their course.