Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  The old man had been left to drown in the surf. He was an old soldier who lived alone on the beach, and he was known to them. They carried him on their shoulders to the forest the way that hurt soldiers and dead men have always been carried: with infinite tenderness and careful respect. When they laid him down, the old man sighed but did not wake. His flesh was cold and his face was dark and he looked altogether near his death.

  Oyster Tom kept a single coal live in a smooth clay jar. Throughout the day he’d feed the coal twigs and bits of dry moss, slips of bark and pinches of sticky lodgepole pine needles, so that smoke followed them across the water, mixed up in their hair and fragrant upon their skin. Now Tom rested on his knees and baled a little hole in the earth where it was soft beneath the trees, added twigs and leaves, then set the bright, heart-shaped coal upon the kindling. Charley Poole tied off the corners of their tattered tarp to make a shelter while Silas sat resting with his back against a fallen tree, his legs splayed out so as not to crimp his chest.

  Rain dripped darkly in the forest and fell upon the ocean. Edward walked a short ways down the beach with a pair of water skins and sank their mouths into a shallow little stream cutting through the sand. The tracks of deer lay pressed into the damp sand all about, and from the blood upon the stones he could plainly tell where the old man had been beaten. The water was cold, but Edward did not clamber from the stream until both skins filled. He crouched in the water, staring at the dark sand. When he finally returned, his father bid him fill their pot and set it on the fire to warm. Edward did this, watching the men as they bent over the old soldier and began to tend his wounds.

  They scraped away his beard with their knives to better stitch the savage cut that ran from his temple to his jaw and tossed the hair into the fire where it stank and sizzled mournfully. All their clean cloth was still fouled with Silas’s blood, so they used moss soaked in warm water to clean the drying blood from his neck and face. Oyster Tom pinched up a measure of cobwebbing from the low branches and held a few strands under the old soldier’s nose to judge the force of his breath. The filmy strings rippled out and settled again leisurely, and Tom grunted his satisfaction, then grasped either side of the man’s shirt and spread it open with two quick tugs.

  But for the dark of bruises and other hurts, the old soldier’s chest and stomach were fish-pale in the flame-colored gloom. Charley leaned to look more closely. He hissed and straightened. “Good God,” he said.

  Ropy, pallid scars scalloped the old soldier’s chest, and here and there about his ribcage the flesh rose whitely in ill-healed little creases. When Oyster Tom lifted him to check his back, they saw the flesh there rippling with yet more scars that lay like wide roseate coins of cooled wax. Edward leaned into the light to look for himself. “He’s the one you said fought in the war?” he asked his father.

  They settled the old soldier down again. “That’s right,” Charley answered.

  “At Gettysburg?”

  “I think he said that once. Plenty of other places too, from the look of him.”

  “You believe him?” asked Edward.

  Charley looked at Oyster Tom, who fixed Edward with a look and asked why the man would lie. He waved his hand over the man’s battered flesh as though to ask what more was needed in the way of proof. When Edward did not answer, he was sent into the forest to gather sneezeweed.

  Oyster Tom sat for a space of time looking at the injured old man before him. The old wounds and the new. He sat as though trying to find patterns in the coil, flex, and scrawl of scars fretting his body, each telling the tale of a wound, each the endpoint of a ball or shell fragment, of a blade or a surgeon’s filthy probe, and each connected to the next by pale, smooth flesh whose sole purpose seemed to be to bind one scar to the next.

  The old Indian leaned over the fire. In the stormy dark of the evening, the flames coppered his pocked, timeworn face and his hair glowed whitely. With the stinking beard burned to ash and the driftwood crackling with flame, he moved his hands in the smoke, scooping up great handfuls and laving them against his face to refresh himself before further labors. Charley watched him breathe the smoke, drink it and delight in it. He knelt beside the old soldier and scrubbed with dampened moss at the blood gilding his neck. The old man breathed shallowly. His eyes were closed, sunken and brown, and he lay very still but for the breath that flexed his scars and made his bruises rise and fall.

  Oyster Tom set his smoky hands to either side of the old soldier’s head and turned it so the light lay upon the wound there. He ran the needle through the flames and had the wound stitched in a matter of minutes. And after he had finished, the old soldier groaned to the side and vomited a slick, yellow bile without waking. Charley wiped clean his mouth as Tom settled down and lit his pipe.

  After few moments, Charley said, “It’s strange. He’s took a beating, but he don’t seem hurt bad enough to be like this.”

  Oyster Tom agreed. He said the old soldier seemed much weakened by something other than his wounds. He said that when he peeled back the skin of his eyes and looked there, when he listened to the sound of his heart and of the blood moving within his body, he had seen and heard therein a deeper hurt. He shrugged and said it was too bad, but that the soldier was much like himself, and that sometimes old men could not recover from the smallest things and old wounds long healed sometimes reopened to do them greater harm.

  Charley sat thinking about that. He pursed his lips and nodded, then looked at Oyster Tom and raised his chin. “But you ain’t even close to being dead,” he said with something like tenderness and something like hard pride, and Oyster Tom looked at him and grinned, then returned to the enjoyment of his pipe.

  Charley shrugged and went about tugging more moss from the trees nearby and from the skins of boulders. After a moment, he frowned and said, “I can’t for the life of me remember his name.”

  “Abel,” said the old soldier, touching his tongue to his dry lips and swallowing painfully. “Abel Truman. And I know this man here from way back. Ain’t that right, Tom?”

  Oyster Tom nodded without comment, and Abel winced himself to a sitting position. His eyes widened when he touched his jaw. “Well I’ll be goddamned if those sons of bitches didn’t steal my beard,” he whispered.

  When Edward stepped from the forest into the flickering camp light, Abel looked at him and asked, “You-all ain’t seen my dog anywheres about, have you?”

  They mashed the sneezeweed with hot water in Oyster Tom’s little clay fire bowl, then folded the steaming mass into two handkerchiefs—one for Silas and the other for Abel. Silas wept a little for the pain of it, while Abel took several long, deep breaths before nodding and winking at Edward.

  Later, they lay listening to Abel tell the story of how his dog was stolen and he was beaten, and when he was finished, Oyster Tom rubbed his jaw and nodded. He stood and, without a word, vanished into the forest where the rain was falling and the night was dark. Abel watched him go, then looked at Charley. “I thought he’d died,” he said.

  Charley nodded. “So did we,” he said. He squatted and splayed his fingers flameward. Edward sat to the side, studying the old soldier and looking away when Abel glanced at him. “He didn’t take food for a week,” Charley went on. “He lay in his house like sleeping but it was not sleep. Something else. You wouldn’t know it, looking at him, but he still carries it inside him. Big as my fist. Right near his crotch. We had the doctor come ’round. He said it had to be cut out before it made little ones inside him. All inside him in different places where they’d grow. Along his bones and in his bones. Places like that. Papa said he didn’t want to be cut and wouldn’t let anyone touch him. Now he wears a fat man’s pants just so he has room so it don’t bind up when he walks.”

  Abel winced at the thought of it. He shifted about and put his back against an old pine, then said, “He’s a tough old man.”

  Charley grinned and nodded. “Our grandfather,” he said.

  Abel smiled back
at him as best as he could and winced as his hurts flexed about. “And you’ve a fine pair of boys, too,” he said, nodding to Edward and Silas. “You’re a lucky man to have so much family.”

  Charley’s grin spread wider, and he covered it with a palm as was his habit. “Only Edward is my son,” he said. “Silas there, I believe to be an angel sent down from our Lord in Heaven.”

  Abel raised his eyebrows and shot a quick glance to Edward, who set his face and minutely shook his head. For his part, Silas lay on his side staring at the fire, his eyes glassy with reflected flame, his expression a study.

  “While Old Tom lay sick,” said Charley by way of explanation, “while he lay not sleeping, I prayed to God to make him well or take him quick. One or the other. I prayed two days. But Old Tom just lay in his house. Then someone shouted from the beach and I saw people gathered.” He jerked his chin toward Silas and went on. “He lay in the surf like he was drowned. We carried him to Old Tom’s house, where we thought he’d finally died, and bundled the drowned one in blankets to bury later. I went back to my prayers and when I came back again, there sat Old Tom beside the boy, caring for him. I prayed it so, you see? So I was doubly blessed.” He looked to the sky where the night and the rain and the stars were. “Great power has prayer, but none so great as our Lord in heaven and His mighty hosts,” he whispered.

  “I fell off a fishing boat,” said Silas abruptly. “Four days out of Frisco and bound for Alaska. Cook’s boy. I went over in the middle of the night while I was doing my business over the side. No one heard.” He scowled and stared at Charley until the man blinked and looked away.

  “Whether he knows it or not or believes it or not,” said Charley finally, “he was sent by the Lord, like all children are, and was upon the Lord’s own business.” He stood and stepped away from the light to sit down on a stone in the outer shadows and stare at the ocean.

  Abel nodded absently. His chest and back where they’d beaten him throbbed, and there was a hard, constant ache all along his crooked left arm. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he gave a soft yelp, then shook his head ruefully. “I don’t guess I’ve gotten used to myself without a few chin hairs,” he said.

  “Your face is cut. Badly,” said Edward, his eyes bottomless and dark by the firelight. “They had to shave you to stitch you.”

  Abel looked at the boy. “Well, I appreciate it, son. I surely do. Reckon I would’ve died had you-all not come along.”

  Edward raised his chin. “You have a lot of scars.”

  Abel wet his upper lip with his lower, then nodded. “I guess I am pretty banged up, at that.”

  “You were in the war?”

  “That’s right.”

  Edward licked his lips and swallowed. “At Gettysburg?” he asked, his voice soft yet tremulous with something like expectation.

  Abel pressed his lips together. He nodded.

  Edward scooted forward so the flames lit bright the shadowed planes of his angular face. His dark eyes softened. “Were you a part of Pickett’s Great Charge?”

  Abel’s eyebrows jumped. “Great Charge?” he asked. He filled his cheeks and blew, then winced. “No sir,” he finally said. “No. I was Second Corps. Under old Clubby. Old Johnson.”

  “Off on the left, then.”

  Abel cocked his head and looked at the boy. “That’s right,” he said. “I did see a little of that Pickett fight, though. Our work was mostly done that day by the time theirs got started.”

  Edward wrapped his arms around his knees and looked into the fire. Then he looked at Abel’s face, scrutinizing, judging. “Johnson’s Division,” he said. “You don’t talk like how I imagine Virginians talk.”

  Abel grinned and shook his head. “Mine was a regiment of Tar Heels,” he said. “But I ain’t one of them, neither. My God, no. I got where I got by way of the state of New York and points between.”

  “There were Tar Heels in the Charge,” said Edward. “They went in under Trimble, I think.”

  Abel shook his head again. “Jesus-by-God, boy. You do know yourself a little history, don’t you?”

  Edward Poole sat up straight and touched his chest with the points of his four brown fingers. “American,” he said simply, looking Abel in the eye.

  Abel sighed and looked down at the fire where the flames fed steadily upon the driftwood, crumbling it into glowing coals and long fingers of ash. He shook his head slowly. “Ah, son,” he said softly. “You …” He looked hard at him. “You’re only an Indian,” he said sadly.

  The expression that passed over Edward’s face was hard to watch, and Abel turned from it. Rain dripped slowly, persistently, from the underside of the canopy. A few drops sizzled into the fire. It pattered softly on the understory beyond. Abel turned back and looked at Edward for a long moment that passed slowly, then stared into the flames and sat that way, silently. The waves battered the beach and the fire crackled. The wind came through the forest. Charley Poole moved off to gather more firewood; if he’d heard what Abel said, he didn’t show it. Silas had fallen into an uneasy sleep, his soft, little-boy moans of hurt coming at intervals between the surging wind and the snapping fire. After a long while, Abel heard Edward swallow and then, after another pause, ask, “What was it like? That day?”

  Abel looked off into the middle distance. “I don’t know that I can tell it,” he said. “Not really and make it like it was. I don’t think any man can, and those that try … Well, they either weren’t there—in the moment, if you understand me—or it’s maybe just their own small version of it. A small part of a big thing.” Abel smiled and went on. “I don’t know that any one of us, if you was to plunk us back down smack in the middle of any of that mess, could tell one battle from the next, let alone our feet from our heads.”

  Abel shook his head and shrugged, then shifted about to find comfort. He sat before the fire with his right hand cradling his left, which lay curled tightly to his side. He gave Edward a look. “There was a whole hell of a lot of marching. I can tell you that. If you asked me what it was I did in the war, I’d say: I marched four pair of good boots to their nubbins, and I was just dumb lucky to get that many. Dumb lucky. We had us days of marching. Long days spillin’ into weeks. In every kind of weather. But that day—hell, any day we had us a fight, and there was a lot of them, too—that day there was noise and smoke and passels of men all over the damn place and you really couldn’t see much of anything. And what you could see—”

  “It lasted two hours,” said Edward. Abel blinked and came back from wherever he was and looked at him. “The cannonade,” the boy explained. “It went on for two hours.”

  Abel shrugged. “Maybe it did,” he said. “I don’t know, but I could feel it. I do remember that. Every mother’s son of us could feel it. The charge, too, as I recall. So there was that. I was … I don’t know.” Abel paused to catch his breath. He was very tired. His face hurt and his chest and his throat from saying more aloud in the last few hours than he had for six months or more, yet he surprised himself by going on.

  “I don’t really know how to describe it,” he said. “Not at Gettysburg or Manassas or Malvern Hill. Not in the Wilderness or any other damn place I was at. I seen things I can’t forget. They won’t turn me loose, and if they did, I can’t imagine what I’d do with myself. Who I’d be. No. I can’t really tell any of it because they ain’t invented the words a man could use to do it justice.”

  Abel Truman panted, hurting. He sat with Edward’s dark eyes upon him, and when he spoke again, he spoke slowly and with as much precision as he could to frame the events of his experience with the poor, rude language at his command. How it had been that afternoon at Gettysburg when the world changed and you could feel that change as though the earth itself was shook to its very core, and maybe it was. That day. Pickett’s Great Charge. Up and through the dirt came the sound of them setting out. Through the earth and through the soles of the boots and bare feet of those watching and those who helped to make it ha
ppen. All those going across the fields who could never turn back from it forever and still call themselves men in that age. Up their legs came the sound. Up their legs where their muscles were burning and their bladders were voided down their thighs and on past their mean, hard, shrunken bellies to rattle around their hearts that beat so quick with fear and dread and wonder it seemed they’d burst. And finally up over the backs of their heads and down their arms like the feeling that comes upon a body when some momentous thing has happened and the truth of it actually happening is only just beginning to dawn; something willfully done that can never be taken back and that changes the world with its doing. Something, some great deed, seemingly foreordained, that in a stroke is writ in the clouds and in the shadows and in the blood of the living who witness it and in the souls of those who have the eyes to read such a language. But something, finally, that rests solely on the shoulders and in the hearts of men who are by nature born to kill other men. Abel fumbled with the telling of it, trying to make the boy understand. Of flags and men and horses and cannon and hot gore slick upon the green grass of high summer. The heat and the smell of the heat. The sound.

  Finally, Abel said, “We had us a fellow in our company. Went all through the war up to the Wilderness where he got himself killed. Simple fella.” Abel tapped his temple with a fingertip. “But that boy could shoot a gun like a dream. Like nothing you ever seen. Like he was born to it, that boy was a shooter. Ned. And I got to where I was pretty fond of him. Spent a lot of my time watching out for him and suchlike.” Abel swallowed and twisted his head about until his neck cracked like a set of back-folded knuckles. “Anyway, we ended up in reserve that afternoon and was watching from a little ridge south of town as those Pickett boys started off. I recollect somebody saying, ‘Mercy God, would you look at that.’ Well. Ned, he up and says, ‘Yessir, I ain’t never seen so much smoke in one place before.’ He had him a hunk of real honest-to-God apple pie that he got somewhere or other, some windowsill in town the day before maybe, and he ate that, then lay down to sleep while I went around trying to hunt up a cup of coffee or milk or some such thing and next we knew the army’s pulling out. And that’s how it was. The world didn’t stop that day. It didn’t even pause or look up from whatever it is the world does while it’s turning. It was only afterwards that it all turned into something more than what it was and that was only because by then we needed it to be. All of us, on both sides of that field. We ended up needing it to be something more than what it was. Which was nothing but slaughter.”