Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  Edward frowned deeply. “I don’t understand. Are you saying it was … That it was all a lot of smoke?”

  Abel shook his head. He was suddenly very tired, very sad. He felt old, and the back of his throat was hot and sick. It seemed every other part of him hurt in some way. “No,” he finally said. “I ain’t told it right, I suppose. All that”—he waved a hand through the smoky, flame-clutched dark—“all that was the bravest goddamned thing I ever heard of. The Charge. Other things too. But I’m like you. I had to read about it later to know how brave it all was.”

  Edward pursed his lips and sat back, obviously disappointed. “Is that where you got all those scars?” he asked. “At Gettysburg?”

  “No,” said Abel, shaking his head. “Most of them come later. In the Wilderness, mainly.”

  Edward cocked his head and shrugged. “I don’t guess I know much about that.”

  Abel wet his lips and moved his shoulders about to try and loosen his cramped muscles. “It don’t matter much,” he said softly, not to Edward, not to anyone. “Don’t matter much at all.” Abel blinked and shook his head. “Why Pickett?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Seems like Pickett’s your man. I was wondering why that was.”

  “It’s not just him,” said Edward. He took a breath and looked hard at Abel. When he spoke next, it was with a force and resolution Abel had not yet heard from him, as though he’d spent a long time thinking things through, a long time defending certain things to himself. “I’m American. Like I told you. And I’m American and not something else because they failed that day. They couldn’t do it and most of them probably knew they couldn’t do it before they even started, but they went anyhow. There’s honor in that. I don’t reckon there’s much of honor left in the world now, but they had it that day and I honor them on both sides by knowing what I can about it. Much as I can.”

  “Honor?” Abel snorted. “Honor, shit.” He ran his hand through his long, smoky gray hair, then leaned close to the flames to peer at the boy. Staring hard, he touched the inside of his cheek with his tongue and said, “There’s just two things you need to know about honor. You know what they are?”

  Edward shook his head.

  “Once you get on her, stay on her,” said Abel, grinning and laughing and slapping at his knee. He doubled over with a wheezing, wet cough that brought tears to his eyes. He pressed his palm to the side of his chest until he’d caught his breath, then looked at the boy, who watched him without expression. Abel frowned and licked his lips. “You see? Honor?”

  Edward shrugged, his gaze drifted to the flames.

  “Well, shit,” said Abel, shaking his head. “I guess I’d better try for a little sleep.”

  Edward nodded and curled down beside the fire and closed his eyes. The old soldier watched until he was asleep and dreaming, then he, himself, lay down beside the fire and closed his eyes.

  And dreamed.

  He came awake panting. Feverish and wet with rain, Abel rocked back and forth with his hand pressed to his chest. He drug a palm down his face and smeared his eyes dry with a curled forefinger. The night was fully dark and the fire had settled to a bed of red coals pulsing with heat, sizzling with tiny points as raindrops spattered them. Oyster Tom sat in the long red shadows beneath the trees, smoking his pipe. He glanced at Abel and softly apologized for waking him, but Abel waved it off.

  The Indian sat with his back to a moss-feathered spruce. The bark crackled against his shoulders, and he said he’d found sign of the thieves. Oyster Tom said that they followed one of the old trails that led through the forest to the foothills and the mountains beyond them, and he said they had Abel’s dog with them. Oyster Tom said he reckoned they fought and bet upon and sold dogs as some men did, and he said that the trail more or less followed the Little Sugar Creek. Abel sniffed and wiped beneath his nose with his wristback. Nodding, he said he knew the area well.

  “I want to thank you for stopping to patch me up,” Abel said.

  Oyster Tom nodded. He said that it was nothing more than what Abel would have done, and then, without preliminary, he leaned forward with his ghostwhite hair haloing the dark about his head and told Abel he was sick. He told the old soldier he was sorry for it, then sat back into the shadows again to watch Abel silently, his dark eyes aglitter.

  Abel pressed his right thumb into the fleshy little valleys of bone and sinew between the knuckles of his wrecked left hand. He took a breath, nodded, then spat into the fire. “Well, I trust you know what it is you’re talking about,” he said, smacking his lips thoughtfully and shrugging. “I reckon I figured as much anyway.” He looked up at Oyster Tom. “Old Charley there, he told me how it went with you.” Abel jerked his chin up. “How’d you get around it?”

  The Indian shrugged and said that he hadn’t. That he had only put it off for a while and that only because of the boy, Silas, and because of Charley.

  Oyster Tom then grinned. His white, white hair waved and trembled. He said that Silas was only a boy in need of care and that Charley, having lost his father at sea, had become the sort of man who needed angels and devils to keep him upright. He said that many men were like this to greater or lesser degrees and that there was no shame or foolishness in it, and anyway, who was there who would tell them they were wrong in their beliefs? “No,” he said softly. “I never got around anything. But the boy, he needed someone at that moment, and Charley needed something also. At that moment. So I got up. This is what men must do. Their true job.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take responsibility for what’s theirs and let go the rest.”

  “Seems the trick, then, is figuring out what you can safely let go.” Oyster Tom shrugged.

  Abel shook his head. “I don’t know about any of that,” he said. “I don’t think most people care for anything but themselves anymore.”

  Oyster Tom said that they were not talking about people but about men. He agreed that most men remain accountable to themselves only, and that but poorly. He said that the proper chore of a man is to be chargeable for those and that dear to him and that this was something women understood and knew how to do without having to be told. It was a thing women looked for in their men, and this was why most women lived lives of bottomless sorrow. “So I got up,” said Oyster Tom. “I saw I needed to care for that which I could and left the rest to itself.”

  “Well,” said Abel. “If that’s the case, then I believe we’re all of us in a mess of trouble. I don’t know that it’s anywhere in a man to do any goddamned thing that’s decent or good.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what-all you’ve seen of him, as a species I mean, but I know for a fact he’s a mean, self-centered sumbitch when given half a chance.”

  Oyster Tom shrugged and said that violence was inseparable from living, and who could say that it never brought forth a greater good? He pointed out the example of Abel’s war and the black man’s freedom, and Abel looked at him and did not reply.

  The fire ticked heat into the upper dark. Beside it, Edward turned in his sleep, then settled again, facing away from the heat. “Let me ask you something,” said Abel. “What makes that boy go on the way he does? Pickett and Gettysburg and all?”

  Oyster Tom took the pipe from his mouth and studied the bowl. He told Abel that he was Edward’s age when he met George Edward Pickett at the soldier’s fort in Bellingham during the Pig War. He said it was well before the war in the east started, and that he went to the fort to find work because sickness was going up and down the coast. He said his mother died, and then his father. His sister and all his aunts and uncles died, then he touched his scarred cheeks lightly and shrugged and said that he was spared. So he went north to the fort where there was much to do because everyone thought there would be a fight with the British because an American farmer shot an Irish pig. Oyster Tom said nothing came of it in the end, but he still fished and hunted for the soldiers, chopped wood, drew water, things like that. He said the fort comma
nder, Pickett, was very kind to all the Indians and took a Haida for a bride who bore him a child that died not long after. Oyster Tom said that Pickett finally went away to the east when he saw the British would not fight.

  The old Indian sucked thoughtfully at his pipe. He nodded to where Edward lay sleeping. “I taught the boy to read English, and he reads very well. Pickett at the fort taught me. So you see, the boy feels a connection to that past.” He shrugged. “What can it hurt?”

  They were silent then—two old men staring at the glowing remains of a burned-down fire in the dark of a long, wet night. When Oyster Tom spoke again, it was to ask if Abel would go after his dog.

  Abel nodded.

  Oyster Tom tapped his pipe against a stone to knock the ash from it before taking out a little nail with which to scrape the sides. “You better have a sleep while you can, then,” he told Abel.

  In the morning, the camp was vacant, though the fire had been built back and there were two cooked salmon steaks lying hot upon a smooth stone beside him. Wincing, Abel stood and looked out at the beach where they stood beside their canoe. They watched Edward as he clambered up the little bluff toward him.

  “A few days’ supplies to see you through,” he said, handing Abel a little sack. “An old knife and a little pistol, but I wouldn’t trust either one too much.”

  The rain had ceased and mist leaked from the trees to hang shroud-like in the forest. The sack was heavy, and Abel stood there with it in his hand. He stood with his head hung and then he thanked the boy, set the sack between his feet, and set his palm on the boy’s shoulder.

  Looking into Edward’s dark, wary eyes, Abel said, “What I told you yesterday … What I said …” Abel’s lips moved about, and he wet them with the tip of his tongue. “Don’t you fret it. Any of it. Americans are …” He shrugged. “Truth is, I don’t know what all we are anymore. We were one thing—now we’re something else. The war mixed it all up. That’s one thing it did.” He let go of Edward’s shoulder and stuffed his hand into his pocket. Squinting at the ocean, he said, “Don’t ever let anyone else try and tell you what I did yesterday. They’d be wrong, like I was.” He looked at the boy and grinned. “And if you do … You go on knock ’em down.”

  Edward looked at the old man. The gray wind blew in his gray hair, and a white crust of spittle had dried at the corners of his mouth and he had to lean against the wind to keep his balance. “What happened to you?” Edward finally asked.

  Abel blew and shrugged. “You tell your papa … Well, thank the man for me and let him know that about five miles up the beach he’ll see him a blood slick on the sand beside the seep that’s there. Where that rock that looks like a horse’s pizzle stands. Shot me a deer there a few days back and there ought to still be some good meat left to it if them thieves didn’t get it all. I buried it a little so it’d keep longer. I couldn’t take but a little of it and I’d be obliged if you-all could fetch out the rest. I wouldn’t want to think of it going to waste.”

  Edward stared at him and nodded. He did not thank him. His eyes were wet, and he knew they would not meet again. Finally Edward turned and started back down to the beach where they stood waiting.

  Abel called after him, and Edward turned. The old man raised his chin. “You watch out for old Helen, now,” he said.

  Edward frowned and shook his head, a little grin beginning to play about his lips.

  “Helen Damnation,” said Abel with a broad smile. “That’s something we old soldiers used to say to each other.”

  Silas was in the canoe and Charley stood calf deep in the surf, fussing over him. Oyster Tom stood in the water near the prow. He looked at Edward, and together they pushed the canoe into the surf, hauled themselves in, and plucked up their paddles. Oyster Tom sang cadence. Edward sat in the stern and steered until they passed the rocky shoals and were beyond the sea stacks that stood like dark sentinels against the gray morning that spread slowly down from the blue foothills. When he looked back, Abel was vanished, and no smoke rose from the cooking fire they’d kindled for him.

  Chapter Six

  Saunders’ Field

  May 1864

  See them on the road. A white road under a blue sky between fallow fields spreading toward hills and forests green and lush in the springtime sun. What little dust their bare feet raises curls and licks at the roadside grasses, then finally settles after they pass. Two of them, a man and woman, hopeful contraband, walking north along the road. The man’s face creased with worry and with pain, hands furrowed with fieldwork, stiffened and rough. He emancipated himself a fortnight ago, and the root-sour stink of fear still rises from the sad folds of his thin shirt. He does not know what to do, where to go. His name was once Dexter but it is not any longer, and he has been walking north with this quiet, careful woman for the past week. The pain in him, carried silently for years now, is all the worse for a taste of freedom and her company.

  They have crossed this day the Newfound Creek and the Little Creek. Other, nameless branches meandering the countryside as though they’d nothing better to do. They have heard trains in the distance, seen cavalry flinging themselves up and down parallel roads. But for the hard, fleshy rasping of their bare feet in the dust, the air is filled with birdsong, the sound of wind. Dexter can smell the perfume of new blossoms, of leafed-out trees and new spring grass, but all of it is tainted by his own stink rising against his nostrils. He looks down and sees he’s wet himself again. A dark stain spreads along one trouser leg, and he wonders will he weep aloud. Even after so long he is still numb in the places they cut him, still unused to the lack of sensation. When he does not sob, when he merely takes a breath, Dexter looks over at her as they walk, wondering if she has noticed. If she has, she does not show or speak it; merely walks along silently, fingers laced across her belly, steps steady, slow, and assured. He can see stains seeping through her dress front and stiffened cloth where her milk has spoiled. Dexter looks away, walks on.

  Her name is Hypatia—a joke of her master, lately dead, for she had no notions of mathematics. For a brief moment she was a mother but is not any longer, and she has been walking northbound roads for over a month.

  Together they top a little rise and see the road spool lazily northward. A dark stain of forest on the horizon where the road disappears. And closer, between them and the forest, a plume of dust and the watery impression of a shape within rattling steadily along. Hypatia settles down on a rock just off the road. A soft, satisfied sigh. With slender, strong fingers she prods her ankles and heels for the pleasure of it. Dexter stands in the road with his hands on his hips, watching the dust. Squinting, trying to decide if it be pilgrims like themselves or soldiers or home guard or any one of a dozen other dangers. Trying to decide should they leave the road for the fields and woodlots, for the beds of streams and runs and creeks. His skin is the soft ruddy color of a chestnut in the fall when the weather turns cold. He shakes his head and says, “I don’t know. A wagon, I guess.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  He shrugs. “Nah.”

  “Then you best get out the road. Up on this hill, they can see you plain as you see them.” With another soft sigh, she tilts her face skyward to let the sun fall upon it, then opens her eyes to look for shapes in the clouds.

  Dexter looks about himself. The white road, the hill, a dark stand of pine within running distance. Shaking his head and muttering softly to himself, he ducks and scurries out of the dust, coming to a crouch near Hypatia’s rock.

  “Figure you can make them trees if we got to run?”

  Blinking, she looks for a long moment at his face, so tired and careworn and pinched with need and hurt. With the very tips of her fingers she touches an old, puckered scar tatting his cheek. Even with so light and inconsequential a caress, she feels him tremble, so draws back her hand. Shaking her head, she tells him, “You go on. There ain’t nothing more they can do to me.” A pause. “They can’t touch me no more.”

  His throat bob
s and he hangs his head a moment before answering. “I reckon I can wait with you.”

  The wagon solidifies from the dust. An old white man on the bench seat with a rifle propped up on his thigh. Dexter raises himself to the balls of his feet, tensed, his arms away from his sides. Ready to throw himself before her and shield her. With her long fingers, Hypatia tucks an errant kink of hair back up under the black rag wrapped thrice around her head. She settles her calm gaze upon the wagon as it approaches and slows.

  For his part, the old man brakes slow and easy after cresting the hill and looks down at them on the grass. He studies them there for a long time, then rubs his jaw and shakes his head. Setting the rifle down, he raises his chin to Dexter. “You there, nigger. What the hell are you doing out thisaway?”

  Dexter cannot meet the old man’s eye. He looks down, looks away. His shoulders sag and his expression slackens so as to give up as little of himself as possible. The old posture of submission. He cannot speak.

  “We goin’ to see Lincum,” says Hypatia, rising from her stone.

  “Jesus Christ.” The old man leans and spits and wipes his mouth with the back of one hand. He ducks his head to try and catch Dexter’s eye. “That true, you crazy buck? You look at me here now, boy.”

  Dexter’s eyes roll up to the old man’s face. A hard face, cruel about the mouth, and the flesh around the eyes chased with age. He takes a deep breath, stands straight as he’s able. “Yes, sir,” his voice not more than a whisper.