Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  The old man’s face sours and he curses and looks away. Looks back at Hypatia and studies her for a time. “Where’s your baby?” he asks.

  “Dead, sir.”

  “Dead where?”

  She looks back down the road the way she’s come and blinks slowly. “Back behind me now,” she says.

  “God damn,” says the old man. “Just God damn it.” Taking a deep breath, he stands and steps into the bed of the wagon, where he roots around through various boxes and sacks, telling them, “You got a fair piece of travel ahead of you. God damn God damn. You have any idea what’s happening up the road? What’s coming thisaway? Do you?” He does not wait for them to answer. “Them armies is coming together, is what’s happening.” Pausing, he makes two fists and bangs them together in the air. “There’s goin’ to be fightin’ like you can’t imagine, and they’re coming right through here. Right down this road. You watch and see if they don’t. Now, you listen. If you can, find you a Union soldier, a soldier in blue. Pick you a young one if you get the choice and just go on up and tell him you-all is contraband. Do you know that word?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Dexter, bobbing his head, looking down at the dust.

  “God damn it.” The old man spits and transfers items from various boxes into a little canvas sack. “Now, I ain’t givin’ you any God damn weapons. Not even a blade, and I hope I am well in my grave ’fore niggers start walking around my homeland armed. But here.” He hands the sack down to Dexter. Hypatia walks across the grass and stands looking up at the old man. “There’s food,” he tells them. “A little cornmeal, some salt beef. I put a hunk of cheese, some soft bread, and a jar of milk in there too, but that’s for you,” he tells Hypatia. “You understand me?”

  “Yes,” she says. “We thank you.”

  The old man steps back onto the bench and takes up the reins. “Stay on this road,” he says. “But God damn it, be careful. You end up with the wrong army, and that’s it. I don’t have to tell you what they’ll do to you. You got that, boy?”

  Dexter’s hands fist and unfist, then fist again. He nods.

  “All right then. Now. You see that dark patch up yonder? That mess of woods? Called the Wilderness. You’ll be there in a day. Maybe two, the way she is.” He looked at Hypatia and shook his head, then indicated the long view toward the Wilderness from the top of the hill. “Anyway, odds are the armies’ll come out on this side and get down to business. Ain’t no white man goin’ to start a fight in them woods but they’d be good for hiding. You two head on north, make for the trees, and watch yourselves. A little luck, and you’ll be all right.”

  They thank him together—Dexter still off-looking to some point in the air just beside the old man’s shoulder and Hypatia meeting his tired, careworn gaze without blinking. “What are you two?” he asks them. “Husband and wife? Kin?”

  “Nah, sir,” says Dexter, shuffling his feet in the dust. “We just meet up on the way.”

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  Dexter squeezes shut his eyes, opens them again. His name is not Dexter any longer. They took that self six months ago when they cut him for not turning down his gaze quick enough when the missus came out into the yard. The master had been especially worrisome, especially watchful, with the way the war was going and so had Dexter taken to the shed. They held him down. A fast memory of the blade. A curve of metal as silvery and cruel as the crescent moon, quick and ice-cold against his thighs until the warmth of his blood spilt over them. He takes a deep breath, raises his chin, and opens his eyes. “My name?”

  The old man frowns. “Yes, God damn it.”

  “Grant,” he says without pause, without lowering his eyes. “Sherman Grant.” He squares his shoulders and shows the old man his teeth.

  The old man looks stricken, shaken, then sniffs and nods. “Well by God, by God. Don’t tell nobody else that.” Grins. Says, “Well, Sherman Grant, there’ll be time enough for the two of you, I reckon.” The old man pauses, leans and spits, then looks over the countryside round about. “Used to be a hell of a country,” he says quietly. “A hell of a place to be. This land here, this good farming soil … it won’t be worth a good God damn in a couple days.” And without another word, he shakes the reins over the old swayback’s flanks and the dust comes up and he and horse and the wagon are vanished in it.

  That was in the morning when the red sun radiated across the rolling hills. Making the pale undersides of the leaves to shine and spinning rubies into the little creeks where they crossed the road. By afternoon of that day, the second of May, 1864, the sky was wholly darkened. The air alive with electricity. They sat out the storm beneath a live oak and Grant drew his blanket up around them. They sat huddled, sharing warmth against the wind and wet, and he could feel her heartbeat against his chest. A shift of a hand stole his breath and unmanned him and he began to weep without control or sound. With soft whispers, Hypatia calmed him, stroked his brow and cheek, and held him tightly in his sorrow. He told her what they’d done to him, what they’d taken from him, and what he’d never known and, now, would never know, and she said nothing. She held him, and he slept. By morning, the storm had blown itself out and they rose without speaking and walked on up the road.

  Later that day, as the heat began to gather, they passed the body of a man hung from the neck until dead. He swung from a stout branch and his hands and feet had begun to swell and his hair was damp. He wore a wedding ring but no shoes and the eyes were gone from his head and three crows watched from the branches above. Grant and Hypatia walked on.

  A stillness now, as if the world were waiting, breathless. The wind did not blow and the day grew warm. They slept that night on the banks of some nameless stream for the cool of the water in the close, hot dark, and when they rose they could hear a distant, tearing sound as of a sturdy piece of canvas ripped lengthwise. It came banging intermittently through the springtime air all morning and in the afternoon the tearing become a roar and the roar was constant. They could hear shouting. They stopped on a rise on the outskirts of a four-building village that lay abandoned. The Wilderness was before them, studded with powdersmoke that rose, slow, malignant, until the sun was darkened and the shadows grew long.

  May 5, 1864

  It was early afternoon when they came out of the woods across the field. They came as they always did: shouting and huzzahing like an organized mechanism geared for war and nothing but. Their lines were as dressed as the Wilderness allowed, running north to south, and they were ranked by regiment in that close space. Small figures uncountable with distance, haze, and dust. The sun on their bayonets like star points against the nightblue backdrop of their uniforms and the greater dark of the woods behind them. They came marching out of the trees. You could feel them coming in the earth.

  David’s knuckles were white upon his rifle, barrel and stock. His eyes stung with sweat and his own stink rose from his collar. He was distantly aware that his head had stopped its throb and his spectacles had slid down the long, thin line of his nose until he eyed the coming battle over their moon-round tops. He took as deep a breath as he could and looked at Abel. “Don’t look like they’re fooling around no more,” he said.

  “About goddamned time,” said Abel. The older man took off his hat, gathered his long, dusty hair into a ponytail, tied it off with a thin strip of leather he kept for that purpose, then tucked the works back under his shirt collar and jammed the hat back on. Behind them, officers strode back and forth, their swords unsheathed, steeling the men with words and shouts and curses; getting them ready for what was coming and telling them to charge their weapons and, when they fired, to fire low. A young aide went about cutting blazes into the trees and telling them to fire beneath those marks, and they could see how his revolver shook in his hand.

  David checked over his piece, steadying the barrel on a slim branch that lay atop the earthworks to his front. Next to him, Abel hawked up a great gob of phlegm and sent it in a long, dirty yellow arc into the
field.

  David shook his head, then ducked quickly as a spattering of bullets sent sprays of dirt over him and down through the holes in his wrecked hat. “How d’you do it?” he shouted as he shook out the hat and clawed his fingers through his hair. “My mouth’s dry as a stone.”

  Abel didn’t answer. His face was unreadable. He reached out one grimy finger and gently pushed David’s spectacles back up his nose, then patted his shoulder with an air of the paternal. As he turned away, David touched his arm and leaned in close to shout, “You been hit.”

  Frowning, Abel touched his neck. The sunbrowned flesh beneath his ear lay raked open. His fingers came back red and Abel crouched there staring at it amidst all the gathering roar of rifle-fire and shouting. He stared at his fingers with dumb amazement, then looked at David. “That’s my blood,” he said.

  David winced and ducked as a bullet went clipping through the branches above them, sounding for all the world like an angry hornet. He glanced over at Abel’s outstretched hand and looked at his face. “Maybe you ought to go on back and find the surgeon. Make sure you didn’t take another one you don’t know about yet.”

  Abel shook his head. “This is just the first I was ever shot,” he said. He looked at David a moment, then licked his lips and risked a quick peek over the earthworks. At the far left of their line, at the north end of the field, their men had begun firing and the smoke from the discharges moved down the line toward their own position like clockwork. The blue soldiers had not yet reached the gully in the center of the field and yet they had already begun dying. They lay scattered amidst the grass. Abel ducked back down. “Listen a minute,” he said. “I want to tell you something.”

  The Union line reached the gully, went down its far side, nearly disappeared—became but heads planted strangely with the failed crops—then came back up the near side. Some dropped to their knees in the grass to fire and some fell forward into the grass and did not rise again. David breathed. He squeezed shut his eyes and opened them again, but nothing had changed. He was not home, abed, and being woken to breakfast by his mother’s call. He panted and made ready to fire, then looked at Abel. “What is it?” he shouted.

  “I was married ’fore the war,” said Abel. “I was a married man.” He paid the gathering violence no mind and held one hand fast to the side of his neck. “Had us a baby girl that died ’fore we even had the chance to name her.”

  David looked at him. Bullets sent sprays of dirt over them and went clipping through the branches overhead to send down bright, spiraling showers of leaves that flashed in the sun as they fell. A man four feet from them threw his arms skyward and fell back dead without a sound. Someone gave the command to fire, and he and Abel and all the men around them rose to their knees and fired over the works, then rolled over onto their backs to reload. From somewhere in the field, beyond the curtain of smoke that had dropped between them and the Yankees, came the chilling, familiar rumble of cannon being brought up the Old Stone Road.

  “I dropt her,” said Abel, not looking at David, his hands moving expertly upon his weapon. He tore open a cartridge with his teeth, spat the paper, then pinched the shot and powder into the barrel and drew the rammer, twirled it between his fingers, and rattled it down the barrel to push home the charge.

  “I never told anybody,” Abel went on, shouting to be heard. “Not even my wife. They all said she died in her sleep, but I know better.” He pursed his lips and frowned as he drew out the ramrod, twirled it through his hands again, then shoved it into the loose soil beside him. The long chain of firing had begun again at the far end of the field, and they crouched silent and waiting. “I’d’ve named her Jane,” said Abel, looking absently back into the dark of the Wilderness behind them. He opened and closed his mouth then said, “Would’ve called her Janey, maybe.” He swallowed, swore, and turned away to fit the firing pin onto his piece.

  The blue line came on. Steady now, without shouting. Leaning forward and clutching at their caps as though they struggled into a wind. No cheering. Abel rolled his head around on his shoulders. Beside him, David’s hands were busy on his rifle. Abel sniffed and tapped his shoulder. “You reload already?”

  “Yes, goddamnit.” David was pale, watching them come. He drew out the rammer again.

  “Then leave it alone,” said Abel.

  David took a deep breath. Exhaled. He set the ramrod aside.

  “One other thing,” said Abel.

  “What, goddamnit?”

  “When you do fire, point it thataway,” said Abel, good-naturedly nodding toward the field.

  David looked at him. He shoved the barrel of his rifle up over the works, fired blindly, then began reloading. He looked back at Abel. “You just go straight to hell,” he said, grinning.

  “Save you a seat,” nodded Abel. He rolled onto his stomach, came up on his knees, and fired.

  There was no use aiming now, for smoke lay thick upon the field and rose slowly over the trees, as though it was night falling. The rushing enemy had become so many dim ghosts solidifying from the vapor momentarily before dissolving again.

  And then they began to fire without order or pause and time compressed upon them all. Firing as fast as hands could load, as fast as tired and tiring arms could lift rifles to bruised and bruising shoulders. Old, familiar aches rose from deep within them as their rifles kicked against their bodies. The sour, charry taste of powder and paper dried their mouths and their jaws hurt and their teeth rattled loosely in their gums as they bit cartridges open.

  Out in the field, the Union lines bowed and bent, sections splintered off and went rushing into the deep green woods that grew ever darker for the smoke in them. The Wilderness rang with cries and shouts and tremendous crashes of musketry. Out in the field, the yellow grass was shorn by the hot iron flung across it. Little mobs of men reached the Rebel earthworks and fought there with fists and rifle butts. A few Zouaves, all bedecked in gaudy splashes of red and blue trimmed in yellow and with mud-stained spats, veered toward them and were cut down as though by razorous wind. Their bodies bright in the grass. More came on. Someone gave the command and their section stood from the earthworks, screamed and charged out into the open field. Behind them, back in the Wilderness, smoke hung in tatters from the branches like strange moss …

  … and had you been there to see it, to hear and taste and feel it, to smell it, it would have been something. It would have been a thing indeed to have been there, that day. At that hour. It was the end of something—all felt that. And the beginning of something else. They’d not line up quite like that again. The flags and banners would not be uncased for this kind of work more than a dozen more times, and though bands would play, they’d not be heard. The cauldron of Saunders’ Field was all aboil and the dark trees that ringed it shook and clashed as though under a great wind, as though something truly monstrous prowled between the trunks as countless bullets tore branches, as cannon fire broke them apart. Their roots groaned slowly loose of the boggy soil. Smoke rose in dark, billowy columns and the sun went dark. Men fell dead in the field and they fell across the Rebel earthworks and men fell dead in the Old Stone Road where a section of Union artillery stood firing into the trees and the backs of their own men. The very air was scorched and there was a constant roaring as of a furnace stoked high, running hot. Red smears on the grass, red stains in the road.

  There: A clean-shaven Union boy with arms too short for the man-sized sleeves of his frock coat is struck on the shoulder by a spent ball, is spun around and skewered on the readied bayonet of the old veteran behind. The boy dies with blood falling from his open, shocked, and terrified mouth. For his part, the veteran shucks the body from the blade, goes on into the wall of smoke, and is gone.

  And over there: A thin and ragged Confederate, hirsute and wild-looking, falls to hands and knees behind the works as though he means to pray there, then leans with slow, calm, resigned weariness against a bullet-chewed old pine. A neat red hole decorates the center of his f
orehead and it is not long before the hat, his name stitched with great care into the band by his sister back in Galveston, is stolen from his head.

  The Union line went down into the gully, came back up out of it shouting into a long gray line of smoke stabbed bright by flame. The Rebel works were ablaze where they were loading and firing and loading again as those Union men, those Billys those bluebellies those northerners those Yankees, fell clawing at their faces and at their arms and legs and stomachs and hips and shoulders, clutching at their soft throats and at their privates and screaming all the while. Covering their eyes with sooty palms, these deadmen stumbled forward, fell, and rose no more forever.

  The sound that came up out of the field that day, rose through the swirling smoke then echoed down the shocked countryside round about. The smell that day was of heat and smoke and fear and rage and shit and blood—a red-hot stink rising salty and bitter from the shivering grass, the clashing trees, the sweating flesh.

  And then the Rebels rose from behind their works and stepped off into the grass to meet them.

  This: A man with his underjaw shot away crawls blindly through the smoke, his red, spastic tongue, suddenly unanchored, become impossibly long, improbably pointed, with bloody slobber running all down the front of him and the tongue still twisting in its socket as he tries to call for his mother.

  And this: A Union man loses both eyes to a spray of hot shrapnel and staggers forward. Rebel soldiers part before him, do not touch him or allow him to be touched, as though he has become beloved of God. He fumbles past, over the earthworks, and is gone.

  This: A lean, tall rebel in a shabby suitcoat comes staggering out of the smoke with a bowler hat held beggarwise before his belly and filled with his own entrails spilling from a long, gaping wound that cuts him near in two.

  And: Great, wide swaths of crisp yellow grass catch fire, the flames jumping and crackling, fanned by soft, spring winds. Black smoke billows from the field as things begin to burn. The sun reddens at its circumference like a bloodshot eye. Flames spread and wash over the dead where they lie, igniting ammo pouches with red, moist reports.