Wilderness

by Lance Weller

Abel squinted at her and raised his chin. “I reckon I’ll step outside, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Pull on my boots and take the air.”

  Ellen nodded again. “I tucked some socks down into them for you,” she told him. “You’d better go on and put those on too.”

  Abel blinked rapidly with surprise, then felt inside the boots and smiled. As he went to the door, Ellen stepped aside, and as he passed her, she caught again the faint, metallic whiff of something gone or going wrong within him and for just a moment she was unbearably sad. Taking a quick, deep breath through her mouth to master herself, she squared her shoulders, and as Abel opened the door the ferrous odor disappeared with the cool air that rushed in.

  The old man turned in the open door and looked back at the dog where it still sat in the hall with its mouth open, looking at Ellen. “What’re you grinnin’ at, dumbass?” he asked it. “This nice lady don’t want you. Now you come on here now.” Abel slapped his thigh twice and the dog stretched its front legs out, raising its hindquarters and squinting with a pleasurable stretch. “Look at you,” said Abel with mock disgust, shaking his head as the dog trotted leisurely out the door. “You are pitiful, is what you are.”

  Before following, Abel turned to Ellen and raised his hand as though to tug down on the brim of his hat, but he was bareheaded so only frowned briefly, then nodded to her and closed the door.

  Abel Truman stepped across the Makers’ porch and sat upon the top step. The day was overcast but not too cold, and Abel reckoned that on clear days the Makerses had a view that stretched over the trees and gentle foothills to the distant ocean. Trees rose through the fog like strange steeples, their trunks looming as though some great, quiet city existed there in the fog without motion or sound. Abel closed his eyes while the dog scampered off, and when he opened them again, Ellen was crouched beside him on the step with her wet hair pushed back behind her ears so it hung in dark ringlets below the sharp hinges of her jaw. She smelled of soap, and Abel blinked rapidly.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, settling a hand upon his shoulder.

  Abel cleared his throat loudly. It became a harsh, hot cough that doubled him over and chased tears into his eyes. He wheezed, though he tried hard not to, and when it was done with him he spat to the side and apologized. Ellen shook her head and handed him his old slouch hat. “You left that in … in your room,” she told him.

  “Goddamn,” murmured Abel, taking the hat from her. Grinning his pleasure, he blocked out the crown with his fist and turned it about by the brim, marveling. “Well, I just knew I’d lost it somewheres,” he said, snugging it down on his head, settling and situating it slightly front and back to account for his haircut.

  Ellen set a mug of coffee on the step beside him along with a little wooden box painted with Chinese dragons in red and gold. “I thought it might have been awhile since you had a decent cup of coffee,” she said, then nodded to the box. “Let alone tobacco.”

  Abel looked at the coffee. He smelled it on the damp air and wiped his eyes, for a fierce heat suddenly troubled them. As Ellen turned to go back inside, Abel shifted on the step and found his voice. “But I couldn’t take none of Glenn’s ’bacca, could I?”

  She paused at the door and looked back at the old man. Very small and worn he perched, half in tears over the prospect of coffee and tobacco. “Glenn doesn’t use it much,” she told him, waving her palm. “You go on, help yourself.” She nodded and winked. “Glenn’ll be down from the field in a little while and we’ll all have some breakfast then and talk things over a little. Is that all right with you?”

  Abel ducked his head and nodded. Ellen returned the nod with one of her own and went back into the cabin.

  Left alone again, Abel took a deep breath and drug his palm down his face. He scowled to remember his beard was gone, then picked up the little box of makings and stared off into the forest. Distantly, he heard the dog barking and Glenn calling to it. Abel smiled and set the box to the side. He lifted the coffee and held the mug by its base in his damaged hand, cupped it with his good one and put his face over the white china rim, closing his eyes to the rich scent and letting it conjure what memories it would. All those unbidden recollections suddenly fine and easy and bright there in the cool morning air. He sipped the coffee and, for the first time in a long while, enjoyed his thoughts. And after a while, Glenn came along the uphill trail beyond the tool shed.

  Abel watched him cross the yard and bid him good morning when he drew near. Glenn nodded in return and settled down on the step beside him, setting the veiny slabs of his forearms on the peaks of his knees and clasping his work-raw hands together in the air before him. They sat together silently and Abel sipped the coffee. In the cabin behind, they could hear Ellen moving about, and presently there came the sound and smells of breakfast cooking—the clatter of crockery upon the wooden table, a sizzling in the pan, and the soft, unbearably clean, fine scent of broken eggs. After a while longer Abel said, “She seems well.”

  Glenn nodded, pursed his lips, then nodded again. “She does,” he said.

  “They ever catch ’em?”

  Glenn filled his cheeks and blew. “No,” he said. “But I don’t figure they’re still around. If they were, even old Jensen would’ve found ’em by now.” He unlaced his fingers then laced them again, trying by small movements not to think of any of it, though, in truth, there was seldom a moment that he wasn’t turning it all over again in his mind. As though it was the punishment for his tardiness that day, it came constantly back, kinking and tangling in his mind like fencing wire that’s slipped the post.

  He recalled paying cash for the down payment on the land and how carefully he folded the paper receipt into his breast pocket. He remembered making a proud show of it in Wheelock afterward so everyone could see he’d finished a legal transaction and by God this land was his now, and he remembered felling trees for three months straight. And then came a warm spring, a hot summer. Nights spent in a mud-spattered canvas tent beside the river at the edge of town as they resupplied. They could hear at night the soft crashing of the ocean beyond the forest and knew its constant presence by the rise and fall of the river in its bank. And Glenn remembered that last week in August when he spent the night alone on the property, hurrying the cabin along, getting it ready to receive them while Ellen waited for him in the tent beside the river swollen by the tide.

  They came in the night while he was away, their boot prints crazing the mud along the riverbank and not a man in Wheelock willing to follow them the next morning save Jensen, who knew little in the way of tracking. Glenn remembered how he’d found her on the floor of the tent, her thighs smeared with blood, her eyes wide without sleep or thought. She didn’t speak for six days after, and on the seventh she wept. Some nights, Glenn’s dreaming mind still recalled the blood on the tent wall where they’d written the word “mudshark” and how he’d naively turned to Jensen, who said past his stained mustache, “What some fools call a white woman who lays with a black man.” And then the rage; the great, hot, red, dirty rage that unmanned him until they’d struck him a blow on the temple and he fell into the dark.

  On their great, grand moving-in day, Jensen was with them and stood beside the wagon, his fingers absently wrapped up in Emerson’s mane, telling them how sorry he was, how there was nothing for it but to put it behind them, that they were most likely long gone and not coming back. And finally, Glenn remembered leaning over to wrap his fist into the front of the sheriff’s coat and saying very softly, “It shouldn’t be hard. You just keep looking until you find the son of a bitch with a bloody rifle barrel and you point him out to me.” And Jensen had eyed him and stepped back as they left for their new home, on their own land, mud from the churning wagon wheels flying through the air like dark, cast-off chains.

  Glenn stood. He stretched and squeezed shut his eyes. Opened them again. He felt the blood, fast and hot, in his arms, and his face was warm with the old anger he’d grown to know so well. Takin
g a deep breath, he looked down at Abel. “You not smoking?” he asked the old man.

  Abel shrugged and grinned in a small way. “Not that I wouldn’t like to,” he said. “But I ain’t even used to this coffee yet. I want to be careful of all this rich living.” He grinned until Glenn gave back a small smile in return, then stood from the step.

  Stretching his arms over his head, Glenn groaned softly and said, “Well, I’m going to see a man about a horse,” and walked toward the outhouse where it stood screened by filmy curtains of hanging moss at the base of a giant fir.

  Abel stood and said his name and Glenn turned. The old man set his lips together and nodded solemnly. “I am obliged, Glenn,” he said quietly. He ran his palm over his close-shorn scalp and smirked. “To both of you.”

  Glenn looked at the old man standing on the step so small and feeble, nodded, said nothing, and turned away.

  The breakfast was eggs and potatoes flavored with shavings of wild onion and flecks of pepper, served simply and hot on thick slabs of crockery etched with blue floral designs. The three of them ate in silence until Glenn slapped the table suddenly and touched his forehead. “Lord God,” he said with quiet urgency. “I almost forgot.”

  Ellen’s eyes went round with sudden fear, and she looked to the window and the gun cabinet, then back again to Glenn’s face. For his part, Abel patted his lips with his napkin, then fisted it in his good hand and waited.

  Looking up at his wife, Glenn saw her face and held up a palm. “No,” he said quickly. “No. It’s nothing really.”

  “Then what?” asked Ellen.

  “Before I left town,” he said, chasing bits of food from about his gums with the point of his tongue. “I met up with a family of Chinese that were going to try and make it over the pass before the snows.”

  Ellen frowned and Abel opened his mouth to comment on the danger of such a course at this time of year, and Glenn raised his palm again. “I tried to talk them out of it,” he said. “I did. But I think Farley put some kind of scare into them. At any rate, I thought I’d gotten their promise to stop here before they tried it.” He looked at Ellen and raised his eyebrows.

  Ellen shook her head and glanced through the little kitchen window toward the Olympics, where they slumped hugely northward in shades of pale blue and white. “I heard a wolf howl the other night, but nobody’s passed by that I saw,” she said.

  “Damn it,” sighed Glenn, resting his chin on the dark bridge of his two linked hands. “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t go looking for them.” Pursing his lips, he stabbed a bit of egg with his fork and looked thoughtfully at it where it quivered on the tines. After a moment, he looked up at her again. “Wolf?” he asked.

  Ellen nodded. “The night you got back.”

  Glenn frowned deeply. “Are you sure it wasn’t Abel’s dog carrying on?” he asked, lifting his chin in the old man’s direction.

  She shook her head. And Abel set his napkin down and cleared his throat, then picked it back up and held it before his lips as he coughed. They watched his face go red, but when Glenn made to rise and help, Abel shook his head and set his upper arm over his mouth. Clearing his throat again, he apologized and said, “Them fellers that took Buster was hunting a dog they thought was half wolf that got away from them, they said.” He looked at Ellen and grinned weakly. “Them brigands,” he said.

  Glenn looked at him. “They lost a wolf?”

  Abel nodded. “Crossbred, they said. Dog fighters. It tore one of them up pretty good.”

  Ellen looked to her husband as he set down his napkin and stood from the table. “Glenn,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  He wiped his mouth and leaned over her to kiss her forehead. “There’s a blowdown across the crick down by the road I need to clear,” he said, squinting to the toolshed. “I reckon I’ll go work on that.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know it.” He went to the door. When Abel stood to accompany him, Glenn motioned him down again, saying, “This’ll be just a one-man job, I think. Two’d just get in the way of each other. Besides, I need to think on things.” He looked at Ellen a long moment and she returned the look and then he was outside, where presently they heard him loading tools into the wagon and harnessing Emerson.

  Abel ate slowly. He held his fork as though made uncomfortable by it, and when Ellen questioned his appetite the old man quickly said, “Oh no, it ain’t that, ma’am.” He sniffed and blinked wearily and smiled. “I’m just still a mite bit tired and I’d forgotten that people do this. Eat this way. Meals and such where they set down together whatnot.”

  “Well,” said Ellen, smiling at him. “It’s what we like to do.”

  Abel’s head bobbed as he swallowed. “I like it,” he said. “I think it’s good. I did notice you-all didn’t say no Grace, though.”

  Ellen pursed her lips and nodded. “You’re right. I suppose that’s a custom we’ve more or less let fall by the wayside here on Hardscrabble Mountain.”

  Abel looked out the window with his brow furrowed then squinted over at her. “That ain’t the name of this hill,” he said.

  She smiled. “No,” she admitted, shaking her head. “But that’s what Glenn started calling it right after we moved in. He said now he knew how President Grant must have felt, only more so.” She grinned wide with that one delicious memory amidst all the other badness of that time but did not share or linger over it and after a few moments asked, “Are you a religious man, Mr. Truman?”

  Abel pushed back his plate with his thumb and rested his elbow on the table. Moving his shoulders about, he winced a little as though the frayed and atrophied places within his arm were troubling him, and seemed to think the question over a long moment before answering. “I have been once, I suppose,” he said. “I don’t reckon there’s a man born who can claim he’s never prayed for one thing or another.” Abel smiled and shook his head. “’Specially when he’s got some other man shooting a gun at him.” Sitting back, he cocked his head and stared off into the middle distance. “In the war … ,” he went on slowly, “it seemed like every other son of a bitch … pardon me, ma’am. But it seemed like every other fella you run into could quote you Scripture up, down, and crossways—we even had us a fella was named Scripture—but I never could. It just never did stick with me.”

  Ellen nodded. “It must have been quite a thing.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Ellen looked at the old man. “The war, I mean. It’s all very sad, isn’t it? Sad and useless, it seems to me.”

  An expression inscrutable passed across the old soldier’s face and he shook his head and rubbed at his hairless chin. “Oh no, ma’am. If you’d pardon me, but you’ve only got it about half right.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Abel pushed his tongue into his cheek, looked at her briefly, a little judgmentally, then looked down at the table. As he spoke, he pressed the pad of his finger down on little grains of salt where they’d been spilt and rubbed them a few times with his thumb before tossing them over his shoulder. “Way I figure it,” he said. “All that, all that back then, it decided some things about how things was going to be that couldn’t be decided no other way. Not the way people are, anyways.” Outside they could hear Glenn loading tools—saw and crowbar, rope and pulley—into the back of the wagon. They heard the wagon creak and groan as his weight settled onto the jockeybox, and presently came the soft clopping of Emerson’s hooves. Abel pursed his lips, flicked salt over his shoulder. “I suppose things turned out the way they should ought to have,” he said.

  Ellen looked at him a long, hard moment. “I’m surprised to hear you say that,” she finally said. “Considering what it was your side was fighting for.”

  He raised his eyebrows to meet her stare for a moment, then shrugged and continued with the salt even though there was none to be seen. “I suppose I could say I wasn’t fighting for no niggers,” he said very softly. “I heard men say that very thing all along, b
ut didn’t nobody ever believe it.” He finally left off the salt and reached, instead, to absently turn the plate around and around in its place before him. “Truth is,” he went on. “Truth is, every one of us on both sides was fighting for the nigs and every one of us on both sides hated that fact. That’s why it was so bad. Why it went on so long.” Abel sighed, and across the table, Ellen turned her head to the side to escape the faint, foul stink of the old man’s breath.

  “Shit,” muttered Abel, unmindful now of her presence. “Even if I didn’t join up for that reason, and I didn’t, my reasons was all my own … But even if I didn’t join up to fight it out over the nigger question, I did come to be convinced that freeing ’em was wrong. For a while there I was a true believer.” He fell silent for a long time, and Ellen stayed still, her face as much a puzzle as the clouds.

  Abel took a great, deep breath, stared hard at the plate, and did not look up. “Somewhere along the line, though,” he said, “and I will admit it was well along toward the end of the things, my mind was changed. I don’t want to talk about much of it ’ceptin’ to say I was in a bad way, a real bad way, in the Wilderness, and two folks helped me when they had good reason to do the opposite. And they was just folks. Folks trying to get by in a bad place.” He nodded, pursed his lips, and shook his head. “So, like I say, things ended up pretty much the way they should have, but it ain’t over yet. I figure there’s still a long ways to go ’fore the issue’s decided well and truly.” He looked at Ellen and made a face. “Otherwise, would you and old Glenn really be all the way up here on Hardscrabble Mountain?” he asked her. “Otherwise,” said Abel, shrugging. “You hit the nail right on the head. Like you said, it was a sad, sad thing.”

  Ellen sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, looking at the old man where he sat small and sick and hurt and sad. “Did you ever run?” she asked him. “You must have wanted to.”

  Abel shook his head and grinned. “I ain’t talked about any of this for twenty years, and here in the last few days I’ve been answering questions about that damn war till I thought I’d lose my voice.”