Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  And then he stood as quickly as he was able and crossed to her. Pressing the palm of his good hand against her forehead, he drew it back quickly. Hypatia watched him as he swore and fussed about her, and when he took up her hand she cried out.

  Abel carefully examined the wound and her hand was like a gob of sour dough; the lines, creases, and wrinkles smoothed out to become giving and moist and without character.

  Abel wet his lips and swore, then swore again. He touched her shoulder and ducked his head to meet her weary eyes. “Tell me what you need,” he said. “You tell me what to do.”

  Hypatia smacked her lips and smiled a small smile. She shook her head. “Answer my question,” she said.

  “What?” Abel asked. “What question?”

  Hypatia swallowed and panted. She closed her eyes and opened them again. “If you could, would you take me?”

  “Sure,” he said quickly. “Sure I would.”

  Hypatia smiled and closed her eyes again. “Liar,” she said so softly that Abel had to lean near her mouth to hear.

  She was quiet for a long time, and after a while, Abel half carried, half dragged her into the shack. Night drew down around them, and it became dark. The firing to the south had not diminished. He stood for a time regarding the hearth where the fire she’d kindled had burnt down to one or two live coals. Outside it began to rain and the wind came up to set the door rattling in its frame while the remains of the rosebush in the dooryard scratched along the wall and all the trees in the Wilderness round about swayed and clashed.

  Hypatia’s eyes came open, and she looked at him. “I never knew what to name him,” she said softly. “I just never did know.”

  Abel made soft shushing sounds. He told her he understood and she said it would have been a fine thing to call him home to supper of a fall evening with the sun going down behind the trees and the wind coming in off the blue Pacific. And Abel told her it would have been a fine thing, indeed, and she opened her mouth to say more but did not. Abel knelt beside her, wonderingly. His hand just so upon her shoulder as though he were a clumsy usher.

  After a while he reached and carefully closed her eyes, then knelt for a time with his palm upon her cheek like a blind man graving a face to memory before a parting.

  In the end, he built the fire up in the hearth and surrounded the place where she lay with brush and what dry timber he could find. He said no words aloud, merely nodded after a few moments’ silence, then went about the shack one last time with a burning stick, touching flames here and there before leaving.

  Abel stood outside the shack and watched it burn. By the time the roof fell in, he realized that the firing to the south had finally stopped and that, but for the rattling of the fire, the night was quiet. The rain had stopped and the air was fresh. And when he heard the sound of cavalry coming fast up the road, Abel turned and walked down the lane to meet them.

  In April, the dead-house wagon came at night and it came every morning. After breakfast yet before the day could turn fine enough to start the corpses stinking, Abel heard it coming up the sandy road from his reeking cot in the long hospital tent. A two-horse wagon driven by a pair of teamsters with faces scarved nose-to-neck like villains. After a bad night in the tents it would take them an hour to load, stacking the bodies up like cut wood, less from respect as for the way neatness would maximize their load, for the way Abel figured it, they surely would not want to make another trip in the afternoon. The drivers worked with flat, repetitious efficiency all out of proportion to their gruesome task, and if Abel propped himself up on his good elbow, he could watch them at their labor. He looked for friends amidst the stiffening limbs and thrown-back chins or salt-stiffened shocks of hair that, perhaps, he’d once helped to wash in the cold Potomac off Lookout Point where the prison camp was. If it was a hard day and he was awash in slow tides of nausea, his shattered left elbow hotly throbbing in time with his weary heart, Abel could still see the teamsters’ long shadows, made indistinct and monstrous with distance and slanting sunlight, as they flickered and moved across the stained canvas tenting with metronomic steadiness. Regardless of his angle, there was always the sound of the patient horses nickering and softly stamping in their traces and, softer still, the low grunting of the men at their work, and punctuating all this, the horrid, dry, heavy, solid smacking of falling bodies settling against each other.

  This was April then, as it had been March before it, and Abel did not know what to expect of the month save more of the same. His coughs joined a throaty chorus of moist and dry lungsounds rattling his tent, one of thirty arranged like the spokes of a wheel outside the stockade and hard by the lighthouse. The moment one of their number was carried to the dead-house to lie uncasketed upon its earthen floor, another would be laid in his place, the ticking still warm. The nurses, other prisoners furloughed from the stockade, carried the dead to their house with the same tired steadiness as the teamsters, and under the guard of Negro soldiers charged to keep them from escaping. This was April, then, with the wind brisk and freshening the air with the smell of the bay, the faint taste of brine, and that oceanic odor of iodine and decomposition that was so much better than the yellow stink of the tents. As he had been since entering the hospital, Abel was thankful that his cot was at the end of the line near the open flaps.

  At April’s opening, his fever broke and his breathing eased, though his bowels still pursued some strange, twisting campaign within him that forced his knees chestward and set his teeth to chattering. A week more went by with things expelled from him that he did not recognize, for which he had no definitions or referents, and his sweats were God-awful. But one morning, with the sun slowly rising to turn the tent’s crosspieces to black lines drawn upon a surging white canvas, Abel found himself feeling tolerable. He lay back, eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the wagon recede as it went trundling back up the road with its sad cargo. Presently, the space left behind was filled with wind clashing in beach grass and the seething of sand. He could hear the calls of sailors on barges in the bay, the slap of waves against hulls, and soldiers drilling in the field out past the stables. But then the confused, staccato racket of coughing and suffering rose to sweep over all the other sounds of the world outside the camp.

  “How you feeling today, Johnny Reb?”

  Abel snorted awake. “Just about ready to take me a French leave,” he muttered, opening one eye to squint up at the Negro soldier standing over him. “Mornin’, Noé,” he said.

  “Afternoon, Abel,” said Noé, his stern, dark face warming with a grin. “Let’s hear it,” he said, grinning wider.

  Abel blinked, rolled his eyes theatrically. “What? Again?” he asked. “Fine, fine: How’s things today, soldier?”

  Noé’s head bobbed with delight and he shifted his rifle so his right hand could describe a rising arc through the air as he said, “Bottom rail? Still up top. And listen here: Old Uncle Abe went on down to Richmond. Sat right down at Jeff Davis’s desk. This war’s about done.”

  Abel blinked and looked at him, then blinked again. “You’re just tellin’ tales,” he finally said.

  Noé shook his head. “They done told us ’bout it this morning.’”

  Abel shrugged. “It don’t mean nothing. Not a thing. This war? It ain’t never goin’ to stop. That’s what I say. That’s what I’ve always said.” Abel shook his head and waved dismissively, wincing with pain as the shift in weight sent a spasm of pain through his wounded arm.

  Noé pursed his lips and set his forage cap back on his head. “You know, that arm ain’t never goin’ to be no use to you no more,” he said.

  Nodding, Abel shifted about for the comfort of it and looked down at the claw his left hand had become. “I know it,” he said. “But I’m still glad some sawbones son of a bitch didn’t lop it off. Rather have it useless than not at all.”

  Noé shrugged and cocked his head. “And the flux?” he asked.

  Abel sniffed. “Well, I ain’t quick-steppin’ like
I was, thank the Lord.”

  Noé reached out, paused for the space of half a heartbeat, then settled a brotherly palm on Abel’s shoulder. It took a conscious effort for Abel not to stiffen, wince, or draw back. And though he did none of these things, the truth of that effort reddened him with a alien shame that he was not sure he understood while the dying johnny in the cot across the aisle snarled and spat and called him a mudsill.

  Abel and Noé looked over at the soldier, who grimaced at them, showing a mouthful of gray teeth and bleeding gums.

  “Old Abe’s notions ’bout charity and malice toward nobody is a hard row,” sighed Noé, shaking his head and shouldering his rifle. “I’m off,” he said. “You need for anything?”

  “You want to look away for the space of time it takes me to get on down the road, I’d be obliged.”

  Noé grinned again, as sudden and startling and fine as the first time Abel had ever seen a Negro smile. “Nope,” he said, and walked out of the tent.

  In March, he’d spent nights wracked with cramps, watching lamp-flames waver in sooty vases of glass curved like the hips of women. Those nights were long and dark and tiresome as nights spent in sickness always are. He’d hear the Negro soldiers gathered round their campfires, speaking softly, softly singing, softly laughing beneath the star-struck dome of night like real soldiers. Like real men. And it was in March that Noé began his nightly visits to Abel’s bedside.

  With a soft whisper to draw him from his inner landscape of quivering bowels and bubbling nausea, Noé would set a cool rag across Abel’s forehead, and Abel would open his mouth to let him press mashed blackberry root against his tongue. The taste of the river water Noé had used to wash it followed by the tuber’s bitter styptic.

  “Why?” Abel had croaked that first time.

  Crouched beside his cot, Noé had stared at him in his misery, his eyes pale in the lamplit dark, his face a shadowy cypher. The soft rustle of his shrug. “I hate you,” said Noé finally. “Ever’ goddamned one of you.”

  “All right.”

  “My hate’s so deep it might well could be bottomless. Leastways … leastways, I ain’t never found no end to it.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “No, it ain’t. It ain’t no way to be. Old Abe, he said we mustn’t be enemies. He says now we got to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Again that soft rustle. “I choose you. And that’s the best I reckon I can do.”

  In April, Noé’s voice drew him from dreams of rills of black water fanning over stone and a moon cut by clouds that rippled like black crepe.

  “Abel. Grant, he gone done it.”

  “What?”

  “Found him the end. You rebs done give it up today.”

  And before Abel could frame a question there came the sudden firing of muskets all in disagreement; there gathered beyond the woodsheds near the kitchen an unharmonious and impromptu philharmonic instrumented with pots and pans and wooden spoons for clappers; there rose great whooping shouts of joy from all about the stockade as soldiering men tumbled from their hammocks, pushed back their tent flaps, and capered gleefully in the sweetened dark; and there also came shouts of outrage and misery, despair and heartbreak, from within the dead-line where the prisoners’ fondest dreams met their ends. Eventually, someone would organize fireworks to give shape to his explosive delight, but at that moment, in the smoky lamplit April dark of the hospital tent, Abel put up his good right hand and Noé took it while across the aisle the johnny gnashed his rotting teeth and muttered darkly.

  Noé came to his cotside one last time. Deep in the lonely watches of the night he softly called to Abel, and Abel grunted, for he was well awake and had been for some time.

  “You fit, reb?”

  “As a fiddle. And from what I’m told? Ain’t no rebs no more. Just folk.”

  Noé grunted. “Get on up,” he whispered. “Get these on and come outside.”

  Noé handed over clothing: a pair of frayed blue sergeant’s trousers with the piping stripped off, leaving behind a paler stripe of frazzled cloth, a thin and well-worn flannel shirt in red and black, a set of black suspenders and an old pair of Federal-issue mudscows with no laces and a hole in the right sole the size of a half-dollar. The clothes had not been laundered and smelled of sweat, soil, sun, and saltwater.

  Abel set his feet on the ground. Noé stood at the entrance to the tent, watching the space between the hospital grounds and the barracks beyond the woodlot. “What’s this all about?” asked Abel.

  Noé glanced over. “Just put on that shoddy.”

  Abel shrugged. “What?” he asked. “No socks?”

  Noé shook his head.

  Abel dressed and went outside where the night air was crisp and cool, smelling of woodsmoke and horses. He heard the sound of the Potomac rushing into the Chesapeake as constant as the blood rushing within him. Noé looked him up and down and grinned in the dark. “Well, look at you. How do you feel?”

  “I’m standing.” Abel shuffled his feet in the dirt and cupped his ruined elbow with his palm. Though the clothes were poor, they were finery compared with the rags he’d been wearing since his capture. He had been on the tip of the peninsula where the stockade was for three seasons before falling ill, and it had taken a toll on his clothing. No trees or brush kept the elements from any of the thousands packed into the forty acres of fenced-in sand, just narrow alleys between miserable little shebangs and one street to speak of. This street, Pennsylvania Avenue as it came to be called, was always clogged with men hoping for a fresh breeze to lift the stink from their faces for a moment. Shamelessly desperate men turned out the pockets of those too weak to stop them and men carved charms and bracelets and rude, mean-faced chessmen from beef bones and still others offered service cobbling or barbering or tailoring for a quarter-ration of muley meat, a twist of firewood, a rare knuckle of soft bread. Abel had seen processions of men blinded by the unceasing glare of sun on sand and water, stumbling about hand-to-shoulder like wretched peasants from some medieval painting.

  And now he stood in the dark outside the stinking hospital tent. He released his elbow and pressed his fingertips to his sternum, moving them about slightly to feel the luxury of napless cloth against his skin. Rolling about his right shoulder, he licked his lips and looked at Noé. “Well?”

  Noé handed him a black slouch hat and bid him follow. Abel snugged the hat down tight, adjusted it front to back, and followed him.

  They crossed to the dead-house and went inside. An old cow barn that had long since lost whatever paint it had had, it stood doorless and quiet and the light did not penetrate far within. The silver wood was paler yet by moonlight, crosshatched by the shadows of trees, and the sound of busy insects trickled out with a ticking buzz that spoke of time passing and of slow decay. Through some miracle of chemistry or climate, or perhaps owing to the gentle reek of his new clothes, Abel could not smell the corpses laid out in lines but could see them in their pathetic exposure, a pale string of bare feet that stretched back into the dark.

  “What is it we’re doin’ here, Noé?”

  “You reckon you’d take the oath?”

  “What?”

  “With me here. Right now. You reckon you can give your word not to take up arms against the Union no more?”

  Abel shrugged and looked at him. “Well, hell, I don’t see why not,” he answered. “Your man Grant finished it up, so there ain’t much point holding out.”

  “Just like that? You ain’t much of a rebel, as I understand them.”

  “My parents are buried in New York,” said Abel. “North Carolina is just a place I happened to be when all this mess got started.”

  Noé stared at him for a long moment, his dark face inscrutable in the tangle of shadows. Then he snorted, grinned, and said: “I wondered. You don’t sound like a proper cracker.”

  “That don’t mean I don’t agree with the Cause.”

  “Do you?”

  Abel shrugged again. He could feel th
e black soldier’s eyes on him, could sense the set of his face sharpened with studied judgment. “Lincoln, he says we won’t never be shut of each other,” Noé finally said. “That we can’t never be, so we mustn’t be enemies. That’s what he said: we mustn’t be enemies. But you ain’t no friend of mine, and I can’t not hate you.”

  “All right.”

  Noé took a great, deep breath and exhaled with a long sigh. “If I was an officer, if I had me rank and a Bible, would you take the oath from me, Abel?”

  “I would.”

  “All right, then,” said Noé. “That’s good enough.”

  A warm, salt-laden wind set the poplars to creaking. Catkins fell all around with soft little thuds, and Abel brushed several from the crown of his hat, smelling their gentle, sticky perfume on his fingertips. He rubbed his elbow and dug little troughs in the dust with his new brogans. Presently the wind fell away, and sound manifested from the sandy road that ran flat and white under the moon to the edge of the trees. And out of the trees the wagon resolved from the dark, aggregating from the shadows board by pale board with that ancient, repetitious stamp-creak-and-jangle common to all such equipage.

  “We’ll part company now,” said Noé as the wagon swung around. “These men will take you with them after they’re loaded up.” Abel did not recognize either teamster. The driver, a spectacularly bearded man whose sad eyes Abel could pick out even in that starry dark, nodded while his companion, younger, also bearded, also melancholic, simply swung down from the jockeybox and unlatched the bedgate without comment.

  “Noé,” said Abel, nodding and touching the brim of his hat as the soldier strode off into the darkness.

  After a moment, he returned to stand looking at Abel from a little patch of moonlight that lit his face with a soft, silvery light. He took a deep breath, released it, then reached down deep into a trouser pocket, removed a few pieces of paper money, and gave them to Abel.

  “You might could use that in the days to come,” said Noé.

  Abel opened his mouth to thank him, then closed it, swallowed, and said, “Hey Noé?”