Wilderness (12 page)

Birdsong was everywhere that morning, and shafts of pale sunlight tilted through the branches so the light lay bright upon the leaves and the moss steamed softly from the forest floor. And the sun that morning made the dew to shine like tiny beads strung upon the precise, wiredrawn designs of spiderwebs. And the air that morning was redolent of sun and warmth and good, growing things—the thick, fecund odor of the forest where things grew, fell, rotted out, and grew again. A vegetable reek, thought David, an ancient, womanish scent, and under it, the faint acrid stink of kicked-over camp-fires and the endless clouds of kicked-up dust.

The body of the cavalryman lay just off the road. The men were filing into the deep brush, paying the deadman no mind. When Ned saw him, he whistled softly and nudged David. “Ain’t that just about the saddest thing?” he asked, his round pink face bright with sweat.

The rider lay on his back in a bright green spray of grass that should have been lovely. He’d not been dead more than a day yet the beetles had already begun their gleaning. You couldn’t tell if he’d been handsome for he was tightening with bloat. He was hatless and beardless and had been shot through the throat; darkened blood wrapped his neck and ran in a trail from him like a scarf knit by someone missing him. His left boot was tangled up in his stirrup, and his horse lay dead beside him, its long snout laying across the rider’s thigh. The ground around them was brown and the leaves crackled with life.

David squatted beside the body and rifled through the saddlebags. He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand, fighting hard against a vomitous swelling at the back of his throat. “I don’t reckon this one’ll get a proper burial,” he told Ned, who stood nearby, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. “Figure, if we can find his name somebody might get word to his people.”

But there had been little time for that. Men were filing to either side of the road and bending to digging. Ned shuffled his feet in the dust. David crouched beside the body. Officers called to them, and before standing to move away, David noticed something clutched in the dead rider’s palm. A small white cross carved of a single piece of bone or something like bone. Ned went off—a blink, and he was vanished in the dark brush. Frowning, David pried the cross from the rider’s stiff hand. He stood looking at it a long time. The cross was light and porous, still cool with the rider’s death. David looked at him. You could hardly call it a face any longer. Touching two
fingers to the brim of his hat, he slipped the cross into his pocket and moved off into the brush beside the pale road.

Now, as he lay on his back in the early afternoon sun, David examined the little cross fitted to his palm by a thong wrapped about his fingers. There was an old bloodstain on the transom, and he ran a thumb across it, feeling how smooth it was near the stain. As though some other man, farmer or soldier or miner or clerk or railroad man, some sailor or teamster or drifter or husband, brother or son, had worked his thumbpad back and forth and back again upon the cross at prayers. Or more simply hoping against death in the dark places of the world.

David sighed. He worried the cross with his thumb, and when the sky did not crack open for the good Lord’s almighty hand to reach down and lift him bodily from this place, he sniffed and closed his eyes. He rubbed his forehead against the old, green pain that flared and cavitated behind his eyes.

There was more rifle fire now—scattered popping sounds like flames working into damp wood. The noise was still individual enough to echo between the trees before diminishing slowly under the sky. David took off his hat and dragged a sleeve across his face. His heart shuddered with each percussion, but this was only the beginning of things, and he knew that after a time it would return to its normal rhythm so paid it little mind.

He ducked as a stray bullet sent a spray of dirt over him, then lowered the cross down the front of his shirt. As he grasped his hat to snug it back onto his head, Gully Coleman leaned over and tapped David’s shoulder. “Hey there,” he said, his thin lips tilting up one side of his face and his rail-thin body all angles as he hunkered behind the works. “Let me see your hat a minute, bud.”

David frowned and silently passed the hat to him. Gully took the hat in hands that seemed in all ways outsized for the rest of him. He had a small head and a large face, and men who did not know his
character remarked on his resemblance to the Union president, but this was mainly for his height and beard, for Gully lacked Lincoln’s deep, sad eyes and laughing mouth. Gully took the hat, winked at David, and hoisted it up over the earthen ramparts on the point of his bayonet. Before David could protest, Gully was waving the hat back and forth through the sunstruck air.

His challenge was quickly answered by a spattering of bullets. They came slapping hard against the piled dirt and went clipping through the branches overhead. Leaves spiraled with the sun bright on their smooth backs, and men up and down the line hooted, shouted, called, and laughed. Gully lowered his bayonet, plucked David’s shredded hat from it, and passed it back. “See, Virdge,” he said to the man crouching beside him. “I told you them boys had their eyes on our section. They all’s eager on account we’re near the road. They know it’s a good spot.” Gully winked broadly and grinned at David.

David took the hat back. The crown was blown out, and there were too many holes in it to count. He reached inside and poked one thin finger through a hole, wiggled it about, then looked at Gully.

“Why in hell would you do that?” he asked softly.

Gully nodded to Virgil, then toward the Yankee sharpshooters bobbing darkly in the yellow grass near the far tree line. “Old Virdge didn’t allow them Yanks was even in the field, let alone watchin’ us, and I said they was.” He shrugged. “I figured puttin’ up a hat would be the most … What do you say?—The most expeditious way to prove me out.” Gully hooked his thumbs into the tattered lapels of his rotting jacket and pulled in his chin. Behind him, Virgil nodded vigorously, then looked away with laughter.

David gaped. He lifted his hand, the hat still hanging from his finger, and pointed at Gully, the hat shaking like a dead bird. “God damn it,” he said. “God damn it to hell. Whyn’t you use your own goddamned hat?”

Gully opened his mouth in mock astonishment. He removed his soiled bowler and held it against his chest. “Why, on account of this is MY hat,” he said earnestly, then jammed the bowler back down onto his head and grinned. “Anyway, I reckoned seeing as how you’re already dressed for the ball in your new finery and whatnot”—he nodded to David’s new shirt—“I just figured you might appreciate your hat being as God-awful-ugly as your shirt.”

There were some thirty men crouching behind the works up and down the line from them who had been watching this exchange, and to David’s ears they all began laughing at once—except for Abel, who still dozed on his back beside him. David scowled and spat and, for spite, slapped hard at the top of Abel’s head with the wrecked hat, but Abel slept on. Disgusted, David put the hat on, then rolled onto his stomach to watch for the Yankees they all knew must come soon.

Gully pursed his lips, leaned and spat, then nodded toward David. “Kindly looks like a pope’s cap now,” he observed.

“Or some kind of piney-apple,” offered Virgil. When David turned to glare at them, Virgil shrugged and held his palms up. “I seen ’em at a stand in Charleston oncet,” he said. “It don’t look bad. On you.”

There was more laughing, and David joined them in spite of himself, but it didn’t last. From the north end of the field, blowing south, came a soft, freshening wind, and from the woods there came a rider.

An officer dressed in his blue finery came a few rods out into the grass. His carriage on horseback was erect and very proper, and neither was his horse skittish as they halted. He wore a sash of yellow and yellow gloves, and his black boots shone as though he’d prepared himself carefully for this moment. Men murmured this was Grant himself come to inspect their defenses, and though most had seen newspapers and knew better, the rumor went up and down the
line. It was not Grant, yet still no man fired. “Goddamn,” said Virgil softly. “Goddamn, but that’s a splendid man.”

For his part, the officer sat his horse and looked over their lines through his field glasses, pausing now and again to jot notes onto a pad balanced on his thigh. And still no one moved until, with a shout that sounded like pain, Gully rose to his knees and fired his piece. Others joined him, and David watched the grass breaking up all around the horse’s legs, yet the officer did not flinch and the horse did not sidestep.

Gully had reloaded his musket and was rising to fire again when Virgil grabbed the barrel and, with a snarled curse, forced it down. Across the field, the officer calmly put the pad and pencil away, set his thumb to his nose and waggled his fingers at them all, and then, without hurrying, rode back into the screening brush and was gone.

Men began to hoot softly and craned their necks about to watch as Gully and Virgil wrestled and beat upon each other in the loose soil behind the earthworks. David nudged Abel’s shoulder hard enough to wake him, and Abel snorted and opened his eyes. “You’ll want to see this,” David told him. “Old Gully’s about to get himself a beating.”

Still on his back, Abel looked over as the two men rolled around on the ground. He drug a palm down his face and shook his head as though to clear it. “Goddamn,” he said softly. “But I get so tired sometimes I dream I’m sleeping.”

David pushed his tongue into his cheek and nodded. Gully’s nose was bloodied, and blood stained the front of his suitcoat. From across the field came the sound of bugles and fifes followed by a chorus of cheers that rang and echoed and did not seem to fade. They looked up over the earthworks. Their pickets were coming in, holding their hats to their heads and running fast—they could see Ned moving through the grass, his legs a blur, a wide, excited grin splitting his face. Across the field, dark figures marched forward in
ruler-straight lines dressed for battle. They crossed from the dark of the wood to the bright of the field and the light came splashing brilliantly as it broke upon their rifle barrels and bayonets. Abel leaned and spat.

“Yonder they come,” said David softly.

Chapter Five

The Branches Above Them

1899

When the whistle blew, Silas pushed the heavy iron door closed with the blade of his shovel and stepped back from the furnace. The boiler rattled as though the heat was something wanting out, while all around the yard and at the outbuildings the machine sounds of the mill at work tapered to stillness. The gray wind was soft, punctuated by the coughs and sighs, the weary soft moans and the low, tired voices, of men coming off shift.

Skimming the sweat-damp gloves from his hands, the boy looked about for the others but did not see them amongst the multitude of flanneled backs moving slowly out into the yard and onward to the rude lane leading to town where taverns and feed stores, barber shops and land offices, rose shabby and mudspattered and sad from the jade forest beside the sea. Silas watched them walk under the trees where leaves hung brightly dying and farther on, past the town and into the forest itself, where their homes waited. Little cabins out in the
green, little shacks on little plots that produced stingy fists of cabbage and hard little potatoes that tasted all wrong. Filthy children squatted in the mud while goats held high court on ragged stumps. Tiny door-yard flower gardens withered slowly in the constant forest dark.

Silas walked alone through the bay of the mill and out onto the sagging dock that thrust into the harbor from the far side of the warehouse. The sky a metal plate whose color foretold a greater darkness yet to come. A faint yellow at the seams where they lay joined and dark over the earth. Night was already falling beyond the Olympics and the peaks were shadow-drenched, huge. Waves slapped the pilings beneath him. A magnificently mustached bolt puncher crabbed his skiff across the darkening shallows. He tied it off to an iron ring set into a log afloat near the conveyor, then stepped with rude grace from skiff to floating log to floating log to shore and was gone.

The boy walked to the end of the dock and sat with his feet dangling over the water. Fish and oil smells. Sawdust and smoke and the sweet fragrance of new-cut wood. The spoiled, acrid stink of machine oil. Ocean scents older than time. An exotic reek. Rain plunged in gray streaks. A foamy scum churned along the shore.

Silas sat with his hands open, palms up, on his thighs as though he’d catch and hold the falling rain. Scabbed-over burn marks peppered his brown forearms with intricate patterns while a dull brown fringe tatted his overalls at the bib. He rested his chin on his chest. The rain was cool, and he smelled its cleanliness and tasted in it the ocean and the sharp, pitchy, dark flavor of the forest from which it had risen cloudward days past. Silas sat watching the rain strike the salty harbor. The shadow of a big coho hovered in the water, its gills splayed and redly atremble, while it finned against the gray swells to stand in place over the sunken remains of rusted-out machinery, dropped tools, and saw-chewed stumps and board ends. And slowly the fish tilted slightly surfaceward as though to study the boy and the solid world above where the boy, in turn, sat studying it.

He had just begun to sing himself a little fishing song that Oyster Tom had taught him when he heard them on the dock behind him. He quieted, and the air he’d gathered for the song came streaming from his lips. The salmon jerked like a stabbed muscle and vanished in the dark water. Silas swallowed, stood, and turned.

There were three of them, and they came hooded, faces covered by varicolored sleeves of flannel cut with frayed triangular slits for their eyes. Two of them carried little clubs of the sort used by fishermen to brain dogfish and spiny rock cod, while the third stood unarmed but for a fat ring of turquoise upon his right fist, and Silas knew that it was Farley.