Wilderness (18 page)

A man came toward him through the smoke, running with his rifle raised like a club and a desperate, terrified expression twisting his features monstrously. Gilded eagle buttons twinkled redly on his coat. With nothing like thought, David squeezed his fist around the trigger. He felt the stock kick against his shoulder; a deep bruise there tomorrow like a blue half-moon etched into his shoulder. He did not even hear the sound it made for the sound of musketry was general and unceasing as rain nor did he need to hear it. The man fell, the gilded eagles winked out, and David ducked back down.

As he settled the charge home for the thirty-eighth time that day, the man he’d shot began to scream. He pleaded and sobbed and called for his mother, his father, and his brother and wondered, groaning, why they had forsaken him.

David closed his eyes and counted slowly, and when he opened them again his hands had calmed and he could breathe once more. Lifting the cavalryman’s cross from around his neck, he wrapped the cord around his fingers so the cross itself fit neatly into the hollow of his cramped palm. He fit a firing pin onto the cone and rose up on his knees.

It was not a man at all lying there gutshot and dying in the dirt before the works but a boy of fourteen years or so. He wore a Yankee coat and lay with his legs kicking feebly in his urine-soaked trousers. The ground beneath him was red, and the hands he held over the wound in his stomach were the hands of a child.

David’s breath left him. He doubled over behind the works with his thumb and forefinger pressed hard to his temples, as though to constrict the veins jangling fresh green pain through his skull. Beyond the works, the boy called again for his father, his brother. He called for his dog and he called for his mother. David pursed his lips and spat. With shaking hands he lay down his musket. He stood. The boy saw him, stared at him through the smoke. His lips moved and he lifted up his gorestained little-boy hands.

David Abernathy was aware of his legs and of his lungs. He was aware of a dull, numb tingling in his hands and he was aware of the bloodred slantings of the late-afternoon sun come cutting through the smoke to stand in strange, ruby-colored columns tilted on the trembling earth. He heard flames crackling orange and red in the dry yellow grass, and he even heard the sound that smoke makes upon the air as it travels—like a soft whisper of lace drug through still, cool water by the hand of a mother who loves her boy.

The boy’s mouth moved without sound, and he vomited bloody sputum down the front of his overlarge uniform.

David churned with a thick, weary nausea, and he wondered if his eyes leaked blood or tears from the pain in his head. Smoke fouled his lungs and dried his mouth and he could feel the fast pulse of blood all through him—temples and arms and legs and the small veins behind his eyes and he could feel blood pulsing in the lobes of his ears.

He took a breath.

The cool, stinging wind of a single bullet passed close to his cheek like the first quick kiss of a shy girl.

David took a breath.

Clambering over the shot-torn works, he ran into the field and down the road toward the boy. He ran with the little cross pressed to his palm, pinching his flesh with a peculiar, satisfying pain. From somewhere came the sound of Abel’s voice, shouting to him, but David paid it no mind. He ran on, suddenly aware of the good, clean feel of his new shirt upon his hot skin—his chest and arms and back where it had soaked up his sweat and now lay cool on him like the damp towels his mother would press upon his forehead in the beforetimes when he lay abed with headaches—and David suddenly knew beyond knowing, beyond memory, how it had been to be a child with a mother who loved him and how it had felt to run through the tall grass, no trace of pain now, toward her where she
stood smiling with her arms open. A dark, welcoming shape against the sun. David was filled with a joy that burned the jolting green pain away. He ran joyously forward, legs fast and blurstruck through the charry smoke.

And, finally, these things: A man runs forward through the smoke, into the field and down the road, to the side of a young boy grievously wounded beside a high wall of flame. This man throws his own tattered coat around the boy and lifts him, mindful not to spill the insides out through the hole in the boy’s stomach. Another man shouts to him, and he turns, still holding the boy as protectively as if he were the man’s own child or the phantom-boy of himself, come to remind him of something he’d forgotten. He turns to face the cannon, to see them jerk the lanyard, and he has only time to raise one hand before he and boy all but disappear in a gust of hot metal. On the smoldering grass where they’d stood is little but a wet smear.

And this: A lean rebel with a tired face and a seeping wound upon his neck stumbles forward. He finds the place where his friend had stood and falls to his knees, searches about in the grass a moment, then lifts up a little carved cross as though it were a rare flower. He puts it in his pocket, then covers his face with his hands and weeps as the balls go whizzing past, leaving thin, diaphanous trails, like strange webbing, hanging in the smoke.

And look—you cannot help yourself. Look to see dead men and wounded, shattered men and burnt. Men standing to battle with fixed expressions of grim resolve, as though they’d discovered things within themselves that will be hard to live with later, and men frightened beyond all sense, lying facedown and weeping in the grass. Union soldiers in retreat across the howling field and masses of men from both sides lying huddled in the damp of the gully between the lines, passing bottles back and forth. Pennants and standards and flags all brightly waving and shot-torn, proud amidst the
smoke and flames. In the woods beyond the field either side, wind-rippled green and yellow hospital flags sprout, drawing the wounded to them like awful heliotropic blossoms. Surgeons stand to their work with bare forearms, fists white upon the handles of their bone saws.

Smoke billowed up in great black sheets that could be seen for miles about. A horse, cut loose from the artillery limber, came screaming down the road past Abel with its mane all afire and its nostrils huge. As he stood to watch it pass, Abel fell again. The sun darkened as though night had come upon Saunders’ Field, and when it did come, hours later, it came slowly but with infinite mercy.

He woke well after dark. His eyes slowly opened, and he lay a long time staring into the branch-crossed dark, wondering if he had died. Abel breathed and he blinked and pondered the nature of light and dark, and after a time of this he sat up. Setting his back against a flowering dogwood, he placed his sticky hands in his lap and let his head fall back against the trunk. Tree branch, shrub, and vine traced ink-black lines across the surface of the night, and Abel’s chest and legs were sprinkled with pale fallen blossoms.

He was far behind his own army’s lines, and how he got there he did not know. Wan circles of sad yellow light cast from cloth-covered lanterns shone here and there through the shadows. Occasionally rifle fire erupted with loud clatterings like someone off-loading planks somewhere, and faintly came the moist grindings of working bone saws. High, falsetto screams of those beneath the blades. The constant tramping through the darkened Wilderness as lost men stumbled about.

Abel pulled himself unsteadily to his feet and leaned against the dogwood. Pain flared blue as ice through his chest. Setting palms to knees to better get his breath, Abel worked his shirt open and sent
his fingers exploring his midsection to see if he’d been killed. When he found the wound, he gathered his lips between his teeth and pushed the tip of his little finger into the wet declivity beside his heart. His nail scraped against his fourth rib before he finally drew his finger out and went carefully feeling along the wound’s length. The ball had gone through his jacket and his shirt and licked along the side of his chest, laying him open without piercing him. His shirt, along with mud and yellow grass from Saunders’ Field, had dried over the wound, making a fist-sized poultice that had stopped the bleeding.

Abel panted, leaning against the tree. He’d begun to sweat, and bile had risen up his throat before subsiding again. His smoke-scorched eyes went grinding dryly in their sockets as he knuckled them with curled forefingers gullied with cuts. He lacked two nails on his left hand and wondered if the thumb on that hand was broken. It surely felt it. When he tried to remember the face of the man he’d clubbed, it would not come to him, though he could still see the look in the man’s eyes as he died.

When Abel finally took a step away from the tree, he fell for the pain of it. Sitting up again, he felt along his right leg and found two bullet holes, hip and thigh, and marveled that neither had struck bone. The hip was another grazing wound, but when he pressed against the back of his thigh just above the knee, Abel could feel the hard alien shape of the ball itself embedded deep in the meat of his leg.

Where he sat, back from the lines, the air was somewhat cool and fresh. Abel gulped at it, then hissed and fought hard to keep from vomiting. When the spell had passed, he opened his eyes and slowly began to grope about the dark for his rifle.

His left hand touched a pants leg, his right settled upon a man’s chest—cold, sticky, and unmoving. Abel sat very still, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. As shapes faded in from the shadows, he realized
he’d risen from a row of deadmen laid out like railroad ties along the road. As he sat there, a wagon slowly congealed from the darkness, its sound describing its shape before he saw the dark silhouette or smelled the horses. The wagon came to a stop down the line from Abel, and he watched two Negroes climb slowly from the bed. A white teamster tied the reins off on the brake, looked about, then pulled his hat brim over his eyes, crossed his arms over his belly, and began a fitful dozing on the jockeybox. One of the blacks lit a tiny lantern and hung it from a nail on the side of the wagon before the two of them walked to the first corpse in line and lifted it between them by the knees and arms. As they rolled the first of their stock into the wagon, a whippoorwill called from the dark, and both blacks paused to look fearfully about. As though the bird call heralded the stirring of the dead; their bright ascension or their long, dark fall. The Negroes watched along the line a moment, and if they saw Abel sitting up amidst the corpses they did not show it; they’d seen deadmen by the score twisted by their endings into every conceivable position of pain and outrage and fear, and so continued with their work.

Abel slowly stood and waited for them. He watched them at their work and reckoned them field slaves long used to heavy loads and wearying labor. Neither spoke as they lifted their charges and carried them to the waiting cart, but neither was there reverence in their actions. They simply worked. The whippoorwill called again, and from somewhere a man cried out once, then fell silent again. The blacks came down the line steadily—lifting, carrying, rolling. Neither looked the other in the eye. Abel could smell them now—the sweat that gilded their foreheads and arms, their rank fear and quiet revulsion, and another, softer scent that Abel had always associated with the race and which seemed to him to have the essence of wet leaves in October.

In that strange, mad dark there were too many dead to count, and as Abel stood waiting in their midst, he wondered if he was, himself, dead or living. He was afraid to look down for fear he’d see his own bullet-gnawed corpse lying at his feet. Abel sniffed deeply, feeling his sinuses rattle soft and wet, and tasted the bitter creosote residue of powder and smoke on his teeth and tongue. His tongue felt dry and huge. He spat into his palm and touched the spittle with two fingers, realized the breath in his lungs, and pressed a palm against his chest to feel the quick, strong beating of his own heart.

The whippoorwill called again. Abel licked his lips and tried a whistle. A soft, mournful note escaped his lips and hung in the darkness, static and sad before fading. The blacks, wrestling a half-headless body that had shat itself, paused in their work to look fearfully down the line. Abel licked his lips again and stepped back from the dead, back into the shadows of the Wilderness. He looked down at the place where he’d been. His body was not there. And he was in pain and discomfort, so knew himself alive. Releasing his held breath, Abel turned and went off slowly through the trees.

He walked a long time. He passed other men, dazed and lost and, like him, out a-wandering. Abel watched them as they stumbled past—dull eyes and slack faces, the shells of their ears crusted with blood. They seemed to vibrate palely in the dark, some of them, as though they’d been afflicted with a palsy that would never quit them. Others merely lurched along or lay curled in tight fetal balls amidst singed leaves and charred undergrowth.

Deadmen from both armies lay scattered about that night. Walking, his way lit by smoldering little fires and distant pale lanterns, Abel passed men fallen with their arms frozen in the rigid postures of rifle-carrying, men whose pockets had already been turned out by thieves that slipped unseen from shadow to body to shadow again. Men whose powder-blacked flesh swelled monstrously in the heat.

There were many fires burning in the Wilderness that night, and as Abel stumbled along he began to see what shapes their light revealed. Dead horses and chunks of dead horses and now a thicker waste of deadmen lying in heaps and rows throughout the thickets. There were fires that flared in the canopy overhead, lighting yellow the dark, moonless welkin where tree branches laced black as snakes. Little weaverbirds, their nests destroyed by fire, flitted worriedly and quiet through the dark and gone again. And here and there, like signal beacons, whole trees stood blazing, pulsing smoke down the floor of the night. Sound bled slowly back into the world, and Abel could now hear the wounded groaning and the soft rumbling of distant wagons and of marching men and the cries of the lost and hurt and the calls of those that sought them. He heard men praying Jesus, and somewhere someone sang a snippet of song Abel did not recognize but that was furious and sad and that he would remember ever after. And beneath all this other sound, staccato and enthusiastic bursts of rifle fire from jumpy men out on picket kept the night lively.