Wilderness (23 page)

Out in the center of the field, through the smoking grass, other Negroes moved amidst the dead. They walked slowly, stooped and bent-backed, their hard, worksore hands dipping now and again past the shivery grass tops to touch a body where it lay. Or, if not bending to feel for pulse or breath, then idly nudging the deadmen with the balls of their feet or the toes of their shoes. Some moved about carefully and with an exhausted attentiveness, while others did such work with a passivity that bordered on the sullen, but all took the time to arrange the bodies flat so they would not mortify in positions that would make it hard to later move them. The Negroes moved about amidst the fallen all along the length and breadth of the field, sidestepping the flames and working with an unhurried lassitude that seemed like careful respect and weary shame in equal part.

Standing there, Grant felt the bottomless sorrow that hung in the air and knew, suddenly, that the grief still to come would be infinitely harder than the work at hand. He also knew that brighter still would be the Jubilee, if and when it came. He took a breath and walked from that place with his head hung as though he’d seen, and by witnessing taken part in, some thing he’d no right to.

He walked back slowly through the Wilderness and passed by death in every posture. Beside a white road slanting through the dark green he came upon an old black man weeping without control beside the body of a young boy in a blue uniform. The old man pressed the boy’s small hand against his cheek, and the other hand was spidered darkly over the child’s face. His grief was violent and soundless, and if he saw Grant he paid him no mind. Grant moved on without a word, and by and by he found a Union sack coat folded neatly upon a log with a forage cap perched atop. He stopped, breathless.

Sherman Grant lifted up the cap. It bore a badly sewn Maltese Cross, and the leather brim was cracked and creased and torn. The
brass eagles on the coat glittered dully, and there was a neatly folded pair of trousers beneath. He wondered what had become of the soldier and looked about himself for a naked body lying dead nearby, but there was only a clothed, sandy-haired fellow lying in a fetal ball.

Grant sniffed. He blinked and looked once more about himself, then lifted up the uniform and carried it away.

He went on up the road past the Union fieldworks until the Wilderness darkened around him. A thin, sallow white man driving a dilapidated carriage rattled up in a swirling cloud of white dust. The rear of the wagon was filled with spades and shovels, and in one corner, half under a small pile of onion sacks, lay a dead Negro boy. A frightened, shocked face and an ugly wound in his throat. The man stopped the carriage opposite Grant and looked him up and down appraisingly. Grant was well familiar with the stare of valuation and bent his gaze away, hoping the man would not demand to see his teeth.

The man let go the reins, took a deep breath, then blocked one nostril with the tip of his forefinger and blew his nose into the opposite palm. He spent a moment studying the mess as though he’d read his fortune there, then scowled and wiped it off along his thigh. “What’re ye doin’ out here, boy? Ye run off?”

Grant opened his mouth. He shut it again.

The man shook his head and shifted about on the seat, and when Grant looked up he saw the man held a revolver. “I’ll ask ye agin,” said the man. “And this time I’ll warrant ye’ll answer. Ye run off?”

Grant rolled his eyes about as though he’d seek escape. He opened his mouth. He shut it again.

“Damn it all to hell,” snarled the man. He stood and turned to step down, and the carriage trembled with his weight. The dead boy’s head rolled as though he’d look away. “Damn it all to hell if the woods ain’t bleeding niggers today,” the man said. “Getting dark
early these days.” He chuckled to himself and leaned to spit. As he wiped his mouth, his eyes fell on the uniform under Grant’s arm and his face split into a wide, malicious grin.

“Where is ye goin’ with that shoddy?” he asked, walking around Grant, looking him up and down as though to evaluate his worth against fair market value. “Why, I’d bet ye’re nothing but a field buck found hisself a fuckin’ blue monkey suit. That right, ye black devil?” He shoved Grant, and Grant stumbled against the carriage. The uniform fell into the dust, and Grant found himself staring into the dead boy’s ever-open eyes. He had a tiny mole at one corner of his mouth, and Grant could see his small white teeth past his lips and the dried salt traces at the corners of his eyes. Grant gripped the rail and closed his eyes as though to prepare himself for a beating.

“What’re ye goin’ to do?” The man laughed. “Ye goin’ to volunteer in old Uncle Abe’s army? Shit. Y’know, I heard tell there’s a whole brigade of you fuckin’ chimps marching around out here somewhere. Like they thought it was fuckin’ Africa or Cuba or some fuckin’ place. Marchin’ round like they thought they was men, if ye can believe it.”

Grant heard him cock the revolver. His eyes were hot and dry. He knelt, staring at the boy in the back of the carriage, and felt a sharp, pleasant quickness at the back of his throat, and he felt no fear. All his varied pains, all his deep, dark, weary aches, were lifted from him as though caught by a risen wind to which his breath was joined and made part of and would now never be separate from. Grant breathed. Quicker than he thought himself capable, he reached into the wagon, grasped a shovel, and swung it.

The man put an arm before his face, and the pistol went off, but the shot was in the air. Grant wrenched back the blade of the shovel from where it had bit into the man’s arm. He was on the ground, and Grant was screaming. A sound raw and bestial. And for the first
time, Grant did not stand apart from his anger but gave himself over completely, and his anger was red.

Grant blinked. At some point, the shovel had broken into two pieces, and the blade was sunk to the scruff in the man’s face. He gripped the broken handle in both hands, and the end of it was dripping and covered with matter. Grant straddled the man’s chest, and the man was wholly destroyed.

Grant stood. His knees were weak, and he walked to the wagon and wiped his face with an onion sack, then walked back and pried the pistol from the man’s fingers and put it in his pocket. He put the man’s ammo pouch around his neck, then retrieved the uniform, dusted it off, and put it into a clean onion sack. Grant stood a moment or two watching up and down the road. He took another shovel from the wagon and lifted the dead boy and carried him into the trees.

By the time he returned it was evening and dark. She’d risked a little fire and had somehow caught a squirrel to roast upon a stick. When Grant came out of the Wilderness, Hypatia saw how he was and pulled the stringy, brown meat from the bones and laid it on a smooth stone for him to eat. He licked his lips and asked her had she eaten and she said she had and he crouched beside the flames and ate. He licked his slick fingers each by each, and juice ran from the corners of his mouth to sparkle in his growth of beard like tiny red-hued jewels.

She did not ask him his business that day, nor did she question the uniform in the onion sack or the dried blood on his fists and face. She watched him eat, and when he finished, she watched him stare into the flames with things happening in his eyes that she’d not seen since he fell in with her. Several times he opened his mouth to speak and each time shut it again. After a while he wept. He covered his eyes with the shells of his palms and wept against his hands and
Hypatia watched without movement or comment. Courteous and respectful of his grief.

The fire had burnt to embers when he finally stood and walked to the edge of the little clearing. Hypatia heard him making water there, heard it spray forcefully into the brush and heard him sigh with simple, cool pleasure. He came to her after, and they lay holding each other the night long with the shimmering coals painting them red and ushering them to a sleep dreamless and fine.

In the morning they rose hungry and cold. Having no food or possibles about, they picked a direction they hoped was north and started walking through the green gloom. The venomous crackling of innumerable unseen fires made the morning air shudder and the smoke was such it blocked what little sky came through the canopy. But they kept moving. Through the morning and into early afternoon, with the brambles making further mockery of their clothing. Grant kept the uniform safe and gave his arm to Hypatia when she needed it, which was not often. Several times they stopped to try and reckon their course but could not find the sun, and neither was skilled in woodcraft enough to read the moss or stones or any of the other common markers set by nature to help lost travelers. Now and again they rested beside dark little streams, then rose again and went on. By and by they struck a road running through all that charry dark and they stood watching where it ran yellowy and straight to deeper darknesses beyond.

The debris of last year’s Chancellorsville battle lay scattered about. A broken wagon wheel scaled with moss. The rusted hoop of a long-decayed barrel. Bits of colored cloth and bits of boots. Grant stooped and plucked a little chess piece from the dust, looked at it briefly, then tossed it away. Hypatia breathed deeply, for the smoke was less in that place and the sun fell suddenly and bright upon the face of the road. As Grant toed the wreckage about, Hypatia walked
to a smooth stone lying in the sun beside an old blackjack. Beside the stone, a short lane ran to a tiny cabin with a door painted sunshine blue. She saw there a covered porch, wild roses blooming in the dooryard. Red bricks framed an earthen path. Hypatia sighed and smiled and walked to the porch.

There was a stool there, and an old crate. A soft breeze came up, and she smelled the roses where they quivered amidst their thorns. The porch boards were littered with rusty, shriveled petals. The air was cool and fragrant. Inside the cabin was a packed-earth floor, a stone hearth. A thin rectangle of ticking in one corner suggested a mattress, and a sagging desk with the drawers turned out stood abandoned along one wall. A Dutch door swung out onto the Wilderness where it reared up behind the cabin. She stood looking at the door, wondering what its business was, being in halves, but could not fathom it. When she came back onto the porch Grant was there, with his big, scarred hands on the rail, looking out at the road. She smiled, and to her surprise, he returned the grin, and they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the road without speech.

In the late afternoon they kindled a fire in the hearth to draw the damp chill from the air, and to their relief, the chimney was sound and drew well. The smoke added itself to what still drifted through the Wilderness, and all moved southward. They heard rifle fire all day, and as the light began to fade, a rain began falling and the firing slowly tapered off. It cooled, but the cabin warmed nicely as the fire crackled on the sagging andiron. And there, in the lengthening shadows that laced the porch and the lane leading to it, they sat as though waiting for something yet to come.

After a time a soldier came limping along the road, careering from side to side like an unmoored ship and spattered with blood from head to toe. He came stirring coils of dust into the darkening air. At the lane, he paused and looked their way and stood looking for a long moment. Neither Hypatia or Grant moved or breathed, for
they recognized his affiliation by the ruins of his uniform and his lean haggardness. The rebel was hatless and his hair was wild and he stood there swaying at the mouth of the lane, staring at them until finally he fell face-first into the dust and did not rise.

Hypatia leaned forward on the crate and the crate creaked and the soldier reared up out of the dust as though from a dream of terror. He gave them another long look, then turned and staggered on down the road and was gone.

With the same silence that had characterized their relationship to that point, Grant and Hypatia stood together and walked up the lane to the road. Squinting through the smoke and gloom and slanting evening shadows, they made him out where he stumbled along. One arm was cocked protectively to his chest like a hurt bird’s wing, and he waved the other before him in the manner of a blindman.

Their faces as they watched him. She: motherhearted and quiet with a grief that drew hard lines about her mouth yet softened her round, almond eyes; he: silent and atremble with a newfound courage that allowed his hate to fist up his hands and bring out the weary veins in his forearms. Together they stood, not touching, and watched as Abel fell into the road again and did not rise.

They watched down the road. The white dust settled in the gloom. The whippoorwills began to call soft and low from the dark of the wood. Grant swore and walked down the road into the dark. Then he came back.

“He ain’t dead,” he said.

“Well,” said Hypatia. With two fingers she delicately shifted about her damp dressfront. “Well,” she said again.

Grant sighed. “Goddamnit. Just God damn it.”

She nodded. “You may as well,” she said. “He ain’t goin’ to do us no harm all busted up like that.”

He did as she told him and brought the soldier into the cabin. He was very light and Grant handled him easily and together they tended
him by firelight, their shadows antic on the wall behind. They cleaned the blood from his flesh to separate wound from waste and found the bullet where it had shorn up in his thigh, the snub, dark shape of it just below the skin of the off-side. The flesh there tight and hot and red. Hypatia cut the bullet from him with the blade of his own little pocketknife and bandaged the leg with strips torn from her dress. Then Grant rolled the soldier up so she could judge his hurt chest. As she cleaned carefully around the red mouth of the wound, she accidentally scraped his exposed rib with a fingernail and he whimpered in his sleep, shuddered, then settled again. It was not as bad as it looked, and when it was cleaned Hypatia tore more fabric from her woeful dress and wound it tightly around him. When they laid him back down before the fire he called out blindly for water and they gave him a sip from what they had. He called again for food but there was nothing to give and so they looked, instead, to his mangled, red-gloved arm.