Wilderness (3 page)

Without realizing it, the old man walked soldierwise with his rifle at right shoulder shift, his tough palm cradling the butt plate and his steps measured and even as though to conserve strength for a day’s hard marching. He walked a beach lit bright by sudden sunlight
escaping the close-packed clouds and felt the hard wind sweeping in off the water. He tasted salt, could feel the wind scouring his flesh and crackling in his beard. He drew his lips back as though such wind, such salt and raw fierceness, might bleach clean his river-stained teeth and kindle heat in the hollow, cold places within him.

With the tide rising, the old man was forced up amidst the tide-stacked driftwood and he picked his way carefully, mindful of the waves and his balance. The great silvery logs lay crosswise and askelter like huge breastworks against the battle line of the ocean, the onrushing attack of the tide. Climbing over and around them got the old man to thinking of battles despite himself. How they’d rush screaming and hollering through some field, some forest or farmer’s woodlot, where musket smoke hung from the branches in pale tatters like strange moss. How they’d go down on their knees in fallen leaves or dew-slick grass, firing blindly and fast. No skill to it. No time for aiming. Driving powder and shot down the barrel and pulling free the rammer and fitting the firing caps and raising the pieces to their cramped, bruising shoulders. Kneeling there, sobbing and loading and screaming and firing and loading again, hearing the shouts and cries and sobs of those everywhere around. The great, rolling, throaty percussion of cannon and the sharp crackle of riflefire swelling up and up like an orchestra in the throes of some grand flourish. And that sound rolled together into a single noise, a solitary booming wail of a sound that had no correlation to any other sound the world makes or that a man makes upon it.

Until the Wilderness, he had hardly been touched by battle, and he had seen his share. The old man, who was then a young soldier named Abel Truman, had only been scratched and bruised, had never gotten sick, and was thought by many to be a lucky man. Men took bets on how Abel would fare that day. They shifted their places about to march near him, as though his good luck might shield them. In
the end it rarely did. And while other men died everywhere all around him at Malvern Hill, while other men fell rudely shocked into their deaths in the green cornfields at the base of Cedar Mountain and in the cool, piney shade of the West Wood beyond Sharpsburg, Abel Truman was not touched until the Battle of the Wilderness, and then it had been very bad.

The old man sat resting on a silvery log. The tide was falling in the early afternoon and the ocean lay gray and foam-cluttered, touched on the horizon by steel clouds shot through with shafts of pale sunlight that stood like great, clean columns on the heaving swells. In the shallows were otters at their play. The dog padded about, sniffing after the strewn purple dung of raccoons and chasing those gulls that landed nearby. After a time, the old man took out a little sack and from that a brown twist of dried venison. He sat eating in the sun, letting it warm him through. He sat eating and trying to empty his mind to the moment, but once started, he could not turn himself from memories of his war.

Too many times to count he’d felt hot metal go buzzing past. The little winds that followed, sharp and cool. He’d felt them come plucking hard at his sleeves and pants legs as though to gently steer him from his path. Holes blown through his canteen and four good hats lost as though borne back by strong wind. Abel had even seen bullets mid-flight—small and dark and fat as horseflies. He remembered one in particular: how he whipped his head around in time to follow its path into the wide, sunburned forehead of Huntley Foster just behind him. A man who had found his way through Second Manassas and Antietam and Chancellorsville and who had wagered good writing paper on Abel’s luck. The moment of Huntley’s death in front of Culp’s Hill: a sharp, flat crack and a look of bottomless surprise on Huntley’s face. His mouth fell open in mute astonishment as though he recognized the moment for what it was, and a silent question formed in his liquid eyes, as though he’d ask of Abel
something and would have his answer. Huntley had fallen back with the ball mixed in with the contents of his skull, a wide tongue of blood laid across the bridge of his nose. When Abel made his way back later, he found Huntley in a bank of fallen leaves. The boy’s eyes were open, now questioning someone else, and his pockets were all turned out, his shoes and writing paper gone.

Abel had seen many men die just so and worse. Scores of men. Men whose bodies were dashed apart like waves against stone. He thought of Gully Coleman. He thought of David Abernathy and tried hard not to think of poor Ned.

Now, an old man sitting in the sun taking his lunch, Abel thought that if he concentrated hard enough, he could call them all back to memory. Each man who died in his sight and whose face he knew. Recall them and let them live again, even if only for a moment and only in his mind. Abel breathed, feeling the steady work of the cool air within him. He sat thinking that if he could call these men back, he would ask of them many, many things.

Abel Truman sat with his right hand open on his thigh, his left arm cocked tight against his ribcage, and the sun on his face. His crippled arm throbbed, as it often did. He wondered why he was left behind. Why, after his daughter’s death and his wife’s and all those good men and boys he marched with. Not to become an old man on a beach where no one ever came. Not just to live steeping in pain and memories of pain, he reckoned. Not unless God were even crueler than he’d proved himself to be.

And, because it was a day for such things, Abel conjured an unwanted vision of his daughter, who was when she died still too young for them to have settled on a name for and so went unnamed to her tiny grave. He had risen early that morning and lifted her from the cradle he’d built for her. It was well before the war and he was still whole and he held her in his strong left hand while with his right hand he reached to move the blanket from her face. It was a
blue paler than the swaddling. A darker blue around her lips and darker still about her eyes, and she was so cold. Behind him, Elizabeth called his name. He turned, and in so turning dropped the child to the floor.

Even now, sitting in the sun on this dark beach, the gorge rose up Abel’s throat to remember the look on his wife’s face. The shock of realization and, finally, the pale, outraged blame that darkened like a bruise until it rotted her with hate.

Abel felt the sun against his eyelids, saw heat pounding redly through the thin panes of flesh that separated his eyes from the air and closed him from all the rest of the world. For no reason at all, he suddenly remembered Elizabeth’s voice when it still loved him—deep and throaty, not what you’d expect from her small frame—and how she’d sing quietly small, sad songs of her own composition that he sometimes thought might break his heart. He remembered her white skin and her strong fingers and her square face. The brown, sun-dazed hair that stuck to the back of her neck when she sweated, and the way that she stood when she stood next to him.

The old man opened his eyes. Such remembering was hard on him. He blinked wetly, sighed, and looked over at the dog. It sat looking from the venison in Abel’s hand to his face and back again. Slowly, deliberately, Abel put the twist into his mouth. The dog cocked its head and popped its jaws. Abel chewed and gave the dog a look and the dog sighed. Drool dripped from its underjaw. After a while, Abel stood. He looked down at the dog. “You are pitiful,” he told it. He looked to sea, then reached into the bag and tossed the dog a piece of meat before continuing up the beach.

He walked a long time with the tide falling and the sound of rattling pebbles and the pungent iodine stink of the waves. Bits of fishing net, broken boards, jade-colored glass floats drifted over the ocean from Japan, and a stove-in cooking pot that Abel knelt to examine before tossing away again. At one point, he thought he saw two figures
on the beach far to the north. He waved, but if they saw him, they did not show it, and when he looked again they were gone.

By and by, the old man came upon a pale blue door lying abandoned in the sand. It had a rusted knob and a rusted knocker and it lay athwart the high-tide line as though to shut something away beneath the cold black sand. Abel walked around the door while the dog sniffed at it, barked once, and scrambled off to chase gulls.

He squatted beside the door and touched its weathered surface. Flies rose from the wet weeds and went exploring the air around his head. For all the sweet reek of tide and rot, the door, baking in the sudden afternoon sun, put Abel in mind of pitch pine, maple leaves, green trailers. Tree bark.

How the mind works, by what strange paths it pursues memory. The old man smiled, remembering how it had been in his soldiering days to boil any dark liquid and call it coffee. Roasted corn and apple cores and peanut shells. Withered potatoes and crushed acorns. Tree bark. The only requirements were that the drink be dark-unto-black, scalding hot, and ungodly strong. Abel could taste the brew suddenly, so sharp was his memory of it, and he remembered the little pouch of coffee he’d found in the haversack of a dead Union boy in the Wilderness. He remembered how rich and pure and good that real coffee had smelled, and how, on smelling it and then finding amongst the other possibles a wondrous handful of real white sugar, he’d ignored the pain in his newly ruined arm and broken down to cry like a child.

How the mind works when presented, without warning, with sights and sounds and smells and doors.

The old man frowned, staring at the door lying on the sand. He did not see it but saw, instead and for just a moment, the blue front door of the home his wife and he had once made—framed by two little windows lit softly from within by lamplight. And then he was gone from there and stood instead in the dark, cool shadows of the
Wilderness watching a tow-haired boy with both eyes shot away destroy his left arm with a lucky pistol shot. He stood instead on that old, red ground they’d fought and refought for. Ribcage curves stood from the grass like strange plantings while gray skulls grinned eyeless and mute from brown leaves like stones.

Parts of the Wilderness had been afire that night, and the air was thick with the stink of burning sweet woods, scorched hair, and stale powdersmoke. Burning horseflesh raised a pall of greasy black smoke against the starlight. Other flesh burned there too that night to raise a stench more shocking still. And the dark that night was hot and orange.

Abel Truman wandered far behind the army’s lines, stumbling through the dark with the soft, mournful cries of the whippoorwill dogging his bloody heels. There was a bullet fast in his upper thigh that had not touched the bone, and another somewhere in the soft part of his trunk—a wound he was afraid to look at in case he was killed without knowing it.

The Union boy, when Abel found him, lay alone in back of the Confederate lines where their afternoon charge had reached its terminus in smoke and leafy green confusion. He lay alone in the deep woods with both eyes shot away and one knee blown redly open so a white, round knob of bone came poking through his trousers. Abel heard the soft, sick creak of the joint when the boy tried to sit up, and as his sack coat fell open, Abel saw a hole in the boy’s chest that he couldn’t have plugged with his thumb.

On hearing Abel enter the glade where he lay, the boy lifted a pistol from somewhere about his person and fired from his darkness at the greater dark beyond. Abel felt his arm destroyed. He fell, and when he reared back up the boy was dead, and Abel went pawing through his haversack after the smell of coffee.

Two days later, Abel stood before a tiny shack in the Wilderness fronted by another blue door, and this time, he was taken in. The reek
of human fear and human hurt, the warm sweetness of mother’s milk at the back of his throat—kindnesses he did not deserve.

A wind had risen on the coast. It blew sea foam along the beach and froze the gulls mid-flight, static and quiet, as though hung by threads from the dark clouds. The old man knelt in the wind beside the old door with his hard palm covering his mouth and his rifle crosswise on his lap. Nearby, the dog sat watching. When the old man sat unmoving for a long time, the dog came up, tilted its head to one side, and turned three tight circles before settling onto the sand.

Abel uncovered his face. He took a great, deep breath. The dog stood quickly. The wind set the old man’s clothes to snapping and stood the dog’s thick fur at strange angles. The old man’s crippled arm ached, as it often did in cold wind. He took a long last look at the blue door, then silently gathered his things and set off for home with the dog running off ahead and the wind at his back, making the walking much easier.

Now, Abel Truman sat before his fire in the night with the dog lightly sleeping at his feet. Flames jumped orange and yellow from the shallow pit. He sat watching the water, remembering times gone by. When he reached down to stroke the dog behind its ears, it woke and looked at him, then sighed and settled its head between its paws to lie staring with contentment at the fire.

After a time, the old man stood and went into the dark shack. He held a small, burning stick plucked from the fire and with it lit two candle scraps standing palely from waxy puddles on a rough table. Tossing the stick back out the door onto the fire, Abel stood looking at his cot and, stacked beside it, the few volumes he read from each night before sleep. A dog-eared King James Bible with a worn calfskin cover. An old
Farmer’s Almanac
borrowed from Glenn Makers the year before last. Abel had read bits from the Bible and nearly all
the almanac—if for nothing else than to try and anchor himself in the world by staying aware of planting seasons and predicted weathers, now past. He touched with two fingers the covers of these and some few other books of his keeping, then turned to a shelf on the back wall where sat a small pine box.

The old man sniffed deeply and rubbed his cocked left arm. Through his shirt, he felt a thick map of scar tissue—the gristle grown through and around shattered bones that had knit themselves back all wrong. He imagined shriveled tendons embedded with old, cold, corroded flakes of metal that frayed the nerves yet still allowed him some little use of the hand. He thought of Hypatia and the taste of her milk. He thought of the blue door of the cabin she’d occupied in the dark of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania and of another blue door closed upon a home and family long lost. Abel took a breath and set the box on the table in the flickering candlelight.