Wilderness (11 page)

Ned’s lips were damp; he licked them compulsively and swallowed. “Abel,” he said softly, staring eastward at the shivering orange light.

There was something in his voice, and Abel looked over at the boy. Ned’s jaw was firmly set, and Abel could see stars glittering in the panes of his eyes. “Abel,” he said again and licked his lips. “I guess I’m pretty scared.”

“All right, Ned,” he said slowly, carefully. “Nothing you need be ashamed about.”

“In the morning, what do you think’ll happen?”

“I reckon we’ll go on up the road a ways farther and have us a hell of a time, Ned.”

“That’s what you said in Pennsylvania.”

“And didn’t we?”

Ned grinned and shook his head. “We sure did,” he said. And then his face fell and he pursed his wet lips. “I get to missing old Hoke sometimes.”

“We ain’t goin’ to talk about any of that,” said Abel.

They were silent together for a long time after. They listened to the soft crackling of distant campfires and the low murmur of sleepless men who, like themselves, stayed up into the night talking of nothing and hoping for rest. “Hey Abel?” Ned.

“What is it?”

“I ain’t ever been with a girl.”

Abel opened and shut his mouth. “Well … Well, shit, Ned,” he finally said.

Ned made a face. “I reckon that must be a pretty sorry thing.”

“Shit,” said Abel. “What do you want me to say to you? There’ll be time enough for all that.”

“What’s it like?”

“Shit. What’s what like?”

Ned picked up a twig and proceeded to break it into a number of smaller pieces. “You know.”

“Christ,” sighed Abel, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips, then dragging them down his face to scratch his neck through his beard. “I ain’t having this talk, Ned,” he said. “I just ain’t.” But when he looked at the boy’s face, he swore softly and shook his head.

Abel looked up at the red-sky night. He looked west where the sun had set, and he looked to the stars, where they had risen silent and bright. He thought of Elizabeth’s shoulders and the soft pulse of blood at the base of her throat that ticked against his cheek. He did not know how to answer the boy and still be honest, so in the end he lied and said, “There’s other things that’re better.”

Again they fell silent. They watched men settling down for rest, watched them at their prayers and not at their prayers and watched them as they turned this way and that upon the ground, looking for comfort. After a while of this, Ned said, “Hey Abel?”

“Shit. Yeah?”

Ned dug a shallow trough in the dirt with his heel. “I ain’t got no family at home to miss me,” he said. “I never did know my daddy, and I only just barely ’member my sister.”

“Well, that’s all right.”

Ned shook his head, his thin hair tracing soft, star-dazzled designs through the dark. “No, it ain’t. It ain’t all right at all.” He broke off and sniffed wetly. “I’m just … What—what do you think it’ll be like? To be dead?”

Abel took a deep breath. The feathery shadows of trees stood in relief against the stars’ far distant light “Won’t it be good, Ned?” he said. “Look how pretty it all is, the stars and the trees. Even them damn Yankee fires look pretty, don’t they?” He looked at Ned until Ned nodded. “Well, then, think about it,” Abel went on, speaking quietly but with soft authority, as though revealing ideas long grappled with. “If God could make all this out of this poor stuff”—he pinched the flesh of Ned’s upper arm—“just think what He’s been able to do in heaven. ’Sides, it’d give us a chance to see Hoke again. Give the old man a ration of shit about lightin’ out early like he done.”

Ned sniffed and ran the back of his hand beneath his nose. “You really think that?” he asked.

Abel pursed his lips and looked away. He smirked and sighed and said, “Hell, I don’t know, Ned.” Taking a deep breath, he let it out again. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t guess I do. Sounded pretty good in my head though.” He shrugged and touched Ned’s arm with his elbow. “Tell you what though,” he said leadingly.

“What?”

“I’ll be goddamned if those Yankee campfires don’t look mighty pretty anyway.”

They sat together watching. Around them, the myriad sounds of an army in its camps gave way to the gentler sounds of slumber. A few stars, unseen by all but them, fell down the bright wall of the
night, their brief arcs described in pale lines like scratches on dark glass. After a little while Ned said, “Hey Abel?”

“What, goddamn it?”

“Sing me that song, Abel.”

Abel looked around. Beside him, the boy settled down and crossed his arms behind his head, staring up at the busy sky. “Jesus, Ned. I ain’t doing that.”

Ned looked at him. “Please, Abel? I just know I ain’t goin’ to get no sleep tonight otherwise.”

“No, goddamnit. I ain’t doin’ it.”

“Well, Jesus,” said Ned good-naturedly. “First you lie to me about women and fuckin’ and now you won’t even sing me to goddamned sleep.”

Abel stared at the boy. After a moment, he closed his mouth. Squinting hard at him, Abel asked, “You did that just to get my goat, didn’t you?”

“Goddamned right I did.”

“Well, stop it. Don’t sound right. Words like that comin’ out your mouth.”

“Will you sing me that song?”

“No, I won’t. I told you that.”

“Well, shit. I guess then I’ll goddamned stop it when I’m goddamned good and shittin’ ready.”

Abel took a deep breath and blew. He looked around to see how many were nearby and if they were listening, then, after swearing under his breath, Abel began to sing softly a little hush-a-bye song he remembered from his youth. Beside him, Ned grinned and shut his eyes. Abel sang softly, his voice deep and soothing, and after a while he too closed his eyes and settled in beside the boy, still singing.

The stars traced their courses and the orange glow gradually faded and was gone. At some point in their sleep Abel put an arm
around Ned’s shoulders and Ned leaned into him and they slept that way, together, until daybreak, when the army roused itself and moved on.

May 5, 1864

They spent the morning digging in the loamy, rainwet earth. All around them rose the soft, seductive scents of spring—the spice of old leaves, the perfume of wildflowers, the richness of turned soil. They could smell the sun and imagine long, hot days to come so that the farmers among them pined for home and the lovers for their sweethearts. Steuart’s Brigade, of Ewell’s Corps, formed a line with two other brigades of the division that threaded north-to-south along the western edge of an old and overgrown cornfield of fifty acres or so, known locally as Saunders’. Whosoever it was that had once owned the land, that had cleared the trash trees and tangles from it and broke the soil, tilled it, sown and reaped and loved it, that had built home and hope upon it, was long gone now. Long gone and leaving behind only stubby, half-wild corn plantings shooting greenly from the yellow, calf-high grass like weird gothic spikes. The old field stretched several hundred yards north and south of the old Orange Turnpike, which slanted eastward through its center and was, in its turn, cut by a deep gully trickling that morning with stale rainwater. A barren yellow patch amidst the darkness and the green. The Wilderness rose around Saunders’ Field like a vegetable wall so that walking from the dark of the wood was like passing from night to day in the space of a step, from sleep to dream.

There was a scarcity of shovels in the division, so men were compelled to break the earth with bayonet points and cutlery and the big, swordlike blades of dragoons that some men carried. A long chain of crumbling mounds rose slowly with the sun. Bristling with roots and twigs and old, dry grass, the earthen mounds were striated light and dark and light again so that those of a geologic bent could
see plainly the years of industry that had operated in the Wilderness. Branches and small downed trees were drug atop the earthworks, and by noon the men were hunkered down like gnomes or goblins behind their hasty battlements.

They waited. They watched down the road, where occasionally they glimpsed the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, now Grant’s, in their dark uniforms crossing the median, and they listened to them in the brush across the field at much the same work as they themselves had done.

A blue sky day and hot. By midmorning fluttery waves of heat shimmered off the planks and rose from the yellow field itself where David Abernathy, crouched down in the dirt behind the fieldworks close by the road, watched as Union soldiers formed up in lines back in the woods beyond the other side of the field. He blinked and slipped the spectacles from his face. The surrounding Wilderness became a soft, fantasy wood of dark shadows and delight, and he sniffed mournfully and replaced the eyeglasses.

Abel lay stretched out on his back beside him, and when David nudged him, he blinked, grunted, and wet his lips as though coming back from some far-off place he did not want to leave. The corners of his eyes were wet, and Abel quickly wiped his face with his wrist backs, one and then the other. Rubbing his palm briskly up and down his face to chase the sleep from him, he blinked and frowned. “What is it?” he asked, his voice rough and tired.

David gripped his rifle and lifted his chin. “Looks like they’re getting ready over there,” he said quietly.

Abel rolled onto his belly and tugged his hat brim down over his eyes to shade them. Squinting, he watched for a long time the far side of the field, where they were gathering themselves behind screens of dense brush—small, dark figures intercut with Zouave uniforms, brightly red, you could just make them out standing double-ranked and bristling with flags and bayonets that sparked in the sun like tiny
embers thrown from a fire. You could tell the sound of officers’ horses breaking up the underbrush, their hooves making that lovely, hollow, clopping sound that can only come from horses walking upon the earth, and you could hear the officers’ voices shouting orders and encouragement, readying the working men for the job at hand. Abel’s lips moved with silent counting as he picked out flags from the brush. When he looked back at David he opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again and looked back across the field to count a second time. “I heard somewhere Grant went and reorganized the whole works,” Abel finally said. “Hard to say what-all’s over there. How many, I mean. Counted twelve flags ’fore I gave it up.” He frowned and wiped his mouth. “There’s a whole mess of men over there, anyway.”

David pinched his temples with thumb and middle finger, then pressed hard against the lids of his eyes to try and drive the green jangle from his skull. It did not work—it seldom worked—and he let out a sigh. “I did see a Fifth Corps flag back in there not too long ago,” he offered.

Abel nodded. “Could be them Maine men, then,” he said. “Maybe them good Green Mountain boys or them New Yorkers, maybe. Sickles’ old bunch.” He looked hard at David. “You goin’ to make it?”

David tucked his tongue thoughtfully into his cheek and seemed to ponder the question a moment before answering. “I suppose so,” he finally said, gripping his rifle again. He looked at Abel. “I sometimes forget that you come from up that way,” he said.

“New York?” asked Abel, waving a hand through the sunstruck air dismissively. “It’s just a place, like any other. Don’t mean anything more’n what a person wants it to, and the only claim it’s got on me is I’ve got people buried up there.” He shrugged. “Aunt,” he said. “My mama and daddy’re up there. Some others.”

David sniffed and curled his lip. “Goddamn Yankee,” he said.

“Fuck you,” said Abel good-naturedly. “And watch your mouth.” He lifted his chin and asked “How’re Lee’s Miserables?”

David grinned wide. “Like the book says,” he said, finishing the joke. “Faintin’.”

They chuckled softly together. A stray bullet whizzed overhead, clipping through the greenery to send leaves spiraling through the blue air and sounding for all the world on this fine spring day like a fat bee or horsefly off about its business. A heartbeat later came the sound of the shot and then its attendant echo. Abel reached out to finger the cuff of David’s gaudy shirt, whistling as he did so, and David pushed his hand back, then nodded across the field. “What do you think about it? Really?” he asked.

“What? The shirt? I already told you, you look like a goddamned—”

“No,” said David quickly. “About what they’re doing across the way. You think they’re coming?”

Abel snorted. “Hell yes, I think they’re coming. I imagine we’ll all have a fine time of it here pretty quick.”

David stared at him, and Abel met his eye, then, after a moment, said, “It’s like I told Ned. I figure they got us by the short hairs, and once they figure that out, it’ll get pretty bad.” He pursed his lips and considered the backs of his knuckles a moment before glancing off across the field, where the blue ranks murmured and swelled behind screens of green. Abel rolled over onto his back. “You just hang back this morning,” he told David. He stared a moment at David’s gaudy shirt, then shook his head. “You hang onto that charm of yours and keep your head down,” he said. “You’ll be all right.” Then Abel tilted his hat back over his face, and a few moments later he was sleeping again.

More noise as skirmishers from both sides found each other in the tall grass. Stray shots hissed over the grass tops, peppering the far side of the earthworks and thunking into the trees. He watched for
Ned or some sign of him rising from and firing over the grass with the other skirmishers but saw no one he knew. Finally, David rolled over onto his back and reached down the front of his varicolored shirt for the little crucifix he’d found that morning on the dead cavalryman.

In the early hours of the day, they’d not known how far the Army of the Potomac had come into the Wilderness nor by what roads, so the Army of Northern Virginia moved slowly east down their two roads, separated by over a mile of dank forest. Ewell moved his corps along the old turnpike with pickets well advanced. As they neared the field where they now crouched, the men fanned out into the shadowy green tangle on either side of the road that ran in a white line that disappeared into the gloom beyond the dull yellow grass. Dust rose and went blowing over the field, and the men were pale with it. Over the treetops, they saw other, larger clouds marking the Union progression through the Wilderness as though Ewell’s corps was the stem of a T the Yankees were crossing. As he stepped from the road, David wondered would they feel a tremor in the earth as so many countless pounds of flesh and machines trod and rolled across it. He wondered would they hear them coming like a thunderstorm troubling the next valley and moving swiftly toward them.