Wilderness (22 page)

He stood ready that way and, when he saw and heard nothing, lit a little lantern on the seat beside him and held it over his head. The dog’s eyes flared in the lamplight as it scrambled into the wagon, and Makers saw it for what it was and saw how its mouth was bound, its neck rope-burnt and raw.

He set the rifle by and stepped into the bed. “That you, Buster?” he asked the dog, and it came to him, whining softly and pawing at its muzzle as Makers took out his knife and cut away the bindings.

Immediately, the dog began a furious barking. It leapt from the wagon and ran into the forest, then turned and barked and ran back out into the road.

Makers looked at the dog. He looked up the road and out at the dark forest, and the dog began barking again. Cursing softly, Makers stepped down into the road to follow the dog where it would lead him, then looked to the sky, where the stars were falling by the hundreds.

They arced in reflection across the dark panes of his eyes, and his mouth dropped open to see them falling so. He thought there should be sound but could not imagine the uproar that might accompany such a spectacle.

Then, quickly as they began, the stars quit falling, and the myriad that remained sparkled from all their right places in the western night. Makers tied the reins around a thin alder nearby, then turned to follow the dog just as the sound of gunfire and outraged screaming crackled from the woods not more than a hundred yards away.

The Haida pushed the barrel of his shotgun against Abel’s temple as tenderly as a kiss. Abel was on his knees, and slow, sick blood dripped
from his lip to spatter softly in the springy moss. “Old man, old man, old man.” The Haida sighed. “You should have just died.”

Willis fisted a hand into Abel’s long hair and lifted the old man’s head. Abel blinked away tears and saw the little man had scooped up the pistol the Indians had gifted him. His eyes widened, and he tongued the red edges of his ruined cheek. In the red light, the little man had a fearsome, scarecrow aspect, and he let go Abel’s hair and stepped back. “Shit, Buddy,” he gurgled. “This man’s sicker’n a dog.”

The Haida nodded and withdrew the shotgun. “It would be interesting, I think, to watch it take him. To watch him at the end. An interesting thing.” He shrugged and looked up at Willis. “Fuck it. You know what to do with a sick dog.”

Willis leaned and spat blood onto the coals, where a yellow flame flared and sizzled and died. He thumbed back the hammer of the Indians’ pistol and pointed it at Abel. “Same thing you do to a hurt one,” he said.

Abel pushed himself up so he was kneeling between them with the coals of their fire warming his right side. He put his palm on his thigh and breathed as best he could for the pain in his chest and held his ruined left arm in such a way as to ease that pain. From somewhere he heard the dog barking. After a moment, he raised his face to stare into the cold, round dark of Willis’s eyes.

There was an explosion, and Abel felt heat scorch his eyelids and his forehead. There was a scream, and he opened his eyes to see Willis fallen to the side with the Haida bent over him. Their shadows on the pines were monstrous in the lurid light. The pistol lay here and there in so many pieces, and Abel blinked and shook his head to try and rid his ears of ringing. As he pushed himself to standing, he reached into the coals and scooped up a bright handful that sizzled mournfully in his bare palm.

The Haida stood and swung the shotgun around as Abel flung his hand forward and released the coals. They went hissing starwise
through the dark space between them, and the Indian ducked. The shot went wide but not by much, the pellets slicing through the underbrush and thocking loudly into the trees.

Abel turned and grabbed his haversack and rifle as the Haida broke his own gun to reload. Willis pushed himself to his knees, holding with his left hand the remains of his right, where the exploding pistol had blown it apart.

Abel had no way to know how far he’d run before he finally fell gasping and sick to the moss, but he reckoned it could not have been far. He could still plainly hear Willis screaming with thick choking sounds as his broken mouth tried to find the proper shape for his pain. Abel lay on his back in the moss with one hand clutching the straps of the haversack and the rifle fallen beside him. He lay with his chin wet and he lay with his heart racing all out of time to the pulse of blood he could plainly feel pounding at his temples.

And then the dog was there—worrying his neck and ears with its soft, warm tongue—and then another figure, a man who looked him over, swore, and helped him to his feet. He fetched Abel’s rifle, and together they stumbled through the brush. Moonlight came through the forest like the ghosts of trees, and they heard crashing in the brush behind them. A hoarse and maddened shouting.

They came out of the woods onto the road, and Abel pulled himself up into the wagon bed as it lurched forward. He whistled for the dog to join him and when it did, Abel told it what a good dog it was. Then with his hurt but still expert hand, Abel checked the rifle over, cocked it, and lay the barrel against the backboard to aim out into the dark forest as it passed by along either side. They were moving fast now, up the road, but the road was not good, and as he was jostled about Abel felt what little strength he still had begin to fail him. When he saw there was nothing, and would be nothing, behind them, he lay back.

“Glenn Makers,” he called out after a few moments.

“Abel Truman,” said Makers over his shoulder. “You all right?”

“Passable,” said Abel. “You can probably slow up a little now.”

“If it’s all the same to you, we’ll keep along like this for a bit.”

“All right then,” said Abel. His burnt face felt light and numb and his right hand itched, the skin tightening. He looked at the little sacks and packages laying heaped in the wagon bed with him. “You-all layin’ in for winter?” he asked.

“That’s right,” said Glenn. His shoulders rose to his earlobes as though he felt a sudden shudder, then fell again.

Abel lay back and quietly panted for a short time. “Well,” he finally said. “Looks like you’ll have plenty. You two must be doing all right up there.”

“We’re doing fine.”

Abel nodded and cleared his throat. He sat up and spat over the side. “Ellen ever get better?”

“She’s just the same.”

“Well, that’s too damned bad.” Abel began a weary, wet coughing that he soon lost control of. Makers slowed the wagon and finally stopped when Abel vomited over the side. It went on for a time before the old man finally fell back gasping, and Makers started the wagon forward again.

“You see them stars, Glenn?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Pretty things, them. Pretty things.”

They went along quietly for a while. Makers wondered if the old man had died until a voice came from the wagon bed. “I brung back your book.”

Makers spoke to Emerson, and the horse picked up the pace again. “Did you?” he answered after thinking about it a moment. “I’d forgotten you had had it.”

Abel stirred about in the dark. “I didn’t,” he said softly.

Again, there was a long period of quiet, and Makers finally stopped
the wagon and climbed into the bed to kneel beside the old man. Looking at him, Makers thought again that he was dead until Abel made a soft sound and grimaced in his sleep. Makers got a blanket from his supplies and settled it over him, and the old soldier slept and Makers nodded and got the wagon moving again.

Chapter Eight

Like a Distant Storm

The Wilderness of Spotsylvania, May 7, 1864

A single raindrop struck his face. A fat drop, filled with springtime promise and tainted now, too, with the smoky pollutants of war, for it had fallen through layers of stale powdersmoke. Risen days past from the solid world below, it plunged. The herald of a hard shower coming, as it fell to the dark green world it gathered to itself dust and chaff and particles of violence that threaded invisibly through the dirty air like shuddering ectoplasm.

The drop smacked against him, pooling neatly at the center of his brow then sliding along his temple, running atop a month’s accumulation of dried sweat and grime and tracing the delicately curved intricacies of his ear before dropping, finally and forever, into the grass, where it seeped into the ruined soil of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania.

Sherman Grant opened his eyes. He blinked and breathed with his flesh all damp and aching in his joints. Filthy and hungry, badly
frightened by the memory of what they’d seen of the fighting the day before, he shook his head to try and dislodge the terrible dreams from his mind’s eye. He tried to forget other, worse things that were not dreams at all but that he would remember always in nightmares.

He lay on his back in the grass, watching the undersides of dark clouds flowing southward. Carried by high winds, they lay seamed each to each and complex as a Chinese puzzle box whose secrets held blue sky and sunlight. Grant smelled the smells of rain and things burnt, and when a blocky rattling came to him upon the wind, he stood.

He looked southward toward a dense screen of trees. Dark smoke stood like tilted columns holding up the gray sky. The artillery rumbled again, and he marked its place by sound and distant flashes of light against the low belly of cloud. Like thunder it rolled, like a distant storm a farmer will watch with worry. He wondered where the armies were meeting again and stared south, trying to see beyond the green rim of the forest. He wondered how far they’d gotten before turning on each other again.

They’d hidden in the woods for three days now, afraid to move for fear of capture or worse. For the first two days and nights they’d heard the sounds of battle issuing out of the dark all around them like nothing either had ever known. Like two animals at each other ceaselessly, they did not stop their fighting for dark of night, merely slackened the pace a little. On the third day the armies moved south. He and Hypatia stayed still as the marching soldiers flowed past. Lights stabbed through the shadows all night long, and the trees filled with the sounds of shouting and the stamping of hooves, the creaking of tack and the clatter of wagon wheels.

At some point they pulled each other to their feet and started stumbling forward through the dark in a direction they hoped was north. They heard caissons rumbling down newly cut roads and the irate shouts of teamsters. Smoke seethed through the trees. Grant
and Hypatia walked the night long and at dawn lay themselves down to sleep.

Hypatia still slept. With knees drawn up and one hand fisted against her neck, her brow was pinched, even in rest, and her head-wrap was discarded, her cropped hair as dusty as her bare feet. Her dressfront was damp, and she pleaded quietly with her dreams. Grant watched her at her dreaming and held a palm before her mouth to feel her breath upon his skin. Closing his eyes, he grimaced and stood, then went a short way through the wood to make his toilet. He lowered his trousers and squatted to let his water spill. He tried hard not to give in to the temptation to examine his mangled sex, and as he fastened up, Grant spied a thin trail winding through the trees. He looked back at Hypatia. She had not moved. After a moment, he turned and went up the trail.

Gaining the top of a small hill, he marked her place in his mind and turned to look out over the Wilderness. Here and there individual trees swayed and clashed with wind or, in the far south, with men fighting and dying at their trunks. The booming artillery swelled and echoed, joined now with tremendous crashes of musketry. Grant stood watching a while longer and a lean wind disturbed the leaves and drew his attention to a burnt yellow field in the dark of the Wilderness. Figures moved slowly through the clipped grass that lay smoking in the afternoon light.

Turning, he started down another trail that followed the back of the hill down into the trees. A donkey lay dead on its side, its belly swollen and its three remaining legs cocked grotesquely skyward. A hickory tree stood split asunder with its shredded meat white and shocking in the gloom. Branches and fallen logs, all nicked and torn by various pieces of flung metal, lay all about the mouth of the trail as though the path had been hard fought for and taken and lost too many times to count. Grant took a breath and walked down into the dark.

He passed trees swollen with bullets, broken by cannon fire, and
singed black by flame. He saw fine-bred horses dead amidst the fallen leaves and dead soldiers lying beside them, weaponless and with their backs shredded. As he picked his way carefully along, Grant could hear the crackling of fire but saw no living flame. Smoke ghosted where the trees kept the wind from blowing, and about the trunks the moss was singed.

When he reached the edge of the field, Grant tilted his face into the breeze, for here it blew softly and fresh upon the outraged grass. He sniffed deeply, his eyes closed. Off in the distance, the sound of battle was dim but constant. Grant rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and stepped out into Saunders’ Field.

The armies had moved on, but had left a goodly portion of themselves behind. Deadmen lay scattered in numbers beyond those he’d learned, yet Grant thought that someone besides God should be counting them. Entering names and dates and sorrowful histories into some great ledger for generations hence to study. He gasped and retched, for the breeze suddenly fell away and the charry stink of death in bedlam rose again. He could see the rounded humps of corpse backs, gray and smooth and common as stones about him in the yellow grass. Men and pieces of men lay smoking like grease fires. A horse knelt dead with its hindlegs standing to and its forelegs drawn under its great chest as though presented for some terrible dressage. Little flames, brightly orange under the dark gloom of the sky, still whispered about so that those few stragglers moving on the field’s perimeter, stranded in the red wake of clashing armies, were obliged to step carefully.

Grant stood looking out onto the field with his arms wrapped about himself. His face was streaked with dirt and sweat and old hurts. His eyes as burnt and wasted as the chewed grass. Another cool afternoon breeze blew mockingly past, billowing his thin shirt and turning leaves about on their stems so their lighter backs flashed dazzlingly in the shadows.