Wilderness (30 page)

Abel was silent for a long time before finally lifting his chin and saying, “I don’t understand it. They ain’t in the Wilderness no more, haven’t been for days, but listen.” He looked hard at her without seeing her at all.

Hypatia shook her head and trembled. She was very cold, yet sweat trickled down her spine. “What am I supposed to hear?” she asked.

“It’s what we ain’t hearing so much of,” said Abel, looking off through the trees into the furious wave of sound that rolled over them like something visible and terrible. “They’re not in the Wilderness,” he said again. “And they ain’t moved no farther south either. That means Lee’s holding.” Abel grinned for a moment, then shook his head, his face gone serious and resigned. “Still and all,” he went on. “He ain’t got the men to hold Grant up for very long. And if they keep on like they been—” He paused a moment as the thunderous sound of cannon swelled. “If they keep fightin’ this way, Lee ain’t goin’ to have an army left to fight with. Bloody old son of a bitch.” Abel shook his head and fell silent.

They stayed on the porch throughout the day, listening and watching the rain fall, which, like the battle, did not let up. There was still
food left, but neither was hungry. Abel complained of his arm but his eyes were clear, he looked stronger, and his face was not as drawn and haggard as it had been. For her part, Hypatia settled with her back to the wall and her legs straight out before her. She was bilious and made a conscious effort to keep her arm still for the bright, sick pain it caused her when she didn’t. She borrowed Abel’s pocket-knife, outwardly for cutting rags with which to fashion a sling for his arm, but when he was not looking she cut hashmarks crosswise over her finger as though she were snakebit.

And in the evening of that day, as light faded from the raindark clouds, Hypatia rolled her head and looked at Abel where he still sat, trying to follow a battle he could not see—that went on and on and would go on and on. “They ain’t never goin’ to stop,” she said. “Even when they come say it’s over.”

Abel nodded.

“They’ll still be goin’ at it a hundred years from now.”

“I know it.”

“What’ll you do?”

Glancing her way, Abel asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean where will you go?”

“When?” he asked. “After?”

“That’s right.” She closed her eyes and opened them again. Her lips were cool and numb and her scalp tingled. “After.”

Abel shrugged, wincing a little with the pain of it. “It’s funny, you askin’ that,” he said thoughtfully, watching a curl of mist leak from the trees to explore the air over their heads. “I never thought much about it till just a bit ago.” He leaned and spat and took a moment to examine the spittle on the ground. “Fella what done this,” he went on, nodding to his shattered elbow where he held it tight against his ribcage. “Well, he had him a letter … I had the damn thing, but I suppose it’s lost now …” He looked at Hypatia for a
moment but did not really see her for the gathering shadows. “You didn’t see nothing like a letter with all my possibles when you come ’crost me, did you?”

Hypatia shook her head and moved her legs about in front of her. Her heels rasped softly on the boards. “Too bad,” said Abel. “Too bad. I’d’ve mailed it for him. Thing like that ought not to get lost.” He shrugged again and winced again with a soft swear. “Anyway, in this letter the fella went on about going out west after the show. He wrote about the Oregon Territory and the blue Pacific.”

“The blue Pacific,” said Hypatia softly, her eyes closed, her voice soft. “That sounds nice.”

Abel nodded. “Don’t it? Letter said the landscape out there isn’t nothing like here, and that that was a good thing.” Abel looked about at the dark of the Wilderness. “And I’m inclined to agree,” he said. “I seen just about all of this part of the country I care to, I reckon, so I figure when it’s finally over, if I survive it, I’ll take a walk out that way. See what it is I’ll see.”

“Would you take me?” Hypatia asked. Her voice was a small thing, and when he heard it, Abel turned.

And then he stood as quickly as he was able and crossed to her. Pressing the palm of his good hand against her forehead, he drew it back quickly. Hypatia watched him as he swore and fussed about her, and when he took up her hand she cried out.

Abel carefully examined the wound and her hand was like a gob of sour dough; the lines, creases, and wrinkles smoothed out to become giving and moist and without character.

Abel wet his lips and swore, then swore again. He touched her shoulder and ducked his head to meet her weary eyes. “Tell me what you need,” he said. “You tell me what to do.”

Hypatia smacked her lips and smiled a small smile. She shook her head. “Answer my question,” she said.

“What?” Abel asked. “What question?”

Hypatia swallowed and panted. She closed her eyes and opened them again. “If you could, would you take me?”

“Sure,” he said quickly. “Sure I would.”

Hypatia smiled and closed her eyes again. “Liar,” she said so softly that Abel had to lean near her mouth to hear.

She was quiet for a long time, and after a while, Abel half carried, half dragged her into the shack. Night drew down around them, and it became dark. The firing to the south had not diminished. He stood for a time regarding the hearth where the fire she’d kindled had burnt down to one or two live coals. Outside it began to rain and the wind came up to set the door rattling in its frame while the remains of the rosebush in the dooryard scratched along the wall and all the trees in the Wilderness round about swayed and clashed.

Hypatia’s eyes came open, and she looked at him. “I never knew what to name him,” she said softly. “I just never did know.”

Abel made soft shushing sounds. He told her he understood and she said it would have been a fine thing to call him home to supper of a fall evening with the sun going down behind the trees and the wind coming in off the blue Pacific. And Abel told her it would have been a fine thing, indeed, and she opened her mouth to say more but did not. Abel knelt beside her, wonderingly. His hand just so upon her shoulder as though he were a clumsy usher.

After a while he reached and carefully closed her eyes, then knelt for a time with his palm upon her cheek like a blind man graving a face to memory before a parting.

In the end, he built the fire up in the hearth and surrounded the place where she lay with brush and what dry timber he could find. He said no words aloud, merely nodded after a few moments’ silence, then went about the shack one last time with a burning stick, touching flames here and there before leaving.

Abel stood outside the shack and watched it burn. By the time
the roof fell in, he realized that the firing to the south had finally stopped and that, but for the rattling of the fire, the night was quiet. The rain had stopped and the air was fresh. And when he heard the sound of cavalry coming fast up the road, Abel turned and walked down the lane to meet them.

In April, the dead-house wagon came at night and it came every morning. After breakfast yet before the day could turn fine enough to start the corpses stinking, Abel heard it coming up the sandy road from his reeking cot in the long hospital tent. A two-horse wagon driven by a pair of teamsters with faces scarved nose-to-neck like villains. After a bad night in the tents it would take them an hour to load, stacking the bodies up like cut wood, less from respect as for the way neatness would maximize their load, for the way Abel figured it, they surely would not want to make another trip in the afternoon. The drivers worked with flat, repetitious efficiency all out of proportion to their gruesome task, and if Abel propped himself up on his good elbow, he could watch them at their labor. He looked for friends amidst the stiffening limbs and thrown-back chins or salt-stiffened shocks of hair that, perhaps, he’d once helped to wash in the cold Potomac off Lookout Point where the prison camp was. If it was a hard day and he was awash in slow tides of nausea, his shattered left elbow hotly throbbing in time with his weary heart, Abel could still see the teamsters’ long shadows, made indistinct and monstrous with distance and slanting sunlight, as they flickered and moved across the stained canvas tenting with metronomic steadiness. Regardless of his angle, there was always the sound of the patient horses nickering and softly stamping in their traces and, softer still, the low grunting of the men at their work, and punctuating all this, the horrid, dry, heavy, solid smacking of falling bodies settling against each other.

This was April then, as it had been March before it, and Abel did
not know what to expect of the month save more of the same. His coughs joined a throaty chorus of moist and dry lungsounds rattling his tent, one of thirty arranged like the spokes of a wheel outside the stockade and hard by the lighthouse. The moment one of their number was carried to the dead-house to lie uncasketed upon its earthen floor, another would be laid in his place, the ticking still warm. The nurses, other prisoners furloughed from the stockade, carried the dead to their house with the same tired steadiness as the teamsters, and under the guard of Negro soldiers charged to keep them from escaping. This was April, then, with the wind brisk and freshening the air with the smell of the bay, the faint taste of brine, and that oceanic odor of iodine and decomposition that was so much better than the yellow stink of the tents. As he had been since entering the hospital, Abel was thankful that his cot was at the end of the line near the open flaps.

At April’s opening, his fever broke and his breathing eased, though his bowels still pursued some strange, twisting campaign within him that forced his knees chestward and set his teeth to chattering. A week more went by with things expelled from him that he did not recognize, for which he had no definitions or referents, and his sweats were God-awful. But one morning, with the sun slowly rising to turn the tent’s crosspieces to black lines drawn upon a surging white canvas, Abel found himself feeling tolerable. He lay back, eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the wagon recede as it went trundling back up the road with its sad cargo. Presently, the space left behind was filled with wind clashing in beach grass and the seething of sand. He could hear the calls of sailors on barges in the bay, the slap of waves against hulls, and soldiers drilling in the field out past the stables. But then the confused, staccato racket of coughing and suffering rose to sweep over all the other sounds of the world outside the camp.

“How you feeling today, Johnny Reb?”

Abel snorted awake. “Just about ready to take me a French leave,” he muttered, opening one eye to squint up at the Negro soldier standing over him. “Mornin’, Noé,” he said.

“
Afternoon
, Abel,” said Noé, his stern, dark face warming with a grin. “Let’s hear it,” he said, grinning wider.

Abel blinked, rolled his eyes theatrically. “What? Again?” he asked. “Fine, fine: How’s things today, soldier?”

Noé’s head bobbed with delight and he shifted his rifle so his right hand could describe a rising arc through the air as he said, “Bottom rail? Still up top. And listen here: Old Uncle Abe went on down to Richmond. Sat right down at Jeff Davis’s desk. This war’s about done.”

Abel blinked and looked at him, then blinked again. “You’re just tellin’ tales,” he finally said.

Noé shook his head. “They done told us ’bout it this morning.’”

Abel shrugged. “It don’t mean nothing. Not a thing. This war? It ain’t never goin’ to stop. That’s what I say. That’s what I’ve always said.” Abel shook his head and waved dismissively, wincing with pain as the shift in weight sent a spasm of pain through his wounded arm.

Noé pursed his lips and set his forage cap back on his head. “You know, that arm ain’t never goin’ to be no use to you no more,” he said.

Nodding, Abel shifted about for the comfort of it and looked down at the claw his left hand had become. “I know it,” he said. “But I’m still glad some sawbones son of a bitch didn’t lop it off. Rather have it useless than not at all.”

Noé shrugged and cocked his head. “And the flux?” he asked.

Abel sniffed. “Well, I ain’t quick-steppin’ like I was, thank the Lord.”

Noé reached out, paused for the space of half a heartbeat, then settled a brotherly palm on Abel’s shoulder. It took a conscious effort
for Abel not to stiffen, wince, or draw back. And though he did none of these things, the truth of that effort reddened him with a alien shame that he was not sure he understood while the dying johnny in the cot across the aisle snarled and spat and called him a mudsill.

Abel and Noé looked over at the soldier, who grimaced at them, showing a mouthful of gray teeth and bleeding gums.

“Old Abe’s notions ’bout charity and malice toward nobody is a hard row,” sighed Noé, shaking his head and shouldering his rifle. “I’m off,” he said. “You need for anything?”

“You want to look away for the space of time it takes me to get on down the road, I’d be obliged.”

Noé grinned again, as sudden and startling and fine as the first time Abel had ever seen a Negro smile. “Nope,” he said, and walked out of the tent.

In March, he’d spent nights wracked with cramps, watching lamp-flames waver in sooty vases of glass curved like the hips of women. Those nights were long and dark and tiresome as nights spent in sickness always are. He’d hear the Negro soldiers gathered round their campfires, speaking softly, softly singing, softly laughing beneath the star-struck dome of night like real soldiers. Like real men. And it was in March that Noé began his nightly visits to Abel’s bedside.

With a soft whisper to draw him from his inner landscape of quivering bowels and bubbling nausea, Noé would set a cool rag across Abel’s forehead, and Abel would open his mouth to let him press mashed blackberry root against his tongue. The taste of the river water Noé had used to wash it followed by the tuber’s bitter styptic.

“Why?” Abel had croaked that first time.

Crouched beside his cot, Noé had stared at him in his misery, his eyes pale in the lamplit dark, his face a shadowy cypher. The soft rustle of his shrug. “I hate you,” said Noé finally. “Ever’ goddamned one of you.”