Wilderness (4 page)

The first thing he took from it was the Union bullet she had cut from his arm. Its tip was splayed and flattened, and by certain lights you could still see a fine craze where the fibers of his shattered capitulum had engraved the metal while it was still fast and hot. Abel sniffed again and put it in his pocket, then took from the box a little crucifix fashioned from a piece of bone or something like bone. Abel never knew exactly what it was. There was an old bloodstain on the transom, faded now to the color of tree bark that took the shape of a bird wing mid-flight. David Abernathy had died holding the crucifix aloft that day in the Wilderness. How dark the mouth of the cannon. Abel shuddered.

He took a deep breath. Let it out. He held the cross in his palm as though to judge its value, weighing it in the manner of a prospector with a gold-flecked stone who wonders if this be true gold or something false and therefore foolish. The cross hung from a salt-wearied leather thong, and Abel, having reached a careful decision, slipped it around his neck and turned back to the box.

He lifted from it a brass picture frame no bigger than his palm with a hinged brass cover set with a steel Maltese cross. It was, on the whole, as beaten and weather-scoured and tired-looking as the old man’s face, his hands, his heart. He opened it carefully and looked upon the tintype within. The frame joints had gone green with age; the thin glass cracked from side to side and turned a smoky yellow, glooming the image behind. But it was all right; the old man did not need to see their faces anymore for he knew them well by his heart’s own photogravure.

There hung behind them, mother and child, a painted canvas lush with green valleys and white waterfalls, blue rivers, high clouds. In the far distance, snowy mountains purple under the sun. All this detail reduced to a general, brown fogginess that obscured even their faces and clothes where they sat posed upon an ornate, high-backed settee placed before the backdrop. Their dressfronts starched and their skirts arranged just so about their crossed and folded legs. The mother held the daughter’s hand, and their free hands were composed precisely on the armrests. Their faces serious as befitting a moment of high gravity—neither smiled but for their eyes, and the girl was the softened echo of her mother and her mother so very beautiful. In all, a proper keepsake for a soldier gone to war to help him dream of home and hearth, and indeed the Union boy who’d shot Abel wore it on a chain near his heart when Abel found it. And there were long times and many afterward that Abel stared upon the tintype and fancied there his own wife’s face, his own daughter’s, had they lived and posed thusly for him.

As it often did these past months, the old man’s heart fell to beating all wrong. A scrim of sweat broke upon his forehead and his breath whistled in his chest. He shut the frame carefully and reached to grip his knee with his right hand as he leaned to better breathe. He began to cough, hot and harsh and sick and foul tasting, and he coughed a long time. When it was done, Abel spat out the door into
the dark so he would not see its color. After he felt right again, and before he could reconsider, he opened the frame once more, pried out the glass, then stepped toward the fire and turned the tintype out into the flames. He watched the bleary image blacken and after a while tossed the frame itself upon the coals. The dog watched him, and he lifted his chin. “It was a poor thing to thieve a thing like that,” he said softly.

Abel stood beside the fire and watched the ocean move constantly, restlessly, in the outer dark. He looked at the stars that glistened hard and cold through gaps in the clouds and at the hazy moon behind. He looked at the dog where it lay sleeping by the snapping fire. Older now, it tired easily and slept hard, its long legs moving restlessly as it gave soft little puppy-barks from its dreams. Abel watched it for a time, then shed his clothes and stood naked, pale and ghostly in the shadows.

He started across the wrecked driftwood toward the sand, picking his way along carefully. The tide seethed and rattled along the shore. It sprayed and echoed on the stones in the deeper waters and slapped against itself still farther out, under the moon as it moved beyond the clouds, where men could not dwell nor prosper. Beds of kelp, like inky stains upon the general darkness, bobbed on the swells while mounds of it, beached days past, lay quietly afester with night-becalmed sand fleas near the driftwood bulwarks. Glancing to the little river that cut sharply and dark through the sand, Abel saw the largest wolf he’d ever seen, standing in the current watching him.

The old man stood stock-still. The wolf stared and did not move. Silver, moon-struck water fell from its underjaw and its hackles were raised in a dark ridge somehow reminiscent of other predators, saurian and long-extinct. They were silent together in their separate places on the shore—the old man and the wolf—and when it finally stepped from the river and turned to lope back into the forest, Abel
saw the moonlight glint hard and fast off a crude, handmade collar round its neck and wondered how much dog was in it.

“I’ll be damned,” he said softly, thinking maybe he was or would be. “I’ll be goddamned.” Then he turned back toward the ocean and walked out into it.

Abel caught his breath as the cold, cold water closed around his bare thighs. He looked down the lean, pale line of his body and felt the ache throb freshly in his ruined elbow and down his forearm to the center of his palm as though the old, violent metal had spread corrosion to those places. The dark water swallowed whole his lower half while moonlight reflected his torso back, pinning and twinning him upon the water as though he faced there some pale, wavering alternate self. A doppelgänger with a history, perhaps, separate from his own but that had been fetched, after all, to the very same place, the very same ending. With all the same hurts and sorrows and ill-healed wounds. “And this is what you get,” said Abel, panting and struggling with the cold. “This is what you get.”

He breathed deeply, shudderingly. The sharp stones beneath his naked feet made him wish he had worn his boots. The old bits of metal still within him cooled further still in the cold water and set ice points of pain through the meat of his muscles, along the curved piping of his bones. Setting his lips together, he started forward once more with purpose and determination as though he had become, one last time, the soldier of his youth. But no bands played and no banners waved and no comrades marched beside him, for all had died long ago. The only thing to urge him onward was, perhaps, a wolf watching from the deep of the forest behind him. Abel walked until he was a head upon the waves and the waves broke over him. He spat salt and his eyes stung and streamed but he did not weep.

And then he floated. His feet no longer touched stone or sand and his head was no longer exposed to the moon and the night. The old
soldier closed his eyes and floated between earth and air with the cold water touching every part of him. He shut his eyes, tasted the sharp flavor of ocean salt and imagined it seeping into him, claiming him back—his poor, ragged flesh—to leave behind bleached and knuckled bones, bits of rusted metal, forever knocking along the floor of the sea.

Beside the fire, the dog raised its head. It stood slowly, stretching and yawning and twisting about to bite after its own haunches where the fur was matted and tangled. Wandering down to the water, it climbed stiffly over the driftwood to sniff the old man’s tracks in the sand. And then it smelled another thing—a wild dog-shaped scent beside the river—and whined and paced and turned about a moment with indecision before continuing down toward the sea. And when it came upon the old man where he lay, the dog whined again and licked his face. A wave surged up around them and pushed the old man’s body through the sand and the dog danced up out of the cold water, then came sniffing back after it had receded. It nuzzled the old man’s neck and licked his ear and the old man began to cough. He sputtered and coughed and sat up with his eyes red and his nose running. After a moment, he leaned to vomit. The saltwater left the back of his throat raw and he sneezed a thick clot of bloody snot into his palm that he wiped off on the sand.

Abel Truman sat staring at the water, trying to will warmth back into his limbs while the dog licked salt from his crooked arm. He looked at it, and then stood. “You just shut up,” he said. “Bet if you was to try it, it’d throw you back too.” Then he turned to make his slow way back to the shack, where the fire still burned up out of its little stone ring while, for its part, the dog paused beside the little river to stare across it at a dark patch of disturbed sand and the tracks that led from it into the forest. It bristled and growled softly until Abel called to it from beside the fire, “Get over here, you old cuss,”
he said. “Don’t you know there’s a wolf about?” The dog huffed its indignation twice, then turned to join the old man in his shack.

That night the old man dreamed a dream terrifying and strange. Buried without a coffin, he clawed the suffocating earth and broke to air with his mouth full of dirt. Around him, campfires burned on a vast and featureless plain. The feminine curve of hills in dark silhouette marked the horizon and there were fires there too, and stars in the sky. The very air was dark as though the dark had become a part of it and it was cold. White flames that shed no heat flapped on twisted black braids of wood.

And there were men that he knew gathered in that place with their hands stretched flameward. Taylor there. And old Hoke who lost his leg to the hip at the base of Culp’s Hill and who died in the ambulance two days later. David Abernathy and old Joe and Gully Coleman and Scripture Lewis. Ned was there, breaking Abel’s heart forever. And countless others known to him and not. Dark crowds gathered around tiny fires. Their breath smoked palely and all were utterly silent, standing like sentinels or crouching apelike in the glassy cold.

Abel called but no one turned. He stood apart from them and when he stumbled forward he woke with his face wet and his thin blanket bunched up around his neck. He breathed into the dark. After a while he flung an arm out from the cot and called the dog to him and it rose stiffly and came.

The next morning, the old man left the shack while the dog stood beside the firepit with its head raised to sniff the morning breezes. It pawed the ground, turned three tight circles, and settled down in its usual place near where the warmth of the fire should have been.

The old man’s steps were loud upon the upriver trail, and the dog’s ears stood half cocked with listening. It waited a long time,
twice longer than it knew it should take the old man to make his toilet and return. In the distance, it could hear him walking on the forest paths and swearing and coughing up great quantities of phlegm, as was his morning custom. After a time, the dog realized the old man had crossed over the river into the shade of the trees beyond. It stood quickly, shook itself, and sniffed the air once more before it bent its nose to the soil to find the old man’s scent upon the earth and follow.

Chapter Two

Hell on Clothes

1864

David Abernathy had never had much luck with clothing during the war, and the night he ripped his last good shirt he was walking picket along the Confederate works south of the Rapidan River. He was cold and he was wet and it was well past midnight when all good, God-fearing folk should be to bed when he leaned his rifle against the stout wall of packed earth and felled timber and stepped into the dark brush to piss. His water streamed from him with hot force that set the moss to steaming. When he finished, David crouched in the lee of the low wall where the wind coming off the river was less. Raising hands to face, he blew warmth into the cold cup of his palms.

Sneezing suddenly, he groaned and sniffed it back. His sinuses rattled and he winced as the deep, tight ache seeped through his face. A dull, bottle-green throb that sometimes made him stagger with nausea, sometimes drove him to weary vomiting, the sick headaches
had become his constant companions over the long winter. Because of them and because of the everyday privations of war and warring, his idle daydreams were of sun, warmth, food, and the smoky brown taste of real coffee drunk from delicate china cups on some wide porch somewhere where the sounds and sights of war did not come. He ached for parlor rooms with overstuffed chairs and fine-bred young ladies in crisp, clean dresses. The smell of books on shelves in a study and the feel of real writing paper under his fingers, anything but soldiering and headaches.

David blinked hard and blinked again. He removed his spectacles to chase rain from the corners of his eyes with his thumbtips. Standing, he stretched his arms over his head and laced his fingers as if to push back the dark. He stood that way for a long time, tensed as a diver, regarding the depth of the night as though it was the sea.

The old moon that night had run to dark, and the new had not yet come. And still the night was bright and wet and silvery with an exaltation of stars all shimmering brightly in the sky. The very air was electric, all acrackle with the residuum of yesterday’s storm. David stood listening to the creaking of the dark trees beneath the cold wind and the constant whispering rush of the river as if it was all a soft music played for his delight alone. He lowered his arms and pushed his hands into his trouser pockets to watch clouds race amongst the stars like funeral bunting on some dark and solemn train traveling slowly westward.

Standing in the gloom, David wondered if the others on picket that night, ranged along the Rapidan’s south bank, had such thoughts as his. He wondered if they thought to listen to music such as he heard, such as was orchestrated by the cold wind.

Yesterday’s storm had swept in from the north and the west and had covered the Army of Northern Virginia in its camps with a ferocious demonstration of wet sound. Back at the Second Corps camps near
Morton Hall, tents had been blown off their pegs like strange, outsize birds taken to awkward flight. Sucked up on the wind, they had landed, finally, torn and mud-fouled in the shuddering, windwracked brush. Men stampeded this way and that down the narrow, muddy camp streets chasing their meager possessions—their hand-carved pipes, their toothbrushes and sewing thread and housewives. White flashes of lightning and tremendous crashes of thunder lit and shook them, flashing ill-shaped shadows on the wet earth, then echoing them, gone again as though they’d never been.