Wilderness (6 page)

Abel gentled the dog down in the V of the roots. His face was wet. His hands trembled, and he swore softly to himself for being such a fool. He looked at the dog. “I’m so tired,” he told it. “I get so goddamned tired.” He looked at the dog where it lay in the moss and stroked its cheek with the backs of his fingers. He could smell its wet fur on the close, electric air, and he knelt beside it in the dripping wet, talking to it, telling it things he’d kept quiet within himself for a long time. Finally, Abel wiped his face with one hand and touched the dog’s broad chest with the other, and it took a great, deep breath and reared up under his palm.

And then it was gone—running fast through the storm again, through the dark of the woods and away, leaving Abel wide-eyed with one hand still outstretched and the fingers of the other lightly touching his lips.

When he returned to camp, the storm was in the process of blowing itself out and there were three officers gathered around O. W., studying his absurdly bandaged face and staring grimly at Abel as he approached. They passed sentence quickly and efficiently and did not even spare a man to guard him after he’d been bound, since rumor was they would be marching soon and there was much to do. And Abel did not speak out against it. He harbored no ill-will against O. W. and shook the man’s hand as they led him to the intersection at the far edge of camp, where no one came save Ned, who only paced nervously about in the underbrush beside the ford road until his feet were fouled with mud. Ned did not say much, just paced and sucked his teeth, and when he did raise his voice it was not above a whisper and was lost on the wind. After a while he went away and did not come back until after the storm had moved off.

Crouching in the wet brush, Ned waited until he was sure no one was about, then scuttled forward with his canteen and tilted it against Abel’s mouth, wetting the rag and loosening axle grease and who knew what else from its folds. Thick and foul against the back of his throat, it left a wash of grit on his teeth that set Abel to choking and sputtering against the rag. Which Ned took as a sign Abel wanted more, so he emptied the remainder of the canteen over his face. There was no way to tell the boy to stop or make him understand, so all Abel could do was swallow grimly and retch against the cloth.

Ned stayed an hour. He wept a little to see Abel bound so and spoke to him of nothing at all before, finally, the supper fires were kindled away at camp and he wandered off toward their pale light. Abel watched him go, then closed his eyes. With Ned gone, he could keep his eyes closed and think of nothing and be alone. But no faster
had he shut himself from the world than the havoc of memory intruded and he was dreaming of his dead child, his dead wife.

He saw, once more, sky blue paint splashed upon the walls from one end of the house to other. As though Elizabeth would mark her grief the way an animal marks its territory and then dwell forever within that place. It was a month after the child died (and here and suddenly a dream within the dream, a sunshine-bright image of the baby falling falling falling from his weak shocked hand, from the cooled blanket in which she’d died sometime in the night before Abel woke and lifted then dropped her in shock to see her face as it tumbled tumbled tumbled to the hard puncheon floor where the sound of thin bone against wood was such he felt it in his heart—where it echoed still—and Elizabeth who came into the room and saw, who called the doctor, who came, who told them the child had died in the night and said, “But look, here, it’s as though her head’s been struck,” then looked at Abel with expectation and with blame, who looked at his wife who looked back to him with eyes clouded with bottomless hurt, with infinite blame and there, just there, something more …), and it was her idea, after rising from her sickbed, to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls and sashes. To brighten their home as though in such small ways they could begin their accepting and change by degrees the house that housed their thoughts and memories of that tiny death. Thus the soft blue paint for the sashes, to match the blue of the door, and the white for the walls. Abel brought the paint home from the mercantile one evening, and left it with her the next morning when he walked the two miles back to clerk at the store.

She’d begun with a single brush, and when he came home in the afternoon the brush was soaked in blue and streaked, faintly, with red and fouled in the dust of the lane leading to the broad covered porch. No smoke rose from the chimney. There was no sound other than the watery pulse of the lake beyond the woodshed. Perhaps
birds called that afternoon. Perhaps frogs sang to an early-risen moon and perhaps the wind set the green world murmuring, but Abel heard nothing but the lake lapping at the shore as though it was a conscious thing and hungry, and he heard it in his dreams ever after.

He found her on the floor beside the cradle with the paint can upended on the floor, the paint thrown in broad splashes against the walls and ceiling. His wife, Elizabeth, crouched naked and alone in a shallow pool of it as though huddled against a backdrop of sky. Her face was turned from him, hidden by her hair. Even then he did not cry out in astonishment, grief, but only stared in dumb amazement before crouching quickly to brush feebly at her legs as though he could sweep the paint from her with a wave of his palm. It was warm from her heat. It slicked his hands, felt heavy on his skin, as if his skin could not breathe. Abel panted. He looked out the window to a daytime moon hanging pale and cool above the trees. He looked at it a long time, fixing it in his mind so that later he would be able to remember clearly, at least, one thing. He did not speak and he did not tremble because he came to the quick realization that this thing, this scene, was only one in a long and mighty chain of events he felt rather than saw stretching so far along the arc of his life he figured the end must meet itself somewhere again to forge a perfect circle of misfortune. A single moment, this. A single event and not even the worst. A little paint. They could stand that.

So Abel Truman feebly brushed sky blue paint from his wife’s bare legs and said her name and when she turned to him he reared up, slipped in the paint and fell back, then reared up again. There was paint smeared across Elizabeth’s face and there was no way to tell how much she’d drunk. As he stepped back, Abel kicked over the second can, the white paint, and the lid came open. It spilled, thick and slow, into the blue, running it cold and paler than a dead child’s face.

She began laughing then. Rocking back and forth on her hard, red heels with her head thrown back and her white, smooth neck exposed. She shook and was utterly silent. Her square, mannish face stood transfigured with grief-dumbed mirth. Abel said her name. He said it again and again and Elizabeth hushed and turned slowly toward him.

He ran. Abel remembered running, nothing else. He must have run back to town through the mill smoke and sawdust and setting springtime sun where someone must have fetched the doctor and the constable. He must have told them about her, perhaps even led them back to her, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember any of it clearly, nor could he remember confessing to dropping the child or the doctor assuring him the child had been dead well before then. Abel had stopped remembering when he saw what she’d done to herself and he didn’t begin again until First Manassas when he stood on Henry House Hill, watching them come in all their gleaming color and glory. Everything between had been a blur of begging, wandering, of lying in drink. But Abel knew all the while that his wife had died not from grief or madness but from hate. Hate for him and what he had done, and Abel knew her hate was such she’d tried to cover it, then douse it, with paint.

He remembered all this, bound and dreaming there beside the intersection. He remembered thinking before he saw her face that they could bear a little paint. That they could stand it. But it was more than them alone and it was more than paint and it could not be borne. It could not be set right. Not by him and not by her and not by them together. In the end it was the vast, bottomless silence that could not be filled with any sound save rifle fire, save cannon. It was the teapot thrown across the room in outraged frustration and desperate sorrow that could not do what paint or a bullet could. It was scalding water on a puncheon floor when he had found a little spot of blood that he could not clean and that she had found anyway
and tried to cover with paint. But it wasn’t paint that was needed. Abel wandered for years not knowing what it was and only realized on the Plains of Manassas what she knew all along: that what was wanted, after all, was fire.

May 4

That morning, on his long, weary way back to camp from picket duty, David Abernathy saw Abel Truman still lying bound and gagged in the mud beside the intersection. His tent-mate had been there for a full day now, and David wondered how much longer they’d leave him. He stood shivering in his torn, wet clothing, trying to decide what to do. O. W. was an ass of a man, and having decided that, David took his knife out and started forward until Abel caught his eye and in so doing warned him off. David knew him well and could tell how it was with him by the lines about his eyes and the set of his chin beneath the filthy beard and the filthier rag. David nodded and put the knife away and Abel closed his eyes, then slowly opened them again. David passed on toward camp.

He found Ned sitting pantsless on a low, sawn-off stump before their common tent, sewing a patch onto the knee of his weather-colored trousers. His bare legs were pink and grimy in the morning light, and as David approached, he looked up blinking. Ned stood and carefully set his sewing down on the stump, touching and smoothing the cloth lightly with the flat of his hand and looking at it there a moment in the careful, fascinated way he did all things.

“Ain’t it a pretty mornin’?” Ned asked, waving his hands through the light. “You can’t hardly tell no more it rained at all.”

“You weren’t stuck out in it all night,” David said, stacking his rifle with the others, Ned’s and Abel’s and a few more, off away from the fire. “You can tell.”

Ned licked his lips then pursed them and looked back down the street toward the thicker woods. “Abel still out yonder?” he asked.

David nodded. Ned had kept their fire going and he crouched near it to hold his hands toward the flames. Closing his eyes, he felt the skin slacken, begin to itch as alien warmth seeped in.

“I told him he shouldn’t start in with O-Dub,” said Ned. “Dog or no dog, and that man hates a dog anyways. O-Dub.” He looked over at David sadly. “I told him he shouldn’t ought to drink like that neither. Path’ll lead him straight away from the Lord in no time.” Ned sniffed and nodded forcefully to himself, then stood looking at David as he straightened from the fire and began cleaning the panes of his spectacles on his decaying shirttail. “I took him water last night while you was out on picket,” Ned went on. “Way he looked at me, ’minded me of my daddy.” The boy stared thoughtfully into the middle distance where dark trees hoarded shadows and stood shivering in a cool morning breeze.

David smelled tobacco. Somewhere, distantly, breakfasts cooking. Ned’s small fire snapped and growled quietly, and David bent over it again as Ned settled back down to his sewing. After a few minutes silent work he looked up blinking. “There was mail come yesterday,” he said. “You was already out when they called you up, so I went on and took it in for you. Little package what I put on your blanket.”

David took a quick breath. With the toe of his split-soled shoe he moved a soot-blacked pebble back and forth through the dirt. “Ned,” he said softly. “Did you see where it came from?”

Ned looked at him, his hairless face round and vacant. He wet his lips and worked them around. “I can’t make words out,” he said, lowering his eyes. “You know that.”

“I thought Abel was showing you.”

Ned looked back up at him, grinning. “That’s right,” he said, his head bobbing, eyes far away. “I can print my name now and read it back, even if it’s someone else what writes it.”

David sighed and nodded. “You say it’s in the tent?”

“What’s that?”

“My mail. The package.”

Ned grinned again. “That’s right. Come in yesterday. I put it in on your blanket. Come from your homefolks, I reckon.”

The day was warming as the sun climbed, and David grinned and shook his head. “All right, Neddy,” he said, unbuttoning his coat and turning toward his tent. “You need anything, yell. Otherwise, I’m going to rest up a little.”

The package lay in David’s corner of the tent atop the messy folds of his moth-chewed blanket. Even in the dim light, he could tell his brother’s hand. He sat on the ground beside it. After a few moments, he reached out and touched the brown paper wrapping with his fingertips. A loud crackling under his cold, unsteady palm. David sat for a long time just lightly touching the paper. Finally he picked it up, eased the string to one side, and tore the paper on one corner to look inside.

When he saw the new shirt he began to laugh, but his laughter was silent, and when it was finished it left him gasping for air. Right away, he recognized the material she’d used, and in that moment of recognition he thought his heart would surely break. Would doubtlessly cease beating. David Abernathy shut his eyes and kept them closed for one long moment with the deep, green glass pain jangling fast through his temples. A quick, dark solitude behind thin panes of flesh. When his heart did not stop or fall apart, when it kept to its old, tired schedule, David wondered idly if there was anything at all left that could shock a pause into the rhythm of his blood save fire, cannon, gore.

There was a letter inside—a folded square of pale blue paper that he eased out without opening the package further because he was not yet ready for that. Pursing his lips, he read the letter slowly for his brother’s poor penmanship and worse spelling. Halfway through, the hand that held the paper began to shake, and the one that still
touched the package balled into a white fist that squeezed and relaxed and squeezed and relaxed again like a weary bone-and-muscle heart. When he reached the postscript recounting rumors of Sherman’s route through Georgia, David set the letter aside. He lifted the package with both hands as though it was a holy relic and pressed it hard against his face to breathe once more and finally his mother’s scent captured in the cloth.