Wilderness (7 page)

The thin cotton kept within its fiber and its weave something of the handmade smells of home and home life. Old cooking smells of buttered corn and boiled cabbage, of great bleeding flank steaks and potatoes, carrots, onions, all smothered in gravy and served on thick platters engraved with blue Chinese scenes of cherry blossoms, fog-wrapped pagodas, strange, umbrella’d maidens. He could smell fresh blueberries and cold milk. And there was, also, his mother’s smell: matronly, womanish, and as distinct as her florid signature or her sharp, cool whisper at prayertimes and candlelighting. Her scent was as though woven into the shirt and now a part of it and never to be separate from it ever. When he took it away from his face the paper crackled in the dark of the tent, and through the rip in the corner David fingered the buttons. They were carved from a wooden dowel pin, painted sky-blue by her own hand with paint gotten from who knew where or how, and sewn to the face of the shirt by strands of her own steel-colored hair for want of proper thread. His mother’s hair served as thread for his soldiering shirt, such was the strength of the Yankee blockade.

David Abernathy’s tired, starved heart fell to aching, and with one great gulp of air he pressed his face once more to the folds of paper that still held it and began a hot, rough weeping that set the rags to flapping restlessly on his thin frame.

“That’s a hell of a handkerchief,” said Abel as he stooped to crawl into the tent.

David looked up. Abel crawled over onto his own blankets like a
mud man, with his eyes red-rimmed and his stiff hair standing to. He swayed a little on his hands and knees, and after a moment looked back out the tent and spat wetly through the door. Rolling over atop his blankets across from David, he lifted his chin and asked, “What in the hell is all that, anyway?”

“Mama sent it,” David said softly. “Brother wrote a letter too.” He sniffed and ran the back of his hand under his nose. Green pain washed like a slow, gentle tide behind his eyes. “Says he figures Sherman’ll make a try for Atlanta here pretty quick,” he said absently, waving the letter through the stale half-dark.

“Let him,” said Abel, shrugging, trying to settle onto his blanket and having a difficult time of it for aching joints and cramped muscles. “I don’t give a good goddamn anymore.” He stretched and winced and finally settled onto his back, then looked over at David again. The younger man’s face was thin and pale and blank where it angled toward the mud-spattered canvas wall opposite him. The panes of his spectacles reflected nothing yet did not show his eyes.

Abel flexed his arms about, trying to work feeling down their length. “What else?” he finally asked, motioning toward the letter.

David blinked. “Old Johnston’s back in charge over there now, he says,” he answered woodenly.

Abel shook his head. “I don’t give a good goddamn who’s in charge over there, and that ain’t what I meant.” He filled his cheeks with air and blew. “I mean, what’s happened? With your homefolks?” He nodded to the letter again.

David looked up. Abel could see his eyes suddenly behind the round panes of glass as they searched out his face, lingered there a moment, then drifted off to the side once more. “Mama died,” he said softly. “Last month, he says.”

“Ah, well,” Abel said nodding. He said nothing more but shifted around atop his neatly folded blanket until he was partly comfortable. Lying on his back with his fingers laced behind his head, he let
out a long, satisfied sigh. After a time, he sniffed and said, “What’s the package?”

Again, David’s eyes went roving to settle, finally, on the paper bundle. “Give over your knife,” he said, sniffing and reaching out. Abel handed him his little knife and he pried the blade open with a dirty, broken thumbnail, then slid it under the string to cut it, refolded the knife, and passed it back.

David shook the shirt from the paper and held it up. It was, generally, the color of cold oatmeal and was chased with bright, swirling designs of scarlet, turquoise, yellow, and orange like something from a Turkish folktale, like some pasha’s bright daydream. It made Abel’s eyes swim and his head hurt so he looked instead out the open tent flap with a broad grin.

David held the shirt open before him, staring at it gravely. He studied the cloth, bright and garish even in the relative dark of the tent, then looked at Abel where Abel lay smiling and looking away studiously. David turned back to the shirt. “Jesus-by-God,” he murmured. “When I first looked, I figured she’d just used it for the collar.”

“Your mama?”

“Letter says she passed on just after she finished it.”

Abel nodded sagely. “Maybe that’s just as well,” he said.

David looked sharply at him, and Abel propped himself up on one elbow with a wince. He nodded to the shirt. “Otherwise, she might have gone on and fixed you up some pants to match,” he said.

David stared at him. Abel returned the look and held it. After a moment, they began to chuckle softly together and then both began to laugh out loud and were still laughing when Ned ducked into the tent. He was still pantsless and was grinning happily around a mouthful of wet dough.

“What in hell did you find to eat around here?” asked Abel, frowning.

“Ashcake,” said Ned around the food. There was a wet gray dollop of tooth-moistened dough clinging to his chin, and the little cake in his hand drooped with teeth marks. “Been in my pocket and I didn’t even know it,” he said, holding out the biscuit to Abel, who raised a hand palm outward and shook his head. Ned swallowed thickly, then looked over at David where he sat holding the shirt. Ned’s eyes widened in his moon face, and his gullet jerked once then twice. “Well,” he said, admiringly. “Well, ain’t that a pretty thing?” His voice was soft with wonder and he blinked again, an expression not just of his eyes but of his whole face. “We all gettin’ new uniforms?” he asked hopefully.

“Just old Abernathy here,” said Abel. The other two looked at him and he nodded. “That there shirt makes it official,” he said. “Our boy’s done gone into politics.” Ned stared at him, and David’s eyes narrowed. Abel looked at Ned. “He just got word. He’s been called to Queen Mab’s Court. That there’s his uniform of office.”

“Jesus, Abel,” said David, grinning and shaking his head.

Ned looked back and forth between them, trying to decide, trying to judge them by their expressions. His lips moved soundlessly and his brow wrinkled as though he was trying to recall some fact or bit of trivia to prove or disprove Abel’s statement. After a few moments of this he finally pursed his lips and nodded. “That’s off crost over the ocean and all, ain’t it?”

Abel and David began laughing again, long and loud and uproarious. Ned looked back and forth between them then shook his head disgustedly and ducked to leave the tent. Abel called after him to put some damn pants on before he caught a chill, and Ned waved a hand as he stepped out.

“What was it, anyway?” Abel finally asked, curling a forefinger to the corner of one eye. “Curtains?”

“You think my mama’d keep curtains this damned ugly?” asked
David, lifting up the shirt again. “No sir. This here was the table-cloth.”

Abel set in laughing again, and David removed his spectacles, pinched his temples between thumb and middle finger. “It’s been in the family for years,” he said, gasping with mirth and pain. “Belonged to my grandmother before my mama got it.” He filled and emptied his cheeks with air. On the other side of the tent, Abel twisted around on his blankets as laughter set his sore muscles to protesting, which made him laugh all the harder, the weary lines around his eyes deepening as he thrashed about. David looked at him. “When I was just a little chap,” he managed haltingly, “I got sick all over it.”

Their laughter rose then fell and gradually tapered away. David rubbed the bridge of his nose and knuckled his eyes while Abel sat up, dragged the back of his hand over his mouth, and massaged his wrists where they were rope-burnt. He didn’t want to look at his feet or ankles just yet, so he filled his lungs with air, blew, then looked over at David. “You got the headache again?”

David nodded wearily, lifting his hand and letting it fall again. After a moment, he wrapped his spectacles back around his face, careful to tuck the arms in behind his ears. He opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again and bent his head to listen, his expression suddenly sharp and alert.

“What?” asked Abel.

David raised his hand again and stared off into the middle distance. Then he got up onto his knees, stripped the old, ruined shirt from his body, and pulled on the new one. The cloth was stiff and uncomfortable, and he rolled his shoulders about to settle into it. “Something’s happening,” he said. “I reckon we’ll be moving out.”

Abel opened his mouth. “How the hell …” But before he could finish, he heard the long roll sounding out on the camp intersections. Outside, Ned whooped with shock and excitement.

Abel watched as David worked the sky blue buttons. He shook his head wonderingly. “You’re really going to wear it?”

David ignored him. “Maybe this’ll be it this time,” he said. He looked over at Abel, where he still lounged on his blanket. “You think? Maybe they’ll give it up.”

“Shit,” said Abel, shaking his head and waving a dismissive hand through the air. “They got it going good, now. I don’t reckon they’d stop it even if they knew how.” He looked hard at David, then finally grinned tiredly. “Which means, you want to wear that damned thing, you better keep your ass down.”

Chapter Three

Inarticulate Hearts

1899

Abel Truman crossed the river half a mile inland where the narrow channel was bridged by a rotting nurse log. Green saplings stood in ordered rows along its surface as though planted so, and the old man was careful in crossing not to tread upon them. For its part, the dog, when it caught up, crossed through the water in three long bounds to stand dripping and panting on the opposite side where Abel stood watching. “I don’t know what you’re grinnin’ about,” the old man told it. “You’ll be fending for your own damned self.”

They cut back through the forest to the ocean. Before leaving the brown river behind to start south along the beach, Abel paused to look back at his little shack. His home for twenty years. He could hear the wind whistling softly through the loose planking. Ashes stirred in the fire pit. The empty rocker moved soundless in the wind as though his ghost had returned already.

He carried his rifle and walking stick, and an old blanket slung
soldier-style from left shoulder to right hip. He wore a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low on his forehead and a sharp knife at his belt. A few biscuits, a little rubber-stoppered bottle half full with sugar, and another full of salt lay wrapped in a cloth and tucked into his haversack along with Glenn Makers’s almanac wrapped in a good India rubber ground cloth. In his pocket was the bullet Hypatia had cut from his arm all those years ago and the crucifix hung from its cord near his heart.

Abel kept his eyes down as he walked, and he breathed evenly. A fit old man, he tried not to think of all the miles ahead of him—all the rolling country filled with people and tilled fields and painted houses, rich barns, cities of vast industry. Roads and lanes and byways and rivers and forests uncountable. He tried not to think of what he might find beyond the mountains. Instead, he conjured images of his long-dead wife, her grave site and their child’s. After a time of walking, Abel put all this away from him and concentrated on his feet and the immediate world around him.

Thick mist clung to the forest at his left, and a cool wind slowly tattered it. The tide lay far to sea and the sand was crossed and re-crossed with the rolling, wheel-like tracks of hermit crabs and the precise, pencil-thin prints of oystercatchers. The smell of beached kelp and broken shells, of damp sand that had never been dry and rock pools astir with tiny fishes, was as heavy as the sound of crashing surf was constant. And wind never-ending. Abel walked the day long and in the evening, when there was still yet light, made his camp on a narrow shelf of land that was protected on three sides by huge, wind-scarred boulders and on the fourth by the ocean itself. For a time, he squatted to watch the sun sink and set long fingers of cloud orange and red against the sparking dark.

It was warm with no rain and little wind, and he knew this place well enough not to have need or want of fire. Exploring a little around the stones in the fading light, Abel found small petroglyphs
carved here and there upon their ancient surfaces. Old, old fashionings of whales stretched leaping from waves of granite. Crude human faces with mouths yawning in terror, shock, outrage, grief, and joy. Countless luck-bringing clamshells scratched into the stones, and little manlike figures crouched and ran and hunted through the cold, gray rock. All of it quiet evidence of long-dead tribes who in ages past whaled these waters, hunted these forests, carved these stones, and who were now as lost as the individual stories told by these cold, flat scratchings.

The wind rose with the tide and came moaning over the rocks to fill with sound the pauses between the ceaseless slap of waves on sea stacks and the quiet, bubbling rush of tidal pools filling and emptying and filling again. The wind set the old man’s sleeves to flapping. He put his good palm against the cold rock face and traced with his forefinger the chiseled grooves of a leaping orca, wondering what strength the act of carving had imparted to the whaler. Abel squatted beside the stone as the sun went down, wondering what he might carve had he time and strength. What fortune such creation might bring. Would he trust his heart’s own desire to cold rock? Or some other thing whose shape would remain unclear until the carving was complete and that would endure until the breaking of the earth? Finally Abel stood and picked his way back down to his campsite.

The sun sank beyond the quivering rim of the ocean. Sheets of coppery light trembled up the sky to fix the sea stacks to their silhouettes like lonesome picket guards beyond the pale of the camp-fire. Abel settled down with his back against a stone and wrapped his blanket around his legs. He breathed the good, tart scent of India rubber. After a time, the dog came up the beach like a flake of shadow split from the darker night that gathered in the forest behind them. It stood in the sand downwind of him and swung its head this way and that to collect his scent, then, finding it, came up onto the shelf and sat nearby. Abel smelled the dog’s supper on its breath—the thick
scent of heat and blood. “What did you get?” he asked it. “You get yourself a little gull?”