Wilderness Run (11 page)

“You looked beautiful up there,” her mother said quietly. “I wish you could have finished.”

“Yes,” Bel said, and walked toward her cousins, Lucia and Anne, who had burst into happy tears and were being comforted by Morey Aldridge. Lucia smiled and took his handkerchief to dry her eyes, her fist hardening around it as if she might never let go of the snowy cloth. “We're so lucky,” she said to Bel when she approached, and Bel nodded solemnly, knowing it was true, that they might have found out that very afternoon that they had lost Laurence.

“We're so lucky,” Anne echoed. “I was dreading having to go up there, and now I think Mrs. Ellsley has entirely forgotten.”

“We're done with all that,” Lucia said with her beautiful laugh. She looked defiantly at Morey Aldridge, who responded by giving her a grim smile and taking the opportunity to touch her arm. “We're ‘finished,'” she added. “We're women now.”

July 1861–September 1862

Chapter Twelve

After a few days of marching and waiting for orders from a soon-to-be replaced General McDowell, Davey set the company to building a new camp outside Washington. As they dug latrines and square holes for their quarters, news came from Sergeant Hamilton, who had been sent back as part of a large detail to gather the dead from the battlefield. Pike's body had not been found. He was officially counted as missing, assumed dead.

Hearing this, Gilbert hounded Laurence for more details, but Laurence would reveal nothing else. He couldn't explain about the other soldier now because it would sound like an excuse. “I found him by the river,” he said over and over, “and then he died.” Gilbert finally gave up, but in the meantime, Laurence discovered that his companions had grown clumsy around him with their shovels, sometimes casting dirt toward his lowered face, or jabbing his feet with the blade itself, never apologizing before they turned away. Red ants appeared in his bedroll, and his canteen was often emptied surreptitiously.

One night after the building of the camp was nearly done, a high, razoring sound filled the air. The soldiers looked up from their fires, to see Laurence prop his book against his ribs and begin to tear. White leaves fell to the ground around him. They were ankle-deep when Gilbert, hard-faced, grabbed a page and began to read aloud. “‘Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.'” He threw the page into the fire. A flame speared up the middle of the paper, ghosting it black.

Laurence paused in his tearing and peered at the others. His blond hair had lightened to a feathery gold and it hung in his eyes as he crouched down among the torn pages and began to collate small piles, doling them out to different members in the regiment. The men who could not read handed the pages to their friends, who whispered over the text, cruelly at first, as if they thought Laurence was trying to make amends. He went back to ripping, but he heard the verses rising from their awkward mouths.

“‘Loaf with me on the grass … loose the stop from your throat.'”

“‘Urge and urge and urge, always the procraint urge of the world'—whatever the hell that means. What the hell do you think it means, Loomis?”

“‘What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children?'”

Laurence tore until there was nothing left except the empty covers and the frontispiece, where the author lounged, his undershirt showing. These he shoved in his haversack, next to the letters from home.

“Say, this ain't half-bad,” said Alfred Loomis, the tall soldier who had spoken up first about Pike after Bull Run. He stroked his heavy black beard. “Listen to this: ‘I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning. You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me—'”

“No wonder you couldn't put it down at night, Lindsey,” said Woodard, his tone nasal, judging, although Laurence had never told of his comrade's cowardice at Bull Run. “It was a dirty book.”

“It wasn't a dirty book,” Laurence said in a low voice.

Gilbert grunted and inched closer to the fire, poking the last of his verse to ash.

“What is it, then?” Addison's voice rang out. He was watching Laurence curiously, his pages propped on his knees, unread.

Instead of answering him, Laurence swept the remaining paper into his arms and rose to walk toward the creek that ran near their camp. The pages looked like a white bird mashed against his chest.

“Read some more, Loomis,” urged Woodard as Laurence crossed out of the firelight.

“All right.” Loomis gave his audience a twinkling glance. “We had the head on the hips part, and now we get: ‘And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart.'” He stopped and tugged at his whiskers.

“Read the rest,” said Gilbert, his eyes flicking to Addison, who stood up and followed Laurence.

“It ain't so great after that,” mused Loomis. “‘And reached until you felt my beard, and reached until you held my heart,'” he finished lamely. “It goes on, but the good part's over.”

“I don't care,” raged Gilbert. He lurched up and stood over the other man. A light wind flattened his shirt over his ribs. “I said, read the rest.”

“All right,” Loomis said. “It's long, though:

“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all men ever born are also my brothers … and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love;

And limitless are leaves stiff and drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.”

“All right,” said Gilbert, echoing Loomis's pet phrase. “Now burn it.”

“No.”

Laurence heard the refusal as he strode toward the creek. He stared at the stars leaking through the sieve of night.

“Who does he think he is, saying things like that? It ain't Christian, talking about ants and people like they're worth the same.” Gilbert's rant pierced the air, making Laurence smile a little to himself. The pages rustled as he pressed them closer to his chest, and he did not hear Addison following him until the other man called his name.

“Lindsey. Where you going?”

“To the creek,” Laurence said.

“Why?”

“I can't read it anymore—” He stopped, his throat closing.

“What really happened by the river that day?” Addison was a blue shape in the dark behind him. “If you just told, they'd stop.” He paused. “You were soaked to the skin. I remember.”

Laurence reached the cluster of bushes that guarded the creek and pushed through. The pages glowed in the moonlight as he knelt down and scattered them on the water. Some sank right away, dragged down by their corners. Others floated on the black current like shavings of starlight. Somewhere, in the rivers of Virginia, a boy's body tossed against the silt, crossed by fish and rain. Every day, another piece of him drifted away.

“Pike was almost dead when I found him,” Laurence said wearily. “He would have died no matter what I did.”

“What did you do?” Addison was above him now, his face framed by thorns. Laurence shook his head and began to tell about wanting to save Pike and the other soldier and how he had almost lost his own life. When he finished, all the pages had sunk or drifted past the oxbow's curve and out of sight. His fingers felt chapped, and he stuck them in the warm water, feeling it slide through his fingers.

“If you had only told me then,” said Addison in a voice thick with grief.

“Then what?” said Laurence. “He'd still be dead. That's what they don't understand.”

As he stood up, Laurence slipped on the mud and had to grab Addison's sleeve. The new blue uniform was coarse and stiff. “No matter what I said, they'd both be dead,” he added.

“You're right,” Addison admitted after a moment. He turned his back on Laurence and pushed out of the brush, holding the branches so they did not slap his companion.

“Sometimes you can't be the hero and live,” said Laurence bitterly. He took the branches from Addison's hands, waiting for the other man to answer. But Addison said nothing as they walked past the tents to the fire where the soldiers were swapping pages with one another, trading for ones they liked better. Only Gilbert sat alone, fiercely polishing his brogans with grease.

“Sunday morning, we're going pig hunting,” Addison whispered before they rejoined the others.

“Who, you and Gilbert?” Laurence asked. “I thought he was going on picket.”

“No, you and me,” Addison said. “In honor of Pike Rhodes.”

Chapter Thirteen

“You've never hunted before, have you?” Addison said after they had crept past the dewy tents and into the brush beyond. The air was cool and still and every sound they made intruded on the quiet, bruise-colored world. But Laurence dutifully scoured the dim forest with his eyes, looking left and right for pigs.

“One time, my father tried to organize a fox hunt, like they have in England, but he couldn't get the right hounds,” he said.

“I reckoned.” Addison sighed. “You go about it wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't look. Listen. You can't stare down a pig.”

Laurence closed his eyes obediently. He heard a spring trickling nearby, and the ticking sound of leaves.

“What are you doing?” Addison hissed, already ten paces ahead of him. “Keep walking, but keep your ears open, too.”

The veil of dark lifted shade by shade as Laurence followed his friend deeper into the woods. Soon it would be dawn and reveille would call them back to camp, but for now there were only the trees sharpening their branches on the faint light and a few birds that scuttled through the canopy.

The dimness reminded him of his house on winter Sundays, when the drapes would stay shut against the chilly dark and everyone spoke in muted voices. On such mornings, his mother would read to him and his sisters from the Bible while they squirmed and longed for the noon meal, usually ham and stewed cabbage that would grow translucent and cold before Laurence could finish eating it. His father always presided at mealtime, quizzing them on the stories of the Old Testament.

“Who was David's downfall?” he once asked, sipping from a heavy pewter cup.

“Absalom,” Laurence answered, remembering the unfaithful son.

“Bath-sheba,” his father corrected him, thumping the cup for emphasis. His mother sighed and rubbed her temples.

“His own pride,” she said to her plate.

“By golly!” A great crashing sound followed Addison's cry, and a sow appeared, her skin the color of milk after strawberries have rested in it. She plowed through Addison's bowlegs and started huffing right toward Laurence. Falling on her with a heavy
ooof,
he buckled his arms around her belly as she kicked and dragged him across the roots of an oak tree. Her back hooves dug into his chest, and she began making the ugliest noise Laurence had ever heard. He roared to cover it.

“Hold her now,” Addison said. He loaded his musket and aimed at the sow. Laurence shied from the dark hollow of the gun, and the pig would have escaped had one hoof not tangled in the buttons of his uniform. Moss and dirt flew everywhere, landing on Laurence's open mouth.

“Hold her,” Addison commanded again, and this time Laurence obeyed, his fingers digging in the furrowed throat. The bullet entered the sow's face, splitting the forehead between her small eyes. She shuddered and her violent squalling halted abruptly in a slow sigh, like air escaping a tin can. As the heat left the slumped body, Laurence continued to hold the sow until a dark, reeking puddle leaked from her hindquarters and then he flung himself away.

“I forgot to warn you about that,” Addison said, smirking at the fresh brown stain on Laurence's coat.

Laurence stood, scrubbing at the stain with a handful of leaves, his palms stinging from the sow's coarse hair. The pig twitched a little, and Addison gave her head a final whack with the butt end of his musket.

“You caught her.” He punched Laurence's arm. “You're the bulliest pig catcher I ever seen. You can quote me on that to your pa when he tries to pull strings for your promotion.”

“I don't want to be promoted,” Laurence said as Addison handed him his haversack and musket and knelt down by the pig. “I don't want to be an officer.”

Addison sliced the sow's throat. Blood spurted out, pattering the leaf-strewn forest floor like a sudden rain.

“It'll be best to gut her now,” he muttered as the stream of blood slowed, “even though Loomis won't like it. We have a far piece to haul her.”

He shifted on his haunches and cut a line down the sow's belly.

“Why won't Loomis like it?” asked Laurence. The tall, genial Alfred Loomis was now a denizen of their tent and had become their default cook, disguising their meager rations with fresh herbs he found in the forests and fields around camp.

“Never slaughtered a hog before?” Addison looked up, his knife pausing. “Generally you boil them first to get the bristles off and then you work on the innards. Keeps the flavor rich. But I ain't dragging this thing two miles with the guts still in it. Now hold the skin open, if you will, sir.”

Laurence crouched beside the maw of sow intestines, his hand slipping on a bloodied nipple as he pried the skin aside. The ribs creaked apart with the slow complaint of long-shut doors. Inside, the steaming guts were black and red, and Addison was doing his best to saw them out in their entirety, but the loops of intestine kept slipping off and battering his wrist. Laurence gave one bark of laughter before he saw deep in the cavity beneath the sow's flank the sleep-eyed bodies of half a dozen piglets curled against one another. Addison's knife cut the veiny sack around them and a bluish water spilled out.