Wilderness Run (27 page)

“And what was your plan, Lindsey?” Addison turned on his friend an instant later. His eyes were lightless.

“I was trying to persuade them not to run,” Laurence said thoughtfully, as if the idea were no longer reasonable. He stepped back from the open knapsack, his snowy trousers clinging to his shins.

Addison snorted. “I ought to arrest you, too,” he said in the direction of the barn. A bullet had shattered the wasp nest, making a ragged crepe flower.

“You ought to,” Laurence agreed.

“He was brave, Sergeant.” Pacquette's expression was sorrowful, and Laurence felt a strange triumph, for he realized that the Canadian truly admired what he had done. “He wasn't afraid of them at all.”

“Brave or stupid.” Addison's lip curled. “‘It is just as lucky to die and I know it,'” he quoted. “Ain't that right, Lindsey?”

“That's right.”

Having Laurence agree with him twice disarmed the sergeant. Addison shifted his weight back and forth. There was a dark ring around the horse where the snow had been kicked off. Furlough's fawn-colored eyes were filming over. At the far edge of the clearing, a tree filled with the shrill commotion of birds, but Laurence couldn't make out a single one.

“If you want to let them go, then let them go,” Addison roared finally, stepping out of the ring. “If you think you know what's right, then do it, Lindsey.”

“Let us go,” said Spider, but at the same time, Lyman Woodard began to sing softly into the mane of the horse, drowning out his companion. He sang the last words of the last verse of “Lorena,” the melody Addison had played on the train as they left Allenton on their way to war. The mournful strain rose above the ribs of the dead stallion and into the clearing. “I'll say to those lost years ‘sleep on.' Sleep on, nor heed life's pelting storms.”

They all paused to hear the end of the phrase melt on the air, the words where the soldier surrenders everything, even his own memories. There was no hope of return for any of them. Dawn drew thin cracks of light in the east and Laurence finally met Addison's searching gaze. “You can't unarrest them,” he said, taking in the vein throbbing at the sergeant's temple, the sweat-limp hair that fell over his brow.

“You can't let them go now and you know it,” Laurence continued softly. “And I'm not going to fight for their lives, because they had a choice and made it, and you had one and you made yours, and now—” He gestured to the dead horse. “They can't go back in time and ride away, and you can't pretend you weren't waiting in the woods for the one chance you had to stop them and save my life, too.”

Looking over the top of the barn, he saw an owl make its humped and vestigial flight across the clearing to alight on a leafless tree on the other side. It was followed by a flock of loud, angry sparrows, their black shadows diving and crying until they drove the owl to another tree, and another. Addison did not answer, except to check the knots holding his captives.

“It don't matter, Lindsey,” Woodard said in a weary voice. His cheek lay against Furlough's flank as if he were listening for a heartbeat.

They left the horse unburied in the clearing. Addison drove the two prisoners in front of him. Laurence went next and Pacquette took up the rear, his face furrowed with a deep frown. It was colder in the woods and it smelled of ice melting down bark. Next to the suddenly stoic Woodard, Spider walked with his head tipped earthward and stumbled over every branch he could.

“The winter is different here,” Pacquette commented aloud. “It already feels like it's almost over.”

The others did not respond, except Spider, who laughed in a high, unkind way as they walked the narrow path. Then there was nothing but breath and footfall, the snow going black with their steps.

Chapter Thirty-four

Addison laid white targets across the chests of the deserters and stepped back to see if they were crooked, then bent forward again to straighten them. His face was blue and slick with rain. When he was satisfied, he nodded to Captain Davey and left the deserters kneeling in their coffins. Spider bobbed and whimpered, but Woodard fixed his eyes down the metal barrels of the muskets.

“I am not ashamed,” he began, and then his voice was drowned out by the “Rogue's March,” an exact and simple dirge summoned by the fife and drum players clustered at the edge of the hollow. The guards loaded their guns.

When the captain shouted,
“Fire,”
it was over before the echo of his cry cleared the shallow gully. Woodard fell face-forward, reminding Laurence of the days when Gilbert used to trip him just for walking by. His light hair spilled to the ground like a fountain. Spider went less easily, twitching against the earth, his long fingers clawing in the dirt. Then he sighed three words,
Oh dear me,
and his eyes fluttered shut. The rain disturbed the silence of the scene, blustering over the men in small drops, making every one bow his head and blink as if he were weeping, although none of them would admit to grief.

Laurence saw Pacquette among them, but the other man's face was distant and expressionless as a winter pasture. He recognized in the tutor his own old refusal to accept the cruelty of war, and he understood how Bel could love Pacquette, for even hawk-nosed and wearing a filthy uniform, he possessed the inner handsomeness of a man who acts on what he believes. Addison stepped over to the dead men, wrestled the white targets from their chests, and pushed each deserter into his own coffin.

Woodard's pine box was too short and his knees jutted up, but this did not deter the sergeant from laying the lid over them and nailing it down with his blacksmith arms. The thud of splitting flesh and bone made Laurence's whole body ache. He stared out over the lowered clouds and, for one moment, he hated the whole world, horizon to horizon, and then he grieved for it, thinking of Lyman Woodard's knees and how they refused to be buried.

When Laurence left the hollow with the other soldiers, Addison was still nailing the lid down over Lyman Woodard, his arm rising and falling, but the thudding was gone, and Laurence knew that the wood had cracked across the middle, where it could not hold, and that Addison did not see it, so focused was he on keeping the seams together. The falling rain tasted fresh and sweet on Laurence's lips and he drank it thirstily, a silvered drop at a time. Walking past him, the drummer boy thrummed his fingers on the stretched skin that swayed from his chest like a second belly. Every once in awhile, the boy's hands would sweep the rainwater off the tight leather surface, turning the streaks into stains.

January–April 1864

Chapter Thirty-five

On the third day after Laurence arrived home on furlough, he walked down the icy drive to Greenwood alone, shunning horse and sled to tromp in a soldierly fashion through the streets. Bel saw him coming. She hadn't intended to look out the window just then, but the passing shadow of a crow had distracted her from a sketch she was making of two wrinkled apples that sat before her on a plate.

After watching her cousin for a few moments, she bent back over the sketch. The apples were wizened like the heads of old men and she could not get them right. But the still life—her tutor Miss Omira Bottum had insisted—was essential to improving an artist's hand. In a fit of frustration, Bel had been drawing Miss Bottum's face on one of the fruits, but she scribbled the whole thing out when she heard the crunch of Laurence's feet on the steps to the door.

Homecoming had not been what any of them expected. Aunt Pattie had been certain Laurence would be haggard and weak, in need of “a good rest.” She was partially right; Laurence had gained back little of the weight he had lost the year before, and purple hollows curved beneath his eyes. Uncle George had anticipated a brave and somewhat embittered soldier, remembering his own visit with Laurence in New York City. He was also right, for Laurence braced his shoulders like a young Atlas and watched out every available window as if he expected rebel troops to be arriving at any time. Bel's father had hoped for some good information on southern architecture, as he was sure the “bright boy” would have noticed such a thing, and her mother had said simply that she guessed Laurence would be happy to sleep in a house again.

Bel had refused to join in the predictions about the soldier who had walked in the door on Twelfth Night and barely spoke to any of them. Long after the trip to Brattleboro, she had guessed, with great embarrassment, that Laurence's request to take down her hair had been something more than a nostalgic gesture, and her memories of that afternoon made her blush. Bel's only hope was that the old Laurence would come back, bossy, intent, and furious with knowledge, the Laurence of her childhood summers, of tree-climbing dares and creek-bed adventures. She couldn't bear to think he had grown as dull and sappy as the rest of Allenton society.

When Laurence had appeared, a day early, on Greenwood's grand oak threshold, Bel was in her hiding place on the stairwell, feeling cramped and resigned. She had already deemed it useless even to enter the dance floor this year. Men were so scarce, even Ernest Pomeroy was in high demand, and Hannah Fithian had already secured him for three waltzes in exchange for a box of chocolates her uncle had sent her from France.

As soon as people realized just who had arrived, Faustina's party careened to a halt. The lilting waltz faded beneath sighs and murmurs of recognition, and the steadily circling bodies suddenly bumbled against one another like bees in a hive. Tanner and taller than when he had left almost three years before, Laurence remained on the threshold, letting the cold air stab through the open door.

Bel had felt the chill, even from her distant perch. She pressed her cheek against the wooden rungs and waited as Aunt Pattie fainted in a sodden heap, as Uncle George rushed forward to claim him with a loud, confident roar. Laurence looked bruised and wary, like an animal that had been beaten. His uniform was dusted with snow, which melted and dripped on the floor. Bel cringed as the assembled crowd issued their greetings, starting with her mother and father and declining in order of relation and importance. It didn't take long for the throng to become frightened by the returning soldier, for he hardly said anything at each new introduction, and by the time the line got to Mary Ruth Cross, he had stopped speaking altogether. The crowd around him dwindled and the music struck up again. Dancers craned their necks to watch him as they twirled around the room.

When Bel heard her mother saying her name, she finally stood from her hiding place and waved. She saw Laurence follow the angle of her mother's finger up the long stair to the balustrade, where she waited in the same blue dress she had worn the year before, insisting on it in a secret devotion to Louis. She saw how he lifted his arm ever so slightly, returning her wave, then turned and stamped out the door, his back crooked like an old man's. A flurry of Lindseys followed him, but she stayed. Her pride was hurt. After all this time, they were strangers.

News came the next day that Laurence was ill with a fever. “Every time his life overwhelms him here, he simply goes to bed,” she told her mother when she heard.

“You don't know what he's been through,” Faustina scolded her. “That you of all people should say that about your cousin.”

“Well, then, what is it?” Bel demanded. “Mary Ruth's brother is home and he's just fine. He took her out sledding and bought her a new mink muff.”

Faustina paced the living room, her skirt swishing over the Ottoman carpet that was this year's Christmas gift. Red leaves and circles and fans bloomed deep in it. “Sledding and a muff. I shall have to tell your cousin how easy it is to impress these days.”

“Yes. Tell him,” said Bel. “Tell him we require nothing but the most basic pleasantries. For instance, a simple greeting would do.”

“You are angry with him, aren't you?” Faustina sat down beside her daughter and tried to touch her hair. Bel no longer allowed her mother to braid the long brown tresses, insisting on putting her hair up herself. Faustina's thin fingers scratched her scalp. Bel twisted her head away.

“I miss him,” she had said simply. The three words echoed in her mind now as the door opened without a knock and Laurence stepped in, blinking. Bel appraised him, and knew he was doing the same. Her cousin's face fell from its bones in steep angles, and there was a hollow of shadow in the center of each cheek. He wore the scars of sunlight now, a cracking around the mouth and eyes, and a deep residual color across his skin.

Laurence even smelled different, the sweaty boyishness replaced by a dry odor, like that of an October garden, yellowed and bare. Clothes three years old slumped from his skinny frame. Except for the faded Union cap left over from his uniform, they looked like they belonged to someone else.

“I missed you.” She spoke first. It was not what she had meant to say. A glade of light from the window divided them and Laurence blinked again as he stepped into it.

“Shall we go to the lake?” he barked, and she was relieved that he did not watch her eagerly, the way he had in Brattleboro. Instead, his eyes scraped right past her figure and out the window to the snowy yard. “I thought you might like to see it today,” he added more gently.

“I would love to.” She marched to the coat closet and pulled on her boots. “We should escape now, before anyone else sees you and tries…” She faltered.

“What?” A ragged, self-pitying grin spread over his face. “And tries to speak with me?”

From upstairs came the sound of a chair scraping across the floorboards. Bel threw her coat over her shoulders and rushed to the door, cranking the iron knob. When she looked back, Laurence was still standing in the sunlight, watching the dust drift down.

“You forget that interiors have their own weather,” he said in a wondering voice. “All that time in a tent.”