Wilderness Run (28 page)

“Come on,” Bel pleaded. “It's cold, and I want to go before one of them notices.”

He stepped out of the light obediently and hunched his shoulders against the January air. “You haven't changed,” he muttered.

“Neither have you,” she retorted as she felt the snow soften and steal her steps, each one slipping away.

*   *   *

There was no ice castle on the lake this year. The freeze had come slowly, without wind or storm, and the rocks leveled evenly down to the white expanse of water. The two cousins did not speak to each other. Bel tried once or twice to make conversation, or to point out some familiar place, Wilderness Run, Wilderness Isle, but Laurence only nodded and hissed through his teeth like a child too cold to be interested in conversation.

Turning from the mouth of Potash Brook, they picked their way along the shore to the vacant Sunday lumberyards and her father's railroad station. It was a fanciful building, even from behind. Towers jutted from the four corners of the brick and stone edifice, each topped with sloping, pointy roofs and metal spires that mimicked the onion domes of the churches in far-off Russia. These roofs repeated down the middle of the station like the spine of some exotic beast. A couple of them functioned as chimneys, but their use was so disguised by ornament that it was strange to see smoke rising from them.

Bel and Laurence stopped at one of the three arches cut for the trains and looked in. Cavelike and draughty, the station's interior was lighted by tall, narrow windows in the walls. An engine waiting for repair sat humped on the far-right track. Letting her eyes rest on the locomotive, Bel inhaled the smell of oil and coal ash. The short, grizzled stationmaster wandered across her line of sight with a bucket of tools.

“Wait here,” Laurence whispered, pulling Bel back from the entrance. His finger pressed her collarbone. “I want to see the whole thing, all the way around.”

While her cousin clambered off through the snowdrifts, Bel stood alone beneath a fang of ice that dripped from her father's cambering eaves. Everything about the station told of Daniel Lindsey's wistful admiration of the exotic. Rising beside the squat, plain lumber buildings, it had all the curves and contradictions of a wedding cake or a French horn, something that should not hold together but did. Her mother loved it. Uncle George thought it extravagant, especially since they were losing money on the train. Mending the tracks was proving costly in a state covered by snow six months of the year. And yet they could not give up on the enterprise. The station was two years old now and needing paint, but her father refused to sell it.

After what seemed like an eternity of listening to the stationmaster grunt and clang at the lifeless engine, Laurence appeared around the other side of the building, his chin tilting up from the collar of his coat.

“‘I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,'” he announced as he approached. His expression was downy and warm, like a young child's. “‘And accrue what I hear into myself … and let sounds contribute toward me.'” He paused, and Bel, eager to reply, to have any sort of conversation with her cousin, began to speak. Laurence held up his hand.

“‘I hear the bravuras of birds.'” He gestured to the puffed gray pigeons parading below the eaves. “‘The bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames.'” He raised his head to the wires of smoke gliding from one of the station's strange chimneys. “Let's go somewhere, Bel,” he said. “I have somewhere I want to go.”

“Wait,” she began again, because she had to say something. “Did you like it?”

“Of course.” He laughed, his boyhood self peeking out for instant. “Your father is a genius. He made me remember there are always reasons to live.”

Then he set off in a rigorous march up the hill. It was the old jaunty stride, which always surpassed hers and necessitated his frequent halting and breathing impatient gusts into the air. Hurrying behind him, she felt her body start to warm up as they ascended to Church Street. They passed a bakery with its golden wands leaning in the window, and she breathed the buttery odor of bread, suddenly hungry. A thin layer of sweat grew on the back of her neck and beneath her arms.

When they reached the corner, Laurence swiveled abruptly by a snowbank and charged north, in the direction of the brick Unitarian church at the head of the street. Bel tried to take the turn with the same quick pace, and her right foot slipped on a patch of ice. She toppled over, landing on her hip. Tears flooded her eyes. As the earth's chill crept through her coat, she realized how it would have been to fall on the lake so long ago, if the runaway had not been there to catch her. Laurence—she knew now—would not have noticed even then. He would have let her tumble from the ice castle while he gazed triumphantly out to the frozen water and recited some poetry he had composed on the spot for how beautiful it was, the two of them, standing on the rim of that emptiness together.

“Miss Lindsey?” said a deep voice. Bel saw the broken boots, the ragged gray trousers she knew so well, and took the hand that Johnny Mulcane offered her. The cold scent of the snow washed his own fetid odor from the air and she breathed easily as he pulled her up, his hand releasing hers as soon as she was righted.

“Thank you,” she murmured, looking no higher than his slack waist. The hired man hovered for a moment, his breath loud, rattling. It had been over a year since her father had let him go. When Bel asked why, her mother had lied. They couldn't afford to keep him, she said, as if Bel had not heard the man lurch from the toolshed every afternoon, wiping his mouth. Whatever the reason, Johnny had dutifully vanished that September like the warm weather, leaving dead leaves unraked across the garden.

Bel took a test step with her hip. It felt solid but sore. “How are you, Johnny?” she asked finally, raising her chin to meet the hired man's eyes.

There was no reply. Johnny Mulcane had already shambled away down the hill, his hatless head bowed, a small bald patch reflecting the muted sun.

“Bel,” Laurence called from a block's distance. With arms folded and knees splayed back, he had the same impatient posture as the boy who long ago had told her not to run from the lost slave, as if he had lived through nothing since that moment, nothing at all. “Are you coming?”

Nodding, Bel looked back down the hill after Johnny Mulcane, but the hired man was gone; only his footprints remained, marring hers and Laurence's, aiming in the opposite direction, each one holding a lake of shadow that would grow as the light faded.

*   *   *

When they finally entered the hardware store on Church Street, a ring of hardened slush had attached itself to the hem of Bel's dress. In the remaining quarter mile to the store, she had magnanimously forgiven her cousin his oversight, and then proceeded to become annoyed with him again as her hip began to ache. She gave a loud sigh as they ducked into a shop filled with hammers, saws, nails, and paint. A yellow dust had settled over everything, and their entrance seemed to cause a disturbance in the back of the room. After an expressive clatter, a tall, lean man emerged, brushing his hands against a leather apron.

“Yes, sir,” he said to Laurence. His droopy eyes slid over them both. Everything about the man pointed downward—his long onion-colored nose, his sagging lips, the slope of his shoulders—and yet his voice was friendly and resonant. “Can I help you with something?”

Laurence looked suddenly baffled and picked up a saw, testing the blade against his palm. The teeth made small white marks where they pressed the skin.

“In the market for a saw, are you?” said the man. “I've got some better ones in the back.”

Her cousin set the tool down. “I'm actually calling to ask about a friend of mine. A friend of a friend,” he said with a trace of irony. The man showed no reaction to the password, although Bel studied him hard. Were they going to rescue another slave? “I mean,” Laurence continued, “I'm home on furlough from Virginia, and I had a friend who was treated very kindly by a man who might be a relative of yours.”

“Oh no,” said the proprietor. He backed up a few steps and held up his hands before letting them be dragged earthward like the rest of him. “You must mean Walt.”

“Walt Whitman,” Laurence said thoughtfully. “I think that was his name.”

“What do you want to know about him?” the man asked. His mouth screwed into a small red knob. “Did he borrow money from you?”

“No.” Laurence shook his head. “My friend knew Mr. Whitman's sister lived in Allenton, so when he found out I was coming here, he asked me to be his messenger.”

The man appeared relieved. He leaned against one of his wooden shelves, letting his hand dangle in a box of nails. They made a small chinking sound as he stirred them with his fingers.

“My friend wanted someone to tell Mr. Whitman that he saved his life,” Laurence added softly.

“He ain't still pretending to be a doctor at them hospitals, is he?” Alarm flooded the man's gray eyes.

“No. With his words, I mean,” Laurence said. “He helped him to understand some things.”

The man righted himself, swaying in the dimness of the aisle. His motion stirred up another cloud of dust, and Bel sneezed. She was disappointed about the “friend of a friend” business and she allowed herself a small sniff. The noise seemed to waken the two men from their disjointed conversation.

“As I said,” the owner began. “I've got some better saws in back. If the lady will wait.”

“No.” Laurence glanced at Bel. “The lady is cold. I'll come back some other time. Does Mr. Whitman ever visit you?”

The man's lips tightened again before he replied. “Unannounced,” he said. “Without so much as a by-your-leave. But my wife will tell him what you said. She has a soft spot for him, you know.” He shrugged. “What women will put up with.”

Bel stared at the pool of slush and dust on the floor, her body quaking with a fresh shiver. “Laurence,” she said, aware suddenly that this conversation might drag on forever, prolonged by the man's reticence and Laurence's curiosity. She was exhausted, less by the exercise than by Laurence's needy and difficult presence. She wanted to be alone. “I'd like to go home.”

“Of course. We need to go home.” Laurence reached out and shook hands with the man. “Thank you, sir,” he said, his starved cheeks folding back as he grinned.

“Don't mention it,” said the man, with a shrug that settled his shoulders even lower than before.

Bel took Laurence's arm and let him lead her out past the files and hammers, which suddenly reminded her of weapons—swords, axes—dulled beyond their original purpose by years and years of war.

Chapter Thirty-six

The remaining weeks in January passed at a furious pace. Two deep snowfalls drifted up the sides of trees and whitened the roads. Although he spoke little of his years at soldiering, Laurence came to Greenwood often, entering the house unannounced to steal Bel away for some long tramp through town. Her parents, eager to see their nephew come alive again, did not protest until Bel ruined several dresses and earned the great irritation of Mary, who was responsible for rescuing the damaged hems. After listening to the servant's shrill keening over the laundry for the fifth day in a row, Faustina insisted the two cousins take some form of transportation when they went out. Consequently, on the last week of Laurence's visit, Bel finally got escorted sleighing like the other wealthy girls with brothers or sweethearts back from the war.

The mild winter sun shone down as Laurence bundled Bel in the sled and plunked down beside her. Today, he had a hard and angry energy, like a penned horse waiting to be let out of his stall. Everything about him had grown since he arrived in Allenton: His hair and beard were longer, his cheeks full and pink. Even his narrow hips took up more of the seat than she expected, and she edged away to give him more room.

“Are we ready?” Laurence asked without looking at her.

“Ready,” echoed Bel.

For three weeks, they had confessed nothing about themselves, although they talked long about their parents and servants and the other young people of the neighborhood. That day, Bel was determined to tell Laurence of her distant, tremulous romance with the French tutor. As the seasons passed, her memory of Louis had faded, much as she tried to revive it by recalling their conversations in the library, by scouring the kind, remote letters he sent to the family for any hint of emotion. Bel no longer thought about him every day, although she wanted to. Surely Laurence, who once wrote that he had met and liked Louis, would be the one to encourage the affair to bloom.

As the sleigh coasted down the lane, Bel let the buffalo robe swallow her up to the chin. Ahead of them, the bay mare kicked up small white coins.

“Where shall we go?” asked Laurence.

“I don't know,” Bel said, hoping they would end up at Battery Park, where the other sleighs gathered. “Not far. It's supposed to snow later.”

“I could take you to meet one of my pards, a bully fellow named John Addison. He's staying with his aunt on the south end of town,” Laurence offered, needlessly slapping the reins on the horse's back. The sleigh skimmed faster down the street, and they passed a lost red scarf trailing in the snow. The shadows of the elms crossed over them.

“That's far,” Bel said.

“You're right. Besides, he's such a hero, you might fall in love with him,” Laurence paused, and then added with a note of ownership, “And I couldn't allow that.”

“Why not?” Bel demanded.

“Oh, I don't know.” He forced a laugh. “You shouldn't fall in love with a soldier. We're a sorry, dishonest, murderous lot.”

“You don't believe that.” Bel brushed a strand of hair back from her face and settled deeper in the buffalo robe. This new conveyance was much more pleasant than walking.