Wilderness Run (6 page)

Laurence looked up, covering the book with his hand. The volume of poetry had been banned in Boston, and he had secretly procured a copy from the author's sister, whose husband ran a hardware shop in Allenton. “It's not a Bible,” he said hastily.

“Whatever it is, then.” The musician's blue eyes strayed over the pure silver buttons Laurence's mother had insisted on stitching on his uniform. “What's your name again, sir?”

“Laurence Lindsey.”

“John Addison.” They shook hands, the other soldier's grasp firm and lasting a little long, so that Laurence was the first to withdraw. They had been drilling together for two weeks in Allenton, but John Addison had always been flanked by a number of other recruits, who directed their jokes and comments toward his square red-blond head, searching for approval. This he doled out in barking laughs, making the whole company join in, as if all along the men had been waiting for the order to enjoy themselves.

Laurence quickly found his place as a loner and a bookworm, tolerated by the farm boys but largely ignored. His only friend was an awkward, blushing fellow named Lyman Woodard, who wished, of all things, to be an actor. A staunch abolitionist, Woodard pronounced views diluted straight from Greeley to anyone who would listen. All day, he trailed an eager half step behind Laurence, his blond hair sticking in the corners of his mouth.

“Lindsey's father owns the railroad,” Woodard interjected. Laurence gave him a baleful glance.

“He and my uncle,” he amended, shoving the book in his haversack and waiting for the onslaught of questions. He considered himself the only boy alive not fascinated by railroads, although he had been once, before he decided he did not admire his father. Now he preferred horses, pausing on avenues to admire their muscled lines and sweet, grassy smell, imagining a world without the loud rumble of wheels and tracks.

But the usual fury of railroad conversation—where the newest lines were being laid, what the best engines were, and who would win the race to cross the West—did not erupt, and Laurence realized from his comrades' awed expressions that this was the first trip many had made by locomotive.

“Can he get me a job driving them engines?” asked Pike Rhodes, one of John Addison's acolytes. He was sitting in a jumble of elbows and knees beside his brother Gilbert, and he scooted forward to the edge of his wooden seat. Redheaded, boy-faced, and adorned with freckled ears that tipped forward in an expression of constant curiosity, Pike Rhodes had already become the object of much good-hearted humor. Now he was staring at Laurence with his mouth agape, body perilously balanced over the aisle.

“Maybe.” Laurence hesitated, hoping to prolong the boy's sudden interest. “I don't know.”

Gilbert reached over and clapped his brother's mouth shut. “We have to whip the seceshers first, Pike,” he threatened, his black hair falling in his eyes.

“That won't take long.” Pike slid back into his old slot beside his brother. “I told Pa I'd be back for harvest.”

“Told mine I'd be back for supper,” John Addison said, and grinned. His neighbors broke into obliging laughter.

Laurence, looking down at his hands, did not join in. He was thinking of his father's assessment of the rebellion.
War
, George Lindsey wrote to his son after the firing on Fort Sumter,
is just a peculiar kind of commerce, one where men's lives are spent for land or ideals. It will take a long time for the rebels to spend every penny they have. I had hoped my boy was going to make an intelligent businessman, and would not be seduced from duty by all those buncombe speeches. There are plenty of other lives less precious or ready to serve for the love of serving
.

“What's wrong, Lindsey?” asked Addison.

“I don't think they'll give up so easily.” Laurence did not look up. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple, and he swabbed it with his sleeve.

“Why's that?” The question was not asked, but nailed on the air with a soft squeal of Addison's accordion. Laurence felt a hundred eyes on him. No one had ever talked of losing the war, of even losing a single battle.

“They're defending,” he explained patiently. “It's always easier to defend. Look at us against the British. Look at Troy. It only fell when they took the horse inside its walls.”

“'S true.” Addison lifted his cap and let it settle slightly more askew, as if a branch had knocked it in passing. The train rumbled and clacked. They were far away from their own hills now and the blue sky drowned the flattening land.

Noting the serious gazes of his companions, Laurence continued: “And you know what the horse is.” In his mind, he saw the lake and the runaway slave he and his cousin had failed to save.

“What?”

“Negro regiments,” he said triumphantly, but the soldiers' faces hardened and he had to look away, out the window to the green fringe of trees beyond the pastures. Only Woodard nodded vigorously, his long nose stirring circles in the air.

“If we listen to the schoolmarm, we might as well just toss our muskets into enemy territory and be done with it,” said Gilbert Rhodes, whose most prominent feature was his nose, broken in so many places that it no longer had the look of a single organ, but a composite, several jigsaw pieces glued together.

“That's not what I'm saying,” Laurence said to the trees.

“He means we should train them to fight alongside our regiments,” Woodard said, interrupting for the second time. His high, reedy voice did little to persuade the others.

“What's to say they don't start firing at us, too?” Gilbert countered.

“Who?” Laurence turned to him.

“Your regiments of niggers.”

Laurence shook his head and bent over to search his bag for the book of poems. Wrenching it out, he cracked it open, hoping the lines would swim through his mind and replace the ugly indifference of the men.
Lives less precious
, his father's voice intruded.
Ready to serve for the love of serving
. George Lindsey had begged his son to train with the officers, but Laurence had refused.

“They wouldn't fire,” John Addison offered after a strained minute, “but they might not fight so good, either. I'm ready to try myself, though.” This seemed to settle the matter, and the soldier began to play “Lorena,” a ballad about a soldier and his lost love. Pike sang the verses, the muscles of his thin neck rippling, and the others joined in when they knew the words. At “What we might have been, Lorena, had our loving prospered well,” Gilbert Rhodes cupped his crotch and everyone laughed.

The car's tiny windows were ringed by a scum of black mildew, making the outside world blur at the edges, as if a shadow were encroaching on all sides. As the men's voices filled his ears, Laurence looked to the endless south stretching before them. It was like peering through a dozen keyholes at once, each one holding its own version of the same hidden room beyond.

Chapter Six

“Watch this,” said Gilbert. He was sitting at the mouth of the tent he shared with his brother, Laurence, and John Addison. The others were sleeping, except Laurence, who lay on the damp earth, writing in a crack of sunlight. Every few moments, he would have to shift the paper to change the place illumined by the ray, but he was too exhausted to go outside. After a week of marching, camp-raising, and drilling in the hot July sun, most of the recruits could barely move on their free afternoon. Gilbert was eternally awake, however, his undershirt tight around his ribs, the uniform his mother had sewn for him dripping from a tent line. He had already washed it twice. “Watch this,” he said again, and Laurence turned on his aching side to see Gilbert thrust one foot out of the shadow of the tent.

With a soft grunt, Lyman Woodard fell facedown against the earth, his blond hair streaming over his cheeks. At the sound of the impact, John Addison cracked one blue eye, then let it fall slowly shut. Laurence sighed and stared at his letter. Every day since they had arrived in their camp outside Washington, Gilbert had managed to trip the clumsy soldier.

“When you going to learn to watch your feet, Woodard?” Gilbert grinned. “When the secesh start shooting at 'em?”

“That's unfair,” Lyman Woodard said, pushing himself onto his knees. “You know that's unfair.”

“Since when is drill unfair?” Gilbert said. “I just invented a new drill, that's all.”

“Well, I don't like it.” Woodard stood up and brushed himself off. He squinted into the shadows of the tent. “Who you writing to, Lindsey? You got a sweetheart?”

“My cousin,” said Laurence, blushing. They wouldn't understand his friendship with little Bel.

“Girl cousin,” Pike amended, although the only way he could have guessed this fact was if he had been reading over Laurence's shoulder.

“How do you know—” Laurence began.

“Keeping the money in the family, ain't you?” Gilbert interrupted, grinning. He fingered a limp dark curl. “Just wait till I start courting her.”

“It's not like that.” Laurence covered the letter with his arm, glaring at Pike, who scrabbled busily in his haversack and refused to return his gaze.

“Sure it ain't.” Gilbert nodded.

“I'm going over to the contraband camp tonight to hear them sing, Lindsey. Wanna go?” asked Woodard. The former slaves who took refuge with the government army were given the nickname “contrabands” for their status as war bounty. They were treated terribly, given the worst jobs in camp and often made the subject of soldiers' pranks, but the evenings were their own, and they held rousing prayer meetings a short distance from camp.

“I can't,” Laurence said. “I'm on picket.”

“Well, some other Sunday, then,” Woodard said hopefully. He continued to brush himself off. “I might not go tonight.”

Gilbert snorted. “What a bully idea. Learn me some nigger songs, why don't you, Lindsey. When you go.”

“I will,” said Laurence coldly. He took out the poetry book and propped it over the letter. Silence fell over the tent again.

“Is it good?” Addison asked Laurence in a voice entirely awake, although he did not open his eyes.

Laurence nodded. “Listen to this: ‘I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own. I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own, and that all men ever born are also my brothers.… '”

“Do you really believe that?” Addison's eyes remained closed.

“I do,” Laurence said. “At least when I'm reading it, I do.”

Woodard was still hovering at the mouth of the tent, blocking Laurence's single ray. “Get on,” Gilbert said. “You don't have my permission to stay.”

“So? You ain't captain.”

“Then how can you shoot a secesh?” asked Addison, pursuing his line of questioning. “When the time comes.”

“Get on!” Gilbert yelled this time, and swiped at Woodard with his fist. The other soldier backed up clumsily.

“You ain't captain,” he repeated bitterly, but he turned and began to shuffle away.

“Let's play,” said Pike, sitting up to pull out a deck of cards, arching them at the tips. “I want to play.”

“When the time comes, I guess I might feel differently,” Laurence said, turning to Addison, but his friend was snoring softly, his body quaking with the first spasms of sleep.

This kind of scenario happened so often in their tent, Laurence had learned to have conversations with the others in his mind, battling with their ignorance and unkindnesses as they sweat through drill and later when they rested together, their bodies stretched along the warm earth. It was easier this way, the quiet settling over the damp, ruined grass inside their quarters, the haversacks heaped beside him, a canteen passed from hand to hand. When the flare of whiskey touched his lips and tongue, he gave the appropriate gusty sigh.

After two weeks in sunny Virginia, he suspected that the others viewed him as a useful but somewhat odd accessory to their tribe, asking him to write their addresses in his neat cursive, to decipher their own missives from home. He knew Addison liked him, but he could not quite understand why and so accepted his friendship grudgingly, as if he were doling out a favor to the handsome soldier. Watching him sleep now, Laurence wondered what it would be like to wake in Addison's body, to open his eyes and see what Addison saw. It would be a light-filled world, he decided, like a spring day in Boston when the harbor gleamed like some lost treasure and, walking beside it, a young man could watch his own reflection lengthened and shattered and lengthened again.

*   *   *

At dusk, they stumbled out to picket, a sentry duty that spread men a half mile apart in the woods, guarding in shifts. Most soldiers, it was discovered, were more afraid of the dark than of any imminent secesh attack. False alarms sounded the first few nights, until Captain Davey, the company's weary-eyed leader, told them he'd shoot the next man who cried wolf.

Laurence liked the solitude after the close quarters of camp life, and he eagerly followed his comrades out to the Big Reserve, the prostrate woodlot where men waited to go on their shifts. Damp spiderwebs tore across his face and made him think of his mother, whose graying hair had dragged over his cheek as she kissed him good-bye, begging him not to forget his family. What this request really meant was that he should not lose his position in the world, son of the richest man in Allenton, that he must return after this youthful escapade and assume the mantle of his father's business. The spiderwebs stuck to his fingers after he tore them from his eyes. He could not imagine going home.

When he reached the Big Reserve, Laurence dismissed Allenton from his mind and sat down to watch the boxing match. The first night he had gone on picket, he had realized he had never before seen men fight in earnest, heard the hollow thud of fists on flesh, the crack of bone. Tonight, the often-victorious Gilbert had been challenged by a stocky drummer boy, and Pike scurried among the men, taking their bets of pennies, doughnuts, and dirty pictures.