Wilderness Run (7 page)

Meanwhile, Gilbert launched into his elaborate prefight routine. First, he stripped off his shirt and hung it carefully over a branch. Then he uttered a brief prayer from the Psalms while he flexed his arms, popping his knuckles: “‘My soul is among lions: and I lie among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.'”

He had just finished pronouncing the last words when the drummer boy swaggered up, rocked back and forth on his heels a few times, and crashed to the ground like a felled tree. A disappointed murmur spread through the men, and the boy's companions confessed that he had been drinking all afternoon.

“Who else?” Gilbert shouted into the close, cloud-covered night. The fire flickered weakly and men averted their eyes one by one. None of them liked fighting the older Rhodes, who had a twisting punch that could leave a lingering bruise.

“I'll take on two of you, then.” Gilbert tossed his head.

“Not tonight, Gilbert,” someone called finally. A wind lifted through their wool uniforms, making the men scratch and shift their positions on the earth.

Gilbert toyed with his shirt but did not put it back on. “So you mean to tell me that I've got to go into battle with a bunch of goddamn cowards who won't even fight a body two to one.”

Above the clearing, the branches of an oak speared the moon. A silvery light fell through the forest.

“I'll fight you,” came Pike's small voice. “I ain't no coward.”

The younger Rhodes walked toward his brother, his fists lifted. There was something both grand and defeated in his posture, something Laurence recognized but could not place until Pike crossed a strip of moonlight, and seeing him silhouetted there, Laurence saw his uncle Daniel seated across from his brother at the dinner table, losing every argument, accepting it.

Before he was fully aware of what he was doing, Laurence leapt to his feet, pushing Pike away. “You don't need to fight your own kin,” he said, disgusted. “I'll do it.”

Pike resisted his shove at first, and the three of them stood in the center of the ring, so close that Laurence could smell the sweat darkening Gilbert's hair and Pike's sour breath.

“I'll do it,” Laurence repeated harshly, and Pike stepped away, his eyes as hollow and lightless as the interior of a walnut shell. A weak cheer rose from the men as Laurence stripped off his shirt clumsily, his arms snagging in the sleeves. The cool air pricked his skin. He could feel the workings of his muscles as he took a few swings at the empty air.

“Can I change my bet?” called a man, and a loud clamoring ensued, Pike dodging among them with his head lowered like a dog. The last soldier to fight Gilbert was still limping, and he threw a bet down on his former opponent with a flourish. There was the rushing sound as a flock of birds descended to a tree nearby, and then everything fell silent. Even the noise of Laurence's breath lifted away from him as he danced opposite Gilbert, waiting for the other man to swing.

It had been Gilbert's strategy to stare down his opponents until they threw their first wild punches. Then he would knock them off balance with a blizzard of tiny jabs. Laurence and Addison had discussed this tactic and how to oppose it. “Just wait him out,” Addison had said. “That's what I'd do. Smoke him out like a nest of bees.”

Under the pressure of Gilbert's gaze, his dodges and feints, Laurence found it hard to follow this advice. He wanted the fight to be over, to plunge headlong into it the way he had plunged through his father's rage when he told him he had enlisted, not as an officer, but as a foot soldier. They had stood opposite each other on the muddy spring earth outside the house, shouting as melted snow trickled down the brick walls and over the ludicrous green awnings his mother had ordered from Paris. At Laurence's news, his father had tried to box him on the ears, but Laurence had pushed him away clumsily and run off through the muddy streets so that his father would not see the tears on his face.

Shrugging off the memory, Laurence waited. Around him, the men sang out their complaints. The fire sank to a dull red coil.

Finally, Gilbert punched toward his gut. Instinctively, Laurence blocked him, and soon after that, the storm of fists descended, battering his mouth and neck. He closed his eyes and hit back, his fists opening. His skull rattled with pain. Somewhere on his face, the skin split, and when he could look again, Gilbert's fists were streaked with red.

Laurence danced away, an old defiance overtaking him. He remembered being five years old, rising in a midnight thunderstorm and running to the kitchen to beat a cast-iron pot with a wooden spoon while thunder boomed outside. Awakened by Laurence's loud response, his father had appeared in the threshold and told him to go back to bed. When Laurence kept clanging on the pot, he carried his son outside in the rain. Lighting flashed around them.

You're not loud enough to drown it out, are you?
his father had said as rain spattered Laurence's nightshirt and made it hang heavy on his shoulders.
You never will be.

“Smoke him out,” he heard Addison call, and he stood his ground just beyond Gilbert's reach. He resisted the urge to touch his throbbing cheek or turn his head to see the others.

“C'mon,” Gilbert snarled. “I ain't waiting all night to win.”

Laurence shook the blood from his eyes and maintained his distance. His brogans carved small circles in the earth, the weeds unrooted, kicked aside. Gilbert pursued him all the way to one flank of the audience, and Laurence felt the men's breath on the backs of his knees as his opponent swung.

This time, Laurence waited for him to throw his whole weight into the punch, taking the blow but responding with one of his own. Laurence's ribs screamed, but he was rewarded by the sight of Gilbert staggering back, holding his cheek. The crowd murmured as Laurence struck again, this time against the father who had tried to stop him from fighting because he thought that this war was just another kind of storm. Then, blood-blinded, he only glimpsed pieces of the other soldier before he hit them: the arch of Gilbert's shoulder, the veins that branched above his temple, the ash of whiskers on his chin.

Gilbert wavered and fell to his knees under Laurence's fury. A howl rose from the crowd. The sky shifted colors, going red, then blue-black, then red again, and Laurence, lifting his fists, felt it wash over his body. It was like a lake, that sky, and when he lowered his hands, he was swimming up through it, able for one split second to look down on them all, standing together in a deep woods dotted with lonely sentries dreaming of home.

His cut lower lip made it impossible to speak when the recruits crowded around him. It was better this way. Silent, he could be one of them, and if he spoke, he would once again become a stranger, saying something they could not hear or understand, something about the way some men waited dully in a dark wood for their time to pass and others called out, frightened by the whispering trees and the certainty that somewhere, something was watching them.

Only Pike did not join the throng, going immediately to nurse his brother, who was still kneeling a few paces away. Out of the corner of his eye, Laurence saw the boy pull out an already-blood-spattered handkerchief and dab at his brother's wounds.

“Never thought there were a fighter in you,” said the man who had lost to Gilbert three days before, thumping Laurence on the shoulder with his bruised hands. They both winced.

Addison came up close and his blue eyes met Laurence's. They were lit with a strange emotion, part envy, part satisfaction, the way a gull looks just after it gets tossed a fish. Laurence blinked. “Smoked him out.” Addison grinned and shook his head, then turned swiftly toward Gilbert, who was now lying flat against the earth, his jaw working but no sound emerging.

“He said he's all right,” came Pike's clarion voice. Laurence felt blood trail down from the gash on his cheek, curving until it touched the corner of his mouth. It tasted warm and salty. The men continued to gather around him, the few who had won the bet shoving in to thank him. As he accepted their praise, he thought he heard the hoarse whisper of Gilbert, who still lay splayed on the ground.

“He said he's all right,” Pike said again to the unlistening crowd. “Just leave him alone for a while.”

Chapter Seven

A yellow boy with a nose as flat as a plate stood in the center of a sagging tent of contrabands, singing. “I see the angels beck'nin, I hear them call me 'way; I see the golden city, and the everlastin' day!” It was a potent, magical voice, higher and richer than a white man's, with a timbre seasoned like Virginia, by warm weather, days of rain.

The other contrabands, with eyes shut and feet stamping, came in on the chorus. “Oh, I'm gwine home to glory; Won't you go along with me, Whar the angels beckon, an' the Lord my savior be?”

Crouched together behind a thicket of blackberries outside the tent, Laurence, Woodard, and Pike listened to the roar and pulse of the hymn. Soles slammed the earth, calves bunched, and spines twitched like trees in the wind. A woman Laurence had seen bowed over her daughter by day had her arms raised, mouth open, drinking the air. He wondered if he would ever see his runaway among them, dancing on his crippled foot.

“See, it ain't the devil's work,” whispered Woodard. “They're good Christians.” They watched together behind the veil of thorns and hard green berries, Laurence sucking at a scratch on his thumb, Pike swaying as the song sped up and the dancers began to spin and leap in tight, convulsive bounds.

At first, a lone woman with the waistless, oblong torso of a bathtub began to call out hoarsely. It sounded like she was being strangled, but she stood alone in the circle of dancers, her head flung skyward. Then a second woman joined in, her own garbled speech directed toward the earth. She moved in stiff, jerky steps and pointed her thin arm at the fire, as if she glimpsed in it a creature that would leap out and devour them all, and only she could keep it at bay. A man with a grizzled beard started hissing and popping like the fire itself, and then he fell to the ground and lay there, rigid, his eyes open, drinking the stars.

Laurence was afraid to look at his companions, afraid he would see in their faces his own dubious envy of the overtaken slaves, or, worse, that they would understand more than he. But when he heard beside him a soft echo of the contrabands' hymn, he turned, to find Pike singing, his hands cupped around the blisters on his heels where his too-large boots had worn the flesh away. Although the boy seemed unaware that he had joined them, his sweet, eerie soprano rose from the thorns and bloomed into the night above. The contrabands danced on, undisturbed, and Laurence heard something in the way Pike's voice echoed the sway and jerk of their bodies, something he knew he had not heard before, and he understood suddenly the fear at the root of his fascination. This war would change them all, the dancers and the watchers, the soldiers and the families that stayed at home. They would never be the same again.

Finally, the singer ran out of verses and the song came to a swelling close. The afflicted ones fell to the ground in a heap. Silence filled the air, and Pike slumped, exhausted, against Laurence's right side.

“Gaw,” he whispered. “Their hands look like the dark got rubbed off from holding things.” Laurence could feel Pike's heartbeat thumping through his bony ribs, and he shifted to let a small channel of air flow between them.

“Cotton,” Woodard affirmed. “It will tear a man's hands to shreds. I read that somewhere.”

“It isn't cotton,” Laurence hissed, irritated. “They're born that way. The babies have it, too.”

“Shh,” Woodard said, and pointed. Another man stood in the center of the circle now. Narrow-hipped and with a regal lift of head, he petitioned the Lord to remember the days when they had nothing to eat, and no time to sleep from working all day in the tobacco fields, when they had been kept out in the frost and snow, and suffered in every way imaginable. The Lord would smother his enemies, said the petitioner; the Lord could help Mr. Linkum win.

“Mr. Linkum,” said Pike. Disgust flooded his voice. “He can't even say the name of the president right. Gilbert says they ain't human, really.”

After all they had seen and heard, this comment angered Laurence, and he cuffed the boy on the neck. “Think for yourself,” he hissed.

But Pike had been precariously balanced to avoid any contact with his blistered heels, and the light blow knocked him into the thorns. He gave a sharp cry. The contrabands turned in its direction, the hum of agreement dying out on their lips. In a matter of moments, the men and women vanished one by one into the mouth of dark beyond the fire. Laurence blinked and yanked Pike back by the collar. He had been gazing so long in the direction of the blaze, his eyes were blind in the near blackness.

“Goddamn it, Pike,” Woodard said. He could never effectively pull off cursing, and he sounded like a schoolboy practicing the language of men. “You had to scare 'em off, didn't you?”

“He didn't meant to—” Laurence began, attempting to explain his own action.

“I didn't mean to,” said Pike, interrupting him. “I just fell.” He was less than a foot away, but still Laurence could not see him. He stared until the boy came in focus. Blood welled into a long scratch winding down Pike's cheek, and he wiped it with the heel of his hand, refusing to meet Laurence's eyes.

Never before had anyone been afraid of him, and the thought made Laurence feel sick and triumphant at once. He watched a moth take off from a leaf, its ugly gray body aiming for the light of the contrabands' fire.

“Well, that's all we get, 'cause of you.” Woodard punched Pike lightly in the shoulder. “The show's over.”

“I didn't mean to,” Pike repeated. The blood had left black streaks up his wrist. He did not rub them away, even after they all stood up and began to walk back toward the tents, stumbling over roots and fallen branches, not knowing which was which until the branches snapped and the roots held fast.