Wilderness (5 page)

David had seen bareheaded men chasing windblown hats and men who stood motionless to watch the wind bedevil the branches as though they had been assigned such duty. A small group of frightened drummer boys, new to the army and to army life, huddled beneath a wagon and could not be coaxed out, while nearby a single officer stood coolly shaving beside a rain-doused fire. Another soldier set out cups, pots, hats, and anything else that would hold water to collect the rain for later drinking.

During the worst of the storm, while the trees clashed and swayed and thunder set horses panicking, David saw one old campaigner with a wild shock of white hair and beard strip away his shirt to kneel fish-pale in the mud beside an emptied wagon. This man closed his eyes and began shouting of the Lord’s Own Vengeance come finally upon their heads for transgressions against His Own Dark Children. Ham’s folk whom they all had sorely abused. The old man swayed on his knees as the wind buffeted him, the wispy horns of his long beard blown back past either shoulder. David watched him take a deep breath and start in again, warning of the Lord and of Grant and all the Yankees coming south. He shouted to all who would listen of locusts and vermin, of hail for rain and flaming fire upon the land. None paused to listen save David, who stood watching beside an old molasses barrel with loose hoops that rattled like dull sabers in the wind.

“Brothers,” called the old man as men rushed past, chasing down their windblown possessions. “Brothers, don’t ye know the Host is coming? Cain’t ye feel them coming even now? On this wind? In this rain? Ain’t they et up all the grains and all the fruits of the land, brothers? Ain’t they run the waters red?” The fanatic beat his breast with open palms, leaving handshaped designs in mud upon his pale flesh. “Listen! Does He suffer any man to do them harm? To do Them harm? No, sir! No! He reproved kings of men for them and He taught senators wisdom for them. What’s Jeff Davis but a king? And surrounded by senators, brothers.” The old man clawed weakly at the air as though it had thickened around him. Men went by, following the muddy thoroughfare with their shoulders hunched and their eyes downcast.

The old man went on, his voice weaker now, his eyes crazed. “He bound princes for them. For their chained feet and the marks upon their flesh and for their turned-out kinfolk. And … and for … And for their ravished sisters, wives and … And for the ravishments of their daughters! Yes. And for their children too! You know the truth of it, brothers. I did not mean to …” The old man put a thin, mud-spattered fist before his lips and his eyes went wide as his voice fell to a hoarse croak. “Always her,” he said. “That dark, sweet berry.”

His head serpentined about and his wild hair streamed in the wind as he pulled himself up beside the wagon. “Listen to me!” he shouted once more. “He sent down darkness and made it dark! He made it dark, I tell ye! Listen to me!” He swung about and his eyes lit on David where he stood and David felt pierced by that wild gaze. “Every mother’s son of you’s a dead man!” shouted the old fanatic, who then covered his face with his muddy palms and fell down weeping in the camp street.

While the old man was rolling about, three men chased a wild boar from the forest into an open tent standing nearby. David turned
to watch as the canvas bulged and shuddered from within, and then swayed dangerously before finally falling in on itself. He grinned to hear the men’s shouts and curses joining song with the outraged squeals of the storm-panicked pig. When David turned back, the old man was gone and in his place was a boy stooping to collect a wind-tossed piece of blanket. The blanket was a poor, torn thing of no account, and every time the boy reached for it the wind kicked it farther along so that he moved down the camp street in a series of half-steps, ducks, and failed grabs until he turned a corner and was gone between rain-doused burn-barrels. As for the boar, it escaped, but not before goring one of its pursuers so badly the regimental surgeon had to take the man’s leg below the knee (the leg was buried in a shallow trough in the woods beyond the sinks, and after the army moved on this same boar rooted it up—two summers later the boar was finally killed down near Stubb’s Mill by a family moved there from Georgia who found in the pig’s stomach bits of shoe leather and a number of thin, white flakes and hard little knobs that had once been the small bones of the soldier’s left foot).

But now, this night, the wind had calmed enough for David to hear the swollen Rapidan running in the dark beyond a nearby stand of trees. And somewhere, over the river in the shadows beyond, the dim, pale light of the Army of the Potomac in its camps sent faint shivers of yellow up the damp walls of the night. If he held his breath, David thought that he could hear them there—the tired creaking of harness leather and the soft, musical rattle-and-squeal of poorly greased wagon wheels, the low, heavy rumbling of artillery caissons and the impatient stamping of innumerable hooves. Distantly came the drawn-out wails of trains moving in more and more men, more supplies, ammunition, horses, more metal, more blood and sinew and raw material with which to make war.

Sometimes, on these nights walking picket in the cold dark, if the
wind was right and the rain soft or quiet or not at all, David fancied he could even hear the Yankee soldiers themselves as they walked their own pickets or smoked or talked around campfires uncountable. Perhaps they drank good whiskey over there, some of them, or maybe wrote letters home on fine Union stationery. Some of them would have guitars and fiddles, fifes and mouth organs for the making of music, while others would sit back and sing themselves softly homesick—singing so their voices and the sweet sounds of instruments mixed with the wind and rain until it was all of a piece and falling on David’s side of the river until he too thought of home because there was nothing else for it.

He shook his head; shook the memories of home and the fantasies of homecoming down and away, then shook his thin white hands and tucked them to his armpits for warmth. In so doing, his cold fingers snagged his shirt through his jacket and he heard and felt the shirt give way. Swearing softly, David unbuttoned his sodden, torn shell jacket and lifted his left arm. There was still no moon, nor would there be that night or the next, but the starlight was such that David saw how the sleeve had come free from the body of the shirt and how the seam that ran along his left side had completely unraveled. The shirt entire, which had been stitched and patched and stitched back again, had finally fallen to rot. The shirt that his mother had bought new for him in Resaca and packed for him and which he’d tended carefully until he had no other untattered clothing to wear had finally and at last fallen past the point of ordinary ruination. It was as though he had blinked and found himself clothed by only so many random, faded threads, nor could he blink again to set them right.

His pale ribcage, the ribs themselves where they pressed against the underside of his flesh like tent braces under weary canvas, seemed aglow. As though what he’d always and secretly feared these long years of war had actually come to pass and he had been killed sometime back without knowing or realizing it. As though he had
become, suddenly and without warning in the way such things must always happen, the ghost of himself set to haunt forever this damp and lonely picket.

David swore again and a soft moan escaped his lips as he tucked the remnants of the shirt about himself as best he could. Pulling the jacket close, he buttoned it against the chill, but the jacket’s previous owner had taken a burst of canister to his spine and most of the back was gone. David made another soft moaning sound, a ghost sound against the dark, and he grinned to hear it echo back softly. He did it again and again, louder, until Virgil answered back from his own place on picket down the river that he’d better hush before the Yankees heard and shot his pecker off.

“You’d have yourself something to moan about then, wouldn’t you?” called Virgil with a soft, throaty laugh. David shook his head and retrieved his rifle. He breathed and watched his breath on the air. David grinned. He was alive. Shouldering his rifle, he walked his route wearily through the dark. Under setting stars, he patrolled the works. Grinning at shadows, his teeth white as moonlit stones.

Abel Truman lay bound in the mud beside the intersection of the Morton’s Ford and Mountain Creek roads. He lay on his side in an oblique pane of soft yellow light that came flickering without heat through the brush from the Second Corps camps off yonder. From the tent city also came sounds of men moving on muddy camp streets, talking in night-hushed tones, and the soft singing of slow, sad songs and instruments played with skill and with heart. And there was scattered laughter that was softer than the music and thereby sadder, too. Abel heard fires crackling and popping and snapping and smelled cooking smells as soldiers fixed meager suppers and boiled parched corn for coffee.

Abel sniffed and tried to shift his cramped shoulders. His arms
were bound tightly to his sides, with his elbows cocked sharply around a broken length of broomstick. His hands were tied at the wrist and his wrists were raw, secured to his ankles by a short cord. An old greasy rag was balled into his mouth and tied off with a leather strap that stank of cattle. The mud beneath him was thick and cold, and the roads were not really roads at all, either of them, but rather old footpaths rudely widened by shovel and axe to accommodate an army corps wintering in its camps. From where he lay, Abel could see the strange silhouettes of old stumps lining the Mountain Creek Road. Lying where they had been levered, pulled and blasted from the tight soil with their pale roots trembling in the light, the stumps squatted like weird gargoyles cast of wood and mud and bits of stone. Other things—bones and fossils, strange hanks of hair and fur and fetishes lost by men when the world was young—lay bound up in their root balls, never to be claimed.

Abel sniffed again and swallowed a thick and foul-tasting grit as he tried to move his jaw around the spit-soaked rag. He swallowed and gagged and squeezed shut his eyes to better force the sting from them, to better concentrate on the beating of his heart, the breath in his tired lungs. When next he looked it was for a greater dark beyond the shadowed canopy, for a cheering glint of stars in the heavens that must be there.

He reckoned them out there, somewhere. Past the concealment of tree branch, vine, and leaf, Abel imagined stars sparkling in the way stars will on certain spring nights after storms wash clean the dusty air. Throwing off icy sparks and glistening at their points. He imagined a high, fine wind to blow back the clouds and suck the campfire smoke down the floor of the night and away so all the heavens would be revealed. He imagined yesterday’s storm now moved out to a sea he’d never seen and that sea heaving, gray and monstrous.

Abel had been put out here, beyond the pale of the camp, even
before the wind quit blowing. He’d been bound beside the intersection for beating O. W. Brown bloody, and he beat O. W. because O. W. shot the dog.

It had been slinking about the margins of the camp for the better part of a month, just an old mongrel with black wiry fur gone white at the muzzle and a stiff gait that spoke of far too many years. Some of the men fed it scraps when they had scraps to spare, others aimed kicks at it and worse when it came close, but most just ignored it as it sniffed carefully around the sinks and garbage pits. Just an old dog as lean and worn-down and hungry-looking as any man among them.

As the days passed, Abel had tamed it to the point where it would accept crusts of bread and little gobs of burnt dough from his fingers before darting away again. It had been a long time, that spring, since he’d been around a dog, and something he could not name happened to his heart when it was near.

The storm began with a white burst of lightning followed by a cannon’s roar of thunder. Men immediately began rushing about, securing tents and calming horses and chasing down hats. The dog, wild with fear, ran fast down the narrow camp streets with Abel running behind, calling after it. It fled past O. W. and into his tent. Swearing mightily over the sound of thunder, O. W. dashed in after. Abel slid to a stop in the deepening mud before the tent. There came three fast pistol shots and three strobic flashes that lit the mud-stained canvas up from within. With an oath, Abel threw back the flap, looked inside, and saw how it was.

Around camp, O. W. wore an old tricorn from his father’s Revolutionary War days. It had been worn at Brandywine Creek and Germantown, and O. W. had worn it proudly in his service to the Confederate States at Antietam and Chancellorsville. Now it lay dented and stained on the mud floor of the tent where the dog had knocked it down and trod upon it, and the dog itself lay unmoving beside the hat. Abel backed away from the tent, staring hard at O. W.
as the man came out holding the hat and making small, useless, brushing motions at it.

“Look at that,” he said, holding it up for Abel to see. “Would you just look at what that beast done to my granddaddy’s hat?” Abel glanced from the tricorn to O. W.’s face to the dog, then turned on the big man, who crumpled to the mud moments after Abel’s fist destroyed his nose.

Abel ducked into the tent and lifted the dog in his arms. It was thin and light as a damp sheet. He took a deep breath and stepped back out into the wind. There was an officer nearby helping O. W. to his feet, and he stepped forward to take Abel’s arm, but when he saw his face the officer stepped back again and let him go.

Abel did not have far to go to lose sight of the encampment. The woods were close and dark, lit briefly fantastic by white flashes of lightning. Wind set the trees to clashing, but the canopy was thick and the rain did not trouble him much. He carried the dog through the trees for a long time before he found a little clearing ringed by green ash and sweet birch. At one corner an ancient, misshapen scarlet oak sent two long roots, bent, scarred, and arthritic as an old veteran’s fingers, through the moss, and its leaves were scattered across the clearing—little withered things holding tiny pockets of deep shadow and trembling little pools of rainwater.