Wilderness (19 page)

After a time of walking, Abel settled painfully upon an old blown-down log to rest. His head was light, and even for all the hot, smoky darkness, he was very cold. Flames shivered and Abel rubbed his face, dragging his palm down from temple to jaw, and then he blinked and looked about again. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said softly when he recognized the flags of his division’s hospital strung limp and backlit between the trees, and beyond them the ghost-pale shapes of surgeon’s tents. He swore again when he then saw yet more lines of deadmen and wounded men and men soon to be dead lying in lines like the spokes of a wheel radiating from the tenting. Among the dead of that place, and not far from where Abel sat, lay O. W. with the lower half of his face shot away and his red, red tongue lying like the bow of some ill-shaped tie upon his throat.
On the stained blanket beside him lay his tricorn, and on his big toe a tag that told his name, his county, and his town.

Abel sat quietly. More sound slowly reached him, and he idly wondered if his eardrums were ruptured. He identified the high-pitched grating he’d been hearing for the last half hour as the singing of bone saws brandished by the operators in their tents. Those beneath the cold teeth screamed like children, begging for it to stop even if it meant certain death. Abel broke a filthy-feeling sweat to hear it and felt his stomach churn.

After a while, he crossed to O. W. and stood looking down at the man. Abel bent and picked up the tricorn. Brushing it off as best he could, he settled the old war bonnet over what was left of O. W.’s face and took a moment to straighten out his clothes and touch his hair. It was as he stood again to leave that Abel heard Ned calling to him from two rows over, where a line of dead lay beneath the branches of an old black oak.

Abel picked his way carefully over men dying and men dead. Every one a broken thing that could never be set right. When he reached Ned’s side and knelt, Abel did not recognize the boy. His moon-round face was powder-burnt and bruised from temple to jaw on the right side. He was shirtless and mud-spattered, and his arms were gone.

Ned was hatless, his thin hair mussed with his cowlick rooster-tailing the way it did, and when he saw the way Abel looked at him, he began to weep. “Look what they done to me,” he sobbed. He tried to lift himself from the foul blanket where he lay and failed.

His right arm had been taken cleanly at the elbow and his left mangled at the armpit. The surgeons had been fast and sloppy in their work—isinglass was slathered in patches onto the red, puckered flesh at the tips of his stumps, but much of it had flaked off into the dirt. Black thread bristled like wiry antennae, and a little splinter
of unsmoothed bone protruded jaggedly from the drain hole of his left stub. Ned gasped with pain or fear and tried to reach for Abel with arms that were not there, then cried out again.

“God damn it, Ned,” breathed Abel. He reached and cupped the boy’s face with his hands. He touched Ned’s mouth with the pad of his thumb and asked him if he was thirsty. “Oh my Lord,” whispered Ned, rolling his eyes and smacking his lips. “Oh God, yes.”

They’d left him his canteen when they put him in line for the deadcart and Abel unstoppered it. He lifted Ned’s head carefully with the palm of his hand and tilted the water against the boy’s lips. Water ran from the sides of his mouth but he managed to get a little down. Abel lowered the boy and fussed with his hair a little, for he knew not what else to do. “What all did they do for you, Ned?” he finally asked, trying hard to keep his voice steady. “Them sawbones … they give you something? For the pain?”

Ned swallowed and blinked. He opened his mouth and closed it again. “They put a rag on my face,” he whispered. “White rag what smelled a hunk … like a hunk of sugar cane. Smelled like candy.” Ned moaned. Swallowed. Went on. “When I woked up—when I woked up there was a big ol’ fly that was on my face.” His eyes rolled. “I reached up to brush it off but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.” His mouth opened wide and closed again, and he began to weep. “Abel, I couldn’t. I couldn’t reach it. I couldn’t.”

Abel looked away, for he did not want Ned to see his face. He tried not to listen anymore, tried not to see all the other mangled bodies lying round about, but could not. He tried to concentrate on the lights of countless little fires burning in the night, but the wounded and the dead would not be discounted in either sound or sight, and Ned went on.

“Fly … that goddamned fly. It lit on my arm. On the end of it. I felt it on me. Then it come back and landed on my face. You see it?
Abel? You see it on me? Oh God, get it off me, Abel! Get it off me!” And Ned began screaming. He screamed with fear and pain and outrage and drew the attention of the dying men around him. They looked up from their places, watched the boy thrashing, then settled down again without comment.

Abel made soft, soothing sounds and brushed at Ned’s face, and after a while Ned hushed. He closed his eyes. His breath was quick and shallow. Abel tore a section from the tail of his shirt, tilted the canteen against the cloth, and commenced cleaning the boy’s face with cool water, all the while speaking to him in the same low, comforting tones of a man calming a good dog that needed to be put down. And as he cooled Ned’s temples with the wet rag, Abel peeled back the blanket that covered his lower half and understood why the surgeons had done such poor work upon his arms.

Ned was lying in a pool of his own blood that spread like a dark wing from his side, and when Abel held a palm over his belly he could feel the fierce, sick heat of a lethal wound. It bled but slowly, yet the blanket and ground beneath were soaked. Abel wondered if it was his kidney or his bowels or both all torn up within him, then decided it didn’t matter. He figured the surgeons, forearms huge with straining and punchily tired from who-knew-how-many hours plying their trade, had only discovered this mortal wound after they taken his arms and begun to sew the stumps. Swearing softly, Abel turned away and set his temples into the cradle of his palm. When he turned back, Ned’s eyes were open, clear, and focused.

He took a breath. “Pretty bad?”

“Jesus, Ned.” Abel’s voice finally broke. He looked at Ned, then looked to find the stars above. He could not see them. “Someday,” he told Ned. “Someday, I’m goin’ to be somewhere where I can find the stars at night whenever I want them.” He licked his lips and
looked down at Ned again. “All right, Neddy. You tell me what you want. You tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”

Ned licked his lips and blinked and looked at Abel. He shook his head. “You just go on do what you think’s best, Abel. It’ll be all right.” He closed his eyes. “It’ll be just fine.”

Abel pressed his lips together and squeezed shut his eyes. He took a breath, then stood. He could only put a little weight on his leg. Slowly crossing the ghastly clearing, he drew to a stop outside one of the tents where the surgeons were still busy at their work. Monstrous shadows gamboled outsized upon the dingy canvas. Unspeakable sounds issued forth and would continue, forever, in his dreams. Screams and rhythmic grindings. The soft ticking of bone dust falling in a cone beneath the bench where three strong men held another down as the operator, like some pagan god all gore-bespattered, took pieces of him away to add to a great, slippery mound of legs and arms, hands and feet, that would be buried later in a long, shallow trench and thence forgotten by all save those who lost them.

Aides came and went and paid Abel no mind. After a while, he blinked and looked around. There was a table nearby, and upon it stood basins of foul, pinkish water, squares of lint, spools of thread, and surgeons’ tools. Gleaming scalpels and long, exquisite needles, pliers and little chain saws and fleams and scissors and, crossed at one end of the table, redly wet, were two huge bone saws like great serrated dragoons’ knives.

Abel took a deep breath, fought down his rising gorge, and went to the opposite end of the table where there stood some half-dozen glass vials and a few squares of somewhat clean linen. Uncapping the bottles each in its turn, Abel sniffed cautiously until he found what he was looking for, then slipped it into his pocket, took a thick square of linen, and returned to where Ned lay dying.

Abel asked him how he was, but Ned did not reply, merely blinked and watched Abel with his eyes wide. Abel gave him more
water, and Ned closed his eyes. Abel breathed. He breathed and opened his mouth as though to speak but only made a choking sound, so turned away a moment to collect himself. He took the vial from his pocket and set it to the side. He doused his hands with cool water and ran his fingers through Ned’s hair. Ned sighed and a long shudder passed through him. Abel looked at Ned’s face, then began to sing to him the Hush-a-Bye song. His voice was soft and it was good, and Abel smiled as he sang. Those men who still remained alive round about quieted their moaning as best they could to hear Abel singing and Abel sang to them and he sang to Ned and he held Ned’s eyes with his own to show him that he shouldn’t fear and as he did his hands were busy opening the vial and soaking the linen with its contents.

Finally, Ned closed his eyes again. His face relaxed. He spoke but softly, as though already far away, and Abel never knew what he said. Abel sang and covered the boy’s mouth and nose. Ned’s eyes came open and he tried to rise, but then they closed again and opened no more forever.

Abel covered the boy’s face with a blanket, then pushed himself to his feet and turned away. His hands, fingers splayed, were in the air before him as though to push something back, and his shoulders shook. He took a great, deep breath that hurt him terribly, then walked away from that place into the dark, flamestruck Wilderness and did not look back.

Abel staggered on through the Wilderness. He saw things that night that would never leave him. He saw a Yankee soldier bound to a thick oak with his throat cut, and he saw a Yankee drummer boy lying dead beside his drum with not a mark upon him. Abel saw three suicides and a naked man hanged by the neck from the branch of a scrub pine, his blue uniform neatly folded and set upon a nearby log. And he came upon a dented tuba lying lost in the middle of a
swampy little creek and loose horses too numerous for counting. He walked and walked and by and by came upon a little clearing floored with soft moss. Abel sat down at the clearing’s edge and closed his eyes.

There came a soft jangle and creak from the opposite side of the glade, a soft, choking cough, and, muttering to himself, Abel stood and looked. A man lay crumpled against the base of an old, furrow-barked box elder. His haversack had spilt and his papers and possibles lay in a jumble on his lap and off. He was a Union man, tow-haired and all but dead. He’d taken balls in both knees and there was no way to tell what other wounds he had. His face was cut and burnt, and somehow he’d lost both his eyes. Yet still the man lived, and still he held a pistol pointed blindly, yet accurately, at Abel.

Abel licked his lips and spat, and even though the Yankee could not see it, he made steadying motions with his hands. “Hold on,” he said softly. “Just ease on up and hold on, now.”

“Who’s that?” the man cried out. “Who is that?” His mouth was open and his upper lip damp. From somewhere, not far away, a man screamed once and loudly, then fell silent.

“It’s just nobody,” said Abel. “Just another fella hurt like yourself.”

At the sound of Abel’s voice, the Yankee fired the gun. Abel sat down hard. He’d felt a sharp tug at his left shirtsleeve and looked that way to see who was wanting him. There was no one there, and after a moment Abel toppled over. He lay very still, looking starward, but there were still no stars, only long shivering streaks of red laid out across the floor of the sky. Behind him, Abel heard the Yankee die—a soft rustling in his clothes and a softer thud as the pistol fell to the moss.

After a while, Abel pushed himself up and looked over at the man where he lay dead. Taking his upper lip between his teeth, he
looked down at his arm. From hand to forearm, he was gloved in blood. He could not move his fingers or bend his arm, and it looked all wrong where it hung from his body. Somehow he got to his feet and staggered over to the dead Yankee. He was but a boy of twenty or so, and there was room beside him at the base of the box elder for another, so Abel settled down. He stretched out his legs. He took a breath. Let it out. “Right comfortable,” he said.

The boy’s haversack lay near Abel’s thigh, and he reached inside. His good right hand closed around a paper-wrapped square of metal, and when he took it from the sack he saw it was a lidded tintype wrapped in the boy’s last letter to his wife. The metal was emblazoned with the Union Fifth Corps cross and the letter was bloodstained. Clumsily, Abel prised open the frame and looked upon the little image of wife and daughter within. He swallowed deeply. His shattered arm crawled with the beginnings of pain and he thought for a moment of the surgeons’ tents and of Ned. Abel blinked and shook his head. He looked at the letter and began to read.

May 5,
Catherine Schwartzenbach
Grape Glen, Pensyl.

My Darling Catherine,
Yest’day we left camp—our Home for the last three months as You know. We started South right away. Richmond bound again or so they say. This morning saw Genl Grant. He is not much too look at but they say he is a good Genl and we need a good Genl if ever we want to lay down our arms and be One Nation again so I hope that they are rite and He is a Good Genl. I guess today we are going to have a Big Battle. When I look I can see Rebs just across the way. There is a little field here and the sun is pretty on the yellow grass. The Rebs are
on the other side and we can all hear them plain as day. I think they are all fine Fellows and am not ashamed to say so. Many others think as I do and do not hate the Rebs but rather hate the War because it is a Bad and Hateful thing. Darling Catherine there are no words to describe the things I seen and if there were I wouldn’t use them because I dont want you to know the things I seen. They are all so bad. But the Rebs. They are all Americans same as us and only gone astray and tho War is very hard and terrible in its aspeck it is nessary to save and Preserve the Union. Youve heard me talk this way before and I still think it. It is hard to Kill a man and sad too because they are everyone of them our true Brothers and whenever we see Them coming we are very Proud to see them coming. Even when we are told to Fire! Fire! and watch as They fall we are Proud still because they are the same as us only gone astray somehow. It is hard to talk about but True.