Wilderness (27 page)

On their great, grand moving-in day, Jensen was with them and stood beside the wagon, his fingers absently wrapped up in Emerson’s mane, telling them how sorry he was, how there was nothing for it but to put it behind them, that they were most likely long gone and not coming back. And finally, Glenn remembered leaning over to wrap his fist into the front of the sheriff’s coat and saying very softly, “It shouldn’t be hard. You just keep looking until you find the son of a bitch with a bloody rifle barrel and you point him out to me.” And Jensen had eyed him and stepped back as they left for their new home, on their own land, mud from the churning wagon wheels flying through the air like dark, cast-off chains.

Glenn stood. He stretched and squeezed shut his eyes. Opened them again. He felt the blood, fast and hot, in his arms, and his face was warm with the old anger he’d grown to know so well. Taking a deep breath, he looked down at Abel. “You not smoking?” he asked the old man.

Abel shrugged and grinned in a small way. “Not that I wouldn’t like to,” he said. “But I ain’t even used to this coffee yet. I want to be careful of all this rich living.” He grinned until Glenn gave back a small smile in return, then stood from the step.

Stretching his arms over his head, Glenn groaned softly and said, “Well, I’m going to see a man about a horse,” and walked toward
the outhouse where it stood screened by filmy curtains of hanging moss at the base of a giant fir.

Abel stood and said his name and Glenn turned. The old man set his lips together and nodded solemnly. “I am obliged, Glenn,” he said quietly. He ran his palm over his close-shorn scalp and smirked. “To both of you.”

Glenn looked at the old man standing on the step so small and feeble, nodded, said nothing, and turned away.

The breakfast was eggs and potatoes flavored with shavings of wild onion and flecks of pepper, served simply and hot on thick slabs of crockery etched with blue floral designs. The three of them ate in silence until Glenn slapped the table suddenly and touched his forehead. “Lord God,” he said with quiet urgency. “I almost forgot.”

Ellen’s eyes went round with sudden fear, and she looked to the window and the gun cabinet, then back again to Glenn’s face. For his part, Abel patted his lips with his napkin, then fisted it in his good hand and waited.

Looking up at his wife, Glenn saw her face and held up a palm. “No,” he said quickly. “No. It’s nothing really.”

“Then what?” asked Ellen.

“Before I left town,” he said, chasing bits of food from about his gums with the point of his tongue. “I met up with a family of Chinese that were going to try and make it over the pass before the snows.”

Ellen frowned and Abel opened his mouth to comment on the danger of such a course at this time of year, and Glenn raised his palm again. “I tried to talk them out of it,” he said. “I did. But I think Farley put some kind of scare into them. At any rate, I thought I’d gotten their promise to stop here before they tried it.” He looked at Ellen and raised his eyebrows.

Ellen shook her head and glanced through the little kitchen window toward the Olympics, where they slumped hugely northward
in shades of pale blue and white. “I heard a wolf howl the other night, but nobody’s passed by that I saw,” she said.

“Damn it,” sighed Glenn, resting his chin on the dark bridge of his two linked hands. “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t go looking for them.” Pursing his lips, he stabbed a bit of egg with his fork and looked thoughtfully at it where it quivered on the tines. After a moment, he looked up at her again. “Wolf?” he asked.

Ellen nodded. “The night you got back.”

Glenn frowned deeply. “Are you sure it wasn’t Abel’s dog carrying on?” he asked, lifting his chin in the old man’s direction.

She shook her head. And Abel set his napkin down and cleared his throat, then picked it back up and held it before his lips as he coughed. They watched his face go red, but when Glenn made to rise and help, Abel shook his head and set his upper arm over his mouth. Clearing his throat again, he apologized and said, “Them fellers that took Buster was hunting a dog they thought was half wolf that got away from them, they said.” He looked at Ellen and grinned weakly. “Them brigands,” he said.

Glenn looked at him. “They lost a wolf?”

Abel nodded. “Crossbred, they said. Dog fighters. It tore one of them up pretty good.”

Ellen looked to her husband as he set down his napkin and stood from the table. “Glenn,” she said. “What are you doing?”

He wiped his mouth and leaned over her to kiss her forehead. “There’s a blowdown across the crick down by the road I need to clear,” he said, squinting to the toolshed. “I reckon I’ll go work on that.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know it.” He went to the door. When Abel stood to accompany him, Glenn motioned him down again, saying, “This’ll be just a one-man job, I think. Two’d just get in the way of each other. Besides, I need to think on things.” He looked at Ellen a long moment and she
returned the look and then he was outside, where presently they heard him loading tools into the wagon and harnessing Emerson.

Abel ate slowly. He held his fork as though made uncomfortable by it, and when Ellen questioned his appetite the old man quickly said, “Oh no, it ain’t that, ma’am.” He sniffed and blinked wearily and smiled. “I’m just still a mite bit tired and I’d forgotten that people do this. Eat this way. Meals and such where they set down together whatnot.”

“Well,” said Ellen, smiling at him. “It’s what we like to do.”

Abel’s head bobbed as he swallowed. “I like it,” he said. “I think it’s good. I did notice you-all didn’t say no Grace, though.”

Ellen pursed her lips and nodded. “You’re right. I suppose that’s a custom we’ve more or less let fall by the wayside here on Hardscrabble Mountain.”

Abel looked out the window with his brow furrowed then squinted over at her. “That ain’t the name of this hill,” he said.

She smiled. “No,” she admitted, shaking her head. “But that’s what Glenn started calling it right after we moved in. He said now he knew how President Grant must have felt, only more so.” She grinned wide with that one delicious memory amidst all the other badness of that time but did not share or linger over it and after a few moments asked, “Are you a religious man, Mr. Truman?”

Abel pushed back his plate with his thumb and rested his elbow on the table. Moving his shoulders about, he winced a little as though the frayed and atrophied places within his arm were troubling him, and seemed to think the question over a long moment before answering. “I have been once, I suppose,” he said. “I don’t reckon there’s a man born who can claim he’s never prayed for one thing or another.” Abel smiled and shook his head. “’Specially when he’s got some other man shooting a gun at him.” Sitting back, he cocked his head and stared off into the middle distance. “In the war … ,” he went on slowly, “it seemed like every other son of a
bitch … pardon me, ma’am. But it seemed like every other fella you run into could quote you Scripture up, down, and crossways—we even had us a fella was named Scripture—but I never could. It just never did stick with me.”

Ellen nodded. “It must have been quite a thing.”

“Ma’am?”

Ellen looked at the old man. “The war, I mean. It’s all very sad, isn’t it? Sad and useless, it seems to me.”

An expression inscrutable passed across the old soldier’s face and he shook his head and rubbed at his hairless chin. “Oh no, ma’am. If you’d pardon me, but you’ve only got it about half right.”

“How do you mean?”

Abel pushed his tongue into his cheek, looked at her briefly, a little judgmentally, then looked down at the table. As he spoke, he pressed the pad of his finger down on little grains of salt where they’d been spilt and rubbed them a few times with his thumb before tossing them over his shoulder. “Way I figure it,” he said. “All that, all that back then, it decided some things about how things was going to be that couldn’t be decided no other way. Not the way people are, anyways.” Outside they could hear Glenn loading tools—saw and crowbar, rope and pulley—into the back of the wagon. They heard the wagon creak and groan as his weight settled onto the jockeybox, and presently came the soft clopping of Emerson’s hooves. Abel pursed his lips, flicked salt over his shoulder. “I suppose things turned out the way they should ought to have,” he said.

Ellen looked at him a long, hard moment. “I’m surprised to hear you say that,” she finally said. “Considering what it was your side was fighting for.”

He raised his eyebrows to meet her stare for a moment, then shrugged and continued with the salt even though there was none to be seen. “I suppose I could say I wasn’t fighting for no niggers,” he said very softly. “I heard men say that very thing all along, but
didn’t nobody ever believe it.” He finally left off the salt and reached, instead, to absently turn the plate around and around in its place before him. “Truth is,” he went on. “Truth is, every one of us on both sides was fighting for the nigs and every one of us on both sides hated that fact. That’s why it was so bad. Why it went on so long.” Abel sighed, and across the table, Ellen turned her head to the side to escape the faint, foul stink of the old man’s breath.

“Shit,” muttered Abel, unmindful now of her presence. “Even if I didn’t join up for that reason, and I didn’t, my reasons was all my own … But even if I didn’t join up to fight it out over the nigger question, I did come to be convinced that freeing ’em was wrong. For a while there I was a true believer.” He fell silent for a long time, and Ellen stayed still, her face as much a puzzle as the clouds.

Abel took a great, deep breath, stared hard at the plate, and did not look up. “Somewhere along the line, though,” he said, “and I will admit it was well along toward the end of the things, my mind was changed. I don’t want to talk about much of it ’ceptin’ to say I was in a bad way, a real bad way, in the Wilderness, and two folks helped me when they had good reason to do the opposite. And they was just folks. Folks trying to get by in a bad place.” He nodded, pursed his lips, and shook his head. “So, like I say, things ended up pretty much the way they should have, but it ain’t over yet. I figure there’s still a long ways to go ’fore the issue’s decided well and truly.” He looked at Ellen and made a face. “Otherwise, would you and old Glenn really be all the way up here on Hardscrabble Mountain?” he asked her. “Otherwise,” said Abel, shrugging. “You hit the nail right on the head. Like you said, it was a sad, sad thing.”

Ellen sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, looking at the old man where he sat small and sick and hurt and sad. “Did you ever run?” she asked him. “You must have wanted to.”

Abel shook his head and grinned. “I ain’t talked about any of this
for twenty years, and here in the last few days I’ve been answering questions about that damn war till I thought I’d lose my voice.”

“If you’d rather not—”

“Oh, it ain’t that,” said Abel. “It ain’t that. Just queer is all. People interested in a thing like that. From that long ago. Says to me that nobody’s got it puzzled out yet—just like I always thought.” He shrugged and grinned again. “But to answer your question,” he said, shaking his head. “Nah, I never did run. Not from them.”

Outside, the day was clearing, and a single ray of sunlight slanted through the dusty window onto the table. Abel tilted his face from it but put his good hand into the light, fingers spread to soak up the heat. He squinted at Ellen. “But I’ll tell you,” he said. “There was plenty of times I walked away from ’em pretty goddamned fast.”

Ellen shared his smile and stood from the table. With quick efficiency, she gathered the dishes and moved them to the counter where there sat a white enameled bowl filled with cooling water. Abel offered his help and half stood, but she bid him sit. Turning away, she put her hands in the water and began to wash. Without turning around, she asked, “What are you doing here, Abel?”

“Ma’am?”

“Why are you here?”

There was a long pause while he sought his answer. Ellen watched out the window, but Glenn was gone, and there was nothing to see but sunlight filtering through the trees and making sparkle like treasure the emerald moss and the last of the little jewel-winged deerflies flitting through the air. She uncurled her fingers in the water, trying to relax, trying to force heat up through her arms and into the dark, windy cavity where beat her tired heart.

“I was out front of my shack where I lived,” said Abel, choosing words carefully. “I like to sit and watch the ocean of an evening. The way the tide comes in and the different colors the sun puts on the water when it sets. At any rate, I remember standing up one day
just as the last light was going out, and when I turned round it was shining back in the trees behind like there was fire in them. I seen fire in trees plenty of times, of course, but this was … But this was like how it was in the Wilderness, in the war. The light and the trees and I could suddenly … smell things I haven’t smelled in more’n thirty years. I had to up and practically pinch myself to be sure of where I really, truly was.” Abel sniffed and sighed. “It greatly disturbed me, as they say.”

He hushed for a moment. Ellen fisted her hands beneath the water, unfisted them again, and plucked a plate from the counter. She began to scrub it. When Abel spoke again, his voice wheezed softly as though his breath were coming from a place fallen into disrepair within him—as though his voice were an old, ill-oiled machine seized with neglect.

“I was remembering how it had been when I realized how much I’d forgot. I don’t remember exactly what kind of trees there was back there. What kind of flowers there was. My wife, she planted us a little garden back behind our house when we was married, and I can’t, for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was she planted. Melons or corn or tomatoes or just a mess of flowers. A man ought to be able to remember something like that. And the color of her dress that day …” He faltered. “I can’t see it,” he said. “I can’t even see her face clear no more.”

Ellen turned from the dishes. She looked at the old man where he sat slump-shouldered, warming his one good hand in a patch of sunlight on the table. “I didn’t know you were ever married,” she said.