Wilderness (31 page)

“All right.”

“My hate’s so deep it might well could be bottomless. Leastways … leastways, I ain’t never found no end to it.”

“That’s all right.”

“No, it ain’t. It ain’t no way to be. Old Abe, he said we mustn’t be enemies. He says now we got to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Again that soft rustle. “I choose you. And that’s the best I reckon I can do.”

In April, Noé’s voice drew him from dreams of rills of black water fanning over stone and a moon cut by clouds that rippled like black crepe.

“Abel. Grant, he gone done it.”

“What?”

“Found him the end. You rebs done give it up today.”

And before Abel could frame a question there came the sudden firing of muskets all in disagreement; there gathered beyond the woodsheds near the kitchen an unharmonious and impromptu philharmonic instrumented with pots and pans and wooden spoons for clappers; there rose great whooping shouts of joy from all about the stockade as soldiering men tumbled from their hammocks, pushed back their tent flaps, and capered gleefully in the sweetened dark; and there also came shouts of outrage and misery, despair and heartbreak, from within the dead-line where the prisoners’ fondest dreams met their ends. Eventually, someone would organize fireworks to give shape to his explosive delight, but at that moment, in the smoky lamplit April dark of the hospital tent, Abel put up his good right hand and Noé took it while across the aisle the johnny gnashed his rotting teeth and muttered darkly.

Noé came to his cotside one last time. Deep in the lonely watches of the night he softly called to Abel, and Abel grunted, for he was well awake and had been for some time.

“You fit, reb?”

“As a fiddle. And from what I’m told? Ain’t no rebs no more. Just folk.”

Noé grunted. “Get on up,” he whispered. “Get these on and come outside.”

Noé handed over clothing: a pair of frayed blue sergeant’s trousers with the piping stripped off, leaving behind a paler stripe of frazzled cloth, a thin and well-worn flannel shirt in red and black, a set of black suspenders and an old pair of Federal-issue mudscows with no laces and a hole in the right sole the size of a half-dollar. The clothes had not been laundered and smelled of sweat, soil, sun, and saltwater.

Abel set his feet on the ground. Noé stood at the entrance to the tent, watching the space between the hospital grounds and the barracks beyond the woodlot. “What’s this all about?” asked Abel.

Noé glanced over. “Just put on that shoddy.”

Abel shrugged. “What?” he asked. “No socks?”

Noé shook his head.

Abel dressed and went outside where the night air was crisp and cool, smelling of woodsmoke and horses. He heard the sound of the Potomac rushing into the Chesapeake as constant as the blood rushing within him. Noé looked him up and down and grinned in the dark. “Well, look at you. How do you feel?”

“I’m standing.” Abel shuffled his feet in the dirt and cupped his ruined elbow with his palm. Though the clothes were poor, they were finery compared with the rags he’d been wearing since his capture. He had been on the tip of the peninsula where the stockade was for three seasons before falling ill, and it had taken a toll on his clothing. No trees or brush kept the elements from any of the thousands packed into the forty acres of fenced-in sand, just narrow alleys between miserable little shebangs and one street to speak of. This street, Pennsylvania Avenue as it came to be called, was always
clogged with men hoping for a fresh breeze to lift the stink from their faces for a moment. Shamelessly desperate men turned out the pockets of those too weak to stop them and men carved charms and bracelets and rude, mean-faced chessmen from beef bones and still others offered service cobbling or barbering or tailoring for a quarter-ration of muley meat, a twist of firewood, a rare knuckle of soft bread. Abel had seen processions of men blinded by the unceasing glare of sun on sand and water, stumbling about hand-to-shoulder like wretched peasants from some medieval painting.

And now he stood in the dark outside the stinking hospital tent. He released his elbow and pressed his fingertips to his sternum, moving them about slightly to feel the luxury of napless cloth against his skin. Rolling about his right shoulder, he licked his lips and looked at Noé. “Well?”

Noé handed him a black slouch hat and bid him follow. Abel snugged the hat down tight, adjusted it front to back, and followed him.

They crossed to the dead-house and went inside. An old cow barn that had long since lost whatever paint it had had, it stood doorless and quiet and the light did not penetrate far within. The silver wood was paler yet by moonlight, crosshatched by the shadows of trees, and the sound of busy insects trickled out with a ticking buzz that spoke of time passing and of slow decay. Through some miracle of chemistry or climate, or perhaps owing to the gentle reek of his new clothes, Abel could not smell the corpses laid out in lines but could see them in their pathetic exposure, a pale string of bare feet that stretched back into the dark.

“What is it we’re doin’ here, Noé?”

“You reckon you’d take the oath?”

“What?”

“With me here. Right now. You reckon you can give your word not to take up arms against the Union no more?”

Abel shrugged and looked at him. “Well, hell, I don’t see why not,” he answered. “Your man Grant finished it up, so there ain’t much point holding out.”

“Just like that? You ain’t much of a rebel, as I understand them.”

“My parents are buried in New York,” said Abel. “North Carolina is just a place I happened to be when all this mess got started.”

Noé stared at him for a long moment, his dark face inscrutable in the tangle of shadows. Then he snorted, grinned, and said: “I wondered. You don’t sound like a proper cracker.”

“That don’t mean I don’t agree with the Cause.”

“Do you?”

Abel shrugged again. He could feel the black soldier’s eyes on him, could sense the set of his face sharpened with studied judgment. “Lincoln, he says we won’t never be shut of each other,” Noé finally said. “That we can’t never be, so we mustn’t be enemies. That’s what he said: we mustn’t be enemies. But you ain’t no friend of mine, and I can’t not hate you.”

“All right.”

Noé took a great, deep breath and exhaled with a long sigh. “If I was an officer, if I had me rank and a Bible, would you take the oath from me, Abel?”

“I would.”

“All right, then,” said Noé. “That’s good enough.”

A warm, salt-laden wind set the poplars to creaking. Catkins fell all around with soft little thuds, and Abel brushed several from the crown of his hat, smelling their gentle, sticky perfume on his fingertips. He rubbed his elbow and dug little troughs in the dust with his new brogans. Presently the wind fell away, and sound manifested from the sandy road that ran flat and white under the moon to the edge of the trees. And out of the trees the wagon resolved from the dark, aggregating from the shadows board by pale board with that ancient, repetitious stamp-creak-and-jangle common to all such equipage.

“We’ll part company now,” said Noé as the wagon swung around. “These men will take you with them after they’re loaded up.” Abel did not recognize either teamster. The driver, a spectacularly bearded man whose sad eyes Abel could pick out even in that starry dark, nodded while his companion, younger, also bearded, also melancholic, simply swung down from the jockeybox and unlatched the bedgate without comment.

“Noé,” said Abel, nodding and touching the brim of his hat as the soldier strode off into the darkness.

After a moment, he returned to stand looking at Abel from a little patch of moonlight that lit his face with a soft, silvery light. He took a deep breath, released it, then reached down deep into a trouser pocket, removed a few pieces of paper money, and gave them to Abel.

“You might could use that in the days to come,” said Noé.

Abel opened his mouth to thank him, then closed it, swallowed, and said, “Hey Noé?”

The soldier turned from the edge of the poplars. Pale flowers fell and caught the moonlight as they tumbled. “What?”

“What’s the date, anyway?”

“April twelfth,” he said, his voice falling off with distance. “Wednesday.”

Abel nodded. “And where’s that bottom rail now?” he called out to the dark, and from the dark came Noé’s voice, soft with the suggestion of laughter: “Still up top.”

The drivers were a Greek father and son from Ohio whose English was spotty at best and who were given to vast, deep silences. They lit two hurricane lamps, hung one from a nail set into the over-tall brake lever, and set the other on the ground within the barn, its yellow light turning the dead men’s darkening soles darker still.

The night was cool and the wind was fine and the pair worked without their scarves, moving with brisk and orderly composure. Abel made to help them but they waved him off, preferring to treat
with each corpse themselves. By necessity, they heaved the bodies into the bed one by one, and when they’d four in a row, the son clambered in among them to straighten legs as best he could, to fold arms across chests, and to unbend necks from positions sad and horrible. The Greeks had blankets with them, some of proper wool and some of thin linen that they’d soaked in the bay—Abel could smell cold salt and bladder wrack rising from dark folds—and one of these they draped over the first layer of corpses, then settled a second layer of bodies upon that. And then another blanket and a third layer in an ever-deepening stratum. One of the last bodies they pitched into the wagon Abel recognized as the johnny from the cot across the aisle, his face in death become softened, slack, pitiable. Abel looked away as the Greeks shook the blanket over him and tied the load off.

They mounted the wagon, and the father gathered up the reins. There were still a dozen or more bodies in the dead-house behind them, and at least as many more would join them before the wagon returned mid-morning. Like players in some ancient tragedy, they looked down at Abel standing in the cool dark.

“You are … a Lincoln man?” the driver asked.

“I don’t reckon I got a choice in the matter no more,” said Abel, swinging himself up beside them. And when the driver cocked his head and looked to his son for translation, he quickly added, “Yes. I am a Lincoln man. Through and through.”

The wagon followed the sandy track until it became a proper road, then left it and doglegged west upon another road before turning toward the capital. The sun rose and the day stood fine and clear and cool. They passed through little hamlets where celebrations of Lee’s surrender were still in evidence. In Leonardstown, they saw six Union soldiers passed out before the doors of a depot half filled with crates of shoes, hardtack, and overcoats. Off the beaten track and not expecting
much in the way of official traffic, they’d mounded up great heaps of straw for their comfort and stacked emptied flasks, bottles, and mugs in little cairns at their feet. In Bryantown, their passage disturbed streamers and curls of confetti in Union colors that had washed up in the lee of storefronts and parked wagons, and the surface of the road was scorched by the blasts of fireworks. In both towns, folk who were awake ceased whatever business they were about, uncovered their heads, and lowered their eyes as the dead-house wagon trundled past.

Abel left the Greeks at a bleak and nameless crossroads west of Nottingham. He stepped down from the moving wagon as it swung slowly about to take the south-running road, and the teamsters watched him without comment before easing the wagon to a halt. A discussion ensued between father and son that entailed much gesticulation and sharp tones. Their ancient, inflected tongue, coupled with the morning birdsong and the crisping of leafed-out trees beneath a springtime wind, put Abel in the mind of other mornings in other lands in eons long, long gone. After a few moments, the father having obviously won the argument, the younger Greek stepped off the wagon and gave Abel two dimes, pressing them to Abel’s palm with fingers whose nails were raggedly chewed to the quick. He removed his hat to thank the lad, but the boy turned back to the wagon, and without a word father and son ferried their cargo southward toward some distant necropolis.

Abel went on up the road. Amidst the easy green hills and swampy woods outside Upper Marlborough, he came upon a sutler in checkered pants and lime green waistcoat taking his ease in the shade of his wagon. Abel bought from him a pair of socks, a double length of twine to lace his shoes with, a pair of raddled brown wool pants that
had the benefit of not having a soldier’s stripe, a little wedge of cheese, a fist of bread, and, on impulse, one thin cigar. The sutler looked at the paper and the coin in his hand after Abel paid him and, with a smile and a waggle of his eyebrows, gave back half.

Abel went on up the road. He had the expectation of violence against his person if it was thought he was an escaped prisoner, so out of sight of the sutler and with no traffic visible, he stepped into the trees to change his trousers. It was watery country, and he found himself beside a little creek running sluggish and dark between drooping trees. Water skippers by the dozen plied the surface tension of the sulky run, maneuvering between leaves floating curled and upended like green Chinese junks. Abel removed his shoes and changed his pants, then stripped off his shirt and splashed his face. He lifted palms of water to his hair until it was soaked, then clawed out the tangles, washed his feet, and dried himself on the shoddy pants, redressed, and went on.

By and by, he found blown up into the grass at roadside a number of sheets of oyster-colored butcher’s paper of the sort used to pack firearms. Sitting down, Abel selected one, then crumpled and folded and snugged it down into the floor of his right shoe. When he stood again, he saw a broadside amidst the packing papers and picked it up. A Special Printing from the
Washington Star
, with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural printed thereupon. Abel sat again, reading the words that Noé had tried to explain to him. A rider cantered down the road toward Bryantown, paused to look him over where he sat, and rode on when Abel did not look up. Two men on lunch break from the sawmill south of town came along and nodded the afternoon to him, but he did not reply, and they went on their way. Abel sat a long time in the grass, reading and rereading, and when he’d finished he folded the paper carefully, empaneling the words so that in his breastpocket they’d lie near his heart just so.