Wilderness Run (32 page)

Around them, the room had the wet, papery smell of illness, and Bel tried not to breathe it in, longing at once both to depart Greenwood that instant and never to leave her parents again, because their complicated hearts both fascinated and disappointed her. For so long she had thought love was just like the swan story, waiting for a message and receiving it, and then sending your own reply, back and forth for years. Watching her father tenderly kiss her mother on an unbruised section of her cheek, now she wasn't sure.

“My dear wife,” he said with uncharacteristic emotion. His pink scalp shone through his thinning hair.

Faustina's eyes met her daughter's as he kissed her, and Bel thought she could see in them a deep and unremitting sadness. She touched the hard locket beneath the cloth across her breastbone and saw her mother nod imperceptibly, as if approving of the fact that it was hidden.

*   *   *

Bel did not let the silver bird emerge again until she had safely bidden her parents a tearful good-bye, laden with valises of plain, sensible clothes for her trip to Washington, and she and her aunt had changed cars in Albany, leaving the most opulent Pullman of the Lindsey line for a humble first-class car to the capital. Bel could not stop missing her mother, who had improved enough over the last day to get up from her bed and walk stiffly to the window, where she told her daughter in a low voice to be careful about what she dreamed of, and to fight all kinds of slavery, especially that of the heart. It was the kind of statement that suggested no reply but silence, and at that very instant, Bel finished her second soldier's shirt, the last stitch tied into a knot. In answer to her mother, she held it up, white, billowing, and let it drift back to her lap.

As she and her aunt left Vermont on the rocking Pullman, the land changed, the steep, tumbled green hills replaced by the river basins of New York. Lake Champlain stayed behind them, a flat scarf of silver-blue. The trees and the people, too, looked less hardy and defiant. Quiet-faced strangers had gathered like a stalled parade at Troy's tidy wooden station when Bel finally pulled out the locket again and examined the silver bird, its bent neck curled like the start of a letter.

“Let me see,” said her aunt, pale and blond in the switching panels of sunlight, shade, sunlight, shade. The train screeched to a stop. A hairy, frog-eyed man got on, heaping at least twenty carefully wrapped packages and crates into the aisle before taking the seat opposite. His worn attire didn't look quite good enough to ride first-class, and he lounged with an uneasy air on the stiff cushions, occasionally parting the red curtain to peer out on the platform.

“Sutler.” Aunt Pattie nodded in his direction as she scrutinized the locket. “Your mother used to wear that.” She opened the clasp in her officious way, her stare widening as if she were surprised at the emptiness inside.

The man rearranged his nest of crates, touching their contents gently. “Thirty pies,” he announced to the dimness of the train. “A crate of lemons, good soap, and some cologne water for the soldiers who want to remember what it was to smell sweet for the ladies.”

“Sir, I caution you against the disreputable elements of the railway,” Aunt Pattie said with a hungry glance toward his pies. “My husband, who happens to own a line, says that all sorts of thievery goes on.”

“I ain't about to lose nothing.” He smiled with genuine friendliness, revealing a blackened tooth. Affronted by his grammar, Aunt Pattie shifted again toward Bel, still holding her niece by the chain. Bel squirmed as the sutler's wet eyes lingered on her hair and shoulders. He would not be included in the range of people Faustina called “polite company.” Aunt Pattie tugged on the pendant, and the chain bit into Bel's neck. Leaning forward reluctantly, she resolved not to wear the swan in the open anymore. The train shuddered into motion again, making the crates clack together, and the sutler bounded up from his studied slouch to protect his wares. Aunt Pattie pulled her even closer.

“You ought to get the hinge fixed by a jeweler, dear. One day, it will just fall apart in your hands,” she said, wagging the loose halves of the silver bird to prove it.

May–June 1864

Chapter Forty

The place was called Chancellorsville, another meaningless appellation, except that a battle had been fought there the year before, and some of the skeletons remained, dredged up by spring rains. A spongy, starless sky hung over the soldiers. Although it had been dark for hours, no one could sleep, and they clustered around the fire, needlessly toasting their already-warm hands.

Digging with his bayonet beyond the light was blue-eyed Addison, silent even when his body shifted. A wet winter had rusted the weapon's blade, pocking the tiny reflected version of his handsome features. He did not appear to notice it as he carved channels around the edges of what looked like a mushroom-colored stone, clumps of clay sticking to his pants. He stabbed down hard and his reflected face blinked out.

Everybody in his company ignored this strange bout of energy. Only Laurence flicked periodic glances beyond the fire to measure the sergeant's progress, as if he knew he were alone in his curiosity and wished to hide it. Stretching out his long legs, he yawned and let his blond hair fall into his eyes, half-listening to the rest of the men, who were talking about their general. They had all seen him riding the day before in the old patched coat of a private, his hat askew and beard uncombed.
Grant,
one said,
was not a gentleman, and that's why he was the best kind of soldier.

If Grant was in charge all this time, we wouldn't be fighting on the same battlefield as last year,
said a veteran who wanted to scare the new recruits into understanding they knew nothing about war.
I don't know anymore if I'm sleeping on roots or bones.

Addison kept digging, stopping occasionally to wipe his forehead with his sleeve.

As their talk slowed, Loomis pulled out the locket his wife had given him long ago and kissed her image inside. Another fellow flapped his bedroll three times before lying down. The newer men, just down from their small towns in Vermont, began to form their own superstitions that very night, touching a letter in a breast pocket, whispering a name.

The sergeant's stone finally loosened, and he pried it up with his bayonet so that it rolled toward the flames. It bounced awkwardly, hollow and scratched across its yellow-white face.

This is what we all are coming to,
said Addison, rising unsteadily.
And some of you will start toward it tomorrow.

The skull bumped against a stick blackened by the fire. Bending forward, the sergeant pulled it back from the blaze and let it rest with the sockets aimed upward at a cream of night clouds, the toothy jaw slack and swallowing.

*   *   *

When the companies entered the thicket, the captains drove them to the intersection of two roads. The dusty lanes ran through an endless forest of thorn trees, chinquapin, and dwarf chestnut, burred across the land like the hair of a newborn, thick and tangled with its own shadow.

Gunfire shattered the stillness. Songbirds made sharp cries before they vanished, diving into hollows and caves. Addison looked instantly lonely, as he always did in battle, the rest of the world receding as he focused forward, his nose thrusting horselike into the wind. Behind him, too tall for this skirmish, Alfred Loomis stooped to save himself, his back bowed to an invisible ceiling.

Light blared through the stunted trees, peeling cool morning from the air and replacing it with the heat of a windowless room. The branches cracked like glass beneath their feet, and Laurence remembered suddenly the taste of blackberries, their laden sweetness filling his mouth.

When the firing began, their close formation was torn apart, the sergeant in the middle, Loomis looping left through a stand of new birch, his paddle-sized feet slipping on the mossy stones. The three friends knew one another so well that when Loomis drifted out, the others glanced to where he headed, the lone dead tree, jutting like a finger from a fisted hand.

Ahead of them, the soldiers on the front line fell slowly, with grand and ridiculous gestures, their arms flopping out to conduct a wild orchestra, or swimming slowly down through the leaves. Addison's line would be next. A bullet sailed into the hollow of the dead tree behind Loomis's head, just missing him. He gave a sigh of relief. He did not see the angry swarm of bees that hurtled out of the hollow by the hundreds and aimed like an arrow of rain against the back of his neck.

At the first stings, he spun around, batting their bodies away with his cap until his hands swelled. Soon the insects covered his ears and the slick crown where his hair was falling out. Howling with pain, he straightened from his safe crouch and began to sprint in the direction of the enemy. The others called out in warning, but he did not hear.

He ran with his arms open, embracing the bushes as they whipped his chest. A shot in his stomach, then another, broke his stride and he dove forward until the branches swallowed him. Following their quarry, the bees sang a hymn of exhausted anger that, against the crack and whine of bullets, sounded like praise.

It would be nightfall before the two remaining soldiers began looking for their friend. By then, his face had swollen tight as an egg, the features nearly erased. He could have been anyone, husband and father to a thousand orphaned sons perched on a flour barrel in the general store, baking their shins against a winter fire, running to answer the knock on the door.

*   *   *

The signal rose through the forest, a low three-note whistle of the dove. It meant
found.
As night fell, rebels had started to fire at the searchers, their own men among them, making branches glow in sharp relief, then vanish.

Bats lost their patterns of flight and slammed into tree trunks with hollow, popping sounds. One fell on Laurence's neck, and he swiped it away, hissing through his teeth. He had found his friend by his socks, where the brogan split and peeled aside and an irregular net of black thread shone through. There was no face left.

He sat back on his haunches, balancing his rifle across his thighs. The air weighed hot across the dead leaves and, far off, he could hear a narrow creek trickling over root and stone. Earlier, Captain Davey had ordered them to fill their canteens there. They'd held the silver lips down in the gravel bed and waited as the slow, silty current entered them. Laurence had stayed longer than the others, hovering over the cool vein, searching for the reflection of his face. He whistled again, three low notes.

When Addison staggered in, he stepped on the body's flung right hand and skidded to a halt. He stared into the hole below the ribs, where ants were marching over the intestines in a relentless line. Every time the wounded man breathed in, the ants would waver and lose their footholds, only to regain them again. The earth around the torso had darkened to mud and the corpses of bees lay scattered across it, like drops of rain that would not sink.

Loomis,
the sergeant said, although he knew the man could not hear him. Then he unhitched his revolver and aimed straight into the body's half-shut mouth. Laurence watched him dully, holding a narrow chain, the hinge of its locket split open by a minié. One half had fallen somewhere into the field of dead bees and the other bulged like a cheek between his finger and thumb, the woman's face inside cracked across the eyes.

Addison fired. It was louder than the whole war, that sound. The line of ants faltered, but only for a moment, less time than it took for him to turn away.

*   *   *

When the minié hit Laurence in the shin, he thought he could walk anyway and was surprised to have his leg collapse beneath him. He rose again and fell again, swaggering like a drunk through the brush. It was the second day. The regiment had moved on, past the intersection, through an open field, and into more unyielding thickets. Addison had left him behind because Davey was wounded, shot in the thigh.

Laurence.

The name burst into light above the chestnut tree. It was not to be believed. His leg was absent beneath him, his right hand split across the palm.

Later that day, the regiment swept back past him in retreat, and he thought he saw Addison running, his cap lost, his bronze hair streaming like a banner. He could not be sure. The woods were the bleached color of locusts, of a manic season.

Laurence.

It was not to be believed. Addison injured beside him, holding his bloody cheek. Yesterday's face scarred to a mask by bees.

Toward evening, the fires came. They were lovely at first, a tingle in the bushes, a flicker of candles in a darkened church.

At first, Laurence tried to drag himself backward to the ragged Union line, but the burning blocked him with a shimmering wall. Mottled with holes, the underbrush took the smoke and raised it skyward. The light followed. He dug a channel of earth around him with his one good hand and waited. Addison must be looking for him, riding through the fire on a borrowed horse.

Laurence.

Screams pitched from the men who were burning alive. His hand throbbed. The leg was still absent, a weight he dragged behind him on a chain. He dug deeper, watching a soldier scramble up a tree, the flames licking after him. Somewhere the corpses of bees turned to ashes above a fresh-dug grave.

The whistle, the signal for
found
, never came. He stamped at the fire with his one good foot. Smoke seared his eyes, dry and stinging. He breathed it in, let it enter him, while his good hand spread a caked mud of dirt and spit across his skin.

Dipping and waiting, the shapes of buzzards loomed high above the fire. He remembered a boy saying it was bad luck to look away from a buzzard before it flapped. The birds made high circles on the night. The yellow flames went white, roaring in his ears. He heard the trees yield and break, their branches swinging down to be consumed.