Wilderness Run (33 page)

Laurence, I'm here.

It was not to be believed. The air was like day. He stared skyward as the fire crossed his circle of earth, felt the heat in his boots as it touched his feet, playing over them.

The buzzards spun higher, riding an invisible current, wings stretched, motionless. His nails cracked as his toes began to burn.

Flap.

*   *   *

It was not a ghost standing above him, but the shape of a man, the very breadth of darkness in the bright rings of fire. His bare skin wore the sheen of coal before it burns. Ridged across his naked body were scars of chains, of lashes up the back. The fishhook mark of his lost tribe curled beneath his left eye.

Without saying a word, he kicked at the soldier with his good foot, motioning for him to rise. After awhile, the sharp pain woke Laurence and he got to his feet, stumbling into the forest, his eyes shielded by one sooty arm. Burning leaves coasted to the ground around him. He turned. The man had vanished. His knees gave way and he would have caved in, but a falling limb knocked him between the shoulder blades, the blow like a heavy fist beating him onward. He kept walking.

When he reached the narrow run of water that ran through the woods, he tripped on a root and tumbled with a hiss into the stream. The red haze of the sky went loose above him, like a bandage wearing off a wound. It unraveled slowly, peeling back layer by layer until the screams returned, the heat of the fire around him, the bright stars of sparks lighting the moss. He could feel one half of his face lifted away.

He burrowed deep in the muddy bank. A damp, crumbling hair of roots cascaded over his eyes. He waited, listening to the screams belly through the woods and vanish, the crash of charred trees. His mouth tasted of soot and blood. Slow water dragged his scorched clothes away from him, his skin tightening where it was touched by flames.

When he reached for his face, the side that rested on the earth was familiar, the curve of cheek, the bristle of lashes. But the side exposed to the sky sifted like char, the eye sewn shut by fire.

He struggled to remember the name of his rescuer, but the name meant nothing, two syllables that drowned in the stream. As a minnow swam against his one good hand, he could feel the cold, intricate lace of its fins, its mouth opening and closing against his thumb, trying, failing to swallow him whole.

*   *   *

Morning played over the dying fire, sweet-songed. He was lying on the forest floor with a hundred other bodies, gathered for burial. The sound of the shovel chinking in the earth reminded him of an old guilt, a hole in his life that would never be filled.

He could go now. The men still alive murmured of a distant train. But he was ready to go without the rails his father had laid for him.

Laurence.

Then his body was taken from the others, stabbed by a thousand knives of sunlight.

The Canadian had come to carry him, a man he had hated for his narrow, hawkish face, for the way he would not be defeated by anything. And he hated the man again for saving his life. He tried to fall, but the man would not fall. The forest vanished, replaced by fields, and they were still running, the Canadian's steps ragged and jolting. Let me go, he tried to say, his voice overcome by the approach of the train, a metal cloud, a storm bringing wind but no rain.

*   *   *

The train ride was a separate dream, one where he could not move or speak except through the humming clack of the wheels over the tracks. The country outside the window streamed into a single swath of green. The man on his right was dead and his hand kept hitting Laurence's side, as if he were trying to remind him of something.

The ceiling of the train was a scratched pine color. When the car moved around the curve, the wooden floorboards joined the moaning of the men. The hot air smelled of smoke. Watching over him was the Canadian who had saved him from being buried alive, holding his red-soaked arm.
Live,
he urged again and again, his strange accent shortening the word.

For a long while, he thought that he was already dead. But when the train stopped at its final station with a resounding hiss of steam, he felt his guardian's hand on his chest, fumbling in the breast pocket.
Live
, he said as he inspected the cool metal of half a locket, the portrait inside.

Solemn as a priest, the Canadian tossed the woman's broken face to the floor. It got stuck in a crack, someone's mother and wife staring up at them all until the conductor opened the doors to the car and the bright light blinded them.

*   *   *

Laurence
.

Only much later, when the train shuddered to a halt and he was carried to a still place where birds crossed the square of sky behind his bed, only when he knew for certain he was not still in the ring of flames, did he recognize who was calling him.

For a long time, her name remained a kind of forgiveness he could not utter.

When he finally answered her, a door flew open to an empty house, moss on the windowsill and dead bees lying in the hearth. A staircase led to the second floor, each step breaking as he took it. Heat filled the attic room, its single window wearing a flap of oilcloth, yellow and ancient.

Isabel,
and the boards made hollow sounds as he crossed them, the spiderwebs softening the corners where beams reached like dark arms. When he pushed the oilcloth aside, the yard unfolded below him, green and rippled by wind. Sunflowers bloomed in the garden, and the welt of sky above bore clouds the color of milk that spilled not rain, but snow, drifting gently down over the warm air, white flakes sinking everywhere and his hand reaching out to hold them as they melted.

Chapter Forty-one

“Yes,” she said, kneeling beside him. The room was filled with the bass murmur of men. Her smile wavered as she stared steadily onto the half of his face that looked back at her.

“You … calling … me?” His voice stayed underwater, the bubble breath of the fish.

“Yes,” she said again, turning her honey-colored head to glance over the sea of beds. Soldiers were strewn like shipwrecked sailors across them. A filtered sun shone into the room, the yellow of melted butter. “I should tell your mother and father.”

“I don re … memger—” he began, and she placed a finger on the half of his lips not covered by bandage. After a few hours, the damp linen would go lucid and she could see the hole where his eye had been burned away. The socket fixed a stare on the ceiling, while the healthy eye shifted restlessly about the room, unable to focus.

The soldier did not yet comprehend he was missing his right leg and the fingers of his right hand. Only the thumb remained, poking like root from its bandage. For hours, the girl had watched the thumb twitch, the stump of the lost leg rear up, making a wave in the sheets, while the good limbs slept peacefully, unmoving. The patient still smelled faintly of the ash that the cooks swept from the stove.

The balding, moonfaced surgeon was fond of relating the story of this soldier to the other surgeons and nurses. He had lost so many to ordinary deaths from infection and disease that when a fellow survived like this, he had to tell it to the world to believe it. He called the soldier “Shadrach,” after one of the survivors of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. A man who could die and live for his convictions, the surgeon claimed.

So few had lived through the fires in the Wilderness, a thick woods outside Chancellorsville. Most had perished that night, and the rest in the remaining days, when they lay on the forest floor, waiting for the ambulance to reach them. Shadrach had lived through every horror the battlefield could offer and then the train ride to Washington, largely due to the ministrations of another casualty, who had stayed with him all the way from Chancellorsville.

The guardian angel was a Canadian who had taken a bullet in the arm on the first day of the battle, and then disobeyed orders by staying and searching for Shadrach, bringing him personally to the hospital. He now worked as one of the invalid nurses in the ward and was due to return to his regiment as soon as his arm was fully healed. “Jean d'Arc,” the surgeon called him in his joking way, for the Canadian had also come from the fire. The brusque Irishman could never remember anyone's name unless he issued it himself. His appellations were not particularly clever, but because every soldier feared and respected the man with the ether and cases of sharp metal tools, they were all accepted without protest.

Once Shadrach was safely in the ward, Jean d'Arc wrote to the patient's family in Allenton and discovered that his mother and cousin were already in the capital. The Canadian found them at the Willard Hotel, one of the most illustrious of the temporary residences of Washington, run by two Vermonters. Pattie Lindsey and her young charge would breakfast at an enormous buffet of fried oysters, steak and onions, and steamed fish, gliding past the important personages of Washington on the way to their polished table in the corner.

The Willard's lavishness had made Bel simultaneously nervous and excited, for she had never seen such poise or finery in small-town Allenton. Aunt Pattie was of the mind that one must be
quite
fortified for one's duties, and she fixed herself plates so gargantuan, Bel heard a southern woman whisper to her friend about the insatiable appetite of the Yankees. In the afternoon, they would visit hospitals, breezing through the Patent Office and other improvised wards where the wounded lay in postures of suffering and quiet acceptance, their naked flesh sometimes exposed to Isabel, who would blush and look away.

The girl would blush at little now, after three weeks in the heart of the busy hospital off Ninth Street. The opulent velvet room at the Willard was sacrificed for a hard cot in the basement, where the female nurses were discreetly placed far away from the wounded. The girl's aunt had fallen ill with fever almost immediately after seeing her son, but she refused to leave the building while Laurence was in such a delicate condition. Consequently, Isabel and her uncle George traded shifts between another basement room of the hospital and the ward upstairs. Below, Aunt Pattie alternately coughed and dreamed and wept, while on the top floor, Shadrach had lain silent until now.

It brought tears to the surgeon's eyes to see the three of them gathered around Shadrach's crippled form. He was certain the boy would never wake again, and he looked disbelieving when the girl told him that her cousin Laurence had spoken to her.

“Shadrach, I mean,” she said softly as she led the surgeon to the bed. The soldier had drifted off again, his burned lashes making a sooty curve above his cheek.

“Are you sure now, Miss Lindsey?” asked the surgeon, bending over him like a robin reaching for a worm.

“He said my name,” she answered simply. She resumed her perch on the stool beside the bed. “He said Isabel.”

Chapter Forty-two

Every day, the vigil changed over Shadrach's body. Isabel and her uncle switched at noon, crossing each other on the stairs, their bodies swollen with lack of sleep, eyes meeting, locking, looking away. In the anxiety over his wife and son, Uncle George no longer paid much attention to his niece. He spoke to Bel only of deliberate things, asking her how well the hospital was supplied with bandages, how many wounded had come in that day, how long her aunt had stayed awake. He bowed his head like a penitent as soon as he passed her.

Upon reaching the ward, George would raise his chin, stride in, and shut the window behind his son, scaring the sparrows that gathered on the sill. The once-handsome man insisted on watching Louis, the invalid nurse, change the dressing. He did not flinch at the sight of Shadrach, but peered with tender interest at where the fire had melted his son's skin against his ribs and shoulders. He lightly touched the white dust that bloomed over it and the flecks of soot that were buried in the soldier's cheek. Shadrach's empty eye socket shone back at them, a yellowed cave of pus. The boy was beyond the ugliness of the maimed, who peopled the ward like a new race, the slow shufflers and awkward lifters, their skin knit back together by the amateur hand of man. He was just a shell for the little spirit left in him, hollow and cool to the touch.

On the morning that Shadrach woke and spoke to his cousin, the Canadian's rough hands finally stopped trembling. He understood that Isabel's uncle tolerated his presence because he had saved his son. He understood that his place had been carved by his rescuing, that as long as he continued to save the boy, this slot remained for him. Consequently, he had quailed at the daily changing of the dressing as a student who dreads a test he knows he'll fail. Shadrach's father was a firm believer in work's ability to elevate the worker, however, and he observed Louis with grudging praise, day after day. For a while, they both believed in Shadrach's recovery, cracked jokes, and spoke to the sleeping soldier about his imminent return to Allenton. But on that afternoon, the invalid nurse knew the patient would never see his home again. When he lifted the bandages, he noticed immediately that the skin that had once tightened to a raw pink sheen was loose, giving way to dark patches of gangrene.

“Tell me again how you saved him,” the father said in a hoarse whisper as Louis heaped the used bandages in an old chamber pot. This was their other conversation, repeated over and over. The man knew the story so well, he would interrupt like a child who guesses what is coming on the next page but must hear it all anyway, this tale he knows the end to.

“He was lying in the creek bed with his face down—”

“Before that—”

“The fires?”

“Yes, the fires.”

“The captains left alive thought no one could survive the fires that swept through the trees. The flame was high and bright and we heard the men screaming as they died.”

“But my son—”

“But your son was lying in a creek bed with another body beside him—”