Wilderness Run (36 page)

What did she know about drawing people? The only things she could get right were grass blades, frost on the windowsill, a maple surrendering its bright red leaves. One inch of Ruth was more complicated than all the hills around Allenton. How dare she try to encompass any of these dark strangers she wanted so desperately to be free? The rats began scratching again, and she threw the sketchbook at the wardrobe before running from the dingy room. On the way out, her foot knocked the chamber pot that Lucy had forgotten or refused to collect. The pot swayed from side to side, sloshing its unpleasant contents, but did not spill. “Goddamn Lucy,” Bel said, and left it there, where the spinster nurse might trip over it.

Exhausted beyond sleep, she went back upstairs to watch Louis move among the wounded, drifting over their prostrate bodies like a restless ghost. He slept only in the brief hours before dawn, sprawling in a corner of the ward and folding his head in his hands. Tonight, he exchanged a glance with her and went back to his ministrations. Irritated that he did not notice her reddened face, Bel stomped over to the corner where her cousin lay. She was starting to feel the tears well up again when Shadrach woke.

“‘My soul is among lions,'” he began, speaking to her slowly and softly by the window's moonlight, “‘and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men.'” And then he was telling the stories of the fellows in his regiment, most of whom, she guessed, were dead. Some of what he said frightened Bel more than the sight of his missing limbs and the scarred face that curled beneath the bandages. She sat slowly down on the floor, crossing her arms over her knees the way she had in girlhood.

The soldier did not look at her when he spoke, but stared at the ceiling stains, dark and curved at their rims, as though some god had invented clouds to cross this interior and then abandoned them there without the wind to push them. Bel watched the ceiling, too. She propped her head on the cool plaster wall behind her and listened fiercely, every word sinking into her memory. The stories of his comrades, John Addison and Lyman Woodard, Pike and Gilbert and Loomis, appeared across the ceiling above. She could see them all, and cried when one died, grieving as his image vanished like a reflection shattered by flung stones.

She did not know if the other men heard the soldier they called Shadrach, for none believed he would ever wake again. Laurence's voice was soft as water through the hands, and the dense white moon coming through the window enveloped the two of them, separating them from the rest of the ward. She listened to the hours passing outside the web of silver light, Louis on his incessant rounds, and, dimly, the sounds of the sleeping soldiers, their sighs and anxious breaths, the restless turning as they fought the enemy in their dreams and sometimes won, sometimes lost. Meanwhile, John Addison was rescuing the horses at Bull Run; the orchard at Antietam rained down its cannonballs; Lyman Woodard was mincing on a makeshift stage in a dress stolen from a girl her age. Listening, Bel began to consider if the depth of feeling she always measured in herself was only the depth of her emptiness waiting to be filled with stories like this. She reached up to touch her cousin's arm. It was cool and stiff, like candle wax. She let her fingers slip from it and fall to her lap again.

When dawn began to crack through the wall of night, Shadrach's voice slowed to a trickle and ceased. He had not told of the battle where he had lost his limbs and burned, but still, the story appeared to be over. He turned his face from her and slept, the good side facing the ceiling, sprouting a dark stubble of hair. The growth surprised her, and she resolved to ask Louis to shave it away. He was coming toward her with a tray of dressings, his expression neutral. Except in the alcove, they never betrayed their emotions. How she longed to tell him the stories she had heard, but Louis did not look at her as he set the tray down next to Shadrach to work his gentle miracle. It was time to leave him and greet her aunt.

She descended to the damp room in the basement, nodding coolly to Ruth, who was polishing the banister on the way down. Uncle George must have left for more firewood, she realized. Her aunt was sleeping, her single window opaque with light. A moth had died against it in the night, and Bel swept it to the floor with her hand. Would Aunt Pattie remember what she had told her the day before?

The blue dimness made the older woman look like a fish trying to hide, its body immobile against the current. Her once-rosebud lips had grown flabby and showed the effort of breath, puffing and sinking back. The rats must have come without Uncle George knowing, because the plate of food Bel had brought down the night before held a constellation of black droppings.

“Have you come to dine?” asked Bel's aunt, waking and seeing Bel hovering above her, the plate in hand. Her face was open and expectant. Clearly, she did not remember her confession.

“No, I fear you've already had some other guests.” Bel set the plate on the table beside the bed. “I came to tell you that I persuaded Laurence to eat three spoonfuls of soup, and a crust of bread, I think.” About the stories, she would say nothing, for they were hers to hear and hers to own, for staying with him while the others could not bear it.

“You think?” Aunt Pattie shifted her head sideways. The dose of calomel had thinned her hair, and Bel could see her aunt's pink scalp.

“Well, I'm certain about the soup,” she said, suddenly uncertain. “The bread, I left for him, and when I came back, it was gone. I thought he was being stubborn. You know how he can be stubborn.”

“You've come to tell me you think he's getting better,” said Aunt Pattie. “That soon he'll be able to walk down here and see me, and then we can all go home.”

“Yes,” said Bel, her voice trembling. Her aunt had spoken with a strange bitterness.

“Well,” said her aunt in a gentler tone, turning her face away from Bel. “I would like to see him tomorrow. George is enlisting some boys to help me up the stairs. I am tired of this room, and I won't be kept away from my son,” she said with an air of defiance. “I'll go to him if he will not return to me.”

*   *   *

When Bel repeated her aunt's command to Louis, breaching their contract not to speak to each other in the alcove, he nodded and said, “She knows.”

“Knows what?” Bel asked. The dark air smelled like chalk. She pressed closer to Louis.

“That he is about to leave us,” Louis said simply. Bel could feel his shoulders rise into an apologetic shrug.

“How can you say that?” she demanded, shoving her face into his shirt, feeling the buttons bruise her cheek. “You saved him.”

“I can't save him.”

“You already did.”

“It was selfishness. I knew that way, I would see you again.” He took her elbows and pushed her gently away from his body. “And I don't deserve any sort of praise.”

Bel felt the tilted end of the days they had balanced between them, the fulcrum their few stolen minutes in the alcove and the hope that Laurence might live.

“You say you hate slavery, Isabel. The worst kind of slavery is to keep a man alive, suffering, when he cannot ever walk again, or look at his reflection without weeping,” continued Louis, his voice a soft rasp. She strained to see his face and couldn't, only the measure of darkness between them. “Don't make me do it much longer.”

“But he woke yesterday. He spoke to me.” She was pleading now, pushing against the current of his threat.

“If you insist, I'll leave tomorrow. My arm is almost healed, and my company needs me,” he said, his face unseen, his accent suddenly thick and foreign. Bel shoved the stranger's hands from her and began backing out of the alcove.

“He told me about all his friends,” she said. Her skirt swept the damp, crumbling plaster. She heard a cricket sawing its leg in the false night behind her. “Why would he do that if he didn't want to live?”

Louis did not answer, but when he came out into the light, he was cupping the cricket in his hands. It sang through the cage of his fingers as if it did not know it was trapped. Frowning, Bel turned away and began walking up the stairs, her steps steady as a drum tap. When Louis opened his hands, the insect sprang back toward the dark, where it became a voice again, bodiless and grating. He listened for a moment, letting his head tip against the cold wall, knowing she would not wait for him.

Chapter Forty-six

Later, Isabel would remember the single day she did not meet Louis behind the stairs as the end of one part of her life—the part where the future was intertwined with a desperate hope that everything might be the same again, one day, restored like a shelled house to its former grandeur. Louis came to change the dressing alone, quickly, as his strength was needed in the raising of Aunt Pattie. Their eyes met above the shallow breaths of the body between them. The nurse was wearing the shirt Bel had sewn for him, and she saw for the first time the mole high in his black hairline, the thickening of the beard across his face. His not-quite handsomeness seemed distant now, an abstraction of the man she loved and not the man himself. How young I must look to him, she thought suddenly, and stared down at her soft, unveined hands. And yet, although only seventeen, she felt like an old woman. A breeze from the window blew over her, and a sparrow landed on the sill, bright-faced and timid.

“Stay,” she said quietly to Shadrach's half a face, although she meant it for Louis. The other men of the ward were playing cards or reading, their knees jutting up in their sheets. Laurence had spoken only a few times, moved only in slight shifts of his amputated limbs, and only when she was watching over him. Had she dreamed it all? The other soldiers never turned their heads, even the Illinoisan in the sling right next to him. What's the use? she thought. What could possibly be the use of keeping him this way when they had their memories of a brave, thoughtful boy who never got in trouble for anything, even for trying to save a runaway slave? Somewhere, that man might be free now, one of the emancipated hundreds who streamed into Washington, carrying his small bundle of possessions. If he were, did that mean their part in the war was over?

Since their failure in childhood to rescue the runaway, Bel had thought of abolition as the one thing that continued to unite herself and her cousin, beyond his misplaced passion for her, beyond her sisterly refusal. Slavery was their last wilderness, the place they had to rename together. And yet now she saw in the faces of Ruth and Lucy, in the pained waiting of the whole city for the war to be over, that slavery would go on long past emancipation. Even the noblest soldier could not overturn the consequences of that institution. The endless suffering terrified her. Staring down at the masked body of her cousin, she felt as if she were balanced on the edge of a cliff, considering how long the leap would take.

Shadrach shifted, sketching a loose arc with his one good hand. The sheet creased beneath his thumbnail. The motion made Bel notice how his wrist resembled her own, the bones on either side jutting out as if there weren't enough flesh to hold them. They were not princely wrists, but the ugly, functional appendages of soldier and nurse. And they were the same ones she had seen moving across her father's drafting desk as he drew his plans. The same for the good hand, the same for the crushed. She'd always known that blood tied their families together, but what about the deep, unrelenting structures of bone? Did it matter which man her mother had loved long ago? She could never feel alone again.

Louis began to change the dressing, letting her watch for the first time as he peeled away the onion-colored bandages to the husk of skin beneath. Shadrach's chest was a pattern of blood black rivers. Bel gagged and turned away from her cousin's ragged breathing. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, running from the decision Louis was asking her to make.

She did not stop until she reached the basement, where her uncle was orchestrating the raising of his wife. Like all the endeavors of a group of men, the procedure had to be copiously plotted and calculated before it could begin. George, the surgeon, and the other two invalid nurses were estimating the number of steps it would take to lift the woman, the radius of their turns on the landing, the amount of space they would have left in the doorways. It seemed like hours before Louis joined them and the collected men began to ease Aunt Pattie from the bed.

Isabel followed the caravan lifting her aunt up three flights to the high ward. Illness had softened the large hull of the woman's body and made her flabby, difficult to hold. Even her husband wore the strained face of a man who wished he might be anywhere else but upon that narrow stair, lifting his wife higher, step by grunting step. She rode in their arms, imperturbable and silent. That morning, Bel had helped her into a dress the pine color of the Green Mountain Boys, and Aunt Pattie bore a resemblance to a snowcapped hill in springtime, her wisps of white-blond hair drifting skyward, a green cascade of cloth sweeping the floor. The men began to adopt the rhythm of the Irishmen who laid the Lindsey rails: swing, step, lift, swing, step, lift, up one flight, past the alcove where Bel had hidden daily with Louis in a brief, trapped eternity of touch. He did not meet her gaze.

At the next landing, Bel slipped ahead of them and ran up the steps to the high ward. She could not walk fast enough past the bed of the German, past the new boy with the stomach wound, the Maine soldier ill with dysentery, past the one-eyed man, to the bed where her cousin lay.

Shadrach's good arm stretched toward the window, his palm open. Two mud-colored sparrows dipped over the hand, feeding on the chewed lump of the crust she had left him the day before. So ordinary, these messengers. Their beaks stabbed into his palm, stabbed again. He was watching them, his head swept toward the window. The bandage had slipped, revealing the ash where hair had once covered his temple, the featureless stretch of his cheek and chin, melted to one. The two halves of the face were separate, like a broken plate that will no longer fit together, some piece flung so far, it will be missing forever. So ordinary, the afternoon absorbed the birds as they flew away. His good eye was fixed on a distant place.