Wilderness Run (37 page)

She heard the commotion of her aunt arriving, the sound of the men's boots scraping the floor. Their strained faces appeared at the threshold. She hovered in front of the body, protecting it from the awkward ship approaching, her aunt's forehead slick with sweat, blue gaze wide as the blind's. The ward fell into a deep silence. Even the hiss of cards stopped. Even the man who moaned in his sleep, and slept constantly, paused to breathe. Bel touched the dry ridge of skin where her cousin's ear had melted against his head. It fell away like a leaf. The procession neared, jostling the iron ends of the beds. She met the eyes of her uncle, stunned, like someone had driven a nail through them, and then those of Louis, steady, as if he already understood how it could be that the one time they weren't listening, the answer came. Her aunt's mouth was just opening, her son's name rising like a keen over the waiting sea of stranded men.

Isabel waited to refuse them all, to say it was too late.

Chapter Forty-seven

He was on the train again, his father's house, only this one was filled with bodies, the wounded and dying, their arms bandaged by corn husks and the strips of a neighbor's uniform. In the next car, he could see the hospital where his cousin waited, her long hair pinned beneath her cap, the way she stood with her knees arched back. There was so much light in there.

But now there was someone calling him from his own car, swaying in the square open door where the fields blurred a yellow-green. Tall and big-eared, he had the long black beard of a sage waiting to go gray. He was climbing a ladder, his grasshopper body springing toward the top of the train, where one could ride in the open wind. There were others above; he could hear them beating their heels on the wooden roof and singing. He could hear the high sawing sound of an accordion. Dust fell through the car, and he went to the opening to take hold of the rungs. The rusty metal flaked away in his hands. He hesitated.

The fields yielded to mountains, parting for the train like the frozen blue crests of a wave. He could smell snow somewhere deep in them, in a mossy cave, or a cleft of boulders pitched against each other for a hundred thousand years. As he started to climb, he saw the grinning faces of his friends above, and a cloud behind them, heavy and winged, like a white bird coming to meet him.

Chapter Forty-eight

It was nearly nightfall when the young man emerged from the hospital for his daily pipe. The building had been quiet all day with the death of one of its well-known inhabitants, the son of a railroad magnate from Allenton, Vermont, who survived the fires at the Wilderness, only to die a few weeks later in a clean white bed. A liveryman across the street paused in his repair of an old saddle to watch. From the stories of his wife, a hospital cook, he recognized the young man as the nurse who never stopped working in the wards, whose gift with the sick had become legend. According to the gossip, he was also in love with the cousin of the burned soldier, and he had long kept the boy alive for her.

About an hour before, the young woman in question had stood under the same blue wooden sign for the hospital, hardly old enough to be allowed out unchaperoned, but dressed in the severe garments of a spinster. Her face, though lovely, was marked by the strain of so much loss. She would be the kind of woman to cede her beauty quickly to age if she didn't escape the daily sight of suffering, yet she stood by her uncle with the air of a prisoner about to be locked away for years.

Two hacks halted in front of them. One would take the girl and her invalid aunt, one her uncle and the coffin that held the soldier's corpse. They would ride the train north again, through the flat terrain of the coast to the high, rolling state from which they came, and bury him. The aunt was stuffed like deflated dough into a hack, and the girl followed, staring up at a window on the third floor that was mobbed daily by sparrows. At the same moment her head wrenched back with the momentum of the hack's exit, the window opened, scattering the birds, and the nurse stood there, looking down at her. Around his neck he wore something small and silver.

The liveryman's old busybody of a wife came trotting across the street after the hacks pulled away. She claimed that Old Sawbones had been trying for weeks to convince the commanding officer of the Canadian's regiment to allow him to stay on at the hospital as a surgeon-in-training and not to fight again. The officer refused. But just that afternoon, the dead soldier's father had gone to the U.S. Army office and paid the three hundred dollars that released the sons of rich men from the draft. He said if he couldn't save his own boy from this foul war, then he might as well save someone else's, and he named the Canadian as the beneficiary.

The commanding officer agreed to the following terms for Louis Pacquette: As long as the war lasted, the Canadian had to work at the hospital, but the day the sides made peace, he could be mustered out honorably with the rest of the regiment, continue his studies, and one day return to Allenton a surgeon.
What a dream for a poor tutor, what an American dream,
the liveryman's wife had said proudly. She lowered her soft, sagging cheek to be kissed and bustled back across the street.

Now it was evening, the day drained to shallow pools of light that lingered on rooftops and in windowpanes. The Vermonters were gone, and the nurse stood with his legs splayed slightly, his weight on his heels, and prepared his pipe. Carriages shuttled past, creaking on strained springs.

If the liveryman had not returned to his work just then, he might have seen the curious reddish color of the tobacco the nurse loaded in the bowl and lighted. It had the consistency of paper that had been splashed by rain and dried again, and it burned without leaving an ash.

Praise for
Wilderness Run

“Maria Hummel's poetically rendered debut novel contains the stuff of great fiction … vivid … intriguing.”

—Lisa Robinson Bailey,
The Independent Weekly

“
Wilderness Run
has many pluses, including realistic battle scenes and some lovely writing … dramatic.”

—Melissa MacKenzie,
Rutland Herald
(Vermont)

“A gripping debut, shot through with poetry and violence,
Wilderness Run
traces the demons that divide us, whether as a nation or in our hearts. At turns radiant and shocking, understated and unbearable,
Wilderness Run
proceeds with the force of a coming locomotive.”

—Nick Flynn, author of
Some Ether

“A gifted poet has immersed herself in the history of her home territory to write a mesmerizing first novel. Maria Hummel's
Wilderness Run
is the work of a prodigious new talent.”

—David Huddle, author of
The Story of a Million Years

“Hummel's debut … is gracefully and evocatively written.… Hummel creates solid characters while capturing the day-to-day reality of military life during the Civil War … well-paced, elegant prose … poignant.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Imagine Cormac McCarthy meeting Alice Hoffman and you have Maria Hummel's graphic, blood-and-bone battle scenes woven through the softer focus narrative musings of her characters, sons and daughters growing up quickly under separation and fire.… Riveting and poignant, impossible to put down, painful and sweet, difficult to ignore. Ambitious in metaphor,
Wilderness Run
is anytime, the War is every war, the loss is always personal. Maria Hummel's debut novel is worthy and unforgettable.”

—John Valentine, The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, North Carolina

WILDERNESS RUN
. Copyright © 2002 by Maria Hummel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

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First St. Martin's Griffin Edition: November 2003

eISBN 9781466879836

First eBook edition: July 2014