Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  Chapter Eleven

  Heat changed the color of the world outside the party, bleaching the land and trees to a dull gold. It looked like the coat of a lion, Bel decided. She stood at the rim of the gathered adults in her yellow party dress with the frilled sleeves, lace neckline, and green ivy her mother had painstakingly embroidered around the hem. She longed to taste a cake from the laden table, but no one was eating yet except for the flies that wagged back and forth over the piles of food, shooed by servants’ hands.

  It was strange that Aunt Pattie had chosen not to cancel her recitation party when they first heard news of the fighting in Virginia, but she claimed she wanted to distract herself from worry over Laurence, and to honor her good daughters. Lucia and Anne were graduating from Mrs. Laurel Ellsley’s School for Young Women, a place Faustina insisted Bel would never attend, as she didn’t approve of the way Mrs. Ellsley taught girls to be subservient and meek. A thin blond woman with big teeth, a refined Boston accent, and the lidded gaze of a lizard, Mrs. Ellsley once had a husband, but he had died in a train wreck, leaving her childless. To pay her way, she started a finishing school at her house, which quickly became popular with the wealthy mothers around town.

  Bel was afraid of Mrs. Ellsley, and she suspected that the girls who went to be “finished” felt the same way. Even sanguine Lucia and Anne spoke their schoolmistress’s name with the lengthened syllables of weariness and obligation. But Faustina outright disliked the teacher, and, to challenge her methods of instruction, she had forced Bel to learn the longest recitation of all: King Henry V’s speech to his men at Harfleur, Shakespeare’s famous rallying cry to stir the British soldiers to victory. Bel would precede Lucia and Anne’s verses from Tennyson with her bold and patriotic call to arms, and she resented it completely.

  The gathered crowd was composed of mostly women, along with a few fathers and even fewer suitors. The majority of the affluent young men were waiting by the post office, eschewing the delicate speeches of ladies for the real news—who had won, who had lost, who had died. She imagined their upright male bodies as they jostled one another, kicking up dust on the dry ground, pipe smoke curling from their mouths. Even the boys who opposed the war had taken to talking about it as if they knew all about drilling and marching and battle strategies.

  “First and foremost,” Mrs. Ellsley began her introductory remarks, “I would like to thank the mothers of these talented and excellently trained girls, for they lead by example, while I can only instruct.”

  Faustina bent down to whisper into her daughter’s ear. “Are you ready?”

  Bel nodded, inhaling her mother’s clean scent. She was proud that Faustina was the prettiest woman in the room, prettier even than Lucia and Anne, whom everyone called the “golden Lindsey girls”—a reference Bel’s mother said was crass, and not entirely related to their blond hair. She was ready, but she would have to wait through several of the graduates first. At the front of the room, Mrs. Ellsley was introducing Mary Ruth Cross, who would recite a portion of The Song of Hiawatha.

  It was a very short portion indeed, and delivered in a blushing stammer that made the gathered mothers wave their fans faster, as if to speed up time itself. The fathers loaded their pipes and settled in for a long wait through Hannah Fithian’s tolerable version of Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” and several attempts at Psalm 23 by the girls who so succeeded at Mrs. Ellsley’s schooling that they could not decide anything for themselves and had gratefully accepted an assignment. Upon the last half-whispered “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever,” Mrs. Ellsley cleared her throat viciously and announced that they had a “special guest” in Miss Isabel Lindsey, who had not attended her school but who had undertaken the task of memorizing Shakespeare. The audience clapped dutifully. Swaying slightly in the new heaviness of her petticoats, Bel walked to the front and faced them all.

  In the back, by the tall windows that looked out on the road, Lucia and Anne stood with Morey Aldridge, the son of a shipbuilder. His severe features had been transformed lately into awkward grins and guffaws by the twins’ attentions. Aldridge was rumored to be coming into a large inheritance, and the twins fought over him with gentle savagery, each employing her best wiles. Lucia was winning, for she had a prettier voice than Anne, and her low, indulgent laugh was contagious. She had worn her sallow blond hair loose for the occasion, and it hung limply in the heat, but Anne’s was worse, knotted in numerous braids that wound around her head like snakes. Bel saw Morey Aldridge whisper something in Lucia’s ear, his black eyebrows knitting together. When Lucia smothered a giggle with her hand, Bel was suddenly struck by the fear that soon they might all be laughing at her.

  Although she had uttered the speech a thousand times, now the dull, expectant eyes of two dozen adults and children blended into one giant gaze. Opening her mouth, Bel waited for the sound to rise as it always did, but nothing came. The wind blowing through the propped door smelled like sawdust from the lumberyards. Her neck itched. Then, looking out the window behind Lucia’s head, way in the distance, Bel glimpsed a boy running up the lane toward her uncle’s house. He must be coming from the post office, she thought, and the wonder at the news he would bring jarred her into speech. She had to say it now, or she might never again get the chance.

  “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

  Or close up the wall with our English dead!

  In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility…”

  The boy stumbled and fell to his knees, ripping a hole in his trousers. He rose and ran on, the torn piece flapping. His blond hair slapped against wide red ears. Bel recognized him, the son of the liveryman in town. His hair was always too long and his pants too short, and he often delivered messages because he was the fastest runner among all the boys, even barefoot. The speech came easily now, but the messenger was so close, she could see the spurs of dust lifting from his heels. She went on, watching him come, his face tight with excitement. What would he say? Would the war be over? Would Laurence come home?

  “‘On, on, you noble New Englanders,’” she commanded, changing the speech, as the fathers and mothers began to turn to the sound of the boy’s feet on the stairs, in the hallway, at the door. “‘Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof! Fathers that like so many Alexanders, have in these parts from morn to even fought, and sheathed their swords for lack of argument.’”

  But the boy was shouting over her now, and the men were rising to surround him. He was saying McDowell had lost, that it was a great rout—“the great skedaddle,” the boys at the post office were calling it. And the wounded? (For they could not say dead.)

  “There’s a list,” the boy said. The men began throwing on their coats, the women folding their fans, lifting bonnets from the backs of chairs. “I have it memorized,” he boasted, and the commotion came to a halt. The men nodded proudly, staring at his sunburned cheeks.

  “Tell us,” shouted Uncle George. He was one of the few men in the room with sons fighting in Virginia.

  “No, come to the front and tell us,” Mrs. Ellsley said encouragingly, and led him right up beside Bel in her yellow summer dress with the green ivy stitched along the hem. For the first time in her life, she became fully aware of how others must see her, standing there in that frilly gown with her budding breasts pressed up by the bodice, her hands fisted like a boy’s. She saw how she refused to move aside at first, the speech still in her mouth, the dream of the war’s glory ending as she was dragged away by her mother, who sat her down on a chair, hard, so a pain jolted up her spine.

  The boy began to recite his litany of names, those who had fallen at a place called Bull Run, the wounded first, then the dead. It was shorter than they anticipated, the numbers of Allenton’s sons who had enlisted fewer than they thought. Laurence’s name was not among them. Neither were the poorer cousins of the Pomeroys, two boys who had gone off on the same train in April,
nor the husbands of their servant girls. In fact, the crowd had to strain to recognize the dead, who were the faceless lumber workers’ sons and brothers, and the farmers scratching a living from the soil outside town. For a moment, Bel had the feeling that it wasn’t their war at all, but someone else’s, to which they listened with voyeuristic intensity in order to find out what it was like to suffer.

  But then her uncle called out that he knew three of the men. They were his sawyers and lumberjacks, and Daniel should know them, as well. Bel saw her father nod and turn to a window as if to witness the dead soldiers departing right then into the clear blue sky.

  “Shall we have a prayer?” Mrs. Ellsley put her hands on the boy’s shoulder, directing him to heaps of cakes and sandwiches, on which he began obligingly to gorge. His scraped knee was bleeding, but everyone ignored it. “Girls—Hannah, Jane, Clara—I’d like you to come up again and lead us in Psalm Twenty-three,” commanded the schoolmistress.

  Bel thought the adults would protest at this, but they leaned forward in their seats, eager, fans snapping open again, new pipefuls lighted. And the three girls, with obedient, downcast eyes, stumbled through their verses once more, only to have the adults join in this time, murmuring at first, then speaking louder and louder. Bel sank low in her seat, hearing the lost words of King Henry V in her mind: “And you, good yeomen, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here the mettle of your pasture.” Didn’t anyone care that they had lost? King Henry would have cared. King Henry would have told them to keep their eyes on the final goal, which was, in Bel’s mind, and, she was sure, in Laurence’s, to end slavery. At least he was alive.

  Aunt Pattie began to pass out the tea cakes, then called for Mary, on loan from Greenwood, to start pouring the punch. The neat rows broke into untidy groups, the adults’ voices hoarse, as if they had all been talking for a long time. Bel’s mother turned to her, her face strangely vibrant. “Aren’t you glad?” she said. “Laurence is fine. We would have heard otherwise by now, don’t you think?”

  But Bel was staring out at the lawn, where the young boys circled around the son of the liveryman, listening to him recite the names over and over, dying mock deaths as he did so. Their bodies collapsed on the grass, then leapt up again. They held invisible bayonets and fought against one another with their mouths open, limbs as fluid as animals. Bel struggled to stand in her heavy dress, conscious of the rim of sweat beneath her lace neckline, and of the drooping ivy-laden hem.

  “You looked beautiful up there,” her mother said quietly. “I wish you could have finished.”

  “Yes,” Bel said, and walked toward her cousins, Lucia and Anne, who had burst into happy tears and were being comforted by Morey Aldridge. Lucia smiled and took his handkerchief to dry her eyes, her fist hardening around it as if she might never let go of the snowy cloth. “We’re so lucky,” she said to Bel when she approached, and Bel nodded solemnly, knowing it was true, that they might have found out that very afternoon that they had lost Laurence.

  “We’re so lucky,” Anne echoed. “I was dreading having to go up there, and now I think Mrs. Ellsley has entirely forgotten.”

  “We’re done with all that,” Lucia said with her beautiful laugh. She looked defiantly at Morey Aldridge, who responded by giving her a grim smile and taking the opportunity to touch her arm. “We’re ‘finished,’” she added. “We’re women now.”

  July 1861–September 1862

  Chapter Twelve

  After a few days of marching and waiting for orders from a soon-to-be replaced General McDowell, Davey set the company to building a new camp outside Washington. As they dug latrines and square holes for their quarters, news came from Sergeant Hamilton, who had been sent back as part of a large detail to gather the dead from the battlefield. Pike’s body had not been found. He was officially counted as missing, assumed dead.

  Hearing this, Gilbert hounded Laurence for more details, but Laurence would reveal nothing else. He couldn’t explain about the other soldier now because it would sound like an excuse. “I found him by the river,” he said over and over, “and then he died.” Gilbert finally gave up, but in the meantime, Laurence discovered that his companions had grown clumsy around him with their shovels, sometimes casting dirt toward his lowered face, or jabbing his feet with the blade itself, never apologizing before they turned away. Red ants appeared in his bedroll, and his canteen was often emptied surreptitiously.

  One night after the building of the camp was nearly done, a high, razoring sound filled the air. The soldiers looked up from their fires, to see Laurence prop his book against his ribs and begin to tear. White leaves fell to the ground around him. They were ankle-deep when Gilbert, hard-faced, grabbed a page and began to read aloud. “‘Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.’” He threw the page into the fire. A flame speared up the middle of the paper, ghosting it black.

  Laurence paused in his tearing and peered at the others. His blond hair had lightened to a feathery gold and it hung in his eyes as he crouched down among the torn pages and began to collate small piles, doling them out to different members in the regiment. The men who could not read handed the pages to their friends, who whispered over the text, cruelly at first, as if they thought Laurence was trying to make amends. He went back to ripping, but he heard the verses rising from their awkward mouths.

  “‘Loaf with me on the grass … loose the stop from your throat.’”

  “‘Urge and urge and urge, always the procraint urge of the world’—whatever the hell that means. What the hell do you think it means, Loomis?”

  “‘What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children?’”

  Laurence tore until there was nothing left except the empty covers and the frontispiece, where the author lounged, his undershirt showing. These he shoved in his haversack, next to the letters from home.

  “Say, this ain’t half-bad,” said Alfred Loomis, the tall soldier who had spoken up first about Pike after Bull Run. He stroked his heavy black beard. “Listen to this: ‘I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning. You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me—’”

  “No wonder you couldn’t put it down at night, Lindsey,” said Woodard, his tone nasal, judging, although Laurence had never told of his comrade’s cowardice at Bull Run. “It was a dirty book.”

  “It wasn’t a dirty book,” Laurence said in a low voice.

  Gilbert grunted and inched closer to the fire, poking the last of his verse to ash.

  “What is it, then?” Addison’s voice rang out. He was watching Laurence curiously, his pages propped on his knees, unread.

  Instead of answering him, Laurence swept the remaining paper into his arms and rose to walk toward the creek that ran near their camp. The pages looked like a white bird mashed against his chest.

  “Read some more, Loomis,” urged Woodard as Laurence crossed out of the firelight.

  “All right.” Loomis gave his audience a twinkling glance. “We had the head on the hips part, and now we get: ‘And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart.’” He stopped and tugged at his whiskers.

  “Read the rest,” said Gilbert, his eyes flicking to Addison, who stood up and followed Laurence.

  “It ain’t so great after that,” mused Loomis. “‘And reached until you felt my beard, and reached until you held my heart,’” he finished lamely. “It goes on, but the good part’s over.”

  “I don’t care,” raged Gilbert. He lurched up and stood over the other man. A light wind flattened his shirt over his ribs. “I said, read the rest.”

  “All right,” Loomis said. “It’s long, though:

  “Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

  And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,<
br />
  And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

  And that all men ever born are also my brothers … and the women my sisters and lovers,

  And that a kelson of the creation is love;

  And limitless are leaves stiff and drooping in the fields,

  And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

  And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.”

  “All right,” said Gilbert, echoing Loomis’s pet phrase. “Now burn it.”

  “No.”

  Laurence heard the refusal as he strode toward the creek. He stared at the stars leaking through the sieve of night.

  “Who does he think he is, saying things like that? It ain’t Christian, talking about ants and people like they’re worth the same.” Gilbert’s rant pierced the air, making Laurence smile a little to himself. The pages rustled as he pressed them closer to his chest, and he did not hear Addison following him until the other man called his name.

  “Lindsey. Where you going?”

  “To the creek,” Laurence said.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t read it anymore—” He stopped, his throat closing.

  “What really happened by the river that day?” Addison was a blue shape in the dark behind him. “If you just told, they’d stop.” He paused. “You were soaked to the skin. I remember.”

  Laurence reached the cluster of bushes that guarded the creek and pushed through. The pages glowed in the moonlight as he knelt down and scattered them on the water. Some sank right away, dragged down by their corners. Others floated on the black current like shavings of starlight. Somewhere, in the rivers of Virginia, a boy’s body tossed against the silt, crossed by fish and rain. Every day, another piece of him drifted away.

  “Pike was almost dead when I found him,” Laurence said wearily. “He would have died no matter what I did.”

  “What did you do?” Addison was above him now, his face framed by thorns. Laurence shook his head and began to tell about wanting to save Pike and the other soldier and how he had almost lost his own life. When he finished, all the pages had sunk or drifted past the oxbow’s curve and out of sight. His fingers felt chapped, and he stuck them in the warm water, feeling it slide through his fingers.