by Maria Hummel
“Let’s take a walk together,” he suggested. “I’ve been sitting at this fire too long.”
Nodding again at men whose names he would never remember, Laurence allowed Aldridge to lead him silently out of the camp and into the woods beyond. As soon as they had entered the trees, the other soldier slowed and turned.
“You must think I’m impolite,” he said, the cold air making ghosts of his words. “But I wanted to speak with you alone, and I’m never alone in camp.”
“I’m glad to meet you finally,” Laurence said truthfully, relieved that Aldridge was nothing like the dandy he had expected.
“Likewise.” Aldridge inclined his head. “Although your sister told me so many stories about her dear Laurence, I felt like I already had.” He swiveled back around and strode deeper into the winter woods. Dead leaves crunched beneath their feet. “In fact, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”
There was no accusation in this statement, but still it surprised Laurence. “What do you mean?”
“Your sister wants to marry a hero like her brother,” said Aldridge, veering from the path they had been following, his gait heavy and purposeful.
“I’m hardly a hero,” said Laurence. “And anyway, my father would probably approve if you refused to fight. He never wanted me to enlist.”
“He’s proud of you, too.”
“He must put up a good show, then,” Laurence said.
“Times have changed since you left,” said Aldridge. “With so many fellows gone off to war, it’s all anyone talks about anymore. And that gives your father a lot to say.”
“You understand him well.” Laurence laughed, but Aldridge did not join in, guiding them toward a bower of pines, the green needles luminous in the dull light.
“I was planning to join the navy eventually, but Lucia begged me to go to Virginia and take down General Lee with my bare hands,” he said, raising one massive fist as they pushed through the soft wall of needles. “Anyway, there’s something in here I wanted to show you.”
The smell of pitch filled Laurence’s nostrils and made him miss his aunt’s annual Twelfth Night party, when all of Greenwood was festooned in hemlock and spruce. He could imagine his father there, holding forth on the war, a respected authority because his son was at the front.
“Your father was a navy man, wasn’t he?” he said, emerging from the pines into a small clearing.
If Aldridge responded, Laurence didn’t hear, stopped in his tracks by the sight in front of him. Rising from the dead leaves was an immaculate waist-high ship constructed from whittled branches, complete with a slender mast, birch-bark sails, and an anchor of twigs trussed together with grass. All the wood had been carved past the bark, and it had a muted white hue, resembling old snow. If it were ever set on the sea, it would look like a ghost ship, but it seemed at home on the wavy russet floor of the Virginia woods. Laurence walked around the vessel slowly, taking in the portholes and the tiny helm, the name etched on the stern, Lucia.
“How on earth did you make this?”
“While I was sick, I worked on one piece at a time,” said Aldridge. “After I got well, I came out here and put it together.”
“You should take it into camp,” Laurence said. “This would be the bulliest thing they’ve ever seen.”
“I can’t. My captain would accuse me of idleness,” said Aldridge. “Besides, I don’t want word getting back to Lucia that I’d rather be a shipbuilder than a soldier.”
“You should be a shipbuilder.” Laurence watched Aldridge straighten a sail with his large hands.
“The sparrows like to play on it,” he said. “Maybe they dream of being gulls on the sea.”
“Are you just going to leave it here?” asked Laurence
Aldridge regarded him for a long moment, his dark brows sinking. “It kept me alive, putting her together. And now that she’s finished…” He shrugged, trailing off.
“But you’re well now,” Laurence protested. “You don’t need it anymore.”
“I love your sister.” Aldridge sounded ashamed. He went back to looking at the ship.
“She loves you,” Laurence said, although he couldn’t imagine his frivolous sister saying the words in seriousness.
“If you bend down here,” said Aldridge, “you can see belowdecks.” He motioned for Laurence to see, and then, circling the ship, he pointed out all its features with grave pride. Laurence followed, stooping, praising, watching his future brother-in-law out of the corner of his eye. Morey Aldridge reminded him of his uncle Daniel, a man who tired of people easily and preferred to work alone with inanimate things, making them come alive. Laurence liked Aldridge immensely, but he also had the feeling that they could never be friends. There was too much between them and too little time to understand it in their soldiering lives.
Aldridge seemed to sense this as well, and when they finished examining the ship, he and Laurence walked back toward his camp without speaking. The woods were brighter now, and Aldridge’s face glowed like white granite, his measle scars fading. When they reached the rim of the forest, he halted and held out his hand.
“I’ll see you again,” he said, and Laurence had the curious impression that Aldridge was looking right through him to something beyond.
“Of course.” He tried to sound casual. “You should visit me next, although I have nothing so astounding to show you.”
“Please don’t speak of my ship to anyone,” Aldridge said. “I’m going to destroy it before we move again.”
“I won’t,” Laurence assured him. “I’m not sure they’d believe me anyway.” Then he took his leave of Aldridge, almost running back to his own camp, eager to get home.
Soon after, both regiments were transported by ship to Fort Monroe, where, on a low peninsula, McClellan would assemble them to attack the enemy unawares. Laurence caught sight of Aldridge on another deck, staring out to sea, his thighs pressed against the rail. Gulls wheeled between them, crying, coasting on the warm spring wind. Laurence waved, but when Aldridge did not respond, he let his arm fall and watched the other man open his mouth to the salty air, taking great, needy gulps, as if he hoped it would drown him.
Chapter Fifteen
In a month, the icy mirror of April rains would narrow to a crooked stream, but now it claimed the whole field, shimmering with reflected clouds. It was the kind of place Laurence remembered geese landing on their way north, their beaky cries and dense, perfect bodies heralding spring. One day, they would depart, the wide pool would vanish, and summer would begin, the grass burning green where the water had once lain. This flooded river crossing was called Lee’s Mills by the generals. Beyond it, the Confederates waited. The onslaught of rebel artillery had stopped soon after Laurence’s regiment arrived to support the Third and the Sixth Vermont, and the smoke was starting to clear over the water.
Laurence jostled for a spot behind the pines. His regiment would cover the Third and Sixth as they crossed the sunken field, bracing for a counterattack, hoping it would come. They had been trading fire with the rebels since picket the night before.
“Before the day is over, you’ll see your share,” Davey told his company as he squinted into the lifting haze.
When the Third and Sixth regiments set foot in the water, their blue legs vanished first in the silver-plated surface, and then their whole bodies were wiped out by drifting gray clouds. Laurence looked for Morey Aldridge among them but could not find him for the chaos that ensued almost as soon as the first men disappeared—the crack of fire from Confederate rifle pits, and Vermonters screaming as they fell beyond the wall of smoke.
Panicked by their calls for help, he started to load his own rifle, the crook of his shoulder pressed against a sticky tree.
Davey huffed up beside him. “You can’t fire from here,” he said. “So what are you doing, Lindsey?”
Laurence did not respond, his hands fast but clumsy as they handled the gun. So many bullets were hitting the stream, it soun
ded like it was boiling.
“It’s not our time yet,” said Davey, grabbing Laurence’s arm.
Laurence shook him off. “I’m not afraid,” he said. Beyond them the last of the Third had vanished and the water looked darker now.
Davey’s next words were drowned out by Union cannons firing. The ground quivered and caused the captain’s heavy face to shake as if he were riding a hay wagon on a bumpy road. As the bombardment went on, Laurence was transfixed by the sight of his superior’s trembling cheeks and loose, flapping mouth. Davey’s ridiculous appearance made him think incongruously of an argument his father had made long ago about offering all his countrymen the smoothness of a railroad ride in place of the old, bouncing cart. Then the artillery stopped and Davey’s face resumed its usual shape. Looking away again to the white-gray void before them, Laurence suddenly understood that his father had been trying to make a point about human dignity and how it could be achieved by anyone, but also lost so easily.
“You’ll see your share,” said Davey, louder than he needed to. The rifle fire continued from the Confederate side, but it sounded weaker now.
Laurence nodded, relaxing his hands on the gun. He wanted to explain that he had been afraid, not of dying but of waiting to die and watching others go in his place, and that this could undo a man more than death itself—but Davey was already turning away.
A bugle bleated, and a few minutes after, the survivors from the Third and Sixth reappeared, carrying the wounded on their backs, on stretchers, helping them hobble up the swampy bank. Morey Aldridge was not among them. The soldiers’ wool uniforms were dyed purple with water and blood, and cartridge boxes hung uselessly from their waists, the powder soaked to a wet, ashy mud. They said they had made it to the rebel earthworks beyond. They had been struggling hand-to-hand with the enemy, and they didn’t understand why the generals had called them back.
Meanwhile the Fourth had made their way to the other side. By the Third’s accounts, the rebs numbered in the hundreds, and Laurence imagined them like a line of ants, stretching back through the marsh.
“Stand ready!” Davey shouted. If the Fourth succeeded, their turn was next. Laurence gripped his gun, ready to enter the smoke. He looked left and right at his companions, Gilbert adjusting his cartridge box, Addison propped calmly against a pine. The artillery had petered out and the silence was sharp in Laurence’s ears.
A bugle called again, a ridiculous, cowardly bleat.
“Stand ready!” Davey repeated the order, but his voice was less certain now.
Laurence heard Gilbert clicking his teeth.
“What the hell kind of battle is this?” Gilbert muttered.
“What the hell is right,” Lyman Woodard echoed from his tree a few yards back.
Laurence unknitted his fingers from their cramped clutch on his rifle. As he shook them loose, he heard Addison’s angry, questioning murmur and Sergeant Hamilton’s clipped reply, something about General McClellan “not wanting a general engagement at this time.”
When the smoke began to clear, Laurence could see the Fourth retreat, running three steps at a time and tripping, then standing to run again, trying to dodge the bullets. A bugle sounded once more.
“The day’s over,” Davey announced, but he was looking at the pines and not his men.
Laurence slumped forward against the tree trunk, letting his arms dangle, holding nothing. The Fourth rose and fell through the last stretch of water. They had learned this tactic from the mistakes of the regiment before them, and therefore they had fewer to mourn when, three mornings later, a truce finally allowed the Vermonters to gather their dead.
* * *
Like books left out in the rain, bodies curled everywhere in the shallow water. Vultures had scarred most of them blind, and many looked heavenward from their sightless sockets, knocked back by bullets, their blue mouths open. Above them, the air was greased soft with the smell of rot, making the approaching soldiers gag. They paused to tie handkerchiefs and rags over their faces.
The first body Laurence came to was kneeling like a man in prayer, head bent and hooded by his own bloodied yellow hair. Laurence lifted at the man’s shoulders, but the fabric of his uniform tore immediately and the soldier tipped backward into the water, the hair fanning out, the chest gouged with blackened holes.
“This hair won’t get off of me,” Gilbert said behind him, stooping to rinse his fingers in the water. They had orders to search the soldiers for personal effects before burying them, and he tossed a lock of someone’s sweetheart’s hair on the shore before wading deeper, his back stooped. The men turned to stare at him behind their masks. “It won’t get off,” he nearly shouted.
“Not in this water,” Addison pronounced, standing knee-deep in it. “This place ain’t ever going to be the same again.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Captain Davey, splashing after Gilbert and pulling him upright. “These places don’t change. They’ll turn lovely as soon as we leave. Even before.”
A silence fell over the company. Laurence paused in his attempt to move the dead man. His hands were filmed up to the elbows in water and blood, and he suspended them away from his sides like a boxer about to fight. Davey was the only captain to apologize to his company for the botched attempt at taking Lee’s Mills, and this had made him less popular with the men. Addison looked annoyed to be corrected and stood with his weight on one leg, the other thrust out to the side.
“Spring comes and the land erases us. It doesn’t need our wars and our glory to go on. That’s what we can’t stand,” Captain Davey added lamely.
“Come on, Lindsey. Help me with this one,” said Addison, interrupting the captain and wrenching another body from the stream. His hands extended beneath the soldier’s burly arms, and it took Laurence a moment to recognize the rough-hewn features, the huge dangling hands. It was Morey Aldridge.
“That’s my sister’s fiancé,” Laurence muttered, feeling more disgust than grief. Aldridge’s gray eyes were wide, his mouth slack, his unified expression silly, astonished.
“He don’t look erased to me,” Addison added with a grim glance at Davey. He let the corpse slump to the ground. “You take his haversack. I’ll do his pockets.”
Laurence accepted the limp bag and started leafing through it. Morey Aldridge’s extra pair of socks was starred with sodden bits of hardtack. Cold ammunition dribbled through Laurence’s hands.
“Nothing,” he said, and tossed it with a thump against the dead soldier’s thigh. Nothing that belonged to the ship in the clearing, or the artist who made it.
“Wait.” Addison pulled a small metal plate from one of Aldridge’s pockets. “There’s a picture here. I think it’s your sister.”
He held out a wet, blurred daguerreotype of Morey and Lucia. Aldridge looked pleased, seated with his big pale hands lying in his lap like a blossom. Beside him stood Lucia, shy and elegant in a print dress buttoned high up her neck. She had one hand on her fiancé’s broad shoulder, and Laurence could see by the tension in her fingers that she was squeezing it hard.
Crouched beside the corpse, Laurence tried to imagine his sisters and mother in the brick house in Allenton, waiting for news. They would perch about the room, embroidering dainty handkerchiefs, or practicing elocution. Lucia might go to the piano and plink through her scales, restless, acting different from the way her sister did to emphasize the new distance between them. She would have a deep, syrupy laugh now, and adopt a mock indulgence for her sister’s travails with the dwindling body of suitors.
Hoping to prompt her niece’s emergence into ladyhood, his mother would invite Bel to sit with them in the long afternoons, giving her sewing projects to occupy her idle fingers. And Anne would treat Bel as her twin treated her, exerting small superiorities, setting her handkerchief of tight, perfect rosebuds beside Bel’s loose daisies and giving her cousin a sighing smile.
But beneath all the old routines, they would watch through the bee-loud lilacs f
or messengers and read the papers with greater interest than ever before. What would the journalists say about Lee’s Mills—a brave engagement, a gallant attack? Lucia would never know that her future husband had been killed crossing a flat field of water and crossing back, the awkward death of a grounded sailor, a shipbuilder in an inland sea. But she had wanted a hero, and now she had one.
“Addison, Lindsey, get on up here,” shouted a gruff voice.
Addison took the portrait gently from his fingers and pushed it into Laurence’s chest pocket until the hard plate slid in above his heart.
“Come on,” said Addison, rising. “Davey wants us to bury ’em now.”
Laurence stood and followed Addison up the hill. When he reached the crest, where men were digging graves, he saw a soldier’s worn cap flung against the roots of a sycamore. Violets bloomed beside it, and already a spider was spinning a silver sail between the brim and the ground. He kicked it just to see it torn.
Chapter Sixteen
The flies were so thick that the men who could still walk after the vicious battle at Savage’s Station did so incessantly to keep the soft black insects away from their faces. Sweating in the July heat, Laurence and Addison strolled first together, then alone. After days of fighting, there was nothing they could say to each other, and it was difficult for two to pick a path through the bodies and the exhausted contrabands, who were digging graves right beside the soldiers as they died. The earth was damp with rain and their shovels sank easily. It’s a small mercy, Laurence thought as he paused to watch a Negro burying a heap of sawed-off ankles and legs.
Short but wiry in the chest and arms, the contraband had a careless strength, allowing him to lift the limbs without strain and toss them into the pit, occasionally overshooting it. A hairy red-flecked ankle smacked against Laurence’s trousers and he kicked it toward the hole.
