Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “From who?” Addison’s voice rang out in the hushed woods.

  “Loomis. Is it true?”

  “Davey says Lee’s moving north,” admitted Addison. “How far is this house, anyway?” He jabbed Spider in the back. The older man stumbled forward, nearly losing his hold on the brown bird.

  “A short piece,” said Spider indignantly. “If you’ll let me get there.” After a few more minutes, the thick woods ended abruptly in a clearing. A rail fence bordered a rocky slope that tumbled toward the run-down farmhouse. The odor of a wood smoke rose to meet them. It had been a long time since Laurence had seen a house like this, weather-beaten, the roof in need of repair, a tilted woodpile flanking one side. A droop-waisted woman with bony, jutting elbows was sitting on the porch, sewing. They climbed over the fence and loped down the pasture, the incline lengthening their strides. At their approach, the woman disappeared into the house with her stitching and came out again with a rifle, shouldering it with an awkward shrug.

  “Ma’am,” said Addison, holding up his hands with fingers spread. “We surrender. You done caught three soldiers in the Union army.”

  The woman did not smile or let the gun waver.

  “Ma’am.” Addison halted. “This sorry soldier on my right wants to return something that is yours and apologize.”

  Laurence looked over the dilapidated house. The glass panes in the two front windows were spotless, but the shutters sagged at odd angles. In one of the windows, a girl sucked on a blond braid, gazing sorrowfully at Laurence.

  “I see you have a daughter,” Addison said uneasily. “How old is she?”

  The woman’s shallow, dish-shaped face furrowed around the mouth and eyes. She would have been pretty as a young girl, delicate about the waist and hands, but an exhausting life had thickened her features and worn them slowly downward, like a candle under the persistent heat of flame.

  “Give it back, Private,” Addison ordered, slapping Spider hard on the shoulder, for the older soldier was half-deaf. Spider staggered toward the leaning porch.

  “Four years old,” said the woman, lowering her gun and pointing it at the thief.

  “She’ll be a pretty choice of it one day.” Addison nodded, but the compliment caused no further reaction except a quivering of the gun.

  “Apologize,” the sergeant roared as Spider dropped the bird on the soft earth. The chicken’s feet stuck up in the air, the claws the texture of onion skin.

  “I’m sorry,” Spider mumbled in the direction of his lost prize.

  “That was Minnie’s fav’rite.” The woman spoke to the blue sky above the clearing. “That was her pet.”

  “We do apologize,” said Addison. He was slowly backing away now, his eyes glistening.

  “I told her a fox took it.” She continued to address the clouds and let the gun slump into her neck. “Now she knows it weren’t no fox.”

  As they climbed back up the slope to the rail fence, Laurence heard a loud but almost immediately muffled wail. He stopped and turned. The porch was empty, the chicken lying in the same position on the ground, its legs spoking up.

  “Did you hear that, Addison?” he asked.

  “No,” Addison said, and kept striding up the hill, his shoulders bowed. “I didn’t.”

  By the misery in his denial, Laurence wondered if Addison had heard the wail but could not listen to it, if behind them was a house just like Addison’s, owned by a woman who could have been Addison’s mother, retreating back into the gloom to bend over her daughter and stifle her cries so they would not reach the men. Had the other soldier turned around at that moment, he would have seen the emptiness of his own yard, the saplings encroaching on its edges, as if the clearing no longer had the strength to hold back time and season. Had he turned around, he could not have turned back again to the cause of the Union. So he straddled the fence ahead of Laurence, swinging one leg over the rotting wood, then the other, careful not to touch a single rail, and stalked into the forest, its shadows swallowing him.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  At the top of the hill outside Fredericksburg, the captured Mississippians sat in a huddle by their old fire pit, whittling pine twigs. It had been a long time since Laurence had seen the enemy up close, and he stared, knowing the others were doing it, too, watching the men who had become abstractions become men again, with yellow teeth and bony, muscle-hard shoulders, strong legs and ordinary feet mashed in boots that were too small and split at the seams. There was scarcely a uniform among them—one wore a gray coat, another the trousers, another the Confederate cap with a tarnished front buckle. The rest of their outfits were recognizably Yankee, stolen from living and dead Union soldiers, and yet Laurence knew they looked nothing like him and never would.

  One of the Mississippians glanced up. He had a scraggly blond beard and long-lashed eyes, the right one slightly askew, as if it could not agree with its partner which world to watch.

  “What are you staring at?” he asked. “We ain’t gonna try anything. We figure we’ll be fed more as Yankee prisoners than as Lee’s soldiers.”

  It had been the hardest charge in the war, straight up a slope through burning brush to conquer the summit. Men had died trying to win the same hill the year before, and twice as he’d ascended, Laurence felt a chill pass through his body. When they took the heights, Davey had announced proudly that the victory was key to crippling nearby Fredericksburg, and it bothered Laurence to hear the Mississippian dismiss their surrender as a matter of better rations.

  “What were you fighting for, then?” he countered.

  “Shoot. What kind of question is that?” The man looked around at his companions for reassurance, but they were whittling or trying to sleep or writing letters to loved ones about their capture. He shrugged. “Because you’re here,” he said.

  Laurence recognized Addison’s forceful new gait coming up behind him.

  “We need to take their knives from them,” said the sergeant.

  They wouldn’t have won without Addison spurring them on, fighting enough for two men, but Laurence refused.

  “They’re pocketknives, Addison.”

  “Throw down your knives,” ordered the cockeyed secesher lazily, as if he were telling them a story. There was a silence and then a series of soft thumps as the men obeyed, some digging in their pockets, others making one last carve before letting go of their weapons. The blades shone on the orange pine needles. Far off in the valley, Laurence heard a high scream. It was not the sound of any living creature. He glanced down through the trees, seeing nothing but the black shapes of branches.

  “If you got me captured, you’ve got them all, Sergeant,” the Confederate continued. “We already gave you our lives, our land.” He gestured to the valley, but his wayward eye was watching the sky behind them. “And it ain’t enough, is it?”

  There was another scream, and a few of the prisoners looked up this time, brushing the soot from their hands, but Addison and the blond Confederate faced each other with the intensity of lovers. The trees drew dark bars across the space between them.

  “I take you on your word,” Addison said finally in a quiet voice. “I don’t know what ‘enough’ is anymore,” he added, spinning on his heel.

  The knives disappeared again, one by one, into pockets and fists, and the prisoners went back to their letters and daydreams. Laurence felt their leader watching him with his wayward eye, so he, too, walked away into the pines, his legs so tired, they stumbled on every root they crossed. It was only later, when they had marched back down the hill, grabbed their haversacks and gear, and set off toward the next battle that he realized the source of the screams.

  Beside the rail line that led to Fredericksburg, someone had spent the afternoon with a few horses and a giant fire, melting rails, twining them up trunks. Thinking of his father’s railroad tracks in Allenton, weed-thick, shifted only by winter frost, Laurence felt a flicker of rage at such easy, useless loss.

  “It ain’t enough, i
s it?” He heard the secesher’s voice, and turned, but only Addison was behind him, marching with his head down, his hand on his revolver. They had let another company lead their prisoners away.

  “They won’t survive the winter,” Addison said to his boots, and Laurence decided he must be talking about the trees, their bark scored and black, some still smoldering. He wondered briefly why the screams had come from the metal as it was twisted from straightness, and not the destroyed trees, which would die as silently as they lived, dropping their leaves, going hollow in their cages.

  Chapter Thirty

  “I hope I can remember my manners,” Laurence confessed as he sat down opposite his father in the spacious hotel dining room. The last time they had had a full conversation was the spring day Laurence told him he would not train to be an officer and his father had struck him, and he had run away. It seemed amazing to Laurence that they would meet again in New York, a place to which he had never been until the city’s violent draft riots so overwhelmed the local police that Union soldiers had to be called in to keep the peace. Since the late summer, his regiment had been encamped in Washington Square Park, and a steady stream of families and sweethearts came to visit them.

  By some persuasive miracle, Laurence’s father had managed to convince Davey to let him take his son away from camp for the evening. Now Laurence sat in a grand dining room for the first time in years. He hardly knew where to look first—at the chandeliers dripping their glass rain, at the waiters drifting back and forth, their trays raised, or, strangest of all, at his own father, who was sitting across from him.

  Age and worry had gentled the abruptness of George Lindsey. It surprised Laurence to see how carefully his father took his own seat, placing both hands on the table before he lowered his body. He never thought two years would make such a difference, but white strands now wove through his father’s beard, and around his eyes he had grown the extra folds of skin that make an old man’s gaze look far away.

  “Your mother would be greatly disappointed if you forgot them,” said his father.

  “It’s just that we don’t have enough amenities in camp to sponsor a great deal of etiquette. One spoon suffices for several fellows.” Laurence eyed the array of silverware in front of him.

  “What do they feed you?” His father wagged a snowy napkin before setting it on his lap.

  “Hardtack and salt hoss, as the boys call it,” Laurence said. “Everything fried in bacon grease, if possible, although when we’re on the march, it’s just confounded hardtack, hardtack, hardtack.”

  “What about all those baked goods and cured meats your mother sits tallying at night for the Sanitary Commission?” His father shook his head, chiding. They were both trying so hard.

  “I suspect they rot on the wharves in Alexandria, Papa.” Laurence said. “Or the sutlers steal them and try to sell ’em back to us.”

  Just then, a waiter came, and Laurence allowed his father to order for them both, for George dined there often when he came to New York on business. The waiter, a turnip-headed fellow with a resoundingly artificial British accent, appeared relieved that he didn’t have to speak with Laurence, whose hands were so tan and calloused, they looked like pottery instead of flesh.

  “They don’t understand it here, do they?” Laurence asked his father after the waiter had strutted off in a haze of cologne. George Lindsey sat back in his chair and began digging in his breast pocket.

  “What do you mean, son?”

  “What we’re fighting for.” Laurence felt the back of his neck go hot.

  “There’s not many men left in New York who are willing to fight, no,” his father answered mildly, and offered him a cigar before lighting his own. Laurence took two and thrust them quickly into his coat. The cigars would be a valuable commodity when he got back to camp.

  “Would you like another?” His father raised a shaggy eyebrow. “I have more.”

  Laurence blushed and took one from his pocket. “Bad habit,” he said, lighting it. The smoke was sweet and thick. “We soldiers like to barter.”

  “I’ll send you a box,” his father promised.

  “No, don’t,” said Laurence. “The others don’t like it when a fellow’s got more than they do.”

  “Like a promotion?”

  “Exactly,” Laurence matched his father’s ironic tone. “Anyway, what about you? Do you understand why I’m a soldier?”

  “Laurence. You’re my son. I think the hardest thing my father ever faced was understanding his two sons.” Behind the smoke, George’s face had a silvery cast, like the bark of beech trees.

  “Why? He wanted you to be rich, and you got rich, didn’t you?” Laurence’s voice rose with challenge.

  His father puffed on the brown thumb of tobacco. “My father deeply loved horses, Morgans especially. He never wanted anything to replace them. He thought change would come with the railroad—things we wouldn’t be able to stop,” he said, and Laurence saw his chin quiver. “You’re too young to remember, but he died angry with me. I was the one who altered Allenton. And, according to him, I was the one who made the sheep farms fail.”

  “That’s what you said to me about the war, too,” Laurence countered. His father’s residual guilt suddenly sounded like his own. “You said we wouldn’t be able to halt what we started.”

  “You haven’t yet.” George Lindsey stabbed out his cigar.

  “Isn’t slavery the same thing?” Laurence demanded. His father looked around the dining room before leaning across the table, so close that Laurence could feel the heat emanating from his skin.

  “No,” he said softly. “Slavery is worse than war. Slavery has no cause but greed, which the men involved call ‘business.’ I would never countenance it in my house.”

  “But in your country?” Laurence punched his own cigar into the ashtray.

  “Laurence,” his father said thoughtfully, as if reconsidering the name of his only son. “You cannot save another person from suffering. But all my life, I have wanted to save you from it. And now you’ve rushed headlong into the worst suffering yet in our history, with thousands of sons lying on battlefields, unburied, while their fathers wait at home to hear the news.”

  “They are buried.” He thought of Morey Aldridge’s grave near Lee’s Mills.

  “Let me finish,” George Lindsey commanded. “Not a day went by that I wasn’t certain I had lost you. And now I see that I have.”

  “You haven’t lost me.” Laurence shook his head, scowling. “I’m still here, with all my limbs, which is more than I can say for a lot of fellows.”

  “But you’re not the boy that left us. Your eyes”—he paused, peering at Laurence—“your eyes have measured everything in this room since we entered it, including the fact that I am older, and perhaps not worth fighting with anymore. You’ve started to read men, which you never did before.” He grunted. “A fine quality for a businessman to have, I might add.”

  The waiter arrived with soup and set it neatly in front of Laurence. “And if I don’t want to be a businessman?” he retorted, but his anger was fading.

  “You may change your mind.” George lifted a spoonful of soup delicately to his lips. Perplexed by his father’s new, agreeable nature, Laurence turned to his own bowl. The delicate flavors of cream, mushroom, and potato soon absorbed him so greatly, he forgot his confusion and concentrated on savoring each spoonful. When he glanced up again, he saw his father watching him with a bemused expression.

  “You’re beginning to look so much like your uncle Daniel,” the older man said, running his spoon along the inside of his bowl. Threads of soup clung to it.

  “You think so?”

  “You have his bearing, even his hair, I think, although yours is a little lighter.”

  “But your eyes,” Laurence said.

  “That’s right, my eyes, and my father’s eyes before me. The color of chocolate, your aunt Faustina used to say.” George Lindsey’s spoon clattered into the empty bowl. Laurenc
e watched him carefully, wanting to ask his father a thousand questions. Did he really approve of Lucia’s and Anne’s copperhead suitors? Was Bel all grown up now? Why had he had Johnny Mulcane carve a swan for Aunt Faustina, and why had she thrown it into the fire?

  “What about Bel? Do you think she favors your uncle?” George said suddenly.

  “I think she favors her mother more,” Laurence answered, his ears burning. Did his father suspect his feelings for his cousin? They sat back in silence as the waiter brought their second course, two round lamb chops for each of them and crusty white rolls that puffed from a basket in the center of the table.

  “How is she?” Laurence said casually. He would act differently around her now, cool and distant. She was his cousin, after all. He tore open a roll and covered it with vigorous sweeps of butter.

  “She’s an odd girl, Laurence, always in the garden or reading in some secret corner of Greenwood,” his father said. “Truth is, I think your aunt and uncle keep her shut in too much. Your sisters were always out calling at Isabel’s age.” He plucked his own roll from the basket, ripping it to expose the steaming white interior.

  “She’s never been like Lucia and Anne,” Laurence said. “She’s probably not ready to let her happiness depend on what color bow will match her dress, or how she can convince her father to buy her the latest silk from Paris.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” George Lindsey half-shouted, his mild exterior falling away, revealing the paterfamilias Laurence remembered from his youth, the man who would not be corrected. “I knew that the day your uncle told me she tried to save that unfortunate slave. I knew she was more like you.”

  His confession startled Laurence. They had never spoken about the runaway. After he had recovered from the fever, his parents had wanted to protect him from the truth, from the story of Johnny Mulcane and the bullet he fired in the dim hayloft, and Uncle Daniel’s reluctance to intercede after the act. It had become, he realized, a story they remembered about Isabel rather than himself, and he felt a surge of jealousy.