Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  They all paused to hear the end of the phrase melt on the air, the words where the soldier surrenders everything, even his own memories. There was no hope of return for any of them. Dawn drew thin cracks of light in the east and Laurence finally met Addison’s searching gaze. “You can’t unarrest them,” he said, taking in the vein throbbing at the sergeant’s temple, the sweat-limp hair that fell over his brow.

  “You can’t let them go now and you know it,” Laurence continued softly. “And I’m not going to fight for their lives, because they had a choice and made it, and you had one and you made yours, and now—” He gestured to the dead horse. “They can’t go back in time and ride away, and you can’t pretend you weren’t waiting in the woods for the one chance you had to stop them and save my life, too.”

  Looking over the top of the barn, he saw an owl make its humped and vestigial flight across the clearing to alight on a leafless tree on the other side. It was followed by a flock of loud, angry sparrows, their black shadows diving and crying until they drove the owl to another tree, and another. Addison did not answer, except to check the knots holding his captives.

  “It don’t matter, Lindsey,” Woodard said in a weary voice. His cheek lay against Furlough’s flank as if he were listening for a heartbeat.

  They left the horse unburied in the clearing. Addison drove the two prisoners in front of him. Laurence went next and Pacquette took up the rear, his face furrowed with a deep frown. It was colder in the woods and it smelled of ice melting down bark. Next to the suddenly stoic Woodard, Spider walked with his head tipped earthward and stumbled over every branch he could.

  “The winter is different here,” Pacquette commented aloud. “It already feels like it’s almost over.”

  The others did not respond, except Spider, who laughed in a high, unkind way as they walked the narrow path. Then there was nothing but breath and footfall, the snow going black with their steps.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Addison laid white targets across the chests of the deserters and stepped back to see if they were crooked, then bent forward again to straighten them. His face was blue and slick with rain. When he was satisfied, he nodded to Captain Davey and left the deserters kneeling in their coffins. Spider bobbed and whimpered, but Woodard fixed his eyes down the metal barrels of the muskets.

  “I am not ashamed,” he began, and then his voice was drowned out by the “Rogue’s March,” an exact and simple dirge summoned by the fife and drum players clustered at the edge of the hollow. The guards loaded their guns.

  When the captain shouted, “Fire,” it was over before the echo of his cry cleared the shallow gully. Woodard fell face-forward, reminding Laurence of the days when Gilbert used to trip him just for walking by. His light hair spilled to the ground like a fountain. Spider went less easily, twitching against the earth, his long fingers clawing in the dirt. Then he sighed three words, Oh dear me, and his eyes fluttered shut. The rain disturbed the silence of the scene, blustering over the men in small drops, making every one bow his head and blink as if he were weeping, although none of them would admit to grief.

  Laurence saw Pacquette among them, but the other man’s face was distant and expressionless as a winter pasture. He recognized in the tutor his own old refusal to accept the cruelty of war, and he understood how Bel could love Pacquette, for even hawk-nosed and wearing a filthy uniform, he possessed the inner handsomeness of a man who acts on what he believes. Addison stepped over to the dead men, wrestled the white targets from their chests, and pushed each deserter into his own coffin.

  Woodard’s pine box was too short and his knees jutted up, but this did not deter the sergeant from laying the lid over them and nailing it down with his blacksmith arms. The thud of splitting flesh and bone made Laurence’s whole body ache. He stared out over the lowered clouds and, for one moment, he hated the whole world, horizon to horizon, and then he grieved for it, thinking of Lyman Woodard’s knees and how they refused to be buried.

  When Laurence left the hollow with the other soldiers, Addison was still nailing the lid down over Lyman Woodard, his arm rising and falling, but the thudding was gone, and Laurence knew that the wood had cracked across the middle, where it could not hold, and that Addison did not see it, so focused was he on keeping the seams together. The falling rain tasted fresh and sweet on Laurence’s lips and he drank it thirstily, a silvered drop at a time. Walking past him, the drummer boy thrummed his fingers on the stretched skin that swayed from his chest like a second belly. Every once in awhile, the boy’s hands would sweep the rainwater off the tight leather surface, turning the streaks into stains.

  January–April 1864

  Chapter Thirty-five

  On the third day after Laurence arrived home on furlough, he walked down the icy drive to Greenwood alone, shunning horse and sled to tromp in a soldierly fashion through the streets. Bel saw him coming. She hadn’t intended to look out the window just then, but the passing shadow of a crow had distracted her from a sketch she was making of two wrinkled apples that sat before her on a plate.

  After watching her cousin for a few moments, she bent back over the sketch. The apples were wizened like the heads of old men and she could not get them right. But the still life—her tutor Miss Omira Bottum had insisted—was essential to improving an artist’s hand. In a fit of frustration, Bel had been drawing Miss Bottum’s face on one of the fruits, but she scribbled the whole thing out when she heard the crunch of Laurence’s feet on the steps to the door.

  Homecoming had not been what any of them expected. Aunt Pattie had been certain Laurence would be haggard and weak, in need of “a good rest.” She was partially right; Laurence had gained back little of the weight he had lost the year before, and purple hollows curved beneath his eyes. Uncle George had anticipated a brave and somewhat embittered soldier, remembering his own visit with Laurence in New York City. He was also right, for Laurence braced his shoulders like a young Atlas and watched out every available window as if he expected rebel troops to be arriving at any time. Bel’s father had hoped for some good information on southern architecture, as he was sure the “bright boy” would have noticed such a thing, and her mother had said simply that she guessed Laurence would be happy to sleep in a house again.

  Bel had refused to join in the predictions about the soldier who had walked in the door on Twelfth Night and barely spoke to any of them. Long after the trip to Brattleboro, she had guessed, with great embarrassment, that Laurence’s request to take down her hair had been something more than a nostalgic gesture, and her memories of that afternoon made her blush. Bel’s only hope was that the old Laurence would come back, bossy, intent, and furious with knowledge, the Laurence of her childhood summers, of tree-climbing dares and creek-bed adventures. She couldn’t bear to think he had grown as dull and sappy as the rest of Allenton society.

  When Laurence had appeared, a day early, on Greenwood’s grand oak threshold, Bel was in her hiding place on the stairwell, feeling cramped and resigned. She had already deemed it useless even to enter the dance floor this year. Men were so scarce, even Ernest Pomeroy was in high demand, and Hannah Fithian had already secured him for three waltzes in exchange for a box of chocolates her uncle had sent her from France.

  As soon as people realized just who had arrived, Faustina’s party careened to a halt. The lilting waltz faded beneath sighs and murmurs of recognition, and the steadily circling bodies suddenly bumbled against one another like bees in a hive. Tanner and taller than when he had left almost three years before, Laurence remained on the threshold, letting the cold air stab through the open door.

  Bel had felt the chill, even from her distant perch. She pressed her cheek against the wooden rungs and waited as Aunt Pattie fainted in a sodden heap, as Uncle George rushed forward to claim him with a loud, confident roar. Laurence looked bruised and wary, like an animal that had been beaten. His uniform was dusted with snow, which melted and dripped on the floor. Bel cringed as the assembled crowd i
ssued their greetings, starting with her mother and father and declining in order of relation and importance. It didn’t take long for the throng to become frightened by the returning soldier, for he hardly said anything at each new introduction, and by the time the line got to Mary Ruth Cross, he had stopped speaking altogether. The crowd around him dwindled and the music struck up again. Dancers craned their necks to watch him as they twirled around the room.

  When Bel heard her mother saying her name, she finally stood from her hiding place and waved. She saw Laurence follow the angle of her mother’s finger up the long stair to the balustrade, where she waited in the same blue dress she had worn the year before, insisting on it in a secret devotion to Louis. She saw how he lifted his arm ever so slightly, returning her wave, then turned and stamped out the door, his back crooked like an old man’s. A flurry of Lindseys followed him, but she stayed. Her pride was hurt. After all this time, they were strangers.

  News came the next day that Laurence was ill with a fever. “Every time his life overwhelms him here, he simply goes to bed,” she told her mother when she heard.

  “You don’t know what he’s been through,” Faustina scolded her. “That you of all people should say that about your cousin.”

  “Well, then, what is it?” Bel demanded. “Mary Ruth’s brother is home and he’s just fine. He took her out sledding and bought her a new mink muff.”

  Faustina paced the living room, her skirt swishing over the Ottoman carpet that was this year’s Christmas gift. Red leaves and circles and fans bloomed deep in it. “Sledding and a muff. I shall have to tell your cousin how easy it is to impress these days.”

  “Yes. Tell him,” said Bel. “Tell him we require nothing but the most basic pleasantries. For instance, a simple greeting would do.”

  “You are angry with him, aren’t you?” Faustina sat down beside her daughter and tried to touch her hair. Bel no longer allowed her mother to braid the long brown tresses, insisting on putting her hair up herself. Faustina’s thin fingers scratched her scalp. Bel twisted her head away.

  “I miss him,” she had said simply. The three words echoed in her mind now as the door opened without a knock and Laurence stepped in, blinking. Bel appraised him, and knew he was doing the same. Her cousin’s face fell from its bones in steep angles, and there was a hollow of shadow in the center of each cheek. He wore the scars of sunlight now, a cracking around the mouth and eyes, and a deep residual color across his skin.

  Laurence even smelled different, the sweaty boyishness replaced by a dry odor, like that of an October garden, yellowed and bare. Clothes three years old slumped from his skinny frame. Except for the faded Union cap left over from his uniform, they looked like they belonged to someone else.

  “I missed you.” She spoke first. It was not what she had meant to say. A glade of light from the window divided them and Laurence blinked again as he stepped into it.

  “Shall we go to the lake?” he barked, and she was relieved that he did not watch her eagerly, the way he had in Brattleboro. Instead, his eyes scraped right past her figure and out the window to the snowy yard. “I thought you might like to see it today,” he added more gently.

  “I would love to.” She marched to the coat closet and pulled on her boots. “We should escape now, before anyone else sees you and tries…” She faltered.

  “What?” A ragged, self-pitying grin spread over his face. “And tries to speak with me?”

  From upstairs came the sound of a chair scraping across the floorboards. Bel threw her coat over her shoulders and rushed to the door, cranking the iron knob. When she looked back, Laurence was still standing in the sunlight, watching the dust drift down.

  “You forget that interiors have their own weather,” he said in a wondering voice. “All that time in a tent.”

  “Come on,” Bel pleaded. “It’s cold, and I want to go before one of them notices.”

  He stepped out of the light obediently and hunched his shoulders against the January air. “You haven’t changed,” he muttered.

  “Neither have you,” she retorted as she felt the snow soften and steal her steps, each one slipping away.

  * * *

  There was no ice castle on the lake this year. The freeze had come slowly, without wind or storm, and the rocks leveled evenly down to the white expanse of water. The two cousins did not speak to each other. Bel tried once or twice to make conversation, or to point out some familiar place, Wilderness Run, Wilderness Isle, but Laurence only nodded and hissed through his teeth like a child too cold to be interested in conversation.

  Turning from the mouth of Potash Brook, they picked their way along the shore to the vacant Sunday lumberyards and her father’s railroad station. It was a fanciful building, even from behind. Towers jutted from the four corners of the brick and stone edifice, each topped with sloping, pointy roofs and metal spires that mimicked the onion domes of the churches in far-off Russia. These roofs repeated down the middle of the station like the spine of some exotic beast. A couple of them functioned as chimneys, but their use was so disguised by ornament that it was strange to see smoke rising from them.

  Bel and Laurence stopped at one of the three arches cut for the trains and looked in. Cavelike and draughty, the station’s interior was lighted by tall, narrow windows in the walls. An engine waiting for repair sat humped on the far-right track. Letting her eyes rest on the locomotive, Bel inhaled the smell of oil and coal ash. The short, grizzled stationmaster wandered across her line of sight with a bucket of tools.

  “Wait here,” Laurence whispered, pulling Bel back from the entrance. His finger pressed her collarbone. “I want to see the whole thing, all the way around.”

  While her cousin clambered off through the snowdrifts, Bel stood alone beneath a fang of ice that dripped from her father’s cambering eaves. Everything about the station told of Daniel Lindsey’s wistful admiration of the exotic. Rising beside the squat, plain lumber buildings, it had all the curves and contradictions of a wedding cake or a French horn, something that should not hold together but did. Her mother loved it. Uncle George thought it extravagant, especially since they were losing money on the train. Mending the tracks was proving costly in a state covered by snow six months of the year. And yet they could not give up on the enterprise. The station was two years old now and needing paint, but her father refused to sell it.

  After what seemed like an eternity of listening to the stationmaster grunt and clang at the lifeless engine, Laurence appeared around the other side of the building, his chin tilting up from the collar of his coat.

  “‘I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,’” he announced as he approached. His expression was downy and warm, like a young child’s. “‘And accrue what I hear into myself … and let sounds contribute toward me.’” He paused, and Bel, eager to reply, to have any sort of conversation with her cousin, began to speak. Laurence held up his hand.

  “‘I hear the bravuras of birds.’” He gestured to the puffed gray pigeons parading below the eaves. “‘The bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames.’” He raised his head to the wires of smoke gliding from one of the station’s strange chimneys. “Let’s go somewhere, Bel,” he said. “I have somewhere I want to go.”

  “Wait,” she began again, because she had to say something. “Did you like it?”

  “Of course.” He laughed, his boyhood self peeking out for instant. “Your father is a genius. He made me remember there are always reasons to live.”

  Then he set off in a rigorous march up the hill. It was the old jaunty stride, which always surpassed hers and necessitated his frequent halting and breathing impatient gusts into the air. Hurrying behind him, she felt her body start to warm up as they ascended to Church Street. They passed a bakery with its golden wands leaning in the window, and she breathed the buttery odor of bread, suddenly hungry. A thin layer of sweat grew on the back of her neck and beneath her arms.

  When they reached the corner, Laurence swive
led abruptly by a snowbank and charged north, in the direction of the brick Unitarian church at the head of the street. Bel tried to take the turn with the same quick pace, and her right foot slipped on a patch of ice. She toppled over, landing on her hip. Tears flooded her eyes. As the earth’s chill crept through her coat, she realized how it would have been to fall on the lake so long ago, if the runaway had not been there to catch her. Laurence—she knew now—would not have noticed even then. He would have let her tumble from the ice castle while he gazed triumphantly out to the frozen water and recited some poetry he had composed on the spot for how beautiful it was, the two of them, standing on the rim of that emptiness together.

  “Miss Lindsey?” said a deep voice. Bel saw the broken boots, the ragged gray trousers she knew so well, and took the hand that Johnny Mulcane offered her. The cold scent of the snow washed his own fetid odor from the air and she breathed easily as he pulled her up, his hand releasing hers as soon as she was righted.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, looking no higher than his slack waist. The hired man hovered for a moment, his breath loud, rattling. It had been over a year since her father had let him go. When Bel asked why, her mother had lied. They couldn’t afford to keep him, she said, as if Bel had not heard the man lurch from the toolshed every afternoon, wiping his mouth. Whatever the reason, Johnny had dutifully vanished that September like the warm weather, leaving dead leaves unraked across the garden.

  Bel took a test step with her hip. It felt solid but sore. “How are you, Johnny?” she asked finally, raising her chin to meet the hired man’s eyes.