Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  “It was an accident,” Bel finally managed to say, and turned back to her mother. She used her cuff to dab at the blood on Faustina’s cheek.

  “Let the doctor do that,” ordered her father. “Mary!” he shouted, going down on his knees beside his wife. “Mary!”

  The red-haired servant appeared, panting, with a feather duster raised like an ax. Her freckles darkened to rust when she saw her fallen mistress. She stepped forward and then halted, unwilling to enter the scene. “Send for the doctor,” Daniel commanded. “Now.”

  Mary ran out the open door, still wielding the duster. The ugly thaw blew over them the scent of frozen things finally turning to rot. Faustina stirred, her mouth slackening to take in air.

  “Why did you let me fall?” she murmured, and opened her eyes, not looking at Bel, but at her husband. He arched over her, and Bel noticed how his skin had aged in the years since the war started, loose at the wrist and chin, and growing the film of brown spots that marked the hands of the old.

  “I wasn’t there,” he said, as if this were an answer. “I was upstairs.”

  Bel thrust herself into their gaze. “I didn’t mean to, Mother. Please. I didn’t mean to.” The silver chain dangled the swan in the air above her mother. Resting her eyes on the bird, Faustina fainted again with a soft wheeze. The air grew empty and cold.

  “You shouldn’t stay,” Daniel whispered to his daughter as she drew back. His eyes flickered over the locket without recognition. “You’re clearly upsetting her.”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” Bel said loudly, hoping it would wake her mother. Faustina stirred briefly, and then her face fell to the side, away from the open door.

  “Let her be, Isabel.” Her father’s voice was still gentle, but he shouldered in closer, pushing Bel aside and blocking her view of her mother. “I’ll take care of her now. It’s my duty,” he said.

  “It isn’t your duty. You love her.” Bel stared at the chord of muscles in the back of his neck, willing him to answer. He didn’t.

  “She fell, Papa. Why don’t you believe me?” she asked.

  Sighing, he straightened her mother’s collar and hair, as if arranging her for a display.

  “Ask her, then. I’m sure she’ll tell you everything,” Bel added bitterly, her hand closing around the swan that he was incapable of noticing, that had made her perfect mother fall.

  When I was sixteen, my mother fell down the stairs, a voice narrated for Bel as she rose and stumbled out, past her father haloed in the light of the impossible spring. She went into the garden and sat on the bench by the lilac tree, remaining there even after the doctor came and then left, calling to her that her mother was fine. Inside her mind, she retreated to tell Laurence the story over and over when they were old and finally together again.

  The world would be different then, the war finished and the two of them alive long past their spouses. They would find their childhood hiding places, and curl deep in the moss to confess to each other the lives they dreamed they lived. My mother fell down the stairs when I was sixteen. With distance, it was easier to believe the accident she had just seen: the flare of her mother’s white legs exposed above her stockings, so vulnerable, like a paper boat set on the sea—and why Daniel Lindsey could not understand that the fall happened as a consequence of motion and gravity. My father blamed me.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  It was Grete who finally rescued Bel from the garden, after the girl’s body had gone stiff and achy from exposure to the damp, chill air. For hours, she had sat with the chewed remains of a bread crust in her palm, the way her grandmother had once taught her and Laurence to feed the birds. The steaming bread went cold and hard, but nothing came except Grete, who made scolding noises as she knocked Bel’s hand clean. Then she ushered the girl back to the kitchen, seating her on a stool by the hot black stove.

  “She wants to see you after you dry out,” Grete said, and added her familiar warning, pointing at the stove. “Beware.” Ever since Bel was little, Grete had issued the same edicts for the kitchen. No touching, no picking, no tasting, unless a sample was offered by the cook herself. Today, Grete had many samples, her broad face gone red with worry and exertion as she fed Bel a spoonful of beef stew, the crumbs of a broken cookie, the heel of a just-baked loaf slathered in butter. After several minutes of eating and thawing, Bel finally spoke.

  “I didn’t do anything, Grete. She just fell,” she said, and Grete peered at her like an old turtle who has all the time it wants to measure the world before deciding on its virtue. Finally, she nodded, but it was a curious nod, transfixed suddenly by the silver locket that hung from Bel’s neck.

  “It’s mine,” Bel said defiantly. “I found it in the coach barn last year.”

  “So,” said Grete. “I think you should put it away once more.”

  “Why?” Bel’s heart quickened at the thought of learning the swan’s secret.

  “When I was a little girl,” Grete began evasively, stirring the soup with her heavy arm, “I asked my mother all the questions I could think of. ‘Why was the sky blue?’ ‘Why does water make that sound when it falls?’ ‘Why can birds fly and not people?’ And she said to me, ‘Someday the things you have no answer for will be the ones that make you happy.’”

  “Are you happy?” Bel asked, disappointed by the cook’s answer.

  Grete grunted. “When I haf my own house, I will be happy.”

  “I’m not happy,” Bel said. Her skin felt baked and cracked by the kitchen’s heat.

  “You will be,” Grete predicted, offering Bel another taste of stew. She needlessly scraped the sides of Bel’s mouth with the spoon to catch the spill, as she had done when Bel was a child.

  “My stockings are dry,” Bel said through a mouthful of warm potato. “Can I go see my mother now?”

  Instead of answering the girl, Grete handed her a glass of melted snow. It tasted earthy and cool, and Bel drank it all down, letting Grete gently tuck the bird back beneath the safe cover of her dress.

  “Please,” said the cook. Bel had never heard her say the word before, even in exasperation. “It came from another sweetheart, one your mother had before your father. Someone your Papa never knew about.” Grete turned and began to dust flour across the table in soft white constellations. “That’s all I can tell you,” she added, spreading the piles smooth.

  * * *

  When Bel ascended the stairs for the second time that day, it was her father who stood at the top, waiting for her, his left hand gripping the rail as if he, too, might fall. In his right, he held something white and thin, and Bel’s stomach sank when she saw it, remembering the letter she had received that afternoon and thought was still carefully stowed in her dress. She felt the place where the envelope had rested, but the letter must have slipped out in the flurry after her mother fell.

  “Is Mother ready to see me?” she asked in a shaking voice, her anger with him suddenly replaced by fear.

  “She’s sleeping again. She asked for you,” he added. “And once we discuss a small matter”—he wagged the letter—“we can visit her together.”

  Bel followed her father to the dim fire-lit library and sat down opposite him in the same chair she took for her tutoring lessons. He tapped the table with the crease of the paper before beginning.

  “Bel, you have some of the finest prospects for marriage in Allenton. You’re a bright, pretty girl from a wealthy family, and there are hundreds of appropriate young men who—” He stopped abruptly and rubbed at his forehead. “I just never thought you would take an interest in men so early. Lucia and Anne, yes, but my studious young daughter, who would just as soon play in the mud as go to a ball? And all for that mincing tutor of yours?”

  “He’s not mincing,” Bel shot back.

  “What did you promise him?” Her father rubbed his forehead again, looking suddenly weary.

  “Nothing.” Bel’s color rose. She stared at the white ash falling beneath the grate. What had her mothe
r promised her secret sweetheart?

  “And from that nothing, he presumed to write you”—he made a noise in his throat—“a letter that speaks of a certain intimacy.” The grandfather clock gave five low chimes. Bel’s mouth tasted of salt and emptiness.

  “Father, I haven’t changed from the daughter you just spoke of.” At this, her voice cracked, for she had changed. Even the word father sounded strange, like an exotic name that would not obey the tongue. “I just finally found a friend—and a kindred spirit. I didn’t know he would write that letter,” Bel insisted. And if I hadn’t found it on my own, she thought with anger, I never would have known.

  “Then why did you hide it?” He turned the paper over and over in his hands, as if repeatedly bringing it to light.

  “Because it’s mine.” Bel met his eyes with all the coolness she could muster. “Because he might die and he wanted me to know that he cared for me, even if nothing comes of it.” She paused. “You said yourself that our generation is different from yours.”

  Her father laid the letter down, his clean, pared fingernails just touching the wood. He did not say anything for a long time, and Bel began to shiver. Her dress, soaking wet at the hem, dragged against her ankles. But Daniel Lindsey was thinking. He was the type of man who could wait on decisions for indeterminate periods of time. Once made, however, they were irreversible. Bel knew enough not to interrupt him—it would only make the consequences worse.

  “I see that my Greenwood has become not a house of your happy childhood, but the cage of the foolish dreams of a girl eager to fall in love. I’m afraid if you stay here much longer, this inappropriate romance will grow, augmented by the lack of any other suitors,” he began. When he made up his mind, her father spoke in paragraphs, charting his argument like a theorem. “In addition, I fear your childish resentment of your mother has somehow led to her fall, and I cannot leave the two of you alone when I go away on business.”

  “I told you it was an accident, Papa!” Bel exclaimed, but he banged the table with his right fist, a judge whose courtroom had become unruly. The left lay on the table like a wilted flower.

  “So I am sending you to Washington with your Aunt Pattie,” he said. “And I will instruct your aunt to have you assist the good nurses so you can see what it is like to be the wife of a workingman, or worse, a spinster.”

  This granting of her innermost wish shocked Bel. Now it seemed more like a punishment than an escape to leave her mother and Greenwood. “If you bid me to, Father,” she said, trying to imagine Washington, like a giant Allenton, rising before her. “When do I leave?”

  “Next Thursday,” he said.

  “May I go see Mother now? I want to see her.” She stood up awkwardly, her thighs banging on the table. Her body was a loose door, almost disconnected from her mind. Washington. He nodded and led the way out of the library, still holding the letter and smelling of pipe smoke. Bel looked back at the empty table where she and Louis had once sat, and pictured herself meeting him somewhere on the busy streets of the capital. She would run to him—she didn’t care—he would be her family. She would let him crush her against the blue wall of his uniform, closer than the waltz—

  “The doctor has pronounced her shaken but not seriously hurt,” her father said, repeating what Grete had told Bel out in the garden. “She needs unbroken rest for a day or two, so please don’t tell her about your departure yet. I don’t want her to worry.”

  He opened the door to the cold, dim bedroom where Faustina lay. Bel saw herself pass across the room in the cherry vanity mirror that hung on one wall. Because her mother had set it at her own perfect height, Bel’s reflection was visible only from the shoulders down. Staring at her headless self, Bel realized it must have been months since she had last entered her mother’s chamber, because she remembered being short enough to see her image if she ducked a little. The room itself was gloomier now, as if the shadows Faustina cast in it had lingered, layering over one another until the air was grainy with darkness.

  The bruises had twisted the right side of Faustina’s face into a clownish grin, and Bel smiled back before she realized this was her mother’s fixed expression. Her green eyes swept over her daughter, looking for the swan and not finding it. She gave a milky sigh.

  “Good evening, dear,” said her father.

  “I’m sorry,” Bel whispered at the same moment, her voice tight.

  “For what, sweet girl?” Faustina winced. “I tripped.” She reached up slowly and touched her daughter’s cheek. “Don’t cry,” she added, and brushed away tears Bel didn’t know were there.

  And from that minute on, it was true. The fall had nothing to do with Bel. She watched her father’s face soften and allowed him to squeeze her shoulder in apology.

  Around them, the room had the wet, papery smell of illness, and Bel tried not to breathe it in, longing at once both to depart Greenwood that instant and never to leave her parents again, because their complicated hearts both fascinated and disappointed her. For so long she had thought love was just like the swan story, waiting for a message and receiving it, and then sending your own reply, back and forth for years. Watching her father tenderly kiss her mother on an unbruised section of her cheek, now she wasn’t sure.

  “My dear wife,” he said with uncharacteristic emotion. His pink scalp shone through his thinning hair.

  Faustina’s eyes met her daughter’s as he kissed her, and Bel thought she could see in them a deep and unremitting sadness. She touched the hard locket beneath the cloth across her breastbone and saw her mother nod imperceptibly, as if approving of the fact that it was hidden.

  * * *

  Bel did not let the silver bird emerge again until she had safely bidden her parents a tearful good-bye, laden with valises of plain, sensible clothes for her trip to Washington, and she and her aunt had changed cars in Albany, leaving the most opulent Pullman of the Lindsey line for a humble first-class car to the capital. Bel could not stop missing her mother, who had improved enough over the last day to get up from her bed and walk stiffly to the window, where she told her daughter in a low voice to be careful about what she dreamed of, and to fight all kinds of slavery, especially that of the heart. It was the kind of statement that suggested no reply but silence, and at that very instant, Bel finished her second soldier’s shirt, the last stitch tied into a knot. In answer to her mother, she held it up, white, billowing, and let it drift back to her lap.

  As she and her aunt left Vermont on the rocking Pullman, the land changed, the steep, tumbled green hills replaced by the river basins of New York. Lake Champlain stayed behind them, a flat scarf of silver-blue. The trees and the people, too, looked less hardy and defiant. Quiet-faced strangers had gathered like a stalled parade at Troy’s tidy wooden station when Bel finally pulled out the locket again and examined the silver bird, its bent neck curled like the start of a letter.

  “Let me see,” said her aunt, pale and blond in the switching panels of sunlight, shade, sunlight, shade. The train screeched to a stop. A hairy, frog-eyed man got on, heaping at least twenty carefully wrapped packages and crates into the aisle before taking the seat opposite. His worn attire didn’t look quite good enough to ride first-class, and he lounged with an uneasy air on the stiff cushions, occasionally parting the red curtain to peer out on the platform.

  “Sutler.” Aunt Pattie nodded in his direction as she scrutinized the locket. “Your mother used to wear that.” She opened the clasp in her officious way, her stare widening as if she were surprised at the emptiness inside.

  The man rearranged his nest of crates, touching their contents gently. “Thirty pies,” he announced to the dimness of the train. “A crate of lemons, good soap, and some cologne water for the soldiers who want to remember what it was to smell sweet for the ladies.”

  “Sir, I caution you against the disreputable elements of the railway,” Aunt Pattie said with a hungry glance toward his pies. “My husband, who happens to own a line, says that all sorts of th
ievery goes on.”

  “I ain’t about to lose nothing.” He smiled with genuine friendliness, revealing a blackened tooth. Affronted by his grammar, Aunt Pattie shifted again toward Bel, still holding her niece by the chain. Bel squirmed as the sutler’s wet eyes lingered on her hair and shoulders. He would not be included in the range of people Faustina called “polite company.” Aunt Pattie tugged on the pendant, and the chain bit into Bel’s neck. Leaning forward reluctantly, she resolved not to wear the swan in the open anymore. The train shuddered into motion again, making the crates clack together, and the sutler bounded up from his studied slouch to protect his wares. Aunt Pattie pulled her even closer.

  “You ought to get the hinge fixed by a jeweler, dear. One day, it will just fall apart in your hands,” she said, wagging the loose halves of the silver bird to prove it.

  May–June 1864

  Chapter Forty

  The place was called Chancellorsville, another meaningless appellation, except that a battle had been fought there the year before, and some of the skeletons remained, dredged up by spring rains. A spongy, starless sky hung over the soldiers. Although it had been dark for hours, no one could sleep, and they clustered around the fire, needlessly toasting their already-warm hands.

  Digging with his bayonet beyond the light was blue-eyed Addison, silent even when his body shifted. A wet winter had rusted the weapon’s blade, pocking the tiny reflected version of his handsome features. He did not appear to notice it as he carved channels around the edges of what looked like a mushroom-colored stone, clumps of clay sticking to his pants. He stabbed down hard and his reflected face blinked out.