The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

  “Of course you do,” she said.

  They went back to her house, and she led him to the bed where he was all energy and enthusiasm. She allowed him to do many of the things she had taught him, but offered nothing new.

  When he woke in the morning, she was gone, but the suits she had bought him were neatly folded and packed in a valise by the door.

  He’d had to seek out Fuller in his cellar gym just to get the name of her supplier of coca-wine.

  He worried about her all the time now. He’d written dozens of times, and had only received two brief notes back. They were impersonal, and cold, and the handwriting looked as if one of her clerks had penned them.

  Of course that was more than he had gotten from his sister.

  He’d given up after weeks of letters went unanswered. He even had a daguerreotype made of him in his lieutenant’s uniform and sent it to his father in care of her, but there was no reply.

  He’d begun to resent her anger. Here he was, doing exactly as Father had told him to do and she still wouldn’t answer his letters.

  After all, it was she who had put everything at risk. It was she who should apologize for putting their father in harm’s way. He was the one who was following the law, she was the one breaking it. He thought of her, cool and dry back in their big house, while he festered in this damned camp, listening to the racket of disjointed bands.

  Just as the rain started, he took the last bottle from the wooden box under his cot, wrapped it in a rag, and left the tent, heading for the enlisted side of camp.

  He wove through the endless rows of white canvas until he reached his familiar destination and pulled back the flap to find Hans sitting on his cot writing a letter. He dug under the cot and found a pair of dirty glasses, uncorked the bottle, and filled them with wine.

  “Back for more, Lelo?” Hans asked. “I would have thought you’d want a night off. Do you even have anything left to lose?”

  “Not much,” Leander said, trying to smile.

  “Well, what I won might at least smooth things over with my father back home,” Hans said. “I promised to send him half of my wages for the church, but they still haven’t paid us.”

  “He’ll be especially happy that it’s Willis money,” Leander said.

  “That he will,” Hans said with a grin. “I hear he’s been using his sermons to condemn that strumpet sister of yours.”

  “Payroll is at the end of the week,” Leander said.

  “Did Chapin tell you that when he busted you down for your poor example of drinking with us lowlifes?” he asked.

  “I guess you heard,” Leander said. “Yes, he said that right before he told me I didn’t belong in his army. I’d sure like to know who ratted me out.”

  “Wasn’t me,” Hans said. “Probably someone you woke up when you left here in the middle of the night, shouting about how we were all cheats.”

  Leander paused, gathering himself before he continued.

  “I came for a farewell libation,” he said. “I will not stay where I am not welcomed.”

  Hans squinted back at him in disbelief.

  “You son of a bitch,” he hissed, contempt in his voice. “This was all your idea. I could be home chasing Susie Munn through the apple orchards, and instead I’m stuck here marching up and down that damn field.”

  Leander downed his glass of wine and pushed the other toward his friend.

  “Where do you have left to go?” Hans asked, ignoring the glass. “Sure as shit Mary doesn’t want you home.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t and I’ve had as much of her as I can take,” Leander said. “I’m going to New York. I’m going to be a trader down on Wall Street. I’ll be rolling in it.”

  “Where will you get the money to start?” Hans asked. “They aren’t going to bankroll you on good looks.”

  “I have an idea.” Leander grinned.

  The rain had started beating hard on the canvas, spattering mud into the leaking tent.

  “I’m sure your daddy will be proud,” Hans said. “You hightailing to New York and abandoning all of us.”

  His stared until Leander collapsed into sadness and he hung his head and ran his hands through his grimy hair.

  “I don’t want to imagine what my father will say,” he said in a cracked whisper.

  “You don’t want to imagine what I’ll say when you’re gone, either,” Hans said. He turned to his letter again, doing his best to ignore Leander.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Leander said. “This whole thing will be over soon. That enlistment contract was only for six months. You can stick the rest of that out. This battalion is dug in so deep it’ll never move, and the rebs ain’t coming this way. By the time General Winnie Scott figures out where and who to fight, you’ll be home eating your mama’s succotash and listening to Susie Munn say how handsome you look in your pretty blue uniform.”

  Hans looked up over the letter.

  “I wouldn’t bet a plug nickel on that,” he said. “They aren’t going to let any enlisted men go, no matter what the contracts say. I’m stuck here forever, and you get to go gallivanting. I’ve had enough of cleaning up your mess.”

  “What about me?” Leander whined. “You heard Fillmore. They promised me a captain’s sash, and instead I end up with butter bars, listening to Chapin break me down over playing some cards.”

  “Poor Leander,” Hans said. “Go ahead, stroll out of here, walking papers in hand. Go get rich and bed that little number of yours, but you better hope you never see me coming your way.”

  Leander’s eyes flashed anger at the mention of Isabel, but he wilted again under his friend’s indignant gaze.

  “They try to keep you here, you send for me,” Leander said, trying to smile. “I’ll hire a fancy New York lawyer and get you out in no time.”

  “I bet,” Hans said. “Because I’ve always been able to count on you.”

  There was a long silence. Leander pushed the wine toward his friend, but Hans pushed it back.

  “You’ll not ease your conscience with that swill,” he said. “It ain’t good stuff. I don’t like how it makes me feel, and I don’t like you when you drink it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leander said.

  “Make no mistake, I’ll never forgive you for this,” Hans said, his gaze cold.

  Leander tried to push the cork back in the bottle, but it had swelled in the dampness and would not fit. He put the bottle and the misshapen cork on the little camp table.

  “I’ll be gone in the morning,” he said. “So this is good-bye.”

  Hans’s eyes focused back on his letter, and did not look up again as Leander stood and stepped outside.

  Leander almost sobbed when the nearly full bottle flew out of the tent and landed at his feet. Still, he picked it up and brushed the mud and grass from it.

  The rain poured onto his bare head. It had sent the other soldiers retreating to their tents, but at least it had ended the bands’ cacophony. He took in the murmur of chatter and laughter that rose from the rows of soggy canvas, each faintly glowing from candles within. He knew which of them housed the others from home, the boys that had followed him into the army. He knew he should go to each and say his farewells, but he did not have the strength to repeat what he’d just been through. He walked back to his own tent in the downpour.

  His civilian clothes had grown moldy in his duffel, but Leander pulled on the least offensive of them and packed a few other pieces in a rucksack. He straightened the bed before laying out the blue uniform on the blanket. It stunk like a wet sheep, but he folded it carefully. Corbett had still not returned when he finished his resignation letter and he left no word for him.

  The rain had turned to a light drizzle as he made his way through the bigger tents where the senior officers were housed. He found Colonel Chapin sitting at his lamplit desk, a pair of spectacles on his broad, bearded face.

  “Sir, this is for you,” Leander said.

  Chapin lo
oked over his glasses at him, then took the offered envelope and scanned the letter before reading aloud from it.

  “‘… did not appreciate the amount of time and labor it would take to fit me for that responsible position.’”

  He leaned back in his chair.

  “Well, I can’t disagree with that.”

  He flipped through a stack of documents on his desk, and handed one to Leander.

  “I took the liberty of having your discharge papers prepared, Mr. Willis,” he said.

  “Sir, you knew I would go?” Leander said.

  “You’re a civilian now. No need for the ‘sir,’” Chapin said, and gestured for Leander to sit on the little stool opposite him. He looked out past his tent flap into the blue rain of the night. “Did you know that when I wasn’t practicing law back home, I was with the Buffalo Niagaras?”

  “The ball team?” Leander asked, impressed. “I didn’t know you played.”

  “I’m a catcher,” he said. “Better behind the plate than with a bat, but I’ve been known to knock a few in.”

  Leander couldn’t help but smile picturing the always-serious captain tossing the ball around in a white woolen Niagaras uniform.

  Chapin smiled back.

  “I did some scouting, too, looking for players for the team all around those parts,” he continued. “Last year, someone, I can’t recall who, told me I needed to see this one outfielder. He said this one could do it all. Hit and throw and catch. So I got on the train and went out to Alden to watch a game.

  “I figured if this boy is the son of Nathan Willis, he must be something.”

  He stopped and looked at Leander over his glasses.

  Leander stared back at him, stunned.

  “What happened? Did I drop a ball? Miss an easy pitch? I must have had a bad day.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Chapin said. “You went three for four, knocked one over the fence, and made a diving catch that no one in their right mind should have.”

  Leander ran through the games he’d played the summer before and tried to single out the one Chapin had come to see.

  “Three for four? That wasn’t good enough?” he asked. “You didn’t even talk to me.”

  Chapin looked at him a long time.

  “You could have been one of the best,” he said. “Still could, for all I know. But the thing I noticed was that when nobody was watching you, you lost interest. Walked back to the dugout when everyone else ran, waved to the girls when you should have been watching the batter.”

  He paused, scratched at his beard.

  “When this battalion was forming, they sent me your paperwork and you were marked down for a captaincy—that President Fillmore himself had said so. I told them I wouldn’t have it. Got into quite a fight. I threatened to resign unless they relented.”

  He nodded, answering an unasked question. “I’m why you were made a second lieutenant.”

  He leaned back over his desk, and turned his attention back to the paperwork in front of him.

  “I knew you’d never last,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you to resign since the day you arrived in camp. Nobody wants a player like that on his team.”

  SECESSION

  The first mark in the perfect white blanket led from the telegraph shack at the train station to the Weber house up on Town Line Road. The second went farther, up Cary Road to the Glass Farm. The third track was the shortest, but by then, the snow had started to melt, and the mark from the station to the Zubrichs’ house was a muddy trample. More came then, a quick shatter of footprints, each another fissure in the ruined pane of snow.

  When the farmers and their wives arrived at the parson’s house, it was Harry who opened the door and led them into the parlor where the pastor and his wife sat.

  Lafayette Glass. Sylvester Glass. Vaness Weber. Hans Zubrich. All of them gone.

  The Battle of Ball’s Bluff. It sounded like a horrid place to die.

  Harry trekked from house to house the next day, spreading the word that there would be no services that Sunday. None blamed the old German pastor, and many said they doubted he would ever have the heart to preach again. In the afternoon, Harry drove the latest Confederate he’d been hiding in the barn down to the Abigail.

  “My friends are dead,” he said to Compson. “All of them, dead. Someone is going to pay for this. Before it’s all said and done, someone is going to get strung up in that town. So I brought your man here, just so it ain’t him.”

  Compson sat behind his desk and tented his fingers, nodding.

  “I understand,” he said. “These people have been friends to my cause. Maybe I should come out for the funeral.”

  “There’s no funeral,” Harry said, resisting the urge to spit. “They’re all buried somewhere down in Virginia, though no one can say exactly where.”

  Compson pushed an envelope across his desk.

  “I can’t do this no more,” Harry said, leaving the money on the desk and turning for home.

  A week passed and still the preacher did not unlock the church doors. Each morning Harry collected the eggs, milked the cow, and managed the visitors that streamed in and out of the parlor bringing food.

  He was expecting Mrs. Weber with her chicken pot pie when he opened the door to find Compson standing there.

  “I’ve come to give my condolences,” the commander said.

  Harry led him into the parlor.

  “Let me speak to these poor people in private,” Compson said.

  Harry sat on the front porch for a long while, watching the snow twist into tiny funnel clouds in the blustery wind until Compson came and sat next to him.

  “Tell the men in Town Line that there will be a meeting at the schoolhouse tomorrow evening. This is civic business, not church. Tell them there will be schnapps,” he said. “Even the heathens will come.”

  Harry spent the next day going door-to-door, and when the appointed time came, Compson greeted the farmers at the door of the mustard-yellow building. He poured them a glass of whiskey and clapped them on the shoulder. Harry had another jug, and circulated around the small schoolroom filling empty glasses.

  The farmers’ tongues loosened with the alcohol, and talk soon turned to the runaway slave and doings at the Willis place. They spoke of how Old Man Willis was held hostage by his wicked daughter and then they spit on the wide plank floorboards and demanded someone do something, but no one could say what.

  Harry had stoked the potbellied stove, but with six score men crowded in, the room became stuffy, and efforts to bank the fire brought no relief. The four tall windows were thrown open, but the cold winter air did little for the men used to open fields and barns.

  Compson motioned for the men to take their seats. Those that couldn’t find a cramped desk stood in the aisles or against the bright yellow walls.

  The pastor stood at the teacher’s lectern at the front of the room and gripped its edges like it was his pulpit.

  “Citizens of Town Line. Wilkommen. Warm für November, nicht wahr?” he said. “Warm for November, no?”

  The farmers grumbled.

  “We here, we have been through so much together, nein?” he asked. “Hard winters and dry summers. But here we are, with our farms, and if you are the lucky ones, your families, too.”

  Harry could see his blue eyes moisten in the long pause.

  “I came here in ’48, like many of you, ja?” he asked. “Leaving the troubles of Deutschland behind. No? Deutschland. Do you miss it like me? It will always be my home. Every morning I woke to look at the mountains, and I would know that God watched over me.”

  He went to the chalkboard behind the desk, and drew an approximation of the German states.

  “I had a big congregation there, many hundreds,” he said, drawing a lopsided star in the lower right corner. “One day, the soldiers came and they took my son, my Alois. He was gone from us, forever. But praise God, I was able to get away with my wife and my youngest boy.”

 
He drew a squiggly line, the east coast of America, and a childish ship, triangular sail, and waves between the two land masses.

  “Like you, I came here. ‘Good land for little money’ is what everyone said. And all you had to do was plow your fields and milk your cows, and you can make a good farm to leave to your children. Isn’t that what you want? Just to be left alone? Nicht?”

  The farmers, dazed from the liquor and the warmth, seemed to be fading to sleep.

  The pastor slammed his fist down on the desk and the farmers jerked awake.

  “But then Abraham Lincoln became president!”

  He went back to the blackboard and drew a line horizontally across the middle of the map and a flag in the bottom half, an X defining it as Confederate.

  “Who here voted for the rail-splitter?” he asked, and his piercing eyes scanned the silent crowd.

  Harry looked at a few he knew to be Union men, but they stared down at the wide plank floor in silence.

  “No one!” the preacher said, his voice rising. “No one here voted for him. No one in the South voted for him, either, did they?”

  He smiled at his own joke.

  “How did he become president when so few people voted for him? Did he cheat? Did he steal the election? I don’t know, but the question must be asked.”

  He stood in front of a farmer missing his front teeth. “What do you think, Klaus?”

  The farmer looked around, surprised to be addressed.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “We might never know,” the preacher said. “I do not believe he is our real president. He is not my president. Is he yours?”

  The men were leaning forward.

  “As soon as he is in, Lincoln says to the people down South that they cannot live the way they always have. These people want to be free to live the way they always have, like you, like all Americans used to. But Lincoln says no, so they leave. They secede.”

  He ran over the horizontal line several times with chalk.

  “That’s a lie,” Old Man Echols muttered from the front row. “That’s not how it happened.”

  A few of the other farmers grumbled at the interruption and Compson stood and glared at him, saying, “Show some respect! This man just lost his son!”