Wilderness

by Lance Weller

  She cleaned it as carefully as she had his other wounds, and when she saw the wreckage of the soldier’s elbow she sighed and settled back on her hard, naked heels. She bid Grant to hold the soldier down and cocked her head, then worked the tip of her finger into the wound to feel the condition of the bone within. The soldier kicked soundlessly about as Hypatia felt along the path of the bullet, working her little finger into his arm nearly to the second joint. Then, with a sharp hiss, she drew it quickly out and flapped her hand through the air.

  “What is it?” asked Grant. “What happened?”

  Hypatia fisted her off-hand around her finger and made a face. After a few moments she looked at it and shook her head. “He’s all broke up inside,” she said. “Around the elbow, like I thought. Sliced myself on a hunk of bone somewhere in there.” She hissed again, looked at her finger mournfully as she wiped it off, then picked up the soldier’s pocketknife again.

  She took a corner of an old rag they’d found in the cabin and began to carefully clean the blade, pushing long, curling strips of gummed blood from the helve with her thumbnail and polishing the blade itself until it sparkled in the firelight. After a time, she looked up at Grant and said, “Hold him tight now, he’ll be kicking up a fuss.”

  Grant looked from Hypatia to the rebel and back again. And back and again once more, as though deciding how much of their care this man deserved. Finally, he sighed and grasped the soldier. Grant looked at her where she knelt, looking hard at the soldier’s ruined arm in her lap. “Where’d you learn all this?” he asked.

  She did not answer right away, and when she did her voice was soft. “I don’t really know nothin’ about anything,” she said. “But I been told I got the knack by folk that was suffering. I’d help the surgeon when he come ’round where I run off from.” She shrugged. “You hold him now,” she instructed.

  In the end, she saved the arm but not its use. The bullet had splayed and flattened against the bone, shattering and twisting into the tendons coiling like slick cables through the joint. Hypatia struggled for a long while to work the bullet out with the pocketknife as the soldier kicked and cried and shouted and wept but did not wake. She braced the shaft of the blade against her knuckle back and grasped the knob of his ulna where it split his skin while prying under the bullet with the point. When it finally dropped onto the floor, Hypatia put the bullet into one of the soldier’s pockets, then stood to tear strips from her undergarments to bandage him with. Grant watched her, his face hot, but when she caught him looking he turned away to tend the fire.

  Crouching like a hunter before the flames, he scraped old blood from his knuckles with a thumbnail and tried not to think of the boy he’d buried. After a while, the soldier woke and called for food and he heard Hypatia give a heavy sigh and then came the old, familiar, heartbreaking rustle of clothing followed by a sound of feeding that he remembered coming from the candlelit corners of cabins where his master put new mothers.

  Grant turned. He watched for only a moment as Hypatia held the wounded man’s face to her bared breast. The soldier’s eyes were closed, and so now, too, were her own. Her fingers were caught up in his hair as she smoothed his brow, and his good hand was fisted in the folds of her dress. His cheeks caved and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his lean, grimy throat. Grant took a breath and walked out the door into the dark.

  There was sound and light from the road where a column of men marched, their way lit by lanterns and torches. They did not sing as they marched, these men, and their officers urged them on in tones as hushed as they were urgent. Grant recognized them by their dark uniforms as Union men, and he stood on the porch watching them pass. Their steps in perfect union, their arms to shoulder, and even with the dust boiling up around their waists, he could see the piping on their trousers, the dull gleaming of brass eagles on their coats.

  His mouth open with wonder and delight, Grant stepped off the porch into the lane. He did not call out, for his throat tightened and he choked off tears. The soldiers marched past, their shadows slanting through the Wilderness. They were black men, marching, and they held their weapons easily, as though without thought, as though they knew they’d earned the right, and they all stepped together through the night southward.

  Grant stumbled down the lane as the last of them passed on the road. A man at the rear of the column spied him where he stood with his hands cupped before his belly in the manner of those witness to a precious thing that know not what to do with idle palms. This man, this black soldiering man, smiled easily and doffed his forage cap and gave it a little twirl like he was McClellan himself before settling it back onto his head. And then he was gone with the rest of them. Grant stood alone in the road watching the torch lights flicker and fade in the black of the Wilderness. He listened to the steady, comforting, monotonous tramping of their feet fade into cricket song, the cries of the whippoorwills somewhere out in the dark. His face was wet and smoothed of care, his mouth open, his eyes wide and hands atremble.

  He walked back to the cabin. He did not look at her but could tell by the air in the room that she’d fastened back up. The thin rebel lay asleep by the fire, the shadows making him look infinitely sad. Grant paused a moment to watch, then turned away and went to the desk and lifted the onion sack with the uniform and held it to his chest. He stood breathing with his face to the dark wall.

  “You’re goin’ with them, ain’t you?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” she said softly. “You go on do that.”

  Grant turned to look at her. Her face had thinned since the day he met her, and little streaks of fresh sweat cut through the pale dust on her forehead and upper lip. She managed a smile and he took a deep breath and looked hard at her. “Ain’t I a man?” he asked. “Still?”

  Hypatia nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you is.”

  He looked over at the soldier, then back at her. “Then goddamnit, Hypatia, I—” He gaped fishwise, then looked away again. “Just goddamnit. God damn it.”

  “Another time, maybe,” she said. “Some other time it would’ve all been different. We could have been something another time, maybe.”

  He looked her in the eye and finally said, “Nah. There never was any way, and there ain’t never goin’ to be another time. I know it and you do too.” And when she looked away, he smiled tightly and nodded while she took a single, shuddery breath, then smiled back at him. “Well,” he said, drawing breath. “All right then. You goin’ to be all right here, girl?”

  “Go on,” she said softly. “I seen ’em through the window, and the way they was marchin’, you goin’ to fall behind lessen you scoot.”

  He bent and took her hand, pausing a moment to look at their two hands joined there in the flickering light. Her cinnamon wrist-back wrapped in his dark fingers. They looked into each other’s eyes, and he leaned and kissed her lips, pressed the dead man’s revolver into her hand, straightened, and walked out the door.

  He stepped into the cool dark. He heard horses on the road, and he stripped and put on the uniform. It fit him well, and for a moment he longed for a looking glass. As he strode out into the road, Grant wondered where he’d find a musket, and then the horses were upon him. A Union officer asked was he of Ferrero’s Division, and Grant answered yes and the officer cursed him roundly for laziness and for the color of his skin and for his African heritage and for a general lack of intellect. Then the horseman helped Grant climb painfully up behind him, and they galloped together on up the road until they vanished into the Wilderness.

  Chapter Nine

  Makers’ Acres

  1899

  He was already two days late getting back, and she had, thusly, already two days’ more worry than she should have had. Fretting deepened the lines about her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. And when she heard the sound of gunfire crackling up out of the nightdark valley like the sound of fire on wet wood, Ellen Makers stood quickly from the rough table in their
cabin to stare through the paned window. Her breath shallowed as she set the paring knife down near the wooden bowl of apples, touching the blade with two fingers to turn it from the table edge. Earlier, she’d dusted half the table with flour to keep the dough from sticking, and now Ellen stood staring at the strange designs of finger pad, thumb, and palm heel drawn there. A strange language, unpronounceable and sad.

  She stood listening. The little pygmy owl that had been calling from the dark of the slope behind the cabin had flown or, perhaps, merely quieted at the dull, metallic echo of violence. Ellen took her lower lip between her teeth, took air to fill her lungs, and stepped out the front door onto the covered porch, where the cold night had gathered shadows from the forest and laid them in a star-strewn sheet across the sky.

  From somewhere down in the valley, a dog barked savagely and wild, then fell quiet again. And another, distant shot with its attendant echo. Ellen stood listening until the fading sound was joined by a wolf’s howl from the pitchblack far away. She turned quickly, eyes wide, one hand white upon the porch rail, and tilted her face toward the mountains like a blind woman. But there was no other sound to hear—only the soft, silvery splashing of the Little Sugar Creek where it flipped and danced through the trees on the lee side of the ridgeline.

  Thoughtfully, Ellen set her fingers to her lips and waited for what more might come. She’d been paring the last of the apples and smelled cinnamon and juice on her fingers, so touched them to her tongue one by one to taste the aftersweetness of a vanished summer. Just before the gunfire there had been a star shower, and she had seen them falling by the dozens. Bright streaks across the night, and she had rested her chin on clasped hands to watch them prayerwise as they flared and fell and faded and were gone. And as the last star vanished beyond the far rim of the world, the gunfire began.

  And now the night was still and cold and quiet. A few thin clouds drifted sluggishly amidst the twinkling stars. A fat portion of moon hung left of center in the night, but Ellen could not recall its proper name, only that it was neither full nor crescentic. Ellen sighed. Her breath appeared and vanished and appeared again. She reckoned the moon might soon pull another frost from the ground, might limn the dead, stiff grass in a hard, white shell and mark precisely the Byzantine curls of moss and fern, the curling leaves of weeds wilting along the lane. In two weeks, maybe, the frost would freeze hard, inches down into the soil, and turn their landscape wintery—hard, silver, joyously beautiful.

  Taking another deep breath, Ellen stepped down into the yard to walk the path to the lane and thence to the edge of the long, easy hill that looked down into the dark valley. The lane ran pale and untroubled to the first curve and was lost in the tall firs and shadows they hoarded to their trunks. She leaned against the fence post and the sign upon it that Glenn had carved and painted and that read: “Makers’ Acres.” Smiling softly, she remembered the day and his fierce joy over the sign, their land, and their first payment upon it. To her right, something went skittering across the roof of the tool-shed and into the trees. Squirrel or night bird or some other thing. Ellen watched in that direction for a time, eyes straining in the dark, and when nothing showed itself she turned and made her way back to the porch.

  Rubbing her forearms to hoard her warmth, she stood with her arms crossed against the cold for a half hour, but there was nothing else to hear now save the owl when it started in again, calling softly, softly from its shadowed woods.

  Ellen finally went back inside to blow out the lamps until all within the cabin was dark save the smoldering hearth fire, where it glowed to cast a flickering red light upon the walls and furniture. She stood in the center of the room, regarding the speckled little coals, then drew a breath and put on more wood.

  She went about the cabin in the firelit dark: the three rooms, touching things absently, righting books on their shelves, blowing motes of dust from atop counters, fussing with the way Glenn’s second pair of trousers hung from their peg on the bedroom wall. After a time of this, she stopped before the cabinet near the door, where they kept the second rifle.

  Flames crackled from the hearth and softly lit the room. Ellen opened the cabinet and took out the gun and broke it to be sure of the shell, then set it down again beside the door and turned away. Dragging the chair from the table, she set it on the porch, then drew a dipper of water from the rain barrel, filled the teapot, and waited while it boiled. She did not look at the rifle again. Ellen brewed herself a mug of strong coffee and stepped back out onto the porch.

  Setting the coffee on the porch boards beside the chair, she retrieved the rifle, and shut the front door so no light would reveal her to anyone on the lane. She sat straight with the rifle crosswise on her knees and touched it no more. She sat waiting, leaning now and again to lift the coffee to her lips and feel its bitter warmth trickle down the center of her. Seep slowly down her limbs and put heat in her belly.

  And with the rifle came the sudden, unwanted remembrance of bright, tearing pain as they held her down and worked the cold barrel into her. Their greasy stink and their damp, rough hands and their outsize shadows rearing wildly on the tent wall.

  Ellen put a palm to her stomach and tried to imagine how she’d once been. “Damn it, Glenn,” she said, her breath a hushed, feathery plume on the cold, starlit air. “You come home to me.”

  Ellen Makers sat in the cold with the rifle ready on her lap. Listening. The little owl called quietly. A soft wind came up the long slope from the valley floor. Trees creaked and shed needles; she could hear them falling like strange rain tap-tapping into the moss. The understory was rife with movement. She sipped her coffee and took an apple wedge from her dress pocket. By starlight, she looked at the backs of her hands where the bones ran wrist-to-knuckle like rake tines, like the hard implements of labor they were. By starlight, her tough hands seemed luminous, aglow, as though built of light. She wondered if she was old as all that. Maybe not. Perhaps she’d not yet begun the slow, hard decline she knew would quicken as the years passed. She pressed her palm forcefully against her belly as had become her custom since they’d ruined her, as though to divine the broken, torn places inside and set them right again. But then a sound rose from the bottom of the hill where the lane ran into the road.

  It was a wagon coming along—she could tell that much from the soft rattle of loose boards and the softer knocking of hooves upon the packed earth. Ellen put by her fear and set her hands upon the rifle. Standing from the chair, she strained with listening, but there was no voice to hear or recognize, so she put the chair out of her way and held on to the rifle.

  She stood waiting, trembling a little now. The wagon came through the dark, coming steadily between the trees that flanked the pale road, and she began to tell its shape where those trees thinned before finally opening into the yard. A dark, boxy thing moving slowly along. She pursed her lips and gulped air.

  A dog ran out of the brush beside the cabin and stopped before the porch with its head cocked and its breath smoking the air around its muzzle. Ellen raised the rifle, quickly and without thought, and sighted down the barrel, then looked around it, frowning. The dog barked once and without menace, and she knew it then for a dog she somehow recognized, so lowered the gun once more.

  And then the wagon was pulling in beside the shed and she heard Glenn’s voice—quiet, deep, with that soft, melodious quality of calm assurance she so loved. He spoke to Emerson, telling him what a good horse he was, his voice all the while so quiet as to be more whispery emotion than true speech.

  Ellen went quickly down the steps into the yard. She could sense that something was not yet right, even though he was home, and so took the rifle with her. But then he was down from the wagon and she could see his teeth in the dark and his open arms. His white shirt flashing beneath his dark fall coat. She went to him who was her husband and he put his arms around her and she tilted her forehead into the hollow of his neck. His scent enclosed her and she released her breath. They stood so, tog
ether, for a long moment with only the moon and wild stars to light them and were quiet.

  And then she stepped back with one palm flat to his chest. “What is it?” she asked. She blinked and her pale hand darted to his dark, swollen face. “Glenn,” she breathed. “What did they do to you?”

  Glenn Makers took her slim white hand in his own two dark and put his lips against her palm where he could smell cinnamon and apples. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She looked at him and sighed and kissed his hurts and they were silent together again.

  There came a soft groan from the back of the wagon, and the dog, forgotten, began barking furiously.

  “What is it?” she asked, peering past Glenn’s shoulder toward the bed of the wagon. “I heard gunshots.”

  Glenn opened his mouth and shut it again. The dog barked and paced. Glenn turned toward it then looked back at her. “It’s that old man,” he said. “It’s Abel Truman.” And he went around to the back of the wagon and lifted Abel in his arms as easily as if he were a child.

  Glenn carried him to the back room while Ellen relit the lamps and bore one after them down the dark hall. They had no second bed or cot, so she spread thick blankets on the floor for Glenn to gentle the old man down upon. There was nothing else in the little room save a small table where Ellen set the lamp. As they stood looking at him, their hands sought each other’s through the shadows and their fingers hooked thoughtlessly after the fashion of those long together in love. The old man’s eyes were closed, and his chest rose and fell steadily, a faint, wet gurgle high in his throat and soft whistle with each out-breath.

  “What happened to him?” Ellen finally asked.

  “Hell if I know.” Glenn shrugged. “I think he’s sick. Hurt, but sick too. Leastways, he sounded it earlier.” He looked at her. “You heard the gunfire?” he asked, glancing in the direction of the gun cabinet. When she told him yes, he nodded and told her how he’d found the old man and shrugged again as though there were other things that needed saying that would keep until later.