Authors: Lance Weller
Satisfied, Abel stood to study the northward beach and by and by found a thin taper of smoke rising from a campfire some two miles away. Their smoke rose straight and unblown until it had well cleared the canopy, so Abel figured their campsite to be a little, wind-sheltered hollow he knew well.
Nodding to himself, Abel spat and walked back to his campsite. As he went, he clucked his tongue and the dog barked once and loud, then ran joyously to him. The old man told it hush and the dog sat quietly beside him as he kindled their fire.
When the fire was burning, Abel took from his haversack two small tins that decades past had held a child’s candies. He laid one on the pine-needled earth and opened the hinged lid of the second. It was half filled with dry brown coffee beans, and he pinched up a measure between thumb and forefinger, then set them in his handkerchief. After beating the beans between two stones, he poured the grounds into a tin cup of water and set it directly on the fire. Abel stood and for a moment feared he might begin a coughing fit, but it did not come, and so he wandered about the margins of his campsite until he found a small, round stone to drop into the boiling coffee. As the grounds swirled and clustered about the stone, the old man opened the second tin, took from it paper and tobacco and rolled a thin cigarette to draw on as he drank his evening coffee.
Despite the mildness of the weather, the dog lay close beside him near the fire. The stars came out over the ocean in fine sprays of light and the moon as well and soon the smooth, dark sea was bright with reflected light. As though there were two skies and two moons, and the old man watched seaward, wondering would he see there some other self rising from the swells and, if so, what would that second self have learned that he had not?
There was no wind for Abel to smell or not smell rain upon, but he could still feel it coming just the same. He stayed up late into the night, long after he’d finished his evening luxuries, watching the stars and picking out the planets among them. Every once in a while a shooting star arced dazzlingly across the night, and he remembered the Leonids when he’d seen them as a child, holding his father’s hand.
He was six years old when the stars fell, thirty-nine when they fell a second time, and both times it was as though the sky itself had caught fire. You had to shield your eyes. Wailings and moanings and desperate hymnals singing from the colored church at the edge of the pinewoods near the river. A soft frisson had moved up Abel’s spine to see the lights, to hear the cries, to hold his father’s hand. His father was a dark silhouette against the brightness—one arm out-flung as though to bequeath Abel the busy heavens and all the planets in them. His mother was not two weeks in her grave, and his father himself but six months from his own.
Abel lay drowsy beside the fire, remembering further ahead—after those six months had fled and his father had gone to wherever it was the dead went. A cold, dark plain, windswept and candlelit. On Abel went, past the years of his adolescence in the dull, weary, cold, silent house of his maternal aunt outside Albany. She’d saved his soul for the Lord, then left him to his own devices. On and on, sleepy by the fire, past his daughter and past his wife, past happiness and hope and the first spring of war upon the land. He remembered Fredericksburg for no other reason than the cold night after the battle the sky was lit by the aurora borealis shining southward, sparkling with every color over all the living and all the dead on those icy, gore-strewn fields below Marye’s Heights.
And now this still night becalmed beside the starlit waters of the cold, gray Pacific, and all the twists of life that led him there. But it was all gone and had been for years, and as he finally slipped to sleep,
Abel stretched out his arm to curl his fingers into the soft fur along the dog’s neck.
His sleep that night was absolute and dreamless as only an old man’s sleep can sometimes be. And so quiet and peaceful, so restful, that Abel had no ready explanation for the quick, bright pain he felt from temple to jaw upon waking. It was sharp and ice-cold, followed by a slow warmth that spread along his neck. As his eyes came open, Abel Truman knew he’d been cut.
Willis crouched in the sand beside him. The little man’s tongue slid about the torn, red edges of his cheek, and the knife in his hand was streaked with Abel’s blood.
The old soldier blinked and took a breath. He rolled up onto his knees, but before he could stand, Willis’ boot slammed into the side of his head and Abel went tumbling back into a stand of waxy salal.
As he rolled over onto his hands and knees, Abel spat a single tooth that rolled off into the brush like a tossed pebble. Willis stood watching. Even had he not been mangled, Abel reckoned he’d have the look of being born out of season. When he raised his palms, Willis brought his boot down again. And when Abel fell, the little man began to use his fists.
Abel woke when water touched his face. The sun was gone, the sky dark gray, and the tide was rising around where he lay in the surf. Every so often a wave would splash against his face. The water was very cold, and Abel was thirsty. He thought to call out for the dog but found he did not have the voice for it. He pushed weakly through the wet sand, but such motion brought him spasms of pain, so he quit.
By and by the sound of the tide receded behind the clatter of his heart. Abel’s face was cool. He tasted seawater. From somewhere came the sound of water slapping against wood, of men’s voices calling, but he still had no words with which to answer.
After a while, he slivered open his eyes. There was a dark shape upon the water. Other shapes separated from it to come wading through the surf. Their shadows were long upon the water. A wave broke over Abel’s head, and he sputtered. He heard their voices again, suddenly close. Their long shadows fell over him. Strong hands lifted him. The dark sky opened. Rain began to fall.
Cyphering
1864
May 4
They struck camp four hours later. Men and boys rolled their meager belongings into blankets and hung the blankets from themselves, shoulder-to-hip. They filled canteens with fresh water and threw their playing cards into the dirt. In the full, bright sun of noontime they swung out onto the road singing “Mister, Where’s Your Mule?” and “I Can Whip the Scoundrel.” They marched with that noon sun winking off their rifle barrels and bayonet points and browning already their winter-pale arms. The Army of Northern Virginia marched that day to the soft snorting of a hundred, hundred horses, their collective breath softly redolent of forage and the good, strong, clean, earthy smell horses have when they are working. Their hooves were well shod, their coats brushed to a shine, and their thick, kinked veins twitched cheek and flank.
The army marched that day as it had always marched: in song,
laughter, talk, and boast. Happy amidst the stamp-tramp-and-creak of worn shoe leather upon the dust, and the hard, fleshy slapping of bare feet upon the same. They marched with bands playing and flags uncased. They marched knowing in their hearts that after this next Big Thing, the war would surely be won, and that Grant was of no account and that the Army of the Potomac was as good as up the spout, Gettysburg notwithstanding. And who was there that couldn’t see it that day, by God? Who was there that could not feel it in the very air of springtime?
But the moment passed and the day grew long. Ahead, down the long pale line of the road and the marching men upon it, loomed a darkness. The road ran east into the Wilderness.
Men by their thousands filled the Old Stone Road and raised the dust in white plumes flecked with gold, shot through with sun. Yet still the air seemed fresh, washed by the rains of the storm just passed. The sun was bright in the leafed trees, upon grass slick with caught rain, and the man-filled road was as protean and indomitable as a river flowing seaward.
And the army flowed—two corps down two parallel roads separated by a mile-wide expanse of scrub forest and hard-luck farms with a third corps, Longstreet’s, a day’s march or more behind as it came out of Bell and Mechanicsville down in Louisa County. It didn’t matter. Two corps marched east to occupy the men from the North, to hold them by the nose until Longstreet, as he always did, could come up for the knockout blow. And then they’d turn them and by God drive them.
The Army of Northern Virginia marched east, and by and by it entered the dark of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania County. The men marching—tramping accordion-style now, bunching up when there was a halt somewhere along the line so that the dust came down upon their hat crowns and fouled their beards—quieted a little as they passed into that dark. They spoke softer if they spoke at
all. There was no singing. The bands stopped playing and cased their instruments, placing them carefully in the backs of wagons and gripping rifles instead. All along the road the marching men could not see ten yards into the dark, green tangle, and the road seemed to narrow the farther it ran. Officers rode along the line urging the men onward in soft, tight voices as though they feared waking something. The Wilderness absorbed the sound of the army with an ever-diminishing echo and constant fadeaways. Sound, if it returned at all from the dark hollows, came back softened and strange, and the dust did not rise beyond the canopy.
From its dim, vine-choked heart, the Wilderness of Spotsylvania stretched over the county from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan to south of Chancellorsville and close by the county seat itself. Just as wide east-to-west, it was the darkest, gloomiest mess of forest that most of these men had ever seen, and yet they knew it well, for they had marched through it, back and forth and back again, many times these past years of warring. Vines and creepers snaked across its damp floor and great brown mounds of dried leaves went rustling and skittering along overgrown farm roads when winds actually found them. Strange shadows reared monstrously in cruel thickets to set travelers’ hearts to beating all wrong.
Toward the end of the day, men by handfuls fell out of column to lie awhile in the cool shade. They quivered from harder exercise than they’d known all winter and were pale and shaky from hunger. And as he marched with a dry throat and a jangle of green pain at his temples, David Abernathy spotted the testifying fanatic lying beside the road in the shade of a big black oak. Sniffing dryly, David left the column to join him.
Balancing his forearms on his knees, he squatted nearby and tugged a long, green shoot of grass from the springwet earth. Meditatively chewing the tip, David let the bitter juice squirt against the back of his tongue and trickle down his throat. The old man watched
him with his dark eyes ashine. After a while, David asked, “Well, how about it, old-timer? You feel any better today?”
The old man blinked slowly and jerked his chin toward the marching column. “Dead men,” he said. “Every mother’s son of them.”
David nodded and pursed his lips. “A good many, probably,” he agreed. He took the grass from his mouth, looked at the flattened, spitwet end, then replaced it. “What about you?”
The old man nodded, smiling now. “Have ye seen the devil?”
David frowned and shook his head. “I ain’t studying no devil,” he said.
“It don’t take study,” the old man answered. “It don’t take nothin’ but thought. Thought and breath, and our nature’s fueled.”
“What nature?” asked David, glancing sideways as the old man moved farther back into the shadows of the oak, crouching now on a length of root that knuckled its way through the grass.
“Killing and war,” said the old man.
David looked at him sadly. “You’re touched,” he said. “Some damn thing’s got you. What you ought to do is go on back and find you an ambulance. Let those boys fix you up. Shoot. Maybe they’d send you on home, being like you are.”
The old man shook his head, white hair waving soft and dazed about his leathern face. “The devil’s got him a dual nature,” he said.
“That so?”
“Yessir. And a name for each. Can ye guess them?”
“You go on tell me.”
“The one goes by Lincoln. And t’other?” The old man grinned again. “He goes by Davis. My opinion? We ought to hang ’em both from a goddamned sour apple tree.”
“That sounds like sedition,” said David.
“It is what it is.”
David took the stem from his mouth and threw it into the road, where it was quickly trod into the dust. He stood. “Well,” he said,
squinting up and down the line of marching men. “I figure I got a job of work to catch back up with the rest of my outfit,” he said. He held out his hand, but it was ignored.
“Can ye cipher?” the old man asked him.
David sniffed and nodded. “I know my numbers,” he said.
“Well, cipher ye this, then. Over across the river—hell, probably this side of it by now—they’s going on 150,000 Yankees. Soldiers coming straight at us as Grant prefers. And do ye know how many we are?”
“We aren’t any 150,000, I know that.”
“No sir, not at all.” The old man grinned and clapped his hands. “By my guess, in the Second Corps alone old Ewell can only field no more’n 35,000 of us, all told. And we ain’t all told. Not by a long shot. Hell, you put in the rest of the army and it’s maybe 60,000, maybe a little more. And Longstreet ain’t up yet. Shit. You want yourself a job of work, you go on up the road a spell and you’re bound to find it. Probably find it tomorrow, ’less I miss my guess.”
The old man held his eyes a long moment, then finally stood from his root and took David’s hand in a hard, callused grip. “What will you do?” David asked him.
The old man grinned again and winked. “My share,” he said. “I got quite a bit of that old devil in me that’s wanting out.”
They stood with their hands clasped beside the dusty road where the soldiers marched eastward through the sun and slanting shadows. “I’ll see you when we get there, then,” David said, and the old man touched a finger to the side of his nose and nodded.
In the evening, that portion of the army with which Abel Truman marched encamped itself in the Wilderness around a burnt-out cluster of buildings known locally as Verdiersville but that many of them, remembering the shade trees that once stood there and the cool spring whose waters so sweetly flavored their canteens, called
“My-Dear’s-Ville.” Night fell quickly, seemed darker and more oppressive in the interior of the Wilderness, and the shadows lay long and thick through the gutted frames of sheds and barns and long-abandoned shacks. Few fires burned, but you could still smell ersatz coffee on the air. Men slept on their arms in the dust, for they knew not what lay ahead nor when they would see it. The weather grew chill and all trace of the day’s heat was sucked starward until the earth became a cool ball. And far away, over the tops of black trees that shuddered and clashed in the wind, there came a faint orange glow that faded by gentle degrees into the upper darkness where the planets were hung, and the stars. From where they sat upon a small, treeless knoll Ned asked about the glow and Abel told him it was firelight from Grant’s vast army, camped two miles up the road at Wilderness Tavern.