Wilderness (29 page)

She walked into the cabin and closed the door. And later, when he woke, they gave each other their names and Hypatia handed Abel Truman a cooked piece of pork and a biscuit with molasses drizzlings that she’d fixed in the hearth fire.

They slept on opposite sides of the cabin. He lay before the fire to
keep the chill away and she near the door, with the cool, dead weight of the pistol in her dress pocket. Numberless times she came awake to sporadic gunfire from the south or merely chased from sleeping by strange, hot dreams. In the morning, when she finally truly woke, Hypatia’s right hand ached sore from her cut finger to the pale base of her thumb, where the small veins ran straight as ill-tuned guitar strings through her wrist, each one vibrating with notes of dull pain as though recently plucked.

It was not warm in the cabin, for the fire had burned down to but a few bright coals, yet she sweated terribly. When she crouched beside Abel where he still slumbered, she found that he, too, had sweat through his clothes. His hair lay loose about his head like damp netting, and his face was flushed. Hypatia laid a palm across his forehead to feel the fierce heat of his gathering infection.

Sniffing dryly, she peeled the bandages from around his arm and prodded the swollen wound until a watery trickle ran. His injury was hot to the touch, and when she tried to straighten Abel’s arm from the angle he’d cocked it, he cried out with such pain that after but a few halfhearted tries she let it be. As she attended to his other, various hurts, Abel muttered something through his sleep and gnashed his teeth. He called a woman’s name and he called a man’s and in the end began to shake with a bone-deep cold.

After a while, Hypatia went outside to collect leaves and roots into a small linen bag she kept about her person. She did not stay out long, for she was unaccountably tired, and the constant sound of the southward fighting was as oppressive as the rain. When she returned to the cabin, she mixed the ingredients she’d gathered with water heated over the fire in a little tin cup until a steaming mash filled the bag. Laying the poultice on Abel’s shattered elbow, she left it for an hour, then changed out the contents with fresh and laid it on his hurt chest. After another hour, she took the used plaster off him and wrapped it around her finger. She could feel its fading
warmth seeping deep into her flesh and felt it settle, it seemed, into her bones, where it hurt like the very devil. Hypatia kept it on as long as she could stand, then carefully rinsed the bag with a portion of their drinking water, turned it inside out, and hung it near the fire to dry. Then she settled herself on the floor near the door with her eyes shut and her forehead cradled in the web of her thumb and forefinger.

She breathed deeply, trying to steady herself. Her eyes were hot and her joints ached, elbow, knee, and hip. After a while she began to cough and could not stop, and by the time she’d finished, Abel had woken and propped himself up to look at her.

“You got yourself sick runnin’ ’round in the weather, auntie,” he said, panting a little with the effort of lifting himself from the floor.

Hypatia gave him a sour look and said, “Don’t you call me that. I done give you my name last night.”

Abel nodded an apology and she returned the nod and shifted the stale, milk-sour front of her dress about for the comfort of it and to feel the reassuring weight of the pistol in her pocket. After a few moments, she cocked her head and asked, “How you feeling this morning?”

Abel swallowed and made a face, then said without thinking, “Like I been ate by a bear and shit out over a cliff.”

Hypatia looked at him and Abel cleared his throat and pursed his lips and said with strained decorum, “I reckon I’d be feeling more’n a bit worse if you hadn’t stayed around to tend me.”

She nodded at the implied gratitude while Abel wet his lips and asked, “Where did your man go?”

“He wasn’t my man,” she said. “I didn’t have no claim on him and I didn’t think you were awake enough to even know he was here.”

“Well,” said Abel. “I had moments.”

Hypatia frowned. “He went on with some African soldiers what marched right by here two nights ago.” She looked hard at him. “You
should know there’s blue soldiers all over these woods. Wouldn’t take long at all for them to show up if I was to yell.”

“Goddamn,” said Abel, snorting. “Nigger soldiers. This war’s lost.” He shook his head and settled back down. “I couldn’t give you no trouble even if I wanted to,” he said. “But I reckon you know that.”

“You never did answer my question straight-on,” she said after a few moments. “How does your arm feel? I’m askin’ for a reason.” She met his eyes and went on. “Are you dizzy? Sick at your stomach? Tell me, so I can figure what needs doing.”

Abel looked at her, then nodded. “I’m cold,” he said. “Awful cold, and I can’t get no breath. And my arm hurts all the way down into my hand.”

“How bad?”

He snorted again and shook his head. “Pretty goddamned bad.”

Hypatia lifted her chin. “You just stay down on the floor, then,” she said. “You got to try and relax that arm if you want to hang on to it.”

He nodded and said, “A surgeon would’ve took one look and lopped it off.”

“I ain’t no surgeon.”

“I know that.”

“Fine.”

“I was fixin’ to thank you.”

“Well, don’t. Yest’day, I was two steps gone from here. Next time I go out that door I might well could be four.”

Abel shook his head and grimaced as he shifted about. “I reckon you’re free now,” he said. “You do what you want.”

She gaped at him and opened her mouth, then slowly closed it and shook her head from side to side. “You got that all wrong,” she said.

Abel frowned. “Well, sure you are,” he said. “You must be.” Outside, somewhere to the south in the rain and the wind, gunfire
crackled like strange, terrible thunder. “I got to believe we all lost that fight, otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing ’em tear into each other down south of here like we are. I figure Marse Robert’s scootin’ back toward Richmond, and if that’s so, it’s on account of he can’t go forward.” He shrugged and looked at her. “Way I see it, this land’s liberated. You’re in Union territory now, and according to Abe Lincoln, you’re a freedman. Woman. At any rate, that’s the way I see it.”

Hypatia shook her head again. “You don’t know nothing,” she said, her voice low and cold. “It’s almost funny, how you don’t know the first thing about anything.” She held her right forefinger tightly in the ball of her left fist. “Such a thing gets onto you, gets put onto you, you can’t never get shut of it. You’re always bound ever after on account of you can’t ’magine no other thing. And there can’t never be nothing else. Not in your hands and not in your heart, so don’t you go on speechifyin’ ’bout freedom when you don’t know what the other is. You just keep your mouth shut about that.”

Abel shuddered with a sudden flare of pain. A soft, mewing sound escaped his lips and he coughed—quick, harsh, and dry—then looked at her with his gaze gone soft and worrisome. “How did you lose your child?” he asked.

She took a great, deep breath, then slowly took the pistol from her pocket, handling it in such a way and with such an expression that she’d have him know her resolve. Moving her lips soundlessly for a moment, she finally said, “Down south of Charles-town while I was still carryin’ him inside me—he was a boy—I went up to a Yankee wagon to try and see if’n they had a little food. A little water. Any work, washing or some such, I could do in trade for it.” Her face went flat. “They got in a circle. It was going on evening and I remember seein’ the sun goin’ down all red behind the trees.”

Hypatia took another breath, her eyes and face now tilted upward, her voice dispassionate as though her memory of events had removed her from them, made of her a witness to her own tragedies.
“Well, you can imagine what happened,” she said. “One went twice and one of them gave me a boot in my belly after.”

Abel said nothing, and Hypatia lapsed to silence. She stared into the fire, and the light washed over her face in sheets of gold and bronze. “When he finally got born, he only lived a little while and he never did make a sound,” she finally said. “Not once. He was such a good baby. Just an eency little thing. Had a little spot on his head that was stove in and I buried him in a shady spot by a little crick. I was so tired, I couldn’t think of no name for him so I just let him be, hoping Lord Jesus would do it for me.” She blinked, her eyes wet, and licked her lips. “I come aways since … and now I don’t even know what county it was. I ain’t never ever goin’ to find that spot again. My head’s the onliest place he is now.” This last she said in a grief-propelled rush, and by the time she’d finished she’d covered her face with her palms.

Abel was silent for a long time after. Finally, he told her how sorry he was for her troubles, and anger flared up across her face. She asked him what he thought he knew about it, and he answered her honestly. Raising her chin, she looked at him, then nodded, stood, and moved so fast to the door the pistol clattered away and was left behind. Hypatia stepped out onto the porch and into the rain, flexing her hurt finger back and forth.

Rain fell; it plunged through the thick canopy in such a manner that she could spy each drop falling and count it as though she’d keep a record of such a thing. Writ upon her heart perhaps. The leaves quivered joyously in the wet and the sound of it falling melded with the iron clang of battle to the south. She looked at her hands, the cut-swollen finger, the work-cracked knuckles and ragged nails. Sighing, she put her hands out into the rain, holding them there until they were wet and the blood was loosed from them, dripping in pale, red drops to the earth. Then she drew them back and went inside again.

The cabin stank with a sickly sweetness that reminded her of
fried onions, and Hypatia wondered if it was all from Abel’s wound or just her own fear tainting the breathable air. Closing the door, she turned to Abel and froze.

He stood shakily in the center of the room, bright with fever and holding by its barrel the pistol she’d dropped. He stood hunched with his wounded arm cocked tightly to his chest like a folded bird’s wing. Abel looked down at the gun in his hand as though to puzzle a course to take, some right decision. After a while he looked at her and blinked heavily, his weary eyes tatted with red lace and his lips cracked with an inner heat. Nodding, Abel made as if to swallow, grimaced instead, then wiped his mouth with the back of the hand that held the gun.

Hypatia lifted her chin and finally said, “You’re all busted up and need to be lyin’ flat.”

Abel nodded again and squeezed his eyes shut tight, then slowly opened them once more. He took a step and held the pistol out to her. Hypatia took it back, stuffed it in her pocket, and managed to get an arm around him before he fell. Panting, Abel steadied himself against her, his face close to her own. He looked away. “There’s something else,” he finally managed.

“What is it?” she asked. “You hurt someplace I didn’t find?”

“Nah,” said Abel. “It’s … I just need to—” He broke off. His eyes sought the dark upper corners of the room, and he swallowed again. “I got to go make dirt,” he finally said.

Hypatia nodded without comment. Helping him across the cabin to the door, she let him find his balance there while she stepped down from the porch and walked around behind the shack.

It was going on evening now, the shadows deepening between the trees. Gunfire and the echo of gunfire haunted the wood. Hypatia looked about the little parcel of land and found no outhouse and the rain kept falling. Going into the Wilderness, she found a sturdy stick and with it dug a shallow hole. Her finger pained her all the while but
she paid it little mind. When she went to fetch Abel, he stood slumped in the doorway and together they made their slow, stumbling way into the trees.

In the end, he could not keep his balance alone, and his legs were too weak to hold him aright regardless. Hypatia looked for the moon behind the clouds as he gripped her shoulder. Cords stood from his neck and his forearm trembled. That he had to strain at all told her his infection had not yet overpowered him and neither spoke as she gathered the softest, driest leaves she could find to clean him with.

Hypatia built the fire up in the hearth and they slept that night in their usual places: he before the fire for the warmth of it and she beside the door with the pistol. At some point the firing to the south tapered away to a dreadful silence and the night stilled, but neither noticed.

The next day, Hypatia woke late again, and again to the sound of gunfire from the south. As the light bled slowly into the absolute dark in which she’d slept and nightmared, she began a hot coughing that made her legs kick upon the floorboards. When it had spent itself, she pushed herself up and cried for the sharpness of the pain that lanced up her arm, into her shoulder, and across her chest. Up her neck and into her jaw. Hypatia carefully got herself sitting up before looking down at her hand where it lay upon her thigh.

She gave a small moan and turned away. Her hand had become something not her own, something unrecognizable. Fingers like so many overstuffed sausages, the dirty cuff of her dress bit tightly into the puffy flesh of her wrist where previously it flapped loosely in the wind. When she dipped her head to sniff at the cut that had now lengthened into the heart of her palm, Hypatia drew back with her stomach heaving. Speaking softly, fearfully, the Lord’s Own Name as she knew it, she struggled to her feet and looked toward Abel, but the soldier was not about.

She wrinkled her brow. She filled her lungs, then waited a few long, weary moments for the nausea that had bubbled up within her to recede. Picking up her blanket, Hypatia wrapped it around herself like a shawl, careful to fold it over her hand and hide it so. Through the tiny window near the door, she saw Abel sitting on the porch step with his own blanket around his shoulders and those shoulders hunched.

When she stepped out onto the porch to join him, he glanced her way, nodded the morning, then looked off to the south again. The warring in that direction had risen once more. Hypatia sat beside him, keeping her swollen hand to her off-side, and together they sat watching the rain fall and listening to the unseen battle.