Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page A

arm ached, as it often did in cold wind. He took a long last look at the blue door, then silently gathered his things and set off for home with the dog running off ahead and the wind at his back, making the walking much easier.
    Now, Abel Truman sat before his fire in the night with the dog lightly sleeping at his feet. Flames jumped orange and yellow from the shallow pit. He sat watching the water, remembering times gone by. When he reached down to stroke the dog behind its ears, it woke and looked at him, then sighed and settled its head between its paws to lie staring with contentment at the fire.
    After a time, the old man stood and went into the dark shack. He held a small, burning stick plucked from the fire and with it lit two candle scraps standing palely from waxy puddles on a rough table. Tossing the stick back out the door onto the fire, Abel stood looking at his cot and, stacked beside it, the few volumes he read from each night before sleep. A dog-eared King James Bible with a worn calfskin cover. An old Farmer’s Almanac borrowed from Glenn Makers the year before last. Abel had read bits from the Bible and nearly allthe almanac—if for nothing else than to try and anchor himself in the world by staying aware of planting seasons and predicted weathers, now past. He touched with two fingers the covers of these and some few other books of his keeping, then turned to a shelf on the back wall where sat a small pine box.
    The old man sniffed deeply and rubbed his cocked left arm. Through his shirt, he felt a thick map of scar tissue—the gristle grown through and around shattered bones that had knit themselves back all wrong. He imagined shriveled tendons embedded with old, cold, corroded flakes of metal that frayed the nerves yet still allowed him some little use of the hand. He thought of Hypatia and the taste of her milk. He thought of the blue door of the cabin she’d occupied in the dark of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania and of another blue door closed upon a home and family long lost. Abel took a breath and set the box on the table in the flickering candlelight.
    The first thing he took from it was the Union bullet she had cut from his arm. Its tip was splayed and flattened, and by certain lights you could still see a fine craze where the fibers of his shattered capitulum had engraved the metal while it was still fast and hot. Abel sniffed again and put it in his pocket, then took from the box a little crucifix fashioned from a piece of bone or something like bone. Abel never knew exactly what it was. There was an old bloodstain on the transom, faded now to the color of tree bark that took the shape of a bird wing mid-flight. David Abernathy had died holding the crucifix aloft that day in the Wilderness. How dark the mouth of the cannon. Abel shuddered.
    He took a deep breath. Let it out. He held the cross in his palm as though to judge its value, weighing it in the manner of a prospector with a gold-flecked stone who wonders if this be true gold or something false and therefore foolish. The cross hung from a salt-wearied leather thong, and Abel, having reached a careful decision, slipped it around his neck and turned back to the box.
    He lifted from it a brass picture frame no bigger than his palm with a hinged brass cover set with a steel Maltese cross. It was, on the whole, as beaten and weather-scoured and tired-looking as the old man’s face, his hands, his heart. He opened it carefully and looked upon the tintype within. The frame joints had gone green with age; the thin glass cracked from side to side and turned a smoky yellow, glooming the image behind. But it was all right; the old man did not need to see their faces anymore for he knew them well by his heart’s own photogravure.
    There hung behind them, mother and child, a painted canvas lush with green valleys and white waterfalls, blue rivers, high clouds. In the far distance, snowy mountains purple under the sun. All this detail reduced to a