Wilderness Run Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  June 1847

  December 1859

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  June–July 1861

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  July 26, 1861

  Chapter Eleven

  July 1861–September 1862

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  January–February 1863

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  January–December 1863

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  January–April 1864

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  May–June 1864

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Praise for Wilderness Run

  Copyright

  For the dear ones

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks go to the following people for inspiration, guidance, or other invaluable assistance: Louisa May Alcott, Wilbur Fisk, Jenn Habel, John Hartford, Chad Holley, David Huddle, Walt Whitman, and my wonderful mother, father, brothers, and aunts.

  My utmost gratitude belongs to Esmond Harmsworth, Fred Chappell, George Witte, and finally to Kyle, my dear heart.

  My soul is among lions, and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.

  —PSALM 57:4

  June 1847

  Isabel’s father claimed she was born on the day the train came to Allenton, a city that had never known the smell of a coal engine, or the squeal of wheels across metal tracks, or the weight of tracks against dusty pasture grass. When the train appeared on the horizon, Allenton pressed inward, like all invaded places. But it was too late. The black arrow broke one field from another, parting neighbors and enemies in a blinding instant of noise and velocity. Isabel slid out, purple, choking, on a snow of sheets. The doctor beat breath into her body. Smoke rose, a banner trailing back to the hills.

  Later, Daniel Lindsey would tell Isabel that her first wail sounded like the whistle of the locomotive as it arrived—a high song, heraldic and longing. This was not a lie, but the kind of exaggeration a father makes to explain significance to his daughter. He did not say that her mother’s labor was difficult, and that the house grew cold around him with the soreness of Faustina’s screams. He tried not to listen to them, straining instead for the rhythmic commotion of the first train, which bore the Lindsey name, to arrive down in the lumberyards.

  He stayed until the doctor emerged, wiping his hands, to say that Daniel had a baby daughter, and invited him to see. He kissed the wet petal of Isabel’s body lying on Faustina’s breast, and held his wife, who wore the white, relieved expression of someone whom pain has just abandoned. And only when Faustina’s eyelids fluttered toward sleep after her first nursing did Daniel creep from his house to get a look at the train he helped to bring, and to feel what it was, for once, to be a destination.

  The small, taut Irishmen who laid the rails were drinking from flasks that had worn white crescents in their hip pockets.

  “Just look at it, Mr. Lindsey. The Allenton has arrived!” a man called, shifting his weight from one leg to another.

  Isabel’s father nodded and appraised the dark skin of the engine. He was entranced by its intricate pieces, the red cowcatcher and silver whistle, and the brass star that joined the two rear wheels of the engine with an L inscribed in its center.

  “You going to drive it now?”

  Daniel shook his head, touching the star with his good right hand. The left, crushed by a childhood accident, hid in the folds of his coat.

  “You going to take it straight on to Montreal? Or back to Boston? We’ll put down the track for you, won’t we, fellas?”

  “I’m not planning on it until it’s full of lumber,” another voice said from the opposite side of the engine. Daniel stepped back and peered around the massive metal flank.

  The owner of the voice was his elder brother, George, who wore a well-cut wool suit but was oddly hatless, his gray hair guarding his head like a helmet. Immersed in his examination of the engine, George Lindsey did not notice Daniel immediately.

  “Full of lumber,” he repeated to himself, as if pleased by the impending commerce. In contrast to Daniel’s scholarly, elegant pallor and narrow limbs, George’s body was as robust as a marker oak on the edge of pasture, and he moved with a vital confidence, stepping back smartly from the train and finally catching sight of his brother.

  “Daniel,” he cried out. “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl,” said Daniel. “Isabel Prinz.”

  “A girl,” George proclaimed for the crowd. He was the one who had convinced Daniel that they should bring the railroad to their little Vermont city; he had thrown himself into the project with such enthusiasm that he knew the names of all the workers and their wives and children, many of whom were still in Ireland. “A Lindsey girl.”

  The flasks were lifted again, and a few cheers shouted, which Daniel hardly heard. A warm spring gust stole the last smoke curling from the smokestack.

  “And Faustina?” George’s voice tightened like a rope.

  “Tired, but fine.” In Daniel’s mind flashed the blood-spattered sheets in Mary’s arms as she descended the stairs, her face pinched in silent prayer. The Irish servant girl began washing them immediately. He could still hear the splashed well water soaking the sheets, poured from a pitcher on the sink to cleanse the doctor’s red-crusted knuckles.

  Before leaving, Dr. Cochran had advised Isabel’s father that they should have no more children. Because of her fragile health, Faustina had already miscarried three babies, and the very fact that Isabel was born was a miracle they should not attempt to repeat, the doctor said. George, on the other hand, already had twin daughters and a young son, Laurence, who rode around town next to his father in princely fur robes, and who bore a miniature whip he cracked at the air in time with the coachman.

  “Glad to hear it. Shall I send Pattie by to visit tonight?” George inquired. A white gull settled on one of the metal rails girding the boiler and began to preen.

  “N
ot tonight. Faustina needs some rest.”

  The women were not friends. Pattie was the busy socialite, the rigorous churchgoer. Faustina preferred to stay home and dip her head over a book Daniel had brought her from Boston, with her feet nestled catlike beneath her.

  George disappeared around the other side of the engine again, and Daniel stared with a certain propriety at the train. Although he had always been a water man, understanding the intricacies of reservoir and canal building better than anyone else in the city, Daniel rocked back on his heels in awe before the black musculature of the engine.

  Allenton was no longer an island, but a peninsula, the crested hills around it finally blasted to make valleys. He crouched down to examine the wheels and saw George doing the same, his likeness, his opposite, brother and enemy. Their eyes met for the first time that day, each peering uncertainly into the shade, testing the other’s gaze. George mouthed something and then looked away, and to the end of his life, Daniel did not know if it was lower or love her that his brother said, or why he answered yes.

  December 1859

  Chapter One

  Isabel set one timid boot down on the creek, a white pastry of ice and fallen leaves, where her cousin Laurence was already running and halting to slide. Her thick honey-colored braid had loosened and a few wisps spoked about her face like the bristles of a much-used broom. She was at that age where girls are big-headed, her body a stickish protrusion of legs and arms.

  “Hurry, Bel,” Laurence said as he coasted away from her. He never called her Isabel. No one did but her father and mother, and consequently she associated the name with a dutiful and somewhat dull version of her twelve-year-old self, who would have stayed at home and practiced her stitches instead of sneaking outside with her cousin.

  “Is it safe?” she asked.

  “‘Is it safe?’” He mocked her in falsetto and nearly lost his balance. “You sound like Mary.”

  Mary worked for Isabel’s parents and was always secreting Bel off to say the rosary, her cold black beads burnished by frequent use. Although she insisted she was still “in the neighborhood of twenty,” Mary had the nervous disposition of an elderly spinster and her red hair already showed a few strands of gray.

  Bel let the other boot down quickly and began walking stiff-kneed toward her cousin. Beneath her, the ice felt like a ballroom floor just cleared of dancers, hushed after a long waltz. The steep banks of the creek bed lifted the winter wind to the world above, and a cove of warmth rose between her coat and skin.

  “Try sliding,” Laurence instructed her, and demonstrated the quick sprint and splay of his feet as he let the ice take him. Bel followed his motion. The surface smoothed her steps away as she ran and then balanced herself to glide. On the second attempt, her boots hit a stick jutting from the white glass. She tripped and landed with an abrupt swoop, her ankle twisting.

  “Try again,” Laurence shouted. “You’ll get it.” He was far away now, skimming down the creek toward the nearby lake. The black coat, tailored to join at his hips, made her narrow cousin look even longer than he was, like a grasshopper dressed for a dinner party.

  “We aren’t supposed to—” Bel started, but she let the wind carry her voice away and eased herself back upright. Laurence was seldom home, and he was so much more fun than any of the playmates her mother tried to arrange for her. He and Bel had spent six blissful years together as children before her uncle George shipped his son off to school in Boston. Although they wrote frequent letters to each other, it was her seventeen-year-old cousin’s holiday returns to Allenton that she looked forward to, for they meant all sorts of adventures and journeys, even in the dead of winter.

  Laurence was always in search of a new secret place, a “wilderness,” he called it, where the foundations of an abandoned house lay ruined in the weeds, or a belt of woods raised up birds, chittering, unseen. Every new discovery was given a name with wilderness in it: Lost Wilderness House, Wilderness Woods, Isle of the Wilderness (this last always unreachable, a knot of land in the middle of the bay where geese landed on their way south). Bel’s favorite place in winter was the creek. Locally known as Potash Brook, their steep-banked Wilderness Run protected them from the harsh wind, and led to the open lake, an icy expanse that bordered Allenton to the west and smelled in December of clean, pure things, and vast distances.

  Upon reaching his seventeenth year, Laurence had stretched himself tall and angular, more like her father than her uncle, although he had George Lindsey’s determined brown eyes. His blond hair had darkened and his voice deepened, occasionally squealing like a new piece of furniture. From far off, she could still hear him clearly calling to her.

  “Come on, Bel. I have something to show you.”

  Bel mustered up a limping dash and slid carefully toward her cousin. Even beneath the thick wall of ice, the water flowed, just a trickle maybe, but still she feared falling into that dark current. Once she had seen the shadow shapes of fish flitting deep below a clear patch on the lake. They looked like slivers of the moon, and the sight of them had made her feel impossibly cold.

  When she glanced up from her mincing steps across the ice, Laurence was standing at the entrance to the lake, waiting for her. The white plain sharpened his figure to a silhouette. As she approached, he opened his arms with a gesture of ownership.

  “Wilderness Lake. It’s like the map of a new continent,” he whispered. “See all the borders?” He pointed to the fissures and ridges running along the lake’s surface.

  “Is it frozen all the way across?” Bel asked.

  “I don’t know. You want to see?” Laurence jogged in place as a shrill wind bore down on them.

  Bel answered her cousin by glancing back in the direction of Greenwood, the house her father built for her mother when she was born. Steep banks blocked her view of their part of the hill, the elm avenues lined with iron gates and brick houses. Greenwood would stand among them on the horizon of the city, watching over it in case invasion came. But nothing ever invaded Allenton but the seasons, and Bel was suddenly aware of how unnecessary the grandeur of her neighborhood was, when other people lived in plain clapboard homes.

  “You didn’t ask me what I wanted to show you,” Laurence chided. “Look to your left.”

  On the bank beside her, the frozen architecture of a midwinter storm rose over red rocks, glistening like the domain of an absent ice queen, with giant thrones, glassy towers, and ramparts for her henchmen to defend her. Bel regarded the crested curls of wave and stone. There were easy footholds all the way up.

  “How could you miss that?” Laurence shattered her awe. “How could you walk out here and not see that right away?”

  “I was looking at you,” Bel stammered. Her cousin’s mercurial moods often confused her, much as she was used to them.

  “You were looking back at Allenton. You missed the whole world for that stupid little city. You’re going to end up like Lucia and Anne.” Laurence kicked a leaf free from the ice as he pronounced his sisters’ names. The twins, both in the perilous age between girlhood and wifehood, were excruciating in their daily routines of dances and dresses and calls from local young men.

  Insulted, Bel turned away from her cousin to clamber up the stiff formation of ice. Finding herself a clear throne, she carefully plucked a downy feather from its seat and let the wind take it toward the lake before she sat down. The hard ice pinched her hips, and she squirmed to get comfortable.

  “I’m sorry, Bel. It’s just that you haven’t really seen Boston, or these other places where—”

  “I’ve been to Boston.” Her breath clouded the frozen room around her.

  “For two days! And with your father. But to watch the immigrants from Ireland and Italy hired at the docks in New York—”

  “I’ve seen Irishmen, too.”

  With a snort of disgust, Laurence commenced climbing a tower of ice higher than her own. From her seat, Bel could hear his breath go ragged with the exertion. His cheeks were sta
ined a deep raspberry.

  “Are you tired?” she asked softly.

  “No, of course I’m not tired. Just think about it, Bel. Think about all those grand cities in Europe that we’ve never been to, and ask if you’re satisfied with stodgy little Allenton.”

  “If Europe is so wonderful, why are they all coming here?” She refused to meet his gaze.

  “Oh, Bel. That’s a thoughtless question. Because not everyone gets to live in a castle like us. You haven’t grown up as much as I thought.”

  This was enough to goad Bel to utter silence, and she stared fiercely over the lake. It was Sunday afternoon, and on the nearby bay, the wooden fishing shanties of the lumberyard workers glowed like shells on a strip of sand. She could see men moving among them, arms crossed, chins tucked against the cold. Beyond them, the lake lay in a skirt of silver and blue, hemmed by the purple shadow of the Adirondacks looming on the opposite shore.

  Laurence began to whistle and leaned out on a frozen prow, holding it with his arms. The sun sank a fraction below the mountains. Bel shivered discreetly. She would not be the first to mention going back.

  “Be you the friend of a friend?” said a hoarse voice, and she looked down.

  A dark-skinned man was standing on the ice, shivering. On top of his head perched a hat made from a burlap sack stuffed with newspaper, its unkempt and somewhat accidental appearance reminding Bel of a capsized bird’s nest. Newspaper also patched large gaps in the man’s homespun shirt and breeches: A headline announcing the funeral of John Brown crossed his chest; another, proclaiming the rise in tobacco prices, covered a hole above his knee.

  The man took a step closer, his rag-bound feet whispering. Bel started and almost lost her balance. “Laurence,” she said softly, watching the apparition.

  “Be you the friend of a friend?” he repeated in exactly the same pitch and rhythm, as if they were the only words he knew. His teeth shone the sharp milky yellow of the ivory tusk Bel’s father kept in his study. She shrank back.

  “Yes, I am the friend of a friend.” Laurence’s voice rang out importantly as he slid down the ice. The man noticed him and bunched up to run. “Friend of a friend,” Laurence repeated in a more soothing tone.