Read Online Wilderness Run by Maria Hummel - Free Book Online

to follow this advice. He wanted the fight to be over, to plunge headlong into it the way he had plunged through his father’s rage when he told him he had enlisted, not as an officer, but as a foot soldier. They had stood opposite each other on the muddy spring earth outside the house, shouting as melted snow trickled down the brick walls and over the ludicrous green awnings his mother had ordered from Paris. At Laurence’s news, his father had tried to box him on the ears, but Laurence had pushed him away clumsily and run off through the muddy streets so that his father would not see the tears on his face.
    Shrugging off the memory, Laurence waited. Around him, the men sang out their complaints. The fire sank to a dull red coil.
    Finally, Gilbert punched toward his gut. Instinctively, Laurence blocked him, and soon after that, the storm of fists descended, battering his mouth and neck. He closed his eyes and hit back, his fists opening. His skull rattled with pain. Somewhere on his face, the skin split, and when he could look again, Gilbert’s fists were streaked with red.
    Laurence danced away, an old defiance overtaking him. He remembered being five years old, rising in a midnight thunderstorm and running to the kitchen to beat a cast-iron pot with a wooden spoon while thunder boomed outside. Awakened by Laurence’s loud response, his father had appeared in the threshold and told him to go back to bed. When Laurence kept clanging on the pot, he carried his son outside in the rain. Lighting flashed around them.
    You’re not loud enough to drown it out, are you? his father had said as rain spattered Laurence’s nightshirt and made it hang heavy on his shoulders. You never will be.
    â€œSmoke him out,” he heard Addison call, and he stood his ground just beyond Gilbert’s reach. He resisted the urge to touch his throbbing cheek or turn his head to see the others.
    â€œC’mon,” Gilbert snarled. “I ain’t waiting all night to win.”
    Laurence shook the blood from his eyes and maintained his distance. His brogans carved small circles in the earth, the weeds unrooted, kicked aside. Gilbert pursued him all the way to one flank of the audience, and Laurence felt the men’s breath on the backs of his knees as his opponent swung.
    This time, Laurence waited for him to throw his whole weight into the punch, taking the blow but responding with one of his own. Laurence’s ribs screamed, but he was rewarded by the sight of Gilbert staggering back, holding his cheek. The crowd murmured as Laurence struck again, this time against the father who had tried to stop him from fighting because he thought that this war was just another kind of storm. Then, blood-blinded, he only glimpsed pieces of the other soldier before he hit them: the arch of Gilbert’s shoulder, the veins that branched above his temple, the ash of whiskers on his chin.
    Gilbert wavered and fell to his knees under Laurence’s fury. A howl rose from the crowd. The sky shifted colors, going red, then blue-black, then red again, and Laurence, lifting his fists, felt it wash over his body. It was like a lake, that sky, and when he lowered his hands, he was swimming up through it, able for one split second to look down on them all, standing together in a deep woods dotted with lonely sentries dreaming of home.
    His cut lower lip made it impossible to speak when the recruits crowded around him. It was better this way. Silent, he could be one of them, and if he spoke, he would once again become a stranger, saying something they could not hear or understand, something about the way some men waited dully in a dark wood for their time to pass and others called out, frightened by the whispering trees and the certainty that somewhere, something was watching them.
    Only Pike did not join the throng, going immediately to nurse his brother, who was still kneeling a few paces away. Out of the corner of his eye,