In the Trackless Wild

A Harry Cogbill Story

By Sean Gates

     It was the last Christmas before my son was born.  The autumn had been colder than usual, which I suppose had something to do with the timing of the boy’s arrival.  At any rate I was outside in my mackinaw and battered brown fedora, my breath huffing out in dense white clouds as the ax head dropped and split another log. 

     The sky was a slab of slate, the air heavy, crisp and clear, the fields devoid of color but for the last speckled leaves of the yellow poplar that skated across the grass when the wind blew.  Nearby Fawkes, our adopted grey fox, prowled his pen with the kind of smile that made me worry what mischief was in his heart.

     Ethel’s red F-1 groaned on its springs as it clattered over the cattleguard and traced the dry orange ruts of the drive like a locomotive on its tracks.  She circled around in front of the house and took her accustomed spot beside my Pontiac.  My wife stepped down off the running board, clamping her hat to her head with one gloved hand, her woolen coat, bell-like, hiding the cut of her waist as it spread across the swell of her hips.  I stuck the ax in the next log and admired her legs in her nylons, and the way her smile lit the yard like spring.  With the other hand she chunked shut the door of the truck and crossed the yard to me, all chestnut curls and electric blue eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose somewhat faded with the departure of summer. 

     “What did the doctor say?”

     “Well, the bad news is we’re gonna have to really manage our money from now on.”

     I felt a chill unconnected to the weather.  A slideshow of horrors passed before my eyes too quickly to register.  I thought I might black out.  I took her in my arms, and held her, and in the back of my head demanded the Lord not take her from me, anything but her.  Anything up to and including my own life.  I took a deep breath. 

     “How bad is it?”

     Her voice came back muffled from the front of my coat.

     “Oh it ain’t so bad, Cogbill.  A few months of discomfort and everything’ll be good.  We’ll just have to accept that our lives’ll be different from now on.” 

     I couldn’t breathe.  It was all I could do not to cry. 

     “The diagnosis, Ethel.”

     “Hieronymus, I’m tryin’ to say I’m pregnant.”

     It hit me like a marching band where every instrument was playing a different tune.  Although relieved, for some reason I thought with sadness of our summer picnics at the edge of the forest, the pale, thick curves of Ethel’s nakedness soft and warm in my arms beneath the blue dome of Heaven.  Soon our privacy would become a commodity, and our physical love a thing of the past.

     “Well Cogbill, say somethin’.  Seein’ as I just come from the doctor, reckon I had about enough of waiting for today.” 

     “It’s a lot to process.”

     “Think how I feel.”

     I kissed her, took the hat from her head and buried my face in the strawberry scent of her hair. 

     “You’re right, I’m sorry Ethel.  Of course I’m happy.  I think.”

     She pushed away from me, looked up at me with a glare that could have melted the face off a dragon. 

     “Got to say, this ain’t goin’ like I expected.” 

     “I’m delighted we’re having a child.  I’m terrified what we’re bringing her into.”

     “I don’t reckon the world’s ever been unicorns and rainbows, Cogbill.”

     I knew she was right.  The shadows were long and blue under the distant droplet of molten gold that was the winter sun.  I walked with her into the house, and made grilled cheese and tomato soup and a pot of coffee, and we ate in relative silence as Fawkes stood under the table, looking expectantly from one to the other of us, his long snout and twinkling eyes quivering with grilled cheese envy. 

* * *

     After dinner I walked out across the darkened fields under a moon that seemed somehow brighter than the sun, wreathed in a fat corona in the chilly, humid air.  The arthritic fingers of the winter trees clawed at the velvet sky, the wind pulling my collar and the brim of my hat as the snow began to fall.  The whiteout hit like the fist of God, painting the frozen earth with the kind of urgency and intent only attributable to divine consciousness. 

     I had been here before, in December ‘44.  I could smell cordite in the air, hear the crescendo screams of mortar shells and the distant snarl of tank engines.  I pulled the army-issue jacket tighter around my neck, tugged on the belt at my waist to bring the coat closer to my body.  The wool cap I wore under the steel pot was slipping upward again, off my ears, and I tugged it down.  The fingers were cut off my gloves so I could shoot, and I couldn’t feel my fingertips.  We were running our M1s without lube to keep them from freezing up. 

     I was dug in a foxhole with Rollie Taylor, a black PFC who was the best friend I had in the world.  Our eyes were watering and our noses running.  He fumbled a cigarette out of a pack with hands almost too cold to function; the click of the zippo sounded like a hammer on a nail in the cold air. 

     “Jesus Christ, Rollie, I can’t feel my nuts.” 

     He took a long drag, perhaps in a vain attempt to warm himself.  The cherry of the cigarette swelled brighter, reflecting in his eyes and casting a red glow across his chocolate-colored skin as he knocked the snow off his boots with the stock of his rifle. 

     “Don’t wanna lose that shit Rony, they property of the US government.  Take ‘em out your pension.”

     Rony was short for Hieronymus I guess.  Rollie and Rony, Europe’s garbage men.  The pay was lousy, but at least the commute was terrible. 

     “It get this cold in King George, Rollie?”

     “Nah man.  Not really.  Some nights in February it be a lil rough, I guess.  But not like this.  Build you a fire, if it too cold you can sleep by the hearth, curled up on the flo’.  Lot of hills up where I live at.  Good sledding for the little ones.  But it don’t snow every winter.  Ain’t no different in Chesterfield, is it?”

     “Probably not.”

     “Why ain’t you like Chesterfield, Rony?”

     “Baggage.  Family stuff, man.”

     “You go see ‘em if you get out this joint?”

     “I don’t know.  I don’t guess we get along all that well.”

     “Brother, is all white guys this damn sad?”

     “I don’t know.  Probably not.”

     By the next morning the growl of the panzers had reached us, the air was full of smoke and ash, and pieces of exploding trees, the sound of gunfire and detonating ordnance a physical force with weight and mass all its own.  My teeth rattled, the ringing in my ears the only sound not muffled by my ruptured eardrums. 

     I remember little with clarity: the tanks making the earth tremble, the screams of dying men on both sides, the odor of feces and the metallic tang of blood mingling with the cordite and the pine.  A distant rattle, and the muted sound of Rollie’s voice, yelling something.  In the muddy snow between us landed a German grenade, a long wooden handle with a small, olive-colored canister riveted to the top.  I hesitated half a second.  I saw Rollie fall on it as somebody tackled me with a hit that would have done an NFL linebacker proud, my steel pot wheeling away into the trees as a muted thump ended my best friend’s life. 

     I clawed my way out of the snow, my head still ringing, and looked down and saw the red plaid of my mackinaw.  I had made it out of Europe once again.  I shivered, and a steady, low-voltage current coursed through me, from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes.  A wisp of electric blue smoke curled among the trees, seemingly undisturbed by the whistling wind and the whirling snow.  Where the blue smoke crossed the strands of moonlight, I could see part of him, the cigarette clamped between the fingers of his dangling hand, the collar of his olive-colored jacket turned against the wind. 

     “War’s over, Rony.”

     “Gonna be a father.”

     “So take your ass home.” 

     “What if I’m no good at it?”

     “What if you is?”

     “Sometimes when I fail, people die.”

     “You didn’t let me die.  I saved you.  If I’d knowed you be all tore up about it, I’d’ve let you punch your ticket instead.”

     “I know you better than that.”

     “Don’t get me wrong, man, I wanted to live.  Sometime it just don’t work out the way we want.”

     “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

      “Naw.  What you afraid is sometime it do.”

     The blue smoke dissipated, and my friend was gone. 

     I had no idea from which way I’d come.  I’d been in the same spot in the woods for an indefinite amount of time; the snow was driving, and any tracks I might have made in the beginning were covered and blown away. 

     My ears were numb, and my face felt raw, my nose and eyes watering as they had in The Ardennes so many years ago.  I gathered the collar of my mackinaw close around my neck and jaw, and through the thin fabric of my trousers, my manhood had retracted and now hid, like an animal burrowed in its lair.  In the whiteout conditions I couldn’t see far, no lights or familiar land features to guide my way.  I listened for any sound but could hear nothing over the wind and the tinkling of snow.

     I began to walk; any movement to generate body heat was better than sitting still, and any direction better than none.  The snow had gathered in my eyelashes and I had to squint to keep it out of my eyes.  Dark, furtive movement ahead in the underbrush, and a grey fox appeared.

     “Fawkes?”

     The fox looked at me, his back frosted with snow, and trotted at a leisurely pace off to the right.  I followed him, not knowing what else to do. 

     “Is that you, buddy?  How’d you get out here?”

     The wind pushed the dry snow like foaming surf in wavelets across the ground, and the tracks were fading before my eyes.  I hurried on after my vulpine guide, and twice saw him waiting for me at the edge of my vision.  At last the forest ended and he led me across an ocean of snow, until I saw familiar fences and the dim yellow eye of our living-room window where the house crouched on a slight rise in the open fields.  I wiped my eyes on the inside of my collar, and when I cleared them the fox was gone, and so were his tracks, and I had no explanation but for the wind and the snow. 

     I stumbled onward to my house, with its chimney-smoke scattering in the curling winds, past the igloo-like mounds of the cars, and climbed onto the porch, where briefly a silhouette appeared at a window.  The door opened and my wife pulled me into the warm yellow light.  Fawkes was curled up asleep on the couch. 

     “My God, Hieronymus!” 

     She helped me undress and stood with me under a hot shower and held me until the blue tinge faded from my skin, and my anatomy more or less restored itself to its usual configuration.

     “Were you trying to die, or just flirting with it?”

     “I had to figure some things out.”

     “You ain’t sure you want to have a baby with me.”

     “Christ, Ethel, of course I do.” 

     “Then what the hell’s the problem?”

     “Me.  The world.”

     “I’m a part of that world.”

     “But so was Nestor Lazos, so was Hitler.  So is Hector Adagio and the men who pushed William to kill an innocent man.  The same world that gave you to me, took Rollie Taylor’s life in a place that still haunts my nightmares.”

     I turned the water off, and we dried ourselves.  She brought me a big, heavy blanket and wrapped me in it, then put on her bathrobe and led me back to the living room and the warmth of our hearth. 

  “A baby, Ethel.  How am I supposed to protect her from all of this?”

     “In the first place, you don’t have to do it alone, and you know it.  Why did you ask me to marry you?”

     “The morning you drove up here was like the first time I saw the sun.”

     She poked at the embers and added another log, and the blue-and-red coals reached out in yellow tongues to consume it.

     “You’re going to be an incredible mother.  We’ll just have to make do with whatever kind of daddy I turn out to be.”

     “You think you’ll screw it up?”

     “I do most things.”

     “Show me somebody who doesn’t.  Hieronymus, my daddy hadn’t got much ability to discuss his feelings.  I think he’s afraid of being vulnerable.  It took me a couple decades to figure that out.  I thought it was me.  For a long time.  I ran around got in trouble just trying to get noticed.”

     I held her tight, and kissed her hair.

     “And then I met you.”

     “And I am also a big strong stupid pain in the ass.”

     “Maybe sometimes.  But you know how to love.”

     “I get it wrong too.”

     “But that don’t stop you from doing it anyway.  And no matter how mean the world is, we own this little corner of it, you and me and Fawkes, and baby too.  We’re a team.  We don’t give up on each other.”

     “I couldn’t.  Any more than I could quit breathing.”

     “That’s how I know you’re gonna be a great daddy.  So don’t get all twisted up.  Don’t overthink.”

     “Rollie thinks I’m scared of things going well.”

     She eyed me curiously.  “Rollie died in Europe, remember?”

     I nodded and chose not to elaborate.  That he still sometimes visited me was not something I ever chose to share, even with the one person in this world who knows my soul.  But I wondered if he didn’t have a point: my grip on happiness was tenuous.  Every change in the wind, every chance or happenstance could take it all back without warning or mercy; I had never quite accepted that the world could be a place of warmth and hope, except for those brief moments in Ethel’s embrace, when our bodies were as joined as our hearts and souls and I felt, fleetingly, that I was part of a larger universe, in the sight of a just and loving God.

     “Well hell, Cogbill, I’ve always told you that.” 

     “What’s that?”

     “That yer afraid to be happy.”

     “I’m afraid of losing my happiness.”

     “So you push it away preemptively.” 

     “I guess.”

     “Well stop it, because the baby and I are going to want you around.” 

     “Me too.  Only I guess our picnics are going to be a little different.” 

     “Hieronymus Cogbill, that is why the good Lord made babysitters.”

     My wife has always been smarter than I am.

     “You still cold?”

     “A little.”

     She stretched out beside me and opened her robe. 

     “Well, I cain’t get any more pregnant.” 

     I could find no fault with her logic.

* * *

     The next day, after a hot breakfast we cleaned off the truck and warmed up the motor while we had a second pot of coffee.  Then we bundled up and drove to Hud Avery’s place on Owens Drive, up on the ridgeline behind the old airport that was being turned into a residential subdivision.  Below us, construction equipment and a couple of half-finished houses stood covered in snow in a semicircle near a flat expanse of white that had once been a grass runway.  All Ethel would tell me was that she wanted to share something special with me.

     Avery’s house sat along the lip of an ancient, boggy crater that encompassed the Dahlgren area on the southern bank of the Potomac River.  The intersection of US Route 301 and State Highway 206 was in the bottom beyond a scrubby treeline.  The Morgantown Bridge was visible to the north.  A hundred yards from Avery’s house, a gnarled old tree stood at the precipice of the hill, and his fields lay spread like a blanket below.  The peak of his roof stuck out black against the snow that had drifted in his gutters, and the broad gable across the back of the house was split by a tall, red-brick chimney.  It gave forth a steady, peaceful stream of grey smoke in the clear mid-morning light, the yellow sun shining off the fallen snow with all the hope and glory of the grace of God. 

     When Avery opened his door, his chocolate lab shot out into the driveway like a ballistic missile, kicking up snow with his big powerful feet and flopping over on his back to roll around in it. 

     “God damn it, Buck, get in here!”

     The dog nearly tackled us all as he came charging back, shaking himself off at the door.  Hud shook my hand and hugged Ethel, offered us both coffee, and approved Ethel’s request to borrow his taboggan for old-time’s sake. 

     “Little old for sledding, ain’t you?”

     “Well, I’m inclined to think so…”

     “Oh now, Mr. Avery.  Cogbill here needs to live a little, and we’ve reason to celebrate.”

     I stuck my hands in my pockets and grinned as she broke the news.

     “We’re havin’ a baby.”

     “Well, hell, congratulations.  You be careful on that sled then, won’t you?”

     She promised, and I promised to make sure of it, and then we dragged the sled out to the brink of the hilltop, and I had to admit the view was beautiful.  It was the first I’d seen it since August of ’59.

     “Now you got to hold on tight, Cogbill, there might be frozen cowpies under there, and we won’t know ‘less we hit one and catch a little air.”

     The hill dropped off steeply for the first fifteen or twenty yards, then adjusted suddenly to a much shallower angle for the remaining hundred-and-fifty or so.  This had the effect of giving us a good burst of speed right out of the gate, building up enough momentum to carry us all the way down to the pasture below, over shallow, undulating rolls of earth before petering out in open field.  When I looked back, the house was invisible, the ridge of the hilltop breaking line-of-sight. 

     The first run made the track, packed it down; and in order to preserve it we climbed back up the hill on the north side, heading for the tree at the corner.  The second run was better than the first.  The snow blew up across the prow of the sled, making us close our eyes, but the track, having been cleared, moved faster and carried us farther across the field at the base of the hill, where we did collide with something and pop up off the ground a good six inches at the end of our run. 

     The cold turned Ethel’s cheeks to apples, and highlighted the freckles on her nose, and in her laughter and her screams of delight as we rode over and over down the hill, I could picture her with her cousins coming here as children. I couldn’t help but think what the joyful screams of our own children might sound like echoing across these fields on a day like this one, and with a clarity like the sky, I understood at last the nature of the gift we had been given. 

     Exhausted, sweating under our heavy coats, we returned Hud’s toboggan to his porch, thanked him, and enjoyed a last cup of coffee in his kitchen.  Then we got in Ethel’s truck and turned North on Owens Drive toward Hooes, which is pronounced “hose,” and the humble home of Iris and Elijah Taylor. 

     Icicles were forming under the eaves of the crooked little house, the dripping water perforating the snow along the front.  The tin roof had mostly cleared itself of snow, and the smoke swirled out of the chimney like the souls of the departed. 

     “You sure this is what you want, Hieronymus?”

     “As long as it’s okay with you.”
     “Cogbill, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” 

     We sat on the couch in the Taylor’s modest living room, under the photos of their seven grown children, Rollie in his Army pink-and-greens, looking ready to liberate all of Europe on his own. 

     “’Ronymus, what in the hell you doin’ out in this stank-ass weather?”

     Elijah was in his chair, drinking beer-on-ice in spite of the cold.  Iris had her own chair nearby.  Ethel helped her with the coffee and then rejoined me on the sofa as Iris took her chair, doilies pinned to the arms and backrest. 

     “Mr. and Mrs. Taylor,” Ethel began.  “Hieronymus and I have some news, and then a question we’d like to ask you.” 

     “I sure do hope it ain’t nothing bad,” Iris said.

     “We’re expecting.” 

     “Oh! I’m so happy for you.”

     “My man!” 

     I took a deep breath.  It was my turn.  As I looked at them, my eyes welled up in spite of me.  I had cut ties with my own family.  I had nobody but Ethel.  And I understood now that sometimes I would need someone older and wiser, whose experience I could draw upon when my own good sense failed me.

     “I don’t know how to ask this.  I need someone to guide me when I lose my way.  I can’t replace what I took from you.  But I want you to know I love you both.” 

     “Mr. Harry…” Iris had never quite learned to drop the Mr.

     I got off the sofa and dropped to my knees, for some reason my eyes were moist and it was difficult to see.

     “Mr. Harry.  Hieronymus.”

     Iris got up and put her arms around me.  The pain poured out of me like the head on a beer running over the rim, like boiling water lifting the lid off a pot of spaghetti.  What the hell, it was only sixteen years late.

     “I took your son from you.  It was my fault.  He was the bravest man I ever knew.  He was better than me.  I’m so sorry Mom, Pops…”

     Eli reached out one brown hand, knobby and twisted with veins, the fingertips flattened and squared from a lifetime of hard labor, and placed it gently on my head. 

     It was a long moment before I could speak. 

     “Ethel and I…we want…that is…we’d like to ask you to be our child’s godparents.” 

     Now Elijah was a hard man, quick-witted and temperamental, but he was also one of the most honorable men I ever knew.  He could fix you with a stare that would put the fear of God in even the most ardent of sinners, and could just as effortlessly make you laugh until you couldn’t breathe.  But that afternoon as I looked up at him, his face was unreadable.  The only sound was Iris’s voice.

     “Taylor?”

     His mouth was a straight line, his nostrils flaring as he breathed.  Then I caught a glimmering of moisture at the corner of his eye, and he nodded. 

     “I guess that be alright.” 

* * *

     We drove home in the gathering darkness, the world around us blue with moonlit snow, the twisted black trunks of sleeping trees tangled like a mane on the humped back of the world.  Along 301 we passed the Hillcrest Motel and intermittently, modest homes shuttered up against the frigid night.  Lights were strung through hedges or around cedars in yards, wreaths hung on doors, the twinkling of Christmas trees through blinds or sheers, and I noted a trace of my mother’s perfume and my father’s pipe tobacco on the air. 

     The smell was a sense memory, the kind that accompanies a feeling of a specific time or place.  It was the smell of Christmas 1930 in Chesterfield Courthouse, thirty years and a lifetime ago, and I understood that through our child I would see these memories from the other side. We went round the traffic circle at Edge Hill, Ridge Road to Purkins Corner, then followed Route 3 through King George Courthouse, where decorations had been hung on utility poles and the tree was lit in front of the courthouse.  The warmth of hearth and family shone from the homes of Hudson, and Morris; Morgan, Clare, and Clift.  Holiday cheer hung over the doors of Trinity Methodist and St. John’s Episcopal. 

     “It’s a pretty little town, ain’t it, Cogbill?”

     I gazed upon the sequined expanse of God’s creation, and knew in that moment that there could be no finer town in any world, for here in lowly King George were the people I loved, and nothing else in the infinite, expanding universe could be worth so much.  Here, at last, was my home. 

     “It’s wonderful, Ethel.” 

* * *

     Late one night the following summer, in a room at Mary Washington Hospital the color of crème-de-menthe, we welcomed Roland William Cogbill into our world, and incredibly, unexpectedly, I found that my life, and all the things I held dear, did not get smaller. 

     They got larger.