excerpt from “The Very Great Abyss” by Pam Durban

Her name is Miranda, and she’s an Engler on her father’s side, raised to be proud of the good her family did during a troubled time. To this day, at every family gathering, an ancient Engler is helped to their feet to tell the story of the weeks, months, years after the Battle of Gettysburg, and what always interested her about those stories was how new details kept being added, as though the stories hadn’t ended yet. She and her brother Curtis had sat side by side among the relatives, listening hard, reviewing the details together later.

The story was about how the Engler men were too old to fight for the Union, but the family did their part. On July 1, 1863, the day the battle began, they fled to Carlisle, and when they returned on July 5, two days after it ended, they burned half a dozen dead horses in the yard. For days, as rain poured through the broken roof of the barn, they tended the wounded and dying there. They went out onto the battlefield and buried the dead, making no distinction, as some of their neighbors did, between the Union soldiers who deserved a decent burial and the traitors who could be left to rot where they fell, with only a thin covering of dirt and leaves kicked over them. An historical marker on the road in front of the Engler farm marked their place as a field hospital.

She’d been around real and make-believe soldiers all her life (her brother, her father, his father, and his), and that’s how she knew that the man Jesse had brought to her door for his three o’clock appointment was dressed as a private in the Confederate army. His gray kepi sat straight on his head; his uniform was creased, like he’d just unfolded it, and a pair of new leather brogans stuck out from underneath the too-short pants. He took off his cap when she opened her door, an act of misplaced chivalry that almost made her laugh until she noticed his high-and-tight haircut. A Marine, she thought, and she saw the close-clipped back of her brother’s head disappear into the door of the bus the morning he left for Afghanistan. She looked at the floor to shake that sight, then went back to sizing up this soldier. A first-time reenactor, she guessed, but not a hard-core, like the men who swarmed over the battlefield every summer, obsessed with getting every nineteenth-century shoe and button right, except for their deaths, which were only temporary. He was spooked like a new one, too: fresh from their battlefield deaths, they came here to prove they were still alive.

Behind her soldier-boy, in the sour yellow light cast by the hallway wall sconces, Jesse checked the giant white wristwatch on her skinny arm. Let’s get this show on the road, she signaled with her thin penciled eyebrows.

Last January Miranda had graduated from massage school in Pittsburgh. She knew Swedish massage and deep tissue and reflexology and Japanese shiatsu and acupressure. At school they’d called her a natural, said she had good hands, intuitive hands that felt the places where the body armors itself against the pain of walking through this world. She was the one the teachers called on in acupressure class. “Come show us the location of the Sea of Tranquility and the correct pressure to apply there,” they said. “Come locate the Very Great Abyss.” And every time, she’d go straight to the tiny point on wrist, hand, foot, eyebrow that set the life-force flowing again.

In March she’d rented this room, knowing what this place was, still believing she could do here just the work she’d been trained to do. Now it was September: the leaves on the oaks in Soldiers’ National Cemetery were turning, the reenactment armies had left for their winter camps, and the show she was supposed to get on the road was the show you imagine as soon as you hear the name Gettysburg Massage. An old stone house where a wounded Union general had died during the battle, now reincarnated as a place where four local women, each for her own reasons, did old business. And if from time to time one of the women claimed to feel the edge of her mattress sag as though someone were sitting on it, they joked that it had to be the general. After all, this was the most haunted place in the country. Brochures in the lobby of every motel listed haunted restaurants, haunted houses, ghost tours of this hallowed, haunted ground. Why not a horny ghost from the last century? Some things, they joked among themselves, never change. Miranda joked along with them, and it was funny, though sometimes when she was alone in her apartment, away from the stone house and the person she was there, she allowed herself to imagine the general as just another wandering soul trying to outrun his sorrow.

Her room had two long narrow windows set high up in one wall so that the view was all sky, and she knew all its moods: bright with sun, gray with rain, pale and shining after. The wood floors in her room snapped and creaked; on cold days a steady blue flame burned behind the grate of the gas space heater in one corner. How had she gotten from Pittsburgh to here? That was the question she asked herself when she was alone in her room, and every morning as she ran on the battlefield roads, she worked it through again. She’d started running the day after Curtis left for Afghanistan, and she still hadn’t missed a day. At first she ran because it kept her close to Curtis, who was a runner too, and to her father, who’d been a battlefield guide, and to this place and why it mattered. She ran along Seminary Ridge and past the Virginia monument—R. E. Lee and Traveler up there against the sky, keeping watch over the scene of the final disaster. She crossed the Emmitsburg Road and ran through the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, past Devil’s Den and through the Valley of Death at the foot of Little Round Top. Great carnage happened here on the second day of the battle, their father told her and Curtis every time he took them there, but when night fell, so many men went out with lanterns to search for their fallen friends the valley was lit up bright as day.

Every day, her run ended in Soldiers’ National Cemetery, where Lincoln had resolved that these dead had not died in vain. It was easy to share that resolve in that green, quiet place, to walk among the graves that widened out in semicircular rows from the tall soldiers’ monument near the place where Lincoln spoke, and to keep the faith that there was some order and purpose to their deaths.

But in May Curtis died in Afghanistan, blown up, along with three of his men, by a suicide bomber in the Afghan army unit they were training, and shipped home in a sealed coffin, and it was like a hole got punched in the bottom of things and the meaning all drained out. She and her mother clung to each other while two Marines came up the walk and into the house and conveyed to them the commandant’s deep regret. “My brother?” she said, but the tiny sound that came out of her mouth was more like a kitten’s mew than a human voice. Her strength returned later as she held her mother back from trying to open the coffin, then put her on a plane to Hawaii with her sister the week after they buried him.

That same week she folded up the massage table her mother had given her for graduation and slid it into the closet in her room in the stone house, and she let Jesse bring in a new mattress and a set of purple satin sheets, because after Curtis died, it didn’t matter what she did. You’d be surprised, she might have said if anyone had asked her, how you can adapt to almost anything once you find the right distance from it, the way she did every day, watching herself on the bed with the men, saying the things she said, laughing, moving her body as though she meant it. She hoped that her mother stayed in Hawaii and lived among strangers who’d never tell her what her daughter was doing, which would break her heart again. This, she thought, is how you live in vain.

. . .