Neverhome

by Laird Hunt

  Then all around us the branches went falling. The air next to my head tore itself open and let a ball pass through. One of my company lieutenants came and put his foot on the rock next to me, drew his pistol, and leaned forward. Someone shouted and I realized I could hear again.

  “Hold steady, now,” growled the lieutenant.

  Then like they had been there but invisible all along, you could see the rows and rows of gray and wore-out butternut starting to move through the trees.

  It was five waves and by the fourth we were all down to but a few cartridges each. If it had been six we would have had to fight with bayonets and teeth. Somewhere in the fight, the Colonel had got down off his horse and stood along the line between me and his cousin. He had those big mustaches so you couldn’t see his mouth but he had the look of a man had his jaw set. We’d been at it three good hours when I glanced over next to me and saw the two Akron boys. They each looked about ten years older. If they recognized me they didn’t show it. They were dug in behind a dead tree about as deep as you could be but they were getting off their rounds. One of them died when the rebels tried a charge. The other one got swept away.

  I saw the Colonel and his cousin until the end of it, though. The Colonel had rallied his officers to reform the line and now we lay waiting with hardly a bullet left for that fifth wave and not a cartridge box hadn’t been pulled off the dead by me and many another left to sweeten our supply. The Colonel was standing next to his cousin, who had found his way back to sit on his rock. They both of them were black as chimney sweeps from powder burn and had cigars in their mouths. My lieutenant had been shot in the shoulder but he came up again and put his leg where he had planted it the first time.

  “How we coming, Gallant Ash?” he asked.

  “Drawing breath, Lieutenant,” I said.

  “Well, draw you up some more and raise up that firearm,” he said. “For here they goddamn come.”

  They came and it was like a hot wind came with them and the air on either side of my ears began to burn and the world turned up and over. I was charging one minute and running back another. A boy twice my size kicked me in the stomach with his foot and I fell down into some fool’s hole. Next thing I knew there was another in the hole with me and I tried to get my weapon around but saw it was the Colonel’s cousin come down off his rock. He looked at me and he smiled, and well there might have been a rain of hellfire and the battle all around us, I can tell you right now he was the handsomest man I ever saw. It wasn’t a handsome you could see down the line and sitting up high on a rock, it was a handsome you could see only up close, with death come a-calling, a handsome of soft cheeks and powder black and eyes set aglow.

  “You’re the Colonel’s cousin,” I said.

  “Did he acknowledge a relation?” he said.

  The voice was as high and as handsome as the face. A voice scooped straight up out of a butter churn set to cool in a clear spring. He said a thing or two more with that voice but I couldn’t hear him for the popping of weapons up above. A hot gust of wind came down into our hole and lifted his wet hair off his forehead and he leaned up close to me.

  “I know what you are,” he said.

  “I am a soldier in the Union army,” I said.

  “I know that too,” he said.

  “We got to get up out of here.”

  I said this but I didn’t move a muscle and he lifted his soft hand and held it to my cheek. He held it there and I did not move nor breathe nor shiver, only closed my eyes and let my face sit still against his hand.

  When I opened my eyes I saw he had jumped up out of that hole and guessed he had run off to regain his rock. I saw him there when my cheek had left off burning and I had climbed out of the hole myself. He was standing on his rock and had his weapon raised. I had it in my mind to run over and get him to put his hand back up onto my face but my lieutenant came up beside me again.

  “How we coming, Gallant Ash?” he asked me, just like he hadn’t asked it a few minutes before.

  “Drawing breath, Lieutenant,” I said, just like I hadn’t said it either.

  “Well, draw a little more.”

  He said that and I heard the rebel cannon and saw the tree coming down at me and felt myself falling backward all at the same time. It wasn’t at the same time, only felt like it was, because the lieutenant wasn’t there anymore and the Colonel’s handsome cousin was gone from his rock and the rebels were almost on us. A soft branch shoved me down then the trunk pinned me tight. I must have lost some of that breath I’d been drawing and taken a whack to the head because it seemed when I looked up through the leaves and branches that the grays and blues were taking turnabout in leaping over the rubbage above me, that the whole contest of the war was to be decided by who could most neatly vault the debris.

  I slept then. Went wandering in realms of black and green. When I woke it was the deep hours. Stars lit the sky, bright burny things. Bigger than the springtime stars of Indiana. I started to count them but there were too many oak leaves in front of my face. I tried to clear the leaves away but found my arms were pinned at my sides. I could turn my neck and wiggle my toes and hands but otherwise could not budge. The breeze blew vigorous through my leaves for a good bunch of my breaths, and then it died. I heard more in its silence than I liked and shut my eyes.

  I had walked out more than once of an after-battle and so had a fair idea of what lay clawing at the air that night around me. Ghosts of the new dead laughing down at what lay cut and burned and broken and still awake to it on the ground. Ours and theirs both had fallen and it was impossible to know what color cloth it was giving up those moans. One boy called out for his aunt Jane. Another was trying to whistle. Three or four wanted something wet to put down their throats. I expect every one of us there of either color had thought about those fights, like the Wilderness to come, when the wounded had been left where they lay and the forest had caught fire and gathered them all up in its burning arms. You would want a weapon if the fire was coming and you couldn’t run. Something that would take you away on out of it quick. I could see my musket if I turned my neck as far as it would turn to the right. But even if I had been able to move I could see it was pinned down just about as neat as me. I caught the panic then. I shook and pushed and coughed and wriggled. Nothing. I had the trunk on my chest and arms and a branch across my legs. The tree wasn’t much more than a sapling but it was tall and full of sap and had me good.

  “I can’t move because I got a ball in my back,” a voice behind me said.

  “You one of us or one of them?” I said. I craned my neck around to the left and saw the bottom of a boot had a hole worn straight through it. It wiggled a little when I looked.

  “I expect so,” the voice said.

  “I’m just pinned down here,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”

  “Won’t make much difference if you stay stuck.”

  I didn’t have any answer to this. Writhed at it little. Got nowhere. After a minute or two, of watching me I imagine, he spoke again.

  “Looks like you got a scratch on your arm.”

  I had forgotten about my arm. I had been aware of a pain but had not yet thought to verify it. As soon as he said this I felt it like some of that fire we didn’t want to come had already set in to burn.

  “That’s about all it is, a scratch,” I said.

  “I’d sure like a sip of water,” he said.

  “Well, hold you on a minute and I’ll run fetch you some.”

  We both of us laughed at this, only his laugh didn’t gallop on too long. You could hear it in his voice and in his breaths that he wouldn’t keep creaking on much more.

  “Where you from?” I said.

  “That ground under you looks soft,” he said. “Looks like it ain’t much more than bits of bark and would succumb to some scratching. Can you move your hands?”

  I moved my hands, pushed my fingers down. The dirt was as soft as he’d said.

  “Where you from?” I said, movi
ng my fingers, cupping and clenching.

  “Work in toward yourself, carve out a cave, take it slow so you don’t cramp, see if you can make a space.”

  It had been quiet a minute but there was an unsubtle owl flew over the field and the moaning around us set up again. Someone called out to God to come down and kill him. To hit down on him with His great and thunderous hands. They would be spangled about every which way, those weepers and moaners. Just like they had been dropped off God’s clouds. Away off in the far distance you could hear cannon fire. Big guns getting ready for another day. Make more happy glades like this one. There were foul smells drifting. Bodies couldn’t tend to their business. Things opened up shouldn’t ever have been.

  “You know what I would like more than that sip of water, more than just about anything besides this ball out of my back?” said the voice.

  I was digging and making progress and did not respond.

  “A fine, clean morsel of foolscap. Some fresh cotton rag. A creamy linen weave.”

  “That ball has climbed up to your brain,” I said.

  “I worked in a law office, down Carpenter’s Lane in Richmond. I worked at copying on fine paper all the day long.”

  “You’re a Secesh.”

  “Just a piece of paper. One sweet sheet. I haven’t held anything but old scrap in a year. Wrote my letters home on a pile of old wallpaper squares. You ever try to write a nice hand on wallpaper? Paper’s what you robbed us of worse than our homes and our lands.”

  “I’m getting somewhere here.”

  “I’ve got grandbabies. More than half a dozen. All of them live close. I was just teaching the oldest boy to write before I left. He knows how to hold the pen, yes, sir, he does.”

  He gave out a cough, then went quiet. The fire in my arm felt like it was working down to the bone. It was my right hand did the bigger portion of the work. It was my right hand that carved most of the cave, that got me free. It was near dawn when I struggled loose. I lay there free for a nice long while then took the bayonet off my musket and stepped over to the reb. He was an old man with a white beard and had small, soft eyes. Too old to be a soldier. He looked too old to be anything.

  My haversack was still around my neck. The first thing my fingers found in it was an apple. I ate that then reached them back in. Down at the bottom, folded neat, I found a sheet of paper. I didn’t know if it was special but I had bought it recent to send to Bartholomew and apart from a few stray smudge spots it was clean. I unfolded it, took out my pencil stub, and wrote Carpenter’s Lane, Richmond, then I folded the page back up and tucked it a little ways into his shirt.

  My idea was to trot right off after my regiment but that’s not how it went. I left behind my captor tree and found the way I wanted obscured. The dead and the about-dead lay left and right, forward and back. You had to pick your path careful. There wasn’t light enough to see a clear road. I stepped on a leg and what was left of what it was attached to gave a shiver whose image when it rippled over the face I’d pay good cash money to have pulled from my head. One or two as could still open their eyes asked me for water. I was just about parched to the point that if they had had a drop of water on them I would have stole it for myself. I wandered this way and that, stumbling as I went. Now and again I would hear a cannon and think to march in its direction but the woods and slopes were cunning and played me clever tricks.

  The light came on and I paused to gain my bearings. I do not know if I had been scrabbling for an hour or ten minutes, but just a corncob’s throw over yonder sat the dead Richmond soldier and my captor tree. The boys hadn’t been dead before had gone quiet. I hoped it was sleep of one variety or another. My arm had left off burning for the minute and was growing cold. I sat to have a look-see but fainted flat out when I tried to pull up my shirtsleeve. I woke with the sun’s fist in my face and a ringing in my ears. I rose and clambered up a slope and climbed a fence where a boy lay skewered with a piece of his face hanging down like a dewlap in the sun.

  All the field ahead was filled with the dead. The local company of vultures had already crept through and turned out their pockets and carried off their canteens. Here and there you met a body part had broken off acquaintance with its owner. A glove had gone with a hand and a boot with a foot. At the middle was a dead bovine. I was not yet hungry and still had an apple and a cracker in my haversack, or I might have inquired after its meat. At the end of the field was another fence and another field. This field was empty of all but cannonballs. You could see where they had cracked through the trees and the paths they had made as they rolled. In the next field there was nothing but some ugly-looking thistles and the beginnings of a breeze.

  Midday I came to a fine old manor house had been about burned to the ground. All that was left was the little gum-tack houses built all around it, mushrooms around a black rose. I poked my head into one or two of them and saw a cross and a magazine illustration of President Abraham Lincoln but nothing else. I looked down the well and saw what had become of the mansion’s dog. It was floating on its side. The air smelled like smoke and the great swaths of mint sprouting deep green along the fencerows. At home Bartholomew and I liked nothing better than to take the scythe to a patch of mint. Two or three strokes and you had heaven climbing up your nose. Bartholomew could make a mint tea to beat the band. He would make it in the morning, set it in the root cellar, and we would drink it to cool off in the evening. Thoughts of the treasures in our cellar away up in Indiana got me to climbing down into the damp black ruin. Everything in the mansion cellar, though, had been hauled off or broken. There was blue and brown mason-jar glass everywhere to decorate the dirt floor.

  While I was hunting down there for anything might have been missed I heard voices in the yard. I peeped out and saw it was a party of rebels, six strong. I crunched my way soft as I could back down and into a corner and waited with my musket. They didn’t come down to the cellar, though. They were each one of them barefoot, and I expect they had tried their luck down amidst the broken glass before. As they were leaving I heard one of them say something about cooling off at a creek. You would think I would have lit out after them soon as they had left to get my own drink but instead what I did down there in the dark and the cool was breathe in some of the burned smell and think about mint and fall into a snore.

  When I woke it was dark. I clambered up out of the ruins and went off in the direction I thought I had heard them take. My arm felt like an icicle, and my forehead was hot. There was a minute I saw my mother walking beside me and asked her to go away and get Bartholomew for me but she said Bartholomew preferred not to come. She went away and Bartholomew did not come. When he did not come I got it into my head I needed to cry. Tears came up their tunnels but could not cut their way through the banks of dirt dried to my face.

  On the outskirts of the farm was a clearing bordered by hedges gone wild and in the middle of the clearing was an urn. It looked pretty to me in the moonlight and I got the idea I had to leave something in it. Some token. A tithe. What you would lay down in the little basket at church. Good Christian passing by. I pulled up a fistful or two of grass and carried it over careful, like I was clutching a child. When I got to the urn and looked close I saw that others before me had had my same thought. There was a spoon in it and a broken plate and a tin pan that had done duty as a spittoon. I said before I can’t sing but I sang and hummed a little as I dropped the grass back onto its ground and walked away.

  I walked then down a tunnel made out of walls overhung by heavy fern. I went through a high gate led nowhere and bordered by strangled trees that twisted and yawed. I climbed a hill and saw line after line of ridges leading away into moonlit clouds. There was a hickory tree had had its arms cut off that I took it in my head to try to climb. I told it if it had had a young lady perched on its peak I would have made it to the top. For a time I followed an old road lined by trees. The road looked like it had once gone from someplace fine to someplace fine else and also that those days w
ere gone. There were dead men sprinkled all around. You would have thought to look at them that they had just got winded and decided to plunk down. Have a smoke. Think it through a spell. One of these men wasn’t a man. She had on a gray cap and was clutching a flintlock pistol had likely seen service in the Revolutionary War. Some of her chest wrappings had come loose and were dangling out of a hole in her shirt. You could see there was dried blood on them. She had been better built even just on army rations than I had ever been and I couldn’t understand how she had hidden herself. I had an idea about sitting down and seeing if she could still palaver, that she might know some secret apart from masquerade devices could get me out of my mess. So I did a crouch-down in front of her but she did not budge. Every now and then as I walked on I thought I heard cannon fire but it was far away if it was anything and I could not be sure.

  By and by, I came down a slope through trees wearing blankets of ivy and found the creek. I drank then. I drank, then retched, then drank some more and lay panting on my side. Then I pulled off my rags and unwrapped myself and took out Bartholomew’s likeness, which was just a piece of hard metal in the dark, and set it next to me on the bank. “We need to discuss our situation,” I said to the hard metal but the hard metal wouldn’t talk, not any more than my dead sister soldier. Only my mother would talk to me. Only my mother could I count on. That thought, once I’d run it through my head, made me laugh out loud, and I sat there laughing like that until the mosquitoes found me, then I lay down on my side again and rolled over into the water. It was waist-deep quick and I played at sinking and rising. I got the idea then I’d been revived and set to work at scrubbing at myself with gravel and water grass. I scrubbed and scrubbed, then pulled my rags into the water and punched and squeezed them to dislodge the dirt. It was all of it slow work because I couldn’t use my left arm. There were boys back in camp had used sticks to scrape off their extremities when they couldn’t scare up soap and I gave that a try when I saw there were still streaks on my legs. I hadn’t had a wash of any kind in three weeks. It didn’t bother me a speck that I laughed as I worked. Or that I couldn’t stop shivering even though I felt hot. After I had laid out my clothes I spent an hour or three crouched and gibbering under the bushes like I’d turned Akron boy and there were women murdering men around me in the dark. Then I stood and walked up the draw a ways to a spot where the creek deepened and spread. The rebel party were there, all as naked as I was.