Neverhome

by Laird Hunt

  “Gallant Ash,” they said. “We heard all about you and your exploits. Come on in here and splash.”

  An invitation as nicely put as that couldn’t be declined. It transpired I’d saved that old Richmond man from certain death by giving him my piece of paper and he shed his grays like the others and came down with us to the water. I’d never felt happier since I had set out to war. Someone had a fiddle. Could give it a scratch. We linked up arms in the cool water and turned circles and laughed and frolicked about. I don’t know what it was made the party take its turn but take a turn it did, and I found I had my good hand around a rebel boy’s throat. All the others had gone, the old Richmond man included. It was just me and that rebel boy, just my hand and his throat. I killed him there in the water and let his dead body float away, then went back to my clothes. They were still soaked so I draped them over me and slept. In the dream I turned to next, my mother came to me. It was the old dream only now I had my musket. The angry crowd around me had lit its torches and grown tall so I laid about me with my bayonet.

  I was sick and far from the creek when I opened my eyes. I had put on my wrap and clothes and found my way into the remains of a shelter looked to have been built for pigs. Clouds had come up in the night and there was a drizzle splattering through a hole in the shelter roof. I had been bitten up considerably during my sleep and, sleeping, had scratched deep gouges in my face. I could not move my left arm at all. It had swollen up against my coat sleeve. I felt for Bartholomew’s likeness under my wrappings and knew at once I had lost it and when I got up on my knees, my stomach, which had nothing much more in it than mud and creek water, emptied out. It took me a time, kneeling there, to be able to open up my eyes and lift my head. When I did I could see a straggled line of our wounded coming down a lane. After my rich visions of the night before, I wiped my eyes and shook my head but the line did not waver. I stood and scuttled across the field and, breathing hot and hard, fell in with them. It was not the sorriest bunch I had ever seen, but it was close. There was more than a few missing digits on their fingers. There were shirts and underdrawers wrapped around heads. One fellow had about two feet of beard was clutching a torn, bloody pillow to his chest and leaving wet feathers to fall to the ground. I pointed at my arm when the man closest to me looked over. He just shook his head and opened his mouth to show me that he had been relieved of his tongue.

  The hospital was in a school in the center of a village. The village had changed into rubble and splinters, and the schoolhouse looked like an island afloat in an awful sea. Everywhere you looked there were hurt men. All the ache of this world and the one beyond. The idea was that we would walk up to the doctors and they would look at us and decide who needed the quickest help. Those that needed it would go straight into the schoolhouse. The others would go and sit in the yard and offer up the wisdom of their ill fortune to the wind. As we walked up, some of the men had been sitting there a time gave out calls. One I went by lifted a blanket up to show a dead soldier. The deceased had had his clothes burned off of him, and his skin bubbled black, yellow, and brown. The man giving the show didn’t say anything, just let us look a minute then put the blanket back down. An older man up ahead had a bandage on his head and drool caterpillaring out of the corner of his mouth said he hoped we all liked saws. Didn’t matter whether you had a toothache or were carrying half a cannonball in your gut, they would cut something off. This set a few of them had already been doctored up and were lying in the dirt with their bandaged stumps to chuckling.

  Meantime, there were screams coming from the schoolhouse. We got up to its side and could see to the back where they were dropping what they cut right out an open window onto a pile. There was a contraband grandpa with a cart loading some of it up. It was slippery work and he dropped a piece or two as he went rattling on his way. Out in the field, where he was heading, the carrion birds were having a contest to see which of them could fly off with the biggest piece. I looked at them and got up this thought those crows and vultures needed whiskey and cigars. I might even have said this out loud. Anyway, someone nearby gave a laugh. Up ahead, they were making the boys take off their jackets, sometimes their pants and shirts. One boy that had an angry, swollen slice down his side stood there naked as the day he was born.

  I asked the tongueless man next to me to hold my place in the line and pointed over at the trees beyond the yard surrounding the schoolhouse. He looked out to the vultures and nodded. Another next to him, whose injury I could not discern, said he would help hold my place, all day if need be, unless of course I was going off into the trees to die. I walked through more hurt men as I made my way but these did not call out at me.

  The first time I ever laid eyes on Bartholomew was in the yard of a house used to stand one mile due east of my farm. He had come with some other boys to see if it was true that the house was haunted and I had come to deliver a basket of sweet corn. The family had moved into the house was Irish or German or Italian or some such but the folks around here called them gypsies. The husband was far away on the railroad and it was just the woman and her two babies. I had got to hold them both. They were good babies, fresh and fat. I saw the boys trying to peek into a window and put down my basket and chased them off. Bartholomew stood his ground a minute before he ran. I got right up to him and he smiled at me, then he took off like a shot. The woman came out to thank me right then or I would have stood there and watched Bartholomew run. He was barefoot and had a floppy brown hat on his head. He was about the strangest thing I had ever seen. The next day he found me out where I was working a barley row and handed me a fresh-picked red zinnia. I’d never had a flower put into my hand before and I expect I stood there struck dumb. After he had handed it to me he did a little bow I never got him to repeat and again broke off into his run.

  I could not run after I had left the schoolhouse-hospital grounds and climbed a fence and gone into the trees. My arm felt like it weighed sixty pounds and was pressed out everywhere against my sleeve. About half my head felt hot and the other half cold. There was a stinging down my legs like nettles had gotten in my pants. I couldn’t run but I thought about Bartholomew running, those years ago, when he had been a boy and I had been a girl. At our wedding three years to the day after he put that flower in my hand we had a basket of zinnias. Every color they come in, though mostly deep, heart-smoking red.

  You can’t ever know when the dead world will come to you. Only that it will. My mother liked to tell me that. She who liked to send me down to the neighbor woman with any extra food we had. She who one night not a month after Bartholomew had handed me that zinnia walked through a crowd that had gathered outside the woman’s house with muskets and pitchforks and lit torches and went and stood with her arms crossed on that neighbor woman’s front porch. She had left in the night while I was asleep but I heard her leaving and followed her through the dark. When I came out of the cornfield I could see her pushing through the crowd. Beautiful and fearsome. Like a scythe through summer grass.

  All this I chewed on as I walked that wood. Southern wood, fern and creeper. It was deeper and darker than I had thought on parting its curtain. I had this idea that they might send someone after me and kept looking over my shoulder, though who amongst that sick company and those overworked doctors they could have dispatched, I do not know. I tried to send hard thoughts to my arm. I thought to it that sick as it was or it wasn’t, I would just as soon it kept hanging where it was.

  I had to stop and rest fairly frequent but after a time of walking I managed to traverse the woods. It was dusk now. I came out onto a road that led over a hill to a town. Down that road a group of people were walking and in that group was a nurse. They had none of them seen me so I stepped back into the trees and when they had passed on a ways I went out again after them. The nurse had on a dark blue cape and a white cap was covered in filth and grime. Everyone in the group had soiled hands. The men had the dirt up to their elbows. I imagined the nurse did too. They walked fast. I kept
expecting one of them to turn and ask me my business so I fried up some story I’d tell about why I was walking alone on the road behind them but not a one of them did. Not a one of them even seemed to notice me as I walked into town, past a cobbler, a dry-goods store, and a stable, and saw where the group broke up and the nurse had her home. There was a dead-end alley next to the cobbler’s with some boxes piled at the end of it. I walked back there and down that alley and dropped myself behind the boxes. I thought I would sleep but I didn’t. I lay there a long while, eyes open, looking up past the walls to the sky, past the sky to the stars, past the stars to my death out there, past my death to the final dark. Then I heaved myself up and walked over to the nurse’s house. It was a cottage with a garden might have been pretty if it had been kept up. There was lamp lit on the front porch. A mat worn down to its nubs.

  Her name was Neva Thatcher and she had thick brown locks. She had blue eyes and high cheekbones and small fine fingers liked to work at the air. She could swat a fly dead before you had seen it land, but she was slow when she didn’t have to be fast. She never, the time I knew her, spoke loudly or needed to step first through a door.

  She had been born up in Maine and had moved south with her husband before the war. This husband had gone off in the first weeks after Fort Sumter to fight as an officer for the Confederacy and had never come home. She had a letter from him, dictated as he lay blinded and expiring at Bull Run, that asked her to bid farewell to the sun for him, to pay his fondest courtesies to the grass, to salute the pretty waving trees. When the Union had taken her town she had quickly set aside the burden of her angers and gone to work in their hospital. She did whatever she was asked. Mopped floors, washed saws, dropped cut limbs out the window. Many times she would just sit and hold the hands of dying men.

  She knew how to dress wounds and keep them clean. She had first thing I arrived dressed and cleaned mine. She had let me lie down on her own bed and had kept the curtains closed and fed me soft bread and stewed peaches and dripped water from a clean rag into my mouth. When she had seen what I was, standing there on her front step and none too gently dying, she had said nothing, had just taken me by the arm that wasn’t swollen and led me in.

  I stayed three weeks in her little house and when I began to be well enough she gave me one of her dresses and helped me to a chair in the kitchen and let me sit by the open window and suck a little at the breeze. She had good rations of salt and sugar and sowbelly and hardtack and fresh bread for her work for the cause. She shared them all with me. She liked to read. Had a wall full of books. Each day she wrapped one or two of them in a cloth and carried them off to the hospital to read to the men. She read to them about hearts and flowers and pharaohs and mountaintops and clear-running brooks. She read to them about Jerusalem and chariots and trumpets and ghosts and lambs. I know what she read to them because in the evenings she would read to me.

  Tired and whipped as I was, some of the gay finery of the images she was conjuring rubbed me wrong. I expected the Colonel wouldn’t have thought anything too much of them either. But you couldn’t hold it against her. She didn’t seem to need any of it to mean too much. One voice saying soft things into another’s ear. She was as wore out as any of us and every morning like any of us who was able she rose and did her work. She didn’t give the day too much of her smile but she had one. I saw it. She had a china service was her pride and joy. Came from a grandaunt back in Maine. Flower and animal was the theme but about every piece to the service was painted different. Neva said it was the work of more than twenty hands. There were doves had an eager look to their eye peeping out from behind indigo roses. Yellow cats asleep under dogwood. Owls perched on plum trees. Wolves howling next to holly. Cows and sheep nibbling buttercups in a field. The service had lived through the trip down south and it had lived through the war. The teapot to it was Neva’s greatest treasure. You did not have to work at it too hard to look over her shoulder as she dusted at it and admire the shades of pink seemed to have come off real roses, the careful greens seemed to have come off real leaves, the deep blues of the feathers of its many birds. The teapot was Limoges, she said. Her grandaunt had painted it herself and Neva gave it a swipe about every day I was with her. Each time she did that chore there would alight on her face a smile.

  “For all it is made of so many different designs, this china service is my miracle of constancy,” she said one day I was watching her. “There were soldiers in this house before I started to work for the hospital, every one of them ready to desecrate my sweet china. The captain with them who ordered it to stop before it had started knew my husband before the war. I served him tea out of this very pot.”

  Still, many was the time after her long work she would come in, wash off her hands, see to my arm, then cry herself straight to sleep. She had kept canaries, a favored present from her husband, in a large white cage in the parlor, but whether she still had her grandaunt’s china or she didn’t, now the canaries and the husband were dead and buried and there were moments she could not bear even to hear a sparrow chirp.

  She spoke of love and love brought to ruin by war. It did not trouble her to betray the cause her husband had fought and died for, she told me. The Confederate States had seceded out of stubbornness, and war had come and taken her husband away. She would move north when it was finished. Take her china and return to the village in Maine she had left all those years before.

  “If they will have me,” she said.

  “Why wouldn’t anyone ever have you?” I said.

  “This war,” she said. “This war, this war.”

  The flesh of my arm crept each day closer and closer together. Like two ragged companies didn’t know yet they were fighting for the same side. When I saw I could comfortably rest my left forearm on the table again, and hold myself to purpose, I asked Neva for paper to write on. She that evening brought me home a fine fresh stack. It was hard to look at the linen cream of that paper bought nice and neat from one of our Union sutlers specialized in officer wares and not think about the old soldier from Richmond. I thought, too, as I sat there and looked at that paper, because how could you ever not, about all my battles, about my days in the camp, my walk through the woods with the Akron boys, my talks with the Colonel, the soft hand on my face come from his beautiful cousin, my time caught tight beneath the tree. I wrote Bartholomew that I had stepped out of my uniform and lost my musket and his likeness—for I had left it in the mud by the creek—and now wore a dress again. My legs felt free and some of the rest of me did too. I had hurt my arm and feared to lose it but here it was holding down the fine paper I was writing to him on. I sat and talked with another woman, I wrote him, and it was good and easy to do so. I thought of my mother and it did not trouble me. “I feel I am sitting outside of it all and can breathe and look at it a minute and not choke on the dust in my mouth,” I wrote. I know I wrote this and that it was received. I have the letter sitting here beside me.

  When I had finished writing, Neva brought me candle and sealing wax and, the next morning, carried my letter away with her. Sent it limping up to Indiana by the first post. The next morning after that, I tottered in from the garden to tell her my arm was no longer tight against my dress sleeve and found her in the kitchen wearing the rags of my uniform.

  “Show me how you march,” she said.

  “I don’t remember how to march,” I said.

  She pouted a minute, worked at slicing cheese and snapping crackers. Then she stopped that and came to me, slowly with the first steps, then quickly with the last, then slowly she kissed me. I let her do this for a time. Her mouth tasted like linden berries of all things and I realized I couldn’t remember what Bartholomew’s mouth tasted like. It occurred to me that my own mouth must taste a little like the late pansy flower I had just been chewing on. We stood both of us, Neva and I, with our arms hanging at our sides and only our mouths pressed together. There was a moth in the kitchen. I could see it with my left eye. It sat waiting for night�
�s dark above the garden door. I moved my head a little to see it better, and Neva’s eyes came open. When they did I put my hand on her arm and pressed her away gently to make her stop. She stopped. She kissed me again the next day, nice and quiet this time and not in my old uniform, and again I let her and again after a time I had her stop.

  The day after that second time, she made stewed oysters and corn fritters dressed in maple syrup and served it to us on her good china plate. This was the plate had on it monkeys climbing cherry trees. I had seen a monkey in a cage once in town. These monkeys looked bigger. Like if they wanted to they could tear down the trees. As we ate at our oysters they seemed to move. They would leap a little higher up their tree when I was lifting my fork but each time I tried to catch them at it they again slipped down. When we had finished our supper, Neva poured hot water into her pot and made us chamomile tea. We held cups favored handsome with golden lilies and blood-dark laurel leaves. She took my hand for a time, then she let it go. We leaned back in our chairs and she asked me if I wanted to hear a story, and though I feared a little she might reach for one of her fair volumes I said that I did.

  The tale she told, which did not come out of one of her books, was about a cousin who had gone west from Maine to help shepherd some poor band of argonauts to California back in 1842. They had headed off west seeking gold from the ground or gold from the land or gold from the sea. Half Neva’s whole hometown had caught the settling fever for a while but only this cousin had actually gone, and not for any gold he thought he could have for the easy pickings but for the considerable riding fee. He had left off alone one early morning and Neva had stood with those who waved and watched. They had not seen him again for years.