Neverhome

by Laird Hunt

  There are other memories now come to join the one of my mother standing on the neighbor’s porch steps, the neighbor that left here with her babies long ago, and of my own baby, who died beside me not an hour into his own life on our plank-wood floor, other spells of the past that won’t be put aside. One of them is of that place they took me after the kindly major made his bow and stepped away. The men he assigned to escort me took me back into the town and even past Neva Thatcher’s little house so that I thought for a minute, forgetting how I had ended up walking the thoroughfares under guard in her dress, that they were going to let me go back to her. She could keep me on awhile, I thought. She could kiss me morning, noon, and night if she needed to. Then I could tell her, when she had got tired of that, I was going to go back to my Bartholomew.

  We went straight on past the little house, though, and on down the street and along another and then they loaded me onto a wagon and took me away. Another town. It was nightfall when we got there and the building we stopped at was tall and wet-looking with windows on the top floor had narrow bars on them. It was made of gray boards had been dusted up with musket balls and you could see even in the light of the streetlamp that part of one wall had been blown open and rebuilt. I had tried to talk a little to the men guarding me but they had refused to speak except amongst themselves and said no word to me as they brought me down off the wagon and handed me over to another guard. This guard would not speak to me either. He took me down a hall had straw and things that crunched on its floor. We went past doors had moans and murmurings behind them. Came every few feet or so past the muffled clink or drag of some chain. At the end of the hall was a door and through that doorway I was pushed.

  When I saw where they had taken me I did not turn and bang the boards and holler to be let out, just as I had not whimpered before when the lieutenant wanted to put me in the ground, nor run, not even once, when the guns had blazed on the field. There were eyes in that place they had put me. Like that girl from the sheep shed had found a way again to keep me company. They were all in a line along the sides of the room. They were every one of them looking at me.

  “I was out of my head a little in the woods, but that was because of my wound,” I said aloud to the eyes. The only answer was a sound came from the corner. It was like bones boiling and cracking in a pot. They every one of them have knives, I thought. Then there was a laugh and the eyes all went shut. After I had stood a minute with my hands and back pressed against the door, my heart beating full hard enough to break the boards behind me, I let my legs lead me down to the floor.

  It was a lunatic house from the old days. Had stood there holding tight its horrors many a year until it had had its sides opened by stray cannon shot in the early days of the war. The keepers had run away and the lunatics had poured out into the countryside. Some had found their way through the battle and never come back. One went off looking for the well he had been dropped down in Georgia during the first part of his treatment twenty years before. He didn’t make it past a pond on the outskirts of town. There were two from the women’s side of the house went with him. Mad as they were supposed to be, they pulled him out of the pond five times before the battle cooled down and some of the locals got the idea to hit him on the head and tie him to a tree. There had been a fire on the men’s side and a number of the ones chained up had burned.

  The fire had worn itself out and the hole in the wall had been patched and some of the lunatics had been rounded back up. The building had locks and chains aplenty so the army had taken to using it for anyone they thought had their firing pins loose. The men’s side was full to bursting with boys had gotten addled up during the fight. Some they let back out. Some they didn’t. I was in my room with two ladies had seen their children blown straight out of their skins in front of them and couldn’t quit wringing their hands. They could talk well enough, just couldn’t stop wringing their hands. There was another supposed spy, this one from New Orleans was the charge, who wouldn’t say a word. There were a couple of gals had been locked in, as far as I could get out of them, for being too heavy. They both of them walked too fast when they came at you and weren’t heavy anymore. The three or four others were the old customers. They wore chains most of the time. One of them liked to talk about the Gadarene that Jesus healed way back in the long ago. About the pigs He had put the Gadarene’s demons into. About how the pigs had flung themselves off the nearby cliff. How the demons had had to find other homes. “Other homes,” she liked to say with a smile shaped like a snapped-off spider leg could have curdled fresh milk, and she’d lift her chained arms to indicate all of us, those in the room and those without. Another of them liked to grind what teeth she had left. Did it awake or asleep, morning, noon, and every inch of the night. She got hit at considerably for it. Even I got grouchy a time or two when, just after I’d got my eyes shut, she offered up that sound.

  Once a day one of the old keepers, big gal, would come in with some porridge for us. She came with kicks and cuffs too. I wasn’t spared this courtesy. She had a soldier with her each time she came in or I might have tried to answer her. Every now and again some fellow as said he was a doctor would peep his head in through the door. Just as soon as he had had that peep he pulled his head back out. We would a few of us yell out to him when he paid these visits but if he heard us he never gave any sign.

  Sometimes several of them came into the room in the evening with buckets of cold water. We each got one of these over the head. It was a long night of shivering on the floor after they had gone. There was other things going on at the men’s side. There was more than one that set to screaming regular over there. At first it sounded like it was all just one screamer. Then you heard them enough and knew it was several and got to know each individual one. You can scream high. You can scream low. You can scream something in between sounds like steam out of a train whistle. You can scream so it sounds like a musket bullet been sent by your ear. You can scream like a monkey. You can scream like an elephant oak struck by lightning in a silent wood. There was a boy across the way screamed like he was singing. Like they ought to sign him up for the stage. There was a curlicue elegance to his scream and I got to wishing it was just him they would poke at with their sharp sticks.

  Once each week one of us with a guard at her back would carry out the slop bucket. I got detailed to it more than my ordinary share because I didn’t faint or try to bite anyone when I was doing it. I kept moving forward. Step at a time. Even when a soldier tried to trip me up for some fun, I did not stop. He stuck his big foot out and I fell forward but caught myself and the bucket both. Managed too not to hit him one for his joke. Just smiled. Like I understood and even agreed with what it was was making him laugh: lady about fell with a bucketful of shit. The slops got carried to a trough in an alcove let out to a stream at the back of the yard. When the stream wasn’t moving much, the heavy part of the slops stayed put.

  Carrying slops wasn’t the only job they let me do. Once when I was carrying a bucket I passed a soldier giving another a shave. They were in the cold sunshine and the one was having it done got his face cut by the other and cried out.

  “You’re holding that blade wrong, for one thing,” I said to the fellow playing at being a barber.

  “How in fuck’s he supposed to hold it?” said the fellow had been cut.

  I put down my bucket and came over and showed him how it was done.

  “You stink like a sewer, little sister,” said the one I’d taken the blade from.

  “He ain’t wrong,” said the other, “but you keep on.”

  I shaved him, then shaved his friend, and every now and then after that I got called on to scrape a face. Mostly it was guards but twice or three times there was a prisoner in the mix. These were big-bearded things attached to some flaps of skin, some ruins of shoulders, some piles of bones. When I shaved them up there wasn’t anything left to them. You could of just dug at the dirt and kicked them straight into the hole. They were happy, though. Sm
iled and winked. Appeared these shaves were a kind of treat. Given out by the guards for good behavior. Maybe they were the ones didn’t scream. Some of them had been soldiers couldn’t stand the fight any longer. Boys that had run away from the bullets or been found back in camp having never left their bunks. One fellow I cleaned up had the wringing-hands problem. Didn’t stop him from smiling like it was Christmas morning when I got the hair off his face.

  It wasn’t just jolly shaves in the yard for the men prisoners in that place, though. Coming and going from the yard you went by a chair set in a cell didn’t have any door. Sometimes there was a man strapped into that chair and sometimes there wasn’t. I walked by it once and a man was attached to it. You couldn’t see what he looked like because they pulled a kind of hat down over the eyes of the ones they had sit there. The hat looked like it was a slop bucket had a brim. He didn’t have any shirt on and you could see the shape of his ribs. Had the stove-in chest of a boy long been sickly, and a ugly cut hadn’t healed too well straight across his stomach. They had tied a gag on his mouth. Hadn’t handed him any flower to hold either.

  You would have thought in that place they kept me for all those months straight through wintertime I would have done the bigger cut of my thinking about home and Bartholomew and that baby boy we had had for those cold minutes and my mother lying done with her shame in her bones beneath the ground, but the truth is I thought more about Neva Thatcher and the Colonel. That place and its ways must have stole into my head to haunt me because the two of them had come to form a kind of happy couple in my mind, Neva Thatcher with her chinaware and linden-berry mouth, the Colonel with his long whiskers and his smoke.

  “Bring me Neva Thatcher,” I would tell the keeper, who would cuff me hard for it. “Bring the Colonel,” I would yell out to the doctor when he peeped in. They did not bring Neva Thatcher to me. But one February morning with the snow falling, my Colonel came.

  They took me down to a room looked like it belonged to another building altogether. It had a green and yellow rug with dogs and diamonds on it and purple wallpaper with thin red stripes. They had a table with a glass vase full of dried flowers sitting in its center and there were two soft chairs. There was a fire crackling nice on one end. A guard stood at attention but the Colonel told him it was all right and he stepped outside. There was a little window in the room and you could see the snow fall past it. While I looked at the snow, the Colonel took up the glass vase of flowers and set it on the floor.

  “Gallant Ash,” the Colonel said.

  “Colonel, sir,” I said back.

  He suggested we move the chairs closer to the fire and sit. I was in my thin dress and expect I had let my teeth clack when I spoke to him. When we had settled he told me that his regiment had been broken to bits and scattered. Some of what was left, including him, had been redeployed.

  “How is your cousin?” I said.

  “Past all care,” he said.

  “I am sorry.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  He did not look grand and gray any longer. He looked old. Like the fist of years had found out his face and struck a sure blow. There was mud upon his boots. His nose gave a trickle. His coat had a long tear down one side.

  “I’m no spy,” I said.

  “I understand you give out shaves to the men here,” he replied.

  “Did they tell you I get to carry out the slops too?”

  “They did.”

  We looked a little at each other.

  “I’m told I’m to be made a general,” he said.

  “I gave no secrets. I did my duty.”

  “Do you know what I was before this war?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nor do I. I cannot remember. Or if I can, it seems like a life that belongs to some other and I do not credit it. There is a wife loves me and whom I love in that life. I expect that if I am not killed, I will remember it again someday.”

  “I remember my home. I remember every inch and mile. I have a husband back home waiting for me.”

  “Is he? Waiting for you, I mean?”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “I have heard it said you hail from the South. I don’t believe that. Not even for one Secesh minute. Your surprise lay elsewhere. Do you remember when we spoke of surprises?”

  “I am no spy. Sir, I just wanted to fight. I just wanted to go away for a while.”

  “That’s two different things.”

  “It’s one thing.”

  “Explain to me how it is one.”

  “I’ll answer to just about any order you give me, but not that one.”

  He looked at me. Long and hard.

  “Because you won’t or because you can’t?”

  “Both.”

  “All right. Well, enough. Let’s leave off that. Leave epistemology be. Let’s return to our earlier line, which was ontological. Do you follow me?”

  “No.”

  “Epistemology concerns knowledge. Ontology concerns what we are.”

  “Or what we aren’t.”

  “Not a whore, we know that, and not a spy, we know that too; that leaves only lunacy for the cause. Or at least that is what the doctor here told me. He says you suffer from that ancient malady. You have been set adrift by the moon. You gallop among the stars.”

  “I don’t answer to any sickness such as that.”

  “I’m quoting your physician.”

  “I just wanted to fight. To plant my foot and stand stalwart and never run.”

  “But you did steal food and tobacco and sundry medical supplies out of the haversacks of active Federal combatants and so deprive men-at-arms, sometimes wounded men-at-arms.”

  “I was a man-at-arms. Wounded for the cause.”

  “You were a common thief.”

  “I stole from no one.”

  “It was a foul rumor, then. Nothing more. Of course it was. I know that. We have already discussed it.”

  The fire gave a pop when he said this and a log shifted. The Colonel reached over, took the poker, and gave the works a push. When he leaned forward I saw he had a long scar went from his neck up the side of his face.

  “You got yourself a scratch.”

  “Nothing more. But I spent thirty days on furlough. Did me a world of good. My wife is the finest woman in the world. You see, I can remember her now. She appears before me. Floats there in the fireplace. You will have to meet her one of these times.”

  “I would like to go home.”

  “Does a body good to be home. My kinsman would have liked that. He would have liked to be shut up safe again in his rooms.”

  I did not recognize the way the Colonel was looking at me. There was a difference to him, like his eyes had changed color, gone from brown to blue, or like he had lost an arm and was studying on how to take up using his left hand.

  “I should have made you a sharpshooter,” he said. “Perhaps it would have put stealing out of your mind.”

  “Stealing wasn’t my central transgression.”

  “Then you do admit to it.”

  “I would like to go home. I would go straight home if I were let to leave. I would like to write a letter to my husband. He would come and fetch me. I know they release people out of here to their families. I never stole. Or betrayed.”

  The Colonel stood and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “You need to wear more and better, Gallant Ash. I’ll see to it that you get something else to wear. Your dress is too thin. It won’t do for this cold weather. You should change clothes.”

  I started to stand but he told me to sit by the fire a few more minutes.

  “We must not let this war deprive us of all comforts,” he said. He bent and picked up the vase and set it back on the table. I watched his back, then turned and saw that he had left behind a letter for me.

  “My Dearest Constance,” it read.

  I write you with your former name because I have grown afraid that you are no longer with us but have gone away
far from this earth and its trials and its cares. It seems to me in such sad possible circumstance that I must write to you as you are and not as you seem if this letter and thought is to have any hope of reaching you. I am well, dear one, but my troubles here, previously described, continue: Now they have burned the seed shed and taken off both our mules. They want our land and continue their depredations and worsen it with talk of paving the way for the forces of the rebellion that must come. Secessionists in our midst. If I hadn’t heard it from their own mouths I wouldn’t have credited it. But I keep the old musket handy and walk vigilant as you would and, though they are strong, hope still to gain the upper hand. And hope too, even if I cannot prevail, to otherwise see things through. I pray that wherever you are, war or no war, this will reach you and send you, all past troubles put behind us, sailing back to me.

  I did sail home to my Bartholomew. That very night in a dream I went rushing over the treetops, along the rivers, through the chill of the mountains, spiriting north and west through snow and thunderstorm and into a white sun. I found the house burned to the ground and Bartholomew run off far away. In his place were old and evil men sharpening their plows and planning to set our good oxen to the yoke and, to the tune of “Dixie” made it worse, gobble everything up.

  It was these same men had burned our neighbor out those years before and so my mother came into the dream and stood in the center of the cinders of our house, which had been her house, and wept. The tears of my mother must have found a way out of the dream and onto my face because when I woke there they were. Hot and heavy ghosts come to haunt my face. I roared and raged then. I beat my hand and head on the door until both were bloody.

  “I must go home,” I yelled. “You must let me leave.”

  It was the keeper gave me my answer. She came in hard with two buckets had ice floating on their tops. February or not, she turned them both over me. She came at me with her foot a minute later as I lay gasping and shivering, and I caught it and twisted and threw her down. The others around me laughed and cheered as I put my fists to the keeper’s face. The guard came into it and I worked on him too.