Neverhome

by Laird Hunt

  Weatherby and the General’s wife stayed inside that greenhouse awhile longer but my face and neck had grown hot, so I stepped outside into the cool and thought I would walk a minute among the peach trees. They were old and intergrown so I had to work and crouch a little to pass between them and after a minute gave it up and sat down near the middle of the orchard against a trunk. There were sweat bees and butterflies at their work and one of them, with green and gold and turquoise to its wing, took my eye over to the back of Weatherby’s house, where, sitting on the bench in the sunlight, I saw his grandson. He was wearing pants and undershirt and had his hands in his lap. The hands were big and the fingers skeletal. His bare feet, planted firm in front of him, were flat and narrow and long. There was a clean bandage wrapped around his ears. Over his face he wore a purple veil. There was a little bit of a breeze playing with the under-end of it. Otherwise there wasn’t a thing on or around him outside flying insects that moved. He might have been graven. Image of hurt for the ages. Hurt come home. I stood after a minute and started to crouch my way out of the orchard to give him a good morning, but my feet found out other ideas and before I knew it I was off and away, without any farewells, let alone good mornings, on my road.

  I thought as I put Yellow Springs behind me and walked fast away that it was seeing those dead soldiers and that whole world being lit to vanishing that made me want even harder than I had to get home before it was too late and Bartholomew and I and the wide world got turned to just some jelly dried to a cracked glass sheet. Cracked for the wind to whistle through. I thought too it might be the picture that bloomed up of Weatherby’s blind grandson tending sprouts in his purple veil under all those fading faces he couldn’t see, all those eyes fading off away until they were all as blind as he was that had put the snap in my step and made me move. Or maybe it was just the smell I still had in my nose of pickled carrots and the sound in my ears of them being crunched by Weatherby with his old teeth in that quiet place. Or the after-hum I had in my head of the General’s wife whistling “The Ballad of Gallant Ash.”

  Whatever it was, I walked away and didn’t stop any longer than I had to over those last miles. So much so that it wasn’t much more than a week after I’d left them at their floating room and its ghosts that I walked back up into Randolph County where I’d left from better than two years before. It was late. Raining, or I would have pushed on for home that evening. Instead, I spent a night with some boys had a fire going under a rubber sheet rigged up high next to a field near Winchester. They had three women with them who all looked happy enough. The boys were back from the war, is what they said, and the women had come out to meet them. They were having a party out of the homecoming and there were jugs of corn whiskey involved.

  I took my drink and shared out what I had left of the jars and sandwiches from the General’s wife and we had a fine old time. They had some impressive firearms they’d brought back with them, including a pair of Sharps and a Henry breechloader made me give out a whistle. That whistle led to a firing demonstration once the rain had stopped. The Henry looked like it had come straight out of the crate and into their hungry arms. It could hit any size object you liked at any distance if you knew how to shoot it. Which I knew I could and which the fellow who said he owned it could not. After he had made the dirt around the can do some high kicks, I took my turn and showed how it was done. I had my suspicions about whether or not those boys had done much soldiering when they couldn’t answer straight about where they had been and had fought and just which line they had stood in to fire off fine fresh weapons like the ones they were toting, but my mind was mostly elsewhere up the road. It was elsewhere enough that when later the boy that claimed to own the Henry left off trying on his snoring woman and climbed on top of me, I let him go with a kick and a elbow to his jaw.

  He crawled back over to his woman and set in to snoring next to her and I thought I’d try to join the party but I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there under the Indiana stars and thought my thoughts. Couldn’t quit thinking them. Not too far off dawn, my paramour let off a loud fart, woke himself up with it, and came back over at me. I was agitated and hit him down harder than I probably would otherwise have done.

  This got the whole band of them roused and before I knew it I was getting chased a hundred yards down the road. Later that same morning, just ahead of noontime, I stepped my foot back down on the dirt of my farm.

  I didn’t do much more than step on it before I left out again. Off yonder in my yard I had spied the fat criminal I’d known all my life called Big Ned Phipps feeding hay to geldings I’d never seen before in a corral I hadn’t built. The seed shed was burned to the ground, the mule pen was empty, and some of our fence was knocked down. There wasn’t any crop to speak of in the field, and a dozen ugly goats were snapping at each other and nibbling the weeds. Here and there around the yard there were holes had been dug in my dirt. Close up next to the house there were four boys sitting in the shade holding plates in their hands. They were laughing and leaning back on our chairs. They were the good chairs, not the ones we used for sitting together in the yard. They had been my mother’s and hers that loved roses before that. Two of them sitting there in the mud on my good chairs had been off to war and come back before I’d left home. One was the son-of-a-bitch who’d pushed me down at the market when I was a girl and who I’d gone back and fought in my muddy dress until he cried, and the other I had never seen before.

  After a time one of them hollered into the house and the next minute my Bartholomew came out. He was holding a tray had cups of coffee on it. He went around to each of the boys and let them choose a cup. By and by Big Ned called for his and Bartholomew went over and stood there a long time in the June sun as Ned moved his mouth and made a fuss over picking it up. I came a tongue crunch away from calling out at Bartholomew to crack that cup of coffee over Ned Phipps’s head but if there is one thing war and the lunatic house can teach you it is how to wait.

  I walked five miles back the way I had come from that morning and I climbed into the cool under some mulberry bushes and I slept. I woke around nightfall and waited until it was late and the moon had dropped down into its cradle of earth. Then I went back to the sleeping camp of boys and their women and stepped right into the middle of it and plucked up a box of cartridges and the Henry gun. They must have all gone swimming down at the creek because they were snoring there in their wet underthings. The one had tried his luck with me was about my size. It took me a long minute of groping but when I left, I had his hat on my head and his clothes under my arm.

  I walked a mile or two east under the stars, then cut north another mile and bivouacked under a shag-bark hickory looked about set to fall down. I tried sleeping some but didn’t. At first light I took a good look at the Henry. They had mishandled it doing their dirt designs but the mechanism was still true. I took it apart, cleaned it as best I could, put it back together again. I removed my dress and wrapped the Henry in it and hid it under some brush a hundred feet from the hickory. Then I again changed my clothes. The pants were big but I found myself some rope. The outfit smelled ripe but I reckoned that helped my cause.

  Town was just waking up when I walked in. I stepped straight into the café and ordered coffee and biscuits. I had ordered that same thing regular in that same café all the grown years of my life but I was in my other clothes and they could not see me. When I had eaten I called over for more coffee.

  “You been off to the fight,” said the can of corned beef brought it over and couldn’t recognize me.

  I nodded. Said I’d had my discharge. Said I was passing through on my way home.

  “Home where?” he said. He had leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, interested in the traveler going his way from somewhere to somewhere else.

  I pointed out through the wall in the direction more or less of Marion and Noblesville. I took a sip of my coffee. Took a look at my fingernails, picked out a speck of grime.

  “I paid
a visit to a farm about three miles yonder yesterday evening, looking to beg a sup of water and some directions, found the welcome wasn’t any too warm,” I said.

  “Which farm was that?” he said.

  “Horse farm, to look at it. They’ve had some fire trouble and fence damage. Goats grazing wild and such.”

  The man uncrossed his arms and gave out a laugh.

  “That’s what used to be the Thompson farm. Gal and her husband. Gal ran off and joined the gypsies. Little fellow she left behind couldn’t fend off the wolves.”

  “I heard some of those wolves are Secesh lovers.”

  “I couldn’t speak to that.”

  “I saw a little corncob serving them cups of coffee.”

  “Bartholomew Thompson. He’s missing the fight because of a bad foot or eyes or some such. Boys that took his farm let him run their errands and live in the barn.”

  I took another sip of my coffee. I looked the man in the eye a good while. He had aged but a little, had a few fresh wrinkles and only just a bit more yellow in his eye than before. He wasn’t any thinner than he had been either.

  “Sounds like he could have used a hand in the fight. I expect there’s folks love the Union in the vicinity.”

  If he heard the iron in my voice he didn’t show it.

  “Time of war,” he said. “I reckon there’s more want him gone than want him to stay.”

  “You among them?”

  It was his turn to give me a good look.

  “I reckon whether I am or I’m not isn’t any of your affair, stranger.”

  We talked war and devils for a while and by the time I left I decided I had had the answer to my question and didn’t need to pursue it further. My next stop was the sheriff’s office. The man who had put his boot on the neck of that institution for many a year and who had stood shouting amongst the burning-out crowd two weeks before my mother hung herself one rainy morning from the ash tree on the edge of our farm was cousin to Ned Phipps, but the fellow built like a broke-string banjo I talked to there told me that old outlaw had gotten drunk one night the past winter before investigating some pranks at the rail yard and let a train take off his legs. They had him in a rolling chair up at the county home. This man, his successor, had only an unrifled musket in his arsenal to go with his badge and wasn’t going to gun for anyone took an angry interest in Ned Phipps.

  “Where you heading off to?” he said when I walked back out of his sorry door.

  “Home. Home is where I’m goddamn heading,” I said.

  On my way out of town and back to the Henry I passed the very Ned Phipps I had business with. He was riding one of the horses he kept corralled on my property. Riding it grand like the cavalry officer he had never been. It was a crow-black racing horse about as handsome as they come. You could see it was on its way to having its back broken by the fat son-of-a-bitch sitting like a general on top of it. That fat son-of-a-bitch gave me down a green-toothed smile and a nod.

  “You back from the fight?” he said.

  “Traveling to it,” I said.

  “Well, then, I wish you luck.”

  In my dream of it there is no moon and there are no stars and I am lost in a crowd carrying torches to set the world alight. My mother’s voice and I cannot reach her. My mother’s voice farther away or me from it as the crowd grows closer and closer still. They turn giant and I rain my blows against their giant legs.

  “Constance,” my mother calls out in the dream. Her voice sounds as thin as a piece of paper and twice as light. “Constance, come and stand up here beside me.” But in the dream I am afraid. In the dream I turn my back on my mother and run.

  On that night it was different from the dream. We had heard there was to be trouble at the house of our neighbor the woman whose husband was gone and who had her two babies and nothing else but the peeling paper on her walls to protect her. My mother sent me to my room to sleep and told me to shut my eyes, but they stayed open and I climbed out my window as soon as I knew she had gone. There was stars and moon aplenty, in the memory and not the dreams, and I could see her up ahead stepping her long legs through the barley. There was a crowd of them already there and my mother walked straight through that crowd and went to stand on the neighbor woman’s front step and face them. She crossed her strong arms over her chest and yelled out to them that they needed to head home and look to their own business. Leave women and their babies alone. She had just yelled this a second time when I came through the crowd and climbed up the steps and stood next to her. In the house behind us the neighbor woman was sitting at her kitchen table with a babe in each arm. Her eyes were wild and she was singing a song I’d never heard before. Rocking a little on a chair wasn’t a rocker. There was upward of fifty of them holding their torches and stepping ever closer to the house and setting in to jeer.

  “We don’t ever turn our cheek, do we, Mama?” I said and crossed my own arms and looked out at the crowd. The constable was at the front of it. Ned Phipps, who I had known of since I was five years old, was there. There was a woman in the mob holding a pitchfork and yelling out for the others to toss forward their torches and send us and all the gypsy niggers in the house to hell.

  “No, we don’t,” my mother said and as she said this, her voice cracked. It was just a speck of a crack, the smallest thing, like a twig touched in winter, but I had never heard any crack come out of her throat before. I looked up and saw there were tears on her cheeks and that her lower lip was moving. A minute later she had set off away, first at a fast walk, then at a run. When she had left I found I couldn’t keep my arms crossed. They dangled at my sides like they’d been sawed down to the strings. Still, it was me helped the neighbor woman to leave, who took one of the babes and a bundle and walked her away through the crowd already set into their burning and off a long stretch down the road. When we got close to the Ohio border, about where I would cross it again those years later on my way to war, she told me I better get back and see to my mother, that whether she would confess to it or not, she was the one needed seeing to now.

  “But where will you go?” I said, for she looked small and alone with her children and her bundle there on the midnight road.

  “You go on now, go on back home,” she said.

  I followed after her awhile but she would not speak to me any longer, was already striding away from Indiana and off into the sadness of the world. World woven from the wool of such partings.

  My mother and I did not speak about that night on any of the days that followed even though the cinders of what had been the neighbor woman’s house smoked dark and slow through every one. I kept looking for my mother to find a piece of fine story to put onto the end of this poor one but she stayed quiet and no crown of justice came to her brow, no sword of vengeance crept into her hand.

  A week or ten days into this some boys on horses called of an evening at the edge of our property. They had a torch with them might have been one from that night. Any other time my mother would have seen them off like sick sparrows but she just sat crumpled at the kitchen table and it was me had to walk out to the edge of the property with her musket and back them down.

  “Your fear will find you out someday too, daughter mine. It will find you out and use its wiles and crinkle your heart,” she said when I came in and put the musket down. I bit my lip. Did not answer. I knew it was true. She seemed to rouse herself some after she had said this. We worked at blade sharpening and spilled out some good sweat together in the yard. Bartholomew came over with another flower and my mother heated us up a jar of ham and green beans. “That’s a good boy you got ahold of there,” she said. She let me walk him halfway back to his house and he kissed me a minute in a ditch beside the fencerow. That night my mother told me the story about the princess and the dragon only at the end of the story it was the princess cut off the dragon’s head. It may be that Bartholomew had come back and was crouched outside the window and giving a listen. “Good night,” my mother said to me when she had
finished. She touched my arm and held it when she said this. Later it was more than one time I would look down at my arm and think I could see a mark she had left in touching me. Who is to say that’s just folly? Who is to say what it is we have left on us after we have been touched? There is the world with its night-walking women and then there is what happens in it. A few days later my mother climbed up into the ash tree with a rope.

  I do not know why it was this I chose to speak of that evening after dark when I had retrieved the Henry and put my dress back on and climbed up into the hayloft of our barn and found my Bartholomew lying under a horse blanket in the straw. I had not stood near him in two years that could have been twenty but when I leaned in close to his face and woke him, it was my mother I spoke of, my mother and her fear and her hand on my arm, her hand on my arm more than anything, and the neighbor woman walking off with her children, and my mother’s death in the ash tree. Bartholomew tried to speak more than once while I was talking but I did not let him. When I had finished I told him that the next morning early he needed to get down to the house and fetch my mother’s old musket and see it was charged and bring it to me. Then he was to go back down and put his apron on and serve all the boys their morning coffee in the yard. When they all of them had their coffee he was to go back inside the house and not come out. No matter what he heard. They had tried to take our land and used him poorly and spoken for Secession and now it was their turn to be used. It was simple. Simplest thing in the world. Simple as standing and not running. Walking with the turn of the earth instead of against it. He was to listen to me. I said this twice. He was not to disobey.