Neverhome

by Laird Hunt

  “Let me speak,” he said.

  I did not answer. There was blood already dripping from my lips and my eyes and he did not open his mouth again, only looked at me a little queer, like he had seen his dream of me gone mad come now to crouch above him, and nodded when I repeated myself. Then I told him I was done talking and called him husband and made him lie back down.

  Sleep without dream. Tunnel without end. Sky without stars. Rainbows burst to bloody colored bits. I did not know where I was when I woke and I stumbled around in the straw for a minute, imagined there was chained women sleeping around me, that there was minié bullets or a bucket of ice water and fists coming for my head. I told Bartholomew, who wasn’t there, not to fret, that we would fight the keeper and her ice bucket off together. Then I heard voices in the yard. I picked up the Henry, fed it all the way full of cartridges, and went to the hayloft window. It was still some dark out but you could smell sun in the purple sky and I could cipher well enough. Men in the yard. Metal in their hands. They were wearing hats and long coats against the morning cold and they were bunched and smeared together. It took me the only several seconds I had but I counted first four, then all five of them.

  They had the barn to their front, the house behind, and forty fine yards on either side. It was like the door had been shut on them. Like when those boys got caught down in the crater and couldn’t climb up its sides. I didn’t like what I was about to set to doing, but I didn’t like them spending their days setting there on my chairs worse. I didn’t like Bartholomew fetching them their coffee worse. I didn’t like the deep fat on the back of Ned Phipps who some said was my father either. Ned Phipps who some said was my father who had helped scare off my mother and burn out our neighbor woman worse. It was him I shot first. I breathed and then hit him on the side of the neck and he fell out of his boots like a side of bad beef and went crawling off in the direction of his horse. The one I had fought with at the market took his in the forehead. The bullet stove out the back of his head and left a spray in the dawn light almost up to the house. The three of them left unhit needed to move but instead stood staring at Ned crawling off and at the boy had once troubled me now dead as dust sitting on the dirt beside them. I shot another twice in his chest and then into the middle of my fury came a goat up out of nowhere, crazed and hopping left and right, so I shot it too. It sat back on its haunches then folded up its front legs and dripped down its head.

  When the goat went down the other two boys took it as a sign and dropped the guns they hadn’t once fired, cried mercy, went into squats and put their hands over their heads. At the minute they did this I heard a hard creak behind me and turned a little and saw a hat and a gun barrel coming up the hole into the shadow of the haymow. The hat came up and the gun lifted after it and I spun full around and shot as the black circle of the barrel found my face. I took the climber through his shoulder and he slumped over and set the gun down gentle in the straw.

  Boys had been squatting outside started to run at my shot and I took the one trailing a step straight through his side. I would have taken out the last a short second later only the Henry jammed. I gave a quick try at clearing the mechanism but it wouldn’t budge and I saw the boy wasn’t shot running past Ned Phipps toward the corral. I didn’t like to be too rough but the one had tried to come up behind me was blocking my way so after I had grabbed up his gun I shoved him down the ladder. He hit barn dirt with a whump and groan. I was over him and out the side door when I saw what the son-of-a-bitch had meant to end my days with: I now had my mother’s musket in my hand.

  Old weapon. Built for other fights and days. It hadn’t ever been rifled and wobbled its round balls like drunk babies but I could see even at a run that it had been well oiled and I knew that it would hit. The boy was already bareback on Ned Phipps’s handsome black horse and had the corral open when I came around the barn. He reined up a minute when he saw who it was in her skirts had been shooting at them. Just like that outlaw boy had done in the house in the woods. I didn’t say a word, only kept coming forward the way we had been taught in the Kentucky fields, the way we had done it in the Maryland pasture, the way we had fought with the cannon fire killing us into wet nothing in the Virginia woods. I kept coming so he kicked the horse hard and cleared the corral and lit out down the road toward town. I got my line of sight, kneeled, lifted my mother’s musket, lowered it a quarter inch, let out my breath, fired off my wobbly ball through the dawn, and shot him down. The handsome black horse galloped on a ways without its rider, then stopped, gave itself a shake, and set in to nibbling like it was Sunday afternoon. I had no urge to shoot at it. The goat had been a mistake. I felt bad about that goat and would not murder a horse.

  Ned Phipps was gurgling loud over at the corral fence. He had got about halfway up to standing. His hat had fallen off and his pants had slid loose down his legs in the crawling. When I got up on him he was dead. Father mine. The others in the yard were just as finished or aiming fast for it.

  “Come on out now, Bartholomew,” I called. I got no answer. Called again. I looked at the musket in my hands, then I counted the corpses. My heart skipped a hard beat so I counted again. Five dead boys and a goat. The one inside made it six. Six was too many.

  Before he died with his head in my lap at the bottom of the barn ladder where I had thrown him, Bartholomew asked me what it had been like down south at the war, and I told him it had been hot.

  “It was hot here too, Constance, and I thought you were dead,” he said.

  “Then, husband, you have been kissed and shot by a ghost.”

  “I wanted to sell,” he said. “Sell and move on out of here. I lacked only the deed.”

  “You could have done it without the deed. All you had to do was take their money.”

  “I wanted to do it right.”

  “You would have never found it.”

  “I’d’ve kept digging.”

  “You were my one true love; you put feathers in my letters, you left me a lilac bundle by my breakfast in the long ago.”

  “Was I?”

  “Always.”

  “Every day I took up the shovel and dug for the deed. Ned made me a fair offer. He and his boys were helping me dig. There wasn’t any harm in it. You didn’t have to kill them all. You should have stayed down there a little longer at your war.”

  “And you should have looked up into the trees, husband, not down into the dirt.”

  “You hid it in the ash tree,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then he died.

  The scrawny sheriff was in his office, and when I told him I was Constance Thompson returned from my wayfaring, he said he had just that minute come back from my land. I started to make my speech and ask for my noose but he stopped me, gave me his condolences, told me my farm had been the site of a terrible crime. Once more I started in on my speech and once more he stopped me. He said a stranger had been in town asking questions about our farm. The stranger had been at the café and complained about some slight of hospitality out our way. The stranger, said the scrawny sheriff, was fresh back from the war and had had nothing but blood in his eyes. The last anyone had seen of this stranger was when he had walked out of town heading our way. You could put that all together. The other part to the equation, he went on, was that there had been some boys and a posse of flouncy women camping and carrying on out in the hinterlands had come into town sniffling about a missing Henry repeater rifle. They had told some that they had been in the war and others that they hadn’t but they had clammed up tight, and left soon after, when someone asked just how they had come to lose such a gun.

  “You see any blood in these eyes I’m looking at you with?” I asked the sheriff when he was done telling me everything I already knew.

  “You have had quite a shock and look road-weary and I will see to your husband’s arrangements if you like, madam,” is what he said.

  “I killed them all, every one, even my Bartholomew,” I said.

>   “You will want to rest up now, Mrs. Thompson,” said the sheriff. “I will have a buckboard take you back home.”

  “Take who home? There’s more than one of me here,” I said.

  Before Bartholomew breathed his last I let his head down soft onto the dirt floor of the barn and I went out to the edge of the south field and climbed the ash tree where my mother had hung herself and where I had found her swinging on the last day of my youth. I climbed it and felt for the notch just above the branch where she had tied her rope. In the notch was an oilskin bag and in the bag was the deed to my farm. I brought the deed down out of the tree and I carried it into the barn.

  “You want to sell, we’ll sell, there’s other buyers in the world,” I said to my Bartholomew. “We can move off away elsewhere. Make a new start. Try for a family together again.”

  But he was already dead.

  Not so long ago I was coming back from a trade show and passed a greenhouse made of glass from photographic plates. It was bigger but not better built than Weatherby’s, and it had been made along the same lines. This one had been standing some time when I saw it and all that was left of what the glass had shown was smudges of gray, swirls of brown. The woman had the greenhouse said it was a company out of Pennsylvania had built it for her. She said it had been pretty when they had put it up and the images had given off just the right speck of shade but now the sun had had its way and all the ladies and soldiers she had liked to look at were gone. I got the name of the company before I left and wrote them when I got home but they had gone out of business and said they couldn’t help me.

  It took me a while but I tracked down three plates of that kind of glass in a likeness shop over in Lafayette and put them in our kitchen window here on the farm. Two fine ladies and one man. Spring and summer, the morning light catches them there, lights them each a minute out of their darkness, lets them glow. One morning these past weeks, as I was looking at them, there was a knock on my door. It was a woman dressed in plain clothes and scuffed shoes about my age had come to pay me a call. She had dust on her from the road and when I asked her she told me she was up from near Yellow Springs, Ohio, so I let her in. We drank hot tea at the kitchen table next to the fading pictures. She was housekeeper to a friend of the General and his wife and at one of the dinners she had helped serve, she had heard a story about a woman had fought for the Union army under the General’s command.

  “He was a colonel when I fought for him,” I said.

  “I did some soldiering myself, or a kind of it,” she said.

  I looked a long while at her and she at me. I had never met another since that time on the road with the colored woman had put her knee to my chest, and I had wondered about it, like I expect all of us had put on pants and gone to war did.

  “What made you go?” I said, facing away from her.

  “There was two of us,” I heard her say. “It was the other one of us put on the colors. I just kind of rode along.”

  “Do you smoke a pipe?” I said.

  She said she did and we stepped outside and sat on my front steps and smoked a pipe and traded stories of our adventures in the war. I spoke first and said not very much at all, though it seemed to satisfy her. When it came her turn she told me that her name during the war had been Leonidas and that her friend’s name had been Leander. Leonidas and Leander had been together through the whole long days of the fight.

  “We had started out,” she told me, “hauling wood and tending stock and working in the fields in place of all the boys who had gone. When we got tired of that and of our harping parents, we followed after them and saw the bullets fly and heard the cannons roar. We went out onto the fields after the fighting and walked among the dead men and helped take them to their graves. We saw the surgeries where the men were brought to have their limbs removed. We watched them chop a boy’s leg off and throw what they took straight out the front door.”

  Dressed in pants, she said, they had attended a battle, and when it went bad and they had killed up most of our side, Leander had put on a dead boy’s uniform and took up his firearm and marched away barefoot with the rest of them. Leonidas had followed Leander through all the weeks and months that followed and even though she had not worn a uniform she had many a time lifted up pistol or rifle and brought the hammer down. After one battle, Leander had got thrown in a prison camp and starved and fooled with and beat for kicking in the teeth of the someone who had fooled with her. Leonidas had met Leander at the gate when they got tired of her troublemaking and set her free.

  “She wouldn’t speak a word when she left that evil place and so we walked the roads until she one day got her voice back. ‘Now, that was something and, goddamn, that was something, and goddamn all of it to hell’ is what she said.”

  Leander had made this comment as they were walking through a pine forest. Every step in that forest had lifted up something soft and special to smell. You could, Leonidas told me as we sat smoking on my steps, have just laid down on that ground and gone right to sleep or died.

  “But we didn’t die yet and there we went a-walking. We turned a corner and come upon a pool of water. When we stepped up close to drink we saw it was shallow and full of dead crickets. Leander looked at those crickets and the tears came climbing up. ‘Every one of them is dead,’ she said. We cried and cried.”

  As they were returning home at last by paddleboat, Leander was taken by a fever and had joined the crickets, along with a number of others. The paddleboat captain, fearing further infection, had organized a burial party on a sandbar. Leonidas had tried as best she could to mark the spot but when she returned some while later she found nothing of her friend but the wide waters of the river. As for her subsequent life without Leander she remarked, “I made it back, sure enough, but never felt I’d made it home.”

  In the days following this visit, which ended very soon after those last words, I wrote a letter down to Yellow Springs, to the General, to tell him that it was true that I had stolen food out of haversacks, that I was sorry for it and did not know why I had done it and wished I could put all that food I had stolen and eaten back. That maybe things would have turned out different and for the better if I had done so. Leonidas had asked me not to speak of her in any communication with the General, so instead I asked after Weatherby and Weatherby’s grandson and the General’s wife and told the General to send them all my regards.

  My husband was long since deceased, I wrote him. By my own hand. I had seen him garbed but not disguised in cloak and hat and climbing up the ladder carrying my mother’s musket, and I had grown frightened—of what had been and what was there—and had seen him in my mind’s eye taking aim at me with it, even though he had not taken aim at me, and I had shot him.

  He comes to me sometimes, I wrote. He comes and sits with me at my table or stands in my doorway after I’ve had one of my bad dreams or goes walking out on some business across the yard. I try to talk to him but he will not talk to me. Only sits or stands there. Not all things disappear quickly.

  It was a long letter. I included in it too an apology that when the General had come to see me in the lunatic house, I had unbuttoned my dress and made to sit in his lap. I apologized for having scratched his face and hit him with the vase of flowers at the start of his visit and for having cursed him to his grave when he shoved me away. I told him I had since tried to do better but had not always done better.

  Fear finds you out, I wrote. It always finds you out.

  I have not had any answer yet.

  Acknowledgments

  Neverhome could not have come into being without the help and support of Linda K. Wickens, Susan Schulten, Susie Schlesinger, Susan Manchester, Kathryn Hunt, Selah Saterstrom, Eva Sikelianos Hunt, K. Allison Wickens, Harry Mathews, Anna Stein, Chris Fischbach, Josh Kendall, Nicole Dewey, Miriam Parker, Pamela Marshall, Garrett McGrath, and Eleni Sikelianos (always). Profound thanks also to the Lannan Residency Program in Marfa, Texas.

  A few of the many excel
lent works I consulted during the writing of Neverhome deserve special mention: Dearest Susie: A Civil War Infantryman’s Letters to His Sweetheart by Frank Ross McGregor; The Civil War Notebook of Daniel Chisholm, edited by W. Springer Menge and J. August Shimrak; Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac by Frank Wilkeson; The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust; They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook; and, most crucially, An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, Alias Private Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862–1864 by Lauren Cook Burgess.

  The Southern Landscapes and battlefield photographs of Sally Mann were indispensable in helping me travel with Ash through mid-nineteenth-century America, as were the first two New History Warfare albums of Colin Stetson and the song “Sorrow, Sorrow” by Lorna Hunt.

  About the Author

  Laird Hunt is the author of several works of fiction. He won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2013 and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and a two-time finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Fiction. A former United Nations press officer currently on the faculty of the University of Denver’s creative writing program, he and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.