Neverhome: A Novel

by Laird Hunt

  “Charge those cannons” came the order. “Kick their fucking teeth out.” “Break his other leg.” “Don’t you let them leave.” “Burn them up alive.” After it had gone on awhile, if they had told me to dig a hole, jump in it, and carry their colors down to hell, I would have dropped my pack and tried.

  What I wasn’t ready for came when they had a regular troop of contraband in to help us near Sharpsburg. This group had been cut to pieces by fierce fire and had saved a hospital full of our wounded boys went the story, and they lived as you could see on half our poor rations without a grumble and we gave them their respect. We worked alongside them for several days and then they got the call to go to help out elsewhere. It was when they were formed up and starting to walk out that I saw a worker in their number wasn’t like the others. This worker was long of leg and broad of shoulder and carried an ax could have cut down a redwood tree. The worker looked at me, got lit up in the eyes, and nodded as their line went past.

  “Hey, you,” I called out.

  “Hey, you, your own self,” she called back.

  I had dreams of getting seen and discharged in disgrace every night the next week after that. I wrote down this dream to Bartholomew and sent it to him and he sent me back a letter said he had had his own dream. In it I had come back home crazy from the fight. I worked the farm but couldn’t speak plain English anymore. I dug at the ground with my gun and was bleeding all over and couldn’t quit that bleeding no matter how many poultices he applied.

  He sent me a thimble of dirt in that letter and asked me to swallow it so I could remember him and our good old home. I wrote him back that I remembered him and it and that I didn’t do anything but that all the time. I wrote him that I thought sometimes I might die if I did not see him soon, that it made me homesick unto my death when I considered how I might be shot down and never see him nor the farm again. I wrote him, as I had written him before, that I kept his likeness sewed tight to my breast and that I touched at it every night before I slept. I wrote him that if it was crazy to think I might die of the thought of us never again getting to sit quiet together—holding hands or not, just sitting, being back there like we had always been, on our chairs or hay piles in the yard—then I was crazy and they ought to take away my hat and my rifle and feed me to the hogs.

  I wrote him all of this. Then saw that I was shaking and shivering at the end of it. When one of my tent mates asked me what was wrong I told him he could go to hell. When he was gone I took the dirt Bartholomew had sent me and swallowed it straight down.

  I had that dirt in my stomach when the Colonel called at my tent earlier than I liked the next morning and stood outside quietly coughing a minute while I clambered up out of my blankets and stepped over my fellow sleepers and tugged on my shoes.

  “I hear there are fat squirrels in those woods, Gallant Ash,” he said when I was up and out in front of him with my jacket pulled half on.

  “Yes, sir, I have heard the same,” I said.

  “Heard or seen?” he said.

  “Seen,” I said, then added, “There’s lots of them,” though I wasn’t sure at that minute whether or not any part of this was true.

  “Well, I have a cook, this fellow here,” he said, pointing at a cinnamon-colored man with a snowy beard was holding a brace of good-looking hunting metal, “who claims if I can come up with the substance, he can make me a fine squirrel stew. You think we can come up with the substance?”

  “I have shot squirrel before.”

  “I would have laid down money on it.”

  We carried our weaponry through the still dark and headed straight for the deeper portion of the woods. We had to go a good ways because everyone in the regiment had made firing into the trees for dinner meat his de facto religion. It was the Colonel who led the walk and who used this choice phrase, de facto, and explained to me what it meant.

  “So you can say a thing is one way all you want but de facto means it’s the other,” I said.

  “De facto is the way it actually is.”

  “Are we losing this war or winning it?”

  The Colonel let the quiet of the morning answer a while at my question that hadn’t had anything close to do with what we were just talking about. Then he let the small cigar he pulled out of his pocket and nibbled the end off of and lit answer at it some more.

  “You can still shoot squirrel even if I’m smoking, can’t you?” he said.

  “Aren’t you planning on shooting any yourself?”

  “I don’t see too well at a distance, especially not in a low light.”

  I almost at that minute told him that my husband suffered from the same affliction, came only a thin string away from uttering it. Stood looking down but leaning backward at the precipice.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes what?” he said.

  “I can shoot squirrel and you still smoke.”

  I did. Three of them, silver as glittery snakes, two good-size. I took them all through the head near their nests while the Colonel sat on one log after another with his cigar. After the first one fell near fifty yards off from where we were situated, he apologized for not having brought along a dog.

  “I never did hunt with a dog,” I said.

  “I always have. When my eyes were still adequate I used to hunt for duck and other waterfowl. Dogs were indispensable. We are short on good dogs in this regiment.”

  “I have seen dogs swim but never had one that much liked to.”

  “On your farm in Darke County?”

  “That’s not really where I’m from.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  I looked away from him and deeper into the trees. Felt him shrug. Waited for him to say something else about it but he just sat there, quiet, peering at me with those eyes he’d said didn’t work too well.

  “Sir, will it make a difference? Does it make any difference?” I said.

  “That you are not from where you claimed to come from when you enlisted?”

  I nodded.

  “I have at least two officers who are not from the cities they claim in their paperwork to have a connection to. I can offer only gross conjecture when it comes to the numbers among the enlisted men. I expect many who have died in our fights together weren’t from where they said they were.”

  “I’m from another state altogether, I said.”

  “All right,” he said, then added. “As long as it isn’t a Southern state. Although now as I say it, I don’t know why that would matter. If you are loyal of heart.”

  “I am loyal of heart,” I said.

  “I know it,” he said after a minute.

  “I’m from Indiana.”

  “Our good brother to the west.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “If I die, you might let them know about it in Randolph County, Indiana.”

  “At the Thompson farm?”

  “Yes, sir, if it weren’t too much trouble.”

  “I expect it wouldn’t be. But let’s all hold off on dying.”

  “How do we do that, sir?”

  He shook his head, smiled a little, then sucked in good and long on his cigar.

  “Do you want me to clean these?” I asked.

  It took him a minute to know what it was I was talking about, like he had gone off a long way into thoughts didn’t necessarily include me and had to journey back to the squirrels and woods to make me my answer.

  “The cook can do it. In fact, he told me expressly not to let anyone besides him get anywhere near them with a sharpened knife.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Yes, it is all right, Gallant Ash.”

  We were in an airy place, a clearing amidst the darker reaches of walnut and hickory and loblolly pine. There were orioles and sparrows at early-morning play in the trees and a breeze carrying through the side-lit trunks could have made you believe it wasn’t fixing any second now to get good and hot. At home I had hunted once a
week even in winter but I had not picked up a gun to fire at anything wasn’t a human being since the Colonel had sent me out after that extra pig. When he handed me one of his small cigars I took it and let him fetch me a light and sat there and breathed air and smoke and felt the dirt from the night before that I had stirred up in talking about Indiana settle back in my stomach. After a while we strung up the handsome squirrels I had shot and talked some more about hunting dogs, then returned to camp.

  The Colonel sighed a long loud sigh after we had reached his quarters and he had thanked me for my company and we had handed over the squirrels and our fine rifles to the Colonel’s cook. I wanted to ask him what made him sigh so loud but there are some questions you don’t get to ask and our walk together was done. Also the cook, with some stage flair, sniffed at the barrels of the rifles we had handed him and rolled his eyeballs in the direction of the Colonel once his nostrils had completed their inspection of the unfired one. When the cook had finished this pantomime, which the Colonel acknowledged with one raised gray eyebrow only, he took up a knife and set to work on the squirrels with such fierce devotion to the chore that neither one of us could take our eyes off him. Later that afternoon, just like the Colonel promised me when I parted ways with him, I found a covered bowl of stew had my name on it sitting on a crack-legged stool outside my tent. I don’t know why I took it into my head to tote that bowl off away into the woods to eat. To sit alone in the dusk light next to a holly bush, bats and owls beginning to scar the air above my head, and sup slowly on that stew that tasted better by far than dirt.

  You eat dirt, you dream strange dreams. Going-home dreams, dreams in which you try to run across your own fresh-plowed field in pants or dress either one and you can’t; in which, home at last, you try to work your own front-door latch and you can’t make it budge. You eat handsome-cooked squirrel stew sent over to you by your Colonel, you don’t dream at all. Is the way I experienced it. Dead as a dark day to the world and slow to rise again. Fact it took a solid kick to my side applied by the tent mate I had told to go to hell to rouse me. He grinned and nodded when I thanked him for it. He didn’t grin as much when I punched him, good and hard, at the meaty part at the top of his arm.

  A few hours later, still feeling that long, syrupy sleep, I got captured. I was out on the scatter end of a picket with a couple of greenhorns conscripted out of Akron to keep us new company and who couldn’t keep their gums from flapping. It was Longstreet this and Sherman that and they had seen Grant one time in a parade and come autumn Lincoln was going to fall and some sniper man needed to set his sights on Jefferson Davis and put an end to the whole shooting match. They talked up the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and said they wished they could dream up a piece of poetry like that, that Madame Julia Ward Howe deserved a place up in the heavens amongst the highest angels for finding such handsome words. They had opinions on our supply lines that were based on information had ceased to be valid back in 1861 and they didn’t mind a smidge, maybe even liked it for all I knew, when I corrected them on it. Dark-colored folks were just fine with them because they had seen a pair of impressive ones playing clown and strongman in a traveling show outside Bowling Green one time.

  They thought that fighting to free the man in bondage was just about as admirable an occupation as anyone could cook up based on this one long-ago sighting they had probably seen wrong. It rained a lot where they came from, but it was good Northern rain and never made your feet rot. Barefoot fighting was best, they said, but they wouldn’t give their shoes away. You gave up your shoes and you were as lost as a soul gone off to his ravishing in a gray uniform. A lassie had shown them her underskirts in Cincinnati on the way to the war. The underskirts had been whiter, is the way they put it to me as we stood out there on picket duty, than the whitest clouds and I thought to myself, my own sad underthings in mind, that she hadn’t been wearing them long.

  The day before this parley, they had got hold of some fair-quality tobacco, and they took turnabout chewing and spitting and loading up their pipes. I still had the taste of the Colonel’s cigar in my nose and I thanked them kindly but declined when they offered me some. I think they had seen about a quarter ounce of engagement between them. About every half of the hour they would interrupt their fine flow of conversation to ask me what I thought, but I told them if I did think, and I tried not to, especially after I had gotten some good sleep, it wasn’t their kind of cowpatties I did my thinking about.

  They reckoned, I suppose, that this was just salty-veteran talk, which it was and it wasn’t, and kept right on airing their opinions and relating their anecdotes. They tried to bring up the Gallant Ash story, which someone or other at camp had thought to revive even though I might as well have climbed that tree and draped that jacket a hundred and twenty years before. I told them there hadn’t been anything to it, so they asked me if it was true I had two weeks before, at the greatest risk to my health and happiness, taken cartridge sacks off dead and wounded soldiers in the middle of a fight because my company had shot itself out of ammunition, and I asked them who had told them that. Everyone, they said, was saying it, and they wanted to know if it was true. It was true, I said, I supposed. Then we got taken. The rebel boys, or that’s what we first took them for, had just walked right up behind our afternoon parley and poked at us with their guns. I felt so stupid and so angry I about threw up but one of them hit me a handsome one with the butt of his sidearm and told me there wasn’t any time for that.

  They marched us or kept us standing for the next several hours and it was clear a few minutes into this outing that we hadn’t got ourselves taken by regulars but by common outlaws. They told us they knew some rebel captain or major who had promised up a reward for captured Union soldiers. I asked them what this fine officer’s name was and what regiment he was attached to and what fights he had fought and what fights they had fought and got a fist put hard to the side of my head. They had hiked a good way out from wherever this bounty was. They had come so far from that reward, in fact, that we had to stop halfway there to rest up for the night.

  It was in a house looked to have once been nice and wasn’t anymore. There was mud streaked on the floors and on the tabletops, and broken crockery lay scattered about. Pages from newspapers and illustrated magazines had been tacked up to the walls then torn off and others tacked up. In one corner, under a cracked sconce, lay what looked like it had once been a vase and the crisped stalks of its former flowers. In another corner lay a pile of grease-stained rebel caps and grays. It didn’t add to the smell of the place that one or both of the Akron boys had wet himself when for part of the march after I had spoken, the outlaws had talked about the bounty being “dead or alive” or “tortured and dead” or some mix of them both. There was a side room led directly off the main one and after they had given us each another smack and greeted with a laugh and a boot my request for a sip of water they pushed us in and locked the door.

  Both those Akron boys, who looked in the smudge of green moonlight we had in there to be no older than sixteen and probably weren’t even that, commenced to gibbering as soon as the door had been shut, but I got up and looked out the little window. One of our captor friends was outside leaning against a magnolia tree and smoking a pipe you could see was too fancy by about a half acre not to have been stolen. He looked at me, nodded, took the fancy pipe out of his mouth, and smiled an ugly, brown-gum, gap-tooth smile. He was the one had hit me with his pistol at the start of things and laughed it up the loudest about our drink.

  “Why don’t you boys climb out the window and suck some fresh air out of my firearm,” he said.

  I had already seen up too close that he carried a Colt. Mean-looking piece. Probably special-bore.

  “I’ll take my chances in here,” I said.

  “Wise choice,” he said.

  “What is it you plan on doing with us?”

  “Turn you in for bounty. You already been told that,” he said.

  “Turn us in as
what?”

  He didn’t answer, just tapped a little at his boot with the Colt. I could see he was provisioned up with a clay jug. I smiled back at him.

  “You enjoy your night now,” he said.

  Growing up, I had known a son-of-a-bitch cut about like him lived in the first town over from our farm. I’d see him when we went in for market days. Each time we went in he gave me a lick. Once he pushed me down into a puddle turned the front of my clothes dark brown. My mother was still alive then. Still strong. She looked at me when I walked up to her and shook her head. She worked awhile at selling the corn she had brought and then she turned and grabbed me good by my ear and whispered into it hard.

  “We do not ever turn our cheek.”

  I looked at that son-of-a-bitch out smoking his stolen pipe by his borrowed tree one more time, then turned away. I went over and leaned against the door that had been locked and saw that it was solid and would not easily be breached. Anyways, there were two of them had their own kinds of pistol were eating at some pork-and-cracker sandwiches they had brandished about for us to admire in the room beyond. There was no gap in the ceiling and none in the floor. There was, though, another smaller door in the room. It didn’t open directly onto our deliverance but deliverance offers itself in different ways. It was a narrow closet, the contents of which, lying there like last Sunday’s lunch, were made out of felt and crinoline.

  I have often wondered what my mother would have looked like in a pair of britches. I have tried to pull pants on her legs in my mind but the exercise is not easy; the result does not satisfy. I get them pulled on and think I have done the chore but look again and see that she still has her old brown work dress on. I do know that my mother had legs made of iron and that they were long, and the times I saw them bare they looked like they were holding themselves still and springy at the bottom of a rushing stream. I saw her legs those Sundays of the month we would take our bath. She would step out of the bath and those legs just kept on coming out of the water like they were tornadoes climbing up out of a pond.