Neverhome: A Novel

by Laird Hunt

  I saw boys in the war had legs some like hers but you wouldn’t have traded hers for theirs. There wasn’t ever anything I saw she couldn’t lift if she got her legs under it. Her arms weren’t any too thin but it was the legs on her that set her apart. She talked about britches some. We’d have a hired man now and again to help at a chore and we would sit down to lunch and she would chew on her cucumber salad and squint and remark that if the hired man had stacked more hay or climbed a ladder more quickly than she had, it was because he didn’t have skirts to get tripped up on. One of these times she told me about how her mother had one whole summer risen up every night and put on her father’s work pants and cinched the waist and gone out to do moonlight work on her roses. We did not have any pair of britches in our house but after this story I borrowed a pair off a line outside town and when my mother was asleep one night tugged them on. It was a close night and I did not at all like the feel of the rough wool on my legs but I jumped a puddle and climbed a fence and understood the principle quick enough.

  After we had decided that I would go to war, I made a pair of pants out of sackcloth and again went out in the moonlight to practice in them. This time I went out in my britches after dark not because I feared the comment of others but because I did not want anyone beyond Bartholomew to know what I was planning, didn’t want anyone to puzzle on it, to speculate. There was and are plenty around could put two and two together and not get nervous to see the sum come out as five.

  A time or two of my moonlight parades, Bartholomew came out into the dark with me. We ran barefoot races through the rows. We took a turn at what we thought marching might be and stepped together across the yard. We went scampering down the lane and one night climbed all the trees in the grove. It didn’t strike me a second on that night that I might one day think about doing just exactly the opposite, think about taking off my pants and putting on a dress and going out to gain advantage in the dark.

  There was no place for dresses that night back home. After we had done our climbing and racing, Bartholomew and I shucked off our britches both of us and lay down together at the edge of our yard. There were mosquitoes out in some number but we thrashed and rolled so eagerly that they barely got a chance at us. Bartholomew came up close on his completion and told me he wanted to stay. “Stay close now,” he said. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I pushed him away. Saw his fine face in the dark. We had done our trying I told him and look what had come of it.

  “I do not want you to leave,” he said.

  “Don’t you?” I said.

  “Constance,” he said.

  “Ash, love,” I said, already knowing what to be called.

  “You are my Constance,” he said.

  “Ash is my name. I will not answer now to any other.”

  And when I saw he had no reply to make and wasn’t going to get up, only lie there in the yard in his mosquito-bait nothings, I got up myself and pulled on my pants and pushed him aside, a little harder than I like to think of now. Then I went running off away from him, speeding up and slowing down until I felt sure it was starting to come natural and there wouldn’t be anything could stop me, like it was to be running races and fence-jumping and tree-climbing from one end to the other of the war.

  The son-of-a-bitch with the Colt was drowsing and the Akron boys were asleep and tucked safe away from their troubles a minute in their dreams when I pulled that pile out of the closet and saw that it would do. It was two dresses, one green, one red, owned once by a stout lady gone down the road or into the earth or who knew where. I picked the darkest corner, shrugged out of my clothes and unwrapped myself, and put the green dress on. It was snug in the chest and loose in the waist but I unstrung my belt off my britches and gave it a shape. There was some stain on it but the stain would work to my favor. I tore a stretch of the other dress off and wrapped it around my shoulders in the idea it might approximate a shawl.

  Then I drew up the little window, dropped my blues down soft onto the ground, and climbed out. First thing I did was make my way to the bushes where I hadn’t gotten to go in what felt like a week. I sat there with that dress on and did my business and a shiver came up over me. I hadn’t felt my legs free under a dress in a year, hadn’t even so much as held a piece of crinoline let alone have it crawl all over me. I got prickly bumps up to their ends. That image of my mother’s legs unspringing themselves out of her bath came back to me. Tornadoes coming up out of the waters. I imagined I had tornadoes under my skirt when I went rustling over in that stout lady’s dress to where that son-of-a-bitch lay sleeping his own evil sleep next to the magnolia tree. He had that clay jug on the ground next to him that I had watched him sip out of until he nodded. I picked it up slow then dropped my knee hard onto his chest so that his head popped up and as it did I smashed that heavy jug down. I smashed it down again, and then a third time, and then I put my hand into the blood I had made and brought it back up to my face. I brought some more of it up to my neck, then stood and draped my shawl over my head. Then I took his fine pistol, checked it, cocked the hammer, held it behind my back, and walked around to the front door.

  It didn’t take but a minute to rouse them. Like I thought it might happen, one of them leaned up at the front window and took a look at me and when he saw me he gave a grin. His teeth didn’t look any better than his dead son-of-a-bitch friend’s. I said I had been set upon by rogues in the forest, that I needed his help. He opened the door and called me “honey doll” and I shot him in the mouth. His friend had his gun to hand and he lifted it but got stuck a second too long wondering what it was was happening. What this woman wearing the face of one of their prizes was doing shooting people dead. He took his first bullet in the neck. When he stood and tried a step sideways I put one in his chest. He fell over in the pile of rebel grays. You almost couldn’t hear him land. I went over to see if I had finished my work, saw I hadn’t, and shot him again.

  I put the fine Colt pistol down on the table, then stepped out the front door. I stood a minute and looked down the pale lane ran away off into the dark. Looked like a thought you’d had and then lost. After I had stood I sat down on the front steps. Exactly what Bartholomew had done, the morning I set out on the road that had taken its many windings and had now led me down this pale lane and again into a dress. I had had it in mind that morning of my leaving that despite our troubles of the past year he would give me some fine Bartholomew word of parting, then wave at me as he wiped away a tear. Would stand tall and wave. Instead, he had looked one last time at me, wrapped his arms hard around his chest like he was afraid his lungs might leave him, and sat down.

  “You had better get to marching because I can’t stand it to see you any longer when you are already gone,” he said when I came over.

  “I am not gone yet, husband,” I said.

  “Constance is gone,” he said.

  He had a far-off look in his eyes, like he had to see through a thousand miles even then, when I was standing right next to him, to find me.

  “I am here,” I whispered, bending close.

  “Off to war with you, Ash Thompson,” he said.

  He said, “I will stay behind and guard this life we don’t have and this family we don’t got.”

  “Husband,” I said.

  “Go on now, Ash,” he said.

  He was still holding his arms tight around his chest and not looking in my direction when I rounded the bend.

  Now, when I could undouble my own self, I sat down on the front step and wiped at my eyes and thought about my Bartholomew gone from me all those long months and miles away. Then I stepped back in, took up one of the canteens sitting in a slosh on the floor, and drank. The Akron boys had been quiet first but now they were pounding on the door. I drank some more then took off the stout lady’s dress, hid it away, wrapped myself back down, got my blues on, picked up some of the dry pork the outlaws hadn’t eaten, took a crunch, then let my fellow soldiers out.

  “How did you do it?” they asked me w
hen they had had their drink and quit their jumping up and down.

  “Trickery,” I told them. “Trickery simple and pure.”

  “There was a lady here,” they said. “We saw her setting around to the front of the house.”

  “Lady?” I said.

  They both of them looked at me and I didn’t like the way they were looking so I fetched them up a piece of pork each and then, with the fine Colt I had picked back up without knowing why, pointed at the pile of grays serving as a bed to the dead man in the corner.

  “You know what they were planning to do with us?” I said.

  They shook their heads.

  “They were planning to put us in those goddamn rebel colors and march us up to their ranks as deserters. I expect when we got close enough they were going to set us loose to run.”

  “Why?” they said.

  “So that after they had shot us in the back we couldn’t answer any questions when they turned us in for deserter bounty.”

  It got quiet in that house after I said that and we all stood and chewed and looked at the dead men at our feet and then one or the other of them asked if that was truly what they had planned and I told them I expected it was. As they chewed on and thought about this and gave out a shiver, I told them I didn’t want to hear any more talk about ladies walking around the yard. They could tell all they liked about what we had gone through and add whatever they liked about their own hands in our escape. They were thinking about getting candied up as rebels and being shot for deserters and when I said this their eyes went wide and they nodded at the idea of looking like more than spare valises in the closet in the story to be told.

  “No more talk about ladies in the moonlight, now,” I said solemnly. They said they felt sure they’d been dreaming and I told them to help themselves to whatever they liked from our friends. One took a rubber cape hung on a chair and the other of them went around the back of the house and borrowed the brogans off the first one I’d killed. They both, “to show the boys back at camp,” picked up a souvenir firearm. They asked me, greedy-like, if I planned on keeping the Colt. Afraid of where its remaining bullets might take it upon themselves to travel, I told them I thought it ought to stay behind at the scene of its triumph. They smiled and nodded and looked, each one of them, like they were at home and heading back to the nursery for a long sleep. I set the Colt down in the corner amongst the dead flowers and was relieved to no longer be holding it. The outlaws had set our Springfields and cartridge bags by the door to the kitchen and we picked them up. On the way out one of us, might have been me, knocked over the last lit lamp in the house. Instead of putting our boots to the fire we walked on away and let it burn.

  In the old days there were Indians here. Miami, Illini, who knows, maybe it was some of the Shawnee. They had a camp on the rise sits in the middle of the front field. Every now and again I still churn up an arrowhead. There are oyster shells from far-off waters in our dirt. There are chiseled bear and wolf bones. When I was a child and my mother let me go, I used to run out to the rise with a feather band on my head. I expect I got a friend or two to play at it with me over the years. You can’t pick anything up out of the dirt that will take you close to the true past, but the child a-dance at dusk amid the chopped-down cornstalks can conjure it. That child I was is long gone but I remember some of her tricks and now and again I pick up a lost feather in the yard and feel a flicker. The fields look to move then. The air gets heavy and fills itself with fires and hurt faces.

  My mother came to this place when she was a girl. She had grown up a ways near Noblesville, daughter to a blacksmith and the lady who wore pants in the rose garden. The blacksmith did well and my mother got a good start on growing up. When I was a child there was a painting of my mother sitting in a carriage next to her father. I do not know if it was her mother made the picture or someone else. Many was the time I would take that painting down off the fireplace and study it. I had never in my life seen my mother in a white dress and I had never seen a bow in her hair. She knew what crinoline felt like. She knew about crepe and silk and every kind of fancy cloth. The horse they had in front of them was a good one, and the blacksmith had his gentle eye on my mother in her white dress and he was smiling. A nice smile. Kind you could linger in. He was a blacksmith come over from the Old Country could read, and he and the lady who liked roses made sure my mother could too. Filled her head with fairy tales. Kind that can make your blood curdle. I still have some of the books they taught her with. He and the lady who liked roses died before my mother was done growing up, and she got sent, her and her books and her picture, to live with an aunt on this farm.

  I don’t know what happened to my mother’s mother, nor do I have much of any idea where that picture is now. What I do know is that when my mother was grown up and had had me and all that was past and she could sit on her own front porch and laugh again her own laugh, she would still dream to waking at night about thorns.

  I have my own kind of dream that chases me up and off my bed. In it, I am in the middle of a crowd of faces I ought to know but can’t recognize. I have grown small again and can’t fight my way through them. It is summertime and the air is close and I need to get to my mother and can’t. There is some in the crowd carrying torches. They are talking, loud, but I don’t need to hear them to know what they say. I know what they mean to do. I have been here before. The crowd is men and women both. It is a good long time ago. Once not too far back I must have yelled my way half up out of this dream because when I woke, Bartholomew was standing in my doorway looking at me. He stood there and I lay there and then he smiled that small smile of his and went floating back to his bed.

  It was that dream came to mind as we stood a minute watching that house start to go up. I get a shiver when it comes and I got a shiver that night so I told the boys we had to go.

  “Pretty, ain’t it?” one of them said.

  “There’s dead souls in there,” I said.

  They both of them gave a look showed they hadn’t thought of that aspect to the equation, then turned to make tracks. Away from the house along the pale lane we hurried. When we came to a road we took it. There were hoot owls in the high branches, sharp-tooth hunters in the trees. We came to a narrow crossroads had a darkened house at each of its corners. There was a white cat sitting on the porch railing of one of them but other sign of life there was none. A half mile up the road we struck a dead mule. It was reclining on its side and had had most of its stomach and much of its front legs chewed off. We passed a pond had the moon painted on its middle. You could see moths diving at it, hoping their hope of the ages about reaching the light. We hadn’t got much beyond that pond when we struck a horseman coming through the woods. We all three of us dropped down on one knee and raised our weapons but the horseman held up his hand.

  “Union officer, men,” he said.

  “Prove it,” one of the Akron boys said.

  “Not sure I can, least not to your satisfaction, but if you lower your weapons I’ll climb down off Rosie here and we can step off the road and talk.”

  We all three looked at each other, then I nodded and they nodded and the horseman kicked his leg over nice and neat and slid down off his mount. He walked him over to a hickory stump, hitched him tight, then told us to come on over and take a seat. There was a mossy log or two shone blue beside him in the moonlight. We came over and sat with him and he pulled out a bottle freshly filled with whiskey. He pulled the cork out with his teeth, took a drink, then offered it over to us. At first I shook my head but he insisted.

  “You have that look about you,” he said.

  “What look?”

  “Of men just been fighting some fight.”

  His name, he said, was Thomas Lord and he was a junior cavalry officer attached to the Kentucky Volunteers. He had gotten separated from his unit in a skirmish and now couldn’t get his way straight in the dark.

  “My horse knows, I just don’t trust him as well as I should,” he said.r />
  “That’s a fine horse,” I said.

  “I rode him to war and haven’t stopped riding him and reckon one day, Heaven willing, I’ll ride him home.”

  “But you don’t trust him.”

  “It’s a defect in my personality. Not the biggest one.”

  The horse whinnied when he said this. Lord leaned over and gave him a tender smack on his side. We had broken out the pork and crackers we had taken off the dead outlaws and after he had had a few crunches of what we shared out to him, Lord gave what was left of his part to the horse. The horse ate his portion with his dainty horse lips then shut his eyes. The Akron boys took this for a signal and shut their own and soon were snoring snores that sounded like they had each one shoved a fat frog down his throat. Me and Lord drank awhile and listened to their frogs croak, then Lord asked me what we had gotten ourselves into. I told him. The version where I hadn’t done it all. Killed them all. Or put on a dress.

  “I heard about schemes like that,” he said. “There’s other varieties but that’s the general idea. Especially the part about you ending up in rebel grays and dead.”

  “That we got taken in the first place was my fault. I let these two cobs of corn get to carrying on.”

  We drank in silence a time. Lord’s horse gave out a kind of bark in his sleep and Lord said, “He’s having that dream.”

  Like I said, I had been thinking about my own dream, so I gave a look over at Lord. He saw this look and smiled back at me.

  “You sit on something long enough you start to be that thing and it starts to be you. I had an uncle in Louisville about never left his soft chair. He would get up and I wasn’t the only one would have sworn that chair would give out a cough and wet wheeze just like the ones my uncle did.”