Neverhome: A Novel

by Laird Hunt

  “You are speaking in originalities,” I said.

  “My horse is dreaming about a bullet we both of us took.”

  I guessed the whiskey had worked up the swirl of war in him and when that happened you couldn’t know what a man would say. I met a man in the days after Antietam would drink whiskey then pull out a knife and start to working its point into himself. And not an hour before I had worn a dress and shot two men and killed another with a clay jug to the head. A man telling me what his horse was dreaming seemed small next to that. I leaned back against my stump and nodded and told him to go on.

  “We were behind lines, not more than a few slippery feet from Memphis and enough fresh rebels to put the fear into any size mountain of our men. We were not to engage at any cost, was our strict order, just reconnoiter and return to tell the tale. And it looked like we might get the errand done. Happy thinking. The kind has paved many a road down to its doom. Our way out of there took us through an ambush of sharpshooters and in the first volley half our boys got shot. It was a night darker and stranger than this one with winds running hither and thither and the moon playing hide-and-seek in the clouds. You thought you had a line on where they were firing from and then you would know—because another of us had been dropped—that you were wrong. A rumor got started it was Pickett and his boys we were brawling with and that set the strange weather to working in our heads and we started doing even worse than we already had. I don’t know how it happened but Rosie and I got ourselves about out of there and up onto a rise. I had one of my boys behind me and raised my hand to signal him to hold a minute when I felt a pinch and saw a musket ball had come to its clattery end in the crook of my fingers.”

  Lord held up his hand and pointed to the crook between his third and fourth fingers. Then he traced a line that dribbled down the back of his hand, along his sleeve and went curling into a drop off his forearm.

  “As I watched, that bullet slipped out from between my fingers and went falling away. It hit Rosie on his neck before it fell down to the ground. He gave up a shout and reared up like he had been hit for good when he felt it. We both about went over backward onto a pile of rock. In the dream he just had it was him caught the bullet in his right front hoof. And me the one went rearing up.”

  “Well, well,” I said.

  “That very night when I made my report at camp my commanding officer told me his grandfather had taken a spent bullet better than mine back in 1812. He had taken it directly between the eyebrows with enough fire left in it to penetrate the skin, skid down inside the right side of his face, and lodge behind his ear. When he was a boy, my commanding officer told me, it was a special treat to climb onto his grandfather’s lap and take a feel at the nub of bullet buried under his ear skin.”

  “That’s quite a dream,” I said. Though whether or not I said it out loud was a question. The events of the long day and now this strange colloquy had done their work and I had got settled down, alongside the Akron boys and Lord’s horse, into my own froggy snores. Whether Lord joined us awhile I don’t know because when we all three woke the next morning he was gone. For whatever reason we did not speak about that meeting as we set out again, and by and by it came to seem to me as vague as the horse’s dream.

  I had this idea we would march more or less back the way we had come and get ourselves home to camp by suppertime but during our overnight, the scatterings of Secesh forces had swollen up. From a rise we could see them spread out like moldy cauliflower across the valley we needed to traverse so we set off through the soldier pines to make our way around. It was cheerful weather for a hike. There were bluebirds in the green trees and breezes blowing quiet, happy things about. Made the night before seem another world entirely, nothing but twists of whiskey and steam. The Akron boys had been clammed up tight all morning but by and by they started into their chirping again. I expect I joined them for a chirp or two and who knows but what we might have started in with some full-out singing if an hour into our hike we hadn’t found ourselves walking through the dead.

  It was a shallow grave cut for hundreds hadn’t had much of its top put on. There was dust and swirls of leaves blown atop them so that we were several yards in when we realized what it was we had stumbled upon. I had my foot on a hand when one of the Akron boys said, “I just saw a face.” The other said, “That down there looks like an arm.” I thought at first it was just Union dead but then I saw there was plenty of gray had joined in too. There was dead and the bones of the dead for the next mile after that. “Here we go now, boys,” I said. There was dead sitting against trees, dead with their feet in the air, dead dangling over the boughs of trees. There was dead fallen three deep in creek beds and dead lying separately in a clearing tucked up to their chins in neat blankets of sun. I saw a head on its way to making a skull and thought about the belle and wondered if she was still wearing her own.

  As we passed through them, we came upon many a crow still making itself a leathery meal. Most of what we passed had also been touched by the kind of carrion creatures liked to peck in pockets and sacks. See what treasures lay there hidden. We ourselves checked a sack or three as we went. There was miles still to walk and the pork and crackers had given out. One of the Akron boys said we shouldn’t, leave the good dead lie and so forth, but I said whatever it was, they didn’t need it anymore. Anyway, hadn’t we already been crunching on the sandwiches of the dead? A quarter mile after I said this we found ourselves a sack shut tight had three good fistfuls of beef jerky wrapped in rose-embroidered napkins. There was a note had a rose motif at its top stuffed in there with the jerky. The note had got damp but some of it could still be ciphered. Come on home, my darling son was what could still be read. The darling son had on a blue, leaf-covered cap had come down cockeyed over his face. He had done his dying alone behind an alder bush.

  It was getting dark when I figured we had notched the miles north we needed and began to true us west. It was poplars and creek bed for the next few miles and when we struck a village had lost its church spire to a cannon blast, our necks were cold and our feet were wet. There was a large group gathered next to torches on a kind of square. If they noticed us or cared about it when we came up out of the creek bed and joined them they gave no sign. There was a gal holding a dried flower sitting in a chair at the front of the crowd. She had her eyes closed.

  “What is this?” I asked a smiling old grandpa leaning on a crutch.

  “She’s going to tell her story,” he said. “Everyone wants to gets to sit and tell their story.”

  “What’d he say?” said one of the Akron boys.

  “Why are they telling their stories?” I asked.

  “I told mine earlier,” the grandpa said. “I told about my mother’s pickled eggs. And her grasshopper soup. Back in Maryland. We had a famine. Come after the crops didn’t make it. When I was young.”

  “Why?”

  “Shhh,” said a woman next to us. She was holding a baby didn’t appear long for this dusky world. It looked like a hoarfrost had come down and done some of its designs on the baby’s brow. Hurt to consider it. Baby had a head the size of an apple. Lacked only the worms.

  “Because,” said the grandpa. He didn’t say any more. Just pointed over his shoulder at the woods we had walked out of. Then in the other direction at the church steeple wasn’t there anymore.

  “We’re all going to be dead soon is what he means though he don’t say it. That’s the way of this war. You’re going to kill us all,” said the woman holding the baby.

  Then the woman in the chair started to speak.

  “You all think I’m just Annie lives out behind the smithy comes and sweeps out your kitchens once in a while. Well, I’m not,” she said. She had a small voice. About the size of a popcorn kernel only got heated halfway at the bottom of the pot. But even the children in the crowd had gone quiet and there were only a few crickets and a kitten meowing somewhere so her words came clear.

  “You all think I am just the door
step in the church and the bridge board on the creek, but I’m not.” She looked up when she said this. She wore a big smile, held it kind of slack-jawed. She looked from face to face in the crowd, nodding. One of the Akron boys leaned over to me while she was doing this.

  “I think she’s drunk. I think they all are,” he said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “I know how to walk where they aren’t looking,” Annie said.

  “What in hell does that mean?” the other Akron boy said.

  “I know how to find the places where the world won’t ever see me. I can walk in the shadow and I can walk in the light. You all want to try and watch me?”

  There were nods from the crowd. The woman next to me said, “Uh-huh.” The grandpa gave a wave at the air with his crutch.

  “You want to try and see me do it?” said Annie.

  “Yes,” said the crowd.

  “Well, I won’t do it,” said Annie. “It’s just for me and never any of you mind. That’s my story. And when the soldier boys come back to finish their job they won’t see me even though I’ll be standing right there.”

  At this, Annie stood up and handed the flower to a man standing in the shadows beside her and he took her place in the chair.

  “We got to get on,” I said.

  “Stay and tell your story,” said the grandpa. “Everyone gets a turn.”

  “We got miles to walk.”

  “Boy, those miles will wait on you. They won’t go anywhere.”

  “That’s what I know.”

  “I’ll give you twenty dollars if you tell us your story. I got twenty dollars hid back of my shed. You can have it all if you’ll tell your story.”

  The grandpa had grown a kind of leer to him. He had his crutch up in the air again. There were others starting to look on.

  “Tell us the story about how you are going to kill us all. Kill us and our babies,” said the woman holding her little apple-head thing.

  “We don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said.

  “You won’t hurt anyone,” the woman said. “You can’t hurt anyone. Not here. We’re done hurting. Maybe we’ll lay some hurt out on you.”

  She said this and pointed up at the steeple had been obliterated, pointed just like the old grandpa had done, like it was the question had to be asked and the answer to the question both. As we walked away we heard the man holding the flower start up his story. He had a loud voice. Throat would have made a parade sergeant feel proud. His story sounded like a good one. Thomas Lord and his horse would have liked it. It was about long ago before the war finding a dead fish with a live snake in its mouth one week and a dead snake with a live fish in its mouth the next.

  We hadn’t got much beyond the squash-colored crackle of the torchlight when a woman wasn’t any too young came swishing on up beside us and invited us all three to supper. We told her we had to get back to camp and she told us she had corn bread and fresh-slaughtered pig. I said no once more, but the Akron boys were already heading off with her. I called out I would leave them behind but they didn’t listen and a minute later I saw my feet had betrayed me and I was following along. She lived a mile off the road we wanted on a rise looked out onto the valley we’d spent all that day trying to skirt. You could see the fires down there and hear the sound. The sound of an army settling down to sleep is a terrible thing. It is both loud and quiet. You can’t like something that is both.

  She had a neat little house the soldiers hadn’t found when they’d come through.

  “What kind of soldiers was it?” I asked her but she said she didn’t know, that it had been dark, that she had been up in her house all alone.

  “Must have been rebels, do you all manner of harm and call it God’s work,” said one of the Akron boys.

  “Sure enough,” the woman said in such a way you didn’t know, not even to get started, what she was agreeing to.

  I asked her her name. She said we didn’t need names. That it was just supper. And a cup or two of something to keep us all warm. She said this then put on a pair of colored glasses. They had purple glass and had belonged to her late husband who had once played cards on a riverboat.

  “He had a green eyeshade too but I can’t find that. These help me see better when the lamps are lit. You ever try on a pair?” she asked. We all took turnabout putting them on then pulling them off. They made the room look muddy and had a funny shape to them. Hexagons. I had seen someone had sown a flower bed in the shape of a hexagon in town once before the war and told her this. She put the glasses back on and asked me what color the flowers had been. I told her, though I wasn’t sure any longer, that they had been purple.

  “What was your story?” said one of the Akron boys.

  “I’m fixing to show you,” she said.

  I didn’t know what kind of hocus-pocus she and those glasses were going to get up to but she just led us out the back door, down a path, and into her garden. It was a fine patch. Well tended. Beans were good size. Eggplant and cherry tomatoes turning the moon to glow.

  “You got a sleeping arrangement out in this garden,” said one of the Akron boys.

  It was true. There was a bed sitting in the middle of the green. It was a big affair, carved headboard, feather bed, pillows flounced in pink.

  “I got a net I bring out against the mosquitoes. String a tarp when there’s rain. You sleep in the garden, it’s peaceful. The onions and lettuce get into your dreams. You can just go and go.”

  We all four stood there and pondered this. There were crickets scraping around us. You get too many crickets around you and you feel like you’re at the bottom of a bowl.

  “You said something about supper,” I said.

  She made no reply but after a minute more of cricket song we traipsed back into her house and she lit her lamps and pulled crocks of fresh cracklings out of her cupboard and a bottle out of a chest. It was a generous size of bottle and we all took our drinks from it. By and by we were as happy as a cackle of crows. Our hostess in her purple glasses was the happiest. She said when she had sat in the chair in town and told her tale they had all cheered. She asked the Akron boy sitting closest to her to tell his tale and when he had gotten about five words into it she stopped him and said, “May I kiss you?”

  He appeared struck. Took a hard swallow. “If you got to,” he said.

  So she leaned over and did the job. Right there at the table over cold pork and corn bread. She then asked if any of us could play the fiddle, that her old husband had left a fiddle behind him when he had gone off to “feed his hopes to the slaughter,” and she hadn’t heard a man’s hands on it since that day. The boy hadn’t been kissed got up then and took up the fiddle, turned it into tune, and started to play. This got our hostess and the kissed boy up to clabber arm in arm about the room. I leaned back and watched some of this but when the boy fiddling winked at me and started to play “Gallant Ash” I got up, made my excuses, and walked out the door. A minute later I was back in the vegetables and sitting on the edge of the woman’s garden bed. A minute after that I was lying down. I had on my mind that church steeple wasn’t there and those graves in the forest that weren’t graves. They were on my mind but I didn’t know how to think about them so I shut my eyes. I drowsed some but got up quick when I saw the woman had joined me.

  “Got those two all but asleep in there,” she said. She stood up after me and there followed a memorable farce around that bed in the moonlight. She would step toward me, her lips puckered, her arms up and good and set for a grope, and I would step backward and pivot away. In the moonlight her purple glasses glowed orange and rose. In between her attempts we would talk of the moon. Its ancient courses and seasons. She had read some poetry or her husband had and she made some remarks on it. Then she stepped at me again. This went on for a while. I got stung a time or two and wished we were doing our dance under a mosquito net. Presently she grew tired and we both went back inside. There wasn’t much more to that night. Only that the Akron boys ended up
finishing it just the two of them in that bed in the garden and I ended up with my head on that woman’s table dreaming there was a boat leaving the world but I couldn’t get on it because I was stuck to my chair.

  We had six-inch-shell headaches and one of the Akron boys had caught a cough but we trotted off of the widow’s property and away from that town the next morning like it had already been named target for cannon practice by the forces to come. We left off the trotting after a mile or two but kept up a good pace all that day and by and by the ragged boundary of our camp appeared. We didn’t look any too smart straggling up the road but one of the pickets recognized me and waved us through. It was a Sunday and warm so there was more boys than ordinary milling in the woods and by the creek and in the big pond it fed into. The Akron boy wasn’t coughing went off straight for the pond, pulling off his filthy clothes as he went, so it was just two of us continued along.

  We passed a birch had nailed to it a big creeper toad. One of its legs was gone. It looked like a finger tap would crack it in two. We went by a maple next had nothing but ladies’ names gouged into it. Jesamine, Turquoise, Apollonia, Marybeth, Ginestra, and so on. We hit the whiff of the camp just as we were passing the names and it didn’t make them read so sweet. Fate of us all. Near the congregation of tents leaned a sutler’s wagon looked picked over, but next to that wagon was a bench pushed up against a tree had a sign hanging from it said Shaves.

  “Shave,” I said to the Akron boy still with me.

  “Sure could use one,” he said.

  This wasn’t any more true for him than it was for me, for we were both as smoothbore as babies, but a shave was more by a bit than just a beard-scraping and we both of us fetched coins out of our pockets and sat down and it wasn’t a minute later that we both of us had steamed rags drooping over our faces. After the rags had drooped the heat out of themselves the old brown fellow running the show pulled them off and made slow circles with fresh hot rags over our filthy faces and if I didn’t gasp entirely out loud about how good it felt, the Akron boy did. When this part of it was finished the barber took still another hot rag and put it over my face and, after making a fuss with some shaving soap, went to work with his neat metal on the Akron boy. There wasn’t any scrape sound to what he was doing, just a kind of quick, low swoosh, but that didn’t stop him from tendering in some comments about how the young gentleman had sure been overdue and how he hoped “all that hard beard” hadn’t dulled his blade. When he had had his turn and it was mine, the Akron boy just slid right off the bench and lay down like dead Jesus on the ground.