Neverhome: A Novel

by Laird Hunt

  “I’ve been born again to better things,” he said as he lay there. Or he tried to say it. His cough had been holding off with the steam and soap but now it came back to him.

  “We’ll get you fixed up just right,” the barber said as he soaped my face. There was more lye in the soap than the kind I used when I had given Bartholomew his shaves in the kitchen at home but there was some lemon perfume to it too. Swoosh, swoosh went the steel through the soap. The instrument was old and had some rust on it but its edge was sharp. Every now and then as the barber swept my face, the owl-looking sutler owned the shop-and-shave outfit leaned out of his wagon and looked kind of mournful at us. I expect it was because his provisions had all been picked over and none too gently. Most of the times the sutlers made more money than Midas but there were other times that the boys got tired of handing over all they had for some stale moon cakes or stained sheets of paper and just took.

  “How we coming?” I said when it seemed the pantomime had probably run its course.

  The barber, who had been working with his face kind of close in to mine, leaned back a little like he was looking things over and said he just about had it, that there were still a few stubborn spots, but he was getting there.

  I shut my eyes when he said this, but I did not drowse. Instead I conjured up the picture that I was at home in my own kitchen and that it was me holding the blade, me had stropped it sharp.

  I had given Bartholomew a shave the day before I left for war. He hadn’t wanted to talk to me much since that night in the yard when I had shoved him away, but that morning I got up early and milked his favorite heifer and picked strawberries and set them down in front of him before our work. If it wasn’t the strawberries and cream set his jaw to working, it was the kiss I gave him on his ear, down on the hard part and onto the soft, and when I asked him if he wanted a shave into the bargain he took me up on the offer most courteously. He liked to sing while he shaved himself or I shaved him and that morning he sang happy songs had his foot tapping the floor so vigorous I had to tell him to quit or he might get cut. He quit his tapping but not his singing and next thing you knew he had found his way into a song had children in it, children running over hill and dale and couldn’t find their way home. He sang at this awhile, getting quieter and quieter, and when I tried to kiss him again in the middle of it he wouldn’t have my kiss, nor would he suffer my touch any longer, and stood with the soap still on his face and his beard half scraped, and when we worked that last day instead of standing shoulder to shoulder we did our working apart.

  I talked to my mother inside and outside my head a great deal that day we worked apart.

  “I am leaving here tomorrow and maybe forever, Mother,” I said to her.

  I know it, she said back.

  “I am leaving, Mother.”

  I know it.

  “I am leaving here.”

  Forever?

  “Isn’t that what I said?”

  You said maybe. It’s only forever if you don’t come home.

  You think you are never going to get back and then you are there and you wonder if you were ever gone. The camp was still the camp. Beside the pond-bathing activities, there were boys fighting over hardtack biscuits and having wrestling contests in a leg-churned pool of mud. A mule got loose while I was walking by it, and I spent an hour at catching him with a gang of fellows had their shirts off against the afternoon sun. What a picture it would have made could I have joined in.

  After the sun there was a cold rain and I discovered my corner of the tent had sprung a hole and spent some wet minutes in plugging it. During this storm a first lieutenant got caught with three helper women in his lean-to and was made to wear a barrel proclaiming the extent of his moral turpitude. Some of the boys who had robbed the sutler had been hung up under a beech tree by their thumbs. I barely got my eyes on either one of the Akron boys over those next days. You would have thought those tricks out in the woods hadn’t happened. The lieutenant spent a fair portion of his time wearing that barrel with tears in his eyes. The boys had been hung up by their thumbs were let down. I started to write Bartholomew about what had happened in the woods and ended up describing that lieutenant, how he cried and cried for shame. I used another page to write down my thoughts about being back home in our kitchen, about giving him his shave, about how sorry for all of it I was.

  Two days after I posted that letter I found myself again in the company of our Colonel. He had set up a desk in front of his tent to scribble out his letters and it took him a minute after I’d been announced for him to look up. He showed a little grander and grayer since our morning in the woods, but that must have just been the grand and gray of the afternoon settling down upon him. The weather will do all kinds of things to a man. It will make him look like a burned cinder or a pillar of ice or a pile of tapioca pudding left too long in the sun.

  “Gallant Ash,” the Colonel said, looking up at last. I had expected the travails of the war would have chased that sobriquet out of his mind but there as elsewhere I was wrong.

  “I have two things to discuss with you,” he said. “But first I want to ask you a question. Would that be all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. For what else would you say to your Colonel?

  “Have you ever met a man who was afraid to step out of doors?”

  “Depends on if stepping out of doors meant getting fired upon, sir,” I said. “Or getting cavalry-charged. I have stood fairly regular on the line next to men afraid of stepping out of doors and getting cavalry-charged.”

  The Colonel looked at me nice and long.

  “Are you afraid of stepping out of doors under such circumstances, Gallant Ash?”

  “I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t.”

  “But you do it.”

  “Every day I have to. Just like all your men.”

  “Not all my men.”

  “Most, sir.”

  “Fair enough, Gallant Ash. Let’s call it most. Most isn’t bad. Most is always about the best we can hope for.”

  “So we aren’t talking here about de facto all your men.”

  He laughed and I wondered if we had had our discussion now or hadn’t. I did not like the way I was feeling standing there, and apparently we had not.

  “I have a man in my company can’t stand it to step outside. Has a good address in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and hadn’t left it in five years before he took up the call to arms. Not even to sniff at the spring air. I know the village of Yellow Springs and the spring air there is fine. This man didn’t want it even if it came in through the filter of his curtain. Claimed it burned him. Now he stands alongside you on the lines. I have watched him in battle and he does not flinch nor will he follow his fellows and hide behind fence or rock or tree.”

  “Why won’t he?”

  “Because it is not bullets he is afraid of. He is afraid of the sun, the earth, the air, the all of it, the sky.”

  “I don’t know the man.”

  “He is a close relation. My cousin.”

  “In the infantry?”

  “He refused a commission.”

  “Why did he sign up at all?”

  “Why did you, Gallant Ash?”

  “Sir?”

  “We have already discussed the loyalty of your heart and it is not a question that requires answering. I have had my eye on you since your tree-climbing exploit. I have seen how you can make a squirrel hurt. I am also aware of your recent adventure. I don’t know and don’t want to know how you got taken in the first place. I can chalk that up to rebel wiles. Were they wily, the outlaw rebel fucks who took you unawares, Gallant Ash?”

  I did not answer his question. Just stared straight over his shoulder at the cot he had in his tent.

  “All right,” he said. “I’d not answer that either. Especially not as it included a vulgarity I lately find myself admitting too frequently into my discourse. Today I pose questions that deepen silence, rather than conclude it. That is the province
of literature, not leadership. Aurelius knew this. I’ve just had Long’s new version lent to me. Long is no fool. His Aurelius will serve our warring times. ‘Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul.’ ”

  The Colonel turned and took up a book had been lying at the foot of his cot. He opened it up to a page marked with a strip of purple leather and read to me. You ask me how I remember it these years later. I do not know.

  “How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame.”

  The Colonel nodded and set the book back on his bed. “My interest,” he said, turning to me, “lies not in your motivation for service, for service is its own great answer, but rather in how neatly you extricated yourself and your fellows from that mess.”

  “It was all three of us got out together.”

  “Your gallantry exceeds you. I have seen and spoken to those two men. They are greenhorns and barely out of the nursery and I exercise the hyperbolic arts in referring to them as men. They would both be better as bootblacks. It is a shame of our days and all days of war that we set our children to arms. One of them cried as he spoke to me.”

  “Like the lieutenant.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “He cried. In his barrel.”

  “He has been demoted and sent to fight on elsewhere. Carousing was not his central transgression.”

  “I didn’t do anything special, sir.”

  “All right.”

  “It was three of us got in and three of us got out.”

  “Fine, fine.”

  The Colonel lit a cigar. He put it in his mouth and took it back out. The smoke came over to me and set a cloud between us.

  “I’d had it in mind after your performance with those squirrels to make you a sharpshooter,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t want to be a sharpshooter,” I said.

  “No, perhaps not, but I’d had it in mind for having seen you in battle and taken account of your exploits and having seen how you barely even had to aim when you shot those tree rats out of their skins. I’d had it in mind to recommend you, in addition, for a citation. For bravery. For that episode with the cartridge boxes. I know about that too. But you hear the tense I am using. You hear that I am speaking in the past.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There are other stories making the rounds about you.”

  I took in a little suck of air. The Colonel’s smoke came in when I did that, caught the wrong part of my throat, and I coughed. I saw the lady crossing through the moonlight behind the house. I saw and felt her both.

  “Sir, I have been a good soldier and have fought well for the cause,” I said.

  “A good soldier, is it? Is that the phrase your mind makes? Is that what rises out of the mystery living its swamp-lit life between your ears?”

  I took another breath. I am coming home to you now, Bartholomew, I thought. Would it be such a bad thing? I should never have left and now I am coming home. The Colonel stood. He was half a head taller than me. He had broad shoulders, and the gilt on his saber handle gleamed in the gray light. I felt small, and tired. I didn’t know what I would wear. I had a sudden, wild wish that the stout lady’s dress hadn’t burned, that I had stuffed it in my pack and carried it back here with me.

  “I had a man in here late this morning says you stole rations out of his haversack while he was at his nap.”

  It took me a minute to hear what he had just said. When I had heard it, it took me another minute to take my mind away from the moonlight and that rustling sound I had made when I walked in the stout lady’s fine cloth to the coarse blue wool I now had on my legs and the Colonel standing behind his cigar smoke in front of me.

  “That man presented three others who were willing to testify that you had taken your fill of their rations too.”

  “It is lies,” I said. “I’ll fight any man says otherwise. I will feed him my fists and ask him afterward how he liked his meal.”

  The Colonel looked at me. He nodded.

  “Maybe so. Maybe it is lies. Probably it is. I’d expect we could rouse just as many or more to refute the charges. Maybe I don’t give a good goddamn. But I imagine you can see that I can’t offer you a special position or a commendation with such propositions swirling, can I?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I could not hold you to the light of general recognition and visibility under such circumstances. I couldn’t put all eyes in this camp on you. You might find you couldn’t move free any longer, that you had found your way into your own barrel, and then what would you do? Do you, Private, disagree?”

  I shook my head. He nodded. He picked up his book again but did not open it. He closed his eyes.

  “ ‘Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine.’ ”

  He tapped the book, opened his eyes.

  “ ‘And fortune hard to divine,’ ” he said again.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  We stood awhile. There was some cannon pop off at a distance and some birdsong closer by.

  “You may go now, Gallant Ash,” he said.

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrow and when he had let his eyebrow down I went.

  I am worn down to the bone,” I wrote my husband the evening after this exchange.

  “Come home to me when you are ready,” he wrote me back. “We can try again.”

  “I am not ready, not yet,” I wrote.

  “I’ll keep on waiting, I will,” he wrote.

  Then the Colonel gave orders and we marched across a strip of pretty water, over a low green mountain, and into the start of my hell.

  TWO

  The battle lasted days. In our minds those days were weeks. In our dreams—taken in short heaps on the hard ground—those weeks were years. My company had been given a battery to help guard and some nights we had our rest under the cannon. The rebels kept us hot and more than once it was blade work under the stars. In the middle of a fight we got the order to drop and our boys fired off that six-inch right over our heads. The rebels had heard the order too and they dropped along with us so the only thing got hurt was an oak tree.

  During the day they worked their mortars on us. You would have thought it was snowing dirt and fine flaked metal after a while. They killed a number of my company off for good but never took our cannon while we were at the guard. One time they tried a charge. To this day I will raise my weapon on any rebel I see, but the sight of a line of those fine horsemen coming at you through the smoke was a beautiful thing to behold. There was the part of the South worth keeping in that charge. It wasn’t the part kept chattel slaves to scratch their masters’ backs and make their beds. To work their fields. To build their houses. To whip when they wanted to. It was those horsemen, riding low, pistols at the ready, sabers up. They looked like knights. Like it wasn’t powder black on their faces they were wearing but grim ladies’ scarves on their sleeves.

  We made our line and cut them down with our muskets and I saw our cannon take off half a handsome white gelding’s head. They did not stop though and got close enough for swords and hooves and pistol work. You ever try to fight a man on a horse? Man with a weapon in his hand? Man come up from Natchez with the demon horse he was born on and hungry for blood? A boy not five feet away from me got made into jelly by a piebald mare with red eyes. Another got his head cracked right open with a pistol butt. I took a saber point across my arm and might have met my glory but a ball come out of nowhere took my ravisher off to his own. It was reinforcements. Four hundred walking blues to fight the one hundred horsemen. Only the grays had infantry of their own. I got a first lieutenant died five minutes later to tie a shirtsleeve tight around my wound. When it was snug
, I loaded my musket and went back for more.

  We brawled and we brawled and when there weren’t enough of us left to guard the battery, they sent up more fresh troops and offered us flank work in the trees. We had not one of us slept even a snack wink in two days but they had us double-time it. I expect I was not the only one could not hear from the cannon fire, and we ran to that fight in the woods in a silence I would trade the happy half of the world not to make the acquaintance of again.

  I saw the Colonel in those trees. He rode up and made a short speech to his officers and then crossed his hands over his saddle pommel to wait with us. When he saw me, he said something. I couldn’t tell what it was. He said it again and I pointed at my ears and shook my head. He nodded, lifted his chin, and looked a little ways down the line. There was a man sitting on a rock with his musket in his lap. We were all the rest of us dug in. I’d seen that man in a fight before. Stood next to him. I thought I could shoot quick but he was like a Gatling gun. I had a minute trying to picture his room in Yellow Springs with the air trying to get in the window to kill him. I drowsed into that picture and it took me far away. When I woke, the Colonel was still there on his horse and the man afraid of the whole wide world was still sitting on his rock, smiling about something and scratching at his knee.