by Laird Hunt
The argonauts, which was the term he had used, even though they were no Greek explorers, just men and women bent on making it west, had done well for a while, the cousin had told it those years later upon his return, and then they hadn’t. The man had hired him rode off one day with some others to scout for water and didn’t come back. He was left with the man’s wife and two daughters. They had started out from Springfield, Illinois, with a hundred wagons in the train and little by little they worked it down to sixty-one. The train had split after the Wasatch, and the cousin had continued on with the woman and her daughters in a company much reduced.
When the Indians came it was in a fury and number that they hadn’t had enough muskets by half to answer. The woman’s two daughters were among those who were taken. The woman, said the cousin, had not waited even until dawn to set off after them. She had just grabbed a musket and walked off in her yellow dress and bonnet. The further diminished train, now just four or five wagons, had regrouped as best it had been able and continued on. Three days later at dusk the woman had walked into their camp with her daughters and three other children in tow. When pressed, she would not say how she had freed the children, only that it wasn’t any use to go after the others taken because they were all killed.
The argonauts made it to California and the woman and her daughters had gone to live with some of their people and that was the last the cousin had ever heard of them, though he had offered up that he hoped the woman had grown as rich as her courage. When Neva Thatcher had finished this story she brushed back a brown curl of hair, took a sip of her tea, and told me if I wanted she would give up on her project of going back home to Maine and that I could stay and live with her here. She had a wedge of land out in the countryside I could cultivate if I liked. It was bottomland, rich as rabbit stew. I did not answer, just sat still and looked at her, couldn’t find any word I could say would correspond to the story she had told about the woman who had gone off into the wild to get back what had been taken from her and what she was asking me.
My world had shrunk those weeks to the size of Neva Thatcher’s little house and yard, and leaving aside the question of kisses, I had gotten comfortable in that world, had found it fragrant, even cozy. Meanwhile, as I discovered when one morning we went out for a walk, the town beyond her fences had been turned during my convalescence into a privy, and the land around the town into a rubbage ground. Union army wagons with broken axles lay in the fields like the bones of lost things had once bellowed and breathed, and everywhere you could see broken munitions of various descriptions and snapped bridles and rucksacks cut or torn. There was a boot-ruined field on the edge of one of the camps and on the hill beside it was an abandoned gallows. We crossed a brown skull or two, one of which had a broken cavalry sword stuck through its eye. I saw something shiny at the edge of a reedy pond and pulled out a bugle had been given an extra twist. We passed a old slave-selling emporium had had its main sign pulled down and its front door, frame and all, stove in, no doubt to facilitate, Neva told me, the egress of all the ghosts had still been whistling around inside it.
“I take it you are against the institution,” I said then.
“Honey, there are plenty of us down here, imports or otherwise, who never held with it.” She spit as she said this. The gob landed near my foot and she begged my pardon. She touched my hand with two of her fingers when she did. “They used to stand them over there,” she said, pointing at a wide piece of wood plank outside the emporium. “There was one time it was just boys and girls, each one of them wearing one of those masks. You could see about all of them, young as they were, had been whipped.”
“Did they get sold?”
“They always got sold.
“My husband,” she added, after we had put our backs to that place, “fought for the Confederacy but felt much the same way.”
Soldiers walked hither and thither in company or alone and a number of them called out to us on our walks. If they had dark soldier thoughts, though, they kept them to themselves and mostly they paid us courtesies and called out to Neva Thatcher by name. We walked farther each day away from the town, and the garbage and soldiers trailed off and by and by it was just the stripped and battle-burned land. I’m painting up a picture of a world gone off to its glory and never coming back and woe to us all, but with every minute my lungs worked on those walks, my head felt lighter and my mind felt clearer and a kind of giddiness galloped up and overtook me. I gave out a happy laugh then when Neva Thatcher took me over a hill and showed me a corner of the hundred and twenty acres had been her husband’s and said once more if I wanted to I could stay and work it after the soldiers had gone. I still didn’t answer but laughed again and even turned a frolic or two as we walked down a few of that hundred and twenty acres’ ruined rows. For a minute some fat sow hadn’t been shot and cooked came out and gave a snuffle into the field and I told Neva Thatcher I was going over to see if I was strong enough to pick it up.
“I used to be able to pick up a good-size pig,” I said and saw in my mind that first pig my companion and I had shot near that shed full of chain in Kentucky.
“Stay here and be my friend and farmer,” Neva Thatcher said, putting her hand on my arm as I thought these thoughts.
But I had grown quiet for thinking of Kentucky and its pigs and wasn’t much company to Neva then or after we returned from our walk. Back at the house over a bowl of corn soup I cheered up some and offered up an apology, to which Neva answered that I must never, but for the gravest offenses, say that I was sorry. We took walks after her work the rest of the days I was there. On one of those walks I hitched up my skirts and gave a try to see if I still remembered how to run.
“You trot admirably, I’ll give you that,” called Neva Thatcher from the other end of the stretch I’d sprinted down, “but now take a look at this.”
I have seen a handsome number of years since then, but I have never beheld anyone, not even Bartholomew at his best, run as strong and speedy as Neva Thatcher did that day when she hitched up her skirts and came running in my direction across the earth.
The days crept their cool ways past and Neva’s kisses came closer together and the soldiers in the street gave signs of a great muster to be held and I knew it was time for me to leave.
“They would have taken my arm off; it was you saved me,” I told her my last night in her house. It was late and she had come like she came every evening now to kiss me.
“It was you your cousin was talking about,” I said. “You were the one who walked into the wild and saved someone.”
“I have never been to California,” she said.
“Doesn’t make the story any one word less about you,” I said.
“And here I thought it was about all of us.”
“Us?”
“Every last one.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You are better, aren’t you,” she said.
“You made me better. And I thank you for it.”
“This is a leaving speech.” Her voice dropped. “I know one when I hear it.”
“I’d like to return to my regiment.”
“Won’t they be far away by now? Perhaps even on the other side of the world?”
“I think I can find them.”
“Why not just go home? To your husband man. Go on home if you won’t stay here. If you won’t stay with me and love me a little and work my farm.”
I shook my head and she gave me up her smile and kissed me one last time in this life and when I woke there were four Union soldiers and an officer standing by the bed. Neva was leaning in the doorway behind them. She didn’t speak when they hauled me up, just handed them my old uniform, watched them drop a rough-cloth dress over my head, and let them kick and cuff me and call me a spy and take me away. She came that evening to visit me in the cell they rigged out of the sheep shed and tossed me in down next to the stable.
“If you had just said you were going home to your Bartholomew and
not back to the war instead of staying here with me. If only you had said that, I could have stood it,” she said.
“You let me out of here, I’ll go back to him,” I said. “Or how about I stay with you. You tell them to let me out of here and I’ll stay with you and we can run races and pick up pigs every day.”
“You didn’t pick up any pig and we already know who would win those races,” she said.
She had brought me two hard-boiled eggs and she helped me peel them. She looked me in the eyes the whole time I ate. Then she went away. In the deep and dark hours of that night I thought she’d come back, for I woke out of a doze hadn’t taken me any farther away than the backs of my own eyelids and saw a figure sitting near me. It shifted though, or the moon outside the window found a way to move, and I saw it wasn’t Neva. It was another woman altogether, one the lay of the moonlight had lent a single golden eye.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Just sat there. Kneeling, it looked like. Hands in her lap. My own hands were bound. She had on pants and a broadcloth coat. Below the eye I couldn’t catch blinking you could see the long curve of her cheek.
“I was sleeping,” I said.
No answer. By and by the moonlight had lit her eye left it and in the darkness she stood.
“Keep a distance, now,” I said.
But she stepped forward and to my side with a movement geared quicker than I liked and after she had stood there awhile breathing cloudy breaths into the cold air, she leaned her head in close to mine. I wanted to turn my own head and look at her but found I couldn’t.
“You come any closer I will fight you, even tied up as I am,” I said.
“Close your eyes,” she said.
It was my turn to stay silent. The voice was large but she was not. She wasn’t any much taller than a child.
“I’m not closing my eyes,” I said at last. She lifted one of her hands up past my face and into the moonlight had found its way back into the stall. There was a knife in it. The knife climbed up through the moonlight and back down. It made this journey several times. When she pulled it away from the light and placed its edge against my forehead, I thought the gold air before me would start to bleed, and when she pressed the blade harder against my forehead I thought that in its bleeding we would both drown.
“Close your eyes now, Ash Thompson, killer of men, or I will cut out your tongue and feed it to the fishes,” she said.
I closed my eyes.
“You tell Neva I was already sorry,” I said.
“Who is Neva?” she said.
Came a scuffle of feet and a cough from outside the shed door. I felt the air in front of my face open and shut like a ball had moved through it. I kept my eyes closed for a long time. When I opened them again even the dark was gone.
They held me in that stall two days past that night. I tried to ask my guard about the girl had come to visit but he wouldn’t answer me. Neither did he say anything about the red line he must have seen I had across my forehead. One of those days they had in another stall a pair of Confederate officers of one kind or the other who spent their time in singing duets about beautiful ladies and the bounty of the lands of the South but otherwise never said any other word. The last morning, my guard and four or five of his friends came and leaned their arms over the top of the stall and looked at me. Then they dragged me over to their camp to be hanged.
There had been word of a spy in the ranks, a whore from Chattanooga dressed up just like a man. This spy had passed on troop movements and gotten a barley field’s worth of boys torn to bits. It was a first lieutenant told me this. Every now and again while he was talking he would pull his handgun out of its holster and point it at me. Once or twice he cocked the weapon. I counted two good teeth in his mouth. There were a few other junior officers present and a number of men from the ranks when he conversed up close with me.
I kept my composure through this, stood as tall as they would let me, looked the broke-tooth lieutenant straight in the eye, told him I had had other interviewers to scare me, that he would have to work twice again as hard as he was if that was his aim. I told him that I was no spy, that I came from Indiana, honest farm country, land come down to me through my mother, that I had never been to Chattanooga, didn’t even know what that was. I gave him the letter of my company, the number of my regiment. I listed the engagements and battles I had fought in. I told them to speak to the Colonel, that he would vouch for Gallant Ash. They laughed at this, said Gallant Ash was just a story some fool and his friends had told to pass away the days. The company I had spoken of was made out of Ohio men, not girls from Chattanooga or Indiana or anywhere else I claimed or didn’t claim to come from. They were still laughing when a major pushed through the crowd and asked for an explanation. He and the lieutenant stepped off to the side.
“Is there no one here who remembers me?” I said. “Look, I have a saber scar on my left arm.”
The men around me neither spoke nor moved. I must not have looked like much in my dress and trying to show my scar in the middle of all those men, because when the major came back over he walked straight up to me and took me gently by the elbow.
“If she is a spy, she will receive a trial,” he said. The men had been hunting blood and had not had it and were none the happier, but when the major spoke again they moved away. He was very kind as we walked. He was tall and pleasant-looking and had a sweet voice. He told me he came from New York, the shores of Lake Erie. He told me he would write to my company commander and apologized for the conduct of his men. I told him I knew a thing or two about men brought to the brink and hard pushed, that I had stood alongside them many a time, that I could not hold the ugliness of war against them any more than I could against myself or those I had considered my friends.
“Why did you refer to yourself as Gallant Ash?” he asked.
I told him. I described climbing the tree and the looks of the men below. I described it at some length. I am not sure but what I might have given out a chuckle or two as I told the story. Might even have tapped a foot and sung. The major nodded. He released my elbow, which he had been holding so gently. Said he had heard a song about Gallant Ash and was pleased to have met the one who had inspired it. Kindness comes in many colors. He called me miss, thanked me for my service to the Union cause, and bade me farewell.
My Bartholomew never learned his way into or out of a fight but there was one thing no one could hold the candle to him at and that was dancing. If he even started to sniff the arrival of a song, he was jumping and kicking across the floor. In our earlier, happier times he would sing himself into a dance if there wasn’t any other music for it. I expect I wasn’t the worst you ever saw at dancing but I was a long way from having the gift. Another lifetime Bartholomew could have been up on the stage. That would have been the life for him. That voice of his could bubble up out of his throat and the way those arms and legs of his could move. Still, we only get but the one life and I never heard him calling out for any other. Except of course for when we first met and he called out for the life had me in it. He called loud to step into that. While he was courting me, is what I mean. I made it take a while but he got it done.
He said, “I got nothing to offer but sweat and zinnias.”
He said, “But I will love you until the day I die into my wings and know you have died into yours.”
He said, “There won’t ever be any other one loves you as true as the blue of this blue shoe.” He held up his shoe for me to look at when he said this. It was kind of blue. Kind of green too. Looked like he was wearing birds on his feet. And then he danced for me. He had rolled an old whiskey barrel all the way out from town and had set that barrel in the yard and had hollered for me to come out of my house and he hopped up on that barrel and danced like a dervish in a mulberry bush or a monkey had a toothache or a rhinoceros had a headache or some such and then he hopped back down and when he saw I’d started up breathing again he said what I’
ve already told, then said he wanted to marry me.
“Why?” I said.
“It’s love pure and simple,” he said.
The day Bartholomew and I got married we danced. There was a small group had gathered and they gave us a clap and a cheer and when it was done we walked out the two of us to the cemetery to see my mother. She had a stone wasn’t much but I had kept it well enough and it had never wanted for flowers. We lay bluets and sweet peas down on it and stood a minute and then I said to Bartholomew, “Now, that’s done.” And he said, “What is?”
I hadn’t known just exactly what I meant when I said it but I knew some choice part of me hoped by turning a dance with my nimble-foot husband and then laying down those flowers on my wedding day I could let some of that which was past trot away. I told him this as we walked home and he was quiet a time and then said he expected it wouldn’t work out that neat. Which wasn’t the last time he was right. I went on thinking about my mother every day just as I had before I had gotten married only now Bartholomew was there and the smells and sounds of the past didn’t scorch quite so hard, didn’t make me stand and slash at the air with a stick or run out hunting more often than I had to. They were still there though, those smells and sounds and sights, and they chewed and worked at me like worms in their corridors, and then other worms came with their own mouths to chew and keep them company. After a time, like I’ve told it, I packed up my bag and went to war.