by Laird Hunt
“I will fight you all until you let me leave,” I said. Around me the ladies howled. One of them picked up the guard’s slouch hat and did a march around the cell. When the keeper tried to get up I put my foot on her neck. It took another guard running down the hall and hitting me on the back of the head with his rifle butt to stop me.
I had many an occasion to dream about home in the long hours afterward when I woke and found they had put me in the chair. I spent two days on its rough planks with the brimmed bucket on my head, and when they untied me, I took up a candlestick and hit the doctor had finally come to visit in the face with it, so they gave me three more. A fever found me that second suite of days. To this fever I attribute the fact that although I sat in that chair the whole time, it felt to me like I was able to stand up out of myself and walk down the corridors of the madhouse and out the door and across the burning countryside. I saw soldiers at their cards or guns as I walked; I saw cannon sitting black in its iron; I saw mules and horses hadn’t eaten in days hollering out in Latin for their feed. I tried one of these times to walk home but the rivers grew wide and deep and the forest grew dark and thick. I turned back to the battle then. The world was afire with it. I looked everywhere for a gun but couldn’t find one. The dead spoke to me on those walks. With mouths that floated above their own bodies with the flies. They clambered up to the rafters of barns and yelled down at me from the treetops, dangled by their knees from the clouds. On one misty field an army of cats had come out to lick the corpses. The cats walked upright and carried colored banners. When I got up close to them they all turned at the same time and looked at me so I ran. Running, I found my way to a fight. The fighters had gotten their coats all mixed up and just stood in a mess trying to figure out which way they needed to turn their guns. “Tell us a story so we’ll know which way to shoot,” they said. They handed me a flower. I took it and put it between my teeth, then pointed to the steeple of a nearby church.
In between these excursions, I would come back to the chair and the bucket with its brim. There was attendants who would come along every now and again to hit the side of the bucket with a hand or poke me sharp in the ribs with a stick. They kicked me too and tightened my cords and whispered that they hoped I wouldn’t wake up any longer, that they could toss me into the field nearby when I was done. They were doing that on one of my bucket walks. Carrying the blackened carcasses out to pile up in a field. I helped in the chore. Laughed until my teeth fell out. Felt the ache in me everywhere, as the job never seemed to get done. So that when after three days my keepers untied me and drenched me down with water and scrubbed me off, I hurt on every square inch of my body and did not have the strength to fight. I lay sick to dying for two weeks afterward. Puddle of arms and legs, bits of burning skin. I kept hoping I would travel out again, even if it was just to pile corpses, but it couldn’t be done. It was into March before I was sitting up against the brick wall and eating the blows they fed us again.
I do not like much to think of the days that followed. When the keeper came at me I cringed and cried. When the doctor peeped in and asked me my name I told him one I had heard in a dream. I told him that I was a runaway from Chattanooga. That I had spied for the forces of the rebellion. That I had handed over secrets had led to the death of ten thousand men. The two women had once been heavy saw an advantage during these days and stole my food. The ones against the wall hollered at me and shook their chains. The women who wrung their hands looked on and shook their heads.
I cringed and groveled and scraped and moaned. The keeper smiled a gummy smile and said it was the chair had changed me. She said sometimes it took a while but that they all eventually changed. She wouldn’t hold my fists and feet against me. She’d had worse. She had known a gal had thought she had invisible arms growing out of her neck had come after her with a broken bottle and cut her three times. That gal had spent one month and two days in the chair and had been cured without a trace of her previous ailment. Had never spoke of it again. All the ones chained to the wall had taken their turns in the chair and had quieted considerably after it. There was others, she said, looking around at the rest of the cohort, that could stand to try the cure.
After this speech on the virtues of the chair, she said I might get back to carrying the slop jar and giving out shaves if I continued to improve. I told her that she was right, that the chair was a wonderful thing, that I was better, that I promised to be good. I was saying this to her when I saw who the guard was standing behind her. I blinked and scrunched my eyes to see if he would go away but there still stood the Akron boy that wasn’t dead.
He was on duty two weeks later when the keeper let me carry the slop jar again. She walked along with us all the way there and all the way back, though it was her custom, when this errand was made, to take her meal and sit quiet in her closet. I did not speak to the Akron boy and he did not speak to me. I had watched him and studied up on whether his months and weeks of battles had put some iron would work against my cause into him. I had watched to see if he still had a shake to his hand and a nervous-sparrow hop to his eyes. When one of the women who wrung her hands asked him if he had seen her darling boy in the fights, he did not answer but he did gulp and look away, and when, in that retreat, his eyes found mine and jumped like they had had yellow-jacket stingers shoved into their centers, I knew I could still have my hope. I carried the slops around into the alcove and the Akron boy followed me and watched me dump the slops into the trench. I took a while at emptying the jar, set it down between pours, wiped my brow. It was a horror what went slopping its way down the stream but I lingered there, made it look like I couldn’t move too quick, needed minutes, not seconds, if anyone was looking on to get up to a trick or two with my handsome guard.
The next week the keeper went back to her meal and her rest but the Akron boy walked behind me and I did my emptying duties exactly the same. I got some help on how it would work best to proceed the day after that when the keeper came in to see us. She was in a foul mood—tripped over my leg and gave me a rich portion of good, sharp smacks. The Akron boy was standing behind her. I did not say a word. After a time he coughed and gulped and said maybe I’d had enough. The keeper turned on him, still kicking, and asked how it was any of his affair. I was a wildcat and needed my kicks. The Akron boy said he had known me once. This set the keeper, whose mind ran with the slop trench, to chuckling and she gave me one more good kick and said she bet I was tasty. The Akron boy turned the color of the freshest autumn apple when she said this. He got so red it changed the color of the floor and the walls.
“Thank you,” I told him the next week we went out with the slops.
“You are welcome, Gallant Ash,” he said.
“You took my part and I appreciate that.”
“There was a time I wouldn’t have had to. You don’t seem as sturdy as you used to.”
“No,” I said. “I expect I’m not. You look like you’ve found your muscles though.”
That blush came back to his face when I said this. Likely it was the size of the lie that helped turn his color. He hadn’t found his muscles. He looked like he had been turned out of a prison camp last week. There wasn’t any muscle on him at all.
The fourth week he was not there and I feared he had been detailed away. I was sick to retching when the fifth week came and still he had not returned. It was a big fellow gave me a jab or two with his musket who followed me down to the alcove. It was evil cold that day so I got away with only a bad minute of him standing too close and breathing on me with his foul breath.
“We’ll talk on it closer next time,” he said.
On the sixth week, though, I got pushed down to the yard by the keeper to do some shaving for the first time since I’d sat in the chair and there the Akron boy was, leaning against a wall. Heaven drips down its gifts. It was five or six of them, though not the Akron boy, there for my services, in their shirtsleeves, and as I shaved the first one, the one who’d breathed hard on me the wee
k before, he said, “Now, don’t you go and cut my throat,” and I said, “No, sir, I won’t,” and he said, “Because I’ve heard you’re a fierce one.” I shaved through them all, taking my time at it, looking from minute to minute at the Akron boy leaning slumped over some against the far wall.
“What about him?” I said when I had pulled my rag off the last one.
“Him?” said my bad breather. “Shave’s not what he needs.”
“Let him have a shave,” said another.
“He looks like he needs it,” I said.
“There’s plenty he needs.”
“He’s coming back, though.”
“Shave would do him good.”
“Did it do you good?”
“Plenty good.”
They went on like this awhile and then I found the Akron boy sitting in front of me. He wouldn’t speak and looked ashamed. I chalked it up to the teasing.
“I haven’t seen you in some while,” I said.
“He’s been otherwise entertained,” said the bad breather. This made all the others laugh.
The Akron boy didn’t have much beard but it was more than he had had when we had sat down together and taken our shaves in the long ago. More and plenty. I had only one brown rag to dip in and out of the big bucket of cooling water they had but I let it sit on his face a good while. When I took it off I thought I saw some smile in his eyes.
He came back to slop-jar guard duty the next day, looking even paler without his beard than he had the day before, and as we started our walk down to the alcove, I asked after his health. He told me he had been down with a wound wouldn’t heal and a sick headache come along to offer the wound its company. The wound wasn’t old but the sick headache he had had to confront since his earliest days. I expressed my sympathies, found a way to touch him a half a second on his hand, told him I was sorry about the teasing he had taken, asked him if he had enjoyed his shave. He did his blush again and quivered his lip and looked at my fingers and said that the following week he expected to be redeployed out to the western front; some of the ones had teased him, including the bad breather, had already left. I said that the western front sounded like it was far away.
“About as far away as it gets,” he said.
“We were about that far away in that house in the woods,” I said.
“I expect that’s true.”
“You can’t get any farther away from the world than the borders of the bleak beyond.”
It was cool even though we were getting good into springtime, and the Akron boy had on his long coat. It dragged a little on the ground behind him and he walked with his musket held slack. I gandered back in his direction when I talked. He had a dreamy look in his eye. He was a boy should have been fishing a creek, not standing guard in a prison madhouse.
“How is that old Colonel of ours now?” I asked.
“Not a colonel anymore. He got made a general. Sits in the big camp over yonder.”
“Well, the world just turns and turns.”
“They say he talks to himself. I haven’t seen it.”
“Don’t we all do that?”
“I don’t.”
“No, probably you don’t. You look solid.”
“You think so? I been working at it. I wish you would tell them that.”
“Tell who that?”
He didn’t answer me. Just looked a little more lost in his big coat.
I set the jar down, readjusted my grip, and picked it back up again. A rain was now making brown splotches on the dirt around us. There was a sleeping dog under an empty wood shelf and a pair of chickens in a twig cage by the far wall about dead and heading for someone’s soup. “That was quite a trick I played out there in the woods on those Secesh wanted to eat us for their supper, wasn’t it?” I said as we rounded the corner, putting us out of sight of the building, and stepped toward the trench. There was a kind of roof over the alcove, and the rain acted like it was fixing to drum it down.
“Yes, it sure was, Gallant Ash,” he said.
“They don’t call me that here,” I said.
He didn’t answer, just looked at me, his head tilted a little and his mouth open like you see sometimes on the dead. I stepped out into the rain, emptied the slops like it was real work for me, then came back under the roof and turned to him.
“You want to see how I did it?” I said, lowering my voice. “See me drop off my clothes? We got time. No one’ll notice. You want to see it done?”
He was quiet and had gone all autumn-apple-colored again but there was a minute I thought I’d misjudged him. There was a minute I thought he had aged up to go with that scrub beard of his I’d shaved off and was going to work his scrawny arms and lift his gun. I thought he was going to fire it at me and that I would fall down the slop hole and get stuck or splatter off down the stream. I think it was the pleasure I should have felt at this prospect but didn’t that brought me back, made me move.
I said, “I know you didn’t know all those days what it was I had hiding in my shirt. You know why I signed up? So I could get next to men, men like you.”
He coughed and gulped. He shook his head and bit at his lip. He kicked one of his boots against the other. He opened his mouth and tried to swallow. But he set his musket against the wall.
“Lean in close, now, and you can learn all the trick of it you like,” I said.
I had the wooden lid to the slop jar still in my hand. He set his tongue along his lips, leaned in close to my shoulder. I reached up with my free hand and ran a finger across his smooth cheek, then I swung up with the other and hit him hard.
“All you do for this trick,” I told him as I started unbuttoning his coat, “is change your clothes. You take yours off and put other ones on. Let’s try it now. You and me together. See how it works.”
So it was him wore the thin dress and walked in front with the empty slop jar as we went back. I had fixed his bayonet and bought his attention with a gentle slice to his side. I had told him if he so much as gave out a shiver as we went back to the cell I would put an end to his days. Like I had put an end to those outlaws we’d left in the woods.
“I never meant any harm,” he said.
“No, I expect you probably didn’t,” I said.
We walked. We passed a soldier or three but they were ones I hadn’t seen before and none gave us the barest look. I well knew how to walk like a man, and the Akron boy in my dress with his long golden locks made a maiden fairer than I. The keeper was on her chair in her room dozing over her coffee and porridge and did not raise her head as we passed. I put the Akron boy in the cell with the women, put a shackle on his leg, made him give me every countersign he knew, then tied a rag around his mouth. Even when he waved his arms at me and I saw again the angry wound on the top muscle of his left arm that I had already seen when I had made him undress in the yard, and that I would see in dreams to come, and can see again to this day, I did not waver. I yanked his mouth rag snug and left him there to wait. To wait to be stripped again of his guard duties, to be put back in the chair, marched out on his own bucket dreams, go back to the men’s quarters they had let him emerge from a minute, and moan out his fresh tale of woe.
“You tell them over there that Gallant Ash sends his regards,” I whispered at him.
Don’t leave me here like this, his eyes spoke back.
One of the heavy gals wasn’t heavy anymore came over at me when I was standing up from tying his rag, and I took a minute to pay her and her friend back for having stolen my food. The keeper, for her part of it, got the musket butt to the side of her head. I had not eaten in two days so I gobbled down what she hadn’t eaten of her porridge and drank her coffee and, before I left, sat a minute on her chair.
I expect anyone just come out of that place would have run about as fast as he could for the hills but run is not what I did. Instead, I walked out slowly through the front door, past the sleepy guards posted there, gave them each a good grin, got back a brace of grins in ret
urn, shouldered my new Springfield, and set off down the road and out of the town where the sick house was and back to the one where Neva Thatcher had her quiet little home. I passed many a footsore soldier along the way. They just nodded at me or asked for news, but I shook my head and said I had none to give. One fellow louder than the others called out about the Wilderness fight and how so many wounded boys had died of fire and not their wounds. There was a picket detail on the bridge led into Neva Thatcher’s town who liked the countersign I gave them and let me through. They had a battle going somewhere nearby and I went through town with an ammunition convoy dragged by tired, hoof-cracked mules.
The battle going on must have been somewhere picturesque without any burning boys to it because there was a party of handsome-dressed fancy people carrying field glasses fixing to ride out to inspect it. The oldest man of the group gave me a right smart nod when I went by, like he was looking forward to seeing me fight a little later in the day. I nodded back, then crossed through the mule train to the other side of the street. A little later I crossed back over and walked up the path and around the back and into Neva Thatcher’s house.
You could hear the battle about as well inside as you could outside but inside it was warm and neat. The old kind of quiet made of mists and dust-gloom reigned there. Neva Thatcher had her breakfast cup drying on the sideboard, and a pile of apples waiting to help get her through the week. She had salt pork and hardtack sitting next to a lump of lard in the cupboard. A stone jug of cool water from her well. In the side room I found her underthings and dresses folded neat. I chose a green-colored gown and a pair of sturdy shoes couldn’t have fit me much better and made a bundle of them with the food I had recruited from the kitchen. Then I went to the dining room.