by Laird Hunt
The chinaware was dusted fresh, its flowers and animals sleeping quiet. Some of the afternoon sun was thieving in through the blinds and nibbling at it. There were motes adrift in the light. I lifted up a hand through some of it and made them swirl. I took up Neva’s grandaunt’s teapot by its handle, carried it to the dining table, lifted it, and started to bring it down. I had had it in my mind the whole walk there to break her chinaware and lay the broken pieces across her floor but holding the pretty thing in my hand, I found I could not do it and instead simply carried the teapot to her room and set it on her pillow. There where she laid her linden-berry head and dreamed her linden-berry dreams. She helped the wounded, shepherded the sick. She had helped me. Then she hadn’t. There it was. I could feel it. I had it again. I knew where she kept a mallet and I fetched it out and went back to her room and I pounded the china-pot heirloom on her bed pillow until its powders were floating up into the air. After I had finished, I stood awhile in front of the rest. Picked up one of the monkey plates. Thought some more. But in the end I put down the plate, dropped the mallet, and left Neva Thatcher’s house.
I went next to the camp outside of town. The pickets were down and I walked right through the camp and a few hundred yards more along a corduroy road to the rear line. Some of the mules I had walked with earlier were just shambling up. I passed a group of cooks playing poker with a second lieutenant in the shade of an apple tree. Men in reserve waiting to see if they would have a turn on the front line that day were dozing in the sun. I still had my coat on, and one or two eyed me a little closer than I liked so I took it off. There was a tall major wearing a stovepipe hat looked a minute like Abraham Lincoln who was swearing at his mount. The wounded were already coming through the trees. I saw one boy crawling with a slick of blood emerging from the corner of his mouth. Every couple of feet he would cough and the slick would spread. There were tears on his dusty cheeks. He kept looking around him and calling out for water. He was crawling to a grave would open up any minute and it made me tired to look at him so I went up to the rise where I had seen the commander’s flag.
My Colonel now a General had his desk set up in front of a day tent. He had left off the start of a letter addressed to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to go to his duty. I picked up this start to a letter and put it down. All he had had time to write on it was the words My Dear. There wasn’t anywhere a soul not seeing to some business, and not one of those souls spoke to me. Down the hill there was a rebel charge. We had guns set on the high ground and blew it, by the sound of screaming afterward, to rough bits. I set the overcoat on the General’s chair and tore off the bottom half of his piece of paper. I took up his pen and wrote Found myself something warmer to wear on one line, and on the next, just like you told me I should, and I set the paper on top of the overcoat. Then I laid down my borrowed musket, walked away from that battle and that camp, found some bushes, and changed my clothes.
THREE
That afternoon I slept my way until dusk time in a cave in a hickory tree had been hollowed out to smoke meat. There were some meat shreds caught in the wrinkles and crevices of the wood, and my fingers found them and felt of them and brought them to my mouth. I woke at moonrise with my teeth chattering hard enough to crack hickory nuts and set off at a trot up the road to try and get warm. I wasn’t any ways at all up the road when I come up on another traveler, a colored gal I knew straight off I had seen before, though it took me a minute to know where. She was taller than me and broader at the shoulder. She walked like she wasn’t back in a dress. Maybe she had always walked that way. Down in a field. Hundred-pound basket on her back. It came to me. The last time I had seen her she had been marching out of our camp wearing contraband pantaloons.
“You can come on out of the shrubbery,” I said, for she had vanished as quick as spit as soon as I came up on her. I called this out more than once. I called it out and told her I wasn’t going to alert the guard or the dogs or anything. I said I knew she was hiding in the bushes not even an apple throw away and that she ought to quit being scared and come out. Or if she couldn’t quit being scared she ought to come out anyway. I was heading north, I said, and if she liked, we could be two travelers together on the road instead of two travelers apart. I said all of this and felt like I was making quite a fair speech out there in the dark night but it wasn’t until I told her I knew she had been a man and that I had been one too that she came up out of the bushes. She was even bigger standing next to me than she had looked hurrying along the chalky road. We hung there some time not saying any word then settled kind of gradual into walking. She was dressed in heavy skirts and a shawl. She had a rag bundle in one hand and a heavy stick in the other.
“Have you had anything to eat?” I said.
She shook her head so I fetched her up a cracker. It took some time of me holding it out and us walking along for her to take it. It took even more of us walking down the road and past a frozen pond and through a grove of burned trees holding up their empty devil hands at the dark for her to lift it up to her mouth and crunch.
“What regiment?” she said.
I told her and when she said she’d shouldered her rifle awhile for the Fifth U.S. Colored I asked her why she had stopped.
“Why did you stop?” she said.
I gave out a cough started out as a laugh at how long it would take me to answer and we left it there at that.
After a minute and another bite of wilty cracker she said, “After Antietam, that’s where I saw you,” and I said that was right and something a little like a smile come up in her eyes but it didn’t stay there long.
“I thought you were a ghost coming along that road back there,” she said.
“I’m not a ghost,” I said. “I don’t think I’m a ghost.”
“Ghost of my old mistress come along the road to catch me. Left her dead of a finger went sour back in South Carolina. She came to me all through the fighting, pointing at me with that finger.”
I showed her my fingers. She nodded. She also shivered a little and you could see plain it wasn’t a shiver come from the cold.
“I’ve seen a ghost,” I said. “I think I did.”
She nodded. Kind of sucked up her lips.
“My ghost had a knife.”
“Ghosts don’t need knives.”
“Mine did.”
She looked away to the side, shook her head.
“You got to get north and out of this country,” I said. “We could help each other, share the road.”
“Share the road,” she said. If she had been a well you could have dropped a stone down her throat and not heard any echo.
We kept walking, with her some way in front or some way behind, and after some good yards of this I started to talk. I had it in my mind, I suppose, to cheer us a little along the way after our talk about ghosts, maybe pull a story or two out of her, hear something about her own fighting days, march along together like two soldier men, even if we were wearing dresses, but the stories I told were about as twisted up as wet turkey feathers and she just kept breathing in and breathing out and looking back and forth across the road. I told one about Antietam, because we had both of us been in those parts, deep in those ugly times, about an unscratched lieutenant had done well for his men in the fight and when it was over leaned his head against a hot cannon barrel and burned off his ear. That story had seemed funny to me at one time but it didn’t any longer out there on the road in the moonlight, so I told another meant to be rosier about a Confederate boy so hungry he tried to play bear and got himself stung to death scooping up fresh honey. When we come up on him, I told it, he had gotten so swollen you could have rolled him down a hill like a ball. There was an old lady had a corncob pipe stuffed in her mouth sitting there next to him said she had some claim on this bee-stung boy, though what claim that could have been I do not know because we didn’t ask. We left her sitting there with her legs splayed out, waiting for him to swell back down. He had something of hers in his pockets, she told us as we walked
away, and the swelling had stretched them too tight and she couldn’t fetch her hand in. I gave a chuckle when I told this story but my fellow wanderer didn’t think as much of it as I did.
“The hell kind of story is that to tell?” she said.
“You ever pretend like you needed a shave?” I asked.
“A shave?”
Thinking about shaves set me to thinking about Bartholomew and I told my companion about the beard that wouldn’t ever grow very well on his face, though maybe, I said, during the many months that had galloped past, he had learned the beard-growing trick. I told her about Bartholomew’s small hands and how he was a better operator in the kitchen with his small hands than I was with mine. I told her that he had a bottle of French cologne water that he liked to sprinkle on a handkerchief before he went out of a morning to do his work. I had missed him terribly, I told her, and more all the time. I was going home to him now, to reacquaint myself with him after the hard separation and set things straight on our farm and settle scores.
“What kind of scores?” she said.
She said this and it seemed to me that a new note of interest had crept into her voice and I would otherwise have leaped in to tell her what I meant but we both heard that very minute horse hooves on the trail behind us and so we stepped quick and quiet off the road.
“They had me locked up,” I whispered as we crouched in the frosty bushes. “There was a chair they put me in. A bucket they put over my head. This dress I got on is borrowed. Ain’t impossible that I’m being chased. You got anyone in particular after you?” She didn’t answer, just looked long at me and then long at the road and the horses filled it up, then left it empty again. I don’t know why it is I got that image of a road empty of us and of anything else but the moon making a white ribbon of it stuck in my head.
“You want to hear about those scores now? I got all kinds of them,” I said after a time.
“We used to kill dogs,” she said.
“Kill dogs?” I said.
“Every one of them we could in those last days. I beat one of those bloodhounds to death with a butter churn.”
I thought about it a minute. It came to me then that I’d heard stories about dogs had had their throats slit on the big spreads, dogs dead the way she’d said and wouldn’t go hunting runaways anymore.
“We ought to go on now, the road is clear,” I said.
She again didn’t answer but there had been a shift in her shoulders and suddenly I didn’t like the look of the size of her as we crouched there in the dark. I tried to stand but the next second I found myself with her knee on my chest and her stick across my throat.
“Tell you what,” she said.
I fought halfway up and she wrestled me back down and got her knee and stick pressed down harder. There’s times part of me likes to think if I hadn’t been fresh out of the slops and ice baths I could have fought her but there’s the other part of me thinks there just wasn’t any way I ever could have.
“You want to share the road, head up north together, we both wore the blue, fought the grays, well, tell you what,” she said.
“Tell you what. It’s a winter’s day. January day. You feel the cold of the ground here, that’s just the swaddling to the cold of the day I’m conjuring. There’s rain coming down, rain like the ropes of the draper man. Ruts and puddles in the barnyard. The one rooster whose neck you haven’t wrung hasn’t crowed day yet. So it’s darker than this dark we got here. It’s black-cold and wet and you got little ones on their pallets and your old mother still dreaming in her chair. Your old mother who never did anything but work and get whipped every day you’ve been alive. Dreaming her dreams. You tell me where she was. Where those dreams had made her go. It’s cold like that and it’s dark like the devil’s teeth and you are awake because you just heard the warning bell. Death is coming down the road to knock on your door and you don’t know what to do. Master’s back after barely a month from the war and Mistress is dead of her bad finger and lies in the dirt next to her dead sons and now he’s coming to bury you. Bury you and your babies and your old mother before he’ll let you go to live with Uncle Lincoln up north. Live in his white house and pluck fruit from his trees. Master and his hired boys are coming. I got two arms and one back. I got three babies and one old mother can’t walk. ‘Run now’ is what my old mother said. She got up long enough to get one of my babies on my back and snug the other two into my arms. ‘Run now,’ she said. My old mother. There was a rise across the yard with bushes like these ones and I went there and I watched them come and pull my old mother out by her hair into the yard. Make her lie down in one of the puddles. Hold her down there in the wet. Hold her down there until she didn’t move. Me carrying three babies. Sitting there watching them drown my mother. Like a rat to spit on. And any minute any one of my babies might cry. And you want to share my road? Hand me a cracker and help me on my way? Tell me stories about some fool captain and some other fool got his pockets swollen shut? Shaves and French perfume?”
“I fought them,” I said, even though that stick at my neck hadn’t budged, even though I couldn’t breathe, even though I thought I was looking up into the eyes of my end.
“Not them, you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t fight any of that,” she said. “You did not,” she said, putting her face down almost nose to nose with mine, her mouth almost onto mine, her shoulders almost onto my own, “fight any inch of that.”
“Where are your babies?” I said.
“My what?”
“I had a baby once.” I don’t know why I said that to her.
She didn’t answer, just took the knee off my chest and the stick off my neck and set off into the dark woods behind us. Away from the moon-white ribbon of the empty road. Last thing I heard her say as she vanished and I lay there choking up the air could now come back at last into my throat was “Tell you what.”
When I was young, my mother liked to start one story and finish it off with another. Hansel and Gretel would end with Rumpelstiltskin, and the Snow Queen with Mother Hen. I don’t know if she did this to investigate my state of interest or awakeness or because she thought the old tales had gotten played out and she wanted to freshen them up. Sometimes she would put three or four together. Tie them into a bundle and let loose the whole shooting match. Bartholomew claimed to me once he had heard her at this game but I don’t know how he could have since she was dead of her own hand no time at all after he gave me that dark red zinnia I took in the house and pressed and have lying here in its hints of old-time crimson even now. Maybe he dreamed it. Maybe my mother visited him in his sleep. Maybe she talked to him too. Told him about the gingerbread boy ran out of the house and bit an apple and the little man spun gold so the whole kingdom fell asleep, the end.
Whether Bartholomew had dream visitors or sat one night outside our window and heard my mother stitching stories together or he didn’t, I had moments after I left the rebellious states and as I walked and rode my slow way back to our Indiana farm that I thought I had stepped out of one story and into some other. In that other I was now in, the angel of death had not unfurled its wings and blacked out the stars and sent metal and men to shriek together in its awful night wouldn’t ever end. Here where I now walked there were no fields of fresh dead to sink in up to your knees, no bee-stung boys in gray or blue or any of the other colors you could find on the field, no towns entire gone mad, no hot cannon, no dogs beat to death with butter churns. Instead there was a season full of flowers, fields that felt the plow and fat young cows at their grass. Birds swooped the trees and sang the branches. Lee’s try on Pennsylvania was long since just bones for the ages in the fields. Laundry hung sweet on the line. Clocks ticked loud on mantels and told something like the right time.
My hair had grown and I had on Neva Thatcher’s good dress and good shoes and more than one family took me in for a meal. It was times strange enough and they did not ask me why I was abroad. A pair of sisters I dinnered with said they had given so
up to a trio of one-armed jugglers not the week before. An old man and woman in a house at the bottom of an apple orchard outside Waynesburg had woken up one morning to find a stove-in mortar abandoned in their barn. Negroes done forever with the South and its yokes were everywhere with their bundles and mules. I thought I recognized my friend from the road one time. But it was some other woman dressed in rag skirts with a calico swaddle in each of her strong arms. Here and there you would cross a discharged veteran still had bombs and bullets flying in his eyes but there was good swaths of the country been emptied out of its men. Didn’t stop the ones who were still there or already back from trying out their tricks and evils, though. It was them more than once let me know my story hadn’t yet slipped its hinges entirely into some other one.
The first time I was just over into eastern Ohio and had been marching a stretch in the rain. Yonder I saw light in a house and I went up and knocked on its door. There was a big fellow with a scar on his forehead come to answer. He told me to step in, step in, said I looked hungry and his wife would get me my supper. The wife looked to be about seventy-five pounds of beat-up bone. She had a bright blue bruise on her cheek and didn’t say a word, only gave out a cringe when the husband pointed a finger at her. When the husband stepped past—to get some cider, he told me, from the shed—she gave me up a hand gesture you didn’t have to work too hard to understand meant run. I stayed long enough to look out the window and see it wasn’t cider he was bringing back from the shed but a standard U.S. military–issue horse pistol and a length of rope. I told the woman she ought to come with me but she just smiled at this, handed me a biscuit, and said she wasn’t worried for herself. I stepped out the kitchen door and trotted off with my biscuit into the dark and rain. I gnawed that biscuit under a lilac bush. The woman had dipped it into some lard and it made a fair meal. As I chewed I thought about her bruise. The rain came down hard through the lilac. I don’t know why I was sitting under it. There is shelter and then there is the idea of shelter. Shore up under the second all you want. You still get wet.