Neverhome: A Novel

by Laird Hunt

  I need to run on out of here and keep getting home, I thought. I thought this once and then I thought it again. I tried saying it out loud to my mother but didn’t get any answer. Tried to think of when I had last talked to her. Started to make my plan about leaving this place and marching off through the rain, marching all night. Still, when I had finished the biscuit I groped myself up a good stick and circled back as wet as a drowned piglet to the lit house. When I got there, ready to take my chances against the horse pistol, I lifted my eyes up to the window and saw the two of them sitting next to the fire. The rope lay coiled on the mantelpiece and the pistol wasn’t anywhere in sight. Go on and figure. World has many ways. The man was weeping with his head in his hands, and the woman had a smile on her face and was slurping at a cup of tea.

  Another less interesting time it was an old grandpa thought he needed to snatch a kiss from me. He had offered me a ride on his manure wagon and when I sat down next to him he hit me straight off in the face with the pommel of his switch. Then he tried to slobber over on top of me. I got the idea that he broke something when he hit the ground next to his mule. I drove on another few miles then left the wagon by the side of the road. The mule tried to follow me a few steps but gave up pretty quick. I had a notion lasted five minutes that I would unhitch it and ride it off for home. The thought came to me, though, about a boy out of Martins Ferry in my company had tried that once with a sutler’s mule and got hung up by his thumbs for three hours then drummed out of camp at my own Colonel’s now a General’s order when they caught him. Still, I did unhitch the mule and give it a good swat to get it going out over the fields and away from that old man, though. There was more than just the sting of the old man’s crop over my eyebrow to motivate me. More than just the man those days before with his rope and horse pistol. More than the memory of all the men I’d lived my life with in the Union army. Men who would piss on a dying cat. Laugh at a little boy lost. Violate a woman in her autumn years. Burn a house belonged to church ladies. Lock you up in the mad chamber and leave you there to rot.

  No, I unhitched that mule and sent it flying because I’d had a picture come to me of my mother. My mother tall and strong. My mother who could captain a heavy scythe all day then go out into the moonlight and plow. My mother, all of that, sitting on the front step with her head in her big hands, her shoulders a-heave, her eyes when I could look at them gone far away from me like beads of black glass. I had been out at some chore and had seen a man come up to the house. I had seen him stand talking to my mother and had seen him shaking his head and pointing his finger at her and at me even where I was way off in the distance and then walking away and climbing up onto his wagon. There had been men aplenty come up to our house for one reason or another but there hadn’t been any before had left my mother sitting like that in her own puddle of tears.

  I was five years old when that man came and left and didn’t come back to our property for many a year. Didn’t keep me from getting the fancy that I should have unhitched his animal while he was talking and pointing and turning my mother’s eyes into black beads. Many was the time in the days to come, even though my mother went straight back even that afternoon to being her invincible self, that I saw it in my head how I would unhitch that man’s animal and poke it with a stick. Watch it run off. Set the man maybe to chasing me. It takes work to unhitch an animal. I never could have done it. But that was the fancy that took me. And that was what I thought of there on that day as I unhitched the old man’s mule. Of my mother crying. Of my fancy. Of the man I’d hear it later said was my father hollering and chasing after me.

  It wasn’t just time- and war-ruined men had tricks to try. Two days after I left that mule to run free I found myself at table with three young girls. I had crossed them sitting together at the end of the lane that led down to their farm. Sitting shoulder to shoulder and twisting daisy chains. Littlest one had a daisy crown in her hair, daisy bracelets around her wrists. They said hello and I said hello back.

  “You hungry?” they asked me.

  There wasn’t any doubt by then that I was.

  “Where’s your folks?” I said. The biggest one winked up at the sky. The middle one smiled out over the fields.

  Their father was dead at Shiloh and their mother had vanished away long ago, and now it was just the three of them. The youngest couldn’t much more than talk, and the two older ones weren’t any riper down the road than eight or ten. This didn’t stop them from welcoming me in once we had got down their lane and serving me up a fair soup of pork and beans, nor from handing me a hunk of soft bread, a chew of butter, and a cup of good cream milk. They had a square locket had pictures of both their parents and took turnabout wearing it around their necks. It looked to be about every hour that one would take it off and pass it to the next, who would put it on, open it, give a nod, and get back to her business, whether that was handling a broom or playing with a corncob doll. The floors were swept, the windows washed, daisy chains were everywhere, and they let me lie down for the night in their parents’ soft bed. When I woke the next morning all was as cheerful as the day before except that my dress and shoes were gone.

  “Now you can’t leave,” the oldest of them said.

  “Not ever,” said the middle girl.

  They had spread the table with food. There was good coffee had but just a minute before boiled. I sat down barefoot in my underthings and ate. I went barefoot in my underthings with them on their chores and took my midday dinner the same way. More than once as we walked the yard the three of them looked over at the well. I let the little one climb up into my lap as we rested a minute at midday. I gave her a tickle and told the older girls they were doing handsome by her, that if they kept on that way they would see her raised up nice. This pleased them so much they let me take a turn wearing their locket and offered me up a show after the meal. Both of them could dance and sing. The older of the two brought down a banjo had belonged to their uncle. She played it so well it made me uncomfortable to watch.

  “Don’t you have any family you can go to?” I asked when the show was over.

  “Such as they are, they are up in Cleveland,” said the oldest.

  “That’s quite a way you have of talking,” I said to her.

  “But we like it here,” said the middle one. “We want to stay here forever.”

  “Forever and ever,” said the youngest.

  “That’s a long time,” I said.

  “Don’t you like it here?” said the oldest.

  “I do,” I said and gave the youngest another tickle. Then I walked outside, pulled the bucket up out of the well shaft, and retrieved my dress and shoes. When I had put them on I found I had the barrel of a pin-fire pistol trained on me. It was in the hands of the oldest girl. I walked over to her and placed my hands on top of hers and held them there a minute, then let them go.

  “You have to fire that thing to make it work on a person,” I said.

  “I know how to fire it,” she said.

  I nodded and thanked the girls for their hospitality, accepted the bundle of food they had packed for me, told them I wouldn’t stand for any crying or carrying on, and left off down the road.

  An hour later I crashed through a small wood had set a squadron of deerflies after me and came across a place where the earth swelled up like a giant’s dinner bell. There was a tree or two on the flanks of this swollen place but the ground underfoot was spongy and mostly it was just high grass and scrub. I walked up this swelling and paused on its top. I had heard about mounds like these, heard there were whole dead cities buried in each one of them, that no one now alive could say for sure how they had come to be.

  I crouched a minute and scraped at the soft surface. I lay on my side with my ear to it. Sun for a blanket. Tune one of the girls had sung on my lips. The dirt below me felt heavy. Like it might whisper. Whisper some secret. I fell asleep and dreamed the world had run to its end.

  I don’t think I would have done anything much m
ore than imagine a visit to Yellow Springs, Ohio, if a tinker selling bedsheets and colored socks hadn’t asked me was I bound there. I hadn’t been, hadn’t even had any idea I was near it, but after he had taken out a sample of his wares, and I had told him I did not at that present time need anything he had to offer, even if the red of his socks was, as he had said, very fine, I followed his direction over a hill and down a good road and took myself into town.

  It was a handsome place. Good, quiet streets and neat houses had squared about each one of them its own pretty yard. There was a well-made church and churchyard with more than a few fresh graves. I found the General’s cousin, buried beneath pink granite and a young almond tree fluttering its first raggedy blossoms in the breeze. The stone had careful carving you couldn’t see from afar. There were stars and birds. There was a bright harvest moon. If you looked close you could see a river curling off toward heaven. Under the cousin’s name were his dates. Under his dates was the word Unafraid.

  It didn’t take much asking to find what had been the cousin’s house. I meant just to have my look from afar but there was the woman of the house chopping hard at some rosebushes spoke to me and told me I had to come in. I said I had been scrabbling with outlaws and orphans in the countryside and wasn’t fit for stepping in a fine house, but I had known her husband and, if she liked, would sit with her a minute on her porch. She took off her garden hat, wiped a hand through her hair, sat me down, and bade me wait, then five minutes later brought out cool tea and sandwiches on soft bread. She brought a whole stack of those sandwiches, which had ham and sweet pickles swimming in fresh butter, and I worked hard at not eating them too fast. Once or twice as I ate I started to speak but she held up a hand. She was as fine to look at as her town. Into her middle years but elegant along with it, maybe more so for her age, soft and flinty both, gentle at the same time as hard. She sipped quietly at her tea and looked out over her garden. She had pink and purple hydrangeas blooming, white lilacs, a pale-trunked line of peach and apple and sour cherry trees. There were maples everywhere well into leaf and you could see the church steeple shining white beyond.

  “Where did you know my husband?” she said when I had eaten the last sandwich and wiped my hands on my napkin. I didn’t like for her to look at my fingers for they were nothing but dirt and chewed-down nails. Even if I had tried to scrub at them some at a well on the way over to her house.

  “I knew him to look at in Maryland and Virginia and some earlier in Kentucky too. He was about as brave as they make them. He would just stand straight up through a battle, calm and quiet. Like it was Sunday afternoon and we’d all gone home from church to eat these sandwiches of yours.”

  She smiled and she shivered. You could barely tell which was which.

  “He did his duty, no doubting that. There wasn’t a man in his company would claim the contrary,” I said.

  “Were you attached to his regiment?”

  “I did laundry and sundry jobs. Drove a wagon now and again. I can cook a little if I have to. Helped the sutlers spread their wares.”

  She had a sharp eye and she looked a good while at me. If I had had on my uniform, she would have seen straight past it like it wasn’t there.

  “And now you have left that service and walked all the way up here from Virginia?”

  “I’m heading back to my husband, who stayed home for the war.”

  “Ah,” she said. “A young married woman, far from her home, traveling with an army at a time of war. That’s an extraordinary image.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Penelope gone to the war and Odysseus staying home.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She was quiet awhile and sipped her tea. I did the same. It was good tea. Plenty of sugar and more of mint. There was birdsong in the air. Robin. Cardinal. Wren. One or two I didn’t know. Some yelling to add to it from a jay. It was a big brick house and just the porch would have done for fifty. We didn’t have a porch at home, though we had often set our chins toward the subject and talked about building one.

  “Please excuse me a moment,” she said.

  She stood and went into the house and came back out with a green velvet sleeve. Out of this sleeve she took a gilt frame. She held it close to her. The gilt had been well wrought and looked pretty against her dark blue dress, like a window onto the other world.

  “We had this likeness made before he left on his orders. He was still a professor then, finishing up his spring term.”

  “A professor,” I said.

  “Here at Antioch, of course. The college is shut down now. We expect it will reopen after the war. It stands just over there.” She waved toward some poplars. There was a hint of stone through the trees, a pair of peeping towers, the corner of a wall, the mossy curve of a well. She handed me the frame and asked me if her husband had still resembled his likeness. If the war hadn’t ravaged his fine looks away entirely. She had seen him after he was wounded, she said, and had not liked what she saw and had begged him to stay at home with her after his recovery.

  “This is your…?” I said.

  “My husband,” she said.

  I had in my hands a picture of the Colonel, my Colonel who had become a General.

  “Then you are not the wife of the man lies yonder under the pink stone who was the General’s cousin.”

  “The General’s younger brother.”

  “His brother.”

  “My husband called him his cousin so that the connection would not be too clear. Neither too clear nor too close.”

  I sat silent. My brain making its rearrangements.

  “He was not well, of course, and he would not be parted from the General. The General was good to him. Very good.”

  “Very good,” I said, my brain still trying to make the new shape.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said back.

  Then I had it all. Nothing was any different.

  “I never spoke to him but once; still, I saw him many a time. Like I said it a minute ago, he did his duty.”

  “Just as you did yours.”

  I looked at her. She had her eye on me again and was smiling. It was a kind smile. There wasn’t any shivering.

  “Has the General changed, in your reckoning of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” she said. She crossed her feet in front of her and sipped her tea. She looked hard at me again.

  “I know you did not do any laundry and wagon-driving down in Maryland and Virginia, unless it was your own laundry and the wagon-driving was in your official orders.”

  I did not answer her, just sat holding the likeness of the General carefully in one hand and my glass carefully in the other. She took a letter out of a clever pocket sewn with crimson ribbon onto the front of her dress. She unfolded it and read.

  My Dear,

  There is a young woman who disguised herself and fought bravely and indeed with considerable distinction for a time in my regiment. She was badly treated upon her discovery. By myself not least of all. After paying me a visit earlier this afternoon to leave me a warm coat she no longer required, she is gone away from us now and I hope has left war behind forever. I do not know why I think this, and so hesitate, my dear, to write it, but I somehow expect she will be coming to you. Look for her along the road. Treat her well if she arrives. Give her your welcome. Let her know she has mine too.

  She showed me the letter and I looked a little at it. There was a brown thumbprint on the left side of the page where someone with dirty fingers had held it. The bottom half of the page had been torn off. The General had a long, tall hand looked something like he did. He had written in a kind of purple ink that bled here and there around the letters, making some of the curlicues look like chrysanthemums.

  “He knew it about me long before anyone else,” I said.

  “I can well imagine that he did,” she said.

  “But he said nothing.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have.”
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  “Why wouldn’t he have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was he a professor of?”

  “Greek and Latin.”

  “I am very tired.”

  “Then you must come in the house, Private Thompson, and lie down.”

  I stayed at the house of the General still away at war and of his wife, who was good to me, for longer than I would have thought, for the crops were up and it was deep on into summer when I started to think about setting back out on my road. I had stayed all that time in the big room that had been the General’s brother’s and as I began at least in my mind to step away from the house and make north and west for home, I thought considerably about his soft eiderdown and good feather bed. It had been the kind of bed you could bury yourself down into and let the warmth and softness smother your dreams. There was something about that bed had to do in my mind with the Indian mound and the chair in the madhouse and the General’s brother’s grave and my mother’s grave and the one I had waiting for me soon or late whether I did or I didn’t keep on. It was that trick of did or didn’t got me slowed and looking slow one way and then the other and then no way at all. In the middle of that no way I found a bucket. Filled up with tears. The bucket was leaking. I wiped my cheeks with the pillowcase. There was some more leak came out. I had never cried beyond getting my eyes damp before. Or any good crying I had done was past my remembering of it: scrawny child in her mother’s arms. I did not like that I was doing it now but couldn’t see any way to stop it. My bucket was still leaking when the General’s wife knocked on my door one warm late morning and told me to come down, someone needed my help.

  “I fear I am indisposed, ma’am,” I told her.

  “Well, dispose of your upset and come on down,” she said back.