Laird Hunt - Neverhome

“I heard about schemes like that,” he said. “There’s other varieties but that’s the general idea. Especially the part about you ending up in rebel grays and dead.”

“That we got taken in the first place was my fault. I let these two cobs of corn get to carrying on.”

We drank in silence a time. Lord’s horse gave out a kind of bark in his sleep and Lord said, “He’s having that dream.”

Like I said, I had been thinking about my own dream, so I gave a look over at Lord. He saw this look and smiled back at me.

“You sit on something long enough you start to be that thing and it starts to be you. I had an uncle in Louisville about never left his soft chair. He would get up and I wasn’t the only one would have sworn that chair would give out a cough and wet wheeze just like the ones my uncle did.”

“You are speaking in originalities,” I said.

“My horse is dreaming about a bullet we both of us took.”

I guessed the whiskey had worked up the swirl of war in him and when that happened you couldn’t know what a man would say. I met a man in the days after Antietam would drink whiskey then pull out a knife and start to working its point into himself. And not an hour before I had worn a dress and shot two men and killed another with a clay jug to the head. A man telling me what his horse was dreaming seemed small next to that. I leaned back against my stump and nodded and told him to go on.

“We were behind lines, not more than a few slippery feet from Memphis and enough fresh rebels to put the fear into any size mountain of our men. We were not to engage at any cost, was our strict order, just reconnoiter and return to tell the tale. And it looked like we might get the errand done. Happy thinking. The kind has paved many a road down to its doom. Our way out of there took us through an ambush of sharpshooters and in the first volley half our boys got shot. It was a night darker and stranger than this one with winds running hither and thither and the moon playing hide-and-seek in the clouds. You thought you had a line on where they were firing from and then you would know — because another of us had been dropped — that you were wrong. A rumor got started it was Pickett and his boys we were brawling with and that set the strange weather to working in our heads and we started doing even worse than we already had. I don’t know how it happened but Rosie and I got ourselves about out of there and up onto a rise. I had one of my boys behind me and raised my hand to signal him to hold a minute when I felt a pinch and saw a musket ball had come to its clattery end in the crook of my fingers.”

Lord held up his hand and pointed to the crook between his third and fourth fingers. Then he traced a line that dribbled down the back of his hand, along his sleeve and went curling into a drop off his forearm.

“As I watched, that bullet slipped out from between my fingers and went falling away. It hit Rosie on his neck before it fell down to the ground. He gave up a shout and reared up like he had been hit for good when he felt it. We both about went over backward onto a pile of rock. In the dream he just had it was him caught the bullet in his right front hoof. And me the one went rearing up.”

“Well, well,” I said.

“That very night when I made my report at camp my commanding officer told me his grandfather had taken a spent bullet better than mine back in 1812. He had taken it directly between the eyebrows with enough fire left in it to penetrate the skin, skid down inside the right side of his face, and lodge behind his ear. When he was a boy, my commanding officer told me, it was a special treat to climb onto his grandfather’s lap and take a feel at the nub of bullet buried under his ear skin.”

“That’s quite a dream,” I said. Though whether or not I said it out loud was a question. The events of the long day and now this strange colloquy had done their work and I had got settled down, alongside the Akron boys and Lord’s horse, into my own froggy snores. Whether Lord joined us awhile I don’t know because when we all three woke the next morning he was gone. For whatever reason we did not speak about that meeting as we set out again, and by and by it came to seem to me as vague as the horse’s dream.

I had this idea we would march more or less back the way we had come and get ourselves home to camp by suppertime but during our overnight, the scatterings of Secesh forces had swollen up. From a rise we could see them spread out like moldy cauliflower across the valley we needed to traverse so we set off through the soldier pines to make our way around. It was cheerful weather for a hike. There were bluebirds in the green trees and breezes blowing quiet, happy things about. Made the night before seem another world entirely, nothing but twists of whiskey and steam. The Akron boys had been clammed up tight all morning but by and by they started into their chirping again. I expect I joined them for a chirp or two and who knows but what we might have started in with some full-out singing if an hour into our hike we hadn’t found ourselves walking through the dead.

It was a shallow grave cut for hundreds hadn’t had much of its top put on. There was dust and swirls of leaves blown atop them so that we were several yards in when we realized what it was we had stumbled upon. I had my foot on a hand when one of the Akron boys said, “I just saw a face.” The other said, “That down there looks like an arm.” I thought at first it was just Union dead but then I saw there was plenty of gray had joined in too. There was dead and the bones of the dead for the next mile after that. “Here we go now, boys,” I said. There was dead sitting against trees, dead with their feet in the air, dead dangling over the boughs of trees. There was dead fallen three deep in creek beds and dead lying separately in a clearing tucked up to their chins in neat blankets of sun. I saw a head on its way to making a skull and thought about the belle and wondered if she was still wearing her own.

As we passed through them, we came upon many a crow still making itself a leathery meal. Most of what we passed had also been touched by the kind of carrion creatures liked to peck in pockets and sacks. See what treasures lay there hidden. We ourselves checked a sack or three as we went. There was miles still to walk and the pork and crackers had given out. One of the Akron boys said we shouldn’t, leave the good dead lie and so forth, but I said whatever it was, they didn’t need it anymore. Anyway, hadn’t we already been crunching on the sandwiches of the dead? A quarter mile after I said this we found ourselves a sack shut tight had three good fistfuls of beef jerky wrapped in rose-embroidered napkins. There was a note had a rose motif at its top stuffed in there with the jerky. The note had got damp but some of it could still be ciphered. Come on home, my darling son was what could still be read. The darling son had on a blue, leaf-covered cap had come down cockeyed over his face. He had done his dying alone behind an alder bush.

It was getting dark when I figured we had notched the miles north we needed and began to true us west. It was poplars and creek bed for the next few miles and when we struck a village had lost its church spire to a cannon blast, our necks were cold and our feet were wet. There was a large group gathered next to torches on a kind of square. If they noticed us or cared about it when we came up out of the creek bed and joined them they gave no sign. There was a gal holding a dried flower sitting in a chair at the front of the crowd. She had her eyes closed.

“What is this?” I asked a smiling old grandpa leaning on a crutch.