Laird Hunt - Neverhome

“She’s going to tell her story,” he said. “Everyone wants to gets to sit and tell their story.”

“What’d he say?” said one of the Akron boys.

“Why are they telling their stories?” I asked.

“I told mine earlier,” the grandpa said. “I told about my mother’s pickled eggs. And her grasshopper soup. Back in Maryland. We had a famine. Come after the crops didn’t make it. When I was young.”

“Why?”

“Shhh,” said a woman next to us. She was holding a baby didn’t appear long for this dusky world. It looked like a hoarfrost had come down and done some of its designs on the baby’s brow. Hurt to consider it. Baby had a head the size of an apple. Lacked only the worms.

“Because,” said the grandpa. He didn’t say any more. Just pointed over his shoulder at the woods we had walked out of. Then in the other direction at the church steeple wasn’t there anymore.

“We’re all going to be dead soon is what he means though he don’t say it. That’s the way of this war. You’re going to kill us all,” said the woman holding the baby.

Then the woman in the chair started to speak.

“You all think I’m just Annie lives out behind the smithy comes and sweeps out your kitchens once in a while. Well, I’m not,” she said. She had a small voice. About the size of a popcorn kernel only got heated halfway at the bottom of the pot. But even the children in the crowd had gone quiet and there were only a few crickets and a kitten meowing somewhere so her words came clear.

“You all think I am just the doorstep in the church and the bridge board on the creek, but I’m not.” She looked up when she said this. She wore a big smile, held it kind of slack-jawed. She looked from face to face in the crowd, nodding. One of the Akron boys leaned over to me while she was doing this.

“I think she’s drunk. I think they all are,” he said.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I know how to walk where they aren’t looking,” Annie said.

“What in hell does that mean?” the other Akron boy said.

“I know how to find the places where the world won’t ever see me. I can walk in the shadow and I can walk in the light. You all want to try and watch me?”

There were nods from the crowd. The woman next to me said, “Uh-huh.” The grandpa gave a wave at the air with his crutch.

“You want to try and see me do it?” said Annie.

“Yes,” said the crowd.

“Well, I won’t do it,” said Annie. “It’s just for me and never any of you mind. That’s my story. And when the soldier boys come back to finish their job they won’t see me even though I’ll be standing right there.”

At this, Annie stood up and handed the flower to a man standing in the shadows beside her and he took her place in the chair.

“We got to get on,” I said.

“Stay and tell your story,” said the grandpa. “Everyone gets a turn.”

“We got miles to walk.”

“Boy, those miles will wait on you. They won’t go anywhere.”

“That’s what I know.”

“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you tell us your story. I got twenty dollars hid back of my shed. You can have it all if you’ll tell your story.”

The grandpa had grown a kind of leer to him. He had his crutch up in the air again. There were others starting to look on.

“Tell us the story about how you are going to kill us all. Kill us and our babies,” said the woman holding her little apple-head thing.

“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said.

“You won’t hurt anyone,” the woman said. “You can’t hurt anyone. Not here. We’re done hurting. Maybe we’ll lay some hurt out on you.”

She said this and pointed up at the steeple had been obliterated, pointed just like the old grandpa had done, like it was the question had to be asked and the answer to the question both. As we walked away we heard the man holding the flower start up his story. He had a loud voice. Throat would have made a parade sergeant feel proud. His story sounded like a good one. Thomas Lord and his horse would have liked it. It was about long ago before the war finding a dead fish with a live snake in its mouth one week and a dead snake with a live fish in its mouth the next.

We hadn’t got much beyond the squash-colored crackle of the torchlight when a woman wasn’t any too young came swishing on up beside us and invited us all three to supper. We told her we had to get back to camp and she told us she had corn bread and fresh-slaughtered pig. I said no once more, but the Akron boys were already heading off with her. I called out I would leave them behind but they didn’t listen and a minute later I saw my feet had betrayed me and I was following along. She lived a mile off the road we wanted on a rise looked out onto the valley we’d spent all that day trying to skirt. You could see the fires down there and hear the sound. The sound of an army settling down to sleep is a terrible thing. It is both loud and quiet. You can’t like something that is both.

She had a neat little house the soldiers hadn’t found when they’d come through.

“What kind of soldiers was it?” I asked her but she said she didn’t know, that it had been dark, that she had been up in her house all alone.

“Must have been rebels, do you all manner of harm and call it God’s work,” said one of the Akron boys.

“Sure enough,” the woman said in such a way you didn’t know, not even to get started, what she was agreeing to.

I asked her her name. She said we didn’t need names. That it was just supper. And a cup or two of something to keep us all warm. She said this then put on a pair of colored glasses. They had purple glass and had belonged to her late husband who had once played cards on a riverboat.

“He had a green eyeshade too but I can’t find that. These help me see better when the lamps are lit. You ever try on a pair?” she asked. We all took turnabout putting them on then pulling them off. They made the room look muddy and had a funny shape to them. Hexagons. I had seen someone had sown a flower bed in the shape of a hexagon in town once before the war and told her this. She put the glasses back on and asked me what color the flowers had been. I told her, though I wasn’t sure any longer, that they had been purple.

“What was your story?” said one of the Akron boys.

“I’m fixing to show you,” she said.

I didn’t know what kind of hocus-pocus she and those glasses were going to get up to but she just led us out the back door, down a path, and into her garden. It was a fine patch. Well tended. Beans were good size. Eggplant and cherry tomatoes turning the moon to glow.

“You got a sleeping arrangement out in this garden,” said one of the Akron boys.

It was true. There was a bed sitting in the middle of the green. It was a big affair, carved headboard, feather bed, pillows flounced in pink.

“I got a net I bring out against the mosquitoes. String a tarp when there’s rain. You sleep in the garden, it’s peaceful. The onions and lettuce get into your dreams. You can just go and go.”

We all four stood there and pondered this. There were crickets scraping around us. You get too many crickets around you and you feel like you’re at the bottom of a bowl.

“You said something about supper,” I said.

She made no reply but after a minute more of cricket song we traipsed back into her house and she lit her lamps and pulled crocks of fresh cracklings out of her cupboard and a bottle out of a chest. It was a generous size of bottle and we all took our drinks from it. By and by we were as happy as a cackle of crows. Our hostess in her purple glasses was the happiest. She said when she had sat in the chair in town and told her tale they had all cheered. She asked the Akron boy sitting closest to her to tell his tale and when he had gotten about five words into it she stopped him and said, “May I kiss you?”