Laird Hunt - Neverhome

He appeared struck. Took a hard swallow. “If you got to,” he said.

So she leaned over and did the job. Right there at the table over cold pork and corn bread. She then asked if any of us could play the fiddle, that her old husband had left a fiddle behind him when he had gone off to “feed his hopes to the slaughter,” and she hadn’t heard a man’s hands on it since that day. The boy hadn’t been kissed got up then and took up the fiddle, turned it into tune, and started to play. This got our hostess and the kissed boy up to clabber arm in arm about the room. I leaned back and watched some of this but when the boy fiddling winked at me and started to play “Gallant Ash” I got up, made my excuses, and walked out the door. A minute later I was back in the vegetables and sitting on the edge of the woman’s garden bed. A minute after that I was lying down. I had on my mind that church steeple wasn’t there and those graves in the forest that weren’t graves. They were on my mind but I didn’t know how to think about them so I shut my eyes. I drowsed some but got up quick when I saw the woman had joined me.

“Got those two all but asleep in there,” she said. She stood up after me and there followed a memorable farce around that bed in the moonlight. She would step toward me, her lips puckered, her arms up and good and set for a grope, and I would step backward and pivot away. In the moonlight her purple glasses glowed orange and rose. In between her attempts we would talk of the moon. Its ancient courses and seasons. She had read some poetry or her husband had and she made some remarks on it. Then she stepped at me again. This went on for a while. I got stung a time or two and wished we were doing our dance under a mosquito net. Presently she grew tired and we both went back inside. There wasn’t much more to that night. Only that the Akron boys ended up finishing it just the two of them in that bed in the garden and I ended up with my head on that woman’s table dreaming there was a boat leaving the world but I couldn’t get on it because I was stuck to my chair.

We had six-inch-shell headaches and one of the Akron boys had caught a cough but we trotted off of the widow’s property and away from that town the next morning like it had already been named target for cannon practice by the forces to come. We left off the trotting after a mile or two but kept up a good pace all that day and by and by the ragged boundary of our camp appeared. We didn’t look any too smart straggling up the road but one of the pickets recognized me and waved us through. It was a Sunday and warm so there was more boys than ordinary milling in the woods and by the creek and in the big pond it fed into. The Akron boy wasn’t coughing went off straight for the pond, pulling off his filthy clothes as he went, so it was just two of us continued along.

We passed a birch had nailed to it a big creeper toad. One of its legs was gone. It looked like a finger tap would crack it in two. We went by a maple next had nothing but ladies’ names gouged into it. Jesamine, Turquoise, Apollonia, Marybeth, Ginestra, and so on. We hit the whiff of the camp just as we were passing the names and it didn’t make them read so sweet. Fate of us all. Near the congregation of tents leaned a sutler’s wagon looked picked over, but next to that wagon was a bench pushed up against a tree had a sign hanging from it said Shaves.

“Shave,” I said to the Akron boy still with me.

“Sure could use one,” he said.

This wasn’t any more true for him than it was for me, for we were both as smoothbore as babies, but a shave was more by a bit than just a beard-scraping and we both of us fetched coins out of our pockets and sat down and it wasn’t a minute later that we both of us had steamed rags drooping over our faces. After the rags had drooped the heat out of themselves the old brown fellow running the show pulled them off and made slow circles with fresh hot rags over our filthy faces and if I didn’t gasp entirely out loud about how good it felt, the Akron boy did. When this part of it was finished the barber took still another hot rag and put it over my face and, after making a fuss with some shaving soap, went to work with his neat metal on the Akron boy. There wasn’t any scrape sound to what he was doing, just a kind of quick, low swoosh, but that didn’t stop him from tendering in some comments about how the young gentleman had sure been overdue and how he hoped “all that hard beard” hadn’t dulled his blade. When he had had his turn and it was mine, the Akron boy just slid right off the bench and lay down like dead Jesus on the ground.

“I’ve been born again to better things,” he said as he lay there. Or he tried to say it. His cough had been holding off with the steam and soap but now it came back to him.

“We’ll get you fixed up just right,” the barber said as he soaped my face. There was more lye in the soap than the kind I used when I had given Bartholomew his shaves in the kitchen at home but there was some lemon perfume to it too. Swoosh, swoosh went the steel through the soap. The instrument was old and had some rust on it but its edge was sharp. Every now and then as the barber swept my face, the owl-looking sutler owned the shop-and-shave outfit leaned out of his wagon and looked kind of mournful at us. I expect it was because his provisions had all been picked over and none too gently. Most of the times the sutlers made more money than Midas but there were other times that the boys got tired of handing over all they had for some stale moon cakes or stained sheets of paper and just took.

“How we coming?” I said when it seemed the pantomime had probably run its course.

The barber, who had been working with his face kind of close in to mine, leaned back a little like he was looking things over and said he just about had it, that there were still a few stubborn spots, but he was getting there.

I shut my eyes when he said this, but I did not drowse. Instead I conjured up the picture that I was at home in my own kitchen and that it was me holding the blade, me had stropped it sharp.

I had given Bartholomew a shave the day before I left for war. He hadn’t wanted to talk to me much since that night in the yard when I had shoved him away, but that morning I got up early and milked his favorite heifer and picked strawberries and set them down in front of him before our work. If it wasn’t the strawberries and cream set his jaw to working, it was the kiss I gave him on his ear, down on the hard part and onto the soft, and when I asked him if he wanted a shave into the bargain he took me up on the offer most courteously. He liked to sing while he shaved himself or I shaved him and that morning he sang happy songs had his foot tapping the floor so vigorous I had to tell him to quit or he might get cut. He quit his tapping but not his singing and next thing you knew he had found his way into a song had children in it, children running over hill and dale and couldn’t find their way home. He sang at this awhile, getting quieter and quieter, and when I tried to kiss him again in the middle of it he wouldn’t have my kiss, nor would he suffer my touch any longer, and stood with the soap still on his face and his beard half scraped, and when we worked that last day instead of standing shoulder to shoulder we did our working apart.

I talked to my mother inside and outside my head a great deal that day we worked apart.

“I am leaving here tomorrow and maybe forever, Mother,” I said to her.

I know it, she said back.

“I am leaving, Mother.”

I know it.

“I am leaving here.”

Forever?

“Isn’t that what I said?”