Laird Hunt - Neverhome

“Where you from?” I said, moving my fingers, cupping and clenching.

“Work in toward yourself, carve out a cave, take it slow so you don’t cramp, see if you can make a space.”

It had been quiet a minute but there was an unsubtle owl flew over the field and the moaning around us set up again. Someone called out to God to come down and kill him. To hit down on him with His great and thunderous hands. They would be spangled about every which way, those weepers and moaners. Just like they had been dropped off God’s clouds. Away off in the far distance you could hear cannon fire. Big guns getting ready for another day. Make more happy glades like this one. There were foul smells drifting. Bodies couldn’t tend to their business. Things opened up shouldn’t ever have been.

“You know what I would like more than that sip of water, more than just about anything besides this ball out of my back?” said the voice.

I was digging and making progress and did not respond.

“A fine, clean morsel of foolscap. Some fresh cotton rag. A creamy linen weave.”

“That ball has climbed up to your brain,” I said.

“I worked in a law office, down Carpenter’s Lane in Richmond. I worked at copying on fine paper all the day long.”

“You’re a Secesh.”

“Just a piece of paper. One sweet sheet. I haven’t held anything but old scrap in a year. Wrote my letters home on a pile of old wallpaper squares. You ever try to write a nice hand on wallpaper? Paper’s what you robbed us of worse than our homes and our lands.”

“I’m getting somewhere here.”

“I’ve got grandbabies. More than half a dozen. All of them live close. I was just teaching the oldest boy to write before I left. He knows how to hold the pen, yes, sir, he does.”

He gave out a cough, then went quiet. The fire in my arm felt like it was working down to the bone. It was my right hand did the bigger portion of the work. It was my right hand that carved most of the cave, that got me free. It was near dawn when I struggled loose. I lay there free for a nice long while then took the bayonet off my musket and stepped over to the reb. He was an old man with a white beard and had small, soft eyes. Too old to be a soldier. He looked too old to be anything.

My haversack was still around my neck. The first thing my fingers found in it was an apple. I ate that then reached them back in. Down at the bottom, folded neat, I found a sheet of paper. I didn’t know if it was special but I had bought it recent to send to Bartholomew and apart from a few stray smudge spots it was clean. I unfolded it, took out my pencil stub, and wrote Carpenter’s Lane, Richmond, then I folded the page back up and tucked it a little ways into his shirt.

My idea was to trot right off after my regiment but that’s not how it went. I left behind my captor tree and found the way I wanted obscured. The dead and the about-dead lay left and right, forward and back. You had to pick your path careful. There wasn’t light enough to see a clear road. I stepped on a leg and what was left of what it was attached to gave a shiver whose image when it rippled over the face I’d pay good cash money to have pulled from my head. One or two as could still open their eyes asked me for water. I was just about parched to the point that if they had had a drop of water on them I would have stole it for myself. I wandered this way and that, stumbling as I went. Now and again I would hear a cannon and think to march in its direction but the woods and slopes were cunning and played me clever tricks.

The light came on and I paused to gain my bearings. I do not know if I had been scrabbling for an hour or ten minutes, but just a corncob’s throw over yonder sat the dead Richmond soldier and my captor tree. The boys hadn’t been dead before had gone quiet. I hoped it was sleep of one variety or another. My arm had left off burning for the minute and was growing cold. I sat to have a look-see but fainted flat out when I tried to pull up my shirtsleeve. I woke with the sun’s fist in my face and a ringing in my ears. I rose and clambered up a slope and climbed a fence where a boy lay skewered with a piece of his face hanging down like a dewlap in the sun.

All the field ahead was filled with the dead. The local company of vultures had already crept through and turned out their pockets and carried off their canteens. Here and there you met a body part had broken off acquaintance with its owner. A glove had gone with a hand and a boot with a foot. At the middle was a dead bovine. I was not yet hungry and still had an apple and a cracker in my haversack, or I might have inquired after its meat. At the end of the field was another fence and another field. This field was empty of all but cannonballs. You could see where they had cracked through the trees and the paths they had made as they rolled. In the next field there was nothing but some ugly-looking thistles and the beginnings of a breeze.

Midday I came to a fine old manor house had been about burned to the ground. All that was left was the little gum-tack houses built all around it, mushrooms around a black rose. I poked my head into one or two of them and saw a cross and a magazine illustration of President Abraham Lincoln but nothing else. I looked down the well and saw what had become of the mansion’s dog. It was floating on its side. The air smelled like smoke and the great swaths of mint sprouting deep green along the fencerows. At home Bartholomew and I liked nothing better than to take the scythe to a patch of mint. Two or three strokes and you had heaven climbing up your nose. Bartholomew could make a mint tea to beat the band. He would make it in the morning, set it in the root cellar, and we would drink it to cool off in the evening. Thoughts of the treasures in our cellar away up in Indiana got me to climbing down into the damp black ruin. Everything in the mansion cellar, though, had been hauled off or broken. There was blue and brown mason-jar glass everywhere to decorate the dirt floor.

While I was hunting down there for anything might have been missed I heard voices in the yard. I peeped out and saw it was a party of rebels, six strong. I crunched my way soft as I could back down and into a corner and waited with my musket. They didn’t come down to the cellar, though. They were each one of them barefoot, and I expect they had tried their luck down amidst the broken glass before. As they were leaving I heard one of them say something about cooling off at a creek. You would think I would have lit out after them soon as they had left to get my own drink but instead what I did down there in the dark and the cool was breathe in some of the burned smell and think about mint and fall into a snore.

When I woke it was dark. I clambered up out of the ruins and went off in the direction I thought I had heard them take. My arm felt like an icicle, and my forehead was hot. There was a minute I saw my mother walking beside me and asked her to go away and get Bartholomew for me but she said Bartholomew preferred not to come. She went away and Bartholomew did not come. When he did not come I got it into my head I needed to cry. Tears came up their tunnels but could not cut their way through the banks of dirt dried to my face.

On the outskirts of the farm was a clearing bordered by hedges gone wild and in the middle of the clearing was an urn. It looked pretty to me in the moonlight and I got the idea I had to leave something in it. Some token. A tithe. What you would lay down in the little basket at church. Good Christian passing by. I pulled up a fistful or two of grass and carried it over careful, like I was clutching a child. When I got to the urn and looked close I saw that others before me had had my same thought. There was a spoon in it and a broken plate and a tin pan that had done duty as a spittoon. I said before I can’t sing but I sang and hummed a little as I dropped the grass back onto its ground and walked away.