Laird Hunt - Neverhome

I walked then down a tunnel made out of walls overhung by heavy fern. I went through a high gate led nowhere and bordered by strangled trees that twisted and yawed. I climbed a hill and saw line after line of ridges leading away into moonlit clouds. There was a hickory tree had had its arms cut off that I took it in my head to try to climb. I told it if it had had a young lady perched on its peak I would have made it to the top. For a time I followed an old road lined by trees. The road looked like it had once gone from someplace fine to someplace fine else and also that those days were gone. There were dead men sprinkled all around. You would have thought to look at them that they had just got winded and decided to plunk down. Have a smoke. Think it through a spell. One of these men wasn’t a man. She had on a gray cap and was clutching a flintlock pistol had likely seen service in the Revolutionary War. Some of her chest wrappings had come loose and were dangling out of a hole in her shirt. You could see there was dried blood on them. She had been better built even just on army rations than I had ever been and I couldn’t understand how she had hidden herself. I had an idea about sitting down and seeing if she could still palaver, that she might know some secret apart from masquerade devices could get me out of my mess. So I did a crouch-down in front of her but she did not budge. Every now and then as I walked on I thought I heard cannon fire but it was far away if it was anything and I could not be sure.

By and by, I came down a slope through trees wearing blankets of ivy and found the creek. I drank then. I drank, then retched, then drank some more and lay panting on my side. Then I pulled off my rags and unwrapped myself and took out Bartholomew’s likeness, which was just a piece of hard metal in the dark, and set it next to me on the bank. “We need to discuss our situation,” I said to the hard metal but the hard metal wouldn’t talk, not any more than my dead sister soldier. Only my mother would talk to me. Only my mother could I count on. That thought, once I’d run it through my head, made me laugh out loud, and I sat there laughing like that until the mosquitoes found me, then I lay down on my side again and rolled over into the water. It was waist-deep quick and I played at sinking and rising. I got the idea then I’d been revived and set to work at scrubbing at myself with gravel and water grass. I scrubbed and scrubbed, then pulled my rags into the water and punched and squeezed them to dislodge the dirt. It was all of it slow work because I couldn’t use my left arm. There were boys back in camp had used sticks to scrape off their extremities when they couldn’t scare up soap and I gave that a try when I saw there were still streaks on my legs. I hadn’t had a wash of any kind in three weeks. It didn’t bother me a speck that I laughed as I worked. Or that I couldn’t stop shivering even though I felt hot. After I had laid out my clothes I spent an hour or three crouched and gibbering under the bushes like I’d turned Akron boy and there were women murdering men around me in the dark. Then I stood and walked up the draw a ways to a spot where the creek deepened and spread. The rebel party were there, all as naked as I was.

“Gallant Ash,” they said. “We heard all about you and your exploits. Come on in here and splash.”

An invitation as nicely put as that couldn’t be declined. It transpired I’d saved that old Richmond man from certain death by giving him my piece of paper and he shed his grays like the others and came down with us to the water. I’d never felt happier since I had set out to war. Someone had a fiddle. Could give it a scratch. We linked up arms in the cool water and turned circles and laughed and frolicked about. I don’t know what it was made the party take its turn but take a turn it did, and I found I had my good hand around a rebel boy’s throat. All the others had gone, the old Richmond man included. It was just me and that rebel boy, just my hand and his throat. I killed him there in the water and let his dead body float away, then went back to my clothes. They were still soaked so I draped them over me and slept. In the dream I turned to next, my mother came to me. It was the old dream only now I had my musket. The angry crowd around me had lit its torches and grown tall so I laid about me with my bayonet.

I was sick and far from the creek when I opened my eyes. I had put on my wrap and clothes and found my way into the remains of a shelter looked to have been built for pigs. Clouds had come up in the night and there was a drizzle splattering through a hole in the shelter roof. I had been bitten up considerably during my sleep and, sleeping, had scratched deep gouges in my face. I could not move my left arm at all. It had swollen up against my coat sleeve. I felt for Bartholomew’s likeness under my wrappings and knew at once I had lost it and when I got up on my knees, my stomach, which had nothing much more in it than mud and creek water, emptied out. It took me a time, kneeling there, to be able to open up my eyes and lift my head. When I did I could see a straggled line of our wounded coming down a lane. After my rich visions of the night before, I wiped my eyes and shook my head but the line did not waver. I stood and scuttled across the field and, breathing hot and hard, fell in with them. It was not the sorriest bunch I had ever seen, but it was close. There was more than a few missing digits on their fingers. There were shirts and underdrawers wrapped around heads. One fellow had about two feet of beard was clutching a torn, bloody pillow to his chest and leaving wet feathers to fall to the ground. I pointed at my arm when the man closest to me looked over. He just shook his head and opened his mouth to show me that he had been relieved of his tongue.

The hospital was in a school in the center of a village. The village had changed into rubble and splinters, and the schoolhouse looked like an island afloat in an awful sea. Everywhere you looked there were hurt men. All the ache of this world and the one beyond. The idea was that we would walk up to the doctors and they would look at us and decide who needed the quickest help. Those that needed it would go straight into the schoolhouse. The others would go and sit in the yard and offer up the wisdom of their ill fortune to the wind. As we walked up, some of the men had been sitting there a time gave out calls. One I went by lifted a blanket up to show a dead soldier. The deceased had had his clothes burned off of him, and his skin bubbled black, yellow, and brown. The man giving the show didn’t say anything, just let us look a minute then put the blanket back down. An older man up ahead had a bandage on his head and drool caterpillaring out of the corner of his mouth said he hoped we all liked saws. Didn’t matter whether you had a toothache or were carrying half a cannonball in your gut, they would cut something off. This set a few of them had already been doctored up and were lying in the dirt with their bandaged stumps to chuckling.

Meantime, there were screams coming from the schoolhouse. We got up to its side and could see to the back where they were dropping what they cut right out an open window onto a pile. There was a contraband grandpa with a cart loading some of it up. It was slippery work and he dropped a piece or two as he went rattling on his way. Out in the field, where he was heading, the carrion birds were having a contest to see which of them could fly off with the biggest piece. I looked at them and got up this thought those crows and vultures needed whiskey and cigars. I might even have said this out loud. Anyway, someone nearby gave a laugh. Up ahead, they were making the boys take off their jackets, sometimes their pants and shirts. One boy that had an angry, swollen slice down his side stood there naked as the day he was born.