Laird Hunt - Neverhome

“You come any closer I will fight you, even tied up as I am,” I said.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

It was my turn to stay silent. The voice was large but she was not. She wasn’t any much taller than a child.

“I’m not closing my eyes,” I said at last. She lifted one of her hands up past my face and into the moonlight had found its way back into the stall. There was a knife in it. The knife climbed up through the moonlight and back down. It made this journey several times. When she pulled it away from the light and placed its edge against my forehead, I thought the gold air before me would start to bleed, and when she pressed the blade harder against my forehead I thought that in its bleeding we would both drown.

“Close your eyes now, Ash Thompson, killer of men, or I will cut out your tongue and feed it to the fishes,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

“You tell Neva I was already sorry,” I said.

“Who is Neva?” she said.

Came a scuffle of feet and a cough from outside the shed door. I felt the air in front of my face open and shut like a ball had moved through it. I kept my eyes closed for a long time. When I opened them again even the dark was gone.

They held me in that stall two days past that night. I tried to ask my guard about the girl had come to visit but he wouldn’t answer me. Neither did he say anything about the red line he must have seen I had across my forehead. One of those days they had in another stall a pair of Confederate officers of one kind or the other who spent their time in singing duets about beautiful ladies and the bounty of the lands of the South but otherwise never said any other word. The last morning, my guard and four or five of his friends came and leaned their arms over the top of the stall and looked at me. Then they dragged me over to their camp to be hanged.

There had been word of a spy in the ranks, a whore from Chattanooga dressed up just like a man. This spy had passed on troop movements and gotten a barley field’s worth of boys torn to bits. It was a first lieutenant told me this. Every now and again while he was talking he would pull his handgun out of its holster and point it at me. Once or twice he cocked the weapon. I counted two good teeth in his mouth. There were a few other junior officers present and a number of men from the ranks when he conversed up close with me.

I kept my composure through this, stood as tall as they would let me, looked the broke-tooth lieutenant straight in the eye, told him I had had other interviewers to scare me, that he would have to work twice again as hard as he was if that was his aim. I told him that I was no spy, that I came from Indiana, honest farm country, land come down to me through my mother, that I had never been to Chattanooga, didn’t even know what that was. I gave him the letter of my company, the number of my regiment. I listed the engagements and battles I had fought in. I told them to speak to the Colonel, that he would vouch for Gallant Ash. They laughed at this, said Gallant Ash was just a story some fool and his friends had told to pass away the days. The company I had spoken of was made out of Ohio men, not girls from Chattanooga or Indiana or anywhere else I claimed or didn’t claim to come from. They were still laughing when a major pushed through the crowd and asked for an explanation. He and the lieutenant stepped off to the side.

“Is there no one here who remembers me?” I said. “Look, I have a saber scar on my left arm.”

The men around me neither spoke nor moved. I must not have looked like much in my dress and trying to show my scar in the middle of all those men, because when the major came back over he walked straight up to me and took me gently by the elbow.

“If she is a spy, she will receive a trial,” he said. The men had been hunting blood and had not had it and were none the happier, but when the major spoke again they moved away. He was very kind as we walked. He was tall and pleasant-looking and had a sweet voice. He told me he came from New York, the shores of Lake Erie. He told me he would write to my company commander and apologized for the conduct of his men. I told him I knew a thing or two about men brought to the brink and hard pushed, that I had stood alongside them many a time, that I could not hold the ugliness of war against them any more than I could against myself or those I had considered my friends.

“Why did you refer to yourself as Gallant Ash?” he asked.

I told him. I described climbing the tree and the looks of the men below. I described it at some length. I am not sure but what I might have given out a chuckle or two as I told the story. Might even have tapped a foot and sung. The major nodded. He released my elbow, which he had been holding so gently. Said he had heard a song about Gallant Ash and was pleased to have met the one who had inspired it. Kindness comes in many colors. He called me miss, thanked me for my service to the Union cause, and bade me farewell.

My Bartholomew never learned his way into or out of a fight but there was one thing no one could hold the candle to him at and that was dancing. If he even started to sniff the arrival of a song, he was jumping and kicking across the floor. In our earlier, happier times he would sing himself into a dance if there wasn’t any other music for it. I expect I wasn’t the worst you ever saw at dancing but I was a long way from having the gift. Another lifetime Bartholomew could have been up on the stage. That would have been the life for him. That voice of his could bubble up out of his throat and the way those arms and legs of his could move. Still, we only get but the one life and I never heard him calling out for any other. Except of course for when we first met and he called out for the life had me in it. He called loud to step into that. While he was courting me, is what I mean. I made it take a while but he got it done.

He said, “I got nothing to offer but sweat and zinnias.”

He said, “But I will love you until the day I die into my wings and know you have died into yours.”

He said, “There won’t ever be any other one loves you as true as the blue of this blue shoe.” He held up his shoe for me to look at when he said this. It was kind of blue. Kind of green too. Looked like he was wearing birds on his feet. And then he danced for me. He had rolled an old whiskey barrel all the way out from town and had set that barrel in the yard and had hollered for me to come out of my house and he hopped up on that barrel and danced like a dervish in a mulberry bush or a monkey had a toothache or a rhinoceros had a headache or some such and then he hopped back down and when he saw I’d started up breathing again he said what I’ve already told, then said he wanted to marry me.

“Why?” I said.

“It’s love pure and simple,” he said.

The day Bartholomew and I got married we danced. There was a small group had gathered and they gave us a clap and a cheer and when it was done we walked out the two of us to the cemetery to see my mother. She had a stone wasn’t much but I had kept it well enough and it had never wanted for flowers. We lay bluets and sweet peas down on it and stood a minute and then I said to Bartholomew, “Now, that’s done.” And he said, “What is?”

I hadn’t known just exactly what I meant when I said it but I knew some choice part of me hoped by turning a dance with my nimble-foot husband and then laying down those flowers on my wedding day I could let some of that which was past trot away. I told him this as we walked home and he was quiet a time and then said he expected it wouldn’t work out that neat. Which wasn’t the last time he was right. I went on thinking about my mother every day just as I had before I had gotten married only now Bartholomew was there and the smells and sounds of the past didn’t scorch quite so hard, didn’t make me stand and slash at the air with a stick or run out hunting more often than I had to. They were still there though, those smells and sounds and sights, and they chewed and worked at me like worms in their corridors, and then other worms came with their own mouths to chew and keep them company. After a time, like I’ve told it, I packed up my bag and went to war.