Laird Hunt - Neverhome

There are other memories now come to join the one of my mother standing on the neighbor’s porch steps, the neighbor that left here with her babies long ago, and of my own baby, who died beside me not an hour into his own life on our plank-wood floor, other spells of the past that won’t be put aside. One of them is of that place they took me after the kindly major made his bow and stepped away. The men he assigned to escort me took me back into the town and even past Neva Thatcher’s little house so that I thought for a minute, forgetting how I had ended up walking the thoroughfares under guard in her dress, that they were going to let me go back to her. She could keep me on awhile, I thought. She could kiss me morning, noon, and night if she needed to. Then I could tell her, when she had got tired of that, I was going to go back to my Bartholomew.

We went straight on past the little house, though, and on down the street and along another and then they loaded me onto a wagon and took me away. Another town. It was nightfall when we got there and the building we stopped at was tall and wet-looking with windows on the top floor had narrow bars on them. It was made of gray boards had been dusted up with musket balls and you could see even in the light of the streetlamp that part of one wall had been blown open and rebuilt. I had tried to talk a little to the men guarding me but they had refused to speak except amongst themselves and said no word to me as they brought me down off the wagon and handed me over to another guard. This guard would not speak to me either. He took me down a hall had straw and things that crunched on its floor. We went past doors had moans and murmurings behind them. Came every few feet or so past the muffled clink or drag of some chain. At the end of the hall was a door and through that doorway I was pushed.

When I saw where they had taken me I did not turn and bang the boards and holler to be let out, just as I had not whimpered before when the lieutenant wanted to put me in the ground, nor run, not even once, when the guns had blazed on the field. There were eyes in that place they had put me. Like that girl from the sheep shed had found a way again to keep me company. They were all in a line along the sides of the room. They were every one of them looking at me.

“I was out of my head a little in the woods, but that was because of my wound,” I said aloud to the eyes. The only answer was a sound came from the corner. It was like bones boiling and cracking in a pot. They every one of them have knives, I thought. Then there was a laugh and the eyes all went shut. After I had stood a minute with my hands and back pressed against the door, my heart beating full hard enough to break the boards behind me, I let my legs lead me down to the floor.

It was a lunatic house from the old days. Had stood there holding tight its horrors many a year until it had had its sides opened by stray cannon shot in the early days of the war. The keepers had run away and the lunatics had poured out into the countryside. Some had found their way through the battle and never come back. One went off looking for the well he had been dropped down in Georgia during the first part of his treatment twenty years before. He didn’t make it past a pond on the outskirts of town. There were two from the women’s side of the house went with him. Mad as they were supposed to be, they pulled him out of the pond five times before the battle cooled down and some of the locals got the idea to hit him on the head and tie him to a tree. There had been a fire on the men’s side and a number of the ones chained up had burned.

The fire had worn itself out and the hole in the wall had been patched and some of the lunatics had been rounded back up. The building had locks and chains aplenty so the army had taken to using it for anyone they thought had their firing pins loose. The men’s side was full to bursting with boys had gotten addled up during the fight. Some they let back out. Some they didn’t. I was in my room with two ladies had seen their children blown straight out of their skins in front of them and couldn’t quit wringing their hands. They could talk well enough, just couldn’t stop wringing their hands. There was another supposed spy, this one from New Orleans was the charge, who wouldn’t say a word. There were a couple of gals had been locked in, as far as I could get out of them, for being too heavy. They both of them walked too fast when they came at you and weren’t heavy anymore. The three or four others were the old customers. They wore chains most of the time. One of them liked to talk about the Gadarene that Jesus healed way back in the long ago. About the pigs He had put the Gadarene’s demons into. About how the pigs had flung themselves off the nearby cliff. How the demons had had to find other homes. “Other homes,” she liked to say with a smile shaped like a snapped-off spider leg could have curdled fresh milk, and she’d lift her chained arms to indicate all of us, those in the room and those without. Another of them liked to grind what teeth she had left. Did it awake or asleep, morning, noon, and every inch of the night. She got hit at considerably for it. Even I got grouchy a time or two when, just after I’d got my eyes shut, she offered up that sound.

Once a day one of the old keepers, big gal, would come in with some porridge for us. She came with kicks and cuffs too. I wasn’t spared this courtesy. She had a soldier with her each time she came in or I might have tried to answer her. Every now and again some fellow as said he was a doctor would peep his head in through the door. Just as soon as he had had that peep he pulled his head back out. We would a few of us yell out to him when he paid these visits but if he heard us he never gave any sign.

Sometimes several of them came into the room in the evening with buckets of cold water. We each got one of these over the head. It was a long night of shivering on the floor after they had gone. There was other things going on at the men’s side. There was more than one that set to screaming regular over there. At first it sounded like it was all just one screamer. Then you heard them enough and knew it was several and got to know each individual one. You can scream high. You can scream low. You can scream something in between sounds like steam out of a train whistle. You can scream so it sounds like a musket bullet been sent by your ear. You can scream like a monkey. You can scream like an elephant oak struck by lightning in a silent wood. There was a boy across the way screamed like he was singing. Like they ought to sign him up for the stage. There was a curlicue elegance to his scream and I got to wishing it was just him they would poke at with their sharp sticks.

Once each week one of us with a guard at her back would carry out the slop bucket. I got detailed to it more than my ordinary share because I didn’t faint or try to bite anyone when I was doing it. I kept moving forward. Step at a time. Even when a soldier tried to trip me up for some fun, I did not stop. He stuck his big foot out and I fell forward but caught myself and the bucket both. Managed too not to hit him one for his joke. Just smiled. Like I understood and even agreed with what it was was making him laugh: lady about fell with a bucketful of shit. The slops got carried to a trough in an alcove let out to a stream at the back of the yard. When the stream wasn’t moving much, the heavy part of the slops stayed put.

Carrying slops wasn’t the only job they let me do. Once when I was carrying a bucket I passed a soldier giving another a shave. They were in the cold sunshine and the one was having it done got his face cut by the other and cried out.