Laird Hunt - Neverhome

After this speech on the virtues of the chair, she said I might get back to carrying the slop jar and giving out shaves if I continued to improve. I told her that she was right, that the chair was a wonderful thing, that I was better, that I promised to be good. I was saying this to her when I saw who the guard was standing behind her. I blinked and scrunched my eyes to see if he would go away but there still stood the Akron boy that wasn’t dead.

He was on duty two weeks later when the keeper let me carry the slop jar again. She walked along with us all the way there and all the way back, though it was her custom, when this errand was made, to take her meal and sit quiet in her closet. I did not speak to the Akron boy and he did not speak to me. I had watched him and studied up on whether his months and weeks of battles had put some iron would work against my cause into him. I had watched to see if he still had a shake to his hand and a nervous-sparrow hop to his eyes. When one of the women who wrung her hands asked him if he had seen her darling boy in the fights, he did not answer but he did gulp and look away, and when, in that retreat, his eyes found mine and jumped like they had had yellow-jacket stingers shoved into their centers, I knew I could still have my hope. I carried the slops around into the alcove and the Akron boy followed me and watched me dump the slops into the trench. I took a while at emptying the jar, set it down between pours, wiped my brow. It was a horror what went slopping its way down the stream but I lingered there, made it look like I couldn’t move too quick, needed minutes, not seconds, if anyone was looking on to get up to a trick or two with my handsome guard.

The next week the keeper went back to her meal and her rest but the Akron boy walked behind me and I did my emptying duties exactly the same. I got some help on how it would work best to proceed the day after that when the keeper came in to see us. She was in a foul mood — tripped over my leg and gave me a rich portion of good, sharp smacks. The Akron boy was standing behind her. I did not say a word. After a time he coughed and gulped and said maybe I’d had enough. The keeper turned on him, still kicking, and asked how it was any of his affair. I was a wildcat and needed my kicks. The Akron boy said he had known me once. This set the keeper, whose mind ran with the slop trench, to chuckling and she gave me one more good kick and said she bet I was tasty. The Akron boy turned the color of the freshest autumn apple when she said this. He got so red it changed the color of the floor and the walls.

“Thank you,” I told him the next week we went out with the slops.

“You are welcome, Gallant Ash,” he said.

“You took my part and I appreciate that.”

“There was a time I wouldn’t have had to. You don’t seem as sturdy as you used to.”

“No,” I said. “I expect I’m not. You look like you’ve found your muscles though.”

That blush came back to his face when I said this. Likely it was the size of the lie that helped turn his color. He hadn’t found his muscles. He looked like he had been turned out of a prison camp last week. There wasn’t any muscle on him at all.

The fourth week he was not there and I feared he had been detailed away. I was sick to retching when the fifth week came and still he had not returned. It was a big fellow gave me a jab or two with his musket who followed me down to the alcove. It was evil cold that day so I got away with only a bad minute of him standing too close and breathing on me with his foul breath.

“We’ll talk on it closer next time,” he said.

On the sixth week, though, I got pushed down to the yard by the keeper to do some shaving for the first time since I’d sat in the chair and there the Akron boy was, leaning against a wall. Heaven drips down its gifts. It was five or six of them, though not the Akron boy, there for my services, in their shirtsleeves, and as I shaved the first one, the one who’d breathed hard on me the week before, he said, “Now, don’t you go and cut my throat,” and I said, “No, sir, I won’t,” and he said, “Because I’ve heard you’re a fierce one.” I shaved through them all, taking my time at it, looking from minute to minute at the Akron boy leaning slumped over some against the far wall.

“What about him?” I said when I had pulled my rag off the last one.

“Him?” said my bad breather. “Shave’s not what he needs.”

“Let him have a shave,” said another.

“He looks like he needs it,” I said.

“There’s plenty he needs.”

“He’s coming back, though.”

“Shave would do him good.”

“Did it do you good?”

“Plenty good.”

They went on like this awhile and then I found the Akron boy sitting in front of me. He wouldn’t speak and looked ashamed. I chalked it up to the teasing.

“I haven’t seen you in some while,” I said.

“He’s been otherwise entertained,” said the bad breather. This made all the others laugh.

The Akron boy didn’t have much beard but it was more than he had had when we had sat down together and taken our shaves in the long ago. More and plenty. I had only one brown rag to dip in and out of the big bucket of cooling water they had but I let it sit on his face a good while. When I took it off I thought I saw some smile in his eyes.

He came back to slop-jar guard duty the next day, looking even paler without his beard than he had the day before, and as we started our walk down to the alcove, I asked after his health. He told me he had been down with a wound wouldn’t heal and a sick headache come along to offer the wound its company. The wound wasn’t old but the sick headache he had had to confront since his earliest days. I expressed my sympathies, found a way to touch him a half a second on his hand, told him I was sorry about the teasing he had taken, asked him if he had enjoyed his shave. He did his blush again and quivered his lip and looked at my fingers and said that the following week he expected to be redeployed out to the western front; some of the ones had teased him, including the bad breather, had already left. I said that the western front sounded like it was far away.

“About as far away as it gets,” he said.

“We were about that far away in that house in the woods,” I said.

“I expect that’s true.”

“You can’t get any farther away from the world than the borders of the bleak beyond.”

It was cool even though we were getting good into springtime, and the Akron boy had on his long coat. It dragged a little on the ground behind him and he walked with his musket held slack. I gandered back in his direction when I talked. He had a dreamy look in his eye. He was a boy should have been fishing a creek, not standing guard in a prison madhouse.

“How is that old Colonel of ours now?” I asked.

“Not a colonel anymore. He got made a general. Sits in the big camp over yonder.”

“Well, the world just turns and turns.”

“They say he talks to himself. I haven’t seen it.”

“Don’t we all do that?”

“I don’t.”

“No, probably you don’t. You look solid.”

“You think so? I been working at it. I wish you would tell them that.”

“Tell who that?”

He didn’t answer me. Just looked a little more lost in his big coat.

I set the jar down, readjusted my grip, and picked it back up again. A rain was now making brown splotches on the dirt around us. There was a sleeping dog under an empty wood shelf and a pair of chickens in a twig cage by the far wall about dead and heading for someone’s soup. “That was quite a trick I played out there in the woods on those Secesh wanted to eat us for their supper, wasn’t it?” I said as we rounded the corner, putting us out of sight of the building, and stepped toward the trench. There was a kind of roof over the alcove, and the rain acted like it was fixing to drum it down.