Laird Hunt - Neverhome

My Colonel now a General had his desk set up in front of a day tent. He had left off the start of a letter addressed to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to go to his duty. I picked up this start to a letter and put it down. All he had had time to write on it was the words My Dear. There wasn’t anywhere a soul not seeing to some business, and not one of those souls spoke to me. Down the hill there was a rebel charge. We had guns set on the high ground and blew it, by the sound of screaming afterward, to rough bits. I set the overcoat on the General’s chair and tore off the bottom half of his piece of paper. I took up his pen and wrote Found myself something warmer to wear on one line, and on the next, just like you told me I should, and I set the paper on top of the overcoat. Then I laid down my borrowed musket, walked away from that battle and that camp, found some bushes, and changed my clothes.

That afternoon I slept my way until dusk time in a cave in a hickory tree had been hollowed out to smoke meat. There were some meat shreds caught in the wrinkles and crevices of the wood, and my fingers found them and felt of them and brought them to my mouth. I woke at moonrise with my teeth chattering hard enough to crack hickory nuts and set off at a trot up the road to try and get warm. I wasn’t any ways at all up the road when I come up on another traveler, a colored gal I knew straight off I had seen before, though it took me a minute to know where. She was taller than me and broader at the shoulder. She walked like she wasn’t back in a dress. Maybe she had always walked that way. Down in a field. Hundred-pound basket on her back. It came to me. The last time I had seen her she had been marching out of our camp wearing contraband pantaloons.

“You can come on out of the shrubbery,” I said, for she had vanished as quick as spit as soon as I came up on her. I called this out more than once. I called it out and told her I wasn’t going to alert the guard or the dogs or anything. I said I knew she was hiding in the bushes not even an apple throw away and that she ought to quit being scared and come out. Or if she couldn’t quit being scared she ought to come out anyway. I was heading north, I said, and if she liked, we could be two travelers together on the road instead of two travelers apart. I said all of this and felt like I was making quite a fair speech out there in the dark night but it wasn’t until I told her I knew she had been a man and that I had been one too that she came up out of the bushes. She was even bigger standing next to me than she had looked hurrying along the chalky road. We hung there some time not saying any word then settled kind of gradual into walking. She was dressed in heavy skirts and a shawl. She had a rag bundle in one hand and a heavy stick in the other.

“Have you had anything to eat?” I said.

She shook her head so I fetched her up a cracker. It took some time of me holding it out and us walking along for her to take it. It took even more of us walking down the road and past a frozen pond and through a grove of burned trees holding up their empty devil hands at the dark for her to lift it up to her mouth and crunch.

“What regiment?” she said.

I told her and when she said she’d shouldered her rifle awhile for the Fifth U.S. Colored I asked her why she had stopped.

“Why did you stop?” she said.

I gave out a cough started out as a laugh at how long it would take me to answer and we left it there at that.

After a minute and another bite of wilty cracker she said, “After Antietam, that’s where I saw you,” and I said that was right and something a little like a smile come up in her eyes but it didn’t stay there long.

“I thought you were a ghost coming along that road back there,” she said.

“I’m not a ghost,” I said. “I don’t think I’m a ghost.”

“Ghost of my old mistress come along the road to catch me. Left her dead of a finger went sour back in South Carolina. She came to me all through the fighting, pointing at me with that finger.”

I showed her my fingers. She nodded. She also shivered a little and you could see plain it wasn’t a shiver come from the cold.

“I’ve seen a ghost,” I said. “I think I did.”

She nodded. Kind of sucked up her lips.

“My ghost had a knife.”

“Ghosts don’t need knives.”

“Mine did.”

She looked away to the side, shook her head.

“You got to get north and out of this country,” I said. “We could help each other, share the road.”

“Share the road,” she said. If she had been a well you could have dropped a stone down her throat and not heard any echo.

We kept walking, with her some way in front or some way behind, and after some good yards of this I started to talk. I had it in my mind, I suppose, to cheer us a little along the way after our talk about ghosts, maybe pull a story or two out of her, hear something about her own fighting days, march along together like two soldier men, even if we were wearing dresses, but the stories I told were about as twisted up as wet turkey feathers and she just kept breathing in and breathing out and looking back and forth across the road. I told one about Antietam, because we had both of us been in those parts, deep in those ugly times, about an unscratched lieutenant had done well for his men in the fight and when it was over leaned his head against a hot cannon barrel and burned off his ear. That story had seemed funny to me at one time but it didn’t any longer out there on the road in the moonlight, so I told another meant to be rosier about a Confederate boy so hungry he tried to play bear and got himself stung to death scooping up fresh honey. When we come up on him, I told it, he had gotten so swollen you could have rolled him down a hill like a ball. There was an old lady had a corncob pipe stuffed in her mouth sitting there next to him said she had some claim on this bee-stung boy, though what claim that could have been I do not know because we didn’t ask. We left her sitting there with her legs splayed out, waiting for him to swell back down. He had something of hers in his pockets, she told us as we walked away, and the swelling had stretched them too tight and she couldn’t fetch her hand in. I gave a chuckle when I told this story but my fellow wanderer didn’t think as much of it as I did.

“The hell kind of story is that to tell?” she said.

“You ever pretend like you needed a shave?” I asked.

“A shave?”

Thinking about shaves set me to thinking about Bartholomew and I told my companion about the beard that wouldn’t ever grow very well on his face, though maybe, I said, during the many months that had galloped past, he had learned the beard-growing trick. I told her about Bartholomew’s small hands and how he was a better operator in the kitchen with his small hands than I was with mine. I told her that he had a bottle of French cologne water that he liked to sprinkle on a handkerchief before he went out of a morning to do his work. I had missed him terribly, I told her, and more all the time. I was going home to him now, to reacquaint myself with him after the hard separation and set things straight on our farm and settle scores.

“What kind of scores?” she said.

She said this and it seemed to me that a new note of interest had crept into her voice and I would otherwise have leaped in to tell her what I meant but we both heard that very minute horse hooves on the trail behind us and so we stepped quick and quiet off the road.

“They had me locked up,” I whispered as we crouched in the frosty bushes. “There was a chair they put me in. A bucket they put over my head. This dress I got on is borrowed. Ain’t impossible that I’m being chased. You got anyone in particular after you?” She didn’t answer, just looked long at me and then long at the road and the horses filled it up, then left it empty again. I don’t know why it is I got that image of a road empty of us and of anything else but the moon making a white ribbon of it stuck in my head.