Laird Hunt - Neverhome

I need to run on out of here and keep getting home, I thought. I thought this once and then I thought it again. I tried saying it out loud to my mother but didn’t get any answer. Tried to think of when I had last talked to her. Started to make my plan about leaving this place and marching off through the rain, marching all night. Still, when I had finished the biscuit I groped myself up a good stick and circled back as wet as a drowned piglet to the lit house. When I got there, ready to take my chances against the horse pistol, I lifted my eyes up to the window and saw the two of them sitting next to the fire. The rope lay coiled on the mantelpiece and the pistol wasn’t anywhere in sight. Go on and figure. World has many ways. The man was weeping with his head in his hands, and the woman had a smile on her face and was slurping at a cup of tea.

Another less interesting time it was an old grandpa thought he needed to snatch a kiss from me. He had offered me a ride on his manure wagon and when I sat down next to him he hit me straight off in the face with the pommel of his switch. Then he tried to slobber over on top of me. I got the idea that he broke something when he hit the ground next to his mule. I drove on another few miles then left the wagon by the side of the road. The mule tried to follow me a few steps but gave up pretty quick. I had a notion lasted five minutes that I would unhitch it and ride it off for home. The thought came to me, though, about a boy out of Martins Ferry in my company had tried that once with a sutler’s mule and got hung up by his thumbs for three hours then drummed out of camp at my own Colonel’s now a General’s order when they caught him. Still, I did unhitch the mule and give it a good swat to get it going out over the fields and away from that old man, though. There was more than just the sting of the old man’s crop over my eyebrow to motivate me. More than just the man those days before with his rope and horse pistol. More than the memory of all the men I’d lived my life with in the Union army. Men who would piss on a dying cat. Laugh at a little boy lost. Violate a woman in her autumn years. Burn a house belonged to church ladies. Lock you up in the mad chamber and leave you there to rot.

No, I unhitched that mule and sent it flying because I’d had a picture come to me of my mother. My mother tall and strong. My mother who could captain a heavy scythe all day then go out into the moonlight and plow. My mother, all of that, sitting on the front step with her head in her big hands, her shoulders a-heave, her eyes when I could look at them gone far away from me like beads of black glass. I had been out at some chore and had seen a man come up to the house. I had seen him stand talking to my mother and had seen him shaking his head and pointing his finger at her and at me even where I was way off in the distance and then walking away and climbing up onto his wagon. There had been men aplenty come up to our house for one reason or another but there hadn’t been any before had left my mother sitting like that in her own puddle of tears.

I was five years old when that man came and left and didn’t come back to our property for many a year. Didn’t keep me from getting the fancy that I should have unhitched his animal while he was talking and pointing and turning my mother’s eyes into black beads. Many was the time in the days to come, even though my mother went straight back even that afternoon to being her invincible self, that I saw it in my head how I would unhitch that man’s animal and poke it with a stick. Watch it run off. Set the man maybe to chasing me. It takes work to unhitch an animal. I never could have done it. But that was the fancy that took me. And that was what I thought of there on that day as I unhitched the old man’s mule. Of my mother crying. Of my fancy. Of the man I’d hear it later said was my father hollering and chasing after me.

It wasn’t just time- and war-ruined men had tricks to try. Two days after I left that mule to run free I found myself at table with three young girls. I had crossed them sitting together at the end of the lane that led down to their farm. Sitting shoulder to shoulder and twisting daisy chains. Littlest one had a daisy crown in her hair, daisy bracelets around her wrists. They said hello and I said hello back.

“You hungry?” they asked me.

There wasn’t any doubt by then that I was.

“Where’s your folks?” I said. The biggest one winked up at the sky. The middle one smiled out over the fields.

Their father was dead at Shiloh and their mother had vanished away long ago, and now it was just the three of them. The youngest couldn’t much more than talk, and the two older ones weren’t any riper down the road than eight or ten. This didn’t stop them from welcoming me in once we had got down their lane and serving me up a fair soup of pork and beans, nor from handing me a hunk of soft bread, a chew of butter, and a cup of good cream milk. They had a square locket had pictures of both their parents and took turnabout wearing it around their necks. It looked to be about every hour that one would take it off and pass it to the next, who would put it on, open it, give a nod, and get back to her business, whether that was handling a broom or playing with a corncob doll. The floors were swept, the windows washed, daisy chains were everywhere, and they let me lie down for the night in their parents’ soft bed. When I woke the next morning all was as cheerful as the day before except that my dress and shoes were gone.

“Now you can’t leave,” the oldest of them said.

“Not ever,” said the middle girl.

They had spread the table with food. There was good coffee had but just a minute before boiled. I sat down barefoot in my underthings and ate. I went barefoot in my underthings with them on their chores and took my midday dinner the same way. More than once as we walked the yard the three of them looked over at the well. I let the little one climb up into my lap as we rested a minute at midday. I gave her a tickle and told the older girls they were doing handsome by her, that if they kept on that way they would see her raised up nice. This pleased them so much they let me take a turn wearing their locket and offered me up a show after the meal. Both of them could dance and sing. The older of the two brought down a banjo had belonged to their uncle. She played it so well it made me uncomfortable to watch.

“Don’t you have any family you can go to?” I asked when the show was over.

“Such as they are, they are up in Cleveland,” said the oldest.

“That’s quite a way you have of talking,” I said to her.

“But we like it here,” said the middle one. “We want to stay here forever.”

“Forever and ever,” said the youngest.

“That’s a long time,” I said.

“Don’t you like it here?” said the oldest.

“I do,” I said and gave the youngest another tickle. Then I walked outside, pulled the bucket up out of the well shaft, and retrieved my dress and shoes. When I had put them on I found I had the barrel of a pin-fire pistol trained on me. It was in the hands of the oldest girl. I walked over to her and placed my hands on top of hers and held them there a minute, then let them go.

“You have to fire that thing to make it work on a person,” I said.

“I know how to fire it,” she said.

I nodded and thanked the girls for their hospitality, accepted the bundle of food they had packed for me, told them I wouldn’t stand for any crying or carrying on, and left off down the road.

An hour later I crashed through a small wood had set a squadron of deerflies after me and came across a place where the earth swelled up like a giant’s dinner bell. There was a tree or two on the flanks of this swollen place but the ground underfoot was spongy and mostly it was just high grass and scrub. I walked up this swelling and paused on its top. I had heard about mounds like these, heard there were whole dead cities buried in each one of them, that no one now alive could say for sure how they had come to be.