Laird Hunt - Neverhome

That evening I stood before our Colonel, and after he had given me a week of midnight picket duty for handing away my military issue before I’d even had a chance to get shot at in it he complimented me on my tree-climbing talents and on my gallantry. He said he hadn’t known they made farm boys that were acquainted with the fancy arts. He said that the world never ceased to offer him up surprises. That the world was nothing but surprises from one long end of it to the other.

“What surprises you, Private Thompson out of Darke County?” he asked me.

“Sir?” I said.

“I asked you what in this wide world of war and its thunders surprises you.”

I had my answer come to me quick but still I thought a long minute or two before giving it.

“Everything, sir.”

The Colonel had the habit of twisting at his mustaches. He twisted first on one side then on the other, then he nodded. He looked at my face awhile and I could tell he was seeing a tree and a jacket and some pretty young woman that wasn’t me.

There was good sport on my account that evening at the fires. A boy with some skill at the guitar, an instrument I had never seen played out of doors, had already worked the episode into a tune. “ ‘Gallant Ash went up the tree, helped a sweet old girl along…’ ”

That boy didn’t have the voice Bartholomew had when he was at his fiddle of an evening when we were sitting together on a straw bale under the stars but I’d heard worse. Another boy could play the bones took up with him. There was some hands clapping. Two or three got up a kind of jig that they pulled me into the middle of and made me hop and shuffle along.

When I went out later to my first night of picket, that song came with me. There was a Louisville boy on duty with me called me Gallant Ash and hummed some of it. I told him he’d better keep that name to himself but some of the others heard and took it up and then there wasn’t any stopping it. Even our Colonel, when I saw him again the next day, handed it over at me to wear, so I put it on.

Wearing it the following night I shot my first man. Six or seven of them looking to harass and harry, or Lord knows what, came up out of the trees an inch or two before dawn. Half the boys on our portion of the line were nestled in the leaves and slow to rise so it was only a few of us had our muskets at the ready and fired at the blurs come running through the draw. Only one of our firearms functioned and that was mine. I got a look at the man I’d killed when his brothers had run off. He had curly dark hair and a little beard. His mouth was large and his cheekbones high. The ball had hit him just above his left breast. You could see a kind of brown bloom coming up through his light coat. He had a filthy old dressing on his left hand and fingernails could have used a trim.

Our relief came with the sun and told us to head back and report, but I stayed on a minute with the killed man. Like anyone else, I’d seen plenty of the dead, but never one I had made. I had just that morning crafted another light remark about how many rebels I aimed to account for, how many I planned to shoot and skin. We had larked on that subject every day. Some of those had already been in fights had told us that what we were most likely to do when the enemy was all lined up and aiming at us was run. But I had not run. I had fired my weapon.

“Did you see that, Mother,” I whispered.

I saw it, she whispered back.

Now there I sat. I wanted to take up the dead man’s head and cradle it but I did not do that and knew that that kind of a thought was another thing I was going to have to learn to kill. Some of them on relief teased me a little as I sat there my minute but I didn’t pay them any mind. They hadn’t killed anyone that morning. When the sun was up sufficient I saw that the dead man’s open eyes were blue.

One week later, the Colonel, whose horses were off working elsewhere, had one of our lieutenants form up a party to search out a likely forward encampment and told him to take me along. It was a dozen of us then to tromp through the trees and creeks, and after living with a thousand it felt like it was just us and the birds left to populate an empty earth. We saw none of the enemy nor any two-leggers white or dark at all. We scouted a ways and struck a deserted house or three but none fit for a camp. The lieutenant had us split ourselves up then to cover more ground and after walking an hour, me and the boy I was with found what looked like the right place hiding away in the trees.

It was a pretty piece of land with a fine, bright stream to split it. There was a stone bridge could take the weight of our guns across it and a cabin for the Colonel and his officers. There was a barn still had straw in it and a big oak tree we sat under a minute to chew our apples and biscuits and a well we pulled good water up out of. Next to the well was a shed. In it we found a chain and a shackle lying open next to a declivity in the dirt floor. You could see the shackle had been shut hard awhile and probably many a time on something soft.

We might have stood on for a bit to look at this sorry spectacle but at that minute a good-size pig that hadn’t long been wild come snorting by. We shot the pig, got it trussed and hung on a birch pole between us, and made our way back to the meeting point, where after many a rest we presented our pig and made our report. Turned out some of the others had found a choicer spot and that’s where the regiment moved but that didn’t stop a good number of us, including the Colonel, from chewing that night on fresh pork.

I wrote Bartholomew about that day and that meal in my next letter to him. I thought about some of the birds I had seen and put those down and about some of the trees and the fine construction of the bridge and the sound of the creek moving under it and included that in my letter too. The pig we had shot had squealed about as loud in its dying as a pig called Cloverleaf we once had back home and I made the comparison in my letter to Bartholomew and reckoned it was true. I read through it after I thought I had finished it enough and hadn’t quite ruined up every inch of it and I was getting ready to fold it for sending when that shed came back to me. I saw the shackle and the old blood caked on the iron and gave a shudder. That shudder started somewhere down low in my back and came up through my throat and breached my mouth. There wasn’t anyone alive hadn’t seen someone with a shackle someplace on his body, I knew that, but there had been a bite of sorrows in that empty place made me glad to think we had found another spot and weren’t going to return.

Return I did, though. The very next day the Colonel instructed me and my fellow to lead a forage party to the environs to see if we could scare up another nice piece of pork. I walked us straight there like I had the map to it written on my shirtsleeve. There was as much sun out as there had been the day before and an even better breeze. We killed another pig, and the boys I was with all thought we ought to have set our camp there but I didn’t say a word. From a distance the shed, with its door hanging off one of its hinges, looked like it opened up onto a darkness would lead you, if you studied at it too closely, down to a place you would have to work hard to climb your way back up out of.

There was still plenty used my nickname, but I didn’t feel any too gallant over the next coming days. I expect if any of the ladies we saw as we marched had lost her shirt to her excitement I’d have let her air out her luxuries in the breeze. Many was the time I stepped off the line to look for a bush and had to trot to catch back up. I wasn’t the only one had swallowed up some swamp water at the camp we had chosen and was paying the price. None of us had any interest in squatting down in front of the others and looked to put good distance between us, but the still real prospect of one of them stumbling onto me at my business I was at every ten minutes instead of every ten hours and uncovering my secret didn’t help cheer me up. It didn’t cheer me up any much more either when a boy came back from his own trip to the bushes carrying a skull in his hand.