Laird Hunt - Neverhome

This kept him quiet a time although I hadn’t meant it to when I had said it. In the middle of his quiet he swallowed down a pickled carrot and walked off into the bushes. I expected he was seeing to his business and shut my eyes but when he came back some good while later he was dripping and said he had been into a pond for a swim. We had to start heading back but there was time, if I wanted, for me to take a dip. He would sit under the crab apple and crunch on carrots and make sure no one — even though he was willing to bet one of his boxes that the road would remain empty — disturbed me.

“What’s in those boxes, anyway?” I said.

“Glass. For a greenhouse,” he said.

I walked through the bushes and down a twisting path that went right through the marshy middle of a stand of cattails to the edge of the water. The surface of the water was smooth except for the skaters on it. I took off my shoes and socks and hitched up my dress and stepped in, sent the skaters skittering off into the weeds. The cool from my feet and ankles rose straight up to my neck and I stepped out and wrestled off my clothes. It was when I was back in it up to my thighs, holding still and hoping the handsome skaters would return, that my mind turned a crank and I remembered my adventure in the creek. I remembered killing that rebel boy in the water after I had danced with him. Whether I had or I hadn’t. Danced or killed. Fiddle music bedeviled my ears. I shuddered so hard I fell over sideways. There were fish or snakes in the wet dark and one of them brushed by my shoulder. Sleep was all I wanted. Get back to that bed at the General’s house or drown. But I stayed in the water awhile longer and didn’t drown. Lay there adrift on my back letting some little fish nibble at my toes.

All the ride over to Weatherby’s and all the unloading and careful stacking and all the ride back to the General’s house, the talk was about the war. Once Weatherby got started you couldn’t get him stopped, didn’t matter how long you didn’t say anything, how long you swatted sweat bees away from your eyelashes or looked off into the yonder clouds.

“You were down there close up to some of those battles, if I understand it correctly,” Weatherby said. “Don’t you have an opinion?”

“I have an opinion,” I said.

His war, as I heard him tell it, was the one you can read about now in books if you care to. I have some of those books near to hand. I’ve perused them carefully. From many of them, you would think it was just captains and colonels and generals leading each other in one after another handsome charge. There are dates this and battles that. Men were foot soldiers in heaven’s war. Quite a healthy number of the women that did get described were saints, and some were angels, hallowed and unscarred. I with my own eyes saw Clara Barton working with the wounded after we fought at Antietam. She brought supplies to the sawbones, gave comfort everywhere she went, and wouldn’t quit until she got the typhus and had to be carried away. But there wasn’t any saint or angel to it. Just a woman in an apron and a sturdy dress. By the by, she would have looked fierce handsome holding a gun. But there aren’t any women holding guns in this pile of books I have. In these stories women are saints and angels and men are courageous noble folk and everything they do gets done nice and quick and nothing smells like blood.

One book talked about Petersburg made it sound like it was a five-minute affair. Like a few officers had set down their cards and whiskey a minute and strolled over out of their mansions and used their officer power to batter down Petersburg’s doors. There weren’t any Fort Hells or bloody redoubts or gabions or trenches cut for miles in this fellow’s telling of it; there weren’t any twelve-pounders, no howitzers, no Dictator to smash what bellowed like burning bulls and elephants through the night sky. You would have almost wanted to be there, the way it was told. Let yourself get killed by a bullet to the bosom, let yourself get shot straight up out of your indescribables just to enter the tale. I read it and felt myself mounted up on a charger holding a jousting lance and getting ready to do battle. God and country. Damsels. Shield the children. Mine eyes have seen the glory. Save the poor black brethren. Bathe each night in the light of the stars.

The way Weatherby told it, or the way I heard it, his grandson’s fighting for one of the grander Ohio regiments was an awful lot like these books. I hadn’t read them yet then, nor had they been written, but they might as well have been. Didn’t mean he didn’t have his reasons. Maybe they all have their reasons. For telling it like poetry, I mean. I learned this that day when I finally roused myself and spoke.

“You’re a nice fellow and you have been kind to me, but it wasn’t pretty like the way you’re saying it,” I said.

He stopped the wagon when I said this. Pulled on the reins and made the mare snort. A hummingbird buzzed by us and Weatherby gave it a laugh then flicked his stump up sideways in the air. He left his stump pointing straight at the side of my head a minute. The knobbly end of it was browner than any other part of him that I could see.

“They burned that shut with an officer’s hand iron,” he said. “Fifty years ago and I can still feel it. I mentioned earlier I had been to war. It took them four tries, and they had to heat up the iron again between each time. But that’s the gentle part of my tale. I know something other than knights in armor about this war we got now. My grandson I’m building this greenhouse for is getting sent home to me next month without half his face and missing both his eyes. You say something one way instead of the other often enough and maybe the thing quits crawling into your bed with you and stroking its claws at your cheek.”

Weatherby said this and then dropped his stump and gave the reins a hard flick. The mare hopped once to the side, then started up again. Weatherby pointed at the air over the road with his chin. The hummingbird was seeing us off. Green shrub. Ruby bloom. We had stopped in its territory. Weatherby had spoken without anything sounded angry in his voice. Only his stump had looked angry. Maybe a fleck or two of the green echoed the hummingbird swimming in his eyes.

“I beg your pardon for misunderstanding you,” I said.

“Isn’t any need for begging or pardoning either,” he said.

When we got back to the General’s house it was into dusk time and the General’s wife was sitting on the front step smoking one of the General’s pipes. When I had made my farewells to Weatherby and walked up the front path, she produced a second pipe and we sat a time together there and smoked.

“The General likes to take a walk in the evening with Mr. Weatherby,” she said. “He finds him fine company.”

“Weatherby likes to talk,” I said.

“When he gets it going.”

“But in a kind way. No argument to it.”

“He is always kind.”

We sat quiet then. If you can call it quiet when the air is getting killed by an army of crickets.

“When will the General come home?” I said.

“When will the war end?” she said. “In his letters he writes that the fight goes badly. Then he writes that it goes well. Lately, more often it is the latter. Will that bring him home sooner or later? I do not know.”

She said not another word. Our smoke walked out together into the night. After a time I took my pipe up to bed with me. The tobacco was stale but still filled the room with the smell of whiskey and cherry and the fields on which I had fought.

During his speech, Weatherby said his ruined grandson had been at Antietam and I thought about this as I laid my head against the pillows and smoked. Maybe we had both been in the cornfield. Charged nobly forward through the powder smoke. Or maybe his fear had found him and he had turned around and run. Maybe he had been in my madhouse with me before the war had grabbed him back and found a way to steal his face and rip out his eyes.