Laird Hunt - Neverhome

Whatever it was, I walked away and didn’t stop any longer than I had to over those last miles. So much so that it wasn’t much more than a week after I’d left them at their floating room and its ghosts that I walked back up into Randolph County where I’d left from better than two years before. It was late. Raining, or I would have pushed on for home that evening. Instead, I spent a night with some boys had a fire going under a rubber sheet rigged up high next to a field near Winchester. They had three women with them who all looked happy enough. The boys were back from the war, is what they said, and the women had come out to meet them. They were having a party out of the homecoming and there were jugs of corn whiskey involved.

I took my drink and shared out what I had left of the jars and sandwiches from the General’s wife and we had a fine old time. They had some impressive firearms they’d brought back with them, including a pair of Sharps and a Henry breechloader made me give out a whistle. That whistle led to a firing demonstration once the rain had stopped. The Henry looked like it had come straight out of the crate and into their hungry arms. It could hit any size object you liked at any distance if you knew how to shoot it. Which I knew I could and which the fellow who said he owned it could not. After he had made the dirt around the can do some high kicks, I took my turn and showed how it was done. I had my suspicions about whether or not those boys had done much soldiering when they couldn’t answer straight about where they had been and had fought and just which line they had stood in to fire off fine fresh weapons like the ones they were toting, but my mind was mostly elsewhere up the road. It was elsewhere enough that when later the boy that claimed to own the Henry left off trying on his snoring woman and climbed on top of me, I let him go with a kick and a elbow to his jaw.

He crawled back over to his woman and set in to snoring next to her and I thought I’d try to join the party but I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there under the Indiana stars and thought my thoughts. Couldn’t quit thinking them. Not too far off dawn, my paramour let off a loud fart, woke himself up with it, and came back over at me. I was agitated and hit him down harder than I probably would otherwise have done.

This got the whole band of them roused and before I knew it I was getting chased a hundred yards down the road. Later that same morning, just ahead of noontime, I stepped my foot back down on the dirt of my farm.

I didn’t do much more than step on it before I left out again. Off yonder in my yard I had spied the fat criminal I’d known all my life called Big Ned Phipps feeding hay to geldings I’d never seen before in a corral I hadn’t built. The seed shed was burned to the ground, the mule pen was empty, and some of our fence was knocked down. There wasn’t any crop to speak of in the field, and a dozen ugly goats were snapping at each other and nibbling the weeds. Here and there around the yard there were holes had been dug in my dirt. Close up next to the house there were four boys sitting in the shade holding plates in their hands. They were laughing and leaning back on our chairs. They were the good chairs, not the ones we used for sitting together in the yard. They had been my mother’s and hers that loved roses before that. Two of them sitting there in the mud on my good chairs had been off to war and come back before I’d left home. One was the son-of-a-bitch who’d pushed me down at the market when I was a girl and who I’d gone back and fought in my muddy dress until he cried, and the other I had never seen before.

After a time one of them hollered into the house and the next minute my Bartholomew came out. He was holding a tray had cups of coffee on it. He went around to each of the boys and let them choose a cup. By and by Big Ned called for his and Bartholomew went over and stood there a long time in the June sun as Ned moved his mouth and made a fuss over picking it up. I came a tongue crunch away from calling out at Bartholomew to crack that cup of coffee over Ned Phipps’s head but if there is one thing war and the lunatic house can teach you it is how to wait.

I walked five miles back the way I had come from that morning and I climbed into the cool under some mulberry bushes and I slept. I woke around nightfall and waited until it was late and the moon had dropped down into its cradle of earth. Then I went back to the sleeping camp of boys and their women and stepped right into the middle of it and plucked up a box of cartridges and the Henry gun. They must have all gone swimming down at the creek because they were snoring there in their wet underthings. The one had tried his luck with me was about my size. It took me a long minute of groping but when I left, I had his hat on my head and his clothes under my arm.

I walked a mile or two east under the stars, then cut north another mile and bivouacked under a shag-bark hickory looked about set to fall down. I tried sleeping some but didn’t. At first light I took a good look at the Henry. They had mishandled it doing their dirt designs but the mechanism was still true. I took it apart, cleaned it as best I could, put it back together again. I removed my dress and wrapped the Henry in it and hid it under some brush a hundred feet from the hickory. Then I again changed my clothes. The pants were big but I found myself some rope. The outfit smelled ripe but I reckoned that helped my cause.

Town was just waking up when I walked in. I stepped straight into the café and ordered coffee and biscuits. I had ordered that same thing regular in that same café all the grown years of my life but I was in my other clothes and they could not see me. When I had eaten I called over for more coffee.

“You been off to the fight,” said the can of corned beef brought it over and couldn’t recognize me.

I nodded. Said I’d had my discharge. Said I was passing through on my way home.

“Home where?” he said. He had leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, interested in the traveler going his way from somewhere to somewhere else.

I pointed out through the wall in the direction more or less of Marion and Noblesville. I took a sip of my coffee. Took a look at my fingernails, picked out a speck of grime.

“I paid a visit to a farm about three miles yonder yesterday evening, looking to beg a sup of water and some directions, found the welcome wasn’t any too warm,” I said.

“Which farm was that?” he said.

“Horse farm, to look at it. They’ve had some fire trouble and fence damage. Goats grazing wild and such.”

The man uncrossed his arms and gave out a laugh.

“That’s what used to be the Thompson farm. Gal and her husband. Gal ran off and joined the gypsies. Little fellow she left behind couldn’t fend off the wolves.”

“I heard some of those wolves are Secesh lovers.”

“I couldn’t speak to that.”

“I saw a little corncob serving them cups of coffee.”

“Bartholomew Thompson. He’s missing the fight because of a bad foot or eyes or some such. Boys that took his farm let him run their errands and live in the barn.”

I took another sip of my coffee. I looked the man in the eye a good while. He had aged but a little, had a few fresh wrinkles and only just a bit more yellow in his eye than before. He wasn’t any thinner than he had been either.

“Sounds like he could have used a hand in the fight. I expect there’s folks love the Union in the vicinity.”

If he heard the iron in my voice he didn’t show it.

“Time of war,” he said. “I reckon there’s more want him gone than want him to stay.”