Laird Hunt - Neverhome

“You among them?”

It was his turn to give me a good look.

“I reckon whether I am or I’m not isn’t any of your affair, stranger.”

We talked war and devils for a while and by the time I left I decided I had had the answer to my question and didn’t need to pursue it further. My next stop was the sheriff’s office. The man who had put his boot on the neck of that institution for many a year and who had stood shouting amongst the burning-out crowd two weeks before my mother hung herself one rainy morning from the ash tree on the edge of our farm was cousin to Ned Phipps, but the fellow built like a broke-string banjo I talked to there told me that old outlaw had gotten drunk one night the past winter before investigating some pranks at the rail yard and let a train take off his legs. They had him in a rolling chair up at the county home. This man, his successor, had only an unrifled musket in his arsenal to go with his badge and wasn’t going to gun for anyone took an angry interest in Ned Phipps.

“Where you heading off to?” he said when I walked back out of his sorry door.

“Home. Home is where I’m goddamn heading,” I said.

On my way out of town and back to the Henry I passed the very Ned Phipps I had business with. He was riding one of the horses he kept corralled on my property. Riding it grand like the cavalry officer he had never been. It was a crow-black racing horse about as handsome as they come. You could see it was on its way to having its back broken by the fat son-of-a-bitch sitting like a general on top of it. That fat son-of-a-bitch gave me down a green-toothed smile and a nod.

“You back from the fight?” he said.

“Traveling to it,” I said.

“Well, then, I wish you luck.”

In my dream of it there is no moon and there are no stars and I am lost in a crowd carrying torches to set the world alight. My mother’s voice and I cannot reach her. My mother’s voice farther away or me from it as the crowd grows closer and closer still. They turn giant and I rain my blows against their giant legs.

“Constance,” my mother calls out in the dream. Her voice sounds as thin as a piece of paper and twice as light. “Constance, come and stand up here beside me.” But in the dream I am afraid. In the dream I turn my back on my mother and run.

On that night it was different from the dream. We had heard there was to be trouble at the house of our neighbor the woman whose husband was gone and who had her two babies and nothing else but the peeling paper on her walls to protect her. My mother sent me to my room to sleep and told me to shut my eyes, but they stayed open and I climbed out my window as soon as I knew she had gone. There was stars and moon aplenty, in the memory and not the dreams, and I could see her up ahead stepping her long legs through the barley. There was a crowd of them already there and my mother walked straight through that crowd and went to stand on the neighbor woman’s front step and face them. She crossed her strong arms over her chest and yelled out to them that they needed to head home and look to their own business. Leave women and their babies alone. She had just yelled this a second time when I came through the crowd and climbed up the steps and stood next to her. In the house behind us the neighbor woman was sitting at her kitchen table with a babe in each arm. Her eyes were wild and she was singing a song I’d never heard before. Rocking a little on a chair wasn’t a rocker. There was upward of fifty of them holding their torches and stepping ever closer to the house and setting in to jeer.

“We don’t ever turn our cheek, do we, Mama?” I said and crossed my own arms and looked out at the crowd. The constable was at the front of it. Ned Phipps, who I had known of since I was five years old, was there. There was a woman in the mob holding a pitchfork and yelling out for the others to toss forward their torches and send us and all the gypsy niggers in the house to hell.

“No, we don’t,” my mother said and as she said this, her voice cracked. It was just a speck of a crack, the smallest thing, like a twig touched in winter, but I had never heard any crack come out of her throat before. I looked up and saw there were tears on her cheeks and that her lower lip was moving. A minute later she had set off away, first at a fast walk, then at a run. When she had left I found I couldn’t keep my arms crossed. They dangled at my sides like they’d been sawed down to the strings. Still, it was me helped the neighbor woman to leave, who took one of the babes and a bundle and walked her away through the crowd already set into their burning and off a long stretch down the road. When we got close to the Ohio border, about where I would cross it again those years later on my way to war, she told me I better get back and see to my mother, that whether she would confess to it or not, she was the one needed seeing to now.

“But where will you go?” I said, for she looked small and alone with her children and her bundle there on the midnight road.

“You go on now, go on back home,” she said.

I followed after her awhile but she would not speak to me any longer, was already striding away from Indiana and off into the sadness of the world. World woven from the wool of such partings.

My mother and I did not speak about that night on any of the days that followed even though the cinders of what had been the neighbor woman’s house smoked dark and slow through every one. I kept looking for my mother to find a piece of fine story to put onto the end of this poor one but she stayed quiet and no crown of justice came to her brow, no sword of vengeance crept into her hand.

A week or ten days into this some boys on horses called of an evening at the edge of our property. They had a torch with them might have been one from that night. Any other time my mother would have seen them off like sick sparrows but she just sat crumpled at the kitchen table and it was me had to walk out to the edge of the property with her musket and back them down.

“Your fear will find you out someday too, daughter mine. It will find you out and use its wiles and crinkle your heart,” she said when I came in and put the musket down. I bit my lip. Did not answer. I knew it was true. She seemed to rouse herself some after she had said this. We worked at blade sharpening and spilled out some good sweat together in the yard. Bartholomew came over with another flower and my mother heated us up a jar of ham and green beans. “That’s a good boy you got ahold of there,” she said. She let me walk him halfway back to his house and he kissed me a minute in a ditch beside the fencerow. That night my mother told me the story about the princess and the dragon only at the end of the story it was the princess cut off the dragon’s head. It may be that Bartholomew had come back and was crouched outside the window and giving a listen. “Good night,” my mother said to me when she had finished. She touched my arm and held it when she said this. Later it was more than one time I would look down at my arm and think I could see a mark she had left in touching me. Who is to say that’s just folly? Who is to say what it is we have left on us after we have been touched? There is the world with its night-walking women and then there is what happens in it. A few days later my mother climbed up into the ash tree with a rope.

I do not know why it was this I chose to speak of that evening after dark when I had retrieved the Henry and put my dress back on and climbed up into the hayloft of our barn and found my Bartholomew lying under a horse blanket in the straw. I had not stood near him in two years that could have been twenty but when I leaned in close to his face and woke him, it was my mother I spoke of, my mother and her fear and her hand on my arm, her hand on my arm more than anything, and the neighbor woman walking off with her children, and my mother’s death in the ash tree. Bartholomew tried to speak more than once while I was talking but I did not let him. When I had finished I told him that the next morning early he needed to get down to the house and fetch my mother’s old musket and see it was charged and bring it to me. Then he was to go back down and put his apron on and serve all the boys their morning coffee in the yard. When they all of them had their coffee he was to go back inside the house and not come out. No matter what he heard. They had tried to take our land and used him poorly and spoken for Secession and now it was their turn to be used. It was simple. Simplest thing in the world. Simple as standing and not running. Walking with the turn of the earth instead of against it. He was to listen to me. I said this twice. He was not to disobey.