Laird Hunt - Neverhome

We never used our bayonets for much of anything but cooking and cutting weeds but the likeness-maker had me hold a hoary old blunderbuss had a bayonet hammered onto it permanent for the photograph. He fussed his way under his cloth and looked through his lens and told me I looked just like a real soldier. My ears were still ringing from the previous week’s brawl, and I had seen a fellow from the line cut by balls into five big pieces not three days before.

“I look like a soldier because I’ve been soldiering, you son-of-a-bitch,” I told him.

“Now, now, gentle down, son” is what he said.

He did his work, though. Give credit where credit is due. I do look something like a real soldier in that piece of tin he had delivered the next day. My jaw was set and my cap sat cockeyed and my eyes were as wild as a snakebit colt’s. Bartholomew wrote me when he received it that he had sewn a smart case for it out of some soft lamb leather but that he had not yet dared to look too directly at it for fear that the likeness would shove aside the sweet memory he kept of me.

“Look at it after they have killed me, then,” I wrote him, for I had a pique on me that he would not look at my picture I’d worked a day at to get made for him.

“If they kill you I will sew it up in its case forever and bury it with my heart in the yard,” he wrote me.

“Well, in the meantime,” I wrote him, “just take a peek at it and see what you think about how straight they’ve taught me to stand.”

It wasn’t just the fighting they wanted us for. At any quiet moments, they had us help with laying breastworks, with building bridges and cutting logs for their corduroy roads. In the big camps, you found yourself sweating under the sun next to every kind of man there was on this earth. I stripped trees with a red Indian out of New York State had green and purple tattoo stripes up and down his legs and arms, and I carried rocks and wrestled oxen and butchered goats and cleaned cannon and loaded wagons with the sad flesh of soon-to-be corpses next to Chinamen couldn’t speak English and Chinamen could speak it better than me and sundry coloreds of all shape, shine, and shade. I think if I had walked straight off the farm and into that work I would have wept at the shock. But the weeks and months had stretched me out into it. You stand in a line in your bright blues with your filthy face and your lice and all the dead you now know and get shot at regular, your thinking takes a change. You get to where you can do things you couldn’t have dreamed up the outline of before.

“Pick up that pile of arms”; “Shoot that line of horses”; “Kill anything that moves. Kill anything that doesn’t” came the orders from my lieutenants and my captains and my Colonel and any other wore the right uniform. You followed them, simple as that, and if you didn’t follow them when the fighting was hot, you died. Maybe you died anyway. There was always that. Death was the underclothing we all wore.

“Charge those cannons” came the order. “Kick their fucking teeth out.” “Break his other leg.” “Don’t you let them leave.” “Burn them up alive.” After it had gone on awhile, if they had told me to dig a hole, jump in it, and carry their colors down to hell, I would have dropped my pack and tried.

What I wasn’t ready for came when they had a regular troop of contraband in to help us near Sharpsburg. This group had been cut to pieces by fierce fire and had saved a hospital full of our wounded boys went the story, and they lived as you could see on half our poor rations without a grumble and we gave them their respect. We worked alongside them for several days and then they got the call to go to help out elsewhere. It was when they were formed up and starting to walk out that I saw a worker in their number wasn’t like the others. This worker was long of leg and broad of shoulder and carried an ax could have cut down a redwood tree. The worker looked at me, got lit up in the eyes, and nodded as their line went past.

“Hey, you,” I called out.

“Hey, you, your own self,” she called back.

I had dreams of getting seen and discharged in disgrace every night the next week after that. I wrote down this dream to Bartholomew and sent it to him and he sent me back a letter said he had had his own dream. In it I had come back home crazy from the fight. I worked the farm but couldn’t speak plain English anymore. I dug at the ground with my gun and was bleeding all over and couldn’t quit that bleeding no matter how many poultices he applied.

He sent me a thimble of dirt in that letter and asked me to swallow it so I could remember him and our good old home. I wrote him back that I remembered him and it and that I didn’t do anything but that all the time. I wrote him that I thought sometimes I might die if I did not see him soon, that it made me homesick unto my death when I considered how I might be shot down and never see him nor the farm again. I wrote him, as I had written him before, that I kept his likeness sewed tight to my breast and that I touched at it every night before I slept. I wrote him that if it was crazy to think I might die of the thought of us never again getting to sit quiet together — holding hands or not, just sitting, being back there like we had always been, on our chairs or hay piles in the yard — then I was crazy and they ought to take away my hat and my rifle and feed me to the hogs.

I wrote him all of this. Then saw that I was shaking and shivering at the end of it. When one of my tent mates asked me what was wrong I told him he could go to hell. When he was gone I took the dirt Bartholomew had sent me and swallowed it straight down.

I had that dirt in my stomach when the Colonel called at my tent earlier than I liked the next morning and stood outside quietly coughing a minute while I clambered up out of my blankets and stepped over my fellow sleepers and tugged on my shoes.

“I hear there are fat squirrels in those woods, Gallant Ash,” he said when I was up and out in front of him with my jacket pulled half on.

“Yes, sir, I have heard the same,” I said.

“Heard or seen?” he said.

“Seen,” I said, then added, “There’s lots of them,” though I wasn’t sure at that minute whether or not any part of this was true.

“Well, I have a cook, this fellow here,” he said, pointing at a cinnamon-colored man with a snowy beard was holding a brace of good-looking hunting metal, “who claims if I can come up with the substance, he can make me a fine squirrel stew. You think we can come up with the substance?”

“I have shot squirrel before.”

“I would have laid down money on it.”

We carried our weaponry through the still dark and headed straight for the deeper portion of the woods. We had to go a good ways because everyone in the regiment had made firing into the trees for dinner meat his de facto religion. It was the Colonel who led the walk and who used this choice phrase, de facto, and explained to me what it meant.

“So you can say a thing is one way all you want but de facto means it’s the other,” I said.

“ De facto is the way it actually is.”

“Are we losing this war or winning it?”

The Colonel let the quiet of the morning answer a while at my question that hadn’t had anything close to do with what we were just talking about. Then he let the small cigar he pulled out of his pocket and nibbled the end off of and lit answer at it some more.

“You can still shoot squirrel even if I’m smoking, can’t you?” he said.