Laird Hunt - Neverhome

They reckoned, I suppose, that this was just salty-veteran talk, which it was and it wasn’t, and kept right on airing their opinions and relating their anecdotes. They tried to bring up the Gallant Ash story, which someone or other at camp had thought to revive even though I might as well have climbed that tree and draped that jacket a hundred and twenty years before. I told them there hadn’t been anything to it, so they asked me if it was true I had two weeks before, at the greatest risk to my health and happiness, taken cartridge sacks off dead and wounded soldiers in the middle of a fight because my company had shot itself out of ammunition, and I asked them who had told them that. Everyone, they said, was saying it, and they wanted to know if it was true. It was true, I said, I supposed. Then we got taken. The rebel boys, or that’s what we first took them for, had just walked right up behind our afternoon parley and poked at us with their guns. I felt so stupid and so angry I about threw up but one of them hit me a handsome one with the butt of his sidearm and told me there wasn’t any time for that.

They marched us or kept us standing for the next several hours and it was clear a few minutes into this outing that we hadn’t got ourselves taken by regulars but by common outlaws. They told us they knew some rebel captain or major who had promised up a reward for captured Union soldiers. I asked them what this fine officer’s name was and what regiment he was attached to and what fights he had fought and what fights they had fought and got a fist put hard to the side of my head. They had hiked a good way out from wherever this bounty was. They had come so far from that reward, in fact, that we had to stop halfway there to rest up for the night.

It was in a house looked to have once been nice and wasn’t anymore. There was mud streaked on the floors and on the tabletops, and broken crockery lay scattered about. Pages from newspapers and illustrated magazines had been tacked up to the walls then torn off and others tacked up. In one corner, under a cracked sconce, lay what looked like it had once been a vase and the crisped stalks of its former flowers. In another corner lay a pile of grease-stained rebel caps and grays. It didn’t add to the smell of the place that one or both of the Akron boys had wet himself when for part of the march after I had spoken, the outlaws had talked about the bounty being “dead or alive” or “tortured and dead” or some mix of them both. There was a side room led directly off the main one and after they had given us each another smack and greeted with a laugh and a boot my request for a sip of water they pushed us in and locked the door.

Both those Akron boys, who looked in the smudge of green moonlight we had in there to be no older than sixteen and probably weren’t even that, commenced to gibbering as soon as the door had been shut, but I got up and looked out the little window. One of our captor friends was outside leaning against a magnolia tree and smoking a pipe you could see was too fancy by about a half acre not to have been stolen. He looked at me, nodded, took the fancy pipe out of his mouth, and smiled an ugly, brown-gum, gap-tooth smile. He was the one had hit me with his pistol at the start of things and laughed it up the loudest about our drink.

“Why don’t you boys climb out the window and suck some fresh air out of my firearm,” he said.

I had already seen up too close that he carried a Colt. Mean-looking piece. Probably special-bore.

“I’ll take my chances in here,” I said.

“Wise choice,” he said.

“What is it you plan on doing with us?”

“Turn you in for bounty. You already been told that,” he said.

“Turn us in as what?”

He didn’t answer, just tapped a little at his boot with the Colt. I could see he was provisioned up with a clay jug. I smiled back at him.

“You enjoy your night now,” he said.

Growing up, I had known a son-of-a-bitch cut about like him lived in the first town over from our farm. I’d see him when we went in for market days. Each time we went in he gave me a lick. Once he pushed me down into a puddle turned the front of my clothes dark brown. My mother was still alive then. Still strong. She looked at me when I walked up to her and shook her head. She worked awhile at selling the corn she had brought and then she turned and grabbed me good by my ear and whispered into it hard.

“We do not ever turn our cheek.”

I looked at that son-of-a-bitch out smoking his stolen pipe by his borrowed tree one more time, then turned away. I went over and leaned against the door that had been locked and saw that it was solid and would not easily be breached. Anyways, there were two of them had their own kinds of pistol were eating at some pork-and-cracker sandwiches they had brandished about for us to admire in the room beyond. There was no gap in the ceiling and none in the floor. There was, though, another smaller door in the room. It didn’t open directly onto our deliverance but deliverance offers itself in different ways. It was a narrow closet, the contents of which, lying there like last Sunday’s lunch, were made out of felt and crinoline.

I have often wondered what my mother would have looked like in a pair of britches. I have tried to pull pants on her legs in my mind but the exercise is not easy; the result does not satisfy. I get them pulled on and think I have done the chore but look again and see that she still has her old brown work dress on. I do know that my mother had legs made of iron and that they were long, and the times I saw them bare they looked like they were holding themselves still and springy at the bottom of a rushing stream. I saw her legs those Sundays of the month we would take our bath. She would step out of the bath and those legs just kept on coming out of the water like they were tornadoes climbing up out of a pond.

I saw boys in the war had legs some like hers but you wouldn’t have traded hers for theirs. There wasn’t ever anything I saw she couldn’t lift if she got her legs under it. Her arms weren’t any too thin but it was the legs on her that set her apart. She talked about britches some. We’d have a hired man now and again to help at a chore and we would sit down to lunch and she would chew on her cucumber salad and squint and remark that if the hired man had stacked more hay or climbed a ladder more quickly than she had, it was because he didn’t have skirts to get tripped up on. One of these times she told me about how her mother had one whole summer risen up every night and put on her father’s work pants and cinched the waist and gone out to do moonlight work on her roses. We did not have any pair of britches in our house but after this story I borrowed a pair off a line outside town and when my mother was asleep one night tugged them on. It was a close night and I did not at all like the feel of the rough wool on my legs but I jumped a puddle and climbed a fence and understood the principle quick enough.

After we had decided that I would go to war, I made a pair of pants out of sackcloth and again went out in the moonlight to practice in them. This time I went out in my britches after dark not because I feared the comment of others but because I did not want anyone beyond Bartholomew to know what I was planning, didn’t want anyone to puzzle on it, to speculate. There was and are plenty around could put two and two together and not get nervous to see the sum come out as five.

A time or two of my moonlight parades, Bartholomew came out into the dark with me. We ran barefoot races through the rows. We took a turn at what we thought marching might be and stepped together across the yard. We went scampering down the lane and one night climbed all the trees in the grove. It didn’t strike me a second on that night that I might one day think about doing just exactly the opposite, think about taking off my pants and putting on a dress and going out to gain advantage in the dark.