Laird Hunt - Neverhome

There was no place for dresses that night back home. After we had done our climbing and racing, Bartholomew and I shucked off our britches both of us and lay down together at the edge of our yard. There were mosquitoes out in some number but we thrashed and rolled so eagerly that they barely got a chance at us. Bartholomew came up close on his completion and told me he wanted to stay. “Stay close now,” he said. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I pushed him away. Saw his fine face in the dark. We had done our trying I told him and look what had come of it.

“I do not want you to leave,” he said.

“Don’t you?” I said.

“Constance,” he said.

“Ash, love,” I said, already knowing what to be called.

“You are my Constance,” he said.

“Ash is my name. I will not answer now to any other.”

And when I saw he had no reply to make and wasn’t going to get up, only lie there in the yard in his mosquito-bait nothings, I got up myself and pulled on my pants and pushed him aside, a little harder than I like to think of now. Then I went running off away from him, speeding up and slowing down until I felt sure it was starting to come natural and there wouldn’t be anything could stop me, like it was to be running races and fence-jumping and tree-climbing from one end to the other of the war.

The son-of-a-bitch with the Colt was drowsing and the Akron boys were asleep and tucked safe away from their troubles a minute in their dreams when I pulled that pile out of the closet and saw that it would do. It was two dresses, one green, one red, owned once by a stout lady gone down the road or into the earth or who knew where. I picked the darkest corner, shrugged out of my clothes and unwrapped myself, and put the green dress on. It was snug in the chest and loose in the waist but I unstrung my belt off my britches and gave it a shape. There was some stain on it but the stain would work to my favor. I tore a stretch of the other dress off and wrapped it around my shoulders in the idea it might approximate a shawl.

Then I drew up the little window, dropped my blues down soft onto the ground, and climbed out. First thing I did was make my way to the bushes where I hadn’t gotten to go in what felt like a week. I sat there with that dress on and did my business and a shiver came up over me. I hadn’t felt my legs free under a dress in a year, hadn’t even so much as held a piece of crinoline let alone have it crawl all over me. I got prickly bumps up to their ends. That image of my mother’s legs unspringing themselves out of her bath came back to me. Tornadoes coming up out of the waters. I imagined I had tornadoes under my skirt when I went rustling over in that stout lady’s dress to where that son-of-a-bitch lay sleeping his own evil sleep next to the magnolia tree. He had that clay jug on the ground next to him that I had watched him sip out of until he nodded. I picked it up slow then dropped my knee hard onto his chest so that his head popped up and as it did I smashed that heavy jug down. I smashed it down again, and then a third time, and then I put my hand into the blood I had made and brought it back up to my face. I brought some more of it up to my neck, then stood and draped my shawl over my head. Then I took his fine pistol, checked it, cocked the hammer, held it behind my back, and walked around to the front door.

It didn’t take but a minute to rouse them. Like I thought it might happen, one of them leaned up at the front window and took a look at me and when he saw me he gave a grin. His teeth didn’t look any better than his dead son-of-a-bitch friend’s. I said I had been set upon by rogues in the forest, that I needed his help. He opened the door and called me “honey doll” and I shot him in the mouth. His friend had his gun to hand and he lifted it but got stuck a second too long wondering what it was was happening. What this woman wearing the face of one of their prizes was doing shooting people dead. He took his first bullet in the neck. When he stood and tried a step sideways I put one in his chest. He fell over in the pile of rebel grays. You almost couldn’t hear him land. I went over to see if I had finished my work, saw I hadn’t, and shot him again.

I put the fine Colt pistol down on the table, then stepped out the front door. I stood a minute and looked down the pale lane ran away off into the dark. Looked like a thought you’d had and then lost. After I had stood I sat down on the front steps. Exactly what Bartholomew had done, the morning I set out on the road that had taken its many windings and had now led me down this pale lane and again into a dress. I had had it in mind that morning of my leaving that despite our troubles of the past year he would give me some fine Bartholomew word of parting, then wave at me as he wiped away a tear. Would stand tall and wave. Instead, he had looked one last time at me, wrapped his arms hard around his chest like he was afraid his lungs might leave him, and sat down.

“You had better get to marching because I can’t stand it to see you any longer when you are already gone,” he said when I came over.

“I am not gone yet, husband,” I said.

“Constance is gone,” he said.

He had a far-off look in his eyes, like he had to see through a thousand miles even then, when I was standing right next to him, to find me.

“I am here,” I whispered, bending close.

“Off to war with you, Ash Thompson,” he said.

He said, “I will stay behind and guard this life we don’t have and this family we don’t got.”

“Husband,” I said.

“Go on now, Ash,” he said.

He was still holding his arms tight around his chest and not looking in my direction when I rounded the bend.

Now, when I could undouble my own self, I sat down on the front step and wiped at my eyes and thought about my Bartholomew gone from me all those long months and miles away. Then I stepped back in, took up one of the canteens sitting in a slosh on the floor, and drank. The Akron boys had been quiet first but now they were pounding on the door. I drank some more then took off the stout lady’s dress, hid it away, wrapped myself back down, got my blues on, picked up some of the dry pork the outlaws hadn’t eaten, took a crunch, then let my fellow soldiers out.

“How did you do it?” they asked me when they had had their drink and quit their jumping up and down.

“Trickery,” I told them. “Trickery simple and pure.”

“There was a lady here,” they said. “We saw her setting around to the front of the house.”

“Lady?” I said.

They both of them looked at me and I didn’t like the way they were looking so I fetched them up a piece of pork each and then, with the fine Colt I had picked back up without knowing why, pointed at the pile of grays serving as a bed to the dead man in the corner.

“You know what they were planning to do with us?” I said.

They shook their heads.

“They were planning to put us in those goddamn rebel colors and march us up to their ranks as deserters. I expect when we got close enough they were going to set us loose to run.”

“Why?” they said.

“So that after they had shot us in the back we couldn’t answer any questions when they turned us in for deserter bounty.”

It got quiet in that house after I said that and we all stood and chewed and looked at the dead men at our feet and then one or the other of them asked if that was truly what they had planned and I told them I expected it was. As they chewed on and thought about this and gave out a shiver, I told them I didn’t want to hear any more talk about ladies walking around the yard. They could tell all they liked about what we had gone through and add whatever they liked about their own hands in our escape. They were thinking about getting candied up as rebels and being shot for deserters and when I said this their eyes went wide and they nodded at the idea of looking like more than spare valises in the closet in the story to be told.