Laird Hunt - Neverhome

“No more talk about ladies in the moonlight, now,” I said solemnly. They said they felt sure they’d been dreaming and I told them to help themselves to whatever they liked from our friends. One took a rubber cape hung on a chair and the other of them went around the back of the house and borrowed the brogans off the first one I’d killed. They both, “to show the boys back at camp,” picked up a souvenir firearm. They asked me, greedy-like, if I planned on keeping the Colt. Afraid of where its remaining bullets might take it upon themselves to travel, I told them I thought it ought to stay behind at the scene of its triumph. They smiled and nodded and looked, each one of them, like they were at home and heading back to the nursery for a long sleep. I set the Colt down in the corner amongst the dead flowers and was relieved to no longer be holding it. The outlaws had set our Springfields and cartridge bags by the door to the kitchen and we picked them up. On the way out one of us, might have been me, knocked over the last lit lamp in the house. Instead of putting our boots to the fire we walked on away and let it burn.

In the old days there were Indians here. Miami, Illini, who knows, maybe it was some of the Shawnee. They had a camp on the rise sits in the middle of the front field. Every now and again I still churn up an arrowhead. There are oyster shells from far-off waters in our dirt. There are chiseled bear and wolf bones. When I was a child and my mother let me go, I used to run out to the rise with a feather band on my head. I expect I got a friend or two to play at it with me over the years. You can’t pick anything up out of the dirt that will take you close to the true past, but the child a-dance at dusk amid the chopped-down cornstalks can conjure it. That child I was is long gone but I remember some of her tricks and now and again I pick up a lost feather in the yard and feel a flicker. The fields look to move then. The air gets heavy and fills itself with fires and hurt faces.

My mother came to this place when she was a girl. She had grown up a ways near Noblesville, daughter to a blacksmith and the lady who wore pants in the rose garden. The blacksmith did well and my mother got a good start on growing up. When I was a child there was a painting of my mother sitting in a carriage next to her father. I do not know if it was her mother made the picture or someone else. Many was the time I would take that painting down off the fireplace and study it. I had never in my life seen my mother in a white dress and I had never seen a bow in her hair. She knew what crinoline felt like. She knew about crepe and silk and every kind of fancy cloth. The horse they had in front of them was a good one, and the blacksmith had his gentle eye on my mother in her white dress and he was smiling. A nice smile. Kind you could linger in. He was a blacksmith come over from the Old Country could read, and he and the lady who liked roses made sure my mother could too. Filled her head with fairy tales. Kind that can make your blood curdle. I still have some of the books they taught her with. He and the lady who liked roses died before my mother was done growing up, and she got sent, her and her books and her picture, to live with an aunt on this farm.

I don’t know what happened to my mother’s mother, nor do I have much of any idea where that picture is now. What I do know is that when my mother was grown up and had had me and all that was past and she could sit on her own front porch and laugh again her own laugh, she would still dream to waking at night about thorns.

I have my own kind of dream that chases me up and off my bed. In it, I am in the middle of a crowd of faces I ought to know but can’t recognize. I have grown small again and can’t fight my way through them. It is summertime and the air is close and I need to get to my mother and can’t. There is some in the crowd carrying torches. They are talking, loud, but I don’t need to hear them to know what they say. I know what they mean to do. I have been here before. The crowd is men and women both. It is a good long time ago. Once not too far back I must have yelled my way half up out of this dream because when I woke, Bartholomew was standing in my doorway looking at me. He stood there and I lay there and then he smiled that small smile of his and went floating back to his bed.

It was that dream came to mind as we stood a minute watching that house start to go up. I get a shiver when it comes and I got a shiver that night so I told the boys we had to go.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” one of them said.

“There’s dead souls in there,” I said.

They both of them gave a look showed they hadn’t thought of that aspect to the equation, then turned to make tracks. Away from the house along the pale lane we hurried. When we came to a road we took it. There were hoot owls in the high branches, sharp-tooth hunters in the trees. We came to a narrow crossroads had a darkened house at each of its corners. There was a white cat sitting on the porch railing of one of them but other sign of life there was none. A half mile up the road we struck a dead mule. It was reclining on its side and had had most of its stomach and much of its front legs chewed off. We passed a pond had the moon painted on its middle. You could see moths diving at it, hoping their hope of the ages about reaching the light. We hadn’t got much beyond that pond when we struck a horseman coming through the woods. We all three of us dropped down on one knee and raised our weapons but the horseman held up his hand.

“Union officer, men,” he said.

“Prove it,” one of the Akron boys said.

“Not sure I can, least not to your satisfaction, but if you lower your weapons I’ll climb down off Rosie here and we can step off the road and talk.”

We all three looked at each other, then I nodded and they nodded and the horseman kicked his leg over nice and neat and slid down off his mount. He walked him over to a hickory stump, hitched him tight, then told us to come on over and take a seat. There was a mossy log or two shone blue beside him in the moonlight. We came over and sat with him and he pulled out a bottle freshly filled with whiskey. He pulled the cork out with his teeth, took a drink, then offered it over to us. At first I shook my head but he insisted.

“You have that look about you,” he said.

“What look?”

“Of men just been fighting some fight.”

His name, he said, was Thomas Lord and he was a junior cavalry officer attached to the Kentucky Volunteers. He had gotten separated from his unit in a skirmish and now couldn’t get his way straight in the dark.

“My horse knows, I just don’t trust him as well as I should,” he said.

“That’s a fine horse,” I said.

“I rode him to war and haven’t stopped riding him and reckon one day, Heaven willing, I’ll ride him home.”

“But you don’t trust him.”

“It’s a defect in my personality. Not the biggest one.”

The horse whinnied when he said this. Lord leaned over and gave him a tender smack on his side. We had broken out the pork and crackers we had taken off the dead outlaws and after he had had a few crunches of what we shared out to him, Lord gave what was left of his part to the horse. The horse ate his portion with his dainty horse lips then shut his eyes. The Akron boys took this for a signal and shut their own and soon were snoring snores that sounded like they had each one shoved a fat frog down his throat. Me and Lord drank awhile and listened to their frogs croak, then Lord asked me what we had gotten ourselves into. I told him. The version where I hadn’t done it all. Killed them all. Or put on a dress.