Neverhome

ONE

I was strong and he was not, so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings, and a blanket too. There was a heat in the air so I walked in my shirtsleeves with my hat pulled low. I wasn’t the only one looking to enlist and by and by we had ourselves a band. Farm folk cheered as we went by. Gave us food. Their best shade to stop in. Played to us on their fiddles. Everything you’ve heard about from the early days, even though it had already been a year since Fort Sumter, and there had already been the First Bull Run, and Shiloh had stole off its souls, and the early days were done and dead and gone.

The tenth or eleventh night on the road we drank whiskey and hollered under the stars. There was a running race. Knife throwing. Cracker-swallowing contest. Feats of strength. One of the boys tried to arm wrestle me and got the back of his hand scraped when I smacked it down. None of the others took a turn.

There was an old lady outside Kettering fetched me up a drink of water from her well, took a long look at me as she handed it to me, and told me I needed to watch my step. No one else outside that lady saw what I was. I slept just exactly like a pine plank on that walk. I sent Bartholomew my first letter from Dayton. I sent him about the same one from Cincinnati. I wrote that I missed him fierce. I wrote that I was fierce happy too.

I gave my name as Ash Thompson down out of Darke County. “Where in Darke County?” they asked me, and I told them, even though I could see straight off they weren’t listening, that where was in the northwest corner of that fine county on my Daddy’s farm. After they had cracked on my teeth and whistled at my thick fingers and had me scrape my thumb calluses across the wood tabletop, they gave me my blues. A week later, when they saw I didn’t mind work and hadn’t run off, they handed me my firearm. It was a Model 1861 muzzle-loading Springfield rifle with flip-up sights and percussion lock, and they said you could use it to kill a man a quarter mile away. That was something to think about. How you could rifle a man down was looking at you and you at him but never see his face. I hadn’t figured it that way when I had thought on it back home. I had figured it would be fine big faces firing back and forth at each other, not threads of color off at the horizon. A dance of men and not just their musket balls. There was another fellow, little bitty thing made me look tall, said something not too far off these lines aloud as we stood there staring at our Springfields.

“Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” said to him the officer was handing out the hardware, “you’ll get so close to those rebel boys you won’t know whether to kiss or kill.”

We marched ragtag for several days south and came to a great camp near the river. They gave me a shovel to go with my rifle and set me to digging fresh latrines. Some already there had it in their minds my first day to strip me down and throw me in the creek, but one of the band I’d come in with said it wasn’t worth the trouble I would give them if they tried it, so they picked on someone else instead. I stood on the bank and laughed with the others when they had him down to his dirty skin, but it was me who waded in when it came out he couldn’t swim. I wasn’t sorry after I’d fetched him, as the wet and cool settled off some of my stink. That evening I walked a ways down the creek past all the eyes and shucked off my own clothing and went back in. I’d have floated on my back a good long while but I could already see that a camp was a sprawly thing and who knew who else might have had the same idea, so I got in and out and dried and dressed back up quick.

The boys at my tent had a game of cards going when I got back and I stood awhile and watched it. In between bets they talked about all the rebel-whipping to come. They had pipes in their mouths, and cheeks still fat from their farms. I did not know what was coming any better than they did but it did not feel like a thing to rattle happy at the dark about. Still, when one of them looked up from his poor hand and asked how many rebels I planned on killing, I smiled and put my own pipe in my mouth and said I’d get my hundred. A little later after I had tended to my gun and polished my bayonet I lay under my blanket and thought about that hundred. I thought about my Bartholomew too. I thought about the hundred then I thought about Bartholomew then I fell asleep and dreamed I was floating dead as the ages in the cool waters of the creek.

We had talked on it for two months before I went. I think we both of us knew from the start where the conversation was wending but we talked on it, took it every angle, sewed at it until the stitch stayed shut. I was to go and he was to stay. There was one of us had to look to the farm and one had to go and that was him and that was me. We were about the same small size but he was made out of wool and I was made out of wire. He took the sick headache every winter and I’d never got sick one gray day in my life. He couldn’t see any too well over a distance and I could shut one eye and shoot a jackrabbit out of its ears at fifty yards. He would turn away any time he could, and I never, ever backed down.

He said we didn’t either one of us have to go and I said someone wasn’t him had to go and represent this farm and after I put the bark on my words and said it a few times that settled up the argument. We kept it quiet. The only other person I raised up the topic with was my mother and of course she was already fine and dead. I would open the discussion with her after Bartholomew was into his snoring or when we were at different ends of the field or when it was my turn to go out to the shed and lay my cheek and shoulder against our cow. Once or twice I went out to the churchyard where I’d put her stone. Curried off its fresh slime and damp mosses and twittered at it like a bird. My mother had traveled in a train once and I told her I wanted to travel like her. Whoosh across the countryside, float the length of its long waters in a boat. I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Walk forward with a thousand others. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run.

I said all this to my dead mother, spoke it down through the dirt: there was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark. We both of us, me and Bartholomew, knew what my mother would have said in response and so it was like she was saying it each time I asked her what she thought.

Go on. Go on and see what you got.

We had drill every day at that camp. We filled up our bags and toted our muskets and we marched long miles out into nowhere and back and we stood at attention for inspection and spent every second we stood there wishing the hot weather would turn. I finished up at drill and dug at the trenches and at any other thing required a shovel. Once it was a sinkhole for the cooks. Another time it was a row of fresh neat graves I helped dig and then fill. Boys they put in them had died of diphtheria. One or two was ones I had walked into camp with. Five-minute funerals were but one of our many fine diversions. There was stealing and drinking and fighting too. There was a little stage where they would get up farces about the officers or stories I knew well, like the little man could spin gold or that poor boy and girl who laid down their bread crumbs in the woods. I heard one fellow say that since those two got free at the end and didn’t get cooked in an oven they were lucky, but there was another said, You get a scare like that put deep into you when you are young, it never comes all the way out.

Whether it does or it doesn’t, we also had minstrel shows for our entertainment or actual Negroes free from bondage to dance for us or sing. There was a giant contraband they said had come up out of Tuscaloosa on an earless donkey did his song for us on a platform he had balanced on the top of a fence post. When the song was done he bowed then flipped off that platform backward and onto the ground. He did this so well the boys had him do it again. The third time, when the crowd had swelled up to almost half the regiment, he landed bad off his jump and broke his leg.

It wasn’t just contraband could offer up marvels. A Mexican boy worked in the kitchen tents could play the banjo so fast his hand would vanish clear off the strings, and there was plenty said in hushed voices when it came to picking, it was only the devil on his good day had him beat. Some afternoons the officers would get up contests. The whiskey would go around on those days and the boys would run races or fight each other with their bare fists or play a kind of baseball involved old apples we didn’t yet know we’d want later or climb up greased poles.

The camp was about as far away as you could gallop in a day from what you would have called a pretty place. There was torn-up pasture fields around us and half the woods cut down for timber and firewood. There was a stink out of a old storybook doing its dance on any breeze might come our way. Men blowing along their own ugly breezes went every which direction, some on horse though most on foot, and there was a little line of cannon they would fire off every now and again when there wasn’t enough smoke and devil smell around to suit them. The tents were dark places, for all that the men would lay down floors and hang up likenesses and sundries from home. Sometimes there were women in the camp. But whether they were officers’ wives or pot scrubbers or ladies had long ago lost their virtue, I kept clear of them.

When I’d eaten up my given share of a day I’d take up my pen to write Bartholomew. I had never written him or anyone else a letter before those days in my life and I did not much like the look of what I found I had to say. I have improved some at writing since, as you can be the judge, but I was slow at my writing back then and using my pen to make words that would still mean something after traveling so many miles seemed a strange chore. I would read through my letters before I posted them off and it seemed like I was reading the letters of a stranger to a stranger and I did not like the way this made me feel.

My Dear Bartholomew,

Dearest Bartholomew,

Bartholomew, My Handsome Friend,

Back home it was words spoke aloud or little presents and notions we would leave for each other that had done the trick. We had a game between ourselves to be the one to see the first daffodil come up in the springtime, the first tulip, the first iris cracking open the fresh purple yolk of its bloom. Whoever saw it was to pick that first one and put it out for the other to find. That spring before I left for the fight it was Bartholomew had seen the first lilac. He tied some sprigs into a little bundle with yellow thread and set it out next to my breakfast bowl. I thought on that bright bundle more than once in my writings to see if there was any fair firsts I could signal to him, but all that came into my mind were latrines and ugly bare backs set to labor and burned coffee and mealworms popping their heads out of our hard biscuits. One day on a march I did see a blue heron spear a fish bigger than its beak out of a still puddle but when I wrote it down, the heron and the fish and the puddle came out so pale I almost struck them out.

Bartholomew’s letters to me were of another order altogether. He had a way of writing five words could bring all of the old world back to life. Reading his letters I could smell the early smells of autumn and hear the early autumn sounds. One time he put a bright red cardinal feather in the envelope and told about finding it “aflit at the edge of the well” into which it might have fallen forever had he not plucked it up and sent it to fly far across the world to find me. I cannot tell you quite why but that feather and his words about it flying far to find me put a tear into the corner of my eye wouldn’t leave even after I had wiped it away. I wasn’t the only one got my face flushed at a letter from home. Some got much worse than that. There was young boys got letters from their mothers who bawled like babies all the rest of the night. One time, I saw an old sergeant sent a pair of fresh-knit socks from his wife had to work hard to bite back the tears. A pair of fellows sitting nearby tried to tease him some but he told them if they kept it up one more minute he would stick a fork in each of their eyes.

It was that same sergeant taught us how to fix bayonets in our Springfields and stab at men made of straw and form a line and, for those that didn’t know how already, shoot. I already said earlier I knew how to shoot, and fifty yards or five hundred, it wasn’t much different in that camp. I could make my Springfield hit whatever it was they wanted me to wherever they wanted to put it and it didn’t matter if they stood behind us while we were at it and yelled in our ears or beat to breaking on a drum. There was plenty who could march or stand longer than I could or stab straw fiercer, but it was only a few could beat me with a gun.

I wrote Bartholomew about it, and in the next letter I had from him he said that was fine and I ought to be proud but that — like we had talked about — if I didn’t want the curious eyes of the entire company on me, every once in a while I needed to miss. I wrote him back that maybe it wouldn’t be so awful a thing to get noticed for what I was and sent home. He wrote that he wanted me back with him more than anything on the green good earth but that I shouldn’t come. That he knew I wasn’t ready to come home yet, that if I didn’t stay to see some of the fight I would forever be filled with the echoes of regret and the ague of remorse.

There was a fellow had his tent near ours who looked wiser than the others and I asked him after I had had this letter from Bartholomew whether he thought love ought to trump duty. “Love? What in hell is love?” said this wise-looking man and spat.

They got us what they thought was trained up enough — to where we wouldn’t stab or shoot at each other too much — and we boarded paddleboats and went down the river, then got off and marched toward the fiery South. There was battles up ahead and soon as word got around that we were moving forward to make their acquaintance, the regiment commenced to bleed off a number of its boys. It wasn’t anything at all to step away from the line and not come back. A kind of mud and mist covered our faces. We were unknown things that marched along with muskets. We might have done a thing or two back in the camp to get us noticed but now that camp was left behind. The sergeant had seen I could shoot hadn’t come along. The boys from my band had seen me at arm wrestling weren’t there. I’ll confess it to you, is all I’m saying, that I thought about leaving many was the time as we marched. Despite what Bartholomew had written me about my not being ready to come home yet. Despite all I said those days to my dead mother.

“I won’t run,” I said to her.

You will or you won’t, she said back.

“There is no storm of ice or fire can make me run,” I said to her.

You will learn whether that’s a lie one way or the other, she said back.

I was thinking about it, about leaving and putting the lie straight into my step, when we marched through one of those towns where they were all lined up to cheer and we saw a girl climbing a tree to look at us better. There must have been something sharp on one of the branches because her chemise got caught as she climbed and it tore right off. That brought a roar up out of all the boys around me, and the girl in the tree took the chemise that she wasn’t wearing any longer and waved it at us. You could see that she was sorry, even as she waved her torn garment, that she was all of her bouncing in the breeze, and before I knew what I had done I was up the tree like it was a ladder and had taken off my jacket and wrapped it around her. I wrapped it around her, pulled it snug. “There you go, miss,” I said. I said this and gave a kind of bow even up there in the tree and she looked at me, then she looked at me harder, and she saw what I was and gave a start turned her eyes from blue to green, but then another happy roar come up — this one for what I had done — from the boys below and I got down the tree and back into the line. I saw her wearing my jacket, still looking at me and pointing, but before I’d taken five or ten more breaths the company had moved on and we had left that girl behind.

That evening I stood before our Colonel, and after he had given me a week of midnight picket duty for handing away my military issue before I’d even had a chance to get shot at in it he complimented me on my tree-climbing talents and on my gallantry. He said he hadn’t known they made farm boys that were acquainted with the fancy arts. He said that the world never ceased to offer him up surprises. That the world was nothing but surprises from one long end of it to the other.

“What surprises you, Private Thompson out of Darke County?” he asked me.

“Sir?” I said.

“I asked you what in this wide world of war and its thunders surprises you.”

I had my answer come to me quick but still I thought a long minute or two before giving it.

“Everything, sir.”

The Colonel had the habit of twisting at his mustaches. He twisted first on one side then on the other, then he nodded. He looked at my face awhile and I could tell he was seeing a tree and a jacket and some pretty young woman that wasn’t me.

There was good sport on my account that evening at the fires. A boy with some skill at the guitar, an instrument I had never seen played out of doors, had already worked the episode into a tune. “ ‘Gallant Ash went up the tree, helped a sweet old girl along…’ ”

That boy didn’t have the voice Bartholomew had when he was at his fiddle of an evening when we were sitting together on a straw bale under the stars but I’d heard worse. Another boy could play the bones took up with him. There was some hands clapping. Two or three got up a kind of jig that they pulled me into the middle of and made me hop and shuffle along.

When I went out later to my first night of picket, that song came with me. There was a Louisville boy on duty with me called me Gallant Ash and hummed some of it. I told him he’d better keep that name to himself but some of the others heard and took it up and then there wasn’t any stopping it. Even our Colonel, when I saw him again the next day, handed it over at me to wear, so I put it on.

Wearing it the following night I shot my first man. Six or seven of them looking to harass and harry, or Lord knows what, came up out of the trees an inch or two before dawn. Half the boys on our portion of the line were nestled in the leaves and slow to rise so it was only a few of us had our muskets at the ready and fired at the blurs come running through the draw. Only one of our firearms functioned and that was mine. I got a look at the man I’d killed when his brothers had run off. He had curly dark hair and a little beard. His mouth was large and his cheekbones high. The ball had hit him just above his left breast. You could see a kind of brown bloom coming up through his light coat. He had a filthy old dressing on his left hand and fingernails could have used a trim.

Our relief came with the sun and told us to head back and report, but I stayed on a minute with the killed man. Like anyone else, I’d seen plenty of the dead, but never one I had made. I had just that morning crafted another light remark about how many rebels I aimed to account for, how many I planned to shoot and skin. We had larked on that subject every day. Some of those had already been in fights had told us that what we were most likely to do when the enemy was all lined up and aiming at us was run. But I had not run. I had fired my weapon.

“Did you see that, Mother,” I whispered.

I saw it, she whispered back.

Now there I sat. I wanted to take up the dead man’s head and cradle it but I did not do that and knew that that kind of a thought was another thing I was going to have to learn to kill. Some of them on relief teased me a little as I sat there my minute but I didn’t pay them any mind. They hadn’t killed anyone that morning. When the sun was up sufficient I saw that the dead man’s open eyes were blue.

One week later, the Colonel, whose horses were off working elsewhere, had one of our lieutenants form up a party to search out a likely forward encampment and told him to take me along. It was a dozen of us then to tromp through the trees and creeks, and after living with a thousand it felt like it was just us and the birds left to populate an empty earth. We saw none of the enemy nor any two-leggers white or dark at all. We scouted a ways and struck a deserted house or three but none fit for a camp. The lieutenant had us split ourselves up then to cover more ground and after walking an hour, me and the boy I was with found what looked like the right place hiding away in the trees.

It was a pretty piece of land with a fine, bright stream to split it. There was a stone bridge could take the weight of our guns across it and a cabin for the Colonel and his officers. There was a barn still had straw in it and a big oak tree we sat under a minute to chew our apples and biscuits and a well we pulled good water up out of. Next to the well was a shed. In it we found a chain and a shackle lying open next to a declivity in the dirt floor. You could see the shackle had been shut hard awhile and probably many a time on something soft.

We might have stood on for a bit to look at this sorry spectacle but at that minute a good-size pig that hadn’t long been wild come snorting by. We shot the pig, got it trussed and hung on a birch pole between us, and made our way back to the meeting point, where after many a rest we presented our pig and made our report. Turned out some of the others had found a choicer spot and that’s where the regiment moved but that didn’t stop a good number of us, including the Colonel, from chewing that night on fresh pork.

I wrote Bartholomew about that day and that meal in my next letter to him. I thought about some of the birds I had seen and put those down and about some of the trees and the fine construction of the bridge and the sound of the creek moving under it and included that in my letter too. The pig we had shot had squealed about as loud in its dying as a pig called Cloverleaf we once had back home and I made the comparison in my letter to Bartholomew and reckoned it was true. I read through it after I thought I had finished it enough and hadn’t quite ruined up every inch of it and I was getting ready to fold it for sending when that shed came back to me. I saw the shackle and the old blood caked on the iron and gave a shudder. That shudder started somewhere down low in my back and came up through my throat and breached my mouth. There wasn’t anyone alive hadn’t seen someone with a shackle someplace on his body, I knew that, but there had been a bite of sorrows in that empty place made me glad to think we had found another spot and weren’t going to return.

Return I did, though. The very next day the Colonel instructed me and my fellow to lead a forage party to the environs to see if we could scare up another nice piece of pork. I walked us straight there like I had the map to it written on my shirtsleeve. There was as much sun out as there had been the day before and an even better breeze. We killed another pig, and the boys I was with all thought we ought to have set our camp there but I didn’t say a word. From a distance the shed, with its door hanging off one of its hinges, looked like it opened up onto a darkness would lead you, if you studied at it too closely, down to a place you would have to work hard to climb your way back up out of.

There was still plenty used my nickname, but I didn’t feel any too gallant over the next coming days. I expect if any of the ladies we saw as we marched had lost her shirt to her excitement I’d have let her air out her luxuries in the breeze. Many was the time I stepped off the line to look for a bush and had to trot to catch back up. I wasn’t the only one had swallowed up some swamp water at the camp we had chosen and was paying the price. None of us had any interest in squatting down in front of the others and looked to put good distance between us, but the still real prospect of one of them stumbling onto me at my business I was at every ten minutes instead of every ten hours and uncovering my secret didn’t help cheer me up. It didn’t cheer me up any much more either when a boy came back from his own trip to the bushes carrying a skull in his hand.

Turned out we were walking through where one of the earliest skirmishes had been and some of the fallen had gone unburied and their bones had been scattered by animals and wind. Soon as we learned this we got bones on the brain and for the next mile, green and brown and mossy white was all we could see.

“There’s one over there,” someone would say.

Another would call out, “There’s a boot down there at the base of that tree still got some foot stuck in it.”

There were bones in the ditches, bones in the fencerows, bones in the cattails, and bones in a kind of circle at the shallow black bottom of a brook. There was some didn’t like all that calling out about bones and thought we ought to stop and do them their justice, regardless of whose they were, blue or gray, but the Colonel had his orders and the regiment was moving and we kept our mouths open and fingers pointing and left our shovels alone.

That feeling of wanting to bury the bones we saw, which had lingered long past the seeing of them, didn’t keep the boy with the skull from pulling it out when we tromped some miles later through a little town, nor from tossing it into the hands of a local belle turned out to watch us pass. A number of us gave out a good laugh when he did this. Not the belle. She neither laughed nor shrieked nor dropped the mossy thing but considered it a minute and then turned and set it carefully on the window ledge next to her. I looked at her over my shoulder a little and wondered at how, after that gift, her lips had made themselves into a strong little smile and at how she had met and held the eye of anyone who looked at or spoke to her as we all trooped past. There was a child or two in the shadows behind her. The front of the house was fire-blackened and the roof had been part stove in. My stomach gave a tug and I turned away but I didn’t stop thinking about her even when I ran off again to find a quiet spot. Who knew what the skull meant to her and hers. As I squatted there at my business, I tapped a time or two on my own skull to make sure it was still resting there snug on my neck.

My mother had a story she liked to tell about a man heard Death was waiting up around the bend. He changed his direction and walked the other way. You know how that ends. I had known it before I left for war and I knew it down there in the South with its bones and ball-stove roofs, so when the regiment’s numbers commenced again to drop after a call to double-time it up to the sound of the cannon we had begun to hear, I gripped harder at my Springfield and swung my cartridge box around behind me and quit my trips to the bushes and followed fast. I did not even start to imagine what it would be like not to follow. I was only sorry that I would be obliged to engage with my stomach in its poor shape. Not so sorry, though, that I slowed when a pair of corporals jogged down the line telling those who were too sick to drop back. Nor did I, nor any of those around me I am proud to say, slow down when the cannon fire grew so hot it seemed like the injury was already being done to us before we had fairly arrived and that we were already part of the world’s everlasting grief and glory, and we could see the trees crashing down destroyed in the heights and hear the sound, from all quarters, of hurt men letting the air out of their throats.

We started to see gray off at a distance, just little speckles of it but everywhere, and they had us take off our knapsacks and anything else wouldn’t help in the fight. I didn’t have time to be sorry to see Bartholomew’s likeness and all my letters from him go. I just untangled the sack like all those around me were doing and let it drop. We all but ran then. There was a company of ours up ahead having hell’s time and needed our help at holding the flank. I had stood at the picket and fired off my rifle at a man as I’ve already said, but there’s a first time for battles too. Some good number of us fell as we made the last effort, and the air filled itself up with smoke. It seemed like we would never get to where we were going and then we were there.

We had come to a field as long and wide as you like with us on one side and them on the other. It was their boys in their slouch hats and us in ours. If we’d been wearing the same colors, you could have thought it was a mirror. Like the central job of it was we were fixing to fire at ourselves. Like the other half of it, the mirror, was fixing to fire straight back. I got this idea I gripped hard on to that there had to be skirmishers go out first, that we would each send out a wave at each other, that it wasn’t yet time for the rest of us to fight. Our Colonel came riding up behind us about then and put that idea right out of my head. He rode up, then got down off his horse and gave his mustaches a twist and said we hadn’t come all the way over from Ohio to pick petunias, that it was time to bring thunder, to fling doom, to stand shoulder to shoulder and never fear the dark. While he made this speech the grays kept creeping forward and we did too and when we had both quit creeping our throats and eyes had already started fighting and our colors stood not forty yards apart.

There had been a sutler in camp just the day before had tried to sell off a set of iron armor could keep out, he had said, any bullet built by man and see you home to your loved ones but he had been laughed down. I got a picture of that armor in my head though when the gray volleys commenced and the boy next to me caught his ravishing and fell away just as we were lifting our guns. The boy on the other side of me croaked out about sure wishing he had a rock or tree to stand behind, and the old fellow been in plenty of fights next to him laughed and bit open a cartridge, sniffed loud, and said, “You are the tree, son.”

It was nothing but marching and battles, marching and double-timing and battles all the long days after that. Once, they put us on a train to take us farther east but I didn’t think about the world whooshing by, I just thought about the engine smoke in the cattle car they had us in and the boys couldn’t take the rocking and kept getting sick out the open door and a duckling-shaped bruise I had on my rear parts so I couldn’t show anyone made it painful to sit. Another time, after we had fought in a swamp had us picking leeches off our everywheres for days, they carried us where they wanted us in a boat sat so low in the water we expected the whole time anything like a wave would come by and Lee’s work would be done for him because we would all drown.

Each time we fought we took off our knapsacks and made a pile out of them. It got to where we’d feel the ground shake and start to shrug them off. I lost two knapsacks when the rebels took our ground and I quit carrying my photographs and letters in them. After I lost the second one I had Bartholomew get another likeness made. The likeness-maker mistook Bartholomew’s intention, figured him for a boy about to head off for the fight, and had him pose in his tall hat next to a weapon that it came off clear in the likeness Bartholomew wasn’t any too comfortable having to grasp. He wrote in the accompanying note that it was a counterfeit worse than any in the Confederacy, but I liked this picture of my soldier wasn’t any soldier holding his musket like it was a hot rake or a bear’s leg, and after I had looked at it a good long while, I sewed it into the wrappings I wore under my shirt.

I had been shy to send my own picture to him but after all those battles I thought I better get my own likeness taken before I got my ticket to hell or lost an eye or an arm. So I got myself a pass and walked the ten miles up the road to where I could catch a wagon into Washington City. It was my intention to spend the portion of the day I didn’t use in likeness-making to see some of the sights of that great city we were all defending, but the wagon I was riding in got stuck when the driver fell asleep and its mules ran it into some deep mud. It took two hours to fetch it out and by the time we reached the outskirts, which was nothing better than a few deserted houses, a kicked-in stable, and tents and cook fires as far as I could see, I knew it was going to be all I could do to make my way back at something like a reasonable hour. So much for sights and seeing. Luckily there was a likeness-maker said he had other likenesses to deliver to my camp when they were ready who had his wagon set up next to a tonic seller down along the banks of the Potomac. Now, there was a fine piece of wet property. I never saw our capital, and expect now I never will, but I saw its river and felt its cool waters, as I put my feet into it while I was waiting for my turn. There was a preacher down by the water hawking his wares too. There were preachers and men just liked to talk and tap a Bible at every turn of the war, and I listened to them about as much or little as anyone else, but this one, down by the waters of the Potomac, had a style to him that went beyond a handsome way to say Mary, Joseph, and Jeremiah. I considered a minute letting the fellow behind me skip over me so I could listen a little longer, but the hour was advancing and I had my chore to accomplish.

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.

“Aren’t you planning on shooting any yourself?”

“I don’t see too well at a distance, especially not in a low light.”

I almost at that minute told him that my husband suffered from the same affliction, came only a thin string away from uttering it. Stood looking down but leaning backward at the precipice.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes what?” he said.

“I can shoot squirrel and you still smoke.”

I did. Three of them, silver as glittery snakes, two good-size. I took them all through the head near their nests while the Colonel sat on one log after another with his cigar. After the first one fell near fifty yards off from where we were situated, he apologized for not having brought along a dog.

“I never did hunt with a dog,” I said.

“I always have. When my eyes were still adequate I used to hunt for duck and other waterfowl. Dogs were indispensable. We are short on good dogs in this regiment.”

“I have seen dogs swim but never had one that much liked to.”

“On your farm in Darke County?”

“That’s not really where I’m from.”

“Isn’t it?”

I looked away from him and deeper into the trees. Felt him shrug. Waited for him to say something else about it but he just sat there, quiet, peering at me with those eyes he’d said didn’t work too well.

“Sir, will it make a difference? Does it make any difference?” I said.

“That you are not from where you claimed to come from when you enlisted?”

I nodded.

“I have at least two officers who are not from the cities they claim in their paperwork to have a connection to. I can offer only gross conjecture when it comes to the numbers among the enlisted men. I expect many who have died in our fights together weren’t from where they said they were.”

“I’m from another state altogether, I said.”

“All right,” he said, then added. “As long as it isn’t a Southern state. Although now as I say it, I don’t know why that would matter. If you are loyal of heart.”

“I am loyal of heart,” I said.

“I know it,” he said after a minute.

“I’m from Indiana.”

“Our good brother to the west.”

“I had my reasons.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“If I die, you might let them know about it in Randolph County, Indiana.”

“At the Thompson farm?”

“Yes, sir, if it weren’t too much trouble.”

“I expect it wouldn’t be. But let’s all hold off on dying.”

“How do we do that, sir?”

He shook his head, smiled a little, then sucked in good and long on his cigar.

“Do you want me to clean these?” I asked.

It took him a minute to know what it was I was talking about, like he had gone off a long way into thoughts didn’t necessarily include me and had to journey back to the squirrels and woods to make me my answer.

“The cook can do it. In fact, he told me expressly not to let anyone besides him get anywhere near them with a sharpened knife.”

“All right,” I said.

“Yes, it is all right, Gallant Ash.”

We were in an airy place, a clearing amidst the darker reaches of walnut and hickory and loblolly pine. There were orioles and sparrows at early-morning play in the trees and a breeze carrying through the side-lit trunks could have made you believe it wasn’t fixing any second now to get good and hot. At home I had hunted once a week even in winter but I had not picked up a gun to fire at anything wasn’t a human being since the Colonel had sent me out after that extra pig. When he handed me one of his small cigars I took it and let him fetch me a light and sat there and breathed air and smoke and felt the dirt from the night before that I had stirred up in talking about Indiana settle back in my stomach. After a while we strung up the handsome squirrels I had shot and talked some more about hunting dogs, then returned to camp.

The Colonel sighed a long loud sigh after we had reached his quarters and he had thanked me for my company and we had handed over the squirrels and our fine rifles to the Colonel’s cook. I wanted to ask him what made him sigh so loud but there are some questions you don’t get to ask and our walk together was done. Also the cook, with some stage flair, sniffed at the barrels of the rifles we had handed him and rolled his eyeballs in the direction of the Colonel once his nostrils had completed their inspection of the unfired one. When the cook had finished this pantomime, which the Colonel acknowledged with one raised gray eyebrow only, he took up a knife and set to work on the squirrels with such fierce devotion to the chore that neither one of us could take our eyes off him. Later that afternoon, just like the Colonel promised me when I parted ways with him, I found a covered bowl of stew had my name on it sitting on a crack-legged stool outside my tent. I don’t know why I took it into my head to tote that bowl off away into the woods to eat. To sit alone in the dusk light next to a holly bush, bats and owls beginning to scar the air above my head, and sup slowly on that stew that tasted better by far than dirt.

You eat dirt, you dream strange dreams. Going-home dreams, dreams in which you try to run across your own fresh-plowed field in pants or dress either one and you can’t; in which, home at last, you try to work your own front-door latch and you can’t make it budge. You eat handsome-cooked squirrel stew sent over to you by your Colonel, you don’t dream at all. Is the way I experienced it. Dead as a dark day to the world and slow to rise again. Fact it took a solid kick to my side applied by the tent mate I had told to go to hell to rouse me. He grinned and nodded when I thanked him for it. He didn’t grin as much when I punched him, good and hard, at the meaty part at the top of his arm.

A few hours later, still feeling that long, syrupy sleep, I got captured. I was out on the scatter end of a picket with a couple of greenhorns conscripted out of Akron to keep us new company and who couldn’t keep their gums from flapping. It was Longstreet this and Sherman that and they had seen Grant one time in a parade and come autumn Lincoln was going to fall and some sniper man needed to set his sights on Jefferson Davis and put an end to the whole shooting match. They talked up the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and said they wished they could dream up a piece of poetry like that, that Madame Julia Ward Howe deserved a place up in the heavens amongst the highest angels for finding such handsome words. They had opinions on our supply lines that were based on information had ceased to be valid back in 1861 and they didn’t mind a smidge, maybe even liked it for all I knew, when I corrected them on it. Dark-colored folks were just fine with them because they had seen a pair of impressive ones playing clown and strongman in a traveling show outside Bowling Green one time.

They thought that fighting to free the man in bondage was just about as admirable an occupation as anyone could cook up based on this one long-ago sighting they had probably seen wrong. It rained a lot where they came from, but it was good Northern rain and never made your feet rot. Barefoot fighting was best, they said, but they wouldn’t give their shoes away. You gave up your shoes and you were as lost as a soul gone off to his ravishing in a gray uniform. A lassie had shown them her underskirts in Cincinnati on the way to the war. The underskirts had been whiter, is the way they put it to me as we stood out there on picket duty, than the whitest clouds and I thought to myself, my own sad underthings in mind, that she hadn’t been wearing them long.

The day before this parley, they had got hold of some fair-quality tobacco, and they took turnabout chewing and spitting and loading up their pipes. I still had the taste of the Colonel’s cigar in my nose and I thanked them kindly but declined when they offered me some. I think they had seen about a quarter ounce of engagement between them. About every half of the hour they would interrupt their fine flow of conversation to ask me what I thought, but I told them if I did think, and I tried not to, especially after I had gotten some good sleep, it wasn’t their kind of cowpatties I did my thinking about.

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.

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.

“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.

“I heard about schemes like that,” he said. “There’s other varieties but that’s the general idea. Especially the part about you ending up in rebel grays and dead.”

“That we got taken in the first place was my fault. I let these two cobs of corn get to carrying on.”

We drank in silence a time. Lord’s horse gave out a kind of bark in his sleep and Lord said, “He’s having that dream.”

Like I said, I had been thinking about my own dream, so I gave a look over at Lord. He saw this look and smiled back at me.

“You sit on something long enough you start to be that thing and it starts to be you. I had an uncle in Louisville about never left his soft chair. He would get up and I wasn’t the only one would have sworn that chair would give out a cough and wet wheeze just like the ones my uncle did.”

“You are speaking in originalities,” I said.

“My horse is dreaming about a bullet we both of us took.”

I guessed the whiskey had worked up the swirl of war in him and when that happened you couldn’t know what a man would say. I met a man in the days after Antietam would drink whiskey then pull out a knife and start to working its point into himself. And not an hour before I had worn a dress and shot two men and killed another with a clay jug to the head. A man telling me what his horse was dreaming seemed small next to that. I leaned back against my stump and nodded and told him to go on.

“We were behind lines, not more than a few slippery feet from Memphis and enough fresh rebels to put the fear into any size mountain of our men. We were not to engage at any cost, was our strict order, just reconnoiter and return to tell the tale. And it looked like we might get the errand done. Happy thinking. The kind has paved many a road down to its doom. Our way out of there took us through an ambush of sharpshooters and in the first volley half our boys got shot. It was a night darker and stranger than this one with winds running hither and thither and the moon playing hide-and-seek in the clouds. You thought you had a line on where they were firing from and then you would know — because another of us had been dropped — that you were wrong. A rumor got started it was Pickett and his boys we were brawling with and that set the strange weather to working in our heads and we started doing even worse than we already had. I don’t know how it happened but Rosie and I got ourselves about out of there and up onto a rise. I had one of my boys behind me and raised my hand to signal him to hold a minute when I felt a pinch and saw a musket ball had come to its clattery end in the crook of my fingers.”

Lord held up his hand and pointed to the crook between his third and fourth fingers. Then he traced a line that dribbled down the back of his hand, along his sleeve and went curling into a drop off his forearm.

“As I watched, that bullet slipped out from between my fingers and went falling away. It hit Rosie on his neck before it fell down to the ground. He gave up a shout and reared up like he had been hit for good when he felt it. We both about went over backward onto a pile of rock. In the dream he just had it was him caught the bullet in his right front hoof. And me the one went rearing up.”

“Well, well,” I said.

“That very night when I made my report at camp my commanding officer told me his grandfather had taken a spent bullet better than mine back in 1812. He had taken it directly between the eyebrows with enough fire left in it to penetrate the skin, skid down inside the right side of his face, and lodge behind his ear. When he was a boy, my commanding officer told me, it was a special treat to climb onto his grandfather’s lap and take a feel at the nub of bullet buried under his ear skin.”

“That’s quite a dream,” I said. Though whether or not I said it out loud was a question. The events of the long day and now this strange colloquy had done their work and I had got settled down, alongside the Akron boys and Lord’s horse, into my own froggy snores. Whether Lord joined us awhile I don’t know because when we all three woke the next morning he was gone. For whatever reason we did not speak about that meeting as we set out again, and by and by it came to seem to me as vague as the horse’s dream.

I had this idea we would march more or less back the way we had come and get ourselves home to camp by suppertime but during our overnight, the scatterings of Secesh forces had swollen up. From a rise we could see them spread out like moldy cauliflower across the valley we needed to traverse so we set off through the soldier pines to make our way around. It was cheerful weather for a hike. There were bluebirds in the green trees and breezes blowing quiet, happy things about. Made the night before seem another world entirely, nothing but twists of whiskey and steam. The Akron boys had been clammed up tight all morning but by and by they started into their chirping again. I expect I joined them for a chirp or two and who knows but what we might have started in with some full-out singing if an hour into our hike we hadn’t found ourselves walking through the dead.

It was a shallow grave cut for hundreds hadn’t had much of its top put on. There was dust and swirls of leaves blown atop them so that we were several yards in when we realized what it was we had stumbled upon. I had my foot on a hand when one of the Akron boys said, “I just saw a face.” The other said, “That down there looks like an arm.” I thought at first it was just Union dead but then I saw there was plenty of gray had joined in too. There was dead and the bones of the dead for the next mile after that. “Here we go now, boys,” I said. There was dead sitting against trees, dead with their feet in the air, dead dangling over the boughs of trees. There was dead fallen three deep in creek beds and dead lying separately in a clearing tucked up to their chins in neat blankets of sun. I saw a head on its way to making a skull and thought about the belle and wondered if she was still wearing her own.

As we passed through them, we came upon many a crow still making itself a leathery meal. Most of what we passed had also been touched by the kind of carrion creatures liked to peck in pockets and sacks. See what treasures lay there hidden. We ourselves checked a sack or three as we went. There was miles still to walk and the pork and crackers had given out. One of the Akron boys said we shouldn’t, leave the good dead lie and so forth, but I said whatever it was, they didn’t need it anymore. Anyway, hadn’t we already been crunching on the sandwiches of the dead? A quarter mile after I said this we found ourselves a sack shut tight had three good fistfuls of beef jerky wrapped in rose-embroidered napkins. There was a note had a rose motif at its top stuffed in there with the jerky. The note had got damp but some of it could still be ciphered. Come on home, my darling son was what could still be read. The darling son had on a blue, leaf-covered cap had come down cockeyed over his face. He had done his dying alone behind an alder bush.

It was getting dark when I figured we had notched the miles north we needed and began to true us west. It was poplars and creek bed for the next few miles and when we struck a village had lost its church spire to a cannon blast, our necks were cold and our feet were wet. There was a large group gathered next to torches on a kind of square. If they noticed us or cared about it when we came up out of the creek bed and joined them they gave no sign. There was a gal holding a dried flower sitting in a chair at the front of the crowd. She had her eyes closed.

“What is this?” I asked a smiling old grandpa leaning on a crutch.

“She’s going to tell her story,” he said. “Everyone wants to gets to sit and tell their story.”

“What’d he say?” said one of the Akron boys.

“Why are they telling their stories?” I asked.

“I told mine earlier,” the grandpa said. “I told about my mother’s pickled eggs. And her grasshopper soup. Back in Maryland. We had a famine. Come after the crops didn’t make it. When I was young.”

“Why?”

“Shhh,” said a woman next to us. She was holding a baby didn’t appear long for this dusky world. It looked like a hoarfrost had come down and done some of its designs on the baby’s brow. Hurt to consider it. Baby had a head the size of an apple. Lacked only the worms.

“Because,” said the grandpa. He didn’t say any more. Just pointed over his shoulder at the woods we had walked out of. Then in the other direction at the church steeple wasn’t there anymore.

“We’re all going to be dead soon is what he means though he don’t say it. That’s the way of this war. You’re going to kill us all,” said the woman holding the baby.

Then the woman in the chair started to speak.

“You all think I’m just Annie lives out behind the smithy comes and sweeps out your kitchens once in a while. Well, I’m not,” she said. She had a small voice. About the size of a popcorn kernel only got heated halfway at the bottom of the pot. But even the children in the crowd had gone quiet and there were only a few crickets and a kitten meowing somewhere so her words came clear.

“You all think I am just the doorstep in the church and the bridge board on the creek, but I’m not.” She looked up when she said this. She wore a big smile, held it kind of slack-jawed. She looked from face to face in the crowd, nodding. One of the Akron boys leaned over to me while she was doing this.

“I think she’s drunk. I think they all are,” he said.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I know how to walk where they aren’t looking,” Annie said.

“What in hell does that mean?” the other Akron boy said.

“I know how to find the places where the world won’t ever see me. I can walk in the shadow and I can walk in the light. You all want to try and watch me?”

There were nods from the crowd. The woman next to me said, “Uh-huh.” The grandpa gave a wave at the air with his crutch.

“You want to try and see me do it?” said Annie.

“Yes,” said the crowd.

“Well, I won’t do it,” said Annie. “It’s just for me and never any of you mind. That’s my story. And when the soldier boys come back to finish their job they won’t see me even though I’ll be standing right there.”

At this, Annie stood up and handed the flower to a man standing in the shadows beside her and he took her place in the chair.

“We got to get on,” I said.

“Stay and tell your story,” said the grandpa. “Everyone gets a turn.”

“We got miles to walk.”

“Boy, those miles will wait on you. They won’t go anywhere.”

“That’s what I know.”

“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you tell us your story. I got twenty dollars hid back of my shed. You can have it all if you’ll tell your story.”

The grandpa had grown a kind of leer to him. He had his crutch up in the air again. There were others starting to look on.

“Tell us the story about how you are going to kill us all. Kill us and our babies,” said the woman holding her little apple-head thing.

“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said.

“You won’t hurt anyone,” the woman said. “You can’t hurt anyone. Not here. We’re done hurting. Maybe we’ll lay some hurt out on you.”

She said this and pointed up at the steeple had been obliterated, pointed just like the old grandpa had done, like it was the question had to be asked and the answer to the question both. As we walked away we heard the man holding the flower start up his story. He had a loud voice. Throat would have made a parade sergeant feel proud. His story sounded like a good one. Thomas Lord and his horse would have liked it. It was about long ago before the war finding a dead fish with a live snake in its mouth one week and a dead snake with a live fish in its mouth the next.

We hadn’t got much beyond the squash-colored crackle of the torchlight when a woman wasn’t any too young came swishing on up beside us and invited us all three to supper. We told her we had to get back to camp and she told us she had corn bread and fresh-slaughtered pig. I said no once more, but the Akron boys were already heading off with her. I called out I would leave them behind but they didn’t listen and a minute later I saw my feet had betrayed me and I was following along. She lived a mile off the road we wanted on a rise looked out onto the valley we’d spent all that day trying to skirt. You could see the fires down there and hear the sound. The sound of an army settling down to sleep is a terrible thing. It is both loud and quiet. You can’t like something that is both.

She had a neat little house the soldiers hadn’t found when they’d come through.

“What kind of soldiers was it?” I asked her but she said she didn’t know, that it had been dark, that she had been up in her house all alone.

“Must have been rebels, do you all manner of harm and call it God’s work,” said one of the Akron boys.

“Sure enough,” the woman said in such a way you didn’t know, not even to get started, what she was agreeing to.

I asked her her name. She said we didn’t need names. That it was just supper. And a cup or two of something to keep us all warm. She said this then put on a pair of colored glasses. They had purple glass and had belonged to her late husband who had once played cards on a riverboat.

“He had a green eyeshade too but I can’t find that. These help me see better when the lamps are lit. You ever try on a pair?” she asked. We all took turnabout putting them on then pulling them off. They made the room look muddy and had a funny shape to them. Hexagons. I had seen someone had sown a flower bed in the shape of a hexagon in town once before the war and told her this. She put the glasses back on and asked me what color the flowers had been. I told her, though I wasn’t sure any longer, that they had been purple.

“What was your story?” said one of the Akron boys.

“I’m fixing to show you,” she said.

I didn’t know what kind of hocus-pocus she and those glasses were going to get up to but she just led us out the back door, down a path, and into her garden. It was a fine patch. Well tended. Beans were good size. Eggplant and cherry tomatoes turning the moon to glow.

“You got a sleeping arrangement out in this garden,” said one of the Akron boys.

It was true. There was a bed sitting in the middle of the green. It was a big affair, carved headboard, feather bed, pillows flounced in pink.

“I got a net I bring out against the mosquitoes. String a tarp when there’s rain. You sleep in the garden, it’s peaceful. The onions and lettuce get into your dreams. You can just go and go.”

We all four stood there and pondered this. There were crickets scraping around us. You get too many crickets around you and you feel like you’re at the bottom of a bowl.

“You said something about supper,” I said.

She made no reply but after a minute more of cricket song we traipsed back into her house and she lit her lamps and pulled crocks of fresh cracklings out of her cupboard and a bottle out of a chest. It was a generous size of bottle and we all took our drinks from it. By and by we were as happy as a cackle of crows. Our hostess in her purple glasses was the happiest. She said when she had sat in the chair in town and told her tale they had all cheered. She asked the Akron boy sitting closest to her to tell his tale and when he had gotten about five words into it she stopped him and said, “May I kiss you?”

He appeared struck. Took a hard swallow. “If you got to,” he said.

So she leaned over and did the job. Right there at the table over cold pork and corn bread. She then asked if any of us could play the fiddle, that her old husband had left a fiddle behind him when he had gone off to “feed his hopes to the slaughter,” and she hadn’t heard a man’s hands on it since that day. The boy hadn’t been kissed got up then and took up the fiddle, turned it into tune, and started to play. This got our hostess and the kissed boy up to clabber arm in arm about the room. I leaned back and watched some of this but when the boy fiddling winked at me and started to play “Gallant Ash” I got up, made my excuses, and walked out the door. A minute later I was back in the vegetables and sitting on the edge of the woman’s garden bed. A minute after that I was lying down. I had on my mind that church steeple wasn’t there and those graves in the forest that weren’t graves. They were on my mind but I didn’t know how to think about them so I shut my eyes. I drowsed some but got up quick when I saw the woman had joined me.

“Got those two all but asleep in there,” she said. She stood up after me and there followed a memorable farce around that bed in the moonlight. She would step toward me, her lips puckered, her arms up and good and set for a grope, and I would step backward and pivot away. In the moonlight her purple glasses glowed orange and rose. In between her attempts we would talk of the moon. Its ancient courses and seasons. She had read some poetry or her husband had and she made some remarks on it. Then she stepped at me again. This went on for a while. I got stung a time or two and wished we were doing our dance under a mosquito net. Presently she grew tired and we both went back inside. There wasn’t much more to that night. Only that the Akron boys ended up finishing it just the two of them in that bed in the garden and I ended up with my head on that woman’s table dreaming there was a boat leaving the world but I couldn’t get on it because I was stuck to my chair.

We had six-inch-shell headaches and one of the Akron boys had caught a cough but we trotted off of the widow’s property and away from that town the next morning like it had already been named target for cannon practice by the forces to come. We left off the trotting after a mile or two but kept up a good pace all that day and by and by the ragged boundary of our camp appeared. We didn’t look any too smart straggling up the road but one of the pickets recognized me and waved us through. It was a Sunday and warm so there was more boys than ordinary milling in the woods and by the creek and in the big pond it fed into. The Akron boy wasn’t coughing went off straight for the pond, pulling off his filthy clothes as he went, so it was just two of us continued along.

We passed a birch had nailed to it a big creeper toad. One of its legs was gone. It looked like a finger tap would crack it in two. We went by a maple next had nothing but ladies’ names gouged into it. Jesamine, Turquoise, Apollonia, Marybeth, Ginestra, and so on. We hit the whiff of the camp just as we were passing the names and it didn’t make them read so sweet. Fate of us all. Near the congregation of tents leaned a sutler’s wagon looked picked over, but next to that wagon was a bench pushed up against a tree had a sign hanging from it said Shaves.

“Shave,” I said to the Akron boy still with me.

“Sure could use one,” he said.

This wasn’t any more true for him than it was for me, for we were both as smoothbore as babies, but a shave was more by a bit than just a beard-scraping and we both of us fetched coins out of our pockets and sat down and it wasn’t a minute later that we both of us had steamed rags drooping over our faces. After the rags had drooped the heat out of themselves the old brown fellow running the show pulled them off and made slow circles with fresh hot rags over our filthy faces and if I didn’t gasp entirely out loud about how good it felt, the Akron boy did. When this part of it was finished the barber took still another hot rag and put it over my face and, after making a fuss with some shaving soap, went to work with his neat metal on the Akron boy. There wasn’t any scrape sound to what he was doing, just a kind of quick, low swoosh, but that didn’t stop him from tendering in some comments about how the young gentleman had sure been overdue and how he hoped “all that hard beard” hadn’t dulled his blade. When he had had his turn and it was mine, the Akron boy just slid right off the bench and lay down like dead Jesus on the ground.

“I’ve been born again to better things,” he said as he lay there. Or he tried to say it. His cough had been holding off with the steam and soap but now it came back to him.

“We’ll get you fixed up just right,” the barber said as he soaped my face. There was more lye in the soap than the kind I used when I had given Bartholomew his shaves in the kitchen at home but there was some lemon perfume to it too. Swoosh, swoosh went the steel through the soap. The instrument was old and had some rust on it but its edge was sharp. Every now and then as the barber swept my face, the owl-looking sutler owned the shop-and-shave outfit leaned out of his wagon and looked kind of mournful at us. I expect it was because his provisions had all been picked over and none too gently. Most of the times the sutlers made more money than Midas but there were other times that the boys got tired of handing over all they had for some stale moon cakes or stained sheets of paper and just took.

“How we coming?” I said when it seemed the pantomime had probably run its course.

The barber, who had been working with his face kind of close in to mine, leaned back a little like he was looking things over and said he just about had it, that there were still a few stubborn spots, but he was getting there.

I shut my eyes when he said this, but I did not drowse. Instead I conjured up the picture that I was at home in my own kitchen and that it was me holding the blade, me had stropped it sharp.

I had given Bartholomew a shave the day before I left for war. He hadn’t wanted to talk to me much since that night in the yard when I had shoved him away, but that morning I got up early and milked his favorite heifer and picked strawberries and set them down in front of him before our work. If it wasn’t the strawberries and cream set his jaw to working, it was the kiss I gave him on his ear, down on the hard part and onto the soft, and when I asked him if he wanted a shave into the bargain he took me up on the offer most courteously. He liked to sing while he shaved himself or I shaved him and that morning he sang happy songs had his foot tapping the floor so vigorous I had to tell him to quit or he might get cut. He quit his tapping but not his singing and next thing you knew he had found his way into a song had children in it, children running over hill and dale and couldn’t find their way home. He sang at this awhile, getting quieter and quieter, and when I tried to kiss him again in the middle of it he wouldn’t have my kiss, nor would he suffer my touch any longer, and stood with the soap still on his face and his beard half scraped, and when we worked that last day instead of standing shoulder to shoulder we did our working apart.

I talked to my mother inside and outside my head a great deal that day we worked apart.

“I am leaving here tomorrow and maybe forever, Mother,” I said to her.

I know it, she said back.

“I am leaving, Mother.”

I know it.

“I am leaving here.”

Forever?

“Isn’t that what I said?”

You said maybe. It’s only forever if you don’t come home.

You think you are never going to get back and then you are there and you wonder if you were ever gone. The camp was still the camp. Beside the pond-bathing activities, there were boys fighting over hardtack biscuits and having wrestling contests in a leg-churned pool of mud. A mule got loose while I was walking by it, and I spent an hour at catching him with a gang of fellows had their shirts off against the afternoon sun. What a picture it would have made could I have joined in.

After the sun there was a cold rain and I discovered my corner of the tent had sprung a hole and spent some wet minutes in plugging it. During this storm a first lieutenant got caught with three helper women in his lean-to and was made to wear a barrel proclaiming the extent of his moral turpitude. Some of the boys who had robbed the sutler had been hung up under a beech tree by their thumbs. I barely got my eyes on either one of the Akron boys over those next days. You would have thought those tricks out in the woods hadn’t happened. The lieutenant spent a fair portion of his time wearing that barrel with tears in his eyes. The boys had been hung up by their thumbs were let down. I started to write Bartholomew about what had happened in the woods and ended up describing that lieutenant, how he cried and cried for shame. I used another page to write down my thoughts about being back home in our kitchen, about giving him his shave, about how sorry for all of it I was.

Two days after I posted that letter I found myself again in the company of our Colonel. He had set up a desk in front of his tent to scribble out his letters and it took him a minute after I’d been announced for him to look up. He showed a little grander and grayer since our morning in the woods, but that must have just been the grand and gray of the afternoon settling down upon him. The weather will do all kinds of things to a man. It will make him look like a burned cinder or a pillar of ice or a pile of tapioca pudding left too long in the sun.

“Gallant Ash,” the Colonel said, looking up at last. I had expected the travails of the war would have chased that sobriquet out of his mind but there as elsewhere I was wrong.

“I have two things to discuss with you,” he said. “But first I want to ask you a question. Would that be all right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. For what else would you say to your Colonel?

“Have you ever met a man who was afraid to step out of doors?”

“Depends on if stepping out of doors meant getting fired upon, sir,” I said. “Or getting cavalry-charged. I have stood fairly regular on the line next to men afraid of stepping out of doors and getting cavalry-charged.”

The Colonel looked at me nice and long.

“Are you afraid of stepping out of doors under such circumstances, Gallant Ash?”

“I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t.”

“But you do it.”

“Every day I have to. Just like all your men.”

“Not all my men.”

“Most, sir.”

“Fair enough, Gallant Ash. Let’s call it most. Most isn’t bad. Most is always about the best we can hope for.”

“So we aren’t talking here about de facto all your men.”

He laughed and I wondered if we had had our discussion now or hadn’t. I did not like the way I was feeling standing there, and apparently we had not.

“I have a man in my company can’t stand it to step outside. Has a good address in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and hadn’t left it in five years before he took up the call to arms. Not even to sniff at the spring air. I know the village of Yellow Springs and the spring air there is fine. This man didn’t want it even if it came in through the filter of his curtain. Claimed it burned him. Now he stands alongside you on the lines. I have watched him in battle and he does not flinch nor will he follow his fellows and hide behind fence or rock or tree.”

“Why won’t he?”

“Because it is not bullets he is afraid of. He is afraid of the sun, the earth, the air, the all of it, the sky.”

“I don’t know the man.”

“He is a close relation. My cousin.”

“In the infantry?”

“He refused a commission.”

“Why did he sign up at all?”

“Why did you, Gallant Ash?”

“Sir?”

“We have already discussed the loyalty of your heart and it is not a question that requires answering. I have had my eye on you since your tree-climbing exploit. I have seen how you can make a squirrel hurt. I am also aware of your recent adventure. I don’t know and don’t want to know how you got taken in the first place. I can chalk that up to rebel wiles. Were they wily, the outlaw rebel fucks who took you unawares, Gallant Ash?”

I did not answer his question. Just stared straight over his shoulder at the cot he had in his tent.

“All right,” he said. “I’d not answer that either. Especially not as it included a vulgarity I lately find myself admitting too frequently into my discourse. Today I pose questions that deepen silence, rather than conclude it. That is the province of literature, not leadership. Aurelius knew this. I’ve just had Long’s new version lent to me. Long is no fool. His Aurelius will serve our warring times. ‘Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul.’ ”

The Colonel turned and took up a book had been lying at the foot of his cot. He opened it up to a page marked with a strip of purple leather and read to me. You ask me how I remember it these years later. I do not know.

“How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame.”

The Colonel nodded and set the book back on his bed. “My interest,” he said, turning to me, “lies not in your motivation for service, for service is its own great answer, but rather in how neatly you extricated yourself and your fellows from that mess.”

“It was all three of us got out together.”

“Your gallantry exceeds you. I have seen and spoken to those two men. They are greenhorns and barely out of the nursery and I exercise the hyperbolic arts in referring to them as men. They would both be better as bootblacks. It is a shame of our days and all days of war that we set our children to arms. One of them cried as he spoke to me.”

“Like the lieutenant.”

“Pardon me?”

“He cried. In his barrel.”

“He has been demoted and sent to fight on elsewhere. Carousing was not his central transgression.”

“I didn’t do anything special, sir.”

“All right.”

“It was three of us got in and three of us got out.”

“Fine, fine.”

The Colonel lit a cigar. He put it in his mouth and took it back out. The smoke came over to me and set a cloud between us.

“I’d had it in mind after your performance with those squirrels to make you a sharpshooter,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to be a sharpshooter,” I said.

“No, perhaps not, but I’d had it in mind for having seen you in battle and taken account of your exploits and having seen how you barely even had to aim when you shot those tree rats out of their skins. I’d had it in mind to recommend you, in addition, for a citation. For bravery. For that episode with the cartridge boxes. I know about that too. But you hear the tense I am using. You hear that I am speaking in the past.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are other stories making the rounds about you.”

I took in a little suck of air. The Colonel’s smoke came in when I did that, caught the wrong part of my throat, and I coughed. I saw the lady crossing through the moonlight behind the house. I saw and felt her both.

“Sir, I have been a good soldier and have fought well for the cause,” I said.

“A good soldier, is it? Is that the phrase your mind makes? Is that what rises out of the mystery living its swamp-lit life between your ears?”

I took another breath. I am coming home to you now, Bartholomew, I thought. Would it be such a bad thing? I should never have left and now I am coming home. The Colonel stood. He was half a head taller than me. He had broad shoulders, and the gilt on his saber handle gleamed in the gray light. I felt small, and tired. I didn’t know what I would wear. I had a sudden, wild wish that the stout lady’s dress hadn’t burned, that I had stuffed it in my pack and carried it back here with me.

“I had a man in here late this morning says you stole rations out of his haversack while he was at his nap.”

It took me a minute to hear what he had just said. When I had heard it, it took me another minute to take my mind away from the moonlight and that rustling sound I had made when I walked in the stout lady’s fine cloth to the coarse blue wool I now had on my legs and the Colonel standing behind his cigar smoke in front of me.

“That man presented three others who were willing to testify that you had taken your fill of their rations too.”

“It is lies,” I said. “I’ll fight any man says otherwise. I will feed him my fists and ask him afterward how he liked his meal.”

The Colonel looked at me. He nodded.

“Maybe so. Maybe it is lies. Probably it is. I’d expect we could rouse just as many or more to refute the charges. Maybe I don’t give a good goddamn. But I imagine you can see that I can’t offer you a special position or a commendation with such propositions swirling, can I?”

“No, sir.”

“I could not hold you to the light of general recognition and visibility under such circumstances. I couldn’t put all eyes in this camp on you. You might find you couldn’t move free any longer, that you had found your way into your own barrel, and then what would you do? Do you, Private, disagree?”

I shook my head. He nodded. He picked up his book again but did not open it. He closed his eyes.

“ ‘Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine.’ ”

He tapped the book, opened his eyes.

“ ‘And fortune hard to divine,’ ” he said again.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

We stood awhile. There was some cannon pop off at a distance and some birdsong closer by.

“You may go now, Gallant Ash,” he said.

He looked at me and raised his eyebrow and when he had let his eyebrow down I went.

I am worn down to the bone,” I wrote my husband the evening after this exchange.

“Come home to me when you are ready,” he wrote me back. “We can try again.”

“I am not ready, not yet,” I wrote.

“I’ll keep on waiting, I will,” he wrote.

Then the Colonel gave orders and we marched across a strip of pretty water, over a low green mountain, and into the start of my hell.