Neverhome

TWO

The battle lasted days. In our minds those days were weeks. In our dreams — taken in short heaps on the hard ground — those weeks were years. My company had been given a battery to help guard and some nights we had our rest under the cannon. The rebels kept us hot and more than once it was blade work under the stars. In the middle of a fight we got the order to drop and our boys fired off that six-inch right over our heads. The rebels had heard the order too and they dropped along with us so the only thing got hurt was an oak tree.

During the day they worked their mortars on us. You would have thought it was snowing dirt and fine flaked metal after a while. They killed a number of my company off for good but never took our cannon while we were at the guard. One time they tried a charge. To this day I will raise my weapon on any rebel I see, but the sight of a line of those fine horsemen coming at you through the smoke was a beautiful thing to behold. There was the part of the South worth keeping in that charge. It wasn’t the part kept chattel slaves to scratch their masters’ backs and make their beds. To work their fields. To build their houses. To whip when they wanted to. It was those horsemen, riding low, pistols at the ready, sabers up. They looked like knights. Like it wasn’t powder black on their faces they were wearing but grim ladies’ scarves on their sleeves.

We made our line and cut them down with our muskets and I saw our cannon take off half a handsome white gelding’s head. They did not stop though and got close enough for swords and hooves and pistol work. You ever try to fight a man on a horse? Man with a weapon in his hand? Man come up from Natchez with the demon horse he was born on and hungry for blood? A boy not five feet away from me got made into jelly by a piebald mare with red eyes. Another got his head cracked right open with a pistol butt. I took a saber point across my arm and might have met my glory but a ball come out of nowhere took my ravisher off to his own. It was reinforcements. Four hundred walking blues to fight the one hundred horsemen. Only the grays had infantry of their own. I got a first lieutenant died five minutes later to tie a shirtsleeve tight around my wound. When it was snug, I loaded my musket and went back for more.

We brawled and we brawled and when there weren’t enough of us left to guard the battery, they sent up more fresh troops and offered us flank work in the trees. We had not one of us slept even a snack wink in two days but they had us double-time it. I expect I was not the only one could not hear from the cannon fire, and we ran to that fight in the woods in a silence I would trade the happy half of the world not to make the acquaintance of again.

I saw the Colonel in those trees. He rode up and made a short speech to his officers and then crossed his hands over his saddle pommel to wait with us. When he saw me, he said something. I couldn’t tell what it was. He said it again and I pointed at my ears and shook my head. He nodded, lifted his chin, and looked a little ways down the line. There was a man sitting on a rock with his musket in his lap. We were all the rest of us dug in. I’d seen that man in a fight before. Stood next to him. I thought I could shoot quick but he was like a Gatling gun. I had a minute trying to picture his room in Yellow Springs with the air trying to get in the window to kill him. I drowsed into that picture and it took me far away. When I woke, the Colonel was still there on his horse and the man afraid of the whole wide world was still sitting on his rock, smiling about something and scratching at his knee.

Then all around us the branches went falling. The air next to my head tore itself open and let a ball pass through. One of my company lieutenants came and put his foot on the rock next to me, drew his pistol, and leaned forward. Someone shouted and I realized I could hear again.

“Hold steady, now,” growled the lieutenant.

Then like they had been there but invisible all along, you could see the rows and rows of gray and wore-out butternut starting to move through the trees.

It was five waves and by the fourth we were all down to but a few cartridges each. If it had been six we would have had to fight with bayonets and teeth. Somewhere in the fight, the Colonel had got down off his horse and stood along the line between me and his cousin. He had those big mustaches so you couldn’t see his mouth but he had the look of a man had his jaw set. We’d been at it three good hours when I glanced over next to me and saw the two Akron boys. They each looked about ten years older. If they recognized me they didn’t show it. They were dug in behind a dead tree about as deep as you could be but they were getting off their rounds. One of them died when the rebels tried a charge. The other one got swept away.

I saw the Colonel and his cousin until the end of it, though. The Colonel had rallied his officers to reform the line and now we lay waiting with hardly a bullet left for that fifth wave and not a cartridge box hadn’t been pulled off the dead by me and many another left to sweeten our supply. The Colonel was standing next to his cousin, who had found his way back to sit on his rock. They both of them were black as chimney sweeps from powder burn and had cigars in their mouths. My lieutenant had been shot in the shoulder but he came up again and put his leg where he had planted it the first time.

“How we coming, Gallant Ash?” he asked.

“Drawing breath, Lieutenant,” I said.

“Well, draw you up some more and raise up that firearm,” he said. “For here they goddamn come.”

They came and it was like a hot wind came with them and the air on either side of my ears began to burn and the world turned up and over. I was charging one minute and running back another. A boy twice my size kicked me in the stomach with his foot and I fell down into some fool’s hole. Next thing I knew there was another in the hole with me and I tried to get my weapon around but saw it was the Colonel’s cousin come down off his rock. He looked at me and he smiled, and well there might have been a rain of hellfire and the battle all around us, I can tell you right now he was the handsomest man I ever saw. It wasn’t a handsome you could see down the line and sitting up high on a rock, it was a handsome you could see only up close, with death come a-calling, a handsome of soft cheeks and powder black and eyes set aglow.

“You’re the Colonel’s cousin,” I said.

“Did he acknowledge a relation?” he said.

The voice was as high and as handsome as the face. A voice scooped straight up out of a butter churn set to cool in a clear spring. He said a thing or two more with that voice but I couldn’t hear him for the popping of weapons up above. A hot gust of wind came down into our hole and lifted his wet hair off his forehead and he leaned up close to me.

“I know what you are,” he said.

“I am a soldier in the Union army,” I said.

“I know that too,” he said.

“We got to get up out of here.”

I said this but I didn’t move a muscle and he lifted his soft hand and held it to my cheek. He held it there and I did not move nor breathe nor shiver, only closed my eyes and let my face sit still against his hand.

When I opened my eyes I saw he had jumped up out of that hole and guessed he had run off to regain his rock. I saw him there when my cheek had left off burning and I had climbed out of the hole myself. He was standing on his rock and had his weapon raised. I had it in my mind to run over and get him to put his hand back up onto my face but my lieutenant came up beside me again.

“How we coming, Gallant Ash?” he asked me, just like he hadn’t asked it a few minutes before.

“Drawing breath, Lieutenant,” I said, just like I hadn’t said it either.

“Well, draw a little more.”

He said that and I heard the rebel cannon and saw the tree coming down at me and felt myself falling backward all at the same time. It wasn’t at the same time, only felt like it was, because the lieutenant wasn’t there anymore and the Colonel’s handsome cousin was gone from his rock and the rebels were almost on us. A soft branch shoved me down then the trunk pinned me tight. I must have lost some of that breath I’d been drawing and taken a whack to the head because it seemed when I looked up through the leaves and branches that the grays and blues were taking turnabout in leaping over the rubbage above me, that the whole contest of the war was to be decided by who could most neatly vault the debris.

I slept then. Went wandering in realms of black and green. When I woke it was the deep hours. Stars lit the sky, bright burny things. Bigger than the springtime stars of Indiana. I started to count them but there were too many oak leaves in front of my face. I tried to clear the leaves away but found my arms were pinned at my sides. I could turn my neck and wiggle my toes and hands but otherwise could not budge. The breeze blew vigorous through my leaves for a good bunch of my breaths, and then it died. I heard more in its silence than I liked and shut my eyes.

I had walked out more than once of an after-battle and so had a fair idea of what lay clawing at the air that night around me. Ghosts of the new dead laughing down at what lay cut and burned and broken and still awake to it on the ground. Ours and theirs both had fallen and it was impossible to know what color cloth it was giving up those moans. One boy called out for his aunt Jane. Another was trying to whistle. Three or four wanted something wet to put down their throats. I expect every one of us there of either color had thought about those fights, like the Wilderness to come, when the wounded had been left where they lay and the forest had caught fire and gathered them all up in its burning arms. You would want a weapon if the fire was coming and you couldn’t run. Something that would take you away on out of it quick. I could see my musket if I turned my neck as far as it would turn to the right. But even if I had been able to move I could see it was pinned down just about as neat as me. I caught the panic then. I shook and pushed and coughed and wriggled. Nothing. I had the trunk on my chest and arms and a branch across my legs. The tree wasn’t much more than a sapling but it was tall and full of sap and had me good.

“I can’t move because I got a ball in my back,” a voice behind me said.

“You one of us or one of them?” I said. I craned my neck around to the left and saw the bottom of a boot had a hole worn straight through it. It wiggled a little when I looked.

“I expect so,” the voice said.

“I’m just pinned down here,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”

“Won’t make much difference if you stay stuck.”

I didn’t have any answer to this. Writhed at it little. Got nowhere. After a minute or two, of watching me I imagine, he spoke again.

“Looks like you got a scratch on your arm.”

I had forgotten about my arm. I had been aware of a pain but had not yet thought to verify it. As soon as he said this I felt it like some of that fire we didn’t want to come had already set in to burn.

“That’s about all it is, a scratch,” I said.

“I’d sure like a sip of water,” he said.

“Well, hold you on a minute and I’ll run fetch you some.”

We both of us laughed at this, only his laugh didn’t gallop on too long. You could hear it in his voice and in his breaths that he wouldn’t keep creaking on much more.

“Where you from?” I said.

“That ground under you looks soft,” he said. “Looks like it ain’t much more than bits of bark and would succumb to some scratching. Can you move your hands?”

I moved my hands, pushed my fingers down. The dirt was as soft as he’d said.

“Where you from?” I said, moving my fingers, cupping and clenching.

“Work in toward yourself, carve out a cave, take it slow so you don’t cramp, see if you can make a space.”

It had been quiet a minute but there was an unsubtle owl flew over the field and the moaning around us set up again. Someone called out to God to come down and kill him. To hit down on him with His great and thunderous hands. They would be spangled about every which way, those weepers and moaners. Just like they had been dropped off God’s clouds. Away off in the far distance you could hear cannon fire. Big guns getting ready for another day. Make more happy glades like this one. There were foul smells drifting. Bodies couldn’t tend to their business. Things opened up shouldn’t ever have been.

“You know what I would like more than that sip of water, more than just about anything besides this ball out of my back?” said the voice.

I was digging and making progress and did not respond.

“A fine, clean morsel of foolscap. Some fresh cotton rag. A creamy linen weave.”

“That ball has climbed up to your brain,” I said.

“I worked in a law office, down Carpenter’s Lane in Richmond. I worked at copying on fine paper all the day long.”

“You’re a Secesh.”

“Just a piece of paper. One sweet sheet. I haven’t held anything but old scrap in a year. Wrote my letters home on a pile of old wallpaper squares. You ever try to write a nice hand on wallpaper? Paper’s what you robbed us of worse than our homes and our lands.”

“I’m getting somewhere here.”

“I’ve got grandbabies. More than half a dozen. All of them live close. I was just teaching the oldest boy to write before I left. He knows how to hold the pen, yes, sir, he does.”

He gave out a cough, then went quiet. The fire in my arm felt like it was working down to the bone. It was my right hand did the bigger portion of the work. It was my right hand that carved most of the cave, that got me free. It was near dawn when I struggled loose. I lay there free for a nice long while then took the bayonet off my musket and stepped over to the reb. He was an old man with a white beard and had small, soft eyes. Too old to be a soldier. He looked too old to be anything.

My haversack was still around my neck. The first thing my fingers found in it was an apple. I ate that then reached them back in. Down at the bottom, folded neat, I found a sheet of paper. I didn’t know if it was special but I had bought it recent to send to Bartholomew and apart from a few stray smudge spots it was clean. I unfolded it, took out my pencil stub, and wrote Carpenter’s Lane, Richmond, then I folded the page back up and tucked it a little ways into his shirt.

My idea was to trot right off after my regiment but that’s not how it went. I left behind my captor tree and found the way I wanted obscured. The dead and the about-dead lay left and right, forward and back. You had to pick your path careful. There wasn’t light enough to see a clear road. I stepped on a leg and what was left of what it was attached to gave a shiver whose image when it rippled over the face I’d pay good cash money to have pulled from my head. One or two as could still open their eyes asked me for water. I was just about parched to the point that if they had had a drop of water on them I would have stole it for myself. I wandered this way and that, stumbling as I went. Now and again I would hear a cannon and think to march in its direction but the woods and slopes were cunning and played me clever tricks.

The light came on and I paused to gain my bearings. I do not know if I had been scrabbling for an hour or ten minutes, but just a corncob’s throw over yonder sat the dead Richmond soldier and my captor tree. The boys hadn’t been dead before had gone quiet. I hoped it was sleep of one variety or another. My arm had left off burning for the minute and was growing cold. I sat to have a look-see but fainted flat out when I tried to pull up my shirtsleeve. I woke with the sun’s fist in my face and a ringing in my ears. I rose and clambered up a slope and climbed a fence where a boy lay skewered with a piece of his face hanging down like a dewlap in the sun.

All the field ahead was filled with the dead. The local company of vultures had already crept through and turned out their pockets and carried off their canteens. Here and there you met a body part had broken off acquaintance with its owner. A glove had gone with a hand and a boot with a foot. At the middle was a dead bovine. I was not yet hungry and still had an apple and a cracker in my haversack, or I might have inquired after its meat. At the end of the field was another fence and another field. This field was empty of all but cannonballs. You could see where they had cracked through the trees and the paths they had made as they rolled. In the next field there was nothing but some ugly-looking thistles and the beginnings of a breeze.

Midday I came to a fine old manor house had been about burned to the ground. All that was left was the little gum-tack houses built all around it, mushrooms around a black rose. I poked my head into one or two of them and saw a cross and a magazine illustration of President Abraham Lincoln but nothing else. I looked down the well and saw what had become of the mansion’s dog. It was floating on its side. The air smelled like smoke and the great swaths of mint sprouting deep green along the fencerows. At home Bartholomew and I liked nothing better than to take the scythe to a patch of mint. Two or three strokes and you had heaven climbing up your nose. Bartholomew could make a mint tea to beat the band. He would make it in the morning, set it in the root cellar, and we would drink it to cool off in the evening. Thoughts of the treasures in our cellar away up in Indiana got me to climbing down into the damp black ruin. Everything in the mansion cellar, though, had been hauled off or broken. There was blue and brown mason-jar glass everywhere to decorate the dirt floor.

While I was hunting down there for anything might have been missed I heard voices in the yard. I peeped out and saw it was a party of rebels, six strong. I crunched my way soft as I could back down and into a corner and waited with my musket. They didn’t come down to the cellar, though. They were each one of them barefoot, and I expect they had tried their luck down amidst the broken glass before. As they were leaving I heard one of them say something about cooling off at a creek. You would think I would have lit out after them soon as they had left to get my own drink but instead what I did down there in the dark and the cool was breathe in some of the burned smell and think about mint and fall into a snore.

When I woke it was dark. I clambered up out of the ruins and went off in the direction I thought I had heard them take. My arm felt like an icicle, and my forehead was hot. There was a minute I saw my mother walking beside me and asked her to go away and get Bartholomew for me but she said Bartholomew preferred not to come. She went away and Bartholomew did not come. When he did not come I got it into my head I needed to cry. Tears came up their tunnels but could not cut their way through the banks of dirt dried to my face.

On the outskirts of the farm was a clearing bordered by hedges gone wild and in the middle of the clearing was an urn. It looked pretty to me in the moonlight and I got the idea I had to leave something in it. Some token. A tithe. What you would lay down in the little basket at church. Good Christian passing by. I pulled up a fistful or two of grass and carried it over careful, like I was clutching a child. When I got to the urn and looked close I saw that others before me had had my same thought. There was a spoon in it and a broken plate and a tin pan that had done duty as a spittoon. I said before I can’t sing but I sang and hummed a little as I dropped the grass back onto its ground and walked away.

I walked then down a tunnel made out of walls overhung by heavy fern. I went through a high gate led nowhere and bordered by strangled trees that twisted and yawed. I climbed a hill and saw line after line of ridges leading away into moonlit clouds. There was a hickory tree had had its arms cut off that I took it in my head to try to climb. I told it if it had had a young lady perched on its peak I would have made it to the top. For a time I followed an old road lined by trees. The road looked like it had once gone from someplace fine to someplace fine else and also that those days were gone. There were dead men sprinkled all around. You would have thought to look at them that they had just got winded and decided to plunk down. Have a smoke. Think it through a spell. One of these men wasn’t a man. She had on a gray cap and was clutching a flintlock pistol had likely seen service in the Revolutionary War. Some of her chest wrappings had come loose and were dangling out of a hole in her shirt. You could see there was dried blood on them. She had been better built even just on army rations than I had ever been and I couldn’t understand how she had hidden herself. I had an idea about sitting down and seeing if she could still palaver, that she might know some secret apart from masquerade devices could get me out of my mess. So I did a crouch-down in front of her but she did not budge. Every now and then as I walked on I thought I heard cannon fire but it was far away if it was anything and I could not be sure.

By and by, I came down a slope through trees wearing blankets of ivy and found the creek. I drank then. I drank, then retched, then drank some more and lay panting on my side. Then I pulled off my rags and unwrapped myself and took out Bartholomew’s likeness, which was just a piece of hard metal in the dark, and set it next to me on the bank. “We need to discuss our situation,” I said to the hard metal but the hard metal wouldn’t talk, not any more than my dead sister soldier. Only my mother would talk to me. Only my mother could I count on. That thought, once I’d run it through my head, made me laugh out loud, and I sat there laughing like that until the mosquitoes found me, then I lay down on my side again and rolled over into the water. It was waist-deep quick and I played at sinking and rising. I got the idea then I’d been revived and set to work at scrubbing at myself with gravel and water grass. I scrubbed and scrubbed, then pulled my rags into the water and punched and squeezed them to dislodge the dirt. It was all of it slow work because I couldn’t use my left arm. There were boys back in camp had used sticks to scrape off their extremities when they couldn’t scare up soap and I gave that a try when I saw there were still streaks on my legs. I hadn’t had a wash of any kind in three weeks. It didn’t bother me a speck that I laughed as I worked. Or that I couldn’t stop shivering even though I felt hot. After I had laid out my clothes I spent an hour or three crouched and gibbering under the bushes like I’d turned Akron boy and there were women murdering men around me in the dark. Then I stood and walked up the draw a ways to a spot where the creek deepened and spread. The rebel party were there, all as naked as I was.

“Gallant Ash,” they said. “We heard all about you and your exploits. Come on in here and splash.”

An invitation as nicely put as that couldn’t be declined. It transpired I’d saved that old Richmond man from certain death by giving him my piece of paper and he shed his grays like the others and came down with us to the water. I’d never felt happier since I had set out to war. Someone had a fiddle. Could give it a scratch. We linked up arms in the cool water and turned circles and laughed and frolicked about. I don’t know what it was made the party take its turn but take a turn it did, and I found I had my good hand around a rebel boy’s throat. All the others had gone, the old Richmond man included. It was just me and that rebel boy, just my hand and his throat. I killed him there in the water and let his dead body float away, then went back to my clothes. They were still soaked so I draped them over me and slept. In the dream I turned to next, my mother came to me. It was the old dream only now I had my musket. The angry crowd around me had lit its torches and grown tall so I laid about me with my bayonet.

I was sick and far from the creek when I opened my eyes. I had put on my wrap and clothes and found my way into the remains of a shelter looked to have been built for pigs. Clouds had come up in the night and there was a drizzle splattering through a hole in the shelter roof. I had been bitten up considerably during my sleep and, sleeping, had scratched deep gouges in my face. I could not move my left arm at all. It had swollen up against my coat sleeve. I felt for Bartholomew’s likeness under my wrappings and knew at once I had lost it and when I got up on my knees, my stomach, which had nothing much more in it than mud and creek water, emptied out. It took me a time, kneeling there, to be able to open up my eyes and lift my head. When I did I could see a straggled line of our wounded coming down a lane. After my rich visions of the night before, I wiped my eyes and shook my head but the line did not waver. I stood and scuttled across the field and, breathing hot and hard, fell in with them. It was not the sorriest bunch I had ever seen, but it was close. There was more than a few missing digits on their fingers. There were shirts and underdrawers wrapped around heads. One fellow had about two feet of beard was clutching a torn, bloody pillow to his chest and leaving wet feathers to fall to the ground. I pointed at my arm when the man closest to me looked over. He just shook his head and opened his mouth to show me that he had been relieved of his tongue.

The hospital was in a school in the center of a village. The village had changed into rubble and splinters, and the schoolhouse looked like an island afloat in an awful sea. Everywhere you looked there were hurt men. All the ache of this world and the one beyond. The idea was that we would walk up to the doctors and they would look at us and decide who needed the quickest help. Those that needed it would go straight into the schoolhouse. The others would go and sit in the yard and offer up the wisdom of their ill fortune to the wind. As we walked up, some of the men had been sitting there a time gave out calls. One I went by lifted a blanket up to show a dead soldier. The deceased had had his clothes burned off of him, and his skin bubbled black, yellow, and brown. The man giving the show didn’t say anything, just let us look a minute then put the blanket back down. An older man up ahead had a bandage on his head and drool caterpillaring out of the corner of his mouth said he hoped we all liked saws. Didn’t matter whether you had a toothache or were carrying half a cannonball in your gut, they would cut something off. This set a few of them had already been doctored up and were lying in the dirt with their bandaged stumps to chuckling.

Meantime, there were screams coming from the schoolhouse. We got up to its side and could see to the back where they were dropping what they cut right out an open window onto a pile. There was a contraband grandpa with a cart loading some of it up. It was slippery work and he dropped a piece or two as he went rattling on his way. Out in the field, where he was heading, the carrion birds were having a contest to see which of them could fly off with the biggest piece. I looked at them and got up this thought those crows and vultures needed whiskey and cigars. I might even have said this out loud. Anyway, someone nearby gave a laugh. Up ahead, they were making the boys take off their jackets, sometimes their pants and shirts. One boy that had an angry, swollen slice down his side stood there naked as the day he was born.

I asked the tongueless man next to me to hold my place in the line and pointed over at the trees beyond the yard surrounding the schoolhouse. He looked out to the vultures and nodded. Another next to him, whose injury I could not discern, said he would help hold my place, all day if need be, unless of course I was going off into the trees to die. I walked through more hurt men as I made my way but these did not call out at me.

The first time I ever laid eyes on Bartholomew was in the yard of a house used to stand one mile due east of my farm. He had come with some other boys to see if it was true that the house was haunted and I had come to deliver a basket of sweet corn. The family had moved into the house was Irish or German or Italian or some such but the folks around here called them gypsies. The husband was far away on the railroad and it was just the woman and her two babies. I had got to hold them both. They were good babies, fresh and fat. I saw the boys trying to peek into a window and put down my basket and chased them off. Bartholomew stood his ground a minute before he ran. I got right up to him and he smiled at me, then he took off like a shot. The woman came out to thank me right then or I would have stood there and watched Bartholomew run. He was barefoot and had a floppy brown hat on his head. He was about the strangest thing I had ever seen. The next day he found me out where I was working a barley row and handed me a fresh-picked red zinnia. I’d never had a flower put into my hand before and I expect I stood there struck dumb. After he had handed it to me he did a little bow I never got him to repeat and again broke off into his run.

I could not run after I had left the schoolhouse-hospital grounds and climbed a fence and gone into the trees. My arm felt like it weighed sixty pounds and was pressed out everywhere against my sleeve. About half my head felt hot and the other half cold. There was a stinging down my legs like nettles had gotten in my pants. I couldn’t run but I thought about Bartholomew running, those years ago, when he had been a boy and I had been a girl. At our wedding three years to the day after he put that flower in my hand we had a basket of zinnias. Every color they come in, though mostly deep, heart-smoking red.

You can’t ever know when the dead world will come to you. Only that it will. My mother liked to tell me that. She who liked to send me down to the neighbor woman with any extra food we had. She who one night not a month after Bartholomew had handed me that zinnia walked through a crowd that had gathered outside the woman’s house with muskets and pitchforks and lit torches and went and stood with her arms crossed on that neighbor woman’s front porch. She had left in the night while I was asleep but I heard her leaving and followed her through the dark. When I came out of the cornfield I could see her pushing through the crowd. Beautiful and fearsome. Like a scythe through summer grass.

All this I chewed on as I walked that wood. Southern wood, fern and creeper. It was deeper and darker than I had thought on parting its curtain. I had this idea that they might send someone after me and kept looking over my shoulder, though who amongst that sick company and those overworked doctors they could have dispatched, I do not know. I tried to send hard thoughts to my arm. I thought to it that sick as it was or it wasn’t, I would just as soon it kept hanging where it was.

I had to stop and rest fairly frequent but after a time of walking I managed to traverse the woods. It was dusk now. I came out onto a road that led over a hill to a town. Down that road a group of people were walking and in that group was a nurse. They had none of them seen me so I stepped back into the trees and when they had passed on a ways I went out again after them. The nurse had on a dark blue cape and a white cap was covered in filth and grime. Everyone in the group had soiled hands. The men had the dirt up to their elbows. I imagined the nurse did too. They walked fast. I kept expecting one of them to turn and ask me my business so I fried up some story I’d tell about why I was walking alone on the road behind them but not a one of them did. Not a one of them even seemed to notice me as I walked into town, past a cobbler, a dry-goods store, and a stable, and saw where the group broke up and the nurse had her home. There was a dead-end alley next to the cobbler’s with some boxes piled at the end of it. I walked back there and down that alley and dropped myself behind the boxes. I thought I would sleep but I didn’t. I lay there a long while, eyes open, looking up past the walls to the sky, past the sky to the stars, past the stars to my death out there, past my death to the final dark. Then I heaved myself up and walked over to the nurse’s house. It was a cottage with a garden might have been pretty if it had been kept up. There was lamp lit on the front porch. A mat worn down to its nubs.

Her name was Neva Thatcher and she had thick brown locks. She had blue eyes and high cheekbones and small fine fingers liked to work at the air. She could swat a fly dead before you had seen it land, but she was slow when she didn’t have to be fast. She never, the time I knew her, spoke loudly or needed to step first through a door.

She had been born up in Maine and had moved south with her husband before the war. This husband had gone off in the first weeks after Fort Sumter to fight as an officer for the Confederacy and had never come home. She had a letter from him, dictated as he lay blinded and expiring at Bull Run, that asked her to bid farewell to the sun for him, to pay his fondest courtesies to the grass, to salute the pretty waving trees. When the Union had taken her town she had quickly set aside the burden of her angers and gone to work in their hospital. She did whatever she was asked. Mopped floors, washed saws, dropped cut limbs out the window. Many times she would just sit and hold the hands of dying men.

She knew how to dress wounds and keep them clean. She had first thing I arrived dressed and cleaned mine. She had let me lie down on her own bed and had kept the curtains closed and fed me soft bread and stewed peaches and dripped water from a clean rag into my mouth. When she had seen what I was, standing there on her front step and none too gently dying, she had said nothing, had just taken me by the arm that wasn’t swollen and led me in.

I stayed three weeks in her little house and when I began to be well enough she gave me one of her dresses and helped me to a chair in the kitchen and let me sit by the open window and suck a little at the breeze. She had good rations of salt and sugar and sowbelly and hardtack and fresh bread for her work for the cause. She shared them all with me. She liked to read. Had a wall full of books. Each day she wrapped one or two of them in a cloth and carried them off to the hospital to read to the men. She read to them about hearts and flowers and pharaohs and mountaintops and clear-running brooks. She read to them about Jerusalem and chariots and trumpets and ghosts and lambs. I know what she read to them because in the evenings she would read to me.

Tired and whipped as I was, some of the gay finery of the images she was conjuring rubbed me wrong. I expected the Colonel wouldn’t have thought anything too much of them either. But you couldn’t hold it against her. She didn’t seem to need any of it to mean too much. One voice saying soft things into another’s ear. She was as wore out as any of us and every morning like any of us who was able she rose and did her work. She didn’t give the day too much of her smile but she had one. I saw it. She had a china service was her pride and joy. Came from a grandaunt back in Maine. Flower and animal was the theme but about every piece to the service was painted different. Neva said it was the work of more than twenty hands. There were doves had an eager look to their eye peeping out from behind indigo roses. Yellow cats asleep under dogwood. Owls perched on plum trees. Wolves howling next to holly. Cows and sheep nibbling buttercups in a field. The service had lived through the trip down south and it had lived through the war. The teapot to it was Neva’s greatest treasure. You did not have to work at it too hard to look over her shoulder as she dusted at it and admire the shades of pink seemed to have come off real roses, the careful greens seemed to have come off real leaves, the deep blues of the feathers of its many birds. The teapot was Limoges, she said. Her grandaunt had painted it herself and Neva gave it a swipe about every day I was with her. Each time she did that chore there would alight on her face a smile.

“For all it is made of so many different designs, this china service is my miracle of constancy,” she said one day I was watching her. “There were soldiers in this house before I started to work for the hospital, every one of them ready to desecrate my sweet china. The captain with them who ordered it to stop before it had started knew my husband before the war. I served him tea out of this very pot.”

Still, many was the time after her long work she would come in, wash off her hands, see to my arm, then cry herself straight to sleep. She had kept canaries, a favored present from her husband, in a large white cage in the parlor, but whether she still had her grandaunt’s china or she didn’t, now the canaries and the husband were dead and buried and there were moments she could not bear even to hear a sparrow chirp.

She spoke of love and love brought to ruin by war. It did not trouble her to betray the cause her husband had fought and died for, she told me. The Confederate States had seceded out of stubbornness, and war had come and taken her husband away. She would move north when it was finished. Take her china and return to the village in Maine she had left all those years before.

“If they will have me,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t anyone ever have you?” I said.

“This war,” she said. “This war, this war.”

The flesh of my arm crept each day closer and closer together. Like two ragged companies didn’t know yet they were fighting for the same side. When I saw I could comfortably rest my left forearm on the table again, and hold myself to purpose, I asked Neva for paper to write on. She that evening brought me home a fine fresh stack. It was hard to look at the linen cream of that paper bought nice and neat from one of our Union sutlers specialized in officer wares and not think about the old soldier from Richmond. I thought, too, as I sat there and looked at that paper, because how could you ever not, about all my battles, about my days in the camp, my walk through the woods with the Akron boys, my talks with the Colonel, the soft hand on my face come from his beautiful cousin, my time caught tight beneath the tree. I wrote Bartholomew that I had stepped out of my uniform and lost my musket and his likeness — for I had left it in the mud by the creek — and now wore a dress again. My legs felt free and some of the rest of me did too. I had hurt my arm and feared to lose it but here it was holding down the fine paper I was writing to him on. I sat and talked with another woman, I wrote him, and it was good and easy to do so. I thought of my mother and it did not trouble me. “I feel I am sitting outside of it all and can breathe and look at it a minute and not choke on the dust in my mouth,” I wrote. I know I wrote this and that it was received. I have the letter sitting here beside me.

When I had finished writing, Neva brought me candle and sealing wax and, the next morning, carried my letter away with her. Sent it limping up to Indiana by the first post. The next morning after that, I tottered in from the garden to tell her my arm was no longer tight against my dress sleeve and found her in the kitchen wearing the rags of my uniform.

“Show me how you march,” she said.

“I don’t remember how to march,” I said.

She pouted a minute, worked at slicing cheese and snapping crackers. Then she stopped that and came to me, slowly with the first steps, then quickly with the last, then slowly she kissed me. I let her do this for a time. Her mouth tasted like linden berries of all things and I realized I couldn’t remember what Bartholomew’s mouth tasted like. It occurred to me that my own mouth must taste a little like the late pansy flower I had just been chewing on. We stood both of us, Neva and I, with our arms hanging at our sides and only our mouths pressed together. There was a moth in the kitchen. I could see it with my left eye. It sat waiting for night’s dark above the garden door. I moved my head a little to see it better, and Neva’s eyes came open. When they did I put my hand on her arm and pressed her away gently to make her stop. She stopped. She kissed me again the next day, nice and quiet this time and not in my old uniform, and again I let her and again after a time I had her stop.

The day after that second time, she made stewed oysters and corn fritters dressed in maple syrup and served it to us on her good china plate. This was the plate had on it monkeys climbing cherry trees. I had seen a monkey in a cage once in town. These monkeys looked bigger. Like if they wanted to they could tear down the trees. As we ate at our oysters they seemed to move. They would leap a little higher up their tree when I was lifting my fork but each time I tried to catch them at it they again slipped down. When we had finished our supper, Neva poured hot water into her pot and made us chamomile tea. We held cups favored handsome with golden lilies and blood-dark laurel leaves. She took my hand for a time, then she let it go. We leaned back in our chairs and she asked me if I wanted to hear a story, and though I feared a little she might reach for one of her fair volumes I said that I did.

The tale she told, which did not come out of one of her books, was about a cousin who had gone west from Maine to help shepherd some poor band of argonauts to California back in 1842. They had headed off west seeking gold from the ground or gold from the land or gold from the sea. Half Neva’s whole hometown had caught the settling fever for a while but only this cousin had actually gone, and not for any gold he thought he could have for the easy pickings but for the considerable riding fee. He had left off alone one early morning and Neva had stood with those who waved and watched. They had not seen him again for years.

The argonauts, which was the term he had used, even though they were no Greek explorers, just men and women bent on making it west, had done well for a while, the cousin had told it those years later upon his return, and then they hadn’t. The man had hired him rode off one day with some others to scout for water and didn’t come back. He was left with the man’s wife and two daughters. They had started out from Springfield, Illinois, with a hundred wagons in the train and little by little they worked it down to sixty-one. The train had split after the Wasatch, and the cousin had continued on with the woman and her daughters in a company much reduced.

When the Indians came it was in a fury and number that they hadn’t had enough muskets by half to answer. The woman’s two daughters were among those who were taken. The woman, said the cousin, had not waited even until dawn to set off after them. She had just grabbed a musket and walked off in her yellow dress and bonnet. The further diminished train, now just four or five wagons, had regrouped as best it had been able and continued on. Three days later at dusk the woman had walked into their camp with her daughters and three other children in tow. When pressed, she would not say how she had freed the children, only that it wasn’t any use to go after the others taken because they were all killed.

The argonauts made it to California and the woman and her daughters had gone to live with some of their people and that was the last the cousin had ever heard of them, though he had offered up that he hoped the woman had grown as rich as her courage. When Neva Thatcher had finished this story she brushed back a brown curl of hair, took a sip of her tea, and told me if I wanted she would give up on her project of going back home to Maine and that I could stay and live with her here. She had a wedge of land out in the countryside I could cultivate if I liked. It was bottomland, rich as rabbit stew. I did not answer, just sat still and looked at her, couldn’t find any word I could say would correspond to the story she had told about the woman who had gone off into the wild to get back what had been taken from her and what she was asking me.

My world had shrunk those weeks to the size of Neva Thatcher’s little house and yard, and leaving aside the question of kisses, I had gotten comfortable in that world, had found it fragrant, even cozy. Meanwhile, as I discovered when one morning we went out for a walk, the town beyond her fences had been turned during my convalescence into a privy, and the land around the town into a rubbage ground. Union army wagons with broken axles lay in the fields like the bones of lost things had once bellowed and breathed, and everywhere you could see broken munitions of various descriptions and snapped bridles and rucksacks cut or torn. There was a boot-ruined field on the edge of one of the camps and on the hill beside it was an abandoned gallows. We crossed a brown skull or two, one of which had a broken cavalry sword stuck through its eye. I saw something shiny at the edge of a reedy pond and pulled out a bugle had been given an extra twist. We passed a old slave-selling emporium had had its main sign pulled down and its front door, frame and all, stove in, no doubt to facilitate, Neva told me, the egress of all the ghosts had still been whistling around inside it.

“I take it you are against the institution,” I said then.

“Honey, there are plenty of us down here, imports or otherwise, who never held with it.” She spit as she said this. The gob landed near my foot and she begged my pardon. She touched my hand with two of her fingers when she did. “They used to stand them over there,” she said, pointing at a wide piece of wood plank outside the emporium. “There was one time it was just boys and girls, each one of them wearing one of those masks. You could see about all of them, young as they were, had been whipped.”

“Did they get sold?”

“They always got sold.

“My husband,” she added, after we had put our backs to that place, “fought for the Confederacy but felt much the same way.”

Soldiers walked hither and thither in company or alone and a number of them called out to us on our walks. If they had dark soldier thoughts, though, they kept them to themselves and mostly they paid us courtesies and called out to Neva Thatcher by name. We walked farther each day away from the town, and the garbage and soldiers trailed off and by and by it was just the stripped and battle-burned land. I’m painting up a picture of a world gone off to its glory and never coming back and woe to us all, but with every minute my lungs worked on those walks, my head felt lighter and my mind felt clearer and a kind of giddiness galloped up and overtook me. I gave out a happy laugh then when Neva Thatcher took me over a hill and showed me a corner of the hundred and twenty acres had been her husband’s and said once more if I wanted to I could stay and work it after the soldiers had gone. I still didn’t answer but laughed again and even turned a frolic or two as we walked down a few of that hundred and twenty acres’ ruined rows. For a minute some fat sow hadn’t been shot and cooked came out and gave a snuffle into the field and I told Neva Thatcher I was going over to see if I was strong enough to pick it up.

“I used to be able to pick up a good-size pig,” I said and saw in my mind that first pig my companion and I had shot near that shed full of chain in Kentucky.

“Stay here and be my friend and farmer,” Neva Thatcher said, putting her hand on my arm as I thought these thoughts.

But I had grown quiet for thinking of Kentucky and its pigs and wasn’t much company to Neva then or after we returned from our walk. Back at the house over a bowl of corn soup I cheered up some and offered up an apology, to which Neva answered that I must never, but for the gravest offenses, say that I was sorry. We took walks after her work the rest of the days I was there. On one of those walks I hitched up my skirts and gave a try to see if I still remembered how to run.

“You trot admirably, I’ll give you that,” called Neva Thatcher from the other end of the stretch I’d sprinted down, “but now take a look at this.”

I have seen a handsome number of years since then, but I have never beheld anyone, not even Bartholomew at his best, run as strong and speedy as Neva Thatcher did that day when she hitched up her skirts and came running in my direction across the earth.

The days crept their cool ways past and Neva’s kisses came closer together and the soldiers in the street gave signs of a great muster to be held and I knew it was time for me to leave.

“They would have taken my arm off; it was you saved me,” I told her my last night in her house. It was late and she had come like she came every evening now to kiss me.

“It was you your cousin was talking about,” I said. “You were the one who walked into the wild and saved someone.”

“I have never been to California,” she said.

“Doesn’t make the story any one word less about you,” I said.

“And here I thought it was about all of us.”

“Us?”

“Every last one.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You are better, aren’t you,” she said.

“You made me better. And I thank you for it.”

“This is a leaving speech.” Her voice dropped. “I know one when I hear it.”

“I’d like to return to my regiment.”

“Won’t they be far away by now? Perhaps even on the other side of the world?”

“I think I can find them.”

“Why not just go home? To your husband man. Go on home if you won’t stay here. If you won’t stay with me and love me a little and work my farm.”

I shook my head and she gave me up her smile and kissed me one last time in this life and when I woke there were four Union soldiers and an officer standing by the bed. Neva was leaning in the doorway behind them. She didn’t speak when they hauled me up, just handed them my old uniform, watched them drop a rough-cloth dress over my head, and let them kick and cuff me and call me a spy and take me away. She came that evening to visit me in the cell they rigged out of the sheep shed and tossed me in down next to the stable.

“If you had just said you were going home to your Bartholomew and not back to the war instead of staying here with me. If only you had said that, I could have stood it,” she said.

“You let me out of here, I’ll go back to him,” I said. “Or how about I stay with you. You tell them to let me out of here and I’ll stay with you and we can run races and pick up pigs every day.”

“You didn’t pick up any pig and we already know who would win those races,” she said.

She had brought me two hard-boiled eggs and she helped me peel them. She looked me in the eyes the whole time I ate. Then she went away. In the deep and dark hours of that night I thought she’d come back, for I woke out of a doze hadn’t taken me any farther away than the backs of my own eyelids and saw a figure sitting near me. It shifted though, or the moon outside the window found a way to move, and I saw it wasn’t Neva. It was another woman altogether, one the lay of the moonlight had lent a single golden eye.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Just sat there. Kneeling, it looked like. Hands in her lap. My own hands were bound. She had on pants and a broadcloth coat. Below the eye I couldn’t catch blinking you could see the long curve of her cheek.

“I was sleeping,” I said.

No answer. By and by the moonlight had lit her eye left it and in the darkness she stood.

“Keep a distance, now,” I said.

But she stepped forward and to my side with a movement geared quicker than I liked and after she had stood there awhile breathing cloudy breaths into the cold air, she leaned her head in close to mine. I wanted to turn my own head and look at her but found I couldn’t.

“You come any closer I will fight you, even tied up as I am,” I said.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

It was my turn to stay silent. The voice was large but she was not. She wasn’t any much taller than a child.

“I’m not closing my eyes,” I said at last. She lifted one of her hands up past my face and into the moonlight had found its way back into the stall. There was a knife in it. The knife climbed up through the moonlight and back down. It made this journey several times. When she pulled it away from the light and placed its edge against my forehead, I thought the gold air before me would start to bleed, and when she pressed the blade harder against my forehead I thought that in its bleeding we would both drown.

“Close your eyes now, Ash Thompson, killer of men, or I will cut out your tongue and feed it to the fishes,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

“You tell Neva I was already sorry,” I said.

“Who is Neva?” she said.

Came a scuffle of feet and a cough from outside the shed door. I felt the air in front of my face open and shut like a ball had moved through it. I kept my eyes closed for a long time. When I opened them again even the dark was gone.

They held me in that stall two days past that night. I tried to ask my guard about the girl had come to visit but he wouldn’t answer me. Neither did he say anything about the red line he must have seen I had across my forehead. One of those days they had in another stall a pair of Confederate officers of one kind or the other who spent their time in singing duets about beautiful ladies and the bounty of the lands of the South but otherwise never said any other word. The last morning, my guard and four or five of his friends came and leaned their arms over the top of the stall and looked at me. Then they dragged me over to their camp to be hanged.

There had been word of a spy in the ranks, a whore from Chattanooga dressed up just like a man. This spy had passed on troop movements and gotten a barley field’s worth of boys torn to bits. It was a first lieutenant told me this. Every now and again while he was talking he would pull his handgun out of its holster and point it at me. Once or twice he cocked the weapon. I counted two good teeth in his mouth. There were a few other junior officers present and a number of men from the ranks when he conversed up close with me.

I kept my composure through this, stood as tall as they would let me, looked the broke-tooth lieutenant straight in the eye, told him I had had other interviewers to scare me, that he would have to work twice again as hard as he was if that was his aim. I told him that I was no spy, that I came from Indiana, honest farm country, land come down to me through my mother, that I had never been to Chattanooga, didn’t even know what that was. I gave him the letter of my company, the number of my regiment. I listed the engagements and battles I had fought in. I told them to speak to the Colonel, that he would vouch for Gallant Ash. They laughed at this, said Gallant Ash was just a story some fool and his friends had told to pass away the days. The company I had spoken of was made out of Ohio men, not girls from Chattanooga or Indiana or anywhere else I claimed or didn’t claim to come from. They were still laughing when a major pushed through the crowd and asked for an explanation. He and the lieutenant stepped off to the side.

“Is there no one here who remembers me?” I said. “Look, I have a saber scar on my left arm.”

The men around me neither spoke nor moved. I must not have looked like much in my dress and trying to show my scar in the middle of all those men, because when the major came back over he walked straight up to me and took me gently by the elbow.

“If she is a spy, she will receive a trial,” he said. The men had been hunting blood and had not had it and were none the happier, but when the major spoke again they moved away. He was very kind as we walked. He was tall and pleasant-looking and had a sweet voice. He told me he came from New York, the shores of Lake Erie. He told me he would write to my company commander and apologized for the conduct of his men. I told him I knew a thing or two about men brought to the brink and hard pushed, that I had stood alongside them many a time, that I could not hold the ugliness of war against them any more than I could against myself or those I had considered my friends.

“Why did you refer to yourself as Gallant Ash?” he asked.

I told him. I described climbing the tree and the looks of the men below. I described it at some length. I am not sure but what I might have given out a chuckle or two as I told the story. Might even have tapped a foot and sung. The major nodded. He released my elbow, which he had been holding so gently. Said he had heard a song about Gallant Ash and was pleased to have met the one who had inspired it. Kindness comes in many colors. He called me miss, thanked me for my service to the Union cause, and bade me farewell.

My Bartholomew never learned his way into or out of a fight but there was one thing no one could hold the candle to him at and that was dancing. If he even started to sniff the arrival of a song, he was jumping and kicking across the floor. In our earlier, happier times he would sing himself into a dance if there wasn’t any other music for it. I expect I wasn’t the worst you ever saw at dancing but I was a long way from having the gift. Another lifetime Bartholomew could have been up on the stage. That would have been the life for him. That voice of his could bubble up out of his throat and the way those arms and legs of his could move. Still, we only get but the one life and I never heard him calling out for any other. Except of course for when we first met and he called out for the life had me in it. He called loud to step into that. While he was courting me, is what I mean. I made it take a while but he got it done.

He said, “I got nothing to offer but sweat and zinnias.”

He said, “But I will love you until the day I die into my wings and know you have died into yours.”

He said, “There won’t ever be any other one loves you as true as the blue of this blue shoe.” He held up his shoe for me to look at when he said this. It was kind of blue. Kind of green too. Looked like he was wearing birds on his feet. And then he danced for me. He had rolled an old whiskey barrel all the way out from town and had set that barrel in the yard and had hollered for me to come out of my house and he hopped up on that barrel and danced like a dervish in a mulberry bush or a monkey had a toothache or a rhinoceros had a headache or some such and then he hopped back down and when he saw I’d started up breathing again he said what I’ve already told, then said he wanted to marry me.

“Why?” I said.

“It’s love pure and simple,” he said.

The day Bartholomew and I got married we danced. There was a small group had gathered and they gave us a clap and a cheer and when it was done we walked out the two of us to the cemetery to see my mother. She had a stone wasn’t much but I had kept it well enough and it had never wanted for flowers. We lay bluets and sweet peas down on it and stood a minute and then I said to Bartholomew, “Now, that’s done.” And he said, “What is?”

I hadn’t known just exactly what I meant when I said it but I knew some choice part of me hoped by turning a dance with my nimble-foot husband and then laying down those flowers on my wedding day I could let some of that which was past trot away. I told him this as we walked home and he was quiet a time and then said he expected it wouldn’t work out that neat. Which wasn’t the last time he was right. I went on thinking about my mother every day just as I had before I had gotten married only now Bartholomew was there and the smells and sounds of the past didn’t scorch quite so hard, didn’t make me stand and slash at the air with a stick or run out hunting more often than I had to. They were still there though, those smells and sounds and sights, and they chewed and worked at me like worms in their corridors, and then other worms came with their own mouths to chew and keep them company. After a time, like I’ve told it, I packed up my bag and went to war.

There are other memories now come to join the one of my mother standing on the neighbor’s porch steps, the neighbor that left here with her babies long ago, and of my own baby, who died beside me not an hour into his own life on our plank-wood floor, other spells of the past that won’t be put aside. One of them is of that place they took me after the kindly major made his bow and stepped away. The men he assigned to escort me took me back into the town and even past Neva Thatcher’s little house so that I thought for a minute, forgetting how I had ended up walking the thoroughfares under guard in her dress, that they were going to let me go back to her. She could keep me on awhile, I thought. She could kiss me morning, noon, and night if she needed to. Then I could tell her, when she had got tired of that, I was going to go back to my Bartholomew.

We went straight on past the little house, though, and on down the street and along another and then they loaded me onto a wagon and took me away. Another town. It was nightfall when we got there and the building we stopped at was tall and wet-looking with windows on the top floor had narrow bars on them. It was made of gray boards had been dusted up with musket balls and you could see even in the light of the streetlamp that part of one wall had been blown open and rebuilt. I had tried to talk a little to the men guarding me but they had refused to speak except amongst themselves and said no word to me as they brought me down off the wagon and handed me over to another guard. This guard would not speak to me either. He took me down a hall had straw and things that crunched on its floor. We went past doors had moans and murmurings behind them. Came every few feet or so past the muffled clink or drag of some chain. At the end of the hall was a door and through that doorway I was pushed.

When I saw where they had taken me I did not turn and bang the boards and holler to be let out, just as I had not whimpered before when the lieutenant wanted to put me in the ground, nor run, not even once, when the guns had blazed on the field. There were eyes in that place they had put me. Like that girl from the sheep shed had found a way again to keep me company. They were all in a line along the sides of the room. They were every one of them looking at me.

“I was out of my head a little in the woods, but that was because of my wound,” I said aloud to the eyes. The only answer was a sound came from the corner. It was like bones boiling and cracking in a pot. They every one of them have knives, I thought. Then there was a laugh and the eyes all went shut. After I had stood a minute with my hands and back pressed against the door, my heart beating full hard enough to break the boards behind me, I let my legs lead me down to the floor.

It was a lunatic house from the old days. Had stood there holding tight its horrors many a year until it had had its sides opened by stray cannon shot in the early days of the war. The keepers had run away and the lunatics had poured out into the countryside. Some had found their way through the battle and never come back. One went off looking for the well he had been dropped down in Georgia during the first part of his treatment twenty years before. He didn’t make it past a pond on the outskirts of town. There were two from the women’s side of the house went with him. Mad as they were supposed to be, they pulled him out of the pond five times before the battle cooled down and some of the locals got the idea to hit him on the head and tie him to a tree. There had been a fire on the men’s side and a number of the ones chained up had burned.

The fire had worn itself out and the hole in the wall had been patched and some of the lunatics had been rounded back up. The building had locks and chains aplenty so the army had taken to using it for anyone they thought had their firing pins loose. The men’s side was full to bursting with boys had gotten addled up during the fight. Some they let back out. Some they didn’t. I was in my room with two ladies had seen their children blown straight out of their skins in front of them and couldn’t quit wringing their hands. They could talk well enough, just couldn’t stop wringing their hands. There was another supposed spy, this one from New Orleans was the charge, who wouldn’t say a word. There were a couple of gals had been locked in, as far as I could get out of them, for being too heavy. They both of them walked too fast when they came at you and weren’t heavy anymore. The three or four others were the old customers. They wore chains most of the time. One of them liked to talk about the Gadarene that Jesus healed way back in the long ago. About the pigs He had put the Gadarene’s demons into. About how the pigs had flung themselves off the nearby cliff. How the demons had had to find other homes. “Other homes,” she liked to say with a smile shaped like a snapped-off spider leg could have curdled fresh milk, and she’d lift her chained arms to indicate all of us, those in the room and those without. Another of them liked to grind what teeth she had left. Did it awake or asleep, morning, noon, and every inch of the night. She got hit at considerably for it. Even I got grouchy a time or two when, just after I’d got my eyes shut, she offered up that sound.

Once a day one of the old keepers, big gal, would come in with some porridge for us. She came with kicks and cuffs too. I wasn’t spared this courtesy. She had a soldier with her each time she came in or I might have tried to answer her. Every now and again some fellow as said he was a doctor would peep his head in through the door. Just as soon as he had had that peep he pulled his head back out. We would a few of us yell out to him when he paid these visits but if he heard us he never gave any sign.

Sometimes several of them came into the room in the evening with buckets of cold water. We each got one of these over the head. It was a long night of shivering on the floor after they had gone. There was other things going on at the men’s side. There was more than one that set to screaming regular over there. At first it sounded like it was all just one screamer. Then you heard them enough and knew it was several and got to know each individual one. You can scream high. You can scream low. You can scream something in between sounds like steam out of a train whistle. You can scream so it sounds like a musket bullet been sent by your ear. You can scream like a monkey. You can scream like an elephant oak struck by lightning in a silent wood. There was a boy across the way screamed like he was singing. Like they ought to sign him up for the stage. There was a curlicue elegance to his scream and I got to wishing it was just him they would poke at with their sharp sticks.

Once each week one of us with a guard at her back would carry out the slop bucket. I got detailed to it more than my ordinary share because I didn’t faint or try to bite anyone when I was doing it. I kept moving forward. Step at a time. Even when a soldier tried to trip me up for some fun, I did not stop. He stuck his big foot out and I fell forward but caught myself and the bucket both. Managed too not to hit him one for his joke. Just smiled. Like I understood and even agreed with what it was was making him laugh: lady about fell with a bucketful of shit. The slops got carried to a trough in an alcove let out to a stream at the back of the yard. When the stream wasn’t moving much, the heavy part of the slops stayed put.

Carrying slops wasn’t the only job they let me do. Once when I was carrying a bucket I passed a soldier giving another a shave. They were in the cold sunshine and the one was having it done got his face cut by the other and cried out.

“You’re holding that blade wrong, for one thing,” I said to the fellow playing at being a barber.

“How in fuck’s he supposed to hold it?” said the fellow had been cut.

I put down my bucket and came over and showed him how it was done.

“You stink like a sewer, little sister,” said the one I’d taken the blade from.

“He ain’t wrong,” said the other, “but you keep on.”

I shaved him, then shaved his friend, and every now and then after that I got called on to scrape a face. Mostly it was guards but twice or three times there was a prisoner in the mix. These were big-bearded things attached to some flaps of skin, some ruins of shoulders, some piles of bones. When I shaved them up there wasn’t anything left to them. You could of just dug at the dirt and kicked them straight into the hole. They were happy, though. Smiled and winked. Appeared these shaves were a kind of treat. Given out by the guards for good behavior. Maybe they were the ones didn’t scream. Some of them had been soldiers couldn’t stand the fight any longer. Boys that had run away from the bullets or been found back in camp having never left their bunks. One fellow I cleaned up had the wringing-hands problem. Didn’t stop him from smiling like it was Christmas morning when I got the hair off his face.

It wasn’t just jolly shaves in the yard for the men prisoners in that place, though. Coming and going from the yard you went by a chair set in a cell didn’t have any door. Sometimes there was a man strapped into that chair and sometimes there wasn’t. I walked by it once and a man was attached to it. You couldn’t see what he looked like because they pulled a kind of hat down over the eyes of the ones they had sit there. The hat looked like it was a slop bucket had a brim. He didn’t have any shirt on and you could see the shape of his ribs. Had the stove-in chest of a boy long been sickly, and a ugly cut hadn’t healed too well straight across his stomach. They had tied a gag on his mouth. Hadn’t handed him any flower to hold either.

You would have thought in that place they kept me for all those months straight through wintertime I would have done the bigger cut of my thinking about home and Bartholomew and that baby boy we had had for those cold minutes and my mother lying done with her shame in her bones beneath the ground, but the truth is I thought more about Neva Thatcher and the Colonel. That place and its ways must have stole into my head to haunt me because the two of them had come to form a kind of happy couple in my mind, Neva Thatcher with her chinaware and linden-berry mouth, the Colonel with his long whiskers and his smoke.

“Bring me Neva Thatcher,” I would tell the keeper, who would cuff me hard for it. “Bring the Colonel,” I would yell out to the doctor when he peeped in. They did not bring Neva Thatcher to me. But one February morning with the snow falling, my Colonel came.

They took me down to a room looked like it belonged to another building altogether. It had a green and yellow rug with dogs and diamonds on it and purple wallpaper with thin red stripes. They had a table with a glass vase full of dried flowers sitting in its center and there were two soft chairs. There was a fire crackling nice on one end. A guard stood at attention but the Colonel told him it was all right and he stepped outside. There was a little window in the room and you could see the snow fall past it. While I looked at the snow, the Colonel took up the glass vase of flowers and set it on the floor.

“Gallant Ash,” the Colonel said.

“Colonel, sir,” I said back.

He suggested we move the chairs closer to the fire and sit. I was in my thin dress and expect I had let my teeth clack when I spoke to him. When we had settled he told me that his regiment had been broken to bits and scattered. Some of what was left, including him, had been redeployed.

“How is your cousin?” I said.

“Past all care,” he said.

“I am sorry.”

“I appreciate it.”

He did not look grand and gray any longer. He looked old. Like the fist of years had found out his face and struck a sure blow. There was mud upon his boots. His nose gave a trickle. His coat had a long tear down one side.

“I’m no spy,” I said.

“I understand you give out shaves to the men here,” he replied.

“Did they tell you I get to carry out the slops too?”

“They did.”

We looked a little at each other.

“I’m told I’m to be made a general,” he said.

“I gave no secrets. I did my duty.”

“Do you know what I was before this war?”

I shook my head.

“Nor do I. I cannot remember. Or if I can, it seems like a life that belongs to some other and I do not credit it. There is a wife loves me and whom I love in that life. I expect that if I am not killed, I will remember it again someday.”

“I remember my home. I remember every inch and mile. I have a husband back home waiting for me.”

“Is he? Waiting for you, I mean?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“I have heard it said you hail from the South. I don’t believe that. Not even for one Secesh minute. Your surprise lay elsewhere. Do you remember when we spoke of surprises?”

“I am no spy. Sir, I just wanted to fight. I just wanted to go away for a while.”

“That’s two different things.”

“It’s one thing.”

“Explain to me how it is one.”

“I’ll answer to just about any order you give me, but not that one.”

He looked at me. Long and hard.

“Because you won’t or because you can’t?”

“Both.”

“All right. Well, enough. Let’s leave off that. Leave epistemology be. Let’s return to our earlier line, which was ontological. Do you follow me?”

“No.”

“Epistemology concerns knowledge. Ontology concerns what we are.”

“Or what we aren’t.”

“Not a whore, we know that, and not a spy, we know that too; that leaves only lunacy for the cause. Or at least that is what the doctor here told me. He says you suffer from that ancient malady. You have been set adrift by the moon. You gallop among the stars.”

“I don’t answer to any sickness such as that.”

“I’m quoting your physician.”

“I just wanted to fight. To plant my foot and stand stalwart and never run.”

“But you did steal food and tobacco and sundry medical supplies out of the haversacks of active Federal combatants and so deprive men-at-arms, sometimes wounded men-at-arms.”

“I was a man-at-arms. Wounded for the cause.”

“You were a common thief.”

“I stole from no one.”

“It was a foul rumor, then. Nothing more. Of course it was. I know that. We have already discussed it.”

The fire gave a pop when he said this and a log shifted. The Colonel reached over, took the poker, and gave the works a push. When he leaned forward I saw he had a long scar went from his neck up the side of his face.

“You got yourself a scratch.”

“Nothing more. But I spent thirty days on furlough. Did me a world of good. My wife is the finest woman in the world. You see, I can remember her now. She appears before me. Floats there in the fireplace. You will have to meet her one of these times.”

“I would like to go home.”

“Does a body good to be home. My kinsman would have liked that. He would have liked to be shut up safe again in his rooms.”

I did not recognize the way the Colonel was looking at me. There was a difference to him, like his eyes had changed color, gone from brown to blue, or like he had lost an arm and was studying on how to take up using his left hand.

“I should have made you a sharpshooter,” he said. “Perhaps it would have put stealing out of your mind.”

“Stealing wasn’t my central transgression.”

“Then you do admit to it.”

“I would like to go home. I would go straight home if I were let to leave. I would like to write a letter to my husband. He would come and fetch me. I know they release people out of here to their families. I never stole. Or betrayed.”

The Colonel stood and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You need to wear more and better, Gallant Ash. I’ll see to it that you get something else to wear. Your dress is too thin. It won’t do for this cold weather. You should change clothes.”

I started to stand but he told me to sit by the fire a few more minutes.

“We must not let this war deprive us of all comforts,” he said. He bent and picked up the vase and set it back on the table. I watched his back, then turned and saw that he had left behind a letter for me.

“My Dearest Constance,” it read.

I write you with your former name because I have grown afraid that you are no longer with us but have gone away far from this earth and its trials and its cares. It seems to me in such sad possible circumstance that I must write to you as you are and not as you seem if this letter and thought is to have any hope of reaching you. I am well, dear one, but my troubles here, previously described, continue: Now they have burned the seed shed and taken off both our mules. They want our land and continue their depredations and worsen it with talk of paving the way for the forces of the rebellion that must come. Secessionists in our midst. If I hadn’t heard it from their own mouths I wouldn’t have credited it. But I keep the old musket handy and walk vigilant as you would and, though they are strong, hope still to gain the upper hand. And hope too, even if I cannot prevail, to otherwise see things through. I pray that wherever you are, war or no war, this will reach you and send you, all past troubles put behind us, sailing back to me.

I did sail home to my Bartholomew. That very night in a dream I went rushing over the treetops, along the rivers, through the chill of the mountains, spiriting north and west through snow and thunderstorm and into a white sun. I found the house burned to the ground and Bartholomew run off far away. In his place were old and evil men sharpening their plows and planning to set our good oxen to the yoke and, to the tune of “Dixie” made it worse, gobble everything up.

It was these same men had burned our neighbor out those years before and so my mother came into the dream and stood in the center of the cinders of our house, which had been her house, and wept. The tears of my mother must have found a way out of the dream and onto my face because when I woke there they were. Hot and heavy ghosts come to haunt my face. I roared and raged then. I beat my hand and head on the door until both were bloody.

“I must go home,” I yelled. “You must let me leave.”

It was the keeper gave me my answer. She came in hard with two buckets had ice floating on their tops. February or not, she turned them both over me. She came at me with her foot a minute later as I lay gasping and shivering, and I caught it and twisted and threw her down. The others around me laughed and cheered as I put my fists to the keeper’s face. The guard came into it and I worked on him too.

“I will fight you all until you let me leave,” I said. Around me the ladies howled. One of them picked up the guard’s slouch hat and did a march around the cell. When the keeper tried to get up I put my foot on her neck. It took another guard running down the hall and hitting me on the back of the head with his rifle butt to stop me.

I had many an occasion to dream about home in the long hours afterward when I woke and found they had put me in the chair. I spent two days on its rough planks with the brimmed bucket on my head, and when they untied me, I took up a candlestick and hit the doctor had finally come to visit in the face with it, so they gave me three more. A fever found me that second suite of days. To this fever I attribute the fact that although I sat in that chair the whole time, it felt to me like I was able to stand up out of myself and walk down the corridors of the madhouse and out the door and across the burning countryside. I saw soldiers at their cards or guns as I walked; I saw cannon sitting black in its iron; I saw mules and horses hadn’t eaten in days hollering out in Latin for their feed. I tried one of these times to walk home but the rivers grew wide and deep and the forest grew dark and thick. I turned back to the battle then. The world was afire with it. I looked everywhere for a gun but couldn’t find one. The dead spoke to me on those walks. With mouths that floated above their own bodies with the flies. They clambered up to the rafters of barns and yelled down at me from the treetops, dangled by their knees from the clouds. On one misty field an army of cats had come out to lick the corpses. The cats walked upright and carried colored banners. When I got up close to them they all turned at the same time and looked at me so I ran. Running, I found my way to a fight. The fighters had gotten their coats all mixed up and just stood in a mess trying to figure out which way they needed to turn their guns. “Tell us a story so we’ll know which way to shoot,” they said. They handed me a flower. I took it and put it between my teeth, then pointed to the steeple of a nearby church.

In between these excursions, I would come back to the chair and the bucket with its brim. There was attendants who would come along every now and again to hit the side of the bucket with a hand or poke me sharp in the ribs with a stick. They kicked me too and tightened my cords and whispered that they hoped I wouldn’t wake up any longer, that they could toss me into the field nearby when I was done. They were doing that on one of my bucket walks. Carrying the blackened carcasses out to pile up in a field. I helped in the chore. Laughed until my teeth fell out. Felt the ache in me everywhere, as the job never seemed to get done. So that when after three days my keepers untied me and drenched me down with water and scrubbed me off, I hurt on every square inch of my body and did not have the strength to fight. I lay sick to dying for two weeks afterward. Puddle of arms and legs, bits of burning skin. I kept hoping I would travel out again, even if it was just to pile corpses, but it couldn’t be done. It was into March before I was sitting up against the brick wall and eating the blows they fed us again.

I do not like much to think of the days that followed. When the keeper came at me I cringed and cried. When the doctor peeped in and asked me my name I told him one I had heard in a dream. I told him that I was a runaway from Chattanooga. That I had spied for the forces of the rebellion. That I had handed over secrets had led to the death of ten thousand men. The two women had once been heavy saw an advantage during these days and stole my food. The ones against the wall hollered at me and shook their chains. The women who wrung their hands looked on and shook their heads.

I cringed and groveled and scraped and moaned. The keeper smiled a gummy smile and said it was the chair had changed me. She said sometimes it took a while but that they all eventually changed. She wouldn’t hold my fists and feet against me. She’d had worse. She had known a gal had thought she had invisible arms growing out of her neck had come after her with a broken bottle and cut her three times. That gal had spent one month and two days in the chair and had been cured without a trace of her previous ailment. Had never spoke of it again. All the ones chained to the wall had taken their turns in the chair and had quieted considerably after it. There was others, she said, looking around at the rest of the cohort, that could stand to try the cure.

After this speech on the virtues of the chair, she said I might get back to carrying the slop jar and giving out shaves if I continued to improve. I told her that she was right, that the chair was a wonderful thing, that I was better, that I promised to be good. I was saying this to her when I saw who the guard was standing behind her. I blinked and scrunched my eyes to see if he would go away but there still stood the Akron boy that wasn’t dead.

He was on duty two weeks later when the keeper let me carry the slop jar again. She walked along with us all the way there and all the way back, though it was her custom, when this errand was made, to take her meal and sit quiet in her closet. I did not speak to the Akron boy and he did not speak to me. I had watched him and studied up on whether his months and weeks of battles had put some iron would work against my cause into him. I had watched to see if he still had a shake to his hand and a nervous-sparrow hop to his eyes. When one of the women who wrung her hands asked him if he had seen her darling boy in the fights, he did not answer but he did gulp and look away, and when, in that retreat, his eyes found mine and jumped like they had had yellow-jacket stingers shoved into their centers, I knew I could still have my hope. I carried the slops around into the alcove and the Akron boy followed me and watched me dump the slops into the trench. I took a while at emptying the jar, set it down between pours, wiped my brow. It was a horror what went slopping its way down the stream but I lingered there, made it look like I couldn’t move too quick, needed minutes, not seconds, if anyone was looking on to get up to a trick or two with my handsome guard.

The next week the keeper went back to her meal and her rest but the Akron boy walked behind me and I did my emptying duties exactly the same. I got some help on how it would work best to proceed the day after that when the keeper came in to see us. She was in a foul mood — tripped over my leg and gave me a rich portion of good, sharp smacks. The Akron boy was standing behind her. I did not say a word. After a time he coughed and gulped and said maybe I’d had enough. The keeper turned on him, still kicking, and asked how it was any of his affair. I was a wildcat and needed my kicks. The Akron boy said he had known me once. This set the keeper, whose mind ran with the slop trench, to chuckling and she gave me one more good kick and said she bet I was tasty. The Akron boy turned the color of the freshest autumn apple when she said this. He got so red it changed the color of the floor and the walls.

“Thank you,” I told him the next week we went out with the slops.

“You are welcome, Gallant Ash,” he said.

“You took my part and I appreciate that.”

“There was a time I wouldn’t have had to. You don’t seem as sturdy as you used to.”

“No,” I said. “I expect I’m not. You look like you’ve found your muscles though.”

That blush came back to his face when I said this. Likely it was the size of the lie that helped turn his color. He hadn’t found his muscles. He looked like he had been turned out of a prison camp last week. There wasn’t any muscle on him at all.

The fourth week he was not there and I feared he had been detailed away. I was sick to retching when the fifth week came and still he had not returned. It was a big fellow gave me a jab or two with his musket who followed me down to the alcove. It was evil cold that day so I got away with only a bad minute of him standing too close and breathing on me with his foul breath.

“We’ll talk on it closer next time,” he said.

On the sixth week, though, I got pushed down to the yard by the keeper to do some shaving for the first time since I’d sat in the chair and there the Akron boy was, leaning against a wall. Heaven drips down its gifts. It was five or six of them, though not the Akron boy, there for my services, in their shirtsleeves, and as I shaved the first one, the one who’d breathed hard on me the week before, he said, “Now, don’t you go and cut my throat,” and I said, “No, sir, I won’t,” and he said, “Because I’ve heard you’re a fierce one.” I shaved through them all, taking my time at it, looking from minute to minute at the Akron boy leaning slumped over some against the far wall.

“What about him?” I said when I had pulled my rag off the last one.

“Him?” said my bad breather. “Shave’s not what he needs.”

“Let him have a shave,” said another.

“He looks like he needs it,” I said.

“There’s plenty he needs.”

“He’s coming back, though.”

“Shave would do him good.”

“Did it do you good?”

“Plenty good.”

They went on like this awhile and then I found the Akron boy sitting in front of me. He wouldn’t speak and looked ashamed. I chalked it up to the teasing.

“I haven’t seen you in some while,” I said.

“He’s been otherwise entertained,” said the bad breather. This made all the others laugh.

The Akron boy didn’t have much beard but it was more than he had had when we had sat down together and taken our shaves in the long ago. More and plenty. I had only one brown rag to dip in and out of the big bucket of cooling water they had but I let it sit on his face a good while. When I took it off I thought I saw some smile in his eyes.

He came back to slop-jar guard duty the next day, looking even paler without his beard than he had the day before, and as we started our walk down to the alcove, I asked after his health. He told me he had been down with a wound wouldn’t heal and a sick headache come along to offer the wound its company. The wound wasn’t old but the sick headache he had had to confront since his earliest days. I expressed my sympathies, found a way to touch him a half a second on his hand, told him I was sorry about the teasing he had taken, asked him if he had enjoyed his shave. He did his blush again and quivered his lip and looked at my fingers and said that the following week he expected to be redeployed out to the western front; some of the ones had teased him, including the bad breather, had already left. I said that the western front sounded like it was far away.

“About as far away as it gets,” he said.

“We were about that far away in that house in the woods,” I said.

“I expect that’s true.”

“You can’t get any farther away from the world than the borders of the bleak beyond.”

It was cool even though we were getting good into springtime, and the Akron boy had on his long coat. It dragged a little on the ground behind him and he walked with his musket held slack. I gandered back in his direction when I talked. He had a dreamy look in his eye. He was a boy should have been fishing a creek, not standing guard in a prison madhouse.

“How is that old Colonel of ours now?” I asked.

“Not a colonel anymore. He got made a general. Sits in the big camp over yonder.”

“Well, the world just turns and turns.”

“They say he talks to himself. I haven’t seen it.”

“Don’t we all do that?”

“I don’t.”

“No, probably you don’t. You look solid.”

“You think so? I been working at it. I wish you would tell them that.”

“Tell who that?”

He didn’t answer me. Just looked a little more lost in his big coat.

I set the jar down, readjusted my grip, and picked it back up again. A rain was now making brown splotches on the dirt around us. There was a sleeping dog under an empty wood shelf and a pair of chickens in a twig cage by the far wall about dead and heading for someone’s soup. “That was quite a trick I played out there in the woods on those Secesh wanted to eat us for their supper, wasn’t it?” I said as we rounded the corner, putting us out of sight of the building, and stepped toward the trench. There was a kind of roof over the alcove, and the rain acted like it was fixing to drum it down.

“Yes, it sure was, Gallant Ash,” he said.

“They don’t call me that here,” I said.

He didn’t answer, just looked at me, his head tilted a little and his mouth open like you see sometimes on the dead. I stepped out into the rain, emptied the slops like it was real work for me, then came back under the roof and turned to him.

“You want to see how I did it?” I said, lowering my voice. “See me drop off my clothes? We got time. No one’ll notice. You want to see it done?”

He was quiet and had gone all autumn-apple-colored again but there was a minute I thought I’d misjudged him. There was a minute I thought he had aged up to go with that scrub beard of his I’d shaved off and was going to work his scrawny arms and lift his gun. I thought he was going to fire it at me and that I would fall down the slop hole and get stuck or splatter off down the stream. I think it was the pleasure I should have felt at this prospect but didn’t that brought me back, made me move.

I said, “I know you didn’t know all those days what it was I had hiding in my shirt. You know why I signed up? So I could get next to men, men like you.”

He coughed and gulped. He shook his head and bit at his lip. He kicked one of his boots against the other. He opened his mouth and tried to swallow. But he set his musket against the wall.

“Lean in close, now, and you can learn all the trick of it you like,” I said.

I had the wooden lid to the slop jar still in my hand. He set his tongue along his lips, leaned in close to my shoulder. I reached up with my free hand and ran a finger across his smooth cheek, then I swung up with the other and hit him hard.

“All you do for this trick,” I told him as I started unbuttoning his coat, “is change your clothes. You take yours off and put other ones on. Let’s try it now. You and me together. See how it works.”

So it was him wore the thin dress and walked in front with the empty slop jar as we went back. I had fixed his bayonet and bought his attention with a gentle slice to his side. I had told him if he so much as gave out a shiver as we went back to the cell I would put an end to his days. Like I had put an end to those outlaws we’d left in the woods.

“I never meant any harm,” he said.

“No, I expect you probably didn’t,” I said.

We walked. We passed a soldier or three but they were ones I hadn’t seen before and none gave us the barest look. I well knew how to walk like a man, and the Akron boy in my dress with his long golden locks made a maiden fairer than I. The keeper was on her chair in her room dozing over her coffee and porridge and did not raise her head as we passed. I put the Akron boy in the cell with the women, put a shackle on his leg, made him give me every countersign he knew, then tied a rag around his mouth. Even when he waved his arms at me and I saw again the angry wound on the top muscle of his left arm that I had already seen when I had made him undress in the yard, and that I would see in dreams to come, and can see again to this day, I did not waver. I yanked his mouth rag snug and left him there to wait. To wait to be stripped again of his guard duties, to be put back in the chair, marched out on his own bucket dreams, go back to the men’s quarters they had let him emerge from a minute, and moan out his fresh tale of woe.

“You tell them over there that Gallant Ash sends his regards,” I whispered at him.

Don’t leave me here like this, his eyes spoke back.

One of the heavy gals wasn’t heavy anymore came over at me when I was standing up from tying his rag, and I took a minute to pay her and her friend back for having stolen my food. The keeper, for her part of it, got the musket butt to the side of her head. I had not eaten in two days so I gobbled down what she hadn’t eaten of her porridge and drank her coffee and, before I left, sat a minute on her chair.

I expect anyone just come out of that place would have run about as fast as he could for the hills but run is not what I did. Instead, I walked out slowly through the front door, past the sleepy guards posted there, gave them each a good grin, got back a brace of grins in return, shouldered my new Springfield, and set off down the road and out of the town where the sick house was and back to the one where Neva Thatcher had her quiet little home. I passed many a footsore soldier along the way. They just nodded at me or asked for news, but I shook my head and said I had none to give. One fellow louder than the others called out about the Wilderness fight and how so many wounded boys had died of fire and not their wounds. There was a picket detail on the bridge led into Neva Thatcher’s town who liked the countersign I gave them and let me through. They had a battle going somewhere nearby and I went through town with an ammunition convoy dragged by tired, hoof-cracked mules.

The battle going on must have been somewhere picturesque without any burning boys to it because there was a party of handsome-dressed fancy people carrying field glasses fixing to ride out to inspect it. The oldest man of the group gave me a right smart nod when I went by, like he was looking forward to seeing me fight a little later in the day. I nodded back, then crossed through the mule train to the other side of the street. A little later I crossed back over and walked up the path and around the back and into Neva Thatcher’s house.

You could hear the battle about as well inside as you could outside but inside it was warm and neat. The old kind of quiet made of mists and dust-gloom reigned there. Neva Thatcher had her breakfast cup drying on the sideboard, and a pile of apples waiting to help get her through the week. She had salt pork and hardtack sitting next to a lump of lard in the cupboard. A stone jug of cool water from her well. In the side room I found her underthings and dresses folded neat. I chose a green-colored gown and a pair of sturdy shoes couldn’t have fit me much better and made a bundle of them with the food I had recruited from the kitchen. Then I went to the dining room.

The chinaware was dusted fresh, its flowers and animals sleeping quiet. Some of the afternoon sun was thieving in through the blinds and nibbling at it. There were motes adrift in the light. I lifted up a hand through some of it and made them swirl. I took up Neva’s grandaunt’s teapot by its handle, carried it to the dining table, lifted it, and started to bring it down. I had had it in my mind the whole walk there to break her chinaware and lay the broken pieces across her floor but holding the pretty thing in my hand, I found I could not do it and instead simply carried the teapot to her room and set it on her pillow. There where she laid her linden-berry head and dreamed her linden-berry dreams. She helped the wounded, shepherded the sick. She had helped me. Then she hadn’t. There it was. I could feel it. I had it again. I knew where she kept a mallet and I fetched it out and went back to her room and I pounded the china-pot heirloom on her bed pillow until its powders were floating up into the air. After I had finished, I stood awhile in front of the rest. Picked up one of the monkey plates. Thought some more. But in the end I put down the plate, dropped the mallet, and left Neva Thatcher’s house.

I went next to the camp outside of town. The pickets were down and I walked right through the camp and a few hundred yards more along a corduroy road to the rear line. Some of the mules I had walked with earlier were just shambling up. I passed a group of cooks playing poker with a second lieutenant in the shade of an apple tree. Men in reserve waiting to see if they would have a turn on the front line that day were dozing in the sun. I still had my coat on, and one or two eyed me a little closer than I liked so I took it off. There was a tall major wearing a stovepipe hat looked a minute like Abraham Lincoln who was swearing at his mount. The wounded were already coming through the trees. I saw one boy crawling with a slick of blood emerging from the corner of his mouth. Every couple of feet he would cough and the slick would spread. There were tears on his dusty cheeks. He kept looking around him and calling out for water. He was crawling to a grave would open up any minute and it made me tired to look at him so I went up to the rise where I had seen the commander’s flag.

My Colonel now a General had his desk set up in front of a day tent. He had left off the start of a letter addressed to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to go to his duty. I picked up this start to a letter and put it down. All he had had time to write on it was the words My Dear. There wasn’t anywhere a soul not seeing to some business, and not one of those souls spoke to me. Down the hill there was a rebel charge. We had guns set on the high ground and blew it, by the sound of screaming afterward, to rough bits. I set the overcoat on the General’s chair and tore off the bottom half of his piece of paper. I took up his pen and wrote Found myself something warmer to wear on one line, and on the next, just like you told me I should, and I set the paper on top of the overcoat. Then I laid down my borrowed musket, walked away from that battle and that camp, found some bushes, and changed my clothes.