Neverhome

ON WRITING NEVERHOME

The seed for Neverhome was planted eighteen years ago when my wife bought me a copy of An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman. That seed eventually grew into a very short story that tells the tale of two women who go off to fight in the war. The women, close friends, are initially swept up in the adventure, only to be ground down by the horror of the conflict. One of the women is captured and exposed for what she is and made to suffer in the worst way at the hands of her fellow prisoners. Her friend is waiting for her when she is finally released. This is how “A Pine Forest,” narrated by the friend who is waiting, concludes:

We walked the roads until she one day got her voice back. “Now that was something and goddamn that was something and goddamn all of it to hell,” she said. She said this as we were walking through a pine forest. Every step we took through that forest lifted up something soft and special to smell. You could have just laid down on that ground and gone right to sleep or died. There we went a walking. We turned a corner and come upon a pool of water. When we stepped up close to drink we saw it was shallow and full of dead crickets. She looked at those crickets and the tears came welling up. “Every one of them is dead,” she said. We cried and cried.

Some time after writing those words, I chanced to read a comment by Tony Horwitz, author of the excellent Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, to the effect that there was still much unturned earth in the history of that conflict, so many stories still to be told. This made me think again of all those women — historians place the number at around four hundred, though it was probably more — who, like Sarah Wakeman and the imagined characters in “A Pine Forest,” went to war and fought for their country, even though their country didn’t want them, or wanted them only as long as they could conceal their identity as women. What, I asked myself, would prompt a young woman to leave home when no one expected her to, to travel far away and face not only bullets and cannon balls but also the fear of discovery? What well of joys and sorrows might underpin such a decision, and would this person, at the end of her perilous journey, return home again to drink from it? I thought about these things and others and took a deep breath. For I had suddenly caught my first glimpse of Ash Thompson, pulling on a pair of sturdy shoes and setting off for war. And I knew I had to gather up my own courage and follow her.