Neverhome by Laird Hunt

Author:Laird Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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