NEVERHOME - LAIRD HUNT

Neverhome - Pg 229

   "Good night," my mother said to me when she had finished. She touched my arm and held it when she said this. Later it was more than one time I would look down at my arm and think I could see a mark she had left in touching me. Who is to say that's just folly? Who is to say what it is we have left on us after we have been touched? There is the world with its night-walking women and then there is what happens in it.

Neverhome - Pg 212

   We almost never talked as we ate. Just let our fingers go out and open jars and cut slices and spread spreads. It was one of these nights, as we were eating hoecakes and honey, that she put her hand on my hand and asked me if I was awake or asleep.
   "I don't know," I said, so she told me to follow her and we went out to the pump where she had me fill a bowl and give it to her. Then she lifted up that bowl and poured it over my head.
   For a minute I was far away. I was back in the heat of Virginia. I was standing at the General's side. He was asking me to be a sharpshooter; I was hiding in a well; whole days went by as I waited to take my shot, and then I was in a tree, swaying with its branches, leaning with its leaves, aiming my gun. "I know you didn't steal out of any of your own comrades' haversacks, I know it, you are my sharpshooter, you are my best soldier," the General said. The bowl came back up off my head before I could answer.
   The General's wife told me then as I dripped out there in the yard in Ohio and not on the fighting fields of Virginia that I could stay at her house for as long as I wanted but that it was time to wake now, that I had slept long enough.

Neverhome - Pg 209

   "You're a nice fellow and you have been kind to me, but it wasn't pretty like the way you're saying it," I said.
   He stopped the wagon when I said this... then flicked his stump up sideways in the air... The knobbly end of it was browner than any other part of him that I could see.
   "They burned that shut with an officer's hand iron," he said. "Fifty years ago and I can still feel it. I mentioned earlier I had been to war. It took them four tries, and they had to heat up the iron again between each time. But that's the gentle part of my tale. I know something other than knights in armor about this war we got now... You say something one way instead of the other often enough and maybe the thing quits crawling into your bed with you and stroking its claws at your cheek."

Neverhome - Pg 153

   That very night in a dream I went rushing over the treetops... 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 cinder 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.

Neverhome - Pg139

   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.

Neverhome - Pg 138

   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.

Neverhome - Pg 125

   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...
   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... 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.

Neverhome - Pg 122

   "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... We stood both of us, Neva and I, with our arms hanging at our sides and only our mouths pressed together.

Neverhome - Pg 115

   I could not run after I had left the schoolhouse-hospital grounds and climbed a fence and gone into the trees... 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.

Neverhome - Pg 94

   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.

Neverhome - Pg 75

I had on my mind that church steeple wasn't there and those graves in the forest that weren't graves. They were on my mind but I didn't know how to think about them so I shut my eyes.

Neverhome - Pg 74

   She asked the Akron boy sitting closest to her to tell his tale and when he had gotten about five words into it she stopped him and said, "May I kiss you?"
   He appeared struck. Took a hard swallow. "If you got to," he said.
   So she leaned over and did the job. Right there at the table over cold pork and corn bread.

Neverhome - Pg 70

   "We got to get on," I said.
   "Stay and tell your story," said the grandpa. "Everyone gets a turn."
   "We got miles to walk."
   "Boy, those miles will wait on you. They won't go anywhere."...
   The grandpa had grown a kind of leer to him. He had his crutch up in the air again. There were others starting to look on.
   "Tell us the story about how you are going to kill us all. Kill us and our babies," said the woman holding her little apple-head thing.
   "We don't want to hurt anyone," I said.
   "You won't hurt anyone," the woman said. "You can't hurt anyone. Not here. We're done hurting."

Neverhome - Pg 63

   "My horse is dreaming about a bullet we both of us took."
   I guessed the whiskey had worked up the swirl of war in him and when that happened you couldn't know what a man would say. I knew a man in the days after Antietam would drink whiskey then pull out a knife and start to working its point into himself. And not an hour before I had worn a dress and shot two men and killed another with a clay jug to the head. A man telling me what his horse was dreaming seemed small next to that.

Neverhome - Pg 58

   The lady who liked roses died before my mother was done growing up, and she got sent, her and her books and her picture, to live with an aunt on this farm.
   I don't know what happened to my mother's mother, not do I have much of any idea where that picture is now. What I do know is that when my mother was grown up and had had me and all that was past and she could sit on her own front porch and laugh again her own laugh, she would still dream to waking at night about thorns.

Neverhome - Pg 57

   When I was a child and my mother let me go, I used to run out to the rise with a feather band on my head. I expect I got a friend or two to play at it with me over the years. You can't pick anything up out of the dirt that will take you close to the true past, but the child a-dance at dusk amid the chopped-down cornstalks can conjure it.

Neverhome - Pg 53

   I had had it in mind that morning of my leaving that despite our troubles of the past year he would give me some fine Bartholomew word of parting, then wave at me as he wiped away a tear. Would stand tall and wave. Instead, he had looked one last time at me, wrapped his arms hard around his chest like he was afraid his lungs might leave him, and sat down.
   "You had better get to marching because I can't stand it to see you any longer when you are already gone," he said when I came over...
   "I am here," I whispered, bending close.
   "Off to war with you, Ash Thompson," he said.
   He said, "I will stay behind and guard this life we don't have and this family we don't got."

Neverhome - Pg 50

   There was no place for dresses that night back home. After we had done our climbing and racing, Bartholomew and I shucked off our britches both of us and lay down together at the edge of our yard. There were mosquitoes out in some number but we thrashed and rolled so eagerly that they barely got a chance at us. Bartholomew came up close on his completion and told me he wanted to stay. "Stay close now," he said. But I didn't.

Neverhome - Pg 48

   I do know that my mother had legs made of iron and that they were long, and the times I saw them bare they looked like they were holding themselves still and springy at the bottom of a rushing stream. I saw her legs those Sundays of the month we would take our bath. She would step out of the bath and those legs just kept on coming out of the water like they were tornadoes climbing up out of a pond.
   I saw boys in the war had legs some like hers but you wouldn't have traded hers for theirs.