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.

Neverhome - Pg 11

   I was slow at my writing back then and using my pen to make words that would still mean something after traveling so many miles seemed a strange chore. I would read through my letters before I posted them off and it seemed like I was reading the letters of a stranger to a stranger and I did not like the way this made me feel.

Neverhome - Pg 8

   My mother had traveled in a train once and I told her I wanted to travel like her. Whoosh across the countryside, float the length of its long waters in a boat. I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Walk forward with a thousand others. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run... We both of us, me and Bartholomew, knew what my mother would have said in response and so it was like she was saying it each time I asked her what she thought.
   Go on. Go on and see what you got.

Neverhome - Pg 6

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

Neverhome - Pg 5

   They handed me my firearm. It was a Model 1861 muzzle-loading Springfield rifle with flip-up sights and percussion lock, and they said you could use it to kill a man a quarter mile away. That was something to think about. How you could rifle a man down was looking at you and you at him but never see his face. I hadn't figured it that way when I had thought on it back home. I had figured it would be fine big faces firing back and forth at each other, not threads of color off at the horizon. A dance of men and not just their musket balls.