“She wouldn’t speak a word when she left that evil place and so 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’ is what she said.”
Leander had made this comment as they were walking through a pine forest. Every step in that forest had lifted up something soft and special to smell. You could, Leonidas told me as we sat smoking on my steps, have just laid down on that ground and gone right to sleep or died.
“But we didn’t die yet and 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. Leander looked at those crickets and the tears came climbing up. ‘Every one of them is dead,’ she said. We cried and cried.”
As they were returning home at last by paddleboat, Leander was taken by a fever and had joined the crickets, along with a number of others. The paddleboat captain, fearing further infection, had organized a burial party on a sandbar. Leonidas had tried as best she could to mark the spot but when she returned some while later she found nothing of her friend but the wide waters of the river. As for her subsequent life without Leander she remarked, “I made it back, sure enough, but never felt I’d made it home.”
In the days following this visit, which ended very soon after those last words, I wrote a letter down to Yellow Springs, to the General, to tell him that it was true that I had stolen food out of haversacks, that I was sorry for it and did not know why I had done it and wished I could put all that food I had stolen and eaten back. That maybe things would have turned out different and for the better if I had done so. Leonidas had asked me not to speak of her in any communication with the General, so instead I asked after Weatherby and Weatherby’s grandson and the General’s wife and told the General to send them all my regards.
My husband was long since deceased, I wrote him. By my own hand. I had seen him garbed but not disguised in cloak and hat and climbing up the ladder carrying my mother’s musket, and I had grown frightened — of what had been and what was there — and had seen him in my mind’s eye taking aim at me with it, even though he had not taken aim at me, and I had shot him.
He comes to me sometimes, I wrote. He comes and sits with me at my table or stands in my doorway after I’ve had one of my bad dreams or goes walking out on some business across the yard. I try to talk to him but he will not talk to me. Only sits or stands there. Not all things disappear quickly.
It was a long letter. I included in it too an apology that when the General had come to see me in the lunatic house, I had unbuttoned my dress and made to sit in his lap. I apologized for having scratched his face and hit him with the vase of flowers at the start of his visit and for having cursed him to his grave when he shoved me away. I told him I had since tried to do better but had not always done better.
Fear finds you out, I wrote. It always finds you out.
I have not had any answer yet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Neverhome could not have come into being without the help and support of Linda K. Wickens, Susan Schulten, Susie Schlesinger, Susan Manchester, Kathryn Hunt, Selah Saterstrom, Eva Sikelianos Hunt, K. Allison Wickens, Harry Mathews, Anna Stein, Chris Fischbach, Josh Kendall, Nicole Dewey, Miriam Parker, Pamela Marshall, Garrett McGrath, and Eleni Sikelianos (always). Profound thanks also to the Lannan Residency Program in Marfa, Texas.
A few of the many excellent works I consulted during the writing of Neverhome deserve special mention: Dearest Susie: A Civil War Infantryman’s Letters to His Sweetheart by Frank Ross McGregor; The Civil War Notebook of Daniel Chisholm, edited by W. Springer Menge and J. August Shimrak; Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac by Frank Wilkeson; The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust; They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook; and, most crucially, An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, Alias Private Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862–1864 by Lauren Cook Burgess.
The Southern Landscapes and battlefield photographs of Sally Mann were indispensable in helping me travel with Ash through mid-nineteenth-century America, as were the first two New History Warfare albums of Colin Stetson and the song “Sorrow, Sorrow” by Lorna Hunt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laird Hunt is the author of several works of fiction. He won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2013 and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and a two-time finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Fiction. A former United Nations press officer currently on the faculty of the University of Denver’s creative writing program, he and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.
READING GROUP GUIDE NEVERHOME: A NOVEL BY LAIRD HUNT
An online version of this reading group guide is available at littlebrown.com.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. From the opening sentence, we know that the narrator, Ash, instead of her husband, chooses to fight in the Civil War. By the end of the novel, we recognize that there may be several reasons for her choice. What do you think was her greatest motivation for leaving? What do you think Ash herself believes about her choice?
2. Did Neverhome change your understanding of the Civil War?
3. As represented in Neverhome, what is the role of women in the Civil War, and what in particular is the relationship between women and violence? What might be the larger implications of Ash’s donning a woman’s dress to evade and then kill the bandits?
4. Describe Ash’s relationships with the various women in the novel, such as Neva, Ash’s mother, and the Colonel’s wife. How are the relationships similar? How are they different? What do her interactions with each reveal about Ash?
5. Discuss the role of men in Ash’s life, both before and during the war.
6. Why does the Colonel take such a particular interest in Ash? Discuss the squirrel hunting, the battle midway through the novel with the Colonel’s kinsman, and the visit in the psychiatric hospital.
7. How does Ash feel about her husband and her marriage? Do those feelings change when she returns from the war? Are those feelings different at the end of the book?
8. The narrative alternates structurally between intensity and calm, horror and grace, reaction and reflection. How does this structure clarify your understanding of war and deepen your understanding of Ash?
9. Go back through the novel and highlight the letter-writing efforts of Ash and others. What role do letters play in the story? Most fundamentally, what function does the act of letter-writing perform for the novel’s characters?
10. What is the symbolic import of Weatherby’s greenhouse? How might his damaged grandson be connected to its construction?
11. What is Ash’s motivation for telling her story? Is Neverhome a confessional, and if so, is there more than one reason for Ash to confess? What acts, both major and minor, impel her to tell her story? Does Ash actually understand or know herself?