I had that dirt in my stomach when the Colonel called at my tent earlier than I liked the next morning and stood outside quietly coughing a minute while I clambered up out of my blankets and stepped over my fellow sleepers and tugged on my shoes.
“I hear there are fat squirrels in those woods, Gallant Ash,” he said when I was up and out in front of him with my jacket pulled half on.
“Yes, sir, I have heard the same,” I said.
“Heard or seen?” he said.
“Seen,” I said, then added, “There’s lots of them,” though I wasn’t sure at that minute whether or not any part of this was true.
“Well, I have a cook, this fellow here,” he said, pointing at a cinnamon-colored man with a snowy beard was holding a brace of good-looking hunting metal, “who claims if I can come up with the substance, he can make me a fine squirrel stew. You think we can come up with the substance?”
“I have shot squirrel before.”
“I would have laid down money on it.”
We carried our weaponry through the still dark and headed straight for the deeper portion of the woods. We had to go a good ways because everyone in the regiment had made firing into the trees for dinner meat his de facto religion. It was the Colonel who led the walk and who used this choice phrase, de facto, and explained to me what it meant.
“So you can say a thing is one way all you want but de facto means it’s the other,” I said.
“De facto is the way it actually is.”
“Are we losing this war or winning it?”
The Colonel let the quiet of the morning answer a while at my question that hadn’t had anything close to do with what we were just talking about. Then he let the small cigar he pulled out of his pocket and nibbled the end off of and lit answer at it some more.
“You can still shoot squirrel even if I’m smoking, can’t you?” he said.
“Aren’t you planning on shooting any yourself?”
“I don’t see too well at a distance, especially not in a low light.”
I almost at that minute told him that my husband suffered from the same affliction, came only a thin string away from uttering it. Stood looking down but leaning backward at the precipice.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes what?” he said.
“I can shoot squirrel and you still smoke.”
I did. Three of them, silver as glittery snakes, two good-size. I took them all through the head near their nests while the Colonel sat on one log after another with his cigar. After the first one fell near fifty yards off from where we were situated, he apologized for not having brought along a dog.
“I never did hunt with a dog,” I said.
“I always have. When my eyes were still adequate I used to hunt for duck and other waterfowl. Dogs were indispensable. We are short on good dogs in this regiment.”
“I have seen dogs swim but never had one that much liked to.”
“On your farm in Darke County?”
“That’s not really where I’m from.”
“Isn’t it?”
I looked away from him and deeper into the trees. Felt him shrug. Waited for him to say something else about it but he just sat there, quiet, peering at me with those eyes he’d said didn’t work too well.
“Sir, will it make a difference? Does it make any difference?” I said.
“That you are not from where you claimed to come from when you enlisted?”
I nodded.
“I have at least two officers who are not from the cities they claim in their paperwork to have a connection to. I can offer only gross conjecture when it comes to the numbers among the enlisted men. I expect many who have died in our fights together weren’t from where they said they were.”
“I’m from another state altogether, I said.”
“All right,” he said, then added. “As long as it isn’t a Southern state. Although now as I say it, I don’t know why that would matter. If you are loyal of heart.”
“I am loyal of heart,” I said.
“I know it,” he said after a minute.
“I’m from Indiana.”
“Our good brother to the west.”
“I had my reasons.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“If I die, you might let them know about it in Randolph County, Indiana.”
“At the Thompson farm?”
“Yes, sir, if it weren’t too much trouble.”
“I expect it wouldn’t be. But let’s all hold off on dying.”
“How do we do that, sir?”
He shook his head, smiled a little, then sucked in good and long on his cigar.
“Do you want me to clean these?” I asked.
It took him a minute to know what it was I was talking about, like he had gone off a long way into thoughts didn’t necessarily include me and had to journey back to the squirrels and woods to make me my answer.
“The cook can do it. In fact, he told me expressly not to let anyone besides him get anywhere near them with a sharpened knife.”
“All right,” I said.
“Yes, it is all right, Gallant Ash.”
We were in an airy place, a clearing amidst the darker reaches of walnut and hickory and loblolly pine. There were orioles and sparrows at early-morning play in the trees and a breeze carrying through the side-lit trunks could have made you believe it wasn’t fixing any second now to get good and hot. At home I had hunted once a week even in winter but I had not picked up a gun to fire at anything wasn’t a human being since the Colonel had sent me out after that extra pig. When he handed me one of his small cigars I took it and let him fetch me a light and sat there and breathed air and smoke and felt the dirt from the night before that I had stirred up in talking about Indiana settle back in my stomach. After a while we strung up the handsome squirrels I had shot and talked some more about hunting dogs, then returned to camp.
The Colonel sighed a long loud sigh after we had reached his quarters and he had thanked me for my company and we had handed over the squirrels and our fine rifles to the Colonel’s cook. I wanted to ask him what made him sigh so loud but there are some questions you don’t get to ask and our walk together was done. Also the cook, with some stage flair, sniffed at the barrels of the rifles we had handed him and rolled his eyeballs in the direction of the Colonel once his nostrils had completed their inspection of the unfired one. When the cook had finished this pantomime, which the Colonel acknowledged with one raised gray eyebrow only, he took up a knife and set to work on the squirrels with such fierce devotion to the chore that neither one of us could take our eyes off him. Later that afternoon, just like the Colonel promised me when I parted ways with him, I found a covered bowl of stew had my name on it sitting on a crack-legged stool outside my tent. I don’t know why I took it into my head to tote that bowl off away into the woods to eat. To sit alone in the dusk light next to a holly bush, bats and owls beginning to scar the air above my head, and sup slowly on that stew that tasted better by far than dirt.
You eat dirt, you dream strange dreams. Going-home dreams, dreams in which you try to run across your own fresh-plowed field in pants or dress either one and you can’t; in which, home at last, you try to work your own front-door latch and you can’t make it budge. You eat handsome-cooked squirrel stew sent over to you by your Colonel, you don’t dream at all. Is the way I experienced it. Dead as a dark day to the world and slow to rise again. Fact it took a solid kick to my side applied by the tent mate I had told to go to hell to rouse me. He grinned and nodded when I thanked him for it. He didn’t grin as much when I punched him, good and hard, at the meaty part at the top of his arm.