FICTION
“Neverhome”
Laird Hunt
Little, Brown and Company, $26, 256 pages
“I was strong and he was not,” says Ash Thompson, the sepia-toned narrator of “Neverhome,” Laird Hunt’s remarkable new novel, “so it was me went to fight the war to defend the Republic.”
Hunt, whose last book (“Kind One”) presented an explosive portrait of slavery on a Kentucky hog farm, now turns his knowledge of the era to the Civil War and some of its most unsung heroes: female soldiers.
It’s 1862 when Ash leaves Indiana to join up with the Union Army. He comes across a handful of like-minded souls, and as they make their way southward, the men drink whiskey and run races, and Ash arm-wrestles and competes in knife-throwing contests. People cheer as the little ragtag band passes by.
Not until they hit Ohio does an old woman take “a long look” at Ash and warn him to watch his step.
Hers, actually. Ash, whose real name is Constance, is a lionhearted farm wife from Indiana who fights in her husband’s stead, leaving him behind to protect their land. Ash’s hidden identity is just one of several secrets the cross-dressing sharp-shooter keeps close to her tightly bound bosom.
It’s estimated that between 400 and 750 women disguised as men fought in the Civil War. They did it for money, freedom, and love of country; for revenge, companionship, and adventure. Their exploits, once vividly recaptured in newspapers and memoirs, were gradually forgotten, replaced by the more acceptable version of war found in history books. Hunt says he was inspired by a collection of letters written by Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, who was counted as a Union casualty in 1864.
A modern-day Odyssey—“Penelope gone to war,” observes one character, “and Odysseus staying home”—“Neverhome” takes place in a single year and unfolds in the spare, plain-spoken language of an uneducated woman for whom writing is “a strange chore.” Driving the story is Ash’s desire to exorcise the ghosts of her past, gradually revealed through dreams, memories and imaginary conversations she has with her dead mother.
Despite her successful camouflage, Ash realizes as soon as she shoots her first man that to maintain her cover she must curb her tender heart. “I wanted to take up the dead man’s head and cradle it but I did not do that and knew that that kind of a thought was another thing I was going to have to learn to kill.”
As he did in “Kind One,” Hunt effortlessly renders the cadences of the region and the times: A dancing couple “clabber arm in arm.” A dying soldier “caught his ravishing.” A “likeness-maker” takes Ash’s photograph. The book’s historical accuracy builds from small, everyday details such as the tintype of her beloved Bartholomew that Ash sews into her clothing so as not to lose it during combat, or her account of the soldiering done in between.
“I stripped trees with a red Indian out of New York State had green and purple tattoo stripes up and down his legs and arms, and I … loaded wagons with the sad flesh of soon-to-be corpses next to Chinamen who couldn’t speak English and Chinamen who could speak it better than me ….”
Hunt weaves together Ash’s story with that of her Colonel, a shrewd and sensitive commander who guesses her secret and has a few of his own. It’s one of the many ways the author serves up the Odyssean theme of disguise or concealment to invert and subvert gender and historical stereotypes.
Within a few hours of being captured by rebels as a Union soldier, Ash discovers a womanly advantage that turns the idea of the weaker sex on its head. Following a near-fatal accident on the battlefield, she finds shelter with a Confederate widow whose interest in Ash takes more than one unexpected turn. And a slave she meets on her journey home — a woman who “had shouldered her rifle awhile for the Fifth U.S. Colored” — surprises Ash with her adamant refusal to “share the road.”
Many a casualty of war — Union and Confederate alike — step forward to reveal how it has transformed them, from soldiers to civilians to orphans in search of a new mother. Near the end, an old man tells Ash his version, “the one you can read about in books now if you care to.” In it, the carnage and the women soldiers have been expunged in favor of “captains and colonels and generals leading each other in one after another handsome charge.”
But glorious memories have their place, the veteran reminds her: “You say something one way instead of the other often enough and maybe the thing quits crawling into bed with you and stroking its claws at your cheek.”
Instead, Ash tells her truth — just as she fought the war, without ever running away.
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