There had been a few ambulances with room for him, and the occasional farmer with space in his wagon had shown sympathy, but before he could explain as much, his mother interrupted.
“What did they do to your face? How bad was it? You must tell us everything and leave out nothing.”
“I’m afraid there’s not much of a story. Happened before I was captured. Just the boys fooling around. A late night and we’d had a few too many. Nothing exciting.”
He bit into the bread and after a second finished off the cheese. His parents seemed to be waiting for him to speak, and the expectation that he might somehow lead the interrogation they’d started was worse than their prodding.
“Has all been well here?” he asked.
His mother again looked at the floor near his chair.
“Other than my untimely death,” he said, in an effort to lighten things.
“These are difficult times for everyone,” his father said. “I think your mother would agree.”
It was then that he noticed the vastness of the space between his parents: the way they had yet to make eye contact, or draw near each other, or even exchange words. He had come so far to return to what little he knew, and all at once it appeared that it might no longer exist. While his parents had been waiting, interminably, for him to find his way home, they had changed, and now all three of them were altered but in the same place they’d occupied for so many years.
He was having trouble sitting still, his knee bouncing and his foot chattering against the floorboard.
“Perhaps we could continue this later on,” he said. “If I could just get a little rest I think it might do wonders.”
His mother stood up.
“Of course. Your bed is made. Everything is tidied up. Fresh towels on your dresser.”
She squeezed him so hard it robbed him of breath. Then her hand slipped to his side and alighted on the leather of his holster. They’d been made to turn their guns over to the Union, yet he’d managed to hide the sidearm, knowing what might befall him on the journey home, the dangers that found men alone on the open road. His mother pulled back and stared at the weapon.
His father stood, too, and eyed the pistol with caution.
“No need for that anymore,” he said. “I’ll put it with your grandfather’s rifles in the cellar.”
It was best to oblige them, Caleb knew—to return, as thoroughly as possible, to the edition of himself they’d once known: a boy who would never lay a hand on something so vulgar. He unholstered the pistol and passed it to his father.
Upstairs, his room, as clean as his mother had described, exuded an element of the macabre—the miniature walking sticks of his youth, leaning against the wall, had been dusted and polished; his hats, stacked in a column, were spotless, unmarred by so much as a speck of dust. How long would she have kept this up? Months? Years? His death something best laundered away on a washboard, swept up with a broom.
He removed his boots and then his trousers and fell onto his bed in a heap. He slept peacefully but was greatly confused upon waking, not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there, as had been the case for so many days preceding this one. The difference this time was that, reaching to the side of the bed, he could not find his trousers. A bleary glance out the window revealed his mother dipping his pants into the boiling water of the copper washing kettle. She slapped at them with the dipping spoon, hard enough to get a life’s worth of grime from the rags. He thought he would have to go pant-less about his home, until he remembered the drawer full of clothes across the room, a bounty to a man who had held on so dearly, to so little, for so long.
*
His father had killed a hen for supper the night before but Caleb hadn’t woken up to eat it. In the morning he tore at it, and his mother, seated with him at the table, watched him as if it was a performance, an animal picking at scraps. When he finished he informed her he wished to head into town, and her disappointment was almost enough to make him change his mind.
“You act like I’m a prisoner here, too,” he said.
“Don’t say that, don’t ever say that. I just wish to spend time with you.”
“We’ll have a world’s worth of time. Won’t be a thing to do but sit around here together. No reason to rush it.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and pushed his chair back. “Where’s the old man?”
His mother nodded to the barn, from which his father was now returning. Caleb went onto the porch and his father gingerly made his way over to him and asked how he was feeling.