Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

But the doctor nodded after a moment, his gray eyes watering, and then looked away, back at Leggett. “Is that man your company cook?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” said Hayes. “He’s only my—”

  “Get your rations from the company cook,” said the surgeon.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Speck stood, brushing ashes down the front of his shirt. “Well,” he said, “I’d best go collect my sword and the rest of my sweltering gear.”

  Hayes noticed that the surgeon was sweating. “Sir,” said Hayes, standing and squaring his shoulders, about to salute, but Speck reached for his hand. The surgeon held him thus with his right hand, tossed the butt of the cigar to the ground, and put his left on Hayes’s shoulder. He glanced at Hayes’s cartridge box, resting atop one of the rolled blankets. “Have you ever seen the wound these damned balls inflict in a man?” he asked. “The ragged tear an iron fragment cuts into a man’s flesh? The shattered bone?”

  “No, sir,” said Hayes.

  “Of course you haven’t,” he said, “not yet, but you will.”

  He released Hayes, took up his folding stool, and made to go. Three or four feet away, he stopped, turned, and looked again into Hayes’s eyes. “Everything’s about to change,” he said. “By sunrise tomorrow nothing will be the same. Of course I’m bound to be sticking with my own regiment. I don’t know when I shall see you again.”

  “No, sir,” said Hayes.

  “I trust you’ll understand me if I say I hope I don’t see you anytime soon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good luck to you, Hayes. God be with you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Once again the surgeon made to leave but returned to Hayes, and when next he spoke, it was with a confidential tone. “If you are wounded, son,” he said, “above all else, try to keep it clean. And if you should find yourself in a hospital, resist all drugs as best you can. Fresh air, clean water, sunlight, these will always be the best medicines.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hayes. “Thank you, sir.”

  Now the man started down the hill slowly, walking slump-shouldered, as if he were headed toward a punishment. Then, abruptly, he turned back in the direction of the sinks and quickened his pace.

  In another minute, Leggett was at Hayes’s side. He pushed his hat off his forehead and said, “What did Major Sawbones want with you?”

  “I’m not sure,” answered Hayes, continuing to look down the path of the surgeon’s departure. “He’d like for you to stop frying everything in sight.”

  Leggett laughed through his nose. “And I’d like to cross the Niagara Falls on a tightrope, but chances are that’s not gonna happen. I’d say he’s taken quite a fancy to you, anyways. Likable fellow that you are.”

  “He was in a dark enough mood, I guess,” said Hayes.

  “Ahh,” said Leggett, nodding slowly, “you’ll be running into plenty of that I reckon. As the sun sets tonight, I expect there’ll be no shortage of dark moods.”

  He squatted and began rooting through a pile of equipment on the ground, muttering something about needing his “good knife.” When he’d found it, he stood and pulled out a shirttail for the purpose of wiping the blade. “What I heard just now from Swift,” he said, “our whole corps is to march downriver to Ely’s Ford tonight. That’ll put us a stone’s throw from Chancellorsville … not a place I ever meant to revisit, I can tell you that. I just hope to heaven we don’t end up back in the Wilderness.” Now he quickly looked down at what Hayes had been about and pointed his finger at the scattered gear. “Bare essentials, Hayes,” he said, “bare essentials. Remember: after a few miles, five pounds feels like ten, and so forth. When we’re under way, fill your canteen every chance you get. It’s gonna be a warm night. And don’t wash your feet till we get to where we’re going. Wet feet, wet socks, sure blisters.”

  “How far’s Ely’s Ford?” asked Hayes.

  “Far enough to make you wish it was closer,” said Leggett. He turned back toward the campfire and his cooking. As he started to move away, he said, “I’ll tell you another thing. If them boys over there light up that bonfire they been building, they’ll get a hidin’ from the captain. Seems some paleface is always burning up his digs and showing Johnny we’re on the move.”

  Hayes stayed still for another minute, surveying the busy scene that stretched before him and thinking of the last letter he’d written to Sarah. In it, he’d described the encampment as an anthill and as a great panoramic painting in motion. A few hours from now—laden with knapsack, tent, blanket, gun, and ammunition—he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the men in his company, not far from this same spot, waiting his turn to fall in and move out. Across the knolls and gaps of darkness, musket barrels and bayonets would catch the sparse light from a sliver of a moon, a trembling necklace of upright and parallel lines, a fantastic flying fence in a dream, not of this world.

  THE AIR IN THE WOODS has grown heavy and stifling, the leaf- and needle-strewn ground boggy, the undergrowth thicker, the terrain undulating. Overhead, dark clouds, bloated and close, threaten to let loose a torrent. He has already heard rumbles of thunder, both ahead and behind. Mosquitoes dance about his head and arms, gnats whiz straight into his eyes and ears, and every other minute there’s a stick on the ground that resembles a snake and gives him a start. He can no longer tell what time of day it is. Hours earlier, the stream he’d been following turned westward, and so he left it, striking out in what his best lights told him was northeast. He means to stop soon and sleep, though he has no shelter from the coming downpour. He figures he’ll burrow in under the densest brush he can find. Anyway, the combination of his sweating and the heaviness of the air has kept his clothes still wet. A blunt mallet pounds inside his head, and his old friend, hunger, grumbles below. He has very little left in his bread bag now, and he must make it last.

  Ahead, he sees a clearing of some sort, an opening in the treetops where the gloomy light pours down onto a tract of blackened earth. As he draws closer, astonishment swells inside him, choking his breath—it is a swamp, the same swamp he has already encountered some hours ago, a scum-covered expanse out of which dead trees rise, their trunks swollen at the waterline. He stops some yards away, throws down his gear, and sits cross-legged on the ground, defeated; he pulls his shirt up over his head like a hood, a paltry protection from the gnats and mosquitoes. Now he admits to himself what has been a smoldering fear, kept at bay these last several hours since leaving the stream: he is lost, utterly. How can he have traveled in a great circle? The sky offers no help. Strangely, he finds himself thinking of how he’ll explain himself once back home in Brooklyn—what will he tell Sarah and his club mates?—and he envisions a headline above a story in the Eagle, SHORTEST MILITARY CAREER IN HISTORY. The absurdity of this concern, at this moment, makes him laugh, and once he has started, he feels he cannot stop, which frightens him into an abrupt silence, a silence that seems to expand outward from him in broader and broader circles until it fills the entire forest. He lowers his shirt from his head. Even the insects have deserted him. No bird sings. No breeze whispers in the pines. The war has ended, he thinks, this is the stillness of peace. And, No, it’s only a dream of death. Next a flash of white light and a peal of thunder that make him bring his arms to his head, followed by what at first sounds like wind approaching but quickly becomes rain, pelting, quickening the world. The dead stuff of the forest floor quivers, the underbrush quakes, the brown-green swamp appears to boil.

  He rolls onto his belly and creeps beneath the surrounding brush. Even in the face of his shame, Sarah won’t quite suppress her temptation to gloat. He’ll buckle pathetically under the interrogations of every man he meets. He’ll not be thought creditable, his story, the truth, taken as pretext. Certainly he’ll not be welcomed back by the Eckford Club. He’ll withdraw to an upstairs room, lower the shades, Ishmael of Hicks Street.

  Now he lays the haversack flat over his head, gripping its straps with his hands close t
o his ears. He feels the eyes of another traveler, nearby, watching him, but he cannot stir up the necessary pains to worry. The boys of the regiment, a receding but still-loved assembly, fight another battle toward Richmond, he thinks—perhaps the same rain falls on them—and as this thought forms in his mind, a hundred or more of them (somebody’s darlings) fall to their death … as he himself lives on, lost in the woods, fatuous to the core, and frets about his homecoming to Brooklyn.

  The rain on the bag sounds something like musketry. A shot of lightning. A long cannonade of thunder. Razors in his wounds. He sees himself from the high branch of a tree, drenched, prostrate, forgotten by God; and his mother, underwater, presses her face against the omnibus glass, long tresses of her hair, unpinned, serpentine, rise and fall about her head. The battle-ring in his ears merges with the din of the rain, and as he drifts into—what?—vacancy, all affairs empty, all cares worthless, it’s as if the storm and the whole silken pageant of May has moved inside his skull, home there, not wild but infinite, obliterating.

  He falls asleep and, in sleep, immediately returns to the burning Wilderness. The woods—sentient, willful, a tight network of limbs and vines—push back at him and breathe smoke into his eyes, scorching his face and hands, as he struggles to advance. Now and again he catches a glimpse of fire through the tangle, and as he proceeds, inch by inch, men and boys emerge from the thicket, some charred, some bleeding from the head, all panic-stricken and weeping, all making as best they can for the rear. He recognizes them only by their sort—youngsters from the drum corps, various officers, teamsters, horseless cavalrymen, an assortment of Negro servants in rags—and yet as each one passes, meeting his eye, he thinks, I know him. It is a dilemma, this knowing but not being able to name, and somehow it mirrors another: he can tell that a great clamor of battle, battle cries, and wails of the wounded surrounds him, and yet he hears almost nothing; the grim drama unfolds in silence but for a repeated plucking of a single string that emanates from above the trees. The figures moving to the rear, transformed by the certainty of his knowing them, begin to pass straight through him as they go, each depleting him further in the passing; likewise, one quietly divests him of his haversack, another his canteen, another his bread bag and weapon. The plucking of the string, growing steadily louder, becomes a high-pitched whir that settles across the membranes inside his ears. Soon he comes face-to-face with a wall of flames, so hot it singes his eyelashes. Out of the fire a team of horses canters, pulling a caisson on which rides the commander of the brigade, hatless and drunk, the sixteen buttons of his frock coat blazing. The caisson, also bound for the rear, passes in silence, to one side, and as it goes the general lifts his head in a wobbly way and looks directly at him. Summerfield! he cries, silently. Wake up! Then the brigadier general—a hero at Gettysburg, now reduced to a seedy role in a private’s dream—draws a pistol and aims it at Summerfield’s heart. Frozen in the moment of his death, Summerfield thinks, Killing me he kills himself. The sizzle-string inside his ears abates, and next he is falling down the well of dying, borne by two adolescent angels whom he identifies as those that once hung on to the posts at the foot of his boyhood bed. Of surprisingly limited intelligence, they speak to his mind in the form of three single musical quavers, which enter him with tiny trembling tails through the pupil of his right eye.

  Cool

  Quill

  Abiding

  When he awakens warm and sodden and quite stationary, belly down on the ground, he thinks at first that he is at the bottom of a well. But of course he has only resumed the waking dream of the forest (lost, now he recalls), and he wonders at how soundly he has slept. The rain has stopped, but there is still the sad noise of its dripping from the trees. He rolls onto his back and sits up, groping in the darkness for his canteen, but he finds only sticks, leaves, and his own shoes. He gets onto his hands and knees and pats the wet ground in a widening circle, blindly, frantically, ever harder and in vain. At last he strikes an object of some weight, his book, Dickens—soaked, cast aside as rubbish—the solitary thing the thief has left him. This is real, not a dream. He is wide awake. He has been robbed as he slept. Sarah’s letters gone, his Testament gone, he possesses nothing that would identify him. He feels himself starting to shake, the tremor in his hands spreading upward into his arms and down his trunk, and so he topples onto one side and hugs his knees to his chest. The acrid scents of gunpowder and something fouler, sweeter, seep up through the rain-drenched straw beneath him.

  IN THE FIRST HALF of the sixth inning—the match still tied, now at fifteen runs—Vesey went to the bat again and sent a splendid grounder to the left field, bringing in all three of the runs the Bachelors would add to their score before yielding to the Twighoppers.

  When Birdsall, the Twighoppers’ second baseman, took the bat, he watched a total of nineteen pitches before finding one he deemed suitable, then landed himself on the first base with a grounder muffed by the Bachelors’ short stop. Next came Fowler for the Twighoppers, who watched twenty pitches before swinging the bat the first time and watching another seventeen before finally going out on strikes. Hayes, who’d stationed himself with the Bachelors (since that was his own personal category), discerned a mounting grumble among the spectators and decided to pay the Twighoppers a visit.

  He requested a time-out from the colonel and approached Coulter, their catcher, most experienced player, and unofficial leader—the likely instigator of this strategy of “patience” at the home base, intended to tire the opposing pitcher. He spoke privately with Coulter, cupping a hand to the side of his mouth. The catcher, who stood head and shoulders above him in height, was required to bend down in order to hear properly. As he spoke, Hayes was aware of their two sharp and disparate shadows on the ground at their feet. “The colonel is getting tight,” he said to Coulter. “If we ask him to start calling strikes on batsmen who don’t swing at fair pitches, he’ll do it. But he’s not likely to do it with much accuracy. Can I impose on you to speak a word of caution to your boys?”

  Coulter, head bowed, took a moment to absorb what Hayes had said. At last he pressed his lips together and nodded slowly, indicating that he understood Hayes’s implications. “I’ll speak to ’em straightaway,” he said.

  “Good man,” said Hayes, swatting him on the upper arm, and when the next Twighopper came to the bat, decorum had been restored.

  Vesey, in the right field, handled the next hit, putting the runner out with a powerful throw to the first base, and then Coulter himself came to the bat. Perhaps having mended his ways with too much zeal, he swung at the first errant toss from the pitcher and missed. He watched the next two, then poked a missile so high and deep into the center field that a brief hush fell over the grounds, followed by an outburst of cheers. Rosamel, at that position for the Bachelors and judging the hit correctly, had turned and run like a deer toward the farther reaches of the field, headlong down the slope there, and entirely disappearing (along with the ball) from view. Both Birdsall and Coulter crossed the home base for the Twighoppers, amid cheers, and then Rosamel reappeared, charging forward in a state of high spirits and waving the ball madly over his head, signifying that he’d made the catch.

  Immediately, cries of “Judgment!” went up both from players and spectators as the Bachelors abandoned their positions and rallied around Rosamel, patting the Frenchman on the back. Amid the uproar, the colonel rose from his chair and again fired his pistol into the air, silencing even the birds in the trees. He holstered his weapon and began taking off his frock coat, an enterprise of momentous struggle. He turned a shockingly red face toward Hayes, who went quickly to his aid.

  “I could see no more of what happened than anyone else,” he said to Hayes, who helped him out of the coat and laid it across an arm of the chair. “How am I to make a judgment? What possible basis is there?”

  Somebody called out “Judgment!” again, which emboldened others, and soon there was another full chorus in swing.

  “With
respect, sir,” said Hayes, “you might consult Rosamel in the matter.”

  “Rosamel?” said the colonel. “Who in blazes is Rosamel?”

  “The man who claims to have caught the ball, sir.”

  In a matter of seconds, Hayes produced Rosamel, who, questioned by the colonel, swore upon his honor that he’d caught the ball on the fly, adding, with a shrug of his shoulders, “I know it is very incredible.”

  “Rosamel’s an honest man, sir,” said Hayes. “He wouldn’t lie.”

  Now the colonel held up his hands to quiet the crowd. Once he had everyone’s attention, he said, “Rosamel is an honest man. He wouldn’t lie. Judgment is three outs, inning over, score—”

  He turned again to Hayes, who whispered the score.

  “Bachelors eighteen runs, Twighoppers fifteen!”

  A few forage hats went flying into the air. The burly Coulter was seen kicking the dirt before taking his position behind the home base. When Hayes returned to his spot near the Bachelors’ bench, Billy Swift came over, sporting a long blade of switchgrass between his teeth; he squatted next to Hayes and put an arm around his shoulders. “The colonel’s gettin’ tight,” he said.

  “I know,” said Hayes.

  “Grand, ain’t it?” said Billy, grinning out over the field, up at the blue sky, and back at the spectators. “Positively grand.”

  THEY LEFT the midday service at Holy Trinity and walked the short distance to Hicks Street in silence. Then, intoxicated by the cloudless sky, bracing air, and abundance of sunshine; the exhilarating music and ceremony they’d just witnessed in church; the houses along the way, dressed in wreaths and garlands of evergreens; and the good cheer evident on the faces of everyone they met—he failed to check himself. “What a brilliant Christmas!” he cried, and she immediately removed her hand from his arm.

  In casting a pall over the season, she’d established a tacit understanding that such expressions of joy would unbalance the crisp civility (mixed with private preoccupation) she was managing to maintain toward him. The previous two Christmases without their parents had been sad affairs fraught with a variety of failed experiments, from which, he’d hoped, the third might benefit. But of course the announcement of his intention to enlist in the army squashed any possibility of that. Mrs. B, with the help of her sister Jane, carried on in spirited fashion, overspending both time and money for what Summerfield secretly dubbed “compensating oysters”—an emblem for the many preparations meant to brighten Sarah’s unyielding mood. He himself had arranged a small tree and some mistletoe on the gaming table in the parlor, where they’d placed their Christmas boxes. But all such gestures ran more than one risk: they might offend the vigil she was keeping in honor of his imminent betrayal; or, though intended to gladden the heart, they might rekindle instead the loss of their mother, who’d observed the holiday with grace and ingenuity. He supposed his thoughtless exclamation in the street might even have done both.