Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  Then, inexplicably, less than three hours along, they stopped.

  The men, jammed close together, began milling about in the heat.

  Hayes asked Leggett why he thought they’d halted.

  “Don’t know,” Leggett said, reaching for his canteen. “I guess they can’t decide which way to take us. But if they make us wait here, we’ll know we’re in trouble.”

  “How so?” asked Hayes.

  Leggett passed him the canteen. Hayes had his own, of course, but it was Leggett’s way of being friendly. “Sometimes waiting’s a strategy,” said Leggett. “But more often than not, it’s what you do when you don’t know what to do next.”

  Hayes reached into his vest pocket, took out his watch, and saw that he’d lost the fob. The watch slipped from his palm, hit the ground, and skittered, vanishing amid the feet in the crush of soldiers. Hayes squatted and found it easily enough, but already somebody had stepped on it unawares. Through the broken crystal the hands read ten minutes past nine o’clock; he held it to his ear but heard no ticking.

  They would stay there, stuck on the narrow road among the pines, for what would seem an interminably long time as the woods around them continued to heat up. Hayes was sure he could smell pinesap and another, burnt odor he couldn’t name. Soon, he got Leggett settled in a patch of deep shade off the road and persuaded him to hold his canteen against his swollen jaw. Leggett lay on his side, his knapsack for a pillow, and gazed meditatively at a single white mushroom that sprouted nearby from the dry brown leaves and needles covering the ground. There was, Hayes thought, something oddly mesmerizing about the perfect little mushroom, an innocence about it amid the gruff army, the stomping and yelling and grumbling, the dust clouds left by the horses, the pyramids of stacked firearms. Their brigade—stalled right near the intersection with the Brock Road, at a place called Todd’s Tavern—was near the midpoint of the corps, which stretched a couple of miles ahead and behind. After a while, they heard sounds of combat, from faraway north, and out the Catharpin Road as well, to the west. Leggett rose onto his haunches, pointed west, and said, “You hear that, Hayes? That’s artillery. It’s started. Here it comes … and we didn’t get out of the damned Wilderness.”

  WHILE THE BRIGHT FOG OBSCURES, it also reveals. He limps waywardly through brush and first stumbles upon his haversack, discarded by the thief who robbed him while he slept; though it’s entirely empty, it is like finding a friend; he pulls the strap over his head and then puts the Dickens novel inside. Less than a minute later, he sees a base ball lying on a bed of leaves. He lifts it from the ground—amber colored, it has been varnished, inscribed with the words 25 APRIL 1864, BACHELORS 24, TWIGHOPPERS 21. This, too, is like a friend, and now, as he moves on, he feels less lonely. The book, the haversack, and the base ball together have restored him a sense of identity, though they have done nothing to restore his sense of direction. For hours (he supposes it’s hours) he wanders the damp and misty woods, which are varied only by the occasional ravine. He has blisters on his feet from walking in wet socks, but he thinks the burning sensation they provide with every step helps to keep him alive. His other, more serious wounds, in his thigh and back, have negotiated new terms with his body: they have agreed to bleed less and to swap their sporadic needlelike sting for a duller persistent ache, and in return they have acquired an odor, something like rotting oysters. This change seems a harbinger of others. Along the way, he soon notices that the maddening whir inside his ears sounds more like an undying wind or possibly rainfall on leaves, altogether less strident. Soon, as he rambles, perhaps in circles, he becomes increasingly aware of a kind of nagging absence, and he understands that it’s his fellow traveler with the hidden eyes, always watching, now gone. Soon the hollow spasms in his belly migrate into the back of his head, an odd place to experience hunger, unnerving and almost painful. He thinks of these spasms as “brain-pangs” and believes they are compromising his ability to concentrate. Again and again, he must exert an extreme effort of will in order to recall his goal—to get to Washington City and not be killed as a deserter on the way; to get from there to Brooklyn, Hicks Street, and his sister, Sarah.

  In time the fog evaporates, and he can see, through the trees, the brighter world of another barren field. He moves in that direction; the field appears to have been recently burned; its openness frightens him, and so he stays within the screen of the woods as he follows its borders. Slowly (for he does everything slowly now) he walks the entire periphery of the field, returning to the spot where he first saw it, and again he struggles to recall his goal. He knows enough to understand that his aim is not to circumnavigate barren plots of land, and so he turns back into the woods, deliberately walking away from the field. Because he is sweating, he stops to open his haversack and take out his canteen but recalls that he has no canteen, no water.

  Now water becomes his goal. Moving very slowly, he keeps an eye out for berry bushes and any leaves that might hold rainwater.

  Sometime later, he stands in a dark hollow, bending down the tender branches of a young tree so he might lick rainwater from its leaves, when he notices that the fog has returned to the woods. This alarms him, for it seems that he has lost part of the day—this is the morning fog of a different day. Perhaps he has even lost whole days, and, if so, how many? The fright lodges in his stomach, where it convulses, and soon he is on his hands and knees, vomiting a yellow fluid dotted with dark red berries, berries he can’t recall having eaten. He puts his hand to his forehead and feels a knot there beneath the skin; he cannot account for it, though he knows he once knew its origin, and it has the odd power to bring Hicks Street and his sister to mind. He shuts his eyes, tight, and wills her to stand before him, to be there when he opens his eyes.

  He opens his eyes and sees only a puddle of vomit on the ground, gluey and grotesque. This, he thinks, is patent evidence of God’s having deserted him absolutely. Was that why his comrades deserted him on the field of battle, because they somehow discerned that God had deserted him already? I’ve no time to be playing nursemaid, said the officer on the horse, and the horse balked as he tried to turn it. But what officer? The words were spoken to Rosamel, the Frenchman, the Zu-Zu with the fez. Leave him. Take his weapon. He knows these were the words spoken and that they were spoken to Rosamel, and he hears them now as he heard them then, not with his ears, but only in his thoughts. He’d had to read the officer’s lips, for he’d lost his hearing the previous day. All through the night, he’d tried to stay awake, knowing that if he fell asleep the bugles wouldn’t wake him.

  When he gets to his feet, his hands are shaking, and so he thrusts them into the pockets of his trousers. After only a few steps, he has to sit down, for his legs wobble beneath him. Once he’s on the ground again, he finds that even sitting requires more strength than he has, and so he lies flat on his back. Again he closes his eyes.

  While he sleeps, time passes, but how much time?

  He awakens to more fog, but doesn’t know if it is the same fog as before or that of a different day. The air is unpleasantly warm and moist. He can smell the foul odor of his wounds. His arms are covered with bug bites, two dozen or more, tiny red welts. He has no food or drink. His tongue is swollen inside his mouth. He props himself onto his elbows and looks down a path through the brush, where he can see, in a small clearing only ten or twelve paces away, the wheels of a limber with a field gun. He sits up straight and wipes his eyes. The limber is attached to a caisson, and leaning against the caisson, smoking a cigar (as it happens, the source of all the fog), stands Brigadier General Ward. The general wears a sad smile beneath his enormous droopy mustache, and when he notices that Hayes is awake, he says, “It was the tree limbs, wasn’t it, son? That, and little Billy Boy.” He waves his hand back and forth in front of his face, fanning away flies.

  Hayes, who feels as if he might cry, nods and tries to say Yes, sir, but no sound comes from him, and in any case, he’s not sure what it is he’s concurring with. Now
he shakes his head, as if to negate the previous assent, and the general laughs. He takes a long draw on the cigar, tilts back his head, and exhales a plume of smoke toward the sky. “You’re delirious, son,” he says. “But look on the bright side: now you don’t have to kill yourself.”

  Again he shuts his eyes, holds them shut while counting his breaths, and when he reaches the number twenty, he opens them.

  It’s nighttime and astoundingly hot. He rests on a bed of pine needles, his bread bag for a pillow, though (because of the book inside it) a very firm pillow. He feels entirely too weak to stand, but he knows he must. Through the trees, the light of a full moon lays a lace cloth over the forest floor. It occurs to him he might abrogate his conviction that God has deserted him and pray for help. He manages to get onto his knees. He imagines himself a little boy, in church. He bows his head, praying silently, moving his lips. “O Merciful God, and Heavenly Father, who hast taught us in thy Holy Word that thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men; Look with pity, we beseech thee, upon the sorrows of thy servant …”

  He pauses here to consider if this is a true depiction of himself. Is he God’s servant? He thinks not, though he has tried to practice kindness, with the recent exceptions of thrusting his bayonet into the belly of a young redheaded boy; and crushing with the stock of his musket the nose of an old man; and firing his weapon blindly into a smoke-filled thicket, killing an unknown number of faceless men. With those exceptions he has tried to practice charity, even when selfish fantasies may have led him (if only mentally) down creaking staircases and into rooms where he didn’t belong. No, not God’s servant, but perhaps an unconfident applicant for the position …

  “In thy wisdom thou hast seen fit to visit him with trouble, and to bring distress upon him. Remember him, O Lord, in mercy; sanctify thy fatherly correction to him; endue his soul with patience under his affliction, and with resignation to thy blessed will; comfort him with a sense of thy goodness; lift up thy countenance upon him, and give him peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  Because the prayer seemed to go by quickly, he prays it again and again, and soon he grows light-headed, a not-disagreeable feeling that flushes down into his limbs.

  And next he is standing on his feet and walking.

  He drifts without any certain direction through a tangled maze of unvaried character. Light-headedness gives way to a sharp heat behind his eyes, his feet turn strangely cold, and then he hears it—the unmistakable plash of water. He follows the sound to its source, a lovely little stream cascading over a crown of rocks and roots into a perfectly round black pool; over the surface of the pool, the moon has knit a quivering net of silver-white ropes. He drops his bag to the ground, removes his shoes and socks, and walks into the chest-deep water. Its coolness has the odd effect of both reviving him and draining him of something vital. He immerses himself, and as he crouches, fully submerged, the water holds him, as if it’s alive, purposive. He senses its invitation—he could give himself to it and become himself the life of the water. But he stands, sending a radiating quake of moonlit rings over the surface of the pool. He makes a cup of his hands and drinks, greedily at first, and then long and slow.

  Still at the middle of the pool, he looks up and sees, across the other side, an ancient dead tree, rising out of the ground like a great obelisk, broken off at a height of about thirty feet. Washed in moonlight, its wide trunk—mottled, scabrous, papery—is pocked by dark impressions that resemble human features. And its many craggy arms, of various lengths and girths, all point in the same direction. Never was there a clearer signpost.

  He retrieves his bag, shoes, and socks from the bank and crosses to the other side. Once he has put his shoes back on, he sets out again through the woods on the indicated course. He feels no pain in his body, only extreme fatigue, and a new fragility that makes him think of spiderwebs in the backyard garden at Hicks Street. After a while, he comes to an expanse of pastureland that stretches flat and far away to a range of low hills at the horizon; atop the hills is a black clump of trees that looks like a giant panther resting on its haunches, surveying its dominion; deep with grasses and white wildflowers that catch the moon, the pasture is bisected by two gleaming parallel lines. Any reluctance he might have felt about the openness of the field is countermanded by the lure of these magical-looking lines; he starts toward them, even as he doubts his strength to get that far. He is still drenched through and through from the stream and the pool, and the skin on his arms appears to glisten in the night air. With every step he grows weaker, and when he turns for a moment to look at the woods from which he has emerged, he’s perplexed by the shallow swale he has left in the weeds—he feels himself too insignificant to disturb even the grasses. The parallel lines ahead of him dim and move farther apart, and soon they themselves appear to be crossed by what look like the pickets of a fence.

  He is not to reach them.

  Only a few steps away, he collapses, rolling onto his back, the word railroad chugging through his mind. He pulls the strap of his haversack over his head and chastises himself for failing to fill his canteen at the stream; then he recalls that he had no canteen to fill. He knows he is dying, and he thinks he no longer has to worry about how he’ll be received in Brooklyn. He won’t be received at all, not even his body, for there’s nothing by which it might be identified. Sarah’s letters would have made him known to the stranger who finds him, or the little Testament with his name, regiment, and home address, but these are stolen from him. He recalls the useless varnished base ball with its inscription, the score of a match on a certain date. He recalls the useless words, in his sister’s hand, on the flyleaf of the book: “April ’64—To my brother, with all my love, Sarah.”

  A wave of anger breaks through him, but he cannot ride it, for it hurts too much, roiling the liquid centers of his wounds.

  The full moon pours down a frigid light.

  Now he glimpses the cluster of stars in the gray dome straight up above him, small and luminous and faintly green. With what little consciousness he has left, he concentrates on these, and he sees that they are actually tiny holes in the sky, leaking a mix of gases into the world, meant not for the living, but only for the dying.

  He breathes it in. It invades every corner of his body, sorting out and stilling every organ.

  Shame and repentance, he thinks. The sure consequences of rashness and want of thought … And at last she arrives, Sarah, mild, like ash, but only for the briefest moment, to kiss him, and then she is gone.

  He touches his fingers to his lips.

  He tries to speak—he wants to hear the sound of his own voice once more before he dies, but he can’t even manage a whisper. Most surprisingly, he finds himself addressing his father: “Papa, I tried to do right, didn’t I?”

  It is only a thought, a query, made of air.

  He closes his eyes and crosses his feet at the ankles.

  He folds his hands over his heart and allows himself to accept this gift, a peaceful death.

  BY THE END of the eighth inning, the Twighoppers had narrowed the Bachelors’ advantage to two runs, and the score in the match stood at 23 to 21. The afternoon had grown steadily warmer, and the sun came into the field at such an angle that many of the spectators were forced to shield their eyes—which created an effect, Hayes noticed, of their saluting. In the frequent breezes, the earth, long sodden and now baked hard, sometimes gave off a modest stirring of dust. The only clouds in the sky resembled bolls of cotton, and occasionally one cast a round shadow that crossed the field like the stamp of a phenomenon creeping beneath the ground.

  At the onset of the ninth, the Bachelors’ first two batsmen produced no fruit. Then Vesey—the day’s hero, responsible for nearly half the Bachelors’ runs—went to the bat. In the heat, he’d rolled the cuffs of his already too-short trousers to the knee, and had they not been so overly tight, they would have resembled sky-blue pantaloons. He didn’t find the first toss to his lik
ing; swung at the second and missed; then drove the third high into the center field, depriving the ball of its cover along the way, which fell like a bird shot from the air, near where the Twighoppers’ pitcher stood. The ball dropped and rolled some distance past the man in the center field, and by the time he’d retrieved it and fired it to the short stop, Vesey was rounding the third base. Any soldier not already on his feet soon was, for clearly the short stop’s throw to Coulter would get to the home base about the same moment as Vesey. Five or six paces from Coulter, Vesey did an extraordinary and shocking thing—he dove headlong, both feet leaving the ground, one arm stretched out before him, and landed belly down with his fingers touching the base. Coulter, disconcerted by Vesey’s surprise tactic, dropped the ball, and a roar of laughter went up from the crowd. Soldiers shoved one another playfully, in disbelief. And before the racket began to abate, new convulsions erupted from them: as Vesey had got onto his hands and knees in an effort to stand, the seat of his trousers parted, from crotch to waist—an event rendered all the more entertaining by the fact that, like nearly all the soldiers, he wore no drawers.

  Some minutes later, when the players changed sides, the low rumble of fun among the spectators took on a ragged cadence that soon gave birth to a chant: Hayes Hayes Hayes Hayes Hayes Hayes Hayes …

  Hayes stood and tried to wave the crowd into submission, but they would have none of it. Aware that the match was in its final chapter, they wanted to see him in the game.