The colonel signaled for Hayes to come forward for a word. He greeted Hayes with arched eyebrows and a kind of knowing smile that Hayes thought altogether odd.
“The purpose of this demonstration is clear,” said the colonel, against the background of the unrelenting chant. “I’m of the feeling that, whenever possible, clarity should be rewarded. Don’t you agree?”
Hayes, who could see that the colonel’s stein had exerted a philosophical influence, said, “I appreciate your feeling, Colonel. But with respect, I believe in this case clarity might compete with fairness. If I was to come into the match, I should’ve pitched for each side equally.”
“But it’s my understanding that you’re unmarried.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you couldn’t come into the match for the married side, could you? I wonder if you mightn’t have an inflated view of your ability, Hayes. Are you really so superior to everybody else?”
Hayes hesitated, weighing the choices the colonel had given him: dishonesty or cheek.
“Well?” said the colonel.
Hayes clasped his hands at the base of his spine and shifted his weight from one foot to the other; the persistent chanting of the crowd felt like a physical pressure. “Colonel,” he said at last, “it’s less a question of ability than experience.”
“I’m keen to see this superior experience,” said the colonel. “It seems the spectators are, too. Please deign to accommodate us and take your position.”
He had no alternative but to move to the middle of the field and accept the base ball from the pitcher—this executed amid torrents of cheering.
He reckoned the best strategy would be the quickest strategy. With three pitches, he sent the first batsman down on strikes.
Exuberant cheers from the crowd, head-shaking from the poor batsman.
Likewise, the second man went out on strikes, swinging in vain at three in a row.
More cheers, more head-shaking.
The third Twighopper at the bat watched a pitch, then swung and missed at the next three, and thus Hayes finished the inning with ten pitches.
He was besieged by soldiers, much backslapping, and shouts of victory. The regimental band began to play, and when Hayes emerged from the knot of comrades, he saw the colonel struggling up from his chair and looking one way and another, as if he hadn’t quite grasped that the match was over.
Suddenly somebody grabbed Hayes from the side and pulled him into a bone-crushing embrace: Vesey, the big man from Bushwick, a sack coat tied by the arms around his middle to hide the split trousers, and tears in his eyes.
A CLATTERING OF WHEELS, a ringing of wheels. He passes in and out of awareness, on his back, shaken to the teeth, rocked by the quaking conveyance beneath him. Darkness. A stench, like being downwind to the sinks at Brandy Station.
Stars overhead, razor sharp, flute the sky.
Men, asleep, pressed up against him, and always the deep rattle of wheels below. A mammoth world, beyond understanding. A raging world, hurtling him through the night.
A train.
Not dead.
He is a little boy. They have been somewhere to visit some people who live on a farm, friends of his mother. A pasture, dotted with white flowers. It’s a long carriage ride home, and he falls asleep. Warm night air. He wakes, pressed against his father, rocked by the quaking conveyance beneath him. A clattering of wheels. In and out of awareness. He’s being carried up the steps of a house. Darkness and light. Through doors, down passages, carried. A lamp, swinging. Laid in a bed. Undressed, washed, dressed again. Covered. Unkissed.
Alive.
A mammoth world, beyond understanding.
Mr. X
He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over,’ ” reads the big old man with the deep delicate voice, quite near Hayes’s bedside. Hayes lets his eyes close and tries to concentrate, not on the words but on the sound, which, like everything, is both strange and familiar. He imagines he has made a long journey, inside some sort of box; now and again, due to a certain tilt, a certain jolt, a lid fell open, allowing him a glimpse of what was about, but only a glimpse, quickly overwhelmed by darkness. His strongest feeling is that of having been brought to this place, deposited without his consent or collaboration, like cargo. In the bed, he strives not to move a muscle—the dubitable hope of the cornered animal, that there might be safety in stillness.
In the large room, the old man’s voice hums pleasantly beneath a babel of human exchanges (the full range of the choir, basses and tenors, altos and sopranos); a jangle of small metal objects; the scraping of furniture and shuffling of many feet over a wooden floor; occasional groans of pain; occasional groans of frustration; and, from outdoors, the ringing of a bell (deeper than a cowbell, higher than a church bell), sporadic, as if blown by wind. The sea of sound has a calamitous character (and like a sea ebbs and flows), and sailing over it all, somewhere a woman sings a hymn of inexhaustible verses, in a voice of penetrating shrillness, off pitch, altogether alarming. Still, what Hayes finds most grim within the clamor are the odd pockets of silence, which seem to signal failure, bewilderment, disappointment, horror, despair. For a moment he experiences a rocking sensation, as if he rests on the deck of a boat, but it’s a phantom thing, a scrap of memory lingering in his limbs.
He parts his eyelids carefully, and from his flat position, close to the floor—his neck banked only slightly forward by a pillow—he can see a good portion of the room: a network of white-painted rafters, a whitewash of sunlight in the vault of the roof, a lantern on a long chain. Dark pictures hang in frames above gas burners on the narrow walls between the many windows—a church, perhaps, serving as a hospital ward, though certainly not with the smells of church but rather those belonging to illness, human suffering, dying flesh, and other odors, too, vaguely chemical. Great diaphanous swags of white netting fall from the rafters, festooning the place with a celebratory air; a warm foul-smelling breeze wafts through the windows, sets everything in motion, sickening light, dizzying shadow. A brown rat trots across the rafter directly overhead, stops, looks down at Hayes, scurries on, and vanishes into the eaves.
“ ‘He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven,’ ” Hayes hears and lowers his gaze to the gray-haired, gray-bearded man, dressed in a wine-colored suit and sitting in a wooden chair, his head bent over a red-covered book. Large, big-headed, and hunched over, he makes Hayes think of a buffalo. A dark and polished cane with a plain silver handle leans against the man’s chair. A crumpled knapsack lies at his feet. Hayes detects a tired hoarseness in the man’s voice and an accent that seems a blend of more than one region; sees that he is quite flushed, the rims around his eyes dark pink; and tries to recall how he knows him, at least to some degree, already. (The man cannot be a surgeon, for in that role he wouldn’t read to Hayes from a novel, nor would he wear a wine-colored suit.) Back of him, along some sort of central artery, a parade of travelers flows—several women of various ages, most of them plain-looking in hoopless black or brown dresses, unadorned in every way; many scrappy-looking soldiers, busy but slow-moving, all bewhiskered, all unkempt, one or two with a broom, another with a pan of bloody rags; a skinny black woman toting a stack of cream-colored blankets; two Catholic nuns; a pale, richly suited man with a birdcage; a bonneted old woman peddling milk; three black-garbed, thin-lipped preachers clutching Bibles; a Negro boy with a yellow, floppy-eared dog; and a number of wounded men, in a diversity of dress and half dress, some with canes, some with crutches. Of this last sort, one now and again pauses to whisper a word into the old man’s ear or merely to stroke his hair—one young patient with a bandaged head even stops to kiss the old man’s brow. These mild, apparently commonplace intrusions he suffers unruffled, as an ox suffers gnats. To Hayes, it all feels like a lot of clutter, much too rich a brew, and he’s aware that there’s a significant blank space inside his mind: a large white leaf of paper devoid of everything but
a few suggestive scribbles (a train, a moon, stars, a river, a steamboat, a stretcher, a lovely young woman), lacking substance and shading. He thinks of a white tablecloth in the dining room at Hicks Street, specks of orange pollen at its middle where a vase of flowers has been removed. He’s aware, too, that beneath these mental impressions of blank paper and white tablecloths—which now seem tightly drawn, tightly laid—some horrible sadness waits. But he is pleased to observe that his strategy of holding utterly still has had a calming effect throughout his body. His injuries cause him no pain. The persistent whirring inside his ears has abated to a soft, intermittent rasping sound. His hands are stable, at rest. He thinks that if someone were to supply him with a pad and pencil now, he would be able to write his name. Though he would of course decline to do so—might even pretend to lack the ability—he relishes the idea of having the option.
“ ‘Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper,’ ” reads the old man. “ ‘They were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the third.’ ” He stops abruptly, lifts his gray head, and looks at Hayes long and hard, as if the stir of Hayes’s thinking has caused the interruption. To Hayes there’s something familiar in this, too, a notion that the old man is supersensible to his thoughts. The man smiles kindly, admiringly (though there is surely little to admire), reaches out a soft warm hand, and pats Hayes on the knee.
Just then one of the scruffy characters with a broom appears behind the old man; working the handle in a scouring fashion, he passes, from right to left, limping, in and out of Hayes’s line of vision. The broom makes a grating noise, and somehow Hayes knows that sand has been scattered on the floor as a means of cleaning without water. Though he won’t turn his head to look, he understands, when the man speaks, that he addresses the patient in the adjacent bed. “I see you dogging me with them sunken eyes,” says the man. “I expect I’ll have that bedsheet for you tomorrow.”
From his chair, the old man speaks into the pages of the book: “But that’s what you told him yesterday. And the day before that. Must the poor creature be always made to lie in a puddle?”
Again Hayes doesn’t turn to look, but he judges, from the abrupt halt of the grating noise, that the man with the broom has stopped in his tracks. Now he reappears, leaning in close to the old man’s ear. With a challenging, saccharine tone, he says, “Well, why don’t you take yourself over to the linen room and see what you can find that I can’t? Or better still, I have no doubt but that you could go out and buy him some if you like.” Now he straightens up, gives a conspirative nod to the end of his broom handle, and moves along.
The old man only laughs and looks again at Hayes. Again he smiles, this time wearily, and says softly, “Mr. Babb doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m wealthy—which is beyond funny—and it makes him angry that I choose to visit the hospital when he would give his eye-teeth, if he had any, to be excused.”
His gaze rests for a moment longer on Hayes’s face, as if he hopes against hope for a reply, but then he lowers his eyes again to the book, removes a fan from the pocket of his coat, opens it, and fans himself as he continues reading: “ ‘He regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.’ ”
He stops again and says to the man in the next bed, “I will find you a clean sheet, Leo, even if I have to go to my rooms and take it off my own bed.”
Now he lowers his voice and speaks to Hayes: “It really is appalling the kind of incompetent rabble that can rise to power in a hospital. I’ve seen the likes of Mr. Babb kill a patient, dosing him with the ammonia nitrate meant for use as a foot wash. I almost thought it intentional.” He shuts his eyes and shakes his head, apparently outraged, but he seems to check himself, willing himself back from that former atrocity to the more agreeable business at hand. He smiles at Hayes apologetically.
“From the looks of it,” he says, “this novel’s been left out in the rain. The covers are swollen and the pages wavy.” He lifts the book to his nose. “Smells like wet rope, gone sour.” He laughs softly to himself and adds, “But otherwise first-rate.”
He coughs and clears his throat with some effort. Then reads: “ ‘So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears, beforehand. All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow …’ ”
HAYES HAS SLEPT AGAIN, and when he wakes, sweating inside a tent of gauze, he feels as if an animal inhabits his body and wants letting out—that excess of energy known to him since boyhood. He recalls the first time he felt it, an evening long ago when his father made him wait inside an office while he conducted a class in the adjacent studio. That night, a question began to form inside him (made not of words, but flesh and bone), a question whose answer, he would discover, was base ball. Even now, he imagines that if by some magical means he could be transported into the midst of a match, all would be right with the world again, order and reason restored. As it is, he must content himself with the memory of an afternoon near Brandy Station, when scores of soldiers threw their forage hats into the air, and their yells, echoing in the nearby woods, had nothing to do with killing or dying.
The old man who read to him earlier has gone, along with the chair he occupied. He can see through the netting that the gas burners on the walls of the ward have all been turned down low. The place is quiet but for the occasional sound of a man snoring, or another coughing, or sighing, or softly moaning. The many visitors have left. Two or three male attendants roam the ward quietly, but the female nurses have retired to wherever they go at night. Hayes is certain that the female nurses will return in the early morning, though he cannot account for how he knows it. He seems to know a great deal he can’t account for. An aroma of tobacco pervades the air, masking but not dispelling the other smells—what he now thinks of collectively as “rot.” These are the hospital odors, but through the open windows wafts another foul smell, and Hayes knows, inexplicably, that it comes from a nearby stagnant canal, an open sewer. He knows, without raising his head from the pillow, that at the middle of the ward, he will find a night watcher, who sits at a table smoking a pipe and reading a magazine by the light of a shaded lamp. If Hayes leaves his bed and goes to visit the sinks, he must pass this table, and the man will peer at him briefly, without a hint of interest, without a word or a nod. Hayes knows the exact location of the water closet, at the end of the ward opposite the dining room. The ward itself is a long narrow pavilion with beds arranged in two rows along either wall. Hayes’s bed (iron, with lengthwise wooden slats) has a number, which, by association, is Hayes’s own number, 33. He knows that this ward is one of many like it, and that the hospital—located not far from wharves and a railroad depot—comprises dozens of buildings connected at their midpoints by covered passageways. He knows that among the buildings are a kitchen, a bakery, a post office, stables, a laundry, and a chapel. He knows that close to the stables and the chapel is the deadhouse.
He was wounded in battle; abandoned by his company in the field; left to find his own way home. He endured a long and perilous journey, keeping to brush and streambeds for fear of being shot, either as an enemy or as a deserter. It seemed to him at first that he hadn’t survived, that he’d died, and that these new shadowy confines and ghostly drapes and shapes constituted the afterlife. Now he understands that he was rescued, brought by rail and boat and stretcher to a military hospital in Washington City, where he has been for a few days already. He was stripped and bathed and put into some kind of white bed-shirt with long sleeves and brown stains on the cuffs. He has been questioned and examined by two different officers in charge, as well as one very austere woman. He remains unable to speak, and when he has been given the opportunity to write his name, his hands shook so severely, both pad and pencil
went flying. A tag, pinned to his chest, reads UNKNOWN. A pink card is clipped to the end of his bed, indicating by its color (he has gathered) what food he is to be served—soup, bread and butter, boiled potatoes, tea with milk. The other patients have two cards clipped to their beds, a colored one and a white one, which Hayes believes records the patient’s diagnosis. If he’s correct, he supposes it means he has not yet been diagnosed. He does not recall his wounds being dressed, but he imagines they have been seen to, for he suffers less pain than before. He walks with a slight limp—due to a persistent soreness in his thigh—though he can get by without the cane or crutches many others require. Exhausted by his ordeal, he sleeps day and night. When he is awake, he frets (itself another inducement to sleep). Apparently, he is being allowed to convalesce here, but not everyone has been kind to him, and he senses duplicity behind the smiles of those who have. He possesses no documentary proof of his impromptu discharge in the Wilderness. He has avoided the eyes of most of his fellow patients, for he believes they regard him as suspect. Some of them are horribly wounded—clearly dying—others quite low with disease. Still others linger in the wards because they lack the wherewithal to get home and have nowhere else to go. Since the sick and wounded arrive from Virginia by the hundreds every day, the beds in the wards have been moved closer together, to accommodate folding cots with canvas covers. Hayes believes there are those who would have him out of his hospital bed and stood before a firing squad. His single design for protecting himself is simple: for as long as possible, he will conceal his identity. This strategy—based on the notion that no one will proceed against him if they don’t know his name—is less than infallible. But as it dovetails with his inability to speak or hold a pencil, it is also the only strategy he can think of.
Now he resolves to remember everything he knows, not to forget the particulars of his situation. Earlier, when the old gentleman read to him from the novel, Hayes’s mind drifted into a dreamy state, in which he experienced things as if for the first time (thus the strange-but-familiar feeling). Perhaps, he thinks, this state might seem happier—“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”—but it is unsafe. Through the netting, he sees a tall black stovepipe running up into the vault of the roof. Across the way, two Union flags fall from poles that jut at an angle from brackets mounted to the window frames. He sees the lamp hanging from the ceiling, extinguished now as always; its brass parts glow in the lowered gas lamps, and soot dulls its chimney. This, he decides, will be his anchor. Any time he feels himself drifting, he’ll look to the lamp, and it will bring him back to himself.
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