Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  The boy squinted and drew his mouth into a straight line. Summerfield noticed that his clothes, though good enough and all black, were too large for him and that his dark gold hair, parted on the side, glowed rather extremely in the gaslight. He judged him to be about twelve, yet—except when animated by any word or gesture from Sarah—he looked older than that around the eyes.

  “Harmon Fellows,” Sarah said, “you can’t have forgotten our ‘certain Persian of distinction.’ ”

  “Oh, yes,” said the boy. “We studied punctuation and read about a man who killed his dog.”

  “You, Harmon, read very well,” said Sarah. She turned to Summerfield and added, pointedly, “A story about the effects of rashness.”

  “I see,” said Summerfield. “And why did the man kill his dog … rashly, I suspect?”

  Hesitating, Harmon looked at Sarah.

  “Go on, Harmon, dear,” she said. “It’s very good practice for you. Just say what happened, in your own language.”

  “I thought it a bit juvenile,” he said, suddenly world-weary.

  “I know you did,” said Sarah. “But my brother would like to hear nevertheless.”

  Summerfield saw wheels turning in the boy’s head: in an effort to impress her, he’d run close to disappointing her instead. It further occurred to him—though it seemed unlikely—that maybe she’d invited the boy to the house so he, Summerfield, might witness firsthand the awkwardness of a schoolboy infatuation.

  “It took place in Persia,” Harmon said, now gazing into the fire. “A man badly wanted a son … so he’d have somebody to inherit his estate. He’s very happy when a boy baby is born, but he’s very anxious for him and will scurcely let the baby be taken out of his sight.”

  “Scarcely,” said Sarah. “Not scurcely.”

  “Scarcely,” said the boy. “Then one day his wife had to go out to the bath and left the baby with the man, and the man got called to the palace and had to leave the baby with the dog. No sooner was he gone than a snake came into the house, headed straight for the cradle. But the dog kills the snake before it can do any harm. And when the man came home, the dog went running out to greet him … all proud of himself for saving the baby’s life. But the man sees blood on the dog and thinks the dog has eaten the baby, so he picks up a stick and kills the dog. The end.”

  “That’s not quite the very end, is it?” said Sarah.

  Harmon looked at her with a knitted brow, his eyes misting over. “Well, he goes inside the house and sees the baby’s all right … sees the dead snake on the floor … and understands what he’s done.”

  “He ‘smote his breast with grief,’ ” said Sarah.

  “That’s right,” said Harmon.

  “So,” said Summerfield, “the moral of the story is ‘Don’t be rash,’ as I suspected.”

  “To be precise,” said Sarah, “ ‘Shame and repentance are the sure consequences of rashness and want of thought.’ ”

  Summerfield stood and moved from the sofa to the mantel. He thought he might light his father’s pipe to see how much it would annoy her. Since the New Year (and as his determination to join the army steeped in her thinking), she’d splintered into more than one person: sometimes taciturn, inscrutable, possibly feeling peeved at him; sometimes warm, attentive in the old way, possibly having forgiven him; and sometimes, oddest of all, entirely preoccupied, but pleasantly, as if he weren’t the slightest part of her thoughts. He never knew, arriving home, which of these he would find, and sometimes he found all three in the course of a night, varying hour to hour. Now, apparently, in the person of young Harmon Fellows, she’d meant to bring home the lesson from school, so her errant brother also might be educated.

  He thought there was something desperate and crude about the strategy. She knew (because he’d told her) that a Union regiment, on furlough in New York, had set up an enlistment office in Manhattan, which he intended to “stop by” before long. Now he turned from the mantel and looked at her, placing the pipe in his mouth. She did not look at him but perched regally on the ottoman, her eyes toward the windows, her hair, her dress, her posture, everything just so. The subtle change common to all her moods was that she took more pains with her appearance lately; he couldn’t have said what exactly were the results—she was (just as their mother had been) never less than beautiful; but he’d noticed that she rose earlier in the mornings, in order, as far as he could tell, to spend more time before the dressing mirror.

  He returned the pipe to the mantel—it was hardly worth the effort if she paid it no mind. “Well, in my opinion,” he said, “the man was most rash to leave the baby in the care of a dog.”

  “Oh,” said the boy quickly, “it wasn’t possible to disobey a royal summons.”

  He looked at Sarah for her approval, which she delivered promptly, with a nod and a smile.

  Close to the grate, Summerfield felt too hot and so returned to the sofa and sat down again. “Of course,” he said. “That’s how it is in Persia. So what you’re saying, Harmon, is that the man had no choice but to go. And under the circumstances, he did what he thought best. He did what he understood to be his duty.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered the boy, “that’s right.”

  “But Harmon,” said Sarah. “What if the man hadn’t been summoned by the king? What if he’d simply decided to go to the palace because he felt it his duty? In other words, he wasn’t required to go, but chose to go of his own free will. What would you think of him then?”

  The boy furrowed his brow again and looked at her as if he was trying to read her thoughts and thereby discover the correct answer. At last his face brightened. “He wouldn’t have done that,” he said. “He loved the baby too much. He would have left the baby only if he was absolutely forced to.”

  “Very good, Harmon,” she said. “Exactly right. So. If the man had a choice of staying or going, and chose to go of his own free will, then my brother would be correct—it would, indeed, be rash and wanting thought.”

  The boy now looked at Summerfield and nodded, as if hoping to find Summerfield pleased by this conclusion.

  Summerfield reached for his teacup and finished what was in it. “Well,” he said, now turning his gaze to Sarah, “it seems our little parlor doubles nicely as a classroom.”

  “God forbid learning should be confined to classrooms,” said Sarah.

  “Still,” said Summerfield, “it’s quite a long school day, only to be extended afterward.”

  “I believe Harmon enjoys school,” said Sarah. “You may ask him yourself.”

  Summerfield laughed. “I don’t suppose it would be quite fair, Harmon, for me to ask you how you enjoy school.”

  Again, the boy looked at him blankly.

  “I mean,” said Summerfield, “with your teacher right here next to you, you could hardly answer but one way.”

  The boy did not smile. He said, “I’m about done with school. Come Ash Wednesday, I’m to go to work.”

  Sarah cast Summerfield another of her deeply meaningful looks. “Work?” he said. “What sort of work?”

  “In a factory,” answered the boy. “In the Eastern District.”

  “What, making boot polish?”

  Harmon didn’t answer, for he was transfixed by Sarah’s leaning forward to pour out more tea for herself. “Harmon,” said Sarah, after a moment, “my brother asked if you’ll be making boot polish?”

  “No, sir,” said the boy. “Rope.”

  “Oh, rope,” said Summerfield. “But must you leave school to make rope?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy. “My father was slain in the war, you see. At Payne’s Farm, in Virginia. And now I must go to work.”

  At last her purpose came clear in all its depth and breadth.

  The coals shifted in the grate, falling with a whisper.

  Now he recalled her mentioning the boy at Christmastime: forced to grow up too fast, changed, no longer a boy, not yet a man. He said, “I’m very sorry, my boy.”

&
nbsp; He ventured a glance in Sarah’s direction, expecting perhaps to see something like triumph in her face, but found there instead a hint of misgiving. She slid a handkerchief from the sleeve of her dress, touched it lightly to her nose, and replaced it. Softly, he said to her, “Shall we ask Harmon to stay to supper?”

  “His aunt’s coming for him,” she said. Now she pulled her silver watch on its long chain from her belt. “About now, in fact.”

  Things were to grow richer still, for when the aunt arrived, not more than five minutes later, she was of course wearing the mourning costume, with veil. She would go no farther than the frigid hall and politely declined Summerfield’s proposal to accompany her and Harmon home, though it was nearly twilight.

  Helping the boy with his cap and coat, Summerfield shuddered and said, “I bet we’ll have skating soon.” Then, more quietly, he offered the aunt his condolences.

  She took his hand in her black glove. She was a tall woman, with a narrow face. “Thank you, Mr. Hayes,” she said. “My brother was the whole world to me.”

  She released his hand, put her arm around Harmon’s shoulders, and said, “We’re all, all of us, heartbroken beyond words.”

  When they were gone from the stoop, and the doors closed, Sarah excused herself without delay and started up the stairs.

  “You used those unfortunate people,” he called to her back.

  She stopped and turned. Her face in shadow, she looked down at him at the base of the stairs. “If you mean they were of use,” she said, “then that’s good news.”

  He felt himself trembling, and not entirely from cold. “You know that’s not what I mean,” he said. “It was guileful.”

  She only continued staring down at him, silent.

  “And shabby,” he added.

  Now she put her back to him and continued as far as the bend in the stairs; then stopped again but didn’t turn. To the curved wall before her, she said, “I’m not ashamed, Summerfield.”

  “Well, perhaps you should be,” he said.

  Now she turned to face him again. “I would exert whatever influence I can over you, by any means I can find.”

  “Clearly!”

  He put his hand on the newel post. He was conscious of his breathing, and then, after a moment, conscious of hers.

  When next she spoke, she lowered her voice and spoke with deliberate calm and a grain of tenderness. “If, some months from now,” she said, “your name appears in a certain list in the newspaper … and I don’t feel that I did all I possibly could to dissuade you … then I’ll be ashamed.”

  She gathered the skirt of her dress in one hand, lifting it, and was quickly out of sight around the bend. He heard her footsteps on the landing overhead and then—like a question followed by an answer—the opening and closing of a door.

  HAYES IMAGINES a long stop-and-go line of ambulances winding through the streets of Washington, for there seems no end to the fresh arrivals from Virginia—some brought on stretchers, some hobbling on crutches, others carried in the arms of their less seriously wounded comrades. About half of the bedside tables have been removed from the ward to make room for more beds and cots, which have been pushed yet closer together. Now each patient shares a table with another, and now the often-prostrate Major Cross is obliged to put his head under Hayes’s bed in order to gain access to the cherished knothole in the floor. Hayes has noticed new signs of strain and fatigue in the faces of the doctors and nurses. Last night, a certain young steward, making his rounds of the ward in a state of drunkenness, tried to give Hayes Casper’s dose of morphine. The already foul-tempered attendants, when they can be found, sulk and snap. Matron quivers and quails more than ever. The barber has pressed Hayes twice to consent to a “tidying up”; twice Hayes has refused; now the barber glares at Hayes as he passes his bed, and Hayes believes the barber has spoken ill of him to others. He believes he detects, among patients and staff alike, a growing resentment—that he is perceived to occupy a bed in the ward undeservedly. And he believes he detects, within the ward’s usual foul stench, the sickeningly sweet smell of blood.

  Jeffers, the new man in bed 32, suffers in the lungs, and when he speaks, his words come out like sawdust. Still, so far, he has spoken a good deal. When he encountered the mute and unresponsive Hayes, he turned his attention to the man in bed 31, who is dying of tetanus. Fairly soon Jeffers understood that this man, too, did not speak (lockjaw) and, furthermore, that his fixed smile was a symptom of disease and not of congeniality. Jeffers, a gaunt Philadelphian of about forty, now sits in his bed facing forward and addresses the air directly before him, an apt target, air being his main topic and concern. He is of the general opinion that there is too little of it available in the ward and that what little there is carries mephitic effluvia. Earlier this morning, he explained (to anyone who might care to know) that the hospital pavilions rest on cedar pilings a few feet off the ground, a design meant to improve ventilation. “Lucky for us,” he said, bitterly. “Better admission to the fumes of the canal.”

  After lunch, Mrs. Duffy, the woman who daily sings in the wards, began strolling the aisle. At the present moment, she is worrying “Jerusalem the Golden” and, by Hayes’s count, is on its thirteenth stanza. She performs without the aid of a hymnal, and despite the horrors she inflicts on the ear, Hayes can’t help but admire the sheer magnitude of religious verse she has committed to memory. Equally impressive is the height of the woman’s bonnet, which makes him think of an Indian cobra snake he once saw in a picture magazine. Now and again, Jeffers’s labored exhalations in the next bed come with what sounds to Hayes like a small protest, a kind of jagged moan—and, as it happens, often coincides with one of Mrs. Duffy’s particularly sour notes.

  The ward is hot and noisy. Rain pounds the roof. A smaller number of the usual visitors roam about, some with dripping umbrellas. A carpenter with a ladder and a screwdriver is installing additional flag brackets to the window frames, increasing the number of Union flags on the ward, which now boasts six, with the promise of more to come. A new one hangs beside Hayes’s bed, and when he goes to the toilet or the dining room, it brushes the top of his bare head. The flags add to the abundance of fabric in the place—with more beds have come more linens and mosquito curtains—and somehow, to Hayes, the flags, with their vivid colors, seem to make the ward hotter.

  To his right, he can see that Casper is composing a letter, balancing a writing pad on his lap; presumably, judging from the words at the top of the page (“My dearest Joan”), to a sweetheart. A short distance away, near the stove, a half-dozen soldiers (one in a wheelchair) sit around the night watcher’s table playing cards, but a mood of indignant silence seems to dominate their games. Nearby, a little tow-headed boy trips and falls amid the human traffic in the wide aisle, scuffs his knee on the rough floor, and begins to cry. His mother yanks him up by the arm and scolds him, making matters worse. Anne, the young nurse who looks like Hayes’s sister, soon appears, stooping beside the boy and trying to console him.

  A cloudburst now drums the roof, and Mrs. Duffy, forced to increase the volume of her singing, loses all semblance of intonation. To Hayes’s left, Jeffers sighs and says, “A person would think it would cool the air, but all we get is steam.”

  Lightning flashes in the windows. A deep roll of thunder shakes the floor and walls. And as Mrs. Duffy is singing “ ‘When in his strength I struggle, for very joy I leap; when in my sin I totter,’ ” the poor man in bed 31 goes into one of his spasms. There is a rush of nurses and attendants to the bedside as he begins to yelp and his body arches grotesquely upward, as if pulled and stretched by invisible wires.

  In the midst of all this, an angry-looking captain, in some position of authority at the hospital, shows up at the foot of Hayes’s bed. Hayes has seen him twice before and has already determined that the man means to do him harm. Aptly, he bears a striking resemblance to the mounted skunk who gave the order to abandon Hayes in the Wilderness.

  “Please sit
up, Private,” says the man crossly.

  The wound in Hayes’s back stings as he manages to raise himself in the bed.

  “State your name,” says the captain.

  Immediately Hayes feels his hands begin to shake. The captain moves around to the side of the bed and thrusts a pad and pencil into his lap.

  “Then write your name,” he says.

  He looks on with disgust as Hayes grapples with the pad and pencil, unable even to adequately grip them. The pencil falls to the floor. The captain bends to retrieve it, then grasps Hayes’s right hand. He roughly arranges Hayes’s fingers on the pencil and places the point of it on the pad, as if, together, they will write Hayes’s name. Hayes watches his own hand, under the captain’s control, scrawl the word deadbeat, the crossing of the t executed with such force that the lead breaks.

  The captain tears the leaf from the pad, wads it into a ball, tosses it onto Hayes’s legs, and moves away. As he goes, Hayes hears him mutter, “I’ll have you where you belong soon enough. Hospital rat.”

  Casper, who has witnessed the whole thing, shakes his head and says to Hayes, softly, “Pay him no mind … the stinking parlor soldier. We’re not under his command. Besides, what makes him think you’re a private? For all he knows, you’re his superior officer. Jackanapes.”

  Suddenly the ward blazes bright white, and a knifelike clap of thunder barrels from one end to the other, causing much gasping, followed by a wave of laughter. Hayes stares for a moment at the lantern hanging from the ceiling, then eases himself down in his bed and covers his face with his pillow. He presses his hands hard over his ears.

  In the darkness, the din of the ward eddies away like water into a drain, buried and barely audible. The noise inside Hayes’s head—what he has come to think of as the sound of his brain—has continued to evolve; more grind than sizzle or whir, it is recognizable to him now as the rasp of a saw cutting through bone.

  But this sound, too, withdraws as he trains his mind on the afterimage of the lantern, which is suspended on the inside of the eyelids, blue-white against a complex of black rafters. He cannot quite make it hold still, but he finds that if he allows himself to follow its gentle heaves and surges (rather than resisting them), the feeling is something like being held fast, contained.