Nostalgia (11 page)

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.

B
Y 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 liking; 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.

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.

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.