Nostalgia (15 page)

As the man spoke, he never raised his eyes from the book, but now he looks up briefly, and back down at the pages. “Let’s see,” he says, “here we are. ‘Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of the sun into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark night. He rubbed his eyes and roused
himself; but he doubted, when he had done so, whether he was not still asleep …’ ”

T
HEIR DIVISION
, along with the rest of the Second Corps, remained stalled on the Catharpin Road for the rest of the morning. The sweltering heat, the rising and ebbing racket of musketry and artillery in the distances, and Leggett’s ever-souring humor made it seem to Hayes an eternity. Stationed on a stump in the shade not far from where Leggett lay, Hayes was enlisted by half a dozen soldiers to write more letters, among them one for Vesey, the big man from Bushwick who’d played in the right field for the Bachelors. Vesey, tearful and shy-seeming, confessed in the letter to his mother that he’d once stolen two dollars from her brother William. (He explained to Hayes that his uncle had stayed with them for a while in Bushwick but now lived somewhere in Indiana.) He begged his mother’s forgiveness, asked that she repay the money from his wages when she could spare it, and that she try to remember him for the constancy of his love rather than for his waywardness in matters of money. After he’d thanked Hayes for the letter and shook his hand, he said with a resigned air, “You see, I’ve a bad weakness for cards and dice.” As the man walked away, Hayes saw that the split in his trousers (incurred by his leap for the home base, itself a kind of gamble) had been stitched up but that he limped a bit now, favoring his right foot.

When at last the order came for them to move, it further aggravated Leggett, for rather than continuing west, they were to reverse direction and then turn and march north instead, up the Brock Road. Leggett slapped his cap to his knee and said to Hayes, “Now let’s see. We done marched east, south, and west … I guess north’s all that’s left.” He stepped out into the sunlight, put his cap on his head, and spat blood onto the dust in the road. He turned back to Hayes and said, “They got us going in circles, son.”

If it had been pandemonium near sunrise, with the infantry columns splintering and shouldering their way around the cavalry and supply wagons clogging the road—now, turning twenty thousand soldiers and funneling them into the windy Brock Road was a brand-new
kind of bedlam. The officers scuttled back and forth on their mounts trying to forge some semblance of disposition, but dust and hopelessness rose all around. Hayes thought he caught a glimpse of the corps commander, conferring with other officers near the intersection of the two roads, and when he turned to consult Leggett in the matter, he found by his side, instead, a boy he didn’t know. Pointing with his chin, Hayes said, “Do you think that’s … do you happen to know … is that General Hancock over there?”

The boy looked at Hayes as if he didn’t understand the question. Small and pale and anxious-looking, he sniffed the air and said, “Can you smell that? I think the woods is on fire.” Hayes assured him that some of the men had built fires for heating coffee, but the boy only looked as if he might cry and backed away. A moment afterward, it seemed to Hayes that the young blue-clad stranger had evaporated into the sea of blue-clad soldiers surrounding them.

A few paces forward, Hayes spotted Leggett and elbowed his way through the throng of men between them. When Leggett saw him, he gave him a chilling blank stare. Hayes said, “I think I just saw General Hancock, turning his steed into the other road.”

“Could’ve been his twin brother, I suppose,” said Leggett, darkly, hoisting his musket sling over his shoulder.

Leggett appeared more peaked than ever—the swollen jaw put his face askew, and the eye on that side stayed half shut. “Well, anyway,” said Hayes. “I’m pretty sure it was him.”

“Did he look soo-perb?” asked Leggett, a reference to the major general’s nickname.

Hayes, who thought Leggett was being unnecessarily difficult, squatted to retie his laces. When he stood again, Leggett put an arm around him. Hayes recalled their wandering through woods the night before, in search of a dentist or a doctor—and how their lantern had made the thicket shadows swing side to side. “Well,” said Leggett, “if it can’t be Julius Caesar leadin’ us, I reckon Hancock’s the next best thing. I’d just trust the situation a whole lot more if he wasn’t acting under somebody else’s orders.”

It was Leggett’s view that Hancock should have replaced Meade at the head of the Army of the Potomac, Hancock being far and away the
more qualified officer. Because of Leggett’s status as a veteran, Hayes seldom doubted his judgments in such matters. Indeed, Leggett’s high opinion of General Hancock was mostly what had made Hayes so excited to catch a glimpse of the man. It occurred to him to remind Leggett that Meade himself was likely under orders from the general in chief, whom Leggett consummately admired, but he decided to let it drop; he was already feeling agitated, and he feared Leggett might offer another of his pessimistic rebuttals.

Leggett released Hayes and asked for the time.

“Somebody stepped on my watch,” answered Hayes. “It’s stuck at ten past nine.”

Leggett squinted up at the cloudless sky. “Close to noon’s my guess,” he said.

Their brigade, led by General Hobart Ward, was second in line to go. Once again they had to maneuver around the supply trains, and artillery clogged the narrow route as well, but soon they were advancing at a fairly good pace. In his feet and legs, Hayes felt the previous day’s long march, combined with last night’s lack of sleep. He wondered if Leggett, older by more than a decade and sore in the mouth besides, wasn’t suffering an even worse strain. Soon they were drenched with sweat, and any singing and joking among the men died away, leaving only the drumming of shoes on the hard-baked road, the clatter of gear, the cloudy rasp of labored breath, and the pop of gunfire in the woods to their left. So far, no officer of any rank had disclosed to the men their mission. They were moving away from the artillery they’d heard earlier to the west, while to the north, they’d heard only what sounded like skirmishes. But as they continued the advance up the Brock Road, with its encroaching brush and vines, the battle din ahead of them steadily escalated. After an hour or so, the road began to fill with smoke—at first white like a mist, then thicker and grayer—and the order came down the columns to increase the pace to double-quick. Leggett, who was two men in front of Hayes, looked back for a moment, and then moved to his right and began to trot ahead, disappearing toward the front.

A few minutes later, Hayes found him waiting at the edge of the road. Quite winded, Leggett fell in alongside Hayes, and said, “There’s
a corner up ahead a ways. There’s a Sixth Corps division already up there”—he paused to take a gulp of air—“General Getty’s. We got to get up there and help hold it. Otherwise we’ll be cut off from the rest of the army.”

Hayes couldn’t think how any kind of battle could be staged inside these narrow roads; likewise, he couldn’t imagine how any army could fight its way through the dense woods that surrounded them. Even if there were paths through the tall switch and tangled grapevines—which there didn’t appear to be—how could any sort of lines be maintained? “Is it a clearing up there?” he asked Leggett. “Something like a field?”

“None’s I know of,” said Leggett.

“Well, then where are we to fight?”

Leggett looked straight ahead. “What do you think I’ve been talking about for the last two days?” he said. He turned his head just slightly toward the woods on Hayes’s side and nodded. “We’re gonna fight in there.”

Now Leggett dropped back and fell in directly behind Hayes, and in a moment, Hayes heard him say, under his breath, “Like a bunch of savages.”

After a while Hayes found that his body took charge of the marching. What had hurt him before stopped hurting. He no longer had to will himself forward, which left his mind free to drift. He examined his fear and found it building and darkening, like the smoke in the road. He found further that, like the feeling at the start of an important match, it was mixed with exhilaration. The difference was in the proportions: at the start of a match, one part fear to five parts exhilaration; now, exactly opposite. He wondered if he shouldn’t have written a letter like Vesey’s, unburdening himself should he not survive and asking for pardon. Vesey’s sin had an enviable clarity about it, the bluntness of an Old Testament commandment. Hayes’s—an unnatural regard for one’s sister, and consequentially deserting her—was a bit more complicated. Never mind that Vesey’s sin induced a shake of the head, and his a shrinking back in horror. And where, in that murkier picture, was the counterpart to money, which could be repaid? Where the recognizable weakness, a bent for gambling? He supposed there
was an eve-of-battle letter that might be composed (with careful omissions), proclaiming love, hoping for sympathy, but he’d already done that, Saturday last. He had nothing to add. If death waited for him in those brambles, he would meet it with the satisfaction—despite his depraved nature—of having done right.

A bit farther along the road, he found himself asking,
But what if I’m patently wrong in everything I think?

What if an hour from now he was to meet a horrible gory end, his last feelings soaked in remorse and terror? It was May, springtime. He’d just turned nineteen, had never crossed the Atlantic, never been with a woman. If he’d made different choices, he might now be playing ball at the Union Grounds, cheered by adoring spectators. The “problem” might well have withered away of its own accord. People grew out of things. After all, he’d once been agonizingly fond of his rocking horse. And what
would
it be like to look into another man’s eyes and kill him? To witness one’s comrades killed? The most blood he’d ever seen had been at winter quarters, when the commissary boys slaughtered cattle. Still, he believed himself to have a strong constitution, for no experience had ever instructed him otherwise. He’d lost both his parents at a tender age, and he hadn’t wilted. He knew what it meant to persist, to fight hard and give one’s all in quest of a victory. He would survive—and, if lucky, survive reasonably intact.

Some minutes before their pace started to slow, a bullet now and again zinged overhead, clipping the tree limbs above the road and raining down leaves and pine needles. The gunfire in the woods to the left grew louder, closer, denser, the smoke in the road thicker.

And then they stalled again.

They could hear a lot of shouting to the front but too far away to make out any words. Some of the men, dog tired, began to squat in the road while some few others collapsed to the ground and went instantly to sleep. Still others retreated into the brush to their right to relieve themselves. Many took advantage of the break to eat something. All around, men fell into conversations, but there seemed to be a general tacit understanding that these be carried on softly.

Farther away to the north they could hear the rolling thunder
of artillery, evidence of a much greater clash than any skirmishes in the thicket. Hayes knelt on one knee, facing the western woods, and began fussing with his cartridge belt. He felt an almost panicky need to run an inspection on himself. The canteen, the haversack, the bayonet, the ramrod—touching these things with his hands was a bit like doing a sum and had the same occupying effect on his mind. If he’d learned anything in the army so far, it was how to endure long stretches of idleness, though he’d never before idled on a road in the woods with minié balls occasionally flying overhead. He turned in Leggett’s direction, but Leggett had vanished.

Instead, he saw Billy Swift running in a crouched posture toward him from the rear. Swift squatted next to him and said, “What in blazes are we doing now?”

Hayes shrugged. “More waiting, I guess,” he said.

Swift took a swig from his canteen. Gazing into the woods before them, he said, “Can you tell if it’s coming closer?”

Hayes shook his head. “Sometimes it sounds closer, sometimes it sounds farther away.”

Swift closed his eyes as if to listen more keenly. After a moment, he said, “Ever noticed how gunfire stops the birds from singing?” he said.

“It has a similar effect on me,” said Hayes.

Swift looked at him with a sad expression. “I reckon I ought to be feeling afraid, but I don’t.”

“Don’t worry,” said Hayes. “I’m plenty afraid for both of us.”

Swift didn’t smile at this remark but only looked down at the ground; he picked up a small clod of dirt from the road and threw it into the brush; he glanced back at Hayes and then at the ground again. At last Hayes said, “What?”

Swift let out a sigh. “You know I look up to you, Hayes,” he said. “I never expected to … well, you know, be on talking terms with the likes of you. Now, I want you to be square with me about something.”

Hayes nodded.

“How good am I?” asked Swift. “Your honest opinion. Don’t spare my feelings.”

It took Hayes a moment to understand what Swift was asking. “You’re good, Billy,” he said.

“But how good?”

“Real good.”

“But what I’m trying to ask … am I good enough to play for a legitimate club? I don’t mean next week, naturally … but say a year or two from now.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Hayes. “You just have to be willing to make certain sacrifices and spend most of your leisure hours—”

“I am, I am!” said Swift. “I am willing. Hayes, do you think there’s a chance … assuming we both make it out of here … there’s a chance you might—”

At that moment, the chaplain appeared at the edge of the road with Banjo, the stray foxhound, at his heels. “I’ve been looking for you,” said the chaplain to Hayes and knelt next to him and Swift.

He removed his spectacles, which had fogged up in the heat, and began clearing them on the cuff of his coat.

Swift gave the dog a few pats on the head and then poured some water from his canteen into the cup of his hand, which she lapped up eagerly.