Nostalgia (16 page)

The chaplain replaced his eyeglasses and started rooting around inside his bread bag. Banjo, intent on getting her nose in as well, had to be pushed away two or three times.

“I’m delighted to have found you,” said the chaplain, again to Hayes. “I was afraid … as we’re about to be engaged … I wouldn’t have the opportunity.”

After another moment he pulled out a base ball.

“I thought you might like to have this,” he said, passing it to Hayes. “I varnished it, you see, so the inscription won’t wear off.”

W
ELL INTO THE MIDDLE
of the afternoon they felled and hauled trees, cleared as best they could the brush nearest the west side of the road, and threw themselves body and soul into fashioning a line of impressive earthworks. The very important corner, not half a mile north, was with the Orange Plank Road, the route of the rebel offensive. By
four o’clock, three of Getty’s brigades and two of Hancock’s were dug in, with the rest of the Second Corps still coming up from the south. If the Confederates hoped to take the corner or any part of the Brock Road near it, they’d better be praying for a miracle.

Pressed up against Leggett in the trench, Hayes must have dozed off, for suddenly he was sitting before a fire in the library at Hicks Street, and his sister, Sarah, was asking him please to cut her the
thinnest
possible slice of marble cake. He heard the jingling of a small bell, like that on a shop door, and then Leggett’s voice: “That’s cannon!” he said. “And it sounds like its firing from our side!”

Hayes opened his eyes and found Leggett looking straight at him, his face only inches away. “I think we’re attacking,” he said. “Not defending. Now tell me why in the world did we break our backs making this damned ditch.”

Leggett reached into his haversack and brought out an oblong cloth bag, gathered and tied at the top with string. “Here,” he said, passing it to Hayes, “this is for you.”

“Why, this is your coffee,” said Hayes, feeling the weight of the thing, then bringing it to his nose and sniffing.

“That’s right,” said Leggett. “And it’s got the sugar mixed into it already.”

“Leggett,” said Hayes, attempting to pass the bag back to him, “I’ve got plenty of my own.”

Leggett pushed the bag back toward Hayes. “Take it, son,” he said. “I want you to have it.”

“But I don’t want it,” said Hayes, offering the bag again.

Now Leggett pushed the bag back at him with vigor, pressing it firmly into Hayes’s chest. “Would you keep the damned coffee and be quiet about it,” he whispered forcefully in Hayes’s face, and Hayes saw that the man’s eyes had clouded over with tears.

“Well, okay, then,” he said. “I guess I’ll keep it for you if you like.”

“I
do
like,” said Leggett.

“All right then,” said Hayes.

“All right,” said Leggett and then turned away and busied himself with untying and retying his shoes.

An interim of time transpired between this moment and the big
thing that happened next, but Hayes would later recall only three vivid impressions: not very deep inside the woods, there was an explosion, and then an enormous cloud of blackest smoke rose up from the tops of the trees, swelling out five dark petals from its center even as it moved toward the Union line, and then they were enveloped in darkness; a human roar like nothing Hayes had ever heard descended on them slowly from their right, burgeoning down the earthworks like a locomotive coming into a station; and horses’ hooves rained into the road behind them, so near Hayes’s face (when he turned to look) he first took them for debris from some sort of rotating machine that had slipped its axle and was flinging out its dangerous inner parts.

Then the bellowed
Forward!
flew down the line, repeated rather like gunfire itself, and they were all leaving the earthworks—a blue wave breaking in a curl along a curve of shoreline—and charging into the woods.

The colonel—or was it only the captain?—barked something about Vermonters, and then it was brambles and switch and vines and a gnarly washboard of three ridges to cross. With each step deeper, the air grew hotter, the smoke thicker. In the troughs between the ridges, they sank ankle-deep into ribbons of swamp that threatened to suck the shoes off their feet. Hayes’s ears and eyes felt as if they were on fire. When he called out for Leggett and received no reply, he tried his Christian name: “Truman!” he shouted, but all that came back was the heightening brattle of musketry and the screaming and yelling of other men. Soon the trees bore the multiple scars of bullets. The Wilderness—itself affronted, itself mangled and marred—swallowed the jagged lines of the army, and once inside its bowels, the men were less and less distinguishable to one another as friend or foe.

S
ARAH
, seated on an ottoman near the grate, offered the boy another of Mrs. B’s ginger biscuits, but he declined with an anguished look. It struck Summerfield that the poor boy would rather go hungry than further manage the weight of eating under the eyes of his teacher, with whom he was obviously, violently smitten. He’d got through the first
round of tea painfully. He’d nearly dropped his cup when it startled him by rattling in its saucer. He’d brushed crumbs off his militarystyle vest, only to think better of it immediately, and then retrieved them one by one from the carpet and held them in the palm of his hand until Sarah indicated he should put them on the tea tray.

Summerfield had found the two of them in the parlor (and all the lamps already lit) when he arrived home a few minutes earlier. She’d never before had a pupil to the house. She’d introduced the boy, Harmon Fellows, said only that he was from the school, and passed Summerfield a cup of tea, though he wasn’t accustomed to drinking tea at the end of his workday. Still, he welcomed it, along with the good fire in the grate, since the January afternoon had turned quite cold. He was trying to sort out the occasion as best he could, and he thought Sarah was conspicuously not helping, though she did seem to cast him a deeply meaningful look now and again. When he asked Harmon Fellows what he’d been up to at school, the boy only looked at him blankly, and so Sarah intervened to narrow the question: “Why don’t you say what we did
today
at school?” she said.

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.”

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?”