Nostalgia (17 page)

“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.

H
AYES 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.

He can no longer deny a certain truth: that though his wounds still pain him from time to time, and though he still walks with a slight limp, he wears no bandages. He has watched the lovely Anne dressing Jeffers’s wounds, front and back, but neither she, nor anyone else, has touched Hayes in this way. The only injuries assessed by any doctor are the pale bruises on his right arm, which were diagnosed as the effect of concentrated use of a musket, and the scab at the crown of his head, judged to be the vestige of his having been struck there with a blunt weapon, and further judged to be healing well. The ward surgeon has expressed a concern about Hayes’s failure to eat adequately, but that is all. Somewhere near his feet lies a crumpled leaf of paper with the word
deadbeat
(malingerer) written on it. If his wounds are imaginary, then what of the pain? What of the bleeding? Imaginary too? And if everything’s only a product of his mind, then perhaps he
is
a deserter. Perhaps he’ll be court-martialed, right here in the hospital’s administration building, taken out and stood against the wall of the guardhouse, executed. (One of the guns will be armed with a blank cartridge, so that no member of the firing party can say for sure that he was the one who killed Hayes.) Across the way, visitors to Washington City will watch the spectacle from the windows of the Smithsonian Castle. Mothers will cover the eyes of their children. Afterward, the entire population of the hospital will file by Hayes’s body, heaped on the ground in the mud.

Beneath the pillow, he slowly relaxes his hands, letting in the hospital sounds gradually, and the drumming of rain and human voices bring him back to bed 33. He is not a deserter. He was himself deserted. There was an officer on a horse, a sergeant. With a rough jerk of the reins, the sergeant pulled the horse’s head around in an abrupt turn. He spoke the words
Leave him
and
Take his weapon
.

What Hayes must do is find a way home, though he cannot think
how he will purchase any car tickets without any money. Still, he understands that the first step to finding his way back to Brooklyn is finding a way out of the hospital. And before he can do that, he must find some clothes to wear.

Mrs. Duffy has stopped singing.

The man in bed 31 has stopped yelping.

Jeffers says, “Put me out to sea, that’s what. God’s sky and the sea air.”

Hayes is thinking,
“My dearest Joan” might just as well be Casper’s sister as his sweetheart
, when someone moves the pillow from his face.

It is Walt, leaning over him, frowning. “Are you all right, my boy?”

“That greenhorn captain came by to torment him,” says Casper.

“What greenhorn captain?” says Walt, turning toward Casper. He places his hat on the table between the beds, where he also leans his cane and a soaked umbrella. Hayes notices a sprig of what looks like spearmint stuck in the buttonhole of the man’s lapel.

“The blowhard,” says Casper. “Somebody’s favorite nephew.”

“Don’t believe I know him,” says Walt and sits on the edge of Hayes’s bed.

He takes a handkerchief from his jacket and begins to wipe his own cheeks and beard. “It’s downright biblical outdoors,” he says. “I’ve just navigated both a flood and an immense drove of cattle. A thousand of them, herded down the street by the most masculine drivers imaginable, whistling and singing. I might’ve been trampled to death … or drowned … or both. I hope you can see how much you boys mean to me.”

He puts away the handkerchief and lifts his bag from the floor. “I’ve a few important errands,” he says. “Three or four letters to write, et cetera, et cetera, a jar of pickles to deliver to an Irish lad named Paddy Sullivan. And then I’ll be back.”

“Pickles?” says Casper. “You never brought me any pickles.”

“I don’t recall your ever requesting any,” says Walt, briefly rummaging inside the bag and then pulling the strap over his head. He turns to go but seizes on the wadded paper at Hayes’s feet. “What’s this?” he asks Casper, lifting it from the bed.