Nostalgia (19 page)

Not far away, he sees a number of the hospital staff clustered
around a bed, where no doubt a more critical procedure than shaving is under way. An air of holiness hangs there in that spot, while, in contrast, surrounding it, everyone and everything continue indifferently. A young medical cadet, one in the cluster observing, drops to the floor. Two attendants drag him by the arms, down to the end of the pavilion and the wardmaster’s room, and this event, a small wrinkle in the plot, passes without the least commotion.

Walt, busy with the razor, makes little noises as he works, peeping like a bird. He has now reached the side of Hayes’s neck, where the brisk short strokes go in many different directions rather than uniformly. Always, there is the pressure of his fingers, stretching the skin where the razor’s applied. “You know,” he says, “I’m really quite good at this. I do hope that whoever you are in the world, my friend, you’ve already discovered something you’re especially good at. There’s nothing so fortifying, I think, as that bright moment when you stumble into something you do really well. It always has about it a feeling of destiny.”

He pulls Hayes’s head toward himself and goes to work on the opposite cheek. “When I was about your age,” he says, “I was a country schoolmaster.” He wipes the razor on the towel and laughs. “
Not
something I was especially good at,” he adds. “But I was earnest enough, I suppose, in my way. I did love the chance it gave me to spare the rod. That I enjoyed very much, sparing the rod. And playing base ball at recess.”

A soldier in a wheelchair stops next to them and looks up at Walt with watery eyes. Both legs have been amputated, one a few inches above the knee, the other a few inches below. “Hello, Walt,” he says, somehow smiling with the corners of his mouth turned downward.

“Oh,” says Walt, “wait just a moment.”

He balances the razor on Hayes’s shoulder, reaches into the pocket of his baggy trousers, and produces a two-cent piece. “Your milk money, comrade. You see, I didn’t forget.”

Hayes notices that there’s something indeterminate about the soldier’s face—he might be an older man, young for his age, or a young man, old for his age. He accepts the coin, pockets it, and stretches his hands upward. Walt bends so the soldier can put his arms around
his neck. As they release each other, the soldier kisses Walt on the temple and then rolls away.

“He was bringing in the wounded from the field, a few days ago, in the Wilderness,” says Walt, taking up the razor again. “A rebel sharpshooter seized on the occasion to shoot him in both legs.”

He repositions Hayes’s head and returns to his cheek, where he works silently for a minute. Then he says, “I did notice, by the way, how your eyes danced up at me with my mention of base ball. Ah, ha-ha, there they go again!” He moves Hayes’s head back to the middle and tilts it up, exposing his neck. “I have in my possession your varnished memento,
Bachelors 24, Twighoppers 21
. And I’m aware from the inscription in your book, your soggy Dickens, that you have a sister. These are your clues, as it were. But I’m resisting the impulse to regard you as a riddle to be solved. I prefer to think of you as a slowly unfolding revelation. A rose in the garden. Now you must hold perfectly still … I’m about to undertake your Adam’s apple.”

Walt falls silent again, except for the occasional peep, and moves the razor, sometimes upward, sometimes downward, in strokes so delicate they almost tickle. After a moment, he says, “I don’t know why I feel so disposed to tell you things about myself—except that there’s a sweet quality to your silence that somehow invites confidences. It’s been years since I’ve spoken to anyone of my schoolmastering days. All my life I’ve been enamored of men’s voices, you see—the great thrill of the human voice, a man’s breath made into meaning. What a thing! But my time in the hospitals has taught me to love silence—or, I should say, to love
silences
. Now would you kindly do
this
for me?”

He pulls his upper lip down over his teeth, stretching the skin beneath his mustache. Hayes follows suit and closes his eyes. “That’s it, thank you,” says Walt as he applies the razor above Hayes’s mouth. “You know,” he says, “I’ve worried more than once that on that glad day when the sound of you returns, I won’t be sufficiently glad.”

Hayes cannot think why he feels like crying, except that the words
a riddle to be solved
have lodged in his mind, and the rain has suddenly stopped falling on the roof, and it has made him think of the whispery lull right after an ocean wave breaks onto the shore.

“Almost done,” says Walt. “Only the chin now.”

Hayes peeks at him through his eyelashes. He appears to be concentrating quite hard; he peeps two or three times, holding the tip of his tongue firmly between his lips. In a moment, he presses his finger into the deep cleft of Hayes’s chin, wiping soap away. “There’s a barber’s adventure,” he says softly, “that handsome little fissure you have there.”

Behind and above Walt, Major Cross’s bright red face appears, his brow—what’s visible of it below the bandages—tightly knitted together. “The maps are all wet,” he says, irately, “wet, wet and shredded.”

Walt, startled, turns and lays a hand on the man’s forearm.

“No touching!” he cries, jerking back his arm. “You’ve let the maps get ruined.”

“Sorry, Major,” says Walt. “What about a horehound stick, would that suit you? I think I might have some licorice.”

“Out of my way,” says Major Cross, narrowing his eyes, and Walt moves back a step.

Major Cross doesn’t budge but slowly begins to shake his head instead; his face appears to crumble, like that of a child whose feelings have been injured. “What shall we do?” he says. “What shall we do?” Then continuing to shake his head hopelessly, he moves into the narrow space between Hayes’s bed and Jeffers’s, lowers himself to the floor, and is soon prone. Hayes, who has turned around in the chair to watch, sees the man’s head disappear beneath his bed.

When Hayes faces forward again, Walt is standing before him smiling. “You’re a dead ringer for somebody I knew and loved not long ago,” he says. “Same black hair, same gray eyes.” He takes the towel from Hayes’s shoulder. “You’re all done,” he says. “And a fine job if I do say so myself.”

He produces a small mirror from his jacket pocket and passes it to Hayes. As Hayes holds the mirror up, Walt moves behind him and bends down, looking over Hayes’s shoulder so he can see what Hayes sees. Though the sight of his barren face in the little oval causes in Hayes an unsettling mix of feelings—overwhelming and incomprehensible—he manages a nod and a grateful smile, which seems satisfying enough to Walt.

Hayes helps with the tidying up and then heads with the basin to the water closet to empty it. The towel has been rinsed and wrung in the basin, and as Hayes moves along the aisle he studies his whiskers floating in the soapy mixture—circles and arcs and black smudges among the bubbles—and something about the sight of them wafting to and fro causes his hands to start shaking. The certain knowledge that he’s about to be at the center of a great noisy mess only makes matters worse, and then suddenly Babb stands before him. “I’ll take that for you,” says Babb and, just like that, relieves him of the basin.

Babb pauses for a moment and eyes Hayes head to toe. “Don’t you look spiffy and slicked up,” he says, unpleasantly, then turns and limps away with the basin.

Back at his bed, Hayes finds that Walt has pulled the chair alongside and taken a seat there. With Major Cross on the other side, Hayes must climb into bed from the end of it. As he does so, Casper hushes him and indicates Walt, who (Hayes sees now) sits with his cane at a slant between his legs, resting both hands on the handle, sound asleep. He has put his jacket back on and buttoned up his shirt, but left off his tie. While Hayes is looking at him, Walt’s head tips an inch toward his chest, crushing and bending the end of his beard.

Casper sighs and adjusts the little pillow beneath his stub, which he pats affectionately, and then closes his own eyes.

Jeffers, whose cap has slid down over his face, covering his nose, moves his lips drily, says the single word
bellows
and then moves his lips again.

On the floor, Major Cross breathes with a steady peaceful rhythm, his bare feet, soles upward, one on top of the other.

Across the way, the young boy has turned onto his side and lies flat in his bed. The chair where his mother sat earlier is empty.

Down the aisle, the bed around which so many had gathered (and where the young cadet fainted) is also empty.

A few feet above Hayes, the Union flag appears to shudder, as if moved by an internal current, and then hangs slack again.

Far away, at one end of the pavilion, behind the closed door to the dining room, somebody drops a glass vessel. A feminine cry follows
the muted jangle of glass, and it sounds oddly like an expression of pleasure.

Sunshine washes through the windows, igniting the strung-up mosquito curtains orange for a moment, and then dies away.

Outdoors, a cock crows, once, and then again.

Outdoors, the breeze-blown bell chimes, in three successive couplets.

Hayes worries with his tongue the smooth naked region above his upper lip. He looks at Walt, slumped in the nearby chair. He thinks of the happy thud an apple makes when it falls to the ground, and the satisfying resonant pop of a base ball well struck.

Owing to how his throat remains unslit, he thinks perhaps he’ll allow himself to love the gray-bearded Walt, as the other men seem to. It occurs to him that he never loved his father until after his father had perished, and then it felt not entirely creditable, loving what’s already lost.

Soon Sarah comes and sits beside him. She leans down to kiss his forehead and then, smiling, fixes an ivory comb that has come loose in her hair. She lays her white hand on his breast and, after a moment, begins to pat him there, in couplets, meant, he supposes, to imitate his heart.

N
OW THAT HIS BODY
has got the rest it needed, Hayes sleeps lightly, as if he were back in the woods, lost and trying to find his way to Washington City. The ward, with its regular nocturnal disturbances, is not the place most conducive to sleeping, and his dreams generally take him to the battlefield, with its reports of musketry and din of grape and canister.

Late into the night, what wakes him the first time is the sound of nearby whispering. He lies on his stomach with one arm over his head; he can see out through a carrot-shaped opening formed by his upper arm and the pillow. There is the usual foul odor, the usual dull glow of the few gas lamps turned low, the usual fog of mosquito curtains. Babb, standing on the far side of Casper’s bed, has just hushed Casper, and Casper, in a heated whisper, says, “That wasn’t our agreement.”

Babb answers, “Well, the agreement changed … It’s getting harder to come by.”

“You’re a rotten devil,” says Casper, and then sits up straighter in the bed, reaches around backward beneath his pillow, and pulls out a bill, which he passes to Babb. Holding the bill in one hand, Babb studies it for a moment, then pockets it.

Now he slowly opens his other hand near Casper’s face.

“What’s that?” says Casper.

“That’s
it
,” says Babb.

“Put it in some water.”

“Ain’t got no water.”

“Then go get some.”

“Don’t have a mind to.”

“What do you expect me to do then?”

“Lick it out of my hand.”

“I’m not licking it out of your hand, you rotten, stinking—”

“Suit yourself,” says Babb and turns away.

“Wait!” cries Casper, and Babb hushes him again.

“At least put it here in my own hand,” whispers Casper.

“Don’t have a mind to,” says Babb, again holding his open palm close to Casper’s face. “If you want it, lick it out.”

Hayes can see in the low gaslight Casper’s eyes glowing with tears.

“And be quick about it, too,” Babb says, pressing the edge of his hand against Casper’s lips.

With his one remaining hand, Casper tilts Babb’s palm toward his mouth and begins to lick, at first tentatively, and then quite thoroughly, as Babb croons, “That’s a good puppy …”

When Casper is done, he turns his head to the side and doesn’t face forward again until Babb has gone, down the aisle to the middle of the pavilion and out of the ward. Then Casper heaves a deep sigh that ends in a soft moan. He adjusts the small pillow beneath his stub and gives it a few gentle pats. He lets his head fall back and expels another long sigh. One explosive sob escapes him, and he quickly flattens his hand over his mouth. After a moment, he takes a corner of the bedsheet and wipes his nose and eyes.
Hayes continues to watch him until Casper’s breath becomes regular, and, still sitting up, he has apparently gone asleep.

Hayes soon allows his own eyes to close.

A loud wind wakes him the second time, a wind that turns out to be Jeffers, gasping for air, asleep, and rolling onto his side. Startled, Hayes raises himself onto his elbows, just in time to see Babb, now kneeling between the two beds, taking a wad of bills from under Jeffers’s pillow. Babb turns and looks through the mosquito curtain directly at Hayes. His face, quite near Hayes’s own, at first discloses alarm but quickly acquires the flat affect of a dead man. He lifts Hayes’s mosquito curtain and drapes it over his own head, gathering and clutching it beneath his chin so that it looks like a woman’s hood.

“Now, who you gonna tell?” he whispers sweetly, smiling. “You can’t talk, can you? Can’t even hold a pencil in your fingers.”

He removes the curtain from around his face and lets it drop again. He shrugs his shoulders and says, through the gauze, “Besides … what use is it to
him
 … where
he’s
going?”

As Babb slips away, Hayes lowers his head onto his pillow.

A man nearby, and another farther away, are having what seem like antiphonal fits of coughing. The ward’s walls and rafters throb amber and violet with the flickering lamps—somehow the very rhythm (thinks Hayes, eyes closing) of sleep.