Nostalgia (20 page)

Soon he climbs out of the bed and gets onto the floor, prone, with his head just under the edge of the iron frame and his right eye positioned over the knothole. It’s darker down there than in the ward, but after a moment his eye adjusts to the gloom, and he can see Banjo, Company D’s foxhound, scratching her muzzle with one of her hind feet. She looks up at him, comes over, and starts sniffing around the rim of the knothole and whimpering. Her whiskers touch his eyelash, and then he sees that it’s a big brown rat, not a dog, and drawing back, he cracks his head against the wooden bed slats. He starts to slide away but stops when he hears somebody whispering his name beneath the floor. Carefully he crawls toward the hole again.

Hayes, Hayes
, he hears.
They’ve took the goats, the rotten thieves. Quick, pull me out, Hayes
.

Hayes already knows it’s Billy Swift down there with the rats, and when he peers through the knothole, he sees Billy standing directly below, reaching a trembling hand upward.

“Shhh,” says Hayes, “nobody here knows my name.”

Pull me out
, Billy whispers,
quick
, but Hayes can’t think how to do it. Smoke begins to swirl around the boy’s face, and Hayes then sees, with horror, that Swift’s feet and legs are on fire.

Now, grasping that he’s having a nightmare, Hayes wills himself awake, only to find that in reality it’s the hospital ward that’s burning. The whole place is filled with smoke, and across the way mosquito curtains roll toward the rafters in bursts of orange flame.

He gets himself up and into the aisle, where he sees that some of the patients have already been evacuated, their beds already empty; other beds contain still-sleeping soldiers; and still others the black cylinders (tapered at the ends) of charred corpses. He tries to call out but cannot make his voice work. He sprints for the wardmaster’s room, which he finds empty but for thick black smoke; he rushes through to the set of outer doors that exit the ward, and when he throws these open he awakens in his own bed, thrashing but restrained by two uniformed guards.

“Be
still
!” says the first, forcefully, and Hayes drops back against the iron bedstead, stupefied.

“Better,” says the second, who reaches for Hayes’s tag, reads what’s on it, and releases it. “What’s your name?”

Hayes is silent.

“If you won’t say your name,” says the first, “we’ll just have to—”

At that moment, Matron appears, in a bonnet and a long nightgown. She looks at Hayes, wide-eyed, and says, “He’s dressed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the first guard. “We stopped him at the doors. He was in a state, like somebody was after him.”

“He was like a wildcat,” says the second.

Hayes’s mind is racing. He looks at Matron, like a ship’s mast at the end of his bed, darkness behind her, and understands all at once that she herself is sick, that she suffers some sort of illness in the advanced stages.

And he believes with a sudden certainty that he is to die after all,
that his sister, Sarah, will never see him alive again. He’s consumed by guilt for having abandoned her and thinks his being deserted on the battlefield was God’s scheme for evening the score.

Now he looks down at his clothes, which he doesn’t recognize. If he could only see his wounds he might
know
if he is to live or die. He pushes himself up and starts to tear at his strange clothes, ripping open the shirt and the fly of the trousers. He feels many hands, pulling him one way and another, but he’s strong and single-minded: he
will
see his wounds.

The guards struggle against him roughly—one claps him against the side of his head with something harder and heavier than any human hand—and Hayes then hears Matron’s voice: “That will do!” she cries, and then, “Go … go … please … and leave us be.”

“Now, see here,” says one of the guards, indignantly, but Matron soothes and persuades both the soldiers—calling them “gentlemen,” thanking them for their help, assuring them that she can manage now—and then they are gone.

Hayes, half naked, allows himself to be sorted out by the woman, who, to his complete amazement, soon has him in her arms, rocking him as if he were a child.

“There, there, my poor boy,” she says, “get hold of yourself. I didn’t know you were so terribly distraught. Everything’s going to be all right, in time. Try to calm yourself, dear.”

Hayes smells smoke and sees flames out of the corner of his right eye. He jerks his head in that direction, and Matron says, “What is it, my boy? What is it you think you see?”

And, after another moment, stroking the back of his head, she says, “It’s nothing, my dear. Nothing at all. Don’t be so very frightened. You’re safe with us … safe and sound with us.”

Just as the land began to level off, they stumbled into a surprising pocket of clear air. For the last several minutes they’d been struggling, almost blindly, toward a continuous clap of musketry, which now suddenly ceased. In the abrupt quiet, a nearby soldier whistled the first phrase of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Hayes saw a fragment of the ragged line of his squad zigzagging away into the thicket, and then Leggett, not more than six paces forward. “Truman!” he cried, and Leggett turned, met Hayes’s eyes, quickly shook his head, and sighed, an assessment of the situation they found themselves in: the ground immediately beyond was littered with dead and wounded Union men. Half a dozen panicked soldiers brushed past Hayes, headed in the opposite direction (one jostling his shoulder), and then a solitary bullet zipped low through the trees and struck the barrel of his musket with a loud
ping!
, knocking it from his hands and onto the ground. He threw himself at it, prone, a reaction that likely saved his life, for in the next instant a fierce volley from an invisible enemy felled the still-standing soldiers on either side of him. The sound—unlike anything he’d ever heard, a mixture of concentrated gunfire, inhuman shrieks, and the dull drumroll of bodies hitting the ground—seemed to shake the earth. Arms outstretched, he gripped the weapon and squeezed his eyes shut. Amid the din rang a muffled
chorus of
“Down down,”
and then he saw Leggett again, who now lay flat with his head thrust back, as if gazing at something high above and behind him in the trees.

Hayes wriggled forward as two undulant walls of blue-white smoke crept toward each other across the forest floor, closing in from either side. It occurred to him that he and his comrades had wandered astray and were now caught between the lines. The earth under his belly felt hot and damp and smelled of burnt pine. Beneath the battle-roar, which sprang from every direction and penetrated the soles of his feet, he could hear, from inside himself, the strangely poignant whisper of his own breathing.

Leggett had been shot in the mouth. Jets of blood pulsed into a brown mat of pine needles beneath his shoulders. Hayes, turning Leggett’s head to one side, saw that the ball had exited the nape of his neck. Two broken amber-colored teeth lay in the rising pool of blood, glistening like gemstones. Hayes slid his hand beneath Leggett’s neck and staunched the current—with the result that the tattered gaping cavity at the lower half of his face filled and began to overflow. Beneath the modest brim of his forage cap, which still hugged his brow, Leggett’s eyes were as wide and vacant as a trout’s. Ten seconds had passed since Hayes had spotted him and called his name, and now he was gone, utterly; the wet and ghastly thing Hayes cupped in his palm bore little that even suggested the man.

Hayes removed his hand, warm and sodden, brought it to his nostrils, and sniffed (rust, weak tea in a tin cup). He touched his lips to his palm (salt, a nickel on the tongue). He wiped his hand on his trousers, looked up to his right, and watched a trio of saplings twitch and quake as their gray bark was gashed and scarred, their new leaves sliced and splintered, by an unbroken tempest of bullets. From a bearing he now perceived as behind him, three or four commanders were shouting
Fire at will!
which, though it struck him as a kind of nonsense—exotic owls screeching in a jungle—did supply a feasible objective.

He unbuckled Leggett’s belt and roughly freed it from beneath him, rolling the body one way and another as required. A short distance away, he saw a soldier burrowed in a shallow recess behind a clump of earth and rotting logs. Hayes crawled forward, dragging his weapon
and Leggett’s belt along the ground. The blare of combat, from both front and rear, was like the toothed jaws of a giant vise. He nestled in alongside the other soldier, whom he recognized as a private named Lynch, from West Cambridge, Massachusetts, and who turned out to be quite dead, though Hayes could not locate any wound. With a little adjusting, he put the man’s broad back into service as a table on which to rest his musket. It was easy enough to discern the rebel line—some two hundred yards through the trees, the screen of smoke sparkled with repeating bursts of yellow fire—but he had no way of knowing who among his comrades might lie between that line and himself. He resolved to aim high enough to shoot over any such soldiers, and then he was loading, firing, reloading, and firing again, keeping careful count of his shots. He found he had to think his way through the series of loading steps only the first couple of times, and then he acquired the cold efficacy of an automaton.

A
PRIVATE FROM
another company, a round-faced boy Hayes knew only vaguely, landed next to him, wide-eyed and sweating. He looked at Hayes with wonder and shouted (for it was the only way to make oneself heard), “I’ve lost my squad. I don’t know where I am. What should I do? I don’t know what to do.”

“Clahane,” Hayes said, for he’d suddenly recalled the boy’s name.

Stunned, he said, “Oh, you’re Hayes, the ball player! I guess I best go find my squad. Trouble is, I don’t know if they’re forward or back.”

“We’ve got ourselves between the lines,” shouted Hayes. “If you go looking for them, you’ll be shot. I’m surprised you got this far.”

“Maybe I’m shot already,” said the boy, knocking his fist hard against the side of his own head, as if to jolt himself from a trance. “Maybe I’m already dead.”

He reached out a hand and pressed his fingers three times against Hayes’s left cheek. Still, he didn’t appear entirely convinced that Hayes was real. His gaze fell on the soldier whose back served as a fulcrum for Hayes’s musket. “Who’s that?” he said.

“Magnus Lynch,” answered Hayes.

“Is he dead?” asked the boy, dreamily.

“Clahane,” said Hayes, “stay here and dig in, like me. Fire your weapon.”

“Fire my weapon,” said Clahane, looking down curiously at his musket. “Yes, but are you sure that’s the thing to do, Hayes?”

“We’re engaged in battle,” shouted Hayes. “You’re supposed to fire your weapon.”

Clahane craned his neck and looked out over the terrain directly before them. Hayes quickly put a hand on top of the boy’s head and pressed him down.

“Do you suppose they’re
all
dead?” said the boy.

“Fire your weapon,” repeated Hayes.

“But what do I aim at?”

“Like this,” answered Hayes and demonstrated the upward tilt of his barrel. “Watch what I do and follow.”

Hayes led Clahane through the loading steps, which seemed to come back to the boy immediately, and soon, lying on his belly a musket’s length away, he was grinning and firing, yelping delightedly with each blast. Hayes put his finger to his own lips to hush the boy—the colonel had instructed them that such squealing was secesh behavior and altogether unbecoming.

Hayes resumed firing and soon forgot about Clahane. Soon his right arm grew sore, and a blister formed in the tender flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Soon his weapon grew so hot that the powder would flash before he could load the ball, and so he began alternating his musket with the dead Magnus Lynch’s. And when he’d exhausted his own ammunition, he opened a tin of Leggett’s.

B
ECAUSE THE LIGHT
in the woods faded, he knew that time was passing. In all the battle depictions he’d heard from veterans, he’d never known anyone to describe an engagement of such relentless ferocity and duration. He witnessed no wounded soldiers retreating or being carried to the rear by stretcher-bearers, no color guards, no visible colors ahead or behind. No rebels charged the Union line, and yet he sensed, at his back, some distance away, a chaotic ebb and flow of troops, fresh regiments arriving piecemeal as spent infantry withdrew.
One thing remained clear—to stand up meant certain death, and so Hayes stayed put and fired the two weapons sixty-seven times.

As he was loading the sixty-eighth, a bugle sounded somewhere off in the woods to his right, and the dozens of dead soldiers sprawled on the ground before him rose in unison onto all fours and begin to crawl forward. Hayes felt the skin on the back of his neck contract. He burst out laughing and turned to confer with Clahane about this extraordinary sight—but Clahane, hatless now, was stretched out flat and peaceful, his weapon beneath him, his cheek resting against the barrel. The boy might have been sleeping but for a bloody furrow that incised one side of his scalp and the fingers of blood that had flowed down from the wound and streaked his face.