Nostalgia (21 page)

Only a trick of the mind: when Hayes looked forward again, the dead soldiers were properly dead once more, and stationary. The forest itself, on the other hand, enlivened by gunfire, continued to pulse and shiver. A gray-green rain of shattered leaves wafted down from the canopy, a thing of simultaneous beauty and horror, and Hayes was struck by the coldness with which he observed it. Something deep within him had gone numb, and then, for a moment or two, he lost touch with all the certainties, small and large, that made him known to himself. It was a kind of blankness, for sure, the result of obliterative noise, but not entirely without character: nothing in the world mattered, nothing in life possessed any value, and all human endeavor was as foul and menacing as the scavenging of wild pigs in the street.

He looked at the barky vertical things that constituted what was called woods, and he couldn’t think of the name for them—the word
book
came to mind, though he knew it to be wrong. He noted the scorch-marks on the back of Magnus Lynch’s sack coat, and he felt a boyhood remorse at having ruined something good and the dread of being found out.

Then, as if these emotions had opened some sort of channel, he heard his sister speak his name, and the world was once again bizarre and recognizable. The shattered leaves rained down from
trees
. His country was at war with itself. He fought for the Army of the Potomac.
In the smoke and confusion his squad had wandered astray, and he’d got caught between the lines. Without his anchor (Leggett), he’d gone unmoored; it was the best he could do, to place himself in one spot like a piece of artillery and wage his singular offensive. But now he longed to find his own comrades, his own officers, and rest in the self-abandonment that came with following orders. He could go toward neither line without being taken for the enemy and shot, so he resolved to try a lateral move and see where that would take him.

As he gathered his gear, there came a lull in the fighting, and the deafening barrage slowly abated to the sporadic popping he associated with picket skirmishes. He thought it dusk now, but a dusk like none other, a failure of light that lacked the promise of darkness. He could hear the enormous thunder of combat farther away and then the deep rumble of more combat farther away still. What had seemed to him so convincingly the heart of the war was but a single lesion on the leprous body of a giant. He began to creep into the thicket. The sulfurous vapors that filled his lungs caused a hot tingle inside his chest. The ground before him sank gradually and then gradually rose beneath a bewilderment of vines and brush, strewn with bodies. Now and again, he crawled alongside a pair with limbs variously intermingled. Though he made no attempt to identify any of the fallen—indeed, he kept his eyes half closed most of the time—he did recognize the mangled corpse of his sergeant resting against the trunk of a tulip tree.

He gathered ammunition from the dead, as well as weapons, trussing with belts a bundle of muskets and dragging it along like a disabled companion. Woodsmoke mixed with gun smoke, and the dusky air grew hotter and darker still. He took a canteen from a dead comrade, drank from it, and poured the rest over his own head. He inched forward, sometimes through thorny brambles and patches of slime. His bundle of firearms got snagged repeatedly, and he found himself cultivating patience toward it, as he’d always tried to do with those who muffed balls on the playing field. For a little while he was back in New York, among his club mates after a match—music, speeches and laughter, chicken potpie and champagne.

H
E REACHED THE CREST
of an incline just as a young lieutenant colonel rode out of the smoke—lowering his head to clear a branch, teetering in the saddle—and stopped about ten yards away. Hayes couldn’t think if he’d seen the man before, for so many of the young dark-haired officers looked alike. He watched as the man (obviously drunk) removed a flask from the pocket of his coat and took a long drink. He wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and then struggled so forcefully to screw the cap back on he broke the hinge and sent it spiraling to the ground. Rather than looking down after it, the man cast his gaze heavenward, as if to reprove a tiresome and trying God, and at that moment a bullet struck him in the left ear, knocking his hat into a nearby tangle of vines, where it lay cockeyed, suspended. He slumped violently forward, his face smacking the mane of the beautiful honey-colored mount, which danced two steps forward and back.

A second bullet struck the forehead of the horse, whose front legs buckled, catapulting the officer headfirst over the poll: a rag doll, an unseemly heap, buttressed by a sword. Third and fourth bullets struck the horse in the breast, and it shuddered and fitfully pivoted its hindquarters in an arc, so that when at last it collapsed, the full weight of its girth flattened the lieutenant colonel to the ground. The beast’s long and final expiration sent dry leaves skittering toward Hayes, and then its lower lip sagged open, discharging a gluey braid of spittle.

Hayes crawled forward and uprighted the officer’s flask before all the contents had spilled out. He found the cap, sniffed it, and screwed it on: bourbon, which he’d never cared for.

A
BREEZE SWEPT THROUGH
the woods, agitating the smoke, and the air went grayer, whiter, and grayer again. Hayes heard a
rat-a-tat
of drums, then a sound like heavy rain, rapidly approaching, and half a minute later he was being carried forward by a great wave of Union troops, Pennsylvania men from his own brigade, who were
accompanied by a sudden onslaught of artillery some distance toward their right flank. Two veterans quickly lifted Hayes’s bundle of guns (one shouted, “Well done!”), and soon the line dug in and a new inferno was under way.

Through the trees down to the right, Hayes could see vertical bars of paler light that indicated a clearing, most likely a road, where shells whistled and exploded above the roar of musketry. The man closest to Hayes, an older gentleman with gray whiskers, called out to him: “How’d you get so far out in front, son?”

“By accident!” shouted Hayes, and the older man laughed.

Hayes forgot to keep count of his shots, but he didn’t mind. He thought of them now as countless, and he was sure he’d developed bruises up and down his right arm. The blister on his hand burst, and a new one formed alongside it.

They continued firing and advanced now and again in small increments, but every inch of gained ground cost them; men lay wounded all about, moaning or silent, half hidden in the underbrush. Hayes could tell that no significant progress was being made, and he thought the seemingly endless supply of Union soldiers worked almost to a disadvantage—the troops were jammed up against one another too close in the woods and resulted in an atmosphere of chaos. As the forest continued to grow darker and they drew ever closer to the opposing line, it became clear that the rebels occupied a higher ground. Even if the Union troops outnumbered them, as long as the Confederates had ammunition, they would hold their position. Each time they appeared to be weakening—and some small hope arose that a real advance might be made against them—they quickened with renewed vigor, always, always punctuated with the hideous rebel cry.

The gray-whiskered soldier who’d asked Hayes how he’d got so far out front took a bullet through the neck and bled to death in a matter of seconds. Careful to keep his head low, Hayes dragged the body a short ways to the rear where the dead were being piled. Many years ago, he’d watched longshoremen at the Atlantic Docks drag big sacks of grain down the gangplank of a barge and heave them onto wagons. Now, as he laid the gray-whiskered gentleman onto the heap,
he recalled how he’d admired the muscle and workaday composure with which the longshoremen had toiled and how, for some time, he’d aspired to become a dockworker.

Soon after he returned to the line, an Irishman with a runny nose fell in next to him. His face bright red, he looked at Hayes, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat, and said, “Christ Jesus, I wish night would come!”

A minute later they advanced a few yards more, and the Irishman was cut down by a blast seemingly from very close range. Collapsing onto one knee, he shouted at Hayes, “Hey, what’d you do that for?”—evidently thinking that Hayes had struck him somehow and caused him to fall.

Hayes peered through the smoke and saw a dark mound straight in front, not a dozen paces away. Crouched, he ran forward and found there a little frayed old rebel in a droopy hat, who’d positioned himself behind a blind of dead Union soldiers, set sideways like so many logs. The old man—skin and bones; barefoot in yellow-brown rags—yanked out his ramrod and pointed his musket at Hayes, but before he could get off a shot, Hayes kicked him with the sole of his shoe. The man went flat on his back, like a sheaf of straw, and Hayes came down hard with the stock of his musket, crushing his nose and rendering him apparently unconscious.

Hayes took the Confederate’s weapon and began to scurry back to the line, when, from behind, he heard the screech of a banshee. He turned and saw the old man charging, blood pouring from his face; he leaped for Hayes, arms outflung, hands like claws, but midleap the old man was felled by a bullet to the chest.

Now Hayes knelt beside the wounded Irishman, who’d taken a ball in the knee and lay bleeding and ashy. The man braced himself against Hayes, twisted round, and yelled at the old rebel’s corpse, “That’s for taking me drumstick, damn you!”

Hayes tore off the Irishman’s trouser leg below the wound and made a tourniquet of the cloth. “Oh, Christ Jesus,” said the man, rocking back, “how I wish night would come, how I wish night would come.”

Hayes reached into his coat pocket and took out the flask of bourbon. “Here,” he said, passing it to the Irishman, “drink some of this.”

“Good heavens, lad,” said the man, staring at Hayes in awe. He tipped the flask to his lips and took a long drink. His eyes brimming with tears now, he said, “That’ll lift me, sure.”

Hayes was thinking about the old rebel who lay dead a few feet away in last year’s fallen leaves. All afternoon the murderous force that had wreaked such havoc against the Union lines had remained entirely invisible, behind a tangle of forest and a wall of smoke. It was as if Hayes had earned his bruises and blisters firing his weapon at the
idea
of an enemy (though unquestionably an intractable one). Now, at last and for the first time, he’d come face-to-face with the foe, and the fearsome warrior—not even identifiably military, but elderly and indigent—weighed in at about ninety pounds. There had been a fraction of a second, just before he’d bashed the man’s face, in which he’d thought to offer him a hand up from the ground. After all, but for the tattered CSA garb, he might have been the withered Methuselah who sat in the front-most pew Sundays at Trinity Church and snored and wheezed throughout the homily.

T
HE END OF THE FIGHTING
, like nightfall, came abruptly. Hancock’s troops were ordered to remain at the front, while General Getty’s were allowed to retreat to the breastworks at the Brock Road. In the dark, the muddled army untangled and rearranged itself, and Hayes found his way to the edge (if not to the heart) of his regiment. Soon he lay on the ground among his comrades, so close to the enemy line he could hear the murmur of the rebels’ conversations. From the nearby Orange Plank Road—where only an hour ago rolled the deafening thunder of artillery—he heard the rumble of wagons and the neighing and snorting of mules and horses. Underlying these sounds, the echo of the long afternoon’s battle rang in his ears. The darkness, marked only by a smattering of small brushfires kindled by evening breezes, was nearly absolute. An enduring smell of smoke pervaded the air and made him recall winter nights on the Brooklyn skating ponds.
Across the heaving marshy terrain, countless soldiers lay clutching their arms. Now and again Hayes heard the muffled cries of the wounded, but for the most part these poor fellows went untended, for search lanterns drew rebel fire and renewed skirmishes. Not far away, a chaplain softly led some men in prayer. All around, there was the whisper of movement—a kind of lost and aimless shuffling that made Hayes think of the Second Corps as a great organism languishing battle-stunned on the forest floor, trying to sort itself out and catch its breath, restive and exhaling smoke. When, out of the night, he heard someone softly calling his name, he first imagined he’d fallen asleep and was dreaming.

Billy Swift, with Rosamel in tow, had sought him out, and the three greeted one another with astonished delight. Hayes remarked on the faces of the two others, how they were blackened with gunpowder, and Swift laughed and said that Hayes obviously hadn’t had a chance to look in a mirror, for Hayes’s face was as black as coal and all the blacker in the darkness. Swift and Rosamel got on the ground on either side of Hayes, pressing close against him, and Billy was soon resting his head on Hayes’s shoulder. For some time the three lay without speaking, and it did seem to Hayes that there was not much that needed saying: they had each survived; nothing beyond that had been achieved; dawn would come, and it would all begin again.

At last—as if he were reporting an event from the afternoon in the Wilderness—Swift said, “Rosamel’s wife ran off with another man.”

“Yes, he told me,” said Hayes, and they fell silent for another long interval.

Then Rosamel said, bleakly,
“Oui … ma Madeleine.”

Swift raised himself onto an elbow and spoke to Rosamel across Hayes’s chest. “Why’d you let her go, Rosamel? That’s what I don’t understand. You should’ve locked her up.”

“You say this because you have never had a woman,” said Rosamel, keeping his head on the ground and speaking into the overhanging branches.

“Me, I would’ve shot the stinker,” said Swift.

“She was not a stinker,” said Rosamel.

“Rosamel,” said Swift, “I meant the man she ran off with.”

“Oh, yes,” said Rosamel, “but you say that because you have never been to jail.”

“You’ve been in jail?” asked Swift.