Nostalgia (23 page)

Flowers fired his weapon and began reloading.

“And what’s the point of noble officers—illustrious generals and the like—if you can’t find them and they can’t find you? What use the willingness to toe the mark when orders can’t be heard?”

He fired again, and again began reloading.

“What a damned muddle!” he shouted. “Look at you and me, Hayes. Here we are, jammed in together like two pickles in jar, and we don’t even belong to the same corps!”

Just then a riderless horse lurched into the small clearing directly behind them, paused, and snorted. Flowers rose onto one knee and turned, then looked back at Hayes and grinned. At that moment a bullet tore a hole in his skull high above his left eye. The impact knocked him backward, startling the horse, which smashed into the trunk of a tree, righted itself, and disappeared into the thicket.

Another soldier scrambled alongside Flowers and started fussing with the dead man’s belt. When he saw that Hayes was watching him, he glared at Hayes angrily and said, “I’m out of
caps
!”

A
FTER
F
LOWERS
, curious voids began to open in Hayes’s ordeal: like a drowsy traveler in a carriage, he would now and again nod off, and then awaken farther along the way.

The fighting ebbed, and a hiatus ensued, though they could hear, from the distant rumble of combat elsewhere in the Wilderness, that the larger war persisted. South of the Orange Plank Road, for what had seemed hours, neither army had gained or yielded any ground, and for now, both were spent.

As best they could, they regrouped. Hayes found the Mozarters half a mile back toward the Brock Road. Some of the men made fires, brewed coffee, smoked, ate. Many slept.

They were supplied with fresh rounds of ammunition.

A hatless lieutenant rode through the woods, calling out, “Hello,
anyone here from Frank’s brigade? Hello, hello, anyone here from Colonel Frank’s brigade?”

H
AYES HELPED CARRY
a wounded man on a blanket out to the Plank Road, where he was put into an ambulance. A good part of the man’s jaw was blown away. Somebody offered him whiskey from a canteen, and when he tried to sip it, the whiskey flowed into the wound and made him howl with pain.

The road, pocked with chug-holes, was an endless stream of the dying, borne on stretchers and blankets, and smelled of manure.

Back in the woods, somebody said hello to Hayes, and weirdly, Hayes responded, “I’m not Billy, I’m Albert,” for those words, turning over and over in his mind, had taken temporary possession of him.

There was no wind, and smoke lingered among the tree limbs.

H
E SAT
on the ground next to a man who reminded him of his father—he had his father’s coloring and thick eyebrows and was about the age his father would have been if his father were still alive. The man had removed his shoes and held a block of soap in his hand. “What are you doing?” asked Hayes, and the man, smiling paternally, replied, “I’m rubbing soap on my stockings, see … it reduces blistering.”

It turned out the man had Hayes’s father’s mellifluous voice as well. He offered the block of soap, and Hayes took off his own shoes and applied it to his own socks.

“You’re Summerfield Hayes,” said the man.

“Yes, sir,” answered Hayes.

“My name’s Phipps,” said the man, and smiled again. “Oscar Phipps.”

They shook hands, and Phipps said, “I’m very pleased to meet you. I should say, I’m very pleased we’re each still alive, that I might meet you.”

“Likewise,” said Hayes.

“It’s strange, isn’t it, to concern ourselves with blisters, when our very lives are in doubt?”

“Yes, sir,” said Hayes, “I guess it is.”

“We exercise power where we can,” said Phipps. “We can’t save our own souls, but maybe we can keep our feet from blistering.”

He smiled again. “Tell me, Hayes, how are you, son?”

Surprised by the question, then surprised again by his own frankness, Hayes answered, “I don’t think I’m quite myself, Mr. Phipps.”

“No,” said Phipps, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, “I’m not either. I don’t expect I’ll ever be myself again.”

He paused for a moment and slipped his shoes back on. Staring at his feet, he said, “And of course the question is—if we’re not ourselves, then who are we?”

He looked at Hayes apologetically, then laughed softly, reached out, and patted him on the shoulder. “Sorry, my boy,” he said. “That’s pure fatigue talking. Pure fatigue. Pay me no mind.”

It occurred to Hayes to tell the man he reminded him of his father, but the idea made him shy.

“I suppose we’ll just have to leave our souls to God,” added Phipps, lacing his shoes. “And meanwhile look after our feet.”

Through the trees, somebody laughed, an unnerving sound, for it had a maniacal edge.

T
HE COLONEL ADDRESSED
the regiment and told them (as far as Hayes could make out) that they should not lose heart, for he knew they were bound to win the contest.

A red-faced old man in a stovepipe hat sat on the ground near the colonel as he spoke. On the old man’s knee perched a squirrel eating hardtack from his hand.

The colonel said it was Divine Providence that they should win, that he’d seen a sure sign of it in the skies over Brandy Station, two days before they’d left. In the afternoon, he said, it had been a battle over what weather should rule the heavens, fair or foul, blue or gray. It had been give-and-take for an hour or more, but at last the beautiful blue skies had blown the gray clear out.

A young soldier standing next to Hayes elbowed him in the arm, and when Hayes looked, the other soldier grinned and arched an eyebrow. Hayes smiled, but he wasn’t sure what exactly the soldier had meant to convey.

Hayes said, “Who’s the old man feeding the squirrel?”

The other soldier looked at him quizzically and asked, “Whereabouts?”

And when Hayes again faced the colonel’s direction, he saw that the old man in the stovepipe hat had vanished.

S
EARCHING IN VAIN
for Swift, Hayes found Felix Rosamel, stretched out on the ground, wide-eyed and staring up into the tree limbs, worrying his mustache with the tip of his tongue and looking to Hayes quite insane. His face, splotched black with powder and spattered with mud, was absent of any light. His beret rested over his heart and was itself dark red and rather heart-shaped. Impassively, he told Hayes he’d not seen Billy all day.

As Hayes turned to go, Rosamel called him back. “The small clock,” he said, “it belonged to my mother. It was to her a treasure. I will not say the details, but she owed money to a man and could not pay him and so he took from her the clock. He was a charlatan.”

Hayes said he was sure Rosamel had done the right thing, the just thing, and Rosamel shook his head, as if to say that Hayes had failed to understand. From his place on the ground, he reached for Hayes’s hand, and Hayes knelt beside him. Rosamel’s eyelashes were caked with mud. He pulled Hayes close and said softly, “I introduced this horrible man to my mother.”

T
HE PERVASIVE SMOKE
, unstirred by any wind, hung in the pine boughs overhead, striped here and there by slanting bars of light.

The man named Coulter, who’d served as catcher for the opposing team in the regimental match at camp, ages and ages ago, said, “You know, Hayes, if you’re gonna get lost in the woods, you can get lost just as well to the rear as to the front.”

Hayes hadn’t noticed before, but it appeared that Coulter had a kind of nervous tic and tended to blink his eyes rapidly and often.

Another man, with a swollen and purple upper lip, told a long story about being stung in the woods by a hornet. It was, he said, the hornet from the old saying “as mad as a hornet.”

T
HERE WAS NO WIND
, no breeze of any kind, and—despite the commotion in the woods and out on the road, despite the clattering of wheels and hooves and the groans of the wounded and dying, despite the restful scents of coffee, woodsmoke, and tobacco—a troubled stillness honeycombed the air, a silent wrathful thing that slept, but not deeply, and not for long.

S
OMEBODY SAID
it was that rebel muggins Longstreet who’d stopped them in their tracks, that Bobby Lee’s Old War Horse was still coming along the Plank Road with more than thirty thousand troops, and his generals was off in those woods getting them all nice and arranged right now.

Bull, said another man, there wasn’t but sixty thousand in the whole Army of Northern Virginia. Besides, Longstreet was apter to come up from the south, along the Brock Road.

Either way, said a third, they were in for an assault, weren’t they?

A fourth man said the sooner the better for him, that this damned waiting made him feel all-overish. The sooner the better.

H
AYES PLACED
a folded handkerchief over the raw blisters on his hand and tied it with a piece of string. His bruised right arm ached, and no amount of swinging it in circles made any difference. Generally agitated, he couldn’t seem to stay with any line of thinking for more than a few seconds. A river of anger heaved and churned inside him, but he could neither trace its source nor follow it to any destination.

He found a spot in the underbrush where he could be by himself and raked together a bed of dry leaves and sat down. He took off his
cap and discovered that if he stared long enough at its blue clover-leaf insignia (indicating his corps and division) it began to resemble a flame, then a mouse with wings, then a tiny sea creature.

T
HEY WERE FLANKED
by rebel troops that came up from the south, not along the Brock Road but through a ravine in the woods. Simultaneously assaulted anew from the front, they were caught in a vise and quickly began to lose all the terrain they’d earlier gained. So surprised were they by the rebels, there’d been no time to put out the campfires, which now set portions of the woods aflame. As Hayes’s regiment defended against the frontal attack, they were barraged by fleeing Union troops to their left; they were ordered to turn to the crumbling flank, an endeavor that served only to further fragment them, and they too soon began to give way: like specters rising out of a dream of flames and smothering smoke and disorder and the panic of nowhere-to-turn, the rebels overwhelmed them.

Hayes did not join the tide of Union troops that were fleeing north toward the Plank Road; at the edge of a small clearing, he holed up with Oscar Phipps within the branches of a felled chinquapin tree, where he waited and watched. Again running low on ammunition, they held on to their arms, loaded and ready, but didn’t fire, for fear of hitting their own comrades. A Union officer rode into the fray of retreating troops, waving his sword over his head and crying, to no effect whatsoever, “Rally, men, rally, for the love of God, rally!”

His mount, already wounded, pitched and staggered, and the officer himself was soon struck by a ball to the elbow. His sword went flashing to the ground, and the horse bolted with the injured officer back into the trees.

The clearing emptied for a moment, and then a rebel soldier—a redheaded ragamuffin with a blanket tied around his neck like a cape—emerged from the smoke, retrieved the sword, and began brandishing it, grinning, and strutting in a circle.

Oscar Phipps took aim.

The bullet struck the youngster in the chest, though he continued to stand and did not relinquish the sword; he placed his free hand over
his heart and began to teeter slowly toward the chinquapin tree, narrowing his eyes and scrutinizing its branches; then, only three paces away, he dropped to the ground.

Phipps said, “God, forgive me,” and then told Hayes to fix his bayonet. “The fighting’s apt to get close now,” he said.

They each fixed bayonets, and then Phipps said, “Let’s go, before it’s too late.” He parted the branches and moved out, but Hayes grabbed his coattail and tried to tug him back.

“It’s already too late,” said Hayes, but Phipps pulled free and started to run across the clearing as it filled with a band of rebel soldiers.

A dozen men took aim at the retreating Phipps, but somebody yelled, “Wait, don’t shoot him! Let’s catch him!” and the band of rebels started toward Phipps and the thicket.

Later, reflecting on the moment, Hayes would imagine that he’d wanted to help Phipps and that creating a diversion seemed the best strategy; but (he would further reflect) such a rationale only meant to put a sane face on a monstrous act of animal rage. He leaped out of the branches and stood over the redheaded Confederate boy dead at his feet. “Gentlemen,” he yelled, “mind this!”

The rebels, not ten yards away, stopped and turned. With one foot, Hayes rolled the dead soldier onto his back and then rammed the bayonet into the boy’s belly. A hideous cry went up from the other men, and now they were after him.

Hayes bounded over the trunk of the fallen tree and was off, zigzagging like a hare as the tangled woods required. Soon he heard the crackle of muskets at his back, but he knew he would be a slippery target. Heaven had bestowed on him two exceptional talents: he could toss a base ball that most men found tricky to hit; and, by God, he could run.

O
NE SPRING AFTERNOON
, not long after he’d turned seven, he lay on the carpet in the library at Hicks Street, where his father was reading the newspaper. He’d come home tired from an interminable day at school and was in that after-school state of mind in which a boy,
having been compelled to sit upright and think about one thing and another for many hours on end, wanted only to fling himself onto a flat surface and go mentally blank. The library’s raised windows let in the various street noises of wheels and bells and hooves, as well as a pleasant rose-colored light made by sunshine bouncing off the brick house across the way. His father sat in one of the leather amber-colored wing chairs that faced the cold hearth. From his position on the floor back of the chairs, Summerfield could see his father’s feet, crossed at the ankles in funny flowery embroidered slippers; his elbow, bare (as he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves) and resting on the arm of the chair; and, higher up, a corner of the newspaper. Now and again, his father would read to him an item he thought amusing (a Canadian man, dead at the ripe age of one hundred six, had left behind forty-three children and sixty-six grandchildren) or instructional (a nine-year-old boy, playing on the roof of his house, had plunged to his death), and Summerfield dreamily likened the flow of words to sand falling inside an hourglass. He enjoyed the sound of his father’s voice and was especially interested in the way it changed whenever it found itself reading aloud—it deepened and grew whispery as it pronounced each word with unusual precision.