Nostalgia (24 page)

Now Mr. Hayes read to him a story that was both amusing and instructional. A crowd of boys, down around Schenck’s wharf, were in the habit of tossing stones at the crew of a certain vessel docked nearby. Apparently they’d done it once too often, and the vessel’s cook had at last fired a loaded gun into the crowd, injuring three. Immediately afterward, the vessel turned about and got under way but an industrious policeman from the First District, informed of what had happened, hopped the ferry, procured a rowboat on the New York side, hailed the vessel in the river, arrested the crew, and fetched them to the City Hall. The guilty cook said he was ordered by the mate to fire the gun and he’d meant only to scare the boys.

“ ‘This is a curious way to scare them,’ ” read Mr. Hayes from the newspaper, “ ‘and reminds us of the man who excused himself when charged with murder by saying that he had only knocked off the man’s hat; but it so happened that the head was in the hat when he knocked it off.’

“Ha!” cried Mr. Hayes, and let loose a gale of deep reading-voice laughter.

Summerfield had closed his eyes, the better to absorb the details of the story. On hearing his father laugh, he opened his eyes and saw that Mr. Hayes had turned in the chair and was now craning his neck around the wing of it and looking at him. His father repeated the laugh, louder, as if to infect him with it, and at that moment Mrs. Hayes and Sarah entered from the hall wearing their cotton dresses of pale pink and pale green.

“What’s all the fun in
here
?” asked Mrs. Hayes, not quite cheerfully, and then quickly added, “Summerfield Hayes, kindly get up off the floor before someone trips over you.”

He rolled onto his hands and knees, unamused by the remark about the murdered man’s head inside the hat, for his mind had got locked on the crowd of boys, fired upon at the wharf—he saw them break apart and scatter like bugs beneath an overturned rock. Some of them, injured, dropped to the planks. Some others likely crouched to tend the wounded. But surely others, maybe most, simply ran. Ran as hard and fast as their legs would carry them. Sprinted like mad from the foot of Joralemon Street. He felt a strong connection to these boys, at least as he imagined them—not for their tossing stones but for their running to save their own lives.

Twelve years later, in the woods of Virginia, the memory of that afternoon in the library with his family—and the newspaper story of the frightened and fleeing boys—returned to him as he darted through the tangled brush, dodging flames and hiding behind tree trunks, eluding the enraged men who meant to kill him.

O
UT ON THE
P
LANK
R
OAD
, a steady stream of blue-clad troops headed back toward the intersection with the Brock Road, the position from which they’d launched their first attack more than twenty-four hours earlier. All the ground gained by the morning’s fierce fighting had been lost. They wove between wagons and ambulances and moved under the arcs of solid shot still being lobbed into the woods by Union artillery. Officers rode among the squads, exhorting them to
turn, to rally, even striking the back of a soldier now and again with a sword—but the men were played-out. They’d not cast down their arms but still carried them on their shoulders. They were not in any state of panic but walked calmly. They stopped when ordered to by a mounted officer, but when he turned to admonish the next squad, they continued quietly on their way. They’d done all the fighting they meant to do, at least for now. Smoke billowed overhead, like low-lying clouds, lit silver here and there by the sun high in the sky. Meanwhile, the Confederate army, in good standing further to press their assault, mysteriously appeared to be stalling instead.

Hayes—winded but exhilarated by having escaped the band of rebels who’d chased him a mile through the forest—entered the flow. A man limping just in front of him fell; Hayes pulled him to the berm of the road and gave him a drink from his canteen. The man said, “Much obliged,” and then lay back onto the ground and closed his eyes. “I just want a little sleep,” he added softly.

“But you can’t sleep here,” said Hayes. “You’ll be trampled.”

The man rolled onto his side, drew his legs up to his belly, and folded his hands between his knees.

Hayes took the man’s weapon, fixed the bayonet, and drove it into the ground next to him. He removed the man’s forage cap and canteen and hung them on the stock as a signpost. When Hayes returned to the road, he fell in alongside an ambulance wagon, and after a moment or two he heard someone call, “Hayes, Hayes, it’s you!”

One of the men sitting inside the ambulance was Oscar Phipps; he’d turned and now gazed down at Hayes over the side of the wagon. “Hayes, it’s you!” he repeated.

“Mr. Phipps,” cried Hayes. “Are you all right?”

“It’s minor,” answered Phipps. “A shell in the woods. I took some shrapnel to the knee. But I outran that bunch of rebel skunks, I tell you. Imagine that, Hayes, at my age. Sorry to have dashed off like that, but my idea was to draw them away from you, you see. At least I succeeded in doing that, as your presence here surely proves.”

Phipps hung one arm over the side of the ambulance. “Take my hand, my boy,” he said, “take my hand.”

“Thank you, Mr. Phipps,” said Hayes, grasping the man’s hand.

Phipps smiled warmly and nodded. “If you don’t survive to toss another match at the Union Grounds,” he said, “it won’t be because of me.”

They moved along like that, hand in hand, for a good ways, and soon the same officers who’d commanded the men to rally were ordering them to the Brock Road, where they were already going anyway.

I
N HIS LETTER
to Sarah, Hayes had imagined the army (preparing to quit winter quarters) as viewed by a bird in the sky, and now, at the Brock Road, he again pictured it as a colony of ants—blue ants, and he wondered if such things actually existed in nature. He thought Leggett would be pleased that the breastworks, built and hastily abandoned the day before, would at last go into service, despite the ironic reason for it: demoralized and disarrayed, forced to retreat to where they’d started out, the Second Corps was in no condition to launch an assault, and so prepared to defend itself if assaulted.

Throughout the middle of the day, troops emerged from the woods and sought out their unit flags planted by color sergeants along the breastworks. Hundreds of stragglers, broken by the ferocity of the fighting, materialized from the rear. Officers moved up and down the road directing soldiers to their proper positions. The reorganized troops felled trees, clearing a swath out in front of the barricade, and stacked the timber against the works till it was as high as a man’s chest. They sharpened branches and fashioned abatis pointed at the enemy.

The battle smoke faded, and bright sunshine engulfed them. They were supplied with fresh ammunition. Rumors (
General rumors
, thought Hayes, for each concerned a commander) shuttled through the ranks—General Longstreet, like General Jackson at Chancellorsville, had been accidentally wounded by his own troops, which accounted for the Confederates’ stalling rather than pressing their advantage; the Union’s own General Wadsworth had been killed; the long-awaited General Burnside was at last “going in on the right,” whatever that meant; General Grant, unhappy with the corps’ defensive position, had ordered a new attack for six o’clock. Heavy artillery
rolled into the road—Hayes counted twelve pieces at the intersection with the Plank Road, close to where the Mozarters were situated. The captain encouraged Hayes’s company (what of it had survived) to eat something, and to rest.

Hayes sat on a stump that was still sticky with sap and oiled his weapon. The cook, suitably named Fry, soon came along and offered him a piece of salt pork, which he declined, claiming, honestly, a lack of appetite.

“Grab a meal where you can,” admonished Fry, narrowing his eyes. “Eat for the future, son, eat for the future.”

The bright sun so bleached Fry’s face it nearly obliterated his features, an effect Hayes found unsettling. Though he knew it to be irrational, he felt that the man forced the salt pork on him and that, in any case, his diet was none of Fry’s business. His lack of hunger, should he have to explain it, was a small symptom of a larger wonder: unessential desires intermitted, he was stripped back to the bare imperatives of a warrior; his body, ruled by instinct, had sacrificed itself to the greater cause of killing; if breathing were not automatic, he wouldn’t expend the energy to will it. He closed his eyes and managed to say, softly, “No.”

Fry said, “Are you all right, Hayes?”

Now the man was probing him, to no useful end. Hayes wanted to say,
Leave me alone
, but instead he held his eyes shut and wished him away. He concentrated on the blood inside his own eyelids, a sunlit red-orange canvas on which he saw, in rapid succession, the red-liquid eruption from Leggett’s shredded mouth; the red hole opened in Flowers’s head by a ball above his eye; the flat belly of the red-haired boy, pierced by the blade of Hayes’s bayonet (sucking sound going in, sucking sound coming out); and the phantom red-faced old man in the stovepipe hat, feeding hardtack to a squirrel. He heard Oscar Phipps’s voice—
If we’re not ourselves, then who are we?
—and Hayes was taken with the observation that a separate part of his brain replied to these presumably unwanted memories with a remarkable and confident neutrality. The reply from that quarter, quite numb, was what he’d already said to the company cook:
No
.

His weapon rested crosswise in his lap. He allowed himself to soak
in the warmth of the sun, most evident on the bridge of his nose and on top of his hands. The Virginian May felt like June or July in New York. He was fully resigned to present conditions—had altered himself and
been
altered accordingly—yet, for a moment, the sun (combined with the leafy aroma of the slashed undergrowth nearby) filled him with longing for the ball grounds and the brilliant exercise in which, for the duration of a match, all of life’s frustrating mysteries were suspended: men opposed each other in an ambience both predictable and accommodating to surprise; reached an outcome to which each, in his turn, had a say; and, at the end, triumphant or defeated, admired one another for the spirit of the play.

When Hayes opened his eyes, Fry had moved on.

He got himself up, gathered his gear, and moved forward to the front line, where he could see the continuing but dwindling trickle of blue-clad troops from the forest. There, among a regiment of men who called themselves Orange Blossoms, many of whom had curled up in the shade of the entrenchment wall and slept, Hayes placed himself near the brigade colors and waited and watched—waited and watched for what seemed hours. He examined the grimy faces of the soldiers as they stumbled and staggered and limped into the broad belt of the new clearing. Across the way, the sun dropped slowly closer to the treetops. Then, at last, Hayes saw Billy Swift emerge, alone, from the woods.

A
FTER
H
AYES HAD LED
Swift back to the regiment and got him a tin cup of hot coffee, the two found some shade and a patch of switchgrass and sat close to each other with their elbows on their knees. To Hayes, Swift looked as if he had aged a year or two—some light had gone from his eyes, which now appeared to remain only half open. An enormous black fly kept orbiting his head, buzzing now and again into his ears, and Swift swatted at it to no avail. When he complained, Hayes hushed him, carefully followed the fly for a moment, then reached out and grabbed it in midair, clenching it inside his fist. He squeezed it between his thumb and middle finger and dropped it into the grass.

Swift regarded him with awe, not smiling, as if Hayes was more curiosity than friend. “Where’d you learn to do that?” he said.

Hayes only shrugged, for it wasn’t something he’d learned to do, nor to his recollection had he ever done it before.

They fell silent for some time, and after Swift finished the coffee, he chose a long blade of grass and inserted it between his front teeth. The two lay back, with their heads almost touching, and gazed up at the wagon-wheel branches of the pine tree above them. Swift sighed and said, “There’s a cat up there in that tree.”

“No,” said Hayes. “Where?”

“Not a real cat,” said Swift, “but look there at that biggest limb on the right-hand side.”

Indeed, after a moment, Hayes discerned that bark and knotholes had conspired to etch the face of a cat on the underside of the branch, with needles for whiskers. “How about that?” he said, and Swift rolled onto his side and looked at him meaningfully.

“What?” said Hayes.

Swift pointed his thumb toward the woods at his back and said softly, “There’s a spring about a hundred yards straight through there. I found it yesterday but didn’t have time enough for more than a quick drink.”

“A spring?”

Swift put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Hayes, it’s a pool big enough for bathing. Wanna go absent without leave?”

S
WIFT STOPPED SUDDENLY
, turned, and put up his hand. When Hayes moved quietly to his side Swift whispered, “Looks like somebody else had the same idea.”

Through the thicket, about ten yards forward, Hayes saw the small round pool—a modest recess in the earth filled with green water, sunlit through an opening in the canopy, with a smooth gray boulder forming a low wall at one end; opposite, a sort of sloping bank, covered with dry leaves, upon which were spread (like the cutout garb of a paper doll) the hat, uniform, and regalia of a brigadier general.

“If I’m not wrong,” said Swift softly, “that’s our own commander.”

Hayes bent forward and rested his chin on Swift’s shoulder. Indeed, knee-deep in the water and unadorned by anything other than a silver flask in one hand, stood Brigadier General J. H. Hobart Ward, of the corps’ First Brigade; somehow, in nakedness, more stately—with his prominent brow and droopy whiskers, he looked like a statue in a Roman fountain. High on the boulder behind him, waited an aide, fully clothed and holding a bucket. Now the general nodded and dropped his chin to his chest, apparently the signal for the aide to empty the water from the bucket over his officer’s head.