Nostalgia (30 page)

Casper has not yet returned from the wardmaster’s room, if indeed that’s where he was taken, and Hayes worries he may never see him again, that he’ll doze off, and when he awakens, a new man will have been substituted for Casper as well. He’s not sure what time of day it is, but he thinks it’s still morning, for the black-clad clergy (always most prevalent in the morning) have been lurking about with their tracts. A short while ago, an especially insensible example snaked up next to Private Raugh and read aloud to him a preachment that included a passage on the evils of dancing. Raugh, immobile and unresponsive
throughout, has been sleeping ever afterward. So far, since Raugh’s arrival on the ward, Hayes has heard the man utter only the one word,
raw
.

Hayes’s head aches, his throat burns, and the nausea persists. He wants water but fears vomiting on the way to the water jar. He fears calling attention to himself in any way, which might provoke a reprise of Dr. Drum and the angry captain. When awake, he has pretended to be asleep and endeavored to keep still, the recent assault having put him back to the mind and manners of a cornered animal.

“I
T
’
S MUCUS
,” says Dr. Drum, peering into the basin held by Anne, “only mucus and more mucus. Entirely to be expected.”

Hayes rocks forward, heaves, retches, and vomits yet again.

After a pause, Anne (wearing the lovely forbidden lilac dress) looks into his eyes and says, “No more?”

Shot through with shame, he shakes his head.

“All done?” she says.

He nods, wishing he were dead.

She passes the basin to an attendant who waits behind her and takes a towel from her apron and wipes Hayes’s mouth. “There,” she says, in a heartening way. “You just lie back and rest now.”

When the surgeon and the attendant move away, Hayes sees Walt at the foot of the bed, still wearing his hat and haversack and gazing down at him gravely. As Walt removes the bag, a meaningful look passes between him and Anne, something vaguely disapproving, and then Casper—once again in his own bed—cries, “Oh, God, I’m cold I’m cold I’m cold!”

“I’ll fetch some blankets,” Anne says to Walt, “but in the meantime that’s brandy in the cup there. Persuade him to drink as much as you can.”

Casper lets out a chattering drone as Walt quickly sheds his own coat and lays it over him. Walt then helps Casper take the brandy, cooing assurances and generally quieting the boy.

“Scoundrel,” says Casper, his voice shaking, “scoundrel.”

“Who’s a scoundrel?” asks Walt.

“Commander of the guard. Ja-ja-jackanapes.”

Walt casts Hayes an inquiring glance, then returns to helping Casper with the cup. “Here,” he says, “drink some more of this, my boy, it’ll warm you.”

In another minute, Anne’s back with blankets, and she and Walt get Casper tucked in. “They put him in the wardmaster’s room and kept him a long time out of bed,” says Anne. “And now his fever’s up again.”

“Who put him in the wardmaster’s room?” asks Walt.

“Jackanapes ca-captain,” says Casper. He joggles his head toward Hayes. “They e-e-etherized him.”

Walt looks at Hayes, back at Casper, and finally at Anne. “I don’t understand,” he says.

Anne moves around the bed and stands close to him, taking his arm as if they are about to set out on a walk. “I must go,” she says softly. “But early this morning—from what I’ve gathered—Dr. Drum etherized our friend here in bed thirty-two. It’s ether that caused the nausea.”

“But why etherize him?”

“Dr. Drum’s test for detecting malingerers,” says Anne. “If Mr. X were feigning dumbness, see, he’d likely speak as he was recovering from the anesthesia … before he had his wits about him.”

“Ha-ha!” cries Casper. “He didn’t say
nothing
!”

“But who
is
Dr. Drum?” asks Walt.

“A friend of the ward surgeon,” says Anne. “Visiting from the Christian Street Hospital, in Philadelphia. Now I must go. You might bring Mr. X some tea when you have time.”

After she has gone, Walt stands between the two beds for a moment, looking first at Casper, then at Hayes, as if they are the two horns of a dilemma. At last he takes his bag by the strap and says, “I shall return. I’ve got a host of errands. And then some banging to do on a certain drum.”

Casper lets out an insane horselaugh, and when Walt hushes him, Casper covers his mouth with his one remaining hand. Walt starts to go but pauses and looks past Hayes at the new man sleeping in Jeffers’s bed. “Why, he’s the very spit of Abe Lincoln,” he says.

When Walt has left, it seems to Hayes that the noise of the ward increases, and likewise the temperature. There’s laughter and moaning and coughing and the rumble of a hundred conversations; a metallic rattle of unknown origin; the dull clank of the bell outdoors; the scuffle of wheels and boots and canes and crutches on the wooden floor.

Suddenly Major Cross shows up and stares down at Hayes with his scarlet face and gauze-white turban. “Dr. Drum means to take me with him to Philly-delphia,” he says.

He leans forward and whispers in Hayes’s ear: “Before it’s over, I’m going to tie him to a chair and feed him last year’s hay.”

Then Major Cross is prone on the floor in the narrow slot between Hayes’s bed and Raugh’s. Hayes can no longer see any sign of the man, but now and again he hears his muttering and sighing.

When Casper speaks next, his voice is thoroughly calm. “There, there, little fellow,” he says, consoling his stump. “Don’t you worry … you’ll be whole again soon enough.”

C
ASPER AND
R
AUGH ARE
undoubtedly drugged, for how else could they sleep amid such commotion? The din of the ward—when it approaches a peak, as now, in the middle of the afternoon—sounds to Hayes like combat, like musketry, and though he recognizes this as misapprehension, he cannot avert a powerful urge to take cover beneath the bed. He has learned the importance of fighting such urges. Succumbing to them can bring about harsh consequences: when he mistakenly thought the hospital had caught fire and tried to run out the doors and had to be restrained by guards, a forced etherization soon followed.

He wishes Walt would come back from his errands, for he feels safest when Walt is near. Even the man’s cane or hat or umbrella, left at Hayes’s bedside, has the power to soothe. Today Walt did not leave any of these, though he did promise to return. In the interim, the aftereffects of the ether have departed, except for a sore throat; the rekindling of his old symptoms (trembling hands, stinging shrapnel wounds); and a sharpened wariness (he minds the flow of traffic in the
aisle with increased vigilance, surreptitiously, to avoid meeting the eye of any passerby).

A while ago, he took up
Come to Jesus
, which he found demoralizing and soon only pretended to read, resting the spine in his lap to stay the quaking pages. One sentence has lodged in his mind: “God requires purity of heart as well as of outward conduct, and he knows all our thoughts.” The assertion offers nothing new in the way of theology—both its principles are familiar to him—yet, as it plays over and over in his head, Hayes sees that his experience of these conditions has changed. Purity of heart, once a worthy ideal, has become an unsportsmanlike precept, policed by surveillance, in a realm where ideas arise before they can be eluded. The state of being thoroughly known, once a solace, has become an invasion of privacy. The state of being never alone, once a comfort, has become the inescapable burden of never being
left
alone.

“… I forgot my glove in the wagon,” mumbles Casper, in his sleep, and then Hayes looks up and sees that Walt and Dr. Bliss stand at the foot of Casper’s bed.

“He had the shakes something terrible,” says Walt.

Dr. Bliss moves to one side, pulls down the blanket from around Casper’s neck, and lays a hand carefully on his brow. “I believe he’s feeling more than warm enough now,” he says.

Both the men step to the end of Hayes’s bed. Hayes starts to get up to salute, but Dr. Bliss raises a hand and says, “Keep still, son.”

Hayes, panicked and disgraced, is suddenly aware that some of the buttonholes on his shirt and on the fly of his trousers are torn. The surgeon slides a chair between the two beds and says, to Walt, “If you don’t mind, I should like you to take a seat here and play the visitor.”

“I don’t need to
play
the visitor,” says Walt. “I
am
the visitor. But as a visitor, I must say I find that chair uncommonly hard.”

The surgeon lifts the blanket from Casper’s bed, fashions it into a cushion, and places it on the chair. Walt thanks him, sits, and leans his cane against Hayes’s table, huffing and puffing.

“And Walt,” says Dr. Bliss, “I hate to ask … but if you don’t mind, kindly remove your hat.”

“I had every intention of doing so,” says Walt.

He takes off the saggy-brimmed hat and wearily lifts the strap to his haversack over his head. Struck again by the man’s blending of youth and old age, Hayes believes Walt looks more played-out than he has yet seen him. Walt smiles, crinkling his eyes, then reaches forward and pats Hayes’s head as if he were a puppy. “ ‘Some feelings are to mortals given,’ ” he says, in an altered voice, “ ‘with less of earth in them than heaven.’ ”

“That’s the idea,” says Dr. Bliss, moving around to the other side of the bed and leaning in close to Hayes. “Recite us some poetry, Walt. Cheer us up.”

“ ‘And if there be a human tear,’ ” Walt continues, “ ‘From passion’s dross refined and clear …’ ”

“May I see inside your mouth?” says Dr. Bliss, and Hayes opens his mouth. “Stick out your tongue, please,” says the doctor. “Turn a bit toward the light.”

“ ‘A tear so limpid and so meek,’ ” continues Walt, “ ‘It would not stain an angel’s cheek—’ ”

Apparently satisfied with the looks of Hayes’s throat, the surgeon takes out a pocket watch, places his fingers on Hayes’s wrist, and times his pulse. Mortified, Hayes cannot make his hand stop quivering. Still touching Hayes’s wrist, the doctor says, “Try to ease yourself, son. You’ve nothing to fear from us.”

When the examination is finished and Dr. Bliss returns to the end of the bed, Walt looks at Hayes sadly and says, “ ‘ ’Tis that which pious fathers shed / Upon a duteous soldier’s head.’ ”

“Shakespeare?” says Dr. Bliss.

“Walter Scott,” answers Walt, “though I’ve bent him some to the occasion.”

“Ah, here’s one of our invited guests now,” says the surgeon, as Dr. Drum arrives and stands next to him at the footrail.

Clean shaven and balding (the line of his steel-gray hair starting somewhere near the crown), Dr. Drum rises not quite to Dr. Bliss’s shoulder.

“This gentleman,” says Dr. Bliss to Hayes, “is Dr. Drum. I don’t believe you’ve been properly introduced.”

Hayes nods, but Drum only gazes at him blankly.

“I understand you administered ether to this young soldier today,” says Dr. Bliss.

Drum, who appears cheerfully prepared for the interview, blinks his eyes and picks at a loose thread on the cuff of his black suit coat. “That is true,” he says, aloof. “As requested to by your own Captain Gracie.”

“Our own Captain Gracie?” says Dr. Bliss. “And why would a contract surgeon perform a procedure at the behest of a line officer? Is that how you do things in Philadelphia?”

Drum lifts his chin and smiles at Hayes with a kind of patronizing cordiality, as if Hayes were the source of a frivolous complaint. “Oh, I don’t think we’ve done him any harm,” he says.

“I didn’t say you had,” says Dr. Bliss. “Though I doubt you’ve done him any good. He’s already wasting from lack of appetite.”

“I secured the ward surgeon’s authorization,” says Drum. “And I believe we’ve gained some useful intelligence besides.”

Dr. Bliss starts to answer, but utters only the word
intelligence
, when, at that moment, Dr. Dinkle and the angry captain arrive at the footrail. Walt takes Hayes’s hand and gives him a reassuring wink as Dr. Bliss makes the necessary greetings and thanks the others for joining him. Then each of the men at the end of the bed turns his attention to Hayes in an auxiliary way, as if Hayes were a fire around which they’ve gathered to chat. Most disconcerting to Hayes, the light from the nearby window keeps coming and going—likely the effect of passing afternoon clouds—and the scene is bright one moment and dim the next. As he studies the men’s faces, he believes he reads contrition in Dr. Dinkle’s but clear defiance in the angry captain’s.

“Here’s the situation as I understand it,” says Dr. Bliss. “Captain Gracie requested ether be administered to this patient, and Dr. Drum did so with the permission of Dr. Dinkle. But what I most fail to grasp is why the captain would make such an unusual request.”

Obviously Dr. Bliss means to draw a response from the captain, but before the captain can speak, Drum says, “It’s not a conspiracy, Major Bliss. The captain and I fell into conversation, over the course of which I told him something of my work at the Christian Street Hospital.
I happened to mention that we’d developed a good test for malingerers, and he told me he knew a likely candidate.”

Dr. Bliss allows his gaze to dwell on Drum for a moment, apparently absorbing what he has been told, and then he turns to Dr. Dinkle. “In the future,” he says, “I should like any such nonmedical procedure to be cleared with me.”

“Naturally, sir,” says Dr. Dinkle. “It was never my—”

“Nonmedical?” says Drum. “Why do you characterize it so?”

“Because it’s designed to probe a disciplinary concern,” says Dr. Bliss, “and not to cure illness.”

“Oh, make no mistake,” says Drum. “We’ve cured many a soldier this way of what ‘ailed’ him. The lame walk again, the deaf hear, and the dumb speak. Why, there’s been more than one idler who—”

“All right, Dr. Drum,” says Dr. Bliss, “I don’t mean to debate you, certainly not here and not now. I am this hospital’s surgeon in chief. I only aim to hone a point of protocol with my ward surgeons. Now, I thank you for your time.”

“But this soldier has proved authentic,” says Drum quickly, “the genuine article, red-hot nostalgia. I’m told he suffers delusions to boot. I’m keen to have him moved to my own hospital, where we’re doing marvelous things on our own hook … marvelous things with a great range of nervous disorders and—”