Nostalgia (36 page)

“Yes,” says the captain, nodding and smiling sadly. “Evidently, Private Hayes, you
believed
a number of things.”

Hayes interprets the captain’s remark as an expression of sympathy. Surprised and encouraged, he says, “Yes, sir. I believed I would survive the battle … and I did. I believed I would be abandoned by my friends … and I was. I believed that war would make me a better man … but it has not.”

“Is that why you chose to desert after only three days of battle?”

“Was it only three days?”

“Three days.”

“It seemed much longer.”

“No doubt,” says the captain. “Tell me honestly, Private Hayes, were you not moved by a sense of duty to enlist but regretful once confronted with real fighting?”

This question strikes Hayes as a riddle, and he begins trying to parse it for the double entendre that might yield the right answer.

“Were you not, and are you not, eager to return to New York and get back to playing base ball?”

Hayes suspects the captain of laying a trap with these riddlelike questions, and he thinks he would do better to stand still than to step into it.

“I ask you,” says the captain, “did you not in fact panic and run, and then later concoct a story to cover your tracks?”

In a certain book, Hayes has seen a drawing of the inner ear’s labyrinth, which looked like something one might find in the wrackline at the seashore.

He hears himself say, softly, “I have wondered the same thing.”

“Anyone can see the boy’s unwell!” cries Dr. Speck. “You take advantage and purposely confuse him! How do you explain the fact that these same events were related to me by a man who witnessed them—a man who had nothing to gain by lying? And why is Private Hayes not reported by his company commander as having deserted?”

“I’m not a police detective,” says the captain, “but I’m sure it could be worked out. In my judgment, it’s a tale made of whole cloth … told by one of Private Hayes’s good friends and brought to us by another.”

“Now, see here—,” starts Dr. Speck, but either stops himself or is stopped by the surgeon in chief.

“And isn’t it too convenient,” continues the captain, “that the officer alleged to have issued the unlikely orders was soon killed at Spotsylvania? I ask you again, Private Hayes, are you not a coward and a deserter?”

Hayes’s palms burn with the precise sting that comes after fielding an especially hard-hit ball. The noise beneath the floor ceases abruptly. The numbness in his right foot abates. The air in the room seems to clear, and he can see the faces of the men before him. The fragment of red ribbon on the window sash swings forward into the room and then falls straight and still, the light on the clapboards outside now soft and unchanging. A small bell, like that on a shop door, jingles, there’s the scent of pipe tobacco, and the wall lamps in the parlor at Hicks Street glow bright and then dim again. Mr. Hayes,
in his funny embroidered slippers, rattles the newspaper and laughs warmly, infectiously, at something he has just read. He peers around the wing of the chair and smiles, his smoking cap crooked across his brow.

Hayes says, “I wonder … may I have permission to sit after all?”

“For heaven’s sake, yes,” says Dr. Bliss, “let’s all sit,” and though Hayes hears the scraping of chair legs, he cannot quite figure where to put himself. Somebody helps him—is it Walt? Burroughs?—and then he looks at the angry captain, who glares at him from across the table, his eyes wide, as if to say,
Well?

Hayes says, “The smoke was so thick … sometimes we couldn’t tell day from night.”

He stops, for his thoughts charge and scatter in a thousand directions, but then he sees Dr. Speck, who offers a corroborating nod, his eyes suddenly watery. Hayes folds his hands—which do not shake—on the smooth oiled tabletop.

“We couldn’t always tell our own men from theirs,” he says. “Sometimes we couldn’t tell the living from the dead … Sometimes we couldn’t tell right from wrong. At night the woods caught fire. Wounded men lay between the lines where nobody could rescue them without being shot. We heard their shrieks and cries as they burned to death. I am not a deserter, Captain, and I am not insane. It’s my hope to return to the front, where I might be of use.”

The captain turns to Dr. Bliss and nods, rather triumphantly, which confounds Hayes; he fears he has somehow stepped into the captain’s trap after all. He starts to say, “What I mean to say is—”

But he does not finish the sentence, for he senses he has already crossed a boundary he should not have crossed, said more than he should have. He closes his eyes and allows his mind to retire to a memory of sunshine and tree-bending breezes, the smell of new grass and baked earth, a scruffy foxhound charging across the sward with a ball in its maw, a chorus of cheering men, hats flying into the air.

Dr. Bliss calls him back to the room: “Private Hayes, you know that our commission has directed you to the Asylum for the Insane.”

“But that was before I gained back my speech,” says Hayes.

“Yes, that’s right,” says the doctor. “And it’s a sign of progress, your
gaining it back. But do you recall what happened when those gentlemen came to examine you?”

“They asked questions, sir,” says Hayes. “And I couldn’t answer because I couldn’t make myself speak.”

“That’s right,” says the doctor. “Do you recall anything else?”

Hayes casts his mind back to the day when a dozen or more very solemn uniformed men gathered around his bed, a mix of line officers and surgeons. They requested him to open his mouth, to stick out his tongue—nothing unusual in that—and asked him his name, where he had come from, and so on. They gave him pencil and paper and observed his humiliation at not being able to use them. They took his arms and bent them at the elbow; took his legs and bent them at the knee; peered into this mouth and throat and eyes and ears. They seemed, as a group, impatient, perhaps bored. A surgeon yawned, an officer sneered. One man—a colonel, Hayes believed, and the person in charge—said something that upset Hayes, or frightened him, he can’t now recall what. The man had a bushy beard, like Walt’s, but neater at the edges. Sunlight lit up the buttons on his coat, and—

“Do you recall anything else?” repeats Dr. Bliss.

Slowly, Hayes shakes his head and says, “Major, sir, I do not think I am insane.”

“I didn’t say you were,” says Dr. Bliss.

“They put me through …”

“They put you through what, son?”

To Hayes’s great regret, his hands have begun to shake, and he removes them from the tabletop and presses them flat into his lap, where no one can see them. His mouth has gone dry. “I
thought
there was a fire in the ward,” he says at last, and tries to swallow. “It had happened before. I understand it wasn’t actually … and I believe that’s why they—”

“Do you recall tearing at your clothes?” asks the surgeon.

“Oh, yes, sir, I’d forgot that,” says Hayes, happy to have a defect to pin on the commission. “Because of all their poking and prodding, my wounds started to bleed.”

“Your shrapnel wounds.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your shrapnel wounds that you know not to be real.”

“Yes, sir,” says Hayes. “I do know them not to be real, but I don’t grasp how they sometimes sting and continue to bleed. How is it that blood—”

He stops, for now, to his surprise, he sees that it’s Dr. Bliss who has laid the trap. Before he can hold his tongue, he says, “It’s
you
then.”

The surgeon looks at him for a long moment, until it appears he has understood what Hayes means. At last he says, “Give me your hand, son.”

Reluctantly, Hayes lifts one hand from under the table and allows the surgeon to take it into his own. “We’ll leave you alone now,” he says. He releases Hayes’s hand and stands up. “We’ll leave you to your friends.”

As all the others rise as well, the captain says quickly, “Even if he didn’t desert, he should never have landed here … never been allowed to stay as long as he has and occupy a bed when—”

“Yes, yes, Captain Gracie,” says Dr. Bliss, turning toward the door. “We thoroughly understand your feelings on the subject. Let’s go to my office and continue there.”

“Even if we cannot prove him a deserter or a malingerer,” adds the captain, following the surgeon in chief to the door, “I will personally see him removed to the asylum, where he has already been directed.”

“That will be most helpful, Captain,” says Dr. Bliss.

“Maybe, there, he can toss some base balls—”

“That will do, Captain,” says Dr. Bliss, “thank you.”

On his way out of the room, Dr. Speck drops his cigar to the floor. He retrieves it and then turns back to Hayes. “We’ll get you fixed up, my boy, if we possibly can. I’ve already written letters to the pertinent parties.” He nods to Walt and Burroughs and adds, “We certainly will, if we can.”

Once Dr. Speck has gone, Walt moves to the open window, sticks out his head, and lets loose with a fit of coughing so fierce Hayes imagines he has been repressing it for some time. Burroughs goes to Walt and lays a hand at the center of his back.

Before Walt’s finished, Dr. Bliss reappears, holding open the door, but not coming through it. “Walt,” he says, and Walt straightens up
and covers his mouth with a handkerchief. The look the surgeon casts him seems to say all that needs to be said on the already belabored subject of Walt’s failing health. After a moment, Dr. Bliss says, “Please come and find me today before you leave.”

“With pleasure,” says Walt.

Next Walt, aided by Burroughs, comes over (dragging his haversack across the floor by its straps) and sits down; he mops his whole face with the handkerchief, lifting his hat an inch to wipe beneath the brim. Burroughs takes the chair next to him, and they each gaze across the table at Hayes with a kindness so clear even Hayes cannot misconstrue it.

“I told you once,” says Walt, “and now I’ll tell you again: as your good friend, I mean to set you straight when you start to sell yourself short in your own mind. I won’t let anyone persuade you that you’ve done anything wrong.”

This makes Burroughs smile and nod, as if Walt has said something Burroughs already values and is delighted to hear repeated. Walt leans his cane against the edge of the table and bends to take from his bag a fan, which he opens with a downward snap.

“And as you know,” he says, fanning himself, “I intended to do that even before I had any particulars about you.”

He lets out an enormous sigh, places his free hand on the sloping plain of his belly, and adds, “Just imagine the girth and weight of my resolve now.”

L
ATE INTO THE NIGHT
, Hayes wakes to find Walt leaning over Casper, trying to hush him. Casper has Walt by the lapels. “Tell them,” says Casper, his voice a rasp, “tell all of them … everyone.”

“I will, I will,” whispers Walt. “I’ll tell them.”

“I was good,” says Casper. “I was brave. And I didn’t get a bung-town copper for those damned shoes.”

“Yes, yes,” says Walt, freeing himself. “Rest now, Casper, rest.”

Casper lies back on the pillow, mumbling, “Rest now … rest now,” but immediately rears up again. “And tell that Millerite pa of mine we’re
still waiting
!”

Walt gets him settled and strokes Casper’s brow until he’s calm and quiet. Casper falls asleep with his knees raised, and so Walt lowers them and carefully aligns the boy’s legs, smoothing and tucking the covers even around his feet. He adjusts the small pillow under Casper’s stump and places Casper’s hand over his heart—exactly as if he’s fixing him for death. When he’s done, he lowers the mosquito curtain and sits in the chair between the two beds, his eyes full of tears. When Walt notices that Hayes is awake, he smiles and gently slides his chair closer. Hayes thinks some of the lowered lamps have gone out completely, for the ward is surprisingly cool and darker than usual. Walt reaches under the gauzy curtain and pats the back of Hayes’s hand as a greeting. His own voice hoarse and dry, he says, “We must keep very quiet. The surgeon in chief has banished me from the hospital, and I don’t wish to attract any attention.”

Because he dreamed there was something alive and thrashing inside his mattress, Hayes is glad to be awake and glad for the ready distraction of Walt’s company. Softly, he says, “What did Casper mean … What shoes?”

Walt shakes his head. “He hasn’t
entirely
been making sense tonight.”

“And what’s a Millerite?” asks Hayes.

Obviously amused, Walt says, “A reference to William Miller, the man who predicted the Second Coming of Christ … back in the forties. The promised date came and went more than twenty years ago, but some stayed faithful one way or another. I gather Casper’s father was a follower.”

He pauses wearily to remove his hat and comb back his gray hair with his fingers. “It was once their practice,” he continues, “always to greet each other with a kiss—sensible and very sweet if you ask me—but then they let that go.”

He leans forward and taps the book on Hayes’s table. “I would read to you, but as you can see I have practically no voice left.”

“You might recite one of your poems,” says Hayes.

“So you
do
know me in my other capacity,” says Walt, clearly pleased.

“I’m afraid I’ve been slow to infer the obvious,” says Hayes. “It was Captain Gracie’s ‘infamous poet’ that finally woke me up.”

“Yes,” says Walt, with a sigh. “How peculiar life can be! I started out wanting fame and ended up with infamy. Who knew the love of the masses comes with such pockets of hatred? Very well, then, my friend, I’ll recite a short one, but first … do you mind coming out from behind that mosquito curtain? This place is dreamy enough this time of night without my having to talk to you through a veil.”

Hayes lifts the curtain over his head and drops it behind his shoulders.

“That’s better,” says Walt. “As it happens, I have the perfect lines for this very late and somber hour … but you mustn’t be surprised if they make me cry.”

He leans back in the chair, crosses his arms on his chest, and whispers the lines with a good amount of feeling. “ ‘Year that trembled and reeled beneath me … your summer wind was warm enough—yet the air I breathed froze me. / A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darkened me. / Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself. / Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? / And sullen hymns of defeat?’ ”