Nostalgia (38 page)

“Thank you, sir,” says Hayes.

“I’ve had a letter from Philadelphia, from Dr. Drum, who inquired about your health,” says the ward surgeon—a flat statement of fact—and then moves on again.

The brown dog from the aisle eases alongside Casper’s bed. A hound with floppy silken-looking ears and sagging jowls, the dog looks briefly at Hayes, its melancholy eyes blinking in the wind from the window. It turns to Casper and sniffs at the stump that rests on the small pillow. It gives the dressing a tentative exploratory lick, sniffs again, and then lowers its chin for a moment to the edge of the mattress. The dog, thinks Hayes, is giving poor Casper more attention and concern than any of the doctors.

With a sigh and a thud, the dog drops to the floor in the narrow space between the beds. When Hayes looks up, he sees, standing tattered and forlorn in the aisle, a soldier about his own age. At first, he thinks it’s the ghost of Billy Swift, but then the soldier removes his cap and reveals an abundant shock of black hair. His right arm hangs in a blood- and mud-stained sling, and beneath his unbuttoned jacket,
his middle is wrapped all round with dirty bandaging. Hayes gets off the bed and starts to go to the soldier, who appears transfixed by the hound on the floor. He allows Hayes to escort him to the bed—they move carefully, in half steps—and just as they reach the end of it and the soldier braces himself with a hand on the footrail, Captain Gracie appears and pauses next to them.

Hayes expects a reprimand—after all, the soldier is obviously a new arrival, and if Hayes means to help, he should be fetching a steward or a nurse—but the captain says nothing, only studies them coldly. Hayes would have thought the captain quite settled on all counts where he was concerned—there was nothing about Hayes still to be explored or debated—yet when at last he meets Hayes’s eye, the usual glare of disdain is oddly complicated by traces of ambiguity. The captain seems as if he might speak but then thinks the better of it, turns, and strides away in a rush.

“Sit here,” says Hayes to the soldier, as he helps him onto the edge of the mattress. “Did you lose your way? Are you in pain? What can I do for you?”

But the soldier, staring down at the hound, says only, “Is he yours?”

“No,” answers Hayes, “I don’t know whom it belongs to. Might be a stray who wandered in.”

“Can I pet him?” asks the soldier.

Hayes sits beside the soldier and coaxes the dog up from the floor, snapping his fingers and whistling softly. The soldier reaches out his free hand, and without hesitation the hound lays its head in his lap. Hayes notices the soldier’s fingernails—lined with grime and chewed down to the quick.

Grinning ear to ear and exposing a wide gap in the top row of his teeth, the soldier says, “I think he likes the way I smell.” He cups the dog’s muzzle in his palm for a moment and then gently scratches the forehead. “No,” he says, “I didn’t get lost. I just figured I’d take a little stroll … to collect myself. I’m supposed to be two wards over. I’m sorry to confess it, but I’m scared to death of doctors. After what we been through … what all we seen … it’s doctors that scare me. Somebody told me—besides the saws and the knives—they got hypothermic styringes in this place. Needles … big as knitting needles … 
they stick into you and pump you full of morphine and the like. Is that true?”

“I haven’t seen anything like that on this ward,” says Hayes. “Only pills and powders.”

“I am very glad to hear it,” says the soldier. “I ain’t about to let nobody stick me with no needle, I don’t care what. I took a bullet to my elbow and another one to my ribs … both of them just chipped me, though, one right after the other. The first hit my elbow, and I threw up my arm in the air, and the second scraped my ribs, just like that,
bang-bang
. I ought to be dead. Does that wind blow like that all the time?”

“No,” says Hayes. “I’ve never seen it blow this hard.”

“Does it always stink like that? Smells like a damn latrine.”

“I’m afraid so.”

The soldier lowers his voice and, indicating Casper, says, “What’s wrong with him? He looks like he’s already been dead a day or two.”

“He’s got a blood infection,” says Hayes. “From the amputation wound.”

“Did he get it here in the hospital?”

Hayes nods.

“I heard they kill about as many in these places as they help,” says the soldier. “How’d you end up here? You look okay.”

“A shell exploded right next to me,” says Hayes. “I was …”

He stops, for he can’t tell where the sentence might be going.

“I bet you went deaf for a while,” says the soldier.

“For a while,” says Hayes.

“I wonder how come it didn’t kill you.”

“What you mean?”

“You said it exploded right next to you. I wonder how come you didn’t die. You didn’t even … you still got all your limbs and everything.”

A burst of wind blasts through the window, very loud, and Hayes flinches. A scent of gunpowder stings his nostrils. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t die.”

The soldier looks at him apologetically, and says, “Makes you feel kind of strange, don’t it?”

“What?”

The soldier shrugs and turns his attention back to stroking the dog.

Hayes says, “Oh, you mean surviving.”

The soldier nods but doesn’t look up. “Down in Piedmont,” he says, “about three weeks ago … I was ten feet away from my best friend … watching him ram his piece … and the thing went off in his face. Burned him up good and blew off both his hands. Died the next day in the field hospital. Now he’s dead and I’m not. I expect I could get used to it if I could stop dreaming about him most every night. I’ve about decided dreams is the worst part of war. Dreams and diarrhea … and
doctors
.”

The wind howls down between the pavilions, whistles in the ridge vents, and then stops abruptly. The flags and mosquito curtains hang limp. Both Hayes and the soldier look up at the ceiling as each of the two whitewashers looks down from his wooden ladder, startled by the sudden change. A near silence falls over the ward.

Seconds later, the wind kicks back up and reinstates the former noisy commotion.

“Well,” says the soldier. “I best be off before they start organizing a search party. I might not see you again. Looking at you, I figure you’ll be heading back into the fray pretty soon.”

“Pretty soon,” says Hayes, surprised by the sheer readiness of the fib.

The soldier stands, puts on his cap, and gives the hound a last pat. He and Hayes wish each other good luck, and Hayes watches him thread along the aisle to the middle of the ward, where he leaves through the doors to the covered way.

“Pretty soon,” whispers Hayes, and glimpses the shadow of his own future, a perseverance of things and sensations—horsecars and streetlamps, books and boat whistles, the scent of the ocean, the changing of seasons, mud and grass and ice, coals in the grate and Christmas boxes—but plagued by inquisitive men in black suits and sapped by a necessity for deceit. He’d gone to war and gone out of his senses, Orphan Hayes, a liar for being ashamed, further ashamed for being a liar.

Near the night watcher’s table, a nurse drops a basin with a great clatter. Immediately the skinny clergyman with the permanent scowl
slips in the spilled (and probably soapy) water and falls to the floor. The incident sets off an uproar of laughter, but evidently the preacher has hurt himself, for a steward and a visiting policeman assist him to the wardmaster’s room.

The wind, if possible, increases. Hayes hears the staccato of grit driven against the outside walls of the pavilion. Soon the chaplain comes around with the mail, and to Hayes’s astonishment he tosses onto the end of the bed an envelope—unsealed, no stamps, and the only address “Ward H, Bed #33.”

H
E RECOGNIZES
his choosing compliance as an empty gesture, for what are the alternatives? Besides—and this is what he recognizes most acutely—he has stopped caring: Hicks Street, the Asylum for the Insane, the siege of Petersburg and Richmond … how do they differ? It strikes him as strange—when he himself is so detached—that his fate has been the cause of so much fuss. Earlier, Burroughs stopped by briefly, a large and bulging canvas bag over his shoulder, and said that he had a score of deliveries to make for Walt first, but then he would return as soon as humanly possible. He stood a pillow-sized package, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, against a leg of Hayes’s table and told him to keep a close eye on it. In a kind of cheerful frenzied state, and wearing a surprising red waistcoat, he spoke everything rapidly, in a stage whisper, and seemed to be executing a scheme designed earlier and elsewhere. Hayes observed a wave of relief cross Burroughs’s face when he glanced at the sleeping Casper—Casper, at least, was one thing that didn’t need to be seen to. Just before he rushed away, he admonished Hayes not to go anywhere, which Hayes thought rather enigmatic if not comical. High conspiracy was afoot, and Hayes decided the only sensible response was to play the role of an obedient soldier and to do as he was told.

The wind has ceased entirely, the ward very warm now and bathed in sunlight and shadows. The whitewashers, half finished with the ceiling, have quit and gone with their ladders. Hayes has read over Walt’s letter several times. He imagines Walt pleased with himself for having worked out the matter of Sarah. (Most likely it didn’t require clairvoyance, since all the blood left Hayes’s face.) Of course Walt meant to express his characteristic empathy, but how could the love between Walt and his brother Jeff approximate the troubled waters of Hayes’s love for Sarah? How could closeness between brothers ever run the risk of crossing the line Hayes’s feelings had crossed? He was grateful for Walt’s inapt analogy, grateful that the
real thing
would simply never occur to him. In any case, from the shock of the news, one truth has emerged immediate and undeniable: Hayes
has himself to blame—she would never have got herself engaged to a man like Gilfinian, so obviously her inferior, had Hayes not left her bereft.

Bereft
—a word no doubt prompted by egotism. True, she hadn’t wanted him to leave, but was it because she loved him or because she didn’t want to be left alone? It seems entirely possible that once he’d gone, she simply coped, and what better way to cope than to marry? It isn’t likely that her connection to Gilfinian took root and bloomed into a betrothal in the span of a few months. Probably the thing was more than nascent already, and Hayes’s leaving cleared the way. Surely there were signs, which he would have noticed had he not been so caught up in himself and his own feelings. Her spirit helped him through the Wilderness. The Wilderness did not push her from his mind. If anything has changed, it’s that there is less room in his mind for her now. Less room, and if possible, even less clarity. It seems to him that his thinking on
all
subjects is now more akin to his thinking regarding her—a jumble, conflicted, confusing, wanting and not wanting—which accretes to a kind of brain-pressure … and which, if it persists, might conscript her into the ranks of the many things about which he is ceasing to care.

Two attendants arrive at Raugh’s bed to wheel him to the sinks. Hayes watches the ordeal, noting Raugh’s apparent passivity. He recalls a mind-trick he sometimes used to play on himself in base ball matches: when he had to face an especially dangerous batsman, he would adopt an attitude of indifference, convince himself he didn’t care what happened. It helped him not to be afraid.

B
URROUGHS
, when he returns, is tuckered out and preoccupied—also worried about Walt’s protracted failure to appear. He has taken out his watch three times since he sat in the chair by Hayes’s bed. Now, looking at it for the fourth time, he says, simply, with a sigh, “Walt.”

Hayes, bewilderingly composed amid what seems some kind of gathering storm, feels an urge to comfort him, maybe, if there were a way, with a dose of his own fresh-brewed indifference. Hayes, of course—spared the details of what Burroughs and Walt have cooked
up—knows nothing of what’s at stake and nothing of the consequences of Walt’s tardiness; perhaps, he thinks, a privilege of being insane, even of being
perceived
as insane. He believes his composure has something to do with his recently acquiring (not through any effort of his own but rather the way one “acquires” an illness) a capacity to observe the curious antics of his mind, antics he has mistakenly taken far too seriously. Certainly he has learned the lesson of not believing everything he sees. Now, for example, and off and on throughout the day, he has felt sure that all fifty or sixty pairs of eyes on the ward are directed at him, but that’s surely untrue. Even while it may be a strong-enough notion to keep him from idly wandering about, he understands that it’s only a notion. He smiles at Burroughs and says, “Before I went to Virginia, I clerked for a while in a shipwrights’ office … where I learned a new word. The men would say of a certain vessel that she was
walt
 … poorly designed or poorly built … unable to bear her sails for standing too high in the water.”