Nostalgia (4 page)

W
HEN HE WAS
a boy he discovered that he could shut his eyes and see on the back of his eyelids a ghostly version of what he had just been looking at. Now, from behind the pine tree (around which he has wrapped one arm), he stares at the figure that approaches, a black featureless specter caught against a mist that hovers over the barren field. But when he shuts his eyes, he sees no ghostly version of the thing. He thinks maybe the thing itself is ghostly enough, and when he opens his eyes again it has vanished. Slowly he pulls himself up, bracing against the bark of the pine, still wielding the knife, and squinting into the ever-brightening emptiness of the pasture. A wild instinct impels him to turn and look into the woods at his back, but these are as silent and unpeopled as the field; their divergent vertical stripes exhale the musty coolness of a church. He returns his gaze to the pasture and sees only that the trench and the toppled wooden crosses of the breastwork appear to have grown darker, likewise the stream and the wrecked posts and railings, yet the long shadows cast by the solitary trees are fading. Now he collapses to the ground and presses the wound in his back hard against the tree, meaning to staunch its bleeding. He wonders why God has judged him so harshly and sought to punish him so severely. The silver blade of the knife gleams in his lap, a tool, a promise, a quick end to his plight. As he moves a hand to touch it, his fingers tremble, and then both his hands flutter as before, uncontrolled, like little sovereign wings attached to his wrists.
He makes of them fists that he rams to the ground on either side of his legs, grinding his knuckles one way and the other, leaving marks in the soil that look like gray roses. After a moment smoke begins to rise out of the roses’ styles, prompting him to leap frightened to his feet. Again he sees the figure approaching in the pasture, the silhouette of a man, waving his arms in an attitude of surrender. This time, leaving the knife on the ground, he runs toward it in a rage. The thing freezes for an instant, and next it twirls in some unworldly way, its shape complex and unidentifiable. Then, as it retreats, he sees the bright white tail bobbing, only a buck come out to forage at dawn.

He feels something beneath his foot and bends to find the rim of a tin pot protruding from the earth. Buried alongside it, a piece of bone. Suddenly aware that he is exposed, unprotected in the midst of the field, he crouches and zigzags quickly back to the trees. Once the cool dark cloak of the forest has enfolded him, he stands with his back to the pasture and notes that he is free of pain, and sleepy. He moves deeper into the trees and finds a spot beneath some young dogwoods, where he rakes together a mound of pine straw for a mattress. As he sits down and arranges his gear around him, he observes that the chicken, so reluctant to depart, is now nowhere to be seen. He lies back and rests his head on the straw, looking up through the bright green leaves of the dogwoods to the darker pine boughs and odd-shaped patches of silver sky. He closes his eyes and sees these same patches wafting like black jetsam in a sea of milk.
Handsome
, Sarah whispers in his ear,
even with nasty lumps
. And, sighing, shaking her head,
Oh, Summerfield Hayes …

Here is what he has never written to his sister in any letter nor admitted in any form to anyone: in the months leading up to his enlistment, he’d dreamed of her, and they were the wrong kind of dreams. He didn’t so much fear his own snarled feelings as he feared what he imagined hers might be. His could be the dark secret he aged out of, or erased with experience and time, or carried with him if necessary to the grave. But should she return his feelings in this corrupted way, he could see nothing in their future but grief. She’d stayed tepid toward the attentions of no fewer than three of his club mates. Now and again, alone with her and shaken to his toes, he thought
he saw in her eyes the spark of an unspoken sentiment, affecting and regrettable. Surely, he thought, a war was strong enough a blast to put things right.

R
OSAMEL
, the Frenchman from Company H who would play the center field for the Bachelors, had stopped by Hayes’s tent the day before the match. He spoke nearly perfect English, with a charming accent, and could usually be counted on for a smile. But today—a day that had started out sunny and soon gave way to storm clouds and rain—he seemed troubled. Hayes bid him to come into the hut, out of the rain.

Nearby, his sack coat draped over his head, Truman Leggett had set up a tripod and built a fire for heating coffee. Because of the rain, the fire produced more than the usual amount of smoke, which rose in fitful puffs straight up into the air. As Hayes set aside his book, Rosamel (like Leggett, a man of about thirty) sat cross-legged next to him on the pine-strewn floor. He wore a coal-black mustache, the right side of which he routinely worried with the tip of his tongue, a habit, Hayes had observed, that sometimes made him seem pensive, at other times insane. Now he removed the last vestige of a former, more dashing uniform, a soiled and tattered red fez, which he held, with both hands, crown down, in his lap.

He spoke softly and went straight to the point: “I have come to make to you a confession,” he said.

Hayes nodded, knitting his own brow to match the apparent gravity of what was to follow.

“I have made myself a member of the unmarried man’s side,” Rosamel continued, “but I have done so with …” He paused here, carefully choosing his next words. “With some convenient evasions,” he added at last.

“Well, I chose you for the team,” said Hayes. “You didn’t make yourself a member.”

“That is true,” said Rosamel, “you are right. My part was to declare myself unmarried when that is the case only in a practical sense.
A year before the war, my wife fell in love with another man. We have lived apart since then and for three years additional. We have no …” Again he paused, thinking. “We have no connection of any sort, and I do not anticipate any in the future.”

“But you’re still legally married,” said Hayes.

“Yes, in our church, you see, it is, do you have this word … 
indissoluble
?”

Again Hayes nodded. After a moment, he said, “This is what you came to confess?”

Rosamel signaled his consent by dropping his head to his chest and passing the sweatband of the fez between his fingers so that the hat went in a circular motion.

Hayes judged the Frenchman’s concern trivial as it applied to the match, but he thought, for the sake of Rosamel’s pride, he should honor the seriousness with which he’d brought it. At last he said, “Well, if you like, I can take this to the captain to consider. But in my judgment, you made the right choice. As you have said, you’re no longer married in any practical sense, and practically is how we would best proceed.”

“Very good,” said Rosamel, visibly relieved. “I think no need to disturb the captain. Of course I imagined you would understand me.” He set aside the fez and reached for Hayes’s book, whose leather cover was the same shade of red; he lifted the book from the ground, felt the weight of it, and turned it to read the words on the spine. “This is about the French Revolution, yes?” he asked.

“It’s set during that period, yes,” said Hayes. “Have you read it?”

“No,” he answered, “but of course I have heard of it.”

“Do you mind if I ask,” said Hayes, “how you were employed in New York, before the war?”

Rosamel held the book in his hands for another moment; as he set it down, he said, softly, “I was a schoolteacher.”

“Oh,” said Hayes, “my sister’s a schoolteacher. In Brooklyn.”

Rosamel smiled and then quickly darkened his expression again, returning to the former subject. “You see,” he said, “I could not determine where I truly belonged.”

With that, he stood, put his fez back on, left the hut, and walked
away in the rain. Hayes moved outside, came alongside Leggett, and watched the Frenchman retreat unsteadily down a slope rutted by rain.

“What an odd and interesting fellow,” said Hayes.

“French,” said Leggett, as if that explained everything. He squatted, poked his fire with a stick of wood, and then let his gaze join Hayes’s, trained on Rosamel’s back. “Not too many of ’em left,” he said after a moment. “Oh, I imagine since he was first mustered in, he seen near about three-quarters of his outfit slaughtered.”

H
E WAKES
with a start, flat on his back, jolted by gunshot and the clang of a minié ball against something metal. He draws up his knees and covers his ears with his hands, but the lingering noise—the unbroken hiss of a snake, the fierce whirring in his ears that makes the bones of his face shudder—comes from within him. Though he has slept only briefly, the air has grown hot, even in the shade of the woods, and what he first takes to be sweat inside his shirt and trousers is, of course, blood, blood saturating the crevices of his groin, blooming like a grotesque flower between his shoulder blades, pressed beneath his ribs and spine. This sopping ordeal, he thinks, is an apt expression of his disappointment at having awakened into the same ravaged and ravaging world from which he cannot escape, even asleep. He has dreamed of Rosamel, the Frenchman who stopped by the hut one rainy afternoon in April, so very long ago, a schoolteacher whose wife fell in love with another man: Rosamel was digging a grave for a fallen soldier, who lay facedown in the rain and mud near the mound of dirt Rosamel heaped up. Rosamel worked waist-deep inside the grave, his red fez cocked at an angle on his head. As he arced the spade into the air over one shoulder, a barrage of gunfire exploded from the nearby trees, and a ball struck the metal blade,
ping!

Now Hayes wipes his eyes, gathers his gear, stands, and moves away toward the stream. The pain in his thigh feels worse, and as he limps through the trees, his woolen trousers, wet with blood, cling to his skin. The scent of pinesap that permeates the warm air is nauseating, and he tells himself he must eat, but first he must do something
about the state of his clothes. A short way upstream, he spies an escarpment, crosshatched by roots, in the bank; about shoulder-deep, with a narrow dirt floor next to the water, it will provide some privacy. He climbs down to the spot and bends to remove his shoes. He untucks the trousers from his socks. He struggles with the buttons on the trousers but finds that if he takes long, deep breaths, one after another, he can steady his hands. He teeters as he starts to remove the trousers but leans against the roots of the escarpment for support. Carefully he peels the fabric of his shirt away from his skin; he reaches one hand up to remove his forage hat so that he can pull the shirt over his head, but he is surprised that he has no hat. He stands still for a moment, recalling a feeling of sun on the top of his bare head; he has not had a hat since the beginning. Lost and deserted without so much as a hat, he thinks, and the thought makes him feel like crying. He notes, too, that despite his sticking to the woods for the most part, and traveling by road at night, his arms are two distinct colors now, marked by a line above his elbows—his forearms darker for having been exposed to the sun. His right arm is splotched with bruises from wrist to shoulder, but—like the soreness at the crown of his head—he cannot recall what inflicted these fading injuries.

Once he has taken everything off, he stoops naked at the edge of the stream and immerses the shirt, the trousers, and the socks, agitating them one by one in the cool water. He steels himself for the sickening sight of blood in the water, but in a magical way, the stream spares him, absorbing and diffusing the blood instantly, without a trace. He hangs the wet clothes over the roots in the side of the bank and then finds his canteen and fills it. Afterward, he walks into the water, placing his feet down gingerly on the mucky bottom. At midstream, the water is cold and reaches as high as his chest. He recalls what Dr. Speck once told him about the need to keep wounds clean, and he thinks perhaps the stream will do his injuries some good. He shuts his eyes, bends his knees, and puts his head under. He turns upstream so that the mild current beats against his face. Underwater, the noise inside his ears seems louder, but he decides to play the boyhood game of seeing how long he can stay down. After quite a long time, he starts to panic, not because he runs out of breath, but because it strikes him
that he could stay under indefinitely, as if he no longer requires air at all. He surfaces and begins to wade out. He notices that a blue jay has lit on the bank just above his clothes, stands there stock-still, and appears to be watching him with interest. A thought forms in his mind:
I am already dead … this isn’t real
.

Then, as he moves nearer and the bird flies away, another thought:
If it is a dream, it means to continue
.

He sees a roundish rock on the ground, about the size of a base ball, which he lifts and palms in his right hand. As a boy, he’d adopted the great Jim Creighton’s practice of tossing an iron ball the same size as a base ball, to build strength in his arm. Now he backs up against the escarpment and looks across the stream for a suitable target; he picks a knot on the wide trunk of an oak, then runs forward to the water’s edge and releases, only inches from the ground, a stiff-armed underhand toss that rises to the mark, a perfect strike. The resonant thud the rock sounds against the oak is recklessly loud, however, and makes him uneasy. Next he finds a stick, breaks it over his knee to a proper length, and then tosses smaller rocks into the air and bats them into the stream. He continues diverting himself this way until he is overcome with a sense that he’s being watched, a naked fool in the woods. Again he hears—from somewhere far away or from inside his head—the rolling boom of artillery. As he turns to his clothes draped over the roots of the escarpment, he sees, directly beneath his trousers, something shiny resting in the dirt—the open-face pocket watch, entirely forgotten, that had come to him from across the Atlantic among his father’s things. He lifts it from the ground and turns it over in his hand. The crystal is cracked, the gold bezel nicked in several spots. The fob is missing, and the hands have stopped at ten minutes past nine o’clock. He twists the crown, but when he holds the watch to his ear, he hears no movement. He decides to open the case and find a patch of sunlight in which to lay it—perhaps it will work again once it has dried out. As he reaches into his knapsack and pulls out the bowie knife for this purpose, he notices, for the first time, that there are initials carved into the knife’s handle:
F.R.