Nostalgia (6 page)

His eyes fixed on his work, and entirely abstracted, Hayes said, “What about the evils of slavery? The preservation of the Union?”

Because Speck stayed silent, Hayes did eventually look up at the surgeon and found the man looking back at him skeptically. Hayes supposed his lukewarm remark didn’t merit a reply, but then the surgeon said, “It’s 1864, son. Those answers are spent by now and gasping for breath.” He drew on the cigar and expelled a plume of smoke upward. “You don’t belong among these …,” he began, but checked himself. “What are you doing here, son?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

Hayes went back to work. “Couldn’t you ask that question of any man, sir?” he said. “Including yourself?”

“No,” said the surgeon. “Two minutes spent with most of them reveals their purpose clearly enough. Glory, spelled out in capital letters … esprit de corps, idleness, lack of imagination … various forms of enchantment … even bloodlust, I’m sorry to say. Or, as in my case, duty, tinged with a desire for personal advancement. But you, Hayes, you’re different. I can’t read you.”

“Well,” said Hayes, after a moment, “perhaps I can’t read myself, Dr. Speck.”

“Yes, that occurred to me,” he said. He looked away down the hillside again and took a long draw on the cigar. “I’ve seen you play ball,” he added, thoughtfully. “Both here and, once last summer, at the Union Grounds. There’s no ambiguity there, Hayes. You’re entirely at home. As self-possessed as a man twice your age. Tell me, how did you end up with that club of mechanics, anyway?”

Hayes explained that he’d wanted to postpone college for a spell, he’d taken a clerking job at a shipwrights’, where he’d met a couple of the Eckford men (a chippy, a caulker), and one thing led to another.

“And you’ve found they accept you as one of their own?” asked the surgeon.

“Well, sir, I
am
one of their own,” said Hayes. “We’re a club.”

“Yes, yes, but you know what I mean. Do you not find it difficult … the social navigation?”

“What, because they come from Williamsburgh and Greenpoint and work at the docks?” said Hayes.

“Yes,” said Speck. “Are you not something of a black sheep?”

“I’ve come in for some teasing now and then,” said Hayes, “but it’s all in fun. We each put on the same ball suit before a match. And once the play begins, we’re boys again, with the cares and concerns of boys. What I find … people generally see you about as different as you see yourself.”

Speck regarded him with a quizzical look for a moment, then smiled and said, “I’m sure you’re right, Hayes. I do hope you had the good sense to lay all this stuff out in the sun today, before you started packing.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hayes. “Well, maybe not all, but most … the tents and the blankets at least.”

Now Speck turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head. “Hayes,” he said, gravely. “Have you thought about what it will mean to point your weapon into the face of another man?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“And …?”

“I hope my courage won’t fail me.”

The surgeon nodded and returned his gaze down the hill toward Leggett and Billy Swift and the campfire. He clenched the cigar between his teeth and placed his hands on his knees. After a moment, he removed the cigar and called out to Leggett. “Soldier! You don’t need to use that damned frying pan for
everything
. Get yourself a good green stick and toast that, directly over the fire.”

Both Leggett and Billy Swift stared at the surgeon for a moment, squinting, and then Leggett shrugged his shoulders and went about his business, unaltered. Billy Swift laughed, struck Leggett playfully upside the head, and then called out to the surgeon, “Frying’s the only cooking he knows how to do, Major! He’d fry up your molasses cookies if you let him!” Billy Swift—noting his failure to amuse the surgeon and construing it apparently as a signal to take his leave—said something brief and final to Leggett, then waved to Hayes and sauntered away down the hillside.

“Why do they oppose all modification?” said Speck, softly, to Hayes.

Hayes, still squatting, held one spare pair of socks to his nose, then
another, to determine which was the less offensive. He hadn’t thought Speck sought a real answer to the question, so he was surprised when the surgeon said, “Well, Hayes, what do you think?”

Hayes saw that the surgeon hadn’t diverted his gaze from Leggett’s fire. “With respect, sir,” he said, “I’d say most everybody here has already undergone a fair amount of modification.”

Now Speck looked down at him, piercingly, and Hayes feared he’d spoken too frankly.

But the doctor nodded after a moment, his gray eyes watering, and then looked away, back at Leggett. “Is that man your company cook?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said Hayes. “He’s only my—”

“Get your rations from the company cook,” said the surgeon.

“Yes, sir.”

Speck stood, brushing ashes down the front of his shirt. “Well,” he said, “I’d best go collect my sword and the rest of my sweltering gear.”

Hayes noticed that the surgeon was sweating. “Sir,” said Hayes, standing and squaring his shoulders, about to salute, but Speck reached for his hand. The surgeon held him thus with his right hand, tossed the butt of the cigar to the ground, and put his left on Hayes’s shoulder. He glanced at Hayes’s cartridge box, resting atop one of the rolled blankets. “Have you ever seen the wound these damned balls inflict in a man?” he asked. “The ragged tear an iron fragment cuts into a man’s flesh? The shattered bone?”

“No, sir,” said Hayes.

“Of course you haven’t,” he said, “not yet, but you will.”

He released Hayes, took up his folding stool, and made to go. Three or four feet away, he stopped, turned, and looked again into Hayes’s eyes. “Everything’s about to change,” he said. “By sunrise tomorrow nothing will be the same. Of course I’m bound to be sticking with my own regiment. I don’t know when I shall see you again.”

“No, sir,” said Hayes.

“I trust you’ll understand me if I say I hope I don’t see you anytime soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good luck to you, Hayes. God be with you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Once again the surgeon made to leave but returned to Hayes, and when next he spoke, it was with a confidential tone. “If you
are
wounded, son,” he said, “above all else, try to keep it clean. And if you should find yourself in a hospital, resist all drugs as best you can. Fresh air, clean water, sunlight, these will always be the best medicines.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hayes. “Thank you, sir.”

Now the man started down the hill slowly, walking slump-shouldered, as if he were headed toward a punishment. Then, abruptly, he turned back in the direction of the sinks and quickened his pace.

In another minute, Leggett was at Hayes’s side. He pushed his hat off his forehead and said, “What did Major Sawbones want with you?”

“I’m not sure,” answered Hayes, continuing to look down the path of the surgeon’s departure. “He’d like for you to stop
frying
everything in sight.”

Leggett laughed through his nose. “And I’d like to cross the Niagara Falls on a tightrope, but chances are that’s not gonna happen. I’d say he’s taken quite a fancy to you, anyways. Likable fellow that you are.”

“He was in a dark enough mood, I guess,” said Hayes.

“Ahh,” said Leggett, nodding slowly, “you’ll be running into plenty of that I reckon. As the sun sets tonight, I expect there’ll be no shortage of dark moods.”

He squatted and began rooting through a pile of equipment on the ground, muttering something about needing his “good knife.” When he’d found it, he stood and pulled out a shirttail for the purpose of wiping the blade. “What I heard just now from Swift,” he said, “our whole corps is to march downriver to Ely’s Ford tonight. That’ll put us a stone’s throw from Chancellorsville … not a place I ever meant to revisit, I can tell you that. I just hope to heaven we don’t end up back in the Wilderness.” Now he quickly looked down at what Hayes had been about and pointed his finger at the scattered gear. “Bare essentials, Hayes,” he said, “bare essentials. Remember: after a few miles, five pounds feels like ten, and so forth. When we’re under way, fill your canteen every chance you get. It’s gonna be a warm night.
And don’t wash your feet till we get to where we’re going. Wet feet, wet socks, sure blisters.”

“How far’s Ely’s Ford?” asked Hayes.

“Far enough to make you wish it was closer,” said Leggett. He turned back toward the campfire and his cooking. As he started to move away, he said, “I’ll tell you another thing. If them boys over there light up that bonfire they been building, they’ll get a hidin’ from the captain. Seems some paleface is always burning up his digs and showing Johnny we’re on the move.”

Hayes stayed still for another minute, surveying the busy scene that stretched before him and thinking of the last letter he’d written to Sarah. In it, he’d described the encampment as an anthill and as a great panoramic painting in motion. A few hours from now—laden with knapsack, tent, blanket, gun, and ammunition—he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the men in his company, not far from this same spot, waiting his turn to fall in and move out. Across the knolls and gaps of darkness, musket barrels and bayonets would catch the sparse light from a sliver of a moon, a trembling necklace of upright and parallel lines, a fantastic flying fence in a dream, not of this world.

T
HE AIR IN THE WOODS
has grown heavy and stifling, the leaf- and needle-strewn ground boggy, the undergrowth thicker, the terrain undulating. Overhead, dark clouds, bloated and close, threaten to let loose a torrent. He has already heard rumbles of thunder, both ahead and behind. Mosquitoes dance about his head and arms, gnats whiz straight into his eyes and ears, and every other minute there’s a stick on the ground that resembles a snake and gives him a start. He can no longer tell what time of day it is. Hours earlier, the stream he’d been following turned westward, and so he left it, striking out in what his best lights told him was northeast. He means to stop soon and sleep, though he has no shelter from the coming downpour. He figures he’ll burrow in under the densest brush he can find. Anyway, the combination of his sweating and the heaviness of the air has kept his clothes still wet. A blunt mallet pounds inside his head, and his old friend,
hunger, grumbles below. He has very little left in his bread bag now, and he must make it last.

Ahead, he sees a clearing of some sort, an opening in the treetops where the gloomy light pours down onto a tract of blackened earth. As he draws closer, astonishment swells inside him, choking his breath—it is a swamp, the same swamp he has already encountered some hours ago, a scum-covered expanse out of which dead trees rise, their trunks swollen at the waterline. He stops some yards away, throws down his gear, and sits cross-legged on the ground, defeated; he pulls his shirt up over his head like a hood, a paltry protection from the gnats and mosquitoes. Now he admits to himself what has been a smoldering fear, kept at bay these last several hours since leaving the stream: he is lost, utterly. How can he have traveled in a great circle? The sky offers no help. Strangely, he finds himself thinking of how he’ll explain himself once back home in Brooklyn—what will he tell Sarah and his club mates?—and he envisions a headline above a story in the
Eagle
,
SHORTEST MILITARY CAREER IN HISTORY
. The absurdity of this concern, at this moment, makes him laugh, and once he has started, he feels he cannot stop, which frightens him into an abrupt silence, a silence that seems to expand outward from him in broader and broader circles until it fills the entire forest. He lowers his shirt from his head. Even the insects have deserted him. No bird sings. No breeze whispers in the pines.
The war has ended
, he thinks,
this is the stillness of peace
. And,
No, it’s only a dream of death
. Next a flash of white light and a peal of thunder that make him bring his arms to his head, followed by what at first sounds like wind approaching but quickly becomes rain, pelting, quickening the world. The dead stuff of the forest floor quivers, the underbrush quakes, the brown-green swamp appears to boil.

He rolls onto his belly and creeps beneath the surrounding brush. Even in the face of his shame, Sarah won’t quite suppress her temptation to gloat. He’ll buckle pathetically under the interrogations of every man he meets. He’ll not be thought creditable, his story, the truth, taken as pretext. Certainly he’ll not be welcomed back by the Eckford Club. He’ll withdraw to an upstairs room, lower the shades, Ishmael of Hicks Street.

Now he lays the haversack flat over his head, gripping its straps with his hands close to his ears. He feels the eyes of another traveler, nearby, watching him, but he cannot stir up the necessary pains to worry. The boys of the regiment, a receding but still-loved assembly, fight another battle toward Richmond, he thinks—perhaps the same rain falls on them—and as this thought forms in his mind, a hundred or more of them (somebody’s darlings) fall to their death … as he himself lives on, lost in the woods, fatuous to the core, and frets about his homecoming to Brooklyn.

The rain on the bag sounds something like musketry. A shot of lightning. A long cannonade of thunder. Razors in his wounds. He sees himself from the high branch of a tree, drenched, prostrate, forgotten by God; and his mother, underwater, presses her face against the omnibus glass, long tresses of her hair, unpinned, serpentine, rise and fall about her head. The battle-ring in his ears merges with the din of the rain, and as he drifts into—what?—vacancy, all affairs empty, all cares worthless, it’s as if the storm and the whole silken pageant of May has moved inside his skull, home there, not wild but infinite, obliterating.

He falls asleep and, in sleep, immediately returns to the burning Wilderness. The woods—sentient, willful, a tight network of limbs and vines—push back at him and breathe smoke into his eyes, scorching his face and hands, as he struggles to advance. Now and again he catches a glimpse of fire through the tangle, and as he proceeds, inch by inch, men and boys emerge from the thicket, some charred, some bleeding from the head, all panic-stricken and weeping, all making as best they can for the rear. He recognizes them only by their sort—youngsters from the drum corps, various officers, teamsters, horseless cavalrymen, an assortment of Negro servants in rags—and yet as each one passes, meeting his eye, he thinks,
I know him
. It is a dilemma, this knowing but not being able to name, and somehow it mirrors another: he can tell that a great clamor of battle, battle cries, and wails of the wounded surrounds him, and yet he hears almost nothing; the grim drama unfolds in silence but for a repeated plucking of a single string that emanates from above the trees. The figures moving to the rear, transformed by the certainty of his
knowing
them, begin to pass straight
through him as they go, each depleting him further in the passing; likewise, one quietly divests him of his haversack, another his canteen, another his bread bag and weapon. The plucking of the string, growing steadily louder, becomes a high-pitched whir that settles across the membranes inside his ears. Soon he comes face-to-face with a wall of flames, so hot it singes his eyelashes. Out of the fire a team of horses canters, pulling a caisson on which rides the commander of the brigade, hatless and drunk, the sixteen buttons of his frock coat blazing. The caisson, also bound for the rear, passes in silence, to one side, and as it goes the general lifts his head in a wobbly way and looks directly at him.
Summerfield!
he cries, silently.
Wake up!
Then the brigadier general—a hero at Gettysburg, now reduced to a seedy role in a private’s dream—draws a pistol and aims it at Summerfield’s heart. Frozen in the moment of his death, Summerfield thinks,
Killing me he kills himself
. The sizzle-string inside his ears abates, and next he is falling down the well of dying, borne by two adolescent angels whom he identifies as those that once hung on to the posts at the foot of his boyhood bed. Of surprisingly limited intelligence, they speak to his mind in the form of three single musical quavers, which enter him with tiny trembling tails through the pupil of his right eye.