Nostalgia (7 page)

Cool

   
Quill

      
Abiding

When he awakens warm and sodden and quite stationary, belly down on the ground, he thinks at first that he is at the bottom of a well. But of course he has only resumed the waking dream of the forest (lost, now he recalls), and he wonders at how soundly he has slept. The rain has stopped, but there is still the sad noise of its dripping from the trees. He rolls onto his back and sits up, groping in the darkness for his canteen, but he finds only sticks, leaves, and his own shoes. He gets onto his hands and knees and pats the wet ground in a widening circle, blindly, frantically, ever harder and in vain. At last he strikes an object of some weight, his book, Dickens—soaked,
cast aside as rubbish—the solitary thing the thief has left him. This is real, not a dream. He is wide awake. He has been robbed as he slept. Sarah’s letters gone, his Testament gone, he possesses nothing that would identify him. He feels himself starting to shake, the tremor in his hands spreading upward into his arms and down his trunk, and so he topples onto one side and hugs his knees to his chest. The acrid scents of gunpowder and something fouler, sweeter, seep up through the rain-drenched straw beneath him.

I
N THE FIRST HALF
of the sixth inning—the match still tied, now at fifteen runs—Vesey went to the bat again and sent a splendid grounder to the left field, bringing in all three of the runs the Bachelors would add to their score before yielding to the Twighoppers.

When Birdsall, the Twighoppers’ second baseman, took the bat, he watched a total of nineteen pitches before finding one he deemed suitable, then landed himself on the first base with a grounder muffed by the Bachelors’ short stop. Next came Fowler for the Twighoppers, who watched twenty pitches before swinging the bat the first time and watching another seventeen before finally going out on strikes. Hayes, who’d stationed himself with the Bachelors (since that was his own personal category), discerned a mounting grumble among the spectators and decided to pay the Twighoppers a visit.

He requested a time-out from the colonel and approached Coulter, their catcher, most experienced player, and unofficial leader—the likely instigator of this strategy of “patience” at the home base, intended to tire the opposing pitcher. He spoke privately with Coulter, cupping a hand to the side of his mouth. The catcher, who stood head and shoulders above him in height, was required to bend down in order to hear properly. As he spoke, Hayes was aware of their two sharp and disparate shadows on the ground at their feet. “The colonel is getting tight,” he said to Coulter. “If we ask him to start calling strikes on batsmen who don’t swing at fair pitches, he’ll do it. But he’s not likely to do it with much accuracy. Can I impose on you to speak a word of caution to your boys?”

Coulter, head bowed, took a moment to absorb what Hayes had said. At last he pressed his lips together and nodded slowly, indicating that he understood Hayes’s implications. “I’ll speak to ’em straightaway,” he said.

“Good man,” said Hayes, swatting him on the upper arm, and when the next Twighopper came to the bat, decorum had been restored.

Vesey, in the right field, handled the next hit, putting the runner out with a powerful throw to the first base, and then Coulter himself came to the bat. Perhaps having mended his ways with too much zeal, he swung at the first errant toss from the pitcher and missed. He watched the next two, then poked a missile so high and deep into the center field that a brief hush fell over the grounds, followed by an outburst of cheers. Rosamel, at that position for the Bachelors and judging the hit correctly, had turned and run like a deer toward the farther reaches of the field, headlong down the slope there, and entirely disappearing (along with the ball) from view. Both Birdsall and Coulter crossed the home base for the Twighoppers, amid cheers, and then Rosamel reappeared, charging forward in a state of high spirits and waving the ball madly over his head, signifying that he’d made the catch.

Immediately, cries of “Judgment!” went up both from players and spectators as the Bachelors abandoned their positions and rallied around Rosamel, patting the Frenchman on the back. Amid the uproar, the colonel rose from his chair and again fired his pistol into the air, silencing even the birds in the trees. He holstered his weapon and began taking off his frock coat, an enterprise of momentous struggle. He turned a shockingly red face toward Hayes, who went quickly to his aid.

“I could see no more of what happened than anyone else,” he said to Hayes, who helped him out of the coat and laid it across an arm of the chair. “How am I to make a judgment? What possible basis is there?”

Somebody called out “Judgment!” again, which emboldened others, and soon there was another full chorus in swing.

“With respect, sir,” said Hayes, “you might consult Rosamel in the matter.”

“Rosamel?” said the colonel. “Who in blazes is Rosamel?”

“The man who claims to have caught the ball, sir.”

In a matter of seconds, Hayes produced Rosamel, who, questioned by the colonel, swore upon his honor that he’d caught the ball on the fly, adding, with a shrug of his shoulders, “I know it is very incredible.”

“Rosamel’s an honest man, sir,” said Hayes. “He wouldn’t lie.”

Now the colonel held up his hands to quiet the crowd. Once he had everyone’s attention, he said, “Rosamel is an honest man. He wouldn’t lie. Judgment is three outs, inning over, score—”

He turned again to Hayes, who whispered the score.

“Bachelors eighteen runs, Twighoppers fifteen!”

A few forage hats went flying into the air. The burly Coulter was seen kicking the dirt before taking his position behind the home base. When Hayes returned to his spot near the Bachelors’ bench, Billy Swift came over, sporting a long blade of switchgrass between his teeth; he squatted next to Hayes and put an arm around his shoulders. “The colonel’s gettin’ tight,” he said.

“I know,” said Hayes.

“Grand, ain’t it?” said Billy, grinning out over the field, up at the blue sky, and back at the spectators. “Positively grand.”

T
HEY LEFT
the midday service at Holy Trinity and walked the short distance to Hicks Street in silence. Then, intoxicated by the cloudless sky, bracing air, and abundance of sunshine; the exhilarating music and ceremony they’d just witnessed in church; the houses along the way, dressed in wreaths and garlands of evergreens; and the good cheer evident on the faces of everyone they met—he failed to check himself. “What a brilliant Christmas!” he cried, and she immediately removed her hand from his arm.

In casting a pall over the season, she’d established a tacit understanding that such expressions of joy would unbalance the crisp civility (mixed with private preoccupation) she was managing to maintain toward him. The previous two Christmases without their parents had been sad affairs fraught with a variety of failed experiments,
from which, he’d hoped, the third might benefit. But of course the announcement of his intention to enlist in the army squashed any possibility of that. Mrs. B, with the help of her sister Jane, carried on in spirited fashion, overspending both time and money for what Summerfield secretly dubbed “compensating oysters”—an emblem for the many preparations meant to brighten Sarah’s unyielding mood. He himself had arranged a small tree and some mistletoe on the gaming table in the parlor, where they’d placed their Christmas boxes. But all such gestures ran more than one risk: they might offend the vigil she was keeping in honor of his imminent betrayal; or, though intended to gladden the heart, they might rekindle instead the loss of their mother, who’d observed the holiday with grace and ingenuity. He supposed his thoughtless exclamation in the street might even have done both.

She lifted her chin an inch and touched her gloved hand to the knot at the hollow of her neck that held her bonnet in place. “Yes, isn’t it,” she said.

In the next minute they arrived at the house, and he was on the fourth or fifth step before he saw that she hadn’t followed him up. He turned and found her standing at the foot of the stoop, apparently lost in thought. He went back down to her and stopped on the bottom step, where he offered his hand. He’d interrupted her reverie, but she surprised him now by smiling up at him sadly—maybe penitently?—as she placed her hand in his. On the landing, she paused again. “I want you to know that I’m aware of the absolute horror I’ve been,” she said.

“You haven’t been a—”

“Of course I have,” she said. “Just now, you were struck by the beautiful day, while I was thinking how impossible it felt to have to go inside and face Mrs. B’s feast. Of all the ungrateful … honestly, I can’t even think of a word to call myself. And you, Summerfield … you would like to have had people in today … or go to the festival at the pond … or to the theater, and I—”

“But I only suggested those things in case
you
might like to do them,” he said.

“Right, but I didn’t, did I? I’ve been nothing but selfish, disagreeable, and tiresome.”

He leaned against the railing and crossed his arms. “It’s Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon that’s provoked this,” he said.

“It most certainly is not,” she said. “I hardly listened to Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon. I’m afraid my thoughts were quite elsewhere.”

“Well, then you should be ashamed of yourself,” he said. “You were brought up better than that.”

“I am ashamed,” she said, “but not about Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon. I go to church to sing and pray and take the sacraments, not to be lectured.”

Suddenly the door opened, and Jane, obviously upset, stuck her head outside. “Summerfield, Sarah,” she said, “I heard your voices. My poor sister’s taken terribly ill.”

Inside the dark hallway, festooned holly twined around the frame of the great mirror, and the aromas of Mrs. B’s cooking rose from the kitchen below. Sarah quickly shed her bonnet and cape and stood her parasol in an urn by the door. “Where is she now?” she asked Jane.

Jane, younger than Mrs. B by four years, smaller in every way and as thin as Mrs. B was portly, had the pale and shrinking manner of someone who’d spent her life in another’s shadow. She leaned in close to Sarah now and whispered as if she were betraying a confidence. “She’s upstairs … in bed … with a pan at her side. Really very ill.”

“How is she ill, Jane?” asked Summerfield.

She looked at him a little stunned—an unexpected burden had fallen her way, which she doubted her ability to shoulder—and tears clouded her eyes. “She’s sure it was her sampling of the oysters that did it,” she said. “She had me throw the rest of ’em out. A terrible waste, too, costly as they—”

“All right,” said Sarah, “I’m going up to her.”

“Oh, no,” said Jane, taking Sarah’s arm, “she won’t like you to. She was very plain on that point. The last thing she wants is to spoil anybody’s Christmas.”

“Well, I’m going up all the same,” said Sarah. At the base of the stairs, she turned to Summerfield. “You might need to fetch the doctor … but let me go see her first.”

“I’ve already got everything laid out for you in the dining room,” protested Jane.

“That’s fine, Jane,” said Sarah. “That’s lovely, but first come with me, and let’s see what’s what.”

Summerfield stood in the chilly hall and watched the two women climb the stairs and disappear around the bend at the top. Disappointed, he stayed there a minute longer and listened to their footsteps on the second flight and then on the third. Sarah’s reversal of feelings had arrived, late but happily, on the stoop outside—he’d barely begun to enjoy it—only to be usurped by the exigencies of the sickroom. He went into the parlor, where he took a chair close to the fire and loosened his tie a half inch. He dreaded having to call Dr. Tilbrook away from home today. He thought of his clever “compensating oysters”—how peculiar that the delicacies intended to brighten matters had darkened them instead. As he imagined himself going to fetch the doctor, he experienced an urge to
run
, a strong physical impulse that had visited him now and again ever since he was a boy. It felt sometimes as if an animal inhabited his body and wanted letting out—an excess of energy he’d learned to use to an advantage (with inconsistent results), charging up to the line and releasing the base ball from his hand.

Now he got out of the chair and stirred about the parlor. He moved to the gaming table and lit the dozen or so little candles on the tree, then pushed back the doors to the dining room, bright with sunlight, where Jane had set the Christmas table: two place settings on either side at the end nearer the windows; their mother’s best dishes, silver, and candlesticks; at the table’s center a crystal vase of white chrysanthemums and a decanter of red wine; on the sideboard, a small turkey with a ring of sausages round it, white bread, pickles, applesauce, onions, and celery. He imagined there would be potatoes and some sort of soup yet to come, hot from the kitchen, and, later, dessert. He poured some of the wine into one of the goblets and took it with him to the window. He looked down into Jane’s fallow garden, then lifted the goblet to his lips, and at that moment, a bird slammed into the glass, so startling him and causing him to recoil he spilled wine down the front of his white shirt.

He was doing his best with a napkin from the table when Sarah appeared in the wide doorway and stood looking at him.

“A bird smashed into the window,” he said, blotting the front of his shirt.

“A bird?” she said, distressed and gliding quickly to the window. She peered down into the garden. “What sort of bird? Was it hurt?”

“Have you no sympathy for me?” he said. “I’ve spoiled my Sunday shirt.”

She moved to him and took the napkin from his hands. “I would have heaps of sympathy for you if you’d smashed your head against the window,” she said. “Now go and change, and I’ll get things ready.”

“What about Mrs. B?” he said.

“I think she’s in no danger, though I did have the feeling she would rather die than send for Dr. Tilbrook on Christmas. I persuaded Jane to stay with her.”

“How did you do that?”

“I told her we were perfectly capable of serving ourselves,” she said, taking a clean napkin from a drawer in the sideboard. She turned to the table and began fussing with the chrysanthemums, straightening a stem or two, and added, “I told her we were no longer children.”