Nostalgia (26 page)

Quickly the air grew hot, bristling with flying bark. Dark gray smoke turned the sunny afternoon to an unnatural dusk.

For a good half hour, the Confederates threw line after line of troops into the slashing. For a good half hour, line after line was slaughtered.

Then the brush and razed saplings of the clearing caught fire. A breeze from the woods blew the black pine-tar smoke back over the entrenchment, blinding and choking the Federal soldiers. And in a matter of minutes, the flames spread to the piled logs of the breastworks.

The rebels seized the opportunity and hurled themselves at the spot where fire had opened a break in the Union line.

F
OR FIVE MINUTES OR MORE
, Hayes and Swift were swept along by the tide of Union troops suddenly fleeing for the rear. The intense heat of the fire and rolling masses of black smoke bit into their eyes. The crackle of musketry and the thunder of artillery (now turned toward the breach) were deafening and confounding. Amid the pandemonium, jostled left and right, Hayes had lost his bearings. An aide to General Hancock rushed through the throng on a mission to rally the retreating infantry, his mount’s neck bathed in white froth. Hayes tugged at Swift’s elbow, and Swift turned on him a completely bewildered face.

Then—not a dozen paces away, breaking through the smoke and stirring up clouds of dust—a caisson roared by with the brigade commander, General Ward (lately seen naked at the spring), aboard. As it passed with a rumble of hooves, the general met Hayes’s eye—the commander had lost his hat, and there was a strange wobbly affect to his gaze. Hayes and Swift watched the caisson disappear into the trees. They looked at each other, and Swift shouted, “He’s wallpapered! He’s headed for the rear!”

Hayes cocked his head in the direction opposite from where the caisson had gone—toward the heat, toward the burgeoning wall of fire at the front—and said, “Let’s go.” They started to run and were presently caught in a wild river of troops from other brigades, hurrying to the breach in the Federal line. In another two minutes, they reached the spot where rebels were pouring over the barricade, and then it was fire and smoke, bayonets and swords, bloodcurdling screams, muskets for clubs, and shells exploding frighteningly near. The black smoke changed dusk to night. Hayes quickly lost Swift altogether, along with his sense of time and place. Apparently, he functioned best within an ebb and flow of awareness. It was something like having his eyes closed but seeing everything more sharply than usual.
Now
and
here
, yoked by a fitful hyphen, became an elusive blinking lamp:
now-here, nowhere, now-here, nowhere
.

Then of course there was the acrid stench of burnt hair, burnt flesh, burnt wool, burnt powder. Using his musket like a medieval pike, Hayes pressed a snaggletoothed boy to the smoking ground and straddled him. They locked eyes. An anonymous Union soldier reached in and slit the boy’s throat with a bowie knife. In the next moment, Hayes was struck over the back of the head with something dull and heavy, and he fell face forward into a spray of blood.

H
E AWAKENED
, still alive, into a twilight of low-lying smoke and flames. The roar of combat persisted, though less feverishly. Flat on his belly beneath a close mantle of smoke, he had the impression that he lay somewhere in the slashing and that he had been dragged there and dropped. The back of his head was sore, and when he touched the spot, he felt a wet knot, tender to the touch. He’d lost his weapon, but on every side of him were dead soldiers and a number of guns. Here and there the smoke itself appeared to be on fire, pulsing orange, and braids of smoke rose continuously from the blackened earth. He crawled toward a musket, keeping his head close to the ground, the only way to breathe. Weapon in hand, he reached for his canteen, which felt hot, and managed a few swallows of warm water. He crawled farther, until he found a discarded blanket, then spread it out flat on the
ground and gathered what other canteens he could from the nearby dead. He emptied the canteens onto the blanket. Now he rolled himself in the dampened blanket, covering even his head. He thought he heard, beneath the ongoing din of combat, men groaning in pain, and then suddenly he was trampled by a rush of soldiers, who tripped over him and kicked him—deliberately, he thought—as they passed.

Soon the musketry began to abate. Longer breaks opened between bursts of artillery. Gratefully cooled, he started to emerge from his woolen cocoon. He had no idea which way to go, but since he judged the troops who had trampled him to be rebels in retreat, he decided to head in the opposite direction. Blanket in one hand, gun in the other, he began to pull himself across the smoking ground. When he’d got only a yard or two—astonishingly, like something in a dream—he heard someone speak his name: “Hayes,” said the voice, hoarsely, “Hayes.”

He raised his head, choked on the smoke, lowered his head, and went into a fit of coughing. Tears flowed from his eyes. It was dark beneath the smoke, and he felt his heart thumping inside his chest. He wiped his face with a corner of the blanket.

Then he saw it, to his right, faceup in a shallow and smoking depression: a charred thing, its head nearest and cocked back, so that two white wet eyes glowed at him from beneath a blackened brow; singed and smoking along its tapering length, it spoke again. “Hayes,” it said, more breath than substance. “Pull me out, Hayes.”

It extended a raven hand to within Hayes’s reach, and Hayes felt the earth give beneath him. The ground dropped a few inches, then tilted at an acute angle, so that he was left stranded on a high plane, looking down at the hand protruding from a smoking sleeve. The sensation was physically sickening—it came with an odor of hot metal and burnt sugar—and Hayes’s tongue seemed to swell inside his mouth.

Billy Swift, scrappy second baseman from the Bronx County. Billy Swift, whose ma had told him he needn’t fear the great change, for on the Day of Judgment we would be resurrected and restored.

“I couldn’t make my legs work,” said Swift. “I couldn’t get out of the fire.”

Hayes took hold of the boy’s hand, which was surprisingly cool,
but with only the slightest tug, the flesh pulled loose into Hayes’s own hand, leaving a glistening claw of bone. Hayes threw the stuff to one side as Billy screamed and withdrew his arm. His body began to convulse. He was crying now, a jagged chirp that sounded oddly like laughter, and Hayes saw wisps of smoke escape the boy’s open mouth. Yellow splinters of fire suddenly sprang up from the depression in which he lay, and just as Hayes went to throw the blanket over the flames, Swift’s cartridge belt detonated,
pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
.

Hayes flattened himself to the ground and covered his head. When it was over, he pivoted round and crouched over Swift at the rim of the depression, keeping his head low beneath the layer of smoke. The boy lay still now, eyes closed, silent. Hayes didn’t know how to touch him. He could see no way to touch him, but at last gently put his hand on the boy’s stomach. Swift let out a broken, pathetic, high-pitched moan. Now Hayes saw, just below the boy’s belt, a dark gaping wound. More than any other Hayes had seen so far, this was the wound Surgeon Speck had described to him at Brandy Station—the ball, flattened and distorted by its impact with human flesh, had bored through the body tearing muscle, splintering bone. Swift opened his eyes, which appeared to be submerged in a silver fluid, and looked at Hayes as if from a great distance, without recognition; mysteriously, he said, “We rode down the hill on a hand sleigh.”

Hayes said, “When was that, Billy?”

Swift now gave Hayes a terrible pleading look. He moved his lips as if to speak but could form no audible words. He let his head fall to one side and gazed pointedly at the musket lying beside Hayes on the ground. With obvious and painful effort, he swallowed and tried again to speak. Hayes lowered his face closer to Swift’s and heard the boy whisper, “I … beg … you.”

Hayes glanced at the gun near his left knee. “I can’t, Billy,” he said. “Don’t ask me to do that.”

“I beg you,” groaned Swift, and started again to weep.

Hayes felt his own hands go cold and numb. Looking down at the boy again, he saw that Swift’s legs were badly burned, black, with patches of blue where the fabric of his trousers had survived. The charred leather of his shoes had bonded to his feet. The ball that had
entered below the belt had likely smashed into his spine. The trough of his neck, beneath the blackened chin, was a dark orange color marked by watery blisters the size of walnuts, his right ear a crater and a crispy flap of skin. Where the flesh had come off his right hand, a wine-red mucus oozed from the torn wrist.

Swift closed his eyes again and whispered, “I … beg … you.”

Under the circumstances, Hayes would need to lie down right alongside the boy. He would need to brace the weapon against his own shoulder while aiming it at Swift’s temple.

Again Swift started to convulse, uttering a quaking series of grunts, and Hayes got himself arranged quickly. He loaded as if his own life depended upon it; rested the barrel on the rim of the depression; and fired a minié ball into the boy’s brain.

He did not hear the shot, for at the exact same moment an errant shell exploded quite nearby, casting up a cataclysm of earth. Fragments smacked Hayes high in the middle of the back and along the backside of his left thigh. The pain was something like being struck by a base ball, but hotter. Far more stunning was the blast itself, which—apart from a persistent ringing in Hayes’s ears—had annihilated all other sound. He could hear no further artillery, no musketry, no rebel yells, no groans from the wounded. Only a sudden silence, bathed in smoke.

In silence, he spread the blanket on the ground next to Swift. He rolled the boy onto it, then gathered it at two corners, and got himself onto all fours. In this manner he began to crawl toward what he hoped would be the Union barricade, dragging Swift behind. It was slow going, for the ground was riddled with the snarls of slashed saplings and underbrush; there were fires and stumps and dead or dying men to get around; and he needed to keep his head below the smoke.

B
EHIND THE
B
ROCK
R
OAD
, he could stand and walk, and the thinning smoke only dimly obscured a golden sky beyond the black arms of the trees. He couldn’t have said if the gold color signified sunrise or sunset, but the ambiguity was of no consequence—sufficient to call it twilight, the afterglow of combat, which he’d survived. He believed
the only hope for Billy Swift was to take him to the field hospital, about two miles through the woods to the rear and, even hindered by his own wounds, he believed that if he proceeded slowly he could get that far. The great colony of blue ants, raided and scrambled once again, twitched and churned with more energy than ever; only now, as Hayes observed it, the elaborate spectacle of recovery unfolded in grotesque silence. Everywhere the injured lay about, and as Hayes moved along, dragging the blanket that bore Swift, some reached out a hand, while others only gazed with the vacant eyes of a hurt animal. A weeping steward knelt beside a captain, trying to stanch a bleeding wound in the man’s shoulder. A stretcher-bearer tripped over a discarded haversack and rolled an unconscious soldier onto the ground. A shirtless private with his arm in a sling leaned against a log and read a tattered and bloodstained letter. Hayes was accosted by a corporal he didn’t recognize, who barked some orders, pointing a finger down at Swift; Hayes nodded and saluted as if he’d understood and said, “Sir!” (It was queer to know himself to have spoken but only to feel his voice rather than to hear it.) The corporal placed his hands on Hayes’s shoulders and peered into his eyes. Again he spoke, now with a look of concern, but the only words Hayes read from the man’s lips were
regiment
and
dead
. Because it seemed to Hayes that the corporal wanted him to abandon his journey to the field hospital, he turned around and started back in the direction of the road. In the distance, beyond the still-smoking breastworks and the slashing, Hayes saw three pillars of fire rising up at the edge of the woods, whole trees ablaze from the base of the trunk to the topmost branches. He went only a few paces and stopped. He checked to make sure the corporal had moved on, then turned again and resumed his way to the hospital, a path clogged by ambulance wagons and scores of dead horses. He sought to load Swift into one of the wagons but was rudely rejected by a skittish member of the ambulance corps, and so he resolved to drag Swift into the woods to the side of the path and take a less populated course.

The forest grew darker and, most surprising, Hayes began to encounter the occasional civilian. A man with a white beard approached him, looked sadly down at Swift on the blanket, and seemed to make Hayes some kind of offer. Hayes only shook his head and moved on.
A while later, he saw another man rooting through the inside pockets of a dead soldier’s jacket, and when the man noticed Hayes approaching, he ran away through the woods. A woman dressed all in black stood over the body of a slain rebel and appeared to be singing out of a hymnbook. (Hayes suspected the rebel soldier had been shot and had dragged himself there, hoping for a safe place to die.) Beside the woman stood the old red-faced man in the stovepipe hat Hayes had seen earlier in the day, and he was glad to know the man was real after all. Near this couple, a shredded blouse, soaked with blood, hung in a snarl of brambles.

It seemed to Hayes that he had traveled a long time, out of night, into day, and into night again, but he knew that—as the smoke of battle blurred these distinctions—he was bound to be confused. A single star fell from the now-lavender sky and lighted on the branch of a pine. The scent of roasted pork and coffee wafted through the woods, and Hayes thought that Swift, when he woke up, would be happy for that. He stopped and sat with his back against a tree, reached for his canteen but found it empty. A rabbit—the same one he’d seen in the trench the night before, when he’d gone to search for Leggett—limped into the dry leaves about a yard away from him. One of the rabbit’s hind legs was torn and bloody; the poor animal crouched there for a moment, panting and trembling, and then hobbled away into the brush.