Nostalgia (27 page)

Hayes stood and took up the corners of the blanket, glad to note that Swift seemed to have grown lighter rather than heavier. Morphine, he thought, a good dose for Billy and maybe a little for himself. As he continued, the ringing in his ears, like a rapidly plucked and ever-tightening string, grew higher-pitched and provoked an ache behind his eyes. Just when he’d begun to worry about losing his way in the darkening woods, he saw through the trees a necklace of yellow lanterns, shifting and blinking like a swarm of fireflies; the pointed white gables of a myriad of tents; a green flag with the letter
H
.

F
ROM A DISTANCE
, it might have been a circus or an Independence Day festival at the Military Garden, but still the sight of it sobered him.
He knew that Billy Swift would not wake up and was well beyond any need for opiates. He knew exactly what the corporal who’d accosted him on the road had said:
Private, get back to your
regiment 
… that boy is
dead. He wandered toward the tents unable to think why he’d undertaken such a foolish enterprise, bringing Billy to the field hospital, and it felt to him only the latest mark of a flaw in his character that would doom him to a life of blunders and poor decisions.

He had to weave his way across a ground dense with wounded men, some writhing in agony. A nurse, transferring a man from an ambulance to a litter, looked at Hayes hopelessly. A steward wearing a white apron stepped in front of Hayes with a notebook strapped to a board. The man said something to Hayes and then bent to explore the pockets of Swift’s blouse. He brought out a charred Christian Commission Testament, thumbed through the first few burnt-black pages, businesslike, and at last asked Hayes a question. Hayes wasn’t sure if the man had asked for Swift’s name and regiment or for Hayes’s own. He said, “William Swift, Fortieth New York,” and the man wrote it into his notebook. He pointed Hayes in a direction to the right side of the hospital tents, where there stood a great oak, older and taller than any tree Hayes had seen in the Wilderness. The steward waved his arms impatiently, as if Hayes should hurry, and then, as Hayes started to move, he tapped Hayes on the shoulder. The next thing the man said Hayes was able to read clearly, for, obviously exasperated, he spoke with emphasis: “You don’t belong here, Private.”

The path to the oak took Hayes near the crowd gathered round a surgeon’s table beneath a tent flap, where a number of men held a number of lanterns. Hayes could see the bobbing straw hat of the surgeon, and as he passed by, the crowd suddenly unknotted to allow a patient to be carried away on a stretcher. The patient, still groggy from anesthesia, reached out a hand to Hayes, but the nurses bearing the stretcher didn’t pause. It was Vesey, the big man from Bushwick, for whom Hayes had written a letter—could it be possible?—only the previous day. Hayes tried to catch up to them, but couldn’t manage with Swift in tow, and he was afraid to leave Billy unattended. The look on Vesey’s face—as he continued gazing back and reaching for Hayes—was one of urgent entreaty and surprise, as if Hayes were a
long-lost friend who’d arrived just in the nick of time to save him from a disastrous misunderstanding: each of Vesey’s legs had been amputated above the knee.

The oak stood at the center of a low rise that accommodated its massive roots. Nighttime had already settled beneath its branches. To the right of the wide trunk, three long rows of the dead had been laid out on the ground, some—wrapped tightly in charred-looking blankets—faceless, limbless, cylindrical shapes, tapered at each end. To the left stood a great heap of severed human arms, legs, feet, and hands, some blackened and already bloated. Hayes pulled Swift to the end of one of the rows to the right of the oak, pushed him onto half of the blanket, and covered him with the other half.

He could recall only fragments of any burial prayers, and so—unable to hear the sound of his own voice—he recited these as best he could, aware, as he spoke them into the darkness, that they lacked even a whisper of anything cogent: “ ‘Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower … he fleeth as it were a shadow … In the midst of life we are in death … of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee … Forasmuch as it hath pleased thee, Almighty God, in thy wise Providence, to take out of this world the soul of Billy Swift’ …”

He stopped—or was stopped—as if he’d hit a rock wall. His mind went entirely astray—for an instant, he couldn’t think what he was doing.

He shook himself and continued: “ ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away’ …”

Though he knew that “blessed be the Name of the Lord” immediately followed that last line, he couldn’t make himself say it.

When he stood to go, his knees buckled beneath him.

And so he sat on the ground—vividly aware of the hill of limbs on one side, the rows of corpses on the other—and allowed himself to be mesmerized by a silhouette drama on a canvas wall a few yards away. The hospital tent glowed yellow from the light of lamps within, where a remarkable industry hummed. The surgeon worked rapidly, wielding a saw, his elbow like a rod on a locomotive; then the gentler motions
of threading the needle (moistening the silk with saliva from his own mouth) and stitching the wound. Patients were removed from the table and new ones placed upon it at a dizzying rate. Hayes couldn’t have said how long he sat on the ground and watched the shadow-play, but soon his own wounds began to sting sharply, his hands to shake, and then his mother’s face rose up in his mind, pressed watery and wavering against the window of the omnibus. He imagined that as she clawed the glass her thoughts had flown to him and Sarah.

A medical officer, an assistant surgeon, pausing away from the tents for a cigar, approached with a lamp. He held it aloft, so that he could see Hayes and Hayes could see him.

“You’ve picked a morbid spot to meditate,” Hayes understood him to say, and then the man asked for his name.

But when Hayes went to answer, he couldn’t. The mechanisms of speech and sound, taken for granted and uncontemplated till now, had thoroughly left him.

All afternoon Walt has been amusing a group of soldiers gathered around Casper’s bed—first with Twenty Questions and then with a succession of witty anecdotes. Though Hayes, in his own bed, lies outside the circle, naturally he can hear every word, every explosive round of laughter, every interruptive gibe, and he would give just about anything for a little peace and quiet.

“… when I visited Culpeper, February last,” Walt’s saying now, “a true story, told me by a certain regimental surgeon. He was posted to a field hospital in a little church, at the first Bull Run. It was July, of course, and very hot, and he’d set up shop under a shade tree near the road that led to the battlefield. His patient had taken a musket ball to the arm, which had fractured the bone. The surgeon was in the midst of applying a splint and an eight-yard bandage, when suddenly a vast throng of soldiers came rushing down the road and shouting, ‘The rebs are after us, the rebs are after us!’ ”

Here Walt pauses to allow for the obligatory chortling and sniggering.

“And the patient,” he continues, “frightened near to death, is instantly up from the table and hightailing it for the woods. As he goes, the better part of the bandage comes undone, and the bemused doctor’s left standing under his shade tree watching him recede into
the distance … with this great long white streamer fluttering in his wake!”

A virtual tempest of laughter, altogether grander than the mildly entertaining story merits, and Hayes thinks perhaps his head will split.

Thankfully, it’s milder weather today, a gray sky (what he can see of it out his window), but windy. The ward’s many shades and flags and mosquito curtains flap unceasingly, and Hayes wishes he could somehow make everything
stop
—the shades, the flags, the curtains, the carnival of visitors and staff in the aisle, the dithering lamp on its long chain overhead. He needs to think, to sort out his situation, which seems to him direr since the previous night’s episode involving Matron and two members of the guard. All day he has awaited the arrival of consequences, which have not materialized, unless one counts nuances—several small nicks in the usual grain of things. He’s seen nothing of Matron all day. Anne, like Walt, seems to be avoiding him, and she wears the lilac-colored dress that Matron already forbade. Casper, quite inspired and pleased with himself, earlier led Hayes through a series of questions with numerical answers (which Hayes could indicate by holding up his fingers), intended to get at Hayes’s identity. The ward surgeon, Dr. Dinkle, making his morning rounds, inspected Casper’s dressing and ordered it changed, yet so far no one has shown up to do it—a concern to Hayes, since he believes he detects a foul odor emanating from Casper’s bed. That same doctor passed Hayes without so much as a nod, even though Hayes had taken the pains to stand and salute. There are more patients on the ward than ever but noticeably fewer visitors. Mrs. Duffy, the hymn-singing woman—parking one pale hand on the footrail of Hayes’s bed and repeatedly meeting his eye whenever she went especially flat—delivered with even more than her usual passion all eight verses of “Plunged in a Gulf of Dark Despair.” And the chaplain—who, as he distributes the mail, usually has a sad smile for Hayes—stopped by after breakfast, bearing only the sadness without the smile, and pointedly left a copy of
Come to Jesus
on Hayes’s table. Meanwhile, the mother across the way (earlier thought by Hayes to be the ghost of his own mother) has sat with her boy since dawn, holding his hand, though the boy has shown not one sign of life. And Jeffers,
clearly dying in the bed on Hayes’s left, no longer mutters to himself but only brays like a donkey, fighting for each inhalation, as now and again one of the young cadets, eager for experience, hovers over him.

These observations strike Hayes as pieces of a puzzle, and though he has tried and failed to make them compose a coherent picture, he believes they do suggest a certain shift of atmosphere, a certain shift in tone: Hayes—the hysterical soldier who, prompted apparently by hallucinations, ran amok and had to be tackled and restrained by the guard—has been a topic of wide conversation, and now everyone regards him with heightened curiosity and reticence. In some office of the hospital’s administration building, his future is being repondered in light of last night’s adventure.

In a more peaceful setting, he might anticipate the likely developments and prepare himself, perhaps even devise plans for eluding certain undesirable outcomes. But here, where nothing’s ever still and there’s never a moment’s silence, it’s like trying to pen a letter in a runaway carriage. Except for the double surprise of Matron’s intervention and her sudden sympathy, he has not even been able to recall exactly how things ended the night before. He expects he fell asleep. Probably he was given a drug.

At last the group around Casper’s bed disperses, but immediately, at Casper’s urging, Walt is wearily dragging his chair near to Hayes, then sitting, smiling, and patting Hayes’s knee. Walt looks more florid than usual and squints his eyes, as if he is enduring a pain inside his head; his bushy gray beard appears burdensome and unclean, an oat bag about his neck. Casper, who situates himself in his own bed so that he’s angled toward Hayes, fluffs and rearranges the pillow that supports his stump. Hayes believes he sees a new flushed quality to Casper’s cheeks as well, and that he seems unusually agitated. He recalls his own insight from the night before, that Matron herself was ill—which likely accounts for her absence today—and he thinks perhaps everybody on the ward will eventually succumb to one death or another. Now that he considers it, he understands that the hospital is a kind of mill, where the sick and wounded come either to die or to convalesce until they’re returned to the front and killed—and that even the majority of those caring for the patients, subjected to a sea
of contagions, won’t survive. Before Hayes arrived at the hospital, he thought he’d died somewhere in Virginia, in a field of white wildflowers, beneath a canopy of gas-leaking stars. Then he was brought by train and boat to this place, where, exposed to surgical fevers and sewer emanations, he’ll undoubtedly contract a fatal illness. He recalls a lost and round-faced boy in the Wilderness, knocking his fist against his own head and saying,
Maybe I’m already dead
, then touching Hayes to test whether or not Hayes was real. He recalls a shell rolling into a hollow, bumping against the trunk of a hazel bush but not exploding. He recalls awakening in a charred slashing where he’d been dumped after suffering what might have been a mortal blow to the back of the head. And he wonders if this mightn’t be the dark-comedic form taken by the afterlife: one dies, one awakens in a new setting where one dies again, then awakens into yet another setting, and so on and so on, forever.

“Okay, my friend,” Casper says, “just like we practiced now.”