This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Dennis McFarland
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McFarland, Dennis.
Nostalgia / Dennis McFarland.
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-90835-3
1. Soldiers—Fiction. 2. Disabled veterans—Fiction. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.C3629N67 2013 813′.54—dc23 2013003361
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket art: Civil War lithograph by Kurz & Allison (detail).
Everett Collection / SuperStock
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1
For M., K., & S., with love & gratitude
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
One: The Dream of the Forest
Two: Mr. X
Three: Smoke
Four: Under, and Stirring
Five: Letters
Six: Afloat
Seven: On Tiptoe
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
from Ancient Greek (nostalgia),
from (nostos, return home) + (algos, pain)
The Dream of the Forest
Summerfield Hayes—erstwhile private in the Fortieth New York Volunteers, Army of the Potomac—rests alongside a silent muddy creek and resolves not to fall asleep. Injured; abandoned in the Wilderness, left to dodge snipers and stragglers from both sides of the contest; forsaken to the unlikely prospect of outlasting the ruin of his shrapnel wounds and the slow-falling curtain of starvation and exposure—he knows himself lost in every sense of the word, adrift in body and mind. He wonders if his lifelong urge to run, the itch of a trapped animal, has in this flight been fulfilled at last. He looks up for a moment at the stone arch of a bridge that spans the creek; he closes his eyes and studies its afterimage on the back of his eyelids, a graceful curve, silver against dark red. He touches the crown of his head, a dull soreness there and a patch of caked blood. He moves his fingers to his forehead and a lump beneath the skin above his right eye, a boyhood scar that makes him recall his life at home with his sister. No breeze stirs the trees, the stillness of the forest alien, collusive. The pain in his leg and spine grows sharp, which conjures his mother’s face, more nightmarish than comforting, pressed against glass, underwater. He diverts his mind the only way he knows how: some limping drive to survive has managed to find the sole scrap of peace within him—a dot on his map of horrors, a memory, a day some few weeks ago in April, an afternoon of sunshine, a ball game.
He’d joined the Fortieth (known as the Mozart Regiment) early in 1864, when the regiment was on furlough in New York, and—along with more than a hundred new recruits—returned with them in February to the army’s winter quarters near Brandy Station. Yet another spring was approaching, and the great general who aimed to deliver at last a victory to Mr. Lincoln had decided to wait out the rains before pushing forward. A handful of men in Hayes’s new company, those who read newspapers and had heard Hayes’s name before, were soon after him to marshal for them a regimental nine. The regiment’s many New Yorkers fancied themselves not only best suited but also morally obligated to bring some gravity to the loose infantile pottering that had previously transpired—raucous ragtag bouts of town ball, amalgams of Knickerbockers this and Massachusetts that, even the occasional one-a-cat. Boredom raged through the camp like a fever; with each passing day, engaging the enemy felt more abstract and elusive; sick to death of rain, mildew, mud, and diarrhea, the soldiers meant to fill the time with something new and better, lift their spirits, and, once a team was established, extend a challenge to the other regiments in the brigade. Hayes suggested that the way to start was to arrange a match within the regiment—he proposed bachelors versus married men—from which the best nine would be culled, deriving a second nine in reserve. Somebody approached the sergeant, who approached the lieutenant, who approached the captain, who approached (with beer, it was rumored) the colonel. The colonel granted permission for the match so long as two conditions were met: all fatigue duty should be carried out regularly and impeccably before, during, and after said match; and he, the colonel, should serve as umpire, with all the attending conventional courtesies (more beer, it was understood).
Hayes knew himself to be lucky, observing that other fresh fish like himself had received no particular welcome of any kind at Brandy Station—save the daily misery of drilling in the muck, sleeping in the cold, and the ubiquitous threat of contagion—and many were received with suspicion, as unfit substitutes or bounty jumpers. He was especially glad to have been procured for the special purpose of getting up a match and overseeing practices, because his sister Sarah’s letters from Hicks Street lacked any grasp of the course he’d chosen. Why, she wanted to know, repeatedly, had he found it compulsory to forsake her; forsake his mates at his club, who’d so generously embraced and promoted him; forsake his plans for school, when his name had never been drawn in any draft lottery? And what was to become of her, with Summerfield her only living family this side of the Atlantic, should, God forbid, he not return? Did he not think it a sufficient loss, in the span of only a few years, their having been orphaned?
These were harder questions—or at least required longer, more thoughtful answers—than those of the infantry boys in Virginia, who wanted to know how the Eckford Club of Brooklyn had fared last season (a reduced number of games, only ten, but all wins, and the championship for the second year in a row). And had Hayes ever the chance to know the great Jim Creighton, inventor of the sinister speedball and dew-drop? (Tempted to lie, Hayes told the truth: he knew somebody who’d known Creighton.)
A sad story, somebody said, that Creighton boy, dying so young.
Tragic, said another. The boy’s heart stopped for no clear reason.
Ironic, said a third, dying young like that without ever setting foot on a battlefield.
The soldiers, many of whom had survived against great odds, and who’d shown valor at Kelly’s Ford and Mine Run, proved diffident when it came to volunteering for a legitimate base ball team. But of course everyone already knew who the best players were, and all that was needed was some legitimate nominating, followed by a bit of legitimate coaxing. The chaplain, a sanguine bespectacled fellow from Yonkers, manufactured five very fine, if lively, base balls by cutting strips of rubber from old overshoes, boiling the strips till they grew gummy and could be formed into small spheres, then wrapping these with yarn and covering them with horsehide. Soldiers whittled a number of bats from a variety of woods and in a variety of lengths and shapes. They found no entirely suitable plot of ground, though the patch they settled on was acceptable but for an alarming downward dip in the center field. The seat of a wooden chair, with legs and back removed, was employed as the home base, and haversacks, filled with sawdust, served as the three others. The practices comprised as m
uch argument as they did physical exercise, and Hayes, young, new, and untested in battle, found himself at the awkward post of arbiter. Some insisted that certain foul flies, judging how far afield they landed, must surely be ruled as outs. Others complained about the dubious delivery of the opposing pitcher. Base runners failed to touch bases, or not. And some of the more senior members (mostly from the married nine, who elected to call themselves the Twighoppers) had to be cured of the old habit of soaking, for they’d played town ball growing up and still very much relished plunking a runner with the ball. A hulking teamster from Bushwick, named Vesey, who could wallop just about anything tossed his way, claimed exemption during practices from having to run round the bases when he’d obviously launched a crusher.
The appointed day of the match started dark and rainy, causing among some men grumbling, among others a dejected silence. But as if heaven meant to offer a small solace in a world of mangling and unnatural death, the skies cleared a half-hour before match time. Birdsong and the awakened scents of the forest charged the air. Since the army had recently begun sending officers’ furniture to the rear (apparently headquarters was at least contemplating battle), it took some effort to secure for the colonel a lolling chair; once found, the chair was placed near the home base, where the colonel, in a fine mood and freshly groomed in his frock coat, situated himself with a lap desk and a pipe. First he assigned one of the sleepy drummers the task of keeping Banjo, Company D’s stray foxhound, off the field of play. Then he presided over the toss of a coin, which determined that the Bachelors should go first to the bat. Vesey—who’d insisted on going first in the order and who wielded a great pudding stirrer of an instrument nearly four feet long—swung at the first ball, missed, glared at the Twighoppers’ pitcher, and the match was under way. Vesey swung at the second ball and missed, likewise the third, and, quick as that, went out on strikes. Amid a mix of applause, cheers, and laughter, he returned head down to his mates, pausing briefly to draw his forearm over his whiskers.
Hayes, kneeling nearby in the dirt and sunshine, watched him, a large and able competitor, utterly surprised by defeat. The big man’s trousers, altogether too tight on him, fell short around his ankles, too short even to blouse inside his socks, and Hayes smiled, his heart full of a warmth he might have called love of the game.
Shyness had prevented him from making it known, but this April afternoon was Hayes’s birthday. He’d turned nineteen years.
BENEATH THE BRIDGE, he has fallen asleep despite his resolve, but not for long, never for long. The noise of his dreaming, as usual, awakens him, and as usual, he begins to tear at his clothes in an effort to expose his injuries. Soon he is naked, his trousers crumpled at his ankles, and he twists round and contorts, trying to explore with his hands the two wounds, one high in the middle of his back, the other along the back of his left thigh—each the bad work of shrapnel. He can achieve no position that allows him to see the wounds, though they recurrently burn like the heat of a hundred needles and sometimes soak his clothes with blood. If he could only see them, he might breathe easier, confirming by sight they’re not mortal. He draws back on his trousers and shirt but leaves off with any buttons or buckles, for his hands have started again to shake, violently, the most irksome of his strange physical alterations.
His hearing has returned almost fully, though the fierce ringing in his ears remains. A high-pitched sizzling whir, it revives in him a sickening regret and sometimes vibrates his skull. He has noticed a soreness at the crown of his head, and when he touches the spot, he feels what’s left there of a scab; he has no recollection of what caused this particular injury, but thankfully it appears to be healing.
When he is able to sleep, he most often has the old dream-come-true, which he first had about a week before the brigades began to cross the Rapidan: he’d startled awake in his tent one warm night near the end of April, crying out and rousing his bunkmate, Leggett, for in the dream his comrades had abandoned him on the battlefield. Now when the nightmare comes, it comes with the mechanics of memory, and he generally continues to doze till he is awakened by the popping dream-din of musketry, the gut-thunder of artillery, or, by far the worst, the grim fire-yelps of men dying. For a few seconds, the scent of gunpowder lingers in his nostrils, or the sweet coppery stench of charred flesh, and he begins again to tear at his clothes.
He rests in rocky soil beneath a bridge; this much he knows. The stone arch overhead spans a creek of about twenty paces in width. He doesn’t know the name of the creek. From the sunlight that slides through the pines on the opposite bank and agitates on the brown water, he judges the time of day to be around six in the evening. Regarding his whereabouts, he knows only that he is most likely somewhere between Culpeper and Washington City. In his bread bag are some leftover rations—two worm castles, some sugar and pickled cabbage, the stub of a candle, and a strip of dry lucifers; in his knapsack, the book sent to him by his sister, her letters, his Christian Commission Testament, and a varnished, inscribed base ball. He figures he has averaged eight to ten miles a day, slipping footsore along streams, crouching through woods and fields, venturing onto roads only after dark. Though he has done no wrong, he must play the fugitive; though he himself was the one deserted, he is certain to be taken for a deserter and has no paper to prove otherwise. Even if he were to try joining another regiment, he might be arrested, perhaps quickly tried and executed. He has heard that the streets of Washington teem with soldiers of every stripe and condition, and he thinks that there he might escape scrutiny while he arranges, somehow, a return to Brooklyn.
His bunkmate, Truman Leggett—a garrulous and morbid man of thirty who possessed the minimum number of teeth necessary to pass the army’s physical examination—was keen on telling terrible stories. Around a campfire, Leggett would recount how he’d once come to the rescue of a neighbor woman whose house cat had crawled into a wall and given birth to kittens. The mother cat had abandoned the kittens, which cried at all hours of the night. Leggett took down some molding boards to gain access to the litter, and when he reached into an unseen cranny of the wall to remove the kittens, what he withdrew was a wretched furry thing with five heads, twelve legs, and a single tail, five kittens fused by nature into one grotesque beast. “Like something out of a Greek myth,” said Leggett, wide-eyed in the firelight. “Had to put the poor thing out of its misery.” Then he reported in careful detail his slaying of the kittens, his crushing one head at a time with a mallet. Another of his favorites was an account of a deserter’s execution, which he’d witnessed in a different regiment earlier in the war. This tale he could draw out at great length, and Hayes observed that Leggett generally added an item or two with each retelling. The deserter, brought to the place of his death in an open wagon, followed behind another cart that bore his coffin. The troops, assembled to witness the execution, watched in silence as the gloomy cortege passed—musicians and clergymen, as well as the twelve soldiers who composed the firing party. Whatever shape the man’s desertion had taken—an unchecked impulse to go home, Leggett said—he was clearly sorry for it and begged the forgiveness of the troops and Almighty God. The captain covered the man’s eyes with a handkerchief, and the firing party took its position six paces away. The deserter, suddenly too weak to stand, sat down on the coffin. The order was given to fire. “They shot him clear to pieces,” said Leggett. “He perched for a spell without moving there on the edge of the box, then he quaked a little and slid to the ground.” Unfortunately, the poor fellow was still alive, and reserves had to be summoned to finish the job. Afterward, the troops were required to file by the bloody corpse and take a good long look. Leggett supplied a vivid description of the man’s several wounds, with special attention given the shots that penetrated his face and brain.
Now as the sun sets behind the trees, and the woods and the water grow slowly darker, Hayes recalls Leggett’s explaining how the firing party’s arms were prepared—one of them contained a blank cartridge, so that afterward no s
oldier could say without a doubt that he had fired the shot that killed the man. And he recalls Leggett saying of the deserter, “I never in my lifetime saw a man more forlorn.”
He resolves to sleep a bit more and then use the darkness for making tracks. He takes a few bites of hardtack from his haversack and a swig from his canteen. Like his less material but boundless remorse—and like the sure belief that everywhere and always he is being watched—hunger has become a constant companion. It is a modest hollow spasm in his stomach, never sated, only soothed, and he has learned not to mind it, this signal that not all his organs have failed. As he closes his eyes, he hears a faint boom and roll of artillery, a sound he has heard off and on throughout his flight, but now, as each time before, he’s unable to determine whether this deep rumble occurs in the real distant fields and woods of Virginia or only inside his head.
Forlorn is the word that ushers him back to sleep. This time he does not dream of his comrades deserting him in the Wilderness but of his sister, who stands turned away from him as he fastens the covered button on her lace collar; he can barely hear the whisper of her breathing, barely smell the minty scent of her hair. When he awakens next, someone has built a fire near his feet. He is drenched with sweat, and as he pulls on the sleeve of his shirt to wipe his face, no less a figure than Brigadier General J. H. Hobart Ward, commander of Hayes’s brigade, limps heavily into the orange glow, red-eyed and stinking of bourbon. He nods sadly and looks down at Hayes with compassion. “Was it the tree limbs, son?” he asks, stroking his droopy mustache. “Is that what did you in?” Hayes is as moved by the general’s wordplay as by his show of empathy, but before he can reply, he awakens again—this time truly—into absolute silence and bathed in the light of a clear half-moon. He raises himself up and watches for a moment the creek, sable and gleaming now, coursing eerily by without so much as a tinkle. Stars nestle cold and sharp in the black boughs overhead. In the woods at his back, crickets chirp, and there is the odd anonymous click of movement among last years’ fallen leaves and twigs. He quickly shifts a few feet to one side, into the dark shadow cast by the bridge, for the feeling that he is stalked, observed by unseen eyes, sends a chill up his spine. He thinks how he would welcome the once-vexing clamor of a city now, the clanging of horsecars, the blasts of ferry whistles. Soon a rustling in the woods, small but menacing, seems to be edging toward him, and he draws his only weapon, a bowie knife that belonged to Billy Swift, the Bachelors’ half-pint second baseman. He swivels on his haunches and waits, ready to face the bloodsucker that means to collect thirty dollars for collaring a deserter.
Nostalgia Page 1
