Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  A stirring in the dry leaves, then only silence.

  After a long while, he stretches out again on the dirt, knife in hand, and drifts yet again to sleep. When he opens his eyes, perhaps only a minute later, he thinks he must be dreaming, for staring back at him an arm’s length away, stands a red chicken. He tries to speak to it—his lips form the words Well, hello, cock-a-doodle-doo—but no actual sound emerges. Still, as if the chicken has heard, it blinks its yellow eyes in the moonlight, shudders, and walks right up to him, offering itself for his continued survival.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1861, little more than a week before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Hayes’s mother and father perished in an extraordinary accident far away from home, during a visit to Ireland. Some weeks earlier, they’d sailed on a steamer from New York to Queenstown and then trained up to Dublin to visit Mr. Hayes’s only living relation, his mother’s unmarried sister, Margaret. Two days before they were to leave Dublin and start their journey back to America, they were riding in an omnibus that stopped to discharge a passenger on a considerable incline, next to a bridge and alongside a canal. When the omnibus began to slide backward down the incline, the driver lost control of the horses, and in a matter of seconds the thing had crashed through a wooden railing and fallen, horses and all, into the lock chamber of the canal. All ten passengers, trapped inside the omnibus, drowned. The Hayeses had planned to be away no more than six weeks and meant to be back on Hicks Street in time for Summerfield’s sixteenth birthday in April. Because of the events at Fort Sumter, news of the tragic accident in Dublin arrived in Brooklyn amid what the local papers were calling “war excitement.”

  Now, near dawn, when Hayes’s wounds pain him most severely—always, mysteriously, the two of them in concert—his mother’s face rises up in his mind, flanked by her pale, white hands, pressed watery and wavering against the window of the omnibus. He imagines that as she clawed the glass her thoughts flew to him and Sarah. She’d not wished to leave home with war looming, but Mr. Hayes had prevailed, taking a view similar to some of the rebels themselves, that no war of any significance was on the horizon. He’d heard that the former senator from South Carolina had vowed in the rebel congress to drink all the blood that might result from secession. It was very like Mr. Hayes to be wrong and even to cite foolish supporters for his arguments. It was also like him to prevail upon Mrs. Hayes in any number of ways that went against her own wishes. It was not like him—in taking the view he did of the impending war—to be optimistic. Summerfield understood, even at his young age, that this departure in his father’s usual outlook was a convenience and born of a definite pessimism concerning things in Dublin: Mr. Hayes declared that if they did not make the journey, Aunt Maggie might die, and he would forever regret not having seen her. Aunt Maggie was not ill. She enjoyed a reputation for being strong as an ox. But of course it was inarguable that she might die, for anyone might. The real outcome of the journey, his own death along with that of the mother of his children, surpassed even Mr. Hayes’s gloomy expectations. Sarah, eighteen years old at the time, was devastated and blamed their father for the tragedy, then, and even to this day.

  “He forced Mommy to go,” she’d said to Summerfield one warm afternoon in May, in the parlor at Hicks Street. Summerfield had been out playing ball after his classes; a careless batsman, overly excited at hitting the ball, had flung the bat wildly and struck Summerfield just above the right eye, giving rise to an alarming purple knot. As Sarah went on bitterly about their father in the parlor, she dabbed a cold wet cloth gently over her brother’s forehead.

  With little conviction, Summerfield suggested that Mrs. Hayes might simply have refused to go.

  Sarah explained that their mother had been as clever as she was beautiful and that she usually managed to find paths to her own desires, circumventing their father’s requirements, often without his knowledge. But in this one thing, she’d found no path, and she’d paid for it with her life. “She gave him the illusion of always having his way,” said Sarah, “because she knew it brought him pleasure.”

  “But after all,” said Summerfield, with even less conviction than before, “he couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

  “Hold still,” said Sarah. “Of course he couldn’t know. But he would have his way no matter what.” She poured fresh water from a pitcher into the bowl on her mother’s nearby gaming table, wrung out the cloth, dipped it again into the water, folded it into a small square, and softly laid it over her brother’s brow. “It’s a pleasure of weak men, Summerfield,” she said, “always going around imposing their will on women.”

  “And I guess it must be a pleasure of strong women,” said Summerfield, “always going around imposing their will on men.”

  Sarah made no reply to this remark, but he thought he saw a smile cross her face, faintly, before she said, “There, at least I’ve got the dirt off it.” She made a few finishing dabs with the cloth and added, “I’ll say this for you, Summerfield Hayes—you certainly did inherit his black eyebrows. Very handsome, even with nasty lumps. You look as though you might be growing a horn. If that’s not gone down by this time tomorrow, I think we’d best send for Dr. Tilbrook.”

  He was glad to have these opinions of Sarah’s concerning their parents, for what she’d said deciphered for him a paradox: he’d always had a sense that while his mother deferred to his father in practically everything, there was something weak about him and strong about her. He’d thought this odd sense might be tied to finances—Mr. Hayes, a dance instructor at a nearby studio opposite the City Hall, had little money of his own, while Mrs. Hayes came from a good deal of wealth—but Sarah’s ideas were a better explanation. The notion of his mother contriving her own happiness surreptitiously, so as not to disquiet Mr. Hayes’s vanity, made Summerfield think of the biblical wisdom that it is more blessed to give than to receive. He supposed it would apply even when what one gave was the illusion of something.

  The knot caused by the blow to his head shrank in due course but never went away entirely. Though it was barely visible, he could feel the small lump with his fingers; he invariably recalled that afternoon in the parlor, and he believed that day was the start of a change in his connection to his sister. Throughout their growing up, her manner toward him had been typical of an older sister to a younger brother, what was often described as “maternal.” With the shocking loss of their parents, that manner might have hardened, yet Summerfield felt, that afternoon in the parlor, a move toward parity. In company, she was not an outspoken girl, and she would have been mortified to be overheard speaking so frankly about their dead father. If, in front of others, she spoke only lovingly and praising of Mr. Hayes, Summerfield did not consider her a hypocrite. He recognized that there were different versions of truth and that some versions would do only for the two of them, together, alone. As she began to make a habit of taking him into her confidence—which happened to coincide with the passing of his boyhood—his feelings for her naturally began to change, from the clear thing they had always been to something else, less clear and altogether unsettling.

  As he pauses at the edge of a pasture in the dim gray light before dawn, he touches his fingers to the spot above his right eye, which has the curious power to unite him to Hicks Street and Sarah. He has walked most of the night, on a road for a while, though the moonlight made him especially wary. Once, in the deadly quiet of the night, a single gunshot somewhere in the distance sent him scurrying into a ditch. For the last two or three hours he has again followed a stream, generally northeast, which has brought him at last to this open field. His heart pounds inside his chest, partly due to exertion, partly to his ongoing certainty of being tracked. As he waits here and gazes over the pasture, he knows that, at some gap behind, another waits, in the dark of the woods. His wounds burn and throb, and he believes they are again leaking blood. He longs to rest but knows he must cross the clearing before dawn. The half-moon, near the horizon, pours its pale milk ove
r the pasture at a sharp angle, and the occasional lone tree, despite the brightening sky, casts an unearthly long shadow over the ground. An abandoned breastwork cuts through one end of the pasture, resembling a piece of frayed rope laid down not far from the smooth ribbon of the stream. Around the periphery he sees the wrecked remains of wooden fences, the bulk of the rails stripped and used for an earlier encampment’s firewood. He adjusts the straps on his bread bag and his knapsack so that they put less pressure on the wound in his back, then sets out, thinking about his sister as he goes, recalling the afternoon in the parlor, wondering if his decision to enlist in the army mustn’t surely have reminded her of their father—a journey, a separation, insisted upon. If so, she did not give him any illusion of bowing to his will. She had opposed him unreservedly and was still aggrieved.

  Halfway across the clearing, he recalls the single letter from their parents, in their father’s hand, posted from Ireland shortly after their arrival there: their quarters on the steamer had been cramped but bearable; the ship was equipped with, of all things, a barber’s saloon.

  Once he gains the woods at the other side, he removes his gear and collapses to the ground, where he turns to face the field. He sees no one there, but he expects the stalker will wait until he himself sleeps, as he surely must, to take up the slack. He opens his knapsack and frees the chicken, which scrambles frantically away but in a crazy circle that carries it back very close to the spot where it was freed. From his bread bag, he takes a corner of hardtack and crumbles it into his palm; the chicken cautiously edges nearer and stands close to his outstretched hand; it gazes off in another direction entirely, and when, after a moment, it pecks a crumb from Hayes’s palm, it does so as an apparent whim. Soon, in like fashion, the chicken has eaten all the crumbs, and Hayes shoos it away. Again the bird bustles madly in a wide arc that returns it close to Hayes’s side, where it twitches its head one way and another and occasionally picks at something near its feet. Of course Hayes had thought to kill and eat the chicken, but he felt sick when he imagined slaughtering and preparing it. And besides, how could he possibly risk a fire and roasting meat, giving away his location by both sight and smell?

  He lies back on the ground, thinking perhaps he has a fever. He resolves not to cry out or even to moan, though the pain of his wounds threatens to take his breath away. After a few moments, he props himself onto his elbows and sees a figure coming toward him across the field—the silhouette of a man, arms lifted in the air in a gesture of surrender. Hayes finds the bowie knife and moves swiftly farther into the dark skirt of the woods, slipping behind the trunk of a pine and pressing his cheek against its craggy bark. His mother’s face rises up in his mind—oddly, his dread and physical agony mix to make a feeling very much like longing—and he hears the screak of her fingernails on the glass of the omnibus window.

  THE YOUNGSTERS IN the drum corps never got enough sleep, required as they were to be on call at all hours, day and night. During the second half of the third inning—the teams tied at eleven runs apiece—the young drummer assigned by the colonel to keep Banjo away from the playing field nodded off. He leaned against a barrel, his mouth slightly ajar, and his cap had slid down covering most of his face. With one man out in the inning, a batter for the Twighoppers struck a ball straight into the ground a few paces from the home base, where it lay spinning in place, and before anyone in the field could reach it, Banjo bounded forward, gripped the ball in her maw, and sprinted into the outfield, where she commenced to run in great loops, chased by a gathering number of players and spectators. A merry chaos prevailed for two or three minutes till the foxhound lit out for the trees and disappeared into the piney forest with her prize.

  The captain of Hayes’s company dispatched a detail of six soldiers to track the dog and retrieve the ball, and meanwhile the batter for the Twighoppers was granted the first base and the match resumed. Soon a rumble of voices and laughter started up among the troops near the first base; like an ocean wave it spread along the margins of the field, growing louder as it went and wholly distracting the players. From his lolling chair, the colonel—who apparently had seen no reason why the reward of beer should be delayed until the conclusion of the match—cast a lost and dangerous-looking glare slowly round the lines, then stood at last, drew his pepperbox, and fired into the air. Having thus silenced the proceedings, he raised his voice to the general public and roared: “What the devil is so bloody funny?”

  After some seconds, a young private was pushed forward by his comrades into the open, where he stood startled to find himself so uncomfortably near the colonel. He straightened himself up and saluted, to which the colonel responded, “Well, Private, let’s have it!”

  “Well …, sir,” he said, haltingly, “it’s just that …” He raised one hand, pointed toward the woods, and said, “It’s just that somebody said that bitch, Banjo … somebody said the bitch’d absquatulated with one of the chaplain’s balls.”

  The colonel, pistol still in hand, studied the soldier for a moment, unblinking. “ ‘Absquatulated with one of the chaplain’s balls’?” he said impatiently.

  “Yes, sir,” said the private.

  The colonel’s grimace faded as he began to grasp the joke. Then at last he lowered his head and started to quake with silent laughter, prompting a renewed uproar from the troops.

  Once things had settled down and play resumed again, still with one out in the inning and the runner on the first base, the Bachelors’ second baseman, Billy Swift—aptly named; the kind of scrappy fielder who hurled himself at every ball that came near him—would astound the spectators. When Coulter, the Twighoppers’ brawny catcher, shot a rocket into the air between the first and second bases, Swift not only found the ball and brought it down on the fly—leaping nearly his own height off the field—but managed to tag the runner trying to advance, thus turning the Twighoppers out of the inning in abrupt and astonishing fashion.

  As the troops still cheered Swift’s antics, a half-dozen soldiers emerged from the pines in the distance, one of them waving the dog-stolen ball triumphantly over his head, and the troops’ ovation swelled. The foxhound trotted contrite behind the group of soldiers. At that same moment a cloud blotted out the sun. A strong wind swept across the whole place, bending the younger pines at the edge of the forest. Then the sun returned, blinding and hot.

  Camp near Brandy Station

  Saturday evening, April 30

  Dearest Sister,

  No official word has come down but I believe we are soon to move. These last few days our drills & target practice have increased three-fold & there is a universal stirring in the air. It has been nearly two weeks since all sutlers & citizens were ordered to vamoose & every day wagons of “inessential” goods & property are being sent back to Alexandria. Sometimes I imagine our low hill as seen from a bird in the sky & I think we resemble a busy colony of ants. Our river is all that separates us from General Lee’s army. They are dug in & unassailable on the other side, so we must trust our commanders to find a means of eluding them & coming at them another way. I write to you now for I am uncertain of when time & circumstances will allow another letter. I want to let you know that my long weeks of waiting to “see the elephant” are nearing an end. Though I anticipate future misery, I feel sure of my survival. Truman says “them’s the famous last words of a fresh fish” & well they might be, but if death comes for me down here in this wasted land they call Virginia, it will most definitely take me by surprise. I know what store you set by dreams, so I tell you that my dreams of battle are decidedly unhappy, but in them I am alive.

  The rumors you have heard in Brooklyn about our rations are unfounded. We have beef & pork, tea & coffee, bread & potatoes, sugar & molasses. I understand the food has not always been this ample or good, but now there is no cause for complaint. Please tell Mrs. B to set her mind at ease in this regard—she’ll be glad to hear we even have plenty of soap. We are having less rain & more sun & wildflowers have begun sprouti
ng everywhere. Less agreeable is the “weather” that looms over the men in the form of their contrary opinions about our officers. Every day brings a new argument with soldiers squaring off on one side or another of this or that colonel or general. They are like children fighting over the faults & merits of their family elders, a disposition that has redoubled as we draw closer to crossing the river. Likewise, from what I hear, our commanders often do not think much of one another, though Gen. Grant seems to enjoy the admiration of more than most. The last time he came over here from his hdqrs I was farther away from him than our house is from City Hall, but I could sure hear the bands playing across the way.

  Besides my usual duties, I have been busy with base ball & writing letters for my comrades. You would be astounded by how many of our boys can not read or write. Many did not advance beyond the fourth grade. What is most satisfying is how grateful they are for my services with the pen & it is surely little enough to give. Thank you for the book, dear Sarah. One of our surgeons happened by my tent of an afternoon when I was sitting on my rubber blanket reading. He commended me for studying what he took to be my Bible & when I showed him otherwise he declared himself, like you, a great fan of Dickens. His name is Speck, though he is quite a large man & entirely visible I assure you. Also like you, he does not much care for Hawthorne. He said of The Scarlet Letter that it is gloomy beyond toleration. Some of my mates tease me about being a bookworm & say they are confounded to find in me such a mix of base ball & books. They also say I will soon regret having a thing so heavy as an English novel to carry in my knapsack. These same ones then entreat me to read to them from it when we are idle. I am nearly finished with the first part & it is both a pleasure & a comfort.