Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  He trudges ahead, a dutiful creature, putting one foot in front of the other, though a dull ache pervades his body, starting and renewing with each step in the soles of his feet, rising through his legs and into his spine. Soon the ache changes to numbness, though he can still feel his heart inside his chest as he goes. The wet clothes cling to his skin disagreeably, and worse, he recalls Leggett’s warning about wet socks causing blisters. Now and again, he believes he hears the gait of another traveler, taking a path parallel to his, but this no longer concerns him. He can no longer feel the concern. Dimly, in his mind’s eye, he sees himself somewhere in the past, before he entered the dream of the forest, naked on the ground, trying to inspect his wounds. I said leave him, says a voice within the whirring inside his ears. And Take his weapon.

  SARAH CAME INTO the library in a kind of flurry, with Mrs. Bannister trailing close behind. Summerfield—lounging in the window seat with its many pillows and its view, through a film of lace, of Hicks Street—had been reading; but now, at dusk, his book lay in the slope of his lap, closed, though his index finger still held the page. His primary experience of the women’s arrival in the room was auditory, the noise of the door, a rustling of skirts. It did not strike him as significant enough an event to pull him from his rapt observation, through the curtains, of a small pink pig rooting about the iron railings of the opposite dooryard.

  “Sarah, please,” he heard Mrs. Bannister cry, with even more than her usual amount of exasperation, exasperation being Mrs. Bannister’s primary response to life and the world.

  “Summerfield,” said Sarah, sternly. “Mrs. B and I want a word with you.”

  His head rested against the wall at his back, and now he allowed it to drop at an angle in the general direction of her voice, a languid gesture that apparently gave her pause. Her dress was brown, he noted, like the woodwork in the room, and she clutched a white cloth of some kind at her waist, as if she’d come into the library prepared to wipe up a mess. Her hair was pulled into one of the beaded nets she was fond of sewing, and in the library’s twilight, he thought she might have emerged from an old painting. She attempted a smile but could not quite bring it off. “I can see that you’re feeling dreamy,” she said to him at last, “but I need you to give me your real attention.”

  He widened his eyes to indicate compliance.

  “I cannot imagine what you’ve said to Mrs. B,” she continued, “but whatever it was, she has misconstrued it to mean that after Christmas you plan to join the army.”

  “He only told me he was thinking of it,” piped in Mrs. Bannister. “And he told me in confidence … a thing I doubt I’ll ever have again after this.”

  “Well?” said Sarah.

  Now he sat up straight and dropped his feet to the floor. He moved to the hearth, where he found the poker and stirred the fire. With his back to the room, he said, “It’s time we should light the lamps, don’t you think?”

  “I can see perfectly well, Summerfield,” said Sarah. “And there’s nothing wrong with my hearing either.”

  In the window seat, Summerfield’s thinking had gone something like this: he’d reviewed the faces of some of the members of the Eckford Club, particularly the style of whiskers each wore (those who wore whiskers); he’d batted around some of the more curious combinations of their names, Beach and Reach, Wood and Mills; he’d reflected that since he would soon be leaving Brooklyn, it would not be necessary this December to purchase a subscription for the skating pond, though rumor had it that the skating pond, under new management, was much improved, and Sarah would probably not wish to skate without him, but it would be easy enough for her to accompany any number of friends as their guest; he’d spied the pig across the way and imagined it first in short pants and a vest, sliding around the icy oval of the Dime Pond, then stripped of its hide, blood red and hanging from its back legs in the window of the butcher shop on State Street. As soon as Sarah declared that she and Mrs. Bannister wanted a word with him, he was sure of her subject. Two days earlier, when he’d mentioned his intentions to Mrs. B, he figured she wouldn’t be able to keep to herself what he’d said. He had used her for precisely this purpose, for the contrivance felt more palatable than his having to approach Sarah directly. When he’d envisioned himself going to her straight, he couldn’t find the right opening words and dreaded her reaction. She would be hurt and frightened. While the strategy of using Mrs. B would provoke a confrontation by Sarah, unpleasant enough, it relieved him of the burden of initiating the subject. He knew it was a coward’s way, but the idea, once it occurred to him, gained ground and refused to retreat. The irony of the situation didn’t escape him—he saw himself adequately brave to go to war but shrank from disappointing his sister.

  Now he put down the poker, turned to face her, and found her standing unnecessarily erect, a few feet away. She did not blink.

  “I see,” she said after a moment. “Then it’s true.”

  “Sarah,” said Mrs. Bannister, from behind. “Why don’t I bring you up your knitting? Summerfield, go on and light the lamps, dear. Sit here, the two of you, by the fire. I’ll tell Jane to serve coffee in here.”

  “Believe it or not, Mrs. B,” said Sarah, not taking her eyes off Summerfield, “there are some things that cannot be fixed by coffee and knitting.” Then, to him: “We had a plan. You would stay out of school awhile longer, continue clerking for the shipwrights, play with the club. Then on to college.”

  He shrugged, but felt shabby for it. “Sarah,” he said, “sometimes plans change. There’s a war.”

  “Oh, war,” she said. “What we have, as you well know, Summerfield, is an ocean of blood … already a full ocean of it. Do you really think it indispensable that you add your own little drop?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Because, Summerfield,” she added, undeterred, “your own little drop will make very little difference to the ocean. I beg you to think what a difference it will make to us … to me.”

  “I have, Sarah.”

  “You have what?”

  “I have considered.”

  She turned away and moved to the window, putting her back to him. “I was prepared to be hurt by your not considering me,” she said, softly. “Now I see how it feels to have been considered and set aside.”

  “Sarah—”

  She turned again, struck, apparently, by a new idea. “Are the admission sums from the Union Grounds not given to the Sanitary Commission?” she asked. “Is that not a sufficient contribution?”

  “No, Sarah,” he answered. “It’s not enough. I need to do this.”

  “But why do you need to do it?”

  “Because I just do.”

  Her eyes lingered on him another moment, blankly, and then she gave him a look he would not easily shake: she tilted her head ever so slightly and seemed to say, Who are you?

  Since it was a question for which he had no ready answer, she dropped her shoulders and then sailed past Mrs. Bannister and out of the room.

  He found himself biting his lower lip, recalling the demoralization at the end of a lost match—there was the awful finality of it, the impossibility of its reversal, but also the palliative of there being another match soon.

  “Give her some time,” said Mrs. Bannister. “She’ll need a good deal of time, I suspect. Go on and light the lamps, Summerfield. I’ll tell Jane to bring up some coffee for you.”

  He thanked her, and she left the room, closing the door behind her.

  He passed the evening alone. The lamplighter came by and lit the lamps in Hicks Street. Soon a gentle snow began to fall outside, the first of the season. When he stepped to the window to look for the young pig he’d seen before, there was no sign of it. He kept up the fire himself, drank coffee, and read the newspaper, which included an amusing story about Ben Franklin and a prank he once played on his mother to test her “instinct of natural affection.” (After an absence of many years, Franklin had traveled to her house in Boston, to see, though
he was much changed, if she would recognize him; not only did she not recognize him, she didn’t much care for him and tried, over the course of the evening he spent among her boarders, to turn him out into the street—during a snowstorm.) The newspaper also contained a notice from the Kings County Board of Supervisors, who were now prepared to pay an additional three hundred dollars bounty to volunteer recruits, over and above that offered by the United States and the state of New York.

  Later on, Mrs. Bannister returned to the library and told Summerfield that Sarah wouldn’t be coming down for supper; she reiterated her earlier conclusions about the need for time and asked his forgiveness for being such an old blatherskite. He told her, truthfully, there was nothing to forgive.

  He had his supper in the library, on a tray. He lit his father’s pipe but smoked only a fraction of a bowl, for honestly he didn’t like it. The snowfall continued as it had begun, never growing any heavier, and it melted rather than collected in the street. At last he decided to extinguish the lights and retire.

  Just as he was about to draw the drapes over the lace curtains and put the room in darkness, the library door opened slowly, and in crept his sister, dressed in a nightgown and bonnet and wearing a capelike sweater. A fair amount of light came through the window from the nearby streetlamp, and they stood for a few seconds looking at each other. The golden lamplight, filtered through the lace curtains, fell in cobwebby patterns across her face. She smiled, but sadly, and though he remained still, inwardly he experienced the kind of shakiness that used to attend helping a girl into a carriage and not knowing exactly where to put his hands. Sarah glanced toward the windows and said, “It’s snowing.”

  Before the hearth were two wing chairs, once occupied for long hours by their mother and father on winter evenings. The chairs were covered in leather the yellowish-brown color of the butterscotch candy their mother had loved. With his open hand, Summerfield now indicated the one on the left, customarily taken by their mother, and Sarah sat down, drew her legs up under her, and wrapped the sweater tighter around her shoulders.

  Summerfield found a woolen blanket in the window seat, which he brought to her, and she thanked him for it. He took the other chair, and they each stared into the embers of the fire, silent for a good long while.

  At last she said, “You’ve been smoking Papa’s pipe again.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I know.”

  A little later, he said, “How did you know you would find me still here?”

  “I suspected as much,” she said. “The lights in my room brightened.”

  Some time ago, the house had been piped for gas, but not properly, and when one dimmed the lamps in the library or the parlor, those in the bedrooms upstairs grew brighter.

  “Ah,” said Summerfield, “of course.”

  Another long silence ensued, after which she said, “You knew Mrs. B would tell me.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It was your way of letting me know without telling me yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Summerfield,” she said, “don’t think I’ve accepted it. I haven’t. I’m only no longer reeling.”

  “Right,” he said.

  After another long moment, she sighed deeply and said, “Oh, how I do miss Mommy.”

  “I know,” he said. “So do I.”

  “Yes, but not quite as I do,” she said. “Not quite as I do.”

  “YOU COULD BE home looking after your sister and playing base ball,” said Speck, the surgeon. “I can’t figure why you would risk everything out here in this godforsaken place.”

  As Hayes went about his own suddenly urgent chores, making ready at last to move out, the surgeon sat on the folding stool he’d brought along with him, his gaze oscillating between Hayes’s small industry and the great commotion down the hillside as far as the eye could see. It was half past five o’clock in the afternoon. The previous night, a storm of rain and wind had swept over the camp, leaving everything with a fresh-washed look. This was followed by a day of bright sunshine, and now the blue light overhead had begun changing to lavender; a ladder of flat gray clouds, above the scalloped line of the treetops, climbed the southwestern sky. Mule wagons from Brandy Station were still being unloaded and reloaded at this late hour, and the myriad of campfires, very like stars, blinked over the countryside as horses and soldiers milled and hustled among them. The smoke from Speck’s cigar lingered around his own head and occasionally he fanned it away, not deliberately, but by the gesticulations of his hands. A handsome man of about forty, with kindly gray eyes and light brown wavy hair, he wore side-whiskers and a mustache of darkest brown. He’d just returned from his second visit to the sinks in only half an hour, bitterly complaining of a case of the flux. Hayes, kneeling on the ground nearby, was busy rolling his own half of a tent, and Leggett’s half, into two separate woolen blankets. A few yards away at the fire and chatting with Billy Swift (who’d brought some tobacco to trade for coffee), Leggett was cooking the several days’ rations they’d been told to prepare for the imminent march. Actual orders remained altogether hazier than the many more specific rumors that swarmed about, but at least one thing was clear—they would not be sleeping that night on Cole’s Hill.

  His eyes fixed on his work, and entirely abstracted, Hayes said, “What about the evils of slavery? The preservation of the Union?”

  Because Speck stayed silent, Hayes did eventually look up at the surgeon and found the man looking back at him skeptically. Hayes supposed his lukewarm remark didn’t merit a reply, but then the surgeon said, “It’s 1864, son. Those answers are spent by now and gasping for breath.” He drew on the cigar and expelled a plume of smoke upward. “You don’t belong among these …,” he began, but checked himself. “What are you doing here, son?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

  Hayes went back to work. “Couldn’t you ask that question of any man, sir?” he said. “Including yourself?”

  “No,” said the surgeon. “Two minutes spent with most of them reveals their purpose clearly enough. Glory, spelled out in capital letters … esprit de corps, idleness, lack of imagination … various forms of enchantment … even bloodlust, I’m sorry to say. Or, as in my case, duty, tinged with a desire for personal advancement. But you, Hayes, you’re different. I can’t read you.”

  “Well,” said Hayes, after a moment, “perhaps I can’t read myself, Dr. Speck.”

  “Yes, that occurred to me,” he said. He looked away down the hillside again and took a long draw on the cigar. “I’ve seen you play ball,” he added, thoughtfully. “Both here and, once last summer, at the Union Grounds. There’s no ambiguity there, Hayes. You’re entirely at home. As self-possessed as a man twice your age. Tell me, how did you end up with that club of mechanics, anyway?”

  Hayes explained that he’d wanted to postpone college for a spell, he’d taken a clerking job at a shipwrights’, where he’d met a couple of the Eckford men (a chippy, a caulker), and one thing led to another.

  “And you’ve found they accept you as one of their own?” asked the surgeon.

  “Well, sir, I am one of their own,” said Hayes. “We’re a club.”

  “Yes, yes, but you know what I mean. Do you not find it difficult … the social navigation?”

  “What, because they come from Williamsburgh and Greenpoint and work at the docks?” said Hayes.

  “Yes,” said Speck. “Are you not something of a black sheep?”

  “I’ve come in for some teasing now and then,” said Hayes, “but it’s all in fun. We each put on the same ball suit before a match. And once the play begins, we’re boys again, with the cares and concerns of boys. What I find … people generally see you about as different as you see yourself.”

  Speck regarded him with a quizzical look for a moment, then smiled and said, “I’m sure you’re right, Hayes. I do hope you had the good sense to lay all this stuff out in the sun today, before you st
arted packing.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hayes. “Well, maybe not all, but most … the tents and the blankets at least.”

  Now Speck turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head. “Hayes,” he said, gravely. “Have you thought about what it will mean to point your weapon into the face of another man?”

  “Yes, sir, I have.”

  “And …?”

  “I hope my courage won’t fail me.”

  The surgeon nodded and returned his gaze down the hill toward Leggett and Billy Swift and the campfire. He clenched the cigar between his teeth and placed his hands on his knees. After a moment, he removed the cigar and called out to Leggett. “Soldier! You don’t need to use that damned frying pan for everything. Get yourself a good green stick and toast that, directly over the fire.”

  Both Leggett and Billy Swift stared at the surgeon for a moment, squinting, and then Leggett shrugged his shoulders and went about his business, unaltered. Billy Swift laughed, struck Leggett playfully upside the head, and then called out to the surgeon, “Frying’s the only cooking he knows how to do, Major! He’d fry up your molasses cookies if you let him!” Billy Swift—noting his failure to amuse the surgeon and construing it apparently as a signal to take his leave—said something brief and final to Leggett, then waved to Hayes and sauntered away down the hillside.

  “Why do they oppose all modification?” said Speck, softly, to Hayes.

  Hayes, still squatting, held one spare pair of socks to his nose, then another, to determine which was the less offensive. He hadn’t thought Speck sought a real answer to the question, so he was surprised when the surgeon said, “Well, Hayes, what do you think?”

  Hayes saw that the surgeon hadn’t diverted his gaze from Leggett’s fire. “With respect, sir,” he said, “I’d say most everybody here has already undergone a fair amount of modification.”

  Now Speck looked down at him, piercingly, and Hayes feared he’d spoken too frankly.