Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  He can no longer deny a certain truth: that though his wounds still pain him from time to time, and though he still walks with a slight limp, he wears no bandages. He has watched the lovely Anne dressing Jeffers’s wounds, front and back, but neither she, nor anyone else, has touched Hayes in this way. The only injuries assessed by any doctor are the pale bruises on his right arm, which were diagnosed as the effect of concentrated use of a musket, and the scab at the crown of his head, judged to be the vestige of his having been struck there with a blunt weapon, and further judged to be healing well. The ward surgeon has expressed a concern about Hayes’s failure to eat adequately, but that is all. Somewhere near his feet lies a crumpled leaf of paper with the word deadbeat (malingerer) written on it. If his wounds are imaginary, then what of the pain? What of the bleeding? Imaginary too? And if everything’s only a product of his mind, then perhaps he is a deserter. Perhaps he’ll be court-martialed, right here in the hospital’s administration building, taken out and stood against the wall of the guardhouse, executed. (One of the guns will be armed with a blank cartridge, so that no member of the firing party can say for sure that he was the one who killed Hayes.) Across the way, visitors to Washington City will watch the spectacle from the windows of the Smithsonian Castle. Mothers will cover the eyes of their children. Afterward, the entire population of the hospital will file by Hayes’s body, heaped on the ground in the mud.

  Beneath the pillow, he slowly relaxes his hands, letting in the hospital sounds gradually, and the drumming of rain and human voices bring him back to bed 33. He is not a deserter. He was himself deserted. There was an officer on a horse, a sergeant. With a rough jerk of the reins, the sergeant pulled the horse’s head around in an abrupt turn. He spoke the words Leave him and Take his weapon.

  What Hayes must do is find a way home, though he cannot think how he will purchase any car tickets without any money. Still, he understands that the first step to finding his way back to Brooklyn is finding a way out of the hospital. And before he can do that, he must find some clothes to wear.

  Mrs. Duffy has stopped singing.

  The man in bed 31 has stopped yelping.

  Jeffers says, “Put me out to sea, that’s what. God’s sky and the sea air.”

  Hayes is thinking, “My dearest Joan” might just as well be Casper’s sister as his sweetheart, when someone moves the pillow from his face.

  It is Walt, leaning over him, frowning. “Are you all right, my boy?”

  “That greenhorn captain came by to torment him,” says Casper.

  “What greenhorn captain?” says Walt, turning toward Casper. He places his hat on the table between the beds, where he also leans his cane and a soaked umbrella. Hayes notices a sprig of what looks like spearmint stuck in the buttonhole of the man’s lapel.

  “The blowhard,” says Casper. “Somebody’s favorite nephew.”

  “Don’t believe I know him,” says Walt and sits on the edge of Hayes’s bed.

  He takes a handkerchief from his jacket and begins to wipe his own cheeks and beard. “It’s downright biblical outdoors,” he says. “I’ve just navigated both a flood and an immense drove of cattle. A thousand of them, herded down the street by the most masculine drivers imaginable, whistling and singing. I might’ve been trampled to death … or drowned … or both. I hope you can see how much you boys mean to me.”

  He puts away the handkerchief and lifts his bag from the floor. “I’ve a few important errands,” he says. “Three or four letters to write, et cetera, et cetera, a jar of pickles to deliver to an Irish lad named Paddy Sullivan. And then I’ll be back.”

  “Pickles?” says Casper. “You never brought me any pickles.”

  “I don’t recall your ever requesting any,” says Walt, briefly rummaging inside the bag and then pulling the strap over his head. He turns to go but seizes on the wadded paper at Hayes’s feet. “What’s this?” he asks Casper, lifting it from the bed.

  Casper shrugs one shoulder, the one with the intact arm. “The bugger made him write something,” he says. “Guiding his hand, like, and then crumpled it up and tossed it there.”

  Walt opens the page and reads what’s on it. He looks for a moment at Hayes, then folds the paper and puts it into the pocket of his coat.

  “What’s it say?” asks Casper.

  “It says that a man’s rank doesn’t always correspond with his judgment or decency,” answers Walt. He moves away, coughing as he goes.

  He returns in the next moment. “What does he look like?” he asks Casper.

  “Like the school-yard bully, all done up in army duds,” says Casper. “Commander of the guard.”

  These last words, the captain’s position, Casper has spoken in a grand exaggerated tone.

  “Oh, him,” says Walt, “oh, yes, he’s to be avoided at all costs … impudent, insolent …”

  He pauses for an additional moment, head bowed, apparently thinking, and then moves away.

  A WHILE LATER, Walt stops at Hayes’s bed, where he drops a bundle of clothes, tied up with string. “I thought it time you had something to wear,” he says. “I did the best I could, but I don’t promise a proper fit. There’s very little left to choose from, you know.”

  He laughs—apparently at a stunned expression on Hayes’s face—and then leaves again, mumbling something to himself about being off to the ice room and the water jar. As he goes, Hayes glimpses a surprisingly quick shift in the gray-haired man’s mood, as if his cheeriness is worked up for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers, and in repose—or unwatched—he reverts to a comfortable sadness.

  Hayes takes the clothes and limps to the bath-room at one end of the pavilion, where he changes into a clean shirt and drawers, trousers, and socks. The trousers are a bit tight in the waist and long in the leg, so he leaves the top button undone and rolls the cuffs. On a wall of the bath-room hangs a mirror not much bigger than a base ball. He steps back from it a few feet and moves side to side, bending his knees and going on tiptoe, trying to gain from these several round puzzle pieces an idea of how he looks.

  When he returns to the bed, Anne waits for him with a basin, a sponge, and a block of soap. She pats the edge of the mattress.

  “Don’t you look lovely,” she says. “Now sit here and let me wash your face for you.”

  He sits where she has indicated and allows himself to be washed, though it is not entirely agreeable being touched, he notes, even by someone as pleasing as Anne; he must will himself to hold still, for part of him wants to flinch. The brown soap smells like tallow candles; Anne herself, like lavender water.

  Behind them, Jeffers cries out, “Abysmal!” and heaves a great sigh.

  “Dr. Dinkle says the poor man won’t last the night,” whispers Anne, close to Hayes’s ear. “Shot straight through the lungs. In the front and out the back. I feel so sorry for him I don’t know what to do.”

  She tilts Hayes’s head forward so she can wash the nape of his neck. When next he looks up, he sees Walt again, standing on the other side of Casper’s bed and holding two drinking glasses filled with a red liquid. “Here,” he says, “I’ve brought you ice water with cherry syrup. I imagined you might think it too hot today for tea.”

  As he moves around toward Hayes, he feigns a puzzled look. “And who is this handsome fellow?” he asks Anne. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  He passes the glass into Hayes’s hands.

  “Oh, that’s good,” says Casper, between gulps.

  “This is our mysterious Mr. X,” says Anne. She wrings out the sponge in the basin and takes a small white towel from the pocket of her apron. As she dries Hayes’s brow, she says, “He’s just about my favorite patient—no wormy wounds to dress, no medicine to persuade down his throat. And he gives me no back talk.”

  Walt sits on Casper’s bed, looking at Hayes. He says to Anne, “You remind me of the young woman who cooks my breakfast. Bighearted, but with a cool exacting edge. Likes everything just so. In quite a funk thi
s morning over my being five minutes late.”

  “Now, Walt,” says Anne. “Tell the truth. How late were we really?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says Walt. “Maybe fifteen minutes, twenty at the most.”

  “Right,” says Anne. “And how frequently are we fifteen or twenty minutes late?”

  “You see what I mean,” says Walt, softly, to Hayes. Then, to Anne, “If punctuality’s not my strong suit, I’m sure I make up for it with other qualities. I’ve always been quite charming, for example, to the young lady’s milk cow, Chloe.”

  “Chloe!” cries Anne, laughing. “That’s my sister’s name!”

  “Your sister doesn’t live in a pen just behind a small brick house near the Capitol, does she?” says Walt, and Anne laughs again and slaps him over the head with her towel.

  At that moment Matron appears.

  Walt lowers his face into his hands, whispering into his fingers, “Oh, dear.”

  “Miss Reynolds,” says Matron. “Are you on your break? You look to me as though you’re on your break.”

  “No, ma’am,” says Anne, folding the towel and returning it to her apron. “I’ve just been bathing—”

  “But this young man is perfectly capable of bathing himself,” says Matron. “Do I need to remind you that we’ve never been so stretched as we are now?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I think you must share with me your secret,” Matron says. “Somehow, with so many suffering and dying all around me, I’ve not managed to find the time for socializing.”

  “No, ma’am,” Anne repeats.

  “And Miss Reynolds,” says Matron, “what may I ask is the color of that dress you’re wearing?”

  Anne looks down at her dress. “It’s lilac, ma’am,” she answers.

  “Lilac,” says Matron. “Well, lilac may suit your altogether regrettable youthfulness, Miss Reynolds, but I don’t see how you can think it a fitting shade for a military hospital. Please go and change at once.”

  “But, Matron, the ward surgeons have expressed a particular interest in—”

  “Please, do not talk to me about surgeons,” says Matron quickly. “What do surgeons know? That will be all. Go and change.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Anne.

  “And while you’re at it, please tidy up your hair,” Matron adds and then sails away, quaking as if carried by a breeze.

  Hayes expects sniggering to follow her departure, but instead there’s only silence, and then Anne lifts the basin from the bed.

  Walt says, “Can you leave that?”

  Anne looks at him, but he gives her nothing in the way of an explanation. After a moment, she says, “Okay … yes, I can leave it.”

  “And the towel, too?”

  She replaces the basin, takes the towel from her apron, and lays it, still folded, alongside.

  “Thank you, my dear girl,” says Walt, solemnly.

  After she has gone, Hayes notices that Casper, who has finished his drink, silently winces in pain as he leans over to place the glass on the table. Hayes, who has drunk less than half of his, passes it to Casper, whose face lights up. “Thanks,” he says. “Good and strong, just how I like it.”

  “Now, Mr. X,” says Walt, to Hayes. “There’s something we must discuss. I’m reluctant to give advice regarding a man’s personal appearance, though I do consider myself capable in some respects. With the considerable gifts God has given you, you can hardly go wrong, but … how can I put it? The whiskers, my boy. They’re … inconclusive.”

  This remark causes Casper to laugh, though not, Hayes observes, unkindly.

  Walt admonishes Casper with a shake of the head, then says to Hayes, “They suggest—in my opinion, awkwardly—a future you don’t quite yet possess.”

  He pauses for a moment and looks penetratingly into Hayes’s eyes. “What I mean to do,” he says, “is offer you a shave.”

  Hayes is gazing directly into the man’s abundant and scraggly beard. Not a lot of practice with the razor, he imagines.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” says Walt. “You’re thinking I lack the necessary experience.”

  This, too, causes Casper to laugh, and Walt gives him the same quick head-shaking as before.

  “And who can blame you?” continues Walt, to Hayes. “But let me assure you, you won’t be the first soldier I’ve shaved. I appear to have a natural ability, and it gives me a good deal of pleasure besides. You wouldn’t deny me, would you, when a little passivity’s all that’s asked for?”

  IF MATRON and the angry captain have been foils, meant to endear Hayes to the patronizing Anne, the affable Casper, and the kindly Walt—the drama of the ward a carefully contrived set piece, culminating in a razor—to Hayes, it has been persuasive. His willingness to play his appointed role feels to him like a sort of surrender, and if the gray-haired man slits his throat, at least there will be a quick end to the ongoing carnival of questions inside his head. He won’t find his way back home, but perhaps he’ll find peace. As he takes his seat in the oak chair at the end of the bed, he wonders: If he bleeds to death on the pavilion floor, will he truly have died? Or will the web-work of mosquito curtains draw up into the heavens, amid thunderous applause, and his comrades lift him by the arms? Will the sick, lame, and the dying walk again, missing limbs restored? Will the dead enter from the wings to take a bow?

  Walt rolls Hayes’s shirt collar away from his neck and, in that uncanny way he has of divining at least the flavor of Hayes’s thoughts, puts on a British accent and whispers what are surely lines from a Shakespeare play: “ ‘I must to the barber’s, monsieur; for methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face.’ ”

  The storms and the heat have cast a kind of numbing pall over the ward. Visitors have thinned out—even the relentless clergymen have withdrawn with their armloads of tracts—and the dominant sound is a low murmur made of subdued voices and rain on the roof. Before Walt begins, he puffs and coughs and then removes his own jacket and tie and lays them on Hayes’s bed; he opens the collar of his shirt, revealing more than Hayes wants of the sweat-glistened mat of gray hair on his broad chest. Hayes dreads his touching him, the hot weight of his thick fingertips. He turns and faces forward as two women carrying teapots pass in front of him; they each look down, unsmiling, and appear to take in the scene, one of them with a particularly knowing glint in the eye. As they go, one whispers something to the other, and they both laugh.

  Behind him, Hayes hears Jeffers’s snoring, which sounds like the rasp of a surgeon’s saw (the sound of Hayes’s own brain). Walt is saying something to Casper, and though Hayes cannot make out any words other than he and he and he, he thinks the tone distinctly conspiratorial.

  In the bed across the aisle, a boy not more than fifteen or sixteen, pretty enough to be a girl, sits propped up by pillows, with his eyes closed; he has no visible injuries, but his pallor’s like ash. A woman, undoubtedly the boy’s mother, sits in a chair by the bed, holding his hand. Hayes cannot see anything of her face. She has removed her bonnet, which hangs from one of the chair’s finials. Something about the back of the woman’s head and the angle of the bonnet (strings dangling) fills Hayes with sorrow and a kind of vague self-reproach. Now the boy in the bed suddenly opens his eyes and looks directly at Hayes, unblinking, a face so utterly blank it’s frightening. The woman then turns in her chair, somehow knocking the bonnet to the floor: it is Hayes’s own mother, smiling sadly at him from across the wide aisle. Hayes stiffens; a chill spreads through his limbs, even into the soles of his feet. The woman quickly puts her back to him, and then Walt is there, saying, “What is it, my boy? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He takes one of Hayes’s hands in his own and pats it repeatedly, as if to draw blood into it. “There now,” he says. “You’re not going to be like the sheep who keels over at being shorn, are you?”

  In the next moment, he’s brushing soap—slimy from having sat in the basin—over Hayes’s cheeks and neck and chin.
“We’ve no shortage of ghosts around here,” he says. “Sometimes it seems that’s mainly what we’re about, ghost-making. Sometimes I think we’ve abandoned all other industries. Lately I’ve looked at my own face in a mirror—a certain time of night, at the end of a certain kind of day—and thought it was a ghost I saw. I’m surely not the man I was before. Which, in my case, is a good thing. I’m better now, if a bit shopworn.”

  He moves directly in front of Hayes and applies the brush to his mustache, then with his bare finger carefully wipes soap away from Hayes’s lips. Somehow, the ease with which he does it renders it less objectionable than Hayes would have thought. “You see,” he says, “just like ghosts, we’re all, every one of us, in a state of suspension, aren’t we? Especially the soldiers in the hospitals, of course. But you could say the same of the nation, couldn’t you? Are we to live, or are we to die?”

  He puts down the brush, and then Hayes feels the man’s fingers rooting through his hair, exploring his scalp. “If only I had the skill to read your bumps!” says Walt. “I might at least know you in that fanciful way.”

  The woman across the aisle, the boy’s mother, has discovered her fallen bonnet. When she bends to retrieve it, Hayes sees her face, the face of a total stranger.

  Walt lays the small towel over Hayes’s right shoulder. “What we want to do is get you out of here as soon as we can,” he says, flashing a razor with a bone handle. “We don’t want you turning into a ghost.”

  A soldier with an arm in a sling stops in the aisle and grins at Walt. “Where’d you get that fine-looking razor, Walt?” says the soldier.

  “From Mr. Allen’s in Pennsylvania Avenue,” Walt answers. “He’s a good friend of mine and gives me a special rate.”

  The soldier tugs gently on Walt’s beard and says, “I didn’t reckon you brought it from home.”

  Walt smacks the soldier’s hand away from his beard, playfully, and the soldier moves on laughing. Now Walt’s face grows serious; with his fingers against Hayes’s temple, he pushes his head to one side, and soon Hayes feels and hears the scratch of the razor. He progresses slowly down the side of Hayes’s cheek, but the short strokes of the razor are rapid. Regularly, he wipes the razor on the towel, which Hayes feels but cannot see. Hayes doesn’t believe that Walt means to murder him, for he doesn’t believe a quick end will be his fate. Long ago, he dreamed that his comrades would abandon him in the battlefield, and they did. But in the dream, he survived. In his heart of hearts, he believes his fortune’s the tortuous test of survival.