Twelve years later, in the woods of Virginia, the memory of that afternoon in the library with his family—and the newspaper story of the frightened and fleeing boys—returned to him as he darted through the tangled brush, dodging flames and hiding behind tree trunks, eluding the enraged men who meant to kill him.
OUT ON THE PLANK ROAD, a steady stream of blue-clad troops headed back toward the intersection with the Brock Road, the position from which they’d launched their first attack more than twenty-four hours earlier. All the ground gained by the morning’s fierce fighting had been lost. They wove between wagons and ambulances and moved under the arcs of solid shot still being lobbed into the woods by Union artillery. Officers rode among the squads, exhorting them to turn, to rally, even striking the back of a soldier now and again with a sword—but the men were played-out. They’d not cast down their arms but still carried them on their shoulders. They were not in any state of panic but walked calmly. They stopped when ordered to by a mounted officer, but when he turned to admonish the next squad, they continued quietly on their way. They’d done all the fighting they meant to do, at least for now. Smoke billowed overhead, like low-lying clouds, lit silver here and there by the sun high in the sky. Meanwhile, the Confederate army, in good standing further to press their assault, mysteriously appeared to be stalling instead.
Hayes—winded but exhilarated by having escaped the band of rebels who’d chased him a mile through the forest—entered the flow. A man limping just in front of him fell; Hayes pulled him to the berm of the road and gave him a drink from his canteen. The man said, “Much obliged,” and then lay back onto the ground and closed his eyes. “I just want a little sleep,” he added softly.
“But you can’t sleep here,” said Hayes. “You’ll be trampled.”
The man rolled onto his side, drew his legs up to his belly, and folded his hands between his knees.
Hayes took the man’s weapon, fixed the bayonet, and drove it into the ground next to him. He removed the man’s forage cap and canteen and hung them on the stock as a signpost. When Hayes returned to the road, he fell in alongside an ambulance wagon, and after a moment or two he heard someone call, “Hayes, Hayes, it’s you!”
One of the men sitting inside the ambulance was Oscar Phipps; he’d turned and now gazed down at Hayes over the side of the wagon. “Hayes, it’s you!” he repeated.
“Mr. Phipps,” cried Hayes. “Are you all right?”
“It’s minor,” answered Phipps. “A shell in the woods. I took some shrapnel to the knee. But I outran that bunch of rebel skunks, I tell you. Imagine that, Hayes, at my age. Sorry to have dashed off like that, but my idea was to draw them away from you, you see. At least I succeeded in doing that, as your presence here surely proves.”
Phipps hung one arm over the side of the ambulance. “Take my hand, my boy,” he said, “take my hand.”
“Thank you, Mr. Phipps,” said Hayes, grasping the man’s hand.
Phipps smiled warmly and nodded. “If you don’t survive to toss another match at the Union Grounds,” he said, “it won’t be because of me.”
They moved along like that, hand in hand, for a good ways, and soon the same officers who’d commanded the men to rally were ordering them to the Brock Road, where they were already going anyway.
IN HIS LETTER to Sarah, Hayes had imagined the army (preparing to quit winter quarters) as viewed by a bird in the sky, and now, at the Brock Road, he again pictured it as a colony of ants—blue ants, and he wondered if such things actually existed in nature. He thought Leggett would be pleased that the breastworks, built and hastily abandoned the day before, would at last go into service, despite the ironic reason for it: demoralized and disarrayed, forced to retreat to where they’d started out, the Second Corps was in no condition to launch an assault, and so prepared to defend itself if assaulted.
Throughout the middle of the day, troops emerged from the woods and sought out their unit flags planted by color sergeants along the breastworks. Hundreds of stragglers, broken by the ferocity of the fighting, materialized from the rear. Officers moved up and down the road directing soldiers to their proper positions. The reorganized troops felled trees, clearing a swath out in front of the barricade, and stacked the timber against the works till it was as high as a man’s chest. They sharpened branches and fashioned abatis pointed at the enemy.
The battle smoke faded, and bright sunshine engulfed them. They were supplied with fresh ammunition. Rumors (General rumors, thought Hayes, for each concerned a commander) shuttled through the ranks—General Longstreet, like General Jackson at Chancellorsville, had been accidentally wounded by his own troops, which accounted for the Confederates’ stalling rather than pressing their advantage; the Union’s own General Wadsworth had been killed; the long-awaited General Burnside was at last “going in on the right,” whatever that meant; General Grant, unhappy with the corps’ defensive position, had ordered a new attack for six o’clock. Heavy artillery rolled into the road—Hayes counted twelve pieces at the intersection with the Plank Road, close to where the Mozarters were situated. The captain encouraged Hayes’s company (what of it had survived) to eat something, and to rest.
Hayes sat on a stump that was still sticky with sap and oiled his weapon. The cook, suitably named Fry, soon came along and offered him a piece of salt pork, which he declined, claiming, honestly, a lack of appetite.
“Grab a meal where you can,” admonished Fry, narrowing his eyes. “Eat for the future, son, eat for the future.”
The bright sun so bleached Fry’s face it nearly obliterated his features, an effect Hayes found unsettling. Though he knew it to be irrational, he felt that the man forced the salt pork on him and that, in any case, his diet was none of Fry’s business. His lack of hunger, should he have to explain it, was a small symptom of a larger wonder: unessential desires intermitted, he was stripped back to the bare imperatives of a warrior; his body, ruled by instinct, had sacrificed itself to the greater cause of killing; if breathing were not automatic, he wouldn’t expend the energy to will it. He closed his eyes and managed to say, softly, “No.”
Fry said, “Are you all right, Hayes?”
Now the man was probing him, to no useful end. Hayes wanted to say, Leave me alone, but instead he held his eyes shut and wished him away. He concentrated on the blood inside his own eyelids, a sunlit red-orange canvas on which he saw, in rapid succession, the red-liquid eruption from Leggett’s shredded mouth; the red hole opened in Flowers’s head by a ball above his eye; the flat belly of the red-haired boy, pierced by the blade of Hayes’s bayonet (sucking sound going in, sucking sound coming out); and the phantom red-faced old man in the stovepipe hat, feeding hardtack to a squirrel. He heard Oscar Phipps’s voice—If we’re not ourselves, then who are we?—and Hayes was taken with the observation that a separate part of his brain replied to these presumably unwanted memories with a remarkable and confident neutrality. The reply from that quarter, quite numb, was what he’d already said to the company cook: No.
His weapon rested crosswise in his lap. He allowed himself to soak in the warmth of the sun, most evident on the bridge of his nose and on top of his hands. The Virginian May felt like June or July in New York. He was fully resigned to present conditions—had altered himself and been altered accordingly—yet, for a moment, the sun (combined with the leafy aroma of the slashed undergrowth nearby) filled him with longing for the ball grounds and the brilliant exercise in which, for the duration of a match, all of life’s frustrating mysteries were suspended: men opposed each other in an ambience both predictable and accommodating to surprise; reached an outcome to which each, in his turn, had a say; and, at the end, triumphant or defeated, admired one another for the spirit of the play.
When Hayes opened his eyes, Fry had moved on.
He got himself up, gathered his gear, and moved forward to the front line, where he could see the continuing but dwindling trickle of blue-clad troops from the forest. There, among a regiment of m
en who called themselves Orange Blossoms, many of whom had curled up in the shade of the entrenchment wall and slept, Hayes placed himself near the brigade colors and waited and watched—waited and watched for what seemed hours. He examined the grimy faces of the soldiers as they stumbled and staggered and limped into the broad belt of the new clearing. Across the way, the sun dropped slowly closer to the treetops. Then, at last, Hayes saw Billy Swift emerge, alone, from the woods.
AFTER HAYES HAD LED Swift back to the regiment and got him a tin cup of hot coffee, the two found some shade and a patch of switchgrass and sat close to each other with their elbows on their knees. To Hayes, Swift looked as if he had aged a year or two—some light had gone from his eyes, which now appeared to remain only half open. An enormous black fly kept orbiting his head, buzzing now and again into his ears, and Swift swatted at it to no avail. When he complained, Hayes hushed him, carefully followed the fly for a moment, then reached out and grabbed it in midair, clenching it inside his fist. He squeezed it between his thumb and middle finger and dropped it into the grass.
Swift regarded him with awe, not smiling, as if Hayes was more curiosity than friend. “Where’d you learn to do that?” he said.
Hayes only shrugged, for it wasn’t something he’d learned to do, nor to his recollection had he ever done it before.
They fell silent for some time, and after Swift finished the coffee, he chose a long blade of grass and inserted it between his front teeth. The two lay back, with their heads almost touching, and gazed up at the wagon-wheel branches of the pine tree above them. Swift sighed and said, “There’s a cat up there in that tree.”
“No,” said Hayes. “Where?”
“Not a real cat,” said Swift, “but look there at that biggest limb on the right-hand side.”
Indeed, after a moment, Hayes discerned that bark and knotholes had conspired to etch the face of a cat on the underside of the branch, with needles for whiskers. “How about that?” he said, and Swift rolled onto his side and looked at him meaningfully.
“What?” said Hayes.
Swift pointed his thumb toward the woods at his back and said softly, “There’s a spring about a hundred yards straight through there. I found it yesterday but didn’t have time enough for more than a quick drink.”
“A spring?”
Swift put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Hayes, it’s a pool big enough for bathing. Wanna go absent without leave?”
SWIFT STOPPED SUDDENLY, turned, and put up his hand. When Hayes moved quietly to his side Swift whispered, “Looks like somebody else had the same idea.”
Through the thicket, about ten yards forward, Hayes saw the small round pool—a modest recess in the earth filled with green water, sunlit through an opening in the canopy, with a smooth gray boulder forming a low wall at one end; opposite, a sort of sloping bank, covered with dry leaves, upon which were spread (like the cutout garb of a paper doll) the hat, uniform, and regalia of a brigadier general.
“If I’m not wrong,” said Swift softly, “that’s our own commander.”
Hayes bent forward and rested his chin on Swift’s shoulder. Indeed, knee-deep in the water and unadorned by anything other than a silver flask in one hand, stood Brigadier General J. H. Hobart Ward, of the corps’ First Brigade; somehow, in nakedness, more stately—with his prominent brow and droopy whiskers, he looked like a statue in a Roman fountain. High on the boulder behind him, waited an aide, fully clothed and holding a bucket. Now the general nodded and dropped his chin to his chest, apparently the signal for the aide to empty the water from the bucket over his officer’s head.
The general quaked like a wet dog and slung water from his hair. He took a long drink from the flask and passed it to the aide; then he climbed the low bank back to his uniform. The aide, joining him, produced a towel from a knapsack, and then, accomplished in silence, came the Homeric enterprise of dressing the general, the last turn of which—after the boots, the belt, the sash, the sword, the buttons, the hat, and another swig from the flask—was the lighting of a fresh cigar. The pale-blue smoke, a menagerie of snakes and dragons, warped up into the tree limbs.
Swift and Hayes waited silently and patiently for it to end, and fortunately, when it did, the general and his aide left the spring on a path that led away from their hiding spot in the thicket.
Hayes said, “Maybe we should get back, Billy.”
For an answer, Swift took off running. Hayes quickly turned and looked in the direction from which they’d come and then followed. He stood his musket alongside Swift’s, against a tree, and then put his back to the pool, shed his clothes, and piled them next to Swift’s on the ground. When he was naked and turned toward the water, he saw Swift standing waist-deep in the pool and smiling at him.
“It’s mossy at the edge there,” said Swift, reaching toward him, “you better give me your hand.”
Hayes offered his hand, only to be yanked sideways into the pool and pushed under. He spun free, surfaced, caught his breath, and went after Swift, who was scrambling toward the rock wall. Swift got only his hands on the boulder before Hayes grabbed him around the waist and tugged him back down. He locked Swift’s head in one arm and splashed water into his face with his free hand. Swift dropped, slipping from Hayes’s grip, found his footing, and butted Hayes in the stomach, knocking him backward. Hayes knelt on the bottom of the pool (a mix of clay and gravel), with only his head protruding, and said, “You’re off your chump, Swift.”
Swift grinned. “You think so?” he said. “Is that your honest opinion?”
Hayes noticed that Swift’s eyes now appeared to be fully open, normal, not at half-mast as before. “Yes,” said Hayes, “it is.”
“Well, I won’t argue with you. ’Cause you know what crazy thing I’m thinking right now? Right now, this minute, I’m thinking we could be in paradise instead of hell.”
He looked away into the woods, took a deep breath, and sighed. He appeared to shudder and then said, “Where’s the sun gone?”
“It’s moved onto that rock,” said Hayes.
Swift turned and looked at the boulder behind him. “That’s inviting enough,” he said.
As they moved toward the boulder, Hayes felt revived by the water—he was hungry and sleepy and full of affection for Billy—but he wasn’t sure the change made him happy; he thought it might be dangerous to his survival. There was no pleasure to the pared mechanism of the warrior, but there was something about it that felt easier, safer. They lay next to each other on the warm rock, on their backs, in the sun. Hayes closed his eyes and had the odd sensation that he and Swift had boarded a conveyance of some sort, a magical boulder-carriage that might roll them out of the Wilderness.
After a minute, Swift said, “I reckon when you play for a genuine ball club there’s no shortage of women after you.”
This remark, combined with the giddy impression of motion, made Hayes laugh. “I reckon so,” he said.
“If you don’t mind a personal question, Hayes, I wonder if you ever … you know … what I’m trying to ask is … was there somebody special you left behind?”
Now the boulder tipped slightly to one side, and Hayes felt a mild wave of nausea. Sarah, having climbed on, knelt at his side with her minty scent and a cool wet cloth for his brow. The pool had revived him, he thought, and so revived, too, that particular thorny rose, the compelling ache. He noted with dreamy amusement an urge to cover himself.
Swift said, “Never mind, Hayes. I didn’t mean to be curious.”
“I left my sister behind,” said Hayes. “But that’s not the sort of ‘someone special’ you meant.”
“I left my ma behind,” said Swift. “And my little brother Valentine.”
“Valentine?” said Hayes.
“Valentine Swift. Ain’t that a good name? Eleven years old come this July. If there’s anybody in the family gonna play serious ball, it’s him. Quick as a fox, and he can already throw harder than me. Mark my word, Hayes—that’s a
name you’ll be reading in the papers someday.”
A strong breeze swept through the woods with a sound like a threshing machine, scattering Sarah and the thread of the conversation, and suddenly Hayes couldn’t recall what Swift had last said. He opened his eyes just in time and long enough to see a whirl of gold-white papery leaves pass a few feet in the air above them.
After what seemed a long silence, Swift said, “Tell me, Hayes, what’s your feelings about the afterlife?”
“Frankly, I haven’t given it much thought,” answered Hayes.
“My ma says we needn’t fear the great change … that’s what she calls dying, the great change. She says on the Day of Judgment we get resurrected. Our bodies get restored, but I’ll be straight with you … after some of what I’ve seen these last two days, I’m not so certain.”
It occurred to Hayes that Swift wanted some kind of reassurance and that the Christian thing to do would be to reassure him. But he suspected that any such attempt on his part would ring hollow. Hayes had always liked the idea of heaven, a place where God’s will was pure and always done, not interfered with by human mischief, but the specifics of the thing—the dying and coming back to life, the rotting and the restoration, the sorting out of the sheep from the goats and so forth—it struck him as unlikely, or at least incomprehensible.
“I don’t know, Billy,” he said, “but I think we should get back now.”
“Come on, five more minutes,” said Swift. “I’m not even good and dry yet.”
They were silent again for a few seconds. Hayes wanted to recall something from the recent past, having to do with goats—Sarah and goats … she’d taken his hand and held it as they looked together out a window—but he couldn’t make the memory come to the surface.
Nostalgia Page 19
