Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  Soon Swift said, sleepily, “I don’t have nobody special either. I’ve never even been in love with a woman, not since I was a kid and got crushes on girls at school.”

  Hayes saw Sarah standing before the library windows at Hicks Street. Having just turned to face him, her eyes linger on him for a moment, blankly, and then she tilts her head to one side and gives him a chilling look that seems to say, Who are you?

  Now he saw her at the bend in the stairs in the hallway, looking down at him. His hand rests on the newel post. If, some months from now, she says, your name appears in a certain list in the newspaper … and I don’t feel that I did all I possibly could to dissuade you … then I’ll be ashamed. She gathers the skirt of her dress in one hand, lifts it, and quickly moves out of sight. He listens for her footsteps on the landing overhead and for the opening and closing of her door. It’s cold in the hallway, and he’s alone with the sound of his own breathing.

  “You know, Billy,” said Hayes, after some time had passed, “I thought I saw you in the woods this morning … at the front. At the height of the fighting a fellow dropped in next to me, crying that he was shot. Turned out it was his canteen that had got hit. He felt the warm coffee running down his trousers and thought it was blood. I took him for you and called him by your name. He said, ‘I’m not Billy, I’m Albert.’ It was like when your heart skips a beat, only it was something that happened in my mind.”

  Swift said nothing.

  “I’ve been seeing some things that aren’t really there,” Hayes continued. “Dead soldiers getting up and crawling and the like. I don’t know what all. An old man in a stovepipe hat.”

  Swift remained silent, so at last Hayes said, “Do you think it’s just … I don’t know … the sort of thing that happens? Or do you think I should talk to the doctor?”

  Swift still said nothing, and when Hayes raised his head to look at him, he saw that the boy had fallen sound asleep.

  He decided to leave him be for a few minutes more, even though he was getting antsy about going back. He was glad Swift hadn’t heard his mumbo jumbo about seeing things, for it felt like a lapse in judgment to have spoken about it, a moment of weakness. He looked down and saw a tiny circle of water resting in the palm of Swift’s upturned hand, gleaming in the sun and throwing a star into Hayes’s eyes. A white butterfly, perhaps attracted by the same spur of light, came along and lit on the ball of Swift’s thumb. It lingered there for a few seconds and fluttered away. As if to answer the attention, the fingers on that hand twitched a little. Soon another breeze, gentler than before, quieter, stirred the warm air, and then Hayes heard a faraway clatter of musketry through the woods.

  He sat up and shook Swift’s shoulder. “Wake up, Billy. We need to get back.”

  Swift opened his eyes but otherwise didn’t move.

  “Can you hear that?” said Hayes.

  Swift rubbed his eyes and listened for half a minute. “That’s not us,” he said. “It’s too far away.”

  “Still,” said Hayes, “it’s time we got back.”

  Now Swift sat up but turned his face away. Softly, he said, “I’m not going back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going home.”

  “You can’t do that, Billy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll be taken for a deserter and shot, that’s why. You fell asleep here. You’re still dreaming.”

  Swift faced him now. “If you were a gambler,” he said, “what would you reckon to be the better bet … me getting captured and shot as a deserter or me getting killed in there on that so-called battlefield … which ain’t no battlefield at all? Now I’ve seen it, Hayes, I know it’s not for me. I want to go home. I want to go back home and play base ball. I want to get earnest about it, like you. In a little while I want to come down to Brooklyn and watch you in a real match. Wouldn’t that be—”

  “But Billy,” said Hayes, “if you desert you can’t ever go home again.”

  Swift paused for a moment to absorb this. Then he said, “I’ve made up my mind. And I’d like to have your blessing.”

  “I can’t do that, Billy.”

  “If you give me your blessing, I’ll have the courage I need.”

  Hayes got up and went to where their clothes were piled on the ground. He retrieved Swift’s trousers and threw them at him. As he stepped into his own, he said, “That’s not a fair position to put me in.”

  Swift only stared at the blue trousers, which had landed at his feet. After another moment, he said, “No, you’re right, it’s not. Forget I asked you.”

  The two of them got dressed now without another word passing between them. Swift sat on the ground to lace his shoes. “When I signed up, I lied to them about my age,” he said at last. “I’m only sixteen.”

  Hayes strapped on his belt. “Well, Billy, that wouldn’t make any difference now,” he said.

  Swift rested his forearms on his knees for a moment. “We could go together,” he said. “You could wait for me here, and I’ll go get our knapsacks and all the food I can scare up.”

  Hayes moved to the nearby tree and retrieved both their weapons. He knelt beside Swift and said, “Look at me, Billy. You need to stop this talk. Now here, take your gun.”

  Swift took the gun from him. He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into me, Hayes,” he said. “I thought a good bath in cold water was supposed to clear a person’s head, not muddle it. I just got to feeling … well, never mind.”

  They stood. Hayes bent for the two forage hats on the ground, put one on his own head and then put the other on Swift’s.

  Swift came to attention and saluted him.

  Before they left, they stooped together at the edge of the spring and filled their canteens. The sound of the fighting grew louder but stayed far away; perhaps, thought Hayes, it was General Burnside, “going in on the right,” as rumored.

  Not more than a yard or two into the thicket, Swift stumbled on a root and tumbled into the brush. He rolled onto his back, looked up at Hayes, and said, “I’d fallen asleep in the sun, that’s all. I was still dreaming.”

  Hayes gave him a hand. The boy was light as a feather. No wonder he could hurl himself at grounders the way he did, without injury.

  BACK AT THE FEDERAL LINE, Hayes fell asleep and dreamed of the lock chamber in Dublin where his parents met their death: In complete silence, the omnibus crashes into the canal with a great burst of silver bubbles, breaks apart from its team of horses, and slowly sinks away, a toy jewel box vanishing into black-green darkness; the half-dozen auburn horses plunge rapidly and then begin slowly to ascend, legs splayed and wafting, manes and tails like seaweed; a beautiful silent spectacle, the thing itself a poem on the subject of troubled sleep. Hayes, dressed in the uniform of the Union army, dives toward the sunken car, lodged aslant at the bottom of the chamber. He sees his sister’s face behind one of its dark windows. She frowns and shakes her head. She places one hand flat against the glass and smiles, farewell. He means to break through with the stock of his musket, but he has lost his weapon and has run out of air besides. He rockets upward, and when he emerges, gasping, there is only the churning smoke of the Wilderness, and the surface of the water in flames.

  From out of the smoke, he hears the colonel, softly crooning, “Steady, boys, steady, steady, steady now,” and at first he thinks he’s speaking to the frightened horses in the water, but it turns out the commander’s trying to embolden a band of fleeing soldiers, Hayes’s comrades, who are leaping over a wooden railing, retreating up the steep cobblestone incline, abandoning him.

  He tries to call to them but can make no sound.

  GENERAL GRANT DID ORDER a new attack for six o’clock, but the Confederates wouldn’t wait that long. Shortly after four, with bugle blasts and a shrill chorus of the rebel yell, they charged into the slashing before the Federal works. Behind the refortified entrenchment, the Second Corps infantry opened fire. From the intersection of t
he Brock and Orange Plank Roads, Union artillery batteries launched shell and case toward the woods and into the clearing.

  Quickly the air grew hot, bristling with flying bark. Dark gray smoke turned the sunny afternoon to an unnatural dusk.

  For a good half hour, the Confederates threw line after line of troops into the slashing. For a good half hour, line after line was slaughtered.

  Then the brush and razed saplings of the clearing caught fire. A breeze from the woods blew the black pine-tar smoke back over the entrenchment, blinding and choking the Federal soldiers. And in a matter of minutes, the flames spread to the piled logs of the breastworks.

  The rebels seized the opportunity and hurled themselves at the spot where fire had opened a break in the Union line.

  FOR FIVE MINUTES OR MORE, Hayes and Swift were swept along by the tide of Union troops suddenly fleeing for the rear. The intense heat of the fire and rolling masses of black smoke bit into their eyes. The crackle of musketry and the thunder of artillery (now turned toward the breach) were deafening and confounding. Amid the pandemonium, jostled left and right, Hayes had lost his bearings. An aide to General Hancock rushed through the throng on a mission to rally the retreating infantry, his mount’s neck bathed in white froth. Hayes tugged at Swift’s elbow, and Swift turned on him a completely bewildered face.

  Then—not a dozen paces away, breaking through the smoke and stirring up clouds of dust—a caisson roared by with the brigade commander, General Ward (lately seen naked at the spring), aboard. As it passed with a rumble of hooves, the general met Hayes’s eye—the commander had lost his hat, and there was a strange wobbly affect to his gaze. Hayes and Swift watched the caisson disappear into the trees. They looked at each other, and Swift shouted, “He’s wallpapered! He’s headed for the rear!”

  Hayes cocked his head in the direction opposite from where the caisson had gone—toward the heat, toward the burgeoning wall of fire at the front—and said, “Let’s go.” They started to run and were presently caught in a wild river of troops from other brigades, hurrying to the breach in the Federal line. In another two minutes, they reached the spot where rebels were pouring over the barricade, and then it was fire and smoke, bayonets and swords, bloodcurdling screams, muskets for clubs, and shells exploding frighteningly near. The black smoke changed dusk to night. Hayes quickly lost Swift altogether, along with his sense of time and place. Apparently, he functioned best within an ebb and flow of awareness. It was something like having his eyes closed but seeing everything more sharply than usual. Now and here, yoked by a fitful hyphen, became an elusive blinking lamp: now-here, nowhere, now-here, nowhere.

  Then of course there was the acrid stench of burnt hair, burnt flesh, burnt wool, burnt powder. Using his musket like a medieval pike, Hayes pressed a snaggletoothed boy to the smoking ground and straddled him. They locked eyes. An anonymous Union soldier reached in and slit the boy’s throat with a bowie knife. In the next moment, Hayes was struck over the back of the head with something dull and heavy, and he fell face forward into a spray of blood.

  HE AWAKENED, still alive, into a twilight of low-lying smoke and flames. The roar of combat persisted, though less feverishly. Flat on his belly beneath a close mantle of smoke, he had the impression that he lay somewhere in the slashing and that he had been dragged there and dropped. The back of his head was sore, and when he touched the spot, he felt a wet knot, tender to the touch. He’d lost his weapon, but on every side of him were dead soldiers and a number of guns. Here and there the smoke itself appeared to be on fire, pulsing orange, and braids of smoke rose continuously from the blackened earth. He crawled toward a musket, keeping his head close to the ground, the only way to breathe. Weapon in hand, he reached for his canteen, which felt hot, and managed a few swallows of warm water. He crawled farther, until he found a discarded blanket, then spread it out flat on the ground and gathered what other canteens he could from the nearby dead. He emptied the canteens onto the blanket. Now he rolled himself in the dampened blanket, covering even his head. He thought he heard, beneath the ongoing din of combat, men groaning in pain, and then suddenly he was trampled by a rush of soldiers, who tripped over him and kicked him—deliberately, he thought—as they passed.

  Soon the musketry began to abate. Longer breaks opened between bursts of artillery. Gratefully cooled, he started to emerge from his woolen cocoon. He had no idea which way to go, but since he judged the troops who had trampled him to be rebels in retreat, he decided to head in the opposite direction. Blanket in one hand, gun in the other, he began to pull himself across the smoking ground. When he’d got only a yard or two—astonishingly, like something in a dream—he heard someone speak his name: “Hayes,” said the voice, hoarsely, “Hayes.”

  He raised his head, choked on the smoke, lowered his head, and went into a fit of coughing. Tears flowed from his eyes. It was dark beneath the smoke, and he felt his heart thumping inside his chest. He wiped his face with a corner of the blanket.

  Then he saw it, to his right, faceup in a shallow and smoking depression: a charred thing, its head nearest and cocked back, so that two white wet eyes glowed at him from beneath a blackened brow; singed and smoking along its tapering length, it spoke again. “Hayes,” it said, more breath than substance. “Pull me out, Hayes.”

  It extended a raven hand to within Hayes’s reach, and Hayes felt the earth give beneath him. The ground dropped a few inches, then tilted at an acute angle, so that he was left stranded on a high plane, looking down at the hand protruding from a smoking sleeve. The sensation was physically sickening—it came with an odor of hot metal and burnt sugar—and Hayes’s tongue seemed to swell inside his mouth.

  Billy Swift, scrappy second baseman from the Bronx County. Billy Swift, whose ma had told him he needn’t fear the great change, for on the Day of Judgment we would be resurrected and restored.

  “I couldn’t make my legs work,” said Swift. “I couldn’t get out of the fire.”

  Hayes took hold of the boy’s hand, which was surprisingly cool, but with only the slightest tug, the flesh pulled loose into Hayes’s own hand, leaving a glistening claw of bone. Hayes threw the stuff to one side as Billy screamed and withdrew his arm. His body began to convulse. He was crying now, a jagged chirp that sounded oddly like laughter, and Hayes saw wisps of smoke escape the boy’s open mouth. Yellow splinters of fire suddenly sprang up from the depression in which he lay, and just as Hayes went to throw the blanket over the flames, Swift’s cartridge belt detonated, pop pop pop pop pop pop pop.

  Hayes flattened himself to the ground and covered his head. When it was over, he pivoted round and crouched over Swift at the rim of the depression, keeping his head low beneath the layer of smoke. The boy lay still now, eyes closed, silent. Hayes didn’t know how to touch him. He could see no way to touch him, but at last gently put his hand on the boy’s stomach. Swift let out a broken, pathetic, high-pitched moan. Now Hayes saw, just below the boy’s belt, a dark gaping wound. More than any other Hayes had seen so far, this was the wound Surgeon Speck had described to him at Brandy Station—the ball, flattened and distorted by its impact with human flesh, had bored through the body tearing muscle, splintering bone. Swift opened his eyes, which appeared to be submerged in a silver fluid, and looked at Hayes as if from a great distance, without recognition; mysteriously, he said, “We rode down the hill on a hand sleigh.”

  Hayes said, “When was that, Billy?”

  Swift now gave Hayes a terrible pleading look. He moved his lips as if to speak but could form no audible words. He let his head fall to one side and gazed pointedly at the musket lying beside Hayes on the ground. With obvious and painful effort, he swallowed and tried again to speak. Hayes lowered his face closer to Swift’s and heard the boy whisper, “I … beg … you.”

  Hayes glanced at the gun near his left knee. “I can’t, Billy,” he said. “Don’t ask me to do that.”

  “I beg you,” groaned Swift, and started again to weep.

  H
ayes felt his own hands go cold and numb. Looking down at the boy again, he saw that Swift’s legs were badly burned, black, with patches of blue where the fabric of his trousers had survived. The charred leather of his shoes had bonded to his feet. The ball that had entered below the belt had likely smashed into his spine. The trough of his neck, beneath the blackened chin, was a dark orange color marked by watery blisters the size of walnuts, his right ear a crater and a crispy flap of skin. Where the flesh had come off his right hand, a wine-red mucus oozed from the torn wrist.

  Swift closed his eyes again and whispered, “I … beg … you.”

  Under the circumstances, Hayes would need to lie down right alongside the boy. He would need to brace the weapon against his own shoulder while aiming it at Swift’s temple.

  Again Swift started to convulse, uttering a quaking series of grunts, and Hayes got himself arranged quickly. He loaded as if his own life depended upon it; rested the barrel on the rim of the depression; and fired a minié ball into the boy’s brain.

  He did not hear the shot, for at the exact same moment an errant shell exploded quite nearby, casting up a cataclysm of earth. Fragments smacked Hayes high in the middle of the back and along the backside of his left thigh. The pain was something like being struck by a base ball, but hotter. Far more stunning was the blast itself, which—apart from a persistent ringing in Hayes’s ears—had annihilated all other sound. He could hear no further artillery, no musketry, no rebel yells, no groans from the wounded. Only a sudden silence, bathed in smoke.

  In silence, he spread the blanket on the ground next to Swift. He rolled the boy onto it, then gathered it at two corners, and got himself onto all fours. In this manner he began to crawl toward what he hoped would be the Union barricade, dragging Swift behind. It was slow going, for the ground was riddled with the snarls of slashed saplings and underbrush; there were fires and stumps and dead or dying men to get around; and he needed to keep his head below the smoke.