Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  “From there we’ll go into camp at Brandy Station, in Virginia.”

  “You said soon. How soon?”

  “A week.”

  “A week?” she said. “That is soon.”

  “Yes.”

  She stared for a moment at the fire. The lamps on the walls flickered. She looked down into her lap, carefully folded the handkerchief, and tucked it back into her sleeve. “Well,” she said, and stood.

  She did not look at him but only moved around the sofa and toward the hall.

  “Sarah, please,” he said, getting to his feet, but she’d already opened the door. He felt the cold air from the hall enter the room.

  Halfway out, she paused. She returned to him, head down, still never meeting his eye. She put her arms around him and held him tight for a good long time, without a word. Then she released him and was gone. She closed the hall door behind her in such a way that it made no sound at all.

  Once again, he would have his supper alone, on a tray, upstairs in the library. Once again, he would light his father’s pipe and then put it away, disappointed that he didn’t enjoy it more.

  The next time he saw her was just before first light, when she anxiously awakened him and told him about the prowler in the garden. He got out of bed and went to the window, where he peered down—heard faintly the bleating of the goats but could see no prowler.

  She moved to his side and then gasped as they spied a shadowy figure vanish behind the shed at the back of the garden. He raised the sash and called out, “Who’s there?”

  The bleating stopped. Sarah shuddered from cold, and he lowered the window.

  They stood there next to each other in their nightclothes, in the near dark, and continued watching for another minute. To the east, Venus blazed and shimmered above the black housetops and barren trees.

  Sarah took his hand and rested her head against his shoulder. “How can the world be so very cold?” she said softly.

  “It’s winter,” he said. “Spring will come again.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “Renewal. And with it, renewal of the war. Renewal of the killing and dying, renewal of heartbreak and grief.”

  Something stirred behind them, and when they turned, they saw Jane and Mrs. B, with night bonnets and candlesticks, lurking in the open doorway like specters.

  “They’ve took our goats,” said Jane, shaking her head. “The rotten thieves took our goats.”

  “THE TRUTH HAS the great advantage of being true,” his mother used to say, and now, in his dream, she has come to remind him. “However else it might be assailed,” she says, looking down at him from the open window of a red omnibus, “this quality remains unchanged. Put your faith in the truth, Summerfield. At the end of the day, it may not save your life, but it will likely save your soul.” There’s the crack of a whip, and the omnibus rattles away, up a steep incline on a cobblestone road next to a canal. Then he hears the rebel yell, the maniacal whooping from the nearby trees, and he thinks, We did, some of us, sometimes, enjoy the killing. He cups his hands over his ears, but the yelling swells and swells till it wakes him.

  The ward, bathed in moonlight, seems unnaturally quiet—he senses the absence of some formerly reliable noise—but perhaps it’s only because of the dream-roar from which he just awakened. Walt, asleep, still sits in the chair between Hayes’s bed and Casper’s, leaning back with his head rolled to one side. His cane rests at an angle between his legs, its silver handle gleaming in the moonlight, which also falls over the muddy toes of his black Morocco boots. Hayes sees that across the way there’s a new soldier in the bed where the devoted mother kept her vigil for days on end.

  And now he sees, too, that Casper’s bed is empty. He closes his eyes and thinks of Casper’s happily tossing an apple into the air and catching it in his palm.

  A moment later, he hears Casper hissing, “Don’t you touch me,” and then sees him being helped back to the bed by Babb and another attendant. Soon enough they have him arranged and the mosquito curtain draped neatly around the bed; without a word, they depart into the darkness at the end of the ward. Immediately Casper cradles his stump and launches a very loud, dry-mouthed serenade: “ ‘Here’s to the maid all dressed in blue, always tidy, always true …’ ”

  Walt startles awake and gets up out of the chair as if an alarm bell has sounded, then quickly moves to Casper and starts to hush him through the mosquito curtain.

  “ ‘When she kisses, she kisses sweet,’ ” wails Casper, “ ‘and makes things stand that have no feet.’ ”

  Walt pulls back the gauzy curtain and puts his hand over Casper’s mouth, laughing. “Shhhh, my boy,” he says, and takes a cup from Casper’s side of the table and helps him drink.

  For the next minute or two, Walt talks softly to Casper, an almost-crooning sound, too low for Hayes to understand any words.

  Soon the ward is quiet again.

  Walt removes Casper’s cap, sits next to him on the bed, and strokes Casper’s freckled brow and hair. Hayes raises himself on his elbows for a moment and looks over: in the dim glow from the lowered lamps and the moonlight, the gray-bearded man might be a doting grandfather, soothing a sick boy back to sleep.

  Walt notices Hayes, turns, and smiles sadly. He tilts his head to one side, as if Hayes has asked a question. He whispers, “Our sweet Casper’s a bit corned.”

  After a pause, he loses the smile and adds, “Nobody … nobody survives pyemia.”

  Hayes lets his head sink back onto the pillow and ponders the network of shadows in the white-painted rafters overhead, something like a ship’s rigging.

  Oddly quiet, he thinks, and then, after a moment, he can almost feel the ward sway to and fro as it drifts gently out to sea.

  Quiet, he thinks, eerily quiet, and then, Jeffers.

  He rolls onto his side, facing the other bed. In the gloom and through the gauze of the two mosquito curtains, he can only barely discern the man’s outline—perfectly still, and silent.

  HE OPENS HIS EYES just in time to glimpse the cone as it descends over his nose and mouth—and then Dr. Drum with a bottle: a sweet pungent odor, a stinging sensation in his nose and throat. He jerks his head back and tries to sit up, but soldiers on either side of his bed press down hard on his arms and legs. An unmistakable voice—that of the angry captain—says, “Hold him!” and “You there … grasp his head.” Someone pulls on his ears and yanks his neck forward, he hears Casper say, “Leave him be, you bunch of scoundrels,” and then he’s lying on the kitchen floor at Hicks Street. Most odd, there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, except that the floor is covered with a jumble of white bedsheets. Two goats—one with an impressive beard—look down at him, each smiling rather Christlike, which, though charming, doesn’t quite dispel the feeling that he’s in some kind of danger. A mosquito curtain drops into his face but is quickly taken away. He’s vividly aware of his body in all its parts—indeed, for the first time ever, he understands that he is his body, and his body is himself and made of many parts. The sense of danger, he thinks, attaches to the fact that at the moment he’s unable to move any of those parts, though the impulse to move clangs and pounds inside him like a steam engine. Someone says, “He’s under,” and he thinks, Yes, Under, precisely.

  The goats move away, a disappointment he intends to bear with manly composure.

  Despite his evident paralysis, there’s a great deal of internal motion throughout his body and limbs—his blood, coursing so fiercely he fears it might break through the skin. He inhales, runs up to the line, and releases the base ball only inches from the ground, his knuckles nearly brushing the fragrant grass. He exhales. The batsman swings and sends the ball straight up, high into the air. All the men on the playing field are set in motion, one way and another, and it makes him think of music.

  Sarah twirls her parasol and says, “Why, Summerfield, you’re an athlete and a poet.”

  A cloud blots out the sun. A strong wind sweeps across the whole place, bendin
g the young pines at the edge of the forest.

  A brief interval of darkness, and then the sun returns, blinding and hot.

  “He’s stirring,” a man says.

  “Tell us who you are,” says another.

  Yes, he thinks, Under, and Stirring.

  Gargantuan figures, like dark mountains, emerge from the light and hover over him. “Tell us who you are,” one of the mountains echoes. “Tell us who you are.”

  He tries to say, “I’m Under, and Stirring,” but cannot will his voice to make the necessary sounds.

  His friend Casper says, “You bunch of scoundrels. What are you doing to him? Why can’t you let him be? This is your work, jackanapes. You wouldn’t last a day in the field. Your own men would see to that.”

  “Remove that man,” says the angry captain. “Take him to the wardmaster’s room.”

  “Ha!” cries Casper. “Court-martial me, why don’t you? I’m dead already, you stinking parlor soldier.”

  Hayes has a terrible taste in his mouth, as if he has drunk lamp oil, and his throat feels sore and mucous. He coughs, which sparks a sharp ache in his head, which in turn sends a wave of nausea to his belly.

  He closes his eyes, and the base ball comes down at last, uncaught, and thumps pleasantly somewhere off to the right side.

  THE NEW MAN in Jeffers’s bed might be Abraham Lincoln’s double except that he has lost both his legs, each amputated above the knee. Hayes—who feels dizzy any time he moves his head even slightly—can’t think when the man was substituted for Jeffers, or when Jeffers was moved to the deadhouse. He recalls, as if from a dream, Anne lifting the tag on the new man’s shirt and saying, Mr. R-a-u-g-h, do you say that—“rough”? and the man replying, in a very deep voice, Raw.

  Casper has not yet returned from the wardmaster’s room, if indeed that’s where he was taken, and Hayes worries he may never see him again, that he’ll doze off, and when he awakens, a new man will have been substituted for Casper as well. He’s not sure what time of day it is, but he thinks it’s still morning, for the black-clad clergy (always most prevalent in the morning) have been lurking about with their tracts. A short while ago, an especially insensible example snaked up next to Private Raugh and read aloud to him a preachment that included a passage on the evils of dancing. Raugh, immobile and unresponsive throughout, has been sleeping ever afterward. So far, since Raugh’s arrival on the ward, Hayes has heard the man utter only the one word, raw.

  Hayes’s head aches, his throat burns, and the nausea persists. He wants water but fears vomiting on the way to the water jar. He fears calling attention to himself in any way, which might provoke a reprise of Dr. Drum and the angry captain. When awake, he has pretended to be asleep and endeavored to keep still, the recent assault having put him back to the mind and manners of a cornered animal.

  “IT’S MUCUS,” says Dr. Drum, peering into the basin held by Anne, “only mucus and more mucus. Entirely to be expected.”

  Hayes rocks forward, heaves, retches, and vomits yet again.

  After a pause, Anne (wearing the lovely forbidden lilac dress) looks into his eyes and says, “No more?”

  Shot through with shame, he shakes his head.

  “All done?” she says.

  He nods, wishing he were dead.

  She passes the basin to an attendant who waits behind her and takes a towel from her apron and wipes Hayes’s mouth. “There,” she says, in a heartening way. “You just lie back and rest now.”

  When the surgeon and the attendant move away, Hayes sees Walt at the foot of the bed, still wearing his hat and haversack and gazing down at him gravely. As Walt removes the bag, a meaningful look passes between him and Anne, something vaguely disapproving, and then Casper—once again in his own bed—cries, “Oh, God, I’m cold I’m cold I’m cold!”

  “I’ll fetch some blankets,” Anne says to Walt, “but in the meantime that’s brandy in the cup there. Persuade him to drink as much as you can.”

  Casper lets out a chattering drone as Walt quickly sheds his own coat and lays it over him. Walt then helps Casper take the brandy, cooing assurances and generally quieting the boy.

  “Scoundrel,” says Casper, his voice shaking, “scoundrel.”

  “Who’s a scoundrel?” asks Walt.

  “Commander of the guard. Ja-ja-jackanapes.”

  Walt casts Hayes an inquiring glance, then returns to helping Casper with the cup. “Here,” he says, “drink some more of this, my boy, it’ll warm you.”

  In another minute, Anne’s back with blankets, and she and Walt get Casper tucked in. “They put him in the wardmaster’s room and kept him a long time out of bed,” says Anne. “And now his fever’s up again.”

  “Who put him in the wardmaster’s room?” asks Walt.

  “Jackanapes ca-captain,” says Casper. He joggles his head toward Hayes. “They e-e-etherized him.”

  Walt looks at Hayes, back at Casper, and finally at Anne. “I don’t understand,” he says.

  Anne moves around the bed and stands close to him, taking his arm as if they are about to set out on a walk. “I must go,” she says softly. “But early this morning—from what I’ve gathered—Dr. Drum etherized our friend here in bed thirty-two. It’s ether that caused the nausea.”

  “But why etherize him?”

  “Dr. Drum’s test for detecting malingerers,” says Anne. “If Mr. X were feigning dumbness, see, he’d likely speak as he was recovering from the anesthesia … before he had his wits about him.”

  “Ha-ha!” cries Casper. “He didn’t say nothing!”

  “But who is Dr. Drum?” asks Walt.

  “A friend of the ward surgeon,” says Anne. “Visiting from the Christian Street Hospital, in Philadelphia. Now I must go. You might bring Mr. X some tea when you have time.”

  After she has gone, Walt stands between the two beds for a moment, looking first at Casper, then at Hayes, as if they are the two horns of a dilemma. At last he takes his bag by the strap and says, “I shall return. I’ve got a host of errands. And then some banging to do on a certain drum.”

  Casper lets out an insane horselaugh, and when Walt hushes him, Casper covers his mouth with his one remaining hand. Walt starts to go but pauses and looks past Hayes at the new man sleeping in Jeffers’s bed. “Why, he’s the very spit of Abe Lincoln,” he says.

  When Walt has left, it seems to Hayes that the noise of the ward increases, and likewise the temperature. There’s laughter and moaning and coughing and the rumble of a hundred conversations; a metallic rattle of unknown origin; the dull clank of the bell outdoors; the scuffle of wheels and boots and canes and crutches on the wooden floor.

  Suddenly Major Cross shows up and stares down at Hayes with his scarlet face and gauze-white turban. “Dr. Drum means to take me with him to Philly-delphia,” he says.

  He leans forward and whispers in Hayes’s ear: “Before it’s over, I’m going to tie him to a chair and feed him last year’s hay.”

  Then Major Cross is prone on the floor in the narrow slot between Hayes’s bed and Raugh’s. Hayes can no longer see any sign of the man, but now and again he hears his muttering and sighing.

  When Casper speaks next, his voice is thoroughly calm. “There, there, little fellow,” he says, consoling his stump. “Don’t you worry … you’ll be whole again soon enough.”

  CASPER AND RAUGH ARE undoubtedly drugged, for how else could they sleep amid such commotion? The din of the ward—when it approaches a peak, as now, in the middle of the afternoon—sounds to Hayes like combat, like musketry, and though he recognizes this as misapprehension, he cannot avert a powerful urge to take cover beneath the bed. He has learned the importance of fighting such urges. Succumbing to them can bring about harsh consequences: when he mistakenly thought the hospital had caught fire and tried to run out the doors and had to be restrained by guards, a forced etherization soon followed.

  He wishes Walt would come back from his errands, for he feels safest when Walt is near. Even th
e man’s cane or hat or umbrella, left at Hayes’s bedside, has the power to soothe. Today Walt did not leave any of these, though he did promise to return. In the interim, the aftereffects of the ether have departed, except for a sore throat; the rekindling of his old symptoms (trembling hands, stinging shrapnel wounds); and a sharpened wariness (he minds the flow of traffic in the aisle with increased vigilance, surreptitiously, to avoid meeting the eye of any passerby).

  A while ago, he took up Come to Jesus, which he found demoralizing and soon only pretended to read, resting the spine in his lap to stay the quaking pages. One sentence has lodged in his mind: “God requires purity of heart as well as of outward conduct, and he knows all our thoughts.” The assertion offers nothing new in the way of theology—both its principles are familiar to him—yet, as it plays over and over in his head, Hayes sees that his experience of these conditions has changed. Purity of heart, once a worthy ideal, has become an unsportsmanlike precept, policed by surveillance, in a realm where ideas arise before they can be eluded. The state of being thoroughly known, once a solace, has become an invasion of privacy. The state of being never alone, once a comfort, has become the inescapable burden of never being left alone.

  “… I forgot my glove in the wagon,” mumbles Casper, in his sleep, and then Hayes looks up and sees that Walt and Dr. Bliss stand at the foot of Casper’s bed.

  “He had the shakes something terrible,” says Walt.

  Dr. Bliss moves to one side, pulls down the blanket from around Casper’s neck, and lays a hand carefully on his brow. “I believe he’s feeling more than warm enough now,” he says.

  Both the men step to the end of Hayes’s bed. Hayes starts to get up to salute, but Dr. Bliss raises a hand and says, “Keep still, son.”

  Hayes, panicked and disgraced, is suddenly aware that some of the buttonholes on his shirt and on the fly of his trousers are torn. The surgeon slides a chair between the two beds and says, to Walt, “If you don’t mind, I should like you to take a seat here and play the visitor.”

  “I don’t need to play the visitor,” says Walt. “I am the visitor. But as a visitor, I must say I find that chair uncommonly hard.”