Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  There was a time, back in Brooklyn, when his sister had tilted her head ever so slightly and given him a look that seemed to say, Who are you? Now Anne tilts her head similarly but looks at him with bone-deep empathy. Astonishing him, she scrapes with one bare knuckle the tears from her cheeks and rubs them onto his.

  “War paint,” she whispers, drawing a wet line straight down beneath each of his eyes.

  Next she coaxes him forward so she can wash the nape of his neck. She remarks on how long his hair has grown, pulls down his shirt collar, and spreads it wide, then resumes bathing him, softly singing along with the music from the next ward, “ ‘I’ll march to Canaan’s land, I’ll land on Canaan’s shore, / Where pleasures never end, and troubles come no more. / Farewell, farewell, farewell, my loving friends, farewell.’ ”

  WHEN THE MOSQUITO CURTAINS are lowered over the beds in the dim gaslight, they resemble broad tree trunks with pale-golden bark—bark so tissuelike that Hayes, who lives inside one of the trees, can look through it into the dreamy orchard. During the night, he sees Walt, sitting close to Casper and writing in one of his scrapbooks as he so often does. Sometime later, Walt has gone, but Babb is kneeling by Raugh’s bed and sliding his arms beneath Raugh’s pillow. What Babb doesn’t understand is that Raugh sleeps most of the day and lies awake, eyes closed, most of the night. One large powerful hand shoots out and clamps Babb by the neck. With supernatural strength, Raugh lifts him from the floor and thrusts him choking and gagging into a distant part of the orchard. Still later, Matron stops by, dressed for travel and looking, as they say, not quite right in the upper story. Gazing intently at Hayes, eyes bulging, she laughs softly and says, “I have Graves’ disease, you see, and must go to my mother’s house in Maryland.” She slips something beneath Hayes’s pillow, adding, “This might be useful to you,” and disappears. Soon somebody climbs inside the tree with Hayes and snuggles next to him. Hayes, sitting up quickly, smells brandy and sickness, and then a hatless and tremulous Casper, sweating profusely, lays his head on Hayes’s chest, his bandaged stump resting heavily against Hayes’s belly. “You’re the best chum a fellow could ever have, Mr. X,” says Casper, loud, and Hayes hushes him.

  “You share your apples and never criticize,” continues Casper, more softly, “and I’m going to tell you a secret I wouldn’t tell another body in all creation. I was glad when I got shot. I thought, Good, now I can get fixed up and go home. Even after the surgeon was done with his sawing, I told myself it was better to go home with one hand than to die with two. Put your arms around me, will you?”

  Hayes holds Casper, despite the odor and the sweat, for what else can he do? In a matter of seconds Casper’s breathing becomes even and regular. A good while later, he lets out a great sigh and grows markedly heavier.

  “I’ll tell you something else, too, Mr. X,” he whispers. “I don’t plan to kick up a dust when the time comes … but honestly, I’d prefer not to die.”

  ———

  THE YEAR BEFORE the Hayeses traveled to Ireland and perished in a Dublin canal, Mr. Hayes borrowed a boat from a physician friend and took the family rowing on a Sunday afternoon in July. Summerfield, fifteen and strong for his age, stationed himself at the rear rowing thwart and took up one pair of oars. Mr. Hayes, with the other pair, sat forward, behind him, and the two women placed themselves, with parasols, aft. It was a splendid afternoon of familial harmony and church bells, tall sails and whistles in the harbor, warm breezes and towering white clouds. Summerfield, inexperienced at rowing but naturally able, found the thrill of propulsion over the water—the direct link between muscle and motion—nearly dizzying. When they’d got a good ways upriver, not far from the bank, Mr. Hayes, worn out and winded, ordered Summerfield to stop, please, and to breathe for a minute.

  As the boat began to drift, Summerfield gazed toward the river’s edge and was shortly entranced by the interaction of shapes at the bank: one line of trees, low and dark near the water, appeared to move in counterpoint to another, bright upon a bluff, and above the higher line a tier of majestic clouds played a faster melody all its own. This visual suggestion of music made him think of the wonderful moment when a batsman knocks a ball into the field, igniting among the players a burst of movement. Without stopping to think, he pointed and cried, “Look!”

  The others turned their heads and watched in silence for a few seconds. His father said, “What is it, Summerfield? I don’t see anything.”

  His mother said, “Oh, yes, I see—there’s a jolly fisherman just there in the shade … exactly like a painting.”

  “No,” answered Summerfield, “not that. Look at the way everything moves.”

  Mrs. Hayes returned her eyes to the bank, bewildered, and Mr. Hayes patted Summerfield’s shoulder and said, facetiously, “Yes, son, everything does move, doesn’t it?”

  Sarah, who’d never taken her gaze from the bank and left it there still, said, “He means the lovely way the trees and the clouds drift against one another, even as we drift in our little boat.”

  She turned and smiled at Summerfield. He said, “It made me think of base ball.”

  At his back, he heard his father’s hearty laugh, but Sarah twirled her parasol gaily and said, “Of course … when the ball’s struck and all the players scamper this way and that. Why, Summerfield, you’re an athlete and a poet.”

  MIDDAY, Babb passes the end of the bed, and Hayes spies a necklace of purple bruises about the man’s neck. This prompts him to reach beneath his pillow, where he finds a creased and oil-stained scrap of paper—on it, written in all capital letters:

  CAPT. GRACIE

  +

  ABIGAIL COX, WARD K

  As he folds the note and slips it into a pocket of his trousers, he catches Raugh watching him from the next bed with a terrible and familiar pleading look in his eyes. At first he experiences the alarm of being discovered at something secret, but then a chill goes down his spine; he feels his own heart race as his hands start to tremble. A compulsion to run so pervades him he quickly leaves the bed, but immediately, in the crowded aisle, he collides with Babb, who says, “Where you going? Oh, I forgot … you can’t answer me, can you?”

  At this close range Hayes can see among the bruises on Babb’s neck the clear imprint of a thumb.

  “Boo!” says Babb, laughs, and moves away.

  Hayes returns to the bed and ventures a glance at Raugh, whose sunken eyes have resumed their usual ceiling-gazing. Hayes thinks the man’s resemblance to Abe Lincoln superficial, a shared gauntness and cut of whiskers. Hayes sits on the bed with his back to Raugh and studies Casper, passed out drunk in the middle of the day. The boy’s name is Casper Mallet, one of his arms has been amputated, and he’s dying of a disease called pyemia, yet—these particulars aside—he is very much like Billy Swift, who did not give a bowie knife to Hayes before he was abandoned in the field, for Billy Swift at that time was already dead (though Hayes cannot quite recall how Swift died). The knife came from a likable Zu-Zu with a big black mustache and a red fez, Felix Rosamel, which accounted for the initials F.R. on the knife’s handle. But what has become of the knife now? Hayes supposes it would have been taken from him by whoever brought him to the hospital. The lost and unaccounted-for knife—in his mind’s eye, the size of a sword, humming and vibrating against a bank of iridescent clouds—seems suddenly crucial and dangerous: like a loose thread in a story, it will reappear, doubtless in the wrong hands, doubtless for the purpose of cutting his throat.

  To shake off this grim vagary, he again stands and moves among the crowd in the central aisle. He finds his way to the bath-room and the small round mirror that hangs there on a wall. He puts his mouth inches from the mirror and watches his lips move as he tries to form the words Summerfield Hayes. He tries again and again, making no sound whatsoever but causing a worrisome mental sensation—the muscles that govern his lips and tongue seize control of the task, steer matters their own way, and soon have him mouthing gibberish, the independent l
ittle fluttering machine in the mirror (flashing two rows of teeth) comical and scary. He pulls himself away and leaves the bath-room, and as he threads through the aisle back to the bed, he wonders if he saw in the mirror a reflection of gibberish or if the repetition of the two words that constitute his name (so long unsounded, so long unheard) only struck him as gibberish.

  The brass and sooty lamp on its chain works its magic. He stares at it long enough to calm himself, and soon even the brown rat that peers down from the rafter seems a friend. Before long Hayes feels sleepy. Not only is the hospital fare making people sick, there is likely some sort of sleeping potion in the water. He dozes off but only briefly, for he’s shortly roused by an extraordinary hubbub throughout the ward, a kind of gentle uprising, reverential and happy in nature. He has dreamed of his sister—as they walked together beneath overarching and leaf-shedding oaks, she kept changing into the nurse Anne and then back again into herself—and now, when Hayes opens his eyes, the surgeon in chief stands at the foot of Raugh’s bed with Captain Gracie, two other members of the guard, and no less than the president of the United States, who holds in one hand a black stovepipe hat. Hayes hears the surgeon say, “I thought you might like to meet your long-lost brother,” and Mr. Lincoln looks down at the sleeping Raugh and smiles. As he smiles, the crevices in his face close together like the ribs of a fan, rucking the pouched skin beneath the eyes, and the large ears (like seashells) move upward a fraction of an inch. Hayes thinks it the face of a man diligent yet bereaved and that he has come in from bad weather—his tie’s askew, his forelock drops low toward the bridge of the nose, and a fob chain appears on the brink of spilling from its vest pocket. After a moment, the president says, “Yes, I do believe I see the resemblance.”

  He loses the smile and adds, “Of course, they are each my brother, only this unlucky man looks the part.”

  After he says this, he chuckles drily, his gaze shifts to Hayes, and then he inclines his head to allow Dr. Bliss to whisper something in his ear. Though Hayes trusts in his heart of hearts that he’s only dreaming, he starts to get to his feet, but the president says, “Stay as you are,” bends forward, and reaches for his hand. He looks deeply into Hayes’s eyes, and Hayes senses a nearly whole presence pouring forward to greet him, even with some never-shared part withheld. The great man’s hand is noticeably soft and cool. “I extend to you the gratitude of our nation, son,” he says, “and wish you a full and fast recovery.”

  As he releases his hand, Hayes notices a fever blister the size of a half dime on Lincoln’s lower lip and detects the scent of his breath, which he likens to a mix of anise and oatmeal. When the entourage moves on, Hayes catches sight of Raugh, now watching them go—crushed and bitter Raugh, who’d only pretended to sleep throughout.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, storm clouds darken the sky, and the air grows heavy and hot, suffused with the stench from the canal. The unrest incited by the president’s surprise visit lingers long after his departure, the ward noisier and more crowded than ever, and when rain begins to pelt the roof, visitors who might otherwise have moved on continue to mill about. The flags and mosquito curtains stir and flap in the winds that erupt through the windows, and soon lightning and thunder add to the turmoil.

  Casper wakes from his nap raving, Babb and a medical steward escort him away, and when he returns a few minutes later from wherever they took him, he’s benumbed, and insists on getting into bed with Hayes. This of course is not allowed, and Casper, looking yellowish and dazed, sinks into a sulk. Immediately Hayes thinks of the little mirror in the bath-room, the “fluttering machine” there, and notes a shift in his feelings—though previously resigned to muteness, entirely acquiescent, now he would be pleased to explain to Casper that it’s too hot in the ward today for sharing a bed.

  When Walt shows up around three o’clock, he brings with him a friend, whom he introduces to Hayes and Casper as Mr. Burroughs. The two men divest themselves of wilted-looking hats and drenched umbrellas, and Burroughs takes the only chair as Walt sits on the end of Hayes’s mattress. Walt tells them that his friend often guides him on walks in the Washington forests, and though Mr. Burroughs works for the Treasury Department, his heart and soul reside in “the wilds and the woodlands.”

  Burroughs—in his late twenties, handsome and slender, well dressed in business attire, clean shaven, with dark chin-length locks—impresses Hayes immediately as a cheering, helpful sort of man, and quite enamored of Walt. At Walt’s urging, he is soon amusing them with his ability to imitate birdcalls. Casper, at first buoyed up, quickly appears to drift—which Hayes construes as an indication that whatever drug the steward dosed him with earlier has taken its full effect.

  “Most assuredly the hermit thrush!” cries Walt now. “I would recognize it anywhere. I don’t know how you do it, John.”

  “It’s not as good as you think,” says Burroughs, “but I continue to practice … continue to improve, I hope.”

  “I didn’t see it before, John,” says Walt, “but you and our Mr. X bear a striking resemblance, don’t you think? You might be—”

  “Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet,” cries Casper, wagging his head side to side. “Chirp, chirp, chirp!”

  Walt looks at him with mild irritation and sympathy. “Aha,” he says, “that must be the Casper-bird,” and Casper casts him a look of suspicion, as if he can’t determine whether or not he has been insulted. Hayes finds himself wishing he could tell Walt about Casper’s being carried from the ward earlier and drugged.

  As lightning ignites the windows and a rumble of thunder rolls through the pavilion, shaking the floor and walls, Mrs. Duffy arrives in a high-starched bonnet to offer her imperious hymn-shrieking. Hayes flinches, squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, and stuffs his hands into his pockets. A great clatter of wagon wheels and horses rises up out in the street. Bells toll, near and far away, and a bugle sounds in the distance. Rain drums the roof, and it seems to Hayes that the scores of people in the ward fairly shout at one another to make themselves heard.

  Just then Anne, obviously in a rush, stops by and places a crown made out of paper onto Walt’s head. She leans in and kisses him on the knob of his cheek above his whiskers. She gives him a small jar and says, “For your birthday, dear Walt. My mother’s own berry preserves, and they’re for you so don’t go giving them away.”

  Walt, quite red-faced, thanks her and then receives a kiss on the cheek from Burroughs as Anne departs. At that moment Captain Gracie passes by in the aisle and looks at Walt with such open contempt that Burroughs raises his eyebrows and says, “I don’t think you’ll be getting any birthday kiss from that man. A friend of yours?”

  “He despises me,” says Walt. “Thinks me a shirker and a coward. He would have me on a battlefield in Virginia, a soldier rather than a soldiers’ missionary.”

  Burroughs laughs and says, “I can scarcely imagine anything more incongruous than you, Walt, killing people.”

  Hayes observes that Casper—who doesn’t seem to have noticed Captain Gracie—stares at Walt and the paper crown with amused puzzlement. After a moment, as if to change the subject in his own mind, Casper extends his stump toward Burroughs and says, “Won’t you give the wee babe a pat? We’re generally shy with strangers, but we like your kindly eyes and your fancy cravat.”

  Burroughs pats the stump, smiling, and Casper pulls it back, crying, “Not so hard, it hurts!”

  “I’m ever so sorry,” says Burroughs and looks at Walt for guidance.

  “John,” says Walt, “why don’t you show us another one, an easy one we can all do? What about the barred owl?”

  Burroughs looks doubtful but smiles again, clears his throat, and croons, “Hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo-hooooo.”

  Walt mimics him, not nearly as convincing, and then says, “You try it, Casper.”

  Casper—who is gazing blankly at the small patch of floor between the beds and caressing his stump—says, “That Dr. Drum took Major Cross with him to Philadelphia. H
e means to electrify him. Why does my Joanie not come to see me?”

  Softly, Walt says, “I’ll write to her again, dear boy, this very day.”

  Casper raises his head briefly and then returns his eyes to the spot on the floor. He slowly allows his eyelids to drop. He whispers, “Will you tell her I’m sorry …” and, even while the others are still looking at him, dozes off.

  After a moment, Burroughs turns to Walt and says, “His girl, I presume?”

  “Fiancée,” says Walt, “though I must say, she doesn’t behave like one. Has so far sent him exactly one silly letter, mostly regarding itself—all about the letter paper, where she’d bought it and at what cost, and about the ink, which she’d made in her mama’s own kitchen, from copperas and nutgalls. Went on at length about the coming of horsecars to Providence, Rhode Island, and then urged Casper ‘to try not to be too dumpish.’ I’ve written her myself and received no reply.”

  Walt pauses and brings his hands together below his lips—sadly, thoughtfully, as if he’s about to pray. He raises his head and looks searchingly at Casper, then says to Burroughs, “I regret you didn’t meet him before. Nobody asks my opinion, of course, but I think he’s about as ruined by remedies as by infection. What you see here is the vestige of a charming and witty young fellow—now brandy-fuddled, now drug-addicted—but once resilient … and handsome, though you would hardly know it.”

  He sets aside his cane and lifts a bulging haversack from the floor; he places the jar of preserves inside and then takes out one of his scrapbooks, into which he scribbles a note. As he bends to put it away, and still leans forward, he says, “Look around you, John, and tell me what you truly think. Now we see that General Grant evidently believes we can supply him an infinite store of young men for slaughter … does the price of victory not grow too great?”