Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  CASPER, who has developed two fresh abscesses on his left cheek, looks up at Anne, quite pathetically, and says, “I only asked him to bring me back some potatoes.”

  She has just finished rewetting his dressing with cold water and now dries her hands on her apron. She has taken to wearing her hair in curls, which, under Matron’s watch, would never have been permitted. “Yes,” she says to Casper, “and Mr. X, being the good fellow he is, brought you some. But, Casper, you’re not allowed potatoes.”

  “I know I’m not,” says Casper, looking straight ahead now, vacantly. “That’s why I wanted them.”

  Hayes, who has pilfered from the dining room a small plate of boiled potatoes, puts it on the table and then sits on his own bed. He finds it difficult to look directly at Casper, for the boy’s face has become a horror—the skin, splotched yellow and pink, sags and tugs down the lower eyelids, exposing the salmon-colored inner tissue, the abscesses, whose purplish aureoles overlap, peaked with pustules.

  “I’m sorry, Casper,” says Anne. “I can bring you some beef tea.”

  “I don’t want no beef tea.”

  “What about a cup of milk?”

  “I don’t want no milk.”

  “Casper—”

  He grabs her hand now and says, “What’s the matter with everybody? Can nobody see I’m dying?”

  Tears spring from his eyes, a remarkable sight as they arc toward the bedcovers and catch the orange light of sunset through the window. Anne turns and looks back at Hayes. She glances down the length of the ward, one way and the other, and then returns her eyes to Hayes, who reaches for the plate of potatoes and passes it into her free hand.

  She places it in Casper’s lap and whispers, “Eat them quickly then.”

  Which he does, using his fingers and making small squeaking noises.

  Hayes watches for a moment, repulsed, a larger reaction than the thing deserves and having little to do with Casper’s rapacious manners. Rather, it’s Casper’s begging that has offended him, the macabre and decisive argument of his dying, Anne’s uneasy relenting, a plate of blandest cold potatoes made over as an offering of charity. He shuts his eyes and sees an image of Truman Leggett, forcing on him his sack of coffee mixed with sugar. He lowers his head, thinking, Dearest Sarah, these will likely be the last words … but then leaves off, recalling that this diversion no longer steadies him—no longer even diverts. Besides, when he has reviewed these fragmentary mental letters, he has found them wanting in both wit and wisdom. Among the several properties lost to his brief encounter with war, he supposes he must count his former modicum of ingenuity. Combat has dulled him, undoubtedly because combat’s a dull business, befitting, after all, barbarians. This accounts, he thinks, for so much being made of military strategy and tactics, costume and matériel—they’re meant to parade as warrantable, even noble, something that’s fundamentally childish.

  In the next moment, eyes still shut, a maddening whir inside his ears, he believes he has read similar sentiments expressed in newspaper editorials on the subject of grown men playing base ball. When he raises his head, he sees that Anne (holding an empty plate from the dining room) and Casper (licking the fingers of his one hand) each stare at him with a kind of wonderment.

  Muttering, he thinks, I have been muttering aloud.

  Anne sits next to him on the bed and starts to put her arm around his shoulders, but he pulls away, and she stands up again. His hands tremble madly, and so he squeezes them between his knees. He hears her say, “My dear Mr. X … don’t you know by now I’m your friend?”

  “ ‘Friend,’ ha, you’re sweet on him!” cries Casper. “That’s what makes him so scared. He pulled his pants down in front of the—”

  “Oh, Casper, hush,” says Anne and moves away quickly.

  When Hayes raises his eyes, she is already gone.

  Casper calls out, “Where’s my punch? Where’s my pill?” and then turns on Hayes a crushed-looking face.

  He sighs, gives his stump a consoling pat, and shakes his head sadly. “I’ll tell you one thing for sure,” he says. “She’s gonna be downright heartbroken when they cart you off to the booby hatch.”

  LEGGETT STANDS at the end of the bed, peering down at him through the mosquito curtain. The ward, bathed in amber light, is entirely quiet, but Hayes can hear the sound of a bell ringing somewhere outdoors, irregularly, as if blown by wind. Leggett stares at Hayes with his eyebrows arched and his mouth drawn into a straight line—as if he has just asked Hayes a question and awaits the answer. After a moment, he removes the canteen from his belt and takes a long drink, then offers it to Hayes.

  A spiral of smoke rises from the opening in the canteen.

  Hayes presses his hands over his eyes, and the moment he does so, he is filled with a longing for his father, as if it were his father’s ghost at the end of the bed. He parts his fingers and sees that the specter has gone. He lowers his hands and turns onto his side.

  Raugh, awake, looks at him wide-eyed and whispers, “Who was that?”

  But Hayes pretends not to hear and closes his eyes again.

  IN THE DREAM, he lies on his back somewhere warm and wet—he cannot tell where, for even though his eyes are wide open, he can see only absolute blackness. He hears a nearby crackle of fire, but whatever burns casts no light. Soon there’s an increasing din of musketry, thundering artillery, and the maniacal rebel yell. What wakes him from the dream is not the noise but a startling awareness that he’s bleeding from a wound at the middle of his spine and the warm wetness beneath him is his own blood.

  A charred Billy Swift stands at the end of the bed, the whites of his eyes blazing in the ward’s dark blue air. Billy has lost his cap. Wisps of smoke rise from the scorched fabric of his coat. He looks at Hayes with eyes like skewers, as if he means to read his mind or somehow see his future. At last his face softens, and he says, “It’s a miracle, Hayes, a miracle,” and then turns and limps away into a cluster of human-shaped shadows that appear to greet and envelop him.

  HAYES FEELS a hand on his brow, and when he opens his eyes, he sees the face of Dr. Bliss, the hospital’s surgeon in chief. “Wake up, son,” says the major, “there’s someone here who thinks he might know you.”

  The mosquito curtains have been drawn toward the rafters. Morning sunlight streams at a sharp angle through the windows on the opposite side of the ward. Hayes sits up partway and sees—standing at the end of the bed, precisely as Leggett and Swift had stood earlier—a uniformed surgeon, a large and strikingly handsome man, who smiles and narrows his gray eyes. “Yes,” says the man, nodding, “though I might very well have missed him … his hair’s grown long and he’s terribly wasted.”

  “He’s wasted because he doesn’t eat,” says Dr. Bliss. “And can’t be persuaded to.”

  He turns back to Hayes and asks, “Do you know this gentleman? He says he met you at Brandy Station.”

  Naturally Hayes believes he’s dreaming, but he gets to his feet anyway and salutes the man—who returns the salute, comes forward beaming and reeking of cigars, and pulls Hayes into a careful but firm embrace.

  “You remember me,” he whispers into his ear. “It’s Speck, my boy … Dr. Speck.”

  He holds Hayes at arm’s length, still smiling, and says, “Major Bliss, this young private was presumed dead by all who knew him.”

  “Oh, you know we’re very good here,” says Dr. Bliss. “He’s not the first soldier we’ve managed to resurrect.”

  Dr. Speck laughs and says, “Well, I’m happy to report that this resurrected soldier is one of Brooklyn’s finest young pitchers of the base ball … a member of the Eckford Club. Quite good at the bat as well and—”

  Hayes’s knees buckle and Dr. Speck catches him and settles him back onto the bed. He lifts Hayes’s legs one at a time onto the mattress, and once he has got him arranged, he says, “Last week in Cold Harbor, I treated a certain Frenchman who revealed himself an acquaintance of yours.”

  He quickl
y confides to Dr. Bliss that a tree limb had fallen upon the Frenchman and fractured his shoulder. Then, to Hayes, he adds, “He told me the most extraordinary story about you.”

  Hayes recalls standing next to Leggett by a cooking fire and watching as Dr. Speck—who was assigned to a different regiment—walked away down a hillside; the doctor, whom Leggett called Major Sawbones, was suffering from the flux and turned abruptly and hurried toward the sinks. He recalls writing in a letter to Sarah that the surgeon who’d befriended him was named Speck, despite his being quite a large man.

  Now Dr. Speck sits next to Hayes, leans down close, and peers into his eyes, as if he will mesmerize him. Softly he says, “You must start eating, my friend,” and Hayes nods.

  The doctor, never allowing his gaze to waver, says, “And you must speak to us, for there’s no reason for you not to. Your voice still resides within you … you have only mislaid it.”

  Hayes turns his head to the side, but Dr. Speck rights him by the chin. “Look at me,” he says. “I have absolute confidence in you. You might have walked through hell since I last saw you … I don’t know … but you are still the exceptional young man who can hush the crowd at the Union Grounds … self-possessed as a man twice your age. I want you to take a deep breath, in and out, and then I want you to say my name aloud. Don’t try to speak … Only speak.”

  Hayes inhales. He imagines himself running up to the line and releasing the ball inches from the ground, his knuckles nearly brushing the grass. He exhales and says, “Felix Rosamel.”

  He recognizes the voice as his own, though it sounds smaller than before, and dry, like Casper’s.

  Dr. Speck smiles and glances at Dr. Bliss. “That’s the Frenchman with the fractured shoulder.”

  “Remarkable,” says Dr. Bliss.

  Hayes looks up at the surgeon in chief and says, “The attendant … the one named Babb … he steals money from the soldiers when they’re sleeping.”

  “Is that so?” says Dr. Bliss.

  Hayes, who can tell that the surgeon is more intrigued by his speaking than by what he has said, answers, “Yes … and he sells morphine to the ones in pain.”

  “Well—,” starts the surgeon, but Raugh interrupts from the adjacent bed, surprising both Hayes and the two others.

  “It’s true,” says Raugh in his deepest baritone. “He tried putting his hand under my pillow one night and got a good throttling for it.”

  ———

  “OF COURSE,” says Walt with a dreamy look. “Your mother was a summer field and your father a haze … so naturally the happy product of their union would be a summer-field haze. Lovely.”

  Burroughs laughs and shakes his head, as if Walt has said something naughty. The three of them—Walt, Burroughs, and Hayes—sit at the end of a table in the dining room. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and they are the only people left in the plain long room with its two rows of tables and one bare window.

  “I believe I’ve heard of you,” Walt says to Hayes. “I wonder if you’ve heard of me.”

  Hayes is thinking of Walt’s remark about the summer field and the haze, and it has the effect of making him feel tired. At dinner, he made an effort to eat more than usual, and the fatigue revives his suspicions about the hospital food. He looks at Walt—who sits with his hands resting atop the silver handle of his cane—and notices, as if for the first time, the man’s unusually high brow; also, there’s a sunken quality to his cheeks Hayes has not seen before and a pained aspect to his eyes that never entirely goes away; his voice has grown so hoarse, he sounds now as if he’s whispering everything he says.

  “You’re overwhelming him, Walt,” says Burroughs. “Imagine how it must feel, to speak only a dozen words in all these weeks, and then be asked to—”

  “Yes, yes, John, you’re right, as usual,” says Walt. “Where would I be without you to keep me in check? You tame me, and like a so-called lower animal, I end up loving you for it.”

  Burroughs bows his head in courtly fashion and says, “More than happy to oblige.”

  “You look splendid, my boy,” says Walt to Hayes. “Freshly shaved and neat as a pin. Try not to be anxious. Remember, your supporters wildly outnumber any dandy self-seeking antagonists … and besides—”

  “Besides,” says Burroughs, “Walt won’t allow anyone to bully you. You may be sure of it.”

  “That’s right,” says Walt, but Hayes observes a hint of self-doubt cross his face, even as he tries to veil it with a smile. Hayes has noticed variants of this symptom before: Walt’s constant good nature is a cultivated thing, requiring preservation, and Hayes wonders if the always-pink rims of the man’s eyes are not the mark of regular private weeping.

  In truth, Hayes does not fear being bullied, not by the angry Captain Gracie or anyone else. He thinks perhaps he should fear it, but he has not been able quite to muster the feeling. He fears the hospital’s catching fire. He fears being burned alive. He fears he might have actually already died in the Wilderness and that everything that has unfolded since (and unfolds still) is a sort of stagecraft, with none of the players being who they seem. He wants to believe that Dr. Speck’s unexpected arrival in Washington is the miracle foretold just hours before it happened by Billy Swift’s ghost. But he’s afraid that at any moment what he perceives as Dr. Speck will change to a charred hull of the man, a kind of ashen gantry from which the soul has long departed. He wants to believe that now that he has found his mislaid voice, he might affect the course of his future for the better, but he fears, as he has feared all along, that finding it might work against him instead.

  “I told you once, a while ago,” says Walt, “and now I’ll tell you again—”

  But at that moment, the others—Captain Gracie and the two surgeons—enter the room. All three already at the table quickly stand, and Hayes notes that the room turns considerably darker. His salute seems to go unnoticed, and immediately, before Dr. Bliss can make any introductions, Captain Gracie says, “Why are these men here?”

  “They are Private Hayes’s friends,” says Dr. Bliss.

  “I see no need of them,” says Captain Gracie. “What do we want here of infamous poets and poets’ friends?”

  “Well,” says Dr. Bliss, smiling, “they’re not here for you, Captain. I have given them permission to audit. Please, do try to proceed without needless insults. Walt, will you and Mr. Burroughs please take a seat over there?”

  He indicates the opposite row of tables, to which Walt and Burroughs retreat. From Hayes’s vantage, they are now only silhouettes, and Walt, possibly because of his being reduced to a silhouette, puts on his hat.

  Dr. Bliss instructs Hayes to sit where he was sitting before, but the captain says, “I prefer the private to stand during questions.”

  “Private Hayes,” says Dr. Bliss, with emphatic composure, “are you prepared to stand during the captain’s questions?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Hayes, though his legs feel as if they might fold under him.

  “Very well,” says the surgeon. “But if the private is to stand, we’ll all stand.”

  Dr. Speck, already seated opposite Hayes at the table and busy trimming a cigar, sighs and stands up again. Dr. Bliss draws a watch from his coat pocket and looks at it. “Since we find ourselves so inundated with new arrivals,” he says, “and since that inundation is the cause for Dr. Speck’s reassignment to us here, I’m eager to return him as quickly as—”

  “Pardon me,” calls out Walt from the other side of the room, “but should Mr. Burroughs and I stand as well?”

  This provokes soft laughter from Dr. Speck, and Dr. Bliss says, “No, Walt, you should remain seated. Now, Captain Gracie, I was about to say—”

  “If you wish to return Major Speck to the wards,” says the captain, “you might let him go right now as far as it concerns me.”

  The surgeon in chief lowers his head for a moment, takes a breath, and then looks straight at the captain. “Sometimes, Captain, your lack of decorum
tries my patience. As you know, I consider this interview unjustified, and I should think you might at the very least refrain from advising me, unbidden, in the process. Now, you have exactly five minutes.”

  “Thank you, sir, my apologies,” says the captain. “I only meant that if the major would be more useful elsewhere, I don’t want to be the cause of his detention.”

  Dr. Bliss looks down at his watch again, and at last the captain blinks his eyes, clears his throat, and turns to Hayes.

  “Private Hayes,” he says, “we’ve been told that following the battles in Virginia on the fourth, fifth, and sixth of May, you were deliberately abandoned in the field … by your commanding officers and by all other personnel … left to find your own way … purportedly to find your way back home. And this, without any sort of formal discharge.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Hayes. “That is true.”

  “I wonder if you appreciate how such an improbable tale burdens our credulity?” asks the captain. “Abandoned on the battlefield by one’s own comrades. And at a time when the army needs every possible—”

  “Unfortunately, Captain,” says Dr. Speck, “it’s not so rare as you suggest. If it were, there wouldn’t be a need for an order from the War Department stating—”