But the soldier, staring down at the hound, says only, “Is he yours?”
“No,” answers Hayes, “I don’t know whom it belongs to. Might be a stray who wandered in.”
“Can I pet him?” asks the soldier.
Hayes sits beside the soldier and coaxes the dog up from the floor, snapping his fingers and whistling softly. The soldier reaches out his free hand, and without hesitation the hound lays its head in his lap. Hayes notices the soldier’s fingernails—lined with grime and chewed down to the quick.
Grinning ear to ear and exposing a wide gap in the top row of his teeth, the soldier says, “I think he likes the way I smell.” He cups the dog’s muzzle in his palm for a moment and then gently scratches the forehead. “No,” he says, “I didn’t get lost. I just figured I’d take a little stroll … to collect myself. I’m supposed to be two wards over. I’m sorry to confess it, but I’m scared to death of doctors. After what we been through … what all we seen … it’s doctors that scare me. Somebody told me—besides the saws and the knives—they got hypothermic styringes in this place. Needles … big as knitting needles … they stick into you and pump you full of morphine and the like. Is that true?”
“I haven’t seen anything like that on this ward,” says Hayes. “Only pills and powders.”
“I am very glad to hear it,” says the soldier. “I ain’t about to let nobody stick me with no needle, I don’t care what. I took a bullet to my elbow and another one to my ribs … both of them just chipped me, though, one right after the other. The first hit my elbow, and I threw up my arm in the air, and the second scraped my ribs, just like that, bang-bang. I ought to be dead. Does that wind blow like that all the time?”
“No,” says Hayes. “I’ve never seen it blow this hard.”
“Does it always stink like that? Smells like a damn latrine.”
“I’m afraid so.”
The soldier lowers his voice and, indicating Casper, says, “What’s wrong with him? He looks like he’s already been dead a day or two.”
“He’s got a blood infection,” says Hayes. “From the amputation wound.”
“Did he get it here in the hospital?”
Hayes nods.
“I heard they kill about as many in these places as they help,” says the soldier. “How’d you end up here? You look okay.”
“A shell exploded right next to me,” says Hayes. “I was …”
He stops, for he can’t tell where the sentence might be going.
“I bet you went deaf for a while,” says the soldier.
“For a while,” says Hayes.
“I wonder how come it didn’t kill you.”
“What you mean?”
“You said it exploded right next to you. I wonder how come you didn’t die. You didn’t even … you still got all your limbs and everything.”
A burst of wind blasts through the window, very loud, and Hayes flinches. A scent of gunpowder stings his nostrils. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t die.”
The soldier looks at him apologetically, and says, “Makes you feel kind of strange, don’t it?”
“What?”
The soldier shrugs and turns his attention back to stroking the dog.
Hayes says, “Oh, you mean surviving.”
The soldier nods but doesn’t look up. “Down in Piedmont,” he says, “about three weeks ago … I was ten feet away from my best friend … watching him ram his piece … and the thing went off in his face. Burned him up good and blew off both his hands. Died the next day in the field hospital. Now he’s dead and I’m not. I expect I could get used to it if I could stop dreaming about him most every night. I’ve about decided dreams is the worst part of war. Dreams and diarrhea … and doctors.”
The wind howls down between the pavilions, whistles in the ridge vents, and then stops abruptly. The flags and mosquito curtains hang limp. Both Hayes and the soldier look up at the ceiling as each of the two whitewashers looks down from his wooden ladder, startled by the sudden change. A near silence falls over the ward.
Seconds later, the wind kicks back up and reinstates the former noisy commotion.
“Well,” says the soldier. “I best be off before they start organizing a search party. I might not see you again. Looking at you, I figure you’ll be heading back into the fray pretty soon.”
“Pretty soon,” says Hayes, surprised by the sheer readiness of the fib.
The soldier stands, puts on his cap, and gives the hound a last pat. He and Hayes wish each other good luck, and Hayes watches him thread along the aisle to the middle of the ward, where he leaves through the doors to the covered way.
“Pretty soon,” whispers Hayes, and glimpses the shadow of his own future, a perseverance of things and sensations—horsecars and streetlamps, books and boat whistles, the scent of the ocean, the changing of seasons, mud and grass and ice, coals in the grate and Christmas boxes—but plagued by inquisitive men in black suits and sapped by a necessity for deceit. He’d gone to war and gone out of his senses, Orphan Hayes, a liar for being ashamed, further ashamed for being a liar.
Near the night watcher’s table, a nurse drops a basin with a great clatter. Immediately the skinny clergyman with the permanent scowl slips in the spilled (and probably soapy) water and falls to the floor. The incident sets off an uproar of laughter, but evidently the preacher has hurt himself, for a steward and a visiting policeman assist him to the wardmaster’s room.
The wind, if possible, increases. Hayes hears the staccato of grit driven against the outside walls of the pavilion. Soon the chaplain comes around with the mail, and to Hayes’s astonishment he tosses onto the end of the bed an envelope—unsealed, no stamps, and the only address “Ward H, Bed #33.”
Dear Comrade,
I will leave this for you with the chaplain—I don’t trust it to stay where I might otherwise put it. I am pretty low this morning but up early in spite of it & have been very lively—So much to do & I must see my landlord, make a final appearance at my office, &c.
Sorry to have kept you awake last night & more sorry to have given you a start—I still wonder if I shouldn’t have fetched the doctor—but the licorice you preferred did seem to restore your color & put you back to sleep—I regret you missed the moonrise … it came up over the roof of the next building, right inside your window—
I believe I have worked something out, dear son, abt your sister, who is undoubtedly named Sarah & to whom you are undoubtedly very close—If I am right, I saw in your face what my own face must have been when I first learned of my brother Jeff’s marriage. We had been so close, Jeff & I … loved each other so dearly when we were younger—I would have stopped us in time (or stopped time in us) & foregone such inconvenient changes as marriage, babies, &c.
Burroughs will drop in for a visit later to-day & then I’ll be along myself when I have accomplished all I must. We’ll see you one way or another all safe back to Brooklyn, back to health, and back to base ball—in my opinion, the best & most romantic game our race has invented so far (unless of course you count democracy)—
Walt
———
HE RECOGNIZES his choosing compliance as an empty gesture, for what are the alternatives? Besides—and this is what he recognizes most acutely—he has stopped caring: Hicks Street, the Asylum for the Insane, the siege of Petersburg and Richmond … how do they differ? It strikes him as strange—when he himself is so detached—that his fate has been the cause of so much fuss. Earlier, Burroughs stopped by briefly, a large and bulging canvas bag over his shoulder, and said that he had a score of deliveries to make for Walt first, but then he would return as soon as humanly possible. He stood a pillow-sized package, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, against a leg of Hayes’s table and told him to keep a close eye on it. In a kind of cheerful frenzied state, and wearing a surprising red waistcoat, he spoke everything rapidly, in a stage whisper, and seemed to be executing a scheme designed earlier and elsew
here. Hayes observed a wave of relief cross Burroughs’s face when he glanced at the sleeping Casper—Casper, at least, was one thing that didn’t need to be seen to. Just before he rushed away, he admonished Hayes not to go anywhere, which Hayes thought rather enigmatic if not comical. High conspiracy was afoot, and Hayes decided the only sensible response was to play the role of an obedient soldier and to do as he was told.
The wind has ceased entirely, the ward very warm now and bathed in sunlight and shadows. The whitewashers, half finished with the ceiling, have quit and gone with their ladders. Hayes has read over Walt’s letter several times. He imagines Walt pleased with himself for having worked out the matter of Sarah. (Most likely it didn’t require clairvoyance, since all the blood left Hayes’s face.) Of course Walt meant to express his characteristic empathy, but how could the love between Walt and his brother Jeff approximate the troubled waters of Hayes’s love for Sarah? How could closeness between brothers ever run the risk of crossing the line Hayes’s feelings had crossed? He was grateful for Walt’s inapt analogy, grateful that the real thing would simply never occur to him. In any case, from the shock of the news, one truth has emerged immediate and undeniable: Hayes has himself to blame—she would never have got herself engaged to a man like Gilfinian, so obviously her inferior, had Hayes not left her bereft.
Bereft—a word no doubt prompted by egotism. True, she hadn’t wanted him to leave, but was it because she loved him or because she didn’t want to be left alone? It seems entirely possible that once he’d gone, she simply coped, and what better way to cope than to marry? It isn’t likely that her connection to Gilfinian took root and bloomed into a betrothal in the span of a few months. Probably the thing was more than nascent already, and Hayes’s leaving cleared the way. Surely there were signs, which he would have noticed had he not been so caught up in himself and his own feelings. Her spirit helped him through the Wilderness. The Wilderness did not push her from his mind. If anything has changed, it’s that there is less room in his mind for her now. Less room, and if possible, even less clarity. It seems to him that his thinking on all subjects is now more akin to his thinking regarding her—a jumble, conflicted, confusing, wanting and not wanting—which accretes to a kind of brain-pressure … and which, if it persists, might conscript her into the ranks of the many things about which he is ceasing to care.
Two attendants arrive at Raugh’s bed to wheel him to the sinks. Hayes watches the ordeal, noting Raugh’s apparent passivity. He recalls a mind-trick he sometimes used to play on himself in base ball matches: when he had to face an especially dangerous batsman, he would adopt an attitude of indifference, convince himself he didn’t care what happened. It helped him not to be afraid.
BURROUGHS, when he returns, is tuckered out and preoccupied—also worried about Walt’s protracted failure to appear. He has taken out his watch three times since he sat in the chair by Hayes’s bed. Now, looking at it for the fourth time, he says, simply, with a sigh, “Walt.”
Hayes, bewilderingly composed amid what seems some kind of gathering storm, feels an urge to comfort him, maybe, if there were a way, with a dose of his own fresh-brewed indifference. Hayes, of course—spared the details of what Burroughs and Walt have cooked up—knows nothing of what’s at stake and nothing of the consequences of Walt’s tardiness; perhaps, he thinks, a privilege of being insane, even of being perceived as insane. He believes his composure has something to do with his recently acquiring (not through any effort of his own but rather the way one “acquires” an illness) a capacity to observe the curious antics of his mind, antics he has mistakenly taken far too seriously. Certainly he has learned the lesson of not believing everything he sees. Now, for example, and off and on throughout the day, he has felt sure that all fifty or sixty pairs of eyes on the ward are directed at him, but that’s surely untrue. Even while it may be a strong-enough notion to keep him from idly wandering about, he understands that it’s only a notion. He smiles at Burroughs and says, “Before I went to Virginia, I clerked for a while in a shipwrights’ office … where I learned a new word. The men would say of a certain vessel that she was walt … poorly designed or poorly built … unable to bear her sails for standing too high in the water.”
Burroughs laughs. “Did they have a word for a ship that perpetually arrives late to port?”
Mrs. Duffy enters the ward at that moment, carrying a guitar, and Burroughs groans and says, “All that was missing.”
She has never before brought along a guitar, and Hayes is almost interested in this new development. He notices, too, that she is without a bonnet, her hair pinned up elaborately but messily, and that though she’s past her prime and entirely unadorned, dressed in black, and has apparently set out to make herself as plain as possible, she has a lingering natural beauty; it shines through against all odds, rather like her occasional right notes, which always seem like accidents.
She sits near the stove, low to the floor, on what looks like a milking stool, the folds of her dress splayed around her. Happily, she does not sing, but only plays—plays very well, an air Hayes thinks might be from Mozart—and soon after she begins, a hush falls over the ward.
Suddenly Casper sits bolt upright in his bed, eyes shut, and says, “Oh … what a lovely breeze … I hear it singing …”
He pauses for a moment, as if to soak up the agreeable encounter.
He removes his cap, as if to let the breeze have at his red hair.
And then lies back down, immobile.
Burroughs stands and holds his flattened hand an inch above Casper’s mouth and nose. He turns to Hayes, shakes his head, and says solemnly, “I’ll fetch someone.”
Mrs. Duffy goes on playing, and gradually people take up their conversations again and the usual chronic murmur comes back, though lowered.
A minute later, Burroughs returns with the ward surgeon and two attendants whom Hayes has never seen before.
Dr. Dinkle leans down close to Casper’s face, lays his hand on Casper’s shoulder, and jostles him. “Private Mallet,” he says. “Wake up if you can.”
Casper’s eyes flutter open.
“Are you conscious that death is near, son?”
No sign of apprehension in Casper’s face, though his eyes remain open.
“Have you accepted your death, son … are you at peace with what’s happening to you?”
Still no response.
“Is there anything at all you want to say … either to your family or to God?”
Casper lies motionless, and at last Dr. Dinkle bends over and presses his ear to Casper’s chest. After another moment, the doctor stands, closes Casper’s eyes, and pulls the bedsheet over the boy’s face.
He says to Burroughs, “I believe he heard me. I believe he was, at the very last, aware, though he could no longer speak.”
He immediately takes his leave, nodding to the two attendants—dark-faced middle-aged convalescents, who go about their work in workmanlike fashion. They wrap Casper in the sheet that already covers him, lift him onto a stretcher, and, just like that, he’s borne away by strangers to the deadhouse.
There is no alteration in the ward’s constant lowered hum. Mrs. Duffy never misses a note in the air she plays.
Burroughs sits down in the chair and looks at his watch. He says to Hayes, “He was your friend.”
“Even more Walt’s,” says Hayes.
“From what Walt’s told me,” says Burroughs, “I imagine he’ll be relieved to arrive and find the empty bed. If he arrives.”
The two are silent for a while, during which Mrs. Duffy plucks out “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”
Soon Raugh stretches his arm across the narrow space between the beds and offers his hand to Hayes, which Hayes takes. At first, it really does seem to Hayes that it’s Abraham Lincoln who offers him solace. Raugh releases Hayes’s hand and then, shaking his head, says, “ ‘Jesus,… let me to thy bosom fly’ … but please, if I must, let me fly there from home, and not from a place like this.”<
br />
The sunlight leaves the ward in a wave from front to rear. The windows glare uniformly, bright silver.
Walt appears at last, looking red-faced and freshly bathed. He wears a tie with his wine-colored suit and a sprig of mint stuck into his lapel, the acorns on the cord of his felt hat newly polished. He kisses Burroughs on the cheek and then likewise Hayes. Clearly relying more heavily on his cane than usual, he sits on Casper’s mattress without any apparent surprise. Hayes thinks Walt has aged ten years since his birthday scarcely more than three weeks ago.
“He was leaving as I was coming in,” says Walt. “Please tell me he didn’t go out raving.”
“Quite the contrary, Walt,” says Burroughs. “It only just happened, not more than five minutes ago. He slept all day, peacefully. And right before he died, he sat up and looked for all the world transported.”
“ ‘Transported’?” says Walt. “Good word.”
“What was it he said?” Burroughs asks Hayes.
“ ‘Oh, what a lovely breeze,’ ” answers Hayes. “ ‘I hear it singing.’ ”
Walt stands and puts his arms around Hayes. As he squeezes him, he says, “You are a very fine young man. And John … I see you out of the corner of my eye, consulting your pocket watch.”
Walt releases Hayes but, instead of sitting back down, turns to Burroughs and says, “Let me have your chair, please, John. I want to put my back to the window … the light hurts my eyes.”
After they have rearranged themselves, Burroughs clears his throat and says to Walt, “So, tell us where we stand.”
“I can tell you two things for absolute certain,” says Walt. “First, Mrs. Duffy should definitely prefer this instrument to the one inside her neck. And second, I’m afraid I’m very ill and have procrastinated far too long. I can stay in Washington City not another day. I leave this very afternoon.”
Hayes receives this news with a realization that his cultivated indifference does not extend to being left at the hospital without Walt.
Nostalgia Page 30
