Nostalgia Read Online Free

removes his gear and collapses to the ground, where he turns to face the field. He sees no one there, but he expects the stalker will wait until he himself sleeps, as he surely must, to take up the slack. He opens his knapsack and frees the chicken, which scrambles frantically away but in a crazy circle that carries it back very close to the spot where it was freed. From his bread bag, he takes a corner of hardtack and crumbles it into his palm; the chicken cautiously edges nearer and stands close to his outstretched hand; it gazes off in another direction entirely, and when, after a moment, it pecks a crumb from Hayes’s palm, it does so as an apparent whim. Soon, in like fashion, the chicken has eaten all the crumbs, and Hayes shoos it away. Again the bird bustles madly in a wide arc that returns it close to Hayes’s side, where it twitches its head one way and another and occasionally picks at something near its feet. Of course Hayes had thought to kill and eat the chicken, but he felt sick when he imagined slaughtering and preparing it. And besides, how could he possibly risk a fire and roasting meat, giving away his location by both sight and smell?
    He lies back on the ground, thinking perhaps he has a fever. He resolves not to cry out or even to moan, though the pain of his wounds threatens to take his breath away. After a few moments, he props himself onto his elbows and sees a figure coming toward him across the field—the silhouette of a man, arms lifted in the air in a gesture of surrender. Hayes finds the bowie knife and moves swiftly farther into the dark skirt of the woods, slipping behind the trunk of a pine and pressing his cheek against its craggy bark. His mother’s face rises up in his mind—oddly, his dread and physical agony mix to make a feeling very much like longing—and he hears the
screak
of her fingernails on the glass of the omnibus window.
    T HE YOUNGSTERS IN the drum corps never got enough sleep, required as they were to be on call at all hours, day and night. During the secondhalf of the third inning—the teams tied at eleven runs apiece—the young drummer assigned by the colonel to keep Banjo away from the playing field nodded off. He leaned against a barrel, his mouth slightly ajar, and his cap had slid down covering most of his face. With one man out in the inning, a batter for the Twighoppers struck a ball straight into the ground a few paces from the home base, where it lay spinning in place, and before anyone in the field could reach it, Banjo bounded forward, gripped the ball in her maw, and sprinted into the outfield, where she commenced to run in great loops, chased by a gathering number of players and spectators. A merry chaos prevailed for two or three minutes till the foxhound lit out for the trees and disappeared into the piney forest with her prize.
    The captain of Hayes’s company dispatched a detail of six soldiers to track the dog and retrieve the ball, and meanwhile the batter for the Twighoppers was granted the first base and the match resumed. Soon a rumble of voices and laughter started up among the troops near the first base; like an ocean wave it spread along the margins of the field, growing louder as it went and wholly distracting the players. From his lolling chair, the colonel—who apparently had seen no reason why the reward of beer should be delayed until the conclusion of the match—cast a lost and dangerous-looking glare slowly round the lines, then stood at last, drew his pepperbox, and fired into the air. Having thus silenced the proceedings, he raised his voice to the general public and roared: “What the devil is so bloody funny?”
    After some seconds, a young private was pushed forward by his comrades into the open, where he stood startled to find himself so uncomfortably near the colonel. He straightened himself up and saluted, to which the colonel responded, “Well, Private, let’s have it!”
    “Well …, sir,” he said, haltingly,