American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  “It would be unbecoming to the president for you to accompany him to Springfield undecorated,” he said.

  Saluting him, I bit my tongue as a child might pinch himself to confirm his presence in the waking world.

  Grant returned my salute with a veteran nonchalance and, with a smile of goodwill, dismissed me. (We would never meet again, though he’d help me twice more.) I returned to the hospital, spruced myself up, and exchanged the bandage for the leather eye patch I would wear henceforth. Next morning, I collected my bugle and haversack and walked through the drizzle to the Baltimore & Ohio Depot to await the funeral train’s departure.

  The wet fields were green with ryegrass and timothy; the willows drooping over the Potomac, the dogwoods, and elm trees called “American” were in leaf. I caught beneath the rain’s scent that of the lilac. New lambs foraged the meadows while robins tugged worms from the germinating earth, as on any ordinary April morning. I had seen spring arrive many times before—to battlefields from the Peninsula to Pennsylvania, to the waste grounds of the Five Points and the ash heaps of the Battery. I could not be deceived by Easter promises. The natural world was not opposed to humankind, merely indifferent to it.

  Like most of my countrymen, I believed that we should subdue nature or, failing that, destroy it. According to Genesis, God gave us dominion over the earth and everything that comes of it. On the Great Plains, the army would slaughter buffalo to deprive the Indians of sustenance. Then it would slaughter the Indians. They were in the way of progress and the American meteor, which must fling itself—a blaze of glory—across the Mississippi to the Pacific. After the Washita River massacre and the bone heaps I saw above Bear River, my conscience began to gnaw at me. I wished I could have it out, like tonsils.

  At eight o’clock, the train prepared to leave the depot. A framed portrait of Lincoln stood in front of the locomotive’s funnel, from which sparks showered into the morning air as the engine overcame its reluctance. On so portentous a day, one might have scried the future in the embers, but I could not. Foreknowledge wouldn’t be granted to me until later, near the Little Bighorn.

  Washington City to Springfield, Illinois, April 21–May 4, 1865

  Mostly, I remember rain. It was an ordinary rain—signifying nothing—produced by whatever agency causes rain to fall; and it fell according to laws governing natural phenomena. That is to say, there was nothing in the least unnatural about it, although it interfered with the enjoyment I took, standing on the rear platform, adorned with my new medal and stripes.

  I thought myself an exceptional young man when I raised Jericho to my lips and blew ardently while the train slowed to let country people gawk. In the big cities en route to Springfield, I played my bugle while Mr. Lincoln’s coffin was taken off the train and laid on a fancy hearse. I admit I swaggered behind the catafalque drawn by black-plumed horses, between mobs of mourners, down the main streets of Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Michigan City, Chicago, and Springfield. In twelve days, the nine funeral cars of the so-called Lincoln Special traveled, in slow and lugubrious procession, one thousand six hundred and fifty-four miles of railroad track, past four hundred and forty-four towns and cities.

  I was a fair-haired, clean-shaven, well-turned-out young man, and I swear the girls did not know whether to look at me or the coffin. I carried Jericho under my arm, though I did not perform at the viewings. Buglers attached to the honor guards of the cities where we stopped played. I could have done just as well as they, but the twin vanities of politics and civic pride were against me. To tell the truth, which I can do more readily now that I am beyond temptation, I was secretly glad. I feared my hand would shake in front of the tens and hundreds of thousands of mourners lined up in their black hats and clothes to see the dead man’s face. They knew in their bones, wearied by many hours’ waiting, that this occasion, however somber, would be one to lord over those who missed it. They’d have put a pen into Lincoln’s hand if they thought he might, by galvanism or sympathy, give them his autograph. You know what people are like.

  In recollection, the cities where we stopped run together, but I vividly recall Cleveland, where a reporter and a photographer from the Cleveland Morning Leader were assigned to do a piece about the “The Bugler of Five Forks and the Lincoln Special.” I have it yet: two columns and a steel engraving of me holding Jericho against my Union coat, next to the Medal of Honor—my eye, caught in the coruscation of the magnesium flash, appearing wide and startled. I would have preferred a brave, unblinking look; nevertheless, I was pleased. Ever since childhood, I’d known that perfection is not of this world and, in all likelihood, not of the next. I was full of myself, my head turned by meeting General Grant and by my shiny decoration. No matter that I deserved neither honor. Or maybe I did, for having suffered sixteen years on this godforsaken planet. My emergence from obscurity had been abrupt. Like an owl surprised in a dark corner of the barn, I was dazzled by the unexpected light. But it didn’t last; neither my celebrity nor vainglory lasted much beyond Springfield, where Lincoln and his son Willie were carried to their rest on a gaudy silver-gold-and-crystal hearse lent by the city of St. Louis. Twelve years later, thieves were caught stealing Lincoln’s coffin, intending to ransom his remains for the release of the infamous Ben Boyd, jailed for counterfeiting. You know what people are like. I always did. In my life, I was never disillusioned—never lost my innocence, for I had none to start with.

  Chicago was memorable for the Irish laundress who gave me the eye, or maybe I gave her mine, as I walked behind the hearse, pulled by eight black horses down Michigan Avenue toward the courthouse. I left the procession and joined her at the curb. She was my age or a little younger— pretty in the way of colleens everywhere, although her face and hands looked boiled. I’d seen enough of her kind to know that in ten years she’d lose her prettiness to steam and lye. She wasn’t in the least bashful, having the flippant manner of the Irish, who—they are quick to tell you—are no worse, or better, than anyone else except the Negroes. I liked her and reached out to touch her mouth; she bit my finger and laughed.

  “You’re a bold one,” she said, “to be taking liberties with a young girl. I’ll call a copper if you try that on me again.”

  I fingered my medal, picked at a thread on the sergeant’s stripes, and gave her what I judged to be a worldly, contemptuous look. She must have seen it before, because she sneered. My dignity collapsed and, with it, the pretense of her annoyance. She took my arm and led me down a side street to a tenement hardly distinguishable from the one I’d left in Brooklyn four years before. Except for an old woman who coughed unmercifully on the other side of the wall separating the girl’s room from hers, the building was empty of people—all gone to see Mr. Lincoln’s send-off. Her room was little better than a closet, containing the runt half of a trundle bed, a pinewood bureau, and a lyre-backed chair. Outside, scarcely visible through the dirty window, was an alleyway jammed with barrels of rubbish and ash, beneath clotheslines hung with wash that didn’t look quite clean.

  The girl—I don’t remember her name, if I ever knew it— unpinned her hat, set it on the chair, and then, unpinning her hair, shook down a glossy tumble of chestnut. I buried my face in it, as if it might contain the remedy for an uneasy heart. I suppose mine was that, although I’d hardly stopped long enough since my flight from Brooklyn to have noticed. Pitying myself, I felt like crying but undid the buttons of her blouse instead.

  I’d like to boast how, confident and suave, I swept her into ecstasy. But the fact of the matter is, I fumbled and made a shambles of love. She was my first—I don’t count what’d happened in the chaplains’ hut—and I was bound to be clumsy and afraid. She knew more than I about the convergence of the sexes. She helped me through my ordeal, and never once did she make me feel ashamed. But I was, and with our comedy ended, I hurriedly dressed and ran out into the street to lick my wounds and compose the story of my conque
st: one I’d tell often, in conjunction with that of my heroism at Five Forks, in saloons, freight yards, and at railheads. Such fabrications are common among men—and among women, too, for all I know of them.

  I retraced my steps down Michigan Avenue, moving against the tide of mourners on their way to view the Rail Splitter’s remains. I passed beneath a banner strung across the street, proclaiming, THE HEAVENS ARE DRAPED IN BLACK. I remember the rain, although maybe it was only in my mind that it fell. I do recall having heard the courthouse bell toll all the way to Lake Michigan, where the president’s train had stopped on a length of track thrown over the water on a trestle. Moved by the melancholy bell, I took Jericho and, standing on the funeral car’s rear platform, blew taps— not for Lincoln, but for my own pathetic self. I don’t believe I ever played it better. Lincoln freed three million slaves, but I couldn’t free even so measly a thing as Stephen Moran. I wish I could tell you that a meteor fell into Lake Michigan, but it didn’t.

  We left Chicago for Springfield, riding through the night on the St. Louis & Alton tracks. Sleepless, I sat up with the president and Willie, who’d died of typhoid three years earlier. He had been disinterred from the Georgetown cemetery so that he might spend the silent ages with his father. Fort Wayne Junction, Bridgeport, Summit, Joy’s, Lemont, Lockport, Joliet (where twelve thousand mourners gathered at midnight in a silent sea of stricken faces and bared heads), Elwood, Hampton, Wilmington, Stewart’s Grove, Braceville, Gardner, Dwight, Odell, Cayuga, Pontiac, Ocoya, Chenoa, Lexington, Towanda, Bloomington, Shirley, Funk’s Grove, McLean, Atlanta, Lawn Dale, Lincoln, Broadwell, Elkhart, Williamsville, Sherman Station, Sangamon—towns and hamlets passed before my burning eye in a blur of faces made terrible by the wavering lights of kerosene lamps and torches.

  I feared I would vomit because of the smell of decomposition, noticeable in the parlor car ever since New York City, in spite of the onboard embalmer’s diligence. The president’s face, visible through the small hatch on the coffin’s lid, was turning black—a sign for those who took an interest in such things. I supposed it was for reason of the odor that I, among all living men and women aboard the train, had the car to myself that night. Remembering the cigars Grant had left for me, I lit one, wondering if he’d known I’d have need of it. I meant no disrespect by my fumigation, and I felt certain that Mr. Lincoln, who had understood expediency, would have forgiven me mine, had he been able to render a posthumous judgment.

  I suppose it only natural that I thought of Grant while enjoying one of his cigars. Of all the men I’d known, he was the best—even better than the man the world called “Honest Abe.” The vicious called him “Ape” and other hateful names. Neither man could abide pomp or fuss, but Grant was a rough soldier and the general who’d as good as anointed me with the flat of his sword on that April morning in 1865, at the beginning of my westering. He did much that was good besides: enforced the civil rights of former slaves and sent troops against the Klan. Sadly, the war against the buffalo, the Lakota Sioux, and the Cheyenne would take the shine off my admiration. Black Friday, the Whiskey Ring, the Delano affair—the scandalous history of his administration didn’t concern me.

  New York . . . I suppose I ought to tell what happened there, though I behaved shamefully.

  In New York, sixteen horses pulled the coffin on an opulent funeral car. I left the parade up Broadway to see if I might happen upon my father in one of the barrooms he used to haunt. But they were closed, their windows shuttered, so that even Manhattan’s most heroic drunkards were obliged to abstain for a day of mourning. As I turned away from the locked door of the Dragon’s Blood, frequented by men of the printing trade, a man stepped toward me and thrust a card into my hand. I had seen him earlier, skulking on the pavement that the mob deserted once the cortege had passed on its way to Fourteenth Street. Engraved and bordered in black, the stiff card resembled those used to announce a death in the family. It bore, in Cooper Italic, the motto Sic Semper Tyrannis. Knowing no Latin, I couldn’t decipher it. I thanked him—a small, furtive man in a greasy frockcoat—and put the card in my wallet. He clapped me on the back and shook my hand; I did the same to him.

  “You look like a man with a mighty thirst,” he said.

  “I could stand a glass or two of beer,” I replied.

  “The saloons are closed for the ‘Great Emancipator’s’ funeral,” he said in a tone of voice I thought a trifle snide. “I happen to know a private club where we can drink a great man’s health for freedom’s sake.”

  “Sounds fine to me,” I said.

  He led me down Broadway and into an alley, at the end of which was an engraver’s establishment. He rapped on the door in a complicated staccato, as though he meant to raise a spirit in the next world. We were let inside by a fat man decidedly of this one. The light was bad; the dreary shop smelled of acid and chemicals. The walls were papered over haphazardly with engravings of every sort: animals of the veldt, wildflowers of the Great Plains, the pyramids at Giza, pugilists in old New York, a patent medicine catalog. The floor, too, was littered with inked foolscap, stamped in grime by the soles of hobnailed boots.

  We followed the fat man into a cleaner, more spacious and illuminated room, where half a dozen others sat around a table laid with bottles of Tennessee whiskey and lager, as well as plates of pickled pigs’ feet, onions, and herring. We sat down, and I helped myself to beer and herring, while the man who’d brought me—his name, I think, was Titus— gave his impressions of the spectacle, which the others evidently had ignored. I went on to sample the whiskey and the pigs’ feet, paying slight attention to the talk around me. The more I drank, the less I was able to take in what was said, but I had a notion that the men spoke insultingly of the dead president. I wanted to object, to stand on my dignity and rebuke them for their irreverence, but the whiskey had tied my tongue, and I could hardly stand without toppling—never mind my dignity. So, feeling there was nothing to be done, I downed another glass.

  “Let’s drink a toast to our Great Emancipator,” the fat man said. “To him who, with a single bullet, has delivered us from the tyrant.”

  They raised their glasses to a framed engraving of John Wilkes Booth, shrouded in crepe.

  “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” they shouted in unison. “Thus Ever to Tyrants!”

  They eyed me suspiciously. Pickled as I was, I sensed their anger brewing, hot and bitter. I felt like Caesar encircled by the conspirators, with no place to duck.

  “Why aren’t you toasting him?” asked a man who’d been introduced to me as a retired expediter for the slave trade.

  He was red-faced, potbellied, and wheezing. He reminded me of Mr. Fezziwig, whose picture I’d seen while thumbing through a book left out on a major’s bunk. That was during the do-nothing days before Bull Run, when McClelland liked to play soldiers. I’ve never known a cockier son of a bitch than McClelland. Can you imagine if he’d beaten Lincoln in ’64? Old Abe’s life would have been spared, but the country would have gone to hell.

  “Perhaps you mistook him for a sympathizer,” growled a fierce old Copperhead.

  “He shook my hand when I gave him the card,” Titus replied indignantly, nodding toward a stack of them on the table. “He laid it in his wallet, like a lock of his sweetheart’s hair.”

  “He’s a damned Yankee sergeant!” snarled a weak-eyed, ink-stained man with the shape and color of a carrot. “You must’ve been crazy to bring him here!”

  “Plenty of Federal boys hate Lincoln for putting them through hell for the sake of the niggers!” Titus spluttered, like fire falling on damp tinder.

  “What’s that medal he’s wearing? For murdering Confederate boys, I suppose!” barked an Arkansas man who claimed to have mailed Lincoln seventeen death threats since ’64: one for each year of life taken, by a Union hangman, from the “Boy Martyr of the Confederacy,” David Owen Dodd.

  I pretended to have fallen asleep. They shook me roughly awake to explain myself.

  “Let him ki
ss the stick!” Titus said. “That’ll prove it one way or the other.”

  A skinny red-haired man named Gaiter, who’d lost a fortune in cotton during the war, fetched the stick while Titus praised it, for my benefit, as the one that hotheaded South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks had used to beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner “to within an inch of his damned life” on the Senate floor. Gaiter handled it with reverence, as you would a relic of a Christian saint. He offered it to my lips, and I kissed it willingly enough. There was room on the calendar for only one martyrdom in April, and my erstwhile commander in chief was welcome to it. I was, remember, just sixteen years of age and enfeebled by strong drink.

  My show of adoration appeased them. They clapped me on the back and filled my glass, but when I commenced to vomit up a swill of pigs’ feet and whiskey with a chaser, they hurried me outside and slammed the door. I considered myself fortunate to have escaped with my life. They were ridiculous but dangerous notwithstanding. Was I a coward? Would you have lit the fuse and waited to be hoisted by your own petard? Often, I’d measure myself against other men and find myself wanting in courage, in selflessness, in any kind of love.

  I’d never again go looking for my father. In fact, that day in New York City, the twenty-fifth of April, would be nearly my last back east. I’d make one more excursion there, ten, eleven years later. Increasingly, I would come to feel the tug of the West. It wasn’t anything definite. I had no tiny Horace Greeley in my head, urging me in that direction. It was a feeling, a sense, a raw emotion that stole over me, like rye whiskey taken slow. If westering was America’s destiny, it was also mine.

  The sweetish odor of animal corruption assailed my nose, snapping my reverie in two. My cigar had gone out. Lighting it, I saw in its glowing ember the dead leaves in the thickets of the Spotsylvania Wilderness that our musket lints had set ablaze. They burned down a stand of trees and, in it, hundreds of trapped Federal soldiers. That was Grant’s worst day of the war, and also theirs.