by Gore Vidal
“Thompson’s Drug Store,” the man read. “Aren’t you a bit late to be delivering prescriptions?”
“No, sir. At least not late for Mrs. Alexander, who’s sinking fast, they say …”
“Go on.”
As David crossed the bridge, he found himself walking straight into a splendid sunset. Dazzled though his eyes were, he could see that there was practically no traffic from the Virginia side except for an occasional wagon of farm produce, while from the Washington side there were a few lone walkers like himself but no carriages. Those who had intended to leave the Union for the Confederacy had long since done so. Halfway across the bridge, he stopped and looked downriver to Greenleaf’s Point, red as blood in the sunset, as was the Capitol on its hill farther to the east. It was then that David noticed an odd metallic glitter just below the point where Maryland Avenue converges with the Long Bridge.
“Move on,” said a voice. He looked up. A patrol of Union infantry was marching from the Virginia side to the Washington side. A corporal had spoken to him.
“Yes, sir,” said David; and he moved on, aware that what he had seen in the swamp south of the bridge was, at the very least, a regiment of infantry, and the flashing lights were bright bayonets reflecting the red sun.
On the Virginia side, David was recognized by the Confederate sergeant, a large-limbed fellow a few years older than himself. “Off to the tavern, Davie?” The sergeant winked at him.
“Well, I’m a bit dry in the throat, if the truth were known.”
“See you then,” said the sergeant. “When I go off duty.”
David made his way straight to the tavern. The main barroom was half empty. Before the trouble, the musty, beer-and-sawdust-smelling room would have been crowded with local farmers as well as with thirsty travellers from the South, having one last drink in Dixie before proceeding on to the capital; but now there were only gray-uniformed soldiers, and a few travelling-salesmen types, all standing at the bar, feet on the never-polished brass rail.
David ordered a beer; ate a pickle; asked the bartender, “Is Mr. Mayberry here?”
“No, Davie. He’s over to Alexandria.”
“When’s he due back?”
“Most any time, I guess.”
David waited until midnight. He drank and swapped stories with the Confederate sergeant and his friends. From time to time he would go outside to relieve himself beneath a full white moon that made the night like day. All was quiet at the Virginia end of the bridge, where soldiers whispered passwords to one another as they came and went, while, to the south, the lights of nearby Alexandria made a yellow glow in the black sky.
At midnight, David was beginning to feel the effect of all the beer that he had drunk; he took the barman to one side. “Maybe I should go looking for him.”
“I don’t know where to tell you to look. He should’ve been back hours ago.” The barman was plainly disturbed. “There’s rumors,” he said in a low voice.
“That’s why I got to get my message to him.”
“I don’t honestly know how you can, Davie.”
Despite the beer that he had drunk, David took seriously his mission. He walked the six miles into Alexandria, where he went straight to the Marshall House, a small hotel on whose roof was visible the Confederate flag. In the hotel’s barroom, David found the owner, a man named Anderson, whom he knew by sight. Anderson was seated at a table with what looked to be a number of local businessmen. David gestured from the bar that he would like to speak to the owner, who joined him at the bar.
“I know you, don’t I?”
“Yes, sir. I’m David Herold. Thompson’s Drug Store. I visit with Mr. Mayberry some, when I come over here on errands.”
“That’s where I know you. Whiskey,” said Anderson to the bartender. “You growed a moustache since I saw you last.”
“Yes, sir.” David downed the whiskey. “I got to find Mr. Mayberry, sir. I got an important message for him.”
Anderson frowned. “I saw him earlier. He looked in to say all was well—for now. He was in a hurry, I thought. Can I help you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good boy. Trust nobody. Well, drink all you like. Wait here if you want.” Anderson went back to his table. David was now sleepy from drink. He had also been up since five. He asked the bartender if there was a place where he might lie down; and he was shown to a shed back of the hotel where he stretched out on a bare cot; and slept.
David was dreaming that he was caught in a thunderstorm on the river’s bank when, suddenly, the thunder was right on top of him. Awakened by the sound of gunfire, David flung himself from the cot to the earthen floor; then got himself out of the shed to find that the moon was down and the sun almost up, and the street crowded with people; some still in their nightshirts; others half dressed. Everyone was hurrying toward the Long Bridge.
“What’s happening?” David managed to stop an old man who, perversely it looked, was going in the opposite direction.
“Yankees gone and crossed the river. They’s attacking Alexandria!”
As the sun rose, David saw again the bayonets that he had seen the previous evening, only now they were silver-bright, not blood-red. The Confederate garrison had been given one hour to evacuate Alexandria, which they had done; they were now on their way to Richmond. As David watched, Alexandria filled up with Union troops, mostly men from New York’s Seventh Regiment.
The townspeople simply stared at them, more astonished than angered or frightened. But then no one quite knew how to behave when American troops occupied an American town except the town’s pigs, who screamed in terror at all the horses that threatened to trample them to death.
A group of Yankee officers walked past David. They were in high spirits. One of them was the twenty-four-year-old colonel of the Zouaves, Ellsworth, who had been delighting Washington—and David—with his regiment’s extraordinary drill, not to mention their recent performance when a fire broke out next to Willard’s and a group of them—New York firemen in civilian life—made a human ladder against the side of the burning building and then, passing buckets of water from hand to hand, had put out the fire to the loud applause of a thousand spectators, among them David.
More than ever, David wished that he was Colonel Ellsworth. The young man moved like a tiger, a highly enraged tiger when he saw the Confederate flag atop the Marshall House. Ellsworth was within a yard of David. “I’ll take care of that,” he said, grimly. “Sergeant!” Ellsworth turned to the soldier next to him. “Fetch me a company of men.” The man saluted; and hurried off. “Major!” He turned to a nearby officer. “Occupy the telegraph office.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain!” He turned, smartly, to another officer. “Take a company and occupy the railroad depot.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
Disastrous though this day was for the Confederacy, David would have given an arm to be this extraordinary young man, so cool, so precise, so—heroic.
Ellsworth, followed by several officers and men, dashed into the hotel. A moment later, Ellsworth was on the roof of the hotel. There was a gasp from the Alexandrians in the street below as he cut down the flag with a Bowie knife. For an instant, in perfect triumph, he waved the flag over his head; and David knew perfect ecstasy as he imagined himself up there. Then Ellsworth vanished through a trapdoor in the roof. A moment later, there was the sound of a shotgun going off inside the hotel; followed by a second blast; and a loud cry. Suddenly, framed in the doorway of the Marshall House, a corporal stood, holding in his arms the plainly dead body of Ellsworth from whose chest the arterial blood made jets, like a miniature fountain, in response to the last spasmodic beatings of the heart, covering the pale face and black curls with a scarlet film. A woman screamed at the sight. David fled toward the Long Bridge.
Mr. Surratt moaned when David told him what had happened. “We could have saved the town if Mayberry had got my message.” The old man lay, propped up with pillows, cl
utching a crucifix in one long, yellow hand.
“Not with all those Yanks, sir. There was thirteen thousand, the papers said. There was only five hundred of our boys in Alexandria.” David wondered what had happened to his drinking partner of the night before. If anyone as handsome and heroic as Colonel Ellsworth could be shot to pieces, what chance did a mere Confederate boy or, for that matter, anyone have once a war had started? David had never seen a man shot before. He could not get over the way the spurting blood had seemed to have a life of its own just as its owner ceased to have any life at all.
“They could’ve been warned. They could’ve brought in Beauregard’s troops. They could’ve made a show, at the least.”
“What did the message mean?”
“Lucifer was Alexandria. That meant it was to be attacked within twenty-four hours. The son of morning was the Hampton Roads. That’s just opposite Fortress Monroe, where Ben Butler’s holed up, within striking distance of Norfolk and Richmond. I reckon he’s already attacked Hampton and Newport News. That was the plan. While Satan is the Potomac Heights just across from Georgetown, which we lost at dawn, which means our railway line is cut. Oh, these God-damned white Northern niggers!” A fit of coughing cut short the old man’s fury.
As David made his way through crowded, generally joyous streets to Thompson’s, he wondered why the message had not been sent several days earlier. But then he had no way of knowing exactly how it was that Mr. Surratt got his secrets from inside the War Department. The fact that he got them at all and that there were a thousand Davids in the city to take the news across the river was one of the few good things to contemplate on this entirely bad day.
That day and the next were equally bad at the President’s House. On the second day Colonel Ellsworth lay in state in the East Room, and a long line of people came to look down at the now-clean marble-white face and dark curls. Keckley stood with Willie and Tad; held them each by a hand, and let them watch for half an hour as the weeping Zouaves filed past their fallen leader. Then Cousin Lizzie appeared and took the boys to the upstairs sitting room, where Mary and the Chevalier Wikoff were seated, drinking tea. From the window, the Union flag was now clearly visible atop the Marshall House. The Confederate flag that Ellsworth had died for lay folded now on a table in the oval sitting room. To Mary’s horror, the flag, drenched in Ellsworth’s blood, had been presented to her at the funeral service as a memorial of the war’s first hero. Once she had left the East Room, she had given Lizzie the flag; and tried not to be ill, as they fled upstairs.
Mary had not been as fond of Ellsworth as her husband, but the fact that someone close to all the family was suddenly dead and lying in the East Room was in itself quite enough to bring on the old panicky feeling that often presaged The Headache. Grimly, she made conversation. Fortunately, the Chevalier was easy to talk to and delightful to listen to.
“Colonel Ellsworth worked in Mr. Lincoln’s law office.” Mary talked rapidly, in a race with her inner demon. “He had no gift for the law, even Mr. Lincoln saw that, but he was a natural soldier, and marvelous with his hands, with guns, with the training of soldiers.”
“Mr. Lincoln has taken this hard, I suppose?” Wikoff sipped his tea, a look of compassion on his grizzled yet still handsome face.
“God, yes! As hard as I have ever seen him take any such death, excepting that of Eddie, our boy who died. One never grows used to these things. It is odd, isn’t it? Particularly in the West, where there is the cholera and all sorts of other sickness that can sweep like the wind through a family or a town, taking the best with it.” Mary could feel the dull ache beginning just back of her eyes. She prayed that this was simply an ordinary headache; she had not the time to be ill now. She would fight it, she decided, pouring herself more tea.
Cousin Lizzie entered with Willie and Tad. “They were crying, the soldiers,” said Tad, with wonder. “I didn’t know they ever did that.”
“They do,” said Mary, “when they are very sad, as they are now because their colonel’s dead.”
“But you always say when I cry that soldiers don’t cry like I do.” Tad’s mind was already of the legal sort.
“You don’t cry because something important has happened,” said Willie, severely, “like your friend being shot in a war. You cry because you don’t get what you want.”
“I cry when I fall down.” Tad began to enumerate the numerous fair instances of his weeping.
But Willie cut him short. “What happens, Ma, to Ellsworth, now?”
“Why, they’ll send him home and bury him in the churchyard.” The ache was beginning to spread from the back of the eyes to a place deeper inside her head.
“And that’s all?” Willie looked sad; he was growing into an uncommonly handsome boy, she thought; the large, blue-violet eyes were those of her own mother, born again.
“That’s all there is for anybody at the end,” said Cousin Lizzie, a bit too complacently, thought Mary. Lizzie loved funerals; and memento mori of any kind.
“How could he be playing with us this time day before yesterday in the backyard there”—Willie pointed to the Park—“and now he’s all cold and white-looking and lying in a box?”
“It’s God’s will,” said Cousin Lizzie.
“Yes,” said Mary, beginning to feel faint. “ ‘There is a time to be born …’ ” She could not finish the familiar passage because the pain in her head was setting the room afire. Chairs and tables were developing lurid nimbuses. But she would not give way; not this time. She stared at Willie; he seemed to be standing, pale and serene, at the center of a mandala of flame. “You don’t remember Eddie,” she began with difficulty.
“Everyone dies,” said Tad, cheerfully, rushing from the room.
“That’s true, isn’t it.” As Willie turned away, the fiery envelope turned with him. “We never know,” he said, “when we’ll die, which is really unfair, isn’t it, Ma? Because you can’t plan or anything. He was going to get married …”
The pain forced Mary to shut her eyes; forced her to scream; forced her onto the floor. But when she was able to open her eyes again, the pain had grown tolerable; and she was in her bed. Lincoln sat beside her, holding her hand. Keckley sat on the other side of the bed, keeping watch.
“Oh, Father,” she said. “Of all times …”
“Don’t talk, Mother. You’ve had a bad bout. But it looks to be over.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days, Mrs. Lincoln,” said Keckley, when Lincoln would not answer her.
“God, no! Of all times,” she repeated. “Are the boys all right? I was talking to Willie when …”
Lincoln smiled. “Willie has now taken to writing poetry. He wrote a very pretty ode to Ellsworth. I’ll give it to you later.”
Suddenly, Mary heard the sound of a loud high voice singing nearby: “Old Abe Lincoln, a rail-splitter was he, and that’s the way he’ll split the Confederac-ceee!”
Lincoln chuckled. “Tad’s in excellent voice today. He doesn’t bother you, does he?”
“Oh, no!”
Mary succeeded in smiling, too. “I think that’s a bit discourteous, calling you a rail-splitter.”
“Well, Mother, they can hardly sing ‘Old Abe Lincoln, Counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad was he.’ It just don’t scan. Anyway, I can still split a rail if I have to.” Tad began, with unusual insistence, to sing the same verses again. “I’ll go quiet him down.” Lincoln left the room. Fearfully, Mary turned to Keckley, “What did I do? What did I say?”
“You were mostly unconscious. When you were not, you were delirious.” Keckley put a powder in a glass of water.
“I hope the doors were shut, and no one heard.”
Keckley gave her the potion to drink. “Don’t you worry. No one heard a thing. I got you to bed straight away, and no one’s set foot in this room except Mr. Lincoln and me.”
“I sometimes think,” said Mary, beginning already to feel drowsy, “that there real
ly is such a thing as hell, but that we must live in it before we die, not after.”
Mary suddenly recalled a jingle that she had not thought of in years. “Mammy Sally, who brought us all up, used to tell us that every Friday night the jaybirds all go down to hell and report to the Devil on who was bad during the week. So every time we saw a jaybird, we used to sing, ‘Howdy, Mr. Jay, you are a tell-tale-tell. You play the spy each day, then carry tales to … hell …!’ ” On the word “hell,” Mary drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
SEVENTEEN
SALMON P. CHASE stood behind the massive black-walnut desk. In a semicircle before him sat a dozen of the country’s leading bankers. Jay Cooke had summoned them to Washington for a consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, whose report to Congress on the state of the nation’s finances was now being composed. The president and cashier of New York’s Bank of Commerce, Messrs. Stevens and Vail, sat side by side, polite, attentive, inscrutable; as well as the officers of the Albany Exchange Bank and the American Exchange Bank; as well as assorted independent bankers like Morris Ketchum and William Henry Aspinwall.
At first, Chase had struck the confident note that all was well with the nation’s finances. But these men knew better and, ultimately, they would have to help him finance a military establishment that was threatening to cost the government a million dollars a day even though no battle had yet been fought anywhere. The capture of Alexandria had cost only one life, that of Colonel Ellsworth, while the seizure of the Hampton Roads and Newport News had been bloodless, but expensive. Chase did his best to emphasize the cost of simply keeping an army and a navy.
“We have received,” said Chase, aware that the bankers already knew the sum, “twenty-three million dollars in voluntary contributions from various state legislatures, municipalities and private persons. Since the President’s second proclamation on the third of May, calling for forty-two thousand volunteers to serve three years, the costs of our military efforts have sensibly increased.” Chase stared with some pleasure at the gilded window cornices surmounted by the Treasury’s seal, his seal. “As you know, gentlemen, when this Administration took office, we found an empty larder. The panic of 1857 turned what had been a Treasury surplus into a deficit, while our Southern friends who were still in the Congress managed to keep us from imposing excise taxes. The few loans that were floated in the general market were done so at exorbitant rates of interest.” Chase studied their faces on the phrase “exorbitant rates of interest,” the reason why those money-men were now seated so demurely in his office. They would be more than happy to buy up the government’s bonds if they were short-term and paid twenty-percent interest. Chase had made up his mind not to go above seven percent. Plainly, there was going to be a good deal of haggling; he thought of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, as he always did in times of trial.