Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  They arrived in a scattered, desperate fashion. Units got mixed up and commands went unheeded. The crater that lay before them was almost empty (most of the South Carolina boys had landed far away), and it was natural to want to go down into it, as if it were a swimming hole they had discovered on some other summer day long ago. Once a half dozen of them had slid down, thousands of Union soldiers began whooping and jumping and piling in, until the crater filled up like a bowl of blueberries. Those who kept their minds on military objectives assumed they would just cross the clay and sand and come up the other side to find that the rebels had taken flight and left the field — maybe even the war’s final victory — to them. They laughed and yelled, all distinctions of rank and outfit disappearing in the predawn carnival.

  It ended in screams. The rebels had not cleared the field; they were soon rushing across it toward the western edge of the pit, firing down into it, picking off Union soldiers. Rushing for cover was impossible: the hole was so full of men there wasn’t room to move. The men were bubbles in a boiling pot, ready to be popped, one by one. General Ferrero’s colored soldiers, bringing up the rear they’d been ordered to occupy, succeeded in flanking the crater north and south, but they were soon driven down into it, where they were given gleeful priority by the rebels above, whose screams of vengeance never ceased, and by some of their Union brothers, who were already fighting for what air was left in the pit.

  Hour after hour it continued, and by mid-morning Will Harris and Major Cutting, along with Colonels Loring, Peirce, and Richmond, were still a half mile from the crater, deep in discussion of what they would tell investigators to save themselves and General Burnside from embarrassment or court-martial. As they worked on their story, Henry sat on his cot, silent, until 8:45 A.M., when he picked up a rifle, brushed off his tunic, and headed west toward the crater. Coming toward him on the morning breeze were screams, louder with each hundred yards he covered, until he was able to distinguish those of vengeance from those pain. The smells, first of smoke and then of exploded bowels, gathered and thickened as he reached the Union rim of the crater and looked down.

  There was a boy looking up plaintively, and Henry regarded him intently before realizing the boy had died, perhaps hours ago, with his eyes open. Farther toward the center, amidst patches of screaming and a hedgerow of limbs that used to belong to bodies, a pair of bayonets still parried each other, clicking like knitting needles. Toward the other side, about sixty feet from where he stood, a Negro’s head exploded in a shower of pink grain. Near him lay some Union flags the coloreds had recaptured from the rebels before being driven into hell.

  That, of course, was where he stood. He recognized it. It was the woodcut from Paradise Lost, the one inside his own father’s Milton, which sat in Ira Harris’s library in Albany. It was Saturday, which meant that Deirdre, an hour or two from now, would be dusting it. And when she did, he realized, his eyes scanning a thousand broken limbs and shattered skulls, he would be inside it. He now felt that everything in his life had tended toward this moment, this vision of man revealed. He stepped to the edge of the crater and looked down, whispering, “ ‘Hail horrors, hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new Possessor.’ ”

  He stepped onto the wall of mud and sand and began his descent, and he was shot, through the top of his chest, before his feet could reach the crater’s floor. He fell onto the small terrace of a ditch within the wall, where he lay for the next sixty-eight hours, passing in and out of dreams — dreams of the Eagle Tavern and his mother, of Clara, of his stepfather’s apple orchards, of the girls on Quay Street. By the time the burial truce was declared, he had lost the strength to bat the flies away from his wound. He lapsed into unconsciousness, after vaguely reasoning that he should try to keep his eyes open and move some part of his body, lest the teams of soldiers coming through with shovels proceed to bury him with the rest of the dead.

  HE WAS BREVETED, once he’d been lifted away from the Crater. His wound had bled amazingly little, the mud having acted as a natural poultice. Exposure and exhaustion were his real complaints, and even the effects of these were abating a week after the battle. He regained strength inside Fort Morton and was urged to complete his convalescence on home leave late in August. Pauline and the girls returned from Newport in order to nurse him. The summer heat in Washington made recuperation uncomfortable, but on the third floor of the Harris house he had the best of care: Mrs. Lincoln even had the President’s personal doctor following his case.

  In his first week home he was so pale and mute that the family feared for his mental well-being more than his physical one. His stepson’s ghostly presence made Senator Harris so nervous that he tried to provoke Henry into saying anything at all. Let it be even a denunciation of Will; that would be preferable to the inscrutable silence. The girls tried to revive him by gentler means, arranging carriage rides and pointing out such novelties as the Capitol dome, completed since he’d last seen it — all without much result. Henry could often be heard murmuring with Pauline when she went to his room and closed the door, but his mother, as if she were a lawyer or confessor, refused to share their conversations with the rest of the family.

  Will, who had also been promoted, arrived at the house on September 5, staying one night only; the following afternoon he testified at the military court set up to investigate the Petersburg fiasco. He bitterly blamed the debacle on General Meade, who after the battle had suspended Burnside. It was a kangaroo court, Will insisted at the Harris dinner table; everyone knew the judge advocate was Meade’s man. Shaken by the only disaster in his charmed life, Will did his best to say as little as possible. He tried to avoid Henry’s thin smile at the far end of the table, just as he avoided talk of the battle itself. Instead he swapped stories with his father and Pauline about entertaining the Grants — he at Fort Morton and they here on Fifteenth Street. Only once did he explode, while recounting some conversations he’d had on Capitol Hill: “They discouraged me more than the worst defeat on the field of battle. The heartless apathy! This criminal faultfinding with officers and soldiers is more evil than the sacrifice of human lives. We don’t deserve peace.”

  “You’re right about that,” said Henry, a reply that sent his stepbrother storming out of the house and off to Cleveland, where he would spend a few days with Emma Witt’s family before returning to a new post at the Allegheny Arsenal.

  Over the next two weeks Henry was intermittently his old self, but that entity had always been mercurial, and it was difficult to tell when it might come and go. Appearances at the Harris home by Edwin Morgan, now New York’s other senator, as well as mad Dan Sickles, roused him to a bit of mimicry and a few whispered asides, but when they were gone he tended to lapse back into silence.

  On the first evening of fall, he and Clara went to dine at Gautier’s. Her attempts at conversation — wasn’t the pâté reminiscent of what they’d had on the rue de Rivoli five years ago? — were so cautious, and his rejoinders so unresponsive, that they might have been old marrieds, or a couple on a first, un-chaperoned date — anything but secret lovers. Afraid to bring up the immediate past or discuss the future, Clara sat quietly and felt the war destroying all her connections to Henry, severing them like an enemy’s rail lines. She wanted the two of them to stand for love, to be an improbable example of it, and here they were, mute strangers to each other.

  “Not this way,” she said after they’d left the restaurant and gotten close to Fifteenth and H. “Not home just yet. I want to walk.” She took his arm and led him away from the park, east down H Street, until the twilight world of lawns and carriages changed into an unpaved one through which tired clerks and freedmen and prostitutes marched between work and home. “Up here,” she said, pointing to the top of some steps at a house near Seventh Street. She had a key from Johnny Hay at the White House; the rooms, a separate apartment, belonged to a friend of his who was away on business through September. Without mentioning the court of inquiry, Hay
had said he knew her brother Will was to be in the city this month; if he wanted a place to get away from the bustle of the Harris household, this friend of his would be only too happy to have him use the rooms.

  They were a solid, masculine affair, book-filled and a bit dusty, but a model of neatness compared to Leander Reynolds’s studio outside Munich, which was what she thought of now. The fears she’d had that afternoon were nothing next to what she felt tonight, a fear that Henry was slipping away, becoming forever unreachable, a silhouette behind stained glass. She wanted to bring him back to life, to make him crazily ardent. She wanted to feel him naked against her in the dark, pressing into her with a force that would banish the last three years of worry and sewing and feminine chatter, banish them in a thrill that belonged to no one but the two of them, here, in the dark. He had worried about the war unleashing all his pent-up anger, but now it seemed as if the war had muffled him to the point of death. As she pulled down the blankets, she imagined herself fanning the last bit of a fire that threatened to go out and leave her frozen. She got into the bed and pulled him toward her, coaxed the lightning down once more. He climbed in beside her and rested his head against her neck. She waited for his whiskers to move, for the rhythm to start; she made an urgent humming sound, and still she waited, until she realized he’d gone to sleep. She stroked the back of his head, smoothed his hair, frustrated and more worried than before, but determined that he would at least have a deep rest. She smoothed and stroked, again and again, until she herself was nearly asleep.

  Her eyes opened in the darkness at the sound of a song, something low and moaning. He sounded like a Negro, singing into the pillow, his throat vibrating against her shoulder: “We looks like men marchin’ on / We looks like men o’war!”

  An hour later Clara was in her father’s study, pleading. “He cannot go back to his regiment.”

  “He must, my dear.”

  “Work something out — with Mr. Lincoln if necessary.”

  Senator Harris frowned. “I’ve made special arrangements for Henry before.”

  “Which proves they can be made again. Papa, he is about to take leave of his senses. I have heard him muttering and singing as if he were somebody else entirely, miles away.”

  “Your mother insists he will be well.”

  “Of course she does. She always insists upon her wishes. You cannot tell me she would oppose what I’m asking.”

  “But dear, what exactly are you asking?”

  “That you contrive to get Henry completely out of harm’s way. Put him at one of the camps for the Confederates.”

  “It’s not for me to put him anywhere. He’s an officer trained to muster men for battles, not to stand guard over those who have lost them. I cannot arrange for him to spend the rest of the war playing cards at Point Lookout.”

  “Papa, I’m not talking about a regular prison camp. I’m talking about Rock Island, out in Illinois.”

  “What do you know about Rock Island?” Senator Harris asked, wishing his daughter weren’t exposed to all that afternoon talk in the Mansion.

  “You know what they’re saying. Or at least what they’re arguing about. Training the captured Confederates for the Union’s service.”

  “General Grant and Mr. Stanton are opposed to it.”

  “But Mr. Lincoln is not opposed,” said Clara, leaning across the desk and making her father look straight into her eyes. “You know why, Papa. If the President keeps drafting men at the current rate, General McClellan is going to win the election. What do you think Mr. Lincoln would rather do during the next six weeks? Issue another induction call and lose Pennsylvania to the Democrats, or take some rebels into the Union army?”

  Ira Harris forced himself to smile. “The war has turned even women into politicians.”

  “My stepmother was a good politician long before Fort Sumter.” Clara took his hand. “Please, Papa.”

  Senator Harris pursed his lips. “You know this is not a good idea, Clara. Asking men to fight their old compatriots.”

  “But they won’t be fighting Confederates. They’ll be fighting the Sioux Indians, which means their loyalties won’t be tampered with. They’re wanted for service in the territories.”

  “I see I should spend more time in the Blue Room. The intelligence I get in the Senate cloakroom isn’t half so specific and up-to-date.” Harris paused. “All right, my dear. I shall speak to Mr. Lincoln.”

  “Thank you, Papa.” She got up to get him his hat and walking stick.

  “I don’t mean now, Clara!”

  “Yes, Papa, right now. If you walk over to the Mansion, you’ll find him up, working with Mr. Hay and Mr. Nicolay. They’re expecting late reports from Sheridan tonight.”

  Old Edward, the doorkeeper, led Senator Harris upstairs, where it turned out Mr. Lincoln was alone, eating raisins and an apple — “a seventy-six-inch squirrel,” Dan Sickles once called him.

  “Come in, Senator. I’ve let the boys go for the night,” said the President, pointing to Nicolay’s empty office. “I can use your company.”

  Harris took a seat across from Lincoln and in an embarrassed rush put forward Clara’s proposal. The President seemed amused. “Mrs. Lincoln speaks admiringly of your daughter’s sense and spirit. Here’s fresh evidence of it.”

  “My stepson,” said Harris, taking a handful of raisins from the President, “is a high-strung young man. I find it difficult to plead his particular case when so many are enduring so much, but he has seen some of the worst of this war — Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Crater — and I couldn’t help thinking as I walked over here that he might be of more use to his country right now if he weren’t in the thick of battle. I fear, given the strain he’s showing, that he might not be quite dependable.”

  Lincoln went out to Nicolay’s desk and took a paper from a stack on the blotter. “This is a letter to General Grant that I had John working on. Read it and tell me if I’m having it both ways, for that’s what I want.”

  Harris skimmed the draft and read aloud the crucial part, which acknowledged Grant’s opposition but still pushed the Rock Island scheme: “ ‘I did not know at the time that you had protested against that class of thing being done, and I now say that while this particular job must be completed, no other of the sort will be authorized without an understanding with you, if at all. The secretary of war is wholly free of any part in this blunder.’ ” Harris looked up, trying to find whatever words the President wished him to say.

  Lincoln took the paper from him and walked it back to Nicolay’s desk. “It’s not the strict truth. I had a pretty fair idea of the general’s point of view all along. But I intend to get this thing done. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see Mr. Stanton and placate him, too. Why don’t you come round to the War Department with me?”

  “If you think I can be useful, sir, I shall be happy to.”

  Lincoln sat down at his old postmaster’s desk and took out his pen. “Good,” he said. “Now I’ll get your stepson to help me as well.” He said no more until he finished composing an order sending Captain Henry R. Rathbone to Rock Island “to make a special inspection, under instructions to be given him by the provost marshal general, of the prisoners to be enlisted.” He handed the paper to Senator Harris. “That should do it.”

  “I’m very grateful, Mr. President.”

  Lincoln offered him an apple slice. “I’m sure this isn’t as good as what you grow up in Loudonville, but let’s finish it off. It will fortify us for our little talk with Mr. Stanton in the morning.”

  The two men — one tall and craggy as a totem pole, the other smooth and solid as a statue in the Rotunda — sat munching the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s apple in silence, until the President, looking tired, asked, “So, is there anything else, Senator? A consulate or a clerkship for some worthy New Yorker?”

  Harris blushed, but Lincoln, rising for his bedtime, brought a friendly hand down on his shoulder. “We’ve done good business tonight, old friend.” They walked
out of the office together, past the war map with its colored pins. “A year from now, less than that with luck, this war will have come to an end, and Henry and Clara will be about the business of giving you and Mrs. Harris a grandchild.”

  Harris looked up, surprised, but the President just patted his shoulder once more and blew out the lamp. “The Red Room is a two-way sieve. Mrs. Lincoln spills what secrets she hears in my direction.”

  October 14, 1864

  Rock Island Prison

  Darling Clara,

  They lied, of course: Grant, the President and the pater. We were instructed to raise the 1st U.S. Volunteers only from persons born in the North or abroad, despite their service to the Southland. Now, to get our 1,750 men, we are being permitted to take the oath from “discouraged Southerners,” too, which is a good thing, since all the captive voices I hear in this place sound just like the ones I heard calling out from the rebel lines before Burnside sprang the Petersburg mine: each as mellifluous as your old friend Miss Bashford’s.

  They are hungry, and the brighter ones realize they will soon be cold. It’s full rations for those who come over, considerably less for those who don’t. The former have been put by Col. Johnson into what we call the calf pen; on the other side of a fence lies the “bull pen,” where the recalcitrant and confused remain. It’s touching to see the odd bit of bread and meat being flung from the sheep to the goats — I wonder if the same generosity manifests itself at Andersonville, or if this is a species of the regional gallantry Miss B. liked to go on about.