I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  “Lost,” she whispered, her body undulating to some rhythm inside her head. I had a hunch that this charlatan was performing for me, that he wanted to show how useful he might become in managing Molly, and should be a member of my own political circus.

  “Mother, can you see him now?”

  “Yes. He’s right here, at the cottage. He’s walking on the roof . . . and wearing the uniform of a bugler. He borrowed it from another boy—in Summerland. He’s so blond, milord.”

  I wasn’t even surprised to hear that knocking on the roof. His conspirators at the table must have had pedals and clackers at their feet that could hurl a sound into the air, or something similar to that. His humbug irritated me, but I was as vulnerable as any other Paw who lost a boy to the fever. And for a second I could glimpse Willie with a bugle in his hand and the sun in his eyes. There was so much pain attached to Molly’s pleasure of conjuring Willie out of this hocus-pocus—she had to worry that he might slip right off the roof. A boy who leapt out of the ether could still crack his skull. Summerland wasn’t all that safe.

  Molly’s shoulders heaved as she began to sob, and the charlatan was alarmed. He couldn’t afford to have his star client out of control. He had to keep her snug inside his own little peg. “Mother, what’s wrong?”

  I ain’t certain what she saw. I had to catch her words between every single sob.

  “Milord, do they have embalmers in Summerland? My boy is tottering on the roof—he’ll fall. And Willie doesn’t have wings.”

  I was still trapped in the séance, with rumblings on the roof. And then the rumblings reverberated right above our heads, in the attic. That damn attic had some missing floorboards, else our ceiling must have been porous and besieged by termites, because a man crashed through the ceiling and fell right onto the table in a whirl of dust. He had every sort of instrument strapped to his middle—hammers and bells and tuning forks that could have re-created the fiercest wind or the echoes of the living and the dead. He stared at us like some delinquent child, though he must have been fifty. Colchester tried to disown him, pretend he wasn’t there, but Molly had had enough of her new confidant. She undid the chain with a violent pull, and that whole spirit circle fell apart. One of Colchester’s henchmen landed on the floor. Molly stood there, muttering to herself. The others were petrified, even Elizabeth. The Senators’ wives commenced to shriek. I calmed them down like petrified ponies and had the charlatan pack all his apparatus. He and his henchmen lit out of there with their little boxes. They scurried to his carriage like a band of mountebank mice. I could have chased them down the hill, or locked them in the guardhouse, or had them quarantined for a week at the Willard or the National. But his Lordship wouldn’t be returning with any of his trickster mechanics to our roof. He’d read the wrath in my eyes, witnessed my swollen cheeks, and he was no fool.

  34.

  At Harrison’s Landing

  I WENT ON A Presidential picnic in July to meet Little Mac at his new headquarters, while Mary went to Manhattan—her favorite arena—with Tad. My little boy was allowed to wear his 3rd Lieutenant’s uniform on the train. He traveled with soldiers rather than civilians. And I boarded the Ariel with a bunch of marines at the Navy Yard, and we hightailed out of the District, while the hospital ships were arriving with their terrible cargo. I couldn’t see a soul under the heavy canvas covers, but we could all hear the wailing that seemed to ride above the river with its own palpable presence—a dirge for the living and the dead. Then a tarpaulin was raised, and a nurse in a wrinkled blue jacket appeared from within the bowels of one boat; I watched her climb onto the wharves with a slow, mournful dance and a deranged look—all that wailing could have been inside her own head.

  The blue unholies hit, and I stood frozen in my summer shawl. My spirits lifted with the morning fog, and I never felt more peaceful than I did on the Ariel’s deck—away from bloodstained bandages for a little while. Our steamer approached Harrison’s Landing right at sunset, with the wharves under a brilliant red sheen—the tents on the hill and the boats in the harbor blazed up for McClellan, as if the sun had conspired with the general’s own wizards. His camps were always a marvel of engineering. At City Point, I saw some kind of soldiers’ Jerusalem, a new town—with hospitals, artillery, tents as tall as a sail—that stretched for miles. His new headquarters at Harrison’s Landing wasn’t as bountiful, but it was sculpted right out of the riverbank, with his boys part of the same pristine sculpture. No one could have guessed that they’d come out of battle two weeks ago with blood under their fingernails, their tunics ripped, their caps lost in some woeful field, with the shriek of a dying brother still in their ears.

  McClellan was waiting for me on the wharves, one hand inside his military tunic; his mustache and chin beard had a raw red gleam that was almost ominous in the near dark, while his aides hovered around him like circus animals, half wild—and utterly timid. All his senior officers had their own chin beards—replicas of Little Mac, they strutted like him and recognized no other god. Yet his own boys couldn’t find him in the thick of battle on the Peninsula. Little Mac rode off on Dan Webster’s back, without leaving anyone else in charge; his generals had to scoot for themselves. And here he was two weeks later, twice as arrogant, rubbing his chin beard as if nothing at all had happened. He’d been four miles from Richmond, four miles, and now he preened in his military paradise on the James, with a host of sutlers’ tents and an embalmers’ shed—none of his officers would ever die unremarked; a special detail would carry them off the battlefield in their tunics and bring them right to the embalmers’ table. He had the cadavers shipped home in a metal coffin, each little agony of war erased from their hides.

  He didn’t have his usual dreamy menace, or that sardonic laugh of a high-pitched hyena.

  “Excellency, glad you could come to my quarters,” he said with a grin. He lived with his family in a mansion on a hill above the embalmers’ shed. I saw an endless scattering of white tents as we climbed that hill—the tents seemed to rise right out of the water and cover the encampment like a series of humpbacked snakes. I could hear a soft tumult come from the tents, like the murmur of siege guns. The soldiers on the hill were much more ragged than McClellan’s honor guard at the wharves. They hobbled in and out of their tents with frying pans, coffeepots, and lanterns that looked like a swelter of swollen eyes.

  Little Mac had turned the old brick mansion into a barrack, cluttered with his generals and all their toys—riding boots, unsewn epaulettes, cigar tins, spaniels that accompanied them into battle and slept in a shoebox. We sat in the parlor, which he had converted into a map room and a mess hall, and he offered me champagne his spies had stolen from the wharves of Savannah.

  He began to pontificate after his first sip of champagne.

  “War, Mr. President, is the finest form of art men have ever had. It must be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. And radical views, especially upon slavery, will be the ruin of our men. We are churchgoers, sir. We don’t attack civilian populations, we don’t steal crops, or give our own shirts to niggers.”

  A Christian war, he said, a little cavalcade between white folks on one side of the river and white folks on the other. But we couldn’t play McClellan’s game much longer, a game in which we staked all, and our enemies staked nothing.

  “General,” I said, in a room that bristled with officers and their hot breath, “we cannot win the war you describe. The rebellion has gone too far. We must strip the South of all its resources, and the greatest resource it has are its colored soldiers.”

  McClellan plucked his chin beard. “Excellency, we didn’t knock down any colored boys on the battlefield. There isn’t one solid nigger captain among the Secesh.”

  His generals laughed and plucked their own chin beards. They would have stripped off my clothes and sent me howling into the wilderness, if Little Mac had given them the word. They were sore as hell after I relieved him of his command as General-in-
Chief. But I couldn’t really get rid of Little Mac. I had to let him stay on to lead the Army of the Potomac. Yet I still seethed a bit about an old war wound. Little Mac had been vice president of the Illinois Central during my seven debates with Dug—a Democrat and a Douglas man, he was the one who ordered his conductors to lock me out of the saloon cars. So I’d always had an urge to whack him around the ears, even when he was my General-in-Chief.

  “It’s preposterous, Mr. President,” said one of his lackeys, Harve Haverstall, a lieutenant colonel with my own affliction, a lazy eye. “Jeff Davis wouldn’t arm his colored population. He’s scared to death of a nigger uprising. Lord, having a slave army among the Rebs would be our biggest ally. But it will never happen, sir—no, no, they’re fiddlers and barbers and drummer boys.”

  “And stevedores and nurses and ammunition carriers that are as good as soldiers,” I said, “because it permits Mr. Jeff to parcel out his fighting men . . . and keep his army afloat.”

  The generals squinted at me as if I’d fallen off the moon.

  “Are you saying, sir,” muttered the tallest general, “that you would like the aforesaid colored boys to fight on our side?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “It would hasten our demise, sir, not theirs,” said the lieutenant colonel, who must have been the family philosopher and court jester. “Our boys won’t fight with coloreds at their side. They’ll lay down their weapons, sir, and run home to their farms.”

  I’ll risk that, I wanted to hurl into their teeth. They were convinced I would smash to pieces, wouldn’t last the war, and that Little Mac would prevail. So I had to deprive them of their little illusions once and for all.

  “Gentlemen, I ain’t going anywhere. I expect to maintain this contest until I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.”

  I watched the glee curl around in Little Mac’s eyes.

  “And what if the army forsakes you, sir?” asked one of the generals.

  “Then I’ll find another.”

  And now the lieutenant colonel rasped at me. “And who would train this mystical army? Colored boys from the Cotton States?”

  “Hush up, Harve,” said Little Mac, utterly pleased with himself. He had his pack of wild dogs soften me for the kill. Now he could pick at my carcass with his own paw.

  “Excellency, you’re correct. It’s hopeless—we cannot win. But for another reason. I’ll tell you a tale I heard from my own spies. When President Davis appeared at Bobbie Lee’s camp for the first time, the general asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ ‘You are,’ said Mr. Jeff. And Lee answered, ‘Then I’d like it a lot better if you rolled right back to Richmond.’ ”

  The generals yawped like a bunch of lunatics, while Little Mac paraded in front of them.

  “Excellency, I mean no disrespect. But unless we are guided by conservative and Christian policies, the war will linger on to a miserable end. A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will disintegrate our present armies, and you will have no other, I swear to God.”

  He must have had spies in the President’s House who read my every scratch. I was thinking hard on “a declaration of radical views,” much more radical than he might have imagined. I couldn’t crush Mr. Jeff without disinheriting him of his army of slaves.

  “Mr. President, I may be on the brink of eternity, with all my warriors, so I can allow myself a little bluntness. You will require a Commander-in-Chief of the Army, one who possesses your confidences.” He paused to cup his chin in his hand. “I don’t ask that position for myself, but I am willing to serve in such position as you may assign me.”

  He was a master of finesse, like an aeronaut in his balloon, surveying every corner of the landscape, but he forgot that I was holding the tether cords and could rein him in.

  “Mr. McClellan,” I said, “I shan’t be appointing any dictators this season.”

  The parlor was poorly lit, and I watched his generals smolder as they moved in and out of the dark like shadow men. Seward had warned me not to tangle with Little Mac on his own territory, that his generals were capable of any kind of revolt. Was I supposed to hide from Little Mac at Harrison’s Landing, not come here at all? I’d wounded his vanity, a little. His mustache was quivering.

  “And what if the country should demand it of you?” he asked in a contralto’s nervous pitch.

  “Well, there’s one Commander-in-Chief, far as I can tell, and you’re looking at him.”

  He was absent from that moment on, his face stark white in the shadows, while we supped on a rabbit stew prepared by his family, absent while we went on a midnight parade in front of his adoring legions, boys who would have done anything to touch Dan Webster’s flanks, and that’s why I kept him, even while he ran off the battlefield like some brat, because I didn’t have another general who could hold the heartbeat of entire regiments in his hand. And when we returned to the old red house, it was Lieutenant Colonel Haverstall who accompanied me up the stairs with a candle; I could feel the malice in the tread of his heels—how he would have loved to pitch me over the banister and into the dark ruin of the stairwell. I heard him sniffle as the staircase rocked under our feet like a decrepit cradle. He delivered me to my bedroom in one piece, lit the lantern on the bureau. But his body writhed with emotion, and went stiff, like some gigantic claw.

  “You have maligned him, Mr. President. He’s the best darn general in the service.”

  He bolted out of there with the candle in his fist, and the clump of his boots haunted my sleep like hammer blows on the head.

  35.

  Jackson & the Little General

  HE CARRIED HIS Bible with him into battle. Stonewall Jackson suffered from dyspepsia and had to suck on lemons all the time. He rode a gelding, Little Sorrel, but wasn’t much of a sight on his chestnut horse, slumped down in a ragged tunic, like some old-clothes man, with the bill of his cap nearly blinding him—that’s how low it sat. His eyes went bad, and his orderly, whom the general had taught to read, now had to recite passages from the Bible, or that dyspeptic man in his ragged coat couldn’t fall asleep.

  Yet he wasn’t dyspeptic on the battlefield. He crept behind our lines in late August and found a treasure at Manassas Junction—all our damn supplies were sittin’ in the sun. That deacon sat on Little Sorrel and watched his boys have a Bacchanal. They gorged themselves on lobster salad and rinsed their throats with Union champagne. They wove around in feather hats and crinolines that must have belonged to some Union general’s war wife. They battled over jars of pickled oysters. They guzzled whiskey until the deacon-general confiscated all the whiskey they had and broke bottle after bottle against the side of a railroad car. He took nothing for himself. But he allowed his boys to escape with some of the spoils. He burnt and blew up whatever remained until that railroad junction resembled a vast funeral pyre.

  I could smell the smoke from my country cottage—I assumed it was a signal that Richmond was on fire. I should have reckoned it was the first sign of our ruination. Jackson decided he would have one more funeral pyre. His men snuck back into the woods—and John Pope, who led our brand-new Army of Virginia, started his attack, confident that reinforcements would arrive from McClellan, but Pope’s boys wouldn’t fight; they loved Little Mac—and McClellan’s relief corps was nowhere to be found. He wouldn’t budge from his new headquarters at Annapolis. His horses were going blind in the sun, he said. And Little Mac telegraphed the War Department: “We have to leave Pope to get out of this scrape & at once use all our means to make the Capital safe.”

  Jackson was like some apocalypse in a ragged coat who could mow down all the men and matériel between Manassas Junction and the District while sitting on the back of Little Sorrel. Our citizens waited for his gelding to appear on Pennsylvania Avenue with all those marching madmen in crinolines and feather hats. Willard’s wouldn’t let in any unfamiliar guests. The hotel’s habitués had steak and onions for breakfa
st, pigs’ feet and gingerbread for lunch, and sat around the Willard’s curved bar with hatchets under their coats, waiting for the barbarians. Families carted their possessions around in wheelbarrows, not knowing where to run; I could see them move in narrowing circles near the canal—their barrows looked like beetles. Some fancy girls from Marble Alley stood on the Long Bridge with Secesh flags until marines from the Navy Yard carried them off to Old Capitol Prison. The B&O station on Jersey Avenue was packed with people who would have given a month’s wages for a railroad pass out of the District—they clambered aboard military trains and left their baggage at the depot, while wounded soldiers wandered the streets.

  My Cabinet screamed for McClellan’s scalp, but I couldn’t pull commanders out of my hat. The Rebels had Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrel. All we had was Little Mac, who built encampments like a pharaoh, entombed himself, and never sought the muck of battle, but his men didn’t have much morale without him.

  In early September, in a torrent of rain, as the last of Pope’s troops trudged back to the District, some of them without shirts or shoes, others limping in paper boots, Tad and I walked out the White House to greet them with a basket of little cakes. The soldiers moved in some kind of reveille, as if they couldn’t rouse themselves from the dream of battle. Their mouths twitched; their eyes fluttered to some private tune where pomp and circumstance failed to matter. They clutched the soggy cake and saluted Tad. He wasn’t a 3rd Lieutenant now, the pampered son of a President. The rain had lent him the illusion of a real officer, who just happened to look like a child.

  “Greetings, sir. God protect ye.”

  These soldiers saw something else in that torrent—their general, Little Mac, riding his black stallion through the blinding rain. These men couldn’t have mistaken him for Stonewall Jackson and his sorrel. He didn’t have tattered sleeves or a cap over one eye. He wore his full dress uniform, with a commander’s yellow sash. But the sash seemed much darker in the rain. He wasn’t some cockerel preening for his generals. His pain was much too raw; the horror seemed imbedded in his brow. His hand shook for a moment; and then this cautious, calculating general rode along that ragged line on Dan Webster and saluted every soldier with his cap. I watched him lean over the bridle and converse with a particular man, ask about his wife and children—it was hard to talk with rain in his mouth, but he swallowed the rain and didn’t cough once.