I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  40.

  Gettysburg

  MY SECRETARY OF WAR had requisitioned a special four-car train that November, with sharpshooters and a tiny cannon, put there for ceremonial sake. I traveled with my confidential secretaries, my valet, and Mr. Seward. Much as I tried, I couldn’t seem to finish my remarks for the dedication—how could one lone man in the White House, who sent boys off to their doom, find the will to represent these fallen boys? I scribbled on scraps of paper, using my stovepipe hat as a desk, but I couldn’t find the words to capture the living or the dead. It was as if I’d suddenly gone deef and dumb to the constant tattoo inside my skull.

  I sat in the personal car of the B&O president, like some ceremonial king, with my own bedroom and private privy, with lamps that lit up the second we approached a tunnel, with Venetian blinds, and carpets soft as quilt, but all that luxury couldn’t inspire me none, or dress over my remarks. I was approaching a battleground where the Commander-in-Chief hadn’t played the littlest part, where row after row of hospital tents had straddled every orchard, where the sting of excrement and rotting carcasses had remained for months, where one sleepy village and all its farmland had turned into a vast slaughter yard.

  I didn’t want it to feel like a circus, but it did. Medicine men hovered around the tracks with every sort of moonshine; children hawked balloons; and counterfeit soldiers in motley uniforms cradled war souvenirs in their arms, but not everyone belonged to the same menagerie. I saw nurses with that genuine remorse in their eyes of women who must have lived for weeks around wounded men. And others, like myself, recalled the battlefields as best we could, and were confused and uncertain and more than a little shy the nearer we got to Gettysburg.

  I arrived at the tall depot on Carlisle Street as the sun was going down—it burnt the walls of the car a soft and luscious red. But I couldn’t relish that color very long. The platform of the depot was lined with row after relentless row of coffins—the very last interments before the dedication, I suspect. Diggers would probably work half the night on Cemetery Hill . . .

  We gathered next morning at the Diamond, as citizens of the town called their central square, with hundreds of souls packed into that space, perhaps a lot more—I hadn’t come here to count. I was vertiginous after a while, as people moved in great numbers and shouted, “Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.” A soldier had to help me onto my horse, or I might have been landlocked somewhere and missed the ceremonial.

  I towered above half the world and rode to the cemetery that morning in the midst of a procession that included firemen, reporters, soldiers, and politicians. People kept trying to clutch my hand. Up Baltimore Street I went on my bay horse, my shoes slipping out of the stirrups, my meager remarks in my pocket. I wore a black band on my hat to remember my dead boy—and the dead boys of Gettysburg, some of whose bones were still scattered in the fields, with the carcasses of horses and cows. I didn’t see any broken buildings on Baltimore Street, or collapsed roofs, but several of the walls along our route were riddled with bullet holes. I’d heard tales of the Rebel yell being much more reckless than a cannonball and halting a courier’s horse in its tracks. And of Lee’s foragers hunting for Gettysburg blacks—mainly women and children—in the midst of battle, forcing them out of their homes like the worst kind of kidnappers and thieves, and hauling them back to headquarters as their own little battery of slaves . . .

  I was pulled right out of my reverie by the folks who were selling souvenirs—little relics of war that included bullet pouches and broken cannonballs. They lurched out at us with their plunder; one of them had a Rebel captain’s uniform on a stick, and brandished it like a scarecrow, with painted eyes and whiskers.

  “Five dollars,” he said, running beside me with that wicked semaphore, as if he were signaling to his own army of ghouls. “Mr. Lincoln, four dollars—you can give the uniform to Tad. I pressed it clean.”

  I had to knock that stick out of his hand, or he would have followed me past the ragged line of houses, to the Baltimore Pike, and the top of Cemetery Hill, where every grave, every marker, could be seen from my saddle. We had to cross a pinched piece of battleground, and I was bewildered by what I saw—belt buckles, bits of cracked glass, torn insignias, a tattered shirt, an officer’s whip, the rusty barrel of a gun, all strewn about, as if some madman were leaving vestiges of his mayhem, or a tornado had struck without warning, desiccated the land, and went on to destroy another hill.

  We cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow . . .

  The ground was pocked with wound after wound, and I felt like some lost pilgrim who might stray into a hole and never be found again, or perhaps it was simpler than that.

  A part of me wanted to remain here amid all the punctures. Now I heard the timpani in my skull. I belonged with the dead, with the stray caps and an occasional boot, and with the cartridge belts hanging from the branches of trees, like grim bracelets. Souvenir seekers hadn’t yet managed to pick the place clean. Dead horses rotted in the sun, their broken reins bleached a bloodless white. The rat-a-tat-tat grew stronger in my ears, as if I could listen to the music of a battlefield, not the Rebel yell, and the roar of Parrott guns, not the clack of hooves in the Peach Orchard, not the groans, not the scratch of body parts flying into the air, not the raw stink of terror, but the soft, incessant rap of boys marching against their own brothers, knowing they would never see sunlight again.

  That Boston orator, Mr. Everett, arrived late, wearing kid gloves and a silk cravat. He was a touch under seventy, and had a stooped back. There was a quiet rage in his eyes. He’d endured a bout of apoplexy that marked him with a slight tremble. He was still the finest orator in the land, but his wife had gone mad. He had to lock her away.

  He peered out at us, sucked us all into his gaze, like some Merlin in a silk cravat, and said, “Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields, and the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is without hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God . . .”

  I wondered if my own courtship would end on the same car with Everett’s mad wife. Mary’s fits grew worse and worse. I’d seen her whack one of the gardeners. I heard her cuss a maid. Then the fits would pass, and she was fine—for a little while. And it would start all over, like some seesaw of the fates.

  She was on much better behavior when Bob was around. But I couldn’t hire him as an adjutant to his own mother. And I had nightmares about Mary and Bob—in my dreams Mary wore an old gown, with Bob hovering over her in some kind of a uniform, like a horsecar conductor. But it wasn’t a horsecar. It was the back room of an asylum. And Bob wasn’t calling out stations and stops. He wasn’t harsh. He wept and tried to calm his mother’s nerves.

  “For consider, my friends, what would have been the consequences to the country, to yourselves, and to all you hold dear, if those who sleep beneath our feet, and their gallant comrades who survive to serve their country in other fields of danger, had failed.”

  He sang to us for two hours in a silver voice that shot across the cemetery, while I glanced at my own speech, scribbled on White House scratch paper. I didn’t have his poetry, his rhetoric, his musical lilt.

  His music didn’t matter to some folks, who covered their faces with mottled scarves, scattered in the middle of his speech, and went searching for souvenirs on the battlefield, while all the others clapped and cheered, and didn’t want Everett to leave the platform. They were restless after he was gone, with wandering eyes, waiting for another fine oration, and I had nothing to give. I strode up to the platform in the black broadcloth of a mortician, while photographers fiddled with their Shadow Boxes in front of me, like a crooked line of crows. My mouth was parched. I had my scratchings, sentences I had strung together without Everett’s silk. I put on my spectacles and plucked the little speech out of my pocket. I couldn’t recognize the sound of my voice—it seemed to ricochet from someone else’s throat.

  “ . . . We cannot dedicate, w
e cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.”

  People muttered a bit, poked each other, clapped, and waited for the fireworks, but I didn’t have Everett’s flair. I had a tin box that couldn’t even rise above the trees.

  I spoke for two minutes and returned to my chair. The crowd was a little ruffled by the briefness of my visit. They had expected a much longer serenade. No one clapped or whistled. I was startled by that sea of silence, as if folks were waiting for me to duck into Everett’s private tent, rinse my throat in salt water, and return to the platform with a resounding song.

  “That speech won’t scour,” I whispered to an old friend on the platform. “It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.”

  Most of the damn reporters at the consecration agreed. I watched them scribble in their notebooks and scurry among themselves. “Silly stuff,” murmured the boy from Harrisburg. “The Pres ought to be ashamed.” He glanced right past me, and walked over to Everett with a look of exaltation in his eyes. Others rambled across the cemetery, hunting for souvenirs. I couldn’t blame these boys. They were exploring a battle circus. I looked beyond the stone wall, into the darkening fields, with its broke-back trees, its pocked earth, its shiny shards of glass, as if I were tethered to this ground, tied with some primitive cord, and while the wind licked at my mortician’s coat, I could feel a tug at the seat of my pants. I wasn’t one of Little Mac’s reconnaissance balloons. I couldn’t float above the battlefield, like some aeronaut of Gettysburg. I had to fend for myself on the cemetery floor—the dead can’t whistle. All I could hear was the rattling sound of souvenir seekers and the rustle of red leaves.

  FARMERS STOOD ALONG the rails, staring at me in soldiers’ caps plucked from the battlefield. I took ill in the cars, and my teeth clattered in my head like a cannonade. My manservant, William, wrapped me up in my green shawl, but I had the chills and couldn’t move my legs by the time we landed in the District; one of Stanton’s sharpshooters had to summon an ambulance from the Navy Yard, and I rode to the White House lying on my back, with people along the Ave looking under the canvas roof and wondering if their President had been shot.

  I did have my own souvenir from the battlefield, it seems—varioloid, a milder variation of the smallpox. I must have contracted it while I was riding up Cemetery Hill with those other pilgrims. I could still hear the music of the dead, that strange tapping in the wind. Whenever I had a nightmare, Mary would enter my room like a ghost in a white gown and sing me back to sleep. Mother refused to wear a mask, and neither would Elizabeth.

  Everybody else at the White House had to wear one—servants and Senators alike. Tad fell in love with this profusion of white masks. He would wait outside my door and watch the generals and chief clerks congregate in their masks, but he loved my barber best. William would arrive promptly at ten with his razor box, looking piratical in the white mask that covered his mouth, Tad plucking at his arm.

  “Will Johnson, are you ever gonna razor me?”

  “Soon as you grow side-whiskers, Mr. Tad.”

  He’d stride into my room with a roaring laugh that nearly ripped away his mask. I’d come to depend on Will. He couldn’t get along with our other servants, who were ashamed of Will on account of his very dark skin. Mary scolded them, but he was still pretty much of a pariah.

  Will came down with varioloid a week after I did, and was confined to the colored ward near the old canal. He couldn’t collect his pay while he was in quarantine, so I had the greenbacks sent to him in an envelope with the White House seal.

  DEAR WILLIAM: The current White House barber will bleed me into oblivion if you don’t get well soon.

  One of the nurses on Will’s ward acted as his scribe. “President Lincoln,” she wrote in her fine hand, “Mr. Johnson says that if that barber ever scrapes you again, he will not live to scrape another man. Johnson will see to it himself.”

  Will died that very afternoon, and I had a dream that night—wasn’t about the barber, wasn’t about Will. It was about my child-wife. The White House was under attack, and we removed to the attic. Mary was the barber now, though she didn’t have much of a razor. Taddie was her assistant, her lather boy—kept heaping foam out of a pail with a stick. The barber chair was an old rocker. I had seen it out on the lawn—rotting in the rain. There were no other women in Mother’s attic barbershop. It was loaded with army officers. I could hear the little noises of battle down below. But those pock-pocks couldn’t invade the attic. Must have been twenty officers in line—ready to be razored by my wife. My own damn officers whistled at her and made obscene calls.

  Mother was wearing a nightgown, like a little girl. The nightgown had a very low neck. And it troubled me, scraped my mind. I wondered if this barbershop was a brothel. I had no proof, no hard evidence. Still, I wasn’t keen on Mary scratching at some officer’s lathered-up whiskers with the blade of her hand—it was more like a caress.

  “Aw, Miss Mary, that’s very nice.”

  I kicked the pail out of Tad’s hand, but I couldn’t crash through that line of officers with lather on their chins. I could see the plop of Mary’s breasts under her silken gown. And then I couldn’t see her at all. Some silly officer had plunked the pail over my head. I was pushed into a corner, and I sat there like the attic dunce, sat for a little eternity—until I woke with a scream.

  Yib came rushing into my bedroom. She wore one of Mother’s morning robes. Her hair wasn’t all trussed up. It lay around her shoulders with a silver shine. I could sense the alarm in her eyes.

  “Mr. Lincoln, I didn’t mean to intrude. But I heard . . .”

  “Is Molly all right?” I asked like the shiest of suitors.

  “Mrs. President is asleep, sir. She had her tonic.”

  I kept seeing that picture of my wife as the lady barber in the attic.

  “Elizabeth, how well did you know Will Johnson?”

  “Your late barber, sir? We never talked much. Sometimes I mended his clothes.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would you . . . ?”

  She smiled at my befuddlement. But it wasn’t untender.

  “I am a seamstress, sir. And Will was also your valet.”

  “I still don’t . . .”

  “Well, sir, Mrs. President couldn’t have your valet coming into the Mansion with a frayed cuff. So she would ask me to fix him up—from time to time.”

  “But I could have bought him a new coat. All he had to do was ask.”

  “He wasn’t a beggar, sir. He had his wages.”

  I pricked my ears and heard Mary moan in her sleep—it was a soft cry, like a lover’s whistle. It wakened a little wildness in me.

  “I’d best return to her bedside, sir. Mrs. President is cranky if she wakes up and doesn’t see me sitting in my chair.”

  And she vanished into Mary’s bedroom, shutting the door behind her—Yib’s feet were bare. I imagined her mending William’s coat with her magic thimbles, a couple of stitches at a time. And then Mother arrived in the very nightgown she wore in the dream, with the same low neck, and I didn’t know what to believe. I saw the little ripe roseola around her nipple, like a pink harvest.

  “Father,” she said with a deep pucker in her brow, “I’m so sorry to hear of Will. We couldn’t even visit him on account of the quarantine. I did try. Some damn major in the Medical Department said I had no business being near the colored smallpox ward. So I had to shout across that infernal room, while the medical staff was gone, and Johnson told me about the scrape he had in the cars.”

  “What cars, Mother?”

  She looked at me as if I’d suffered a sunstroke in the middle of my bedroom.

  “Why, the cars out of Gettysburg.”

  No one had bothered to tell me until now. The conductor was a McClellan man, and ridiculed my speech on Cemetery Hill, called it trash. Will dragged him along the aisle, and dumped him into that
little socket where Stanton’s sharpshooters liked to sit when they weren’t protecting me. The conductor would have pressed charges if I hadn’t taken ill.

  Mary’s mind began to drift. She cupped her hand over her nipple, as if she were examining some exotic merchandise, and she chattered about the draperies in the East Room, about the mice in the attic, about Taddie’s lisp—a songbird that could dart from subject to subject. I couldn’t get her to sit still. And when I touched her hair to calm her, she bolted out of the room, and I was left with the memory of Will shouting across the ward to my wife, rekindling my own time at Gettysburg and the dead who seemed to bestride that village in ghostly blue caps.

  41.

  The Rebel in the White House

  I WAS STILL IN quarantine when I heard the tale of Little Sister’s travails, and it rubbed at me like a raw wound. Emilie Todd Helm had been living on potato peels and rotten collards with her little girl. There were food riots in Selma, and robber bands ravaged the town on ponies that cried out their pangs of hunger. That sound tore through whatever spirit she had left—it was worse than a child wailing under water. A renegade with a red rag around his throat nearly chopped her head off with an axe while looking for a handful of butter beans. Emilie was Mother’s favorite half sister, and she might not have survived another week in Alabam. She’d crossed the mountains and come to Selma to be near her husband, Ben, but a courier dressed in rags knocked on the door and told her that Ben lay dying at a hospital in Atlanta. She couldn’t have gotten onto the cars with her little girl if Ben hadn’t been a brigadier general. Officers in rumpled tunics and great slouch hats fed Emilie and the girl scraps of food from their despatch cases—soda crackers, a dried plum, and discolored lemon drops. The cars arrived in Atlanta a little too late. She went through every ward at the hospital in her white veil, while wounded soldiers called her a livin’ wraith and clutched at her hand, but she couldn’t find Ben—until one of the surgeons accompanied her to the morgue.