Elizabeth returned to my wife. The fire continued to crackle—I could see the sparks slap at the horses’ flanks and sail into the burning wind. A minstrel song started to roll around in my head—humming always seemed to sooth my nerves.
To Dixie’s Land I’m bound to trabble
Look away! Look away! Dixie Land
I could feel the unholies coming, and even while I hummed, the stables went on burning. I could hear terrified ponies whimper through the wall, like the last, agonizing cries of battle. Then the whimpering got closer and closer, and I wondered if these phantom ponies had come right into the house.
I looked up—Mary stood there in her velvet coat of quills. But she wasn’t wounded—it was the sunlight dancing off the pins in her back.
“I was reckless with Mr. Tim,” she muttered, without looking into my eyes. “And now I have no peace. I keep hearing the ponies call for help. I must be mad.”
I wanted to tell her, Mother, I hear ’em too—the ponies. But I couldn’t resolve the mystery of dead horses that neighed like dying boys in hospital wards, and in some broken field. I couldn’t resolve anything at all. I knew I’d keep on hearing the ponies in time and in eternity, and I’d never reach some bourne, where I might be safe from their soft, persistent cries.
43.
Grant
FRED, WHO WAS all but fourteen, had been to Vicksburg with his Pa, had lived through the siege and final surrender of the town, had seen the Rebels hurl hand grenades from their parapets, and watched his father’s men dart out of a rifle pit to catch a grenade and hurl it right back. His Pa intended to “out-camp” the enemy, which he did. Cannons couldn’t topple this little fortress town, the general told his son. “It can only be taken with the pick and shovel.” Grant surrounded Vicksburg with seven miles of tunnels and rifle pits, and waited while the town starved. “Whatever they have on hand cannot last always.” Fred saw the first surrender flags, and the elaborate caves that civilians had carved out of the dark red earth on the hillside. They’d abandoned their homes under the parapets—that’s how frightened they were of General Grant. His Pa did a kind of Indian dance in the privacy of their quarters. “Son, the fate of the Secesh is sealed. We control the Mississippi from its source to its mouth.” Ulysses Grant had not always been that sanguine. Fred had to watch over him during his drunken withdrawals, while the general stared at some chandelier for hours and wouldn’t eat a morsel.
His Pa was jittery about coming to the capital, where he would be fêted as the first three-star general since George Washington; Congress had revived that rank for Grant, who hated every kind of celebration. They’d never been to the District before, and the general wasn’t interested in any of the sights. He had a reservation at the Willard, but no one recognized him in his worn duster. What was this modest little man doing at the hotel of Presidents and diplomats? The clerk assigned him a tiny garret right under the roof. And then the little man scribbled his name in the register.
U. S. Grant & son, Galena, Illinois
The clerk started to tremble. He hadn’t recognized the hero of Vicksburg. Grant had attacked through the swamps with a python’s grip and nothing but a toothbrush in his pants. He walked into the dining room with Fred, cloaked in the anonymity of a little man with crooked shoulders, lusterless eyes, and a light brown beard—until someone at the next table noticed him. “There’s the general.” The whole dining room cheered. Fred was embarrassed for his Pa, whose eyes darted from wine bottle to wine bottle at the different tables. Guests at the Willard banged the tabletops with their fists, while the wine bottles wavered, and Ulysses bowed to each guest. He looked more like a grocery clerk than a general . . .
He dozed in the middle of the meal—trench warfare could awaken him, not the Willard. He wouldn’t talk about Vicksburg at the dinner table. He signed a dozen autograph albums and went up to his room with Fred. He’d rather have slept on dark clay with his men than have his own suite at the Willard. Ulysses put his son to bed, but he couldn’t find the key to his trunk. He walked out of the Willard in his old travel uniform with missing buttons and a frayed cuff, crossed the miasma of Pennsylvania Avenue, and wandered into the Mansion. Nicolay & Hay hadn’t expected Grant until tomorrow. And here he was in the middle of a White House gala with mud on his boots.
Folks swarmed around him—gloves were lost, crinolines collapsed, and shoes were trampled on in that swarm. It was like an invading army in our own salon. And that’s how I first met Ulysses Grant. I looked into his blue-gray eyes, and could feel that sense of risk I hadn’t been able to find in my other generals. He fights, he kills. He stole the Mississippi from the Rebels. And now he’d come to the capital in his rumpled uniform, a commander who made sure his mules were fed.
He seemed uncomfortable amid that blind thrust of people in the Blue Room. Ulysses blinked as he was shoved along, sweat pouring from his forehead. I loped toward him, grinning like a jackass. He was a soldier who could disappear into the swamps and survive without a servant or a camp chest or a caravan of clothes.
He didn’t have much use for shindigs and chandeliers. He could have had McClellan’s old headquarters on Lafayette Square, but he’d have to suffer a season of soirees, with Senators barking down his back. So he decided to make his headquarters at City Point, beside his war tents and his troops.
We all wondered why Ulysses hadn’t brought his wife—he was always with Julia. The Rebels had tried to capture her during the Vicksburg campaign, when they raided one of Grant’s supply depots; she outfoxed those butternut boys, disappeared from the depot in a squaw’s blanket, and managed to join Ulysses at the front. Julia wasn’t a great belle—she had a horseface and a permanent squint in one eye, but she was devoted to Grant. Yet he hadn’t brought her to the White House on the eve of his anointment as lieutenant general. She was cleverer than Grant beyond the battlefield. And she didn’t want to compete with Mary on Mary’s home ground.
Mother was delighted with the general. She wasn’t shy around this shy man. She kept nudging me with her elbow, while she looked at Ulysses.
“Father, we can’t have him leave the capital without a dinner in his honor. It isn’t fair. Invite him for Saturday. And don’t you fail!”
Swamped by politicians, he had to stand on a crimson sofa, or he would have vanished in that morass. The general blushed like a little girl as women leapt out of their lace shawls to clasp his hand.
“Speech, speech,” they shouted under the chandeliers. “Hurrah for the hero of Vicksburg!”
He turned ashen all of a sudden—that little girl’s blush was gone.
I could tell how mortified he was, and I invited him to climb down. He was no McClellan, who loved to pontificate on the littlest maneuver. Grant killed quietly and wouldn’t talk with civilians about the fake romance of blood.
We went upstairs to my war room. He sat in Mr. Seward’s Cabinet chair, lit up a cigar, and shut his eyes; there was a slight tremor in his eyelids. I was silent until he opened his eyes again.
“Grant, I never liked to interfere with my generals. It’s a bad policy. You can’t run a war from the White House. But I didn’t have much choice.”
Folks said I ought to fear him—as a rival, like Little Mac. But the general with the gray eyes was my wild card, perhaps the only card I had left. My own Party wanted to ditch me; my precinct captains said I’d never win another election—without Grant. I couldn’t read much into that ash gray color while he puffed on his cigar. I watched the smoke rings multiply, mesmerized a little. I’d made him my General-in-Chief—and I didn’t want those honors to bite my own back. No one could say when that Presidential grub gets to gnawing at a man, and I didn’t know if there was one gnawing at Grant. Yet that wasn’t what gnawed at me. Horace Greeley wrote that if I couldn’t find some prescription for peace, we would all drown in new rivers of human blood. But I could not preserve the Union without these rivers of blood. And I needed Grant as a great military captain. I still found it hard t
o talk to this quiet killer.
“My wife says you cannot leave the District without a dinner in your honor. Does Saturday suit you?”
He shut his eyes again, with a deep tremor in his eyelids, and he said in that slow drawl of his that he couldn’t dally—each dinner he attended would cost us.
“We can’t excuse you, Grant. It would be the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out . . .”
I’d been jousting with him like a juggler, a common clown. He must have seen the dilemma in my eyes, that supercilious smile.
“Mr. Lincoln,” he said, gripping my hand across the table with all the camaraderie of a very private man. “I’ve liquored up a lot, and it’s no secret. There must have been a torrent of detraction from every quarter, yet you stuck with me.”
I took a shine to Grant. He didn’t hide behind his own war paint, and the flags of his men.
“Well, Grant, if I had listened to my Washington friends, who fight with their tongues, the Rebels would still be roasting chestnuts on the banks of the Mississip, with our gunboats dead in the water.”
He was still in some sort of agony. “You named me General-in-Chief before we ever met. Weren’t you gambling with the nation’s chips?”
“General, a man who feeds his mules before he sits down to supper is someone I’d be willing to wager on—with my life.”
None of his aides arrived in the morning, not one solid general from his staff, not even a plumed horse. He rose early, without Fred, and toured the District in his slouch hat. No one accompanied Ulysses. First he marched to Old Capitol, where the sentinels gawked at him and got out of his way. He went upstairs and sat with Rebel officers and Union men, calming them with his own deep quiet. Next he walked down to the Navy Yard, sat with sailors, not admirals and the commandant. He didn’t ask one question about ordinance at the yard. He looked at the machine shops and the sheds, at gunboats in disrepair, and scribbled a few cryptic lines on his cuff. He was forever at some front deep inside his head. I pitied Grant, a little. He was reborn on a battlefield, and couldn’t go back to selling saddles in a saddle shop.
He wandered into the Soldiers’ Retreat, near the wharves, and had an apple and a fried egg. The soldiers and sailors in the canteen were bewildered by his presence: a three-star general who didn’t even wear shoulder straps. There wasn’t a gold button or bar on his uniform. He was all slumped over, like someone who had been defeated in battle. They fell into an eerie silence while he finished his meal, but whistled and clapped when Grant stood up from his tiny table and acknowledged them with a slight twist of his slouch hat.
Crowds gathered as he loped up Georgia Avenue to the Orphans’ Asylum; soon he had a little tail of soldiers and civilians that tucked itself right behind him; he didn’t rouse the asylum, raise it from the dead. He met with orphans in the chapel. They asked him wondrous things about the war. And he spoke to them with a fluidity he didn’t have with his generals. He plucked the toothbrush out of his pocket—it had broken bristles. “Boys, I do my best thinking whenever I brush my teeth.”
It wasn’t like the days when McClellan first rode into the District on Dan Webster, capturing the town with his golden strides and the dizzying flight of his reconnaissance balloons. Grant didn’t have an aeronaut, not even a coal-black stallion. He came alone and promised nothing. But there was the quiet of a man who appeared without drums or regimental banners, without the fanfare of military campaigns, just a soldier with his mules and his supplies, wading through the swamps with his men, and arriving under the parapets of Vicksburg, almost by accident, but with deadly design.
44.
Mad Friday
I KNEW THEY STOOD some wayward boy on a barrel with a knapsack crammed with bricks and wouldn’t allow him to budge through roll call and reveille; then his sergeant would bang his toes with a hammer until he swayed and danced and toppled off the barrel with his bag of bricks. He wouldn’t be ruined, but he’d have blackened toes for life. Or else they’d sit him on a chair with a rifle thrust between his legs and toss him into the Potomac. Sink or swim was their motto, and none of the boys ever drowned, but they often returned to shore with blood in their eyes and ears and ended up in the infirmary with acute catarrh.
Then the desertions got real bad. And there were no more punishment chairs and knapsacks of brick. My Secretary of War said we couldn’t control this epidemic of desertions without the ritual of a firing squad. A soldier would sit on his own coffin in front of a firing squad dressed in short capes, with his regiment looking on—until the boy’s commander rode onto the grounds, raised his sword, and there would be a fusillade that echoed through the camp like ruffled thunder; it took a full minute for the puffs of fire and smoke to clear; and then they saw the boy lying on the coffin, with his head pulled back, half his fingers ripped off, his tunic torn to bits, and a wall of blood on his chest.
And when I could hear that terrible clatter of bullets—a merciless, ungodly rip—from a military camp nearby, I knew it was the mark of mad Friday. Deserters were always shot on that day. I pardoned as many as I could. “It would frighten the poor devils too terribly, to shoot them.” That’s what I told my generals and my Secretary of War, but they were adamant about deserters. And I couldn’t add to Stanton’s troubles. The pressure upon him was immeasurable. Without Stanton the war would grind to a halt. We’d have no horses and ammunition—and supply trains would land in the wrong depot. I couldn’t really complain to Grant. He’d fled the capital a week ago, and I didn’t want that burden on him.
So I dreaded Friday mornings. And as I scraped around in my slippers, I noticed a man come out of the Prince of Wales Bedroom, wearing one of my nightshirts; it was much too large for him. He swam inside that shirt, the sleeves hanging down to the floor like elephant trunks. I didn’t recognize him at first; he had the matted gray beard of a fallen patriarch, with scratches and welts all over his face. It was Billy Herndon, my law partner, whom I had left behind in Springfield. Billy wasn’t fat, but he had a fat man’s dreams, like the Falstaff I had seen at Grover’s. Billy loved to carouse, like Sir John, loved to be in his drams. He also knew how to run a campaign. But I abandoned Billy, let him twist about in Illinois with holes in his pockets . . .
I ordered up an egg, toast, and tea for the two of us and signaled for Billy to wander into my office. Meantime I found Mary floating around the corridor, in her satin nightgown.
“Mother,” I whispered, “what is Billy doing in the Prince of Wales Bedroom? I thought you banned him from our living quarters. How did he get upstairs?”
“The coachmen had to carry him,” she said.
“Was he inebriated?”
“Oh, it was much worse than that. I couldn’t leave him stranded. Billy was the best soldier you ever had.”
My own 3rd Lieutenant, I muttered to myself, as Mary told me what had happened. He was discovered outside the Willard last night by a clerk—he’d been in a brawl. But the hotel wouldn’t receive him in such a state. He had no money in his purse, and nothing but a letter from me in his wallet. The Willard sent a message to the White House. And Mary herself had fetched Billy while I was at Grover’s with Tad.
“That was mighty kind of you,” I said.
“It wasn’t kindness. We couldn’t have Billy sleep in some pauper’s paradise, while he has a letter from you in his pocket. He was once your partner, for God’s sake.”
“Still is,” I said.
“But he has to be out of here by noon.”
Billy must have had a bad angel in matters to do with my wife. He could never get on her good side; it was like being sick with poison ivy every season of the year. But they were more alike than Mother imagined. They were always socking people. Something gnawed at them—a terrible want, as if they meant to control the world through one of their rages, and finished up eating their insides.
I went into my office with Billy and shut the door. I could still hear the burst of rifles from Fort Stevens—the sound grew fainter and fainter
. Billy watched me wince with each soft clap.
“What is that?”
“Deserters’ Day,” I said.
For a second I thought Billy was gonna flatten me. He hunkered down in that fighting stance of his, and his eyes shrank into his skull. But Billy must have changed his mind.
“Couldn’t you put an end to it? You’re the President. You can stop an execution anytime you want.”
“And have my generals revolt? That would murder morale. And Stanton would run into the hills with all his railroads. I have to show a little discretion.”
“That’s not what I hear,” he said. “You’ll sign any pardon, if a mother cries to you about her boy.”
Our breakfasts arrived in a pair of tin trays; we used our pocketknives to crack open the eggs. Billy’s knife shivered as he buttered his toast; and then the toast fell to pieces in his hand.
“What happened at the Willard?”
Billy got into a scrape with a Democrat—while they were having a dram. They quarreled inside the bar, and then out on Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of all the carriages and horsecars and military ambulances.
“And what was that quarrel about?”
“Your wife,” he said.
I liked the idea of Billy defending Mother’s honor at the Willard. That Democrat had called her unconscionable things, he said. I had to stare him down until he spat out the details.
“He called her a harlot and a Rebel spy who harbored Jeff Davis’ own whore in the White House.”
“I’m the harlot here. Mary’s Rebel sister had nowhere else to go. I let her stay with us a while. So your quarrel with that Democrat was about a little dust.”
Billy had the ragged look of a renegade general. And he once had the merriest eyes in Illinois, but Lincoln & Herndon meant nothing in the middle of a rebellion. The war had beggared Billy, made him into a wanderer with nowhere to go.
We both sucked on our eggs, the way we had done at my law office when we didn’t have more than a minute to spare; soon our nightshirts were stained. It wasn’t that simple to suck on an egg.
I Am Abraham Page 32