“None of your business, grandpa.”
A wounded boy in the next cot tossed a broken boot at him.
“Hey, Johnny, show some respect to the Commander-in-Chief.”
“He’s not my Commander,” the Rebel muttered. “Not today, not tomorrow.”
There was no use having this tug of war. I’d never win. But then Mary came over and charmed that skeleton out of his hospital shirt.
“You mustn’t be unkind to Mr. Lincoln,” she sang in that Southern lilt of hers. “He might have a nightmare and scare the bejesus out of his own boy. Where are you from, soldier?”
“I’m from Milledgeville, ma’am. And we’ll never forget that maniac, Wild Bill Sherman—he burnt the Oconee bridge, burnt the Statehouse, burnt the penitentiary, burnt the arsenal, and left us with nothing but a fistful of sand and rye.”
I couldn’t pretend I was deef. I knew what Sherman had done November last, with his lugubrious eyes, his crooked mouth, and sixty thousand boys that Grant himself said was like a monster that could brood and think. Milledgeville wasn’t much—just a watering hole where the monster could slake its thirst and breathe a little on the way to Savannah. And the foulest part of the monster’s foul breath belonged to the foragers—or bummers, as everybody called them, and the bummers called themselves. They were jaunty boys in buckskin shirts who left camp every morning on foot and returned on a mule or a Rebel captain’s horse, with their own store of goods they had pilfered from a farm, a supply train, or some Rebel scouting party.
According to this wounded boy, the bummers crept into Milledgeville near midnight and set fire to the north side of Statehouse Square, their faces covered with gunpowder and black earth, so that they looked like creatures who’d rumbled right out of the ground. They didn’t stop their pillaging when the State militia appeared, fourteen-year-old boys who hadn’t even finished their first season at the military academy; their hands shook so hard, they couldn’t hold on to their cartridge cases.
That’s when Wild Bill’s cavalry rode into town, their forage caps tilted over one eye, as they pursued the militia halfway across Milledgeville, cranking up their sabers like madcap windmills and nicking the boys’ arms and legs until blood and horse piss mingled into a deadly sweet perfume, and Wild Bill himself had to stop this mayhem pell-mell, round up these junior reserves in their ripped coats, lock them inside the chapel, and have his own surgeon attend their wounds.
The governor had fled a week before with all his clerks, and while the fire reveled in the November wind, the lunatics walked out of the State asylum in their nightgowns and wandered into the governor’s mansion. They tore the chandeliers from their sockets and marched through the halls, like chamberlains—and magicians—from the new Republic of Georgia. They might have triumphed, if they hadn’t been trapped in the flames. They stood in line and leapt out the windows with their gowns on fire. Their sad bleats resounded from roof to roof like some terrible war cry that froze Wild Bill and his cavalry. But the bummers dove into the fire with wet handkerchief masks, uncovered a back stairway, and coaxed the lunatics down the stairs, one by one, with hoots and lies and bawdy songs. Still, a dozen lunatics perished in the fire, and the bummers went right on ransacking the town; they gallivanted along Liberty Street, stole bags of flour and jelly jars from frightened widows, stripped every bed and cupboard at the hospital, raided a peacock farm at the edge of town, plucked those birds, and filled an enormous sack of peacock feathers worth a fortune.
“They were scalp hunters, too,” said the boy from Milledgeville. “They wore charm bracelets strung together with bits of ear as black as tar. Wild Bill rode with these devils, and he had a squint that could melt a man, and pocks in his face the size of a peanut. He went on a tour of ruination through Milledgeville with his bummers. They took our church and made it into a barn, filling it with their cavalry horses and our cattle. What kind of war is that, frightening folks out of their wits, settin’ up their own legislature in the Republic of Georgia, and declaring Yankee rules and Yankee laws? Destroying our church organ, pouring molasses into the pipes out of devilment, tearing up our railroad tracks and twisting the rails onto the roof of our depot, like a mockery of the Cross and a sign of their own black deeds, what kind of war is that?”
Colossal Destruction, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Grant had given Wild Bill the license to make war on people and property, and I had licensed Grant. We had to punish the patriarchs in Richmond, punish the whole of Dixie, else the war might drag on and on, through weal and woe. But I couldn’t mock this poor boy, tell him that the raking of Milledgeville had been one of my own ideas. I had to watch the skeleton writhe in Mary’s arms, as he told her his name, and his mother’s name. He had a wound in his gut and could digest nothing but a watery potato soup that had less nutrition than a peach pit, and wasn’t half as succulent. And seeing him suffer like that, I had a tear in my gullet to tell him the truth.
“Son, you ought not blame Wild Bill. I gave the order to bust up the town.”
The boy glanced at me and commenced to cackle. His ribcage shook so hard, I worried he might crack in two. Then he calmed down a bit and clutched my hand in his skeletal claws.
“Will ye feed me, grandpa? I want to get my vittles from the Commander-in-Chief.”
So I sat there on his rumpled cot, worried that it might crash right out from under me, and gave him a sip of that watery soup. It was edifying. Not on account of him being a wounded Rebel who wouldn’t survive this cot, and City Point, and the war—it was the replication of that unpolished spoon, how peaceful it was, like a metronome, or the tick of a clock. All the shiver had gone out of my hand, as I fed him sip after sip, and my legs didn’t feel cold in that field hospital near the front.
The surgeon whispered in my ear that this might be the boy’s last meal. But the boy was awful pleased with himself when he had Mary take down all the little reverberations of his last letter home to Milledgeville.
Ma, you could never guess in a million years who’s feeding me now at this dog’s hospital in Yankeeville. It’s Grant’s own war chief, him with the warts on his face and his high hat that’s the living dream of every sharpshooter in our Republic. Well, I hate him and I don’t. But his wife is from Kentucky, and I promised her some home cooking after the Yankees pack up and leave. Don’t you break my promise . . .
I didn’t have to hide any tears. I wouldn’t have wanted that sick boy to see me cry. Mary finished the letter—Grant’s postmaster would send it right to Fort Monroe, where Rebel couriers would ride it down along a particular route. I could fancy some courier galloping in Wild Bill’s wake, along a road of sacked farmhouses, smashed bridges and culverts, wrecked depots and deserted hamlets, with a bonnet on a blackened windowsill and the bloated carcass of a cow blocking the courier’s path.
49.
Lincoln’s Folly
AFTER SEVERAL DAYS of parties and a flotilla of dances, I accompanied Grant on horseback to review General Ord’s troops at Malvern Hill, four miles from City Point. We had to cover some bitter ground—swamps and woods and swollen fields, where men from the graves division wandered about like ghouls in the debris of battle, looking for the dead in some hidden ravine, or the hollow of a tree. I should have sat in my saddle with the Lady President right on my lap, but Grant insisted that she follow behind us in her own ambulance, with a military escort, and Mrs. Grant to keep her company.
So we took off for Malvern Hill, and I had my usual dilemma with Grant. He could be detailed and precise—even eloquent—in his despatches from the field, and shut-mouthed in my presence. I asked him what would happen if Lee and Jeff Davis took a gamble, gave up Richmond, and fled deeper into the South. At first he didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to pull the grit out from under his gray eyes. He was on Cincinnati, his favored mount, and I was on Egypt, his other bay.
We rode for half an hour in treacherous islands of mud, where Egypt would sink up to his shoulders and slog through terrai
n thick as tar. And suddenly Egypt sank deeper still, and I had a reservoir of mud around my eyes. Egypt snorted and most of him disappeared in that morass, with the bells on his bridle. I was certain I would drown, certain I’d never see Mary and Bob and Tad again, that the war would ravel out of control until North and South were one great swamp of misery where nothing could reside. It was Grant who lifted me off my saddle with one hand, and held me there, until Egypt’s finicky ears and black mane rose out of the mud, and my horse moved onto much higher ground. But Grant hadn’t uttered a word. And while he steered his horse and mine like a river pilot, he said out of the blue, “Mr. President, each morning I awake from my sleep with the worry that Lee has gone, and that nothing is left but a picket line. I fear he will run off with his men and his ordinance. He can move much more lightly than I can, and if he gets the start, he’ll leave me behind, and I’ll have the same army to fight again farther south and the war could be prolonged another year.”
I was startled some, since he could have been reading out one of his despatches right from his saddle. And I panicked that Petersburg might not be the final chapter.
“General, where would he go?”
Grant scratched his scrub of beard. “He could sweep down the coast of Florida, capture the Dry Tortugas, and squat there for the duration.”
He saw my hollow cheeks and the unholies that were coming on, and it was the first time I could remember Grant with a smile.
“It will never happen. The stakes are too high. But the longer they sit in their so-called capital, the stronger we get. They’ll have to evacuate, and when they do, the whole South will crumble. Richmond is their pet rattlesnake, their last vital sign, and Lee knows it.”
THE CAVALCADE BEGAN with Mrs. General Ord at my side, her red hair under a plumed hat, her riding boots without a single crack, as she sat high in the saddle on her bay horse, while I was half hidden on Egypt’s back.
“Mr. Lincoln, I am vexed.”
The sun lit up her red hair, and I’d never known a vexation that sweet.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Ord?”
“My husband’s men are saluting us, as if I were your bride.”
“Well, we won’t unlearn them,” I said, enjoying myself at this cavalcade, with Bob right behind me, looking more and more genuine with Grant, and not a toy solder in a captain’s cape.
Ord’s men were delighted—until we all could hear that infernal crack as Mary’s ambulance lumbered over the logs like some license of doom, and she appeared with mud all over her satin gown, her bonnet askew, her face all red, her temples beating with an ungovernable rhythm. No one had to learn me what had happened on that corduroy road, where a crooked ladder of logs had to cover a quagmire of soggy ground. Mary had bumped her head as the ambulance careened off the logs with a wilder and wilder bounce, and she near broke her neck. She insisted that the ambulance halt in the woods, so that she could arrive faster at Ord’s encampment on foot. As Mary floundered in the mud, Julia said with a look of bemused pity, “Madame President, this wagon is our only ark of refuge.”
Three officers had to extricate her, tugging with all their might, until they returned her to the ambulance, while Mary bristled—and that’s how she arrived at the cavalcade, deep puckers in her forehead, as Mrs. General Ord leaned in her saddle with an elegance and a grace Mary couldn’t have missed. My wife ran across the mud with her tiny feet, while Mrs. General Ord tried to welcome her. But Mary couldn’t be stopped. She looked satanic with her veil over one eye. I could sense the pain that welled up in her after that catastrophic ride. City Point had become a series of humiliations in her mind, and now she had to deal with a much younger woman on a magnificent bay.
“Hussy,” she said, “making eyes at my husband. Do you think I haven’t noticed?” And Mother had a perfect audience—soldiers on parade. “What does this woman mean by riding at the side of the President? People might mistake her for a duchess. We don’t have duchesses here, at least not in the swamps around Malvern Hill.”
There was no mercy in Mother’s eyes, no chance of conciliation, and Mrs. General Ord galloped off the field in tears. I watched Bob, whose face swelled with some of Mary’s rage. He would have kidnapped his own mother, carried her off the field, if we hadn’t still been on parade.
Mary continued to rip. Next she attacked Julia Grant. She wasn’t completely mad. She knew I couldn’t have been reelected without Ulysses, that I needed my own general to outmaneuver McClellan, so she had to dethrone Julia, whittle away at her because she couldn’t whittle Grant.
“I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?”
I could see how difficult it was for Julia, with her homely looks and horseface; she couldn’t even fasten onto her walleye. So she stared at the ground. “I’m quite satisfied where I am, Mrs. President.”
And Mary smiled like the Hell-Cat Billy Herndon and my secretaries believed she was. She fought with everyone who’d had the littlest sway over me. She’d fought with her own sisters and cousins, fought with Senators’ wives who’d curtsied to me at some shindig. And why shouldn’t she fight with Julia Grant and Mrs. General Ord when she didn’t have a solitary female friend in the capital, without her couturière?
“Oh,” she said to Julia, in her most practiced lilt, “you had better take it if you can get it—it’s very, very nice, my darling Mrs. Grant. And next time, don’t you dare seat yourself in a carriage, until I invite you!”
I could sense Julia’s anguish. She couldn’t flaunt herself, play the Hell-Cat, since she was the general’s wife. But Mother shut her eyes like a weary child, and one of Grant’s aides drove her back to the River Queen.
I returned around midnight. The river had a perfect black sheen, without a ripple. We could have been on the Nile. Mary sat in the upper saloon, knitting a sweater for Tad. And there wasn’t a mark of madness on her face.
“Mr. Lincoln, you mustn’t bother about me. I had a fit—but it’s over now. I banged my head while we were on that awful wooden road. And that Todd temper does run in our family—it’s like living with a ghost. I have written a lavish note to Mrs. Grant. I know, I know. I should be shot at dawn. But will you forgive your child-wife, just this once?”
I knew she was crafting something in her skull. She wanted to make amends, have a dinner for my generals without their wives. Mary was clear on that particular subject. And her dinner would be aboard the River Queen, where she could be the hostess, since this tub was a portion of the President’s House—while we were on the premises.
I had to lend a little of myself, or keep her locked up in the lower saloon . . .
She didn’t have Mrs. Keckly to groom her, but she had some of Keckly’s wiles—she wore a white lace gown with garlands in her hair. I couldn’t recognize my own wife. All the vacant looks were suddenly gone, that sense of exile at City Point. Her old luxuriance had come back, the plump arms and shoulders, the jiggle of her breasts under the gown. And then, with one delicate touch, she put on a black veil below the garlands.
“Mary, it’s not a funeral. It’s a dinner party. Why a black veil?”
“To fight mosquitoes,” she said.
There was no epidemic of mosquitoes in March, but I wouldn’t argue with my wife. Grant arrived with General Ord and some of his young captains, including Bob. No one dared mention the veil. She flirted with the generals in her own childlike fashion, lit their cigars.
Her voice wasn’t shrill. We all chomped on our salads. She didn’t meddle in military affairs. But she told Grant that my little stay at City Point did wonders for my dark complexion. And Ulysses was under the spell of Mother’s soft lilt. He shut his eyes and sat there with his fingers crossed, like a soldier sleeping in his saddle.
“Well, Madame President, once we chase the Rebels down into hell, you can have the manor house.”
“Gracious,” Mary said, with girlish charm, her bosoms breathing under that buttress of lace and silk, while every capta
in watched. “We wouldn’t dream of disowning you. Where would you stay?”
“In my cabin, ma’am. I’m quite content.”
She giggled, but I heard a note of hysteria, as if her music now had a ragged edge, and her little plan of seduction had gone awry. Did she want to bewitch Ulysses and all the young captains—including Bob—like some Salome of the Seven Veils? And it seemed as if her signals were stuck somewhere between her rôle of enchantress and Lady President, and she was lost in her own bewildered world, where generals and captains and Presidents were all replaceable figures in a frozen field—except for Bob. She watched him with one blazing eye in the midst of her performance and scowled at the cook, who was also our butler on board the River Queen. She picked up Grant’s fork, squinted at it, and said, “Josiah, that fork is filthy. Would you want General Grant to die of some gastric disorder? Then you must wash and rewash every fork on the table.”
“Damn if I won’t eat with my hands,” one of the captains muttered under his breath.
But Mary had too much ammunition under her veil. She sidled down next to Grant, with the perfume of her bosoms right under his beard, stroked his hand and said, “I am piqued by one of your generals, sir.”
Grant was still jovial; her perfume might have intoxicated him a little, but he couldn’t comprehend the waft of her ferocious will.
“And why is that, Madame President?”
She continued to stroke his hand, even while she stung him between the eyes. “You must remove General Ord immediately. He has harmed my husband beyond repair, sent his little wife to distract and confound the President with her wiles. He’s unfit for service, and so is Mrs. General Ord. She’s a hussy—and a witch. She has her own horse in a diabolical trance.”
My fault. I should have run into the privy rather than ride with Mrs. General Ord.
“Mary,” I said, but she was already beyond my reach.
I Am Abraham Page 36