I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  General Ord stood up in a bewildered rage; he stroked his silver mustache out of nervousness, I imagine. He bowed to Mary, saluted Grant, and begged his permission to leave, while Mary snorted under her veil.

  “Coward, what would you do if I were not Mr. Lincoln’s wife?”

  He was Grant’s most trusted general. Ord hadn’t busted up Atlanta, like Wild Bill, but he’d been wounded twice in the heel, and commanded his own corps during the current siege.

  “Madame,” Ord said, bowing again. “I am not in the habit of insulting ladies.”

  Ord was beside himself. But Mary continued to goad him.

  “Tell me—tell me what you would do.”

  “I would find a way to end your silliness—without insulting Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Grant.”

  He looked like a ghost in that silver mustache of his. And he rushed out the saloon in several short strides. I’d never seen Grant so shaken. His ash gray eyes seemed to disappear inside his skull. Mother’s tirade had jolted Grant out of his own private shell and filled him with confusion and some kind of fatigue. How could he have known that living with Mary was like a constant barrage of fire?

  “Mr. President, my men are tired. We will have to conclude this meal.”

  “But it is forbidden,” Mary said. “You cannot interrupt a dinner on the River Queen without the President’s approval—even if you are General Grant.”

  “Mother,” I said, in a voice that was near a whisper. “He has my approval.”

  “But he does not have mine,” Mary said. “He’s your best battler, well, let him battle with me.”

  Now Robert stood up. The most junior of junior officers had to protect Ulysses Grant.

  “Mother, shut—your—mouth, or I will drag you to the river and drown you, help me God.”

  Mary hadn’t expected her own boy to bark at her like that. The veil fell off and floated onto the table. She wasn’t much of a menace without that veil. Her cheeks were bloated. Her eyes had the vacant stare of a sleepwalker. She seemed helpless—alone—on the River Queen. Bob took her in his arms, petted her hair, like he’d pet his own Puss, and accompanied her out the saloon, as if she were some wayward little sister of his who had lost all sense. They had their own language of little caresses and secret looks . . .

  We fell into total silence, Ulysses Grant and I. This was one scrape he wouldn’t have to describe in a despatch. He left with his young captains, except for Bob. I sat there, mesmerized by that black butterfly, the silken veil. The mind played its own muscular tricks.

  Bob returned to the saloon. I saw both our fatigued faces in the mirror. He was his mother’s child—had her aristocratic mien and a soft, sullen glow around the eyes.

  “Father, she’s asleep, and she’ll stay like that—in her own trance. There’s nothing you can do when she’s that way. I witnessed the fights she had with the butcher, haggling over pennies. She always won. I watched her donnybrooks with the Irish maids, saw it all when I was a little boy. There was that itch just under the surface, that need for a reckoning. She made war on Billy Herndon and your other allies. And if you had been around more often, she would have declared war on you.”

  “But I never . . .”

  “You were on the circuit, Father, somewhere with your saddlebags . . . when she wakes up, she won’t remember much. She’ll write the most charming letter in the world to General Ord. She’ll have flowers sent from the White House to Mrs. Mary and Mrs. Julia. And the rancor will build up again. She’ll seethe at some new offense. And she’ll blame it on her monthlies, or blame it on you, that you slighted her in front of the general, or that you wasted a lot of time kissing Mrs. Julia’s hand. But you must promise me one thing.”

  I felt enfeebled in front of my own boy, as if I could juggle battlegrounds in my head, but couldn’t cure the wildness in my own wife.

  “Son, I’ll do what I can.”

  And Bob’s dark eyes grew infinitely sad. “It’s not about Mother. You must rescue me. I cannot go on as my general’s pet, bundled up in captivity, away from the war. I will not stay here and liaison with Senators’ wives. I will not dance with local debutantes while our siege guns travel closer to the enemy’s line. I will pick my own bride, without Mother or Mrs. Grant—I want to go with my general to the front. I insist.”

  “And have your mother go completely mad? She’ll ride with you in the same troop train, and I’ll have to join you both on one of Grant’s war horses.”

  Oh, I could whistle with my boy about rebellion—I was in my stride. Mary wasn’t the culprit in this piece. My own fears had periled me. I could risk other sons, could see their ragged remains on the battlefield, but didn’t want Bob’s bones to arrive in a metal box. All my proclamations were like bugle calls on a narrow hill—full of thunder and tin. And Bob was sick of my White House reveilles.

  “Father, should I play Hotspur, and have you be my Hal? Or whack you with a wooden sword—”

  I was astonished when Bob shoved me with the flat of his hand. He was just as astonished by his own fury. His shoulders shivered as I toppled over and landed on my rump, in the upper saloon. I shouldn’t have gone overboard with one simple shove. I was a head taller than Bob.

  “Father,” he said, standing there forlorn, in all the finery of his polished buckles and straps. “It was unforgivable. I . . .”

  I scrambled to my feet and couldn’t bear to watch him crumple up, as if he wanted to leave the country and vanish from my sight. I took him in my arms, but his body stiffened against my touch, and I had to let go.

  “Son, I needed that spill—it kind of cleared my head.”

  I scribbled a note to General Grant. Bob folded it into his pocket, pecked me on the forehead, and raced the hell out of there—like a disheartened boy who’d gotten a little bit of enchantment back. I didn’t wander into the stateroom, fearful I might wake Mary from her own charmed sleep; I sat there with her silk veil in my hand, soft as night, and worrying that I’d never see an end to this war, that Grant would falter somehow, that the Rebels would remain in Richmond through time and eternity, and that Bob wouldn’t survive the next onslaught, that he would lie down in an unrecorded grave, and no one would ever find him again.

  50.

  The Lone Rider

  I’D SEEN BOB go off on the battle train, in the very car with Grant, our own prince of darkness in a rumpled coat. This wasn’t like McClellan’s forays, with his lackeys looking at him in awe, while he preened himself. Grant had no ornaments. His eyes were already screwed inward, into some landscape where no one else could follow, not my Bob nor the President of the United States. Then I heard that thump, thump of hooves and a neighing as furious as the Rebel yell. Cincinnati was beside his general, his flanks glistening, as the train lurched with a groan. And I went back down the hill to the River Queen and had to deal with my wife.

  It was all a ruse—to stop the chatter, I suppose, like a feint of war, to mask her epic battles with two generals and their wives. She did not want to be remembered as Mr. Lincoln’s mad lady. So I acquiesced to her little scheme. She would pretend to be my sergeant, my sentinel. I watched her eyes flutter as she memorized her lines, like an actress on a riverboat. “I’ll say, Mr. Lincoln had a dream when downriver at City Point . . . that the White House was in ruin. Sent me up the river to see.”

  She was diminished, shrunken, when I accompanied her to the wharf. Bob wasn’t there to say goodbye, so half the drama was gone. She couldn’t make her grand exit without Bob, couldn’t make an exit at all, couldn’t tolerate the idea that he’d gone to the front while she was still asleep. He’d left her the shortest of notes.

  Mother, I’m with my General.

  Love, Robert

  Her mind had taken flight to some far sea. Her blue eyes were no longer with me and Tad. Then she wrapped a white lace shawl around her, and her blue eyes came back from that far flight—with a hint of madness.

  I should not have given Bob to those barbarians, she said, meaning Gr
ant and his charger, Cincinnati, whom she considered a war monster that could belch fire and whiskey, like Grant, and foul the air with his stinking breath. She would never forgive me if Bob lost so much as a finger at the front. And she cursed the two Mrs. Generals for mocking her and belittling her station in front of the troops.

  In her moment of folly she did not even say goodbye to Tad—she’d removed herself from City Point, since she couldn’t reign at some army camp where a President was just another privileged guest. Luckily I had wired Elizabeth to come and fetch my wife. She’d arrived from Sixth Street that same morning on a revenue cutter, and stepped onto the wharf wearing a simple black gown. It didn’t take Mrs. Keckly more than a single glance to estimate all the damage. But Tad was bewildered. He couldn’t understand why Yib was here. He wondered whether she was a war bride, who’d traveled up the James to be with a soljer boy.

  Yib started to cry. She must have sensed that Tad was caught between the Titan in the tall hat and a First Lady in disrepair. And she was startled by the abruptness of City Point, how deserted the camp was without its generals. Even the sutlers had scattered, and the embalmers, and the array of concubines, as if the generals and their battle horses were never coming back. Their stables loomed above Grant’s cabin like a ghost town on a hill. But we did have our own chorus—the generals’ wives had come down to bid the Lady President adieu. Julia Grant and Mrs. General Ord were there on the wharf, with a kind of inexorable charm; they didn’t want to slight Mary, knowing she was unwell. But her eyes sailed right over their heads. She wouldn’t acknowledge them, and I couldn’t heal the rift, that war among the wives.

  I let Mother have the River Queen, so she could hold on to her stateroom and all the little condiments of the Presidential steamer. Her luggage had been carried aboard, every one of her hatboxes and valises, with the extra curtains and footstools, but she dallied on the wharf, couldn’t seem to climb onto the Queen. And suddenly she was aware of all the faces around her, and that arctic face of hers unfroze. She waved her fist at Julia Grant, and I couldn’t tell if it was out of defiance. But she curtsied to all the generals’ wives, thanked them for their graciousness.

  “Mesdames,” she said, clutching at the lace around her throat, “I’m so, so sorry I have to part, but duty beckons. There’s been talk about some blatant damage at the White House. Charges have been leveled. And my husband is sending me upriver to deal with the ruckus.”

  Then she tousled Tad’s hair with such warmth, I thought she’d had a spontaneous eruption of joy.

  “Don’t you trouble your Pa,” she said. “And I’ll bring you a charlotte russe from Gautier’s on my next trip.”

  Her eyes had a remarkable sheen in the morning sun, like a kitten without claws. She was the same coquette I’d first encountered at a Springfield ball, with that plumpness I adored.

  “Father,” she whispered, “don’t forget me, hear?”

  She nuzzled me with her nose in front of the mechanics, pilots, porters, and generals’ wives. And she climbed aboard the River Queen with Mrs. Keckly clutching her long, black train. She stood at the edge of the gangplank for a moment, waved to us with her fat little fingers, and sang, “Au revoir, Mesdames et Messieurs.” I was mightily confused, as if some bullet was bouncing in my brain, and I could no longer tell the mad from the unmad, the generals from the carpenters, the Rebels from our own boys. And then I caught a last glimpse of my wife, with that fork of distemper in her forehead, as she disappeared with her long black train under the dark mantle of the deck.

  MOST TIMES I WAS at the telegraph office, waiting for some news from Grant. “I intend to close the war right here—at Petersburg,” he’d told me, as he mounted his car to the front, with troopers snaking along the tracks for much of a mile, their cheeks smeared with gunpowder to guard them against the sun; they didn’t have that brilliant look of McClellan’s boys, when every soldier in the Union was under his command; these boys had grubby hands and rag-tail uniforms; several even wore Rebel caps as their own private insignias. And then there were the engineers, rugged boys in dirty red neckerchiefs, who had to carry lumber on their backs and build corduroy roads every foot of the way while the general’s brigades advanced, or we wouldn’t have had a piece of artillery at the front—that’s as much of the spring offensive as I ever saw. There were reports of our men mounting the parapets and hurling themselves inside the enemy’s line, reports that the Rebels broke and ran, and still other reports that our own boys had been repulsed. So I didn’t know what to believe and which despatches to trust. In the thick of this hurly-burly, the machine clattered on the second of April, and I had word from Grant.

  We are now up and have a continuous line of troops, and in a few hours will be entrenched from the Appomattox below Petersburg to the river above. . . . The whole captures since the army started out gunning will amount to not less than twelve thousand men, and probably fifty pieces of artillery. . . . I think you might come out and pay us a visit tomorrow.

  That was the whole drama of Grant—not that Petersburg had been taken after a siege of nine months, but that I could come tomorrow and catch a few of the sights. Then the machine clattered again, and I prayed that the war news hadn’t swirled around and that Grant had to leap back over the parapets with all his twelve thousand captures. But the news wasn’t from Grant. Word from Mary came through the wires.

  Miss Taddie & yourself very much—Perhaps, may return with a little party on Wednesday—give me all the news.

  And I wondered if that voyage upriver had healed her, a little. Safely ensconced at the White House, she was plotting her return to Soldier Land, and all the perils it entailed. But her telegram had nothing to do with City Point. It was all about Bob—Bob—Bob. She’d have sailed above the parapets in a silk balloon, tethered to the River Queen, if that could have brought her closer to Bob.

  I ducked outside the telegraph office, where a little band of pickets were already celebrating the end of the siege—they must have had their own despatch rider or some internal telegraph. They whooped and hawed and played Axe-on-the-Handle with an old rusty axe, but none of them could raise that axe up high with one hand. They stopped their whooping when they saw me.

  “Mr. President,” they said, “is it true that the general had a game of checkers with Bobbie Lee while they were on the parapets, and that Bobbie won, but he still had to run to Richmond on a corduroy road?”

  There were no corduroy roads to Richmond, but I didn’t want to dampen their tale. I hefted the axe and raised it up with my right arm until it was even with the horizon—and held it there without a single quiver. I took a certain pride in holding that axe, as if I were the main feature at a monster show.

  Suddenly all the pickets close to the telegraph office wanted to compete with their President—they were burly boys, but none of them could hold on to that rusty axe; it dropped to the ground, and never once rose above their knees.

  I didn’t revel. Pa had me handle an axe before I was six. One of the boys offered me whiskey from his canteen. But he scampered with the other pickets when he noticed an officer come charging up the hill on a big bay. I recognized the horse—Egypt—but not the rider, who sat low in the saddle and chased after the pickets with his riding crop. “I’ve never seen such rascality,” he shouted. “You were supposed to guard the perimeter, not carouse on a hill with an axe.” His voice had a falsetto that was suddenly familiar. And the officer had a wild look about him; with his cap over one eye, he could have been deranged—it was Bob.

  His shoulder straps had been ripped off; his sleeves were ragged; his tunic was torn. He scrambled down from his horse like some Cossack, not my son Bob.

  “Father, my general sent me here—I didn’t want to come back.”

  I was dumfounded and so dizzy I had to drop the axe.

  “Son, did you bring a despatch from Ulysses?”

  “Sir, I’m not his messenger boy—not yet.”

  He tossed his cap into the air—his
left eye was swollen shut; he had a patch of blood on his cheek, like some mysterious sign.

  “Bobbie,” I said, “the blood . . .”

  “I was in a skirmish,” he said. “Two Johnny boys broke through our perimeter, wearing National uniforms—they crept close to headquarters and would have murdered Lucifer if they’d had half a chance.”

  Bob could sense my dismay and confusion.

  “That’s what some of us call Mr. Grant—Lucifer. . . . There was a scrape right outside his tent. Grant never blinked. He smoked his cigar and watched it like the-ay-ter, as you might say. But you mustn’t worry. Lucifer’s bodyguards were with me during the entire skirmish. Your precious Prince Hal only suffered a scratch as we scuffled with the invaders. It wasn’t pretty, Father. Those two Johnny boys were cut down in their tracks. They ended up as bags of blood and shit. And we sent them back across the lines with a little doggerel that I crafted myself.”

  There once were a pair of bitches who belonged to Bobbie Lee . . .

  I got more about my General-in-Chief in a few minutes with Bob than I ever got in my encounters with other commanders, or with Grant himself. Lucifer, it seems, would sit on the ground writing a despatch while the trees shattered over his head—nothing could disrupt his concentration. He stood on the parapets outside Petersburg and directed our battle lines, strumming his fingers through the air, like a magician with multiple wands, and taking as little notice of Rebel sharpshooters as he would a bunch of bothersome bees. And when he found a sutler whipping his horses in brutal fashion, he had the wretch tied to a tree for six hours—and confiscated the horses.

  “And did you enter Petersburg with Lucifer?” I asked Bob, who had suddenly become my chief scout.

  “Yes, I did. The Rebels were running like rabbits. And when he saw them all packed up on the streets near the little bridge at the Appomattox bottom, he told me that he didn’t have the heart to turn his artillery on such a mass of defeated and dispirited men, but he planned to capture them as soon as possible, and capture them he will. The Rebels can’t hold on to Richmond—they’ll have to run.”