Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

“But don’t you think Heaven would smell better, Mr. Buchanan?” Warren Harding is a flatulent roan pony who can’t digest grass. “The presidency was Hell,” he hiccups. “All I wanted was to get out of that damn White House, and now look where I’ve ended up. Dispatch for Mr. Dante: Hell doesn’t happen in circles. This Barn is one square acre of Hell and Fitzgibbons is the Devil!”

  Rutherford lately tries to avoid the question. All the explanations that the other presidents have come up with for what has befallen them, and why, feel too simple to Rutherford. Heaven or Hell, every president gets the same ration of wormy apples. Every president is stabled in a 12′ by 12′ stall.

  Maybe we have the whole question reversed, mixed up. Rutherford sighs. At night the wind goes tearing through the Barn’s invisible eaves and he wonders. Maybe the man is Heaven, the mobile hand that brings them grain and water. Maybe the Barn itself is God. If Rutherford lops his ears outward, the Barn’s rafters snap with the reverb of something celestial. At dusk, Fitzgibbons feeds them, waters them, shuts the door. Then the Barn breathes with the promise of fire. Stars pinwheel behind the black gaps in the roof. Rutherford can hear the splinters groaning inside wood, waiting to ignite. Perhaps that will be the way to our next life, Rutherford thinks, the lick of blue lightning that sets the Barn ablaze and changes us more finally.

  Perhaps in his next body Rutherford will find his wife, Lucy.

  The runaway

  One day, at the end of an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, James Garfield makes it over the Fence. Nobody sees him jump it. Fitzgibbons and the girl come in to groom the horses, and Rutherford B. Hayes overhears them talking about it. Shouting, really: “Well, I’ll be sweetly pickled! A runaway!” Fitzgibbons’s face looks blood-pulsed, flushed from the search. But his eyes crinkle up with delight. Sunup, sundown, Fitzgibbons follows the same routine. Surprise is a rare and precious feeling on the farm.

  “How do you like that, angel? We’ve never had a runaway before …”

  “But where did he run to, Uncle Fitzy?”

  Fitzgibbons grins down at her. “I don’t know.”

  Fitzgibbons doesn’t seem at all put out by the loss. Something about the way that he squints into the green mist beyond the Fence makes Rutherford think that Fitzgibbons is rooting for Garfield’s escape.

  “Do you think that Garfield will return?” James Buchanan asks now, looking nervous. “Because he must return, for the good of the Barn. We elected Garfield to represent the mallards. Who is going to speak out on behalf of the mallards at our next Convention? You can’t just shirk a duty like that. You can’t just abandon your post!”

  Apparently, you can, thinks Rutherford. The other presidents all stare at the dark and rippling air in James Garfield’s vacant stall.

  The next incumbent

  The following morning, Fitzgibbons comes in early to muck out Garfield’s stall. The Barn buzzes with speculation about the next president to join the ranks. Millard Fillmore is nervous enough for all of them. “Do you think he will be an agreeable sort of man? Do you think he will be a Republican? Why, what if he’s just a regular stud horse, and not a president at all …?”

  Nobody answers him. Every man is scheming in the privacy of his own horse-body. Andrew Jackson, a stocky black quarter horse stabled next to Rutherford, can barely contain his ambitions in his deep ribs. You can feel his human cunning quiver from the fetlock up. “Whoever the newcomer is, I will defeat him,” he says. Jackson has been lonely for an adversary. Every spring he runs uncontested for the office of Spokeshorse of the Western Territories. Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of the Cow Pastures, Commanding General of the Standing Chickens. They reminisce about their political opponents like old lovers. There’s a creeping emptiness to winning an office that nobody else is seeking.

  At noon, Fitzgibbons leads the new soul in. He’s a thoroughbred with four white socks and a cranberry tint to his mane. Buchanan recognizes him right away: “John Adams!”

  Adams lets out a whinny so raw with relief that it dislodges sleeping bats from the rafters: “You know me!” Adams woke up just yesterday, in the dark, close trailer that he assumed was a roomy coffin. “Excepting that I could see sunshine through the slats,” he says in a voice still striped with fear. He seems grateful when Buchanan gives him a friendly bite on the shoulder.

  “Are we dead?”

  Ten horses nod their heads.

  “Is this Heaven?”

  It’s an awkward question. Ears flatten; nostrils dilate as wide as a man’s fist. Rutherford unleashes a warm, diplomatic sneeze to ease the tension.

  “That depends,” shrugs Ulysses. A series of bleary battle-weary lines cross-hatches his black nose. “Do you want this to be Heaven? Does this look like Heaven to you?”

  Adams studies the dark whorls of mildew, the frizz of lofted hay, his own hooves. He goes stiff in the ears, considering. “That also depends. Is Jefferson here?”

  Jefferson is not. There are many absences in the Barn of unknown significance: Washington, Lincoln, Nixon, Harrison. The presidents haven’t arrived in the order of their deaths, either. Woodrow Wilson got here before Andrew Jackson, and Eisenhower has been here since the beginning.

  “But we can’t live out our afterlives as common beasts!” Adams’s eyes shine with horror. “There must be some way back to Washington! I am still alive, and I am certainly no horse.”

  There is always this period of denial when new presidents first arrive in the Barn. Eisenhower still refuses to own up to his own mane and tail. “I’m not dead, either, John Adams,” Eisenhower says. “I’m just incognito. The Secret Service must have found some way to hide me here, until such time as I can return to my body and resume governance of this country. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I’m no horse.”

  “ ‘I’m no horse!’ ” Andrew Jackson mimics. He butts Eisenhower with the flat of his head. “What the Christ are you, then?”

  “The thirty-fourth president of the United States.” Eisenhower shakes burrs from his tail in a thorny maelstrom.

  Adams is rolling his eyes around the Barn, on the verge of rearing. His gums go purple: “Gentlemen, we must get out of here! Help me out of this body!” By the looks of things, Adams will be a stall-kicker. He kicks again and again, until splinters go flying. “We need to alert our constituents to what has befallen us. Gentlemen, rally! What’s keeping us here? The doors to the Barn stand wide open.”

  “Rutherford,” says Ulysses. He stands sixteen hands high and retains his general’s authority. “Why don’t you show our good fellow Adams the Fence?”

  The Fence

  Rutherford and Adams trot out of the dark Barn into a light, silvery rain. The fence wood is rotted with age, braided through with wild weeds. Each sharpened post rises a level four feet tall, midway up the horses’ thick chests. Fitzgibbons put it up to discourage the fat blue geese from flight.

  “This is the Fence? This is what keeps us prisoners here? Why, I could jump it this moment!”

  Rutherford regards Adams sadly. “Go ahead, then. Give it a try.”

  Adams charges the Fence. His forelegs lift clean off the ground as he runs. At the last second, he groans and turns sharply to the left. It looks as if he is shying away from the edge of a cliff. He shakes his small head, stamps and whinnies, and charges again. Again he is repelled by some invisible thicket of fear. Sweat glistens on his dark coat.

  “Blast, what is it?” Adams cries. “Why can’t I jump it?”

  “We don’t know.” The presidents have tried and failed to get over the Fence every day of their new lives. Rutherford thinks it’s an ophthalmological problem. A blind spot in the mind’s eye that forces a sharp turn.

  “How did James Garfield manage it? And where did he run to?”

  Garfield’s hoofprints disappear at the edge of the paddock. The fence posts point at the blue sky. Adams and Rutherford stare at the trackless black mud on the other side of the Fe
nce. There are two deep crescents where Garfield began the jump, and then nothing. It’s as if Garfield vanished into the cool morning air.

  “Good question.”

  Animal memories and past administrations

  Woodrow Wilson is giving speeches in his sleep again: Ah, ah, these are very serious and pregnant questions, Woodrow mumbles, his voice thick with an old nightmare. Upon the answer to them depends the peace of the world.

  Poor Wilson, Rutherford thinks, watching as he addresses the questions of a phantom nation. Wilson paws at the stall floor as he dreams, his lips still moving. The world is drafting new questions, new answers, without him.

  In his own dreams, Rutherford never returns to the White House. Instead his memory takes him back to his Ohio home of Spiegel Grove, back to the rainy morning of his death. Unlike the other presidents, Rutherford’s dreams find him paralyzed, powerless. He remembers watching the moisture pearl on his bedroom window, the crows lining the curved white rail of his veranda. Lucy’s half of the huge pine bed had been empty four years. In the end, divested of all decisions, he had only an old thick-waisted nurse opening his mouth, filling it with tastes, urging him to swallow. Boyhood tastes, blood-pumpkin stew and sugared beets. His son and his youngest daughter were two smudges above the bedside. The boy quietly endeavored to blink good-bye. Then Rutherford’s throat began to close, shutting him off from all words, and he felt himself filling with silence. The silence was a field of cotton growing white and forever inside him. Rutherford wasn’t afraid to die. My Lucy, he remembers thinking, will be waiting for me on the other side.

  The first First Lady

  Lucy Webb Hayes was the first president’s wife to be referred to as a First Lady. Nobody besides Rutherford and a few balding White House archivists remembers her. Rutherford wishes that he was still a man and that she was still a Lady. He wishes that he had a hand to put on her waist. “Lucy?” he hisses at a passing mallard. “Lucy Webb?” Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can’t remember where he learned this—France or the Bible.

  “Lucy Webb!”

  The duck goes waddling away from him, raising the green tips of its wings in alarm. When Rutherford looks up, Fitzgibbons and the girl are standing at the edge of the pasture, looking at him strangely.

  “Uncle Fitzy? Does it sound like that horsie is quacking to you?”

  Rutherford and Fitzgibbons stare at each other for a long moment.

  “You know, Sarge has been acting up lately. All the horses have been behaving mighty queer. Worms, maybe. We ought to get the vet out here. We ought to get them some of those hydrangea shots.”

  After Fitzgibbons and the girl disappear behind the house, Rutherford continues on his quest to find the soul of his wife. There is a sheep that Rutherford has noticed grazing on the north pasture, slightly apart from the others. The sheep perks up when Rutherford trots over. It might be his imagination, but he thinks he sees a fleck of recognition, ice-blue, floating in her misty iris.

  “President Wilson?” Rutherford nudges him excitedly. “Could I trouble you to take a look at one of the ewes?” Rutherford has heard that Woodrow Wilson grazed sheep on the South Lawn. He hopes that Woodrow will be able to confirm his suspicion.

  “Your wife, you say?” Wilson exchanges glances with the other horses. “Well, I will gladly take a look, President Hayes.” His voice is pleasant enough, but his ears peak up into derisive triangles. Rutherford’s shame grows with each hoof-fall. The closer they get to the sheep pasture, the more preposterous his hope begins to seem. His trot hastens into a canter until Woodrow is breathless, struggling to keep pace with him. “Slow down, man,” he grumbles. They stand in the rain and stare at the sheep. She’s taking placid bites of grass, ignoring the downpour. Her white fleece is pasted to her side. “Uh-oh,” says Woodrow. “Hate to break it to you, but I think that’s just your standard sheep. Not, er, not a First Lady, no.”

  “Her eyes, though …”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. Cataracts. Unfortunate.”

  Rutherford thanks him for his assessment.

  “President Hayes?” Eisenhower is smirking at them from across the field. “Pardon, am I interrupting something? The other presidents have all gathered behind the bunny hutch. You are late again, sir.”

  Rutherford straightens abruptly, his cowlick flopping into the black saucers of his eyes. He takes an instinctual step in front of sheep-Lucy to shield her from Eisenhower’s purple sneer.

  “Late for what? Not another caucus on that apple tax.”

  “We voted that into law two weeks ago, Rutherford,” Eisenhower sighs. “Tonight it’s the Adams referendum. On the proposed return to Washington? We are leaving in three days’ time.”

  Washington or oblivion

  Secret deals get brokered behind the Barn, just north of the red sloop of the bunny hutch. A number of the presidents are planning their escape for a day they are calling the Fourth of July.

  “The country is drowning in sorrow,” Adams snorts. It’s high summer. Oats fall around him like float-down snow. “Our country needs us.”

  After several months of nickered rhetoric, Adams has convinced a half dozen of the former presidents to be his running mates in a charge on Washington. Whig, Federalist, Democrat, Republican—Adams urges his fellow horses to put aside these partisan politics and join him in the push for liberty. He wants the world to know that they have returned. “It is obvious, gentlemen: of course we’re meant to lead again. It is the only thing that makes sense. What other purpose could we have been reborn for? What other—”

  Adams is interrupted by a storm of hiccups. Behind him, Fitzgibbons is hitching Harding to a child-size wagon. He helps the girl into the wooden wagon bed. Fitzgibbons grins as he hands the child the reins, avuncular and unconcerned, his big arms crossed against his suspendered chest.

  “And tell me,” Rutherford asks quietly, “tell me, what evidence do you have that the country needs us to lead again? They seem to be getting on just fine without us.”

  Now Harding is pulling the girl in miserable rectangles around the bare dirt yard, hiccupping madly. “This—hiccup!—is—hiccup!—Hell.” The girl waves a dandelion at him like a wilted yellow scepter. “Giddy-up, horsie!” She laughs.

  Aside from Rutherford and Harding, the other presidents are in ecstasies. “Surely the term limits of the Twenty-second Amendment won’t apply to me anymore. This rebirth is the loophole that will let me run again, Rutherford.” Eisenhower grins for some invisible camera, exposing his huge buck teeth. “And win.”

  Oh dear, thinks Rutherford. That smile is not going to play well on the campaign trail.

  “With all due respect, sir, I fear you might be seeking the wrong office? I think there are some, er, obstacles to your run that you perhaps haven’t considered?”

  “Obstacles?” A fly buzzes drowsily between them and lands on one trembling whisker. “Now, give me some credit, Rutherford. I’ve put a lot of thought into this. Let me outline my campaign strategy for you …” Eisenhower has made this speech before.

  “And what about you, Rutherford? What are you, a stallion incumbent or a spineless nag?”

  Rutherford blinks slowly and doesn’t answer Eisenhower. Both options are depressing. He doesn’t want to return to Washington, if there even is a Washington. He just wants a baaa of recognition out of this one ewe.

  “Neither. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving my wife.”

  “Baaa!” says the sheep. She is standing right behind him. Her head is a black triangle floating on the huge cloud of her body. Rutherford has been training the sheep who might be Lucy to follow him. He holds his own supper in his mouth and then drops clumps of millet and wet apple cores to coax her forward. “Come on, sweet Lucy, let’s go back to the Barn.”

  The other presidents mock him openly, their ears pivoting with laughter. The sheep trails him like a pet delusion. Or like a wife who hasn’t woken up to the fact of o
ur love yet! Rutherford tells himself, tempting her with another chewed-up apple. White apples stud the slick grass behind him. The sheep that might be his wife follows him into the Barn, blinking her long lashes like a deranged starlet.

  Dirt memoirs

  The girl comes again later that evening with a currycomb and six leafy carrots. Her arrival causes riotous stirring in the Barn.

  “Does the child have her book bag?” Buchanan inches forward in his stall and cranes his neck, trying to see around the child’s narrow back.

  “Yes!” Adams crows. “To arms, gentlemen!”

  The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him. Fitzgibbons is no help; he is maddeningly apolitical. He’ll spend hours musing out loud about fertilizer or the toughness of bean hulls. But Fitzgibbons never complains about property taxes. He never mentions a treaty or a war. He seems curiously removed from the issues of his day.

  “Get her book bag,” Eisenhower hisses. There’s something sinister about the angle at which his lips curl over his rubbery gums. The girl’s schoolbag is leaning against the Barn door frame.

  Van Buren tries to hypnotize the child by rhythmically swishing his tail. “Look over here, girlie! Swish! Swish!” He shakes his head from side to side. Eisenhower steps gingerly into the looped strap of the child’s bag and drags it with his foreleg. He has it almost to the edge of his stall before she notices.

  “Uncle Fitzy!” the girl yells. “Gingersnap is being bad!” Eisenhower hates it when she calls him Gingersnap. He complains about it with a statesman’s pomp: “Gentlemen, there exists no more odious appellation than”—nose crumpling, black lips curling—“Gingersnap.”

  The girl walks forward and snatches her book bag back, but not before Eisenhower has shaken it upside down and kicked several of the books under a clump of hay. “Hurry,” he hisses, “before Fitzgibbons comes with the whip!”

  The presidents crowd around the books. Literature, mathematics, science, cursive. No history book. The cursive book has fallen open to a page thick with hundreds of lowercase bs. Eisenhower sends the books flying with a swift kick from his right foreleg, disgusted. “Every subject but American history! What has become of our education system? What are they teaching children in schools these days?!” It’s an urgent question. What are they teaching children these days? And how is each president remembered? That’s the afterlife the presidents are interested in. Not this anonymous, fly-swatting limbo.