by Max Byrd
Malarial fever, Trist had learned, could rise and fall like a red-hot tide. He felt a familiar scalding flush, pushed his chair back again, and looked around the room. Mrs. Cameron was nowhere to be seen. Where was Twain? Trist passed unsteadily across the rear of the hall, stumbling like a blind man in the darkness, and found him in the farthest possible corner, at a small table by the wall. Next to him a youngish, drunkish man in a private’s uniform was clutching his head between two hands.
“Vilas is good,” the private whispered miserably to Twain.
Twain aimed his cigar at the speaker. “Colonel Sanderson Vilas,” he muttered to Trist. “From Wisconsin, famous stump speaker and preacher.”
“In Illinois,” the private said, “we think Bob Ingersoll is one hell of a talker.”
Vilas was a small dog-faced man whose neck and chin were lost in his high military collar. He was evidently responding to the toast “Our Gallant Leaders.” Seated beside him in the spotlight, Grant kept his face clamped in an iron calm.
“Here he goes,” Twain said as Vilas began to pace back and forth and pound his open hand with his fist. There was a rising shout from the crowd—
“Get up on the table! On the table!”
From the audience a blur of men suddenly surged forward, around the head table; heads, hands flashed in the spotlight, Vilas disappeared into shadows, reappeared abruptly, lifted on a wave of blue shoulders and carried right up to the top of the table, next to the imperturbable Grant. His shoes snagged on the white tablecloth, and he wobbled dangerously for a moment, straddled a plate, blinked out at the room, then, almost without a pause, he resumed his pounding oration. The hall thundered and cheered.
Lightning flashed in Trist’s skull. He fumbled in his coat for a packet of medicine. A few intelligible words cut through the noise like rockets—“Grant—Heroism—Let Us Have Peace”—and then the room seemed to crash apart in applause.
“Bob can’t touch that,” the private wailed.
When Ingersoll did appear, introduced by a disheveled Sherman, he stood for a moment behind the table and looked out at the crowd. Then he grinned and pulled up a chair and climbed onto the table as well (“Now we’ll all have to do it,” Twain grumbled). He was an odd, bald figure with a high forehead and small, close-set eyes. He waited for almost a full minute, hands in pockets, audibly jingling coins. “The Volunteers,” he announced, and began his speech.
Slowly, as the brandy did its work, Trist found the room growing hotter and darker. Sherman’s white face became a starburst of disorder. Twain sipped water, studied Ingersoll’s every gesture. The oration moved ponderously through the topic of the volunteers, how they had risked everything to defend their country, how they had entered the war certain of victory, fallen away into the bleak discouragement of the middle years—Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg—watched with awe as this calm man before them, the Supreme Volunteer, rose out of undeserved obscurity and took the helm.
Against his will Trist found himself straining forward, listening. As always, whenever he thought about the war, the result was a bundle of contradictions—butcher versus hero, ruined bodies versus freed slaves, a saved Union, a country to run away from.
The private from Illinois pushed the brandy toward him. You go to war because of your father, Trist suddenly thought, men always had. Ingersoll reached Gettysburg with its twenty thousand dead—the father Trist had never known had been a soldier; his stepfather had been a Jeffersonian patriot, dedicated with all his heart to the new Jeffersonian nation; as a diplomat, he had settled the Mexican War single-handedly, writing the treaty himself, and then congressional politics had done him out of a job and a pension, and he had died living on next to nothing, but still a patriot to his bones. He had driven Trist to the recruitment station in Hartford; his last political act had been to vote for Grant’s second term in 1872. On the platform Grant’s small, hard profile caught the light and held it. Ingersoll’s high voice went on relentlessly, naming battle after bloody battle in the final year.
Trist drained his brandy. Next to him Twain scratched a note to himself in a small leather pad. Grant was a volunteer, Ingersoll told them, Sherman, Sheridan, every soul in uniform tonight—when they marched out to save their land, ready to give the last full measure of devotion, “at that sacred moment blood was water,” he cried, “money was leaves, and life was only common air until one flag”—his right hand swooped and swung to the Stars and Stripes suspended above the General’s head—“until one flag floated over a Republic without a master, and without a slave!”
Before his hand could drop, the audience was on its feet clapping and stamping and waving their napkins in a snowstorm of applause.
There were five more speakers before Twain. At intervals he turned to Trist and said something so low and fleeting that Trist could only pretend to hear. Once, in a lull, the drunken private asked if he had written out his speech, and Twain explained in his soft drawl that he never wrote things out, but instead arranged his silver and plates in a mnemonic system. A cup placed here meant such-and-such a joke, a fork turned sideways meant change the subject. “What’s your toast?” the soldier asked, but Twain merely shook his head and drank his water.
By two o’clock in the morning the banquet hall was a limp haze of smoke and exhaustion. At speaker number fourteen Twain slipped away. Trist made his way back to Cadwallader’s side just as Sherman rose to his feet for the last introduction.
“Cameron married his niece,” Cadwallader whispered. “Sherman’s.”
Sherman was motioning to the top of the table. Somebody else—General Sheridan? Ingersoll?—was offering to boost Twain up, but the writer waved them both aside and stayed behind the table. Unhurried, he moved a few leftover glasses and spoons in an aimless pattern on the rumpled cloth. Then he reached into the shadows and brought out a chair and used it to climb onto the table all by himself, just to the left of the seated Grant. He pulled long and deep on his cigar and gazed about the room.
The last clatterings and clinkings faded away. “The Babies,” Twain said in a leisurely tone. His voice was unremarkable, yet carried to the corners of the hall. “My toast is, ‘The Babies, As They Comfort Us in Our Sorrows, Let Us Not Forget Them in Our Festivities.’ ”
He paused and flicked a little ash into a saucer. “I like that,” he said. Another pause. “We haven’t all been generals or heroes or statesmen, but when the toast works down to the babies, why, we stand on common ground.” For the first time since the speeches had started, Grant actually moved his head and looked up. Twain looked down at him, utterly deadpan. “Well,” he said slowly, “we’ve all been babies.” Grant’s beard parted in a smile.
Afterward, when he tried to remember it, Trist couldn’t be sure precisely what Twain had said—they had all been babies, babies tyrannized comically even over soldiers and heroes: “You could face the death storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow, but when he clawed your whiskers and pulled your hair and twisted your nose, you had to take it. When he ordered his pap bottle, and it wasn’t warm, did you talk back? Not you. You went to work and warmed it.” By the end of the first two minutes Twain had his audience helpless with laughter, even Grant, who was rolling about in his chair like everyone else. At the end of every sentence he stopped and looked languidly about the room, expressionless, while the laughter continued to build. He’s routed Grant, Trist thought, changed places with him.
Toward the end he turned his attention briefly from Grant to Sheridan. “As long as you’re in your right mind,” he told the crowd, “don’t ever have twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot.”
Slowly, carefully, he built to a long climax. He asked them to picture the future rulers of the country, those who would inherit the great flag of the Republic that Colonel Ingersoll had saluted, when it flew fifty years hence over a nation of two hundred millions—at this very moment, Twain said, those illustrious leaders were no more than babies lying in their cradles. Imagine
a future Admiral Farragut teething, a future President pulling at his tiny tufts of hair, a future great astronomer reaching for his wet nurse. “And in still one more cradle,” he said, “somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious Commander in Chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth.” The laughter died away. The crowd stirred uneasily. Grant’s countenance grew blank as Twain’s. The toast seemed suddenly to hover on the brink of catastrophic insult. “An achievement,” Twain continued, “which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest of this evening turned his whole attention to some fifty-six years ago.”
A kind of shuddering silence fell over the room. Twain looked down at the table and used his shoe to move a spoon an inch to one side. A flag rustled and snapped in a current of stale air. He surveyed the room slowly, left to right. Raised his cigar to his lips, took it away.
“And if the child is but a prophecy of the man”—the longest, most agonizing pause yet; then a headlong rush of words—“there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”
In the detonation of laughter and cheers that followed, as Grant actually stood to shake Twain’s hand and Sherman clasped him in a rolling, wrestling bear hug, Trist felt a grip on his arm. “Stole my idea,” Cadwallader complained thickly. “Grant in his cradle, goddam Twain.”
When Twain finally made his way past their table, heading toward the exit, still surrounded by shoulder-pounding admirers, he stopped and leaned over to grab Cadwallader’s lapel. “Did you see Grant break up? Didn’t I fetch him? Didn’t I make his bones ache?” To Trist: “Didn’t I nearly kill him?”
CHAPTER SIX
THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT
by Sylvanus Cadwallader
CHAPTER TWO
WELL, MEXICO MADE HIM; MEXICO WRECKED HIM.
I myself despise the whole damn hotfooted Mexican country, have from the first minute I crossed the border as a young “special correspondent,” and that was not two full months after Lieutenant U. S. Grant himself marched in, in the year of decision 1846, part of old Zachary Taylor’s so-called “Army of Observation.”
Actually, I came to despise the state of Texas first and simply enlarged my dislike to cover Mexico too, both of them dried-up oceans of sand and thorns, under a sun so hot it seemed like a maniac slinging coals of fire. (Phil Sheridan once told me if he owned Texas and Hell, he’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.)
But Grant—Grant fell in love with every part of it. I have heard him wax almost lyrical (for Grant) over the beauty of the little Mexican town of Matamoros on the Rio Grande. He talks about the red-tiled roofs, the red and yellow flowers on the white walls, even the soft, tranquil nights, he says, full of perfume. I sometimes think the human personality is like one of those little Russian dolls, every time you open it there’s another one inside. This wasn’t your Grant of Cold Harbor and the Wilderness. This was the dreamy boy from Ohio popping up, who went through West Point skipping his lessons to read the romantic novels of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton; Grant number one.
West Point, of course, had been his awful father’s idea, not for the glory and prestige of a military career—in those old peacetime days there wasn’t any—but because the education was free, and Jesse Grant never spent a dime he didn’t have to.
Grant himself has told me the story more than once—home he came for Christmas in 1838, back from the latest school he’d been attending, age seventeen, and there was his father opening an official-looking blue envelope from Washington City. “Ulysses,” Jesse said—nobody alive ever called him “Hiram”—“I believe you’re going to receive the appointment.”
“What appointment?”
“To West Point. I applied for it.”
“But I won’t go!”
But Jesse folded his arms and said grimly he thought he would, and Grant likes to add, dryly, “and I thought so too, if he did.”
An undistinguished time he had of it, however, hardly living up to Jesse’s boasts about young ’Lyss’s “genius.” The only subjects he ever did well in were mathematics and drawing—an officer has to be able to see and draw the land in front of him, that was how Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought himself to George Washington’s attention—and Grant did very badly indeed in French (though in Mexico he learned to speak Spanish quite well); middling in military deportment. (The cadets of Grant’s era all spoke with awe of an earlier cadet who had passed through four straight years without a single demerit, Bobby Lee.) Grant hated the discipline, hated being addressed as “Animal,” as all the plebes were, found the rigmarole of army customs pointless. In his first year he read in the papers that Congress was thinking of abolishing the Academy. Though not otherwise a religious person, he prayed assiduously for that to happen.
He graduated twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine and was assigned to the Infantry and posted away to St. Louis. There he passed the time drilling his troops and courting his roommate’s sister. Julia Dent lived with her parents just close enough for a young second lieutenant to ride over after the day’s work and linger chatting in the Missouri twilight until a disapproving father grudgingly asked him in for supper. (About West Point I will only add that in all the mathematics textbooks today the standard solution to a certain problem in analytic geometry is credited to one U. S. Grant. His famous old professor Dennis Mahan, author of a dozen books on mathematics and physics, wrote analyses of every cadet who passed through his class; Grant’s “mental machine,” Mahan claimed, was of the “powerful low-pressure class, which condenses its own steam and consumes its own smoke.” I have no idea what he meant.)
Missouri twilight; copper-colored, flame-throwing Mexican noon. Where West Point was an episode, an interlude, Mexico was an education.
An education in injustice, first of all, because it seemed to Grant, as it did to me, that from start to finish the Mexican War was totally wrong, morally wrong, the calculated and indefensible invasion of a weak country by a stronger one, for no better reason than greed for land. One way or another, President James Knox Polk meant to “adjust” the disputed boundary between Mexico and the brand-new state of Texas and in the process simply seize all of California to the west, to make it safe for expansion and slavery. Generals who disagreed were swiftly shelved. Generals who looked as if they might become presidential rivals next election year—a lesson in politics and war not lost on Grant—found themselves out of command. While the diplomats played out their charade, Polk quietly massed his troops at Corpus Christi. And then on March 11, 1846, Zachary Taylor raised his glove and gave the order, and the American Army set out at a run for the Rio Grande.
At the first little battle of Palo Alto, the Mexicans fired their muskets at four hundred yards—might as well have fired from the moon—and discharged a few ancient, creaking cannons. (The advancing Americans stood in the dried grass and watched the cannonballs slowly bouncing and skipping toward them, then just took a step or two out of the way.) Nonetheless there were casualties. Grant wrote home to his fiancée Miss Dent that a nine-pound shot hit one Captain Page in the face, and “the under jaw is gone all the way to the windpipe and the tongue hangs down upon the throat” (a Grant love letter).
Your historians, snug in their college library, will call the Mexican War a dress rehearsal for the Civil War. But your journalists like me will tell you it was actually the last old-fashioned war in history. The soldiers, those that were not perpetually drunk, malaria-ridden, or pondering desertion, fought for individual glory, not for President Polk, certainly not for the Cause. What they wanted, first of all, was to get their names in the official reports to Washington, second to get their names in the newspapers. Many a gift of whiskey was I offered for a special paragraph or two in the Chicago Times, concerning little local acts of heroism. And the glory did indeed rain down—Bobby Lee, Pete Longstreet, a Mississippi colonel call
ed Jefferson Davis—name after name gained a brevet promotion or a special citation in Scott’s weekly report.
Not Grant’s name, however. At the start of the invasion Grant had been made quartermaster of his regiment, in charge of the mules and the cooks and the dusty boxes of hardtack that followed the fighting troops. Not much glory in kicking mules.
He begged for reassignment, but he was too competent at his job, and too insignificant and unprepossessing in appearance for his colonel to notice. As often as he could he left his braying charges to the sutlers and raced ahead to join the battle unofficially. I claim our paths crossed once or twice—Grant says no—we both remember the eerie sight of soldiers’ corpses floating in the Rio Grande, rolling and twitching as if they were still alive, because the fish were already nipping their flesh. And the day at Veracruz it was so spellbinding hot that the whole army marched in its underwear (glory!). At Monterrey, behind a barricade, he watched a wounded private who sat down on a boulder with his red sticky guts spilling onto his lap, singing a psalm till he toppled over and died.
Once, in the ironic fashion of life, the Congressman, now a general, who had appointed Grant to West Point came galloping by at the head of a division; two weeks later they buried him in the sand. And once, in the battle of Mexico City, young Grant did get his name in the reports for the commonsense feat of carrying a little Howitzer cannon up to the top of a church and bombarding the Mexicans below.
But when the army captured Mexico City at last and the diplomats set to work, Grant was still a second lieutenant, obscure as ever.
His comrades passed the time of the occupation in fighting duels and chasing señoritas—the Mexican girls used to come in giggling squads to the river’s edge every afternoon and step out of their clothes for a bath; to an Ohio boy a vision right out of Eden—but Grant was too puritan for the one and too sensible for the other. (In 1868, in a spectacular waste of money, the Democrats hired some of Pinkerton’s detectives to follow presidential candidate Grant and see if they could trap him in a bawdy scandal.) He set up a little private bakery next to his quartermaster’s tent, perhaps the only profitable business he’s ever run, and he wrote his weekly letter back to St. Louis. But mostly he sat in his quiet, moody way with a bottle in his hand, staring at life. The liquor started to buzz in his blood. It settled into him like a squatter into an empty house. Grant number two.