Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  THE NEXT TIME HE SAW HER WAS THREE DAYS LATER, ON THE sidewalk three-quarters of the way down Pennsylvania Avenue, near the set of especially dingy redbrick buildings known to locals as “Newspaper Row.”

  “Last night,” Clover Adams told him, almost without preamble, “we were at a dinner for John Sherman, and his brother General Sherman was there and talked for hours about the war. Henry almost screamed.”

  Trist wore an obviously puzzled expression. From what he had seen in Chicago, Cump Sherman was a highly educated, highly entertaining talker.

  “The war,” Clover said, rising on her toes as if the war were rounding the corner like an omnibus, “is sometimes for Henry a great bore.”

  Trist kept his face a blank.

  “He spent it in England,” Clover said, looking somewhat vaguely around. Together they stepped away from the edge of the sidewalk and the rattle and spray of passing carriage wheels. Washington weather had turned grayer and wetter, and this side (unpaved) of the Avenue was a cold primordial slush. “Henry was his father’s private secretary in London, when his father was ambassador. His brother fought in the war—like you—all his Harvard friends did. My brother did. What does Dr. Johnson say, a man who’s never been a soldier will always think less of himself?”

  “Dr. Johnson is a great bore,” Trist said, and Clover rewarded him with one of her homely, oddly melancholy smiles.

  She had come this far down Pennsylvania Avenue, she explained, in search of a new establishment called “The Boston Store,” run by two men her father knew, Woodward and Lothrop. She intended to spend the whole of her father’s annual Christmas cheque on rugs and lamps—“for the parlor at the yellow house, so we can ask the neighborhood in for a toot. I assume you’re here, Mr. Trist, to send telegrams.” She gestured toward the cluster of newspaper offices on the next corner, where the overhead wires were unusually tangled and thick and a big square sign for the Washington Star hung from a second-story window.

  “In fact, I was looking for a shop that sells engravings.”

  “Photographs,” said Clover Adams, “are much more interesting. You can’t print them in a newspaper, of course. You must come and see my photographs.”

  They stood for a moment in awkward silence. A green-and-yellow U.S. mail wagon stopped next to a pillar box. One of the horses stretched its head down to a water trough. “This is almost the very spot,” Clover said over the rattle of another passing wagon, “where I watched the Grand Parade of 1865, when Grant’s army was officially dismissed from service—there was a reviewing stand over there, and the troops marched up from the Capitol, straight up Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s house.” Across the street where she pointed was now, not a reviewing stand, but a nondescript wooden storefront and a signboard for Ivory Soap, “99 44/100 PER CENT PURE.” “You must have been in that very parade, Mr. Trist, when the war was over.” Trist shook his head, pulled up his collar.

  “I was just a girl, not married. I spent the whole war making bandages for the Sanitary Commission—when I told my father I wanted to go to Washington to see the parade, he simply hooted.” She nodded her head at the memory. “So I put on my bonnet and went forth to seek a man.”

  Trist found himself wondering what strange impulse had seized tiny Mrs. Adams—then or now—to travel all the way from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see the soldiers parade, to stand on a public street fifteen years later and tell a near-stranger all about it. In a nearby shop window their cold reflections turned away from the wind. She clutched his arm like the Ancient Mariner in skirts.

  “Some man,” she said scornfully, “my second cousin Russell Sturgis. But he did escort three of us Boston girls on the train, and we stayed in the attic of my uncle’s house on F Street. I saw Ford’s Theatre and the room where Lincoln died—his pillow was still on the bed, with a dried bloodstain, and I actually leaned over and touched it because it was an historical fact, it was real. Then I went to the courthouse where the assassination conspirators were still being tried—my cousin Russell worshipped Lincoln and wouldn’t go, but I did. Mrs. Surratt was horrible, fat, I thought how could she do it? When they hanged her later I pictured her being stuffed in her coffin like a chicken in a pan.”

  Trist touched her elbow to move her out of the path of two black workmen pushing a dolly down the sidewalk.

  “And the next day,” she said, intent on her story, ignoring the dolly, “was one of the most glorious sights I ever witnessed—it was about noon, and General Meade had just started marching the Army of the Potomac up Pennsylvania Avenue, past the reviewing stand. A band was playing ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and all the officers’ horses had beautiful floral wreaths around their necks and the officers all had one free hand filled with roses. Then suddenly—a lone horse came galloping wildly up the side of the troops, full speed, with a hatless rider—he had long golden hair like Apollo—I wrote it all in my diary—streaming in the wind.”

  “Custer,” said Trist.

  “General Custer—his horse was apparently terrified of crowds and had broken loose and started to run, but Custer wheeled it around and reared it up just over there, in front of Grant and President Johnson, holding his roses all the time, and he got his horse finally under control, and then he galloped again all the way back to his troops. The whole parade took six hours to pass, it was the biggest crowd in the history of Washington, and we never moved from this very place. Some of the regiments that marched by had only twenty or thirty men left, and their flags were just little bullet-torn rags. It was a strange feeling to be so intensely happy and triumphant because the war was over, and yet to feel like weeping.”

  Of the two Adamses, Trist decided, he far preferred the sweetly named Clover.

  “Where were you, Mr. Trist, if not in the parade?”

  He pulled his collar up again, unnecessarily. Looked down the street toward Newspaper Row. “About six blocks away from here,” he answered. “In a hospital bed.” He turned back to her and gave a lopsided smile. “Probably wrapped in one of your bandages.”

  “Poor Henry,” she said, without any discernible irony.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A STORY SHOULD BE ABOUT LOVE AND DEATH.

  Sylvanus B. Cadwallader read his sentence over with admiration; underlined it; read it again, frowned; scratched it out; put down his pen.

  Who first told him that?

  Cump Sherman maybe, history’s most histrionic general. He could remember one night after Vicksburg, Sherman talking about “the drama,” reciting Shakespeare by the yard. Another time, not even drunk, he had declaimed entirely from memory “The Death of Little Nell” by Dickens (there was a not-so-secret affinity, Cadwallader thought, between sentimentality and slaughter). Sherman hated writers, but was fond of telling people how to write.

  Or it might just as well have been that celebrity thief Mark Twain, who had his sentimental streak, God knew.

  A story should be—

  His pen scratched it over again. He stood up and walked to the window and stared down at State Street, three stories below his hotel, where the gas lamps were just flickering on and there was the usual entertaining mud-and-twilight confusion of wagons and horses and hatted and coated pedestrians hurrying every which direction, and storefront shutters and awnings closing and folding and three or four newsboys hawking their papers on the corners. Chicago had fourteen different newspapers, not counting the ones in German and Swedish: you could pretty well count on buying a paper whenever and wherever you felt like it.

  Odd, uninvited memory: during the war, except in the thick of battle, you could pretty well count on buying a newspaper whenever you felt like it too, because as soon as the troops stopped marching and made a camp, the newsboys would magically start to appear, strolling casually right out of the piney woods, waving the New York Herald or the Boston Transcript. Did anyone remember that now?

  He squinted to follow the wayward path of a man in a top hat riding his bicycle next to a canary-yellow landau
with black fenders. The other thing you could count on, whether the paper was then or now, the news would be violent. The bicyclist crashed (inevitably) sideways against a fender and spun into a puddle, and the newsboys threw rocks. No blood, no news, that was the fact of the matter. What the papers brought you every day was simply vicarious gore—had that started in the war? With all those stories of battlefield casualties, severed limbs, fields of blue and gray corpses? It was certainly true that unless you were one of the privileged few who wrote just about politics, news today, twenty years after the war, still consisted of little more than coarse, brutal, completely sensational accounts of modern American mayhem. If a man was caught in a factory machine or burnt crazy by a shower of molten lead, or just beaten and robbed in the wrong part of town, then the reporter came out to write it up. For a good writer who wanted to keep his job, every pitiful groan and moan, every laceration, fracture, industrial dismemberment, was described with painterly feeling and a surgeon’s vocabulary. The railroad strikes of 1877 had been like covering Shiloh.

  Down on the street a crowd of pedestrians had turned on the newsboys and chased them around the corner. The bicyclist stood in the middle of the puddle wiping his hat. In San Francisco they had a new word for street thugs: “hoodlums.” In Chicago the boys themselves had names for their gangs. He knew for a fact that down on the South Side there were embryo criminals who called themselves the Dead Rabbits and thought nothing of using a knife or a revolver on a perfect stranger. A gang of even younger children called themselves the Little Dead Rabbits and came out of the tenements at night to steal and sometimes kill, and a group of thieves over by the lake docks called themselves the Daybreak Boys and not one of them was over twelve years old, and every day at breakfast that was what you opened your newspaper to read about. Whatever the war had started, Cadwallader thought, it wasn’t done yet.

  On his writing desk, under a little shaded lamp, were three or four chapters of a “conventional” campaign biography of Grant that he had begun to write a few months ago, then abandoned. Out of curiosity, habit, he picked up the first page and read it again.

  Ulysses S. Grant was born to the smell of smoke and the sound of axes ringing on wood. Easterners who moved to the banks of the Ohio River in the early 1820s often remarked that the fragrance of burning leaves and wood was just like New England, except that beside the Ohio the fires went on all year long, not just in the autumn.

  That was because in those days the forests of Ohio and Kentucky still grew so thick and deep that the sun seemed to vanish in the early afternoon, lost in the endless trees overhead. No matter where you were, you walked around as if on the dark, swampy floor of a valley. Farmers cleared their land by cutting circles on the trunks of live trees, to interrupt the flow of sap, and came back in six months to chop the deadened trunks. All year long you could see a red glow at night somewhere off in the hills that meant a settler was burning timber, and the air was soft day and night with drifting ribbons of gray haze.

  No blood or gore, but accurate for sure. He himself had been born and reared in Ohio, he knew exactly what Grant’s boyhood would have been like.

  The river first of all—it was a nice artistic touch of history that all of the Union armies Grant commanded were named after rivers, starting with the Army of the Tennessee, because any boy growing up back there, back then, would have rivers running through his soul. There was a book to be written just on American rivers—he remembered well the curiosity he’d felt moving down the Mississippi the very first time, on his way to the Mexican War, and discovering the different nature of Southern rivers, so muddy-red and slow in comparison with Northern rivers, like warm molasses spilled over clay. The Ohio was a Northern river, wide, cool, fast; in the 1820s it was covered with life, with travellers, immigrants, pioneers flowing west like the nation. At night you could hear the slap of keelboats and steamboats going by, the voices that carried for miles in the dark; often the flatboats had a campfire going, raised up on a little deck, a small red glow floating down the great black space, an echo, so to speak, of the distant red glow of burning timber back in the hills.

  Cadwallader stretched his arms and looked at his watch. Outside, the wind was blowing harder, Chicago was lowering its big German chin and hunching its shoulders for another winter storm. He ought to hunch his shoulders himself and get back to work.

  Except, of course, that he was in one of those writer’s moods when he didn’t feel like writing a word. He slipped his page back in its folder. The conventional Grant biography would have probably been all right, somebody would have published it; but he had given it up as pointless. Not nearly as truthful as his little secret project down in the bottom drawer of the desk, and he was writing that really just to amuse himself; he was still, despite everything that had happened, a loyal Grant man. Loyal enough.

  And besides, he thought, pacing restlessly back to the window, the real story was far too big and complicated for an uneducated bumpkin scribbler like himself, and he hated to spoil it by telling it wrong. The real story was that the Civil War had completely split the nineteenth century in half, like a steel wedge in a stump, two different countries, two different times, and somebody born today—or a relative boy like that reporter Trist—would have no idea at all of life in an American river town, back when the country was raw and men like Grant were formed.

  Cadwallader fumbled in his vest for a cigar. Down on the street an old man in a faded greatcoat and kepi was hobbling along past a horse trough, and it made him think of his father. His father and his grandfather. He thought of fifty generations of fathers and grandfathers, in fact, who had never travelled faster than a horse or a sail could carry them, never communicated with another person except by voice or pen; never expected to, never dreamed of a world much different from the one they were born into. Yet right now, if he wanted to, he could follow that old man down the street and go in an office and send a telegraphic message around the globe, in less than a minute. In certain Eastern cities you could actually talk on a wire instrument strung between two buildings. You could put fresh butchered beef in one of Gus Swift’s refrigerated railroad cars and drive it from Chicago to San Francisco—two thousand miles—then take it out and eat it. There was a great story waiting for someone to tell it, not about the war, but about the reborn nation, on the other side of the war.

  Somebody else. Not him. Cadwallader blew his nose on his sleeve and noticed with regret that he was now making the same fluxible morning noises that his father used to make.

  He crossed over the bare floor to the chest of drawers and rummaged until he found a half-empty bottle of E. C. Booz and poured two lovely inches of it into his toothbrush mug. When he was a boy in Ripley, Ohio, the owner of the village grocery and dry-goods store kept a little oak-charred cask of whiskey on the counter, and a tin cup on a string, and any customer, man or boy, who could reach that high was welcome to refresh himself with a nip.

  Cadwallader refreshed himself with a nip. He peered back at the window. The sky was louring. The wind was growing angry. Second-half-of-the-century weather.

  He stood with the toothbrush mug in his hand and drank a little and thought Mark Twain was a thief and a genius; thought Grant had looked well, well and prosperous at the banquet; thought a story should be about love and whiskey.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT

  by Sylvanus Cadwallader

  CHAPTER THREE

  LOVE, THEN. LOVE FIRST: ULYSSES AND PENELOPE.

  Back in the summer of 1843—unlike him, I don’t mind a bit retracing my steps—when the Mexican War was still just a rumor and a grumble on the horizon, Brevet Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, fresh out of West Point, said good-bye to his family in Ohio and took the steamboat down the Mississippi to his first official army assignment. Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, was widely considered desirable duty in those days, partly because it was set on what looked like a rich man’s estate of beautiful hills and meadow
s next to the river, and really because the city of St. Louis was only nine miles north. This was the do-nothing peacetime army, remember. Most of the soldiers drilled and yawned and polished their buckles lackadaisically till supper, then jumped on their horses and galloped off to study St. Louis’s rather fleshy and metropolitan charms.

  But not Second Lieutenant Grant. Too shy. Too puritanical. Besides, even before he left West Point his mathematics teacher had pulled him aside and promised that when the first opening appeared, if Grant kept up his standards, he intended to appoint him his Assistant Professor. Much to be preferred to grunting and sweating with the infantry. Much to be preferred by somebody who didn’t think he truly belonged in the army at all. Grant bought a big lined notebook, cracked open his old math primer.

  But a young man of twenty-one does not live by binomial theorems alone. Grant’s West Point roommate Fred Dent came through Jefferson Barracks one day on his way somewhere else and took him over to a home-cooked dinner at the family farm, not five miles away as it happened. It had the grandiose name of “White Haven,” and a population of eighteen slaves, two parents, and three young daughters. And that was the end of mathematics.

  The father, Colonel Dent, was no colonel, no military man at all, but he was, till the day of his death, one of Nature’s prime and matchless jackasses, worse even than Jesse Grant, and that is saying a mouthful. Colonel Dent had made a small fortune before the War of 1812, cheating Indians on the frontier mainly, and then returned to his native Maryland, where he married an otherwise intelligent Englishwoman named Ellen Wrenshall. After the war, restless like everybody else, he pulled up stakes and started to wander west again; in 1817, more or less on whim, he bought 925 empty acres in Missouri, and there he settled down to amuse himself by suing his neighbors, bullying his slaves, and pretending his poor little pork-and-wheat farm was a Southern gentleman’s plantation. He was all his life violently pro-slavery. I have never yet met anybody outside the family who could actually stand the old man. When Grant was in the President’s Palace … but I jump ahead. Back in 1843 the important thing about Colonel Dent, at least to Grant, was not his politics, but his favorite daughter, Julia.