Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Trist turned and saw Elizabeth Cameron standing beside her carriage on the other side of Fourteenth Street, gloved hand raised in greeting. Cadwallader reached into the limitless pockets of his disreputable jacket and came up with a gold-plated toothpick. He grinned around it like an alligator. “Senator Cameron’s pretty young wife,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SUMMER OF 1884 CAME EARLY, UNSEASONABLY MILD AND inviting. Toward the end of May, Trist counted out his savings on the table, Grant-fashion, stared a long blank time at the dusty pyramid of notes and photographs on his desk; then abruptly applied for a two-month leave of absence from the Post. Since his March trip to Fredericksburg and the Spotsylvania Court House, he had actually written nothing, nothing at all, not one syllable or page of the promised book on battlefields—he glanced at the calendar beside the basin on the shelf—due now in three weeks.

  “How does it feel to produce a book?” Elizabeth Cameron had demanded of him one afternoon, propping herself up on her elbow and admiring what he had taken to calling the Leaning Tower of Notes.

  “Like giving birth to a grand piano,” Trist answered, and she had laughed and called him back to bed, and that night he had read the account of Ulysses and the sirens in a schoolboy’s Homer he had bought at a sale. Ulysses, he thought, glumly poking at his scant pages; a step up from poor old baffled Actaeon.

  Three days after Trist began his leave, Don Cameron took his family away to Pennsylvania for the summer; shortly after that, Henry and Clover Adams likewise retired to their seaside house in Massachusetts, to be near Clover’s father; Congress stumbled to the end of its session, President Chester A. Arthur wandered back to New York City for a rest; and Ulysses—Ulysses, Trist thought with another glance at the battered Greek textbook, took to the road.

  The hired photographer had long since handed over his battlefield photographs and disappeared. Trist was to make a preliminary selection, and these would be winnowed down in turn by his editors in London and then delivered to the engravers for reproduction. All that was needed now was one good push, one good look at the landscape again, a last hundred pages or so of narration and captions.

  He began by travelling north to Gettysburg, less than an hour’s carriage ride from the Camerons, where he paced restlessly through the military cemetery and looked about at the scattered monuments and weathered bronze tablets that various regiments, Southern and Northern alike, had erected here and there in the bare fields. No one could tell him exactly where Lincoln had stood to give his speech. No one could tell him how to write a chapter that was anything more than the desiccated facts, figures, dates that Henry West had warned against—“The battle of Gettysburg was fought on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863; to see where Pickett’s gallant charge was beaten back, the visitor should walk one mile south on Cemetery Ridge, turn to the right at the marker.” He wadded up sheets of paper and threw them in his wake like bobbing corks.

  From Gettysburg he took a train south to Antietam. He unfolded his maps and notebooks again and worked out where the famous bloody cornfield had been, where the swarm of bees had comically stopped the battle, where incompetent McClellan had stood on a hill with his hand in his tunic like Little Napoleon and watched his lambs march off to slaughter, six thousand of them in a day.

  Trist hadn’t fought at Antietam. He had still been an almost-boy sitting in a classroom in Connecticut. Nor had he fought at Ball’s Bluff farther down the river toward Washington, or the Second Bull Run or Chancellorsville, and somehow, as if that mattered, everything he wrote now grew stiffer and stiffer, more and more lifeless. Dust flowed from his pen.

  On a cloudless hot afternoon near Manassas Creek, two weeks into the trip, he sat on a rock and watched for an hour while an old man and his grandson walked from one end of the battlefield to the other, maps in hand. Now and then they paused and drew on the ground with their sticks, or looked across with wary expressions to a dark stand of timber on the east, as if Jeb Stuart’s cavalry might still come charging at any second out of the shadows. But there were only field hawks circling in the sky, an occasional misguided rabbit that peered from the brush. On the main road, carriages bound for Washington hurried by in the heat, their spoked wheels turning in the strange backward blur of something going forward too fast.

  Trist tried to remember anecdotes. In a lull between the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, one of the artillery companies had fixed up a local good-natured dog with a can tied to his collar, and the dog trotted cheerfully back and forth all day between Rebel and Union lines, carrying packs of cards and clean socks and clothing one way, tobacco and cured beef the other. Once—Trist was there and witnessed it himself—the skirmish lines were close enough that the soldiers traded insults with each other between shots, and one Connecticut boy grew so angry and personal with his Confederate counterpart that both finally flung down their rifles in a blazing, sputtering fury and came out in a clearing together, and all the firing for hundreds of yards just stopped while those two boys went at each other with their fists, and when they were finished (a draw, both with bloody noses and black eyes) they withdrew to their lines and started shooting to kill again.

  At the Rapidan River below Manassas, on impulse, he crossed a little bridge and entered the Wilderness forest on foot, just as he had in the spring of 1864. In the tangled brush and second-growth pine that grew right up to the edge of the road, untouched or cleared for twenty years, he found broken wagon wheels, bones, bits of skull, rusted canisters. When they had begun to fight, when Lee’s army had come screaming in like banshees on Grant’s flank: so thick and terrible was the gunfire that the trees, the brush, the very leaves and grass on the ground burst into flames. The whole battlefield burned like tinder. Fire running out of control would reach the dead and wounded lying underfoot, heat would make the cartridges in their belts explode, dead bodies would jerk and roll about with the explosions, men with broken legs or backs, crawling through the flames, would scream as their own ammunition blew holes in their flesh. At night, in an impenetrable black smoke, they could hear men crying for water, or mercy, or a bullet, and then the flames would start up again and drown their pleas.

  At Spotsylvania Court House, scene of the infamous Bloody Angle, the 21st Connecticut had been held in reserve and not fought. Afterwards they were transferred to General Wright’s VI Corps and ordered south toward Jericho Mill. Trist scribbled a note; all those biblical battlefields mixed with the most American possible names: Jericho Mill, Shiloh, Chicamauga, Pamunkey River. But he could make no pattern or sense of it. At Hanover he stayed overnight in a wretched Virginia tavern, sharing a bed with two other travellers, though they were youthful and prosperous and headed north, as if to another country.

  The next morning he sat in the empty tavern long after breakfast was over, notebooks open, and wrote six pages; tore them up in the afternoon. Late in the day he hitched a ride to Mechanicsville in a farmer’s wagon. He walked the last few miles of the trip with a borrowed lantern, so that it was almost midnight when he reached Cold Harbor.

  He had never intended to come back, he thought. Never consciously meant to write a word about it. There were fine, parklike cemeteries at Gettysburg and Antietam, groomed and tended like weeping gardens; battlefield guides and museums at Bull Run and Richmond and half a dozen other consecrated sites. But nobody visited Cold Harbor. Nobody erected monuments there.

  Nobody, in fact, could even explain the name, because the place was twelve miles from the nearest body of water, the Chickahominy River, and not, by any standards, cold. It was a traditional English name for a stagecoach rest, somebody had told him, or perhaps a corruption of “cool arbor,” since the plains around it were bare and hot; but near the crossroads and the little white clapboard church that had actually survived the battle, there were a few stands of sheltering pines, and far back of the battle lines, where the generals had pitched their tents, a pleasant grove of oak.

  He spent the night in another roadside taver
n, sitting on a bench by the fireplace because all the beds were taken, listening to the rain outside. Early in the morning, without breakfast, without his notebook, he walked up Cold Harbor Road in the soft gray light of the dawn.

  The rain had stopped an hour or so before, leaving the promise of heat. His shoes splashed in a puddle. Out of sight, over a low, dark ridge, a rooster crowed, and the sound carried far and clear. Sarcastic crows answered somewhere, and then the whole drifting, out-of-focus landscape was mute.

  If time were a forking path, he thought, a series of choices instead of whatever irrevocable thing it is, he or his ghost or his younger self could turn here, go one step backwards. As he moved down the road he would be able to feel the straps of his cartridge belts biting his shoulder again, the weight of the rifle on both his arms. He passed the hollow spot on the left where the Connecticut troops had crouched in the mud, waiting for the artillery signal to begin. Ahead, no more than two or three hundred yards, easy range for a rifle, a zigzag line of raw earth had marked the Confederate trenches, which nobody on the Union side had yet scouted out or studied, because incompetent officers had marched them all in the wrong direction the night before. So General Grant’s quite brilliant plan for attack had been delayed for twenty-four hours while Bobby Lee’s ragamuffin soldiers dug themselves an unassailable line of works that nonetheless Grant had ordered them to storm and charge and overrun.

  You can wait a lifetime on a line of battle. You see with supernatural clarity every flag and guidon, hear every broken note of the military bands tuning up far to the rear, every tap of the drums whirring low and steady behind you, building and building like a lighted fuse of sound.

  At four-twenty-five, orderlies and grooms could be seen going back down the road with riderless horses, a sign that regimental and brigade commanders intended to go in with them on foot. A soldier nearby wrote his name on a scrap of dirty paper, then pinned it to his shirt. Somewhere back by the clapboard church General Meade, in charge of the battle that day, looked at the hands of his watch and nodded to an aide and a signal flag went up and a lone brass trumpet sounded.

  For a split second it is possible to think that destruction looks exactly like creation—a gigantic roar of pure and inconceivable volume, a flash of light two miles long, like the first moment of the first morning of the universe, and then the trenches were dotted with thousands of black slouch hats and glittering musket barrels and a long blinding sheet of flames ran from one horizon to the other, and the charging army before it burst into smoke and blood.

  He found a few of the trenches and rifle pits where the Confederate troops had waited, but most of the zigzag line had been filled in now by twenty summers of leaves and dirt. The big plain where he and his troops had stood up and run forward to their fates like men leaning into a rainstorm was still not plowed or cultivated. No trees grew anywhere around it. Everything was flat and bare as a table. He had no anecdotes here, not where he was shot, not how he had fallen. Once or twice he thought he had stumbled upon the very place, but who could be sure? Seven thousand Northern soldiers had been killed or wounded in the first twenty minutes of Cold Harbor. They had covered the ground two and three deep in every direction, and for the next two days Rebel gunfire, merciless in victory, had kept the ambulances and rescue teams away while the wounded, dead, and dying lay in a great blue and red carpet under the boiling sun, waiting for the generals to agree to a cease-fire. He would never understand the minds of generals. He had used up all his words for Cold Harbor.

  At midday a colored boy who must have been watching him brought out a wooden kitchen chair and a piece of bread and a gourd of water, and he gave the boy a dollar and sat on the chair, bareheaded, feeling the hot sun on his face, and the long afternoon passed slowly on, time itself passed, like pages in a book turned by the breeze.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WELL, MEADE LOST IT, OF COURSE.”

  Emily Beale’s young man was named John Roll McLean, and he was a handsome barrel-chested person in his middle thirties, with straw-blond hair and fine blue eyes and the irritating quality, Trist thought, of somehow being an expert on the Civil War, although he like Henry Adams had never served a moment in it. He was also the sole owner, publisher, and editor of the powerful Cincinnati Inquirer, the “Voice of the Middle West,” and therefore a potential source of income to Trist, and therefore an individual to whom, no matter how irritating, one listened with respect.

  “General Meade,” young McLean repeated firmly, “was just as incompetent as all the rest—McClellan, Pope, Hooker—”

  Emily stopped behind his chair, rumpled the straw-blond hair, and sang in a cheerful soprano,

  “Joe Hooker is our leader.

  He takes his whiskey strong.”

  McLean grinned and raised his left hand to hers and continued his recital. “Burnside, Butler—the Army of the Potomac was run by the most incompetent generals. Wouldn’t you agree with that, Trist? If Meade had attacked when Grant gave the order, June second instead of June third, the war would have ended on the spot. Am I right? Same thing two weeks later. Grant crosses the James River and outflanks Lee, and then Warren and Wright and all the rest can’t figure out how to attack in time. But bad as they were, Grant never quit, Grant never stopped fighting. I like to say Grant willed the army to move, just the way Lincoln willed the Union to stay together. We ran a series of articles in the Inquirer, ‘Great Generals of the Century,’ starting with Napoleon and Andy Jackson, and everybody agreed that the greatest of all was Grant.”

  Magical words, of course, in the Beale household. As they sat down to lunch in the second-floor dining room, pleasantly cool for Washington in late September, General Beale ostentatiously cleared his throat and read a personal letter from Grant with all the latest news. The Grant family had spent the summer, as always, in a borrowed seaside cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey, although the General was still suffering from the sore throat that had started with his pneumonia. The scoundrel Ward had been arrested for fraud, along with the president of the Marine Bank, and would come to trial next year. Vanderbilt had generously offered to forgive his $150,000 debt, but Grant had insisted he take as payment all of his military souvenirs and memorabilia, and these the admiring millionaire had now donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

  General Beale paused to look out the window across Lafayette Square, as if to the Smithsonian, but all Trist could see was the still-unfinished white shaft of the Washington Monument rising above the trees.

  “Well, but how in the world,” McLean said, turning back to his soup, “how in the world does he live if Ward stole all his money and he don’t have a job or a government pension?”

  “Friends,” said Mrs. Beale somewhat tartly.

  “He received,” General Beale explained, “a generous check in the mail from an old soldier in upstate New York. Soldier said the enclosed money was a loan ‘on account of my share for services ending in April, 1865.’ ”

  “Other people have helped,” Emily said with a sidelong glance at her father. “General Grant sold everything he had, even his horses that he loved so much, and his wife now does all the cooking and housework.”

  “Going to write articles about the war,” General Beale said, snapping Grant’s letter open again, “for the Century magazine—you write for them sometimes, don’t you, Trist?—first one to be about Shiloh. Then Vicksburg and Chattanooga.”

  “Well, nobody could touch him as a general, of course.” McLean began to carve a vast slice of chicken for himself. “Monstrous fine poultry,” he muttered. “But I’ve hired and fired a hundred reporters, and I’m damned if I think Grant’s a writer.”

  AFTERWARDS, BECAUSE THE DAY WAS STILL COOL AND PLEASANT, General Beale led everyone down H Street to a handsome redbrick enclosure, walled off from city traffic, and they all inspected his stables, including the two blooded mares that Henry and Clover Adams boarded with them while they were gone for the summer.

  “And what, in fact, do
you hear of the Adamses?” Trist asked as he and Emily held out a pair of monstrous fine carrots.

  “Well, Elizabeth Cameron spent July with them at Beverly Farms,” Emily replied. Emily was now completely recovered from her illness of the previous year. Emily had, in fact, metamorphosed into a bright, pretty, and thoroughly grown-up young woman. A young woman much too good, Trist thought paternally, for John McLean. “Of course, Clover was so preoccupied with her father, who isn’t well, you know, he’s a kind of invalid, Elizabeth mainly visited with Henry.”

  “Ah.” Trist held out a carrot to Henry’s horse, which showed her teeth and turned away with an equine sneer.

  “Then,” said Emily, “Henry went to New York on business, and there they were again, the Camerons.”

  “The Senator too?”

  “Maybe just Elizabeth.”

  “Ah,” said Trist, “again.”

  As they strolled back toward Decatur House, McLean detached himself from General Beale, busy talking with his head groom, and fell back with Trist and the ladies.

  “I thought you were just a reporter,” he told Trist, “but now I hear you write books too.”

  “A sideline, to pay the rent.”

  “Mr. Trist,” corrected Mrs. Beale, “has published several books of history and travel and personal impressions all put together, he’s much too modest. He wrote one about travelling in the south of France, and one about Egypt, and one last year about Paris in the Second Empire. We met him years ago”—she gave a proprietary nod toward Trist—“in Paris, and now here he is, writing a new one.” And she proceeded to give a brisk and impressively accurate summary of the battlefields book.

  “Not fiction?” McLean asked.

  “No.”

  “You ought to try fiction. The best war books are fiction. Look at Thackeray, look at Tourgée.”