The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  Dawkins said, “This is my wife, Savannah. I brung her up here for a pleasant afternoon and that’s what I’m tryin’ to give her.”

  She said, “I haven’t had a real ice cream soda from a real soda fountain since I was a girl. She dipped her spoon, then looked up. “Say, you gents aren’t here to bother my husband like those others, are you?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Henry. “We here ’cause we heard what a beautiful wife he had, and we just had to see for ourselves.”

  She laughed. “I got enough sugar in my cup right here, mister.”

  Peter said, “Who were those guys, what did they look like?”

  “I told you,” said Dawkins, “they’re watchin’ right now, right over in the tavern.”

  “And they’re botherin’ me, too.” Savannah took a long sip of soda.

  Henry said, “They’re botherin’ you because your husband has some valuable stuff.”

  “And a lot of junk,” she said.

  “That picture of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation,” said Peter, “that wasn’t junk. I’d love to know where it came from.”

  “Don’t say nothin’,” said Dawkins.

  “That ain’t constructive,” said Henry.

  “No, it ain’t,” said Savannah. “We got that stuff from the attic of a neighbor lady who passed. Esther Molly was her name.”

  “Now, don’t say no more,” ordered Dawkins.

  But Savannah ignored her husband and talked faster and faster. Maybe it was the sugar. “Funny last name, ‘Molly.’ But anyways, I used to bring her cake and coffee on Sunday mornin’ after church. Lived alone in a big row house. And do you know, just from that human kindness, she left us … everything. Her row house, the furniture, everything.”

  “Didn’t she have any children?” asked Peter.

  “Lost her only boy in Vietnam.”

  “I was in Vietnam,” said Henry.

  “Me, too. Got this.” Dawkins pointed to his left leg.

  Peter lifted the cloth and looked under the table: a prosthetic leg.

  “You got that in the Nam,” said Henry, “and them boys are botherin’ you?”

  Dawkins nodded.

  “Well that ain’t right.” Henry turned and started across the street.

  Not good, thought Peter. He said to Dawkins, “Don’t go anywhere.” Then he followed Henry to the opposite sidewalk, past a stall selling quilts, into the tavern.

  * * *

  Captain Bender’s was the only restaurant in Sharpsburg. And it was jumping. The bartender was pouring as fast as he could. One waitress was rushing from counter to table with burgers and fries and fish ’n’ chips. All the tables at the front were full. All the pool tables at the back were racked up and rolling. There were young families, couples, tables full of reenactors in blue and gray. And the boys in the blue T-shirts were sitting at a round table right in the window, just where Dawkins said they’d be. Three of them had taken off their hats.

  Peter grabbed Henry at the door. “Let me handle this. You just stand there looking—”

  “Pleasant?” Henry folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Some piped-in oldie from the Rolling Stones was competing with the indoor din and the outdoor string band. Henry started to hum along.

  Peter walked over, borrowed an empty chair from the table next to them, and sat. “Mind if I join the Knights of the Golden Circle?”

  “It’s Knights of Liberty,” said the big one who had been at the Eastern Market the day before.

  “And yeah,” said Steve Burke, the one with the beard, the one from the train. “We do mind.”

  Keeler looked over his shoulder. “Who’s your friend?”

  Peter said, “He’s the head of security for Fallon Antiquaria.”

  Keeler said, “Why would you need security?”

  “I’m very insecure. Why are you bothering my friend Dawkins out there?”

  “He’s not your friend. He’s your next mark. We’re trying to do business with him. Then you come along. Did Kathi Morganti get you into it? Or was it Dougherty? You look like another gun for hire.”

  “Just like you, Harry,” said Steve Burke, “just like all of us. A lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, a lobbyist. All white-collar criminals. The only difference between us and the guys still wearing the white collars is that we got caught.”

  Peter said, “So why do you want this diary?”

  “For the money,” said Keeler.

  “That’s a motive I can appreciate,” said Peter. “It’s pure.”

  “And simple. Unlike the usual D.C. dance. Spin brings power, power brings money, money brings more spin and more power.” Keeler took a long draft of beer, then wiped the foam from his mustache. “Do you know that the thirty largest companies in the United States pay more for lobbyists than they do in taxes? The Kathi Morgantis of the world spin the truth to the Doughertys, who tell the congressmen, and the money flows. The lobbyists get big fees. The staffers get job promises from the lobbyists. The pols get contributions. And the corporations get to run the rest of us.”

  “And we,” said Steve Burke, “won’t be run.”

  “That’s right,” said the quiet one sitting beside Keeler. Peter pegged him for the accountant. “The drug companies get their price protections, the hedge funds get their interest carryovers, the oil companies get their sweetheart leases, all because they have lobbyists, and all the poor schmucks outside this window … don’t.”

  Peter wondered what kinds of Medicare frauds, embezzlements, and bribes had brought them all together in federal prison. But he didn’t have time to find out. He said, “I’d just like to know why you were taking pictures of me at the flea market.”

  The big one leaned across the table and said, “None of your fuckin’ business.”

  “Easy, Doc.” Keeler made a small gesture. “This is a family place.”

  So, thought Peter, there was Mr. Medicare Fraud.

  Keeler turned to Peter. “You must know my story by now?”

  “Congressional staffer and lobbyist, disgraced, indicted, imprisoned.”

  “Sent to jail for playing the game, schmoozing, talking, writing position papers, picking up tabs, running golf tournaments, selling ideas to politicians while they sold their souls for Super Bowl tickets. I did it all. But it’s a corrupt system, no matter how hard they try to clean it up.”

  Steve Burke was wearing the hat. He pointed to the symbol. “Do you know what that is?”

  “White star on a blue patch,” said Peter. “You’re an admiral.”

  “It’s the Bonnie Blue Flag. Southern rights. Independence. Self-determination. Don’t try to live my life and I won’t try to live yours.”

  “Fair enough,” said Peter. “So you’re in this for the philosophy, too. And for playing rebels when you go reenacting on the battlefield.”

  “We’re not playing anything,” said Doc, the big one. “And they don’t let you reenact on a battlefield because it’s sacred turf to both sides, you damn fool.”

  Keeler said, “We’re in it for the money. Kathi Morganti and Congressman Milbury both understand that motivation. They play the spin-power-money game as well anyone.”

  “And when the time came,” said Burke to Keeler, “they both testified against you in front of the House Ethics Committee.”

  “So revenge is in play, too,” said Peter.

  “Maybe. But money is always in play,” answered Keeler. “I’ll bet you’re carrying a few thousand in foldin’ money right now to give to that black guy across the street, all to get your hands on something worth—what—twenty million?”

  “Maybe. But you just paid five thousand for it.”

  “True.” Keeler drained his beer and plunked it down. “That means we have what we need right now to find that diary.”

  “Then go and find it.” Peter stood. “But the world better hear about it or I’ll hound you all the way back to your Ohio compound. And if you threaten my friends—”

  �
��Here’s my threat.” Keeler stood and brought his face close to Peter. “This thing belongs to me. So stay out. You and your potbellied pal over there—”

  From the door came a deep voice. “Who you callin’ potbellied?”

  A few of the tables around them fell silent. And the silence radiated through the bar.

  Keeler glanced over his shoulder and said, “You.”

  In a flash, Henry crossed the floor, picked Keeler up physically, slammed him against the wall, right beneath a Baltimore Ravens poster, and said, “I am what you call big-boned.”

  Peter noticed the bartender take a Louisville Slugger from under the bar.

  Doc and Burke and the accountant started to stand.

  “Y’all just keep your seats,” said Henry. “This won’t take but a second. Then all the nice folks can finish their lunches.” He looked back at Keeler. “I am the biggest-boned motherfucker you ever met, and I don’t like skinny rats botherin’ brother veterans, like Don Dawkins out there, sellin’ his books and his bobbleheads. You remember that.”

  Henry dropped him, stepped back, and raised his hands as if he were a weight lifter after a clean and jerk. It also told the bartender that he was done as the aggressor.

  Peter looked at Keeler and his friends. “We are now in a race. That’s good. I like races. I usually win.”

  * * *

  “‘Pow’ goes the No-Pete.” Henry laughed. “I like the way you stood up to him.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have you behind me.”

  “Well, when you gave them that speech about houndin’ them back to Hicksville, they were like, damn, this bookseller got some stones.”

  “If I was just a bookseller, I wouldn’t even have gone in there,” said Peter. “I’m a seeker of the truth. Now, let’s get Evangeline and Diana and get back to D.C.”

  Route 35, the Hagersburg Pike, took them past the Battleview Market and then up onto the gentle ridge where Lee had made his stand.

  The visitor center was a standard piece of sixties government architecture, glass and steel, flat and square, handsome but unobtrusive.

  Peter ran in and asked the young ranger at the desk where the film crew was shooting.

  She opened one of those classic National Park Service brochures, all designed the same way from Mount Desert Island to Haleakala, with pictures and information on one side, features map on the other. She said, “They received permits to shoot at the Dunker Church, the Cornfield, the observation tower at Bloody Lane, and Burnside’s Bridge.” She circled each place on the map.

  A short time later, Henry was driving the battlefield loop road, going with the flow of slow-moving tourists.

  The Dunker Church, a little whitewashed replica of the building that had seen such slaughter, came up on their left. No film crew.

  So they rolled along the Hagerstown Pike, past one monument after another, to the Cornfield.

  “The Twentieth Massachusetts would have scrambled over the fences along this road around nine o’clock,” said Peter. “They were heading for the woods, where they’d be ambushed.”

  Henry looked into the woods on their left. “Nasty-ass place for a fight.”

  “Oliver Wendell Holmes was shot through the neck and survived. He was back in the spring, got shot again, in the foot, then served in Washington for a while before his discharge.”

  At the corner of the Hagerstown Pike and Cornfield Avenue, they stopped. The corn was still high, as it had been at dawn on that day.

  Peter said. “Hard to believe the bloodshed in this field. Men firing point-blank into each other, fighting back and forth for two hours. Then Clara Barton came across this field. It’s where she was almost killed.”

  “You mean that bullet hole story is true? Damn. I need to stop readin’ so much poetry and read some history.”

  But there was no film crew at the Cornfield, just lots of interpreters and rangers and crowds, driving slowly, taking the tour, following the map.

  So Henry looped back toward the center of the battlefield and took Richardson Avenue, which ran along the old roadbed called Bloody Lane. The rebels had used it for protection and slaughtered the Yankees before lunch. The Yankees had flanked them and slaughtered the rebels in the afternoon.

  For a better view of the lane and the whole battlefield, the NPS had put up an observation tower. And there was the production van.

  It was a five-story stone obelisk with a hipped roof. An NPS ranger in a stiff-brimmed hat was stopping people. Peter said he was part of the crew, then took the stairs two at a time. Henry stayed with the car. When Peter reached the top, the producer brought her finger to her lips, because Evangeline was interviewing Diana on camera:

  “What is the true significance of the bloodshed here?”

  Diana said, “The North had yet to win a major battle in the East and wouldn’t win another until ten months later at Gettysburg. If the South had won here, Lincoln would have sat on the Emancipation Proclamation. But he seized on the victory to change the moral dimension of the war. England and France would not support the South if the North was fighting for Emancipation. And a hundred thousand colored troops would help to tip the balance on the battlefield.”

  “So your thesis is that he issued the Proclamation to win the war, not free the slaves?” Evangeline said. “Hence your title, The Racism and Resolve of Abraham Lincoln. Why such a strong title?”

  “You need to shout to be heard in today’s noisy culture. I was taught that Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, and he was. But history is always more complicated than myth. So I come at it from a contrarian point of view to find the truth.”

  “And you come to the places like this, where history happened,” added Evangeline.

  As he listened, Peter heard motorcycles. He looked out at the ridge, the background for Evangeline and Diana. Less than a mile away, four bikes were going into the visitor center lot.

  Diana was saying, “Lincoln himself toured these sites with McClellan. He rode in one of the ambulances with his legs pulled up against his chest. The papers said how undignified he looked. And as he rode, he asked a friend to sing a few songs. The friend tried to lighten the mood with a silly ditty. The newspapers killed Lincoln for failing to show respect to the dead.”

  “Spin even then,” said Evangeline.

  “I’ve tried to give Lincoln flesh and blood by exploring his human reactions to the world he lived in. That’s how you learn to appreciate his greatness even more.”

  Evangeline looked at the camera. “That’s what history should be all about, folks.”

  “And cut,” said Abigail.

  Everyone relaxed.

  “It felt a little superficial,” said Diana. “I was just warming up.”

  Abigail Simon said, “We’re done in the boondocks. Back to D.C.”

  Evangeline said to Peter, “Thanks for not messing up a take.”

  “Diana was on a roll.” Peter glanced out across the fields. The motorcycles were rolling, too, off to the north, as if they were following the loop road. He said to Evangeline. “We have to hustle. Now.”

  Evangeline, who could argue with the best of them, got the point.

  She made quick good-byes, said she would see everyone back in Washington, and took Diana by the elbow. “Great job, come on.”

  * * *

  At the bottom, Henry was waiting by the SUV. “I was thinkin’ about yellin’ up, but I didn’t want to spoil your scene. Our boys are comin’.”

  Evangeline had told Diana that Henry would greet her with a joke and some bluster. When Evangeline heard nothing but serious, she knew this was trouble.

  Within a minute or two, they all were in the Edge, driving the loop road to get out of the park. But that meant driving at the speed limit or less. On the loop road, no one got angry, no one tailgated, because everyone was there to see the sights.

  “What’s going on?” asked Evangeline once they were rolling into a little wooded glade where sharpshooters would
have been lurking that day a century and a half before.

  Peter said, “We had a run-in with our friends from last night.”

  “Who are we talking about?” asked Diana.

  “The boys with the cameras, the questions, and the single star insignia,” said Peter.

  “And,” said Henry, “they’re on to a hot trail.”

  “Can you take me back to my car?” asked Diana.

  Henry said, “We want to get you back to D.C.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” said Henry.

  “What about Dawkins and his wife?” she asked. “Are they in danger?”

  “They be fine,” said Henry. “They got no more info to give.”

  “Ah, shit.” Peter was looking in Henry’s passenger mirror, objects closer than they appeared. Four motorcycles had just popped up. “There they are.”

  The women in the backseat turned.

  “Why don’t we find a ranger and say we’re being followed?” asked Evangeline.

  “Everybody in this park is followin’ everybody else,” said Henry. “They just fuckin’ with us. They couldn’t do it in the restaurant so they decided to do it here.”

  Peter grabbed the Park Service map and opened it. “We pass under the Boonsboro Pike, then we have a choice at a stop sign. We can go straight and drive out of the park. Or we can go left and drive up to the overlook at the Burnside Bridge.”

  “Can we drive over the bridge?” asked Henry.

  “No. It’s a relic. Five hundred Georgians held off Burnside’s Corps from the overlook. But—” Peter studied the map. “—there’s a traffic circle up there at the parking lot. Maybe we can use it.”

  “I like how the No-Pete is thinkin’.”

  So they went left, passed another farmhouse, and rose up onto the heights from which the Confederates had fought so bravely for so long, outnumbered ten to one.

  Evangeline looked down at a beautiful stone bridge reflected in the slow-moving creek, a picture postcard, except that the stones of that bridge had once been soaked in the blood of hundreds of Yankee soldiers.