by Norman Lock
I like to think the Flea was once as blesséd as a dew drop or as harmless as the Commas that appear to hop about the page, excited—according to Dr. Williams—by the hysteria of my retinas. Lately, they have been washed immoderately by tears—what with Mr. Lincoln gone, & then Carlo.
What will the Nation do now that HE is a perpetual resident in Springfield, amid the marbles? What will I do now that Carlo has lain down beneath the Pear tree in the garden’s southeastern corner, never to get up? Because Eternity is cold, I wrapped him in a quilt. I would spend all the words left in my Purse to bring him back again.
Write to me in care of Woe,
Emily
P.S. Carlo has sent me word from his loftier vantage that the Future is catastrophic.
P.S.S. I lied just now when I wrote that Carlo sleeps through the ages beneath a quilt. It is the red serape rather, which he always loved.
Your letters would arrive at the fort, where I’d read and keep them. There was nothing to compromise either of us, but I didn’t want to give Ruth cause for suspicion. She was not jealous of me or envious of you as two beings subject to desire. What she might have feared was the intercourse of two minds exchanging thoughts whose import she could not have grasped. She might have insisted that I put an end to our correspondence, a renunciation impossible for me to contemplate. Your letters were a gift of sight to a man who had always seen things from the common point of view.
And so I cannot accept the harsh sentence you pronounced on the marvelous utterance you shape with your mouth and with your pen: “Words leave no trace and are cold besides.”
You spoke from the center point of a narrowing circumference where one turns to speak to another, only to find that he is talking to himself. Why, words are your blood, bones, and very atoms! Your hammer and forge. They are all we have at the end of our allotted span and all we leave behind us. They are our posterity—yours and also mine, though mine are likely to be few and carved on a marble slab.
I know what you’re thinking, holed up in your room like a female Hephaestus, smithying words into shapes at the forge of your tiny desk—your slender fingers sooty with ink.
Charlotte. Always, my daughter’s name is on my mind like a cold on the stomach.
At the time, I believed that I was acting in her best interest. Her mother was dead, and I could not have cared for her properly. Aunt Tess was lonely. You would be her teacher and friend. Austin would be like a brother to her. Carlo would romp with her. Your mother would delight in her. Your father’s heart would soften. Amherst is more civilized than Springfield. Illinois is nearer “Bleeding Kansas” than Massachusetts. The Indians of the western plains are more dangerous than those of the northeastern Woodland tribes. In that I could rationalize my having put a thousand miles between us is sufficient reason why I was and am unfit to be her father.
And yet I do miss her and miss—oftentimes yearn—for poor vanished Ruth. If I had been devoutly Christian and God-fearing, I would have raged against Him who took her. I’d have wept like Job. It was only the lack of an authentic vocation that kept me placid.
You once asked me why I had become a man of God.
To discover if, after having studied His way and Word, I would have cause to love or to hate Him. If I hadn’t lost my father, perhaps I would not have had to wrestle with Him until, His patience grown thin, He turned His back on me. I couldn’t have known myself well enough then to articulate our curious relationship. I believe now, however, that to have wrestled with divinity until “my thigh was put out of joint” may have been my true vocation. As you once said to me, “Wrestling with an angel is good exercise.”
Unless I really did mishear my calling.
–7–
ONE SUMMER, RUTH AND I BOARDED a Pacific Railroad train bound for Hannibal, Missouri, to see the river the Indians rightly called the “Father of Waters.” The scenery was grand, the weather fine, the other passengers untalkative, and the rapidity of our westward progress an exciting novelty for Ruth, who had never ridden by rail.
Did you go by train to Boston when you consulted Dr. Williams about your eyes? If so, you don’t require my effusions in praise of travel by steam locomotive. I’ll describe Hannibal, which you haven’t seen and never will now that you are walled up inside the Homestead, like Fortunato in the catacombs, in Edgar Poe’s oppressive tale.
The town had sprawled at the expense of the trees, with which it had been aboriginally and abundantly supplied. With its mudflats, stubble, dusty streets, and peeling warehouses, you’d have called it a “blister on creation.” But the river, sown with gaily painted boats, compensated for what the town lacked in charm. Side- and paddle wheelers threshed the broad brown river, their decks teeming with fancy-dressed passengers, livestock, and slaves. The Mississippi was an extraordinary sight even for a New Englander who once had stood on the Atlantic’s rocky coast and howled, for want of a destiny, into the north wind.
Ruth and I rested in a garish belvedere built on a bluff overlooking the river, enjoying the freely circulating air. We held hands like a couple just embarked on their courtship before time—that bitter solvent—could dissolve their bond of affection and marriage—that mangle—iron out their endearing differences. Being neither poets nor politicians, the talk was small.
A boy sat on the bench next to ours. He must have been sixteen or seventeen years old, a prepossessing youth whose slouch and lankiness reminded me of Abe Lincoln. The young man worked as a typesetter for a Hannibal newspaper. He was contemplating a sandwich and a slice of pie that had been wrapped in the morning’s front page. I took note, among the crumbs, of the “workmanlike manner” of W. M. Smith, M.D., dental surgeon, an advertisement set in type worthy of an invitation to Christ’s Second Coming.
“Most rags aren’t fit to eat off,” he said. “But the Western Union is printed with a love for cleanliness, if not always the truth.”
With a glance at the headlines lying open on his lap, he commenced to eat in a curious fashion, taking a bite of sandwich and then one of pie until both had been consumed.
“To eat the sandwich first and then the pie stinks of patronage,” he said in answer to our mute inquiry. “It goes against the grain of a boy raised up in Missouri to believe in democracy and the equality of all white men. Now if I were a duke, say, or a postmaster or customhouse spoilsman, I’d eat the pie and throw away the sandwich. Mine used to be the tongue of a cow who liked to chew its cud.”
He ate awhile and then asked, “You folks got a name?”
“We are Mr. and Mrs. Winter, of Springfield, Illinois,” I replied. “And what might you be called?”
“A number of things—most of them unflattering or downright defaming. But when she’s sober, my mother calls me Sam.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Sam.”
“Likewise.”
“I suppose you mean one day to become a correspondent or an editor?”
“Well, the newspaper business is steady work as long as men beat their wives or kill Injuns. And if you’ll pardon me, ma’am”—he touched his hat brim courteously with an ink-stained finger—“the papers are always in demand by those who do their reading by the light of the moon cut into an outhouse door. I once saw the San Jose Visitor torn to flinders and nailed to the wall of a necessary house. Seems a disgraceful end for journalism. (I nicknamed the rag The Privy Counsellor.) No, the newspaper business will never go flat. But what I want to be is a Mississippi steam boatman.”
A shrill whistle was just then announcing the arrival of the General Putnam.
“Do you have any experience on a steamboat?” asked Ruth, pretending to a curiosity that her eyes belied. She’d grown tired of the young man’s flippancy.
“I saw a minstrel show on the Cotton Blossom last year and some pretty fair circuses out on the river; and, in my capacity as apprentice reporter, I go aboard steamboats to count barrels, bales, and slaves for the shipping news.”
Ruth had walked to the lookout’s r
ailing to view a passing side-wheeler through a brass telescope we had brought with us from Springfield.
“There’s two thousand miles of river, and a pilot needs to know every snag and shoal, bar and stump of it,” said Sam as proudly as if he had already committed the dangers to navigation to memory.
“There’re slaves on that boat!” cried Ruth, turning toward us, the telescope forgotten in her hand.
“The lucky ones are roustabouts,” said Sam, biting off a chaw of tobacco. “They get to tote four-hundred-pound bales of hemp, sugar, tobacco, and cotton up and down gangways from here to New Orleans. Contrary to what you might think, ma’am, a four-hundred-pound bale of cotton weighs the same as a four-hundred-pound crate of cast-iron stove lids. The unlucky ones get lynched.”
“It’s a hateful thing to see!” said Ruth with a bitterness that surprised me.
“True,” said Sam. “It would be a whole lot less hateful if you hadn’t seen them up close through your glass. I always say that darkies are best seen at night, when the sight of them can’t offend the finicky or gnaw the consciences of good Christians.”
“My husband is a minister of God!” said Ruth angrily.
“And I’m positive that he prays for the souls of all poor niggers,” said Sam, undismayed. “’course in Missouri, we’re used to seeing black people suffer at close range. The abolitionists had hoped the territory would come into the union a Free State, but the Missouri Compromise compromised the negroes here into everlasting chains. Maine got in as a Free State, only there weren’t any colored people living there to speak of. Be wary of appeasement, sir,” he said to me, “for on such is built the kingdom of the damned.”
Abe had said much the same thing.
Sam spat tobacco juice toward the railing, but a wind sprang up and blew the brown spittle back again. The wind had also brought the stink of the tannery and of the wide mudflats where a flat boat sat piled high with grain.
“Damn!” he said, mopping his coat with a handkerchief.
So rigid was Ruth’s back, which she had turned to us, I could see her corset stays pressing through the fabric of her dress.
“Mrs. Winter, I apologize if my remarks offended you. I’m a river rat and haven’t had much use for manners or practice in making polite conversation, especially with ladies. Fact is, ma’am, I’m just a rambunctious no-account marking time until I get my bearings.”
Sam stood and coughed like any gentleman wishing to attract the attention of a lady.
Having decided to forgive him his “enthusiasm,” Ruth sat once again beside me. Sam sat, leaned back on the bench, and contemplated the river, whose boats no longer seemed gay.
A tiny silvery sound came from inside the boy’s pocket. He took out his watch and, after having told us the time, showed us the inscription on the inside of the lid: To Tom, from Becky.
“I won it in a poker game off a miner whose claim went bust. Every time I hear it chime the hour, I remind myself never to draw to an inside straight. You have a pleasant trip home.”
Sam went on his way, presumably to set columns of type that would wrap his next day’s lunch.
“What shall we do until the Springfield train arrives?” I asked.
“Let’s find a present for Charlotte and a little gift for Mary Lincoln.”
We strolled along the sidewalks of Hannibal, peering in at store windows. Outside the Western Union office, we watched Sam pick lead from a case. We sauntered past the cooperage, the rope makers, and Tilden Selmes’s Emporium, where Ruth bought a christening spoon and a cloth doll for Charlotte and a tortoiseshell comb for Mary Lincoln. I bought Abe a watch fob. At the Petersen House, after his death, they emptied his pockets and found the fob, along with a pocketknife, some newspaper clippings, two pairs of spectacles (one mended with string), and a Confederate five-dollar bill. It was the string that caused me to shed tears a second time for him, after I’d read the inventory taken of his pockets in the Boston Evening Traveller.
Ruth and I had supper at the station saloon and dawdled afterward over a glass of ginger beer.
“I’m glad I got to see the Mississippi River, but I wish we’d stayed in Springfield,” she said pensively. I guessed that she was thinking of the black men chained up on the steamboat.
I said nothing, and my inability to offer words of comfort, consolation, compensation, or explanation (of man’s behavior or God’s in allowing such infamy) distressed me. I waited for her rebuke. Wasn’t I a minister? Wasn’t it my duty to summon words from the great store of them laid down at Gettysburg and by experience? The latter, however, had only contradicted the books that I had read, lectures I had attended, and homilies I had heard. I’d been to school in Mexico, where my Christian faith began to crumble as even rock will when water freezes in its crannies. What was the seminary next to Chapultepec, Huamantla, or Veracruz?
Emily, do you recall your odd descant on the “stone-breaker” plant?
I let Saxifrage into the little Eden behind the house & fed it stones—in recognition of its Latin meaning, “rock breaker.” Dr. Harbison, who comes to take Mother’s pulse, said that I had been misinformed—the plant possesses a medicinal property that can rid the sufferer of Kidney stones. Indeed, it has not touched a single one of Earth’s that I set out for it—not even a fine yellow gravel from Puffer’s Pond—which I’d have thought a delicacy. It does have the prettiest red flowers & rosettes of succulent leaves.
I’ve consulted Miss Lincoln’s Botany, which parses it thus: kingdom, Plantae; order, Saxifragales; family, Saxifragaceae; genus, Saxifraga. I intend to cultivate my Saxifrage against the time when I may have kidney stones or—more likely—when my mind shall have petrified. My heart, I fear, has already done so.
At a table inside McFadden’s Station Saloon, Ruth was agitated. I watched her finger sketch nervously in the salt that had collected around her plate. She always did take too much of it with her meals.
“Are you all right, dear?” I asked, without taking her hand. I was fascinated by what she was doing with the salt, you see.
“I never thought much about their suffering.” At that moment, she was deserving of her Christian name. “I’ve only ever known house slaves and those that work in the garden. But those enormous bales they must carry! And their backs, Robert, I saw the most awful scars on one!”
She must have known that she could expect nothing from me.
Ruth, I wish you could have seen me at Andersonville! If, during our brief marriage, you were disappointed in me as a man of God, Andersonville redeemed me, though I’m not sure God was there, either, to take note of it.
We sat while the silence lengthened into uneasiness, and then Ruth, capable and resigned, took her napkin and wiped the table clean of salt, as though she were at home.
Just then, a bell clanged, and the Springfield train pulled into the station. We watched coal smoke drift down over the locomotive like a funereal drape.
“Pay the man,” said Ruth, collecting her packages and preparing to leave the saloon.
In retrospect, it might not have been the happy day that I recalled. Abe once said to me, “A man is given only a handful of happy days, if he’s lucky. Only fools and drunkards believe otherwise.”
We rode through the evening and on into night. I was glad when Ruth fell asleep, though she gave me hell when she awoke for letting her new hat get crushed against my shoulder. When we arrived in Springfield, my mouth tasting like cinders, we were worn out and longing for bed. We walked home to our house on Eighth Street in the ordinary silence that comes of weariness. The town was abed, all except for its drunk, a fellow named Dugan, and a mongrel dog licking a piece of greasy butcher’s paper at the curb.
In May of ’65, I would stand in that same station when Abe and his son Willie, in their coffins, were brought home from Washington. I was there as a friend of the Lincoln family; otherwise, I doubt I would have gotten near the funeral train or the borrowed hearse that carried Abe to the statehouse for his own
eulogy and, on the next day, to Oak Ridge Cemetery to be “folded away in time’s violet-scented handkerchief”—not with 100,000 mourners filling the town.
Abe seemed to have had an intimation of his fate. He said to me, while we were making our customary survey of the traffic passing the corner of Sixth and Adams streets, “I will never be an old man.”
I recall a solitary bugler standing on the rear platform of the “Lincoln Special,” as the funeral train was called. He made so mournful a music that the mob wept in its thousands and tens of thousands. Moran was his name. He had lost an eye at the Battle of Five Forks. General Grant himself gave him the Medal of Honor. According to a newspaper account I read, the boy had named his trumpet “Joshua.”
–8–
DURING THE 1850S, SOLDIERS ROUNDED up rogue bands of hostiles that refused the hospitality of the reservations and herded them into Indian Territory. Massacres were common on both sides of the moral argument, whose resolution few could foresee. Fewer still could guess that the union would, in less than ten years’ time, be ripped apart. Like others, I believed that we had more to fear from the savages than from the secessionists.
“Fear makes us martial,” you once said. “Thus do brutes beget brutes on good men.”
Between skirmishes, buffalo hunts were a favorite pastime of the men and good exercise for their mounts. I rode out with them once and discovered in the chase and kill an ecstasy that verged on the religious. The Indians revere the bison because of that rapture, which opens their hearts to the earth and to their gods. They also admire the animal’s enormous vitality. Despite its speed and power, a troop of cavalry could slaughter a hundred in an hour and strip them of their coats, with which to warm their winter bivouacs in the high plains. Hides were also prized as gifts to send east to loved ones, who’d have them made into muffs, polar hats, and lap rugs. Ruth no longer needed them, having grown indifferent to the cold. I did send a buffalo skin to Charlotte and another to Tess. I thought you might disapprove of robing yourself in an animal carcass, or Carlo would have objected to the smell.