Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  The two men looked on as solid ranks of soldiers—twenty or twenty-five abreast—came marching steady down the avenue, one regiment after another. For an hour, there would be nothing but cavalry, walking slowly on exhausted gray horses with bleeding eyes—the cavalrymen swung their sabers around in salute to Mr. Lincoln and his companion. Then came batteries of ruined cannon, with gunners sitting up sharply on top of broken caissons. And then, the infantry again, Negro and white, Union and Confederate, turning their faces in a crisp motion to behold Lincoln and salute him. They marched as dusk gently fell on them, and a sign lit up on a building across from the stand. Someone had arranged a series of gaslights to spell out “How are you, Lee?” Walt peered into the gloom, trying to recognize his brother George among the marchers. But then he realized that George was not among them because this was a parade of the dead.

  “Quite a spectacle,” said the late President.

  “They are very many,” said Walt.

  “Yes. It would crush me, I think, but death has eroded my cares a little.”

  “I have friends among them,” Walt said. He went to the rail and leaned over it, looking hard at the faces as they passed by.

  “Sweet Henry Smith,” said Lincoln.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know them all. Aren’t they my boys, every one of them, just as they were yours? They want to come back. Listen to them—they are crying to come back.” Walt listened—he closed his eyes and realized that the parade was going by in perfect silence.

  “I hear nothing,” he said.

  Mr. Lincoln shook his head. “The dead are not silent,” he said, and turned his back on Walt, so Walt could see his wound, gaping just behind his ear. “Go on,” he said. “You may probe it, if you like.” It seemed suddenly to Walt that he must do just that. It was enormously necessary to put his finger in that hole. I have been waiting so long, Walt thought as he reached out his finger, to do this. His finger sank into the wound as if into a sucking mouth. There came a deafening roar from the soldiers. Walt felt a shock all over his body, as if he’d fallen from a tree onto hard ground, and woke in his bed with his limbs splayed out around him like a startled baby.

  It was May of 1868. Walt was still in Washington, making a comfortable salary as a clerk in the office of the Attorney General. He lay in bed, panting because this dream always left him feeling exhausted, and listening to the noise of migrating birds outside his window. He liked the smell of this hour—he thought it must be around five in the morning—and he liked to lie and listen to the big song, and picture the immense flock. He listened carefully, trying to identify species. As he lay with his eyes closed, listening so hard, he heard Hank’s voice speaking softly into his ear. He always sounded so close—close enough to kiss. Walt had been hearing him, not since his death, but since Mr. Lincoln’s, since the first time he’d dreamed of the reviewing stand, since the first time he’d put his finger in the great wound and felt the exuberant, electric whack. At first, Walt had thought it was his brother Andrew speaking to him. He’d died of tuberculosis, just after Hank died, and Walt thought he’d come back to haunt him, to chide him for not attending his funeral, for grieving less for a brother than he did for Hank, or, indeed, for Mr. Lincoln. But the voice he heard was Hank speaking, in his sweet Missouri accent, a soft voice out of the boundless west that was made elegant and articulate by death. Bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, he said. White-crowned sparrow. It’s rare music, isn’t it, Walt?

  Walt had been in New York when he heard of Lincoln’s death. That Saturday, he’d sat at the breakfast table with his mother, neither of them eating anything, neither of them speaking. He’d crossed the river to Manhattan, and walked all day in the strangely quiet and subdued city. Every shop was closed, except the ones selling the equipment of grief. Walt stopped and bought crepe for the mournification of his mother’s house, and a motto for her door: O the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!

  All week long, he went out to observe the progress of mourning. From Bowling Green to Union Square, every store, house, and hotel on Broadway was alive with the national colors in celebration of Appomattox, and over all these hung black cloth. In the harbor, black pennants flew over the flags at half-mast, and the private signals of captains and owners were draped in black. All over the city, the folds of crepe grew darker, denser, and more numerous as the week went on, until Walt thought that the sky would be blotted out by a low hanging belly of crepe, settling so thick and deep over every street and building that Manhattan might be hidden forever-more from the world.

  When the President’s body came to New York, Walt stood in the immense crowds around City Hall and waited his turn to see it. From the west gate of the park, people were lined up twenty across and three blocks deep down Murray Street. All across Printing House Square the crowd stretched, away up Chatham to Mulberry Street. Batteries were sounding every minute, and bells were ringing all over the city. Outside City Hall, a group of Germans was singing Schumann’s “Chorus of the Spirits.”

  Inside City Hall, the fabulous catafalque was waiting for Walt. The coffin lay under a twenty-foot-high arch topped with a silver eagle whose head drooped sadly, and whose wings were folded shyly against its body. Very slowly, the line moved forward, until at last Walt got a good long stare at the dead man, at the coffin of wood and lead and silver and velvet, at the flowers—scarlet azaleas and double nasturtiums, white japonicas and orange blossoms and lilacs. The body had been out for many hours by the time Walt saw it. The face had begun to show wear—perhaps, Walt thought, from the pressure of all those thousands and thousands of pairs of eyes that had beheld it. The jaw had dropped, the lips had fallen open slightly to reveal the teeth. An undertaker leaned forward next to Walt and discreetly dusted the face, but this only made it look worse.

  Walt stared and stared, holding up the line, fascinated by the dead gray face. A lady behind him gave a polite shove. Her child, horrified by the disagreeable face, was weeping, and she wished to move on. Walt gave her a slight bow, but as he turned to walk away he heard a voice calling his name, Walt, Walt, Walt. He turned back to the lady.

  “Did you speak?” he asked her, though it wasn’t a lady’s voice he’d heard. She shook her head no, and motioned again for him to please move on. Walt looked once more at the late President’s face, at the lips hanging open. As he walked away he heard the voice, plaintive now, Walt!

  For weeks the voice would only speak his name. Back in Washington, it would call to him as he sat at his desk in the Patent Office. He’d had a new job since January, working as a clerk in the Department of the Interior. Walt, the voice would say, and he would look up at the Indians waiting serenely to see some undersecretary, sitting lofty and remote in their necklaces and feathers and paint. “Did you speak?” Walt would ask them.

  The voice kept calling Walt’s name, all through the summer, and after. It called to him at his job in the Attorney General’s office, procured for him by a friend after he was fired (for the sake of his Leaves) from the Department of the Interior. Day and night he heard it, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and he thought it was his brother until he knew it was Hank, and he named it Hank, and then it spoke to him sweetly and at length, no longer just calling his name. And until he named it, it was his fear that the voice was a symptom of a sick mind, but this concern slowly melted away, until it did not matter to him if his mind was decaying into madness, so long as the voice kept speaking. What did you think? the voice asked him. Did you think I would leave you?

  It was one of Hank’s virtues that he never told Walt what to do. The living Hank had been a great and incessant demander—Walt, fetch me some ice; Walt, I got an itch on my back, roll me over and see to it; get me a pipe; get me a bird; get me a picture of a French girl, naked. But Hank’s voice never asked for anything. It offered salutations in the morning. It commented on the beauty of a beautiful day. Death had changed Hank’s appreciation of Walt’s poetry—the voice spoke Walt’s own words back to h
im, or offered him new ones, a generous muse. But it never asked for anything, it never once gave a command until the autumn of ’68, when Walt was in New York, having a sort of vacation.

  In Manhattan, if it was very pleasant outside, Walt would take a trip on a stage. Nearly all the Broadway drivers were his personal friends. They’d let him ride for free if he didn’t insist on paying—he’d ride for hours and hours and pay multiple fares. You see everything, Hank said the first time they took such a trip together. It was true—there were shops and splendid buildings and great vast windows, sidewalks crowded with richly dressed women and men, superior in style and looks to those seen anywhere else. It was a perfect stream of people.

  One day in October, Walt took Hank for a ride on the Belt Line. They got on in the early afternoon and rode round and round along its course, circumnavigating the lower reaches of Manhattan, going down along the Hudson River docks, up along the East River front, and then across Fifty-ninth Street to start the ride all over again. The day was dusty and warm. Walt rested his head against the window and watched the sun striking through ship’s flags. A great day, Hank said, and Walt wondered, not for the first time, if he ought to pay double the fare since Hank was with him.

  Lost in the sunstruck flags, Walt hardly noticed the passengers as they came and went, until, at Fulton Market, there boarded a man who demanded Walt’s attention. He tripped on the platform and fell into the car, catching his hand on the driver’s strap and giving it a mighty tug. The driver (his name was Carl, he was a friend of Walt’s) dropped a curse down on him. The fellow reached his hand up to squeeze the driver’s calf where it hung down in view of all the passengers.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

  A muffled reply came down from the driver on his perch. Walt looked away as the fellow came back, feeling shy all of a sudden, though he had never before been shy on a stage. He had accosted all sorts of men on the stages, and made many dear friends that way. But now, as the fellow sat down across from him, Walt stared out the window, down at the ground where the shadows of masts and rigging were everywhere. As the new passenger had come closer, Walt had peeked and seen that he was young, or at least he looked very young, despite the big brown beard on his face.

  “Hello,” he said. Walt did not reply, and that was when Hank offered his first posthumous demand. Say hello, Walt. But Walt remained silent.

  The young fellow began to sing a tune, “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” falling into a hum sometimes when he forgot the words. When they had been up the East Side, and along the lower margin of Central Park, the fellow spoke again. “You are on for the ride, just like me.” Walt said nothing, and Hank chided him. I’ve never known you to be rude. Walt put his head down and pretended to sleep. His palms were burning and his heart felt as if it were riding just under his chin. Just look at him, Hank said. Take a good long look. Then you’ll know.

  “Bostonians are supercilious towards everybody,” the fellow said.

  Walt let out a little counterfeit snore.

  “Are you from Boston?”

  Walt opened his eyes, but did not look up. “I am not from Boston,” he said. “It’s only that I would prefer not to have a conversation.”

  “Well, you might have said so.” The young man muttered to himself for a while, and when they had passed down to the oyster boats at Tenth Street, he stood up and exited the stage. Walt’s shyness and fear evaporated immediately, and then he wished he had not been so rude, and he was inclined to chase the man down just to apologize to him.

  But he was only gone for a minute. Before the car could leave him behind, he returned with a bucket of oysters and sat down again in his spot. Very soon Walt could hear him slurping them and throwing the shells down on the floor among the straw and dried mud. “Oh damn,” he said suddenly. Walt looked up to see that he had cut his thumb trying to shuck an oyster. There were only four fingers on the hand he’d injured; he was missing the littlest finger of his left hand. He brought his thumb to his mouth, staining his lips with blood. He looked away from the door and met Walt’s gaze, and Walt saw that his eyes could not have been more like Hank’s if he had stolen them and set them in his own head. Walt got a feeling, then, which crowded into his heart with the shyness and the fear, but did not displace them. This fellow, this boy, was intensely familiar—he felt sure he’d met him before, or seen his face, though he knew he had not. Give him a kiss, Walt, said Hank. Embrace him. He is for you, and you for him, a great true comrade and a great soul. He is a builder.

  “Are you well, sir?” Walt asked him, because the thumb, out of the young man’s mouth now, was bleeding profusely. Walt thought back to an instance in Armory Square when his own thumb had been cut by a scalpel covered with gangrenous filth. His thumb had swelled up like a plum, then, and taken months to heal.

  “It’s a scratch,” said the boy. Now Walt thought he was definitely a boy, not even twenty years old, though deep lines of care were writ on his brow. Walt leaned over, very slowly, to inspect the wound.

  “It’s deep. It should be bandaged.”

  “It’s not so deep,” he said. “See? Now it’s drying up.” He gave it a few shakes, and the trickling blood slowed and stopped.

  “But it was deep,” said Walt, who thought he’d seen a flash of white bone between the lips of the cut.

  “No,” said the fellow. “I think it wasn’t. And I am a doctor. A connoisseur, if you will, of wounds.” He put out his bloody hand for Walt to shake. “Dr. George Washington Woodhull,” he said, “but you may please call me Gob.”

  Walt stared and stared at him, but did not take his hand. Though Armory Square was so fresh in his mind that he sometimes thought he could still smell blood and ether in his beard and his skin, it took him a moment to place the name Woodhull.

  “Well, you are Walt Whitman. You don’t need to tell me. I knew it the very moment I entered this car. Who else, I ask you, looks like Walt Whitman? And see here, the whole city has been notified of your visit.” He moved over, sat down next to Walt, and took a copy of the Times from his coat. “‘With the advent of autumn,’” he read, “‘Walt Whitman once again makes his appearance on the sidewalks of Broadway. His large, massive personality; his grave and prophetic, yet free and manly appearance; his insouciance of manner and movement; his easy and negligent but clean and wholesome dress—all go to make up a figure and an individuality that attracted the attention and interest of every passer-by.’” Walt stared, remembering Dr. Woodhull of Armory Square, barely listening to the personal notice in the paper, though he was very pleased with it. He’d written the outline himself and submitted it to a friend at the Times.

  “Mr. Whitman,” said the boy. “I am so glad to meet you.” He put his hand out again, and this time Walt took it. It was a small hand, but strong, and the boy squeezed so hard Walt thought he might whimper. He pumped Walt’s arm and with every shake Walt got a feeling, a happy feeling, as if this young fellow were pumping him up with joy. See? Hank said. Do you see him, Walt? Do you see him?

  The next day Walt went planting in the park. While he waited for his new friend, he searched out places where he thought people might settle down for a picnic. Kneeling in a good spot on the meadow, near the lake, he tore up some grass and made a little bed of it on which to rest his book. He’d inscribed it earlier in a neat but carefree hand: For you.

  It was his conviction that he was most successful with the reader in the open air, and so he planted, certain that a person who encountered his poems among the natural splendors of this park would be charmed and changed by them. He sat down on a bench some hundreds of feet away from where he’d left his book, and watched. Opening a paper and pretending to read it, he thought not about his prospective reader, but of Dr. Woodhull—of Gob.

  Gob had invited Walt to walk with him, and walk they did, all over the city for hours and hours, so today even Walt, a perennially enthusiastic and untiring perambulator, had sore feet. Walt confessed that he already knew a D
r. Woodhull, and Gob confessed that Canning Woodhull was indeed his father, though he had not seen him since he was five years old. They talked about poems because Gob insisted that he was a great admirer of Walt’s Leaves, and they talked about politics because as night fell there began a grand Democratic meeting and torchlight procession. Democrats poured out into the street by the thousands, and the whole city was lit up with torches. On Second Avenue, Walt and Gob climbed up on a stalled omnibus to watch the procession go by. There were models of ships some sixty feet long, fully manned, and liberty cars overflowing with women in robes of red, white, and blue. Every member of the parade carried a torch. Gob laughed at a lady who wore a hat made of Roman candles, which shot tiny fireballs into the crowd along the sidewalks. The two of them had parted after the last straggler in the procession, a child wearing a placard proclaiming for Seymour, had passed by. They arranged to meet the next day in the park, and then Walt went home, thinking of his new friend, wondering that he had ever been afraid of him. Hank was silent, except to make an occasional exclamation. O joy, he said. O happiness.

  In the park, Walt kept watch over his book, but though a few people passed by it, no one stooped to pick it up. His spirits were beginning to droop when he heard Gob’s voice behind him saying, “Hello, Walt!” Gob was proceeding rapidly down the carriage path, accompanied by a laughing redheaded female in liberated dress. Only their upper portions were visible above a hedge that ran along the road, and these seemed quite impossibly to be floating. Walt figured they must be on bicycles, but when they came around the hedge he saw that they had contraptions on their feet, big rubber wheels the size of a person’s head, two for each foot, attached to iron braces that fit under their shoes.