American Meteor (20 page)

I’d promised myself that I would put an end to Custer, but it’s hard to kill a man in cold blood. Especially a man I found—in spite of myself—fascinating. My perfect hatred for him was spoiled by a particle of envy. There was something of Lincoln in my makeup—if you’ll forgive my presumptuousness—and also something of Custer. Later on,
Crazy Horse would muddle me even more. I would kill the general, but I’d have to work myself up to it.

Washington City, March 28–April 21, 1876

George Armstrong Custer was another American meteor: a man fated to burn brightly, only to be extinguished in the cold sea of time and forgetfulness. The forgetfulness reserved for legendary men and women, whose true characters—good or bad—lie buried beneath the sediment of stories told about them. Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse were also destined for oblivion, and even Lincoln is obscured by the thickets of myth that have grown up around him. Unlike them, however, Custer contrived his own deification. He campaigned against the forces of anonymity that overwhelm all but the most illustrious or infamous of our kind. He exaggerated his virtues and colored his vices, both of which were centered on a morbid courage. He risked his life and, unpardonably, the lives of men under his command. He wrote dispatches to the newspapers and the illustrated weeklies of the day concerning his exploits in order to locate himself at the center of stirring events. The Indians abominated him. Many whites despised him, but I suspect that most admired his dash and recklessness. More than any other man I can name, Custer was the stamp and image of Manifest Destiny and the perfect type of western man: heroic, lawless, and undisciplined.

After the expedition’s triumphant return to Fort Lincoln, Custer stayed at the fort with Libbie, while Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse began to gather defiant bands of Cheyenne and Sioux up in the Powder River Country of Wyoming Territory, between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. I continued, in effect, as Custer’s personal
photographer, recording moments, both public and private, for the history that would one day open its bloody maw to receive him. At his request—a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse—I produced a series of prints for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia: the general with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers’ pack of eighty dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux; with Libbie in the parlor of their private quarters at the fort; and the general striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon’s: arms folded across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent destiny.

At the end of March 1876, Custer was summoned to Washington to testify at proceedings brought against Secretary of War Belknap, accused of enriching himself by the unlawful sale of civilian contracts at western forts.

“Moran, I want you to go east with me,” he said while I immortalized him lacing up his cavalry boots. “Heads are going to roll in Washington, Moran, and Custer needs to be seen with his hand on the lever of the guillotine.”

“Naturally, General.”

I hadn’t been east since ’65, and the thought of visiting there pleased me.

“Be sure to take the stereo camera,” he said. “My pictures are in great demand ever since I discovered gold.”

“Excellent idea, General!”

“Libbie’s grateful to you, Moran, for sharing your royalties with her. She’s spruced our quarters with new curtains and furniture. Did I ever tell you that the writing table she’s so partial to is the very same one where Lee signed the articles of surrender at Appomattox Court House?”

“No, sir.”

I’d heard it often but pretended otherwise. I needed to stay on his good side if I was to get close enough to kill him.

“Sheridan gave it to me at the McClean house—a gift for Libbie. He doted on her.”

The Civil War began in Wilmer McClean’s front yard in Manassas and ended in the parlor of his house in Appomattox, where he’d moved his family to escape the strife. There is a thread to tie together the most divergent events or the most unlikely persons, if one can find it.

We rode to Washington on the transcontinental railroad. My apparatus was packed in the baggage car. When we arrived at the Baltimore & Ohio Depot, where I’d set out with the body of Mr. Lincoln eleven years before, Custer waited inside the car until I could arrange the camera, prepare a negative, and take his picture as he descended onto the platform. I never saw a bigger ass than George Armstrong Custer! That morning in Washington, you might have thought it was Jesus arriving in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, so laden with a tragic nobility did he appear. While we attended the impeachment hearings, I photographed him in his fancy regimentals, with a hand on the Holy Bible, swearing to tell the truth—a feat for someone used to embroidery; on the Capitol steps; outside Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse and in the Arsenal courtyard, where she was hanged; by the Potomac, ready to throw a silver dollar across it—he’d have chopped down a cherry tree if he’d had a hatchet—and in a number of other poignant tableaux.

One picture I didn’t take was of Custer knocking at the White House door; Grant refused to let him inside. He was furious with Custer for having implicated his brother
Orvil in the trading-post scandal and, on the twenty-first of April, relieved him of his command. Happily, it was restored in time for the Little Bighorn. Later on, Orvil was committed to an insane asylum in New Jersey for a “monomania for large speculations.”

“Moran,” said Custer while we stood at the hotel bar drinking lemonade. He had taken the pledge in ’61, after a disgraceful exhibition in front of his sweetheart, Libbie, and her starched father.

“Yes, General?”

“I want to go to Philadelphia to see the exposition.”

“What about the Sioux War?” I asked.

“The Sioux will await Custer’s pleasure. I want to see my pictures.”

Camden, New Jersey, April 22, 1876

While Custer was admiring himself in Philadelphia, I crossed the Delaware on the Camden ferry and visited Whitman. A grievous stroke suffered three years earlier had obliged him to leave Washington and move into his brother George’s Camden house. When George showed me into the front room, I found Whitman slumped on a sofa, scratching at foolscap with a pen. I thought he must be composing new verses for his
Leaves
, but on closer inspection, I saw what appeared to be a genealogy, perhaps the Whitman family tree. We had believed his book, like the poet himself, to be unstoppable; that even in death, he would manage to enlarge it with editions as natural as the rings marking a tree’s annual increase. But now he was done with it and looked like a man preparing to give up the ghost. His rude health and rough manner had deserted
him. He was worn-out, like the nap of a corduroy suit. I saw the bones of his winter and—when he lifted his gaunt face to mine—the remnant light that time conspired to quench. I thought then that he must be a great soul, however much his imperfections kept him human.

“I’m Stephen Moran,” I said, since he didn’t recognize in me the boy he had consoled in the Armory Square Hospital. I thought my name would be sufficient to bring to mind the author of the western photographs I’d been sending him ever since Bear River City.

“Stephen Moran . . .” he repeated in bewilderment.

I hunted the room with my eyes; saw an oil painted by his friend, the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, and on the wall, above a fernery, a photograph of William Henry Jackson that I’d taken in the Wasatch Range, after our winter sojourn with the Ute.

“I took this picture,” I said. “Six years ago, in northern Utah.”

“Ah! Now I recall the name. It’s a fine photograph, Mr. Moran. I’ve admired the others you’ve kindly sent to me. I took inspiration from them.”

“Do you know why I sent them?”

His bemused look grieved me, for it spoke of the slippage of a great mind toward its end.

“I was the bugle boy you recommended for Mr. Lincoln’s funeral train. I played taps on the trip to Springfield. I’ve always been grateful for the notice you paid me.”

I didn’t mention the first time I saw him, by Sheepshead Bay. He might not have cared to be reminded of his vanished virility.

“There were so many young men. Though it seems to me I
do remember your face—because of the eye patch, though I don’t recall the circumstances. What brings you east, friend? If I were lucky enough to be a man at large in the West, nothing short of dynamite could relocate me.”

I told him that Custer had taken me on as his photographer and that we’d come east to see the exposition. (I didn’t mention the general’s disgrace.) Whitman said he hoped he’d feel up to scratch enough to go. He was keen on Machinery Hall. He believed that machines would be the motive power to push the democracy forward into the twentieth century. He planned on going to Philadelphia with Eakins, if his strength didn’t desert him entirely. He wanted to ride the Camden ferry once again. Looking at his hand, wondering, perhaps, what had become of its power to snatch from the air his mind’s effusions, he recited, “What exhilaration, change, people, business by day. What soothing, silent, wondrous hours, at night, crossing on the boat, most all to myself—pacing the deck, alone, forward or aft. What communion with the waters, the air . . . —the sky and stars, that speak no word.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw him on deck, wearing his suit of iron gray, loosely cut and old-fashioned. The Good Gray Poet, “taken by strangers for some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer”—sadly, now, no more.

“Custer is a magnificent specimen of the American man,” Whitman said later while we were drinking tea in the sunny kitchen. “You won’t catch the general sipping horse piss like this.”

“The general’s teetotal,” I said.

“Is he?” This news seemed shocking to Whitman, as if I’d told him Custer liked to dress up in Libbie’s undergarments.
“I would never have thought it. Grant’s a man’s man, though! Nothing but whiskey and cigars for him!”

Both manly vices would prove fatal when Death came for him—destitute and forgotten—in 1885.

“Custer will deal with the Indians,” said Whitman, who must have forgotten his verses in praise of them.

“Yes,” I said, to be agreeable. And I will deal with Custer, I thought.

“What do you think of love, Stephen?”

“Pardon me?” I said, much surprised by this question, which was apropos of nothing.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking a good deal about love,” he said with a distracted air that made him look like a moon calf. “I thought I understood it, but now, now I’m not so sure.”

Strange, isn’t it, Jay, that the nearest I had gotten so far to an understanding of love was with an Indian girl who didn’t speak English?

“It’s a mysterious force to make men and women behave in the most extraordinary way.”

Yes, I said to myself, not feeling qualified to interrogate the matter with him.

“You know, when I was a boy of five, General Lafayette picked me up from a crowded sidewalk and carried me down the street during his visit to New York. I have always believed that happenstance conjunction determined my destiny.”

He lapsed into a silence fretted by wonder and regret while he played absently with his teaspoon.

“It cannot stand!” he said with sudden vigor. “My dismissal! To have been let go with such contempt; to be dismissed for having written a book ‘full of indecent passages.’
He called me ‘a very bad man,’ you know, a ‘free lover.’ No, I can’t allow Harlan’s calumny to go unanswered.”

I knew that Harlan, secretary of the interior during Johnson’s presidency, had sacked Whitman because of
Leaves of Grass
, which he judged obscene. That was nearly eleven years ago, and it had returned, the cheap denigration of his life’s work and life, both: a grievance the old man gnawed, like a marrow bone, in his winter, his sad decrepitude. If he’d ever forgotten the affront. I could not pity him: I was no one to pity a great man, however reduced by age and sickness. I was sorry. We can feel sorry for people fallen on hard times without demeaning them by pity. Though I could have cried to see Whitman’s rheumy eyes, his gnarled, arthritic hands, the remains of a coddled egg left from breakfast on his shirt. His great head waggled a little, the way an old man’s will.

I stood and shook his hand. From his chair, he threw an arm around my neck and drew my face down to his and kissed me. Our beards entangled as briefly as our two lives had done—in Brooklyn, Washington, and now in Camden—and then they disentangled, one from the other, although he’d be often in my thoughts.

“Thank you for your visit, young man. Will you be stopping at the exposition?”

“Briefly, Mr. Whitman.”

“Walt—call me Walt, as you would a comrade.”

“Walt.”

He smiled, and I watched his face undergo a metamorphosis that would have entranced Ovid: It passed from the unalloyed joy of an elk at the summit of its range to the anguish of a deer, an arrow through its lungs and heart.

“Perhaps, I’ll be able to visit it next month. Sadly, the organizers did not invite me to read my poems.”

He would visit the Centennial Exposition and slide his fifty cents through the ticket window, like any ordinary citizen of the democracy he cherished and sometimes wrongheadedly defended. Still, you couldn’t help but love him—at least I couldn’t, who had heard him bellow his love while the waves crumbled on Brooklyn’s pleasant shore when I was nearly twelve.