American Meteor (7 page)

He was red-faced, potbellied, and wheezing. He reminded me of Mr. Fezziwig, whose picture I’d seen while thumbing through a book left out on a major’s bunk. That was during the do-nothing days before Bull Run, when McClelland
liked to play soldiers. I’ve never known a cockier son of a bitch than McClelland. Can you imagine if he’d beaten Lincoln in ’64? Old Abe’s life would have been spared, but the country would have gone to hell.

“Perhaps you mistook him for a sympathizer,” growled a fierce old Copperhead.

“He shook my hand when I gave him the card,” Titus replied indignantly, nodding toward a stack of them on the table. “He laid it in his wallet, like a lock of his sweetheart’s hair.”

“He’s a damned Yankee sergeant!” snarled a weak-eyed, ink-stained man with the shape and color of a carrot. “You must’ve been crazy to bring him here!”

“Plenty of Federal boys hate Lincoln for putting them through hell for the sake of the niggers!” Titus spluttered, like fire falling on damp tinder.

“What’s that medal he’s wearing? For murdering Confederate boys, I suppose!” barked an Arkansas man who claimed to have mailed Lincoln seventeen death threats since ’64: one for each year of life taken, by a Union hangman, from the “Boy Martyr of the Confederacy,” David Owen Dodd.

I pretended to have fallen asleep. They shook me roughly awake to explain myself.

“Let him kiss the stick!” Titus said. “That’ll prove it one way or the other.”

A skinny red-haired man named Gaiter, who’d lost a fortune in cotton during the war, fetched the stick while Titus praised it, for my benefit, as the one that hotheaded South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks had used to beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner “to within an inch of his damned life” on the Senate floor. Gaiter handled it
with reverence, as you would a relic of a Christian saint. He offered it to my lips, and I kissed it willingly enough. There was room on the calendar for only one martyrdom in April, and my erstwhile commander in chief was welcome to it. I was, remember, just sixteen years of age and enfeebled by strong drink.

My show of adoration appeased them. They clapped me on the back and filled my glass, but when I commenced to vomit up a swill of pigs’ feet and whiskey with a chaser, they hurried me outside and slammed the door. I considered myself fortunate to have escaped with my life. They were ridiculous but dangerous notwithstanding. Was I a coward? Would you have lit the fuse and waited to be hoisted by your own petard? Often, I’d measure myself against other men and find myself wanting in courage, in selflessness, in any kind of love.

I’d never again go looking for my father. In fact, that day in New York City, the twenty-fifth of April, would be nearly my last back east. I’d make one more excursion there, ten, eleven years later. Increasingly, I would come to feel the tug of the West. It wasn’t anything definite. I had no tiny Horace Greeley in my head, urging me in that direction. It was a feeling, a sense, a raw emotion that stole over me, like rye whiskey taken slow. If westering was America’s destiny, it was also mine.

The sweetish odor of animal corruption assailed my nose, snapping my reverie in two. My cigar had gone out. Lighting it, I saw in its glowing ember the dead leaves in the thickets of the Spotsylvania Wilderness that our musket lints had set ablaze. They burned down a stand of trees and, in it, hundreds of trapped Federal soldiers. That was Grant’s worst day of the war, and also theirs.

On the morning of May the third, twelve days after having left Washington, Mr. Lincoln reached the end of his journey—unless you believe in the lessons of the Sunday school—at the Chicago & Alton Depot on Jefferson Street. I had thousands of miles yet to travel. They took him and Willie to the State House, where, with rouge chalk and amber, the undertaker made
our
Great Emancipator’s face presentable. The day scorched, as though hell’s own wind were loosed on Springfield to mock him; and I feared that the secret processes of the embalmer’s art would be undone. I nearly shouted, because of the heat and my anxiousness, that they should hurry the dead man to his tomb and slam the heavy door shut to prevent some horror. Nerves strung tight like piano wire, I felt I was a player in an ancient tragedy. Was this how Booth felt on that Good Friday in Washington? Had he absorbed too much of
Julius Caesar
, in which he’d played Marc Antony to his brother’s Brutus? It ought to have been the other way round, but things are seldom so neatly done in real life. (Was my life real? Real and unreal, like everybody else’s. Photographers can get muddled up in that kind of question—the serious ones can.)

At the cemetery the next day, the feeling that I was extraordinary, that I was a person at the center of great events left me. Modesty prevailed, an unfamiliar emotion to one who liked to show off. I didn’t push ahead of the others standing at the iron door of the tomb; I skulked among the trees. I’d had enough of celebrity. I was sorry for Father Abraham, for me, for the whole damned world. Of Bishop Simpson’s interminable oration, I remember only this: “His moral power gave him preeminence.” I walked
back to the railroad depot, thinking how I might acquire such power. I felt full of a great and noble purpose. By the next day, I’d forgotten all about it.

Springfield, Illinois, May 26–December 7 (Thanksgiving Day), 1865

In Springfield, I shot a man named Jacob Lowry. He came at me with a bayonet he claimed to have used to gut the blue bellies at Chickamauga. I stood in the street and called him a scavenger of corpses belonging to honorable men—in blue and gray—cut down in battles he was too scared to fight. I don’t know which side of the truth I’d landed on in my ire. It didn’t matter, because the reason he lunged at me with that tarnished piece of steel had nothing to do with the War of Secession, but with a pretty black-haired girl. Funny, I can remember Lowry’s name but not hers. Fury must be a stronger, more durable emotion than—call it “infatuation,” since I’m not sure I ever understood love.

I was at loose ends after Mr. Lincoln was laid to rest. With no money or place to go, I took a job at a feed and grain store in Springfield. Lincoln’s parlor car was sold to the Union Pacific Railroad, but I was allowed to sleep there until a train heading to Nebraska Territory could be made up. A girl—she was eighteen and filled her bodice handsomely—came into the store one morning for a bushel of dried corn. I had on my blue coat and—I’m embarrassed to admit—the Medal of Honor. It must have impressed her, unless it was something in my face she liked. The workings of a woman’s heart and mind are mysterious to me.

We began to see each other. She showed me what respectable amusements the town had to offer: dances in the grange
and church halls, baseball games, picnics and band concerts by the Sangamon River, and walks along its bluffs. I taught her euchre and keno, games I’d learned while soldiering. I held her hand and mooned over her. I might’ve kissed her. It’s a shame if I didn’t—she was a pretty girl. We walked out together from late May until Thanksgiving, when Lowry returned to Springfield. He’d been in Charleston after Sherman thrashed it with fire and sword. Lowry was like a magpie picking at leftover stubble in hopes of finding shiny trash. Now, once again in town, he let it be known that he had an understanding with the girl and no Federal son of a bitch was going to trespass on his territory.

“We had no such thing, Jacob!” she scolded, after he’d barged into the kitchen and laid claim to her. We had just sat down with her mother and young brother to eat our Thanksgiving turkey.

“You’re a lying bitch!” he screamed.

“I could never stand the sight or smell of you!” she screamed right back.

His unsavory presence in the close kitchen confirmed her low opinion of him. In a fury of resentment, he cut her lip with the back of his hand and tried to kick my chair out from under me with his muddy boot. Her mother jumped up with a napkin to staunch her daughter’s bloody mouth. The boy began to whimper. The dog, waiting underneath the table for carelessness and gravity to serve him dinner, yelped. I sank the carving fork into Lowry’s thigh. He pulled it out and flung it at me, but his aim was poor, doubtless owing to the pain. I laughed as he hobbled in a rage out the kitchen door.

“You’ll wish you was in hell, boy, when I get done with you!” he shouted from the yard.

My insides were quivering like a custard, but I managed a show of gallantry worthy of my medal. Who’s to say who is or is not deserving of his honors?

The widow—her husband had been killed at Shiloh— went into the front room and began to mangle “Rock Me Back to Sleep, Mother” on an upright piano. The boy shared a turkey leg with the dog. I had lost my appetite for dinner and romance and was about to say good night when the girl—I wish I could remember her name!—disappeared into an unlit room. I thought, for a moment, that she meant me to follow her and receive in the discreet darkness my reward for having sent her suitor packing. I waited in confusion, listening to a drawer groan open and shut. In another moment, she returned to the kitchen with a Colt pistol.

“It was my daddy’s. I’ve kept it cleaned and oiled,” she said proudly.

I looked at it as if it were the turkey’s other leg.

“You best be careful,” she said, touching my eye patch wistfully. “Jake’s got it in for you, and he was crazy even before he went away to fight.”

Reluctantly, I accepted the pistol; its cold, sobering weight annulled the evening’s farce, just as John Wilkes Booth’s derringer had turned a frivolous
Our American Cousin
into tragedy.

I was no gunman; my talent was musical. Depressed, I opened the back door, stepped into the yard, and turned. Standing in the doorway with the skittish light behind her, she kissed me. The moment comes back to me in a rush of recollection: how I turned to take her hand in mine—the one holding the Colt—and then stammered an apology for my clumsiness. Pleased by my confusion (proof of her
fascination), she kissed me lightly on the mouth. I tasted blood like a rusty spoon. She shut the door on me. The windowpanes were wet inside the kitchen, where the stove was roaring against the December cold—unless it was my ears that roared.

I walked back to the depot in the “mystical moist night-air,” careless of danger, thinking only of how I might taste her kiss again, so easily was a young man satisfied in that—I nearly said “innocent time.” But there was nothing innocent about that time—not when it came to lives cut short, hobbled, or robbed of painlessness. Boys may have been barely acquainted with sex, but they were on familiar terms with dying. Even a fraudulent bugle boy would already have seen death in its ingenious masks and bewildering variety of postures, all of them perfect for the long-held gaze of Matthew Brady and his tribe.

I lay awake in the funeral car, the Colt on the nightstand—my head spinning with ragtag thoughts. I remembered Philadelphia, where the funeral train had stopped at Broad Street Station on its way to New York. That night, there was to be a private viewing at Independence Hall.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 22, 1865

I wandered down Market Street to the Delaware, where a young Ben Franklin had arrived from Boston with only a Dutch dollar and a copper shilling to his name. On the wharf that afternoon, I felt that I, too, might yet make something of my life. In the broad brown river that, from instant to instant, was discharging its measureless potential in unceasing motion, I sensed a like potential in me, not entirely wasted by my sixteen years as a ne’er-do-well. Life—the
better part of it—lay before me, as it had for Franklin, just off the Boston packet. I can still do something, I told myself; and then I tripped over a stern line stretched tight around a bollard by the outbound tide and fell headlong into the river. I couldn’t swim, had never learned the art, though I’d been terrified of drowning while I raked up oysters or stole rides on the Brooklyn ferry.

Delivered, finally, unto the water, I was all for drowning. To hell with Ben Franklin—the game wasn’t worth the candle. I felt a languor stealing over me as my body began to tire. It had resisted the river’s lap—so amorous and inviting—in spite of me. Then, when words like
will, desire, resignation
had lost their meaning, I was hauled out with the abruptness of a fish taken from its element. I woke—it was like waking—to a man busily rowing my arms to rid me of river water. Lying on the planked bottom of a skiff, I coughed and stared at the white sun overhead.

“You all right, boy?” he asked.

He was a colored man of middle age. We’d have called him worse back then. Many still would. The look of concern on his face seemed genuine.

I took my time in answering him, nostalgic for the numbness through which I’d recently passed on my way to elsewhere or nowhere. I blinked my eyes awhile, fidgeted, and wriggled in the noonday light. I knew I ought to thank him, and in a moment I did—convincingly, it seemed to me.

“Yes. Thanks, mister,” I said, fixing my eye patch, which had been skewed by the current.

He tied up to the wharf, collected his fishing pole and creel, and then followed behind me as I climbed the ladder to the dock. He lived nearby and insisted I go home with
him to dry my clothes. It seemed the sensible thing, and I did as he asked. I felt squeamish about going inside a black man’s house. But I went—maybe to prove to myself I was a different boy from the one who’d fallen into the river. Maybe I wanted to believe I’d been changed by my “Baptist drowning.” The lies we tell ourselves!

He gave me a shirt and a much-mended pair of pants, which I put on willingly to show I had no prejudice. He made me drink hot broth while I sat in front of the fire, in his front room. He handled my uniform respectfully, as you would a priest’s Sunday outfit, wringing the blue coat and pants with his strong black hands before hanging them up to dry. He wanted to know what I was doing in Philadelphia. I told him I had arrived that morning on the Lincoln Special, with the president’s body.