Bold Sons of Erin (22 page)

The parson said that Mr. Evans would be remembered by all as a good man. He should have said, “By all but one.”

I could not shake his sin from my thoughts. Twas almost as if he had passed it on to me. At home, I would take my wife into my arms at any stray moment, until she found me silly. A part of me feared she might be gone of a sudden, although that was unreasonable. I have seen a muchness of death in my days, and know it is part of God’s plan. But I could not find my ease by day or night.

Even Fanny sensed a change in me. She sang my favorite hymns of an eve, and her voice was pure and true, but she saw she could not reach me, for all her trying. She sat by the stove and puzzled out her grammar, asking now and then for my help with a word. Perhaps she feared I had turned cold and would send her back to the streets. But it was not coldness in me, only confusion. And more fear than ever I felt on a battlefield.

Above all, I worried over the health of our John and the child to be. For great sins pass down through the generations.

One good thing there was, and that was Mrs. Walker’s common sense. I give her that. I had worried that she might create a public scandal by appearing at the burying, but she did not. It was her gift to her dead lover’s reputation. But I did not doubt that she would come in the darkness, in her veil.

The parson spoke too long and said too little. My Mary was a fine little soldier, composed in her widow’s weeds and unshaken by the cold and wet, although I worried for her health. She had cried much between the death and the ceremony, for Mr. Evans had been her last family tie. Now she was as bereft of relations as me. We had each other, two against the world, to defend our family.

Afterward, a cold meal had been arranged in Mr. Evans’s house. Twas a small affair of ham and mumbled condolences. Mrs. Walker had not been invited, of course. But I had the queerest sense that she should have been there. As if she were his widow, legal and proper.

Mrs. Walker did not appear, but Mr. Hemmings did. His law offices handled Mr. Evans’s public and private affairs. He come up to me directly.

“When would Mrs. Jones like to hear the will read?” he asked me. “We could do it this afternoon, if she’d like.” He glanced about us, then leaned closer and whispered, “There is one other party who must be present, I’m afraid.”

Yes. Of course.

I almost told him we would have the will read without delay. On the very verge of saying so, I was. Then I stopped myself.

I begged his pardon and stepped over to my darling, drawing her aside.

“Mr. Hemmings asks when you would have the will read out,” I told her.

I almost saw the hint of a smile at my new deference, although she had the sense to banish it quickly. “Whenever you think it fit, Abel,” she told me.

“Then, with your permission, I will have Mr. Hemmings wait until I return from Washington. It will only be a few days.”

I was punishing myself, see. For my eagerness and greed.

My darling acquiesced. Then a certain dowager approached us, a woman whose only joy was another’s burial. She carried a plate eaten down to the slops, with her appetite for misery unabated.

I place my lips next to my darling’s ear and said, “Another party must be present, when the will is read, Mary.”

My darling did not flinch, but whispered, “She loved him.”

“EVER HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE CANNIBALS COOKING up the missionary feller?” Mr. Lincoln asked me. He was a lovely, sad man, fond of jokes.

“No, sir, I have not,” I assured him.

Mr. Lincoln slapped his knee and sat back, putting on that mischievous smile he liked to wear in private. He placed his hands upon the arms of his chair, chewed the air for a moment, then leaned forward again. More lined each time I saw him, his face could seem a map of human sorrows. Yet, he laughed with the innocence of a child, displaying his brown teeth.

“Well, there’s this cannibal family out there on one of those South Sea jungle islands.” His eyes twinkled in anticipation, for he liked a well-told tale as much as a Welshman does, and he loved to affect the voices of the characters. “Catch them a big, fat missionary, size of a Dutch saloon-keeper. Conk him over the head, and put him in the pot.” Mr. Lincoln gestured as he spoke, describing the action with huge, worn hands. “And he’s cooking up just fine, all salted down and rendered . . .”

Now, something there was about Mr. Lincoln’s storytelling that let you not only smell the poor fellow cooking, but made you want a slice. Although I do not mean that improperly.

“ . . . Mrs. Cannibal, she’s stirring in a little of this and a little of that, so that everything’s going to be fixed and on the table when the little ’uns get home from the cannibal schoolhouse.” He sighed, savoring foreign and forbidden aromas. “Smells so
good that ole Mr. Cannibal’s getting right fidgety about now. Hungry as a bear in April. Twice that hungry. So he wanders on over to that pot”—Mr. Lincoln stretched his fingers toward an invisible cauldron—“and he’s lookin’ to tear himself off a little piece of haunch or maybe some back-meat, and ole Mrs. Cannibal gives him a smack with that big stirring spoon of hers.” Mr. Lincoln yanked back his hand, shaking it and grimacing.

Leaning still closer, he smiled again. Casting just a brief glance toward Mr. Nicolay, his confidential secretary, who completed our party of three.

“Well, Mr. Cannibal needs to fix on something to take his mind off all those cooking smells. So he starts in to rooting through the chests and trunks that missionary fellow had carried on into the jungle with him.” Mr. Lincoln paused, as a tenor will to heighten the ear’s demand. “And what does he find in there? In the heaviest chest of them all? Well, he finds him a big chest full of diary books. Everything about that missionary fellow’s written down in there, neat as a pin, going all the way back to his childhood and his studying . . .” Mr. Lincoln shook his head slowly, in mock wonder.

“Well, Mr. Cannibal runs out to Mrs. Cannibal, waving him a passel of those little diary books, crying, ‘Lookee here, darlin’ of mine, that fat feller was borned and bred in Boston, Massachusetts!’ And his wife just puts down her spoon, gets up a look of high consternation, and settles her hands way up on her hips. ‘You just throw every one of them books on the fire this minute,’ she tells him, ‘before the childrens git home. I don’t want ’em thinking about where meat comes from and spoiling their appetites.’”

Mr. Lincoln laughed to bursting, slapping his baggy trouserknees like a minstrel in a show. “Doesn’t that just beat all?” he asked us.

Mr. Nicolay, who was of German extraction, did not understand the humor, but sought to please Mr. Lincoln with a smile. Then he watched us. Waiting.

Mr. Lincoln’s laughter faded. And he put on an expression as serious as ever a look could be. With those lonely, prairie eyes that burn in the memory. He leaned toward me yet again, earnest as a casualty list.

“John here tells me you’ve been asking where the meat comes from, Major Jones.”

“EVER BEEN TO Missouri?” Mr. Lincoln asked me.

Guns and caissons rattled by in the distance, accompanied by faint shouts and the crack of whips. The smoke of a city in autumn dimmed the horizon, but enough late sunlight struggled through the windows to varnish half of Mr. Lincoln’s face.

“No, sir, I have not,” I told him. “I hear it is disreputable.”

Mr. Lincoln shrugged. “Parts. Out to the west. But St. Louis now, that’s a fine city. Important city. Vital. Our German citizens saved it for the Union. Very patriotic folk, the Germans, when the bug catches ’em. Although I would be grateful if Mr. Schurz would be a little less angry and a bit more helpful. Spain didn’t work out for him, but now I’m growing inclined to pack him off to China. Or to visit those cannibals. Anyway, plenty of our Missouri citizens had a mind to go out with the South. But the Germans wouldn’t stand for it. Raised up their own militias, bought muskets for their singing circles. Kept St. Louis in, and that kept Missouri in.” He nodded, gratefully. “I made a passel of colonels and generals out of them after that, figured they’d be best at leading their own kind. Truth be told, they’ve been little worse than those West Point boys.”

I did not see what any of this had to do with my inquiry about the details of General Stone’s background and the matter of Russian visitors to Pottsville. But Mr. Lincoln had a way of circling a problem, as I believe Red Indians like to do. Then he would leap upon the matter, when least a fellow expected it.

“I had their votes, as well. One thing you can say about the Germans, they don’t have any patience with slavery.” He made a cradle of thumb and forefinger for his beard. “Has to do with
all those revolutions that didn’t work out and drove them over here in the first place. Well, when I asked ’em who might be fit to lead troops who spoke Dutch, nearly all of them said, ‘Carl Stone.’ Well, that didn’t sound much like a German name to me, but sometimes they change ‘em. Hurrying up to be Americans. Or to leave some part of their past behind. So I gave General Frémont a hint—then a second one, ’cause that man never would take the first one—that this Carl Stone fellow should be made a colonel and put in command of a regiment of Germans. Well, Fremont got his back up, the way he liked to do—never met a man who could squeeze so much blood out of an imagined insult, excepting George McClellan—but, the third time I gave him a hint and a strong suggestion to go along with it, he put some eagles on
Herr
Stone’s shoulders.”

Mr. Lincoln made a slight rearrangement of his great collection of limbs. The window light climbed higher up his face. The President’s House was quieter now than it had been in his first year, when office-seekers loitered on the stairs and Westerners spit tobacco juice on the carpets. There were new velvet draperies, and the halls were clean. Mr. Lincoln’s office smelled of liniment, not cigars, although its simplicity had not changed.

“I understand Stone gave a fine account of himself, and more than once. Pea Ridge made him a general. Seemed he was born to lead men. Unlike General Frémont, who I believe was born to lead cotillions.” He gave his cheek a scratch, then dropped his hand. “Come high summer this year, with the war’s appetite for recruits outstripping the number of those willing to be et up by the army, General Stone asked to be relieved of his command. All of a sudden. Said he could do more good persuading working men to join the colors than he could do on the battlefield.”

Mr. Lincoln’s face grew weary. “Now, I never have found a shortage of officers willing to sacrifice themselves to the hardships of service in the rear, but this feller’s lead didn’t seem to pour into that particular mold. Stanton was all for letting him take a stab at rounding up folks willing to be fitted into a uniform,
and that seemed to be that. Last I heard of him. Until the telegraph office got a message from McClure up in Harrisburg, telling me Stone’s been murdered. In your Schuylkill County, too, which seems to be a place that has more trouble before breakfast than the rest of the country has in a week.”

He turned to Mr. Nicolay. “John here suggested we have you take a look, so we did.” Mr. Lincoln returned those great, sad eyes to me. “Seward didn’t tell you anything about the Russians, because, frankly, we thought we ought to let that dog lie down. Didn’t really seem to bear, given the circumstances of Stone’s death. That was a mistake, not telling you, and I’m sorry for it.”

“But what about the Russians, sir?”

A flurry of thoughts swept over his brow before he spoke again. Twas queer. Mr. Lincoln could speak with all the grand formality of Cicero, when the occasion asked it, and he kept his pockets filled with words, as if he had plucked a luxuriant row of books. But his favorite role was that of the country lawyer, the man of simple language masking great wiles. He had played that role so long it fit him like an old, favorite coat. I believe he hid behind it, although he was no coward. Ever underestimated by men who lived above their mental economy, he lived within the means of his thoughts and spoke for a wounded nation.

But let that bide.

I heard footsteps running up and down the hall, likely those of a child. If so, I was glad of any joy returned to the President’s House, for Mr. Lincoln had suffered the tragic loss of a son earlier in the year. And it was said his wife made certain difficulties, although such gossip is not always sound.