I Am Abraham (40 page)

I didn’t reprimand Wood in front of his own men. I tried to stay civil. Told him I hadn’t come here to inspect his damn hotel, but to free one of his prisoners, who shouldn’t have been here in the first place.

The tallest of the sentinels cupped his hand over Wood’s ear, and they whispered back and forth like buzzards, while Wood’s face turned a lunatic red.

“Mr. Lincoln, I’m afraid there’s been a malaprop—Mrs. Keckly is missing.”

Mother nearly swooned under her own bombazine. “Father, they’ve killed her.”

“No, no,” Wood insisted. “She must have wandered somewhere. There are no locks and keys at Old Capitol. But I’ll find her, Madame President. You have my word. Please come with us.”

Mother grabbed my elbow, and we went deeper into that brick barn, marched up a flight of stairs with the Super and his sentinels. The staircase was lit with one gas lamp gouged into the wall. Our shadows climbed like wanton sheaths. We passed bald rooms that had an unbelievable stench—like the sting of cats’ piss. None of the rooms had a reliable door. I watched Rebel officers walk round and round a row of bunks—there was nothing left in their eyes, not pride or fear or sorrow. But they marched to the beat of some monotonous music inside their skulls.

I’d come to the house of the dead.

I recognized clerks who had talked treason, businessmen who had blown up a bridge—saboteurs and lunatics, and other political prisoners, who had their own stark room, Number 16, an enormous closet, really, with a mound of straw, like a manger littered with bedbugs and lice—this
seat
at the center of Old Capitol had once been used by Congress and had all the gallantry of that great arched window above the prison’s main door. Number 16 had a triple tier of bunks that reached the ceiling and looked like it was about to topple on our heads. One of the lunatics ran out and accosted me. He kneeled down and clutched my shinbones.

“Oh, pardon me, kind sir. I have done nothing that would cause alarm. Help me, Captain!”

“Imbecile,” the Super said. “You’re talking to the President of the United States.”

The man grinned at me. “Is that Abe the Cock-a-doodle? Or Captain Tenafly? Didn’t ye arrest me for trying to bomb the B&O? It wasn’t sedition, sir. I have a grievance against the railroad. One of its detectives threw me off the cars and stomped on my hat. That was unkind, sir.”

“I’ll look into it, son.”

He slid off my shins and hopped back into that huge hole in the wall, while his compatriots in Number 16 stared at me in the feeble gaslight with the yellow eyes of wounded animals. And I wondered what harm I had done that had caused so much grief? But I hadn’t been honest with that lunatic. I’d outlawed sedition
everywhere
, and my Secretary of War had dragged editors, government clerks, matrons, and railroad men into Old Capitol if they had ever been a little too vociferous in their sympathies to the South. I had little choice. We couldn’t win a war while there was a fire in the rear, with the flames licking at our coats. Stanton had arrested the mayor of Baltimore at my command. The mayor started up his own militia, and was fixing to turn the town into a Rebel fortress. I had him dragged right out of Baltimore . . .

We passed another room, where Union officers sat in their own filth. What crime had they committed? Had they led some charge down the wrong hill? Massacred some of their men? Criticized one of my generals? What horrible sin tore them from their regiments and earned them a card to Old Capitol? I had to crucify my feelings, or I would never have gotten to Elizabeth.

“Super,” I shouted, “will you find these officers some fresh uniforms? Whatever they’ve done, they’re still ours.”

“But Stanton said that—”

“Damn my Secretary of War! Get them some uniforms. They can soil their britches as often they like. Stanton will pay for it—out of his own pocket.”

I had the Super bring me one of the officers, a young captain of the 2
^nd
Ohio who had been stripped of his rank and all his insignias; his tunic sat on him like a rumpled nightshirt. He seemed reluctant to approach. He kept twisting and untwisting the bill of his cap. He had the dark red
insignia
of squashed bedbugs on his sleeves. His name was Robertson.

“Come closer, Captain.”

“I can’t, Mr. President. I shit my pants.”

“Well, Captain, my little boy shits his pants every day of the week, and I’ve managed to survive.”

He shuffled a little closer in his prison slippers. “But Mrs. Lincoln, sir . . .”

Mary was much braver than Wood and all his sentinels, who pulled back from the powerful sting in their nostrils. She fondled the captain’s tunic where his shoulder boards had been. I could feel the sweetness of her touch. She cradled her arm in his, and strolled with the captain in that infernal corridor. I saw him smile. Half his teeth were gone, and his gums were like black pits. He kissed Mary’s hand and sauntered back to me. I watched him rub at his tunic until his fingers were raw. I didn’t have the heart to interrogate him.

“Captain, you don’t . . .”

His eyes seemed to twist right out of their sockets as he hopped on his toes with a violent rhythm and commenced to croon. “
An-tiet-am
, sir. I was attached to the general. I watched him pace his tent. He was near undone when he had to lose lives. So I figured I’d stay healthy on account of the general. We loved to see him ride black Dan . . .”

McClellan, always McClellan.
It was as if I had no other generals
.
I could picture him charging up the stairs on Dan Webster’s back and rescuing this boy captain from the Super’s abominable sink.

“I was in the middle of an apple orchard, with the Rebs fifty feet away, and I couldn’t fire my gun. A Rebel captain rushed at us with his colored orderly right beside him, and they were whooping and cawing like crazy crows. Next I remember I was in the Provost’s hut, with two of his adjutants kicking at me, and saying I led my own boys into a death trap. They never convened a court. I didn’t merit one, they said. They sent me here in a cattle car filled with Rebel prisoners . . .”

It was one of Stanton’s tricks. He’d rather
warehouse
lost souls in the prison yards at A Street than surrender them to a court-martial that might rain down some bad publicity on the War Department. And if I interfered with that little gnome of a man who had all the wrath of Jehovah in his long, scratchy beard, I could wreck my own war machine. Truth is I preferred this boy to stay here than risk sitting on his own coffin in front of a firing squad. But that didn’t make me less angry at Wood, who was in cahoots with my Secretary of War.

Mary brushed the boy captain’s cheeks with the soft bump of her hand, and he went back inside that squalid room, while I deliberated how to smash Wood’s little kingdom at Old Capitol. I’d never win. There’d always be
another
Wood with sentinels who seemed to have bands of leather and rough bark screwed tight into their skin.

“Mr. Wood, you can tell your master at the War Department that if I don’t have fresh uniforms by this afternoon, you’ll have to strip in front of your sentinels and offer that boy captain your clothes . . . now
find
Mrs. Keckly.”

We turned the corner and entered a corridor that swarmed with as many harlots as that Whores’ Lane just west of the White House. When Little Mac still ruled the District, he would chase the harlots to Boundary Street on one of his colossal
whore runs
. I could watch that roundup from my window, the harlots shrieking as Dan Webster flew right past, and they tumbled to the ground in their crushed crinolines. Didn’t seem to matter how often Little Mac made his runs. The harlots always reappeared in their petticoats, with the high-stepping kick that had become their hallmark. And here they were in the corridors of Old Capitol, with the same high kick that was halfway between a walk and a dance. They were not alone. They had their gentlemen callers—cardsharps in tall hats, confidence men, clairvoyants, even a Confederate general, who must have escaped from that officers’ asylum on the other side of the hall in his slouch hat. He couldn’t have noticed us. He clapped his hands, and one of the harlots raised her petticoats to the sky and revealed her quim—couldn’t see much more than a flick of her unwashed thighs in that somber light, and neither could my wife.

“You cockroach,” Wood roared, “the Lady President is in this house—with Mr. Lincoln,” and he threw his baton at the general. The whole corridor emptied in a whirl of petticoats, and that poor general had to fend for himself. He stood on one knee and doffed his slouch hat. He was no general of the line, but a logistics officer who had been captured while sitting on a supply train.

“I am inconsolable, Madame President,” he muttered. His eyes couldn’t seem to focus. One of his own commanders must have left him on that train, half out of his mind. He knew Mary’s people in Lexington and wouldn’t stop yattering about great aunts and prize peacocks and a duel over some damsel who lived down the road on Short Street.

“Father,” Mary whispered, “we must find Lizabeth.”

So we abandoned the general and marched into that enormous barrack where all the harlots had fled. It was as big and wild as the President’s Park—Number 19, where the commissary was situated and all the bartering was done—copulation was the prison’s prime affair. Number 19 was populated with an armada of curtains and privacy screens, where the prison’s prostitutes assembled with their clients. The Super couldn’t even suppress such business while Mary and I were there; it was beyond his purview, like the shifting chaos of battle. Yet Mother didn’t trouble herself about this
charivari
of grunts and groans.

We had to survey Number 19, walk among the harlots in their cloaks and stockings rich as blood, but we couldn’t find Elizabeth in the general uproar. I glanced across that room like a chicken hawk on the prowl, went into every corner with my lazy eye.

“Lizabeth,” Mary shrieked, “Lizabeth, where are you?”

No one could have heard her in all that din.

“Mother, wait here.”

Now I went from curtain to curtain, trying not to bother about the copulations, but I had a peculiar lesson in
geography
; most of these harlots had painted their nipples and their quims with lip rouge; their eyes were camouflaged with charcoal. Some wore chains around their middles like Christian martyrs. They didn’t copulate on some old mattress. They clutched a curtain rod or the rails of a privacy screen and stood with their arses in the air, while their clients rutted them from behind, their faces half hidden. Else they danced in front of a feller, while he plucked on his own red root. And it kind of interrupted my search—I was caught in the sway of these prison house Salomes, with all their shivers and undulations, the tiny turns of their hands, the sweet pendulum of their breasts, and I might have plucked at my own root on another occasion. But I wasn’t as mottled in the head as that supply general. I noticed a Senator and a couple of Congressmen who must have entered Old Capitol through some private door. They were so
inflamed
, with their eyes squeezed tight, that I probably looked like one more shadow in Number 19.

Then someone scratched at my sleeve—it was the mayor of Baltimore with nothing on but his boots; he had scars under his heart that looked like arrow heads, and I wondered if it was the price he had to pay for some scalping party. I should have realized that my Secretary of War had incarcerated him among all these slobbering fools.

“Lincoln, you and that damn
writ
of yours. Stanton stole my life away.”

I didn’t want to deal with him now, listen to his drumroll of complaints.

“I have no time for you.”

“Then you had better make some time,” he said and clung to my sleeve like a shoofly. So I had to stand there and jaw with him in that monumental harlots’ house.

“You’re a monster,” he said, “tramplin’ on the law and suspendin’ habeas corpus. Judge Taney called you a tyrant and a maniac.”

“Well,” I said, jabbing at the mayor, like a stick in his guts, “I might have the Judge keep you company at Old Capitol,
jest
like that.”

The wind went out of him. “You can’t arrest the Chief Justice. That’s obscene.”

I twisted free and shook him like a great rag doll. “What’s obscene, sir, is asking for troops to protect your little enclave in Baltimore, when all the while you plotted to kill me and my wife in bed.”

His shoulders slumped and his mouth twitched with alarm. “How did you . . . ?”

Allan Pinkerton had planted a spy in the mayor’s office and read all the
traffic
between Richmond and Baltimore, or we couldn’t have squandered him and his plot.

The mayor commenced to sob among all his cronies. But he might as well have been silent in all that squealing behind the curtains.

“It ain’t right. These yards are your monstrosity, Lincoln. Your footprint is in every room.”

And he wandered off. I did feel like some kind of dragon in his own lair.
Old Capitol
. Yet I hadn’t dragged Mrs. Keckly into these yards. I hadn’t hired sentinels with bullet ears and mean little eyes. I hadn’t built a
locomotive
heated up by harlots and their privacy screens. Every screen could have been painted by some prison artist, with castles and cornfields, lighthouses and ships of the line, hurricanes and desert storms, as if some biblical creature had reinvented the world at Old Capitol. But I didn’t want to reinvent the world.

I overturned the screens, kicked at them, and finally found Elizabeth behind a curtain, hugging her knees, as she shivered on the floor. She was wearing some sort of smock that looked like a monk’s shirt; her hands and feet were filthy. Her hair must have been shorn by some sentinel who fancied himself a barber. There were bumps all over her scalp. She had bruises on her face. I couldn’t even tend to her. I had to give my autograph to certain ladies of Number 19, who kept their souvenir albums tucked inside their bodices. They gawked at me as if I’d tumbled out of a dream. They touched my beard while I tried to gather Elizabeth in my arms. She sat there frozen, her teeth rattling all the time. I whispered in her ear like some kindly serpent.