I Am Abraham (45 page)

“My wife says you cannot leave the District without a dinner in your honor. Does Saturday suit you?”

He shut his eyes again, with a deep tremor in his eyelids, and he said in that slow drawl of his that he couldn’t dally—each dinner he attended would cost us.

“We can’t excuse you, Grant. It would be the play of
Hamlet
with Hamlet left out . . .”

I’d been jousting with him like a juggler, a common clown. He must have seen the dilemma in my eyes, that supercilious smile.

“Mr. Lincoln,” he said, gripping my hand across the table with all the camaraderie of a very private man. “I’ve
liquored
up a lot, and it’s no secret. There must have been a torrent of detraction from every quarter, yet you stuck with me.”

I took a shine to Grant. He didn’t hide behind his own war paint, and the flags of his men.

“Well, Grant, if I had listened to my Washington friends, who fight with their tongues, the Rebels would still be roasting chestnuts on the banks of the Mississip, with our gunboats dead in the water.”

He was still in some sort of agony. “You named me General-in-Chief before we ever met. Weren’t you gambling with the nation’s chips?”

“General, a man who feeds his mules before he sits down to supper is someone I’d be willing to wager on—with my life.”

None of his aides arrived in the morning, not one solid general from his staff, not even a plumed horse. He rose early, without Fred, and toured the District in his slouch hat. No one accompanied Ulysses. First he marched to Old Capitol, where the sentinels gawked at him and got out of his way. He went upstairs and sat with Rebel officers and Union men, calming them with his own deep quiet. Next he walked down to the Navy Yard, sat with sailors, not admirals and the commandant. He didn’t ask one question about ordinance at the yard. He looked at the machine shops and the sheds, at gunboats in disrepair, and scribbled a few cryptic lines on his cuff. He was forever at some
front
deep inside his head. I pitied Grant, a little. He was reborn on a battlefield, and couldn’t go back to selling saddles in a saddle shop.

He wandered into the Soldiers’ Retreat, near the wharves, and had an apple and a fried egg. The soldiers and sailors in the canteen were bewildered by his presence: a three-star general who didn’t even wear shoulder straps. There wasn’t a gold button or bar on his uniform. He was all slumped over, like someone who had been defeated in battle. They fell into an eerie silence while he finished his meal, but whistled and clapped when Grant stood up from his tiny table and acknowledged them with a slight twist of his slouch hat.

Crowds gathered as he loped up Georgia Avenue to the Orphans’ Asylum; soon he had a little tail of soldiers and civilians that tucked itself right behind him; he didn’t rouse the asylum, raise it from the dead. He met with orphans in the chapel. They asked him wondrous things about the war. And he spoke to them with a fluidity he didn’t have with his generals. He plucked the toothbrush out of his pocket—it had broken bristles. “Boys, I do my best thinking whenever I brush my teeth.”

It wasn’t like the days when McClellan first rode into the District on Dan Webster, capturing the town with his golden strides and the dizzying flight of his reconnaissance balloons. Grant didn’t have an aeronaut, not even a coal-black stallion. He came alone and promised nothing. But there was the quiet of a man who appeared without drums or regimental banners, without the fanfare of military campaigns, just a soldier with his mules and his supplies, wading through the swamps with his men, and arriving under the parapets of Vicksburg, almost by accident, but with deadly design.

44.

Mad Friday

I
KNEW
THEY
STOOD
some wayward boy on a barrel with a knapsack crammed with bricks and wouldn’t allow him to budge through roll call and reveille; then his sergeant would bang his toes with a hammer until he swayed and danced and toppled off the barrel with his bag of bricks. He wouldn’t be ruined, but he’d have blackened toes for life. Or else they’d sit him on a chair with a rifle thrust between his legs and toss him into the Potomac.
Sink or swim
was their motto, and none of the boys ever drowned, but they often returned to shore with blood in their eyes and ears and ended up in the infirmary with acute catarrh.

Then the desertions got real bad. And there were no more
punishment chairs
and knapsacks of brick. My Secretary of War said we couldn’t control this epidemic of desertions without the
ritual
of a firing squad. A soldier would sit on his own coffin in front of a firing squad dressed in short capes, with his regiment looking on—until the boy’s commander rode onto the grounds, raised his sword, and there would be a fusillade that echoed through the camp like ruffled thunder; it took a full minute for the puffs of fire and smoke to clear; and then they saw the boy lying on the coffin, with his head pulled back, half his fingers ripped off, his tunic torn to bits, and a wall of blood on his chest.

And when I could hear that terrible clatter of bullets—a merciless, ungodly
rip
—from a military camp nearby, I knew it was the mark of mad Friday. Deserters were always shot on that day. I pardoned as many as I could. “It would frighten the poor devils too terribly, to shoot them.” That’s what I told my generals and my Secretary of War, but they were adamant about deserters. And I couldn’t add to Stanton’s troubles. The pressure upon him was immeasurable. Without Stanton the war would grind to a halt. We’d have no horses and ammunition—and supply trains would land in the wrong depot. I couldn’t really complain to Grant. He’d fled the capital a week ago, and I didn’t want that burden on him.

So I dreaded Friday mornings. And as I scraped around in my slippers, I noticed a man come out of the Prince of Wales Bedroom, wearing one of my nightshirts; it was much too large for him. He swam inside that shirt, the sleeves hanging down to the floor like elephant trunks. I didn’t recognize him at first; he had the matted gray beard of a fallen patriarch, with scratches and welts all over his face. It was Billy Herndon, my law partner, whom I had left behind in Springfield. Billy wasn’t fat, but he had a fat man’s dreams, like the Falstaff I had seen at Grover’s. Billy loved to carouse, like Sir John, loved to be in his drams. He also knew how to run a campaign. But I abandoned Billy, let him twist about in Illinois with holes in his pockets . . .

I ordered up an egg, toast, and tea for the two of us and signaled for Billy to wander into my office. Meantime I found Mary floating around the corridor, in her satin nightgown.

“Mother,” I whispered, “what is Billy doing in the Prince of Wales Bedroom? I thought you banned him from our living quarters. How did he get upstairs?”

“The coachmen had to carry him,” she said.

“Was he inebriated?”

“Oh, it was much worse than that. I couldn’t leave him stranded. Billy was the best soldier you ever had.”

My own
3
^rd
Lieutenant
, I muttered to myself, as Mary told me what had happened. He was discovered outside the Willard last night by a clerk—he’d been in a brawl. But the hotel wouldn’t receive him in such a state. He had no money in his purse, and nothing but a letter from me in his wallet. The Willard sent a message to the White House. And Mary herself had fetched Billy while I was at Grover’s with Tad.

“That was mighty kind of you,” I said.

“It wasn’t kindness. We couldn’t have Billy sleep in some pauper’s paradise, while he has a letter from you in his pocket. He was once your partner, for God’s sake.”

“Still is,” I said.

“But he has to be out of here by noon.”

Billy must have had a bad angel in matters to do with my wife. He could never get on her good side; it was like being sick with poison ivy every season of the year. But they were more alike than Mother imagined. They were always socking people. Something gnawed at them—a terrible want, as if they meant to control the world through one of their rages, and finished up eating their insides.

I went into my office with Billy and shut the door. I could still hear the burst of rifles from Fort Stevens—the sound grew fainter and fainter. Billy watched me wince with each soft clap.

“What is that?”

“Deserters’ Day,” I said.

For a second I thought Billy was gonna flatten me. He hunkered down in that fighting stance of his, and his eyes shrank into his skull. But Billy must have changed his mind.

“Couldn’t you put an end to it? You’re the President. You can stop an execution anytime you want.”

“And have my generals revolt? That would murder morale. And Stanton would run into the hills with all his railroads. I have to show a little discretion.”

“That’s not what I hear,” he said. “You’ll sign any pardon, if a mother cries to you about her boy.”

Our breakfasts arrived in a pair of tin trays; we used our pocketknives to crack open the eggs. Billy’s knife shivered as he buttered his toast; and then the toast fell to pieces in his hand.

“What happened at the Willard?”

Billy got into a scrape with a Democrat—while they were having a dram. They quarreled inside the bar, and then out on Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of all the carriages and horsecars and military ambulances.

“And what was that quarrel about?”

“Your wife,” he said.

I liked the idea of Billy defending Mother’s honor at the Willard. That Democrat had called her unconscionable things, he said. I had to stare him down until he spat out the details.

“He called her a harlot and a Rebel spy who harbored Jeff Davis’ own whore in the White House.”

“I’m the harlot here. Mary’s Rebel sister had nowhere else to go. I let her stay with us a while. So your quarrel with that Democrat was about a little dust.”

Billy had the ragged look of a renegade general. And he once had the merriest eyes in Illinois, but Lincoln & Herndon meant nothing in the middle of a rebellion. The war had beggared Billy, made him into a wanderer with nowhere to go.

We both sucked on our eggs, the way we had done at my law office when we didn’t have more than a minute to spare; soon our nightshirts were stained. It wasn’t that simple to suck on an egg.

We drank our tea in silence. We couldn’t talk politics any longer. One civil war wasn’t enough for Billy. He wanted a different kind of war—
bloody
revolution
, as he called it, where the South would be reduced to rubble and the border States would have to give up every single black. Maryland, Missouri, and Kentuck had poisoned the Union in Billy’s mind, and we had to rid ourselves of all the paraphernalia of slavery. Otherwise we’d have a slave culture another hundred years. Billy wasn’t so wrong. Slavery anywhere in the Union was an
affront
. Yet I had to woo
our
slaveholders gently until we finished the war. Julia Grant still had her own slave. She was a good Missouri gal. Billy might have forgiven Julia, but he wouldn’t forgive the South. And I couldn’t save the Union by turning the South into a vast prison farm. I was no jailor, and neither was General Grant.

Billy broke the silence with a short breath. “It wasn’t only about your wife,” he blurted out. “That Democrat said you had a harem in the White House—that you slept with all the maids and with Mary’s seamstress, a mulatto gal—that you sired a devil child, half boy, half dog—that he lives in the attic, and presides over a Miscegenation Ball. That’s when I hit him, hit him hard.”

I didn’t know how to comfort Billy. I wanted to touch his face; but he was covered with welts and his beard was gnarled as a blackberry bush.

“Mr. Lincoln, are you ever coming back to Illinois?”

“I may be back sooner than you think—if the Democrats prevail.”

“I’ve kept your chair the way it was, close up to the wall,” he said. “And your couch, with all the piles of paper. People are always coming in to have a look. I have to chase them out. ‘It’s not a shrine, for God’s sake.’ That’s what I tell them. ‘It’s where Mr. Lincoln worked, and where he’ll work again.’ ”

I could have found a sinecure for Billy—some fat office in the Interior Department. But he would drink his way into oblivion, fight with his superiors, and I’d have to clean up the mess. I had no time for Billy.

He finished his tea and toast, and walked out of my office. I wouldn’t have followed Mary’s mandate, and hurled him out at high noon. I’d have let him heal up in the Prince of Wales Bedroom. Perhaps he had never intended to come here, but had been waylaid by Mary’s coachmen after his drunken brawl. He gathered up his clothes, scribbled a couple of lines to my wife, and left the White House at a quarter to nine, in a hat with a tattered brim . . .

I heard the rifles from Fort Stevens well into the morning—that strange, almost silent bark, like the sound of pathetic, tin dogs. My hands were shaking, and I had the worst blue spell in a long while when my confidential secretaries knocked and entered with a brand-new folio of court-martials from Stanton at the War Department. I noticed the hollows in their cheeks. Nicolay & Hay were as melancholy as their Titan about the fusillades at Fort Stevens.

“Damn my Secretary of War!”

I took that folio and tossed it against the wall—my secretaries blinked as all the dossiers flew out like paper orphans and landed on the oilcloth.

The Titan is having a fit.

They stooped and picked up the different dossiers and piled them on my Cabinet table. I looked upon these court-martials as little sagas. I perused the first one. It told the saga of a farmer boy from Missouri who deserted, took care of his crops, and enlisted again.

“Why shoot that boy? Let him fight.”

I pardoned him with a scratch of green ink. After that the tales grew more entangled and more complex. A raw recruit murdered his own captain, but there had been bad blood between him and the captain, who was brutal with all his men; then there was the deserter who signed up with the Rebels, collected his bonus, ran back across the lines, joined another regiment, and did the same maneuver five or six times; or the colonel who left the battlefield and slashed his wife to pieces on his own little holiday from the war. These sagas started to molt inside my brain, and to preserve my sanity I scribbled on the dossiers:
Send to Dry Tortugas.
It was where McClellan had banished all his bad soldiers—the military’s isolation camp on the Dry Tortugas, where none was ever heard from again.