I Am Abraham (54 page)

“Master Lincoln,” he said, with a lot of salt, “have you come to Richmond to be our King?”

He was still gallant in his torn tunic, but I pitied him and his twisted legs.

“Son, I’m here on furlough—to see the sights.”

He let out a bitter laugh. “Well, you’re a little too late. The sights are all gone. Our soldiers set fire to the tobacco warehouses, and the fire never stopped. They drank all our liquor and looted all the shops. They blew up the Powder Magazine, and it was like Vesuvius—buildings crumbled and every pauper in the Alms House was killed. Richmond sat in a sea of fire. We thought the Yankees would murder us in our beds, but they’re the ones who put out the fire—don’t fool with me now. You’re the incoming King.”

I didn’t argue with a lieutenant who had to grimace with each jerky motion of his mangled legs. He hadn’t lied about Richmond. We passed the looted shops on Main Street, with their twisted signboards and hollow interiors, like dark little dungeons where all the windows had been smashed. I saw wind-up dolls with their mechanical eyes ripped out; I saw a dead dog; rats scurried here and there, round as beavers. The Rebels had burnt every bridge, according to my young lieutenant. They’d blown up every ironside in the canal; and that’s how come we had to arrive in a rowboat—Rocketts Landing was littered with debris.

The fire had leveled the landscape, scouring markets and churches and warehouses in its wake, so I could see clear to the river, with the blackened stumps of Mayo Bridge, like monumental gaps in a giant’s mouth, and deeper into the harbor, with its canals and basins looking like broken hinges, there was Belle Isle, a little desert of stunted trees in that haze of cinders. It had once been a Rebel camp for our captured recruits; I’d read the surgeons’ reports on Belle Isle—prisoners had to live in the wild, without warm clothes, and suffered from scurvy, frostbite, and the runs; they had lice in their eyes and ears, and a good number fell into a constant state of melancholy and mindlessness, couldn’t even recollect their names, or why and where they had been captured; and so I was troubled and aroused as I walked Richmond’s streets and recognized the sites: the forlorn façade of the Custom House, with its crumpled roof; the grim remains of the Exchange Bank—a pair of bruised marble pillars, standing in a mound of rubble.

We passed a fire-scarred hotel with craters in the front wall like sinister eyeholes. We passed a little park with scorched grass. I would have lifted Tad high on my shoulders, but I had a lingering fear that some fool sniper—abandoned by his comrades—would have taken his revenge on my little boy. My stovepipe hat, I knew, was target enough. I didn’t want to die here, yet somehow I felt my journey was near complete. Richmond was no Jerusalem, but it was holy ground for the Rebels, where they had enshrined themselves, and I had to break through the wall of their reverie and hold their convulsive heart in the flat of my hand.

Finally we strode past the
reach
of the fire, and I saw women and girls who sat on the ground with all the furnishings they could salvage from their homes—mirrors, mantles, and enameled trunks that could have contained some pirate’s treasure. Among them were the war widows, women in black veils who’d lost brothers, husbands, and sons. They slapped at the burnt embers around them. And when a particular widow’s veil caught fire, I
smothered
her in my own black coat until I licked whatever fire was left.

Mother in her mourner’s gown. Alone, alone
in another capital, half crazed without Bob.

“Ma’am,” I asked, forlorn in this capital of burnt embers and black smoke, “I’m a newcomer here, but can I be of some assistance?”

“My,” she said, in front of the other widow ladies, “you have a lot of sauce,
manhandling
me like that. If we had a Provost worth his salt, he would slap you silly and put you in one of the colored cribs, and you could eat corn the rest of your life. . . . Why did God make you so tall? You’re the Emancipator, aren’t you?”

She commenced to sob and clutched at the weeds of a much younger widow. “Angelina, he’s brown as an ape, and twice as ugly. Our three boys suffered and died on account of Lincoln’s War. We don’t even have a picture of them in their battle shirts—Jeb and Farley and Jim, lying somewhere among Yankees on Yankee soil.”

“Mama,” said the younger widow, who peeked out from under her veil, “he can’t be much worse than our own President, who tucked in his tails and took the last train to Danville.”

“But Mr. Jeff didn’t bring in no colored riders to unlock the cribs and scare us
mortally
out of our minds . . . and turn this sweet capital into a nigger barrack.”

I wrote down the names of the three dead boys like some clerk from the Sanitary Commission. But I knew that our commissioners wouldn’t have torn up battlefields for the right to register Rebel graves, while the
Secesh
never had a Sanitary Commission. So I couldn’t help these widows find the buckles and bones of their dead boys. I felt like a huckster who hadn’t arrived with any bonuses or bargains. Richmond had become a city of white “contrabands,” who had to congregate on the streets with their precious mirrors and bundles of fine clothes; they
rent
a ragged line longer than a mile; and I wasn’t sure what our own battle corps could do about these contrabands. Then I turned the corner and stumbled upon a slave crib with its iron fence torn apart and ribbons of blood on its narrow wooden walkway. I couldn’t pretend to blush at all its
crime.
I wasn’t much of a neophyte. I’d seen a hundred cribs in Orleans and Louisville and in the District, too, when I was with the Congress, and Washington had the largest crib in the country, with cage upon cage, like some impossible tower that leaned into the wind, and where the cries of men and women could
clot
the air . . .

But it was
this
crib, between the Post Office and the City Jail, that troubled me most. It was some kind of open-air veranda with cages on both sides; the cages had metal grilles where no woman could hide her modesty. I walked on the wooden planks, saw the slave catcher’s own little cabin, with its cot and leather chairs, and polished stand for his saddle—and I stood there, forgetful of where I was and who I am.

The cages rattled then; dust and cinders flew; little sparks of fire swirled around my head. A bugle sounded once, like a lamb’s bleat rather than a complicated mouth of tin. I leapt through the crib’s wall, while they rode out of the cinders in their yellow stripes, first black buglers who sat three on a horse, with cymbals in their saddlebags, then a wagon that must have carried their supplies, though I saw none, and finally the colored cavalryman; six I counted with sabers and yellow stripes on their trousers and coats, their eyes peering
inward
at some magical point, while I gripped Tad, who might have been crushed by the cavalrymen, but couldn’t bear not to watch the rhythmic rise and fall of their saddles. They must have had field glasses in their rumps, since they paused in midstride to slash off the buttons and insignias of my Rebel lady scouts without drawing a drop of blood, and then the last cavalryman twisted slightly in his saddle and said, “Welcome to Richmond, Mr. President. We’ve been patrolling this damn sink for twenty hours.”

And they disappeared into their own dust storm, perfunctory and supernatural at the same time. I wanted to stick within their spell, to remain with these riders, whoever they were. But I didn’t have their sabers or their sass—I hadn’t rounded up stragglers and dumped them into a corner of Libby Hotel, hadn’t cleared all the slave pens, hadn’t charged up and down the hills of this hellhole like avenging angels, with three buglers riding the same horse. I was just a flimflammer from the North, with one boy at my side and another boy with Grant—husband, father, and President, worried about my wife.

We passed the smoking walls of the First African Church, with its charred pews lying like a scatter of coffins behind the church gate, and arrived at the pristine colonnades of the Rebel White House—its walls and little garden hadn’t been touched; the Rebels could have blown it up, but they left it there, like some religious shrine. The Rebel White House had gray stucco walls. It sat on a hill. I’d heard a hundred tales and rumored reports about its prized inhabitant, and reveled in every one. Jeff Davis had a frozen nerve in his face—he twitched half the time; his old war wounds had never healed; he was blind in his left eye; and he suffered from insomnia. He would prowl the Mansion every night in a ragged shirt, pace his office on the second floor. He seldom left the White House. My Cabinet mocked him night and day. General Sherman had called him an old wife. Others said he had the skills and the temperament of a grocery clerk and couldn’t have led a little band of firemen, let alone a gang of rebellious States.

But I was closer to Mr. Jeff than to my Cabinet and my generals, in some perverse way. Both of us were besotted by every horse trader and office seeker under the sun, both of us had to wield a nation out of some lyrical belief that we alone held, both of us were pigheaded, and seldom sought advice, both of us had to brood over the battle dead while we rushed more and more boys to die, like some beast of blood.

Jeff Davis had scattered with his government. The Stars and Stripes hung over the colonnades—that stucco Mansion was now Union headquarters. Its stairs and portico were swollen with officers and politicians and sutlers who had come to Richmond to barter in the
bidness
of war. They’d suck the town dry, sign monumental deals, sell the Rebel White House to the highest bidder, turn it into a museum with wax dolls of Mr. and Mrs. Jeff. I shunned them all, wouldn’t even tip my hat, as they tried to grab my coattails and seek some damn favor. I’d never been as rude in all my life.

“Gentlemen,” I muttered, “a man worked here, Mr. Davis, and I’d be much obliged if you didn’t befoul his nest. Do your
bidness
and go on out of this place.”

I skirted around them and entered the White House with Tad. The pickets were startled by the proportions of my peace parade.

“Mr. President, where did all those colored soldiers come from?”

“They’re my bodyguard,” I said. I chatted with the general who was in charge of Richmond, a burly man in a pale blue coat covered in plaster and soot. He was quite flustered by the enormity of his task. He’d spent a whole day putting out fires and procuring rations for
Richmonders
who wouldn’t bother to greet him. He couldn’t earn the respect of a town where the men were mostly phantoms and the women were widows in black who regarded him as a barbarian inside the burnt walls of their own little Troy.

“Mr. President, I cannot deal with endless bamboozlement, sir. What should we do with all the prisoners? And people won’t come out of their homes, if they have a home left. We can’t count them, or check them, or see if they’re harboring spies. I’ll have to arrest the whole lot.”

“General,” I said, “if I were in your place, I’d let ’em up easy. They’ll have to live a long time with their wounds. And whatever spies they’re harboring won’t carry much weight in a feral town. We’re not philosophers and churchmen. We can bring vittles, not provide for their souls. They’ll come around. They have nowhere else to go. I’d like you to find shelter for all the citizens who are stuck out on the street.”

“But that’s the gist of it, sir. They’ll never think of us as liberators.”

“General, they can hate us or love us, but I don’t want to stand on this hill and see a town of wanderers and vagabonds.”

Then I climbed the stairs with Tad and several marines, and some of the stevedores and black soldiers I had met on Main Street. We went into the nursery, which was next door to Mr. Jeff’s office—it must have delighted him to hear the chatter of his children while he was at his desk. Our own spies had captured a letter from Jeff Davis back in ’62, when Varina and the children had gone to Raleigh, in the Carolinas. “I go into the nursery as a bird may go to the robbed nest.” For a little while one of the cooks at the Rebel White House belonged to McClellan’s secret service, and Allan Pinkerton had talked of kidnapping Varina and the children to break Mr. Jeff’s heart, but I wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would McClellan.

The nursery was as grand as the Crimson Room at our own Mansion; the cribs all had mosquito curtains, and the cloth on the walls was patterned after pink and white roses; there were miniature rockers with a doll on every seat, miniature cast-iron cannons, and a horse coated with shellac was attached to a wooden stand by a metal pike; I was startled to see how close this
mock
horse
resembled Cincinnati—some Richmond toy maker had installed a replica of Grant’s big bay right in the middle of Varina’s nursery. The horse was near life-size, and I wondered who were its riders.

I discovered a child’s silhouette of George Washington over one of the cribs, a portrait in pigtails. His left eye was shaped like a perfect almond. His nostrils flared out, his jaw was supple, with a teasing smile on his mouth. That portrait had no ominous intent. It wasn’t on any currency. It was for a child’s amusement, a child’s fancy. It was the first portrait of Washington I’d seen in this somber, smoking town. And I pitied Mr. Jeff, just a little. I couldn’t find a hint of politics in this nursery.

There were relics on the wall of Little Joe Davis, who was five when he plummeted from the portico last April and never woke up: a tinted photograph, with Joe looking as severe as one of his father’s colonels; a white glove embalmed in glass; a miniature officer’s cap on a metal peg. I was curious how Mother might have behaved in this room. She would have caressed every doll and every chair, cried for Varina and Little Joe, but these mementos would have summoned up Willie’s death.

Perhaps I saw Mother’s reaction in Tad, who was tentative about these toys, and didn’t even try to mount that mock horse, even though it had its own ladder; the place must have saddened him, as it saddened his
Paw
. We strode through the nursery’s rear door and into Mr. Jeff’s office—our own boys had raided it for souvenirs; most of it was picked clean. I didn’t mind. They hadn’t ripped the amber wallpaper yet. They’d gone off with whole sections of the carpet, but there were still a few red diamonds left in the design. And Davis still had his rosewood desk, even if every drawer had been removed.