So we held onto each other and swayed a little, like
wrasslers
warming up for a tug-of-war. A couple of the charlatan’s little men moaned. But the moaning wasn’t loud. Colchester never asked us to shut our eyes, so I watched Mother and Mrs. Keckly—I was like a Pinkerton at the table sifting for clues. Mother’s eyes shone with a liquid light, as if she were locked inside some rapture where not even a husband could intrude. I didn’t feel some electrical cord winding through my body, not a pinch of power. And then one of the women shouted from under her veil.
“I can see my Tommy,” she said. “The sun is out, Lordship, and he’s still on the battlefield, with blood all over.”
And that’s where Colchester chimed in, with his voice hopping out of the chandeliers like some revelation from the cottage’s own burning bush.
“Mother, what did Tommy say?”
“That I shouldn’t fret. His wounds didn’t hurt him none. He’s already crossed.”
“But he’s still on the battlefield,” Colchester said while I squinted at the chandelier.
The woman was sobbing now. “The battlefield’s a mirage. He’s crossed over, blood and all.”
I looked at Keckly; she must have caught the shiver of some electrical charge, but she didn’t squeal or moan like Colchester’s little men and she didn’t have Molly’s bliss in her eyes.
“Mother Keckly,” said the charlatan, “has your boy been visiting with you too?”
She was silent for a second, but she near took off my arm with the current inside her. And I wondered if I was just another casualty of Colchester’s spirit wars.
“The Bluecoats tried to set fire to my George, said he shouldn’t be in Summerland. But George don’t have to listen. He’s content.”
“Mother Lincoln,” said that buzzard, “what about your own dead boy?”
Suddenly that allure was gone, that brilliant blue of her eyes, and there was a look of pure terror. Molly was caught in that chain. She couldn’t clasp or unclasp her hands.
“I can’t, milord. Not . . .”
Colchester could have been perusing a worthless child. That’s how hard he stared at my wife.
“Now, now, mustn’t whisper. Speak up.”
“I can’t. Not with Mr. Lincoln in the room.”
I wanted to rip Colchester from his
chair
.
“But we’ll break the chain if Mr. Lincoln leaves,” he said, in the unctuous voice of an animal trainer. He prospered in such a brutal time, where the living had to
live
with the dead. He must have struggled until the war as a sharper, and now he was a
spiritualist
who had his own little order of heaven. “And where will you be, Mother, without your Willie?”
“Lost,” she whispered, her body undulating to some rhythm inside her head. I had a hunch that this charlatan was performing for me, that he wanted to show how useful he might become in managing Molly, and should be a member of my own political circus.
“Mother, can you see him now?”
“
Yes
. He’s right here, at the cottage. He’s walking on the roof . . . and wearing the uniform of a bugler. He borrowed it from another boy—in Summerland. He’s so blond, milord.”
I wasn’t even surprised to hear that knocking on the roof. His conspirators at the table must have had pedals and clackers at their feet that could hurl a sound into the air, or something similar to that. His humbug irritated me, but I was as vulnerable as any other
Paw
who lost a boy to the fever. And for a second I could glimpse Willie with a bugle in his hand and the sun in his eyes. There was so much pain attached to Molly’s pleasure of conjuring Willie out of this hocus-pocus—she had to worry that he might slip right off the roof. A boy who leapt out of the ether could still crack his skull. Summerland wasn’t all that safe.
Molly’s shoulders heaved as she began to sob, and the charlatan was alarmed. He couldn’t afford to have his star client out of control. He had to keep her snug inside his own little peg. “Mother, what’s wrong?”
I ain’t certain what she saw. I had to catch her words between every single sob.
“Milord, do they have embalmers in Summerland? My boy is tottering on the roof—he’ll fall. And Willie doesn’t have wings.”
I was still trapped in the séance, with rumblings on the roof. And then the rumblings reverberated right above our heads, in the attic. That damn attic had some missing floorboards, else our ceiling must have been porous and besieged by termites, because a man crashed through the ceiling and fell right onto the table in a whirl of dust. He had every sort of instrument strapped to his middle—hammers and bells and tuning forks that could have re-created the fiercest wind or the echoes of the living and the dead. He stared at us like some delinquent child, though he must have been fifty. Colchester tried to disown him, pretend he wasn’t there, but Molly had had enough of her new confidant. She undid the chain with a violent pull, and that whole spirit circle fell apart. One of Colchester’s henchmen landed on the floor. Molly stood there, muttering to herself. The others were petrified, even Elizabeth. The Senators’ wives commenced to shriek. I calmed them down like petrified ponies and had the charlatan pack all his apparatus. He and his henchmen lit out of there with their little boxes. They scurried to his carriage like a band of mountebank mice. I could have chased them down the hill, or locked them in the guardhouse, or had them quarantined for a week at the Willard or the National. But his Lordship wouldn’t be returning with any of his trickster mechanics to our roof. He’d read the wrath in my eyes, witnessed my swollen cheeks, and he was no fool.
34.
At Harrison’s Landing
I
WENT
ON
A
Presidential
picnic
in July to meet Little Mac at his new headquarters, while Mary went to Manhattan—her favorite arena—with Tad. My little boy was allowed to wear his 3
rd
Lieutenant’s uniform on the train. He traveled with soldiers rather than civilians. And I boarded the
Ariel
with a bunch of marines at the Navy Yard, and we hightailed out of the District, while the hospital ships were arriving with their terrible cargo. I couldn’t see a soul under the heavy canvas covers, but we could all hear the wailing that seemed to ride above the river with its own palpable presence—a
dirge
for the living and the dead. Then a tarpaulin was raised, and a nurse in a wrinkled blue jacket appeared from within the bowels of one boat; I watched her climb onto the wharves with a slow, mournful dance and a deranged look—all that wailing could have been inside her own head.
The
blue
unholies
hit, and I stood frozen in my summer shawl. My spirits lifted with the morning fog, and I never felt more peaceful than I did on the
Ariel
’s deck—away from bloodstained bandages for a little while. Our steamer approached Harrison’s Landing right at sunset, with the wharves under a brilliant red sheen—the tents on the hill and the boats in the harbor blazed up for McClellan, as if the sun had conspired with the general’s own wizards. His camps were always a marvel of engineering. At City Point, I saw some kind of soldiers’ Jerusalem, a new town—with hospitals, artillery, tents as tall as a sail—that stretched for miles. His new headquarters at Harrison’s Landing wasn’t as bountiful, but it was sculpted right out of the riverbank, with his
boys
part of the same pristine sculpture. No one could have guessed that they’d come out of battle two weeks ago with blood under their fingernails, their tunics ripped, their caps lost in some woeful field, with the shriek of a dying brother still in their ears.
McClellan was waiting for me on the wharves, one hand inside his military tunic; his mustache and chin beard had a raw red gleam that was almost ominous in the near dark, while his aides hovered around him like circus animals, half wild—and utterly timid. All his senior officers had their own chin beards—replicas of Little Mac, they strutted like him and recognized no other god. Yet his own boys couldn’t find him in the thick of battle on the Peninsula. Little Mac rode off on Dan Webster’s back, without leaving anyone else in charge; his generals had to scoot for themselves. And here he was two weeks later, twice as arrogant, rubbing his chin beard as if nothing at all had happened. He’d been four miles from Richmond,
four miles
, and now he preened in his military paradise on the James, with a host of sutlers’ tents and an embalmers’ shed—none of his officers would ever die
unremarked
; a special detail would carry them off the battlefield in their tunics and bring them right to the embalmers’ table. He had the cadavers shipped home in a metal coffin, each little agony of war erased from their hides.
He didn’t have his usual dreamy menace, or that sardonic laugh of a high-pitched hyena.
“Excellency, glad you could come to my quarters,” he said with a grin. He lived with his
family
in a mansion on a hill above the embalmers’ shed. I saw an endless scattering of white tents as we climbed that hill—the tents seemed to rise right out of the water and cover the encampment like a series of humpbacked snakes. I could hear a soft tumult come from the tents, like the murmur of siege guns. The soldiers on the hill were much more ragged than McClellan’s honor guard at the wharves. They hobbled in and out of their tents with frying pans, coffeepots, and lanterns that looked like a swelter of swollen eyes.
Little Mac had turned the old brick mansion into a barrack, cluttered with his generals and all their toys—riding boots, unsewn epaulettes, cigar tins, spaniels that accompanied them into battle and slept in a shoebox. We sat in the parlor, which he had converted into a map room and a mess hall, and he offered me champagne his spies had stolen from the wharves of Savannah.
He began to pontificate after his first sip of champagne.
“War, Mr. President, is the finest form of art men have ever had. It must be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. And radical views, especially upon slavery, will be the ruin of our men. We are churchgoers, sir. We don’t attack civilian populations, we don’t steal crops, or give our own shirts to niggers.”
A Christian war
, he said, a little cavalcade between white folks on one side of the river and white folks on the other. But we couldn’t play McClellan’s game much longer, a game in which we staked all, and our enemies staked nothing.
“
General
,” I said, in a room that bristled with officers and their hot breath, “we cannot win the war you describe. The rebellion has gone too far. We must strip the South of
all
its resources, and the greatest resource it has are its colored soldiers.”
McClellan plucked his chin beard. “Excellency, we didn’t knock down any colored boys on the battlefield. There isn’t one solid nigger captain among the
Secesh
.”
His generals laughed and plucked their own chin beards. They would have stripped off my clothes and sent me howling into the wilderness, if Little Mac had given them the word. They were sore as hell after I relieved him of his command as General-in-Chief. But I couldn’t really get rid of Little Mac. I had to let him stay on to lead the Army of the Potomac. Yet I still seethed a bit about an old
war
wound. Little Mac had been vice president of the Illinois Central during my seven debates with Dug—a Democrat and a Douglas man, he was the one who ordered his conductors to lock me out of the saloon cars. So I’d always had an urge to whack him around the ears, even when he was my General-in-Chief.
“It’s preposterous, Mr. President,” said one of his lackeys, Harve Haverstall, a lieutenant colonel with my own affliction, a lazy eye. “Jeff Davis wouldn’t arm his colored population. He’s scared to death of a nigger uprising. Lord, having a slave army among the Rebs would be our biggest ally. But it will never happen, sir—no, no, they’re fiddlers and barbers and drummer boys.”
“And stevedores and nurses and ammunition carriers that are as good as soldiers,” I said, “because it permits Mr. Jeff to parcel out his fighting men . . . and keep his army afloat.”
The generals squinted at me as if I’d fallen off the moon.
“Are you saying, sir,” muttered the tallest general, “that you would like the aforesaid colored boys to fight on our side?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“It would hasten our demise, sir, not theirs,” said the lieutenant colonel, who must have been the family philosopher and court jester. “Our boys won’t fight with coloreds at their side. They’ll lay down their weapons, sir, and run home to their farms.”
I’ll risk that
, I wanted to hurl into their teeth. They were convinced I would smash to pieces, wouldn’t last the war, and that Little Mac would prevail. So I had to deprive them of their little illusions once and for all.
“Gentlemen, I ain’t going anywhere. I expect to maintain this contest until I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.”
I watched the glee curl around in Little Mac’s eyes.
“And what if the army forsakes you, sir?” asked one of the generals.
“Then I’ll find another.”
And now the lieutenant colonel rasped at me. “And who would train this mystical army? Colored boys from the Cotton States?”
“Hush up, Harve,” said Little Mac, utterly pleased with himself. He had his pack of wild dogs soften me for the kill. Now he could pick at my carcass with his own paw.
“Excellency, you’re correct. It’s hopeless—we cannot win. But for another reason. I’ll tell you a tale I heard from my own spies. When President Davis appeared at Bobbie Lee’s camp for the first time, the general asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ ‘You are,’ said Mr. Jeff. And Lee answered, ‘Then I’d like it a lot better if you rolled right back to Richmond.’ ”
The generals yawped like a bunch of lunatics, while Little Mac paraded in front of them.
“Excellency, I mean no disrespect. But unless we are guided by conservative and Christian policies, the war will linger on to a miserable end. A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will disintegrate our present armies, and you will have no other, I swear to God.”