I Am Abraham (52 page)

“
Mesdames
,” she said, clutching at the lace around her throat, “I’m so, so sorry I have to part, but duty beckons. There’s been talk about some blatant damage at the White House. Charges have been leveled. And my husband is sending me upriver to deal with the ruckus.”

Then she tousled Tad’s hair with such warmth, I thought she’d had a spontaneous eruption of joy.

“Don’t you trouble your
Pa
,” she said. “And I’ll bring you a charlotte russe from Gautier’s on my next trip.”

Her eyes had a remarkable sheen in the morning sun, like a kitten without claws. She was the same coquette I’d first encountered at a Springfield ball, with that plumpness I adored.

“Father,” she whispered, “don’t forget me, hear?”

She nuzzled me with her nose in front of the mechanics, pilots, porters, and generals’ wives. And she climbed aboard the
River Queen
with Mrs. Keckly clutching her long, black train. She stood at the edge of the gangplank for a moment, waved to us with her fat little fingers, and sang, “
Au revoir, Mesdames et Messieurs
.” I was mightily confused, as if some bullet was bouncing in my brain, and I could no longer tell the mad from the unmad, the generals from the carpenters, the Rebels from our own boys. And then I caught a last glimpse of my wife, with that fork of distemper in her forehead, as she disappeared with her long black train under the dark mantle of the deck.

M
OST
TIMES
I
WAS
at the telegraph office, waiting for some news from Grant. “I intend to close the war right here—at Petersburg,” he’d told me, as he mounted his car to the front, with troopers snaking along the tracks for much of a mile, their cheeks smeared with gunpowder to guard them against the sun; they didn’t have that
brilliant
look of McClellan’s boys, when every soldier in the Union was under his command; these boys had grubby hands and rag-tail uniforms; several even wore Rebel caps as their own private insignias. And then there were the engineers, rugged boys in dirty red neckerchiefs, who had to carry lumber on their backs and build corduroy roads every foot of the way while the general’s brigades advanced, or we wouldn’t have had a piece of artillery at the front—that’s as much of the spring offensive as I ever saw. There were reports of our men mounting the parapets and hurling themselves inside the enemy’s line, reports that the Rebels broke and ran, and still other reports that our own boys had been repulsed. So I didn’t know what to believe and which despatches to trust. In the thick of this hurly-burly, the machine clattered on the second of April, and I had word from Grant.

We are now up and have a continuous line of troops, and in a few hours will be entrenched from the Appomattox below Petersburg to the river above. . . . The whole captures since the army started out gunning will amount to not less than twelve thousand men, and probably fifty pieces of artillery. . . . I think you might come out and pay us a visit tomorrow.

That was the whole drama of Grant—not that Petersburg had been taken after a siege of nine months, but that I could come tomorrow and catch a few of the sights. Then the machine clattered again, and I prayed that the war news hadn’t swirled around and that Grant had to leap back over the parapets with all his twelve thousand
captures
. But the news wasn’t from Grant. Word from Mary came through the wires.

Miss Taddie & yourself very much—Perhaps, may return with a little party on Wednesday—give me all the news.

And I wondered if that voyage upriver had healed her, a little. Safely ensconced at the White House, she was plotting her return to Soldier Land, and all the perils it entailed. But her telegram had nothing to do with City Point. It was all about
Bob
—
Bob
—
Bob.
She’d have sailed above the parapets in a silk balloon, tethered to the
River Queen
, if that could have brought her closer to Bob.

I ducked outside the telegraph office, where a little band of pickets were already celebrating the end of the siege—they must have had their own despatch rider or some
internal
telegraph. They whooped and hawed and played Axe-on-the-Handle with an old rusty axe, but none of them could raise that axe up high with one hand. They stopped their whooping when they saw me.

“Mr. President,” they said, “is it true that the general had a game of checkers with Bobbie Lee while they were on the parapets, and that Bobbie won, but he still had to run to Richmond on a corduroy road?”

There were no corduroy roads to Richmond, but I didn’t want to dampen their tale. I hefted the axe and raised it up with my right arm until it was even with the horizon—and held it there without a single quiver. I took a certain pride in holding that axe, as if I were the main feature at a monster show.

Suddenly all the pickets close to the telegraph office wanted to compete with their President—they were burly boys, but none of them could hold on to that rusty axe; it dropped to the ground, and never once rose above their knees.

I didn’t revel. Pa had me handle an axe before I was six. One of the boys offered me whiskey from his canteen. But he scampered with the other pickets when he noticed an officer come charging up the hill on a big bay. I recognized the horse—Egypt—but not the rider, who sat low in the saddle and chased after the pickets with his riding crop. “I’ve never seen such rascality,” he shouted. “You were supposed to guard the perimeter, not carouse on a hill with an axe.” His voice had a
falsetto
that was suddenly familiar. And the officer had a wild look about him; with his cap over one eye, he could have been deranged—it was Bob.

His shoulder straps had been ripped off; his sleeves were ragged; his tunic was torn. He scrambled down from his horse like some Cossack, not my son Bob.

“Father, my general sent me here—I didn’t want to come back.”

I was dumfounded and so dizzy I had to drop the axe.

“Son, did you bring a despatch from Ulysses?”

“Sir, I’m not his messenger boy—not yet.”

He tossed his cap into the air—his left eye was swollen shut; he had a patch of blood on his cheek, like some mysterious sign.

“Bobbie,” I said, “the blood . . .”

“I was in a skirmish,” he said. “Two Johnny boys broke through our perimeter, wearing National uniforms—they crept close to headquarters and would have murdered
Lucifer
if they’d had half a chance.”

Bob could sense my dismay and confusion.

“That’s what some of us call Mr. Grant—
Lucifer
. . . . There was a scrape right outside his tent. Grant never blinked. He smoked his cigar and watched it like the-
ay
-ter, as you might say. But you mustn’t worry.
Lucifer’s
bodyguards were with me during the entire skirmish. Your precious Prince Hal only suffered a scratch as we scuffled with the invaders. It wasn’t pretty, Father. Those two Johnny boys were cut down in their tracks. They ended up as bags of blood and shit. And we sent them back across the lines with a little doggerel that I crafted myself.”

There once were a pair of bitches who belonged to Bobbie Lee . . .

I got more about my General-in-Chief in a few minutes with Bob than I ever got in my encounters with other commanders, or with Grant himself.
Lucifer
, it seems, would sit on the ground writing a despatch while the trees shattered over his head—nothing could disrupt his concentration. He stood on the parapets outside Petersburg and directed our battle lines, strumming his fingers through the air, like a magician with multiple wands, and taking as little notice of Rebel sharpshooters as he would a bunch of bothersome bees. And when he found a sutler whipping his horses in brutal fashion, he had the wretch tied to a tree for six hours—and confiscated the horses.

“And did you enter Petersburg with
Lucifer
?” I asked Bob, who had suddenly become my chief scout.

“Yes, I did. The Rebels were running like rabbits. And when he saw them all packed up on the streets near the little bridge at the Appomattox bottom, he told me that he didn’t have the heart to turn his artillery on such a mass of defeated and dispirited men, but he planned to capture them as soon as possible, and capture them he will. The Rebels can’t hold on to Richmond—they’ll have to run.”

Bob mounted his horse in a cavalryman’s high stride and clucked at Egypt like a coyote. He wasn’t some poor prince surrounded by Grant’s bodyguards; he’d grown into a warrior in less than a week.

“I have to get back to
Lucifer
. I wouldn’t want my general to race ahead and run me right out of the war. . . . Oh, and how is Mother? Did you say goodbye to her and Tad for me?”

“Mother may be back with her own little peace mission come Wednesday.”

He paused for a moment and grabbed one of Egypt’s ears with his fist.

“Father, you must disallow all her attempts to return to the base. She has sown havoc here. I had to apologize on my knees to Mrs. General Ord.”

The boy wasn’t wrong. But I couldn’t corral Mother like that, imprison her in one of her own hatboxes.

“It’s
jest
a fancy, Bob—I doubt she’ll come.”

“Father, that’s not good enough,” he said. “She is her own portable insane asylum. And when she walks a very narrow perimeter at the White House, all is well. She can cuff the maids and gardeners to her heart’s content, and bribe them with a couple of coins. Who will ever notice? She can reign in her ballet slippers, but she cannot meddle with matters at an Army camp, interrupt a parade, flaunt her bosoms like a high-strung schoolgirl, and insult my general—Father, if you will not tell her, I will. Goodbye.”

Bob crouched in his saddle like a Comanche, thumped Egypt’s flanks with the crushed bill of his cap, and galloped back down the hill, past the wharves, past the crooked railroad tracks, with that special right of passage held by one of the general’s staff, as hospital orderlies and pickets flew from his path, and lesser officers waved to him with their own crushed bills, and I realized that Bob didn’t belong to Mary or his Pa, perhaps not even to Grant, that he was a lone rider, returning to the front.

51.

Richmond

N
O
ONE
COULD
say where the first fires started, or who had started them, but our generals surmised that the retreating Rebels wanted Richmond’s tobacco warehouses burned, so they could deprive us of their stores. Still, their soldiers didn’t set half the business section ablaze, from the south side of Franklin Street to the river. I was told by a secret source that the Female Orphan Asylum on Leigh Street was where the immolation began—that it had nothing to do with tobacco and cotton or grog. Another witness claimed that the Quartermaster’s men wanted to burn Richmond to the ground before the mayor had a chance to surrender the city. Hence, these men skulked across the Hebrew Burying Ground at midnight, when they wouldn’t be trifled with, and carried their torches into the inner wall of the Powder Magazine, and they themselves were trapped in the explosion that roared above Richmond like a pernicious ball of fire and blood—with flying shards of glass and brick. And whatever else happened, a mob of angry, drunken men intervened; some were stragglers from the retreating Rebel garrison, and others were escaped prisoners from the penitentiary; they stole whatever cotton and tobacco they could, and while martial music was heard in the distance, they set fire to the warehouses, the City Jail, the First African Church, the County Courthouse, and a dozen hotels. So our Federal troops entered Richmond as firefighters rather than conquistadors, but the mob had destroyed all the fire engines. We couldn’t feed the starving population with our own stores—and the last Rebel rations—until some of the smoke cleared and we corralled the half-crazed horses that leapt across the burning husks of buildings.

I wouldn’t be daunted by fire and smoke. It was Tad’s twelfth birthday—the fourth of April—and I couldn’t wait all morning for a wire from my wife. My Secretary of War was worried about sharpshooters in a town the Rebels had forsaken and set on fire—that fire was still raging, and they’d left a team of snipers behind. Jeff Davis had run to Danville, skedaddled a hundred and fifty miles with all his records and all his clerks, Stanton barked with ferocious glee. “The Rebels are beyond repair, Mr. President. They have
nothing
in their bag of tricks but a desperate assault upon your life.” He wanted me to enter Richmond with a whole armada, like some admiral-king who would overwhelm every landing on the James. But I wasn’t going to wait around for a gallery of gunboats. So we left City Point at seven in the morning on the
Malvern
, a tub that couldn’t even accommodate my legs
.
That was my birthday present to Tad—a ride to Richmond.

Turns out Tad’s nurse, Mr. Crook, came along. He was a corpulent man who’d been my bodyguard once upon a time, but was better suited as a nurse, even with the pistols tucked in his vest. We had sharpshooters of our own—half a dozen marines in blue coats and round blue caps were on board, equipped with carbines. And as we steamed up the James, they watched both shores with their Indian eyes, but there were no bushwhackers lying about, at least none that my sailors could see. Tad was transfixed by their tiny rifles.