by Ralph Peters
I told her of my dead love and the babe, and she learned at last why my letters had stopped for so long.
“I will not be false now,” I told her downcast head. Her hair was pinned back sleek, her gray dress prim. “I loved Ameera. And the little one. Without benefit of clergy, we were. But a family none the less. For all the devils of India, I loved her. As I love you now and forever.” Her head sank toward her knees and her small shoulders quivered. “As I love our little John.”
I let her cry, and cry she did. Sobbing hard. She was a woman of great reserve in her parlor ways, but privately she kept no walls between us. She was better than I deserved, and I knew it and had taken the gift in silence. And never think that silence is no lie. It lulls the decent heart until it kills.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Mary. But you had to know the truth of it. Wrong it was of me to keep it from you. Wrong and cowardly.”
“You . . . would not have left her, then?” my love begged. “Had she lived? You would not have . . . returned to marry me?”
The words come so heavy. But I would not lie to her now.
“I would not have left her. Or the child.”
She wept from the depths of her, face in her hands. Tears ran down her wrists and into her sleeves.
I wished to be strong. But I could restrain myself no longer. I cast myself upon my knees before her.
“I’m so sorry. I’ve broken your heart . . .”
She cringed as if afraid that I would touch her, so I did not. Though I longed to gather her to me. I felt my fine life dissolving, and wondered if it would not have been better had I not risen from my fever bed.
“I’ve broken all your faith in me,” I whispered, and I was weeping, too. “And brought you only disappointment . . .”
Suddenly, she straightened. Face fierce as the Black Mountains. She grasped my wrists with her little hands. Strong from the scrubbing, they were.
“Don’t you understand?” she cried. “Oh, don’t you?”
“I do,” I assured her. “I’m so sorry, my love.”
She shook her head. Denying that I could ever understand. Then, all unexpected, she flew from the chair and clutched me. Holding me hard.
“I’m such a wicked woman,” she told me, sobbing. “It’s me who’s the wicked one, don’t you see?” I felt the rise and fall of her breast against me. “I’d feared so much the worse of you, my darling.”
TWAS NIGHT, AND OUR LITTLE JOHN SLEPT. We had already put certain things behind us, my sweetie and I. Too vivid in our love, we could not sleep.
“I don’t know what to make of it all,” I told her. For I valued her advice above that of all others. “Mr. Seward insists there’s to be an insurrection. Yet I can find no clear sign of it. I feel myself a failure, see. And the business with the girl and her visions and sickness fair took my balance off.” I sighed, turning to hold her the better. I loved the scent of her hair. “Well, I will go to Washington. And tell them what is and what is not. Then we will see.”
“Then all agree there is no insurrection?” my love asked.
“Just so.”
“Yet there is murder?”
“That, too.”
“But Mr. Seward thinks there will be trouble?”
“He does.”
“And so do you?”
“I do.”
She got up on an elbow, hair cascading in the lamplight. “Then you are right,” she said.
I gave her a look. For she must explain.
“There is simple,” she went on. “There is murder, and trouble afoot, but no rebellion.”
“And?”
“No ‘and.’ And you keep your mittens down, until we’ve done our talking.”
I ceased my molestations.
“I do not see where you have gotten to,” I admitted. For she was ever quicker.
“Look you, Abel. There is murder, and trouble, but no insurrection against the government. Well, that is it. No insurrection, no rebellion. But something else. You are looking for a goat because they sent you to look for a goat. And so you do not see the sheep.”
“What sheep, then, my little shepherdess?”
She gave me a slap. “You will behave, Mr. Jones. Until we have gotten to the end of this. Or you’ll get none of what you want, and plenty of what you don’t.”
She was ever a hard one, when she set her mind on a thing.
“And how many questions did you ask up in New York?” She tried a new approach to make me see.
“Questions, my little one? I asked a thousand. And every answer come back the same.”
“That is because you did not ask a thousand questions, but one question a thousand times. Will you not see that there’s no Irish rebellion there? Although there may be something else entirely, and Irishmen aplenty in the doings. Do you not see it, then? You will not have the right answer until you put the right question. Oh, I swear—”
“Mary!”
“Well, I do. Though only to you. And upon this one occasion. I tell you that I’ve never known a man so clever and foolish at once. You have the saddle ready before you’ve caught the horse.”
“I would saddle no horse, girl.”
“Look you,” my love commanded. “If they will send you back, forget rebellions. Begin again. You’ve been working backward from what this Seward has decided. Without a true knowing. Instead of starting with the facts and going forward.”
I saw it. I did. She was as right as I was slow of conception. It is my sense of duty, see. I would do what my superiors ask of me. Even when I should know better.
“Well, there is clever,” I said.
“Clever there’s none. You’ll use the brains the Lord bestowed upon you. And come home safely.”
When I looked at her lovely outline by the lamp, then thought of the mind that worked within my darling, I almost could agree with Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony as to Woman’s possibilities. Although I know that is a foolish business, and trouble.
“Well, then,” I said. “I have my orders. From General Jones herself. And but one question left to close the matter.”
She looked at me all fierce, my little lioness. “What, then?”
“Would you turn down the lamp and come closer?”
“No. For we are not done.”
“More, then?”
“More. The girl. This Nellie.”
“Oh, Mary! There is naught between us. I never—”
She smiled at that and gave me a gandy look. “Oh, Abel, I know. I can see you’re taken with her, but not in a way to trouble me. For I know that I will keep you, and fight I would, besides. But fight I will not have to, for you would fight yourself first.”
“She’s dying.”
“We’re all dying,” my wife said. “That’s what we do. She’s only dying faster. Does it not seem queer to you, Abel, that we should all put in our claims for Heaven, but fear the going so?”
“The body fears what the soul would have. But there is strange. I do not think the girl fears dying. It’s the living that frights her.”
“Well, I meant not to be hard. That was not my meaning. Only that I think she knows more than she has told you, and I do not speak of spirits. You will need to talk to her again. And help her if you can, for that is Christian. But pity with a clear head. And that business with her father. There is a mystery. Perhaps he is like your rebellion.”
“How, my little one?”
“Something other than he seems. I do not like the sound of him.”
“Nor would you like his look. Different from the girl, he is. I wish that they were parted.”
She rose still higher above me. “Do you? Do you wish that, Abel Jones? Without knowing the history of them, and what that girl needs when the doors are shut?”
“She’s burning away,” I said.
My love softened. “Oh, I know it. You’ve said. And though I have no fear, I will give you jealousy. When I hear you speak of her beauty. And know I will never be suc
h.”
I moved to hold her, full of words of praise and adoration. But she set her free hand to my chest and kept me back.
“Be careful,” she said. “Only be careful, Abel. For I know how it is with these consumptives. When they’re going, they crave the life of all around them. There is passion in them then, and heat. So much it is unholy. I know, for I have nursed them. And the girl’s mad. Though not so mad as you think her.”
“But, surely you don’t believe in—”
“I believe,” she said, looking down at her pillow, “in what I can hold. And in what the Gospels tell me. I’m a simple woman, Major Jones.” She reached for the lamp. “And now I would hold my husband.”
RISING FROM MY JULIET, I did not hear the lark of Mr. Shakespeare, but woke to early church bells up the hill. I took the nightpot outside, then washed in the cold under the pump, and lit the stove. I started to make the breakfast, then realized it was a kindness that would wound her. For she would want to break the eggs and spill the pancakes on the griddle for me. I only put the kettle on for coffee, that joy of good Americans.
My footsteps up the stairs woke little John, and he woke her. There was not enough time. A better man would have counted himself lucky to be home for even an hour, when vast armies were condemned to winter quarters and unbroken loneliness. But the torment of another does not lessen the hurt of our hangnail, and we are selfish creatures to the core.
I ate mightily, making up for a month at Mr. Morris’s table.
We went to chapel as a family, but I had to leave before the final hymn. I heard them singing “O Thou who earnest from above,” as I flew down the street with my bag. My eyes were so bothered I was nearly run over by one of Mr. Yuengling’s brewery wagons, off to water some profane gathering up in the patches. That would have been a hard end for a Methodist.
EIGHT
“OOOOCH, MAJOR JONES! YOU ARE COMING AGAIN!” MRS. Schutzengel, my Washington landlady, waved her mixing spoon like a saber. Filling her doorway, she seemed a bulwark of all that is good and homely. “We beat them slave-keepers gut und hart, nicht wahr? Now pie I am making!”
Even as she said the word “pie,” her rapture withered and her broad face sprouted worry. “Ein Apfelkuchen ist schon gemacht,” she continued, but the beauteous passion with which she customarily spoke of food deserted her. She looked me up and down, as if appraising a youth set under her charge who had ranged delinquent. “Mein Gott,” she declared, “he ist only the bones and all starfed! They have taken half of him away! Where ist you gone, Major Jones? And why ist you knocking and not coming in? Sind Sie nicht hier zuhause?”
Of a sudden, the woman puckered with tears.
“My dear Mrs. Schutzengel,” I began, “there is good to see you again. I only thought that, since I’m no longer a boarder, I had best knock. I was hoping, see, that you might have an open room for a night or two, perhaps in the attic and—”
Now, I know that a bull is not a female creature, yet Mrs. Schutzengel was a bull of a woman. And that is nicely meant. It is her strength I would convey to you. And, yes, her presence of body evidenced a good table. Yet, delicate in her feelings she was. Tears fair poured from her, even as her great red face exploded with anger. She brandished the mixing spoon above her head again.
“Herrgott erbarme,” she wailed, with her Communist eyes raised to Heaven, “dass der gute Mann so wenig von der Schutzengel hält! Meint er, dass ich nur ein böser Kapitalist bin?”
And then she began to scold. Still waving that spoon.
“Ooooch, now my heart ist all broken in Stücken. That you are thinking I am only after the money!” Oh, she wept. “So geldgierig ist die Schutzengel nicht! You will have a room in the attic? Nein! Nein, bis zur Ewigkeit! And what is wrong with the room you are already having? Is it not all sauber und waiting for you?”
“But . . . my good lady . . . I gave up my room when I went to New York . . .”
Didn’t she give me the fierce then?
“You gived up your room. Jawohl! But your room is not giving up you! Even if them Rebels are coming, Hilda Schutzengel is guarding your room wie ein alter Grenadier!”
“But . . . I explained . . . that I cannot pay for two—”
She near slashed me dead with the mixing spoon. A hard end that would have been. Though not worse than mortality under a beer wagon.
“Pay? Who ist saying to pay? How else will Hilda Schutzengel fight for the Union und die Freiheit? For the freedom of the peoples, I give you the room when you are gone.” Great choring muscles rippled beneath the cloth of her workadays. “Ooooch, if I am being a man, I make worse for them Rebels than Fort Henry! Over the head, I will hit them!”
A woman of passions she was. Of fire and mood. Again, she drooped into sorrow.
“But only the bones you are! Nichts als Knochen! Like the prisoner! Come inside. Komm! Marsch, marsch! Eat!”
The truth is that we would have liked to hug each other. But such things are not done in proper society. Even by Communists.
When my dear landlady shifted to allow me inside, I saw Annie Fitzgerald, the housemaid, standing behind her in the hallway. The stalk of a girl had been rendered invisible until then by the capacity of Mrs. Schutzengel’s mortal coil. I had done Annie a small good turn once, but hardly expected to be remembered for it. Yet she cried to greet me, too. Now I would not have women weep for me, for I have never been the kind who takes joy in the suffering of the poor creatures—though some men do. But who does not like a nice welcome?
“Oh, Major Jones,” Miss Fitzgerald said to me, “I dreamed you were gone into danger, and prayed to Our Lady til dawn.”
Mrs. Schutzengel grunted. With a tad of jealousy in it. As if she had been trumped in her devotions.
“Major Jones must eat now,” she admonished the girl. “And there ist plenty you are cleaning.”
Humbled, Annie Fitzgerald curtsied and said, “Yes, Madame.”
But Hilda Schutzengel truly did believe in the Brotherhood of Man, and her good woolen sense always conquered the high silk of her temper in the end. She softened and laid a mighty arm around the girl.
“Doch, first we are all having pie.”
WITH MY BELT LOOSENED A NOTCH, I tapped along toward the President’s House. The streets were mires. Even where cobbled, they had been muddied over by countless wagon wheels and the leavings of horses. Rain spit. Smoke and the smell of slaughtered cattle thickened the air. Twas past the visiting hour, so the fine carriages were put up, and nobody strolled for the joy of it. Only those without choices walked the streets, and the drabs kept to the doorways.
A regiment of pale recruits, not yet issued waterproofs, marched soddenly from one camp to another. They had the faces of long-punished children, and the sergeants failed to keep the step. Army supply wagons grumbled along behind delivery carts, the teamsters huddled low beneath broad hats and turned-up collars. The drivers lacked the spark to curse, which, though a blessing, tells you of the dreariness. Rats slicked about, unafraid. A miserable day it was, a winter Monday, bare as bones. It put me in mind of Britannia’s damp, and of coughing children.
Yet, there was something in the town I liked. Perhaps it had only grown familiar. But I had spent a barren night in Philadelphia, delayed by trains diverted, and would not have traded the ferment of our capital for all the elegance of Rittenhouse Square. Although I might have wished for better sewerage.
The President’s mansion was a shambles. The public hall was filled up dense as a barroom when oysters are set out free, and the look of the guests was no better. Shabbiness of dress vied with shoddy ostentation. Nor was every man sober. Now, I am told there is such a thing as a good cigar, but I smelled nothing of the kind that day. A cannonade does not leave smoke so thick. Twas a wonder the President’s family could bear the stench.
The horde of men waited sullenly, for Mr. Lincoln would see all who waited upon him, but never soon enough to suit their vanity. Office-seekers and favor-beggars spoke loudly to
one another, as if the volume justified their claims.
“Old Abe’s forgot the likes of them put him in,” a fellow with tobacco juice in his beard told his neighbor.
“Gone all high and awmighty,” the next man agreed, “and thar’s a fact.”
Another visitor cut a souvenir from the draperies with his clasp knife.
As I went up to Mr. Nicolay’s office, the supplicants lining the stairs complained about the military pushing good men out of the way and damned West Pointers—though I am far from such. I passed a bald man with the shakes and he called out, “Lookee there. It’s a pegleg puss-in-boots.” But when men speak to hurt, their own wounds show.
Mr. Nicolay himself answered my knock. He got me inside through the crush and complaints, then closed the door and locked it. The smoke seeped through.
The President’s private secretary looked as though he had not slept in weeks. He bid me sit and took a chair himself.
“These people,” Nicolay said, with just a trace of German heaviness, “I tell Mr. Lincoln they must go. But he lets them come. I tell him he must say they are to join the army, if they wish to serve the government. But he laughs and says that the best thing he can do for the army is to keep men like these out of it. What are we to do?”
Germans. Where the Englishman is only clever, the German is intelligent and earnest. And when he is not wanted, he keeps to his beer and cabbage. Loyal, too, your German, and he does not fear work. If only others made so little trouble.
“I fear,” I told him, “I do not have a head for political matters.”
He did not smile, for your German is a somber fellow at his workplace. But I sensed he was amused.
“The paradox of democracy, Major Jones. The bad man is born for politics, but governing requires the good man.”
