American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  On Thursday, I was driven to the Armory Square Hospital and liberally dosed with rye whiskey before my eye socket was cleaned, cauterized, and bandaged. I’d already concocted the story of my heroic charge against a rebel battery, armed with nothing but a B-flat bugle. (Sadly, no lithograph was made, commemorating my musicality and derring-do.) That afternoon, Walt Whitman sidled up to me where I lay on a cot among the wounded, watching cigar smoke write in Persian letters prophesies of my coming life as a man.

  Looming like the moon in a fog of mosquito netting, Whitman’s face got in the way of my destiny, which, in any case, I couldn’t decipher. His countenance was intelligent, kind, but underlain by a fierceness that would blaze up into his tired eyes. Five years earlier, when I’d watched him shout his verses into the evening breeze, his hair, beard, and mustache had been unfashionably neat for that manly age of facial barbarism. They were indifferently kept now, as if pain and sorrow had made the least act of self-regard frivolous to his mind. At Sheepshead Bay, he had resembled the picture of Jesus in the testament later given me by the Christian Sanitary Commission. Now, he appeared as Moses must have after hearing the Almighty speak from the burning bush. His eyes bore into a man, as though he meant to assay the ore of his character. I’d have shivered had his look not also conveyed so large a store of pity. Wrath for what the war had taken was mostly dampened by the better angels of his nature.

  I’ve heard the talk concerning Whitman’s depravity, but I never believed it. When he laid his hand gently on my brow, I felt the tenderness of a benevolent man, nothing else. If I had been well and he’d thrown his arm over my shoulder and embraced me—even if he’d kissed me with his bearded lips and called me his sweet comrade—I would not have been ashamed. In my childhood, I had grown beyond shame, and nothing could embarrass me. I’d walked the squalid streets and alleys of the Five Points and the Bowery; passed—an unnoticed boy—among filthy dens where whores, thieves, and cutthroats consorted. I’d seen most every variety of human and bestial conjugation and suffered the hardships of our kind’s most ingenious war. There will be others, even more ingenious and brutal. I mean to say that I was not naïve, nor was I the least afraid of this man whose love for men and women seemed perfect Christian zeal.

  I knew no other faith; knew of Christ and the mother of God, of His saints and angels only what my Irish mother had taught me before typhoid took her to Abraham’s bosom or only to the sure and certain corruption of the body, packed with little ceremony in the impoverished earth of Ward’s Island, on the other side of Little Hell Gate. I don’t believe in hell, except as it was spread daily before my eyes from Canal Street to Pearl, squeezed into Manhattan’s rancid tit between the East River and the Hudson. Hell is for the living. And heaven? A boy, I pictured it as a field of fireflies on a summer’s night—each tiny yellow light a blessed soul. If my childish fancy is true, then the end of days for hosanna-hymning bugs lies in the bloated belly of a bat.

  “Poor boy,” Whitman murmured, as if he had looked into my mind with his all-seeing eyes and found there the common tragedy of the poor.

  Grateful for his sympathy, which I knew to be genuine, I nodded my thanks. Like love, it was a delicacy rarely served in tenements where creatures (call them people for old time’s sake) swarmed like ants on a stale cake, in spaces (I will not call them rooms) with a dearth of light and air but a plenitude of misery and disease. I had a brother, Sean. Too young for war, he stayed behind in Bushwick with our useless souse of a father. After I left, he went bad (a word used also for spoiled meat beloved by maggots), preferring a roughneck life to the oyster trade. Small and wiry, he excelled as a pickpocket until a porter found his hand inside his dungarees and broke it. Versatile, he took to waylaying swanks on Wall Street and looting Fifth Avenue kitchens of silverware and plate. Sean moved into the “Bloody Sixth” near the seaport so that he could rob the Irish just off the boat “to give them a taste of equality.” When my uncle Jack broke his neck, falling from a streetcar, I had no further news of Sean or of my father. Uncle Jack had beautiful penmanship—strange in a man with fists like beef hearts—and he liked to write letters. Once he’d gone, I would get no others, though envelopes would pass through my hands—links in a chain holding the continent together—while I sorted mail, in motion between Santa Fe and Independence, Missouri.

  Ten years ago—it must have been—I was leafing through a book of pictures taken by Jacob Riis, when my hand was stayed by a photograph of “Bandit’s Roost” in New York City. In the foreground, my brother stands with swaggering nonchalance, a hand in the pocket of his dark suit. From the shadow of a derby hat, his eyes confront the camera with cold and insolent certainty. His mouth is cruel. Behind him, another man appears to be leaning on the barrel of a rifle, unless it’s only a length of steel with which to batter down doors or break heads. In the wet, somber recesses of the alley, between two Mulberry Street tenement houses, overhung with ragged, dingy wash, other roughneck men stare down the interloper, while, from out a window, a sharp-faced woman glares. I wondered then if Sean had died since his picture’d been taken and—for a moment—I hoped he had.

  “Were they able to save your eye?” Whitman asked, his voice so drenched in melancholy that my unbandaged orb began to weep in pity for its lost twin.

  “No, sir,” I said, touching the ravaged place.

  He shook his head ruefully and gave me a look that would have softened Herod’s flinty heart. When I’d wished my brother dead, I was indulging in the self-righteousness of someone who had already grown away from temptation after capacity and appetite had dulled. I’d never been vicious like Sean, but I had sinned in the usual ways of men and women who did not settle and who lived on the frontiers of existence, under conditions most would consider savage. The ill will I felt toward my brother when I saw him at Bandit’s Roost (a fabulous place despite its meanness) might have been envy for a young man still in the prime of life. That he, too, must have aged since Riis had captured him with his box camera didn’t occur to me. That day in the Lincoln public library when I saw Sean’s picture, I felt I’d been squeezed dry: I’d lost my sap and vinegar. But in 1865, when I lay on my hospital cot, manhood waited to be claimed, like a bag at the freight depot in a city spread out before me like a mirage.

  “How old are you, son?” Whitman asked.

  “Going on seventeen.”

  “So young,” he said, stroking the back of my hand with his poem-stained fingers. “How did you come to lose your eye?”

  I told him the story of my heroism, with embellishments—told it so well, I was nearly persuaded of my exceptional character.

  “You sacrificed what little you had to call your own for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. You gave an eye, half of man’s greatest blessing, when rich men up north paid a small price to keep themselves and their sons from harm.”

  With those few words, accompanied by a glance that seemed to measure the dimensions of my meager existence, Whitman made me see myself as a sacrifice on the altar of wealth, but a hero notwithstanding. He didn’t believe in tragedy, however; and elbowing me playfully as you would a friend sitting on a bar stool next to yours, he gave me a draught of democratic optimism: He smiled at me with a frankness that, in any race but the American, would have been mistaken for idiocy. The effect was disagreeable, since I’d been enjoying the lugubrious feeling his pity incited in me the way a successful man looks back pleasantly on the privations of his childhood. Their memory is like a drop of Angostura bitters to spice up his gin.

  I had yet to develop a conscience—boys rarely have one— and four years of war had blighted what might have taken root in an untroubled season. Hatred and spleen soured me. While I grew, in time, into an ordinary man of equal parts goodness and selfishness, I have a cynic’s view of God and His principal creation. My later “visions” confirmed my misanthropy: I’ve learned that so many of our deeds are really misdeeds committed without thought for the future. I’ve come to view the world with s
uspicion and alarm, as even Huck Finn would have, had he seen Tom Sawyer grow into an old man and Jim lynched, his body dumped into the Mississippi.

  “You’ll be yourself in no time!” Whitman declared with enthusiasm. “The war’s nearly finished. The Union has carried the day, and the world’s a young man’s oyster!” I knew all there was to know about oysters: how they broke your back to harvest, pained your feet to carry from street to street, and lacerated your hands to open. “I’d like to see your Jericho, if you still have it,” he said.

  I lifted the sheet and showed him my bugle.

  He took it up and admired the dents.

  “What’s your name, friend?”

  “Stephen Moran.”

  “I won’t forget you,” he said.

  Then he gave me his book so that I wouldn’t forget him: a first edition of Leaves of Grass, bound in green cloth. He showed me his picture on the frontispiece, and I saw there the man I’d seen on the beach at Sheepshead Bay and on the streets of New York, jaunty, amused, infatuated with existence—every last sublime and ignoble, gallant and shameful particle of it. All of it, superb!

  I carried his book in my haversack, although I wouldn’t read it until I got myself jailed and grew homesick for a life that crowds with its multitudes, its noise and smells, its unending parade of being. Whitman’s pages shout humanity at you, which is a comfort to the solitary. “I accept Reality,” he said, “and dare not question it.” Me, I’ve run from it in horror, just as I once skedaddled from Bull Run. Maybe that explains why I was forever on the move and, for a while, took to living on a train.

  “Have you learned to read?” Whitman asked.

  “Yes,” I said, not in the least insulted.

  Most of the boys and many of the men of the 13th Brooklyn were illiterate. Tenement children didn’t go to school. But my mother taught me to read from a tattered copy of Tales, by the O’Hara Family, which she’d had ever since she was a girl in Dún Laoghaire. Like all her race, she loved stories; and the book, its cloth binding threadbare, was one of the few things left from her days in Ireland. While my father was out boozing, she’d read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upward from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and—lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama—turn the dreary space around me into a stage for the wildest imaginings. That is my happiest recollection of the years in the Bridge Street tenement and of my mother, whose slight body typhoid fever would tint pink and rose like one of Raphael’s Madonnas. My brother seems not to have been with us then, although, four years younger than I, he must have been. There is no greater infidelity than memory’s desertion.

  I thanked Whitman for the book, and he drew down the mosquito netting over me. He may have said I looked like a bride behind the veil, but maybe he didn’t. He moved to the next cot to dress the wound of a soldier whose arm was gone. I shut my eye, begrudging the buzzing flies the bedpan they’d appropriated.

  Next night, we were awakened by the rumor, whispered down the lane from cot to cot, that Lincoln had been killed. We might have been schoolboys in a dormitory, afraid to give substance to their fears by speaking them aloud, and not sick or maimed soldiers in a hospital ward. Across the mall, on Tenth Street, the lights blazed at every window of the Petersen house, where the good man was not dead but dying into morning from an actor’s bullet: Booth’s, he who had once played Romeo and Hamlet. The hospital was dark, the gibbous moon low. We couldn’t see if the streetlights had been put out in mourning or if the stars were dimmed in grief. The death of Lincoln was high tragedy, and I hope to find the words to say what it meant—never mind their purple. None of us slept. We were silent and timid, as though we ourselves waited for the hearse to come and collect our corpses.

  At half past seven in the morning, an officer arrived. Shoulders stooped by the burden of his loss (for each one who loved Lincoln, the loss was unique), he stood next to the washtubs and told us that the president had just died. Tears ran into his cavalry mustache. He wiped them on his sleeve, careless of the fancy braid and buttons. He had relinquished his claim to our respect, paying his own in mourning to his dead commander in chief. I admired him. In a moment, he was gone; but I can recall his face even now. I can’t think of that April morning without seeing him—naked and abject as we are when bereft of hope— standing, without the customary iron in his backbone, by the gray washtubs while dismal morning light entered the eastward windows, followed by a breeze that quickened the tar smell of carbolic soap. I closed my eye and saw in my mind’s blackness a meteor fall.

  Garfield and McKinley would also be assassinated; the death bell would toll for them, too. But Lincoln’s murder was the first and cast the longest shadow. For those who suffered the Civil War with him, his life, as well as death, belongs to them. More deaths are bound to follow for as long as some believe the quickest way to change other people’s minds is to put a bullet through their brains. But who am I to talk?

  I always said that a man made his own bed. But now that I’m dying—there’s no point in arguing the fact—now that I am, I realize the futility of struggling against fate. Our bed is made for us: We do as we are obliged. Leastways, enough to humble us. That’s a bitter pill to swallow late in the day. While we’re alive, we’re like a man who steps in horseshit on his way to church. Only when he’s home again and has cleaned his shoes can he smile at his humiliation and—more to the point—his helplessness before what lies in wait and is beyond his power to prevent. Here’s what I think: Behind every gunman stands another gunman, in a concatenation of death and destruction, difficult to break.

  Here’s a story: On an afternoon in Santa Fe, when I’d left the mail car to stretch my legs in town, I saw a farmer gunned down by a cattleman. While the dust was soaking up the dead man’s blood, the farmer’s son picked up his father’s gun and shot the cattleman dead—only to be killed, in his turn, by the man’s brother. A tired old story, but true nonetheless.

  Five days after Lincoln’s death, on the twentieth of April, a major attached to the War Department came to the Armory Square Hospital to speak to me.

  “You are Private Stephen Moran, bugler in the One Hundred and Seventy-third New York Infantry?” he asked, standing at the foot of my cot.

  “Yes, sir.” His presence there surprised me. Mine was one of the lowliest ranks and occupations in the army.

  “Are you fit to travel?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Then I ask that you accompany me, Moran.”

  I put on my uniform and cap and followed the major outside and into a buggy. He drove to the War Department building, next door to the White House, already hung with crepe. There I met Secretary of War Stanton (Lincoln called him “old Mars”), who’d said at the Petersen house when the president slipped into the tide that would carry him into eternity, “Now he belongs to the ages” (or in another version, “angels”). With Stanton was Ulysses S. Grant, adored by every soldier in the Army of the Potomac. My astonishment at seeing the general staggered me, and I rocked unsteadily on my heels. Grant took me by the arm and set me in a chair.

  “Are you recovered from your wound, Private?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “You took me by surprise.”

  Stanton scowled, but Grant seemed pleased by my frankness. He was a man who got on well with his inferiors, who were never made to feel so. And if he liked his whiskey, we didn’t hold it against him, being fond of it ourselves.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m just another hardscrabble soldier like yourself.”

  Stanton snorted. His manner was cold and imperious. Grant, on the other hand, had an urbanity that would have pleased Walt Whitman. Common himself, he appealed to the common soldier. I liked the smell of him, which was of tobacco and the dusty roads we both had traveled, though I never imagined our paths would converge. Captivated by the gold stars on his epaulets, which shone in the excitable light of an April morn
ing, I seemed to have been snared in Lincoln’s remarkable destiny, which, with a conspirator’s bullet, had entered its tragic phase. But it was vanity for me to think so, and only in his death was I to play a modest part—thanks to Whitman, who had commended my youthful heroism and sacrifice to the secretary of the interior, for whom he worked as a clerk and copyist. Whitman thought a one-eyed bugle boy would add pathos to the mournful spectacle, were he to play taps in the Rotunda, where the president was to lie in state. The secretary mentioned the idea to Stanton, who judged I would be better used, and less likely to offend, by playing my bugle on the rear platform of Lincoln’s funeral train as it carried him home to Illinois. I had the impression that, having watched me nearly swoon, Stanton would have returned me forthwith to obscurity, if not for Grant.

  “Will you show him your devotion one last time?” the general asked, after telling me in the simplest terms why I’d been summoned. He had stressed the word him, as if in his mind’s eye, the h had been a capital letter reserved previously for the Almighty.

  I stood and drew myself up to my full height, which at an inch above five feet was hardly impressive, and said in the manliest voice I could muster, “I will, sir!”

  Grant beamed down on me, as though he were astride his beloved horse, Cincinnati.

  “You won’t disgrace us, will you, boy?” said Stanton, with vinegar that could have pickled.

  I did not bother to answer him, looking instead at the gray eyes of my general, set in the kindliest of faces.

  “He will not,” he said, and I knew that I would rather fall on my bugle (I had neither sword nor bayonet) than disappoint him. He saw my resolve and pronounced it “good.”

  What followed was one of the most remarkable things ever to happen to me. While Stanton grumbled a sort of basso continuo of disapproval, Grant promoted me, then and there, to the rank of sergeant and pinned the Medal of Honor on my blue sack coat.