American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  “I was the bugle boy you recommended for Mr. Lincoln’s funeral train. I played taps on the trip to Springfield. I’ve always been grateful for the notice you paid me.”

  I didn’t mention the first time I saw him, by Sheepshead Bay. He might not have cared to be reminded of his vanished virility.

  “There were so many young men. Though it seems to me I do remember your face—because of the eye patch, though I don’t recall the circumstances. What brings you east, friend? If I were lucky enough to be a man at large in the West, nothing short of dynamite could relocate me.”

  I told him that Custer had taken me on as his photographer and that we’d come east to see the exposition. (I didn’t mention the general’s disgrace.) Whitman said he hoped he’d feel up to scratch enough to go. He was keen on Machinery Hall. He believed that machines would be the motive power to push the democracy forward into the twentieth century. He planned on going to Philadelphia with Eakins, if his strength didn’t desert him entirely. He wanted to ride the Camden ferry once again. Looking at his hand, wondering, perhaps, what had become of its power to snatch from the air his mind’s effusions, he recited, “What exhilaration, change, people, business by day. What soothing, silent, wondrous hours, at night, crossing on the boat, most all to myself—pacing the deck, alone, forward or aft. What communion with the waters, the air . . . —the sky and stars, that speak no word.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw him on deck, wearing his suit of iron gray, loosely cut and old-fashioned. The Good Gray Poet, “taken by strangers for some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer”—sadly, now, no more.

  “Custer is a magnificent specimen of the American man,” Whitman said later while we were drinking tea in the sunny kitchen. “You won’t catch the general sipping horse piss like this.”

  “The general’s teetotal,” I said.

  “Is he?” This news seemed shocking to Whitman, as if I’d told him Custer liked to dress up in Libbie’s undergarments. “I would never have thought it. Grant’s a man’s man, though! Nothing but whiskey and cigars for him!”

  Both manly vices would prove fatal when Death came for him—destitute and forgotten—in 1885.

  “Custer will deal with the Indians,” said Whitman, who must have forgotten his verses in praise of them.

  “Yes,” I said, to be agreeable. And I will deal with Custer, I thought.

  “What do you think of love, Stephen?”

  “Pardon me?” I said, much surprised by this question, which was apropos of nothing.

  “Lately, I’ve been thinking a good deal about love,” he said with a distracted air that made him look like a moon calf. “I thought I understood it, but now, now I’m not so sure.”

  Strange, isn’t it, Jay, that the nearest I had gotten so far to an understanding of love was with an Indian girl who didn’t speak English?

  “It’s a mysterious force to make men and women behave in the most extraordinary way.”

  Yes, I said to myself, not feeling qualified to interrogate the matter with him.

  “You know, when I was a boy of five, General Lafayette picked me up from a crowded sidewalk and carried me down the street during his visit to New York. I have always believed that happenstance conjunction determined my destiny.”

  He lapsed into a silence fretted by wonder and regret while he played absently with his teaspoon.

  “It cannot stand!” he said with sudden vigor. “My dismissal! To have been let go with such contempt; to be dismissed for having written a book ‘full of indecent passages.’ He called me ‘a very bad man,’ you know, a ‘free lover.’ No, I can’t allow Harlan’s calumny to go unanswered.”

  I knew that Harlan, secretary of the interior during Johnson’s presidency, had sacked Whitman because of Leaves of Grass, which he judged obscene. That was nearly eleven years ago, and it had returned, the cheap denigration of his life’s work and life, both: a grievance the old man gnawed, like a marrow bone, in his winter, his sad decrepitude. If he’d ever forgotten the affront. I could not pity him: I was no one to pity a great man, however reduced by age and sickness. I was sorry. We can feel sorry for people fallen on hard times without demeaning them by pity. Though I could have cried to see Whitman’s rheumy eyes, his gnarled, arthritic hands, the remains of a coddled egg left from breakfast on his shirt. His great head waggled a little, the way an old man’s will.

  I stood and shook his hand. From his chair, he threw an arm around my neck and drew my face down to his and kissed me. Our beards entangled as briefly as our two lives had done—in Brooklyn, Washington, and now in Camden—and then they disentangled, one from the other, although he’d be often in my thoughts.

  “Thank you for your visit, young man. Will you be stopping at the exposition?”

  “Briefly, Mr. Whitman.”

  “Walt—call me Walt, as you would a comrade.”

  “Walt.”

  He smiled, and I watched his face undergo a metamorphosis that would have entranced Ovid: It passed from the unalloyed joy of an elk at the summit of its range to the anguish of a deer, an arrow through its lungs and heart.

  “Perhaps, I’ll be able to visit it next month. Sadly, the organizers did not invite me to read my poems.”

  He would visit the Centennial Exposition and slide his fifty cents through the ticket window, like any ordinary citizen of the democracy he cherished and sometimes wrongheadedly defended. Still, you couldn’t help but love him—at least I couldn’t, who had heard him bellow his love while the waves crumbled on Brooklyn’s pleasant shore when I was nearly twelve.

  I left him sitting in the kitchen, upright in his chair, his saucer flooded with tea, without a backward glance— knowing that the door to my childhood, which I believed long ago dead and buried, had finally closed with the shutting of the Whitmans’ front door on Stevens Street.

  That evening, I crossed the Delaware to Philadelphia and joined Custer at the exposition. Two months later, a telegram from Salt Lake City would arrive there, electrifying visitors with the news that Custer and all his men (save one) had fallen at the Little Bighorn. Shortly afterward, Whitman would write “A Death-Sonnet for Custer” and publish it in the New York Daily Tribune.

  I.

  From far Montana’s cañons,

  Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the silence,

  Haply, to-day, a mournful wail—haply, a trumpet note for heroes.

  II.

  The battle-bulletin,

  The Indian ambuscade—the slaughter and environment

  The cavalry companies fighting to the last—in sternest, coolest, heroism.

  The fall of Custer, and all his officers and men.

  III.

  Continues yet the old, old legend of our race!

  The loftiest of life upheld by death!

  The ancient banner perfectly maintained!

  (O lesson opportune—O how I welcome thee!)

  As, sitting in dark days,

  Lone, sulky, through the time’s thick murk looking in vain for light, for hope,

  From unsuspected parts, a fierce and momentary proof,

  (The sun there at the center, though concealed,

  Electric life forever at the center,)

  Breaks forth, a lightning flash.

  IV.

  Thou of sunny, flowing hair, in battle,

  I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand,

  Now ending well the splendid fever of thy deeds,

  (I bring no dirge for it or thee—I bring a glad, triumphal sonnet;)

  There in the far northwest, in struggle, charge, and saber-smite,

  Desperate and glorious—aye, in defeat most desperate, most glorious,

  After thy many battles, in which, never yielding up a gun or a color,

  Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,

  Thou yieldest up thyself.

  I wasn’t taken in by that horsesh
it, either.

  San Francisco, May 10–16, 1876

  If I’d ever been tempted to unknot the rope that bound my destiny to Custer’s, it was during the six days I spent in San Francisco, while, confined at Fort Snelling, in Minnesota, the general wrangled, wept, and sulked in disgrace for having defamed brother officers—not to mention Orvil Grant—at the impeachment of the secretary of war. I was ravished by the city on the bay and by a woman living there.

  Anna McGinn owned a studio on Kearny Street—a rarity at a time when photography was practiced mostly by men, if for no other reason than the weight and cumbersomeness of the apparatus, glass plates, and chemicals. Anna was making ambrotypes, an innovation superior to daguerreotypes but considered quaint by wet-glass snobs because they could not be reproduced on paper. They were suitable to hang on parlor walls or to enclose in little gold shrines for gents to carry in their coat pockets, like a cigarette case or a whiskey flask. But though she held me captive for a handful of spring days—never mind the San Francisco damp—I’d come to believe in my inalienable destiny as an assassin.

  Nevertheless, those days do deserve mention as the pinnacle of my experience of love. Had I met Anna before my visit to Whitman, I could have told him what I thought of that most disquieting emotion. I said nothing about Fire Briskly Burning. He might have understood my feelings for her—he understood far stranger affections; but I wasn’t sure if his racial tolerance was sincere or merely literary. Now that I think of it, I wonder whether I did love my winter squaw. She seems at this remove in time and space no more than a dream. If life is nothing but a swamp in which we lose our way, the affections are quicksand in which we drown.

  I met Anna in a gaudy saloon on the Barbary Coast, Frisco’s brawling, disreputable district, where every manner of vice and meanness could be found. She was there to deliver an ambrotype she’d made of a chanteuse for a miner whose pockets were lined with silver from the Comstock Lode. I was there to soak up local color and the rum brought by ship from the East Indies. I noticed her immediately; she had a striking profile, framed by hair that seemed in the light of the saloon’s gas brackets to flash with emeralds. In the sunlight, her hair was ash-blond. She was small-boned and delicate—shorter than I, who had drunk enough rum to surmount a habitual timidity before the opposite sex. I noticed that her fingers were blackened by the silver nitrate of her trade, or “black art,” as it was often called. I sidled down the bar and listened to her harangue the goggle-eyed miner, whose fickle affections had gone elsewhere. Anna got her money, and when she left the saloon, I followed her along Pacific Street to her studio on Kearny.

  “I take pictures, too,” I said—idiotically in retrospect. I stood in the middle of her studio, trying my level best not to sway or breathe.

  “You stink of rum,” she said, not deceived by my pantomime of sobriety.

  “I took a drop against the damp. At the saloon up on Pacific. I noticed your fingers.”

  “What about them?” she snapped, loudly enough to upset my precarious equilibrium.

  “They’re stained black. So I knew.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “To make your acquaintance.”

  In answer to my smile, she raised her head defiantly; her green eyes glared. In a moment, I’d be showed the door, if not kicked and shoved through it. For a small package, she was fierce. I thought momentarily of Amazons and female mountain lions and wondered if I shouldn’t sneak sheepishly out the door while I still had the power of locomotion. But the woman fascinated me for a reason I couldn’t have explained at the time, even to myself.

  “I’m in town on a visit,” I said quickly, hoping to defuse an anger I could almost hear hiss. “I’ve been out west taking pictures.”

  She relaxed a little, and her eyes granted me a stay of judgment in which I might explain myself. I told her the story of my life, as much of it as I dared. She sat on a stool, her elbows on the counter, and listened attentively. I held the floor, as orators say. I held it well. I doubted if John Calhoun or Daniel Webster—or even Abraham Lincoln himself—could have done better. I was possessed of an eloquence I might have imbibed while keeping the dead man company, or else from the Barbados rum. When I’d had my say, Anna allowed that I might stay awhile. We talked about our work. She showed me several albums of her pictures—things she’d done for her own pleasure. I recall the portrait of a sockeye, caught in the Columbia River, she’d bought at Paladini’s on the wharf. I had never in my life considered taking pictures of fish. Dead buffalo were more in my line, but she preferred small subjects, in consideration of the cramped studio.

  She’d made a series of ambrotypes devoted to butterflies and moths—dead ones pinned to sumptuous fabrics: Japanese silk, Venetian cloth, Flemish lace, Italian brocade. They were gorgeous in their way. They would have delighted the eye and smoothed out the wrinkled brain of most people, but their prettiness rubbed me raw. Anna’s photographs showed a side of the world contrary to what William Jackson had taught me to see: the stark and brutal reality of the western plains and the half-tragic, half-lunatic emigrants who crawled over them. If we knew what waited for us, would we alter our courses—or are we fixed hypnotically, like a compass needle on the lodestone of our destinies?

  We kept company during the brief time allotted me by the urgency of history and my own death wish. We took our meals together and drank genteel spirits in keeping with the age’s idea of decorum. Even in San Francisco, women could not stray too far from propriety without tripping over their petticoats into the abyss: Fashionable Van Ness Avenue is only a block from sordid Polk Street. We went to the music halls on Geary Boulevard; we walked along the bay and saw the distant ocean from the Presidio. Coming from Philadelphia, I’d had my camera and supplies taken off the train at Omaha and sent on to wait for me at Fort Lincoln. I wanted to see the city in the way ordinary people do: imperfectly and dreamily. I sometimes wonder if real life is more truly apprehended by eyes not pressed to the camera back—heresy to Jackson. To look through a camera can be like being made to stare at the sun.

  Anna and I did not make love. I don’t remember why. Maybe we didn’t need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She’d been a midwife before she opened a studio; she’d held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy.

  Did she sense my frostiness? No, that wasn’t it: I was not—to my mind—the least cold toward her. As I recall, my mood was a match for the season and took its colors from the green of Golden Gate Park, with its vivid eucalyptus and pines. I’ve never been an optimist, but I was not cast down while Anna showed me her city. I was hardly aware of the dark purpose that had driven levity from my mind in Washington City, in Philadelphia, and on the train when Custer and I were carried down the rails toward our fatal intersection. My happiness in being with Anna over-ruled, for a time, the murder in my heart. If you’ll excuse the metaphor, she was a perfume drizzled over a corpse— man’s or beast’s, I’d had experience with both. No, there was nothing frosty in my attitude toward her; but she must have felt the sickness in me—in my soul, if you care for the word. The disease that undermined a perfect intimacy.

  And yet she said to me, “Why don’t you stay?”

  “What, here in San Francisco?”

  “We could open a studio together. Like your Jackson brothers.”

  I flirted with the idea while we took the Clay Street Hill Railroad up the steep way to Leavenworth—the city’s first cable car. Two years later, Leland Stanford would build his up Powell Street to save his horses the brutal climb to Nob Hill, showing a laudable sympathy he never wasted on his Central Pacific coolies. Anna wanted me to admire the view of the port beyond the hill, with its Calvary of masts. I did admire it while my mind spun the thread of her notion into a tapestry in which I saw myself photographing the city
and its hash of people. At the time, there was nothing like it for novelty and excitement. I thought I could get on well there with her.

  “You can make all the outdoor views you like,” she said as we stoked each other’s fancy. “The city’s growing like a field of Jimson weed. I’ll keep on with my portrait work. There’s plenty of business to keep us both busy. After a while, we can take a bigger studio and live on top of it.”

  “Might do,” I said, my imagination electric with the prospect of a new start. I saw myself living fixed, in a comfortable room whose window looked out on a street instead of on scenery flying past a train’s or else plodding by at the speed of a mule. I’d been on the move for fifteen years, ever since I boarded the Marion at Brooklyn, a green recruit. I felt played out, as if every mile of the thousands I’d covered had cost me a grain of sand or a particle of the iron a person is born with—call it courage or will, as you like. Suddenly, I felt I’d aged twice over during my twenty-seven years. I was tired of flight and of the black compulsions misdirecting my nagging heart. Who was Custer to me that I should forfeit the ordinary life of a man to destroy him? What was Fire Briskly Burning, or the Lakota Sioux, or the bison and ponies that I should spend unquiet days and restless nights contemplating their piteous ends?

  We went into a tearoom near Lotta’s Fountain and ate some fancy scones. The turmoil of my thoughts must have showed on my face; or perhaps Anna, like anyone used to looking hard, was able to see more clearly than most what my face concealed. I was expert at masking my fears and desires.

  “What’s wrong, Stephen?”

  “Nothing. I’m thinking is all.”

  “The frontier’s no place for you,” she said gravely. “Out there is death to a sympathetic nature, to reason—to anything but what is violent and uncouth, selfish and absurd. You’ve seen enough of the Wild West for one lifetime, Stephen. Here, you can begin to mend.”

  “Am I broken?” I asked. I knew the answer already, but I was curious to hear her opinion of my . . . soul. Damn it, Jay, I’ll use the word with or without your blessing! What were Crazy Horse’s dreams if not the glass plate by which his soul was made visible? I could not ridicule the idea of a human soul and still believe in that Indian and his visions of the future. Which I do!