by Andrew Pyper
“Oh, Jane. This again?”
She circled her hand over the bedsheets next to her, asking him to sit close. It was a struggle for him to slide along the few inches of the mattress’ edge to her hip.
“For a moment, don’t see me as the tricksome wife,” she said.
“How should I see you?”
“As the one who knows you to be good.”
Franklin almost yielded, if not to her argument than to her body, his head leaning closer to her shoulder in the yearning to be held, to rest. But his eyes found hers first and he saw in them the shards of the secret that still lived in her. He sat straight.
“Tell me this,” he said. “The one you call Sir and the Fox girls called Splitfoot—what are his designs? To haunt us? To drive us to madness?”
“He’s likely already succeeded on both counts.”
“So it is only that?”
She removed the black shawl she wore and let it fall behind her. The simplest of gestures, yet they both saw it for what it was. A removal of armor.
“I’m not certain of his plans,” she said. “But I believe he seeks to bring about destruction through us.”
“By wrongful actions.”
“By taking no actions at all. By plaguing you or whatever man is elected to replace you so that he can only see these rooms and the shadows that darken them, and not the people and truths outside the walls.”
“He means to blind me to the world.”
She remembered how Sir put it. I can break the world by breaking the mind of the man with power over it. Jane looked at her husband, gaunt and with a twitching blink she’d never noticed before, and saw how it was almost done. You break his heart.
“He means to turn you inward,” she said. “To see only the self. And through you, he hopes the country will do the same. Twenty million souls suffering alone.”
As had been the case on the occasions she’d been on her own too long, the speaking of her thought allowed her to see its meaning. Splitfoot could achieve little by himself. His power came through the division of man from neighbor, sister from brother, husband from wife. She had only to see what was left of her own family, her own marriage, for evidence.
“This matter we face—it’s personal,” Franklin said. “The nation doesn’t see what’s afflicted us here.”
“But it feels it. Are we not the First Family? Or what’s left of it.”
“Are you saying he means to hurt many by hurting us?”
“Many were already hurting. Bringing you low is meant to let the wounds fester.” Her voice quieted as it grew in intensity. “The newspapers confirm it. Every story tells a different version of the same condition. State against state. The rights of one race against another. The free and the enslaved. All of it as far from God’s kingdom as he can drag it.”
“But there’s still further he can disassemble the union,” Franklin said, and Jane understood what he referred to. The taking up of arms. The spread of bloodshed beyond Kansas and the western frontier. Civil war.
“Yes,” she said.
Franklin looked down at his spotted hands laid unmoving on his lap. “How to divert him?”
“Do what you can. Call upon your goodness instead of compromise,” she said. “That’s how Sir can be confronted.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure that the time for evading choice is over.”
Even in the candlelight they could hardly see each other. It drew them closer still. Jane pulled her dress from her shoulders, and Franklin put his hands on their pale corners, guiding his head to hers, his lips.
Both of them expected the other to pause, or speak, but neither did. There was enough warmth under the covers that let them undress without shivering. Their skin brought a new kind of heat.
Afterward, they lay on their backs, legs entwined. There was a quiet between them that was partly the calm that followed lovemaking, partly the strain to hear something in the darkness they felt was there.
When they finally heard it, their bodies went stiff. The heat drawn away from the points where they touched.
Something moved between the walls. Heavy and slow, yet never struggling to find its way. Every unremarkable thing it might be was eliminated from their minds. Mouse, squirrel, bird, bat.
It sounded less like a rodent than a snake, one of a length that could wrap itself around the entire room, its tail curling up into the ceiling, its head bumping and sliding under the boards beneath their bed.
“It’s him,” Jane whispered.
How did he know whom she meant? Because he was the boy’s father, just as she was his mother. The two of them could recognize the sound of Bennie’s step without seeing him.
They would have held each other closer if they didn’t worry that the movement of their bodies would alert the thing in the walls to where they lay.
But of course it knew. It’s why it came to this room rather than the hundred others in the house. Why it kept moving around them through the night, denying them sleep. Why at one point, minutes before the dawn when it could see that its prowling had left them as solitary and wrecked as they had been the evening before, it uttered a new sound.
From behind the plaster, muffled as a voice within a pine box, Bennie laughed.
29
The president’s first order of the day to his secretary was to arrange a cabinet meeting to be held in the Blue Room that afternoon.
“Is there an emergency I’m not aware of, sir?” Webster asked, rising from his desk to summon messengers to descend on the Capitol offices and nearby apartments where the leadership of the Pierce administration would still be hunched over their breakfasts.
“Don’t phrase it in those terms,” Franklin said, rubbing his stubbled cheeks so hard it left scratch marks on his palms. “Tell them it’s a conversation on policy. One that can’t wait.”
Webster gave him a look. It wasn’t of the kind Franklin was expecting, the brow-raised show of doubt, or the fey curiosity that fell just short of disrespectful. This was concern. For Pierce’s state of mind, yes, but also the state of the household, the nation, and most apparent, Webster himself.
“Are you feeling all right?” Franklin asked him as the man made his way for the door. “You look like you’ve been at sea.”
“Fine, sir. It’s only that I stayed late in my office yesterday and fell asleep in my chair.”
“You slept here last night?”
“Didn’t leave my chair.”
“I see.”
Webster looked down at his shoes, stricken. “It was— There were things that—”
“It can be a noisy place in the nighttime,” Franklin said, sparing his secretary from saying something he clearly preferred not to. If Webster had heard even a fraction of the noises coming from within the mansion’s walls that he and Jane had, Franklin pitied him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Best if you slept in your own bed in future.”
“I believe you’re right, sir. Thank you.”
It would otherwise be the moment for Webster to clip away to carry out his orders, but on this morning the secretary lingered.
“May I ask how you are, sir?” he asked.
“Would you prefer the truth or polite fabrication?”
“The truth, I think. There’s enough of the latter in Washington to last anyone a dozen lifetimes.”
Franklin sighed. A long breath that took longer to resolve than either of them expected.
“I’m not at all certain I’m fit for this position, Webster.”
“None are, sir.”
“No?”
“Polk. Jefferson. Washington himself. The nation has lifted them to the heights of deities, but in rooms like this, they were each of them only men, making decisions as best they could.”
“It’s the decision-making I’m never sure of.”
“How could you be? Your choices won’t be fairly judged until we are both long removed from this house.”
“Fr
om this world, you mean.”
“Yes. Possibly only then.”
Franklin rose from his chair.
“I’d like to share something with you that you might find strange, but there’s no other way to phrase it,” he said. “I fear things may grow turbulent in the days to come. Not in the capital but here, in this house. Forgive me for not speaking of the threat directly, but I don’t honestly know what shape it will take. I’m asking for your courage, Webster, but also your discretion. What you will see, what you may be called upon to do—it must stay with us. Do you understand?”
Webster looked shaken. Not by the mystery of Franklin’s request, but his awareness of its meaning.
“I have lived easily and well until now, but also with the guilt of both,” Webster said. “I welcome any test. Perhaps just as you do, sir?”
“How do you mean?”
“We’re both driven by the memories of our fathers. And their fathers. A line of soldiers we wish to join.”
“We’re men in search of a battle. That it?”
“We’re men in search of a chance to show we aren’t afraid.”
For the first time, Franklin saw the precise terms with which Webster cared for him. Prior to this he’d assumed his secretary was the sort of man who responded to authority with the desire to please, or perhaps to be transported on coattails. And there were moments when the thought occurred to Franklin that there was more to it in Webster’s case, an intensity that came from attraction, the invitation to love he’d felt from a couple of friends in college, and later, even some married men in courthouses and Congress. But he saw now that his secretary was motivated by the opportunity to put aside the demons of self-doubt he carried. Webster was no unrequited lover, nor sycophant. He was a brother.
“Then let us be ready when the chance comes,” Franklin said, and shook Webster’s hand with a firmness that steadied them both.
* * *
Franklin arrived last. As he walked into the elliptical Blue Room with what he hoped was a purposeful countenance he saw how the faces of his government, secretary by secretary, fell before correcting themselves. His careful shaving and extra hair tonic hadn’t worked. He looked worse than he already guessed he did.
“Welcome, and thank you for coming,” he said, and the men, every one of them older than he, rose on stiff hips and gouty feet to shake the president’s hand.
Pierce had forged a deliberately blended cabinet, each member selected to offset the baggage brought by the others. His picks included political rivals within the party (notably William Marcy, secretary of state, who ran for the leadership in Baltimore only to lose to an absent Pierce) along with those to be counted on for their faithfulness, all of whom were carefully pieced together according to geography, state by state, North versus South.
The idea was to avoid either side of the slavery question from being able to claim neglect. It had worked so far, up to a point. Aside from the predictable squawking from the extremes, Pierce was largely spared from criticism that he showed favoritism to either the Democratic Party’s abolitionist or proslavery factions, the Know Nothings or doughfaces. But all this compromising was the cause of its own problem. The fundamental question of one’s right to own slaves went undebated, beyond the government’s position that some would have the right and others not, as determined by precedent within particular states and, in the case of new territories like Kansas and Nebraska, their own votes.
The issue, then, wasn’t an issue. Except it was the only issue.
Over and over, in virtually every exchange of business or domestic policy, it hovered over the proceedings like a wraith, one that increased its demands to be seen the longer it was pretended not to exist.
That’s how Franklin thought of it now and would continue to think of it for the rest of his life. A flesh-and-blood ghost. Like the dead child he’d let slip out of his room. The furnace keeper. The men who warmed themselves at the bottommost part of America’s house.
“Well, Mr. President,” Marcy began, assuming the role of chairman as was his habit, “we’re all very curious to hear of the matter that brings us together in such haste.”
“Won’t you sit, gentlemen?” Franklin replied, acknowledging his secretary of state with a nod while ignoring his words. Each of them found the chair they’d risen from, letting Franklin take the one with its back to the windows. “I’ve called you here for an open discussion, one I’ve felt compelled to entertain with increasing urgency these last number of days.”
They all sat forward at the same time.
In addition to Marcy, there was Kentuckian James Guthrie from the Treasury. Guthrie had the appearance of a man who’d survived an illness against the physician’s predictions and had come out the other side with a glimpse of the afterlife that he found disappointing.
A fellow Southerner was Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, secretary of war. Davis’s face was as puckered as a raisin, but without the promise of sweetness within. Yet he was noble in appearance compared to Caleb Cushing, attorney general from Massachusetts, a doughface in both the political and physical sense. Franklin noted how the absent members, away on travel or ill-disposed, happened to be those more friendly to abolition, relatively speaking.
“Be assured, sir, we relish open discussion,” Marcy offered, once again overstepping his place, or at least this is how it sounded to Franklin’s ear, sensitive as it was to condescension.
“As you know,” Franklin carried on, “our policies are built on the foundation of westward expansion and the opportunities it will bring—”
“Has brought,” Guthrie interjected. He liked to credit himself for cutting the national debt in half in record time whenever possible, preferably without mentioning the discovery of gold in California that paid for it.
“Indeed, we must acknowledge the opportunities it has brought to our pockets and to our global esteem. But it also brings conflict. And I now fear these troubles are bound only to get worse.”
Davis rubbed his hands over the tops of his pants as if to dry them of sweat. “What conflicts and troubles are you speaking of ?”
“We’ve got Free Soilers rioting in Kansas like medieval crusaders, and on the other side we’ve got Border Ruffians pouring in to tip the votes in slavery’s favor. Arguably events occurring on the periphery. A flared temper here, a feud a thousand miles away. Yet I fear they won’t remain so far off, nor will the resentments closer to home stay within our control.”
He was saying too much, no matter how well he was saying it. This was Franklin’s shortcoming, one he was aware of, but in moments of uncertainty—in all of the moments when the eyes of the meeting hall or churchyard or Congress fell on him—he reverted to the rag-and-polish of speechmaking instead of the hammer-and-nail of commands.
“Not following you, sir,” Guthrie said, following well enough.
“If we can’t do what’s required to keep the peace, perhaps we should consider”—Franklin almost finished his sentence by saying doing what is right, but he hedged, again—“a change in course.”
Marcy scowled. It was an effortless expression for him, as his skin was set in a mask of disapproval at all times.
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“A reconsideration. A hard look at how expansion without Washington’s attention to its promulgation of slavery is a policy actively in support of it.”
“We aren’t in support of it,” Davis said, as if the words were clumps of ash in his mouth. “We permit it. But we are in support of commerce, are we not?”
“In some parts of the country the two are bound together. Perhaps it is the time for us to separate the two.”
“A fine thought!” Davis exclaimed, almost spitting on the floor before remembering his place. “As you may recall, sir, I’m a plantation owner myself. Cotton. Among my assets are, at last count, seventy-two Africans. How do you propose I separate my business from myself ? Give it away?”
“I understand how you would s
ee it in such terms,” Franklin said. “I’m asking you to see if differently. As a matter of rights.”
Davis was about to launch another rebuttal, but Guthrie raised an arthritic hand to ask for a turn of his own.
“With respect, Pierce, you sleep in this house and sit in that chair to serve a single purpose, and that is to hold up the principle of states’ rights,” the old dog growled. “Now you’re saying—well, what? We’re overnight abolitionists? They’ll have our damned throats next!”
“Don’t tell me what my purpose is,” Franklin said. “We are all still free thinkers.”
“Not here we’re not. We’ve got a line to hold.”
“What about the line between good and evil?”
“What about the Mason-Dixon Line! Can we keep our eyes on the map instead of scripture while in the White House? This is no church, Mr. President, despite your abrupt conversion.”
“Gentlemen!”
Cushing stood, and the rest of the room looked to him. It prompted the attorney general to sit again, flustered, as if their eyes reminded him of his small stature, and that standing lent him no more authority than sitting.
“I ask that we let Mr. Pierce lay out his case,” he said.
Only a few minutes earlier Franklin had entered the cornerless room tired but buoyed by the knowledge of what must be done. There was a shade in the president’s house. One that would cast a lengthening darkness over the nation unless he could step outside his role for once, to act instead of being an actor. Now he surveyed the gray faces of the politicians in a circle in front of him and saw the depth of his error. Maybe there was another way, in another house, to vanquish the one Jane called Sir by shining a light into the corners where it dwelled. But this wasn’t like other houses. And he wasn’t its master, only a tenant. It would be easier to make a change in himself as a common man than as president.
“Rest assured, I’m not a mystic,” Franklin continued, sitting straight. “But I have seen some things from the lookout of this office that, I believe, signal events to come. Conflicts greater than those we tell ourselves are presently being managed. Bloodletting of a kind that surpasses today’s sporadic murders on the frontier. We need to pause and consider our path.”
