Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  At Lafayette Square, just past the big granite hip of the Treasury Department, Trist stopped and checked his watch, pointlessly. Looked to the left at the drowsy front porch of the White House; the elegant redbrick town houses in facing rows on two sides of the square, the yellow Adams house on the top, a hundred yards or so away.

  He opened the iron gate and sat down on the nearest bench, under an elm whose green branches hung so low they partially obscured the statue of Andy Jackson and the occasional passerby on one of the diagonal paths. He might just as well have accused himself of deliberately arriving early, lying in wait. He did; he was.

  At a minute or two past three, while the bells on St. John’s church were still ringing, Elizabeth Cameron stopped in front of a puddle twenty feet from his bench. She was dressed in a blue striped polonaise and a pouf bustle and a patterned scarf tossed around her shoulders with a jaunty flair. She frowned at the puddle and lifted the hem of her skirt with one hand.

  “Mrs. Cameron, bonjour.”

  The hand dropped quickly, her right foot swung to the left, and she looked up at him with a perfectly gorgeous smile. “Mr. Trist.”

  “I thought you might be going to General Beale’s for tea.”

  “I am, yes. My husband is already there. They had a late meal, I think, then a meeting, and I lost track of time.”

  “There was a wit in Paris, walking on the Champs-Élysées, knocked down by a workman who was carrying a grandfather clock. ‘Why don’t you wear a wristwatch,’ he said, ‘like everybody else?’ ”

  She laughed and brushed back a strand of hair with one hand, and Trist took a step toward her. Her smile vanished in a flash.

  “There come the Adamses,” she said.

  Around the corner of H Street, mounted on two brown mares, Clover and Henry Adams seemed to see them at exactly the same moment. Sidesaddle, Clover flicked her reins expertly and turned the horse in their direction.

  “I thought you were Senator Don,” she said with a nod and a smile to Trist when she reached the gate, “and then not.”

  “Quite not,” said Adams, with only a nod, no smile.

  Elizabeth busied herself with the muzzle of Clover’s horse. “Mr. Trist is on his way to General Beale’s, for tea. We happened to meet,” she added unnecessarily, “just now.”

  “Well, tea,” said Clover, “what is so nice as tea with the Beales? And to have an escort as well.”

  “I should have assumed,” Henry Adams said dryly, “that Lafayette Square was a safe enough environs to cross without a bodyguard.”

  “General Grant,” Trist began, “is supposed to be at the Beales’—”

  “And you’ve come to interview him,” Clover interrupted, “a newspaper ‘scoop’—am I right?”

  “He came, he saw, he had tea.” Adams seemed unusually dyspeptic. He snapped his riding crop against the mare’s flank, and the horse jerked her head up in surprise, snorting, and took two or three splayed steps backward into the street.

  “And I know he’s there,” Clover said, bending forward and stroking her own horse’s quivering neck, “because I saw him arrive on Sunday. From our front window. A great deal of fuss and far too many black carriages.”

  “Mrs. Adams sits at her window on Sunday mornings,” Elizabeth Cameron explained, looking down at the horse’s hoofs. “She smiles and watches the rest of us trudge to church. It’s very wicked of her.”

  “It is,” Clover agreed cheerfully. “I sit and watch funerals too, but they make me hungry. The hearses always look like bonbons on wheels.”

  “Grant must be planning his campaign strategy. And ‘strategy’ is the right word, for once, eh, Mr. Trist?” Henry Adams nudged his horse forward, inches from Trist, lifted his right hand to shade his eyes against the sun’s glare, and studied the front of the Beale house through the trees. “Since the Democrats are certain to nominate General Hancock. Duo strategoi, what?”

  “I don’t know the word.” Trist was standing so close that the mare’s big shoulders literally pressed against his flat left shoulder. “Sorry.”

  “Greek,” Adams said. “Stratego means ‘general’ in Greek. I thought you would know. Two presidential generals,” he repeated for the ladies, with a mock sigh and a shake of his head. “And Garfield waiting in the wings, another general. Hancock’s speeches are a wilderness of clichés, Grant scarcely speaks at all except to say, ‘Let us have peace.’ The whole country fights and refights the war as if it had never ended. Meanwhile the world is shifting under our feet.”

  “Henry is making a speech,” Clover said.

  “We live in the past,” Adams told Elizabeth Cameron. “Heads buried in the sand.”

  Not for the first time Trist wondered about the Adamses’ manner of speaking to each other, intimate, parallel, but neither ever quite answering or responding to what the other said. Marital geometry, he thought, parallels that don’t meet.

  “That’s kind of a surprising complaint,” he said, “for a former professor of history.”

  Adams smiled, a broad, charming, entirely unexpected smile that lit up his face with intelligence. “Touché, Mr. Trist,” he said, and pulled his reins back as if to depart. “I see you’re reading Democracy.” He pointed the crop at Trist’s pocket.

  “It’s very good, yes.”

  “I never read fiction,” Adams said. Then over his shoulder as the horse swung around: “I understand you write sometimes now for the Post?”

  Trist nodded warily.

  “Not,” Adams said, still smiling, “a great newspaper.”

  ONE HUNDRED YARDS AWAY, IN THE SECOND-FLOOR DRAWING room of the Decatur House, great, heroic, impassive Grant crossed in front of the Martin Van Buren window with his cup of coffee in his hand.

  He smiled to himself as he sat down in General Beale’s favorite chair. Great, heroic, impassive—powerful adjectives, fresh as his coffee, right out of an article in the New York World that very morning by John Russell Young, and Grant supposed they were meant to flatter him, or make him seem imposing and mysterious, “great” enough to attract any undecided Republican votes, “heroic” enough to overcome any third-term objections. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror as he sat down. The idea of writing, he assumed, was to place a grip on reality. He had never thought adjectives had much to do with reality.

  “We were talking about the Mexican War,” Beale said to Don Cameron, who stood by a silver coffee urn (one of Mrs. Beale’s outstandingly ugly European purchases) and a porcelain china tea service so far untouched by anybody. Cameron spooned extra sugar into his cup and peered at it, as if in hope of a miracle of transubstantiation, coffee to bourbon. Grant knew the look.

  “Well, I don’t remember a damn thing about the Mexican War,” Cameron said. “I was ten years old. But it sure as hell won’t bring us any votes.”

  “A politically irrelevant war,” Beale agreed. He puffed his cheeks and pursed his lips like a carp. Beale had recently shaved off his beard, one of the few clean-shaven men his own age that Grant knew, and up close, below his sideburns, you could see little shiny dots of whisker in the skin, like flecks of mica, where the razor had missed. Beale, of course, had run his own irrelevant side-war, so to speak, on the Mexican coast, selling contraband, buying up land, Beale and an Indian scout named Kit Carson, and he had ended up being made governor, if Grant remembered right, of a California district called San Jose.

  “I once built a signal fire at San Pasquale,” Beale confided, sitting down next to Grant. “Entirely and completely out of poison oak branches. Dumbest thing I ever did. Thought I had caught Pharaoh’s plague. The smoke was what did it. Took me a week to get over the itch.”

  Grant laughed and looked affectionately over at Beale. There was something comfortable and comforting about a man of your own generation. A wealthy man, too, he thought, as he took in the newly remodeled elegance of Beale’s house, with its floral tapestries and its teakwood cabinets and display cases and fine Louis Tiffany lamps, and its spl
endid view of Lafayette Square and, just in one corner, the President’s Palace, where Grant had once lived; and might live again.

  “Now we ought to talk about the convention. Two months is not a long time off.” Businesslike, impatient, Cameron spread some of his papers across the quilted ottoman in front of his chair. He started to go over the delegations again briskly, who was for whom, state by state. Like a commanding general, Grant thought, and smiled again, inwardly. Outwardly, he was sure, nobody could have told that his mind was elsewhere, lazily turning over thoughts, memories, making similes. His mental process, he believed, resembled an old Missouri farmer digging at a stump, slowly prying it up from the dirt, excavating his idea. There were two parts to the world. There was the outward world of mass and line, force and counterforce, noun and verb, that the eye took in and the body felt. And there was the world inside the closed blank sphere of his mind, a kind of fragile white eggshell of consciousness through which he could see, but dimly; dimly. He knew he seemed silent, impassive; he knew other people mistook that for strength.

  Cameron asked him a question about the Illinois delegation and Elihu Washburne, but because he hadn’t quite heard the question he simply sat in his chair with his cup of coffee and said nothing. Cameron fidgeted. Beale looked out the window and waved. The clock on the mantel ticked. Abruptly Cameron went on to his next sheet of paper.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT

  by Sylvanus Cadwallader

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BENJAMIN LOUIS EULALIE DE BONNEVILLE—NAME LIKE sweet French brandy, fairly curls around your flat American tongue, does it not?

  Eulalie de Bonneville was born in Paris in 1796—an eighteenth-century man by the skin of his teeth. His family fled Napoleon for the New World shortly after his birth, and the boy, without much schooling or influence, somehow ended up at West Point, class of 1815; somehow after that was assigned, despite manifest incompetence, to lead an exploring party through fur-trap and Indian country, up the Columbia River to Hudson’s Bay, object: Fort Vancouver.

  Never mind that he got so completely lost that he never managed to find Vancouver; or that he got lost again in the next few years, repeatedly, in the Cascade Mountains and then the Rockies, and only emerged into dim mediocrity when he fought alongside Scott in the Valley of Mexico. Bonneville had the comic French touch for strutting self-display. He refused to wear military headgear, sported instead an enormous stiff white beaver stovepipe hat that made him look tall and imposing, not short and bald; he sought out newspaper reporters to write about his supposed adventures, including the nostalgic rumor that he was secretly the illegitimate son of the Marquis de Lafayette. That fat-bottomed New York–Dutch journalist Washington Irving swallowed his story whole and wrote a book that made our Frenchman famous. Last time I looked, a grateful and gullible nation had even named some arid, godforsaken stretch of scrub desert after him, out near the Great Salt Lake.

  But in the year 1852 Bonneville was still in the army, not on the maps, a flap-jowled, petulant little infantry lieutenant colonel; and much to his disgust and dismay one fine day in the spring of that pleasant year he was put in charge of the U.S. Fourth Infantry, Sackets Harbor, New York, and ordered to take it at once across the Isthmus of Panama and up the Pacific coast to California.

  Now this was welcome news to Lieutenant Grant. California was in the grip of a gold-and-land rush such as never had been seen, the place was one great big golden throbbing nerve, and the army was frantically needed to keep the Indians and displaced Mexicans calm and maintain a semblance of general order. Opportunities for promotion here. And if not promotion, numerous soldiers sent to California had already dropped out of rank, bought a pickax and a pan, and struck it rich, and as long as I have known Grant he has entertained the fantasy that sooner or later he too will stub his toe on a rock or scratch at some dirt and likewise strike it rich.

  Add to that the fact that life at Sackets Harbor had become as blank as a bowl of water.

  The drawback was that Julia was in the family way again and she and the baby boy couldn’t go with him. And the second drawback was that Colonel Bonneville for unknown reasons took an instant, permanent, and querulous dislike to Grant and tried to have him demoted from his regimental quartermaster post. (Flamboyant people, Sherman excepted, often don’t like Grant.) The other officers protested: Grant was quiet and inconspicuous but he got his job done. Bonneville waved his hand airily, Frenchily. All right, then let the quartermaster work out how to transport seven hundred soldiers and a hundred or so wives and children on a steamship built for three hundred and fifty, let the quartermaster manage the trip.

  The quartermaster built a set of clever berths and bunks on the outer decks, measured and paced and sawed and hammered and actually squeezed them all aboard. Bonneville snorted, disappeared into his own private cabin. On July 5th, the U.S. Fourth Infantry cruised out of New York harbor and set off down the Atlantic toward the Gulf of Mexico.

  I happened one day at City Point, Virginia, summer of 1864, to make the acquaintance of the former captain of that little paddle steamer, an elderly party named J. Finley Schenck, then employed on the army hospital ships that crawled up and down the James. Schenck remembered that Quartermaster Grant, if you ever got past the diffidence and shyness, was a thoughtful but high-strung man; talkative, not phlegmatic. Everything to do with the voyage devolved on him. Schenck wrote it up in a note for me—“Most conscientious. Grant never went to bed before three in the morning, after he had seen to everybody’s needs. He paced the decks and soothed people’s nerves; he smoked cigars eternally. I told him the first day if he needed a drink to stop by my cabin anytime. Every night after that, after I turned in, I would hear him, once or twice, sometimes more, open the door and walk softly over the floor, so as not to disturb me; then I would hear the clink of a glass and a gurgle and he would walk softly back.”

  They docked at a town called Aspinwall, on the Gulf side of the Isthmus, July 13th, and stepped down the gangplank into a green, wet, and scummy hell. I have a copy somewhere of Dante’s Inferno, translated by H. W. Longfellow, about which chiefly I remember that I was surprised that Dante thought Hades was going to be as cold as ice, not hot as … Panama, I suppose. Nobody who hasn’t been there can imagine the heat, the dripping orange flame-colored sky, the daily equatorial rain that hits your bare skin like drops of scalding oil—they get twelve feet of rain a year in that part of Panama. The sidewalks in Aspinwall were all eight inches under water. You waded through mud and slime, mosquitoes, sandflies, snakes—the town was built on a stinking marsh where the railroad construction crews had hauled loose fill—up to the edge of the jungle. There the great but unfinished Panama Railroad waited, steaming and sweating, for its passengers.

  Bonneville was no help. Took off his high beaver hat, wiped his jowls; climbed in the nearest railroad carriage and waited. Quartermaster Grant got them all out of Aspinwall without incident, twenty-five miles of rickety one-track vertigo, up the Chagres River to the end of the line. At a little town named Barancos they clambered into a fleet of dugout canoes, bungoes, poled by naked Indians and Negroes. At an even smaller town upriver called Gorgona, most of the able-bodied troops swung out of their bungoes and said good-bye to the civilians. According to the War Department’s plan the soldiers were to march twenty-five miles or so, straight from there to the Pacific and Panama City and a waiting troopship. Wives and children were to travel farther upstream to the village of Cruces, where the army had arranged for mules to carry them and the regiment’s surplus equipment down an easier path to Panama City.

  What the army hadn’t foreseen was the absence of actual mules in Cruces.

  Or the presence of cholera.

  Here is what happens when you take sick with cholera.

  First comes the diarrhea that wrings you out like a filthy rag. Then vomiting, violent and constant. After that, cramps begin in the legs and torture their way up to the belly. Then a t
hirst like burning sand starts in your throat. Your skin turns blue toward the end, your voice gives way to a hoarse, gagging croak that the medics call “vox cholerica.” Healthy on Monday, sick on Tuesday; dead and buried Wednesday.

  The promised mules of Cruces had all been hired away earlier, free-market style, at inflated prices to California-bound miners coming through first. The best that Grant could do was to round up what few beasts remained, at double the authorized prices, and find some native bearers who would carry boxes or sling canvas hammocks between their shoulders for the weakest women and children. And even this took time. The army buried some of their number right at Cruces. At the end of a week, when everybody and everything that could be hired was hired, Grant gathered them all at the edge of the village. One hundred and twenty guards, women, children. They started off single file, heading west.

  A two-day trip, normally. In July, a walking, sweltering, endless nightmare. The jungle crowded in like a hot green blanket. The sides of the path, one-mule wide, were on fire with flowers. Monkeys and parrots screeched and chattered overhead in the coconut palms. Where there was water it was covered with thick gray slime—Grant warned them not to touch it, told them to drink the colonel’s wine or nothing, but such was the heat that few listened. When the Americans stopped for the night they would wearily watch the native cooks chewing sugarcane, then spitting into a pot for sweetener. Rains came daily. Cholera victims would suddenly slide off their mules or tumble from their hammocks. Sometimes they buried their dead in the mire, in the roots and blossoms tangled along the foot of the path. Sometimes the native bearers would simply fling them back across the donkeys, or roll them like logs into a hammock.

  More than a third of the party died before they reached Panama City—of twenty children, only three survived—and many more died soon after that. The idiot Colonel Bonneville had already hustled all his people aboard the troopship, even the ones who were showing sick. Grant and the regimental doctor were horrified, and Grant hurried back to shore, where he leased (unauthorized) the unused hulk of an abandoned clipper ship out in the harbor. The shore authorities had by now quarantined the Americans, so Grant and the regimental doctor carried the sick and dying over to the hospital ship in dinghies and then organized shifts of volunteers to tend them. Bonneville thought this was an excess of authority and threatened the doctor with court-martial (ignored).