“Nathaniel,” he said at last, signing his name to a paper with a flourish. He did not return Peregrine’s salute but handed him the document he had just finished composing.
General Order Number 28 was being issued, the document declared, in response to the uncivilized manner in which the women of New Orleans treated Union soldiers.
Peregrine read: Hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her trade .
“What do you think the rebs will say about that?”
“It will offend their Southern sense of chivalry to have you ordering Union soldiers to treat their women like common prostitutes if they insult us,” Peregrine said.
“To hell with Southern chivalry. Do you know what they call me behind my back, Nathaniel? ‘Spoons’ Butler. Of all the infernal cheek. Spoons! The gossips say I confiscated the silver from the Crescent City’s homes and churches to line my own pockets. You know that I gave no such order. If liberties were taken, then it’s no more than what the traitors deserved. The eight hundred thousand dollars I confiscated from the Dutch consulate—tongues are wagging over that, of course—was being held in escrow to purchase rebel war supplies. You know I’m not averse to taking stern measures when they are warranted. The fellow I hanged for hauling down the Union flag at the Mint, for example. How do these people expect me to react to such a provocation?”
Butler took the proclamation out of Peregrine’s hands and bellowed for the lieutenant manning the desk outside the office. He handed him General Order Number 28 and ordered it be posted throughout the city without delay.
“They can hate me all they want,” he said to Peregrine, “but they’ll damned well obey me.”
Butler came around his desk toward a pair of leather club chairs arranged on either side of a smoking stand. He lowered himself into a seat and indicated to Peregrine to accommodate himself in the other. Butler lit a cigar and puffed quietly for nearly a minute, meditating on the cloud of blue smoke swirling in the air. Peregrine studied a map of the city opposite his chair. The cigar Mordecai Johnstone had given him stayed in the pocket of his jacket. His head was beginning to ache. It was not a cigar he craved, but a pipe.
“That was a rum business last night at the Chinaman’s,” Butler said at last.
“Yes, sir. I want you to know that I didn’t have anything to do with those people getting hurt.”
“Of course you didn’t. You’re a Union officer, and a highly decorated one at that. The idea that you could sully your hands with crime is unthinkable.”
Peregrine felt his face redden.
“Did you find and arrest that strange woman?”
“Woman?” Butler’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know anything about a woman. The Chinaman is the one responsible for those foul deeds.”
“Yu didn’t hurt anybody.”
“He damned well did. Five people he murdered, two of them defenseless women. And worse than that, he came this close to murdering my most-decorated brigadier general.”
“I’m afraid a mistake has been made, General Butler.”
“No mistake,” Butler said, underlining each word with a slashing movement of his cigar. “It’s all in the report. You can read it, if you want. I have taken care that your name is not mentioned. Once his clients were rendered insensible with drugs, the Chinaman strangled them one by one. The motive, it seems, was theft.”
“But they weren’t strangled, sir,” Peregrine argued. “The puncture wounds in their necks—”
“There were no wounds,” Butler said, cutting him off. “None whatsoever. You’re lucky you got out alive. If Captain O’Rourke hadn’t come looking for you, your body would be in a pine box right now, on a train home for burial, killed by that murdering yellow bastard.”
“My God,” Peregrine said.
“Buck up, son,” Butler said, misinterpreting Peregrine’s frustration. “You’ve survived close scrapes before and will do so again. You need to save your luck to use against the real enemy, not some yellow-skinned, squint-eyed hophead.”
“I saw the wounds, General Butler. Here—in the neck, a pair of punctures as if made by some beast’s teeth.”
“Nathaniel, stop. That is an order. There were no wounds. Ask O’Rourke.”
Peregrine opened his mouth, but the look Butler gave him led him to shut it again, as Butler glared like a minor devil through a mephitic exhalation of blue smoke.
“You weren’t in any condition, Nathaniel, to know what you did or didn’t see last night. No doubt you also saw purple-spotted elephants dancing about. Not even a bourbon-drooling, cousin-marrying, backwoods Southern judge would consider the testimony of a witness who was insensate from the effects of smoking opium at the time of the crime. We gave the Chinaman a drumhead trial—which was more than he had coming, if you ask me—and hanged him at dawn. I’ve ordered all the hop joints in the city closed. This sort of thing will not happen again on Benjamin F. Butler’s watch.”
Butler reached inside his jacket as he spoke and withdrew a folded paper, which he unfolded with great drama.
“This is a telegram from the War Department. It says”—he paused a beat for effect—“that Halleck is putting you forward for the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery at Antietam.”
Peregrine’s face began to burn again. “I don’t deserve that.”
“Stuff and nonsense, Nathaniel. If you hadn’t held your men together when A. P. Hill finally attacked to pull Lee’s chestnuts out of the fire, it would have turned into a rout. The Union can’t afford many more battlefield fiascos if we’re going to put down this damned insurrection. I suspect President Lincoln himself gave Halleck the idea about putting you forward for recognition. I understand you and the president are old friends.”
“That’s hardly the case. I don’t even remember the president visiting me in the field hospital. I was out of my head from blood loss.”
Butler turned sideways in his chair and regarded Peregrine closely, his small, shrewd eyes shining. “The Union needs heroes, Nathaniel. People imagined the war would be over in three months, and now here it is dragging into its third year. The authorities in New York are worried that there will be draft riots if Mr. Lincoln orders up any more conscripts, as he certainly must do.”
Butler pushed his head forward on his neck, like a snapping turtle contemplating a minnow with unblinking eyes.
“You need to pull yourself together, Nathaniel. You’re too valuable a man to the cause for me to have to hang you. Do I make myself clear?”
“Clear as a bell, sir.”
Butler puffed thoughtfully on his cigar, his manner softening, the need to threaten past.
“I know you are grieving for your family, Nathaniel, but you need to swallow your grief before it consumes you. You are certain to ruin your health as well as your career if you continue on this path. It’s time you did some hard thinking about your situation after the war, my boy. An educated and handsome young fellow, with a battlefield promotion to brigadier general and a chest loaded with gleaming medals, will have excellent prospects once we whip the rebs. This war isn’t going to last forever, you know. We need to make the most of our opportunities. But a word to the wise, Nathaniel: Don’t hitch your star to your friend Mr. Lincoln. He can’t possibly win reelection in 1864. The way the war has gone, the voters are certain to send him back to Springfield to practice law.”
“Have you considered my request for transfer to a battlefield unit, sir?”
“Ha ha!” Butler leaned over and slapped Peregrine’s knee. “You are an ambitious young man. But you have not fully recovered from your wounds.”
“I am fit enough.”
Butler squinted at him through the smoke. “Your skin has an unhealthy pallor.”
“Yes, from being penned up in this infernal city of traitors.”
“Don’t think your
prospects to kill rebs will be limited by serving under me, Nathaniel. I’m promised a command in Virginia as soon as Banks can relieve me. If you remain on my staff, I can promise you all the fighting you can stand.”
“Begging your pardon, General, but I am anxious to get back into the field as soon as possible. Sitting in this rebel city with little to meaningfully occupy my time is doing me no good.”
“I will give the matter consideration,” Butler said. “The War Department would have to agree. They won’t be anxious to send one of our most decorated heroes back in harm’s way.”
“My job is killing rebels, sir.”
“And you’ve proven you are very good at it. Now, Nathaniel, regarding the other unpleasant matter…”
Butler reached for the ashtray to unburden his cigar of a precariously long ash.
“You are hardly the first officer to develop an unhealthy friendship with the poppy while recovering from wounds. I am a worldly man. I understand that men must have their vices. But in a civil society, it is necessary for government to define the limits of what will be tolerated. We are a nation of laws, Nathaniel. That is why we will win this war. We have right on our side. We are doing the Lord’s work, fighting to free the slaves from bondage, although what we will do with them after the war remains to be seen.” His voice fell slightly. “Confidentially, I question whether it is healthy for the races to mingle. Perhaps the best answer is to repatriate the Africans to the Dark Continent.”
“My wounds cause me little pain now,” Peregrine said. “I no longer need the medicine. I can wean myself from it.”
“I know you can, son. Get a grip on yourself and you’ll pull through. You must put the past behind you and look to tomorrow. A man of your qualities has a very bright future indeed.”
3
Saints Preserve Us
“WHAT DID YOU see last night at Yu’s?” Peregrine asked. “You were there, sir. You saw what I saw.”
“The bite marks in their necks—you know Evangeline and the others weren’t strangled?”
O’Rourke gave Peregrine a long look. “No, sir, I saw none o’ that.”
“Forget what Butler told you to tell people. Man-to-man, Seamus, what you saw.”
“Aye, a grim scene it was. There will be more than one nightmare born of that, I’ll wager. But I saw nothing to do with bite marks, sir, not that I looked any harder than I needed to be sure those poor people were dead.”
The saloon keeper came to the end of the bar where Peregrine and O’Rourke were standing, bringing two glasses and a bottle.
“ ’Tis a salutary thing, a glass of whiskey,” O’Rourke said, raising his glass after the bartender had turned away. “It gives strength to the weak, sight to the blind, and comfort to the afflicted, the perfect medicine.”
O’Rourke touched his glass to Peregrine’s and they both drank. Whiskey would take some of the edge off the sickness rising in Peregrine’s belly.
“I haven’t thanked you,” Peregrine said into his glass.
“Not to mention it, sir. As concerns to your safety, it was your interview today with old Spoons that had me worried.”
“General Butler was most accommodating.”
“You deserve accommodations, sir.”
“No, but that doesn’t matter. It isn’t expedient for Butler to cashier me. God save the United States Army from politicians.”
“They have their place, sir.”
“I asked General Butler again to transfer me to Virginia. He said he’d think about it, but he isn’t going to help me. I’m more useful to him if he keeps me around as a symbol of Union fighting spirit.”
“The men do look up to you, sir. If we had more general officers like you, we’d win more fights.”
Peregrine took another swallow and shrugged.
“You’re a hero, sir, like it or not.”
“The only difference between me and any other soldier is that I have learned how pointless it is to fear the inevitable. The things you know about and can see—like some Alabama sharecropper in homespun gray pointing a squirrel rifle at you—aren’t the worst things that can happen to you. The things we ought to be afraid of are the things we never think about until it’s too late.” Peregrine reached for the bottle. “We’re all as good as dead anyway. The sooner it happens, the sooner it’s finished.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“Don’t insult me with that kind of question, Seamus.”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for a cynic. It’s unbecoming of an officer.”
“I don’t give a damn.”
“You sound as if you’ve given up.”
“Maybe I have.”
“Then maybe you aren’t that man I thought you were. Not if you’re going to talk like a coward.”
“Careful, Seamus.”
“You said I could speak plainly.”
“Just be careful.”
O’Rourke grinned at his commander. “I can handle meself with my own two fists.”
“So can I.”
“That’s more like it, sir,” O’Rourke said, and laughed. “Let’s have another drink.”
“Let’s.”
O’Rourke freshened their glasses.
“To tell you the truth, General, I’m concerned. Your grief is eating you alive.”
“I’d rather not discuss personal affairs, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Sometimes it helps to talk, sir.”
“It never helps me.”
“Well, then I’ll do the talking, if it’s all the same.”
Peregrine didn’t look up from his glass.
“The good Lord created us for noble purposes, sir, not to be broken beneath the weight of sorrows. I saw my share of troubles before coming to America. Three brothers put in early graves and many a friend, too. It was hard to leave home, the hardest thing I’d ever have to do, but there was nothing left for me in Erin but the gallows and an English rope.”
“But you didn’t forget.”
“No, sir, forgetting is the one thing I could never do. But time has taken away the sting. We have to move on or our past destroys us. I will never forget, but still I’ve managed to move on.”
“Leave it be, Seamus.”
Peregrine poured another glass. The whiskey made it easier to forget some things, but not the important ones.
“So you saw no wounds in the neck of the woman I was with last night?” he asked, giving it one last try. “Just here,” he said, pointing with two fingers. “You’ve got to tell me the truth, Seamus. I need to know.”
“May the devil take me if I’ve ever been less than completely truthful with you, General Peregrine.”
“There was a beautiful young woman there, tiny of frame, with coal black hair, green eyes, and white skin, like a porcelain doll. She must have passed you as you came in. Young, hardly more than a girl.”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe you saw her on the street outside Yu’s?”
“Sorry, sir, I saw no such female.”
A muscle in Peregrine’s face began to twitch. He turned away from O’Rourke and rubbed it with his fingers to make it stop. “Yu didn’t strangle those people.”
“General Butler hanged him for it right enough.”
“It was the young woman I told you about. She killed them all. She would have killed me next, if you hadn’t come busting in when you did.”
“A wee girl strangled those people?”
“I told you: she bit them in the neck and sucked the lifeblood out of them, the way a spider kills a fly. She’s no ordinary woman. She can’t be. I don’t know what exactly—something monstrous.”
“Listen to yourself. Begging the general’s pardon, but you’re speaking pure madness.”
Peregrine didn’t disagree. He couldn’t.
“You were out of your mind with the opium last night, General. You don’t know what you saw. It must have been a dream.”
“That’s what General Butler sa
id, but I know what I saw.”
“Saints preserve us!” O’Rourke cried.
The bartender looked their way.
“If you continue talking like that,” O’Rourke said in a furious whisper, “they will lock you away in an asylum, and it will be an unpleasant end for you. Maybe you did see something in that hop house. It’s not for me to say, sir. It’s a right queer world God created for us to live in. If there are angels and devils, then maybe there are comely banshees who sup on the blood of the living. But for the love of Mike, General, put this experience behind you, along with your grief for your own poor murdered family. Spoons has his eye on you. Who knows what he’ll do if he senses you turning yourself into a liability to his political career. I’d rather have a division of rebels in front of me than a treacherous old snapping turtle like Ben Butler behind me, staring at my back with his goggle eye. You’re balanced on the surface of a soap bubble, sir. If you aren’t careful, it will burst, and you’ll burst with it.”
The people on the street gave wide berth to Peregrine’s blue uniform with the brigadier general’s gold star on each epaulet. The men, nearly every one a rebel at heart, looked away or stared past Peregrine, as though he were invisible. Butler’s cold-blooded decision to hang William Mumford for taking down the federal flag at the Mint had been brutal, but it had curbed the outward defiance of New Orleans’s conquered men.
An old woman with a bottle green parasol stepped out of a dress shop as Peregrine passed, looking up at him over the top of her pince-nez spectacles with surprise that quickly transformed to disgust.
“Nigger lover,” she yelled after him.
Peregrine considered stopping to advise her about General Order Number 28, but he kept walking. She would find out about it soon enough without his help.
American Gothic Page 2
