Otherworldly Maine (26 page)

And suddenly I was sure. I rose up off my knees without a single doubt as to the outcome of the battle.

I didn't tell Sickles all of it, though. Not my bargain! That part I kept wrapped up in my heart as where it ought to stay. But I told Sickles the rest.

Then, caught up in the emotion of the event, I reckon, I reached down and patted the flat spot in the blanket where Sickles' leg should have been. I told him to get well, as if words alone could heal.

But then, I have always believed they could.

I have always believed they could.

John Hay's Diary

November 17, 1863

Saunders, the man who planned the cemetery grounds and designed its layout, paid a call on the President today. I cannot believe it. A national graveyard designed by an
Agriculture Department
. How Europe must be laughing at us.

It's been four months since Gettysburg and yet my thoughts are never far from it. I dreamed of it again last night. The battle and my professor.

In this new dream, he wasn't wearing his specs. No fancy college robes. He wore Union blue instead, the uniform of an officer, a colonel. And he was there on a slope of a small rocky hill. His men were out of bullets and Lee's men were coming up the slope fast and hard.

I flew high above the entire battle sprawled across the countryside like a giant fishhook. My professor stood at shaft's end—the very end of the Union line. If he gave way, the entire Union Army and the entire Union cause—would give way and be lost. And my professor
must
give way. No hope for it.

And then he yells to his boys and orders the bayonet . . .

John Hay's Diary

November 17, 1863 con't

Lincoln spent quite a bit of time with Saunders talking over his plans for the cemetery. Odd. Lincoln not only asked questions about the maps and plans of the cemetery, but about the Gettysburg battlefield itself. At times Lincoln seemed to know more about some sections of the battlefield than Saunders—as if Lincoln could somehow see it clearly in his mind's eye.

Well, I guess we will have the chance to see if Lincoln's mind's eye is myopic or not. We leave for Gettysburg tomorrow.

My speech ain't even out of the barn yet. I try to write, but all I hear is my professor lecturing in Greek, lecturing until my ears ring with it. All I got to show for my troubles is a pile of crumpled foolscap at my feet.

Not as if the crowd will be coming to hear me, anyway.

This famous feller, Everett. He's already speechified at Bunker Hill and at Lexington and Concord cemeteries as well. Makes a regular business out of it.

Me, all I reckon to do is say enough to catch and hold Pennsylvania through the election. Hopefully, I won't need many words to do that.

John Hay's Diary

November 18, 1863

On the train

He asked me a curious question this morning. Said he: “Johnny, you're a college boy. What would you think if some professor knocked on your window every evening?”

“Is there a young lady involved?” I asked to which Lincoln only knocked his head back and laughed heartily.

I then said, “Well, his being a professor and all, I would think he came to lecture you.”

Lincoln's face fell in one of his mercurial moods, somber and pensive. “So he has, Johnny,” he said after some length, “so he has.”

A different dream about my professor last night.

In my new dream, it was just before battle. My professor had a whole bunch of men in front of him, like an outdoor class, maybe, 'cept these boys (and most of them
were
boys) were wearing Army uniforms. And these boys had hard drawn faces of old men who'd seen too much of war, seen too much of death. It came to me that they'd thrown down their weapons and now they wanted to quit, wanted to just go home.

My professor, he hasn't time to heal what's hurting them. Hasn't any time at all. He has to go fight now. He needs these boys to go fight with him.

And all he has is words.

He has to talk to them boys, has just one chance to talk to them, has just time enough for a few, few words. He's got to talk to them so's to get them to fight again.

And I realize. I realize I got to do the same. I got to get these boys and all the other boys of the North, get them to fight again. And keep on fighting until they win.

And so my professor, he talks to these boys. But, really, he talks straight to me.

John Hay's Diary

November 18, 1863—p.m.

We arrived at Gettysburg. Trains were all fouled up. Bridges out. A grand mess. If Lincoln had not been so anxious, had not been so insistent in leaving a day early, we would never have made it.

Not that it matters. A week from now nobody will ever remember we were here.

The classroom dream again this time, but the meaning of my professor's words finally were clear. He was lecturing his boys about the grand funerary orations of the ancient Greeks. It seems Greek oration had an exact form and each specific part of that form had its own name.

A Greek funerary oration has two main sections, he said—
epainesis
or praise for the dead, and
parainesis
or admonishment for the living. He had the boys read Pericles out loud to he while he went through and named off all of them parts like a surgeon naming off the innards of his cadaver.

Funny thing was, them boys were reading in Greek and I was understanding them just fine. And the more they read, the more I begun to see how the battles those ancient Greeks fought and our Gettysburg weren't all that much apart from one another.

He's shown me what to do. Maybe not the exact words, but the tack I need to take.

One thing frets at me, though.

This business of praise for the dead and remembrance of the living: epainesis and parainesis. A couplet as indivisible as night and day. I can't shake the notion that one of us is to die, and one of us is to live, my professor and I. One must offer himself up in death so that the other can raise his memory up in life.

And I have already offered myself up as His instrumentality that dark, dark day in July . . .

John Hay's Diary

November 19, 1863—a.m.

Lincoln was up well past two this morning, scribbling away again at the speech. I think he is finally finished now, but he still won't let me see it. Claims he's being “cow-ish” about it. “Need to ruminate,” he said as he moved his jaw side to side like some heifer chewing its cud. Another of his homespun jokes, I guess. But he looks so haggard. I worry.

I deliver my speech, then sit down. I'm no Pericles, that's certain. Hardly even a scattering of applause—and that's mostly for politeness sake. They don't know what to make of my speech, I guess. I shake my head. That speech won't scour.

Johnny was right. I do feel bone tired. Maybe I can sleep on the train back.

John Hay's Diary

November 19, 1863—p.m.

Writing this on the train back from Gettysburg. His great speech has been given—for all the good it did the Pennsylvania vote.

The cost was high enough: Lincoln is quite ill. The doctors said it's variola, a form of smallpox.

Lincoln is feverish, sometimes delirious and sometimes even babbling at times. I've ordered everybody out of his train compartment and turned it into a sickroom. I'm not thinking too clearly. Worried sick about Lincoln.

Lincoln has started mumbling again. Claims he's going to die. That was the bargain. Then he starts asking who's to be the dead, who's to be the living. Other questions, too, just as nonsensical as that.

Maybe I've come down with varioloid, too. I keep imaging Lincoln asks his questions in Greek.

I keep asking Johnny if he'd found the professor's grave yet. Didn't I come to dedicate it? Isn't it marked on the plans?

Johnny clucks at me and tells me I have a fever and to rest.

I cannot.

I cannot rest until I know which one of us is the dead, my professor or me.

Johnny tells me again I have a fever. Maybe I do. It's so hard to think. The train jounces and jars the life out of me. My joints ache. Why is it so dark in here?

I turn my head toward the windows. Why are the curtains black, Mary?

But she is not here. I am alone.

Alone with my professor.

John Hay's Diary

November 21, 1863

Lincoln still sick. Doctor says two or three more weeks. I do not know if I can last that long. Been getting little sleep. Lincoln was delirious throughout the night again. He told me about what he calls his professor dreams. Finally told me the whole sad story.

Would that I could believe it was all just part of the fever, pass it off as fever dreams. I can't. It's the Greek.

But for the Greek, I would laugh it away.

“One must die,” he says repeatedly. “One must live.
Parainesis
must have its
epainesis.”

John Hay's Diary

November 23, 1863

Lincoln on the mend at last, but still too sick to read so he asks me to read the clippings to him.

Chicago Times
tore the speech to shreds. There is no Constitutional promise of equality for the Negro, they thundered. How dare Lincoln stand on the graves of those dead and misstate the cause for which they had died? Lincoln has swindled the nation. They claim he has changed history to suit his needs.

Maybe he has.

John Hay's Diary

June 19, 1864

I was just on my way to his office, carrying some new dispatches, when I heard this terrific crash and the clatter of objects falling from Lincoln's desk. I entered to find his inkwell upset, books and things all scattered on the floor.

Lincoln was just sitting there, arms hanging at his side, staring off in the distance. Today's copy of
Harper's Illustrated Weekly
lay at his feet, blotched by a puddle of ink.

Lincoln, after some length, said simply, “Well, Johnny, I know my professor's name now.”

I picked the newspaper up and scanned the opened pages. I saw the engraved portrait of a Brigadier General Chamberlain. The accompanying article said he'd been a professor of rhetoric and oration before the war. Said he'd been fatally wounded in one of those intermittent battles around Petersburg. The papers listed some of Chamberlain's previous services: Antietam. Fredericksburg. Gettysburg.

Chamberlain was not expected to survive his wounds.

Lincoln gave a little shrug. “It appears I shall be the one who lives after all.”

John Hay's Diary

April 11, 1865

I tried to hide the newspapers, but that fool Seward blundered in with some right in front of Lincoln's eyes.

May God help him. May God help us all.

Johnny, I say. “What's with this sad face? You look lower than a snake's belt buckle. Lee surrendered two days ago—hadn't you heard? Johnny won't answer.

Seward comes in carrying a stack of newspapers. Johnny tries to grab them away, but my reach is just a mite longer than he thought.

I didn't even have to open it up to see the headline Johnny was trying to hide. There it is. Page one.

GEN. JOSHUA CHAMBERLAIN RECEIVES

SURRENDER OF REBEL ARM

15,000 STAND OF ARMS & 72 FLAGS SURRENDERED

THE DAY OF JUBILEE!

My professor lives after all.

I set the paper on the table. Johnny sees Seward out, leaving me alone with my professor.

John Hay's Diary

April 14, 1865

All day today Lincoln was as giddy as a boy out of school. “Johnny,” he says to me. “A great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. You know what I call that millstone that's dropped from around my neck?”

I shake my head.

“Uncertainty,” he winks back at me.

He held a cabinet meeting that morning. He was positively . . .
buoyant
is the only word I can think of. He spoke openly about his barge dream, as he refers to it. He told them how he dreamed again last night of this singular, indescribable vessel, about his boarding it and moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore. He told them when he had that dream it always signified some portentous event. “Means good news,” he said and smiled.

It is a solemn smile, a wistful one. Then he laughs and shakes their hands and claps them on the shoulders.

I imagine a meaning to his smile it cannot possibly hold. Men do not smile so at their own death. Or do they?

He goes to the theater tonight. I fear for him.

I have proved myself wrong and am glad for it.

I know my dream barge for what it is now: a ship crossing the River Styx, sailing on some stranger tides to a far distant shore.

I am ready.

I had thought for a short time that perhaps it had sailed past and had taken another passenger aboard, but the plans of Divine Providence are immutable. He has taken me, gripped me tightly in His hand as His instrument.

I was the one to offer up my life that day so long ago. My life for the Union's.

I am content with the bargain.

Dedication of the Maine Monuments at Gettysburg

Evening of October 3, 1889

Joshua Chamberlain stepped before the crowd to give his last speech of the day. The chill evening air condensed his breath. His old wound from Petersburg burned with fire from yet again climbing up this rock-strewn hill.

He blinked against the flickering torchlight. Squinting his eyes, he could almost imagine he saw Lincoln in the back of the crowd.

Someone coughed and Chamberlain realized the audience was shifting about nervously, waiting for him to start. The young man from the committee held up a lantern so Chamberlain could read.

He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket. He started to unfold it, then slipped it back into his pocket unused. He knew what he needed to say.