Gob's Grief (6 page)

“I knew him not,” Woodhull was saying, “but I knew him well!”

“Canning,” said Dr. Walker. “They’ll be sending us more boys. You need to come back, now.”

“Oh, Vicky,” he said, dropping tears on the head of the shroud, so that the features of the dead boy became slowly visible beneath the wet cloth. The boy had a thick mustache, and a mole on his cheek. “There’s such an awful lot of blood. You’d think they could do something with all that blood. A great work. Oughtn’t something great to be coming?”

Dr. Walker noticed Walt standing by the door. “Mr. Whitman,” she said. “If you would assist me?” Walt put his arm around Dr. Woodhull and bore him up, away from the body and out of the dead house. They put the doctor in an empty cot, in a half-empty ward.

“Oh, darling,” said Woodhull, “I don’t even want to think about it.” He turned over on his side and began to breathe deeply and evenly.

Dr. Walker took a watch from her pocket and looked at it. “A wire has come,” she said. “They’re moving a thousand boys from the field hospitals.” Then she leaned down close to Woodhull’s snoring face and said, “You had better be well and awake in five hours, sir.” She straightened up, adjusted her hat on her head, and uttered an explosive sigh. “General Stuart has died,” she said to Walt. “Did you know that? Shot by a lowly infantryman. I had a dream once that Stuart came for me on his horse, with garish feathers in his hat. ‘Come along with me, Mary,’ he said. ‘Not by your red beard, General Satan,’ said I. ‘Get thee behind me.’” She paused a moment, and they stood together looking down at the serene Dr. Woodhull. “Do you suppose I did the right thing? Would you have gone with him?”

“No,” Walt said, “of course not.” But really he thought that he might have. He pictured himself riding west with General Stuart, to a place where the war could not touch them. He imagined the tickly feeling the General’s feathers would make in his nose as they rode to the extreme edge of the continent. And he thought of the two of them riding shirtless through sunny California, of reaching out their hands as they passed through vineyards, and of picking fat grapes from heavy vines.

“I got to get out,” said Hank. A week had passed, and the wounded from Spotsylvania had stuffed Armory Square to the gills. Hank’s leg was scheduled to come off in two days. In the dead house, a pile of limbs edged towards the ceiling.

“Settle down,” said Walt. “There’s no cause for alarm.”

“I won’t let them have it. You got to help me get out. I won’t make it if they take my leg. I know I won’t.” Hank had a raging fever, and tended to sink into delirium with the sunset.

“Dr. Walker is said to wield the fastest knife in the army. You’ll be asleep. You won’t feel it.”

“Ha!” said Hank. He gave Walt a long, wild look. “Ha!” He put his face in his pillow and wouldn’t talk anymore. Walt walked around the wards, meeting the new boys, then went to the chapel, where there were many services.

That night, unable to sleep, Walt made his usual tour of the city, stopping for a long time outside of Armory Square. He found himself outside of Hank’s window, and then inside, next to his bed. Hank was sleeping, his arm thrown up above his head, his sheet thrown off and his shirt riding up his hairy belly. Walt reached out and touched his shoulder.

“All right,” Walt said. “Let’s go.”

It was not a difficult escape. The hardest part was getting Hank’s trousers on. It was very painful for Hank to bend his knee, and he was feverish and disoriented. The night attendants were in another ward; they saw no one on their way out except Oliver Barley, who glared at them and then rolled over in his bed, but raised no alarm. They stole a crutch for Hank, but he fell on the Mall, and the crutch broke under him. He wept softly with his mouth in the grass. Walt picked him up and carried him on his back, towards the canal and over it, then into Murder Bay, where Hank cried to be put down. They rested on a trash heap teeming with small, crawling things.

“I think I want to sleep,” said Hank. “I’m so tired.”

“Go ahead, my dear,” said Walt. “I shall take care of you.”

“I would like to go home,” Hank said as he put his head against Walt’s shoulder. “Take me back to Hollow Vale. I want to see my sister.” Hank slowly fell asleep, still mumbling under his breath. They sat there for a little while.

If this heap were a horse, thought Walt, we could ride to California. “Never mind General Stuart,” Walt said aloud, taking Hank’s wet hand in his own. “In California there is no sickness. Neither is there death. On their fifth birthday, every child is made a gift of a pony.” He looked at Hank’s drawn face glowing eerily in the moonlight—he looked dead and returned from the dead. “In California, if you plant a dead boy under an oak tree, in just five days’ time a living hand will emerge from the soil. If you grasp that hand and pull with the heart of a true friend, a living body will come out of the earth. Thus in California death never separates true friends.” Walt looked awhile longer into Hank’s face. His eyes were darting wildly under the lids. Walt said, “Well, if we are going to get to California soon, we had best leave now.” But when eventually Walt picked him up he brought Hank back to the hospital.

“You will wash that beard before you come into my surgery,” said Dr. Woodhull. Walt stank of garbage. He went to a basin and Dr. Walker helped him scrub his beard with creosote, potassium permanganate, and Labarraque’s solution. Walt held a sponge soaked with chloroform under Hank’s nose, even though he hadn’t woken since falling asleep on the heap. He kept his hand on Hank’s head the whole time, but he could not watch as Dr. Walker cut in and Dr. Woodhull tied off the arteries. He looked down and saw blood seeping across the floor, into mounds of sawdust.

“That is America’s choicest blood on the floor,” Walt said to Dr. Woodhull, but he and Dr. Walker were too intent on their task to hear him. Walt fixed his attention on a lithograph on the far wall. It was torn from some book of antiquities, a depiction of reclining sick under the care of the priests of Aesclepius, whose statue dominated the temple. There was a snake-entwined staff in his hand, and a large friendly-looking stone dog at his feet.
Every night for a thousand years
, it said,
the sick and despairing sought healing and dreams at the temples of Aesclepius.
Walt closed his eyes and listened to the saw squeaking against Hank’s bones. He put his hand on Hank’s head and thought, Live, live, live.

Hank woke briefly.

“They got my leg,” he said. “You let them take it.”

“No,” said Walt. “I’ve got it right here.” The limb was in his lap, bundled in two clean white sheets. He would not let the nurses take it to the dead room. Walt passed it to Hank, who hugged it tight against his chest.

“I don’t want to die,” Hank said.

Walt packed his bag and sat on it, waiting at the station for the train that would take him back to Brooklyn. When it finally arrived, Walt stayed sitting on his bag, not even looking up at the train when it sat waiting noisily by the platform, and when the conductor asked him if he would board, he said nothing. When the train was gone again, he got up and went back to Armory Square. It was night. Hank’s bed was still empty. He sat down on it and rummaged in his coat for a pen and paper. He wrote in the dark:

Dear Friends
,

I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few lines about the last days of your son, Henry Smith, of Company E of the 14th Missouri Volunteers. I write in haste, but I have no doubt anything about Hank will be welcome.

From the time he came into Armory Square Hospital until he died there was hardly a day but I was with him a portion of the time—if not in the day then at night—(I am merely a friend visiting the wounded and sick soldiers). From almost the first I feared somehow that Hank was in danger, or at least he was much worse than they supposed in the hospital. He had a grievous wound in his leg, and the typhoid, but as he made no complaint they thought him nothing so bad. He was a brave boy. I told the doctor of the ward over and over again he was a very sick boy, but he took it lightly and said he would certainly recover; he said, “I know more about these cases than you do—he looks very sick to you, but I shall bring him out all right.” Probably the doctor did his best—at any rate about a week before Hank died he got really alarmed, and after that all the doctors tried to help him but it was too late. Very possibly it would not have made any difference.

I believe he came here about January of ’63—I took to him. He was a quiet young man, behaved always so correct and decent. I used to sit on the side of his bed. We talked together. When he was bad with the typhoid I used to sit by the side of his bed generally silent, he was oppressed for breath and with the heat, and I would fan him—occasionally he would want a drink—some days he dozed a great deal—sometimes when I would come in he would reach out his hand and pat my hair
and beard as I sat on the bed and leaned over him—it was painful to see the working of his throat to breathe.

Some nights I sat by his cot far into the night, the lights would be put out and I sat there silently hour after hour—he seemed to like to have me sit there. I shall never forget those nights in the dark hospital, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and the wounded lying around and this dear young man close by me, lying on what proved to be his death bed. I did not know his past life so much, but what I saw and know of he behaved like a noble boy—Farewell, deary boy, it was my opportunity to be with you in your last days, I had no chance to do much for you, nothing could be done, only you did not lie there among strangers without having one near who loved you dearly, and to whom you gave your dying kiss.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I have thus written rapidly whatever came up about Hank, and must now close. Though we are strangers and shall probably never see each other, I send you all Hank’s brothers and sister Olivia my love. I live when at home in Brooklyn, New York, in Portland Avenue, fourth floor, north of Myrtle.

Walt folded up the letter and put it in his shirt, then lay down on his side on the bed. In a while, a nurse came by with fresh sheets. He thought she might scold him and tell him to leave, but when she looked in his face she turned and hurried off. He watched the moon come up in the window, listening to the wounded and sick stirring in the beds around him. It seemed to him, as he watched the moon shine down on the Capitol, that the war would never end. He thought,
In the morning I will rise and leave this place.
And then he thought,
I will never leave this place.
He slept briefly and had a dream of reaching into Hank’s dark grave, hoping and fearing that somebody would take his groping hand.

He woke with the moon still shining in his face, and started to weep, deep racking sobs which he tried to muffle in the pillow that still smelled powerfully of Hank’s shining hair. Someone touched his shoulder, and when he looked up he saw Oliver Barley kneeling by the bed, haloed in moonlight from the window, with his hands, still wrapped in bandages, raised before him. He reached out again to touch Walt’s shoulder, but this time he struck him hard, a shove that must have made his wounds ache wildly. “Be quiet, you,” he said. “Just hush up.”

2

EVERY YEAR AFTER THE WAR ENDED, DREAMS OF THE LATE PRES
ident would arrive with the spring. Just before the weather changed, Mr. Lincoln would visit Walt in his sleep, stepping out of a bright mist, with lilacs clutched in his hands and the odor of lilacs on his person. That was always the first dream—the groundhog dream, Walt called it, the harbinger of winter’s end. Others followed: a dream of wrestling with a Lincoln graced with enormous black wings; a dream of building a bed for him and Mr. Lincoln to sleep in, a very long bed indeed; and a dream where Walt stood with the late President on a wooden platform overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and watched a grand review.

The two men looked on as solid ranks of soldiers—twenty or twenty-five abreast—came marching steady down the avenue, one regiment after another. For an hour, there would be nothing but cavalry, walking slowly on exhausted gray horses with bleeding eyes—the cavalrymen swung their sabers around in salute to Mr. Lincoln and his companion. Then came batteries of ruined cannon, with gunners sitting up sharply on top of broken caissons. And then, the infantry again, Negro and white, Union and Confederate, turning their faces in a crisp motion to behold Lincoln and salute him. They marched as dusk gently fell on them, and a sign lit up on a building across from the stand. Someone had arranged a series of gaslights to spell out “How are you, Lee?” Walt peered into the gloom, trying to recognize his brother George among the marchers. But then he realized that George was not among them because this was a parade of the dead.

“Quite a spectacle,” said the late President.

“They are very many,” said Walt.

“Yes. It would crush me, I think, but death has eroded my cares a little.”

“I have friends among them,” Walt said. He went to the rail and leaned over it, looking hard at the faces as they passed by.

“Sweet Henry Smith,” said Lincoln.

“Do you know him?”

“I know them all. Aren’t they my boys, every one of them, just as they were yours? They want to come back. Listen to them—they are crying to come back.” Walt listened—he closed his eyes and realized that the parade was going by in perfect silence.

“I hear nothing,” he said.

Mr. Lincoln shook his head. “The dead are not silent,” he said, and turned his back on Walt, so Walt could see his wound, gaping just behind his ear. “Go on,” he said. “You may probe it, if you like.” It seemed suddenly to Walt that he must do just that. It was enormously necessary to put his finger in that hole.
I have been waiting so long
, Walt thought as he reached out his finger,
to do this.
His finger sank into the wound as if into a sucking mouth. There came a deafening roar from the soldiers. Walt felt a shock all over his body, as if he’d fallen from a tree onto hard ground, and woke in his bed with his limbs splayed out around him like a startled baby.

It was May of 1868. Walt was still in Washington, making a comfortable salary as a clerk in the office of the Attorney General. He lay in bed, panting because this dream always left him feeling exhausted, and listening to the noise of migrating birds outside his window. He liked the smell of this hour—he thought it must be around five in the morning—and he liked to lie and listen to the big song, and picture the immense flock. He listened carefully, trying to identify species. As he lay with his eyes closed, listening so hard, he heard Hank’s voice speaking softly into his ear. He always sounded so close—close enough to kiss. Walt had been hearing him, not since his death, but since Mr. Lincoln’s, since the first time he’d dreamed of the reviewing stand, since the first time he’d put his finger in the great wound and felt the exuberant, electric whack. At first, Walt had thought it was his brother Andrew speaking to him. He’d died of tuberculosis, just after Hank died, and Walt thought he’d come back to haunt him, to chide him for not attending his funeral, for grieving less for a brother than he did for Hank, or, indeed, for Mr. Lincoln. But the voice he heard was Hank speaking, in his sweet Missouri accent, a soft voice out of the boundless west that was made elegant and articulate by death.
Bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush
, he said.
White-crowned sparrow. It’s rare music, isn’t it, Walt?

Walt had been in New York when he heard of Lincoln’s death. That Saturday, he’d sat at the breakfast table with his mother, neither of them eating anything, neither of them speaking. He’d crossed the river to Manhattan, and walked all day in the strangely quiet and subdued city. Every shop was closed, except the ones selling the equipment of grief. Walt stopped and bought crepe for the mournification of his mother’s house, and a motto for her door:
O the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!

All week long, he went out to observe the progress of mourning. From Bowling Green to Union Square, every store, house, and hotel on Broadway was alive with the national colors in celebration of Appomattox, and over all these hung black cloth. In the harbor, black pennants flew over the flags at half-mast, and the private signals of captains and owners were draped in black. All over the city, the folds of crepe grew darker, denser, and more numerous as the week went on, until Walt thought that the sky would be blotted out by a low hanging belly of crepe, settling so thick and deep over every street and building that Manhattan might be hidden forever-more from the world.

When the President’s body came to New York, Walt stood in the immense crowds around City Hall and waited his turn to see it. From the west gate of the park, people were lined up twenty across and three blocks deep down Murray Street. All across Printing House Square the crowd stretched, away up Chatham to Mulberry Street. Batteries were sounding every minute, and bells were ringing all over the city. Outside City Hall, a group of Germans was singing Schumann’s “Chorus of the Spirits.”

Inside City Hall, the fabulous catafalque was waiting for Walt. The coffin lay under a twenty-foot-high arch topped with a silver eagle whose head drooped sadly, and whose wings were folded shyly against its body. Very slowly, the line moved forward, until at last Walt got a good long stare at the dead man, at the coffin of wood and lead and silver and velvet, at the flowers—scarlet azaleas and double nasturtiums, white japonicas and orange blossoms and lilacs. The body had been out for many hours by the time Walt saw it. The face had begun to show wear—perhaps, Walt thought, from the pressure of all those thousands and thousands of pairs of eyes that had beheld it. The jaw had dropped, the lips had fallen open slightly to reveal the teeth. An undertaker leaned forward next to Walt and discreetly dusted the face, but this only made it look worse.

Walt stared and stared, holding up the line, fascinated by the dead gray face. A lady behind him gave a polite shove. Her child, horrified by the disagreeable face, was weeping, and she wished to move on. Walt gave her a slight bow, but as he turned to walk away he heard a voice calling his name,
Walt, Walt, Walt.
He turned back to the lady.

“Did you speak?” he asked her, though it wasn’t a lady’s voice he’d heard. She shook her head no, and motioned again for him to please move on. Walt looked once more at the late President’s face, at the lips hanging open. As he walked away he heard the voice, plaintive now,
Walt!

For weeks the voice would only speak his name. Back in Washington, it would call to him as he sat at his desk in the Patent Office. He’d had a new job since January, working as a clerk in the Department of the Interior.
Walt
, the voice would say, and he would look up at the Indians waiting serenely to see some undersecretary, sitting lofty and remote in their necklaces and feathers and paint. “Did you speak?” Walt would ask them.

The voice kept calling Walt’s name, all through the summer, and after. It called to him at his job in the Attorney General’s office, procured for him by a friend after he was fired (for the sake of his
Leaves)
from the Department of the Interior. Day and night he heard it, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and he thought it was his brother until he knew it was Hank, and he named it Hank, and then it spoke to him sweetly and at length, no longer just calling his name. And until he named it, it was his fear that the voice was a symptom of a sick mind, but this concern slowly melted away, until it did not matter to him if his mind was decaying into madness, so long as the voice kept speaking.
What did you think? the
voice asked him.
Did you think I would leave you?

It was one of Hank’s virtues that he never told Walt what to do. The living Hank had been a great and incessant demander—Walt, fetch me some ice; Walt, I got an itch on my back, roll me over and see to it; get me a pipe; get me a bird; get me a picture of a French girl, naked. But Hank’s voice never asked for anything. It offered salutations in the morning. It commented on the beauty of a beautiful day. Death had changed Hank’s appreciation of Walt’s poetry—the voice spoke Walt’s own words back to him, or offered him new ones, a generous muse. But it never asked for anything, it never once gave a command until the autumn of ’68, when Walt was in New York, having a sort of vacation.

In Manhattan, if it was very pleasant outside, Walt would take a trip on a stage. Nearly all the Broadway drivers were his personal friends. They’d let him ride for free if he didn’t insist on paying—he’d ride for hours and hours and pay multiple fares.
You see everything
, Hank said the first time they took such a trip together. It was true—there were shops and splendid buildings and great vast windows, sidewalks crowded with richly dressed women and men, superior in style and looks to those seen anywhere else. It was a perfect stream of people.

One day in October, Walt took Hank for a ride on the Belt Line. They got on in the early afternoon and rode round and round along its course, circumnavigating the lower reaches of Manhattan, going down along the Hudson River docks, up along the East River front, and then across Fifty-ninth Street to start the ride all over again. The day was dusty and warm. Walt rested his head against the window and watched the sun striking through ship’s flags.
A great day
, Hank said, and Walt wondered, not for the first time, if he ought to pay double the fare since Hank was with him.

Lost in the sunstruck flags, Walt hardly noticed the passengers as they came and went, until, at Fulton Market, there boarded a man who demanded Walt’s attention. He tripped on the platform and fell into the car, catching his hand on the driver’s strap and giving it a mighty tug. The driver (his name was Carl, he was a friend of Walt’s) dropped a curse down on him. The fellow reached his hand up to squeeze the driver’s calf where it hung down in view of all the passengers.

“Sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

A muffled reply came down from the driver on his perch. Walt looked away as the fellow came back, feeling shy all of a sudden, though he had never before been shy on a stage. He had accosted all sorts of men on the stages, and made many dear friends that way. But now, as the fellow sat down across from him, Walt stared out the window, down at the ground where the shadows of masts and rigging were everywhere. As the new passenger had come closer, Walt had peeked and seen that he was young, or at least he looked very young, despite the big brown beard on his face.

“Hello,” he said. Walt did not reply, and that was when Hank offered his first posthumous demand.
Say hello, Walt.
But Walt remained silent.

The young fellow began to sing a tune, “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” falling into a hum sometimes when he forgot the words. When they had been up the East Side, and along the lower margin of Central Park, the fellow spoke again. “You are on for the ride, just like me.” Walt said nothing, and Hank chided him.
I’ve never known you to be rude.
Walt put his head down and pretended to sleep. His palms were burning and his heart felt as if it were riding just under his chin.
Just look at him
, Hank said.
Take a good long look. Then you’ll know.

“Bostonians are supercilious towards everybody,” the fellow said.

Walt let out a little counterfeit snore.

“Are you from Boston?”

Walt opened his eyes, but did not look up. “I am not from Boston,” he said. “It’s only that I would prefer not to have a conversation.”

“Well, you might have said so.” The young man muttered to himself for a while, and when they had passed down to the oyster boats at Tenth Street, he stood up and exited the stage. Walt’s shyness and fear evaporated immediately, and then he wished he had not been so rude, and he was inclined to chase the man down just to apologize to him.

But he was only gone for a minute. Before the car could leave him behind, he returned with a bucket of oysters and sat down again in his spot. Very soon Walt could hear him slurping them and throwing the shells down on the floor among the straw and dried mud. “Oh damn,” he said suddenly. Walt looked up to see that he had cut his thumb trying to shuck an oyster. There were only four fingers on the hand he’d injured; he was missing the littlest finger of his left hand. He brought his thumb to his mouth, staining his lips with blood. He looked away from the door and met Walt’s gaze, and Walt saw that his eyes could not have been more like Hank’s if he had stolen them and set them in his own head. Walt got a feeling, then, which crowded into his heart with the shyness and the fear, but did not displace them. This fellow, this boy, was intensely familiar—he felt sure he’d met him before, or seen his face, though he knew he had not.
Give him a kiss, Walt
, said Hank.
Embrace him. He is for you, and you for him, a great true comrade and a great soul. He is a builder.