Grant: A Novel (49 page)

B
RASS SPITTOON!” MARK TWAIN SAID WITH A CHUCKLE
. “Steamboat pilot I knew on the Mississippi, absolutely true story—in the war he used to wear a brass spittoon on his head while he piloted the boat. Kind of a helmet, he thought, to protect him from flying bullets.”

“Did he ever get hit?”

“Oh, hell, yes! Bullet hit him in the spittoon one day, his poor old head clanged like a bell—we all heard it. He damn near ran the boat aground, couldn’t walk a straight line for a week!”

Henry West was almost doubled over with laughter. He took a deep, hacking breath, exhaled with a hee-haw honking sound, and wiped the tears from his eyes. Next to him, two other reporters were helplessly shaking their heads. Twain sipped his drink and looked benevolently around the newsroom.

“
You
were too young”—he pointed his cigar at West’s scrawny chest—“to fight in the war.”

“Yes, sir.” West pulled a dirty white handkerchief out of one coat sleeve and touched his eyes, then his temples. “Age fourteen in ’65.”

“Did you ever fight, Mr. Twain?” Besides West and the two reporters sitting on his desk, six or seven others had taken up
places around Twain’s chair, some with stacks of copy sheets cradled in their arms, some with notebooks and pencils, one or two in hats and fur-collared topcoats, right off the street.

“I was a member,” Twain answered with a solemn voice and a deadpan expression, “of the illustrious Marion Rangers.”

“Union?” somebody asked doubtfully.

“Confederate.” Twain tapped his cigar against a little iron ashtray next to Henry West’s typewriter; sipped his Scotch again; engaged in one of his famous pauses. “Summer of 1861. I just happened to be visiting Hannibal, Missouri, Marion County, and a few of us got all fired up by what we took to be the Union invasion of our natal soil. So we came together in a secret place and formed ourselves into a military company, fifteen of us, fifteen of the most innocent, ignorant, good-natured, full-of-romance kind of fellows you could ever hope to meet—remind me, Mr. West, to write up a piece for you sometime on why the novels of Walter Scott ruined the South. Gave us the most extravagant notions of aristocracy and chivalry.”

“You sound like a gang of Tom Sawyers,” one of the younger reporters ventured.

“
Exactly
what we were!” Twain was clearly pleased. “A regular army colonel came over from Mississippi and swore us into the service, and he commenced to
try
to train us, but it was really just one long camping trip, nothing but idle nonsense. We would form ourselves into lines of battle—all fifteen of us—and march a few miles, and then find some shady and pleasant spot and set up our tents. Lived off the local farmers till they were sick of us. Once or twice we came near to landing in an honest-to-God battle, and once or twice we did fire our weapons, but it was all Tom Sawyer horseplay.” Twain paused again and rolled his long cigar slowly under a freshly lit match. “Nearly killed General Grant, of course.”

Trist entered the newsroom from Stilson Hutchins’s office just in time to hear a shout of hilarious protest rise from the crowd around West’s desk. He stopped, transferred the papers he was carrying to his jacket pocket. Mark Twain, naturally. He threaded his way across the floor, through a mountainous jumble of cartons and cabinets and packing boxes that were the sure signs Hutchins was planning yet another move for the
Post
. Twain was seated in a swivel chair with his back to the window, wearing, of all things for the first day of December, a white suit. His bushy red hair was illuminated
by an electric streetlamp just outside the window; his foxy face was almost obscured, as usual, by cigar smoke.

“We’d heard about an unknown Union colonel, you see, sweeping down our way with a regiment of troops—” Twain broke off to wave his cigar at Trist and smile. It was, Trist recognized at once, the story of the Marion Rangers in the Missouri woods. Twain had told it to Trist and Sherman in New York, two nights before Grant’s funeral procession. It was Trist’s strong impression that the humorist was working the story over, polishing it up, less for the lecture platform than for some personal reason hard to fathom.

The female reporter Calista Halsey beckoned him to stand beside her. Twain swiveled, paused, tapped cigar ash. He had already reached the point, Trist saw, where the Rangers had shot an innocent civilian stranger in the forest, and Private Twain had decided that was all he needed to see of war.

“After we fired our volleys at that perfect stranger,” Twain said, modulating his speech to something soft, accentless, even maudlin, “we all crept stealthily out to see our victim. He was lying on his back in the moonlight, his chest was heaving, and his white shirtfront was splashed with blood. The thought went through me that I was a murderer, that I had killed a man—a man who had never done me any harm, and that was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.”

“Who was he?”

“We never knew. He muttered some words about his wife and child and died, and soon after I lit out for the Territories. In plain English, I deserted and went to live in Nevada.”

“And Grant?”

“Well, the General and I used to talk—how it
might
have been
him
that night in the woods, just as easy as anybody else. You see, that unknown Union colonel that was coming after the Rangers turned out to
be
Grant. And Grant in those days didn’t have a uniform yet, he was still in his civilian clothes, and he had just left his wife and child in St. Louis, fifty miles away. We used to talk, the General and I, about how mysterious it was, our two fates linked like that, how the course of human history would have been changed if he had come after the Rangers a day or two early.” Twain paused, contemplated his smoke. “Not to mention the history of publishing.”

Henry West was the first to laugh. He held up the copy of volume one of Grant’s
Memoirs
, published that very week by Charles L. Webster & Company, for the rest of the room to see, and Twain himself leaned forward and opened a carton on the desk to reveal more books, a free copy for every reporter present.

In the ensuing scramble Twain worked his way over to Trist. “This man,” he told Calista Halsey, shaking her hand, “wrote the best article anybody ever wrote on Ulysses S. Grant.”

“ ‘The View from the Porch.’ ” Calista patted Trist’s shoulder like a big sister. “Our boy does good work.”

“Stole it from me, I’m sure,” Twain said pleasantly, winking at Trist. “General Grant sitting on his porch at Mount McGregor, reviewing his life. If I didn’t think of it, I
meant
to. You ought to write a biography of him, Trist, I’m serious, a full-length book—go see Charley Webster.”

“He’s writing a book on Edison,” Calista informed him a little briskly, and then, because she was the unofficial hostess of the unofficial dinner the
Post
was giving him, she took Twain’s arm and began to lead the chattering reporters out the door toward Willard’s.

Leading newspapermen anywhere, as Henry West liked to say, was like herding cats. Twice they stopped off in neighboring bars; once, although it was almost six o’clock, they looked in a bookshop on Pennsylvania Avenue to see if the
Memoirs
were on display yet. Calista Halsey, now happily married, had come back to work a year and a half ago at the
Post
. But quite daringly, she still retained her maiden name—to his surprise Trist found he rather approved—and Twain evidently regarded her as at once exotic and alarming. In the lobby of Willard’s, while the waiters were conferring about how and where to seat a party of sixteen men and one lady, he pulled Trist aside; asked her full name again; wondered aloud if she were one of those
radical
females.

“The Marion Rangers,” Trist prompted. “In New York you told us something else, at the very end.”

“Part about war.” Twain nodded, glumly for once, and studied with an uncharacteristic frown the waiters and reporters across the lobby. “Part about how that man we shot wasn’t in uniform, wasn’t even armed. How I couldn’t drive away the thought that taking that unoffending life was a wicked, wanton thing. And it seemed like the epitome of war to me, what war really was—killing
strangers in cold blood, strangers you would help if you found them in trouble, or they would help you.”

“Word for word,” Trist said with a faint smile.

“ ‘It made me see,’ ” Twain recited, “ ‘I wasn’t equipped for that awful business. It made me see the true nature of war, which is murder, and so I fled.’ ”

Calista Halsey was waving them over. A headwaiter carried a leather-bound menu over his head like a trophy. “And yet—” Trist’s own mind was distracted, wrestling with other thoughts, but something in Twain’s tone made him grip the older man’s shoulder and hold him back for a moment. “And yet that was what Grant did, that was his trade.”

“And we admired and worshipped him for it.” Twain’s smile was bleak. “He was a man and he faced up to the world, good and bad—and I was a child.” A slow, melancholy pause. “I don’t have a shred of religion. To a child, a grown-up man can look like a god.”

“Mr. Twain—” An already drunken Henry West was tugging them both toward the open French doors of the dining room. “We voted, six of us at the table, to ask if you have any Advice for Youth?”

The showman’s mask returned in a flash. The stage-prop cigar was produced, the drawl became a rich instrument of theater. “Well now, I would advise American Youth,” he said with a deep Missouri rasp, throwing his shoulders back and walking toward his audience, white suit gleaming like a pearl under the new electric lights, “in the important matter of Lying, for instance, to be very, very careful.” Pause, puff; wink. “Otherwise you might get caught.”

It was three blocks from Willard’s Hotel to Lafayette Square. By a quarter till eight Trist had slipped away from the dinner and was standing outside on the sidewalk, under the Willard’s green-and-blue-striped awning, watching a cold rain come down.

A one-horse herdic rattled toward him, up from the Capitol. The driver slowed and peered through the rain over a swaying lantern, but Trist only shook his head and started to walk west. At the corner of the Treasury Department building he waited while an omnibus on rails made its noisy, iron-shredding turn down toward Pennsylvania Avenue. In his pocket he felt the note of dismissal Henry Adams had given him the day before, and for a
moment he considered pulling it out to read again under the streetlamp. But in fact, for some things, he had a verbal memory almost as good as Mark Twain’s.

Adams hadn’t read the note, of course, no matter what smug pose of superiority he affected in his empty shell of a house, with his glass of port twirled between his tiny fingers. Adams hadn’t been “instructed” to say a word. Henry Adams was simply a meddler, a self-appointed five-foot-tall stump of irony and malice and intuition.

Trist crossed the bottom of Lafayette Square, stepping around the carriages parked as usual at the gate to the White House. The single soldier posted as a sentinel glanced in his direction and yawned. The horse in front of the nearest carriage stamped its hoof with a splash. Even in the cold and the dark Trist could smell wet leather, the faint stench of rotting vegetation from piles of unburned leaves. At Don Cameron’s house he rapped on the knocker hard, and when the black maid peeped in surprise around the edge of the door, he smiled and handed her his hat and walked straight in.

“Senator Cameron now, he’s
out
,” the maid protested unhappily, following him with quick little steps into the parlor. “Gone out late.”

“At the Republican caucus, down at the Capitol.” Trist went from one end of the familiar room to the other, stopped at the train-wreck photograph, still bizarre, he thought, and inexplicable. He felt his sleeve brush the tops of Cameron’s quite formidable collection of crystal whiskey decanters, all full; resisted the impulse to pour himself a glass. “Mrs. Cameron’s here, though?”

It was the same maid who had first greeted him in 1879, dressed as far as he could tell in the same starched white apron and gray cotton uniform dress. She straightened the decanters automatically and looked even more unhappy. “Mrs. Cameron’s resting, Mr. Trist.”

He walked over to the window and parted the curtains. “Well, I’m glad we’re not in Cleveland anyway,” he said, and the maid, whose name was Jewel, gave a nervous laugh and pushed the decanters farther against the wall. In the very late summer, after the enormous funeral procession for Grant the first week of August, Trist had travelled on some flimsy pretext or other to Cleveland, where the Camerons were visiting relatives. He had
waited three long days in the Western Terminus Hotel, next to a seedy bar called the Cleveland Bunch of Grapes, hoping against hope that Elizabeth could break free for two hours, an hour, anything. Love’s old sweet song. Jewel had carried the note for him. Jewel had shaken her head sadly when he had strolled by the family house at a prearranged time. Jewel, Trist thought, had gone about as far as she was going to go.