The March (37 page)

VIII

A
LOCOMOTIVE HAD TAKEN THEM TO MOREHEAD CITY,
and there they boarded a coastal steamer for the overnight trip to City Point. The sea was like glass but Sherman said, What can you do for seasickness? Wrede prescribed tincture of laudanum and Sherman drank it greedily.

Among the things I have to talk to Grant about is this business of executing a Negro, Sherman said. The Southern papers would go to town with that. And I want you to look at Grant when we get there. Tell me if his liver is intact. I hope so. I would prefer he kept drinking—he thinks better when he’s drunk. I can tell when his letters are written under the influence—they’re precise, to the point, clear, and beautiful to read.

After Sherman fell asleep Wrede stood on the foredeck and looked out to sea. Army life demanded a self-submission that did not come easily to him. Here he was, aboard this steamer with his medical instrument bag for luggage and the obligation to attend a general like some factotum.

It was difficult on this overcast night to see where sea and sky were different. Wrede Sartorius saw, as if reflected, his inherently bleak state of being. He smiled, a man who lived alone, his own mind his only companion. He had been in America for almost twenty years, but he felt no more settled here than he had in Europe. He was contemptuous of the army’s Medical Department and no longer saw any reason to share his findings. The war was almost over. He was ready to resign his commission.

GENERAL GRANT’S RESIDENCE
was not elaborate but well situated on the bank of the James River, with a view of the harbor. It was a place. It stood still. Sartorius found himself sitting in a tufted parlor chair with his knees together and his hands in his lap while Mrs. Grant sat opposite him and gallantly attempted to deal with his silences. Somewhere along the march, he supposed he had lost the talent for polite conversation. She was a charmingly homely woman, Mrs. Grant, a thoughtful hostess, and he appreciated her effort to entertain him while her husband and General Sherman were secluded. But she did ask him his advice about Ulysses, who was having some trouble with his back. Then she herself admitted to some difficulty breathing when walking up a stairs.

Grant, when he appeared with Sherman, was almost shockingly unprepossessing—rather short, stocky, brown beard of a thick texture, a quiet man clearly not interested in making any kind of impression, unlike Sherman, who didn’t seem to be able to stop talking. Grant’s color was good, and his eyes only slightly bloodshot.

Wrede was included in the luncheon, an affair of about twelve, mostly Army of the Potomac staff, with Mrs. Grant at one end of the table and the General at the other. His tunic unbuttoned, Grant sat slumped in his chair, not eating very much, nor drinking anything but water. Uley, Mrs. Grant called to him, Dr. Sartorius has a liniment for your back, if you would consider it. I think that is so very kind of him, don’t you?

After lunch everyone stood up from the table and Wrede didn’t know what to do when Grant and Sherman walked out of the room and made to leave the house, but Sherman came back and beckoned to him, and he joined the two generals as they strode down to the wharf and went aboard the
River Queen,
a large white steamer with an American flag flying at the stern. After the bright light of day, Wrede needed a moment to acclimate himself to the dim light of the aftercabin, where a tall man had risen from his chair to receive them. He had the weak, hopeful smile of the sick, a head of wildly unmanageable hair, he wore a shawl over his shoulders and house slippers, and Wrede Sartorius realized with a shock, this was not the resolute, visionary leader of the country whose portrait photographs were seen everywhere in the Union. This was someone eaten away by life, with eyes pained and a physiognomy almost sepulchral, but nevertheless, still unmistakably, the President of the United States.

After these many months of nomadic life in the Southern lowlands, Wrede could not quite accept his proximity to Abraham Lincoln. The real presence and the mythic office did not converge. The one was here in a small space, the other unlocatable anywhere save in one’s own mind. Lincoln’s conversation was deferential, too much so. You could not imagine any European leader appearing this self-deprecatory before underlings. The President at moments had about him the quality of an elderly woman, fearful of war and despairing of its ever ending. General Sherman, he said, are you sure your army is in good hands while you’re away? Why, Mr. President, General Schofield is in command while I’m gone who is a most able officer. Yes, Lincoln said, I’m sure he is. But we’ll have our little talk and we won’t keep you.

Sherman was ready to speak of the war as if it were over. He thought that, for the peacetime regular army, new regiments should not be commissioned but, rather, that existing regiments should be replenished from the ranks. Ah, General Sherman, Lincoln said with a faint smile, so you think we have a future? Sherman, humorless in this situation, replied, General Grant will agree with me that with one more good battle the war will be won. One more battle, said Lincoln. How many would that make, now? I think I have lost count, he said, bowing his head and closing his eyes.

General Grant asked after Mrs. Lincoln, and the President excused himself for a moment to summon her, at which point Grant came over to Sartorius. The President appears to me to have grown older by ten years. What do you have in the nature of a nostrum to brighten him up? Do you have anything? It is hard for all of us, but we are in the field. He can only wait on our news, sitting in Washington without the hell-may-care that comes from a good battle.

Before Wrede could reply, the President returned and announced that Mrs. Lincoln was not feeling well and had asked to be excused. The President’s heavy-lidded eyes suddenly widened with an alarmingly self-revealing glance directed at Sartorius. An embarrassed silence ensued.

At this point the President and his generals retired to another cabin. Sartorius paced about and tried not to interpret the sound of their conversation as it drifted through the wall. He did not hear the actual words but the voices—the baritone murmurs of the President, the occasional gruff utterance of Grant, and the louder exclamations of Sherman, who sounded the upstart assuring his elders that he had everything in hand.

Finally the cabin door opened and Sartorius, standing upon their return, was able to see now how tall the President was. His head almost brushed the cabin ceiling. He had enormous hands and large, ungainly feet, and the wrist where his shirtsleeve was pulled back showed curled black hair. The long head was in proportion to the size of the man, but intensifying of his features, so that there was a sort of ugly beauty to him, with his wide mouth, deeply lined at the corners, a prominent nose, long ears, and eyes that seemed any moment about to disappear under his drooping eyelids. Sartorius thought the President’s physiognomy could suggest some sort of hereditary condition, a syndrome of overdeveloped extremities and rude features. Premature aging might also be a characteristic. That would explain the terribly careworn appearance, the sorrows of office amplified by the disease.

What is most important, the President was saying, by way of conclusion, is that we not confront them with terms so severe that the war will continue in their hearts. We want the insurgents to regain themselves as Americans.

At this moment Mrs. Lincoln appeared, after all, a stout woman with her hair tightly bound to frame a round face, and eyes filled with undifferentiated suspicion. She seemed barely conscious of the visiting generals, to say nothing of Wrede, but went right to her husband and spoke to him of some later plan for the day as if nobody else were present. Then, frowning in response to some invisible disturbance, she departed as suddenly as she had arrived, the cabin door left open behind her, which Lincoln moved to close.

The generals, who had risen to greet her, could only think to resume their conversation.

Wrede was startled to find the President looming up. The odd exhilaration one felt in being directly addressed by Mr. Lincoln made it almost impossible actually to attend to what he was saying. One had to not look at him in order to listen. General Sherman tells me you are the best he has, the President said. You know, Colonel, this war has been as hard on Mrs. Lincoln as on the longest-serving battle-worn soldier. I do worry about her nerves. I sometimes wish she could have the advantage of the latest medical thinking, the same that is available to any wounded private in our military hospitals.

It was only a few minutes later, as Wrede Sartorius accompanied General Sherman to the steamer waiting for the return voyage, that he was made to understand of what a presidential wish consisted. I’m sorry, Colonel, Sherman said, but you’re off the march. You are reassigned to the Surgeon General’s office in Washington. You will embark with the President’s party.

Sherman made to go aboard but turned back. There can be tragic incongruities in a man’s life, he said. And so a great national leader suffers marriage to a disagreeable neurasthenic. They did lose a son. But so did I, so did General Hardee. All our Willies are gone. Yet my wife, Ellen, is steady as a rock. She does not plague me with her fears and suspicions while I attend to the national crisis. I will have your things sent to you. Good luck, Sherman said, and ran up the gangplank.

IN CITY POINT,
Sartorius bought some clothes and a bag to put them in and repaired to the
River Queen
for the trip to Washington. He had to accept his situation, there was nothing else for it. Mr. Lincoln may be under an illusion about the quality of care in army hospitals, he thought. If so, it is his only illusion.

I have no nostrums—none. I have a few herbs, and potions, and a saw to cut off limbs.

He could not stop thinking of the President. Something of his feeling was turning to awe. In retrospect, Mr. Lincoln’s humility, which Wrede had descried as weakness, now seemed to have been like a favor to his guests, that they would not see the darkling plain where he dwelled. Perhaps his agony was where his public and private beings converged. Wrede lingered on the dock. The moral capacity of the President made it difficult to be in his company. To explain how bad he looked, the public care on his brow, you would have to account for more than an inherited syndrome. A proper diagnosis was not in the realm of science. His affliction might, after all, be the wounds of the war he’d gathered into himself, the amassed miseries of this torn-apart country made incarnate.

Wrede, who had attended every kind of battle death, could not recall having ever before felt this sad for another human being. He stood on the dock, not wanting to go on board. Life seemed to him terribly ominous at this moment.

IX

W
HEN THE LOCOMOTIVES SCREECHED INTO THE GOLDS-
boro junction railroad yards, the earsplitting sounds were heard as a fanfare. Lines formed before the commands were given. Soon the soldiers were showing one another their sparkling new blue tunics and trousers. They marveled at the repeater rifles that came out of the crates oiled and gleaming. They clumped around delightedly in their thick-soled boots. Their rags and worn shoes were everywhere consigned to little celebratory fires. The bandsmen had new skins for their drums, new reeds for their clarinets, and the Quartermaster General was everywhere praised as the finest officer in the army. Mail had arrived, too, and allotments from the paymaster, and with the weeks of camp rest, and the refitting, and the mail from home, and their pay in their pockets, the ninety thousand men who moved out of Goldsboro punctually on April 10th were refreshed, replenished, and ready to end the war.

Unwinding from its encampments, the army slowly extended itself in a forty-mile-wide swath along the Neuse River, and on roads that cut through rich acres of young green corn. Down the line to the lumbering wagon trains came the news that Lee had been driven from Petersburg and Richmond. That would account for the cheers that Stephen and Pearl had heard floating back to them over the hills. Now the intent of the march was simplicity itself. There would be no great wheel to the northeast and Richmond. It was on to Raleigh and the Reb army of General Johnston.

Stephen and Pearl were too unsettled to share the prevailing mood. When Dr. Sartorius had not returned, another colonel from the Medical Department had merged the surgery with his own. Stephen having no credential as an army nurse, was ordered to return to his original regiment. Pearl being a civilian volunteer, was told she was not needed and to go home, wherever that was supposed to be. Pearl was frightened, but Stephen said to sit tight, and so they had ignored the orders. Stephen knew about the army as she did not. He knew that, given the turmoil of the refitting of the troops and the administrative reorganization General Sherman had implemented, there would be enough confusion for them to wait things out and find a place for themselves in the march. This was particularly necessary, because Calvin Harper was in their charge. When a detail from the Medical Department removed the two ambulances and one supply wagon assigned to Sartorius, Stephen had asked the lieutenant in command what to do about the black man standing there with his eyes bandaged. He’s all yours, son, the lieutenant said. That was hardly enough to relax their vigil. Another lieutenant, or captain or general, might come by with a different idea. Of course Calvin had told them the whole story. Pearl nearly wept that this man who so loved taking picture photos might never see again. Dr. Sartorius had said that was possible. And not an hour passed when Calvin Harper didn’t lift up the bottom of his bandage to find out if his eyes were any better. I can see light, is all. Not anything but light. The boy David watched him closely, and it was his own idea to hold Calvin’s hand so that he could move about without hurting himself.

While it was true that Calvin Harper had warned General Sherman and, more coherently, Colonel Teack, that the man behind the camera was a Rebel soldier, he knew the top general of the army, with everything he had to do, would never be bothered to depose, and that the Colonel, with a wound of his own, was unlikely to be a sympathetic witness. My only chance, Calvin said to them, is that I am a Negro and with everything else going on they will forget about such small potatoes. That’s my only chance.