The President's Daughter (60 page)

“He sent me to you first because he dreads seeing you without his twin, since he thinks James was your favorite.”

“Oh, Thor! How could I love one more than the other. They're two sides of the same coin, just as you and Thance . . .”

Thor's eyes met mine in silent communication. Did history really repeat itself? Or only family history? Thor's face was drawn and haggard, his eyes hollow and pained and red-rimmed, with a growing network of lines around them. The beautiful mouth was one single line of fury. His voice, like mine, was hoarse and raspy from the pall of smoke, the sting of gunpowder, and the stench of rotting bodies that rode the winds out of the valley. I had suffered in my flesh and spirit from what I had witnessed. I was unwashed, my hair streaked with white. My breath was heavy. My uniform was filthy, permeated with the liquids and gangrene of death. I fumbled for a comb, wishing for some rouge; then the immensity of what had happened dawned on me.

We were in each other's arms. Thor's rank smell and my own mingled in a maelstrom of battlefield sweat and blood. His tears dropped on my bound head, and mine made one more stain on his filthy uniform.

“Oh, Harriet, what a brave woman you are. I would salute you if I did not already worship the ground you walk on.”

“I love you, Thor.”

“There's no time.”

“There'll be time.”

“I'm leaving you alone again. Saying good-bye again.”

“People as old as we are should say good-bye to each other each night before they lie down to sleep, since each night might be their last,” I said.

“People as old as we are should also say ‘I love you' each day. Each day is a gift.”

“James was cheated.”

“Madison will be here soon.”

“And you'll be gone.”

“I believe a new battle will be fought in the days ahead. That's why we're sending the surgeons south. Lee is trapped on this side of the Potomac, which is unbridged and flood-swollen. Meade must destroy him there.”

“Then it's not over?”

“No, Harriet, it's far from over.”

“I must stay here until every wounded soldier is evacuated or buried.”

“Charlotte is coming with the next contingent of Sanitary Commission volunteers,” said Thor.

“Charlotte?”

“Your best friend.”

Didn't Thor know I had no best friend to whom I hadn't lied?

When Charlotte arrived, as fresh-faced and energetic as always, unmarked by tragedy, she and Emily buried their jealous animosity and we made a trio known to the men as the Auburn-haired Angels, although we had all turned gray.

It seemed impossible that one soldier amongst so many could find his mother amongst so many, but Madison Wellington stepped into my hospital ward a day later.

“Nurse.”

His voice was light and plaintive. I was glad I was washed and dressed in fresh white and navy, my hair clean and braided, my scissors and probe and smelling salts on a ribbon around my neck. He stumbled toward me, limping but alive, stronger, taller, and heavier than I remembered him. I saw James's eyes, James's hair, his nose, mouth, ears, bearing. James's shoulders, James's hands. Oh, Lord God, his voice, his mouth, his form, his life, his half.

“Thank God.”

“Oh, Lordy, Mama. Mama, I love you.”

It had been a long time since Madison had called me that.

“You're alive, Mad; that's all that matters now.”

“Mama, how can you say that, with James dead? I should never have let him ... he wouldn't have joined up if I hadn't talked him into it. It's my fault he's dead.”

“Shush, darling. You were spared—for whatever reason, God took James. Nothing can change that. Grieve for James, but never blame yourself. God bless you for being alive.”

“Do you believe in fate, Mama?”

“I believe in chance.”

I let him cry. I could hold him as I had when he was small. We rode up Seminary Ridge and roamed the makeshift graves marked with wooden crosses, dug by black men, looking for James's. We finally found the pitiful splintered wood. I vowed to carry him back to his grandmother's house in
Anamacora when this war was over. I told Madison how I had accidentally eavesdropped on the battle from my bell tower, had witnessed the horror and might of it, but he didn't want to talk about the war; he wanted only to talk about his brother and their childhood—the belongings James had collected, his love letters from his girl, all the accoutrements of a young man's life. There was so much I hadn't known about my son; so much of his life—as any young man's—had been a secret to me, secrets he had taken to his grave. We left behind the foul, overpowering stench of the unburied dead, which robbed the battlefield of its glory and the survivors of their victory.

By the time we came back to the Sanitary Commission Pavilion, the railway cars were ready to leave and men were boarding them. I put Madison on the train to Philadelphia and safety in the care of his sister at Anamacora.

My labors and those of Emily and Charlotte continued for another four months.

“Why is it that the southern boys, dying, never speak of slavery or their cause? How can it be that they have fought so bravely and well and died so nobly for such an ignoble cause? They call it their states ‘rights,' but it comes out ‘stat-rats.' ”

“I don't know, Charlotte ... I don't know . . . ,” I replied. In the heat of the battle and the fight against death, I had forgotten about southern “rats” and the “cause.”

On the fourth of July, five thousand horses and eight thousand humans had lain dead, scattered and sweltering in the heat. The horses and mules were burned, trading the smell of burning flesh for that of rancid decay under the driving rain. White-masked and retching, groups of soldiers, black teamsters, Confederate prisoners, and local civilians covered the bodies with a layer of earth as fast as they could, but even after the corpses were hidden, the scene was repellent with the soft rise and swell of bodies. The whole town of Gettysburg was one makeshift cemetery, fetid and steaming as the summer wore on and relatives arrived to rifle these troubled graves, looking for their dead.

To our despair, General Meade did not attack Lee's army at William-sport as Thor had announced. When he finally got his army in place on the nineteenth, he found nothing but rear guard. Robert E. Lee's slippery Rebels had vanished across a patched-together bridge during the night. Lee had been allowed to escape again. The war would go on. The South would go on because it had to go on. It was no longer “the cause,” but pride. Southern pride.

The last railway car of mutilated men departed for Pittsburgh on the seventeenth of November. I could rest at last; I could go home to Maria and Madison at last. I could grieve at last. There was only one more duty.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him. He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties
of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the
lives
of another.

Thomas Jefferson

The thicket of feathery crosses above which aerial ghosts still fought under round suns of Indian summer bled in pinpoints, like shafts of broken wheat that flowed to the horizon. Abraham Lincoln arrived at Gettysburg to dedicate the cemetery, laid out in the shape of a huge amphitheater, where eight thousand men lay buried under neat wooden crosses.

As I surveyed the wide, gently rolling valley almost a mile wide, I thought that the broad highway of white crosses could just as well have been that of those bell-shaped, purple-hearted white flowers I had waded through to reach Sally Hemings the day I changed my race. Like bouquets of them, the graves spread as far as one could see. They carpeted the valley like white thistle planted in rows, as if they would grow and be harvested, fertilized by the fresh bones of a whole generation. Silent cannon rested on grassy embankments like sleepy brown cows, sentinels of census takers, keeping watch on the dead, thirty thousand strong.

I had never found my uncle James Hemings's grave, and I decided then and there that this cemetery, where James, my son, his namesake, lay, was his
final resting place as well. I don't know why I thought of him that day; I hadn't thought of my uncle James in years. Yet there he was, as Adrian Petit had described him to me, his spirit, at my left elbow as I closed my eyes against the glare of the sun and the speechless memory of the battle I had lived through.

Up on Seminary Ridge, a sound gathered that I recognized from the third of July. It was a sound no one who had ever heard it would ever forget, the immense, woeful spectral groan coming from thousands and thousands of human throats: cursing, grunting, roaring, howling, and weeping their way through a fight to the utmost limit of primal endurance and savagery. There had never been and never would be another sound like that one, and my ears pricked up with it like those of an animal who scents his valetudinarian killer. Up my spine it rose, as my heart accelerated and my throat closed and Emily's awful words came back to me: “This cannot be borne by men born of women or women who have borne men.” But it had been, the proof being that we were here, in this place, to commemorate its being borne.

The speaker's platform, hung in red, white, and blue bunting, seemed terribly far away, as if it were a child's cardboard playhouse painted onto the blue sky. On it ruminated a lot of black-clad men in black top hats, one taller, thinner, and uglier than all the rest. The black-hatted, black-coated, black-trousered, black-bearded men had stood back and parted for one of their kind, the granite-faced, half-shaven, beautyless, hollow-eyed man who had sent my son to his death. I stared down at the rushing armies now asleep. Behind me stood Madison and Sinclair, Emily and Charlotte, Raphael and Willy and Thor. It was not a time for pride but for pity, but I felt pride lifting Madison and Sinclair out of their grief as the President prepared to speak.

Far away, over the field, I saw him stoop, a piece of paper flutter, the Union flag snap in the wind then straighten, lift his hat and settle into slated immobility.

The tall, gaunt scarecrow's voice shot back like a burst of thunder.

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” the high-pitched voice intoned, and to my surprise, the equally harsh and high-pitched voice of my father, but with a Virginia rather than a Kentucky accent, answered him:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . .

“We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this.”

and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them . . .

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract,” intoned the thin, tall man on the platform.

A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . .” continued Lincoln, his voice flailing the stiff breeze.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

“... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion . . .”

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . .

“. . . that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

And to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

“... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The two recitals merged in aria, one in my head, one on the platform below me, the voices counterpointing each other in a melodious fugue that wove in and out of the crisp afternoon as if two incomparable musical instruments, different yet in harmony, played a duet of lyric splendor.

“Father ...” My voice carried because there was little applause. The sound was as sharp as a rifle shot. But it was too late to stifle that cry. I was transfixed, as if for the first time I had heard him speak. Why had those long-forgotten words come back to me, and why had they echoed in the words of that distant black figure, now turning woodenly toward his seat. People were startled, yet they behaved with a strange subjection, as if the words still rested on the surface of the air, and, like water on parched earth, had not yet penetrated the roots of the crowd's consciousness.