Vampires in the Lemon Grove (17 page)

“The thirty-fourth president of the United States.” Eisenhower shakes burrs from his tail in a thorny maelstrom.

Adams is rolling his eyes around the Barn, on the verge of rearing. His gums go purple: “Gentlemen, we must get out of here! Help me out of this body!” By the looks of things, Adams will be a stall-kicker. He kicks again and again, until splinters go flying. “We need to alert our constituents to what has befallen us. Gentlemen, rally! What’s keeping us here? The doors to the Barn stand wide open.”

“Rutherford,” says Ulysses. He stands sixteen hands high and retains his general’s authority. “Why don’t you show our good fellow Adams the Fence?”

Rutherford and Adams trot out of the dark Barn into a light, silvery rain. The fence wood is rotted with age, braided through with wild weeds. Each sharpened post rises a level four feet tall, midway up the horses’ thick chests. Fitzgibbons put it up to discourage the fat blue geese from flight.

“This is the Fence? This is what keeps us prisoners here? Why, I could jump it this moment!”

Rutherford regards Adams sadly. “Go ahead, then. Give it a try.”

Adams charges the Fence. His forelegs lift clean off the ground as he runs. At the last second, he groans and turns sharply to the left. It looks as if he is shying away from the edge of a cliff. He shakes his small head, stamps and whinnies, and charges again. Again he is repelled by some invisible thicket of fear. Sweat glistens on his dark coat.

“Blast, what is it?” Adams cries. “Why can’t I jump it?”

“We don’t know.” The presidents have tried and failed to get over the Fence every day of their new lives. Rutherford thinks it’s an ophthalmological problem. A blind spot in the mind’s eye that forces a sharp turn.

“How did James Garfield manage it? And where did he run to?”

Garfield’s hoofprints disappear at the edge of the paddock. The fence posts point at the blue sky. Adams and Rutherford stare at the trackless black mud on the other side of the Fence. There are two deep crescents where Garfield began the jump, and then nothing. It’s as if Garfield vanished into the cool morning air.

“Good question.”

Woodrow Wilson is giving speeches in his sleep again:
Ah, ah, these are very serious and pregnant questions
, Woodrow mumbles, his voice thick with an old nightmare. Upon the answer to them depends the peace of the world.

Poor Wilson, Rutherford thinks, watching as he addresses the questions of a phantom nation. Wilson paws at the stall floor as he dreams, his lips still moving. The world is drafting new questions, new answers, without him.

In his own dreams, Rutherford never returns to the White House. Instead his memory takes him back to his Ohio home of Spiegel Grove, back to the rainy morning of his death. Unlike the other presidents, Rutherford’s dreams find him paralyzed, powerless. He remembers watching the moisture pearl on his bedroom window, the crows lining the curved white rail of his veranda. Lucy’s half of the huge pine bed had been empty four years. In the end, divested of all decisions, he had only an old thick-waisted nurse opening his mouth, filling it with tastes, urging him to swallow. Boyhood tastes, blood-pumpkin stew and sugared beets. His son and his youngest daughter were two smudges above the bedside. The boy quietly endeavored to blink good-bye. Then Rutherford’s throat began to close, shutting him off from all words, and he felt himself filling with silence. The silence was a field of cotton growing white and forever inside him. Rutherford wasn’t afraid to die.
My Lucy
, he remembers thinking,
will be waiting for me on the other side
.

Lucy Webb Hayes was the first president’s wife to be referred to as a First Lady. Nobody besides Rutherford and a few balding
White House archivists remembers her. Rutherford wishes that he was still a man and that she was still a Lady. He wishes that he had a hand to put on her waist. “Lucy?” he hisses at a passing mallard. “Lucy Webb?” Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can’t remember where he learned this—France or the Bible.

“Lucy Webb!”

The duck goes waddling away from him, raising the green tips of its wings in alarm. When Rutherford looks up, Fitzgibbons and the girl are standing at the edge of the pasture, looking at him strangely.

“Uncle Fitzy? Does it sound like that horsie is
quacking
to you?”

Rutherford and Fitzgibbons stare at each other for a long moment.

“You know, Sarge has been acting up lately. All the horses have been behaving mighty queer. Worms, maybe. We ought to get the vet out here. We ought to get them some of those hydrangea shots.”

After Fitzgibbons and the girl disappear behind the house, Rutherford continues on his quest to find the soul of his wife. There is a sheep that Rutherford has noticed grazing on the north pasture, slightly apart from the others. The sheep perks up when Rutherford trots over. It might be his imagination, but he thinks he sees a fleck of recognition, ice-blue, floating in her misty iris.

“President Wilson?” Rutherford nudges him excitedly. “Could I trouble you to take a look at one of the ewes?” Rutherford has heard that Woodrow Wilson grazed sheep on the South Lawn. He hopes that Woodrow will be able to confirm his suspicion.

“Your wife, you say?” Wilson exchanges glances with the other horses. “Well, I will gladly take a look, President Hayes.” His voice is pleasant enough, but his ears peak up into derisive triangles. Rutherford’s shame grows with each hoof-fall. The closer
they get to the sheep pasture, the more preposterous his hope begins to seem. His trot hastens into a canter until Woodrow is breathless, struggling to keep pace with him. “Slow down, man,” he grumbles. They stand in the rain and stare at the sheep. She’s taking placid bites of grass, ignoring the downpour. Her white fleece is pasted to her side. “Uh-oh,” says Woodrow. “Hate to break it to you, but I think that’s just your standard sheep. Not, er, not a First Lady, no.”

“Her eyes, though …”

“Yes, I see what you mean. Cataracts. Unfortunate.”

Rutherford thanks him for his assessment.

“President Hayes?” Eisenhower is smirking at them from across the field. “Pardon, am I interrupting something? The other presidents have all gathered behind the bunny hutch. You are late again, sir.”

Rutherford straightens abruptly, his cowlick flopping into the black saucers of his eyes. He takes an instinctual step in front of sheep-Lucy to shield her from Eisenhower’s purple sneer.

“Late for what? Not another caucus on that apple tax.”

“We voted that into law two weeks ago, Rutherford,” Eisenhower sighs. “Tonight it’s the Adams referendum. On the proposed return to Washington? We are leaving in three days’ time.”

Secret deals get brokered behind the Barn, just north of the red sloop of the bunny hutch. A number of the presidents are planning their escape for a day they are calling the Fourth of July.

“The country is drowning in sorrow,” Adams snorts. It’s high summer. Oats fall around him like float-down snow. “Our country needs us.”

After several months of nickered rhetoric, Adams has convinced
a half dozen of the former presidents to be his running mates in a charge on Washington. Whig, Federalist, Democrat, Republican—Adams urges his fellow horses to put aside these partisan politics and join him in the push for liberty. He wants the world to know that they have returned. “It is obvious, gentlemen: of course we’re meant to lead again. It is the only thing that makes sense. What other purpose could we have been reborn for? What other—”

Adams is interrupted by a storm of hiccups. Behind him, Fitzgibbons is hitching Harding to a child-size wagon. He helps the girl into the wooden wagon bed. Fitzgibbons grins as he hands the child the reins, avuncular and unconcerned, his big arms crossed against his suspendered chest.

“And tell me,” Rutherford asks quietly, “tell me, what evidence do you have that the country needs us to lead again? They seem to be getting on just fine without us.”

Now Harding is pulling the girl in miserable rectangles around the bare dirt yard, hiccupping madly.
“This
—hiccup!—
is
—hiccup!—
Hell.”
The girl waves a dandelion at him like a wilted yellow scepter. “Giddy-up, horsie!” She laughs.

Aside from Rutherford and Harding, the other presidents are in ecstasies. “Surely the term limits of the Twenty-second Amendment won’t apply to me anymore. This rebirth is the loophole that will let me run again, Rutherford.” Eisenhower grins for some invisible camera, exposing his huge buck teeth. “And win.”

Oh
dear
, thinks Rutherford. That smile is not going to play well on the campaign trail.

“With all due respect, sir, I fear you might be seeking the wrong office? I think there are some, er, obstacles to your run that you perhaps haven’t considered?”

“Obstacles?” A fly buzzes drowsily between them and lands on
one trembling whisker. “Now, give me some credit, Rutherford. I’ve put a lot of thought into this. Let me outline my campaign strategy for you …” Eisenhower has made this speech before.

“And what about you, Rutherford? What are you, a stallion incumbent or a spineless nag?”

Rutherford blinks slowly and doesn’t answer Eisenhower. Both options are depressing. He doesn’t want to return to Washington, if there even is a Washington. He just wants a baaa of recognition out of this one ewe.

“Neither. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving my wife.”

“Baaa!” says the sheep. She is standing right behind him. Her head is a black triangle floating on the huge cloud of her body. Rutherford has been training the sheep who might be Lucy to follow him. He holds his own supper in his mouth and then drops clumps of millet and wet apple cores to coax her forward. “Come on, sweet Lucy, let’s go back to the Barn.”

The other presidents mock him openly, their ears pivoting with laughter. The sheep trails him like a pet delusion.
Or like a wife who hasn’t woken up to the fact of our love yet!
Rutherford tells himself, tempting her with another chewed-up apple. White apples stud the slick grass behind him. The sheep that might be his wife follows him into the Barn, blinking her long lashes like a deranged starlet.

The girl comes again later that evening with a currycomb and six leafy carrots. Her arrival causes riotous stirring in the Barn.

“Does the child have her book bag?” Buchanan inches forward in his stall and cranes his neck, trying to see around the child’s narrow back.

“Yes!” Adams crows. “To arms, gentlemen!”

The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks
for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him. Fitzgibbons is no help; he is maddeningly apolitical. He’ll spend hours musing out loud about fertilizer or the toughness of bean hulls. But Fitzgibbons never complains about property taxes. He never mentions a treaty or a war. He seems curiously removed from the issues of his day.

“Get her book bag,” Eisenhower hisses. There’s something sinister about the angle at which his lips curl over his rubbery gums. The girl’s schoolbag is leaning against the Barn door frame.

Van Buren tries to hypnotize the child by rhythmically swishing his tail. “Look over here, girlie! Swish! Swish!” He shakes his head from side to side. Eisenhower steps gingerly into the looped strap of the child’s bag and drags it with his foreleg. He has it almost to the edge of his stall before she notices.

“Uncle Fitzy!” the girl yells. “Gingersnap is being bad!” Eisenhower hates it when she calls him Gingersnap. He complains about it with a statesman’s pomp: “Gentlemen, there exists no more odious appellation than”—nose crumpling, black lips curling—“Gingersnap.”

The girl walks forward and snatches her book bag back, but not before Eisenhower has shaken it upside down and kicked several of the books under a clump of hay. “Hurry,” he hisses, “before Fitzgibbons comes with the whip!”

The presidents crowd around the books. Literature, mathematics, science, cursive. No history book. The cursive book has fallen open to a page thick with hundreds of lowercase
b
s. Eisenhower sends the books flying with a swift kick from his right foreleg, disgusted. “Every subject but American history! What has become of our education system? What are they teaching children in schools these days?!” It’s an urgent question. What
are
they teaching children these days? And how is each president remembered? That’s the afterlife the presidents are interested in. Not this anonymous, fly-swatting limbo.

James Buchanan is busy rewriting his memoirs,
Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion
. He is furious that none of the other presidents ever read the original while they were alive. “Yeah, about that,” coughs Harding. “Pretty sure that’s out of print.”

It’s a labored process. Equine anatomy severely limits the kinds of letters the presidents can straight-leg into the dirt. Buchanan can draw an
H
, an
F
, an
E
, an
A
, a
T
, an
I
, an
X
with the meticulous action of his right hoof.
Z
, once you get the hang of it, is also quite easy.
O
s and
U
s and Ss are impossible. Ks and
W
s leave him shuddery and spent. Buchanan never questions his own record of the past; commas are tough enough, and he would have to break his leg to make a question mark. He is just now putting the finishing touches to Chapter Four. “Voilà, gentlemen! And now I will add a final paragraph of summation and then on to chapter … 
oh no
!”

Fitzgibbons rolls one of his red fleet of tractors over Buchanan’s sod parchment, erasing even the prologue.

Rutherford used to believe it was the civic duty of every elected official to preserve a full record of his administration. While in office, he was a compulsive memoirist who filled dozens of journals with his painstaking schoolboy script. But now he has only a single use for the human alphabet. He hoofs messages in the rich loam behind the coop, too, but they are for one woman instead of posterity.
L-L-L-L
, he writes, by which he means
Lucy
.