In Springfield, I shot a man named Jacob Lowry. He came at me with a bayonet he claimed to have used to gut the blue bellies at Chickamauga. I stood in the street and called him a scavenger of corpses belonging to honorable men — in blue and gray — cut down in battles he was too scared to fight. I don’t know which side of the truth I’d landed on in my ire. It didn’t matter, because the reason he lunged at me with that tarnished piece of steel had nothing to do with the War of Secession, but with a pretty black-haired girl. Funny, I can remember Lowry’s name but not hers. Fury must be a stronger, more durable emotion than — call it “infatuation,” since I’m not sure I ever understood love.
I was at loose ends after Mr. Lincoln was laid to rest. With no money or place to go, I took a job at a feed and grain store in Springfield. Lincoln’s parlor car was sold to the Union Pacific Railroad, but I was allowed to sleep there until a train heading to Nebraska Territory could be made up. A girl — she was eighteen and filled her bodice handsomely — came into the store one morning for a bushel of dried corn. I had on my blue coat and — I’m embarrassed to admit — the Medal of Honor. It must have impressed her, unless it was something in my face she liked. The workings of a woman’s heart and mind are mysterious to me.
We began to see each other. She showed me what respectable amusements the town had to offer: dances in the grange and church halls, baseball games, picnics and band concerts by the Sangamon River, and walks along its bluffs. I taught her euchre and keno, games I’d learned while soldiering. I held her hand and mooned over her. I might’ve kissed her. It’s a shame if I didn’t — she was a pretty girl. We walked out together from late May until Thanksgiving, when Lowry returned to Springfield. He’d been in Charleston after Sherman thrashed it with fire and sword. Lowry was like a magpie picking at leftover stubble in hopes of finding shiny trash. Now, once again in town, he let it be known that he had an understanding with the girl and no Federal son of a bitch was going to trespass on his territory.
“We had no such thing, Jacob!” she scolded, after he’d barged into the kitchen and laid claim to her. We had just sat down with her mother and young brother to eat our Thanksgiving turkey.
“You’re a lying bitch!” he screamed.
“I could never stand the sight or smell of you!” she screamed right back.
His unsavory presence in the close kitchen confirmed her low opinion of him. In a fury of resentment, he cut her lip with the back of his hand and tried to kick my chair out from under me with his muddy boot. Her mother jumped up with a napkin to staunch her daughter’s bloody mouth. The boy began to whimper. The dog, waiting underneath the table for carelessness and gravity to serve him dinner, yelped. I sank the carving fork into Lowry’s thigh. He pulled it out and flung it at me, but his aim was poor, doubtless owing to the pain. I laughed as he hobbled in a rage out the kitchen door.
“You’ll wish you was in hell, boy, when I get done with you!” he shouted from the yard.
My insides were quivering like a custard, but I managed a show of gallantry worthy of my medal. Who’s to say who is or is not deserving of his honors?
The widow — her husband had been killed at Shiloh— went into the front room and began to mangle “Rock Me Back to Sleep, Mother” on an upright piano. The boy shared a turkey leg with the dog. I had lost my appetite for dinner and romance and was about to say good night when the girl — I wish I could remember her name! — disappeared into an unlit room. I thought, for a moment, that she meant me to follow her and receive in the discreet darkness my reward for having sent her suitor packing. I waited in confusion, listening to a drawer groan open and shut. In another moment, she returned to the kitchen with a Colt pistol.
“It was my daddy’s. I’ve kept it cleaned and oiled,” she said proudly.
I looked at it as if it were the turkey’s other leg.
“You best be careful,” she said, touching my eye patch wistfully. “Jake’s got it in for you, and he was crazy even before he went away to fight.”
Reluctantly, I accepted the pistol; its cold, sobering weight annulled the evening’s farce, just as John Wilkes Booth’s derringer had turned a frivolous Our American Cousin into tragedy.
I was no gunman; my talent was musical. Depressed, I opened the back door, stepped into the yard, and turned. Standing in the doorway with the skittish light behind her, she kissed me. The moment comes back to me in a rush of recollection: how I turned to take her hand in mine — the one holding the Colt — and then stammered an apology for my clumsiness. Pleased by my confusion (proof of her fascination), she kissed me lightly on the mouth. I tasted blood like a rusty spoon. She shut the door on me. The windowpanes were wet inside the kitchen, where the stove was roaring against the December cold — unless it was my ears that roared.
I walked back to the depot in the “mystical moist night-air,” careless of danger, thinking only of how I might taste her kiss again, so easily was a young man satisfied in that — I nearly said “innocent time.” But there was nothing innocent about that time — not when it came to lives cut short, hobbled, or robbed of painlessness. Boys may have been barely acquainted with sex, but they were on familiar terms with dying. Even a fraudulent bugle boy would already have seen death in its ingenious masks and bewildering variety of postures, all of them perfect for the long-held gaze of Matthew Brady and his tribe.
I lay awake in the funeral car, the Colt on the nightstand — my head spinning with ragtag thoughts. I remembered Philadelphia, where the funeral train had stopped at Broad Street Station on its way to New York. That night, there was to be a private viewing at Independence Hall.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 22, 1865
I wandered down Market Street to the Delaware, where a young Ben Franklin had arrived from Boston with only a Dutch dollar and a copper shilling to his name. On the wharf that afternoon, I felt that I, too, might yet make something of my life. In the broad brown river that, from instant to instant, was discharging its measureless potential in unceasing motion, I sensed a like potential in me, not entirely wasted by my sixteen years as a ne’er-do-well. Life — the better part of it — lay before me, as it had for Franklin, just off the Boston packet. I can still do something, I told myself; and then I tripped over a stern line stretched tight around a bollard by the outbound tide and fell headlong into the river. I couldn’t swim, had never learned the art, though I’d been terrified of drowning while I raked up oysters or stole rides on the Brooklyn ferry.
Delivered, finally, unto the water, I was all for drowning. To hell with Ben Franklin — the game wasn’t worth the candle. I felt a languor stealing over me as my body began to tire. It had resisted the river’s lap — so amorous and inviting — in spite of me. Then, when words like will, desire, resignation had lost their meaning, I was hauled out with the abruptness of a fish taken from its element. I woke — it was like waking — to a man busily rowing my arms to rid me of river water. Lying on the planked bottom of a skiff, I coughed and stared at the white sun overhead.
“You all right, boy?” he asked.
He was a colored man of middle age. We’d have called him worse back then. Many still would. The look of concern on his face seemed genuine.
I took my time in answering him, nostalgic for the numbness through which I’d recently passed on my way to elsewhere or nowhere. I blinked my eyes awhile, fidgeted, and wriggled in the noonday light. I knew I ought to thank him, and in a moment I did — convincingly, it seemed to me.
“Yes. Thanks, mister,” I said, fixing my eye patch, which had been skewed by the current.