Chicago was memorable for the Irish laundress who gave me the eye, or maybe I gave her mine, as I walked behind the hearse, pulled by eight black horses down Michigan Avenue toward the courthouse. I left the procession and joined her at the curb. She was my age or a little younger— pretty in the way of colleens everywhere, although her face and hands looked boiled. I’d seen enough of her kind to know that in ten years she’d lose her prettiness to steam and lye. She wasn’t in the least bashful, having the flippant manner of the Irish, who — they are quick to tell you — are no worse, or better, than anyone else except the Negroes. I liked her and reached out to touch her mouth; she bit my finger and laughed.
“You’re a bold one,” she said, “to be taking liberties with a young girl. I’ll call a copper if you try that on me again.”
I fingered my medal, picked at a thread on the sergeant’s stripes, and gave her what I judged to be a worldly, contemptuous look. She must have seen it before, because she sneered. My dignity collapsed and, with it, the pretense of her annoyance. She took my arm and led me down a side street to a tenement hardly distinguishable from the one I’d left in Brooklyn four years before. Except for an old woman who coughed unmercifully on the other side of the wall separating the girl’s room from hers, the building was empty of people — all gone to see Mr. Lincoln’s send-off. Her room was little better than a closet, containing the runt half of a trundle bed, a pinewood bureau, and a lyre-backed chair. Outside, scarcely visible through the dirty window, was an alleyway jammed with barrels of rubbish and ash, beneath clotheslines hung with wash that didn’t look quite clean.
The girl — I don’t remember her name, if I ever knew it— unpinned her hat, set it on the chair, and then, unpinning her hair, shook down a glossy tumble of chestnut. I buried my face in it, as if it might contain the remedy for an uneasy heart. I suppose mine was that, although I’d hardly stopped long enough since my flight from Brooklyn to have noticed. Pitying myself, I felt like crying but undid the buttons of her blouse instead.
I’d like to boast how, confident and suave, I swept her into ecstasy. But the fact of the matter is, I fumbled and made a shambles of love. She was my first — I don’t count what’d happened in the chaplains’ hut — and I was bound to be clumsy and afraid. She knew more than I about the convergence of the sexes. She helped me through my ordeal, and never once did she make me feel ashamed. But I was, and with our comedy ended, I hurriedly dressed and ran out into the street to lick my wounds and compose the story of my conquest: one I’d tell often, in conjunction with that of my heroism at Five Forks, in saloons, freight yards, and at railheads. Such fabrications are common among men — and among women, too, for all I know of them.
I retraced my steps down Michigan Avenue, moving against the tide of mourners on their way to view the Rail Splitter’s remains. I passed beneath a banner strung across the street, proclaiming, THE HEAVENS ARE DRAPED IN BLACK. I remember the rain, although maybe it was only in my mind that it fell. I do recall having heard the courthouse bell toll all the way to Lake Michigan, where the president’s train had stopped on a length of track thrown over the water on a trestle. Moved by the melancholy bell, I took Jericho and, standing on the funeral car’s rear platform, blew taps— not for Lincoln, but for my own pathetic self. I don’t believe I ever played it better. Lincoln freed three million slaves, but I couldn’t free even so measly a thing as Stephen Moran. I wish I could tell you that a meteor fell into Lake Michigan, but it didn’t.
We left Chicago for Springfield, riding through the night on the St. Louis & Alton tracks. Sleepless, I sat up with the president and Willie, who’d died of typhoid three years earlier. He had been disinterred from the Georgetown cemetery so that he might spend the silent ages with his father. Fort Wayne Junction, Bridgeport, Summit, Joy’s, Lemont, Lockport, Joliet (where twelve thousand mourners gathered at midnight in a silent sea of stricken faces and bared heads), Elwood, Hampton, Wilmington, Stewart’s Grove, Braceville, Gardner, Dwight, Odell, Cayuga, Pontiac, Ocoya, Chenoa, Lexington, Towanda, Bloomington, Shirley, Funk’s Grove, McLean, Atlanta, Lawn Dale, Lincoln, Broadwell, Elkhart, Williamsville, Sherman Station, Sangamon — towns and hamlets passed before my burning eye in a blur of faces made terrible by the wavering lights of kerosene lamps and torches.
I feared I would vomit because of the smell of decomposition, noticeable in the parlor car ever since New York City, in spite of the onboard embalmer’s diligence. The president’s face, visible through the small hatch on the coffin’s lid, was turning black — a sign for those who took an interest in such things. I supposed it was for reason of the odor that I, among all living men and women aboard the train, had the car to myself that night. Remembering the cigars Grant had left for me, I lit one, wondering if he’d known I’d have need of it. I meant no disrespect by my fumigation, and I felt certain that Mr. Lincoln, who had understood expediency, would have forgiven me mine, had he been able to render a posthumous judgment.
I suppose it only natural that I thought of Grant while enjoying one of his cigars. Of all the men I’d known, he was the best — even better than the man the world called “Honest Abe.” The vicious called him “Ape” and other hateful names. Neither man could abide pomp or fuss, but Grant was a rough soldier and the general who’d as good as anointed me with the flat of his sword on that April morning in 1865, at the beginning of my westering. He did much that was good besides: enforced the civil rights of former slaves and sent troops against the Klan. Sadly, the war against the buffalo, the Lakota Sioux, and the Cheyenne would take the shine off my admiration. Black Friday, the Whiskey Ring, the Delano affair — the scandalous history of his administration didn’t concern me.
New York. I suppose I ought to tell what happened there, though I behaved shamefully.
In New York, sixteen horses pulled the coffin on an opulent funeral car. I left the parade up Broadway to see if I might happen upon my father in one of the barrooms he used to haunt. But they were closed, their windows shuttered, so that even Manhattan’s most heroic drunkards were obliged to abstain for a day of mourning. As I turned away from the locked door of the Dragon’s Blood, frequented by men of the printing trade, a man stepped toward me and thrust a card into my hand. I had seen him earlier, skulking on the pavement that the mob deserted once the cortege had passed on its way to Fourteenth Street. Engraved and bordered in black, the stiff card resembled those used to announce a death in the family. It bore, in Cooper Italic, the motto Sic Semper Tyrannis. Knowing no Latin, I couldn’t decipher it. I thanked him — a small, furtive man in a greasy frockcoat — and put the card in my wallet. He clapped me on the back and shook my hand; I did the same to him.
“You look like a man with a mighty thirst,” he said.
“I could stand a glass or two of beer,” I replied.