“Fact is, I’d been working for Alan Pinkerton in Chicago. You ever heared of Pinkerton’s detective agency?” When Dr. Treffler nodded, he said, “Thought you might have. Alan was employed by his friend Colonel McClellan to eliminate banditry from the railroads out west. When old Abe appointed the colonel to head the Army of the Potomac, McClellan brought along his friend Alan Pinkerton, who was using the pseudonym E.J. Allen at the time, if I remember right. And Alan brought along some of his operatives, me among them, to organize an intelligence service. Then came what the Federals called the battle of Antietam, after the stream, and the Confederates called the battle of Sharpsville, after the village. With the help of General Joe Hooker—who tore himself away from his camp followers, what we jokingly called Hooker’s girls or just plain hookers, long enough to lead the attack on the right—McClellan won the day and Bobby Lee was obliged to pull his force, what was left of it, back into Virginia. Antietam was the first time I saw the elephant—”
“Saw the elephant?”
“That’s how we described experiencing combat—you say you saw the elephant. After the battle, Alan sent several of us riding south to discern the Confederate order of battle, but that old snake in the grass Lee bamboozled us—he must have figured we could estimate his troop strength by counting the rations he issued, ‘cause he doubled the rations and we doubled the size of his army and McClellan got cold feet and stayed put, which is when old Abe decided McClellan had got the slows and sent him packing back to Chicago. Alan Pinkerton went along with him but I stayed on to work for Lafayette Baker, who was setting up a Federal intelligence service in Washington. Which brings me to McClellan’s successor, Ambrose Burnside, and Fredericksburg.” Leaning forward, Lincoln picked up the small microphone and spoke into it. “A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em, the better they be. Hey, doc, what about you and me having dinner together when we’re finished here?”
Bernice Treffler kept her face a blank and her voice neutral. “You’ll understand that this is simply not possible. A psychiatrist cannot have a relationship with a client outside of working hours and still hope to maintain the distance she needs to evaluate the client.”
“Where is it written there has to be a distance between you and the client? Some psychiatrists sleep with their patients in order to bridge this distance.”
“That’s not the way I function, Lincoln.” She tried to make a joke out of it. “Maybe you need another psychiatrist—”
“You’ll do fine.”
“Why don’t you go on with your story.”
“My story! You think it’s a story!” He set the microphone back on the table. “You still don’t see that what I’m telling you really happened. To me. At Fredericksburg.”
“Lincoln Dittmann taught history at a junior college,” Dr. Treffler said patiently. “He turned his college thesis on the battle of Fredericksburg into a book and printed it himself, under the title Cannon Fodder, when he couldn’t find an editor willing to publish the manuscript.”
“There are things that happened at Fredericksburg you can’t find in any history book, or Cannon Fodder, for that matter.”
“Such as?”
Lincoln was angry now. “Alright. Burnside force-marched the Union Army down the Rapahannock, but wound up bivouacking across the river from Fredericksburg for ten long days waiting for the damn pontoon bridges to catch up with him. Lafayette Baker’d posted me to Burnside’s staff—I was supposed to figure out the Confederate order of battle so Burnside could reckon on what was waiting for him once he got across the river. Armed with an English spyglass, I spent the better part of the first nine days aloft freezing my ass off in a hot-air balloon, but the mustard-thick haze hanging over the river never burned off and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on up on the ridgeline behind Fredericksburg. Which is why I decided to infiltrate the Confederate lines. I found a sunken fisherman’s dingy and raised it with the help of some skirmishers and greased the oarlocks and set off before sunrise to cross the river, which was in flood, creating a margin of shallow marshes on either side. When my dingy couldn’t make it as far as the shore, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled up my trousers and climbed out and waded through the slime until I reached solid ground. I found myself on the slope below the lunatic asylum. The doctors and nurses had fled inland when Burnside’s army appeared on the other side of the river, leaving the demented women to fend for themselves. They were leaning out of windows, some of them clothed, some buff naked, mesmerized by the sight of the Federal soldiers urinating into the river, also by the occasional mortar shot Yankee gunners lobbed across the Rapahannock and the ensuing explosions on the heights behind Fredericksburg; the demented women were sure something dreadful was about to happen, sure, too, that they were meant to witness it and spread the story, so one young lady with tufts of matted hair hanging over her bare breasts screeched to me from a window when I made my way up the hill past the asylum.”
The memory of the poor lunatics trapped between the lines in their asylum set Lincoln to breathing hard through his nostrils. Dr. Treffler said, very quietly, “Want to take a break, Lincoln?”
He shook his head roughly. “I purloined an orderly’s smock from the laundry shed behind the asylum and put it on and walked through Fredericksburg in the direction of Marye’s Hill. The city was deserted except for sentinels who, seeing the white smock, took me for someone employed at the asylum. I made a mental note of everything I saw. Fredericksburg itself was obviously not going to be defended, despite the occasional Mississippi sharpshooter firing across the river from buildings along the waterfront. I made my way out of the city, past buildings with greased paper serving as windows, past an emporium with boards nailed over the doors and windows (as if this would stop looters), and headed across the plain. I could see that no effort had been made to dig trenches or pits, and I began to wonder if there was to be a battle after all. Then I came to the sunken road under Marye’s Hill, with a stone wall running the length of it, and I knew there would be a battle and that it would go against the Federals, for the sunken road was acrawl with Confederates—there were sharpshooters polishing the brass scopes of their Whitworths and setting out the paper cartridges on top of the stone wall; there were short-muzzled cannon with grape charges piled next to their wheels; there were officers afoot with swords and long-muzzled pistols directing newly arrived troops into the line; there were Confederate flags and unit flags furled and leaning against trees so the Federals, when they finally appeared, would not know what they were up against until it was too late to turn back. The single unfurled flag visible to the naked eye belonged to the 24th Georgians, known to be hard customers and surpassing marksmen when sober. No way around the sunken road and its stone wall presented itself—to the right it was too swampy for a flanking movement, to the left the road and wall went on forever. I was challenged by pickets several times but, making laughing reference to the lunatics, talked my way past and continued up the hill. And back from the crest, out of sight of Pinkerton men peering through spyglasses from balloons, was the largest army I ever set eyes on. There were more cannon than a body could count. Soldiers were watering down the road to suppress the dust as teams of horses positioned the cannon behind freshly dug earthenworks. A Confederate band belted out waltzes for the southern gentlemen and ladies who had come down from Richmond to see the battle. My footpath took me past a large gray tent set next to a copse of stunted apple trees and I saw three generals poring over maps stretched open on a trestle table. One, in a white uniform, I took for Bobby Lee himself; the second, in homespun gray with plumes fluttering from his hat, I took for George Pickett (which meant that Pickett’s division had come up earlier than anticipated and was taking its place in the line); the third, with a woman’s woolen shawl draped over his shoulders, I took to be Old Pete Longstreet. I was sorely tempted to try for a closer look at the generals and acted upon this desire, which proved to be my undoing. A young officer wearing a brand new uniform with a sash to hold his sword accosted me. My story about being the last orderly to abandon the lunatics to their asylum did not appear to persuade him and he set me to walking toward the divisional tent on the far side of Marye’s Hill, him following close on my heels. As much as I ached to, I could not run for it—all he had to do was raise the alarum and a thousand rebels would have been upon me. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”