“No problem.” Dr. Treffler walked over to a sideboard and filled a glass from a plastic bottle and carried it back, aware that Lincoln’s eyes never left her. Was he thinking of the young lunatic, leaning out the window with the matted hair covering her breasts? Was he regretting he didn’t have a shrink who slept with her patients?
Lincoln drank off the glass of water in one long swallow and then ran his finger around the rim as he picked up the thread of his tale. “I was closely questioned by a stubby, hunch-shouldered officer with a shock of hair turned silver from age and battle fatigue, so I supposed because he walked with the aid of two wooden crutches. And when he didn’t esteem my answers—I admitted to having been born and raised in Pennsylvania but claimed I’d gone south to defend state’s rights and slavery, for who in his right mind wanted millions of freed slaves invading the north to take away our jobs—he had me stripped to the skin and began examining each item of clothing. Which is how he came across the watch fob decorated with the symbol of Alan Pinkerton’s detective agency—an unblinking eye—that Alan himself had given me back in the days when we were chasing train robbers and cattle thieves. The old officer recognized it immediately and my efforts to make out that I had got it off one of the crazed women in the asylum fell short of convincing him. You are a Federal spy, he said, caught behind our lines. Make your peace with your Maker for you will be executed at dawn.”
Lincoln, reliving the episode, wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of a wrist. “I was allowed to dress, after which they tied my ankles loosely so I could walk but not run and took me to a circle of hospital wagons and sat me down at a wooden crate inside one of them to write my last testament and any letters that I deemed necessary to deliver to friends or family. Night fell quickly at this time of the year. The aurora borealis, a rare sight in these latitudes, flickered like soundless cannon fire in the north; it didn’t take much imagination to suppose a great war was being fought beyond the horizon. I was brought an oil lamp and a tin plate of hard crackers and water, but try as I might I was unable to swallow even the spittle in my mouth, the lump in my throat, which I identified as fear, being too big. I attempted to write my mother and father, and a girl I had been sweet on back in Pennsylvania, I wanted to tell them what had befallen me and so began: I take the present opportunity of penning you a few lines, my health is good but it will not be so for long I was obliged to discontinue the letter because my brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could not locate the words to describe my condition. I became convinced that it was all a terrible dream, that any moment I would become too frightened to continue dreaming; that I would force myself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and wipe the sweat from my brow and, still under the spell of the nightmare, have trouble falling back to sleep. But the wooden crate felt damp and cold under my palm and a whiff of sulfurous air—in the next wagon the surgeons, amputating the leg of a boy who had been pinned under an overturned cannon, were dousing the stump with sulfur—stung my lungs and the pain brought home to me that what had happened, and what was about to happen, were no dream.”
Dr. Treffler, caught in the web of Lincoln’s tale, leaned toward him when he stopped talking. “Admit it,” he said with a sneer, “it’s beginning to dawn on you that I am recounting the truth.” When she nodded carefully, he went on. “I was expecting execution by hanging but the old officer with the silver hair and crutches had something more dreadful in store. At first light my wrists and elbows were bound behind my back with a length of telegraph wire. I was taken from the hospital wagon by two men wearing the striped shirts of penitentiary guards and paraded to the other side of Marye’s Hill and the turnpike known as Plank Road, called so because the craters gouged by several dozen exploding Federal mortar rounds had been too deep to fill with earth and had been covered over with planking to make the road passable. Standing at the lip of one such crater, which was roughly the size of a large wagon wheel, with the planks intended to patch it stacked at the side of the turnpike, it struck me what my interrogator intended when he spoke of execution. One of the penitentiary guards produced a square of strawboard with the words “The spy Dittmann” lettered on it in India ink and attached the sign with cotter pins to the back of my shoddy jacket. I divined who the author of my unusual execution was when I caught sight of Stonewall Jackson, known to be a religious fanatic, sitting his horse on a rise above me, a look of unadulterated malevolence on his face. He removed the cigar from his mouth and studied me for a long while, as if he were committing me and the moment to memory. He angrily flicked cigar ashes as he issued instructions to an aide. I was too far away to make out more than a few words. Buried, that’s what I want, but alive … Hundreds of Confederates on the side of the hill had stopped what they were doing to watch the execution. My interrogator plucked a cigarette from the mouth of one of the penitentiary guards and, making his way to me on his crutches, wedged it between my parched lips. It is a matter of tradition, he said. A man condemned to death is entitled to a last cigarette. Trembling, I puffed on the cigarette. The act of smoking, and the smoke cauterizing my throat, distracted me. My interrogator stared at the ash, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall so they could get on with the execution. Sucking on the cigarette, I became aware of the ash, too. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette.”
“And then?”
“And then a whisper of wind coming off the river brought with it the distant sound of a brass band playing Yankee Doodle. Under cover of darkness the Federals had finally thrown their pontoon bridges across the river and were starting to come over in force. There were scattered shots from Fredericksburg as the Confederate rear guard pretended to put up a fight to suck the Federals into the trap that awaited them once they captured Fredericksburg and started across the plain Richmond-bound. The notes of Yankee Doodle and the hollow reports of muskets set everyone to peering toward the river. Bobby Lee reined up next to Jackson, who touched his hat in salute. They talked for a moment, Lee pointing out the Chatham Mansion, which served as Burnside’s command post, within eyeshot on the other side of the river. And then Lee happened to glance in my direction. His eyes fixed on me and he called, What the blazes is going on down there? My interrogator called up that I was a Federal spy caught behind the Confederate lines the previous evening; that they were about to bury me alive as a warning to others. Lee remarked something to Jackson, then stood in his stirrups and, removing his white hat, shouted down, There will be enough killing on these fields today to last a man a lifetime. Tie him to a tree and let him watch the battle, and set him free when it is over. Which is how I came to see the elephant again—to witness the carnage that unfolded below Marye’s Hill that terrible December day. Burnside’s army burst out of Fredericksburg onto the plain and formed up. The 114th Pennsylvania Zouaves with their white headbands were the first to charge the stone wall along the sunken road—they came on with pennants flying while a drummer boy set the cadence for the attack until his head was severed from his body by a cannon ball. It was a massacre from start to finish. Through the afternoon wave upon wave of Federals charged the sunken road, only to be cut down by a hail of minié balls. I counted fourteen assaults in all, but not a one of them made it as far as the wall. The cause was so hapless, the Confederates looking down from the hill took to cheering the courage of the Federals. I could see the Rebel sharpshooters dipping their hands in buckets of water so they could load their Whitworths, scalding hot from being shot so much, without blistering their skin. At one point in the afternoon I could make out groups of Federals trying to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. It was a Godawful thing to behold—there have been days since when I wished they’d gone ahead and buried me alive so that the sight and sound of battle would not be graven on my brain.”