Lincoln and His Boys Read online

  The baker cannot take his eyes off us. He says, “I will tell my children that I fed my muffins to President Lincoln’s sons. Someday they will tell their children about it, and their children after that. Off into time ever after! Can you imagine!”

  “Eat your muffin, Taddie,” I say. But Taddie does not eat his muffin. He holds it in his hand, letting the butter drip onto the track below us. I watch him. His eyes are glued to something at the other side of the wall. After a few minutes, a little girl dressed in rags strolls up to the train window. Her face is covered with sores. Taddie gives her his muffin. He grins at her, and she eats it with her eyes closed as if she had never eaten anything so good in her life.

  “She had the pox,” says Taddie when we begin rolling again.

  The people want to see Mama and so she is in her best dress, which she has just bought in Indianapolis. They want to see us, me and Taddie, but Taddie won’t do it. He lies on the floor of our train car, rips off his cravat, and kicks his feet and says, “When are we going to get there? I want to go outside and run around!” until Bob says, “Taddie, shut up whining! It doesn’t make the train go any faster.”

  Mama says, “Don’t say ‘shut up’ to your brother, Bobby. It’s common talk.”

  I don’t think Bob cares, because he is on his way to Harvard College and that’s where his whole mind is.

  Mama takes Tad on her lap and gives him sugared tea and a slice of apple we got on the platform from the last station. They are winter-softened Macouns from somebody’s cold cellar. Mama sings with Tad and lets him go through every item in her handbag.

  Between stops, Father gets down on the floor with us. Dust soils the knees of his new president’s suit. He doesn’t mind. He plays horse with me and Tad until he says his spine is going to give out. Then the brakes squeal and the train shudders to another stop.

  Father tries to slide me off his back. “People are waiting,” he says. “They want me to tell them I will make the war clouds go away.”

  “What are war clouds, Pa?” I ask astride his back, holding on to his ears.

  “Gathering to the south,” says Father, pointing to the right side of the train. I see no clouds. Only bright March sun.

  Father goes on, “Willie, the South wants to shear its states off from the rest of the country. They have their own president, Jefferson Davis, a four-flusher if there ever was one. They are determined to split the country across the middle — half slave, half free — and they’ll start a war to do it. It’s my job not to let them do it.”

  “How are you going to not let them?” I ask.

  He stands up, brushing off the knees of his trousers. He takes Tad from Mama and looks out the window with me, curling his arm around my side. His eye closes as it does sometimes, and there is no answer, I think because he doesn’t quite know.

  Nothing about war clouds is real until Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then danger is on us. We are at the Jones Hotel with Governor Curtin. I am very bored and yawny because the day has been full of more speeches and hours of Tad and me sitting up properly in our best suits not fiddling around or kicking.

  Suddenly Father comes up to us at the children’s supper in the hotel dining room. We are served vegetable soup, and Taddie takes all the peas out and puts them on the nice linen cloth. Father is wearing someone else’s eyeglasses, a low-crown hat, and a light gray coat.

  “Pa, why are you dressed that way?” I ask.

  “Just a lot of shicoonery, Scout,” he says. “Mr. Pinkerton is dressing me like a haberdasher and putting me on a fast train to Washington.”

  “But why, Pa?” I ask. “Who is Mr. Pinkerton?”

  “See you tomorrow, Scout!” is his answer.

  Taddie grabs Father by the lapels of his strange gray coat until Father takes Tad’s hands and places them back on the tablecloth. “Eat every single one of those peas, son!” he says, spooning them up and putting them back in Tad’s soup. He winks and then is gone.

  We board the train — Mama, Taddie, Bob, and me. Mama says nothing, but her mouth is a tight line of worry.

  Later, when we are rumbling through Pennsylvania, Bob comes over to my bunk. “Mr. Pinkerton,” Bob whispers, “is a detective from Chicago with a passel of hired police to protect Father.”

  “But what happened?” I want to know.

  “Some Copperheads in Baltimore threatened Pa’s life, Will. That’s what.”

  “Who are Copperheads?” I want to know.

  Bob answers, “The Copperheads are border staters. They’ve got rebel hearts. They hate real hard, and they wanted to kill Pa because he will stand against the slave states.”

  I have no idea what a border state is. I suppose they can’t decide if they are North or South. Our train is heading to Baltimore, Maryland. A huge tangle of copperhead moccasin snakes appears in my mind. I tell myself to lie, hands at sides, stiff as a board. I tell myself if I don’t move a muscle all night long, then Father will be safe from Copperheads.

  “You wait, Willie,” Bob goes on. “Pa’s going to be swallowed up by the war because it’s coming soon.” He tells me he wants to enlist in the army instead of going to Harvard but Mama won’t hear of it. Then he snugs my blanket under my chin and turns out the blinky little gas lamp over my bed.

  In the morning, Mama is all rustle and bustle, and by that I know that Father is not dead.

  There is a comet in the sky over Washington city. Its tail is to the north and its head to the south. Everyone says the comet means that the North will strike an arrow into the heart of the rebel states. Just before supper, I see Father at his new desk in the president’s office, one foot propped up on an open drawer. Mr. Nicolay and Mr. Hay, Father’s private secretaries, have gone home for the day. Father is staring out at the war comet.

  I whisper to Taddie. “He’s coming up for air. Mr. Nicolay says over a hundred people came to see him today.”

  “I hate all those people,” says Taddie.

  “You can’t say hate, Taddie. It’s wrong.”

  “I hate them anyway,” says Taddie.

  I give Tad a little kick in the back of his shoe. He knows he is not supposed to say hate, because it is uncharitable talk. But if the truth were told, I would have to say I hate the hundreds of visitors too, because they wander around the President’s House, all these unknown people, and want favors from Father. No one stops them. They clip off little pieces of the rugs and other things for souvenirs. They line up in the halls and fight about who’s first in line. Now that Father is president, they want him to give them jobs and money and letters written on their behalf. They eat up Father’s time, and it’s hard to get to play with him the way we used to. So sometimes we have to drag Father out of meetings. He is never too unhappy about it.

  Tonight he hears Tad and me scuffling. He turns and sees us. His face lights up and he says, “Who’s that foolishing in the hall?”

  “It’s us, Pa!” I say. He sits down on a couch and pulls me into his lap. Tad comes along.

  “How do you like this big old president’s mansion?” Father asks. Father lifts Taddie up and sits him on the table next to us. Taddie bangs his feet, and Father quiets him with a hand on his ankles.

  “We love it, Papa-day,” says Tad.

  “Mama says she’s turned up some playmates for you. The Taft boys?”

  “Holly and Bud. They come with their sister. She’s supposed to mind us, but we don’t let her.”

  “Holly and Bud are good codgers?” asks Father.

  “We are as four brothers now,” I answer him.

  Then Father goes into his office and we clomp after him. He points out the window to the sky. “Look at that!” he says. “Some little star got loose in the sky!”

  “It’s the war comet,” I say to Father.

  “So they say,” he answers.

  “Do you really think it’s a war comet, that it’s true, Pa?”

  “Somewhere in the South some fool will light a fuse,” he says, “and the war wil
l begin. It’s only a matter of days. If the comet is here to announce that, then the comet speaks the truth.”

  “Will we win the war, Pa?” I ask.

  He smiles. “If I can get us the services of Colonel Robert E. Lee, best man in the army, then we stand a fair chance of whippin’ the rebels,” he says.

  “We’ll help, Pa!” I say. “We have made a fort on the roof, me and Tad and Holly and Bud. We have cannons, swords, and muskets that we found in the attic. We have everything we need except fire. Pa, can we light a campfire up there?” I ask. “Please, just a little one?”

  “The answer is no,” says Father. “It is a real and big no, Willie. The whole President’s House could go up like a box of matches. Now, swear you won’t do it, Willie.”

  I put my hand under his vest on his shirt over his heart until I feel it beating against my palm. “I swear no fire, Pa,” I say. I take Taddie’s hand and make him swear the same oath.

  We have been busy, Tad and me, Holly and Bud. The President’s House has as many rooms as a good-size hotel. The green room has disgusting moldy sofas and chairs. We bounce on them, but clouds of dust and mold come up and make us sneeze. Some rooms are filled with boring old statues and paintings in flaking gold frames. But there are secret attics upstairs above our living rooms. There are basement storerooms downstairs near the kitchen. In them Tad and me, Bud and Holly, found trunks and boxes left over from other presidents. There was a pile of rusted swords and guns in an old wardrobe labeled Jackson. We found a minuteman’s uniform. It was rotted out along the folds in its cloth. It is from the time of George Washington, says Holly Taft. Mama made us drop the uniform because it had fleas all over it.

  We grab Father and get him upstairs to the roof, where we have our fort. There are ten logs all pointed in different directions but mostly to the south. They are our artillery. “These are two-hundred-pounder Parrot siege guns,” I tell Father.

  “Where’d you find that out?” he asks.

  “From the bucktails outside the President’s House gates. We talk to them all the time,” I say. I know the bucktails are supposed to be drilling, but they stop and tell us all about army life.

  Father strides in and out of our fort with his hands in his pockets. He looks at the southern sky, which is just losing the sun’s last light. “Who is that?” asks Father. He points to Jack. Jack is a doll in a Zouave uniform — red pants and a blue tunic. “Why is he hanging by the neck?” asks Father.

  Taddie answers. “Jack’s a rebel spy,” he says. “We have to file charges against him for treason and hang him. Then we bury him in the rose garden. Then we dig him up. The gardener gets mad at us, Papa-day.”

  Father turns Tad upside down and swings him by his feet. “You must not annoy the gardener, Taddie. He is doing his job, and he doesn’t like little boys ruining his roses. You know that. Your mother told you that last week.”

  “Papa-day, I want a goat, please?” says Taddie.

  “Promise not to annoy the gardener?” asks Father.

  “Promise!” says Taddie. “When can I have my goat?”

  “We will see in the morning,” says Father. “In the meantime, boys, I don’t think any rebel army is going to come up this way with your seige guns trained right on ’em. No indeed, they won’t!”

  “You think we’d really scare ’em, Pa?” I ask.

  “Scare the pants off ’em!” he says. “Now, come to supper. Mama’s waiting.”

  “Can my goat sleep in the bed with me, Papa-day?” asks Tad.

  “He may turn up his nose at your bed and prefer the stables, son,” says Father. “We’ll have to ask him!”

  At supper Mama has covered the dining table with swaths and squares of velvet and silk. Many pieces have gold thread. All are bright colors and soft materials.

  “The President’s House is not just our house,” says Mama. “It’s the people’s house too. And it is a filthy mess at the moment. We are getting rid of the rotting furniture, the moldy drapes, and the carpets with holes in the middle. Shameful!”

  “Mother, don’t spend too much of the people’s money on the people’s house!” says Father, spooning up chicken fricassee. “This is the best place we’ve ever lived. It’s good enough for me without a lot of extra expensive flub-dubs.”

  “Too many bachelors all in a row!” Taddie and I sing to Pa. That’s what Mama says about the house. We know Mama will make the president’s mansion beautiful because Mama has top-rail taste, which Father doesn’t care about. We also like Mama busy.

  “Bachelors!” says Father. “What’s bachelors got to do with it?”

  “Papa-dear,” says Mama. “The last president was a sloppy old bachelor, and the ones before not much better. The one before last let his drooling spaniels up on the furniture. If we don’t spruce this old house up, the spiders will take over!”

  Later, before bedtime, Taddie asks me, “What is a bachelor?”

  “An old man with no wife, no kids, and hair in his nose and ears,” I say.

  “Just like all those old men in the Cabinet! Just like Governor Chase and Senator Seward and General Scott!” says Taddie.

  Governor Chase is the Secretary of the Treasury. Senator Seward is the Secretary of State. We don’t like them, Tad and I, because when we come into the Cabinet meetings, they absolutely glare at us as if their eyes were daggers. Once I heard Mr. Chase say in a loud, huffy whisper to General Scott, “Children should be seen and not heard!” but of course it doesn’t matter to Father.

  In April, Father tells us that the war has begun somewhere down to South Carolina. Taddie and I make everything ship-shape on the roof in case the rebels want to invade Washington.

  Shortly after the war starts, Father goes into a black-dog mood. You can see it on his face. He won’t come up for air. One evening I find him staring out a President’s House window facing south.

  “What are you looking at, Pa?” I want to know.

  His hand comes and rests lightly on the top of my head. “See there, to the left of that row of pontoons?” he says, and points to a patch of ground way off in Virginia across the river. “That’s land that belongs to Colonel Robert E. Lee and his family.”

  “Is he the one you want to lead our troops, Pa?”

  “He is the best man in the U.S. Army, son. But he is a Virginia man, and Virginia is a slave state. Today Lee took his West Point sword, turned it around handle first, and gave it back. Tears in his eyes, they say. Lee won’t serve his country. He’s going to bide with the rebels and lead his state against us.”

  “Don’t we have good generals too, Pa?” I ask.

  He half closes his left eye and the air comes out of him. “No,” he answers so I can hardly hear. “All the clever generals are with the South. We’ve got the leftovers.”

  All summer long, Father goes into meetings. This is after he’s already seen a hundred people, one after another, in the morning. These meetings are depressing to Father because the war is going so badly for us. The South is winning all the battles.

  So oftentimes I say to Tad, “You think he’s had enough for the day?”

  Tad says, “Yes, let’s get ’im!”

  So we do. The Cabinet gets really mad, but we don’t care. Sometimes we have to throw ourselves on the big Cabinet room table and kick their papers onto the floor. That really steams them up. Father laughs. It is the only time he gets to laugh, he says.

  It is Mama’s work that goes well. The President’s House gains a new carpet as big as the town square in Springfield. It is made of deep wool and dyed with a pattern of ocean waves in blue, green, and white. Tad and Holly and me and Bud love to dive down onto it and pretend to swim. The draper comes and cuts new draperies and re-covers the disgusting sofas, making them beautiful. We boys grab all his discards and make days-of-old robes out of the satin and gold cloth, just as good as the real knights in armor.

  Mama is happy with her beautiful new president’s mansion. She throws parties and receptions, and she
loves dressing up for them. Bob comes down from Harvard for Christmas.

  At Christmas Eve supper, Mama says a prayer. We ask God to care for our little brother Eddie in heaven. We thank Him for all His gifts and we ask Him to bless all the souls of the soldiers in the war who have died and help heal the soldiers who are wounded and in pain, on both sides.

  As a carol is sung, I see tears brighten in Father’s eyes. He holds my hand and Tad’s across the table and nods at Bob. “If it were not for my dear codgers here at this table, I could not go on,” he says. Mama beams at him down the table. “And your mother,” he adds. “Your precious mother has given me the three best sons in the world.”

  Tad puts red holly berries in his hair. We are so happy.

  Downstairs, the night of the big winter party, a thousand people come to eat and drink and dance in Mama’s new and beautiful President’s House.

  Upstairs, Willie and I lie in our little beds with the fever. We are so sick, we can’t sit up to drink water. Mama stays with us. Then Papa-day comes up and makes Mama go downstairs to be nice to the guests. The fevers make me and Willie so weak, says Papa-day, we are like kittens in a hailstorm.

  Morning comes, then another night. At last I open my eyes and the fever has left me. My brother is white as a ghost, wrapped in his blanket, with the doctors around him. Willie does not open his eyes again. Holly Taft comes in to visit us. He holds out his arms. Willie dies inside them. Papa-day hides his face in his hands and falls crossways onto the bed. “Willie is gone to the house of the angels,” says Mama when she says anything at all.

  Until late spring, Mama stays in bed almost all the time. Her maid, Lizzie Keckley, draws the curtains over the windows because the daylight hurts Mama’s eyes. Mama steps out of her bed and goes down crying on the floor. She can’t stop. She doesn’t even look like Mama when the crying comes over her. She gets all puffy in the face, and her hair streams down on her shoulders. Papa-day tries to calm her, but she twists away, just the same as a dog on the end of a chain. Lizzie washes Mama’s face and brushes the tangles out of her hair. To cheer her up, Lizzie brings out one of Mama’s special dresses, the prettiest one, but Mama just pushes the dress aside. Some days, first thing in the morning, Lizzie puts Mama back in bed and then they give her laudanum against the crying.