Fiddlehead

Twenty-four

December 1880

“‘It did not happen immediately, but it happened quickly in the wake of Katharine Haymes’s death: Word was out. Word went even farther the next morning, when all of us—Abraham, Gideon, Nelson, and myself—exhausted to the bone yet thrilled to be alive, scattered to the four winds. We took the news wherever we went, threw it as far as our aim could reach.

“In the ensuing weeks, we found others reaching out from across the Mason-Dixon—reaching across a barrier that had once seemed insurmountable. The diminutive Confederate officer Sally Louisa Tompkins regained her standing and her credibility by force of will, and her voice amplified our message. Maria Boyd’s voice did likewise, for although she belongs to neither North nor South, she speaks to both with equal authority. So, too, Gideon Bardsley, no longer a slave but a citizen, both of Alabama and the District. Outcast and hero, the inventor and scientist who created the machine that might save us all with its warnings.’”

Julia shook her head. “Dearest, no one talks like that. Least of all you.”

“No, but people write like this. This is the language that ‘keeps’ the best.”

“I wish you wouldn’t bother. Sounds a bit forced to me, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, not taking his eyes off the papers he’d so meticulously written out by hand. They’d taken five months to compose, and they went off to the printer tomorrow. This was his last chance to read it before he committed indefinitely to the saga. “But if I wrote it as it happened, with all the swearing and sweating, no one would want to read it.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong about that,” his wife murmured with a sly smile. She lounged in an overstuffed chair beside a cooling fire. “If anything, I think the readership might blossom.”

“No one wants to read about men being bored on trains, or swearing every day when the post comes.”

“Or threatening to punch telegraph operators.”

“That only happened the once. You may rest assured, I’ve left that part out.”

She grinned, and she was beautiful. “More’s the pity. Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve written so much so quickly. Anyway, go on.”

“‘Those who had been silenced were heard, and although forces conspired to silence them once more, the truth grew larger than the lies—large enough to rise above them, and stand its ground. The undead leprosy was a threat to all. It cared nothing for the color of a man’s uniform, or the state of his purse. It disregarded politics, age, and virtue. It came for all alike.

“It came for us.’”

“Oh, very dramatic, dear.”

“But it has come for us, hasn’t it? You’ve seen the measures we’ve taken—the measures we’ve been forced to take.” He meant the quarantined quarters. He meant the pits dug at the far side of town, and filled with the remnants of the writhing corpses, killed again and burned, then buried.

“The war is over, and that’s cause for celebration, isn’t it? We’re living at the beginning of a brave new age—a new era of cooperation against a common foe. But here you go, writing your memoirs like you’re already living the epilogue.”

“It is an epilogue of a sort,” he said defensively. “The end of the conflict—the reunification of the United States of America.”

“The ink on the treaty is scarcely dry, and here you go spilling more of it. You’ve earned some time to rest, and I wish you’d take it.”

He shook his head and bit his tongue, not saying aloud what he suspected at the bottom of his heart: He did not have as much time as she thought. Something was wrong; he felt it when he swallowed, when he woke in the night after nightmares of hands clenched around his throat. He sensed it in the weight he’d lost, and in the weakness he felt upon standing.

Julia would’ve called it old age, but it was something else, something he’d shared with no one but the physician Nelson Wellers—who now visited him weekly, for a chat and some brandy. And for an examination, after Julia went to bed.

Wellers saw it, too, and had offered prescriptions and suggestions, but not much in the way of diagnosis or hope.

Perhaps months, perhaps years. Perhaps it was nothing at all, for in some respects the human body was as foreign a frontier as the moon, or the bottom of the ocean. But in truth, Grant did not expect to find medical treatment. He only wished to tell someone in confidence that he knew he was dying, and to have that secret kept so long as it needed keeping.

He had withdrawn his bid for the presidency, and forfeited the November election, even though word in the papers and on the taps suggested he’d win in a landslide, after the tale of his exploits at the Lincoln compound became public news. He was a hero again, the upstanding general of legend rising one last time to prove his mettle against treason and treachery.

The public ate it up, and if anything, this feather in his cap did more to spread the Fiddlehead’s message than he cared to admit. He did not want their cheers, because he did not deserve them. He’d come around in the eleventh hour, in time to control the damage, but not prevent it. The fault was his. Not the credit.

If he hadn’t been the president, he might’ve even been able to take action sooner. His authority had never come from his figurehead position, but on the strength of his tactics and his “great brass balls” … as the air pirate—and now formally pardoned free man of color—Croggon Hainey had so eloquently put it.

Grant was glad the office was finally someone else’s problem. Now the freshly rebuilt United States rested in the hands of Rutherford B. Hayes, a lawyer from Ohio. A good man, by Grant’s estimation. Their disagreements were relatively few and minor. Grant had high hopes that the country’s restoration might be managed well and wisely now that the battlefields had fallen silent, the casualties were buried, and everyone lived under the same flag once again.

“Well,” Julia said, drowsy with the warmth and the lateness of the hour. “It’s a very exciting story, however you tell it. You’ve kept the ladies in it, haven’t you? I mean, I know you mentioned them in passing—but I hope you recounted their troubles. They were no less brave than you.”

“How could I tell the tale without them? They helped us save the Union, from opposite sides of the line.”

“And I hope you’ve left in the bit about the pirates.”

“The crew of the Free Crow, to be certain, and its captain—the last of the Macon Madmen. I left that part in, too, for the sake of spice.”

“He must’ve been little more than a child when the jailbreak happened.” Then, as if it’d only just occurred to her, she blurted out, “And they were going to hang a child? How barbaric.”

“Hang him, shoot him. The particulars are lost to time and memory,” he said vaguely, of the notorious incident of thirty-five years previous. Nine colored men convicted of arson and murder on spurious evidence and sentenced to die. In prison, they revolted, escaped, and scattered to the four corners of the earth. Only two were ever recaptured. Grant had drawn the story out of Hainey over whiskey one night; they had traded war tales and dirty jokes, and somber silences wherein their eyes did not meet.

“Quite a character, that one,” Julia summed it up. “I’m glad you pardoned him. And what of Troost?”

Grant shook his head. “He’s still refusing his own pardon. For one thing, he says he’s guilty of enough that he doesn’t deserve it. For another, he doesn’t want it. He likes his reputation in its tarnished state, and wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Odd little man.”

“Truer words were never spoken. I ought to have him arrested, I suppose, but we all know that won’t happen. The world is too complicated a place; it has room for men with good hearts and bad hands.”

“I like that. You should put that into the book.”

“No, he asked me not to. He asked me to leave him out of it altogether. He prefers his anonymity, he said. I’m choosing to respect it.”

“How kind of you.”

He shrugged. Was it kind? Or was it merely convenient?

Kirby Troost had murdered a representative and fled, taking up with a pirate crew and contributing to the havoc of the unincorporated West. But he’d also moved heaven and earth to send help when he couldn’t be there himself. He’d saved two presidents, a scientist (as well as that scientist’s kidnapped family), a doctor, an old lady, and a serving girl. And countless colored men and women through the years, smuggling them up the railroad lines and into safety. He was a hero, but a dangerous one. And in the back of Grant’s mind, he felt that it was simply easier to let the man have his way.

In cooperation with former Confederate States, we created a task force to manage the encroaching threat of the guttersnipe lepers, the wheezers, the cankers, the Hungry, the zombis. They had many names, for they had found a foothold in many places. But by their sheer unlikelihood they had successfully remained a fearsome bedtime story long enough to grow their numbers and expand their menace.

By the time the Fiddlehead was heeded, it was almost too late.

I watched Hayes and Stephens sign the papers, while Gideon Bardsley stood stiffly beside me, and Abraham Lincoln sat next to us, confined to his marvelous chair. Maria Boyd was there, too, standing by Croggon Hainey and the crew of the Free Crow, for apparently they were acquainted already. (I never did learn how that odd, unlikely friendship came to be.) The marshal Henry Epperson joined them, having been released from the Robertson hospital in Virginia, where his care was managed by the renowned Sally Thompson. And Robert Lee’s son was in attendance, for the great man himself had passed away three years previously.

Likewise, Jefferson Davis was there, looking tired. He looked like a man watching other men finish something he’d started, and he was neither happy nor unhappy—he barely looked present.

Desmond Fowler was not in attendance. He was in a grave, beyond the edge of Arlington, for I would not see him buried with the heroes. According to the doctors who examined him, he committed suicide after his involvement in the treachery that nearly ended us all was discovered. There was a note. I was never privy to its contents, but I do not care what he had to say for himself, if in fact the note was even real. If in fact the gun in his mouth was put there by his own hand, and no one else’s.

I have my doubts.

It is possible that he was heartbroken when his puppet-mistress abandoned him, leaving him to face trial alone for the war crimes they perpetrated together.

But even as those of us who remained stood there and signed, holding our breaths for this momentous occasion—this moment in history—we heard unsettling scrapes from outside, the sound of ragged breaths being drawn through shredded lungs.

The courthouse was evacuated, and we finished the ceremony in the Capitol, on the steps of Congress. The taps lit up around the globe.

The world was watching.

“Good night, dear.”

“Good night,” Grant replied, turning his cheek for her to kiss on her way to bed. “I’ll be up before long.”

“Do you promise?”

“One drink, and no more.”

“And one pipe,” she chided.

“And one pipe,” he confessed. “I’m restless, that’s all.”

She nodded, and kissed the top of his head. “The new routines have been difficult for everyone.”

“You’ve adjusted easily enough.”

“You know me—I’ve always been able to sleep through anything.”

“Must be nice,” he mumbled, reaching for his glass, then rising to fill it. “Some of us are not so lucky. Still, I’ll join you soon.”

She retired upstairs.

He was as good as his word. He put the bottle away when he’d finished pouring, and once his pipe was stuffed and lit, he put the tobacco pouch away as well.

One more drink. One more smoke.

The tobacco comforted him in a way the drinks did not, anymore. Once he had been delighted for the blurry feeling of brandy, or the wobbly pleasantness of whiskey. Now he needed his faculties too much to dull them, much as the temptation remained. His memoirs were nearly finished, and that was a relief—one project accomplished before he reached the end.

As for the rest …

He walked to the window and looked out over the stretch of grass behind his house, bright with floodlights that would blind him if he gazed straight into them. They were electric, designed by Bardsley and installed with haste at the same time as the fence—which was also electric. A powerful current ran its length, created by the noisy diesel generator that ran day and night. Anyone who touched the fence would surely fry, and notices to that effect were posted round its length. The host of warnings declared: FENCE IS ELECTRIFIED FOR THE OCCUPANTS’ SAFETY. DO NOT TOUCH. These warnings were underscored by the Secret Service agents who patrolled in full body armor, night and day. Grant was getting used to them. He was even beginning to learn their names.

At the fence’s far left corner, a bright burst of sparks announced the sizzling demise of something human-shaped, but no longer human. It shuddered and jerked, and collapsed into a smoking pile of flesh.

He closed the curtains and finished his pipe.

Then he left the remainder of his drink on the sideboard, and joined his wife in bed.