Butler

Nine

The Bells

For all his varied talents, General Butler is without music. And though the streets are thronged—a wall of hissing, spitting faces between which he passes with his troops at the drummers’ beat—he is focused on his feet, keeping time by sight. He has no nerves in courtroom, chamber, Senate rotunda, or factory floor, but set him in a ballroom struck with waltzing tune or on the march at martial rhythm and he is lost. Despite all the dreaded practice drilling, all the stiff parading through the streets of Lowell, Boston, Baltimore, and the Capitol (where they passed under the review of the president whose regard is that of a rheumatic bumpkin glaring across the counter at a clerk in implacable penny ante haggle), his ungainly step remains unchanged.

He is flanked by his adjutant, George Strong, of the proud even stride and supreme indifference of a granite cliff beset by piffling waves, and Tibbets, who jitters beside at dogsbody trot and attempts to snare his general in some comment, perhaps for the relief of fear.

Even with eyes toewise General Butler spies peripheral mockeries: a child stutter-steps alongside, and with cruel dexterity tugs her eyelids down and draws her mouth into a froggish flap. The universal childish reaction to his appearance. The mercy of the dark and a low-tucked cap saves Tibbets from the jibes and mummery his eyebrowless condition would surely warrant. Others sing mocking tunes, address him with jeers the origins of which are known only to them. He takes his pace from their damns like drill-cadence, marches at the rhythm of their hatred. They shout the name of their native-son general, now surely scourging the Yankees in Corinth after dealing the bloodiest blows at Shiloh: Beauregard! Beauregard! Beauregard! More worrisome are the silent ones. They stare at him, and in their looks are repeated the glares his vindictive schoolmates would give whenever he prolonged a class-day with untoward observation or provoked a long and torturous lecture by questioning the parentage of Cain’s wife or stood up and gave a speech demanding an end to fines for missing chapel. But now as then there are peeps of encouragement, the balled fists of likeminded fellows. Good on you, Ben. Go get ’em. (And he always does: twenty years after the fact, he has managed to install on the board of supervisors of the miserable Baptist college a cousin whose first act was to squelch mandatory chapel.) He holds fast to the snippets of encouragement as they wheel from Canal to St. Charles, disregards his boots for a moment to see the few who cheer him quickly battered into silence by others in the crowd.

His men tense and some make to break ranks and relieve the beleaguered loyalists. Butler calls them back. It’s not worth a riot, and there will be time enough for correction.

Funneling through a sharp bend in the street before the monumental rise of the St. Charles Hotel hoves into view. No time to admire this the largest hotel on the continent, though like a tourist he has read the brochures detailing its gold leaf service (made in New York) and satin footboards (plushed in Paris). The St. Charles, he thinks, with its grandly theatrical air, would do well for Sarah. But tonight his quarters must be more defensible, and his wife left aboard the Saxon.

He wonders how she will pass the night. Sarah has lately been prey to nightmares. Last week, having returned of a morning from a reconnoiter with the ships at the Pass, he’d found Sarah shaking in her tent, bag-eyed from lack of sleep. Terrible, terrible, she said, and what she told slipped seamlessly from the waking world to dream. There had been a storm last night—yes, he’d seen. And the tent was shuddering, straining so at the stakes that Molly—her girl—had to go outside with a mallet, and just when the storm had abated and we laid our heads to our pillows there was a great crash of thunder that sent her bolting up in bed, the lightning-flash revealing outside her tent a figure. A man. Clawing, scraping, trying to get in. Then, somehow, she knew who it was so desperately trying to get in. Lorenzo, the Negro. A sutler’s boy who tended jobs around the camp. She could see him clearly now, in silhouette they’re so different, you know. He was hunched and horrible and thrashing at the flaps until he came shambling in and she reached to pull up a floorboard and she was battering Lorenzo as best she could but suddenly she had no strength and she was thrown back on her bed beneath that debased visage and then, of course, woke up.

She couldn’t, simply couldn’t, bear to see Lorenzo after that. So at her urging General Butler has left Lorenzo on the island with the remaining garrison, though with the admonishment to Sarah that she’d better lose her fear of Negroes soon; he couldn’t very well banish all the blacks from New Orleans, now could he?

Ben, Ben, Ben—she’d shook her head—you simply do not understand a woman’s fears.

Ah, he understands them well enough, though the women here seem to show little sign of any terror of his marching horde. They spit farther arcs of tobacco juice, cry louder, more inventive insults, and generally display vitriol far beyond the ken of the men. See them, undone harridans, making mockingly carnal gesticulations at his fresh-faced lads until they are in blessed proximity to their destination and he calls halt, the company commanders arraying the men in phalanxes of guard to surround the Custom House—a dripping half-roofed monstrosity of Massachusetts granite, designed by the very man whose name has been shouted at him from the moment he stepped off the boat. Here stands Beauregard’s cavernous hulk, constructed on what parameters Butler cannot conceive save for the Cyclopean and Quixotic. From the street, the place still bears the scent of its late usage as a manufactory of percussion caps. Saltpeter wafts as the gate is flung wide and they approach the unlit mass and find themselves surrounded by a vast horde of shadowed forms like an overgrowth of mushrooms, some nary a foot high and others taller than a man, and it is not until someone trips and beneath the curse over a stubbed toe there sounds a distinct tong that he understands they are in a field of bells. Gasps followed by investigative kicks and the dull vibration of ground-trapped resonance. Torches and lamps are brought; these bells must have been gathered from across the country, so numerous and varied is this collection. Carillon rows and elliptical peals, churchbells of all denomination, dreaded schoolbells and workbells and, see here the inscription, bells that call slaves to the fields.

In the shadow of this colossal rain-dripping monument to the grandiose incompetence of the people he must now govern, in this fairy-tale hoard of bells meant for desperate smelting into cannon, General Butler begins to laugh, as we may begrudge any man some humor when he wades into the realm of madness.