Butler

Two

“A Thousand Paths,
Where Every Clue
Was Lost”

The crowd outside the St. Charles Hotel, grown from a trickle of weary drunks upon his relocation in late morning to full-throated mob by one o’clock, cries that General Butler is asleep. Asleep as he legendarily was while the guns rained hell and his troop-line buckled into ignoble retreat at Big Bethel, the only action he has seen in his time as major general.

The long hat-and-cloak table of the ladies’ parlor has been dragged across the room to make the desk at which he sits, unmoving, these past minutes. Military matter, neatly stacked, occupies a single rosewood corner, its ranks threatened by a steady invasion of letters, dispatch scraps, scribbled invective from the populace; the remaining expanse awaits filling by the figures of the city. He has sent emissaries to the banks, to the storehouses and newspapers and foreign ­consulates—to City Hall. They will return with falsified pages and hopefully some recalcitrant city elders, ready for capitulation. Brother Jackson, named for the general under whom their father served at this very site, has taken the initiative to begin a survey of the saloons and taverns and coffeehouses, certain venues perhaps frequented nearly half a century ago by the father neither of them can remember.

Outside, the rioters call him a drowser, make sawblade snores at the window. General Butler does not move.

He is, in fact, reading—an open and well-thumbed copy of Gardener’s New Orleans Directory of 1861, wherein are listed not only the names of citizens and their businesses from patent clerk to prostitute, but the offices and officers of the city government in all their varicose and labyrinthine forms. Pity the poor devil who had the task of hacking any semblance of order from the tangled knots these people call a municipal government, which appears to him as a colossal obfuscation. Boards and committees that would have five members in Boston have fifteen here. The needless gothic embellishments of sub-subcommittees for waste and streetlights and levees and gasworks and draught-animals. City government arranged on Chinese puzzle-box lines, with no compartment containing a plurality or avenue to the offices above. A quorum of counterproduction, at first maddening and perverse until you consider that the arrangement is innate to the character of the place.

When he reads, Butler’s eyelids droop lower even than usual, and with head inclined he is often mistaken for dozing. General Grant, so he hears, napped while the corpses piled high at Shiloh.

Tibbets’s voice: “Should I draw the curtains, General?”

“I’ve had about enough of them myself,” adds George Strong.

Butler listens. Outside the people drone like an enraged apiary. He does not move, nor give orderly or adjutant an answer, but lets his head tip farther forward. The panes rattle with the laughter of the crowd.

“Should I . . . ?”

“General, sir?”

Still downward slumps his head; he exhales, fluttering his lips so that the ends of his moustaches whistle. He struggles not to betray himself with a smile, fights the concussion of withheld chuckle threatening his broad shoulders to quake now that even his men have taken the bait. When he feels the pages of the directory at the tip of his nose, in a single motion Butler snaps himself straight and with eyes bright and open as he can manage grins at the crowd and gives them a wink.

The windows may come apart with their surprise—Tibbets and George stepping back from the thunderous yawps—as even rebellious hearts cannot help but cheer and dance for a moment at his jest. All, he sees, save one who stands at their forefront. Dark of hair and whisker, a man of maybe forty—too old for rabble-rousing but given some primacy by his fellows—he wears in his collar button a large tuft of the flag of the United States. He exhorts, baring tobacco-stained teeth, pounds the shreds of stars and stripe at his breast, shakes his fist at the general, and meets his eyes. Vitriol subsumes the whoops and George Strong, brushing past Tibbets, takes the tasseled cord and yanks the curtains of the nearest window closed. Moving about the room, Strong hauls curtains shut, calling for Tibbets to do the same until they are left in darkness.

Butler sighs, waits while lamps are lit and in orange-glowing succession the room is illuminated corner by corner, unscrews the bell of his desklamp, and lights the wick.

In the glow and flicker he espies his adjutant’s frustration. Butler looks to this strapping Vermonter, a major though barely twenty-three. “George,” he says, “the essence of humor is not to make the other man laugh, though it naturally occurs, but to make him realize that he is the joke.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Of course you don’t. Square-jawed George, tall trim George whose bedside is stacked with letters from a lovely young wife and the admiring girls of home, able to shut your eyes and remember the swoons of the milkmaids of Vermont, and of whom the little girl they’d rescued was troublingly fond. See, George, when you’ve been joked about all your life you must learn to turn it back. There are few better things than wrenching the giggle from some dullard’s throat so that only a smile, a front maintained against the sting of rebuke, remains. Or take an angry man, hammering his fist on your desk over some courtroom sleight of hand, some unexpected brief—all he’s angry about is being outwitted, being beaten. Do not gloat, do not meet his rage, but find some humor in the situation, even yourself, and twist it into a laurel he may wear upon his loser’s head.

“And if all else fails,” Butler says, “simply remain composed and give him time to cool. But if this is unsuccessful, if he maintains his rage and threat—crush him.” Stamp out his pitiful flame like you would a fleck of ember escaped from fireplace grate. Put your boot to it before the carpet catches fire.

He considers the man with the flag-scrap boutonniere as the crowd strikes up the “Bonnie Blue” ditty, answered in chorus by the guards barking for them to keep back.

“I’m afraid,” says George Strong, “we have more than a little crushing to do.”

Butler trudges through waterworks and drainage-sectors divided up like fiefdoms, the commissions spread among four competing municipal districts and the two incorporated cities. Boston, the torch by which he makes his way through New Orleans’s interminable turns and catacombs, is a poor light. And he knows that there is no lone Minotaur lurking in the umbral reaches of the city’s obfuscations, but a beast in gestalt.

The hotel steward appears at the door, asks timidly from the bright outer world of the monstrous St. Charles if the general will be requiring anything.

“We’re fine, thank you,” says George Strong. “You’ll find New England men prefer to serve themselves.”

Muttering, the boy retreats into recesses unimaginable for those without the concierge’s brochure, and even thus equipped you may find it difficult to navigate the hotel’s three hundred and fifty-nine rooms, bifurcated along lines of gender—ladies to the westward side, gents to the east—themselves containing twelve private parlors, a half dozen stairway sitting rooms, connected in intricate lacing of guest-stairway and deeper recesses wherein servants may climb unseen from the backside kitchens, over which are flung their own quarters, down into the cavernous dining rooms (similarly separate) that hold eaters in the hundreds and are fronted by their respective saloons (where Jefferson Davis held court before the convention in ’60) and drawing room (wherefrom Butler now contemplates the expanse), then into the basement ­barroom—an uncommon thing in this city to have any space underground, but dryness is afforded by limestone walls and flooring three feet thick—the octagonal den lined with Corinthian columns themselves festooned with playbills and slave-auction notices his men have taken to ripping down—and terminating in the cave-reeking bathhouse, where a hundred men may steam away the city’s grime.

We consider only in passing the portico fronting the hotel, one hundred and forty-five feet long, the titanic granite breaker at which the rabble of the city now flings itself, and the crowning dome, among whose turrets once stood a fifty-foot-high statue of George Washington that was felled by a fire and collapse eleven years ago.

Though Sarah would adore it all, for prudence’s sake he keeps Mrs. Butler aboard the Saxon. He is not yet willing to test the limits of Southern chivalry, but he will have his wife on land before nightfall.

He will have to do something about the attitude of his men. Not just George, but much of his staff have taken to berating the hotel workers, Negro and white, about the self-reliance of Northern men. Useless when someone’s trying to give you a glass of lemonade, a silly pose that breeds discontent and only furthers the people’s belief that we are a nation of Ichabods, lecturing away. As though we all stoke fires, cook meals, beat rugs and children ourselves. Butler has no such illusions, nor need of them. He understands himself as an aristocrat of lifestyle and a democrat of politics. Where others might see contradiction, the general finds only harmony.

“George,” he says. “Do you recall the man outside wearing a piece of the flag of the United States?”

“No, sir.”

“I see the rascal,” chimes Tibbets. “They got him on their shoulders.”

“Check the window and see. You’ll find he’s of middle age, dark, face a bit bleary from drink, and vociferous.”

Strong complies, shoulders alongside the orderly and peers out. “You described the villain to perfection.”

“The general never forgets a face,” says Tibbets.

Without looking up from the directory, Butler says, “Let’s find out that man’s name, shall we?”

“Do you want him detained?”

Tibbets is tapping at the window, pointing, presumably, at the man and mouthing you.

“Just his name, thank you.”

Strong goes to pass the order on. The man’s name is a formality; give George something to do besides unsettle the help. Butler already has the man’s face; and were there an artist nearby he could go into more meticulous detail: the snarl of a scar at his right upper lip, the bushy blue-black brows. He could pick the man out of any crowd, as he’s done in courtrooms and bustling commons, hailed a man he’d seen months back in an actuary’s office; he can recall the face of all who’ve stood beside him at the bar in twenty-five years, call to mind individuals out of the multitudes of the accused and the aggrieved. In his mill he is a hero for addressing each smudge-faced girl on the line by name; when he was in Congress he could claim to know the greater portion of his district by heart. And one might think his mind overburdened by the cast of a lifetime, but just as people tend to take undue notice of his face, so he commits theirs to memory.

Tibbets lets the curtain slack, comes to pour him more coffee, as his emissaries trickle in bearing the various refusals. The owner of the newspaper True Delta refuses to print his proclamation; at City Hall the mayor and his people refuse to come to the St. Charles and meet him; the banks refuse to surrender accounts of their specie; the consulates refuse to detail the sheltered holdings of foreign nationals; and on and on so that he is glad when the litany is interrupted by Strong with the name of the errant spark: William Mumford, who openly admits he is the man who tore the flag of the United States from its staff at the Mint.

He will deal with this Mumford in time, just as he will roust city elders and impertinent printers and bend all refusals into pleading acquiescence, but for now his eyes return to the directory, the catacombs yawn and contract between walls illumined only by nitre; deep in the dankness of Southern calumny and disregard, he hears the crowd sing. A chorus of sparks building to an inferno.