Butler

Two

A Matter of Business

In the courtyard of the Custom House, Admiral Farragut is shrieking:

“Damn the uniform! Burn it!” A sound of shattered glass. “Not water, you fool! Spirits! Spirits!”

The admiral, naked and raving behind an honor guard of aides who protect with unfurled horse blankets his flailing modesty, these parting briefly to admit a corporal rushing back from the medical stores with bottles clutched to his chest. Holding his end of a blanket high, a member of the honor guard casts a baleful look over his shoulder in the direction of General Butler.

At the open window of his office in the Custom House, he listens to the man who stole his glory hiss and spit geysers of grain alcohol. Evidently, when the doxies of a particular house had emptied the contents of their chamber pots down onto the passing admiral, his mouth had been open.

And he would be savoring a smile were it not for the presence of his older brother, redolent of distillation as no doubt our intrepid admiral is at this very moment. So he shuts the window, returns to filial obligations.

“So,” says Jackson. “I made my survey of the saloons. . . .”

“Thoroughly, it seems.”

“That’s right.” Jackson claps his hands to his knees, leans forward. “So, when do you give the order to shut them down?”

Some of the more puritanical officers have come to him bemoaning the men’s slide into drunkenness. Drunk on watch, drunk on duty, drunk at mess and parade. This city sweats spirituous liquors, General, and the weak-willed souls lap it up. There must be something you can do. And, of course, there is.

“A few days at most,” Butler says.

Jackson nods in mock thoughtfulness. “Now, I don’t think we should buy out the larger, gentleman’s saloons until—”

“I’ll tell you again. We’re not buying the saloons, Jackson,” he says. “You will wait two weeks from the time I close them down, then you will buy their liquor.” He pauses, allowing the order to penetrate the twilit depths of his brother’s murky understanding. “You will buy their stores, and those of the importers. And three weeks later, when the owners are desperate, I will reinstate the drinking houses and saloons and you will sell their liquor back to them at double cost.”

Elder brother huffs, looks about the office, readying himself to speak. And it is, the general knows, not the stupid man who is the most frustrating, but the stupid man who believes he is bright, strains his hamstrung faculties with overthinking, as Jackson does now.

“But, Ben, the money from the liquor’s nothing compared to the real estate!”

“Real estate is a fool’s game.”

“You’ve made money at it before.”

“Do you think housing values are due to increase in the South anytime soon? Or perhaps you foresee a rise in demand?”

“N-no, but right now we can get the places cheap.”

“This isn’t California—where you have to rush out and hammer your flag in the first mudhole you see.” The general stops to watch his brother’s eyes lower to the floor.

“It’s an investment, Ben,” Jackson addresses the boards. “An investment for the future. For when the war’s over. I thought you’d respect that.”

“When the war is over,” Butler says, “any scrap of land or building will cost a quarter of what you’d pay today, you follow? That is when we buy property. So now consider liquor, which will only grow cheaper as trade is reinstated and Lincoln lifts the blockade, per my request. The liquor gives us a quick turnaround on a relatively small investment. A prospect I thought you would find particularly enticing, if not worthy of respect.”

His brother has given up on the floor, looks now to the papers, logs, and inkstands that separate them and, yes, across the years and achievements, the inches of height and pounds of sinew, across the childhood battles for a mother’s affections and the endless times when they would set themselves before her in competitions—who has drawn the better ship? who has leapt the highest? who has caught the biggest fish?—she was too much a mother to truthfully judge. Butler has learned the lesson from his experience of fatherhood: Of course a parent knows one child is more skilled or the better leaper, more intelligent or handsome, than the other. But you hide behind some false equalizing love: Oh, children, I could never choose. I love you both the same. And you leave them to fight among themselves, though each knows the truth.

Jackson’s thoughts have taken another turn: “You know what one of them said to me today?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I was at this run-down little shack of a bar, asking how was business, and this man—thickest drawl you can imagine, not a ball team of teeth in his head—called me, all Yankees, indefatigable. Indefatigable hunters of money, he said.” Elder brother’s face grows wistfully bemused. “You’d never think a man like that could muster such a phrase.”

“And what did you say to this unexpected erudition?”

“Well, I was soreheaded I’ll admit. So I said to him that Southerners were too lazy, too slow.”

“And we’re quicker, more industrious.”

“Right.”

“And that’s what you believe?”

Jackson chews his cheek. “No, not really. I’d say, Reb or not, everyone wants money just as bad. Some of us just have the better method.”

Like a pair of brothers holding up pages drawn with sailing ships to a mother’s sigh-slung face, both wanting the same commodity of approval, dominance of the heart. You do not shout and mawk and beg the way your brother does; you know you’ve drawn the better ship whether Mother says so or not. No comfort, though, when brother can take you out back, knock you down, and pin behind your back the small, careful hand that drew so well, wrenching till you scream surrender in whatever terms he likes.

With a scowl he cannot fight, Butler says, “Well, we agree on this point, at least.”