Butler

Seven

Departures

George Strong in his sickbed. Not yellow fever, thank God, something respiratory. Troubling nonetheless to see a young man so laid out. Stubble darkens the hollows of Strong’s cheeks, a shadow down his phlegm-rattled throat to the open collar of his nightshirt where someone has painted a plaster that smells of linseed. Still, Strong’s eyes are bright, his smile winning, when he stirs awake and finds Butler sitting beside him.

George manages a limp salute and lets his hand fall to the bed, wheezing.

“I brought you something,” Butler says, handing over a rumpled sheet of paper engraved with a scene of a tall, handsome Union soldier hauling a priest from his pulpit, subtitled: the “strong” man enacts the will of the beast. “Quite the likeness, eh?”

George first holds the sheet at arm’s length, then brings it to his nose, as though unsure of his vision. What starts as a laugh ends with him rolled over, hacking into a pan. Wet gobs on tin. Quaking shoulders.

“No blood,” Strong says, rolling back and settling in his pillows.

“Good, good,” says Butler. For the better part of two weeks Adjutant Strong has kept himself going on coffee and nerves alone. His youthful energies failed him on the day of Mumford’s execution. He has been abed for four days. The doctors say there shall be no improvement if he remains in New Orleans. The climate being disagreeable to his condition and, according to a current of wisdom popular among the ranker abolitionists who would have our soldiers replaced by armed blacks, the constitution of any white man. Butler has been quick to point out that the argument that southern climes are unsuitable for Anglo Saxon men is the same argument put forward by the slaveholders. Still they shout, Send our boys home and give the niggers guns. Strong is the fifth member of his staff to have fallen ill within two weeks. He cannot send them all away. They would have him officerless and with no more than three thousand troops fit for duty in the city, and all the while Secretary Stanton ordering him to send men north to attack Vicksburg. But George is the exception. He owes him that much.

“I’ve seen the news,” says Strong.

“Oh yes: General Banks repulsed, McClellan’s forces routed, Washington in the hands of Stonewall Jackson who is no doubt reading a sermon to his men while making them run barefoot along the perimeter of the city with Lincoln’s head on a pike. It’s not as bad as all that. The corrections are already coming in.”

“I assumed the reports were . . . exaggerated. I thought I’d hear celebrations outside if the Rebels had taken Washington.”

“Indeed,” he says. “The capital thrives so well they’re sending a man down to adjudicate the case of the precious foreign consuls. Do you remember Mr. Reverdy Johnson of Baltimore?”

George rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “That damned man.”

Unlike Strong to curse, but if he hadn’t Butler would do so for him. Mr. Reverdy Johnson, former attorney general, council for the defense in the Dred Scott case, and doddering old fork-tongued secessionist spy, and among the more odious and infuriating persons he encountered in Baltimore, will be dispatched by Secretary Seward to New Orleans within the month to arbitrate between Butler and the foreign consuls and the banks. In fact this will be an investigation of him and his department. The first step to removal.

“You’ve sent a complaint to Seward, yes?”

Butler nods. “But you know it won’t do any good. They understand nothing.”

The Sewards and Johnsons of this world could never do his job. Before he’d come to visit George, Butler had sat with the son of Commodore de Kay, lying now at the St. James Infirmary. A wound received on a scouting mission, gone septic. He’d visited the boy this morning, written his father a letter of condolence thereafter. He’d like to set Seward and Johnson beside a stinking corpse-to-be. See how they like it.

Strong runs a hand down his face. “Who has my post? Who’s writing the dispatches?”

“Captain Davis, of the Eleventh Maine.”

Strong is shaking his head. “Davis is a poor writer.”

“I don’t need a wordsmith, George. And besides, you’re overqualified. Now you’ll regroup and by the time you’re well, have a command of your own no doubt.”

Coughing again, George is careful to keep the pan out of sight. “I know I may have seemed a little schoolmarmish, all those hours going over the wording of orders with you over and—”

“Don’t forget over and again,” Butler smiles.

“But there’s a reason for it, sir.” Strong’s face slackens; his voice goes soft. “Every word we put down will be printed. It’s all going to be history.”

“A man in your condition shouldn’t be dramatic, George.”

The coughs return and Strong speaks through his fist. “Mrs. Butler . . . Send her home?”

“She’s already gone.”

All his world is falling away, piecemeal departures and removals seemingly building towards his own. He saw her off yesterday morning at the Girod Street wharf in a manner hurried, tearless, and without ceremony. Sarah biting her lip. In her face remembrances of their argument the night before.

It’s for your own good.

Fine. If you want me to go away . . .

A cold embrace despite the heat. She turned and stamped up the gangway and was gone.

Now as then he feels himself nearing the terminus of a dark passage, approaching not a point of daylight and open ground but nooses and gallows and the ledger-scratch of civilian commissioners, shadows in the weird angles of broken necks.

He tells Strong of the latest batch. Four men of the Fourteenth Massachusetts and two sailors from the same damned ship that brought him up the Mississippi have been robbing houses at night, turning the owners out with supposed orders from the general and helping themselves to the goods therein. Boys of Fort Hill, Back Bay, Boston dregs. He’ll have them hanging in a week.

Strong sighs, shuts his lids. He stays this way so long Butler has risen to his feet when the bright eyes open and Strong takes his wrist, eases him back down.

“I’m worried you’ll be rasher,” Strong says. “Harsher without—”

“My two consciences—?”

“Your friends.”

“I have too many friends. Every day I get letters from sanctimonious old college chums, railing at me over Order Twenty-eight.” He thinks of one man who kept on about how disappointed he was. How he felt betrayed that his good friend Ben Butler would do such a thing. “But of course my business partners are happy.” Jackson, running around the town buying up confiscated goods, packing the holds, Fray in Boston, Fisher Hildreth in Lowell. He looks to Strong, unable to help the touch of despair that creeps now into his voice. “I feel like the boy in the schoolhouse who everyone likes only on the day he brings a cake from home to share.”

George, fists clenched, in surer throat: “And now they’re sending that bastard Johnson. God Almighty. How will it end?”

“I should think poorly, for one of us. But I can’t worry about that now.”

“Bastards. Utter bastards.”

He claps Strong’s shoulder. “I haven’t seen you so worked up since they shot at you in Biloxi.”

For a moment George is laughing round his breath, but something has snatched his mind. His expression darkens. “You know,” he says. “I haven’t thought of the little girl, Marina, in so long. . . . She’s somewhere here. . . . Been here for months . . . and I never once sought her out. Never once.”

“You’ve been busy, man. Propping me up, dragging preachers from their pulpits . . .”

Strong pats the sheet. “My wife will like this.”

“And besides see Miss Nancy, what will you do when you’re home.”

The ceiling has his attention. “I’d like to hike the White Mountains.”

“The George Strong patented cure.”

Strong shakes his head; other thoughts have him. The phlegm is shuddering in his chest, slime-fists slapping to be let out. “It just seems wrong,” he says. “To be so . . . ghostly . . . in her life, then out . . .”

“You’re no ghost.” He squeezes a knot of muscle at Strong’s elbow, thinks how he’s never had one there himself. “Let’s make sure you stay that way, eh? We’ll have you on the ship to New York by Friday. In ten days you’ll be scaling the peaks or whatever you wish.”

“I’m sorry to leave you here,” says Strong. “I’m just so tired of being underwater.”

Down here we all drown in one way or another. In greed or fear or in the lonesome encumbrances of power, George, it’s all the same. Here and there, North and South, the waters flow the same. Deep and dark and ready for us all.

At the Custom House he dictates the order for the execution of the thieves. Captain Davis jots with cloying eagerness words George would amend for their harshness and brevity. George who fears for his commander to be friendless. George who never understood that all he does, all he’s ever done, has been accomplished alone. He will preside over the dying lieutenant’s funeral; he will share the Confederate general’s mansion with the retinue of slaves, officers, and guards; he will have dinner with his damned brother; he will drink too much, by candlelight write letters to the bastards in Washington, letters he must ball up in the morning; he will await the arrival of Seward’s spy; he will hang these four men. He will be the Beast.