Butler

Three

Thanksgiving

The carcasses are picked clean, and the pie dispensed in slices to diners whose appetites are far past slaked. It is agreed that Southern pumpkins do not match their Northern cousins, which are far nuttier and more sweet. The uncomfortable prayers have been hustled through, the chatter of here and home suspended. Evening smears the panes of dining room, blots out the garden-pathways of what could rightly be called the Butler plantation. The shuffle of servants, the clack of bone on china, the dribble of coffee being poured by black hands now paid a wage. The sounds of things ending.

Fifteen miles downriver from the city: Vacherie, sugar country. Here the citizens have signed the oath of allegiance almost to a man, the lone exception being the former owner of this house, who abandoned the property and sent his family to Texas at the time of the invasion. So, with the cane ripe and the hands escaped or idle, the situation begged for an able man to be sent. Brother Jackson, needing diversion and to be out of New Orleans, fit the bill. He has driven crews of California Mexicans and gold-field Chinese, so why not Negroes? And the place is profitable, even with the hands being paid for the first time in their lives—lives the general has glancing observed from the dining room window this day of Thanksgiving. A different breed than the city blacks. Darker, leaner, troublingly quiet. One sits in the far corner, a withered manikin just behind his brother’s head, basket of napkins in her lap.

From the opposite end of the table, General Butler watches his brother lean close to the loyalists, to Creole planters by whose expressions you may know the shallowness of their esteem. Each time they call his brother Colonel Butler, the general feels his wife’s nails root deeper in his thigh. The clench of Sarah’s fingers and the corner-cut of her blue eyes that he has learned in the course of years of parties, holidays, and visits, unmistakably ask, May we go now?

He closes his hand over hers; the nails stay planted.

After months of vacillation, arguments by packet, her letters, at first filled with reasons not to come back to New Orleans (to which he would, by silence, agree), turned gloomy and sulkier than their daughter’s missives from boarding school; when he asked that she send photographs of her and the children so that he could have the family’s portraits painted on china plate, Sarah’s looked like a memento mori; when he wrote asking for new pairs of his favorite merino winter underwear and shirts, she acted as though the letters were lost; and finally her tone turned furious—livid lines screaming to know why he wasn’t asking her to return. He tried to show his wife her autonomy, the ease of his hand, but she wanted to be told. And so he had, scribbling one late September morning, by turns ebullient and begging. A sick Ben in need of his Sary.

In his letters he joked that he wanted her happy and glad, so she arrived whittled and bitter. She begged for him to beg her to come, and now that she’s here, Sarah is misery incarnate.

She said, You want me fat to make yourself feel better. You want me fat and happy, to be like you.

I am, he wished to say, far from happy.

Those who left him in the heat of the summer have returned: Sarah, spite-thin, who scrapes the tines of her fork everywhere on her plate except the slice of pie; George Strong, who days before rode off to Pass Manchac in hopes of earning his spurs in what guerilla contests pass for combat. All safely returned. Yes. Wonderful. They have come back just in time, to see the stripping away of everything he has accomplished.

Seward’s man Reverdy Johnson did his master’s work well. From a little office on the opposite side of the Custom House, sending notes back and forth to the general, Johnson made his sly “mediation” of the case. Obfuscation, threats, and gall—nothing more. And if he can be proud of anything, Butler is of the tolerance he showed the man. Various diplomats’ trinkets seized by overeager soldiers were sussed out of pawnshops and whores’ parlors, and most importantly all one and a half million dollars of seized specie was returned to the esteemed consuls, an order with which Butler graciously complied, adding only that he wished the esteemed consuls would also take the dies for making bank notes and the crate of plates for printing Confederate treasury notes that were found along with the kegs of silver.

“Cream, Monsieur?”

He says nothing; stares into his coffee. Sarah answers for him. “Oh, yes, cream and four sugars, please. He likes it sweet and fatty.”

It’s come to this. Treacherous foreigners are given a carte blanche by Washington, so terrified is Mr. Seward and his creature Lincoln of the prospect of European discomfort or, God forbid, intervention. He can hear them: Butler riles the Europeans—we must put a stop to it or this emperor or that king will be at our throats. Let them be treacherous in secret rather than open enemies.

Cowards. Goddamned cowards.

Since the judgment and Johnson’s swift departure in August (fanned by rumors that the Rebels were planning an assault), such imagined conversations have held dominion over his resting mind. When not at some task, the voices come to gnaw at him. Seward yipping for his removal, Lincoln’s drawl, the lazy chuckle only a drayman would mistake for wit. Stanton bellowing fruitlessly is his favor, drowned out by the chorus of the cabinet that is managing to lose this war. Butler is a liability. He (not this summer’s failures in the field behind beauty McClellan) turns the European powers (ha!) against us at the moment we will need them most—the enacting of the president’s proclamation to free the slaves in all territories not in U.S. hands. Butler is a liability, they say. Rash and impertinent. A thief along with his brother who calls himself colonel though he holds no commission. They have enriched themselves to the tune of millions. They buy cotton from Confederates and sell them salt and sugar. And worse, he is a Democrat.

“Gentlemen?” says Jackson, rising from his seat. He has in mind cigars and brandy and escaping the company of the women.

Sarah gives him a pointed smile. All her perfect teeth.

He is tired. He doesn’t know which voices should have primacy—those he hears or the ones within. They seem equally unreal, equally consequential.

He has told no one of the news received today. The news that stabs his stomach. The confirmation of a summer-long conjecture, rumors dribbled southward in a constant venomous trickle: he will be recalled from his command. In August, hearsay had it would be General Dix, in September, General Fremont. He wrote the secretary of war, saying that if they had a replacement in mind, they should send the man soon so that he could enjoy the full fury of the fever season.

But of course there is no fever in the city. Some deaths among the poor, immigrants, Negroes, but not the scythe-sweep dying of years past. He has beaten the thing that killed his father. Yellow fever, like a whipped cur, is skulked off to Havana, San Juan, Veracruz. And no one will give him the credit. With less than ten thousand men he has held this half of the state, made incursions into Mississippi, bolstered the siege of Vicksburg, while with a hundred thousand McClellan and Burnside have their heads kicked in and lose everything up to the gates of Washington.

Now it has come to him by way of a spy among General Polk’s officers, who saw it in a cable from Richmond, that General Nathaniel Banks, fresh off his “victory” over Stonewall Jackson’s maniacs, is sent with thirty thousand men on an expedition against Texas. It is not without rage that Butler contemplates the fact that Jefferson Davis knew about this before he did. Banks. Nativist, Know-Nothing—hater of immigrant Catholics so long as it won him elections, and lover of nigger freedom providing it did the same. Of all the men they could have sent. Banks, who, within a year of Butler’s age, has served as speaker of the House and a term as governor of Massachusetts. And in their acquaintance, on opposite poles of politics, still Butler has never been unkind to the man. Never noted, as do many others, that he started life as a bobbin-boy, threading the empty spools of mill-women in Waltham. He holds meagre beginnings against no man. Certainly not against Banks. Tall Banks. Dashing Banks. Banks with hair on his head to spare.

Butler rubs the graying tufts that cling above his ears—his ­tonsure—looks to Sarah and sighs. “I won’t be long. Just a drink, then we can go.”

From across the room: “Come on now, Ben. I need a smoke!”

Sarah shuts her eyes, waves him off. He will pay for this on the ride home, and at home he will spend the night at his desk to avoid his wife’s boundless ire. He will sit at his desk and work. He will write directly to Lincoln, demand an explanation. He won’t allow them to hide their designs. The Illinois rail-splitter will know his feelings, and be forced to make his own plain. And isn’t that what our beleaguered president, who mortgages a war on political favor and thinks more of slaves than his soldiers in the field, likes best? Plain speaking. Plain dealing. Plain shit.

In the staggering powerlessness, Butler feels himself receding. Growing smaller. There is no maneuver to be made, no legal wrangling, no law to bend or mold. The judgment is out of his hands; all he can do is wait.