Grant: A Novel (2 page)

For all his bluster, though, Jesse was a shrewd man. He had chosen the tannery business because he correctly saw that a new territory, in the process of settlement, was going to have a growing demand for leather goods, and also because the vast green shimmering forests of the Ohio Valley (all gone now, stripped as if by locusts armed with axes) would give a perpetual supply of oak bark, whose tannic acid was what you needed to tan your hides. If he hadn’t been such a self-satisfied, opinionated cuss, Jesse might have become the Leather King of the Middle West. As it was, despite his personal unpopularity he quickly prospered; he made some money and bought his own tannery, and at the age of twenty-eight,
consulting a “life schedule” he had drawn up for himself, noted that it was time to go out and find a wife.

Three engraved illustrations from
A Boy’s Life of General Grant
, published in that year of glory 1865.

Picture Number One
A two-room clapboard house, 16 by 19, the closest thing to a log cabin you could get in Point Pleasant. This is 1822, long before the invention of photography, so the artist is free to use his imagination. The front room has a fireplace where Hannah cooks and a few straight-backed chairs on a bare pine floor. The six-week-old infant General is sleeping in a crib made from a drawer. The rest of the family is pulled up in a circle by the fire. On Jesse Grant’s lap sits an old black slouch hat crammed with slips of paper torn from a tablet—Hannah has written “Albert” on one of them because they’re choosing the baby’s name and for some peculiar reason she’s always liked Albert Gallatin, who was Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of Treasury; Hannah’s sister Anne has written “Theodore” on her slip because she thinks it’s romantic; Grandfather Simpson considers “Hiram” a handsome name, but his wife and Jesse, who have both been reading in an odd lot of books that Jesse bought, want “Ulysses” after the great Grecian warrior in Fenelon’s
Telemachus
(names are Fate). Anne, the youngest, is about to pull out a slip of paper, Jesse is bending forward to read.…

Picture Number Two
Hiram Ulysses Grant, age nine, on a horse—the army in its inimitable and intractable way will mistakenly change his name to Ulysses S.—bareback in his father’s tannery yard in Georgetown, Ohio, where the family has moved from Point Pleasant. The prosperous new brick house is in the background, also the tannery sheds and the quiet tree-shaded brook that runs beside them, trickling down toward the Ohio River five miles distant. A pleasant scene, right out of Mark Twain’s little book
Tom Sawyer
. What the artist can’t show is the
blood
everywhere, specks and globules of red and drying blood all over the hides, the sheds, the workers’ arms, clothes, hair, and faces, not to mention the stench of scraped and decaying animal flesh and lumps of fat quivering on the ground and the sharp counter-smell of tannic acid from the oak bark in the iron grinder. What he can’t show either is the boy Ulysses in actual motion (we’d need one of
Mr. Edison’s zoopraxiscopes), galloping his horse down the main street of Georgetown like a Tartar.

It is a celebrated fact about him, of course, as soon as he could stand up and walk Grant found his way into the company of horses. At West Point he was known as the finest rider of his era—set a record for the high jump that still stands—and in Georgetown he was known as little Grant who could ride, break, or train any horse he saw. When he was three a frantic Grant neighbor banged on the window to shout that the baby was swinging from horses’ tails in the stable (Hannah merely nodded and went on with her business). At age eight he was driving his father’s wagon by himself all over the backroads of the county, hauling in bark. At nine he bought his first horse, a dappled white mare, with his own money. (Grant could read a horse, somebody said, with the same natural fluency Dr. Johnson could read Latin.) If you are small and lonely and looking for power, and we all are, a tall, strong horse between your legs will do it.

Shadows of the future bankrupt: when he was twelve or so, his father sent him to buy a neighbor’s horse, and he struck the bargain by saying, “Papa says I should offer you twenty dollars, but if you won’t take that I can go to twenty-two and a half, and if you won’t take that I should give you twenty-five.”

Picture Number Three
Fourteen-year-old “Useless” Grant, as his fellow students call him, stands on the doorstep of his one-room schoolhouse. He’s alone and the illustration makes him look disconsolate: he does no better in school than his horse-bargaining story would suggest. Satisfactory in mathematics, a remarkable visual memory (for landscapes, terrain), which school doesn’t test; poor in all other subjects. His ambitious braggart father nonetheless declares him a “genius” and sends him to one country school after another, covering the same lessons over and over—I heard so many times, Grant says now, that a noun is the name of a thing that I even began to believe it—but “Useless” still doesn’t shine.

If he walks outside the wrinkled gray border of the engraving and we follow him, we see him telling his father he will work in the hated tannery as required until the day he comes of age, never one minute after that. Now he goes down into the cellar of the new brick house. In a locked cupboard is some all-purpose home fever medicine, fifty percent alcohol—the world before the Civil
War was boiling with all varieties of fevers—and young Hiram Grant is kneeling down, undoing the lock.

Lincoln used to say that he was a product of the Kentucky backwoods of the 1820s (just the other side of the Ohio from Grant) and he didn’t think there had ever been such heavy drinking anywhere in the world as there was back then—men, women, even children. I myself remember the cask of whiskey and the tin cup on every store counter. There were jugs at the end of furrows, for the plowman’s comfort, at the end of corn rows for huskers. There were jugs in the fence corners for the farmhand’s dinner. This part of Ohio grows grapes and makes bad but abundant wine. The town hotel is an endless gurgling tap room. Every kind of celebration centers around the whiskey barrel. If a man isn’t dead drunk three or four times a year—on the Fourth of July, certainly, and Andy Jackson’s birthday—why, he loses all standing in the community.

What leads young Grant furtively down the cellar steps? Well, inheritance maybe; his paternal grandfather was without a doubt a drunkard. Loneliness, too, perhaps, the feeling that he is unloved by his silent mother, misunderstood by his awful father. The village boys mock him because he won’t go hunting and shoot a living animal with a firearm. They mock his prudery—no boy, no man in the army would ever hear Grant swear or tell an off-color story. A few years later, at age seventeen, he will stand only five feet one inch tall, weigh 117 pounds. He will not swim or bathe naked in front of anybody, he has a fragile, rather feminine delicacy of feature (pull aside the coarse beard and cigar—in the Mexican War the other officers called him “Little Beauty”). Put your face close to the picture. Under the shell of a mute, determined reserve do you hear a sad and sensitive little boy crying?

A child’s feelings are like the stars, they never burn out. They have to be buried or drowned.

Thus great generals are born.

A
N AUTHOR,” SAID MAUDIE CAMERON, AGED TEN, WEARING A
crisp white pinafore and an expression of pug-nosed disdain, “is a dreadful person who writes books.”

Nicholas Trist III scratched his chin stubble with the palm of his hand and studied a crystal decanter of amber-brown whiskey just to the child’s left, on a tabletop otherwise uselessly cluttered with little colored porcelain figures of cats and dogs in bonnets.

“My father never reads books,” Maudie said. “He says books are a damn-blasted waste of time.”

“That’s quite enough, Maudie.” The child’s governess was knitting or sewing or vivisecting something furry and blue in her lap, and without actually looking up she narrowed her eyes in a professional frown. Trist caught a glimpse of his own red-rimmed eyes in one of the room’s six mirrors. He placed his hand on his knee and stood up and dropped his hat.

“
You
wrote a book,” Maudie said.

“But nobody read it,” Trist assured her. Despite himself he licked his lips. Three steps to the decanter. Five steps to the door. Five thousand steps back to the steamship docks at Baltimore. His hat somehow found its way to his fingers again. There were four separate kinds of malarial fever according to the drunken Arab
doctor he had seen in Marseilles, and Trist had managed to come down with the least severe but the most persistent strain, though for the life of him just now he couldn’t remember the technical Latin name of it.

“Are you, in fact … an author, Mr. Trist?” The governess had put down her knitting and was making apologetic little flutters with her hands. “I understood you were Senator Cameron’s escort to Chicago.”

“Journalist,” Trist said. In the mirror, by a species of optical illusion, he swayed on his feet.

“Yes. Well.” Doubtful flutters now. “I can ring for the Senator’s wife—she knows the Senator’s schedule, but he should be home himself any moment.”

“You’re per-spiring,” Maudie announced, coming closer. “And your eyes are red.” She cocked her head like a sparrow on a curb. “And you haven’t got one arm
at all
.”

“Maudie—”

“I wonder,” Trist said unsteadily to the governess, and stopped to rub his brow with his hat. “A little touch of illness from the ship,” he said, “overheated, ocean voyage.” He gestured vaguely toward the window, which opened onto the redbrick elegance of Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., at present not overheated but overcast with low, fat afternoon clouds the color of avocados, at present showing no ship at all anchored under its leafless gray trees. In the center of the Square a colossal bronze statue of his stepfather’s old boss Andrew Jackson reared his horse and tipped his tricorn hat to a squadron of pigeons.

The governess had tended a hundred feverish children. She pulled a silken bell cord behind the whiskey decanter and scooped young Maudie out of harm’s way, germ’s way. Instructions flew. Doors rapidly opened and closed; a black maid in a black uniform hurried down a hallway in front of him, pointed wordlessly to a door, and disappeared. Trist nodded his thanks to the empty corridor, then slumped his back against the wall.

In one pocket of his coat he had seventy-three dollars in new American greenbacks, a handful of useless French sous, and six paper packets of Dr. Susens’ Patented Tropical Miracle Quinine Powder. In the other pocket he had a dented brass flasket of miracle brandy. The sweat was now running down his cheeks and
neck and under his shirt; he was starting to melt from the top down, like a candle. This was the classical pattern—Fever first, then Dizziness, Chills, Trembling Extremities,
La Nausée
. Dr. Susens listed the symptoms briskly and unsympathetically on the packet and recommended one dose every four hours, taken with two tumblers of water. Trist used his teeth to tear open a packet, licked the bitter quinine crystals from his hand like a dog, and then uncapped the flasket and swallowed steadily for as long as he could stand it, till brandy spilled over his chin and leaked out his pores. The Arab doctor had suggested a mixture of arsenic powder and chalk instead of quinine, but in the war Trist had seen arsenic used as a poison as well as a medicine; if he was going to poison himself, it might as well be with brandy.

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and braced himself against the wall. Brandy worked fast. He could already feel his veins start to crackle and light up like burning twigs. Quinine made him excitable. He glanced at the dark little privy behind him—what else did you expect of a United States Senator in the year 1879 if not modern indoor plumbing?—and then pushed away from the wall and began to walk. Because he ought to be there, waiting, when Senator Cameron arrived, a journalist ought to be on time and waiting.

He passed one closed door, a second, turned a corner, and stopped. In a house ten minutes and lost. Trist took another swallow of brandy. The corridor was at least fifty feet long and ended at a heavily curtained window. There were three dim gas lamps spaced on brackets along the wall, but they did little to dispel the inky gloom. Trist had the sensation of walking downhill, as if into a mine. He passed another mirror where somebody’s flushed and overheated face floated in the black glass like a burning moon. In his first command in the war, in the summer of 1863, three-fourths of his troops had caught either dysentery or malaria. He blinked at a pencil-thin streak of light creeping under the bottom of a door six feet away. In the war, Senator Cameron’s father had been something important in Lincoln’s cabinet. Trist moved toward the light and tried to remember the story. The older Cameron was a Pennsylvania politician with a reputation for wholesale thievery. When Lincoln asked a colleague if Simon Cameron was likely to keep it up in Washington, the colleague had scratched his head
and said, well, Simon probably wouldn’t steal a red-hot stove. When Cameron demanded an apology, the colleague declared, I did
not
say you wouldn’t steal a red-hot stove.