Grant: A Novel (32 page)

T
HE BARN SAT AT THE NARROW END OF AN OVERGROWN LANE
, between two bending stands of dark pine. It had evidently been abandoned years ago, but used occasionally since by tramps or hunters, because a faint trail could be discerned across the weeds to the door and an old patchwork blanket hung nailed to one of the windows. Trist ran skidding and sliding through the rain, yanked the latch open for Elizabeth, then ducked inside himself.

There was one large open space, fitfully illuminated by gaps between planks; two or three animal stalls in a corner; a loft, a ladder, a wooden roof with splits and cracks everywhere that let in dozens of steady, rattling trickles of rain.

Elizabeth stopped three feet inside the door and looked at the leaking roof; then turned back to stare at the black sky and the wind-whipped trees on the other side of the lane.

“It looks,” she said with another shiver, “as if it’s going to rain all week.”

Trist poked among the harnesses and boxes on the far wall.

“If we’d been in Washington,” she said, beginning to wring out one sleeve of her jacket, “Clover Adams would have known the storm was coming to the very minute. She gets the Weather Service forecast delivered to her house every morning.”

“There’s an old blanket over here,” Trist said doubtfully.

Elizabeth peered at the saddle blanket he held up for her inspection; shook her head. He watched her in silhouette against the murky light of the open door.

“Or I suppose
you
should have known about the weather, Mr. Trist, the canny old soldier.” She slipped the jacket completely off and squeezed more water onto the floor. “And of course you ought to have known these woods too, so we didn’t get lost like Hansel and Gretel in a monsoon.”

He laughed and took off his own coat, then gave it to her. “This may be a little drier, Miss Gretel.”

“You
did
fight here?”

He walked over to the door and squinted at the blustery landscape. Pines, scrub oaks, snarled undergrowth. Long gray clumps of Spanish moss were strung out flat in the wind like flags or old men’s beards. A low, rumbling sky poured rain down in a constant blistering hiss. He had in fact marched and fought and ate and slept for nearly three weeks all over these woods, but trees and brush had grown up in different patterns now, and that was twenty years ago, almost exactly.

“I wish
I
could have fought,” Elizabeth Cameron said. She wrapped his coat loosely around her shoulders and came to stand beside him. “I’ve always heard there were women who joined the army and passed for men and actually fought in the ranks. I would’ve done it in a flash.”

Trist ran his hand through his wet hair and looked down at the wet cloth clinging to her hips and breasts and thought that in fact Elizabeth Cameron could never in her life have passed for a man; thought also that that was probably not a thing to say just now. After a moment she turned and walked back into the shadows of the barn.

“It’s three-thirty by my watch,” she said two minutes later.

He heard the sound of boards being moved, a clatter of old pots or harnesses. He stretched his arm and flexed his fingers and noted that his own shirt was soaked through and clinging to his skin. When he reached her, back in the driest corner under the loft, she had shaken out two musty blankets, cleaner than the one he’d found, and set up a rusty kerosene lantern on a sawhorse.

“Like Robinson Crusoe in his cave,” she said, holding the
lantern so he could hear the gurgle of kerosene in the base. “There’s a flint-and-steel too.”

“Puts the Palmer House to shame.
Bien trouvé
.” He knelt and pinched the oily lantern wick another inch higher, then placed the flint under the heel of his shoe to hold it fast. Dry straw made a miniature faggot. He scraped the steel five or six times as hard as he could against the flint: a shower of sparks jumped into the straw. Then he bent and blew them into a tiny flame, and this he held to the wick of the lantern, where it caught and flared.

“You do everything with just one hand.” Elizabeth sat down heavily on the straw facing him. “And you never talk about it or complain. You never even ask for help. I could have held the flint for you.”

He was silent, listening to the rain.

“You’ve cut your wrist.” She reached forward and held up his hand, so that both of them could see the thin red gash bleeding raggedly into his muddy cuff. She gripped his wrist with her left hand and began to wipe the blood away with a damp corner of her blouse. He shifted to brace the hand on the sawhorse and felt the small circular motion of her chest against his shoulder. His pulse began to thump. Slowly he became aware of the stiffened tip of her breast, and almost at the same moment she stopped and sat back.

“Not exactly a case for the ambulance,” she murmured.

“But it’s my writing hand.”

She laughed and rested her chin on her knees. After a moment she said, “Is this where … it happened?”

“No.” He looked down and opened and closed his fist. “Cold Harbor was just about three weeks after the Wilderness. June third, and fifty miles south of here, almost to Richmond.”

She sat quietly in the darkness. Half her face was lit by the flickering lantern, a soft, radiant oval of white against a backdrop of restless shadows. The first time he had ever seen her, he thought, the day he had clownishly blundered into her dressing room, she had also been soft, radiant, sheathed in light. Her skirt rustled as she moved her legs. He leaned farther back until his head touched the wood.

“After the war,” he said, “I used to make a little mental list of ‘accomplished amputees,’ as I called it. My hero was Major John
Wesley Powell. He went down the Colorado River in a rowboat and mapped the Grand Canyon. And there was O. O. Howard, who lost an arm at Seven Pines but still commanded the Army of the Tennessee at Atlanta, under your uncle. And Ulric Dahlgren, minus one leg, a brilliant cavalry officer. The best of all was a Confederate enlisted man, I never learned his name, lost
both
arms in the Wilderness. When he went home to North Carolina, he had no money, no hope, no future. He told his wife to hitch the plow harness around his shoulders and guide him, and up and down the fields he walked, plowing ground. I was twenty-two years old. An arm or a leg here or there, I told myself, it wasn’t a brain, it wasn’t a heart.”

He got to his feet and walked to the open door. The rain was falling, if anything, faster than before. He stepped into it and stood for a moment with his face to the sky, feeling the wind and water, then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and came back in.

Elizabeth was still sitting in the same position. He eased his back against the wall again. “Oddly enough,” he said, “if I hadn’t been an officer I might not have lost it. The surgeons always treated the officers first, then the enlisted men. But the field hospitals were so bloody and dirty, often the privates who were just left alone out in the ambulance wagons did better.”

Thunder rumbled far off in the distance, but still strong enough to make the barn roof shake, and a three-second gust of wind sent a new cascade of water pouring down past the door. Her hair was wet and long and the scent of it reached him even in the darkness. He felt his blood pound in his veins like a drum. He felt rather than saw Elizabeth stretch out a tentative hand and touch the cuff of the empty sleeve that hung from his left shoulder. “In Chicago,” she said, “I was afraid you would think I didn’t come to the park because of this.”

“No.”

She touched his shoulder, then the flat plane of his chest. Her fingers found a button, skin. The wick of the lantern flared in a sudden draft, and light seemed to blow hard against the glass, the walls. Her face drifted behind a veil of shadows. He saw the curved outlines of her cheek, throat, white on black. He bent forward and kissed her lips. He murmured in French, English; cursed in French the acreage of clothes a fashionable lady wore. “Hold this,” she giggled, “and
this
.” The wet cloth fell away from her
breasts in a sweet whisper. When he kissed her nipples the wind groaned. When he touched her waist the wind said his name, and then light and shadow arched their backs and turned together. His hand touched her thigh and parted a sea of petticoats, stroking gently upward till he reached bare flesh, and he thought as she held out her arms and drew him in that poor befuddled Actaeon himself never went to his doom with such a cry of pleasure.

A
FTERWARDS THEY SAT SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE BLANKET
around their shoulders and watched the chill rain as it pelted the grass and weeds outside.

“Now a better planner, of course,” Trist said, pulling her closer, “a
French
lover would have had a bottle of wine and a basket of food stashed away in the straw.”

She shook her head and smiled. “No wine, thank you very much, monsieur.” She used one finger to trace the outline of his jaw. At the door of the barn a brown-and-white rabbit hopped into the light and stood on its back legs. “I see enough,” she said in a faintly weary tone, “of bottles of wine and liquor.”

“Senator Don.”

“Senator Don,” she agreed softly. “The Pennsylvanian sponge.” She let her finger drift down his jaw to the underside of his chin; scratched a bristle of beard where the razor had missed. “I have never,” she said, “understood men.” She shifted under the blanket and brought her little gold watch out to see. Trist read it over her shoulder. Half past four. The rain was lighter now. The wind had almost stopped. “I don’t suppose,” Elizabeth said as she stood up, “that Clover Adams or Emily Beale has told you the scandalous story that I was once engaged to somebody else, secretly, before the ever-thirsty Senator.”

Trist watched her reach behind her back to do something complex and sibylline with hooks and clasps. “Not a word.”

“His name was Joe Russell, and I was seventeen and he was twenty, and I was about as desperately in love as a girl could be, and we plighted our troth in a rather sweet and innocent Ohio way, and then my mother and father went—what would be the French expression for stark-staring-out-of-their-heads with puritan horror?”

“You would have to use English.”

“Yes. They said Joe Russell
drank
and he wouldn’t be a suitable husband, and besides—and here we came to the point—he was as poor as a church mouse and likely to stay that way.”

“Whereas the Senator—”

“My uncle John Sherman already had his eye on the Senator. He was a widower. He had older children, but the famous Maudie was still just a baby. He had an enormous fortune. The family
controls
Pennsylvania politics and Uncle John had thought of that too—they laid down the law to me in Ohio and then shipped me off to Washington for a season of dancing and twirling in front of the gentleman’s eyes—I felt like a slave girl at a genteel auction, or a sacrificial lamb—and before very long we were engaged and married and the lamb was in the Senator’s private railroad car on our first night of wedded bliss, and of course he staggered in drunk and heavy and—” She turned swiftly and kissed him, full on the lips. “He was not a French lover,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I cried all day before the wedding, and my mother came in and slapped my face. The only one ever on my side was Uncle Cump. I remember at a reception in Washington—it was at General Beale’s house, Decatur House—and I was standing with a group of blighted Camerons and Uncle Cump came striding through the door in his full-dress general’s uniform, looking as angry as Mars, and he walked right up to me without speaking to anybody else at all, and he glowered left and right at all the Camerons and said in a voice you could hear across the street, ‘Permit me to say, my dear, that I wholly
disapprove
!’ Then he spun on his heel and marched out again.”

At the door of the barn they stopped and she held out her palm to test the rain. “When we get to the Fredericksburg station,” she said briskly, “tell them we stayed in a farmer’s house with his wife and family.”

T
HE RABBIT IN THE BARN PUT TRIST IN MIND OF AN EPISODE
the autumn before the Wilderness—he couldn’t remember the date or the place exactly, somewhere in late ’63 along the Maryland border, a pitched battle for a field and a hill. There were five or six infantry regiments on each side, two or three of them with heavy artillery attached, and the noise of the cannons and muskets was, as always, terrifying, apocalyptic. The ground and trees shook, and at eye level the air itself seemed to burst into flames, catch fire, and turn into smoke—and then, suddenly, unbelievably, out of the burrows hidden beneath the trampled grass and along the roadside, hundreds and hundreds of tiny rabbits came running and hopping across the battlefield, crazed with fright. And more amazing still, they ran for protection, not to the woods or the road, but directly toward the soldiers. Trist and his men were lying down on the hump of a cleared ridge, firing at dug-in Rebels seventy yards away, and the rabbits simply swarmed all over them and huddled under their legs and arms, nestled trembling in their coat flaps, pockets, against their belts and under their chins. For five or ten minutes at least the troops on both sides held their fire and watched, or stroked the rabbits’ ears and bellies, and comforted
them. Finally some idiot in one regiment or another began to fire again, and everything reexploded back to normal.