Sarah's Ground (9781439115855) (11 page)

All around the city soldiers were building earthworks, on both sides of the river. I could see that it was ruining the farmers' land. Their orchards and gardens were filled with tents. Their trees and fences were being cut down. Their cattle displaced, their soil transformed into high piles of dirt and deep ditches. We would have famine this winter for the sake of earthworks.

I knew better than to go first to President Lincoln. So I went to General Scott. At least he had treated me decently
the last time we met, even though his passes had been overridden by McClellan.

Under McClellan's new regulations certainly Scott's name would be good on passes this time, wouldn't it?

I got to the War Department building and left Priscilla in the carriage with instructions not to move the wagon. “I am on important business with General Scott,” I told her. And I left her a note with my name on it and the name of the Association.

Inside was the usual crowd of hangers-on, favor seekers, and soldiers. I pushed my way through to General Scotts aide and told him what I wanted.

“He isn't in today, miss. He's sick.”

“Then, who do I see?”

He shrugged. “The president. Lincoln. If McClellan has refused you, there is no power on Earth who can help you now but President Lincoln.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

He said to go right to the White House. He grinned. “Everybody else does,” he told me.

So, on to the White House. And more maneuvering to find a place for our buggy, and the same instructions to Priscilla. All I managed to absorb, as I was led by a soldier through the presidents house, was a glimpse of the Blue Room and the elegant carpets underfoot.

I was in the White House! What would Fanny say? I
wondered as I climbed the stairs to the president's office. Would she still insist on coming to fetch me home?

Likely she'd scold me at this moment because my dress wasn't fancy enough or my shoes dusty.

What would Miss Semple think of me now?

When I finally got in to see him, the president was at the window in his office, reading something. His glasses were on the edge of his nose. He was dressed in black, as I expected. But he appeared rumpled, from his cravat to his wrinkled trousers.

“Miss Sarah Tracy, sir, from the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association,” his secretary announced me.

Would he remonstrate with me for not receiving his wife that day? Would he even know of it?

“Ah.” He turned, adjusted his spectacles, and looked at me. “Do sit, Miss Tracy. Can you believe that I do not have a telegraph in my office? That I must go over to the War Department and Mr. Stanton's office to get news?”

I nodded and smiled. He didn't have scores of guards, like McClellan had. Or an expensive uniform. Or more than one headquarters.

A servant came in, peered at a plate of food on his desk. “Mr. President, sir, you haven't eaten,” he said sadly.

“Food does not appeal to me, Henley. Get me an apple.”

The servant took the plate and left. Mr. Lincoln sat. His bony knees stuck out in front. He didn't seem to know
what to do with his hands. He was all arms and legs. His face was sallow and wrinkled, but when he smiled and asked me about how Mount Vernon was doing, I felt a whole sense of warmth, I felt the world opening up for me, and I found myself telling him my troubles.

“I must come to see you there sometime,” he said. “I must come and see the generals tomb,”

The servant returned with an apple on a plate. Mr. Lincoln proceeded to pick it up and peel it with a knife, trying to get all the skin off in one long peel.

“Can you do this, Miss Tracy?” he asked.

“I did it once, sir,” I said.

“It's an accomplishment,” he said. “Go on, so you were saying that General McClellan denied his aides issuing your passes.”

“I'm sure he forgot, sir. He has many responsibilities.”

“Yes, I'm sure.” Then he smiled, and the homely face was full of a sort of rapture. “Like the farmer said to the pig after he slit its throat, Miss Tracy: ‘You must forgive me. I forgot you were the one I was going to let live. Next time I'll do better,'”

We laughed at the joke together, and when he laughed, he hee-hee-heed and slapped his knee. The apple was peeled. The peeling was all of a piece.

“May I offer you a piece of apple?”

“No, sir, thank you. But you eat, you must be hungry.”

“I'm never hungry. But I'll eat when you leave. First let
me give you a letter for General McClellan. He'll sign your passes, I promise you.”

He scribbled out a letter. “My secretary, Mr. Hay, is swamped with work.” And I thought,
Even Miss Cunningham wouldn't write her own letters
.

I thanked him profusely, and he stood, a tall, gangling man who did not look polished and elegant like McClellan, but who did look as if he knew what the war was all about.

“It's been my pleasure, Miss Tracy. Take care of the general's home for us. One of these days maybe I'll have the time to visit.”

He took my hand, not to kiss, but to shake, vigorously. And it was over.

I found my way back downstairs. As I left the room I heard him munching the apple.

Over to H Street then, where McClellan said he would be, near Lafayette Park. Government wagons raised dust in the street. The sun was getting hot. I longed for something cool to drink. Or some of that apple the president was eating when I left.

“How was the president?” Priscilla asked me.

“Wonderful,” I told her, “just as we've been told he is. A real
person
.”

“You think he be as good as Washington?”

I was surprised at the question. And even more surprised at my answer. “He is what we need right now, as
Washington was what we needed then,” I told her. And she nodded and understood.

Of course there were sentries, twelve of them, in front of McClellan's fancy brick house. Of course the house had wrought-iron gates and flowers in front, and long ceiling-to-floor windows and marble floors inside.

Of course I had to wait again and sit and watch the aides and officers running in and out with the purpose of such importance that I felt part of the wall when they passed.

And of course McClellan was annoyed when he looked up from his desk to see me again.

“I told you to go to the president,” he said, as if speaking to a stubborn child.

“I did,” I said. “He gave me this for you.” And I handed him the letter. It had been sealed by the president, of course, so I do not know what was in it, but whatever was in it made General George McClellan's face redden.

“I never told you my aide didn't write the passes,” he said. “Of course he wrote the passes. What I told you was that he had no right to do so. And regulations have changed since then. But of course, Miss Tracy, I will write new ones.”

The voice softened until it became like syrup. “Its just all a grand mistake,” he said. “And I will do anything in the world I can to help you.” He wrote quickly. I asked for a pass for Mary McMakin, and he wrote that, too.

“I'll send a steam tug with provisions to Mount Vernon
if you need it. All you have to do is ask, Miss Tracy.”

So,
I thought when I left.
So. One has all the guards of the queen of England, and the spit-and-polish uniform and the fancy furbelows of rank and privilege. The other peels his own apples and doesn't even have a telegraph in his office. I didn't see an officer in sight. And yet this one cowers before the words of the other
.

I don't think General McClellan will last long,
I told myself, going back outside.
I don't think so at all
.

Priscilla and I got some frozen ices from a street vendor. Then some hot pretzels and coffee. Then we went to the Washington market to shop for meat and vegetables and other items.

The new passes worked wonders on the ride home.

M
ary is here. I made another trip to Washington to bring her. She is at once fearful of the war and animated because of all the soldiers. Every time we were stopped at a picket point, I noticed her fluttering her eyelashes at the sentries. Oh well, this is an adventure for her. She has led a sheltered life.

The heat of the summer has abated somewhat with the onset of September. Mary likes her room, but I fear she does not like Upton. “Does he have to be here all the time?” she asked me. “Even when we eat?”

“He lives here,” I told her.

“With you?” And she giggled.

“Mary, it isn't like that,” I told her. “He is the dearest man. I could not do this without him.”

“Are you in love with him, then?”

“But of course not.”

“Then, you shouldn't call him dearest.”

“Well, I don't say it to his face, of course!”

It is as if we are back at Troy Female Seminary again, where Mary was my roommate. Back then we told each other everything. But that was a hundred years ago. Only Mary,
with her pert little-girl ways, is still back there, and I am not.

“Do you remember?” she will say. “Alice Charles? And the time we picked the apples in the orchard when we were forbidden to? The farmer stormed right into the school building and told Miss Semple to keep her hussies off his land. Do you remember?”

And she goes on and on.

She chats constantly. While all this is going on, of course, Upton is at the table too, trying to read his paper. Usually he will read it of a morning at breakfast and tell me the news. Now he just reads it solemnly.

They do not get on. Right from the minute they met, there was animosity. And after just two days they were fighting openly.

“I think you are rude to read the paper while we are talking,” Mary told him the second morning at breakfast.

Upton had never been called rude in his life. He was taken aback. “I thought you two were having a private conversation,” he said.

“We want to include you,” Mary told him.

“It's rude to speak of things in front of a third person of which that person knows nothing,” he chided.

“Oh, excuse me, the Southern gentleman is holding forth!” Mary said with exaggerated politeness.

“Stop it, you two. This will never do. We have to live here together!”

But Mary would not stop it. And polite and imbued with
Southern grace as he is, Upton took exception to her sniping, for which I did not blame him.

I don't know what I shall do with the both of them. It is as if the war between the North and the South has come into our kitchen.

Mary is small and fair and very pretty and fragile looking, but that look is deceiving. She is iron willed. As the only daughter of an indulgent father, she has been taught to stand on her own, yes, to speak out, yes, but the trouble is that the part of her that will always be a girl sometimes wins over the part of her that learned to be a woman.

She has terrible vanity, and everything must always be about her. I thought, being a Southern man, Upton would recognize those qualities. But I think he does not like them.

Still, I think he could try harder. And I am getting annoyed with both of them already.

A good thing and a bad thing happened on this beautiful September day. Upton's brothers, Arthur and William, came by in their Confederate uniforms to say good-bye before they went off to war.

Upton was repairing the roof with the workmen. I get so frightened when he gets up there on the roof. I hear the
hammering inside the house, and it seems to shake everything, including me. And then I think as long as we have hammering, it means he hasn't fallen off.

I dread his falling off. We are nowhere near any help if anything happened to him or one of the workmen.

He got down immediately when his brothers came, of course, and I was surprised to see them hug. Upton called a stop to the work, and the workmen had lemonade while he brought his brothers into the house.

“We've been here before,” Arthur said. “When we helped Upton move in his belongings.”

We sat at the dining-room table, and Jane gave us coffee and some fresh buns. I could not but notice two things about the visit. For one, Upton looked with such envy on the uniforms his brothers wore that it broke my heart. For another, Mary looked with such flirtatious eyes at them it embarrassed me. And I think it embarrassed them, too.

When it came time to say good-bye, I wished them luck and all but dragged Mary into the house so Upton could have a quiet moment with his brothers.

They do look dashing in their officer's uniforms with the swords at their sides. Their horses are sleek and noble looking. They are, of course, both cavalry. And my heart leaped in my breast as they rode away and I saw Upton, his workman's hat in his hand, watching them go.

To think that they are off to fight, and mayhap kill some Northern boy I might know, devastates me.

A wonderful thing has happened to smooth out the tension in this house now. Miss Cunningham wrote to me from South Carolina and said she has acquired the English harpsichord that belonged to Nelly Custis. Despite the war, it is being shipped north and will come by boat up the river.

We have heard that the army is going to confiscate our own boat for the use of troops. Oh, I hope the harpsichord gets here safely. She said I was to write to her the minute it came.

As part of the fall harvest I have the servants picking apples. I intend to make applesauce and preserve it for the winter months. I cannot, however, enlist Mary. She refuses to do any work but embroidery.

She is making an altar cloth for the church she attended in Philadelphia. It is very long and of white linen, and she is embroidering angels and cherubs and just about every vision of heaven on it.

I think it is useless right now, when we must not only harvest the food, but put it away for winter. But then, I must be fair. I did not ask Mary here to do servants' work. I asked her to be my companion only, and she expected no more from the job.