Walt Whitman's Secret (5 page)

(In any case, his hand was far better than my own, I hasten to say. I have observed, however, in going back over early papers, that mine was better in extreme youth, rounder and more perpendicular, but steadily descended into crabbedness as I became W's friend. To the point, as you can see, Flora— at least I hope you
can
see, and make out the meaning beneath the poor appearance of the words on the page— I now scribble like a physician instructing his dispenser to prepare some poultice, potion or elixir.)

W went on. “Then, with the day's labor done sometime in the afternoon, I would take up my haversack and be off to make my rounds.” The haversack was a black canvas bag on a long strap, like the ones common soldiers carried, stuffed with the requested items for that day, plus whatever special foods, books &cet. he thought they might like. W used his own salary to these ends, less only what he put aside for his room and board and what he sent home to his mother. More importantly, he was a master of shaking contributions from the prosperous and patriotic citizens, so that sometimes he would arrive at the hospitals with food baskets and flasks of brandy, and even cash itself. “I brought them the brand-new ten-and twenty-five-cent notes, all crisp and clean, thinking used bills might remind them of that which they needed to forget.” Looking back, it is little wonder he was so successful publishing and selling his own books, as for so much of his career he was forced to do. He threw his energy and talents into a good cause. Sometimes the cause was the plight of the wounded; at other times the cause was the immortal
Leaves.

“I would dress wounds,” he said. “I had to learn not to show my shock at what awaited beneath the bandages, which oftentimes were yellow from the infection they covered up. Some of the boys wouldn't permit anyone but me to change their dressings. They trusted me. I purposely kept my hair long and my whiskers full and bushy; the farm boys and woodsmen and sons of the frontier among them were less comfortable with people too citified in their grooming. And I talked to them as an uncle would whom they were especially close to. Conversation was the essence of my medicine. Sometimes I even got one of them to let out a laugh, but I didn't turn away from or ignore the ones who wept. Many times boys asked me to hold their hand. Many others didn't need to ask. When I came in to find someone new in a bed where I had known a familiar face only the day before,
I discreetly inquired of the details and later wrote to the mother or wife, or sister, using my notarial hand of course, for I knew that what I sent would be saved and be passed along through the family in years to come.”

W was not one to treat his war stories as yard goods. He did visit the past quite often, though, and when he did so, there were certain topics that could be counted on to transport his emotions. One was the Patent Office both as it had been early in the war, before the losses mocked everyone's worst expectations, and as it became again later, near the end. You may know the building. It is in the manner of a Greek temple, and it is huge. W said: “Its rooms had echoes, and the echoes were the cries of the dying.” Around the great hall were tall glass cabinets where the scale models of new steam engines and other inventions were displayed as proofs of Man's imagination, creativeness and talent at resolving problems. Between these cabinets, beds had been set up for young men with wounded bodies, many of whom were dying— proof of Man's
lack
of skill at resolving problems. The Patent Office was only one of numerous public structures taken over temporarily for the use of the sick and maimed. (At one point, though not for very long, there apparently were cots in the aisles of the House of Representatives. Good God.)

“The Patent Office was an especially poignant place,” said W. “The smell of death was strong there.” Why it should have been more obvious there than at the other hospitals he visited I cannot say, unless he meant that it was one of the last government properties converted for use as a warehouse for the dying, not one of the first, so that its patients were mostly those who had managed to escape injury until the end of the fighting was nearly at hand. But I dared not interrupt him, as he was about to tell me a remarkable tale.

“There was a soldier named Billy Prentiss, nineteen years of age. The surgeons had taken off his right leg, but the stump never healed
properly. His eyes were like glass marbles in the days that followed, and I knew by looking into them that he wouldn't pull through. I sat with him many an evening. He was very weak. We talked, though his speech was not always logical, owing to the morphine they gave him. One night he was sweating something terrible. I mopped his face with my kerchief and he took my hand and brought it to rest on his cheek and kept it there. He wished me not to go. When he released me, he suddenly spoke, clearly, coherently, and in a stronger voice than before. I remember his exact words. ‘I hardly think you know who I am,' he said. ‘I don't wish to impose upon you. I am a Rebel soldier.'

“‘You tell me something I did not know,' I answered him. ‘Be assured it makes no difference. Rebel and Union men are as one to me.'

“He pulled on my forearm and I bent low, thinking there was something more he wished to tell me, but in a whisper. But when I was near, he kissed me on the lips. I kissed him in return.

“The story becomes still more tragic. Young Prentiss had an older brother, a young Union colonel. Officers ran young in those days. I found him in one of the other wards. He spent much of his time there praying with intense passion. Both had been struck down in the siege or stalemate at Petersburg that dragged on for ten months in all and at a horrible cost. I visited Billy daily for two weeks, and then he died. It was May of Sixty-five, a month after the war ended. The life went right out of him before he could be reunited with his brother, who was in horrible pain as well but was discharged, as the fighting was over, and transferred to a more permanent bed in my dear Brooklyn. There he too died shortly thereafter, sometime in June. They hailed from Baltimore, where their situations and then their reunion can scarcely have been unique, for perhaps no other state than Maryland supplied a higher percentage of its men to the two opposing armies.

“In March, only two months before Billy left us and less than three
before his brother followed suit, the Patent Office, that place of Billy's death and so many others', had been the scene of President Lincoln's second inauguration ball. Down below were the rooms of the Office of Indian Affairs where I had found a new position as a clerk, after failing to get work at the Treasury despite a letter recommending me from Emerson himself, the Secretary saying that my writings had put me in a bad odor. I thought I would be safe in this corner of the Department of the Interior, safe in my cellar of the Patent Office, below where the wards, with
their
bad smell, now were, beneath the floor that the hems of ladies' gowns had swept clean on the night of the grand celebration. On the last day of June, however, the new Secretary, part of President Johnson's cabinet following Lincoln's murder, ordered my dismissal. Someone had riffled my desk and discovered the Blue Book and evidently shown it to the Secretary, who was a pious and God-fearing Methodist man.”

W had a faraway look. “Eighteen sixty-five. There's never been a year with more excess emotion and greater public tragedy. Seventy-three, with Mother's death and what the doctors kept calling my ictus, was as much as I myself could bear, or so I thought at the time. But Sixty-five was a stroke of the soul rather than one of the body.”

I presumed he was referring to the assassination and not merely to his dismissal, which actually brought him significant and long-lived sympathy and gave a boost to his renown besides. But I didn't know the half of it, and couldn't have imagined then what I now understand. The secrets he carried with him, I mean; secrets he transferred to me, as though they were a strange bequest and a legacy that was stranger still.

The night I am telling you about here was only one of times beyond number in the Mickle Street bedroom I shall never forget, if for no other reason than I have willed myself to remember, thinking there may still be more to learn from them.

It was around noon on one of the days when W was feeling good enough to get out. I knew the moment I climbed those narrow steps that he was feeling spry, for he had opened the shutters on all three windows. When he was feeling poorly, all of the windows would be covered and the room darkened; when he was somewhat better and had been working in his rocker, the western-most window would be dark and the other two not. This, however, was the first time I'd seen all three simultaneously being put to the use for which they were intended.

“I've bought us the makings of a lunch,” he said. From the pine shelf he took down a small loaf, one little parcel wrapped in oiled paper and another done up in what I recognized as a page of the
Camden Daily Post.
He took out his penknife. This was like any other small folding knife carried in the pocket and given the name penknife except that W actually used it on occasion for cutting off the tip of a fresh quill, into which he then inserted a steel nib. In this way he made a concession to the modern-day pen without abandoning at least the look of the instrument that had all but faded from use by, say, the time of the
Leaves
' first appearance. Moving about the bedroom, he sometimes bumped into a mountain of books and newspapers, occasioning an avalanche.

“I haven't felt this good in five or six years,” he said cheerfully, “not since I went on my big travels and saw the true America stretched out in every direction, there for us to bathe in.”

He was referring to one of his only two long journeys, if you don't count the sojourn in New Orleans. The first came in Seventy-nine when he was asked to be the official poet of a small group of dignitaries invited to visit Kansas to help mark the silver anniversary of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 by which the two places became states.

“My brother Jeff, whose wife, Mattie, had died a few years earlier, was still settled in St. Louie, an engineer in the waterworks, and I paused there for a family powwow before moving on to Lawrence, where the martyred John Brown fought the pro-slavers in the Fifties. Now, some people tell me they find the Plains monotonous, but I thought every mile fascinating. The time flew by as quickly as the landscape out the windows of the brand-new palace-car, but then it's always that way when you're going west, following the possibilities, racing the sun to day's end.”

“That must have been your first time west,” I said.

“Well, Jeff and I came back from New Orleans by way of Chicago, but yes, I know what you mean.”

“Did you have the urge to go all the way, to California?”

“Had the urge but lacked the means. Or even the opportunity. Events intervened. Made it as far as Denver, though, a town a mile up in the sky, very lively. But the air's so thin there that I started having spells, some of them quite bad. I retreated back to St. Louie and forted up. There I had the worst spell since Seventy-three. I don't mind telling you, I thought it was time to pour the coffee on the campfire. I didn't get back home”—it pleased me to hear W refer to Camden as his home—“till January. I'd been gone two months.”

As I piece together the fragments of past events, I see that when W returned from that trip, a new chapter in his life was about to be initiated. I refer of course to the way that his health, having improved enough to permit such an excursion at all and seeming to have stabilized at that new level, plummeted treacherously, putting him on the downward slope he was never to leave. But I also mean that this was the beginning of important new friendships and of existing ones deepening and becoming more meaningful to those involved. Around this time he made the acquaintance of William Sloan Kennedy, a local writer in Philadelphia, who would ferry over
to spend time with him. You of course know the book he published after W died,
Reminiscences of Walt Whitman.
Bob Ingersoll, the famous agnostic and rationalist, came into view as well. Maurice, your own friend and mine and one of your leading countrymen, Doctor Richard Maurice Bucke, whom people long thought a genius but under oath couldn't explain just why, came down from Canada to gather information for the biography
he
was writing, with W's assistance, and the two of them attended one of Ingersoll's fiery orations. W always attracted helpful admirers as easily as stubborn detractors, so that his life was a litany of both favors and gross disservices done for him or to him, respectively. Now, though, is when a strong international circle first formed, made up of figures dedicating themselves to W's work and thought. So W had to carry less of the daily burden himself, which was just as well, given how his condition kept declining, albeit jaggedly so, with many periods of hope and even laughter during the protracted and relentless slide along the gradient. I suppose you could say I became the sergeant of the army of W's admirers, an army otherwise made up mostly of officers.