Presented by The Widsith Institute, the below short story was written by Steven Douglas. Please visit www.blackcrownproject.com for more information.
Lincoln's Bedsheet
by
Steven Douglas
To be forced to visit the President’s room was a rare punishment. Only three misdemeanours warranted such an action, and every soul that set foot on the half-meadow of the White House’s frontage was made aware of them.
They were, in reverse order of severity:
1) Speaking in favour of slavery;
2) Trespassing into any of the rooms marked, at their thresholds, with blue paint;
or
3) Discharging a firearm within the grounds.
Ward had committed none of these three sins. And yet here he was, allowing himself to be led along the corridor to the Yellow Library by a man three-quarters his size. The man, marshy in his mind to suit the climate, was William Johnson, and Ward hated him for the simple fact that he was not scared of him. Of all the looming Negroes that Lincoln could have brought into the White House to adonise his cause, Johnson had been his choice, with the scuttling train of a monitor lizard. Down in the canals, powdered with flour like rye bread, taller, blacker millers could be found, but Lincoln's mind was clouded by his love for the man. Everywhere Johnson was paraded, quite more than any servant should be, people saw the tar at the lip of the barrel, the least of what could be in a free Union.
Johnson insisted on pressing his fingers lightly into the small of Ward’s back, as if his reluctance were apparent and treatable. They tapped some nerve that drove his month-long headache further into the future. Ward slowed deliberately, taking in the stripped walls. The doctors had denounced the wallpaper as impregnated with venom, perhaps lain there by a Southern sympathiser in overalls two years before, and so it had been peeled away. The walls beneath were moist and full of holes. He remembered when he had first walked these halls, marvelling at Mistress Todd’s bust dangling like a tender candelabra, and watching the wallpaper flex, as if it were breathing. He stuck his hands into his pockets.
“Is only nothing, Mr. Lamon,” said Johnson. “One all knows you’re a man pertaining to sense.”
There was a butchery happening behind him. Not only were the words hacked to pieces by teeth the colour of March slush, but Johnson was coughing again, bringing up lozenges of phlegm as if he meant to supply a pharmacy with his tonic. It was all Ward could do not to strike the man there and then.
Being forced to share lodgings with Johnson was what caused his headaches and nosebleeds, he was sure of it. Lincoln had wanted them both close by, and the only available room in this vestigial palace was the old laundry. All of that cotton, pounded with bone, made him wheeze. Johnson was enamoured with the softness, and sang that old chain jubilant about the court of King Cotton every night. And now that room was grapeshot with red, marking Ward 's nightly attempts to escape Johnson's patois.
It often made Ward wonder, where the servant had learnt that song.
“The President does not only castigate and splutter with the federal mouth, William. He is known to speak kindly to friends also.”
“All respect according, Mr. Lamon, he has spoken fifteen words in a month, and not one of them was kind.”
This Ward knew. No gay colours were worn by the House's denizens, and the only jewellery hangnails jutting from every finger. The President had not left his room, but everybody heard him pacing the Library, climbing in and out of his relocated bed like a toddler. He screamed whenever he heard someone in the corridors. He had ordered two servants stripped at the door as they lay water and biscuits there. Hundreds of dollars had been spent on reconstructing Mistress Todd's greenhouse into two open-sided triangles; the section which he could see when propped up on his pillows was carefully removed, the glass reworked, and the thin wedge of soil razed and salted. A doctor told him that the “mental divot” caused by a youthful connection with a horse’s hoof had returned. The man was banished from Washington, a practice that was not legal but was nevertheless carried out on threat of death.
“As you say, William, it is only nothing.”
Johnson spluttered again, and Ward felt a rustle in his hair. As they approached the Library door, Johnson scurried ahead of him, his hands in his back pockets as always. He often went about like this, looking as if he had been caught in a flame, and was crabbing off to find a water butt. He drew out a fist with one finger extendedand touched the door handle lightly before turning back. Despite his goblinesque frame, the man’s face had the noble shape of a sage leaf, and the same microscopic fur.
“You’re remembering the new rule, Mr. Lamon? Three feet, and no closer. Look to the blue circle around the bedstead.”
“I am remembering, William. How about you go to your chores?”
“All respect once more, sir, but I am the only soul who can touch the knob of the door, on account of the spreading of inflection and such.”
“It’s an infection, William. Inflection is what civilised people use when being interesting.”
“I’m as sure not to fall to it as you have, then, Mr. Lamon. And Old Garrulous was quite clear on it all, his last kind word, if you will.”
Ward felt the anger start to bake to a nugget under his chin. “Old Garrulous” was what Lincoln, in a rare bout of wineful merriment, had allowed Johnson to name him. But now the fool used it everywhere, to everyone, turning the great man into a geyser out west, or the train that took you there. Ward noted, however, that the servant, remembering something of himself, always lowered his voice when he used it.
Johnson uncurled another finger and pincered the door handle until his claw made a grip and it turned. His other hand curled bashful over his chest, cradling it. Ward tried to remember if he had seen such an affectation before, amongst simpletons or consumptives.
When the door opened, along the whole slope of his body Ward resisted the urge to flinch. He smelt the head of dead air poke out to greet them, and then spread its arms wide. It crashed into him and dragged him after. The bed was pushed as best as one could into the line of the ovalling walls, and, as Johnson had said, a border of ultramarine surrounded it at what Ward assumed was a distance of three feet; he had not bothered memorising the measure that came with this new decree. The Indian glaze on the floor was pricked with footprints, Grant’s smooth boots, the dainty sword-points of Mrs. Todd’s “hooves”, as she called them, and the anonymous punchcards of over a hundred retainers coming and going. Within the circle, however, there was not one, not even a platter-tread of the bed’s occupant himself.
The doctors had said “Forty days! Forty days and he will be back!” But it had been nearly three months since Lincoln had been shut away, and since Ward had seen his friend. He barely saw him now. He was reminded, shamefully, of a child’s balloon, venting more than air as it languished on a muddy beach. The Nippon lanterns of his features were still there, the johnnycake lips, the eyes hooded with dusty parasols of skin, and even lying down his curved spine poised like a spry branch under its own deliberations. The boils were worse. They had popped in what Ward fancied were a pattern, before he dismissed such a notion as disrespectful; nature had no time for wallpaper. The President had attempted to shave himself, but his jowls still sprouted in abysmal copses, and the razor was coated with pap on the nightstand beside him, along with an open envelope. He barely kept up any correspondence these days. He was naked to the waist, and his chest had all the majesty of a ruined well. One hammer-thumb rested on his brow, and he did not look as the two men entered.
I must go coney-hunting. Mary will want some for the pot.
His voice seemed to emanate from underneath the bed, as if his lungs had been pruned from him and had grown like a vine throughout its wide frame. It was as they said - he was changed, a light slime lay over his words. Johnson still mooned about the threshold, and Ward could hear the parched hrff hrffas the servant rubbed his hands together. Lincoln never hunted, and damned men that did. There had been rabbits digging up the White House lawn when Adams had been President, but not since their poisoning had one been seen within the boundaries of Washington.
“Mary would not appreciate the slaughter, Abe.”
The thumb descended a line from the cheek, like the gesture of an actor, but Ward could see that the President’s hand was almost bound to his face with crumpy sweat. He had taken so long to notice every degradation that the President had unfolded his legs and swivelled into an Eastern squat, right there on the bed. A mulatto stain was left behind on the pillows, like thoughts.
Nonetheless, first, you must catch a hare.
Ward moved towards the blue circumference. When he was a child, his mother had told him to look up from the ground and see the little things God left there for inquisitive boys. Since then he had always made a special effort to do so, even if a grown man stood with his Adam's Apple weaving about like a sabre was not the most becoming sight. Now he saw the drapery that came with the President's bed, horse-green and hung in mourning folds. It stank of sulphur. Ward turned his approach into a ranging along the blue line, and Johnson stifled a cough, or a laugh.
“You are iller, sir,” Ward measured out, a little too loudly, and he made to inspect the window frames. As always in this mug, they were rotting. “I had thought to find you better, what with all the expensive doctors your wife sends this way.”
Ah, Ward, it is only a small pox. Anything to stop me thinking is a blessing in disguise.
The president attempted to laugh at his own joke, but the sores had made a varnished frame of his mouth, and only his teeth jiggered within.
“I had hoped to see you before this, Abe. I truly did.” He was glad the President was abed. Reared up to his full height, he had the aspect of a falling mast at the best of times, and now the flies would follow him.
Few but Johnson have been dipped in that poor pot, Ward. I hope you knew that it was not from want of love.
“Sir, please speak up – if I am bound to wait for you all the way over here, I do not wish to strain my ears!”
The President began to sulk. For such a man, comprised of so many parts, such extensions on what any other man could be, to grumble like that, was disgusting.
“I had heard that men are only brought here if they have broken the law, now. What are you, a wendigo tucked up for Indian children? Gets up, god!” A smile was on his face, and he hoped his friend would break his varnish, but nothing changed. He felt Johnson’s fingers in his back again. Could the damned slave not stand in the sight of a man’s eyes?
“William, remove your hand. And leave us be.”
“All respect for the final occasion, sir, but I may not be without if the President is in company. His orders.”
Ward glared at the bed. “Is this true, Abe? That I cannot be alone with you, anymore? Are they afraid I’ll smother you?”
Decorum must be observed in every situation.
“Well, I never took you for a lonely man, or churlish. Curled up in here on your own, it's preposterous!”
Roll in that tongue, Mr. Lamon.
The President had only called him by his surname once, when they had first met.
“So, what is it, Abe? I have done no wrongs, not least by these cocked rules you have dreamt up.”
Lincoln reached for his nightstand, and on to the envelope. As it was lifted, Ward could see dimly through it, like kettle steam, as the bottom was steeped in grease. Lincoln took a scalpel from the drawer, and held out his arm. Before Ward could stop him, the President had peeled away a bill of four or five sores, plump with syrup. With a flourish, he deposited them into the envelope, and sealed it with his tongue. Ward felt Johnson press harder. Why was he paying any attention to that damn circumference, and Johnson's hand? The smell and that sight almost made him faint there and then.
“What in God's name, Abe? Do you want more scars?”
Ward noticed, as the sun finally hauled itself up backwards and surprised the windows into illumination, that there was thick makeup on the President’s cheeks, concealing his childhood scars. The sores pushed through it with indifference.
William, search his pockets.
Before Ward could protest, pudgy arms enlaced him from behind, and as much as he kicked out and shouted, he watched a hand descend into his pocket and draw forth the grey pill. It had shrunk from the heat of his thigh, and there was the puck of mercury, filling the room all at once. William withdrew like corset lace and threw the pill onto the President’s bed.
Lincoln began a series of motions that bent him into an accordion crouch.Scooping the pill, rubbing his eyes and his mouth, gazing out to the lawn, blinking in the sunlight, mining something from inside his cheek, and finally, with a whimper, raising it to his eye.
I thought that they did not make blue mass anymore. And I did not hire you to be a chemist.
Ward saw no point in denying it. “Hollyhock grows wild in the fields, and you cannot ban the seeds and the wind. The rest was procured easily, sir.”
I can ban any man putting it in my soup though, Ward. It is lucky that I am missing an appetite.
“I only wanted to help you, sir.”
The President's voice had another beneath it, a whine made wholly of rising water in his throat. It sounded as if he were crying.
By poisoning me? You know that these make me cross. I swear, Ward, sometimes I think your head is only an appendix with a face painted on it.
Ward whirled about, a little foolishly, as he expected Johnson to still be there, but the grinning servant had retreated to the door. Ward had that particular urge, that grown men have on an occasion, to kill the Negro with his teeth. He had not thought that the President would not eat.
“I thought that they would help.”
I am dying, Ward. My moods are the least of my worries. It could have interfered with my medicine.
When Ward stormed towards the circumference, Johnson moved to stop him, but Lincoln dismissed them both with a flick of his wrist.
“And what medicine would that be now? What do they have you taking? Doctor Clemence is from Georgia, for God’s sake! That you would take anything given to you by a southerner... At least the blue mass made you feel better!”
Fleet has been my friend for longer than you have been alive, Ward. And, besides, he has not given me anything.
“What?” shouted Ward.
I have taken nothing.
“Nothing?What good is this? You know my thoughts on doctors, but to take nothing -”
My medicine is being prepared.
“And we are all supposed to sit in this place like it's a tomb, and ignore New York, all that news, all the news these days -”
YOU BELIEVE I WISH TO BE HERE? SHUT BEHIND THIS DOOR LIKE A BREEDING SOW? FORTY DAYS, THEY SAID! I AM LIKE TO BE HERE FOR FORTY WEEKS!
He rose and his legs vacillated like he was shuffling a pack of cards, deciding which two to lay on the floor.
Ulysses took the mass as well, Ward, and look at him! Look what myth he has become!
“I can't, can I, sir?”
No! No man can! This house, this tomb, if you choose to see it as such, is growing myths every day. Should I excavate caves to keep them all, and send young men down with a hot sword and a cool mind?
“Both of you travelled too much.”
I was ill before I left the Union, Ward, and every sane man knows that travel and all winds that accompany it are the best tonic that no doctor can charge for.
“And those British legba? How much did they charge you?”
Snow and Farr are good men, and-
“Enemies! Farr would have Snow dead if it would not cost him a guinea! Which of the two did you follow in their dementions?”
Foul air and foul water are both foul, Ward. If a man lives in a filthy world, which filth makes him the uglier does not matter. Look what illness has done to me, and there are those who would call me closest to a king.
“But not you.”
No, not me! I am just the crust from which the pie has been eaten underneath.
“And after that? The two months that we had to wait for you?”
Are you my wetnurse? That it matters to you where I waddle off to?
“You are starting to need one, Abe. And Mary-”
Careful, Mr. Lamon. Mistress Todd, to you.
Who was this vicious streak of bacon hung in the place of his President, twisting and drying into pemmican? The worst punishment he could receive had passed already; he had been party to Lincoln's curing.
“It is as if you are not even speaking, sir. Am I to be punished for trying to help you?”
Ward realised that Lincoln’s eyes were behind him. Johnson's shirt was unbuttoned, and there in his hand he held a glass jar, filled with something dark. Ward wanted to see blood, like a poet would, but all he saw was wine.
“And what is that? Were you brewed a philtre, to knock all this talk of ugliness out of your head?”
Johnson, I-
Lincoln was weeping, that wide landscape of a throat roiling and trying not to break childish. He was talking to the black again, thought Ward, and his anger baked to something even tighter than coal.
“Do you not even see me? Is that nigger everything to you?”
He managed to keep his voice down. He did not want to make things worse. Johnson seemed to have ignored Ward's comment, and had pinched the door open again, peering down the corridor.
“Do not be a-worry, sir, they will be here soon. A little longer.”
You need to be forgiven that, Ward, because what was it you used to say to me? What was it?
The President knew what it was. This was to embarrass him.
“I said that I had grown for you. That all my muscle I put on for you.”
Was there more?
“Not that I remember, sir.”
Now a thick steam rose from the cold soil outside, and it drifted against the window. The panes had milked up completely now. There was a knock against the door.
“Do not cry, Abe. You have guests.”
Now, as I said, you need to be forgiven that, and I cannot put this off any longer, and I want you to know that you are as good as my second son living, and that you grew just fine for me, but I wish that you had grown for yourself, and that I will remember what illness does to us, and that I know, I know, I know that I was never a handsome man. You do not need my permission, Johnson!
The servant opened the door, and six guards that Ward did not recognise bundled through, rifles raised to the ceiling, and went grimly to Johnson. The servant's lips started to work like baker's hands, mealing over each other. and his own hands went to the pockets in the seat of his pants.
No, not him. The white.
The guards barely heard, but Ward turned to see Lincoln, cosseted in bed like a boy, pointing at him. He allowed himself to be taken; any time spent in prison would be time for the President to gather himself.
It has to be a white.
As he was dragged out of the Library and into the denuded corridor and fresh air, Ward's thoughts took a strange order. He looked at the walls, and then realised that what hung above the President, with that smell of far-off islands, was not the awning of his bed. He looked at Johnson, whose face still wore that cowed little grin, and the jar of wine. The ex-slave turned to follow him, but stopped, frowning, and began to scuff at a red slick on the floor. Ward thought that the clumsy Negro had spilt some of his prize, but he saw now that it had been him. All the way across the room, to the blue line, to the window, back to the line and again out with a fury into the corridor, was a little crimson trail.
Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to look up all the time.
Even though it was ludicrous to think so, the blood, not the wine, was his blood, and Johnson had taken it from him. He thought back over the past weeks, his headaches, the nosebleeds, the billet he had been forced to share with the slave and his nickering song. He had taken more than one jar from him, the little loogaroo! Ward felt like he had taken off a winter coat; he had been right, all along. For all his buttoned shirts and bowed heads, Johnson had brought as much darkness from the South as anybody else. Would it be baked into a cake, or drunk under a sick moon? God damn all Negroes!
Ward shouted after the careful Negro, but the guards whirled him around, and no doors opened to aid him. He was bundled downstairs and through the scullery and into the garden, past the strange sculpture that the greenhouse had become where the maids still cut their fingers in the soil, and in amongst the wildflowers and ornamental pears. The sun was packing the dew off into carriages of steam, but there was too much for just the one sun. It was everywhere, eating picnics of cold air underneath the trees, delving into the shadows of the hollybushes. Too much steam by half.
A congregation of cooks stood in the very centre of the lawn as they passed on their way to the main gates, preparing for the spring promenade. He recognised Hart, an old Vermont hotellier in his stained mason's apron, and his two sons Abel and Saul, who always stood miserable to either side of their father as if their future role as his pallbearers weighed on their minds already. The others were new, pinched men, a few Negroes with straight backs. Doctor Clement stood with them. In between the blinds of steam, what he had taken for another stranger solved itself for him. It was a cauldron of boiling water, heated by a branch-fire, and inside it stood a terracotta jug, slender and with no handles, more like a vase for flowers. The steam mingled with the abandoned rain of the previous night. Ward craned his head back; there was no figure in the windows of the Oval Library. Everyone but his friend had come to see him led away.
He realised what was happening to him as the following occurred:
1) Another guard hurried up from behind, holding at arm’s length a stained bedsheet.
2) Their path turned sharply to the left, and began to proceed towards the jug.
3) He was stripped of his coat.
4) A lid atop the jug was lifted, and the bedsheet fed in by two of the guards.
5) Doctor Clement, a kind old man, now that Ward thought of it, with two slaps of white whiskers across his cheeks, took the vial of blood from Johnson and threw it in after.
6) Even though he still went behind him with a small wind, Johnson did not place his hand in the small of his back.
7) Ward smelt the scent of more blood, gallons of blood, his blood, boiling in the pot, along with herbs from every corner of Mistress Todd’s plot.
8) Two guards lowered laced hands next to the fire, for him to place his feet and be hoisted. Four of them pointed rifles at his head. He did not run, as he thought he might have, if you had asked him that morning.
9) He gulped down the sigh of the incredible heat, the tightening heat, the melting of his boots, the unbearable scent of coins as his eyes sunk below the rim of the pot, the thought of those cool lawns just beyond the wall of clay, and the loss of that brightening sun as the lid shut, though not before an envelope, the sun glinting through it like a church window, was slipped in after him.
Prepared, With Some Permissions, By The Widsith Institute
