Gob's Grief

1

WALT DREAMED HIS BROTHER’S DEATH AT FREDERICKSBURG. General Burnside, appearing as an angel at the foot of his bed, announced the tragedy: “The army regrets to inform you that your brother, George Washington Whitman, was shot in the head by a lewd fellow from Charleston.” The general alit on the bedpost and drew his dark wings close about him, as if to console himself. Moonlight limned his strange whiskers and his hair. His voice shook as he went on. “Such a beautiful boy. I held him in my arms while his life bled out. See? His blood made this spot.” He pointed at his breast, where a dark stain in the shape of a bird lay on the blue wool. “I am so very sorry,” the General said, choking and weeping. Tears fell in streams from his eyes, ran over the bed and out the window, where they joined the Rappahannock, which had somehow come north to flow through Brooklyn, bearing the bodies of all the late battle’s dead.

In the morning Walt read the wounded list in the Tribune. There it was: “First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore.” He knew from George’s letters that there was nobody named Whitmore in the company. He walked through snow to his mother’s house. “I’ll go and find him,” he told her.

Washington, Walt quickly discovered, had become a city of hospitals. He looked in half of them before a cadaverous-looking clerk told him he’d be better off looking at Falmouth, where most of the Fredericksburg wounded still lay in field hospitals. He got himself on a government boat that ran down to the landing at Aquia Creek, and went by railroad to the neighborhood of Falmouth, seeking Fer-rero’s Brigade and the Fifty-first New York, George’s regiment. Walt stood outside a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahan-nock, somebody’s splendid residence converted to a hospital, afraid to go in and find his mangled brother. He took a walk around the building, gathering his courage, and found a pile of amputated limbs, arms and legs of varying lengths, all black and blue and rotten in the chill. A thin layer of snow covered some of them. He circled the heap, thinking he must recognize his brother’s hand if he saw it. He closed his eyes and considered the amputation; his brother screaming when he woke from the ether, his brother’s future contracting to something bitter and small.

But George had only gotten a hole in his cheek. A piece of shell pierced his wispy beard and chipped a tooth. He had spit blood and hot metal into his hand, put the shrapnel in his pocket, and later showed it to his worried brother, who burst into tears and clutched him in a bear hug when they were reunited in Captain Francis’s tent, where George sat with his feet propped on a trunk and a cigar stuck in his bandaged face.

“You shouldn’t fret,” said George. “I couldn’t be any healthier than I am. And I’ve been promoted. Now you may call me Captain Whitman.” But Walt could not help fretting, even now that he knew his brother was alive and well. A great, fretting buzz had started up in his head, inspired by the pile of limbs, and the smell of blood in the air, and by ruined Fredericksburg, all broken chimneys and crumbling walls across the river. Walt stayed in George’s tent and, watching him sleep, felt a deep thrilling worry. He wandered around the camp, and as he passed by a fire in an enclosure of evergreen branches piled head high against the wind, he met a soldier. They sat down together by the fire, and the soldier told Walt hideous stories about the death of friends. “He put his head in my lap and whispered goodbye to his mama,” the soldier said. “And then he turned his eyes away from me and he was dead.” Walt put his face in the evergreen wall, smearing his beard with fresh sap, and thought how it smelled like Christmas.

Ten days later, Walt still couldn’t leave. He stood by and watched as George moved out with the healthy troops on Christmas Day, then idled in the deserted campground, watching the interminable caravans of army wagons passing and passing into the distance. Near at hand, some stragglers crossed his line of sight — a large young man leading a mule that pulled a wagon, on top of which perched a fat man cursing in French. When all were gone, and the campground empty, Walt went up to the brick mansion and made himself useful, changing dressings, fetching for the nurses, and just sitting with the wounded boys, with the same excited worry on him as when he watched George sleep. Back in Brooklyn a deep and sinister melancholy had settled over him. For the past six months Walt had wandered the streets with a terrible feeling in him — Hell under his skull bones, death under his breast bones, and a feeling that he would like most of all to lie down under the river and sleep forever. But in the hospital that melancholy was gone, scared off, perhaps, by all the shocking misery around him, and it had been replaced by a different sort of sadness, one that was vital, not still; a feeling that did not diminish his soul, but thrilled it.

When Walt finally left Falmouth, it was to watch over a cargo of wounded as they traveled through the early-morning darkness back to Aquia Creek, where they would be loaded on a steamer bound for Washington. With every jolt and shake of the train, a chorus of horrible groans wafted through the cars. Walt thought it would drive him insane. What saved him was the singing of a boy with a leg wound. The boy’s name was Hank Smith. He’d come all the way from divided Missouri, and said he had a gaggle of cousins fighting under General Beauregard. He sang “Oh, Susannah” over and over again, and no one told him to be quiet.

All the worst cases went to a hospital called Armory Square, because it was closest to the boat landing at the foot of Sixth Street. Walt accompanied them, and kept up the service he’d begun at Fal-mouth — visiting, talking, reading, fetching, and helping.

And he went to other hospitals. There were certainly enough of them to keep him busy. Their names were published in the papers like a list of churches — Finley, Campbell, Carver, Harewood, Mount Pleasant, Judiciary. And then there were the public buildings, also stuffed with wounded. Even the Patent Office held them; boys on cots set up on the marble floor of the Model Room. He brought horehound candy to an eighteen-year-old from Iowa, who lay with a missing arm and a sore throat in front of the glass case which held Ben Franklin’s printing press. Two boys from Brooklyn had cots in front of General Washington’s camp equipment. Walt read to them from Brooklyn papers his mother sent down, every now and then looking up at the General’s tents rolled neatly around their posts, his folded chairs and mess kit, his sword and cane, his washstand, his surveyor’s compass, and a few feet down in a special case all to itself, the Declaration of Independence. Other wounded boys lay in front of pieces of the Atlantic Cable, beside ingenious toys, in sight of rattraps, next to the razor of Captain Cook.

Walt could not visit every place all in a day, though he tried at first. Eventually, he picked a few and stuck with those. But mostly he was at Armory Square, where Hank Smith was.

“I had my daddy’s pistol with me,” said Hank Smith, sprawling in his slender iron-framed bed. “That’s why I got my leg still.” It wasn’t the first time Walt had been told how Hank had saved his own leg from the “chopping butchers” in the field hospital, but he didn’t mind hearing the story again. It was spring. The leg was still bad, though not as bad as it had been. At least that was the impression that Hank gave. He never complained about his wound. He’d come down with typhoid, too, a gift from the hospital. “I want my pistol back,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Walt always said that, but they both knew no one was going to give Hank back the pistol with which he’d threatened to blow out the brains of the surgeon who tried to take his leg. They had left him alone, then, and later another doctor had said there wasn’t any need to amputate.

“Meanwhile, here’s an orange,” said Walt. He pulled the fruit out of his coat pocket and peeled it. Soldiers’ heads began to turn in their beds as the smell drifted over the ward. Some asked if he had any for them.

“’Course he does,” said Hank. In fact, Walt had a coatful of them. He had bought them at Center Market, then walked through the misty, wet morning, over the brackish canal and across the filthy Mall. The lowing of cattle drifted towards him from the unfinished monument to General Washington as he walked along, wanting an orange for himself but afraid to eat one lest he be short when he got to the hospital. He had money for oranges, sweets, books, tobacco, and other good things from sponsors in Brooklyn and New York and elsewhere. And he had a little money for himself from a job, three hours a day as a copyist in the paymaster’s office — he’d given up, for the present, on seeking a fancier appointment, put away in a drawer the letters of introduction to powerful personages from Mr. Emerson. From his desk in the paymaster’s office, he had a spectacular view of Georgetown and the river, and the stones that were said to mark the watery graves of three Indian sisters. The sisters had cursed the spot: anyone who tried to cross there must drown. Walt would sit and stare at the rocks, imagining himself shedding his shirt and shoes by the riverside, trying to swim across. He imagined drowning, too, the great weight of water pressing down on him. (When he was a child, he’d nearly drowned in the sea.) Inevitably, his reverie was broken by the clump-clump of one-legged soldiers on their crutches, coming up the stairs to the office located, perversely, on the fourth floor.

After he’d distributed the oranges, Walt wrote letters on behalf of various boys until his hand ached. Dear Sister, he wrote for Hank, I have been brave but wicked. Pray for me.

* * *

Armory Square was under the command of a brilliant drunk named Canning Woodhull. Over whiskey, he explained to Walt his radical policies, which included washing hands and instruments, throwing out used sponges, and swabbing everything in sight with bitter-smelling Labarraque’s solution. He had an absolute lack of faith in laudable pus.

“Nothing laudable about it,” he said. “White or green, pus is pus, and either way it’s bad for the boys. There are creatures in the wounds — elements of evil. They are the emissaries of Hell, sent earthward to increase our suffering, to increase death and increase grief. You can’t see them except by their actions.” The two men knocked glasses and drank, and Walt made a face because the whiskey was medicinal, laced with quinine. It did not seem to bother Woodhull.

“I have the information from my wife,” Woodhull said, “who has great and secret knowledge. She talks to spirits. Much of what she hears is nonsense — do not tell her I said so. But this bit about the creatures in the pus — that’s true.”

Maybe it was. Woodhull’s hospital got the worst cases and kept them alive better than any other hospital in the city, even ones that got casualties only half as severe. The doctor stayed in charge despite a reputation as a wastrel and a drunk and a nascent lunatic. A year earlier he had been removed by a coalition of his colleagues, only to be reinstated by Dr. Letterman, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, who had been personally impressed by many visits to Armory Square. “They say General Grant is a drunk, too,” Letterman said in response to the charges against Dr. Woodhull.

“The creatures are vulnerable to prayer and bromine, and whiskey and Labarraque’s. Lucky for us.” Woodhull downed another glass. “Ah, sir — there is the matter of the nurses. Some of them are complaining. Just last Tuesday I was in Ward E with the redoubtable Mrs. Hawley. We saw you come in at the end of the aisle and she said, ‘Here comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and unbelief to my boys. I think I would rather see the evil one himself — at least if he had horns and hoofs — in my ward. I shall get him out as soon as possible!’ And she rushed off to do just that. And you know how she failed to eject you, how she always fails to eject you.” He poured again.

“Shall I stop coming, then?”

“Heavens no. As long as old Hawley is complaining, I’ll know you’re doing good. God bless her pointy little head.”

Two surgeons came into Woodhull’s makeshift office, a corner of Ward F sectioned off by three regimental flags.

“Assistant Surgeon Walker is determined to kill Captain Carter,” said Dr. Bliss, a dour black-eyed man from Baltimore. “She has given him opium for his diarrhea, and, very foolishly, in my opinion, withheld ipecac and calomel.” Dr. Mary Walker stood next to him, looking calm, her arms folded across her chest. Her blue uniform was immaculate, a studied contrast to Woodhull’s stained and threadbare greatcoat, which he wore in winter and summer alike.

“Dr. Walker is doing as I have asked her,” said Woodhull. “Ipecac and calomel are to be withheld in all cases of flux and diarrhea.”

“For God’s sake, why?” asked Dr. Bliss, his face reddening. He was new in Armory Square. Earlier that same day Woodhull had castigated him for not cleaning a suppurating chest wound.

“Because it is for the best,” said Woodhull. “Because if you do it that way, a boy will not die. Because if you do it that way, some mother’s heart will not be broken.”

Dr. Bliss turned redder, then paled, as if his rage had broken and ebbed. He scowled at Dr. Walker, turned sharply on his heel, and left. Dr. Walker sat down.

“Buffoon,” she said. Woodhull poured whiskey for her, handed her the glass, then took a rag and began to knock the lint from her second lieutenant’s shoulder straps. It was an open secret in the hospital that they were married in all but name.

“Dr. Walker,” said Woodhull, “why don’t you tell Mr. Whitman about your recent arrest?”

The woman sipped her whiskey and told how she’d been arrested outside of her boardinghouse for masquerading as a man. Walt only half listened to her talk. He was thinking about diarrhea. It was just about the worst thing, he had decided. He’d seen it kill more boys than all the minié balls and shrapnel, and typhoid and pneumonia, than all the other afflictions combined. He’d written to his mother: War is nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory. Those who like wars ought to be made to fight in them. And sometimes, up to his neck in sickness and death, he did believe that the war was an insufferable evil, but other times it seemed to be gloriously necessary, and all the blood and carnage and misery a terrible new beginning that was somehow a relief to him.

“I did my best to resist them,” said Dr. Walker, “and I shouted out, ‘Congress has bestowed on me the right to wear trousers!’” She held out her cup for more whiskey, and shook her head sadly at Walt. “But it was to no avail.”

In the summer, Walt saw the President almost every day. He lived on the route Mr. Lincoln took to and from his summer residence north of the city, and walking down the street, soon after leaving his rooms in the morning, he’d hear the approach of the party. Always Walt stopped and waited for them to pass. Mr. Lincoln dressed in plain black and rode a gray horse. He was surrounded by twenty-five or thirty cavalry with their sabers drawn and held up over their shoulders. They got so they would exchange bows, he and the President, Walt tipping his broad, floppy gray felt hat, Lincoln tipping his high stiff black one, and bending a little in the saddle. And every time they did this Walt had the same thought: A sad man.

With the coming of the hot weather Dr. Woodhull redoubled his efforts to eradicate noxious effluvia. He ordered the windows thrown open, and burned eucalyptus leaves in small bronze censers set in the four corners of each ward. The eucalyptus, combined with the omnipresent acrid reek of Labarraque’s solution, gave some of the boys aching heads, for which Dr. Woodhull prescribed whiskey.

“I want a bird,” Hank Smith said one day in July. Walt had brought several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, mixed them with ice and water, and delivered the delicious concoctions to the boys, along with the news from Gettysburg. Hank was uninspired by Meade’s victory. He was in a bad mood.

“I’ve been here forever,” he said. “And I am going to be here forever.” He had been fighting a bad fever for a week. “Nonsense,” Walt said, and helped him change out of his soaked shirt, then wiped him down with a cool wet towel. The shirt he took to the window, where he wrung out the sweat, watching it fall and dapple the bare ground. He laid the shirt to dry on the sill, and considered his damp, salty hands. In the distance Walt could see the Capitol, magnificent even under scaffolding.

“I want a bird,” Hank said again. “When I was small, my sister got me a bird. I called it after her — Olivia. Would you help me get one?” Walt left the window and sat on a stool by the bed. The sun lit up the hair on Hank’s chest, and called to Walt’s mind shining fields of wheat.

“Did you read my book?” Walt asked him, because he’d finally given Hank a copy, inscribed to my dear dear dear dear boy. Walt had had a dream, a happy one at last. Hank, transformed by Walt’s words, had leaped out of bed, wound gone, typhoid gone, had shaken Walt by his shoulders, and had shouted “Camerado!” so loud the Capitol dome rang like a bell, and all the boys all over the country had put down their guns and embraced each other in celebration of that beautiful word.

“I fingered it a little. But a bird, wouldn’t that be fine?”

“I could get you a bird,” Walt said after a moment. “Though I don’t know where from.”

“I know where,” said Hank, as Walt helped him into a new shirt. With a jerk of his head Hank indicated the window. “There’s plenty of birds out in the yard. You just get a rock and some string.”

Walt came back the next day with rock and string, and they set a trap of breadcrumbs on the windowsill. Crouching beneath the window, Walt grabbed at whatever came for the crumbs. He missed two jays and a blackbird, but caught a beautiful cardinal by its leg. It chirped frantically and pecked at his hand. The fluttering of its wings against his wrists made him think of the odd buzz that still thrilled his soul when he was on the wards. He brought the bird to Hank, who tied the string to its leg, and the rock to the string, then set the rock down by his bed. The cardinal tried to fly for the window, but only stuck in midair, its desperate wings striking up a small breeze that Walt, kneeling near it, could feel against his face. Hank clapped and laughed.

Hank called the bird Olivia, though Walt pointed out that it was not a female bird. The female of the species was dun and dull, he said, but Hank seemed not to hear. Olivia became the ward’s pet. Other boys would insist on having him near their beds. It did not take the bird long to become domesticated. Soon he was eating from Hank’s hand, and sleeping at night beneath his cot. They kept him secret from the nurses and doctors, until one morning Hank was careless and fell asleep with him out in the middle of the aisle while Dr. Woodhull was making his rounds. Walt had just walked on the ward, his arms full of candy and fruit and novels.

“Who let this dirty bird into my hospital?” Woodhull asked. He very swiftly bent down and picked up the stone, then tossed it out the window. Olivia trailed helplessly behind it. Walt dropped his packages and rushed outside, where he found the bird in the dirt, struggling with a broken wing. He put him in his shirt and took him back to his room, where he died three days later, murdered by the landlady’s cat. Walt told Hank that Olivia had flown away. “A person can’t have anything,” Hank said. He called Olivia a bad bird, and growled for a week about his faithlessness.

* * *

At Christmas, Mrs. Hawley and her cronies trimmed the wards, hanging evergreen wreaths on every pillar, and stringing garlands across the hall. At the foot of every bed, they hung a tiny stocking, hand-knitted by Washington society ladies. Walt went around stuffing them with walnuts and lemons and licorice.

Hank’s leg got better and worse, better and worse. Walt cornered Dr. Woodhull and said he had a bad feeling about Hank’s health. Woodhull insisted he was going to be fine; Walt’s fretting was pointless.

Hank’s fevers waxed and waned, too. One night, Walt came in from a blustery snowstorm, his beard full of snow. Hank insisted on pressing his face into it, saying it made him feel so much better than any medicine had, except maybe paregoric, which he found delicious, and which made him feel he was flying in his bed.

Walt read to him from the New Testament, all the portions having to do with the first Christmas. “Are you a religious man?” Hank asked him.

“Probably not, my dear, in the way that you mean.” Though he did make a point of visiting the Armory Square chapel, whenever he was there. It was a little building, with a quaint, onion-shaped steeple. Walt would sit in the back and listen to the services for boys whom he’d been seeing almost every day. He wrote their names down in a small leather-bound notebook that he kept in one of his pockets. By Christmas, he had pages and pages of them. Sometimes at night he would sit in his room and read the names softly aloud by the light of a single candle.

Hank dropped off to sleep as Walt read, but Walt kept on with the story, because he could tell that Hank’s new neighbor was listening attentively. His name was Oliver Barley. He had been tortured by Mosby’s Rangers, staked spread-eagled to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet. Whenever Walt came near to try and speak with him, Barley would glare at him and say, “Shush!” And sometimes if Walt and Hank were speaking too loud, he’d pelt them with bandages sopped with the exudate from his hands. It was Walt’s ambition to be Barley’s friend, but the boy rejected all his friendly advances. Yet now he was listening.

“Do you like this story?” Walt ventured, stopping briefly in his reading.

“Hush up,” said Oliver Barley, and he turned away on his side. Walt might have gone on reading, but just then Dr. Walker came by and asked to borrow his Bible. She said she had news from the War Department.

“What’s the news?” he asked her.

“Nothing good,” she said. “It is dark, dark everywhere.” She wanted to read some Job, she said, to cheer herself. She took Walt’s Bible and walked off down the ward, putting her hand out now and then to touch a boy’s leg or foot as she passed. When she opened the door to leave, some music slipped in. It seemed to be borne along to Walt’s ears by a gust of frigid air. Voices were singing: “For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over.” Walt kissed Hank’s sweaty head, then followed Dr. Walker off the ward. He followed the song to an invalid chorus in Ward K, led by a young nurse who accompanied herself on a melodeon. The gas was turned down low, as if to heighten the effect of the candles held by all the singers. There were deep shadows all up and down the ward. Walt retreated into one of these, and put his head down and sang along.

Sometimes when he could not sleep, which was often, Walt would walk around the city, past the serene mansions on Lafayette Square, past the President’s house, where he would stop and wonder if a light in the window implied that Mr. Lincoln was awake and agonizing. One night he saw a figure in a long, trailing black veil move, lamp in hand, past a series of windows, and he imagined it must be Mrs. Lincoln, searching forlornly for her little boy, who had died two winters previous. Walt walked past the empty market stalls, along the ever-stinking canal, where he would pause, look down into the dirty water, and see all manner of things float by: boots and bonnets, half-eaten vegetables, animals. Once there was a dead cat drifting on a little floe of ice.

Walking on, he would pass into Murder Bay, where whores uttered long, pensive hoots at him, but generally left him alone. He would peek into alleys that housed whole families of “contraband.” On one occasion, a stout young girl had come out of the dark, pushing a wheelbarrow in which another girl was cuddled up with a small white dog in her lap. The little dog was yipping fearfully, but the girls were laughing. Walt traded them candy from his pocket for a gleeful ride in their wheelbarrow, the two of them pushing him along for a few yards until he fell out into the filthy road, laughing hysterically, the little dog jumping on him and catching its paws in his beard.

Walt would cut back along the canal, then across, sometimes watching the moon shine on the towers of the Smithsonian castle, and on the white roofs and white fence of Armory Square — the whole scene so expressively silent in the pale weak light. He would walk among the shrubs and trees of the Mall, sometimes getting lost on a footpath that went nowhere, but eventually he would cross the canal again and walk up to the Capitol. There was the great statue of General Washington, the one that everyone ridiculed because he was dressed in a toga. (It was said that his sword was raised in a threat to do harm to the country if his clothes were not returned.)

Walt liked the statue. He would crawl up into its lap and sprawl out, Pietà-like, or else put his arms around the thick marble neck and have a good wrenching cry. At dawn, Walt would stand outside the Capitol, writing his name in the snow with his urine, and he could smell the bread baking in the basement. He had a friend in the bakery who loaded him down with countless hot loaves. Walt would walk back to Armory Square, warmed by the bread in his coat, and sometimes he’d have enough so that every full-diet boy in a ward would wake with a still-warm loaf on his chest.

* * *

“They want to take my leg,” Hank told him. It was early May, and still cold. “I ain’t going to let them. You’ve got to get me a gun.”

“Hush,” said Walt. “They won’t take your leg.” In fact, it looked like they would have to. Just when Hank had seemed on the verge of good health, just when he had beaten the typhoid, the leg had flared up again and deteriorated rapidly. Dr. Woodhull cleaned the wound, prayed over it, swabbed it with whiskey, all to no avail. A hideous, stinking infection had taken root, and was spreading.

“I saw my brother last week,” Walt told Hank. “Marching with Burnside’s army. It was on Fourteenth Street. I watched for three hours before the Fifty-first came along. I joined him just before they came to where the President and General Burnside were standing on a balcony, and the interest of seeing me made George forget to notice the President and salute him!”

“Hush up!” said Oliver Barley.

Hank raised his voice a little. “They’ll take his leg, too. Or both his legs. He had better keep a good watch on them.”

“Yes,” said Walt. “The Ninth Corps made a very fine show indeed.” Hank gave a harrumph, and turned over on his side, clearly not wanting to talk anymore. Walt went looking for Dr. Woodhull, to discuss Hank’s condition, but couldn’t find him in his office. There was a pall of silence and gloom over all the wards. News of the horrible casualties accrued by General Grant in his Wilderness campaign had reached the hospital. Dr. Bliss and Mrs. Hawley were having a loud discussion as she changed dressings.

“Trust a drunk not to give a fig for our boys’ lives,” said Mrs. Hawley.

“He spends them like pennies,” said Dr. Bliss. “This war is an enterprise dominated by inebriates, charlatans, and fools.” Bliss gave Walt a mean look.

Walt asked if either of them had seen Dr. Woodhull. Neither of them replied, but the young man whose dressings were being changed told Walt that Dr. Woodhull had gone out to the dead house.

Walt found him there, among the bodies. There were only a few, just the dead from the last week. Dr. Woodhull was weeping over a shrouded form, Dr. Walker standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder. Even from across the room, even with decay thick in the air, the smell of whiskey that emanated from Woodhull’s body was overpowering.

“I knew him not,” Woodhull was saying, “but I knew him well!”

“Canning,” said Dr. Walker. “They’ll be sending us more boys. You need to come back, now.”

“Oh, Vicky,” he said, dropping tears on the head of the shroud, so that the features of the dead boy became slowly visible beneath the wet cloth. The boy had a thick mustache, and a mole on his cheek. “There’s such an awful lot of blood. You’d think they could do something with all that blood. A great work. Oughtn’t something great to be coming?”

Dr. Walker noticed Walt standing by the door. “Mr. Whitman,” she said. “If you would assist me?” Walt put his arm around Dr. Woodhull and bore him up, away from the body and out of the dead house. They put the doctor in an empty cot, in a half-empty ward.

“Oh, darling,” said Woodhull, “I don’t even want to think about it.” He turned over on his side and began to breathe deeply and evenly.

Dr. Walker took a watch from her pocket and looked at it. “A wire has come,” she said. “They’re moving a thousand boys from the field hospitals.” Then she leaned down close to Woodhull’s snoring face and said, “You had better be well and awake in five hours, sir.” She straightened up, adjusted her hat on her head, and uttered an explosive sigh. “General Stuart has died,” she said to Walt. “Did you know that? Shot by a lowly infantryman. I had a dream once that Stuart came for me on his horse, with garish feathers in his hat. ‘Come along with me, Mary,’ he said. ‘Not by your red beard, General Satan,’ said I. ‘Get thee behind me.’” She paused a moment, and they stood together looking down at the serene Dr. Woodhull. “Do you suppose I did the right thing? Would you have gone with him?”

“No,” Walt said, “of course not.” But really he thought that he might have. He pictured himself riding west with General Stuart, to a place where the war could not touch them. He imagined the tickly feeling the General’s feathers would make in his nose as they rode to the extreme edge of the continent. And he thought of the two of them riding shirtless through sunny California, of reaching out their hands as they passed through vineyards, and of picking fat grapes from heavy vines.

“I got to get out,” said Hank. A week had passed, and the wounded from Spotsylvania had stuffed Armory Square to the gills. Hank’s leg was scheduled to come off in two days. In the dead house, a pile of limbs edged towards the ceiling.

“Settle down,” said Walt. “There’s no cause for alarm.”

“I won’t let them have it. You got to help me get out. I won’t make it if they take my leg. I know I won’t.” Hank had a raging fever, and tended to sink into delirium with the sunset.

“Dr. Walker is said to wield the fastest knife in the army. You’ll be asleep. You won’t feel it.”

“Ha!” said Hank. He gave Walt a long, wild look. “Ha!” He put his face in his pillow and wouldn’t talk anymore. Walt walked around the wards, meeting the new boys, then went to the chapel, where there were many services.

That night, unable to sleep, Walt made his usual tour of the city, stopping for a long time outside of Armory Square. He found himself outside of Hank’s window, and then inside, next to his bed. Hank was sleeping, his arm thrown up above his head, his sheet thrown off and his shirt riding up his hairy belly. Walt reached out and touched his shoulder.

“All right,” Walt said. “Let’s go.”

It was not a difficult escape. The hardest part was getting Hank’s trousers on. It was very painful for Hank to bend his knee, and he was feverish and disoriented. The night attendants were in another ward; they saw no one on their way out except Oliver Barley, who glared at them and then rolled over in his bed, but raised no alarm. They stole a crutch for Hank, but he fell on the Mall, and the crutch broke under him. He wept softly with his mouth in the grass. Walt picked him up and carried him on his back, towards the canal and over it, then into Murder Bay, where Hank cried to be put down. They rested on a trash heap teeming with small, crawling things.

“I think I want to sleep,” said Hank. “I’m so tired.”

“Go ahead, my dear,” said Walt. “I shall take care of you.”

“I would like to go home,” Hank said as he put his head against Walt’s shoulder. “Take me back to Hollow Vale. I want to see my sister.” Hank slowly fell asleep, still mumbling under his breath. They sat there for a little while.

If this heap were a horse, thought Walt, we could ride to California. “Never mind General Stuart,” Walt said aloud, taking Hank’s wet hand in his own. “In California there is no sickness. Neither is there death. On their fifth birthday, every child is made a gift of a pony.” He looked at Hank’s drawn face glowing eerily in the moonlight — he looked dead and returned from the dead. “In California, if you plant a dead boy under an oak tree, in just five days’ time a living hand will emerge from the soil. If you grasp that hand and pull with the heart of a true friend, a living body will come out of the earth. Thus in California death never separates true friends.” Walt looked awhile longer into Hank’s face. His eyes were darting wildly under the lids. Walt said, “Well, if we are going to get to California soon, we had best leave now.” But when eventually Walt picked him up he brought Hank back to the hospital.

“You will wash that beard before you come into my surgery,” said Dr. Woodhull. Walt stank of garbage. He went to a basin and Dr. Walker helped him scrub his beard with creosote, potassium permanganate, and Labarraque’s solution. Walt held a sponge soaked with chloroform under Hank’s nose, even though he hadn’t woken since falling asleep on the heap. He kept his hand on Hank’s head the whole time, but he could not watch as Dr. Walker cut in and Dr. Woodhull tied off the arteries. He looked down and saw blood seeping across the floor, into mounds of sawdust.

“That is America’s choicest blood on the floor,” Walt said to Dr. Woodhull, but he and Dr. Walker were too intent on their task to hear him. Walt fixed his attention on a lithograph on the far wall. It was torn from some book of antiquities, a depiction of reclining sick under the care of the priests of Aesclepius, whose statue dominated the temple. There was a snake-entwined staff in his hand, and a large friendly-looking stone dog at his feet. Every night for a thousand years, it said, the sick and despairing sought healing and dreams at the temples of Aesclepius. Walt closed his eyes and listened to the saw squeaking against Hank’s bones. He put his hand on Hank’s head and thought, Live, live, live.

Hank woke briefly.

“They got my leg,” he said. “You let them take it.”

“No,” said Walt. “I’ve got it right here.” The limb was in his lap, bundled in two clean white sheets. He would not let the nurses take it to the dead room. Walt passed it to Hank, who hugged it tight against his chest.

“I don’t want to die,” Hank said.

Walt packed his bag and sat on it, waiting at the station for the train that would take him back to Brooklyn. When it finally arrived, Walt stayed sitting on his bag, not even looking up at the train when it sat waiting noisily by the platform, and when the conductor asked him if he would board, he said nothing. When the train was gone again, he got up and went back to Armory Square. It was night. Hank’s bed was still empty. He sat down on it and rummaged in his coat for a pen and paper. He wrote in the dark:

Dear Friends,

I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few lines about the last days of your son, Henry Smith, of Company E of the 14th Missouri Volunteers. I write in haste, but I have no doubt anything about Hank will be welcome.

From the time he came into Armory Square Hospital until he died there was hardly a day but I was with him a portion of the time — if not in the day then at night — (I am merely a friend visiting the wounded and sick soldiers). From almost the first I feared somehow that Hank was in danger, or at least he was much worse than they supposed in the hospital. He had a grievous wound in his leg, and the typhoid, but as he made no complaint they thought him nothing so bad. He was a brave boy. I told the doctor of the ward over and over again he was a very sick boy, but he took it lightly and said he would certainly recover; he said, “I know more about these cases than you do — he looks very sick to you, but I shall bring him out all right.” Probably the doctor did his best — at any rate about a week before Hank died he got really alarmed, and after that all the doctors tried to help him but it was too late. Very possibly it would not have made any difference.

I believe he came here about January of ’63—I took to him. He was a quiet young man, behaved always so correct and decent. I used to sit on the side of his bed. We talked together. When he was bad with the typhoid I used to sit by the side of his bed generally silent, he was oppressed for breath and with the heat, and I would fan him — occasionally he would want a drink — some days he dozed a great deal — sometimes when I would come in he would reach out his hand and pat my hair and beard as I sat on the bed and leaned over him — it was painful to see the working of his throat to breathe.

Some nights I sat by his cot far into the night, the lights would be put out and I sat there silently hour after hour — he seemed to like to have me sit there. I shall never forget those nights in the dark hospital, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and the wounded lying around and this dear young man close by me, lying on what proved to be his death bed. I did not know his past life so much, but what I saw and know of he behaved like a noble boy — Farewell, deary boy, it was my opportunity to be with you in your last days, I had no chance to do much for you, nothing could be done, only you did not lie there among strangers without having one near who loved you dearly, and to whom you gave your dying kiss.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I have thus written rapidly whatever came up about Hank, and must now close. Though we are strangers and shall probably never see each other, I send you all Hank’s brothers and sister Olivia my love. I live when at home in Brooklyn, New York, in Portland Avenue, fourth floor, north of Myrtle.

Walt folded up the letter and put it in his shirt, then lay down on his side on the bed. In a while, a nurse came by with fresh sheets. He thought she might scold him and tell him to leave, but when she looked in his face she turned and hurried off. He watched the moon come up in the window, listening to the wounded and sick stirring in the beds around him. It seemed to him, as he watched the moon shine down on the Capitol, that the war would never end. He thought, In the morning I will rise and leave this place. And then he thought, I will never leave this place. He slept briefly and had a dream of reaching into Hank’s dark grave, hoping and fearing that somebody would take his groping hand.

He woke with the moon still shining in his face, and started to weep, deep racking sobs which he tried to muffle in the pillow that still smelled powerfully of Hank’s shining hair. Someone touched his shoulder, and when he looked up he saw Oliver Barley kneeling by the bed, haloed in moonlight from the window, with his hands, still wrapped in bandages, raised before him. He reached out again to touch Walt’s shoulder, but this time he struck him hard, a shove that must have made his wounds ache wildly. “Be quiet, you,” he said. “Just hush up.”

2

EVERY YEAR AFTER THE WAR ENDED, DREAMS OF THE LATE PRESident would arrive with the spring. Just before the weather changed, Mr. Lincoln would visit Walt in his sleep, stepping out of a bright mist, with lilacs clutched in his hands and the odor of lilacs on his person. That was always the first dream — the groundhog dream, Walt called it, the harbinger of winter’s end. Others followed: a dream of wrestling with a Lincoln graced with enormous black wings; a dream of building a bed for him and Mr. Lincoln to sleep in, a very long bed indeed; and a dream where Walt stood with the late President on a wooden platform overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and watched a grand review.

The two men looked on as solid ranks of soldiers — twenty or twenty-five abreast — came marching steady down the avenue, one regiment after another. For an hour, there would be nothing but cavalry, walking slowly on exhausted gray horses with bleeding eyes — the cavalrymen swung their sabers around in salute to Mr. Lincoln and his companion. Then came batteries of ruined cannon, with gunners sitting up sharply on top of broken caissons. And then, the infantry again, Negro and white, Union and Confederate, turning their faces in a crisp motion to behold Lincoln and salute him. They marched as dusk gently fell on them, and a sign lit up on a building across from the stand. Someone had arranged a series of gaslights to spell out “How are you, Lee?” Walt peered into the gloom, trying to recognize his brother George among the marchers. But then he realized that George was not among them because this was a parade of the dead.

“Quite a spectacle,” said the late President.

“They are very many,” said Walt.

“Yes. It would crush me, I think, but death has eroded my cares a little.”

“I have friends among them,” Walt said. He went to the rail and leaned over it, looking hard at the faces as they passed by.

“Sweet Henry Smith,” said Lincoln.

“Do you know him?”

“I know them all. Aren’t they my boys, every one of them, just as they were yours? They want to come back. Listen to them — they are crying to come back.” Walt listened — he closed his eyes and realized that the parade was going by in perfect silence.

“I hear nothing,” he said.

Mr. Lincoln shook his head. “The dead are not silent,” he said, and turned his back on Walt, so Walt could see his wound, gaping just behind his ear. “Go on,” he said. “You may probe it, if you like.” It seemed suddenly to Walt that he must do just that. It was enormously necessary to put his finger in that hole. I have been waiting so long, Walt thought as he reached out his finger, to do this. His finger sank into the wound as if into a sucking mouth. There came a deafening roar from the soldiers. Walt felt a shock all over his body, as if he’d fallen from a tree onto hard ground, and woke in his bed with his limbs splayed out around him like a startled baby.

It was May of 1868. Walt was still in Washington, making a comfortable salary as a clerk in the office of the Attorney General. He lay in bed, panting because this dream always left him feeling exhausted, and listening to the noise of migrating birds outside his window. He liked the smell of this hour — he thought it must be around five in the morning — and he liked to lie and listen to the big song, and picture the immense flock. He listened carefully, trying to identify species. As he lay with his eyes closed, listening so hard, he heard Hank’s voice speaking softly into his ear. He always sounded so close — close enough to kiss. Walt had been hearing him, not since his death, but since Mr. Lincoln’s, since the first time he’d dreamed of the reviewing stand, since the first time he’d put his finger in the great wound and felt the exuberant, electric whack. At first, Walt had thought it was his brother Andrew speaking to him. He’d died of tuberculosis, just after Hank died, and Walt thought he’d come back to haunt him, to chide him for not attending his funeral, for grieving less for a brother than he did for Hank, or, indeed, for Mr. Lincoln. But the voice he heard was Hank speaking, in his sweet Missouri accent, a soft voice out of the boundless west that was made elegant and articulate by death. Bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, he said. White-crowned sparrow. It’s rare music, isn’t it, Walt?

Walt had been in New York when he heard of Lincoln’s death. That Saturday, he’d sat at the breakfast table with his mother, neither of them eating anything, neither of them speaking. He’d crossed the river to Manhattan, and walked all day in the strangely quiet and subdued city. Every shop was closed, except the ones selling the equipment of grief. Walt stopped and bought crepe for the mournification of his mother’s house, and a motto for her door: O the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!

All week long, he went out to observe the progress of mourning. From Bowling Green to Union Square, every store, house, and hotel on Broadway was alive with the national colors in celebration of Appomattox, and over all these hung black cloth. In the harbor, black pennants flew over the flags at half-mast, and the private signals of captains and owners were draped in black. All over the city, the folds of crepe grew darker, denser, and more numerous as the week went on, until Walt thought that the sky would be blotted out by a low hanging belly of crepe, settling so thick and deep over every street and building that Manhattan might be hidden forever-more from the world.

When the President’s body came to New York, Walt stood in the immense crowds around City Hall and waited his turn to see it. From the west gate of the park, people were lined up twenty across and three blocks deep down Murray Street. All across Printing House Square the crowd stretched, away up Chatham to Mulberry Street. Batteries were sounding every minute, and bells were ringing all over the city. Outside City Hall, a group of Germans was singing Schumann’s “Chorus of the Spirits.”

Inside City Hall, the fabulous catafalque was waiting for Walt. The coffin lay under a twenty-foot-high arch topped with a silver eagle whose head drooped sadly, and whose wings were folded shyly against its body. Very slowly, the line moved forward, until at last Walt got a good long stare at the dead man, at the coffin of wood and lead and silver and velvet, at the flowers — scarlet azaleas and double nasturtiums, white japonicas and orange blossoms and lilacs. The body had been out for many hours by the time Walt saw it. The face had begun to show wear — perhaps, Walt thought, from the pressure of all those thousands and thousands of pairs of eyes that had beheld it. The jaw had dropped, the lips had fallen open slightly to reveal the teeth. An undertaker leaned forward next to Walt and discreetly dusted the face, but this only made it look worse.

Walt stared and stared, holding up the line, fascinated by the dead gray face. A lady behind him gave a polite shove. Her child, horrified by the disagreeable face, was weeping, and she wished to move on. Walt gave her a slight bow, but as he turned to walk away he heard a voice calling his name, Walt, Walt, Walt. He turned back to the lady.

“Did you speak?” he asked her, though it wasn’t a lady’s voice he’d heard. She shook her head no, and motioned again for him to please move on. Walt looked once more at the late President’s face, at the lips hanging open. As he walked away he heard the voice, plaintive now, Walt!

For weeks the voice would only speak his name. Back in Washington, it would call to him as he sat at his desk in the Patent Office. He’d had a new job since January, working as a clerk in the Department of the Interior. Walt, the voice would say, and he would look up at the Indians waiting serenely to see some undersecretary, sitting lofty and remote in their necklaces and feathers and paint. “Did you speak?” Walt would ask them.

The voice kept calling Walt’s name, all through the summer, and after. It called to him at his job in the Attorney General’s office, procured for him by a friend after he was fired (for the sake of his Leaves) from the Department of the Interior. Day and night he heard it, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and he thought it was his brother until he knew it was Hank, and he named it Hank, and then it spoke to him sweetly and at length, no longer just calling his name. And until he named it, it was his fear that the voice was a symptom of a sick mind, but this concern slowly melted away, until it did not matter to him if his mind was decaying into madness, so long as the voice kept speaking. What did you think? the voice asked him. Did you think I would leave you?

It was one of Hank’s virtues that he never told Walt what to do. The living Hank had been a great and incessant demander — Walt, fetch me some ice; Walt, I got an itch on my back, roll me over and see to it; get me a pipe; get me a bird; get me a picture of a French girl, naked. But Hank’s voice never asked for anything. It offered salutations in the morning. It commented on the beauty of a beautiful day. Death had changed Hank’s appreciation of Walt’s poetry — the voice spoke Walt’s own words back to him, or offered him new ones, a generous muse. But it never asked for anything, it never once gave a command until the autumn of ’68, when Walt was in New York, having a sort of vacation.

In Manhattan, if it was very pleasant outside, Walt would take a trip on a stage. Nearly all the Broadway drivers were his personal friends. They’d let him ride for free if he didn’t insist on paying — he’d ride for hours and hours and pay multiple fares. You see everything, Hank said the first time they took such a trip together. It was true — there were shops and splendid buildings and great vast windows, sidewalks crowded with richly dressed women and men, superior in style and looks to those seen anywhere else. It was a perfect stream of people.

One day in October, Walt took Hank for a ride on the Belt Line. They got on in the early afternoon and rode round and round along its course, circumnavigating the lower reaches of Manhattan, going down along the Hudson River docks, up along the East River front, and then across Fifty-ninth Street to start the ride all over again. The day was dusty and warm. Walt rested his head against the window and watched the sun striking through ship’s flags. A great day, Hank said, and Walt wondered, not for the first time, if he ought to pay double the fare since Hank was with him.

Lost in the sunstruck flags, Walt hardly noticed the passengers as they came and went, until, at Fulton Market, there boarded a man who demanded Walt’s attention. He tripped on the platform and fell into the car, catching his hand on the driver’s strap and giving it a mighty tug. The driver (his name was Carl, he was a friend of Walt’s) dropped a curse down on him. The fellow reached his hand up to squeeze the driver’s calf where it hung down in view of all the passengers.

“Sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

A muffled reply came down from the driver on his perch. Walt looked away as the fellow came back, feeling shy all of a sudden, though he had never before been shy on a stage. He had accosted all sorts of men on the stages, and made many dear friends that way. But now, as the fellow sat down across from him, Walt stared out the window, down at the ground where the shadows of masts and rigging were everywhere. As the new passenger had come closer, Walt had peeked and seen that he was young, or at least he looked very young, despite the big brown beard on his face.

“Hello,” he said. Walt did not reply, and that was when Hank offered his first posthumous demand. Say hello, Walt. But Walt remained silent.

The young fellow began to sing a tune, “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” falling into a hum sometimes when he forgot the words. When they had been up the East Side, and along the lower margin of Central Park, the fellow spoke again. “You are on for the ride, just like me.” Walt said nothing, and Hank chided him. I’ve never known you to be rude. Walt put his head down and pretended to sleep. His palms were burning and his heart felt as if it were riding just under his chin. Just look at him, Hank said. Take a good long look. Then you’ll know.

“Bostonians are supercilious towards everybody,” the fellow said.

Walt let out a little counterfeit snore.

“Are you from Boston?”

Walt opened his eyes, but did not look up. “I am not from Boston,” he said. “It’s only that I would prefer not to have a conversation.”

“Well, you might have said so.” The young man muttered to himself for a while, and when they had passed down to the oyster boats at Tenth Street, he stood up and exited the stage. Walt’s shyness and fear evaporated immediately, and then he wished he had not been so rude, and he was inclined to chase the man down just to apologize to him.

But he was only gone for a minute. Before the car could leave him behind, he returned with a bucket of oysters and sat down again in his spot. Very soon Walt could hear him slurping them and throwing the shells down on the floor among the straw and dried mud. “Oh damn,” he said suddenly. Walt looked up to see that he had cut his thumb trying to shuck an oyster. There were only four fingers on the hand he’d injured; he was missing the littlest finger of his left hand. He brought his thumb to his mouth, staining his lips with blood. He looked away from the door and met Walt’s gaze, and Walt saw that his eyes could not have been more like Hank’s if he had stolen them and set them in his own head. Walt got a feeling, then, which crowded into his heart with the shyness and the fear, but did not displace them. This fellow, this boy, was intensely familiar — he felt sure he’d met him before, or seen his face, though he knew he had not. Give him a kiss, Walt, said Hank. Embrace him. He is for you, and you for him, a great true comrade and a great soul. He is a builder.

“Are you well, sir?” Walt asked him, because the thumb, out of the young man’s mouth now, was bleeding profusely. Walt thought back to an instance in Armory Square when his own thumb had been cut by a scalpel covered with gangrenous filth. His thumb had swelled up like a plum, then, and taken months to heal.

“It’s a scratch,” said the boy. Now Walt thought he was definitely a boy, not even twenty years old, though deep lines of care were writ on his brow. Walt leaned over, very slowly, to inspect the wound.

“It’s deep. It should be bandaged.”

“It’s not so deep,” he said. “See? Now it’s drying up.” He gave it a few shakes, and the trickling blood slowed and stopped.

“But it was deep,” said Walt, who thought he’d seen a flash of white bone between the lips of the cut.

“No,” said the fellow. “I think it wasn’t. And I am a doctor. A connoisseur, if you will, of wounds.” He put out his bloody hand for Walt to shake. “Dr. George Washington Woodhull,” he said, “but you may please call me Gob.”

Walt stared and stared at him, but did not take his hand. Though Armory Square was so fresh in his mind that he sometimes thought he could still smell blood and ether in his beard and his skin, it took him a moment to place the name Woodhull.

“Well, you are Walt Whitman. You don’t need to tell me. I knew it the very moment I entered this car. Who else, I ask you, looks like Walt Whitman? And see here, the whole city has been notified of your visit.” He moved over, sat down next to Walt, and took a copy of the Times from his coat. “‘With the advent of autumn,’” he read, “‘Walt Whitman once again makes his appearance on the sidewalks of Broadway. His large, massive personality; his grave and prophetic, yet free and manly appearance; his insouciance of manner and movement; his easy and negligent but clean and wholesome dress — all go to make up a figure and an individuality that attracted the attention and interest of every passer-by.’” Walt stared, remembering Dr. Woodhull of Armory Square, barely listening to the personal notice in the paper, though he was very pleased with it. He’d written the outline himself and submitted it to a friend at the Times.

“Mr. Whitman,” said the boy. “I am so glad to meet you.” He put his hand out again, and this time Walt took it. It was a small hand, but strong, and the boy squeezed so hard Walt thought he might whimper. He pumped Walt’s arm and with every shake Walt got a feeling, a happy feeling, as if this young fellow were pumping him up with joy. See? Hank said. Do you see him, Walt? Do you see him?

The next day Walt went planting in the park. While he waited for his new friend, he searched out places where he thought people might settle down for a picnic. Kneeling in a good spot on the meadow, near the lake, he tore up some grass and made a little bed of it on which to rest his book. He’d inscribed it earlier in a neat but carefree hand: For you.

It was his conviction that he was most successful with the reader in the open air, and so he planted, certain that a person who encountered his poems among the natural splendors of this park would be charmed and changed by them. He sat down on a bench some hundreds of feet away from where he’d left his book, and watched. Opening a paper and pretending to read it, he thought not about his prospective reader, but of Dr. Woodhull — of Gob.

Gob had invited Walt to walk with him, and walk they did, all over the city for hours and hours, so today even Walt, a perennially enthusiastic and untiring perambulator, had sore feet. Walt confessed that he already knew a Dr. Woodhull, and Gob confessed that Canning Woodhull was indeed his father, though he had not seen him since he was five years old. They talked about poems because Gob insisted that he was a great admirer of Walt’s Leaves, and they talked about politics because as night fell there began a grand Democratic meeting and torchlight procession. Democrats poured out into the street by the thousands, and the whole city was lit up with torches. On Second Avenue, Walt and Gob climbed up on a stalled omnibus to watch the procession go by. There were models of ships some sixty feet long, fully manned, and liberty cars overflowing with women in robes of red, white, and blue. Every member of the parade carried a torch. Gob laughed at a lady who wore a hat made of Roman candles, which shot tiny fireballs into the crowd along the sidewalks. The two of them had parted after the last straggler in the procession, a child wearing a placard proclaiming for Seymour, had passed by. They arranged to meet the next day in the park, and then Walt went home, thinking of his new friend, wondering that he had ever been afraid of him. Hank was silent, except to make an occasional exclamation. O joy, he said. O happiness.

In the park, Walt kept watch over his book, but though a few people passed by it, no one stooped to pick it up. His spirits were beginning to droop when he heard Gob’s voice behind him saying, “Hello, Walt!” Gob was proceeding rapidly down the carriage path, accompanied by a laughing redheaded female in liberated dress. Only their upper portions were visible above a hedge that ran along the road, and these seemed quite impossibly to be floating. Walt figured they must be on bicycles, but when they came around the hedge he saw that they had contraptions on their feet, big rubber wheels the size of a person’s head, two for each foot, attached to iron braces that fit under their shoes.

“Look, Mr. Whitman,” said the lady, who was pretty and fat, with eyes like her companion’s, blue and Hankish and beautiful. “We are velocipedestrians!” She waved her arms, catching her balance as she stopped her rolling.

“This is my aunt,” Gob said, “Miss Tennie C. Claflin. When I told her I was to meet you today, she could not stay away.”

“It is my great pleasure, sir,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it vigorously. “My very intense pleasure.” She was dressed in a dark blue tunic and skirt of blue wool, with a pair of yellow bloomers on her legs that demanded even more attention than the wheels on her feet. All over the park, as far as Walt’s eyes could see, people were pointing at her, but she seemed not to notice.

“Do you like my land skates?” Gob asked Walt. He’d told Walt the night before that tinkering and inventing were his avocations, that he had been educated as an engineer as well as a physician, and Walt had talked about his engineer brothers, George and Jeff.

“They are very particular,” Walt said, because he did not quite know what to make of the skates. Tennie insisted on surrendering hers so that Walt could try them out. They held his arms and pulled him to and fro over the grass by the lake, until he got some skill with the things.

“It’s just like ice-skating!” Walt said, very pleased with how he was flying down the road at what must have been a full ten miles an hour. He imagined a notice in the papers: Walt Whitman was in the Central Park yesterday, riding on the wheels of the future. Gob put his fingers on Walt’s wrist to steady him, then took his hand. They skated full around the lake, returning to find Tennie seated by the water. She rose and ran to them, a confusion of blue and yellow fabric, flashing her legs at the whole wide world, waving in her hand the book she’d found.

“A dark place,” said Tennie, “but I like it.” Walt had taken them to Pfaff’s, because he thought Tennie would liven the place up considerably. It had become rather staid since the days before the war when Henry Clapp and Ada Clare held court there. “We are in my neighborhood, you know,” she said. “I live with my family in Great Jones Street, Number Seventeen. You are welcome to visit, Mr. Whitman. My sister would be delighted to meet you. Of course, don’t come by thinking to see little Gob, here. Great Jones Street is not great enough for him. He lives in Fifth Avenue, and doesn’t care for visitors.”

“The house where I live is gloomy,” Gob said. “It was my teacher’s. When he passed on he left it to me.”

“Did you hear of the horrible murder in France?” asked Tennie. Walt said he had not. “A man named Gaucher went for a stroll in the Tuilleries and noticed a fine handkerchief abandoned on the wet ground. Now, he is a man of limited means, this Gaucher. He has never been a fortunate person, but he blesses his good fortune that he has found this truly exquisite piece of material, which he is already planning to sell before he picks it up. But no sooner does he take it than he discovers that in doing so he has uncovered a horrible staring eye. A hideous, staring green eye. It belonged to the youngest child, the only member of a family of five not buried completely by the fiend who killed them.”

“I hadn’t heard!” Walt said.

“No,” said Tennie. “Of course you hadn’t. It’s a year off yet. Sometimes I am confused. But worry you not, Mr. Whitman. Those poor babies will be sheltered in the Summerland.”

“I think they’d rather shelter on earth,” said Gob. “But what say have we got in it, eh Walt?”

“Pfaff’s used to be a lively place,” said Walt, feeling bewildered. “Back in its day.”

“Gob, fetch us some frankfurters,” said Tennie. “I am hungry for a frankfurter and thirsty for a beer.” As soon as Gob left, Tennie leaned over to Walt and whispered to him. “Mr. Whitman,” she said very slowly. “Listen to me. I am beautiful and I love you. I think you have got a child for me, a noble and perfect man child. Our boy … do you not already love him? He must be gotten on a mountaintop, in the open air. Not in lust, not in mere gratification of sexual passion, but in ennobling pure strong deep passionate broad universal love!”

As she spoke, Walt had shrunk back from her, so far that his chair was leaning away from the table and he might have fallen over if Gob hadn’t come up behind him and steadied the chair with his hip. Tennie had been charming, previously, and now she was just another alarming female.

“Walt,” said Gob, “I think my aunt has played a joke on you.”

“A joke!” said Tennie. “Mr. Whitman, I only sought to amuse you!”

“Of course,” said Walt. “Of course.” He took his frankfurter from Gob, who was scolding his aunt.

“It’s a cause with me, Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said in her own defense. “The manufacture of liveliness is my cause.”

Among the men and women the multitude, Hank said, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs. Walt was at his desk in the Attorney General’s office. It was one o’clock on a snowy afternoon in early December of ’68. To the casual observer, he appeared to be very hard at work, bent over a sheet of paper with his broad-brimmed hat on the desk beside his arm. He looked to be copying some official document, writing a bit and then glancing again at the original, but in fact he was copying a letter of his own, making it prettier to look at and more pleasing to the reader’s ear.

Dear Gob,

I send you a few lines, though there is nothing new or special with me. I am still working in the same place, and expect to be here all winter (yet there is such a thing as a man’s slipping up in his calculations, you know). My health keeps good, and work easy. I often think of you, my boy, and think whether you are all right and in good health, and riding yet on the Belt Line when the mood takes you.

I suppose you received the letter I sent you. I got yours November 15 and sent you a letter about the twentieth or twenty-first, I believe. I have not heard from you since.

Congress began here last Monday. I have been up to see them in session. The halls they meet in are magnificent. The light comes all from the great roof. The new part of the Capitol is very fine indeed. It is a great curiosity to any one that likes fine workmanship both in wood and stone. But I hope that you will come here and see me, as you talked of — Whether we are indeed to have the chance in future to be much together and enjoy each other’s love and friendship — or whether worldly affairs are to separate us — I don’t know. But somehow I feel (if I am not dreaming) that the good square love is in our hearts, for each other, while life lasts.

As I told you in my previous letter, this city is quite small potatoes after living in New York. The public buildings are large and grand. Most of them are made of white marble, and on a far grander scale than the N.Y. City Hall; but the oceans of life and people, such as in N.Y. and the shipping etc. are lacking here. Still, a young man ought to see Washington once in his life, any how. Then I please myself with thinking it will be a pleasure to you to be with me, Gob, I want you to write me as often as you can.

Walt folded up the letter in the envelope and took a break to post it. Outside, he leaned for a moment against a streetlamp, because he was momentarily overcome with a feeling like the one he’d had in Central Park — there were magical wheels on his feet and he was flying along hand in hand with his comrade. This feeling kept returning to him, the same way a tossing sea feeling would return to him as he fell asleep after a day playing in the surf. Acknowledging none else, Hank said. Not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am. Some are baffled, but not that one — that one knows me.

Walt got no reply to his December letter. Christmas came and went, and though he was among good friends, he felt lonely. He and Hank welcomed in the New Year sitting by his window. Walt made a punch of lemon, scotch whiskey, sugar, and snow from the windowsill. “To the year!” Walt called out to the black sky. Year all mottled with good and evil! shouted Hank. Another week passed, and another and another, with still no word from Gob. Walt gave up hope of hearing from him again, and cursed his own extreme nature. How stupid, after all, to feel such a ridiculous attachment! “We will leave omniphily to M. Fourier and his moony-eyed compatriots,” Walt said to Hank. “It is not for Walt Whitman.” Hank said, Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life! Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.

But on the evening of January 20, as Walt sat in his favorite (and only) chair, watching the snow fall outside his window, there came a knock at his door. He listened at it a moment and heard voices. A woman was saying, “Are you certain this is the address?” Walt opened the door and saw a regal-looking lady dressed all in blue, with a white tea rose at her throat, with yet another pair of Hankish eyes set in her head. Gob, obscured by her tall chapeau, stepped around her and clasped Walt to his chest.

“Hello, Walt!” he said. “Hello, my friend! Here I am, just as I promised. And here’s my mother, too. Victoria C. Woodhull, but you may call her Empress Eugenie.”

“Really, Gob,” said the lady. She put out her hand and waited patiently for Walt to take it. She stepped into his room, making it seem somehow as if Walt had drawn her in, though it was not his intention to do that.

“Walt,” said Gob. “Get your coat on and don’t be pokey. We’re late for the female convention.” Walt put his coat on, and his shoes, while Victoria Woodhull said various things, none of which he heard very well because of his agitated state. She complimented him on his room, looking around at the dingy walls, the socks drying on the bedpost, and the curtains nailed up on the wall, where they wouldn’t block his light or his view. The thing that ought to have been under the bed was out in full view, and it was brimming. Her glance fell on it and moved on.

“An honest room, Mr. Whitman,” she said. “Simple and austere. Yet when I close my eyes I can feel how it is a palace of wisdom.”

“Considerably less than that,” said Walt. “A lean-to of good sense, perhaps. Or a thatched hut of affability. I don’t often have visitors.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Woodhull. “Come along, then.” She offered Walt her arm — and yet when he took it he got the feeling somehow that he had offered her his — and they were off. It did not occur to Walt to ask where they were going until they were situated in the fine carriage that was waiting outside.

“Where else but the female convention?” said Gob. It became clear that he thought Walt had received a letter detailing the plans for this evening. When he realized Walt had received none such, both he and his mother were embarrassed and apologetic. Mrs. Woodhull offered to return him to his room, but Walt declined. “I like nothing better than a surprise,” he said, which was not entirely true. But this particular surprise — that Gob should appear unexpectedly at his door and pluck him from out of a still pool of sadness — was altogether fine and good.

The three of them proceeded to the National Woman Suffrage Convention, the first ever to be held in the capital. At Carrol Hall, they sat together among a very heterogeneous congregation. There were men and women, whites and Negros, people with a look of wealth about them and people whose clothes declared their poverty. With a rolled-up program, Mrs. Woodhull pointed out those on the stage.

“There’s Mrs. Mott, in the Quaker bonnet. She looks sweet and grannyish, doesn’t she? Well, she is no ordinary granny, though I hear she is sweet-tempered. There is Mrs. Stanton, next to her. Don’t you think, Mr. Whitman, that she looks like a queen?”

“Certainly,” said Walt. Mrs. Stanton did look queenly, with her hair all in white ringlets, and with her nose, the fineness and nobility of which Walt could appreciate even at a distance. And she possessed an enormous, immensely solid-looking bosom, which seemed to him sturdy enough to be the foundation upon which a queendom might be raised. “And there,” he said, “on the end of the platform, with the Eve-like disarrangement of hair, that is Dr. Mary Walker. I knew her during the war, when she was your husband’s colleague.”

“My former husband,” Mrs. Woodhull corrected. “And speaking of men, is that Senator Julian on the right? I understand he is friendly to the cause. That preacher I do not recognize. He is not a Beecher.”

The preacher was finishing up his opening prayer with an ill-considered reference to Eve: he called her Adam’s spare rib. This started a stir which continued through two more speakers. The crowd only quieted when it came Mrs. Stanton’s turn to address them.

“A great idea of progress is near its consummation,” Mrs. Stanton began, “when statesmen in the councils of the nation propose to frame it into statutes and constitutions; when Reverend Fathers recognize it by a new interpretation of their creeds and canons; when the Bar and Bench at its command set aside the legislation of centuries, and girls of twenty put their heels on the Cokes and Blackstones of the past.”

Walt got quite wrapped up in Mrs. Stanton and her speech. He liked her anger and her eloquence and her bosom. She inspired him to get lost in his own fancy, and he pictured her a giantess, one hundred feet high, who waded into the Potomac and launched ship after ship from her rampart breast, a thousand ships each filled with a thousand angry women. These women were about to fire great broadsides of explosive discontent at the capital when Walt was distracted by a pressure on his shoulder. Gob had lobbed his head there and was sleeping soundly.

“My brother died at Chickamauga,” said Gob. “That’s where he died.” He and Walt had adjourned to a saloon after just a few hours of conventioneering. Mrs. Woodhull had stayed on, though she was already belittling the proceedings as a series of teacup hurricanes. “They talk and talk and talk,” she had said, “when they ought to be doing.”

“My brother died in Brooklyn,” said Walt, speaking of Andrew. “With his throat rotted out.” After a bottle of whiskey between them, their conversation had taken a maudlin turn.

“Tomo ran off when we were eleven. Walt, I ought to have been with him. We ought to have been together, there at the end.”

Walt wasn’t much of a drinker, but he tried to keep up with Gob, who seemed to take after his papa, the elder Dr. Woodhull, with respect to liquor. The whiskey had made Walt’s emotions labile and monstrous. He stared at Gob’s sad face, turning over in his mind the idea of him dying, arm in arm, with his twin brother, the two of them riddled identically with bullets, whispering goodbye, goodbye to each other as they drifted off the earth. What a scene — it was enormously horrible and enormously beautiful. It caused him to cry. Hank, drunk too, said, O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!

“Yes, yes,” said Gob. “My sentiments exactly. I used to cry for it, until it occurred to me that tears do nothing. They comfort the living, but do they appease the dead? Do they want our tears? Is it useful to them that we mourn? Life might spend all its days grieving for lost life. You’d think something could be done with it.”

“All the blood,” said Walt. “All the precious blood. A great work ought to be coming, oughtn’t it?” He was sobbing, uttering a choking call like a hairy animal. It attracted the attention of the other patrons of the saloon, horsecar drivers and conductors all, and many of them Walt’s friends. A few came over to comfort him and glare at Gob. “Walt, is this fellow causing you some upset?” they asked. Walt shook his head, but all the boys kept casting angry looks at Gob, so he and Walt left the place, taking a walk up to the Capitol. As they walked, Walt apologized for the inhospitality of the boys in the saloon. “Everywhere I go I have friends,” he said. “But nobody like you.”

They sat on the steps of the Capitol passing back and forth another bottle.

“Drunker and drunker and drunker and drunker,” said Walt.

“Do you know what I am thinking, Walt?” Gob asked.

“You are thinking of Mrs. Surrat,” said Walt, “because she was hanged over yonder.” He pointed across the snowy grounds, across the street to where the old prison used to stand. “You are thinking, ‘Poor dear, I bet she was just somebody’s dupe.’ And you are thinking how it would upset your mama and all those other sufferables that a woman can hang but she cannot vote. I saw John Surrat’s trial this summer. He is very young. I sat near him. It was hot in the courtroom, and he kept me cool with his big palm-leaf fan.”

“I was thinking,” said Gob, “that we ought to take shelter from the snow.” Even as he spoke, Walt noticed that the snow was falling again, thicker and faster than earlier. Gob stood up, gathering his enormous black coat about him — it seemed to Walt that there must be room for two of him in it, or one of him and one of Walt. He ran up the Capitol steps, taking them two and three at a time. “Come along, Walt!” he said. “I see a little cottage where we can shelter!”

It was close to two in the morning, so there was no one about on the grounds, and there could be nobody inside the Capitol but a stray guard or two. Yet Gob was knocking as if he expected some bleary-eyed innkeeper to rise from his bed and open the door. “Hello!” he called out. “Open up for two travelers weary with the cold!” Walt laughed, but the door popped open with a great loud click, throwing cheery yellow light onto Gob’s shoes.

It was at just that point that the evening began to seem dreamlike and strange to Walt, but not frightening. Somewhere a little voice — not Hank’s, though — was urging him to flee over the snow and throw himself in George Washington’s arms, to cling to the General till dawn. But the voice was whispering through smothering pillows of booze and contentment. Walt could barely hear it. It was easy to ignore. He followed Gob into the grand building, and walked after him down the gorgeous painted corridors.

“They say this place is haunted,” Gob said. “They say you can see the ghost of a workman who fell from the scaffolding while they were building the new rotunda. They say his neck is at a horrible angle and he moans in a most frightening manner.”

“I’m not afraid of spirits,” Walt said.

“There’s also a demon cat. A great big one, black as soot, with red coals for eyes. It always appears before somebody important dies. And they say these statues come alive on New Year’s Eve and dance with one another to celebrate another year of survival for this delicate, sickly Union.”

They had come to Statuary Hall. Walt paused by a statue of Mr. Adams and tried to imagine him stepping down from his pedestal to click his marble heels around the room. “Come along,” Gob shouted as he ran away. “To the House Floor. We shall legislate!”

When Walt came into the House Chamber, Gob was already down at the bottom. Walt called to him: “John Quincy Adams died right there. In the middle of a passionate speech he suffered an apoplectic fit and fell down dead. In times of trouble, he reappears and finishes his speech. If you listen to the whole thing you will find that at the very end, he reveals the solution to whatever national crisis is pending. A very convenient arrangement, I think. It’s said that Mr. Lincoln came here during the war, in hope of a consultation, but Mr. Adams did not show.”

“Spirits are notoriously fickle,” Gob said.

“I make a habit of coming to watch the proceedings here. But I think I will give it up. I am sick of the shrewd, gabby little manikins, all dressed in black, all supremely lacking in ability.” Walt paused a moment and looked around the room, feeling bold and drunk and powerful. “From right here they might do it,” Walt said. “They might do a great work with the blood, might have done, but I begin to think it will turn out to have been all for nothing.”

“Shall we make it better, Walt? Shall we legislate?” Gob bounded up to the Speaker’s desk and, picking up a gavel, banged it on the wood. “I hereby declare,” he shouted, “that brothers are nevermore to be separated! Let it be so written into the laws, natural and unnatural, the laws of this Union and the laws of every state!” He let go with the gavel again. “Mr. Whitman,” he shouted, “what say you, sir?”

Walt raised his hands in a grand gesture. “Let it be so!” he shouted. “And furthermore make it forbidden that true friends and comrades should ever be separated!”

“Not by distance!” said Gob. “And not by death! Let it be so!” He banged again with the gavel, pounding away with it, relentless and furious, until it broke in half in his hand.

Walt kept wondering, Where were the guards? They were not drawn out by the racket he and Gob made in the Capitol. Now, in the Model Room of the Patent Office, there was no sign of them as Gob’s boots made sharp, loud noises. Gob stomped up and down the aisles, peering into the glass cases by the light of a match. Walt walked behind him, looking at Ben Franklin’s printing press, at the models of fire extinguishers and ice cutters, guns and rattraps. Gob was deeply excited. He said he was looking for something, and he wanted Walt to be there when he found it. There was a whole series of cases containing treaties between the United States and various foreign powers. Gob lingered over Bonaparte’s sprawling, nervous-looking signature on the treaty of 1803. Nearby were various Oriental articles. Walt pointed at an Eastern saber, at a Persian carpet presented to President Van Buren by the Iman of Muscat. “Is that it? Is this what you seek?” Gob shook his head and moved on.

“Not that,” Gob said. “Not this either, but maybe … this.” He shone a new match on another model, very plain and roughly made, representing a steamboat. A ticket on it read, Model of sinking and raising boats by bellows below. A. Lincoln, May 30, 1849. Hank spoke up, his voice very loud this time in the immense quiet of the Model Room. He was a builder, too.

“Is that it?” Walt said. “Is that what you require?”

“No,” Gob said. “But it is related to the thing I require. Ah, there it is.” With very little ado — he only cranked his arm back a little — he put his elbow through the case next to the one containing Mr. Lincoln’s boat. He reached in and removed a hat, which he immediately set on his head.

“It’s a crime!” Walt said. “It’s a crime what you did!” But he didn’t say it very loud, and in fact he found the vandalism somehow exciting. He had the old thrill back — the buzzing in his soul like Olivia’s frantic wings, and he did not know if it was the crime, or proximity to Gob, or the drunkenness that caused it. He lit another match and held it near the tag that dangled from the brim of the hat. Hat worn by Abraham Lincoln, it read, on the night of his assassination.

“There,” said Gob. “Now my thinking is much improved.” He put his hands on his face and was silent awhile. Walt closed his eyes too, and saw sick and wounded boys laid out on cots between the glass cases, saw blood gleaming by gaslight on the polished marble floor. When Walt opened his eyes again, Gob had turned back to the broken case.

“Look!” Gob said. “I need that, too!” He reached in, to another shelf, and removed a length of cable. He pushed it in Walt’s face and rubbed it against his cheek, asking, “Do you know what this is? It’s the Atlantic Cable. The thing itself!”

“A crime,” Walt said. As if at his call, a guard came at last, and found them. He called out, “Hey there!” Gob took Walt’s hand and ran, pulling him along, dragging him and lifting him painfully by one arm, so fast and smooth Walt wasn’t quite sure if their feet were touching the ground. They ran toward the guard and knocked into him, sending him sprawling as a train might send an unlucky cow sailing over a pasture. Walt heard him land with an oof and a curse, and then they were flying down the stairs, Walt stumbling at every step and Gob bearing him up.

Did they go after that to Ford’s Theatre? Walt was never sure, and later when he asked Gob, he’d only get a shrug for an answer. It was like remembering something through a great space of water. Walt was thinking they would go into the theater and embrace in the spot where Lincoln had died. Their marvelous passion would go out from them in waves, transforming time, history, and destiny, unmurdering Lincoln, unfighting the war, unkilling all those six hundred thousand, who would be drawn from death into the theater, where they would add their strong arms to the world-changing embrace, until at last a great historic love-pile was gathered in Washington City, a gigantic pearl with Gob and Walt the sand at its center.

But the box was gone. The whole theater had been gutted and refitted as a medical museum. Gob led Walt up a spiral staircase from the first floor, which was cluttered with clerks’ desks, past the second floor, a library, to the top of the building.

The third floor was filled with hideous curiosities, testaments to the ways in which human flesh is heir to misery. At the top of the stairs, Walt was greeted by a row of jars containing heads that looked, because they were near a window, to be suspended in moonlight. Three Maori heads from New Zealand grinned at him as he walked towards them. He bent down to look at their empty eye sockets, their cheeks striped with betel-juice tattoos, their glowing white teeth. Nearby, there were tumors piled like candy in a jar. Walt had a perverse notion that he and Gob would go bobbing for them like apples. He turned away from the tumors and considered all the bones — they hung from the ceiling in complete or partial skeletons. There were skulls lined up on shelves, trephined or saber-whacked or bullet-ridden. Gob began plucking booty from the ceiling and shelves, putting into a sack he’d pulled from his coat the arm bones and leg bones, the finger bones and toe bones and ribs and pelvises. “I need them, Walt,” he said. “I need the bones.” When his sack was full he made as if to leave, but then his head swung around, as if pulled by Mr. Lincoln’s hat, to a place where three human vertebrae were mounted on a stand. Walt lit a match to read the ticket:

No. 4,086—The third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae. A conoidal carbine ball entered the right side, comminuting the base of the right lamina of the fourth vertebrae, fracturing it longitudinally and separating it from the spinous process. From a case where death occurred a few hours after injury. April 26, 1865.

A separate ticket indicated that the bones belonged to Mr. Booth. They looked to Walt to be stained, as if people had spit on them. Gob put them, too, in his sack. He leaned over and whispered in Walt’s ear, his voice sounding almost like Hank’s. “I need the bones,” he said. “I need them for my engine. You see, I’m building an engine to bring them back, my brother and all the rest. A machine to abolish death, to lick it like a cowardly Reb. I need the bones, I need the hat, and I need you, Walt. I need you especially.” Walt tried and failed to imagine the machine that would require such matériel.

That was the last Walt remembered of this very peculiar evening. He did not remember the walk home from Ford’s. He did not remember taking off his coat and shirt, his pants and boots. He woke once before dawn with Gob’s sleeping head on his chest, and then woke again in the morning with his head on Gob’s chest.

Walt sat up in bed. Gob said his brother’s name, “Tomo,” but didn’t wake. Walt looked around the room and saw no bag of bones, but there was a hat placed neatly on the table by the bed. It was an ordinary-looking hat. There wasn’t any tag on it. But it was black, and tall, and made to fit a big head. Walt took it up and put it on his own aching head. Listen, Walt, Hank said. Do you hear it? Walt listened dutifully, and he heard a noise. At first he thought it was Gob’s breathing, low and steady and deep, but then he understood that it was something different, a deeper, mightier sound, like a giant breathing, a noise of distant waves crashing, a noise like the sea.

3

“LOOK THERE, WALT,” GOB SAID. “HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT boat?” It was July of 1870. Walt and Gob were in New York. They’d gone down to the water to watch the Queen’s Cup race, part of a crowd of one hundred thousand spectators gathered on the shores and hills all around the harbor. Walt followed Gob’s pointing finger to a boat called the America.

“It’s the handsomest little craft I ever laid eyes upon,” Walt said, but really he was in love with all the boats, and they all seemed very beautiful to him. Walt watched the white sails flapping in the breeze, and the boats tearing along in the green water, trailing flags and streamers and throwing white spray from their bows. He leaned against Gob and tried to think of nothing, to let the lovely darting shapes command his vision and his mind. But thoughts of Gob began to crowd out the boats — first he imagined sailing with Gob in the America, how it would delight them both to move so fast. And then Walt imagined them moving over the water without need of a boat. Hand in hand, he and Gob ran over the bay, and leapt howling off the tall tops of the waves. It was always this way; it wasn’t enough merely to be with him, being with him inspired thoughts of him even as they were together. Your Camerado, said Hank, and indeed it seemed sometimes that Gob was that, a friend above all friends. Yet sometimes he seemed a stranger, even after a year and more of companionship. Or better to say instead that he was strange, but never a stranger. For he was strange, infinitely strange. He had strange knowledge, and strange obsessions. His profession was medicine, but he dedicated his life to his wondrous, tyrannical engine — wondrous because he truly meant it to abolish death, tyrannical because he was enslaved to its creation. “I give it everything,” he said to Walt, on one occasion, “and it gives me nothing.”

He is a builder, Hank said, but Walt often feared that Gob was a little mad, that his dry, obsessive imagination had been set on fire by the death of his brother. Gob kept the engine at his house, a five-story mansion on Fifth Avenue in the neighborhood of the ever-growing Catholic cathedral. Madame Restell, the infamous abortionist, lived not three houses down. Gob knew her. He called her Auntie.

Walt had disliked the house from the instant he saw it, when he got a grand tour the first time he came to New York to visit Gob. It was a lightless place, and it looked not to have been cleaned in years. Every wall, even in the kitchen, was lined with books. Walt squinted to read their titles as he passed them. There was Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Determinative Mineralogy, Design of Hydraulic Motors, On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences, but there was not a line of poetry to be found. Everywhere Gob’s building stuff was scattered — giant gears and metal beams piled in the dining room, magnets heaped on the parlor sofas. “The servants left when my teacher died,” Gob said. Walt asked about that teacher, about how it was that Gob lived apart from his mother, and why he had been living in New York for longer than his mother had — he’d been there, Walt gathered, since the autumn of 1863, but Victoria Woodhull had not arrived until ’68. To all his questions, Gob simply replied, “It doesn’t matter. It’s all past.” Walt came to imagine this teacher as a sort of anti-Camerado, an unfriend who was both wise and cruel, the sort of beast who likes to destroy friendships from the comfort of his grave.

“What’s behind there?” Walt had asked, at the end of the tour, when they’d come to Gob’s bedroom at the top of the house, the place where servants were usually quartered. Walt pointed at a giant iron door a few feet from the bed.

“My workshop,” Gob said softly. He had become quiet and nervous as they ascended into the high parts of the house. On the fifth floor, Walt stuck his head into an abandoned and neglected conservatory. The room was full of dead plants, and carpeted with dead leaves. “There’s nothing in there,” Gob said, pulling him through the only other door off the long hall.

Walt looked around. This was the one clean room Walt had seen in the house, a bedroom furnished in a simple style, except for the bed, which was huge and ornate, hung with white curtains that shivered and undulated in the breeze from a window open despite the cold. A blue skylight let tinted sunshine into the room. There was a wardrobe, and a pine desk covered with mathematical doodles. The floor was wooden, piled with rugs, except in one corner, which was paved with a little circle of stone. While Walt was looking around the room, Gob had gone to this corner, undone his pants, and dropped them. He fell to his knees and bent his head to the ground. Walt looked away too late — he saw the horrible thing like a fleshy eye winking at him obscenely.

“I’m ready,” Gob said softly, but Walt had fled, out the door and down the stairs. He kept running all the way down Fifth Avenue, and hurried to Brooklyn, hurried even to Washington, taking the first available train after bidding a very hasty goodbye to his mother. Back in his room in Washington, he felt he could catch his breath at last. He wept because he thought his beautiful friendship had been ruined. Gob sent him a package with a simple note. Forgive me, he wrote. I thought for a moment that you were my master. He enclosed a present, a copy of Leaves, the only gift, he said later, that he was absolutely sure Walt would like. Gob inscribed it with a line modified from Emerson: True friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Walt wrote back: Dear Gob, you must forgive me for being so cold the last day. I was unspeakably shocked and repelled from you by that proposition of yours — you know what. It seemed indeed to me (for I will talk plain to you, dearest comrade) that the one I loved, and who had always been so manly and so sensible, was gone, and a fool and intentional murderer stood in his place. But I will say no more of this — for I know such thoughts must have come when you were not yourself, but in a moment of derangement — and passed away like a bad dream.

Indeed, they said no more of that incident, and for all that it was terrible Walt came to be glad it had occurred, because it revealed the gigantic nature of their friendship — it seemed to him that only the best and purest sort of friendship could conquer such a horror. So if Gob invoked horror once or a hundred times, so if he was a little mad or a lot, so if he was a boy of seventeen who often acted like an old man of seventy-seven — so what? Walt had taken the measure of his feeling for Gob, and discovered that as wide and deep as his own soul.

The day after the Queen’s Cup race, Walt and Gob went out to Paumanok, because Walt had been promising for months to take Gob to the ocean. “Two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois!” Walt said, striking his naked chest and belly, then running off into the surf, into the terrific breathing noise of the sea. He liked to hurl himself around in the water, throwing his body against the breaking waves, or swimming along with them until they bore him up and carried him, flipping and spinning, towards the shore. Gob was more reserved in his play. He entered the surf slowly and purposefully, walking until the water was halfway up his chest, then swimming with powerful, even strokes, ducking under the waves like a dolphin till he was beyond them, then heading straight out into deep water. “Where are you going?” Walt shouted after him, but got no answer. Because Gob was in a poor mood — the outbreak of the new war on the Rhine had had an extraordinarily depressive effect on him — Walt feared, for a moment, that he meant to swim towards the east until he tired and drowned. Hank said, I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks!

But very soon after he had disappeared against the horizon, Walt saw him again, heading back, his bobbing head growing from a speck to a blob as he came nearer. He swam as even and serene as when he had gone out. A wave picked him up, sent him tumbling forward to land on his feet. He walked out of the ocean, up the hot sand to the shadows under a dune, where they’d left their clothes. Walt waded ashore, then ran to him.

“What a display!” he said. “I feared you’d be drowned.”

“I like to swim,” Gob said. “It’s the first thing I remember in my whole life, swimming with my brother.”

“Do you feel better, then?” Walt sat down, put his arm around Gob’s shoulder, and gave him a squeeze. He wished he hadn’t asked. As soon as he did, Gob seemed to remember how sad he was.

“I don’t,” he said. Walt tried to cheer him with a dinner of cold roast chicken, and with talk about the beach. He told Gob how he’d come to this same stretch of sand when he was a boy, spearing eels in the winter and gathering seagull eggs in the summer. Somehow this pleasant reminiscence brought to Gob’s mind the latest murder to delight sensation-loving New Yorkers. Mr. Nathan, a distinguished Jew, had been bludgeoned in his beautiful house.

“My mama says she spoke with that dead man,” Gob said. “It was the son who did it, she says.”

Walt said he thought it was terrible that a boy should beat his father to death with a lead pipe, that it reflected a failure to cast aside irritating thoughts. “I am not mastered by my gloomy impulses,” he said. “That is the main part of getting through the battle and toil of life, dear Gob — keeping a cheerful mind.”

“Don’t you think of them, Walt?” Gob asked. “Those Frenchmen dying as they move on Saarbruck? Mr. Nathan crying out for mercy from his furious son? Your brother calling out in the madhouse, dying among strangers?” Walt had lost another brother that winter, Jesse. He’d been mad for years, since taking a hard fall from off a ship’s mast. Walt had had him committed to the King’s County Lunatic Asylum, and had visited him just once. Jesse had sat very quietly while Walt put a gift in his lap — fresh bread and jam from their mother — and while Walt told him news from home. But then without warning Jesse had leapt from his chair and wrestled Walt to the ground. He bit his nose and licked his eyes and called him a despicable hater of cabbages. Now he was dead, and Walt found that, having already put his brother out of his mind after madness claimed him, he did not in death seem so much farther away. How to explain? Jesse’s and Andrew’s deaths seemed small, and yet the thought that Gob might die was incapacitating to him. Indeed, it had incapacitated him. If he thought on it too long he would work himself into a terrible state, getting woozy with sadness and fear. His hands would burn, a lump would swell in his throat, and he’d have a terrible attack of diarrhea. If Gob had been out of his sight for much longer during that long swim, Walt might have fainted away into the water and drowned himself.

“Of course I do,” Walt said. “Of course I am sad. If I let it, it might consume me. His heart tore, and I wonder if it was not the accumulated burden of madness and woe that tore his heart apart as hands might tear a paper bag. Sometimes I think I can hear him, raving and crying and dying. I can think on his life — what it might have been if madness hadn’t claimed him, and I can love that lost life as I can love Andrew’s lost life, and grieve for him. A person could live his whole life like that, in service to grief. You’ve said as much yourself. What does it do? It will not bring them back, to hollow yourself out, to crush your own heart from loneliness and spite. My friend, it will not bring them back.”

Walt liked these words less and less as he spoke them, because they seemed conventional and cowardly and stupid, and at odds with his own experience. Hadn’t Hank come back to him, in a sense?

Surely, said Hank. Surely I did. And Gob said, “It might, too.”

“Mr. Whitman,” said Tennie. “You are fatter and saucier than ever.” Walt was at Victoria Woodhull’s house, invited with Gob to a party on a warm September evening in honor of Stephen Pearl Andrews, an ultimately learned and ultimately radical man, and a very frequent contributor to the paper Mrs. Woodhull had started with Tennie in May of 1870, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. They were a very special pair of sisters. In the winter they’d opened up their own brokerage house. Walt had visited their offices a few days after they’d opened, when the rooms on Broad Street were still packed with reporters and curiosity-seekers. The lady brokers had received Walt and Gob in their private office. Walt kept a huge walnut desk between himself and Tennie, but offered sincere compliments to both ladies. “You are a prophecy of the future,” he told them.

“New York agrees with me,” Walt said to Tennie at the party, looking around for Gob but failing to find him. Mrs. Woodhull’s house was not so large as her son’s, but it was much prettier. The guests were gathered in two large parlors, the walls of which were hung with purple velvet and white silk. White roses were everywhere, in vases and in pots, strung along banisters, and even hanging from the ceiling in flower-chandeliers. “This is a fine house. I think it must be roomier than your house in Great Jones Street.”

“Great Jones Street?” said Tennie. “Did we ever live in that dismal alley?” A man came up to them, a great big tall well-gristled fellow in a black suit. He took Tennie’s hand and kissed it, then looked at Walt coolly.

“Dr. Fie,” Tennie asked, “have you met Mr. Whitman? He’s Gob’s dear friend, you know. And mine too. Mr. Whitman, Dr. Fie is also a friend of our Gob.” Walt put his hand out for the doctor to shake. Dr. Fie considered it a moment before he took it.

“I’m a physician,” Dr. Fie said, shaking Walt’s hand hard and slow. “What’s your profession, Mr. Whitman?”

“I write poems,” Walt said.

“Mr. Whitman took care of our sick boys during the war,” said Tennie. “Didn’t you, Mr. Whitman?”

“Did you?” asked Dr. Fie. His smile was not friendly. “No doubt you healed them with verse.”

“I gave them the medicine of daily affection and personal magnetism,” Walt said.

“Very efficacious, I’m sure,” said Dr. Fie.

“Dr. Fie,” said Tennie, “do you doubt that magnetism is strong medicine?” She put out her finger and poked Dr. Fie in his broad chest and he leapt up, as if shocked. Tennie threw her head back and laughed very loud. This attracted her sister, who stepped gracefully across the room, nodding and smiling at her guests, until she came to where Walt was standing.

Mrs. Woodhull nodded at her sister and Dr. Fie, then asked Walt to walk with her. Walt was afraid she might ask him again to endorse her bid for the Presidency of the United States in 1872: She had declared herself a candidate back in April, in a letter to the Herald.

“Isn’t Tennie a delight?” she asked, but before Walt could answer she started talking about the late war between the French and the Germans. She said Louis Napoleon fully deserved his defeat.

“Yes,” said Walt. “Even with all his smartness, I consider him by far the meanest scoundrel that ever sat upon a throne.”

“It’s cheered Gob,” said Mrs. Woodhull. “To have all the killing done with.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear. “Yet he seems a little gloomy, this evening. Would you investigate the cause?” They rounded a giant fern, whose drooping branches were hung with roses. Gob was sitting alone on a deacon’s bench. “Well, Mr. Whitman. I hope I will be in Washington this winter. You may expect me to call on you.” Mrs. Woodhull gave him a little push towards Gob, who did indeed look gloomy, though earlier in the day he’d been very happy. He and Walt had had one of their customary walks along the river, and the sight of all the German steamers covered with bright flags had made Gob caper.

“Hello!” Walt said as he sat down. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“I’m just having a rest.”

“You’ve been mighty cruel to that flower.” Gob had taken a rose from the fern and plucked out all its petals. They were scattered on his lap.

“Yes,” said Gob. He took the petals up and began to manipulate them, rolling them into tiny cigar shapes and tying them together end to end. “How do you like the party?”

“It is more subdued than I expected. I thought there would be more emancipated dress. More Free Love. More people hanging upside down from the ceiling shouting out revolutionary slogans. I thought Dr. Graham would be here, peddling his sawdust muffins. Did you know your Aunt Tennie is the author of a pamphlet? She gave me a copy.” Walt took it out of his pocket—The Non-Participatory Female, and Other Natural Abominations.

Gob laughed. He took the pamphlet and put it in the fern pot. Then he went back to weaving the petals. Walt watched silently. For five minutes, Gob’s nine fingers made a quiet frenzy of obsessive, repetitive motion. When he was finished, he took Walt’s hand and tied the bracelet around it. “There, my friend,” he said. “A present for you.” Walt held his hand up, pulled at the bracelet. It was as strong as any good yarn. Hank spoke: Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

“Thank you,” Walt said.

“It’s just a trinket,” said Gob. “Don’t get all sobby-eyed. Look here, I need your opinion.” He leaned across Walt and spread the branches of the fern, revealing a scene from the party: a young lady in conversation with a hideous man. Walt knew the man. It was ugly Benjamin Butler, the congressman who had wanted so badly to evict Mr. Johnson from his fancy house. Walt didn’t know the young lady. She looked to be about twenty-five years old, and was very small and dark.

“Do you see her?” Gob asked. “Do you think that girl is pretty?”

“My boy,” said Walt. “Princess Ugly of Ugly sur Ugly could stand next to Ben Butler and seem beautiful merely by comparison. She’ll have to stand away from him before I can make a proper judgment.”

Just then the doorbell rang, and from the guests a little cry went up proclaiming that Steven Pearl Andrews had arrived. Walt and Gob joined the crowd that gathered around the door to the parlor to greet him. A welcoming round of applause went up, louder and louder until a servant came into the room accompanied not by Mr. Andrews but by a small, skinny figure with a broken hat on his head and a dirty bag in his hand. The applause wavered. Perhaps because the man did not know what else to do, or perhaps because he was drunk, he took off his broken hat and bowed deeply. Tennie said, “Doc!” but didn’t go forward to greet him. It was Walt who did that.

“Dr. Woodhull,” Walt cried. “It is a great pleasure to see you again!” There was a stir among the guests, but nobody called for him to be thrown out, though he looked like a sandwich-board man and smelled like decay. He was desperate and drunk and charming, come back to his wife because he had heard of her fame from far away, and because he had nowhere else to go. Mrs. Woodhull received him graciously. So did her second husband, Colonel Blood, who took him upstairs to bathe and change, and gave him a too-big suit to wear until he could get some good clothes of his own.

Dr. Woodhull turned out to be the star of the party, telling hospital stories to Dr. Fie, talking about Armory Square with Walt, and scolding Mr. Butler for insulting the honor of the women of New Orleans. Everyone was kind to him save Gob, who wouldn’t speak to him, and barely would look at him. Gob went back to his seat by the fern, and Walt stayed with him while he glowered at the floor.

“Who cares about that ridiculous drunk?” he said. “I am Dr. Woodhull.”

Walt saw Mrs. Woodhull present her memorial to the combined Judiciary Committee of both houses of Congress in January of 1871. Tennie came with her, as did the young woman Gob and Walt had seen talking to Ben Butler at Mrs. Woodhull’s September party. The three women all wore like attire: dark blue skirts and masculine coats, shirts, and ties. From the waist up they seemed to be dressed as men. Walt considered their three identical alpine hats, tipped at identical angles, and thought of Dr. Mary Walker. She would never have worn such a hat.

The three ladies sat together at a mahogany table in a little conference room in the Capitol — a faulty stove had poisoned the air in the much grander room where Mrs. Woodhull was supposed to make her speech. Various fat, red-nosed politicos sat across the table from her and her two supporters, waiting patiently for her to begin. Walt leaned against a bookshelf at the side of the room, feeling a bit dizzy. He had just recovered, in late November, from an attack of a recurring illness he was sure he’d contracted during his time at Armory Square, a weary, feverish malaise that Gob had skillfully lifted from him.

Besides congressmen and senators and reporters, the room was packed with famous radical females — Mrs. Woodhull had audaciously scheduled her presentation on the very day the Woman’s Righters were opening their winter convention in the capital. Her plan was for them to cancel and come observe as Congress granted her the unprecedented honor of a formal and respectful interview. They did come to observe, and they whispered among themselves in shock. They thought Mrs. Woodhull and her sister — especially her sister — were scandalous. Everyone had heard how Mrs. Woodhull was a Free Lover, how she was divorced, how she had declared in her paper that marriage was the grave of love, and prostitution a profession that ought to be regulated into respectability.

Gob was there, too. He stood next to Walt, hand in hand with a pale child of five or six years, whom he called Pickie and who was, he said, his new ward. “I found him two weeks ago in a drift of snow in Madison Square,” he told Walt. “Could I leave him there? Could I leave him to the weary mercy of an orphanage?” Pickie was a friendly child, but a strange one. Walt decided three minutes after meeting him that he had been driven mad by whatever cruelties he’d suffered before Gob found him.

“There you are!” Pickie said to Walt, when Gob had introduced them. “There you are at last!” He rushed over and gave Walt a hug around the leg. “Pick me up!” he cried. “Pick me up, Uncle Walt!” Walt took him up, and when he gave him an affectionate squeeze the boy made a curious noise, a deep, resonant burp, and the air around him suddenly reeked of blood. Walt put him down. The boy was stroking his face like a fly. Later, Walt noticed that there was a big hole in his beard, as if someone had taken a bite out of it. Wonderful child! Hank said. Wonderful wonderful child!

A very strange boy, but Gob seemed to love him, so Walt was kind to him, and never harped on the boy’s obviously defective nature. Gob petted him and hugged him and fed him hard red candies from out of his pocket. Walt found his attention drawn to the two during the speech. They chattered and whispered like schoolboys, even when Walt shushed them. Gob and the boy were dressed alike in fine gray wool suits with blue waistcoats and neckties that matched the uniforms worn by Mrs. Woodhull, her sister, and the young lady, who, Walt had discovered, was called Maci Trufant. She was employed by Mrs. Woodhull as an editor at Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Walt had decided that she was pretty, after all.

Mrs. Woodhull started out nervous and pale, looking as if she might soon faint under all that powerful attention, but she soon bucked up. Spots of color appeared in her cheeks, and her voice grew strong and mellifluous. Her hand rose to her throat to stroke the petals of the tea rose fastened there. She was speaking from memory, so her other hand was free to wave and undulate, as if conducting the mood and attention of her audience.

It was a pretty speech, and a powerful one. Gob told Walt it had been dictated by Demosthenes, Mrs. Woodhull’s spirit guide, that it had poured out of his mother’s mouth as she lay on her own dining-room table, and that Colonel Blood was only able to keep up with her dictation because Stephen Pearl Andrews had taught him his newfangled method of shorthand. She pleaded for a declaratory act to the effect that women were already entitled to vote by the Fourteenth Amendment. “The sovereign will of the people,” she said, “is expressed in our written Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. The Constitution makes no distinction of sex. The Constitution defines a woman born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, to be a citizen. And it recognizes the right of citizens to vote.”

It was simple and glorious. Walt was sure that he ought to have paid better attention, because it seemed to him that something very important was transpiring in his presence. But he was distracted by little Pickie’s serene pale face, and his candy-red mouth, and his chattering whisper. And being in the Capitol brought to mind the strange night Walt had spent with Gob here, so when he wasn’t contemplating the boy he was contemplating that night. He was still afraid to go back to the Patent Office, lest someone recognize him as a thief or the accomplice to a thief.

After Mrs. Woodhull had finished, after she was applauded at length by every person in the room and whisked away in the arms of the now-adoring suffragists, Walt and Gob went out for a walk with Pickie on the Capitol grounds. They had a little time before they had to attend a party at the Willard Hotel in celebration of the great day. Walt and Pickie went out onto the snow, leaving Gob to stand on the great porch, where shortly Miss Trufant accosted him. He turned away from her after a few moments and came to Walt, packing snow in his hands as he walked.

Walt threw snowballs at Pickie as he climbed on the statue of Washington. Gob threw his own snowball, perfectly aimed, but Walt batted it aside before it could strike his head. Gob clapped his hands. All his autumn gloom was gone. Walt laughed just to see him laugh.

“How does your work go?” Walt asked him. Little Pickie jumped from Washington’s arms and did somersaults in the snow. He sat up, lowered his chin, and snotted in his muffler.

“Excellently!” Gob said, smiling very wide and clapping Walt on the back. “So very well!”

The boy ran over and put his cold hands against Walt’s cheeks, put his red lips to his ear and whispered to him. “My name is Pickie Beecher!” he said. “I come before.”

“He aspires to greatness,” said Gob. “Today he is a Beecher, tomorrow he’ll be an Astor or a Vanderbilt.” He leaned down and looked at the boy, who was dancing in place, but stopped as if Gob had stilled him with his gaze. “Woodhull,” Gob said. “Now you are a Woodhull.” The boy laughed and threw himself down in the snow to roll like a dog in filth. Walt was thinking, Woodhull, I like the sound of it, and Hank said, Walt Woodhull, I like it too. Walt looked away from Gob, who had lifted little Pickie up in his arms. He closed his eyes and imagined Gob, an angel of charity, reaching out to him instead of Pickie, as Walt lay abandoned and forgotten in the snow of Madison Square Park. He opened his eyes again, and saw Miss Trufant standing alone on the porch. When she noticed Walt looking, she turned and walked away.

“I have come to New York to die,” said Canning Woodhull. He and Walt were in a saloon that catered specifically to veterans. There were old regimental flags on the walls, and groups of men — now amputated or perpetually despairing or with ruined health — still loyal to those flags, who sat under them and drank. “My beautiful wife has visions of the future. She sees a paradise coming — crystal cities and sunshiny days. I have told her, Mr. Whitman, that everybody is prescient, everyone can see the future. You can do it now. Close your eyes, calm your mind, extend your extraordinary vision through the mist of time. Do you see? There you are in your coffin. I wanted to be near my wife when I died.”

“I like this place,” Walt said. He had gone to Mrs. Woodhull’s hoping to find Gob when there was no answer at the house on Fifth Avenue, but instead had found Dr. Woodhull. “The boys are still good,” he said, looking about him at the devastated men, some not so very much older than Gob, who leaned against each other and sang “Jeff Davis’s Dream.”

“War wraiths,” said Dr. Woodhull, and poured out his own story of ruin. He’d gone south after Armory Square was closed, and worked in a hospital in Charleston. Dr. Mary Walker went north to continue a career of professional female radicalism. Poor Canning Woodhull deteriorated without her, and without the war. “It made me something better than I am,” he confessed to Walt. “I used to dream of illness, and how it might be conquered. Ah, I talked with Aesclepius in my dreams, and he told me secrets. Now I cannot even talk to his dog, and I dream only of my own death. There I am in my coffin. Do you see me?”

“No,” said Walt. He tried to change the subject. “I am a good friend of your son. An exceptional young man. I think you must be very proud of him.”

“He hates me!” Woodhull moaned. “Oh, Gob hates me with good reason. I only came up here to die. I would have been content just to crawl under her bed and slowly expire, but she was kind to me. She feted me and made her friends my friends, and now I have caused her the most immense trouble.” It was May of 1871, convention time, and Mrs. Woodhull had charmed the National Woman Suffrage Association meeting in New York. But the very next day the papers had published an account of a lawsuit brought by her mother against Colonel Blood. The public eye looked closer at Mrs. Woodhull’s family and discovered that there were other Claflins besides her sister, and they were a grappling, squabbling bunch. The family disharmony was aired in court, and it became public knowledge that Victoria Woodhull had two husbands living in her house. “I am a bother to everyone I meet!” Dr. Woodhull said. Walt patted his hand.

“Not to me, sir,” he said.

“Oh Mr. Whitman,” Woodhull said dismissively. “You are everybody’s friend.”

* * *

There were other strange nights, besides the one at the Patent Office and Ford’s Theatre. Sometimes Gob would put on the hat, and Walt knew something curious would be presented to him as he walked with his friend in the city. They never had another session of naughty vandalism, but they wandered in naughty places, up Front Street and Water Street, where thugs stepped out of the river fog on cold evenings, only to be thrust aside by Gob’s strong arm. Once they leaned over the water and Gob shone a light on the river. Walt saw a baby, dead from a smashed head, floating a foot or two beneath the surface, one hand in its mouth and the other reaching towards him as if to tug at Walt’s fascinating beard. “The river is full of them,” Gob said softly. “Any day of the week you can come down and see them floating.” He took Walt farther up South Street, to a slip where a French steamer was docked, where they waited in the darkness, Walt asking repeatedly what they were waiting for, and Gob only saying, “Patience.” Suddenly, white light came blasting out of the sky, so bright Walt thought they must be in the midst of some impossibly silent explosion. But then there was noise, the spit and hum of an electric arc light burning high on the ship. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Gob asked him, luxuriating in the light as if it were warm sunshine. Walt held up his hand in front of his face, thinking it looked in that light like the hand of a corpse.

Another night they headed for Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Walt paused under the entrance, a massive sandstone edifice that looked like a little cathedral. Moonlit statues stared down at them while Gob picked the lock on the gates: a group representing the raising of the widow’s son, another representing Faith, Hope, Memory, and Love. “It should be your motto,” Walt said of the phrase carved into the stone above them. They passed inside, pausing, before they had walked very far, by the monuments of Charlotte Canda and De Witt Clinton. Little Pickie was with them on this graveyard outing. He leapfrogged over headstones, ran down into the empty moonshade beneath a willow. The three of them wandered over acres of cemetery, Gob offering comments every now and then: “There are one hundred and fifty thousand buried here,” or “Walt, we are gliding into eternity.”

Walt visited the grave of McDonald Clarke. “What a fellow!” he said to Gob. It made him glad, to think of the man, but Gob started to cry. “The heavens ought to open up!” he shouted. “They ought to weep!” Gob pounded his fist on the headstone, and the heavens did open up: a heavy summer rain began to fall, dark and thick and warm.

Each strange evening would end with a trip to Gob’s house, to the fifth floor. They’d walk into Gob’s room, passing by the stone circle (not even casting a glance at it), and pause before the iron door. Gob would throw it open, revealing his enormous workshop and his engine, a great nonsensical conglomeration of mechanical parts that sat under an enormous telescopic gaselier whose fittings were cast in the shape of birds that shot flame out of their beaks. Glass tubes and iron gears, steel ribs, yards and yards of twisting, wrist-thick bundles of copper wire, here and there a bone, after all, from the theater — it was bigger every time Walt saw it. It’s for you, Hank would say. You are a kosmos. Gob would say, “Won’t you help me, Walt? Won’t you help me win?” as he started a steam engine or activated a battery. “It’s not ready yet,” Gob would say, “but it will be, and then it will require your help to be complete. Will you give it to me, Walt?”

“Yes,” was always his answer. Walt would reach his hand out and touch a copper pipe, cold despite the June heat in the house. Pickie would dance around in a circle, saying, “Little brother!”

Sometimes they’d drink on these nights, but even when they didn’t, Walt would have a drunk feeling by this time. “You are the most important, Walt,” Gob would say to him as they lay in bed together. “There are others who will help me, but no one is as important as you are.” He’d sleep as dawn came, and wake with Gob’s head heavy as a chunk of wood on his shoulder. He’d look over and see the iron door, closed again and locked, and he’d have something in his belly, a question turned into a feeling — did it all happen? Every time Walt woke up he made a decision; he didn’t care to know the answer, he didn’t care about the answer. Gob was real, their beautiful, mountain-high, sea-deep affinity was real, squeezing him was real, his snort and his sleepy smile were real and natural and perfect.

Walt was invited to read a poem at the fortieth annual exhibition of the American Institute, a festival of industry. On September 7 he went with Gob, Tennie, and Miss Trufant to the Cooper Institute.

“I think you’ll be a most welcome change from Mr. Greeley,” Miss Trufant said to him before he mounted the dais to begin. It was usually Horace Greeley who gave the address every year. “He blathers.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Walt said.

The displays were still being assembled when Walt, dressed in a gray suit and white vest — gifts from Gob — climbed a stand to open the exhibition with his poem. On the fringes of the crowd, men in their shirtsleeves worked with hammers and saws and wrenches to put in order the displays of goods and machinery. They put down their tools as Walt read, so by the time he was half done the racket of assembly had quieted. He was thinking as he read of Gob, who stood holding Walt’s Panama hat at the foot of the stage. Tennie and Miss Trufant stood next to him. The iron door swung open in Walt’s mind, in the same way that the doors of Armory Square sometimes swung open to release memories of sickness and dying and death. The door opened and Walt saw gears and batteries, smelled acid and coal and fresh white steam. He heard Hank’s voice reading with him as he spoke: Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping, high rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades.

When the poem was done, after Walt had retired to enthusiastic applause, Gob took him around to look at the displays. Gob was keen on all of them, a sewing machine or a buttonhole maker put the same light in his eyes as a screw propeller or shiny electric engine, and he seemed to know all the intimate details of every machine’s operation. They examined a harvester that could clear a field of oats in twenty-two minutes, a furniture suite made entirely of india rubber — here they lost Tennie, who sat down in an intricately carved chair and held court for the workmen.

“I think science is his religion,” Maci Trufant said. Walt talked with her some, as Gob stared, open-mouthed, at a copper vat the size of a cottage.

Mrs. Woodhull held a reception for Walt at her home. All that night, Gob was in an ebullient, bouncy mood, the result, Walt figured, of his spending the day at a celebration of machines. Tennie, inspired by Walt’s poem, was playing “find the muse.” “Not here!” she’d say, peeking under a chair cushion. She looked behind curtains and said, “Not here either! No, she is installed among the kitchenware!” Walt couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or not.

This night, it was Walt who retreated to the bench behind the fern, peeking out occasionally to watch Gob circulating among the elegant radicals, laughing with Tennie, putting his hand on Maci Trufant’s arm. Eventually Mrs. Woodhull came and sat down next to Walt, and invited him to a Spiritualist convention up in Troy, for which she would depart late in the evening. Walt politely declined.

“Well,” she said. “I think your poem would be well received there. I am sorry I missed it earlier. You see, my duty to the workers kept me busy all day.” She’d taken on new responsibilities recently, besides those of publisher and broker and presidential candidate. Now she was the head of Section Twelve of the International Workingmen’s Association. Walt said she must be fearless, to associate with Communists. “Yes,” she said. “Demosthenes tells me, ‘Be radical, be radical, but not too damned radical.’ Still, I go where I must in Heaven and on the earth. If I worried what people said of me, then I would stay home all day in bed, prostrate with nervousness. But I think you know as well as I do what it is to be maligned by distempered, ignorant maleficos.” She thrust out her wrists, showing him how she’d sewn the 120th psalm into the sleeves of her dress.

“‘I am for peace,’” Walt said, “‘but when I speak, they are for war.’”

“It’s not easy, is it, Mr. Whitman, trying to improve the world?”

Maci Trufant and Gob were married in April of 1872, in Plymouth Church. How they came to be married in the church of glorious, greasy-headed Henry Beecher, Walt didn’t know. He had been under the impression that Beecher and Mrs. Woodhull were enemies for all that Theodore Tilton, Beecher’s chippish adjulant, had been a near constant presence at Mrs. Woodhull’s house the previous summer. Walt’s misery was compounded by the seating arrangements — he was put next to Tennie and the other Claflins. “Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said to him as they were waiting for the ceremony to begin, “you’ve cut your hair and beard all away!”

“Yes,” said Walt. “All my acquaintances are in anger and despair and go about wringing their hands. ‘Who are you?’ they ask me.”

“I like it,” Tennie said. “It’s taken ten years off you. Why do you deliberately cultivate the aspect of old age?” She looked like she wanted to say more, but she was hushed by music.

Walt put his hand to his greatly shortened beard. He’d cut it all away in anguish when he’d gotten the telegram from Gob announcing his engagement. The news had come as a total surprise. Walt had just returned to Washington from New York, where he’d taken a fat leave of two months spent almost entirely with Gob, during which time there had been no mention of the pending marriage. When Walt got the news, he had sat up all night in his favorite chair, with a glass of whiskey punch in one hand and a letter, recently received from Tennyson, in the other. “He says I have a large and lovable nature,” Walt had said to Hank, who all that bad night would only say one thing over and over, You are a kosmos.

The wedding was a simple and beautiful ceremony, marred only by Tennie’s constant whispering that her nephew and Miss Trufant were making a terrible mistake. Any other church besides Plymouth would have been bursting with the guests — Gob had joked to Walt that his wedding was a campaign event. Mrs. Woodhull’s star was taking crazy dips and turns. It seemed to Walt that she could not appreciate how different species of radicalism were immiscible, how a Woman’s Righter could hate her for being a Communist, how a Communist could hate her for being a Spiritualist, how a Spiritualist could think her a fool for putting too much faith in Graham Crackers.

There was no one Mrs. Woodhull could not alienate, but it seemed there were always people who loved her. The wedding and its association with respectable Mr. Beecher brought out all her old supporters. She sat looking prim and regal as her son was married to her protégé. A moon-faced reverend, not much less dramatic than Mr. Beecher, invoked for the couple the perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love. But when I hear, Hank said, of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them, how together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were. Then I am pensive — I hastily walk away filled with the bitterest envy.

The guests filled up a whole ferry getting back to Manhattan for the celebration at Mrs. Woodhull’s house. Walt tried to hide away in the bow, but little Pickie followed him there.

“Well, Pickie,” Walt said, “now you have a mama.” Pickie shrugged and showed him two uncut emeralds, which he pulled from his pocket as Walt talked. “They are for my brother but you may have one, since you are for my brother also.” When Walt didn’t take either jewel, he put them away and said, “My brother is absent. Your brother is absent. They are absent from this boat, absent from there and there.” Pickie pointed with either hand at Brooklyn and Manhattan, and then up over his head. “They are absent from the sky. The whole world is made up of the absence of brothers.” He took Walt’s hand, and stood with him in the bow, under swarms of gulls flying in circles above the boat, looking back at the milling radicals swarming like the gulls around Gob and his bride. Walt had been the very first to congratulate them — he had made sure of that, that his congratulations were first and heartiest. He’d kissed Gob and said, “My dear boy, I am so very happy for you.” Now Walt looked away from Gob and the new Mrs. Woodhull and stared out across the water at the place where the tower for the great bridge rose high on the Brooklyn shore. Had he gone there one strange night with Gob? Had Gob borne him up to the top of the Brooklyn tower and showed him the impossible vista? It all seemed unreal — every year of perfect loving comradeship seemed unreal and impossible, a ridiculous dream inspired by loneliness. I too knotted the old knot of contrariety, blabb’d, blushed, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d.

“Oh, be quiet, Hank,” Walt said, for the first time ever. Hank was quiet, but another voice spoke next to him.

“Mr. Whitman,” said big Dr. Fie. “You look pensive.”

Little Pickie took his hand out of Walt’s, pointed at the Brooklyn tower, and said, “It comes before and makes the way. It is like me.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Fie. “Run along, Pickie.” The boy ran a few steps and stopped, and started to grab at gulls when they swooped close to the deck. Dr. Fie nodded at the tower. “Can you imagine the bridge?”

Walt said, “I think it will be glorious.” Dr. Fie smiled, and then he leaned close to Walt’s face.

“I’m sure you do. I’m sure you can see it in all its glory. You are so precious and able, Mr. Whitman. You with your swaggering walk and your great soul and your distinctive absence of necktie. But I know you, sir. I know you well, and you are not very much at all. You think you are special, and yet really you are not. Really, sir, you are nobody at all. Really you are the least important person in all the world.” Dr. Fie went away, then, not elaborating on his attack, or explaining it. Instead he took Pickie into his big arms and walked back to the crowd. Walt hung on the rail and looked down at the rushing water. Usually he was sensitive to cruel words, but it meant nothing to him, today, to be attacked by a stranger.

Canning Woodhull died two weeks after his son’s wedding. Walt went up to see him buried at Greenwood Cemetery, though he had planned not to return to New York for a long time. He’d encouraged his mother to move to Camden with George, so he could visit her but not have to look at all the places in Brooklyn and Manhattan — every last place, everywhere, it seemed — where he and Gob had wandered.

It was a pretty, white funeral, filled with joyous songs — a Spiritualist funeral. Mrs. Woodhull and Tennie and Maci Trufant and all the Claflin ladies wore matching white dresses of white silk, with lace at their throats, and white skirts that became stained green at the hems by cemetery grass. Gob and Dr. Fie wore white suits, with white silk ties and diamond stickpins. Pickie Beecher was dressed to match them precisely, except he had a ruby pin in his small tie, that glinted there like a spot of fresh wet blood.

The joyous white mourners were gathered next to a coffin draped like an Easter altar with white linen and lilies. It was lowered down into the ground while everybody sang a very happy song. Mrs. Woodhull herself officiated — Mr. Beecher was nowhere to be seen. She spoke elegantly and harshly for the dead man, saying her husband was a genius, selfish and inconsolable in his need for drink, and that death had translated him into a happy spirit who worked with all the other spirits to hurry the day when Earth and Heaven would be married into a single perfect place. Walt stood with his arm around Gob, who’d sidled up to him as his mother spoke, and listened. Walt was dressed in a respectable black suit, and felt he must look like a penguin in a wilderness of ice.

Gob stayed on after his mother and her family had left. Even after the new Mrs. Woodhull went wandering off among the tombstones with Dr. Fie, he stayed, looking down into the grave. Because Gob had asked him to, Walt stayed with him. Gob began to cry. Not, Walt was sure, because he loved his father, but simply because he loved all the dead. Walt gave him a long squeeze and sang a song for him, one as joyous as those sung by the white mourners. He leaned over, singing loud and sweet into the grave:

“My days are swiftly gliding by, and I a pilgrim stranger,

Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger;

For O we stand, on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over.”

At the end of June, Walt took a trip to New England, to read a poem at Dartmouth College for its commencement. It was a pleasant journey, but it did nothing to distract him from his unhappiness. Maci Trufant came from this country.

He did not wish to hate her. He was not jealous, no matter what Hank said. He felt sad, and he felt a fool, and his stomach hurt when he thought of them together, so close and so happy. A person could not have two Camerados — such intimacies of the soul could only be shared with one other — and Gob had chosen the girl to be his. Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? O I the same, Hank said. But Walt did intend to give up. He was steaming down the Hudson on the Fourth of July, dozing as the boat passed through a series of thunderstorms punctuated by bright skies, when he made his decision. As he slept, he dreamed he was a little spider, throwing out silk from his belly, delicate tendrils that drifted into a void in search of a nonexistent other. When he woke he took out his latest daybook from his pocket and made an entry: To GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY and for good, from this present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless undignified pursuit of GW — too long (much too long) persevered in, so humiliating. It must come at last and had better come now — LET THERE FROM THIS HOUR BE NO FALTERING at all henceforth (NOT ONCE, under any circumstances) — avoid seeing him — OR ANY MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE.

Oh Walt, said Hank. You can’t mean it.

Walt and Gob wrote letters back and forth, through the rest of the summer and the fall of 1872. Work keeps me here, Walt wrote. And Mother has gone to Camden, so now really I have little reason to return to Brooklyn. And I am very sorry for your mother’s declining fortunes. I think it was a mistake for her to clobber Mr. Beecher — he and his friends will clobber her back hard and long. Mrs. Woodhull ‘s fortunes had indeed taken a precipitous dive after seeming to peak in May, when she gathered a faction of Woman’s Righters to herself and formed the People’s Party, who nominated her as their candidate for President, with Frederick Douglass as her unwitting running mate. After her nomination, people began most vigorously to persecute her for her beliefs. She was turned out of her fancy house, and business dried up at her brokerage. Beecher was her enemy again. Indeed, she perceived him and his sisters Catharine and Harriet to be the chief architects of her misery. She retaliated by publishing an account of Henry Beecher’s affair with one of his parishioners, the wife of Theodore Tilton. Mr. Beecher practiced as Mrs. Woodhull preached — why was he not denigrated as she was? A man named Comstock had her and Tennie and Colonel Blood arrested for sending obscene materials through the mail. They spent election day in jail, and remained there intermittently, from October on.

I miss you, Walt, Gob wrote. But his life seemed to be proceeding very smoothly and happily without Walt in it. His work went very well—You should see how our little friend has grown, Gob wrote, meaning his engine. He reported that his wife got more beautiful every day, and every time he put pen to paper the weather in New York was balmy or crisp or the beautiful snow was falling like a blessing. (In Washington, meanwhile, it was sweltering or bitter stinging cold or ice fell from the sky and slew horses by the dozen.) Little Pickie was contented and fat, but he missed his Uncle Walt.

A very happy family, the three of you, Walt wrote. How nice for you, my boy.

Eventually, Walt stopped answering letters. For a while he sent only tiny notes. So busy! Will write soon! Once, in a little fit of loneliness and spite, he sent just an empty envelope, and then he sent nothing. Gob’s letters he placed unopened in a cigar box, which he hid in his wardrobe. Hank scolded him endlessly, becoming increasingly shrill—You are a kosmos. He is a builder. You must be together. You must help him. How can we come back if you don’t help him? Walt ignored him, or scolded back, and at last drove Hank to silence. Then his winter was truly silent and dark and lonely. Walt trudged back and forth to work, looking like an old man again with his beard and hair grown long, and now walking like an old man, too. He slept more and more, though he wished not to, because Hank and Gob waited in his dreams to plead with him.

“You are not he,” Walt would say to them both. He dreamed of the reviewing stand in winter, without Mr. Lincoln and without the parade. Only the sign remained, but now it spelled How are you, Walt? Hank and Gob were with him on the stand. “You are not the Camerado, and you are not the Camerado,” Walt said. Because they were not. One had abandoned him for death, the other for marriage, and neither, he understood finally, had reciprocated his affection and his friendship — their love was never as pure and strong as his love. In the dream, Hank and Gob would crowd around him, enfolding him in their arms. “We do love you,” they’d say. “Brother, father, son, we love you — you are our love and our hope. Come back to us. Come back to New York.” Then Gob would put his earnest beautiful face in Walt’s and say, “Help me win, Walt, please help me win.” They would squeeze him and squeeze him until he woke, shouting, “I won’t, I won’t! Leave me be!”

* * *

Walt went back to New York in the second week of January of 1873 because he wanted to sleep without Gob and Hank pestering him all night long, and also because he thought that seeing Gob again would help rid him of the weighty feeling — the deep grief that he could feel in his belly, as if he’d eaten stones. This feeling was on him like the old feeling he’d had before he went down to Washington looking for his brother. Walt felt tired and hopeless, as if all his days had been lived for nothing, and all his work was nothing more than whispering into his own hands — no one had heard, and no one cared. On the train he slept a dreamless, squeezeless sleep, the first in months. When he woke he felt no less weary.

When Gob opened his door and found Walt standing there, he said, “You’re just in time.” Beyond the foyer, Walt could see that the house was transformed. Walls had been knocked down, ceilings removed through all five floors, so what was formerly many rooms on many floors was now a huge barnlike edifice spanned by immense arches like the ribs of some leviathan. Gob put on his coat and pushed Walt out the door. “We’d better hurry.”

“Where are we going?” Walt asked.

“To hear a speech,” Gob said. “Didn’t you get my letter? You were expressly invited, and now here you are.”

“I got it,” Walt said. “I’ve been dreaming….” He tried to tell Gob that he’d been haunted by him in dream after dream, but for the first time since he was an infant Walt found himself at a total loss for words.

“Ah,” said Gob. “We can talk later.” Dr. Fie was waiting in the stable with a carriage all ready. He tipped his hat to Walt. “Mr. Whitman,” he said. When Walt and Gob were settled in their seats, he took off, driving the horses like a fiend. “Will’s a brave driver,” Gob said. “He used to drive an ambulance. We’ll make it in time.”

“Is your mother speaking from jail?” Walt asked.

“Jail?” said Gob. “No, she’s escaped! She’s escaped to New Jersey.”

“My mama, too,” Walt said. Gob had his arm around him and was squeezing, but it was not oppressive, as in the dreams. Walt wanted more of it.

Federal marshals were guarding all the entrances to the Cooper Institute, waiting, Gob said, to snatch up his mama if she dared show her face. Walt asked if she would really come.

“Of course she will,” said Gob. Walt looked around the rooms for Mrs. Woodhull, but found Gob’s wife instead. She was standing amid the crowd, all by herself, looking very tired. She returned his stare for a few moments, then shifted her attention to the stage, where a lady had come forward and begun to talk.

“The enemies of free speech,” she said, “have ringed this place round with marshals and police. Though our friends are free from Ludlow Street Jail, the custodians of the law guard the doors of the institute, and neither Mrs. Woodhull nor Miss Claflin can, no matter how much they may desire it, appear upon this platform tonight.” This announcement was greeted with howls and hisses.

The lady was trying to shout over the noise of the crowd that she had been deputized to read the speech, and that she would do so if they would only quiet down. As she shouted, an old Quakeress, dressed in a long gray cloak, a coal-scuttle bonnet, and heavy veils, joined the lady on the stage. The old woman walked half bent over, and held her hands before her as if blind. People laughed at her, thinking she was just a confused old biddy who had somehow managed to wander up on the stage, until suddenly she pushed the cloak back so it fell off her shoulders, and tore off her bonnet and veils. Victoria Woodhull stood revealed before the audience.

“Well,” said Gob. “There she is.” Her hair was all in disarray and her dress rumpled, but she looked proud and mighty. Her commanding presence precipitated a hush over the whole hall. The lady who had begun the speech smiled exultantly and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Victoria C. Woodhull!”

Cheers and applause filled the hall, but Mrs. Woodhull held up her hands for silence and got it immediately. “My friends and fellow citizens!” she began. “I come into your presence from the American Bastille, to which I was consigned by the cowardly servility of the age. I am still held under heavy bonds to return to that cell, upon a scandalous charge trumped up by the ignorant or the corrupt officers of the law, conspiring with others to deprive me, under the falsest and shallowest pretenses, of my inherited privileges as an American citizen. In my person, the freedom of the press is assailed, and stricken down, and such has been the adverse concurrence of circumstances that the press itself has tacitly consented, almost with unanimity, to this sacrilegious invasion of one of the most sacred of civil rights!”

She detailed all the particulars of the conspiracy against her. She told how Anthony Comstock was Beecher’s tool, how his agents had ransacked the offices of the Weekly, how Mr. Comstock had sworn to destroy her utterly if he had to spend all the energies of his life upon the job. But she didn’t look as if anybody could destroy her, that night. She was vibrant and magnetic and fascinating — even the marshals stared at her in wonder, and listened raptly. They seemed to forget that they were obligated to arrest her. Walt forgot some of his sadness, watching her.

At last, Mrs. Woodhull made her concluding exclamation. “Sexual freedom, the last right to be claimed for man in the long struggle for universal emancipation, the least understood and the most feared of all the freedoms, but destined to be the most beneficial of any — will burst upon the world!” There were roars of approval. She tore the rose from her throat and hurled it like a bomb into the crowd, then ran off the stage and up the aisle, through the reaching arms of people who tried to touch her as she passed, all the way to the back door, where two marshals were standing. She stopped, crossed her hands at the wrists, and surrendered.

“That was that,” said Gob.

* * *

Walt and Gob went to Pfaff’s after the speech. Gob seemed uninterested in visiting his mother in jail. “She won’t be there for long,” he said confidently, “and I have a more pressing concern, tonight.”

“What’s that?” Walt asked.

“You, of course,” said Gob. “You’ve come back to me, just as I hoped you would and knew you would.” They sat together for a while in silence, Gob’s hand on Walt’s hand, not touching their beer. Every so often, Gob would reach out to lift Walt’s chin so he could look into his eyes. “Yes,” he’d say, with deep satisfaction. “Yes, there you are.”

They went for a walk, after Pfaff’s, a long walk arm in arm, through the late-night crowds on Broadway, up even into the park, where they sat by the lake, holding hands in the same place where Tennie had found Walt’s planted book years before. Ghostly-looking sheep were out on the meadow.

They still had not said very much to each other. Walt wanted to protest, to say it could not be as it was before, to say, “You are not he.” But it was easier not to speak, and Walt had a fear that if he made a noise, Gob would take his hand away from him and never give it back again.

“My work is done,” Gob said at last, after an hour of sitting. “It’s complete. It only lacks you, Walt.”

“Me,” Walt said softly. Gob did not take away his hand.

“Did you think I was lying when I said I needed you? When I begged you to help me win, did you think it was a jest? They want to come back. Can’t you hear them begging to come back?”

“Not anymore,” Walt said. Though he’d spoken to Gob of Hank, he’d never mentioned the boy’s posthumous chattiness.

Gob stood and pulled Walt up after him. “Come home with me,” Gob said. “I’ll show you something wonderful.”

“Your wife is there,” Walt said, but Gob ignored him. Now, Walt wished Gob would let go his hand. He felt afraid again, as he had been on the stage when he met Gob for the first time. Gob pulled him along, all the way down to the house on Fifth Avenue, where little Pickie opened the door just as they approached it and said, “Welcome Master, welcome Kosmos.”

Inside the house, Walt got a better look at the transformations it had undergone. “My little brother,” Pickie said, waving his arms around at everything. The engine was everywhere. It had grown down from its fifth-floor room, through the ceilings and the walls until, it seemed, it had become the house itself. Here was a big red dude of a fire engine, there was an electromagnet as big as a man. But one part stood out because it was larger than any other, and because it was located in what might as well have been the center of a thing that was otherwise mischievously asymmetric. That part looked like the gate to Greenwood Cemetery, complete with a gatehouse, and the whole thing sheltered under a pair of wings. The gatehouse was lovely, a little church of glass and bone and steel. It was full of gears — visibly turning through the glass — which ranged in size from one story high to as small as the nail of Pickie’s thumb, and they spilled out of the gatehouse to spin all over the room. The gears turned all sorts of contrivances, most of which seemed to be doing no useful work at all. The very biggest gears conspired to turn the wings — Walt squinted at them a few moments before he realized that they were glass wings, made of photographic negative plates.

Dr. Fie and the new Mrs. Woodhull were both there, looking grave and serious. “Are you here?” Dr. Fie asked him, sounding cordial for once. He put his big finger out in front of him and poked Walt in the belly. Walt did not bother to answer the question. Dr. Fie looked to be drunk or confused or in pain. Maci Trufant Woodhull said, “God bless you, Mr. Whitman.”

“There it is,” said Gob, sweeping his hand out to indicate the whole house. “The engine. It’s complete, except for you. There’s a place for you in it, Walt. I need you to go in it, and then it will bring them back, all the six hundred thousand, my brother and Will’s brother and Maci’s brother and your Hank, too. All the dead of the war, all the dead of all the wars, all the dead of the past. We’ll lick death tonight, Walt, if you’ll help us. I’m ready. Will’s ready, and Maci is ready. Pickie is ready and the engine is ready. Are you ready?”

Walt opened his mouth to answer, paused a moment without saying anything, and then he ran away. He fled past Will Fie, pushing him aside when he tried to stand in his way, and knocked down Maci Trufant. He ran, jumping over wires and dodging under steel struts and copper pipes, until he was in the foyer, and then out the door. He ran down the marble steps and then down the street, not slowing till he had passed Madame Restell’s house and the Catholic cathedral. He stopped, looked back for pursuit, and saw there was none. He sat on the steps of the still-unfinished cathedral and put his head in his hands. He tried to quiet his fear but found that he could not. Once, as a child, he’d almost drowned at the beach. A powerful wave had picked him up and thrown him down against the sea bottom, and held him there as if it were trying to murder him. He’d got a lungful of water and was quite sure he was going to die. Even back then, when he never gave a thought to death, when he did not even know yet what it was, it still frightened him. Now he was frightened again in just that same way, blind panic filled him up. When he heard the voice, he thought at first that it was Gob calling after him, but it was Hank, long silent but shouting now: Walt! Walt Walt Walt!

“No,” Walt said.

Walt. Please help. I want to come back. We all want so bad to come back. No one can do it but you. Nobody loves us like you. Please go back you have to go back you have to nobody loves us like you.

“I’m afraid,” Walt said.

Don’t be afraid it’s a good thing you’re going to do. The best ever.

“I can’t,” Walt said. But Hank said you can and you must, and so Walt did. He went slowly back up the street to Gob’s house. The door was still open. Gob, his wife, little Pickie, and Dr. Fie were all waiting patiently, as if they knew he wouldn’t be long in returning. They put him in the gatehouse, bundling him with wires into an iron and glass chair. Young Mrs. Woodhull settled Mr. Lincoln’s hat on his head. Now it was decorated with a corona of silver spikes, each of which plugged into a hole in the crystal wall of the gatehouse.

“Bless you, Mr. Whitman,” said Maci Woodhull, again as she put the hat on him, and she kissed him on the forehead as a mother might do. Walt thought then of his mother, thought he saw her bustle by outside with a stack of pancakes on a plate, thought he caught the wholesome odor that fell off her.

“We’re ready,” said Dr. Fie, and closed the crystal door of the gatehouse.

Gob put his face up against it and called through. “Don’t be afraid, Walt,” he said. “It’s all for the best.”

Hank said it too. It’s for me. It’s for us. Thank you, Walt.

Walt watched through the door while Pickie ran speedily up and down ladders, flipping switches, closing connections, activating batteries, while Dr. Fie stoked up engines all over the room, while Gob’s wife went around spinning up cranks and adjusting knobs. Gob held up his own hand before his face and stared into it. Walt tried to imagine the aftermath of this night. Not, he was sure, the abolition of death. For all that Gob was strange and wonderful, despite all the extraordinary things he’d shown Walt during their strange evenings, he knew no one could make that happen. Sparks might light up the Manhattan sky like fireworks, the whole house might fall down and leave them miraculously untouched, a whale might be driven to swim through the Narrows and throw itself on the shore of the Battery, but when dawn came the next day, the dead would still be dead. Hank might finally be silent, and Walt would leave this place and not think of Gob ever again. Maybe that would be the great miracle, that Walt would be true to his nonexistent Camerado but finally not suffer for his faith.

“Now!” said Gob, and Hank said, Goodbye, Walt. Unnatural light flooded the gatehouse, and a great noise started up in the air all around him — a cranking, grinding, coughing machine noise that settled into a giant breathing noise like that noise of the sea. Magic images danced all around Walt — the faces of boys and men cast on the floor, and dead bodies, torn by bullets and shells, shimmering on the glass walls. He looked down at his chest and saw a picture there — a row of bodies laid out along a fence.

Goodbye, Hank said again, very sad, and Walt thought of how he’d sat with him as he died. Hank’s eyes had darted fearfully in his head, and he had clutched Walt’s arm with great strength despite the morphine Dr. Woodhull had given him to soothe his last hours. He’d not said goodbye, then, just “No,” over and over again until he couldn’t get the breath out to make the word, but still his mouth formed it silently, “No.” “Goodbye, my dear,” Walt had said, giving him a rich, desperate kiss on his lips.

Walt stiffened in his iron-and-glass chair because a terrible pain filled his head, as if the hat spikes had suddenly been thrust into his troubled brain. The pain moved out down his neck, through his chest and arms, his belly and loins and legs. He let out a hoarse scream, and wished he had run harder and farther from this place, wished he’d run right off the island and kept on going south till he reached the very tip of Florida, because it seemed he would have to run very far away to be safe from this immense agony. He screamed again and again, then called out to Gob, who was standing just beyond the crystal door with light in his hand. Walt cried out to him, but the pain only got worse. Walt spoke again, much softer, and then again, so soft he wasn’t even sure if he made a noise.

“Help me,” Walt said.

~ ~ ~

IT WAS TIME TO RUN OFF TO THE WAR: THEY’D BEEN MARKING off their growth against a crooked doorjamb, and very recently had reached a notch representing a height Tomo figured suitable for soldier boys. Tomo thought they could pass for fifteen, and if they couldn’t fight they could at least be company musicians. They both had bugles, though Gob was not so fine a bugler as Tomo. Gob knew the calls, but they came out like the bleating of an anxious sheep. It would do, Tomo said of Gob’s playing. It was Tomo’s firm belief that the whole army was desperate for musicians.

Tomo dragged Gob from their bed, a square of ticking stuffed with dried corn husks. They slept on it with one blanket and no pillow but each other’s back. Gob said, “Don’t get rough. I’m rising.” But he lay there a few moments more.

“I’ll kick you,” said Tomo. Gob rose to his knees, then to his feet. He’d gone to sleep in his clothes; he had only to put on his shoes to be ready. Tomo had procured new Jefferson bootees for them the previous summer and put them aside for this night.

Gob stood on the bed. “Goodbye room,” he said, taking in one last look at the place he and Tomo had lived almost all their life. It was a small room, not more than three times larger than their bed. The rough pine floor yielded splinters endlessly. The ceiling was stained with candle smoke. “Goodbye bed,” said Gob. “Goodbye books.” They did not have many books, but Gob loved them all. He ran from the bed, knelt by a little stack of books that leaned against the far wall, near the wardrobe, and picked one up.

“We got no room for books,” said Tomo, standing by the open window, though Gob knew he had Hardee’s Tactics crammed in his own bag in the orchard.

“Just one more,” said Gob, but he only touched the books, and did not pick one up. He already had a complete works of Shakespeare in his knapsack, the gift of the town schoolmarm, who usually threw fruit at them when they put their heads in her window and looked in on the schoolroom where they were not welcome, but sometimes, if they made her angry enough, threw books. Some of their library came to them by way of Miss Maggs’s furious hand; most came from their mama.

“Goodbye house,” said Tomo in the birch tree that grew close up against their window, stepping carefully down from branch to branch. Gob followed him slowly, not less nimble but more fearful. “Goodbye mill. Goodbye barn. Goodbye Mr. Split-foot.” Mr. Splitfoot was their grandpa Buck’s Appaloosa. Tomo waved to the barn as they passed it.

“Goodbye orchard,” Gob said softly as they walked among apple and pear trees that yielded abundant fruit every autumn.

They walked to a clearing that industrious Tomo had made himself, hacking away to make a little round place among the trees. Their knapsacks were hidden in the clearing, behind a wall they’d built of mud and broken bricks. Scarecrow Confederates — props for games — looked real where they crouched behind the wall. Gob half expected one to issue a dry wooden challenge at them as he approached. Gob helped his brother into his knapsack, then shrugged into his own while Tomo lifted it onto his back.

“It’s burdensome,” Gob said, not precisely complaining, just noting the fact. In his sack he carried the book; three candles; an extra shirt; two pairs of drawers; wool socks stolen from Buck (their grandma made them with hexes against wetness and cold knitted into the fabric); a pocketknife; a tin plate; a little fork and a big spoon; and a wedge of fatback half the size of his head, wrapped in a piece of waxed paper. A canteen slung from a strap on the sack banged against his chest as he walked. His bugle swung from a strap on the other side.

“Like it ought to be,” said Tomo. Gob knew his brother’s pack was just as heavy. Tomo was outfitted just like Gob, except he had two pair of their grandma’s magic socks, and a knife upon whose bone handle were carved scenes from the life of Andrew Jackson. He also carried all their money, ten dollars held back last summer from their humbug earnings.

“Goodbye Anna,” said Tomo. They paused in front of the house. “Goodbye Aunt Tennie. Goodbye Uncle Malden. Goodbye Aunt Utica. Goodbye Mama. And goodbye Buck, God damn you straight to hell.”

Gob looked at the silent house. Darkness made it look less like a shack, and hid the flaking paint and the sagging rails on the porch. The house sat on a hill above the town. Another hill rose behind the orchard, and beyond that hill rose wooded hills where lived a mad hedge wizard called the Urfeist. It was rumored that he was incredibly ancient and withered, that he was a contemporary of General Washington, that he was an Indian half-breed, or the spawn of an animal. It was known for a fact that he had an appetite for children; those foolish enough to wander into his domain returned with their voices stilled by horror and the littlest fingers of their left hands missing. And it was known that people sometimes went to bargain with him, and received power great or small depending on what they offered up to him, and on the quality of their ambition. Grandma Anna had been to see him. She lacked a finger and had small witch’s power in accord with her petty desire; she wanted one day to ride around in her very own carriage.

The boys turned away from the house and walked down the east side of the lower hill. They would catch the train where it ran down from Brandon, the next-nearest town. “Goodbye, Mama,” Gob whispered. They had not taken twelve steps when he saw a flash of white darting among a copse of hemlocks at the foot of the hill. He ran off immediately to investigate.

“Where are you going?” Tomo called after him. “We got to hurry. We’ll miss the train.”

Gob stopped and turned around. “I saw a boogly!” he said, and ran again down the hill, tripping in his haste but rolling immediately to his feet and back into his run. Soon he’d entered the deeper dark under the trees. He thought that darting white shape was a spirit. It was his fondest wish to see one. The family business was fortune-telling; every summer they went out in a garish wagon to comfort and fleece those bereaved by the war. Gob and Tomo were frauds. In dim rented rooms they spun out sweet stories for grieving wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and lovers. Whatever the loss, they would deny it, whether by claiming it had not happened at all (He is alive!) or else by claiming that the loss was meaningless (The dead are not dead — your beloved is smiling on you from his spirit abode!). But Gob and Tomo had never seen a spirit, or heard spirit music, or moved a planchette except with their mundane fingers.

Their mama, who did see spirits, said that they would see as she did, one day. “When you are men,” she said. “When you are grown up.” Tomo was a doubter — the dead, to his mind, were dead. He would believe in spirits when he saw one for himself, and that would be never. Gob was more inclined to believe. He would hold his mama’s hand and will her power into him when she was in a trance. Always he saw nothing. She’d come back to her senses and kiss him on the head. “Ah, be patient, my little man,” she’d say. But he would rather talk to famous dead personages than be patient. His mama talked with Josephine, with Bonaparte, with an ancient Greek who would not reveal his name. Gob’s imagination was always filling empty air with shining spirit bodies — his three dead aunts, Augustus Caesar, Marie Antoinette bouncing her head like a ball. He knew they were not real, but hoped with a full heart that one day they would be. As he ran past the tree trunks he imagined the spirit he was chasing to be General Jackson, still quite upset after his recent death at Chancellorsville. A hideous warbling noise assaulted Gob’s ears. Restless spirit! he thought. Miserable spirit, to complain so horribly!

But it wasn’t a spirit. It was a girl, wrapped in a white sheet, with her long blond hair let down so it dragged behind her as she ran among the trees, emitting the peculiar warbling sound. Her name was Alanis Bell. She was their neighbor. She lived at the bottom of the hill, and practiced a forbidden affection for the two boys. If her mama ever caught her talking to them, she got a beating with a splintered ruler.

“There you are,” she said, running over to Gob. The way her sheet covered her feet, it looked like she was floating. “Where are you going?” Tomo ran up beside Gob, panting and scowling.

“To the war,” said Tomo. He pulled at Gob to get him going, but Gob pushed his hand away. He thought Alanis Bell was fascinating, though Tomo hated her.

“To the war?” said Alanis Bell. She put her head back and made the warbling noise again.

“Hush up!” Tomo said to her. “You’ll get us caught!” But she kept warbling, until Tomo threw a stick at her. It struck her head, and stopped her warbling but did not make her quiet.

“I was mourning you!” she cried, rubbing her head. “I was mourning you like I mourn for Walter, but now you’ll get no mourning from me!” Walter was her brother, whose death at Shiloh had set her to running in the woods. “Now, I’ll be glad when you die! Go on! Get out of here. Go on and die! Two less Claflins in the world. Every good person will celebrate!”

“We’re Woodhulls, you goddamned idiot girl,” said Tomo. “Come along, Gob.” They left Alanis Bell cursing them in the hemlocks. They hadn’t walked for five more minutes, though, when Gob stopped.

“It’s a bad night to go to the war,” he said. “A person shouldn’t start a trip on a full moon.”

“The light’s best then,” said Tomo. “We better hurry.”

“It’s a bad thing,” said Gob, “to be cursed at the start of your trip. Let’s go tomorrow.”

Tomo stopped and turned around to face his brother. “Let’s go tonight,” he said. They had already stayed home on three other nights on account of Gob’s fretting. “Let’s go tonight or let’s not go at all.”

“Well,” said Gob. But he didn’t move as he was supposed to. The train whistle sounded in the distance.

“We got to go,” said Tomo.

“Well,” Gob said again. “We could not go, too.” It was brave of him, to make the suggestion. It was Tomo, five minutes older than he, who had always directed their lives.

“Not go?” said Tomo, immediately furious. “How could we not go? There’s not a reason in the world not to go.”

“I don’t want to go,” Gob said for the first time. He’d never said it before, not in so many words, because during all the daydreaming and planning, it had always seemed to him that they would not ever actually do it, and also because he was sure that whatever his brother wanted, he must come to want too. And yet he wanted not to go. He wanted nothing less than to go to the war.

“Well, why the hell not?” Tomo asked, very quietly, but his voice was full of anger.

“I just don’t want to,” Gob said simply. Tomo took him by the shoulders and gave him a shake. Gob said, “I’m afraid,” and Tomo shook him again.

“What’s to be scared of?” Tomo asked him. Did he think that Rebs were to be scared of? Rebs were to kill like a hole was to dig. And didn’t he know that Tomo would kill any Reb that dared bother his brother? While the train got closer, Tomo went on and on. He scolded and cajoled. He called Gob a bad brother and a false friend, he called him a yellow-bellied girl.

“You’ll run for that train before it’s too late,” Tomo said.

Gob said, “I’m afraid to die.” He closed his eyes and tried to screw his feet into the ground. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

“Will not, either,” said Tomo. He took a few steps away and said, “God damn you, then,” and he ran off. He ran towards the train, and Gob ran away from it. Gob ran past Alanis Bell’s white form, still darting and ululating among the hemlocks. He ran back home, to the birch tree that grew close up against the house. Only when he had climbed the tree to the height of their bedroom did he turn and look for his brother. He could see the smoke from the train hanging like a low cloud against the clear sky, but he couldn’t see the train, and he couldn’t see Tomo. While he was running he had been too afraid to feel regretful, but now he did feel that way. He pounded his fist against his head and cried, but though he felt very bad indeed, there was a strange elation in him. He felt a selfish happiness, a greedy appreciation of safety, there in the tree, and he could not reconcile that feeling with the noise of the train, with Tomo’s receding from him.

“Wait!” Gob said, thinking he would climb down the tree and run after Tomo. But haste made him clumsy. He fell from the tree, knocked his head against the ground, and bit his tongue. Then he was asleep for a while. Alanis Bell came up the hill to watch him, and she might have stroked his head or said a comforting word to him, but she was disgusted by the way his leg was twisted up at a terrible, unnatural angle, and she left him there. She went back to the little hemlock wood, where she ran and danced under the moon, and sang for her brother.

For a week Gob was senseless from the blow to his head, and when he woke he was transformed into a creature of regret. Every time he heard the train whistle blowing in the distance he thought how he had abandoned his brother, and been abandoned by his brother, how if he had not been afraid they would still be together. The brotherless days ran miserably one into the next, until Gob woke one night absolutely certain that Tomo had been killed. He tried not to believe it, for fear that his belief might make it so, but though he struggled against the knowledge, it was confirmed at the end of the summer, when Tomo’s body returned to Homer.

Gob was not supposed to be one of the pathetic, maudlin bereaved. Tears were appropriate for ordinary people, but Claflins were special; the lie of death was undone by their magic senses. His mama scolded him when he cried for his brother.

“The dead are not dead,” she said. “Would you cry if Tomo moved to Wyoming? The Summerland is closer than Wyoming.” This did nothing to comfort Gob. Wyoming seemed to him a place incredibly far away. In fact, he was not even sure where it was, and he knew it must be a place peopled exclusively by savages and bears. It was no place he wanted his brother to be. He said so, and his mother put her soft white hand over his mouth and told him again that the dead were not dead, but more alive even than the living. They dwelt happily in the Summerland.

Gob had cottoned to that notion when he was a child, but Tomo had always hated it. Now Gob hated it too. Now he suspected that the dead were dead, that death was like sleep without dreams, or like being locked in a dark wardrobe where you did not hear or smell or feel or touch, where you did not sleep or wake, where you did not even contemplate the darkness, but you were one with it, and it was a big, horrible nothing.

He asked his mama if she couldn’t bring Tomo back to visit. Couldn’t she talk to him? She said that she could. They put out all the lights in his room except for a single candle. She grew still and quiet, and then began to sway lightly from side to side. “Mama?” she said. “Is that you walking in the light? Is that you? Is that my brother Gob? How come you look so sad, Gob? Don’t you know I’m a living spirit? Don’t you know I’m walking by your side, and one day you’ll see me just like Mama does, when you’re a man? Don’t you know how it’s true, Gob?”

Gob thought he would float away from joy and relief, and grabbed at the mattress for purchase. He talked for a little while with Tomo, asking what it was like in the Summerland, if there were other children there, if he was treated nice. But his mama’s answers began to make him suspicious. He was an experienced humbugger, and something seemed to him not right. Was there a message for Alanis Bell? “Yes,” replied his mother, who knew nothing of Tomo’s hatred for the girl. “Tell her I miss my sweet friend.” Gob began to cry then, because he knew his mama was lying to him, because he felt certain in that moment that there was nothing beyond death but the filthy, silent grave. He fell back on the bed and imagined he was falling into a grave himself — he was falling, and he might have fallen forever if a furious rage had not come welling up in him. He opened his eyes and saw his mother peering down at him with concern. “Gob?” she said. “What’s wrong, brother?” He shouted at her, not words, just a howl, and he struck at her face with his fist. He chased her from his room, and when she was gone he pounded on the door he’d slammed behind her, and he howled and howled.

Gob was lonely for the first time in his life, and hoped being near Tomo’s body would rid him of this new feeling. He sat on a wooden chair near the flat rock in the orchard where they had sometimes laid out their dinner, and that now was Tomo’s headstone. Gob felt no less lonely for sitting there, but though it made him sad to sit and consider how his brother’s body lay beneath the ground suffering the abuse of worms, there was no place else he felt comfortable. He held in his fist the letter Tomo had written but not mailed out of Secessia, which he’d read and reread, torn up and reassembled with paste and thread, buried and retrieved.

The family was kind to him, each in their own way, after Tomo’s body came back from the war, escorted by a pair of soldiers who told that a generous Rebel general had arranged for the body to return to Homer. Anna fussed over Gob’s wound; it was she who saved him from death. Children died from such terrible bone breaks. She set the leg and bound it up with all sorts of sweet-smelling herbs. Gob, drunk on her medicines, had a sudden fear she was making him delicious for cooking. “Mama,” he cried out, “is she going to eat me up?”

Tennie came out to the grave, bearing a sunflower, which she laid against the stone. She told him Tomo was not in the Summerland. None of her spirit friends there knew him. But that did not mean he wouldn’t go there eventually, and pass from there to the living earth with great ease. “My dear child,” she said, “there is no death.” Gob said nothing. He did not believe her.

“What are you doing here?” Utica wanted to know when she came out to visit him. It was night. Gob had been all day in the orchard. “Do you think he’ll come out of the grave if you sit here and stare? Do you think he’ll come down from Heaven? Well, he won’t.” Utica was a doubter when she was sober. Drunk, she was susceptible to rage against such opinions as were held by most of her family. “A body don’t return from where he’s gone, my little friend.” She’d had a beau, a cooper in Brandon, where Claflins were less infamous, but cholera had killed him, and he had not returned to her when she pleaded, alone or with her sisters. “You are a dreary, moping thing,” she said. “They die. What do you want to do? Spend all the rest of your days here? Do you want to crawl into the grave with him? You make me nervous. Do you realize how you make me nervous?” Utica nudged Gob from his chair and said, “A gentleman always makes room for a lady.” Without complaint Gob sat on a nearby stump. Utica passed him her glass of whiskey.

The glass was chipped, so Gob cut his lip as he drank, but found the taste of blood and whiskey pleasant. Utica pulled a bottle out of her dress and drank with him. “How your mama would shriek if she saw you with whiskey!” she said, and then tittered. She got up and walked away, but soon returned with a veil. She stood on the chair with the veil over her head, waving her bottle and reciting all the female lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She stepped down and twirled around the grave, looking ghostly and magical. Gob watched his aunt spin and shout, but said nothing, and when she finished and bowed, he did not applaud. Her swirling white veil reminded him of Alanis Bell, who never came to visit him at Tomo’s grave.

“Dreary boy,” Utica said, but not without some affection, and she refilled his glass before she walked off into the trees, idly waving the veil behind her. Gob drank his whiskey and then cupped his hand before his mouth to smell it on his breath, thinking of his father.

The whiskey put into his head the seemingly excellent idea of kneeling on his brother’s grave and digging in the dirt. He was not sure if he was digging to rescue Tomo from the grave or to make a home in it for himself. He grabbed fistfuls of dirt with his left hand and threw them over his shoulder. With his right he dug with the glass. He had only made a shallow Gob-shaped depression when he grew tired, but he lay down in that and pressed his eyes against the fresh earth. It smelled of old apples. Something that might have been a piece of turkey bone pressed against his cheek. Something else brushed against his neck, crawled along his skin for a few inches, and then turned away. All he saw was darkness. When he sat by the grave and closed his eyes, he sometimes got the feeling that Tomo was standing behind him, reaching out a hand to touch his shoulder, but every time Gob turned around there was only empty space. Now as he nestled atop the grave there was not even that feeling, but he pleaded anyway for Tomo to step out of the darkness before his eyes. Darkness could hide anything. Why wouldn’t it hide his brother? Doors could conceal anything. He had opened and closed his bedroom door at the house, hoping each time to find Tomo on the other side. Once it had revealed his mama, who had creeped upstairs to try and reconcile with him. He shut the door in her face.

He imagined Tomo staring up at him now with his one good dead eye. It was dried and rheumy when Gob peeped under the coffin lid at the funeral, shriveled like a very old grape. Gob stared back, conjuring Tomo’s supine dead image, coloring him with an additional two weeks of decay. If he kept digging, he would eventually be able to reach out his hand to touch the dead flesh. It was just the few feet of earth and a few inches of wood separating them. Or it was just a few feet of earth and whatever walls God might throw up between the living and the dead. But if the earth would yield to a human hand, why not those other walls? “I will bring you back,” Gob swore to his brother, speaking into the dirt so he soiled his tongue and his teeth. And not just as a spirit like their lying mama said she saw. He would somehow bring his brother back into living flesh. He would find a way to do that, because his brother would do the same for him, and because he was to blame for Tomo’s death — he felt sure Tomo would not have been killed if he’d gone with him. This was Gob’s conviction: that he had killed his brother with his fear as surely as the Rebel had with his bullet. The prospect of living a life without Tomo was no less impossible than the prospect of somehow turning him from a rotten horror to a warm living boy, and if fate had determined that he must do one or the other, he would much prefer to do the latter. “I will bring you back,” he said again, and the words were a great comfort to him, because he could only reconcile himself to his brother’s death by thinking it temporary. Feeling at peace, Gob snuggled deeper into the dirt, and listened as a gust of wind came into the orchard, shaking the trees and knocking fruit to the ground. There was another noise — he could hear it if he listened very, very hard, a noise like a giant softly breathing, or like the ocean, which he remembered from his distant childhood in San Francisco. The noise rose and fell, lulling him to sleep.

Gob’s ignorance necessitated a teacher, but who could teach him how to defeat death? He thought of Miss Maggs, simply because she was a teacher, but he was sure she could only teach him how to be bitter and ugly and how to be a bad shot with a book. His mama might have been a candidate if she hadn’t been such a shameless liar. He did not trust her any longer, and if she could not even bring Tomo’s spirit to talk to him how could she put life back in his flesh? For the same reason, Aunt Tennie was not suitable. Utica had no knowledge he needed. Grandpa Buck was not stupid, but Gob needed no instruction on how to cheat people. Uncle Malden was as dumb as he was smelly. Grandma Anna had only small power, and anything he might learn from her he could learn from her teacher. So Gob turned on his heel, away from Homer town, and he walked through the orchard and up the high hill, then into the woods beyond that, up into the highest hills where the Urfeist lived. It was a simple decision; there was only one person in his whole world from whom he had any hope of even beginning to learn what he must. But, though it seemed simple and right to take the trip into the highest hills, he felt dizzy and weak and cowardly as he shuffled along under the dark trees. He knew very well what the Urfeist took from the children he captured. Weighed against his brother’s life, it seemed a small thing. And it made great sense to him that he should have to do something fearful to undo the consequences of his fear.

Alanis Bell found him as he was passing over the high hill.

“Gob Woodhull,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“Get away from me,” Gob said. She danced around him, skipping and throwing her hands out. Her prancing seemed an offense against his sadness.

“It is a beautiful night,” she said. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

“To see the Urfeist,” he said. That put an end to her prancing. She grabbed his arm.

“Hush! You know better than to say that name. You’ll call him down on us!” He pulled his arm away.

“Leave me alone,” he said, but she kept clutching at him.

“He’ll bite your finger! He’ll eat you up! He’ll break your bones!”

“I’ll break yours!” he said, pushing her away from him. “I’ll lift you up and break you in half, you girl!” He had pushed her down and now he was standing over her, ready to step on her or kick her. “Go away,” he said quietly. He turned away and walked on.

“Go on!” Alanis Bell called out behind him. “I don’t care!” But the warbling noise came drifting after him as he walked. He stopped up his ears with his fingers.

Gob did not know where he was going. He simply wandered. It was common knowledge that the Urfeist could smell a child from miles away. Gob closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, because it was also said that the Urfeist drew sleeping children to him with a call that only they could hear and follow. More than one child slept with a leash that ran from ankle to bedpost, to prevent just that sort of wandering. Gob got quite lost.

The wind had picked up, and a bit of slivered moon was in the sky. It peeped out occasionally from between racing blue clouds, and lit the spinning fall of oak leaves when the wind nudged them off the trees. Gob happened upon a hawthorn bush. Resting next to it, he saw that a shrike had left a tiny shrew impaled on a long thorn. If that is not an omen, he thought, then my name is Mary Lincoln and I own many fine gowns. It was just then, when cowardice very nearly overwhelmed him, that he caught sight of a cheery yellow light beckoning through the bush.

He picked his way through with care. He hid his hands in his coat and hunched his face down against his chest, but still he got a scratch high on his forehead. He wondered if the odor of blood would draw the Urfeist from his cave. Gob stood watching the entrance for a long time. There was a space cleared before it, where roses were planted in orderly rows, and when he moved a little closer he saw that taller rosebushes flanked the cave mouth, which opened into what must surely be the highest hill in the woods. The entrance turned as soon as it opened. All he saw was yellow light flickering on gray rock.

“I’m here,” Gob said, speaking so low he could hardly hear himself above the wind.

“I know it,” said a voice beside him. The Urfeist looked just how people made him out to look. There was the scraggly iron-colored hair, the jaunty red cap. He wore a chemise of some animal’s skin, and the kilt of fingers was pulled up high on his hairy belly. His feet were wound with bark. “You are welcome here, child,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.” He was always waiting for a child to come to him. The Urfeist smiled, showing strong white teeth that would have been the envy of a horse.

“I want something,” said Gob. “I’ll pay for it. I want my brother back. He’s dead but I want to bring him here again, into the world. It’s got to be so he’s a living boy.” He kept babbling because the Urfeist said nothing. He only moved one long finger slowly towards Gob’s face. Gob did not try to back away, but he did not think he could have, had he tried. The Urfeist put his finger gently against Gob’s lips.

“Hush,” he said. He left his finger there for a long moment. Gob was dashed with horror, as if someone had filled a bucket with pure liquid horror and dumped it over his head. Now he found he could move, so he turned and ran, faster than he thought he’d be able to, with his bad leg. He burst through the hawthorn, hardly aware of the scratches he got, and went running through the woods towards home. He felt borne up by fear, lifted and pushed by a great, blowing terror. His mama chased him, sometimes, when she was drunk on her visions of personal glory. She always wanted Gob then, not Tomo. It was Gob she wanted to catch up in a crushing embrace, and it was into his ear she wanted to pour her rushing sibyl’s monologue — she’d go on and on about all the fantastic things that lay in store for her and her sons, how she would be the leader of her people and deliver all the world from misery, how a golden age would be born in her and through her. Gob came to fear these attacks of hers. He’d run from her when she had the particular look in her eyes, when he knew what was coming. Tomo would exhort him, saying, “Run, Gob, run!” He’d flee through the orchard with his mama close behind, her arms held out in front of her and her hands grasping for him like the jaws of some small, famished animal. She always caught him, always spoke her glory into his ear, telling him how her sons were part of her, how they were connected by mystic cords, so no matter how far away he or Tomo went they would all three still be one.

Gob never looked back, but he thought he could feel the Urfeist pursuing him, drawing closer and closer. He was certain, then, that the monster would kill him. He was certain that it would tear off his head and kick it all the way back to Homer, or that it would sip blood from his wrists until he swooned away into death. He knew that he should stop running and face it, anyhow, that he must do this for Tomo’s sake, and yet he did not. He ran all the harder, but he couldn’t run fast enough to escape it. Gob knew when the Urfeist was just behind him, and closed his eyes just before the thing knocked into his back and sent him sprawling among dry leaves.

“Hush,” the Urfeist said again. He undressed trembling Gob with great tenderness, which was horrible because it was not expected, and though he looked thin and weak as Anna, his grip on Gob’s neck was strong, and the weight of him on Gob’s back felt heavy as the world. He worked to a chanted, unintelligible cadence. When he was finished, he lifted Gob up, took his limp hand into his own and put Gob’s left littlest finger in his mouth. He bit it clean through. Gob could not watch it happen, but he imagined the Urfeist’s mouth opening wide and moonlight racing between the clouds to strike his white teeth. Gob thought then how the bite was a mercy because it distracted you from the other thing, and he made a noise, though he’d sworn to himself he would make none. It was a pitiful sound, a single plaintive, dwindling O like a girl might make if you stole away her dolly. He heard the sound as if somebody else was making it, and then he fell back on the ground, what remained of his finger pulling from the Urfeist’s sucking mouth with a wet pop.

When he woke, Gob was inside the Urfeist’s cave, a distinguished dwelling. There were rugs laid three deep on the stone floor, and the furniture was elegant and expensive-looking. Dressed again, Gob was draped over a blue damask divan. Another cave opened up onto the one he lay in, and another opened up beyond that. Gob’s hand was bandaged neatly; there was just a little spot of pale pink fluid at the place his finger had been. The Urfeist was smoking in a matching blue chair directly across from him.

“I know who you are,” he said. “Did your grandmama send you to me?”

“No,” Gob said, and then he asked again, “Will you teach me?” It occurred to him how he had extracted no promises from this creature before he submitted to him.

“What would you like to know?” said the thing. He still wore his bark shoes and red hat, his skin shirt and the horrific finger-kilt, over which Gob’s eyes darted in search of his own lost digit. But the Urfeist seemed the very picture of urbanity, and spoke with an air of refinement that reminded Gob of the way his mama talked when she was trying to make people think she wasn’t a Claflin.

“Everything,” said Gob, figuring only that would be enough to sustain his oath. The Urfeist laughed. He was rolling something between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. When Gob saw that it was his finger he went over and tried to pluck it away from him, not afraid anymore, just full of anger at the thing and at himself for coming up here. “Give it back!” he said. The Urfeist stood on his chair and dangled the finger just out of Gob’s reach. Gob spit on him. This only cheered him further, so Gob bit him on his tough shin, thinking back to the tough leathery black skin of a turkey he and Tomo had once cooked whole over a fire in the orchard clearing. The Urfeist howled and with his great strength tore Gob away from his leg. The Urfeist raised Gob by his shirt until he looked directly into his eyes.

The Claflin gaze was formidable. Gob and Tomo had played a game of staring over the hedge at Alanis Bell’s mama as she lay taking the sun with her Bible, until she’d get up and flee inside her house, saying, “Those eyes! Those eyes!” But the Urfeist did not flinch. He had one blue eye and one brown, the latter set crazy in his head as if he’d stuck it in there only just lately, a replacement, harvested from some brown-eyed child, for the lost original. Gob did not flinch either. He imagined himself a soldier and thought bullets and bayonet stabs at the thing. Slowly, the Urfeist put him down and then considered him at length. They stood there with their eyes locked together for many minutes before the Urfeist said, “I will teach you,” and then beat Gob savagely with a hickory paddle he had been keeping special against the day when he finally took an apprentice.

Gob took to wearing an old black coat of Malden’s. The family thought he’d put it on in mourning, but in fact he was using the too-long sleeves to hide his hand and his bruises. He thought for sure that his mama or Tennie, with their ostensibly preternatural senses, would detect some change in him. But when he came down out of the hills at dawn, and put on Malden’s coat and waited at the kitchen table until the house began to stir around him, no one remarked that he seemed different. They were busy getting ready to go out on another humbugging junket, the last of the season, which ran in time with the war season. There were supplies to be loaded: a tent under which a person could tell fortunes al fresco; salt pork and hardtack diverted from the Army of the Cumberland; bottles and bottles of their own patent medicine — Miss Tennessee’s Magnetio Elixir. Gob watched the bustle but did nothing to help, and no one scolded him for it. Except for his mother, they were all still indulging him on account of Tomo’s death.

Regardless of the indulgence they afforded him, Gob was beginning to think that his family had already forgotten that Tomo was dead. How they went on with their lives! Not as if nothing had happened, but as if nothing had changed. To Gob his brother’s death was as gross and certain a change in the world as an extra moon hanging in the sky. But the Claflins settled back into their old routine as if death had no power to touch them.

That night in October of 1863, there was a celebration in the yard. All day, Anna had brewed the elixir in a cauldron over an open fire. Tennie ladled it into blue bottles, to which Malden glued labels covered with Tennie’s picture. The elixir was mostly whiskey, added after the mixture had cooked, with a hefty dash of laudanum, and spices to make it less palatable — if it was too delicious nobody would believe it medicinal. When it was bottled, and when they were all drunk (except Gob and his mama), the Claflins celebrated the end of their little labor, and the dawn of their journey, the last before winter came and made the business of slaughter impractical, and the business of humbugging unprofitable.

Buck had his banjo out. He plucked while Tennie and Victoria and Utica and Anna danced round the fire, and when they were tired of dancing they lingered outside. Utica reclined in the dirt, muttering Shakespeare to the embers. Buck sat in the darkness beyond the fire smoking and sipping whiskey while Anna leaned against him and mumbled into his beard. Victoria and Tennie sat in dilapidated rockers on the porch, whispering to each other. They ignored Gob, who stood for a while and watched them, then retreated into the orchard. His mama had become acutely intolerant of his grief, and his unbelief offended her. She had abandoned her attempts at reconciliation, and she was cool to him, lording over him her certain knowledge of life beyond life. Tomo was alive and well in the Summerland; Gob’s mama said it did not behoove a son of hers to lack faith in that certainty. Gob hated her for saying this, and hating her, with the pure, furious hatred of a child, made it much easier to take leave of her and the others. Watching them from the orchard, he was whispering goodbyes again. Goodbye mill pond, goodbye mill, goodbye house. The Urfeist had made departure from Homer a condition of his tutelage. Homer was only his summer retreat — he had stayed too long already. If Gob wanted to learn from him, he would have to accompany him to his winter quarters. They would leave not just because the Urfeist found Ohio intolerable in the winter, but because it was no place for him to teach what Gob needed to learn.

Gob was about to go to the grave again and say his last goodbye to Tomo when he heard laughter at the house. It was just one person laughing, at first — it sounded like Tennie — but then the others joined in, and he could hear his mama’s high, clear laugh floating above the rest. Before Tomo died, Gob hadn’t got mad over every little thing. He did not have Tomo’s temper. But he suffered a flare of temper, that night, as bright and hot as the one that had burned against his mama when she afflicted him with her hideous lie, and against the Urfeist when he taunted him with his own finger. Gob ran back through the orchard, towards the remains of the fire and the dark shapes around it. They were still laughing when he got there. His mama and Tennie had come down from the porch. They were standing with the others near the fire, laughing and holding their bellies. Gob stood before them and raised his arms. In his coat, and in the darkness, he looked like some baleful spirit, but they laughed harder when they saw him. It was likely that they were laughing at some remark of Tennie’s, or some crude joke of Buck’s. It seemed to Gob, though, that they were laughing at him, or worse, at Tomo, or worst of all, at Tomo’s death. He ran towards his mama, stopped just before her, and shoved his wounded hand in front of her face.

“Have you forgotten?” he asked them all. “Have you forgotten already?” His mama stopped laughing and reached out to gather him into her arms, but he ducked away. Before he ran off, he made her a promise. “I am dead,” he told her quietly. “I am dead, and you will never see me again. I’m going to the war.”

It was dramatic and delicious, that pronouncement. It made him feel better as nothing else had. It put an excellent feeling in him, how her proud face fell at his words, how it suddenly filled with hurt, as it ought to have for Tomo.

She followed, but the black coat made him difficult to see. Even with his leg, he escaped her. He ran up to the high hills of the Urfeist, thinking, Goodbye, I hate you! at all of them.

His new teacher was waiting outside the cave. “You’re late,” the Urfeist said, and though he had the paddle in his hand, he did not use it. He sat on a rude cart, among a collection of trunks and crates.

“Have you nothing to bring?” the Urfeist asked. Gob said that he didn’t, but he had filled his pockets with dirt from Tomo’s grave. The Urfeist put out his hand and helped Gob up onto the cart. “Away, Paymon,” he said to his horse. They started off down a path that Gob had not noticed on his previous visit, and he half expected it to close up behind them. Gob looked back at the dark cave mouth until they made a turn and it was lost among the trees. “Your happiness is irrelevant, and may even work against your cause,” the Urfeist said, putting his arm around Gob’s neck. “But I think you will like your new home.”