Fiddlehead

“The war is over, and that’s cause for celebration, isn’t it? We’re living at the begi

“It is an epilogue of a sort,” he said defensively. “The end of the conflict—the reunification of the United States of America.”

“The ink on the treaty is scarcely dry, and here you go spilling more of it. You’ve earned some time to rest, and I wish you’d take it.”

He shook his head and bit his tongue, not saying aloud what he suspected at the bottom of his heart: He did not have as much time as she thought. Something was wrong; he felt it when he swallowed, when he woke in the night after nightmares of hands clenched around his throat. He sensed it in the weight he’d lost, and in the weakness he felt upon standing.

Julia would’ve called it old age, but it was something else, something he’d shared with no one but the physician Nelson Wellers—who now visited him weekly, for a chat and some brandy. And for an examination, after Julia went to bed.

Wellers saw it, too, and had offered prescriptions and suggestions, but not much in the way of diagnosis or hope.

Perhaps months, perhaps years. Perhaps it was nothing at all, for in some respects the human body was as foreign a frontier as the moon, or the bottom of the ocean. But in truth, Grant did not expect to find medical treatment. He only wished to tell someone in confidence that he knew he was dying, and to have that secret kept so long as it needed keeping.

He had withdrawn his bid for the presidency, and forfeited the November election, even though word in the papers and on the taps suggested he’d win in a landslide, after the tale of his exploits at the Lincoln compound became public news. He was a hero again, the upstanding general of legend rising one last time to prove his mettle against treason and treachery.

The public ate it up, and if anything, this feather in his cap did more to spread the Fiddlehead’s message than he cared to admit. He did not want their cheers, because he did not deserve them. He’d come around in the eleventh hour, in time to control the damage, but not prevent it. The fault was his. Not the credit.

If he hadn’t been the president, he might’ve even been able to take action sooner. His authority had never come from his figurehead position, but on the strength of his tactics and his “great brass balls” … as the air pirate—and now formally pardoned free man of color—Croggon Hainey had so eloquently put it.

Grant was glad the office was finally someone else’s problem. Now the freshly rebuilt United States rested in the hands of Rutherford B. Hayes, a lawyer from Ohio. A good man, by Grant’s estimation. Their disagreements were relatively few and minor. Grant had high hopes that the country’s restoration might be managed well and wisely now that the battlefields had fallen silent, the casualties were buried, and everyone lived under the same flag once again.

“Well,” Julia said, drowsy with the warmth and the lateness of the hour. “It’s a very exciting story, however you tell it. You’ve kept the ladies in it, haven’t you? I mean, I know you mentioned them in passing—but I hope you recounted their troubles. They were no less brave than you.”

“How could I tell the tale without them? They helped us save the Union, from opposite sides of the line.”

“And I hope you’ve left in the bit about the pirates.”

“The crew of the Free Crow, to be certain, and its captain—the last of the Macon Madmen. I left that part in, too, for the sake of spice.”

“He must’ve been little more than a child when the jailbreak happened.” Then, as if it’d only just occurred to her, she blurted out, “And they were going to hang a child? How barbaric.”

“Hang him, shoot him. The particulars are lost to time and memory,” he said vaguely, of the notorious incident of thirty-five years previous. Nine colored men convicted of arson and murder on spurious evidence and sentenced to die. In prison, they revolted, escaped, and scattered to the four corners of the earth. Only two were ever recaptured. Grant had drawn the story out of Hainey over whiskey one night; they had traded war tales and dirty jokes, and somber silences wherein their eyes did not meet.

“Quite a character, that one,” Julia summed it up. “I’m glad you pardoned him. And what of Troost?”

Grant shook his head. “He’s still refusing his own pardon. For one thing, he says he’s guilty of enough that he doesn’t deserve it. For another, he doesn’t want it. He likes his reputation in its tarnished state, and wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Odd little man.”

“Truer words were never spoken. I ought to have him arrested, I suppose, but we all know that won’t happen. The world is too complicated a place; it has room for men with good hearts and bad hands.”

“I like that. You should put that into the book.”

“No, he asked me not to. He asked me to leave him out of it altogether. He prefers his anonymity, he said. I’m choosing to respect it.”

“How kind of you.”

He shrugged. Was it kind? Or was it merely convenient?

Kirby Troost had murdered a representative and fled, taking up with a pirate crew and contributing to the havoc of the unincorporated West. But he’d also moved heaven and earth to send help when he couldn’t be there himself. He’d saved two presidents, a scientist (as well as that scientist’s kidnapped family), a doctor, an old lady, and a serving girl. And countless colored men and women through the years, smuggling them up the railroad lines and into safety. He was a hero, but a dangerous one. And in the back of Grant’s mind, he felt that it was simply easier to let the man have his way.

In cooperation with former Confederate States, we created a task force to manage the encroaching threat of the guttersnipe lepers, the wheezers, the cankers, the Hungry, the zombis. They had many names, for they had found a foothold in many places. But by their sheer unlikelihood they had successfully remained a fearsome bedtime story long enough to grow their numbers and expand their menace.

By the time the Fiddlehead was heeded, it was almost too late.

I watched Hayes and Stephens sign the papers, while Gideon Bardsley stood stiffly beside me, and Abraham Lincoln sat next to us, confined to his marvelous chair. Maria Boyd was there, too, standing by Croggon Hainey and the crew of the Free Crow, for apparently they were acquainted already. (I never did learn how that odd, unlikely friendship came to be.) The marshal Henry Epperson joined them, having been released from the Robertson hospital in Virginia, where his care was managed by the renowned Sally Thompson. And Robert Lee’s son was in attendance, for the great man himself had passed away three years previously.

Likewise, Jefferson Davis was there, looking tired. He looked like a man watching other men finish something he’d started, and he was neither happy nor unhappy—he barely looked present.

Desmond Fowler was not in attendance. He was in a grave, beyond the edge of Arlington, for I would not see him buried with the heroes. According to the doctors who examined him, he committed suicide after his involvement in the treachery that nearly ended us all was discovered. There was a note. I was never privy to its contents, but I do not care what he had to say for himself, if in fact the note was even real. If in fact the gun in his mouth was put there by his own hand, and no one else’s.

I have my doubts.

It is possible that he was heartbroken when his puppet-mistress abandoned him, leaving him to face trial alone for the war crimes they perpetrated together.

But even as those of us who remained stood there and signed, holding our breaths for this momentous occasion—this moment in history—we heard unsettling scrapes from outside, the sound of ragged breaths being drawn through shredded lungs.