A Song of Grace

Washington City August 1865.

Dr. Jacob Lewis’s eyes welled as he gazed out the carriage window and saw his home for the first time in four years. He wasn’t sure what he had expected. Wreckage, perhaps, or widows weeping in the street. But not this stinking emptiness. And man alive, did it ever stink. He thought he’d left the stench of defecate and decay behind on the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland, but clearly it had followed him home.

If not for the familiar façade of his own home, he wouldn’t recognize the neighborhood at all. Once echoing with life, most of the tall houses on the oak-lined street sat shuttered and dark, as silent as the residents of the new cemetery on the hill across the Potomac. Most of his neighbors had been Confederate sympathizers, and it looked like they’d turned tail and run when the war shifted against them.

But the neighborhood wasn’t quite empty. There was a steaming pile of cow paddies right next to the carriage that Jacob had to dodge when he stepped out of the carriage and onto the muddy street. A pig shot out from behind a house and rushed him, and he jumped backward right into the shit. He reached for the bowie knife in the sheath on his right hip, but the animal cut to one side at the last second. He left his hand on the hilt of his knife for another couple seconds, taking comfort in the cold metal strapped to his hip. The knife was the one of only two mementos of his army service he had kept. He’d thrown his bloodstained uniform into a campfire when he’d mustered out.

He sighed and picked his way around the manure piles toward his house. He nearly tripped over a grimy man lying motionless in the gutter. The man’s scraggly beard lay halfway down his chest, and the uniform he wore was so muddy and tattered Jacob couldn’t tell whether it was Union or Confederate. Flies buzzed around the soldier’s head. That was never a good sign. He stared, searching for the telltale rise and fall of breathing, but couldn’t make out any motion. He wanted to keep walking, but with his right foot, he nudged the man in the ribs.

The man snapped awake, his muddied, yellow eyes darting back and forth. “Whassa matter wi’ you? I’m tryin’ to sleep.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said, skittering back a few steps. “Just seeing if you were all right.”

The man told Jacob where he could go and what he should do with his mother when he got there. Then he rolled over and closed his eyes.

Shaking his head, Jacob dug a brass key out of his pocket. The motion dislodged his other army memento from its home snug in the bottom of the same pocket. He gasped and caught the small lead cone just before it landed in the muddy street. He closed his eyes and blew a breath out between his cracked lips, gripping the Minié ball in his fist before tucking it back into his pocket.

“You dropped me,” it whispered.

Jacob shook his head and squeezed his pocket. He needed sleep.

The porch creaked under his weight when he approached the front door. He reached for the lock but then turned and looked out across the neighborhood. The few fellow Unionists on the block had fled when the war broke out. Having a rebel army only 800 feet across the river from the Executive Mansion tended to make a body uneasy. A few houses showed signs of life but judging from their smashed windows and half-unhinged doors, the occupants probably weren’t the lawful residents. Guilt knotted in his chest as he turned back to his own, unmolested, home. An elderly neighbor had kept an eye on the place while Jacob was away at war, but the man left town a few months ago. He’d written to say he was headed to relatives in Baltimore and if the government had any sense, they’d move the capital and abandon Washington.

“Makes you wonder why the President was so determined to protect the city, doesn’t it?” the Minié ball said from its nest in the bottom of Jacob’s right pocket. “Should have let the Rebs have it.”

For once, Jacob didn’t disagree with the mouthy bullet. He swallowed hard and reached for the door latch. The lock was cranky from neglect, and he jiggled the key a few times to make the sliders click into place.

The shuttered windows blocked all daylight into the house. He sneezed twice while he fumbled to light one of the gas lamps on the wall. When the lamp at last hissed to life, its flickering glow illuminated thick motes of dust drifting from the chandelier overhead.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he stepped into the sitting room and set his rucksack on the floor. Like all the furniture in the house, the sofa and armchairs were draped with sheets, once brilliant white but now dingy with dust. He lit a couple lamps, strode to the fireplace, and ripped the protective sheet off the large portrait that hung over the mantel.

“Hello, ladies,” he whispered to the figures smiling down at him. He gazed up into the eyes of his late wife, Hannah. In the portrait, she stood behind their daughter, Lydia, then nine years old, seated in a chair. How was it possible Hannah was ten years gone? Right up until the war broke out, her older sister had tried to persuade Jacob to move back to Boston near her, but he couldn’t leave the house Hannah had loved so dearly. The house was Hannah. She had selected every stick of furniture, every curtain, every tablecloth. She’d given birth to Lyddie in an upstairs bedroom where she died ten years later.

It was home.

He looked around at the dusty, sheet-draped sitting room and fought the urge to cry. What would his wife think of her home now?

He shifted his gaze to Lyddie’s grinning image. The ache that had settled in his chest tightened further. He’d missed her fiercely the past four years, but thank God he’d had the sense to send her away at the war’s outset. Now twenty years old, she’d written to him often from his brother’s cattle ranch in California, her most recent letter asking when she might come home. Her letters made it clear she loved California, but she missed him.

Putting the house back in order would be easy enough, but he couldn’t reverse the city’s decay. He and Lyddie could tolerate the mud and the crumbling buildings, he supposed, if not for that god-awful smell. Washington City’s sewage had been inadequate before the war, and the turmoil of the past few years hadn’t helped. Much of the excrement now fermenting in the streets was probably of human origin as well as animal.

“It’s all right, Lyddie,” he whispered. “We’ll figure it out, you and me. Just like we’ve always done.”

When he turned to leave the sitting room, he caught a glimpse of himself in a small mirror on the wall and stared, wide-eyed at his reflection. Who was this man staring back? He hadn’t taken a good look at himself since joining the Army. His hair, once dark and neat, was now wild and streaked with gray. He’d always preferred to stay clean-shaven, but a lopsided, graying beard drooped from his chin. Only his eyes were familiar. Their blue-gray hue that his mother used to say reminded her of the sea was unchanged despite the heavy bags underneath.

He trudged upstairs, yanked the protective coverings off his bed, and lay on top of the musty quilt. He pulled out his pocket watch and opened it to the small portrait of Hannah he kept tucked into the case. He laid it on his night table and dropped his head onto his pillows, ignoring the puff of dust that wafted up around his head. Though the sun still rode high in the sky, he closed his eyes and dropped right off to sleep, one hand covering the pocket where the Minié ball rested.

Jacob woke the following morning exhausted. But this was nothing new. He hadn’t slept well in two years. At least he’d awoken screaming only four times. Four was nowhere close to his record.

Unlike most of his fellow Army surgeons, he’d refused a position rehabilitating soldiers at one of Washington’s Army hospitals. He’d had enough of gangrene and amputated limbs. He’d even chucked his bone saw into the same fire he burned his uniform in. After a breakfast of stale biscuits leftover from the journey home from Virginia, he headed to his clinic a few blocks away. The boardinghouse next to his clinic used to be a respectable establishment favored by Congressmen, but it seemed that at some point during the war it had been put to other purposes. A jagged sign reading “Crooked Hat Saloon” hung over the door, and Jacob guessed the bedrooms on the second floor were where the owner’s real money was made. In the absence of adequate law enforcement, sex and liquor were the only two businesses still thriving in Washington.

Make that three businesses. He’d forgotten burglary.

But he remembered it as soon as he caught sight of his clinic. It was a small, one-story building with an anteroom where he kept his desk and greeted patients. A tiny kitchen sat off the back of the anteroom. An exam/operating room adjoined the anteroom and contained his medicine cabinets. He’d always liked the unassuming nature of the little building, but that unassuming nature clearly hadn’t been enough for it to get through the war’s desperation unnoticed. The front door’s bottom hinge was gone, and the door swung crazily from the upper hinge. He’d boarded up the windows before he’d left, but he’d foolishly assumed the rim lock would secure the door. He drew his knife and stepped around the swinging door into his anteroom.

A quick look around revealed the anteroom was relatively untouched. His medical school diploma still hung on the wall above his desk. The desk’s drawers were pulled out, their papers strewn on the floor, but that was it. His medical texts sat undisturbed under a thick layer of dust on the bookshelves. He expected he knew what whoever had broken in was looking for.

Sure enough, when he crossed into his examination room, the glass doors on his medicine cabinets had been smashed. Broken glass crunched under his feet as he checked to see what was left. He’d given most of his medicines to an older colleague who stayed in the city and taken the covetable items—his morphine, laudanum, and chloroform—with him. Whoever broke in didn’t find more than a few old bottles of iodine. They probably smashed the glass in frustration. He sheathed his knife.

“Look at this mess,” the Minié ball said. “Just give up. It’s not worth it.”

Jacob looked around and felt inclined to agree, but all told he’d probably gotten off easy. And he needed to reopen his practice if he wanted to bring Lyddie home. His had a respectable savings account thanks to modest inheritance from his father and his own frugality, but it wouldn’t last forever. He placed a small portrait of Hannah on his desk and pried the shutters off the windows. The air outside stank of urine and stale beer from the saloon next door, but he needed the light. He spent the rest of the morning sweeping up the broken glass in his exam room and dusting and sweeping the rest of the clinic. Over a lunch of more of the cold, stale biscuits he ate for breakfast, he wrote a list of medicines and supplies to order, including new glass for his cabinets. He paused in his work only long enough to jot “No Surgery” on a piece of paper and tack it to the clinic door.

After lunch, he walked to the post office on F street to collect his mail. The post office was only about a mile and a half away on the other side of the Executive Mansion. He paused for a moment in front of the presidential home and whispered a prayer for the late President Lincoln. When he finished, he added a short one for the new President Johnson as well. The man was going to need it.

When he reached the east side of the mansion, he regretted walking rather than hailing a carriage. He’d forgotten about the shantytown that now abutted the president’s home. The carriage driver yesterday had told him the locals called it “Murder Bay.”

“Sprung up when all them freedmen came into the city after President Lincoln issued that damned Emancipation Proclamation,” the man grumbled. “Police don’t even bother tryin’ to arrest murderers there. Too many scoundrels and not enough officers. Ain’t gonna get no better now we got all these soldiers comin’ home an’ lookin’ for work that ain’t there.”

Jacob quickened his pace, but the feculence from the old city canal that ran behind the Executive Mansion and the shantytown slapped him the face. He pulled his shirt collar over his nose, but the lightweight fabric rendered no aid. The canal had been too shallow for boats, and when the war broke out, the government shifted the money meant for its improvement to the military. The great canal that was supposed to connect Washington to the West now served as an open sewer. Jacob despaired at how much the waterway had deteriorated in only four years.

“Damn miracle everyone hasn’t already shit themselves to death,” he grumbled. The canal was one flush away from sparking an epidemic of cholera, or worse, dysentery. Jacob had lost more soldiers to dysentery than anything else, even battle wounds.

He glanced behind him at the looming figure of the Executive Mansion and then back at Murder Bay. Two young colored boys, neither of them older than ten, fought in the mud over half an apple core.

The Minié ball snickered in his pocket.

“Hundreds of thousands of lives lost,” it muttered. “For what? Do you think the freed Negroes feel cheated?”

Jacob sped up some more.

When he reached the post office, the postman surprised him with a small sack of mail. Jacob hadn’t expected much. His family and friends had all known to write to him care of the Army of the Potomac. Back in his clinic, he dug into the bag to discover a small archive of periodicals. He’d received his magazines and newspapers for several months before his subscriptions ran out. But mixed in with old issues of Scientific American and the New York Times was a recent letter from his brother, William. He wrote that he hoped Jacob had returned home safely and that Lyddie was looking forward to seeing him again.

“We’d all love to see you,” William’s letter read. “Come to California, Jacob. Spend some time here on the ranch before returning to your work. You deserve a respite.”

“Older brothers,” Jacob said, shaking his head. “I’m forty-six years old, and he still thinks he can tell me what to do.” The corners of his mouth twitched upward ever so slightly as he dropped the letter back in the mail bag.

He stayed late at the clinic, trying to avoid the emptiness of the large, dusty house. He needed to fix the door anyway. Fortunately, the hinges weren’t broken. He’d need to replace some of the wood of the door frame to get the rim lock to attach properly again, but refastening the hinges was good enough for now. He didn’t have anything worth stealing. Someone banged on the piano in the saloon next door, and he soon wearied of the drunken shouting. Once the door would latch again, he decided to head home. As he turned to check the latch one last time, the skin on the back of his neck crawled.

“Hi, fella,” a sultry voice purred. Jacob started. “Sorry about that.” The woman laid a hand on his shoulder. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” She stepped closer. Her hot breath wafting over his ear reeked of cheap whiskey. “You feeling lonely, fella?”

The timbre of the woman’s voice prickled something in his brain, and he turned around, squinting through the waning light. “Mrs. Thompson?”

She jumped back, her hand snapping away from his shoulder. “Dr. Lewis?” Even in the twilight, Jacob could see color rise on her pale cheeks. “Dr. Lewis, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you, I…” She spun on her heel and fled toward the saloon. Jacob sprinted after her, catching her by one arm after only a few yards.

“Alice.” He searched for words, but for a moment could only point at the saloon. “Why are you working here? What happened to Henry?” He flinched, and the Minié ball glowed warm in his pocket. Henry had spoken at length about the need to preserve the Union. He probably closed up his bookshop and joined the Army shortly after Jacob had.

“Henry’s dead,” she said, her voice flat. “Sammy too.”

Jacob’s stomach lurched as he remembered the cheerful, blond little boy with the bright eyes. “What happened to Sammy? He would be what? Six?”

“Seven. Typhoid. Last winter.” Her face stayed blank as she tucked a lank lock of mousy hair behind her ear. She was so emotionless she could have been telling him the time.

Damn that canal.

“Alice, I’m so sorry.” Jacob dug into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin. He pressed it into her hand.

She took it without acknowledgement and tucked it into a bodice that swung so far south it must have been part of the Confederacy. “Where’s Lydia?”

“California with my brother. I’m sending for her tomorrow.”

“Don’t bring her home. Don’t let her see this.” She gestured to the street with a sweep of one hand. Somewhere behind them, a baby cried. He wanted to join it. He’d known the Thompsons since he and Hannah moved to Washington more than twenty years ago. He’d delivered their son. Bile rose in his throat. He forced it back.

“You don’t have to work here,” he said. “Do you need a place to stay?”

“I’m past help. Goodnight, Dr. Lewis.” She disappeared under the shadowy eaves of the saloon.

Jacob looked at the street, once smooth and flat, now covered in six inches of sticky muck, the boarded-up businesses, and in the distance, the noxious fog rising off the canal. The city itself reflected the war’s brutality on its inhabitants. His eyes glazed over as his mind drifted back to the hilly battlefields of Maryland and Pennsylvania and his hand drifted into his pocket and clutched the bullet.

When a crash of shattering glass rang out from the saloon, he dropped flat onto the rotting wooden sidewalk. He threw his arms over his head and lay there trembling until he felt a nudge in his ribs. In one swift motion, he rolled onto his back, ripped his knife from its sheath, and leveled it at the dark shadow looming over him.

“Easy there, mister,” a deep voice drawled. “War’s over.”

He sheathed the knife and apologized. After receiving Jacob’s assurances that he was all right, the man continued his shuffle toward the saloon. Jacob almost followed him. Maybe a drink would settle him down. But he turned and raced for home, one hand on the hilt of his knife the entire way.