narrow Galena River, once twice as wide and thronging with Mississippi River steamboats, was still and silent, filmed over with a thin sheen of ice, bits of which reflected brightly in the afternoon sun. Somewhere out of sight a horse snorted.
“Now if you’re ready, General,” Sir Arthur said. “We’ll get started.” I let the curtain fall and turned back to the task at hand.
I dipped my pen in ink and marked in longhand at the top of the page: December 17, 1892, 3:38 p.m., Brigadier General Cornelius Starrett, Union Army of the Cumberland. I propped my notebook in my lap and prepared to take dictation.
“Eeee!” someone squealed. The chandelier bounced up and down, the glass prisms jingling, as something thumped on the floorboards above us.
“What the devil was that?” Sir Arthur exclaimed as we both stared up at the ceiling.
“Oh, never mind that.” General Starrett chuckled. “It’s just Adella’s children romping around upstairs. Now what were you saying?”
“As I said in my letter,” Sir Arthur began, glancing at the swaying chandelier, “I’m writing a book about the men at Appomattox Court House the day of April ninth, 1865, you, of course, being one. I’ve spent the better part of a month researching those men, only to find by chance that one of the officers on my list wasn’t even there. Before you begin your personal account, General Starrett, would you be able to recall those present?”
“Of course! Does a skunk stink? Seventeen soldiers were in the room,” the general said without hesitation, “us boys from Galena, some of Grant’s men, and of course Lee and his aide. I remember because it was my lucky number. I started out with the Seventeenth Illinois Infantry and married Lavinia on the seventeenth of June.” As General Starrett counted off the names on his fingers, I wrote them down to compare to our list later.
1. Ulysses S. Grant1
2. John Rawlins1
3. Ely Parker1
4. Cornelius Starrett1
5. Robert E. Lee
6. Orville Babcock
7. Horace Porter
8. Robert Lincoln
9. Theodore Bowers
10. Phillip Sheridan
11. Rufus Ingalls
12. Adam Badeau
13. George Sharpe
14. Michael Morgan
15. Seth Williams
16. Charles Marshall
17. Edward Ord
“Of course, men milled about in other parts of the house and in the yard then and over the next day or two; Lee’s man Longstreet was one of them. Chamberlain was in charge for the formal surrender. I don’t remember the others.” “Very good, thank you, General,” Sir Arthur said when I indicated with a nod that I had all the names. He beamed at the old man. We were finally getting the information Sir Arthur needed. “Now in your own words, please describe everything you can from that day.”
The general sat back a little more in his chair, his cigar dangling from his mouth. “Reveille was at 0500 hours,” the general began. “Grant was already up and complaining of a terrible headache—”
And that’s when the brawl erupted.
CHAPTER 2
“Traitor!”
“You’re a swine, Henry!” another man bellowed.
The general, startled by the shouting, stopped mid-sentence, almost dropping his cigar.
“Copperhead! Traitor!” Henry answered.
Sir Arthur rushed over to the window as I drew back the curtain. A one-horse buggy, its wheels sliding sideways in the mud, stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. Its owner, a tall, lean man with white bushy eyebrows and a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a brown derby, stood up and shook a clenched fist at a man standing with his back to us on the edge of General Starrett’s lawn.
A single train engine, with one bar of the cowcatcher bent in, rumbled past less than twenty yards beyond the house. Its wheels clanking and its motor hissing made the men’s shouts inaudible until it chugged down the tracks that ran along the riverbank toward the depot and the railroad yard down the hill.
“—should’ve seen you and your rebel friends hang!” Henry, the tall, rotund man on the lawn, was shouting.
“You’re a relic, Henry!” the man in the buggy shouted. “The war ended over twenty-five years ago. You should’ve gone down with one your ships.”
“Y-y-you . . . I’ll,” Henry stammered with rage. “You’re gonna regret that, Jamison.”
“Ambrose, Ambrose!” the housekeeper cried from somewhere inside the house. “Get the mistress. Go get Mrs. Reynard. Now!”
The general, looking slightly disoriented, frowned and inched to the edge of his chair.
“What’s all the shouting?” he said. “What’s going on out there?” He pointed his cane toward the window and shook it as hard as his weak hands would allow. His face was red with anger. “Go see what all the fuss is about.” I knew the order wasn’t for Sir Arthur and so I rose to investigate.
“Spineless traitor!” Henry yelled.
“Bloody hell,” Sir Arthur said before I took more than two steps toward the door.
Someone screeched in pain. A neighborhood dog barked, another followed, and soon a cacophony of yelping and howling arose. I rushed back to the window in time to see the large man, Henry, punch the driver of the buggy, wrench him from his seat with both hands, and drag him onto the dirt. Fists and gravel flew as the two men grappled on the ground. The horse, spooked by the commotion, reared slightly and then bolted down the street, the bells strapped around his neck jingling a frantic tune. A red and blue plaid heavy wool lap blanket, twisted into one of the buggy’s wheels, flapped with every turn. The horse barely missed running over the men struggling in the street. Henry, having the upper hand, landed several calculated jabs to the other’s head before standing up, leaving the man lying groaning on the ground. He delivered one last kick to his victim’s side before brushing the dirt from the road off his coat, turning his back on his victim, and walking toward the house. I gasped.
Henry was Santa Claus, albeit slightly younger; his girth, his white beard and mustache, and the plump rosy cheeks matched the image of the rotund, jolly Saint Nick on the displays I’d seen lately in shop windows and in advertisements printed in the newspaper. He was dressed in a brown sealskin overcoat trimmed at the collar and the cuffs in black fur, a shaggy brown fur cap, and tall brown
