Excerpt
Jackson: A Novel
CHAPTER
1
Andrew Jackson awoke leaning with his back against the barn door. His arms were flung forward across the side bar of a wagon. Sweat poured down his scalp and his neck and his chest in an amazing profusion for someone so skinny, so gaunt.
“You havin’ the dreams again, Gen’l?”
The black slave squatting on his heels beside Jackson now rose and wiped his face with an old towel that seemed to glow pale white in the dark. Both men ignored the sickly sweet smell of Jackson’s diarrhea, which ran down both pants legs, mingling with the sweat, and into his boots.
“Get me some gin.”
“Yes, sir.” The slave didn’t move.
“Put some water in it. And go wake up John Coffee.”
“Yes, sir.” Still there.
“But don’t wake her up.” Jackson closed his eyes again as if to sleep. “Or I’ll have your skin,” he added automatically.
“Yes, sir.” This time the slave, whose name was Alfred and who slept every night on the floor outside Jackson’s bedroom, padded away on bare feet, toward the dark house.
Jackson shifted his arms so that he bent forward even more, at an angle of almost thirty degrees. He was sixty years old, and sometimes the pain was so bad it was still the only posture he could bear to take; back flat, knees flexed, arms flung forward over something. When he had fought the Creek Indians in 1814, he had often propped himself the same way exactly on a bent sapling while his officers stood in a half circle around him and wrote down his orders.
Those that could write.
Those that hadn’t lied about that too.
Jackson blinked and stared up at the bleak, unfriendly stars, whose insides, somebody had told him, were actually made up of nothing but furious burning gases. Just like himself.
Crippled stars. Furious stars. Beads of burning sweat on the divine celestial face.
All his life, Jackson thought, slowly closing his red eyes again, he had been angrier and hotter than a star.
The Dreams of Andrew Jackson
Late September 1780, Waxhaw, North Carolina
WHEN COLONEL BANASTRE TARLETON—THE SAME REDHEADED, SIDEBURNED Tarleton who later chased Governor Thomas Jefferson out of his house and into disgrace—when that same Colonel Tarleton and his green-jacketed dragoons rode into Waxhaw one bright morning, every man and boy in the county took to his horse and his musket.
I was fourteen years old and too young to fight (they said), so my assignment was to ride hell-for-leather south to warn the next settlement. Halfway up Catawba Mountain I met a saucy blond-haired girl standing by the road, Susan Smart was her name, about my own age, her hands on her cocked hips, pert little backside round as an apple. I reined up, dirty, tired-looking, covered with grime, and wearing a yellow broad-brimmed hat that flopped over my face; no cavalier.
“Where are you from?” asks Susan Smart.
“From below.” My heels almost met under my pony’s belly, and I saw her peeking at them and laughing.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Above.”
“Who are you for?”
“The Congress.”
“Well, what are your people doing below?”
“Oh, we’re popping them good,” I say, pushing up the hat.
“We,” she snorts, wagging the hips. Over her shoulder, flouncing away, “Some poppin’ you’ll do, you skinny boy.”
Six months later, when the British officer herded three of us into his tent and told me to clean the mud from his boots, I said I was a prisoner of war despite my age and ought to be treated with respect, like a man. I never saw a quicker explosion. The officer’s cheeks went red, his teeth bared like a wolf’s. He took one step back and without a word swung his sword—my left hand flew up, just the way it does in the engraving my people commissioned in 1824, The Brave Boy of the Waxhaws. His back-swing sliced open my scalp and gashed my hand to the bone. When I ride I finger the scars like beads.
Before that, at the Waxhaw Massacre, while I was on Catawba Mountain, Tarleton’s cavalry had charged full speed into the poor old county militia, who had already put down their empty muskets and sat on the ground to surrender. One hundred and thirteen Americans killed outright, nobody could ever count how many wounded. They had to rip out the pews to turn the old log church into a hospital, and I remember that the floor was thick with straw and blood. To carry water I crawled on all fours through pools of blood and corpses; my mother floated beside me, nursing the dead.
CHAPTER
2
I’m afraid, Mr. Chase, that I don’t speak a word of French.”
Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale put down her steel-nib pen, rose to her feet behind the desk, and bowed six inches forward, hands clenched in front of her waist, like a Chinaman.
David Chase, who was still brushing snow from his shoulders, tried to imitate her bow and succeeded only in stumbling on the carpet. He was cold, he was sleepy, and if the truth were told, he had no idea in the wheeled universe why Boston women bowed instead of shaking hands or nodding, as European women did.
Mrs. Hale was now moving around her formidable desk and motioning him to a chair. “But I do know a good deal of Latin,” she said. She took his hat and sat down beside him. “My brother taught me secretly when he was at Dartmouth.”
“I have forgotten every word of Latin that I ever learned.”
Mrs. Hale had a quick, unexpected smile that flashed and vanished in an instant. “So have I,” she whispered. She snapped away snow from the top of his hat with one efficient finger. “We shall have to do our business in English, Mr. Chase.”
“Englisch it is,” Chase said, and was rewarded with the smile a second time.
“You are much younger than I imagined, Mr. Chase, to be such a celebrated writer and cosmopolitan.”
“As are you, Mrs. Hale,” said Chase gallantly, though in fact it was true. “To have accomplished so much.” Sarah Hale, he thought, was forty at least, but hardly looked it. She had brown hair worn in side-curls (an old-fashioned fashion that Chase hadn’t seen in a decade); hazel eyes of great depth; and a delicate pink-white complexion that a girl of sixteen would have envied. Yet he knew for a fact that she had published one novel, Northwood, because he had bought and read it the day before, and had already worked a year and a half as founding editor of the Ladies Magazine. She was also the author of a nauseous little poem that had taken both English and American children by storm, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Surreptitiously he glanced around the office for signs of lambhood.
“Well,” she said, rising from the chair with the hat between her hands like a pie. “Well, then, that’s settled. We are both paragons, are we not?”
Chase grinned and watched her deposit the hat on top of a bookcase and cross back to her desk. He had forgotten how much, despite their eccentricities, he liked the tart, dry voice of a native New Englander.
“My one concern,” she said as she sat down again, “has been that you are too much of a European paragon—you have lived in France for these last nine years, yes?—and not enough of an American one. But you are a very good writer, I can see that, and your friend Professor Ticknor thinks the world of you. I don’t like your poetry very much,” she added rather brusquely, “to tell the truth. I don’t understand what ‘symbols’ are. But then we are not asking you to write poetry, are we?”
Chase nodded slowly. In fact, he hadn’t the least notion what they were asking him to write. But his bank account had now sunk so close to zero that anything short of a sequel to the mutton-headed Lamb he would undertake in a minute.
Mrs. Hale held up a cloth-bound book. “This is very good,” she said, then used a word he had never heard before, “very readable.” When she turned the volume sideways Chase recognized his little biography of the eighteenth-century statesman the Elder Pitt, published in London a year ago and disastrously stupid in its political judgments and facts. To his (and his publisher’s) astonishment, it had sold more than eight thousand copies.
“You write clearly,” Mrs. Hale told him, “and with a sure sense of moral value. And moral value is what we cannot, in this country, ever forget.”
“No,” Chase murmured. Ticknor had cautioned him that Sarah Hale was a patriot of the purest American kind. Almost single-handedly she had led a fund-raising venture among the ladies of Boston to complete the stalled monument on Bunker Hill, she was now busily campaigning to establish Mount Vernon as a government shrine, and she had just proposed in an editorial that Massachusetts’s Thanksgiving Day become a national holiday. When she had gone to consult Ticknor about an anthology of the “world’s greatest poetry,” she had pointedly excluded all poets except Americans.
“In that unfortunate France where you have lived,” Mrs. Hale began solemnly, and Chase hunched his shoulders (mentally) in preparation for yet another sermon on French immorality, a subject that appeared to fascinate and uplift Boston society. But before she could go on, the large brass bell behind her desk began to chime, and almost simultaneously someone knocked at her door and a rabbity young woman stuck in her head, glanced at Chase, then whispered very loudly, “He’s here, Mrs. Hale—downstairs!”
Mrs. Hale quickly replaced the Elder Pitt among ordinary books and smoothed the skirts of her handsome silk gown. She would return in a moment, she said, if Chase would excuse her. Chase, on his feet as well, offered to hold the door, to wait outside, to vanish politely into thin air, whatever was required. Mrs. Hale only swept her hand in the direction of the window or his chair or both (the first vague gesture Chase had seen her make) and closed the door.
The window gave out onto Boylston Street. Boylston Street in turn gave onto the Boston Common, invisible from here; then Beacon Hill (a few slate and chimney rooftops in the distance), then the river, then Cambridge, and then at last the long, whiskery gray winter forests that ran up the rocky north shore toward Ipswich, where he had been born.
