Legends

Lincoln was angry now. “Alright. Burnside force-marched the Union Army down the Rapahannock, but wound up bivouacking across the river from Fredericksburg for ten long days waiting for the damn pontoon bridges to catch up with him. Lafayette Baker’d posted me to Burnside’s staff—I was supposed to figure out the Confederate order of battle so Burnside could reckon on what was waiting for him once he got across the river. Armed with an English spyglass, I spent the better part of the first nine days aloft freezing my ass off in a hot-air balloon, but the mustard-thick haze hanging over the river never burned off and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on up on the ridgeline behind Fredericksburg. Which is why I decided to infiltrate the Confederate lines. I found a sunken fisherman’s dingy and raised it with the help of some skirmishers and greased the oarlocks and set off before sunrise to cross the river, which was in flood, creating a margin of shallow marshes on either side. When my dingy couldn’t make it as far as the shore, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled up my trousers and climbed out and waded through the slime until I reached solid ground. I found myself on the slope below the lunatic asylum. The doctors and nurses had fled inland when Burnside’s army appeared on the other side of the river, leaving the demented women to fend for themselves. They were leaning out of windows, some of them clothed, some buff naked, mesmerized by the sight of the Federal soldiers urinating into the river, also by the occasional mortar shot Yankee gunners lobbed across the Rapahannock and the ensuing explosions on the heights behind Fredericksburg; the demented women were sure something dreadful was about to happen, sure, too, that they were meant to witness it and spread the story, so one young lady with tufts of matted hair hanging over her bare breasts screeched to me from a window when I made my way up the hill past the asylum.”

The memory of the poor lunatics trapped between the lines in their asylum set Lincoln to breathing hard through his nostrils. Dr. Treffler said, very quietly, “Want to take a break, Lincoln?”