Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 7)

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“But back to Peggy. You’ve given the facts, but what’s the real story? I don’t see the woman. Did she sleep with the new president?”
    “She must have. I don’t know. She had his ear, and what secrets did he reveal? Secrets of state.”

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 6)

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Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the president of the local branch of the Bank of United States and leader of the social circle of Washington ladies, wrote a letter on New Year’s Day, 1829 that came into John Eaton’s hands. He married Peggy that same night. He called her Peggy when they were alone together; he asked Edgar to use Margaret. Mrs. Smith said his bride’s reputation had been “totally destroyed” by her relations with John, General Jackson’s “bosom friend and almost adopted son,” and that none of the respectable ladies would attend the wedding or call on her, even though she was now the wife of the Secretary of War, as she had strayed from the path of virtue.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 5)

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Though their union engendered a baby, her child and Walt’s was not born. At least not for well over a hundred years. She was to suffer miscarriages, intensifying her longing for a child more than for fortune or for love, which never was what she wanted it to be. She hoped she’d made more than love with Walt, on that March morning so inhospitable out of doors but so cozy in front of the blazing fire with the rum filling her with golden warmth, with this man who was not as old as he looked but seemed so avuncular, or even grandfatherly, he seemed, but how would she know what a grandfather was like? So safe, that’s what he was; that made her so happy. He deserved good love, and she was good, when she was loving, giving to one deserving, poor, lonely man. From that union, a magical thing happened, unique in Nature. Maybe. Or what if it happens all the time? If a child was conceived, not in the womb, but in the blood or genes or in the psyche or maybe in the hope, her hope for the child but also in a greater hope too much for her to think about, it lay dormant through many long generations, waiting to be born, when the time was right, when the need was greatest, when it could be of most service, when a great battle was prepared that only it could win. There would come a first battle to be fought over the slaves from Africa, and another over the far vaster race of slaves of all nations.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 4)

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“Okay. Here’s what it is. You’re a full-fledged woman, one who’s grabbed sexy and taken it beyond where anyone thought it should or could ever go.”
    “No, I have not!”
    “Yes, yes! You have! And you pretend not to know it, which is precisely what I mean by beyond. You take a man beyond what he believes is possible. And yet, at the same time, you’re innocent. It’s not that you seem innocent, but that you are. You’re a child. And I mean that as a compliment. Not a child, but childlike. You see me as a daddy. That’s the only reason you’re here. And I want to love you like a daddy, protect you, make sure you’re gonna be all right, but I see the willingness of your flesh, and I want that, too. So bad. You don’t aim to incite me, but I respond. But the need in you for daddy puts the clamp on the man in me who wants you in the nasty fun way. I want to embrace you, for the course of the night. But that’s all. Don’t ask me for more, for I know you want no more, and we can do no better for one another than to love each other in just that way.”

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 3)

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Shields had said, on that day six years earlier, “It feels like we’re Hamilton and Burr!”
    Lincoln had replied, “We are in no way similar. They had a long-standing enmity based partly on politics and more on hotheadedness.”
    “Okay. Plus they used guns, with which I might have had the advantage. But just the drama!”
    Lincoln replied, “Here’s the drama,” and he reached up, extending his arm as high as it would reach overhead and swung his saber, lopping off an overhanging branch.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 2)

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Walt invited some soldiers recently returned from the war in Mexico to join them, because one of these was General James J. Shields. Walt, familiar with the legend of the Rebecca letters and subsequent duel, asked him for the real story, which he was glad to relate, because he was still rather vain and had to try his capacity to charm the beautiful blonde lady seated puzzlingly with these two possibly disreputable fellows.
    “I begin at the site of the action, and, as I felt neither of us truly wanted to be there—we had been friends theretofore, or friendly rivals—I dissembled calm by conjecturing a comparison of ourselves to those other famed duelists Hamilton and Burr. I asked if such had occurred to him.”

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 1)

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“Madame,” began Walt, in a voice of deep and assumed majesty, “I require a cup of your coffee, but only if its taste is as rich and pleasing as its aroma.”
    Whitman spoke to a Creole woman in a stall in the marketplace in New Orleans. Her head wrapped in a lime-colored scarf, she squeezed the juice from an orange in her large palm into a pitcher of glass.
    She turned and smiled at him, scrutinizing him behind a hard-to-maintain modesty, but he held up a finger of warning. “Wait!” he cried. “Do not lie to me now, or exaggerate its quality in the least, for I can be violent before I have had my coffee, and I require the absolute best!”