He’s made comfortable, propped with pillows. His glasses are set on the small nightstand, his face bare and strange without them. Rosalie fetches a pitcher of water with ice in it and the brothers move two chairs alongside the bed so they can sit with him. The day’s heat is coming on and the air in the room is very still. Rosalie can smell the medicine under Adam’s bandages, something sharp like eucalyptus. John’s and Edwin’s faces shine with sweat from the work of carrying him. John and Adam reminisce about their meeting at Edwin’s wedding. Such a joyous day, they all agree mournfully. No one could have predicted this unhappy future. “？‘Our wills and fates do so contrary run,’？” says Edwin.
“？‘O God, that one might read the book of fate And see the revolution of the times,’？” says John.
The men settle in. Rosalie can see what a relief it is to Edwin to talk again about Mary with someone who knew her well and she likes Adam better for his patient listening. He’s had a long journey in a weakened state. He must be exhausted. Edwin has said all these same things to Adam before, and yet, he encourages Edwin to keep talking. He himself says lovely things about Mary. Their contentious, competitive relationship is forgotten. Now that she’s dead, Mary and Adam were the best of friends.
Adam’s wound still needs care, twice daily cleaning and redressing, but he’s brought a servant to do this. Randall is a young black man with wide eyes and a scar on one cheek that no one asks about. He moves about the room, preparing the basin, unpacking Adam’s clothes and medicines, answering Rosalie’s questions in his musical accent. He’s from New Orleans. He’s been with Captain Badeau for nearly a month. He has four little sisters back home and it shows in the way that Edwina takes to him. Rosalie has to physically remove her from the sickroom. She leaves the men to their talking and herds Edwina down the stairs to the kitchen for a slice of buttered bread as compensation for the loss of Randall’s attention.
I order that a draft be made in the said Sixth District of the State of New York for the number of men herein assigned to said District, and fifty percent in addition.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
—Abraham Lincoln
* * *
—
Adam enters the house on Saturday, July 11th. The following Monday, the 13th, as Rosalie is taking a solitary breakfast of apples and cheese, she hears a strange sound outside. It’s a bit like an enormous audience clapping and cheering, but not exactly. It’s a bit like a howling wind, but no wind is blowing. John appears in his shirtsleeves, drops of water still clinging to his mustache from his morning’s shave. The noise continues. Now it’s clearly human.
“What in the world?” Rosalie says.
“I’ll go see,” says John. She follows him to the door, where he grabs his hat and disappears. She doesn’t even think to tell him to be careful; she has no sense that care is needed.
Edwin and Mother have come downstairs. “John’s gone to see,” she tells them. She goes to check on Edwina. “Keep her out of Adam’s room,” she tells Marie and Edwina’s lip comes out. She’s only starting to speak, but there’s a surprising amount she understands. She stamps her tiny foot. It’s adorable.
Almost three hours pass. The noise has receded by the time John returns. Fire bells ring in the distance and then abruptly stop. The smell of smoke is in the air. “It’s a riot,” he tells them. “It’s a working man’s riot.”
New York City has just begun the new draft. There’ve been mutterings ever since its announcement, much of the anger focused on the fact that three hundred dollars buys your way out. The war will be fought, by design, only by the poor.
According to John, a crowd of German and Irish immigrants marched from Central Park to the Ninth District Office, growing in numbers and anger as they went. They moved like a wave or a fire, destroying everything before them, howling their fury. He saw several men break into a store and steal axes with which to arm themselves. He saw women prying the tracks of the Fourth Avenue railway off with crowbars. He saw a policeman set upon and beaten until his head was as swollen as a melon. And he saw the Black Joke Fire Brigade torch the Ninth District Office and refuse to put out the fire they themselves had started. They’d assumed the traditional waiver for firemen would apply to the new draft. They’d found out otherwise.
He’s only come home to give them this report. John is eager to get back out there. Edwin thinks of going, too, but John says no. Edwin’s sympathies are too well-known. “The streets are full of Lincoln haters. It’s Jefferson Davis country now,” John says.
Initially, Rosalie is not alarmed. The fire and the crowds seem to be moving away from the house. She still thinks of war as something tidy enough to happen on prearranged battlefields, the women left out of it, their only role to nurse the wounded and mourn the dead.
She wonders a little about John. He seems exhilarated. Is he truly only an observer? He has always had this need to be in the story. And she has no doubt that agents of the Confederacy are working the mob, stoking the rage, whispering a word in someone’s ear, handing someone an axe. She tries to remember how Dickens described the mob in A Tale of Two Cities—something about a howling universe. Surely John, despite his sympathies, would never be part of that?
Edwin goes upstairs to sit with Adam. Rosalie begins a letter to Asia. “We are all well here,” the letter begins, “though suffering considerably from the heat.”
* * *
—
By eleven-thirty a.m., the draft has been suspended. This has no impact on the rioters. John’s periodic reports grow more alarming. They’ve torched the Eighth District Office. They’re destroying the Lexington Avenue homes of wealthy Republicans, smashing their windows, chopping up their sofas and paintings, emptying their pantries. Looting stores, destroying telegraph lines. A policeman was stripped of his clothing and murdered with paving stones.
Five thousand frenzied rioters are right now swarming First Avenue, armed with pistols and hatchets. They’re looking for more policemen. They’re looking for rich men. They’re looking for abolitionists. They’re looking for Negroes. They attack the first two black men they find—a man selling fruit from a cart and a little nine-year-old boy. By suppertime, the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue has been sacked, the beds, the children’s clothes, carpets, and desks carried off and the building now nothing but embers. The police presence held out just long enough to get the more than two hundred children to safety.
The smoke has thickened. “We should leave,” Rosalie says. She’s been thinking this for the last couple of hours, waiting for someone else to say it. She’s worried about the fires, worried about the difficulties of moving Adam in a hurry should it come to that. Better to go too early than leave it too late. Surely Edwin has friends in the country who would welcome them.
John says that the railways and the ferry slips have all been destroyed. No one is working. “There’s no one to take us,” he says. “Besides, it’s too dangerous to go out.”
“Stay home tonight,” Mother tells John and he complies. The decision is an easy one. Another storm has moved in.