“Blast, what is it?” Adams cries. “Why can’t I jump it?”
“We don’t know.” The presidents have tried and failed to get over the Fence every day of their new lives. Rutherford thinks it’s an ophthalmological problem. A blind spot in the mind’s eye that forces a sharp turn.
“How did James Garfield manage it? And where did he run to?”
Garfield’s hoofprints disappear at the edge of the paddock. The fence posts point at the blue sky. Adams and Rutherford stare at the trackless black mud on the other side of the Fence. There are two deep crescents where Garfield began the jump, and then nothing. It’s as if Garfield vanished into the cool morning air.
“Good question.”
Animal memories and past administrations
Woodrow Wilson is giving speeches in his sleep again: Ah, ah, these are very serious and pregnant questions, Woodrow mumbles, his voice thick with an old nightmare. Upon the answer to them depends the peace of the world.
Poor Wilson, Rutherford thinks, watching as he addresses the questions of a phantom nation. Wilson paws at the stall floor as he dreams, his lips still moving. The world is drafting new questions, new answers, without him.
In his own dreams, Rutherford never returns to the White House. Instead his memory takes him back to his Ohio home of Spiegel Grove, back to the rainy morning of his death. Unlike the other presidents, Rutherford’s dreams find him paralyzed, powerless. He remembers watching the moisture pearl on his bedroom window, the crows lining the curved white rail of his veranda. Lucy’s half of the huge pine bed had been empty four years. In the end, divested of all decisions, he had only an old thick-waisted nurse opening his mouth, filling it with tastes, urging him to swallow. Boyhood tastes, blood-pumpkin stew and sugared beets. His son and his youngest daughter were two smudges above the bedside. The boy quietly endeavored to blink good-bye. Then Rutherford’s throat began to close, shutting him off from all words, and he felt himself filling with silence. The silence was a field of cotton growing white and forever inside him. Rutherford wasn’t afraid to die. My Lucy, he remembers thinking, will be waiting for me on the other side.
The first First Lady
Lucy Webb Hayes was the first president’s wife to be referred to as a First Lady. Nobody besides Rutherford and a few balding White House archivists remembers her. Rutherford wishes that he was still a man and that she was still a Lady. He wishes that he had a hand to put on her waist. “Lucy?” he hisses at a passing mallard. “Lucy Webb?” Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can’t remember where he learned this — France or the Bible.
“Lucy Webb!”
The duck goes waddling away from him, raising the green tips of its wings in alarm. When Rutherford looks up, Fitzgibbons and the girl are standing at the edge of the pasture, looking at him strangely.
“Uncle Fitzy? Does it sound like that horsie is quacking to you?”
Rutherford and Fitzgibbons stare at each other for a long moment.
“You know, Sarge has been acting up lately. All the horses have been behaving mighty queer. Worms, maybe. We ought to get the vet out here. We ought to get them some of those hydrangea shots.”
After Fitzgibbons and the girl disappear behind the house, Rutherford continues on his quest to find the soul of his wife. There is a sheep that Rutherford has noticed grazing on the north pasture, slightly apart from the others. The sheep perks up when Rutherford trots over. It might be his imagination, but he thinks he sees a fleck of recognition, ice-blue, floating in her misty iris.
“President Wilson?” Rutherford nudges him excitedly. “Could I trouble you to take a look at one of the ewes?” Rutherford has heard that Woodrow Wilson grazed sheep on the South Lawn. He hopes that Woodrow will be able to confirm his suspicion.
“Your wife, you say?” Wilson exchanges glances with the other horses. “Well, I will gladly take a look, President Hayes.” His voice is pleasant enough, but his ears peak up into derisive triangles. Rutherford’s shame grows with each hoof-fall. The closer they get to the sheep pasture, the more preposterous his hope begins to seem. His trot hastens into a canter until Woodrow is breathless, struggling to keep pace with him. “Slow down, man,” he grumbles. They stand in the rain and stare at the sheep. She’s taking placid bites of grass, ignoring the downpour. Her white fleece is pasted to her side. “Uh-oh,” says Woodrow. “Hate to break it to you, but I think that’s just your standard sheep. Not, er, not a First Lady, no.”
“Her eyes, though …”
“Yes, I see what you mean. Cataracts. Unfortunate.”
Rutherford thanks him for his assessment.
“President Hayes?” Eisenhower is smirking at them from across the field. “Pardon, am I interrupting something? The other presidents have all gathered behind the bunny hutch. You are late again, sir.”
Rutherford straightens abruptly, his cowlick flopping into the black saucers of his eyes. He takes an instinctual step in front of sheep-Lucy to shield her from Eisenhower’s purple sneer.
“Late for what? Not another caucus on that apple tax.”
“We voted that into law two weeks ago, Rutherford,” Eisenhower sighs. “Tonight it’s the Adams referendum. On the proposed return to Washington? We are leaving in three days’ time.”
Washington or oblivion
Secret deals get brokered behind the Barn, just north of the red sloop of the bunny hutch. A number of the presidents are planning their escape for a day they are calling the Fourth of July.
“The country is drowning in sorrow,” Adams snorts. It’s high summer. Oats fall around him like float-down snow. “Our country needs us.”
After several months of nickered rhetoric, Adams has convinced a half dozen of the former presidents to be his running mates in a charge on Washington. Whig, Federalist, Democrat, Republican — Adams urges his fellow horses to put aside these partisan politics and join him in the push for liberty. He wants the world to know that they have returned. “It is obvious, gentlemen: of course we’re meant to lead again. It is the only thing that makes sense. What other purpose could we have been reborn for? What other—”
Adams is interrupted by a storm of hiccups. Behind him, Fitzgibbons is hitching Harding to a child-size wagon. He helps the girl into the wooden wagon bed. Fitzgibbons grins as he hands the child the reins, avuncular and unconcerned, his big arms crossed against his suspendered chest.
“And tell me,” Rutherford asks quietly, “tell me, what evidence do you have that the country needs us to lead again? They seem to be getting on just fine without us.”
Now Harding is pulling the girl in miserable rectangles around the bare dirt yard, hiccupping madly. “This—hiccup! — is—hiccup! — Hell.” The girl waves a dandelion at him like a wilted yellow scepter. “Giddy-up, horsie!” She laughs.
Aside from Rutherford and Harding, the other presidents are in ecstasies. “Surely the term limits of the Twenty-second Amendment won’t apply to me anymore. This rebirth is the loophole that will let me run again, Rutherford.” Eisenhower grins for some invisible camera, exposing his huge buck teeth. “And win.”
Oh dear, thinks Rutherford. That smile is not going to play well on the campaign trail.