“With all due respect, sir, I fear you might be seeking the wrong office? I think there are some, er, obstacles to your run that you perhaps haven’t considered?”
“Obstacles?” A fly buzzes drowsily between them and lands on one trembling whisker. “Now, give me some credit, Rutherford. I’ve put a lot of thought into this. Let me outline my campaign strategy for you …” Eisenhower has made this speech before.
“And what about you, Rutherford? What are you, a stallion incumbent or a spineless nag?”
Rutherford blinks slowly and doesn’t answer Eisenhower. Both options are depressing. He doesn’t want to return to Washington, if there even is a Washington. He just wants a baaa of recognition out of this one ewe.
“Neither. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving my wife.”
“Baaa!” says the sheep. She is standing right behind him. Her head is a black triangle floating on the huge cloud of her body. Rutherford has been training the sheep who might be Lucy to follow him. He holds his own supper in his mouth and then drops clumps of millet and wet apple cores to coax her forward. “Come on, sweet Lucy, let’s go back to the Barn.”
The other presidents mock him openly, their ears pivoting with laughter. The sheep trails him like a pet delusion. Or like a wife who hasn’t woken up to the fact of our love yet! Rutherford tells himself, tempting her with another chewed-up apple. White apples stud the slick grass behind him. The sheep that might be his wife follows him into the Barn, blinking her long lashes like a deranged starlet.
Dirt memoirs
The girl comes again later that evening with a currycomb and six leafy carrots. Her arrival causes riotous stirring in the Barn.
“Does the child have her book bag?” Buchanan inches forward in his stall and cranes his neck, trying to see around the child’s narrow back.
“Yes!” Adams crows. “To arms, gentlemen!”
The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him. Fitzgibbons is no help; he is maddeningly apolitical. He’ll spend hours musing out loud about fertilizer or the toughness of bean hulls. But Fitzgibbons never complains about property taxes. He never mentions a treaty or a war. He seems curiously removed from the issues of his day.
“Get her book bag,” Eisenhower hisses. There’s something sinister about the angle at which his lips curl over his rubbery gums. The girl’s schoolbag is leaning against the Barn door frame.
Van Buren tries to hypnotize the child by rhythmically swishing his tail. “Look over here, girlie! Swish! Swish!” He shakes his head from side to side. Eisenhower steps gingerly into the looped strap of the child’s bag and drags it with his foreleg. He has it almost to the edge of his stall before she notices.
“Uncle Fitzy!” the girl yells. “Gingersnap is being bad!” Eisenhower hates it when she calls him Gingersnap. He complains about it with a statesman’s pomp: “Gentlemen, there exists no more odious appellation than”—nose crumpling, black lips curling—“Gingersnap.”
The girl walks forward and snatches her book bag back, but not before Eisenhower has shaken it upside down and kicked several of the books under a clump of hay. “Hurry,” he hisses, “before Fitzgibbons comes with the whip!”
The presidents crowd around the books. Literature, mathematics, science, cursive. No history book. The cursive book has fallen open to a page thick with hundreds of lowercase bs. Eisenhower sends the books flying with a swift kick from his right foreleg, disgusted. “Every subject but American history! What has become of our education system? What are they teaching children in schools these days?!” It’s an urgent question. What are they teaching children these days? And how is each president remembered? That’s the afterlife the presidents are interested in. Not this anonymous, fly-swatting limbo.
James Buchanan is busy rewriting his memoirs, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion. He is furious that none of the other presidents ever read the original while they were alive. “Yeah, about that,” coughs Harding. “Pretty sure that’s out of print.”
It’s a labored process. Equine anatomy severely limits the kinds of letters the presidents can straight-leg into the dirt. Buchanan can draw an H, an F, an E, an A, a T, an I, an X with the meticulous action of his right hoof. Z, once you get the hang of it, is also quite easy. Os and Us and Ss are impossible. Ks and Ws leave him shuddery and spent. Buchanan never questions his own record of the past; commas are tough enough, and he would have to break his leg to make a question mark. He is just now putting the finishing touches to Chapter Four. “Voilà, gentlemen! And now I will add a final paragraph of summation and then on to chapter … oh no!”
Fitzgibbons rolls one of his red fleet of tractors over Buchanan’s sod parchment, erasing even the prologue.
Rutherford used to believe it was the civic duty of every elected official to preserve a full record of his administration. While in office, he was a compulsive memoirist who filled dozens of journals with his painstaking schoolboy script. But now he has only a single use for the human alphabet. He hoofs messages in the rich loam behind the coop, too, but they are for one woman instead of posterity. L–L-L–L, he writes, by which he means Lucy.
Hunger and restraint
Rutherford is losing weight. He keeps the sheep near him all the time now, crooning to her through closed gums: “Lucy, Lucy, give me your answer, do, I’m half crazy …”
“Pipe down, Rutherford,” snaps Harding. “Stop giving that sheep your food, you idiot. You will starve to death if you keep it up.”
Rutherford ignores the other presidents and kneels next to the sheep. He smiles at the blue fleck of evidence that his wife is hiding somewhere inside this fleecy body. I know you, he whispers. He lets a brown apple plop into the sawdust between them. The sheep eats it with gusto, and Rutherford hopes this means his love is requited. In the morning, Fitzgibbons yelps when he discovers the sheep in the stall with Rutherford. “Sarge!” Fitzgibbons smacks a palm against his bald head. “What in the hell are you doing with that blind ewe? That is spooky, Sarge. That is goddamn unnatural. You feeling sick, Sarge? You get into some rat poison or something?” Fitzgibbons approaches Rutherford with the oiled halter. “Come along now,” he grunts. “Open up …” He jostles a carrot around Rutherford’s stubbornly pursed lips. A second later the carrot has disappeared and Fitzgibbons is cursing and hopping on one foot. “Jesus!” he growls. “Sarge, you old fleabag, you bit me!”
I am becoming very clever at getting the carrot without opening up for the bit, Rutherford thinks. He keeps the carrot in a pouch in his cheek, a gift for Lucy. At the games of hunger and restraint, my fellow countrymen, I am becoming excellent.
Campaign promises
In the yard, the other presidents are still hungry for power. They are practicing for the return to Washington. Adams is so starved for dominion that he begs the girl to allow him to represent her interests to her uncle Fitzgibbons. “Elect me to take part in the public life of your Barn, young lady, and I shall act a fearless, intrepid, undaunted part, at all hazards …”