Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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.

“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.