Lincoln's Assassin Read online

Tucking it under my left arm I marked off a notation next to my name upon a small sheet of paper tucked next to the door and turned to say goodbye. Murphy was now some few steps up a ladder with his back toward me. I could see him smile without turning as I left him in silence.

  Outside the shadows seemed almost to have lengthened even as midday approached. Cola was at the other end of the street, her post having inadvertently become the focus of a group of playing schoolchildren.

  “Mr. Booth!” called one of my young students, grooming the horse with the edge of a pickaxe, while another conducted an imaginary symphony. “How are we to think of your lectures on liberal spontaneity when everywhere the theaters fill with those who crave only Zola’s studied indifference and Belasco’s mechanical perfections? Even your brother’s style is today branded somewhat libertine!”

  “Then leave!” I commanded. “I am master of this school, not of your life. There is nothing wrong with the approaches of which you speak. My father greatly admired Mr. Keene, though their audiences thought them bitter rivals.

  “I am a Booth. And here you will rather learn to think with your heart and act with your soul.”

  “John!” came the voice from behind me.

  ***

  And I awoke. An April drizzle was tracing wet forests on my window and the sound of a swelling river rushed up from the glen below. Hand was sitting aside me, just staring, as he often would.

  “What were you going to do last night?”

  I looked at him for a moment. It seemed fairly obvious. He looked back, knowingly.

  “But where did you find eet?” he continued. “I z’ought eet was h’all gone—finished.”

  “It was cognac.”

  “Mon dieu!” he gasped, nodding. “Ah, yes? I suppose z’at would ’ave worked.”

  “Ah, yes?” I mimicked in agreement. “I tried. I really had tried. But I was sure you would never return. That I would stay here forever. And for what?”

  “But I did return. And now, per’aps, you ’ave a reason. H’even I would not ’ave suspected z’is.” His look of serious concern turned to a simple pout. “And yet, maybe.”

  ***

  That day, our father looked to us with studied grace from across the table of the palace car as we three trained to New York City for the first night of his new season. One hand tucked inside his gold-embroidered vest, the other poised about a too-thick cigar. The signet ring on the little finger of the one barely exposed, shining its trillium diamond ever bright, the thumb and forefingers of the other perfectly balancing their West Indian quarry between occasional puffs.

  That was the last time he took me along, choosing my brother Edwin Thomas as better company and more fitful successor, perhaps, to his career. Certainly more proximate, with his fourteen years to my nine. Proud, confused, ever-haunted Edwin, the heir apparent. But that day father’s pronouncement was to us both, that we should together follow him upon the course of his profession. “Trod the boards and find acclaim!”

  This same injunction he had made only months before to our older brother, his namesake Junius Brutus Jr. But puzzle-faced June could never wholly see our father’s drunkenness as a viable career, and acted as he might between his other vocations.

  I still see the scene. The sweeping views of fields and towns brushing unrecorded past the car. My father’s anxious enthusiasm. Feel yet the locomotive’s steaming breath. Hear the rhythmed pistons and grating gears of the coal-fed engine, the tireless gait of steel-wrought wheels. Know its might and force and course.

  And I am ever haunted by the resemblance of my father’s black appetite and tireless propulsion toward an unknown station along miles of ever-widening, ever-disappearing tracks. Secreted, silent and anonymous, I should be thankful of my life. The simple, carefree woods, the steady, mindful brook, the pulsing heavens and guileless toads—they hold no comfort.

  My father too was ever desperate. Of success when he was young and hungry, of fame when he was still unknown, of adventure at all times, of progeny when his instincts called, of freedom when his family and work consumed him. Twice only had I seen him satisfied, yet never with himself. Only with some vanquished bottle whose constant protests he had quieted. The device’s final sobriety having insisted the deafening vengeance of a would-be conqueror. Alexander’s empire was no less regretted.

  The Sunday when the news of my father’s death reached us from Cincinnati, Asia and I had spent the morning quarreling. Mother had expelled us from the house despite inclement weather suggesting, “A fresh rinse might cool our spirits and souls.”

  So when she called to us regretfully an hour later, we did not expect the reason for her melancholy humor. Neither my sister nor I had seen the messenger, nor guessed the letter from the previous week proclaiming our father’s victory over the New Orleans audience was to have been his last. The riverboat steamed all the way to Ohio, but Junius Brutus Booth had made the passage only as far as Missouri. Asia and I listened with the calm and acceptance only innocent youth can truly muster.

  “It is your father,” sputtered Mother, eyes swollen.

  My mother’s face, elegant, almost too simple. Watchful, unaware. Familiar stranger. Complete contradiction. Who she was, who she seemed to be. She was my mother, my suck, my eternal warmth.

  And she was as cold to me as she was to my father and herself—with herself it was protection. My father and his erratic passions accounted for at least the better part of the need for that. But with me I would never understand. I was at once her favorite and, as a result, the least approachable.

  I, who should have received her tenderest counsels and confidences, received only conditional comfort. I was held, occasionally kissed, and felt nothing. I was told I was loved and only longed for proof—more than words.

  That next day was Black Monday, the day the school term began anew. There was already a certain understood anxiety about this day, and in my mind it would ever then be increased. Holidays had been so welcome, so full and yet over-short, one could scarcely believe classes had recommenced. There were ever those, of course, who seemed to have benefited only from their time off by further burying their noses and souls into hopes of pleasing their masters. A kind of sincerity one must ever study to produce. How do I think of my brother Edwin with my most insipid recollections?

  This year, whatever soothing had occurred during the term break was forgotten in a moment as Asia and I left our mother to cry alone on the emerald green divan in the parlor. Recognition of the next day’s responsibilities furthered our commitment to acceptance, but we were nonetheless loath to part, and our affections for each other increased according to the proverb.

  Monday morning, after Asia had already left, I lay half-waking in my room as Mother opened the door and wondered was it not time I was about. She scolded me with the same look that proffered a mug of strong coffee and in that instant I felt I had never loved her more.

  ***

  How was I ever to think that I, the son of such a man, might be different? Or, if God’s graces had fallen upon my family, assuredly on the forms of my brothers Edwin and June, that there would still be more of it at large. Enough to carry me into some light or favor.

  What I am I have inherited largely from my father. I could no sooner be a surgeon than he could be a solicitor. Still, had I studied medicine as my younger brother, I could have known how the missile had penetrated this or that tissue, had entered the cerebellum, having left some occipital or other skullish plate shattered clean. Oh, would that I had never dreamed my father’s mad obsession, but left it to June and Ted alone while I joined young Joe.

  And, as if my waiting knowledge could stay the life that, though still I hate, has long since ceased its madder movements. Or reverse that wound that a thousand dreams have seen these same hands inflict to satisfy the gracious multitude of promise. A greater ovation would I have received to tender my time on curing a cold.

  Yet I will not content myself to be seducer nor wastrel. If the n
eighbors should nominate me Farmer Booth, the Lunatic, the inherent eccentricity of that remark—as it places me far outside their humdrum world—should please me thoroughly.

  If I have inherited my father’s madness, I can own it without assuming the adultery of an entire family. His first wife Adelaide, whom for the sake of my inconveniently pregnant mother he unabashedly left penniless and broken, or June’s slighted Clementine, and Edwin’s neglected Mary, still dying in the belief she was the only one. Why would I go on?

  The theme was so the same. If I had not seized that life for whom you otherwise might grieve more, admitted Atropos—she who cannot be turned, to his porch and cleaved the scriptured spool to still the clamor of so many cutthroat hearts—if I had lived out my life in careless comfort and relative renown, would I not have rued the mediocre coward I should have been? Remembered for the career that dared not soar, the flightless child of legacies lost, the man who would not act upon his one invention, forever confounded by his other?

  Strophe

  I

  This was not murder. It was justice, vengeance, retribution. Sacrifice. Glory for the South. If not an exchange, the purchase of one unworthy life as payment for the loss of so many brave and loyal others.

  This was not murder. How could it be? This man’s appearance, his pedigree, his coarse, low humor and home-spun anecdotes, his vulgar similes and careless frivolity were a disgrace to the seat he held.

  It was not murder. It was deliverance.

  It was as if someone or something—some universal power—desired my simultaneous success and failure. Some law of God or nature or both, cried for the supreme justice that could only end with his death and my ignominy. Compelled me, the flawed and cursed champion, to perform its will—despite the cost. Was as unable to reconcile my valiant act as to suppress its own egoed enterprise. Better I should fall than it fail. Who, what, might I imagine, could possibly own to such power, responsibility, contradiction?

  It was ritual; and the sacrifice was mine to make. Was it not, after all, my own soul that gave of life and meaning?

  Still, once a man has murdered, once he has taken the life of another—particularly an innocent—what would he not sacrifice or risk to satisfy and avenge the loss of that life on its truest thief. While the villain lives, I will not rest.

  Our country was at war. And war, as ever, her separate heroes had made. Strangely, they had changed from those who had pursued and hanged the villainous Brown to those who two years later hailed his martyred act. For my own part I was later content to feel that I had done some good by supplying my brethren of a poor beleaguered South with what comforts smuggled quinine and morphine could provide. But there was a time I thought to share in what I imagined as the inevitable and was where you will know it all began. For war, like love, springs forth from design, even to the smallest action that is as a wrinkle upon the brow of God, or the furrow of his deepest thought. It is no chance that I too am who I am, have done that which I have done, and know you are no less a part of what was meant to be.

  ***

  I know if I were somehow to look into their eyes I would recognize them at once. If on some city street or public garden or town square we should happen upon each other, they would recognize me too. Recognize the depth or peril, confusion or insanity or misdirection that inhabits all our eyes.

  There are those things that time and life and even generations cannot change or disguise. Blood is one of those things, perhaps the most powerful. The blood that swims inside the body, and the blood whose scent spurs the mind to imagine, create, accomplish.

  We toss from Springfield into Chicago, that loveliest of three-rivered and be-smoke-stacked vessels, thence to the lagan that is Harrisburg, and lastly to the improbably afloat Philadelphia. Everywhere the results of a twenty-five-year-past conflict are submerged in the waved progresses of a reconstructive sea. Quiet, implicit, echoing, unknown, but felt, unseen, but heard, unfathomed and treacherous for their shoals. But this is North. Here the tides of fortune return with currents of kindness, though their shores are no less littered with wreckage and debris.

  Still, the train ride from Springfield to New York is not without its comforts. Even for those who must travel in what is courteously referred to as third class, or freight. Gone are the days of my extravagance and pretense. Hail these times of truth and simple vision.

  Fortunately, the railway is no worse for the passing winter, for the alternate route by river is still closed with the ices of a lingering season. And though much of the country is yet cold and stony, one can manage a pleasant journey—providing one enjoys the study of the human character, for its representatives are legion and varied on such an excursion.

  I particularly enjoy the spinster twins who embark at Pittsburgh, each the image of the other, from hat to clutch to dress and shoes. Their over-pleasant faces given to the porter mask the looks they share between themselves during the course of their overnight travel.

  In the early hours of our collective morning, I switch my eye-patch from the right eye to the left, knowing, though they never so much as hint a look in my direction the previous evening, they would not fail to notice something remarkably different about me. I pretend ignorance to their resultant yammering, as they do not cease to exchange looks at me, and words between themselves. I chuckle to wonder how precise those words might be.

  And when I learn their conversation is indeed occupied by a particular subject this morning, the little boy who sidles with his mother on a bench in front of me and last night kept the entire car awake with his snoring has been wholly vindicated by the spinsters’ conclusion—and conviction—that I, not angelic he, am the culprit. Once more I find myself a convenient victim of a somewhat inconvenient circumstance.

  Still, what do I care of this blame, so long as his mother knows the truth? And so she does. It is she, in point of fact, who conveys to me the elderly censure.

  “One day my son will be a fine declaimer,” she continues in a whisper, with a proud smile and a handsome turn of her head.

  “Actor?” I puzzle at the happenstance and hesitate to raise or avoid the topic.

  “Politician,” retorts this proudest of parents. “Perhaps even president!”

  She turns to the boy who has his eyes only fastened to the constant stream of passing fenceposts and the trespassable fields they pretend to protect from his slingshot eyes. Not a thought of future, less of law. And yet there is something familiarly likeable about him, and he waves farewell good-naturedly as his mother scoops him and their baggage away at the last though briefly sunlit stop of the day. The spinsters had quitted us just before midday.

  ***

  Friday, November 1859. Richmond Theater, Richmond, Virginia. Afternoon. A TROOP OF ACTORS prepare an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby.

  ***

  One afternoon in late November, I was preparing my part for the Richmond Theater’s production of Smike, an adaptation of Mr. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. As we rehearsed our lines and set our marks, we were suddenly aware of a great disturbance on the street outside. We often practiced our roles at volumes that took the sounds of racing steel, locomotive engines, passengers, and merchants into consideration. Those sounds were there, but this time the very sense with which our ears received them was remarkably different. The train whistles seemed to come from a different station, signal departure for a very different destination.

  Without a word the entire company stopped its work and walked to the front door of the small foyer. Outside, a detachment of local Grays, under the command of a certain General Lee, then in the service of the one united army, was forming ranks and readying to board the steaming train like fledgling angels at the cloud-caped gates of paradise. Hardly aware of the moment and urged by a hand I felt, but knew not, I turned to one of my fellows and expressed my resolve to go with them.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Wilkes?” came the obvious, if somehow unanticipated reply from the over-practiced rusti
c, fancying himself rather comely as he found the spittoon on the corner of the porch. “This cannot be one of your famous Booth family larks. We play tonight.”

  “Smike is a very small part,” I assured him, “and any supernumerary who can hunch, look humble and diseased, can surely fill the role. Perhaps yourself?” I suggested.

  I did not chew tobacco—smoked it only on occasion—but was in command of my throat to the extent that I could instantly summon a sufficient insult for the quite taken aback Norris as I turned to join the company aboard the train for Charles Town.

  “But, Wilkes,” he called behind me. “The play is Smike!”

  “Congratulations on being cast in the lead,” I grinned.

  At the moment I stepped outside the theater the commotion increased, as if I had suddenly entered a forgotten, fully sensible world. Gone were the drilled and practiced mechanics of the play, the familiarity of cue and cross. Still, I was fairly amazed to see and hear the coincidental precision of the day’s choreography and orchestration, and the expertise with which the city’s inhabitants performed their unrehearsed parts. Bustled mothers with parasols and zig-zagging broods in tow, coatless porters of high-springing, gaitered and salaaming steps, yah-sah-ing and yahs-ma’am-ing with perfectly compliant smiles, and all nature of cherooted salesmen, tradesmen and slouch-hatted dandies, each as particularly uniformed as the Grays themselves.

  The buzz on the street was that a large group of mercenaries in the employ of a foreign power were being landed, along with heavy artillery, outside of Charles Town, Jefferson County, West Virginia. The Grays were to confront the faceless foe and be praised for their courage, laughing and joking as in preparation only for color-guard duty in the following week’s parade. I sensed my fellow actors standing at the theater door, shouting to recall me as they whispered among themselves, still I moved forward, and by the time I was halfway into the street the simple facts of the regiment’s duty had surfaced. They had been called to Charles Town to guard the captured abolitionist John Brown.