Lincoln's Assassin Read online

  I live like the animal I have always been. Alone in the hole of my wintry birth and constant hibernation, I am savage of spirit, bereft of soul. No human grace or beauty blesses this, my heart. How many mistakes have I made only to feel I have made them each singly, or not at all? Is there not some friend, some one, some God who might take some share? Yet who would hear me even if I should cry?

  The horrible crime I have committed—upon man, upon myself—I needfully re-examine with imperfect and preserving eyes that through a self-forgiveness I may live with the savagery of my own being.

  Antistrophe

  How does one reconcile and repent? How do they? If only through cursing me, they have sinned again. Either I am too protected, too shallow, unreflective, or, they will not see.

  The God whom I had cursed and spit upon has not forgotten me. He howls at me and taunts me with his justice. The crippling of my spine, which twists my back and humps my shoulder, recalls the hunched Plantagenet for whose portrayal I was acclaimed. That usurping Richard of England whose stampeding fury found its final judgment afoot. Every twist, from my scar-knotted neck on down, presents a choice between that reining truth and my own.

  What madness is this that courses through my veins, ices summer’s lazy whims and fires winter’s snug content beyond hearthside warmth, melts satisfaction into senseless pools and spoonfuls of despair? If I were free to roam about, pronounce my craft or answer to my name, would I be as miserable?

  I have been cursed, not unlike he who committed the “first murder.” I could no sooner blame him than I would wholly myself. But perhaps the Universal Church’s principle has penetrated your imagination as well. Or can you too understand the frustration that led the honest Cain to envy and kill his favored brother?

  One night two winters ago, while the Great Blizzard of the East was laying untimely claim to four hundred frozen souls, I walked down to the river. Only its half-iced lullaby, deeply submerged and secreted, could be heard alongside the worried exhalation of the north wind. I swallowed a large mouthful of brandy from my hip flask and soon found myself sitting comfortably in the snow.

  Oh, Father! I thought as I lifted my eyes to the pinpricked canopy of ebon. Who is your son? And why is he here, so far from love and dreams? What doubts are mine that I would not share them with you?

  The night was over clear, the moon three or four days past full but bright. I fixed the great and lesser bears, Orion and two or three of the planets. All these I could discern, still not a glimpse of my own bearings.

  I let my eyes wander those always strange yet familiar heavens until they led me to a quadrant with which I seemed to find some natural affinity. The seven sisters, they are called. There, I thought, there. And just then a meteor streaked its sputtering tail across the sky from pole to pole. Could I be sure? But no sooner had I questioned this, this sign, this symbol or measure of divine will, when another streaked in almost the same path, but on an opposite course, now south to north.

  “Thank you,” I said aloud to no one, while a comic gust of wind shook the laden branches of the surrounding pines, whistling once or twice about my head before moving on. Thank you, I thought to myself, what only I could answer.

  But tonight, those signs are absent, tragic, nowhere. Tonight, I let them laugh that I should fill my veins again to end the score and four winters during which I have nailed my hopes and very life to this hutch, these woods, these trees that only cross the heavens out.

  ***

  Thursday December 31, 1863. Washington City.

  New Year’s Eve. A light snowfall. Hackney cabriolets and coaches, gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies and private carriages of all kinds deposit their contents of costumed gentry at the entrance of the stately NASH home. FOOTMEN wearing glazed chapeaux greet the procession, open carriage doors and assist GUESTS up the wide, polished stone steps, while DRIVERS steady steam-snorting

  HORSES.

  Inside, disguised MANSERVANTS take hats and capes and canes, and lead the way to the reception room. TWO ACTORS, dressed as Romulus and Remus, exchange quick greetings with a group of similarly masked and anonymous HOSTS and certain sober MEN by the names of Crowe, Jones, Kennedy, Lester, McCord, Reed, and others. Dutch-capped MAIDS bustle about attentively, as the Two Actors separate.

  In a corner of the room stands MR. PIKE, friend of General Lee, his large and powerful stature towering over the others. Pike’s granite-featured face, as those of the men he addresses with quick successions of filial embrace, is uncommonly grim, but perfectly suits the long, feathered Indian Chieftain Headdress he sports.

  In another section of the room, a man named LUTZ in the attire of a riverboat gentleman and on whose arm is the actress LAURA KEENE dressed as a Southern Mammy, her ringlet tresses wrapped under a gingham kerchief, are gathered with a group of seriously demeanored men.

  A small ORCHESTRA plays under an indoor arbor as the entire room heaves and glows with the sounds and colors of festive songs and draperies and candles, whirs with the rustlings of feathered masks and costumes.

  Among the flurried pageant of curvets, caracoles and capers, the occasional waltz or minuet or jig, appears a beautiful YOUNG WOMAN. Auburn hair, emerald eyes behind a silvery mask, a carnelian and pearl dress that accents her complexion, and a smile that glints as she dances. She is the picture of the season.

  She retrieves an hors d’oeuvre from the catering table and is soon alone in a corner of the gallery, though she continually nods apologetic pardons to disappointed dance-suitors. There she stands, somewhere between a fidgeting girl and swaying enchantress, lost among lacy billows of ruffled silk over hoopskirts delicately hung with rosebud garlands. An unexpected, open-mouthed yawn brings the YOUNG WOMAN to THE ACTOR’s side with a smiling, arched-eyebrow rebuke.

  Here is a romance. No crash of symbols, rolling flats, descending backdrops, flickering lights. No exotic locale, time-pressed moment, glorious protestations or oaths; simple, careless, conversational romance. They stand together, hardly aware of their surroundings, lulled by each other’s breathless harmony.

  ***

  As the scene of the tyrant haunted my nights, so did this one burden my days. I knew that evening was the key to all—my murderer was there.

  Scene II

  Flying to kiss a fair lady’s cheek,

  Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak;

  Beautiful snow, from the heavens above,

  Pure as an angel and fickle as love!

  The night I tied off my arm for what was to be the last time (was, for a very different reason than I had at first intended) Hand returned after nearly four months. I never really expected to see him again, thought some stranger might find my corpse in years to come and, somehow recognizing it, have it placed on display at a carnival road-show.

  Hand seemed so natural, so familiar, as he hobbled his funny form up the path, balancing his traveling bag and a number of paper-wrapped packages. He had gone before the winter snows to see, he had said, if there was any chance I might finally leave this place. Now was he returned.

  Quite a sight was he, his body bobbing back and forth upon legs too short yet sturdily perfect. Fingers and palms, huge by comparison to the stubs out of which they protruded, ever-willing to grasp and clutch and, even as they released, defiantly leaving their trace on all. Underneath a wide-brimmed hat his deep black eyes recalled a life of unshed tears. He alone cared for me in moments when no amount of morphine could soothe my fever.

  “I ’ave news, my broz’er,” came his even, if thick-accented words as he emerged from the wide-open, leather-hinged door. Laying down his parcels he ignored the syringe and spoon outlaid upon the table with certain courtesy and discretion, aware of the beast that had dug its spurs into my sides long before he had come to know me.

  Without another word, he reached into his brocade tote and produced for me a copy of the January 1890 edition of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, earmarked and folded open to an article about myself,
Pursuit and Death of John Wilkes Booth.

  “Another mob of lies, I presume,” trying to discount the tourniquet I was unraveling.

  “Per’aps,” he said, pushing it toward me, and glancing at the violin collecting dust in the far left corner of the room. “You ’ave not been playing, I see?”

  “At what,” I laughed. “A wedding march? Or something new, Onegin’s Polonaise?”

  “Z’en must you rh’ead,” he said, and at his insistent urging I sat down on the stone hearth. By the blinking firelight I read with a somewhat renewed interest in the ancient tale, wondering what Hand had seen to so capture his cynic’s attention.

  I finished the article in time to see the dwarf falling asleep in the broken armchair across the room, and stared for what seemed a long time into the fire and at the smoke ascending the clay chimney, before I found myself following his example. It had meant nothing to me.

  ***

  I awoke the next morning as Hand lifted a smoldering pot out of the fire and placed it upon the table next to two cups he had set out for us. Both were color-worn and chipped, and only the one somewhat dutifully set before my place, of all my collection of six or seven, remained upon its own patterned saucer. Yet he had set out no spoons.

  “You do not see, do you, mon vieux?” he queried, less disappointedly than I would have been, and perfectly pouring off the steaming tea. He always understood.

  “I am afraid I do not.”

  “No,” he nodded. “Per’aps you will understand z’is.”

  He produced two letters bundled together with coarse twine. One was written on a rough and colorless parchment, the other upon a delicate stationery, and surely in a young woman’s hand. They were both addressed “Father.” I looked up at Hand with some surprise, but he had already removed himself back toward the hearth.

  He waited patiently for my reaction as I quickly read the two short notes.

  “But how; what?!” I exclaimed.

  “I ’ave been to New York. Man’attan Island. I saw my cou’zahn Henri. Your broz’er would not see me. ’E ’ad Henri deliver z’ese z’ings to me.”

  “My brother? Edwin?”

  “You are surprised? You must not be so. You z’ought ’e waz dead, per’aps? ’E ees not so very much h’older z’an you. And, of course, ’e knows you leeve. ’E ees your broz’er.”

  Hand knew the cursory import of his statement. Edwin and I had ever been rivals more than kinsmen, though at times we seemed to struggle that it was not so. He, in his silent refusal that it should be true, and I awkwardly trying to balance the pathetic unproductiveness of his method with occasional pleas for recognition and reconciliation.

  It had been never worse than the August Friday he enjoined me to play opposite him, as Richmond to his Richard III at the Holliday Street Theater in Baltimore. It was the part in which I had debuted two years before, but I was yet 19 years of age and scarcely known outside my township. He was 24 and already marked to succeed our father as the country’s finest tragedian. For the occasion of our first performance together, he booked for me an excellent room at Barnum’s Hotel with a curtained bed and a well-filled basin.

  It was, at the heart, as true an act of filial devotion as I could ever hope, and yet he took every opportunity to turn the screws against me. Somewhat, though every line and cue and crossing was memorized, for having arrived at the performance without my script in hand, in event that I “should need for any reason to fill another’s part.” But mostly for not adhering to the traditional interpretation in all ways, particularly in the fight scene, within which I again exercised my skill by making Richard fence instead of merely foil.

  Did I not understand the “horrid dangers” of such “unrehearsed, unblocked antics”? Or, was I, but “a dilettante, unhappily born” into an otherwise brilliant family? These rebukes I bore to the witness of the entire company, and tried my best to see their merit, though he would never yield an instant to any of mine.

  And so I billed myself as only “Wilkes” for three more years, until I could feel I had earned the name of my father. But more of him anon. It was as Richard, at the Petersburg Theater in Virginia, I finally assumed my family name while yielding not my own technique nor interpretation. Which interpretation I may say, was, if startlingly, well-met more times than not. But those were years and days long-vanished even at the time of my transition.

  “My brother! And the uncle of my children,” I thought aloud. “My children!” I repeated. “I have children?”

  I was truly astonished. Among all my suspicions of twenty-five years it was the one thing at which I had never guessed. Not for a moment. Not for I, a father!

  “Mais, z’ey do not know ’o you h’are.”

  “Then I must tell them. I must go to her! Now!”

  “I do not z’ink so,” lifting his eyes to mine. “You really do not understand why I show you z’e article?”

  “It does not matter. I have children. I have a—”

  I stopped myself. Remembered Ella. I had never forgotten her, but now her image, her scent, her voice, every memory of her rushed on me at once. She was the mother of my children! But she had never been my wife. I had no wife. And I had no name.

  Hand was still looking at me. He knew this too. And he knew more.

  “She died z’e day after z’ese letters were written.”

  “But—” I started.

  “Forget z’at my friend. Forget everyz’ing. Can you not see what ’as ’appened? Z’ey knew eet was you. Z’ey came for you. Z’ere ee’z somez’ing you can do for your children, but eet ’as noz’ing to do wiz’ seeing z’em.”

  I do not know how much time passed before I spoke again.

  “Do what? What are you talking about? What happened? Who came?” I shook my head, still dazed from recollections of the past.

  He grabbed the volume from the hearthside and hopped back over to the table with it under the light of the kerosene lamp.

  “Z’ere!” he pointed with a shout, his former accent returning as strong as ever. “Page four-four-seven,” a gnarled finger drummed. “R’head!” he commanded with a guttural trill and his habit of placing “h’s” where they did not belong. “H’aloud!”

  His force took me aback as his finger continued to pound at the specified passage. With some temerity, I began to recite Captain Doherty’s Narrative.

  “I proceeded to the barracks, had boots and saddles sounded, and in less than half an hour had reported to Colonel Baker. I took the first twenty-five men in the saddle, Sergeant Boston Corbett being the only member of my own company—”

  “Ah!” he screamed with satisfaction. “You see?!”

  I began to re-read the segment to myself. Hand was clearly frustrated and half-furiously spun around.

  “Regarde, mon vieux! L’hook!” He pointed again at the passage. “‘… be’hing z’e h’only member of my h’own company!’ Coh’rbett! Z’e man ’o shoot ‘you!’ You ’ave never understood ’ow z’e troops knew to go to Garrett Farm. Now you must know,” his eyes squinted with increased excitement. “Z’eir ‘h’intelligence’ came from your ‘fr’hiends.’”

  “Forgive me,” I said. “I still—”

  “No,” he sighed as he took a chair again. “I do not guess you would. I do not z’ink I would. It eez a ’ard tru’z.

  “Garrett Farm was known only by you and z’e people ’o ’elped you plan your h’escape,” he continued. “‘O h’arranged z’e missing guard, and gave you the navy password. You ’ave h’always wondered ’ow Mr. Pinkerton’s detectives could ’ave discovered h’any’zing. Z’e article explains z’at z’e idea to go to Garrett’s was Captain Zhett’s.”

  “The same old lie,” I reminded. “That is the account of a certain Lieutenant A. R. Bainbridge, who swears he and I were old acquaintances. I know. I never knew Bainbridge. But I knew Captain Jett, and Jett knew where we were headed.”

  “Yes, you were somewhat—’ow does eet say in z’e arhticle?—‘braggad
ocio.’”

  “It says I used ‘no braggadocio,’” I corrected with a half-smile and an able reference to the text of the article.

  “Does h’eet? Well, we bo’z know better,” he smiled broader and without a look at the indicated sentence. “Mais, z’is h’ees not z’e point. ’Ow did z’ey find z’eir way into z’at place at h’all? To find poor Zhett and z’reaten ’im? Z’e Virginie countryside ees beeg.”

  “Yes, you are right. How? That was always my question. Luck, I suppose.”

  “And why should z’ey h’always ’ave h’eet? ‘Luck’ to find you; ‘luck’ to shoot you dead—z’e o’zer you. No. Z’is article tells h’us more. Does h’eet not seem strange to you z’at z’e entire company h’ees under orders to ‘take Booz’ alive,’ and z’e one man ’o disobeys z’ese orders ees z’e only man ’o was ’andpicked for z’e zhob? Do’erty was peeked by z’e War Department and ’e personally peeked Coh’rbett! And Coh’rbett shoots Booz’. Against h’orders! Z’e one man Do’erty might z’ink to trhust.”

  I looked at him blankly, awaiting the foregone conclusion I could not see.

  “I z’ink Do’erty knew ’e could trust Coh’rbett. Just like z’e War Department knew h’eet could trust Do’erty. To pick a man ’e knew was sure wiz’ ’is gun. To keel you!” he shrieked.

  He was right. My heart seemed to stop and I winced with the pain of awful truth.

  “Why?”

  “Ah!” he shrieked again. “Z’at I do not know. Only z’at you may never leave ’ere." He shook his head with miserable sympathy. “You know ’o z’ey h’are. You know why z’ey wanted Lincoln dead. And z’ey could allow you to tell? Not z’en, not h’ever.”