by Norman Lock
On the morning of May the third, twelve days after having left Washington, Mr. Lincoln reached the end of his journey—unless you believe in the lessons of the Sunday school—at the Chicago & Alton Depot on Jefferson Street. I had thousands of miles yet to travel. They took him and Willie to the State House, where, with rouge chalk and amber, the undertaker made our Great Emancipator’s face presentable. The day scorched, as though hell’s own wind were loosed on Springfield to mock him; and I feared that the secret processes of the embalmer’s art would be undone. I nearly shouted, because of the heat and my anxiousness, that they should hurry the dead man to his tomb and slam the heavy door shut to prevent some horror. Nerves strung tight like piano wire, I felt I was a player in an ancient tragedy. Was this how Booth felt on that Good Friday in Washington? Had he absorbed too much of Julius Caesar, in which he’d played Marc Antony to his brother’s Brutus? It ought to have been the other way round, but things are seldom so neatly done in real life. (Was my life real? Real and unreal, like everybody else’s. Photographers can get muddled up in that kind of question—the serious ones can.)
At the cemetery the next day, the feeling that I was extraordinary, that I was a person at the center of great events left me. Modesty prevailed, an unfamiliar emotion to one who liked to show off. I didn’t push ahead of the others standing at the iron door of the tomb; I skulked among the trees. I’d had enough of celebrity. I was sorry for Father Abraham, for me, for the whole damned world. Of Bishop Simpson’s interminable oration, I remember only this: “His moral power gave him preeminence.” I walked back to the railroad depot, thinking how I might acquire such power. I felt full of a great and noble purpose. By the next day, I’d forgotten all about it.
Springfield, Illinois, May 26–December 7 (Thanksgiving Day), 1865
In Springfield, I shot a man named Jacob Lowry. He came at me with a bayonet he claimed to have used to gut the blue bellies at Chickamauga. I stood in the street and called him a scavenger of corpses belonging to honorable men—in blue and gray—cut down in battles he was too scared to fight. I don’t know which side of the truth I’d landed on in my ire. It didn’t matter, because the reason he lunged at me with that tarnished piece of steel had nothing to do with the War of Secession, but with a pretty black-haired girl. Funny, I can remember Lowry’s name but not hers. Fury must be a stronger, more durable emotion than—call it “infatuation,” since I’m not sure I ever understood love.
I was at loose ends after Mr. Lincoln was laid to rest. With no money or place to go, I took a job at a feed and grain store in Springfield. Lincoln’s parlor car was sold to the Union Pacific Railroad, but I was allowed to sleep there until a train heading to Nebraska Territory could be made up. A girl—she was eighteen and filled her bodice handsomely—came into the store one morning for a bushel of dried corn. I had on my blue coat and—I’m embarrassed to admit—the Medal of Honor. It must have impressed her, unless it was something in my face she liked. The workings of a woman’s heart and mind are mysterious to me.
We began to see each other. She showed me what respectable amusements the town had to offer: dances in the grange and church halls, baseball games, picnics and band concerts by the Sangamon River, and walks along its bluffs. I taught her euchre and keno, games I’d learned while soldiering. I held her hand and mooned over her. I might’ve kissed her. It’s a shame if I didn’t—she was a pretty girl. We walked out together from late May until Thanksgiving, when Lowry returned to Springfield. He’d been in Charleston after Sherman thrashed it with fire and sword. Lowry was like a magpie picking at leftover stubble in hopes of finding shiny trash. Now, once again in town, he let it be known that he had an understanding with the girl and no Federal son of a bitch was going to trespass on his territory.
“We had no such thing, Jacob!” she scolded, after he’d barged into the kitchen and laid claim to her. We had just sat down with her mother and young brother to eat our Thanksgiving turkey.
“You’re a lying bitch!” he screamed.
“I could never stand the sight or smell of you!” she screamed right back.
His unsavory presence in the close kitchen confirmed her low opinion of him. In a fury of resentment, he cut her lip with the back of his hand and tried to kick my chair out from under me with his muddy boot. Her mother jumped up with a napkin to staunch her daughter’s bloody mouth. The boy began to whimper. The dog, waiting underneath the table for carelessness and gravity to serve him dinner, yelped. I sank the carving fork into Lowry’s thigh. He pulled it out and flung it at me, but his aim was poor, doubtless owing to the pain. I laughed as he hobbled in a rage out the kitchen door.
“You’ll wish you was in hell, boy, when I get done with you!” he shouted from the yard.
My insides were quivering like a custard, but I managed a show of gallantry worthy of my medal. Who’s to say who is or is not deserving of his honors?
The widow—her husband had been killed at Shiloh— went into the front room and began to mangle “Rock Me Back to Sleep, Mother” on an upright piano. The boy shared a turkey leg with the dog. I had lost my appetite for dinner and romance and was about to say good night when the girl—I wish I could remember her name!—disappeared into an unlit room. I thought, for a moment, that she meant me to follow her and receive in the discreet darkness my reward for having sent her suitor packing. I waited in confusion, listening to a drawer groan open and shut. In another moment, she returned to the kitchen with a Colt pistol.
“It was my daddy’s. I’ve kept it cleaned and oiled,” she said proudly.
I looked at it as if it were the turkey’s other leg.
“You best be careful,” she said, touching my eye patch wistfully. “Jake’s got it in for you, and he was crazy even before he went away to fight.”
Reluctantly, I accepted the pistol; its cold, sobering weight annulled the evening’s farce, just as John Wilkes Booth’s derringer had turned a frivolous Our American Cousin into tragedy.
I was no gunman; my talent was musical. Depressed, I opened the back door, stepped into the yard, and turned. Standing in the doorway with the skittish light behind her, she kissed me. The moment comes back to me in a rush of recollection: how I turned to take her hand in mine—the one holding the Colt—and then stammered an apology for my clumsiness. Pleased by my confusion (proof of her fascination), she kissed me lightly on the mouth. I tasted blood like a rusty spoon. She shut the door on me. The windowpanes were wet inside the kitchen, where the stove was roaring against the December cold—unless it was my ears that roared.
I walked back to the depot in the “mystical moist night-air,” careless of danger, thinking only of how I might taste her kiss again, so easily was a young man satisfied in that—I nearly said “innocent time.” But there was nothing innocent about that time—not when it came to lives cut short, hobbled, or robbed of painlessness. Boys may have been barely acquainted with sex, but they were on familiar terms with dying. Even a fraudulent bugle boy would already have seen death in its ingenious masks and bewildering variety of postures, all of them perfect for the long-held gaze of Matthew Brady and his tribe.
I lay awake in the funeral car, the Colt on the nightstand—my head spinning with ragtag thoughts. I remembered Philadelphia, where the funeral train had stopped at Broad Street Station on its way to New York. That night, there was to be a private viewing at Independence Hall.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 22, 1865
I wandered down Market Street to the Delaware, where a young Ben Franklin had arrived from Boston with only a Dutch dollar and a copper shilling to his name. On the wharf that afternoon, I felt that I, too, might yet make something of my life. In the broad brown river that, from instant to instant, was discharging its measureless potential in unceasing motion, I sensed a like potential in me, not entirely wasted by my sixteen years as a ne’er-do-well. Life—the better part of it—lay before me, as it had for Franklin, just off the Boston packet. I can still do something, I told myse
lf; and then I tripped over a stern line stretched tight around a bollard by the outbound tide and fell headlong into the river. I couldn’t swim, had never learned the art, though I’d been terrified of drowning while I raked up oysters or stole rides on the Brooklyn ferry.
Delivered, finally, unto the water, I was all for drowning. To hell with Ben Franklin—the game wasn’t worth the candle. I felt a languor stealing over me as my body began to tire. It had resisted the river’s lap—so amorous and inviting—in spite of me. Then, when words like will, desire, resignation had lost their meaning, I was hauled out with the abruptness of a fish taken from its element. I woke—it was like waking—to a man busily rowing my arms to rid me of river water. Lying on the planked bottom of a skiff, I coughed and stared at the white sun overhead.
“You all right, boy?” he asked.
He was a colored man of middle age. We’d have called him worse back then. Many still would. The look of concern on his face seemed genuine.
I took my time in answering him, nostalgic for the numbness through which I’d recently passed on my way to elsewhere or nowhere. I blinked my eyes awhile, fidgeted, and wriggled in the noonday light. I knew I ought to thank him, and in a moment I did—convincingly, it seemed to me.
“Yes. Thanks, mister,” I said, fixing my eye patch, which had been skewed by the current.
He tied up to the wharf, collected his fishing pole and creel, and then followed behind me as I climbed the ladder to the dock. He lived nearby and insisted I go home with him to dry my clothes. It seemed the sensible thing, and I did as he asked. I felt squeamish about going inside a black man’s house. But I went—maybe to prove to myself I was a different boy from the one who’d fallen into the river. Maybe I wanted to believe I’d been changed by my “Baptist drowning.” The lies we tell ourselves!
He gave me a shirt and a much-mended pair of pants, which I put on willingly to show I had no prejudice. He made me drink hot broth while I sat in front of the fire, in his front room. He handled my uniform respectfully, as you would a priest’s Sunday outfit, wringing the blue coat and pants with his strong black hands before hanging them up to dry. He wanted to know what I was doing in Philadelphia. I told him I had arrived that morning on the Lincoln Special, with the president’s body.
“I ought to have done nothing all day, except pray for Uncle Abe,” he said sheepishly. “But I suppose he won’t mind, seeing as how Jesus Himself liked to fish.”
I allowed that he was right.
“Mr. Lincoln freed me,” he said. “I owe him my life.”
His voice was pitched between pride and resentment. I didn’t understand why he should feel the latter but decided it was none of my business. Besides, I was too busy considering my destiny, which seemed, more and more, to be the work of powerful influences.
Once again, I felt I’d gotten tangled in a knot of unusual convergences, whose threads included Whitman, Grant, Lincoln, Franklin, and now this black man—his name was Spotswood—whose heart was just as unfathomable. I knew nothing of his suffering or sorrows. They were likely to be heavier and harder to bear than mine, though I had suffered and sorrowed some. The room bore not a trace of a past or present life: no pictures on the walls, no gimcracks or souvenirs. It appeared to have been scrubbed clean of remembrance. I almost asked to hear his story but decided it would be inconsiderate of me and maybe painful for him.
We had been talking of this and that, the way strangers will when their lives momentarily converge. When darkness entered the room, we fell silent. Spotswood lit two candles, and we sat together in the deepening night, the ceiling thatched with shadows. I think he was keeping a vigil for the man whose body lay a few blocks to the west, where the Liberty Bell, like him, was broken and mute. To tell the God’s honest truth, I don’t know what thoughts might have been chasing one another round in Spotswood’s brain. My own were none too clear. I strained to keep my mind centered on Lincoln, but it wandered elsewhere: to Brooklyn and my mother’s grave, Five Forks and the Armory Square Hospital, Walt Whitman and oysters.
I wanted Spotswood to remember me—God knows why. I told him my name several times. I would have written it down if there’d been a pencil. I wished I had some little gift to make him in honor of our encounter and the entanglement of our two lives. He’d saved mine, after all. Maybe I was just glad to have been born a white man. And for the first time in my life, I was glad to have been born in Brooklyn! Supposing I’d been reared up in the South, the son of a plantation owner. What would have become of me? Very possibly, I’d have died, or been put in a prison cell next to Jeff Davis’s, or hanged like Captain Wirz, commandant of Andersonville, who let thirteen thousand Union men perish. And where would I be now? Damned, most likely. Strange the ways of fate, as the saying goes. This fact might interest you, Jay: The pistol with which Booth shot Lincoln dead was made in Philadelphia by the gunsmith Henry Derringer. And there I was, in Philadelphia, dressed in clothes belonging to a slave freed by the dead man I was escorting to his final and lasting repose. Yes, I had a destiny all right. Like it or not.
My clothes dry, I dressed and thanked Spotswood for his kindness with what I believe was genuine warmth, taking his black hand and holding it in mine—the same hand that would hold a Springfield girl’s and also put a bullet into the forehead of hateful Jake Lowry. The hand, you know, was shaped for murder and for love.
Springfield, Illinois, December 8, 1865–January 14, 1866
The day following the Thanksgiving debacle, I woke, feeling grainy-eyed and irritable from too little sleep. I dressed in my uniform, pinned on my medal, and walked down Jefferson Street to the eatery where I took my breakfast. I dawdled over my eggs, thinking of the Colt pistol in my waistband and what the advertisement claimed: “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” I didn’t feel equal to anybody, except for old Spotswood. I was always subject to mental vicissitudes: the highs and lows of a mind inadequately moored. It must have made me a difficult person to get along with, which may explain why I spent the greater part of my life alone. But that was my way, and nobody can help his way.
“Snow coming,” said the grizzled counterman to break the silence. He wore a damp dish towel across his shoulder with the panache of a diplomat or a Mexican bandit. He gave me a meaningful look. “This afternoon or maybe tonight.”
I nodded, unwilling to discourse on the subject of weather, good or bad. I had things on my mind. But so as not to get a reputation for being standoffish and superior, I beamed at him before returning to my scrambled eggs. He coughed, as if to introduce a further elaboration. I fixed my eye on the end of my fork, refusing to be drawn in. A woman entered, making the bell above the door hop, and ordered fried potatoes for her husband, laid up after a hod of bricks had fallen on him. I felt safe for the moment from distraction.
Ambition was not yet among my virtues. Or is it a vice? I’d aspired to nothing, striven for nothing, envied no man his good fortune or lot in life. My desires had been modest enough to make me a Christian example of temperance. Or a Hindu one, for that matter. Religions look very much the same, once you scrape off the crust. God is everywhere, unless He is nowhere. But I believed myself to be in love with this Springfield girl. Taking stock, I had little to offer her. The feed and grain store didn’t pay much. I managed to make ends meet only because I was living gratis in the funeral car. Even if it weren’t soon be on its way to Omaha, I couldn’t expect a young bride to take up residence where two bodies had ripened into corruption, no matter how famous their former owners. When the fire’s gone out, a leper is the equal of a king—and vice versa—death being the one true democracy. Until my prospects improved, I couldn’t expect to marry her.
How could I have forgotten the name of someone so dear to me? Unless I’d mistaken my feelings. What did I know of love? What do I know of it now? Heartbreak. Heartbreak and a misery—that’s what love is. But what if the confidences I’ve received in the whiskey-scented confessionals of barrooms, ba
rracks, and backwater depots down the years from love’s besotted, disappointed, jilted, and abused victims are untrue? What if love is really what the poets say of it? I don’t feel equal to the subject. Desire, maybe; the reckless passions that scald without warmth or tenderness, certainly. But not love. Of this, I felt sure even then. I pushed a strip of bacon cased in congealed fat around my plate, feeling once more in the trough of the wave, waiting for momentum to lift me up. Disgusted, I slapped a few coins on the table, wiped my mustache, and left.
Tomas Bergman, who owned the business, had gone to Lake Springfield for the ice fishing, as he did each year when the water froze. Except for a half-deaf old black man who hauled feed sacks in and out of the barn, I was alone in the store. Customers would be few on the day after Thanksgiving. Dog-tired, I lay down on a shelf behind the counter and slept. I dreamed, I suppose; but I’ll be damned if I can remember what. No, I won’t make up a dream simply to round out my story. While I might not be interested in history, except for the parts I clambered through, I’d like to tell the truth, insofar as I am able and inasmuch as it can be told. Funny, how I’d come to believe the fabrication concerning the loss of my eye!
Spotswood had said that to start again was impossible; that all we could do was wait. He didn’t say for what, nor did he say why we couldn’t begin anew. I should have asked, but the twilight that had brought out in him a strain of melancholy befuddled me and turned my tongue to India rubber. Night came and silenced him with gloomy thoughts: of Honest Abe, perhaps, stretched out inside his trestled coffin, or of some private, embittering grief that caused a portion of him to despise Lincoln, me, and the entire white race. Yet, I’d seen him touch my uniform the way someone would Jesus’ robe or shroud. Maybe an old slave’s habit of ingratiation remained in him, stubborn and ineradicable. No, he was not so devious a man. I wish I could have seen into his heart, which, like everyone else’s, was shut. I sometimes wonder if I see truly into my own.