Lincoln's Assassin

by J F Pennington

  ***

  Lutz and I gathered no more suspicions than our previous positions had recommended. He because of his enormous wealth and continued successes—for it was never luck—as riverboat gambler, and I still making a certain amount of headway as the latest member of my family’s considerable theatrical destiny. Still, that part of my fate seemed less absolute these days. Often for periods of weeks at a time, I was beginning to lose my voice. During performances, during rehearsals. When I awoke in the morning, as I lay myself to bed. And always, I could find only one relief. Never a cure.

  ***

  Before I continue, I must take a moment to tell you of something you may already know. My voice. While you may not hear these very words as I pronounce them into their scripted place, you have certainly heard the reports of the younger Wilkes. Of his dark eyes, his athletic countenance, his passions—as quick upon the stage as off. His voice. My voice.

  Oh, do not think me terribly vain to occupy your time with these few notes. Do not accuse me of conceit or pride until you understand the object of my digression and the manner of its expression. For they are not my words that you will have heard time and again exclaim the beauty of the voice that currently mouths its last public utterance. Truly they were never my thoughts at all, except they had been given me too many times by others. After a first and brief introduction, after a single word—it often would seem—of greeting or inquiry, until the intended compliment appeared all but premeditated. Always the same.

  How long was it before I realized the power of such a gift? Not very, I admit. In my early youth I discovered its—not my, you will notice—ability to readily charm any woman upon first entreaty. And here I would proceed as if I could explain it, but I cannot. No, nor imagine at all, but I can tell you that it is. It was. It always has been.

  Forgive me again, for here I would recollect a first comment upon its strangeness. I was a mere lad, some seven years of age. What was said I can less than recall, but our Bel Air neighbor good Mrs. Stephens made first in my memory the remark that was to precede so many others—and with a chuckling smile of which I had less than any understanding.

  Or the day my young classmate tapped upon my shoulder to whisper her difficulty sitting behind me in our Sunday catechism, that when I asked or answered questions during recital, the back of my chair abutting her desk, her table shook with the timber of my twelve years. She reddened only where she had meant to explain.

  And that rain-soaked night at seventeen, when I fancied a kiss from one of the young ingénues in my father’s company, though she was surely already in her twenties. A laryngitis brought about by the dampness of the evening and my foolishness during that day caused me to immediately deem as futile my chances for so much as a second glance. It is perhaps the only occasion I remember where, voice or no, my powers were received.

  ***

  As I rode my horse Cola from Graysville to Gloryton one bright midday, the Union picket guards raised their arms, more ready and willing to fire as not. It was completely the opposite sentiment from those in the actual field.

  “Hey, Edgar!” shouted the young guard on duty to his older companion. “It’s Mr. Booth, Mr. Wilkes Booth!”

  “What’s that?” came the disinterested reply from an unshaven sergeant with jet black hair and gray sideburns.

  “The actor, the great actor!”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Of the famous Booth family!”

  “Never heard of him! You daft Edmund?”

  “Sorry, sir,” he said to me alone. “There were reasons some of us joined the army. Not all of us have ever had the distinct pleasure of seeing a theatrical performance. Less one with a gentleman like you. Don’t you worry, he’ll know who you are one day.”

  “Thank you,” I managed to grin, glancing past the apologetic soldier toward his superior, who continued to ignore the two of us as he stoked a pitiful lightwood flame of campfire. “That is a great comfort,” I conceded. “A very great comfort.”

  ***

  Lutz’s trust of me and faith in my sentiments and abilities was borne out of more than merely my now-infamous vociferations. John Lutz was born in Baltimore and for that we were, of a kind, kinsmen. More importantly he had for some time been involved with the actress Laura Keene. It was in her acting company my brother Edwin had practically apprenticed those several years before. Lutz knew, firsthand through Edwin’s disapproving filial rants, the true nature of my sympathies. That which was once enough to make me claim certain treasons for my own, just to engender my brother’s foolish wrath, was finally abundant to have me perform much more.

  Can you imagine what it was we smuggled, or must I satisfy your curiosity before you have had time to comprehend my current state and ever think the worst? Or will you be disappointed to know I was no pirate, no true adventurer risking all for wagonloads of arms and munitions—merely the transporter of quinine. At least, that is how it began. Still, even from the first, it was not the less delicate and disheartening. War is ever war.

  Within less than two hours I found myself in a Confederate hospital camp. The burgeoning acres of blue just over that last ridge had given way to an anaemic sea of gray in the little smoke-filled valley. It was dirty and bloody and ragged and ripped, but it was still a comfort to me, this gray. As I crossed the guard post, an audible murmur fanned out ahead of me. From amid a group of weary young soldiers someone asked if I would play Richard for them, “Or Hamlet, or Hemeya?”

  “All of them, or whatever you wish!” I replied, struck by the difference of this reception from the northern one at noon. “Only first show me to Doctor Bickley’s tent.”

  This was the name Lutz had given me as my contact, and I never put it together until I faced him for the first time. I recognized at once the man I had met on the train to Charles Town those years before to watch the hanging of John Brown.

  There were no chuckles left in the surgeon’s eyes to remind of my having once mistaken the doomed abolitionist whose fate we swore to seal with a slave-owning friend of Colonel Lee. He recognized me too, but was only as cordial as his situation could permit. At this point of the war that was not much.

  George Washington Lafayette Bickley was stationed with Stuart’s regiment in North Carolina. Stuart was forever at the front of every doomed foray upon which the South embarked, and the doctor had his hands full. He was no longer the lean and scrappy surgeon I had once met, still tall, but now gaunt and possessed of a personality as pallid as his bearded stubble. Understandably. There was little time for him to shave, less to be amused.

  But I was crossing the pickets daily on a pass signed by General Grant himself. It was thought that ones as I might color and entertain the ashen troops. I, being part of an already traditional family, had even less problems at the sentry points. I could nearly have as easily smuggled arms as quinine and morphine.

  ***

  Bickley had his own way of showing appreciation for my services, though I required none. Still, he was of the mind that we were somehow brothers in the Hippocratic craft—my supplying him withal—and so we had to share a smoke he said, that day we were re-met.

  I unharnessed my horse beside the operation tent of a thirty-year-old man dressed in the white robes of a surgeon and the insigne cap of an officer. His hands and gown were stained with blood, his brow besweated. Unwrapping Cola’s corded harness I produced quantities of quinine to which the surgeon reacted enthusiastically.

  “If it were in my power to do more I surely would to see these children suffer and yield their boyish lives limb by limb,” he said. “But better they should lose an arm or leg to need than to fraternal strategies as in the prisoner camps of our illustrious foe. Their surgeons, I am told, are instructed to leave no son of the South whole of limb, that he will ever be disqualified from becoming a Freemason. I would swear to save all but a few, for all their calls for expedience and supply shortages.

  “Still, there is a limit to the effects of chemistr
y,” choked the major. “And none know better than I. Come. To my tent,” he suggested in the doubly commanding tone of physician and officer.

  I followed him through the makeshift city of canvas, the bivouacked rifles, the stacked and leaning soldiers, some uniformed in gray or yellow or green, many lucky to be booted.

  In the midst of the camp was the surgeon’s tent. Taller, larger than the rest, the folded flap of its entrance wiped rusty with weeks of a doctor’s work.

  “Shall I prepare an extra needle for you, Mr. Booth?” he asked as he held back the dried bloodstains for me to enter. “It will help make it somewhat bearable,” he suggested. “It will help.”

  We checked each other nervously while the camp’s collective moans became apparent for what they were.

  ***

  “Why are all them boys dyin’, Mr. Booth?” said the powder-faced soldier with sleepless eyes, hardly seventeen, his lower body ending in what might have been two split branches of birch.

  Bickley prepared the towels and hacksaw, and I considered administering to myself twice the dosage we had just given this brave and spirited youngster. Only his lower jaw was still capable of movement.

  “Weren’t tellin’ nobody what to do four years ago. Weren’t killin’ nobody—white nor colored. We was happy. Me an’ Sue Ellen. Times was peaceful. Now they’s just killin’ an’ killin’. An’ dyin’. An’ Mr. Lincoln’s jus—”

  I looked up from where I’d been watching Bickley work with his practiced and studied discipline. He looked up too. The jawbone was now as frozen as the rest of the boy’s face. Bickley lifted the torn swathe of bedding from where it lay across the lad’s chest to cover the motionless eyes. He signaled me to follow him to the next cot, two aides left behind to silently smooth the ripples of our wake while a third, lantern raised high, continued on with us.

  “This is Mr. John Wilkes Booth,” Bickley introduced me again. “The greatest actor in all o’ these Confederated states. Famous for his pronouncements of Shakespeare and Cicero.”

  This soldier’s eyes were bandaged with what looked to have once been part of a Union uniform. Yet that did not dampen the enthusiasm he held for a visitor of any sort, particularly of such a great and famous actor. Even if he could trust the report of the introduction, I doubted he had ever heard my name any more than many of the others. Likely not at all. They were simple boys who were fighting and dying, not the kind who spent evening after evening at the theater. Still, the doctor’s charm had worked its desired spell.

  “Would you like to hear a bit of reciting from Oedipus or Hamlet?” asked Bickley.

  “Oh, yes!” beamed the lad in a muffled trumpet of a voice without choosing one or the other perhaps unfamiliar selections. “Would you—Mr. Booth?” he wheezed, holding out his remaining arm to the phantom but accepted player.

  So I recited while the doctor worked and every movement of the boy’s forehead showed his appreciation for us both. The one of pleasure as grateful as the one of pain. Bickley’s sweat seemed salve to the wounds as it dripped steadily upon his work, stopping only when he reeled to curse the aide who unsteadily switched the lantern from hand to fatiguing hand. My own declamations were pitifully absurd as I spoke of ancient plagues and murders in measured tones. Fictions only in the face of such truth.

  From cot to steaming cot we made our way, sometimes successfully, sometimes too late for even a chance at success. The vapors of sweating blood and perspiring fear mingling with the imagined shapes of souls set loose into what one could only pray to be a welcoming sky. At last we reached the end of the fifth row of makeshift beds.

  Here our work seemed hardest still. Though some of these soldiers were old and seemingly full-worn before any of this had started, most were only boys, surely younger than I. Yet there was a certain ageless glance about all of them. Something around their eyes that made one think they had lived a long, long time. That same something made it easier to watch them when they faded once and for all.

  But this last one was different. There was nothing of the others in his eyes. Only beauty. A deep, certain beauty—impossible to describe, but less easily denied. Bickley saw it, too. He explained it as a look that is often there to warn a surgeon from being too optimistic with his own work, confiding, “Those are the ones who always die.”

  But there was something else. How can I tell you? I do not know myself. I seemed to look deeply into this boy’s still and glassy eyes, but could only see my own image. My reflection. Standing, helpless and somewhat full of horror, in the light of the one pale lamp, and with the plain effects of one simple needle.

  “Am I all right?” Corporal Dunlap kept muttering, hardly aware of his own words, the silence upon which they fell or his clearly mortal wounds. The blood seeped from bandages over no fewer than four large gashes as he looked at and through us.

  “Am I all right?” in cadent tones. “Am I all right? Am I—”

  Although his last breath was contorted and sorely searched, at the moment of its letting go the lad’s face became even more pure than his less-than-a-score of never-shaved years. And there I held him to have the purity and peace of a swaddled babe. A closed-eye cherub answering the final call, borne weightless by a sudden sprouting of the soul’s wings, the breath of heavenly chorales full upon his parted lips. So must transfigure all men in death who die true. Not to return to the dust and ash, but to the first moment of gardened innocence, the mind’s eye of creation.

  I fancy even the oldest of them had half that look in the end. A second’s recognition of the unseen and unheard, that which will be forever. The semblance of feathers in the air above and a sourceless wind to cross their brows and mouths and hearts one final time.

  Harper’s Ferry comes to mind, not just for Bickley, but the images of its residue, which read so easily on the tattered sleeve and torn and soiled face of Brown. The helpless sense of loss, the smoking heat of blaring arms. The futile screams of ignorant young men. The week-old stench of innocent corpses sent thither by an incomprehensible filial duty. Yet, all its mighty repugnance, its acrimonious sensations—the sights, smells and sounds that all the more greeted my hasty desire to have some share in what surely would become a historical event—could still not have prepared me for the fetid horrors of post-battle hospital tents. I marched into a score of them with similar, if more mature and responsible urgency. And limped out of each with something less than I had imagined taking in.

  After a time, I knew my very soul had been so deeply stained with spurting limbs and fevered glares of the shocked and guiltless that I would never again feel an innocent, any less a murderer. One could not merely watch or wait without a sense of participation, complicity. It was as if I had fired every scathing mortar and carbine, plunged each bayonet.

  If not I, then who?

  Entr’acte

  The Day

  The bearded tyrant sat grim and still. I could not hear him breathe or snore, but I imagined he slept then, as ever. How fitting it would be to interrupt his sleep only long enough to send him to a lasting one. One where his actions, visions, fantasies, could be neither enforced nor expressed. Let him be as some memory only, or some chastened devotee whose vows of silence and prayer may inspire without influence. But let it be done.

  The deed awaited me. The result was my arm’s length away. All anticipated my action. The seconds and scene changes, the minutes and final exits, the ten o’clock curtain and the tolling of twelve.

  The gaslights cast their first glories upon the gaily dressed ladies, the proud, blue-uniformed men, fresh from the celebration of their short-lived victory under a shorter-lived tyrant. All seemed joined in some hapless and misdirected dance of conquest to the strains of the orchestra warming its brass and strings, while I wondered in my heart at my own metal and pluck.

  And I questioned the coincidence of my thought. Knew I had not planned to martyr him by spilling his blood on such a day, yet maybe by some subconscious reserve. Had he not proclaimed himself a k
ing of kings? Had he not spun his fabled sermons with allegory and common device? And promised to feed the multitudes with loaves and fishes where only Pharaoh’s empty coffers could be found and blood-stained rivers flowed?

  With these considerations and reasonings, what could stop my perfect scheme? The horses waiting at every checkpoint. My escape ensured, my reception only slightly imaginable. His death will be less remembered than any incendiary dome. And my action that of Tell, or a much-debated and advised Sanhedrin.

  And I knew the moment of my deed. The precise instant of the thing. Had I not rehearsed Taylor’s scene a hundred times and played it full a dozen more? Had I not played here too, but one month before?

  Mrs. Mountchessington exited in a flurry and a single player stood upon the stage. His cue well-met, his lines well-spoken, I crossed and played my business out. And it was done.

  Act II

  The Journey Home

  Only one shot was fired in the entire affair—that which killed the assassin.

  —New York Times, Thursday, April 27, 1865

  As an officer was about placing the irons upon Harrold’s wrists, Booth fired upon the party from the barn, which was returned by a sergeant of the sixteenth New York, the ball striking Booth in the neck, from the effects of which he died in about four hours.

  Booth, before breathing his last, was asked if he had anything to say, when he replied, “Tell my mother I died for my country.”

  —The Star, Washington, Thursday, April 27

  At first Booth denied that was his name, or that he had killed the president. Harrold, also, at first called him some other name.

  —Evening Post, Washington, Thursday, April 27

  He lived two hours after he was shot, whispering blasphemies against the government and sending a farewell message to his mother.

  —Associated Press, Washington, Thursday, April 27