Lincoln's Assassin

by J F Pennington

  People had been arguing about the issue of slavery for as long as the Union had been around. Longer. But Brown had been lately making the headlines with a bold attempt to enforce his beliefs in the inherent evils of the slave trade and institution. What started the previous year as bloody confrontations in Kansas had moved into our heartland. He holed up at the armory in the small town of Harper’s Ferry, demanding immediate attention to his desires on threat of either controlling or destroying the river crossing. For a time he was actually rumored to expect support from other nations – from exactly where was unknown and unlikely, but not altogether unreasonable, as the circulated stories attested. Any man with the courage and daring to hold an entire town hostage could not be underestimated.

  After hearing descriptions of Brown’s wildly prophetic features, accounts of his divine inspiration and the tragic sacrifice of his sons, I was even more resigned to go, but met with a modicum of opposition. Three of the officers in charge, while insisting they had much else to do, yet stood long enough to make an exaggerated fuss over my desire to travel with the regiment, said the train was strictly for military use. I had begun to speak of my many years as a cadet to very little effect when one of the officers excused himself after commenting on my father’s signet ring. It bore the initials HTWSSTKS in a circular fashion around a broad cross and had once belonged to a great uncle.

  I imagined it had some sort of theatrical significance, and when first given it as a boy I pored over volumes of my father’s plays and poetry seeking the title or selection to which the letters referred. Week after week I searched to no avail, but committed it to memory as “How the weather starts, stops, then keeps storming!” The only help my father volunteered was the key to his library trunk, a chuckle and news that it would come in handy if I ever took to travel east. But at the moment, south by south-west was my proposed direction.

  Inside five minutes’ time the young officer returned while the other two continued to engage me, still protesting the urgency of their mission and the limited time they had to argue with civilians. He handed a packet and uniform to me saying, “Compliments o’ th’ Co’nel,” and I was instantly, if temporarily, appointed assistant commissary or quartermaster.

  “Which colonel is that?” I wondered aloud.

  “Why, Co’nel Lee,” he answered with a deep and toothy grin. “Th’ Old Man, hisself. Co’nel Bobby Lee.”

  It was some time before I understood the significance of this officer’s recognition of me, thinking at the moment it was only my father’s name that recommended me to his favor.

  On the ride down to Charles Town I met another soldier, no older than myself, who acted as both surgeon and chaplain for the regiment. He too was intrigued by the stories about the Harper’s Ferry incident, and we shared our feelings that, regardless, the now-caged beast named Brown was a man of dedication and purpose. An abolitionist—a word that would shortly gain much more attention than any other in our nation’s history, he and his sons and the handful of zealots who felt their passion held the crossing at Harper’s Ferry hostage to a demand for the end to slavery. This was not a new idea, but his passion gave it a fire and authority it had never known. Still, there were laws that men had vested with authority and power, and by those laws the wretch and his righteous renegades were confronted, and by those laws they would be put to death.

  “But what are they doing?” I asked the doctor as we stepped off the train together. “Is he going to be freed?”

  “Wha’? Who?” he answered, flustered by my choice of words.

  He followed my eyes to where Colonel Lee apparently spoke to the very object of our mission. Several inches taller than the colonel, his hair and beard were not as hoary as I had been led to believe, but every bit as wild. Yet it was not purpose I saw now in his otherwise decisive brow. It was laughter. The two of them laughed and caroused like old schoolmates, as they engaged in a prolonged and double-fisted handshake.

  “Tha’ ain’t him!” chuckled the doctor. “Tha’s Mr. Pike, a good friend o’ the colonel. Though, them frontier boys all looks ’bout th’ same. Mr. Pike shows up at some o’ th’ queerest times.” He laughed again. “Tha’ man ain’t never loved no niggers!”

  “Who does?” I remarked distractedly, wondering where or if I had previously heard Pike’s name.

  “Truth be told,” he answered seriously, “rumors are th’ Old Man! I don’t know for certain. Only wha’ I hear. But one thing’s sure—he don’t keep none at Arlington House. An’ they say tha’s cause he don’t think it’s right.”

  I looked again to the two comrades, trying to make some sense of it. Something was happening already. I could feel it. But I didn’t know just what.

  My turn at guard duty came the evening of the third day. Not turn, really. Thirty-two dollars I paid for the privilege of overseeing him for one hour of a particular private’s watch.

  “Don’t let ’im scare ye’,” said the young private as he counted his money with a smile. “And don’t be disappointed when he won’t talk to ye’. Outside of mumbling a few prayers, he hasn’t said a word since ’is arrest. Remember, nobody can know I’ve gone—’ceptin’ you has t’. And then, jes’ tell ’em I had t’ get sick.”

  A bright sun shone its last rays forth through dark gray clouds as the soft rain continued to fall. “The devil’s beatin’ ’is wife,” said the private, looking skyward. “But I don’t think it’s with no leg o’ mutton! It’s with the promise of this man’s two legs swingin’ in the wind,” he nodded and grinned as he sauntered away.

  Then I saw him, the man Brown, slouched in the corner of his cell, his body stripped to shirt and trousers alone. Scarcely acknowledging our actions, he yet seemed fully aware as he closed his bible with a lover’s fingers.

  The cell in which Brown was kept was a familiarly hollow gray cube, seven feet wide, seven feet tall and seven feet deep. It had a barred door at the front and a small barred window at its rear, and Brown looked every bit the prophet of yore to which he had been likened in the Tribune and Post. His savage white hair fell in plaintive waves to his shoulders and his beard was snowy with implicit wisdom.

  He was not a huge man—though quite tall, yet he filled his cell in a way that made his shoulders seem to hunch and his head bow with a forced obeisance, which withheld an attitude of defiance. I, who was never at a loss for words and had insisted I should take watch for the chance to speak alone to the possessor of such an undeniable presence, found myself awed by the very look of the man.

  As soon as the outer door clapped shut he began to speak, but not in quiet psalms or verse or parables. His words, if uncommon, were clear, his voice quite like thunder, matching his grave and stormy look.

  “Do you know what you are doing here?” he asked with a tilt of his head, directing an ancient gaze out the moon-split window.

  Although it might have been addressed to any issue and any one, there was no doubt in my mind to whom and what he referred.

  “Why the mysteries of life have called your name outside of sleep, so that you might respond while waking to their call?”

  He turned his stone-etched eyes to meet mine and answered before I said a word, the foremost, if unframed question in my mind.

  “Our lives are not our own, not really. Their purposes are ours to find—as Mr. Emerson says. But, once discovered, what choice is there? That you or I should live and die without some end accomplished is hardly worthy for the mind of God to have conceived.”

  He walked toward me, his giant form and oaken features gaining in their majesty and effect, the seeming fire above his grizzled brow, a living forge for the laws of men or every one of my curiosities. His body was like the fabled pillar of smoke, his eyes reflections of the pillar of fire, and upon these two columns the strength of the man Brown rested its trust.

  “Will you pray with me?” he asked, sinking to his knees and closing his eyes as if there could be only one reply.

  “Great Heavenly Father,” he b
egan with commanding humility. “What are we to do—I who have these many months been the servant of your will, and this man, whose journey just begins? I am chained, gratefully by your most ferocious will. His chains he scarcely feels —yet knows they are but part of your design.”

  His eyes were still closed, but I could feel their watchfulness, as if many others were present. I looked around to see we were indeed alone and realized I was not only kneeling, but my hands, as Brown’s, were folded in prayer.

  Suddenly his eyes opened with their kindled fury, and he reached through the bars, enormous fingers wrapping like pulsing manacles around my wrists. Drawing me as close as our barred barrier would permit, he stared intently at me with the vast honesty of a fasting wilderness.

  “These hands,” he said, looking at his own knotted knuckles. “These hands have wrought the Tempest’s soul. Those hands,” as he shook me with a horrible power, “Shall free it! Those hands have not seen their day. There will be a time when they would rather fill an endless cup than sip the waters satisfied.

  “What will come, all men must fear, though none can say.”

  Ten years earlier, my father had taken our family to New York at my birthday to attend a performance of William Macready as Macbeth. Edwin, at 16, was just starting to accept roles, Asia was 14, Joe 9, and I was turning 11. Junius and Rosalie were to meet us at the theater, but could not get close, because that very night the tragic Astor Riot took place, claiming a score of lives and injuring an hundred others. Both Macready and Edwin Forrest were playing the role of the Scottish lord at the same time, and a theater-going city could not reconcile who was greater. As it was my birthday, and in typical fashion, my father, just as typically drunk at the time, blamed me and my birthday for interrupting the season of the world’s finest actor. He meant neither Forrest nor Macready but himself. Was it not ever so?

  And now another self-proclaimed scion was again proclaiming my defect.

  Brown turned to look at me, showing a kind of luminescence. I felt a strange foreboding and was reminded of yet another time—of family, not my father, but my own dear sister. The following year, two or three weeks before my twelfth birthday, I had my palm read at a traveling carnival for sheer amusement and came home with the fateful news I had been born to cause great misery.

  And now, all my life seemed fluid in front of this Brown’s vision, and every image, recognizable or no, was sure and true. So penetratingly did he look into my eyes, I could not doubt his second sight.

  ***

  “The gypsy said, the gypsy said,” repeated Asia to my deep, stump-seated afternoon thoughts. Her impish smile and glistening forehead mixed with the scent of early magnolia to tilt my credulous senses.

  “Pay no attention to that old hag,” she dismissed. “She is just some circus stroller who will have her dollars by scaring young and trusting boys into believing she has their answer to ‘life’s great mysteries.’”

  “She knew I was born on a Thursday!”

  “You told her your birthday, didn’t you?”

  “Thursday’s child has far to go! How did she know?”

  “It is not that difficult to calculate.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Asia gave me half a smile, but I knew she was struggling to explain.

  “She was right!” I concluded, staring directly at her.

  She lowered her brow and squinted her eyes with a mocking intensity. Rolling her arms conjuringly about my head, she adopted the drama of a Slavic accent as she circled the tree stump on which I sat.

  “Fvadt she fvas rhighdt aboudt fvere youhr eyes. Szey shall charhm fvone szousand unlucky szouls.”

  “If that is to be true, I must do it deliberately,” I dared to boast.

  “No. By accident’al,” she exceptioned with a haughty air, grabbing my arm by the wrist and pointing to the criss-crossed lines. “By accident’al. It isz much more sze gentlemanly szing to do fviszout trhying.” Making again to swoon, she released my hand and looked deeply at me, “Oh! Sze moszt handsome of men in sze countrhy, in zse fvorldt.” She sidled next to me. “Ahndt szose eyes. Youhr eyes! Szey shall charhm fvone szousand szouls ahndt break fvone szousand hearts. Szey fvouldt breahk mine—ifv I fvouldt ledt szem,” she pulled herself away, as if to break her own charm. “Ahndt ifv I fvas not—”

  “Not what, not what?” I called to her, half angry, half laughing nervously, as she broke off and danced into the budding hickory of the Cockeysville woods, her arms still twirling poetically, her body spinning a favorite summer dress into calico waves and hoops.

  “Your sister, silly!” she replied in her own sweet voice, tripping backwards over a broken branch and giggling as she fell.

  She continued to laugh as she got up and skipped off gaily. I, of course, followed.

  I tried to forget the incident, but there was a lingering uncertainty to Asia’s mockings and the cautions of the old gypsy woman, and April would ever after hold promises of more than merely nature’s spring fulfilled – but of mine own hands, and mine own eyes.

  “This is where you are coming from, this is where you are going,” said the hoary old woman as she balanced my two hands in her own, weighing them together and separately and leaving me with a sense of wanting. “This is what you are given,” looking into my eyes as she raised my left hand slightly. “And this is what you will make of it,” now lifting my right.

  Her voice had not the Romany lilt Asia imagined, sounding rather like the one or other grandmother I had never known but who knew me completely—always. She spoke in clear, unmistakable English, at once distant yet connected.

  I dreamed out over Tudor’s acres, my family’s lands, the rambling greens running into one another, the rolling hills and jagged crests of Maryland. I did not watch them alone. A quick look over my right shoulder. No one. My left. Still. And yet I heard a voice, his name, the sound of his soul trapped within those woods. The gurgling of his last breaths. Some one bathed his feet just below the bend in the creek.

  ***

  Brown seemed to see the same aspect of grief in my features. I could nearly see the tears welling up in his eyes, like those of the boy who makes his first kill at the hunt. While knowing that he must eat, still he wonders and despairs that it should be the flesh of another living being. The motionless form with still-wet eyes incomprehensibly panicked in its last moments upon the grass.

  “Blood,” he said without bending his brow. “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged, but with blood. Your time will come, when you must do that for which you were designed, despite the cost to your life—and soul, despite the disapproval of those whom once you loved, but may not see. Even I might hate you for it—if I were not dead.”

  “You will die in the morning.”

  The words escaped without my knowing how or from where, except that it was a place of fear. His reply did nothing to ease the feeling.

  “In the morning. Or on the evening when you fulfill my dream.”

  “What dream?” I wondered, but could not speak, only watch him as he once again turned his eyes to the dark gray corner.

  At the end of my hour, the private came back to relieve me, fastening the brass buttons of a brown oversized redingote.

  “Gave me just enough time to win his jacket at dice. No one questioned that a quartermaster should be doing the duty of a private, I suppose?”

  “No. No one.”

  “And no word out of him either?” he added, expecting only a single answer.

  “Just some mumbled prayers,” I replied and walked away.

  Scene IV

  How the gay sledges like meteors flash by—

  Bright for a moment, then lost to the eye!

  I suppose I was a handsome youth. Beautiful even, if I may dare to use that word—for it is not mine own. My sister Asia would often tell me so in a way I never fully understood and also truly frightened me somewhat.

  “Oh John, those dark eyes of yours will surely be your undoing,” s
he would say playfully. “If you were passing clever, they should be the same for all the world. And your ivory-sculpted arms—what would I do if I were a stranger woman?”

  And though we might imagine it betimes, it was but one more thing that could not be. Then she would laugh wickedly and walk a careful circle around where I might stand or sit, fetch a curl or two from its place upon my head, tug playfully, and laugh again. Being only slightly more than two years apart in age—and with no other relations in America—we were as much cousins as brother and sister. At least to our minds.

  “We might well be sprung from different mothers—or fathers,” Asia would hint, before either of us understood the possibility of that truth.

  Our time together seemed always an event, a holiday. So it was whenever I came home to Tudor Hall between the spring and autumn sessions of the St. Charles’ Academy, we would rise early each morning with a child’s yuletide enthusiasm and read late into the nights from Poe or some such latest entry in Burton’s or The Messenger. Each would try to wring the fullest effect from the delightfully macabre words, to outdo the dramatic tones of the other, until we would fall into a rolling contagion of hushed laughter that our mother should not be awakened.

  My sister’s name, anything but Christian, had ever influenced her desires to study the Eastern philosophies and even those of the pre-Columbian American continent. She seemed to read constantly and was, from childhood, somewhat the family expert on primitive societies and religion. Her middle name, Frigga, for the Scandinavian goddess of love, tempered all her research with a kind of icy maternity that at once understood and yet held all at a distance more worthy of reason and realistic perspective.

  But when she laughed it was the knowledge of that most primal part of herself that glinted unashamedly in her dark eyes. That same strange knowing that led her one day to kiss me more fondly than even cousins might.

  I never had to kiss a girl, to beg or ask or plead for favor. As with Asia, they kissed me. First, last, always.

  What clever joy was mine to watch the other boys trip and flatter for the courage to crave a soft hand. Their own full-drenched by the final moment of request and possible acceptance, only adding to their shy discomfort.