The brook, from which I had artlessly washed and drank that morning, sprang wonderfully from the greening crags atop the hill. Across its mouth spanned a rough-hewn tower forged of the kind of ancient stones that dressed the tiny valley where I had passed my latest night of perspiring dreams. It was not an abandoned arrastra after all, but the newly consecrated monastery of St Alban.
I cannot explain my feeling of relief or the soothing effect of the plain white cross of which I had been told, marking the foot of the small winding path. With hardly more than an iron-ringed knock upon its simple oaken door, the man in tatters—and I looked more like Badin this moment than any member of my true family—was taken in for supper, a necessary bath and my first real night’s sleep in more than a week.
So, for three fortnights I lived the life of a Camaldolese monk. My rags were exchanged routinely upon my arrival for coarse but clean muslin trousers and a rope-belted frock. Neither was I questioned, nor was I engaged in idle conversation. The order, being devoted to a contemplative life, our days were spent in silence and prayer—and work.
During the day I helped the brothers complete construction of individual shelters—the second of which became my own for the time I was there, the first having become that of the Abbot. They had spent most of their initial time building the hermitage’s place of worship, a central hall for washing, cooking and eating, and the adjoining dormitory where I spent my first week with all of the others. After sunset only group prayer was considered before retiring for the night. The vow of silence certainly worked in my favor, and because of the past several anxious months, I welcomed the change toward workmanlike monotony, enthusiastically joining the brothers in their otherwise humdrum society.
From morning vigils and lauds to evening vespers, we labored together, with only an hour’s repose for Eucharistic prayer and meditation. Two small suppers, each granted a quarter hour, were shared during the day. The simple meals of wheat biscuit and chicken fixings, or corn bread and common doings, were eaten in silence and alone when possible.
This was a brand of Catholicism I had known nothing about but which aimed at a spiritual and physical purity I could not but help admire. Whether it was the fact I continued to keep my face clean-shaven and hair shorn, or the unlikely rags in which I had first appeared, or the disassociation from all things material and the news of the day, I never felt suspect—not for a moment, though this complete lack of distinction had a rather strange side-effect for me.
Strophe
I am dead. In a Benedictine monastery of the Camaldolese order in the Lost River wilds of Rockingham County. Sworn to work, silence and prayer. My secrets are my secrets, my sins are mankind’s. But who is my God? Where is He? Will He only show Himself when I no longer seek His face; be mine when I no longer hunger and thirst for His presence, comfort me when I am finally ready and able to console myself but need no consolation?
***
It was not Henry Johnson who came at last one evening with a signal whistle throughout the coomb below my hermit’s cell, as the thrush opened their throats for a last sunlit song upon the deepening world. What trail I might have left for any to follow I cannot imagine but when I heard it first, still was there no doubt as to its purpose or intent.
“Whooo-whit,” came the first of the three partridge trills up through the gathering mists. “Whooo-whit,” again, then finally, “whooo-whit-whit.”
I gratefully awaited the last of the series before responding with three of my own. Shuttering my window with a deep sigh I then gathered my journal pages and folded them back into the small leather satchel, reflexively tightening the belt of my frock. My ankle was newly wrapped, and I was ready.
Henry’s cousin startled me as much by his looks as by his appearance at the door to my cell, carrying an overstuffed valise as if he meant to join me for the week. Brother Pascal stood just behind him with a strange though trusting look upon his sun-freckled brow. Then, with a solemn almost knowing look he retreated wordlessly to the other side of the flagstone courtyard where he finished helping Brother Arnaud light the several torchieres around its perimeter, always left burning at night.
“Who and what do you know?” I asked simply.
“Everyz’ing,” came the hushed and throaty shrill of my visitor. “What do you know—Booz’?”
His skin was very black, much more so than Henry’s, and his accent was Creole. I must have turned quite white with surprise as I nodded assent to his one-word question.
“H’eet eez no wondair you find my rhace so strange, as cou’zahn Henri ’as told to me. We share z’e same eyes, but mine h’are zhust z’e reflexion of my skeen. I wondair what h’eet eez z’at yours do mirroir?”
I looked at him quizzically, first to be sure I had understood what he said and meant to say, and then doubly when his constant gaze confirmed I had. I wondered if he had the answer, as he seemed to, for his own question.
At his silent beckoning, I accompanied his waddling form through the courtyard and out into another unknowable if somehow less uncertain night. I waited for a moment at the monastery door for some sign of farewell from Pascal or Arnaud—or any of the others, but soon realized there would be none. I caught a glimpse of the two of them as they continued their silent rounds without a glance in my direction, and I closed the door behind me.
***
“Marechal Antaeus Philippe de Mercure et Le Main,” he said with a thick accent, deep flourish and a courteous pride as he led the way down the path, and past the break where the small cross marked where I had first caught sight of the monastery after stumbling up from the river.
“You must call me Ma’zhor ’And, h’as do my coo’zahn.”
The major, Major Hand—Henry Johnson’s cousin—the man to whom I was now entrusting my safety, was perhaps three feet tall. Black as pitch and three feet tall! Stopping for a moment only he quickly addressed my unspoken if obvious concern.
“Do not worry, Monsieur Booz’, I h’am steel enough z’e man to ’elp you to h’escape. I h’am a dwarf, not a mizh’ette, which means my ’art beats h’as strong h’and eez h’every beet h’as big h’as yours. Yes, and oz’er z’ings, h’as well,” he smiled strangely. “I h’am certainly more z’e man z’an Monsieur Boston Coh’rbett!”
He let out a quiet shrill that I soon realized was intended to be a laugh.
“Who?”
“Oh, z’at eez true, eez eet not? I h’am sorry. I forget. You ’ave not been but ’ere z’ese several weeks. You ’ave not ’eard z’ee news? You h’ar dead, Monsieur Booz’! Yes, quite dead, indeed. And z’e man w’at keel you eez Monsieur Boston Coh’rbett.”
As we entered the twilight wood he let out his shrill laugh, pleased with himself. Laughing all the while he intermittently turned in stride in a quick circle and using his bag as counterweight, as if he were dancing at some fairy cotillion, before continuing on. Curious, I followed him into the deepening night, often noting how his winding steps ahead of me appeared influenced by the phantom music of an elfin jig. Or was it just his size and aspect?
I had spent six weeks at the monastery. It was June 14th. By sunrise the hermitage would be nothing more than a memory. There was a kind of irony in this, though I was not altogether sure of exactly what. And three weeks later Hand would lead me at last from the woods and up the gentle rise for the first time to the rustic cabin where I would spend the next twenty-five years in seclusion and effective hibernation.
***
The road west. Two travelers with a looming storm behind them.
A DWARF: Would h’eet be to z’e advantage of a master to wheep h’or maim ’is properhty beyond value?
THE ACTOR: The old argument. No, nor any man’s advantage to murder his brother. The hand of justice will surely deal with all.
A DWARF: Ah! H’out of z’e mouz’s of sinners?
THE ACTOR: Yet, penitence is possible.
A DWARF: Not for me!
Scene IV
How strange i
t would be, when the night comes again,
If the snow and the ice struck my desperate brain!
Was Cain justified in his brother’s murder? I have often puzzled over the story. Found reason behind this first crime to pity the hapless Cain, and with him despise the brother whom God had favored for no particular reason.
It is not that I was irreligious. I was, if anything, perhaps too devout for my own well-being. I accepted religion not as an answer but as a series of questions demanding inquiry. The more I inquired, however, the more dissatisfied I became with the replies. Forgetting for the moment, of course, they were my own responses.
It began with Cain and Abel. I moved past Adam and Eve with the kind of resolution that sees necessity to beginning the story of earthly man, not the creatures of Paradise. Resigned that somehow man had fallen from grace and it might as well have happened at the hand of a woman. Had to, in some ways. Still, no one ever seemed to take that part of the story too seriously—except Corbett—although women, I expect, must feel a general brunt of the guilt, if only implicitly.
But Cain and Abel. That story bothered me. Confused me. Tried my faith until the point where perhaps I have found understanding in the unskeined moments of true reflection.
Why was Abel favored for his sacrifice? Both had worked with equal faith. Both had made their offerings with equal piety. Why wouldn’t God accept those of Cain?
Why shouldn’t Cain be angry—with his God, with his brother? I would have been.
That is where it started to unravel, for me.
I imagined how a father might treat a favorite son. Harder and more severely than the rest. Expect more of him. Test him at every turn.
Perhaps God was merely testing the favored Cain. Pushing him to see how far he would go. How much he could endure—as with Noah, Abraham, Moses. But Cain gave in. He failed. God’s favor was misspent.
God tests me. How much may I endure? Surely I have been favored. In many ways been blessed, and now given a second chance. What must I do to prove my devotion?
I would retrieve that purer time, before the fall of Adam and his Eve. Forget the manifold errors of our choices to relive those first moments when love seemed the only issue.
***
Time. Place.
“You’re funny,” she laughed deeply. “You’re really funny!”
The ACTOR simply smiles.
“Why do you never think to do comedy?”
“The truly great comedians are those individuals whose lives are filled with sorrow and tragedy.”
“Are the lives of the great tragedians then—is your life—so very comic?”
“This moment—yes. I have never been happier. I should think my next performance may grant my best reception yet, by critics and public alike. Yes, even if I were to play to the audiences of the North.”
“Your brother is always successful with the New York crowd.”
Angrily.
“I am not my brother. I would never be my brother! Not my brother Edwin, at any rate.”
The ACTOR smiles again.
“And all true comedy ends with a marriage, you know.”
“But I would never marry you. Surely, you know that.”
***
My hand was ready to meet her face. Feeling its imminence she pushed at me with all her might, but I was frozen. And then rather than fly at her in any manner and without yet thinking of what I was about to do, though certainly with less fervor than I might have easily managed, I still insulted her—and myself—in a way I find it hard to now recount. Directly into her eyes, I looked hard—and spit.
It was not she who insulted me by holding some vain and superficial affection for my brother or some inconsequent suitor before my eyes as bait, to set my juices to roil. It was some instrument of feminine wile thinking only of any way to change my course.
Yet it was I who knelt and wept to take her up and blot her face with my kerchief. I who sought only to protect her from the beast that seemingly devoured us both, one slow fanged mouthful after another.
I cannot return nor undo what I have done. Nor think yet to remain here in the shadow of so many ills. And this considered, then move on. And if I cannot change the baser aspect of my soul, then will I dream her out. One murder have I plotted and performed, and so another shall I accept.
Strophe
I am lonely. Yet, I cannot name the single thing to make me whole. In a crowd of people I would crave adulation and applause. With a woman, she would be just a woman, and I her man. I lack love.
My solitude is scarcely bearable. Where, upon a time, I had longed for the peculiar perfection of an evening alone, unoccupied in times when every night came to a crescendo of ovations and dressing room attentions, now a single furtive gaze or sympathetic voice would calm my anxious heart.
***
How could I have needed so to impress or impel? If I thought, had really thought I was so deserving, why did I ever entertain a moment’s doubt or despair?
And now, to hear this?
***
“What about Aunt Julia?” I asked myself, the tread of my heels clapping down the street behind, the capital city strangely quiet. She had been living in Boston since 1863, but visited mother at Tudor Hall in March, not one month before the fatal shot. I too was down from Baltimore at the time and something in her manner intimated a strange knowledge of my work. But how could she have known?
She who gave the most glorious of verses, her Battle Hymn of the Republic. She who had also written my condemnation in her Parricide, the day of the Union president’s funeral, but eight days afterward eulogized me with Pardon, when she read of the incident at Garrett’s farm.
“Death brings atonement; he did that whereof ye accuse him,—
Murder accurst;
But, from the crisis of crime in which Satan did lose him,
Suffered the worst.
So the soft purples that quiet the heavens with mourning,
Willing to fall,
Lend him one fold, his illustrious victim adorning
With wider pall.
Back to the cross, where the savior, uplifted in dying,
Bade all souls to live,
Turns the reft bosom of nature, his mother, low sighing,
Greatest, forgive!”
She knew all of them. I remember being surprised that New Year’s to see her in Washington. Yet not so surprised. She had after all distinguished herself in all circles. Still, what might she know? What cipher might lay hidden in her verse?
Surely, I was reeling, desperate to catch hold of some final truth. Any truth at all. But truth was, I could scarcely expect more from Julia Howe than I had received from John Surratt. I had to search elsewhere.
***
There is an arbor between Pennsylvania and I believe it is West Third Street, at the edge of a tiny park. In late autumn one may there find perfect refuge from sudden bursts of rain. The perennial boughs allowing infrequent droplets to fall through and soothe. Shelter and sanctuary without complete cloister.
In the middle of this park is a bust of some forgotten hero of a more glorious war and time. He may have been an expatriate volunteer of a sympathetic foreign power. Or a frontier farmer forgetting pastoral pleasures for high ideals and moral calls. Perhaps he was a wealthy landowner who pledged his sacred honor by hiring the blood of lesser men. He is silent, cold, nameless in my memory, the mere sentinel of an occasionally occupied garden.
As I walked past what seemed a newly planted row of trees, a fresh easterly raced about my collar with portents of a possible Atlantic storm. How many times I had prayed with her for the same. Now it only brought shivers to my heart. Shivers and the thought of once-spent tears. Still, the city was sweet with the scent of lilac. Not as sweet as Richmond’s magnolias but sweet nonetheless.
From the Symphony Hall I could hear a movement from Rossini’s Tell straining through the air. Or was it Verdi’s Rigoletto? She unknowingly introduced me to opera, that theater
of her maternal homeland, and likewise my love for both developed simultaneously. It is for that I can scarcely bear sometimes to hear a single note, or less, a phrase of music and its foreign verse.
Wandering west on Cherry Street toward my rented apartments, I watched my shadow dance and bob pale gray under the moonlight. And though this was not new to me, to watch my own reflection, it was perhaps the first I noticed the inability, nay refusal, of my knees to so much as pretend to meet where my legs pivoted past each other.
Tomorrow I would head south again.
Strophe
How hopeless seemed the weight of that crippled cross. How hapless he who dared consider it a burden at all. The years still pass and it is scarcely remembered. But weights and tasks I have aplenty. And so reality mirrors strangely its own call from afar.
***
I trotted past a shop on Baltimore’s principle street. Not an expensive shop, though one the likes of which was far away and wholly forgotten of the Kentucky woods.
There was in the window on this particular day a mannequin upon which was draped a wedding dress. Again, it was not of the latest style, brought late of Vienna or Paris, but it was long the most fashionable dress I had seen in some time. And though I could almost hear Ella’s complaint for its want of train and lace, yet I could not hope but see her in it.
***
Time. Place.
“My father has promised me a great wedding,” she said abruptly that first full night together. “And a rich trousseau—when I have found the man I wish to marry.”
And wishes to ask you, I thought to myself, confused.
“All Washington will be invited. Perhaps the president himself.”
“Yes?” I said disparagingly. “As if he might add some grace or splendor?”
“Why, o’ course. Whatever do you mean? His wife owns the most beautiful closet in the nation.”
“In the North, perhaps.”
“Why must you always be so bitter?”
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