The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  She was eccentric, and in need of help, which he had given her as far as he was able. But once she ceased being delusional—and had apparently learned to control the cause of her delusions, at least for the time being—she did not deserve to be locked up simply so that Robert Lincoln would not be embarrassed.

  John leaned his head sideways against the jolting wooden wall of the “colored” car, and stared out at the yellow wheat-fields streaming by under black-floored mountains of gathering clouds.

  Would he have helped Mary Lincoln if he'd known that assistance was going to cost him, not only the job that supported his family, but the career toward which he'd striven the whole of his adult life?

  He didn't know.

  Myra Bradwell.

  He closed his eyes, and felt the anger rise through him, like pain coming on as the numbness passed away.

  A reporter. The man she'd brought in was a Goddamned reporter. And it had never even occurred to her to ask John what the repercussions of that would be.

  Even in his fury and despair, he had to admire the cleverness of the maneuver. It completely circumvented the issue of whether Robert Lincoln would give permission for his mother's release or not. Dr. Patterson couldn't afford bad publicity—he was in financial trouble already. When the “Mary Lincoln Is a Prisoner” article came out—and it would undoubtedly contain the words habeas corpus somewhere in its text—all those other families who were keeping their female relatives in Bellevue would begin to pull them out, too. Sooner than see that, Patterson would shove Mary Lincoln out the door, and at that point Robert would dare not put her elsewhere . . . not unless he wanted to learn the real meaning of public embarrassment.

  Oh, oops, we happened to squish a Negro in the process, but at least Mrs. Lincoln is free! Hip hip hooray!

  Sorry about your job, and your career, and all. . . .

  Even a white attendant guilty of that kind of betrayal couldn't hope to find another position of trust, much less a patron willing to teach him. But a white man would at least have the option of seeking a post as a guard—if he really wanted to go on working with the insane—or of going west and looking for work in California or Oregon, far away from the close-knit circles of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane.

  A white man could usually get another white man to at least listen to him when he said, “I didn't know. I'll never do it again....”

  His salary of sixty dollars a month, joined to what Lionel made in the stockyards and the income from Cassy's laundry business, was barely enough to make the rent on the house, buy firewood and soap for the laundry, and feed the dozen-plus members of the household. He knew a white man would be paid far more—a railroad porter would make more—but he had looked on the work as the road to better things.

  And now there was nothing.

  He debarked from the local train at the Twelfth Street station and for a time simply stood on the platform, the hot reek of the city beating on him, crushing him. For two years now the knowledge that he could go back to the green quiet of Batavia had sustained him every time he walked east toward the hellhole streets between tracks and packing-yards.

  Now he could not face the thought.

  For the first time since he'd left the Army he thought, I really need a drink.

  Walking into the wrong neighborhood grog-shop, of course, could get you killed, if you were Irish or black or Hungarian or whatever the local regulars were not. But he knew there were saloons all along State Street near the levee and the yards where they didn't care if you were black or white, male or female, human or a pig escaped from the stock-pens, provided you had money to pay for your liquor, and one of these was Flossie's.

  Flossie's was a three-story brick building rammed in between two other three-story brick buildings in the block called Coon Hollow. Flossie herself, a blowzy harridan who'd run a parlor-house in New Orleans during the War and a string of brothels in Mobile immediately afterwards, kept a bordello on the upper floors and, according to Lionel, owned the panel-house next door where the customers were robbed systematically rather than intermittently. Flossie's barroom was long, dark, and nearly empty at this time of the day—four in the afternoon—furnished with rough tables and chairs at which gamblers plied their trade in the evenings.

  He bought a whiskey from the slatternly waiter-girl behind the bar and then another, and retreated to the dimness to think about what he was going to say to Clarice.

  What he was going to say to Cassy.

  At this time of the day, it was mostly the sneak-thieves and pickpockets of the levee, the strong-arm men who made their living selling “protection” to local shopkeepers, the whores from upstairs jolting down preliminary drinks to get them through their first few johns of the evening. A man came in with two girls—the man dark-skinned but with the features of an Italian or a Spaniard, the girls white and barely pubescent—and the waiter-girl behind the bar said, “You better vamoose, Dago; you know better than to bring those little chickabiddies in here.”

  “You jealous they'll take your customers?” sneered the pimp. “Wouldn't be hard. Give us a couple toots of shock for the girls, and a whiskey for me, and I mean all whiskey, not that camphor shit you dole out to the niggers.”

  John settled back against the wall—after a preliminary check to make sure there wasn't anything walking up it just then—and cradled the faintly camphor-smelling whiskey between his palms. He knew what they cut liquor with in places like this and didn't much care. Griffe Moissant's booze would be the same, closer to home, and there'd be the chance of walking into Lionel there or, God forbid, Phoebe.

  He closed his eyes, listening to the voices. So many of them with the smoky inflection of the South: Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana. So many men, like himself, like Lionel, who'd come north looking for something other than sharecropping the land they'd once worked on as slaves, and more coming in every day.

  And finding nothing. Since the banks had collapsed two years ago a man was lucky to have a job sweeping blood off the killing-floors into drains. And those jobs, he knew, went to those who knew people in the yards already. As the voices drifted to him in the saloon's gloom he heard those of men coming in after hunting work, or laboring a few hours stacking lumber or slapping pork in cans amid clouds of steam and pounding machines that could take off a hand or a finger if you blinked....

  More men, who hadn't even found that.

  “I hear Mushmouth lookin' for a couple boys to help him knock off a big place out by Douglas Park.” John glanced up as the voices passed his table, a couple of laborers listening to a dapper weaselly man whom Cassy had pointed out to him once as an enforcer for one of the protection bosses. “You boys lookin' for a few dollars?”

  And later—how much later he wasn't sure—he overheard someone say, “Three dollars a day, they askin'! Three dollars to stay on that corner, without them runnin' me off . . . Some days I don't shine three dollars' worth o' shoes!” The man who was speaking looked at least seventy years old. John wondered how much he had to pay for rent on top of that three dollars, and if he had a family to support.

  Get used to it, he thought, his eyes going to the men crowding around the bar as their shift ended at the yards, or slumped morosely on the benches around the room. Three card-games were in progress, run by slick-looking men in flashy suits with diamonds on their stickpins and fingers. In the back room, the click of billiard-balls could be heard, and men's voices, loud with anger and drink.

  This is your world now, the only world you're going to have. Luck gave you a single open door, and you let that chance slip away.

  Because you pitied a woman who treated you like a human being when no one else did—and because you trusted her friend.

  Despair brought the taste of bile to his mouth, and the metallic nastiness of whatever the waiter-girl had given him.

  This place, and the house, with Cassy and Mama and all the children, and the stench at the back of the yards. Th
ese would be the limits of his experience. And of Cora's, too, when she grew up.

  He knew he was getting very drunk, but couldn't remember why he should care. Like Mrs. Lincoln, he had nowhere that day to go. He could smell the stockyards from here, and hear the constant, clanging roar of the trains as they rolled through not three blocks away.

  Already it seemed to him that everything he'd gone through and worked for since the War's end was dissolving like a coat of cheap whitewash in the pouring rain of reality.

  This was the world into which he had been freed.

  The world in which he'd believed that it was possible to make a life for himself.

  I was the insane one, he thought.

  Dago the Pimp was back, with another girl this time. She couldn't have been as old as Selina, and her round, scared, pretty face reminded him heartrendingly of his sister Lucy—before Lucy had taken to drinking and whoring. One of Flossie's strong-arm men went over to talk to Dago, shoving him. The girl clung close to him, staring around her in desperation, and one of the yard-men went over to her in his shirt and pants all gummed with dirt and dried blood, and pinched her shallow breasts as he talked to her.

  It was as if John watched someone else lurch to his feet. One of Flossie's girls intercepted him: “Ain't seen you 'round here before, Handsome.” She was “bright,” as the white men said. Her hair had been straightened with lye and dyed vivid red and her dress was cut away nearly to the nipples. She was fleshy, like a light-brown satin pillow.

  “Excuse me,” he said politely, and stepped around her. He caught the blood-caked slaughterer by the wrist and heard himself say, “You old enough to be that poor little girl's daddy. You should be ashamed.”

  The man turned around, baring broken teeth at him. Dago broke off his argument with the house strong-arm and said, “Now, my friend, that little girl knows more about pleasin' a man than any ten other nymphs of the pavement, and she'll be more than happy to prove it to the both of you.” He seized her arm so that his fingers dug into the tender skin. “Won't you, sugar?”

  “You get the fuck out of here, Dago, and take your whore with you!” screamed the red-haired girl who'd followed John from his table. “Or I'll tell Flossie!”

  “You can stick Flossie up your—”

  The red-haired whore snatched a bottle off the bar, smashed it on the bar's edge, and slashed at Dago. Dago's little nymph screamed, and the next second, it seemed, the barroom erupted into violence. Someone—John was never sure who—grabbed him and hurled him back against the bar, the edge gouged his back. The young girl screamed again and John lunged to drag her out of the sudden morass of struggling limbs and slashing glass and steel that had churned into life in the cavelike semidarkness.

  Something struck him and he fell, rolling, his old instincts kicking in. He tucked to protect his belly and face as a boot smashed into his ribs, and another caught him glancing on the side of the head. He smelled fresh blood and spilled beer and someone tripped over him, even in the corner against the bar into which he'd rolled. There was shouting and a man bellowed, “Oh my God, oh my God . . . !” the way he'd heard men shriek when they brought them into the hospital tents with their intestines dangling. Then shock caught up with him and he felt himself sinking, colder and colder, down into the earth, to come out chilled to the bone, and aching all over into sudden quiet, near-darkness, and the stink of blood.

  John started to sit up and, as it had in the tent at Camp Barker years before, nausea seized him and he rolled over fast, choking as vomit spewed from his lips. A thick Irish voice said, “What d'we got here, Sleepin' Beauty?” and men laughed.

  One of the dark shapes in the now nearly empty barroom reached him in two strides—blue-clothed, like the Union soldier all those years ago, with a nightstick instead of a rifle in his hands. John raised his hands to show them empty and the policeman struck him, casually and with full force, slamming him back to the floor and sending lancing agony through his right arm.

  The next moment his hands were jerked behind him, and the pain blacked out his mind. When he came to, he was lying with his cheek in a puddle of beer-diluted vomit, handcuffed and looking at the three policemen gathered around the two bodies in the middle of the floor. A woman was talking, shrill and furious—

  “—I pay my money to the stationhouse and this sure as hell isn't the kind of service I expect—”

  It wasn't until one of the cops dragged the bodies closer to the single gaslight still burning near the bar that John recognized Dago the Pimp, with his throat cut from ear to ear and his whole flashy green suit a single black wash of gore.

  The other body was that of his little whore.

  HE WAS TAKEN TO THE TWENTY-SECOND PRECINCT HOUSE ON Maxwell Street, and in the morning—night had somehow fallen while he had mused in his camphorene-induced haze and the fight had taken place at close to eleven—was taken to the jail of the Cook County Courthouse on Clark Street, and indicted for murder.

  And passed a week in Hell.

  He'd had a little money in his pockets when he'd risen from his table at Flossie's, but there was none there when he was arrested. His watch, hat, and jacket had vanished, too. One of the men in the jail-cell with him was a thick-shouldered angry laborer named Klauswijz who knocked John's head against the brick wall and took the meager plate of food he was given—the other men simply moved aside and watched—and thereafter stole food from him whenever it was brought. Anyone with any connection to the protection gangs or gambling bosses had, naturally, been bailed out on the night of their arrest, so the cells were populated by the pettiest of independent criminals, smash-and-grab thieves or thugs for hire, too mentally deficient or too far gone in drink or drugs to be of use to anyone: angry, sullen, violent.

  One of the men in the cell turned out to be a cousin of Dago the Pimp. John kept very, very quiet about why he was there.

  It seemed to him that he never slept that first week. There were four bunks and eight men in the cell—two men slept on the floor in spite of the roaches and the rats. John sat in the corner near the latrine bucket with his arms folded around him and simply tried not to speak to or look at anyone; thirsty, nodding with exhaustion, legs and arms cramping from days of inactivity, his right wrist puffed up and hurting so that the pain sometimes made him faint.

  “They won't even expect me at home till Wednesday,” he whispered one night, half-delirious, to Bailey, one of the two other black men in the cell, a scared and rather simple-minded youth who divided his share of the water with him after Klauswijz snatched his away again. “I could be hanged by then.”

  “Don't break yourself into a dew of sweat about that, boy-o,” remarked a wizened Irish drunkard who'd taken over one of the upper bunks. “They're not gonna get 'round to tryin' the likes of you for weeks.... You kill a nigger or a white?”

  “I didn't kill anyone,” whispered John.

  The Irishman crowed with laughter. “Sure, and neither did I!” There was dried blood caked all over his shirt.

  By the following Friday morning John would have been willing to be tried and convicted if only for the chance to get out of the cell and walk. When the guard came to the bars and said, “Wilamet? Somebody here to see you,” he nearly fell, his legs and body were so cramped and his mind so hazy with exhaustion and hunger.

  Cassy was waiting for him in that long room where prisoners were brought, always supposing there was anyone on earth who wanted to see them. John had been there more than once, when he and Cassy had gone to bail out their mother. There was a table and some broken-down benches. The Courthouse was barely four years old—rebuilt after the Fire like everything else in this part of town—but already the visiting-room had the soiled drabness of hard use and neglect, the smells of dirty clothing and dirty flesh, expectorated tobacco, and cigar-smoke.

  Most of the visiting women matched the men who were in the cells. Nobody with any money or any connections had anything to do with the Cook County jail.

  Even wi
thout his glasses—which had also disappeared at Flossie's—he could see the anger that stiffened his sister's body when he told her he'd been sacked. “God damn it, am I the only one . . . ?” she rasped, then stopped herself, breathing hard. He saw her big, knotted hands ball on the grimy table. Saw how she made herself relax. “Are you okay, brother?”

  “I think I broke my wrist—broke it or sprained it. Cassy, they got me for murder, for killing a pimp and his girl. I didn't do it, I got caught in a brawl at Flossie's, when I come to they were dead already—”

  Cassy whispered, “Jesus.” For the first time in her life, she sounded hopeless, and scared.

  Cassy, who would walk up and spit in the Devil's face.

  That, as much as his own fear of what would happen when he was brought up before a court of white men, felt like the crushing weight of a tomb falling on his shoulders.

  She straightened her back. He could almost see her gather up a mouthful of spit. “What're we gonna do?”

  “Get in touch with Mrs. Myra Bradwell,” said John, and realized, with another cold jolt of shock, that he had no idea where she lived. Panic flashed through him, then he thought a moment, and said, “She's the wife of Judge Bradwell. Somebody here will be able to tell you where to send her a letter, or somebody at the Chicago Times, or the Chicago Review of Law. They'll be in the City Directory.”

  Just being out of the cell, being able to move, to talk to his sister, revived something inside him, that had been numbed by days of shock and thirst and pain. One foot in front of the other . . .

  I got away from Blue Hill Plantation, and got Mama all the way to Washington without being caught. Anybody who could do that should be able to get through damn near anything.

  He drew a deep breath.

  “You tell her that I got sacked—and I got into this trouble—because I helped out her and Mrs. Lincoln.” He braced himself for Cassy's spitfire retort, but she said nothing. Squinting across the table at her, he saw that her fear for him had even swamped the anger of him losing his job.