An Acquaintance with Darkness (29 page)

In a like manner, Robert put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to him. Like a brother. Or like Johnny would have done. Had there really been a Johnny? Or had I dreamed him?

I looked up into Robert's face, remembering what it was I had to say to him. "I was so silly, Robert. I thought, these past months, that what Uncle Valentine was doing was wrong and bad. I wasted all my energies on it. And it wasn't wrong or bad. All he was trying to do was help people."

I heard the loud clapping of someone's hands. A signal. I heard a chopping sound. I supposed it was the soldiers under the platform, axing the props.

"Annie told me what real trouble was. And I
wouldn't believe her. How could I have been so young and so silly, Robert? My daddy used to call me Miss Muffet. Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't," he murmured.

Then a snapping sound as the trapdoors went through. And a
whoosh.
And a heightened murmur from the crowd. Some people near us started praying.

"Do you know what, Robert?" I asked.

"What?"

"I wish I could be Miss Muffet again."

And then I turned and looked. And I knew I could never be the way I had been before. None of us could. Miss Muffet was dead. My daddy was dead. The world as we had all known it before the war and the shooting of Lincoln, that innocent world, was dead. This was the world now, as we had brought it upon ourselves to be.

Four hooded bodies swinging under the trapdoors of the scaffold. One of them a woman.

This is what the crowd had come to see this day, the official death of that old world. They had come to bear witness to it. I could do no less than look, could I?

One body swung harder and longer than the rest. Someone was struggling. Who was it? Mrs. Mary?

I knew I would, forever after, see those bodies every time I closed my eyes. And hear the terrible silence of the crowd in the pressing heat that sat on us in its white-hot fury.

They wouldn't give Annie her mother's body. Uncle Valentine and Robert did all they could. "I can't," Captain Rath told them. "They won't let me."

So we left, then. Annie left the casket. Robert and I asked her where she wanted to go. Uncle Valentine wanted her to come home with us, but she said no, she was all packed and leaving, going home to Surrattsville. "Even though they've changed the name," she told us. "They aren't going to call it Surrattsville anymore. Can they do that? Change a town's name?" She seemed more worried about that than anything.

"Why is she talking about this now?" I whispered to Robert.

"She has to," he answered. "She has to focus on something. Talk about anything she wants. The price of tea in China. Anything."

"Well, I changed my first name," Annie was saying, "and maybe now, I'll change my last one, too. They'll give me no peace if I don't. Help me find a new name, Emily."

So that's what we did, all the way home. We thought of new last names for Annie. We had to walk. Robert couldn't get a hack. The press of people was terrible leaving the prison. Hacks were all over,
people yelling for them, drivers yelling at each other. The mood was vicious and the heat didn't help any.

Annie was selling the house at 541 H Street. She needed the money. We went inside. It was musty smelling and all the furniture was covered with sheets. It was eerie. I didn't look at the stairway for fear I'd see Johnny coming down, all gussied up for a night at the theater. I didn't look at the piano, either, for fear I'd see Mrs. Mary just sitting down to play.

I was in the nest that had hatched the eggs. And it was already haunted.

Annie was all packed. Except for Puss-in-Boots. I hunted her up for her. She knew me and purred. I kissed the top of her head and told her to be a good girl, she was going home to Maryland. Then I put her into the basket for Annie and we went out front, where Robert was trying to hail a carriage. He finally got one and paid the man himself. Then he put all Annie's portmanteaus in.

H Street was quiet. The houses all shuttered. Yet I felt eyes peering out at us, at Annie. In front of her house I kissed her good-bye. We promised to keep in touch, but like it was the day Johnny walked out of my life, I knew I'd never see Annie Surratt again.

The last thing I did when she got into the hack was give her the nightflowers. Tears came to her eyes. "You've been a good friend," she said.

"I haven't been, and I know it," I told Robert as we watched her drive off. "I haven't been a good friend or a good niece or a good daughter or a good anything. Have I?"

He shrugged. "You were a good sister to Johnny Collins," he said.

"That you can joke at a time like this," I admonished.

"It's called gallows humor," he said.

"Robert!"

He thrust his hands into his pockets and stood there on the deserted street smiling at me. "No disrespect intended. Soldiers have it. Doctors have it. It gets us through the terrible times. Or we'd go insane."

He was perfectly solemn. "And you were good at the cemetery that night, too."

"Good enough to do it again?"

"No. Good enough to do something better."

"What?"

"What do you want to do?"

"I've been giving it a lot of thought. Don't laugh. Promise."

"It hasn't been a day for laughter," he said.

"Maybe it's been living with Uncle Valentine. And reading his books. But I'd like to be a nurse. Like Clara Barton."

He nodded. "What about a doctor? Like Mary Walker?"

He was serious. I felt something swelling inside me in the place where I supposed my heart to be. On the deserted street, I smiled at him and the moment held for us, healing and full of hope. "You won't ever tell Uncle Valentine about that night, will you?" I asked.

"Do you want to ride home or walk?"

"Ride. It's too hot for walking. But you'll never get another hack. They're all busy taking people home from the hanging."

"Trust me," he said.

In 1639 an apprentice in Massachusetts was dissected after his death, and his master, Marmaduke Percy, was arrested for causing the young man's skull fracture. This was one of the first legal postmortems in America. Such dissections were conducted all through our early history in this country. Many led to the arrest of perpetrators of murder. Many were done so doctors could simply determine why a patient died. Today we call them autopsies.

The acquisition of bodies for medical research became a problem in the eighteenth century in both England and America. At that time executed criminals were the only legal source for physicians. The first medical school in America was in the University of Pennsylvania's medical department, established in 1765. Dissection was allowed on the bodies of executed criminals, unclaimed bodies and, in Massachusetts after 1784, on victims of duels. Thus the practice of dissection became associated with criminality in America. It was said that the horror of dissection was additional revenge on criminals. And the blame was laid on surgeons and anatomists.

Back in those days, however, medicine was still half folklore, half magic, and half art. Medical training was acquired by the apprenticeship method. A young man followed a doctor around for several years and learned by watching and assisting.

It was different in England. Medical education required five years of study. Students had to take courses, attend lectures, do autopsies. So, many young men of means in America went abroad to study medicine, to London, Dublin, Edinburgh, or Glasgow.

Anatomy courses were the main reason for the establishment of medical schools. But both in England and in America there was a shortage of cadavers for dissection.

The acquiring of dead bodies for study goes back to the fifteenth century. Antonio Pollaiuolo (14311498) was the first painter to study the human body. Michelangelo (1475–1564) was able to do his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in St. Peter's in Rome because he spent years studying the human body through dissection. Leonardo da Vinci (14521519) has been hailed as the best anatomist of his time and did many illustrations of the human body, besides being known as a painter and sculptor.

During the American Revolution more men died in hospitals than on the battlefield. Hospitals were where you went to die. By the 1850s medical schools had sprouted up all over America, but the quality of education was poor. And vying for the attention of the sick were the herbalists, those who practiced slave medicine and folk medicine, and those who peddled bottled "cures," as well as just plain quacks. There were also midwives, who did more than deliver babies, and who sometimes knew as much if not more than the local doctors in far-flung regions.

In my book
The Blue Door,
which takes place in 1841, I have Ben Videau giving his girls "blue pills" to ward off "hot fever." He rolls the pills himself from the decoctions supplied by a slave herbalist on the South Carolina island plantation. In
The Second Bend in the River,
which takes place in Ohio in the early years of the nineteenth century, I have a doctor visiting a young dying woman and bringing "Bateman's drops, Godfrey's cordial, Anderson's ague pills, and Hamilton's worm-destroying lozenges." Both incidents are accurate depictions, gleaned from research.

In 1847 the American Medical Association was born and some control was exerted over medical practice. The profession in America upheld new techniques, put new focus on anatomical knowledge, and soon the torch was passed from Europe to America in medical education.

From 1768 to 1876 about eight thousand dissections for medical science were done in medical schools in Pennsylvania alone. There was a constant search for bodies. Between 1820 and 1840 more than sixteen hundred medical students were in school in Vermont. Four hundred cadavers were needed for dissection. Only two bodies a year were made available legally.

The American Civil War highlighted our physicians' abysmal ignorance and, at the same time, taught them so much. Surgeons just off the battlefields, where they'd dealt with carnage unbelievable to mankind, knew what they had to learn, and they weren't about to shilly-shally anymore about learning it.

Washington, D.C., at the end of the Civil War had more problems than any other city in the North. Change was happening so fast nobody could keep up with it. The war was ending. Thousands upon thousands of "freedmen" (freed slaves) had gathered there since Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. They were living in hovels, needing food, education, a new start. Photographs of the dead lying on the battlefield of Gettysburg were available to the public for the first time in the art galleries, the toll of dead was six hundred thousand in both the North and the South, African Americans were armed for the first time to fight for the North, women were entering new fields—nursing, writing, speechmaking. We even had an occasional woman doctor or two.

Officials were making a graveyard of General Robert E. Lee's front lawn at Arlington, which would eventually become our National Cemetery; the telegraph, cameras, and newspapers were making news available quicker than ever before; and what I call "the hysteria of celebrityhood" was fast taking hold.

State legislators had not yet made up laws to deal with supplying bodies for teaching. Resurrectionists, those who dug up and sold bodies, were rushing to Washington. Grave robbing became a lucrative activity. Handbooks were written on it. Wealthy people posted guards in cemeteries to protect the final resting places of their loved ones. There were four colleges in the District of Columbia. Three had medical departments. But there were a lot of cemeteries, as well as the Washington Asylum, and the Washington Almshouse (poorhouse). There were many derelicts who had nobody to claim their bodies. There was a potter's field and a good rail line, which made feasible the interstate shipment of bodies to Virginia and Michigan, where there were more good medical schools. (Back in 1859, when John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry to free the slaves, students from a medical school in Winchester, Virginia, rushed to the scene on hearing that the raid failed. They stuffed the body of Watson Brown, son of John, into a barrel, packed it in ice, and took it back to the college for dissection.)

In 1865, Washington was a boiling pot of confusion and constant turmoil. It had a peculiar mixture of educated and uneducated African Americans, well-placed citizens and transients, captured Confederate soldiers, Confederate sympathizers, political power grabbers, visiting dignitaries, do-gooders establishing new social agencies, architects finishing the Capitol building and the Washington Monument in the midst of pigs wandering in the muddy streets, a newly organized Sanitary Commission (precursor of the Red Cross) rushing to organize hospitals, the first women nurses in America, barrooms, dance halls, Willard's Hotel, the Smithsonian Institution, as well as people in the vanguard of our culture establishing museums, theaters, and art galleries.

It also had John Wilkes Booth.

I felt that the assassination and the mayhem that accompanied it was the perfect backdrop for my book. And Annie Surratt, the perfect friend for Emily. Only Annie Surratt could show Emily, who thinks she knows horror in her suspicions of her uncle's body snatching, what horror really is.

Emily Pigbush, Dr. Valentine, Maude, and Robert deGraaf are characters I created. Merry Andrews, the Spoon, and the Mole really lived and were involved in body snatching, though not in this time and place. Everything that happened to the Surratts is as I depict it.

It is true that Mrs. Surratt didn't have lawyers and someone supplied Mr. Aiken and Mr. Clampitt. No one knows who. Three doctors did attend Lincoln at Ford's Theater the night he was shot. Two are known. I made Dr. Valentine Bransby the third, who was unknown.

Lewis Thornton Powell also called himself Wood, and sometimes Payne. He did hide away in the Congressional Cemetery the Sunday night after the assassination, as I have him doing. And he did arrive at the Surratt house just as detectives were about to take Mrs. Surratt and Annie away for questioning.

Johnny Surratt's "career" and background were exactly as I depict them. He did take two young ladies to Ford's Theater on the night of March 15,
1865, and they did sit in the president's box, and John Wilkes Booth did stop by. Everything about Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and personal confidante of Mrs. Lincoln, is true.