Walt Whitman's Secret (27 page)

Leaving, he stops to gaze at the poor prisoners being shuffled along some distance away and to glare at the small blue figures of their new masters. By chance he has met up with John Matthews, a stock-company actor of no great renown, currently cast as the drunken butler in
Our American Cousin
at Ford's; and the two of them take in the sight together.

“Great God,” Wilkes says, “I no longer have a country.”

He asks Matthews if he will please do a friend a favor and take this sealed letter to the editor of the
National Intelligencer
“if you don't hear from me by ten tomorrow morning.” Matthews agrees. Just then a carriage passes by bearing General and Missus Grant out of the city.

Wilkes is still busy busy busy. He goes to the Kirkwood House but not to see Atzerodt, who already has been cast in his supporting rôle. Taking a card and a pencil from the front desk, he writes a note to Andrew Johnson: “Don't wish to disturb you. Are you at home?” He hands it to the unsmiling day clerk, who turns with a studied minimum of exertion and pops it into the vice president's mailbox, already full of various messages and reminders. Then it's back to the National Hotel, thinking of dearest Lucy upstairs, thinking of the assignment he has given himself that awaits completion. Again he asks for paper and something to write with. Two acquaintances happen to be in the lobby. Wilkes turns to them.

“Is it 1864 or 1865?” he asks.

They find it odd that he doesn't know which year it is, but they don't understand, cannot understand, how forcefully his mind is concentrated on the task before him, bearing down on it like a narrow beam of light on the carpet of an otherwise totally darkened room. He always has kept a scrapbook, the way theater people do, but has begun to keep a diary only now. It is a cheap one for the pocket, cheap because it is for the year 1864, and thinking of it just now, he has become confused for a second, hence the query. He finishes his letter, takes a postage stamp from his billfold and drops the letter into the mail slot on the counter.

The president presides over the usual cabinet meeting. The agenda is taken up with questions surrounding the surrender of Lee (while
Joe Johnston's army, such as it is, is doing its fatal waltz with Sherman's in the piney woods of North Carolina). Outside the cabinet room, the president is laid siege to by a couple of the petitioners and favor-seekers who always have the effect of showing how seemingly infinite his patience is. He pleads, honestly, that he is already late for the theater and is going to be very late indeed if he tarries.

The presidential carriage stops en route to pick up a youngish officer, Major Henry Rathbone, and his fiancée, Clara Harris, who will be filling the two seats originally intended for the Grants. The party arrives twenty minutes after the opening curtain. The orchestra strikes up “Hail to the Chief.” The audience is excited. Once in the box, the president acknowledges their affection with a bow then settles into the rocker that the Fords, knowing that he finds such chairs easier on his long legs, have kindly provided. The idiotic play resumes.

Missus Surratt has been to Surrattsville to visit friends, driven there by Lou Weichmann, but returns home to H Street to find Wilkes, nearing the end of his long and frantic day. They exchange pleasantries and Wilkes rides back to Baptist Alley and asks Ned Spangler to hold his horse. When Wilkes has gone inside, Spangler hands over the reins to Peanuts. Wilkes is pacing in the lobby and out front in the street, waiting for the minutes to tick away until the actors arrive at the perfect scene for the deed about to be done. To speed the process, he nips into the Star saloon for a whiskey and branch water. Thus fortified, he enters Ford's Theatre one last time to perform his greatest rôle. He walks up to the dress circle and flashes his calling card to the lone guard and goes into the dark passageway leading to the boxes, closing the door behind him and then barring it. The door to the president's double box has been left ajar. Through it he can see Major Rathbone but not the others. His right hand is in his right pocket, touching Mister Deringer's pistol. His left hand holds his dirk, guarding it jealously.

Wilkes is the only one with an overview of the whole affair. He will strike at Lincoln at virtually the same moment Atzerodt kills the vice president, Andrew Johnson, and Payne and Herold do in, not the next in line to take over the presidency according to the Constitution, but rather William H. Seward, the secretary of state, who is recuperating at home following a dreadful carriage accident. Seward is a career politician, age sixty-four, who for many years has been a loudly animated and influential opponent of slavery.

Payne and Herold are sitting in Lafayette Park opposite the Executive Mansion awaiting the familiar nine o'clock call telling patrons that the park is closing for the night. The call comes promptly. Without speaking to each other, the two men walk across to Secretary Seward's house. But the plan, for Payne to gain entrance by pretending to be a delivery boy from the chemist's shop, falls apart. Seward's doctor, the one who supposedly would have written the prescription that exists only in Payne's imaginative cover story, is leaving the house just as the two men approach; it must be him, for he carries a doctor's satchel and climbs into a carriage. There goes the idea of simultaneous attacks on the intended victims. Thinking quickly, Payne tells Herold to ride as fast as possible to tell Atzerodt and Wilkes, while he continues with his portion of the plot regardless. He is, after all, a soldier, and he has been given an order.

The servant who opens the polished front door sees an enormously tall young man in a distinctive long overcoat of some unusual light gray material.

“I am delivering the Secretary's medication,” the man says.

The recipient of this remark thinks it out of the ordinary as the doctor has just left, and tries to turn the caller away. With almost no
visible effort, Payne pushes him aside and bounds up the staircase two steps at a time in the direction of the master bedroom on the third floor.

Knowing his recovery will be a long one, Seward has had his son Frederick made an assistant secretary of state, charged with keeping minutes of what goes on in the meetings that he himself is unable to attend. Frederick has been living in the house to be close to the patient during this agonizing recuperative period. He is studying his notes of the cabinet session held earlier that day when he is startled by a commotion and steps into the corridor to inquire. He doesn't recognize Payne, doesn't know that Payne has knocked over the servant two floors below, but is naturally suspicious of him all the same. He opens the door to his father's room to see if the secretary is still awake. That seems not to be the case, for the secretary is motionless and his eyes are closed; his sixteen-year-old daughter sits by the bedside, holding his hand as he slowly drifts into the promise of drugged and dreamy sleep. Frederick gently closes the door behind him as he leaves the room. But in a moment he hears the latch open again. His sister contradicts him: “He is awake now,” she says.

Payne pipes up. “Is the secretary asleep?”

“Not quite yet, but almost,” Frederick's sister says before disappearing back into the bedroom.

Knowing that something is amiss, Frederick takes Payne's paper parcel and tells him that he himself will give the medicine to his father. Payne accepts this and turns as though to go down the stairs. But in turning, he pulls a revolver from somewhere inside his long coat, puts it to Frederick's temple and squeezes the trigger. The revolver misfires. So he brings the barrel down on the young Seward's skull.

Miss Seward and a Negro, an invalided army private who is helping to look after her father, open the door again and peek around it to see what's going on. Frederick is on his feet, but barely. A cascade of blood is falling over his face. Payne has drawn another weapon from the voluminous coat: a bowie knife. He uses it to knock down the soldier and rushes past the daughter to where Seward lies, immobilized by his shoulder cast and the jaw splint holding his mandible in place. Payne crosshatches his victim's head and neck with deep cuts. He is pulling him over on his side to expose the jugular, which the jaw contraption obscures, when the wounded soldier jumps on the back of the much bigger man and hangs on his neck like a child playing piggyback. Payne loses his balance and the two end up wrestling on the carpet.

Another of the Seward children appears. Taking in the scene in an instant, he runs to fetch his own revolver. Whereupon Payne rises to his full height, tosses the soldier aside like a small piece of furniture and tears down the stairs, encountering a messenger coming up. Payne knocks him down and then stabs him before dashing into the street. In a moment the servant who first opened the door, on his feet once again but terribly dizzy, flies out of the Seward house crying, “Murder!” Some soldiers lounging nearby see a tall figure in a long coat mount a horse tethered to the now-locked iron fence of Lafayette Park. The unknown man rides off to the sound of hooves rapidly striking the paving bricks. Being on foot, they cannot catch him.

“Murder” turns out to be an overstatement. Seward is alive, though barely. His jaw hangs from the rest of his face by a strip of flesh. Payne has once again shown his daring, but this time he has failed. He has, however, come far closer to success with the secretary of state than Atzerodt who was delegated to kill the vice president. Andrew Johnson is not molested this night because his assigned assassin is too drunk to act, standing in a barroom, where Herold
is unable to locate him. Indeed, after achieving a certain level of inebriation with his own funds, he is wondering if he can spot a familiar face or a kind-looking stranger who might stand him another drink, as such charity is his only conceivable source of credit.

The president, two women and a Yankee officer. The last of these is the only one who might— might— be armed. Wilkes watches the officer closely as he steps into the box and plants the barrel of the pistol right against the back of the president's skull. There is a deafening report. The blast propels Lincoln far forward. The runners of the rocking chair tip violently, and the victim falls to the right, landing on the not particularly well swept floor. Not taking any chances that he himself could be shot from behind in turn, Wilkes leaps at the young major with his dirk and slashes him badly. He is moving so quickly, an infinity lasting only a few seconds, that his eyes do not even take in Missus Lincoln and the major's fiancée. He steps neatly between the empty rocker and the first lady's chair, grabs the rail and steps out onto the edge of the box, catching one of his spurs in the damned Treasury flags as he launches himself into space. He is five foot seven, meaning that once he jumps over the rail and straightens, the soles of his riding boots will plummet less than seven feet before hitting the stage. The problem is not height but rather the fact that the foot tangled in the flag comes down an instant later than the other, causing him to land awkwardly. He sprains his left ankle, though not seriously enough to impede his escape. He faces the audience for a second, holding the blade aloft like a trophy, and utters an histrionic slogan. Most of those who hear it believe he says “Sic semper tyrannis,” the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Others whose hearing is just as acute interpret it as “The South is avenged.”