Walt Whitman's Secret (28 page)

Not too hastily but hastily enough, he crosses the breadth of the stage and goes out through the wings stage right, favoring his left leg only slightly. He whips into Baptist Alley, takes the reins out of Peanuts's hand, throws himself into the saddle and spurs the horse to a gallop, disappearing into the streets of the District, into the darkness and into history, just as per the plan.

In the theater, there is disbelieving silence. Then Missus Lincoln screams and wholesale panic breaks out. People are jumping to their feet, among them Pete the Great, who says to himself, “This ain't no Kidnap.” Several members of the cast are still onstage but seem paralyzed. Many figures are running toward the presidential box: several doctors, some soldiers and also Laura Keene. Knowing that the fame of actresses lasts only so long for what they have accomplished onstage, she elbows her way into the box, kneels on the floor and, with difficulty, gets hold of the president's slippery head and nestles it in her lap. She stays until her costume is drenched in blood and speckled with tiny fragments of brain tissue and she can glide through the remainder of her life on a reputation for heroic selflessness.

Suddenly the theater is full of men in blue, and these ones are armed. Pete has left his seat and is making his way through one of the galleries en route to the street, slowly and with what he hopes is deadly earnest casualness. “I Suppose i lingered almost to the last Person,” he informs Doctor Bucke many years later. “a Soldier come into the gallery, saw Me still there. Called out to me, ‘Get out of here! We're going to Burn this d——ned building down!'”

“If that is so, I'll Get out,” Pete replies, sensibly enough, and strolls out into Tenth Street and keeps walking, not too fast and not too slowly, until he can't hear the hubbub anymore. “I went out the same Way I come in.”

He instinctively reverts to his military frame of mind, determined to reveal none of the fear he feels washing over him even as
his carotid arteries pound like the long roll the drummer boys use to summon men to battle. The sound in his ears is the body's emergency supply of blood being rushed to reinforce the brain. He is, at that moment, too busy fleeing for his life in an orderly fashion, too busy escaping as unobtrusively as possible, to be fully conscious of his movements.

There is no curfew within the city itself, but no one is supposed to enter or leave after nine o'clock at night. That's the rule and everybody knows it. So a sergeant guarding the wooden drawbridge that crosses the Potomac, near the Navy Yard in the eastern part of the city, is surprised to see a rider approaching at twenty to midnight. The rider is calm and polite, but his horse looks exhausted. Wilkes gives his real name and explains that he's returning to his home in Charles County. He apologizes for not knowing about the rule but says that he was waiting for the moon to rise because the road beyond the city is so dark. This sounds plausible. The soldier notices that the gentleman's nails have been manicured recently. He shouldn't let the man pass, but he does anyway, grateful though he is to have another human being to talk to. Wilkes walks the horse over the bridge, as the regulations require, and then remounts and is quickly gone.

No sooner has the first rider vanished into the blue-black night than a second one draws up to the barrier. Herold says his name is Smith. He too is headed down to Charles and claims to know nothing of the restrictions in force. The sergeant is getting mightily suspicious now, until the stranger takes him into his confidence, man to man.

“You see, I was with this Dutch girl,” he says. “I couldn't pull out in the middle. I mean, I couldn't tear myself away.”

The sergeant smiles and lets him proceed.

Minutes after Dave Herold gets back on his horse on the other side of the bridge and speeds off to catch up with Wilkes, a
third
traveler appears. This is a real circus tonight, the soldier thinks. The rider says he's trying to catch the man who just passed through.

“I can let you go, but you know the rules: you can't come back into the city until the morning.”

The latest rider is disappointed. “The son of a bitch stole my horse!” he says. He turns back toward the city.

Then, as always, comes the unexpected, for which no insurance can ever be underwritten. Across the river the road is dark, the two men are moving as fast as they can in the circumstances. Wilkes's mount lands with one hoof in a deep mud hole and rears up, throwing the rider. Herold takes the reins and calls out to see if his friend is hurt. Wilkes knows at once that his ankle is broken. The same one he injured in the theater. As it was already weakened in the escape from the president's box, it was begging for something like this. He curses his luck as he gets back into the saddle with difficulty, and the two men ride to the Surrattsville tavern. There they retrieve one of the carbines, a box of ammunition and a pair of binoculars, and buy a bottle of whiskey while they're at it.

At four in the morning, Herold wakes up Doctor Samuel Mudd and tells him there is a man outside— the dark silhouette sitting not quite upright in the saddle some yards away— who needs a surgeon bad. They ease him off the horse and into the doctor's front room. Mudd has to cut Wilkes's left boot to get it off the swollen leg. Mudd determines that the fracture is not in the ankle but the lower end of the fibula. It is a clean break. He puts on a splint and finds a pair of crutches. The injured man stays in bed all day, wearing a beard that has served him well in various stage rôles. Mudd later testifies that, despite their meetings the previous winter, he didn't recognize Wilkes (whom Herold, or Smith, was now calling Tyson).

By this time, all approaches to and from the District have been sealed off and the authorities are frantically looking for Wilkes and Herold in all the wrong places, believing at first that they have gone to ground in Baltimore. But there is progress in the blossoming investigation nonetheless. While the public and the newspapers wallow in information, wildly inaccurate gossip and preposterous rumors, the authorities prove themselves far better policemen than the plotters are criminals. Edwin Stanton runs the investigation from the War Department, right across from the Executive Mansion, and his brisk no brusque efficiency has never been shown to better advantage. Fourteen hours after the shooting of the president and the stabbing of the secretary of state, a thousand men, mostly cavalry, are racing through southern Maryland and the northern parts of Virginia.

When the newspapers identify Wilkes as the assassin, John Matthews opens the letter he was asked to deliver to the
Intelligencer.
He quickly destroys it, horrified at reading Wilkes's arrogant confession and the list of his main accomplices. Yet the lack of this information does not hinder the case that Stanton and his detectives and soldiers are making. One clue leads to another. Atzerodt's name keeps recurring in interviews and interrogations, and a search of the clothes in his room at the Kirkwood House turns up Wilkes's bank book in a coat pocket (right where Wilkes has secreted it, like a pickpocket in reverse)—but no actual Atzerodt, not so far. For on the morning after, Atzerodt has sold, for ten dollars, the revolver with which he was supposed to dispatch the vice president, and leaves central Washington for one of the outlying District communities. O'Laughlen for his part gives in to his fear in a different way. He goes on a champion bender, touring saloons, bordellos and leg shows. His friend Arnold is being hunted as well, but isn't immediately located either.

Troops go to Missus Surratt's and arrest her. While they are there, Payne arrives, wearing workman's clothes. As always, he has
a believable alibi; he never leaves his bed in the morning without one. But the lady of the house refuses to back him up, and they are both taken in. People present at the attempt on Seward pick him out as the assailant, and he is transported in shackles to an ironclad lying at the Navy Yard. He always has a cover story, is not too vain to hide his intelligence, tells inquisitors nothing and shows no fear. There's a person inside the long overcoat, but no one knows him. It is as Lewis Payne that Lewis Thornton Powell will go to the gallows, a gifted pupil of whoever taught him the craft.

Getting a photograph of Wilkes isn't difficult. His image is everywhere to be found, including no doubt the bottom of the most privileged drawer in the bedroom chests of romantic schoolgirls. Likenesses of the others are obtained as well. The area for hundreds of miles is papered with circulars offering big rewards for those still at large, and they are illustrated— a Stanton innovation.

Within days the federal government has Arnold and O'Laughlen in custody under the strictest precautions, along with Payne and Missus Surratt and the unfortunate stagehand Ned Spangler, the only employee of the Ford brothers to be charged. Spangler's principal offense was that he held the assassin's mare for a few moments in the alley before turning the reins over to the clearly innocent helper called Peanuts and then perhaps leaving the stage door open. There were still no reliable leads on the whereabouts of Wilkes and Dave Herold, though they are now known to have headed south and not east. Atzerodt has yet to be hauled in, and there is no sign at all in what jurisdiction John Surratt may be. A colonel grilling Missus Surratt demands she answer the question. She replies that he is very likely in Canada.

The colonel explodes. “No man on the round Earth believes he went to Canada!”

But she is telling the truth. Her son was making for Montreal when
the news reached him in Elmira, New York, and he crossed the border as soon as he could (it was not a difficult matter). He lands in Canada West but does not rush eastward to glittering Montreal. He knows, and his mother knows that he knows, that a devout young man who has studied for the priesthood can find sanctuary among priests across the borderline, particularly those serving rural parishes.

All this while, psychics, visionaries, people with the gift of either telepathy or of the gab, and all manner of other such individualists, bombard Stanton's department with news of Wilkes's whereabouts, some claiming that he too is to be found in Canada.

Wilkes's tactic of incriminating others by having them use horses with which he himself has been associated comes back to haunt him when the singular mare with the white star and the one blind eye breaks her bridle and wanders off while he and Herold are resting in the woods. The troopers crisscrossing southern Maryland, clambering and clattering all the way to the Potomac and soon enough beyond it, undoubtedly have full descriptions of the mounts as well as of the riders. A Wilkes sympathizer hears the two men making a racket in a thicket. He brings the mare back but advises the fugitives to get rid of their horses and find replacements, which they do. The man helps by taking the animals to a swamp— there are swamps everywhere— and shooting them. Herold's horse dies, then Wilkes's, whose head sinks last, the white star vanishing forever. The man has brought with him some newspapers telling of the assassination and its aftermath. Wilkes is hurt, alarmed and puzzled to read that he is being denounced editorially even in the Southern press. The dead president, the editors say, would have been easier on the vanquished states than his successors will be. In this, they say, they are simply putting into type the received understanding of the people.

“The fools.” Herold isn't certain whether Wilkes is talking to him or only to himself. “Does it mean nothing that I have brought down
the father of our country's misery?” Eventually his sentences turn into mutterings and mumbles whose substance he confides to posterity via his diary. The mind-storms become more frequent and perhaps more intense, but each lasts only a short while.

Pushing south, the fugitives come upon the house of a man named Swan, who is of mixed white, African and Indian blood. He sells them whiskey and bread and for an additional payment leads them to the other side of the great swamp full of water snakes and lizards, to the farm of a Southern gentleman whose views have made him famous in the area and infamous to the federals. He sells them a meal at his table. Herold then threatens their host's life if he ever tells of the visit. Despite this, the wealthy farmer helps them find their way. They are now forty miles south of the District but are still in Maryland, not yet in glorious Virginia.

The logical place to cross the Potomac is closely watched, and they wait, hidden by the riverbank, for several hours. Finally their guide, another local farmer, gives them a skiff he has hidden for just such a purpose after first misdirecting a band of cavalry. The wind is high, countermanding their progress, but the river is nonetheless in thick fog. The two fugitives have nearly made their way across when a Yankee gunboat appears. They sit as still as possible and hope that the fog and the darkness are their friends. In the morning they reach the homestead of another Rebel farmer, but they still haven't set foot in Virginia.