Walt Whitman's Secret (29 page)

Mistakenly believing that the great swamp could not be crossed, soldiers and government detectives are working in tandem first at Surrattsville and then close to Doctor Mudd's farm even as substantial bodies of opinion point toward Baltimore, Canada and several other places. At the Mudd farm, a big break is served to them like mashed potatoes. The doctor's wife says the left boot that her husband had cut off the stranger with the broken leg got lodged under the bed
and forgotten about on the night in question but has now come to light during routine housekeeping. She hands it to the soldiers. Inside is the inscription “H. Lux, maker. 455 Broadway. J. Wilkes.” Doctor Mudd is unceremoniously arrested. Now those in authority know positively that Wilkes has headed farther down into southern Maryland and will be crossing the Potomac once again, at a place where it is much wider than at the Navy Yard Bridge in the District.

Wilkes and Herold have overshot the fording place. To make a second attempt at landing in Virginia, they first paddle back the way they came and round the little neck of Virginia that juts far out into the river and forces it into the shape of a letter U as it runs to the sea. Federal gunboats are nearby, though they are proving no match for the wily locals. Wilkes and Herold aren't locals of course, but they manage, with only one close call, to blend in with all the other small river craft going about their business. On the morning of the ninth day after the events at Ford's Theatre— April twenty-third, Shakespeare's birthday, a fact hardly lost on Wilkes— they step ashore in Virginia and go in search of Elizabeth Quesenberry's place. Quesenberry is a minor aristocrat from a family of politicians connected to some of the Founding Fathers as well as the crowned heads of Mexico. She is living in such a benighted place because, until the loss of Richmond and the surrender of Lee's army, she had been using the modest home as a safe house for Confederate agents. When located, she is highly suspicious of the two visitors but delivers food to them through intermediaries, who suggest that Wilkes might find treatment for his leg at the Summer home of a Doctor Stuart, a few miles distant. The fugitives pay ten dollars for the privilege of doubling up on their informant's horse. Their compatriots are bleeding them dry.

Stuart is even more aristocratic than Missus Quesenberry, being connected, through the marriage of his cousin Robert E. Lee, to
descendants of George Washington himself. And many others besides. He refuses to put the pair of men up for the night, much less provide medical help to the one who is hurt. He has sometimes been tricked by Yankee spies posing as Confederates in need of assistance. At one point he had been arrested and held for months on a river barge being used as a makeshift jail. Still, he would not turn away hungry men with out a meal, not even these dirty and obviously disreputable jaspers. He also grudgingly gives them some advice about accommodation.

“I have a neighbor here, a colored man who sometimes hires out his wagons,” he says. “Probably he would do it if he is not very busy.”

When Wilkes and Herold locate the man's home, they find him unhelpful as well.

“I have no right to take care of white people,” he says. “I have only one room in the house, and my wife is sick.”

The strangers refuse to take such treatment from a member of the other race. Wilkes pulls his dirk on the man and forces him and his family, including his sick wife, to remain outdoors until morning, when they intend to make off with two of the man's horses.

Armed with the evidence of the boot, detectives are now pursuing the theory that the wanted men either are holed up in the woebegone swamp or have crossed into northern Virginia. If the former is the case, the searchers will have to wait until hunger and disease drive them out of hiding; if the latter, the fugitives will be running fast but out in the open, where cavalry could ride them down. On the hopeful assumption that the second idea is accurate, they cross the Potomac and renew the search.

To prevent the theft of the horses he needs to make a living, the black man, whose name is Charlie Lucas, agrees to take the two white men in his wagon down to the Rappahannock River. There the two can cross by ferry and penetrate much deeper into Virginia, where
they may find a better welcome. At the dock, Wilkes and Herold meet two threadbare former Confederate soldiers making their weary way back home at last. Calling himself David E. Boyd, Herold states that he and his brother, John Boyd, who walks with crutches because of a wound incurred at Petersburg, are in the same position. The Confederates are mighty suspicious of these claims. So Herold blurts out, half bragging, half confessing, that he and his friend “are the assassinators of the president.” For this is the problem that has been facing them: Wilkes knows that he lacks the common touch and will betray his education if he tries to engage such people as these in conversation. For his part, Herold, though by no means the mentally disadvantaged person that people in the District believe him to be, has none of his partner's acting talent. He always continues to talk and talk until he gets them into difficult situations. The ferry makes the crossing in only a few minutes, before either man can get them both hanged.

In Washington, Lafayette Baker, the disingenuous and self-promoting head of the secret service, is one of those who believe his prey are heading south through Virginia, not coughing with swamp fever in Maryland. He puts together a small but select band of twenty-five horse soldiers to scour the sections of northern Virginia that, however many times other troops have passed by, through and over them, have not been so thoroughly investigated as they might be. As its leader, he picks a young Canadian, a lieutenant named Edward Doherty.

The ferry's southern terminus is Port Royal, where Herold tries to find beds for himself and his injured friend. One landlady agrees but changes her mind when she sees Wilkes, who now looks like the hunted animal he is. She points them in the direction of Richard
Garrett's tobacco farm some miles distant. Meanwhile, the cavalrymen arrive at the ferry dock on the other side. They have photographs of Wilkes, Herold and Surratt. A black man tells them that he has seen the first two pass through but has never laid eyes on the third.

Without knowing the specifics, Wilkes and Herold certainly understand that the odds of their getting away are growing slimmer and slimmer. Eleven days have gone by since the killing. The locals they meet are no doubt betraying them to the Yankees as soon as they are out of sight. They decide their best chance is to split up and go in opposite directions; at least one of them might get out of the country and survive. Herold heads out alone toward the west but has second thoughts and returns to Wilkes's side. He is not a leader but a loyal assistant, not a star of the stage but a member of the audience sitting in one of the cheap seats. They proceed together to Garrett's farm.

The horsemen had been twenty-four hours behind those they have been pursuing, but as they are on fast horses and their quarry on foot, they quickly close the gap. They find one of the Southern veterans who had been on the ferry and knows the territory well, and from him learn that the figures they seek are most likely at Garrett's by now. The night is moonless and they ride hard for two hours. On arriving, they surround the farmhouse and wake the owner, whom they threaten to kill on the spot if he doesn't tell them where the wanted men are hiding. Garrett says they have gone, gone into the woods.

“What? A lame man go into the woods?”

“He went on his crutches.”

Now the bluecoats produce a coil of rope and threaten to hang the farmer without further ado but give him one more chance.

“I do not want a long story out of you. I just want to know where these men have gone.”

To save his father, Garrett's son tells the soldiers that the men are in the barn. The building is already surrounded, and Lieutenant Doherty forces Garrett to enter it and return with Wilkes and Herold. Garrett says they should surrender now, as Doherty calls on the two plotters to give up their weapons or the barn will be set alight. Wilkes promises a fight to the death, like a character in so many plays. The soldiers carry out their threat and set the building on fire. Herold says he is surrendering, ignoring Wilkes's vow to kill him if he does so, and walks out to deliver himself into custody.

The structure is old and dry. As in most such buildings used to cure tobacco, there are wide gaps between the slats for maximum air circulation, and the resulting cross-draft maximizes the speed and height of the flames. The soldiers closest to the scene can see Wilkes hobbling round inside with the repeating carbine taken from the stash at the Surrattsville tavern. One of those peering in is Sergeant Boston Corbett, a curious customer, born in England and a hatter by trade. He is a fervid and fervent born-again Christian. So much so that to help him overcome sinful temptation, he has castrated himself with scissors. He aims his revolver through one of the openings and fires. Wilkes falls flat on his face with a wound to his neck.

Soldiers carry Wilkes to the front porch of the farmhouse, where his hold on consciousness rises and falls. Garrett's sister nurses him (and clips a lock of his hair for a souvenir when no one's looking). A doctor is summoned. He realizes Wilkes has incurred spinal cord damage. Booth's body is like a nocturnal city that is going dark one block at a time.

In the moments when he can speak, Wilkes says, “Tell my mother that I did it for my country— that I die for my country.”

He is paralyzed, and at dawn he asks someone to hold up his hands so that he can see them. He says, “Useless, useless.” Those who hear him assume he is referring to his hands. Then he dies.

Pete the Great has fled the District and is lying low outside Baltimore, where he reads of Wilkes's death in the newspapers and shivers a bit until he remembers the horrors of prison and the worse horrors of battle and the tough hayride that has been his life so far. “i figured I ought not ta be cowed by whatever trouble there was to be,” he tells W many years later. “I made a Decision. i decided i was scared a Yankees and englishmen about the same amount a pig is scared a mud.” W thought those were poetic words, but he didn't know how true they were.

   
ELEVEN
   

O
NE DAY IN THE
S
UMMER
of Eighty-eight W gave me a packet of correspondence, some of which was only three years old— three years almost to the day. It was an exchange with James Redpath of the
North American Review
concerning publication in its pages of W's piece called “Booth and the Old Bowery,” about seeing the great actor perform in New York long ago, before the Lincoln affair discolored that talented family. The gist of the letter was that W originally asked a hundred dollars but was prepared to bargain. The last item in the little pile was W's receipt for sixty, given with the proviso that he be allowed to reprint the article in his own book. For by then we were hard at work on a new project, one almost absurdly ambitious for a sickly author. It was the
Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855–1888.
The former date was of course the year of the first edition of the immortal
Leaves.
The latter was not only the year of the book's most recent piece but also the year in which he expected the whole nine-hundred-page affair to be published! Given his diminishing energies and his tendencies both to revise and to procrastinate, I thought this a difficult proposition. I also believed that including the whole of
November Boughs
in the new book was a poor idea, given that the independent existence of
Boughs
was so recent that the market had yet to digest much of the inventory.