Walt Whitman's Secret (46 page)

“Lincoln saved These States from disintegrating and ultimately disappearing from the map of Liberty. Its location at the center of that map is after all what brought your own family here escaping oppression.”

(I thought to myself, “We can debate that another time.” Then I realized there would of course be no other time.)

“No one exceeded me in admiration for Lincoln,” he went on. “By which I mean, not even in the all too brief periods when he was enjoying his topmost level of support. I was vocal about it. You've never lived through a war, my boy. You can't imagine what the reality of it was day upon day, the politics, the whole atmosphere and feel of it, not simply dispatches from the battle-fronts. You might say it assumed its own form, as both religion and disease. It entered every conversation just as it filled every newspaper. The District was a city besieged, as well as the besieger of its nemesis. Of course you already know all this from what I later wrote.

“Now Pete had all the virtues of very young men: manliness, quickness, a reckless disregard for his safety based on the belief— until it was proved wrong, as it was for my hospital boys— that he was invincible. But despite the hard life he had led, his responses were not yet always tempered by his experiences: the corresponding
weak
spot of the young. He was prone to sudden floods of temper. I could picture him entering into brawls with his fellow Rebel soldiers from time to time, and perhaps doing likewise with the patrons of Northern saloons. To see him in his town clothes he was not especially athletic looking, but he had a powerful chest and strong arms.”

I had to move my chair closer as his voice was curving downward again. I could see the way he was expending his energies, and it moved me deeply, as it does now to recall.

“He was given to periods of stationary blackness as easily as to ones of touchiness, when he could not be approached without caution. I was one evening speaking of Lincoln, talking of the war and political affairs of the day, when he seemed to erupt in flames.”

Here he paused to let more breath accumulate in his damaged lungs.

“He was accusing me of loving the president more than I did him. He was being absurd of course, in the grip of an angry fit. Lincoln was an impressively tall and straight-backed man whose face made an art of homeliness, but those were my only opinions on his physical person as distinct from his convictions and philosophy. Pete stormed out of my room. More than once in a single evening, in fact. I resolved to show greater grasp of his piques and vexations. But some damage had already been done, and more was to follow.

“Horace, I won't be able to talk much longer. I don't have the wind and am unsure even of my will. So I will come to the head of the matter. When we resumed our bond, but on a slightly less happy and less constant basis, he let me know, by dribs and drabs, that he had become acquainted with Edwin Booth's brother, the darkly handsome one. When he was in the right state to tell me, but wishing to tell me so as to do me no injury, he revealed that he had, in a way, rejoined the Struggle. Booth had recruited him for a conspiracy to kidnap the president and hold him hostage. The way in which he revealed this to me, with his head almost bowed, suggested to me that his being raised in the Roman faith, even though he no longer subscribed to its precepts or dogma, had left him with the idea that any form of transgression was erasable with enough confession and penance.

“Naturally, I advised him never to repeat to anyone else what he had told me in the confessional of my boarding-house and with all swiftness to distance himself from J.W. Booth. I presume he took the first advice, but evidently he didn't accept the second.

“I was unwell at the time with the lingering consequences of an unusual fever I seemed to have contracted from the wounded. I was in my latter forties, but this was the first time my body had let me down in such a way: a warning of what was to come, I would learn to my sorrow. Also, my family in Brooklyn was experiencing difficulties once again. What's more, I wanted to find just the right printer for stereotype copies of
Drum-Taps.
Leaving Pete in what I hoped, and what certainly seemed to be, a calmer state of mind, I therefore went to New York.

“Four years after the whole glorious hell began, I was on my leave, up in Brooklyn again looking after family matters, when I read the first news of Lee's surrender. And so too, a week after that, getting ready to address the cooked breakfast Mother had prepared, I picked up the paper and saw the telegraph news of Lincoln's murder the previous evening. For the rest of the day I went up and down the old streets, watching shopkeepers tacking up black crepe. I grabbed newspapers. I brought home every morning and every evening edition. The boldest, blackest headline in one of them was A TERRIBLE TRAGEDY!, which indeed it of course was. There was a feeling of tragedy in my heart as well when I read that Booth was the killer, though I did not know how an abduction had become an assassination or what part Pete might have played and what the condition of his mind must be.”

He began to cough and asked for some water, which he drank quickly. Some of it spilled down his front. It looked to me that his under-lip had gone numb, for it appeared scarcely to move at all when he spoke.

“I was back in the District two days later. I couldn't locate Pete anywhere; he had gone to ground. You have read about the events that followed the murder. There was found to be a large conspiracy. Many were jailed, from the surgeon who set Booth's leg to those who had made disparaging remarks about Lincoln and people who
just happened to resemble Booth. It was a bad time for good-looking black-haired young men with a certain bearing to them. Of the actual assailants, three were hanged: Payne, who stabbed Seward, Herold, who fled with Booth into the swamps, and the feeble-minded Prussian, Atzerodt. Missus Surratt, who participated in no violence, was hanged with them. Her son, however, escaped to Canada and from Canada to Europe, and when brought back for trial was let go because of a hung jury. He is still among the living.

“In short, the country was in an uproar of retribution. Even a fellow named Spangler, I believe it was, one of the stage-hands at Ford's, was sent to prison, because he may or may not, absentmindedly or with deliberation, have left open the rear door through which Booth fled. Everyone believed that there were a great many other small fry, and no doubt some bigger fishes as well, who dispersed widely in the hours after the event and were never identified, have not been identified even yet.”

He took another gulp of water and closed his eyes, resting for less than half a moment. His voice was still more hesitant and muted when he resumed.

“Pete burned the one piece of paper that would have connected him to the assassin with criminal certainty, a brief note Booth had sent him. Then he fled the capital, sensibly enough. He was still in a state of justifiable fear in the Autumn of Sixty-eight when he wrote me that he was considering taking his own life on account of a bad case of barber's rash. Of course I knew the genuine agony that hid behind that flimsiest of ciphers. He was wounded and needed me. In my letters I sent him every affection. We even undertook a brief trip together. He accompanied me to Mannahatta and to Brooklyn, where I introduced him to Mother, though we were careful to stay in New Jersey. It was here in Jersey that he gave me the details of April the fourteenth Sixty-five and what he was doing at Ford's.

“Booth had obviously planned the murder to take place at a moment when the stage was least populated with actors. He also depended on the fact, or the hope, that the response of those in the audience would be slowed down by the jolt to their nerves. He believed that he could make his histrionic leap, utter his line like the player that he was and escape across the stage— but only if there were no overly heroic soldiers in the house who were armed and were quick enough of wits and hands to prevent him from effecting his exit. Booth asked Pete to rise the instant the commotion began, survey the rows carefully and shoot down anyone who might him self get to his feet and begin to point a weapon. He sat on the left-hand side of the house, the actor's stage-right, up quite a ways so that there would be few who could in turn shoot him in the back. But not so far away as to preclude him from discerning the Lincolns clearly. He had to get his quarry, if there were to be any, before they could clamber awkwardly onto the stage from below and step over the foot-lights, becoming, for that one brief but crucial moment, other than fully upright and then silhouettes with blurry outlines.

“I was astonished. If this had been known, poor Pete would have been hanged for certain. I asked what plans Booth had made for Pete's own escape from the theater. Apparently there were none. Fortunately, no armed soldiers jumped up before Booth disappeared, and Pete didn't even touch the pistol hidden beneath his long coat. He just took his sweet time, as shocked as everyone else, and walked out of Ford's seeming to be exactly the thing he was not, another follower of the theater, slightly fazed and confused.”

W paused once more, overcome by emotion this time and perhaps by the necessity of having to re-enter the one part of the past he feared reliving. He got control of himself and tried, unsuccessfully, to clear his throat.

“Later, in my own silent analysis of what he had told me, I could conclude only that Pete's lack of ease, or do I mean his disease?, must somehow have entered a new period. The two hemispheres of his problem— the extreme melancholia that weighted his step and dulled his thinking, and the blind anger that became actual violence; two states that until then had alternated with irregular frequency— were now, briefly, operating in unison. Bucke is the expert who would have the better explanation, but of course I have never told him of Pete's part in the tragedy, have never told another soul until this instant. And you must never do so either, on your word to God or whatever you hold most sacred, for Pete too is still among us on Earth, weighted down with guilt. Whether at this late date he might still be hanged or at least imprisoned, I cannot say, but he would be destroyed all the same.”

W's eyes opened and closed rapidly a number of times, as though he were trying to clear some obstruction from his idealized vision of those war-weary days. Or perhaps he was fighting to keep from weeping.

“After that, I resolved to break off our relations, though another part of me wished not to. The process was neither quick nor neat. Both of us had grave doubts about our abilities to go on as previously. There was much recrimination, to be followed by attempts at renewed affection, themselves succeeded by still more recrimination. Knowing myself the pressures brought by family difficulties, I tried to help and console Pete in Seventy-one when his brother, the policeman who had barely escaped dismissal from the force, was shot to death while performing his duties.

“Pete needed a fresh start. He quit the horse-cars and became a railroad brakeman. As I had tried to comfort him when first restoring contact and then during the unfortunate business with his brother, so he helped to nurse me when I had the first stroke in
Seventy-three, which as you know brought me here to the city from which I am about to take my leave.”

By this time, I believe I myself must have been in tears.

“He quit the brakeman's job too, and got work as a baggage master in Philadelphia. We wrote each other still and even visited. It was always awkward. I wished my heart to be free of him, yet could not cease to worry about him, which inevitably meant continuing our communication. He gave me this box, telling me he wished never to set eyes on it again, though why he didn't destroy it I don't know. I suppose that, like me, he was now trapped in his past while trying to persist through each new day.”

He stopped once again, for his lungs' sake, I believe.

“And that is the sad story, abridged to meet the requirements of my waning strength. For now I have made myself very tired. You see how my hands shake. I must rest.”

With his eyes he pointed to the box, imploring me to take it with me when I went, which I did but only after opening it, to see what I was letting myself in for. Inside, wrapped tightly in a big square pillow slip, was a very old pistol of some kind.

He had talked far too much and at far too great a cost. His voice was barely functioning at all. I believe what he said was, “Colt, thirty-six caliber. Not large.”

I resealed the lid and left with the box under my arm, like a large loaf of bread. Going back across to Philadelphia, I threw it over the side of the ferry when I thought no one was looking.

Still stunned and about to become more so, I entered the front parlor at mid-morning to find Tom sitting there with the painter Eakins and two of Eakins's assistants, all of them looking purposeful and
somehow serene. Sitting opposite were W's brother George and his fearsome wife. Missus Whitman looked cross. W had died the previous evening, March twenty-sixth, Ninety-two. Even now I can barely write even a sentence about what I had seen take place the previous evening, not with any assurance that my face will not soon be streaked by tears. I was at the bedside with Tom, Doctor McAlister, Missus Davis and Warrie. Once the end came, all of us dispersed to our individual sorrows. And to our tasks, as with Tom and me frantically sending the news by telegraph far and wide to those who most cared for him. Missus Davis washed the face and Warrie the body. Then the room was darkened. Later I returned alone and gazed down on the still form, which looked sweet and innocent of trouble. I bent down and kissed his forehead. He was stony cold of course, but I caught the scent of his hair. Later still I went in a second time just to take another look. I kept my composure but barely. Now I took Eakins and his apprentices up the worn stairs and opened the shutters on the three windows. It was raining hard yet there was good light, which they needed in making the death mask. Tom helped them. I can't imagine what use a lawyer could actually be, but he too was quite attached to the person who had resided in the body, and so he wished to participate as best he could.