by John Jakes
A vacant smile. Her right hand lolled over the carved chair arm. The filthy goblet slipped, fell, broke. She paid no attention. “Ah—ah. If it were only that simple. My father did use force the night I told him I wanted to marry. The rest of your chronology is out of order.” He didn’t understand. “Later, I wanted to do away with the unborn child. My father in one of his rages said he would kill me if I did. I was too terrified of him to attempt it. Together—his was the hand forcing mine, you see—we summoned Starkwether and convinced him of his responsibility. His guilt, if you will. I suspect he carried it until he died, poor wretched man.”
Dills’s hair crawled. Light was shining into the putrefying burial place.
“Are you saving you deceived Heyward Starkwether, madam?”
“Yes.”
“My late client—Elkanah Bent’s patron and declared father—had no connection with the boy?”
“Heyward supposed he was Elkanah’s father. We convinced him of it.”
“But he was not?”
“No.”
“In other words, all those years, my client was coerced into helping and supporting—?”
“Not coerced, Mr. Dills. Once he was convinced that Elkanah was his child, he helped him gladly, as any father would.”
“Who was Bent’s father, madam?”
The yellow eyes, moist and mad, reflected the candles around the tower.
“Why, Mr. Dills”—she giggled, a hideous coquetry—“surely you know. I said he used physical force.”
“Sweet Christ! Elkanah’s father was—”
“Mine, Mr. Dills. Mine.”
The straw-littered stones of the floor seemed to tilt and shiver beneath Jasper Dills. The rational underpinning of his world threatened to collapse. “Goodbye,” he said, snatching his carpetbag and rushing toward the door. “Goodbye, Miss Todd.”
In the cul-de-sac, shivering, he waited and waited for the hackney to return. Now he understood the cause, and the extent, of Elkanah Bent’s insanity. He no longer cared about the stipend. He wanted no more of it, or the woman he’d deceived, or Bent. Especially Bent, wherever he might be.
Dills finally understood much that he’d never understood before. Bent’s unreasonable grudge against the Mains and the Hazards, a preoccupation since his cadet days; the brutality of the Lehigh Station slaying—Bent had inherited a capacity for evil.
Chilly sweat broke out on Dills’s face as he recalled the times he’d criticized Bent, reproved him, ordered him out of his office. If he’d known the sort of man Bent really was, and if he’d known why, he’d never have done such things. He’d probably have cowered instead.
The hackney never came. Dills picked up his carpetbag and stumbled downhill, all the way to the lodging house he’d previously telegraphed for a room. There, at a late hour, he paid exorbitantly for a zinc tub of heated water.
Feeling filthy down to his bones, he sat in the tub with a cake of homemade soap as yellow as her eyes, scrubbing and scrubbing at his wrinkled, mottled skin and thinking of Elkanah Bent, his brain, his blood, his very being poisoned before his birth.
Dills slumped back in the tub, inexplicably sorrowful. God pity poor Bent, whom he surely would never see again. God pity even more the next person to incur Bent’s wrath.
42
NORTH OF WASHINGTON ON the Seventh Street Road, Maryland farmers once a week set up stalls and wagons for an open-air market. On the last Saturday in March, two days before the President’s trial was to begin in the Senate, Virgilia and Scipio Brown went to the market to buy food for the orphanage. Brown drove the buggy and carried the money, amusing Virgilia by this insistence on handling all the male duties. He didn’t seem upset by the looks they drew because she was white and he was not.
They moved through the crowded lanes of the market, among hens squawking in crates and piglets squealing in improvised pens. They argued about the subject most of Washington was arguing about these days.
“He’s usurped power, Virgilia. To make it worse, he’s the elect of an assassin, not the people.”
“You have to be more specific than that to convict him.”
“Good Lord, they’ve drawn up eleven charges.”
“The first nine are all related to the Tenure of Office issue. Ben Butler’s tenth article condemns Johnson for speeches criticizing Congress. Is free speech now a high crime or misdemeanor? The eleventh article is just a grab bag.”
“Authored by your good friend Mr. Stevens.”
“Even so—” They reached a cross lane. A cart approached, piled with crates of rabbits. “I stand by my opinion on it.”
He saw the cartwheel lurch into a rut, tilting the vehicle sideways. Cordage snapped, freeing the crates. The huge stack toppled toward Virgilia and Scipio. He seized her waist and swung her away from the spot where the crates crashed down. Several broke; rabbits escaped in every direction. The driver ran off in pursuit.
Virgilia was abruptly aware of the mulatto’s strong hands on her waist. And of a curious intensity in his dark eyes. She’d noticed similar looks several times lately. “Perhaps we’d better search for eggs and forget politics, Scipio. I wouldn’t want it to ruin our friendship.”
“Nor I.” He smiled and released her. She tingled from the touch of his hands, and was more than a little startled by that reaction.
With arms grown strong from hard work, Virgilia pushed the wood paddle around the steaming kettle of thick pea soup. It was noon the next day. Across the kitchen, Thad Stevens sat with a tawny little boy dozing in his lap, thumb in his mouth. Virgilia’s friend looked pale and weary.
“You will be there tomorrow for the opening of the trial?” he asked.
“Yes, and for as much thereafter as I can manage without falling behind here.”
“You want him convicted, I assume.”
Reluctantly, she said, “I don’t think so. He denies any crime.”
“His denial is estopped by his previous behavior. He sent Thomas to remove Stanton.”
“Thomas failed, so it was only an attempt, not a removal.”
“You’re becoming legalistic, my dear.” He didn’t sound happy about it, although the whole Stanton mess was nothing if not a lawyer’s delight.
Even Grant had been caught in the tangle. Grant’s withdrawal as interim Secretary of War had precipitated a series of bitter exchanges with Andrew Johnson; a final letter from Grant charged the President with trying to “destroy my character before the country.” That letter completely alienated Johnson, and persuaded many people that Grant was at heart a Radical. No one had been quite sure before. Grant’s detractors immediately called him an opportunist, a political chameleon, and—the old canard—a drunkard. Never mind. Grant had purified himself in the eyes of the Radical leadership. In late May the Republicans would convene in Chicago to nominate a presidential candidate. Cynics said the general would there be “confirmed as a new member of the Radical church,” and be chosen to run.
“Legalistic, Thad?” she said. “No. I’m only trying to look at matters fairly.”
“The devil with fair. I want Johnson out. I will hound him till he’s gone.”
She let the paddle rest against the rim of the kettle. In the yard, where a mild March sun fell through the bare branches of two unbudded cherry trees, Scipio laughed and romped with several of the children. “Whether he’s guilty or not?”
In his glare, she saw the answer before he gave it. “We are purging the man, but we are also purging what he represents, Virgilia. Leniency toward an entire class of people. Unrepentant people who still conspire to return this nation to what it was thirty years ago, when an entire black population was in chains and Mr. Calhoun arrogantly threatened secession if anyone dared object. There are seven impeachment managers. Do you have any idea of the enormous pressure already being brought against us? Letters. Cowardly threats—”
Disturbing the boy nestled in his lap, he pulled a wrinkled yellow flimsy from his pocket. “This came from Louis
iana, that’s all I know for certain.”
She unfolded it and read, STEVENS, PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD. THE AVENGER IS UPON YOUR TRACK. HELL IS YOUR PORTION. K.K.K.
Shaking her head, she handed it back. For a moment Stevens’s waxy cheeks showed some color. “The avenger is upon Mr. Johnson’s track, too. His portion is a guilty verdict.”
Scipio ran in the sunshine, whooping. The joyful sound seemed chillingly at odds with the congressman’s angry eyes. His dogma had carried him down a road Virgilia had abandoned. There was no longer much hatred in her, but in him the war raged on.
On Monday, March 30, she arrived an hour before the doors to the Senate gallery opened. When they did, she fought her way upward among people hurrying and pushing. By the time Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase took the chair and opened the trial, there wasn’t an empty seat or vacant stair step in the gallery.
Days ago, Chase had organized and sworn the Senate as a court. Today, all fifty-four legislators representing the twenty-seven states were present on the floor. Among them Virgilia saw Sam Stout, calm and smiling. He’d been quoted widely about his confidence in the outcome. He believed there would be no problem in obtaining the thirty-six votes necessary to convict Johnson on one or more of the articles.
The gallery was noisy, demonstrative, divided by partisanship. Some spectators whistled and waved handkerchiefs when the impeachment managers, seven men from the House, including old Thad with wig askew, took their places amid piles of books and briefs at a table to the left of the chair. President Johnson’s five eminent attorneys faced them on the other side of the chair. All of the senators were squeezed into the first two rows of desks, with the desks behind packed with members of the House. Reporters filled the back aisles, lined the wall, and blocked the doors.
The trial opened with a three-hour oration by the chief manager, Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts. Spoons Butler, the Beast of New Orleans, was a skilled and abrasive lawyer. He generated cheers and a blizzard of waving handkerchiefs when he declared that Johnson was patently guilty for removing Stanton in defiance of Congress and while Congress was in session.
Seated in the restless, noisy crowd, Virgilia gazed down on Sam Stout and felt no great hurt, only a melancholy emptiness. Time was indeed changing and mellowing her. To her surprise, her attention wandered several times from the scene below. In its place she saw Scipio Brown’s eyes after he’d saved her from injury when the market cart overturned. She remembered how his hands had felt on her waist, pressing tightly. She liked the memory.
By the ninth of April, the managers had rested their case. Perhaps the high point of the prosecution’s presentation had come when Butler whipped out a red-stained garment and flourished it. He said it was the shirt of an Ohioan from the Freedmen’s Bureau whom Klansmen in Mississippi had flogged. Next morning Washington had a new phrase for its political lexicon; you whipped up anti-Southern sentiment by “waving the bloody shirt.”
Johnson’s lawyers presented the arguments for acquittal. Because of an epidemic of measles at the orphanage, Virgilia missed many of those sessions in April. When she read about them in the papers, she didn’t regret it. The legalisms, the hair-splitting over the language of the Constitution, and the all-day orations sounded boring.
She wondered why long speeches were necessary. The issue seemed clear enough. Johnson’s authority had been challenged by the various Reconstruction bills, including the provocative Tenure of Office Act, which effectively denied the Chief Executive the power to remove cabinet officers whom the Senate had confirmed. On this issue Johnson had dug in, to force a test.
Virgilia thought that that was not only valid but also necessary. Further, Edwin Stanton was Lincoln’s appointee, not Johnson’s, and it was in Lincoln’s term, not Johnson’s, that the Senate had consented to the appointment. She thought there was a strong argument that Stanton was actually outside the Tenure of Office jurisdiction.
Lengthy summations began. She heard the one by William S. Groesbeck, an eloquent Cincinnati attorney. He spoke to the subject of Johnson’s character.
“He is a patriot. He may be full of error, but he loves his country. I have often said that those who lived in the North, safely distant from the war, knew little of it. We who lived on the border knew more … our horizon was always red with its flames, and it sometimes burned so near we could feel its heat on our outstretched hands. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee lived in the heart of the conflagration … in the very furnace of war … and his tempered strength kept him steadfastly loyal to the Union … impervious to treason. How can he then be suddenly transformed, in the words of the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Boutwell, to the arch-demon? It is ludicrous.”
At the managers’ table, George S. Boutwell glared.
On and on they went, accusing, defending, interpreting, theorizing. Occasionally fist fights broke out in the gallery, and the trial would be stopped while ushers removed the combatants. The atmosphere in the gilt-and-marble chamber grew more and more charged with emotion, until Virgilia began to feel she was no longer in the United States, but in some Roman arena. The difference was that the victim to be sacrificed had not made even a single appearance. Johnson had organized a staff of runners to report each new development.
The Roman analogy proved especially apt the day the Honorable Mr. Williams, manager from Pennsylvania, attacked the accused:
“If you acquit him you affirm all his imperial pretensions and decide that no amount of usurpation will ever be enough to bring a chief magistrate to justice. That will be a victory over all of you here assembled. A victory to celebrate the exultant ascent of Andrew Johnson to the Capitol, dragging not captive kings but a captive Senate at his chariot wheels.”
Men jumped up in the gallery, some cheering, some protesting. Chief Justice Chase needed four minutes to restore order. Virgilia saw faces red with indignation, and she saw others that made her think of predators—predators who fed on every accusation, no matter how outrageous.
Suddenly, on the far side of the gallery, she was startled to spy two other faces overlooked before. Her brother Stanley and his wife Isabel.
Virgilia no longer had contact with them; no invitations to dine at I Street, no birthday greetings, nothing. She often heard Stanley’s name in the city, sometimes not in a flattering way.
Isabel glanced at Virgilia with no recognition. Stanley was absorbed in matters on the floor. How puny he looked, Virgilia thought. Older than his forty-five years. His skin had an unhealthy, jaundiced coloration.
Williams eyed the quieting gallery. He raised his voice:
“If indeed the miscreant returns like a conqueror in Roman triumph, I can predict what will follow. A return of the Rebel office-holders whom he favors, and a general convulsion of their states, casting loose your reconstruction laws, and delivering over the whole theater of past conflict into anarchy, injustice, and ruin.”
Again members of the crowd surged up, yelling and waving handkerchiefs. Virgilia sat in sad silence. In her view the managers had proved nothing, except that they wanted Johnson’s blood before he ever came to trial, and would have it whether he was guilty or not.
The session recessed. On the packed staircase, Virgilia came upon Stanley leaning against the wall and mopping his yellowish face with a large kerchief. She stopped on the step above, trying to shield him from the buffeting crowd.
“Stanley?” she said over the noise. She tugged his sleeve. “I saw you earlier. Are you all right?”
“Virgilia. Oh—yes, perfectly fine.” He seemed remote, eyeing the people pushing past her down the stairs. “And you?”
“Well enough. But I’m worried about you, Stanley. You look ill. It’s been so long since we talked, and there are so many unkind stories afloat.”
“Stories?” He jerked back like a felon threatened with handcuffs. “What sort of stories?”
She smelled the clove he’d chewed. To hide what other odor? “Stories about the things you do to hurt your
self. Great long drinking sprees—”
“Lies.” He leaned his sweaty forehead against the marble, gasping. “Damn lies.”
Grieving for him, and for his own lie, she touched his sleeve. “I hope so. You’re a prominent man, enormously wealthy and successful. You have everything now.”
“Perhaps I don’t deserve it. Perhaps I’m not proud of what I am. Did you ever think of that?”
The blurted words stunned her. Stanley guilt-ridden? Why?
From behind, someone seized her shoulder. Virgilia was nearly toppled off balance; if she’d fallen, those pouring from the gallery might have trampled her.
Not four inches from Virgilia’s nose, Isabel’s long, horselike face seemed to inflate with rage. “Leave him alone, you mongrel slut. Stanley is tired, that’s all. We have nothing to say to you. Stand aside.”
Like an officer disciplining a private, she took hold of her husband’s arm and thrust him down the stairs. She elbowed and pushed to open a path. Stanley was unsteady. He glanced back at his sister with a swift look of apology. At the landing, he and Isabel disappeared.
Virgilia thought she’d never seen her brother look so bad, so tormented. Why should great success cost him so dearly? she wondered again.
The summations concluded in the first week in May. By then all of Washington was charged, and changed, by the trial. Some called it the majestic working of justice. Others called it a saturnalia, a circus. Police routinely broke up fights that erupted over the trial. Gamblers poured into the city on every train, crowding the hotels and taking wagers on the verdict. When Chief Justice Chase closed the doors on Monday, May 11, and the court went into private session, the odds favored acquittal.
In the Star and other papers, Sam Stout had announced that the gamblers were wrong. Thirty-one votes for conviction on at least one article were firm, he said. Six more would tilt in favor of conviction by the end of the week.
On Thursday, Stevens sought refuge at the orphanage. “The damned press won’t let me alone. My own constituents won’t either.” He looked even more tired than he had the last time he’d come.
