“The bitterness is only the scent of squandered blood from men too young to die.”
“And gruesome,” she turned her face away from me.
“I have seen it more than once and tasted it ever since. Each laced collar, each pleat, each ruffle on her sleeve was once a platoon, a column, an entire regiment crippled, blinded or unceremoniously buried in some field or pasture. Soon to be forgotten, turned and ploughed under by a future generation with no memory of the countless names that once were men. No recollection of the reasons that brought them to arms. Only the propaganda of the reigning politics, whose scribes are empowered to tell the story.
“So were spun the glorious tales of Pericles, Alexander, Augustus,” I continued. “So always will be the conqueror, the tyrant, the favorite in His eye. So shall the vanquished be ever silent, but for the few who know the truth and dare remember.”
“Must we always speak of war? You would have yourself be one of these few?” she taunted. “It is you who would seem the tyrannical poet who fancies himself some divine mouthpiece. Or were the muse’s words whispered to you alone that I could not hear? For tragic Melpomene could just as easily be masked Thalia, having her way at your expense. Mine too, if I might allow it.”
Antistrophe
I must have loved her. Loved her only. For I had never before felt the complete emptiness that her reasoned wit and occasioned rebuke easily engendered in my chest, the hunger of my body and soul for those kind or sensible words to remedy my pain. Just thinking of her finds me vacant and longing again.
***
The perfume of timothy and clover permeated the glaucous mossed and misty air. Spring drank deeply of its muted colors and aromas, lending through her mild enjoyment what vibrancy an April, though heartily, pretends. Everywhere shadows of gum and dogwood heaved thawing sighs of appreciation for the feasting scene as I approached.
Sweet-scented myrtle hedged a six-foot coppice along the edge of the property’s lane. An intoxicating barrier, it guided one’s path with the faint threat of loss. Evergreens, reeds, brambles, brush, tulip trees and oaks abounded and seemed to breathe only of truth and life. In the distance marsh hens called a lonely tune that echoed past the rotting planks of old slave quarters. Ahead in the middle of this 1,200-acre plantation stood the colonnaded home, unchanged, uncannily serene—especially considering the havoc indiscriminately visited everywhere else within calling distance.
Casually tying my hired mount to a carriage post, I thought to walk around the back, to certify the strangely proposed calm, but felt it could be trusted despite my intuition. Besides, what would change, and might I not gain less suspicion by merely continuing my way straight up the front steps?
Perhaps I had been spied by chance through the oiel de boeuf in the narrow passage leading from the entry to the great hall by one of the maids who scurried through the corridors upon my entrance, or perhaps it was the hesitant sounds of my newly heeled boots upon the hollow porch before I had summoned the courage to knock. The door immediately opened, and I was invited in without question by a comely and handsomely dressed black whose smile was curiously hung from small but protruding ears like a pair of spectacles.
I was taken into the main parlor as he left to announce me. Without my name, I wondered, as what?
***
“Pale sherry for our guest, Johnnie,” he commanded without hesitation and was likewise obeyed by the young white manservant appearing in the doorway.
Should I have been startled by the coincidence? It was just a name.
“How is your brother?”
His tone was both as frank and removed as ever.
“Of course you have been to see him before coming here. Do not look so surprised. Or was I neither to expect nor recognize you? I daresay, I know many more things than you would care for me to know. Though many of them are well-within my province. Now, what exactly is it you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come, sir. Must we have secrets? I was her father. That makes me,” he hesitated, “grandfather of her children.”
Senator Nash said this in a manner totally unlike anything I could remember, then stopped long enough to receive our drinks and dismiss his manservant before continuing. Of course he made certain the serving carafe was left upon the small silver-wrapped tea wagon and was neither upset nor surprised when I declined the offered crystal pony glass.
“It cannot be money,” he started, putting down the one glass. “You must still have plenty of that. Am I right?”
“There was very little to spend it on—until now,” I said frankly but distractedly with a glance toward a young housekeeper who dusted about the secretary desk at the far end of the large and sumptuously decorated office.
“Still, I may be sure that you managed. It is, after all, well within your ruinous nature.”
He eyed me with a suspicion whose source I could scarcely deny. I fidgeted with my cap, as if to examine its lining.
“I can see by your nervous dissipation you are your same covert and insecure self, afraid to know the mind you might then speak, lest you chance disappointment. Allow me to ease your curiosity, regarding your family.”
The senator hesitated momentarily, now only long enough to dismiss the young maid who had begun again to enter the room but apologetically took hold of the double pocket doors and slid them shut with a silent nod.
“Pardon me but the household is surely curious about my ragged visitor. They are used to expecting political figures and foreign dignitaries. President Harrison was here not one month ago,” he recalled with a glint before continuing. “They probably think you a spy—and would not be far from right, do you say?
“If I thought any good could come of it they would all be here with me,” he continued in a confidential tone, resuming the prior topic with his usual callousness. “But, Mr. Booth, that is impossible. The scandal would undo my family name. Everything I would like to give them would just as surely be taken away.”
“Not to mention your political career.”
“This is not outside consideration, but makes little matter today. At my age you must see it is rather the least of my concerns. What I care for is my daughter’s wellbeing.”
“Which makes little matter today.”
Nash finished his glass in a single sip and turned his back on me to look out through the high oriel.
“As you say, Mr. Booth.”
“Is this why you had arranged for her to meet me? For her wellbeing?”
“What she chose to do was her own affair. Obviously. Or, perhaps you believe it was my desire she should bring bastards into an otherwise genteel world!”
“But you went to so much trouble.”
“Oh, you mean when I introduced myself as if I thought you were your brother? Mistaking performances, and all that? That was really nothing. Just a little assurance that you would strive all the more fervently to distinguish yourself. Your relationship with your brother was not unknown—nor that unusual, after all.”
This was more of a declaration than I had imagined and the senator seemed suddenly aware he had told me more than I had ever guessed, his manner changing at once.
“I am afraid you need see no more of me. It is my brother-in-law, Badeau, you seek. But I will make you swear to keep your identity—and paternity—secret from the children—or understand, I will track you until you are a certain corpse. The past is past, gone. Dead as the man you once were. It is not some idea of principle, Mr. Booth. Nor has it ever been. But business only, as everything. Purely business.”
The senator’s frame had been compromised with the years but not so his intent.
“The same as when we discovered it was not your body in the barn. What to do? Your little conspirator friends had failed, as I suppose we ever knew they would.
“But you know I trusted you, Mr. Booth. Damned if I know why. Even argued that you were our man indeed. And I suppose you were. It was not easy to convince my associates. Or, a
t times, myself, I admit. Of course, I knew as soon as Ella reported our lack of confidence you would again work all the more diligently. You are so predictable in your dramatic choices, Mr. Booth. Then that is why it was so simple to know you would be here.”
The senator refilled his glass until it almost began to overflow, took a large mouthful and filled it again, nearly as full.
“But those others. We had to hang the ones who knew about the money. It took us three days to be sure Mudd and those others did not. Poor Mrs. Surratt could not stop talking about it. How she knew it was not you at Garrett’s Farm on account of the money not being found with the body. Thought that would save her. Did quite the opposite, you know.
“Of course, we would have liked to pay you the rest of it—although I imagine you had more than enough where you were.
“Where were you, anyway? Oh, never you mind, it does not matter. You are here now. Aren’t you Mr. Booth?”
He motioned as to put his glass down but kept it in his hand, raising it to eye level and absently viewing its vague prisms as he turned it first in one direction then the other.
“Still, I owed you something. A chance to live. You had not failed us. I knew that. But, of course, the initial fear was that you would be captured and tell all you knew. You understand that now, don’t you? Why we had no choice? Rather ironic, isn’t it? Assassinate the assassin?
“Then when it was discovered Corbett had killed the wrong man, we had another choice. We could have come after you, nearly did. But I knew you would see it as your chance to escape. That you knew the plot had ultimately failed. Your plot, Mr. Booth. Not ours. Never ours. You were always very clear about that.
“How could you return knowing there would be no bows, no applause, no bouquets tossed up from the pit? And no woman ready to become your wife?
“That was the one thing I had to certify. Because, you know, by then, Ella would have gone anywhere with you. Despite everything. Unless—she thought, you had left—with another woman.”
His eyes looked straight into mine for the first time since I had arrived. Maybe the first time ever.
“Do not look so shocked, Mr. Booth. You know as well as I, it was a very easy thing to imagine. Almost as easy to prove, but quite unnecessary.”
He laughed his hollow, vacant laugh.
“An amazing coincidence, the pocket full of photographs. Your double could not have done you a greater disservice, even in his greatest of sacrifices. Ella at once believed and disbelieved it was you for this very reason—other women, not one, but many—finally convincing herself she was too trusting.”
“Are you finished?”
“Ah, you mean—shall I recount the tale of your sweetest Ella? So pure and so divine? She was mine too remember? Before she failed her desired vocation, like generations of others who preceded her and have yet to come. Still, she made her living, at the theater—in the theater district, after all. In the shadows of the stage doors and the alleyways for a time. Her mask positioned, her part well-rehearsed, Mr. Booth, as only you might know. As you had certified. Sic semper coitus! Thus ever to harlots!”
I suddenly stopped thinking about his having described my new suit of clothes as ragged, though clearly it was not of the quality to which he was accustomed, his lightweight gabardine jacket draping perfectly over a crisp linen shirt. The blood he had kept subdued at the first now rose to his cheeks as he continued.
“You know my Ella had always been the devoted one. To me. To the memory of her mother. Then to her children. Unfortunately also to you, Mr. Booth. Always to you.
“If she had received a single word from you she would have been by your side in an instant. For this alone I can take the credit. I knew as much as you would want to write as many letters as you might start you would never send a single one. You had to feel she would be better off without you. Am I right, Mr. Booth? That you could not take her with you into a world of infamy or obscurity? And that has not changed. It would ever be the same situation, the same dreaded outcome.
“Now, as to the matter about which you have come here. What matters is not the life of some frail has-been senator who might have gotten what he thought he desired, nor any more of some once-famous family and its heirs. The future. The only thing more precious than time and life itself. The promise of tomorrow.
“Swear you will honor this, Mr. Booth. Only then may you see my brother-in-law—and your children. Johnnie has Badeau’s calling card and address for you at the door. And swear one other thing, that you will do what is right and put an end to the past. Then leave me alone. I have a bottle to finish.”
He may have owed me something from back then, but I owed him nothing, less than nothing, and he knew it. As for his threat, I held little fear, for as Corbett had made me see I was already a corpse. Still, what he said about the future made me think. Though I wondered about this oath and the past to which he referred, I would understand what he meant, if anything, soon enough. Without another word or glance, I took my leave.
***
At Badeau’s I was received anonymously but with great affection. There, unlike at the senator’s, I was but another of the busy home’s many unannounced guests. Time had treated the old bachelor as well as he could have hoped, and somehow he credited me with much of his happiness. Strange, how in a world full of loathing and self-hatred there could yet be held high opinion of such as I. His career, his adopted family, his wealth, it was all due to the man he introduced to his foster son as, “a very dear old friend, who once saved my life—would he have been there when my brother was killed,” turning a strange smile toward me.
“So you see, we both owe him a great deal,” he added and winked at me with a kind of friendship I had never known, not even from Hand. “It is too bad your sister could not be here to meet him as well. I am sure he would be surprised to see her resemblance to her late mother,” he added with pointed deference, before leaving the two of us to get acquainted while he attended to some important paperwork.
***
I listened to him speak calmly of all things. Of his plans to start a family, of a career in politics like his sponsor-uncle, of the great inventions and opportunities of the future, of the great and precious mystery of life—a mystery that had claimed his uncle’s brother just after the close of the great civil war, of the horrors of all war. Calmly and never else. And never one mention of his father, neither good nor evil.
And I thought, where is the turmoil of which his sister wrote? But when he mentioned her and the position she held as an attendant in the house of a great politician I began to remember the young maid’s eyes that caught harried glimpses of me as she shuffled past on some pretended errand. Current circumstances were certainly very different for her.
Still, if he had purged himself of his hatred and his hated past, why could I not do the same? And it struck me. Did he know full-well who his uncle’s mysterious visitor was? Had she known who had been her employer’s quick if graciously received guest? Or did it even matter? What difference, after all, would it make upon the face of the future? This was the oath the senator wished for me to honor, and I now found worthy of consideration.
And by the time the truth became apparent, I was too far past shock to register it openly. Their mother had not been dead, after all. Not until that very week, while I was at my brother’s. The Sunday before my visit to the senator. He had only received the news himself that very day, else he would not have spoken of her as he did—drink in hand throughout.
The real reason for the senator’s attempted candor and intended stupor was that Ella had died a stranger to him. He had indeed disowned her, but she responded by refusing him also. After the birth of the children she took the maiden name of her mother and moved to Chicago where she raised them on her own. She accepted the senator’s regular offerings of money and seasonal gifts, but never allowed him to re-enter their lives. And kept her distance even after she accepted on behalf of Viola the position he had offered in his ho
usehold.
It was not that they did not simply know the identity of their ignominious father, they neither knew the identity of their illustrious grandfather or the truth behind the senator’s continued benefaction. It was his identity, not mine, he wished to keep secret.
Their mother had died of a sudden. She had not been dead, as Hand had believed. And she had not been ill, as their letters had described. Why, then? Closure. They had thought to deny me the only reason I might have had to return, without understanding the knowledge of my paternity would have been enough. The ultimate in self-denial and humility.
“Very Caz’olic, h’indeed,” Hand would have said.
And now Ella would never be mine again. Her father’s wish, fate’s hand, and my own actions, all satisfied in a moment of absurd and horrible irony. Especially since I had been twice to Chicago in the past weeks while she still lived. She had been so close the entire time. Whatever had I accomplished or resolved at which I could now point with pride?
Strophe
And when they dragged his bleeding body from the burning barn, his dying breaths provided a message to the successful hunters. He thought it surefire, unmistakable. Like Mary Surratt, however, what he hoped would be his passport to freedom may have instead decreed his death—had it been understood. Yet I, as those whose glowering faces surrounded him in that fire-lit dawn, choked what air he could suffer to strain from the smoking dark, misread a thousand times the epitaph he styled for himself as he raised his arms to heaven.
For it was not futility he uttered in that momen—save it was with Laocoön’s knowledge of his word’s unheeded portent, it was the name of he who had sent him to raid, along with the rest, the life and soul of one whose only sin was to believe in his own patriotism and trust those who professed the same belief. I know now what horrid syllables repeatedly poured forth from the dying dupe. Was it the name of the man who betrayed us all, yet on whom the fates had seen, until his death, to smile?
“Ulysses, Ulysses!”
***
In order to have the indictment lifted from his head, and in order to exact a certain vengeance upon the North as well, Pike ordered—from his position as Masonic Grand Master—the execution of the president. From Pike to Stanton, of Steubenville #45; from Stanton to Grant, of St John’s of Galena; from Grant to Dougherty, Conger, Jett and the rest. Now were they all dead except the one—and the senator of course. So let the past be past?
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