Lincoln's Assassin

by J F Pennington

  Still atop the pyramid, Pike was safe from any scrutiny. Like Pharaoh himself bidding the super-vizier to perform his duty, and that vizier passing the word down to another underling until finally—yes, to me! Was it not the more fitting that the engineer of the most visible machinations, the man whose identity was whispered in the dying breath of my proxy, was named Hiram?

  Hiram, Tyrian, Widow’s Son, Sendeth to King Solomon. It was Hand who finally solved the riddle of these letters, told me the meaning of the cipher. Laughed at my ignorance. Did I not even know I was a Lewis?

  “What’s a Lewis?” I had asked.

  “Z’e son h’of a mason—and, Monsieur Booz’, z’e broz’er h’of one, too. Et les exigences d’un frère doivent être fournis par ses frères. What one bro’zer requires, z’e o’zers must supply.”

  I always knew my father and brother were Freemasons. To me, it was simply one more private bond between them. One more thing they shared without me. No surprise, no special mystery. Many men of fashion and influence belonged.

  Who did not know Washington himself was one? And Madison, Monroe, Jackson.

  But you cannot understand the political machinations that pervaded the government at the time of the war and its conclusion. Whigs, Republicans, Know-Nothings like myself. Let me remind you of a simple truth. Prepare your slates and ready your sticks of chalk.

  At the time of our nation’s birth there were two great factions of power—that of the Massachusetts delegation centered at Boston and that of the Virginia delegation centered at Richmond. The first site of the national capital was New York, closest to Boston; the second Philadelphia, somewhat equidistant. The decision was arrived to build the capital at the new city of Washington—unmistakably closer to Richmond. Where was the true power?

  During the war between the states, the government of the Union continued to function at Washington, though the government of the South was maintained only a day’s ride away. Richmond was still the focal point of the South.

  At this same time the order of the Scottish Rite, the predominant Masonic Society of our young nation—and not forsworn to only a Christian God, was delineated into northern and southern jurisdictions. The northern jurisdiction was predictably headquartered at Boston—and ever is. The southern jurisdiction, established in 1801, was headquartered at Charleston, South Carolina. South Carolina, the first state to secede—and in which place, at Fort Sumter, the first shots of the war were fired. But Charleston was nearly razed during the war—we need not imagine why it had become the particular target of certain union soldiers, and at the close of hostilities the Fraternity’s headquarters were moved—not to Richmond but to Washington City. The nation’s capital.

  What would that say to any Northern brother who makes his home at Boston?

  Born in Boston, Pike, the modern Masonic father, brother to a king and fellow to a prince, the master builder and great high priest of earthly architects, dreamed beyond the bounds of geography with aims of universal liberty. Though somehow he found purity only within the race of white men. The black men and red men would have their place, but it would be beneath those whose Aryan heritage had long prepared them to rule.

  As Pike’s involvement and ideals crystallized, so did my own impressions of their fanatic effect. Upon him, of course, but also upon that part of me, which had once thought to preserve and promote what I was also so sure had been divine. What else could it be called when Pike’s wife Mary Ann died of a sudden fever April 14, 1876—ten plus one years after the event he had orchestrated.

  How close I was now to final accomplishment, to what must have been, all along, my divine errand. How many times had I lately slept and dreamed more frequently of my ever-clearer quarry? Each time the vision of my dream was remarkably familiar. Each time, my path was chosen, my performance seemingly complete. Through veiled and shadowed mists of sleep, my way was ever clear.

  ***

  At six foot two inches tall, over 250 pounds, and with long silvery hair and beard, Pike was not very difficult to locate—even in the bustling capital. Not surprisingly he was living at the Supreme House of the Temple at the northern end of the city. Here he had been housed by the Order since shortly after his return from Canada, when Masonic brother Andrew Johnson succeeded the presidency and pardoned Pike and others of their accused war crimes, the scalpings by Confederate troops and their Indian-nation allies at the Massacre of Pea Ridge. The needs of the supreme brother were met by his myriad brethren.

  As I would soon discover, Atzerodt had not actually lost his nerve but fled before accomplishing his role in our mission, having already received the balance of the funds originally promised me. As Nash confirmed, everyone who knew anything about the money was doomed to be tried, without a chance to testify, and ultimately hanged.

  From the Temple Pike wrote the volumes of scholarly matter, which had both aggrandized his name and made his style so recognizable for its sheer erudition. No other man in our country could boast a working knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin, Farsi, and Hindu. All of these he studiously added to a dozen or more dialects of native American tongues, as well as his abilities in the four principle languages of Europe.

  But think not that this man, albeit inflicted with gout and an unquenchable thirst for bookish knowledge held no outside interests. Though I could hardly believe myself the happenstance of his biding passion. Nor could I refuse the obvious opportunity this affection presented. I chuckle even now at the thematic uniformity with which all seemed to unfold.

  ***

  Needing a post from which the aging general’s movements could be monitored without attracting too much attention or suspicion, I rented rooms nearby, again under the name Jack Harvey. This nearly took the balance of what remained of my small fortune, having given the lion’s share to Badeau, to be anonymously split between the children—with certain provisions—the primary being that he should wait until their twenty-fifth birthdays, just a few months away. With little enough to spare, especially without knowing exactly how long my surveillance might take, I decided to seek work.

  Not two blocks away from the far corner of Sixteenth Street Northwest, there stood still the small pharmacy where once David Herold had worked unconsciously to foil my first and simplest plan. How much would have changed had that lad been of any other than the dimmest disposition. What a fool was I for thinking him capable of carrying out the thoughts of another when he was incapable of producing a single one of his own. Still, what was done—or, more correctly, was not done—was past, as palpably proven throughout the modern city with three of five metropolitan train lines operating electric streetcars.

  It was not my first attempt of the day, I introduced myself to the aged pharmacist as a Marylander returning to the region of his birth after many years on the frontier. With ironic honesty I admitted I had been loathe to return in the aftermath of our late Civil War, only recently feeling any sense of security or desire to do so.

  When I gave him my name as Harold, it pleased me to watch him start for just the instant with a concerned wince before I completed my breath with the name Springer, confirming the former as my given not family name, and subduing the old gent’s heart after only a single, nervous palpitation.

  “Well met, Harry,” he addressed me straightaway as much, I am sure, to override his own associations as from any gracious sense of familiarity. “Who sent you? But never you mind, we just so happen to need an extra hand about," he phrased in the local style, then squinted, "But I’m afre’d we can’t pay you very much.”

  “Hal,” I corrected, then confirmed, “The work, I want to work.”

  “And that’s what you’ll do!” he snapped. “Startin’ tomorrow. Te’k it or leave it,” he smiled genuinely, extending his hand.

  The next day Mr. Phipps began showing me how to stock the shelves, how to feed him the prescriptions, and even let me watch as he went about filling them. He kept the list of names of those for whom he weekly worked, and on it was old gra
ybeard himself, Albert Pike. Already 80 years old I imagined he might not be well, but I could scarcely have hoped for such fortune. And I began to recognize that it was not fortune at all but fate that should have woven our lives so closely together.

  I had only to wait until the day—Thursday, I quickly learned—for Phipps to fill Pike’s prescription and make a note of the medication and dosage. With access to the entire stock I was certain it would be of little difficulty to find an appropriately shaped and concentrated dosage of some very effective poison. With hardly an effort the next week, or any week after, it would be delivered, taken and received for its fatal effect.

  But that was almost too easy. As Pike’s daughters Lillian and Yvon were currently sharing his lodgings in the Temple House, I felt anxious. Could I be sure of his taking all of the medication and not leaving any part of either of them or anyone else? Would another accidental death or two, intentioned or no, be too much for even my vengeful soul to bear?

  Phipps had also told me in passing that, while the name of the prescription patient is always carefully written upon the dosage package, along with the date by which the medication must be taken so spoilage can be certainly avoided, both of those indications were regularly ignored.

  There was something else bothering me too. The thing that had haunted my dreams. Pike had to know I was the cause of his death. He had to know why his life’s thread was being cut short. He had also to stare his last stare into my eyes. This was vengeance. Poison on its own was too silent, too gentle, too forgiving, too anonymous.

  My revenge would have to be more. And to bring it to its finest point of dramatic fervor, nothing could have been more perfect than Pike’s own passion. Theater!

  It must not be thought surprising that he too embraced the favorite recreation of every other Washington notable. The theater was where they all went to see and be seen. They did not have to love it or even understand it. Half of them slept the entertainment away as it was. But still they went, and with them Pike.

  Here would I write the final scene of the drama that had begun to unfold long before I understood the theatrical nature of life itself. No coda could have been more conveniently devised, more appropriately applied, more perfectly executed.

  At this same time there came into the service of the Supreme House of the Temple a somewhat withered mason from an outlying lodge and whose arrival coincided with the strange and sudden disappearance of a local druggist’s clerk, only recently hired. To look upon him he might have been an aging suitor of Bianca, or the venerable didact of the Danish prince’s court. But he was silent, steady of purpose, and his intentions were neither amorous nor necessarily instructive.

  Because of the new man’s duties to care for an even more aged mother, he could only volunteer his time in the evening after she had gone to sleep. Yet this was the time most desired by the principle occupant of the Temple apartments, for he worked there from dawn to dusk on his translations of ancient Aryan texts, and could not suffer interruptions during daylight hours. His mania for labor had driven him to secure, within the Temple walls, the remarkable and conspicuous absence of a single chair that rocked.

  Come the night there were tapers to light, fires to stoke and doors to secure—nor could the sovereign grand commander or his daughters be expected to caretake also for the various chambers of the shrine. No, nor cook their own meals. Had he not devoted his life’s energies to the craft, was he not currently lending credence to its heritage and scholarship? Were they not his beloved daughters? And were they all not also particularly fond of my beer-baked pork?

  Everything was in readiness. And then it came to me. Nash had wished for this very thing. Indeed, had orchestrated it, pulled my strings again as he had before. Baited me with taunts of hope and goads of the children that would never be mine. Why else would he have begged my visit to Badeau? Been so cool in his admissions? What other oath could he have hoped so certainly I would keep?

  How or why I did not know. But it was sure. Sure that somehow Pike himself had come into disfavor with the other inner circle. Was even now upsetting some next series of political plans? It did not matter how, only that it surely happened.

  But, no. They did not need me to perform the deed, only needed me to try. Must not the senator himself have reveled at the dramatic possibility? The would-be two-fold assassin. A final vengeance visited upon the man who had stolen his most-cherished prize.

  And I had come so close. So close to repeating again the folly of my past. And for what? It is not my decision who should live or die or worship as he will. I can only answer for myself, and this alone I must ever do.

  Strophe

  I

  I am a man. It seems so simple. It is so simple. I am glad of it. Rejoice in it. The life I nearly surrendered. The soul I have retrieved. The miracle, the blessing of it. Still, I know that it has not always been so. And I wonder what was I before I was a man?

  II

  Squirrels make their daytime nests in the crooks of trees from which they watch me like so many fur-tailed Pinkertons, guessing at the conspiracy of my admissions. The beauty, life and quiet of these woods, returned now with their nameless hermit. And that hermit, at last, happy to leave his fate and that of others to the God whose love he now understands.

  I see my reflection in nature. The family of possums that has lately taken to play at night upon my newly-shingled roof mirrors strangely my situation. The one I’ve come to call Dicky Crookback or just Dicky appeared this evening with a wounded hindquarter. Irony that he should embrace his role? Though not seemingly fresh, I have not noticed it before and wonder at its source. I never felt his subtle kinship so strongly, and he came much closer to me than before to where I sat upon my crude porch as if to see what I could do for him. For want of a nail?

  Seen closely his leg has the look of being crushed by the wheel of a cart, though I can scarcely imagine how it might have happened, or again, when? How should he have journeyed so close to a driven road, so far from his score of habited trees.

  On seeing this, I felt a strange compunction and found myself talking to him, and he seemed to listen. I bade him stay while I fetched some dried grains from my pantry, offering them to him in a wooden bowl at the foot of the stoop and returning to my seat. He did not move for some moments, then scurried away—his crippled limb conspicuous, without venturing any closer to the offered meal. But I let it stand and hoped he would soon feel safe and sure of my intent. Perhaps he will come back tonight with others.

  Scene V

  Fainting,

  Freezing,

  Dying alone,

  Too wicked for prayer, too weak for my moan

  To be heard in the crash of the crazy town,

  Gone mad in its joy at the snow’s coming down;

  To lie and to die in my terrible woe,

  With a bed and a shroud of the beautiful snow!

  Strophe

  I

  Instruct your sons and daughters to know the difference. Between leadership and tyranny. Between principle and loyalty. Question not that they succeed nor withstand. Teach them no, but teach them yes. Yes, I am. Yes, I can. Yes, I will. Yes, by God and man!

  II

  That man for whom my vision of the heavens hungered—for even in my hatred and contempt or all their certainty, who knows better than I that judgment is an earthly bond alone? Who knows as well the perpetual torment of a topsy-turvy world? Yesterday I would have hanged his heels beside my own tomorrow, forgive, forget all to celestial strains.

  I have in Cymmerian lands been living as in some dream. Far across the rivers and woods of even the western wilderness, without sun-bleached refuge of island balm or beach.

  And I have cursed his name a hundred thousand times without knowing it, without pity or passion for any, but myself. Damned the fate that made him part of mine, deceived for even an instant that I should hope or think there is salvation, a final reclamation of errant souls as mine.

  III


  Of life, I have never asked much. To live simply to work in my chosen profession, to marry, have children and look back upon a life spent well and decently. Of death, I only wished that it should come surely, and after a time that I might review with some success my accomplishments. Quick, painless, and finalized by the final prayers of those I have loved—perhaps at some ceremonious wake where other spirits too might be raised as my empty body burns brightly upon a bier.

  Somewhere—tucked between the opening lines of these confessions, or lost to those days that haunt me still—there was the impulse to create, to recreate, to represent. To give life to the thoughts and dreams of others, to imagine I somehow understood. I was the vehicle, the uniting force, the tool. It was more than an affected lisp or limp, much more than an arching glance or ambling gimp. All for an image, her image, kneeling in prayer.

  IV

  And know your loving parents—both—calm in the simple knowledge that, despite every other uncertainty, the family was ever that—a family. No separation of distance or death or time would intercede. No fateful summers erase, deny.

  It would not be so. Life has never been so simple, fate never so kind. And all that might be desired would lose its substance, yield to every other want and preferred reality.

  But I have been rent from all I love. The trusts that I have held sounded hollow. The hopes, dashed. I am at once afloat in a boundless sea, strapped to the mast, yet also stranded upon a pirate shore where no flotilla of my faithful adherents could affect rescue. And there are none such. I am carrion only for all the vultures of the air and beasts of the field that ever found genesis in the brotherhood politic.