The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  And when Robert finally departed, at close to midnight when the final summer twilights had faded out of the burning sky, she would cling to Tad's hands and whisper frantically, “Don't leave me, Taddie. Don't leave your mother all alone! I shall die if you leave me, I shall die....”

  Towards the end she didn't even know whether he heard, though sometimes tears would flow down from his closed eyes.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  TAD DIED ON THE FIFTEENTH OF JULY, 1871. THE ANNIVERSARY OF her father's death. A haggard Robert arranged the funeral at his home and afterwards took his brother's body down to Springfield. Tad was put to rest in the tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery, with Willie, Eddie, and Lincoln himself. On his return Robert departed for one of the new resorts in the Western mountains, to seek rest of his own. He left his mother at his house: “Surely you will find it more comfortable than boarding, at this time.” Young Mary and Mamie had gone back to Iowa, to care for Young Mary's ailing mother.

  At any other time Mary would have responded to the news of Ann Harlan's illness with cynical suspicion that her daughter-in-law was simply fleeing from her, and thus deliberately depriving her of her only grandchild. At another time she might have queried why Robert didn't take refuge with his wife.

  But she felt literally stunned, as she had in the days immediately following her carriage accident. Her memories of the days between July and October were little more than a blur of grief and cloudy dreams. Myra Bradwell came to the house daily, mercifully bustling and efficient, though she had, of all things, begun publication of a small legal newspaper and frequently brought long ink-smelling galley-sheets to read while Mary lay in numb silence on the sofa in her room.

  Mary later was sure that it was Myra who made certain that one or the other of the Spiritualists came to sit with her, to make her meals that she did not eat, to sometimes brush her hair.

  Mary did remember the heat, for like an obscene afterthought it exacerbated the tormenting itches of her female parts that had begun with Tad's birth. Twice or three times thunder tolled over the lake, but no rain fell. The river sank, and the stench of it crept over the city. The shacks and sheds filled with cow-fodder and firewood, the wooden sidewalks and the wood-block streets, all cracked and bleached in the slow-baking heat. The curtained guest-room at Robert's house was like a dark oven, where she would lie in silence, or talk in feverish broken sobs to whoever happened to be with her that day.

  Ella Slapater, a woman she had met through the New York Spiritualists surrounding Lord Colchester, came from Pennsylvania to be with her for almost a month. Robert, when he returned from Colorado, got that tight, wooden expression in his face whenever Ella spoke of the comforts of speech with the dead, but forbore to argue the matter. On an evening when Robert was out—Young Mary still remaining in Iowa with her mother—Mary, Ella, and Myra formed a Circle in the parlor, sang a hymn, and asked the spirits to come for their comfort.

  If any came, they did not speak, and Mary went to bed uncomforted.

  Mostly, in those autumn days, she felt nothing but a sense of vast confusion.

  Tad was gone. Robert had been stolen from her by that treacherous hussy of a wife.

  She could not even imagine where she would live now, or how. The whole of her life stretched before her, a bleak process of going someplace and waiting to die. Elizabeth sent a letter inviting her to live with her in Springfield—Mary tore it up and threw the pieces on the floor.

  Never would she go and live again as a pensioner in Ninian's house.

  September turned to an October equally hot, equally dry. Desiccating winds breathed over the prairies from the southwest, like the exhalation of Hell.

  ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, A FIRE BROKE OUT ON THE WEST SIDE. The insurance men called that neighborhood “The Red Flash”: a crowded maze of wooden shanties, lumberyards, saloons, and cheap frame houses. By morning the blaze had been put out, the stink of smoke adding to the city's multifarious stenches and the grit of it burning Mary's eyes when Myra came by, to have coffee with her on Sunday morning while Robert was at church. Mary spent the day in her room, while hot prairie winds rose and scoured the town.

  “Will you come out with me for a walk in Lake Park?” asked Robert, when he brought her lunch.

  The thought of the crowds in that small patch of greenery on a blistering Sunday like this one made her shudder. “Robert, how can you?”

  “You cannot sit in a room for the rest of your life, Mother. You must come out sometime.”

  She merely covered her face with her hands, and turned away. “You don't understand! You cannot understand! If you did you would not demand that I . . . I parade myself for people to stare at . . . !”

  When Robert said nothing she swung around to face him again, and noticed that he had left off wearing his black armband for Tad. His father, she recalled resentfully, had never worn anything but black, from the day of Willie's death to the day of his own.

  Robert's mouth had a compressed look to it under his mustache, as if asking himself how he could put up with this woman. Mary lowered her head to her hands as a wave of heat swept over her, nauseating her. “Leave me alone. You want me out of here, so that little coward wife of yours will dare to come back!”

  He did not reply. It was only later, after Mary heard the outer door of the house close, that it came to her that in fact he did understand—as well as Robert could understand anything, she thought. He had lost his last brother, as she had lost, now, all but one of her sons.

  The howl of the wind and the smell of smoke followed her into her dreams. She dreamed of fire, of the smell of smoke—of the screaming of her sons' ponies as they burned to death in their stable—and waking, pulled her wrapper close around her and stumbled to the window. But she saw nothing, only the flat sleeping faces of the houses on the other side of Wabash Avenue.

  Going downstairs she found Robert by the front door, still dressed, even to his jacket.

  After his father's habit of walking around in his shirtsleeves—and barefoot half the time—Mary had worked all her life to inculcate proper dress and manners in her son, whom she had never seen half-dressed in all the years since he'd left Springfield for Exeter School in 1859. Looking out, she saw red staining the northern sky.

  “It appears to be on the other side of the river.” Robert's voice was calm. “The river should hold it.” Far off, a dim clamor came to her, too indistinct to be clearly identified but terrifying, a whisper of primal chaos. “There's nothing to worry about, Mother. Go back to bed.”

  She obeyed, but lay awake. Even at this hour the heat was oppressive, parched wind screaming around the house-eaves. When at last she slept, her dreams were dreams of horror. The cities of the plain were burning, as they had in the Bible—she saw them, two of them, with flames a hundred feet high dyeing the lake-waters blood-red. Then she found herself in the streets of those burning cities, whose wooden sidewalks, crisped with the summer's heat, roared up into lines of fire. The streets themselves burned, for they'd been paved with blocks of wood, and wooden fences carried the blaze as wires carry an electrical charge. Men and women poured along the streets, dragging wheelbarrows or trunks, or clinging to the reins of terrified wagon-horses whose heads were wrapped in coats to keep them from running mad in the blaze.

  But the fire roared up before them, blocking their way. There was nowhere to flee to.

  She woke, trembling, to the sound of shouting, of wagons passing in the street. Running to the window she saw the fugitives from her dream: men and women, young girls or what looked like shoeshine boys and newsboys, pushing handcarts, dragging boxes, carrying sheets or tablecloths filled with papers or books or silverware. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, running and stumbling as they looked back over their shoulders up Wabash Avenue. She leaned out the window and shouted, “What is it? What's happening?” but no one paid her heed. She threw a shawl around her nightdress and ran downstairs with streaming hair, out the front door to the sidewalk. “What is it?”
>
  She grabbed a man's arm, a fat laborer whose jowls were blue with beard. He yanked free of her grip and ran on, as if he feared the Devil would catch him if he halted for so much as a second.

  And Mary, looking back, gasped in horror, for it was true.

  The Devil was right behind them.

  Flames poured skyward far up the street. Smoke made a pall over the city, so that it was impossible to tell what time it was, or whether dawn had come. Flame lay across Wabash Avenue, many blocks away yet but sweeping closer, driven by the wind, devouring the wooden houses, the wood-framed brick buildings, the woodpiles and coal-heaps and sheds full of fodder and kindling and lamp-oil and firewood. Flames rose above the buildings, licking in the rolling masses of smoke, a wall of flame stretching west and east, like the front of an advancing army. From that wall the wind threw showers of sparks, igniting everything they touched. The noise of it was a fearful bellowing, unlike anything she had heard in waking life—it dwarfed the roaring of the White House stable fire to a titter.

  And above it rose the clamor of those who fled.

  “It's jumped the river,” gasped an older man, like Mary in his nightclothes and barefoot, his garment black with soot. “They're lootin' and robbin'—the firefighters can't stop it, it's got away from 'em, it's too big....”

  From the crowd a woman with streaming hair screamed, “Davey!” and the man ran to her, the two of them instantly swallowed up in the mob.

  Mary turned back to the house, crying, “Bobby! Bobby!” and ran up the stairs to her son's room. She expected to find him dressing, putting his legal papers into a valise, readying himself in his usual methodical way to make an escape.

  But he was gone. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom, shocked numb, staring at the neatly made bed—Myra used to joke that Robert made his bed before he got up—the empty clothes-stand.

  He had left her. He had left her!

  Mary's jaw dropped. Never in a lifetime had she thought that Robert would desert her.

  In the street a woman screamed.

  Mary shrieked, “Bobby!” and ran downstairs again, to the dining-room, the parlor, the study.

  But he was indeed gone.

  Panic gripped her.

  She tore upstairs, breathless and gasping at the exertion, pulled on a skirt over her nightdress and buttoned the highest button she could without a corset, stuffed her feet without stockings into shoes. Clutching the shawl about her she fled down the stairs, ran into the street. People were shoving and thrusting, shouting and coughing in the smoke. The air was filled now with flying cinders; through the oily clouds she could see that it was daylight, early morning, grilling hot.

  She thought she was fighting her way along Mitchell Street toward the lake but wasn't sure. The neighborhood was unfamiliar to her, and the street was jammed with carriages, struggling figures, horses, cows, and dogs running wild in panic.

  A fat woman carrying a cage full of finches slammed into her, screamed as she struggled past. Two little girls in nightdresses darted by, barefoot and clinging to each other's hands. Smoke blinded her; she sprang out of the way of a man in a policeman's uniform who was riding a wild-eyed horse down the center of the street, then she turned and ran blindly....

  The fire was ahead of her. The fire was roaring toward her, vomiting sparks that lit on the wooden roofs of the buildings all around her, kindling them like touchwood. She had missed her way and was among the shops on State Street, near the Michigan & Southern depot. Mingled with the crowd of terrified fugitives were others shoving and struggling in the other direction, their barrows filled, not with household possessions, but with crates of liquor and bolts of gleaming silk.

  Someone shoved her aside, throwing her down against the hot bricks of a wall. Three rough-looking young men smashed a shop window beside her, rushed in and emerged moments later with their hands full of necklaces and earrings that flashed in the light of the advancing flames. Across the street a man and a woman, roaring drunk and shrieking obscenities, dove into a deserted tavern and came out with bottles of whiskey in their hands. Others—they looked like laborers, men wielding clubs while their girlfriends hauled a barrow—stopped those who fled and wrested away from them whatever looked valuable, silver candlesticks, their jewelry boxes. The pavement glittered with shattered mirrors, trampled underfoot, with a smashed rummage of bedding, crockery, a broken guitar. Looking down, she saw the street was littered with paper money, trampled in with all the rest.

  A spark caught her skirt, setting the black crape instantly ablaze. She screamed, struck at it with her hands, and ran on again with the scorched hole in the fabric still smoking. The mob carried her along, she could not struggle against it. She tripped, and found herself next to the corpse of a man sprawled in front of his looted store, his skull cracked open and bright blood leaking into the gutter.

  The shattering roar of an explosion split the darkness; someone yelled, “They're blowin' up the buildin' for a firebreak!” Gunfire cracked; she couldn't tell from where or why. A girl ran past her shrieking, long blond hair blazing—one of the ruffians by a looted wine-store hurled a glass of liquor over her, and she ignited like a blue-burning torch.

  Flame was all around them. She screamed “Abraham!” hoping against hope—against all logic and sense—that he'd come striding out of the smoke and the blaze of this hell, that he'd take care of her, lead her to safety....

  They reached the lake, hundreds, thousands crowding into Lake Park, running across the rails of the Illinois Central line to the water's edge. Fire towered in the blackened sky, north and west of them; ash and cinders rained down. Children screamed in terror and pain; women slapped wildly at their burning hair. The heat was infernal, as if the fire reached out to devour them, and Mary, stumbling with hundreds of others into the waters of the lake, thought desperately, What if the fire comes to the lakeshore? What if the trees in the park, the grass that's been drying to tinder all these weeks, catch fire as well? What then? Will we all be driven deeper into the water, to drown?

  The world shook again with explosions. She saw fragments of masonry hurled high into the sooty maelstrom overhead.

  Her wet skirt dragged on her, her wet nightgown sodden on her uncorseted breasts. Men and women shoved against her, pushing further into the water as they were pushed by terrified newcomers. The weeping voices, the frantic cries rose on all sides as women tried to find their husbands or children, as men shouted for their families. The sounds were like the lamentations of Hell.

  Someone fell against her—a boy of nine or ten, carrying a baby. Mary caught him as he stumbled. Without her grasp, he and the sobbing infant would have simply slipped below the surface, for his soot-black face was blank with shock. The lake-water that came up to her hips came nearly to his shoulders and others were thrusting them both out deeper. She took the baby from his arms, cradled it against her breast with one arm, and steadied him with the other.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, and the boy stared up at her with uncomprehending eyes. “Bist du verletzen?” she asked, guessing from his fair hair he might be one of the immigrant children from the filthy patches back of the stockyards, and he clung to her skirt and sobbed,“Wo ist Mutti?”

  Where's Mama?

  Mary tightened her arm around the boy, for it was a question she'd asked all her life, and had never gotten a satisfactory answer.

  For hours they stood there in the water, the crowds pushing tighter and tighter around them. Mary felt that she would faint, but knew that to faint was to drown. No one would catch her, no one would hold her up. Through the jostling rank of shoulders between herself and the shore, she could catch glimpses now and then of the park and the trees in the sickly glow of daylight.

  The trees were yellow and limp, but still unburned. The lawns swarmed with huddled shapes.

  Beyond them, the first houses—the handsome houses of the lakeshore—stood deserted but intact. Now and then gangs of looters pulled carts up to them, helped the
mselves to rugs, clothing, jewelry in full view of the onlookers, and went unhurriedly on their way.

  Gradually, the red wall of flame diminished. Smoke continued to pour skyward, but Mary heard—like the tramp of the New York regiment down Washington's silent streets—the voices of men, the clatter of fire-wagons. They, too, were soldiers. It wasn't just her memory. She saw flashes of Union blue coats. Northward the flames still scraped the sky.

  Feeling she could stand no longer, she began slowly, stumblingly, to push her way ashore. The crowding in the water wasn't so bad now. Others were creeping out of the lake, falling to their knees on the wet cinders between the railroad and the park's edge. The baby in her arms began to cry again, weakly, and she felt a surge of joy—at least the poor little thing wasn't dead—and the boy beside her helped her to kneel on the land. She could still see nothing but a wilderness of knees, a sodden wilderness of slumped shapes under the hellish yellow glare of smoke-stained day, but someone said the fire was burning itself out at the Rock Island and Chicago tracks.

  She held the whimpering infant in her arms and relayed the information to the child's brother in German. “My mother is lost,” said the boy in the same language, and she said reassuringly,

  “The Army will find her for you, once they get the fire out.”

  He put his head on her thigh and slept.

  They remained there, through the whole of a hellish day. Exhausted, starving, and thirsty, Mary dozed sometimes, and in her dreams she wandered through the contraband camps around Washington during the War, where shattered men and women huddled, who had left their old lives behind. Now and then explosions sounded across the city, and the sullen clouds rained burning cinders.

  Dark fell, and a few hours later real rain began. Those few who had remained—Mary couldn't imagine how—standing in the lake-water throughout the eternity of that hideous day finally waded ashore and collapsed on the mud and cinders. Someone took the baby from her arms—she didn't know who, or whether the little German boy ever found his Mutti. Men and women started coming through the darkness of the park bearing lanterns. Some of the men wore the blue uniforms of Union soldiers, and the women were of that indefatigable breed who had throughout the War made up the Sanitary Committees and the Volunteer Nurses associations.