The Day Lincoln Lost

by Charles Rosenberg

  “The only way I’m coming back here is to be buried.”

  “Well, then, come back to be buried beside a husband.”

  Annabelle sighed deeply. “Mama, I would be delighted to fall in love again, this time, as you put it, with the right kind of man. But men don’t seem much interested in me these days. Could be a lot of reasons, but they just don’t seem to be.”

  “Like what reasons?”

  Annabelle paused. Her mother was utterly unaware of her detective job. “Most likely because I’m divorced. Now let’s change the topic.”

  Her mother poured a heavy dose of cream into her coffee, something that would normally have been attended to by a maid.

  “Mama, where are the servants? Did you go all modern and give them a day off?”

  Her mother didn’t immediately answer, but just stirred the cream in her coffee around and around. Finally, she said, “Unless we really need them in the house, they are working now in the tobacco drying sheds. We’ve been really shorthanded there.”

  “Polly isn’t working there, is she?” Polly was the slave who had really raised Annabelle and her sisters from infancy. She had to be in her late sixties by now and the last time Annabelle had seen her, she was bent over by age.

  “No. Of course not,” her mother said. “She was the one slave we have kept in the house. She is upstairs resting right now. She is not well.”

  “If you ever send her to the sheds...”

  Her mother’s face grew red. “What, Annie? You’ll come back here from your wage-paying job in Chicago and help us run this place?”

  “You’re right, Mama. I’m sorry. But why are you shorthanded in the sheds?”

  Her mother sighed deeply. “Truth be told, we’ve been having a hard time. Your father doesn’t manage very well these days and his overseer left, so things slip.”

  “That can’t be the only problem. What else?”

  “A blight in one large field. And you’d think shortages would drive up the price. But for some reason the price paid for tobacco is dropping like a stone in a pond.”

  “So you’re cash short.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the bank?”

  “They’re not lending. Afraid of what that Abraham Lincoln person is going to do if he’s elected. If he frees the slaves, everyone around here will be ruined.”

  “Lincoln says he has no intention of freeing the slaves.”

  “I don’t believe him.”

  “I do. But what does being cash short have to do with being shorthanded in the tobacco sheds?”

  “We sold some of the men who used to work there.”

  Annabelle sat bolt upright. “Did you break up families?”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “But they thought about it!” The voice was that of her youngest sister, Suzanna, who had just turned sixteen. She had apparently sneaked into the room at some point.

  “Suzanna, I have told you more than once that it’s rude to sneak into a room like that,” her mother said.

  “But such fun, Mama!”

  “Fun or not, stop telling your sister stories that aren’t true. We never thought about breaking up families.”

  “Yes, you did. I heard you and Daddy talking.”

  There was a sudden silence in the kitchen. After a few seconds, their mother said, “Well, I never,” got up from her chair and marched out, slamming the door behind her.

  “Annabelle, Mama and Daddy are in desperate financial condition,” Suzanna said. “I know. I listen.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “They have kept it from you, but it has been over a year since you were last here.”

  “I know. I’ve been busy, and I really had no idea.”

  “Why are you here anyway?” Suzanna squinted her eyes and held her sister’s stare without blinking.

  Annabelle looked away and shrugged. “I just needed to get away for a while. Work has become taxing. I thought I could relax here for a few days. But it appears not.”

  “Perhaps the party Mama is planning for you will be fun. It’s tomorrow night, and there will be dancing.” She twirled around.

  “Perhaps. But she has invited the Goshorn brothers, whom I despise.”

  “They can be fun.”

  “Perhaps for you, Suzanna.”

  “The one you dislike most is away, looking for his father, who disappeared while chasing after an escaped slave named Lucy.”

  “The story of Lucy and the riot in Springfield is all over the Chicago papers. Did you know her?”

  “A little. You know how slaves and white children from the plantations sometimes play together some when we’re all young?” She twirled again and kept going.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Suzanna stopped twirling, looked at Annabelle and said, “That’s why you came back, isn’t it?”

  Annabelle realized she had a decision to make. Suzanna had always been her favorite sibling. She had been ten when Suzanna was born and she had helped raise her. So they shared a bond more like mother and daughter than sisters. And a lot of confidences.

  “Can you keep a secret, Suzanna?”

  “Of course. Tell me, tell me!”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “You taught me that when I was six. And you were...”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Have I ever gone back on those words, Annabelle? And notice I didn’t call you Annie.” She started spinning again.

  “I did notice, and no, you haven’t.”

  Suzanna grinned, showing a crooked tooth, and put her hand over her heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die, I won’t tell anyone what you tell me.”

  “Alright, I need to find Lucy.”

  “To help them get her back?”

  “No. The opposite. My employer is part of the Underground Railroad and wants to help her escape to Canada.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know where she is. But I think Polly does. She’s friends with Lucy’s mother.” She twirled once again and fell down from the dizziness, laughing.

  20

  Annabelle had gone to visit Polly that very afternoon. When Annabelle found her, she was no longer upstairs, like her mother had said. Instead, she was sitting in the old, ladder-back wooden chair in the small room off the kitchen that she’d always sat in when she wasn’t working. Annabelle saw Polly before Polly saw her, and the same thought went through her head that passed through it every time she came back and laid eyes on her: Polly had been more a mother to her than her own mother, except that, as Annabelle passed out of childhood, they had become separated by the impenetrable wall of slavery, woven over centuries by law and custom.

  Polly turned her head at the noise of Annabelle coming in and smiled a broad smile. She rose to greet her, but made it only halfway up before grabbing on to the arms of the chair. As Annabelle rushed to help, Polly said, “I will do it myself, child!” and pushed herself to a standing position.

  Annabelle hugged her and was shocked. Polly had always been thin, but now she was not just more bent than the last time she’d seen her, but almost bony. Her face was gaunt, and her once jet-black hair was now totally gray. “Polly, you are clearly not well.”

  “It’s my age, Annie. I will be seventy next month. If they got my birth month right, and my mama thought they did. Anyway, I am old, child. Old. It is so good to see you.”

  “Please sit back down.”

  Polly did, but made a grunting sound as she more or less fell back into the chair. Annabelle had lunged forward to help, but too late. And she thought, as she had the last time she’d been there, that she had now saved up enough money to buy Polly’s freedom. But to what effect? Where would Polly go? Who would look after her? Somehow, she would figure those things out, too. She had to.

  “You still wo
rking for that detective, Annie?”

  “I told you what I really do is a deadly secret, Polly. You haven’t told anyone, have you?”

  Polly looked at her, clearly offended. “Right now, I’m only telling you. I ain’t told nobody else.”

  “Alright. I still work for the same man, Allan Pinkerton. The best detective in the country.”

  “What do you detect?”

  “You ask me that each time I see you.”

  “I do, ’cause I still don’t understand what you do.”

  “I try to track down criminals, Polly. Bad guys. And sometimes good guys who have gone missing.”

  “Your sister done tell me you be looking for Lucy, too.”

  Annabelle realized that Suzie had not kept her secret after all and wondered if she would keep the more important one. But she might as well admit it. “Yes, I am looking for her.”

  “Why don’t you stop lookin’?”

  “Why? Do you think she’s dead?”

  “No, no, I got nothing ’bout where she is. I just think you will do her no good if you find her.”

  “I can help her be liberated. Help her find her way to Canada.”

  “She be finding her own way.”

  “But she may need help.”

  “I am gonna say somethin’, Annie, that woulda’ got me whipped by your daddy back in the old days.”

  “Daddy never whipped you!”

  “Oh, he did. He surely did.”

  There was a silence as Annabelle contemplated what Polly had just said. It was probably true. It had just been kept from her by the enveloping myth of her childhood. That their plantation was just her peaceful Old Kentucky Home, and all the Darkies were happy, just like in the popular song.

  “What were you going to say, Polly? No one will whip you for it, least of all me.”

  “When Lucy really needed you to help her—over on that plantation run by that evil Goshorn man—you weren’t no way there to help.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Did’ya try to find out?”

  “No.”

  “Let her go. Don’t go finding her. She has took her own life in her own hands. For the first time. Don’t be one of them white people always tryin’ to help out.”

  Annabelle suddenly realized that Polly didn’t know. “You don’t know, do you, Polly?”

  “Know what?”

  “Lucy was being sold south when she escaped. And then she was taken by slave catchers in Illinois. She was about to be returned back here when there was a riot in Springfield.”

  “Then what?”

  Annabelle told her the rest of the story and finished by saying, “So you see, I can help her. Because half the slave catchers in Illinois are looking for her right now, but with Pinkerton’s help—if I can find her—I can be sure she gets on the Railroad.”

  After that, Polly relented and told her the little she knew. Which was that the year before, a man named Winston Green, perhaps seventeen years old, had escaped from Riverview and made it to Springfield, Illinois. The news that filtered back was that someone there had bought Winston’s freedom.

  In any case, Lucy had told someone, who had told someone else, who had told Polly that Lucy was going to head for Springfield to find Winston Green.

  If any of that was true—and Annabelle had her doubts—she at least had some things to talk about with whichever one of the Goshorn boys showed up at the party.

  As she was about to leave the room, Polly said, “Have you found love again, child?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “You so needs to. Or before you knows it, you will be an old lady.”

  As Annabelle departed, she wondered why everyone seemed to be after her to marry again. If truth be told, she was happy just as she was, although they all had a point that it was in many ways easier for a woman to be married. But what husband, even in this modern age, would let his wife be a detective?

  * * *

  For the next day and a half, Annabelle tried to forget about the world outside and focused instead on the plantation. She attempted to bring her father out of his trance, but without much success. She met with the new overseer and went over the plantation’s finances. She helped him think through putting one of their pieces of land up for sale, and got his agreement that they would sell no more slaves to make ends meet. She also persuaded him to let at least some of the house slaves leave the sheds.

  Annabelle also tried to do what she could for Polly. As she suspected he would, the local doctor refused to treat her. “Black bodies are very different,” he said. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  Then the doctor said the thing that upset her the most. “Do let me know if she gets even worse, though, to where she really can’t do any useful work.”

  “Why?”

  “I could buy her from you—not for too much you understand—and try out an experimental treatment on her.”

  “One that might be too dangerous for white people until you see if it works?”

  “Exactly. But if it works it could benefit everyone.”

  Annabelle just stared at him.

  Finally, the doctor said, “I can tell you think that’s evil. I just think it’s practical. Which is what medicine is mostly about.”

  Annabelle wanted to throw him bodily out of the house, but she needed information from him, so she buried her feelings and said, “Doctor, my mother also has a little bit of the same thing that Polly does. What would you recommend for her?”

  “Ah, there is a tea brewed from willow bark that can be quite helpful. You can find it in most pharmacies.”

  She went to the small town nearby, found that very tea at the apothecary and bought a month’s supply. She showed Suzanna how to brew it and persuaded Polly to take it. She hoped it would help.

  By the evening of the second day, all was ready for the party. Annabelle looked deep into the armoire in her old room and found a red party dress with a ruffled top that she’d last worn when she was twenty. Her mother permitted the seamstress to come back from the tobacco shed to adjust it, and together with a too-tight corset, it looked good.

  Suzanna was going, too, even though her mother’s usual rule for girls was that you had to be seventeen to attend a “grown-ups party.” But she had cajoled and wheedled, and her mother had finally relented.

  21

  When Annabelle arrived—somewhat late, on purpose—the plantation ballroom (a separate structure her father had had built for her mother to celebrate their tenth anniversary) was already filled with people standing, sipping champagne and talking. Her mother had gone all out. Six long tables, each one able to seat ten people, were arrayed around the sides of the room. The tables were draped in elegant white damask cloths and set with the plantation’s special china—bone white with a blue edge. The service, Annabelle knew, had been imported from England when the plantation had been at the height of its prosperity. Tall candelabra on each table completed the look.

  In the middle was a wooden dance floor. There was no one on it, though. Her mother’s strict rule was “no dancing before dinner.” Well, there was actually one person on it—Suzanna—who was waltzing, sort of, by herself over in a corner, to the piece being played by the pianist, who was hammering out the newly popular Mephisto Waltz. It would not have been her pick, but her mother loved Liszt, and it was at least lively.

  Over in another corner, she saw two fiddle players and a banjo player talking and guessed the music would become more to plantation taste in Kentucky later. She had a request in mind.

  The music stopped not long after she arrived, and she spotted Slim Goshorn walking along one of the tables, clearly trying to find his place card. Annabelle knew exactly where it was because she had earlier rearranged them so they would be seated together.

  She walked down the tables, pretended to locate
her own, and called out, “Slim. We’re together. Over here!”

  He turned, and a look passed across his face that Annabelle read as at first dread and then anticipation: dread being the part that came from her having tormented him all through their childhood with her superior intelligence; anticipation from, perhaps, the thought that she had come back to belatedly accept his proposal of marriage. She had turned him down by explaining that she was enjoying seeing the wider world and had no desire to come back to Kentucky. That had been seven years ago.

  After they greeted each other and had gotten seated, she said, “I am so sorry to hear about your father.”

  He looked startled. “What have you heard?”

  “Well, that he was attacked by an abolitionist mob in Springfield and that they haven’t found his body yet.”

  “You think he’s dead?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “You know I work at a bank in Chicago, right?”

  “Of course. You’re the one girl who got out of here.”

  “One of the girls in the office is married to a detective of some sort, who has a friend who has a friend who works for an agency that looks for escaped slaves.”

  “And you heard he’s likely dead?”

  “Yes. I’m so sorry.” She put her hand on his shoulder, as if to comfort him. “But it’s far from certain. You know how rumors are.”

  He didn’t say anything in response, but she thought she saw a tear on his cheek.

  “Slim, my mother said Amasa went to look for your father. Have you heard anything from him?”

  “He’s got a lead, but that’s it.”

  “That’s good. Perhaps that means he’s still alive. What about the slave girl?”

  “We assume she’s dead or gone to Canada. We don’t care anymore. She was a useless piece of dirt in any case. Amasa is using the lead to look for our father, nothing more.”

  Now was the time Annabelle needed to use all of her wiles.

  “Well, I hope it’s a good one.” She took his chin between her fingers and turned his face gently toward her. “I know how close you are to your father.” She wiped the tear from his cheek. “If there’s anything I can do to help when I’m up in Chicago, please let me know.”