The Emancipator's Wife (76 page)

One of the dark shapes in the now nearly empty barroom reached him in two strides—blue-clothed, like the Union soldier all those years ago, with a nightstick instead of a rifle in his hands. John raised his hands to show them empty and the policeman struck him, casually and with full force, slamming him back to the floor and sending lancing agony through his right arm.

The next moment his hands were jerked behind him, and the pain blacked out his mind. When he came to, he was lying with his cheek in a puddle of beer-diluted vomit, handcuffed and looking at the three policemen gathered around the two bodies in the middle of the floor. A woman was talking, shrill and furious—

“—I pay my money to the stationhouse and this sure as hell isn't the kind of service I expect—”

It wasn't until one of the cops dragged the bodies closer to the single gaslight still burning near the bar that John recognized Dago the Pimp, with his throat cut from ear to ear and his whole flashy green suit a single black wash of gore.

The other body was that of his little whore.

H
E WAS TAKEN TO THE
T
WENTY-SECOND
P
RECINCT HOUSE ON
Maxwell Street, and in the morning—night had somehow fallen while he had mused in his camphorene-induced haze and the fight had taken place at close to eleven—was taken to the jail of the Cook County
Courthouse on Clark Street, and indicted for murder.

And passed a week in Hell.

He'd had a little money in his pockets when he'd risen from his table at Flossie's, but there was none there when he was arrested. His watch, hat, and jacket had vanished, too. One of the men in the jail-cell with him was a thick-shouldered angry laborer named Klauswijz who knocked John's head against the brick wall and took the meager plate of food he was given—the other men simply moved aside and watched—and thereafter stole food from him whenever it was brought. Anyone with any connection to the protection gangs or gambling bosses had, naturally, been bailed out on the night of their arrest, so the cells were populated by the pettiest of independent criminals, smash-and-grab thieves or thugs for hire, too mentally deficient or too far gone in drink or drugs to be of use to anyone: angry, sullen, violent.

One of the men in the cell turned out to be a cousin of Dago the Pimp. John kept very, very quiet about why he was there.

It seemed to him that he never slept that first week. There were four bunks and eight men in the cell—two men slept on the floor in spite of the roaches and the rats. John sat in the corner near the latrine bucket with his arms folded around him and simply tried not to speak to or look at anyone; thirsty, nodding with exhaustion, legs and arms cramping from days of inactivity, his right wrist puffed up and hurting so that the pain sometimes made him faint.

“They won't even expect me at home till Wednesday,” he whispered one night, half-delirious, to Bailey, one of the two other black men in the cell, a scared and rather simple-minded youth who divided his share of the water with him after Klauswijz snatched his away again. “I could be hanged by then.”

“Don't break yourself into a dew of sweat about that, boy-o,” remarked a wizened Irish drunkard who'd taken over one of the upper bunks. “They're not gonna get 'round to tryin' the likes of you for weeks.... You kill a nigger or a white?”

“I didn't kill anyone,” whispered John.

The Irishman crowed with laughter. “Sure, and neither did I!” There was dried blood caked all over his shirt.

By the following Friday morning John would have been willing to be tried and convicted if only for the chance to get out of the cell and walk. When the guard came to the bars and said, “Wilamet? Somebody here to see you,” he nearly fell, his legs and body were so cramped and his mind so hazy with exhaustion and hunger.

Cassy was waiting for him in that long room where prisoners were brought, always supposing there was anyone on earth who wanted to see them. John had been there more than once, when he and Cassy had gone to bail out their mother. There was a table and some broken-down benches. The Courthouse was barely four years old—rebuilt after the Fire like everything else in this part of town—but already the visiting-room had the soiled drabness of hard use and neglect, the smells of dirty clothing and dirty flesh, expectorated tobacco, and cigar-smoke.

Most of the visiting women matched the men who were in the cells. Nobody with any money or any connections had anything to do with the Cook County jail.

Even without his glasses—which had also disappeared at Flossie's—he could see the anger that stiffened his sister's body when he told her he'd been sacked. “God damn it, am I the only one . . . ?” she rasped, then stopped herself, breathing hard. He saw her big, knotted hands ball on the grimy table. Saw how she made herself relax. “Are you okay, brother?”

“I think I broke my wrist—broke it or sprained it. Cassy, they got me for murder, for killing a pimp and his girl. I didn't do it, I got caught in a brawl at Flossie's, when I come to they were dead already—”

Cassy whispered, “Jesus.” For the first time in her life, she sounded hopeless, and scared.

Cassy, who would walk up and spit in the Devil's face.

That, as much as his own fear of what would happen when he was brought up before a court of white men, felt like the crushing weight of a tomb falling on his shoulders.

She straightened her back. He could almost see her gather up a mouthful of spit. “What're we gonna do?”

“Get in touch with Mrs. Myra Bradwell,” said John, and realized, with another cold jolt of shock, that he had no idea where she lived. Panic flashed through him, then he thought a moment, and said, “She's the wife of Judge Bradwell. Somebody here will be able to tell you where to send her a letter, or somebody at the Chicago
Times,
or the
Chicago
Review of Law.
They'll be in the City Directory.”

Just being out of the cell, being able to move, to talk to his sister, revived something inside him, that had been numbed by days of shock and thirst and pain. One foot in front of the other . . .

I got away from Blue Hill Plantation, and got Mama all the way to Washington without being caught. Anybody who could do that should be able to get through damn near anything.

He drew a deep breath.

“You tell her that I got sacked—and I got into this trouble—because I helped out her and Mrs. Lincoln.” He braced himself for Cassy's spitfire retort, but she said nothing. Squinting across the table at her, he saw that her fear for him had even swamped the anger of him losing his job.

She loved him, he realized. Loved him more than the thought of their home, their survival as a family. Those paled for her beside fear for his survival.

The understanding of the depth of her love—and of his love for her—was honey and sunlight, in the midst of Hell. It burned his eyes with tears.

“And you think that's gonna get this white woman to lift a hand?” Cassy's voice was bitter.

“I do, yes. Cassy, please.” She'd dealt with too many wealthy white women who wanted their sheets and petticoats washed right away and not starched too much, to have any high opinion of the breed. “She'll help,” he said.

Cassy sniffed.

“She's got to know lawyers. She's a lawyer herself. She owes me.”

“I got lots of white ladies owe me,” retorted Cassy, getting to her feet. Through the haze of myopia John saw she was wearing her Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, faded sage-green chintz, the neatest she had. Like armor against the dirt and poverty and scorn of the jail. “And if they didn't need me for somethin' else, not a one of them would pay me.” She reached across the table, and took his left hand.

“You keep strong, John. We'll get you out. With or without your white lady lawyer friend.”

When John got back to the cell, Klauswijz and the boy Bailey were both gone. Before evening their places were taken by a gambler—who was bailed out within hours—and a morphine addict who proceeded to vomit, purge, and howl for the remainder of the day and night, but at least John got his own share of water and food. The gambler brought a newspaper with him, and left it behind. It contained a letter to the editor from Judge James Bradwell, accusing Dr. Patterson of treatment “calculated to drive Mrs. Lincoln insane” and a threat to come knocking on the “prison-house” doors with a writ of
habeas corpus.

That night he slept like a dead man, and dreamed of the tangled woodland battlefields of the Wilderness between Crown Point and Richmond. Dreamed of searching through the woods, and finding dying soldiers as they lay sobbing amid hackberry and weeds. Dreamed of carrying them back to the ambulance-carts, with their blood dripping down his back. He saw the dim shapes of the dead-carts above him, the piles of bodies heaped like cordwood. A tall man in shirtsleeves was working there alone, lifting the dead onto the cart, and as he came nearer John saw it was Mr. Lincoln, wearing a butcher's bloodied apron, his hands and arms crimson to the biceps. Every time he turned, John saw the gaping wound in the back of his head, where Booth's bullet had smashed through the skull.

John asked him, “Did you know this was going to happen?”

“I guessed it,” said Lincoln. “Yes.”

“Was it worth it?”

Lincoln bent to help John load a corpse onto the cart. It was the little whore who'd stared around her in such terror at Flossie's, the little girl who so resembled Lucy. The older man stood looking down at her for a moment, then sighed like a death-rattle. “I think so.”

“Even for this?” The fog was thinning. The battlefield lay exposed, stretching as far as anyone could see, filling the world. Smoke drifted, with the stink of blood and sulfur. Flies roared in black clouds. This then was the glory of the coming of the Lord, John thought: bodies lying like the trampled skins of grapes, wrath hanging like a poison over the stricken field. Somehow he knew they'd be picking up the bodies of the slain for months, for years. His mother was out there dead somewhere, and Cassy and Lionel and Lizabet Keckley and Frederick Douglass, and men and women not yet born. “None of them asked to die. They asked only to live.”

Lincoln said, “We all die, John.” And with a self-conscious gesture fingered the wound in the back of his head, looked at the blood on his hand, then shrugged and wiped it on his trouser-leg. “Would you go back if you could?”

John grinned up at him. “Not a chance.”

And Lincoln grinned back, suddenly young. “Neither would I.”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY-SEVEN

“I
DO NOT KNOW WHAT
I
AM GOING TO DO WITH YOU!
”
R
OBERT
slapped the newspaper down on the bench beside Mary, the strained violence of his movement speaking volumes for a lifetime of restricting what he felt and how he reacted. A lifetime of dealing with Mary. Of being pointed at as Abraham Lincoln's son.

He'd come on her in the rose garden, striding up the gravel drive—Mary had seen Argus let him in at the front gate, had seen by the way he walked that he was furious. She'd considered going into the house and making him ask Dr. Patterson to bring her to the parlor, where at least he couldn't shout and rail at her, but a kind of weary anger kept her in her seat.

Let him shout,
she thought. Though Dr. Patterson had only told her that John Wilamet had “decided to quit us,” she knew Robert must have had something to do with his dismissal a week ago. And her anger at the loss of her friend—at the loss of the only person in this place who truly had her good at heart—had fire-cured the hard knot of strength within her that had somehow gotten lost in the soft haze of her medicines. She found that even in cold blood, she no longer really cared whether Robert was angry at her or not.

She picked up the paper and glanced at the place to which Robert had folded it open.

“Why is it necessary that you do anything with me?” she asked quietly. “Because you can't endure the thought of having a mother who travels around the country without a male protector? Or a mother who is interested in politics and writes letters to newspapers? Or is it just that you don't like the sight of me spending money that you think of as yours?”

“We've been through this before, Mother.” He spoke as if trying to conceal a painful carbuncle whose existence was beneath the dignity of Abraham Lincoln's son. “You think that by getting your friends to bring calumny down upon Dr. Patterson and his family—none of whom have ever done you the slightest harm...”

“Not done me
harm
? Not done me harm, to suggest to you that the best thing that you could do with an embarrassing female relation is to have her declared mad and locked up? In
his
private madhouse, at the rate of two hundred dollars a month . . . Or did you find Bellevue with a pin and a City Directory?”

Robert's blue eyes shifted, then returned to hers aflame with indignation. “It didn't happen like that at all. Dr. Patterson's brother examined you in Washington, when you had your carriage accident. Dr. Patterson was one of several doctors I consulted about your sanity.”

“The only one who runs a private institution and was looking for patients to fill it up, I daresay. And on the subject of calumny, you have been calling me insane—in the public newspapers, no less—since the time I began fighting for Congress to give me the remainder of your father's salary so we could have something to live on while that dilatory hog Judge Davis collected the interest on your father's estate. You called me insane while I tried to get a pension to live on at a time when Congress and every wealthy businessman in the East were shoving handfuls of greenbacks and house-deeds into Sam Grant's pockets for doing less to save the Union than your father did, and at far less cost to himself. Don't think I don't know that you were calling me insane to your cronies at Harvard and in the Army as well.”

“You
are
insane!” he shouted at her. “Good God, Mother, you should have seen yourself when you came off the train last March, raving that I was going to die! When you were wandering around the halls of the Grand Pacific in your nightdress, swearing that voices were speaking to you out of the walls!”

Tears filled Mary's eyes and with them, the blinding urge to turn on him her old weapons of sarcasm and hysterics, of guilt and shame. Instead she said, “Obviously, I was ill, and now am better. You can ask Dr.
Patterson, or his son, if I have had any such delusions while I have been here. I reserve the right to remain eccentric—I never noticed anyone trying to lock up your Uncle Levi when he'd go on shouting rampages, or for heaven's sake Cash Clay....”

“The only reason no one has tried so far to lock up Cassius Clay is because they're afraid he'll shoot them in the process.”

“The only reason no one has tried to lock up Cash,” said Mary firmly, “is because he is a man. And a man can make as much of a jackass of himself as he pleases, writing letters to newspapers or switching political sides or speaking to mobs of freedmen urging rebellion against Reconstruction . . . or keeping a harem of Russian dancing-girls and driving his poor wife to distraction and divorce, for that matter. And half the members of Congress, over the years, haven't been much better.”

She folded the newspaper with James Bradwell's letter in it and set it again on the bench at her side, and shaded her eyes as she looked up at her son. “But a woman is considered mad if she spends her own money to excess, or loses her temper too often and too loudly, or seeks communication with the souls of those she loved in life, in order to comfort her grief.”

“If she hands all her money to charlatans who claim to be the ‘media' of that communication, yes, I'd say that was insane,” snapped Robert.

“But it is
my money.
If I were to hand it all to the Catholic Church, or to the Freedmen's Relief Association—or to the clerk at the jewelry counter at Marshall Field's, for that matter, like some women I could name—it is
my business,
and not yours.”

And she saw him stiffen up with stubborn anger at the idea that any doings of his female belongings—whether mother, wife, or daughter—were not his business.

She went on, “My sister tells me that you wrote to her warning her that Myra Bradwell was the ‘high priestess' of a ‘gang of Spiritualists' who were trying to get their hands on my money. And that she is in perfectly good health, and not—as you specifically told me—that she was too ill to have me go and stay with her.”

“I did not say
specifically
that she was too ill.”

She promptly fished for the letter in her reticule, and with blotches of anger staining his cheekbones Robert raised his hand. After a moment he said, “I was only thinking of you, Mother. This place is good for you. You said yourself you have ceased having those delusions, and it is because you have been living quietly here, and not exciting your brain with the confusing distractions of travel and of those da—” He caught himself from swearing, and corrected, “—those wretched table-tappers who do nothing but raise the passions of women to such a degree that they result in derangement.”

“You mean they raise the passions of women to such a degree that they result in disagreement with men,” retorted Mary. And then, as Robert opened his mouth, she added, “As you just said yourself, we have been through this before, and we shall probably never agree. But there is a law of
habeas corpus
in this state—”

“You damned—wretched—women, quoting the law . . .”

“The law that you'd rather we didn't know about? As slaveholders preferred that their chattels not learn about it? I expected better of your father's son!”

Mary stood, and shook out her black skirts. The morning was growing hot. The scent of the roses swathed her like a veil, as if the sweetness were intended to mask the dim screams coming from the house. That would be Mrs. Hill, strapped in a hydrotherapy tank.

“There is a law of
habeas corpus
in Illinois, Robert. And I
am
going to get out of this place. As I'm sure that neither of us wishes me to come live with you and your
lovely
wife—” her voice twisted with scorn “—perhaps it would be best if you stopped lying to my sister, and Mrs. Bradwell, and Dr. Patterson, and accepted that fact. It is possible for me to be sane in places other than the one you sanction, and to get help from sources other than those of which you approve.”

“I will not have you running about the world creating an embarrassment for the Lincoln family!”

“Your embarrassment is your own problem, Robert, not mine,” she pointed out icily. “Please feel free to disown me. And if at any time in the future I start hearing voices coming out of the floor, or begin having delusions of men following me—that is, men other than those
you
have hired yourself—you may call in your mad-doctors to examine me again. But not until that time. May I take this?” She held up the newspaper.

Robert turned from her without a word, and walked stiffly away down the gravel drive to the gate. She watched him go, her heart aching. Not with the loss of the man, she realized. For years, she understood now, he had been a stranger to her. Maybe he always had. But she was losing the sturdy boy who'd run through the leafy aisles of the vegetable garden on Jackson Street, the boy the other children had called Cock-Eye, the boy who'd darted about the steamboat deck to look at the paddles, and the young man who'd written to her wild with excitement:
The other boys said how proud I must be, to have him for my father.. . .

Her heart went back further, to the rainy November night and the silence of Simeon Francis's house; Lincoln's weight pressing her body into the worn sofa. The hoarse gasp of his breath, the brush of his lips on her face, the fire reflected in his gray eyes.

Life is short. We don't know what the future will bring. I don't want never to have done this. . . .

She realized that she still felt the same way. That if she could go back, and erase everything that had passed between that night, and the tall angry figure striding from her down the garden path, she would not. It was all precious to her, every moment, the painful along with the sweet. The lie that she had told had made Robert what he was, and what he would go on to be: the whole of their relationship implicit in those few impulsive words that she could not take back, once they'd been spoken.

Everything that had come of that lie seemed to settle into her heart, like wings folding. It was what was. For the first time in over thirty years, she felt no shame, only a profound sadness.

Robert was gone. With him he was taking Mamie, and the other
children Young Mary would bear: Abraham Lincoln's grandchildren.
Her
grandchildren.

With him he was taking the past, and whatever future that she might have had, with Abraham Lincoln's only surviving son.

And though a tear crept down her face for that vanished future, she was still glad that she had done what she had done, and had what she had had.

C
ASSY AND
C
LARICE BOTH CAME TO THE
C
OOK
C
OUNTY JAIL ON
Saturday to visit John, and again on Sunday with Selina and Phoebe and a box of apples and hard-boiled eggs. If there had been any repercussions or rage on Phoebe's part—or Cassy's, for that matter—about money and the future, they had taken place at home. Just the knowledge that his family knew where he was, that they cared about him enough to endure the streetcar ride and the walk in the brutal August sun, made the jail-cell bearable.

On Monday a young white gentleman named Leeland turned up. A lawyer, he said, and a friend of Mrs. Bradwell, he was willing to argue John's case. In the crowded visiting-room he listened to John's account of the evening at Flossie's, and took notes. This was more than was being done, John couldn't help noticing, by the sparse scattering of pro bono attorneys pulled from the court roster to help the more deserving or endangered of the other prisoners. One of these, a stout sleepy gentleman in an appalling checked suit, kept shaking his head at his client's impassioned protests of innocence and saying, “I'll do what I can, Mr.—uh—Mr. Belker—but you understand I mostly do probates, not murders....”

He also couldn't keep from noticing what was obvious even without his spectacles: that he was the only black man in conversation with a member of the legal profession, probates or otherwise. He guessed—his guess a near certainty—that without Myra Bradwell pulling in a favor, he'd have been arguing his own not-very-convincing case in court.

“Oh, they haven't got a leg to stand on,” said Leeland, when John had finished his account of what little he'd seen of the fight. “The police had a couple of bodies on their hands and wanted to make an arrest to impress their sergeant. I'd wager they don't even have any witnesses, other than the flatfoot who made the arrest.”

“That'll be enough to get me hanged, if we don't have at least one witness that I was knocked out on the floor,” pointed out John grimly. “And you're going to have your work cut out for you finding one. I surely don't advise you to try going into Flossie's alone and asking questions.”

“Good God!” Leeland looked horrified at the thought. “I know better than to do that. But we'll be all right.” The young lawyer gave John a cheerful slap on the shoulder. “Half the time, when the judge hears that there's going to be an attorney for the defense at all, he just drops the charges, especially if there's no witnesses. I'll see what I can do.”