Freeman (8 page)

The white man said, “You mean his brother, then? John Wilkes?”

She opened her eyes. “That’s the one. Shot the president at the theater. At Ford’s.”

The white man turned from her without another word, his lips working furiously, no sound issuing forth. Another white man standing next to Sam spat, “That reb son of a bitch. Need to hang every last one of ’em, by God.”

When Sam looked toward him, he snarled, “What the hell are you looking at, nigger?”

Sam glanced away.

He did not know what to do with himself, but he knew he could not simply stand there, still, as if nothing had happened. It seemed important to walk. Many in the crowd had already begun to move. Sam joined them. They walked as if drawn by something nameless and inexorable, something that required them to stand in the awful presence of the awful thing, for themselves. Something that required them to bear witness.

All about him, candles were being lit, lamps were being lit, stricken faces were appearing from the darkness of an evening in spring turned suddenly grim as a morning in winter, to ask, “Is it true? Did it happen?” People nodded or said yes. The crowd swelled.

“You a soldier?”

It took Sam a moment to hear the question, a moment more to understand it was meant for him. He turned and found himself walking beside a dark-skinned Negro, maybe a few years older than himself. Sam stood six feet; the other man was a few inches shorter. His face was carved deep with lines, and his scalp was smooth, a landscape unbroken by so much as a single hair.

“I said, you a soldier?”

“Yes,” said Sam. “At least, I was.”

The man nodded toward the faded Union Army jacket Sam wore. “I thought so,” he said. “And you got that soldier’s walk,” he added. “Straight up, chest out. Need to watch that. That walk get you killed, you ain’t careful.”

At Sam’s questioning look, he gave a tight smile. “I served, too,” he said. “Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry. We defended this here city.” The tight smile became a grimace, as if he were sucking on something profoundly distasteful, and he added, “Leastways, I thought we did. If what they sayin’ about the president is true…” He allowed the thought to
evaporate. After a few moments they turned onto Tenth Street. And the tiny hope Sam had allowed to live inside him died, gasping.

The street was madness. By the light of a gas lamp in front of the theater he saw hundreds of people standing about, choking the muddy, rutted road. Their faces were uniformly stunned. When they moved, they seemed to stagger, as if walking was somehow new to them. But they did not move much, other than to clear a path when some soldier or official came barreling through, crying “Give way! Give way!” Otherwise, they stood, their attention fixed on a narrow house across from the theater.

A Negro woman waited in back of the crowd, her hands pinned beneath her arms, tears gleaming on her cheeks. Because he did not know what else to do, Sam approached her. She did not seem to notice, but when he drew close enough, she spoke without turning. “I seen him,” she said. “He look more dead than alive. They carried him right out the theater.” She pointed. “Right up into that there house.”

“It’s true, then?”

The question came from the Negro soldier who had walked alongside him. Sam was surprised the man was still at his elbow. And what a foolish question. But then, he thought, the man probably just needed to say it out loud, for himself if for no one else. Saying it helped to make it real. The woman nodded.

“Is there any hope?” asked Sam.

Now she turned toward him for the very first time. She was young and she was pretty in a heartbreaking way, her eyes round, and red from crying. “I seen ’em stop twice,” she answered, and her voice was loose and fluttery, “there and there.” She pointed toward the middle of the street. “They reached into his brain and they pulled out the clots of blood.”

Sam swallowed.

The other man said, “I need a drink.”

A smirk from the woman. “They done closed all the taverns by order of the government.”

“Good thing I carry my own,” said the man. A flask was in his hand. He unscrewed it and took a long pull, then extended it to Sam. Sam hesitated only a second—he was a man for whom exhibiting correct behavior was very important, especially in public. And drinking from a stranger’s flask in the middle of a muddy street, well, it was hard to think of any behavior that
was less correct, less reflective of the sort of man Sam considered himself to be, wanted others to see in him.

But the president…

He accepted the flask and threw back a healthy swig. He felt it burn a path to his stomach, where it glowed like embers.

Now he hesitated again, unsure what the etiquette was, whether it was proper to pass the flask on to a lady. She solved his dilemma for him, reaching boldly to take the flask and tip it. She passed it back to him, he passed it back to the other man.

They waited.

Sam had not liked Abraham Lincoln much at first. Lincoln had always struck him as a coarse Westerner, too timid and accommodating on the evil subject of slavery. His famous Emancipation Proclamation had only infuriated Sam. After all, Lincoln had ordered the slaves freed in Southern lands where he had no jurisdiction, but left them untouched in lands where his word was still law. But though he had not liked the president, Sam had come to respect him if only because in the end, he had allowed Sam—and thousands of other former slaves—to go fight for their freedom.

Had someone asked how he felt about the president even a few hours ago, that’s all Sam would have said, that he respected the man. But standing here in the muddy ruts of Tenth Street, watching a nondescript brick house, waiting for what, he did not know, was more than respect. The thought that Abraham Lincoln might be dying, might already be dead, made something flap loose in the very bottom of his stomach. It had never occurred to him that you could shoot a president like you could any other man. But apparently, you could. Black was white and up was down and right was left and the president of the United States lay in a nondescript house on a nondescript street, dying of a gunshot wound to his brain. Sam felt again what he had felt standing on the library steps: as if his very life, the whole
country’s
life, had become confetti, floating down, and all he could do was wait to see where it would land, what the new order of things would be. Or if, indeed, there would ever be order again.

He waited.

It seemed to him incomprehensible that he had walked and ridden so far, crossed rivers and meadows and woods, only to reach this city on this awful night.

He waited.

“My name is Lucy,” said the woman at some point.

“Sam.”

“Ben.”

She ignored Ben. “You from around here, Sam?”

He shook his head. “I am from Philadelphia.”

“Ain’t never been there. ’Course, I ain’t never been nowhere.”

A moment passed. She said, “You just get into town?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You got business here?”

He shook his head. “I am just passing through on my way south to Mississippi. “

“I see,” she said. It was clear from her tone that she did not.

“I was a slave,” explained Sam, “years ago. There was a woman I knew who is still down there.”

“You going to find her?”

“Yes.”

“Same thing I’m doing,” said Ben. “Goin’ back to my wife. Her name Hannah. We got us a daughter, too, little baby gal. Ain’t seed her in seven years, though, ever since I escaped Tennessee. I guess she ain’t a baby no more.”

Sam looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Long way to go,” Lucy said.

“Yes it is,” said Ben.

“You got a horse?” the woman asked Sam.

“I am on foot,” said Sam.

“Me too,” said Ben.

She shook her head. “Long way to go,” she said again.

There was a silence. Then she said, “This ain’t such a bad place to live, you know. Washington? It ain’t so bad.”

Sam looked at her. Earnest eyes above tear-stained cheeks. He knew what he was being offered. And he could only guess at the loneliness and fear that motivated it. Especially tonight. “No,” he said, “I am sure it is not a bad town at all. But it is not the town I am looking for. That town is in Mississippi.”

She met his gaze. She turned away. “Then Mississippi where you need to go,” she said.

They waited.

Hundreds of them, they waited. Mostly colored, they waited. The sun rose. The sky was filled with clouds. The day was the color of nickel. It began to rain. They waited.

Sometime around six, the door opened, and an odd-looking white man with a fringe of white beard and goggle eyes stepped onto the porch. He seemed surprised to see the crowd. Sam knew him at once. Father Neptune, the president had called him: Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy. He walked through the crowd. They pressed him. “How is the president?” yelled Sam, above the tumult. “Is there any hope?”

He told them there was no hope.

They waited.

Was it an hour later? Two hours later? People began filing out of the house, men and women with glittering eyes and drawn faces. One of the last was Mary Lincoln herself. And as she climbed into a gleaming black carriage, she glared across the street with unmistakable malice at the theater where her husband had been killed.

And the people knew. They knew.

The carriage clattered away. They waited.

A group of soldiers turned onto 10
^th
Street carrying a pine box. And now an anguished moan went up from the crowd. Sam clasped his hand to his mouth. His tears flowed freely. His voice was strangled, guttural, without words.

The soldiers carried the box up the stairs and into the house. Not a proper casket, but just a box, a shipping crate. Moments later, they brought it out again. They strapped it to the back of a horse-drawn wagon. The driver touched the horses lightly with his reins and the wagon began to roll. Soldiers and officers fell in behind the wagon. A crowd, most of them colored, fell in behind that. Lucy walked among them, her head down, crying inconsolably.

Sam took a step, two, as if the carriage were a ship and he was pulled irresistibly in its wake. Then he stopped. He stood watching the tragic procession until it was gone.

“What you suppose they do now?” Sam started. It was as if Ben had read his mind.

“I have no idea,” said Sam.

“I pray to God they catch him. Want to see him strung up good.”

“I agree with you there,” said Sam. He started walking. Suddenly, he wanted nothing so much as to leave the capital city behind. Ben fell into step beside him.

“You say you lookin’ for your wife?” he said.

“Yes.”

“What her name?”

The question brought a soft smile he had not intended. “Tilda,” said Sam. “At least, that’s what I called her.”

“Must be some kind of woman,” said Ben.

“Why do you say that?”

“See it in your face when you say her name.”

They stepped around a hog, snuffling and grunting in the mud. “Me, I can’t wait to see Hannah and my little baby girl. Leila her name. Prettiest little thing in the world. Wasn’t even walking, last time I seed her.”

“I hope you find them,” said Sam.

“Maybe we might travel together?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Make sense, don’t it? We both goin’ the same way, lookin’ for the same thing. We maybe might could help each other. Maybe might need each other.”

Sam looked at him. “No, I do not think so,” he said. “No offense.” Ben nodded. “None taken,” he said. Then he said, “How you come to talk like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You sound like you ’most white.”

“I am sure I have no idea what you are referring to,” said Sam. “I strive to speak proper English, nothing more.”

Ben responded with a smile Sam couldn’t read, and Sam was grateful when they parted company at the corner. He walked back the way he had come, head down, lost in reverie. Around him, the city was already wreathed in black bunting and American flags.