He tied up to the wharf, collected his fishing pole and creel, and then followed behind me as I climbed the ladder to the dock. He lived nearby and insisted I go home with him to dry my clothes. It seemed the sensible thing, and I did as he asked. I felt squeamish about going inside a black man’s house. But I went — maybe to prove to myself I was a different boy from the one who’d fallen into the river. Maybe I wanted to believe I’d been changed by my “Baptist drowning.” The lies we tell ourselves!
He gave me a shirt and a much-mended pair of pants, which I put on willingly to show I had no prejudice. He made me drink hot broth while I sat in front of the fire, in his front room. He handled my uniform respectfully, as you would a priest’s Sunday outfit, wringing the blue coat and pants with his strong black hands before hanging them up to dry. He wanted to know what I was doing in Philadelphia. I told him I had arrived that morning on the Lincoln Special, with the president’s body.
“I ought to have done nothing all day, except pray for Uncle Abe,” he said sheepishly. “But I suppose he won’t mind, seeing as how Jesus Himself liked to fish.”
I allowed that he was right.
“Mr. Lincoln freed me,” he said. “I owe him my life.”
His voice was pitched between pride and resentment. I didn’t understand why he should feel the latter but decided it was none of my business. Besides, I was too busy considering my destiny, which seemed, more and more, to be the work of powerful influences.
Once again, I felt I’d gotten tangled in a knot of unusual convergences, whose threads included Whitman, Grant, Lincoln, Franklin, and now this black man — his name was Spotswood — whose heart was just as unfathomable. I knew nothing of his suffering or sorrows. They were likely to be heavier and harder to bear than mine, though I had suffered and sorrowed some. The room bore not a trace of a past or present life: no pictures on the walls, no gimcracks or souvenirs. It appeared to have been scrubbed clean of remembrance. I almost asked to hear his story but decided it would be inconsiderate of me and maybe painful for him.
We had been talking of this and that, the way strangers will when their lives momentarily converge. When darkness entered the room, we fell silent. Spotswood lit two candles, and we sat together in the deepening night, the ceiling thatched with shadows. I think he was keeping a vigil for the man whose body lay a few blocks to the west, where the Liberty Bell, like him, was broken and mute. To tell the God’s honest truth, I don’t know what thoughts might have been chasing one another round in Spotswood’s brain. My own were none too clear. I strained to keep my mind centered on Lincoln, but it wandered elsewhere: to Brooklyn and my mother’s grave, Five Forks and the Armory Square Hospital, Walt Whitman and oysters.
I wanted Spotswood to remember me — God knows why. I told him my name several times. I would have written it down if there’d been a pencil. I wished I had some little gift to make him in honor of our encounter and the entanglement of our two lives. He’d saved mine, after all. Maybe I was just glad to have been born a white man. And for the first time in my life, I was glad to have been born in Brooklyn! Supposing I’d been reared up in the South, the son of a plantation owner. What would have become of me? Very possibly, I’d have died, or been put in a prison cell next to Jeff Davis’s, or hanged like Captain Wirz, commandant of Andersonville, who let thirteen thousand Union men perish. And where would I be now? Damned, most likely. Strange the ways of fate, as the saying goes. This fact might interest you, Jay: The pistol with which Booth shot Lincoln dead was made in Philadelphia by the gunsmith Henry Derringer. And there I was, in Philadelphia, dressed in clothes belonging to a slave freed by the dead man I was escorting to his final and lasting repose. Yes, I had a destiny all right. Like it or not.
My clothes dry, I dressed and thanked Spotswood for his kindness with what I believe was genuine warmth, taking his black hand and holding it in mine — the same hand that would hold a Springfield girl’s and also put a bullet into the forehead of hateful Jake Lowry. The hand, you know, was shaped for murder and for love.
Springfield, Illinois, December 8, 1865–January 14, 1866
The day following the Thanksgiving debacle, I woke, feeling grainy-eyed and irritable from too little sleep. I dressed in my uniform, pinned on my medal, and walked down Jefferson Street to the eatery where I took my breakfast. I dawdled over my eggs, thinking of the Colt pistol in my waistband and what the advertisement claimed: “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” I didn’t feel equal to anybody, except for old Spotswood. I was always subject to mental vicissitudes: the highs and lows of a mind inadequately moored. It must have made me a difficult person to get along with, which may explain why I spent the greater part of my life alone. But that was my way, and nobody can help his way.
“Snow coming,” said the grizzled counterman to break the silence. He wore a damp dish towel across his shoulder with the panache of a diplomat or a Mexican bandit. He gave me a meaningful look. “This afternoon or maybe tonight.”
I nodded, unwilling to discourse on the subject of weather, good or bad. I had things on my mind. But so as not to get a reputation for being standoffish and superior, I beamed at him before returning to my scrambled eggs. He coughed, as if to introduce a further elaboration. I fixed my eye on the end of my fork, refusing to be drawn in. A woman entered, making the bell above the door hop, and ordered fried potatoes for her husband, laid up after a hod of bricks had fallen on him. I felt safe for the moment from distraction.
Ambition was not yet among my virtues. Or is it a vice? I’d aspired to nothing, striven for nothing, envied no man his good fortune or lot in life. My desires had been modest enough to make me a Christian example of temperance. Or a Hindu one, for that matter. Religions look very much the same, once you scrape off the crust. God is everywhere, unless He is nowhere. But I believed myself to be in love with this Springfield girl. Taking stock, I had little to offer her. The feed and grain store didn’t pay much. I managed to make ends meet only because I was living gratis in the funeral car. Even if it weren’t soon be on its way to Omaha, I couldn’t expect a young bride to take up residence where two bodies had ripened into corruption, no matter how famous their former owners. When the fire’s gone out, a leper is the equal of a king — and vice versa — death being the one true democracy. Until my prospects improved, I couldn’t expect to marry her.
How could I have forgotten the name of someone so dear to me? Unless I’d mistaken my feelings. What did I know of love? What do I know of it now? Heartbreak. Heartbreak and a misery — that’s what love is. But what if the confidences I’ve received in the whiskey-scented confessionals of barrooms, barracks, and backwater depots down the years from love’s besotted, disappointed, jilted, and abused victims are untrue? What if love is really what the poets say of it? I don’t feel equal to the subject. Desire, maybe; the reckless passions that scald without warmth or tenderness, certainly. But not love. Of this, I felt sure even then. I pushed a strip of bacon cased in congealed fat around my plate, feeling once more in the trough of the wave, waiting for momentum to lift me up. Disgusted, I slapped a few coins on the table, wiped my mustache, and left.
Tomas Bergman, who owned the business, had gone to Lake Springfield for the ice fishing, as he did each year when the water froze. Except for a half-deaf old black man who hauled feed sacks in and out of the barn, I was alone in the store. Customers would be few on the day after Thanksgiving. Dog-tired, I lay down on a shelf behind the counter and slept. I dreamed, I suppose; but I’ll be damned if I can remember what. No, I won’t make up a dream simply to round out my story. While I might not be interested in history, except for the parts I clambered through, I’d like to tell the truth, insofar as I am able and inasmuch as it can be told. Funny, how I’d come to believe the fabrication concerning the loss of my eye!