18
FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS I walked around in a kind of daze. I took part in things but did not feel part of them. After a while I felt like Addie must feel and thought I must be going mad.
How does one go mad? Is Addie mad? If she is, she does not know it. If you don’t know it, does it count?
One minute I’d be so sure Uncle Valentine and Robert were involved in the snatching of bodies. Everything pointed to it. The way Robert and the Spoon and the Mole had jumped so fast on that steamboat accident. Robert going there as a brother of one of the victims. And taking Marietta along as the wife of a neighbor. Why couldn’t Robert have gone as an assistant for Uncle Valentine, if they were to bring back live bodies?
Uncle Valentine saying it was always better to have a woman along because they invited less suspicion. Suspicion of what?
Merry saying Maude should go along to act as a grieving mother. And how good she was at it. Was that why Maude went to so many funerals here in Washington? As a grieving mother? To claim the bodies? Was that why she went only to funerals of the impoverished or the forgotten?
It was all starting to add up, and I did not like the arithmetic.
Then the next minute I would look around me at the ordered rhythms of the house, at Uncle Valentine’s casual and yet elegant demeanor; I would think of the good he was doing, and know I was wrong.
If he was engaged in body snatching, why did all those poor people who came on Tuesdays and Thursdays entrust themselves to him for treatment? I know he didn’t charge them. I watched when he welcomed his patients. I saw the gratitude in their faces. One day I saw an old Negro woman kiss his hands.
Why had he taken Addie in instead of letting her die in the streets and using her body? Why didn’t he let Marietta die after she was pulled out of the water? She’d been so sick, she had told me.
Why hadn’t I found any evidence in the shed? Robert hadn’t had time to remove it.
Was it possible that all the intrigue involved in his trip to Memphis was because Uncle Valentine simply wanted to treat two burn victims who might be left to die? And in order to get them here Robert had to pretend to be a relative?
Would he be good in his role of brother to one of the victims? I could see him doing it, limping a little when he walked across the room to speak to the authorities. With that old military bearing about him, proud and in command of himself, yet all respectful at the same time. Never giving away what he was thinking; guarded, yet polite.
Where did you get your war wound? they would say.
And he’d tell them, hesitantly. Fredericksburg. With that little hoarseness he got in his voice when he spoke of the war.
And they’d give him the two wounded. Or the two dead bodies. Or whatever he wanted. Because when he said Fredericksburg like that, when he looked down saying it, or across the room, as if he were still hearing the guns booming and the screaming men and crazed horses, when he got that look in his eye like he did remembering, they’d give him anything.
I’d given him my heart, hadn’t I?
Thirteen days went by with me in this state. Somehow I got through them and managed not to make a brass-bound fool of myself.
“Don’t ever act on your thoughts if you’re confused, Miss Muffet,” Daddy had told me. “Wait until your mind clears.”
There it was. There was what I would do. I would do nothing. For now, at least. I would wait until my mind cleared. If it ever did. I would treat Uncle Valentine as I had always treated him, as if I suspected nothing. I would sit on my tuffet and continue to eat my curds and whey.
On May 1 President Johnson ordered nine army officers named to the military commission to try the eight accused in the assassination conspiracy. Of course Annie’s mother was one of the accused.
Uncle Valentine read this to me from the newspaper at breakfast. “Federal authorities have ruled it be a military rather than a civil court,” he said. “This might be a good topic for your Wednesday Discussion Group. Everyone in Washington is arguing the point. Does the military have a right to try civilians?”
It was a good question. But I did not bring it up for the Wednesday discussion, even though Mrs. McQuade gave us extra credit if we introduced a good topic. I was too involved in the whole thing. I didn’t want Myra to get a whiff of my friendship with Annie and Johnny Surratt. Who knew what she’d do with that little tidbit, she and her newspaperman father. No one in my class knew of this yet. So far I’d managed to keep it secret.
Was I still friends with Annie? I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her since our argument. Then that very Thursday, the fourth, when I was thinking of her, she came around again. It was downright creepy.
I had just settled the next-to-last of Uncle Valentine’s patients in the waiting room and turned to see what the last lady in the hall was here for. Out of my eye I’d seen her lingering in the shadows with a shawl over her face. I had a pad and pencil in my hand.
“And what is your ailment?” I asked before turning.
“They’re going to try my mother.” She drew the shawl back.
“Annie!” I dropped my pad and pencil and we hugged. She felt thinner.
“You never noticed me,” she said.
“You had that shawl on.”
“I wear it all the time when I go out. I don’t want to be recognized.”
“Nobody here would recognize you. These poor people all have their own troubles.”
“Still, I didn’t want to put you in any danger. By association.”
“Oh, Annie.” I ushered her into the kitchen. I was flooded with guilt for having ignored her. “I don’t feel that way about you,” I said.
She sat down and peered at me. “I was watching you. You seemed a thousand miles away. I know the look. I feel that way myself most of the time. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was just busy. How have you been, Annie?”
“Terrible. I have bad news.”
“I know about the military trial. Uncle Valentine says they won’t dare convict her. He says they’re only putting her on trial to try to bait Johnny out of hiding.”
“It isn’t that,” she said dully.
I put the water on for tea. “What, then?”
“It’s my Alex.” She took a crumpled paper from her reticule. Her movements were like those of an old lady. “Alex has been killed.”
“Killed?” I almost dropped a cup taking it down from the cupboard. “Killed?” I asked again. “The war is over!”
She shook her head sadly and pushed the crumpled letter across the table at me. She seemed awfully calm. I picked up the letter and read it.
She was right. Alex had been shot on April 25 at Durham Station in North Carolina, by a Southern sniper who had decided the war wasn’t over yet.
“Oh, Annie!” I said.
She was either in shock or beyond grief. “It’s for the best, I suppose. I never did tell him about Mama. Although I know he may have seen it in the papers. And that’s why he stopped writing. I couldn’t bear losing him because of that. I suppose it’s better this way. I’ll take that tea now,” she said. “Things can’t possibly get much worse.” Her eyes were dull. She looked like a waxwork figure we’d seen once in the Smithsonian. “Except if they hang my mother.”
“They’re not going to hang your mother.” I said the words fervently.
“People in Washington are thirsty for blood,” she said. “They want culprits. They don’t care who they are, innocent or not. They want someone to blame for the loss they have suffered. Do you know they’re still dragging Lincoln’s body around out there? The man’s been dead two weeks and they haven’t buried him yet. If they’d bury him and get it over with, maybe all this hysteria would stop and we could all get back to normal!”
She was right. The Lincoln funeral train hadn’t reached Illinois yet. But I doubted if things would be back to normal when it did. I felt as if I didn’t know what normal was anymore. And I hadn’t lost a sweetheart in the war. My brother hadn’t run off to Canada with a price on his head. And my mother wasn’t in prison.
But I felt a deep and haunting sense of loss just the same. What loss, I asked myself, besides Mama? And she would have died even if Lincoln hadn’t been shot.
I’d done nothing but gain knowledge since I’d come to Washington.
Now I knew that a girl could have been one-eighth Negro and still been sold as a slave. Now I knew that people rob graves. Now I knew that our medical hospitals were hopelessly behind the times. I knew that more men could have been saved if we’d had an ambulance corps earlier in the war. I knew that a young man can be shot by a sniper even after a war is over. While another can run off and not come out of hiding, even when his mother’s life is threatened.
Now I knew that a matinee idol can kill a president.
I knew that my uncle may have been stealing bodies for research. So that maybe the next time a young girl’s daddy got wounded in the stomach, they could save him. Or the next time a president got shot they would be able to keep him alive.
Would that be so wrong?
Were there degrees of right and wrong?
It was a loss I felt. The loss of my innocence.
On May 4 they finally buried Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. On the tenth they arrested Jeff Davis, president of the Confederacy, in Georgia. They said he was wearing a woman’s dress.
On the twelfth a man came up to our door, took off his hat, and asked to rent a room. I was alone after school. He was in uniform. “We don’t rent rooms,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”
I felt bad. He was thin and sunburnt and somewhat the worse for wear. He wore a loose shirt and held a soft hat. His boots were dusty and his mustache drooped. So did his eyes. “There are places that feed soldiers on their way home,” I said. “I can direct you to one.”
“Ain’t hungry, miss. Or on my way home. Yet. Come for the review.”
“Review?” I asked.
He must have thought me a noodleheaded flighty girl. “Hunnerts of soldiers in town. Ain’t you seen ’em?”
I had. I nodded. There had seemed like an unusual amount of soldiers walking the streets these last couple of days.
“Gonna be a lotta soldiers in Washington the next week or so. ’Bout a hunnert and fifty thousand of ’em.”
“A hundred and fifty thousand soldiers?”
“Yes, miss. For the review of the Grand Armies of the Republic. On the twenty-third. They say it’ll take us two whole days to parade. I was with Sherman.”
“Sherman? Did you know a Captain Alex Bailey?”
“No, miss, sorry.”
“Well, in any case, doesn’t your regiment have a place to stay?”
“We’re bivouacked near the unfinished monument to George Washington. But I had hopes of a clean room and a tub of water. Been a long time since I was in a house.”
I directed him down the block to where Mrs. Waring, whose husband had been killed in the war, was talking about starting a boardinghouse.
“Much obliged,” he said.
“Would you like something cold to drink?” It was the least I could do.
“That sounds good, miss.”
I fetched him a glass of lemonade. He drank it quickly.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Indiana, miss.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and handed the glass back to me, then put his hat back on his head. “Much obliged,” he said again.
“Can I ask you something before you leave?”
He nodded briskly.
“Did you burn people out down South, like they say Sherman’s soldiers did? Women and children?”
He hesitated. “You’re Secesh,” he said.
“No. I’m from Maryland, but we’re Union. My daddy died fighting for it.”
“I ain’t never burned no women or children, miss,” he said.
“What did you do, then?”
“I foraged. For food.”
I smiled to show I believed him. But I didn’t. Likely the food he’d foraged had been plundered from the larder of some Southern woman who had children to feed and no man left on the plantation. Mrs. McQuade said what Sherman’s men couldn’t take with them they’d slaughtered on the spot—chickens, hogs, cattle. Just to leave destruction in their wake. Was it wrong? They’d brought the war to a quicker end. Did that make it right? We’d had a whole Wednesday Morning Discussion on it.
The soldier smiled back at me. “Come see the review,” he invited, as if he were in charge of the whole thing. “Gonna be cavalry and mules and wagons, infantry, Zouaves in their flashy uniforms, everything.”
I told him I would, watched him walk away, and went back inside. I had some reading to do for class. It was the end of the term and Mrs. McQuade was giving tests. No sooner had I sat down than there was another knock. Another soldier? Again I went to open the front door.
It was Robert. He had a cat under his arm. A red cat.
“Was that soldier looking for a room?” he asked. I found my tongue. “Yes.”
“They’re all over town. It’s swarming with them.”
“There’s going to be a review.”
“I heard. It’ll bring disease, drunkenness, and fights.”
“My, you’re in a cheerful mood. I suppose things went well in Memphis.”
“They did.”
“Why did you knock? You never do.”
“I have a friend who needs a room. I thought I’d ask politelike.”
“Why don’t you take your friend to the Young Men’s Christian Association, where you live?”
“Because they don’t take cats,” he said. And he held out the fluffy red cat. “He needs a home. His name is Sultana. Will you give him one?”
We were uncomfortable in each other’s presence. It was different now. I hadn’t been wrong about that morning in the hallway. Something had happened between us and whatever it was, he’d felt it, too.
We sat in the parlor. I gave him some lemonade. He put the cat in my arms, and I carried on about it like I’d never seen a fool cat before. “Sultana?” I said. “You named him after the riverboat that blew up?”
“Yes.”
I stroked Sultana. He purred in my lap, looked into my face, and gave me that unblinking stare cats give. “Where did you get him?”
“Found him abandoned on the docks in Memphis. I’d wired your uncle on a business matter and asked him what I could bring home for you. He wired back. ‘A cat,’ he said. That you were upset because you’d lost Puss-in-Boots.”
“Annie took her back. Why did you want to bring me something?”
“To make up for things.”
“What things?”
“Whatever it was that caused the look on your face the day I left here.”
I stroked the cat’s ears. “They’ll give you undying loyalty for scratching their ears,” I said. “Such a little thing to do to get loyalty.”
“Yes,” he said. “And humans require so much.”
“You want me to say I want my ears scratched, Robert? You think that’s what I want from you?”
“No, but I’d like to know what it would take, Emily, for you to trust me. I thought what I did that morning in the hall would do it. When I didn’t tell your uncle you were eavesdropping.”
“Is that why you didn’t tell him?”
“Yes. I want you to trust me, Emily. What must I do?” He looked at me square. “Since the day I met you, you’ve been angry, defiant, bitter toward me, as if I’m to blame for everything in your life. I can’t help it about Johnny. Or Annie. You have to stop blaming me. All I want is to be friends with you. I like you, Emily. I liked you the minute I met you.”
“As a girl?”
“Well, you are a girl, aren’t you? Yes.”
I ducked my head. I could feel things bursting inside me. “I’m not blaming you for Johnny or Annie,” I said.
“Well, then, what are you blaming me for? Would you do me the honor of telling me?”
I gave a great heaving sigh. “You mustn’t tell my uncle any of this. Promise?”
“Trust me.”
“I heard the conversation before you left for Memphis. You were to bring back two riverboat victims. Have you brought them back?”
“Yes.”
“Are they dead or alive, Robert?”
He was not stupid. The understanding was there in his eyes. I could not catch him off guard. “They’re alive, Emily. Burn cases. I dosed them with laudanum to ease their pain and brought them back. They’re in Douglas Hospital. Why would I be bringing back dead people?”
“For specimens. What we talked about the night you showed me inside the shed.”
More understanding in those eyes. “You suspect us of stealing bodies. That’s why you were listening on the stairs.”
“I can’t help it, Robert. There’s the Spoon and the Mole, for one thing. They were trying to rob my mother’s grave the very night she was buried! Uncle Valentine chased them.”
“He told me about that.” He sighed. “He found out they were running a little grave-robbing business on the side. He’s called them to account for it and made them promise to stop. They never stole bodies for him.”
“Then what were they doing here that morning you left?”
“They work for your uncle. They do numerous odd jobs. They get around, as dwarves do. They scout around the city and tell your uncle of cases he might be interested in. They found him Marietta. And Addie. And their contacts got the news to us about the riverboat accident.”
“Why did you have to lie and say you were a relative of the burn victims? Why not say you worked for a doctor?”
“Relatives get there first. Officials release victims only to relatives. I know it was a little dishonest, but we’re concerned with helping the victims. Your uncle is doing research on burns. He’s made progress.”
“You have an answer for everything,” I said. “It’s so provoking.”
“I’m sorry, Emily, if the answers I give you don’t fit in with what you want to think of us. You’re of an age where you have a lively imagination. We’re not doing anything dramatic or exciting here. Our work consists of long, tedious hours, a lot of failures, and a few slow gains. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“I’m a lot older than fourteen. Don’t treat me like a child.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And what about Marietta? Why did she have to go? Oh yes, I forgot. She’s sharp and smart. She has a level head. And she’s not given to silly feminine hysteria or scruples.”
“You’re jealous of Marietta,” he teased. “That means you like me.” Then he got serious. “Her not having silly feminine scruples makes it a lot easier, I admit. But I much prefer you, if you must know.”
Something was stuck in my throat. My heart. Oh, it wasn’t fair, him doing this now. I closed my eyes and clung for dear life onto the cat. But there was one more thing I had to know.
“What about Maude? And the way she’s always going to the funerals of people who are impoverished or without family?”
“I can see where that might bother you, given what you’ve been thinking of us. But what can I say? Maude is just Maude. Have you ever known another like her?”
I had to agree that I hadn’t.
He reached out and touched the side of my face. “You’ve got yourself tied all in knots. I know you haven’t had an easy time of it in life. And all this business with the Surratts has likely made you mistrust everybody. And then from what your uncle tells me, your mother made you suspicious of him even before you came here. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“She was jealous of him, Emily. Your mama was an unhappy woman. Look at the things she said about your father. Do you believe them?”
I lowered my eyes. “Would you march into hell for Uncle Valentine?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m honored to be able to work for him. It’s the chance of a lifetime.”
He had the answers. All of them. I had nowhere else to go.
“I can’t make you trust me, Emily,” he said finally. “But I’m glad I’m the one you took your anger out on and not your uncle. He’s a good man. He loves you. I don’t want to see him hurt. If you have any more questions or doubts, come to me, will you?”
“I have one more question. If I were to ask you to take me to my uncle’s lab at the college now, right now, are you telling me I’d find no burn victims there?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” he said.
We faced each other. He smiled. “You want to go to the lab right now? There are not only no dead burn victims there, there are no dead bodies. We’re winding up the spring semester and they’ve all been properly buried. You’d be disappointed. Well? Do you want to go?”
I felt so tawdry, so small. So full of silly feminine scruples. He’d just come home from a long trip with a cat under his arms for me. He was doing important work with Uncle Valentine. And I was acting like a spoiled child. “I don’t want to go,” I said. “I believe you.”
“Good. Because there’s someplace else I’d like to take you.”
“Where?”
“To Gautier’s. For some ice cream. What do you say?” I said yes.