26
“MY GOD, they’re not going to hang the woman, are they?”
He looked like a newspaperman. There were so many of them around. He had pad and pencil. He pushed his way through the crowd at the gates of the prison yard. It was eleven in the morning and already the sun was beating down like some kind of a great white bird suffocating us with its wings.
“Nobody knows yet,” a man behind us said. “Ask that one there, why don’t you? She’s the daughter.”
The reporter looked at Annie. His face lit up, not believing his luck. “Are you Annie Surratt?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, Annie,” Uncle Valentine said.
Annie said it was all right and went off with him a distance away from us and the others crowded at the prison gate. “How long have you been keeping this vigil here?” I heard him ask. And Annie’s murmured answer, “Since I came out of my mother’s jail cell and bade her good-bye at six this morning.”
We’d been here since ten. Uncle Valentine hadn’t wanted me to come. “A hanging is no place for a young girl,” he’d said. “What has the world come to?” But his argument was no good. He knew what the world had come to.
There were a lot of young girls present. There must have been about two thousand people pressed against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the prison yard. Inside were about a thousand soldiers. And some civilians.
Annie had told us they had special tickets.
The crowd was in a festive mood. Inside the gates the carpenters were still hammering at the gallows. Every once in a while we could hear the crash of a trapdoor as it was tested. The sun rose higher in the sky. Everyone waited.
Annie came back with the reporter. “They can’t find anybody to dig the graves,” she was telling him. “All the prison employees refused, because they are hanging my mother.”
He scribbled very fast. “Thank you, Miss Surrart,” he said. “I wish you luck. I heard that General William Hancock is at the back door of the prison waiting for a messenger from the president.” Then he lifted his hat and motioned for a guard. While he waited, he looked at me. “Those flowers you’re holding are wilted, miss,” he said.
“No,” I told him. “They’re nightflowers.”
“Nightflowers?”
“Yes. They will bloom tonight.”
He tipped his hat at me. “How appropriate,” he said. Then he flashed a card at the guard, who opened the gate and let him into the prison yard.
Annie followed him with her eyes. She gripped the iron bars of the gate. Uncle Valentine put a hand on her shoulder and drew her back. She was hollow eyed, white-faced. She looked ten years older than her seventeen years this morning.
Propped up in a corner, where the gate met the fence, she had a casket. A plain pine casket. She’d brought it, just in case.
Now we saw a short man in a captain’s uniform coming across the dusty yard toward us. Two soldiers with carbines were with him. Everyone else saw him, too, and a murmur ran like a ripple through the crowd. He drew some keys out of his pocket, opened the gate a crack, and motioned Annie to the other side. The soldiers stood by the opening, rifles poised to hold back the crowd. Annie went in.
A distance away she conferred with the man. His face was close to hers. From our side of the gate the people shouted at the soldiers. “Let the woman go! Stanton doesn’t need to hang a woman!” The soldiers stood guard, stone-faced, carbines poised across their chests. A distance behind them I saw other soldiers approaching.
Annie was conferring with the captain. I saw her nod and smile weakly, then he led her back to the gate. The soldiers opened it and slipped her through and locked it.
She walked and spoke like someone in a trance. “That was Captain Rath. He’s the hangman,” she said dully. “He said Generals Hancock and Hartranft, who are running things, want him to stall as long as he can. They’re still hoping for a messenger from the president.”
Uncle Valentine drew her aside and pulled a flask out of his pocket. “Have some water, Annie,” he said. She took some. I saw her lift the flask and the water dribble down her chin. Then we waited some more.
Robert drew me aside. “Are you sure you want to see this?”
“I must stay with Annie,” I said.
He nodded and took my hand. He squeezed it.
“If it were my mother, I wouldn’t be able to be like Annie, Robert,” I said. “I don’t know how she’s holding up.”
“We never know what we can do until we have to do it.”
There was something I needed to say to him, something important. But I couldn’t think of what it was. Time and the sun beat down on us. People were opening umbrellas, holding them over their heads. Why don’t they just go home, I thought, to their cool, safe houses? Why did they have to come out here to see this?
In what seemed like a short while I heard church bells down the street. Twelve chimes, soft and musical on the summer air. Birds twittered in the trees overhead. Across the street some children were playing. How could this be? How could life go on like this when they were going to hang my best friend’s mother?
Then the back door of the prison opened and they came out.
Four of them. Three men and a woman. Accompanied by two priests and three ministers.
A unified gasp went up from the crowd. Then silence.
Mrs. Mary was wearing her good black bombazine dress, the one with the satin ribbons. How could you wear your best dress to be hanged in? Her head was veiled. The priests were on either side of her, supporting her arms. Under the blazing impersonal sun the sad procession walked across the dusty prison yard and the prisoners went up the steps to the scaffold. Atzerodt, Herold, Payne, Mrs. Surratt.
Thirteen steps. Had they planned thirteen steps?
It was in that moment that I thought of Johnny Surratt. My Johnny. I wondered if he still had the handkerchiefs Annie had made him with the days of the week on them. I remembered the night he took me to Ford’s Theater and we sat in the president’s box.
A hundred years ago. Another time. Where are you, Johnny? If you’d come back they wouldn’t be hanging your mother. Couldn’t you have come back?
I wondered if Annie’s mother were thinking of him. I wondered what she was thinking just now.
The prisoners sat on chairs on the platform. General Hartranft read the execution order. Then the clergymen said their prayers, each in turn. Then more waiting.
“Oh, God!” Annie moaned. “They’re holding an umbrella over my mother. She must have one of her headaches!”
“Hold on, girl,” Uncle Valentine told her. “A stay of execution can still come.”
“How can they be so cruel, Dr. Bransby? How can human beings be so cruel?”
Uncle Valentine put his arm around her and held her close. I clutched the stems of my nightflowers. Robert gave me a tight smile of encouragement.
Then we waited some more. Mrs. Mary was kissing her crucifix.
Nooses were slipped over the heads of the prisoners. Then Captain Rath made them stand up while soldiers tied their hands behind them. He himself knelt and tied a rope around Mrs. Mary’s dress, just below her knees. Then white hoods were placed over the prisoners’ heads.
Just before the hood was placed over Payne he shouted, “Mrs. Surratt is innocent and doesn’t deserve to die!” Then the voice was muffled by the hood.
Emboldened, Atzerodt cried out, “Good-bye, gentlemen. May we all meet in the other world!”
Annie moaned. “Don’t look,” Uncle Valentine said. He drew her head against his chest. Her face was to his jacket front. I saw him cast an eye to Robert, saw Robert nod.
Captain Rath wasn’t ready yet. He walked up and down the platform behind the bound and hooded prisoners, checking ropes and hoods. “He’s stalling for time,” Robert whispered.
Time. I looked up at the white heat-laden sky. Cicadas were singing in the trees, their song an upward spiral. Then the back door of the prison opened and everyone gasped again.
I craned my neck. Was it a reprieve?
General Hancock stood there. “Go ahead,” he said.
Captain Rath stood motionless. “The woman, too?” he asked.
Hancock nodded.
Annie had turned her head to see, but Uncle Valentine turned her face back into his jacket front again. “No more looking, Annie,” he said. “No more, child.”
In a like manner, Robert put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to him. Like a brother. Or like Johnny would have done. Had there really been a Johnny? Or had I dreamed him?
I looked up into Robert’s face, remembering what it was I had to say to him. “I was so silly, Robert. I thought, these past months, that what Uncle Valentine was doing was wrong and bad. I wasted all my energies on it. And it wasn’t wrong or bad. All he was trying to do was help people.”
I heard the loud clapping of someone’s hands. A signal. I heard a chopping sound. I supposed it was the soldiers under the platform, axing the props.
“Annie told me what real trouble was. And I wouldn’t believe her. How could I have been so young and so silly, Robert? My daddy used to call me Miss Muffet. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” he murmured.
Then a snapping sound as the trapdoors went through. And a whoosh. And a heightened murmur from the crowd. Some people near us started praying.
“Do you know what, Robert?” I asked.
“What?”
“I wish I could be Miss Muffet again.”
And then I turned and looked. And I knew I could never be the way I had been before. None of us could. Miss Muffet was dead. My daddy was dead. The world as we had all known it before the war and the shooting of Lincoln, that innocent world, was dead. This was the world now, as we had brought it upon ourselves to be.
Four hooded bodies swinging under the trapdoors of the scaffold. One of them a woman.
This is what the crowd had come to see this day, the official death of that old world. They had come to bear witness to it. I could do no less than look, could I?
One body swung harder and longer than the rest. Someone was struggling. Who was it? Mrs. Mary?
I knew I would, forever after, see those bodies every time I closed my eyes. And hear the terrible silence of the crowd in the pressing heat that sat on us in its white-hot fury.
They wouldn’t give Annie her mother’s body. Uncle Valentine and Robert did all they could. “I can’t,” Captain Rath told them. “They won’t let me.”
So we left, then. Annie left the casket. Robert and I asked her where she wanted to go. Uncle Valentine wanted her to come home with us, but she said no, she was all packed and leaving, going home to Surrattsville. “Even though they’ve changed the name,” she told us. “They aren’t going to call it Surrattsville anymore. Can they do that? Change a town’s name?” She seemed more worried about that than anything.
“Why is she talking about this now?” I whispered to Robert.
“She has to,” he answered. “She has to focus on something. Talk about anything she wants. The price of tea in China. Anything.”
“Well, I changed my first name,” Annie was saying, “and maybe now, I’ll change my last one, too. They’ll give me no peace if I don’t. Help me find a new name, Emily.”
So that’s what we did, all the way home. We thought of new last names for Annie. We had to walk. Robert couldn’t get a hack. The press of people was terrible leaving the prison. Hacks were all over, people yelling for them, drivers yelling at each other. The mood was vicious and the heat didn’t help any.
Annie was selling the house at 541 H Street. She needed the money. We went inside. It was musty smelling and all the furniture was covered with sheets. It was eerie. I didn’t look at the stairway for fear I’d see Johnny coming down, all gussied up for a night at the theater. I didn’t look at the piano, either, for fear I’d see Mrs. Mary just sitting down to play.
I was in the nest that had hatched the eggs. And it was already haunted.
Annie was all packed. Except for Puss-in-Boots. I hunted her up for her. She knew me and purred. I kissed the top of her head and told her to be a good girl, she was going home to Maryland. Then I put her into the basket for Annie and we went out front, where Robert was trying to hail a carriage. He finally got one and paid the man himself. Then he put all Annie’s portmanteaus in.
H Street was quiet. The houses all shuttered. Yet I felt eyes peering out at us, at Annie. In front of her house I kissed her good-bye. We promised to keep in touch, but like it was the day Johnny walked out of my life, I knew I’d never see Annie Surratt again.
The last thing I did when she got into the hack was give her the nightflowers. Tears came to her eyes. “You’ve been a good friend,” she said.
“I haven’t been, and I know it,” I told Robert as we watched her drive off. “I haven’t been a good friend or a good niece or a good daughter or a good anything. Have I?”
He shrugged. “You were a good sister to Johnny Collins,” he said.
“That you can joke at a time like this,” I admonished.
“It’s called gallows humor,” he said.
“Robert!”
He thrust his hands into his pockets and stood there on the deserted street smiling at me. “No disrespect intended. Soldiers have it. Doctors have it. It gets us through the terrible times. Or we’d go insane.”
He was perfectly solemn. “And you were good at the cemetery that night, too.”
“Good enough to do it again?”
“No. Good enough to do something better.”
“What?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Don’t laugh. Promise.”
“It hasn’t been a day for laughter,” he said.
“Maybe it’s been living with Uncle Valentine. And reading his books. But I’d like to be a nurse. Like Clara Barton.”
He nodded. “What about a doctor? Like Mary Walker?”
He was serious. I felt something swelling inside me in the place where I supposed my heart to be. On the deserted street, I smiled at him and the moment held for us, healing and full of hope. “You won’t ever tell Uncle Valentine about that night, will you?” I asked.
“Do you want to ride home or walk?”
“Ride. It’s too hot for walking. But you’ll never get another hack. They’re all busy taking people home from the hanging.”
“Trust me,” he said.