Assassination Vacation Page 5
I find it strange that such an evocative artifact of the Lincoln assassination is archived in Canadian exile. But that night at the comedy festival, as I listened to American comic Rich Hall sing a country song he wrote about the current president called “Let’s Get Together and Kill George Bush,” a song the audience of Quebeckers loudly adored, I remembered that Canada in general and Montreal in particular were thick with Confederate Secret Service agents during the Civil War. John Wilkes Booth himself used to come here to conspire. So I took a stroll in the neighborhood in which Booth was known to lurk, the old part of Montreal known as “Old Montreal.” Walking in Booth’s footsteps, I was thinking of Lincoln’s head.
From the Petersen boardinghouse, a hearse took Lincoln’s body back to the White House. There, army surgeons Joseph Janvier Woodward and Edward Curtis performed the autopsy. Addressed to Surgeon General Barnes, Woodward’s official report is by the book, so specifically scientific I had to consult a dictionary to understand it. Parts of Lincoln’s face are “ecchymosed” — swollen. His brain is “pultaceous,” which means, according to the Shorter OED, “semifluid, pulpy.” It must have been a great relief for Woodward to hide behind words like that, the august Latinate words of his profession — “pultaceous” being as distant as ancient Rome compared to the horrifying here and now of “pulpy.”
In Washington, far from the National Mall, artifacts from the Lincoln autopsy are on display in what used to be the Army Medical Museum. Now known as the National Museum of Health and Medicine, it’s located on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. To get in, one passes through a military checkpoint.
Being searched and questioned by camo-clad armed soldiers is disquieting enough if you are a small, meek white woman whose bag contains nothing more menacing than a Lemony Snicket novel and cinnamon gum; but if you are the Arabic-speaking cabdriver who drives her there and you are ordered to get out of the car to open the hood, the sweat starts to spurt off your forehead as if your turban is wound out of a garden hose that just got turned on. Maybe the terror of getting past the checkpoint is part of the medical museum experience: rattled and perspiring, once you finally get inside the cool, dark building, you feel so lucky to be alive that the display about Civil War scabies seems less depressing.
The exhibition devoted to Civil War medicine is called “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds,” a play on a line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Still, the display case devoted to his assassination is shoved to the side. It could be easily missed. Dr. Woodward, he of “pultaceous” and “ecchymosed,” would approve of the clinical arrangement. Lincoln’s skull fragments — the little pieces of bone that shattered when Booth’s bullet made impact — are contained in what looks like a Petri dish. The probe Surgeon General Barnes used to locate the bullet lies there next to a teensy gray metal blob matter-of-factly labeled “The bullet that took the president’s life.”
My head tells me autopsies after murders are routine, that before Ford’s Theatre turned into a shrine it was a crime scene, that of course the evidence of the crime was analyzed, then archived, that Abraham Lincoln was not just a martyr or a myth but a case file, what the pros nowadays call a “vic.” So the evidence here calls up the corporeal presence of Lincoln (pieces of his head — gross) and Booth, who bought this very bullet, put said bullet in his pistol, then into Lincoln, which struck the skull, thereby chipping off these little pieces of it, mashing the bullet itself. These well-labeled, well-lit artifacts also suggest the existence of: the autopsy surgeon, the file clerk who catalogued and stowed them, the curator who decided to put them on display, the carpenter who built the display case, etc. Even though I am currently the only pilgrim paying my respects to the relics in this out-of-the-way museum, it suddenly feels pretty crowded in here, what with all the people who made this exhibit possible — from John Wilkes Booth on down to the intern who probably typed the labels — breathing down my neck. I can’t make up my mind which step in the process is weirder, the murder or this display, unless the weirdest step of all is taking a fourteen-dollar cab ride to look at the display about the murder.
The “cuff stained with Lincoln’s blood from the shirt of Edward Curtis who assisted in the autopsy” is there in the same case with the bullet and bones. After the procedure that stained his shirtsleeves, Curtis wrote a letter to his mother. It stands to reason that this doctor’s letter to his mom is more vivid than his coworker’s report to their boss. Curtis’s description is everything Woodward’s is not — physically, palpably aware of who the dead man was and what the dead man meant.
Curtis and Woodward were examining Lincoln’s head, looking for the bullet, this bullet now in this museum. Curtis wrote, “Not finding it readily, we proceeded to remove the entire brain.”
Think about that. I know I have. For the first few days after I read that, every time I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet I looked at the engraving of Lincoln’s head and couldn’t get the image of his detached brain out of my head. Curtis goes on to write that as he was lifting the brain out of the skull, “suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath.” Listen. That room was so quiet. Of course it was. When the bullet dropped in such a quiet room, it must have been almost as jarring as the original gunshot. In less steady hands, the brain could have fumbled to the floor. Curtis stares at that bullet:
There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger — dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize…. Silently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing. As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it was impossible to realize that it was that mere clay upon whose workings, but the day before, rested the hopes of the nation. I felt more profoundly impressed than ever with the mystery of that unknown something which may be named “vital spark” as well as anything else, whose absence or presence makes all the immeasurable difference between an inert mass of matter owing obedience to no laws but those covering the physical and chemical forces of the universe, and on the other hand, a living brain by whose silent, subtle machinery a world may be ruled. The weighing of the brain…gave approximate results only, since there had been some loss of brain substance, in consequence of the wound, during the hours of life after the shooting. But the figures, as they were, seemed to show that the brain weight was not above the ordinary for a man of Lincoln’s size.
On April 14, 1865, after President Lincoln RSVP’d for Our American Cousin, the theater manager draped an American flag in front of the presidential box. After Booth shot Lincoln and stabbed Henry Rathbone, Booth’s spur caught on the flag as he jumped to the stage. The fall damaged Booth’s leg but not his flair for drama. “Sic semper tyrannis!” he shouted. The state motto of Virginia, it means “Thus always to tyrants.” Then, his horse waiting, Booth escaped, meeting up with co-conspirator David Herold. They were to ride through Maryland, toward the safety that was Virginia.
One Saturday morning, my friend Klam, who lives here in D.C., picks me up to drive Booth’s escape route. One of John Wilkes Booth’s many faults is that he did not have the decency to die within walking distance of a Metro stop. I don’t have a driver’s license (phobia). So Klam is one of the many friends and family members I am always cajoling into chauffeuring me to glitzy assassination-related destinations. Plus, I purposefully invited along as many people I care about who would say yes because I thought it would keep me from objectifying my historical dead bodies. Like, if I were in the presence of loved ones whose deaths I dread, then I would be more likely to remember the grief of the loved ones of the dead presidents. I thought of it as the Hamlet approach. In the gravedigger scene in act V, Hamlet looks upon an anonymous skull and jokes that even Alexander the Great decomposed into dust that could have been used to plug a beer bar
rel. But when Hamlet is shown the skull of his old friend Yorick, the prince becomes unspeakably sentimental and sad because he knew him.
Klam is a writer who used to be a high school English teacher. I explain the above scenario, telling him that I’m Hamlet (without the suicidal tendencies) and he’s Yorick’s skull. I ask if he minds.
“I won’t hold it against you unless you say I was driving and the rustling sound of my adult diapers was deafening.” So, for the record, the rustling was rather faint, like riding shotgun next to a delicate hummingbird, a delicate hummingbird who, hearing his passenger’s rhetorical question about why Booth had assassinated Lincoln to supposedly save the South instead of enlisting in the Confederate army, answers, “I totally get that impulse to do something big. It’s why I quit short stories to write a novel.”
Our first stop is the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland. You wouldn’t know it from looking, but this old wooden house isn’t just a tourist trap for the historically curious. It’s the Vatican of the Lincoln assassination subculture, hosting symposia, publishing scholarly books and journals.
Like a scene from a Western, Booth and Herold stopped here to pick up whiskey and guns. We came here to take a tour from a woman in period costume. Wearing a homemade hoop skirt, she’s polite and welcoming, serene.
Having been around the block with regards to historical house tours, I have learned I learn more if I just clam up and listen. I’ve learned that the people who volunteer to preserve and interpret at such places are mostly local heroes who care deeply about their hometowns and the people who lived there before them. I have also learned that the people who spend a lot of time in these old houses care very much about the houses themselves — their architectural adornments, the household items that indicate past customs and ways of life. Though they’re often dressed up in old-timey costumes, historical house guides often remind me of those modern painters who insisted a painting is first and foremost paint on canvas, not a picture of the world. A lot of house tours are about the thingness of things. For instance, when one visits Jefferson Davis’s White House of the Confederacy in Richmond one learns that his bed was so short because most people back then slept sitting up; one doesn’t hear much about how on earth Davis could sleep at all given the fact that he was waging a war to keep human beings enslaved. And when one visits Andrew Jackson’s house in Nashville, one is more likely to hear about the painstaking restoration of the wallpaper and nothing much about how Jackson’s policies sent one’s Cherokee ancestors on the Trail of Tears. And though our lovely hoopskirt wearer addresses the dastardly Booth in the tavern part of the house, she spends as much time walking us through the Surratt household’s typical laundry day.
In the dining room, our guide shows us some heavy rocks of bread. Klam is for some reason very interested in the bread. She is delighted by his curiosity and rewards him with their name. “Maryland beaten biscuits,” they’re called. She tells him that she herself has baked the biscuits on occasion. And right when he starts pumping her for her recipe, I look at this pleasingly matronly woman in a hoopskirt tell my friend how to bake Maryland beaten biscuits, and I notice my friend is wearing an orange T-shirt emblazoned with the words PORN FREAK REHAB.
In the middle of a spiel about the sort of gentleman who dropped by the tavern to imbibe a glass or two with his fellows, our guide is called outside briefly to answer a coworker’s question. Klam whispers, “You know what those guys would do? They’d sit around talking about whores. Then they’d spit and crap in the field. Then they’d rape a slave.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s what she was about to say, Porn Freak.”
I used to think John Waters movies were on the outlandish side until I came to Maryland. Klam and I stop for lunch at a dark roadside joint that feels like more of a throwback than the Surratt House ever could. The vegetable of the day is succotash to give you an idea. Technically, it’s a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.
I can never make up my mind whether Maryland is offbeat or just off-putting. I probably would have felt that way if I were passing through in the 1860s too. While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man’s-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.
Listen to its state song. Sung to the tune of the German Christmas carol “O Tannenbaum,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” was written as the Civil War was breaking out in 1861. The first line goes, “The despot’s heel is on thy shore.” Who is the despot? The new president, Lincoln, who, it’s worth remembering, had to sneak into Washington for his inauguration so as to avoid the assassins waiting to jump him in Baltimore, a city which, in the song, is rhymed with “patriotic gore,” commemorating the blood spilled on its streets on April 19, 1861, when a mob of local secessionists attacked a Massachusetts regiment passing through town. “Maryland, My Maryland,” the song says, “spurns the Northern scum!” The song also calls for seceding from the Union, to stand by its sister state Virginia, going so far as to allude to that state’s motto, Sic semper tyrannis:
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain —
Sic semper! ’tis the proud refrain
Sic semper, of course, was the proud refrain hollered by Maryland’s own John Wilkes Booth after making good on shooting the aforementioned “despot” Lincoln at war’s end. One might think that a state song hinting at presidential assassination would have eerie echoes when that state’s native son assassinated said president and therefore it might be headed for the title of “state song emeritus,” the dustbin into which Virginia herself tossed its racist favorite “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” But “Maryland, My Maryland” did not become the official state song until 1939. Despite the occasional nice try to ditch it, it remains the state song to this day.
All of which could just be written off as harmless symbolism, almost laughable anachronism. However, careful readers who are also symbolism devotees would have noticed that the date in 1861 when the Baltimore mob clashed with the Massachusetts soldiers was April 19 — Patriot’s Day — the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, when the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War. It is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was wearing a T-shirt. On the back of the T-shirt, perhaps as a nod commemorating Patriot’s Day, was the famous quote from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” On the front of McVeigh’s shirt was a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Printed under Lincoln’s face was the caption “Sic semper tyrannis.” McVeigh ordered his shirt from a catalog sent out to subscribers of Southern Partisan, the pro-Confederate magazine. As if McVeigh wearing the shirt isn’t disgusting enough, the catalog sold out of most sizes of the shirt after McVeigh made the news. People actually heard that a mass murderer responsible for 168 deaths was wearing clothing celebrating another murder and they wanted to dress up like him. According to media watchdogs Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, by December of that year, the catalog reassured Partisan readers who had ordered the shirt:
Due to a surprising demand for our anti-Lincoln T-shirt, our stock has been reduced to odd sizes. If the enclosed shirt will not suffice, we will be glad to refund your money or immediately ship you another equally militant shirt from our catalog.
And if the shirts were too big or too small, the readers could have cheered themselves up with one of the fetching, one-size-fits-all bumper stickers like “Clinton’s military: a gay at every porthole, a fag in every foxhole.”
If the shirt’s popularity with readers of Southern Partisan, a magazine on the fringes, seems just that — on the fringes — three years after McVeigh inspired the shirt’s commercial success, a Missouri senator would do an interview with the magazin
e announcing, “Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.” And if that random senator still seems on the fringe, what with representing Missouri and/or kookily complaining about Jeff Davis’s bad rap, it’s worth noting that three years after saying that, the Missouri senator, John Ashcroft, became the attorney general of the United States, which is to say, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in all the land.
Meanwhile, in Charles County Maryland, Klam and I have finished lunch at Chez Succotash and are ready to resume the John Wilkes Booth escape route. About ninety minutes into the roughly ten-mile drive from the restaurant to the Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House, I become convinced of Mudd’s guilt. Klam and I, armed with one road atlas, two historical maps of John Wilkes Booth’s route, an old article from the Washington Post travel section, directions from various locals gassing up their cars, and six printouts from MapQuest.com, are lost for two hours. Mudd’s house in rural Maryland is so hard to find, even in the daylight, even with a lap full of maps, that I don’t see how Booth and Herold, who were horseback riding under the influence of the whiskey they acquired at the Surratt Tavern, could have found Mudd’s house in the middle of the night if they didn’t know exactly where they were going, and whom they could trust.
Booth arrived at Mudd’s house in the middle of the night, seeking medical care for his broken leg. Days later, when Mudd was arrested for aiding and abetting the assassin, the doctor claimed that he didn’t recognize the actor, that he was then unaware that Lincoln lay dying, and that in caring for a wounded man, even one who had just fatally wounded the president, Mudd was simply doing his Hippocratic duty. Though Mudd was convicted anyway, and shipped to the Fort Jefferson prison off the coast of Florida, he stuck to this story until the day he died. The mystery — did he or didn’t he? — might have died with him but for the impressive tenacity of his grandson Richard Mudd.