Outlaw Style: Poems

Keepsake

Keepsake Of the many who wore clippings of his hair in lockets because he had been their matinee Hamlet, some chose to dispose of the strands, though others saw how any oddment of evil might fetch a handsome price, and he was seen, overnight, to have been a villain all along. Nonetheless, the escape was romantic—broken leg bone, a scrap of Latin, a waiting horse. For years his manservant had sold stray tendrils— even clippings from the mane of his mare— to society women who fanned their bosoms and schemed to meet him, to glean a souvenir. Some, in distress, may have buried their tokens or burned the hair in private. One lock, however, was the saddest artifact, for Senator Hale’s daughter, courted by John Hay and Todd Lincoln, had in the public parlor of the National Hotel fallen for the actor and consented, under the spell of his dark charm, to marry in the coming season. Her doting father, a new-tapped ambassador, disapproved and vowed to spirit her to Spain. 43 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 43 Shocked by the breaking news of Wilkes’ role in the murder, she pled in print for evidence of his innocence, then swore to wed him, if necessary, in the scaffold’s shadow. The night when the actor’s body was smuggled from that rural conflagration and his final gasping soliloquy, Miss Hale, under escort and heavily veiled, was led aboard the Monitor Montauk and allowed to view the gruesome corpse. An officer, it is said, pulled aside the torn horse blanket, and when Booth lay thus unshrouded in the watchman’s lantern beam, the lady whose name no one uttered began to wail like a widow and shiver. Only then did the young lieutenant sever a ringlet for her with his penknife.Years later, Lucy, truly widowed and back at last from Spain, whispered to a familiar that any book or stage drama daring to offer her story since that stony moment should bear the title A Dead Woman’s Life. She wore only 44 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 44 black after that, grew addicted to charities, kept her treasure who-knows-where? and refused, as was the custom of the time, all interviews. And who can fathom the mysteries of shrift? The rumors say she suffered from spent nerves and always wore beneath her simple shift a pendant—inscribed in floral cursive I forgive. 45 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 45 ...