Outlaw Style: Poems

Exhuming Booth

Exhuming Booth When Booth the future assassin strutted and sulked his adequate Hamlet, the ladies in the front row swooned.“The handsomest man in America,” the Boston Herald called him, and he insisted on swordplay so violent his body was mapped with scars. He loved his pocket flask, his diamond stickpin and yellow foxskin cap. Had his target,“Ape” Lincoln, turned in his rocker, he would have greeted the man,“Good evening, Mr. Booth.” That railsplitter loved drama and comedy alike and admired the whole Booth family of madcap actors. He had met Wilkes once and shook his hand. Popular history calls the player mediocre, disappointed, mad, but Wilkes had star status, an ivory-tipped cane, hair lustrous as a raven. The actress Clara Morris wrote,“At the theater, as sunflowers turn upon their stalks to follow the beloved sun, so old and young our faces smilingly turned on him.” He loved the South and women, especially the tarts at Ella Starr’s sporting house near the capitol, and men praised his manners, his equitation, fencing, and diction. He was a lively companion and known to be sharp with a gun.Yet he was restless, and ambition would not let him sleep. He took physic and paced, saying over and again the lines of Richmond, Shylock, and Claudius. And yes, he lived in his father’s shadow and could not get warm. He prospered during the war but grew strange, furtive, spent thousands on quinine for Confederate wounded.“His palms were rough,” his friend Mears wrote,“from oaring a boat through mist to deliver the forbidden.” He could have been wild as Byron but insisted his valet clip names off any letter from a“true lady.” He would not compromise an admirer, 40 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 40 and yet he had stage-door lovers, dozens of assignations and trysts. But what was he thinking those last months, downing French brandy by the tumbler to whisper over candlelight his avenging schemes? His comrades were fools and felons. Born a bastard, he once showed his palm to a gypsy, who said,“You have a dangerous hand.”As a spy, he was a failure, but years after a sergeant shot him in a blazing barn, he was reported lurking in taverns from the Gulf to Singapore. In his diary he had written,“I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but I must fight the course. ’Tis all that’s left me,” the last words Macbeth’s. Fevered, his shank badly broken, he stood in the barn, taunting the wrathful cavalry. They struck match flare to fodder corn, and he leaned on crutches under an arc of fire beyond the theatrical. His moustache was gone. Mr. Boyd said he was surely a demon framed in flame. One soldier claimed to hear the voice of God commanding, so he shot. The bullet entered the neck, spinning downward to pierce three vertebrae and sever Booth’s spinal cord. Under the apple tree they placed him on a straw mattress.“Kill me, oh, kill me,” he said, then,“Tell mother I died for my country. I did what I thought was best.”As dawn embered over the Rappahannock, the blazing Garrett barn collapsed. Everyone remembers the words he cried that Good Friday night: Sic Semper Tyrannis. From Brutus, and Virginia’s state seal. During the autopsy by Doctor Barnes, his head came detached. The body was thrown into a musket case, nailed shut and shoveled under the Old Penitentiary’s cellar floor. Carnivals claimed to display the skull: The Mind of the Monster! Spectators wanted to see the brain’s convolutions, others to touch the cranium and measure it, to anatomize in a sterile academy 41 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 41 and apply the tenets of anthropometry or intuit the man’s nature, his phrenos, from the white dome’s lunar map. Would it matter? Maxilla and fossae, parietal slope, the malar bone that harbors the eye? How much is simply chemical? He believed in slavery as a way to enforce order. He did murder and cheated the gibbet. Men of judgment looked him in the eye and saw not a glimpse of the riddle. Smitten women wore his hair over their hearts, but why would Providence allow such a twist of spirit, a nightmare walking among celebrating citizens? In the...