Outlaw Style: Poems

Booth from Beyond

Booth from Beyond Seventeen, star-struck and affluent, having swooned at his Hamlet, Miss Isabel Sumner visited the actor in his chamber and wrote letters he answered with a swain’s eloquence and nothing of the assassin: “I know the world, my dear, and had begun to hate it. I saw you, Things seemed changed.” He asked her with his best conventional diction not to play upon his heart with“a Girl’s caprice, the mere pastime of an hour” and swore,“Your sweet face could move me to do anything.” She sent flowers and her blessing, but he vanished into the tragedy he composed on venom and brandy. The papers painted him a monster, sic semper tyrannis the zeal of a fevered mind. But later, sipping on memories of that evening in his arms, the souvenirs dueling on stage had written on his body, she knew the eyes were in torment and carried a paper with his name inscribed in code to Madame LaDoux in Boston, who was said to conjure the voices of the dead. Summoned, he whispered secrets, how“Uncle Ape” was plotting to burn the South and send his Negroes raping. The frail spirit wept to see her engaged to a trader named Dunbar.“Beware the Beacon Street gentry,” he echoed.“The foxes will tear your soul with simpering dignity. Remember, he loves his country more than gold or life. Thus Brutus, thus Booth.” He said the Styx is not so soothing 46 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 46 as the Rappahannock, and“Do you yet wear the ring of pearl inscribed with our linked initials?”And if he ever came again, she kept her own council. Smiling at clouds from a lounge years later, while facing death in the Fairfax Hotel, she offered her one daughter this, “He was pure genius and beautiful, though almost evil. Whatever mortal agent aimed him to such infamy never knew of the healing angel he burned to be. His carte de visite is best consigned to flame, for this is another era. The secret dies with me.” A beckoning candle seemed to offer counterclaim. 47 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 47 ...