Outlaw Style: Poems

Asia

Asia PANGLOSS COTTAGE, NEAR LONDON/ 1880 Dear Sophie, “Job’s Tears” was the quilt I gave Wilkes the year we failed at farming, but he could not, he said, bear the sorrow in the pattern. Father gone, dear mother almost smothered in widow’s weeds, melancholy haunted him already. Those were prosy days, as we struggled with our Memoir of Booth the Elder, since published, of course, under my name alone—Asia B. Clarke. Benign enough, I trust. We read Hawthorne, Milton, and Plutarch to distract us. We studied butterflies and lightning bugs Wilkes swore were carrying a sacred torch. A mild boy, and yet, in the wake of our mad sire’s demise, he took the master’s staff and ledger, Prince Hal rising to the crown, though his heart was pledged to the stage. Agriculture, alas, was never his strong suit, nor was he fond of the hunt, but we made do, husbanding resources with money scarce and conflict on the horizon. We missed the ease of earlier days but found pleasure elsewhere. I prompted him on Caesar so often old Joe had half the lines by heart, as all Tudor Hall’s darkies played Anthony and Casca in the swing seat under the willow. As you know, assassination is the Bard’s 56 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 56 bread and meat. A natural romantic, Wilkes loved the rhetoric, which made him feel Roman. But that is not what your sweet letter asks. Therefore, this, my friend, for the record: I never guessed at the plot nor heard him utter anything of murder. Of his sense of mission, however, I was not wholly in the dark. So many nights he slept on our sofa in those high boots with sewn-in holsters and counseled strangers in the parlor all ungodly hours. They called him“Doctor,” and when I inquired, he confessed to carrying quinine in horse collars to his Rebels, chamomile, morphia, all manner of contraband. His hands were hard from rowing the Potomac— night work, cavalier foolery, but it was Grant’s pass that let him cross borders and ghost between beliefs. Both South and North, the crowds adored John Wilkes, and who can believe now his autograph scarcely exists, so perilous to own it in the vengeful frenzy. Lids shut, I remember him acting Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in my long-trained dress. He seemed so harmless elocuting in the woods, the very songbirds transfixed, or galloping about on Cola di Rienzi. His equestrian grace stamped him a legend. Precious, he was our prince, but boys from town called him Billy Bowlegs: Never was he free from scoundrels’ jeers. Always ardent, he bore the gypsy’s curse: a crone 57 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 57 confessed his palm alarmed her.“You were born,” she said,“under a crossed star for a life riven by thundering herds of enemies, a bad end, but many will survive to mourn your loss.” That was his burden. Mine is speculation and regret. I have no mystic glass to peer into the conspiracy, but he drew followers like a bellwether, and even under the Quaker Lambs at Cockersville where we read history and pauper’s French he dreamed up mischief: a squirrel in the proctor’s desk, the alarm bell’s clapper swung for no earthly reason. When the papers showed his cohorts—poor Mrs. Surratt included—hooded, pendant from the gallows, I wept to think how many his absurd intrigue ushered through death’s door, and it was I who first showed him Foxx’s Book of Martyrs, which he clung to like a charm, so I cannot altogether disavow the blame. Listen, dearest Sophie, who can know the heart of a son of Brutus? Mother’s vision was prophesy: Our hearth flame up-lept like a wave of blood, then blazed country and his name just two days before his birth. Omens, ill luck. Still, one asks, “Why him?” He loved the village dance and camp meetings, nibbling sweet roots and twigs he called his“burrowing,” and the blunderbuss in his room, our only gun, was no more than a jest to him, and yet a chamber in his brain was ever 58 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 58 shut snug as a coffin. How quickly his star ascended. One day we...