Assassin (5 page)

School was not in session for the first few days after the inauguration. I waited at home each evening for the bits of White House news my grandmother brought home. The Lincolns were a change for the household staff, a busy, loud family in contrast to the quiet Buchanans. “Those boys!” My grandmother shook her head after the second day. “I doubt they’ve ever been told to be quiet.”

I looked up from the stitches on my sampler. I was very interested in Lincoln’s sons. Robert, seventeen, was away at school. Willie, ten years old, was just my age. The younger one, Tad, was eight. “Have you seen them?” I asked.

“Seen them? They’re everywhere, sliding down the banister on the front stairs, sitting on the floor, and leaning against their father’s knee while he talks to government men.”

I went back to my sampler. As I worked on the embroidery stitches, Arabella Getchel, age ten years, 1861, I thought about Mr. Lincoln, a man who liked having his children with him even when he was busy trying to run a whole country. I wondered if I would ever see my own father again.

The next day my grandmother came home with big news to share. I had peeled potatoes for supper, and
she began to slice them into a pan on the stove for cooking.

“Mrs. Lincoln has hired a Negro woman as her chief dressmaker. Isn’t that something? Folks whisper that Mrs. Lincoln feels so comfortable with slaves because she had them when she was growing up in Kentucky.”

I stopped laying the table with plates and forks. “But this woman can’t be a slave, can she?”

“Oh, mercy no, not in the White House. She’ll be paid all right, a pretty penny, I would imagine. Elizabeth Keckley is her name, and they say she can make mantuas that can’t be matched by anyone else in this city.” Grandmother reached for a lid to put on her pot of potatoes. “I have a hope to learn from her, so as to teach you.”

I never wanted to discuss my grandmother’s plans to train me to become a mantua maker. “Are you angry, Grandmother?” I asked. “I mean, about being a helper to a colored woman?”

My grandmother did not pause in her work. “And why should I be angry? Me with so much to learn from the woman.”

After a couple of weeks, my grandmother said it would be all right for me to come to the White House after school. Steven and I spent most of our time in the back garden or the kitchen, ready to help with some slight chore. We were there on April 12, the day war began.

We had heard at school about how the fort off the coast of South Carolina had been attacked by Southern
troops. A man had come into our little building. He held his felt hat in his hand. Looking up, Mistress Newby had said, “It’s my husband. Will thee please sit quietly, children?”

She moved quickly to the back of the room. We children stole furtive glances at the two as they stood with heads bent close. Our teacher’s husband had not come to school before, and we knew something important must be the subject of their whispers. When the conversation was over, Mr. Newby stayed at the back, but our teacher, white-faced, made her way to the front of the room.

“A battle has begun, dear students,” she said, and holding to the edge of her desk for support, she explained about Fort Sumter. “I fear we shall soon be at war. Go home.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Thee should go home and pray. Pray that this terrible conflict might somehow yet be averted.” We made no movement. “Go,” she said. “Go now.”

Steven and I looked at each other. As we filed toward the door, even the very small children were quiet. I looked back just before going out. Mr. Newby had joined his wife, and both were on their knees beside the big desk.

“It was bound to happen,” Steven said when we were outside.

I made no answer. Steven understood so much more about things than I did. We knew that he was about to finish with Mistress Newby’s school. It had already been arranged that he would leave Washington City in the fall
and travel alone by train back to Pennsylvania, where he would go to a boy’s preparatory academy. I felt lonely just thinking of his coming absence, and now there was this war thing. I remember that we spoke but little on our journey to the White House that day.

Willie and Tad Lincoln were in the garden, Tad on the ground with marbles and Willie on a bench. We had encountered the boys a few times before and had spent one afternoon playing a game of stickball with them. The boys looked alike, both with round faces that I studied, looking for some resemblance to their father. I saw none, and decided it would be impossible to see anything of that worn face in the features of a boy.

I did notice that each of them was marked with one likeness to their famous father. Their unruly hair stuck up in all the wrong places. They both stood up as we approached.

“We can’t go inside,” Tad told us. “Even Papa said we had to go to our rooms if we want to play inside.” He dropped back to the marbles he had abandoned upon our arrival.

Willie did not sit back down. He looked at us carefully. “Did you hear? I mean, about the battle and all?”

“Yes,” said Steven, and I nodded. The three of us had just settled ourselves on the bench when the president appeared. Both of his sons ran to him, and he hugged them. “I needed a breath of air,” he said.

Mr. Lincoln amazed me when he remembered Steven’s
name from the introduction he had been given to the staff and their families. Steven smiled widely, and introduced me to the president. “Bella’s grandmother works here too,” he said. “Mostly helping with the sewing.”

“How do you do, Miss Bella,” he said.

My heart beat wildly, but I managed a little curtsy and said, “Very well, thank you, sir.”

“I am glad you’ve come to play with my boys,” Mr. Lincoln said.

“Papa,” said little Tad, “will you have to go and carry a gun now?”

The big man mussed his hair. “No, son, I’ll not go to war, but I’ll have to send other men, young men.”

“As young as Willie and me?”

“No,” said his father, “blessedly I won’t be sending boys as young as you two, but there will be some who are only as old as your brother Robert.”

My grandmother had told me that Robert Lincoln was away studying at a college called Harvard. “That’s pretty young,” said Tad. “Robert’s age is pretty young.”

“Yes,” said his father. “Pretty young.” I looked at his face and noticed tears misted in his eyes.

“Papa didn’t want war,” Willie said when his father had walked away. “It troubles him awful bad.” There were tears in Willie’s eyes too.

During those early days, everyone said it would be a quick war. Mr. Lincoln made a call for soldiers to serve three months. On May 21, word came that Richmond had
been selected as the capital for the Confederacy. I heard the news at the White House. I had come to the back garden to wait for Steven to come out before we went in to see Willie and Tad.

Steven called the news to me as soon as he saw me. “Well,” I said, “I’m sure now that my father will be involved in the war. Nothing could touch Richmond so closely without touching him.” I bent from my bench to study a small group of ants that moved near my feet.

Steven dropped to sit beside me. “Wish I was just a little older. I’d be in the army.” He pressed his lips together hard and, forming a fist with one hand, struck at his other hand.

The thought horrified me. “That’s silly,” I said emphatically. “You’re way too young to be a soldier.”

“I’m almost twelve,” he said. “The boys who strike the drums are not much older.”

“But you aren’t older,” I said, “and you aren’t going to be a soldier. You’re going to be a student at a military school, that’s all.”

We sat for a minute without talking before he suggested we go inside. I told him I had developed a stomachache and had decided to go back home. After he left, I stayed for a time on the bench, thinking. I dreaded the day later in the summer when Steven would leave me to go to Pennsylvania to school. Now I wondered how I would feel if he were going away to be a soldier.

Then I thought of my father. I closed my eyes to
remember him, but I did not see him as he was when I was eight. Rather I saw him in a gray uniform. He would, I was certain, be a soldier. I walked home, hating the war that tore our country apart.

When our school term ended, Steven and I spent more time at the White House, often going up with Willie and Tad to the private rooms on the second floor or to play on the flat roof. We tried hard to avoid contact with Mrs. Lincoln. She was not a small lady, and the wide skirts she wore over big hoops made her seem larger. Sometimes she was pleasant, smiling and saying, “Hello, children. Willie and Tad certainly enjoy your company.” The next day she might snap at us.

Someone gave the boys a small goat, and we spent many hours playing with her. She loved us all and would follow us anywhere. Once when we had failed to secure the latch on her pen correctly, Nanko followed us to the backdoor of the White House and pushed her way in behind the laughing Tad.

Mrs. Lincoln happened to be nearby and, hearing the commotion, came to see what caused it. She began shouting, at once blaming Steven and me. “Get that goat out,” she ordered, “and you two urchins go with it.” She grabbed an umbrella from a stand, and started to wave it at us. I ran, but Steven stayed, helping Willie pull the reluctant Nanko out the door.

Outside, we put the goat back into her pen. Willie reached through the fence to stroke Nanko’s black-and-
white head. “Don’t worry about Mama,” he told us. “She doesn’t mean to hurt people’s feelings, but sometimes her troubles make her cranky.”

I wondered what her troubles were, but I didn’t want to ask. Steven never held back a question. He put out his hand to pet the goat too. “What troubles your ma?” he asked.

Willie spoke softly, and I had to lean close to hear. “She worries about Papa, you know, people wanting to hurt him. She frets about what people think of her too. Folks never take to her like they do Papa.”

I wanted to say that people would like her better if she didn’t try to hit them with umbrellas, but I didn’t. Willie went on. “There’s talk that she favors the South because she grew up in Kentucky.”

I understood what he meant. Kentucky, like Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware, had some people who owned slaves, but those four border states had stayed in the Union even though many residents were unhappy about not pulling out. I didn’t think, though, that anything Willie said really justified Mrs. Lincoln’s moods.

Steven said aloud what I was thinking. He pulled back his hand and stood up. “Your mother doesn’t seem to try too hard to get people to like her.”

Willie stood too. “Mama’s good, she really is.” He pressed his lips together before going on. “She is just not happy, not most of the time, even back in Springfield. It’s a burden for Papa, but he is always kind to her.”

That summer of 1861 gave Steven and me our last easy days together. The Lincoln boys were kept close to home, but the two of us roamed the streets of Washington City that summer.

The city changed in July. Evidence of war had been plentiful before, soldiers everywhere, but on July 21, a battle took place not far away near a town called Manassas that was on a creek called Bull Run.

Steven had been excited about it the day before. “Lots of folks are going over there in carriages to watch,” he told me. “I wish I could go.”

His mood was different when he showed up at our house the next day early, even before Grandmother left for work. It was raining, and when I opened the door, he stood on our stoop with no cap to keep his head dry, the water running down his face. “Did you hear them last night?” he asked

“Who?” I asked, and I stepped aside so that he could come in.

“The soldiers. I heard them, all coming back into Washington City. I looked out our window, and there they were in the rain, just filling up the streets, not in any order at all, just men from all different regiments. Our boys got licked, bad, and they had to run back here for protection.”

My grandmother had been at the stove preparing our breakfast, but she moved to the table and sank onto a chair. “This war won’t be over in any three months
like they said.” She leaned her face against her hands. “You children mark my words. We’re in for a terrible long time.”

Later, walking the streets of Washington City, Steven and I saw for the first time what war was really all about. There were wounded soldiers everywhere, bleeding around their makeshift bandages, limping and leaning on one another. They were blackened with smoke and powder, and they seemed so terribly tired, about to fall. Lots of schools and churches were turned into hospitals.

“It’s like the whole city is wounded,” Steven said as we wandered about, our eyes taking in the misery.

In a few days, though, we began to notice that the soldiers who were not bleeding were trying to forget their troubles when they had a bit of free time. We saw card games played under almost every shade tree. Signs on all the drinking establishments said, “No Spirits Sold to Soldiers,” because that was the law, but the military men certainly got alcohol from somewhere. We saw them, even in the daytime, stumbling out of doorways, their arms around women in dresses my grandmother would have called shocking.

In fact, I did not mention to my grandmother how much time Steven and I spent on the streets of Washington City. “It’s a wicked place I am bringing you up in, Bella,” she would say to me from time to time. “An awful place for a child.”

I did not think of the city as awful. I was fascinated by
the hurry and the crowds, and I felt great sympathy for the soldiers who might soon face death.

I discovered that Mr. Lincoln shared my attitude toward the city. Once when we were near the president’s office, he came out just as a man was seeking to see him. “I am Reverend Harvey,” the man said to the president. “I want to talk to you about the sin that goes on in our city.” Reverend Harvey was a pinch-faced man who looked as if he had an unpleasant odor in his nose. “I shudder to think,” he said stiffly, “what should happen in case of our Lord’s second coming.”

Mr. Lincoln laughed and clapped Reverend Harvey on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry, sir,” he said. “If the Lord has ever been to Washington before, I doubt he would choose to come again.”