An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [65]
"Nobody here would recognize you. These poor people all have their own troubles."
"Still, I didn't want to put you in any danger. By association."
"Oh, Annie." I ushered her into the kitchen. I was flooded with guilt for having ignored her. "I don't feel that way about you," I said.
She sat down and peered at me. "I was watching you. You seemed a thousand miles away. I know the look. I feel that way myself most of the time. What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I was just busy. How have you been, Annie?"
"Terrible. I have bad news."
"I know about the military trial. Uncle Valentine says they won't dare convict her. He says they're only putting her on trial to try to bait Johnny out of hiding."
"It isn't that," she said dully.
I put the water on for tea. "What, then?"
"It's my Alex." She took a crumpled paper from her reticule. Her movements were like those of an old lady. "Alex has been killed."
"Killed?" I almost dropped a cup taking it down from the cupboard. "Killed?" I asked again. "The war is over!"
She shook her head sadly and pushed the crumpled letter across the table at me. She seemed awfully calm. I picked up the letter and read it.
She was right. Alex had been shot on April 25 at Durham Station in North Carolina, by a Southern sniper who had decided the war wasn't over yet.
"Oh, Annie!" I said.
She was either in shock or beyond grief. "It's for the best, I suppose. I never did tell him about Mama. Although I know he may have seen it in the papers. And that's why he stopped writing. I couldn't bear losing him because of that. I suppose it's better this way. I'll take that tea now," she said. "Things can't possibly get much worse." Her eyes were dull. She looked like a waxwork figure we'd seen once in the Smithsonian. "Except if they hang my mother."
"They're not going to hang your mother." I said the words fervently.
"People in Washington are thirsty for blood," she said. "They want culprits. They don't care who they are, innocent or not. They want someone to blame for the loss they have suffered. Do you know they're still dragging Lincoln's body around out there? The man's been dead two weeks and they haven't buried him yet. If they'd bury him and get it over with, maybe all this hysteria would stop and we could all get back to normal!"
She was right. The Lincoln funeral train hadn't reached Illinois yet. But I doubted if things would be back to normal when it did. I felt as if I didn't know what normal was anymore. And I hadn't lost a sweetheart in the war. My brother hadn't run off to Canada with a price on his head. And my mother wasn't in prison.
But I felt a deep and haunting sense of loss just the same. What loss, I asked myself, besides Mama? And she would have died even if Lincoln hadn't been shot.
I'd done nothing but gain knowledge since I'd come to Washington.
Now I knew that a girl could have been one-eighth Negro and still been sold as a slave. Now I knew that people rob graves. Now I knew that our medical hospitals were hopelessly behind the times. I knew that more men could have been saved if we'd had an ambulance corps earlier in the war. I knew that a young man can be shot by a sniper even after a war is over. While another can run off and not come out of hiding, even when his mother's life is threatened.
Now I knew that a matinee idol can kill a president.
I knew that my uncle may have been stealing bodies for research. So that maybe the next time a young girl's daddy got wounded in the stomach, they could save him. Or the next time a president got shot they would be able to keep him alive.
Would that be so wrong?
Were there degrees of right and wrong?
It was a loss I felt. The loss of my innocence.
On May 4 they finally buried Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. On the tenth they arrested Jeff Davis, president of the Confederacy, in Georgia. They said he was wearing a woman's dress.
On the twelfth a man came up to our door, took off his hat, and asked to rent a room. I was alone after school. He was in uniform. "We don't rent rooms," I told him. "I'm sorry."