An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [95]
Just before the hood was placed over Payne he shouted, "Mrs. Surratt is innocent and doesn't deserve to die!" Then the voice was muffled by the hood.
Emboldened, Atzerodt cried out, "Good-bye, gentlemen. May we all meet in the other world!"
Annie moaned. "Don't look," Uncle Valentine said. He drew her head against his chest. Her face was to his jacket front. I saw him cast an eye to Robert, saw Robert nod.
Captain Rath wasn't ready yet. He walked up and down the platform behind the bound and hooded prisoners, checking ropes and hoods. "He's stalling for time," Robert whispered.
Time. I looked up at the white heat-laden sky. Cicadas were singing in the trees, their song an upward spiral. Then the back door of the prison opened and everyone gasped again.
I craned my neck. Was it a reprieve?
General Hancock stood there. "Go ahead," he said.
Captain Rath stood motionless. "The woman, too?" he asked.
Hancock nodded.
Annie had turned her head to see, but Uncle Valentine turned her face back into his jacket front again. "No more looking, Annie," he said. "No more, child."
In a like manner, Robert put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to him. Like a brother. Or like Johnny would have done. Had there really been a Johnny? Or had I dreamed him?
I looked up into Robert's face, remembering what it was I had to say to him. "I was so silly, Robert. I thought, these past months, that what Uncle Valentine was doing was wrong and bad. I wasted all my energies on it. And it wasn't wrong or bad. All he was trying to do was help people."
I heard the loud clapping of someone's hands. A signal. I heard a chopping sound. I supposed it was the soldiers under the platform, axing the props.
"Annie told me what real trouble was. And I wouldn't believe her. How could I have been so young and so silly, Robert? My daddy used to call me Miss Muffet. Did you know that?"
"No, I didn't," he murmured.
Then a snapping sound as the trapdoors went through. And a whoosh. And a heightened murmur from the crowd. Some people near us started praying.
"Do you know what, Robert?" I asked.
"What?"
"I wish I could be Miss Muffet again."
And then I turned and looked. And I knew I could never be the way I had been before. None of us could. Miss Muffet was dead. My daddy was dead. The world as we had all known it before the war and the shooting of Lincoln, that innocent world, was dead. This was the world now, as we had brought it upon ourselves to be.
Four hooded bodies swinging under the trapdoors of the scaffold. One of them a woman.
This is what the crowd had come to see this day, the official death of that old world. They had come to bear witness to it. I could do no less than look, could I?
One body swung harder and longer than the rest. Someone was struggling. Who was it? Mrs. Mary?
I knew I would, forever after, see those bodies every time I closed my eyes. And hear the terrible silence of the crowd in the pressing heat that sat on us in its white-hot fury.
They wouldn't give Annie her mother's body. Uncle Valentine and Robert did all they could. "I can't," Captain Rath told them. "They won't let me."
So we left, then. Annie left the casket. Robert and I asked her where she wanted to go. Uncle Valentine wanted her to come home with us, but she said no, she was all packed and leaving, going home to Surrattsville. "Even though they've changed the name," she told us. "They aren't going to call it Surrattsville anymore. Can they do that? Change a town's name?" She seemed more worried about that than anything.
"Why is she talking about this now?" I whispered to Robert.
"She has to," he answered. "She has to focus on something. Talk about anything she wants. The price of tea in China. Anything."
"Well, I changed my first name," Annie was saying, "and maybe now, I'll change my last one, too. They'll give