Overdue

Abraham Lincoln, a library book and the long path to publication

Forty years ago, I checked out
O Captain! The Death of Abraham Lincoln by LeRoy Hayman from a local library. It was due March 9, 1978. I know this because I still have it. I never returned the book.

I was a nine-year-old kid with a fascination for local history, which was also U.S. history. Growing up in Falls Church, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the Nation’s Capital, history was all around me. After all, my home state was the birthplace of eight presidents, including four of the first five.

I knew all the historical plaques and markers in our town and never tired of telling my parents about how a local car dealership was built on top of a former Civil War battlefield. I loved going to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on school field trips, and gazing up at the solemn likeness of President Abraham Lincoln.

Despite all of my so-called knowledge, Hayman’s book made the Civil War real to me in a way that statues and statistics had not.

Like so many of my schoolbooks about the Civil War, Hayman’s begins with portraits of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. But then he shatters the academic tone with one of Matthew Brady’s battlefield photos where the dead lay scattered in the field — arms outstretched, faces bloated — like haymows after harvesting.

But this is just the preamble. The book’s main concern is the assassination of President Lincoln, and the next hundred pages count down Lincoln’s last hours on earth, John Wilkes Booth days as a fugitive, and the long court proceedings that ended with the hanging of three men and one woman who were guilty of conspiring to kill the president and overthrow the Republic.

The book ends with a pair of photos of the conspirators. In the first they are standing on the gallows, surrounded by soldiers. In the second, they are dead. Their heads hooded, hands and feet bound, necks snapped, bodies dangling in air.

These photos of haunted me.

I hadn’t checked the book out for a school project. It was my own curiosity that led me to the material and my own morbidity, stubbornness and shame that caused me to hold on to it long after it was due.

Hayman’s book, brought this era of marble and stone to life with stories and photographs that animated the past and made me question things I was being taught in school, things I thought I knew.

I couldn’t understand how Lincoln, this man who’d done so much for our country, who occupied a sainted place in my Catholic imagination for his role in righting a gross injustice, had been so hated. In spite of all the details about the plot to kill the president, O Captain! couldn’t make me understand why someone would conspire to kill this man.

I couldn’t let the book go. So I kept it.

Twenty years later, I was still questioning things. I’d gone on from grade school to high school to a stint in the U.S. Nava Reserves and then on to college and a Master’s degree in English. I was starting to explore these questions in short stories. I’d written about the Haymarket Riots in Chicago and the Blitz in Belfast. At one point I could have taught a course on German naval operations in the North Atlantic.

But the story I was most obsessed with was the story of the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination. There were just so many layers to the story.

I learned all about the John Wilkes Booth’s relationship to the stage. How he came from a family of thespians and on that fateful night at Ford’s Theater a number of people wittingly and unwittingly helped him make his escape. I learned all about the play being performed when Booth shot Lincoln in the head, a shot that had been drowned out by the audience’s laughter in response to the line, “You sockdologizing old mantrap!”

I learned more about the plots to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward on the same night. Lewis Paine, who’d served in the Union army as a male nurse like Walt Whitman, slipped into Seward’s room and stabbed Seward in his bed. If it hadn’t been from an iron brace that Seward wore around his neck as a result of being thrown from a horse, the Secretary would have been killed.

I learned how Booth came to be killed by a soldier named Boston Corbett, who was almost certainly insane. (There may be excellent reasons for cutting off one’s own penis but I have yet to hear one.)

But the story I was most fascinated with was the tale of Dr. Samuel Mudd and his friendship with Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell. The two man shared a cell in Fort Jefferson, a military installation in the Dry Tortugas, a desolate island 70 miles west of Key West.

Grenfell was an English soldier of fortune who had claimed to have fought in Africa, Asia, Europe and both Americas. Mudd was a stoic doctor who treated the injuries Booth suffered during the assassination. Fort Jefferson, which was never completed, was susceptible to outbreaks of Yellow Fever. If not for Dr. Mudd, countless prisoners and soldiers would have perished.

Eventually these disparate elements came together in a story of my own making that I called “With Mournful Tread.” The line comes from the same Walt Whitman poem that Hayman uses for the title of his book.

But I with mournful tread
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

When I submitted it to Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, an online creative writing workshop that flourished for a time in the late 90s and early 00s, the feedback I received encouraged me to submit to top literary magazines. The story received a number of flattering rejections from places like Harper’s and The New Yorker, but there were no takers.

Maybe it was the structure of the story that put people off. With Mournful Tread is told from eight different points of view. (True, Lincoln in the Bardo has 166, but I am no George Saunders, though for many years I tried.)

Maybe the canvas of the story was too broad for a short story.

Maybe it was the description of Lincoln’s penis.

For whatever reason, as the years went on, it continued to be rejected. I would go through periods where I submitted it religiously with the new work I was creating but there were years when I barely sent it out at all.

I think most writers have a story like this, a story they love with a passion that makes them blind to its weaknesses. I was okay with that. In my estimation, Lincoln was worthy of such a passion.

Then early last year I was a visiting writer at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, not far from the home where John Wilkes Booth was treated by Dr. Mudd, changing the latter’s life forever. The house, which is now a museum, was closed but I stood outside in the cold and read the plaques and historical markers with the same curiosity as my nine-year-old self.

When I returned home, I saw a call from a San Diego-based literary magazine, pacificREVIEW, formerly Fiction International, for the theme of Errant Mythologies to be edited by the poet Hari Alluri. I immediately thought of “With Mournful Tread” and the many mythologies that sprung up around John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators in the aftermath of the assassination.

I submitted the story and, to my great delight, after nearly 20 years and at least 100 rejections, it was accepted.

What makes the acceptance even sweeter is that it appears alongside so many friends from San Diego and the Vermin on the Mount community: Adam Deutsch, Julia Dixon Evans, Justin Hudnall, Vi Khi Nao, Hannah Tawater and many others.

Errant Mythologies is out and is available through Amazon. I hope you will check it out.

As for that long overdue library book, maybe now I can return it.