A torch is thrown inside the barn. The straw catches immediately, illuminating the scene as clearly as if he were onstage. “I saw him standing upright,” one Colonel Conger says later, “leaning on a crutch. He looked so like his brother Edwin I believed for a moment the whole pursuit to have been a mistake.”
He’s shot through the neck by Sergeant Boston Corbett on instructions from God. “Tell my mother I die for my country,” John says. But when the dying takes more than three hours, he says, “Please kill me now.”
* * *
—
His diary, found on his body, becomes part of the court record.
On April 21st, he wrote:
After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat . . .
. . . I think I have done well, though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me. When if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great, though I did desire no greatness.
To night I try to escape these blood hounds once more. Who who can read his fate. God’s will be done.
I have too great a soul to die like a criminal. Oh may He, may He spare me that and let me die bravely.
I bless the entire world. Have never hated or wronged anyone . . .
v
All that remains is the going on.
* * *
—
Edwin is summoned to the capital to testify to John’s insanity. Apparently his testimony isn’t what was hoped for. He’s never called.
He thinks briefly about visiting the Sewards, with whom he once spent such a lovely evening, offering his sympathy. But the promises of continued friendship are surely moot now. Seeing him will only hurt them more.
He visits June and Sleeper in their cells. He offers to let Sleeper out of their partnership; in fact, he urges this. Sleeper tells him no. He doesn’t tell Edwin that the partnership he wants out of is his marriage. He’s decided that the only way to restore his honor is to divorce his pregnant wife. When finally released, he returns home to tell Asia so. She won’t do it.
He speaks to the press. The Booths, he says, are a nest of vipers. A family of Iagos, a house of secrets. He himself is not a Booth, thank the Lord, never has been, never will be.
Six months later, he and William Stuart mount a production of Our American Cousin at the Winter Garden in New York. Sleeper takes on the starring role. Edwin’s feelings about this are unknown.
Only Laura Keene publicly objects. What could be more tasteless than this rank cupidity? The play runs for a month to full houses.
Keene will actually suffer more than Sleeper from the assassination. She’d made her way to the box, held Lincoln during the doctor’s initial examination, since his wife was unable to do so. His blood soaked her skirts and petticoats.
The public is deeply uncomfortable with the thought of their dying president in the arms of an actress. Her career is as a comedienne. No one finds her funny anymore.
* * *
—
John once gave Rosalie the courage to leave her house. Now he’s taken it back. She no longer even wishes to sit and listen to Edwin’s friends. There is no one she can ask to share her bed now that Mother is gone to Asia and, with no one there as witness, she sobs through the night, her hands pressed against her face. Her books no longer engage her. Her grief is a well with no bottom. Each day lasts longer than she can endure and night is no respite.
All the Booths, though mostly Edwin, continue to receive threatening letters. But another sort of letter comes as well. More than one young woman writes to say that she was secretly married to John, or secretly engaged to John, or has secretly had John’s child. All have pressing financial needs. Edwin deals with these claims swiftly and coldly.
One letter contains the picture of a child. A girl—her name is Ogarita Rosalie Booth. Rosalie feels that the resemblance is undeniable. While Edwin is in Washington, Rosalie asks Ogarita’s mother, Izola, to bring the child to the house. Izola is an actress, darkly Spanish in looks, and she shares the details of her secret and passionate marriage. Rosalie hadn’t realized how consoling it would be to talk about John with someone who still thinks he’s wonderful. She becomes uncharacteristically loquacious—telling stories about John as a boy, a rapscallion, for sure, but delightfully so, an imp, a larker. They agree that John was a mere tool of greater forces, pressured by the Knights of the Golden Circle into a thing he would never have thought of on his own. This is as close to happiness as she’s come since April 15th.
Ogarita looks less like John in the flesh, but her coloring is his, and maybe there is something about her eyes?
Rosalie feels that Izola’s grief is real and if that’s real, it follows that the rest is also. John left Rosalie some oil stocks. They don’t amount to much, but, at forty-two, it’s the first money she’s ever had that’s all her own. She presses some of it into Izola’s hands. They agree to meet again.
Edwin is angry when he finds out. What he sees is a scheming woman preying on Rosalie’s kindness and her fairy-tale heart. He tells Rosalie that six pictures of women were found in John’s diary and Izola wasn’t among them. He shows her a letter from Lucy Hale, the senator’s daughter with whom John had an understanding. “Read the words of this broken-hearted woman to whom our brother promised such happiness,” he tells her. Surely that’s put a stop to it.
In fact, Rosalie merely changes the address to which Izola’s letters are sent so that Edwin never sees them. The two women continue to correspond until a few years before Rosalie’s death. In letters, Rosalie refers to her as “my dear sister,” and signs “your loving sister, Rose.” She gives Izola personal items she thinks John’s child may someday want—his playbook, his gloves, a photo of him as a boy. When, in 1877, Izola has another child, a son, she tells Rosalie she wants to name him after John. Rosalie can’t imagine the child’s father will agree to that. Anyway, it’s a bad idea. She asks instead that he be named after her great love, the lion tamer. Harry Jerome Dresbach is close enough to Jacob Driesbach to satisfy her.
Rosalie’s not the only one who loves a good fairy tale. Ogarita will grow up to tell her children that Driesbach died when his own lions ate him. Or perhaps this story also comes from Rosalie. Better dead and eaten by lions than married and running a hotel with his wife in Apple Creek, Ohio.
vi
Asia’s twins arrive, one boy, one girl. They do not name the boy for John. The girl lives less than a year. After their daughter’s death, Sleeper goes to London, where he proves a great success. He writes to Asia that she should come and bring the children, but she delays, reluctant to leave her mother.
Meanwhile, those who knew John （and many who didn’t） are selling their stories. He’s called a cad, a cheat, and a violent drunk. That he was all those things is no comfort.
“North, East, and West the papers teemed with the most preposterous adventures, and eccentricities, and ill deeds of the vile Booth family. The tongue of every man and woman was free to revile and insult us,” Asia says, and then, and in almost exact echo of John’s diary, “Every man’s hand was against us.”