The Dark (23 page)

1823, two years before the canal was complete and there was still work aplenty. Already boats were being drawn between Utica and Seneca, already the freight charges were dropping like pigeons under the gun.

“The canal shall traverse there!” announced some pockmarked engineer.

The men, John among them, scoffed at this prophecy. The tree trunks spanned ten feet or more, the underbrush was a mesh of stinging nettles. The rare natural clearing was but a swamp with malarial fumes and mosquito clouds, snakes and water rats.

John watched the targetman confer with this engineer. They discussed where a lock should go, calmly, as if it were like putting in a gate. The engineer … ah, but Pock-Face was
not
an engineer, as John soon discovered. Indeed, not one true engineer was to be found on this American marvel—the Grand Canal, the Erie Canal. The planners were instead inspired amateurs who had invented, among other things, a monstrous stump puller with wheels sixteen feet high, and a cement of crushed limestone that hardened under water. The latter seemed an impossibility. But then the whole canal seemed an impossibility. The plan was to build more than four hundred miles of this watery road, from the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. Off this route, feeder-canals would link to lesser places. Some surmised that in time canals would be cut from New York to Florida, and even across the great plains to the far West. As grand an undertaking as any, and John was mortal proud
to be part of it all, though he resented that he, a home-born Yankee, must labour alongside a multitude of Germans, and an even greater multitude of Irish. At least the foreigners’ scarce English excused him from chit-chat, and from joining in the pointless songs of the grievances they’d left behind.

John first worked with a crew that bulwarked the canal with manure and hay and hand-cut stones. Other crews built up the berm on one side, the towpath on the other. John spied the sketches and heard talk of bascule bridges and swing bridges, and then of aqueducts, eighteen in all. The largest was to be in Rochester itself. John liked the ring of that Latinate word:
aqueduct
. He’d heard some of old Rome and its wonders. Thought: But we’ll do better than them fucking, dress-wearing dagos yet.

John rolls the blotter over the page. Considers well before dipping his pen again.

By summer’s verge John’s hands were gloved with calluses, his muscles knotted like cordwood. He had no pocket watch. Like most of the crew, he marked his time by the whens of liquor. Before the whistle blew for lunch a boy was already running to a grocer or candy store for buckets of ale. Sundown was the time for black-strap corn-juice and whisky, after which the men were often working again by lantern light. On a Sunday, he and a gang-up of men would bet on the nags racing at the local ovals. He was called Grim John for his lack of happy chat, but was admired for his trove of cusses, his steady hand at the cards, his ability to pour into his small frame quantities of liquor that would topple the strongman at a fair.

John worked hard for all his imbibing, put to use his blacksmithing talents, his talents with mechanisms and levers. That autumn of’23 he was assigned to the Niagara Escarpment, at a settlement soon to be called Lockport after the extravagant terrace of five locks designed to drop boats down seventy feet. The locks reminded him of the clever traps he once made to catch rabbits for the stewpot. Leah would help skin them, eager for their pelts. She was collecting them, she said, to make a fine lady’s coat.

He laboured through that winter of’23–’24 in a boat-building yard, the boats taking shape under a heated shed. He sent home not a nickel. The wages didn’t hold to his fingers, which were the fingers of a free man. Far too long, his view had been the ass-end of a plow mule. For too long he’d been hidebound to his parents, then to a family of his own. Once the canal was done he had no intention of returning to Rockland County, to his wife, Margaret, to his children: Leah and Maria and David. He could have been a lock-tender, mind, for such an employ was offered after his tenure at Lockport. He could have sent for his family, had a neat little house, a garden, some sly commerce of his own. Or he could have been a towpath-tender and slaughtered muskrats that dug into the canal walls. In winter he could have helped restore the prism of the drained canal. Likewise, his family could have been near to hand. Yet even on contemplation of such employ, John’s throat tightened as if in a stranglehold. He plumbed the gold depths of his whisky glass and saw himself as a canaller, nothing else.

John stretches his fingers, then turns down the lamp’s wheel, then half-cups the chimney glass, then blows out the flame in one expert breath. He has never shattered a chimney from wayward spittle, nor burned his palms, nor caused undue soot to sully the glass.

He walks out into the foreyard, the moon casting a tarnished but sufficient light. Now notices that David’s house is already dark. His women haven’t even called him in to bed. No matter. He is surprised, even pleased that he, a taciturn man by nature, could give so many words to a page. Surprised, too, that his mind feels lighter, his thoughts more clear. Prayer has never produced such an effect, he realizes a short time later, as he kneels aside his blessed marriage bed.

“Y
ou are rallying some, duck. This should settle,” I said, and unfolded a newspaper to show my patient the soft-fried oysters. “And these,” I added, and indicated the sweet-dates. “The hawker proclaimed them ‘an exotic little treat from a land afar,’ and offered two-for-one on the deal. We have fourteen of them to mark the fourteen days of your biding. Few of my patients have such time before they’re called to—”

“To the Glory, yes, I know,” my patient said, her tone all-huffy. She peered at the sweet-dates, then poked at the grease-soaked newspaper, which was an old copy of the
New York Times
.

“Is the
Tribune
no longer printing?”

“Printing what?”

“Itself.”

“I wouldn’t know. Should I know everything? Am I a genius? A polymath?”

She smiled. “They do come in many guises, though when it comes to common sense you are surely a genius, and common sense is of more use in life than dead languages or algebra.”

To this fact I wholly agreed.

“I only ask about the
Tribune
,” she continued, “because Horace Greeley became a great friend to me and my family, though he favoured Katie most. We fell out with him, or rather I did, then found a way back to some mutual regard.”

“Did you now, duck?” I kept my voice level, but only with difficulty.

“Yes. Could you manage to bring a copy, I—”

“No! I cannot ‘manage’ that. I don’t hold with the
Tribune
, that damned rag. I won’t read a column of it. It’s not fit for wrapping cow brains. It scarcely figures if Greeley is dead. It’s his paper through and through, and I cannot forgive his meddling exhortations during the war. So if you want a copy you’d best bestir yourself forthwith and buy your damned own.”

She waited until I dumped the oysters into two bowls, then said, “He was often plagued with melancholy, you know. Horace. He took his responsibilities hard. He was a good man.”

“Good is as good does.”

“Now there’s a catchy slogan, fit for P.T. Barnum himself. Should I tell you of when we met him?”

“Barnum? You met him? The man himself? In truth?”

“Yes, Horace introduced us, just as he offered to in his letters. Though first we Fox sisters had a, yes, a ‘triumphant’ tour of New York state. Albany. Troy. We held private sittings with all the local worthies, gave displays in local halls and lyceums, became very public creatures indeed. Eliab, you see, wanted to make certain we were prepared for New York. That city of cities, he warned, would either shower us with fortune and fame, or break us into bits and bobs.”

“That is, yes, New York in a nutshell. And when did you meet that Greeley?” I said, and frowned and set aside a dubious oyster.

“Direct upon arrival, yes, in the early summer of 1850. He came to us at Barnum’s Hotel. It was not owned by P.T., incidentally, but by a cousin of his who no doubt liked the association with his more celebrated kin. And then a week after our first meeting Horace took us to P.T.’s famed American Museum, the first incarnations of it. Did you ever visit it, Mrs. Mellon?”

“No. That one had already gone up in flames by the time I arrived here … the poor animals.”

“Should I tell you of it? The meeting? The museum?”

“If you wish to, I won’t quibble,” I said. To hide my curiosity I set out the remainder of the oysters, the dates, the laudanum. “We have, after all, our dining to do.”

M
AGGIE, HEAT-FLAGGED AND ANXIOUS
, watches as the piebald boy studies Horace Greeley, who studies Phineas Theodore Barnum, who studies with a sweeping gaze his small empire of the hideous and the strange. “Damned vexing. And you can’t figure the how of it?” she hears Barnum asks Horace. Barnum’s gaze now passes over Leah and Mother to fix on Maggie and Katie, who are feigning listening to a giantess tell the joys of giant life.

Maggie tips her head towards Barnum. “He’s nothing to worry on, Kat,” she whispers. “It’ll turn out right.”

“Tragic, just tragic,” Katie answers, her eyes still on the Giantess, whose heavy face is sheened with sweat, whose breath is working like bellows in the early July heat. “I mean that Calvin and George have got errands.” Katie adds. “They’ll just die when they find out we got to visit Barnum’s … These poor old ghastlies, though. Do you reckon Mr. Barnum ever lets them out to have fun or anything?”

At this Maggie chances another look at Barnum himself. He is a solid man with a blunt face and wiry hair in two queer protrusions on either side of his head, as if covering small horns. In his presence the human curiosities are performing their best. Yan Zoo the Chinese juggler. Zip the Pinhead. The Mammoth Highland Boys, fat as barrels in their kilts. Mr. Diwali the Snake Charmer. A Circassian Beauty caped in her wild black hair.

If the Devil were come to earth … No, no, Barnum’s only a man, Maggie reminds herself. And you’re too old for foolish thoughts. Didn’t Horace say he first met Barnum at the Universalist church? And don’t the Universalists preach salvation for all and hellfire for none? Such is not Mr. Split-Foot’s cant. And Mr. Barnum is an abolitionist and a temperance man, just like Horace. The Devil would be neither.

Maggie watches Yan Zoo juggle what appears to be shrunken heads and ponders what it is she finds so distressing about Barnum’s American Museum; it is, after all, one of the finest and most edifying establishments in New York. Everyone says so. Besides this hall of human curiosities there is an ornate lecture theatre and then the
Great Hall, where the eye can barely take in all the displays—suits of armour, skeletons, mechanical dolls, stuffed creatures from every corner of the globe and wax figures of the famous dead that seem more alive than some people Maggie could name. In another room are scale models of cities: Paris by moonlit, Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day and Moscow in flames. In yet another are aquaria aswim with fantastical fish. And in the largest is a menagerie of animals whose squawks and growls pervade the museum, and whose simulacra are nailed to the museum’s outside facade.