The Dark (39 page)

The excitement past, Chauncey stretches out his legs and taps his feet, to the annoyance of the other passengers. He thinks on the
brothel in New York, the one recommended by the maid at Barnum’s Hotel, the one that specialized in feet. The madame, the maid’s aunt, showed him a collection of footwear that made Chauncey appreciate man’s ingenuity anew. Research, he told himself. And indeedo, those ladies had some tricks with their toes the Fox females could never imagine. But truly, how did the Fox women manage the constant cracking and snapping? Chauncey’s feet were always swollen after his exposes, became so sore and knobbed that at times they barely made a sound. He’d kept the sorry state of his feet secret, of course. But then that Leah had found him out. She or a confederate must have visited his hotel in Cleveland last spring and paid off a porter or waiter. How else could the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
have known of the wretched state of his feet after every demonstration? Why else would the writer have compared his grimaces and scowls when toe-cracking to the Fox ladies’—ah, yes—
placid, blameless countenances when attended by what are indisputably spirit noises given how effortlessly they emit from any room in which the Ladies are sitting
.

Blameless. Blamed. Blasted. Bullshit.

“We shan’t lose. Righto, Hemano!”

“ ’Course,” Heman mutters.

Chauncey sighs. It had all been going so well. Mrs. Ruth Culver had been his
coup de grace
. For her name he had to thank that animate clockwork Alfie Kincaid. Chauncey arrived at Ruthie’s door on a day of spitting rain. He was accompanied by reputable men—a doctor, a lawyer, a possible minister. The face of Ruth Culver was a map of disappointments, her house the dwelling place of bitterness. It had a smell, bitterness did: vinegar, lye, rapeseed-oil lamps, musty carpets, burned biscuits, rancid butter. She sat bolt upright by a hissing fire. No need to coax a story out of her, no need to offer money, either, though Chauncey gave her three silver dollars. Maggie and Katie, she said, were experts at mimicry. They’d imitate their old mother most cruelly, and their schoolmaster, and their saintly old father. They were far better at repartee than farm girls should have been. And they had a strange language between them.

“What manner of language?” the lawyer asked sharply.

“Couldn’t say, but it were strange in my opinion,” Ruth Culver replied. “A jumble. It were like something you thought you could recognize but couldn’t. Or like to some language you’d forgotten. Not foreign, so much is what I mean. But old.”

The possible minister frowned. The doctor looked uneasy. The lawyer scribbled something down. Chauncey steered the conversation away from weird languages and mimicry. What next? Talk of spells? The riding of brooms?

Ruth Culver’s every word was scribed down. Was only altered a small bit here, added to there.

“Katie disappointed me, I’ll say it again,” Ruth said. “Never could get the spirits to locate my ivory comb nor Norman’s boot jack. Oh, she helped some with the milking, but she wouldn’t raise a tiny hand to help with the cooking. She had the worst case of blanket fever you ever saw.”

“Blanket fever?” asked the doctor with a professional air.

“Like none you’ve ever seen! She’d laze in bed past dawn unless you hollered at her five times. A good whipping would have cured her, in my opinion, but I don’t reckon her pa ever whipped that little skeezick once. And those barn cats. She wouldn’t let me drown them. Threw an unholy fit. After that, those cats followed her around near everyplace.”

“Cats?” echoed the lawyer, the doctor, the possible minister.

“Fortunate I’m not superstitious or I’d nail juniper over my door,” the lawyer said as they left the Culvers’ yard.

“Horseshoes work just as well,” said the possible minister, then quickly added that he was jesting, of course.

The Concord arrives at last in Columbus. Chauncey and Heman search out the courthouse on foot. Get lost twice before finding it on the outskirts. A small crowd specks the steps.

“They’ve come to see a ‘scientist’ and a sorceress before a judge of the land!” Chauncey says to Heman. “An honour, isn’t it, brother mineo?”

“I suppose,” Heman mutters. “Not really, though.”

“You hungry? Damn, but I am.” And Chauncey’s gut is indeed light and hollow. He buys some early-ripe apples from a stall. Nearby, a wainwright kicks at a mangy dog. The dog yelps then slinks off.

“We wait until the last chiming second, righto?” Chauncey continues. “The females aren’t the only ones who can make a damnedo entrance, eh?”

The beaten dog has returned. He slinks up to his master, all acringe. The wainwright tosses the dog some gristle, then bootkicks him again.

Heman watches this, shakes his head. “I’m just hoping we can make an exit.”

“A
nd what of the helpless dog? You mentioned him yesterday.

The one outside the courthouse?”

My patient smiled. “What would you like to know?” Her tone, I should add, was all-inviting, alike an open door to a some sun-struck garden.

I understood her tack then, clear as glass. She was luring me to question, as was her lifelong habit. She was fishing for truths beneath. Questions reveal as much as answers, she had said that herself. Or perhaps this Chauncey had. “Nothing. Forget I asked.” I said.

She made no reply. She was fast asleep.

I had only asked about the dog because my son had so hated to see dogs beaten or even chained. Consider this: when he was six he padlocked himself to the dog post and let Queenie, our yellow hunter, roam free. My son was weed-thin and tall for his age. He was no great scholar. Not one who promised fine looks. But he was fierce in his idealism even then. He wanted to know, he told me, how it felt for poor Queenie. He’d tossed the key, he confessed, into the shell road aside our cottage. Dark clouds boiled while I searched through those whitened fragments. It began to rain and thunder.

I begged help of Mr. Mellon, but he only laughed and said the larky fool could get lightning struck and wouldn’t that teach him a lesson.

“He’s not a fool. He’s full of good!” I yelled.

“Hah, hah. Much the same,” Mr. Mellon said. I could have killed him then, but my hand had alighted on the key, there among the crushed shells and bones of sea-creatures, and I was intent on rushing back to the post and padlock.

I took the half-worked cover-all out of my satchel and studied my patient. Her eyes were fast shut, but I knew she was awake. I could tell by the cadence of her breath, the tension in her hands, the sense withal. Maggie Kane was not the only one who could read a sign or two.

“Are you sleeping, duck?”

She opened her eyes, tugged at her braid. “I should like the lily box,” she said abruptly. “I was just thinking about my father. He met the same young man, this Brother Able, the one that Chauncey met, surely. Is not that fated? A meaningful thing. It must be.”

“Coincidence,” I said, and saw in this another tack of hers: the fixing together of rags and shards to make a tidy sense.

A
MID
-M
ARCH IN
A
RCADIA
and the weather is at last allowing John to labour constant on his house. His latest additions are a side pantry and buttery. Next he plans to add a water-closet. It will be inside the house itself and wide enough for this fashion of ever-widening petticoats. And all these plans have a cord-taut urgency. His wife, Leah, Lizzie, Maggie, Katie. It has been five years since the cholera, since his prodigal women spent any notable time at home. But that will soon change.

“This was at the post for you, Pa.” The letter is like a playing card in David’s massive hand.

John Fox cracks the seal in puzzlement. Adjusts his spectacles. Peers close. Leah. She reports that they have moved into a Manhattan brownstone on a street where the
majority of the ambulatory could find them
. She writes that her court case against the dreaded Reverend Chauncey Burr has been won. She is ten thousand dollars richer; though of course the money cannot repay the grief his slander cost her. And she with all her expenses …

His eye skips down.
The flock
.

John reads it three times over. Lifted up? To the heavens yet? When the flock passed over he found her crumpled by the stump where he had seen her last. She was bloody and senseless and he’d thought her certain to die. He had nearly begun a wailing when she stirred and smiled.

John folds up the letter, wonders if mayhap she
had
been borne aloft. The flock had obscured her. It was possible. Anything seems possible where Leah is concerned.

I should have carved a swarm of pigeons on the lid of her bible box, he thinks, and visions Leah standing at the canal-boat prow, the flock a black and tattered cape stretching from her shoulders and over half the world.

The canals. John lives far from them and now eschews canal travel completely. Still, even now, if God’s grace would allow it, he would be of the watered world. He walks back into his house. Steps over the planks and tools and sits at his makeshift desk. He considers for a while, but a direct response to Leah’s letter fails him. Instead, he takes the scribed papers out of their keeping. Fires the new-hung betty lamps. Dips a nib.

Five days later at an Utica barbershop, John met one Erastus Bearcup, captain and owner of the
Morning Star
, a bullheaded boat that hauled flour from Rochester’s mills as far as Buffalo in the west and Albany in the east. Erastus wore his mat of dark hair long and pulled back with twine. His beard, stained with tobacco juice, was a shade lighter, and spanned his wide chest and obscured his mouth and crawled up to his cheekbones, above which were eyes of bottle green. For all that, he was a style-setter in this canaller world. Wore red suspenders and red garters over a smocked shirt. Wore a black sack coat, a straw hat banded with paisley, and gummed boots toed with steel.

John had heard of the man, his boat. No scolding wife hanging petticoats out like frilled flags. No thumb-sucking, nappy-shitters tied to the rail so as not to plop overboard. Just a crew of five, men of free ways all.

Erastus finished his whisky and took his place at the barber chair. The barber tossed back his own whisky, then sharpened his razor on a strop.

John spoke in his usual clipped tones. “I can fix near anything. Worked on the locks. Worked in the building yard. I’m a blacksmith by trade. Looking for work as a bowsman now.”

Erastus said to the looking glass, “We could use a bowsman. Ours just up and died of some fucking ailment of the heart.”

“He damn well drowned.” This from a man with a bulbous nose that ill-fit his gaunt face. He returned his attention to a periodical, said, “Keeled off a bridge after a Saturday spree. Not easy to drown in four feet of water, but he always was determined.
Veni, vidi, vici
.”

“That there’s the cook, Jeb O’Doul from the Carolinas, he’s a swell at the Latin,” Erastus explained. “Attend and you might start jawing like a learned man same as him.”

“He won’t,” Jeb said, eyeing John.

“Or I might.”

“Why, just for
exempli gratia
?”

“That’s it,” John said.

“And by the by,” Erastus warned. “There’s not a fuck-all thing Jeb won’t contradict or argue on about.”

“There shore is,” Jeb said. He stabbed at the periodical and nodded at some outrage. Such was the way of the man, John soon learned. Convincing him of anything through conversation was nearly impossible. He held only with what was in print. Scorned using his fingers to guide his reading, an odd thing to see, though often, as now, he licked a stubby lead to underline this important fact or that.

Erastus snorted and ordered the barber to trim his ear hair, said to John, “You’re a little shit of a thing. What’s your tipple?”

“I’d drink the Holy Spirit itself if it had any bite, but I’ve never slept past the bell. I’ve never slipped up.”