The Outcasts (20 page)

L
ucinda lay on a day couch, her face toward the ceiling, but she cut her eyes to the side, following the movements of Hattie Hamilton as she paced the floor. The madam had one hand in a fist at her hip, and she pointed and jabbed the forefinger of her other hand like an ice pick.

“I won’t have any sick girls in my house, Bill. It was deceitful of you not to tell me.”

Bill shifted in the chair set closest to the couch, nodding sympathetically, as though he were merely complicit in the deception and not the perpetrator of it. He exhaled a dense band of cigar smoke and carefully, with his fingertips, plucked a grain of tobacco from his bottom lip.

Hattie added, directing her finger at Lucinda, “You’re lucky she didn’t have the fit while the judge was still on top of her.”

Bill smiled.
“Vero nihil verius.”

“Don’t get coy with me. She can’t stay here. She’ll have to go.”

Bill dropped his head back to gaze at the ceiling. “Hasn’t she been a good earner?”

“As far as it’s gone. Yes.” Hattie had stopped pointing and now planted both fists on her hips. “But Bill, it spooks the customers. I get some old piddler on her while she’s rattling around with one of her fits, and he’s like to die of heart failure. And then I’ve got a fire stampede out the door.”

Bill looked at Lucinda, who met his gaze for a moment and then looked away. “You’re not using your imagination.”

“What do you mean?” Hattie looked from Bill to Lucinda and back again.

“A specialist.”

Bill stood up, and for a moment Hattie looked to move back a step.

He said, “Perhaps someone who would simply want to watch.”

Hattie ducked her chin. “To watch?”

“Yes. To simply watch.” Bill smiled at her as though he’d solved a complex riddle. He placed an arm behind her ample back and guided her to the door. “Think about it, Hattie. I’m certain that with your contacts, you’ll find someone who would, even at a moment’s notice, come and see…How should we call it?…Death dancing with the maiden.”

He closed the door after Hattie and returned to the couch to stand over Lucinda. He pulled a vial from his coat pocket, placed it on the small table next to her, and said, “Lucy, you don’t have the luxury of being sick right now. If we lose your fish because of this, we’ll have to start over again, in some other city. We don’t have the time, and we don’t have the money for it.” He reached down and brushed the hair off her forehead but then pinched her ear painfully between his thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t make me sorry that I forgave you in Galveston.” He kissed her on the mouth. “You seem less excitable when you’re on the laudanum. I’d recommend a spoonful every few hours to begin. Perhaps you should start now.”

He straightened and turned his back to her, then walked from the room.

She fixed her eyes on the mural of the Muses painted on the ceiling, breathing through her teeth; the sickness in her stomach and bowels rose to her throat, threatening to spill over her tongue and out of her mouth and spoil the satin covering of the couch. Her vision still pulsed; the lines of the painting danced crazily. But to close her eyes brought a more unbearable feeling of being knocked from a water tower. She slowed her breathing, counting the folds in a Muse’s cloak, and the nausea retreated.

The attack had come without warning and with none of the usual signs, and she had no memory of what had happened between the time she lifted her skirts to the judge and the moment she’d awakened, an hour later. She had opened her eyes to the madam and some of the other girls standing around the bed, their expressions fearful—the foreign-born girls crossing themselves in frantic succession—but all of them with an unreserved curiosity. The judge had long since fled and one of the girls murmured that Hattie would have to give him free humps for a month of Sundays.

The judge was old and mostly impotent, liking best to look at her body through the film of a nightdress. He tipped her well and was courteous, and she was sorry to have lost him.

She wondered how many other customers she would lose because of the revelation of her illness. She thought it possible that her fish, the skittish and guilt-ridden client she had stolen from Tartine, might use this as an excuse to discontinue their increasingly dangerous games of restraint and orchestrated punishment. She thought of telling him that it was all an elaborate act, that the judge had asked her to feign being unconscious and helpless, but she could imagine Tartine, or any of the other girls, whispering into his ear the shameful details of her sickness: the terrible distortions of her face and limbs, the spittle from her mouth, her loosened bladder.

A cautious knock sounded at the door, after which it opened slowly. A young woman entered the room and stood looking at Lucinda from a distance.

“Hattie asked me to come see after you.”

Lucinda remembered that the girl’s name was Katrin, but she couldn’t recall from which northern, sunless place she had come. Perhaps Germany, or Sweden? Katrin was dressed in a thin linen petticoat, and the curve of her pregnant belly was visible through the fabric. She followed Lucinda’s gaze and cupped her mounded flesh with one arm. Lucinda had heard that the girl had followed every bit of whores’ wisdom on ending a pregnancy, from tincture of arsenic to repeatedly jumping off a table, to no avail.

She returned Lucinda’s gaze and shrugged. “I guess the little bastard still expects to be born.”

Lucinda asked for some water and then told the girl to go. Lucinda drank sparingly and soon began to feel better, her vision clearing. The intense nausea was a new, unwelcome visitation. A memory connected to the nausea and brought on by the girl’s appearance began to surge into her consciousness, and she reflexively looked to the ceiling, trying to hold the threatening thoughts at bay.

But her thoughts slipped free and she realized she hadn’t felt so sick to her stomach since her own pregnancy three years before. And with this breach came a flood of remembrances.

The first few months of it she’d spent with her face over a porcelain thunder mug and she thought she would surely die of starvation. Then one day she woke and had no more sickness. It had disappeared like clouds before a strong wind, leaving only a ravenous appetite and her eyes bloodshot and swollen from the ceaseless retching. She came to feel better than well, to feel as a child does at the outset of a summer’s day, a child who has never known illness or injury and is experiencing only the certainty of newly developed muscles, liquid within supple skin.

But the fits returned in her sixth month and worsened in severity and duration until she feared she would be extinguished completely or rendered a simpleton by a brain rupture. She began to loathe and fear in equal measures the body growing inside of her own, was jealous and resentful of it sapping her strength and vitality.

One evening she overheard her father and husband speaking in whispered, conspiratorial tones, saying that, for the infant’s own safety, it should be given to a nurse to be raised, and that she, Lucinda, might do better placed again in the care of a “curative” institution.

A month before she was to give birth, she left her father’s house accompanied by a Mexican woman who had experience as a midwife, and they traveled north to a place far enough, and isolated enough, that Lucinda would not be reclaimed. She had made arrangements to be taken into a home for unmarried mothers and she gave birth on a gentle spring evening, without much pain or any dangerous complications. They had advised her to look away when the baby was pulled from between her legs, as it would make the parting easier. But she did look, and it was a healthy, squalling girl still slick from her womb, and she had felt a clenching ache in her breasts, needing to be relieved of their burden. She watched the nurses clean and swaddle the baby and when they began to carry her from the room, her eyes opened and fixed on Lucinda’s with a steady, ancient ownership. Lucinda reached her arm out, fingers extended, and the midwife frowned but let Lucinda briefly touch the downy surface of the baby’s head.

For hours she listened for the sound of an infant crying in the nursery, but she heard nothing more than the restless shifting of the still-pregnant women beside her. She left after four days, assured repeatedly by the nurses that the baby would be cared for and placed with suitable parents.

Before traveling, she had bound up her chest to stop her breasts from leaking, but when she stepped onto the coach, the top of her bodice was wet, as though soaked from tears.

Now Lucinda eased her legs over the day couch and sat up. She felt faint for only a moment and, after taking a few more breaths, stood. She reached for the bottle of laudanum on the table, walked to the wash station, and poured the contents into the water pitcher. She straightened her hair, pinched her cheeks for color, and walked from the room to the balcony overlooking the downstairs parlor, where she observed Bill in a gentleman’s chair, Tartine draped across his lap. The whore was whispering into his ear, and when she looked over her shoulder at Lucinda, she narrowed her eyes and curled her lips in a triumphant smile.

O
n the steamer’s deck, soon after boarding, Nate heard a horse screaming and the pounding of terrified hooves down the boat’s open corridor. He was certain it was the big bay breaking loose, but it was a speckled roan, mad with terror and on a collision course with him against the railing. He ducked, covering his head with his arms, and felt the wind from the horse as it leaped over the railing, and a second later he heard the splash as it fell into the Gulf.

He grabbed the deck rail, looking for the horse’s head to appear, and soon after saw the struggling animal swimming strongly towards the nearest point of land.

Passengers ran onto the deck to watch, and the captain pointed and yelled, “He’s making for Pelican Island!”

For forty-five minutes they watched the horse swimming against the tide, and often the body would sink until only the tips of the ears and the nostrils emerged to signal that the animal had not yet drowned.

He looked through the scope of the Whitworth, following its progress, and one of the passengers mistook it as an aim for a killing.

“Shoot it,” the man had urged, laughing.
“Shoot it!”

A hundred feet out from the island beach the head disappeared under the waves and the man continued his barking laughter, telling Nate that he had missed a fine chance to test his rifle.

Nate pressed the scope closer to his eye, scanning the shoreline for signs of the horse, and when he saw flickers of white light streaking his vision, he realized he had been holding his breath. He thought his eyes were mistaken when he saw two small triangles appear from the waves and then the horse’s head rear from the water. With a great intake of air, the horse simply walked up along the sloping sea floor until it came to stand on the beach, coughing and breathing in great sucking gasps.

A jubilant cry rose up from all the other passengers except the barking man, and Nate watched the island through the scope until the horse was lost from view. And then he handed the rifle to a surprised passenger and with both hands pummeled the barking man until he fell to the deck. He hit the man savagely and repeatedly, feeling bones and flesh breaking under his fists; feeling, too, a momentary easing of loss, his grief for Dr. Tom oozing out from some deep place within, like the blood that seeped through the split skin of his knuckles. He kept hitting the man, beating back his uncertainty as to his mission, until the captain and two passengers pulled him away.

Afterwards, he sat against the railing looking at the Gulf sky, the gray clouds mushrooming together in storm formation. He thought about the roan, believing that he’d been meant to witness the horse’s struggle. The event recalled to him the thinking of a horse, which is neither reasoned nor reasoning, but steadfast and untiring against all contrary tides. He knew that a horse, if stubborn enough, was capable of running through prickly wire; it would tangle itself until it was shredded hide to bone before abandoning its determined run.

If the roan, like a man, had pondered on and fretted over the difficulty of swimming a half mile to a small island, it most likely would have given up, let the water take it, its churning thoughts working as surely as weights around its legs.

Nate had committed to this path, and he would not think beyond the length of the steps that pointed towards the ultimate capture, or killing, of William Estes McGill. He would not defeat himself with complicated strategies or undo his resolve with worrying over the difficulty of finding his way through a city where he had never been before, where he had no contacts or friends.

He would, like the roan, point his nose to his destination and work muscle and bone to find himself on home ground again.

L
ucinda sat in the carriage across from Tartine, staring out the window. She could feel the whore’s eyes on her, though, and knew that if she glanced at the girl’s face, she’d see her mouth twisted into the same smirking grin she’d carried since spending an entire night with Bill. Tartine crossed her legs as a man would, one ankle over a knee, flashing her red-and-white stockings like a challenge.

Hattie had called them both into her private parlor that morning and told them that Lucinda’s fish had requested that they both go to his house—a mansion on First Street—that afternoon. It was an unusual request, Hattie admitted; one, the madam insinuated, that hinted at the unpleasantness of the encounter.

“Unpleasant for you,” Hattie had said, looking pointedly at Lucinda.

As they left the parlor, Tartine had whispered into Lucinda’s ear, “He will want for you to scream quite a lot.”

The fish had not been frightened by Lucinda’s fit; in fact, he had specified to Hattie that Lucinda should replay her helpless state in his presence, wearing the same modest schoolteacher’s dress she had worn the first evening. She was to remain passive and feign unconsciousness while he worked to revive and reanimate her through “treatments” of his own devising.

The carriage bounced hard over a break in the road and Lucinda looked down at the carpetbag at Tartine’s feet, revisiting in her mind its contents: a razor strop and belts of various sizes; rigid paddles, deeply scored; and a pig’s bladder with a long, perforated tube attached. She dabbed at the sweat on her upper lip, and her eyes met Tartine’s gaze.

She said something in French and Lucinda snapped, “Say what you have to say in English or shut it.”

Tartine tilted her head and smiled. “I said only that Bill told me how pretty is St. Louis.” She uncrossed her legs and sat with her knees wide apart. “He is very felicitous, wouldn’t you say?”

She laughed and Lucinda turned her head towards the window once more. She had tried telling herself that Bill’s sudden attentions to Tartine were to be seen as only his escape from boredom or, at worst, a warning to her against attempting further disobedience. But, in truth, she was ill with anxiety that his restlessness and disapproval would edge her towards another series of weakening fits, rendering her useless to his plans and pushing him to seek another partner.

In every brothel she had ever known, she had always felt herself to be above the other girls, certainly the most poised and intelligent of them. And if not the most beautiful, she presented to her clients the appearance of refined accomplishment. She did not look like a whore, nor did she act like one, and the men who paid for her time felt themselves elevated because of it.

But in New Orleans, her cool detachment was looked upon as an anachronistic and elaborate act that was to be dropped as soon as the customer closed the door. She was not easily shocked, but some of the requests had left her feeling she could crawl out of her own skin.

Soon, soon,
she thought.
Bill will get what he wants and we can leave this city and its scheming whores, and all of what I do today will be washed away in perfumed baths and fragrant sheets.

The carriage had stopped in front of a large house. Tartine hoisted up the carpetbag, stepped onto the street, and held open the door.

“Well…?” she said impatiently.

“…is a deep, dark hole,” Lucinda whispered, “into which I would gladly push you.”

Lucinda stepped from the carriage and, brushing past Tartine, walked up the stairs and then into the client’s house.