The Scribe (20 page)

November 4

S
HE LOOKED NEITHER RIGHT NOR LEFT AS SHE
walked toward the heavy-looking door at the center of Fulton Tower, only kept her eyes straight out front of her, her package held in two trembling hands before her at her waist. Off to either side of the walkway, men in stripes were bent hoeing and weeding in the prison garden, and though they worked steadily under the watch of a mounted guard with what she thought was a shotgun laid across his saddle, their eyes had fixed on her the moment she stepped down from the carriage and had not yet left. She heard a murmured word once, and as she neared the great door a low whistle sang out over the garden. The guard spoke harshly and the whistle cut off and as she knocked on the big door she could hear only the sound of the hoes working, blades hacking the earth.

The face that greeted her when the door swung open had no welcome in it. She started to speak her introduction but the man behind the door shook his head and began to shut it. She shifted her package into one hand and unsnapped her purse
and brought forth the badge she had slipped out of Thomas's coat. The man studied it quizzically for a moment, then swung the door fully open and stood beside it for her to pass. All without a word spoken on his part.

She had read about Spot 12 in the papers and knew to expect a place of squalor and despair. Still, she was nearly overwhelmed by the oppressive air of the place, the silent gloom that had descended when the jailer shut the door behind her. He leaned against it now, watching her with the same suspicious glare with which he'd greeted her.

The man lay on a cot bolted to a wall of brick, on which had been written all manner of names and dates and foul language to accompany them. The man on the cot was in a state just as motley, resembling a scarecrow more than a man. He lay on his stomach with his face toward the brick, and she was grateful for this because the back of his head was a horror the likes of which she'd never seen, a mess of sutures and scabs from which patches of white hair sporadically sprang. They had not even bothered to bandage the wounds. It put her in mind of Mary Shelley's monster, or the damned in Dante or one of Poe's revenants. She steeled herself before she spoke.

“I am a friend of Thomas Canby's,” she said. “I've come to bring you something.”

She watched for a sign of movement in the man but did not see any. The scabbed head was still.

“Thomas will live, Doctor Johnston is sure of it. He will live to see you hang. Can you hear me? You did not murder him. He is on the mend. He will see you into the ground for what you've done.”

She thought of poor Mary Flanagan and shivered. She resolved to conclude this visit.

“I've brought something to you. Or back to you.”

She held out the Mason jar she had brought with her, then lifted it. “Can you hear this?” She shook the jar and the lead pellets inside it rattled against the glass. “This is what you tried to kill him with.

“I've brought this back for you to study. You can think about the meanness and futility of your life. A handful of lead that did not stop a good man. You see, it all comes back, the good and the bad.”

She moved to set the Mason jar on the stone floor, just past the point where he might have reached through the bars to it. The pellets shifted in the jar as she leaned over, making a tinkling sound against the glass.

She stopped midway, took another glance at the unmoving wraith on the bed, at the rude jailer. Stood upright again.

“Perhaps you haven't heard me,” she said, and turned the Mason jar upside down. The pellets hit the floor and scattered, the misshapen pieces of lead bouncing and rolling erratically, each pellet that had impacted Thomas's back charting its own course across the floor.

Then she turned and walked out. The mute jailer looked outraged, but he held the door open for her exit.

She would tell Thomas about this visit after all, she resolved. Even though she had taken the badge without asking and had not been able to summon the temerity to tell him about her plans beforehand. She would tell him how insensate was the man who had shot him, how wrecked and ruined. How the
pellets that had been in Thomas's back sounded as she shook them in the Mason jar, how they sounded scattering across the floor, so that they would echo through the murderer's conscience.

What she would not tell him, because she did not know—had turned her back and could not see—was that in the silence after the last of the pellets had fallen, the scarred and scabbed head had begun to tremble.

November 5

“T
HOSE WERE GRAND DAYS, LONG BEFORE THE WAR
and everything that led up to it,” Billingsley said. “I came and went as I pleased, not only in the house and outbuildings but in the slave quarters as well. I was left alone to
become
.

“I took a special pleasure in watching Banks, our overseer, discipline the hands. Banks was not a cruel man but in those days the whip was as much a part of a plantation as was the plow. He was efficient with it when it had to be put to use. The whipping post was out behind the barn, where Mother would not have to see it, and I prevailed upon Banks against his better judgment to allow me the privilege of watching. At first I kept a distance, but every lashing drew me closer. In time I was tying their hands to the iron ring myself.

“Banks left the untying to me—after he had coiled and hung the whip in the barn and gone back to the fields. Some of them had taken lashes so deep I could lay my finger inside the cuts. I remember the colors in such detail. The shade of their dark skin and the shine of blood on it. The acres of white rows
around us, swaying in every breeze. The color of the ground by the post, where the dirt had been stained. Quite beautiful. Their backs were scarred in much the same way I imagine yours is, Detective.”

For the first time since Canby and Underwood had entered the cell, Billingsley opened his eyes. He lay on the cot that was bolted into the black brick wall on the opposite side of Spot 12. Billingsley's head had been shaved, unevenly and apparently in haste, and his scalp was a variegated mess of stubble and bare skin, through which ran black sutures in a convoluted network of patches where the doctors had knitted his head back together. The skull beneath was knotty and ridged, either from his beating or from the bones working to mend. The eye that Billingsley turned to them was red from its pupil to its lid, shot through with blood. If Canby had seen a man worse damaged in the war, he could not remember. It pleased him to see it.

“My back is nearly healed. I'd predict a worse prognosis for that face of yours. Though we'll cover it with a sack soon enough.”

“I'll settle with Campbell by and by.”

“Which Campbell do you mean—the father or the son? Did no one tell you that Tunis Campbell is dead? By his own hand.”

The red eye closed. “By and by.”

“We did not come for the auld lang syne. Just your statement of the murders. I have Underwood here as a scribe and witness.” He saw that Underwood's gaze had fixed on Billingsley and that his jaw was rigid. He held the pencil in his hand tightly enough to snap it.

“Will my old friend Vernon Thompson not deign to visit?”

“He sends his regards and says he'll see you at the hanging. Meantime, I'm to get your full confession.”

“I had hoped for a jury trial. I wished to proclaim my guilt to the world.”

“Then why plead as you did?”

Billingsley raised a hand to his head, felt along one of the ridges there gingerly. “My time draws nigh. I likely would not survive to the end of a jury trial. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

“That's Scripture,” Underwood said.

“It is, nigger-boy. I have found another avenue. The two of you will be the vehicle for my message.”

“Let's stick to present business,” Canby said, watching the set of Underwood's jaw. “Start with Alonzo Lewis.”

“In due time, Detective. A confession is only part of the last testament I mean to give to you.”

“There'll be no thousand and one nights. We'll hang you without it if needs be.”

“I will not be rushed, Canby.”

“
Detective
Canby,” Underwood said.

“It is not your place to correct me, boy,” Billingsley said. He struggled to raise himself to a sitting position against the brick wall behind him, the names of the former condemned scratched and carved into the bricks. He leaned against them, his head drooping from the exertion. His breath came raggedly. “You are a child of Atlanta, Canby, and Atlanta will never have a proper regard for history. But to understand the
now
, you must know the
then
. In time that will be clear to you.

“You have your black friend here, and I had one of my
own back then. Older, though. The other darkies called him a conjure-doctor. Saul was his name. Father bought him off another planter over the state line in Alabama. But Saul was never much for Alabama. In fact, he was not really of any time or place, although his bloodline ran back to Haiti. Saul introduced me to mysteries from that part of the world—voodoo, Santeria. And darker mysteries of his own contriving. Crude stuff, but wondrous to a child. We spent many late nights together and I was an ardent pupil. He marked my progress until I outstripped him, and then he kept a fair distance from me.

“It was Saul, you see, who introduced me to my destiny.

“Before long, I had developed a kind of contempt for Saul. When Banks took ill and died, Father assumed one of the hands had poisoned his food. There was no shortage of fingers pointed at Saul. He fled; Father rounded up a contingent of the local white trash, and Saul met his end.”

Billingsley raised his head and took an appraising look at Canby, at Underwood.

“I assumed Banks's duties, over Father's mortified objections. But I loved the work. I grew more subtle with it, more refined in my methods. The wenches seldom showed a mark. I moved among them enough to spread my work around. The cotton grew, the corn grew; Father was happy, the plantation prospered.”

“And then the war,” Canby said.

“The war ruined everything. In spite of a heroic effort on our part. We made a splendid start of it. We harried that Yankee rabble all over Virginia at the outset. How I loved to see those blue bodies stack up like firewood. But in time . . .”

“You lost everything.”

Billingsley's battered face assumed a nearly wistful look. “A person as common as yourself can barely imagine what I lost. Absolute power. Total order. We drew it from the blacks and from the land itself.”

“Hell on earth,” Underwood said. Billingsley smiled at him.

“I begin to see your motivations now,” Canby said. “The old order broke down, didn't it? And you've hated seeing anyone who would have been a field hand or house slave back then do better for themselves. Where did that leave you?”

“You have a primitive mind, Detective. I suppose it's what suits you to your profession—that you break work such as mine down to crude particulars. But yes, to descend from such sovereignty on one's own land to slinking around this cesspool of a city like a pickpurse or a cat burglar—I confess I resented it. I raged.”

“And Malthus. I should have seen it. By your lights, the plantation held perfect balance intact. Malthus wrote that the only histories we have of mankind are histories of the higher classes. Your era was over.”

“Oh, Malthus is an old name.”

“Like Legion?” Underwood asked.

“You may be on to something there, boy.”

“And you feel, like Malthus, that equality among all would only lead to misery. The Cotton Exposition fairly celebrates that.”

“A very old name.”

“But why did you kill Anse? How did he fit your desiderata?”

Billingsley was reclining, in increments, back to his supine position on the bunk.

“You tire me, Detective. Your pedestrian thinking. You stutter and stumble along your way and still you do not see. I expected better of you.