The Whip (3 page)

Five

Watsonville, California

December 28, 1879

The table was covered with a red cloth and set for two. The interior of the small cabin glowed in the candlelight. Homemade curtains rippled from the dark recesses of the windows inward towards the illumination. Deliciousness hung in the air; something savory was cooking. Anna bent over the wood stove for a moment, adding fuel, the glow of the fire playing over her face.

Close to sixty, one could still see in the secret places of that face, covered over by shadows and hard lines, what a beauty she must have been…a pressed rose now lost in the dusty pages of some nameless book.

Anna heard the familiar sound of slow hoof beats approaching the cabin. She reached up to smooth her hair, her dark eyes tightening, apprehensive.

A few minutes later the door of the cabin opened and Charley entered. Anna put her hands, protected by two checkered cloths, around the rim of a steaming tureen of soup, and carried it from the wood stove to the table.

Charley reached with difficulty to hang his coat and hat on their customary hooks beside the door. He paused to rinse his hands and face in the basin of water, then turned and limped toward the table and sat down. Anna watched him with concern. Not a word had been spoken.

Charley brought the spoon to his mouth, blew on it to cool it, and then tried to sip the broth. He could not swallow…the liquid spewed from his mouth. The exertion brought on a racking cough. Pain clouded his eyes.

“Please let me help you. Let me go get the doctor.”

The music of Anna’s Sicilian roots still, after all these years, colored her husky voice.

Charley’s face was ashen, sweat beading down. When the cough subsided, he grunted, “No.”

He heaved himself out of his chair. Anna watched him as he moved in a slow painful shuffle toward their bedroom; Anna’s lips pressed inward, her mouth a shadowy slash against pale skin. He vanished into the room, closing the door behind him.

Charley sat on the bed patting his pockets until he found matches and a cigar. He bit off the end, lit the cigar and took a deep draw. His exhalation became another wrenching cough.

Anna stood up and made her way to the closed door.

“Charley? Why won’t you let me help you?” She tried the knob. The door was bolted. “Damn it, you answer me.”

“We all got to go sometime.” His voice was raspy and winded.

“This is not a joke. Why do you lock the door?”

There was no reply.

“Alright. I don’t care. Even if you don’t like it, I’m going across to the Harmon’s, so George can go and get Dr. Irelan. Just lie down on the bed and rest. I will be back soon, I promise.”

Still there was no response. Frustrated and helpless, holding back tears, Anna slapped the door with her hand. She grabbed her coat and walked out of the cabin.

A moment later, when Charley opened the door, he saw that she was gone. He turned back, shutting the bedroom door again. He started to take another pull on the cigar but his lips had no strength. His arm felt heavy holding it. The cigar fell from his fingers to the floor. He stared down at it. He put it out with his boot. A stabbing pain ran down his arm.

He sat back down on the bed…his breathing still labored, his throat tight. He took from his pocket a small tin. Sliding open the top, he removed several opium tablets from inside. Somehow he managed to swallow them. He bent and pulled off his boots. He felt winded…like he had been kicked in the gut. With great expense to his body, he dropped down to the floor on his knees in front of the bed.

Reaching well under it, he pulled towards him the little trunk hidden there. He brushed a thick layer of dust off the top and stared at it for a moment as though it were a stranger. He took a little key from his pocket, turned it in its lock and then raised the lid. Reaching in, he pulled out something small and fragile and red. He held it up in his hands. It was a tiny embroidered homespun dress…the dress of a small child.

Charley lifted the dress to his face, breathing from it as though it might give him life. He put it down on the floor alongside him and reached back into the trunk: a tiny pair of crocheted shoes. With care, he placed them below the little red dress. His shoulders rose and fell. Next, a tattered copy of Emerson’s
Essays
. And then lastly, a coiled dusty old whip.

It meant something, Charley thought, that he’d held onto these souvenirs from a life that had long since ceased to be his.

He pulled himself up from the floor.

He was feeling ensnared beneath his garments. He felt he might smother within their bindings. He had to remove them and free himself from their grasp. He stripped off his shirt. His back and chest were wrapped round with wide bands of cotton stripping. He began to unwind the coarse cloths that bound him, and they fell in loops onto the floor.

In a moment he was finished. Fighting against the waves of nausea and vertigo, he bent down to remove his pants and undergarments. His breath was short and strained and made a hollow yellow sound in his chest.

He was naked now. He felt liberated, weightless, euphoric.

In the dark glow of the candlelight, he stood in front of a small silver framed mirror perched on his bureau. There he watched himself remove the last bit of cover on his body…the black patch from his left eye, revealing an opaque, sightless orb.

Next he took the mirror, his hands trembling, and moved it all around his body, every inch that he could see. He put the mirror back in its place.

He took his hands and moved them to his waist and onto the hair of his groin. His hands touched the softness of his chest and then the roughness of his face.

Unexpected tears came to his eyes.

He lay down naked and spent on top of the blanket and looked up into the shadows of the air above.

In the distance, he could hear his breath rattling.

How strange it was. All that seemed to be left of this world now was breath.

Then a sound came to him. A whistle. And fluttering…tiny flapping—orange against the blue.

The candle next to the bed sputtered, struggling to stay lit.

Warm blood escaped from his mouth. He sensed now, that he was a stranger to that flesh beneath, to that final intake of breath. Without fear, without surprise…the realization that in that moment he was about to die.

Six

Boston, Massachusetts

March 1812

It was March of 1812, the month when wagon-ruts were filled with cold, dark puddles—the month of mud and suicide in New England. Inauspicious thunder rumbled that morning from dark, low-hanging clouds. The rain was freezing. It came down slanted. A wagon clattered up the road toward a dreary-looking institution surrounded by barren winter fields. It was the Boston Society for Destitute Children.

From a distance the building looked bleak—somebody’s old mansion converted by committee work to a good cause. From closer up the building looked not merely bleak but stricken. Shutters hung off. Paint peeling. A child’s rag doll was disintegrating in one of the puddles that pitted the front courtyard. The granite vases flanking the stairway were broken into great pieces.

The wagon stopped in front. A young blond woman in a dark shawl, hugging a straw basket to her chest against the rain, stepped down and hurried toward the front door. She raised her fist and pounded hard against the peeling paint. Without waiting for a response, she knelt and placed the basket down on the topmost step. She had tucked a rag poppet inside the basket with her baby. She’d left a little note with no information of any earthly use. Neither of them, baby nor mother, was crying.

The young woman returned to the wagon and touched the back of the hand of the older man beside her. He grimaced and slapped the reins across the back of the nags.

The door of the orphanage opened and a man, the headmaster, appeared. Seeing no one in front of him, he looked down for a baby. Indeed, there it was. Another one. He bent down to pick it up. He held it so that it might also see the wagon moving away down the road.

“Wave good-bye to mommy,” said the headmaster. “Wave bye-bye. You’ll not see her again.”

Seven

That night it was still raining; it had been
raining
for days. A flash of light, followed by a deafening crash of thunder, illuminated the room revealing long rows of crude beds, each with one or more sleeping children.

The noise awakened the baby, hemmed in by pillows on a bed. She rooted for a breast. She thrashed her little hands out and grasped nothing. The baby whimpered, then started to wail. In a moment she was screaming, hot and red-faced.

All up and down the rows, the screaming ignited the other children, who burst with some relief into tears. How they needed to cry, those children. Some of them had not even awakened. They were crying out loud from their sleep, crying their hearts out, knotted up in their coarse white nightclothes. It seemed there was not a dry eye or a closed mouth in the place.

A fleshy, greasy-haired woman in a soiled nightdress appeared in the arched doorway, carrying a candle. She cast a grumpy eye over the room. Her mere appearance was enough to silence the children. They buried their faces in their pillows to stifle their sobs. The general racket died down, leaving a single burred, ear-splitting wail that moved up and down the audible registers: the baby, still screaming among her pillows.

The woman lumbered over to the bed. For an instant the baby was diverted by the flickering candle in the woman’s hand. Curious, she paused her screaming. Then she caught sight of the woman’s big face coming closer and closer to her own, and howled even louder than before…with terror this time.

The woman hoisted the baby up like a small plank onto one rolling hip. “We’ll have none of this now, missy,” she said. “Don’t I need my beauty sleep like anyone else?”

Carrying the squirming, screaming bundle under one arm she strode past the rows of beds. As she passed by, the children in each row feigned sleep, holding themselves still, not relaxing nor peeking out from their pillows till they knew she’d gone.

Lee Colton however, a skinny somber-looking boy of four, slipped out of the bed he shared with another boy, and followed at a canny distance. Curious where the mean fat lady was taking the crying baby, he continued to follow them. He tiptoed through another room of beds, and then down a long hallway, past a heavy mahogany wardrobe, and then further down the hallway at the end of which there was a door.

The woman held the child against her hip with her big elbow and pulled the door open. Inside was a cramped, dark space filled with shelves of stained linen. She set the baby into a laundry basket on the floor. “When you stop your bloody caterwaulin’, then you can come out.”

She stepped back, yawned, and closed the door. A moment of silence, and then the muffled sound of redoubled screaming from within. In the laundry closet, utter darkness had descended.

The woman turned, grunted with exasperation, and lumbered back down the hallway.

Lee had drawn himself into a corner where the mahogany wardrobe met the wall, and now he inhaled and held his breath. The woman moved with much slapping and sliding of her flesh against itself. She wheezed and she thumped, too. The light from the candle illuminated the high parts of the walls and then the lower parts. Lee closed his eyes. In a moment she had heaved herself by him. He could hear her belabored passage into the dormitory, and then into the one after it. He could hear the final closing of the door. The children in their rows of beds were now breathing, unclenching their fists. Lee opened his eyes. He knew the children were whimpering themselves to sleep now.

There was a little moonlight filtering in through a window, and he could make his way by it. He moved to the closet door and stood outside it for a moment. He listened to the frantic cries of the baby. Standing there in indecision, he hoisted up his baggy long underwear. He put his hand on the closet door handle. He had to stop the crying, he had to save the pretty baby. Turning to look once more behind him, he slipped inside.

Early the next morning the fleshy woman reappeared, in an acre or so of apron, sighing, put-upon, dragging with her through the rooms and hallways a mop and a pail of dirty water. She paused at the laundry closet, put her hand on the knob, and yanked open the door. She stopped in mid-movement. Inside the closet, Lee was sound asleep, the baby, safe in his arms, staring up at him.

Eight

A cloud of dandelion fluff floated through the air.

“I’m making a wish. I’m making a wish,” sang little Charlotte.

Lee was keeping his eyes protectively on her as she played in the spring grass freckled with milkweed and wildflowers. At eight years old, he was still skinny and small for his age. He was pale and intense.

Charlotte was four now. She was happy looking, with a sweet face and bright periwinkle eyes framed by an angelic cloud of flaxen hair that seemed to harbor the new sunlight. She looked up and saw a butterfly. She fell to the ground and began to wiggle her little body. “Look. I’m wiggling. I’m a pillar.”

“No, I told you. It’s called a caterpillar.”

Charlotte held her breath till her face was red. Then she jumped up and started to run towards the butterfly. “See. Now, I’m a butterfly. Look at me, I’m flying,” she squealed. At the last moment she swerved, swooping at Lee with playful mischievousness, knocking him sideways.

He let himself be knocked over and then, as she attempted to climb over his legs, he sat up, pinned her down, and plunked himself upon her, triumphant. “I win. I’m the winner,” he shouted. He lifted one fist towards the sky.

Charlotte, face-up under him, giggled. “Look. Look.” She pointed at one of the butterflies.

In the moment that Lee was distracted she managed to wriggle free. “Can’t catch me,” she taunted, and teetered away.

But Lee had lost interest in their game. He was still staring at the butterfly, fascinated. It was hovering just over him. It had orange translucent wings, veined with black. The wings were glossy, like paper soaked in oil, but also—he had just sensed—there was featheriness there. He wanted to see the wings even more close up. He wanted to touch it.

Charlotte looked back over her shoulder at him and came to a halt. She trundled back, disappointed. “Lee,” she said. “What is it?”

“Look up,” he whispered.

She saw the butterfly hovering just over his head and jumped towards it, reaching out with her pudgy little hand.

“No,” hissed Lee between clenched teeth. “You must not touch it. If you touch them, they die.”

She looked back at him, surprised by the thought that her touch could make something die. But regardless of the danger, she defiantly stuck out her finger.

“Silly baby Charlotte,” said Lee. The butterfly was leaving anyway.

But no, it wasn’t. It was moving over to the spot just above Charlotte’s head.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

The butterfly hovered for an instant before spiraling down to her hand in a single smooth arc and, to the absolute surprise and delight of both of them, alighted on her finger.

Charlotte and Lee stared at the little creature, amazed.

Then, just as quick, the butterfly floated off her finger towards the sky.

“See. See it didn’t die,” she said back to Lee.