The Book of Speculation (35 page)

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Amos and Evangeline had not left their room after the morning meal, causing Peabody to demand Mrs. Tyghe wake them. She called their names and rapped on the door until her hand ached with it. Amos appeared. At the sight of him—hair ratted and standing on end, half-clothed and gasping—Mrs. Tyghe shouted. Amos blocked the doorway with his body and fumbled for a card. After several failed attempts at communication, he gave up and allowed Mrs. Tyghe to enter.

The curtains were drawn. Trunks were in disarray with clothing strewn about—boots, shoes, brushes, combs tossed aside. In the heart of the disorder, on the great oak bed where George Washington had slept, Evangeline clutched her swollen stomach.

Mrs. Tyghe had birthed several children, both living and dead. Recognizing the condition, she said, “Monsieur, your child is coming. It is not proper for you to be here; I’ll have the boy send for the doctor.”

Despite Mrs. Tyghe’s insistence, Amos would not be moved. He sat on the floor by the bed. When he reached to take Evangeline’s hand, she batted it away. In silences between spasms, they listened to the rise of the rain. The storm grew heavier, but Evangeline found the pounding water a comforting reminder of the outside world.

When informed of the impending birth, Peabody clicked his boot heels and ordered the troupe to Mason’s Tavern to celebrate, only to find it closed due to a flooded cask room. He settled for the parlor at Cook’s, which sat on higher ground. The whitewashed walls and broad brown ceiling beams made a warm den for the performers. Ale flowed and the troupe claimed chairs, tested cushions, and watched as the streets turned to mud, then streams. They waited. Evangeline’s child was in no rush to meet the day.

The doctor was sent for. Mrs. Tyghe’s son made the trek downriver toward the Waxhaws and the doctor’s home. When the boy arrived he was met by the doctor, who was well into sandbagging the house. The doctor’s wife emptied washtubs filled with river water out the windows. The boy delivered his message.

“Women have carried about birthing for many a year without the aid of men, good son,” said the doctor, wiping rain from his brow. “Sandbagging, however, is a different matter. Houses require man’s intervention. Give us a strong back and lift.”

The river continued rising. At midday the casks from Mason’s Tavern floated past Cook’s. The floor began taking water. The troupe lined the door with rags, sandbags, and tables to hold back the flood. Peabody took to a divan, reclining in relative safety while casting a suspicious eye to the rain. Benno and Melina balanced above the water on chairs. Melina asked if he would check on Amos.

“I believe I would not be welcome,” Benno replied. “And what would I do?” Rocking on the balls of his feet, he frowned at the encroaching water.

By late afternoon Oren Mapother, the son of Charlotte’s hatter, had drowned in the depths. The current would drag his body ten miles downriver toward Pineville.

Day wore into evening and Evangeline’s body fell limp into the mattress, covered in sweat that smelled of iron and salt. She bit her lip until it was bloodied. Amos crawled into the bed and smoothed his fingers over her cheeks. Her mouth moved as she tried to thank him and he missed her voice. Evangeline contorted. Loneliness lurked within worry and made him grind his teeth. If she died and took the child with her, could he live? If she died and left the infant behind, could he raise it? It might have her eyes. It might be mute. Could he love the child that killed her?

In the night the Stavish farm livestock perished. The cows and pigs had crowded into the corner of the barn, trying to escape. Under the press of water and the weight of so many bodies, the structure gave way and crushed the animals. Those that survived made for a curious sight as heifers paddled down Sugar Creek, necks straining to keep above the tide.

In the creek, along with the cattle, floated the body of Eustace Wilder, a drunkard who had the day prior touched bloated lips to Evangeline’s hand. He had stepped from his porch to shout at the storm, only to fall. The bald back of his head shone in the moonlight as the river coursed over it like a stone. The Presbyterian Church crashed down and pews piled against the courthouse walls like matchsticks. The streets of Charlotte were running over with scriptures.

On the second day of labor Evangeline took no food or drink. Melina was sent upstairs with bread but was turned away. The kitchen maid, fearing running through the dry flour, began to ration biscuits. The troupe became confined to tabletops. Peabody spread himself out over a stretch of the bar.

Amos dealt cards on the bed around Evangeline. What he read brought no peace, but he could not fight the slick rightness of a properly set card. He began to pick the trumps he desired, their words—happiness set beside her ear, home by her feet. He surrounded her with hope, each card a wish. He thought of life before her, the years in the wood and the running.

With night, the storm passed and the Catawba receded with the same swiftness as it had risen, pulling the creeks back with it. A last lightning crack signaled the birth of a girl, small, blinking, and silent. The father looked at the infant, red-faced and wrinkled with a dusting of hair as black as her mother’s. Her wide animal eyes met his. Amos felt his heart begin to slow and still, finding the weight of the air, and the rhythm of his daughter’s heart. On the crown of her head a circle of skin pulsed, shouting wonderful life, and terrifying him with her fragility. Had Evangeline been awake she might have seen Amos fade into the fabric of the room, vanishing into the gaze of their unnamed child. It was the first time he had ever vanished in joy.

The parlor of Cook’s Tavern woke. Chairs that had rolled with the water came to rest once more. Benno climbed from a perch near the rafters. Peabody set booted foot to sodden board. With Meixel’s help Mrs. Tyghe moved the rags, sandbags, and tables that had held back the water.

Into this slow-waking movement Evangeline descended, careful not to stir the child in the bend of her arm. Amos followed. One by one heads turned. Amos took the infant from Evangeline and handed her to Peabody. The girl yawned at the touch of Peabody’s delicate hands. A smile crept from under the curled ends of his moustache. He’d not held a baby since his son.

“Dear little signet,” he cooed. “Perfection, darling children. You have wrought perfection.” He looked to Amos. “Shall we, my lad?”

Amos nodded and Peabody held the child aloft. All eyes fixed on the squirming baby. He began.

“Friends, children, grandest fellows. We are touched by the ethereal. From such loss as we have of late suffered, the gods have blessed us with a child of our children, a daughter of the menagerie as there has never been. Most precious friends, ’tis our solemn duty to grant this child a name.”

Amos looked at his daughter and thought of the night he’d stood on a tree stump, when Ryzhkova had told him who he would be. His heart was tired.

“Ruth.” Meixel began the calling of the names. Faces crowded around the wriggling child.

“Dorcas.” This from Susanna, it being the name of a favorite aunt.

“Veronique.”

From Nat, “Mariah.”

“Danielle.”

“Lucinda.”

Names passed to and fro until Mrs. Tyghe emerged from the kitchen. “Bess,” she said. The baby shrieked out a piercing wail. “My mother’s name was Bess.”

“It seems the whelp has chosen,” Peabody said, returning the child to her mother with a soft pat on the back. “Bess she shall be. Quite well, for we must thank the goodly woman who has been kind in allowing our imposition.” He flashed a smile to Mrs. Tyghe.

The warmth of beginning unfurled. With tenuous hope they set forth to greet the day, and Mrs. Tyghe went about the business of running the tavern. Stark, cold light filled the entry as they opened the door on the world left by the flood. A small wave rolled in over the threshold.

Charlotte had been stripped away.

“God in Heaven,” Peabody whispered.

Gone were the tailors and the smiths. The grain mill lay in waste, destroyed. The courthouse had fallen to its brick-pillar knees. Trees lay like drunken men against hills and embankments. Bricks made pockmarks in shallow pools; there, the sign from Mason’s; there a child’s wooden horse half-hidden below the dark slurry. All that remained was encased in thick red silt. Mixed among the detritus were the same odd creatures that had been at the river. Dead, spidery legs in the air, their pointed tails stuck up from the mud like spikes. Though it lay far to the east, the air smelled of ocean salt.

Charlotte was no more. Cook’s stood, the lone building that remained unharmed.

Mrs. Tyghe clenched her apron in her fists. “Should my son be—”

The kitchen maid took her by the shoulders and patted her gently. “Hush, Louisa. He may yet return.”

Mrs. Tyghe lifted her head to survey the wreckage once more, and to search for her son. It was then that she spied, resting against the remains of a mounting block, the twisted filigree of the weather vane that had once sat proudly on the roof of the doctor’s home. Any small hope she had was consumed by fury.

“You’ve killed him,” she said. “You killed him sure as you stand here. Never have I met such cursed people. You brought this.” She nodded at Evangeline. “You come here, saying you tell the future, things only the Lord would know, then lie up in my bed and bring the flood. You took my
son,
” she shouted and turned to Amos. “You Devil, take you and your child. Leave here or I’ll find who still lives and let them set their guns on you. Get.”

Evangeline clutched Bess.

On the outskirts of what had been Charlotte, the menagerie’s wagons were waterlogged yet functional, the llama and pig had been lost, but the horses remained dry, safe atop the hill past Sugar Creek. They packed in haste. Peabody insisted that distance and time would remedy their misfortunes, though he found the words difficult to believe. Before the sun hit its peak they rolled onward.

“North,” Peabody told them. “I find I am done with the South. Philadelphia,” he said. “Philadelphia will welcome us.”

Evangeline knew his words were empty. Looking over the destruction and at the strange peacefulness of her child’s quiet face, she agreed with Mrs. Tyghe. Never had there been two such cursed beings.

27

JULY 23RD–JULY 24TH

We flee the rain, clinging to the library’s walls. Blue security lights fix us flat like a photograph, burning everything away: Doyle, ink and skin; Enola, bones and a ravenous stare. She hasn’t spoken to him since the car. Alice’s key trips into the lock and turns with a satisfying crunch. The alarm squeals the moment the door opens. I find the keypad, punching in the numbers my hand has memorized the same way it knows to hold a pen or turn a page. The air is musky with paper, dust, and Grainger’s unique redolence of disrepair. I move for the lights.

“No worries, man. I got it,” says Doyle. He trots over to circulation and puts his hand to a desk lamp. One at a time, the fluorescents stutter on with percussive hisses, bathing books in cold green light. It’s an uncanny thing to watch, but Doyle merely shakes out his hands when he’s finished, as though this is as mundane as tying his shoes. Enola walks ahead, a visible shiver working its way up her spine.

“Little Bird,” Doyle calls. She flips him the middle finger and disappears upstairs, heading toward the whaling archive. He starts to go after her but I stop him with a hand on his elbow.

“Don’t. Let her go.” Enola can sulk effortlessly for days. She once refused to speak to me when I brought Lisa Tamsen home after a shift at the Pump House. She shouted that Lisa smelled like old fry oil. I got seven days of silent treatment before she admitted that Lisa’s sister had filled her locker with dissected grasshoppers from the biology lab. She’d glared at me as if I should have known what I’d done. I know what Doyle’s done. “What do you know about us? I mean everything.”

“Pretty much what I said.” He shrugs and searches for somewhere to sit. He props his feet on one of the lounge chairs in periodicals and they land with a squish. “My friend collected circus stories so he’d have shit to talk about. He was big on accidents. Like, I bet you didn’t know that they lynched an elephant in Tennessee, right?”

No. I did not. The wind has started clawing at the windows. Lights flicker.

“Yeah, this circus elephant snapped and killed somebody—trampled or strangled, I don’t remember—so the town decides to put it down, but they can’t figure how. They wind up using a crane to hang it. Anyway. He used to talk about train wrecks, fires, people breaking their necks on the high wire, trapeze stuff. Sometimes I think he was just waiting to see if I’d electrocute myself. I told him it doesn’t work that way.” He doesn’t elaborate on how exactly it does work. “So, we’re down somewhere around Atlanta and it’s so unbelievably hot, and we’d just spent all day putting up tents. I guess I said something about wishing we had a dunk tank, and that starts him on a jag about mermaids. He says there are these women that pop up on the circuit every once in a while, they can hold their breath for an insanely long time and swim like they’re half fish. They’ve been around forever. It’s one family and they all look the same—black hair, and so skinny you could break them. Everybody takes them on, no matter what show, since a woman like that brings in cash like crazy, because you’re watching the impossible, the actual impossible.” He looks at me. Impossible meeting impossible. “The whole time I’m listening for the catch. His stories always had catches.”

“They die.”

“Yeah,” he says. “They drown. Hardly any of them ever make it past thirty.”

“Did you ask him how he knew about the women?”

“No. Dave had this way of picking up stories. I figure most of them were bullshit. I mean, drowning mermaids?”

“But you believe it now.”

“The breath-holding? I’ve seen you swim.” He grimaces, showing a slight snaggletooth. “The rest? A couple years later I’m working for Rose’s. The first time I showed up with Enola, Thom took one look at her and I swear he nearly crapped his pants. He asked if I knew who I had with me. I told him she was the best damned tarot reader I ever saw. Thom kept asking if she swam or not. I said all I know is that she does cards. Pretty soon he tells me almost the same story Dave did.”