The Halifax Connection (55 page)

The days bled one into the other. Aggie tried to talk to her, to cheer her; she listened politely and said nothing back. Outside, in the streets, everything was mud; inside, everything was damp and cold and the work was endless. When the first bit of grippe came on, she paid little attention. On a bleak Saturday morning a few days later, Aggie dragged her from the ice house, burning with fever and coughing as though she would die.

She was aware of very little that came after: mouthfuls of soup and bread; a man’s voice, harsh and tired, talking about her as though she were not there; someone crying out in the hallway, MacKay perhaps, nobody else had that soft, scared little whimper; Aggie Breault’s strong hands wiping her face, straightening the covers, lifting her when she needed to use the pot. All the time, when she was conscious enough to want anything at all, she wanted Erryn. But he never came.

M
ARCH WAS HALF GONE
, but the nights still came early. Outside, for endless miles in all directions, there was only forest—snow to a man’s knees, and bare trees, and silence. Perhaps a few wolves. Inside the stagecoach depot, dim kerosene lamps barely held back the darkness, and the fire burned sputtery and pale. Erryn glanced once around the room and sighed. Weeks before, at a candlelit table in the Waverley Hotel, he had wished for a chance to spend some time with Maury Janes. He had proof now, if he ever needed it, that a man should be bloody damned careful what he wished for.

The depot called itself Miller’s Inn, but it had no chambers to let, or even beds. Most of it was a long wood-frame house belonging to a family presumably named Miller. At the front, for the use of the stage passengers, was a large, drafty room, rather
like an ill-kept mess hall in a frontier fortress, its windows rattling in every gust of wind. The room had a fireplace, a table where the passengers could eat, and some pallets they could spread out on the floor. Millers of both sexes and various ages appeared from time to time through a back door, to sell drinks and eventually supper. They were always friendly and polite. It was, Erryn thought, the only good thing to be said about the place.

He picked at his supper. The food was stale, and in any case he had no interest in it; his mind and his heart were elsewhere.

Across from him, Maury Janes lifted a last forkful of stew halfway to his mouth and glared at it. “What d’you figure they made this out of, anyway? Skunk?”

“No,” Erryn said. “Skunk is meat. If there ever was any meat in that pot, it jumped out and ran home at least a week ago.”

“Ha.” Janes put the offending mess in his mouth, wiped off his plate with a piece of bread, and gobbled it down too. The man could eat anything. He could sleep anywhere. He was one of the few Southerners Erryn had ever met who seemed indifferent to northern cold. If he had any weaknesses at all, Erryn had yet to discover them. Even his tendency to talk too much proved harmless, for he never talked about his work. He talked about his boyhood. He talked about the things he disliked in the world, and how to fix them. But more than anything, Janes talked about women, including the young Miller who came to fetch away the plates when their meal was ended.

“Made just like a willow, ain’t she?” he remarked. He watched her brazenly until she disappeared through the door. “Damned if she don’t remind me of that chambermaid we got back at the boarding house in Halifax. She’d be a real tasty morsel too, except she’s got the most godawful scars down one side of her face. Top to bottom, like this.” He ran his fingers over his cheek as he spoke. “I seen sailors cut up like that, but never a girl. She must’ve got herself in one hell of a cat fight.”

Erryn took a long sip of brandy and put the glass carefully down. The man would dare, by God? She tended his fire and packed away his filth, and he would make sport of her? He of all the maggots in the world?

Erryn would not say it; he must not. But neither could he let the matter be.

“I always thought the Danners ran a respectable place,” he said with all the amiability he could manage.

“Oh, I’m sure they do. I’ve never had a thing to say against the Danners.”

“But you can’t possibly keep a respectable place without respectable servants. I’d rather think the poor lass must have been in some kind of accident, wouldn’t you?”

Janes stared at him for a moment as if puzzled, and then he shrugged. “Might be,” he said. “I don’t see as how it makes any difference.” He glanced briefly down the table, where one of the other passengers had taken out a deck of cards. “You’re an odd fellow, Shaw. I keep trying to figure you, and I can’t.”

Erryn did not like the sound of this at all, but Janes went on, “Sometimes you seem like an ordinary fellow—a lot like me, actually, down to earth and all, with your head on straight. And then, for no damn reason I can see, you turn all …” He made a wide gesture in the air. “I don’t know, all full of …
notions.
All proper, like the sort what think truffle ain’t truffle if you don’t eat it with the right spoon.”

“Surely not that bad,” Erryn said. He managed a watery smile.

“No. Not quite that bad. Orton tells me you come from a real fine family in England, and went to college and all. That true?”

“It’s true.”

“And then you ran the theatre in Halifax, till it burned down?”

“That’s right.”

“Why’d you want to do a thing like that?”

A talent for the theatre, and all it might imply, was the last thing in the world Erryn wanted to discuss with a Rebel agent.

“Well,” he said, “do you know a better way to meet pretty actresses?”

“Can’t say as I do.” Janes laughed a bit and leaned back in his chair—satisfied, apparently, at least for the moment. An appetite for women was something he understood.

After more than a fortnight travelling with the man, Erryn could still not decide if Janes was the most skilful professional operative he had ever met, or simply an adventurer who had spent his whole life playing for the main chance and was now extremely good at it. What Erryn did believe by this point was that Janes had about him nothing of the actor. Everything he seemed to be, he was—coarse, ambitious, highly intelligent, cold. A man who would talk cheerfully to anyone who crossed his path and afterwards, never mention them again. A man who scarcely seemed to live in his body, who never cared what he ate or where he slept or how long the road was. A man who resented bitterly his lack of social place, not because of the pleasures and opportunities he had lost, but because others were able to look down on him. And therefore, more than anything else, a man who meant to rise in the world, so he might look down on others in his turn. This he showed without pretence, as he showed his frank approval of slavery. Cream just naturally rose to the top, he said. The folks who were running things were mostly the ones who knew how, who were best at it. And sure, once in a while some worthless scalawag made it in. Hell, just look at Abe Lincoln. But Lincoln would never have made it on his own; he found himself a pack of riff-raff to hold him up, folks who thought they could climb by tearing other people down.

Mile by mile, Janes had explained America to Erryn, two days back when they had the coach to themselves for a time. He explained the North and the South, freedom, slavery, all of it. Abolition was not about freedom, he said; abolition was about tearing other people down.

“Getting freedom’s like … like getting young ones: when the critter’s growed up enough, it simply does it. Like those countries
in Europe, kicking out the Turks and the Russians one by one. They had to be ready first. Now some folks figure the niggers will be ready for freedom someday, couple of hundred years maybe, but I don’t think so. I think they’ll always be slaves.”

“Always?” Erryn said. “That’s pretty grim.”

“Not really. You like books and such things, don’t you? And the opera? Well, the way I see it, you can’t have those things less’n you have a class of men with nothing else to do. Your friend Shakespeare didn’t write his plays grubbing in a cottonfield, now, did he?”

“Indeed not.”

“So look at history, Shaw. Where did all the great cultures come from, all those famous writers and philosophers? They came from slave states—Greece, Rome, the aristocracies of Europe. The Europeans called them serfs, and couldn’t sell them, but they were slaves just the same. The world is like … it’s like those old cathedrals, you might say. You can’t build yourself a cathedral without putting a lot of stone face down in the mud. There’ll be high and low in the world, or there’ll be nothing but low. Nothing but savagery and stupidity.”

Erryn had heard this argument before, of course: slavery made possible a cultured elite, from whose ranks would come the finest thinkers and artists, just as in the past. But those who argued it never told him which idle slave owner painted the Sistine Chapel, or wrote the Unfinished Symphony, or observed how the earth moved around the sun. They never explained why Mozart was dead at thirty-one, thrown in a common grave and covered over with lime.

Nor did anyone ever explain why so little art was coming from the slaveholding South. The region certainly did not lack for brilliance. For decades it had provided the nation with talented statesmen, lawyers, and military leaders. Its people designed magnificent homes and public buildings, and made food to tempt most any Englishman into never going home again. But where was the
literature, the painting, the music? Why did their brilliance and creativity stop so sharply, so abruptly, at the boundary of the imaginative arts?

Was it perhaps
because
those arts were imaginative, because the imagination never abided walls? It wanted to experience everything, to answer the whys and hows and what-ifs of all eternity. Why did this happen? What does it mean? What would it feel like?

What would it feel like to be a slave?

The Great Wall of Dixie, right there in a single question, solid stone and a hundred feet high. Picture it, he thought: the blossoming artist and the question. Maybe a friend throws it at him, or the rain at midnight, or the sound of someone crying, but the question is there and his imagination must answer it. What is it like to be a slave? To own nothing, not even the rough shack you sleep in or the shapeless clothes on your back? To be sure of nothing, not your food or your safety or your dearest affections? What is it like to be flogged for a trifle and never call it cruelty, to be used as a whore and never call it rape? What is it like to hoe and scrub and mend and carry, hour upon hour, day upon day, nothing else, no books, no symphonies, no theatre, just work, till your eyes are ruined from the sun or your joints from the cold, till your back cannot straighten and your hands fumble when they pick up a piece of bread? To know there is no end to it, and no escape, not for you, not for your children, ever?

To imagine these things, and then to give them form—to paint them or write them or set them to music—would tear the institution of slavery apart. To imagine these things and not to give them form would tear the artist apart.

For the young Southerners were not Greeks or Romans, or even children of the Renaissance. They did not have the world view of the medieval Church, which made it Christlike to be downtrodden and oppressed. They did not have the paradigms of pagan Fortuna, reminding them how a lord might become a slave, or a slave a free man, in the turning of a single battle. Aeschylus
could weep for Hecuba in chains; she might easily have been himself.

Now the world was different, no longer a world of virtuous suffering or arbitrary fortune, but one where men governed themselves under the authority of a just God in heaven, where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were inscribed as inalienable rights. In such a world slavery was unthinkable, unless the slaves were slaves by nature—no tragic queens, no conquered children of Israel, no possible other self, no there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I, but rather someone, or indeed almost some
thing
, utterly different from oneself.