The Scribe (29 page)

The grip on his ankle and the tearing went away. He sat up on the edge of the pit, legs dangling over it, and gathered his weapon in his lap. He felt of it. Some kind of mallet. One end of its head was peened and the other, flatter side was slicked with blood. He was raising it to strike again when he heard the squealing of hinges and the hulking forms of the engines and boxcars sprung forth from the dark roundhouse. He looked behind him and saw that the mechanic had flung open the furnace and was shoveling coal into it, showers of yellow sparks and orange light pouring out of the furnace door.

The pit was bathed in flickering light and shadow. Billings
ley was down in it, down on one knee, his good hand pressed against his blackened face. Freshets of blood poured from his open mouth. Canby dropped into the pit and began to circle him. Billingsley was trying to work his jaw, but the mallet had broken the bone past functioning. The left side of it hung loose in the ripped flesh as though it had been shot away. With every clenching of it came a clicking sound and another spurt of blood. He looked up at Canby, his jaw working its strange new circuit, guttural sounds coming from behind the cracked and broken teeth. His eyes flashed in anger and pain.

“Speak, Malthus,” Canby said.

He brought the mallet down with both hands gripping its shaft and the full force of his weight behind the blow. Billingsley's head came apart at the stitches the doctors had sewn into it, the plates of the skull separating. Canby raised the hammer and struck again. And again.

His arm had begun to waver, flagging with fatigue, when the mechanics pulled him off Billingsley's ragged body and carried him to the roundhouse office. There, under the light of the yardmaster's green-shaded lamp, they doctored his wounded leg with kerosene and wrapped it tightly. Then wiped the blood from his face and arms. After some time, nursing the pint of whiskey they'd given him, Canby was aware that the gaslights had come back on and that the trains were moving through the roundhouse again, the iron horses that graced the city's seal rumbling through Terminus and back out into the southern night again. He watched the trains come and go, watched the nimble hustle of the mechanics and flagmen and signalmen stepping lightly over the rails and
crossties, moving unscathed among the steaming and clanking machinery that dwarfed them. All of them going about their business as though the bloody-sheeted corpse laid outside the office were not there, had never been there.

Atlanta
, he thought, just before the fatigue and the wounds and the whiskey claimed him, his head nodding.
Restored to her timetables
. It did his soul good to see it.

V
ERNON THOUGHT
that the evening's breeze, though cold, held all the elements of a perfect Georgia night. It carried on it the reassuring tide of people-noise above the crowded exhibits, the music of the calliope piping from the east end of Oglethorpe Park, the myriad good odors that the food vendors sent up into the night air. And he savored, best of all, what was not in it: the shrieking of police whistles, cries of alarm.

Yet still there was this crowd of gawkers that surrounded Sherman and the entourage like a cloud of mosquitoes. Vernon hung close to the general's elbow, but Underwood had been pushed back now to the periphery by Grady and the men of prominence. Every one of them wanted a word with Sherman. Grady making sure that none of Atlanta's or the I.C.E.'s virtues escaped the general's notice; Kimball and his circle leaning close to the man's ear, no doubt pressing further investment ventures. All of them flushed by close proximity to this celebrity, faces lit up like jack-o'-lanterns. And the autograph-seeking boys dashing up out of the crowd constantly, dozens of them.

They passed the last of the industrial buildings. Ahead of
them, at the park's western edge, lay the racetrack. It was now ringed by what Kimball had dubbed “Horticultural Avenue,” a collection of flowering plants and shrubbery of which only the azaleas were native, and many of which, Vernon thought, would not likely survive this night's frost. A brass band of a dozen musicians was lined up on the track, in the blue and green uniforms of the exposition staff. The conductor, spying Sherman in the crowd, raised his baton above a braided shoulder and the band broke into “Dixie.” Knees raised high, the band members began a prancing circuit around the track. Apparently the conductor had an ironic sense of humor, Vernon thought. Or an ax yet to grind. But just a few bars into the song the man signaled again and the horns segued into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Vernon did not need to turn his head to see that Grady was smiling.

Then it all went dark.

The sounds followed the light. Behind him, Vernon heard the calliope wheeze into silence, and out front the brass horns fell off, one after another, in sputtering decrescendo. Then there was scattered noise: the nervous laughter of the women and the muttering of men fumbling for matches. The procession halted.

Vernon pulled a match out of his jacket pocket and struck it with his thumbnail. Other matches began to flare and he saw a new face working its way through the ranks of the autograph-seekers. Vernon felt some stirring of his memory as he regarded the boy, sorting through the inventory of faces he'd stored over a long career. The boy smiled at Vernon and he realized that though the boy's hair was black as pitch, the eyebrows were white. He studied the distinction as the match's
flame ebbed down into a steady glow, and he was watching the face as a bead of sweat ran down the side of its forehead, in spite of the night's chill. The sweat ran black as a woman's makeup through tears.

The boy stepped closer, and as he raised a hand with a paper in it the smile on his face twisted into a snarl of rage beyond his years. The breeze lifted the paper away and Vernon saw that it had covered a derringer, which the boy raised higher as he pressed through the crowd toward Sherman.

Underwood stepped forward.

W
HILE THE SHOT
was still echoing in Grady's ears, and his eyes were fixed on the black man on the ground, the others of the Ring were in his face, at his ear, his elbow.

“We can't let this get out, Henry.”

“God, this is worse than Greenberg.”

“What will Chicago say?”

“We are so
close
, Henry.”

And above it all he could hear Hannibal Kimball shouting to the crowd: “Just a child's popgun, ladies and gentlemen! No cause for alarm!” over and over while the Negro detective whose name he could not remember lay bleeding on the exposition turf. It was the first serious violence Grady had ever seen close-up and the amount of blood that was flowing from the black man's upper arm was staggering. And the expression on the child's face—the
grimace
, Grady thought—just as he let off the shot and as he turned to run through
the crowd with one of the policemen behind him. Grady felt overwhelmed.

“We still have a month to go, Henry. Think about attendance.”

“You can bury the story, or not run it at all.”

“It doesn't have to get out.”

Grady looked around him at the faces of Atlanta's first citizens, the expression on his own face like that of a man pulled abruptly from an unpleasant dream.

“An ambulance,” Grady said.

“What?”

The crowd was now, at Kimball's urging, moving away. Bearing with it General Sherman away from the scene, to safety. No one had moved to assist the black man where he lay writhing on the ground.

“An ambulance, I said.”

The others looked at him in bewilderment.

“Gentlemen,” Grady said, waving a hand at the backs of the departing crowd, then at Underwood where he lay, “is this what we want for our Atlanta?”

I
T WAS THE
silence that woke him. Canby started from the chair and then winced at the burst of pain from his calf, looked around the roundhouse, and saw that it was still, the trains mute hulks on the tracks. The body was still where it had been laid out but all the railroad workers were gone. Nothing in motion but the pulsing glow of the great furnace. Then he caught the scent of cigar smoke on the night air.

“Found you sleeping on the job, didn't I?”

“Vernon?”

Vernon stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the W&A platform. “I hear you got our man.”

Canby nodded. “Where is everyone?”

“On break until the eleven o'clock trains come through. Courtesy of the Atlanta P.D. You and I have one last bit of business here.” He moved through the shop with his cigar clamped in his teeth, sorting through the tools and oil cans, until he found a pair of railroad gloves. He pulled them on and walked to the furnace, pulled its door open.

“What do you aim to do?”

Vernon walked over to the body and squatted beside it. He lifted the sheet and stared down at the broken face for a moment, his expression stern, chewing on the cigar.

“You gave him hell, didn't you?”

“He had it coming.”

Vernon nodded and dropped the sheet. “In spades. Come help me with this.”

Canby found himself loath to touch the corpse. He took an ankle in each hand and hoisted and they lurched with it to the furnace. At the open door, Vernon looked at Canby and nodded, wincing at the blast of heat. They heaved the body in.

It crumpled upon itself as the head went into the coals, bending nearly double. The sheet caught fire and the flames began to lick around it and the outline of the body came clear, blackening, the blood smeared on it beginning to crackle and peel. When they could smell burning flesh Vernon shut the door and latched it.

“And that's an end to that,” Vernon said. He took off the gloves and dropped them to the ground. He tapped the ash from the end of his cigar and looked at Canby. “Probably headed for the exhibition when you got him.”

“Likely so.”

“Johnny Drew was there.”

“According to plan,” Canby said.

“In the flesh. Right after the electric cut out. Little black-haired boy like any other. Came out of the crowd as they do, out front of the Exhibition Hall. Black-haired, I said, or else I'd have known the bishop's son. But, Thomas, as this boy comes closer, I see his brow is slick with sweat, spite of the cold, then a bead of it runs down his cheek, black as coal. Underwood saw it, too.

“Little single-shot derringer, it was. Popped off a round meant for General Sherman but Underwood was there. He took it in the arm.”

Vernon saw the concern in Canby's face. “Underwood will be all right. I sent him down to Doctor Johnston's clinic.”

Canby nodded. “What about John Drew?”

“Disappeared into the crowd. Maddox was right behind him.”

“Maddox better be careful.”

“Always is. He's got him collared by now, I wager.”

“And how will the prosecution of that case be handled?”

Vernon looked weary. “God knows,” he said. Then he raised his eyes to Canby's. “You've not mentioned Julia.”

Canby shook his head.

Vernon took in a long breath. “I don't know what to say.”

“There's not much to be said. She's gone.”

Vernon took Canby's shoulders in his hands.

“It's all a bunch of shite in the end.”

“No. It is not. That's no fit benediction for that good woman's life.”

Canby felt his throat hitch. He fought it back by thinking of the body in the furnace. “I've got nothing left.”

“Yes, you do. There's the difference between you and Julia. And Angus. And that bastard,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the furnace, “whose name I'll not speak aloud. You're alive.”

He clapped Canby's shoulders, softly. “I'll wait for you outside.”

Canby watched his old friend walk out of the roundhouse, feeling certain that Vernon would have the hansom waiting at the curb, that he'd be able to sleep for a week, if he needed it, at the house on Butler. Then he picked up the gloves Vernon had dropped and opened the furnace. The flesh was burning away from the body. Its skull was now peeled of skin, the broken dome of it blackening in the bed of coals. Malthus subsiding to ash.

He shut the door and walked out into the night.

November 20

T
HE YOUNG PRIEST STRUGGLED TO RAISE HIS VOICE
over the wind on the mountain. “‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,'” he read, the wind snatching the tail ends of each of the words. “‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whoso believeth in me shall never die.'”

The priest stood with the open prayer book in his hands, Julia's coffin before him and the great expanse of Georgia sky behind. Canby listened with the others gathered in the little cemetery, where Uncle Solomon Pace had dug out a grave for her among his own people, his father Hardy and the rest. The coffin was heaped with flowers and the wind caught them up and lifted them until they dropped and mingled with the fallen leaves of the mountain's old oaks and hickories. Canby, lost in the rhythms of the service, heard the trace of a brogue in the priest's voice, noted the ruddy complexion over the white collar, and felt his eyes water yet again.