The Scribe (9 page)

They sat now dry under the eaves of Atlanta University's South Hall, watching as the university's chaplain—also a lesser bishop of Atlanta's First African Methodist Episcopal Church—bolted the front door of his campus parsonage and
snuffed the lights of its lower story in preparation for bed. The day before, the chaplain had been featured on the second page of the
Constitution
, quoted in one of Henry Grady's newfangled “interviews” as he voiced his support for the I.C.E. and urged Atlanta's Negro population to swell its attendance numbers. He had spent most of this evening, however, behind a locked door at Mamie O'Donnell's bordello in the company of a mulatto girl called Misty. Now, with the chaplain presumably ascending the stairs to join his sleeping wife, Canby and Underwood crouched under their eave, each shaking his head almost in time with the dripping rain.

“I thought surely our man would show himself tonight,” Canby said. He glanced at his pocket watch and noted ruefully that the hour had slipped past midnight.

“Ain't right,” Underwood muttered for perhaps the dozenth time in the past few hours. “Not for a preacher.”

“What do you know of preachers and their private hours?”

“Enough to know they ain't supposed to lie with whores,” Underwood said quickly, then added, “sir.”

Canby tried to gauge the level of anger in Underwood's voice, the intensity of his disdain—whether it was of a measure with the controlled fury that had been loosed in Alonzo Lewis's shop or L. J. Dempsey's office. If it held any of the sadistic rage he had seen vented in Mamie O'Donnell's rooms the last week. He could not be sure. Casually, Canby said, “‘For some are false apostles, deceitful workers masquerading as apostles of Christ.'”

Underwood stared at Canby as though the cistern beside him had spoken. After a moment he said, “‘Yet no wonder, for even Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.'”

“The words of Saint Paul himself.”

“Yes,” Underwood said. “Corinthians. Didn't take you for a religious man, Mister Canby.”

“I'm not. I think of Paul as a holy fool. But my father did not. And so we read the epistles together. And both testaments, old and new. He was a minister. Methodist, in fact.”

“Didn't mean no offense by what I said . . .”

“None taken. My father was a good man.”

“But you didn't cotton to his faith.”

“His faith did not save him.” He looked at Underwood, saw the intensity with which the black man was looking at him. “Underwood, you believe what you like. It's not my place to tell you otherwise. But I saw no angels in the war, no devils, either. I think it's a bygone way of looking at the world, reading signs and portents all around. For me, this,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the ground beneath him, “is enough.”

“You lost your faith.”

Canby looked out over the campus as the rain redoubled its intensity. The creek behind the privies and the stables was beginning to flow out of its banks.

“Yes. July seventeenth, 1864.”

Why tell the younger man this? Canby thought. If indeed Vernon's suspicions of Underwood were valid, what good would it do to tell of his father? Or, looked at another way, how could it worsen things?

“You've heard of the great famine, perhaps? An Gorta Mór, it was called. After my mother died my father resigned his parsonage and we took the boat over. He settled at Emory College. Have you seen it? No? You should ride down to Oxford
sometime. Beautiful setting, like this. Peaceful. He taught Latin and Greek there. But it did not last long. They hoisted the Confederate flag over the campus right after Fort Sumter, in April. My father's lectures took a turn away from the classics after that and his students did not care for it.

“My father could not believe he had traded tens of thousands of starving Irish for tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. Worse still that tens of thousands more were willing to die to keep those chains in place. I suppose the students tired of his perspective.”

Canby told of how he had come home from one morning at the grammar school shortly after and seen that someone had slung black paint across their porch and painted
NIGGUR LOVER
in dripping black letters across the front of the faculty house. He and his schoolmates had lingered out front of the cottage, nervously shooting marbles in the dust of the yard, until Angus had come home from the day's lectures. His father had stared at the vandalism for a long moment, then begun to laugh until he dropped his books in the dust and had need to dab at his watering eyes with his handkerchief.

“My days here are done, lads,” Angus had said, clutching the handkerchief in a trembling hand. “Perhaps I could not teach these Georgia boys to love their brothers, but by God, I should have taught them at least how to spell ‘nigger' correctly. What kind of southern gentleman cannot spell
nigger
?
Nigger!
”

Angus's brogue had drawled out the final syllable of the word in an awful way. A word the son had never heard from the father's lips now repeated three times, like a portent that made Canby suddenly and quite consciously aware that the
works of his outsized father were in the end earthbound and frail, and that someday he would indeed be alone in the world.

“We came to Atlanta as soon as he ended that term at the college,” Canby said. “He opened a little grammar school on Whitehall Street. Said the war was going to make widows and orphans aplenty, especially the latter. He set up a kind of combined school and chapel for them.”

“And that's what killed your faith?” Underwood asked.

Canby shook his head. He remembered the little building, rubble now, that had been on Whitehall, his father's table at the front of the long room that had served double duty as headmaster's desk and altar. The slate board behind it, and above that, set high in the wall so as to catch as much northern light as it could, the small stained-glass window his father had been able to glean from the Methodist Church, South, as part of the parcel of its beneficence for this bit of mission work. The blue and gold glass that was lit glorious every morning.

“No,” Canby said, “that was four years later. When Sherman came. A longer story for another time.”

Underwood was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Mind if I ask what was it happened between you and Mamie O'Donnell?”

“What've you heard?”

“That you went down on a bribe,” he said in a low voice. “That you were taking protection money from her.”

“I took money from her, Underwood. A loan, between friends.” He looked up at the lowering clouds. “I had others I could have asked but I was too proud to go to them. I knew Mamie would not tell.”

“But she did.”

“She was approached by a detective, I'm not sure which one. Maybe Maddox. Whoever it was had the Ring behind him, I'm sure. I guess they didn't give her much choice.

“She and Vernon had their own interests to protect. And I had sided with the Republicans. Sticking up for me would have cost them. Dearly. But I did not believe Frances would have truckled. We go back, you know. But she did. By the time I believed it, it was too late.”

Underwood nodded, staring down at the ground. “Mind if I ask what the loan was for?”

“You'll be a detective yet,” Canby said. He made a sound he had intended to be a laugh. “That's the question you should ask. Something for a lady.”

Canby rose and stretched his legs. “We'll work separately for a day or two. Get a few hours' sleep if you can. I want you to go to the Cotton Exposition, nine o'clock sharp.” He took his wallet from his jacket and counted out fifteen dollars from it. He handed the bills to Underwood. “Spend this there, all of it. Conspicuously. I'll be about town. We will see what happens.”

Underwood looked at the money in his hand as through it were dirty. “Conspicuously,” he repeated. “Like a sitting duck.”

“You'll be a moving duck,” Canby said, “unless you refuse the assignment.” His eyes locked on the black man's until Underwood folded the bills and tucked them into his breast pocket.

Canby looked out over the sodden campus, at the rain still falling. Dawn would be a muted affair, in this weather. Over by the stables the creek had now come out of its banks. The
swollen water was lapping at the base of the privies, fresh rain and overflowing waste licking at the weathered clapboards. He remembered again his father's laugh at Emory those years ago, the sound more like a cough than one of mirth.

“Tonight's done for us, Underwood,” he said. “It's all a bunch of shite.”

A
NSON
B
URKE
stepped off the seven-thirty Western & Atlantic train with a large flowered carpetbag in one hand and his hat in the other, his big Colt revolver tucked under his chambray shirt but bulging enough beneath it to be clearly outlined against the cotton. He stared about him at the activity of Union Depot without noticing Canby's approach, the country mouse awash on the swelling tide of noise and movement that were Atlanta at this hour—at most hours. When Canby touched the big man's arm, Anse flinched and seemed to take a moment to focus on the one familiar face before him.

“Good God, Thomas. How many are there here?”

Canby smiled. “Not many with a grip as pretty as yours.”

Anse blushed and looked down at the bright bag. “It was Mama's,” he said slowly.

Half an hour later the carpetbag was safely ensconced with the porters of Kimball House and Anse, penthouse key of his own in his pocket, was following Canby through the streets of Atlanta as they made their way northward through town. Anse's pace seemed to quicken as the homes they passed grew smaller and more modest and the faces of
their fellow pedestrians grew darker. Sprinkled among the residences here was industry of all types that could process whatever was brought in on the rail lines, from cotton and timber to mercantiles and ores. Every building that was not a house, it seemed, belched forth either smoke or steam into the Georgia sky.

“How'm I supposed to keep track of a single nigger in Atlanta, Thomas?”

“
Negro
, Anse. You're going to have to get that right.”

“All right, then, Negro. How will I know him?”

For answer Canby pulled him into the shadows of a lumber kiln that sat radiating heat from its walls as it cured its contents on the west side of Marietta Street. He nodded toward a whitewashed two-story house across the road that had seen better days.

“He boards there. His name is Cyrus Underwood. I want you to follow him to the Cotton Exposition and keep track of him. If anybody asks, you're just in town for the fair. But don't let him out of your sight, not till he's back here. Follow him home this evening and keep south on Marietta. You'll see the top floor of Kimball House soon enough.”

After a time the front door of the boardinghouse opened and Underwood strode out of it and down the front steps. He settled his hat on his head and set out south on Marietta Street toward the roundhouse and the depot, where the W&A was running trains out every fifteen minutes for the exposition.

“Note the suit and the hat, Anse. Don't lose him.”

Anse nodded and tugged at his belt, whether to reposition the Colt or to adjust his prodigious belly, Canby could not tell.
He looked like a man readying himself for battle as he stepped out from the shadow of the kiln.

“And Anse?” Canby said, trying not to smile. “Try to blend in.”

T
HE SMALLER BLADE
of Canby's penknife fit the lock easily enough. With a jiggling turn of it he was inside Underwood's quarters, taking in the spartan room. An iron bed, neatly made, two spindle-backed rocking chairs with a side table between them, heaped with books. Night jar in the corner. He stepped to the bureau, which was missing one of its drawers, and on which sat the apparatus of Underwood's toilet, catching as he did a hazy reflection of himself in the smoked mirror pegged to the wall above it. Canby regarded the lather brush, the well-worn hone, and the razor itself. A folding straight-edge, cheap but sharp enough. The washbasin in which it lay was chipped but the blade was unmarred—no nicks or burrs to indicate rougher usage than that for which it was made.

The stack of books on the rockers was another matter. Canby recognized a name from several spines of the books. George Fitzhugh. One of his father's particular bêtes noire from the days of heated debate and then open rancor that led up to secession. He picked up
Sociology for the South
and read a passage that had been underlined: “We have fully and fairly tried the experiment of freeing the Negro . . . and it is now our right and our duty, to listen to the voice of reason and experience, and reconsign him to the only condition for which
he is suited.” Another of Fitzhugh's treatises,
Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters
, had been similarly marked. “Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves,” Fitzhugh argued, adding, “Where a few own the soil, they have unlimited power over the balance of society.” Canby remembered how he had been startled from his lessons one evening by the report of
Cannibals All!
hitting the mantel above the fireplace, where it had struck after being thrown from Angus's hand.

That copy, he assumed, had been returned in damaged form to the Emory College library. The one he now held, he noted from a bookplate pasted inside its front cover, was checked out from the Young Men's Library Association. He set it with
Sociology for the South
on the bed for the moment, then took another look around the room and decided to pay a visit to the Y.M.L.A.'s quarters up from Pryor Street next. But his eye fell to the open pages of the book he had uncovered when he moved Fitzhugh's works. A worn Bible, left open on the rocking chair's seat, a passage from Revelations highlighted, in contrast to the other books, with a red ink: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”