Walk Through Darkness (28 page)

S
IX
William heard the door shut, not the normal slam but enough of a familiar disturbance in the air for him to recognize it. A few moments later, Dover descended the stairs and stepped into the room, her eyes on him as if she had been there with him the whole time, intent and knowing and somehow unnerving. He had meant to question her straight away, but mumbled instead and indicated that he wished he could sit up. Dover nodded and disappeared again. She returned a few moments later with a mass of cotton bedding in her arms. She kneaded it, folded it over on itself and patted it into a shape little changed for her efforts. Helping him up with one arm, she stuffed the linen beneath him, whispering to comfort him, working fast. She stood erect and studied him. He was more upright, but awkwardly so. One shoulder jutted higher than the other did; arms limp on either side of him; head canted forward so that his chin touched his chest. Dover spent a few more moments trying to set him right.

“You’re too heavy to be waiting on me,” he said.

“Too heavy? You got complaints about my care?”

“That’s not how I meant it. You shouldn’t have to wait on me.”

“William,” she said, just his name but stated in a way that stopped him.

He looked around the room as if his new vantage might give him some different impression of it. It did not. All was the same as before and the same questions pressed him. He felt choked from asking them though they were simple questions that any man would have asked. But they sat in the back of his throat like goiters growing within him. “I need time to think,” he said.

Dover—too quick for his mindset, too obliging—offered to leave him alone for a time. She would go on upstairs so that he could get a little rest.

“Naw, I don’t want to sleep. Couldn’t sleep if I tried.”

She said he might be surprised. She would just leave him be a little and see if Anne needed help.

“Quit walking them stairs, woman. You’ll lose the baby you keep that up.”

Dover paused and thought this over and responded guardedly, saying she knew something about her own body and the baby inside it.

William interrupted her. “What was you talking to that man about?”

“Just bout the plans. Gotta make sure this goes off right.”

“I asked you before,” William said, his voice trembling though he spoke with more calm than he felt. “Now I’m asking you again—who is that man? Don’t tell me he’s just helping us. Tell me the truth. He somebody you know someways?”

If Dover heard accusation in the question she didn’t acknowledge it. “Never laid eyes on him fore today.”

“That don’t make sense.”

“Well …”

“Why won’t you tell me?”

She snapped her eyes at him, up and sharp and then down again. William thought he saw anger flare on her face but knew the next second that he was mistaken. Her voice was kind when she said, “Cause I don’t know how you’ll take it. Thought maybe we could just get through this next bit a trouble …”

“Look here, Dover, don’t act like I’m a child. I don’t know a single thing about that man. He doing things for us and I don’t know why and something ain’t right about it. He’s a white man. And you say you don’t know him, but you sitting there acting like all and everything’s all right. That don’t match up. So whatchu ain’t telling me? Whatchu know that I don’t?”

The cot creaked as she sat down beside him. She faced him
and looked at him directly, though not into the eyes. She seemed to lose herself in the study of his features. “They say blood is thicker than water,” she said. “I ain’t never seen that to account for much, but maybe it’s true. Sometimes. Maybe it’s true to them that believe it.”

William, despite himself, despite knowing that she was testing her way forward, wriggled as if he meant to get up. He scowled, at her or at the pain or both. But she ignored all this, only pressed her palm against his chest. With her other hand she slipped a square of paper from her bodice. She turned it over in her fingers, one yellowed side and then the other. William watched it. The lamplight was warm behind it, illuminating the marks enclosed there, hieroglyphs betrayed by the thin skin.

And then Dover began to tell what she had come to believe, saying that his father had a brother. That was enough to still the man. And from that statement she went on, note held in her hand, forefinger running over the edge of it as if she were testing the hone of a blade.

S
EVEN
Morrison spent the better part of the night trying to find a coach bound for the North. He had come to know the city somewhat during his stay and used that knowledge as best he could. He thought of the places he had seen coaches: the depots for interstate travel, the street corners, lining the parks. For the most part he found each of these as pitch black and quiet as the night. He banged on doors when he thought he could get away with it, threw rocks at windows and shouted loudly enough to set the hound to baying. Most places answered with silence, a few with curses, one with night pan flung toward him with groggy aim. A burly man came at him with an iron bar from one
carriage house, woken from a drunken sleep and intent on damage. Morrison shifted as the man came forward, clipped his legs with a blow from his rifle and left him scrabbling on the paving stones like a frantic crab. The hound darted in and nipped him on the shoulder just to have some part in the action. After this encounter Morrison considered looking into rail travel, but he knew that a train wouldn’t do. They needed privacy. They needed closed doors and shuttered windows. Most of all they needed for nobody to ask questions, no fellow passengers, no porters, nobody who might find curious a battered mulatto and a heavily pregnant Negro and an old white man.

In the end he found his answer from a different source altogether. He happened upon a young man unloading freight from a cargo wagon, alone in the gaping mouth of a warehouse. The lad was nervous with him at first and close-lipped, until they’d exchanged enough words to mark them both as Scots. It turned out the lad was new to the country and spoke English interspersed with Gaelic words. He had come in from an estate north of the city and would be returning that way around sunset. It was far from perfect, but with twenty miles between them and Philadelphia Morrison figured they could catch a proper coach at less risk and so carry on. He propped a leg up on the wagon and produced a flask and shared it, coming at his plan directly for time was short. The young man agreed to carry him out of the city, and then agreed even more heartily when Morrison placed a gold coin in his hand and showed him the others that would be his upon completion of the task. The lad’s eyes were full of questions but he kept them to himself, seeming to feed upon the suspense of the proposal. Morrison left him with the details of the time and place for the rendezvous, telling him there would be two others, two other good people in need of help. He explained that one was a pregnant woman, and that the other was an injured man. But he gave no details beyond this. He left praying that the boy would be true, uneasy at having to rely on a stranger but seeing no way around it. Having made the arrangement, he put it behind him. He had one more thing to do and it would require all of him.

It was still the dead of night when he reached the warehouse. He approached
cautiously, laying his soles flat upon the stones, setting them down and pulling them up, kicking no debris and stirring no pebbles. He shot a hand back to caution the hound but this was not necessary. The dog read the man’s body language and followed suit. The night had cleared of mist but was still heavy and darker for it. They somehow found shadows of still greater black and it was through these that they moved. Morrison knew this territory for he had walked it just the day before. Now, as then, he pulled up in the lee of the warehouse, in an alleyway choked with crates, rubbish and discarded bits of machinery, prehistoric in their angulations and just as silent as those deceased creatures. He stretched out a hand that the hound came to and set her head beneath. He rolled the rough barbs of the beast’s hair in his fingers and listened to silence to discover if it were real. He believed it was.

A row of windows ran under the eaves of the warehouse. They folded outward for ventilation and to provide some scant natural lighting inside. He expected to find these open but few were, and the ones most easily reached were black with soot. He climbed up on a crate to get a better view. He had to duck beneath the eaves and lean his head into the shadows there. The hound below studied the perch. She bent at the knees and considered leaping up, but as the man did not turn and motion to her she stayed as she was.

Morrison brushed the glass with his fingertips. The filth was resilient. He spat and tried the flat of his hand and then the cuff of his shirt. He gave up on the effort and just peered through the grime, breath still lest it fog the glass. Two lamps burned on the table, casting a liquid light that flowed across the bodies of the men strewn around the floor on bedrolls, two on cots, from the ends of which their feet dangled. They slept in disarray unusual even for these men and it was clear they had only recently bedded down after the evening’s turmoil. Humboldt was nowhere to be seen. Morrison climbed down and sat beside the crate, hidden from the front entrance to the alley. He set the rifle down and slipped the sack from his shoulder.

The hound stepped toward him, head low, eyes looking off to the side and then back, off and then back. She thought they might rejoin the others.
Though she had mixed feelings about this she might at least get some food out of it. Those men seemed never to tire of dangling food above her, tossing pieces of meat into awkward places and shouting and hooting until she managed to get to it. She nudged the man’s foot, stepped back and whined, but the man showed no sign of rising. Eventually, she checked the ground beneath her, circled over it, looked to the man and circled the ground again and then sat down. This life was made up of so much waiting, bursts of action and then more waiting. So be it. She crossed her forelimbs and set her head on them and inhaled.

For his part Morrison’s thoughts were someplace else entirely. He knew why he was here in the alley and what he would do when the opportunity came and he knew he just had to wait for that time. He sat thinking of William, trying hard to remember him by that name and not by description alone. What was he thinking now? Had he learned the content of that letter and if so how did it effect him? Rage or joy or fragments of both, the past ripped apart and only this tattered reality left to explain it. And he was not sure that he would ever be able to explain it. Words tended to make excuses, and that was something he couldn’t do. There were no excuses. There were just things done long ago, so far back they couldn’t be remedied, or explained away, so much a part of them that they would never be forgotten. But how could he ever explain it? He had not lied when he spoke to Dover but neither had he given the whole truth. He had argued with Nan just as he told her. He had questioned her race and her intentions and denied her right to a place in his family. And when she insulted him he pulled back his hand and hurled it at her. All of this was as he told the maid. But it hadn’t ended there. Nan took his blow. It knocked her back and left her on the floor. She looked up at him, her hair suddenly loosed from the band that had contained it, wild around her. She asked him why he was here, and it was only then that he knew. Lust follows fast on violence and that night the two converged within him. In a moment without thought he had lifted her from the floor and thrown her across the room and came at her on the bed. She had fought but that was no deterrent. That was part of it all and somehow he reasoned that he was simply fighting her. He was ripping off her clothes
but he was just arguing with her. He was prying his way between her legs but he was just teaching her a lesson. His hand was over her mouth and he was stifling her screams but that was because he had heard enough from her and now it was time for her to hear from him.

A sound jolted him back to the alley. For a moment it seemed loud out of all reason. Then the noise was gone and he knew it had just been a rat knocking over a can. He reached for his rifle and held it as if unsure of what to do with it. He heard the rodent scurry away and felt the hound shift as she scented it. He whispered to still her. He ran his hand over the rifle stock, hefted it and measured its weight. It was an unadorned weapon, no brass strapwork or silver adornments. He brought the old percussion lock close to his nose, inhaled the fulminate of the cap and studied it a moment. It was a simple mechanism but one that he had relied upon many times before this. It was powerful enough to take down a bear. A cannon the woman had called it, one that he carried on his shoulder. He trusted it, but he knew also that the muzzle held only one shot of lead, powerful, but singular. There were no second chances, at least not for what he intended. He tilted the weapon as if he might reload it. But he stopped himself. What’s done is done, he thought. Leave it be. And yet he had never managed to do that.

There was no pleasure in his memory of that night with Nan. There was no sex even. He didn’t remember pushing himself inside her though he knew that was at the center of it all. And the hardest thing of all was that in his remembering he knew what he hadn’t known at the time. He was not ashamed of his brother’s love for her. He was jealous of it. Lewis was all he had and this woman had taken a piece of him away. Though he hated her for it he coveted her also and had not the strength to answer these emotions as he should have. When she said Lewis was the better man he had known it to be true. His younger brother had a more honest heart and no blot on his conscience. He saw her without seeing only her skin. He knew her for who she was and this rewarded him with a great love and for this Morrison had wished to punish him. It was first a brother who betrayed his brother. Morrison was no better than that first son of man.

Lewis came for him the next day. They did battle silently, needing no words to incite them. The younger brother had a rage in him too and it drove him forward with wild swings. He came on teeth and fists and knees and elbows. His fingers talons aimed for this brother’s eyes. But Morrison was best in moments of violence and his younger brother was no match. He boxed him about the face and drove his fist up into his abdomen and slammed the flat of his palm down upon the base of Lewis’s neck. He popped him with short jabs that made a mockery of the younger man’s anger. And then, as if all that were not enough, he hooked an arm across his chest, under his shoulders, lifted him up and spun and tossed him down with the full force of both their bodies. He meant the injury to hurt, to hurt like hell, to knock the wind out of him and end the fight. He didn’t mean to slam him down on a barb of rusted metal. The nail split his brother’s flesh to the bone. He didn’t mean for the injury to be fatal, but that’s just what it was.

In the following weeks the sickness set in. Lewis’s fingers went rigid. The muscles in his neck stood out like taut ropes. His jaw locked shut. His fury and anger and love were all contained within him. When he died he did so crying, crying and speaking his first language through his clenched teeth, words the woman could not understand. The words cut right to the older brother’s soul and allowed him no peace, forever after. The younger brother cursed him in the language of their birth, swore his love in the language of their birth. His love for the woman, that is. He allowed no love for his brother any longer. Only in death was Lewis calm and only then had Morrison reached out and touched him. He whispered his sorrow and cried and understood how empty the world now was and just how great his crimes. He had pulled from his pocket the memento that his father had given to him as the eldest son, a button handed down several generations already, the sole trinket carried from a bloody battlefield wherein clans fought clans in a fool war that rewarded other men entirely. He pressed this against his brother’s chest, left it there and moved away.

From that day on life was a punishment. Of all his people he was alone in the world and this by his own doing. In dreams he relived that
fight countless times. In waking he asked God to change that moment so that it was he who fell upon the nail and not Lewis. But God was silent. In battle he wished for his own death and it was this that had led to the death of so many other things. It had felt to him at times—lonely moments at the edge of the plains, frozen mornings when his toes went numb and his hands were two mallets, nights spent staring across campfires shared with silent ghost people, any moment in which he defied mortality by killing that which would have killed him—that God was not allowing his death. He had thought life an affliction all those twenty-some years. Until he got the note. He had read the words and heard again the voice that spoke them and saw that beautiful face as it had been. Then he thought, maybe, just maybe, he was being allowed one more chance.

Morrison stirred, realizing that there had been a change in the light. Just slightly. There were the hints of forms where before there had been only blackness. There was a shadow cast by the warehouse and on the far wall the faintest indication of the patterns in the masonry. Dawn was still far off, but night had acknowledged its coming. The old man lifted the rifle and smelled the cap again. It was almost time. Perhaps it was foolish, this mission of his, but he would never get this chance again, not quite like this. One more chance, and one more death to go with it.