by Joseph Fink
“Sweet Theo,” she whispered through freshly painted lips. “Sit up and let me look at you.”
“My darling Eleanor,” Theodore grumbled, in a liminal state. He sat up slowly on the edge of the bed, and she leaned forward to straddle him. He then glanced back toward the end of the bed a couple of times. I had disrupted his comfort. “I do love you so, but I do not feel well tonight,” he said.
“You must have some energy left to love your wife,” she said, glancing backward over her shoulder to where his anxious gaze had been. I was hiding behind the armoire, believing I was well out of sight, but her eyes locked right on me. She seemed to look at me steadily, then turned her head back to Theodore.
From behind her on the nightstand, she produced two glasses and a bottle of sherry. “Your legs are so cold, I think a drink will warm you up.”
They clicked their glasses together, announcing “to our love,” and drank.
“My dearest,” she said placing her soft hand on his thick chest, “surely you remember what it is like to be young, to be impatient, to want something before you can have it.”
She bit her lip and then his earlobe.
“Want and need are inseparable, love,” she said, “when you are young.” She lifted his frock over his head and gently pushed him down onto the bed.
It was doubtful that this young beauty should be so physically desirous of such a dried fig of a man. I distrusted and respected her with equal intensity.
She disrobed and straddled his torso. She heaved her body up and down and moaned so convincingly, as Theodore barely moved a muscle. I watched her watch his expression closely, and at the almost imperceptible moment of his climax she let out a satisfied cry, undulating her spine, decreasing tempo and intensity with each wave until they were both still.
She dismounted him gently, like a trained rider from an injured nag. She put her gown back on and ran her fingers through her hair, and I watched in confusion as she removed one earring, palming it carefully in her right hand.
“My dear, you should get some rest,” she said gently kissing his forehead, “but share one last drink with me first?”
She picked up both glasses and handed him the one in her right hand. I knew suddenly what she was doing.
“I love you,” she paused, and then, “husband.”
“And I you,” he said, clumsily repeating her childish smile back to her, “my wife.”
“Down the hatch,” she said, and drank the rest of her sherry like a whiskey shot in a lawless saloon.
He reflexively did the same.
I watched his face contort for a second, and his eyes flashed the same emptiness I had seen before. He coughed several times and finally laid down to sleep.
Dunce! I was such a fool to let my mind nap in the presence of this woman.
The earring in her right hand, a small cylinder easily mistaken for a glistening gem, a vial of poison. His wan face and empty eyes worsening since he arrived from Europe. She had been slowly poisoning him each night since his return.
She laid next to him, but I could tell she was not asleep. Eleanor and I, from our separate corners of her room, watched over the next two hours as yellow foam gradually formed at the corners of Theodore’s mouth, and Eleanor wiped it away, sweetly, with a handkerchief. His breathing stiffened and slowed, and by dawn it had stopped. When she was certain he was dead, she held his body tightly and cried, an honest cry, a cry of love, but also a cry of remorse. She would inherit Theodore’s and Edmond’s immense wealth. She would birth her child. She would be free for the first time in her life from the men controlling her, but her tears spoke of the cost of that freedom.
“Sweet Theodore, I couldn’t let you die without the sweetest good-bye.” She kissed his forehead. He was smiling in death. Like his father before him, he had lived a privileged life. And his final conscious moments were in a passionate embrace with his wife.
“No!” This time my shout was heard. Eleanor sat up. The tears had ended, but their salty trails left lines on her face.
My own face felt hot, not with anger, but with woe.
She arose, stepping toward me. She did not look bothered, just studied me for several moments with curiosity and a touch of compassion. “I hope my face shines with such vigor when I am your age,” she said. “Let those words be the last exchange we ever have.”
She caressed her belly and left.
Over the next several months, I moped about St. Augustine hoping to find solace in the police’s investigation into Theodore’s death, but all that came of it was a report that the sherry he drank before he died was a gift from a member of The Duke’s Own. Perhaps someone he or his father had betrayed years ago had finally gotten him back. Others were certain Eleanor had murdered her husband. She told the investigators she was with him his last night but did not drink any of the sherry, as pregnancy had made her feel unwell.
Meanwhile I made an effort to cheer myself up by haunting Edmond’s crew members, some of whom I remembered from my final days.
Instead of knifing (or hungry-ratting) them in their sleep, I would spend several days replacing their clothing with similar but noticeably different clothing. Or I would put spiders I collected in the fields inside their boots. Sometimes I would write messages on their mirrors like “God does not like what he sees, Timothy. Repent.” They would think themselves mad and behave so publicly. Eventually I would drive them near enough to suicide that if they didn’t choose to end themselves, I would do it for them, and no one else knew the difference. Each man’s slashing of a wrist, or drowning, or plunge from a high ledge, came on the heels of erratic public behavior. Soon the town was abuzz about Ocean Madness, the intensified awareness of which made my task even easier. And it began to explain Theodore’s sudden death as well. The ship from Barcelona was cursed, the town believed.
It was fun, I could admit, but it could not bring back Edmond. I am not a ghost, I told myself, but I am certainly behaving like one.
Eleanor gave birth to Theodore’s child: a boy. She named him Gregory. And seeing Edmond’s eyes once again, knowing he could live a whole new life through his grandson, free from judgment for his crimes, destroyed what little was left me. I was empty of meaning, of hope, and of life. I did not understand why I still existed at all.
5
This is what failure feels like.
Hunched over a sleeping child, the oblivious offspring of a vile man who never paid for his transgressions, who died happy and unaware.
Failure feels of fever, of hot blood under cold skin, bumpy and painful to the touch.
Failure is the sound of a gentle snore of an infant, ignorant to its sinful heritage, its putrid ancestry. The baby cutely flexes its fists through empty dreams.
I could have waited at that sleeping child’s side for decades, watching it grow older into adulthood, into understanding, until the moment I could tell him who his father was, what his father did, and then what?
The grown child would say, “Sorry about the actions of a man I never knew?” He would exhume his grandfather’s corpse and allow me to stab it in the gut and say, “Revenge is mine, Edmond?”
What I wanted had been stolen from me. That’s not true. Something stolen can be returned. What I wanted had been destroyed.
For hours each night, I lurked around Gregory’s crib watching him sleep so sweetly. I grew to adore his fat fingers and bubbling lips. My heart had not changed, but revenge was no longer in reach, so I did the only thing I felt I could do. I helped raise a child.
Eleanor never remarried. She inherited the fortune of her murdered husband and lived with Gregory in a mansion in St. Augustine. She possessed him as her father had possessed her, doting lovingly on him and stashing him selfishly away.
The boy was polite and good natured, if prone to occasional spoiled fits. I kept a close watch on him, sometimes singing to him as he slept to calm his nerves. I visited Eleanor often, helping her keep her books balanced and to cook. I never knew if Ele
anor was ever again aware of my presence, but there were occasions when she would pause while reading or sewing to look around the room, as if she sensed me there. She kept a loaded pistol by her nightstand, but she had always done that.
Gregory was schooled at home. Eleanor taught him piano, grammar, arithmetic, and Christian verses. They sang hymns together, recited poetry and Greek classics.
Sometimes when Gregory practiced his piano alone, I would sing quietly from behind him. At first, he would stop playing, frightened by the unseen voice. But over the years he grew used to it. He would sometimes tell his mother that their house was haunted, but she would tell him not to play devil’s games.
Gregory grew into a handsome young man, and Eleanor, like her father before her, controlled his social life with an iron fist. By the time he was sixteen, he rarely was allowed in public without her at his hip. Many other prominent families paid visits to Eleanor and Gregory, and like Eleanor, I too became quite interested in weeding out the less desirable options.
Delilah Thomas, a pleasant enough fourteen-year-old, was brought by to meet Gregory. Eleanor took a liking to the young lady, but Eleanor had not seen inside Delilah’s home. I had.
For every young woman who came to meet Gregory, I spent a week secretly living in her home to find out everything I could. Delilah had a weak immune system, nearly died at age two, and routinely fell ill. I doubted she could survive childbirth, let alone have the child make it out unscathed. I wrote an anonymous letter to Eleanor about this, and the courtship of Gregory and Delilah was off.
The Winchesters introduced their daughter, Bernice, but Bernice, behind closed doors, was a monster, shouting at no one and throwing objects. She screamed until she was red-faced and near collapse, and would conclude her tantrums by sobbing bodily into a pillow. I felt empathy for this troubled teenager, but I also could not have her marrying my Gregory, let alone carrying his child.
For months Eleanor introduced Gregory to young women hoping to find another wealthy family to join into her own.
On Gregory’s seventeenth birthday, Eleanor surprised her son by announcing he was intended to wed Letitia Van Alston of the Pensacola Van Alstons. They would marry in two years’ time. Gregory smiled, but it was a false smile, borne of matriarchal tyranny. Gregory wrote often in his diary that he did not wish to marry anyone, let alone someone he never chose. He wished to play the piano for a living and travel the world. He would never do either.
I liked Letitia fine. She would be a healthy and loving mother, perhaps not as fearsome and strong as Eleanor, but a good mother nonetheless. Despite Gregory’s inner complaints about the marriage, he was a dutiful son, husband, and eventual father.
I spent the next two years keeping an eye on Gregory, but I knew it would be time to leave soon. I did not know exactly where I would have to go next, but eventually I would start to move. Lovely young Gregory helped me find my path once again. It was not a path of brick or dirt or stone, but a feeling within me. An intuition that my existence had purpose and meaning. And I would follow this path where it led.
By this time, learning the lesson of the sea’s dissipation of my body, I found I could be many places at once, and I began secretly living in several homes simultaneously. I was particularly drawn to slobs and sloths. Perhaps it is the captain in me to demand better of people, or rather to demand that they demand better of themselves. I would tidy up squalid bedrooms and barn lofts. I would attempt to strengthen tenuous relationships by writing letters to people.
In cases where someone appeared beyond help and where they seemed a danger to others, I would terrorize them like Edmond’s sailors until they changed or rid themselves from the earth. I would lurk behind them in mirrors. I would whisper to them in dark rooms. I would put centipedes in their mouths while they slept until they thought themselves mad.
It passed the time.
And every day I thought about Edmond’s happy face as he died, him seeing only the faces of Theodore and Eleanor while never seeing mine. He never smelled my rotten breath, heard my gravelly voice, tasted his own nervous bile, or felt my blade in his belly.
Those watery eyes of Edmond’s, clear and content as he looked into his son’s eyes, were the same deep, thoughtful eyes of Gregory as he looked into Letitia’s eyes on their wedding. Gregory had taught himself to accept the path he did not choose for himself, and I knew I could do the same.
I stayed in St. Augustine, because remaining with Gregory was my path. Gregory and Letitia had four children together, three daughters, then finally a son. They named the boy Gabriel.
It had been a quarter century since Edmond’s happy death and my greatest despair, and here I was now cooing over newborns, each with their father’s eyes. In every baby, I saw Edmond looking right back at me, and yet each time I felt such joy at the miracle of birth.
In 1892, when Gabriel was four years old, Gregory died unexpectedly, when the horse he had just dismounted kicked him in the head outside his home. The town mourned. Letitia, Eleanor, and the three daughters mourned. Gabriel was too young to fully understand what had happened to his father.
Letitia, overwhelmed by the tragedy, moved away from St. Augustine along with her children. Eleanor tried to stop her, tried to keep her family like gold in a safe, but Letitia could not bear it in Florida any longer. Outraged by this theft of her granddaughters, Eleanor removed Letitia and her children entirely from the family will. Eleanor died wealthy and alone ten years later of heart failure, sitting by herself at a long dining table after her servants had cleared the prime rib but before they had served the cobbler.
Letitia had to rebuild her life as a working-class single mother. Gabriel grew into adulthood, and married a young woman named Hannah. They had children, and while those children would not grow up with the wealth of Gabriel’s grandparents, the love they felt from their parents would be riches and wonders enough.
I paid my respects at Eleanor’s grave, and then I too set out. It was time for me to move on. I did not know to where, but I was certain it would become clear. The path reveals itself to the faithful traveler.
I walked across Florida. I didn’t have to walk to move from place to place, but I did. In the decades that followed my transformation in Nulogorsk, I had grown quite comfortable in my new body. No longer did I struggle with simple human functionality as I had those first few weeks in St. Augustine, but in all my previous travels I had never been to America, and I wanted to see it on foot.
It was a beautiful place, but not a good place. Slavery and genocide of natives had been vocally decried in the latter part of the 1800s but were tacitly allowed to continue under different names. Wealth inequality, political instability, ever-expanding industry coughing black smoke into pristine skies, all fueled by an ignorant and hateful philosophy of manifest destiny—a spoiled, rich child’s justification that everything he can see belongs to him.
The land itself was stunning in its endlessness, its diversity, its loamy soils and prolific wildlife. I saw my first cottonmouth in a swamp near Tallahassee. I named the snake Lora because, like my giant friend once did, the serpent had eaten a turtle in a single unchewed bite.
I stayed in New Orleans for twelve years. It was economically depressed and politically corrupt, but it was where the path led me. Since the night I was taken from my burning home, my path had always been clear. The night Edmond died, I lost my direction, my hope. But I had found my path again, and I would follow it for as long as it would guide me. The path was my meaning and my comfort. From New Orleans, it led me to Memphis, which had been decimated at the end of the nineteenth century by yellow fever. The city had just begun to turn itself around, as trade along the Mississippi brought more jobs, new homes, and a burgeoning musical spirit. I spent many nights over the next decade falling in love with deep-throated hymns of love and loss.
I could have stayed in Memphis forever, but my path had taken the shape of the Mississippi River, and I secretly lived on a trawler for two years, fo
llowing a fourteen-year-old fisherman named Thomas. I dripped latrine water in his ears as he slept to give him infections. I cut serrated lines in his boots which caused one to tear while he was on the port deck. He went overboard and delayed his crew by almost an hour. Plus the usual nighttime whispers and centipedes in the mouth that had become a staple for me.
Thomas was a handsome and charming boy. I had followed him growing up in Memphis. Like all babies, he was a cute one. But Thomas’s father Matthew was an insecure and controlling man. Matthew expressed his insecurities through hitting his wife, Laura, Thomas, and the other children. Thomas was bright enough to escape his father’s reach at an early age, and he found honest work, unlike his father who, in 1910, was gunned down in St. Louis by a French spy who, through mistaken information from his government contacts, mistook Thomas’s dad for an influential Spanish dissident.
Thomas exasperated me because he put everything into his work and would not settle down with a family. I eventually finagled a meeting with a lovely woman in Minneapolis named Pauline, and he was so frustrated with his constant illnesses and madness on that fishing ship, that he left the river to raise a family. Minneapolis’s winters forgave no sins. And shortly after the birth of his second child, Thomas fell into the frigid waters of Lake Minnetonka while ice fishing. He found himself trapped below a thicker layer of ice. He could not recover his position, because his muscles stiffened. No one saw him fall, so there was no one to pull him out. In minutes, his body seized up and hypothermia painfully ended his life. His body would not be found until spring.
Pauline and her children abandoned the brutal cold of Minnesota for a warmer climate, and my path led me away from the freezing north as well. I saw Sioux City, a fledgling river city, growing rapidly with the influx of Dust Bowl refugees. But I did not stay long. The path guided me deeper into America’s economic pain, as I reached Enid, Oklahoma, a town with more oil derricks than jobs. The oil discoveries of the previous three decades had brought fortune to the city, but as the Great Depression sat its unbearable weight upon the young nation, the population was either crushed or dispersed or both. The epicenter was Enid with its metal derricks pumping up and down, great hammers cracking open the earth. The wealth of the oil boom brought fortune to Enid, but only to those who owned the quickly eroding land.
