If I Never Get Back

by Darryl Brock

  “Do you enjoy Moliere?” She laughed delightedly at my expression. “I am reading Le Misanthrope. Do you know it?”

  I tried to remember it from college. “Well . . .”

  She lifted a volume from her table and read a passage aloud in fluent, musical French. “Alceste’s friend, Philinthe,” she translated, “tells him, ‘My mind is no more shocked at seeing a man a rogue . . . than seeing vultures eager for prey, mischievous apes, or fury-lashed wolves.’”

  She spoke slowly. Her pale eyes stared into mine. In them I saw tiny reflections of a flickering gas jet on the wall behind me.

  “Sam,” she said huskily, stroking my hand, “a gentleman needs to be a rogue on occasion.”

  That did it. I pulled at her dress as she tore at my shirt, and things became like a movie passion montage—you know, naked bodies churning and tumbling and dissolving from one position to another. Charlotte knew her business and gave every appearance of liking it. Once when I thought I was hurting her—she was anything but a heavyweight—she hissed and clawed at me when I slackened.

  I couldn’t get enough of her smooth flesh against mine. I pressed her hard, ran my hands over her, stroked and kneaded, took the warmth of her into me. Toward dawn, after the last climactic shudder, after the last glass of brandy, she held my head to her breasts and rocked me like an infant.

  “Dear Sam,” she whispered, “you needed this terribly.”

  A high sighing sound escaped me; she pressed me tighter.

  “I haven’t felt like this since I was first married.”

  She laughed gently and said, “I help many marriages.”

  “I’ll bet. What about you? A beautiful woman who reads Moliere and plays Chopin. Why aren’t you out shopping the Ladies’ Mile, spending a rich husband’s money?”

  She smiled faintly. “I was ruined for that life.”

  “Ruined?”

  “Seduced by a gentleman.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t understand? We were to marry. I let him have his way. Then he no longer wanted me.” She shrugged. “It occurs commonly.”

  “And you’re ruined?”

  “Why do you say it so? You know perfectly well no respectable man would have me.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.” She shrugged. “It all took place five years ago. I don’t look backward or carry regrets. I’ve saved my earnings. Someday I’ll have a mansion of my own.”

  “Ruined, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What a time to live!”

  She kissed me. “Is there another?

  Chapter 8

  Central Park’s greenery glowed in the afternoon rays. Twain and I halted our carriage some distance from a gazebo where a band tuned noisily for the Sunday afternoon concert.

  “You don’t look the worse for wear,” Twain noted. He wore an ivory-colored linen waistcoat and white silk necktie. A pair of dark glasses—“green spectacles”—perched on his nose.

  “Could hardly feel much better,” I told him.

  We spread a blanket and settled.

  “There’s a good deal about you, Sam, that don’t add up if studied very close.”

  I felt myself tensing. “What do you mean?”

  “Now don’t get riled. It’s just that I’ve been studying you. I can’t help it, it’s my nature. I pride myself on knowing folks. When I talk about the pilot trade back in my rivering days, I generally lay the claim that I ran afoul of every type imaginable. But God’s truth is, I never met one quite like you—though there were a number who didn’t let on much about themselves.”

  “You think I’m hiding things?”

  “Think it? I know it! What’s more, it’s like you’re studying how to behave. Sort of like I did when I came here at fifteen, not knowing how to act at all, lookin’ around for signals but keeping quiet and hoping nobody’d notice.”

  He looked at me speculatively. “Now, mind you, I’m not criticizing. A man’s business is his own. As a general thing I’m partial to them who consider before starting their jaws. And I’ve observed you enough to see that you manage all right. In fact, for a greenhorn, you make out tolerably.”

  He waited for the band to finish a clamorous passage.

  “Now, I’ve considered this, Sam. I’ve learned to trust my estimation of my fellowman, and I’m seldom wrong in my judgments.”

  I smiled at his earnestness. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I want to pass on a tale told to me after a lecture up in Elmira last year. I happened to stick in a warmhearted piece about a certain John Irishman. Well, the next day an old codger appeared at the Langdons’ front door and stirred up such a ruckus to see me that the servants finally gave in.

  “I went out and sat on the porch swing and smoked while he poured out everything he had to say. He was Irish himself, and he talked so thick it was hard to decipher him at points. But I got the gist, and once he wound up and pitched into it, he had my hair fairly standing at attention.

  “Started off telling me he could feel death coming. Didn’t want to depart with his secret untold. Naturally, I asked what the secret was, but he told me to be patient, it was a mite complicated. And so it was.

  “Late in the war, after the two sides stopped exchanging prisoners in ’sixty-three, a surplus of Secesh captives forced the building of more Yankee prisons. In May of ’sixty-four one opened for business in Elmira, right down on the Chemung River. Well, they hadn’t even got barracks up yet; the prisoners lived in tents. During the summer things went along, but once the cold flowed in it was mortal hell. Boys perished from exposure. Smallpox broke out. In the spring of ’sixty-five the Chemung flooded, dysentery got bad, and then to cap it all, they got hit with erysipelas.”

  “With what?”

  “You’d maybe know it as St. Anthony’s Fire. Head turns red and swells, high fevers and delerium. It spreads like perdition when those with it can’t be isolated—like in a cramped prison. The Rebs got to dyin’ so fast—one out of three during the worst of the pox—that for a spell they were carted off to the cemetery nine at a time, that being how many coffins the ambulance wagon held. It went on around the clock.

  “The old-timer knew all about this ’cause he worked in the death house. That was a shack just off the hospital, where he packed the boys in their boxes and did whatever precious little else to prepare ’em for their Maker.

  “Now, another consideration during all this is that the Yankee guards were the New York Ninety-ninth Regiment—mostly Fenians who’d survived Meagher’s Irish Brigade in places like Antietam—and they got this plum of a job for the duration.

  “Now the Irish, you know, are thick as thieves, and gambling comes as natural to them as breathing. The guards held regular games and often let prisoners in on ’em too. There were a good many Irish Johnnies—people forget that when they claim migrants alone won the war for the North—and sizable amounts of money changed hands, sometimes up in the thousands.”

  “How’d the prisoners get money?”

  “Oh, they were allowed to receive drafts—drawn on Yankee banks, of course. Some lived fairly high. One in particular, who went through the faro and poker sessions like wildfire, got assigned to burial detail. His name was . . . well, I don’t rightly know it, but he came to be called O’Shea. Mark that, Sam, it’s critical. Before long, working together as they did, O’Shea and the old-timer got to be like father and son.

  “Meanwhile, at night, O’Shea and ten others set about digging a tunnel from inside the hospital. By the time they’d burrowed under the stockade walls sixty feet distant, the smallpox siege was at its peak and they decided to make a break right away. But two nights before their target time, O’Shea was cleaned out in a poker game by a Yank sergeant named Duffy. It was generally suspicioned that Duffy cheated and that he’d stockpiled considerable funds since coming to Elmira. O’Shea was bitter. He confided to the old-timer about the game, and also about the breakout. He swore he’d square himself with D
uffy before he escaped.

  “Then a number of things transpired. The breakout went as planned. Eleven boys were counted missing. Eventually ten were recaptured, and security tightened down considerably. But the eleventh, who had trailed the others through the tunnel, was never seen again. Can you fathom which?”

  “Got to be our man O’Shea.”

  “The same. Now here’s where it gets right interesting. Duffy was found in his tent, his throat slit. Next to him, a large oak chest had been prized open. Scattered around like chicken feathers were bank drafts and currency—Secesh notes—in the thousands. But missing were thousands more in greenbacks and gold! Upwards of twenty thousand, near as they could estimate.”

  “U.S. dollars?”

  “Yes, partly in greenbacks—that’s what Yanks were paid with—but mostly in gold eagles and double eagles.”

  “Duffy must’ve been one hell of a cheater,” I said.

  “Likely so, but there’d often be several thousand sitting in just one pot. Look at it that way, and it’s not hard to calculate him salting away quite a load over a year and a half.”

  “What happened to O’Shea?”

  Twain chuckled. “For five years now a lot have wondered that. The Fenians are especially curious, since they claim first rights on the money. Rumors had O’Shea getting plugged by a guard the night of the breakout; or making it all the way to Richmond, only to be killed later in the war; or still living today like a god somewhere in the South Seas. In any case, the money never turned up.”

  He emptied his pipe and reloaded it leisurely.

  “But you know where O’Shea is, I gather?”

  “Don’t crowd me,” he drawled. “Story as good as this needs time to spin out to its proper length.”

  I lay back on the grass and watched wispy clouds trailing lazily against the sky. Soldiers’ shapes moved among them.

  “The old man was in his shack by the death house that night, nervous as a cat. You can fathom his shock when O’Shea staggered through the doorway, bleeding from a mortal wound. What happened was, he’d sneaked in on Duffy and delivered a good lick to his head, figuring it would hold him. But just when O’Shea’d cleaned out all the usable money from the chest and packed it in two big knapsacks, Duffy jabbed a blade in his back. He was trying to repeat when O’Shea grabbed it away and finished him. But it was too late for O’Shea. He died in the old man’s arms.

  “Well, the alarm sounded and Hades tore loose. In the confusion the old man made two trips to Duffy’s tent—it was all he could manage to lift one knapsack—and brought the money back to his hut. He spent the next days mourning over the boy, scared to death they’d come in and find the money and blame him for Duffy’s murder. He wracked his mind to figure some way out of his predicament.”

  Twain refired the pipe with maddening care.

  “What he finally came up with was this: He packed O’Shea into an extra-long pine box—remember, O’Shea wasn’t his name, but that’s what the old man stenciled on the lid to cover his tracks—and he packed the money in quart jars all around the boy.”

  “But wouldn’t they check the phony name against prisoner records?”

  “I asked him that very question. He told me some prisoners never gave their rightful names at all, just said ‘registered enemy.’ Moreover, the prison hadn’t made any plans for boys dying. First they buried them along the riverbank, till those got swept away in the flooding. At the height of the pox they used communal graves. It was all a tangle. So he didn’t fret about discrepancies—’cause nobody was looking.”

  “Well, what happened?” I said. “Did the old man get the money back?”

  Twain eyed me shrewdly. “Once I tell you, Sam, the two of us’ll be the only ones alive who know. I want to make a proposition. If you decide to go for the money, I’d want half as my share. Discreetly done, of course.”

  “Why cut me in? If the old-timer’s dead, why not take it all yourself?”

  “I don’t dare. If it ever came to light I was linked with a grave-robbing scheme, my standing with Livy’s relations’d be blasted all to perdition.” He sighed. “A sultan’s treasure for the taking, and I can’t make a stagger at it. You’re the only one I’ve run into who might be foolhardy enough to take on the job, yet honest enough to trust.”

  I laughed at his assessment. “Okay, I promise. I mean, I want to hear what happened. Who wouldn’t? But I can’t see myself robbing a grave.”

  “I’ll just leave it with you, then, and expect you’ll keep your shutters up.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, O’Shea’s coffin was taken up to Woodlawn Cemetery above Elmira. There’s a Confederate section there with over three thousand graves. They weren’t even marked at the time, but luckily an army sexton copied the names off coffins and kept track of burial plots.”

  “I just thought of something,” I said. “O’Shea’s folks had no way of knowing what happened to him.”

  Twain nodded. “The old man felt poorly over what he was doing to the boy’s family. His notion was to write them in Carolina, once he’d retrieved the money.

  “But it never happened. What he didn’t count on was the army keeping a guard posted in Woodlawn’s military section day and night, all through the war—and after. It’s still guarded, in fact.”

  “Couldn’t he have said he was kin? Claimed the body and taken it away?”

  “He tried,” Twain replied. “They wanted proof. When he came back with trumped-up papers, somebody recognized him and started asking questions. That scared him off. He fretted for a long while, but came up blank. By the time I heard his tale, he’d given off doing it alone.”

  “So what did he want you to do?”

  “Use my ‘influence’ with city hall to have the guard removed one night.”

  “Plant a bribe?”

  “Most probably.”

  “Would it work?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Ten thousand dollars. My half would set me up for a long time.

  “Ponder it some,” Twain drawled. “That money ain’t going away. And if it should happen into our hands soon, why, we could boost Freddy’s flying machine and make ourselves rich as all splendor.”

  “That’s quite a scenario,” I said. “You got any moneymaking schemes on the ground? Yours’re all above or below it.”

  He laughed, winked his foxy wink, and said no more.

  The next morning Twain left for Hartford to attend the wedding of Livy’s cousin and pore over final proofs of Innocents Abroad with his publisher, Elisha Bliss. Then he would accompany the Langdons to Elmira. He had intentions, he said, of journeying to California in late summer. He promised to follow the Stockings’ progress in the papers. He said he’d see me again. We shook hands, and I watched his hack clatter away.

  I returned to Earle’s, already missing him. Could bare coincidence have thrown us together? Not likely. But what else explained it?

  I retreated into the day’s newspapers. Monday, June 14. I’d been back in time for two weeks. It seemed an eternity.

  The Stockings were getting more coverage as the victory streak lengthened. After whipping Boston’s champion Lowells and Tri-Mountains, they’d taken on the strong Harvard team. Powered by Waterman’s early homer, they coasted, 30-11. Their record was now 14-0, and Manhattan writers drooled over the next day’s clash with the Mutuals.

  Seeing their names in print, I realized that they were my people, the only family I had in this world. I realized something else: I didn’t want to stay in New York. Even in this slower time it was too big, too fast-paced, too impersonal for me. Maybe I could think of a way to stay on with the club.

  At 8 p.m. they arrived at the New York & New Haven depot behind Madison Square. I watched as teams of horses drew the New Haven’s straw-colored cars along rails in the street. The city’s ordinance against steam vehicles forced the disconnecting of trains from locomotives fifteen blocks from the passenger station.

  Andy ran up
and hugged me hard, recoiling when he remembered my wound. I assured him it didn’t hurt. Brainard and George and the others crowded around, marveling at my recovery.

  As Andy brought me up to date at the hotel, I kept thinking inanely, He’s the greatest little brother I never had. He said they’d rented boats in Springfield and rowed miles up the Connecticut River; played on Boston Common’s lower parade ground and Jarvis Field in Cambridge; visited the penitentiary at Charlestown; cruised Boston Harbor on a revenue cutter; seen the Peace Jubilee’s grand organ—the largest in America—with pipes so large a man could stand upright in them; been guests at a burlesque, Humpty Dumpty, filled with gorgeous women in tights soaring over the stage in swings.

  “But not one of ’em a dinger like the peach we saw in Troy,” he concluded. “I’m freezin’ to cross her path again.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him. According to the papers, Holt was leaving New York for Philadelphia anyway. I described meeting Twain, but Andy insisted that either I was telling him stretchers or I’d been taken in by a humbug. It must have bothered him to think I’d had high times while he’d pictured me suffering in bed.

  Champion tried to keep everybody in the hotel that night. It worked with Allison, Hurley, Mac, and Gould—all from outside the New York area. But Brainard and Waterman vanished before supper, and Andy and Sweasy went out with friends from Newark. George took off for Morrisania, a village across the bridge from the Harlem flats where he’d grown up. Harry, ever responsible, stuck around.

  I met with Champion and Harry later on. They asked me to recount the details of the shooting. “You’re positive you saw McDermott and Le Caron?” Champion said. “But nobody else? No possible witnesses?”

  I shook my head.

  “We’d never get a conviction,” he said. “You think it all stemmed from the cash box incident?”

  “And the Haymaker game.” I told him of McDermott’s losses.

  “I’ve heard the same,” Harry confirmed.