The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

  “I wish Joe had finished you,” she said as she walked. “I wish he had beaten your brains in.”

  “Don’t make me do it,” he said.

  “They all know the story back at the plantation,” she said, goading him. “They all laugh about how Joe took you down with nothing but a rock. You, up in the old house, them all in the back, laughing at you.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” he growled.

  “If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead,” she said, turning to look at him as she walked. “I don’t know what you have in mind, but you still can’t touch me.”

  There were voices and laughter in the distance as he marched her toward the town. Pistol raised, he followed her down the road until they came to a grand house with music seeping out from the windows. A huge man in a floral vest stood guard at the door.

  Yates tied the horse to a post and pulled Alaura up onto the porch.

  “I’m here to talk to Miss Levant,” he said to the doorman.

  A rush of warm air and the smell of smoke wafted out as the doorman went inside, and soon an elegantly dressed woman stepped out.

  “Mr. Bell,” she said, running her eyes up and down Alaura. “What a pleasure. Don’t you usually join us at the beginning of the month?”

  “Yes, well, as you can see, I have a different type of deal to discuss tonight,” Yates said, smiling.

  “She is a pretty thing,” Madame Levant said, running a finger along Alaura’s jaw.

  “She’s been crying, and got a little roughed up on the way over,” Yates said. “Cleans up nice, and never been touched.”

  Levant cocked an eyebrow.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Her brother wouldn’t let a soul near her,” Yates said.

  “Her brother?” she asked. “Sounds like I might have to deal with him.”

  “He’s dead,” Yates said.

  “What?” Alaura shrieked.

  “Strung up, then fed to the hogs. Happened two days ago in a shithole named Horseheads, New York. I only wish I could have seen it.”

  Alaura fell to her knees and covered her mouth with her hands.

  “You are a cold man,” Levant said.

  “Two thousand,” Yates said.

  “We don’t really deal with her breed here,” she said. “And she’s not really that pretty.”

  Yates cocked his head and pulled his lips back in a grin.

  “Yes, she is,” he said. “Look at those eyes.”

  “Did you bring papers?” she asked. “Your father’s signature.”

  He shook his head.

  “Seven,” the madam said. “The lack of documentation complicates the matter considerably.”

  Yates looked at the crying girl at his feet.

  “A specimen like that,” he said. “You’ll make four on her first customer. Give me eight, and full run of the house tonight.”

  Levant smiled, and fluttered her eyes.

  “Come inside,” she said, extending her hand. “Let me get you something to drink.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Yates woke alone and nauseous, his head throbbing. The brocade curtains had been drawn, but the bright light of day cut a line between them onto the Oriental carpet. He pulled the velvet cord that hung from the ceiling, and a knock on the door came almost immediately. Still naked, he opened it to the uniformed maid.

  He looked her over.

  “Do you work here?” he asked.

  “I’m just the maid,” she said.

  “Draw me a bath,” he said. “And I’ll have someone to scrub my back as well.”

  In the afternoon, Madame Levant brought him his cash and told him that if he wanted to stay any longer, he’d need to hand some back.

  “Keep in touch,” she said as he walked out onto the broad porch.

  “I will,” he said. “You’re the only connection I have left in this town.”

  He went to the saloon, had himself a steak dinner, then retrieved his horse and rode north.

  THE BALL

  Every attempt was made to keep the crowds out of the depot until Lincoln’s train arrived. The main doors were barred, but since the train entrance was open, people walked in by the dozens. As Lincoln’s train approached, the mass of people gathered in the depot became alarming. A huge cheer rang out from everyone in attendance as the train slowly came to a halt and Lincoln stepped off the train and onto the platform. The President-elect was met by ex-president Millard Fillmore and acting Buffalo Mayor Bemis.

  An artillery brigade began blazing a rapid salute, the people were cheering, and the President-elect’s cortege took up its line of march for the carriage between the ranks of military personnel assigned to protect the dignitaries. The rush was tremendous. A squad from Company D threw themselves around Mr. Lincoln and his immediate party and measurably protected them, but it was impossible to protect anyone else. The soldiers pressed bayonets to the crowd, but the pressure from behind was so frightful that it would have been murder to have used them on the unlucky citizens who “had got the best place,” and the D Company men had all they could do to recover arms without bloodshed.

  The lines were broken and Mr. Lincoln was able to enter his carriage. Women fainted, men were crushed under the mass of bodies, and many others had their bones broken. Once out of the depot every man uttered a brief “Thank God!” for the preservation of his life. More with personal injuries were carried away and the fainted women were recovering under a free use of hydrant water.

  The route that Lincoln’s carriage took was very brief, being directly to the American Hotel on Main Street. The street was magnificent. The rush and roar and surge of the crowd was its grandest feature, but all the roofs and windows of buildings were filled with people; the gay winter attire of the ladies and the waving of their handkerchiefs as the cortege passed added brilliance to the scene. All the principal buildings were decorated with banners, from every flagstaff waved the stars and stripes—now dearer than ever to the American eye.

  The scene from the balcony of the American Hotel was unexampled. From Eagle to Court Street, the mass of humanity was the densest ever witnessed, and the pressure toward the central point was tremendous. Men cheered, looked pale, and perspired.

  Mr. Lincoln left his carriage attended by his immediate party and entered the hotel between two files of the escort. He appeared upon the balcony with Mr. Fillmore. His appearance was the signal for the most enthusiastic cheering, helped out by a salute of artillery on Clinton Street.

  —BUFFALO COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER, FEBRUARY 19, 1861

  “I’ve paid for the rooms already,” Nathan insisted again as he climbed out of the wagon. “You must come. For God’s sake, Abraham Lincoln himself will be there. Leander is coming, along with this new friend of his. Charles is expecting you. I moved heaven and earth securing these invitations.”

  They had been arguing all morning, and he had not stopped even as she drove him to the Town Line station. He took his time fetching his valise from the back of the wagon as he grumbled about her stubbornness.

  “I will stand on that platform right there and wave to Mr. Lincoln when he passes through in the morning,” Mary said. “The walls of the American Hotel will stand just fine without me helping to prop them up.”

  She looked up into the gray sky. “There looks to be more than a foot before the morning. More than likely you’ll get stuck downtown, and you’ll be glad there’s someone here to tend to the animals.”

  Her father stepped onto the platform before turning to her again.

  “You’ve been saying for months that Charles needs to get off that farm,” he said. “Well, I finally got him to leave. He’s already gone downtown to buy new clothes just for the occasion. I promised him you’d be there, that you’d dance with him. You’re making a liar of me. And you know he’ll just mope the whole evening away, not saying a word to anyone.”

  She turned the corners of her mouth down and shook her head.

  “Ch
arlie Webster is a handsome man. He’ll meet some pretty young thing down there. He has no need of me,” she said, shaking her head. “I will not endure another grand ball as a Cinderella with no fairy godmother.”

  The train whistled its departure.

  “You are the most obstinate child any man has ever been cursed with,” her father huffed.

  The whistle blew and Nathan climbed onto the train, pursing his lips in frustration while she turned the wagon toward home.

  * * *

  Gaslights burned from the columns of the American Hotel, casting a glow on the men gathered on its porch to smoke cigars, talk business, and watch as the squall blew in off Lake Erie.

  Since he’d moved to the city, Leander had come to see his father’s friends in a different light. He’d remembered them as boring old men with bad breath and too much hair sprouting from their ears, but in the city, their names were in every paper and on everyone’s lips. He could see Bill Seward leaning against a white column, unchanged from the days when he brought him sticks of candy and shooed him out of his father’s study. Millard Fillmore was there, too. His name had long been banned from the Willis house, but Leander could remember the days before he’d become president when he’d arrive at the farm with a bottle of whiskey and sit on the porch with Nathan all night. Birdsill Holly and Lyman Spalding stood together on the porch and nodded at Leander and Isabel as he drove a buggy to the hotel’s entrance.

  When Leander went for dinner at this restaurant or that, there would always be one or two of these men there to clap him on the back and remark how much he looked like his father, and to buy him a steak dinner and a snifter of brandy. He’d smile and thank them, all the time gritting his teeth that here he was just Nathan Willis’s son.

  It wasn’t that he was unhappy downtown. In a way, he enjoyed the work. The dealers were happy to see him and would say how the finest rooms in the city were paneled in Willis oak. They’d joke with him and offer him pours of whiskey from the bottles in their desk drawers and pay top dollar. But all they wanted to talk about was how much they admired Nathan Willis.

  He could not help but think that tonight, instead of talking about his father, they would notice him and Isabel.

  “Pay attention,” Isabel scolded him, as he narrowly missed running down one of the soggy onlookers in the street.

  He guided the buggy into the valet station, but stole a glance at her as she checked the intricacies of her makeup in a pocket mirror and patted her hair. He found her beautiful on most days, but the gown she wore tonight left him breathless.

  He was in awe of her in other ways as well. She was only a few years his senior but had already lived in ways he could not imagine. She’d grown up in New York, married one of the richest men in the city, and been widowed young. She’d spent years traveling through Europe and into the Far East. Her husband had been a trader of bonds and businesses, but she offered few details other than that the wealth he’d built up was now hers and that she had come to Buffalo to sell his interests in several businesses in the city.

  Leander had met Isabel Fitch at a soiree at one of the grand houses on Delaware Avenue. Even now it was unclear how she had come to be there. While the ladies and married men sat in the parlor and talked of the theater season, she wandered into the billiard room where the single men had gathered. Before long, the game fell away as the players gathered around to hear tales of her just-completed tour through Europe. She drew them in with her ice-blue eyes and tales of Roman catacombs and the filth of London’s alleys. As the evening wore on, she spoke of her long nights spent in the salons of Paris, offering lurid details of famous men hopping into bed with ladies and men and young boys.

  Susie Munn in her gingham dresses seemed a silly schoolgirl compared to this silk-draped creature. He had stood at the back of the gathering, unable to take his eyes from her, his overly loud laughter poorly masking his shock.

  At the end of the evening she singled him out, seemingly at random, and asked him to see her home through the cold streets to her mansion on Chippewa Street. He had nearly bolted when she explained that her servant was away and she needed his help lighting the stove.

  She brought out a silver tray of cut glass and poured a bitter green liqueur over lumped sugar while telling him of the secret places she’d been, chambers draped in silk and incense. She brought out an elaborate device with colored hoses and showed him how to suck the acrid smoke of a blackish-yellow paste through it. His head was swimming and his vision blurred when she put one hand on his crotch and popped the buttons from his trousers with a quick, sharp yank.

  She’d left him there during the following day, just him and the manservant, Fuller, and then the next day, too. His days with her blurred after that. Leander would lounge in the parlor with the hookah or sleep in the bedroom. Once he asked Fuller to make him a sandwich, but the only acknowledgment of the request was a barely discernible twitch of the man’s mustache.

  After a day or two, Leander came to wonder what Fuller did all day and explored the rest of the house looking for signs of his work. He heard grunting at the entrance to the basement stairs, and crept down only to see the servant stripped to the waist, lifting massive barbells overhead in an improvised gymnasium.

  Whenever Isabel came home, she would bring things to eat and drink and inhale that he’d never imagined. Afterward she would lead him to the bedroom, and hours later, leave him spent and gasping.

  Just that morning he had returned to the rooms at Whitney Place for the first time in a week. He found a three-day-old telegram from his father demanding an update on several deals. He had promised Isabel he’d be back in an hour, and he gathered his things and went down to the waterfront to get some orders. The usual buyers were away, preparing for the big night, and he’d stopped into one of the shadier dealers, asked what they needed, and sold cheap, just to have something to show his father.

  He patted his pocket, hoping the one order he held there would be enough.

  “What imbeciles would voluntarily stand in such weather? What do they hope to see?” Isabel asked, staring back at the gray and homespun onlookers gathered under a streetlamp in the swirling snow.

  “A pretty woman in a beautiful gown?” Leander offered.

  She snorted.

  “Subtle as a flying hammer,” she muttered, rolling her eyes.

  He helped her out of the buggy, put his hand at the small of her back, and guided her across the wide porch to the hotel entrance where a surge of heat and a top-hatted doorman met them. He took their coats and directed them to a ballroom filled with gaslight and color. Leander speared a pair of champagne glasses from a passing tray and paused at the ballroom entrance, taking in the sea of black suits and silk gowns that dipped and swirled to the rhythm of a minuet. He looked around to see who was looking at Isabel.

  “Hello, Lelo,” someone said from behind him.

  Leander turned and was disappointed to see that it was only Charles Webster. Leander could not remember ever seeing him in anything but the rough clothes of a farmer. His wind-chapped face and thick, callused hands looked out of place with the stiff black and white of his new suit. Mary insisted he was a smart and kind man, but Leander had rarely heard him say more than ten words in a row.

  “Lelo?” Isabel asked with a smirk.

  Leander squirmed to hear her use the name.

  “That’s what his friends call him,” Webster said.

  “Look at you, Charlie, all dressed up,” Leander said, changing the subject. “What are you doing down here?”

  “I was planning to … ah … dance with Mary, but she has chosen to stay home instead.”

  “You live next door, surely you could dance with her anytime you want,” Leander said.

  “This was going to be special, though…” he said.

  “Tell me something else embarrassing about Lelo here,” Isabel said, cupping her elbow in the palm of her hand and smiling over her champagne glass.

  Charles blinked at her,
surprised at the question.

  “Leander’s the best baseball player in the county,” he said. “All the girls come from far and wide to see him play.”

  “Baseball?” Isabel asked.

  “It’s a boy’s game,” Leander said dismissively.

  “Leander’s the best damned outfielder on the Niagara Frontier,” Charles repeated.

  “Is that so, Lelo?” Isabel asked, enjoying his embarrassment. “The best on the Niagara Frontier?”

  “I can’t believe Mary would miss this,” Charles said. “I thought she’d want to meet the president.”

  “Even I want to see him,” Isabel said. “I’m curious to see if he’s as ugly as he looks in his pictures.”

  Charles screwed his face up in surprise. “He’s a great man that has shouldered a terrible burden.”

  “A great man?” she asked. “I hear his accent is so ridiculous that the last time he was in New York, they had to hire someone to translate.”

  “Have they forgotten English in New York already?” Charles asked with a frown, then pointedly turned toward Leander.

  “How do you like living downtown?” he asked him. “Do you like your new apartment?”

  Isabel’s face flashed anger.

  “He doesn’t use that squalid little place,” she said. “He stays with me.”

  Leander flushed red, and Charles looked down at his shoes.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Leander asked, turning on her.

  “It’s true, is it not?” she asked.

  “That’s not the point,” he said, flustered. “Charlie is a family friend. What of your reputation? You’ll create a scandal.”

  “Scandal is exactly what you need,” she said with a sweet smile. “You think I don’t know when I’m being paraded around? I am only helping your reputation as a man about town. You should thank me.”

  “Leander,” his father’s voice boomed from behind him. “I’ll have a word with you.”

  The tone he used made Leander feel like he was being sent into the yard for a switch. Even though Leander was used to being one of the bigger men in any room, his father always seemed larger, like a holdover from a time when giants walked the earth.