All Those Vanished Engines

by Paul Park

  We coud see where the enemy had torn down the trees and made a new road thru the woods and rold their enjns on the big logs. We lisend to the guns.

  “Oh, look,” she sed. Mor guns now, and then the canons. Then we watcht the great behemoth slide down out of the wood, bellowing its smoke and steam, smashing hard thru the dyk and then exploding in a roar of sparks and dirty sindrs falling from the sky. The wind blew the smoke away, and we saw the soljers and the colej men along the dyk were lying down. No one was moving on the lip of the raw kratr where the enjn had blown up. But on the hilside we could hear the soft pop-popping of the guns.

  “God oh God,” she sed.

  I was carving the basket. I wanted to go bak, but she cot my sleve. We ran away, and I was crying. In the afternoon we ate the bacon sandwiches, crouching in a rocky del along the rij of the hil a few miles south of town.

  We didnt go bak. Later after sunset, shivring and hungry, she tukt her chin into her coat. “Tel me a story,” she said—“your so good at inventing things. Coud you tel me an adventur story with a narro escape, but maybe with a happy ending at the end? Somthing with a boy and a girl who get away?”

  Peopl said that about me, that I was good at making things up. But all I ever did was steal and plajerize and cobl things together. My mother used to say ther wer three things: the truth, our memry or percepshun of the truth, and what we make up. That nite I was too ankshus and tired and sad to think about those three things. I was woried about my famly and so was she. I thot I woud tel her a warm-wether story of the past. I woud use what was hapning rite now—she would like that. She woud recognize herself. But I woud mix her in with stories from my mothers childhood in Petersburg. And I woud cast them even farthr bakward into the safe time past, another 40, 50 years to shake them loos. What was Petersburg, Virginia, like in the 1880s or 90s? It didnt matr. Ther was no comfort in the truth. I stood up and clapd my mittnd hands and tryd not to think about what mite be watching our campfire, a glo between the trees of the wild wood. I blew out a mist of breth, choosing, because I could not think of a beginning, to start in the midl:

  She had not been called down to supper, and it was already dark. She must have dozed off. Her candle had burned out. It was too hot in her room to lie under the covers, too hot to wear anything but her small camisole.

  She lay clasping her doll with the gutta-percha head. She was startled when the sound came in the window from the Marshall Street side. Who was watching her? Her bedroom was on the second floor above the mews. Light seeped in through the wooden shutters. Of course before retiring she had bent back the window-lock with the penknife Cousin Adolphus had given her. She had pulled up the sash to catch the nonexistent breeze.

  “You sound just like a book,” sed my frend. “So old-fashioned. ‘Before retiring…’ And whats a camisole? No—dont tel me. I can gues. Sorry I interuptd.…”

  The sound came again, a rattle on the slats. In the dark room she put the tray aside. She slid out of bed and retrieved her dressing gown from the hook inside the door. Then she pushed open the casement shutters and peered into the street. She saw someone standing below her in the narrow, cobblestoned mews, and she recognized the colonel’s voice, a high-pitched whisper. “I’ve got the horses.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Girl,” he said, “don’t argue with me.”

  Unsure, she crossed her arms over her chest.

  He made a hissing sound. “Andrew didn’t give you my letter? Be quick—”

  They were interrupted by a soft knocking at the door on the other side of the room, and Gram’s voice. “Paulina, dear, may I talk to you?”

  She didn’t sound angry. And what did she mean by “dear”? In the darkness, the girl climbed to the other side of the bed and to the door. She heard the old lady fumbling with the outside lock. But she had her own key on the inside. Turning it, she waited for a snarl as the knob shook. “Child, open this.”

  “Just a minute.”

  She found another candle stub, lit it, and pressed it into the candlestick on the tray where she’d been writing. She heard a noise behind her. The colonel had managed to climb up the wisteria vine below her window. Now he slid over the sill. Though he was dressed for riding, his shirt was made of institutional gray serge, and his cap bore an embroidered patch: Holyrood Hospital.

  Too late he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror in the wardrobe door. He pulled the cap from his head and slid it into the pocket of his coat. Paulina was not reassured by his staring eyes and tangled hair. “Shush!” he said. “Don’t say a word.”

  “Child, open this door! Is there someone there with you?”

  The colonel made an exaggerated grimace. He pantomimed the need for silence with a high-stepping tiptoe and a long finger in front of his lips. This display of his antic self made her forget about the cap, and when with stealthy tread he came to her and whispered in her ear, she did not pull away. “That woman, she intends to murder you.”

  This was shocking news, of course. “Child, open the door.” The knob twisted back and forth, and Paulina heard something scratching at the lock plate.

  “Furthermore,” the colonel said into her ear, “she is not even your grandmother.”

  Before she had a chance to respond there came a crash and then another. Something was smashing through the panel of the door next to the lock, a blade of some kind. She’d moved over to the window, but now she turned. With the candle flame between them, she saw Andrew mostly in silhouette, lit from behind by the brighter gaslight in the hall. Dressed in shirtsleeves and suspenders, he carried an axe in his hand. He reached through the splintered panel and unlocked the door.

  The wallpaper behind him was garish and red. His face shone with sweat. But then his expression changed. He ducked his head and disappeared, retreating back into the corridor. Paulina turned to her cousin; he had opened his shirt and pulled a long-barreled revolver from a holster underneath his armpit. He stretched out his left arm, pointing the gun, and for a moment they were alone.

  He peered out the window. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and wiped his high forehead, running the fingers of his right hand over the crown of his head and back through his long hair. “I’ll get dressed,” Paulina said, uncertain.

  “Oh, but it’s too late. They will have taken the horses.”

  “But … didn’t you say we had to go?”

  “In a minute. When they arrest you, be sure to bring that book—what’s that, your diary? Perhaps they will let you make a record. And your doll. You know it was the one thing they let you keep after the Battle of the Crater. A gift from your real mother.”

  Eyes on the door, the gun silent in his left hand, he held out the other one and she took it hesitantly, for the sake of the lump-cat and his kindness through the years. “The diary is so I can talk into the future,” she said. “Maybe I can talk to the people there.”

  He smiled. “Of course. That’s what writing is. What else could it be?” He put up the gun and called out toward the broken door. “I surrender. There’s no need.”

  Then came a pause, and some whispering in the corridor. The door slammed open and some men were trooping in, four members of the Petropolitan Police with their high hats and brass badges and mustachios. Paulina crossed her hands over the lapels of her dressing gown. Adolphus Claiborne put his gun down on the floor. Gram was there: “I was afraid he’d hurt the child!” The colonel stood with his neck bent, his face hidden in his hair, while one of the policemen held his arm. But at the last instant he wrestled free and was gone out the window while the police shouted and cursed.

  Paulina sat down on the edge of the bed where he had been. She closed her eyes. In her imagination she could see him slithering down the wisteria and then jumping the last distance. She could see him running up the mews, his boots striking sparks from the cobblestones in the steaming night. When she opened them again, her grandmother was standing beside her, a small, thin-lipped woman whose face was scarc
ely higher than her own.

  She hugged her doll and wondered if what the colonel said was true or even partly true. How had she found herself here in this terrible place? Mrs. McKenney at that moment looked like what she was, one of the first citizens of the town, relict of a judge and congressman who had given his house for a public library. She took off her platinum spectacles with the carved floral pattern. She polished them with a monogrammed handkerchief she took out of her sleeve. The temple bows ended in sharp points. She thanked the officers for their prompt response. She showed no sign of explaining, or needing to explain, the shattered door panel, or even what had happened in the room. But after a moment she took some money from her reticule and then the men marched out again, and the corridor was empty.

  Paulina glanced down at the floor beside the bed. Her cousin’s revolver had disappeared. Perhaps he was a madman after all. “Child,” Gram said, “that was unfortunate. Did he hurt you in any way, or give you anything? You have Andrew to thank. Because of him we were forewarned.”

  “You might have been forewarned. I wasn’t.”

  “Child, don’t argue—”

  “You used me as bait.”

  “Child, he is a dangerous criminal, wanted by the police. We gave him too much credit, because he was with Mahone at the Crater’s Mouth. Let us not think about it anymore. Tonight is a special night. There is a celebration in your honor at the library. These clothes are not suitable. It is time to put away your doll.”

  Paulina stared at her. As always, under her gaze the old lady seemed to wilt, and soften, and resume her doddering old self. Blinking, she bowed her head and then scuttled sideways out the door, holding her skirts as if there were some puddle of something on the floor. Andrew came in, his face so full of blandness that Paulina doubted her own memory even of something not thirty minutes old. She had to look back and forth between him and the smashed door, recasting in her mind his staring eyes and shining teeth, the axe in his hand.

  She rose to her feet, stood beside the bed. “Miss,” he said, bowing slightly. “Your grandmother has asked you to come downstairs. She has chosen some clothes for you.” He laid something wrapped in paper on the end of the bed.

  Paulina studied his familiar face, trying to figure out how she should feel—relieved? Betrayed?

  “Andrew,” she said, “my cousin gave you a letter.”

  His smile, intended to be reassuring, already showed some strain, some underlying grimness.

  He moved to the window and shut it, at the same time examining the broken lock at the top of the sash. His hair, straightened and brilliantined, shone like a solid surface in the candlelight. Paulina watched him give a quick signal through the glass, a flick of his gloved fingers. “Miss,” he said, “I’ll be outside in the hall.”

  “Please wait for me downstairs.”

  “I’ll be outside in case that fellow returns. Mrs. McKenney is awful concerned.”

  “Please wait downstairs. That fellow is Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, my father’s cousin, whom I’ve known my entire life. You had a letter from him. What did it say? Where did he intend to take me … in such haste?”

  “Miss, he’s no kin to you. Just so’s you know.”

  When he was gone, when she was left alone, Paulina saw her diary and her doll, also, had disappeared, though she had not seen him pick them up. Bewildered, she sat for a moment in silence. That night familiar things had turned unfamiliar and then back again. She got up to close the broken door and then stood behind it, trying to maintain a sense of privacy as she took off her robe.

  On the bed, inside the tissue paper, carefully folded, lay a white lace and chiffon princess gown, embroidered with rhinestones and seed pearls. There was a tiara and even a scepter, and as she unwrapped it Paulina realized what she was holding. This was a Mardi Gras dress. Tonight was the night of the UDC Mardi Gras ball, which Gram gave each year in memory of her own father and mother, both long deceased, Addison Pickerel, the “handsome captain of the Crescent City rifles,” and Justine Lockett-Pickerel, the spy.

  What had Gram said? A celebration in her honor? In previous years, Paulina had never been allowed to attend. Now she was sixteen, maybe that was going to change.

  Not knowing what else to do, she made herself ready. As she slipped the dress over her head, as she pulled it down over her narrow hips, she sensed tiny intimations of disaster. But they were interspersed with other feelings: excitement, even anticipation. She picked up the scepter.

  At that moment a distant orchestra commenced their program as if they had been waiting for her signal, not in Marshall Street, but somewhere in the big house around the corner on Sycamore, the William R. McKenney Library, which her grandmother reclaimed once a year for this event. Over the strains of the waltz, Paulina heard the first explosions of squibs and bottle rockets. And it occurred to her that everything so far that evening had been part of a performance, choreographed and rehearsed, the onset of a festival of chaos and reversal in honor of the lords of misrule. All her life she’d had to wear black whenever she went out in public, but not tonight. She was a tall, skinny girl, too tall for most of the clothes Gram got for her. But this gown fitted her as if it had been made especially, with a tight bodice and a row of rhinestones up her back.

  When she came into the hall, she saw Andrew had wore a striped waistcoat under his jacket, and was waiting to escort her away from the wrecked door. He followed at a discreet distance as she stepped downstairs, then moved ahead of her to unlock and thrust open the door onto the street. “You look very pretty, miss,” he murmured as she walked past him onto the porch.

  “Thank you.” This was not an impression she was used to. Touched, despite herself, with a sense of gratitude that almost felt like happiness, Paulina stepped into the street. Behind Gram’s motorcar, pulled up at the curb, horses had stood under her window. A houseboy was sweeping the evidence into the gutter.

  She looked up at the sky. For many weeks she had been observing the progress of the red planet, which that spring was closer to Earth than any time in memory. Sometimes it was so bright in the early evening, before the lamps were lit, that she saw it from her bedroom window.

  Tonight the sky was low and close. Paulina followed the lanterns that hung from hooks in the brick wall, glowing spheres in the sweltering mist, each surrounded by a cloud of bugs. Already she could feel the sweat along her arms. In her dancing shoes, she stumbled on the cobblestones. With Andrew behind her, she made her way around the corner to the library, where, in serried ranks under the porte cochere, she saw the leadership of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and not just the Virginia branch. Some of these ladies, identifiable by their bright cockades, were from Georgia or the Carolinas, some even from faraway New Orleans, where Gram’s mother had died of tuberculosis in the Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street, a martyr to the cause, whatever cause it might have been.

  The orchestra, stashed somewhere out of sight, ended their rendition of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” and swept immediately into “If Ever I Cease to Love.” Gram—Mrs. McKenney—stood with the guests of honor. She wore a headdress of ostrich and egret plumes with an enormous paste-and-marcasite medallion in the front. She looked ridiculous, an impression furthered by her fumbling hands and doddering gait, her expression of soft senescence so at odds with the platinum-pointed sharpness she had shown earlier in Paulina’s bedroom. Perhaps for that reason, the girl found herself comforted by what ordinarily exasperated her. Later on, when she tried to reconstruct how it was possible that she should so quickly forget the colonel’s warnings, she thought it was not only because of the dress. But it was also the way Gram wagged her chin as she spoke to Miss Lavinia Bragg and Miss Annette Jackson, and the surreptitious way those two ladies caught each other’s eye and tried both to suppress and reveal their condescending smiles. Paulina knew how they felt. In any case, there was no danger here. Cousin Adolphus must have been wrong to think so.

  No one else carried a scepter. Andrew led he
r up the library steps, up into the atrium, and up the grand staircase to the ballroom on the second floor, which was usually kept locked. Ordinarily colored people weren’t allowed inside the main library building, though there was a room in the basement with a separate entrance, specifically established in Judge McKenney’s will. But Andrew, in his striped waistcoat, seemed to have a ceremonial role in these proceedings; he led Paulina to a dais in the middle of the floor, and then left her to escort the others to predetermined places on the raised benches lining the walls.

  Standing on the dais, observed by so many eyes, in her mind Paulina moved as if through alternating currents of reassurance and unease. But even so: perhaps this was the night, she thought, when she would learn something new about herself, something real. Maybe she would learn who her parents were, or maybe something else that was all her own. Surely that was worth a risk. Now, finally, Andrew was closing the doors as, smiling and nodding, her grandmother moved toward her up the center aisle.

  For the second or third time that evening, as she moved she seemed to change. Inside the hall the gas chandelier gave off a new, hard light, different from the soft luminescence of the fog-bound lamps in the porte cochere. The gas jets were like little tongues, and the light reflected from the surface of her grandmother’s metallic gown as if she were encased in mirrored armor. At the same moment her ostrich-feathered headdress, ludicrous outside, appeared suddenly menacing, like the device on a medieval helmet, or the horsehair plumes of the ancient Greeks.

  In a moment, as she looked around, Paulina found herself surrounded by a host of soldiers—the other ladies in their sham finery, similarly transformed. The raised dais on which she stood, scepter in hand, no longer seemed a place of cynosure and rapt display, but instead, suddenly, a prisoner’s dock. The doors, as Andrew slammed them closed, snapped the sound of the orchestra in half.