Buck led me to a low basement door at the side of the building, affixed to the building on a slant so that the door’s near end touched the ground while the top of the door stood less than three feet higher against the side of the building. He reached down and pulled the door up and then pushed me forward down those five steps to another door, this one vertical. I seized the knob but the door was locked.
“Wait,” Buck said. He lowered the first door behind us, enclosing us in absolute darkness. The space we shared was barely large enough to allow for a yawn, so he had to squeeze past me to stand before the second door. He rapped on it with his knuckles, once, then twice more, then three times more.
A key turned in the lock on the opposite side. Then the door came open and there stood Miss Jones looking tall and brittle and terrified. The room behind her, the furnace room, was lit by a single oil lamp on a small table. She had hung black cloth over the basement’s two small windows.
“Here he is,” Buck told her, and pulled me inside.
As Buck closed and locked the door behind us, Miss Jones gestured toward the table and chair in the center of the room. “Sit here,” she told me.
I crossed to the table, the basement’s earthen floor no warmer to my feet than the ground outside. But atop the table was a small iron kettle, and from it came a warming scent of stew, of potatoes and gravy and onions and meat. Even before dropping my buttocks onto the chair I reached for the pot’s lid, lifting it up only to have Miss Jones jerk the lid from my hand.
Without explanation she laid before me a blank sheet of paper and a patent pen. Then took from the pocket of her shapeless frock another piece of paper, unfolded it, and smoothed it out beside the blank sheet. There was writing on the second sheet. She jabbed her finger at it. “Copy this over in your own hand. Quickly now.”
I read what she had written. As recompense for the loss of your skiff. A.D.
“What do I need a skiff for?” I asked.
“Write,” she said, and jabbed at the paper again.
I turned to Buck. “I’m not leaving this city, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“For Christ’s sake, Gus—sorry, Miss Jones—write the damn note!”
I did not like to see such fear on his face. And so I wrote, because Miss Jones’s words did not sound like my own, In exchange for your skiff. A.D. I waved the note through the air a couple of times, drying the ink, then handed it to Miss Jones. “I wouldn’t have used the word recompense,” I told her.
She sniffed, only mildly affronted. She then folded the paper in half, folded it a second time, and handed it to Buck, who stuffed it in a pocket and then went quickly out the basement door.
She relocked the door behind him. Then stood there for several moments leaning against it, fingers pressed to the wood.
I told her, “I’m not leaving this city. Besides, I don’t have any shoes.”
She turned and looked at me. Blinked twice. Then said, “You can eat now.”
I required no second invitation. I lifted the lid off the kettle and beheld a feast of brown gravy and chunks of brown meat, a symphony of carrots, potatoes, onions and yams.
“There’s no spoon,” I told her.
She clicked her tongue, whether at me or herself I did not know nor much care, then hurried across the room and up the stairs. I could hear her above me then, yanking open a drawer, the clatter of cutlery. With my fingers I fished a chunk of meat from the pot and popped it into my mouth and almost swooned from the rich peppery taste of it.
Her footsteps came tapping down the stairs again, so I chewed and swallowed quickly and wiped a sleeve across my mouth. She came to the table and held out the spoon. “You had the decency to wait, I hope.”
“Miss Jones, please. I am not a barbarian.”
At this she sniffed again, then drew back a step and looked me up and down. Obviously, judging by my scent and appearance, I was nothing but barbarian. “I will bring you water and a razor in the morning,” she said. “And a pair of shoes.”
“And what will the janitor do when he finds me here?”
“There is no janitor. Susan and I tended to all the duties here.”
She looked for a moment as if her face might lose its composure, as if it might suddenly break apart at all those seams and wrinkles. But she blinked, she inhaled sharply, she held herself together. “Eat,” she told me.
I did so. The pot contained twice as much stew as I could comfortably eat, but I continued to spoon it in long after my waistband had expanded, devouring every chunk of meat and scrap of vegetable if for no other reason than to show Miss Jones how grateful I was for her hospitality, for her trust in me, the love for Susan she could express in no other way.
I scraped the last spoonful of gravy from the pot, placed the spoon in my mouth and sucked it clean, then dropped the spoon clanging into the kettle. Miss Jones had spent the past ten minutes seated on the steps rising to the kitchen, staring at her hands clasped atop her knees, eyes closed as if in prayer. But she looked up at the sound of the spoon’s chiming.
“Best I ever had,” I told her, and said to myself, Except for Mrs. Clemm’s.
She said, “Half of that was intended for Mr. Kemmer.”
My stomach bubbled. “Well why in the world didn’t you say so?”
“You should have inferred as much.”
“I was too hungry to make any inferences. You should have told me.”
“It isn’t natural for a man to eat that much.”
I would have argued further but for the gurgling of my stomach. She was right; it wasn’t natural. “Is there I place I can lie down?” I asked.
“There’s a pallet laid out behind the furnace.”
I pushed back my chair and stood, then crossed to the rear of a cast-iron wood boiler. There, against a stack of neatly cut and split logs, she had prepared my bed. I went down on my knees atop it, then collapsed sideways onto the heavy quilts, my head on a goose feather pillow. The wood-beamed ceiling was not half as high here as the one in my jail cell, and for a view I had only a stack of wood to my left, the black bulk of the furnace to my right, but the blankets were soft and clean, the furnace warm with a low fire, and for the first time in a long while I actually felt a smile coming to my mouth. I remember looking at the firewood and thinking, I’ll bet Buck did that because the wood was so uniformly split and so perfectly stacked, That’s the way Buck would do it.
Unfortunately my moments of relative ease were short-lived. Soon other thoughts prevailed. Here you are in hiding again.
I did not at seventeen feel significantly different about hiding out than I had when I was a boy, which is to say that I was angered by the need to do it, made to feel ignominious by my desire for self-preservation. It came to me then that nearly everything of importance in my life had been accomplished in darkness and had required a period of concealment until the danger had passed. Was this, I wondered, the way my life was going to play itself out, the pattern I was destined to repeat?
Such did not seem appropriate for a man who, a week past, had been trying to do some good with his life. I would rather have been the kind of man who worked his small wonders by daylight, who could then at nightfall take to his bed and sleep in something like contentment until another day began. And it had seemed for a few days that I might indeed be just that type of man, a writer of stories true and unusual, to be read by people at their morning and midday meals. But apparently that had been a temporary illusion. Apparently I possessed an affinity for the darkness that was just as strong as Poe’s, just as binding.
It was an exhausting thought. Even more so when the emptiness and impossibility of Susan broke over me like a sickening wave, colder and darker than my basement hideaway could ever be, and I had to turn my face into the pillow to muffle the choking sounds I made, as if I were being slowly suffocated by my darkness.
28
I AWOKE with a start. The room was pitch-black now, the single lamp extinguished. I do not know what
had awakened me so suddenly, whether a dream noise or a real one, but I came awake by sitting up abruptly, gasping for air as if I had been underwater too long, so deep I might never have broken the surface.
Almost immediately I sensed that I was not alone. Near the foot of my pallet, somebody sitting. He moved his chair slightly, made the wood creak, to let me know he was there.
“You owe me for a flat boat,” he said. His voice was soft in the darkness. Warm. There was a sadness in it too, a weariness, but it held no anger.
“I told you before. I don’t want anything to do with a boat right now.”
“It’s already done.”
“What is, Buck?”
There was a pause before he spoke. “I punched a couple of holes in the floor of it. Hated to do that to a perfectly good boat,” he said. “Another man’s property.”
I thought I understood him then, but said nothing.
He continued. “Set it adrift out into the river.”
“How long before it went down?”
“Couple of minutes. Current should take it quite a ways yet.”
“So now I’m a boat thief as well as an escaped murderer.”
“You’re likely to be a lot of things before this is done with,” he said. “But that boat weren’t stole. You paid a silver eagle for it.”
“Who put up the money?”
“I did. But it was Miss Jones’s idea. She’s the one come up with it. Pretty clever, if you ask me.”
“If it works it is.”
“No reason it shouldn’t. A man wakes up in the morning, finds a note and a silver eagle shoved under his door. Note says here’s some money for your boat I took. So he goes to where his boat was tied up and it’s not there.”
“It won’t stop them from looking for me.”
“At least they’ll be looking down the Ohio somewhere and not here.”
I began to wonder what Poe would think of me when he heard the news, how my disappearance would erase all doubts he might have harbored concerning my guilt.
Buck must have intuited my thoughts. “They’ll be asking Mr. Poe to study that note you wrote. Identify your handwriting and all.”
“That was a good idea Miss Jones had.”
“Clever lady, like I said.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s got a sleeping room upstairs. This is her home as well as her school.”
“She must have thought the world of Susan to do this for me.”
Buck said nothing. He swallowed thickly.
I told him, “Maybe Poe will tell them I’m on my way to Mexico. That’s what we talked about doing.”
“That would be good,” Buck said. “Couldn’t hurt.”
We sat in silence for a while. Then I asked, “Did you go to the doctor’s mausoleum today?”
“Yesterday,” he said. “Right after we talked about it at the jail.”
“And?”
“It’s what made me decide to break you out of there. Except that now it don’t seem to make any sense to me.”
“What doesn’t? Breaking me out, or what you learned at the mausoleum?”
“I’ll show you in a bit,” he said. “When there’s light.”
“Tell me what you found.”
“In the morning,” he said.
His resolve was tangible, as solid as his presence. “Then at least tell me this much, Buck. Has Miss Jones talked yet with anybody from the party? The party at Brunrichter’s place?”
“Wait till morning,” he said. “She’ll come down then with something for us to eat, and she can tell you herself.”
“Why can’t you tell me now? I won’t be able to sleep anymore anyway.”
“It’ll be better if we can see each other’s face when we talk.”
“If you tell me now, I can think about things in the dark.”
“The things you think about in the dark won’t be of no use to you in the daylight. Trust me.”
He let a moment pass, then continued. “This is no way to have a conversation,” he said, “whispering like hooligans.”
In a sense Buck had already become a hooligan, a criminal on my behalf. The difference was that Buck felt no ease in the darkness, found no solace in invisibility. As a creature of the sunlight he preferred all things open and exposed. Me, I was born to be nocturnal.
But I took no pleasure from the knowledge that I was constructed that way.
I told him, “There’s no reason you have to spend the night here. You could go home to your own bed, you know.”
“I know,” he said.
And we let it go at that.
After a while I asked, “What time do you think it’s getting to be?”
“Couple hours yet before the sun’s up. Better get yourself some sleep.”
“That goes for you too.”
“Not me,” he said. “I don’t like what I see when I close my eyes.”
“You can’t stay awake forever, Buck.”
He made no reply to this. Nor could I come up with a convincing argument to counter his silence.
I eased back down atop my blankets finally, hands crossed atop my chest, and stared at where the ceiling would have been had I been able to discern it. I discovered that by staring into the darkness without effort and letting my eyes relax I could deepen the blackness and push it higher, turn it into a kind of midnight sky not a few feet but hundreds of feet above my head, a sky without ceiling that went on soft and black forever into the unimaginable reaches of empty space.
And as I lay there with no companion but for the sound of Buck’s breathing I wished for some small break in the monotonous blackness above. It did not have to be an eye of God gazing down on me; any pinpoint of light would do, any small indication or suggestion of the Particle Divine.
But I was just a boy then, and I have long since forgiven myself such desires.
MISS JONES started moving about before first light. Not that I could have seen the sunrise anyway, what with the black cloth draped over the windows. But if you are quiet and attentive you can feel the morning changing at dawn, you can sense the subtle difference just as old salts can sense a change in barometric pressure. If there are animals to watch, they will tell you too. Birds are especially useful.
Outside Miss Jones’s school there were several trees in the yard, two stately oaks that I could remember, and another three or four tulip maples. The birds had returned to those trees early that year, chickadees and phoebes and sparrows. Softly they began to twitter that morning, one or two singing at a time, just before Miss Jones’s feet first scraped across the floor overhead. In a half hour the birds would be in full chorus. Their exuberance always made me wonder if they had been taken by surprise by the sunlight, if their brains were so small that they had forgotten that the miracle of sunrise had ever happened before.
Was that such a bad way to be? I wondered. Maybe it was a blessing to have a brain so small it could retain no memories more than a few hours old. How many people did I know who could awaken each morning with a songbird’s exuberance? Was memory, and therefore regret, a natural consequence of intelligence?
This thought gave me yet another reason to feel no great pride in being human. In truth, any pride that managed to survive my first seventeen years had been wiped out in the events of the past few days. If my history, both recent and older, had taught me anything, it was that mankind’s intelligence contributes little to this world but misery.
In one of Poe’s tales he wrote of a visitor from a distant planet, a wise and witty fellow who, if a bit sarcastic, was nonetheless compassionate and well-meaning toward us humans. But in this depiction of a superior mind, I think Poe erred. For if we study our own planet we can conclude that no evidence exists to prove that intelligence makes a species more tolerant or compassionate.
It then seemed to me (and seems to me still) that somewhere between the automatic aggression of the very small-brained-the viper, the crocodile, the snapping turtle—and the selfi
sh and deliberate cruelty of the large-brained—man—there is an optimal middle ground of wit. The cow, for example. As a farmhand in Ohio I had spent numerous hours in study of the cow, who must surely be the most contentedly stupid creature on earth. Beat her flank with a stick and she will maybe roll her head your way, appeal to you with those huge trusting eyes, and issue a low “Mooo!” on her way to the slaughterhouse. But provoke the powerful crocodile, or provoke a powerful man, and the response will not likely be as innocuous as a moo.
No, intelligence does not render us docile or sweet. Intelligence makes us irritable, short-tempered, impatient, and arrogant. If a superior race from some distant planet ever does make a call on Earth, no amount of mooing will ever save us from the slaughterhouse.
In any case, such was my mood by the time Miss Jones rose from her bed to begin the day’s ablutions. I listened as she shuffled toward the rear door, paused to pull on her boots and, I imagined, a heavy flannel robe, then shuffled outside to the privy.
When a few minutes later the rear door opened and fell shut again, Buck told me, “You’d better go now if you have to. While it’s still fairly dark.”
I wasted no time in taking care of necessities, though I had to run to the privy barefooted over frosty ground. When I returned, Buck hurried to do the same. Miss Jones was waiting halfway down the staircase by then. “I’ve got a washbasin up here,” she told me.
“Do you think it’s safe to come up?”
“Stay away from the windows,” she said.
She led me to her tiny kitchen, where, as I filled myself with the scent of a thick slab of frying ham, I washed my face and hands in heated water and scrubbed at my teeth with a finger. The abrasion on my forehead was scabbing over, and the yellowing bruise on my cheek was no longer tender. None of this made me feel new but at least I felt put together again, haphazardly perhaps and with a few mismatched parts, but nonetheless complete.
Complete and stomach empty. “Is that ham for me?” I asked. “I mean for me and Buck?”
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