The threat was enough to make Jane abandon Scared Little Sister and put some distance between her and the policeman. She’d been in the workhouse once already, and had escaped after the longest month of her life. Going back there would be worse even than being caught again by Riley Steen.
Moving quickly, invisible again, she skirted the crowd and hopped nimbly into the empty bed of a fish cart. From there she could see that the ropes blocked off one of the docks. Crowds were gathered on the adjacent docks, people pointing occasionally and shaking their heads much as the policeman had. So there was something to see, but how to see it? Jane looked around, kicking the cart in frustration.
There: the docks each had ladders at their sides going down to the water. Jane jumped out of the cart and hurried to the base of the dock that extended White Hart Street. Just to the east, between White Hart and Broad Streets, a cluster of police sat in a small boat, lashed to the pilings of the roped-off dock. She climbed down the slippery ladder and spider-crawled across the struts supporting the White Hart dock on its pilings, a tang in her nostrils that seemed to be more than just rotten seaweed from the brackish water lapping at her feet.
Peering from underneath the dock, Jane saw the policemen in the boat, aided by dockworkers with a block and tackle, raise a long, wide canoe from the waters. One of the ropes caught and the canoe tilted toward her, spilling dirty water and exposing the pale bodies of naked children, packed side to side with bent knees and hands clasped over the ragged wounds in their breasts.
“Oh, Daddy,” Jane whispered. “Poor Little Bree.” She could see him near the back of the skiff, a trickle of water running from his open mouth. The canoe shifted again, and his dark purple heart fell from his dead hands to splash in the river.
And she could see Deirdre, and Paulo, before the canoe swung back level and was hoisted onto the deck. A wave of gasps and shocked cries swept through the crowd, and the police began shoving people farther away from the horror that sat dripping on the weatherbeaten dock.
Little Bree, and Deirdre and Paulo and all the rest, had lain dead in the same water that slapped at the pilings just below Jane’s feet. Their hearts are still there, she thought. Their hearts are still in the water, beating in time to the dirty waves. Her own heart seemed to stop for a very long time, building a sickening ache in her throat; when it finally beat again, its hammering shook her grip on the slick timbers. She scrambled up underneath the dock and pressed herself into a corner amid spiderwebs, afraid to stay near the water but more terrified still that if she moved she would slip and fall in, to drown in the dark water among the ghosts of dead children.
Stephen stood on the slanting porch of his small cabin, listening to the laughter of the other slaves gathered inside for Christmas supper. It wasn’t in him to smile today, and he had come outside to sit and have a pipe and figure out why; but he was neither sitting nor smoking. Instead he was looking to his left at the broad path that sloped down from the hotel’s sun porch, crossing the packed earth of the stagecoach turnaround and winding amid debris from the saltpeter mining—old poplar trunks used as piping, mounds of leached earth and sprouting weeds, a broken wheelbarrow—and ending out of his sight, at the rim of the gaping pit that enclosed the cave entrance. Under Stephen’s feet lay Houchins Narrows, the stoop that marked the end of the entrance and the beginning of the real cave. After that came the vast Rotunda, which split into the Main Cave and Audobon Avenue. And after that … he rubbed his face, trying to get the sand out of his eyes and his head. Sleep had been difficult these last few days, and all of his dreams were of the cave, in particular of the odd square chamber behind Bottomless Pit and the voice he’d heard here. This voice spoke to him, drowning out the other voices in the cave, swelling into a thunder that left him headachy and irritable when he woke. It came not from the mummy, but from the stone face looming over the altar, the face with its ringed eyes and fanged mouth. Its lips did not move, but the voice was clear, and Stephen feared that he was going insane.
When I return, Stephen, a new world will be born. A new world, and in it you will have all that is forbidden you now. Not a slave, but a man, Stephen.
Would you be a man?
“I am,” he said softly, seeing his breath in the afternoon sun and knowing he lied. He was privileged, certainly; perhaps indispensable, even, to Dr. Croghan and his grand plans for “The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.” Stephen’s lip curled as he thought of all of the gaudy names Croghan insisted he attach to rooms and rocks in the cave, names like River Styx and Audobon Avenue that bent the cave out of shape, making it a toy for Croghan’s self-regard and the wealthy visitors who made Stephen so useful. And Stephen used the names, too, but he knew them for what they were: words that had no real bearing on the places they were supposed to define. This knowledge had come by way of the voice, the silent statue speaking the word Chicomoztoc and the syllables reverberating through Stephen’s mind. The cave’s true name.
Freedom, it promised him, but something was missing. Stephen was canny enough to realize when he was being treated as a resource—which was, in his experience, always—and he instinctively questioned the voice’s promises. What was this new world and how would it be different from the one he lived in now?
You will be a man. The simple assertion, confident and infuriating.
I am already.
Stephen’s reverie was interrupted by Nick Bransford’s arrival on the porch. “Lord help me if Charlotte can’t cook,” Nick said, patting his lean stomach. He sat on the step, stretching his long legs out onto the ground and contentedly picking his teeth.
“What’s on your mind, Stephen?” Nick asked after a silence punctuated by a burst of laughter from the cabin. “It’s Christmas, ain’t it?”
Stephen didn’t answer immediately. When he did, the sound of his voice surprised him; he sounded old. “Sure, Nick, it’s Christmas. I’m just not sure what I’m celebrating.”
“Charlotte’s cooking, for starters.” Nick laughed and tossed his toothpick into the grass. Frost was beginning to form in the lengthening afternoon shadows, and those shadows grew in Nick’s face as his smile faded. “Your problem is too many ideas. You got to get all them big schemes out of your head. Christmas is just a day when we don’t have to work and we can sing around a fire without the white folks bothering us. Don’t have to be no more than that.”
“Maybe not.”
Stephen packed his pipe, feeling the texture of the clay and tobacco, smelling the richness of the weed’s smell against the sharp clarity of winter air. He struck a match on the sole of his shoe and sat next to Nick, trying to rid himself of the strange distance he’d been feeling since the dreams began; it wouldn’t hurt just to sing around a fire and enjoy a full belly.
But the big ideas wouldn’t go away.
“Ever hear of Monrovia, Nick?”
“Town in Illinois, ain’t it?”
“No, a place in Africa. Set up by free Negroes who wanted to go back. Feel like I want to go there sometimes, take the boat the other way, see my mother’s country. Be free. Be a man.” The smoke tasted good on Stephen’s tongue. He started to relax the slightest bit.
“Got to get that idea out of your head too.” Nick looked troubled, shadows marking creases in his forehead and chin. “Dr. Croghan ain’t gonna let you go to Africa. If you left, who’d show off for fancy English doctors? Problem with you, boy, is you learned how to read and got full of ideas that don’t have nothing to do with you. We ever get whipped? We ever go without? No. The woods is full of deer, there’s fish in the river, and people come from all around the world just to go into the cave with you. Think you’ll have it that good in Monrovia?” Nick let the question hang in the air for a while before he went on. “You got to live where you are, not go moonin’ around about Africa. Besides, your daddy was a Indian, so you’re in his country. Best leave that other alone.”
“My daddy wasn’t an Indian,” Stephen said. “That’s just another story for British doctors
.” His pipe had gone out; he struck another match and gazed into the flame. “My father is a white man,” he said, the quiet words ruffling the flame, “and I know who he is. You know him too,” Stephen finished, and relit his pipe.
“Hold on.” Nick looked away and stood, his hands fluttering like bat’s wings, as if to brush away Stephen’s words. “I don’t know nothing and I don’t want to. Your daddy could be Andrew Jackson and it wouldn’t make no difference—you’d still be a nigger in Kentucky with a pretty wife inside cutting mince pie. You know what’s good for you, you’ll go on in and have some of that pie and forget all about Africa and your white daddy. I know that’s what I’m going to do.”
Stephen smoked the rest of his pipe after Nick went inside, wondering if perhaps the Bransford boy was right. Boy, he thought. When did an eighteen-year-old get to be a boy to you? That’s a white man’s thought. Stephen shook his head and tapped out his pipe; his twenty-second birthday was months away yet, but in the last week he’d felt a hundred.
I am a man, he thought, hearing the voice again. It whispered in the leaves of the tulip poplars lining the cave trail. I am.
Cries of “Extra!” rang through the crowd as Jane hurried up Pearl Street, nervous because the sun had gone down and she was out of the safety of the gaslit avenues. The stink of the docks followed her, clinging to her clothes and surrounding her in the smells of dead things and fear. She avoided the glance of a staggering Indian, looking down at her battered shoes and seeing the dried river scum streaking them. Again she thought of the hungry water lapping at her feet, the secret sounds of things moving among pilings. All she wanted was to be home, to stash today’s silver and hide away.
“Extra! Murdered children! Indian murder on the dockside! Extra!”
Jane quickened her pace to a near run. What sort of person could kill children, Little Bree and Deirdre and all the rest? What had happened to Little Bree’s rabbit? Dinner, no doubt, for whoever had found it hopping frightened down an alleyway. Jane wished for a home, a real home with bedsheets and a kitchen table and warm light shining through its windows onto the street. She skirted the edge of Franklin Square, where Cherry, Frankfort, and Dover Streets emptied into an oblong plaza of rutted, snow-covered mud. A few trees straggled up from this mud, having somehow survived the crush of wheels and feet.
Pearl Street came out the other side of the square and curled back north and west until it intersected Broadway across from the hospital. Jane could visualize the whole of New York in her head, and thinking of maps soothed her, drew her mind away from dead friends in sunken canoes. She had an actual map of the city tacked up back in her burrow, one of many maps that helped remind her that there were places where a girl and her Da might go to live other than cold filthy stairwells and tenements.
Jane ducked into the gap between MacGavran’s grocery and the meeting hall whose back stair hid her den. The stair rose perhaps four feet from a cobblestone courtyard to a recessed door, with one side of it built against the brick of the grocery’s rear wall. Jane didn’t know who met in the hall there, but groups of men came and went every Thursday evening. The open side of the stair had been walled off by a row of planks buttressed by a single diagonal board, and the enclosed triangular space was Jane’s home. Her burrow.
Pulling aside a loose plank, she crawled under the stair and sat quietly for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. She realized that she’d been holding her breath; it came out of her in a long whoosh as she saw that nobody had disturbed her home. The pile of blankets, the lamp on the floor, the flat stone in the corner covering her treasure hole—everything was as she’d left it. Hooking a finger through the knothole of the loose plank, she pulled it back to its original position, closing herself off from the alley and the city beyond it.
She took another deep breath, let it out as she dug a match from her pocket and lit the lamp, keeping the flame low even though she’d plugged all the holes in the planking that enclosed her little space. Outside in the square, and on Cherry Street running away from it, nightfall would bring out the roving gangs that frightened even the police, who wouldn’t patrol this district in groups of fewer than six. One night in late fall, Jane had peered out her knothole and seen two men hastily burying a dead sailor beneath a pile of rubbish. The dead man hadn’t been discovered for nearly two weeks, and then only because a pig had scented him rotting beneath the heap and dragged his body out for a feast. Jane had been more careful coming and going at night since then, and she had double-checked that all of the chinks in her wall were well filled; but she was still glad to be here because being here meant she was really free of Riley Steen.
Thinking of Steen gave her a chill. She pulled off her shoes and wrapped a blanket around herself, relaxing on her bed. Her eyes went automatically to her favorite map as she settled against the warm bricks of the grocery’s wall. It was a complete rendering of the United States, extending all the way from the Florida territory north to Maine and west to the Mississippi River and the Republic of Texas. Jane couldn’t read, but she knew her letters and had learned to recognize some of the names on the map. Mississippi was one, with all those s’s in it, and the river snaked like an endless series of esses down to the ocean. Jane imagined it too wide to see across, the buildings of St. Louis barely visible across the expanse of brown water, steamboats blowing their horns up and down, leaving trails like clumsy ducks that couldn’t fly.
I will see the Mississippi someday, she swore for the hundredth time. St. Louis, too, and maybe even all the way across the Rocky Mountains to California or Oregon, following Lewis and Clark and looking out for Indians along the way.
She got another chill at the thought of Indians, and snuggled deeper into her bed of rags. People were saying that Indians had murdered Little Bree and the others because the bodies were mutilated and packed in a canoe. Jane had gathered this from eavesdropping on her way back from the docks, and had gathered also that New Yorkers believed it and were angrily ready to do something about it. She thought of the drunken Indian she’d seen on Pearl Street and wondered if he would end the night buried in a trash heap like that sailor.
Now she was crying again, quietly, a tear itching as it trickled down her scarred cheek. All those children, and how many of their mothers even knew they were gone? And if she’d been among them, her father would not have missed her. She continued to cry, still quiet and mindful of the dangers beyond the loose plank in the wall. Eventually she fell asleep, silently weeping and thinking of her father and brown rivers too wide to cross.
Breaking glass woke her. She scrambled to her feet in the darkness, listening for another sound from outside. Her lamp had burned out, Jane guessed; at least it hadn’t fallen over, or she wouldn’t have had to worry about her father or her scarred face ever again.
“He came down here. I saw him.”
Jane crept to the knothole, unplugged it, and peered out. Two men walked slowly around behind the grocery. They wore heavy boots, and one a long coat and full beard. The other sweated in a thick woolen sweater, his head shaven under a black watch cap.
The bearded one looked directly at her, and she froze perfectly still, not even daring to blink.
“There he is,” the man said. He drew a knife from within the folds of his coat, and Jane heard a rustle from just to the right of the loose plank. “Ain’t a good time for a redskin to be out alone, friend,” the bald sailor said. “Why, you might be a damned murderer.”
“Our civic duty,” continued the first sailor. “Remove murderers from the streets.” Together they stepped forward.
Jane heard the Indian stand up. “You would do well to leave me alone,” he said slowly in a strange whisper, a sound that buzzed around in Jane’s head after he’d finished speaking. The words sounded odd; she’d never heard an Indian speak before.
They were going to kill him, she knew. It was wrong. They didn’t know who had murdered the children.
But what if they did? What if this Indian
had? Why was he outside her burrow, today, with her friends killed just yesterday?
“Leave you alone?” The sailor with the knife took another step toward the Indian, who Jane still couldn’t see. “Redskin, we’re going to get together. We’re gonna get real close.”
Jane gritted her teeth, wishing she could see more through the knothole. She didn’t know what to do; if she made some kind of noise, it might distract the sailors long enough for the Indian to escape, but what if she did that and he turned out to be the murderer? What if he came back for her another time?
“Look here, Dixie,” the bald sailor said. “He ain’t a redskin, he’s a nigger. Look at him.”
Dixie shrugged. “He’s dressed like a redskin; likely acts like one too, don’t you, chief? I’m surprised you didn’t scalp them children, chief; but if you’re just a nigger trying to act like an Indian, I guess that don’t surprise me.”
“I want his coat,” the bald sailor said. “Always did think feathers were nice.”
“Last chance,” the Indian said in that same buzzing whisper.
“Your last chance, chief.” Dixie lunged forward, out of Jane’s field of vision.
She heard a harsh scrape as the knife blade grated across a hard surface, and suddenly the scarred side of her face itched madly. The feeling spread down her arm and across her back until it felt like her skin was trying to fight its way out of her clothes. At the same time, a low growl rose from outside, the sound reminding her of a caged tiger she’d seen once in Battery Park. “Christ, let me go!” Dixie was pleading; then his voice was cut off in a series of sharp cracks.
Something slammed into the loose plank, punching it into Jane’s face and knocking her backward. Blood ran from her nose and she screamed as it began crawling sideways, spreading out over her itching scars. Wherever it touched, the itching subsided.
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