by Paul Boor
On the ground floor of the Port Authority Building, they stood at window after window, dealing through steel grates with officials who, from their various cages, served as experts in matters of docking permits, port taxes, and harbor law. Nicolas was told that because all his assets had been stolen from the safe of the Jilted Lady, it proved necessary for him to “procure a financial advance”—in hard cash—from an established Galveston businessman to cover his unloading expenses. He immediately thought of Pierre Bonferri, his partner in ice.
Fortunately, Nicolas and Schuyler found Bonferri in the foyer of his nearby offices, keeping company with a stable of young women eager for a turn at his Remington typewriting machine. Schuyler dallied in the outer office with the young ladies while his father retreated to Bonferri’s inner office.
Bonferri welcomed Nicolas warmly and quickly agreed to help with his problematic finances. As details were discussed, the Frenchman eyed the sad state of Nicolas’s ill-fitting trousers and bursting shoes. His brow wrinkled.
“Say, Van Horne, while you’re in town,” Bonferri said, “you might consider a new suit. I recommend Myer’s shop. He’s my favorite clothier.”
Nicolas agreed with a chuckle. “I’m afraid my garb’s better suited to the high seas,” he said. “Once we’re unloaded, I must get myself to Myer’s.”
Back at the Port Authority Building to hire some stevedores, Nicolas discovered that virtually all Galveston’s stevedores were tied to an organization controlled by the cotton jammers—the Island Society of Longshoremen, or ISL. The bureaucrat in his cage further informed Nicolas that the ISL prohibited its members from unloading “dangerous cargo” at the port of Galveston. “And Northerner ice is dangerous cargo,” the man said. “At least according to the ISL.”
“For God’s sake!” Nicolas railed at the man behind the steel bars. “What’s dangerous about ice?”
Nicolas and Schuyler were forced to walk the docks searching for laborers not tied to the ISL, though they found none.
It was noon when the Jilted Lady steamed in from the medical dock. Father and son, still without stevedores, sat on the pier, dejected, in the midst of stacks of baled cotton, hogsheads of molasses, and crates of bananas and pineapples. Captain Rossbacher scurried up to them.
“You and yer infernal ice,” he said. “I’ve heard the damnedest things.”
The river pilot explained that during his evening’s stay at the Jolly Seaman’s Inn, he’d heard dockworkers talking about an “ice trader” who’d crossed the wrong port authorities. Rossbacher further reported that while downing an eye-opener at a corner bar that morning, he’d happened to mention “New York ice” to one of the port authorities and was met with deathly quiet that fell like a curtain.
“Somebody in this port’s got it out for you, Van Horne. Can’t tell why,” he laughed, “but I know one thing. Your ice is the most accursed cargo I’ve ever carried. I’ll be right pleased to see her unloaded, so’s I can get this tub back to New Orleans.” Rossbacher looked up and down the pier. “I trust I won’t have to wait till yer damned ice melts before I can fire the Lady’s boiler.”
With that, Captain Rossbacher strode off the pier in search of further liquid refreshment.
“Looks like the cotton jammers have us stopped,” Schuyler said. “Bet I can change your luck, though. As I said, I’m in tight with their leader. I struck a bargain with the fellow on a certain business arrangement.”
“Would that ‘certain arrangement’ have to do with horse racing?”
Schuyler was taken aback. “Why . . . yes. It’s guaranteed profits, you see.”
“So I’ve heard,” Nicolas said with a smirk.
“I figured Sailortown the best spot for a new track. This voodoo fellow has a lot to say about such things. He controls the port with his cotton jammers…cops ’em a fair wage, I hear. It turned out he was happy to have my track on a parcel of open land at the end of Post Office Street, just past the brothels. He saw my racing venture as good for his end of town, I figure.”
“So you’ll talk to him about men to unload the ice.”
“Let me go see what the problem is.” Schuyler paused. “Do you happen to know this voodoo fellow’s connection to Hutch Sealy, the financier?”
“You do get about in this town, don’t you, Schuyler.”
“Quite an intriguing place. Sealy’s two sons are the most powerful men in the city, from different angles. Naturally, they hate each other.”
“I learned as much on my first visit.”
“All very hush-hush. Doctor Voodoo’s a prince of a fellow, once you meet him. Quite educated. He puts on a primitive act for his followers, but it’s an act, believe me. They’re a superstitious lot, these jammers. Curses . . . spells . . . Louisiana voodoo . . . they go for all that.”
“He’s got it in for us body-in-a-bag men.”
“I’ll go see him, Father. I don’t want you to end up like those dead chickens.”
Nicolas settled onto a cotton bale and heaved a weary sigh. “See what you can do, Son.”
“With any luck, I’ll fix things,” Schuyler said. “Then we’ll get you to my place for some rest. You can have the sofa, it’s quite cushy. No nasty seafarer’s quarters for you.”
Schuyler wrapped an arm around his father and gave a tug. “I’ll lend you some of my duds, too,” he said with an extra squeeze. “You’re looking so spare, you’ll probably swim in them.”
Schuyler hustled off to see the Voodoo Doctor while Nicolas sank onto a cotton bale, his head in his hands. The arduous voyage south would be a total loss if his ice sat at harborside, melting. But Schuyler seemed so changed, and for the positive. Perhaps the clever boy would finagle a deal somehow . . . but with this Voodoo Doctor fellow?
Nicolas looked up from his musings to find a blue-suited functionary planted in front of him, his hands on his hips, a stern look of officialdom on his face.
“Tariff inspector here, sir,” the gent said. “I believe this here’s your vessel.”
A thin, athletic-looking young man, the tariff inspector stood eye to eye with Nicolas. His long, spidery fingers wrapped nearly around the blue notebook he held. The badge on his chest, freshly polished, shone in the noonday sun.
“I’ll need to see your cargo.”
Nicolas gave a shake of his head, and was slow to stand.
“Right now, sir, if you please.”
Nicolas led the young inspector across the gangplank and aboard the Jilted Lady. The inspector walked to the line of hatches, threw the first open with a flair, and peered down for a moment before going on to the next. Nicolas followed, quickly shutting the hatches behind him.
“What’s this?” the inspector muttered to himself. “Looks like a tunnel.” The inspector made a brief entry in his notebook and set it on the deck. “I’ll need a lantern. I’m going to have a look.” Nicolas went below to retrieve an oil lamp—the smallest, dimmest he knew of—then watched as the inspector’s lean frame disappeared down Adam’s ice chimney.
Nicolas paced the deck. How long would this inspector be touring the icy catacombs? Finally, a cool draft wafted from the hatch and the inspector’s head popped out of the ice.
“Damnedest layout down there,” he said. “Tunnels everywhere. Nothing requiring tariffs that I can see, but heaven help me, at the bottom of the shaft I found this nasty item.”
Delicately pinched in his fingers, the inspector lifted a human hand onto the deck.
Coarse and callused like a workman’s, the hand had been severed well above the wrist, with half the forearm attached. The hand was missing the pinky finger from a long-healed mishap. A dingy brown crust covered the site of its crude amputation, immediately recognizable to Nicolas as the work of the Forestport sawmill’s notorious circular saw.
“Any idea how this got down there, sir?”
“Perhaps an accident? During loading?” Thinking quickly, Nicolas added, “I don’t recall such an accident, but I’d be glad to see to t
his thing’s proper disposition, with the utmost respect and dignity, of course.”
The inspector held him with a disdainful glare. “I suspect that where you come from, sir, folks know little about a proper burial.” He pulled a paper sack from his pocket, slipped the severed hand into it, and set the bag on the deck. Then he was back at his notes.
“I’m takin’ this to the city constable, Mr. Van Horne,” he said as he wrote. “He’ll be in charge of disposal and—naturally—the legal enquiry into the matter.”
The inspector stepped down from the ship and called back at Nicolas, who appeared frozen in place. “You may proceed with your unloading . . . but do take care in our town,” he added as he sauntered off with his grisly prize. “Take special care.”
73
Voodoo Doctor
“Nothing doing,” Schuyler said upon his empty-handed return. “No stevedores. The Voodoo Doctor wants to see you personally first. Seems to be some misunderstanding about your business at the medical college.”
“I’m afraid this Voodoo Doctor understands too much.”
“Don’t worry. I made him promise he wouldn’t harm you.”
The headquarters of the Island Society of Longshoremen was a short walk from Pier 28, on the edge of Sailortown. It was located on Post Office Street, an avenue lined by brothels but quiet now, in broad daylight.
It was a plain one-story brick building, windowless, with the look of a warehouse. Inside was a large hall; Schuyler led the way to the front, past row upon row of wooden chairs. A few workingmen were taking seats. The men were of various colors and nationalities. The somber, muffled conversations suggested that a speech of some importance would soon be delivered, though the podium at the front of the hall, draped in red and white bunting, was empty now.
Schuyler stepped to a door behind the podium and gave a knock. “He told me he’d be available until the speech at three o’clock,” Schuyler said. “Some foreign visitor or other.”
“Come in,” came from the other side of the unmarked door.
“His office isn’t much,” Schuyler whispered before reaching for the doorknob. “But very red.”
They entered a small office that held a half dozen wooden chairs, a large round table, and a desk. The table was piled high with promotional pamphlets and tracts. Nicolas glanced over the material, which leaned toward trade unions, improving the lot of wage earners, and Marxism. Stretched across the walls were two banners, one portraying a hammer and a plow, the other a dagger’s hilt grasped in a brawny fist.
Behind the desk sat the leader of the ISL, whom Nicolas had last seen at the lynching of the medical school’s body-in-a-bag man. The mulatto who sat atop the nefarious buckboard a year ago was unmistakable. His hair, previously a tangled nest of darkness, was now plaited to a smoother mane, and the amulet around his neck that had called up some mysterious voodoo spirit earlier was missing. He wore a clean, blue work suit, common to the jammers. Seated at his desk, leaning over the litter of journals and handwritten papers, the young man’s blunted features and bright skin gave him an entirely different air than Nicolas expected. The Voodoo Doctor appeared more business than voodoo. Still, his commanding, steely grey eyes cast a certain spell as he motioned, without offering his hand, for Schuyler and Nicolas to take the two chairs across from him.
“So you’re the ice merchant,” he said, his eyes burning holes into Nicolas.
“Recently arrived, yes.”
The youthful mulatto began to gently rock in place. His desk chair squeaked. He picked up a hefty letter opener crafted of whalebone and began tapping it on his other hand to the rhythm of his chair’s creaking. “I believe, sir, you are also a grave robber.”
“No, sir, absolutely untrue. I never open graves, and I never shall.”
“Body snatcher, then.”
“No.”
“How, precisely, does one obtain dead bodies without robbing graves or stealing them from loved ones?”
The Voodoo Doctor’s tone, too, seemed surprisingly erudite, and calm. The man clearly had two different ways of speaking, two different personas.
Nicolas leaned forward in his chair. “You see, sir,” he began in earnest, “the dead bodies I supply for the education of medical men come to me in various ways, mostly as unclaimed bodies, without family. They were never destined for a decent burial. They come from all parts of the Northeast.”
“The North, you say?”
“The upper reaches of New York State.”
“They weren’t dug from potter’s fields then?”
“No, sir. That would be outright thievery. I am not interested in burial clothes or jewelry or gold teeth, only their earthly bodies, and only so that medical men—scientists—can learn from them.”
The surprise on the young man’s face reawakened in Nicolas the sights he’d seen on his first visit to the Medical College of Galveston. He could never forget the lynching he and Adam had witnessed, with this odd ruffian leading the atrocity. But Nicolas also envisioned Professor Keiller’s vats and anatomy facility at the medical college, the hanging bodies reeking of formaldehyde. Those corpses, he recalled, were solely of the impoverished, and nearly all colored folks. From potter’s fields.
“How can I be expected to believe you?” the Voodoo Doctor asked. “For years, ever since the medical college opened, the graves of our people, the colored cemeteries and potter’s fields throughout the South, have been defiled by criminals such as you.”
“I’ve heard that, yes, but that hardly allows one to take the law into one’s own hands, does it?”
The Voodoo Doctor looked away, stared at a banner on the wall. “I regret having to resort to violence, but that man was thoroughly warned, and he would not desist. The law does nothing to these grave robbers. In some cases, violence serves as a means to an end.”
“I disagree,” Nicolas said. “I’ve had too much of violence, and I find it accomplishes nothing.”
The Voodoo Doctor refixed his stealthy stare on Nicolas. “I admit, sir, you surprise me.” He motioned toward Schuyler. “I’ve come to know Sky here, and he seems a decent sort. Somehow, I expected something else of you, Mr. Van Horne.”
“Perhaps your mind is open to the prospect of learning, then? Even at the medical college?”
“Oh, I don’t fault them for their anatomy lessons. But the graves of my people, of the poor, those I will defend until . . . yet you say you don’t defile our graves? I can’t believe that.”
“Perhaps you must trust me.”
“No.” The Voodoo Doctor leaned forward, set his letter opener on the desk with a thump, and swung back his mane of hair. “I must see these bodies you brought from the North,” he said.
“I suppose . . . I suppose that could be arranged.”
“If it’s like you say, you and Sky can have your laborers.”
“There’s a professor at the college, a gent named Keiller. It’s him you must see. I’ll arrange what I can.”
Once they were back on Post Office Street outside the ISL headquarters, Schuyler leaned in close and said, “I’m beginning to think this town’s not safe for you, Father. In too many ways to count.”
“Doomed to deal with murderers on all fronts, aren’t I?”
“You’d best catch the first train and vamoose. Let me manage the ice.”
“I’ll not run,” Nicolas said with a shake of his head. “I’d only be running again in the North Country, and I’ve had my fill of that. For now, I’m going to get word to Keiller about a visitor.”
At dawn the following day six well-muscled stevedores of the ISL appeared on Pier 28. The crack team of dockworkers secured the ship’s cargo of thirty thousand tons in the new Van Horne icehouse by the time the sun began to set over the bay.
“They demand a hefty wage,” Schuyler said, “but they earn every penny.” A broad smile lit his face. “I take it your professor convinced the Voodoo Doc.”
In the long shadows at the end of day, Captain Henry
Rossbacher waved farewell to the Van Hornes and the Jilted Lady steamed off. Father and son, weary from the unloading, walked to Schuyler’s flat, an airy set of rooms above a local apothecary by the name of Tackleberry.
As they passed the apothecary’s shop, Nicolas hesitated. The window display of hypodermics sparkled with a steely allure. The door swung open. A gentleman exited. Nicolas’s heart lurched at the powerful medicinal fragrance drifting out. It was all too familiar. Tackleberry was preparing a mix in his laboratorium.
Nicolas shuffled his feet on the sidewalk. “My stomach’s been sour,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll purchase some salts. You go ahead.”
The heft of a hypodermic, the tingle at injection, the white dreams of morphia . . . all the thrilling sweetness of his past habit rushed back. Had he forgotten the misery the drug had wrought?
Tackleberry came from the back of the shop and handed a package to a young enough gent whose baggy black eyes and trembly hand gave him away. Tackleberry took payment, then stood at his counter and smiled at Nicolas. “How may I be of help, sir?”
“I’ve a sour stomach. Just arrived from a long journey, you see.”
“I believe Colonel Hoestetter’s Bitters to be most efficacious.”
“I’ll take them,” Nicolas replied.
Tackleberry gave Nicolas a befuddled look. What sort of gentleman hid behind such scruffy beard, weary eyes, and cheeks made swarthy from exposure at sea? Not to mention the shabby secondhand outfit. “Should you be in need of leeches during your stay,” the apothecary said as he wrapped the bottle of bitters, “our depot on the Strand keeps well supplied.”
