The Scribe

by Matthew Guinn

  The light grew. While the sleepers clacked beneath the engine it seemed to be burning with a rhythm of its own. As they drew nearer Canby could see that it was the flickering pulse of dozens of torches held aloft by the men in the mob and that some of them, off to a corner of the crossroads, had started a bonfire. The engineer threw the brake on the train and the wheels began to grind against the steel of the tracks, fighting the momentum the engine had built up in the miles since Atlanta, and before it had slowed to a jog Canby and Vernon were leaping out of the engine and running.

  Most of the men circled around the tree had turned at the sound of the train; those who hadn’t now glanced over their shoulders at the sound of bootheels on the hard-packed clay of the road. They parted for Canby and Vernon, stepping back with torches in hand to make way. Canby’s sprint had carried him nearly to the trunk of the tree when he brought himself up short before it, looking up at what hung there.

  “Goddamn,” Vernon said.

  Leon Greenberg’s wrists and ankles were still shackled. His rent clothing hung on him like rags. They had covered his face with a white handkerchief but the noose’s knot under his chin exposed the throat’s elongation, the brutal realignment of skull and body that the rope and his broken spine had created. The body still twisted in a slight pendulous swaying against the rope. Canby thought he could hear, under the snickering of the flames, the hemp fibers creaking. He reached up a hand and put it against Greenberg’s shin to still the dead weight.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “You just missed his last kicking,” one of them said. “Pulled that wagon bed out from under him and he commenced to jumping like a cat in a skillet.”

  Canby lowered his hand and turned around, looking at the men and boys in the crowd. Their faces seemed dazed and Canby knew the look: bloodthirst slaked, and after it, a kind of guilty wonder turning in the minds of each of them at what they had unleashed. He reached into his jacket and pulled out the Bulldog.

  “Bring the wagon back around.”

  “Now, just you wait a minute.” One of the men, older, took a step forward. Canby recognized him from the courthouse yard. Not even bothering with a hood for this work. “This ain’t your deal here.”

  “Oh, indeed it is, Malcolm,” Vernon said. “Shall I even begin to list the felonies you’ve committed tonight?”

  The man’s sunburnt face cracked into a crooked smile. “You aim to take me in? For hanging that wicked son of a bitch?”

  “I’ve a mind to.”

  The smile dimmed. “Boys, y’all cut that jewboy down and get your souvenirs. Mary’s got her justice. Let’s wrap this up.”

  Canby felt his hand rising, the revolver’s weight steadying his arm. “Cut him down, yes. But the first one to maim him is a dead man.”

  “You ain’t got bullets enough for all of us.”

  Canby looked at the pistol’s barrel, then at the man. “You’re right,” he said, cocking the pistol. “But the first one is yours, Malcolm.”

  Canby kept his eyes on the man’s face until he saw the peckerwood cunning leave his eyes. Light flickering on his face, he nodded to the men closest to him and three of them broke off from the group, one mounting to the wagon’s bench and the others climbing in back. The driver snapped the reins and the horse came around, snorting as it passed Greenberg’s earthward-pointing feet. The wagon stopped and one of them wrapped his arms around Greenberg’s waist and lifted while the tallest man sawed at the rope with a Barlow knife. They lowered him first to the wagon bed and then, almost gently, to the dust at the foot of the oak.

  Wordlessly, they began to depart, the circle dispersing. Men tossed their torches into the bonfire as they left, the fire itself beginning to dwindle now, and untied their horses and mounted. Soon the last sounds of hoofbeats had faded into the distance. Vernon sat down wearily and leaned himself against the oak tree.

  “Well, that’s the end of it, Thomas. I hate to see it done outside the law, but that is an end to it.”

  “An innocent man, Vernon.”

  Vernon did not answer. Canby stood regarding the locomotive, still and dark now where it had come to a stop on the tracks. His chest felt hollowed out. “Think we could take him back on the engine?”

  “No room. Go on over to Irby’s and ask him to wire Atlanta for an undertaker.”

  Canby looked over to Irby’s store. Its windows were resolutely dark. Irby too good a man to have sought or taken any kind of profit from this affair. Straining, Canby could nearly make out the profile of the buck’s head hung over the door. Still too dark to see how much it had weathered since he’d last passed through. He started across the road.

  “And Thomas,” Vernon said, “see if he has a horse to spare.”

  Canby stopped and turned around. “What for?”

  “Solomon Pace is still taking lodgers at his place,” Vernon said, lighting another cigar. “Vinings is only five or six miles.”

  “Vernon—”

  “Go on up to Vinings, see Julia. Uncle Solomon will put you up. I’ll see if anything can be done in Atlanta to save your job. And mine.”

  “Vernon,” Canby said, waving a hand at the hanging tree, Greenberg’s body, “this is not over.”

  Vernon shook out the match, exhaled a plume of smoke, and leveled his eyes on Canby. “I’m not speaking as a friend, Thomas. That’s an order.”

  Canby’s footsteps sounded leaden to him as he crossed the empty road. He knocked on a window, called out, “Police,” and watched as a point of candlelight appeared and made its way to the front of the store. Soon there were sounds of the door being unlatched from within.

  He emerged from the store fifteen minutes later with the telegraph receipt. He had asked the telegraph office to send a courier out to the undertaker’s home immediately, Bond’s or Roth’s, whichever was closest to the telegraph office. Just before the transmission went out, he appended, DID WHAT WE COULD TO STOP IT.

  As he walked back to the tree he saw that Vernon was standing over the dying bonfire. As Canby watched, he pitched a length of rope into the flames. Canby knelt by Greenberg’s body and lifted the handkerchief from his face. His glasses were gone—a trophy, he imagined, taken by one of his executioners before they strung him up. Canby saw that, above the handsome but bloodied mustache, Greenberg’s nose had been broken. Gone, too, was the noose from around his neck. It had left only its mottled imprint in the flesh.

  He looked over to the fire again. Vernon was walking toward him. He lowered the handkerchief over Greenberg’s face.

  “Irby’s saddling the horse.”

  “Good. You are overtired. Get away for a while. That’s at least some good to come from this.”

  “This is not over. Innocent blood, Vernon.”

  “I told you, it is an order.”

  “I should be in Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta will still be there when you get back. Let me see what can be done in town. I’ll wire you. Meantime, get yourself rested. Give my best to Julia.”

  Vernon put a hand on Canby’s shoulder and they stood in that filial pose for a few minutes, nothing spoken. Above them, dangling from a broad limb of the old oak, the severed length of rope swayed in the predawn breeze. Canby fingered the folded telegraph receipt in his pocket. The response from the undertakers had come back quickly. He imagined he could feel the words of their reply on the paper in his pocket, as though etched on the paper with the finality of chisel on stone: WOULD THAT IT HAD BEEN ENOUGH.

  After a few minutes, Canby saw Irby emerging from the back of his store, leading a horse by its bridle toward them. Saw, too, that to the east, beyond the rim of the dark horizon, the sun was struggling to rise.

  October 28

  AND YET THE KILLINGS HAD STOPPED. THE ROUTINE of days in Vinings with Julia, awaiting word from Vernon that did not come and did not come. A telegraph from Underwood nearly every day. But no progress. The overwhelming numbness of his guilt hanging on Canby like a pall, refusing to lift despi
te the mountain air, despite Julia’s presence. Every afternoon he scanned the Constitution for news of another murder, report of the killer who surely was not Greenberg resuming his dark work. He had read that the expenses for Greenberg’s funeral had been paid by Morris Rich, the department store man, and that the viewing of his body had been attended by hundreds. Burial, the paper reported, was to be in his native Brooklyn. Just as well, the writer editorialized; he never belonged down here anyway.

  But the news of Greenberg had run on page three, pushed to the back of the paper by coverage of the International Cotton Exposition. Columns of glowing words on the city-within-a-city, praise for its technological marvels, its brilliant electric lights, its swelling attendance numbers. News of the impending arrival of William Tecumseh Sherman, the general descending on the city to confirm the reconciliation of this New South the I.C.E. celebrated, to toss a garland for this phoenix arisen from its own ashes.

  Canby folded the paper and set it aside. The breeze here on the mountain moved through the trees and scattered the gold and auburn leaves that had begun to drop from the oaks, the hickories, the sycamores. There was a hint of winter in it. The fallen leaves had begun to pool against the headstones of the little cemetery at the mountain’s summit, where the early settlers of Vinings’ first families—Paces, Randalls—had been laid to rest. He looked away from the stones. Far to the south, near the end of his vision’s range, Atlanta teemed in the valley, the railroad roundhouse smoking at its center. He knew his business there was not yet finished.

  He heard the clap of wood down below him and figured it to be the door of the Vinings school slapping against the front of the schoolhouse. He looked down and picked out the school from the other buildings of the village, all of them green-shingled, whitewashed clapboard, save for the Negro settlement that sat at a short distance on the northernmost part of the mountain, where the buildings were all spare parts, tumbledown and ramshackle. Surely enough, the dirt lot out front of the school had filled with Julia’s scholars, noisily dispersing as though they had flung themselves off its porch in their eagerness for room to move, for fresh air, the precious stretch of an afternoon’s freedom in these shortening days of autumn. He smiled. If there had been no truants or idlers today to be held after, Julia would soon be on her way up the mountainside to meet him.

  For a few minutes he drowsed with his back pressed to the rocky soil of the mountain. It was, by Appalachian standards, a modest summit, but an elevation fair enough. The air here was cleaner even than down in the little town, and a far cry from the smoking gully of downtown Atlanta. It had seemed at times, in this week of afternoon meetings, that the breezes up here blew not only into his lungs, but through him, with Canby ever hoping that this elevation, given time, might cleanse him of the worm that had been turning in his gut since they’d cut Greenberg down.

  “‘Does the road wind uphill all the way? Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?’” her voice called.

  Canby sat up and looked down the slope. Julia had climbed to nearly a stone’s throw of him while he dozed. He smiled as he watched her coming up the trace of a path, holding her skirts up over the rockiest parts.

  “I’ll guess. Longfellow today?”

  Julia settled down next to him, light as a bird, and tucked a wisp of bang behind an ear. “Rossetti,” she said.

  “Haven’t read him.”

  “Christina Rossetti, you lout. Do you read at all anymore?” Julia sighed. “No reason a country school can’t be as au courant as any other.” She touched his hand and cocked her head so that he could brush her cheek with his lips. She paused a moment to catch her breath. “Though your method of courting is going to wear me down to nothing.”

  “I’d be happy to call on your house. If you’d let me farther than the porch.”

  “We’re not that au courant up here. Not yet. I need to maintain appearances on my way to spinsterhood.”

  “You’re no spinster. Nor will you be.”

  She studied his face in the uncomfortable silence. After a time, she said, “Anyway, it’s better up here.”

  He reached into the basket beside him and pulled out the bottle of Riesling and the glasses. The wine was still cool from where he had stored it, wedged between two rocks in Stillhouse Creek at the base of the mountain. He poured for both of them and she raised her glass. Canby shook his head.

  “No toast today.”

  Julia touched his face, her fingers tracing the scar down his left cheek.

  “What about to new beginnings?”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “I’m out of fresh starts, Julia.” He touched his glass to hers. They drank and looked out over the valley. Canby studied the sunlight where it gleamed in the bends of the Chattahoochee, let his eyes wander down the stitching of railroad tracks that ran like seams across the valley. The sun was behind the clouds above them and it cast cloud-shadows on the valley floor, pools of shade that coasted and paused over the topography with the wind.

  “The chautauqua is tonight in the pavilion,” Julia said. “See the train coming up from town? There, on the Marietta line?”

  “What’s the topic?”

  “No topic this week. A performance. Something of Handel’s with a string quartet. How wonderful it would be if I had an escort.”

  Canby raised his glass. “My honor and pleasure. That, I’ll drink to.”

  Julia leaned on his shoulder, her head under his chin. They sat and watched the train pull into Vinings Station and the smoke from its stack diminish as it sat idle while the day trippers from Atlanta disembarked. They emerged from beneath the green roof of the station in pairs and groups and mounted into wagons to carry them the short distance to the pavilion. The musicians came last, toting their instrument cases and climbing into the wagons with the black cases in their hands, clutched close as children might be held.

  After a time, Canby stretched his arm behind him, slowly, and emptied his glass of the sweet wine onto the ground. And some time later he rose and lifted the basket in one hand and reached for her hand with the other. And they began to make their way, slowly, down the slope.

  HE WATCHED and listened at once. Watched the departing sun light up the wall of the mountain above the pavilion in a band of gold that mingled with the turning leaves, creeping higher on the mountain with every movement of the string music and drawing behind it a swath of shade that heralded nightfall. And listened to the music, Handel indeed from what the quartet’s first violinist had announced. He would not have known it from any other, but it was fine to his ears. Listening, he forgot himself and forgot time as well, forgot all the bright young set of Atlanta crowded into the pavilion on folding chairs around him, only a few gray heads in their midst, Robert Billingsley’s among them. He watched as the players bent to their instruments, coaxing the wood and catgut, the notes springing from the bent bows rising to the eaves of the pavilion as if to find their way back to some higher source. Canby’s cheeks burned in the presence of it. The players leaned in toward one another as the music rose to its crescendo, as they held the minor chord, then resolved into the tonic major, faces rapt, then relaxing as the strings shuddered over the last drawn note. In the silence that followed, Canby imagined that they had, for a few measures, bent time itself.

  The applause was earnest but diminutive by comparison, little clapping echoes coming back off the mountain as the players nodded over their instruments. The audience began to rise and the scraping of the chairs on the boards of the pavilion brought him fully back. He realized that Julia’s hand was still held tight in his own.

  “Grand, wasn’t it?”

  Canby looked up to see Robert Billingsley standing above him, a smile on his face and a hand extended. He pried his fingers away from Julia’s and took the hand offered, pressed the cool flesh.

  “It certainly was.”

  “Ma’am?” Billingsley said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “Of course,” Canby said. “My friend Julia Pr
eston.”

  Billingsley bent his head as he took her hand. Canby wondered if he intended to kiss it. Instead, he straightened from his half bow and returned his eyes to Canby.

  “I have something of yours, Mister Canby. Given over to me by Vernon Thompson, and to him by one of Hannibal Kimball’s men. A rather weighty knapsack that clanks when it is moved, apparently heavy with small arms.”

  Canby blushed under his smile. “I did not know when I left Kimball House I wouldn’t be returning.”

  “No need to explain.”

  “I suppose Kimball wants his key back.”

  “It’s my understanding that he has had the lock changed,” Billingsley said, his face clouding. “But that is neither here nor now. I have your bag on the back of my surrey. I ask only a small fee in exchange for my courier services.”

  Billingsley nodded to Julia and placed an arm over Canby’s shoulders, guiding him down the pavilion steps. He lowered his voice as they passed a group at the base of the steps and walked toward the edge of the lamplight that shrouded the pavilion.

  “I would like for you to be my guest out at my country place hard by Mableton. The quail are in fine fettle this time of year. My hands have harvested the corn but left the back acres cut over. Every fall, the quail feed there by the score. Please be my guest for a hunt. You could bring your lady friend back a few braces of birds—and it would also ease my conscience over the unpleasantness in Atlanta. I offer it by way of apology, Mister Canby.”

  “I don’t see how I could decline.”