CHAPTER 13
New Haven Barber and Shave
34 Branhurst
Mr. Sears—
Remedy this young man’s rat’s nest. Give him a campaign cut.
Professor Wallace Quillan
Montgomery Elias
Hartford, Connecticut
Dear Mr. Elias,
I have lodging at Fenton’s Boardinghouse. Please send any further information here. If you see the clerk from Alan and Jamieson, avail him of my address.
Dear Lill and Ry,
I’ve made it to the East Coast. I’d almost forgotten what trees look like. The elms are colored like flame with the autumn chill.
I have connected with Professor Quillan, a man of impressive intellect and stamina. I start work in the morning and am as eager as a child on Christmas Eve.
It is fine to sleep on a real bed again, duvets and featherbeds instead of flour sacks and straw ticks. The housekeeper is a fine cook, I am, twenty-four hours in, already growing fat. I shall visit the barber and refurbish my wardrobe; there is a fine gentlemen’s shop off the green. You will hardly recognize me at day’s end. I shall, however, remain,
Ever yours,
Edward Turrentine Bayard III
I arrived for my haircut as the barbershop opened. In response to my greeting, the barber merely narrowed his eyes at my shoddy appearance. I gave him the note, hoping the missive would warm his opinion. It did not. The barrel-chested man pointed to a hook where I should hang my jacket and pointed to the nickel chair where I should sit, then picked up his scissors. I had no idea what a campaign cut was and sat down with some trepidation. With the distaste of an earl shearing a sheep, the barber cropped my hair as short as shears would allow, then ran around the outskirts of the newly forested vale with a razor that left my neck pink and sensitive. He slapped a ripe-smelling tincture on the rash, making my eyes water with the sting, and demanded payment.
Itching with the detritus of my transformation, I waited at the Peabody for half an hour before an elderly man dressed in a doorman’s jacket walked up the front steps and unlocked the heavy double doors. I asked after Quillan.
The doorman looked me up and down. “Round back. Ring th’ bell on th’ door.”
Quillan opened the heavily paneled door to the lab and looked pointedly at his watch before motioning me inward. The room was filled with stones, ore, bones, and paper, floor to ceiling. It looked less like a laboratory than the interior of a cave, one in which every boulder, every pebble, every shard of bone had a number. Quillan folded his arms from the middle of the room. “What do you think?”
I examined a strange embossing on a rock. “Amazing.” Quillan put out his hand and warned not to touch anything, an instruction I found amusing, looking at the array of stones, some still encrusted with western gumbo, that had been wrenched from the earth, pick and shovel. It was of no account. The specimens were as fine and fragile to Quillan as a porcelain vase.
He ran his fingertips over the embossed rock: “Smiledon jawbone.” He drew me aside: “Megatherium.” Pointed left: “Hadrosaurus, Equus simplicidens, Plesiosaur, Ceratops.”
I was absolutely awed. Quillan was pleased, throwing out his chest and harrumphing happily. “It is but a drop, a scattering of dust, compared to the fossil record that waits to be discovered in the Permian era alone.” He looked upward to where the fossilized bones of a strange bird flew on gossamer wires. “One day we will have it all, we will have a tome of history in which we can read our story within rifts and ghosts of stone, from the earliest tremor of life to where we now stand!”
He clapped his hands together. “There is work to be done.” He pointed into his private office where a chair stood in the middle of the room. I sat.
Quillan opened a cupboard and withdrew a man’s bald porcelain head, limned into sections like the ceramic cow at the butcher, as if the bust were a plan for cannibals. Instead of steak, tenderloin, and rump roast, each section was labeled with a number and a curious illustration.
Quillan murmured, “Relax, Ned. This will not take a moment.”
My heart dropped. I had been right at the outset. The man was mad.
Quillan commenced to run his fingertips over my head. This must be why he’d wanted my hair so short. Alarmed, I stopped his hand. “Sir?”
Quillan harrumphed. “Phrenology is the only true science of the mind.” He slapped my hand, and I dropped it into my lap. He resumed pushing and prodding my skull, narrating as he went. “The brain is the organ of the mind, its different parts manifest distinct faculties, and the power of manifestation in regard to each is proportionate, coeteris paribus, to the size and activity of the organ.” He referred to the porcelain head on his desk, murmuring, “Prominent frontal development; observant … width of the head at the temples bespeaks a resourceful man … full crown, stable, ambitious, a strong sense of moral obligation.”
I peered at the porcelain head, smooth as a diviner’s glass. The images drawn on it were unsettling: two glaring men lifting glasses of ale, a driver beating a horse, a boat capsizing in a quiet sea, a pair of women clutching at each other, a leering cherub.
Quillan’s tone changed. “Not good.”
“Not good?”
He whipped out a pair of wicked-looking calipers and measured from nape to nose, pricking me with the points. “A mastoid process behind the ear, bony protuberance….”
He crossed his arms and looked sternly at me. “The seventh faculty: secrecy. At its best, a tendency to restrain, with the mind, involuntary thoughts and emotions, but may portend cunning duplicity, deceit, and lying.” He tapped his nose. “We’ll think the best, though it is something to be on guard over, certainly.”
“Yes, sir.”
Quillan slapped me on the back, the investigation apparently over. “You’ve a head of magnitude, Edward, well adapted to the life of letters, a bit of a philoprogenitive tendency, unfortunately”—he waggled his finger in chastisement—“affection toward the weak, a weakness in itself. Still, all in all, quite decent, quite decent.”
He gazed at me, apparently pleased.
“I will take you on. Congratulations, my boy. You shall be instrumental in the grand effort.”
He began pacing as if he’d started his engine and couldn’t contain himself.
“When I saw your work in Nebraska, I knew it to be so. You, Edward, are my luck, my muse. Your draftsman’s skills will make possible the next great forty-league stride in paleontology.” He shook my hand in a congratulatory way and resumed pacing. “It’s all come together, God’s will. You see, I had gone to Nebraska, not only to search for fossils but also to clear my head, to find some way out of a dilemma.”
“What dilemma, sir?”
He rubbed his thumbs and forefingers together.
I remembered his line. “If money and science could come together?”
“What strides might be made!” Quillan crowed. “Exactly! I am—science is—stymied, obstructed, impeded at every turn by want of capital. We two shall be alchemists, turning want into gold.”
I nodded, not understanding at all. “How are we to do that?”
“By taking advantage of the passing of the whale.”
“Sir?”
“Men are consumers of the dead, Edward. Eat of the dead, warm ourselves by the dead’s flame. The whale has lit our way for centuries with its oily corpse. But no longer. The marine behemoth is reduced to lonely survivor. Gone are the great shoals; only sad flinders remain. Men must find other combustion for their dark nights, the remains of the long dead, the fossil fuels.” He jabbed his finger toward me. “Fossil fuels.” He nodded wisely.
I continued my clueless nodding.
Quillan took my arm and sat with me, crowding the single chair. “I must have your pledge to secrecy.”
I nodded. “You have it.”
“I have found … a marker, if you will. A means not only of identifying coal deposits but of ascertaining the richness of the veins. Do y
ou know what this means, Edward?” He did not wait for my response but lowered his voice still further so I had to bend over the table to catch his words. “The coal companies can save millions, mining only the richest deposits and bypassing the poor imitators.”
He sat back, smug as a toad.
I was still without a clue as to what this meant to paleontology, and certainly what I was to do about it. He slapped his knee. “All this requires full dedication. I trust you, Edward. In my gut, I knew you were the man I could rely on. Can you assure me that I am right?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“I think I can.” He inclined his head toward the corner of the office as if it were a far distance. “Come with me.”
I was relieved to rise from our too-close seating and followed him across the room. Quillan drew out a box. From the box he took three items wrapped in newspaper. He indicated I should examine one.
I unwrapped it. A piece of coal.
“Do you know what this is?”
I leaned closer thinking it must be a trick, a test. I sniffed it. I looked at it from the side, then reported apologetically, “It looks like coal, Professor.”
He clapped me on the back again. “Exactly! Common coal. You can buy it out of a wagon on the lowliest street. A dollar a ton. Coal!”
Quillan laughed at my reaction, put up one finger, then sailed it slowly downward and landed it on the corner. “See here,” he whispered. He handed me a magnifying glass. “Look closely.”
I took the glass and examined the coal. Where Quillan had pointed was a tiny divot, the size of his fingertip as if he had impressed it in the black himself.
“Platyceras parva. An aquatic snail of the Permian.”
“In coal?”
“Unexpected, I know. That is the beauty of it.”
“Why?”
He whispered again. “I am not only finding fossils in coal, but rife in the material striping the richest anthracitic coal beds. Coal, the hard bed and anthracite in particular, is the future of mechanization, of great industry. If fossils mark coal beds, who will pay for the work of excavation? Hmmm? Yes! Coal is going to be our savior, Ned. No more begging and mewling after university funds, no longer competing against quacks and charlatans for money. The coal companies will be the Medicis of the fossil arts, paying us to search for fossils because of the ultimate advantage to them.”
He pushed the handkerchief and coal lump to me. “I need you to draw this. Clean up the lines in the illustration. It is difficult for the layperson to identify a fossil for what it is.”
I picked up the coal and studied the small mark. “Are you sure—”
“Of course I’m sure!” He went to the shelf, pulled a box out, and shuffled through the contents. He brought over a fossil embedded in limestone, crisp and clean. “You see? Another Platyceras.”
I nodded. “I can see this one.”
“Use it for reference if you need to.”
I picked up the glass again and peered from one fossil to the other. “I see it now….” I murmured, though it was still no more than a sooty divot to me.
Quillan rifled through the box, pulling out another five coal lumps. “Each one of these also has a fossil. I’ve marked them.” He pulled down another box filled with myriad smaller boxes; inside each, a different type of fossil. Quillan spread his hands proudly. “These are my teaching specimens. Study them, and you may as well have sat through an entire semester of paleontology. Allow these specimens to be your guides when drawing the fossils in the coal, which may be … a bit irresolute.”
I nodded, as eager to open the stores as if the boxes were filled with pearls. Quillan tapped his pudgy fingers on the lab table’s marble surface. “I must have the illustrations as soon as possible. Can you do it?”
“I will work day and night, sir.”
He clapped me on the back. “You are going places, Ned. We are going places. The future looks bright indeed.”
He put his hat on, and his coat. “I’ll let you get to it. In the meantime, I have business to attend to, telegrams to send, contacts to make.” He hesitated at the door, flicked the lock on behind him, and put a finger to his lips. “Secrecy, Edward … shhh,” and the door latched behind him.
I was glad to have the odd professor leave me to my observations. He made me nervous: the inspection of my skull, the cloak-and-dagger mystery, in addition to the coal embedded with virtually imperceptible fossils. I spent only a moment peering at the black depressions. They were so rough as to be laughable. Perhaps the professor, with his microscope and higher education, had means of ascertaining a fossil over a divot, but the coal held nothing but chips and hollows to my untutored eyes.
I pushed the coal aside and immersed myself in the other fossils. The beauty of the stones was not lost on me, and I was happy to turn the specimens over and over, celebrating the coils of shell, the beads of vertebrae so long preserved.
After a time I found the fossil of a small turtle, its head the size of a pea, its shell a pocket watch. What a change from the Nebraskan behemoth I’d drawn from western soil. It was so fine, a beak as fragile as the most diminutive wren’s, hair lines rounding the fingernail scutes, morsel legs. How had it lived in a world of storms and wind and tossing oceans, of claw and craw and appetite? But it had, and if this one had lived, many others must have lived as well.
Truth be told, it gave me some relief. Remembering Lill pointing out that the Nebraska turtle’s largeness might actually be a reflection of my own diminutive size, this turtle validated my substantial heft. If not gargantuan, I was at least middling. Quillan would not mind my study for a day or two. I would keep it near for a time, feel it between my fingers as I lay on my little bed with quiet and time. I slipped the fossil into my pocket. Within the week I would return the little turtle to its casket.
Quillan returned late afternoon and patted my head, as if I were a hound gifted with a pencil. “We have put the spin on the planet, Ned.” He chuckled and retired to his office with barely a glance at my work.
When he finally emerged again, patting his round belly as if remembering its demands, it was after dark. “Good night, Ned.”
I had been hungry for some hours, we had not broken for lunch, and I had now missed Mother Fenton’s dinner hour. I jingled the few coins in my pocket, further diminished by the barber, and wondered how I would get by. I had no choice but to say something to Quillan, though it embarrassed me to do so. He motioned me out the open door. “Come, come. My wife has dinner waiting.” I was hopeful this was an invitation, but Quillan continued. “I will see you tomorrow morning at seven, sharp.”
I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair. “Professor, would it be possible for you to advance me some pay? I wouldn’t ask, but I have nothing for food.”
“I left money in Nebraska for you.”
“Enough for the ticket only.”
He looked a little bewildered. “No good, no good at all.” He frowned and sighed. “All right, then, come to the house. I’ve got cash there.”
Quillan lived in one of the fine turreted houses off Prospect with an expansive lawn and whitewashed fence. I waited outside on the porch while he went in. Almost immediately, Mrs. Quillan came out, a fine-boned woman with a mass of auburn hair piled high on her head that must have given her neck some exercise. She was dressed in gray silk; lace flumed from her neckline and sleeves. She was apologetic. “Leaving you on the porch: such manners.” She put out her hand. “I am the professor’s wife. You are Ned?”
I bowed. “Edward Turrentine Bayard the Third.”
“Please come in. The professor mentioned he met you in Nebraska, on his buffalo hunt. What I got out of him sounded so exciting.” She sighed and went in.
I walked into the foyer. A splendid hall tree graced the entry with dragon heads clutching coats in their jaws and a plush oriental rug protecting its feet from the marble floor.
“You have a beautiful home.”
She smiled and twisted her ri
ng. “It was my aunt’s. She didn’t have another heir. I suspect I will have to find a niece myself.” She glanced upstairs. “I would so love to go west. Only four days by train now. Isn’t it easy to go so far away?”
“Won’t you go with your husband?”
She put her hand to her throat. “No. Professor Quillan goes to work and not to worry about me.” She made a stern face. “‘No place for a woman. So many dangers.’”
I thought of Lill, how happy she was for a time. “Marriage seems to be the greatest of them.”
She laughed delightedly. “And I’ve already fallen into that trap.” She leaned forward. “Are there women there?”
“More every day.”
Quillan came down the stairs and into the parlor. He counted some bills, arrayed them into a fan. “Your first month’s wages.”
I took it without counting and thanked him profusely.
“No need to thank me. Wages, that’s all there is to it.” He turned to his wife. “Sylvia, what has happened to dinner?”
“It’s been on the table for half an hour now, Wallace.” Mrs. Quillan twisted her ring again. “Would you stay and eat with us, Mr. Bayard?”
Quillan shook his head. “Of course not, Mrs. Quillan. He’s a young man, not prone to keeping company with us old folks.” He chuckled, pleased with the observation.
Quillan and his wife exchanged glances, as if each was still, after ten years of marriage, wondering what the other was.
“Thank you, but I should take care of some business.” I tipped my hat to Mrs. Quillan, who looked disappointed. “Professor, thank you.”
He waved me off. “Seven sharp, sir. No more lying abed till eight.”
CHAPTER 14
Dear Edward,
I am pleased to hear you are sailing ancient seas as captain of science, first rank. Continue to enthrall me with your exploits in academe and keep up the good and valued work, friend. One may easily add to ignorance, but it is blessed to advance knowledge.
As for myself, I have found more humble employment, serving as teacher for the town of Hammond, Indiana. Though the town is newly sprung and correspondingly rough, teaching here is gratifying work, if frustrating at times. So many of my students are in and out, threshing, planting, and milking being of greater importance than education. Still, if it were not for the little larnin’ they get here, they would get none at all.
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