Coffins (9 page)

7. The Frozen Baby

As the reader has no doubt surmised from the title given to this chapter, we've come round at last to where we began, to the mystery of the infant dead in his cradle. A poor, ten-week-old child somehow frozen solid in a room as stifling warm as an Indian sweat lodge. My recollection is somewhat confused by the emotional state of all concerned, not the least myself, and I do not recall precisely how we managed to remove Sarah from the nursery, or how I was able to pry Nathaniel's hands from the bar of the cradle. By then Benjamin Coffin had entered along with Jebediah, and eventually Barky the cook, who had been roused from his hammock nearby the kitchen, and whose stoic presence helped to calm us all somewhat.

“'Twas an unfortunate draft,” he muttered in his peculiar, high-pitched voice. “All the heat was sucked up the chimney with the blaze of the fire, and drew the cold up through the floorboards. Something like that. Must have been. Just a misfortunate accident, and there's nothing to be done about it. Poor child, he never felt a thing. He's in heaven now, missus, never doubt it,” and so on, seeking to ease the shock of the cruelly bereaved mother.

It was Benjamin who insisted that we all remove to the parlor and await the arrival of the family doctor, who had already been summoned. Nathaniel at first resisted, as if he expected his little son to somehow return to life from an icy nightmare, but stern Benjamin prevailed and we soon found ourselves—the men, at least—sitting around the card table that had been hastily abandoned when the screaming began. Quite numbed and speechless, all of us, for what was there to say?

Sarah lay insensible upon the appropriately named fainting couch, attended by cousin Lucy. I quickly procured smelling salts from the family medicine chest, and she revived somewhat, although her pulse was rapid and erratic. Still, she was a sturdy woman, if cruelly shocked, and would soon recover, or so I thought at the time.

“Would you fetch a cool compress, and place it upon her forehead?” I asked Lucy, who readily complied.

Jebediah had the look of a man possessed by some terrible and unbearable knowledge. He seized the nearly empty glass of whiskey I'd abandoned and downed the meager contents like a man dying of thirst. “Impossible,” he said at last, keeping his voice low and conspiratorial, excluding the women. “Never mind what Barky said, there was no draft in that room. None that I could feel.”

“God took him,” Nathaniel said, burying his face in his hands. “God takes what he likes, don't he? The mighty bastard!”

“You mustn't speak that way,” Benjamin hissed. “Think of your wife and mind what you say.”

Insensible to his brother's admonition, Nathaniel looked up through a blur of tears and said, to no one in particular, “If it wasn't God took him, who was it then?”

I spoke not a word—it wasn't my place—but my mind was in a fever, searching for a rational explanation. Had someone snatched the baby, exposed his frail little body to the cold night air, and then returned it frozen to the nursery? But according to Sarah, or what we could make out of her keening, she'd never left the room. She'd nursed the baby, laid him down in his crib, adjusted the lamb's-wool blanket, and then proceeded to knit by the fire. When she checked to see if he'd fallen asleep, she found him in the state we'd all seen. As cold and hard to the touch as a block of January pond ice.

Was it possible that she'd nodded off by that roaring fire—lulled by the heat—and not been aware that her baby had somehow been removed and then returned, all without waking her? Possible, perhaps, but there was another factor, that being the actual weather conditions outside. It had been temperate these last few days, and though the winter frost had seeped into the ground, a skim of ice had just barely begun to form on the puddles left behind by the melting snow. An infant might well perish from such exposure, but it could scarcely be frozen solid in so short a time. Which brought me back to the cook's theory, that a curious, icy draft had been caused by the heat roaring up the chimney. A blast of frozen air sucked up through the floorboards from some deeper, colder area beneath the house. Was it possible?

Soon enough the family physician arrived. A certain Dr. Griswold, whose most notable feature was a pair of protuberant, bulging eyes, magnified by the lenses of a pince-nez. Apparently Griswold had heard a bit of the circumstances from the sailor who'd gone to fetch him. With barely a glance at Sarah, prostrate upon the couch, or Nathaniel hunched in paroxysm of grief at the card table, he turned his attention to Jebediah.

“Take me to the nursery,” he demanded. “At once.”

As there was nothing for me to do in the parlor, I felt it my duty to accompany Jeb and the stolid doctor. Dreading what undoubtedly awaited us, I was at the same time half convinced we would find the baby dead in his cradle, but otherwise normal. The blueness, the numbing cold of his tiny body, surely we'd all imagined it, mistaking the commonplace of death for something even more terrible.

But there had been no mistake. The nursery was still warm to the point of stifling, and little Casey Coffin was as we'd left him: a block of blue ice, cold enough to burn the doctor's fingers.

“Good Lord!” Griswold cried out, snatching his hand away. So startled that the pince-nez fell from his eye and dangled violently upon its ribbon. “What mischief is this? Jebediah, how did this happen?”

Jeb regarded the tiny body somberly, indeed mournfully, but without the distress he'd first expressed. “There is no explanation, none that you would believe,” he finally responded.

“No explanation?” said the incredulous doctor. “You show me this … this
thing
, and you say there's no explanation?”

Death seemed to have made him angry, though at first the anger wasn't focused upon us in particular, but at a world where babies died in their cribs, in warm rooms with loving mothers in attendance. Dr. Griswold was a middle-aged, small-boned man of less than medium height, somewhat swelled by the necessary overconfidence of his profession, but the anger had shrunk him small again, and when he'd digested what Jeb had said he focused a pop-eyed, glowering look in my direction. “What do you have to say for yourself, young man? Were you a witness to this event? Is that why you're skulking around?”

“Griswold!” Jebediah barked in a warning tone. “This is my good friend Davis Bentwood. He's a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and a guest in this house, and must be treated with respect.”

“You're a doctor?” he responded with surprise and irritation. “Then why have I been called?”

“I received my degree, but I've never actually practiced medicine. And in any case I know little or nothing about babies.”

The doctor nodded stiffly, but continued to look on me with suspicion.

It was only later, as the recollection burned itself into my mind, that I had occasion to reflect how strange was this scene. Three men surround a crib. The object of their interest is a dead baby. One of the men is a dwarf and he's clearly in charge, a commanding presence all out of proportion to his stature. Shadows flicker, low flames cast spiky glows upon the low ceiling, and all three men are sweating profusely as they contemplate that which has no explanation.

“There must be an inquest,” Griswold finally said, as if trying to convince himself that an inquest would put things right.

“I leave that to you,” said Jeb, moderating his tone. “Will you take it with you,” he added, “out of this house?”

“It?” asked the doctor helplessly.

“The baby, sir. I'm concerned for the mother. She mustn't see it again, not in this state.”

The strangeness of the “state” he referred to was not just the original icy condition, eerie enough, but that after an hour in a hot room the little body hadn't yet begun to thaw. It remained as hard as marble, and so cold that the good doctor—and he was, I think, a good man, despite his reflexive distrust of a stranger—the good doctor had to wrap the remains in several layers of blankets to prevent his own hands being frostbitten by contact.

When at last he was ready to leave, bearing the tiny, swaddled corpse, he looked to Jebediah with a glance that was stern enough to curdle cream. “The body will be taken to Caswell's,” he announced, naming the village funeral parlor. “I will examine the cadaver in the light of day, and make my report for the inquest. Burial can be anytime after, say, noon tomorrow. I will not attend, is that dear? I will have nothing more to do with this hideous affair. If the mother requires treatment for nervous prostration—and I assume she must—and if your Boston doctor doesn't feel competent to attend her you are to call on Dr. Shattuck. Do I make myself clear?”

“Very clear, sir.”

And with hollow eyes he left us, clutching his sad cargo and convinced, I'm certain, that someone in the house, and possibly all of us, had played a ghastly, damnable prank resulting in the death of an innocent child.

There was, as you might imagine, no chance of sleep that night. Jeb and Benjamin and I sat in the kitchen—or galley, as the Coffins called it—in the glow of a well-tended stove, drinking strong coffee and trying to make some sense of what had happened. And yet the more we talked the clearer it became that there was no rational or scientific explanation that made any sense. There were old wives tales about “cold spots,” of course, and we'd all had the experience of detecting a chill in an otherwise warm room, but we all agreed that nothing less than exposure in a nor' east blizzard would so quickly turn a body to ice. And yet it had happened, there was no denying that, and if it happened then it must, ipso facto, be possible.

It was only, I told Benjamin, our ignorance that prevented an understanding of what, exactly, had occurred.

“Ignorance?” he said groggily, and for an instant a dangerous look flickered in his eyes, as if he was resisting an urge to strike me with his powerful fist. “I suppose I am ignorant, never having been educated like you and Jebediah. But I went to my own school, the school of hardtack and salt beef, and I guess I know when a cursed thing has happened, and this is a cursed thing, in the same way Sam'n'Zeke getting sawed to bits was a cursed thing. Sailors know about cursed things. They know there's nothing you can do but pray, and that's what I aim to do, if God will hear me. I'm going to pray hard, as hard as I've ever driven a ship in beastly weather. I'm going to pray until my knees hurt, see if I don't.”

With that he got up from the trestle table and stalked from the kitchen, his leonine head dipping as he passed through the door.

“Poor Ben,” Jebediah said when he was gone. “This has riled him something awful. They say as a boy he prayed most devoutly, but never, I think, since Mother died. Since I was born,” he added, and then turned to me with a curious look. “Do you think it might work? Prayer? What does Mr. Emerson say about prayer?”

“He would never, I think, underestimate the importance of prayer,” I responded, somewhat diplomatically. My mentor had, of course, resigned from his ministry over a matter of theology, but that had not affected his spiritual nature. What I did not add, given the circumstances, was that Emerson's transformative ideas about communing with the God-within-us-all would not likely meet with the approval of, say, the local Methodists or Lutherans. Indeed, in an earlier age they might well have burned him at the stake.

The sun having fully risen, I suggested that we take a turn around the grounds and fill our lungs with fresh air. Although I could not say so without risking offense, the house itself had a morbid grip on me, and I was eager to get away, if only briefly.

“You go, Davis,” Jeb said wearily. “I must see to things here.”

“Then I shall stay,” I said instantly.

Jebediah shook his head and sighed. “I insist that you walk as far as the harbor and stretch your legs. Stretch your mind, too, because we have another problem to solve. It is this: how do we bury a frozen baby? Under normal circumstances the body would lie in the crypt until spring. But I won't risk exposing that poor child to the ravages we found there.”

He looked so hopeless, so woeful, that my first instinct was to take his hands in mine. “My dear Jebediah. Please do not torment yourself about these matters. The crypt is being cleaned even as we speak, and once it has been returned to a presentable state the vault door will be sealed in a way that prevents any further defilement. Certainly little Casey will not have to enter the place, nor will you or anyone from the family. Let me take care of the arrangements for the poor child. May I do so without being presumptuous, or causing offense?”

In reply Jebediah gripped my hands, bowed his great head, and wept.

8. Ice to Ice

A ten-dollar gold piece bought the services of three strong men recommended by the church sexton. My excuse that only an immediate burial would relieve the mother's mind was accepted without comment, as all eyes focused upon the gold piece. Using sharply honed pickaxes the laborers managed to chip out a grave deep enough for the purpose, and later that day, after a final and useless examination by Dr. Griswold, little Casey was placed in a tiny coffin and laid to rest. The brief ceremony was attended only by immediate members of the family, along with Father Whipple (a severe though calming presence) and myself.

The Captain, informed of his grandson's death, raged for hours in his tower, but could not be persuaded to leave the place, which I thought was just as well, considering his strange and sometimes violent behavior. Not to mention his aversion to the Episcopal priest, whose presence was more or less demanded by Benjamin. The elder brother seemed to have recovered the fervency of religion he'd lost as a boy. He had, as he vowed, prayed excessively, and the effort had evidently appeased his grief at the inexplicable loss of his infant nephew. God's will, he informed us, and he had become convinced, like Barky, that the baby had been carried off to heaven.