The Dark (38 page)

Leah tosses the bird over the side. Prays he escapes to the trees. He does not. A shot and he plummets into the canal waters. Leah snorts in anger and yanks on Maria’s arm and then on Charlie’s. “Below! We must below. This is no place for us.”

They come reluctantly, but Calvin stays for the sport, slip-sliding in blood and bird droppings.

Leah stretches in her bed slot. Charlie pouts and counts out his fingers. Maria lights their portable stove, making tea at Leah’s behest. No soporifics. Leah must remember that, because her head-pain is returning with the retort of the pistols and rifles and the reek of gun-smoke. She wads her ears with cotton batting. She has a strange and fierce affection for birds in general, but for the passenger pigeons in particular. So many shooting at them, so few to protect them. Their passing is not as it was; will only take a day and not three, as it had when Leah was a girl and she waited for their arrival with greater anticipation than her siblings awaited Christmastide.

“Come, Leah-Lou,” her father said when Leah was a child of nine. “We’ll get us some pigeons.” They took the flat-wagon to the edge of the forest. She recalls how she gaped at the sight before her, how the vast cylinder rolled over the forest and reached to the horizon’s bounds. “A fifty-miler,” her father said with satisfaction. He spat tobacco, poured powder into his flintlock.

First, young Leah smelled the reek that obliterated all other odours. Then heard the tumult of coos that was like the ringing of every bell in God’s heaven, then witnessed the massive branches of the oaks and elms breaking under the weight of the nesting birds. Five hundred, even a thousand to each tree and their droppings were a fantastical white quilt. The forest would be devastated in their wake.

Her father caught a pigeon and sewed shut its eyes, the rivulets of blood like copious tears. He tied a small stool to its legs, then tossed the bird into the field where the farmers stood at the ready with nets and with pots that spewed out poisonous sulphur. The stool pigeon flew low and erratic with the weight, crying piteously. Leah ran from her father’s side to the forest’s edge and held fast to a stump. Her father was talking with the farmers and did not see her until she was too distant.

“Come back, you damned idjit!” he yelled. Too late. The guns had fired to startle the birds and make them notice their companion and so follow him low in his distress. And then it was as if the soul of the forest had lifted out. Leah was immersed, not in darkness, but in a dazzle of copper, green and white as the sunlight struck the feathers. Wings beat at her with the power and swiftness of angels’ wings and she screamed out in horror and wonder as the birds lifted her in flight. She woke earthbound and in the same spot. She was badly bruised and her forearms were cross-hatched with deep wounds, the scars of which she bears even yet.

Her father wrapped her in his greatcoat and carried her back to the flat-wagon. She remembers how he shook, how his coat smelled of tobacco and ale. They came home with enough for a year of smoked-pigeon pies. Leah was sent to bed. She slept until Maria appeared, her black, button eyes staring. “Here, Pa told me to bring you supper … Oh, and
now
why are you crying on?”

“How could he have betrayed them all? That bird. Even if I had my eyes sewn shut I wouldn’t betray mine own.”

“Sakes alive, Leah, if your eyes were sewn shut you, you wouldn’t know what you were doing, would you?”

Now Leah sips her tea. The gunfire on the deck has slowed, either from boredom or from lack of ammunition. Though the farmers and village dwellers will continue to fire as long as the flock is in sight. The majority of the carcasses will be sold to the Southern plantations for slave food. The birds captured alive will be sold to the firing ranges.

“Maria, do you recall when I was caught up in the pigeon’s flight?”

Maria looks at her. Her eyes still remind Leah of black buttons. “Surely. I recall you convalescing like a princess and I had to do your chores for a good week.”

Leah sniffs and calls Charlie over for an embrace. Thinks: No wonder I was not afraid of the mob at Troy like Maggie was. No wonder I am not terrified of human mobs at all. Who would be after such an experience? Who wouldn’t feel protected by the multitude by some uncanny luck?

M
ULTITUDES
, I
THOUGHT
, as my patient spoke of Leah and the passenger pigeons; it is a handy word to employ when numbering loses meaning. Consider the “multitudes” lost in the abolition war. Oh, there was some attempt at tallying the dead. Thus one can read that approximately twenty-three thousand fell at Shiloh. Twenty-six thousand at Antietam; fifty thousand at Gettysburg. Approximations. Souls rounded up or down. Where was their luck, uncanny or otherwise? Their guarding angels? Their watching gods?

I considered the scarf in my lap. Why had I not knitted the lines tighter? Even a paltry rain would come through. “Rot and nonsense. It won’t be any kind of useful.”

“What do you mean? Mrs. Mellon. Ah, your scarf. Well, let it become something else, then.”

I didn’t answer straightaway. They were looking askance, I thought, the gods, the angels, the lucky this and that. They were tending oblivion. Worse, they were, and are, imagined only. We, the dominion of souls, are unguided. A multitude alike the passenger pigeons, winging hither and yon and without true understanding or intent.

“A cover-all,” I said at last. “Or blanket. That is what it will be. They are ever needed.”

My patient agreed.

“So, who won?” I asked, and sighed, and began again with a cast-up stitch. “You have them set to join each other in Columbus,” I reminded her. “Your Leah. Her Chauncey.

“B
ALLS, THAT’S WHAT,”
Chauncey tells Heman as they lurch in the Concord towards Columbus, Ohio. “She’s got them the size of a bloodyo mule. Ten thousand dollars! I’ll give her ten thousand thwacks on her fine arse, what ho.”

Heman says, “I did mention that calling her a woman of notoriously bad character weren’t wise. Not clever neither. There’s a line, Chauncey, and if—”

“I’ll set fire to everything we own before she sees a damnedo nickel of it. Won’t I? Won’t I?”

“Everything
we
own?” Heman echoes. He looks with longing at the Concord door.

“I’ll see her ruined. I’ll see her reputation strung up in the nearest tree, won’t I, Hemano? She’ll not make a jackass of Chauncey Burr. Not neither a fox-ass, hah.”

“Jimmeny Jesus,” Heman mutters. “Why’d I leave the dry goods business? Why?”

“Because it was a fucko bore.”

At this remark the stout lady across from Chauncey nearly asphyxiates from shock.

“My apologies, madame,” Chauncey says, all amiable of a sudden. “I’ve been unjustly accused. My dander is up. My ire aroused.”

The stout lady clutches her carpet bag like a shield. A man in a bang-up coat glowers. Let him call me out for a duel, Chauncey thinks. I’d rather have a fucko hole drilled in my skull than suffer a court dock.

Heman whispers, “It’s thanks kindly to your mouth that we’re in this rotten pickle. Yup, it is. You’re a reverend, recall that? Start acting the part. You were fair good at it once. And convincing besides.”

Chauncey agrees with his brother for once. He
had
made a damn fine reverend. He conjures up the high vaulted tent, the sea of people within, and never has a metaphor been more apt. He visions the revivalists arrayed in storm-greys, their hair straggled as seaweed, their faces are whitecaps; their undulate movements a wave’s movements; their voices like wind roaring, water crashing, and Chauncey high in his makeshift pulpit, more alike to Neptune than a preacher of the Christian world.

The revivals would tumult into dawn, men and women collapsing and shaking with the spirit. Even yet Chauncey can hear the hallelujahs, the rousing hymns, his own bellowing exhortations. He became an expert at the head-smack that sent a participant into ecstasy. The power of suggestion, that was all. But there’d been no need for such a trick on the baker’s wife. She came to him—splendid woman—fearless and broad-beamed. He left before a scandal broke. Before, in fact, she could follow him with her baker’s dozen worth of
children. Chauncey smiles in nostalgia of those glorious days. Still, is it not better to be a scientist? Is it not better to dine with men who are so learned it takes them half an hour to make one damnedo point? Unlikely the learned men would dine with him now, and all because of those Fox females.

Chauncey sighs and rolls up the window flap and surveys the open countryside. It has been unusually warm for March and the main of the snow is gone. Flowers are thrusting up hither and yon. Birds are making their usual racket. Chauncey squints in disbelief. The entire horizon is heaving and undulating as if to detach from the earth. Ah. The passenger pigeons. He wonders if he should point them out to the others in the Concord. Decides, no. He will take credit for the sighting only if the birds fly overhead. They do not. The line sinks away and Chauncey’s eye falls now on an itinerant knife grinder. The grinder ignores the Concord even as it overtakes him. He walks head-down with poverty’s defeated gait, which is the gait of itinerants and peddlers the world over, no doubt.

Chauncey swats at a foot dangling from the stage roof. Maggie and Katie Fox said a peddler had been murdered for his money, and that made sense. Who gives a ratter’s ass about peddlers, or for itinerants of any stripe? Who marks where they go, or why? Their names are unknown. They have no set residence. And they might as well have
Blame Me
scripted on their backs, so often are they scapegoated. Indeed, if Chauncey were a miscreant, he would choose such men as victims, as had the Fox girls, those cunning little demons. No, society does not respect itinerants, not even itinerant preachers.

Chauncey recalls now a stuttering young circuit rider he’d met—in’32, was it? At the height, anyhow, of all that bullshit and ballyhoo about temperance. The young man, scrawny as a plucked rooster, was just commencing his mission and was yet agog with optimism. Said he was not going to accept donations. “No, s-sir!”

That’ll bloodyo change, Chauncey had thought. His advice? “Be God’s bulldog. Never accept a reluctant convert. Sinners must be brought to the fold! Or else you fail in God’s design.” Such blather, but it had seemed the fitting thing to say.

“Th-thank you, s-sir. I’ll t-treasure your a-a-advice,” he replied, clasping his hands as if he were holding actual words and not just vacant air.

“Oh, and hey-ho there, boyo, get yourself a horse if you aspire to be a circuit rider. Hard to seem above it all when you’re squelching in the mud with the downtrodden.”

The young man stuttered that he didn’t know how to ride. That he couldn’t afford a horse anyway. “It’s j-just my m-ma and m-me now. And we’re a p-poor family, p-poor as Job’s t-turkey,” he said, as if that explained everything.

Chauncey heard rumours later that the young man was having an exceedingly trying time as a preacher. Well, indeedo. Listening to him stutter out a sermon must have required more patience than Job ever had, never mind his turkey. And then Chauncey heard no more about him. Likely he became a bookbinder or a tailor. Likely he realized, as Chauncey did, that a wanderer had no respect.

Recalling all this Chauncey decides that whether he wins or loses this court battle, he will settle down and marry a good woman of ample charms. Become a professor of something or other. Botany, he decides as the Concord rolls on past an endless wood of what might be chestnut trees or elms. Chauncey sees polecats and deer and bears, now a field of horned cows, now a marsh crammed with ducks. At the edge of this marsh a horse, shod with clogs, balks at crossing while a child beats him with a stick. Chauncey sympathizes with the horse and the boy in equal measure. But then he has a knack for holding contradictory emotions. Particularly for Leah Fox Fish, whom he’d like to ruin and ravish and at the same instance.

“Great damn it!” shouts Heman. A woman screams. The Concord has rounded a curve too fast and now lists precariously on two wheels.

“Now, people!” Chauncey orders. In one practised go, the passengers heap to the high side of the Concord, forcing it back down to four wheels. The passengers then pop back to their own seats, as neatly as corks in a toy gun. The Concord has only tipped over once this trip, the driver seeming more sober than most.