Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  Hillegond took maternal control of Magdalena’s bite wound, bathing it, bandaging it, sitting the patient close to the fireplace, whose fire Capricorn faithfully stoked. Then we huddled in front of the flames as Magdalena relived for us her time in the underworld.

  “When I first died,” Magdalena began, speaking with a dramatic fervor befitting her thespian nature, “I saw a child looking up at me from the bottom of the river as I was slowly sinking from above. She was a pretty little thing, and she looked like a doll I used to own. I remembered the dress, a blue gingham.”

  “Did she speak to you?” Hillegond asked. “They like to speak, dead children do.”

  “She gave me a welcome, is how I’d put it,” said Magdalena.

  “I knew it,” said Hillegond.

  “ ‘I welcome you,’ she said, ‘to the birthplace of dreams, where even dolls live forever.’ ”

  “Isn’t that just like a child?” said Hillegond.

  “Do you mean,” asked Maud, “that you remember those words, just as the little girl spoke them, and you were both under water?”

  “Not only under water,” said Hillegond, “they were both dead too, weren’t you, dear?”

  “Well, I think so,” said Magdalena. “I mean, you never get to hear that sort of thing when you’re up and about.”

  “Never,” said Hillegond. “It’s a special event, being dead and then coming back. I never thought I’d see it with my own eyes.”

  “But here I am,” said Magdalena.

  “Here you are,” said Hillegond. “Aren’t you the wonder?”

  “Was there anything at the bottom of the river except the child?” asked Maud. “I should think there’d have been dead fish and lots of muck.”

  “Dead fish rise to the top of the water,” I said, expert at last on something.

  “I don’t remember any muck,” said Magdalena. “The most I remember is how bright it was. ‘It ought to be dark at the bottom of the river,’ I kept saying to myself, but it was like the light of a thousand lamps. It was ever so cozy.”

  “Were you in heaven or hell?” Maud asked.

  “I really couldn’t say, Maudie, but I think it must’ve been heaven.”

  “You in heaven?” said John the Brawn, and he let out a great guffaw. “That’ll be the day, me love. I’ll show you how to get to heaven,” and he guffawed again.

  “You are too crude for words,” Maud told my master, stamping her foot as she addressed him. “You are the piggiest man that walks the earth and I hope you rot so awfully that your feet fall off.”

  “Now, now, dearie,” said Hillegond. “He’s only making a joke to lighten the subject. Your auntie was dead, you know.”

  “I rather doubt it,” said Maud. “I believe the symptoms of her life vanished, but not life itself.”

  “She’s a savvy little brat, ain’t she?” said John. “She’ll grow up to drive men batty, is what she’ll do.”

  “I was very dead,” said Magdalena. “Don’t tell me I wasn’t dead. You think I wouldn’t know it if I was dead?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” said Maud. “Nobody knows anything when they’re dead.”

  “Oh, that’s very wrong, child,” said Hillegond. “All sorts of people come back from the dead to tell what it was like. I’ve heard of folks who saw dead women with their feet on backwards, and dead dogs climbing trees, and dead men covered with feathers. You mustn’t be too smart about the dead, child, or they’ll catch you out when you don’t expect it. Be friends with the dead is what Hillegond says, and it’s served her well.”

  “Anyway, I’m glad I’m not dead anymore,” said Magdalena, who saw Hillegond usurping her stage.

  “What’ll you do now, dear,” asked Hillegond, “now that you’re not dead?”

  “Oh, I have plans,” said Magdalena. “I’ve got bookings to dance all the way to Buffalo. They’ll want me more than ever, now that I’ve died and come back.”

  “You’ll want bodyguardin’ for certain,” said my master, “or the crowds’ll tear you apart. A strong man’s what you’ll need.”

  “I imagine I will,” said Magdalena, nodding, and when I saw the way Maud looked in that very moment, I knew she felt trapped and that she would soon remind me of my promise to steal her. But before anything of that order could happen, a fierce knock came at the door, and as Hillegond opened the portal to the arctic night, a tall, cadaverish man, his hat and greatcoat covered with snow, stepped across the threshold to utter the single word “Lunacy.”

  “Lunacy?” echoed Hillegond.

  “Prisoners,” said the stranger, and he doffed his hat, revealing a thick head of hair, white as the snow that spattered about the foyer when he whacked his hat against his leg. “Wrap yourself up, Hilly. Your mansion has been defiled by madness and I need help in coping with it.”

  The man who brought us this grim news was Will Canaday, one of Albany’s most powerful citizens, the founder and editor of the Albany Chronicle, a sheet of considerable power and political brash. His newspaper had brought us to this house, for it was in the columns of the Chronicle that Magdalena had placed her notice about crossing the river. And now here appeared the owner of those columns, bringing us news not only of the prisoners he had been tracking but also of the ongoing madness of nature and its consequences to all forms of life.

  The cold had descended upon the city so suddenly after the flooding of the riverbanks that men were forced to bring their livestock to high ground. Canaday mentioned one man who brought his horse into his front room, and wisely so, for horses tethered untended in water found their legs frozen in the instantaneous ice that rose ’round their bones. Before the night was out, one man in Greenbush would grow furious at his inability to extricate his horse from deep ice and, in watching the horse dying standing up, the man himself would die of a congested brain. Carriages would become ice-locked, birds would freeze to the limbs of trees, and not only ice but fire would ravage the city wildly and indiscriminately. The bonnet of Bridie Conroy, an Irish washerwoman, would catch fire from sparks on the burning quay and Bridie would run crazed into the night, tumbling headlong into a shed full of hay, and igniting what history would call The Great Fire—six hundred buildings, many of them shops, all burned to cinders: five thousand people without lodging from the blaze that would yield its fury only to the heavy fall of snow that was just now beginning.

  None of us, not even Will Canaday, knew of this new curse sent down upon Albany by the maddened gods on this day of hellfire and ice, for Bridie Conroy was not yet aflame when Will cast his glance upon our comfort near the fireplace. He spoke to us with such solemn intent that we were all moved outside of ourselves.

  “I would not normally recommend that any man, woman, or child look upon what I am about to show to Hillegond,” he said. “But by all that is holy in this world, I feel that everyone alive should see this sight, so that its vision may endure for as long as we are able to hand it on.”

  As if summoned by Mesmer himself, we all slowly arose and wrapped ourselves in heavy garments to fend off the night, and we trekked single file through the new snow into a coppice in what I, from my vantage point at the rear of the column, saw to be the same procession of pilgrims I had witnessed in the once-dead eyeball of Magdalena Colón, even to the presence of Will Canaday’s black dog at my heels.

  Carrying a torch, Will led the way to where Amos Staats, adolescent hero of the Revolution, lay buried in his marble mausoleum, and where his Indian mother, Moonlight of the Evening, had spent her final days eating meals off his sarcophagus.

  Hillegond entered behind Will and John, and she gave a shriek that bespoke the power of this madness Will had invited us to witness. One by one we entered, Maud again clutching me in her passionate way.

  What we first saw when we edged around the sarcophagus was a dance of light and shadow from the torch upon an image I could not discern with certainty. In truth, its abnormal position was such that no man would have understood the sight
at first glance. What was clear was the head of the hanging man. The light revealed his crooked neck, and the rope around it suspended from a decorative protrusion of marble. But the top half of the corpse was awry, in a way no hanging man’s logic would recognize, angled unnaturally, as if he were lying asleep on the very air.

  In time our eyes perceived that the dead man’s arm was pulled earthward by something unseen, and what lay at the end of that arm proved to be another being in total shadow. Only when Will Canaday moved the torch closer to the tableau did we see the dead arm manacled to the living arm of a Negro, a man in such debilitated condition that he looked more dead than the corpse above him. Yet his eyes were open and staring.

  “He’s alive,” said Maud.

  “It’s Joshua,” whispered Hillegond, leaning close to the man.

  “It is,” said Will. “That’s why I tracked them.”

  “But who is the other?”

  “A Swede who spoke no English and whose name I don’t know,” said Will, handing me the torch and moving a wooden box to use as a step stool. “He was driven wild when he lost his wife in a throng at New York. Swindlers put him on a boat to Albany to find her, then abandoned him and took his life savings. Once in Albany, realizing he was lost and in penniless despair, he dove headlong into a well to kill himself, and when a good samaritan pulled him out before he drowned, he brained the samaritan with a club. Constables shut him in prison and he grew ever more demented, screaming constantly of his losses.”

  “God save us from madness,” said Magdalena, and she blessed herself with the sign of the cross.

  “Only a madman could understand what has happened today in this mad city,” said John the Brawn, his first admission in my hearing that he was not equal to all that passed in front of his face. Will clambered atop the tomb of Amos to cut down the Swede and I noted then that the covering slab of marble atop the tomb was already dislodged from its straight angle. As Will stood on tiptoe to cut the rope his foot moved the slab farther and it fell to the floor, marble onto marble, splitting into four irregular pieces as neatly as might a well-cut diamond. For an instant Will dangled in air, his arm around the dead man’s waist. Then, with full awareness of his position, he deftly sliced the rope and, quite agilely for his fifty years, leaped to the floor clutching the corpse, avoiding the violation of Amos’s exposed coffin by either his own or the dead Swede’s heavy feet.

  Certainly our priority now was the rescue of Joshua from his torture: removal of the manacle that was still tearing his flesh. With the dead man’s weight it had cut into the bones of Joshua’s wrist and hand, and he had lost such blood as would bestow death on most men.

  Will and my master tried ways of carrying him so as not to injure him further, but whichever way they lifted, the Negro’s pain was compounded. And so I spoke up.

  “If each of you support one man, I can walk between them and hold up their arms. That way there won’t be any pressure on the wounds of the man called Joshua.”

  “That’s good thinking, lad,” said Will.

  “He’s a ready one,” said my master.

  “We can’t leave the tomb open like that,” Hillegond said. “I’d be afraid some animal would come in.”

  “We’ll put boards over it,” said Will.

  “I’d be afraid of rodents. No, he’s got to come into the house.”

  “You want the coffin in the house?” said Will.

  “In the Dood Kamer,” said Hillegond firmly, and she turned to leave.

  “Come, Maudie,” said Magdalena. “Back to the house.”

  “I prefer to go with Daniel,” said Maud, the first time she had pronounced my Christian name. “I can come to no harm in the company of three men, and I shall carry the torch to show them the way.”

  “She has a mind of her own,” said Hillegond, who then took the arm of Magdalena; and with heads bowed against the billowing snow, the two compatriots in lust strode out into the night toward the mansion.

  Will led us to a secondary entrance of this enormous house, where we were met by Capricorn, who expected us. We followed him through a long corridor, down two dozen steps to a basement, and then, by the light of Maud’s torch and Capricorn’s lamp, we walked the length of the enormous cellar to a cavelike room whose existence became obvious only after Joshua moved two foundation timbers, which were, in fact, a door.

  We lowered Joshua to a padded pallet that lay ready on the floor, and the manacles cut again into his wrist, shooting agony even through me. Capricorn squatted beside Joshua to study his condition, then rose and spoke to us.

  “I thank you gentlemen, and you, too, Master Daniel,” he said. “I’ll take care of him now.”

  He turned back to Joshua, and as he did so, his lamp cast a beam into the deeper region of the cave and I caught sight of three forms, one a female, all Negro, all crouching in the darkness. I gave off a startled grunt and Will saw my surprise.

  “Whatever you see, boy,” he said to me, “you see nothing,” and he shook a finger in my face. “Nothing.”

  I nodded at this and he added, “I’ll join you in a few minutes at the mausoleum to bring in the coffin,” and Maud, John, and I retreated from the cave while Will conferred with Joshua. As we went my master remarked, “They got themselves a regular nigger factory in there.”

  “You mustn’t use that word,” said Maud.

  “What word might that be?” said John.

  “You know what word I mean,” said Maud, “and if you use it again in my presence, I shall find a hatpin and stick you with it.”

  John shut his mouth at that, the first of his many silencings by Maud, and we retraced our steps to the mausoleum. Will eventually enlightened me on Joshua, an intrepid fugitive from Virginia who had escaped from slavery, later returned to Virginia by stealth to free his woman, and on subsequent trips led six other slaves through the night forests to freedom in the North. He had been recently captured near Albany by slave hunters, the quest for him sweetened by a three-hundred-dollar reward, and he was jailed under the federal law that honored the property rights of Southern slaveholders.

  News of a fugitive slave’s capture reached Will Canaday at the newspaper and he discovered it was Joshua in custody. A conspiracy among antislavers to snatch Joshua away from the law was plotted, but the day’s madness intervened yet again: the driver of the carriage transporting the prisoners to a southbound train was struck by a flying prism of ice, and before Will Canaday and his conspirators could intervene, Joshua and the Swede to whom he was manacled took the reins themselves, fled from both captors and liberators, lashing the horses into such furious flight that at one turning both men were thrown off the carriage, whereupon they fled by foot to the sanctuary offered by the mausoleum of Amos Staats, where Will found them. Once inside the tomb, which over the years had become as much a storage shed as a burial site, the Swede decided that death was his destiny. He choked the weakened Joshua out of his lights with a single hand, and then, with a length of rope, hanged himself with great skill and effectiveness, full certain, I conclude, that no horrors of the beyond could match those of this world.

  We waited in the mausoleum and Will returned presently. Then we three, two men and a boy, with Maud lighting our way, lifted Amos from what proved not to be his final resting place, carried him up from the earth and into the Dood Kamer, which was thereby hosting its second resurrection of the evening, and placed his coffin on the same raised platform from which Magdalena had arisen. The coffin was remarkably clean and dry in spite of its years of burial, and the odor of its occupant’s decay had been banished by time.

  The entire household, servants included, gathered in front of the coffin when we set it down, witnesses all to sanctity disturbed, a hero encased, though I knew nothing of Amos’s history in the Revolution at that moment. The coffin had been hand-hewn by Amos’s father, Jacobus, who had also sealed its edges and surfaces with a substance waxen to the touch and which seal I now could see had been broken, an infinitesim
ally fine crack running the length of coffin where the lid closed.

  “I would like to see what he looks like,” Maud said.

  “Dead these seventy-odd years, he wouldn’t be a pretty sight, child,” said Hillegond, more amused than affrighted by Maud’s suggestion. But Maud did not wait for approval. She walked to the coffin and lifted the lid on a stunning sight: Amos in his soldier’s cap and uniform, arms crossed on his chest, a warrior’s medal over his heart, lying as if asleep. His skin was a gray transparency, the color of exhausted night, the perfection of his death exuding a radiance that awakened swooning sounds in the onlookers.

  “He hasn’t decayed,” said Will. “An amazing achievement. It must be the way the coffin was sealed.”

  “I always thought corpses rotted from the guts out,” said my master.

  I moved alongside Maud, and as naturally as breath itself we intertwined our hands and stared at Amos from the end of his coffin.

  “He’s so beautiful,” Maud said. We stared together at his beauty until she turned her gaze to my own face. “And you are beautiful as well,” she said, and she kissed me with her mouth upon my mouth. She kept her mouth there and my arms went ’round her. We kissed under the spell of death’s beauty, then stopped kissing to gaze again at Amos.

  “Oh my God, look what’s happening to him,” said Magdalena. His face had begun to swell: cheeks, forehead, neck, eyelids all rising as might a loaf of leavening bread, a shocking sight from which we could not take our eyes. And then he exploded—his perfection, I suggest, rent by the air of our pernicious age—exploded upward and outward, his hands and face disappearing beneath a great grayish puff of dust tinged with pale blue, a puff that ascended fully six feet above the coffin and spread over us all in a melancholy haze. The dust demarcated the end of something, the final burst of heroism, perhaps, whose like was no longer accessible to our commonplace lives. The sadness of lost glory was implicit, most especially to Maud, who cried as if a demon held her in its jaws. She clutched me, threw her arms about my neck and kissed me again with passion and energy, ground her pelvic center against my own and kissed all of my face with a ferocious gluttony.