Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  All this was coming back to me when Aaron Plum and the second man jumped from the carriage, grabbed roughly at both of Dirck’s arms, and pushed him toward the carriage, whose door the sheriff opened.

  “Murder!” screamed Dirck. “They will murder me!” Upon which remark he was thrown headlong into the carriage, the men climbing in behind him. Dirck screamed out to us before the carriage flew away behind the same matched pair I had seen in La Última’s dead eyeball. “They want my book!” he yelled. “Save my book!”

  And then poor Dirck was gone.

  Will turned and ran back up the stairs to his office, I at his heels. After we entered the office a man rose from where he had been crouching behind Dirck’s desk and ran down the stairs. Will yelled and ran after him and I did likewise. The man was clutching Dirck’s ledgers, and as he ran headlong across the street to another waiting carriage, he fell. One ledger flew out of his grip and landed at my feet, and I immediately snatched it up. As the man arose and turned to me I had a full look at him. He had red hair, a poor crop of muttonchops, and the top of his left ear had been sliced or bitten off. He stared at me and I took that stare as a threat. But Will was closing fast on him, and so the one-eared burglar leaped onto the step of the waiting carriage, clutching Dirck’s second ledger, and held on to the window as the carriage raced away. I looked at the ledger in my hands and saw it was the one in which I had studied Dirck’s hieroglyphics.

  “You did well, Daniel Quinn,” Will said to me, and I handed him the ledger. “This is a terrible event and I must set it right. You’ll go home now to the mansion, and I’ll see you when I can.” He signaled one of his printers in white smock and black derby who was standing (and bouncing) in the small crowd that had gathered. Will told the man to see that I got to Hillegond’s house, and then he shook my hand.

  “You are a friend of more things than you know, young man,” Will said to me, and then he went to his office.

  The printer found a cab for hire and took me to the Staats house. He said little as we rode, but I noticed he was bouncing even as he sat, and that I was not. I told him I had seen him bouncing at the newspaper and again in the crowd and that he was bouncing still. I asked him why.

  “It is because of my hat,” said the printer.

  “I see,” I said, and I said no more.

  At the mansion I told my story to John the Brawn, but it made so little impression on him that he told me not to bother Hillegond with it, for she had no use for her son. I said I could hardly do such a thing after seeing Dirck kidnapped at knife point. John agreed I should tell her since there was a knife involved, which is a measure of the man’s logic. We went to the music room, where Hillegond was sitting with Maud, listening to Magdalena playing the pianoforte and singing a love ballad:

  “Hangman, hangman, hold the rope!

  Hold it for a while.

  I think I see my father coming,

  Coming on the mile.

  Father, did you bring me gold,

  Or come to set me free?

  Or did you come to see me hang

  Upon that willow tree?”

  “Daughter, I did not bring you gold,

  Nor come to set you free,

  But I have come to see you hang

  Upon that willow tree.”

  I grew to love the song because of its message. All the daughter’s relatives come to see her hang but it is her sweetheart alone who sets her free. Maud and I exchanged glances and then John the Brawn announced I had a story to tell. And I told it.

  “Then Dirck is truly in trouble, the poor boy,” said Hillegond when I had finished my tale. She arose and went to the east parlor and turned outward the two portraits of Dirck at ages twelve and nineteen. At twelve Dirck was fat as a dumpling; at nineteen he was emaciation incarnate—the pair of portraits telling the story of his improbable progress as an ascetic. “He will feel better knowing they’re set right,” said Hillegond.

  “How will he know such a thing?” Maud asked. “Hasn’t Daniel told us he was abducted?”

  “He will get my message no matter where he is,” said Hillegond.

  “With trouble in the family,” said Magdalena, “we must be on our way.”

  “You needn’t leave,” said Hillegond. “I do enjoy your company.”

  “We’ve overstayed already,” said Magdalena. “This is such a madcap time for you. And I must get back to my work in the theater.”

  “What will happen to Daniel?” asked Maud.

  “Why, he’ll come with us,” said John the Brawn. “A group like this needs a slavey.”

  “I’ll be lost for conversation,” said Hillegond, who saw her new world of thumping, music, mysticism, and children about to vanish. “I will wither,” she added.

  “Nonsense,” said Magdalena. “You’ll blossom. And you’ll find a purpose in life, working to help your son. Life must continue. We’ve loved being here, in spite of all the death.”

  I was bewildered. Nothing seemed to conclude. I was in the midst of a whirlwind panorama of violence and mystery, of tragedy and divine frenzy that mocked every effort at coherence. I now felt a physical sadness overtaking me, my body and brain losing their security and being thrust into hostile weather. I knew that apart from my family’s being swept away by the cholera, what had happened to me in recent weeks was the most significant phase of my life thus far, the core of that significance being, and preeminently so, Maud. I longed only to watch her, talk with her, touch her hand, kiss her mouth. I had unholy longings to explore certain regions beneath her clothing, but I withheld such unschooled enterprise, for it seemed certain to generate trouble beyond my control. I had only one chance to talk alone with Maud in the next few days, an encounter in an upstairs hallway, outside the room filled with mirrors.

  “You must not forget your promise to steal me,” she said in an urgent whisper. “The chance will come very soon. I must take my life out of the hands of these people.”

  “But how will I ever do it?” I said to her. “I can’t even find a way to get near you. Where would we go? And with what money? It’s true what your aunt said. I’m penniless.”

  “You will have to figure it out,” said Maud.

  Then she was gone and we were busy with our goodbyes. In the kitchen I embraced Capricorn and Marty, with whom I had spent a great deal of time. In the foyer Magdalena and Hillegond wept grand tears on each other, and as we left the great house John the Brawn surreptitiously (though I witnessed it) thrust his hand high under Hillegond’s skirt to give her a farewell stroke. Into the carriage we lofted Magdalena’s trunk, John’s suitcase (which he’d retrieved from our old landlady), and the small traveling bags Hillegond had given Maud and me for our belongings.

  I leaned out the carriage window for a final look at the mansion, which aroused pity and terror in my breast, but without Aristotle’s cathartic effect. I pitied myself both for my inability to ever dream of living in such a place again, and also for my loss of its comforts as I reentered the world outside its doors. And its receding presence aroused in me the terror of John the Brawn, the terror of the unknown, the terror of once again being a penniless orphan.

  Hillegond’s driver took us to the pier at the Albany Basin, the mouth of the Erie Canal, which was opened because of the weeks of warm weather. Hillegond had suggested we save time by taking the train to the Schenectady highlands and boarding the packet boat there, as did everyone else. But Magdalena was against it, fearing for her safety behind a locomotive. Our final destination was Buffalo, but our first stopping point was to be Utica, where, said Magdalena, the opera house manager would welcome her, for on her last visit she had sold out the house for two weeks. Soon after we boarded the packet the boatmen hitched up the mules and we began our journey westward, scrunched in the salon with a half-dozen lumberjacks and drummers. I won no bed and John told me I could sleep on deck with the spare mule. I will refrain from reporting on the trivial details of the hours that followed, for they were hateful. I loat
hed being back on the canal, being looked upon as another higgler’s boy, one of those shiftless and worthless rungates who deserve whatever their drunken masters mete out to them in whippings, kicks, and cuffings, and whose destiny is either the penitentiary, the Almshouse, or an early grave.

  The mules moved us along as I schemed in silence on ways to steal Maud away from John the Brawn and La Última. I conceived of first stealing a horse and carriage, sweeping her into my grasp, fleeing down a gravel carriageway, leaping to the reins, and driving off into the cherished night of freedom, into the unchartable challenges of love. We would ride with the west wind and the flight of wild geese, imposing on each other the most exquisite splendors of which our adolescent imaginations were capable.

  As I entered my world of romantic intention I fell into a sleep that, for reasons I judge escapist, proved narcotic. Unable to resolve the theft of Maud, I thrust it even out of my dreams and awoke from that comatose condition facing the rising sun, curled up on dry ground. I was at the edge of the towpath, and what I saw in my first glance was a meadow to one side, canal to the other, no canalboat anywhere, no people and no houses, only a lone cow beside a small shack in a far field. My small clothing bag was beside me and, atop that, wrapped in a greasy newspaper, a ragged chunk of stale bread, the crust John the Brawn had promised me. Slowly I realized I was desolate. But far worse was the intolerable dawning that while I’d been trying and failing to bring about the theft of Maud, scurrilous John the Brawn had stolen her from me.

  I WEPT DESOLATED TEARS and felt the spiny urchins invading my soul. I shouldered my bag and walked eastward along the towpath, not knowing what town I was near, knowing only my position beneath the sky. Boats, mules, horses, and men passed, but I had commerce with none of them. I screamed, or thought I did, but wasn’t certain. I began a new scream that I would surely hear, but the sound was inconsequential to the rising sun. I stifled it and picked up a green stick. I walked until I found the correct rock and then I beat the rock until the stick was limp sinews. This also was inconsequential and I began to believe then that no act, no thought of mine, could shape a response equal to the feeling the theft of Maud had generated in me.

  I began to dwell on what it meant to find your love and then to have it taken from you, framing the question with a fifteen-year-old brain and a body in transition toward nefarious impulses. Even so, I could instantly see what a hollow game this was. If my condition was desolation, what, then, was Maud’s? I was at least able-bodied, male, unsubjugated, and capable of self-sustenance, whereas she was this fragile and precocious visionary in a state of peril. Who would save her from the ritual bawdry that awaited her? What guardian quality in John the Brawn, that overmastering Priapus, would protect her from life-long invasion by the lust of strangers? The child was, to my mind, about to become a spangled womb, a witch of beauty wasted on the bloody and pecunious bed of ravaged hymen.

  I yelled to a passing boatman, who told me I was twelve miles from Schenectady, and as I walked on I thought of telling Maud now all that had befallen me before I met her, those events that had brought me to the moment when I saved her from the bottom of the river. I thought the telling might even reach Maud in Utica, just as Hillegond had faith that her feelings would reach the kidnapped Dirck.

  Coupling Dirck and Maud I realized I had witnessed the theft of two lives, and I brooded that Dirck, Maud, I, and all the others were parts of a great machine, generating immeasurable power in the universe. I drew little comfort from this thought for I seemed too minuscule a part to be of any significance. Men like John the Brawn with his strength, Will Canaday with his brain and his newspaper, and the captors of Dirck with their will to evil were the great turbines, were they not? Children like myself waited their turn at power.

  But then I thought, no. Age alone does not determine whether one wields power, or even whether one remains a child. My own childhood had been terminated for me on a warm morning in April 1850, under the rising sun on the banks of the Erie Canal. There and then, Daniel Quinn, late a boy in possession of neither safety nor joy, a boy being shaped by fire, flood, ice, and the less comprehensible barbarities of men and women, was entering into a creaturehood of a more advanced order: young animal confounded—solitary, furious, eccentric, growing bold.

  This is the message I sent through the sky to Maud about my new condition:

  Maud, I begin on an event that took place a month before the raging of the plague. A stranger in old clothes walked crookedly up Van Woert Street and collapsed on Rhatigan’s front stoop. Old Lydie Rhatigan came out in her apron, her broom in hand to shoo him away. But one look at him changed her mind.

  “You’re sick, is it?” said Lydie.

  “My left leg is dead,” the man said to her. “I couldn’t walk another step. Feel the leg if you like.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” said Lydie.

  “Death is moving in me,” said the man, and he shifted his position so that his back rested against the stoop’s iron railing and his dead left leg dangled off the bottom step. The right leg he stretched along the width of the stoop.

  “It’s going into the right leg now,” he said. “Two more minutes and the right’ll be as dead as the left.”

  “What ails you?” asked Lydie.

  “The death is what it is.”

  “What kind of death?”

  “The only kind.”

  “Get on with ye. Is it a plate of food you’re after?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Well, you can’t clutter the stoop like this.”

  “It’s in both arms now,” said the man, and his left arm went limp. With his right hand he took off his hat, exposing a bald head, and put the hat on a step above him.

  “At least get the last bit of sunshine on the pate,” he said, and his right arm went as limp as his left.

  Lydie dropped her broom. “God bless us and save us,” she said.

  “A prayer is a blessing,” said the man, “but it doesn’t bother death. Now it’s in the stomach. And now the neck.” He closed his eyes. “There it is in the chest,” and he opened his eyes like two full moons. “Now I’m dead,” he whispered, and dead he was, with his eyes as open as the sky.

  Everyone thought of this as an isolated incident. Not until the others died was the man who had tracked the course of his own death seen as both carrier and emissary of the plague. It was a fiery hot summer, the worst time for it, the time when death grows fat. I was working for food with Emmett Daugherty, my father’s great friend, helping him rebuild his shed and privy. Emmett lived two miles north of Van Woert Street, and because of the distance I stayed with him, and so I wasn’t home the week death first walked up our street.

  The McNierney family across from us had four die in two days that week, and the four others who lived on fled to no one still knows where. Two desperate stragglers from Vermont found the McNierney house empty and open (Pud McNierney didn’t even close the front door when he ran out), and they went in and helped themselves to food, drink, and beds. Both were dead in those beds three days later.

  Maud, I won’t tell you all the horrid matter that comes out of the body when the cholera invades people; you probably know for yourself. But the sight of such things recurring so often put the fear into everybody in the city. A good many remembered the plague of ’32 that killed four hundred in Albany, and so people locked their doors, wouldn’t go out, wouldn’t let anyone in. Prayer vigils were called and some brave souls came out to hear our preachers tell them their sins were causing people to die. One stranger stood up and called the preacher a madman for saying that and yelled out how it was pigs running loose in the city, not sin, that caused the cholera. But he didn’t get far with that. They hit him with a plank and he stopped yelling.

  My mother got sick while I was at Emmett’s house, and when I came home she was in bed, smothered in blankets, shivering. She’d had the sickness for two days and the doctor gave her Veratrum to take on a piece of sugar. It didn’t
help at all, even with greater dosage, so Pa gave her Spirits of Camphor and she said she felt better. That same day Pa came home from work at the lumberyard (they wouldn’t let him stay home) and found my sister Lizzie face down on the paving stones near the house. She was alive but very ill. Pa carried her to bed and gave her the Spirits of Camphor right off, along with the Veratrum. That was the day I came home from Emmett’s house. I sat vigil with my mother and Lizzie both, and I never got sick, though I still don’t know why I didn’t.

  We heard that looting was going on down the block, which was news, because after the first flurry of deaths nobody went near any of the death houses; for who could be sure which things were uncontaminated and safe to steal? But for some the lure of larceny is greater than the fear of death, and soon every empty house was a target for thieves in masks and gloves. When my mother heard this she told me to find our birdcage and bury it. I asked her why.

  “Because I brought it from Ireland,” she said, “and because a birdcage isn’t all that it is, but you needn’t mind about that. Just remember what I say. Study it well and mind you that there’s value in it you can use someday. God knows the value. Now do it, boy, do what I say, and tell no one where you bury it.”