“Mr. Cannon, ahead of us lies our destination.” He pointed up the street. “The Old Mortuary Church, the oldest church in New Orleans still standing, built to conduct the funerals of swamp-fever victims.” He winked at Nate and stepped expertly over a man dead drunk in a doorway, his legs jutting onto the sidewalk.
Nate stepped over the man as well and asked, “What was in that drink you sent me?”
“Neutral spirits, sugar, dried fruit, and tobacco for the bead and sparkle.” Gorman touched Nate’s elbow to guide him around a vegetable cart. “And, of course, knockout drops of my own design.”
When Nate pulled up short, Gorman shrugged. “You would have slept, Mr. Cannon. It wouldn’t have killed you, but I would have taken your rifle. I changed my mind when you ignored the girl. I told my partner, Pierre, that you were a man of singular character.”
They had come to stand in front of a mission-style church, compactly built with a single spire. Nate followed Gorman inside. The interior was dark, with only a few candles burning, and Nate stopped in the open doorway to let his eyes adjust to the gloom, his hand instinctively going to the pistol grip. The church seemed to be filled to capacity with men and women sitting quietly in the wooden pews or standing against the walls. Their heads all turned expectantly to the door when he walked in, their clothes rustling in one swelling movement.
Gorman’s partner, Pierre, stood in the center aisle holding paper and pencil, a basket at his feet filled with coins and paper money. He nodded once solemnly to Nate and then went back to his tallying.
Gorman waved cheerfully to the priest standing by the altar and said, “You’re quite a draw, Mr. Cannon.” He motioned for Nate to follow him through a small door leading to a narrow passageway.
Nate turned once to look at the crowd dressed in the flamboyant, extravagant manner of whores, jailbirds, bounders, and worse, and he felt Gorman’s hand on his shoulder. “You’re safer here, son, than in anyplace else in the city, I assure you.”
Nate followed Gorman up to the bell tower and stood at the railing, open at all sides, looking at the expanse of the city, and then he gripped the railing, dizzy and winded. Gorman pointed to the river, to the great building works in all directions, and to the towering spire of the St. Louis Cathedral; Nate, who’d thought that Galveston was an impressive town, with its gaslights and railroads and storefronts, abandoned all expectations of ever seeing another city of such monumental scale.
“That is Conti,” Gorman said, pointing to the street bisecting Rampart. “It runs in a straight line to the river. Look through your scope to the top of the last building on the right and tell me what you see on the roof.”
Nate knelt on one knee, propped the barrel of the Whitworth on the low railing, and sited down the street. Squinting through the scope, he said, “Looks like some kind of bird.” It appeared to Nate to be a large statue of a rooster, facing towards him, with a body of tainted copper and a head of what looked to be luridly colored red glass.
“It’s a capon,” Gorman said. “A castrated rooster. And the man who put it there is one Gaspar Duverje, a man of great wealth and property, with one of the largest plantations right across the river in Algiers. I’ve had, over the years, occasion to rob him many times.” He smiled at Nate and motioned for him to stand again. “I was never caught and he hated me for that. He made it his life’s work to exact his revenge, and he tried in numerous ways to do so.” He pointed to a scar on his forehead.
“I was married in this church to the most beautiful Creole woman you could imagine. What she lacked in spotless character, she made up for in good-natured enthusiasm. And Gaspar Duverje stole from me the one thing I would have traded everything else to keep. He took her to Paris and she never returned. Shortly after, he had the capon made and shipped at great expense from France and mounted it on that island building, four stories tall, knowing that every time I came up to the bell tower, which I often did, I would see his insult to me.
“The building is guarded night and day, and every other building around it for blocks is one-storied. The distance between this church and the bird is nine hundred and eighty yards. Mr. Cannon, I’ve schemed for years on how to knock the head off that bird, and the minute I saw your Whitworth, I knew I had my chance. You give me what I want and I promise you, you’ll get what you want.”
“So all you want me to do is shoot the rooster?”
Gorman nodded and crossed his arms. “If you overshoot the mark, all you’ll hit is water.”
“And if I undershoot it?”
Gorman shrugged. “New Orleans is a dangerous place, Mr. Cannon. Anyone who lives here accepts that.”
Nate thought about how few tries he’d get. His mind told him it was an impossible shot; he’d fired the gun only once at just over six hundred yards, and, though he’d hit the mark, the shot only nicked the outermost edge of the target. There were four hexagonal bullets left for the rifle, but some quiet caution whispered to him to keep one back, even if it meant losing his chance for information on McGill.
“I have only three bullets,” he said. “And the farthest target I’ve hit was six hundred yards. What happens if I miss?”
Gorman shrugged. “I have every confidence in you. However, I have placed quite a sizable bet on your succeeding. If you were to miss, I wouldn’t encourage you to stay in New Orleans.”
Pierre appeared at the bell-tower door, nodded to Gorman, and then looked expectantly at Nate. There had been a slight morning wind that seemed to be strengthening with the rising temperatures, but in his favor, it was blowing towards the water. The sun was moving westward and before long the reflection off the rooster’s head would be a hindrance.
The people in the church had begun spilling onto Conti Street, walking in the direction of the river, their heads turned expectantly towards the church tower at times, as though waiting for some kind of signal.
Gorman said, as though it were an afterthought, “One more thing, Mr. Cannon. If you do manage to hit the target, it will not sit well with Duverje. He’s threatened to kill anyone who brings down the rooster.”
Nate rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Anything else you want to tell me now to steady my hand? God Almighty,” he muttered. He stared out at the crowd, and one man cupped his palms around his mouth and shouted up at the bell tower, “Go on, you son of a bitch, I’ve got money riding on this here.”
He looked back at Gorman. “You’ll find my man?”
Gorman nodded once and Nate cleared his throat, saying, “All right, then. I need a runner to get my cartridge pack off my saddle. I’ll want some bunting tied to the railing to cradle the barrel, and a rug to kneel on. And some water. I need some water.”
Pierre turned and called down the bell-tower stairs, where a chorus of voices repeated the instructions and Nate realized that there were people lining the stairwell, passing information like a fire brigade handing along buckets of sand.
Folded rugs were placed at Nate’s feet, and cotton packing covered with a cloth—an ornate strip of embroidery that Nate suspected had been taken from the altar—was lashed to the railing, a sloping V couched in the middle. Within twenty minutes a boy had brought his cartridge pack, and Nate carefully measured out the powder and poured it down the barrel. He started to ramrod the wadding down the bore, but thought better of it and added more grains of black powder. He tamped down the stiff wadding, loaded the bullet, and fitted a percussion cap onto the nipple.
He took his position and sighted down the scope at his target. He took a few deep breaths, pulled the hammer back, squeezed the air out of his lungs, and fired. When the smoke cleared, the rooster’s head was still intact, and Nate had no idea how far he had deviated from the target, whether above it or to the side. He didn’t think he had undershot the mark, as he could see no damage to the building below the roofline.
Deerling had once told him that the side scope sometimes influenced the shooter to drag to the left at the moment of firing, so after he repeate
d the loading process, he edged the centering reticle a thread’s distance to the right. He stared at the target until his open eye began to water and then he squeezed off another shot. Again, the clearing air showed the rooster intact.
He looked up at Gorman, who was staring at him, expressionless. Nate stood to stretch and loosen the muscles in his neck and shoulder, and he drank deeply from the glass of water left for him.
The sun had moved farther across the sky and Nate could see the rooster’s head beginning to glow like a whorehouse beacon, the faceted glass reflecting light in reddish flares. He thought about his next shot and whether he should use the fourth bullet if he missed.
He reloaded, knelt at the railing, and propped the barrel onto the padding. He exhaled until he felt the bellows of his lungs played out, pulled off another shot, and heard the distant dull ping, barely audible, of the bullet hitting something solid. When the smoke cleared, there was a jagged hole in the rooster’s body, but the head remained, and Nate cursed and dropped his head below the stock that was still pressed against his shoulder. He cupped his forehead in one hand, feeling what little grace he had left hopelessly lost against the enormousness of the city below and the task set before him.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Gorman lean down and place something on the rug next to him, and when he looked, there were three more hexagonal bullets.
“The man from Spotsylvania didn’t have the rifle,” Gorman said. “But he did manage to part with these. For a price.”
“You’ve had the bullets the whole time?”
“You’re not a cardplayer, are you, Mr. Cannon.”
Gorman leaned against the railing once again, waiting, and Nate struggled to dampen the anger that rode his frustration and tension like barbs on a tight wire.
Gorman said, “I imagine your shots have begun to claim some attention.” He pointed to the distant building, and when Nate looked through the scope again, he saw two men with rifles on the roof, one with a spyglass pointed in his direction.
Nate had used so much black powder for the last three shots that he told Gorman he’d have to clean the rifle bore so it wouldn’t foul. He quickly cleaned the gun while Gorman stood impassively looking out towards the river, the people in the streets craning their necks up to the tower, trying to make sense of the delay.
Nate deliberated for a moment and then loaded a hundred grains of powder into the barrel, ten more grains than the last shot. To his great relief, the new bullet fit down the bore as well as the old, and when he had seated the cap onto the nipple, he raised the barrel once more to the railing. The view from the scope showed Nate that the spyglass man on the target building had seen him take his shooter’s position, and the man frantically waved his partner down, out of sight.
The sometimes buffeting wind had paused. Nate had heard no sounds from the street since a woman’s loud laughter was cut off midbreath with a sharp and exuberant curse. Deerling had once told him regarding the Whitworth not to think about the distance being traversed, that his common sense would try to tell him that it couldn’t reasonably be done. But he reminded Nate that the gun was made for distance, like a good relay horse was made for long travel, and to imagine the bullet as a thought flying easy and sure to his beloved, though the beloved be far away.
He fired off the Whitworth and a second later heard a faint sound like the scattering of leaves, and, without waiting for confirmation, Gorman pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and waved it to the crowd below. Conti Street erupted with cheering and yells, and Nate saw that the number of spectators had grown to fill the avenue like an invading army. He stood up, still holding the Whitworth, his knees and hip popping like corn out of hot coals. He turned away from the street and Gorman nodded, smiling his gentleman’s smile, and extended his arm to the bell-tower door.
Nate followed behind Pierre, who cleared a way through the people standing two abreast on the stairwell, and, with Gorman at his back, they walked out of the church onto the street, where the bounders and footpads clapped him on the back and the whores pressed his hand warmly and whispered into his ear things he couldn’t quite make out above the swelling noise and confusion.
He was taken to a nearby saloon, and a whiskey was pressed into his hand, which he quickly drank. And then he drank another, and another, all the while accepting with a growing sense of amazement the sly, excitable good wishes of Gorman’s ever-expanding street court, all of them assuring Nate he was now one of their own. When Gorman finally asked him the name of the man he sought, Nate shouted into his ear, “William McGill,” and told him about Lucinda traveling with him. Gorman turned his head away for a moment but finally nodded and moved off.
A fiddle, and then a squeezebox, began to scratch and wheeze above the din and he later remembered dancing with a woman, his feet moving faster than his lagging mind, until his knees could not support his weight and Gorman guided him to the door, signaling to a girl to take him home. Nate thought that home sounded like a good idea and staggered behind her for several blocks before thinking to ask her whose home he was going to. The girl put one of his arms around her shoulders and guided him into a small, one-story house, the front door unlocked, the two rooms modest and tidy.
She sat him on a chair and knelt in front of him to take off his boots, and he took her chin in his hand and raised her high-cheeked face to the light.
He asked her who her people were and she said she was Caddo. He then told her that his wife was Cherokee, and the girl nodded as though the revelation were only right and proper. She unpinned her hair and moved him to sit on the bed. But he took her arms to stay her movements and asked if she would sit on the chair for a while, just so he could look at her. She slipped down her petticoat, baring herself to the waist, and he could vaguely see the small globes of her breasts behind the black hair that fell over them.
When the yearning to touch her became too terrible to bear, he mumbled his thanks and lay on the floor, his back to her. Through the girl he was able to summon the image of his wife under lamplight: the particulars of her features, her softly rounded moon face, and the jet hair that cloaked her shoulders falling straight as rain.
He finally closed his eyes to sleep, and sometime in the middle of the night, the girl rose up and covered him with a blanket.
Chapter 27
The staircase was wide and curving, made of marble and carpeted down the middle with a runner of majestic blue. Lucinda stood at the top of the stairs holding a small tin box in one hand and gripping the banister tightly with the other. She had purposely set her naked feet on the exposed marble, hoping its brittle chill could distract her from the recent memory of what had been done to her body—what she had allowed to be done—and her growing anxiety coiled and uncoiled in her stomach like a worm.
She shivered inside her nightdress, tissue thin and stained with sweat that was not her own, preparing to place one foot down the riser, and the memory of standing atop Mrs. Landry’s stairwell slid into her mind. That moment, too, had been a supposed beginning, a stepping from one life into another. She had made an expert copy of the German’s key from an impression scored into a thin bar of soap in a tin box, just like the impression she had made of the key belonging to her fish, the key that opened the front door to the house with the curving marble staircase.
Clutching the banister, she followed the first step with a second, but she could go no farther until she slowed her breathing, bringing her mind into sharper focus, ignoring the pain of the abraded flesh on her buttocks and thighs. She had had no fall for days now, but she felt clenched and ragged, as though a new kind of sickness had seeped into her pores along with the damp and the cold.
It seemed to her that everything of import in New Orleans had been built of marble: the monuments, the interiors of the mansions that lined First Street, the mausoleums in the cemeteries. To stand within a marble hall was to be comforted by the exquisite coolness of the veined white stone. But to Lucinda, looking across the g
rand foyer of the house, with its marble floors and columns, softly luminous in the lamplight, it now gave her the feeling of being entombed alive.
She moved her hand down the banister, her feet following suit another few steps until she stood at the midway point. She heard a door open somewhere on the second landing and she gripped the tin box until its edges broke through the skin of her palm, like a shard of metal piercing a crust of ice, and then the door closed again and she realized it was Tartine using the water closet. Minutes passed and there were no further sounds.
She padded softly to the bottom of the stairs, and though the servants had all been sent away, she peered through the darkened foyer for any moving shadows. A sudden cramping in her abdomen caused her to double over in pain, and she stared at a pinpoint of blood at her feet before realizing that the hand holding the tin box had been cut.
A hollow sensation began building in her head, and pressing her injured palm with the bottom of her shift, she leaned against a column and closed her eyes. This, then, was the moment that had been approaching since the day William McGill lay with her in her bed staring into her face, which was contorted and grinning in a stricture of pain like a death’s-head mask, promising to care for her as long as she remained loyal. She had never asked the cost of that loyalty; had never wanted to know. He was the one person who, in the moments of confronting her waking terrors, would not turn away, did not shun or pity her. He would hold her more closely, in those unmarginned spans of time, peering readily into her eyes as they stared unfocused and vacant towards the ceiling.
It was more than anyone else had ever done—more than her own father—and now the bill for the partnership had come due. Her belly cramped again and she clutched the tin more tightly.
Bill would take the impression she had made and fashion a key that would gain him access to the very house in which she stood. He would rob her fish, silently and expertly, taking all the jewelry and gold he could carry in one large carpetbag. Then they would leave for Atlanta, or St. Louis, or some other city of their choosing.
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