The Undertaker's Assistant

by Amanda Skenandore

  The gentleman in front of her stepped aside to say something to his companion, and for the first time, the orator stood before Effie in clear view.

  Years of embalming had well acquainted her with variations of the human form—fat, thin, aged, youthful, muscled, wasted, crooked, straight. But she’d never seen a more perfect example, living or dead, than this man. His confident air suggested a man in his forties, but his dark, luminous skin—free as yet of lines or furrows—hinted at one much younger. Thirty perhaps, or younger still. He moved with graceful purpose as he spoke, turning to address each segment of the crowd, raising an arm, brandishing a loosely closed fist. His words no longer registered. It was the gentle slope of his wide-set shoulders that claimed her attention now, the outline of his deltoid and bicep muscles beneath his cotton shirt.

  The bells of St. Patrick’s tolled the hour, startling Effie back to her senses. The sun, no more than a smudge of white behind the clouds, lolled closer to the far horizon. The Italian men had finished their game and quit the circle. The bustling crowd had thinned from the banquettes.

  What foolery to linger as she’d done, listening to this political babble when more pressing needs abounded. At this hour, she had little hope of finishing her errands before the shops closed. If she left now, she might at least make it to the apothecary and hosier.

  Then the speaker turned and looked in Effie’s direction. His heavily lashed eyes locked with hers. She forgot the soap and stockings and shoe polish. She forgot even to breathe. His earnest gaze penetrated her, singling her out as if she were the most enthralling person in the crowd. As if she were the only person in the crowd. His dark irises, the same glowing brown as his skin, held her there, affixed to the stone walkway as surely as iron nails.

  “And you, miss? I see you are not blind to the ills of this fair city that so sorely try our souls. What issue would you bring forward for consideration?”

  Effie glanced around her. Surely his question was meant for someone else. But no other women stood within a dozen paces of her. “Umm . . . er . . . the overcrowding of the cemeteries.”

  Several in the crowd snickered, but the man silenced them with a wave of his hand. “No, the lady’s right.” He paused, and for the first time during his stumping seemed to grope for something to say. “We’ve not done enough at the statehouse to address the unsanitary conditions of the city, it’s true. And plots in the new cemetery in Metairie are a mighty high cost, such that the workingman is all but excluded. Yet another way they try to push the Negro and the immigrant out . . .”

  He spoke on about injustices done the poor, the colored, the infirm. True enough, but not what Effie had meant. She really ought to attend to her errands, but she couldn’t leave such a misunderstanding uncorrected.

  “All must rise,” he said now. “All must fight to ensure our collective advancement, to ensure that the rights granted us, not by man but by God Almighty, are realized by all.”

  Effie waited for him to pause long enough that she might interject and explain herself. But his words continued unbroken, and his gaze slipped away. Likely he didn’t understand the gravity of the issue, for he said nothing more about the cemeteries. Effie tried to squeeze forward, to sidestep and shimmy through the horde. She made little progress. She stood on her tiptoes and waved her hand until those behind her complained they couldn’t see.

  If she could just correct the man on her point of overcrowding, then she could be gone and to her errands. But his stubborn eyes avoided her, sweeping the crowd, resting here and there, glancing in her general direction without settling upon her as they had before.

  Sometime later—Effie couldn’t tell if it had been ten minutes or fifty—applause sounded. The man stepped down from the banana box he’d used as a platform during his speech. Dozens of men circled around him, vying for a chance to shake his hand and offer their praise. Effie pressed in too, unladylike as it was, but found herself waiting just the same.

  Slowly, the crowd dispersed. In its place, crept the cold. A few men yet tarried around the speaker, jabbering on about this or that. The young boy she’d seen earlier skipped about the circle, picking up abandoned handbills from the ground. He whistled as he went, the thin, shrill sound almost painful after listening to the man’s richly toned voice. Her feet ached from standing so long on the hard stone, and her stomach grumbled for supper. She craned her neck to see St. Patrick’s clock tower above the bald treetops. Already she regretted the afternoon’s dalliance and knew she’d rue it even more tomorrow when she ran out of soap.

  When she faced forward again, the man was standing right in front of her.

  “You stumped me a moment,” he said. The timbre of his voice was just as distracting up close, making molasses of her wits. Rosemary and perspiration wafted from his skin. “I thought for sure you’d say something about schooling or the recent spike in the cost of flour.”

  “You mistook my point,” she managed at last.

  “Oh?”

  “What are we to do in an epidemic when we haven’t enough plots and gravediggers? When yellow fever struck in fifty-three they resorted to dumping bodies in ditches only to have them wash up later when it rained.”

  He cocked his head and cleared this throat. “I . . . hadn’t thought of that. A good point.”

  Effie bristled. He was just placating her now. “When you ask a woman her opinion, you shouldn’t assume she’ll make some dithering comment about domestic affairs.”

  “Indeed not, I see.”

  “And to your point about the unsanitary conditions of the city—”

  He held up his hand and gave a tired smile. His teeth were large and white, nearly straight save for a narrow gap between his top incisors. “Come to our meeting and we can discuss the issue further then.”

  “What meeting?”

  He nodded to the forgotten flyer in her hand.

  “Oh . . . no. I’m not politically inclined.”

  “You seem rather so to me. And we could always use a spirited young woman like you.”

  “Why should I concern myself with politics? My vote doesn’t count.”

  The man smiled again, one side of his lips pulling slightly higher than the other. “The enfranchisement of our race goes far beyond the ballot box. Consider the integration of schools, or right to purchase a first-class rail ticket.”

  “I could hardly afford a first-class ticket,” she said. His easy answers combined with the distracting line of his mouth irked her further.

  “That’s another issue we fight for, fair wages.”

  Effie shook her head, as much to clear her addled mind as to dissent.

  “Think on it,” he said, nodding again to the flyer. And before she could say she most certainly would not think on it, he bowed and turned back toward his worn banana box.

  A new group circled around him. The boy with his flyers. A stately woman perhaps twice Effie’s age. A crutch-wielding man whose lower leg was missing. The orator’s posture relaxed and he flashed them a smile more brilliant than any he’d shared with the audience. The woman offered him her hankie. He blotted his sweat-dappled forehead. The crippled man bent down with surprising agility and picked up the banana box. The young boy said something and they all laughed. Then the irksome man crouched down for the boy to clamber onto his shoulders.

  Effie watched them leave, not turning from where she stood until the fading light and growing distance conspired to conceal them.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mrs. Neale called to her from the parlor before Effie could sneak past to her room.

  “You home awfully late, Miss Effie.”

  The landlady sat in her usual chair beside the fireplace, her graying hair tied up in a silk scarf and a worn book of psalms open on her lap. The gas lamp on the far wall burned dimly and the fire had dwindled.

  Effie squatted beside the hearth. She jostled the embers with the poker to bring down the ash, then added more coal. The lumps smoked and crackled. “I know.”
<
br />   “Third time this week you done missed curfew.”

  Effie started to speak, but the old woman flapped her hand. “I know, death don’t follow no schedule. What was it this time?”

  “Consumption.”

  Mrs. Neale shook her head and whispered a quick prayer. “How’d a girl like you get caught up in work like this anyhow?”

  “The War,” Effie said. “I was a runaway.”

  “They didn’t toss you back into the fields?”

  She shook her head.

  Most of the officers had wanted to. What use was so small a child? But Captain Kinyon refused. She could still hear the rattling fervor in his voice. It was one of her earliest memories that didn’t come in fits and snatches, and the only memory at all of the captain lit with such passion. “An army surgeon took me on. Brought me North with him after the War.”

  “What put him in mind to do that?” Her lips puckered. “A white man bringing a black girl North. Gracious me, you couldn’t have been a day over ten.”

  “It was nothing like that.” She stared into the gathering flames. “He’d had a daughter himself.”

  When they’d arrived North, Mrs. Kinyon had led her into the house and upstairs. “I expect Mr. Kinyon means for you to sleep here in Annabelle’s room.” She released Effie’s hand but hesitated before opening the door. Stale, musty air rushed out.

  Effie stepped into the room, but Mrs. Kinyon tarried at the threshold, as if a hex prevented her entry. “I’ll heat some water for your bath.”

  For several moments, Effie stood in the center of the room, afraid to touch anything. A bed with a blue and red checkered quilt sat at one end. Beside it, a dresser and matching washstand. A wicker bottom chair. She set down her knapsack and unrolled her blanket along the opposite wall. Cobwebs fluttered in the corners. Two moths lay dead on the windowsill. She unpacked her spare shift and box of buttons, setting them neatly alongside her bedroll.

  “Don’t just throw your things on the floor like that, Euphemia,” Mrs. Kinyon said when she returned.

  “Where shall I sleep, ma’am?”

  “In the bed, of course.”

  “But where will Miss Annabelle sleep?”

  Mrs. Kinyon winced. “Our daughter is dead, Euphemia.”

  Effie blinked and looked away from the mesmerizing coals. “They were reformers, the surgeon and his wife,” she said to Mrs. Neale. “Abolitionist before the War.”

  “Thought to make you their little charity case, then?”

  “No, I was their . . .” Ward, that was what Mrs. Kinyon had said. A word Effie had to look up in the captain’s leather-bound dictionary. A minor or person under the care of a guardian. Ward, not daughter. Guardian, not parent. How had Effie ever confused the two? “I was the captain’s assistant.”

  “Hmm.” Mrs. Neale’s eyes narrowed a moment before softening. “Well, leastwise you back South and home now.” She glanced at the mantel clock. “Suppose I can make an exception for you now and again with this curfew business. You’ve enough wit not to get into any trouble. Don’t be lettin’ on to any of the other ladies, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Effie set the poker back in its stand and stood. Her thighs ached from crouching so long beside the fire. “Shall I read to you some?”

  “Nah, you head along. I’m about set for bed myself. There’s a plate of food for you in the kitchen.”

  The stove fire had burned to ash, but the small kitchen was yet warm. Effie poured herself a glass of buttermilk and uncovered the hoecakes, greens, and boiled ham Mrs. Neale had left out for her. All day she’d kept a tight rein on her thoughts, distracting herself with whatever busywork she could find. That morning while working her syringe pump, she mentally conjugated every Latin verb she knew. Later, she balanced the shop’s account book, even though she’d double-checked the numbers the day before.

  Now, as she nibbled at the cold food, her defenses slackened. She tried to focus on the silky texture of the greens, the way the buttermilk coated her tongue, but in a matter of bites, she was back standing in Tivoli Circle. The lingering smell of fried hoecakes and ham gave way to that of dried grass and horse manure. Din filled the silence and above the din, his voice.

  Sometimes, it was just the raw quality of his rich, resonant baritone. Sometimes, like tonight, her mind replayed specific words and phrases. Though the long night of slavery has ended, our work toward equality has just begun, he’d said, in that Southern flavored way that reminded her just how far from Indiana she’d come.

  The number of dialects in New Orleans was dizzying—the drawl of the Americans, the soft h and peppering of French common to the Creoles, the nasal brogue of the Irish, the backward v’s and w’s of the Germans, the dems and dey and dis of the freedmen. Effie had little patience for any of them. Conversation ought to be short and to the point. Cutting through someone’s accent to decipher their meaning only belabored the exchange.

  His way of speaking didn’t bother her, though. His soft, drawn-out vowels, the errant dem or jes that crept back from his plantation days—all this only added to the songlike quality of his voice. It was more than that, though. The sound of it stirred something inside her.

  She’d spoken that way once, hadn’t she? But in those first few months after she’d escaped to the Union line, Captain Kinyon had righted her crooked speech the same way he reset a bone—sharp, quick, painful, but straight thereafter. What remnants of her former life, her life before the Great War, had been lost to the endeavor? She spoke like a damned Yankee now, and an uppity one at that—or so she heard daily from shopkeepers and streetcar drivers.

  She ate another bite of ham and crumbled the last of her hoecake into the glass of buttermilk. How long had she stood there in Tivoli Circle and listened? An hour? Longer? Such a terrible waste. She’d only stayed to correct him on her point about the cemeteries. Not because of him. Certainly not because she gave a drat about politics.

  Yet somehow, she couldn’t scrub this dalliance from her mind. His words, his expressions, his fiery gestures. All must rise, all must fight . . .

  Effie shook her head and stood, the legs of her chair scraping over the floor. What was wrong with her? She took her cup and plate to the dishpan and scrubbed until her fingers were numb. Every day had been like this—one wayward thought leading to another until five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour had been wasted.

  He was clever, she had to give him that. The way he simultaneously acknowledged what she’d said and redirected it to some other point that served his purpose. Injustice, poverty, that silly club meeting. And he’d been kind to shush the crowd when they laughed at her remark about the cemeteries. It was that simple gesture, as much as his voice, that stirred her, recalling another time, another man, another kindness. Her true father perhaps? A brother? She pressed at the margins of her memory. Nothing.

  Regardless of his wit and the small courtesy he’d paid her, this man from Tivoli Circle hadn’t any right to harry her thoughts this way. She didn’t need his vexing repartee. His crooked smile and beguiling voice.

  Perhaps some sickness had infected her brain. She laid the back of her hand on her forehead. No fever. She probed beneath her jaw and down her neck. No swollen lymphatic glands. No headache, chills, or muscle pains. Subclinical, then. Prodromal. Tomorrow, she’d consult her textbooks. Tonight, she’d sleep and hope he didn’t pester her in her dreams.

  * * *

  The next evening Effie made a point of returning before curfew only to realize as she mounted the steps to her room that it was Saturday and she needn’t have bothered. Now she had an entire evening to whittle away alone with her thoughts. Her books could stand rearranging; her shoes polishing. She’d spied a copy of The Louisianian in the sitting room. If she read every word, including the advertisements and lottery schedule, she might enjoy an hour free from thoughts of him.

  Meg and three other boarders flitted past her. They wore their Sunday dresses and a dusting of rouge across their cheeks. At
the bottom of the stairs, their footfalls stalled. “No, don’t ask her,” one of them whispered. “She’s a downright fuddy-duddy.”

  A few chirps of laughter sounded before Meg hushed them. “Effie, we’s agoin’ out. Wanna come?”

  No readied on her lips. Whatever dancing or drinking or lollygagging they were getting up to, she wanted no part in. But then, mightn’t an evening out prove more distracting than reading and polishing? She turned around. “Where are you going?”

  Meg peeked over her shoulder into the parlor, where Mrs. Neale sat with her book of psalms. She climbed a few steps and whispered, “A séance.”

  “Séance?”

  “Shh.” Meg flapped her hand through the air, looking again to the parlor. The others shook their heads and snickered. “It’s kinda like a party, only there’s a medium who uses her powers to call up the dead.”

  “I know what a séance”—Effie lowered her voice after another flap of Meg’s hand—“a séance is. I mean, why ever are you going to one?”

  “For fun.”

  “There’ve been numerous scientific inquiries into—” Effie stopped. She’d happily pass the evening outlining all the ways extracorporeal communication and clairvoyance conflicted with the current scientific thinking. But judging from her already listless expression, Meg didn’t care. And Effie needed distraction, however senseless. “I’ll come.”

  * * *

  Streetlamps lit their way downriver along St. Charles. Soon the old part of the city, with its dingy iron-railed balconies and moss-covered roofs, became visible beyond Canal Street.

  “How far away is this place?” Effie asked, her feet going numb inside her too-small boots.

  The leader of their little ensemble—Harriet, wasn’t that her name?—stopped and turned. “Madame Desâmes does not leave the Quarter.” Her shrill, parrotlike voice made Effie’s arm hair stand on end.