The speaker—the club’s president, she guessed—droned on about the unlikelihood of President Grant seeking a third term in light of some newly passed resolution brought forth by congressional Democrats. The resolution, which the club president suffered them to read aloud, maintained a third term would be “unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions.” Grumbles rose amid the crowd. Several hollered objections.
This was Effie’s chance. She leaned closer to Tom. He smelled of lye soap, machine grease, and newsprint—a strange, but not altogether unpleasant combination. “I just remembered I have—”
The door at the back of the room swung open and banged against the far wall.
“Sorry I’m late.”
The voice struck her with the same force as it had in Tivoli Circle. While everyone around her turned and stared at the newcomer, Effie sat immobile, her lips parted and skin tingling.
“You didn’t get down to the good stuff yet, did ya? Surely not without me.”
Many in the room laughed. Tom smiled and shook his head. Representative Greene—tardy, but present, he wrote in the minutes.
Representative? The man was a legislator? Effie straightened and smoothed the hairs at the nape of her neck, only to have them spring back defiantly.
His boots clapped atop the floorboards as he made his way to the front of the room. Her eyes strained to the far edge of her sockets, eager to catch sight of him the minute he strode into view.
Her memory had not done him justice, had not captured the straight-backed confidence of his walk, or the easy exuberance of his smile. Even in the poorly lit room, he seemed to shine, as striking in the shadows as he was in the dancing light.
Effie jogged her head. This was a ridiculous assessment. Humans lacked the bioluminescent abilities of, say, a lightning bug. More likely he had this appearance because of the dim lighting, not in spite of it. Or perhaps she needed eyeglasses.
“You was saying, Ms. Jones?”
“Hmm?”
“That you’d just remembered something.”
“Oh . . . er . . . yes.” She wrestled her gaze from the front of the room, where the man—Representative Greene—now stood, shrugging off his woolen overcoat. “Yes, I just remembered how . . . fond I am of President Grant. What a shame about this . . .”
“Resolution.”
“Yes, this deplorable resolution.”
“Deplorable, I like that word.” He jotted it down in the margin of the journal.
“a-b-l-e, not i.”
He scratched it out and rewrote it with the correct spelling. “Ya know, you talk like a—”
“Uppity carpetbagger? Yes, I get that rather a lot.”
Tom chuckled. “I was gonna say poet.”
“Oh.” She looked down at her interlaced hands, then back at his dark eyes. “Thank you.”
The club president began speaking again and she returned her attention forward. He wasted little time introducing Mr. Greene, though it seemed from the smiling faces and ready handshakes that had greeted his arrival, Effie was the only one who didn’t know the legislator personally. Mr. Greene spoke briefly about the latest happenings at the statehouse. Effie had passed the building several times on her way to the pharmacy without thought to the goings-on inside. Now, however, she listened as if nothing in the world held more interest.
His demeanor was more casual tonight than it had been that afternoon in the circle. But the timbre of his voice was just as pleasing, his expressions just as earnest. He could have been selling gutter water and she’d have bought it then and there without compunction. She scooted to the edge of her stool so that it balanced on a single leg, aware of her precarious perch, aware of her irrational rapture, yet helpless to pull back.
Too soon his legislative update ended. He sat down in the front row in a chair made vacant for him. Effie could barely see his closely cropped hair and sloping forehead above the dozens of heads in between them. The club president spoke again, then one of the white men who held some important position or other at the Custom House. A small, austere woman updated the group on an ongoing campaign to provide blankets for the Negro wing at Charity Hospital, followed by more words from the president. Effie tried to listen, to prove she still held command of her senses, but caught at best one sentence in ten. Several people stood and were stretching their backs and donning their coats before she realized the meeting had concluded.
“Here,” Tom said, offering her a hand. “I’ll introduce you to everyone.”
Effie stood without taking his hand. She’d not heard St. Patrick’s bell toll, but it must be getting on past curfew. A smart woman would head home. Instead, she followed him to a nearby group of people, hoping they’d eventually wind about to the front of the room, where Mr. Greene stood, shaking yet more hands. Of course, he wouldn’t remember her from that afternoon at Tivoli Circle. How could he? Hers was not a face that stood out amid a crowd. But—
Effie brought her attention to heel, though several seconds passed before she remembered to smile and say “How do you do?” to the small cluster of people Tom had just introduced. Two were younger men, hardly old enough to vote, another in his middle years, and a gray-haired couple. Effie hadn’t caught any of their names.
The woman who’d spoken about the hospital approached them, carrying a bundle of cloth. She was petite in every way save for her comportment. The assuredness of her step and set of her shoulders aggrandized her small stature to match that of any man’s in the room.
“Euphemia Jones, may I present Mrs. Carrière,” Tom said.
The woman nodded at Effie, “Bienvenue.” Then she turned to the others and unfurled a large banner of alternating green and purple squares. DEFEND THE BALLOT BOX was overlain in large black letters. “Voilà. What do you think?”
“Right lovely,” Tom said.
The gray-haired woman let go of her husband’s arm and took hold of one end. “Stitchin’ ain’t done, Marie.”
“I know. Just here at the edges. I thought we might finish tonight.” Mrs. Carrière turned to a small boy who squatted nearby playing with jacks. “Jonah, fetch me mon étui, s’il te plaît.”
Effie recognized Jonah as the same boy who’d handed her the flyer in Tivoli Circle. He loped to the front corner of the room and returned with a small wooden sewing box.
“Merci,” Mrs. Carrière said, and pulled over a chair. The older woman sat beside her. They both looked at Effie.
She shuffled back a step and glanced around for Tom. He’d moved off a pace and taken up conversation with another group of men. So much for further introductions.
Effie worked the strings of her purse over in her hands, recalling Mrs. Kinyon’s quilting bees she’d so hated as a girl. All tedium and chatter. She glanced sideways at the door. Thirty paces and she’d be free. Her gaze swung to the front of the room. Mr. Greene, in his beige suit and burgundy necktie, still impossibly radiant in the dim, remained engaged in conversation. She’d wanted to write him off as a braggart. The confidence with which he spoke, the swagger with which he walked surely justified such an opinion. Except now he wasn’t talking but listening. She remembered the intensity of his dark brown eyes and envied the speaker this attention.
“Surely you sew, Miss . . . Jones, was it?” Mrs. Carrière said.
“Yes—er—no. I don’t sew, that is.” But she sat down anyway, no longer sure of her feet to bear her anywhere.
“Course you do, dearie,” the older woman said. “Ain’t have to be perfect.”
Mrs. Carrière handed her a needle and a length of thread. Her ochre-colored skin was smooth and bright as a newly minted penny. Only a few shallow furrows about her mouth and eyes hinted at her age. “Just hem that edge with a simple catch stitch.”
Catch stitch? Effie was sure she’d learned this technique at one time or another from Mrs. Kinyon but had long since forgotten. Still, how hard could it be? She took up one edge and, after observing Mrs. Carrière for a minute, did he
r best to copy her technique. Happily, the two women took up conversation about the hospital, leaving Effie’s thoughts and eyes free to wander.
“Your stitches are remarkably even, Miss Jones,” Mrs. Carrière said after several minutes. “For one who doesn’t sew.”
“I’m more accustomed to the turgor and thickness of skin, but—” Effie’s addled mind caught up with her mouth and she stopped. Experience had taught her it best not to bring up her work in casual conversation. No getting around it now, though. “I’m an undertaker’s assistant. I embalm the dead.”
“I’ll be!” the older woman said. “That’s where they drain the blood from the bodies and fill ’em back up with chemicals so they don’t stink and rot, right?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s more than that,” Mrs. Carrière said to the other woman, her tone even more solemn than before. “When you embalm someone it gives the family time”—her voice wavered—“time to bring them home, time to say goodbye before the burial.”
Effie noticed the black trim of her dress and the thick band of crepe around her hat.
Mrs. Carrière’s hands remained fast and steady at her stitching, even as her eyes glistened. “A noble profession. Though a bit peculiar, I must say. However did you come to such work?”
Effie shifted in her chair. Gasping and fainting over her profession she was prepared for; earnest questions she was not.
Jonah, who’d found a spot on the floor nearby and returned to his jacks, saved her the trouble of an answer. “You a Yank?”
“For shame, Jonah,” Mrs. Carrière said. “Where are your manners?”
He shrugged. “She talks funny.”
“I was educated in the North,” Effie said. “But I was born here in the South.”
“Whereabouts?” he asked.
Mrs. Carrière shot him a stern look. “Where about, Miss Euphemia.”
“Effie’s fine,” she said, though she rather wished they’d never ventured from talk of the hospital or her stitches. “Louisiana, someplace.”
“You don’t right know?” he said, and then, after another stern look from Mrs. Carrière, added, “Miss Effie.”
“No.”
“What about your kin?” Jonah asked. He bounced his rubber ball and grabbed at the rusty jacks scattered across the floor. One jack, two jacks, three . . . he got to eight before missing the ball after its bounce. He tried again, this time missing one of the eight jacks and sending another skittering across the floor to Effie’s feet. “Merde.”
“Jonah!” Mrs. Carrière said.
“Sorry.”
Effie set down her needle and thread and picked up the jack. She squatted down beside him. “Here, let me show you a trick.”
He handed her the rubber ball and watched as she cast the jacks across the floor. Several pale scars stood out against the dark skin of his little hands. His palms were calloused, but his nails trimmed and clean.
“Best plan your strategy before you bounce your ball. Which jacks do you think will be the hardest to grab?”
He pointed to three jacks scattered far from the others.
“Good,” she said. “Start there. Get the most difficult ones first and the rest come easily.” She bounced the rubber ball and swept her hand over the dusty floor, scooping up the three outliers before snatching the rest and catching the ball. “You try.”
He scattered the jacks and readied the ball. “I’m an orphan too.” He managed eight, then nine, and cast the jacks out for ten. “Didn’t mind the streets none. Expect when it rained.” He missed and tried again. “But Mrs. Carrière ain’t got no children, so I keep her company now.”
“Mighty good of you,” Effie said.
He snatched up all ten jacks and smiled at her with his mouth full of missing teeth. “Bet she’d let you come on for company too.”
Effie glanced over at Mrs. Carrière, seated straight and prim as a sarcophagus, then back at Jonah. She’d always found children loud and squirmy and, often as not, smelly. But at least they spoke straight. They laughed when they were happy and cried when they were in pain. You never had to second-guess their motives or scrutinize their expressions.
“Penny to your nickel I can beat you to ten,” he said.
“I’m supposed to be stitching.”
He scrunched his face and fished a penny from his pocket.
“You turning our club into a gambling den, Jonah?”
Effie startled at the voice, teetering where she crouched as her balance faltered. She reached out to steady herself and planted a hand square atop a jack, its metal spike jabbing into her palm. A yelp built in her throat, but she strangled it back.
Mr. Greene knelt beside her and took hold of her arm. “Apologies, miss. I didn’t mean to cause you fright.”
Effie stared at his hand about her arm—his long fingers, his square knuckles, the swell of veins beneath his skin—then dared a glance at his face. He’d said something, hadn’t he?
“Best watch out for Jonah, here. He’s a regular blackleg.” Mr. Greene helped her to her feet and released his grip.
“The odds seemed fair enough to me,” she managed to say.
He laughed, a rich, deep sound like that of a drum. “I’m Samson Greene.”
“Euph—Effie Jones.”
He took her hand and, for the span of a moment, she thought he might kiss it. Instead he squeezed and gave it a quick shake. “Pleasure, Miss Jones. Glad you decided to come by.”
“Me too,” she said, her hand hanging stupidly in the air where he had released it.
“You had some concerns about the cemeteries, I believe.”
She dropped her arm to her side. The rush of blood brought with it a dull throbbing where the jack had stabbed her palm. “I hadn’t realized you were a state legislator, I might have spoke differently.”
“But not about anything so dithering as education or the cost of grain.”
“This is a serious matter, Mr. Greene.”
“I have no doubt.” But his crooked smile said otherwise.
“Most of the cemeteries in the city are privately owned and beyond the statehouse’s control anyhow.”
“You underestimate the power of the statehouse.”
“Perhaps you overestimate it.”
His rich laugh came again. “I like your spirit, Miss Jones. You’ll be joining us at the parade, I hope.”
“Parade?”
“We’re meeting two blocks up from the Henry Clay statue.”
“Oh, yes, Mardi Gras.” She should have listened better during the meeting. “I’ll . . . think on it.”
“Good.” He smiled, then turned to Mrs. Carrière. “An exceedingly fine banner, Marie.”
“Merci.”
To Jonah, he said, “Don’t let Miss Jones here take your penny.” He winked at Effie, then fished through his pocket, tossed the boy a new rubber ball, and walked away.
Effie watched him go, her muscles overcome with rigor. The evening had not gone to plan at all, the calm and satisfaction she’d so hoped to obtain all the more elusive.
She snatched up her coat and purse, nodding to Mrs. Carrière and the others in lieu of a goodbye.
Why hadn’t she said no when he’d asked about Mardi Gras? Why hadn’t her lungs remembered to breathe when she’d looked into his face? Why had she come at all?
The bells of St. Patrick’s tolled the hour, echoed in the distance by those of St. Louis. Her feet had taken her down Julia Street to the levee. Once the repartee of chimes died down she could hear the gentle ripple of the river.
Whatever was wrong with her? A Creole couple passed by her on their way downriver. Their patois mutterings reminded her of Madame Desâmes and all the foolery she’d undertaken to relieve herself of . . . whatever this awful feeling was.
Effie stopped suddenly. Une femme like her wouldn’t know love if it dropped on her head from heaven.
She staggered from the walkway to the river’s edge and splashed the silty water ont
o her cheeks, heedless of soiling her gloves and collar. The river’s earthy rotten odor assaulted her like smelling salts. Despite the jolt to her senses, Effie couldn’t rid herself of Madame Desâmes’s words.
CHAPTER 7
Love. That was the purview of second-rate poetry and dime novels. Of silly young girls with nothing else to fill their heads. No, Effie was not in love.
Yet as she gripped the banister on her way to bed, her hand trembled worse than Mr. Whitmark’s. Love or not, she couldn’t carry on like this. Even though calls at the shop had doubled since her arrival, the mixing and the cleaning and the cutting and the stitching no longer proved sufficient distraction. Thoughts of Samson—his rousing voice, his handsome face, his gentle hand—swarmed in like maggots to a festering wound.
Today her blade had slipped, and she’d cut clear through the artery and down to the bone. Yesterday she’d miscounted their inventory of chemicals and purchased more muriatic acid instead of bichloride of mercury, necessitating a second slog across town to the pharmacy. The blisters from her ill-fitting boots still pained her.
She mounted the steps one by one, each contraction of muscle, each flexion of her knee a conscious effort. The mistakes bothered her more than the blisters. Effie didn’t make errors. Not like this. Not before.
When she reached her room, she realized she’d not brought up water for her washbasin, and lumbered downstairs to the backyard cistern. The damp night air turned her skin to gooseflesh. Moonlight filtered down through a thin film of clouds. Had it been a mistake to come here? If she’d stayed in Indiana, she’d not have to endure her fellow boarders’ prattle, nor the incessant humidity and the fetid smell off the river. Certainly not this vexing sensation called love.
The Undertaker's Assistant Page 6