Never had she given such a complete and uncensored accounting of her life. The telling undressed her. Or so it felt. A shoe, a glove, a hat at first. Mundane stories of life in the camp or the journey North after the War. Then came the buttons trailing down her blouse, the ties of her skirt, her stockings. Here her voice wavered. Were it not for his steady gaze she’d have abandoned the telling. The why of her leaving Indiana, only that she withheld. And when she’d circled back to the present, to the Voodoo queen and the stockyard and awful memories it triggered, she could almost feel the river’s cool breeze trailing over her naked body.
In turn, Samson told her more of his days on the cotton plantation. He too was an orphan, his mother dying of childbed fever only days after his birth. His father sold off a few months later to pay his master’s gambling debts. The other women in the slave quarters took turns caring for him, though. He learned early he had a gift for storytelling, and became a vagabond of sorts, roaming among the slave cabins, spinning a yarn for any who asked in exchange for a turnip from their garden or a leg of rabbit from their stew.
He shrugged out of his jacket and leaned back against the surrounding bales of cotton as he spoke, his hands laced beneath his head, eyes turned heavenward. Effie eased back too, painting his words into a moving picture in her mind. He was easy to imagine thus—dapper, even as a boy; precocious; seducing those around him with his wit and melodious voice.
It wasn’t until the War he’d learned to read and write. Said he wasn’t all that good at it even now. Not like Tom. Certainly, not like her.
Effie turned onto her side, reclined as she was against the soft bales, and propped her head up with her hand. Only a narrow expanse of cool night air separated them. “There are far fewer orators than there are ready pens to transcribe their words.”
“That’s kind of you to say, considering you were teaching others to read and write by War’s end.”
“I’m not being kind. I’m being truthful.”
He smiled at her. “That’s what I like about you, Effie. I reckon it impossible for you not to say the truth.”
She lay back and stared up at the sky. The moon had dipped toward the horizon, but the dawn had not yet broken at the opposite edge of the sky. The air was still now, heavy with that river smell, and for the first time that night, Effie felt its chill. “I was wrong to look into the past.”
“How can you say that?”
“I’m no closer today to finding my kin than I was yesterday. Yet now I have all these, these . . . disquieting memories dulling my attention.”
Samson rolled toward her onto his side. “That’s not true at all. There are records of those sales. Who bought you. Who sold you to those traders in the first place. It was law to record such things.”
“Really?” In her excitement, she flopped to her side to face him, shrinking the space between them to but a hair’s breadth. For a moment her brain idled and muscles froze. The surrounding cotton bales concealed them from any who might pass. Not that she’d seen or heard anyone since their arrival. She wiggled back a few inches. They were still far too close for any claims of propriety, but at least he needn’t vie with her greedy lungs for air.
He brought a hand to her face, tucking a frazzled strand of hair behind her ear. But then his fingers lingered, dragging lazily over the curve of her jaw and down her neck. “Really. Tom could help you. He’s good with records and bookkeeping, and all those kinds of things.”
Her lips parted, but she couldn’t speak and settled for a nod. His fingers flirted with the collar of her shirt, tracing the edge of the fabric, then dipping beneath.
“You could even look into what happened to your friend Jonesy.”
The name jolted her from her pleasant stupor. Jonesy.
“None of the buyers wanted him,” she said and then, after a moment, “Me either.” She explained the lash marks on his back and how, despite Jonesy’s size and strength, as soon as a prospective buyer saw them, he’d back away, mumble something about vice of character, say he wasn’t interested in no bad Negroes. Effie they’d called queer, touched, dull.
He rolled away from her and she feared what she’d said—that she too had been unwanted—was too much.
But he didn’t sit up or make to leave. Instead, his hands worked the buttons of his waistcoat, tugged his shirttails free of his trousers, and then pulled both up and over his head. “They’d have called me a bad Negro too, then.”
Several thin scars streaked across his back. Not like the gnarled mess that had marked Jonesy’s, but painful to behold nonetheless. She reached out, this time without hesitation, and traced the dark raised lines with her fingertips. Water rimmed her eyes. Her hand shook with hatred for the vile scourge who’d inflicted these lashes. She reached the small of his back, where the scars tapered into smooth, warm skin and started over again at the top, as if her fingers could somehow erase what had been done to him.
She sniffed to staunch her running nose and he turned back to her, cradling her face in his palms. “It’s behind us now. It doesn’t define us the way it still defines them.”
His voice trembled with that same passion she’d fallen in love with back in Tivoli Circle, and when his lips found hers she let them guide her through a kiss. And then another. Harder than the first, flattening their mouths together and open, his tongue flicking inside her. For once, her rational self disengaged, and she was all emotion and sensation. His fingers loosening the top buttons of her shirt. His hand working beneath her chemise and corset to find her breasts.
She felt his other hand grasping at her skirts, pulling them upward. Over her calves, her knees, her thighs. Her senses surfaced a moment, just to glance between the bales and be sure they were alone. Then she surrendered fully, throwing her head back, inviting his lips upon her neck. He worked his hips between her legs. The sketches of human anatomy she’d studied flitted at the edge of her consciousness. How clinical they’d seemed. How void of any—
A sharp pain rent her from her musing. She winced and tried to reposition herself beneath his weight. Samson slowed a moment but did not withdraw. He kissed her again and breathed her name. The pain dulled, and she returned his embrace.
CHAPTER 20
The home on Josephine Street that Mr. Whitmark had dispatched her to reminded Effie of Adeline’s. It was lovely on the outside, with a wide front gallery and fluted Greek columns. A crepe myrtle flanked one side of the cottage with reddish-green shoots and small, glossy leaves just beginning to sprout from its pruned-back branches. Winter’s detritus had been raked from the yard, the flowerbeds and rose bushes groomed for spring. But the interior told a different story. Worn carpets, faded wallpaper, sparsely appointed rooms.
“Shall I set a fire for you?” the woman who’d let Effie in and led her back to the bedroom asked.
With the shutters closed to morning sunlight, it was cold in this part of the house. She glanced at the fireplace. A fine layer of dust dulled the cast-iron screen. But no soot. Likely this woman and her dead husband hadn’t spared coal for this room all winter. All the more kind of her to offer.
“No, thank you. It’s best to keep the room cool until we’re done with the . . . er . . . process.”
The woman nodded, her gray eyes flickering to the bed and then back to Effie. “Can I get you some tea? Coffee? Louisa down the street brought over biscuits. I think I have ajar of last year’s—”
“I’m fine.” In truth, a cup of coffee sounded divine after the few short hours of sleep Effie had gotten, but she never ate or drank while embalming. Captain Kinyon had told her once of a man who’d mistaken a jar of injection fluid for a glass of water and nearly died. She’d not believed him, the captain, when he’d told her the story. How could one be so distracted as to drink embalming fluid? Surely the sharp smell of chemicals would have alerted him. But in those days, she had only her work, her studies, a worry or two over whether Mrs. Kinyon would drag her to the church pie sale or quilting bee. Nothing to tru
ly divide her attention.
Her current state of mind, however, gave credence to the story. She’d not even remembered to tie her boots this morning until she’d nearly tripped over her laces hurrying down the stairs.
“You just let me know if you need something.” The woman’s gaze wandered back to the bed. Her fragile smile tottered. “I didn’t know if I should”—she nodded to a wooden leg propped against the far wall—“you know, put it on. He hated for anyone to see him without it.”
“I’ll reattach it at the end.”
“Of course, of course.” She looked around the room, clasped and unclasped her hands, then, at last, shuffled out, reminding Effie there were coffee and biscuits in the kitchen.
Effie shut the door behind her. She leaned back against the smooth wood and closed her eyes a moment. The woman’s violet-scented perfume lingered in the air, mixed with the smell of camphor and a body just beginning to turn.
Though Mr. Elliott had assured her he’d not recorded her name in the jail’s logbook last night, Effie had feared somehow Mr. Whitmark had gotten word of her arrest. Her hands had quivered such that it took her three tries to unlock the shop’s carriage gate. What a relief when Mr. Whitmark bade her good morning, chirk and lively as if it were Christmas Day. He asked nothing of her bloodshot eyes nor her unpolished boots nor her mismatched gloves, but directed her here, to this kindly woman’s house, and said he’d follow presently.
She opened her eyes and set to work. She was tired, yes, but altogether glad to have something to occupy her hands and mind. Something solitary and familiar.
Without even pulling back the coverlet, she could see the body of this man had been made gaunt and shrunken by some drawn-out illness. Malaria, perhaps. Consumption. His bewhiskered cheeks sagged. His collarbones all but jutted through his skin. Upon undressing and washing him, she found his arms bruised from where he’d been bled.
As promised, Mr. Whitmark arrived at the house shortly thereafter. He helped her lift the body onto the cooling table, though it was so light and emaciated she likely could have moved it herself.
“Did you know this man?” she asked, when he lingered, staring down at the body. His once-cheerful expression had gone wan.
He shook his head and she realized it was not the man’s face Mr. Whitmark was gazing at, but his missing leg.
“At Stones River we were camped so close to the enemy line, I could hear the screams of the Rebs across the field under the saw at the same time I was operating on our Union boys. Seemed between us there’d been enough feet and arms and legs to damn the Mississippi.”
Effie too remembered the screams. The piles of bloodied limbs. The endless flies buzzing and circling.
“And what for?” he continued. “To die like this, wasted and impoverished?”
She ought to have said nothing. Kept her tongue still and gone about her work. Or else muttered something banal about preserving the great Union his forefathers had created. Instead she said, “That every drop of blood drawn with the lash be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
He cocked his head toward her and blinked, as if only just realizing she was there beside him. Then his eyes narrowed.
Her gaze retreated to the scuffed floorboards. “Lincoln, sir.”
“I know damn well who said it, Effie.” He grabbed her embalming cabinet from beside the cooling table and thrust it into her arms. “I don’t pay you to quote dead men at me. I pay you to work.”
Her jaw tightened, but she said nothing as he clomped from the room.
It took her four tries to elevate the artery from the cut she made in the underside of the dead man’s arm. Another two to cannulate the flimsy vessel. Hypovolemia—that was the cause of her troubles. It had nothing to do with her scattered thoughts or clammy fingers.
Mr. Whitmark hadn’t been the same since his brother’s visit the week before. No, further back than that. Since the day they were called to that palatial Garden District house after Mardi Gras. True, business was up. She welcomed the extra money. He was sober and eating more now than just kola nuts. And hadn’t it been good to see him smile? Not that wistful half smile he’d worn on occasion those first months after she came. But a true smile, one she imagined had graced his face often before the War.
Yet Effie rather missed the aimless drunk he’d been on her arrival. Apathy was easy to navigate. This moodiness—happy one minute, glowering the next—was far more treacherous terrain.
She could hear him now through the thin wall separating this room from the parlor. His voice came low, even, and professionally somber. He spoke of casket options, pallbearers, and plumage. Of hymns and bible verses for the service. Of the advantages of crepe bunting over flowers.
Perhaps she’d spoken out of turn. No need to lecture a man who’d fought against his countrymen, against his very brother, that the Union cause would triumph. Hadn’t Samson said something about that in a club meeting once? About holding fast to their allies?
Samson. Not six hours ago he’d been kissing her, stroking her skin. She wasn’t naive to what they’d done. More than once Mrs. Kinyon had lectured her on the virtues of chastity, on the shame and ruin that awaited girls who gave in to lust. Swarthy as she was, but a few generations removed from those heathens in Africa, Effie was particularly susceptible. Or so the lecture went.
But she was not penitent or ashamed as Mrs. Kinyon forewarned. She didn’t feel spoiled or dirty. No, not like she had when those men in the slave pen had touched her. She wished rather Mrs. Kinyon had told her something useful, cautioned her about the initial pain, the blood, the stickiness afterward.
Her dress, her petticoat, her crinolette, her chemise had all ridden up and bunched uncomfortably beneath her. The cotton bale’s burlap covering had chafed the exposed skin between her gartered stockings and corset. Mosquitos had bitten her thighs.
She’d felt so vulnerable at first. Bare to the world. Unable to move, to disentangle herself, to scarcely breathe for his weight upon her. But then in the throes of it all—the pain, the chafing, that feeling of suffocation—she’d looked up into his face. His eyes were scrunched shut, his lips parted. Beads of sweat glistened at his hairline. He was at once entirely apart from her, lost in his own sensations, and entirely hers. Just as bare and vulnerable as she and utterly beholden. The dock could have sprung to life at that moment, steamboats blaring their horns, stevedores rolling sugar barrels up the gangplanks, merchants barking orders in a dozen different languages, and Samson would not have flinched. She’d wrapped her legs around him then, enmeshed her fingers in his hair, urging him closer, deeper that he might stay lost in her forever.
A steamboat did sound just then. A sharp, high-pitched whistle. No, not a steamboat. A kettle. She heard the woman of the house pad from the adjacent parlor, over the threadbare runner in the hallway, and into the kitchen. Effie rattled her head and looked down at her work. Her hand had stilled on the injection pump, blood-tinged fluid backing up into the tubing. Her first impulse was to squeeze the bulb harder and faster to make up the lost time. Mr. Whitmark’s mood would only sour further if he found her dawdling. But embalming couldn’t be rushed. And this man looked ravaged enough without his capillaries bursting into bruises across his skin.
The clank of china in the parlor told her Mr. Whitmark was yet engaged anyway. Her stomach rumbled as she thought of the warm tea and jam-covered biscuits he and the woman were likely enjoying. She thought she caught a whiff from beneath the door—nutty, sweet, and rich. But that was probably just her scattered mind again. When she inhaled a second time she smelled only muriatic acid, arsenic, and chemical salts.
She was glad for the sharp odor. It kept her tethered to the present. For a moment she’d slipped back to the slave pen, to those early days before Jonesy had come and the other children—a dozen inches taller and years older—had stolen her food. How her stomach had grumbled then.
But the smell of the embalming fluid had saved her from falling back fully into t
he memory. The whoosh of the injection syringe. The muted voices of Mr. Whitmark and the woman sounding through the wall.
Effie inclined her ear toward the sound. She didn’t care what type of casket the woman chose, how many black plumes she ordered, whether Father Girardy from St. Alphonsus or Reverend Chase from Christ Church would perform the service. But she’d never finish her work if her thoughts kept drifting.
“Did you know my Matthew?” the woman asked. And then, after a short pause, “Before the War?”
They couldn’t possibly have become acquainted after the War. The woman’s tone, though not unkind, said as much. Before the War, perhaps. When decent men would still receive Mr. Whitmark, invited him into their studies to drink bourbon and smoke cigars. Before he’d turned scalawag and sided with Yanks. Before her husband lost first his leg, then his fortune. Before the world turned topsy-turvy on them all.
How Mr. Whitmark’s past stalked him. A decade gone and still relentless. It wasn’t just vagrants defacing his shop, or Ku Kluxers disparaging his trade, but even goodly women talking around the subject like it were unfit to be spoken of plainly.
“Only by reputation,” he said. “I believe he and my older brother were at university together.”
“Ah, yes. I was sorry when I heard he’d been lost at Vicksburg.”
Effie scooted her stool as close to the wall as the embalming tubing would allow. She’d not known he’d had an older brother too. On which side of the Vicksburg line had he stood and fallen?
“Matthew was there too, you know. That’s when he lost his leg.”
Silence followed. The sound of pouring liquid. The clink of a spoon against porcelain. More silence.
“We had such high hopes at the outset of the War. To be free of Northern tyranny. To continue on with our beloved way of life. And to come back to this . . .” Her voice diminished into sobs.
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