She’d sat up then and buttoned her blouse. I’ve got to get home and ready for work, had been her excuse. To which Samson had enquired what she did. Had it been horror that flashed across his handsome face when she reminded him she worked as an embalmer? Or merely surprise? Not horror, no. She’d told him the whole of it, from her earliest days in the Union camp fetching water and clean bandages, to her later apprenticeship in Indiana. He understood how she’d come to such an uncommon profession. He must.
Effie worked the soap into a lather and set to scrubbing the bowls and spoons. Horror or no, seeing the lovely cake she’d made would set his mind at ease, prove she could do womanly things too. She pushed her sleeves above her elbows and plunged her hands into the warm water. The scent of soap mingled with that of allspice and molasses. She tried to reel her thoughts back to the present, to focus on the scrubbing and scouring, the feel of the water against her skin, the quiet pop of the soap bubbles. But cleaning dishes demanded far less of her attention than baking had.
She ought to have told Adeline about her night with Samson. Adeline would have instructed her just how to behave at the baseball match to further things along. But there was something oddly delicious about the secret of it. That the night belonged only to her and Samson. She alone knew the feel of his hands—soft yet calloused from his years of toil. His whisperings belonged solely to her ears. His scent—that of shaving soap, and hair balm and sweat and smoke.... Smoke?
Effie spun round to the stove. Wisps of smoke curled from behind the oven door and beneath the top covers. When she unlatched the door, a black cloud spilled out into the kitchen and with it a bloom of heat that stung Effie’s cheeks. She scrambled about the kitchen, throwing open drawers and cupboards in search of an oven mitt. Nothing but teacups and ladles and knives and skimmers. An apple corer, a pie crimper, a cherry pitter, a spice grater. Oh, hell! She’d have to just use her skirts.
With the fabric bunched about her hands, she reached into the hot oven.
“Lordy, Effie!”
Meg’s voice made her stop and turn around.
“You’s about to burn a hole clear through your hands. Here.” She moseyed from the doorway to the smoking stove, grabbing two thick potholders from pegs beside the flue.
A black crust covered the top of the cake when Meg pulled it out. She dropped the pan on the table and shook out her hands. “Sweet Mary and Joseph! What you doing cookin’ at such a heat?”
“Do you think it’s ruined?”
“Like perfume in a pisspot, it is.”
“What if I just cut off the burnt layer? Underneath should be fine, right? It couldn’t have been in the oven for more than twenty minutes.”
Meg pursed her lips and grabbed a knife from one of the drawers Effie had flung wide. She chipped away at the charred surface, revealing a dry, crumbly layer beneath. “Puts me more in mind of the hardtack them soldiers done ate during the War than cake.”
Even in her distress, Effie couldn’t help but smile at so apt a description. She’d lost more than one baby tooth biting into the stuff. “Perhaps the middle is salvageable.”
Meg excavated farther, but the center proved nothing but a gooey, brown mess. “What sort of cake were you bakin’, anyhow?”
“Marble.”
“Don’t look much marbled to me. And it didn’t rise none either. Did you sift together all the dry ingredients before adding the wet ones?”
Had she? Effie grabbed the instructions. “Mrs. Neale didn’t say to do that.”
“Probably ’cause she rightly expected you to know.” Meg turned back to the stove. “And you’ve got the dampers all the way closed. No wonder it burned.” She shook her head. “You’s smart as the dickens, Effie, but ain’t got a lick of mother wit.”
Nearby church bells chimed noon. Effie had little better than an hour and a half to get to City Park. She grabbed the pan and the knife. Some part of the cake must be edible. She started slowly, the way Meg had done, chipping away layer by brittle layer. Who would eat such rubbish? It wasn’t worth a penny! She stabbed the knife through the burnt brick of a cake, striking the tin bottom. Then stabbed again, and again. Samson would think her the worst cook ever if he tasted this. Why, he’d spit it out and laugh. But she couldn’t go to the baking sale empty-handed. What would he think of her then? She threw down the knife and upended the pan, shaking in the hopes that what fell out might miraculously resemble a cake.
“Effie, dear . . . Effie!” Meg grabbed hold of the pan and wrenched it from Effie’s hands. “It’s all right. You can just bake another. I’ll help.”
“I haven’t the time or the compo—ingredients.” She bent over, planting her elbows on the table and enmeshing her fingers through her frazzled hair. Who was she fooling anyhow? She couldn’t bake. She could barely churn butter. Meg was right, she hadn’t any common sense. All those afternoons when Mrs. Kinyon had called her to help in the kitchen—why hadn’t she paid attention? She’d thought Mrs. Kinyon did it to punish her, thought the woman believed her suited for naught but domestic drudgery on account of her race and sex. Perhaps instead she’d been trying to help, to teach Effie something truly useful.
“Let’s see what you’ve got left here. Molasses, sugar . . .”
Effie kept her head lowered, staring at the flour-dusted tabletop as Meg listed what odds and ends remained. Allspice, soda, milk.
“Go fetch four eggs from the coop and a lemon from the pantry. We’ll borrow a little ginger and some flour—”
“But Mrs. Neale—”
“Mrs. Neale won’t mind none. Everyone knows she’s a soft spot for you on account of you reading her psalms to her. Stop your moping now and git.”
* * *
“These ginger cakes are délicieux, Miss Effie.”
“I . . . um . . .” Effie’s gaze broke with Mrs. Carrière’s, taking refuge in the adjoining field. The baseball match was under way, the men’s trousers rolled to their knees and caps shading their eyes.
“Especially for one who professes not to bake,” Mrs. Carrière said with a faint smile as she arranged the wares at their makeshift stand. Her composure had returned since the dreadful day of the Grant Parish case decision. So too, it seemed, had her shrewdness.
“I . . . er . . . a friend helped me. It’s her recipe.”
“Is that lemon peel I taste?”
Effie nodded. She’d grated it in herself while Meg did practically everything else. She’d bustled out of the house and onto the streetcar with the cakes still hot in their pans. Only then did she realize she’d forgotten to change her dress and remake her hair.
Hopefully the customers lining up at their stand didn’t notice. And Samson. Hopefully he wouldn’t either when he took a break from the match and came to taste their wares.
She watched him from the corner of her eye while she made change for the customers. A dusty path had been worn into the newly green grass in the shape of a square. Samson loitered around one of the vertices, facing inward toward the man at the middle who tossed the ball at the man farther on with the stick. The sport seemed a lurching one. Fits of action followed by great lulls. Banter was the only constant—hoots and jibes and cheers—lobbed not only between players, but from the spectators as well.
She gathered that after a player struck the ball, he was able to progress around the square, stopping at each vertex, sometimes momentarily, sometimes for several minutes. Great fanfare greeted him once he made it all the way around, though it hardly seemed deserving for such a trivial accomplishment.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed the freedom to stare in Samson’s direction. He was so alive. He brought the same passion and animation he displayed speechifying atop that banana box to the field—smiling and laughing one minute, grimacing and hollering the next. He jumped and stomped and clapped and wheeled his arms, though what any of this had to do with the game she wasn’t sure.
When Jonah bounded over for a jar of lemonade, Effie offered him a ginger cake in exchange fo
r a more thorough explanation of the sport.
“What’d ya wanna know, Miss Effie?”
“What’s the objective?”
“Objective?”
“The goal, the purpose.”
He crammed half the cake into his mouth and spoke while chewing. “Ain’t you ever seen a baseball match before?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Mrs. Carrière said, then to Effie, “Surely they have clubs up North.”
“Bet your boots they do!” Jonah said, quickly swallowing. “You’ve got the St. Louis Blue Stockings, the Chicago Uniques, the Cleveland . . .”
The line of customers had dwindled, and Effie took the opportunity to sit a moment on the grass beside their stand. Jonah plopped down beside her, lemonade sloshing in his jar. The twisted boughs of an oak shaded them from the afternoon sun. He finished the ginger cake with another two bites, licking his fingers clean when Mrs. Carrière turned away to help a customer. “That man there, with the ball, he’s the pitcher. He throws the ball for the batsman to hit.”
“With his stick.”
“It’s called a bat, Miss Effie,” he said as if the nomenclature ought to be obvious.
“With his bat.”
“Then he runs to first base, second if he can, while the others try to field the ball. Sometimes he’ll make it all the way around. That’s called a home run.”
Effie nodded, though it seemed little more sensible than when she’d understood nothing.
“If a fielder catches the ball, that’s a hands out. Three hands out and it’s the other team’s turn to bat.”
“They play on teams?”
His frown answered in the affirmative. “Sheesh, you don’t know nothin’.”
“Hush now, Jonah,” Mrs. Carrière said, still tending the stand, but close enough to hear their conversation. “Miss Effie knows a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“I can name every bone in the human body. The muscles, the organs—”
“What’s this one?” He pointed at his forearm.
“The lower arm has two bones actually, the ulna and the radius.”
“And this?” He jabbed a finger at his thigh.
“The femur.”
He yanked off his boot, leaned back, and raised his foot. His big toe peeked through a hole in his sock.
“There are twenty-six bones in the human foot. The navicular bone, the cuboid bone, five metatarsi—”
“Ma foi, Jonah,” Mrs. Carrière said. “I told you not to wear those socks until I’d had a chance to darn them! And put your boot back on. Miss Effie doesn’t want to smell your stinky foot.”
He drew his foot to his nose. “It don’t—”
Eh! was all Mrs. Carrière had to say for Jonah to pull on his boot. “How come you know so much about bones?”
Effie opened her mouth. Closed it again. Perhaps this was one of those moments it best to smile and nod. Or tell one of those lies Mrs. Kinyon insisted was not really a lie because people needn’t know everything about you and death wasn’t a topic for polite conversation. But this was hardly teatime in some stuffy parlor. Besides, Jonah was an orphan. Surely he knew about death.
Then again, such a discussion might upset Mrs. Carrière, remind her yet again of her husband. She seemed her usual stoic self today, no tears or hysteria. But best not—
“Miss Effie works for an undertaker. She’s an embalmer,” Mrs. Carrière said. “Do you know what that is?”
Jonah shook his head. Mrs. Carrière nodded at Effie.
Did she really mean for Effie to explain? No one had ever asked that of her before. Not in earnest. She turned to Jonah, who’d scooted close and gazed up at her. She brushed a spot of flour from her skirt, readjusted her bonnet to shield her eyes from the afternoon sunlight that stole between the fluttering leaves. Suddenly she cared very much if she said the wrong thing or spoke too bluntly.
“When a person dies . . . their body . . . begins to putrefy.”
“What does that mean?”
Effie glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. Carrière, who was too busy showing off the different types of pie to be of any help.
“Spoil.”
“Like old meat?”
“Precisely. An embalmer’s job is to arrest the putrefaction process, that is to say, stop the body from spoiling.”
“How?”
Effie shifted. The downy grass felt suddenly hard and prickly. “I inject an admixture of chemicals into one of the main blood vessels and pump it throughout the body so that it can seep into all the tissues.”
“You cut them open?”
“A small cut”—she gestured to the underside of her arm below the armpit—“usually right here if I’m able. Otherwise here.” She drew her finger down the side of her neck.
His little nose wrinkled and brows pinched together. “Eew. Is there blood?”
“Not much. The blood coagulates . . . er . . . clumps together when the heart stops, so the process isn’t all that messy.”
“Oh.” His shoulders slumped at this.
Had she said too much?
But then he smiled. “What about all the guts inside the belly? What do you do with those?”
Effie couldn’t help but smile too. She explained about thoracic injection to preserve the organs and cases where more extreme measures might need to be taken. Jonah all but clambered onto her lap to listen. She’d just begun to describe how the ancient Egyptians used to embalm their dead by pulling out their brains through their noses when Mrs. Carrière cleared her throat. “Perhaps you ought to finish telling Miss Effie about baseball.”
By the fifth inning, Effie was a baseball expert. Jonah refilled his lemonade jar and skipped back to the diamond—it wasn’t a square after all—and she returned to her duties at the cash box just as a new crowd swelled around the stand. By the seventh inning, they’d sold nearly all their wares, netting $31.16 for the Aid Society. Many of the players had sauntered over between turns at bat for lemonade and a slice of pie. Samson was not one of them.
He’d seen her not long after she’d arrived and smiled, returning her wave with a nod from where he stood at second base. But he didn’t come over when his turn in the field was done. Nor after the next turn or the next. His gaze seemed to favor the ball and runners, even the dirt and grass, above her and the bake stand. She wrapped up the last ginger cake for him and stowed it in her basket before it could be sold along with the remaining biscuits, pralines, and the final slice of Mrs. Carrière’s apple pie.
When Tom, who’d spent the game between the batsman and the catcher in the role of—what had Jonah called it?—the umpire, called the match, the sun yet shone bright in the westerly sky. Samson’s team had won twelve runs to ten and they celebrated with a loud whoop. Samson hugged the pitcher, lifting him clear off the ground. The catcher tossed his gloves into the air. Mr. Elliott, who she’d spied playing left field, hoisted Jonah onto his shoulders and paraded him around. Meanwhile, the spectators, hitherto standing beyond the foul line or seated deep in the outfield, swarmed around them, eager to join in the back-slapping and cheers, and more eager still to collect their winnings from the bookmakers who’d loitered about soliciting bets during the match.
Effie helped Mrs. Carrière pack up the club’s banner and dismantle the trestle table they’d used for the baking sale, all the while eyeing Samson. His sweat-shined skin and flushed cheeks reminded her of their lovemaking, and her own cheeks blazed at the thought. Several women milled among the crowd, twirling parasols or batting fans. They smiled and laughed with the players in the coy way she’d seen Adeline do. None was as lovely or skilled as Adeline, but they succeeded in stealing Samson’s attention every time he seemed ready to look or move in Effie’s direction.
What did they say that made him so readily chuckle? Was it their prettily made hair or colorful Sunday dresses that commanded his attention? One of them, a dark girl with big eyes and a dainty nose, proved so bold as to take his arm while ch
attering in his ear. Watching this, Effie felt as if someone had slit her open and stirred around her insides in the manner Jonah had assumed she did with the dead.
“Effie.”
Mrs. Carrière’s voice startled her.
“Are those the last of them?” Mrs. Carrière nodded toward the clutch of sticky lemonade jars in Effie’s arms.
“Oh . . . ah . . . yes.” She packed the jars into a crate and heaved it onto the waiting cart. Was that strumpet still holding fast to Samson’s arm? Still leaning close as if she had some great secret for his ears alone? Effie didn’t want to know and yet was desperate to look. Mrs. Carrière, however, stepped between her and the crowd.
“I’m much indebted for your kindness the other night after that meeting at the Republican Office. Seeing me home, returning to fetch Jonah. So I hope you’ll take this as it’s meant, in a maternal sort of way.” She paused, and it was all Effie could do to keep her eyes from straying toward the field. “I’ve noticed the particular fondness you show toward Mr. Greene.”
The mention of his name snared Effie’s attention. What had she done to betray her feelings? Surely Mrs. Carrière didn’t know they’d been intimate. She couldn’t know. That was impossible—well, not in the strictest sense of the word, but entirely improbable. Did she suspect, though?
Effie couldn’t think what to say to refute Mrs. Carrière’s hypothesis. Even her silence felt incriminating.
“I caution you against such feelings, Effie. Mr. Greene is a good man. A great man. And I’m not so very old as to be blind to his charm and good looks. But some men don’t make for suitable husbands and I fear Mr. Greene is one of them.”
Temptation proved too great, and she glanced above Mrs. Carrière’s head, fighting a surge of panic when she no longer spied Samson or the doe-eyed woman in the crowd. She made to step around, but Mrs. Carrière gently clasped her arm. “Si tu plaît, Effie, listen. I’ve seen other girls, far less . . . delicate than you lose their hearts to him and get nothing but sorrow in return. He doesn’t mean to—”
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