Effie pulled free of her grasp. Delicate? She’d survived three years in a Union camp and worse in that slave pen. She wasn’t delicate. And Samson did care for her. He must. Mrs. Carrière hadn’t seen the burn in his eyes or felt the urgency of his kiss that night on the levee. “You’re right. You’re not my mother. So I’d thank you to keep your maternal advice to yourself.”
She brushed past her and into the thinning crowd. Tom called her name, but she feigned not to hear. He’d bought three of her ginger cakes and complimented her after each bite, but she couldn’t muster even a smile for that now. Mr. Elliott touched her elbow and enquired how she fared. She turned away without reply, frantic now to find Samson.
He must be here still. Surely he’d not have left without so much as a hello and goodbye.
She wound through the crowd again. And again. And again.
He had left. He was gone.
She sat down on a bench a little way off and shoved the entire ginger cake she’d saved for him into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed without tasting. Then she took the streetcar back into town, disembarking two stops early to retch alongside the tracks.
CHAPTER 22
Effie awoke to a pinging sound against her window. Had she been dreaming? It called to mind the sound of hail. Another ping, this one so sharp she expected the glass to be cracked when she pulled back the curtain. No crack. No hail either. A gibbous moon shone in the sky above. Below on the street, a flit of movement caught her eye. A man?
Samson.
She half thought to yank the curtain closed and return to bed. After Sunday’s game, she’d vowed not to see him again and subject herself to more heartbreak. But even from this distance, she could tell something in his aspect was amiss. She raised the sash and climbed out onto the gallery.
When he saw her, the deep-set furrows bracketing his mouth slackened.
“Effie, thank God, we need your help.”
She leaned over the wrought-iron railing and hissed down at him, “Shh! If my landlady catches you here, she’ll toss me out.”
He came to stand directly beneath her and lowered his voice. “You’ve got to come straightaway. I’ll explain everything on the way.” His upturned face looked gray and haggard in the moonlight. His eyes were bloodshot, his chin covered in stubble.
Effie hesitated. What help could he possibly need of her in the middle of the night? Did he think her some trifle? Someone he could bed when he wanted and ignore when he did not? But Samson hadn’t come for an amorous liaison. Effie could see that plain in his expression, hear it in the thinness of his voice. “I’ve got to dress. Wait for me across the street.”
“Bring your embalming tools.”
Her tools? Whatever for? But then, there could be only one answer. Had something happened to Tom or Jonah? To Mrs. Carrière? Effie’s insides shriveled. How rude she’d been at the baseball match when last they’d spoke.
Samson must have read the distress in her expression. “It’s no one you know. But please, Effie, hurry.”
“I’ve got my scalpel and pump, but I’ll need preserving fluid from the shop.”
“Have you a key?”
She did, but what if Mr. Whitmark woke to the rattle of the gate or the pad of her footfalls across the courtyard?
“We’ll stop there on the way,” he said before she could answer.
Effie crept back through her window and shrugged out of her nightshirt. She’d washed her stockings that evening and hung them over the back of her chair to dry. It mustn’t be that late then—eleven o’clock, maybe midnight—for the cotton was yet damp when she tugged them on beneath her dress.
Samson waited for her across the street, shadowed from the flickering streetlights by the wide boughs of an oak tree, pacing and muttering. Tucked into his waistband was a gun. When she told him the location of Whitmark’s shop, he took her hand and ran there—not so fast she couldn’t keep up, but fast enough her lungs soon strained against the steel ribbing of her corset. Rats squeaked and scampered up drainpipes and across darkened roofs at the sound of her and Samson’s feet atop the banquette. Condensation dripped from cottage eves and townhouse balconies. Otherwise the city slept.
On Julia Street just before crossing Magazine, Samson pulled her into the shadowy lee of a doorway as a policeman sauntered past. Flush against the cold wood, she struggled to quiet her ragged breathing. What was Samson about that he needed to carry a gun and hide from the police? His palm was hot and sticky against hers. His temporal vein pulsed quick and steady. Once the officer was gone from sight, Samson tugged her onward.
When they arrived, the new lettering painted in block script across the storefront window shone in the lamplight: GEO. WHITMARK, UNDERTAKER. Behind the glass, the new model caskets and funeral plumes lay in darkness.
Effie glanced down the street in both directions. Empty. She inspected the shuttered French doors and windows on the stories above. Not a glimmer of light between the louvers. Even so, she hesitated. What excuse would she offer should Mr. Whitmark catch her sneaking in—or worse, sneaking out with jars of embalming fluid?
Beside her, Samson shifted his weight from foot to foot and held his pocket watch up to the lamplight. She fished in her skirt pocket for the key to the carriageway gate. It slipped her grasp as she pulled it out and landed with an echoing clank on the brick pavers at her feet. Effie winced. Three times she tried before fitting the key into the hole.
She cracked open the gate and slipped in, Samson behind her.
“Wait here,” she whispered. If Mr. Whitmark awoke, her own presence perchance she could explain. But Samson’s? Impossible. She tiptoed down the carriageway and across the moonlit courtyard to the storeroom. The windows on this side of the house were naked of their shutters, a few cracked open to catch the night’s breeze.
Last week she’d seen Colm tinkering around the shop with an oilcan at Mr. Whitmark’s bidding. But the storeroom door screeched as she opened it, a sharp, high-pitched sound loud enough to wake the dead. Of all the hinges that lout could forget to oil. She froze and listened, expecting to hear footfalls from the house, the door onto the gallery opening, a shout or the cocking of a pistol. But no sounds came.
Effie groped her way to the back of the storeroom. She knew the layout well enough to keep from knocking over the cooling board or stubbing her toe on the workbench. When her hands found the cold, smooth jars of fluid she realized she’d forgotten to ask Samson about the body. Was it that of a man or woman? An adult or child? What had been the cause of death? All this had bearing on the amount of embalming fluid she’d need.
She pulled out several jars, rearranging what remained so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious any had been taken. Not that Mr. Whitmark would notice. He rarely ventured into the storeroom and still relied on her for most of the accounting. Colm paid little mind to anything. She could clear out the entire room without arousing his curiosity. Even so, best not to invite questions. She packed the jars into a traveling case, padding them with strips of linen to keep the glass from clanking. Cotton, court plaster, wax, eye caps, and a small can of white lead filled the remaining crannies.
The door whined again as she closed it behind her. This time Effie didn’t wait to see whether the noise might wake Mr. Whitmark, but skirted the edge of the courtyard, keeping to the shadows until she reached the cover of the carriageway. Safe from view, her jittering pulse slowed but did not steady. Even though she intended to replace the supplies, she felt like a thief.
Samson checked to be sure the street was empty before they locked the gate and set to running again. He carried both the traveling case and her embalming cabinet, but still she struggled to keep up, her skirt and petticoat caging her strides.
Not until they reached the levee did Samson slow. The docks were far busier at this time of night than they’d been when she and Samson had dallied on the cotton stacks in the hours just before dawn. Sailors staggered back from the nearby saloons and gambling dens. Roustabouts crouched together shoot
ing dice. Women, whose brightly colored dresses matched the rouge smeared across their cheeks, sauntered on the arms of men off to dark corners.
Effie slowed and watched one such couple disappear into the berth of a small boat. She felt suddenly dirty. Had her and Samson’s encounter been so different? After the way he’d all but scorned her at the baseball match, she wasn’t sure. No money had been exchanged. And she loved him, even if his feelings were less true. Yet she couldn’t shake her affinity with the woman.
Samson touched her arm. He held both cases in one hand now and looped his free arm about her elbow. Her body reacted with a delicate shiver, her nerves sparking like a lighted wick. Would she ever be immune to his touch?
She pulled free and continued in the direction they’d been going, though still uncertain of their destination.
Large steamers gave way to schooners and tugboats, then to a spattering of skiffs and fishing smacks moored on the pebble-studded shore. She could no longer hear the ruckus from the saloons and dance halls. No longer spied whores and their eager consorts. The slaughterhouses lay just upriver, and the water here carried that familiar stench of death and decay.
A man waved at them from a small rowboat. Samson glanced about, down the winding bend of the levee to the east and then to the west, before hurrying toward the boat. His caution, his silence, his evident agitation gave Effie pause. That part of her still capable of logical assessment warned her against following. But her feet were already picking their way over the rocks behind him.
She recognized the man on the boat from the Republican Office. He helped Samson stow her cases, then clasped his hand with a firm but silent shake. He wore a somber expression much akin to Samson’s, one that only deepened when he turned to Effie. “Where’s the embalmer you spoke of?”
Samson clambered onto the rowboat. “This is her.”
The man frowned. “The body . . . the Regulators did some number on him, Samson. And they’re still about. Said they’d whip but good anyone who touched him.”
Samson yanked off his hat and wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead. “Damn it. You might have said.”
“I didn’t expect you to bring no woman.”
Effie stepped onto the boat. “I’ve worked under worse conditions.”
They crossed the river to Algiers and from there traveled by wagon to where the town petered out into swampland. She and Samson sat in the bed. More than once, they’d hidden beneath a dusty canvas at the sound of approaching horses, while the man—Benjamin was his name—made excuses to passersby for his late-night travel.
What had she gotten herself into? Even with Samson close, her body knotted with fear.
“What’s going on?” she finally asked when the second band of riders passed.
Samson and Benjamin explained the situation in clipped whispers. A man, a ward comptroller and newly appointed election commissioner, had been murdered after submitting several reports and complaints to Governor Kellogg and the election board. A marauding group of whites, who fashioned themselves Regulators, were to blame, leaving his body to rot in the swamp.
“Why not just retrieve the body and bury it?” she asked.
“That’s just what they want, the whole affair to pass away real quiet-like. A midnight burial, or better yet lost to the gators. No body, no fuss.”
“Serves double purpose that way,” Samson said. “They get to terrorize his family, deny them a proper funeral, make him an example to other colored folks, without it catching the attention of the army or any friends we have left in Washington.”
Eventually, they arrived at a small tarpaper shack elevated on rotting wood poles a few feet above the boggy ground. Faded scraps of flannel covered the window holes, and the front door sagged on its hinges.
“This is where he lived?” Effie asked.
“Ain’t safe to bring him home,” Benjamin said. “Once them Regulators find out the body’s gone, you can be sure they’ll come a-lookin’.”
Samson grabbed her cases, and Benjamin handed her an unlit lantern. “How long you reckon you’ll need?”
“I can’t say without inspecting the body.” She lit the lantern and climbed the worm-eaten steps. Frogs croaked from the nearby waterways, and mosquitos buzzed about her ears. The dead never frightened her, but she found her hand trembling as she reached for the door.
The inside of the shack was bare save for a rusty pail, a length of knotted fishing line, a toppled chair missing several rungs. And the body. It lay atop the unfinished floorboards in the center of the room, bloated with swamp water. Samson, still standing by the wagon, gasped—likely from the smell—but Effie moved farther inside and crouched beside the dead man, holding the lantern aloft.
The man’s left orbital socket had been crushed, and the surrounding skin was swollen and discolored. Dried blood had matted in his hair where he’d suffered another blow. His right radial bone was fractured and jutted out a full inch through his skin just above the wrist. She suspected yet more bruising and lacerations lay beneath his torn, wet clothing.
Her comment about having worked under worse conditions now seemed not only glib but inaccurate. Every errant sound from without the shack sent a pulse of fear through her. The men who’d done this, these Regulators, might already be out looking for them. She needn’t any imagination to know what they’d do to her and Samson if they found them.
“Well?” Benjamin asked.
The stairs behind her creaked. Samson made a choking sound, then tried to cover it with a cough. When he spoke, his lustrous voice was thin. “Can you help him, Effie?”
She wrangled control of herself and nodded. Though the swampy night air was cold, she shrugged out of her coat and balled it beneath the man’s head that gravity might reduce the swelling. Then she stood and faced the men. “I’ll need at least four hours, maybe five.”
“Best you be gone and across the river before sunup,” Benjamin said.
Samson groped in his vest pocket. The brass chain trembled as he opened his watch. “Can you do it in three?”
Effie glanced back at the body. Three hours? Highly improbable. But no use wasting time debating it. She grabbed the rusty bucket and traded it to Samson for her cases. “Water.” And then to Benjamin, “A fresh set of clothes.”
By the time Samson returned with the water, Effie had already reset the fractured arm and stitched up the skin. The oil lamp cast only a weak glow, but she dared not raise the wick for more light.
Samson laid the pail down beside her, then set to pacing, stopping every few turns to pull the tattered drapes back from the windows and stare into the night.
“I’m going to need your help,” she said, as much to silence his footfalls as from true need. “Undress him while I lather the soap.”
Samson nodded, but for a moment just stood there, staring down at the body. “I’d thought the War had brought an end to this.”
Despair turned his voice into that of a stranger. But what could she say to comfort him that wasn’t a lie? “His clothes, Samson.”
“Right.” He took off his own jacket and cuffed his sleeves before undressing the man.
They washed the body together with nothing but the sound of splashing water and hum of insects to fill the silence. When they’d cleaned away the mud, swamp grass, and dried blood, she tasked Samson to shave the face while she massaged the swelling and sutured the numerous cuts and gashes. The injuries to the man’s head required more care: cotton and wax to build up the eye socket and shattered cheekbone, a small incision in the scalp to realign the fractured skull bones.
Samson shrank away as she performed these tasks, sitting in the far corner with his head hung between his drawn-up knees. “How do you do this, Effie?”
“With a basic understanding of the underlying anatomy, it’s really not that difficult to—”
“No, I mean, be around death all the time and not . . . not go mad?”
Was that judgment underpinning his words or bewilderment?
Either way, the short distance between them—a mere half-dozen feet of weatherworn floorboards—seemed to lengthen. The intimacy they’d shared, the friction of their sweat-slickened skin seemed almost a fantasy.
Sometimes she wondered if she turned her scalpel on herself, if she opened wide her body, what it would look like inside. Would her liver lay to the right, her heart up and to the left, her intestines coiled neatly through her abdomen? Or would there be some physical sign of her sentimental defect, a reason she seemed to see the world differently than everyone else? Perhaps she hadn’t organs inside at all. No lungs or spleen. No heart. Only cogs and gears and springs like the inner workings of a clock.
But then, what explained her pride when Meg read an entire paragraph without tripping over a word, her concern when Mrs. Carrière had wept in her arms, her worry that Adeline would settle for Mr. Chauvet and never know love? If she hadn’t a heart, what had pained her when Samson left Sunday’s baseball match? What pained her still?
“The dead can’t hurt you. Only the living can.”
“That surgeon, he never should have kept you. War’s no place for a girl, a child.”
Effie retrieved the jars of embalming fluid from her case. “The smell of this is quite . . . sharp.”
He raised his head and regarded her with a queer, glassy-eyed expression, and she had to look away. She feigned attention at connecting the lengths of rubber tubing from jar to syringe and syringe to needle. Her hands were dry and ashy from the soap, the pads of her fingers thick and hardened from years of the same repetitive movements.
Though the incision might show above the collar of whatever shirt Benjamin brought to dress the body, Effie chose the carotid, both for time’s sake and to help flush the bruising from the man’s face. A sharp intake of breath sounded from the corner when she made the careful cut through skin and fascia.
“It was better than the contraband camps. Or being sent back to whatever plantation I’d run from.” She elevated the artery and began the injection. Her back and knees ached from kneeling so long on unforgiving floorboards. Her eyelids tarried shut with each blink. “Anyway, Captain Kinyon didn’t do this to me. I was this way when I arrived. He would never have kept me on had I not been so . . . unaffected.”
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