“I’m sorry.”
At this, she glanced up and dared meet his eyes again. Sorry for what? Did he mean it in the pitying way? Sorry for the years she’d spent in the surgeon’s tent among the dead and dying. For the years of slavery before. Or was it an apology? Sorry for bringing her here amid such danger. Or for leaving the baseball match without taking one bite of the stupid cakes she’d made for him. Perhaps he meant it in the sense of regret. Sorry to have made the acquaintance of one so peculiar, to have kissed her lips, touched her skin, and moved inside her.
Adeline would know which he meant, would be able to read the line of his mouth and subtle tilt of his head. Yet another way Effie was defective. “I—”
The distant howl of dogs silenced her.
“The light, Effie,” Samson whispered. “Dampen the light!”
But Effie couldn’t move. Every command to her muscles misfired. Even her lungs seemed frozen, suspended mid-exhale. Samson scrambled over and snuffed the lantern.
“It’s all right.” He scooted up beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, but even that failed to touch her. Another howl and she began to shake. Not a quick twitch or shiver. Not a diminutive tremble. A body-racking shudder. The syringe pump fell from her hand, the resulting clamor disquieting her all the more.
Samson pulled her closer still, caging her against his chest. She could feel the cold steel of the pistol in his waistband, but even this didn’t calm her.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, but this time her mind could barely latch on to the words, let alone ponder their meaning. He rubbed her arms and stroked her cheek. “They won’t find us.”
More barking.
Something warm dampened her skirts and spread across her thighs. The smell of urine bloomed in the air. Humiliation rose alongside her terror. She tried to pull away, but Samson’s hold didn’t slacken, though surely he must have noticed the wetness.
“I never should have dragged you out here. It wasn’t fair or right in the slightest.”
What was wrong with her? She’d worked beside Captain Kinyon with cannons booming and gun smoke choking the air, the Rebs a half mile away and advancing. She’d survived weeks in that slave pen and who knew what before and after. And this, the howl of dogs across the swamp, incited convulsions and a bodily purge akin to the neurotic fit of a lunatic. If Samson hadn’t been repulsed by her before, surely he was now.
She scrunched closed her eyes, tears at the ready should she open them. The self-imposed blackness only agitated her other senses. The savage barking, the loamy smell of the swamp, the cold night air.
Everything else receded.
She was alone.
Panting. Listening. Running.
A root caught her toe. She stumbled forward and splashed into the mud. The footfalls she’d been tracking stopped. She waited for them to start up again, then peeled herself from the ground and scurried after. An arm circled around her waist and a hand clamped over her mouth.
“What the devil you doin’ out here, Effie?” Jonesy’s resonant voice had an edge of anger.
“I’s followin’ you.”
He shook his head and released her. “Effie.”
“You don’t want me round no more?”
“That ain’t, it’s just—”
“What she doin’ here?”
The four other men Jonesy had been traveling with had circled back and stood glaring at her.
“Send her back,” one whispered.
“She’ll slow us down.”
“Lead them patrollers right to us.”
Jonesy’s cross expression held a moment more, then softened. He brushed the mud from her cheek with the pad of this thumb. “I’s bringing her along. If you got a problem with dat, you’s welcome to go your own way.”
The others continued to harrumph, but didn’t sass Jonesy further. They walked on together straight through the night. Effie did her best to keep up and didn’t complain one peep. When at last her little legs tired, he carried her and still outpaced the other men.
“Where we goin’ anyway?” she said, resting her head on his shoulder.
“Someplace better.”
She felt the words rumble through his chest as he spoke. Someplace better was fine by her, so long as they were together.
“Effie . . .”
That deep, pleasant rumble.
“Effie!”
She opened her eyes. The walls of the cabin took shape around her, pallid gray in the moonlight. “Someplace better,” she whispered, desperate to hold on to the memory, to follow it through to the end.
“What?” Samson said.
It was gone.
The swamps surrounding the cabin had quieted. Her skirts clung damp to her thighs. Death perfumed the air.
“I can do this,” she said. “I can finish this.” Still shaking, she groped along the dusty floor until she felt the cold metal of her syringe.
“It’s all right, Effie. Let it rest. I daren’t light the lamp again, anyway.”
But she didn’t need light. Not for the injection. She fumbled along the tubing until her fingers brushed cool skin. By some miracle, the needle had not been pulled from the artery. At first, she struggled just to close her hand around the pump, but with each squeeze and release the motion grew easier. Her bounding heart slowed. She could do this. Whatever her defects, this she could contribute.
CHAPTER 23
Effie hadn’t intended to attend the vigil or the funeral service. Best put that night, with all its humiliations, as far behind her as possible.
Benjamin had arrived back at the tarpaper shack not long before dawn with a fresh set of clothes. By then, Effie had finished the arterial injection, sutured up the wound, and was nearly done filling the thoracic cavity through her long metal trocar. All this she’d done in darkness. Even the gibbous moon had shrank behind the moss-strewn cypress and set. Touch alone guided her.
She’d ridden back to Algiers Point in the bed of the wagon alongside the body, a dusty blanket shrouding it from view. The three of them crowded upfront with the bed seemingly empty would have begged questions. Samson insisted he be the one to ride beside the dead man, but the idea plainly sickened him. Benjamin pointed out it would look more natural for a woman to ride in back and Samson quickly conceded.
Her skirts still damp with urine, Effie hadn’t said a word, but climbed into the bed beside the body. It no longer smelled of day-old meat, but faintly of chemicals. Its flesh was cold and hard to the touch.
The sway of the wagon as they started off nearly rocked her tired body to sleep. Her mind, however, would not be lulled. What did it say of her that she could nigh fall asleep beside a corpse? And Samson. Just thinking his name made her head throb. In one night she’d unraveled weeks’ worth of effort to fashion herself normal and desirable under his gaze. Even Adeline would concede failure at this point.
But mostly, her thoughts circled around Jonesy. They’d been running away, him and those other men. She knew that somehow, while the rest of the memory remained fuzzy and elusive. The War was on; had they hoped to make it to the Union line? Was that the better place he spoke of? But then, where were they, Jonesy and the others, when she’d stumbled into Captain Kinyon’s camp? Where were they now?
Safely across the Mississippi, she, Samson, and Benjamin parted ways, the men with the body to St. Augustine and her home to wash and change before work. She’d walked a short distance along the levee before turning back, just in time to see Samson climb into a new wagon and start off in the opposite direction. The rising sun cast his profile in a jaundiced glow. His cheeks bore a dark shadow of whiskers. His short, coiled hair was in desperate want of oil and a comb. And still he was the handsomest man she knew. The bravest and most committed to his cause. Despite all that had happened, perhaps indeed because of it, she loved him all the fiercer. And it had taken her very last scraps of energy and will to turn away.
For the next two days, New Orleans burned with rumors abo
ut the comptroller from the fifteenth ward who’d been murdered. Jacques Guillot. She was glad to learn his name, felt a strange kinship with him. Another break with the captain’s rule to maintain her distance.
He’d been trying to protect her, Captain Kinyon, to spare her the heartache death left in its wake. That had been his reasoning, hadn’t it? Not simply to engender indifference that she might remain the perfect ward, never demanding affection; the perfect undertaker’s assistant, never allowing the messiness of life to interfere with the noble business of death. Either way, he’d failed. She too.
At the Poydras Street market, she heard a fruit seller whisper to a customer that Mr. Guillot had been shot twenty-three times and his body eaten by alligators. The old woman seated in front of Effie on the streetcar told her companion it was the rougarou that done got the body. Harriet informed the other women gathered after supper in the parlor Monsieur Guillot wasn’t dead at all but fled to Mexico, and that’s why ain’t no body been found. Effie bore the gossip in silence, waiting for it to die down, as gossip always did, and allow her to go about forgetting.
She’d taken out her key to lock the carriageway that second evening when she heard a passerby mention Mr. Guillot’s name again. This time in connection with a vigil at St. Augustine later that evening. Effie couldn’t help herself. She slipped back through the gate and pilfered a few supplies from the storeroom—face powder, black court plaster, and putty darkened with charcoal. She’d started the job, managed the preservation before having to flee with the dawn, but there hadn’t been time for cosmetic concerns. If the body was to be on view, she must make it as presentable as possible.
After explaining who she was and why she’d come—first to a prune-faced nun who spoke only French, then to a man with a priest’s collar who called himself Père Villeré—she was shown to the sacristy where Mr. Guillot, in a casket of polished walnut, awaited transport to the chapel. When she opened the lid, that pungent, slightly sweet odor of rot wafted upward. It was faint, though, barely noticeable even to her well-trained nose. The incense already being lit in the adjoining hall would soon mask it. With so many contusions to the body, there were bound to be broken vessels, leaving some tissues untouched by her preserving fluid. In truth, Effie was surprised the body did not smell more strongly.
The swelling around his eye had lessened, as had the greenish-purple discoloration. She built the sunken brow bone up with putty, smoothing out the edges until they blended with his marble-hard skin. Then she dusted his entire face with powder. It wasn’t quite the right shade—too light for his tawny skin.
Beneath his cravat and collar, wide, unevenly spaced stitches tattooed his neck. Not her best work, but then she’d sewn him up in complete darkness. She concealed them with a strip of black court-plaster just in case his cravat slipped down.
With nothing more to do, she knew she ought to steal away. Already she could hear the hushed voices of those gathering for the vigil. Soon they’d come to move the casket into the chapel. Yet Effie lingered. She fussed with the knot of his cravat, aligned the buttons of his suit just so, licked her palm and smoothed a stray lock of his wavy hair.
Considering the state of the body when she’d arrived at the shack—battered, stiff, and water-logged—she ought to be proud of how well he looked. Instead her nerves were raw. Despite her care to his bruises, her efforts to realign his broken bones, despite the putty and plaster and powder, the violence done to him was inescapable.
“Effie?”
She startled and spun around. Samson stood before her, worrying his hat in his hands. He took a step toward her. “I’d hoped you’d come tonight.”
“I didn’t come for the vigil, only to ensure the embalming had taken.” She shuffled back and sideways, her hip bumping into the casket, her eyes measuring the distance to the door.
“You must stay.”
“I’m not . . .” She started to say she wasn’t rightly dressed for it, but her black work dress wouldn’t allow such a lie. “I’m not Catholic.”
“Me neither. Don’t matter none.”
He reached to take her arm, but she shrank back. How could he want to touch her after that night? He cocked his head and studied her. She felt like an insect on a pinning board beneath his gaze.
“Mr. Guillot’s kin would like to say a few words to you, I’m sure. And others. You’re a right celebrity.”
“Whatever for?”
“For this.” He gestured to the body. “For what you did.”
Effie frowned and wrung the cords of her purse. “If I’d had a bit more time maybe . . . better lighting . . . The fluid didn’t penetrate all his tissues, I’d have to undress him to determine just where, and his orbital bone . . .” Her gaze fell to the floor. She couldn’t bear another look at the corpse or Samson. A faded, rust-colored stain showed on the rug. Wine likely, or blood. He moved closer, but she sidestepped his advance, nearly toppling the plume-filled urn beside the casket in her haste.
“Effie”—he raked a hand through his oiled hair—“about the other night.”
The incense wafting from the chapel roiled her stomach. Heat flushed beneath her tight collar. She stepped wide around him and hurried to the door. It led to a small interior courtyard. The cool night air was a godsend. Light spilled through the church’s stained-glass windows, casting the cracked stone pavers and trembling palm fronds in an anemic glow. Samson followed her, evidently intent on reviving her humiliation. They spoke at the same time.
“You must think me awful—”
“Please, let’s not discuss—”
They both stopped. Samson gave a nervous chuckle. Effie bit down on her lip and skirted his gaze.
“Can we sit?” He motioned to a stone bench dappled with pale green moss.
“I’ve got curfew.”
Samson chuckled again, this time full and earnest. “Curfew? On a Saturday? It’s not yet seven o’clock.” He took her by the hand before she could work out a better lie and tugged her to the bench. “Effie, that night when we . . . at the levee . . . I’m sorry I didn’t . . .” He ran his free hand through his hair again then wiped his oil-slickened palm atop his trousers.
It took Effie a moment to shuffle around her thoughts. That was the night he wished to speak of? The heat beneath her skin became a burn. She tried to read his expression, a difficult task in the best of lighting, but the slight cock of his head cast his features in shadow. What would Adeline say at such a moment? Again, Effie regretted not confiding in her. “Neither one of us are impervious to nature’s imperatives. Mr. Darwin writes in The Descent of Man that—”
“Lord! We’re not animals, Effie. It wasn’t just . . . nature, as you say. But I can see how you might rightly think that how I left things afterward.”
Effie looked down at her feet. Her boots were in want of a good polishing, her laces in need of replacing. “I had hoped you might try my ginger cakes. I didn’t make them entirely on my own, mind you, but I’ve since practiced with the oven’s dampers and am quite confident—”
He raised her hand to his lips. “You done scared me, Effie Jones. You’re too good for me and I know it.”
How could he say that? He was a representative in the statehouse, the darling of the Republican Party. Everyone, not only her, coveted his attentions. “That’s preposterous.”
“See there, that’s it. Who else is gonna say something like preposterous, or face a band of drilling White Leaguers, or sneak out in the middle of the night to help bring peace to the soul of a man she doesn’t even know.”
Effie pulled her hand away. “But that night I . . . I don’t know what came over me. That howling . . .” Even now, at the mere remembrance of the sound, her pulse sputtered. She let the silence dangle between them a moment that he might call to mind just how unbeseeming her reaction had been. When he didn’t stand and leave, she said, “Something’s not right with me.”
“You sure are different than most womenfolk. Knew that about you straightaway.
”
Effie looked up at the glowing stained glass seated in the stucco wall opposite them. White saints draped in blue and red tunics stared back at her. Their expressions seemed plaintive and despairing. A piano began to play. “Best get inside or you’ll miss the vigil.”
He pulled back her hand, but she held steady the gaze of the saints. “Look at me, Effie. You got such pretty eyes.”
No one had ever described her that way—not her eyes, or her too-big feet, or too-curly hair. Few people remarked on her at all—save for her unruly tongue—as if she were more a specter than a flesh and blood being.
“I know it’s not the proper time for such discussion, but, well, I was hoping you might consider being my wife.”
Effie blinked and turned to face him. The piano’s slow, strident dirge had swelled to mezzo forte, and surely she’d misheard him. “What?”
“My wife. I wanna marry you, Effie.” Her face must have telegraphed her confusion for he hastily followed with, “You don’t need to decide straightaway. Think on it some.”
Thoughts pinged helter-skelter in her brain. The women from the saloon and baseball match. Mrs. Carrière’s warning. “You needn’t ask just because we—”
“That ain’t it. You’re a good woman, Effie. Smart and brave. We care about the same things, come from the same bedeviled past. We make sense together.”
They made sense together. A sound-minded assessment. “I see.”
“Is that a yes?”
Effie didn’t reply. Of course she wanted to marry him. Couldn’t remember wanting anything more deeply in her whole life. But something gave her pause. She ought to rejoice that he’d come to so dispassionate a decision. Marriage was far too important a matter to decide based on emotions. Yet however sensible a union between them might be, she wished he’d said simply, I love you.
“I did something to show you how earnest my intentions are.” He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to her.
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