The men looked from one to another with uncertain expressions, as if they’d never considered Mr. Whitmark mightn’t have been involved. One scratched at his overgrown sideburns. The man with the knife set to work again on his teeth. Their liveliness was waning. Likely the men had devoted all night to this escapade—shoring up their courage with cheap whiskey, trolling the back-of-town streets for a suitable victim, bribing or bullying the coroner to comply with their plan and send for Mr. Whitmark.
Still playing docile, Effie strained her eyes upward to regard the primo uomo without raising her head. She only needed to convince him. He too looked tired, sagging shoulders and twitching eyelids. “How you still in business with a shake like that?”
“I cover them messy sutures with court plaster and powder,” Effie said before Mr. Whitmark could open his mouth and incriminate her. “But anyone with any know-how can still tell.”
“You sure got a lippy wench here,” primo uomo said.
“Indeed,” Mr. Whitmark replied.
“You got an alibi for Wednesday last?”
Mr. Whitmark’s shoulders straightened. “You might have started with that question instead of wasting my time with this charade. Wednesday was the Gerhing funeral, wasn’t it, Effie?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that evening I was out late at the theater. You might ask my brother.” He yanked the watch from his pocket. “You’ll find him lunching at the Pickwick Club in a few hours.”
At the mention of this, the men stiffened.
The primo uomo glanced between Mr. Whitmark, Effie, and the body, his jaw tight and eyes narrowed. Seconds piled one atop the next, adding to the already heavy silence.
At last, he said, “Let’s go, boys. I’m tuckered.” He picked up the scalpel and rammed it like a stake into the wooden examination table. “Keep your nigger-lovin’ nose outta trouble now, ya hear?”
Not until the men had left did Effie draw a full breath. It couldn’t be more than nine o’clock, though it had seemed like they’d been possums in a wolf’s jaw for hours. A handy stool and she would have collapsed. But then, best not tarry should men think to return and resume their sport. She reached for the upright handle of the scalpel. Before she could pry it free from the bloodstained wood, a hand circled around her arm and yanked her back.
“You ever do anything like that again, I’ll not only sack you but see that you haven’t enough fingers to ever work again,” Mr. Whitmark said, spittle flying from his lips onto her cheek. He muscled her against the wall. The rough plaster bit into the nape of her neck.
Effie blinked and tried to focus. Hadn’t she just saved his life? “It was the only thing I could think of to call them off.”
“Not that. Your little act is the only reason I’m not firing you here and now.” His grip tightened. “You think I don’t know you embalmed that body?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Who else could have done it? Did you stop and think how word of this could destroy us? The shop? All the progress I’ve made?”
“We can get by without such clients.”
“Look around you! Who do you think runs this city? It’s not that band of carpetbaggers and Negroes dithering about at the statehouse. Besides, I’m done getting by. I don’t know what kind of radical nonsense you’re involved in. But it stops. Today.” He released her and staggered back, bracing his hands on his knees as his chest heaved.
Effie swallowed, anger burning like bile in her throat. Only eleven years on from the War, and freedom and dignity were radical nonsense now? She wanted to remind him that he himself had fought for such nonsense.
She wanted to remind him too that her personal affairs were none of his concern. She was his assistant, not his property. But she remained silent, watching him wrest control of his ragged breath and twitchy limbs. When he righted himself, his gray eyes were hard as whetstone. How dissimilar he’d become from the broken man she’d stood beside in this very morgue last December.
He tugged again on his suit coat. It was too small for him now, constrained about the shoulders, pulling at the waist. Indeed, that tremor was the only vestige of the sickly man he’d been. Two months ago, she’d say outright he looked a bumpkin and needed a new coat. Now, she daren’t speak at all.
“You’re lucky those men were too sapheaded to connect you with all this.”
The thought had surfaced after she’d mentioned her attendance at the funeral. Might the men figure her involvement? But no. In their puny minds, a Negro couldn’t manage such things, and certainly not a woman.
Mr. Whitmark gestured to the haphazardly packed cases beside the table. “Take this mess back to the shop and get it set right. I’m going for some air.”
He started toward the door, stopped, and glanced over his shoulder at her. For the flicker of a moment, his stony regard cracked. His incisors pulled at the corner of his lips. The set of shoulders slackened. He opened his mouth—to apologize for the bruises he’d left on her arm? To thank her for saving their lives?—but he closed it just as quickly and stamped from the morgue.
The coroner had gone too, perhaps upstairs, perhaps at last to fetch the police, leaving her alone in the cold, dank, ill-lit room. She pulled a bar of soap and several washing cloths from one of the cases. She didn’t dare embalm the man on the examination table, but she’d not leave him dirtied and bloody either.
CHAPTER 25
“You forgive me that I can’t come with you?” Samson asked, handing her traveling bag to Tom, who loaded it along with his own onto the steamboat. “I’ll send my regrets to Mr. Chauvet this very minute and jump on the boat with you.”
Effie shook her head, uncertain she could keep the disappointment from her voice were she to speak. The trip to St. James Parish had been his idea, after all. But Samson was right not to come. It would be bad form not to accept the invitation to Mr. Chauvet’s party after he’d sponsored Samson’s membership in the Louisiana Progressive Club. With the club’s backing, Samson’s bid for state Senate was as sure as April rain.
“You look after her,” he said to Tom, then pulled Effie close and kissed her. She felt both thrilled and a touch embarrassed at such a public display, especially in front of Tom, who frowned toward the river.
“Good luck up there,” Samson said. He’d released her lips, but kept a snug hold about her waist. “And don’t let any of those swampers charm your heart away, you hear?”
Effie managed a laugh, her first in weeks it seemed, ever since Mr. Whitmark and the morgue. Her diaphragm was stiff with the effort. “I won’t.”
“And you’ll think on my proposal?”
“I will.”
Samson waved to her from the dock as the boat pulled away, then disappeared into the blur of the crowd. Despite the warm day, Effie reached about her shoulders, only to remember she’d packed away her shawl.
She and Tom sat portside near the stern wheel amid the seed bags, farming tools, and barrels of rum going upriver. Tom knew one of the roustabouts who’d taken them aboard without fee, provided they keep to the lower decks. Effie unwrapped a bundle of cornbread Mrs. Neale had sent, and Tom opened a can of pickled herrings. They shared the luncheon treats between them and stared out at the silty water rippling in the boat’s wake.
“Heard you got in a spot of trouble with your boss after the funeral,” Tom said, spitting out a bone and tossing it in the river.
Spot of trouble. An ill-fitting description, but she had no desire to correct him and relive the events at the morgue in the telling. “He’s trying to distance himself from his position during the War.”
“Outrun his reputation as a scalawag, you mean?”
“Yes, so he’s . . . wary of political matters.”
Tom stopped eating and turned to her. “Effie, why you defending him? Way I heard it, he slammed you into a wall and threatened to cut off your fingers if you done such nonsense again.”
“He . . . I . . . We’re all just trying to get by.”
“Embalming is all I’m good at.”
“That ain’t true. You the smartest gal I know. You could be a nurse, a teacher, even start up your own undertakin’ business.”
“Tom, you’re plumb crazy if you think that would ever work. Not even up North would they take to that.”
“So you just work for the coloreds.”
“Plenty of them would still object on account of my sex.”
“Something else, then.”
She’d never considered work beyond the dead. The idea tarried in her brain, an unexpected but not altogether unwelcome stranger.
Tom drew her attention back with a gentle nudge and handed her the last herring. “How’d you manage these four days away without getting your boss’s dander up, then?”
“He’s at the lake this week, fixing up his mother’s summer house.” She didn’t tell him of all the chores he’d left for her at the shop, how she’d been up past midnight the last two nights sweeping and scrubbing.
“Must be nice, taking the summer by the lake.” He leaned back against a stack of seed sacks, resting his head on his interlaced hands. “You ain’t been here for a summer spell yet, have you? Some treat you’re in for.”
“I lived through the Indiana winters. I’m sure I can endure the New Orleans summers.”
Tom laughed. “Don’t know about that.”
His laughter drifted into silence and they sat quietly for several minutes. The sway of the boat and warm, river-scented air soothed her nerves. She tucked her legs beneath her and rested her head atop a small wooden keg. She let go of the foreboding that had followed her from the docks and tried not to think about what lay ahead. A heron called from the shore. Dragonflies hummed overhead, their spindly bodies iridescent in the sunlight.
“You remember the first time it really hit you that you weren’t a slave no more?” Tom asked.
Effie raised her head but didn’t answer.
“Me, was a few years on in the War. The company chaplain been teaching us to read and write. When there weren’t no trenches to be dug or lumber to be cut. I was mustered in for pay and instead of signing an X, I spelled out my full name, Thomas Button.”
“You didn’t feel it when you first enlisted?”
“Nah. Your rifle, see, they can take from you. Hell, if you was captured and not killed they could send you right back to the cotton fields. Even a leg they can take from you. But this”—he tapped his temple—“ain’t no taking away what’s in here.”
Effie considered his reply. She too had learned to read during the War, but didn’t remember feeling materially different at any one point during the process.
Then it struck her. There had been a moment. A line, a fracture, that proverbial point of no return she’d traversed by no one’s hand but her own.
She told him about the Kinyons and the daughter they’d had before the War. “I never flattered myself that they held for me the same affection. But I did replace her, in some measured way. Slept in her bed, played with her dolls, wore out her dresses.”
Mrs. Kinyon had never thought of Effie as a daughter. But Mr. Kinyon had. Or so she’d thought. And though she’d never called him papa, he’d been idol, savior, and father to her all in one. How eager she’d been to impress and please him, to prove herself worthy of any affection he might spare. She kept her distance, studied tirelessly, endured the cold nose and slobbery tongue of his mangy dog Otis.
Again Effie groped about her shoulders for her shawl, ruing the decision to pack it away. “I hadn’t a family back here. None that I knew of, none I remembered. Peculiar as our situation was—the captain and missus and I—I suppose I thought . . .” Effie stopped, surprised how her throat constricted around the words.
“Thought you’d found a new family,” Tom finished for her.
Effie nodded. But fascination, not paternal affection, motivated the captain. Effie realized that now. Realized how he too saw her as an oddity, a museum curiosity more than a girl. Astounding intellect! Unmatched skill! Impervious to the labile emotions and fragile sensitivities so common to her sex.
“One evening a man came to dinner, a well-known naturalist from Philadelphia. I didn’t know his niche of study, but hoped we might talk of botany or ornithology. I’d recently read Mr. Audubon’s Birds of America and hoped—” Effie stopped again. She was shirking the subject and would soon bore Tom dead.
She turned and faced him. “Are you acquainted with the field of craniometry?”
He shook his head.
“It’s the examination of the skull and facial features, measurements of the cranial circumference, facial height, nasal breadth, and the like. Scientists use it to explore variation within and betwixt species.”
“You mean, like animals?”
“People too. It’s used to buttress claims of Negro inferiority, hayseed theories that the races developed from different origins instead of a single ancestral species. Polygenism, they call it.”
Tom’s expression darkened, his eyebrows bunching and his full lips cinching together.
“Neither the captain nor I favored that theory. But this naturalist from Philadelphia did. He was one of the foremost proponents of such . . . rubbish.” Effie stared beyond the river at the foliage-entangled shore. Cyprus trees and ferns and marsh grass. Creeping vines and drooping moss. She drew her knees up to her chest, wishing as she had then to disappear like vapor into air. “Captain Kinyon brought this man to our—his home, that he might measure and examine me.”
At the time, Effie hadn’t been able to explain her dread, didn’t remember her days in the slave pen, the daily indignity of being poked and prodded. She declined the examination, but Captain Kinyon pressed her. Think what a contribution she’d be making to science. It wouldn’t hurt a bit. The man had come hundreds of miles for this, after all.
A father would have noticed her fear—the frantic push and pull of her breath, the sweat aglint on her forehead—but Captain Kinyon had not.
“I thought you said the captain didn’t believe in this polygenism,” Tom said.
“He didn’t. He thought I was the perfect specimen to disprove the theory.”
“Specimen?”
Effie kept her gaze trained on the river’s shoreline. Not even Samson or Adeline knew of this sliver of her life. After all, if Captain Kinyon, the man who’d saved her from the War and raised her up since she was small, saw her in that light, a mere specimen to be studied, surely others would too.
“I did as he bid and let that man . . . measure me.” She took a deep breath to fill the sudden stab of emptiness. “Eleven years—since the first day in camp—I’d done as the captain bid, thinking . . . thinking that’s what love looked like. But that night, as that vile scientist tinkered about with his tools, that was the moment. I sat there and I knew. I’d never do as Captain Kinyon bid me again.”
After the examination, she’d lain awake, recalling the cold pinch of the man’s caliper against her skull, the flutter of his measuring tape, the pads of his probing fingers across her cheekbones, down her spine, and other places of no relation to craniometry at all. She’d disgorged her dinner into the chamber pot many times over and couldn’t bring her quaking limbs to heel. Before dawn, she’d packed her trunk, her traveling bag, her embalming cabinet, and was gone.
Tom touched her hand. She peeked at him without turning her head. “You must think me foolish for leaving after so trivial an offense.”
Neither his hand nor his gaze retreated. “It ain’t trivial, Effie. Not at all. You’re a woman, not some specimen.”
The emptiness inside her lessened. She turned to him and did her best to smile. “Thank you.”
Tom returned her wan smile. He picked up the empty herring tin, tossed it up and down in his palm a few times, then chucked it into the water. It floated a moment atop the waves, then sank below the surface. “We’re going to be all right, living
through what we’ve done. You’ll see.”
Effie longed to believe him.
* * *
Several hours into the afternoon, the boat stopped at a small dock affronting a wide swath of sugarcane fields to unload cargo. Effie and Tom disembarked and headed down a narrow dirt road paralleling the river. The sugarcane stalks reached thigh height, the neat rows in which they were planted blurring to a sea of green as they stretched to the distant tree line. Between the far trees, Effie could just make out the shingled roof and dormer windows of a monstrous plantation house.
“Is that—”
“No, the Saulnier place is the next tract upriver. But likely some of the old field hands sharecrop these parts too. We’ll find a place we can bed down for the night and see what folks can tell us.”
Inland from the river, beyond the rows of sugarcane lay a spattering of clapboard shanties raised on pillars a few feet above the muddy ground. Rust streaked the tin roofs a bloody red. A spattering of children played with sticks and rag dolls in the shanties’ lengthening shadows, but anyone big enough to hold a pail or hoe bustled about fetching water or tending the gardens.
Tom introduced himself to an old woman hanging out the day’s wash. Her filmy eyes narrowed slightly when he mentioned he was from the Republican Office. Not here to stir up any trouble, he assured her, only to see how things were faring in these parts and if the Party might be able to help.
Effie had worried without Samson they’d struggle to make headway with these people. He was the great speechifier, after all. And with that smile, he hardly needed words. It struck her now, however, how well-suited Tom was for this work. He’d removed his faded slouch hat before addressing the woman, exposing his shaggy hair. Samson’s hair, trimmed short and slicked to the side with oil—à la mode in the city—would seem ostentatious here. Tom had brought his wood-whittled crutch instead of his brass-tipped cane to better navigate the uneven terrain and this too seemed fitting. The woman eyed his cotton suit—tidy and well-tailored, but not at all foppish—his stump leg and travel-worn boot. He too had a handsome smile, Effie realized, broad and earnest.
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