If I Never Get Back

by Darryl Brock

  “Yes, damn his soul,” said O’Donovan. “One of those ballists they’re all falling over here. A big cheeky bastard named Fowler, friend of her brother. Caitlin’s silly fancy will pass once this sporting craze ends.”

  “Nothing at fault with the game,” said O’Neill. “I encouraged it during the war. Good for the lads. But there’s more to Fowler than a ballist—if our countryman McDermott has his facts straight.”

  “It’d be the first thing straight about that one,” O’Donovan said contemptuously. “Why is filth like McDermott allowed to contaminate us?”

  “You didn’t sing that song when he delivered the arms at half price,” O’Neill said mildly. “It’s true his morals aren’t the keenest. But he’s proven useful at times. And this may be one. McDermott claims Fowler took our money from Elmira.”

  “What?”

  I leaned against the wall and listened numbly to O’Neill recite McDermott’s description of me.

  “Scar on his cheek!” O’Donovan said with growing excitement. “That’s the giveaway! Wearing a beard now, of course! And he has money. Caitlin said he paid to bury her mother in Ireland. So the rumored treasure does exist! Oh, to steal it from us is a profanity!”

  “We’d surely put it to grand use,” O’Neill said. “There’s more on this: He also swears Fowler stole our weapons payment in New York.”

  “Tis more likely McDermott lost at wagering, as our reports had it,” said O’Donovan. “But it’s all one. What I don’t understand is how Fowler still walks the earth.”

  “Through no want of effort by Red Jim, I’m thinking,” said O’Neill.

  “He’s protected, then?”

  “That we don’t know.”

  “The man’s surely an agent,” O’Donovan said grimly. “A paid Pinkerton informer. Or in the employ of the bastard English!”

  “The matter is grave,” O’Neill agreed. “I thought it too serious even to risk using the wire. When I learned that Fowler’d been in this very house, I came straight down from Detroit.”

  “Playing up to Caitlin to get information,” O’Donovan added. “I’ll kill him.”

  “You’ll obey orders,” O’Neill said. “We have a fine chance to discover useful information and at the same time confuse our enemies.”

  “Through Caitlin?” O’Donovan did not echo the other’s enthusiasm. “Does she know about him?”

  “No,” said O’Neill. “And for now that’s best. We don’t want her to act differently and alert him. We’ll start her on the money; that is our first need.”

  Well, I thought darkly, if our relationship hadn’t been complicated enough, it now promised to bristle with intrigue.

  “I suspected something was up with him one morning when we unloaded the guns and suddenly he was standing there looking at us,” said O’Donovan.

  “Have you checked the stores?”

  “No, he’s out of town; there’s no problem. Still, it might not be a bad idea.”

  My mind froze with the abrupt realization that I’d left the candle down there. It would confirm all their suspicions. I pushed through the shrubbery and ran toward the street. At the corner I looked back and saw O’Donovan emerge with a lantern. He moved purposefully toward the basement door. Shit!

  We’d trounced the “champion” Brooklyn Eckfords, 24—5, on their home grounds. But they’d found a way to pooh-pooh it, claiming that the earlier game had not been a match contest since several of their top players had been absent. It rankled us. If we beat them again, we would still need to go East for a third victory to claim the coveted pennant. It made us so mad, in fact, that we drubbed them mercilessly, 45—18, behind George’s six hits and four stolen bases.

  More than eight thousand paid fifty cents apiece to crowd the Union Grounds. The new posters and ribbons and rosettes sold like crazy; the concession booth was mobbed, and our vendors—we’d rigged a few kids with baskets—did a. brisk trade in hot dogs and pretzels among the carriages. Champion, glowing, promised to raise my salary ten dollars a week. Mr. Generous.

  “Gentlemen,” Champion announced after the game. He was standing on a chair in the clubhouse waving a piece of paper. “Yet another opponent, not convinced by previous defeat, has challenged us. They propose to come here and expose us as frauds before the entire nation!”

  Champion smiled benignly as we hooted, until Waterman said crisply, “Horseshit.”

  “Who?” George yelled.

  “None other than our. old friends,” Champion replied, “the Troy Haymakers!”

  While the others roared, my stomach bounced on the floor.

  “I gather,” Champion said, milking the moment, “we accept?”

  “Bring ’em on!”

  I stood there thinking. Thinking quite hard. In my guts I knew beyond doubt who would show up with the Haymakers: McDermott and Le Caron.

  Cait waited at the Laurel Street gate. I moved forward eagerly, thinking she had come to the game after all, despite Timmy being ill. Then I saw her expression.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Biting her lip, she held out a flat packet stamped Daviscourt Photography Studio.

  “The shots of us?”

  She nodded, her eyes wild.

  “Hey, they can’t be that bad.”

  “Look at them,” she said.

  There were five five-by-seven-inch prints. In each one, hovering over the painted stream, was a face. A muted face, not nearly as defined as our three, but quite distinct. An aquiline nose, dark hair, dark, softly staring eyes, lips pressed together. Below the strong jaw was what appeared to be a uniform collar.

  I knew who I was looking at. I had seen him before, although in the other photograph he was infinitely younger and unburdened. It was Colm’s face.

  Chapter 19

  10 AUGUST 1869

  ELMIRA

  Dear Sam’l,

  As the man said, it was ever so different before it all changed. Tiring of me moping about in mortal dread of the lecture circuit, Mr. Langdon finally took pity & sent me shopping for a newspaper with about as much care as bed give to Livy’s purchasing new gloves. Well, a hat, maybe. I had a good-sized nibble in Cleveland & if it had stayed on my line you & I would be Ohio neighbors.

  I found a sweeter deal in Buffalo, however, well inside Mr. Langdon’s coal kingdom & close enough to Elmira to be less uprooting for Livy after the wedding—which is in February, by the way, & which you must attend. Anyhow, Saturday week (the 21st) I take one-third possession of the Buffalo Courier and commence work as chief editor of my own sheet. 1 wish you, my ever-silent partner, could have seen Mr. Lang-don’s face when I said that instead of him covering the entire $15,000 I’d pick up half—in cash! My stock in the futures market soared tolerably with him.

  It’s a tame prospect partly—like coming off the river to open a dry-goods store—but I’ve navigated alone for too long & I’m eager now to settle with the dearest woman on this planet. No trip to California now, & I confess to a certain amount of relief on that score. But I’ll miss witnessing Freddy’s Avitor, of which I am sure you have read, & no longer hold doubts. I saw where the English established an Aeronautical Society three years back & already have exhibited likely models at the Crystal Palace. We should be in on the “ground floor” of this, don’t you think? Since our first venture was so lucrative, why not pursue another?

  Enjoyed your letter of last month. Porkopolis must be nigh delirious over your club. I can’t visit anywhere now without having my head pounded by talk of Brown Stockings, Green Stockings, Ivory Socks, Maroon Hose, & on & on through rainbows of leggings till my ears sag. Couldn’t you boys lose, just once, so the National Game could go back to being a game & stop being pure bunkum religion?

  Must post this now. Regards.

  Cordially,

  SLC

  P.S. The Fenian uproar has died down & a high fence now circles the military cemetery. Your work has spawned a whole generation of ghost tales, however, and 1 suspect folks here
by are privately thankful for your livening their drab lives. You’ve taken on a sort of immortality.

  Immortality. I liked that. I thought about Twain on the verge of the emotional security and social respectability he wanted so badly. Soon he would enjoy the stable pleasures of family life. I envied him that. But I also remembered that Jervis Langdon, after buying the newlyweds a mansion in Buffalo, would die within the year. Livy’s sister would also die during their Buffalo residence, and they would lose their own firstborn, an infant son. Stunned with grief, Twain would sell his share in the paper at a loss, sell the house as well, depart from Buffalo.

  He was blissfully unaware. My foreknowledge made me feel old and weary. I wondered about my own life. I’d been thinking of my daughters again, and, by extension, of the world I had left. I missed the oddest things: the taste of pizza, the sounds of aircraft, late-night TV movies, driving a car, paperbacks, electric lights, and innumerable other things that blipped unexpectedly into sense-memory. Pizza was the most nagging.

  I’d been back in time for two and a half months. What must my daughters be feeling? Was it that long for them too? If so, they’d think I deserted them. Shades of my father. Maybe it was possible, on the other hand, that I was still there, living simultaneously in two dimensions. Maybe it had always been that way, my consciousness simply shifting from there to here. But I didn’t like the idea. And I couldn’t see what to do about it anyway.

  Daviscourt had tried to comfort Cait—she nearly fainted when she’d first seen the prints—with vigorous assurances that there was simply no explaining the extra face, or why one print had been ruined by overexposure; he’d never experienced anything similar. None of which, of course, spoke to what she was feeling.

  We went back to see him together. I grilled him for nearly an hour. He walked us through each stage of his developing and printing process, showing how he had prepared the glass plates in solutions of collodion and silver nitrate only minutes before our sitting, explaining that the exposures had to be made while the plates were still wet.

  “So no previous image could exist on the glass?” I asked.

  “Absolutely impossible,” Daviscourt said.

  “So something had to be there with us when you took the pictures?”

  “I would conclude so,” he said reluctantly.

  “Have you heard of this sort of thing before?”

  “Not among recognized photographic artists,” he said archly. “Of course one reads of it among spiritualist Summers and fakers.”

  “Enough, Samuel,” said Cait, sounding distraught and tired. “There’s no explanation here. I think we knew that before we came. You’re not at fault, sir.”

  “Madam, if you wish it . . . removed,” he said tentatively, “I believe it is within my means.”

  Which raised an interesting question: Could he remove the intrusive image? But Cait would have none of it. She shook her head violently and tugged me through the front door.

  Outside, she looked me in the eye and said, “Will you help me with something?”

  “If I can.”

  “You can,” she said. “We’ll talk to someone.”

  I knew before she told me. I’d seen the advertisements. Clara Antonia was in town. Scheduled to speak Friday evening at Greenwood Hall.

  “After her lecture we’ll find our answers,” Cait said firmly, “if any are to be obtained.”

  “Why after?”

  “Because that’s when her seances are.”

  It was not a wonderful week. I dropped by Cait’s evenings after practice—all her boarders seemed to have vanished—to deliver little gifts and to chat. I worried about both of them. Cait looked drawn and tense. Timmy seemed tired and weak all the time.

  The specter of the photographs haunted us, though we pretended otherwise. I developed an eerie and pervasive sense that we were not alone. Colm filled my thoughts. Why had he appeared to us, seven years after his demise? Was he jealous? In the pictures he hadn’t looked jealous. Just intent.

  The Fenian question also lay between us like a bog. I didn’t want to spoil our time together by raising the subject. For her part, Cait didn’t bring up the money issue. We were probably trying to nurture our feelings for each other. Not easy, under the circumstances. Love surely feeds on mystery—but only to a point.

  Tensions also continued on the team. Gould accused Allison of loafing during practice, and the two nearly came to blows. George was absent one day, provoking dark mutterings from Sweasy and Waterman.

  Trying to capitalize on the Stockings’ cresting fame, Waterman and Brainard had each lent his name to a local cigar store. These were not the tiny magazine-and-smoke stands I had known in San Francisco, but were spacious halls with pool tables and chairs and spittoons, hangouts for the sporting life. Kimball’s, on Fourth, became Brainard’s and Kimball’s, while Schipper’s Cigars, on Vine, became Fred A. Waterman & Company’s Red Stocking Headquarters, and there business reportedly boomed even more than at Brainard’s.

  At practice, however, Waterman still groused over Champion’s threatened temperance pledge. Brainard, on the other hand, went about his chores like a model citizen.

  “Settle up with you before long, Sam,” he told me one afternoon.“Oh?” I said, surprised. “Things going that well at the store?”

  “Could be,” he said. “Could be.”

  I thought I heard a note of smugness.

  Greenwood Hall was narrow, gloomy, and jammed. With four hundred others we sat on creaking, straight-backed chairs and waited for Madame Clara Antonia to appear on a small stage heaped with flowers. The gathering’s size surprised me. I recognized several professional men, affluent members of the club. A cross section of the city’s population seemed to be there, including boys making predictably rude noises. With no preamble, a short and very fat woman appeared from the wings. Applause swept the hall, undercut by the boys’ guffaws. She moved calmly to the lectern.

  I’m not sure what I expected—a nun in exotic habit, a flamboyant gypsy in headdress and gold bangles—but whatever it was, I felt disappointed. Clara Antonia wore a plain dun-colored dress trimmed in dark velvet topped with a lace collar. It hung on her like a grocery sack. The boys’ observations grew creative. But it no longer mattered what she wore when she lifted her eyes to us; the irises—pale gray or blue, it was impossible to tell—were opaque, almost luminous. They scanned us like unfocused cat orbs, seemingly oblivious to what lay immediately before them. Was she blind?

  “The spirit world is not entirely alien,” she began, her voice girlish and piping, almost comically incongruous with her bulk, yet carrying distinctly through the hall. “We catch inklings of forces at work in the spirit world—electricity is one—in our daily lives, and certainly in our dreams.”

  A deep-voiced man behind us scraped his chair and said, “Least she don’t grope all over the landscape for words, like most female elocutionists.”

  Cait turned and glared at him.

  “Spirits exist in an atmosphere etherealized around our tangible world,” Clara Antonia said. “The forces in this spiritual ether are unnamed because they are largely uncomprehended. And yet, as with electricity, they can be used, though they are not fully comprehended.”

  She explained that clairvoyants received certain emanations from the spirit world. She had realized early on that she herself had such capacity. It had come unbidden and, until she learned to help and comfort others with it, she had thought herself cursed.

  Snickers came from the rude-boy contingent.

  Clara Antonia’s eyes tracked slowly to them. “Your twenty-five cents does not buy you the right of disrespect,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s also inappropriate since one of you—that boy in the sweater—grieves over a dear companion recently arrived among the spirits.”

  “Cripes, Willy,” one of them blurted. “Yer brother, how’d she know?”

  It sent a ripple through the crowd. Too pat, I thought. Prearranged.

  “My
task here is not to communicate with spirits, although I sense a number about us.” She paused as another hum passed through the hall. “Rather, I will tell you something of their nature and dwelling conditions. Those of you who might wish me to communicate with a particular spirit may so arrange with my agent at the conclusion of this lecture.”

  I leaned toward Cait and whispered, “What does she charge?”

  “Shh, I’ve paid.”

  Clara Antonia spoke for ninety minutes. In no-nonsense phrases she asserted that the spirit world was a better world than this, that guests in that world were of a higher order than in this material life. Just as geology showed the original mass at the center of the earth to improve in high qualities as it approached the surface, she argued, so too was humankind elevated and refined through a process of decomposition. That part got a little hazy, but my interest rose when she described her work with dying soldiers in Union hospitals.

  Time after time she had witnessed the departure of spirits from their corporeal bodies. First a dark, leaden vapor arose over the chest. Lights shone from the brain, dim as gas jets seen through a glass. As the patient grew feebler, emanations from his body made the vapor denser, while the brain light stretched upward to it, as if trying to extract nourishment. In two to three hours the vapor gradually assumed human form. If interrupted during that time—for example, if the body was about to be carted off to the dead room—then other similar forms looking on came down and took the emergent form tenderly and bore it away.

  Toward the end she answered questions. Yes, she had seen manifestations of dogs and cats and birds and flowers in the spirit world. No, the spirits of former humans didn’t run around naked, but gathered a shadowy sort of raiment about themselves, according to taste and character. The clairvoyant could generally tell from this what they had been in life; indeed, she thought it very possible that spirits appeared in that way so as to be recognized. Those with unfinished business were those, obviously, who went to greatest lengths to be recognized.