by Daren Wang
Even here, though, he could see the signs of smoke everywhere. The clothing was of a better cut and fabric, but the glaze of the women’s eyes and the limpness of their postures spoke of the same affliction that Leander knew so well. He suspected that he read their languid stares differently than the gentlemen that walked the streets around him.
The two of them had plotted their assault on the house carefully. It was Malcolm who had worked through most of the details, scouting the house for an entire night, watching the comings and goings through the brightly lit downstairs parlor and the muted, draped windows of the second floor.
The man at the front door wore a paisley waistcoat, a holster, and a jacket two sizes too small that emphasized the expanse of his shoulders and the bulk of his arms.
“He’s not allowed,” he said, putting his hand on Malcolm’s chest. “No coloreds.”
“He’s my valet,” Leander said. “He takes care of me.”
“That’s what the girls are for,” the doorman replied. “He can wait for you behind the house. There’s a bench back there, away from the street. We don’t want folks thinking we serve his type.”
Malcolm spat at the doorman’s feet and dodged as the man halfheartedly swiped at him. He laughed over his shoulder as Leander gestured him up the path to the back of the house.
The beveled glass door opened into a room crowded with men in suits and women in silk dressing gowns. A long mahogany bar ran the length of the far wall. As he scouted the faces all around him, a matronly woman approached him and offered her hand.
“Marianne LeSoleil Levant,” she said. “Welcome to my house.”
“Leander,” he said, hesitating to reveal his real name. “Leander Fitch.”
“What can we offer you?” the madam asked. A blond girl, no more than twelve, passed them and Levant ran her fingers along the girl’s neck. Leander smiled to keep from wincing.
The room was close and stuffy, and he feared he had begun to sweat.
“I’m looking for a black girl with different-colored eyes,” he said, his eyes scanning the women as they mingled with the well-dressed men. “A lovely slave woman. I’ve heard stories about her.”
“We don’t have any slaves here,” Levant said, eyeing him. A suited waiter passed and she snatched a glass of whiskey from his tray and handed it to him. “Here, you look parched. Now, when you finish that, you may go down to George Street for the cheap trade, if that is your taste.”
“I misspoke,” Leander said, downing the whiskey. “I’ve heard there are no girls finer than yours, Miss Levant. In particular, a friend mentioned a rather exotic young lady…”
“We do have a West African princess of such astonishing beauty that she’ll make you long for faraway places, and indeed she has one eye green, the other brown. She is, of course, a bit more than the rest of our girls. Such is the case with royalty.”
“Might I meet her?” Leander asked.
“Certainly,” Levant said. “Why don’t you relax here and I’ll bring her to you when she’s not indisposed.”
The woman flitted away and Leander stepped to the bar.
The wall behind the bar was punctuated by French doors open to the cool night, and he could see Malcolm talking with several other black men gathered in a gazebo. A light rain had started.
Leander took in the overstuffed couches and crystal chandeliers, the dark-wood bar, and leaded glass tumblers in every hand. Looking at the women reminded him too much of Isabel, so he glanced at the clients instead.
He could spot the posture of command evident in his fellow officers, and as the men joked together, he made out the bend and the lilt of the Southern tongue in some of them. The business at hand had caused Yank and Reb to leave their grievances at the door.
He sat on a plush sofa, and two women sat to either side and asked his name. He used a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face, and chatted long enough to have two more drinks. He enjoyed how the alcohol made him feel, and that worried him.
“Mr. Fitch,” Levant said to him. She motioned toward a woman in a blue silk gown.
Leander could understand why the house billed the woman as a princess. Her long neckline and strong chin gave her a regal bearing and her skin, coffee colored and flawless, glowed in the candlelight, but he could not look away from her eyes.
“My friend Joe told me she was the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said. “Said he’s missed seeing her for years.”
He watched the girl’s drug-hazed face closely as he spoke and was rewarded with a flinch of pained recognition at Joe’s name.
“She’s perfect,” he said.
“This way, please,” Levant said, leading Leander by the hand.
Leander followed as she led them up the broad marble staircase, down a scarlet carpeted hallway, and into a high-ceilinged room. A canopied bed draped in crimson silk stood on one side of the room.
“If there’s anything else you desire, let me know,” she said, smiling slyly and brushing her hand across a velvet pull hanging from a bell chain before leaving and pulling the door shut behind her.
Leander lifted his finger to his lips and listened for the sound of the woman’s shoes as they made their way back down the heavily carpeted hallway. The princess reached to undo the straps on her dress, but he stopped her, taking her hands in his.
“Alaura?” he asked.
She hesitated, confusion in her face.
“I’m here to take you to Joe,” he said.
“Joe’s dead,” she stammered. “Went up north and got himself killed.”
“No, he’s not,” he said. “I know him. He runs my sister’s farm.”
The news took a minute to cut through her haze.
“Joe’s alive?” she asked.
She sat on the bed and rubbed her face, smearing the powder and paint, transforming her from a princess into a confused girl.
“Where is he?”
“Back at my home. Please, you need to listen. We need to get away,” he said.
“Away?” she asked, looking at him blank-faced.
He yanked at the swollen window casement until it opened.
“As soon as we get you out of West Virginia, you won’t be a slave anymore,” he said. “We just have to get you out of here.”
“Yates Bell,” she said. “He sold me to these people.”
He climbed out onto the porch roof. Still light-headed from the alcohol, he pulled himself up onto the broad roof of the house and crawled across the cypress shakes to the back. He fished a penny from his pocket and threw a strike at Malcolm.
Malcolm tipped a nonexistent cap and made for the front of the house. Leander crawled back onto the porch roof and helped Alaura through the window and onto the rain-slicked shingles.
“He’s with me,” Leander whispered, pointing Malcolm out to Alaura. “He’s a good man. You can trust him.”
Alaura nodded.
“Can you run?” he whispered.
She nodded again.
“It’s raining, goddammit. Let me in,” Malcolm shouted from the street. “It’s a goddamn whorehouse, why ain’t I good enough for that?”
“Quiet down,” the doorman’s voice rumbled from the porch below.
“Come over here and make me, hooplehead,” Malcolm said. “I’ve wiped my ass with finer men than you, and I will not be held out here by you.”
The doorman’s steps creaked on the floorboards of the porch and Malcolm backed away. Leander motioned Alaura to the side of the porch roof where she climbed down and hung by her fingers before dropping into the bushes below. The girls on the porch laughed to see her blue gown billow, but she shushed them with a finger. Leander dropped beside her and took the pistol from its holster.
“Do you know where the courthouse is?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Meet me there,” he whispered. “Now, run.”
The girl ran north up the street, silk flowing behind her, bare feet slapping the wet cobblestones. M
alcolm danced outside the range of the doorman’s long arms, throwing wild punches at the air around him.
Leander signaled and he dropped his arms.
“I beg your pardon,” Malcolm said, winking at the women on the porch. “I thought you were somebody else.”
He turned and sprinted south. The girls giggled as the doorman stood in the rain, befuddled. Leander ran to follow his friend.
The madam stepped onto the porch and pointed at Leander.
“Get him, you idiot. He’s taken Alaura,” she shouted.
Leander ran up the middle of the cobblestone street, shouting to keep the doorman’s attention from the running girl. The chase drew derisive cheers from streetwalkers and soldiers gathered under overhangs and umbrellas. The men waved their hats in the air as if they were watching a horse race or a ball game.
Leander had a vision of standing on third on a spring day with a high blue sky, Harry on the mound and Hans at the plate. His muscles remembered the joy of running home as he sprinted in the fouled streets of the Southern city.
He heard the crack of the bat, and he heard Hans yelling for him to slide home.
His knees buckled and he went down onto the cobblestones, laughing even as the pain of the bullet wound in his back came over him in a wave.
He felt someone pry the pistol from his hand, and heard the snap of the little gun. Malcolm’s face appeared in front of his, the same color as the coal-hazed sky.
“Get up,” he said. “March, soldier. Let’s get out of here.”
Leander looked into his friend’s black face.
“Home,” he said, and his lifeless hand fell to the ground.
LADIES OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
There had still been leaves on the trees the last time a letter from Leander had arrived for her father. Since then the men had moved back to the city for the winter season, the snow had piled deep on the field, and the knot in Mary’s stomach had ossified into a nearly unbearable burden. Even having Joe nearby did nothing to ease her sense of dread.
There had been other letters. One from Katia in Canada. Although the letter was addressed to her father, Mary could see that she expected her to read it to him, and she did.
She told the story of the day the raiders killed the Zubrichs and attacked the house as a way of apology for running out as they did, and said how much she regretted the trouble it had caused them. She wished that both Mary and Nathan had been there when she and Harry had gotten married, and hoped for Nathan’s blessing. They invited them to visit in Canada, and made it clear that it was unlikely they’d ever be able to come see them in Town Line.
Nathan said there was only one more border he was willing to cross, but made them a little rocking cradle and sent it to them via Palmer.
Mary tried not to think too much about that day. There’d been too much blood spilled on her farm. There had been a trail of it left behind. Joe had started to follow it, but the buzzards circling a copse of spruce made it clear that he didn’t need the pistol he was carrying, instead coming back to the house for a stained canvas tarp to cover their bodies. Mary sent a telegram to the new marshal, but never did hear any more about them.
Out of respect for Hans, she’d gone to see the Zubrichs’s funeral behind their little church. None of the Town Line farmers had looked her in the eye, but there seemed more shame than anger in them. She was surprised when Mr. Snyder came up from the crossroads the next day with a cart full of glass panes and went about fixing all the windows broken during the fight. He greeted Nathan as he always had, with a tip of his hat, and never sent a bill.
Fending off the raiders seemed to have cleared the last of her father’s cobwebs, and in the weeks after the attack, she took real pleasure in his return to health. He kept pressing to see the mill, and eventually, Joe took him to the ruins. He went for days without speaking again, but eventually Joe asked him for help in fixing the bullet holes in the house.
“Damned lobsterbacks,” he’d said, and finally cracked a smile. After that, he was better. He still spoke to her mother, but it seemed more a habit than an affliction.
Without Katia around, Mary found herself cooking and tending her father more, and Joe often helped with the books and the other business of the farm.
She’d always disliked her time in the kitchen, and had found it to be one of the more tedious chores. But now, her father would come and sit at the table and shell peas or husk corn, and then Joe would follow them in and sit at the table and work through this invoice and that, and the three of them would while away the day.
She was alone in the kitchen when she heard the wagon rattle in the snowy driveway and looked out to see Malcolm in the driver’s seat next to a black woman weighted under many layers against the winter.
She went out to welcome him and behind the welling in his eyes, Mary saw a sadness that she did not recognize in the big man’s face. As he so often had, he stood wordless, but with just a motion, a small movement of his hand toward the pine box in the wagon, he told her that her brother was gone.
Malcolm caught her in his arms and held her as the uncertainty drained from her, leaving a hollow in her chest into which everything seemed to collapse.
She led them into the house and back to the kitchen to sit near the warm stove. She could see by the way the woman held Malcolm by his arm that they were in love.
She brewed a pot of coffee and poured them each a cup before the strange woman broke her silence.
“Is Joe here?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
For the first time, Mary looked in the woman’s face. There was a hope there, something she thought she would never know again. And there were the eyes, one green and one brown.
Before she could say anything, the popping sound of her father knocking the snow from his boots on the back stoop echoed through the house, followed by the intermingled murmur of his and Joe’s voices.
The two men were joking, and as the door opened, Joe’s laugh filled the room. The woman rushed to the opening door and leapt into her brother’s arms, nearly knocking the one-legged man to the ground.
Mary tried to smile for him when he finally turned to introduce them properly, but he stopped short when he saw her pain.
“We brought Leander home,” Malcolm whispered.
Nathan grasped the back of a chair, and Alaura took his arm to steady him.
He looked straight at Malcolm.
“Where’s my boy?” he asked.
Malcolm nodded out the window at the wagon.
Mary took her father from Alaura and led him out to the barnyard. He ran his hand over the cheap pine, brushing away the powder of quicklime seeping from the loose joints. Mary lay her face against the snow-speckled wood.
Joe came and moved the wagon to the barn, and Alaura put blankets around Mary and her father, and the two of them sat with Leander and the animals well into the night. When her father finally slumped over, she roused him and took him into the dark house. He shivered under her arm as she led him up the stairs. She added her regret for allowing him to sit in the cold for so long to the others she had spent the day cataloging.
In the morning she lay abed long after sunrise, listening to the murmur of happy voices echoing up from the kitchen. She knew the reunion’s joy would be ended the moment they heard her foot on the stairs and she wished she could slip out the door, unnoticed, back to the barn to sit with her brother.
Eventually she heard the back door open and close, and expecting the house was empty, she rose. She checked on her father before going down, and found him sitting in his chair staring into the distance out the window.
“Pine.” He spat. “I’ll set about making something fitting for him tomorrow. He always liked walnut. I’ll make something from walnut.”
“Come down,” Mary said. “There’s work to do.”
She helped him stand up, and guided him down the stairs.
Alaura was waiting for them in the kitchen.
“I hope you don’t
mind,” she said, tugging at the floursack apron she wore, a threadbare rag that Katia had nearly worn through. Mary took her hands and nodded, but said nothing.
“Sit,” Alaura said. “You have to eat.”
She filled bowls with porridge and put them in front of Mary and her father, then sat in the chair across from them.
Mary spooned the warm oats into her mouth.
“You have to know, he died saving me,” Alaura said. “He was brave and he came from nowhere and saved me.”
Mary got up and took the coffeepot from the stove. She filled their cups, and sat again.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
Alaura told of the days after Joe left, and how she’d been sold. Then she told of the night Leander died.
“I went to the courthouse, where Leander told me to go,” she said. “I sat there a long time, and I could hear shots and shouting, but I had that poison in me, and I could hardly make anything out. It was maybe an hour I sat there, and I was cold and it was raining, and all I wanted was a warm place where I could have some more of that stuff, and I thought about going back. Then Malcolm came up to me, carrying Mr. Leander over his shoulder.
“‘They’re looking for me,’ Malcolm had said. ‘We’ve got to go.’
“We had to hide out after that,” she said. “We found this burned plantation north of the town, and we hid out in the cellar. We hid out for weeks there. Malcolm, he took care of me. I was sicker than I’ve been, getting over that stuff. Malcolm, he did what he could, he found some tools and some wood, and he made a casket for Leander. He snuck back to the army camp and he got his uniform and a horse and wagon, and then when I was feeling better, Malcolm waited until there was a rainstorm. He covered me in a tarp, and we set out. It was slow going that night, but nobody was on the road, nobody was looking for us.”
A pot of stew was bubbling on the stove and two loaves were in the oven before Mary realized that she and Alaura had been moving around the kitchen, the two of them preparing food together.