Kate could still see him as he stood at the door of their Charleston house for the last time, the home she and her mother had also walked out of within days.
Kate had been huddled close to a low fire in the fireplace—so it must have been winter. Too little to reach the mantel, she’d asked her momma that evening to set a framed picture close to the edge where Kate could see it, and she’d plopped down and dug out a handful of crayons and begun drawing the little family inside the frame.
Mommy, Daddy, me, she’d murmured over and over again as she’d lined out three figures building sand castles at the beach.
Mommy, Daddy, me, she’d insisted to no one who was listening, her little voice steady but scared against the rising shouts from her parents’ bedroom.
Her father’s tall frame was rigid as he stalked away, the door slamming so hard behind him it sent the picture set too close to the edge crashing to the floor.
There in the midst of the shattered glass, her mother still in the bedroom and sobbing, Kate had looked at the door. And at the crackling fire. And at the three smiling picture-people there in her chubby hand.
But now she remembered something she’d forgotten: her father turning at the front window. His face, handsome and square, distorted now. And wet.
Daddy’s so angry, Kate had thought at the time. Daddy’s so sad.
It was the sadness that she’d forgotten. The way he’d lifted a hand to her and froze there a moment, looking at her. Then turned his back and strode away into the night, the screech of his tires shredding the quiet of their leafy, gas lantern–lit street.
What she hadn’t forgotten was this: glass shards dropping from her lap to the ground as she rose, stepped to the fireplace, and let go of her drawing, its swooping flight over the smoke and then down, down into the flame, where the three smiling faces began to burn.
Chapter 5
1822
Sparks flew upward, arcing, raining down on the circle of stone.
Again the bellows blasted air in great gushes. Again the sparks.
Tom Russell looked up once from the forge but let his hands speak first. Eyes fixed on the anvil, he swung down the hammer to make the whole shop shudder again.
“No,” he said. “For the last time.”
His chest, as black as the coal he bent over, swelled and rolled and glistened above a low flame, as if the inside of him glowed—as if the blacksmith himself stood ready for forging.
Denmark Vesey lifted a ball-peen hammer and used it to stir the coals. “Bayonets and spears’d come first,” he said. “And remember, we’re willing to pay for the weapons.”
The words were not out of his mouth when a rattling at the side door that led into the alley and then a pounding made both of them jump.
The two men exchanged glances over the fire.
“Damn it, Vesey! If somebody’s heard . . . !”
Tom stepped softly to the side door, one finger over his lips, and was easing the bolt sideways when the East Bay–facing front door of the shop flew open, slamming against the interior wall.
Three skirts swept into the shop, two of them billows of silk, one of them—the one lagging behind—hanging in coarse blue tow cloth.
Two voices chattered at the same time. Then stilled.
“I’m Miss Emily Pinckney,” one of the two white women called, “as you are likely aware.”
Lifting his hammer, Tom Russell kept his eyes down. “Yes, ma’am.” He could have guessed she was a Pinckney; that much was true—although her haughtiness, her presuming that of course he kept careful track of the ruling white families and each of their individual names made his jaw clench and his fingers tighten around his hammer.
Emily Pinckney had her father’s broad forehead, and her eyes, the color of ice over blue water, surveyed the blacksmith shop just as he had, with their family’s stiff superiority. But something else flickered there as the girl scanned the walls: a startled kind of wonder, it seemed.
As if snapping herself from her own reverie, she gestured impatiently. “We’ve been trying for some time now to access your shop from the side door.”
“No, ma’am. Made it so it don’t open inward from the street. Need it dark back here in my forge to see.”
“Dark to see?”
“Iron got to be just the right color for crafting. Need dark to see.”
The second white girl swept toward the forge—closer, in fact, than any white woman ought really to come. “That’s extraordinary. Imagine my being seventeen and never knowing that.”
Tom did not say what he thought: that no white woman here needed to know such a thing.
He let himself look—but only once—at the figure in the blue skirt, the third. Her neck like a dancer’s, long and slender and graceful, skin the light beige of Low Country sand. A head she kept high. Always kept high.
Dinah raised her eyes—just once—to meet his.
A jolt ran through his body. Tom fumbled his hammer.
Vesey’s head cocked, as if he’d seen this. He looked hard at the implement Tom was now fishing out of the coals with tongs. “I best be getting on. Got plenty of carpentry work to finish on up ’fore we call this day done.” Vesey put a hand to his hat but did not lift it to the ladies, and his smile had more mockery than friendliness to it. He paused at the threshold. “Time to take action, I’d say.”
The blacksmith held his breath and glanced toward the white women’s faces as Vesey sauntered out the front door of the shop.
The Pinckney girl’s face had gone even stiffer, as if she were determined to ignore Vesey’s self-assured exit. “My father asks me to inquire if you have his gates completed quite yet. The sheaf of rice. The family crest with a thread of damascened gold?”
“Be another day, maybe two.” Tom hauled on the bellows to keep himself from adding this next: that he’d never forgotten an order in all the years he’d bent over the forge. “Deliver it myself by the end of the week.”
“Well,” she said, “that should suffice.” She gathered her skirts as if she would go, but her companion who’d walked too close to the forge was waving her forward.
“Come see this!”
“Angelina, land’s sakes, you’ll catch yourself on fire leaning so close.”
“Emily, look at the detail on this bird he’s making. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not outside of the real living thing, anyway.”
“You’ll get ash all over that pretty lace. Your momma won’t let you out of the house with me ever again.”
“The heron’s just lifting up, don’t you see? But one leg—”
“Don’t say leg, Angelina!” the Pinckney girl whispered. “It’s vulgar.”
“It’s a bird. A magnificent bird. I refuse to say limb for a bird. But just look what Tom’s done here. Dinah”—she motioned to the woman in blue—“you’ve got to see, too. But one leg looks like maybe it’s mangled.” She addressed the blacksmith. “Was that a mistake? Or did you mean it to be?”
As if it were an answer, Tom lifted the bird, its wingspan nearly three feet across.
“A heron just taking flight,” the girl Angelina remarked. “And these stalks here would be rice. Ripe. Just readied for the blade.” She paused there, as if something disturbed her, though she wasn’t sure what.
Drawing the heron back through the coals and then to the anvil, Tom smashed down the hammer, metal fanning to feathers, then reached for the tongs and a tapered pick.
Back into the fire it went, the metal quivering. The flames of the forge curled down into coals, the iron wings glowing red at their tips as if the bird were flying through fire.
Tom raised his hammer in its next arc. But did not raise his eyes.
“I wish,” the one called Angelina murmured, “the leg weren’t hurt like that. Although I suppose the point is it’s flying now. It’s gotten free.”
Dinah’s eyes, wide and frightened, darted to Tom’s, then away.
Angelina stared past them all into the fire.
“That it’s gotten free would be good.”
Emily linked her arm through her friend’s. “It’s not proper, our coming in here more than to check on Father’s order. He’d have my hide if he saw. We must leave now.”
And they did, three skirts sweeping back toward the shop’s door, the last, the blue one, pausing at the threshold.
“Your purse, Miss Emily!” the blue-skirted woman called out toward the street. “I believe you left it inside.”
Dinah turned back, cheeks flushing. She shut the door nearly closed.
Tom was around the stone counter and across the shop’s floor in an instant, one arm cinching her waist.
One eye on the street, she ran a finger from his temple down to the edge of his mouth. “Things got to change.” Her voice was so low he could barely make out the sounds. “Got to cut loose all my tomorrows from what’s already past.”
“Vesey came back today.”
She shook her head. “That can’t end nowhere that’d get us two free. Don’t you go join up. We got to keep alive, you and me. And we got to get out.”
“Dinah!” Emily Pinckney’s voice carried in from the street. “I have my purse here!”
Tom brushed two of his fingers, dark and calloused, to the silk of her neck. His words came choked. “For you I would risk the wide world.”
But Dinah, one hand on her middle, slipped from his arms.
The door shut softly behind her.
Chapter 6
2015
The morning sun gaining strength, Kate strained to make out the tiny font on her laptop’s screen and shifted the computer’s position on the café table. Rubbing her forehead, beginning to ache now, she bent closer to the screen. As the next 1822 Charleston Courier masthead slid by, she paused. Squinted at the date, its numbers blurred. Too much ink here on some apprentice’s part—and not enough sleep on hers.
She picked up her phone. Dialed the office of the chair of the History Department again and this time left a message: “Hi, Dr. Ammons. Kate Drayton here. I think I owe you an . . .” Apology was the word he deserved. But that might remind him of her train wreck of a lecture, and maybe that memory had faded already for him. “An explanation,” she supplied instead. “I’m down here in Charleston doing research, just pulled in this morning, and already reading old Couriers from the weeks just before the revolt.”
Kate let her left hand drop to the keyboard, as if he could see proof of her working. “And I’ll be visiting the archives here soon, of course. Today, in fact. Probably. I expect it to be incredibly worthwhile—the research here in person, I mean.” She swallowed. “About my deciding to come down so abruptly, I realize I’ll need to have someone cover the grading for your Early American seminar for a couple of days. Or . . .”
Or maybe longer. Or maybe forever, if I’ve already dug my own grave.
“At any rate, Dr. Ammons, I wonder if you’d be good enough to call me back. Just so we can be sure we’re on the same page.”
On the same page? She cringed. Like she thought they were equals. Which graduate students and full professors were decidedly not.
“And so I can get your expert feedback on my latest research here.” There, that sounded more like she knew her place. “Thank you so much for your valuable time.” She gave her cell number and signed off.
But who was she kidding that he’d believe she’d bolted down here with no notice at all, just walked out midlecture, because of a burning, urgent, clock-ticking desire to begin archival research on the Denmark Vesey revolt?
Kate rubbed the heel of her hand across her forehead. She’d better have something new to tell him about her findings on the revolt by the time he called back. She’d better read fast.
Her fingers flew over the keys, calling up the Charleston County Public Library’s South Carolina Room. She skimmed down its holdings. And the South Carolina Historical Society’s archives, housed at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library. Both definitely worth visiting soon.
Then again, maybe Dr. Ammons would never call back. Maybe her name had already been deleted from all departmental records. Her transcript dropped into a file labeled Mistakes Made in Admittance.
Maybe she was already fired from her teaching assistantship, her name scrubbed from the door of the office she shared with two other grad students who, even if they weren’t actual friends, had brought her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and three Boston Kremes the day after she’d learned her mother had died. They’d stood there, mute but well meaning, looking as if they desperately wished they knew what to say. Kate, who knew better than anyone that there was nothing to say, had been grateful for the coffee and doughnuts but especially for their silence.
She reached now, shakily, for more coffee to calm her nerves. Which is how bad things have gotten—coffee to calm my nerves.
From where she sat, she could see a fountain, its spray a pearly pink under an early morning sun nearly smothered in storm clouds hanging low over the harbor. A runner was pounding past—the same runner, in fact, from the seawall, the Nike swoosh over his chest. Kate ignored the face but cocked her head at the form, the force of each foot hitting the pavement and launching, the sheer reach and grace of his stride.
She’d once been a runner—up until this past year, in fact, when running or anything else she’d done in ritual fashion didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Not after her father had called last summer to summon her to DC to see him and she’d refused—because what right did he have to demand her presence like some sort of feudal serf before the king?—and he’d died the next week, just when she was thinking of relenting. He’d known he was sick, as it turned out, three months at the most to live, and maybe he’d wanted to say good-bye. Or tell her how she still wasn’t measuring up one last time. She’d never know now.
And then three weeks ago, her mother—one slip of a tire, one slick spot on a curve on a road in their little town in the Berkshires out the Mass Pike from Boston. Sarah Grace’s Ford Taurus had accordioned into a sugar maple. And, just like that, Kate’s family was finished.
The simple cruelty, the senselessness of the whole year, the chance at some sliver of reconciliation stolen from her. The car wreck that could have happened to anyone but happened with Sarah Grace at the wheel: Sarah Grace, who was depressed, who needed her daughter to check weekly on her—and Kate mostly did, but sometimes, like that time, she could not make it back to Great Barrington for the weekend. Sarah Grace, who drank too much when she was alone. Who’d tried bravely for years to battle the darkness that crashed down on her without warning. Some days she was stronger than others. But that weekend when Kate could not come home was especially dark. The car might have slid on the ice toward the tree. Cars sometimes did that. Or—and here was what bore down on Kate as if the car had landed on top of her chest—Sarah Grace, at the end of her strength, might have been steering directly toward it.
Last summer, after word of her father’s death—the phone call that came in even as she was searching online the Greyhound bus schedule to DC—Kate had given up going to Mass, her way of shaking her fist at the divine. If God were that capricious to keep her father alive all those years to torment her, then take him out just as he might have been ready to offer her some sort of peace or ask forgiveness, then Kate wanted no part.
She’d given up running at daybreak, too, or sleeping at predictable times. More shaking her fist at God or whatever pretended to order the chaos of the world—and clearly did a despicable job. She embraced strange hours, spent evenings, and sometimes more, with men she’d only just met, then refused to see them again.
Since her mother’s death, she’d kept no real schedule at all. Returned no phone calls or e-mails. Graded stacks of research papers from Dr. Ammons’s Early American seminar—anything to keep herself distracted—but had no idea what they’d said even moments after she’d read each of them. She took long walks by the Charles River alone and wondered what would have happened if she’d made it back to Great Barring
ton that weekend to check on her mom.
A breeze from the harbor wafted its way to her, and Kate lifted the weight of her hair. She took a long swig of coffee.
At the table to her left, two seagulls squawked over the remains of a chocolate croissant. To her right sat an elderly woman, thick silver hair rolled into a perfect chignon, her spine the straight of those raised to believe the world was waiting for them to order its chaos. But Kate was a believer in the first commandment of Boston street etiquette: never make eye contact with strangers.
Kate stretched and lifted her coffee, the scent of baked bread hanging here in the mist.
A waitress was approaching the table of the elderly woman, the server’s greeting a running chatter: “Why if it isn’t my favorite customer come awful early this morning.”
Kate included them both in the sweep of her frown.
Behind her, from the shop across the alley from this café, came the clangs of metal on metal and metal on wood. Someone was hammering something, and each hit was echoing inside her head.
After unloading her boxes, she’d returned to the southern tip of the city where she’d stood with the boy, then walked north on East Battery, which turned into East Bay, historic mansions giving way to a march of rectangular houses and shops, all in pastels. Then came the phalanx of art galleries and restaurants where she sat now, beneath a brass sign that announced PENINA MOISE: SERVING THE FINEST BAKED GOODS AND COFFEES.
After the café came an alley, cobblestoned and shadowed.
And just past the alley, a wooden shingle hung from scrolled iron brackets over the sidewalk: CYPRESS & FIRE, it read.
It was an intriguing shop, antique brick with paned windows and upscale sculptures just visible through the wavy glass of its window display. From the narrow two-story shop, smoke curled out a crooked brick chimney, its mortar mostly crumbled away—as if it had stood leaning forward to watch the invasions and victory marches and funeral processions of two, maybe three hundred years.
A Tangled Mercy Page 5