A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  Gabe’s head drooped. “Me and Daddy, we’re both of us missing her extra today.”

  “That makes for a hard day.” Kate gave him a side hug. “I’m so sorry.”

  She restrained herself from lunging over the counter to inspect the disc. This was more than a historical artifact; it was also a memory of someone cherished—and lost. She of all people ought to know how that felt.

  But still she had to force herself not to stare. From this distance, maybe even up close, the disc was too timeworn to make out any possible numbers or words.

  Daniel continued sanding the cypress board.

  Gabe followed Kate’s gaze to the disc.

  “Sorry.” She looked quickly away. Daniel would offer for her to see it when he was ready.

  But Gabe intervened. “Looks like a big dirty penny. You’re wondering about it.”

  “Is it . . . ?” she murmured to Gabe. “The real thing? An urban slave badge?”

  He nodded vigorously. “So now you’d be wondering how come my daddy would want to go and give a thing like that to my momma, a thing some slave somebody wore?” Gabe’s eyes swung to his father, who glanced up and nodded for him to go on. “Pride. To remember who’s come before—all the somebodies, name and no name.”

  Daniel tossed a match into the metal can in the fireplace, the newspaper inside it flaming, its lid, in the instant before he placed it over the can, reflecting a perilous, pulsing red. “To remember,” he agreed.

  Knowing she couldn’t be the first one to break the silence that followed, Kate waited for one of them to speak as the three of them watched the fire, and let her gaze shift back to the disc at Daniel’s neck. But the quiet stretched on.

  Behind them, the front door suddenly clattered open.

  A small black leather case clutched in one hand, Rose Pinckney paused at the threshold of Cypress & Fire. “I see what you mean about the shop’s age. I’d guess there are as many inches of paint here on this door as there are of wood.” She stepped through into the gallery. “I’m glad you called to let me know where you’d be, Katherine, since I had to delay our meeting. Because I have something I think you’d like to see. And Mr. Russell here is just the man I need to put it to rights.”

  Before anyone else could speak, Rose ran a hand over a chess table of cypress and inlaid ceramic. She called back toward the kiln, “You do yourself—and all of Charleston—proud with this work, Daniel Russell.”

  Dan raised one hand in greeting. Sweat pouring down his face, he wiped his eyes with the upper sleeve of his shirt. “Good to see you again. Be with you in just a minute.”

  “Katherine, dear, I wanted you to see this, too: a family heirloom you may recall from the”—she lowered her voice and glanced back toward the kiln—“journals.”

  Kate laughed. “Rose, the Russells won’t tie you up and force you to donate Emily’s journal to the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill.” She gestured toward Gabe. “I think you’ve met Dan’s excellent son before, right? This is Gabriel Ray. The middle name for Ray Charles and for—”

  “His grandfather the Honorable Elijah Ray Russell, family court judge.” She lifted her chin. “I’ve told you, Katherine: I know Charleston.”

  Rose studied the child. “Well,” she said at last. “Such beautiful curls.” She reached a hand, tentatively, toward the wild, swirling bounce of them. “Splendid.”

  Dan approached now, wiping his hands on a towel. From her feet, Rose lifted the black case, its outer leather cracked and peeling, and placed it on the stone counter.

  Unsnapping the tarnished brass clasps, she opened the case to reveal a silk lining, torn in only one place, and deep in its cushioning, two matching guns.

  “Prussian, I’m told,” Rose said. “Late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth. This from a dinner guest back when my husband had these on display in the parlor—before I relegated them to the attic. My dear departed husband’s temper needed no firearms near it, loaded or not.”

  “Rose.” Kate laid a hand on her arm. “The pistol in Emily’s journal. Have you looked these up to find out more about them?”

  “That, my dear, is why I have a research partner.”

  Kate slid her laptop down the counter and called up images of handheld firearms from that period made in Prussia. “Look!” She turned the screen so the others could see. “These look remarkably similar. Dueling pistols.”

  Daniel nodded. “Breech-loading. Ready-primed cartridges.” All their eyes turned to him. “So I liked guns as a kid. And read about them.” He plucked two items from the case and held them out to Gabe. “Ingenious, really, paper tubes with their tin bases and the piston-fired needles that punctured them.”

  “It was my great-grandfather’s—seven greats, I believe—prize firearm,” Rose offered. She looked at Kate. “Jackson Pinckney’s.”

  Gabe’s eyes wide, he ran a finger in a circle around the muzzle.

  Kate reached to touch one of the barrels but drew back, feeling as if she’d stopped short of stroking a viper. “So this might have been the one he used . . .”

  Rose’s fingers slid to the trigger. A distinct click. A spring-loaded bayonet about five inches long snapped into place.

  Kate gasped.

  Rose touched the tip of the knife and flinched. “It usually jams. I suppose it’s been bent over the years.” She looked at Daniel. “If you’re willing to take on another project from me, Mr. Russell, it could stand restoration to its original state.”

  “Not original,” Daniel corrected. “The bayonet switch was added after the original got cast.”

  “Yes,” Rose agreed. “Of course. You’re right.”

  His finger ran the length of the blade. “Somebody needed the defense of bullet and blade.”

  Seeming to address no one at all, Rose said, “My grandfather used to hold this gun and muse over whether a firearm still ought to require a real man to handle a ramrod and mallet.” Slowly, delicately, she snapped the bayonet closed with one finger.

  Gabe shook his head, eyes round and earnest. “Miz Rose, why’d your seven-greats granddaddy want a big knife on his gun anyhow?”

  Daniel bent toward the kiln door.

  Rose faced the child. “That, Mr. Gabriel Ray, is an excellent question. Which reminds me to say that I understand you are a particular friend of Katherine here.”

  “Only I call her Kate,” Gabe said a bit territorially.

  “Ah, the informal. A lovely name, nevertheless. Mr. Gabriel Ray, as a particular friend of Kate’s, I wonder if you’d like to come with her sometime to visit me at my house. Assuming your father says it’s all right.”

  Beaming, Gabe hesitated.

  “And if I know when you’re coming with Katherine—Kate—I might just have a whole platter of Penina Moise house biscuits, steaming hot, ready for you.”

  From behind the kiln, where he was sanding the cypress board, Dan lifted a hand. “So long as he brings his daddy back one.”

  From the door, Gabe and Kate watched Rose Pinckney go.

  Behind them, the ring of a hammer, steady and strong.

  “I like things that sound alltime the same,” said the boy. “A beat you can count on. Like hammers. And waves. And heartbeats. Only . . . only you can’t always count on the heartbeats, can you?” His head fell against her side.

  “Not always so much the heartbeats,” she agreed, eyes filling like his. Because sometimes there was nothing to say but the truth.

  Daniel joined them at the door, his eyes on where Gabe was pointing: to their three shadows racked to monstrously tall. Gabe laughed and raised both arms overhead, reveling in his own bigness. The shadow of a palmetto stabbed at the bare of the boy’s feet.

  Gabe looked down at his hands, which were filthy from cleaning out watery ash from the metal can, then up at Daniel. Then he focused in on his daddy’s jaw, the crop of dark stubble over the chin. Lifting a hand to stroke his own jaw like he was deep in thought, the boy rubbed sooty fingers over the lowe
r half of his face.

  Daniel laughed. Not much more than a chipped piece of a chuckle, really, like it rumbled up from somewhere deep down inside and rusted to stiff but somehow still lurched its way up and out. Then Kate was laughing, too.

  Daniel put a hand to Gabe’s jaw. “You’re past needing a shave.”

  “Hadn’t you ever seen a man with a beard before?”

  “What I see’s a boy looks like he’s been crawling up chimneys.”

  The pout was losing its hold on the boy. “I reckon I’d be about as good at that as anything else.” Gabe turned to inspect himself in one of the gallery’s raku mirrors.

  Chuckling, Daniel stepped up beside him. Gabe’s curls and his face had gone as dark as his father’s, both of them with their poet’s eyes, round underneath the broad foreheads, and jaws square as a box: as alike as two etchings by the same hand.

  Leaving the gallery in the hands of a kindly middle-aged woman in a voluminous purple skirt, they invited Kate to walk with them as far as the harbor to see it at dusk. Daniel and Gabe sat on the seawall laughing together, the two of them backdropped by the harbor turning carnival colors like a party about to begin.

  Settling down beside them and promising herself to stay only a minute, Kate wanted this moment to stretch on, herself not a part of the two but included somehow. The waves rolled in steady and faithful, their swell and their splash, their rumble and roll a song from djembes drumming inside the earth.

  “A kind of music you can count on not stopping,” she said to Gabe. “Not ever.”

  Kate turned toward the child, the trust in his face nearly knocking her flat.

  Behind them came a stumbling shuffle of footsteps unsure of themselves. As she glanced over her shoulder, three young white men with nearly identical sun-streaked hair, sunburned cheeks, and foam sunglasses straps looping behind their heads were heeling hard to the left as they wove their way down the seawall. Kate turned back to Gabe.

  “It’s a shame’s all I’m sayin’,” one of the young men slurred, stopping a few feet away. He tried gesturing with his head toward Kate and Gabe and Daniel but upset his own balance.

  A second man steadied him. “Shhh!” he warned, louder than the first. “Wha’, you think they can’t hear you?”

  “It’s all I’m sayin’,” the first argued. He held a finger in the face of the second. “An’ don’ shush me again.”

  Gripping the edge of the wall, Daniel straightened his back. “Tourists,” he muttered.

  The third young man, his red plastic cup tipped precariously sideways, was staring down at his deck shoes, where brown liquid from the cup was pooling on their tops—though he seemed mystified as to why.

  Looking up, he blinked as if he were trying to clear his vision. “Gen’l’men, le’s not argue.” He lowered his voice—but not low enough that he couldn’t be heard. “We agree—basi’ally: it’s not fair to the children, all this racial”—he swished his hand in a circle—“mixin’.” And he flopped an arm toward Gabe as if to give evidence of this wisdom.

  Kate reached to cover Gabe’s ears, but, gently, Daniel stopped her hands.

  Rising to face the young men, he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “It’s not racis’,” the first one defended himself, “jus’ to observe something.”

  Dan stood even straighter, eyes leveled on them, but said nothing.

  “Wha’ the hell, man?” the second one said. “You don’ have to get all upse’. We weren’t bein’ racis’.” He turned to the first for confirmation. “Righ’?”

  Daniel cocked his head. “Let me get this straight: So you’re asking your buddy here with his three sheets to the wind if you’re being racist by ‘observing’ that racial mixing is bad for kids?”

  The second one raised both hands, palms out. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, dude. You people can be so touchy.”

  Kate rose then and turned. Folded her arms to match Daniel’s. “Who exactly would be ‘you people’?”

  Gabe rose and folded his arms in the same manner.

  Scowling, the first young man backed down the stone stairs of the seawall. “Jus’ sayin’.”

  The second scurried to follow the first.

  The third, though, hoisted himself up to sit, just barely balanced—the harbor shallows lapping below—on the rounded metal rail just a few inches from where Daniel stood. “I jus’ need to make one final poin’.”

  Daniel raised both eyebrows and waited for him to go on.

  “Jus’ tha’ . . .” With his right forefinger, the young man cheerfully poked Daniel in the chest on each word to punctuate his point: “We. Are. No’. Racis’.” His left hand raised the red plastic cup high, the crowning moment of his argument—which unbalanced him from his perch. He tumbled backward into the harbor below.

  Kate, Daniel, and Gabe leaned over the railing to see his head pop up, water spewing out his mouth. Flailing, he staggered to his feet in the shallows.

  “Wai’!” he called. “Thi’s very impor’an’ to know.” Earnestly, he held up the foam strap of the sunglasses he’d scooped from the water. “They float!”

  His eyes gone steely, Daniel dropped himself off the seawall and offered a hand to Gabe, who leapt down by himself.

  “Gabe . . . ,” Kate began, falling into step beside the child, “forget everything you just heard.”

  “C’mon, Kate. He’s heard ignorance before. Not often here. But he’s heard it before. Better to face it head-on than pretend not to hear.”

  “I guess growing up in the South . . .”

  Stopping in his tracks, Daniel shook his head. “Don’t kid yourself. It’s not just here. Wasn’t it your town, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a black man got harassed for supposedly breaking into a house—and he turned out to be not just the home owner but also some celebrity professor at Harvard?”

  Suddenly cold even in the evening heat, Kate crossed her arms over her chest. “Yeah. But still.”

  “Those men back there?” Gabe bumped against her, his eyes on the ground. “They thought you and my daddy were a couple and I was your kid.”

  She tipped his chin up to her. “Which would’ve been fine, since your daddy is awesome—except for the little detail of our being just friends. But listen now: anybody in their right mind would be proud as hell—and I mean the real actual place—to have you as their kid. You know that, right?”

  He nodded slowly. Then turned to his dad. “I’m thinking maybe Kate here might like to see the badge. She kept staring at it before. Maybe now’s a good time.”

  For a moment, Daniel did not move. “You’re right,” he said at last.

  Kate held up her hand in protest. “It was your wife’s gift. And not after”—she jerked her head back toward the harbor—“those idiots. I can see it another day that’s not . . .”

  But Daniel slipped the copper disc on its cord from his neck.

  Chapter 27

  1822

  The circle of young oaks blocked the light of a waning sunset. Tom crouched in the shadows and waited.

  He hadn’t much time. Only enough to dig near the hidden bullets for the single knife he’d buried there. Knock the sand from it. Slip it inside his shirt. And pray for some movement, some sign on the piazza across the street.

  He should have left already. The city was on high alert. Hardly a soul on the streets except for droves of patrollers on horseback. Inspecting the wharves. Manning the city arsenal. Guarding every road that led through the Neck into the city.

  Word of the revolt had blown through Charleston like hurricane winds.

  He might already have waited too late—his own chance to get out maybe already gone.

  But he would not leave without Dinah. No matter what it might cost.

  The circle of oaks blocked whatever breeze might have cooled him. Tom wiped sweat from his face with the back of his arm.

  Light at the second-story bedroom. A single candle.

  A figure slipping out onto the piazza. Skirt
s of coarse blue muslin: it had to be her.

  Tom rose. Stepped soundlessly to the edge of the circle of oaks.

  For her, he’d risk being seen.

  Another figure joined the first on the piazza. A swish of satin and lace. A voice—not hers—asked: “Is it any less beastly hot out here, Dinah?”

  A pause. Then Dinah’s voice, her face toward where Tom stood—as if she knew he would be there: “I’m glad the night’s come.”

  “For the cool, yes,” said the other voice.

  “And the dark. Glad for the dark.”

  Another pause. Then the voice said: “Dinah, let me suggest that you think carefully how you phrase what you think—especially during these harrowing days.”

  “The Lord throws his shadow over the earth. And it is good.”

  “Oh. Yes. If that’s what you meant, then yes.” The first skirt swirled back to the threshold. The voice came more strained: “You continue to limp.”

  “Workhouse has a way of crippling.”

  Tom closed his eyes at the words. He had not known. Dinah, his Dinah, at that place. The whip against the bare of her back. Pieces of her flesh stripped away.

  Bile rose into his throat.

  A pause. Then Emily Pinckney’s voice came, pinched: “The smell . . . are your wounds . . . worse?”

  Silence.

  “I assume that means yes. Perhaps Prue can wash them better tonight. I will insist that she does. And I want you to know . . . I want you to know the place you were sent, I think it’s barbaric.” The next words came out in a rush. “I wish I could have stopped it.”

  Silence again. A heavy quiet that carried with it an accusation unsaid: Of course you could have done something.

  As if defending herself from what wasn’t said, the Pinckney girl demanded, “What could I have said that would have stopped him?” Then, more bitterly, she added: “Men do as they wish.”

  Cicadas chirped from the garden. Somewhere up near the harbor, a buggy rolled past.