Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “Arrest you? What nonsense!” There is conviction to his dismissal but it lasts only a moment. Then she sees him recall to himself her oddity and her rummaging through his Smoke; her repeated refusal to give him her name.

  “Who are you?”

  “Eleanor. Eleanor Cruikshank.”

  Cruikshank. He must recognise the name. The school’s erstwhile porter. In the stories, he is little more than a buffoon.

  “You mean that Cruikshank? I did not know he had a daughter…”

  Then he finally understands. The wonder of it uncreases his whole face. He steps back and stares at her: at her hips, her back, her chest. It isn’t lechery that drives him and she does not shrink from his scrutiny. He is picturing a metal corset encasing her trunk, imprinting its stiffness upon her spine; a steel dial rising from her chest, inviting self-correction.

  “Eleanor! Renfrew’s little niece…”

  She nods. “It’s my uncle—Cruikshank said he’ll never stop looking for me. Now that he’s found me, he will want me back.”

  [ 10 ]

  Balthazar starts packing up his props.

  She had hoped for more: sympathy, an invitation; advice on how to disappear. She’s placed her secret in his hands, has used a name her foster father told her to banish from all memory. “Hamilton”—that is what they lived under; a name she has recently paid to have chiselled into stone. But the old director seems to have lost all interest. He has withdrawn into himself; is cursing as he drags the beds clanging off the stage.

  “Bloody stagehands said they would be here by now. I will dock their pay!”

  She watches him quietly and realises that she herself must voice her petition. But her boldness has left her; the mayor took it out with him, back to his house, where he will lie in bed trying to put a name to her face.

  What she asks is:

  “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “The last part of the play.”

  “The scene with the two boys? I’ve done a lot of research.”

  “Not that. I mean the Smoke you released. It was…like it was in those first days. Like being out in a Gale.”

  “When have you last been in a Gale, Eleanor Cruikshank?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Then what do you know? Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.”

  [ 11 ]

  She leaves him, exits the market hall then wanders aimlessly into the cold of the street. They built it grandly, in grey slabs of stone. The sea is so near, even the snowflakes seem to smell of salt.

  Balthazar comes running after her. Later, it will cheer her to think about his haste. He skids on the icy cobbles and nearly breaks his neck. She bends to retrieve his flat cap for him.

  “Cruikshank’s conked it, I suppose,” he says as he snatches it back.

  “Yes. Two weeks ago.”

  She wonders how callous she must sound, answering so calmly the calculated brutality of Balthazar’s question. The dead man raised and protected her; she loved him much like a father. And yet he always remained “Cruikshank” to her, querulous and palsied. He gave her practice in dealing with the sour-tongued.

  Balthazar thinks long and hard before making his offer.

  “We sail tomorrow,” he says at last. “For New York City. I could pass you off as one of the players. My Meister Lukas is good at forging paperwork.”

  When she does not respond, he starts swearing at her.

  “Jesus Christ, girl, isn’t that why you came to me? To charm me? To convince me to get you out of town? All right, so you’ve won, I’m offering passage. What now, am I not asking nicely enough? Or is New York not good enough for you?”

  She pays no attention to his anger, skin-deep, free of Smoke.

  “What made up your mind?” she asks.

  “Nothing. You are amusing, that’s all. And you have talent.”

  “Talent? At what?”

  Balthazar ignores this, waves his hand in front of him like a magician, conjuring reasons.

  “You met Charlie Cooper. If the story is true.”

  She nods to say it is.

  His face unknots. “What was he like?”

  “I only met him the once.” Then she adds, speaking so quickly it outraces her need to parse her own words: “He rescued me, you know. Like a knight.”

  He seems delighted at the word. “A knight! So you’re in love with him! Well, why not, half the world is, after all. And the other two? Thomas and Livia. Did you meet them?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “I went looking for them.” He spits, dark on trampled snow. “They did not receive. Come now, better you sleep in the hotel tonight.”

  Later he asks,

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Cruikshank always said I’d run away with the circus.”

  [ 12 ]

  They leave town with the afternoon tide. The Elsinore, originally out of Denmark. The captain wants to know why it makes Balthazar laugh.

  That night he stands on deck with Etta May and watches the black swell.

  “Is the girl all settled in?” he asks.

  “Tuckered out and sleeping. I gave her the top bunk.”

  “Good. It’s better not to talk to her too much. It’s like going ten rounds with a prizefighter. Exhausting.” He flashes his teeth. “What do you make of her, Em?”

  “Odd bird. Lonely. And her Smoke…I am a little scared of her.” She lights a cigarette, shields it from the breeze. “You know she’s a risk. For the troupe. For you.”

  “It’ll be all right, once we are back in American waters.” He sees Etta May smirk at the yearning in his words. “What now? So I’m sick of the stink of Empire. And of its reach.”

  “And yet you dream of England.” She shakes her head, openly laughing at him now. “You know they say the Company owns half of Manhattan.”

  “So what?”

  “Where the Company is, hon, the Empire is not far.”

  EXCERPT FROM “THE COMING OF THE PROPHETS,” FROM P. SAUNDERS, A POPULAR HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE COLONIES TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE SECOND SMOKE, WRITTEN TO EDUCATE, AMAZE, AND BEGUILE, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND POSTSCRIPT BY CLAY WARREN, ESQ., AND NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS BY D. B. HYDE. BOSTON: JAMES B. WHITE & SONS, MCMVI.

  While it is not the customary function of the Historian to commemorate acts and events that are as recent—and remain as starkly imprinted on the popular memory—as the devilish scenes occasioned by the arrival, by sea, on our national shores of that scourge popularly known as the “Second Smoke,” the confusions pertaining to said events leave me little choice but to devote this final chapter of my History to their clarification. The precise circumstances that led to the generation or summons of this Second Smoke cannot detain us here. These happened far beyond our borders and remain shrouded in obscurity; doubtless the proliferation of vulgar ballads touching on the subject has done more to occlude than to clarify said circumstances. What can be established with good certainty is the date of arrival of that first group of unfortunates who had contracted this physical and moral malaise and, through a process of constant reinfection, contrived to sustain it during their nine days’ voyage from Liverpool to the southern part of the Virginias aboard a Quaker steamer named the Endeavour. What scenes of violence and debauchery were witnessed by this ship as it crossed the icy wastes of the Atlantic, we can only imagine. Its landing, however, is well attested.

  Behold, then, the sixth of February 1899: on a cold, misty morning, still half shrouded by dusk, a transatlantic steamer makes its way through the calm waters of the majestic roadstead known as Hamptons Roads to enter, without either seeking or being granted authorisation by the authorities of our proud and sovereign Nation, the m
outh of the James River. There, possessing no knowledge of the depth of the river bed and sailing at a speed ill-judged for inland waters, the ship soon runs aground upon a sandbank. In a manner oddly shambling and disorganised, the lifeboats are lowered into the shallow waters. One hundred and one passengers—men and women both—disembark the ship to find space upon these lifeboats, the plume of their madness rising from the gunwales and thickening the morning mist. Some Negro farmhands who live near the riverbank behold their slow approach and note how haphazard is the rowing, how distracted the crew. It is as though these strangers are intoxicated. Some are singing, others clinging to each other like scared children; others yet appear to be copulating in plain view of their peers. Struck by this sight, the farmhands descend to the strip of beach that flanks the riverbank to offer aid to the shipwrecked. Once arrived, they pause at some distance from the strangers’ Smoke, offended in their Christian consciences by its unrepentant bloom. Then the Smoke performs a feat no Smoke has yet been observed to do. It leaps at them across many yards of bank; plucks the very Soot from their work clothes, resurrecting yesterday’s sins. As though mesmerised, the farmhands join those they came to rescue, drowning in the self-same madness that was brought ashore. Only a single youth of fifteen, whose lame leg and cautious nature kept him some ten steps behind his companions, escapes. He runs away, to safety. By the midafternoon he can be found drinking and spreading his story at a Negro establishment three leagues to the west.

  And so our National Virtue was lost.

  It took four days for the news to spread to Richmond, two more to verify its truth. The newspaperman at the Richmond Enquirer settled on the term “carrier” for those infected by the Second Smoke and issued a grave warning to city authorities. At this time another name—ignorant and blasphemous—had already spread amongst the rural Negro populace, inflected by their ill-digested knowledge of the Bible and its warning of apocalypse. “Prophets,” they called them, “pilgrims,” making the long voyage, spreading a new evangelism. There was a rumour of a mob of them marching upon Richmond. A telegram was sent to alert the state and federal authorities, urging them to close all harbours; in Richmond itself the militia was armed, the city closed to strangers, guards placed on all roads.

  Richmond fell within twenty-four hours. By the end of the week, there were reports of new “pilgrims” landing on our shores. Smugglers helped them; self-declared revolutionaries; Negro fishermen bamboozled by the rumours of this new church of the Smoke. The arriving ships were fired on by our valiant navy, were sunk in our bays. Outlandish tales abounded, of single pilgrims swimming ashore from cannon-pitted hulls, then moving inland across the vast plains of the Americas, there to set ablaze whole cities. A shaven-headed child of six put paid to Charleston; a nursing mother infected Baltimore, walking bared down to her waist; a blind priest on a snow-white ass rode out of the Pennsylvania woods into a Pittsburgh factory, corrupting it to the last man. Congress declared a state of national emergency; the Democratic senator John F. Calhoun of Tennessee made the case that the landings by foreign citizens amounted to invasion and urged the president and Congress to consider a formal declaration of war. It was as though the first trumpet had sounded. Across the land, Christian men begged the Lord to be forgiven for their sins…

   BEETLE

  [ 1 ]

  “Fits you like a glove, boychik. No, look, you have to tie it at the waist. And now pull down the shirt. There—a Hindoo houseboy if ever I saw one! And look how the colour complements your skin. It’s good cotton, that, soft as soft.”

  “Enough, old man, you’re making me blush.”

  The boy is very appealing. Irresistible, even. That broad, dark-hued face, the slender lips, the small sharp nose: handsome, yes, but above all mobile, changeable, and (when caught unawares, unguarded, unprepared) surprisingly vacant. His body, too, is tidy, limber, well proportioned; unfixed in its mannerisms, eager for a role. The boy is a blank into which you insert your longings. It must work magic on the girls. Only that’s something he does not do. Intimacy. And, of course, none of it is real. The first time Riedl realised this, it damn near broke his heart.

  Which isn’t to say Riedl is quite himself when dealing with the boy either. The boy is a customer, after all. A business associate. A fellow rogue. There are rules that govern their interaction, scripted into their relative positions of seller and buyer. The boy understands this better than anyone, embodies it to a frightening degree. It is Riedl who slips up and becomes familial; imposes on that mobile face the features of a never-born son.

  “Just what are you up to, boychik?” Riedl asks now, growing angry at his own foolishness and ramping up his inner yid. “One of the Company warehouses, is that it? Or one of their ships? Be careful who you meddle with! You’re not the first who thought he could grow rich on their fat. All swimming in the Hudson now, kiddo. Feeding the fish.”

  The boy takes up his change of mood, stops admiring himself in Riedl’s mirror, deflects his anger into banter.

  “I’m no kid.”

  “What, a man now? Herrgott, don’t you even move like one of them darkies, though! Been studying, eh? Do that head waggle again. Perfect. And that shit-eating grin. Very good. It’ll fool any white man. You just hope you don’t run into the real thing. They’ll be like the rest of us. We know our own.”

  “I have no ‘own,’ Riedl.”

  “Oh, a poor little orphan, are we? All alone in the wide world, not a people to our name. That’s how you haggle. Next it’ll be, ‘I’ll pay tomorrow, Sahib, here’s a nickel for my pledge.’ ”

  “And who else is going to rent these rags from you? Look here, there’s a tear right above the kidney, along with a nice big stain. Got this from the morgue, did you, you cheap kike?”

  “Rags, Neel? Rent?! Not buy, he says, but rent! Take them off this second, you schmutzig little mongrel, or by God I’ll put another tear into that fabric.”

  Neel. That’s the name they have agreed upon, Riedl and the boy. Nil, actually, but it has lengthened with use.

  “What do I call you?” Riedl asked him the first time they did business.

  “Whatever you will.”

  “What are you, some kind of walking mystery? A no-name, a niemand, a snot-nosed little nil?”

  “Nil,” said the boy, a curl in his lip like sour milk. “That rather has a ring.”

  He’s been Neel to Riedl ever since.

  [ 2 ]

  It takes them another half hour to settle on the price. It is Riedl who is reluctant to see him go. The pawnbroker senses an impatience in the boy that is unlike him, who gives so little away. He must be off on a job. Something unusual, and dangerous. Something that matters to him.

  “The Spires!” it comes to Riedl. “Chaim says he has seen you hanging about the Spires. Watching. Talking to people at the docks.”

  Riedl gets animated, afraid for the boy; starts lecturing him.

  “These are serious people, boyo. Secretive. I ask you: what sort of outfit schleps its entire workforce over from the other end of the world when there are a thousand coolies you could hire right here on the spot? They like their privacy, see, and here you want to go and pry. And anyway, why break in there? There’s no money in the Spires. Just papers. It’s where they do their orders and accounts. Don’t be a yonts.”

  The boy listens unmoved, still caught in the half-smile of their banter. Then something raw rises out of him, something rare and unmediated, climbing up his throat. Or perhaps it is just that Nil has learned that pain, too, can be a mask, and that all the best lies start in truth.

  “Home,” he says. “I am looking for home.” And he touches Riedl’s hand. It’s a squeeze not a shake (and what a calculated little gesture this is, forging a bond both binding and false). Next Nil runs off, the bundle of new clothes rolled under one arm. At the end of the alley, where he thinks he is no lo
nger watched, his posture changes along with his gait, and he wrests new features from the mobile musculature of his face. Then he is lost from view, Third and Bowery, merging with the downtown crowd.

  [ 3 ]

  New York, né New Amsterdam. A city built to resist that paramount truth of cities: that crowds breed vice. Cities lend themselves to industry, and to sin. The Old World has long accepted this equation and written its cities over to workers and paupers. The respectable live in the fresh air of the hills. In the New World, where cities were built from scratch, a variety of models were trialled, though few as successfully as this. New York—the peninsula of Manhattan—is a network of villages separated by moats. Uptown, north of the mile-deep park that bisects the city east to west like a belt of grass and shrub, lies a world of villas surrounded by generous grounds: a New World Oxford built on a New World scale. North of these there are woods dotted with estates too grand for either Oxford: old Dutch money building a Protestant’s idea of a palace. Farther north yet sits the rough little shantytown that is Yonkers: a paper mill, a general store, and a whorehouse, greasy with its own Soot. Beyond are homesteads and emptiness.

  Downtown is a different story. South of Central Park, the city is dominated by four-block neighbourhoods separated by block-wide gaps of empty space. “Air shafts,” “commons,” “moats,” these go by many names, though locals most often refer to them as “scars.” Some are grass-covered and used for husbandry; some choked with shrubs and trees. Some are garbage pits; some sports fields; some are battlegrounds upon which annual war is waged, between Chinatown and Little Germany, between the thugs of Chelsea and the thugs from the meatpacking factories living in its flank. Each neighbourhood carries its own shroud of Smoke; in strong winds—in winter storms—they mingle, carry lust and violence from east to west. In the humid lull of summer, when the heat saps all strength and appetites grow indolent, truces appear as people creep from their brick houses and factories to seek air and shade within the neutral ground of the scars.