The Eulogist

by Ms. Terry Gamble

  As she twisted my scant tresses into a topknot, I said, “Tell me about Mrs. Bethany.”

  She said nothing.

  “Eugene’s wife?”

  Again, nothing.

  “Is she pretty?”

  After a pause: “They say she is.”

  “But you don’t like her?”

  Tilly murmured something about it not mattering much either way whether she liked her since Mrs. Bethany was the missus and, as such, got her way, especially at her sweetest when they all had learned not to cross her. “And ’sides . . .” Tilly began, and stopped.

  “Besides?”

  “’Sides nothin’,” Tilly said. “She’s not my problem now.”

  I had so many more questions, but her lips were pursed. “Well then,” I said. “Let’s go show Dr. Orpheus how presentable you’ve made me.”

  * * *

  Silas might not have noticed if Tilly had attached a dead raccoon to my head, but Hatsepha pounced after dinner.

  “That’s quite a fetching coil, Olivia. Have you been practicing?”

  In fact, I told her, I had been auditioning a maid.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “Never mind. You would fear for your neck.”

  “Oh, Olivia! That girl?” She eyed my hair. She stroked her throat. “How is her touch?”

  “She says she never worked in the fields.”

  We were nestled in the ladies’ parlor. I could hear the servants clearing the dishes. William was tucked into bed.

  “What are you up to, Olivia?”

  I considered how to answer, but I was not fully certain. Surely, an additional income would benefit Silas. But beyond that, Tilly’s situation nagged at me—the casual way in which she was a proxy for payment.

  “Who knows?” I said to Hatsepha, my voice more carefree than I felt. “If Silas can make a little money off her, then . . . we’ll see.”

  The next time Tilly came to the house to do my hair, she mentioned how nice it would be to have a hot iron. That, she said, and some satin ribbons for embellishment. “Some don’t need it,” Tilly said, “but your hair is flat.”

  With that, she reached into her kit and pulled out two sets of curls that she held to the side of my forehead, her brow furrowed as she gleaned the closest match.

  “Tilly,” I said, eyeing the clumps of hair she was maneuvering about my cheeks, “where did you come by those curls?”

  She cast about her kit that was full of hairpins. “Thought I had a comb in here somewhere.”

  “The curls, Tilly. I know they do not come cheap.”

  Indeed, it was becoming de rigueur for young women to hack off their tresses and sell them, particularly when they had no other means of support. Flyers went out soliciting locks, countered by tracts that compared the practice to prostitution. The prices fetched, however, were compelling, and many a shorn head was concealed by hood or bonnet.

  “Dr. Orpheus says it is neither here nor there if I keep the hair.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you telling me this hair comes from a corpse?”

  “No one need know, Miss ’Livia. These curls are as good as wasted. Why, I would whack off my own hair, though no white woman would want it even though I seen nappier on some of they own heads.”

  “I shall upbraid that man,” I said, although I had to allow as how Tilly was resourceful. “You cannot go round robbing hair off dead people.”

  “Don’t stop Dr. Orpheus from robbing them of everything else,” she muttered. “Why the other day, I saw him cut a man’s pecker clear off!”

  * * *

  “She needs the money, James.”

  “You have the wildest notions, Olivia.”

  At Hatsepha’s encouragement, I had gone directly to my brother’s workshop. “I am only asking you to invest in a venture.”

  “I would sooner give my money to that railroad scammer who came through last week.”

  I should have lied and told him the funds were for that Miss Beecher’s school. Through the window of James’s office, I watched the bank clerk haul in the bag of payroll. Should no children be born to James and Hatsepha, this would someday come to William.

  Seeing the clerk unpack the bills, I was struck by an idea. “James, if you lend the money to Tilly and she builds her business, she can buy herself and pay you back. With interest! And then Silas’s brother can pay him.”

  “Honestly, Livvie. What do you know of business?” I knew he was in a hurry to meet a maker of crates. “And why should you care about this creature?”

  “So you will say yes?”

  * * *

  I am sorry to say he did not say yes—at least not then. With most of his profits churned back into the business, James could brag without censure that he was lighting up Cincinnati, and not only Cincinnati but a good deal of northern Kentucky and no small swath of Indiana. Now he was eyeing the West. The problem was transportation, since most of the roads were wheel-breaking, shoe-throwing affairs and vulnerable to scoundrels. The best prospect, as James saw it, was with the rails, and so he huddled constantly with developers whose various schemes might crisscross the territory and expand the market.

  I, in the meantime, continued to try to expand Tilly’s market, much to Silas’s amusement. “Why, Miss Givens, I believe you are on a mission.”

  “You do not see the benefit?”

  Strolling with Silas on the raised walkway past a row of haberdasheries, silversmiths, hatmakers, and jewelers, we peered into windows to admire a shirt or a bolt of fabric, a hair clip or a ring.

  “She could make even more money,” I said. “Why in the North, a hired girl makes—”

  “She’s not a hired girl—”

  “—and not from the North. I know.” Chewing my lip, I looked down the street at the river.

  “How about that one?” Silas said, pointing at a blue stone set in filigreed gold.

  I shrugged. “Hatsepha has all the rings in the world,” I said, touching my head upon which perched the locks of the deceased, “and nothing makes her happy.”

  “Is Hatsepha taking the medicine I prescribed?”

  “She is practically a dipsomaniac.” I touched his arm. “I do not wonder if you create more problems than you cure.”

  Silas tipped his hat at a couple drawing near, and I recognized Phinneaus Mumford and his bride, Ariadne Pritchard, the wretch who had absconded with my pantalette years before. Now she was wife to this rising politician whose platform was the improvement of sanitation after the last go-round with cholera.

  “Looking at rings?” said Ariadne, and to my surprise, for it was generally assumed that Silas and I would never marry.

  “I am ever hopeful,” said Silas before turning to talk in earnest to Phinneaus Mumford about the disposal of trash.

  Ariadne fixed her attention to me. “You are looking awfully well, Olivia.” She eyed my head so intensely I feared my borrowed curls might go the way of my pantalette and end up on her person.

  I leaned forward and whispered, “My new hairdresser. She is an alchemist, but do not tell anyone. I am trying to keep her for myself.”

  I had hit my mark. Ariadne looked rapacious. Clearly, James was not the only Givens whose métier was sales.

  * * *

  Slowly, word got out. Soirees, balls, teas—even debuts—were becoming more frequent in our former backwater. Though the streets remained muddy and swine-ridden, it was not uncommon to find an opera singer or an orator gracing parlor and proscenium. The growing fashionableness required the accoutrements of seamstress and jeweler, hairdresser and maid. One could barely leave the house without the help of staff.

  “This girl of yours,” said Hatsepha. “She’s awfully good.”

  “As I have said.”

  “And what shall she do with the money?”

  “She shall buy herself free.”

  “Are you sure of that?” said Hatsepha.

  “Of course I’m sure,” I said crisply. “A woman’s g
ot a right to buy herself.”

  But the next time Silas and I met for tea, I asked him straightaway.

  “Buy herself? I hardly think so.”

  “But she brings in quite a stream.”

  “Which goes mostly to my brother.” Silas looked at me with a mixture of exasperation and pity. “Like it or not, he still owns her.” He signaled for the check before turning back to me. “But console yourself with this, my dear: enslaved or not, Tilly is better off with me.”

  Chapter 15

  1834

  Only October, and already snow—an early dusting that blanched the landscape. We ran outdoors to fling fistfuls of white into the air, roughhousing so joyfully that my hair came loose. Willy, too, was wild with play. We were in such a state when the rider came up the drive that we barely noticed the man, and had we done, wouldn’t have known him. It was not until he called my name that I recognized the voice of my younger brother.

  I pushed my hair back and squinted. I had seen him disheveled before, but this scarecrow bore little resemblance to Erasmus. So emaciated was he, so wan and long-haired and bearded, that had he announced himself as Our Lord Jesus, I shouldn’t have disputed the likeness.

  “Erasmus?”

  I had been growing ever more uneasy at the lack of correspondence, wondering if he had taken ill or ended up incarcerated. Anything worse I refused to consider.

  “’Tis your da!” I said to Willy, lifting him in my arms and rushing toward my brother, nearly knocking him off his mount.

  Erasmus alighted, still holding the reins of a moribund mule that made his old horse Abel look like a thoroughbred.

  “What steed is this?” I said. “And where have you been?”

  “’Tis much to tell,” Erasmus said, holding Willy and me to his chest. “Forgive me,” he said. “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.”

  * * *

  He had left us in the autumn of 1832 after the death of Julia. The leaves had turned, fallen. He had had no plans to speak of, just a vague notion of finding redemption. He ate what people gave him, gleaning ears of late corn, shooting rabbits. A month in, he had taken to boiling acorns. On the fifth week, he had walked into the river.

  Sam Mutton, the preacher who had converted him, was on the shore when Erasmus floated by and yanked him out. What were the chances of that?

  “’Twas a sign,” said Erasmus. “On that you can count.”

  Erasmus had had some sense of where Sam Mutton lived, and my less charitable self wagered that Erasmus knew his “suicide” would draw attention. But Erasmus insisted God had handed him a miracle.

  Over the next few months, he had worked alongside Sam at his encampment along the Ohio, manning two rowboats and a raft, meeting the steamboats, ferrying passengers who, for whatever reason, chose to disembark in the middle of nowhere. Some were interested in pushing into northern Ohio to settle and farm. Others preferred to jump ship short of Ripley or Cincinnati, where they might be noticed. Whatever their reasons for disappearing, Erasmus knew better than to ask.

  Sam Mutton spent most of his time talking about the souls one met on the river, and how one should preach against slavery as those from the North would have it, or justify the institution, as many from the South would hear. Some would ask him for his sermon, delivered on the fly as they made their passage. Others received his wisdom unsolicited, merely as an aside from one riverbank to the other.

  Mostly, I tell them what they want to hear.

  When Sam died after a piece of venison got wedged in his gullet, Erasmus stayed on in the encampment. Before long, he was in cahoots with whiskey runners that were siphoning off a still in Frankfort, paying Erasmus one barrel per ten he poled across.

  There had been times—too many to count—when Erasmus would hear shots in the night. Occasionally, a patroller showed up and, seeing not Erasmus but a muddled inebriate on the threshold of middle age, his hair and beard badly in need of tending, shrugged and moved on. There was nothing to fear from this one.

  Erasmus’s nails grew long. Voices laughed from beneath the floorboards. He became aware that he was cold, and looked up to see red leaves clinging to branches that only days before were fulsome with green. What month was it? How old was the boy? He cried as he told me this, saying that never once had Julia accused him of abandonment. He would turn back the river if he could.

  “I admit it now, Livvie. It was James she should have married. I knew it at the time.”

  Then Abel died, and this grieved Erasmus sorely. Burying the horse alongside Sam, he tried to collect himself and recall the days when a hundred people gathered to hear him preach. To offer up such a sermon again—alleluia! He tried and failed to recall the words. Something about glad tidings and the love of the Lord, but having no one to listen, he offered the Lord’s love to Abel, saying, Ye were a fine horse, and that’s a fact. Would that I cared for my son as much as thee.

  Somehow the Lord, upon hearing these words, mistook them for a prayer, and Erasmus felt his heart fill and his mind grow steady in a way that was unfamiliar—like the first time he saw Sam and plotted his way out.

  Go forth and sin no more.

  It came to him from the rafters or the branches—not from beneath the floor where the Devil lurked. It sparkled like sunshine, and his face grew wet with tears.

  The river. He had to get himself to the river.

  Staggering toward it, he thought, But what if I drown?

  And in the wake of that thought, So be it.

  In he went. The cold waters of autumn surrounded him, his footing unsteady on the rocky edge, buttressed by the current. He plunged in as if he were a Baptist and came up choking, lungs full of river and laughter while he was carried downstream, his shoulder-length hair all about him. He waved at a steamboat. Everyone on the deck waved back as if he were an apparition borne by the flood. Then someone tossed him a rope and he grabbed it, and they pulled him in like a fish.

  Praise the Lord, he said.

  And everyone answered, Amen.

  But when they offered him some whiskey to warm himself, he refused it. “I told them to just let me off at Cincinnati,” Erasmus said, smiling at William and me. “It’s time I retrieved my son.”

  * * *

  Hatsepha wouldn’t allow him into the house without a good scrub. Even then, she slipped a scrap of linen onto one of her petit point chairs. I sat across from him, while Erasmus repeated his talk of finding redemption and being baptized in the river.

  “Well then,” said Hatsepha, her eyes straying to the clock on the mantel.

  Neither of us could bear to broach the subject of adoption, especially when Erasmus told us how he had preached on the landing for several weeks to scrounge enough money to buy the mule, professing that William was the reason for his return, having been called by God to do so, and that he meant to do right by the child.

  Oh Lord, thought I. There shall be such a tempest when James returns.

  “Tell me, brother,” said Hatsepha, with a clear of her throat. “Do you have any society near your encampment?”

  Erasmus blinked at her. He’d never had use for Hatsepha.

  “Not so much,” said Erasmus. I appreciated his effort to be civil. The confrontation would be arduous enough without being rude to the woman who had housed his son.

  “No school?”

  “None as such that you might recognize, though Sam owned some books.”

  “Twenty miles you say?”

  “Depends if you go by horse or boat.”

  “Well,” said Hatsepha, sitting back in her chair and shaking her hair, “James will never have it.”

  * * *

  “Just like that?” said James when he returned that evening to find our brother in his parlor. “Gone for nearly two years and not a word? And now with a scheme that’s little better than a squat?”

  “’Tis land, and I own it,” said Erasmus.

  “Look at ye,” said James.

  Indeed, even cleaned up, Erasmus looked
a sight. Not yet thirty and with silver in his hair. This plan of his (if you could call it that) of ferrying and preaching seemed daft—but not as daft as taking the boy away when Willy could be cared for and educated here.

  “Why not ask the boy?” said Erasmus.

  “The boy is barely five.”

  “He knows his father.”

  “I doubt that.”

  It was left to me to bring the child. Up till then, I had said nothing. My head and heart were not of the same opinion, but when I sank to my knees in front of William in the nursery, I whispered that his father had come for him, and that he should be very brave and good and kind. William was too young to know about the adoption or that James had consulted lawyers and tried to have Erasmus declared legally dead. It would be a difficult argument to make now that Erasmus had both a pulse and a desire to reclaim his son.

  “He smells bad,” said William.

  “’Tis from the horse.”

  “That’s no horse.”

  “Even so,” said I.

  We arrived in the parlor, and from the expression on my brothers’ faces, I could see they had argued.

  “There, then,” I said. “Go greet your da.”

  And proud I was, too, of the lad, who marched right up to Erasmus and stuck out his hand as James had trained him to do when making the acquaintance of a stranger.

  Look them in the eye, James would say. Give a good grip so they shan’t have the upper hand.

  William gave a mighty shake, but I could see he was crying. Then Erasmus, kneeling down, pulled from his pocket a smooth white stone upon which was the delicate imprint of a fish gill. William wiped his nose on his sleeve. “There now, my son, shall ye like to go up the river?”

  And William, who had looked solemn and scared up till then, studied the stone and broke into a smile.

  With a hoot, Erasmus grabbed the boy, tossed him into the air, and spun around. In that moment, the two of them swirling—father and son—I could see which way it would go.

  Not for James, this boy, thought I. And I felt sad for James. But more than that, I was sad for me.