Chapter 16
1835
Erasmus stayed with us through that winter. For the sake of the boy, he and James were civil to each other. I cut my younger brother’s hair, fed him, asked if he had any inclination to preach.
“It will take some doing before God wants to hear from the likes of me.”
“Cheer up,” I said, feeling compassion in spite of my views. “You speak of a loving God with infinite capacity for forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness is not the same as fondness,” said Erasmus. “Even the Catholics know this.”
As soon as the snow melted, he told me, he and the boy would head back to the encampment to sow crops and ferry passengers in the hope that God might show His way. For all our sakes, I wished for a long winter, but the thaw came in March, and for once, Erasmus was true to his word.
James could not look at the boy when he was packed up and standing in the hallway, his hair wetted down as if he were going to church. I wondered when we would see him again, for twenty miles might as well have been a hundred, and Providence had a way of dividing families more often than not. It was a bitter wafer to be separated from that boy, but no more for me than for James. I had only seen him so wretched years ago when Erasmus returned married to Julia.
And what was I to do now that I was relieved of my charge? Since the cholera, Silas had barred me from autopsies, saying resurrections could carry risk. I was left to my needlework. At least my hair was presentable.
* * *
Expecting Tilly, I was surprised when Silas opened the door to his office.
“Olivia?” he said. “Do you have an appointment with Tilly? I thought she came to you.”
I looked him up and down. “You don’t look well,” I said. Indeed, his whiskers were unkempt, his shirt unpressed. “I should think she’d be looking after you.”
“I’ve been running an experiment . . .”
“May I come in?”
He stood back, saying something about a Negro with a missing spleen.
I pushed past him into his office space. There was no sign of Tilly or her hair basket. These days, she was frequently out ministering to ladies in their homes. “Dead or alive?” I said. When he looked at me blankly, I said, “The Negro?”
“Oh! Dead, of course. And most interestingly, his body seemed blackened with tar. It leads me to believe—”
“I’ve missed you, Silas. And the boy has gone with his father.”
“Olivia . . .”
“What was it you once said? Something about having no time for a wife nor the means? Your being a man of ‘limited interests and singularity of mind’ was how you put it. You’ve insisted on no children. Well, I’ve thought this over, and frankly, it suits me, as does the fact you have no money. I no longer care what James thinks. I’m in need of being useful.”
“I’m confused.”
“I’m saying,” I said, turning to face him, “let’s get on with it.”
* * *
Losing the boy to Erasmus left James with little ardor for protesting my marriage to Silas. He even consented to our using their parlor for the ceremony with Hatsepha standing as my attendant, struggling between her disapproval at my marrying a poor man and her delight at showing off a new silk dress. I, in turn, felt quite giddy at the prospect of leaving Key’s Hill. I had listened patiently to Hatsepha’s marriage-bed advice that intimacies benefited from cloak of darkness, and that should I feel pain, do not blame the man, but with patient persistence, the results could be—“well, quite pleasing!”
This was the only time I blushed during her discourse. As for the rest, I refrained from mentioning that I had not only splayed open the womb of a corpse, but sliced through vagina and vulva.
The door to Silas Orpheus’s office was, like all doors along that row of brick town houses, an impeccable, glossy black. Even the brass plate was respectable: silas orpheus, medical doctor. His flat behind the office was another story altogether. Stepping over yesterday’s shirt and a pair of muddy boots, I stood in a parlor of shelves, and on those shelves, jar after jar of frogs, fish, even something with fur. Fossils and bones and pages of notes huddled upon the desk, the cramped space lit by candles burned to stubs, the discards collected in a pot for melting down and for use again as light or for fixing the corpses of insects.
And tools! Tools for hacking, for sawing, suturing, extraction. A mallet to test reflexes; a hammer to crack skulls. Even the bed was stacked with saws and books and newspapers and a few bloody rags.
“I’ll need a place to sit,” I said. “I could do with a chair and a cushion.”
The room’s one tall window faced north, away from the river. What few sticks of furniture there were—a pine table, a good mahogany dresser, a ratty needlepoint rug—were claimed by experiments in various stages: glass tubes, bottles of alcohol, instruments of bloodletting, of cupping, of measurement. There was not one book of poetry. Nothing upon which to make music. No flowers. No air.
“Dust, dust, dust,” said Silas. He had removed his hat, but the room was cold, so he retained his scarf and coat. “Have you ever seen such dust?”
But his mattress promised a new frontier—as exotic and alluring as Illinois. My image was of Julia rushing from our room to my brother’s bed, their exclamations and hushed laughter, their whispers of Shh! and Darling!
That my marriage bed might be otherwise had never occurred to me.
“And where does that lead?” I said, indicating a door on the other side of the room.
“That?” said Silas. “Oh, that’s where I keep Tilly.”
* * *
Hatsepha had been quite right about the pain, less so about the pleasantness.
Perhaps you should have a glass of wine? Silas suggested.
Perhaps you shouldn’t have run off so quickly to wash, thought I.
After a month or so of this, we fell into a pattern of Silas asking me about my menses, showing ardor in the week that followed, abstaining during the second and third weeks and, of course, when I bled. The whole business quite embarrassed me, and I began to think I’d imagined those feelings of longing when I was barely fifteen.
Stitching with Hatsepha one afternoon, I cleared my throat. “This ‘pleasantness’ you spoke of . . .”
Hatsepha slowly lifted her gaze to mine, eyebrows raised, the hand holding the needle suspended over the canvas. Then she nodded. “I did quite think I was having a convulsion. And then it happened again. Well!” she said, stabbing her canvas and drawing through the thread. “I went straight to the minister. And you know what he said?”
I leaned in.
“He said”—she lowered her voice to assume pastoral authority—“‘Dear lady, this is Jesus approving of your match.’”
* * *
It took me some time to broach the topic with Silas. We were picnicking on a low hill not far from the river. Tilly, as usual, was with us, sitting erect, her own parasol positioned to protect her skin from becoming even darker. She would study the opposite bank as if to solve a riddle. More than once I’d seen her toss a button or a ribbon into the current. When I asked her why, she shrugged and said, You try crossing that thing without the Lord’s help.
Today, taking advantage of her distraction, I said, “Silas, do you believe Jesus—or God—keeps a ledger on people’s marriages?”
Silas was lying on his side, propped on his elbow, reading a medical journal. For a moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me. “A ledger?” I said. “Like the one James—”
“I heard what you said.” With some care, he marked his page with a leaf and set aside the tome. “Surely you’re not serious?”
“Well, you know I’m not . . . I don’t . . .” I sighed. “It’s not Jesus’ pleasure I worry about. It’s yours.”
He stroked his beard. I felt like one of his cadavers. “Perhaps it is time for an anatomy lesson.”
I glanced nervously at Tilly, but if she heard us, she gave no sign.
“There’s a ra
ther sweet glade just back on the path,” said Silas. He almost smiled. “Perhaps we should take a walk.” His eyebrow rose. “For the love of Jesus, that is.”
* * *
“Why’d you let the boy go?” said Tilly. We were discussing William and how, once he’d left, I saw no reason for staying on with James and Hatsepha. “Once you let a child go, you never get them back.”
I was sitting in the chair in front of her as she combed and braided my hair in the corner of Silas’s office.
“Erasmus is his father.” Although I was in agreement with Tilly’s sentiments, I felt obliged to model a sense of filial decorum.
“Don’t see how that makes no never mind,” she said. “Not all daddies want their chillun. From what you say, the boy’s opportunity was up the hill.”
“Let’s talk about something else. Your opportunity, for instance. How much revenue have you brought in?”
Even Silas had to admit that Tilly’s enterprise was impressive. He said as much when he begrudgingly conceded that it was a shame that she had to send most of the revenue back to Eugene in Kentucky. I fancied that Silas was changing his position on the subject of slavery and coming around to a more democratic view of human independence.
“Five ladies I done last week,” said Tilly. “You’d think they was the Queen of Sheba.”
“Humph,” said I. “And where are they all going, I would like to know. Galas, I suppose. Or balls.” I sniffed. “No one asks us,” I added, thinking it would be lovely if Silas showed a little more interest in the living aside from our recent spate of affection. I still accompanied him to autopsies, but only at my insistence. He felt it was more expedient to take Tilly. I considered suggesting he should pay her for her assistance but decided not to press it as I didn’t want to hear once more that her labors were part of the agreement with his brother. Many nights Silas would stay up late writing and experimenting, returning to our bed just before dawn, if at all.
“I’d like to go to a ball,” said Tilly. “Dance all night. Wear out my shoes. Haven’t you ever danced, Missus ’Livia? Why, they used to have dances down at the farm ’fore Missus Bethany went all strange, and they’s neighbors stopped letting they daughters near Mr. Eugene.”
I started to ask her what she meant, but she gave my hair such a tug, I cried out.
* * *
In the first year of our marriage, Alexis de Tocqueville came to town, extolling Cincinnati as “a model of democracy.” There was built a wax museum of such uncanny likenesses that Tilly and I swore we saw them breathe. So, too, the circus came, complete with fire-eaters and bearded ladies and a man with feet like fins. Eighteen thirty-five saw the charter of seven railroads, only one of which laid a road. Key’s Hill was renamed “Mt. Auburn.” And in 1837, the market crashed—the very same year that Silas took sick.
It started with a cough—a cough like any other, brought on by the increasing factory smoke or a malingering cold.
“You spend too much time in the basement,” I said.
“It’s nothing much.”
“You should get some rest.”
“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
I regarded his pallor. “You shouldn’t jest.”
“Your concern touches me, Olivia. You are a better woman than you think.”
“Oh, I consider myself fine indeed.”
“And who is the jester now?”
Such was our banter. And then he was gone.
Chapter 17
1837
The veil on the bonnet I had borrowed from Hatsepha tossed in the wind. As the riverboat pushed upstream, every turn of the wheel swooshed like a year passing. Eighteen since our immigration; eight since William was born and I first met Silas. There were miles of shore, so many little settlements, an abundance of trees, an absence of landmarks, the feeling one has when something cherished slips from one’s hands.
Closing my eyes, I was once again that girl of fifteen coming down this great river for the first time, awed by the enormous beeches and oaks, the flocks of birds, the body of the black man, bloated and abandoned, the view of Cincinnati in the distance. Decades had passed since Fulton’s steam engine first drove a barge upstream, and still a sense of giddiness that one could span thirty miles in a day. Again, the turning wheel—this time whispering, Get on with it! Get on with it!
Tilly and I had tried to revive Silas with mustard poultice and mint teas. We stayed at his bedside, marking his breath and pulse. I touched his head; she held his hand. Together, we willed him to live.
Should we bleed him? I had asked.
I don’t go in for that, said Tilly.
The cough became a rattle, became a gurgle, became a rasp.
There is no poetry in dying.
Now I was accompanying his body up the river. Every time we passed a small settlement or the merest wisp of an encampment, someone would be waiting in a rowboat, offering to take passengers ashore. Two young men on a raft just off the bow waved at me frantically. For a moment, I forgot my sorry cargo and waved back.
“Ferry off! Ferry off!” they cried, hoping to catch a fare. The captain blew the horn.
Occasionally, and much to my amazement, a passenger would alight onto one of the little rafts or skiffs. Though the road was clear and trodden on the Kentucky side, the Ohio shore was buttressed by trees so dense that I couldn’t imagine any purpose other than the siren song of wilderness for jumping ship several miles ahead of Ripley.
“Ferry off!”
I looked down this time to see a boy and a man in a shard of a boat. I grasped the railing. How well I knew that hat, although the boy I barely recognized.
“Erasmus!” I shrieked, and hoarsely, too, but the blades and the cascading drip of water drowned me out. I pulled off my hat and veil, craning for another sighting.
“Ma’am?” A steward had heard my shouting and come to check on me. “Are you unwell?”
“That man in the boat,” I said. “Do you know him?”
He squinted at the receding dinghy. “River preacher. Lives over yonder at Enduring Hope.”
“Enduring Hope?” For three years, I had been sending letters and books to Erasmus Givens posted to New Richmond and Ripley, my own hope being that one or two would arrive.
Make the boy read, I wrote. Don’t reduce him to idiocy.
I wanted to call out to the captain, Turn around! Go back! But it seemed our course was set, and half an hour later, we glided past Ripley.
* * *
From what little Silas had told me about his brother, I knew better than to expect mourning. Even so, I was unprepared for Eugene.
Disembarking from the steamboat, I scanned the crowd on the Maysville, Kentucky, landing, my hat pulled low against the glare of the midday sun. Everyone else seemed to scatter, and I was left quite alone.
Moments later, a Negro youth in homespun pants and oversized shirt hurried over. “Excuse me,” I said as he hoisted my bag onto his shoulder. “What are you—”
“S’okay,” said a familiar voice. “He’s my boy.”
The voice belonged to a man on a horse. I squinted up, and seeing a face I knew so well, I almost cried out.
“My dear sister Olivia,” he said, dismounting, his voice thick with southern charm and irony. Like Silas, his tone was amused, but there was no affection in Eugene’s voice. “May I call you Olivia?”
“Sir,” said I, and held out my hand.
They had brought a hearse carriage for the coffin, and several horses. When I said I preferred to ride, Eugene whistled at the two boys loading the coffin. “Careful now,” he said, lifting me up onto the sidesaddle, and all the while appraising me with that same familiar look.
Our procession through Maysville was somber. Merchants and customers came out of shops to pay their respects. Had it been another occasion, I would have spent more time admiring this town with its neat houses and stores and shaded streets. Whatever Eugene’s faults (according to Silas, profligacy and gambling), the Orpheu
s family had standing. On the face of it, Eugene was dressed for the occasion in a frock coat and pantaloons, but on closer inspection, his loose cravat and brocade lapels betrayed evening clothes unchanged from the night before.
“I look forward to seeing your famous farm, Mr. Orpheus,” I said, trying to conceal my discomfiture. “My husband told me all about it.” The horse Eugene had given me was a chestnut with a gait not quite broken to the sidesaddle.
“You got to grip that horn with your knees,” Eugene said when my horse shied at a passerby.
I tightened my legs as we ascended through limestone bluffs that gave way to fields of hemp, velvety soft and sultry. The buzzing in my ears seemed to come from a distant swarm of bees.
“How much longer?”
“I am forgetting myself, Miss Givens. You must be weary.”
I was weary—brittle as porcelain. The next thing I knew, the ground was coming at me. A sharp pain in my arm, and Eugene was shouting, and I was being lifted. After that came darkness. I was aware of a rocking as if at sea. But the smell this time was of grass, not of salt water, and the box I was resting against was my husband’s coffin.
* * *
“Imagine my surprise.”
My fingers scrabbled at something lacy. The rocking had stopped, and when I opened my eyes, there were two faces staring down. One was a fair-haired woman, her hair in braids. The other was that of a black woman with cheeks plump as pincushions.
I struggled to rise, to regain myself, but my arm gave way, and the room spun. Hands pressed me back onto the pillow.
“When they opened that carriage,” said the pale-haired woman, “I thought Eugene had brought along an extra body. It would be just like him.”
The Negress wiped my brow. I was trying to say thank you when the two faces became three, the third being that of a child around seven. She was very pretty with green eyes and long lashes, plump lips, and dusky, wavy hair tied with a bow.
“Auntie?” said the girl.
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