The Eulogist

by Ms. Terry Gamble

  “And now this,” I said.

  “You did not hit or claw?”

  I knew there would be no legal remedy for my outrage. I was no maiden, after all. The men were white. I had been alone.

  “What do you want from me?” asked Mrs. Beasley.

  “I am told your store has many wonderful things and for a variety of purposes.”

  I told her that I knew about abortifacients—that herbs such as tansy, pennyroyal, rue, and ergot could cause my bowels to constrict. I knew from my miscarriage it would not be easy—that it would be awful, in fact. Indeed, Silas and I had helped more than one woman desperate to end a pregnancy because of circumstances, poverty, transgression, or the burden of too many children. And I should never forget the freckled face of that woman who had died, trying to abort.

  “Come back next week,” said Mrs. Beasley.

  The next week I made up a story about meeting a traveling doctor who had been a student of Silas’s research. I would have driven the carriage myself, but it was seemlier if the boy accompanied me.

  “Find lodging down at the mills,” I said to William when we got to Mrs. Beasley’s. “You know Mr. Rutger?” Indeed, Rutger had sent us an entire family early in August when it became apparent that there was inadequate transportation to usher them uphill. “Come back in the morning.”

  Mrs. Beasley looked up when I entered the store. “This is no small inconvenience. But given what you went through, I felt it was my duty.”

  She took me into her back room, pushed aside a worktable, undid two hooks obscured by a hanging cloth of embroidered Bible verse, and swung open a panel of beadboard wainscoting.

  “Take this,” she said, handing me a powder and a tincture along with a glass. “You understand the effects?”

  Before shutting the wainscoting behind me, she added, “Take care you don’t cry out.”

  The room was barely worthy of the name, furnished only with a cot and a basin. The concoction tasted like bile and took hours to act. In the middle of the night, my stomach heaved and then contracted as with a horrible bout of diarrhea. Everything released and, once released, persevered in spite of there being nothing left to expel. For the world, I could have been Julia in the final throes of cholera. Indeed, it was not until midmorning the following day that I could so much as sit. But the bloody sheets and the contents of the basin attested to the success of my endeavor. Thanks to Silas, I knew how to read the tea leaves of tissue, and though it pained me to have to do it, the suffering was worth it.

  Mrs. Beasley looked in on me shortly after noon. It may have been my imagination, but she seemed a tad solicitous, asking if I’d like some clothing of her own.

  “I’m a little faint,” I said. “I’m sure it will pass.”

  “It usually does,” said Mrs. Beasley. “As often as not, the mothers are younger than yourself. At least you lived. That’s more than I can say for a couple of the girls.”

  I flinched at the use of the word “mother.” Indeed, at thirty-five, I might have been a grandmother.

  When Mrs. Beasley sent for the boy, it was late in the day. He arrived sprinkled with hay, regarding me with perplexity, for I looked white and drawn.

  “You are a good boy, Willy.”

  By the time we got back to Enduring Hope, I was feverish.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Erasmus asked as the boy shouldered me from the buggy.

  With a straight face, William said, “She’s taken ill from a bad piece of fish.”

  “Then get her inside and cover her up. We must keep her warm and well drunk of water.”

  But no matter how much water I drank, I could not sit up without my head spinning. Whatever herb had been in Mrs. Beasley’s recipe seemed more lethal than what it had cured. For three days I hovered and would have gladly been taken, so low was the sun, so thin the veil between here and there.

  Erasmus wiped my brow with a cloth dipped in river water and fed me chicken broth. He scrambled eggs on a skillet over the open fire. He baked the bread that should have been mine to bake. But my stomach did protest.

  “She needs a doctor,” William said. He had stayed close to me, touching my forehead like a little nurse. “We should take her back to Ripley.”

  “’Tis best that I keep a light footprint in Ripley, given our activities,” said Erasmus. “When dawn comes, we’ll take her west.”

  * * *

  And so it was that I returned to Cincinnati in the company of my brother and my nephew—a weakened woman who had neither strength to live alone nor to protest against her brother’s wife who insisted she move in.

  “Finally you’ve come to your senses,” said Hatsepha. “And goodness you’re so thin!”

  Thrice her maid came to change my sheets. I could hear the servants’ murmured German as they discussed my plight, drawing Lord knows what conclusions. None of them wanted to get close to me in case I was contagious. I swam in the dull light of pulled draperies, tossing off the covers only to freeze. Food was brought in and taken away. And then one evening, I managed to drink some broth.

  Hatsepha entered the room carrying a candle. “I don’t know why you’re having these problems, Olivia. You, a single woman. It reminds me of when I miscarried. I bled so hard, it ruined my woman parts, for, ever since, I do not conceive. Even when I think I might have, the bleeding comes.” She blinked several times. “But then, you must know all about that.”

  “I’m sorry, Hatsepha,” I said, for I hadn’t known the full extent of her disappointment at her barrenness. Nor had she ever quite forgiven me for not confiding about my own miscarriage with Silas.

  Before Erasmus left, I had heard raised voices, but could not make out the thrust of the dispute. Erasmus came to my door along with the boy, looking concerned.

  “I won’t tell James what you’ve been doing,” I said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s you I’m worried about, Livvie. I’ve never seen you brought so low.” But he did look immensely relieved.

  “As for you, Willy,” I said, extending my hand from beneath the comforter, “I expect you to keep up with your reading and your fossil collecting. I will return to test you as soon as the leaves turn red.”

  As Hatsepha rang for the maid to bring another change of bedding as well as a coal heater to warm the mattress, as she fussed with the hangings on the bed frame, tucked my hair into a cap, pushed on me a thick soup of beets, I swore I’d make my way back to Enduring Hope before the frost was hoary on the ground, but it was not to be. It took me years to return.

  Chapter 24

  1839–1840

  The problem was, I did not get well. The bleeding stopped, but not the weakness. And worse, my eyesight began to falter. Whatever alchemy Mrs. Beasley’s herbs had worked in my womb turned with a vengeance on other organs. I knew enough about the body to understand the symptoms of a compromised liver or kidney. The lower rims of my eyes turned yellow. I lost a good bit of my hair. Tilly might have said, Good riddance to that mess, but it made me sad to see my tresses come out in chunks, the red replaced by gray at thirty-six years of age.

  Hatsepha read to me as I had read to William. We had moved on from Mr. Hawthorne (too puritanical, we agreed) to Mr. Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to take in my skirts,” I said one day when the gingham slipped to my knees as we were walking in Hatsepha’s garden. The late-summer vegetables were coming up—pale, delicate lettuces and tiny tomatoes the size of marbles and sweet as candy, so unlike the hearty vegetables suitable for winter that we grew by necessity at Enduring Hope.

  “Nonsense,” said Hatsepha. “We will commission a new wardrobe. Between the two of us—you so thin and me so fat—we have the perfect figure!”

  And money to squander. Money that came from illumination such as God had created—only, according to James, he, James Givens, was better at it, first with his perfect candles, and now with gas for lamps.

  “Candlelight is on
e thing, but gas brings consistency and durability. Gas brings the prospect of security and new horizons. People will have a new world once our cities are lit up with gas,” James pronounced that night at dinner.

  Orders were coming in, and already he was laying pipe in Clifton. The day would come (or night, rather) when walkways would glow in so modern a way that pedestrians could see their feet and one another.

  “You amaze me, James,” I said, recalling the first time he took me to the processing plant that extracted gas from coke. “I remember you practically falling into a vat of grease that you stirred yourself, and now—what?—a hundred men?”

  “A hundred and twenty,” he said.

  He now hired with an eye for dedication and temperance and fortitude, blind to color and deaf to accent. Free blacks, Irish Catholics, Germans, Dutch—each found a job at Givens and Sons.

  “But you,” said James, “you must regain your strength.”

  If James—or Erasmus, for that matter—had any idea of what had set off my wasting, they did not let on. I was quite certain Hatsepha suspected because she went on at length about the deplorable nature of “women’s problems” and how, as much as she’d wanted children, she thought it had gone far worse for her friends who had died in childbirth, or for those who had more children than they could count on both hands, these women forever on their backs, enduring a husband, issuing forth a child.

  “We should count ourselves lucky,” she said, patting me on the hand.

  She never once asked who the father might be. Perhaps she thought that I, with no husband, would be desperate enough to make a misguided choice. And so I passed the summer of 1839 still ensconced in Cincinnati. In late August, I sent a letter to William commending him on his birthday and telling him how well I remembered his entry into the world. It was the night I’d met Tilly, the night before I met Silas. How my life had changed. Now I spent most of my time reclining, trying to read, occasionally making a trip into the conservatory, and receiving the occasional letter from Erasmus.

  Dearest Livvie, he wrote in September,

  It is already fall, the river so low that the steamboats are running aground. I am endlessly called upon to ferry passengers that have been waylaid by shallows and snags. The boy has grown beyond my shoulders and has become an expert shot. He often practices in back of the escarpment to the south, although he nearly took off the hat of one of the Utopians who was walking through the woods, and would have expedited the man’s path to heaven, which, in the view of the Utopians, meant a swim across an ocean of lemonade escorted by angels so lurid they would make a Catholic blush.

  You would not recognize our little camp. I have secured another helper along with Willy, this time a young man whose wife died in childbirth. He has come here to pray and work off his grief. I told him about losing Julia, and he said, “At least you have a son.” I suppose he’s right on this, and I have sworn to thank God every day that I have the boy, and that if I no longer have a wife, at least I hold her memory in the expression of his face.

  After that, I heard nothing for months, and long months, too, in which my headaches grew worse, and I sat in the parlor by the thin light of autumn, a fire kindled in the hearth while Hatsepha read articles about exploding steamboats and arrests of runaways and a new contraption for pressing shirts. By the time Christmas rolled around, I was in no mood to celebrate the birth of Jesus with jelly molds and a goose, though Hatsepha tried to stuff me with the latter, and so I took to my bed until they assured me that 1840 was well under way.

  Dearest Livvie—

  It turns out the young man who came to work here was a spy. As luck would have it, it was an uneventful autumn, but I thought it odd when he produced a bottle on Christmas Eve and got me to talking, then asked question after question about my other dealings. This is entrapment of the most perfidious sort, but also means that those holding with slavery are resorting to every description of trickery. I heard that someone tried to corner Rankin by using a man posed as a slave. Eyes are everywhere. My plan for now is to stick to ferrying wayfarers of a less controversial sort.

  * * *

  Cursed with one of my headaches, I had begged off accompanying Hatsepha and James to church one late March morning, when Hatsepha’s newly hired Norwegian girl knocked on the door of the library. I was curled up in a leather chair, covered by a rug, struggling to make out the print of Nicholas Nickleby.

  “What is it, Mette?” This Mette was a superstitious girl, prone to hysterics whenever a misshapen root was dug from the garden, leading her to argue terribly with the cook about whether to worship the root as a spirit or toss it into the soup.

  Lord protect us, said James. We are becoming the last refuge for decommissioned saints.

  “There’s a black man, lady,” she said. “He says his name is Handsome.” She put her hand to her mouth to suppress a laugh. “But I don’t think he is.”

  I arose abruptly. The rug slid to the floor. “I will meet him in the cook’s pantry.”

  She goggled at me for a second, thinking the whole arrangement odd—which it was, for I hadn’t seen the man since the summer of our absconding and had only heard about him from Erasmus, who had been adamant about me not sending word to the man of Tilly’s fate.

  It’s not as if the girl was so much in his life. She was a house girl, right? Erasmus had said, contending that if Handsome knew Tilly had been sold off, he might do something foolish. Why should we burden him?

  I hadn’t argued with his rationale. Who knew what Handsome would do? If he were to go back across the river to Kentucky to settle scores, he’d surely be picked up. Furthermore, Erasmus said, Handsome can’t read. He won’t learn it from the newspapers. So unless someone tells him—he shot me a look in the manner of James.

  The cook’s pantry was lined with baskets of onions, bottles of vinegar, cider, tubs of flour, sherry for flavoring and for the cook who took nips. I sat in a poky chair, wrapped in my shawl, while Handsome stood, hat in hand, before me. Although his hair was white, his face was much the same—the scarred eyebrow, the cracks around his eyes.

  “Don’t say it,” I said. “I look ever so much older.”

  “Is it true?” Handsome said. “Tilly’s gone?”

  I had no choice but to nod. Indeed, it had been two years.

  He didn’t exclaim, but made such an expression that I felt cursed. Years before, when we’d made our escape to Enduring Hope, I had promised Handsome that Tilly would be safe in Cincinnati, protected by respectability and the esteem of so many ladies.

  “Eugene came and got her,” I said. “We hired the best lawyer to defend her.”

  “I’da liked to kill that Eugene,” said Handsome. “And not for the first time neither. You know what he did to my Delilah?”

  It didn’t take much imagination.

  “And I knows what he tried with you.”

  I said nothing.

  “So now my girl’s back with that devil?”

  It took me a moment to realize he thought she was back at Orpheus Farms. “Oh, Handsome,” I said. “Would that it were so.”

  I told him about the trial and the crowd, how they’d hustled her down to the river to an unspeakable fate. I told him about everything except how I’d taken the money. I could not tell him this.

  Pots clanked as the cook got ready for Sunday lunch. The air was thick with frying onions and buttery biscuits.

  I laid my hand on his arm. “Erasmus says you’ve got a good life in one of the settlements.”

  He stared out at the hills from the window. Whispers of green had appeared almost overnight.

  “They started raiding the settlements,” he said. “They’s even stealing Negroes and selling them down. Maybe not so interested in an ol’ nigger like me, but they’s gonna come. Likes nothing more than a hangin’.”

  Neither of us said anything as the cook marched through the pantry, cross that we occupied her territory, glowering particularly at Handsome as if he offended her Iris
hness.

  When she’d gone, I said, “Have you spoken to Erasmus?”

  He shook his head. “Came a different way. ’Sides, that man don’t know what he’s doing.”

  I gave a quick look over my shoulder at the cook, but she was busy haranguing the Norwegian.

  “He’s got it down to an art,” I said. “There’s a network in Ripley.”

  “I heard it pretty much blew up this last year on accounta Mahan’s trial.”

  “What about here? Do you have any contacts?”

  “I was thinking you might, missus. Your older brother? I’m told he backed my Tilly.”

  “Oh my goodness, he’d be the last one to ask. Yes, there was Tilly, but that was personal. James is the picture of propriety. I’d suggest the Birneys.”

  “I see.” He fiddled with his hat brim. “Oh, and missus, if someone was to go to Kentucky to steal off slaves, there’s some others down on Orpheus Farms you might want to know about.”

  “And put ourselves right back into hot water?”

  “There’s Grady,” he said, ignoring me, naming the boy whom I had seen flogged so viciously by Bethany. “And there’s my other girl, Sticks.”

  “Sticks wasn’t four years old,” I said. “She’s your girl?”

  “Grandchild. And probably seven by my count.”

  Seven. The age my child with Silas would have been.

  “And my other granddaughter. Sticks’s cousin? She’d be pretty hard to get at, being up at the house ’n all. Best probably to leave that one alone, though it was cruel when they snatched her. Drove her mother crazy. Well, you saw her.”

  Just then, Cook dropped a pot and I jumped. I was about to ask him exactly what he meant when the Norwegian girl ran into the kitchen and yelled, “Mr. Givens is back, and there’s not even soup on the table!”

  “Go to the carriage house, Handsome,” I said. “Tell Rutherford I’ve given you work brushing down the horses.”

  I went up the backstairs to my bedroom and popped my hair into a cap and pulled on a housecoat. When I entered the dining room, I saw that we had company for Sunday lunch.