The Eulogist

by Ms. Terry Gamble

  “Ah,” I said, “Ariadne. And Phinneaus!”

  They both smiled, but neither could hide their shock at seeing me. For once, I was glad that I seldom left the house.

  “We heard you let your apartments to that young doctor,” said Ariadne. “We heard you were unwell.”

  “Much better, thank you,” I said.

  “Next spring,” said Hatsepha, who had just entered the room, adjusting her bows after ridding herself of her hat, “Olivia and I are going to take the waters. We might even go to Saratoga!”

  “As far as that?” said Ariadne. She sniffed and glared at her husband. “Phinneaus insists that Mays Lick will suffice for us.”

  “James will send me anywhere I want,” said Hatsepha. “I believe he likes having me away.” She gave a little laugh as James stepped through the French door from the garden. “And where have you been?”

  “At the stable seeing to the horses.” James shot me a look. “We’ve had some turnover in the hands, and I thought it best to examine their work.”

  “And?” said Hatsepha.

  “You get what you pay for,” said James.

  * * *

  As soon as the lunch was over—a two-hour affair in which Hatsepha and Ariadne sparred over the virtues of coral versus amethyst in setting off the complexion—I said my good-byes and hurried to the library to search for a scrap of letterhead. Finding a sheet, I scribbled out a quick testimonial about Handsome and begged that the recipient help him along. I addressed the envelope to James Birney.

  Slipping out the back, I made my way to the stables. Handsome was curled on top of a pile of hay, snoring. There was no sign of the groomsman Rutherford, who must have departed for his own Sunday meal.

  “Handsome,” I said, shaking him. He sat up. A bit of straw clung to his hair. “I want you to take this letter to the Birney house on Walnut Street. Tell them you work for Givens and Sons.”

  “That’s a terrible plan,” said a voice from behind me. I turned. James stood in the doorway, arms crossed. “And who, may I ask, is Handsome?”

  Handsome rose to his feet.

  “James,” I said, choosing my facts carefully, having never actually admitted that it was I who had absconded with the man. “Handsome used to work for Eugene Orpheus.” James wore the unreadable face that made him so good at his business. I was prepared to dig in my heels and summon arguments to counter his objections.

  “Birney?” James shook his head. “You do not think that every colored person, man or woman, who goes into Birney’s house isn’t watched?” He clicked his teeth. “I assume you have no papers?”

  Handsome held up two empty hands.

  “And you, Livvie. Why would you get involved?”

  Playing a precious card that I hoped would move James’s heart, I said, “Handsome is Tilly’s father.”

  Handsome cleared his throat. “I thank you, sir, for what you tried to do for my girl.”

  James raised his eyebrow and, in feigned exasperation, said, “But can you do hair?” When Handsome did not respond, James added, “Don’t worry. I only jest. Look, man.” He straightened and pointed his finger at Handsome. “You showing up here puts all of us at risk. The good news is that my sister hasn’t already sent you down to Birney’s, where you’d be grabbed before your hand touched the knocker.”

  “How would you know this, James?” I asked. “From what I hear, Birney is a devout abolitionist and outspoken for our cause.”

  “Exactly,” said James. And he was right. Even after his press was destroyed, Birney had persisted in publishing his abolitionist newspaper, The Philanthropist, and thus invited scrutiny. “And please do not say ‘our’ cause, Olivia. Your recklessness pains me.” Again, to Handsome: “Can you steer a pair of drafts?”

  “It’s what I’ve been doing all these years.”

  “We could use another driver in the company yard. And the name of Givens keeps the patrollers away. But if you go outside the yard, I will not be able to protect you.”

  “With all due respect, James,” said I, “that all sounds a bit shaky.”

  “With all due respect, Olivia, Handsome here doesn’t have many choices. Unless I want to call the constable, which I don’t. I’ve seen enough colored people dragged back into slavery to keep me ill for a lifetime.” James looked at me and said, “And why the amazement, Livvie?”

  “It’s just that . . . It’s a very kind offer, James.”

  “Sometimes you see me narrowly.”

  “You are very kind, Mr. James,” said Handsome. “You and your brother, though he was the one who sent me back to—”

  “Well, then, Handsome,” I said, cutting him off. “What do you say? Are you going to work for the great company?” It wouldn’t do to have him bring up his connection to Erasmus, and I didn’t want to step on James’s charity.

  “If it’s all the same to you, ma’am, and to you, Mr. James, I think I’d best try my luck in Canada.”

  “But how will we get you to Canada?” I said.

  “Well,” said James, and quite jovially, “let’s go into the library and write another letter. This time”—he jerked his head at the letter in my hand—“we’ll write to Mr. Dean. Now there’s a man who can help you.”

  * * *

  Handsome slept in the loft above the stables that night and the following. On the third night, a dray pulled up stacked with candle crates.

  “Evidently, Livvie,” James said as he filled out the paperwork in his study, “we are reaching farther markets. These candles are going all the way to Cleveland. Now let’s go talk to your friend Handsome.”

  We went out to the stables, James holding forth about Mr. Dean, his crate maker. “An ingenious fellow! Knows a lot about a lot.”

  “Crates?” I said cautiously, but James seemed delighted.

  “Crates. Pallets. You name it.” He whistled for Handsome, who peeked out of the loft. “C’mon down!”

  Handsome descended the ladder and stood while James explained his scheme as if he were pitching investors rather than speaking to an audience of two. He took us to the dray that was stacked high with crates stamped with the label “candles,” but with the name of Givens omitted. As he dropped to the ground and crawled beneath the wagon, James said, “I’ve commissioned Dean!” He beckoned us to follow, so we, too, ducked down and scrabbled forth. Soon we were beneath the platform of the dray as James unlatched two hooks, allowing a trapdoor above us to fall open. “Look inside,” he said to Handsome. “You’ll have plenty of air, but not much light. You might get a sore joint or two, but it shouldn’t be too uncomfortable. There’s a place to sit, see? Dean was only too happy to build some cabinetry besides crates. There’s a man waiting for you in Cleveland.”

  “Well, I’ll be smote,” said Handsome, standing up and craning his neck into the cunningly fashioned compartment that, from the outside, was concealed by stacked-up candle crates. He would have said more, but we heard footsteps across the yard, so the three of us crouched very still, assuming it was one of the servant girls. We could hear the sound of a skirt sweeping along the cobbles. Suddenly Hatsepha bent down and peered at us.

  “Dear?” said James. “What are you doing here?”

  “Eleven years of marriage?” said Hatsepha. “Surely you know I read your mail?” She gaped at Handsome, whose eyes were wide and who looked as if any minute he would bolt. “So this is the man you are ushering?”

  “You intercepted my note to Dean?”

  “And to that man in Cleveland.”

  James and I braced for the tirade—the ignominy of this endeavor, the prospect of jail, the loss of our good name and business.

  “Well, he has to eat something,” said Hatsepha. “I had the cook make up a basket. Oh, and a blanket. It’s still cold at night.”

  James, Handsome, and I crawled out from beneath the dray and brushed off the straw.

  “I ain’t got words,” said Handsome, taking the basket.

  “Nor I,” said I.
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br />   “We loved Tilly very much, Mr. Handsome,” said Hatsepha. “It was an outrage what was done to her.”

  Handsome took the basket and gave a little bow. James said, “You might want to use the privy. It’s an all-night ride.”

  * * *

  “Well, I hope that takes care of that,” James said before we went to bed. “Your little foray into abolition.”

  “James,” I said, “what made you think of using crates?”

  We were in the library. James was paging through a book of Mr. Emerson’s lectures, and furtively, too, since Hatsepha had pronounced Emerson “too heady,” and worse, an atheist.

  “Interesting what this man Emerson says,” said James, marking a line with his forefinger, “about being part of something larger. This notion of us all being one.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Crates. Well, I overheard Dean going on and on about abolition and . . . well, Dean makes our crates.”

  “So who gave you the man’s name in Cleveland?”

  “Dean, of course. Seems to know everyone,” said James. He tapped his finger on Emerson’s essay. “I’ve often wondered . . . had I been a scholar . . .” He wrestled with the words, his eyes drifting back to the page, lingering on the essay until he came to the end and snapped the book shut.

  Chapter 25

  1841

  Dear Livvie—

  Now with the snow upon us, one would think our life would quiet down, but not so. First, the mule ran off on Christmas Eve. For once, I felt blessed that the nag was slow, for I caught up to her just up the road at the Utopia settlement, where, I believe, they were eyeing her for a meal.

  And then a flock of blackbirds—you know of what I speak—decided to fly over a frozen river. Half of them went through the ice. How wrenching it is to hear their screams and know that if I went out in the skiff, I might join their frigid Purgatory.

  Lastly, the boy had a spell of fever, but seems to be recovering

  I set down the letter on the settee in my sitting room and rubbed my eyes. The boy needs a mother, I thought to myself. And Erasmus needs a wife. I knew there were women he visited—the kind who live on the edge of town and who weren’t averse to a penny. But he needed a partner, and since it wasn’t to be me with my compromised vision, he should seek someone out. Perhaps the third daughter of some farmer.

  In the meantime, I had my books and my notes. Often, I would inscribe my own observations in the margins of Silas’s conclusions. I would, for example, add a few lines about the benefit of peppermint along with chamomile for a cold. At the escritoire, I scribbled on a sheaf of paper that rice, when heated in a silk bag, could ease menstrual cramps or even the contractions that followed the aborting of a fetus. I had noticed, too, that corsets caused bruising and constrained a woman’s ability to laugh.

  My own health was finally improving. The most difficult to endure were the headaches, and I squinted at everything—words on a page, stitches pricked by my needle, a bird in a tree.

  The week after receiving Erasmus’s letter, Rutherford took me into town in the gig to see the oculus maker, a German Jew named Krauss who also practiced phrenology.

  “Really?” I said when he placed his hand on my skull as if to fathom my myriad ailments and quirks. “I fear it’s my eyes that are giving me fits.”

  “And your head, yes?” Krauss said in a thick accent. “What is this here? Did you fall down?”

  Abner—or was it Pate?—had slammed me into a wall.

  “It was a mishap,” I said.

  “And yet when I press here”—he dug his thumb in painfully—“it goes all the way to your stomach, ja?”

  Indeed, I felt quite nauseated.

  “Your skull has known some violence.”

  Not only my skull.

  “My eyes?”

  “Ah,” he said. “We try some lenses.”

  He brought out a black lacquer box lined with velvet and filled with rows of crystal disks. Holding up one after another, he instructed me to gaze toward a painting on the far wall and tell him when I could see the cow.

  “The Holstein?” I said on the fourth lens.

  “Actually, a Friesian,” said Krauss, sounding immensely pleased. “Now, on to the close vision,” he said, producing a second box of crystals. He handed me a book and asked me if the letters were clear. It took me some time before I could distinguish an O from a Q.

  “Bifocals would be best,” he said, “but not so pretty, I think. So heavy with the frames. You need to wear glasses like jewelry, so a set of lorgnettes. One for reading, one for scenery.”

  “Bifocals are fine,” I said, well aware that I was lucky to have glasses at all, and only thanks to James. Then there was the matter of my sensitivity to light, but Krauss said that he had a solution—dark crystals the color of amber. “I show you mine,” he said, leaving the room.

  The table by which I was sitting was covered with papers, so I experimented with the lenses for closer reading, pecking among the sheaves. Rejecting various Cincinnati papers and flyers, I snatched up an old copy of The Liberator dated February 1, 1839. I had read William Lloyd Garrison’s works, but was no subscriber. Now with a new lens, I found myself regarding his reasoning with keener focus.

  There has never been, as far as we know, in all the free states, a single meeting of colored people in favor of Colonization. Surely they are more interested in a right decision of the matter than any others. And he who should say they are not competent to inquire and judge wisely in the matter needs only to attend one of their meetings on the subject to blush at his own ignorance and prejudice.

  That Krauss would openly display the work of an abolitionist like Garrison betrayed the naïveté of one so recently immigrated. When he reentered the room, I tapped my finger on the page. “Is this your customary reading?”

  “Ja, ja,” he said. “This terrible situation. No German would hold with it. And even the English have said genug. Enough. But here in America—” He clicked his teeth. “Freedom, democracy, and incredibly—this.”

  “You are openly an abolitionist?”

  He leaned back his head and laughed. “I suppose yes. Only two years ago, I was just a German. I get here to Cincinnati, and I am nothing. Now I have a business and I’m an abolitionist. What a wonderful country, no?”

  “Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril,” I said, reading aloud the banner head.

  “We know this to be true, ja?” said Krauss as he ushered me to the door, promising me glasses by the following week, adding, “And are you sure no lorgnette?”

  “Heavens, no.”

  “But you are a pretty lady!”

  I laughed. “Maybe once.” Indeed, my hair was turning white.

  “Mrs. Orpheus?” he called after me as I descended the stairs to the street. “Please take care that nothing further hurts your head.”

  * * *

  The glasses, indeed, were unbecoming, but my headaches diminished. I could spend more time reading and writing, though I still found stitching excruciating.

  “Truly, Olivia,” said Hatsepha, “you might have done with the lorgnette.”

  “These free up my hands. Perhaps I shall take up the piano again.”

  Hatsepha stared out the window and sighed so heavily that I could only imagine she was overcome by longing for a time when we had played duets, unburdened by husbands and the passage of time. “Do you suppose he made it?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Handsome?” she said. “I hear the cold in Canada is fearsome.” She began to thread a needle. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d care so much, but Eugene Orpheus was dreadful and not in the least like your Silas. Perhaps I feel quite spiteful.”

  Bolstered by a sudden sense of solidarity, I said it would be a worthy venture to spirit off each and every slave, and not just Handsome, whose flight to freedom had been inadvertent from the start.

  �
�Goodness!” said Hatsepha. “Where would you put them?”

  “You told me to suggest Liberia,” I said, and accusingly, too.

  “I changed my mind on that subject.” She shuddered. “Or rather, Tilly did. She said, ‘Miss Hatsepha, I no more speak African than you speak Chinese.’”

  “What if we could spirit just a few?” I said. “Tilly has a brother named Grady. And there’s a little girl named Sticks.”

  “Tss!” she said. “The names they give their children. Well, we can’t exactly parade a fleet of Givens candle crates into Kentucky, can we?”

  I dared not tell her that Erasmus had transported a man in a coffin, for evoking my brother’s name had an ill effect on Hatsepha. That madman, she called him. That abductor of children, she would say, ignoring that William was, in fact, Erasmus’s child.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “The idea is mad. Silly for me to even put into words. And yet . . .”

  Hatsepha licked the end of her thread. “And yet, we could get a bit of revenge.”

  The poor woman had no idea how appealing revenge was to me—not only against Eugene, but against those brothers, Abner and Pate, the whole damn lot of slaveholders. And yet we would find few friends on this side of the river, regardless of abolitionist ardor. Tut-tutting about slavery may have been an acceptable posture, but worse than slavery was the thought of actually ending it, for too much was at stake—livelihoods, property rights, not to mention the exquisite indignation derived at the expense of slaveholder and slave alike. We whites of the North could slip from our pews to sip at the cup of disapproval tendered by our minister and still return to our Sunday meals of self-satisfaction and demiglazed duck.

  And so I would have limited my experience of ushering slaves to my episode with Handsome and my stint at Enduring Hope, and would have done so happily had not I received another letter from my brother.

  Dearest Livvie—

  It has been some time since you left us. New Richmond is turning into a metropolis. More people settle all the time. I’ve heard little from our friends in Ripley, who have been spooked by the aggressiveness of the patrollers and undone by Mahan’s tribulations. I’ve turned my attention elsewhere. We have cleared more forest, and though the soil is thin, I am hoping to grow apples.