“Well!” said Hatsepha. “If she thinks that wearing my old hand-me-downs is supposed to impress me . . .”
“Don’t you see?” said I. “She knows! She knows exactly where her funds went from buying that hat!”
Hatsepha gaped. “Surely you don’t think?”
* * *
I can’t say that suddenly the drawing rooms of Cincinnati were festooned by Hatsepha’s hats. From time to time, we recognized a cap or a bonnet—or thought we did—but we were reassured that Erasmus was proceeding in his enterprise by Erasmus himself, who wrote more frequently than he used to, perhaps because he was curious about his son.
I have quite a knack for salesmanship [he wrote]. Indeed, it takes me back to the days when I was scavenging animal parts for James. You have to know how to talk to people, women especially. I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t like to be told that she looks fetching in this or that, and though I know nothing about hats, I know well how to appreciate a pretty face, and this is to my advantage, for I have made more selling hats in a week than I have in years of preaching the gospel.
“Isn’t he supposed to be”—Hatsepha dropped her voice—“smuggling people?”
Our original scheme was that Erasmus would consult with Mrs. Beasley and her associates as to the particulars of whom to abet. Few knew all the details of the network, but Erasmus was supposed to make himself available, and when instructed, go across to Kentucky. After familiarizing himself with a town or village, he would establish trust and blend in. At a predetermined time, he would collect his cargo and conceal the person in the compartments of his carriage. The proceeds of his actual hat sales were to be used for purchasing further inventory as well as to support himself. That hats now were appearing in Cincinnati, however, indicated that he was selling into a market other than the one we had intended.
Hatsepha smacked the parchment. “He says nothing about conducting runaways!”
I scrubbed the letters for a clue. Something about the popularity of a certain style of headdress that was easily shipped, for instance. But the letter was inscrutable, and we were left guessing as to the efficacy of his enterprise.
Years passed, and we heard less and less from Erasmus. By then, William’s voice was changing, and he had grown a foot so that he met me eye to eye. I spent most of my time tutoring my nephew, exploring not only literature, but the natural world as well. We even familiarized ourselves with the sages of the time—Emerson and the like—discussing the limits of democracy, the responsibilities of the educated man. Indeed, I hadn’t been this intellectually engaged since I was married to Silas, and had to remind myself that the boy was not my peer, but rather a lad whose views were not yet formed.
“That’s my boy,” said James, marveling at William’s ability to solve an equation.
“Be careful,” said I. “He is ours only temporarily.” Even if Erasmus never returned for him, the boy would grow up.
James accused me of discouraging William from his training at Givens and Sons. As for William, he liked history, but was most alive when talking about rocks—a not altogether inconsequential talent when pertaining to the business of mines. When he was thirteen, we took him by carriage to eastern Ohio, where were located most of the mines whence James extracted his gas for lighting.
“Never become a miner, Willy,” advised James. “’Tis a dirty thankless job that results in infirmity. Own a mine if you must, but better still, be rid of the headache and own the leases to the gas that is easily rendered from coal. ‘Junk,’ they said, just as they said pig fat was junk. But from this junk comes light.”
And so continued William’s education in the absence of Erasmus, whose presence dimmed before an incandescent life with James, the memory of a campsite by the name of Enduring Hope, a half-built chapel, the slowness of rural life along the river, a father who wrote intermittently and vaguely about selling hats in this village or that south of the river, none of which seemed compelling.
Chapter 27
1847
The house was in a state. Trunks had been purchased—mostly for books—but Hatsepha insisted the boy have new vestments, particularly if the winters were cold. I reminded her that, though Oberlin was farther to the north, it wasn’t so far—not nearly as far as if he’d gone to Princeton or Harvard or Columbia College’s School of Mines.
“Nevertheless,” she said, “we don’t want him taking a chill.”
“I’ll be fine, Aunt Hatsepha,” said William.
She gave him such a fond look that who would have remembered this was the baby whose squall had disrupted her wedding, who persistently reminded her of Julia, who came to us unkempt and ill-educated, but whom she and my brother now regarded as their son?
“You will write,” said Hatsepha, brushing some lint off his shoulder.
“And with beautiful grammar,” he said, gracing me with a glance.
I was afraid to smile lest my whole countenance dissolve. This boy who had to be taught how to hold a teacup, to dip punch from a crystal bowl, to dance a square at a cotillion, to fashion his cravat, to whom to bow, from whom to turn away, when to remove his hat. He did all this as if learning the customs of a foreign land, finding them charming but irrelevant, something to be indulged.
It had been seven years since Erasmus had brought him to us. Though Hatsepha may have seen it as charity, we had in fact traded for the boy, ridding ourselves of Erasmus, who now was absorbed as an itinerant peddler into northern Kentucky where he could observe the comings and goings of commerce.
Hemp, mostly, he wrote. And lately, a zeal for tobacco.
His letters spoke of a maker of tools so fine that farmers came up from Versailles, and an ironworker whose banisters were famous. And of course there were hats, along with all variations of fashion, including footwear, the leather for which had come from north of the river, but whose final incarnation rivaled those of Paris. Livestock, especially horses, but occasionally cows and sheep, the rare exotic such as a zebra once making an appearance upon the auction block and causing quite a stir.
But it is in human flesh they mostly deal, wrote Erasmus:
the trading of which would curdle your blood. I tell you, Livvie. It’s as if these people had no heart or mind or sense of pain. I would deny that this was the very country to which we came so long ago, and with the highest of expectations.
About the true nature of his enterprise, he wrote more opaquely, such as the time he ushered to Ripley a woman fleeing the paws of her master. So coded was the text that I could not be sure if it was the girl’s body or soul that had been scarred (the line read “a parcel damaged but reparable”) or if she was a child of fourteen or a woman of forty-one (both numerals appearing in a sentence describing the cost of said parcel). That she was a female, we had no doubt, and hailing from Augusta, transported by wagon to Erie.
As Dante described hell, such is the auction block. It could well bear the placard “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The slaves know it, too, Livvie. You can see it in their eyes.
In the first few years after Erasmus left, William had run away twice, once after arguing with Hatsepha, and once after a small dustup when I insisted he complete an essay before hiking up the hill. I had known where to find him . . . down on the quay, having taken a horse from the stable. Having no money of his own, he was prevented from accessing passage upriver, but it took my explaining several times that his father was no longer at Enduring Hope but instead making money in Kentucky.
Hats? William had blurted in disgust. Da’s a riverman.
I had leaned into William’s face—this when I still stood taller—and said, Your da is doing important work, and there will come a day you’ll be proud of him.
Whether he had believed me and held on to this vision or sloughed it off as the memory of his father faded, the boy turned to literature and his rock collection and, in what would have made Erasmus happy, a love of hymns. He seemed reasonably but not particularly pious, a trait in keeping with
our family, Erasmus’s convenient sanctimony notwithstanding. He attended teas with young ladies—the Isabelles and the Mauds, daughters of landowners and of shipbuilders, regarding them courteously but with detachment.
You care more for your fossils, I once chided him.
And you, Aunt Fossil, he said with that smile.
How much I loved the boy.
And now we were sending William off to college. He stood a full head taller than I and had grown into a sort of handsomeness that I associated with English poets, though my eyesight was unreliable. He was accepted in church and town and workshop as James’s heir and sat next to Hatsepha in the carriage.
Of his father, he had ceased to speak.
He was getting into the carriage now. Late summer, but one of the maples already red. Five slaves had been hunted down in Bucktown the week before and dragged back across the river. The pulpits were heating up. I did not know whether to wish for rains and a turgid river to stanch the flow, or a dry autumn and shallow waters that might ease the passage of runaways.
I ran to the carriage. “You shan’t strain your eyes by staying up too late? The books shall wait till morning.”
William leaned out the window and took my hand. I wanted to touch his curls. “I have a case of candles, Aunt Livvie. And a lamp from Uncle James.”
James approached from the house, behatted and caped. He would escort the boy to school, the first of our family to go to college. Even with my dreary eyes, I could see the pride in my brother’s face, and for a moment, I recalled him as a young man eagerly selling candles, determined that fortune lay ahead.
“Good-bye, William,” called Hatsepha, producing a lavish hankie from her sleeve. Soon she would be blubbering, so I took her arm, and together we watched the trunk-laden carriage amble away, the hand of our nephew waving with all the optimism and confidence of that earlier Givens, my father, as he’d set upon the Ohio River on a flatboat, his future sure as the current, so close he could feel it, the promise of a new land right around the next stand of trees.
Chapter 28
1848
It wasn’t until the course of buttered sole that the subject was broached. Hatsepha had laid out all her finest linens, most of which were embroidered HGP in a lovely cursive, the enlarged G in the middle denoting “Givens,” the sponsor of the feast.
The occasion was the visit of our cousin Samuel who hailed from Enniskillen. It was Cousin Samuel’s father who had appropriated the family estate after the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the embargo lifted, he being the first son and the favorite of our grandfather. At the time of our emigration, Samuel, along with his parents and siblings, had stayed in County Crom, raising hops and cattle, fetching whatever the market would bear, smoking, drinking, praying to a Protestant God while assiduously avoiding the Catholics.
Now it had behooved Samuel to sail to the States to see how his cousins fared, although, as James pointed out, no one had seen fit to inquire until now when commodity prices had dipped again and word of the American Givenses’ success had drifted across the pond. It was early spring, and the centerpiece featured daffodils wedged so tightly into corsets of silver that they threatened to explode. Cousin Samuel twisted his water glass, gold-rimmed and enhanced with the Givens crest—a griffin surrounded by flames. In an Irish accent unmarked by famine or suppression of any kind, he addressed the assemblage gathered by his cousin’s wife. “A parson, you say?” he said, nodding to the Reverend Boland. Turning to Phinneaus Mumford: “And you, sir. A politician? Better a politician in America than in Dublin, where you’d fear for your hide.” Upon seeing the alarm on Phinneaus’s face, Cousin Samuel assured him that the constabulary in Northern Ireland was inclined to favor Protestants.
“Still bickering with the Catholics?” said Phinneaus Mumford. “Why, in America, it suits us to get along.”
“And yet,” said Cousin Samuel, “is there not some disquiet hereside when it comes to this slavery business?”
Silence, punctuated by the clink of fish forks upon plates adorned by the portraits of ancestors, real or imagined.
Ariadne Mumford spoke up. “All we talk about these days is slavery. Goodness, you’d think we were steeped in it, but we’d be hard-pressed to find a maid.” Ariadne patted her hair that had been dented by her hat, one that was all too familiar for having been one of Hatsepha’s staples two years earlier. “Of course there was our Tilly. Terrible scene when she was dragged off, and screaming, too.” She laughed lightly. “Sadly, she was the only one who could make sense of this mess.” She indicated her sorry hair as well as giving mine a piercing look.
At that moment, I regretted my earlier restraint when Ariadne arrived wearing a hat—pleated moiré lavishly lined in pink—and looking haughty as a cat wearing a castoff, oblivious to the destination of its proceeds.
“Sold to a brothel, no doubt,” said the Reverend Boland, speaking of Tilly, and with more relish than was seemly as he cut into roast beef garnished with horseradish.
“Fascinating,” said Cousin Samuel, chewing zealously. He pinged his crystal goblet as if to make a toast, then tapped on the dinner plate with a spoon that also bore the Givens crest. “Truly fascinating,” he said, bringing the spoon close to his eye. “You Americans fought a revolution and still manage to set a table fit for a lord.” Waving his napkin like a handkerchief of surrender, he said, “Does nothing escape the Givens mark?”
Ariadne Mumford looked forlornly at the napkin in her lap, and for a moment I suspected she was fixing to purloin it, much as she’d done with my pantalette so many years before when it had shown up at her neck.
Phinneaus Mumford could not contain himself. “This abolition business. Terrible for commerce. Why, ask James.”
Hatsepha eyed him beadily. “And what would my husband know of abolition?”
James dabbed his mouth with his napkin, smudging the G with gravy. “You must think I have my head in the sand, wife.”
Said I, “We all know you are too preoccupied with work to bother with the controversy. And thankfully, I might add, for without you we would starve.”
It had taken some years for James’s business to recover after he’d paid for the defense of Tilly. Apart from the risk he took with Handsome, we saw no need to sully him any further by tying him to the topic. In this I was thankful, for he seemed uninterested in Erasmus’s whereabouts or whether his business was successful. Erasmus was displaying a surprising aptitude for discretion, covertly moving about Kentucky, though lately I had seen signs that he’d ventured back to Cincinnati in spite of our admonitions to stay away. That Ariadne had bought a hat without recognizing this peddler as our younger brother spoke to the efficacy of his disguise as well as his change in demeanor. True, she had not seen him for years, but that Erasmus had taken such a chance infuriated me. Indeed, his last letter had bragged of his successes, implying that he was not only carrying out his mission, but was thriving economically as well.
I see another Givens venture in our future, he wrote. One that might dwarf James’s enterprise.
“Slavery more than abolition,” said James, who was still considering Phinneaus’s statement.
“Excuse me?” said Cousin Samuel.
“You ask what causes instability in business. I fault the Peculiar Institution more than those who would remedy it.”
Hatsepha waved to Mette, the Norwegian girl, to take away the plates and bring the dessert.
“It is such a pleasure having you visit, Cousin Samuel,” said Hatsepha as we settled into the sherbet. “James and Olivia were just children when they left Ireland. How would they find it now?”
“More refined than here,” said Cousin Samuel. “Though not without its problems.”
“Starvation, for one thing,” I said under my breath.
“There are those who would starve,” said Cousin Samuel, sucking on his spoon. “And the Crown does little to help. But then again, we’re not fighting savages on the prairie. Ha! Ha!”
Af
ter dessert was done, James spirited Cousin Samuel, Phinneaus Mumford, and the Reverend Boland to the study for a smoke.
“Awful man,” sniffed Hatsepha as we retired to the parlor. “I’ll wager he’s looking for a wife.”
* * *
But the following day, Cousin Samuel confided in me the real purpose for his visit. We were promenading upon the quay admiring the steam vessels.
“Why, you could take a boat all the way down to New Orleans,” I told him, hoping he would take the hint.
“Alas, boats bring me no pleasure, though a marvelous thing they are. So many are leaving Ireland. ’Tis a sad thing, emigration.”
“As I recall.”
“You were sixteen?”
“Fifteen.”
“Barely a woman. And sailing to Lord knew what.”
I told him I couldn’t remember such solicitousness ever expressed by his father.
“But now you’ve created such a prosperous household—”
“James has. Not I.”
“—that a new generation of Givenses need not suffer such uncertainty.”
A horn tooted, and a roar rose up from a crowd as a brass band burst into a waltz to hasten the embarkation of a new batch of travelers. There was always a sense of hurry-up about the landing, speed being an American virtue. Boats would race to see which was the fastest to Louisville, blotting out all memories of a decade earlier when the steamship Moselle had overtaxed her boilers and exploded. I should never forget the gruesome aftermath that littered the shores. It was the very vessel I’d taken when I’d returned to Enduring Hope.
“What are you saying?”
“To be blunt, Cousin Olivia, I am impressed by the wealth of the American Givenses, the only drawback being the lack of issue.” We paused as a passel of Germans pulling their children and a crate of chickens hustled toward the docks. “And so I have a proposal . . .”
The Eulogist Page 23