“California.”
“You’re late.”
“Don’t got a watch.” Quimbly slipped under the dock and sat beside John Bovee. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been eating with Bettine and her mother. The girl had found him skipping rocks, taken his hand, and brought him fireside, where Frau Klein fried eggs and served him hot cabbage and potatoes from a chipped ceramic pot. Bettine made him lie down, and she ran her hands over him just like the Fool had the sailor a few hours before. He’d watched her fingers, the smallest encircled by a scrap of red cloth, ends tied to resemble a rose.
“No watch?” Parkhurst laughed and the other boys followed, tearing the night with their mirth. “Here, take one of mine. You can pay me later.” He tossed a cold metal oval at Quimbly, who caught it and stuck it into his one good pocket.
“We’ve planned it all out,” Parkhurst continued. “Wednesday, Cobb and Phineas and me and you will take the boat out, before daybreak, when it’s darkest. We’ll board the Sea Witch stern side, and slip into the hold, all of us except Cobb, who’ll stay with the rowboat. He’s too small to carry much anyway. And John Bovee will be on shore watch.”
“I’m always on watch,” John Bovee said.
“We need to have room for the gold.” Parkhurst bent forward and the others pulled closer to listen, “I hear there’s nuggets as big as my head.”
“What if they catch you?” Cobb pulled his torn jacket tighter, the shirtsleeves dangling over his fingertips.
“Won’t happen.” Parkhurst reached behind him to pull out his murder knife, which he tapped, blunt side against his knee. “First off, no one’s expecting us to row out. Second, ain’t no one awake at that hour, and third, if there is, I’ll take care of him.”
“Me too,” Phineas said, though his words rang hollow.
Quimbly rubbed his new pocket watch. The thought of the icy Hudson terrified him, though he would never admit it, nor the fact that he couldn’t swim. He was still new to the River Gang, still proving himself. He knew the boys liked him for the very reason they were wary of him: he was traveled, adventurous. To contradict this image would upset them. His words would hold less authority, and he knew what happened when one lost authority. Knew from the example of his father, a preacher now behind bars for thieving, though no one would have raised even an eyebrow had he not admitted, one drunken afternoon before his congregation, to meeting Satan. His wife, Quimbly’s ma, had slept with too many dairy farmers to have much authority either. Quimbly knew better. “What about the docks?” he said.
“John’ll whistle three times if he sees anything. We’ll row out whichever way’s safe.” Parkhurst nodded, the motion of his head and shoulder a dark blur. “Tomorrow night, we practice.”
“It’s a good plan,” Phineas confirmed, brushing the dirt from his trousers and rising. “We’ll be rich.”
“Wait!” Parkhurst held forth his knife, one hand on the handle, the other cradling the blade, and Phineas bent to kiss it. Cobb and John Bovee followed, then Quimbly, who, like the others, did it because it brought good luck. The moon, just a ribbon, hung low enough that it shone blue in the metal.
“May the Sea Witch bring great riches.” Parkhurst looked down, as if praying, and Quimbly could make out the lines of his friend’s narrow lips, which opened and closed around each word with practiced precision. Soon Parkhurst would scratch a new line beside the dozen or so that marked each meeting.
“May —” Parkhurst turned suddenly, raising his knife. “Who’s there!”
Feet crunched beach gravel. All five boys turned, discovered the small, dark figure a few yards away. Within seconds Phineas held the intruder pinned between his arm and chest. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“You’ll wake all of New York!” Parkhurst stepped forward to take the intruder from Phineas’s rough embrace. The outline of a skirt swirled, and Parkhurst leaned forward to regard the sniffling creature. “It’s that German girl,” he said. “Must have followed you, Quimbly.”
“How do you know?” Quimbly stared at Bettine, but he couldn’t tell if her eyes met his. She’d get him in a lot of trouble if she hadn’t already.
“We all came from downtown.”
“Wasn’t me.” Quimbly said, but Bettine had recognized him. She stepped tearfully beside him, her hand seeking his.
“How much she hear?” Cobb asked.
“Don’t matter now,” John Bovee tossed a rock into the river, allowing the thunk to introduce his conclusion. “Now we’ve got to kill her.”
“She didn’t understand. Can’t speak a word of English.” Quimbly knocked Bettine’s hand away so that she’d know not to follow him again. He raised an arm against John’s intentions. Quimbly didn’t much care for violence, especially to girls. And contradicting John Bovee was easy, as no one ever listened to him.
Parkhurst swung his knife. He laughed and stepped close to Bettine. Words rushed from her lips, harsh, quick, German words, the sounds tumbling over each other like children over fallen change.
“You won’t say nothing to no one, you hear?” Parkhurst said and then tucked the knife into his back pocket, perhaps too quickly, because he added: “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will next time.” He turned to the others. “Come on.”
“What about —” John Bovee began.
“Quimbly’s sweet on her.”
“Am not,” Quimbly called as the others headed back along the waterfront. Bettine took his hand again, and he was glad for the darkness concealing his blush.
THE MEMORY OF the Fool’s voice drew Quimbly to Thompkins Square the next morning, after a hasty breakfast of stale rolls and fried fish swiped from a stand. The crowd surpassed the one assembled the day before, though the dockworkers now wore clean, buttoned shirts and held children or called after ones running screaming through trampled flower beds. Even the fashionable ladies, arriving from the surrounding brownstones in white gloves and tulle-covered hats, trod upon the soil to steal a better view. The Fool knew people in high places, Quimbly decided.
The Fool wore wide gold-colored suspenders and a top hat that towered high. He seemed to dance as he pulled a dark metal rod from his traveling trunk and circled the old elm near the park’s center. Ada held one of the tree’s snaking roots, thick as her arm and the color of frosty soil. Her hair, fastened back in a braid and tied with blue ribbons, was shiny. She appeared tired to Quimbly, who noted her pallor and the red lips that not once turned up to smile. She bent gracefully, nodding politely when the Fool asked if she “felt it,” but her heart seemed elsewhere. The Fool, on the other hand, tied rope with zeal, dozens of eight-yard lengths that he spread along the ground to radiate from the tree trunk like the spokes of a wheel.
Quimbly leaned forward to observe the frayed end of the strand nearest him. He reached out to touch it, but a cold hand pulled him away.
“Let the sick forward.” An old woman glared at him from a Merlin chair with large, mud-covered wheels and a padded back and footrest. Dressed head to toe in gray delaine, she looked like an insect. “Move aside, boy.”
And though Quimbly had no desire to comply, her two sons, dockworkers both of them and strong enough to heft crates of coffee and flour single-handedly, pulled him away.
“I’ve waited nearly two hours,” Quimbly began, but the Fool announced himself, and the crowd applauded and Quimbly fell back yet again.
“This is Ada, my lovely assistant.” The Fool’s voice rose, sweet syrup to the hungry. “She will join today with the sick and find cure! For though heavenly in aspect, she is diseased. Insomnia! Nights without the pleasure of dream! Waking hours of cold darkness, solitude. Who will join with her today? Who, too, will find peace of body and mind?”
Ada tied a cord around her waist. She raised one arm and regarded the crowd with eyes made no less beautiful by the dark circles beneath them.
“We men are like magnets,” the Fool continued. “We act on other bodies, we propel matter through sp
ace. We are fluid, natural, one with all celestial — Wait!” He held his hand to the crowd. “Do not mock my words. Do not disregard their truth. Open yourselves to the force, the magnetic energy emanating from this elm. Allow it to join with you, to flow through you, to heal your wounds and troubles. Listen to me. Listen to my words.”
The spidery gray lady grasped the rope, as did nearly a dozen others, older people mostly, aside from Ada and a young girl with a harelip. Quimbly longed to take hold of a rope as well. The Fool’s words had uncovered a roughness inside him, a feeling that throbbed like an empty stomach. He felt foolish, uncertain. If he’d been a child, he’d have run to his mother.
“I’ve magnetized this tree with my most powerful magnet. The force will flow through you, align your humors. Remember, the magnetized compass needle points north, while its poleless counterpart spins aimlessly. Come, join me!” The Fool led the roped patients — he, pushing the old lady’s wheeled chair, the others, stepping slowly, mostly with eyes closed, expectant. Forward and back. Quimbly could not look away.
“I’m healed!” a gaunt man cried, flexing his fingers in front of his eyes. One after another, the patients released their ropes, meeting Ada, who had stepped away from the tree to collect payments in her blue silk bag. The old woman attempted to rise from her wheeled chair, and the Fool put his arms around her, guiding her upward, forward.
“Once the internal harmony has faltered,” he said — he’d been speaking for some minutes now, Quimbly realized, only he couldn’t remember the words —“we must reestablish the natural state. The healthy state. That is to say, disease is nothing but interference. Matter interfering with fluid.”
“I have not felt so good in years,” the old lady said, though her legs gave way and she fell back into her cushioned seat. “Years!
“If only I had the baquet!” the Fool answered, speaking over her head to the crowd. “There’s no substance more fluid, more capable of conducting, than water. But we need a baquet.”
“Help us build a baquet!” Ada echoed. And as she had the day before, she gathered contributions, this time hundreds of folded bills and silver coins.
Quimbly found a stretch of shaded ground and sat, watching strangers engage the Fool in conversation: Will it work for rheumatism? For chronic pain? For toothache? Blindness? Upset stomach? Even Quimbly could answer the questions, a boy who could neither read nor write, who stole his breakfast and slept under the stars with a rusted saucer that served as a pillow.
At last only the Fool and Ada remained, and Quimbly approached them, his hair combed as best he could with fingers, his face wiped clean with palms and spit. “I’d like to apprentice,” he said before he realized that he’d waited till all the others left in order to say just this. He could taste the words, like suckers dissolving on his tongue. An unexpected sweetness.
The Fool regarded Quimbly with a half smile. Up close his skin looked windburned. “You could use a good bath, a bit of soap,” he said.
Quimbly stared back at him, hands in pockets. Now that he’d spoken his unformed desire, he could think of nothing else.
“You have great animal magnetism. I sense this about you. You draw people, don’t you?” The Fool did not wait for an answer. “You were drawn to me. But you must realize that I practice with powerful forces. Cosmic forces. Not the sort one takes or gives lightly.”
Ada ran her hand over the Fool’s shoulder. “I could use a rest, love,” she said.
“A rest from the bottle.” The Fool tousled the boy’s hair. “You must promise, on the blood of your ancestors, and your own if you have no one else, to do good. Solely good. Not one false step. Not one careless word! When you practice my art, you control your listener. Do you hear me? Do you really hear me? Do you understand?”
Warmth coursed through Quimbly despite the chill of spring dusk. His eyes felt heavy, his lips tried to open but could not.
“You must not use the power for selfish gain. You must not abuse it. Not once. Do you hear?”
Quimbly tried to nod, felt the muscles but not the motion. Had he answered?
“Very good,” the Fool said. “Tomorrow, then. Noon at 62 Orchard Street. My dear sister has invited us to perform a cure. Bathe first.” The Fool removed his top hat, revealing damp curls that spiraled around his forehead. “Buy yourself something to eat,” he added kindly, handing Quimbly a wad of folded bills. “And a smart outfit.”
THAT NIGHT, AT MIDNIGHT, under a cloud-covered sliver of moon, was the practice run. Parkhurst and Phineas, the largest of the five boys, carried the rowboat to the river’s edge, and Cobb, who noticed the missing oar, raced off to steal one from a nearby pier.
The water looked blacker than usual to Quimbly, and especially cold, as he remembered he’d have to bathe in it the next morning. His parcel, containing new trousers, shirt, and a black stovepipe hat, sat concealed among the rocks. He hadn’t returned to the shantytown for fear of finding Bettine, whom he’d managed to avoid all day. He tied his face mask, torn from an old jacket lining Parkhurst brought, and tried to look confident as he stepped into the rowboat.
John Bovee refused to steady the boat, a passive protest against his status as watchman, but Quimbly made his way to the front beside Parkhurst. Behind him Phineas and Cobb argued, the older brother claiming that the younger’s strokes scarcely touched the water, forcing the boat to turn constantly starboard. The river moved differently in the darkness, as stealthy as a burglar, and strong. But the four soon found a rhythm, learned the current.
“We’ll have to be faster tomorrow,” Parkhurst said, his oar balanced on his knees.
Tomorrow Quimbly would see 62 Orchard Street. The address alone evoked a happiness as bright as a fresh, plucked fruit. He’d learn how to make magic with his voice, how to hold people trancelike, how to cure and control them.
“Quimbly!” Parkhurst said. “Mind the dock.” And Quimbly ducked just in time to avoid colliding with the wooden rail at the side of a low pier.
“I didn’t see,” Quimbly said.
“Be alert. We can’t afford mistakes.”
The admonition delighted Cobb and Phineas, who received Parkhurst’s displeasure so often they rejoiced when it fell on other shoulders. Quimbly shifted his weight; the boat dipped. Mistakes happened only when he lied. If truth was on his side, as his father used to say when he was sober, so was everything else, and there was no way he could go wrong. He searched for the words to explain this, to assure Parkhurst that everything would work out. “I don’t make mistakes,” was all he could come up with.
From the shore came three low whistles: John Bovee reporting a constable or night watchman. “Come on,” Parkhurst said.
“It’s not really an alarm is it?” Cobb said. “I mean —”
“Pull,” Parkhurst commanded. “Pull hard.”
The boys pushed off from the dock and rowed toward the hideout to the rhythm of Parkhurst’s hissed disappointments: Your heart must be in it. I can’t be minding you. You can’t be whining, or dreaming, or picking your nose. There’s thousands of dollars of gold to be had. Are you in? All in?
Quimbly felt his friend’s demanding stare. Cold water leaked into the bottom of the boat, a half inch, but enough to wet his feet and send a chill through his body.
“You haven’t been the same since you lost your heart to that girl,” Parkhurst continued.
“I did not.” Quimbly’s voice wavered. Bettine meant nothing to him, despite her soulful eyes and hair that always looked neat though she slept on a filthy pink blanket and didn’t own a mirror. “She follows me around.”
“Your head’s so full you practically lost it on that dock back there.” The boat struck the riverbank, and Parkhurst jumped out to pull it ashore. “We might have to put you on dock watch.”
Cobb and Phineas laughed.
“I’m in,” Quimbly said, words he hoped sounded convincing. Soon he would stand on land again, and he’d feel more in control. “All in.”
�
�� • •
THE HOUSE AT 62 Orchard Street, even grander inside than out, had carpeted floors and chandeliers that hung like sparkling gems from the ceiling. Embroidered curtains framed tall windows, and a dark-skinned girl stood beside the door to sweep the step so that it was fresh for each arriving guest. The house was an institute, a special hospital for the head. Quimbly couldn’t read the sign, but he overheard two gentlemen speak of it, and the fact that Caroline Stone brought all her suitors for a reading before she would receive them in her home.
The front parlor contained nearly twenty guests, Quimbly estimated, trying not to stare at any of the finely dressed men and women. A dark-haired woman — the Fool’s sister, most likely — was greeting each arrival and handing out pamphlets. She wore four gold necklaces and as many gold rings on each hand, and she didn’t even look when a heavyset woman hailed her urgently from across the room; she shook her head and said, “Not now, Letty,” nothing more, even when Letty dropped the tray of dried plums she’d been holding and stomped away, leaving the fruits to roll over the floor.
The Fool, fingers dampened with spit, played an old-fashioned glass harmonica, left foot pumping the worn wooden pedal, fingers rubbing the instrument glass with great fondness. The soft notes hung behind genteel conversations about weather and riding, miracle cures, and the latest fashion.
“Bit late,” the Fool said.
“You said noon.” Quimbly felt small, despite his top hat and clean red shirt fastened with real cufflinks snatched secretly from Parkhurst’s stash. He glanced around the room again, searching for Ada, but finding no one quite so glamorous even among the ladies in lovely silk gowns, with lockets — all of them — around pale necks.
The Fool nodded toward the guests as if to apologize for his assistant’s tardiness. “Ada’s ill, or rather, she’s refused cure this morning. A half hour with the baquet is all she needs. But she heard no reason.”
Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain Page 10