Washington Black: A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

  “I have not,” I said, hearing the brittleness of my voice, the suppressed contempt.

  “Oh, as a lover of equations you would surely find them wonderful. The calculation involved. The art. They are true marvels of propulsion. But mark my words when I say they will bring about the desecration of all that we know and rightly hold sacred. Distances grow ever shorter, the lands are more closely drawn together, and distinctions become blurred.” He spoke slowly and with great measure, so that I almost could not hear him. “I myself will always go by carriage, even when it ceases to be fashionable and other men accept strange means of conveyance—steam engines and such. Unholy aerial contraptions.”

  I studied him quietly; he was speaking of the Cloud-cutter, of course. Behind me a man cried hoarsely out for more drink and was hissed down by his companion. A glass clattered to the floor but did not break.

  “I made the most fascinating journey recently, in America. I passed for hours through the countryside. Outside, the grass was grey and dry, went on for miles and miles. You see, one misses such things when one travels by other means—you don’t get the sense of dimension. I had always supposed America to be a land of mountains. Well, I tell you, that is not so. Not always. This I have witnessed with my own eyes. You can rumble about for days without seeing so much as a bearded hill. So much as a bump.

  “I came to a final stop in a village I did not know. I hadn’t wanted to disembark, but the driver would no longer have me. It was full dark, and I began to walk but saw no landmarks. I was well and truly lost. I noticed then a figure on a far-off bench—a lady in dark skirts. How odd, I thought, a lady out alone at night. I called out to her, but she did not answer, and so I approached.

  “Imagine my surprise. She was not human; she was a doll, life-sized, sewn up out of sacking with little black rocks for her eyes. The deeper I walked into that village the more dolls I came upon, as though some deranged old woman had spent a lifetime sewing them. I saw no living soul. A village inhabited only by scarecrows.”

  I felt my grip giving on my ledger and I adjusted my wet palms.

  “What do you make of that?” said he.

  I did not answer. Behind me a man coughed softly.

  “At an inn some two miles beyond the village,” he continued, “I found a living man to tell me the story. It was strange, sad, as such stories usually are. Some twenty years before, the village’s children had begun to sicken. At first it had seemed the usual maladies: headache, grippe, sore bellies. But then came the bruising, the boils, the fits. It was as if some perverse disturbance were playing itself out, a shift unnatural and not right. The local doctor’s knowledge did not extend to these mysteries. And so the children were sent away, to be cared for elsewhere.

  “They never returned. Only the old were left. And they began to die off. Those who did not die left the village by other means. In the end there was only one widow left, a dressmaker, and she began to sew the visages of those who had vanished. She hand-stitched the bodies and the clothes; she perfected the faces. Each and every doll was a precise replica of someone who once lived there.”

  He stared quietly down at the table. “And so it is that the true and the living disappear, and in their place rise the disfigured and the unnatural and the damned.”

  He paused, raising to me eyes calm and water-blue. He seemed to be awaiting some answer.

  “That is a fine fable,” I said.

  “It is no fable.”

  I glanced at the exit.

  “Do you think it is natural, what I have said?”

  “I think it is unnatural that you have said it.”

  He gave a vague smile. “Your manner of speech, even.” He shook his head. “In the dark you might be taken for an Englishman.” He paused. “Is that natural, Mister Black?”

  I stared steadily at him. I betrayed no alarm, no fear.

  “Is it natural to sever low beings from their true and rightful destinies? From their natural-born purpose? To give them a false sense of agency? As if some creatures are not put here in the service of others. As if cows don’t exist to be eaten.” He turned his glass in his hands. “Nothing is accidental in the works of nature. Do you know who said that? Aristotle. He said, Nothing is accidental, everything is, absolutely, for the sake of something else.”

  I smiled bitterly. I knew I should better hide my contempt, but the man struck me as ridiculous, beyond fraudulent, memorizing fine quotations from the Greeks in order to twist their meaning. I glanced at his face. The sight of his clear, placid eyes made my stomach plummet.

  “Do I amuse you?”

  I made no comment.

  “Do you know Aristotle?”

  I did not answer.

  “He was a great thinker. A European.”

  Again I said nothing, studying his face.

  “It is not for you that I have come,” said John Willard softly, and it was as if in speaking it he was unsettled anew by the fact, the oddness of it. “You could not be further from my thoughts these days.”

  “You have been to my rooming house,” said I.

  And then this man whom I had feared, this hunter from my past, smiled vaguely, so that his crooked white incisor peeked over his thin lip. “I did not even know you were in the country, Mister Black.”

  I wondered what to make of this.

  “I am in insurance now,” said he.

  I almost failed to take his meaning, so outlandish did this strike me. I searched his face for irony.

  “Erasmus Wilde is dead. Though I will say he was getting more and more difficult to work for. You might imagine how the work dried up after that.”

  I was shocked, taken aback; I could not speak, though the truth of it seemed plain. And yet a part of me would not believe it.

  “I am still an investigator of, shall we say, human errors, but for a business venture that insures cargo being shipped overseas. It is fine work.”

  “How did he die?” said I. “Master Wilde, I mean?”

  “Of course, you would be surprised at how many attempt fraudulent claims. It is rampant. Men lying about the cheapest of goods.”

  “How did he die?” I said again.

  “Some illness or other, I do not know. Putrid fever, perhaps. It has been two years now.” He shrugged. “I earn more money in insurance than was ever paid me scrambling after niggers and misfits.”

  I recalled Erasmus, his thatch of white hair and his pale eyes like steel shavings, the refined, almost cultured cruelty. I did not understand how he could be granted so merciful a death as a fever. However painfully it had struck him down, the release seemed too easy—like a betrayal of the countless men and women and children whose fates he had ended on a whim, because the sky on that day was too blue or they moved too slowly through the field or the moon had kept him up the night previous.

  “I was shocked to discover you here, in Nova Scotia,” he continued. “Imagine. To leave the docks after hours of inspection and encounter you at once, right in the street, strolling about like you owned all creation. Now, mind, you almost don’t look like yourself, grown so old now—I will admit that at first I was not certain. But that scar will betray you each and every time. Lord. For years I looked for you. Years. And when I finally give it up? You appear.”

  He glanced sidelong at me, his pupils flinty, black and fine. “You caused me a lot of embarrassment, you and your master,” he said with a dim smile. “I was told, dead or alive. You can take apart a piece of furniture and pack it up in a crate, or you can transport it whole, it’s all the same. But you must acquire it first.” He stared at his glass without expression. “What does a boy like you know of the world? What can you understand of its workings? You should have been easier to find than a spoon in a bowl.

  “I did not hold such a fine reputation after losing you and your master.” His voice was soft. “I was not
, shall we say, sought after. I lost considerable business. When I was last in England, Mister Wilde himself passed me in the street without so much as a glance. For years I hunted the two of you. For years that man ran from me. In the end? I might have been a street sweeper, for all his acknowledgement.” He paused, thoughtful. “If that is not failure, I do not know what is. If that is not defeat—” He fell silent.

  I was slow to take in his words. “Christopher?” I said. “You mean Christopher?”

  “Your owner,” said he.

  “Christopher,” I said again. “He is in London?”

  “Liverpool. I was inspecting a cargo of mahogany chests arrived from the Indies. March of last year—no, two years ago. I would not have remarked upon him at all but that I heard someone talking loudly to himself in the street, and I glanced up to see if he might be avoided.”

  A heat radiated through my chest, a weight warm and almost liquid.

  Willard was studying me. “You did not know,” he said.

  I was picturing the impossibility of Titch shuffling the streets of that unknown city mumbling to himself—alive, saved, whole.

  “Did you run from him too, once you were clear of Faith? Is that what happened?” Willard gave me a curious look. “Oh, do not tell me he released you?” He shook his head. “Erasmus was right. There was always a madness in that man.”

  I sat in a haze, hearing his lips on the glass of whisky, the moist sound of his swallowing.

  A long moment seemed to pass between us.

  “The moon has a strange aspect here,” Willard said, setting down his glass. “It is so different from how it appears in the southern hemisphere.” He peered beyond me to the window. “When it touches stone, it has the quality of water. Of dirty water.”

  I glanced at the window, at the hard yellow light pooled on the gravel path. Calmly, Willard set his spectacles on his small nose, pushing them into place with his thumb. He stood, and with great delicacy placed change enough for his drink on the counter, arranging it with his tan, veined hands.

  “I’ll leave you to your meal,” said he.

  And he stepped between the tables and was gone.

  11

  SO THIS WAS HIM: my ghost. This man small and calm and emboldened by outlandish morality tales and borrowed quotations. This was he, the one from whom I had been running these three years, the creature of nightmare who had driven me through landscapes of heat and wind and snow, whose shadow had forced me aboard boats and carriages and even a shuddering Cloud-cutter by night, whose face I’d pictured so many waking days and imagined so many sleepless nights, the man who’d forced me away from all I had known, so that I was obliged to claw out a life for myself in a country that did not want me, a country vast and ferocious and crusted in hard snow, with little space, little peace for me.

  I sat in the roar of the grill-house, my sticky bowl touching the back of my hand. My throat was very dry, and I felt a great fear spreading through me, and it was a fear touched with wonder.

  Was it some madness on my part to believe he might actually have encountered Titch in Liverpool? Willard was obviously a sinister creature, not worth the believing. And yet. I sensed the possibility of it, the way I had always known in my blood that Big Kit was dead. But perhaps these feelings had no basis, were only superstition, hope or the absence of it.

  No; I did not believe it.

  Nor did I believe that Willard had tracked me down in all this fashion simply to talk. He was no longer interested in my flesh, he’d said; he was a claimsman now. And yet there had been such a tension underlying all he uttered that even now I felt the heat of his hatred, his contempt. I despaired to think of him in the streets, roaming, restless.

  I rose to find my legs shaking, and I had to sit. Breathing deeply, I stood again and placed my own money on the counter alongside his. I gathered my ledger and satchel and went out.

  The evening was quiet, the vacant streets echoing distantly with the clattering of far-off carriages. I looked constantly over my shoulder, staying close to the buildings. The wind was soft and smelled of lavender, and I could hear my shoes stirring the gravel on the uneven path. Dry leaves rasped in the gutters. My mind was afire, going in all directions. Big Kit, Philip, Mister Wilde; I had suddenly the image of Titch at the window of his residence, leaning over his long steel scope. And I thought of Willard quoting Aristotle.

  I had long seen science as the great equalizer. No matter one’s race, or sex, or faith—there were facts in the world waiting to be discovered. How little thought I’d given to the ways in which it might be corrupted.

  I passed now a blackened alley. It ended in a bricked-up wall before which a heap of trash had been dumped. A small shadow broke off with a squeal, went dashing across; a large rat, or a cat. The wind filled an old canning jar with a deep hum, and I was flooded by a memory, of myself in the field at four years, climbing up to sit on an old fence I’d sat on many times before, a fence weathered and aged, the wood so grey and flaking it looked like bones half-rotted, and all at once I was filled with presentiment, a feeling the fence would break beneath me, and though I told myself the fear was stupid, unfounded, a dread entered me as I clambered up, my knees swinging, and seconds later came the angry snap, and I was falling, falling at the field’s edge, the pale screech of restless birds above as the old familiar fence gave way, driving its wreckage and splinters into my thigh.

  I was turning away from the alley’s dark mouth when the blow fell hard on my forehead. I staggered, the crack resounding in my teeth, my nose filling with the stench of hot tin. Above me the moonlight swayed crazily between the rooftops and I planted my feet to stop from falling when a blow dropped on my collarbone, the pain flaring up my arm in a wave of fire, and I fell, the gravel spraying from under my knees. I could hear him heaving up there, swinging some hard object down, and I rolled instinctively out of his path, so that the hammer or baton or board struck the dust in a shimmer of grit.

  All was darkness. I blinked the blood out to see the frenzy of his small white hands grabbing at me, the claws of them as he dug viciously into my cheeks so that I felt my hardened skin tearing away, the scars of many years, and I cried out, shocked, shaking, sickened at the rope of blood pouring down my face, filling my mouth with a taste of rust. I struggled away, smelling his milky stink of sweet unwashed skin and whisky, hearing the moisture of his mouth as he began to curse in a stream as I drove my own nails into his face. I was afraid he would take up his weapon again and I sought his neck, praying I might grip it strongly enough to cut his breath.

  A bird hooted in the masonry; wind rustled the trash. I flailed for his neck, trying to shift my own body so he could not get at me, praying beyond all hope for some drunk to stumble from the eatery and aid me.

  “Audacious nigger,” hissed Willard, his right hand grasping my throat as he groped with the other for the weapon tossed somewhere in the dust. “You will not humiliate me. You will not embarrass me.”

  I shifted back and forth on the gravel, the stones grinding into my spine so that I felt my back bleeding. There was the smell of primrose and whisky, of blood and rotted leaves and clean rock dust. He fastened his hands at my throat, hot and callused, and I kicked out, my legs sprawling, my hands clenching at his own throat as I felt my breath choking off. In that moment I could see the gleam of his crooked white teeth, the sheen on his dirty spectacles. I felt the bulk of his body on my abdomen and was surprised by the lightness of him, the thin, wiry weight of his power.

  The knife, I suddenly remembered it—the ivory-handled kitchen knife I’d taken from a sideboard drawer and carried daily in my forepocket. I tried to take my hands from his sweating neck but found myself overpowered, breathless, and had to put them back on. We lay in the dust choking each other, his left hand feeling wildly for the weapon in the thin moonlight. Slowly I eased a hand free, and in a single swift motion I groped the bla
de from my front pocket, cutting my own thumb, and swung it briskly up under his spectacles, driving the tip in as deeply as I could.

  His scream I will never forget. Rearing back, he clutched in anguish at his face and I shoved him off then, kicking at him, crawling to my knees and panting fiercely for breath. We kneeled side by side, like worshippers at an altar, him screaming in agony and me just breathing. And then I stood, retching, broken-shouldered, blood coursing down my face, and, gripping the side timber of the building, stumbled slowly away.

  12

  I SHOULD HAVE SOUGHT out Medwin. Medwin who had always the thirst for a fight, a desire to leave other men in ruins. Instead I found myself at the door of the small blue saltbox house, my blood staining the welcome mat.

  When she answered the door, her hair was pinned sloppily at her nape with a series of laboratory clips. I was startled to see her dressed in her nightgown, a white, billowing gust of cloth, the edges of the sleeves soiled with ink.

  I lowered my eyes. I had not realized she would be sleeping.

  She came out to me at once. “Heaven’s sake, Wash,” she cried. “What has happened? Good lord, do come in.” Her voice sounded hollowed out, shaken.

  I entered the reception hall, with its familiar comforting smell of lemons and fixative. I tried not to further hurt her modesty by looking at her dress, though the instinct was silly—here I stood bleeding and broken before her, my shirt torn. “Your father is not—?”

  “Come in, come. Come into the drawing room. Let me fetch the medical bag.”

  I remembered then that Goff was from home, to see after the rumoured existence of a winged fish.

  She turned and bid me follow her to the parlour. The lamps caught her form, and I could see the trace of her body through the fabric. I glanced away, the scuff of my shoes loud in the hall, and I thought of the blood I must be trailing on the boards. But ever so slightly my eye was drawn back, and as I watched the soft undulation of her hips, a heat flooded through me, despite all.