Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “No. I have another trick. It’s the . . . Chinese Mystery. A-La-Ka-Zam,” he murmured, spinning on his heels.

  “What Chinese mystery?” Charles squinted. Since Jenks had sat still through the card trick, Charles tried to treat him the way James would—a kind soul who’d done them no wrong. But as James twisted and swirled the scarves, beads of sweat appeared on Jenks’s brow. Having Jenks there was like standing too close to a guard dog.

  “The Chiii-neeeese Mysss-tery,” James sang out. “Mr. Jenks, watch me!” He flapped his arms so that the scarves made curlicues in the air.

  Jenks choked out a slow message. “Gotta. Go back.”

  “No, stay,” said James in a rush. “It’s not over.”

  “We’ll be very cross if you go now,” Charles added. “There’s just one trick left.” It was easy now to look beyond the torn flesh and into his eyes; Jenks was an audience member, and he had to be shown a good time. Charles had outfitted himself for tricks like James, with a duplicate wire-and-tissue flower and cards and his own rock, just in case he had to take over the act.

  Carter whispered to Jenks, “The next trick requires a coin from the audience.”

  Grimly, Jenks reached into his pocket and pulled out his last quarter dollar until payday.

  Carter said, “1896, San Francisco mint mark.”

  “Look, look how they move now,” James called from behind Jenks, spinning the scarves in corkscrews.

  “There is nothing up my sleeve,” Carter said quietly. He willed Jenks to look away from his brother, and toward his hand. It worked. He had Jenks’s full attention. The quarter dollar was supported by Carter’s right thumb and forefinger. He grasped at it with his left hand, closing it into his fist. He pointed at his left hand, opening it slowly, and, remarkably—even he was stunned—in his first attempt in front of an audience, Charles Carter performed a successful magic trick: the coin was gone. Beautifully done. He smiled, full of wonder.

  It was like being hit by a locomotive. He slammed against the wall of the kitchen so fast, he had no time to react, so fast James was still singing “The Chinese Mystery” to himself. Jenks’s hand, at Charles’s throat, had picked him up and carried him there in three strides, all in one second.

  Choking, Charles stared into a face apoplectic with rage. Jenks’s grip made it impossible to plead or explain that the coin hadn’t really vanished. James gasped in midsong, and then he, too, was smashed against the wall.

  Charles planted both his hands on Jenks’s arm, to no purpose. The quarter dollar bounced to the floor audibly, but Jenks didn’t seem to care. Looking into those black, watering eyes, Charles saw hatred. If magic was a great force for Charles, then it was great, too, for Jenks.

  When he could breathe a little, Charles let out a sob, just one. James cried furiously.

  Jenks barked, “Little! Rich! Rats!” Charles hoped that yelling was the worst, that he would put them down, but instead, Jenks readjusted, tucking one of them under each arm.

  He began to walk.

  Charles’s mind went blank; it was as if a plug had been pulled and he drained away with the bathwater. Wedged under Jenks’s arm, smelling the stale liquor and dirt on him as he found the flight of stairs, going down to the basement. Jenks knew where they were going, even in the dark, and he didn’t care when one or the other of the boys collided with stored furniture as he took them deeper and deeper under the house. The sound of James crying filled Charles’s brain, as if occupying where Charles himself had once been.

  He could hear James crying because he, himself, was not. He was no longer panicking. He was maintaining a calm disposition.

  A jangling of keys. They were at the deepest end of the basement, by a padlocked door Charles had never seen open. Jenks took the two boys into a room that was illuminated only by small, smeared windows high on the wall. It was small and unfinished, with a concrete foundation that extended halfway across; the rest was earth.

  For the first time, Charles saw his father’s other collections. The room housed what Mr. Carter thought wise and decent to exclude from the house: a blunderbuss, a flintlock, a musket; erotic engravings from Les Mémoires de Saturnin; first editions of books from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; stereoscopic cards from Paris, France. There was a magic lantern and drawers of forbidden slides in cabinets marked “Not for young eyes.” It was here that Mr. Carter had Jenks carry the items too disquieting to display in the home, such as the instruments of punishment from Colonial America.

  Jenks lowered James to the ground, slowly, and Charles noted the care he took, and he felt relief, for this meant he would treat them gently.

  Then Jenks devoted his attention to Charles.

  Jenks flipped him upside-down and smashed him against the wall. Charles’s shirt fell over his face; he could hear but not see what was going on. He wanted to call out, but was also curious about what was being done to him. If he listened, perhaps he’d have a clue. Something hard grasped around his ankles; there was a clatter of chains, and then a final-sounding click, and then he jerked toward but not against the ground. He pulled his shirt away from his face.

  The light coming from the windows showed him he’d been clapped into the bilboes. There was a pole attached to the wall and soldered to the pole was a pair of foot cuffs, from which he dangled, upside-down, so that the blood was rushing to his head. Something in his pocket, probably the tissue rose’s wire stem, was jabbing him in the leg. He let his arms go limp.

  James whimpered. He looked like a wreck, nightshirt and scarves askew. He’d lost his hat and shoes. Jenks picked him up and fastened him into the pillory. As the heavy oak top beam fell against the lower plate, James was pinned between the two, his head and hands sticking through the portholes. He shrieked.

  “Don’t be afraid!” Charles called. “Don’t be afraid!”

  Jenks padlocked the pillory into place. Red-faced, James was silent, but also trembling, because he was drawing in another breath with which to shriek again.

  Jenks slapped him across the face.

  Charles flinched with the sound. “Don’t!”

  James looked at Jenks with astonishment. He was waiting for a misunderstanding to be made right.

  Jenks yelled, “Shut up! Punk!” And then James started crying again.

  “Don’t cry, James!” Charles thrashed in the bilboes.

  “Shut up!” Jenks backhanded James so hard the pillory shook.

  “James!” Charles looked at his brother, whose face was losing definition. His charcoal mustache was half consumed by sweat and a small trickle of blood. “Jenks! I’m going to kill you!” Charles bucked against the wall, arms reaching up achingly toward the foot cuffs to see if he could pull them apart. “Jenks, when our father gets home, you’re in big trouble!”

  Jenks was silent now. Slumped with fatigue, he regarded the boys: James was shivering, but finally quiet; Charles wasn’t about to shut up. So Jenks walked to a dark corner and returned with a heavy iron device in his hand that caused Charles’s blood to freeze. It was a brank.

  The woodcut on his father’s wall had frightened him enough. Seeing it now was far worse. The brank, “the crown of the curste,” was a set of iron bands that made up a slatted cage into which the head was placed. A strong adult needed two hands to carry it. Beneath the space for the nose was “the Devil’s bit,” a spiked plate of adjustable length that was inserted, spikes down, into the victim’s mouth. A second set of spikes fit just under the chin. The penitent, as long as his jaw remained still, would be uninjured, but a single attempt at speech would puncture his mouth in a dozen places.

  It was used on women who scolded, or men who spoke blasphemy, or debtors who claimed to be wealthy. It promised not only suffocating confinement, but also an unknowable kind of blistering pain. Now, Jenks fell to his knees and methodically tugged at the bit so that it came all the way free of the brank. He inserted a key into a lock, turned it once, and the device fell open. Charles watched like this was happeni
ng to someone else, all feeling squeezed out of him, displaced by leaden terror. Jenks brought it over his face and locked it again behind him. There were slits for his eyes and his nose showed through, just where it was supposed to.

  Jenks grabbed Charles’s nostrils, pinning them shut. This forced him to open his mouth, and the rusty bit was shoved in. A coppery-tasting lump filled his mouth. While Jenks secured the spiked chin strap, Charles swallowed carefully, knowing that the wrong motion would send a spike into some soft part of him, the side of his cheek, behind his jaw, the meat of his tongue.

  With a grunt, Jenks stood, pocketing the key. A second later, Charles heard the door shut, and lock.

  With Jenks gone, Charles’s first reaction was, “I am good at not panicking,” but his second, at gut level, was pure panic. Upside-down, stomach churning. The taste in his mouth of rust and iron, and the force of the spikes against his chin, the weight of the cage pulling on his neck, his head filling with blood like it was about to burst. But, somehow, the panic felt like a ripple across deeper water, as it was so very interesting to have something terrifying happen. He was still sure they were about to be rescued.

  James was silent. Charles saw him, ravaged and small, shivering. He wished he could reassure him.

  At some point, fifteen minutes, an hour later, no one was there to count, something poisonous rose in Charles’s mind. How exactly were they going to be rescued? When someone found them? When their father, or someone, finally came home?

  If he had learned but one thing recently, it was that no one would come, no one would rescue them. A great sob jolted his sternum, and his jaw fluttered. This made the spikes jab him and he sobbed again. Now it was his tongue that suffered. He couldn’t tell whether he was bleeding. He cried, choking, overcome by exhaustion. Nothing mattered and no one cared about him.

  He had failed poor James, the shadowy boy who was pale and fading, silent in the pillory.

  He had a list of all the people who had disappointed him, from his mother and father to his nurse and everyone else who had fled. He saved for last the most recent and crippling failure: Professor Ottawa Keyes. Never fail. Always punish meddlers. How naive, how cruel it was to extend that hope. The world was never so simple as the promise extended by that book—how could you possibly never fail and always be calm?

  His jaw cramped, and he accidentally flexed it, causing a stabbing pain under his chin, which made him sob again in despair. The adult world promised so many wonders and delivered only horrors to those who wanted a place to belong.

  Then his watering eyes sprang wide open. The brank was causing him such pain he had ignored the jabbing in his leg.

  He reached deep into his trouser pocket: here were the rock, the cards, the rose. Carefully, he pulled out the rose, separating the tissue from the wire stem. The wire was flexible but very strong. It could be curled in a hoop for easy concealment up the sleeve. Charles felt around the brank, for the keyhole locking its back hinge into place. The wire slipped in. Keyes suggested that when escaping from a coffin, one should, instead of focusing on the unseen lock, take the pulse at the carotid artery. This was said to soothe the nerves. So Charles put his left index finger against his neck, and counted, while his right hand worked the lock.

  The wire was thin; the lock was made of heavyweight iron. He had to work upside-down. There was no reason he could make it spring open, save one: it was inconceivable to the ironworkers of Colonial times that a penitent would try to escape from it.

  At the ninetieth beat of Charles’s heart, the rear lock parted, and the back of the brank swung open. His elation was cut short by gravity: he had undone the wrong lock first. Now the full weight of the iron cage pulled against his face, where the spiked strap still held his chin.

  Iron dug into his mouth and under his jaw. Grimacing, he fit the wire into the chinstrap lock, twisting and tugging until it, too, fell open. Then the whole brank, devil’s tongue and all, fell off his face and clattered to the foundation.

  Charles spat out the foul taste from his mouth. He felt heavy scratches on his face, but the spikes hadn’t penetrated his tongue or chin. He was by no means through—the bilboes would be next. But he felt raw exhilaration as he never had before. “Ahoy, James!” he cried.

  Unmoving in the pillory, James managed a weak “Hello.”

  It took only a few seconds to undo the bilboes, but during his labor, Charles noticed that the light from the windows had dimmed. More bad weather, perhaps.

  “I see wheels. Carriage wheels,” James observed.

  “Jenks is escaping. He’s probably taking our surrey. Oh, he’s in trouble.” Charles rubbed at his ankles. He limped across the room, to work on the ancient lock that kept James in place. “I’m rescuing you,” he said flatly.

  “Thank you,” James replied, weakly, but no longer crying.

  “We’re going to get Jenks,” Charles declared.

  James rubbed one foot against another. “We don’t have to.”

  The lock fell open, and Charles lifted the top beam wide. James pulled his head and hands out, and then sat down in a chair by the wall. Charles crouched before him, outlining a plan for revenge. James looked everywhere but at his brother, and when Charles finished talking, James said, “I want to go home.”

  Charles stared at him. “We are home.”

  The carriage’s wheels were on the driveway side of the house. Charles pried open a window on the opposite side, boosted James out first, and slipped through himself next. They raced around the back of the house, to the kitchen door, to better spy on the carriage to see if Jenks had escaped yet.

  “Papa!” James cried.

  “What are you—” Then Charles saw what his brother had already seen. Their father, in his impeccable cravat, vest, and coat, stood by the spider phaeton, one hand lifting his leather satchel from the luggage rack, the other waving at them. He was clean, and smiling, and as impossible as a mirage. But here he was! The boys raced toward him, half tackling him, and he responded with delight.

  “Hello, little men! I hear you’ve had an adventure.”

  He went down on one knee while James and Charles fell on top of him, explaining everything all at once. Mr. Carter put on a concerned face when listening to the most awful parts, but his underlying smile told Charles his father in no way understood what they were saying.

  “Jenks tried to kill us. Where were you?” Charles asked, and the heat of his tone made his father stare at him.

  “I was surveying our new vineyard,” Mr. Carter explained. He had more to say: the purchase had been phenomenal, far more complex than he’d anticipated, they would appreciate it when they were older, there was nothing wrong with the servants’ watching them for a few days.

  “But Cook and Patsy—” Charles started.

  “Did you know they’re heroes?” Mr. Carter interrupted. “The tent at their revival meeting collapsed in the snow, and they’ve been tending the injured. It even made the newspaper.”

  “Why didn’t they come back for us?” Charles asked.

  Mr. Carter looked disappointed. “These were poor people. The most wretched. You boys had Mr. Jenks to look after you.”

  “You have to let Jenks go,” Charles said. “He put us—”

  “He already told me and I gave him a piece of my mind.”

  “You have to let him go!” Charles touched his face, where the deep scratches from the brank ached.

  “He shouldn’t have taken you into my collections room.” Mr. Carter wet his thumb and rubbed roughly at Charles’s cheek. “That place isn’t for young eyes, and you could have damaged some valuable pieces.”

  Charles quaked, choking against his father’s misunderstanding. “No, he put me into the brank, and—”

  “He put you in your place, didn’t he?” The corners of Mr. Carter’s mouth turned up.

  “He hit James and put him in the pillory—”

  “You teased him, and you know you’re not supposed to.”

  �
�We didn’t!” Charles cried, nudging James. “Tell him.”

  But James only held on to their father’s hand silently. He was staring beyond their father, and Charles followed his eyes; Jenks was approaching.

  “You’re in trouble,” Charles hissed. Jenks ignored him.

  “Mr. Jenks, I apologize for the boys’ behavior,” Mr. Carter said, taking out an envelope. “Boys, before you wash up, I think you have something to say.”

  Charles teared up. His father wasn’t listening.

  James whispered, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jenks.”

  Jenks didn’t move. His eyes were on Mr. Carter’s envelope.

  Mr. Carter said, “You’re a big boy, James. Now go wash up. And take care with my nightshirt.”

  James limped up the back stairs and into the house.

  Charles spat it out: “I’m not apologizing.”

  His father grabbed him by the collar. “Young man, you live a life of privilege and when called upon, you will behave with respect and humility and self-control.”

  It was in the words his father used that Charles found a swell of unexpected freedom. He wasn’t just a rich man’s son; he was a master conjurer. Though it made his mouth tremble, he forced himself to say it. “Mr. Jenks, I apologize to you.”

  He awaited acknowledgment, but there was none. Jenks watched Mr. Carter pull bills from the envelope. Mr. Carter said, “The storm caused a run on gold, I’m afraid. So I hope silver certificates will be all right.”

  Jenks nodded. Mr. Carter passed a one-dollar bill to his son. “Look what the Treasury is up to. They call this the Educational Series.” There was a movement to edify the masses, to promote classical civilization in all governmental pursuits. “So the architecture from now on will be Greek Revival, and the greenbacks, the ones, twos, and fives, they’ll depict important scenes from historical, scientific, and mythological viewpoints, the creation of the steam engine, and so forth.”

  For once, Charles didn’t listen. He didn’t even bother to look at the bill between his fingertips. Instead, he focused on his father: the brilliantly polished surface of his shoes, the neat pressing and starch to his shirt, the easy smile on his face as he counted a stack of five-dollar bills into Jenks’s palm.