The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  By far, Eva was most intrigued by the tale of the penny emperor, though it was not necessarily her favorite. Her mother began this story as she was sewing pockets in Eva’s clothes. Helen could no longer carry all their coins in her corset. Their weight and rustling intruded not just on her waking moments but also her rest, her ability to dream. A pocket in Eva’s cap would be an ideal place for storing coins, she said, since Eva could then become an empress of copper. She was, after all, heir to the penny emperor of Baltimore. On this train she was directing her first voyage of conquest, extending the empire’s holdings across the continent, to the territories where they were headed. To Arizona, it was, and then who knows? Onto California, where she would challenge gold’s supremacy. But first she needed a crown befitting her position, and a lesson in the origins of her sovereign.

  The penny emperor did not begin life as a prince, but as a fatherless boy. While he fed and slept in his mother’s warm belly, his father was killed in a most egregious accident. His father worked at the tallest building in all of America, the Shot Tower, where it had been his job to wait at the bottom as men at the top poured hot lead through a sieve. The lead stretched like quicksilver over the sieve’s perforations, and then plunged as individual droplets into a vat of cold water. His father rescued this newly minted shot, or ammunition, from the vat, so it could be polished and packaged, then bought and loaded into guns wielded by hunters and soldiers.

  One ordinary day, however, the sequence of locks and pulleys that held the molten lead in place failed. The tumblers in the locks seized, the pulleys snapped, and the hot lead was sent tumbling out of the cauldron without the sieve in place. The air chiseled the rushing metal into a fine a point as an arrow, and the force, volume and stink of this freshly hewn weapon lanced right through his father. He was cleaved in two, but one side could not live without the other, just as a shadow cannot move without action, and a mirror cannot thrive without reflection.

  And so he perished.

  The workers at the Shot Tower fetched the penny emperor’s pregnant mother from her home so she could be brought to the foreman’s office, and the foreman would explain. He spoke of the locks and pulleys and added a treatise on how the gears in the tower also might be to blame. But this did not assuage the new widow. She called the accident murder, and was then roughly escorted out of the foreman’s office. The workers saw to it that she got home safely, but the next day she was back. She demanded a more truthful narration. That was never to come, so each day she ventured to the Shot Tower in her mourning clothes and black veil and knocked on the door. She was denied entry and went home, but came back the next day. In her black dress and veil, politely requesting entry. This she also was denied, so she took to simply standing across from the entrance, fixing her widow’s glare on the place. People said she was cursing the tower, though there were no more accidents like the one that took her husband—at least none that anyone heard tell.

  Day after day, and all of the days afterward, she stood out there, hating, except when she gave birth to the penny emperor. Thereafter she brought the babe with her, on the chance her dead husband’s companions might cross the street to admire the newborn, and the foreman might remember how this young son was practically orphaned. This was before the babe was known to be the penny emperor, of course, so she and the baby were largely ignored. He grew from infancy to boyhood rather anonymously, except in his own family. His little girl cousins adored the boy, called him “Sweetie cake,” “Jimmy-bean,” and “Junior-jam,” as James was his name, being named for his father, James William Grabowski. The girls taught Jimmy-bean how to play five stones, run races, and use a stick to push a hoop forward on the cobblestones. James and his mother moved in with them, as she was no longer able to fend for herself. In their room, they were given a bed to share, and James was never in want of playmates.

  His uncles groomed young James for great things. They taught him how to memorize sequences of numbers, how to use his voice to reach a great many people, and they bought him a matching cap and knickers so he’d be dressed properly. James’s uncles hired newsboys who sold the papers by shouting headlines on the street corners. A penny apiece, each paper cost.

  “Could you guess what happened next?” Eva’s mother would interrupt herself.

  “But you’re the storyteller,” Eva would reply. “You have to say.”

  “Did he become a baker when he grew up?”

  “No,” Eva answered.

  “A circus performer; maybe he trained the elephants?”

  “No,” she sighed, dutifully.

  “Maybe he studied to become a painter,” Helen guessed. “Or an artist of some sort.”

  “No!” Eva always insisted. “He became the penny emperor!”

  Indeed he did. When he was old enough to be left on his own, he was given a raft of papers to put on his arm, and told to shout out the headlines. The papers went flying off his arm as though they were snowdrifts in a high wind. And he’d collect pennies, which he passed onto his uncles. They regarded him as their most efficient newsboy, and their most honest. They showed him how they kept track of all the papers the boys sold, on lined green paper with boxes for all their calculations.

  They had a lovely existence, this family, in a row house with bay windows. Each week the uncles brought home something plump and tender from the butcher’s, and on Sundays there was turkey and all the trimmings. The aunts baked potpies and stews for the girls’ lunches, and meat pies for James to eat on his street corner. On the brick range, a pot of water was always heated, for a bath, a cup of tea, or the washing. When the girl cousins played school, the young emperor was usually the only pupil, so the girls took turns placing their hands upon his as he held a pen. In this way he was initiated into the alphabet and cursive writing.

  All was well, except for his mother. On the bed mother and son shared in the girl cousins’ room, she rocked herself or muttered incessantly until she was exhausted. She still walked each day to the site of her husband’s last day in this life, but the foreman and the tower’s owner succeeded in having her moved farther and farther away from the tower; so far that the last bit of her husband remaining on earth—the last place he had been before he was evaporated up to heaven—may have appeared as no more than a crease in her vision. She did not care to see the pennies the young emperor accumulated, though he told her he would buy for her anything she wished. A team of horses, he thought, and a fine carriage, to carry her to the Shot Tower and finally say goodbye to his father in the proper fashion.

  James shot up tall and lean as a tree, and as handsome as befits an emperor. But his form and copper riches attracted the wrong kind of attention. The hooligans of the neighborhood knew what he was carrying, and began to attack him. The uncles taught James how to place the pennies in his gloves, on his knuckles, if possible, in winter. In summer, he carried extra socks to hold the pennies, and he figured, on his own, how to swing a penny-laden sock as if it were a yo-yo, or a mace fit for a king. Anyone who dared to challenge the penny emperor on his rounds would wear telltale blue half- and quarter-moons, like new mountains and gullies, on his face the following day.

  The penny emperor became a recognizable, dependable bearer of news and currency, so the men he sold papers to, in their frock coats and top hats, enlisted him in their businesses and political campaigns. Sometimes these men would entreat James to memorize a long, difficult number. The numbers came in bunches, in twos, sometimes threes, on scraps of blank newsprint that had to be disposed of immediately. Nothing was to be committed permanently to print or handwriting. There was barely enough time to get them all in his head, and sometimes the numbers were as long as the Shot Tower was tall! And then he was to accompany another set of men—the “policy men,” they were called—from house to house, across town where the freedmen and fugitive slaves lived. Those numbers were their only hope for a better life and as James performed his recitation they would
clasp their hands together as if in prayer. Finally the policy men would wrest him away from the doors and porches where the downtrodden would inevitably cry, or shout, or plead. James could hear it in their voices, their contrition and their begging, and it frightened him, to think his voice commanded such power and numbers held that kind of meaning. But the penny emperor’s palm was met with real paper money, real legal tender, by the end of each day. He could not turn his back on it.

  James much preferred working for the rich men on Election Day. At least it seemed more honest, working with a list of names printed on handbills that were not to be junked; people kept them, in fact, as souvenirs of their fidelities and dignity. The men would give James a stack of handbills to press into the pockets of voters as they lined up at the polling places. He had to do this delicately, artfully, without drawing the notice of policemen or operatives with their own handbills, with an entirely different set of names on them. Otherwise they might cry “Foul!” should they discover the small bottle of spirits wrapped within each of the handbills.

  “Spirits?” Eva questioned, for she knew what a spirit was, although it was difficult to know just what a spirit in a bottle might do for someone waiting at a balloting station. Helen had read her stories of spirits from bottles that could be vengeful or generous, given the nature of the person in possession of the bottle. As the penny emperor, James must have known which type of spirit to assign to each person. People said her father had a nasty spirit, if his patience was tested. But was this how spirits came to be distributed throughout the population, on Election Day? What about the spirits of children, and women, who were not permitted at the polls? How were those spirits obtained?

  “You are an astute listener,” Helen said, though now the story was faltering. For the penny emperor no longer had need of his coins, with all of the rich man’s currency—paper money—filling his pockets. He had volumes, as thick as Bibles, and he strung the legal tender as if it were fabric, and he meant to make for himself a cloak of all the denominations. While this cloak served as his credentials, it also made him more of a target. Anyone could steal the cloak and thereby defrock him of his status, but they would just as soon have themselves and their crime found out.

  So her mother would abandon this thread and seek to start again somewhere in the middle, with the hope that she would find the key to a better ending. In one version, the penny emperor learned his numbers only in the pursuit of sound business practices, and pennies continued to buy his meat even as his uncles moved toward a more criminal practice. From his aunts, he learned to sew his pennies into the sleeves, cuffs, pockets and collars of his shirts, and in the hems and knees of his trousers. He was creating a kind of invisible armor for when he’d finally be ready to avenge his father. But lead is a far stronger, far more resilient metal than copper, and Eva’s mother knew this either as fact, or intuited it, and therefore could not account for how the penny emperor might have overcome the leaden forces at the Shot Tower.

  Once she told of the fine carriage he had promised his mother, how he brought it to life with a team of fresh copper horses. They pulled the carriage through the streets, and people saw a rush of fire, one lit to forge shields that would make quick work of lead bullets, rendering the products of the Shot Tower obsolete. Or perhaps people witnessed a second sunrise as the carriage passed by, heralding a new day when men such as James’s father would be remembered, and their widows rightfully compensated.

  In most versions Helen attempted, her voice wavered, falling deep into her throat, into the chest, where it nested like an orphaned bird, comfortable but anxious. In this voice the penny emperor would sometimes escape his dilemma for a ship to Boston, which Eva understood to be her birthplace, and therefore the site of her parents’ marriage. Only when her mother’s voice managed to find an equilibrium between her teeth and tongue would Eva be rewarded with a more complete version, where the forces her mother had arrayed against the penny emperor would at least be addressed, if not dispatched and conquered. For no matter the height and sturdiness of his stacks of his pennies, the ingenuity of his armor, or the peevishness or evil of his enemies, he could not bring back his father or extend the life of his mother.

  In her final days, the mother of the penny emperor could go no further than her own front door. The owners of the Shot Tower had laid increasingly elaborate gauntlets to end her vigils; outside they maintained a thriving parade of muggers and pickpockets, dirty coppers and flimflam men, and finally lawyers. James and his uncles tried to bring doctors into the house so they might ease her discomfort in the distention in her hands and fingers, the swelling of her ankles, in her constant sweating, as if she were excreting the effort her husband failed to deliver upon succumbing to an arrow of lead and fire. But all refused to treat the widow, given the labyrinth they would have to conquer just to get at their patient. Of course the mother of the penny emperor died, for someone usually had to die in her mother’s stories. Death was her mother’s consummate arrangement for distinguishing an era, or ending a story.

  If someone did not die in one of her mother’s stories, someone would disappear, his talents or insights no longer relevant to the lesson she was imparting, the epoch she wished to illustrate. The penny emperor was from another time, she’d confess in the morning, following one of her more lavish iterations of the tale. He gave hope to orphans and a counter-argument to those who said a boy could not rise above his origins. But the country was changing; it was relentless in its need for change, and the old tricks—hard work, sweat, slaving and saving—would get a boy nowhere these days. Or perhaps it would land him in the clutches of the United States Army. For the tale of the penny emperor was nothing less than a gussied-up version of her father’s story, Miss Williams came to understand once she was ensconced in a teacher’s college abroad and assembling her own tales. She exchanged her father’s pennies for her mother’s pearls, and hatched what would be the first of her tales to gain notice, the story of the pearl palace.

  To begin, she thought of a young boy, poor and restless, following a rainbow for its pot of gold. He was to be disappointed, of course, but by tracing the dregs of the colorful spectrum, he found a kind of light. It was austere, and inconceivable to anyone who thought of light in the common sense. One did not see it directly; this was light in its infancy, which is nearest in the senses to something that makes a sound. The boy did not hear this light as one might listen for the rustling of other animals in the undergrowth, or the pluck of an instrument. Rather, he closed his eyes and drew upon his promises, so that the sound entered him through other channels: his hair, nose, throat, and knees. From there, the strands traveled to his chest, and in his heart, they intersected. Then he could hear that sound light makes, if others could have understood it; the slow odyssey of the earth and its satellite.

  The boy became possessed of such grand feelings, he thought himself capable of slaying dragons, rescuing princesses, raising the dead souls of those he had lost, commanding the spirits of those who wronged him. But how to carry this feeling with him forever? Despite its virtues neither the light nor its sound could feed or clothe him, nor provide shelter from the elements. He cupped his hands to his ears as if to trace the sound’s direction, and heard in his heart what he should do next. At moonrise, in this very spot, he should dip his palms into the reflecting light, and from there hold it fast between his hands, and allow it to shape itself.

  The boy waited, listening through his chest to the intricate forces of the universe: all the suns, stars, and planets. He waited for so long he heard the moon’s tug on the oceans and flow of rivers. He waited until the moon was suitably high so its light accentuated each blade of grass, as the dew does some mornings, and then he opened his hands so his palms would catch every sound the moonbeams made, like a hum that warms insects beneath the soil. He opened his palms only once he was certain that all was silent against his skin, and found a stone, or truly a pebble, in each hand. Like light
compressed, each layer gently stitched into the next, an incandescence that was the heart of fire in one moment, and a coverlet of ice in the next. Pearls, if we could call them something familiar to us. He would not trade them for anything: not stone or wood, pitch or metal. Instead he would put this raw material to practical use; he would build a palace of pearls.

  For the rest of that night and all the nights when the moon made an appearance, the boy took light by the handful and doubled his strength with every grasp. In the daylight hours he aligned his pearls to mark the boundaries of his castle; then he stacked and sculpted towers, gates and wards. He sang as he worked, as if being led in a chorus, and in the highest places he carved out turrets for the pearl weaponry he’d have to make, to defend his creation. On nights of the new moon, when no light fell to him, he rubbed his hands together and found nacre, or mother-of-pearl, ghosting the curvature of his palms, and used it for windows and mirrors. Over the months and years, his citadel rose where the rainbow had failed him, a Tower of Babel without the repercussions. Here everyone would be welcome, for succor and shelter, from they who had faith in him, to they who had not the courage to follow his ascent to the more recognizable pearl landmarks.

  People were amazed, astounded, and ran to see what might have blinded them if built with different intentions. The boy, now a man, invited them inside, and they looked for their homes through the mother-of-pearl windows. They were mesmerized by their reflections in the mother-of-pearl mirrors. But neither window nor mirror provided perfect views or decent likenesses. The outside world, whether from the ground level or the farthest reaches of the clouds, was softened in a way that left the people questioning whether it had ever been real. The mirrors had a similar effect on the faces that could not stop staring into them, melting away age and infirmities and offering only a fawning smear of the basic features.