Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  “Oh you don’t, do you?” came the guard’s reply. His footsteps thundered down the hallway.

  Miss Jones pulled back from the door, held the Bible flat against her chest. “Never mind,” she told the guard. “This vile young man is beyond redemption.”

  “Didn’t I tell you so?” he said.

  Miss Jones strode away without giving me another look.

  I stuck my head out the opening. “Bring me something to eat!”

  In answer the guard, who was closer than I had thought, yanked out his truncheon and took a swing at me. I ducked inside. He laughed again, then slammed and bolted the panel door.

  I TOOK my supper without complaint that evening. The barley soup was barely warm, with little islands of congealed fat floating atop it, the barley overcooked to a mush, the broth all but soaked up by the chunk of bread laid atop the soup. Even so I gulped down every drop of it.

  I did not heave the contents of my chamber pot in the guard’s face because I no longer felt entirely alone in my plight, no longer felt abandoned to an unjust fate. Though outside those stone walls I could not have felt more secure than in the company of Buck Kemmer, his physical bulk did me little good where I was, and his capacity for the type of careful, deliberate maneuvers that might eventually free me had engendered little in the way of confidence. But he believed me, and that was confidence enough. Miss Jones, on the other hand, though as brittle as a charred stick, possessed an iron will and a keen intelligence. So now there were three of us.

  With every spoonful of soup I sat anxious for further news from Buck, an indication of how his search of the mausoleum had gone. I expected him shortly before supper, then during, and then after. Something had gone wrong. Had he been apprehended while skulking about Brunrichter’s estate? Or had he in fact not even made it that far, but was instead conveyed by a father’s irreconcilable grief to one of the waterfront groggeries, where even now he flooded his misery with rum?

  Worse yet, had he reached the realization that fluttered and whispered through my own consciousness that neither justice nor revenge could ever undo the loss, and that his anguish might be undone by one act alone? Had he therefore taken a knife to his own throat, just as I might yet decide to do, but only after exhausting every possibility of first taking that knife to another’s?

  I had lived most of my seventeen years steeped in hatred. Hatred was a part of my veinwork, and the desire for revenge was the blood that flowed through it. Those few days of something like dignity that I had long ago enjoyed in the company of Poe and Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, and the few sweet hours of something like joy in the company of Susan, they were as foreign to me now as the ancient wonders of Egypt. I expected to see a pyramid about as much as I expected to feel clean and free and content with the world. Which is to say, Never.

  I did not mind the solitude of my cell. Those stone walls seemed nothing more than a physical extension of the interior walls that isolate us from one another. About this, John Donne was wrong. Every man is an island. There can be, for the fortunate ones, moments of contiguity, moments of union, but they are only that, transient, and when they pass or are stolen from us we are pitched into a silence even more profound, even more impenetrable from the outside.

  And here is the ultimate cruelty: Not only can we never truly know one another, never truly see into the bared essence of another human being nor communicate to them our own, neither can we communicate our own to ourself! A human being is a bifurcated creature—and perhaps, if there is a spirit (my hope in this regard remains small), even trifurcated—one whose principal parts, the body and the mind, can know each other only superficially, as mere acquaintances, sometimes affectionately, though often not.

  My hair grows. My beard. But am I the one who does it? Do I make or inspire them to grow?

  The length of my arms. The shape of my feet. How much say in that is mine?

  My stomach, for a reason known only to itself, might suddenly double up, knot up in pain like an angry fist. Does it tell my mind why? Does the mind bother to inquire?

  I eat a chunk of bread, drink pallid soup, I chew, swallow, forget about it. Next morning, there it is again, reconstituted. Am I responsible for this process?

  This body, this stranger to myself. This thing that tastes and touches and sees and smells and aches and calls itself me, but isn’t.

  Yet the other part confounds me more.

  I use my mind to think, to think about itself. But the thing has no eyes of its own, no ears. It casts no reflection. The thing cannot know itself. Nor can it explain to me, neither to the me it is nor to the other, the visible and unthinking me, what or how I am.

  I can think, yes. Why can’t I know?

  And the greatest mystery of all, the heart. Is it mind or body or separate from both? Do not tell me that the heart is an unthinking organ, a mere mass of pulsing muscle. It is that, yes, but why, with happiness, does it lift up inside my chest, why does it beat wildly with excitement and passion, why does it thrum so ominously with fear? Why does it feel and give form to the very emotions the mind cannot explain?

  What causes love? We do not know.

  How can a heart so pierced as mine or Buck’s not bleed to death?

  How can so much love and so much murderous hatred exist side by side and not devour one another completely?

  How can a heart die, again and again and again over the course of a single day, yet continue to beat?

  We do not know.

  We do not know.

  We do not know.

  THE NIGHT bled in through the eye of God and stilled myself and all around me. I counted three stars framed in the distant window, three dim pricks of light softened and blurred by cloud. There was nothing else to look at, nothing else moving in my universe, and so I watched until one of those stars had crawled beyond the window’s frame, and only two remained. These two I watched a good while longer, holding my eyes open and not allowing them to blink, until my eyes stung and teared and the muscles in my face began to ache. And finally I accomplished my one objective for the night, to exhaust myself sufficiently to sleep, and I closed my eyes at last.

  IT is a dream, I told myself. A shrill scratching in my dream, cat’s claw on glass. Repetitive. I listened to it in my sleep for a good long while, trying to turn my sluggish mind toward it, to seek it out, all to no avail. It culminated in a muted cracking sound, a snap. And with that snap I realized that I had come awake, was lying there curled on my side, eyes open to the darkness.

  I listened awhile longer. Nothing. I drew a hand to my face, felt its warmth, then reached out in the blackness and touched the cold wall not four inches away. Yes, I told myself, you are awake.

  But there seemed some difference to my cell, and to me. I rolled onto my back then, looked up, saw nothing, could not now distinguish even the shape of the window high above me, so uniformly black my surroundings. But the air—was it cooler now? Freshened?

  I felt a draft wash over me. Sat up. Placed stockinged feet upon the floor. Heard nothing.

  But the draft was there, no dream. I felt it on my face, smelled it in the faint smoky odor of Pittsburgh air.

  I stood, crossed cautiously toward the door, hands outstretched to feel my way. Found the door, touched it, ran fingertips up and down the wood. No, the panel was closed. Locked tight.

  I turned. Walked back into the center of the room, hands raised, fingers spread to catch the mysterious draft. There, I felt it again! But where was it coming from? I moved a step to my right. Nothing. Two steps to my left.

  And suddenly something in the night attempted to seize me by the wrist, brushed roughly against my wrist so that I jerked away, jumped back, then stood there waving my fists in front of me, swinging at air lest the thing attempt to grab me again.

  It did not. I could hear my own snorting breath, shallow inhalations quick and terrified. Could hear the drum of blood in my temples, heart thunking in my chest.

  The thing did not approach.


  I stood there so frightened that I wanted to shriek, my tongue too paralyzed to make a sound. And I admit to thinking to myself, All those stories of Poe’s—could they have been true?

  I don’t know how long I stood there frozen. Maybe half a minute. Maybe more. Eventually I calmed myself enough to become embarrassed by my fear, and then angered by it. I stepped forward again and swung hard at the air.

  And felt it again—there! The thing was still there!

  But it moved away when my fist made contact, it yielded to my touch. It moved away … but then returned. Cautiously now I opened my fist and moved my fingers toward it, felt a rough and not unfamiliar texture. More important, the thing made no attempt to seize me. I turned my hand toward it now, gingerly wrapped the tips of my fingers around it, then took it into the palm of my hand, put both hands on it, held it tight. And very nearly laughed out loud.

  A rope. A thick braided rope, hanging down from the ceiling.

  A rope had been lowered to me through the high black eye of God.

  Because I wanted to shriek with joy but could not, I sent that shriek into my muscles and pulled myself up hand over hand, shinnying up one pull after another, holding tight with my ankles and knees as well. Almost giggling, I thought, The Indian rope trick—I’ve read about this! and neither knew nor cared what strange plane of existence I might tumble into on the uppermost side.

  I POKED my head up through the hole, through the window I had been thinking of contemptuously as the eye of God, and into open night. There, sitting awkwardly astraddle the roof slates, one hand wrapped tight around the rope he had looped about the chimney, the other hand clutching the thick plate of glass he had pried loose, was a shadow so large it could only belong to Buck Kemmer.

  “Watch out for the edges,” he whispered hoarsely. “The metal’s sharp.”

  “The opening’s too small. I’ll scrape my hide off.”

  “Your hide or your neck. Choose quick.”

  I chose to keep my neck intact, and, considering the way men are hanged at the penitentiary, my head too. I wriggled, squirmed and twisted to get my shoulders clear, and in the bargain flayed a long strip of flesh off my left shoulder and arm. But then I was out, and oozing like a worm up beside Buck.

  “Watch those slates,” he said. “They’re slippy.”

  “I forgot my shoes.”

  “Better take off your socks.”

  I pulled them off and stuffed them into a pocket. The slates were as cold as ice on my skin, but how I reveled in the chill. “Which way now?”

  Buck handed me the pane of glass then, perhaps two feet long by a foot and a half wide, while he hauled up the rope, coiling it around an elbow as he reclaimed it. This done, he balanced the coil atop the roof’s peak and pressed it flat with both hands so that it would not slip away.

  Then he took the glass from me. “Grab hold of my waistband,” he said, “so that I don’t go falling in.” I did so, and he leaned toward the opening, inclining forward an inch at a time as he lowered the pane of glass back onto its metal frame—an impressive feat of balance and strength.

  When he sat back, finished, he released a low huff of relief.

  “How’d you get the glass out?” I whispered.

  “Got a friend works at Bakewells. Borrowed a few of his tools.” He tapped the front of his shirt; the tools inside made a clinking sound.

  Now, half crouching, he used the rope to pull himself up to the roof’s peak, then sat there, knees hugging the slates, and motioned for me to do the same. After I had joined him he pointed to the rear of the building. “We’ll go down over there.”

  “What’s on that end?”

  “Kitchen and pantry.”

  “What time of night is it?”

  “Time to get the hell out of here,” he said.

  We walked duck legged, hunkered low, straddling the peak, hands riding the cold slate tiles. Midway Buck loosed the rope from around the chimney, tied the loose end around the coil and then draped the coil over his head, wearing it like a horse’s collar.

  Several anxious moments later we reached the back edge of the roof. I leaned forward over my stomach but could see only darkness below. Both sides of the roof sloped off too steeply for us to contemplate working our way down with any degree of deliberate movement.

  “You’ll have to turn around and go over the edge butt first,” Buck instructed. “Slide off over your belly. About four feet down you’ll feel a ladder underneath you. It’s set up on the roof of the pantry.”

  “You carried a ladder too?”

  “I brought what was needed.”

  Only then did the magnitude of Buck’s labors dawn on me. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  “I might yet. Now shut up and go. Give me your hands, I’ll steady you.”

  More skin came off as my belly scraped over the roof’s cornice, but that was the least of my concerns. I eased down as quietly as I could, feeling the wall with my toes, imagining that at any moment my weight would pull Buck off his tenuous perch to send both of us plunging into a noisy heap. But never was an anchorage so secure as the one provided by Buck Kemmer that night. I am confident that even had his arms popped from their sockets he would not have let me slip.

  My toes finally found the first rung of the ladder. Then the second. A minute later I was standing firmly, if with watery knees and trembling hands, atop the much flatter pantry roof. I leaned then against the ladder, doing what I could to steady it as Buck climbed down.

  It was sheer brute strength that allowed him to push his body over the roof’s edge and into empty space, to hold it there secured by nothing more than ten fingers pinched like pinions into the tiles. Then at last he was beside me, and without a moment’s hesitation he whisked the ladder away from the wall, crossed to the edge of the pantry roof, and noiselessly let the ladder down through his hands until it touched hard ground.

  “Go to the Hand Street Bridge,” he told me. “Wait for me underneath it where it crosses Duquesne.”

  “I’ll wait for you on the ground. Help you carry things.”

  “You’ll not. Now go before I throw you off this roof.”

  He grabbed me by an arm and thrust me toward the ladder. I scurried down. The first shock of ground beneath my feet, even cool, hard-trampled earth such as it was, strengthened and steadied me.

  I looked up at Buck’s great black silhouette as he stood above me. “Go!” he said.

  I turned and ran.

  At Seventh Street, having upbraided myself the entire way, I turned and went back, meaning to help Buck with his load. But he was gone. The ladder was gone, the rope, all trace of him gone. I crept to within three feet of the pantry’s small porch, saw its interior still pitch dark, before I was convinced that he had made it safely away.

  And then, the strangest urge came over me. Or perhaps it was not strange at all, but merely human. An urge to demean those who had demeaned me.

  What I did next was immature and foolish, I admit. I blush even now to remember it. The act was made even more foolhardy by the fact that all evidence of my disdain would have been thoroughly dried by morning, and surely went unnoticed by all but the local tomcats who, sniffing an intruder in their territory, would have covered my mark with their own. I knew all this even as I walked softly over the porch boards, soaking them with my scent.

  I saved the last of it for the pantry door itself. And then, because of a scuffling sound from somewhere out in the yard, a stray pig perhaps or a wandering goat, I hopped off the porch and once again broke into a run, buttoning up on the go, half pig myself but determined that never, not ever, would I be anybody’s goat.

  BY THE time I reached the Allegheny waterfront my feet were stone-bruised and half frozen. And the exuberance of my escape had by now been replaced by a chill, so that as I cowered against a piling beneath the Hand Street Bridge I hugged myself and shivered. The night smelled of river fog, that dank, cloying scent of dead fish and mud.

  Ther
e were no streetlights here, the only illumination a meager sprinkling of candles and oil lamps burning in small houses and shops. I guessed the time at maybe three in the morning, but it was only a guess, based on nothing, for the moon and stars were obscured by heavy clouds, my own innate clock obscured by an escalating anxiety.

  Realistically I did not expect that my absence from the jail would be discovered until morning. The guards maintained a fairly lax routine, trusting to the security of the heavy cell doors and most inmates’ inability to fly or leap eighteen feet into the air. At sunrise, however, the order would go out to watchmen in every ward that a murderer was on the loose. Apprehend at any cost. Shoot on sight.

  A quarter hour passed with no sounds other than the liquid hammerings of blood in my temples, the river pulsing against the docks. Then, startling me, though I had been listening intently for just that sound, footsteps. I strained even harder to hear. They were quick footsteps, heavy, coming from the west, long strides over cobblestone. I moved to the opposite side of the bridge piling, flattened myself against it, tried to quiet my breath.

  The footsteps came upon me quickly, then stopped. By my guess the individual stood not six feet away. His feet scraped as he turned. Ten seconds of silence. His feet scraped again. He was looking for somebody.

  “You here?” he whispered.

  I slipped around the piling and went to him. “You have a voice like a meadowlark, Buck. I never noticed that before.”

  Buck Kemmer did not pause to chuckle. He seized me by the wrist. “This way.”

  We hurried inland, keeping underneath the bridge. I asked, “We going to the school?”

  “Quiet,” he said.

  We were indeed headed for Miss Jones’s School for Young Ladies. As we skirted the front schoolyard I could not help but glance at the spot where, a lifetime ago, I had stood to wait for Susan, my heart thrashing with hope, my body warm with desire. Now, in passing that spot, I was cold inside and out.