In the end he found his answer from a different source altogether. He happened upon a young man unloading freight from a cargo wagon, alone in the gaping mouth of a warehouse. The lad was nervous with him at first and close-lipped, until they’d exchanged enough words to mark them both as Scots. It turned out the lad was new to the country and spoke English interspersed with Gaelic words. He had come in from an estate north of the city and would be returning that way around sunset. It was far from perfect, but with twenty miles between them and Philadelphia Morrison figured they could catch a proper coach at less risk and so carry on. He propped a leg up on the wagon and produced a flask and shared it, coming at his plan directly for time was short. The young man agreed to carry him out of the city, and then agreed even more heartily when Morrison placed a gold coin in his hand and showed him the others that would be his upon completion of the task. The lad’s eyes were full of questions but he kept them to himself, seeming to feed upon the suspense of the proposal. Morrison left him with the details of the time and place for the rendezvous, telling him there would be two others, two other good people in need of help. He explained that one was a pregnant woman, and that the other was an injured man. But he gave no details beyond this. He left praying that the boy would be true, uneasy at having to rely on a stranger but seeing no way around it. Having made the arrangement, he put it behind him. He had one more thing to do and it would require all of him.
It was still the dead of night when he reached the warehouse. He approached cautiously, laying his soles flat upon the stones, setting them down and pulling them up, kicking no debris and stirring no pebbles. He shot a hand back to caution the hound but this was not necessary. The dog read the man’s body language and followed suit. The night had cleared of mist but was still heavy and darker for it. They somehow found shadows of still greater black and it was through these that they moved. Morrison knew this territory for he had walked it just the day before. Now, as then, he pulled up in the lee of the warehouse, in an alleyway choked with crates, rubbish and discarded bits of machinery, prehistoric in their angulations and just as silent as those deceased creatures. He stretched out a hand that the hound came to and set her head beneath. He rolled the rough barbs of the beast’s hair in his fingers and listened to silence to discover if it were real. He believed it was.
A row of windows ran under the eaves of the warehouse. They folded outward for ventilation and to provide some scant natural lighting inside. He expected to find these open but few were, and the ones most easily reached were black with soot. He climbed up on a crate to get a better view. He had to duck beneath the eaves and lean his head into the shadows there. The hound below studied the perch. She bent at the knees and considered leaping up, but as the man did not turn and motion to her she stayed as she was.
Morrison brushed the glass with his fingertips. The filth was resilient. He spat and tried the flat of his hand and then the cuff of his shirt. He gave up on the effort and just peered through the grime, breath still lest it fog the glass. Two lamps burned on the table, casting a liquid light that flowed across the bodies of the men strewn around the floor on bedrolls, two on cots, from the ends of which their feet dangled. They slept in disarray unusual even for these men and it was clear they had only recently bedded down after the evening’s turmoil. Humboldt was nowhere to be seen. Morrison climbed down and sat beside the crate, hidden from the front entrance to the alley. He set the rifle down and slipped the sack from his shoulder.
The hound stepped toward him, head low, eyes looking off to the side and then back, off and then back. She thought they might rejoin the others. Though she had mixed feelings about this she might at least get some food out of it. Those men seemed never to tire of dangling food above her, tossing pieces of meat into awkward places and shouting and hooting until she managed to get to it. She nudged the man’s foot, stepped back and whined, but the man showed no sign of rising. Eventually, she checked the ground beneath her, circled over it, looked to the man and circled the ground again and then sat down. This life was made up of so much waiting, bursts of action and then more waiting. So be it. She crossed her forelimbs and set her head on them and inhaled.
For his part Morrison’s thoughts were someplace else entirely. He knew why he was here in the alley and what he would do when the opportunity came and he knew he just had to wait for that time. He sat thinking of William, trying hard to remember him by that name and not by description alone. What was he thinking now? Had he learned the content of that letter and if so how did it effect him? Rage or joy or fragments of both, the past ripped apart and only this tattered reality left to explain it. And he was not sure that he would ever be able to explain it. Words tended to make excuses, and that was something he couldn’t do. There were no excuses. There were just things done long ago, so far back they couldn’t be remedied, or explained away, so much a part of them that they would never be forgotten. But how could he ever explain it? He had not lied when he spoke to Dover but neither had he given the whole truth. He had argued with Nan just as he told her. He had questioned her race and her intentions and denied her right to a place in his family. And when she insulted him he pulled back his hand and hurled it at her. All of this was as he told the maid. But it hadn’t ended there. Nan took his blow. It knocked her back and left her on the floor. She looked up at him, her hair suddenly loosed from the band that had contained it, wild around her. She asked him why he was here, and it was only then that he knew. Lust follows fast on violence and that night the two converged within him. In a moment without thought he had lifted her from the floor and thrown her across the room and came at her on the bed. She had fought but that was no deterrent. That was part of it all and somehow he reasoned that he was simply fighting her. He was ripping off her clothes but he was just arguing with her. He was prying his way between her legs but he was just teaching her a lesson. His hand was over her mouth and he was stifling her screams but that was because he had heard enough from her and now it was time for her to hear from him.
A sound jolted him back to the alley. For a moment it seemed loud out of all reason. Then the noise was gone and he knew it had just been a rat knocking over a can. He reached for his rifle and held it as if unsure of what to do with it. He heard the rodent scurry away and felt the hound shift as she scented it. He whispered to still her. He ran his hand over the rifle stock, hefted it and measured its weight. It was an unadorned weapon, no brass strapwork or silver adornments. He brought the old percussion lock close to his nose, inhaled the fulminate of the cap and studied it a moment. It was a simple mechanism but one that he had relied upon many times before this. It was powerful enough to take down a bear. A cannon the woman had called it, one that he carried on his shoulder. He trusted it, but he knew also that the muzzle held only one shot of lead, powerful, but singular. There were no second chances, at least not for what he intended. He tilted the weapon as if he might reload it. But he stopped himself. What’s done is done, he thought. Leave it be. And yet he had never managed to do that.
There was no pleasure in his memory of that night with Nan. There was no sex even. He didn’t remember pushing himself inside her though he knew that was at the center of it all. And the hardest thing of all was that in his remembering he knew what he hadn’t known at the time. He was not ashamed of his brother’s love for her. He was jealous of it. Lewis was all he had and this woman had taken a piece of him away. Though he hated her for it he coveted her also and had not the strength to answer these emotions as he should have. When she said Lewis was the better man he had known it to be true. His younger brother had a more honest heart and no blot on his conscience. He saw her without seeing only her skin. He knew her for who she was and this rewarded him with a great love and for this Morrison had wished to punish him. It was first a brother who betrayed his brother. Morrison was no better than that first son of man.
Lewis came for him the next day. They did battle silently, needing no words to incite them. The younger brother
had a rage in him too and it drove him forward with wild swings. He came on teeth and fists and knees and elbows. His fingers talons aimed for this brother’s eyes. But Morrison was best in moments of violence and his younger brother was no match. He boxed him about the face and drove his fist up into his abdomen and slammed the flat of his palm down upon the base of Lewis’s neck. He popped him with short jabs that made a mockery of the younger man’s anger. And then, as if all that were not enough, he hooked an arm across his chest, under his shoulders, lifted him up and spun and tossed him down with the full force of both their bodies. He meant the injury to hurt, to hurt like hell, to knock the wind out of him and end the fight. He didn’t mean to slam him down on a barb of rusted metal. The nail split his brother’s flesh to the bone. He didn’t mean for the injury to be fatal, but that’s just what it was.
In the following weeks the sickness set in. Lewis’s fingers went rigid. The muscles in his neck stood out like taut ropes. His jaw locked shut. His fury and anger and love were all contained within him. When he died he did so crying, crying and speaking his first language through his clenched teeth, words the woman could not understand. The words cut right to the older brother’s soul and allowed him no peace, forever after. The younger brother cursed him in the language of their birth, swore his love in the language of their birth. His love for the woman, that is. He allowed no love for his brother any longer. Only in death was Lewis calm and only then had Morrison reached out and touched him. He whispered his sorrow and cried and understood how empty the world now was and just how great his crimes. He had pulled from his pocket the memento that his father had given to him as the eldest son, a button handed down several generations already, the sole trinket carried from a bloody battlefield wherein clans fought clans in a fool war that rewarded other men entirely. He pressed this against his brother’s chest, left it there and moved away.
From that day on life was a punishment. Of all his people he was alone in the world and this by his own doing. In dreams he relived that fight countless times. In waking he asked God to change that moment so that it was he who fell upon the nail and not Lewis. But God was silent. In battle he wished for his own death and it was this that had led to the death of so many other things. It had felt to him at times—lonely moments at the edge of the plains, frozen mornings when his toes went numb and his hands were two mallets, nights spent staring across campfires shared with silent ghost people, any moment in which he defied mortality by killing that which would have killed him—that God was not allowing his death. He had thought life an affliction all those twenty-some years. Until he got the note. He had read the words and heard again the voice that spoke them and saw that beautiful face as it had been. Then he thought, maybe, just maybe, he was being allowed one more chance.
Morrison stirred, realizing that there had been a change in the light. Just slightly. There were the hints of forms where before there had been only blackness. There was a shadow cast by the warehouse and on the far wall the faintest indication of the patterns in the masonry. Dawn was still far off, but night had acknowledged its coming. The old man lifted the rifle and smelled the cap again. It was almost time. Perhaps it was foolish, this mission of his, but he would never get this chance again, not quite like this. One more chance, and one more death to go with it.
EIGHT “What are you telling me?” William asked. He had been listening to her. He had heard her reaching back into his past and uttering names of the dead and moving events around as if she would revise the story of his world. He heard her, but he couldn’t form a new whole of her words. Fear crept over him like ice forming on the skin of a lake. “Just what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that man’s kin to you.”
“What kind of kin?”
“What’s your daddy’s name?”
William looked away from her, suddenly gone shy. In all their time together he had never shared this simple fact of family history. He knew the name. It was instantly in his head, but when had he ever uttered it? When had anyone other than his mother asked him of such things? It hadn’t mattered. He was dead. He was white. William was as content to be fatherless as any of the millions who shared his skin tones were. He looked back at Dover, no guile in her face, no mirth, no judgment. Just the question. “Lewis,” he said. “Lewis Morrison.”
The woman closed her eyes and let out a breath. Her lips trembled and then went calm. She held up the square of paper and opened her eyes. “He gave you this.”
William, confused for a moment, stared at the note as if it had been delivered of a ghost.
“Gave it to me fore he left. Said you should read it.”
Still staring, his hand rose up and took the note, both their fingers firm on it for a second. Then hers opened and the document was his. “Did you read it?” he asked.
Dover shook her head. “That’s for you to do. Don’t tell me you don’t read. I know you learned. Know they tried to shame the learning out of you, but you’ve still got it. I’ve seen it in your eyes sometimes, you looking at words and them meaning something to you. You never could put on a dumb face. Not to fool me, at least.”
William held the note between his fingers. He didn’t want to read it. He didn’t want to, but he knew that not wanting whatever it was the letter would tell him had little to do with it. He lifted it and held it trembling, folded it open, turned it over and placed his eyes upon the unsteady loops and curves of the script. He felt Dover’s hand on his thigh and was thankful for it. He read.
Andrew Morrison,
You going to be surprised to get this and maybe not all that happy either. Seen Mr. Moser out here and he said he seen you in Saint Lewis. Said he might well see you again and if he did he would deliver of you this message. So I writing this down. That probably surprise you but this old negress can write it took my whole life to learn it. Just hope you old Scot can read. I gonna pass on soon to the next world but had to say my peace afore then. You know how I am. So here it is.
After you left out of here and Lewis went in the ground I did have a chile. A boy massa named William. I brought this boy up and told him bout his daddy Lewis, and about the country he come from and tried to make him proud a something. Don’t no if I seeded in that. Other thing is that that was a lie. Lewis not his daddy but you are. I no that cause I felt you in me and dont ask me to explain it. He your son. I no this to be true though I cant explain why. But youll feel its true when you read this. It will ring inside you and that all the proof either one of us needs. Aint it?
Now, I got two things to ask of you and if your a Scots man youll do them both to honor your brother and the family what come before you. First you need to come on out here and take William from here and see him to freedom. Your own son a slave and now you no it. So take him out of here. Tell him the truth as you no it to be. You his daddy, but that boy come out of the love between Lewis and I and that is a greater truth even than blood. Between you and I was something but it was not love. Let the boy come from love. Teach him bout his daddy. Make a truth out of the crime you done to Lewis and me.
Thats all now please see to it.
Annabelle.
Having read it, William let his head fall back against the bedding. His gaze drifted across the ceiling for a moment, and then he closed his eyes. He heard Dover move beside him. She cleared her throat. He knew this was a sign to him but he still did not answer. It was too much. He needed a few moments. A few moments to restructure everything he believed of his life. He had a father. He had seen his face.
NINE The sky grew light in the pre-dawn. There were no signs of the sun itself, no crimson hues stirring fire into the firmament. There weren’t even any colors in the dank alley, only blacks and grays and the shades in between. But the day was stirring. Morrison sensed it, and so did the men sleeping in the warehouse at his back. Somebody awoke with a string of sneezes. Some heavy metal object clattered down against the stone floor. A chorus of groggy voices called out in protest. The calls faded into a s
ilence which tried to be as it had been before but which was not. It was quiet for some time, but the night was broken. Soon the men seemed to grudgingly acknowledge this fact. They stirred and cleared their throats of phlegm and greeted each other in grunts that slowly evolved into true dialogue. Morrison rose and flexed his fingers, trying to ease the stiffness out of his old joints. He climbed atop the crate and peered through the sooty glass. The hound lifted her head and watched.
The men inside had kindled a fire on the stone floor of the warehouse itself. They now huddled around it, waiting for the kettle that had been set precariously atop the boards that served as fuel. Morrison’s eyes floated over them, taking inventory, touching on each man. While he cared little for these weak-willed men it was not them that he was after. Satisfied of this, the old man climbed down and resumed his wait.
He sat recalling that in an earlier time he might have stridden right into the warehouse, rifle leveled. He would have taken out whoever moved first and kept going, swinging the rifle itself as a blunt weapon and then tossing it away and using his hands. He would have spun among them and understood exactly the distances between them and known instinctively each man’s speed and intentions. He would have seen the fragments of their bodies at which to strike as if a light had been pinpointed on them: that nose to be shoved upwards under the eyes by the base of his palm, a larynx to be crushed against the fat of his hand, the knee joint to be taken from the side by his heel. He would have asked for death and therefore it would’ve escaped him. This was what he was good at, his violent gift. No matter how much time passed between these savage episodes he knew that gift was still his.
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