The Scribe

by Matthew Guinn

  “Banks left the untying to me—after he had coiled and hung the whip in the barn and gone back to the fields. Some of them had taken lashes so deep I could lay my finger inside the cuts. I remember the colors in such detail. The shade of their dark skin and the shine of blood on it. The acres of white rows around us, swaying in every breeze. The color of the ground by the post, where the dirt had been stained. Quite beautiful. Their backs were scarred in much the same way I imagine yours is, Detective.”

  For the first time since Canby and Underwood had entered the cell, Billingsley opened his eyes. He lay on the cot that was bolted into the black brick wall on the opposite side of Spot 12. Billingsley’s head had been shaved, unevenly and apparently in haste, and his scalp was a variegated mess of stubble and bare skin, through which ran black sutures in a convoluted network of patches where the doctors had knitted his head back together. The skull beneath was knotty and ridged, either from his beating or from the bones working to mend. The eye that Billingsley turned to them was red from its pupil to its lid, shot through with blood. If Canby had seen a man worse damaged in the war, he could not remember. It pleased him to see it.

  “My back is nearly healed. I’d predict a worse prognosis for that face of yours. Though we’ll cover it with a sack soon enough.”

  “I’ll settle with Campbell by and by.”

  “Which Campbell do you mean—the father or the son? Did no one tell you that Tunis Campbell is dead? By his own hand.”

  The red eye closed. “By and by.”

  “We did not come for the auld lang syne. Just your statement of the murders. I have Underwood here as a scribe and witness.” He saw that Underwood’s gaze had fixed on Billingsley and that his jaw was rigid. He held the pencil in his hand tightly enough to snap it.

  “Will my old friend Vernon Thompson not deign to visit?”

  “He sends his regards and says he’ll see you at the hanging. Meantime, I’m to get your full confession.”

  “I had hoped for a jury trial. I wished to proclaim my guilt to the world.”

  “Then why plead as you did?”

  Billingsley raised a hand to his head, felt along one of the ridges there gingerly. “My time draws nigh. I likely would not survive to the end of a jury trial. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

  “That’s Scripture,” Underwood said.

  “It is, nigger-boy. I have found another avenue. The two of you will be the vehicle for my message.”

  “Let’s stick to present business,” Canby said, watching the set of Underwood’s jaw. “Start with Alonzo Lewis.”

  “In due time, Detective. A confession is only part of the last testament I mean to give to you.”

  “There’ll be no thousand and one nights. We’ll hang you without it if needs be.”

  “I will not be rushed, Canby.”

  “Detective Canby,” Underwood said.

  “It is not your place to correct me, boy,” Billingsley said. He struggled to raise himself to a sitting position against the brick wall behind him, the names of the former condemned scratched and carved into the bricks. He leaned against them, his head drooping from the exertion. His breath came raggedly. “You are a child of Atlanta, Canby, and Atlanta will never have a proper regard for history. But to understand the now, you must know the then. In time that will be clear to you.

  “You have your black friend here, and I had one of my own back then. Older, though. The other darkies called him a conjure-doctor. Saul was his name. Father bought him off another planter over the state line in Alabama. But Saul was never much for Alabama. In fact, he was not really of any time or place, although his bloodline ran back to Haiti. Saul introduced me to mysteries from that part of the world—voodoo, Santeria. And darker mysteries of his own contriving. Crude stuff, but wondrous to a child. We spent many late nights together and I was an ardent pupil. He marked my progress until I outstripped him, and then he kept a fair distance from me.

  “It was Saul, you see, who introduced me to my destiny.

  “Before long, I had developed a kind of contempt for Saul. When Banks took ill and died, Father assumed one of the hands had poisoned his food. There was no shortage of fingers pointed at Saul. He fled; Father rounded up a contingent of the local white trash, and Saul met his end.”

  Billingsley raised his head and took an appraising look at Canby, at Underwood.

  “I assumed Banks’s duties, over Father’s mortified objections. But I loved the work. I grew more subtle with it, more refined in my methods. The wenches seldom showed a mark. I moved among them enough to spread my work around. The cotton grew, the corn grew; Father was happy, the plantation prospered.”

  “And then the war,” Canby said.

  “The war ruined everything. In spite of a heroic effort on our part. We made a splendid start of it. We harried that Yankee rabble all over Virginia at the outset. How I loved to see those blue bodies stack up like firewood. But in time . . .”

  “You lost everything.”

  Billingsley’s battered face assumed a nearly wistful look. “A person as common as yourself can barely imagine what I lost. Absolute power. Total order. We drew it from the blacks and from the land itself.”

  “Hell on earth,” Underwood said. Billingsley smiled at him.

  “I begin to see your motivations now,” Canby said. “The old order broke down, didn’t it? And you’ve hated seeing anyone who would have been a field hand or house slave back then do better for themselves. Where did that leave you?”

  “You have a primitive mind, Detective. I suppose it’s what suits you to your profession—that you break work such as mine down to crude particulars. But yes, to descend from such sovereignty on one’s own land to slinking around this cesspool of a city like a pickpurse or a cat burglar—I confess I resented it. I raged.”

  “And Malthus. I should have seen it. By your lights, the plantation held perfect balance intact. Malthus wrote that the only histories we have of mankind are histories of the higher classes. Your era was over.”

  “Oh, Malthus is an old name.”

  “Like Legion?” Underwood asked.

  “You may be on to something there, boy.”

  “And you feel, like Malthus, that equality among all would only lead to misery. The Cotton Exposition fairly celebrates that.”

  “A very old name.”

  “But why did you kill Anse? How did he fit your desiderata?”

  Billingsley was reclining, in increments, back to his supine position on the bunk.

  “You tire me, Detective. Your pedestrian thinking. You stutter and stumble along your way and still you do not see. I expected better of you.

  “If you dream tonight, Detective, ask your father about his last view of this world. Did he see blue and gold? Or only blood-red?” Billingsley sighed hoarsely. “No more tonight.”

  His eyes closed and a rattling breath came from his chest. It sounded enough like a dying breath that Canby held his own until he saw the chest rise again.

  “Should we wake him?” Underwood asked.

  Canby was slow to answer. “No,” he said.

  “I can wake him. I’d be glad to.”

  “Leave him be,” Canby said, getting to his feet. “I need a drink.”

  “YOU KNOW I can’t serve colored, Thomas,” Lee Smith said.

  “It’s police business,” Canby said. “Make an exception tonight. It’s been a hell of a day.” He showed him Vernon’s badge.

  “You think you’re the only gent in here with a badge?”

  Canby set Anse’s Colt revolver on the mahogany bar, its long barrel not quite pointed at the apron wrapped around Lee Smith’s waist, and tapped the trigger guard with his finger.

  And so the Jameson was on the house this evening and they found themselves at the darkest table in the quietest corner of the Big Bonanza with the bottle and two glasses and the Colt set between them, talking of Malthus the English parson and philosopher and of magic and madness and how s
oon they could noose the bastard that had brought them all together in Atlanta.

  “I know nothing about this voodoo business,” Canby said. “What is it, some kind of black magic?”

  Underwood shook his head. “No. But it can lead to all kinds of wickedness.”

  “Used the wrong way.”

  “Yeah. Can open up the wrong kinds of doors. Specially if you go looking for the wrong door.”

  “Spirits and such? Spells?”

  “You making fun?”

  “No. Just thinking about the so-called spirit world.”

  “Well, that’s some progress there.”

  Canby sat for a while, looking at his glass set on the table, half filled with amber whiskey. The movement of the other drinkers in the bar, the tramping on the floorboards, made the whiskey move in the glass, the surface of it tilting slightly, forward and back.

  “In the old country,” Canby said, “they talk about thin places. Ever heard of those?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a natural place—maybe a rock, or a waterfall, or a very old tree, or a grove of them—where they say the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual one is stretched thin. Where you can almost cross over. From one to the other.”

  “You wanting me to call that superstitious?”

  Canby shrugged.

  “You believe in thin places?”

  “No,” Canby said. He shook his head and sat up and took the glass and drained it. “Not at all. Just old Celtic superstition.”

  “Felt like some kind of thin place up in Spot Twelve to me. The wrong kind of thin place.”

  “I’ve not seen one like Billingsley in my time, I’ll grant you.”

  “Pure evil.”

  “More madness than evil, Underwood.”

  “I’d have thought he was testing your notions.”

  “He is—of madness.”

  “Up till here lately he’s done pretty well for a crazy man.”

  “He’s done well because he enjoyed the privileges of his position. The Ring and their like, they protected him without knowing it, people looking the other way in the name of discretion. Southern manners, you know. There’s your old order, still with us, at least a little.”

  Canby refilled his glass.

  “Do you know what this man Malthus actually wrote, Underwood? There wasn’t anything sinister to it, just common sense. Common sense from an Anglican parson. Maybe I should say refined common sense. He looked around in Europe in his day and saw that the people were outgrowing the food supply. He’d been moved by the Irish famine. He pointed out the need to control population.”

  “That’s what Billingsley was doing. One nigger at a time.”

  Canby looked up. “You think I’m making light of it?”

  “Only it wasn’t all Negroes, was it? Wasn’t Thomas Malthus he was about by the time he got to your friend. It was a new Malthus, him. That’s the only coherence I see. Just evil.”

  Canby refilled their glasses, cocking an eyebrow at Underwood.

  “There you go sliding off into superstition again.” He slid the Colt across the table to Underwood. “Put your faith in this. It’s the best answer for the likes of Billingsley.”

  Underwood glanced around the bar before he touched the pistol. Quickly, he slipped it into his jacket. Then he looked again at Canby as though the forbidden transaction were already off his mind. “Couldn’t you feel it up there in Spot Twelve?”

  “Hocus-pocus, Underwood.”

  “How do you want to explain the hold he’s had over them Campbells? Fortus up there in Fulton Tower for perjury and abetting, and the old man’s head blowed clean off?”

  Canby thought of Tunis Campbell’s last words. Dead and gone and bound to hell, had the old man said? He shook his head. “More superstition.”

  “You heard him back there. Conjuring and such? I tell you, he ain’t entirely of this world.”

  Canby let out a long breath and leaned back in his seat. “Underwood . . .”

  “Study on it, you’ll see it adds up. Tell me. What was it he said to you about your father?”

  But Canby was suddenly rising to go. He tossed back the last of his drink and set the glass on the table. “Good night, Underwood,” was all he said by way of an answer.

  AGAINST HIS WILL, he dreamed that night. He was back on Whitehall Street, July ’64, and the hot streets were exploding under Sherman’s cannonade. Great clouds of sulfur smoke scurried over downtown in between the belches of the big guns, and the sun’s efforts to penetrate the haze did no better than to render the sky a sheet of shimmering bronze, an impenetrable hot fog. Men and women—among them a father and his daughter—had died in their beds, asleep, or at clotheslines hanging wash, at kitchen tables eating. Still the shells rained down as though Sherman would never run out of ordnance. By then the city’s better-off were spending their days huddled with their servants in bombproofs dug out beneath their homes or into the hillsides. Others, like Angus, still stubbornly maintained routine as though they could not hear the shells bouncing down the alleys, careening off the buildings. Or as if resolute that their faith would preserve them.

  And so Canby, dreaming, found himself back in the little schoolhouse, of a Sunday in the siege, with his father and Julia and Frances O’Donnell. His dream-memory was ruthless in its accuracy: the hymnal lay spread open before Angus, though he knew the ritual by rote; he and Julia and Frances knelt on the raw-wood floor before the table and the meager loaf, the chalice half filled with sherry. Angus spoke the familiar words, his voice cadenced and rich, and Canby listened over and behind the voice to a cannonball bounding down Mitchell Street, heard the cracking of wood as it thwacked into clapboard siding, followed by the sound of brick crumbling.

  It seemed that Angus had not heard it. He blessed the loaf and the wine, his hand hovering over each in turn. Together, the four of them recited the Lord’s Prayer. Outside, a block away, a man’s voice called out in pain.

  Angus turned with the loaf in his hands. He raised it toward the stained-glass window set high in the north wall and broke it.

  He had begun to turn back to the makeshift altar and the children when the shell struck the schoolhouse. The wall came apart, in the slowed sequence of Canby’s dream, in stages: the dust first issuing forth from between the clapboards as though in a sharp exhalation, the boards splintering just after, and the stained glass shattering, bursting and flying inward in a shower of blue and gold fragments.

  Angus turned back to the children before he fell. His face was transfigured. Shards of the glass protruded from his cheeks and forehead and his eyes were embedded with colored slivers. Beneath the girls’ screams and the falling of boards and timbers Canby heard the glass cracking underfoot as he rushed to his father. He knelt beside him and watched, helpless, as Angus’s hands sought the wounds in his face, winced back from the pain when his fingers touched the glass in his eyes. Angus shook his head from side to side and his hands went out over the floor, patting at the boards, reaching for what he could not see.

  “I dropped it, boy!”

  “Stop talking, Father,” Canby said.

  He saw blood seeping with Angus’s pulse from a shard that had caught in his neck and Canby began to pull it out, carefully as he could. But the blood pumped faster. Angus was murmuring and Canby saw that his ruined eyes were leaking tears as well as blood.

  At some point he was aware that Julia and Frances were beside him and that his father had gone on. Frances reached out a hand to Canby’s cheek and turned his head and gently pulled a blue fragment, a shard the size of a penknife blade, from his face. He looked at Frances and Julia, at his father’s body and the halved loaf where it lay on the floor. He looked up at the ragged gash rent in the schoolhouse wall and that coppery half-light out beyond it.

  That had been the end of it, in life. But in the dream, Canby walked out of the schoolhouse, down the front steps, and saw in the lone oak of the schoolhouse yard Billingsley perched
on a thick limb in his suit of glistening black.

  “Died blind!” Billingsley crowed. “Died blind!”

  November 6

  “YOU EARLY,” SZABÓ SAID THROUGH THE WICKET.

  “I am a detective. There is no early or late for me.”

  The wicket shut and Canby stood listening to the flags atop Fulton Tower snap and flutter in the dawn breeze while the jailer worked the lock. The heavy door swung inward.

  “A bad night he had,” Szabó said, locking the door behind them.

  “What the hell do you care?”

  The jailer shrugged. “Colonel is gentleman.”

  Canby leaned close to the man, studied his furtive gray-green eyes beneath the brows, the hair nearly white where it grew out of his pale flesh. “Colonel is a murderer. Of the vilest kind. Do not forget it.”

  The jailer turned and walked to the cage that was Spot 12 and unlocked the door. His broad back to Canby the entire time, dumb as an ox. Once they had breached the front door, Malcolm Harrigan and his mob must have had the run of the place. Greenberg never had a chance.

  This man Szabó was new since Canby’s time on the force. And from what Vernon had told him, there had been plenty of grumbling not only when local men were passed over for the job, but when it went to a Hungarian immigrant, a protégé of Hannibal Kimball’s. To men of a certain hardened stripe, the jailer’s job was a sinecure—a sure livelihood from the county in exchange for making sure the inmates were kept fed and quiet. Any complaints could be fixed either with solitary confinement or a discreet beating. And since Reconstruction, at least, a paycheck from Fulton County never bounced. This man, though, had hardly worked his way up to it.

  Szabó opened the cage door for Canby and began to shuffle his way down the hall to his living quarters. Canby pulled the door shut behind him until it latched. Billingsley sat up on his bunk and Canby saw that he was dressed in a suit and shined shoes, all of it, except for the boiled-white shirt with its high collar, entirely black.

  “Where are this man’s prison togs?” Canby called down the hall. But although he could hear Szabó whistling a foreign tune as he moved down the long hallway, the jailer gave no sign of having heard him.