The Scribe

by Matthew Guinn

  Underwood stepped aside so that Canby could see into the room. On its far side, over the head of Szabó’s cot, the wall was covered with dark crosses. Crucifixes, all of them, some as simple as two crossed pieces of wood and others ornate, brought, Canby imagined, from Szabó’s native land, crosses on which Christs in agony suffered in degrees depicted in a range from beatific to ghastly. Some shedding carved tears and others stoic, some with the build of athletes and others thin, tortured wraiths. But each and all of them arrayed on the wall above Szabó’s bed had been hung, meticulously, upside down.

  Underwood was moving back up the hallway, his footsteps gaining momentum. Canby listened to him go as he took in the rest of the room: the domestic items—a washbasin, a shirt and a pair of pants draped over a ladder-back chair—mixed in with the tools of the jailer’s trade: manacles, leg irons. Atop a bureau he saw a half dozen of the foppish collars Billingsley had taken to wearing, resting there, perfect crescents of white. His eyes drifted back to the manacles. He thought how they covered such a broad swath of a man’s wrists, how the leg irons could reach so far up from a man’s ankles. An impenetrable band of iron. As he heard Underwood unlocking the cell door he picked up one of the manacles and set it inside one of the collars on the chipped and scarred top of the bureau. Studied the perfect circle of iron inside the broader circle of starched cotton.

  Up the hallway Szabó’s cries resumed, then ebbed into a series of low grunts, coming regularly. When Canby got back to the cell he saw that Underwood was working over Szabó’s midsection methodically, like a seasoned cop would—like Canby should have—dealing out damage where it could not be seen in a courtroom by judge or jury. Underwood was acting more the professional than he had.

  “Underwood,” Canby said after a minute, “I think that’s enough. Leave a little starch in him yet. He has some digging to do tonight.”

  THE BILLINGSLEY family plots in Oakland Cemetery were on a slight rise above the Confederate Section of the vast graveyard, so that as Canby and Underwood stood over the grave and watched Szabó dig his way down into it, they could look across Oakland to Atlanta. To the west, the International Cotton Exposition glowed with cheerful light at Oglethorpe Park, the fair’s operating hours now extended late into the nights. Nearer were the lights of Atlanta, the beacon of Kimball House, and the smoldering glow of the railroad roundhouse, where the smiths and mechanics worked on the cars and engines through the night. The closest landmark otherwise was the Confederate Monument, which raised its stark marble obelisk above the tombs and mausoleums like a finger of bone. Surrounding it were row upon row of white-tablet markers, plain save for name and rank, of Georgia’s Confederate dead. Their number, last Canby had heard, was nearly seven thousand—among them some three thousand unknowns who had fallen with their comrades, the lot of them, in Canby’s estimation, dying in the stead of men like Robert Billingsley.

  Szabó had dug himself down into the grave neck-deep, with Canby and Underwood standing above, when they heard the cock of a pistol’s hammer behind them.

  “Not a motion, you goddamn ghouls.”

  Canby spoke without turning. “Is that you, Mister Connelly?”

  “Yep. Got the drop on you sonsabitches, didn’t I? Which college you headed to with that dead man?”

  “Imagine our lantern helped you spot us, sir,” Underwood said.

  “You getting smart with me, boy? You’d not be the first sack-’em-up man I’ve dropped in a hole of his own digging.”

  “He didn’t mean any harm, Mister Connelly,” Canby said. “We knocked at the gatehouse but didn’t get an answer.”

  Connelly stepped up close, put a hand on Canby’s shoulder, and turned him around. Canby could smell the sweet stink of bourbon on his breath. “I stepped out for a minute. But I stepped back in. Where’s that leave you?” He gestured with the pistol, its enormous barrel pointing at Canby and Underwood in turn. Canby imagined the sidearm might have been standard issue for the Mexican War, if not earlier.

  “I’m Thomas Canby, Mister Connelly.”

  “Angus’s boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Angus was a good man.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, it’s a shitload of trouble you’ve got yourself into again, isn’t it?”

  “It is. Trying to get out of a bit of it here. Would you mind lowering that pistol?”

  Connolly did not answer, only stepped around Canby to get a better look at Szabó in the grave. His eyes roved over Szabó’s broken face and the blood- and clay-stained cotton of the blouse-like shirt he wore. He glowered at him until Szabó, doggedly, began to dig again. Connelly studied the ragged hole in the ground and the earth slung up to the side of the grave.

  “Shoddy work, even the second time around,” Connelly said. “Where the hell is he from, that he don’t even know how to dig a square hole?” He nodded, as though to himself. “Trying to go shallow, he was. Had to ride his ass to get it six feet deep. But would he let me dig it? No. Just a bunch of that gobbledygook he talks.”

  “Was he alone?” Canby asked.

  “He brought that bishop with him. They were friends, you know, him and the colonel. It was as small as a pauper’s funeral, which I guess is fitting, knowing all the bad he done.”

  Underwood cleared his throat and spoke. “No one else with them?”

  “Naw. Just the two of them, one on each end of the coffin when they lowered it.”

  “Doubtless it wasn’t much weight,” Canby said.

  “How you figure?” Connelly asked as they heard the sound of wood being struck by the shovel.

  “You think Johnny Drew’s in it?” Underwood asked.

  “I think it’s empty,” Canby said.

  Underwood’s eyes widened. “Think Malthus climbed out of it?”

  “Billingsley, Underwood. In a manner of speaking. But not like you think. He was out of it soon as the wagon left the tower.”

  Szabó had nearly cleared the coffin lid of dirt. The shovel scraped on the wood and he moved from the foot of the casket to the head, tossing shovelsful of earth upward indiscriminately, some of it landing on the boots of the men standing above. When Canby saw that the coffin had a split lid he called Szabó off the digging.

  “Go ahead, open it.”

  “He’s liable to be real ripe by now,” Connelly warned.

  Szabó shook his head. Canby reached a hand into his jacket and said again, “Open it.”

  Slowly, Szabó knelt down at the foot of the grave and reached for the latch that secured the casket’s top half. “You don’t know what you doing,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Just open it,” Underwood said.

  He loosed the latch and raised the coffin lid slowly, Canby and Underwood craning their necks to see over the lid and Connelly pressing a handkerchief to his nose. Connelly lowered the handkerchief as he and the others saw that the casket held no body. Upon the satin pillow of its lining rested, as though set there for viewing, an iron slave collar.

  “Hand it up, Szabó,” Canby said.

  “Son of a bitch,” Connelly said.

  Canby took the collar from Szabó’s outstretched hand. Its four prongs had been broken off, but not entirely. Four short nubs, filed round at their ends, remained attached to the ring of iron. Careful not to lock it in place, Canby fitted it around his neck, brought a splayed hand up from his sternum until his fingers caught against the nubs.

  “That’s how you survive a hanging, Underwood. Nothing supernatural to it.” Then to Szabó he said, “You’ll hang for this. Without a collar.”

  Szabó glared up at them defiantly. “He’s loose, he’s loose! Ain’t nothing you can do now!”

  The report of Connelly’s pistol seemed as loud as a cannon. Its barrel barked flame and smoke and Szabó fell back against the far wall of the grave, then slumped down onto the closed half of the coffin. His head drooped, then rose, and looked down again. As Canby heard the last echoes of the report coming back fro
m the headstones across the cemetery, his ears ringing, Szabó reached down into his lap and picked up the lead ball from where it had fallen. He pressed the fingers of his other hand against a spot on his chest, his eyes widening, and looked up from the grave.

  “Goddamn,” Connelly said, peering down the flintlock’s barrel, then sniffing it. “Bad powder, I guess.”

  Szabó began to laugh, then to cackle. He sat up and held the ball aloft like a trophy. “He did not lie! He lives! I live, too! What you say to that?”

  Canby was reaching into his jacket again when Underwood began to fire. The Colt barked five times, as quickly as the revolver’s action would allow, and with each shot a red blossom sprouted on the white cotton of Szabó’s blouse. Szabó slumped again. The light that had kindled in his eyes a moment before ebbed just as quickly. He raised one arm, as if to bestow a curse, then his head and the arm dropped earthward together.

  They stood staring down at Szabó’s corpse as the gun smoke slowly cleared from over the open grave. Underwood, hand trembling, returned his pistol to his jacket pocket.

  “Well, there’s justice, I suppose,” Canby said after a long moment. He remembered the line of Emerson’s, Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. Here was edge, indeed. “Though I’m not sure Vernon Thompson will appreciate the sentencing much.”

  “Piss on that,” Connelly said. “Vernon’s gone soft if he don’t get it.”

  Unbidden by either of the policemen, Leonidas G. Connelly slipped down into the grave and began wrestling Szabó’s body into the coffin. Once he had stuffed the corpse in, he stomped the lid shut and picked up the shovel and gestured for Canby to give him a hand up. Then he began to refill the grave, red clay piling up over the casket. After a few minutes he paused in his work, looked up at Canby and Underwood as if exasperated to see them still there.

  “Well, go on with you, now,” he said. “You’ve got your own work to do.”

  VERNON STARED AT the iron collar on the table before him and ran a hand through his graying hair while Canby gave him the report. Since letting them in through the front door on Butler Street he had said little, and now he seemed bereft of words. He sat in a cane-bottomed chair at his kitchen table clad only in his nightshirt and slippers, his eyes cutting from time to time between Canby and Underwood and the collar. Slowly, he picked it up and felt its heft, the nubs around its circumference.

  “And I told them to drop him easy,” he said at last.

  “It might not have made a difference,” Canby said. “The width of the thing could have kept his neck from breaking.”

  “Might have. Could have.”

  “He fooled all of us, Vernon.”

  “Twice,” Vernon said. He set the collar down heavily. “Szabó fooled me, too.”

  “You don’t have to worry about Szabó anymore, sir,” Underwood said.

  “No, only about Szabó’s surviving relations, if there are any. Or the district attorney, or the county commissioners wondering why Fulton Tower suddenly has no jailer.”

  “Szabó is where he belongs,” Canby said. “Procedure can get your neck wrung in Atlanta. You told me that yourself.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have, Thomas. I’m curious, which of you was it shot him?”

  “We both did,” Canby said. From the corner of his vision, he thought he saw Underwood’s expression change.

  “Both. Even better.” Vernon sighed. He patted at his chest absently and Canby realized that the older man was unconsciously reaching for a cigar.

  Canby rose from his seat and opened the cupboard, found the bottle of bonded there, and set three glasses on the table. As he poured, he said, “Szabó is out of this picture. What remains is to find Billingsley, and John Drew if we are able. Remember, Sherman’s name was in Billingsley’s book.”

  “The last name, you say?”

  “Mine was the last. Sherman’s just before it.”

  “Ah, the S that will finish this thing. Sherman is to be on the morning’s first train. Do you think he can pull this thing off?”

  “Tell us about the bombproof where Mrs. Drew was found.”

  “Why in God’s name would I want to revisit that scene?”

  Canby set the bottle on the table. For answer, he leaned against the cold cookstove and sipped his glass of whiskey.

  Vernon took a deep drink from his glass. “All right, Thomas. You have to understand, Lydia Drew was a strange woman. Half debutante and half hypochondriac, or all of both, you could say. Always either in high spirits or else sickly nigh unto death. When it got to be clear that Sherman meant to shell us all to hell, she had the bishop hire out a crew of Negroes to dig a bombproof on the south side of a hill over by Hunter Street. She was strange, I said, but not stupid. On the south side of the hill, safest from the artillery coming in from the north, where Sherman’s front was. Closer to the roundhouse than it might ought to have been, but separated from the rail lines by two blocks of cotton warehouses. Sherman was not shelling cotton stores, you know.

  “Those boys dug it out proper, then lined the inside with cedar planks and topped it with a double-timbered door on brass hinges. Where Drew got the materials for it by that stage of the war is your guess, not mine. They even replaced the sod on top of the door—nothing to be seen but a grassy hillside, unless you knew to look for it. She provisioned it full of stores and got down there with little Johnny before the first shell struck. And stayed. Even after the mayor carried out the white flag and the Federals themselves were walking the streets. Even after Drew took the boy back to the rectory with him, she wouldn’t come up.

  “Then Sherman set his engineers loose on the depot and the roundhouse. Tearing up everything related to the rail lines. Heating up the rails on fires made from the crossties and wrapping them around trees and light poles, ‘Sherman neckties,’ they called them. I imagine she resolved never to come up when she heard all that.

  “The next night, the Federals set fire to everything. She’d survived the shelling but there was worse in store for her. What do you think burned the worst? Do you remember it? Those cotton warehouses were pillars of flame. The fire spread down the hillside, anywhere there was thatch or tinder. When it burned over and the Federals had left, we went down with Drew to check on her. Nothing left down Hunter Street but the gutted frames of the warehouses and a blackened hill.

  “I was down in that bombproof that afternoon. You could not tell whether she’d asphyxiated or been roasted alive. But you could tell it had taken some time. She suffered more than a lady ought.”

  Vernon drained the last of his glass and poured himself another.

  “We need to go there,” Canby said quietly.

  Vernon shook his head. “No point in it. We sealed the bombproof up after we removed her body. That hillside’s been grown over with ivy for ten, fifteen years.”

  “I think that’s where we’ll find John Drew.”

  “Good God, in his mother’s tomb. Dead or alive?”

  “From what the bishop told us before he passed,” Underwood said, “the boy might be alive.”

  Vernon drained his second glass of whiskey. “This thing is inconceivable.”

  “That’s how Billingsley has tricked us. His modus operandi is the inconceivable.”

  Canby saw Underwood’s expression change again. He saw that the black man bore the trace of a smile on his face. “Now you coming around,” he said.

  Then Underwood seemed to be working to return his expression to a neutral one.

  “Sir,” he added.

  November 15

  ON THE HILLSIDE THEY STOMPED THE EARTH IN widening circles, their feet tangling in the ivy, then tearing free to stomp again, their motions like a pagan dance to the rising sun. Canby marked the cardinal points of the compass as they canvassed the hillside, from the sun cresting over Kimball House to its farthest light on the foothills in the west, where the Chattahoochee wound its way southward. Above the hills a line of clouds was coming on, gunmetal
-gray. They looked to be bringing heavy weather with them.

  Vernon’s boot sounded on a dull hollowness. “Here,” he said. He stomped again, sounding out the perimeters of the bombproof’s door. Canby and Underwood joined him, the three of them kneeling. The ivy had been cut along the left side of the charred door. Underwood pushed the vines clear of the rusted handle, looked at the others for a second, and pulled the door open.

  A set of stairs led down into the darkness. “John!” Vernon called.

  There was no answer.

  “A light, Vernon?” Canby asked, and Vernon struck a match and handed it to him in a cupped hand. Canby started down the stairs, with Underwood behind him and Vernon squatting in the doorway holding the door open to let in as much light as it could. Canby could make out an unmade double bed and a nightstand with a lamp on it. He lifted the globe and touched the match to the wick. When it flared, he set the globe back in place.

  “I feel it here,” Underwood said.

  At first they saw nothing amiss. There were shelves of canned goods on one wall and a washbasin and water pitcher sat on a small table beside a small pile of dirty washcloths. Beneath the table was an old peach crate full of cans that had been opened raggedly, as though in haste or by an unpracticed hand. Among the rumpled linens on the bed rested a little pickaninny doll, the eyes bulbous, red ribbons plaited into the kinky hair that Canby guessed was fashioned from cotton dyed black. The skin darker than night. They saw in a corner a slop jar that, from the smell of the room, needed emptying, and beside it a set of marbles that the boy had apparently abandoned mid-game. It was this that drew their eyes to the floor.

  The boy had drawn off chalk circles for his marbles but alongside them and winding through the circles and across the floor were drawings of such vileness that Canby felt his breath coming short. The figures were human, but barely so, contorted into acts of deviance Canby could not have imagined, a bacchanalia of sadism and sexual congress that wound and crept across the entire floor in whorls of chalk. Most of the figures were Negro men and women, crudely caricatured, suffering as many types of assault as the floorboards’ span could accommodate. Each time Canby or Underwood moved their feet, they were greeted with more of the nightmare visions.