Curly yelped, “Mother Mary Magdalene!” and threw himself into the corner. Pete started and the ball dropped with a thud. Pete bent to pick it up, but Phaegin screamed, “Don’t touch it!”
Pete snorted and picked it up. “Why not? Just an empty float.”
Curly stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Huh?”
Pete rolled the nut off the bolt and peered inside. “Done as a bottle.”
Curly started laughing crazily. He peered in the orb himself. “What nobs. Empty as Sunday, kin you believe?”
Phaegin shoved him into a chair and wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “Who are you talkin’ about? Cud it out now, Curly, or I’ll have Sean squeeze it from you.”
Curly stared at his feet. “Some dupes, I don’t know nowhat else about ’em, tol’ me I’d be a hero fer the workers if I lit an’ threw that”—he indicated the tin orb on the floor—“into the crowd of swanks. And they’d pay me five dollars for the trouble.” He leaned over, picked up the float, and rolled it back and forth on the table. “It was supposed to pop like a squib, jus’ to get folks’ scare up.” He looked disturbed; his lip trembled. “Made a muddle of it, they did. One working naught, the other too good.” He flung the orb back to the floor and put his head in his arms on the table. His shoulders shook. Phaegin looked away.
Suddenly Curly jumped and slapped his thigh. “On top of trouble, I can’t get the watch. They were gonna pay me after.” He shook his head at me. I could see the track of tears through the ash on his face. “If I charred the fuse, Ned, mebbe I could still collect. That it didn’t pop is their mistake.”
Phaegin wilted to the floor. “There was no mistake, you nit. They wouldn’t trust you to throw the real bomb. You did everything they wanted perfectly. Showed up at the rally with your bush of red hair, made yourself conspicuous shoutin’ and wavin’ that fake bomb around. Whoever lit the real fuse is drinkin’ grenadine right now while you’re good as broiled for everything that happened.” She gave me a tragic look. “And us along with him.”
Curly sniffed. “I woulda been secret as a … as a … secret”—he pointed at Phaegin—“if you had not took hold of my ear thatta way.”
I stared at him incredulously. He grinned apologetically at me. “Don’t worry, Ned, I’ll get that watch back somehow. I will.”
“Forget the watch, Curly! My God, that is nothing compared to the mess we’re in now.”
Curly apparently took that as forgiveness and, looking somewhat relieved, took a piece of folded paper and began to clean his nails, humming tonelessly.
Phaegin shouted hysterically. “Put a cork in it!” She gave an anguished sob, drew her hands through her hair, and rubbed her streaked face. “Pete, Sean. Listen to me. You have to go somewhere else, out of town. Don’t talk to anyone or let anyone see you. Stop only at Ma and Da’s. Tell them not to worry, I’ll make out. Then get out of New Haven and don’t come back.”
“Ever?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. You’re going to have to use your own sense. I’m not going to be here.”
“Where are you going?”
“You don’t need to know anything more. Just leave.” She kissed them both. “Go now.”
They shuffled out. Phaegin commenced to cry again as she went through the room, putting a few things in a bag. “This’ll have to do, can’t risk goin’ back to my place.” She snuffled. “Get your bag, let’s go.”
I shook my head. “Where?”
“We have to get out of here.”
“No, we have to go to the police.” I trailed along behind her as she threw a knife, a hunk of bread, a towel into her bag. “We did nothing wrong.” I kicked Curly’s boot. “And he was hoodwinked.”
“Don’t be so bloody stupid,” Phaegin growled. “We’re leaving.”
I grabbed my bag, protesting, and followed her to the door, Curly trailing me.
Phaegin swung around and shoved Curly so that he stumbled back to the wall. “Not you. You can hang for all I care.”
“No one’s going to hang!” I shouted. “We have to explain!”
Phaegin turned on me. “Idiot! We were seen there, no matter if we did anything or not. There were hurt, dead, rich people involved. Even if he owns up, though that’s a fat chance, we’d be in it. If we don’t leave now, and lose that piece of pig seed, we’re gonna die.”
Curly whimpered.
I said, “Curly didn’t mean it, Phaegin. He didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Phaegin wrenched open the door. “Not him.”
I put out my hands. “I can’t leave him to hang.”
She grit her teeth. “There is no time.”
“Please, Phaegin.”
I slapped the back of Curly’s head. He mumbled, “I’m sorry, Phaegin.”
Phaegin clenched her hands and shut her eyes. She kicked the door so it bounced on its hinges. I stopped it from slamming. She looked at Curly staring at the floor, then at me, then out the door, where an aureole of yellow light showed faint over the buildings. It was a long minute she considered, until she spat, “All right!” She pointed at me. “Everything that follows, Edward Turrentine Bayard the Third …” She didn’t finish, only squared her shoulders. “Just keep your tongue between your teeth, both of you, and follow me.”
We slunk downtown, skirting the green where flares still burned, illuminating the bodies of dead horses and the devastated buildings, until we came to the cigar shop.
“Wait here.” Phaegin dumped her bag beside me and stepped toward the door.
I grabbed her skirt. “Are you crazy?” From this distance I could still hear the shouts of reporters and police.
She pulled her hem from my grasp and repeated, “Stay here!”
Phaegin dashed across the street. In the lamplight I could see her lifting the rocks in the border in front of the shop. She must have found the key, for she looked right and left, then opened the door. In a minute, she was back, two cigar boxes in her hands. “Let’s go.”
“What’s that?”
“Cigars.”
“You risk our lives for cigars?”
Curly whispered. “They’re good cigars.”
She rounded on him. “If you ever touch these cigars, sniff them, or look at them, I’ll cut your eyes out.” She glanced at me. “I had wages coming. I get what’s owed me.”
She wouldn’t have taken the risk of breaking into the shop for cigars; it must be she’d cleaned Mr. Cordassa out. We would now face bona fide larceny charges along with the spurious claims of murder and anarchy. There was no time to deal with it now, however.
We fled, weaving in and out of the streets, keeping close to shrubbery and as far from the light as we could. At the edge of town loomed a blocky factory, reeking of bitter vinegar. A sign over the door read SNOOK MUSTARD WORKS. I stopped dumb-founded until Curly charged into me and Phaegin, stumbling into him, ordered us to get our sticks moving.
We continued without speaking for hours, following the train tracks, slipping on the graveled banks. The crescent moon cast so little light, it was almost worse than no light at all as we lurched through the high grass and eventually through the tangled wood, tripping over hickory roots, slapped by vines and creepers festooning branches of black walnut and elms. Clumps of willows impeded our paths, and the humidity rising from the waste of vegetation was oppressive if not poisonous.
All the while I repeated to myself that this couldn’t be happening. It was a mistake. We shouldn’t be running. If we had stayed in New Haven, the misunderstanding would be cleared up, but now there would be hell to pay in bringing things to rights. I told myself to stop running; the sooner I commenced explanation, the better. Still, I couldn’t make myself turn around, for even though I told myself that justice was as sharp and right as steel, I knew that justice had been a stranger to me for some time.
When dawn came, we collapsed within a small copse of trees. Curly fell to sleep in an instant, his arms raised above his head as if he we
re surrendering in his dreams.
Phaegin curled up a few feet away, using her bag for a pillow. I stretched out below an oak tree. No matter that I was exhausted to the point of pain, I could not sleep. Beyond the horror of the last hours came the realization I would not be picking up the papers to be delivered at Mother Fenton’s tomorrow. My mother, my past, my identity continued to shuffle beyond my reach, even though I raced to reach them, my heart bursting from the strain.
After some time I heard Phaegin, crying again, this time muffling it with her jacket. I inched over and put my arm around her. She turned and buried her face in my chest. The paper she clutched in her hand crackled.
“Chester was such a nice man, Ned. He believed in me, no matter that I was a shopgirl. Said I was smart. He lent me money to get a dress to look right for the bank. Now they’ll make such fun of him. It is so unfair. They’ll tell him he was just a cover for my secret anarchist’s life, a harelipped dupe. He’ll be sure I never really appreciated him, even liked him. And I can never tell him now … that I did.”
She smoothed the paper. “I wrote a poem for him, paid a feller to write it down for me, but he won’t get it.” She began crying again. My chest grew damp and hot under her cheek, my arm numbed under her weight, but finally she slept.
The sun climbed and warmed. The perfume of wildflowers rose in the heat. Trees wove early twigs into irregular lace. I lay back and looked at the blue sky all in pieces through the limbs. A haze of green. In another week, there would be no seeing the sky at all for the leaves. Who would have thought that country was so close to the city trumpet we’d left behind? Humans, less imaginative than other animals, cannot believe in a blizzard when the summer reigns. We could have had picnics here. There was a hill across the way, a giant sleeping a long grassy sleep. Just last month we could have sledded. Happiness had been sighing in our faces all along.
I listened intently for the sound of dogs, the jangle of horses, the shout of policemen, but it was as if we had dreamed trouble and were merely on an excursion, birds and crickets singing around us.
The crumpled paper tumbled from Phaegin’s relaxed palm and rocked in the breeze. What poem had she written? I slipped carefully from her embrace and read:
Constant’s grace, imperfect form,
perfect fruit kept from harm,
a song of sweet
life and long
will always keep
a heart so strong.
I closed my eyes. And when the wash of shame and sorrow had diminished, I folded the paper and placed it again within the clutch of Phaegin’s hand.
It occurred to me I had a letter of my own that Mother Fenton had given me, what seemed like years before. I pulled Lill’s missive from my pocket.
Dear Ned,
Come to me now. The skies here are cold and hard as I become. I have not the courage to live as I have had to live any longer. I sold your gold pen and, with the proceeds, Lucy and I fled Rhylander and his brown life. I must tell you, I am expecting another baby. I fear I will not survive the labor, either before or after the birth.
I imagine you in Yale robes, wandering the halls of the Peabody, thinking deep thoughts, cementing your stakes in that civilized world. You have achieved what you promised there, and now I must ask you to remember your promise to me. I will wait as long as it takes here in Omaha. Or until I am forced to leave. Heaven help me. You are a success and of true heart and soul. Perhaps the many allies you have made, the connections you have forged, can somehow save me from myself.
I will keep you safe with my hopes and dreams.
Love, ever,
Lill
I crushed the letter into a ball. Pregnant again? He must have been on her the hour of the baby’s birth. I was furious with Lill, with her miseries, with her complaints, all of her own doing. She did not know what it meant to need heaven’s intervention. What I would give to be in a warm little house, nothing to worry about but the effort of putting meals on the table, scrubbing diapers, figuring what to name my next child and whether a stupid lovelorn boy could rescue me from my own foolishness.
She had made a terrific error now. How could she be certain of me, how dare she presume, how could she stake her future on me?
I felt sick. My anger gave way to shame. She staked her future on my stupid, fatuous promises, on my arrogance and deceptions. I couldn’t dream of helping her now. I was lost. And while I felt I had but a gossamer tie to her before, I now saw that filament was stronger than I’d thought, and, further, it was around her neck and would drag her to the depths.
As for my mother, it occurred to me now that perhaps it was she who had kept the money and taken her leave. Well, she would have what she wanted. Now I would ever be dead to her as she would be to me.
The thought was indeed black, and I immediately regretted my lack of faith. Part of the horror was that I would now never know, would never receive the packet the clerk was to send on, would never face Alan and Jamieson, would never enjoy a home and family. I tossed the balled paper into the weeds. I had damn well killed us all. Lill, Phaegin, my mother, Avelina, Tilfert, my horse, and even Curly. Had I left him in the mines, he would be serving a mere two years of indenture instead of facing the hangman’s noose.
It was an ice-thin sheet we danced on, breaking apart as spring finally arrived. Setting fools adrift, never to return. Our circumstances dangerous as a loaded gun. All of my past was gone. Edward Turrentine Bayard III was dead.
I closed my eyes. The blue sky went orange against my lids, then gray, then black.
I was on the ocean. A white sand beach ahead, waves breaking like lace along the shore. Through the shimmering heat, an elephant decorated in sapphire and ruby thundered through palm trees. I yearned. I stretched out my hands. It was all so far away. Then I found, having sent my hands, sent my heart over that water, I could not get them back—and that was the true horror, the failure of desire, which had delivered only the vague chill of absence. The only thing to do was to pursue my errant shares, to be whole once again.
I rose to gloaming and shook the others awake.
Phaegin clutched her bag and nodded. Curly rubbed his eyes and shivered, then grinned like Christmas when I told him we were going west.
CHAPTER 25
We took a snaking path up the coast, away from the nexus of the bomb and its aftermath. How many steps to outrun a bomb? How many miles to leave the bodies behind? How many days would we stumble through the trees of the coastal forests before we were safe from another’s insanity?
On the first day Curly talked a mile a minute about what he was going to do when he got to Indian country. “I’m takin’ a scalp a week. I’ll be Dan’l Boone or Bill Hickok, scourge of the country!”
Phaegin was yet sandbagged, taking step after step without seeing anything but the place her foot would next fall.
And I fought despair, attempting to shove it aside by ruminating that with this second trip to the wilds, I supposed I was having the true American experience of western expansion: flight. From the time of Plymouth Colony, the country sluiced with the shadowed, persecution looming at each labored step. Supposedly running to something—to riches, to a new life—in fact they ran away. An escape from poverty, from poor decisions, away from trouble and hopelessness, away from the war, away from the law.
On the second day, Curly exchanged his wild anticipation over adventures to be had for complaints: “We gonna eat?”; “We gonna eat other than tack bread?”; “So hungry my throat’s suckin’ on my tongue, Ned”; “How many days till Indians?”; “Couldn’t we get a horse? We cain’t show up without a horse”; “I need a western peg, Prairie Prince, Snake-eye maybe, been thinkin’ and thinkin’ and I cain’t come up with anythin’ real good.” I finally told him we’d turn around and head to Florida if he didn’t shut up.
On the third day we arrived outside a little town, stopping on a hill overlooking the scattering of buildings and the gray-green conifer forest beyond. Curly narrowed
his eyes and set his hat. “Where the hell’re we at?”
I shrugged, but I could see railroad tracks. “We’ll catch the train here.”
Curly nodded and pointed toward town. “Tavern?”
“You’d be spotted in a second.”
“Me? I’d blend in.”
Phaegin sneered at him. “Redheaded guttersnipe tot playacting Deadwood Dick? Sore thumb.”
“Better a sore thumb than stickin’ my little brown finger out fer tea, playactin’ Missus Vanderbilt,” Curly growled back.
I smacked Curly on the back of the head. “Stop. I’m going in and I’ll get us something to eat.”
Phaegin sat down on a rock. “Maybe we should go awhile longer. Somebody nabs you now, we all swing.”
Three days tearing through underbrush with little more to eat than crackers. We were briar-whipped, filthy, and ravenously hungry and had to stop. Further, not only did I desire to fill our bellies, my hope was that in town I would find the bombing ascribed to those who deserved the blame, so we could return to New Haven, pick up our lives, and forget these miserable hours ever happened.
“It’ll be fine.” I whacked my hat on my leg a couple of times to clear it of debris, dusted my jeans, and rubbed my shoes on my calves to give them a little shine.
Phaegin motioned me over, spit on her handkerchief, and rubbed smut from my face. “Take this.” She handed me a ten-dollar bill.
“Where did you get it?” I thought of the cigar boxes.
She shrugged. “Goin’-to-the-bank dress. Never did buy it.”
It seemed a lifetime ago, and the girl pirouetting in the square, anticipating her future, seemed a much younger version of the grimly exhausted woman with me now. “Ah, Phaegin.”
“Go on. We can’t eat money.”
In town I found a marker. I was in Mercator, a quiet little place that would not have survived its lonely post if it weren’t for the railroad passing through. I walked into the ten-by-ten timber-framed commissary, a lean-to addendum on the gabled living quarters alongside.
Turpentine Page 21