Of Grave Concern (4 page)

6

I must have been asleep, because I didn't know Tom the Jailer, was standing outside my cell door until he spoke.

“Miss Wylde?”

I opened my eyes and saw him there with a newspaper beneath his arm and a cup of coffee in his hand. From the coal oil lamp in the bull pen, half his face was bathed in yellow light.

“Yes, what is it?” I asked, taking Eddie from my shoulder and placing him back in his cage.

“I don't know if you drink coffee, but it is about all that we have here in the jail, except for the bottle of whiskey that the marshal keeps for snakebite upstairs in his desk drawer that nobody is supposed to know about. And he gets popped by more rattlesnakes out here than any other man I know of.”

“Coffee,” I said. “Bless your rustic soul.”

“I also brought you yesterday's paper, for the boredom.”

“Only dull people are bored. But thanks.”

He passed me the coffee through a little trapdoor in the bars and I passed back my dirty plate and lunch things. I took a drink of the coffee and it was so strong my eyes fluttered in pleasure.

“Too rough for you?”

“Rough? It's perfect.”

He smiled.

“Tom,” I said, “I have been here some hours and was beginning to wonder . . . well, how am I to attend to personal business?”

A blank stare.

“You know,” I said. “Private . . .
business
. The kind the coffee will undoubtedly hasten.”

“Oh, sure. There's a thunder bucket in the corner of the cell. All prisoners are supposed to use the bucket. But seeing as how you're a cut above the ordinary inmate, I can escort you to the privy out back.”

“For that, I would be grateful. Half an hour?”

He nodded.

“Oh, Tom,” I said as he turned to go. “There's another thing I need: a lawyer. I need to clear up this case of mistaken identity as soon as possible, so I think a writ of habeas corpus is in order. You must have seen the lawyers in this town at work in police court. In your opinion, who is the best?”

“Best sober or drunk?”

“Best during their normal state of consciousness.”

He thought for a moment.

“Towner gives the best show and is a teetotaler, to boot, but he's more concerned with having people think he's smart than doing right by his clients,” he said. “Wilbert is good, but his wife died of the fever last winter and he's been unenthusiastic about work and life ever since. So I'd say Potete is your best bet. It's even money whether he'll come to court drunk or sober, but hope for drunk. He's a mean drunk, but one who swings with words, not his fists. He's brilliant right up until he passes out.”

I sighed.

“Potete, then. Send word.”

Tom turned to leave, then paused.

“You might want to save that paper.”

Now it was my turn to give him a blank stare.

“In case the Montgomery Ward catalog is all used up.”

“Of course,” I said. “Always good to plan ahead.”

He left and I scooted around so my back was against the bars nearest the lamp. I unfolded all four pages of the
Dodge City Times.
It wasn't the
Chicago Tribune
or the
New York World,
but at least it was something to read. There was a hyperbolic article on the front page that talked about how good the grass was this year, and I doubt if any big-city editor had ever waxed more purple:

There was a related story about the first herd from Texas having arrived, a herd of twelve hundred cattle from the Red River, and how the cowboys had some trouble with farmers in Comanche County at the quarantine line. Thousands more longhorns were expected in the days to come.

I jumped over to a story about tramp jitters:

Not a very Christian attitude, I mused.

Then I turned the page and found the following:

At least I wasn't crazy. That was good to know, but it led to other troubling questions: Who was she? Who had killed her? And (especially) why had she appeared to
me
? But I had no time for a murdered girl. My plan was to get the hell out of Dodge.

When Tom came back for me, I was finished with the
Times,
at least for reading. I tucked the paper beneath my arm as he unlocked the cell door. By lantern light, he escorted me to the privy behind the jail. The privy was about the size of the average spirit cabinet. When I opened the door, I discovered it was just about as dark inside.

“Can't see a thing in here,” I said. “I'm afraid I'll fall in.”

He handed me the lantern, and I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I hung the lantern by its bale from a peg on the wall and then sat and waited.

“Tom, can you hear me?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Then you're too close,” I said. “Back away.”

While I waited some more, the
Times
across my knees, I inspected the inside of the privy. There was the usual juvenile entertainment scratched into the wood: stick figures engaged in unspeakable acts, a limerick about a girl named Delores, a graffito Uncle Sam.

Then I noticed something bulky down near my left ankle.

I unhooked the lantern and brought it low.

Tucked beneath the bench was an open gallon of red paint, with a brush stuck in it. I picked up the brush. The paint was still fresh enough to drip like molasses back into the can.

7

My Tanté Marie was a firecracker of a woman, not five feet tall and so lean that her hands and wrists seemed like the skeletal fingers from one of the ghost stories she was always telling. She seemed ancient to me, but now I realize she must have been in her thirties. I never saw her in anything but a white cotton blouse, a long blue skirt, an apron around her waist, and a red bandana tied around her head. Beneath her blouse, she wore a necklace that had many strange and wonderful things on it: feathers, beads, bits of polished bone.

My father bought her at a slave auction in New Orleans in 1840 or 1841, when Marie would have been about fourteen years old. My father, it is said, declared that she was the most spirited slave of them all, and a quadroon of exceptional beauty. He paid $630 in gold for her. It was years more before she was broken enough to be a house slave, about the time I was born, my uncle said. I don't know about these things personally because my father died in 1848, the year of my birth, kicked to death by a horse. At least, that was what was assumed—he was found dead in the stable one Sunday morning, with his head stove in and an empty bottle of rum beside him.

In her grief, my mother turned my raising over to Tanté Marie. I never grew close to my mother, who always seemed distant, shrouded in the crinoline trappings of antebellum Memphis society. She did not understand my passion for stories and books, my love of ghost stories and folklore, or the odd conversations I sometimes had with my bedroom mirror. I thought at the time that I hated her. But looking back, I realized she was no better and no worse than any of the other Memphis women of her age and time. It was the lack of otherness that I hated. It was as if I had been dropped into this strange life by accident, that perhaps I had been set adrift in a reed basket on the Mississippi and rode the wake of a packet boat up the Wolf River, that my real family would one day show up, clicking apologies in a strange tongue to claim me.

More than anything, I wanted to belong.

Then, three years after the cub pilot had pressed my name into his dying brother's hand, I met Jonathan Wylde. Seven years older than me, Jonathan was a sensitive and handsome young man with a shock of blond hair, a free thinker who declared that women were the equal of men, that blacks were human beings, and that love survives death.

I loved him from the start.

 

 

It was the January before the war, Jonathan was a divinity student at Stewart College, and we met at a stationer's on Beale Street. We were both seeking copies of Susan Warner's
The Wide, Wide World
(which I am now ashamed to admit, but which you can perhaps forgive). I had momentarily slipped the leash of my Tanté Marie, who had become increasingly watchful since I had begun to fill out my dresses. When our hands accidently touched while reaching for the only copy of the Warner book in the store, we both blushed.

We both apologized and insisted the other take it. I agreed, but I suggested that since I was a fast reader, he could call for it in a few days. But neither of us wanted to part, and we lingered near one another, silent.

Then, impulsively: “You have the most beautiful aura I have ever seen.”

“What's an aura?” I asked.

“It is a radiant band of color that outlines a person's body,” he said. “It's from the Greek, for ‘breath' or ‘breeze,' and it represents the essence of a person.”

“You mean like a halo?”

“No,” he said, and smiled. “Only Jesus and the saints have halos, but everyone has an aura, like everyone has a shadow. Your shadow is something that is cast by your body, yes?”

I nodded.

“Your aura is the shadow your soul casts.”

“A soul shadow,” I said.

“Exactly,” Jonathan said. “And they come in all colors and sizes. Angry or passionate people have red auras, great thinkers or leaders have green ones, and melancholics dark brown.”

“I've never seen one.”

“It takes a bit of practice,” he said. “I can teach you how, if you like.”

“And what, exactly, do you find so beautiful about mine?”

“It is a remarkable mixture of colors,” he said. “Violet and yellow and blue, all swirling in harmony. All the best colors, in my opinion. Inspiration, joy, and love.”

Jonathan's visits to the Wolf River Plantation became frequent. He taught me to see auras. His was a beautiful magenta, the signature color of the nonconformist. We practiced table tilting and automatic writing. He brought me books and read me poetry and taught me every secret thing.

When the war came in April, he quit Stewart College and volunteered to fight for the Yankees with LaDue's Company, an act that scandalized Memphis society. When we secretly wed when I was fourteen years of age, the discovery mortified my family. My mother cried for days, my uncle threatened to bullwhip Jonathan, but my Tanté Marie understood.

“Di moin qui vous laimein, ma di vous quie vous yé,”
she said.

It was an old Creole proverb: “Show me who you love, and I'll show you who you are.”

All I wanted in this world was Jonathan, and I was terrified that he would die—killed in battle, dead by disease, or extinguished in any of the hundred ordinary ways that people depart this earth every day.

Jonathan laughed, saying there was nothing to fear, and he quoted Whitman:

He created a secret message, shared only with me. He promised that if he died before me, he would send over a message, proving survival of the spirit—and our eternal love.

Hank began appearing to me less and less after I met Jonathan. The mud clerk's image was as wind-blown as ever, but he began to fade, until at last he was just a shadow in my bedroom mirror. There were no more jokes. By the time Jonathan and I were married, Hank was gone.

 

 

While Jonathan marched off with LaDue in the spring of 1861, I waited at home. Life in Memphis changed very little during the first year of the war, and then there was a river battle just above Memphis, and ten thousand people turned out on the bluffs to see it.

There were eight or nine Union gunboats and rams against a similar number of Rebel vessels, former steamboats that had been converted into some notion of fighting ships by mounting light guns on their decks and lining their hulls with cotton. As ridiculous as the “cot-tonclads” were, some of the Union boats looked even more absurd, like giant turtles spouting smokestacks. Neither side seemed to know what they were doing, and nobody now can agree on exactly what happened, except to say that in the end, all but one cottonclad had been disabled or sunk.

It was 1862, and Memphis had fallen.

Ulysses S. Grant moved his command from Corinth to Memphis, stopped publication of the
Memphis Avalanche,
ordered the arrest of all newspaper correspondents sympathetic to the South, and drove all families of Rebel soldiers and Confederate officials from the city. Jonathan returned to Memphis with LaDue's Company, and we had a tender reunion. Then, in 1863, Vicksburg fell. With nearly the entire river in Yankee hands, Grant turned his attention to the east, and LaDue's Company marched with the army toward Knoxville.

Letters came regularly from Jonathan at first, cheerful notes in which he chatted about his commander, John Grenville LaDue, a rabid abolitionist who had spent some time in Kansas with John Brown before the war. But as the fighting became bloodier as Grant moved his army ever closer toward Richmond during the Overland Campaign, the letters stopped. With every day that passed without word from Jonathan, my heart broke anew.

The war had elevated slaughter to a science, and the list of battles in which the casualties numbered into the tens of thousands is shockingly long. The deadliest battles were Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville . . . and Spottsylvania Courthouse.

At Spottsylvania the fighting raged for a fortnight, including twenty-four hours of the worst hand-to-hand fighting of the war, much of it in trenches. When the hurly-burly was done, thirty thousand lay dead or wounded, sacrificed for a battle in which neither side could claim victory. LaDue's Company was thrown into the worst of it, an abattoir known as the Bloody Angle. Of 105 men in the company, only LaDue and twelve others survived.

Jonathan was not among them.

I was a widow two weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday.

I didn't even know how Jonathan had died. None of those who were lucky enough to be numbered in what came to be called the LaDue Survival Ranks witnessed his death. His body was so ravaged that it could scarcely be recognized as anything human and could only be identified by the book tucked inside his jacket,
Leaves of Grass,
in which my name and his were found penciled in the endpapers.

Jonathan was buried in Spottsylvania County, Virginia. The only thing that was returned to me was the bloodstained book. At first, I felt nothing, and then I believed I was the butt of some cruel joke perpetrated by the universe. Then when the pain hit in full, I wished nothing more than to join Jonathan in death.

By war's end in April 1865, there would be more than half a million dead. Grieving parents, wives and daughters, and sisters and girlfriends, turned to Spiritualists and mediums to give hope that some spark of their loved ones had survived the horror to cross over to a better place. There were even séances in the White House, with Mary Todd Lincoln trying to contact her dead son, eleven-year-old Willie, who had been taken by typhoid fever.

I, too, joined the seekers.

 

 

For twelve years, on the anniversary of Jonathan's death—May 13—I had held séances, desperately seeking contact with my true love and transmission of the coded message.

After the first failures, I blamed myself, thinking that my lack of belief was to blame. I strove to become a more devout Spiritualist, and eventually sought out Paschal B. Randolph, a New Orleans trance medium of mixed blood. He taught me many things—including, to my shame, how to use the sexual act to cast spells—but never how to contact Jonathan.

Disenchantment spread like rust.

Like most Spiritualists, I was regularly conducting séances for others. Strange things did happen—raps and knocks that did seem to contain meaning, weirdly knowing messages scrawled when our fingers were lightly touching a planchette, odd lights and sounds in darkened rooms. I would accept love offerings from those who had been comforted with what appeared to be contact with lost loved ones. But when the table tipping or the planchette writing became more difficult, I began to help the spirits along—a little at first, then more later. It wasn't as if I were cheating, I told myself. After all, I'd had plenty of what I thought was evidence that the spirits were real. What harm could there be in giving the bereaved a bit of comfort?

Inevitably, it all became cheating.

As in any profession, there was a sort of fraternity among professional Spiritualists, and information was exchanged on how to give the best séances. One of the first tricks you learned was to visit the local cemeteries in a new city, to choose a few families represented by the best-looking tombstones, and memorize the names and dates. You also would want to visit the demimonde, because whores always had the best gossip. Husbands are compelled, it seems, to confide the most damning of family secrets when in the arms of even the cheapest of Cyprians. Then there were Blue Books for every major city, which was a listing of those families most receptive and (more important) most generous to mediums, along with details about the occupations and personalities of their recently deceased.

Then, if you had a little money, you could order the stage props for a bang-up séance from Sylvestre & Company of Chicago, which produces a privately circulated catalog that offers everything an ambitious medium would need—from self-rapping tables to spirit cabinets, with secret compartments, to fully formed apparitions of cheesecloth, with ghostly rubber faces.

I had their latest catalog in my valise.

We do not, for obvious reasons, mention the names of our clients and their work (they being kept in strict confidence, the same as a physician treats his patients),
Sylvestre & Company promised,
but you can trust that our effects are in use by all of the prominent mediums in the entire world. In addition, we can furnish you the explanation and, where necessary, the material for the production of any known public “tests” or “phenomena” not mentioned in this, our latest list. Custom orders and rush service available upon receipt of telegraphic communication from trusted customers.

I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of their magic slates.

Still, I was not without compassion.

I gave away sessions to those who had little or no means, but were seeking only a little solace, some small sign that their loved ones were happy in Summerland. What harm could there be in providing comfort? For the big money, I targeted those predators who seem particularly in need of a lesson in humility—speculators, politicians, preachers. All men, of course, and therefore easy marks for the humbuggery of free love.

Even though I had become a professional fraud, inside me still burned a foolish hope that my antics were some pale reflection of truth. Perhaps it was possible that love could survive death.

Even though I knew there was no bigger sucker than a grief-stricken spouse, I kept up the earnest and private séances every May 13. I would spend sunrise to sunset in prayerful reflection, asking God to forgive my corruption. Then I would surround myself with innocents and believers in a darkened room and plead for Jonathan to signal from the other side.