Never sleep, p.25
Never Sleep, page 25
They let her arms free just long enough for her to flail them out so a man could grab her wrists and pin them behind her back. She held and held her breath the same way she and her childhood friends would dare each other to do at the swimming hole back in Lockport. She always lasted the longest, but of course, when she was ten, she didn’t have this bastard’s hand on her—
The hand yanked her up by her hair, and she took an involuntary gulp of air. When she did so, half the blood and gore on her face slid into her mouth and it tasted like the unholy baptism it surely was. Her stomach thrashed and burned with bile.
“Who else knows, madam?” growled the Prophet. “Where are your other railroad agents? We know your kind never works alone. Like any other form of vermin, you infest in swarms.”
Half-blind from watered-down blood stinging her eyes, Kate hocked and spat at where she presumed the Prophet’s face to be. That forced her to taste the week-old gore in her mouth, mixed with her saliva. The urge to vomit came up strong, and it took all her will to force it back down.
“I have had some experience in rendering pliant both the male and female genders,” the Prophet said over her ragged gasps, “and have always found that the woman holds out longer than the man. Though we males may be superior in strength, we lag far behind our opposite sex in the experience and endurance of suffering. Childbirth, her monthlies, the aches and pains of bearing the burdens of life with a frailer frame, and so forth.”
As he blathered, Hattie, his personal guide, took a fresh handkerchief and wiped off the bloody load Kate had hawked onto the cuff of the Prophet’s vulcanized raincoat. Kate simultaneously did and did not recognize this other woman. Hattie looked right through her, without recognition, as if she wasn’t even there. If this was an act, a feint while awaiting an opportunity for rescue, it was a damned convincing one.
The Prophet knelt down and reached out and found Kate’s face with his hand. “I know it won’t be easy to peel away what I want from you, lass. I know you can handle yourself. I learned that in Pennsylvania. But in the end the Cause will prevail. It must. We are the only hope for a rudderless world.”
When the Prophet stood up, the unseen hand on her head pushed her back down into the tub. Her mouth was open, and she nearly choked on the salty blood that gushed up into the back of her throat, causing even her vomit to retreat into her stomach. She was nauseous, gagging, and choking all at once. She began to thrash her head, sopping up the offal in her hair, kicking her boots backward as if she could somehow swim her way out of the visceral pool. Long after she thought she could no longer take it, her captors pulled her head back up again.
The Prophet was standing on the other end of the tub with his hands clasped behind his back. “It is in the nature of the daughters of Eve to betray,” he said. “But those men who are traitors to the Cause are traitors to their race and thus betrayers of the mandate of God. These men must be excised from the host of whiteness like gangrenous limbs. You will give me their names now. And you will tell me which one of them killed my boy Jeremiah.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but her eyes darted to different corners of the room and the rough, faceless men beneath their dirty hats as she searched for the best lie. The Prophet recognized this hesitation for what it was. He nodded at whoever held her to dunk her head back under.
Her gasps prevented her from breathing in as much air as the first two times, and she stopped being Kate Warn within a matter of moments; she stopped being a human being at all with any self or thoughts to string together to form consciousness. Instead, she was just a need inside the physical confines of a body, and that need was for air that she could not have, and though there were many times she had told herself she was not afraid to die and then went on to prove it there was no margin for error here only death she was about to die you are dying right now this is no hypothetical tell them it was hattie then they’ll do this to her instead of me
tell them it was hattie look at her eyes she’s gone over to their side you must betray her before she betrays you
tell them what all chicago wants to hear tell them you poisoned him tell them you really did poison your husband
Kate’s head was pulled up, and she no longer cared how much old blood she pulled into her mouth with the sweet oxygen she inhaled.
The Prophet sat near the bloody tub on an empty barrel with one boot on its rim. He looked bored. God damn him, Kate managed to think.
“The names of your conspirators, or your life,” he said. “You will give me one or the other.”
Kate looked at the girl Hattie and her dead eyes. Again the Prophet nodded to have her dunked back into the gore. Desperation gave her strength, though, and Kate managed to break her arms free from the man who had been holding them. She threw her hands on the rim of the bloody tub and screamed.
“Stop—stop! I’ll tell you!”
The Prophet took his foot off the tub and leaned forward on his walking stick. “Go on.”
She had had enough time to catch her breath, convince herself she could regain control of the situation—and that the most unexpected thing would prove the means to her salvation: the truth.
“I was aided solely by Mrs. Anna Cain,” she said.
The men looked at each other in wonder, and Tobias laughed out loud. “The wife of the marshal of police? You’re mad—or think we are.”
“Mrs. Cain was cross her husband was shutting her out of planning for secession. So together—and this was entirely her idea—we hid out in the City Hotel kitchen below the ballroom and listened to all of the Palmetto Guards’ plans through the voice tubes the servers use.”
Tobias shook his head. “I’ve never heard such a load of shit. We should drown this one like a kitten.”
He advanced on Kate, but the Prophet stopped him by throwing out an arm.
“No. I detect the ring of truth. I never trusted that milk-hearted marshal. Caesar’s men always cling to whoever’s ass currently covers the throne.” His eyes narrowed. “Who else?”
“There were others,” Kate said, looking down on the ground, “but they’re beyond your reach. They went to Philadelphia to head off Lincoln and stayed with him all the way to Washington City. They’re not coming back to Baltimore . . . I’m all that’s left.”
“Lucky us,” one of the men said.
The Prophet considered her words, then pointed a dirty finger at her. “We’ll run this story down. If it’s a tall tale, that story won’t end well for you.”
She didn’t say anything to that; it was impossible to believe the Prophet was planning a happy ending for her under any circumstances.
Two of the Volunteers dragged Kate across the cellar to a dank recess under the stairs where a kind of wooden cage of wire and scavenged planks was sequestered. She was shoved headfirst into it, and the gate was slammed shut and padlocked behind her. A pile of straw heaped in the corner quivered with teeming weevils. This must have been one of the Bloody Tubs’ notorious “coops” that Lieutenant Hill had told her about, where they had kept boozed-up phony voters in between dragging them from poll to poll. Though Election Day had been four months ago, she could smell what was left of the piss and shit of the previous occupants.
Kate tried to force her anger and resentment at Hattie aside. The girl obviously hadn’t betrayed her yet. She was maintaining that aspect of her cover identity, at least. She was smart, or lucky.
In spite of Kate’s bravado, her lip began to quiver. She felt pressure against her eyes. Didn’t she deserve some luck too, though?
As her eyes adjusted to the near total lack of light in the coop, Kate spotted several slats that had been pulled off the wall in one corner, long nails jutting out of rotting wood. Behind them lay a flat brick wall. She leaned forward and discovered an inscription scratched into the brick by a previous inmate, filled in with what could have been dried blood or dried shit, or both.
E. A. Poe kidnapped and drugged by K.N.’s Election Day ’49 if this is ever found tell my Muddy Bronx NY & E. Shelton Church Hill Richmond Va. how much I will always love them
She stared at the inscription, trying to will it out of existence. It seemed to her to be the final proof that her insomnia and her ordeal had at last driven her stark, raving mad.
When Hattie emerged from the cellar with the Prophet and most of his other men, she caught her reflection in a window. The sun had just begun to peek above the wharf-side warehouses, and her skin had the cast of week-old oatmeal. A shroud of numbness had fallen over her. She despised herself for not mustering the courage to rescue Mrs. Warn by shooting the Prophet where he stood, but she was paralyzed by the knowledge that all her attempts to intervene on the side of good had thus far only caused her to stumble tragicomically further down the path to evil. Across the street, men rolled kegs of iron nails up ramps into the flatbeds of wagons pulled by impatient oxen. She could hear the sour clang of bad notes tested in a nearby piano factory.
Down the block a small man with an olive-shaped head made his way toward them with a half-dozen well-dressed men with pistols on their sides trailing behind him.
“It’s Captain Ferrandina,” Hattie reported, and the Prophet growled under his breath like a wolf.
The little Corsican doffed his hat to the Reverend and bowed deeply. “I bear bad news from Washington City.”
“There is no other kind from that benighted place,” the Prophet said. “Lincoln has eluded our grasp.”
“How—how do you know?”
“How do you?” Mr. Tobias demanded.
“From Marshal Cain, who else? A Maryland delegate of that cowards’ ‘Peace Conference’ between North and South wired him from the Willard Hotel, where they’re meeting. He saw the orangoutang walk right into the lobby and register not two hours ago with his own eyes. By himself. The abolitionists must have slipped him into the city overnight while we were sleeping. The wires say that the presidential train is still coming, though, with his wife and kids waving from the windows. Cowardly tyrant ran so fast through Baltimore he couldn’t even bring his own family with him.”
Everyone looked to the Prophet, Hattie included. He was staring off into the distance, as was his wont, but now he actually appeared to be seeing something. “Very well. Our plans must be nimble enough to change with the circumstance.”
“What change do you advise, Reverend?” Tobias said.
He shook his head, then spat on the street. “None.”
“None?” Ferrandina frowned. “But our target is no longer available to us.”
“One of our targets is no longer available to us,” the Prophet said.
“One . . .” The Corsican’s voice trailed off when the implication of the words sunk in. Then he simply said, “No.”
The Prophet grinned. Hattie’s stomach churned, and even Mr. Broddle looked pale and nauseated.
“I cannot allow you to do this,” Ferrandina said, swallowing.
“You greasy little wop,” the Prophet laughed. “You think I have a care for your blessing? I take my orders from a higher power, and he has provided me with a clear path forward. If the male is not here to defend his mate and spawn, so much the worse for them. We now have an opportunity to demonstrate the seriousness of our purpose. Make the Northern dough-men quail at what we are willing to do to protect our values and our culture.”
“If you do this . . .” Sweat broke out on Ferrandina’s forehead. “Killing Mrs. Lincoln and her children cannot . . . It will stain the Cause right from the outset and never be wiped clean, it will turn too many even in our own country against us—”
The Prophet’s face widened in amazement. “You pitiful city dweller, soft and perfumed. Out in the roaring wilderness, I learned the one truth of life, which is that the world will not bend to your will unless you break it first.”
“Slavery . . .” Ferrandina started to stammer, “ennobles . . . it is a civilizing influence—”
“No. You have it all mixed up. Slavery is civilization. There can be no mastery of men, or ourselves, without spilling seas of blood. You either sail that crimson tide or you drown in it. Which do you choose?”
Ferrandina had run out of flowery words. His rhetoric was made of mist, the Prophet’s of fire. The one had utterly burned away the other. The Corsican turned and walked away. About half of his Palmetto Guards went with him, and even a few National Volunteers sidestepped toward nearby alleys, softly as they could so as not to draw the Prophet’s notice, or his wrath.
“Go on, then!” the Prophet called after them. “Tug on your lace hankies and studded cuffs! The pioneers will do what we have always done, which is the dirty business of navigating the way forward so the bankers and wives can come safely along later, on the path we cleared!”
The last to desert the Prophet was Mr. Esau Broddle. His eyes caught Hattie’s as he was backing up, right before he turned and ran—and she thought, just for a second, that he was going to motion for her to come with him, that they could run back to Perrymansville together. But it didn’t matter whether she read the hog farmer right or not because she wasn’t going anywhere. She was not going to leave the Prophet’s side. She would see this thing through to the bitter end. She had done so many terrible things that all she had left to cling to was the hope that the opportunity to do something noble could, in its singular light, redeem her.
Fewer than ten men were left around them, a mixture of Bloody Tubs and Kansas frontier men and Harford County farmers and the sole straggling dandy left over from Ferrandina’s Palmetto Guards, that New Orleans futures man, Howard. Hattie reckoned half the remainder were true believers—and the other half were too terrified of the Prophet to run.
The Prophet summoned Mr. Tobias to his ear. The rain had started its pitter-patter, and Hattie was close enough to hear: “Wait for me where we planned.”
Tobias took a step back as if he had been shoved. “Don’t you need me by your side to do this, Rev?”
“I need only the Lord,” he rumbled. He grabbed the back of Mr. Tobias’s head and pulled him in close, though not outside Hattie’s earshot. “I lost Jeremiah, and that means you’re all that’s left of my Kansas night riders. I’m not losing you too, not when we have so much left to do. You hear me?” Tobias raised his eyes until they connected with the Prophet’s shrouded gaze. “Only two men’s heads hold our plans and I can’t risk losing yours. If the first man you see walking down the dock isn’t me, put a bullet in him and light out for Charleston like we planned. We still have a few thousand left over from Captain Mahoney’s stash. Make sure you put it to good use.”
“And what about our guest?”
“Take her with you. I don’t think we’ve yet gotten everything that’s useful out of her. We’ll have time for that at sea, and when she’s told us who did Jeremiah so poorly, then the sea can have what’s left of her.”
Mr. Tobias nodded. They embraced and he went back inside the slaughterhouse, while the Prophet reached his hand out to Hattie.
“Mrs. Wilson, if you would, I need your help to find destiny. Fear not, though: I can point the way.”
The rain was still moderately heavy as Hattie escorted the Prophet and his flock through the streets of Baltimore. They only traveled a few blocks before her dress was thoroughly soaked through. The Prophet poled himself forward at the end of his walking stick like a gondolier.
To a town used to street gangs, Hattie’s charges must have seemed a motley crew. Any concern—or hope—that the pack she headed might draw undue attention to themselves was quelled as soon as they crossed Jones Falls at the Lombard Street lumberyards. Suddenly, they were just one small band among the many hundreds of disappointed gawkers filtering back to the Inner Harbor from Calvert Station, where the Rail-Splitter’s original train from Harrisburg had been scheduled to arrive, annoyed that they had been robbed of the opportunity to express their low opinion of the president-elect to his face. Hattie watched as a bushy-bearded Black man driving a wagon full of scrap wood was held up by the crowd, then dragged to the street by a half-dozen giggling whites. They pulled his coat and shirt off and held him down so one of them could write “abe lincoln” on his back in chalk.
A three-wagon train piled high with baggage rattled in front of Hattie as it turned off Calvert. Tags bearing the initials “A.L.” and “Mrs. A.L.” and “R.T.L.” shook from the handles of the trunks and metal crates. A secondary train of curious street urchins trailed in the wagons’ wake, jumping up and down and hooting at a particularly long, deep chest in the center.
“He’s there!” one gutter monkey kept crying, trying to work up the courage to scale the side of the cart and check the chest himself. “Abe’s hiding in that one!”
Hattie’s eyes followed the boy’s pursuit and met with an unexpected shock on the sidewalk opposite: a tall redwood of a man following them with his palm-leaf hat pulled partway over his brow. Mr. Dawson. A few days ago, or yesterday, even, Hattie would have swooned in delight at the sight of him, that he was striding to her rescue. But now he was just one more ball tossed among the others that she was already desperately trying to keep juggling in the air. She had to stop the Prophet, free Mrs. Warn, and now keep her partner safe too? Were there no limits to the impossibilities asked of her?
A hand tapped her shoulder, and she turned to see Mr. Howard, nodding toward a nearby alley. She gently took the Prophet’s shoulder and arm and steered him in that direction, losing sight of Mr. Dawson and hoping he did not lose sight of her. Mr. Howard produced keys, unlocked the heavy oak door at the alley’s end, and ushered them inside what turned out to be a sprawling candleworks. Row upon row of loom-like machines stretched out before them. Cylinders of wax hung by their long wicks from the ceiling. Troughs lay empty except for a thick, pasty film. Lining the cream-splotched wall on the far side of the factory were kegs labeled “paraffin.” Wax in its purest form, which was why most candlemakers had to cut it with dye and fragrances. Hattie knew from her candle-making days in the orphanage that if you just stick a wick in a barrel of the stuff and light it with a match, it had this nasty tendency to explode.
