Chapter 11

When Walt wakes, Henry is gone, and he worries that what happened between them frightened Henry away again. He touches the indent left by Henry on the straw mattress. Still warm. He checks his pocket watch, which lies on the small table next to the bed. Almost four.

At the thought of Henry, he can’t help smiling. And then worrying. Why hadn’t he said good-bye?

Whitman rolls over and tries to sleep, but his face, thick and swollen like a mask, is throbbing again from his altercation with Clement. The next thought that takes hold is that if he doesn’t print the Harris murder story first, his eyewitness account will be drowned out by the larger dailies, a problem not only for the Aurora’s ledger, or his writing career, but one of accuracy: A story such as this can turn sensationalist awfully fast.

He sits up, swings his legs to the floor, and takes a moment to gather himself before standing. He lights the lamp next to his bed, goes to the armoire for a set of clean clothing.

While he’s dressing, he hears footsteps. Is that Henry? He puts on socks and slips quietly into the classroom. The sight of the small form in the darkness tells him straight away that it’s not Henry at all but Azariah Smith, hobbling to the front door of the women’s college.

“And where do you think you’re going?” Walt’s voice carves into the silence.

Azariah turns, and when he sees Walt standing there, he shrugs. “You caught me.”

“Is something the matter?”

Azariah thinks before he speaks. “I appreciate all you done for me, I really do, but I don’t belong here. All these women fawning over me. I need to get back to my people.”

“But you’re not well.”

“I’m well enough,” Azariah says.

Even in the dark, Walt can see the grimace on the boy’s face and, from the way he stands tilted to the left side, that he’s protecting himself from the pain. No, he can’t let the boy leave. Azariah’s best chance is to be here, and then Walt has an idea. “Mr. Smith?”

The boy smiles at this. “Yes, Mr. Whitman?”

“I could use some more help. Are you up to it?”

Azariah shifts his weight from his left foot to his right. He looks up at the ceiling while he considers the question. Finally, he says, “I think I am.”

“Good,” Whitman says, “I’ll grab my coat.”

And so Walt Whitman and Azariah Smith trudge to the Aurora offices together. Next to Walt, Azariah shuffles more than he walks. The boy should be in bed, recovering, and yet Walt would prefer to supervise him than have him out on the streets alone. The twenty-minute walk passes quickly, and when Walt unlocks the Aurora’s front door, it is only minutes before five.

In the front office stands Henry’s tidy new desk, paper stacked neatly in one corner, a tray of pencils in the other. Walt’s own desk is a mound of paper—old newspapers mixed with ripped sheets full of his own scribbles. Where is Henry?

Walt locks the door behind him and leads Azariah through the office to the composition room. The large table in the center is where they do most of their work, and the printing press sits heavy next to it. Azariah explores the room with wide eyes. He stops in front of the press, runs his hands along the metal. “Will you teach me?”

Whitman looks up.

“I’m not without ambition,” Azariah says. “You should know that by now.”

Walt smiles. “You can help by starting a fire in the stove there, and I’ll light the lamps.”

While Walt lights the three lamps, he keeps an eye on the boy. Azariah has set the kindling up properly, but he’s overloaded his pyramid, suffocating the flame. Whitman remembers his own father teaching him how to light a fire, how he lovingly guided him step by step, and for a fleeting moment Walt again feels connected to his father.

Whitman joins Azariah at the woodstove. “You’re smothering the fire before it has a chance to burn.”

Azariah shoots back, “I know what the hell I’m doing.”

Walt shifts the wood, adds more newspaper, and hands Azariah another match. “See if that works better.”

Azariah scrapes the match on the brick underneath the oven, waits for the flame to catch, and lights the newspaper.

“Leave the door open for a few minutes,” Walt says, exactly how his father said it to him. “Give it a chance to burn.”

The two of them watch as the kindling catches fire.

“Well done.”

Azariah smiles. “What’s next?”

“You are going to help me typeset tomorrow’s edition.”

“Typeset?”

“Here. Watch.” Whitman sets up the trays on the composition table, showing Azariah how he will transpose his article from the green notebook to the print tray. “I learned to set type when I was about your age.”

Azariah says, “What should I do?”

“Mr. Hartshorne called it following the letters.”

“Following the what?”

“The letters. I have to find each of these letters in type”—he points to his script in the notebook—“and assemble the blocks in the tray so they can be run through the printing press. I work fast, but along the way I make a lot of errors.” Walt stops. “Your job is to tell me when I do.”

“Okay.” Azariah kneels on the table and is ready.

But Walt is stuck in his own history. “Back then, I worked at the Long Island Patriot, and I was Mr. Hartshorne’s apprentice. He was from Philadelphia, and while we set the daily edition, he used to tell me about meeting George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Can you imagine knowing such great men?”

“I can’t.” He pauses for a second, waiting for Walt to start working. “Ready, Mr. Whitman.”

“My brothers, George and Jeff, are named after them.”

“Mr. Whitman!”

“Oh yes.” He shakes off the past. “Can you read?”

“The nuns worked with me some,” Azariah says. “Can’t read words but I know the letters.”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

Once Walt begins, his hands move almost automatically, shooting from one tray to the next, finding the right letter, then sliding it into place, the metal crashing into the wood tray like tiny explosions. Azariah edits as Whitman works, and is surprisingly good at it. He catches several errors in the first column alone, catches that will save a lot of time with the printing.

In the article, with the headline SHERIFF HARRIS MURDERED, Walt begins with the suggestion that Lena Stowe might not have killed her husband and that Abraham’s death might instead have had something to do with the underground body-snatching business and not the sensationalized and slanderous accusations of the Mary Rogers botched abortion. Walt figures that the tension created between the headline and the Stowe lead will jar the reader in a way that benefits his argument. Then he goes on to describe the illegal cadaver business itself—the demand for bodies, the point of view of the colleges—and finally transitions into what happened that night: his personal account of Sheriff Harris’s murder and his own abduction.

This last part is where Whitman will grab the reader by the throat. He shifts into the first person, adopting a narrative style much like that in the stories he’s been publishing. He wants the reader to feel what he felt, to be called to action as it were. He reads the passage to Azariah about being in the wagon with the corpse:

Upon waking under the tarp, I saw her. The girl’s eyes, stretched wide open, glared as at some monstrous spectacle of horror and death. The sweat started in great globules seemingly from every pore of my face; my skinny lips contracted, and I showed my teeth; and when I at length stretched forth my arm, and with the end of one of my fingers touched her cheek, each limb quivered like the tongue of a snake; and my strength seemed as though it would momentarily fail me—

Azariah interrupts him. “No offense, Mr. Whitman, but that sounds a titch melodramatic.”

“A titch?”

Azariah says, “You sound like you ain’t never seen a body before.”

“Fair enough,” Walt says. “We’ll delete that paragraph, then.”

“And while we’re on it. Didn’t I tell you to stay away from James Warren?”

“You did.”

Azariah shakes his head. “And you nearly got yourself killed.”

Whitman smiles. “Nearly but not quite.”

“I let you teach me how to build a fire,” Azariah says, “now you got to let me teach you how to stay alive.”

With the blocks of type set in the tray, it is time to run the proof.

When Walt finishes the print run at eight in the morning, he takes a rest and stares out the front window. The sun stretches over the buildings on Nassau Street and through the glass, but the air is cold. Icicles form in the crevice where the wall is joined to the window.

Walt approaches the sleeping Azariah and gently rocks his shoulders. “Mr. Smith? It’s time.”

The boy stretches, looks around, and when he sees Walt, he grins. “I dreamed I was taking a bath with those women doctors.”

“My,” Whitman says. “Perhaps, then, you’ll return to the college for a spell after we’re done here? See if dreams come true?”

Azariah plays along. “How can I say no to that?”

They load the newspapers into the Aurora’s wagon. They will pull it street to street, searching out the boys Mr. Ropes has hired to sell it, an exhausting task Walt himself has performed only once before. He appreciates having Azariah along for this—he’s already helping by steadying the cart, which is always near tipping over on the cobblestones and sidewalks. They maneuver their way through the morning traffic, following the voice of their first newsboy. “Extra! Extra! Sheriff Harris murdered!”

Walt is astonished. Someone still beat him to the story. No matter, he thinks. They certainly won’t have the angle I do.

The first newsboy, a burly sixteen-year-old with a missing front tooth, comes into view. He’s standing on an upturned milk crate, holding the Tribune in each hand, calling out the headline. “Sheriff Harris murdered!”

Azariah and the newsboy size each other up.

“Who is this?” the newsboy says to Whitman.

“Who am I?” Azariah says. “Who the hell are you?”

Walt steps in between the two boys. “Now, gentlemen,” he says, “don’t we have business to perform?”

The newsboy agrees, and so steps down, takes the bundle of Aurora editions. He reads the headline. “A bit late to the party, no?”

“Ours is a better story,” Walt says.

“It always is,” the newsboy says.

“Just sell it,” Azariah says.

As they leave, the newsboy’s high voice hacks through the morning air: “Sheriff Harris murdered! Get the story here! Two cents!”

“What was that all about?” Walt says. “Do you know him?”

“It was nothing,” Azariah says. “His sort thinks they’re better than folks like me.”

Whitman studies the boy but doesn’t grasp his meaning. Both Azariah and the newsboys are shabbily dressed, their speech equally rough.

Azariah is not smiling now. He’s retreated deep within himself. The boy is a strange contradiction, Walt thinks. He operates with a maturity beyond his years, which Walt now believes is eleven or twelve.

“Let’s finish delivering these newspapers. We both could use some sleep.”

It is not until ten in the morning that Walt and Azariah return to the women’s college. Walt’s legs are heavy as tree stumps, his eyes dry and itchy. Mud cakes his boots and streaks his overcoat.

Azariah collapses in one of the classroom chairs.

“Let’s get you upstairs,” Walt says.

Azariah shakes his head. “I’ll never make it.”

“I’ll carry you.”

Azariah nods, and so Walt cradles him, the boy’s warm body pressed up against his own. He thinks of his own brothers and sisters, and he longs to be with them, but he’s grateful for this moment with his new friend. Azariah leans his head on Walt’s shoulder.

In the large dormitory room, the students are up and about. Most of them are reading. They smile and nod at Whitman as he carries Azariah around the curtain and lays him in bed. He’s already fast asleep.

On the other side of the curtain, Elizabeth Blackwell waits for Walt. “What happened?” she whispers.

Whitman puts his fingers to his lips. “I’ll tell you later.”

She nods.

Walt acknowledges Miss Zacky, Miss Onderdonk, Miss Perschon, and Miss Emsbury. They are an impressive group, he thinks, as he goes down the stairs and into his room.

With the door shut, he drops into the chair next to the bed, unbuttons his coat, and slips into a trancelike state where he wonders about his ten-year-old brother, Jeff. Up already, no doubt, the cows milked and morning chores finished. He is probably sitting at the kitchen table, the sun’s rays warming his arm through the window, the sound of Mother, Louisa, humming to herself behind him. On the table, a stack of flapjacks drips with hot maple syrup and a swirl of butter. The kitchen smells best in the morning, scented with coffee and pancakes, the mixture of bitter and sweet he will forever connect to growing up in that house.

The bed is too much to resist now, so he rolls onto the straw mattress, which crackles as he comes to rest. He closes his eyes and feels sleep take him over, his body weightless and spinning into darkness and silence.