November, 1861
The Positive Mind protect her soul she had not had an easy time and I began to see at last that I wasn’t as crucial as I had imagined. On the first Hand of Fate there was serving His Seership and then on the second to serve William Mumler and yet on the third serve the Marshall and Gerry in a way that embattled the first pair of hands.
But these eight hands were preferable when in former times I had served just Diakka
About my head the buffeting and always blackly of their wings.
In these conditions I abided, thinking waiting in my cell. I’d told the lawmen on my faith that Mumler was the murderer and told them too in what queer place and how deep down Child’s corpse was laid. But my time on the stand could no more put off.
When Counsellor Gerry questioned me it had been as he said a “formality only.”
—Deception not that I had seen.
—The Spirits were as real as any.
—The man himself oh most integral kind and even brotherly.
Piety was sacrifice and sometimes yes of lesser lives. The Mumlers were my sacrifice as Child had been one in his turn to the Mumlers.
For everything was necessary. Everything was perfect too. The universe reflects I knew and in that reflection was all that it held.
During that day’s adjournment they paid me a visit, setting stools before the bars. The Marshall had not been in court though here he turned up red and chafed as though he had been in a strenuous hurry. Gerry wore spectacles over his whiskers so bright I could not see his eyes.
“He’s a fiendishly clever one, no?” says the Marshall. “More clever, surely, than he looks.”
Says I: “Is there something wrong?”
“Oh plenty!” says Tooker “And yet you seem to have no clue.”
“Did you go where I told you?”
“Indeed sir,” says he.
“To the Negro churchyard at the base of the hill?”
“It goes by some exacter name?”
I could not see to answer that. I says to the Marshall: “Well what did you find there?”
“A mute set there to guard the gates.”
I swallowed stones I could not breath. “But what did you find in the grave, Marshall Tooker?”
Marshall Tooker took the time to build and light a cigarette and when he had it smouldering he glanced at the Counsellor and says: “Not a thing.”
“The plot was empty,” says the Counsellor tipping down his spectacles.
“But that cannot be true,” says I. “I saw him buried there myself.”
“You saw him buried,” says the Marshall. “Someone saw him out again.”
“You have perjured yourself, Mr. Guay,” says the Counsellor.
“For all I knew he was right there. For all I knew, my lords, believe me. If he were moved, I don’t—”
“—please, sir. Preserve what honour you have left. Mr. Gerry and I have conversed,” says the Marshall, “and here is what we’ve come to think. You are a saboteur, of course—possessed of a certain rudimentary cunning that we were too proud to detect at first glance but now we have you in our sights we’ll not soon forget it, of that, I assure you. Which brings us to your strategy.”
“Your aim in all of this,” says Gerry.
“To destroy, on the one hand, the state’s case for murder by having the body removed from the plot, while planning, on the other hand, a straw indictment of your friend. You would see William Mumler fall, but you would play no part in it. You would let Hannah, mad, do that. As Hannah, mad, has surely done. You’ll notice Counsellor’s time with you was not exactly probing, was it? Nor were your answers quite up to the promise you made in exchange for immunity, sir.”
“We might’ve delayed your testimony until after we’d dug up the plot,” says the Counsellor. “Yet alack and alas, we could no longer do. And so we have ourselves to blame.”
“But you are far too clement, Counsellor. We are agents of the law. Mr. Guay of Poughkeepsie,” the Marshall begins in the voice of a stuttering ignoramus, “is all but the commonest c-c-criminal, Counsellor, lest we fail to recognize. Add to that: a common coward. But wouldn’t you guess it, Mr. Guay, we too have our insurance policies.”
“Plenty of them, Mr. Guay.” And here the gaslight down the block twinned hell in Counsellor Gerry’s lenses.
“See if this one fits,” says Tooker. “The trial will go on unabated. If murder cannot be the charge, let fraud and larceny stick deep.”
“Let fear of us stick deep,” says Gerry.
“But not of us alone,” says Tooker. “Let the fear of this Juggler stick deepest of all.”
“Mumler?” says I.
“Juggler, sir. For that is what this Mumler does. He has juggled alliances, enemies, all, in arcs too high and wide to gather and they have fallen round his feet in patterns most desperate indeed,” says the Marshall.
“But I have not betrayed him, sirs!” says I to these men of the law rising up and Tooker and Gerry they backed from the bars as though they were afeared of me.
And Marshall Tooker says to me: “Remember where it is you are.”
“But I have not betrayed him, sirs!”
And Tooker says: “Successfully. Which does not mean you haven’t tried. But how should Mr. Juggler know, attempting to stand beneath so many baubles?”
“We will make sure he knows, is how. You can depend on that,” says Gerry.
“Once a jeweller, always one.”
“Once a killer,” says the Counsellor.
“You can always depend on a jeweller,” says Tooker, “to make right his assets before closing shop.”
Tooker stood there at the bars his baldness and his knuckles bright. His eyes were on me hard as slate his skull vibrating in its casement but then when he saw me. I mean really saw me: sprawling tearful on the floor his eyes lost their sheen for the wretchedness of me.
And then he slowly backed away.
Q
That night I did not sleep a murmur lying wide-eyed in my cell as the branching and winding of all I had heard brought me skinning my bones on the selfsame terrain.
And yet after a certain point I did not think of anything but the small Quaker girl with the Light in her eyes who had brought me the bread when I came to Esopus. She had bounded right up to the place where I sat. She had not been afeared of me. She’d given me the cornbread hot in its straw-woven basket and under its cloth and she had raced away from me and waved to me along her way and I had ate it pinch by pinch while sprinkling the powder from one of my vials.
I was not nor had been anything in my life. That little Quaker girl was all.
When finally they came for me to bring me to the court of law my eyes were so starved of the morning’s last dark that they refused to open fully. But my vision cleared some at the door to the jail where there were figures standing, waiting.
It was the Mumlers, flanked by guards.
The figure of Mumler was bristly and big while the figure of Hannah was tattered and thin and pressing in around their bones a pulsing robe each one of Light. While out beyond the metal doors that led to the courtyard that led to the court there stretched a sort of Maw of Light that swallowed everything save them.
Mumler’s figure nodded once. And then I could see him distinct at my side.
“Good Morning, Mr. Guay,” says he. “A little sleepy are we, then?”
He smiled and then he clapped my shoulder. “Today, perhaps, shall be our day.”
I looked at him and looked at him for any trace of what he knew and when I saw that he did not I nodded at him lovingly. And then I tells him: “After you.” And William Mumler smiled again as if to say: I am obliged. As if to say all is forgiven good sir whatever it is that you think you have done for it could not be helped one bit. And Mumler and Hannah they both took a step and then the Maw of Light unhinged and just as my arm raised to block out the glare it took them ranks of guards and all.
“You’re waiting on me to remind you how to? One foot goes in front of the next,” says the guard.
So I squinted my eyes and I followed them forth until the brilliance claimed me too.