NOT UNTIL WE EMERGED from the brothel did I realize I had been holding my breath. I paid the girl for her time and considered but did not offer to heal her friend’s face. A dark channel had opened up between Grace and me, and I did not want whatever was on the other side of it to reach across and grab me. Or you.
“How in the hell did she know your name?” Hawking asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“While we’re at it, how does HE know your name?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
My mind was on the implication of the monster’s reaching through that young prostitute’s body to speak to me. Could very well have been that he had told Grace to say that to me, that he was trying to frighten me home. That would mean he was just a man, though. And I could tell from looking sidelong at Hawking that even he did not believe that.
The roadhouse had stood for so long unaccosted due to the solidarity of the women who tended it. Your great-grandmother had long since passed, and once we girls had all grown and left the house, so had Aunt Lucinda. Only my mother and Aunt Griselda remained behind to tend to the hearth and grant shelter to those seeking it. Your gran Cat would bundle herbs and brew tinctures and tonics for those who asked, and your great-aunt Griselda would read their cards and their palms and reveal their futures within. That they had each other had been a comfort to me all these years, but I felt no comfort now, only fear and pain.
I had no notion of the nature or character of the monster who had killed your father and was now threatening the rest of my family. Though I had my suspicions, the books from which I drew them were hundreds of miles upriver.
At the time, I made no notice of it, as the butcher’s moods had a tendency to fluctuate depending upon how much whiskey he managed to put away before unconsciousness came to claim him. I know now, looking back, that he was in a darker mood than I had seen thus far. I was not interested in his mood, whether it was singular or shifting. I now knew the way from Madame Lavoie’s to the hotel on Dauphine Street, and I moved as quickly as my bare feet and belly allowed.
“Wake the stabler,” I said as we rounded the corner towards the hotel. The street still stank of blood and burnt gunpowder.
Hawking neither questioned me nor responded with his usual brand of insolence. He patted down his person to assure himself he had not misplaced his wallet, then left me to my errand.
I rushed through the lobby and past the saloon, where the clinking glassware and shuffling cards would have been a siren song to my companion had he accompanied me inside. Packing was among the least of my concerns. The mirror at the vanity table, however, I went straight to, pushing the dainty chair out of the way and bracing myself on the table.
My mother’s Work has always been enabled by the use of mirrors, but I learned to extend my sight through minerals, black obsidian, and the sediment at the bottom of a copper cup. This mattered not one lick to me. I wanted to reach out to my mother, and my Will was stronger than my tools would have been.
I looked into the mirror, breathing slow and purposeful until all that existed was my intention to summon my mother. If the spell had succeeded, the reflection would have rippled and your gran would have appeared, and I would have sent her the message I kept in the back of my mind.
It did not succeed. I was quite calm by the time I realized she would not come, but I could not bring her to the mirror.
The door slammed open a moment later and Hawking leaned in to ask, “What are you doing?”
“Trying to send a message to my mother,” I said. “There’s too much water.”
“Why don’t you send her a telegram and save yourself a headache?”
“Telegram?”
He stared at me a moment, then sighed and scrubbed his face with his hand.
“Christ,” he said. “Come on.”
To my eye, the telegraph station was no different than any of the other buildings I had seen in the business district thus far. It was not quite so large, and it boasted a porch where the other buildings did not seem to invite their patrons to sit and stay awhile. This time of night, any who might have been so inclined had already found their diversions and committed to them. Our horses encountered no traffic as they clopped along.
All of the station’s windows were darkened, and the front door resisted intrusion. I found, at last, a sign that said Back at dawn, hung upon a more permanent fixture that stated the establishment was open all night.
When I turned to voice my displeasure to Hawking, he was nowhere to be seen. I called his name, and received no answer. I called louder, and only the horses responded. One shook out her mane and snorted while the other pawed the ground and nickered. Though I did not speak their language, I took it for an attempt to communicate all the same and went back to the cart. What I muttered to the animals as I dug through my slapdash medicine bag does not bear repeating, but in my digging I found a white ribbon and a book of matches. Though I had him on my mind already, I breathed steady to dispel my impatience before I introduced flame to the fabric.
Once the spell was cast, I tied the horses to the post out front and told them to behave themselves while I was gone. The foggy trail illuminating Hawking’s way hung low to the ground and did not proceed in a straight line. It wavered from side to side, a trait I would have taken for injury had I not known my prey.
It was no path I would have thought to follow if I had to think as Hawking was thinking. It took me south, through open plots of land and long stretches of lit yet empty streets. Were it not for the persistence of the ribbon’s trail, I would have thought myself to be imagining the distance he had covered. Thinking back, I ought not have been surprised.
At first I was uncertain of where he had gone, for the place was contained by a weary metal fence with neither signs nor light to see by. The ground was parched and the grass had died, and while the earth itself had a reverent quality, I could tell the church had not sanctified the place. Such places have an airless quality about them, a sense of being alone and being watched at the same time. I have been inside a church only once, my cousins and I daring each other to see who would be brave enough to run into one after nightfall and run back out again. None of us burst into flames, but we wished we had when our mothers found out what we had done.
Just because the entity described in the Christian Bible is a fiction does not mean spirits do not exist. They do. Whatever Christians summon when they give their sermons and perform their rituals, I am not familiar with. But in this place, I recognized its absence. The land felt abandoned.
I realized then that Hawking had approached the graveyard from the north. We were standing in a potter’s field.
Unlike those of a consecrated cemetery, the graves were marked by modest stones if they were marked at all, and to see from one end to the other was hardly a task. I did not have to follow the ribbon’s trail the rest of the way, for I saw my friend crouched down in front of a small gray slab. Or perhaps he was sitting. My memory has afforded him more dignity than his due.
Regardless, Hawking did not hear me approach, not because my steps were light but because he was absorbed in his own ritual. A fresh bottle of whiskey sat at his side. The stone had a smooth face and rough edges. Over his shoulder, I read the inscription:
MAY GOD GRANT YE MERCY
Without a name or dates, I could only look upon the stone and the man sat in front of it. I opened my mouth to draw him back from the precipice, but decided against it in the end. When he was ready, he would come find me, or I would leave without him.
Dawn was still a way off as I began my slow journey from the cemetery back to the telegraph station. Boys with newspapers piled high on the backs of their bicycles and men in white uniforms driving clanging milk carts passed me from time to time. I and a lone woman I presumed by her dress and the focus of her eyes to be a midwife passed each other by. She smiled at me, and I at her.
The horses were where I had left them, if a bit cross that I had left them, and I hung their oat bags and offered them apples from my hand. They would not forget my abandonment, but they would forgive it for the moment. While they ate I took a seat in one of the wicker chairs on the station’s porch and watched the sun rise.
Not long after a neighborhood rooster began to crow, the windows slid upward and the shutters slid outward and the front door jingled and opened. I turned to glimpse the owner, or at least what I presumed was the owner, which may have been a poor presumption on my part.
He was the shortest grown man I had ever seen in my life, with wisps of spun-sugar hair covering a perfectly round head as well as the knuckles of his hands, which themselves were liberally liver-spotted. Though his spine was stooped with age and his hands shook, he was quick on his feet and quicker with a grin. Some of his teeth had left behind pink holes, but he did not appear to miss them.
“Bonjour!” he said, and then repeated himself, his accent even thicker than Madame Lavoie’s. “Entrez, entrez, je viens de terminer le nettoyage de notre telegraph d’impression!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t speak French.”
“That is fine!” he said. “I do not speak English! Hah!”
Whether he was mad or just pulling my leg, I forced a smile and attempted to play the part of the gracious patron.
“You have send a telegraph before, n’est-ce pas?”
“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”
He walked me to the counter and spoke the entire way about the telegraph.
In spite of my hesitation, he told me of the English inventor Francis Ronalds, who built the first working telegraph in 1816 and powered it with static electricity, setting up an underground trench 175 yards long and an 8-mile-long overhead line. At the ends of the lines were revolving dials marked with the letters of the alphabet, and the electrical impulses sent along the wire, carefully tapped out by the operator, would spell out a message a single letter at a time. Not until twenty years later would American scientist David Alter invent the electric telegraph in Pennsylvania. Though he demonstrated its use to witnesses, he, unlike Samuel Morse the next year in 1837, never attempted to patent the idea.
“Do you know,” the telegraphist asked, “that the first message he send, in 1844, from Washington to Baltimore, say, ‘What hath God wrought??’”
Behind him lurked the machine, a monstrosity of keys and wheels and wires set up on a stately wooden desk, with tendrils sneaking up the ceiling and out into the beyond. Apparently there was another one just like it in St. Louis. Whatever I wrote down for the telegraphist to send, another man whose face I may well have never seen would transcribe it, and read it, and only after all of that would he contact my mother.
Part of me longed to see her face, to tell her myself what had happened to your father. I wanted my mother the way I fear you will want me and I will not be there. Another part of me felt the wild teenager in need of reproach as soldiers hauled her back from Texas. But I did not care. All I cared was to know she was alive, and it was only the water or distance or some other unknown keeping me from reaching her.
Above all else, I had to warn her.
Behind the counter, the telegraphist had wet the nib of his pen and introduced it to a well of ink and was now looking at me, one eye a clear brown and the other clouded by cataract.
“Êtes-vous prête?” he asked.
It was not until that moment that I realized how strange the message would be to this man. It seemed unwise that I tell him I was a pregnant fugitive witch chasing a mysterious stranger who’d killed my husband and whom I had on good authority from a self-mutilating prostitute was on his way to do harm to my sorceress kin in St. Louis. Even if I could use my Will on him, it would not affect the man who received the message in St. Louis and thought it nonsense or worse.
I nodded, gave him a weak “Yes,” and began in the form instructed: “Matthew dead by what you feared.”
“Matthieu dead as by what you feared. Arrêt.” His mind caught up to his hands, and I saw sadness in his gaze as he looked at me through his stormy eye. “Matthieu, he was your husband?” he asked, with his eyes on you. I nodded. “Mes condoléances.”
My dear, strange though it seems, aside from Hawking, this stranger was the first person to express sympathy for your father’s passing. This man who had never met us seemed to genuinely care about our fate. He motioned for me to continue.
“Sought by Ness,” I said in a tone I hoped would dispel suspicion.
He looked up. “A suitor, so soon?”
“Yes, well, he’s certainly after me,” I said. Before he could ask another question, I went on, “In New Orleans. Fear this darkness coming for you next.” His sadness persisted, but otherwise the man did not appear alarmed. “You will need strong wards. On way by riverboat.”
After the old telegraphist returned the pen to the inkwell, he held it up and blew on it and counted the words. As he calculated the cost on a wooden abacus beside a metal cash register that may well have been older than he was, he did not speak.
It was not the clearest warning, but given the circumstances and your father’s death, I thought your gran would see its meaning in spite of the murk.
I do not know whether Hawking had chosen to wait for me outside, or if he had decided to sit there until he reached the bottom of the bottle. I did not ask. I came out of the telegraph station, and I saw him in the wicker chair I had occupied not so long before. This time of day I was prepared for him to be uselessly drunk, and perhaps he was. But his drunkenness was often accompanied by jokes, or questions, or some other manner of nonsense that only strengthened my desire to see him swiftly off to sleep.
He took a deep breath when he saw me and braced himself on either arm of the chair. When he stood, he did not wobble. His eyes were reddened. Though I looked at him long enough to judge him fit to continue on, I did not ask him what was the matter.
“You send your message?” he slurred.
“I did.”
“You ready?”
“I am.”
“Good,” he said, and began an uneven walk towards the street. “I found a man who wants to buy the horses.”
“You’ve been busy,” I said.
He had nothing to say to that. He started readying the horses to walk, and I stole a moment to pet Matthew’s, the one he had named and I had teased him for naming. It was an uncomplicated process. After we signed the animals over to the broker, he paid us in large bills and we made our unhurried way to the riverboat landing.
I do not recall much about our time on the steamboat. It was a large, sturdy vessel with plenty of room both above and below deck, such that anyone who did not wish an encounter with another person could easily avoid one. For my part, I was both restless and exhausted. The steamboat afforded us a place to rest and meals at sunup and sundown, and our first full day on the river I availed myself of all they offered. Something told me I would not have much rest in the days to come, and I took as much as I could.
Our second night on the river, I awakened for no discernible reason and did so to an empty cabin. This would not strike me as unusual but for the fact of Hawking’s behavior striking me as strange. He had said very little to me after we left Madame Lavoie’s, and I could not enjoy the silence for its sounding to me like a warning.
Well past dark, likely nearing midnight, I made my way above deck in a nightgown and a pair of moccasins I had purchased from another couple traveling all the way to Saint Paul, Minnesota. My feet were thick with callouses and had never grown accustomed to shoes, but I wore them anyway. I feared slipping and hurting you.
A short walk around the steamboat’s deck revealed Hawking standing at its stern, polishing off what I feel safe in assuming was another new bottle of whiskey. He had a weak grip on the railing that suggested he was hoping to go over, not retain his balance.
“Roger,” I said to get his attention rather than to chastise him.
“What,” he said.
“You’re making me nervous.”
“Ah, I ain’t gonna jump.”
“Were you thinking about it?”
“Course I was thinking about it.” He sighed and turned away from the water as I settled beside him. He went on, “I’m too pigeon-livered to kill myself. Always have been.”
“It don’t take courage to kill yourself,” I said.
“Well, whatever it takes, I ain’t got. I’ve let other people die, you know, to pay for what I’ve done.”
“Would you quit feeling sorry for yourself?” I asked. “I owe you a debt I can never repay. You’re risking your own neck right now just being with me. That takes courage.”
He snorted, took another long pull off the bottle, and squinted at it once he realized it was empty. Into the black water it went, hitting with a hollow splash before the current and the churning backwash from the boat made off with it.
“You got any spells that can erase memories?” he asked.
“I could,” I said.
“Would you, if I asked you to?”
Given the state he was in, I would not feel justified in prying what he wanted gone out of him, nor in wiping away whatever he thought he could no longer live with. Maybe if he were sober when he asked, but at that juncture I had more faith in the man in black turning himself in than I had in Hawking drying out.
I said, “I know something’s hurting you. I could work a spell to make you forget it. Thing is, the past hurts sometimes. You either learn from the hurt, or you run from it. I make you forget, you got nothing left to learn from. You’ll always be running, and you won’t know why. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said, though he did not sound convinced.
“Come on inside,” I said. “Sleep on it. Come morning, you still want me to make you forget, you go on ahead and ask. I owe you that much.”
“In the morning?”
“That’s right.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
He nodded and let me put a hand on his back to steady him as we made our way back below deck. As he had at the hotel, he fell asleep as if he and sleep were long lost to each other, but this time he acquiesced to taking off his boots and suspenders first.
That night I would relive in my dreams the night your father died, but it was at the roadhouse, and it was your Nana Cat the man in black shot on the porch instead. I lay awake, holding you, whispering spells of protection for you, and her, and your father’s spirit, wherever it was.
In the morning, Hawking mentioned neither our talk nor our agreement. I reckon he had decided the memory of his trespass, whatever it was, was his punishment to endure. I waited the whole rest of the trip, but we made it to the docks in St. Louis without him breathing a word of it.