CHAPTER 20
The home on Josephine Street that Mr. Whitmark had dispatched her to reminded Effie of Adeline’s. It was lovely on the outside, with a wide front gallery and fluted Greek columns. A crepe myrtle flanked one side of the cottage with reddish-green shoots and small, glossy leaves just beginning to sprout from its pruned-back branches. Winter’s detritus had been raked from the yard, the flowerbeds and rose bushes groomed for spring. But the interior told a different story. Worn carpets, faded wallpaper, sparsely appointed rooms.
“Shall I set a fire for you?” the woman who’d let Effie in and led her back to the bedroom asked.
With the shutters closed to morning sunlight, it was cold in this part of the house. She glanced at the fireplace. A fine layer of dust dulled the cast-iron screen. But no soot. Likely this woman and her dead husband hadn’t spared coal for this room all winter. All the more kind of her to offer.
“No, thank you. It’s best to keep the room cool until we’re done with the . . . er . . . process.”
The woman nodded, her gray eyes flickering to the bed and then back to Effie. “Can I get you some tea? Coffee? Louisa down the street brought over biscuits. I think I have ajar of last year’s—”
“I’m fine.” In truth, a cup of coffee sounded divine after the few short hours of sleep Effie had gotten, but she never ate or drank while embalming. Captain Kinyon had told her once of a man who’d mistaken a jar of injection fluid for a glass of water and nearly died. She’d not believed him, the captain, when he’d told her the story. How could one be so distracted as to drink embalming fluid? Surely the sharp smell of chemicals would have alerted him. But in those days, she had only her work, her studies, a worry or two over whether Mrs. Kinyon would drag her to the church pie sale or quilting bee. Nothing to truly divide her attention.
Her current state of mind, however, gave credence to the story. She’d not even remembered to tie her boots this morning until she’d nearly tripped over her laces hurrying down the stairs.
“You just let me know if you need something.” The woman’s gaze wandered back to the bed. Her fragile smile tottered. “I didn’t know if I should”—she nodded to a wooden leg propped against the far wall—“you know, put it on. He hated for anyone to see him without it.”
“I’ll reattach it at the end.”
“Of course, of course.” She looked around the room, clasped and unclasped her hands, then, at last, shuffled out, reminding Effie there were coffee and biscuits in the kitchen.
Effie shut the door behind her. She leaned back against the smooth wood and closed her eyes a moment. The woman’s violet-scented perfume lingered in the air, mixed with the smell of camphor and a body just beginning to turn.
Though Mr. Elliott had assured her he’d not recorded her name in the jail’s logbook last night, Effie had feared somehow Mr. Whitmark had gotten word of her arrest. Her hands had quivered such that it took her three tries to unlock the shop’s carriage gate. What a relief when Mr. Whitmark bade her good morning, chirk and lively as if it were Christmas Day. He asked nothing of her bloodshot eyes nor her unpolished boots nor her mismatched gloves, but directed her here, to this kindly woman’s house, and said he’d follow presently.
She opened her eyes and set to work. She was tired, yes, but altogether glad to have something to occupy her hands and mind. Something solitary and familiar.
Without even pulling back the coverlet, she could see the body of this man had been made gaunt and shrunken by some drawn-out illness. Malaria, perhaps. Consumption. His bewhiskered cheeks sagged. His collarbones all but jutted through his skin. Upon undressing and washing him, she found his arms bruised from where he’d been bled.
As promised, Mr. Whitmark arrived at the house shortly thereafter. He helped her lift the body onto the cooling table, though it was so light and emaciated she likely could have moved it herself.
“Did you know this man?” she asked, when he lingered, staring down at the body. His once-cheerful expression had gone wan.
He shook his head and she realized it was not the man’s face Mr. Whitmark was gazing at, but his missing leg.
“At Stones River we were camped so close to the enemy line, I could hear the screams of the Rebs across the field under the saw at the same time I was operating on our Union boys. Seemed between us there’d been enough feet and arms and legs to damn the Mississippi.”
Effie too remembered the screams. The piles of bloodied limbs. The endless flies buzzing and circling.
“And what for?” he continued. “To die like this, wasted and impoverished?”
She ought to have said nothing. Kept her tongue still and gone about her work. Or else muttered something banal about preserving the great Union his forefathers had created. Instead she said, “That every drop of blood drawn with the lash be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
He cocked his head toward her and blinked, as if only just realizing she was there beside him. Then his eyes narrowed.
Her gaze retreated to the scuffed floorboards. “Lincoln, sir.”
“I know damn well who said it, Effie.” He grabbed her embalming cabinet from beside the cooling table and thrust it into her arms. “I don’t pay you to quote dead men at me. I pay you to work.”
Her jaw tightened, but she said nothing as he clomped from the room.
It took her four tries to elevate the artery from the cut she made in the underside of the dead man’s arm. Another two to cannulate the flimsy vessel. Hypovolemia—that was the cause of her troubles. It had nothing to do with her scattered thoughts or clammy fingers.
Mr. Whitmark hadn’t been the same since his brother’s visit the week before. No, further back than that. Since the day they were called to that palatial Garden District house after Mardi Gras. True, business was up. She welcomed the extra money. He was sober and eating more now than just kola nuts. And hadn’t it been good to see him smile? Not that wistful half smile he’d worn on occasion those first months after she came. But a true smile, one she imagined had graced his face often before the War.
Yet Effie rather missed the aimless drunk he’d been on her arrival. Apathy was easy to navigate. This moodiness—happy one minute, glowering the next—was far more treacherous terrain.
She could hear him now through the thin wall separating this room from the parlor. His voice came low, even, and professionally somber. He spoke of casket options, pallbearers, and plumage. Of hymns and bible verses for the service. Of the advantages of crepe bunting over flowers.
Perhaps she’d spoken out of turn. No need to lecture a man who’d fought against his countrymen, against his very brother, that the Union cause would triumph. Hadn’t Samson said something about that in a club meeting once? About holding fast to their allies?
Samson. Not six hours ago he’d been kissing her, stroking her skin. She wasn’t naive to what they’d done. More than once Mrs. Kinyon had lectured her on the virtues of chastity, on the shame and ruin that awaited girls who gave in to lust. Swarthy as she was, but a few generations removed from those heathens in Africa, Effie was particularly susceptible. Or so the lecture went.
But she was not penitent or ashamed as Mrs. Kinyon forewarned. She didn’t feel spoiled or dirty. No, not like she had when those men in the slave pen had touched her. She wished rather Mrs. Kinyon had told her something useful, cautioned her about the initial pain, the blood, the stickiness afterward.
Her dress, her petticoat, her crinolette, her chemise had all ridden up and bunched uncomfortably beneath her. The cotton bale’s burlap covering had chafed the exposed skin between her gartered stockings and corset. Mosquitos had bitten her thighs.
She’d felt so vulnerable at first. Bare to the world. Unable to move, to disentangle herself, to scarcely breathe for his weight upon her. But then in the throes of it all—the pain, the chafing, that feeling of suffocation—she’d looked up into his face. His eyes were scrunched shut, his lips parted. Beads of sweat glistened at his hairline. He was at once entirely apart from her, lost in his own sensations, and entirely hers. Just as bare and vulnerable as she and utterly beholden. The dock could have sprung to life at that moment, steamboats blaring their horns, stevedores rolling sugar barrels up the gangplanks, merchants barking orders in a dozen different languages, and Samson would not have flinched. She’d wrapped her legs around him then, enmeshed her fingers in his hair, urging him closer, deeper that he might stay lost in her forever.
A steamboat did sound just then. A sharp, high-pitched whistle. No, not a steamboat. A kettle. She heard the woman of the house pad from the adjacent parlor, over the threadbare runner in the hallway, and into the kitchen. Effie rattled her head and looked down at her work. Her hand had stilled on the injection pump, blood-tinged fluid backing up into the tubing. Her first impulse was to squeeze the bulb harder and faster to make up the lost time. Mr. Whitmark’s mood would only sour further if he found her dawdling. But embalming couldn’t be rushed. And this man looked ravaged enough without his capillaries bursting into bruises across his skin.
The clank of china in the parlor told her Mr. Whitmark was yet engaged anyway. Her stomach rumbled as she thought of the warm tea and jam-covered biscuits he and the woman were likely enjoying. She thought she caught a whiff from beneath the door—nutty, sweet, and rich. But that was probably just her scattered mind again. When she inhaled a second time she smelled only muriatic acid, arsenic, and chemical salts.
She was glad for the sharp odor. It kept her tethered to the present. For a moment she’d slipped back to the slave pen, to those early days before Jonesy had come and the other children—a dozen inches taller and years older—had stolen her food. How her stomach had grumbled then.
But the smell of the embalming fluid had saved her from falling back fully into the memory. The whoosh of the injection syringe. The muted voices of Mr. Whitmark and the woman sounding through the wall.
Effie inclined her ear toward the sound. She didn’t care what type of casket the woman chose, how many black plumes she ordered, whether Father Girardy from St. Alphonsus or Reverend Chase from Christ Church would perform the service. But she’d never finish her work if her thoughts kept drifting.
“Did you know my Matthew?” the woman asked. And then, after a short pause, “Before the War?”
They couldn’t possibly have become acquainted after the War. The woman’s tone, though not unkind, said as much. Before the War, perhaps. When decent men would still receive Mr. Whitmark, invited him into their studies to drink bourbon and smoke cigars. Before he’d turned scalawag and sided with Yanks. Before her husband lost first his leg, then his fortune. Before the world turned topsy-turvy on them all.
How Mr. Whitmark’s past stalked him. A decade gone and still relentless. It wasn’t just vagrants defacing his shop, or Ku Kluxers disparaging his trade, but even goodly women talking around the subject like it were unfit to be spoken of plainly.
“Only by reputation,” he said. “I believe he and my older brother were at university together.”
“Ah, yes. I was sorry when I heard he’d been lost at Vicksburg.”
Effie scooted her stool as close to the wall as the embalming tubing would allow. She’d not known he’d had an older brother too. On which side of the Vicksburg line had he stood and fallen?
“Matthew was there too, you know. That’s when he lost his leg.”
Silence followed. The sound of pouring liquid. The clink of a spoon against porcelain. More silence.
“We had such high hopes at the outset of the War. To be free of Northern tyranny. To continue on with our beloved way of life. And to come back to this . . .” Her voice diminished into sobs.
Effie imagined Mr. Whitmark shifting in his chair and longingly eyeing the parlor door while he reached into his suit pocket for a hankie.
“You can’t imagine the humiliation my husband endured, Mr. Whitmark. And not him alone. All our men returning home. Though they’d never right admit it.”
A few sniffles sounded through the wall, followed by a dainty honk of the nose. Humiliation? What did these men know of humiliation? They’d not been poked and fondled, bidden to step lively and act the genial slave while on display. Effie stopped her work. She didn’t trust her fingers not to strangle the pump. And Mr. Whitmark. What of his humiliation? To come home the victor but be treated as the vanquished.
“All those rights they’d fought and bled to protect—gone! One illegitimate government after the next. Taxed to the very brink of poverty.” The woman blew her nose again. “I’m sorry Mr. Whitmark, I know you’re a Republican, but I just can’t abide what our beloved South has become. It killed him. Just as sure as the illness. It killed him, Mr. Whitmark. A man must be able to hold high his head.”
More sobs.
“Every time he strapped on that dratted leg, it was a reminder of what he’d lost. What we’ve all lost.”
Effie looked at the man on her cooling table. Even with that wooden prosthetic, he must have hobbled when he walked. He’d likely not passed a single black man on the street without the niggling reminder of his folly and defeat. She started up with the injection again, the slow, rhythmic squeeze of the pump, the steady course of fluid. Judging from the pressure and resistance, his veins were nearly filled.
But Tom had lost a leg too and managed to hold his head aloft. He’d been born and raised as chattel and yet had dignity. Effie pitied the woman her sorrow, the loss of the man she’d loved. But though she managed to keep the flow and force of the injection even, she could not pity this man.
She’d finished the injection and was tying off the artery when the woman’s tearful diatribe ended, and Mr. Whitmark spoke. For all his moodiness and disorganization, his shaky hand and mediocre skill, his talent for undertaking showed in these moments. He could lay a banquet of the most unpalatable things—death and loss and all their costly accoutrements—as if it were a feast. In similar form, he would disagree with the woman now, defend the Union cause, Republicanism, Emancipation, without seeming the least contrary.
His first words were conciliatory. How awful all that had befallen her husband. So ugly the ravages of war. History would remember all those who bravely fought. He cleared his throat. The low whistle of a sofa cushion taking in air sounded. Floorboards creaked. Effie guessed he’d stood. Perhaps wandered to the window or marble hearth.
“Life certainly isn’t as tidy as I supposed in my youth,” he said. “This certainly wasn’t the future I’d envisioned when I joined up with the Unionists. All these Northern opportunists—vultures, really—and the corruption. But take heart. Change is coming.”
Northern opportunists? Had Effie heard him right? Is that what he thought of her? She hastily tied off the final suture, sealing closed the incision she’d made in the man’s arm. Still clutching the needle and thread, she pressed her ear against the wall, the peeling lime paint cold and scratchy against her cheek.
“Do you really think so?” the woman asked.
“Look at what happened last fall in Mississippi. A sweeping victory for Democrats in the statehouse. Why, that carpetbagger Governor Ames resigned just last week.”
“But you’re a Republican, Mr. Whitmark. Surely that doesn’t suit your cause.”
“I’m a Southerner, ma’am. Beyond that . . . I don’t know what I am.”
“I must confess, I’d thought not to hire you. Didn’t seem right to have an enemy of our cause profit from my husband’s death. Not when . . .” She blew her nose again and took a ragged inhale. “But Mr. Randolph said you and your Negress were the best in the city. You came from a good family, after all, and weren’t like those other scalawags. He was right.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” The words came out hoarse, hesitant. Or was that just the muffling effect of the wall? He cleared his throat again. “I best check on my assistant. She ought to be close to finished by now.”
Effie hastened from the wall, her heel striking one of the open jars scattered about on the floor. Embalming fluid seeped into the pine floorboards and wicked into the rug, its sharp scent blooming in the air. She rummaged through her dressing case for scraps of muslin to soak up the fluid, tossing pins, collar buttons, shaving soap, a brush, a razor, a comb onto the floor around her. The bedroom door opened just as she covered the spill. She scrambled to her feet, standing over the sodden scraps of cloth so they were hidden beneath the hem of her skirt.
Mr. Whitmark winced and wrinkled his nose. His gray eyes roved the mess of supplies cast about the floor. “Are you finished?”
The conversation he’d had with the woman didn’t seem to have upset him. Not her rationalizing or misplaced blame. Not her unintended insults. He just looked tired and impatient.
“I still have to inject the cavity. I . . . er . . . was just looking for my trocar.”
“It’s there, in your embalming cabinet.”
She glanced at the case laid open on the side table, her long metal trocar nestled against the pink velvet backing in plain view.
“Of course. I . . . I thought I’d moved it.” She dragged the fluid-soaked rags into a pile with the toe of her boot, trying to keep the rest of her body still.
He frowned and did not move. Was he going to stand there and watch her finish? “Well, get to it. I’ve orders to place back at the shop.”
She turned back to the body, keeping the pile of cloth hidden as she moved. Her gait was awkward. The sound of the cloths a deafening murmur over the floorboards, leaving a damp trail in their wake. “I’ll fetch you as soon as I’m finished. It won’t be but a few minutes.”
He lingered a moment more. Surely he’d seen the spill. She grabbed the trocar and steadied it above the dead man’s belly button. Mr. Whitmark had never shouted at her. Never struck her. Never threatened to let go of her service. But this new man, this man who disavowed Republicanism, who lauded a victory won in Mississippi by terror and violence, she didn’t know how this man would react to even the smallest mess.
“You’ve a quarter of an hour. And crack a window. It smells like the dickens in here.”