Tuesday, April 9, midday
With my oversight Charlie’d written up the Fort Sumter story and now was focused on setting it. Typesetting’s intricate work. You have to find every letter and place it, backward, in the composing stick to produce a tray of type you can print.
I was going to operate the press.
First I hung rope lines across the room, low enough so nine-year-old Owen could reach them. He was growing fast, but he wasn’t as tall as Charlie or me.
“Thanks, Joe!” Owen said. “Now I won’t have to stand on a chair to hang the broadsides to dry.”
“Don’t knock against any of the papers when you’re racing about the room, taking the damp ones from the press to the line,” cautioned Charlie.
“I’ll be careful,” promised Owen, his dark eyes shining. “I won’t smudge even one!”
“I know you won’t,” I told him, patting him on the back. “We’d be up a tree for sure without you, Owen.” Even though I couldn’t pay the boy much, he sure did work hard.
Once I’d overheard Owen bragging to another boy that he was apprenticed to me. That made me grin. Most boys my age were apprentices themselves. But Owen’s family didn’t mind his taking time from schooling to be at the Herald’s office. He was bright, and I suspect caught up quickly when he did go to class. His was one of the few families in town whose forebears had come from Africa, not Europe. It made no difference to me where someone’s family came from. But I wondered sometimes if it made a difference to others. Owen seemed to have few friends his own age.
If I lost the press, how would I tell Owen his job had disappeared? I pushed that thought to the back of my mind.
I rolled ink over the type, placed a sheet of paper over the form, pulled the heavy lever down on the press, raised it, checked the resulting page, pulled the broadside off, and handed it to Owen.
“Today we have to be ’specially quick. We’ve got to print eighty copies of this, and at least another eighty of the sheet Charlie’s setting type for now.”
Owen held the paper by its edges and read it out loud:
“Who’s Miss Nell Gramercy?” asked Owen.
“The Boston Transcript said she’s one of the few spiritualists innocent and pure enough to contact the dead,” I told him. “All I can vouch for is she’s an orphan, twelve years old, and traveling with her aunt and uncle. Mr. Allen, her uncle, hired me to print these and hand them out around town.”
“Can she really talk to dead people?” asked Owen as he carefully hung the sheet over the line. “Could she talk to Caleb?”
Owen’s brother Caleb had died of fever a few years back. Owen was only five then, and Caleb four, but he remembered.
“I don’t know, Owen,” I told him. “I guess some people think she could.”
“I’d like to talk to Caleb. I’d ask him what Heaven’s like.”
Charlie looked over at me and shrugged. I could tell he might have some doubts about Heaven, and he definitely had doubts about Miss Nell Gramercy. But he held his tongue. For Charlie, that was unusual.
“With the possibility of fighting in the South, I wonder if Mr. Allen’s thought of canceling her appearance Saturday night,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Not a chance,” Charlie said. I’d known he couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself for long. “People are nervous. They’re afraid there’ll be war. They’ll be looking for answers anywhere they can get them. I’m no spiritualist, but I predict Miss Nell Gramercy will have a ballroom full of people asking her questions Saturday night.”
