The men would not stop coming for her, whoever they were. In Wapping, in Spitalfields, wherever. They would wear different faces and be of any age and carry any kind of firearm but the money offered would always be what it was and too much for a person to deny.
Eliza did not go back inside. She thought of Marlowe whom she loved and she knew with a sudden clarity that he would be safer by far with Brynt. Brynt, who knew the ways of the world, who was not wanted by bounty hunters, who had talked of returning to America one day. It seemed now like a kind of dream. In Blackwell Court two streets over there waited a man with a pint in his fist and a weapon in his pocket and he would be awake even at this hour. She drew her filthy shawl closer around herself. She gripped her elbows in her crossed hands. She walked down the dripping cobblestones through the fog and then into the street. Her heart was breaking but she did not let herself slow or turn or look back at the cracked window of their rented room for fear of what she would see, the small figure silhouetted there, wrapped in a blanket, his pale hand pressed to the glass.
A MAP MADE of DUST
?
1882
2
LITTLE FIRES
It felt like little fires in his flesh. That is what he tried to explain to them. That it hurt.
His name was Charlie Ovid and he was maybe sixteen years old by the judge’s reckoning and despite a lifetime of whippings and beatings and brutality there was not a scar anywhere on his body. At six feet he was as tall as he would ever be but still lean through the chest like a boy. His arms were wiry with muscle. He did not himself know why his body fixed itself the way it did but he did not think it had anything to do with Jesus, and he knew enough to know it was better kept to himself. His mama was black and his daddy was white in a world that looked at him a monster.
He could tell neither his age nor the month of his birth but he was smarter than they thought and he could even read some and write out his own name in careful letters if they gave him the time to do it. He was born in London, England, but his father had dreams of California, of a better world for them all. Maybe he’d even have found it, had he lived long enough to get there. But he’d died in their wagon train in Texas, south of the Indian Territory, leaving Charlie and his mother stranded, with only enough coin to get them back east again past Louisiana. After that they were just two more drifting black folk in a country full of them and when his mother took sick and died five years later, she left him nothing but her wedding ring. That ring was silver with a crest of crossed hammers in front of a fiery sun, and Charlie, not even ten years old, would hold it and turn it in his fingers in the lantern light, remembering the smell of her, wondering at his father who had given it to her in love, trying to imagine who he had been. Charlie still had that ring, hidden on his person. No one was taking that from him.
His mother had known what he could do, the healing. She’d loved him anyway. But he’d tried his best to keep it a secret from everyone else, and that—as much as the healing—had kept him alive. He had survived the river work south of Natchez, Mississippi, and the dark shanties that had sprung up nearer River Forks Road in that same town but here, standing manacled in the darkness of an old warehouse shift room, he was not sure he would survive this. Everything he’d ever known or lost or suffered in his brief life had taught him the same solitary truth: everyone leaves you, eventually. In this world, you only got yourself.
He wore neither shoes nor coat and his homespun shirt was stiff with his own blood and his trousers were ragged. He was being kept in the warehouse and not in the jail on account of the fear the sheriff’s wife had of him. He was pretty sure that was it. For two weeks now he’d been kept manacled at the ankles and his wrists cuffed in front. The deputy marshal would come some days with other white men holding clubs and chains and they would set the lantern down on the floor and in the crazy shadows beat him for the sport of it and then watch laughing in amazement as the wounds closed over. But even as he healed, the blood was real, the pain he felt was real. The terror as he lay crying in the darkness was real.
Later he could do little but lurch, clanking from wall to wall in the near dark, feeling the little fires where his wounds had been, the tears and snot drying on his face, careful not to knock over the bucket of his own night soil. His wrists were so narrow the irons had kept sliding off until the sheriff brought in a set made special by the blacksmith, and those ones fit. The only furniture in the room was a bench suspended from the wall on rusting chains and he would lie out on it when he thought it must be night and try sometimes to sleep.
He was lying on it that day when he heard voices in the street outside. It was not mealtime, he knew that much. Mealtime came but twice a day and it was the deputy marshal who brought it over on a tray covered in cheesecloth straight from the sheriff’s kitchen up the street and the deputy marshal would sometimes make a point of spitting in it before setting it down. Charlie hated him, hated and feared him, the casual cruelty in him and the way he called Charlie mongrel and his coarse laugh. But most of all it was the look in the man’s eye that frightened Charlie, the look that said he, Charlie, was just an animal, that he was not even a person at all.
From outside there came the banging of tumblers in the big warehouse door and then the slow heavy tread of boots approaching. Charlie got to his feet, cringing, afraid.
He had killed a man. A white man. That is what they told him. It was that Mr. Jessup who stalked the wharf of the riverboat shipping lines going south to New Orleans and north to St. Louis with a whip singing in his fist, just like it was still 1860, just like no war had ever happened and nothing had been abolished and freedom wasn’t yet the lie it would be proven to be. The man he killed deserved it, he was sure of that, he felt no remorse. But the thing of it was, he did not remember the killing. He knew it had happened because at the hearing everybody had said he had done it, even old Benji, with his sad eyes and trembling hands. In broad daylight, yessir. On the lumber platforms, yessir. Charlie was being whipped for some transgression or other and it went on so long he could feel the slashes beginning to close over and when Mr. Jessup saw it too and swore and started calling down the devil on him Charlie turned in fear, turned too quickly, it must have been, and he knocked into Mr. Jessup and the man had fallen onto the pier and struck his head funny and that was that. But when they tried to shoot him for it Charlie just started breathing again almost at once and the bullets oozed back out of his flesh in front of the executioner’s very eyes. And when they tied him to a post a second time and took their aim they still could not kill him and they did not now know what to do with him.
Now the footsteps had stopped and Charlie heard the scrape and jangle of the keys on their ring and then the heavy door with its iron locks shook. The sound of a club striking the metal clashed and echoed.
“On your feet!” the deputy marshal shouted. “You got visitors, boy. Straighten up.”
Charlie flinched and moved to the rear wall so that the cold bricks were against his back. He held his hands in front of his face, shaking. No one came to visit him, ever.
He took a deep frightened breath.
The door swung open.
* * *