Quinn's Book

  In replenishing his vision of it all, Quinn sought not what was new but what was not: the elusive thing that endured unchanged in spite of growth. He tethered his horse in the front carriageway and knocked at the portal of first entrance, the carved wooden door looming before him with the same majesty it owned on the night he arrived a fugitive from the wild river. He stood on the same spot where he had stood then, feeling the strength of ritual rise in him. Repetition of past gestures suddenly seemed to hold the secret of his restoration to . . . to what? He could not say. He would not repeat a single day of the known past, would he? Would he willingly relive the days in which Maud was revealed to him, full knowing that the brink of that ecstasy gave onto a chasm of loss and waste? He had kissed Maud and known love, and then descended from beauty into the valley of putrefaction, where lay a generation of blasted sons: seven thousand dead in a single battle, dead in a great wedge of slaughter, their brains and bowels blown out of them, and they then left to rot on a field consecrated by national treachery and endemic madness. And the killing moved on to greener pastures.

  The front door opened and Quinn recognized Capricorn, hair gone to white, skin gone to leather, eyes waning. The old man did not recognize the long, lean Quinn in his soldier’s shirt (he was not a soldier), his riding breeches and boots, and the wide-brimmed slouch hat beneath which he had lived so long. But when Quinn took off the hat to reveal dense waves of hair the color of earth, then the old man’s eyes remembered history.

  “You’re Mist’ Quinn.”

  “Cappy, you’ve kept your wits intact, unlike most of us.”

  Quinn entered a house refurnished: gone the cherrywood sofa on which the widow Ryan and her terrified children had sat, replaced by a resplendently huge oval settee; gone the music-room portraits of Petrus and Hillegond, the walls covered now with huge tapestries; gone, too, the foyer’s Dutch colonial chandelier, and pendulous now in its place one of crystal, twice the size of the old one and exuding thrice the former elegance. This place does not shrink in memory. It waxes in breadth, and its opulence thickens.

  “Is Dirck home?” Quinn asked.

  “No more. He marry that singer and he move to Sweden. That’s where he live now.”

  “Sweden. I remember his wife always wanted to go back there.”

  “Said he didn’t wanna be here no more. Sold the house to Mr. Fitzgibbon and went away.”

  “Sold the house? What about Hillegond?”

  “Mist’ Quinn, Miss Hilly’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Gone. Killed. They strangle her. Wire her neck. They say she musta died right off.”

  Quinn took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, falling into the void, groping for a word.

  “When?”

  “Last Feb’ary sometime. Six months now. Worst thing ever happen in this house.” Capricorn sighed mightily and his voice broke. “They do my Matty too. Killin’ women like that.”

  “Who did? Why? What is all this?”

  “Don’t really know. Some thinks they knows. But nobody knows why they do my Matty too.”

  Capricorn was near tears, and Quinn motioned the old man toward the east parlor.

  “Can we sit and talk about this?”

  “Capricorn don’t sit in there. New butler, he don’ allow that.”

  “A new butler. Everything’s changed. What about the porch?”

  “Don’ think so.”

  “We won’t go to the kitchen. All right if we walk?”

  “Walkin’ is fine.”

  And so they walked on the road under a relentless sun, with Capricorn immediately talking of the great wealth of the new owner, Gordon Fitzgibbon, son of Lyman, and passing on then to Hillegond. Sadness smothered Quinn with each vision of her that came into his memory, and he knew he would have to turn the conversation away from her. He would find out the details of her murder from Will Canaday, read all the stories Will must have written about it. Quinn could drown in such evil but he would not. He would survive Hillegond’s death as he had others in the war: move past them; control the power of grief and anger to destroy the vessel. But he could feel the impetus for control weakening with each new death that touched him, his survival drive waning like Cappy’s eyesight. Soon there may be no drive.

  And Capricorn talked on.

  “This woman, she open her house to colored folks. She feed them, help them go to freedom. She save Joshua from jail, then give him money so’s he can bring other coloreds up from Carolina. Joshua’s woman stop here too. Miss Hilly a sainted lady. She in heaven for sure. She be a queen up there.”

  “I was here the night Joshua came in as a prisoner, manacled to the Swede,” Quinn said.

  “I recollect.”

  “After that I asked you about him, but you wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “I recollect that too.”

  “I saw Joshua in New York.”

  “We ain’t seen him here. How that boy doin’?”

  “Long time ago, but he was all right then.” Quinn the liar.

  “Aw, that’s fine.”

  “He was working in John McGee’s saloon. You remember John? The fighter? John the Brawn they called him.”

  “Nobody forget that man once they meet him.”

  “Joshua had a new name first time I caught up with him. Called himself Mick the Rat.”

  “Go on. Mick the Rat?”

  “That’s it. He was handling rats for John.”

  “Handlin’ rats?”

  “A special show to bring people into the saloon. They see the rat show free, then maybe they drink and gamble some. Joshua had a bag full of rats. He’d catch a fresh bunch every night at the slaughterhouse. Throw a light on them and while they stared at it he’d grab ’em with long pincers and drop ’em in the bag.”

  Capricorn shook his head. “Joshua do that? Joshua?”

  Quinn nodded. “Then he’d bring the rats into John’s place and put one into this pit in the back of the saloon. People all around the pit watching, and then somebody’d put a bull terrier in with the rat. Terrier’d kill it quick. Then Joshua’d put two rats in and the terrier’d kill them too, sometimes just one bite apiece. Then they’d put a Mexican hairless in and Joshua’d dump in four rats and the Mex’d get them all. Then five rats, then six. The rats had no chance. It was a matter of time.”

  “Can’t say as I like that game.”

  “No. But Joshua needed money. He was hiding two fugitive slaves and trying to move them north.”

  “He always doin’ that.”

  “Asked me to help him. He didn’t really know me, but he trusted me. Said that was his talent, knowing if he could trust you.”

  Joshua told Quinn the bounty on one of the runaways was three hundred dollars, which made his work of hiding the pair doubly difficult. The second slave had no price on his head, being possessed of only one eye, the other destroyed by the lash of a whip from his master’s hand, marking him as an evil-eyed source of ill luck to all. Joshua had led the slaves from Philadelphia to a farmer’s cabin south of Kingston that was only marginally secure; and when he learned the slave hunters were closing in he put the problem to Quinn: We need a white man. Quinn said he was a white man.

  Joshua had allies, but the known local abolitionists were of no value in this situation. Quinn, a stranger, could bring the necessary word to the inns and the grogshops where the deadliest gossip thrived and where the slave hunters had been biding their time to hear it. The slavers were also a pair, not from the South (by their accent) but Yorkers, clearly. They came equipped: ropes, manacles, rifles, pistols, money to loosen tongues. They called each other by name—Fletch and Blue—and made no secret of their ambition: “Catch niggers.”

  And so when Quinn sat in the Eagle Tavern and ordered his whiskey toddies and grew garrulous, dropping the news that he’d seen niggers moving around near a cabin up the pike, then repeated his performance at the Bump Tavern at the next crossroads, well, it came as no surprise when
Fletch and Blue turned up at his elbow, inquiring about particulars.

  “You hunt niggers, is that it?” Quinn asked them.

  “We take property back to its rightful owners,” said Fletch.

  “A wonderful thing,” said Quinn. “Man owns somethin’, he shouldn’t oughta have to give it up, just on accounta the thing he owns don’t want to be owned no more. Man could lose all his cows that way.”

  “Cows,” said Fletch, and he thought about that.

  “You think you could show us where you seen them niggers?”

  “Can’t really tell it,” said Quinn. “Don’t know the names of none of these roads, don’t know where nothin’ is, rightly.”

  “You figure you could show us?” asked Fletch.

  “I s’pose.” And Quinn mused on the possibility. “What’s the profit for a fella like me shows you what you’re lookin’ for?”

  “You want profit, is that it?”

  “Most folks do.”

  “We’ll give you profit.”

  “That case, we probably got us a deal.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “How much profit you figure we’re talkin’ about?”

  “We give you two dollars. You can buy a new horse with two dollars.”

  “Not no kind of horse I’d wanna ride.” And Quinn fell silent.

  “We’ll give you three,” said Blue.

  “We’ll give you five, never mind three,” said Fletch.

  “All you gonna give me is five? I was thinkin’ twenty ain’t a bad price for a couple of niggers.”

  “Twenty; all right, twenty. Let’s go.”

  “I’d like to get the feel of the twenty ’fore we go,” said Quinn.

  “Give him twenty,” said Fletch. And Blue opened the flap of his shirt pocket and took out a fold of bills.

  “You ready now?” Blue said when Quinn took the money.

  “I’m ready,” said Quinn. “You ready?”

  “We’re ready,” said Fletch. “But if’n we don’t get no niggers I’ll be lookin’ to get back that twenty.”

  “Fair’s fair,” said Quinn, and he led the way out of the tavern, mounted his horse, and headed north on the turnpike.

  Wrapped in blankets, the fugitive slaves squatted on the earth in a pit under the floorboards of the cabin, their retreat in times of threat. Planks covered their heads. Long slivers of light from the oil lamp in the second room of the cabin found their way down between the boards and into the soft clay cubicle of the slaves’ secret dwelling place.

  Joshua added wood to the fading fire, the first time the stove had been used in the eight days the slaves had been here, for smoke is a traitor. In the second room of the cabin sat two white men with blackened faces, each with pistol and shotgun. When they heard the horses approach, the men took up prearranged positions and Joshua stood by the cabin door, carrying no weapon, and waited for the visitors to knock.

  Quinn rode to the rear of Fletch and Blue when they neared the cabin and in his mind heard the music the two banjos made when the cadaverous dancer at The Museum sang his ditty:

  Dere’s music in de wells,

  Dere’s music in de air,

  Dere’s music in a nigger’s knee

  When de banjo’s dere.

  And then Fletch was telling Joshua that they were working for the federal marshal to track runaway slaves. Joshua spoke in a voice foreign to Quinn, whining and mewling.

  “I’s a free man,” he said. “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout no ’scaped slaves. Lived here all my days. You don’t believe that, go ask anybody here’bouts.”

  “Ain’t you we’re lookin’ for,” said Fletch. “We’re after two niggers got only three eyes between ’em.”

  “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout three eyes,” Joshua said. “You wanna come in and look, you can. I ain’t fightin’ no federal marshal. But ain’t nobody here but Mick the Rat, and that’s me, and that’s what is.”

  “We’ll have a look,” said Fletch. He dismounted and tied his horse to a bush, and then with Blue behind him and Quinn bringing up the rear, the three entered the cabin. What Quinn saw was a long shadow of a man in the second room, and Fletch and Blue both drew their pistols and moved toward it. Joshua backed into the room ahead of them and turned toward the shadow, which was made not by a man but a coat and hat on a stick, at which Fletch and Blue pointed their guns. As they did, the shotguns of the blackfaced men rose out of the shadows to the level of their faces, and both slavers dropped their pistols.

  “You lookin’ for us niggers?” said one of the blackfaces. “You wanna take us to Virginia?”

  Fletch shook his head.

  “Thought you did,” said blackface.

  Joshua drew a knife from the scabbard on his belt and with deft strokes cut the belts and waistbands on the trousers of Fletch and Blue.

  “Sit,” said Joshua, and Fletch and Blue sat.

  “Take off your boots,” said Joshua, and they did.

  “Stand up and drop your pants,” said Joshua, and they did.

  Joshua left the room, lifted the planks, and helped the slaves up from their pit as the blackfaces led Fletch and Blue to the pit’s edge. The slaves huddled by the stove and watched as Joshua and one of the blackfaces tied the arms and ankles of the slave hunters. Fletch wore long underwear to his ankles. Blue’s went to his knees. Neither man wore stockings. When the slavers were bound, Joshua and one of the blackfaces rolled them into the pit.

  “We gonna be leavin’ now,” Joshua said to them. “But thinkin’ about how you gonna be all alone down there, we got you some company.”

  Then from a corner of the cabin, he dragged out a canvas bag the size of a small child. He undid its drawstring, then upended it, dropping two dozen live rats into the pit. The men yelled, the rats squealed. Fletch and Blue kicked at the rats and backed themselves into a corner together.

  As Quinn raised the lamp to see what was happening, a courageous rat began climbing Fletch’s bare foot.

  Fletch kicked it, and the rat flew against the wall and rolled over.

  Then it righted itself, undaunted.

  Quinn, at this point, let the twenty dollars he had taken from Fletch and Blue flutter back down to its rightful owners.

  Capricorn was laughing so hard that tears were on their way.

  “Oh, that Joshua, he wicked. That man, he know how to do it. How all that come out?”

  “Joshua took the horses and they all rode north,” Quinn said. “I guess they made it. I never saw any of them again, except Joshua. Never did know those fellows in blackface.”

  Quinn and Capricorn turned toward the house, walking past the pond Petrus built for the wild ducks, six of which were in residence. Quinn looked toward the house and saw Hillegond in the window fourteen years before, and he thought: Queen mother of compassion, I loved you.

  But he would not weep.

  He would not be diminished.

  Joshua, a saint, could diminish Quinn, but not death, not even the death of queenly love. The war, wondered Quinn, astonished anew at his toughness—has it turned my soul into a lump of lead? He pictured the city of corpses where he had lived, and a fear gripped him. He was growing strong because of that city, preening with survival. One by one the corpses struggled upright, began a ragged march in his direction. He remembered his Celtic disk and he imposed its memory on this vision, raised it before his eyes like a monstrance, like a shield. Protected from corpses, he breathed deeply and walked toward the mansion.

  As he approached his tethered horse he saw a coach and four coming up the carriageway from the new turnpike that now passed the Staats property, and Capricorn said, “That’s him now. Mr. Fitzgibbon.”

  And so it was: Gordon Fitzgibbon, son of Lyman, a man Quinn knew by name but had not met. Beside him in the carriage Quinn saw a woman.

  Then he saw it was a woman of love.

  Saw Maud.

  He could not have suspected or even intuited her presence here, and yet neithe
r was this coincidence. We could call it Quinn’s will to alter existence, to negate life’s caprice and become causality itself. This was not the first time he had willed history to do his bidding, but it was the first time history had obeyed him. He’d come here seeking not Maud’s presence but the ethereal fragrance of her memory, all he could hope to find. Given that, he felt he would be able to trace her. Now here she arrives, and so begins a new confluence for these two strangers of love.

  The coach halted at the mansion, and the coachman leaped to the ground, opened the door. Out first stepped Maud Fallon, dressed in black and white silks, her abundant auburn hair upswept into a crown encircled with a white ribbon, her skin exquisitely white; and upon seeing Quinn she said, “Daniel, I feared you were dead,” and gave him her hand, which he took and held.

  “I seem to have survived,” he said, “but it may be an illusion.”

  Maud turned then to Capricorn and said, “Cappy, will you bring in my boxes?” Then, nodding once at Quinn, she entered the mansion. Gordon Fitzgibbon approached Quinn with extended hand.

  “You’re Quinn,” he said.

  “That’s a fact,” said Quinn.

  “I’ve heard about you and read your writing. You’re quite a famous fellow.”

  “I think you exaggerate.”

  “Not at all. Everybody knows Quinn.”

  “I would have thought almost nobody knows him.”

  “I’m a true admirer. You’ve projected me into battles and set me alongside those wounded soldiers. I could feel the weight of their haversacks. You have a talent for creating the vivid scene. Won’t you come into the house?”

  “I was just leaving. I came to see Hillegond.”

  “Poor Hillegond. But at least they caught the villain.” Gordon nodded sadly and, without waiting for Quinn’s response to his invitation, strode purposefully into the mansion.

  Quinn debated whether to follow, stunned by Maud’s brusqueness, then decided he had not exhausted his fate’s capacity for surprise (and that’s why they call it your fate). Also he wanted to hear more about the villain, and so he left his horse and followed Gordon into what he now was forced to think of as the Fitzgibbon mansion. In the drawing room Gordon offered him whiskey, Quinn’s first under these multiple rooves. The two men then settled into facing armchairs, a table between them, and on it a bowl of grapes and apples. Gordon positioned himself so that he was framed from behind by his own enormous portrait: a figure of abundant black hair, strong of jaw and dark of eye, wearing a cloak flared over one shoulder, holding a sheared beaver hat in his right hand, and standing in boots and breeches on the steps of his newly acquired mansion: arrived—for the ages.