Of Grave Concern Read online

  First of all, let me emphatically state that I am not a whore. That rumor has dogged every woman independent of mind or body since Eve plucked the apple. Never have I broken a home—happy or otherwise—although my own heart remains irrevocably shattered. I suppose it fair, however, to allow that I have sometimes used my feminine charm to get by. Violence repels me, so you will find none to suggest I have physically harmed another, and I am certainly no murderer like Katie Bender. But other charges have been leveled against me: I am a liar, a thief, a swindler, a con woman, a free lover, and a hypocrite. Those descriptions you will have to judge for yourself.

  I am a Spiritualist, and I come by it honestly.

  Spiritualism is a uniquely American invention, equal parts religion and carnival sideshow, a largely benevolent and oddly matriarchal institution that appeals to the adolescent sense of angst and awe in all of us. It has been known now for less than thirty years, ever since two little girls in New York state claimed they could talk to the dead.

  The little girls were named Kate (of course!) and Margaret Fox, and they scared themselves and their family silly by saying a spirit calling itself “Mr. Splitfoot” would answer their questions through otherworldly raps, taps, and knocks.

  From the very first, the messages spelled murder.

  A peddler had been killed years ago and his body hidden in the basement of the family’s home, old Splitfoot said. The Fox family dug, but they never found any bones. Seems the basement was prone to flooding, which made the search difficult. But despite the lack of evidence, soon all sorts of people were coming to see Maggie and Katie communicate with the dead peddler. The thing became formalized when the family started calling the demonstrations séances—French for “session,” but which means far more now.

  The sisters became a sensation, and before long they could communicate not only with the spirits of lowly murdered peddlers but also dead dignitaries, including George Washington and randy old Ben Franklin. Eventually the sisters were playing packed opera houses and making more money than their poor blacksmith father ever dreamed.

  Spiritualism became the newest rage.

  After all, if messages could be sent via Mr. Morse’s telegraph, which clicked and clacked, then why couldn’t a sort of spiritual telegraph carry messages from the other side, in raps and knocks? What hath God wrought, indeed.

  People found this new idea of life after death comforting in a way that the old religions didn’t offer. There was no need to consult your preacher for answers or trust that all would be revealed in the fullness of time. Instead, all you had to do was sit at a table in the dark, ask whatever questions were lodged in your heart, and count one rap for “yes” and two raps for “no.”

  In haunted Memphis, a house was not truly considered a house unless it had a full complement of ghost, and the stories that went with them. Spiritualism was accepted as just another part of the supernatural order.

  My earliest brush with the other world came in 1858 when the steamboat Pennsylvania met disaster at Ship Island, sixty miles below Memphis. On June 13, her boilers exploded and 250 were killed outright, while dozens more were scalded to death by the steam or burned up in the fire that raced over the ruined hulk. The wounded were rushed by other boats to Memphis, where they were put in the great hall of the Exchange, and were constantly attended by a battalion of physicians and nurses. The ladies of Memphis also turned out, bringing flowers and candy and whatever else they thought might give some small comfort.

  My mother was one of the ladies, and she dragged me with her to the Exchange. I had come to dread anything my mother thought was good for me, especially the Sunday-morning command performances at the Wolf River Baptist Church. I hated the suffocating Sunday clothes, I hated the sermons that preached slavery was ordained by God, and eventually I convinced myself that I hated my mother.

  At the Exchange, we passed as quietly as in church among the rows of the men wrapped in cotton gauze soaked in linseed oil. Their breathing was tortured, their fingers and toes curled in pain, every one was cloaked in wicked odors. Many of the victims were deep in the embrace of morphine, silently wrapped in private dreams. Others were shrieking, and some begged for someone, anyone, to put an end to their suffering.

  I was not yet eleven years old.

  Each of the thirty-two men in the hall was a tragedy of unimaginable heartbreak, but there was one I remember with particular vividness. He was a nineteen-year-old mud clerk on the Pennsylvania. As I walked by his bed, a bandaged hand reached out and grasped my arm. He said nothing, but a single bloodshot blue eye blazed from a nest of gauze over his face.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Annie!”

  My mother tried to pull me away, but I resisted.

  “No, my name’s Ophelia.”

  “Oh, my poor Annie! Don’t you recognize me?”

  Stoked by unknown fires, the eye flared.

  My mother knelt, trying gently at first to remove the young man’s hand from my arm, and then with more force.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Tell me, where is Sam?” the boy asked. “Is he on board?”

  “I am here,” answered a slender man only a few years older than the stricken mud clerk. He wore dark clothes that were well-made but disheveled. Some kind of nautical hat, with a short brim, rested atop a crown of dark curls. A pencil and a brace of cigars were tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket. He drew up a chair and sat where the young man could see his face.

  “I only stepped out a moment, my dear Henry,” the man said.

  The man’s voice carried the unvarnished rasp of the frontier side of upriver. It was shot with sadness and—at least I like to think now—carried the promise of wisdom. He was a cub pilot, on his way to earning his license. He had been responsible for securing Henry his position as mud clerk, a sort of unpaid apprenticeship.

  “I shan’t do it again, little brother, I vow.”

  The blue eye closed in relief. The hand clutching my arm relaxed and the fingers slipped away. At the moment of release, I felt something electric jump from the young man to me, a kind of blue spark that did not burn.

  “Thank you for staying with Henry until I returned,” the man told me and my mother in a soft voice. “I have sat here for the last forty-eight hours, and there are some things that are beyond the will of man to control. Many things, to my eternal regret.”

  “He called me ‘Annie.’”

  The man smiled.

  “Our niece, our pet, the daughter of our sister, Pamela. She is about your age.”

  “He shocked me.”

  “I’m sorry, angel. His condition shocks me as well,” the man said, tears flowing. “I have humbled myself to the ground and prayed, as never man prayed before, that the great God would strike me to the earth, but spare my brother. If only He would pour out the fullness of His wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy upon this sinless youth.”

  My mother put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “God’s plan is not for us to know.”

  “You do not understand,” the man said. “I will tell you. I left St. Louis on the Pennsylvania, but Mister Brown, the pilot who was killed by the explosion, had quarreled with Henry without cause. He struck him in the face! I was wild from that moment and left the boat to steer herself, so intent was I on avenging the insult. But the captain promised to put Brown off as soon as practicable, in New Orleans if he could, but by St. Louis at any rate. There not being room for the both of us on board, I stepped off the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left New Orleans, and sent with orders to take another boat to St. Louis. So you see, it was not God’s plan that spared me from the inferno of the Pennsylvania—it was mine.”

  “Sir,” my mother said, “you must not blame yourself.”

  “Henry was asleep, was blown up into the sky, then fell back on the hot boilers, and I suppose that rubbish fell on him, for he is injured internally. He got into the water and swam to shore, and got into th
e flatboat with the other survivors, with nothing on but his wet shirt, and he lay there, burning in the southern sun and freezing with the wind, till the Kate Frisbee came along. His wounds were not dressed until he arrived here, fifteen hours after the explosion.”

  My mother cooed and patted his shoulder.

  “But there is more,” the man said.

  A week ago, while visiting his sister in St. Louis, he had had a strange dream. In it, he looked upon the body of his brother, dead, in a metal coffin, placed between two chairs. A bouquet of white roses rested on his chest, with a single red rose in the center. The dream was so real that he rushed downstairs, expecting to find Henry’s body.

  “If only I had realized the dream for the prophecy it was!” the cub pilot lamented. He took from his pocket a carte de visite photograph of his brother and passed it to my mother. Henry shared his older brother’s strong jaw and high forehead, and the eyes had the same sad but mischievous quality. His hair was wild, as if he had just stepped out of his front door into a hurricane. The boy’s clothes seemed two sizes too small for him. His outfit featured a vest whose buttons appeared ready to pop, a linen shirt with an irritatingly high collar, and an elaborately knotted silk tie at his throat, as if to keep it all together.

  “But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth,” the student pilot said as he returned the photograph to his pocket. “You ladies have done well. Yesterday a beautiful girl of fifteen stooped timidly down by the side of our second mate, a handsome and noble-hearted fellow, and handed him a pretty bouquet. The doomed boy’s eyes kindled and swelled with tears. He asked the girl to write her name on a card so that he might remember her by it.”

  “How touching!” my mother said.

  “Would it be asking much if your angel affixed her name to a card for Henry?”

  Before my mother could reply, the man took the pencil from his breast pocket and handed it to me. The pencil stank of cigars. Then he gave me a card.

  I wrote my name in a childish hand.

  “Ophelia,” he read.

  “It means help,” I said.

  “Thank you, Ophelia Welch. You are too young to know what this means.”

  He placed the card in the hand of his unconscious brother.

  The mud clerk died within the hour.

  Of course he had the metal coffin, resting across two chairs, and the bouquet of white roses with a single red one at its center.

  But I had not seen the last of poor Henry.

  Three nights later, his smiling face appeared in the mirror above my dressing table, undamaged as in the little photograph. But instead of being merely a frozen image, this image was alive. His face was illuminated by an unearthly blue light, his features were animated with mirth, and his hair was buffeted by some unseen gale. The ends of the silk tie danced and fluttered like the tail of a kite.

  “O-phel-ia,” he called. “O-phel-ia, I see you!”

  Then he laughed like a fiend.

  I shot out of bed and spent the rest of the night with Tanté Marie, who patted my hair and told me that nothing in the mirror could hurt me. Still, she threw a cloth over the glass the next day. Henry never made any knocks or raps, but he found plenty of ways to show himself when I was alone. His face would appear in a windowpane or on a polished metal surface, or it would form in a bowl of water. Any reflective surface would do.

  “O-phel-ia!”

  Eventually I removed the cloth from my bedroom mirror. “Horrible Hank” had appeared to me so often that his appearance could no longer shock me. Being eleven years old, and steeped in Tanté Marie’s stories about magical New Orleans, I assumed that seeing dead people was not all that unusual.

  Besides, Hank told jokes.

  “Why is a dog like a tree?” he would ask. “Because they both lose their bark when they die.”

  Another: “Why has a chambermaid more lives than a cat? Because every morning she returns to dust.”

  And: “What is the undertaker’s favorite sport? Boxing.”

  These were hilarious to my unseasoned sense of humor. As I grew older, the jokes grew somewhat coarse, and I would often catch Hank leering at me from the mirror.

  “Stop that,” I would say.

  But I was never sure if he heard me. If he did, he never gave a sign. Perhaps it was the eternal gale on his side that prevented him from hearing, or perhaps sound didn’t pass from our world through the glass, or perhaps he just didn’t feel like conversation.

  Then, one night while I was sitting at the dresser and trying to draw a comb through my tangle of red hair, Hank appeared over my reflected shoulder. The wind on his side had calmed, his hair was positively neat, and his necktie was hardly flapping at all.

  “Show me who you love,” he said, “and I’ll show you who you are.”

  6

  I must have been asleep, because I didn’t know Tom the Jailer, was standing outside my cell door until he spoke.

  “Miss Wylde?”

  I opened my eyes and saw him there with a newspaper beneath his arm and a cup of coffee in his hand. From the coal oil lamp in the bull pen, half his face was bathed in yellow light.

  “Yes, what is it?” I asked, taking Eddie from my shoulder and placing him back in his cage.

  “I don’t know if you drink coffee, but it is about all that we have here in the jail, except for the bottle of whiskey that the marshal keeps for snakebite upstairs in his desk drawer that nobody is supposed to know about. And he gets popped by more rattlesnakes out here than any other man I know of.”

  “Coffee,” I said. “Bless your rustic soul.”

  “I also brought you yesterday’s paper, for the boredom.”

  “Only dull people are bored. But thanks.”

  He passed me the coffee through a little trapdoor in the bars and I passed back my dirty plate and lunch things. I took a drink of the coffee and it was so strong my eyes fluttered in pleasure.

  “Too rough for you?”

  “Rough? It’s perfect.”

  He smiled.

  “Tom,” I said, “I have been here some hours and was beginning to wonder . . . well, how am I to attend to personal business?”

  A blank stare.

  “You know,” I said. “Private . . . business. The kind the coffee will undoubtedly hasten.”

  “Oh, sure. There’s a thunder bucket in the corner of the cell. All prisoners are supposed to use the bucket. But seeing as how you’re a cut above the ordinary inmate, I can escort you to the privy out back.”

  “For that, I would be grateful. Half an hour?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, Tom,” I said as he turned to go. “There’s another thing I need: a lawyer. I need to clear up this case of mistaken identity as soon as possible, so I think a writ of habeas corpus is in order. You must have seen the lawyers in this town at work in police court. In your opinion, who is the best?”

  “Best sober or drunk?”

  “Best during their normal state of consciousness.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Towner gives the best show and is a teetotaler, to boot, but he’s more concerned with having people think he’s smart than doing right by his clients,” he said. “Wilbert is good, but his wife died of the fever last winter and he’s been unenthusiastic about work and life ever since. So I’d say Potete is your best bet. It’s even money whether he’ll come to court drunk or sober, but hope for drunk. He’s a mean drunk, but one who swings with words, not his fists. He’s brilliant right up until he passes out.”

  I sighed.

  “Potete, then. Send word.”

  Tom turned to leave, then paused.

  “You might want to save that paper.”

  Now it was my turn to give him a blank stare.

  “In case the Montgomery Ward catalog is all used up.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Always good to plan ahead.”

  He left and I scooted around so my back was against the bars nearest the
lamp. I unfolded all four pages of the Dodge City Times. It wasn’t the Chicago Tribune or the New York World, but at least it was something to read. There was a hyperbolic article on the front page that talked about how good the grass was this year, and I doubt if any big-city editor had ever waxed more purple:

  Never in the history of the prairies of Western Kansas has a season been more favorable to vegetation than the present. The rainfall has been greater and more regular, and the grass, which came earlier, is much healthier, and a thicker crop than ever was known before now covers the earth.

  There was a related story about the first herd from Texas having arrived, a herd of twelve hundred cattle from the Red River, and how the cowboys had some trouble with farmers in Comanche County at the quarantine line. Thousands more longhorns were expected in the days to come.

  I jumped over to a story about tramp jitters:

  Dodge City is just now especially favored by the tramp fraternity. It seems to be the jumping-off place for the Westward-bound tramp (they invariably travel toward the setting sun).

  Not a very Christian attitude, I mused.

  Then I turned the page and found the following:

  THE GHOST STILL WALKS!

  The ghost of the unidentified murdered girl found last month on the century meridian marker continues to walk with uncanny tread along the Santa Fe right-of-way. Police Judge Frost believes that an investigation will reveal some startling things.

  For over a week, supernatural manifestations near the railway depot have aroused the community, and the shacks in the vicinity of the ghostly perambulations have been vacated.

  On Friday night, Hoodoo Brown, thinking the story of the ghost was humbug, paid a midnight visit to the monument. He had not waited long, when a low plaintive wail assailed his ears, and almost simultaneously a figure clad in blue gingham materialized on the meridian marker. The ghost was the likeness of the beautiful but unknown girl, down to her long blond hair and the deep slash beneath her chin. At the same time, a light, resembling a calcium ray, shone down on the monument, and the girl rose from her deathly repose and began her nightly walk.