The Eulogist Read online

  Dedication

  To Peter, the love of my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Terry Gamble

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Anything untethered washes down this river. Old stoves, felled trees, derelict cows. A spring surge might bring a smorgasbord of candle crates and errant knickers, while autumn eddies snatch a mud-caked doll or blackbird, its wings splayed and broken. Just last week, one of Mary’s girls informed me a house had flowed right past.

  How big a house? I asked.

  I told her I once saw an entire encampment that had washed away, carrying with it men, women, and children. I once saw a riverboat explode, raining body parts on the Kentucky and Ohio shores. Long ago, I saw the body of a man fleeing slavery who drowned while trying to reach the other side.

  But people tire of my memories. I am eighty-six and nearly blind, and people wrongly regard me as a spinster. I overheard Mary promising her husband that, as soon as I’m gone, they’ll move to California. California! It seems the Givenses are always pushing west. Over seventy years since we left Ireland—poor Ireland, impoverished by the falling crop market. If you happened to be on the banks of the Ohio in 1819 when we drifted past, you would have seen a father, a mother, and three children with the erect bearing of the privileged. Look more closely and you would have noticed our frayed clothes, my brothers’ pants too short, my dress hanging limply on my ungenerous chest. At fifteen, I must have looked a sight, having wailed across that ocean—a six-week passage of wailing and puking, and wouldn’t you have wailed if you were pulled away from that bonny youth who had kissed your unkissed mouth with such urgency as to make you want to lie right down and unbutton something?

  We were Ulster Plantation Irish, which is to say that we were Scots. We had come to America to pray and to prosper. Come to America because America wanted us—this too-new country with land and trees to spare, but not enough people. I can see him now—my father standing at the bow of the flatboat he had christened the Ark of the New World but which to us felt more like the belly of the whale. Josiah Givens—a man of strong conviction and tepid Calvinism, whistling a passage from the Eroica Symphony and wishing he had more to show for himself.

  “Ye shan’t be finding many symphonies here,” said my mother, resting a hand on her queasy stomach. “Ye’d be hard-pressed to find a fiddler.”

  It wasn’t just seasickness that affected her, but the twinges of an early pregnancy going awry. Having lost four already, she knew she would lose this child, leaving only three—James, myself, and Erasmus.

  It was early autumn. Our father had hired a pilot to navigate the rocks and fend off pirates who would rob and possibly murder us. By now we had grown accustomed to the animal carcasses and half-eaten limbs that washed down from the hinterlands. We scarcely noticed the stench until James shouted, “Look, Da! ’Tis a body in the snag!”

  Dazzled by the sun on the water, we followed the direction of his finger, hoping it might be a felled tree since there were so many being cleared. The figure’s head dipped below the surface, its bloated chest lifted, its arms flung wide as if to embrace the sky.

  “Lord help us,” said the pilot. “Niggers clogging the river.”

  I gaped at the body.

  “You’re not even going to pull him out?” I said to the pilot, tapping my parasol upon the deck. In Ireland, we would have helped anyone—even a Catholic—but you’d think this was a sheep for how little vexed he was.

  “And what then, missy?” said the pilot. “We haven’t time to bury it. And why bother? If someone comes by and thinks they can fetch a price . . . well, then.” The pilot spat. “In the meantime, my contract is to deliver you.”

  “I feel sick, Da,” said Erasmus.

  We had all been sick. Nothing stayed down after that first week out of Belfast, and now our mother, wan and edgy, spent most days on her cot. So many long days staring at the horizon, and my saying, There! Land! But it was only a fogbank teasing us until—finally!—Nova Scotia.

  We arrived in Philadelphia diminished. Halfway across the Atlantic, paralyzed by doldrums, the crew of the schooner Lucretia had pitched our piano overboard. And then to have my mother’s trunk of good dresses and most of our books stolen off the landing in Philadelphia. We had watched as seven shirtless black men had loaded onto a stagecoach what was left of our belongings. It scarcely mattered that we still had our Minton china and our silver candlesticks.

  Hottentots. That’s what they were to us. My skin had burned—mostly from the sun, and there was Jamie jabbing me in the ribs, pointing at a half-naked Negro and saying, Livvie, did you see that?

  Honestly, Jamie, this is America.

  America—where it was said that the Indians were cannibals.

  Every day on the river, we would see distant fires clearing forests for settlements. We’d heard tales of a comet and how an earthquake had reversed the current, reddening the river with iron-rich soil. Now at sunset, the smoke rendered the sky hellish and glorious as Dante described, The Divine Comedy being my only salvaged book other than the Bible. With the strange weather and the crops failing, the Book of Genesis had collided with the Book of Revelation, and portents could be gleaned in anything.

  “You saw that body, Josiah,” said my mother. “What next?”

  A flock of geese blackened the sky. To the south lay Kentucky: slave state. To the north was Ohio: free. We drifted past limestone escarpments restraining forests of beech trees ten hands wide. “This is ours,” said our father. “Our new Eden.”

  * * *

  It was fortunate Erasmus vomited. Had he not done, we might have kept floating, floating, floating—past Indiana and Illinois, into the Mississippi, all the way down to New Orleans.

  By morning, he was talking in gibberish, swearing that small, rabid creatures were tearing at his skin. He swam in delirium, alternating between the conviction he was the baby Moses borne by water into a strange land, or damned for abusing himself, and not just on the passage over, but on the flatboat with James and me sleeping beside him as he carried on with despicable and furtive abandon. Salt, he said through parched lips. Brimstone. When the fever broke, he rose from his cot, beheld the new city, and announced to us all, I am saved.

  We all felt saved. Cincinnati was a village on the verge, the Queen of the West, the North’s last bastion before the frontier. Flophouses and whorehouses had sprouted up. Packets of tobacco and indigo, rice and cotton heading north, pens of pigs and crates of produce heading south. Into this Babylon we alighted—a mosquito-infested backwater at a bend in the Ohio that muddled up rich, poor, black and white, fifteen versions of English, a growing German population, and a smattering of French.

  And on every corner, a preacher.

  Th
e streets will flow with blood, the preachers said.

  Which was not far from the truth. Blood and bones clotted the streets and creeks downstream from the slaughterhouses. The carrion was the worst near Bucktown, where the Negroes lived—those who had been given up or sold free or who had stolen themselves out of slavery until no one cared to find them.

  Thou art dead in sin, and only by divine hand will thee be converted, said the preachers, damning the populace with their cheerful theology.

  After enduring a few nights in a hotel, we moved into a boardinghouse where, for a dollar a week, we had two bedrooms and access to a privy that served half a dozen domiciles. The water pump was down the street, and twice a day I carried buckets for drinking, bathing, and cooking. In the bed we shared, my mother tossed and groaned. I was sure she would be fine. Our father had promised.

  Yet when the baby came, it was stillborn, and soon thereafter, my mother died, the stench of her necrotic womb so foul that the landlady, one-eyed and irritable, threatened eviction.

  “Mrs. Humphries,” my father said, squaring off with her in the hall. “My wife is dead and my younger son isn’t right in the head.” Met with her intractable stare, my father added, “We will pay you in advance.”

  Humphries eyed him with her single orb, knowing that the silver candlesticks would soon be hers. “Then bury her quickly. I shall not abide with the smell.”

  “And where exactly shall we bury her?”

  We were not yet attending church, but laying my mother’s body to rest seemed imperative enough to join one, and so the following day we were in a pew at the First Presbyterian, our father’s hat in his hand as he explained our plight to the minister. Alas, said the minister, our story was all too familiar. The best he could do was direct us to the immigrants’ graveyard, our mother being the first of our family to die upon American soil. In that unhallowed grave we buried her along with my lifeless baby sister—a plot of land far from any church, unwelcoming as the anteroom of Purgatorio.

  We had neither the time nor the means for lengthy mourning. Within weeks of our landing, a bank collapse had ground all enterprise to a halt. The fires of brick kilns were extinguished. Nails went unhammered. Chisel ceased to meet stone. Even the wealthy were reduced to chopping wood and bartering livestock. At night, my father, whistling with less conviction, counted the last of his coins with James gazing on as if he were willing those mounds of silver to multiply.

  “I found a job,” said James. “It doesn’t pay much, but the work is steady.”

  “Steady work in a city brought to her knees?” said my father. “And what is that now?”

  “With the chandler Midas Barker. I’ll be fetching animal castoffs for tallow.”

  “’Tis a pissman’s job. Leave it to the scum.”

  “’Tis we who are the scum, Da. Look at us.”

  My father ran a coin up and down between his fingers. “You were a scholar, my boy. Your mother was right. You could have gone to Trinity.”

  Our father started to weep in a silent way that frightened me more than his graveside wailing.

  “We’ll make the money, Da,” said James.

  It was the obsession of every immigrant. Ambition—along with its sullen sibling, thwarted plans—was thick as miasma in the valley. Our father had hoped to speculate in real estate or at least buy land to grow hops. Unable to raise more capital, he would try his hand at several enterprises—cobbling and lathe turning—each of them failures.

  In the spring of 1822, bitter and despairing of making a living along the Ohio, our father grasped at the promise of fecundity in the alluvial deltas of the Mississippi. Three years to the day of our arrival in Cincinnati, our father pronounced the three of us of age and booked himself passage on a steamboat heading south, assuring James that he would one day return after establishing a distillery.

  “Look after Olivia and Erasmus,” our father said to James. “Make sure you remain Christians of some description, and read anything you can lay your hands on so as not to become illiterate as Americans clearly are. And James—you should by all means marry, but only when advantageous. If all else fails, make as much money as you can and purchase passage back to Ireland to secure assistance from my scoundrel of a brother who stole the estate out from under me.”

  Our father waved his hat from the upper deck of the Mississippi Queen that would be stopping in Louisville, St. Louis, and Natchez before putting in at New Orleans. We never learned if he had made it all the way to New Orleans or disembarked along the way, for that was the last we saw of him.

  Chapter 2

  1828

  “We are not impoverished. We are reduced,” James said—an assessment I found a little rich given that we often could not make rent and had to plead with the ghastly Humphries. Out of desperation I had placed a notice in the local papers soliciting students whom I could teach to read and write and do simple sums. If promising, my advert read, I shall teach them Latin.

  It was six years since our father had deserted us, three since James had gone into business for himself. Each morning, James rose before dawn, packed a scrap of bacon, donned his hat and coat, and walked the half mile to his workshop. By six a.m., he would have stoked the fire and commenced to render lard into tallow and stearic acid. The air in his workshop was so stifling that I would not have wondered if he had fallen into the vat and become a candle himself.

  He was very proud of his new spinning machine. Braided wicks were much improved over the old simple strands that needed constant tending. The candles I sell are good burners, James pronounced, so full of self-importance. And I don’t overcharge.

  Housing his enterprise in a tiny building in the yard of a pork broker close to the creek, James nailed up a sign with the grand inscription givens and sons—although he had no sons to speak of. Not even a wife, though by then he had met someone.

  Well, not met exactly. Spotted.

  He had considered speaking to her, but it was difficult to clean up and look one’s best after toiling over grease. Poor James. His skin was constantly smudged from smoke, his hands and forearms marred by burns. Verily, he looked a wreck. This after working fourteen hours a day, six days a week, observing the Sabbath less from religious leaning than from exhaustion.

  Still, he told me, he would like to have a son. Our younger brother, Erasmus, was an uneven employee given his fondness for drink. Had Erasmus not been our brother, James would have fired him, but to his credit, James could no more forsake his family than he could forsake a god in whose existence he only partially believed. If he thought about it (which I suspect he seldom did), James would have said his religious views consisted of a Divine Creator who, having accomplished His task of Creation, had moved on to another enterprise, leaving Man to fend for himself as he, James Givens, surely did.

  Once we concluded our respective obligations—James his boiling, I my tutoring—we would meet each other on the landing, fleeing the reek of Mrs. Humphries’s cooking to make our way across the broad, dirty streets.

  On that day late in April, James was already checking his watch, his face compressed with irritation.

  “Are you tapping your foot for me?” I asked while trying to catch my breath.

  “’Tis Erasmus. He was supposed to be back with a load.”

  It was Erasmus’s job to go from door to door to collect meat scraps and bones for rendering.

  “Perhaps he was held up at the docks,” I said, knowing full well he was probably buttoning up his pants as we spoke, assuring some Mollie she would be paid soon enough.

  “I will give him an earful,” said James.

  Yet when Erasmus put his mind to it, he was a good producer. Even James reluctantly admitted that our brother could have been the best scrapper in the city. He could talk a housewife out of her rolling pin, procuring a payload worth of scraps in one afternoon that could have fed a family for a week. Girls and women were always falling for him. Even from the start when we arrived in Cincinnati, and Erasmus
was frail and sickly, there was something sweet and charming about his face. Some said his eyes were womanish, but that made him all the more appealing, for pretty eyes are rare in a man, and women like to look at them.

  But pretty or not, he was just as apt to turn up empty-handed, infuriating James. Like his former employer, Midas Barker, James ran a tight ship, insisting that a day’s batch of candles must run on schedule to meet each evening’s demand for light. No candles, no money. I admonished Erasmus, but even then I was disinclined toward mothering, so it had fallen to James to be parent to us both. No wonder he was yearning for a wife.

  Heading across the muddy swath teeming with barkers and boatmen, James muttered as we picked our way through the jumble of draymen and carts, dodging ruffians and feral chickens while men in suspenders loitered by storefronts, smoking cigars and greeting us with a tip of their hats. It was a hodgepodge of humanity unheard of in Ireland. Black, red—even yellow. I could not help but stare.

  “We are set for candles today,” said the gnomish clerk at Merkl’s paper shop. It was James’s practice to make several calls before we took our meal.

  “Then place an order for tomorrow, and I’ll throw in a couple extra,” said James.

  “You’re an ambitious young man,” replied the clerk, who had an unattractive growth on his forehead. “But no more than Barker, I’d say.” His eyes drifted over to me and settled. “Is this the missus?”

  “Heavens, no!” said I.

  “Barker’s candles are burned up in half the time,” said James, pegging the clerk for gullibility.

  “You don’t say,” said the clerk. “Well, the sooner the second candle’s done, the sooner I’m home to bed.” To my horror, he leered at me.

  “Then save my candle and relight it,” said James. “It will not disappoint.”

  The clerk, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me, said, “No, my lad, I’m sure it will not.” Turning back to James, he tapped the blossom above his eyebrow. “You’ll go far if you don’t extinguish yourself too quickly.”