The Eulogist Read online

  “Mark my words,” said James. “I intend to light up Cincinnati.”

  “Really, James,” I said after we left. “What a demon.”

  “Oh, he will buy some candles. Just you wait.”

  Another whistle. A carriage hurried past. Taking my brother’s arm, I accompanied him to the next shop and the next, three more before heading home. I could see him making mental lists: extra candles for all the customers next week; hire another apprentice to replace Erasmus; try his hand at soapmaking to better wash off this infernal grease.

  “James,” I said. “A note has come from the minister’s daughter inviting us to tea.”

  He looked at me sharply. “Reverend Morrissey?” he asked. I nodded. “And his daughter?” Again, I nodded. His features melted from pleasure into worry. “And how to be presentable?”

  A printed bill, dancing merrily in the breeze, affixed itself to the front of James’s shirt. He snatched it off and read aloud: “‘100 Dollars Reward! Runaway from the subscriber on the 27th of January, my Black Woman named Bee, standing about four foot eleven, with black marks on her cheeks . . .’ By God,” he said. “’Tis far better to deal in tallow than in human flesh.”

  “Tch,” said I, echoing his disapproval.

  Crumpling up the bill with a grunt of disgust, James used it to wipe the grease from his face before tossing it away.

  * * *

  I was pushing what I thought to be a carrot about my plate, hoping we might have pie for dessert, when Erasmus finally appeared. Everyone stopped talking as they took in Erasmus’s sorry state—all grease and wayward hair with a look on his face that betrayed mischief.

  “The pigs got the goods,” he said, gripping his hat and avoiding James’s glare. “I came up empty.”

  I stabbed an onion that rolled away. James cleared his throat.

  “’Twas the pigs!” said Erasmus.

  Said James, “’Twas Barker’s nephew sure as soot, for he knows your ways, Erasmus, and you are easy enough to snooker.”

  It had been a great disappointment that three years prior Barker had chosen his nephew over James as successor. That the nephew was dim and shiftless added further insult, and soon thereafter, James had set out on his own.

  “I shall fetch twice as much this evening,” said Erasmus, his expression darkening.

  “Then you’d bet’ get going,” said James in a tone.

  I retrieved the onion from the edge of my plate. Every day since our father had left, the three of us, at James’s insistence, sat together for the afternoon meal whether or not we were speaking. “You were with those women.”

  Erasmus looked at me with some amusement. “And who are you, Livvie, to cast aspersion when you engage so little with society yourself?”

  I was used to his chiding me that I was too tall, too thin, that my temper, like my hair, tended toward the red. Erasmus saved his flattery for others. As for me, I’ve never been one to preen for a compliment, even as a girl when preening seems to be the way and at my prettiest back in Ireland before we crossed that swollen sea.

  A day like this could end in thunder, another fact of Ohio I had never grown used to, like that day the pigs got into the boardinghouse and knocked over the table before Mrs. Humphries herded them out, shouting suey! suey!, and all my pupils were shrieking and hooting, and even my brothers thought it was funny as though we had never lived in a lovely house with beautiful things on an estate in Ireland.

  Remembering the feeling of another’s lips on mine, I fanned my face. A pool of fat that had congealed on the plate. In my opinion, Mrs. Humphries’s larder offered more than enough inedible parts to stock James’s cauldron for a month. Some mornings, Erasmus came home slam-into-the-wall drunk, and I had to get up and shut the door so my pupils would not see him. Then Mrs. Humphries would swoop down, banging on the door and screaming, Your brother is at it again! And out he would go onto the street with the squalid pigs and back to the landing, where boozing and spitting were as natural as prayer.

  It was not just Erasmus who drank. Everyone knew whiskey was safer than water seeing as how some took sick after drinking from the wells. Some men seemed able to drink and keep working, but there were hordes of sots sleeping in alleyways or wedged between sacks of wheat. More than once I had to step over an inebriate sprawled in the road like a pile of manure.

  “The pigs indeed.” I sniffed.

  “You watch,” Erasmus said. “One pass down at the docks, and I will fill up the ’barrow. Heck, I’ll take their old shoes and dead passengers. There is nothing I can’t boil down.”

  * * *

  There was no sign of Erasmus for the next two days. More often than not, we knew better than to worry. But this time, our brother returned in a bad way—bruised and cut, looking like Lazarus before he met Jesus.

  “Say nothing,” he said to James and me at dinner. “I have heard it all.”

  James opened his mouth and closed it. There were people you knew better than to associate with, but that did not stop Erasmus, who was drawn to the disreputable like a moth to flame. He would find the wrong girl attached to the wrong man or the wrong man attached to the wrong deal and come out the other end with wings as scorched as Icarus.

  “I have met a preacher,” Erasmus said. He had a shiner, and the cut on his lip was still bleeding. “A Methodist.”

  “Oh, this is rich,” said James. “And what has the poor man done to deserve the likes of thee?”

  “I have been listening to him,” Erasmus said. “I took his tract.”

  James looked at the folded paper as if it were a rotting fish. “Does it promise to cure your dipsomania? Or rid you of the clap?”

  “It promises to save my soul.”

  “Does it, now? Well, so do the Catholics if you pay them enough.”

  The tract was printed on a cheap stock and featured a clumsy drawing of what purported to be praying hands but which looked more like a mollusk. Salvation is available to anyone, it read. Anyone can repent!

  As Presbyterians, we had been raised with the assurance of our own election at the expense of everyone else, who would be going to hell, and better them than us.

  James said, “So repent and get on with it.”

  Which was very like James to say. And very unlike Erasmus to do.

  “Sam Mutton said . . .” began Erasmus.

  “Mutton?”

  “’Tis the preacher’s name.”

  “’Tis a ridiculous name,” said James. “The next thing we know, you shall be becoming a Mohammedan or a quaking cracker. These preachers are everywhere, Erasmus. And contributing what?”

  “You are not listening to me.”

  “Open your eyes.”

  * * *

  Several weeks later, with my cloak wrapped around me, I walked with purpose as though I had an appointment, pausing as a shepherd coaxed his woolly procession across the cobbles. I had decided to go see this preacher Sam Mutton for myself. As a girl, I had pointed out to the minister in Enniskillen an inconsistency between the Book of Job and John 1:18 as to whether one could see God. The minister had marched me back to the Grange and demanded to see my father, who whacked my hands with a spoon.

  Who shall marry a girl like this? my father asked my mother after the minister had left.

  Amid the crates and barrels of the landing, peddlers hawked cornhusk pipes and furled tobacco on pavement littered with tattered bills. Negro women balancing baskets on their heads moved like swans amid locust swarms of children carrying letters and hustling for change. Through the mayhem, I spotted a black-hatted figure poised on a crate. He was wearing too-short pants and a too-big coat, his wide-brimmed hat slipping below his brows. When he spoke, he punched the air as if jousting with an unseen adversary.

  “Oh, we all know too well the sins of Eve,” the preacher exhorted as I drew in closer, his eyes trailing across the crowd and, for a moment, alighting on me.

  Oh, to have some sins, thought I.

  “But ever since
the Fall, we have been waiting at the garden gate, asking to be let back in.”

  I expected hokum and was not disappointed, for Sam Mutton went on to claim that we had a choice one way or another in our own salvation. Good deeds and right intention—not election by God—were the surest path to heaven.

  A choice indeed! thought I. Pulling my cloak about me less for warmth than as a shield against such outrageous theology, I scanned the faces until I made out Erasmus, who was intensely focused on what was being said.

  “There are those who would tell us that God has already stacked the deck,” said Sam Mutton. “But I say this is balderdash. For who among us separates our children thusly, or lays a hand on one simply because he is not the other?”

  I lifted my skirts and barreled through the crowd until I came up alongside my brother.

  “Livvie?” said Erasmus. “Are you spying on me?”

  “Just curious.”

  And I was curious. For two weeks, Erasmus had been sober as a brick and a diligent worker. James had been silent on the subject, but he, too, was taking note. I was certain that, at any moment, Erasmus would fall, for he was a chronic backslider and weak of will. If this fool of a preacher could sway him, I wanted to meet the man.

  The preacher’s hands were twitching. “So if thou art cast off, is it not of thy own doing? And so should it not be of thy own doing that, like the Prodigal, you can choose to return to God?”

  There were murmurs among the crowd.

  “He speaks of me, Livvie,” said Erasmus. “Of me.”

  I sniffed. Surely Erasmus’s lurch to religion had sprung as much from expedience as a call to redemption. His notion of godliness was wispy as clouds. At this moment, the promise put forward by this preacher named Mutton held more allure than knocking on the doors of slaughterhouses and evading debt collectors.

  “Erasmus,” I whispered, “you are going to be late for work. If James has his way with you, you’ll meet your maker soon enough.”

  But even when he was a child, claiming to have visions—or more recently in the thrall of women and liquor—I had never seen a look on his face quite like this: a mix of rapture and serenity like an infant’s comtemplation of its mother’s breast, eager, hungry, avid. In truth, it scared me, for as my father once said, Erasmus was not altogether right in the head.

  Chapter 3

  1828

  It was the steamiest of days—the kind that dampens the lightest muslin as soon as it touches your skin. Even the river seemed stupid in the heat. Slow flowing and sluggish, it meandered past banks of cicada-infested trees. Cincinnati, Sabbath-silent but for the occasional hymn, had surrendered to its lethargy.

  For days we had been hearing rumblings about “the coloreds” and the “city going to hell,” and was it any wonder with so many of them settling here, and now the Germans were arriving and, worse, the Catholics. If there were to be a riot, it shouldn’t have surprised me in the least, and I would gladly have joined in if someone had given me a stick.

  I stared out of the window of Hatsepha Peckham’s book-lined parlor, my needlepoint in my lap like a sleeping cat. The little crisscrosses upon my canvas were intended to tell a story—one that I could display to a prospective suitor and say, See? Here on the upper corner? That’s a daisy.

  But I have never felt any particular ardor for daisies. They were simply easier to stitch than roses.

  But you must have a flower in your sampler, Hatsepha Peckham had told me with resolution bordering on fervor. It would be unwomanly to omit them.

  Doing needlepoint with Hatsepha Peckham made my head hurt, but she was the closest thing I had to a friend. As Erasmus had so baldly observed, I seldom went out in company. Hence, James pressed for my acquaintance with Miss Peckham, saying it would do me good. Do him good, more likely, given that the business of her father was coal, the mining of which necessitated the purchase of many candles.

  Hatsepha was telling me that I should get a maid as my coiffure was compromised. Would that I could afford one. In Philadelphia and Boston, ladies employed dressers to do their hair, but there were few maids in Cincinnati, even with half the girls so poor and ignorant you would think they would jump at the chance.

  “Indeed I should,” I said to Hatsepha with as much courtesy as I could muster. Church all morning, and now an endless afternoon of visiting and stitching. If previous horrors were any indication, Hatsepha would soon rise to the piano and sing.

  “Tell me,” said Hatsepha, pretending to focus on a fancy threaded detail, “why does your brother James rush off so quickly after church?”

  Had I told her James had hurried back to his workshop on a Sunday to preserve a day’s worth of candles from softening, Hatsepha would have been appalled. In her mind, it would be an affront to piety to toil on the Sabbath.

  “He was not feeling well,” I said.

  “Not well? Why, he looked in the pink even before the Creed.”

  Clearly, she had her cap set on my brother. Hatsepha, with her wide, bland face and badly spelled name that gave a nod to the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Today, her head was a bowery of satin roses stuck all about. I fancied a swarm of bees might rush through the window in a frenzy of pollination.

  “Of course James is well,” I said quickly, not wanting her to assume he was in need of nursing.

  “But you said . . .” Hatsepha shook her head. The roses quivered. Phantom bees flew up. “I couldn’t help but notice he was staring at Julia Morrissey.”

  Now I understood the invitation to stitch. A little stitchery and spill the beans. But there were no beans to spill since James would tell me nothing.

  I murmured that James was merely paying his respects to the minister’s daughter.

  I wanted to say, You may be rich, you silly thing, but that girl has thrice your looks. Nevertheless, Hatsepha seemed appeased by my answer. She said, “That Reverend Morrissey makes me quake in my pew.”

  “Imagine being his daughter.”

  “And have that man glowering at me over breakfast?” She shuddered. “And poor besides? No thank you.”

  I drew my needle through the canvas, pulled it taut. Indeed, it was known that half the male congregation was in love with Julia Morrissey. “Her impoverishment will serve her well, don’t you think? No threading that camel. Heaven is positively panting for her.”

  Hatsepha bit her lower lip. I almost regretted toying with the woman. You have a mean streak, James often told me, wider than the river.

  “Father says that prosperity is a sign of God’s approval,” said Hatsepha, her lips thinning to a small moue of sanctimony.

  My canvas had all come loose in its hoop and was puckered at the edges. Feigning a gaiety that I was sure rang hollow, I said, “Then He undoubtedly approves of the Peckhams!”

  I am very sorry to say that Hatsepha beamed. Oblivious to irony, she persevered. “I went up to Maysville last month,” she said, her voice dropping as if to include me in a secret. “All the new styles are in. And the bonnets? Have you seen such extravagance?”

  “Only on you, Hatsepha.”

  “You don’t think they’re too large? People might talk.”

  Talk, talk, talk. How was it that a city built only decades earlier in the spirit of progress could so quickly succumb to manner and habit?

  “But you, Olivia! You don’t care about such things. I hear your younger brother has run off into the wilderness, but you haven’t even mentioned it.”

  Which was true. I had not. Perhaps I was embarrassed. Or perhaps the omission stemmed from my own misplaced hope that Erasmus would come to his senses. My eye settled on the spine of a book that read Piety and Proverbs. “One need not go so far to find oneself in the wilderness.”

  “Is that biblical?” Hatsepha said. “Because you are always quoting something, though I know not what. I daresay it surprises me, for I have scarcely seen you pray. So tell me, has your brother turned into a primitive?”

  I regarded my shoes. They were practical l
eather boots—not the fine silk shoes Hatsepha wore. In spite of brushing them daily, I could not absolve the effects of manure and slop.

  “You make him sound like an Indian,” I said. “He has . . . well, he has become a Methodist.”

  “A Methodist?” Hatsepha’s eyes bulged.

  Until that day, I had never been inclined to defend Methodism—or any religion, for that matter. Still, I shrugged as if becoming a Methodist and riding off into the woods was as common as shopping for hats.

  In truth, there had been a terrible row between James and Erasmus when Erasmus told us he had been saved.

  Saved from what, you horse’s ass? said James. Your creditors?

  After several weeks of piousness, Erasmus had succumbed to his ways and showed up looking a sight (so badly banged up that I feared he might expire), begging James for the money for a horse.

  You’re out, Erasmus, said James as he laid out the bills. I’m done.

  The next day, Erasmus had left Cincinnati with twenty dollars in his pocket and a thirdhand Bible, mounted on a swaybacked, half-blind, ill-christened horse named Abel. It wouldn’t be the last time James would bail out Erasmus. As I watched him ride away, heading toward the wilderness, I imagined him sauntering through the arched cathedral of trees, liberated by faith and a little bit of currency. Alleluia, he would say, fresh and free of sin. Alleluia.

  “Tell me, Olivia, do you play?”

  “Pardon me?”

  Hatsepha smiled. “Piano?”

  “Alas,” said I, my gaze drifting longingly once again toward the books. “No more.” Our piano lay at the bottom of the ocean, a casualty of capricious winds. That I had once loved to play, and had done so with some élan, I did not mention. Again, embarrassment. That and the defiant refusal to admit that, in coming to America, our family had lost nearly everything.

  “But then, you must start up!”

  She was indomitable. I tried to protest, pleading lack of practice. But Hatsepha wasn’t having it. “Everyone plays,” she said, determined to prove I could be as conventional as she. Or if not conventional, that I, like Erasmus, could at least be saved.