The Eulogist Read online

  “And now,” continued the gratified Dr. Campbell before Owen could object, “let all those who are in support of the Truth of Christ show their faith by rising.”

  Immediately the rest of Cincinnati stood. In the midst of thunderous applause, I, now seated, glanced furtively over at James and recognized in his look at least a week of silent dinners.

  Neither of us noticed the gentleman standing at the back of the room, taking it all in, taking particular note of me.

  “My dear Olivia,” said Hatsepha, rushing me out of the theater in such haste that I was unable to retrieve my pantalette. “You might as well move up to Fanny Wright’s colony and live like a rustic for all the suitors you shall receive henceforth.”

  Chapter 10

  1829

  As Hatsepha had predicted, the rest of the summer was an arid desert in spite of the humid weather. No one called at the boardinghouse. No one spoke to me at the market, although I was stopped in my tracks at seeing Ariadne Pritchard wearing my errant pantalette as a tucker about her neck.

  James did not speak of it, but several merchants had dropped their orders with Givens and Sons—and just when the business was doing so well. Such was the sensibility of Cincinnati that a woman of contrarian opinion could drive away commerce like pigs before a stick.

  Julia, in the meantime, had taken to bed. Sleeping beside her was difficult, for she was agitated and fearful about the coming childbirth.

  “I keep having dreams.”

  Had I been raised on lurid prophecies like those advanced by her father, I, too, would be having dreams.

  “Julia,” said I, rising to dress, “you have neither been cleaved by the Devil, nor is your imminent labor punishment for your sins.” I may have said this with some impatience and little sympathy. So full was I of Fanny Wright’s words and attitudes that I had to bite my tongue from adding, And what did you expect from marriage?

  And now here we were, prostrated by heat and the dullness of our existence, and Mrs. Humphries in the kitchen frying something foul. Little wonder Julia was melancholy. And where was Erasmus that he should leave his wife to languish?

  Spotting a stack of my brother’s clothes that Julia had laundered, I reached for his shirt and britches. Julia laughed and covered her mouth as I pulled on the garments that fit me quite well once I tucked in the shirt.

  “‘O come,’” I sang, prancing about and waving Erasmus’s hat, “‘let us make a joyful noise unto the rock of our salvation!’” I spread my arms. “Alleluia!”

  It was immodest to brag, but I quite captured Erasmus in manner and tone. “You goose!” said Julia, but for the first time in weeks, she smiled.

  * * *

  And like that, I was given my first taste of liberation. Taking shelter in the privy the following day, I drew off my clothes and undergarments and pulled on the costume I had paraded for Julia. Stashing my bundle of skirts and petticoats behind the henhouse, I made for the street, hat pulled low, hair pushed up, stockings and britches shoved into the top of worn but heavy boots in which I managed an ambling stride. With such little subterfuge, but helped by my height, I became a man. No one heckled me. No gossip nipped at my feet.

  On that first day, my foray was brief and modest. A trip to the landing—with which I was already familiar—yielded such pleasure from being able to look brazenly into storefronts, to step into a tobacco store, to walk by Merkl’s lascivious clerk without so much as a second glance from him. For the first time in my life, I flagrantly read the want ads as if they were mine to answer.

  “Got to have more meat on your bones for that job, boyo,” said a ruddy roustabout who looked too porcine to be literate. He nodded at the illustration of a hog. “Gotta weigh more than them oinkers if yer gonna hoist ’em up,” he said, poking me in the ribs.

  Defiantly, I tore down the bill.

  Walking down Cherry Street, I saw a Choctaw wearing buckskins and an epaulet-capped jacket such as Napoleon might have worn. The Indian’s head was shaved but for a topknot of hair, his fierce nose glinting with a golden hoop.

  The third or fourth time I ventured out, I mustered my courage to visit Bucktown, where pickaninnies scavenged through the garbage and the coloreds lived ten or more to a room. Whites, too, who had come from the East, or from Ireland, or from Europe, looking for something better. And I saw women and girls (and possibly some boys) advertising themselves to passersby.

  “Come here, Pretty Face. You there! Handsome! I’ll cook your biscuits.”

  Realizing she was talking to me, I blushed like a girl, pulled down my hat, and hurried on.

  But it was up in the hills that I felt the keenest pleasure. I climbed a steep path, unencumbered by pantalettes, petticoats, or corset, making my way into fresher air and farmland from where I could see all of the city and Covington across the river, the steamboats and ferries, canoes and rafts, smokestacks and roofs, and the wide expanse of Kentucky. I breathed in the summer air and fanned myself with Erasmus’s discarded brim—escaped as if from bondage, splay-legged as a boy, giddy with perspiration.

  * * *

  My antics were cut short the following week. It began as a too-hot day in a chain of too-hot days. On the street, there were conversations beneath the conversation, another tongue altogether. And now someone was wailing in the house or out on the street—impossible to tell in the nonstop noise. Everybody was hammering or carting goods through the dust, and all day long men were yelling like jackals, and if they weren’t yelling, they were spitting, and if they weren’t spitting, they were drinking, and if they weren’t drinking, they were eating meat. The smell of it was constant. Cooked meat, rotting meat, bleating-grunting meat.

  The moaning coming from upstairs could easily have been mistaken for the sound of a saw through a reticent piece of lumber. Gradually, the sound took on more human characteristics.

  “Oh God, Olivia! Will you come?”

  Dropping my book, I hastened up the stairs to find Julia collapsed in the hall, the floorboard drenched.

  “Oh dear!” I said, nearly tripping, for the baby’s arrival was upon us, and with barely a blanket knit and Erasmus so scarce these last few days. “Mrs. Humphries!” I shouted, sliding down the wall beside Julia.

  “Pshaw!” said Mrs. Humphries, her one eye glaring as she waddled up the stairs, gathered Julia into her hefty arms, and dragged her to her feet. “Mrs. Givens,” she said, “the baby is coming.” She said this as if Julia were deaf or foreign. At which point Julia screamed again.

  “Get Dr. Orpheus!” Humphries shouted to the girl downstairs, telling her to make haste and not talk to anyone.

  Only ten days before, the esteemed doctor, Silas Orpheus—according to Hatsepha “a man worth listening to” and “apparently without a wife”—had taken the lectern to discourse on the various causes of biliousness. I had commented that he seemed a trifle sure of himself, but now I wished sorely for his presence.

  Humphries bundled Julia off to the room she had shared with me. An hour later, Julia was grasping the spindle bedposts, while I, in spite of my being a nascent atheist, commenced to pray.

  “Forgive us our trespasses,” I began—and meanly, too, for Julia had clearly never trespassed upon anyone—but Mrs. Humphries cut me short by ushering in the midwife. The look on the landlady’s face was enough to shut me up, her brow raised as if to say, It has come to this, for I could not remember ever seeing a Negro in Mrs. Humphries’s house.

  “This here’s Tilly,” said Mrs. Humphries, jerking her head at the girl beside her. “The doctor sent her.” She glanced at the bed, then at me, implying that we all deserved each other, and if Mrs. Givens’s husband had not seen fit to be present, then it was meet and right that his child be birthed by a colored girl.

  Julia let out with another awful howl, and Tilly dropped her bag and set to her.

  “Where is the doctor?” I snapped, groaning with exasperation when Tilly said he was otherwise occupied with some problem down in Bucktown.

/>   Tilly was neat-haired and simply dressed, and she wasted no time. She stroked and soothed Julia, who was now silent except for the occasional whimper. I counted the hours by the chimes in the downstairs parlor. By the time the streetlights were lit, no baby had arrived. Tilly, however, was calm. It was second nature, she said, touching the knotted scarf on the back of her head. She’d practiced on kittens and goats as well as helping her mother, who was a midwife herself. She was in the middle of telling me how her mother used to put a knife beneath the mattress to cut the pain of childbirth when Julia let loose with a holler that had Mrs. Humphries shrieking up the stairs that that baby better come and soon, as we would be out on the streets, baby and all, if we did not pipe down.

  “Julia,” I said, with her gripping my hand so tight it cut off the blood. I looked her in the eye. “You’ve got to have this baby.”

  Tilly reached between Julia’s legs and told her it was time to push. Such grunting I have never heard, and soon I, too, was panting in solidarity. Time and again Julia tried, until, all at once, she let out a ghastly howl, and a baby’s red face appeared. Tilly let go of Julia’s legs to grab him. I nearly wept, and would have done if Tilly had not so swiftly placed the child in my arms and turned right back to Julia. I stared at the baby, and he at me as if I were his mother.

  “What is it?” cried Julia.

  “A boy!” I said, loving him immediately. He was covered with paste and blood, slippery as a trout, and with that bit of Givens severity in the downturned mouth. “A right pet fox.”

  “A boy?” said Julia, still panting with exhaustion. “A boy? Thank God.”

  She closed her eyes and settled into the mattress. Tilly gave her a sponging, then pulled down her nightshirt. I clutched the child until Tilly took him from me, making quick work of the cord with her teeth. So engrossed was I in his tiny feet and hands that I barely registered the shouts outside. The room was peaceful, the blood-soaked sheets and afterbirth the only evidence of what had transpired.

  As Tilly laid the baby in Julia’s arms, I wondered where Erasmus was and if Mrs. Humphries’s girl had found him. But it was James who arrived first, smudged with tallow, his hat in his hand as he knelt beside Julia. Hard he looked at her, so hard that no one could have questioned his feelings.

  “A boy,” Julia whispered. She pulled back the shawl so he could see the little head that was slightly pointed and with a dab of gold hair.

  The look upon James’s face made a tightening in my chest, and I had to turn away. Watching from the window, I saw somebody run up the street and turn the corner. A few seconds later, three or four people followed. The shouting grew louder. Someone flew by on a horse.

  “Goodness, Jamie,” I said. “What is all the fuss?”

  Slowly James rose, looking very tired. “’Tis nothing, Livvie.”

  The room darkened. I could not move from the window. The clamor on the street rose and fell, started up again. Tilly lit a taper, going from one candle to another until the room was aglow.

  It was nearly morning when Erasmus returned. Julia was asleep, the baby in her arms. James had gone to his room, I was curled up on the chair, Tilly lay on the floor. A few candles flickered feebly at the stubs.

  I roused in time to see Erasmus slumping down beside the bed, reaching to touch the child.

  “Shhh,” said Julia. “It is a boy.”

  I pretended to be asleep, but I needed to relieve myself. I stretched and groaned. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “There was a fire,” said Erasmus. “I was in the bucket line.” I recollected smelling smoke, but it had seemed the least of our concerns.

  “Who is this?” said Erasmus, indicating the sleeping Tilly.

  “The doctor’s girl,” I said. “Seems we have a hand-me-down.”

  “All right, then,” said Erasmus, crawling under the sheets beside Julia. In the half-light, I could see he was grimy. Lord only knew where he had been.

  Julia said, “Erasmus, you smell horrible.” But she allowed him to move in close, and I knew I would not be sleeping in that bed for a while.

  Donning my jacket over my chemise and pulling on my boots, I headed to the privy. It was already warm in the way of August mornings, and the smell was ripe. When I was finished with my business, I pulled my coat back on. My legs were exposed below the hem of my chemise like two sticks stuck into my boots. In spite of my regalia and unkempt hair, I paused at the front of the house and lingered on the door stoop, surveying the morning. Given all the shouting of the night before, it was strangely quiet except for a cow nudging at the window of a house, hoping to get fed. Even the pigs were absent, though an odor of burned meat permeated the air. I did not notice the figure coming toward me until we stood face-to-face.

  “Why if it is not the unorthodox Miss Givens.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, tugging at the hem of my jacket as if a chemise minus petticoats, pantalettes, and a dress was the latest fashion.

  “It is I, Dr. Orpheus.”

  The famous Dr. Orpheus, who only a week before had held forth upon biliousness. He looked a bit worn around the edges. And his clothing was disgraceful. Still peeved about his absence the night before, I muttered something about Hatsepha’s assessment of him being a bit generous. That he might know me was not altogether surprising, for I had garnered notoriety as “The Woman Who Stood in Support of the Atheist Robert Owen.”

  “I’ve come to fetch my girl.”

  “A girl, I might add, to whom we are very grateful. Which is more than I can muster for you, sir.”

  A rider made his way up the street, his cheeks smudged with ash. He stared so intently that I grew embarrassed at my appearance. Worse—I recognized the rider as Mr. Phinneaus Mumford, who only a year before had come to call. How quickly word would spread that Miss Olivia Givens of already dubious character had been seen half dressed in public.

  Silas Orpheus tipped his hat at Phinneaus Mumford and offered me his arm. To Mr. Mumford he said, “Miss Givens is just catching some air after spending all night delivering her sister-in-law’s child.”

  “Oh,” said Phinneaus Mumford, “well!”—as he gave his horse an extra kick to urge him to a trot.

  I let go the doctor’s arm and glanced over at his profile. He was not so very handsome, but his high forehead and grave, gray eyes gave the impression of intelligence. “I suppose I should thank you for what is left of my sorry reputation.”

  “Neither of us appears to have worn the night well,” said Silas Orpheus.

  “I had no place to sleep,” I said. “When my brother returned, his place was with his wife.”

  “Then you haven’t heard? Your brother . . .”

  “My brother.” I gave out a snort. “He said he was in the bucket line.”

  “Had he been in the bucket line, it might have helped.” He studied me. “But you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Silas Orpheus removed his hat and said that it pained him to give me the news that the livelihood of our family—James’s workshop with its two vats and fifty crates and five wheelbarrows and a horse cart, not to mention his already completed order for five thousand candles to be delivered to Midas Barker’s former customers, situated as it was on the edge of Bucktown—had been besieged by rioters, who had burned it to the ground.

  Chapter 11

  1829

  In the days that followed, the papers were filled with editorials pronouncing the riots “inevitable” due to tensions between the Irish Catholics and the free black population. Everyone was vying for jobs. Jasper Fry, a metalworker, had brought down an iron rod on Cicero Green, a former slave who hauled junk for a living. A group of white millworkers broke the windows of a house and set it on fire, chasing a Negro family as they fled.

  The colored community was not alone in its suffering. Caught in the random cross fire, the charred remains of James’s workshop yielded little that was salvageable other than the iron pot. His dipping racks had melted; all of hi
s supplies had combusted. Knowing that there were others who had lost their lives in the melee, James spent little time complaining. Instead, he went straightaway to the Commercial Bank of Cincinnati and pled his case, and when that was refused, went hat in hand to the office of the coal-merchant father of Hatsepha Peckham to ask him to underwrite his business and guarantee the purchase of candles from a resurrected factory.

  “It would save me all my customers, Mr. Peckham,” said James. “And you would have a lifelong discount on candles.”

  “There is just one thing, Givens,” Mr. Peckham said after James described how he had figured it out. “It will be difficult for me to convince my associates to hold their orders while you get set up along the canal.”

  Even before the fire, James had already staked out a future site better suited for expansion. He would hire on seven hands, all of whom were Scots-Irish and each and every one a good Presbyterian. These would be hardworking men that James could count on—not the Catholics who had haunted our family’s concerns back in Ireland, or the Negroes whom James found too exotic to be collegial.

  Mr. Peckham clasped his hands together while James, sitting across his desk, discussed the virtues of slow-burning candles as well as the potential for coal gas in domestic lighting. James was flattered that Mr. Peckham regarded his opinion so highly, for though James was a man of intelligence, there were many such gentlemen of Mr. Peckham’s acquaintance.

  “I’ll have to stake my reputation as if you were my own son, if you get my drift,” said Mr. Peckham.

  James, however, did not catch his drift. “That’s fine, Mr. Peckham, but your partners will have my word that I will have this operation up in no time.”

  “Then again, there’s the matter of the loan.”

  “I am hoping you can put in a word with the bank.”

  “It’s true”—Mr. Peckham paused—“I have quite a bit of influence with the bank.”