Gilded Mountain, page 32
“Put this back!” I brandished the money. It was hundreds of dollars.
“Keep it. It’s yours.” He ran up the stairs ahead of me. Sick with panic, I stuffed wads of money inside the bosom of my dress and ran after Jace.
In the drawing room was a man covered in blood. Caleb Grady. He held one arm at a distorted angle, like a broken-winged bird. His eye was dripping red, swollen shut.
“Cal!” Jace cried. “What happened? You were gonna stay in Carbondale. I told you be careful! My father—”
“We got turned around. They blocked the track.”
“Jesus, Cal, you’re bleeding. Your eye—” Jace helped Cal to the sofa. He pressed a satin pillow to Cal’s face to stanch the blood. “Jesus. Cal.”
“I’ll get something,” I said. “Bandages. I’ll get a doctor—”
“Use the telephone,” Jasper said.
I went to the foyer and dialed. The switchboard girl answered. “I’m calling from Elkhorne Manor,” I told her. “Mr. Padgett is asking the doctor to come right away. Connect me to the clinic.”
“But Mr. Padgett is right here in the office,” the girl said.
“No, it’s his son, Jace, who’s asking. A man here is hurt. Please send the doctor quick. To Elkhorne.”
From the kitchen, I brought a basin of water and towels. Blood dripped from Cal’s eye. It splashed in dark blooms on the velvet couch. I wrung the cloth and went to clean his face. Cal brushed me away, scrubbing at the stains with his good hand. “Ruined this pillow, now,” he said. His shirt was splashed with crimson.
“Shhh. Cal, don’t mind about that,” Jace said. Fresh springs of blood dripped from Caleb’s eye. Jasper took the cloth and held it to the bloody socket.
“What happened?” I said. “How—”
“He says your union dogs beat the daylights out of him,” Jace said. “Thought he was a scab. Mistook him for one of the replacement workers, a whole lot of colored men over there in that stockade by the mill.”
“Not my union dogs,” I said. And they are not dogs.
“Four, five boys come along, claim I’m a blackleg scab,” Caleb said. “I told them, ‘Nossir, I’m a traveling chef for Mr. Padgett.’ ”
“The name Padgett only made ’em kick you harder,” said Jace.
“Anyway, I did a pretty good number on one of ’em.” Caleb managed half a smile.
“I bet you did, Cal,” Jace said. “They didn’t know what they were getting into when they tangled with you, huh?”
Watching them, I checked for signs of brotherhood and saw the tenderness Jace showed, how gentle he was with Cal.
“Where’s that goddamn doctor?” Jace said. “His elbow’s dislocated.”
“My eye,” Caleb said. “Can’t see.”
“It’s just swollen, Cal. We’ll fix it up. Who did this? Give me a name.”
“Some ’skowski or Houlihan,” said Cal. “I couldn’t hear it—”
“Bastards!” Jace said. “I’ll break their necks.”
“Nah, not a chance,” Cal said, as if he found the idea funny, wincing. “Young lady, you know this man Jasper won’t be breaking any necks. He won’t land a punch, even to save his own neck. Too softhearted.”
“Shh. Don’t go saying that to her, now, Cal, she’s my girl. Get him a glass of whiskey, Sylvie, please, would you?”
I was his girl. Was I? His kitchen girl. I went through the swinging door and considered the back exit. I could leave, get my coat, get out with the money. I breathed against the hard lumps of cash stowed beside my ribs and poured the whiskey. I drank a glass for myself, straight down, so the liquor ran with the Devil’s influence along all the channels in my head.
There was more shouting. “Jasper!”
That voice froze me. The Duke himself had arrived. The thickness of bills burned in my guilty bosom. It was wrong to keep it, wrong all around. Dump the money in a drawer, was my thought. Hide it under the sink. Why didn’t I? Because: You are owed, said the Devil or the truth talking. Blood money. Jasper himself said Padgetts owed us Pelletiers, and who didn’t they owe? Caleb was bleeding. In a split minute I decided. With the cash still stowed in my bodice and the whiskey bottle on a tray, I went back out to the scene on the couch, where Cal sat with the bloody towel pressed to his eye.
Duke Padgett stood over him, shouting, “What the hell! Get up, Caleb! What are you doing there, boy? Get up!”
Cal stood. “Hello, sir.”
“Let him rest. He’s hurt.” Jace stepped in front of his father.
The three men in a row like that. A frieze. Padgett & Sons.
“Take Caleb in the back,” said the Duke. “Look at this mess.”
Duke was looking at the blood on the carpet. Jace was looking at Cal, who stood stoic, his one good eye on the middle distance, some future far away from these people. I was looking for signs and found them. Unmistakable. The ear. Cal had it, the protuberant Padgett ear, same as the grandfather, Brigadier General Padgett of the library portrait. The ear of the Duke himself. Three generations of cup-handle ears.
Cal’s breathing was strained, and Jace put a hand out to steady him.
“Take him out of here,” the Duke said.
“He’s injured, Dad,” Jace said. “Leave him alone.” The liquor had burned through him and colored his flaming cheeks. “I’ll take care of him.”
“He doesn’t belong here,” Duke said.
“Then I don’t belong here either.”
Duke Padgett stared at his son. “You’re sick, Jace. You’re not right in the head. Remember what the doctor said? Not to get excited. Over this—nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense. It’s truth.”
“Please,” Duke faltered. “Son. You had me out of my wits. Those anarchists blocked the track. We had to turn around. When that girl called—I feared that you were killed. She said”—he pointed at me without looking and misquoted my telephone call—“that my son was badly hurt.”
His son. Caleb Grady smiled, bits of grit in his expression. He glanced at me as if he knew that I knew, that I had seen him denied.
Duke was still looking at Jace as if accusing him—of what? I did not want to play a part in this drama, yet I had—had I?—just consented to marry—to join the family. Caleb Grady would be my brother-in-law, outlawed.
“I’ll just be leaving now, Mr. Padgett,” I said.
“You’ll stay,” said Jasper. “Sylvie, stay, please.”
“My son’s had too much liquor,” said the Duke, apologetic. “He’s not well.”
“It’s Caleb! Cal who’s not well!” Jace roared. “Christ! Look at him, Dad. They tried to kill him. They left him for dead.”
“He’s not dead, though, is he?” the Duke shouted. “Didn’t I tell you not to let that union in? Thugs. I told you! But you don’t listen, and this is the result!”
“I told Bowles not to bring those scabs up here—”
“Don’t you lecture me,” the Duke said. “You made a hash of it, and you wanted out. So you’re out. You quit.”
“Come with me, Cal,” Jasper said. “We’ll fix you up.”
“Cal’s fine,” said Duke. “Aren’t you, boy? You’re fine.”
Cal grimaced to show he was fine, just dandy, when obviously, he was gravely hurt. Caleb Grady was a master of a defense tactic that I recognized: silence as shield. “Yessir,” he said. If you looked, you could see the cold superiority in his coiled smile.
“Attaboy,” said Duke Padgett. “Get on over to your place now, Caleb.”
“I’ll take him upstairs,” Jasper said. “He’ll sleep in my room.”
“Damned if he will,” said Duke. “This is my house. I won’t have that boy bleeding in every damn room. Look at the mess he’s made already.”
“The mess he’s made?” Jasper cried. They stood bristling at each other.
“Jace,” Caleb said sharply. He started toward the kitchen door, the distorted elbow propped in his hand, bones at sickening angles. “Let me get out of here.”
The Duke watched the two of them with narrowed eyes.
“All right, Cal, good man,” Jace said. “You’ll be okay. Doc’s on the way.” His voice was full of worry, his hand gentle on Caleb’s shoulder.
I liked him so much in that moment.
Duke went to the sideboard to pour whiskey, the bottle shaking. Did he tremble in remorse? Or in fear—that he might be exposed, condemned to hell for what he’d done to Easter? He blamed Jace, or Caleb Grady, union scum. Anyone but himself.
“The audacity,” Duke said. “To bring that boy in here.” He drained the glass. The bell rang in front. “Get that, will you?”
Go to hell, I did not say, lacking Easter’s nerve.
Doc Butler was at the door with his black bag. “Ah. The young lady of ‘Infirmary Notes.’ Where’s the patient?”
* * *
In the kitchen, Caleb Grady rested his distorted arm on the table. I cleared the plates in a rush, an apron over my dress, watching from the sink as the doctor examined him. Cal breathed in a stutter of pain and drank down a second glass of whiskey. The doctor cut the bloody shirt, peeling it off. Cal’s bare ribs were purpled with bruises and bleeding cuts. Butler pressed his fingers along the wounds. He tipped Cal’s head to the light and parted the lids of the swollen eye. Cal inhaled sharply.
“A bad business here,” the doc said.
“What about the elbow?” Jace asked. “That’s his pitching arm. Nobody gets a hit off Cal Grady.”
“Well, I’ll reset it,” the doctor said. “And he’s gonna yell. After that he’ll wear a sling. And rest these ribs. You cracked a few.”
“He didn’t crack them,” Jasper said. “Goddamn lynch mob did. Lucky those boys didn’t hang him.”
“Two of ’em went for a rope, but I outran ’em,” Cal said. “Done with running.”
The doc rolled up his sleeves. “Gonna yank it good now. You brace him, Jasper.”
“Give him a shot of morphine,” Jace said. “For Chrissake.”
“He had plenty of that whiskey,” said Butler. “They don’t feel pain like we do.”
“Like hell.” Jace was livid. “You go on and give him a goddamn shot.”
“Doc, please,” I said. “Give him something.”
The doctor went to his bag and removed a vial and syringe, muttering, “Waste of a dose, but all right.”
“That’ll dull the pain, Cal,” Jasper said. “You won’t feel it.”
“Hell, it’s you who won’t feel it.” Caleb laughed with some ironic bitterness.
“I should be out of the way now,” I said. “I ought to go—”
Jace did not stop me. He stood with his hand on his brother’s shoulder. I knew it for sure then. Anyone could see it if they looked. He blew me a distracted kiss off his fingertips. “I’ll come for you tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll come for you.”
Would he? I went out the back door with my doubts, my spinning head, and two hundred dollars stuffed behind the buttons of my dress.
Chapter Thirty-One
SAFE IN THE RETREAT OF my closet, the smell of paper and ink like home, I sorted the cataclysms of the evening and wrangled the Devil over the soul of Sylvie Pelletier. The warm lumps of money had left red dents on my skin. I broke the paper strip around the stack and thumbed the bills in a fan, relishing the crisp of new greenbacks. Each twenty was an Aladdin carpet to fly me away—with Jace Padgett? Or not. I could take it and flee alone. My thoughts were a welter in the aftermath of the blood, the whiskey, the wild untethered offer.
If you do not hate me.
A low standard for matrimony, wasn’t it? The absence of hate. And a bribe. This could be yours. He would offer me marriage as payoff, as if he would save me. Was I some penance he must pay? Not a word of love. Perhaps his people did not say it. Or know what it was.
In the tossing darkness, I pondered the Padgetts. The monstrous equation that made Caleb Grady one of them—yet not. I did the math of it, subtracted ages and decades and tracked events backward to when it happened. The year 1883. Easter was a young woman then, the Duke older, neither of them married. After Caleb was born, Duke married Opal and Easter married John Grady, who raised Cal as his own. Marcus Grady was born. Then Jace months later. When Opal died, Easter nursed both those babies, her son and a dead white woman’s child.
Everyone knows, Jace said. Except Jace had not known.
How the mind, my mind, stammered and balked, pondering the shock of it… the secret shames of Padgett history. That the rumors… that the talk… that his father… that Easter. And now she had quit at last. Told him to go to hell.
Duke’s crime was the root of Jasper’s anguish. The father’s sin arising from the original sin, as Dr. Du Bois called it, of slavery. Up until that time, the Confederacy of the South for me was a dusty lesson of boring battles, a sweating swamp of snakes and sausage curls, as exotic as a foreign country. But Jasper had invited me to live in it with him, alongside his monumental obsessions. He was called delusional, as if to care about his brother and the Gradys were a sign of insanity instead of what it was. Just love.
How drawn I was to Jasper’s torment; how romantic it seemed that I alone understood him. And to confess: I was also drawn to those piles of greenbacks.
Oh, money. Two hundred dollars. A pittance to Jasper, with a vault of dragon loot, but a fortune to me, under the mattress. That night I lay awake on it as if it were a dried pea and I were a false princess, tossing in a nightmare of gore and money, Cal’s bloody eye. Alcohol kisses. That question.
I had answered yes but might still say no.
At dawn, before I could be accused of stealing it, I sent a hundred dollars, five twenties, in a letter to my mother. “I was able to secure extra work at the manor,” I wrote, with other fibs of news: “The union will soon resolve the strike. Miss Redmond sends best wishes. The autumn leaves are magnifiques.” Another hundred dollars stayed in my bodice, scratchy and damp. I might need it.
* * *
All morning I was agitated, waiting. Before I lost my nerve, I wanted Jasper to hurry and fetch me, as he’d said he would, to stand in the courthouse and get married. It seemed more likely that the Sheriff would take me to jail, accused as a safecracker. I wished Jace would come before I changed my mind. Before he changed his. We’d run away eloping, and then together we’d give thousands to the families on Dogtooth Flats, as fair compensation, to pay what they were owed, to make things right.
All good judgment was lost in the undertow of events, wishful thinking, and a fatal resolve to prove my worth to this Prince. Did I love J. C. Padgett? His oddness and drinking and erratic affections were marks against him. His jokes and talk about books, his anger and idealism, were marks in his favor. His kindness. Kissing. Also the money. Does it tempt you, sweetheart? What love I felt for him was all tied up with money. I wished he would hurry.
For distraction, I tidied the piles of newsprint, cleaned the press platens, emptied the ash barrel, and struggled to ignore the roar of silence from Elkhorne Manor. Perhaps the Duke had killed his own son (which one?) in a furious fit. Or the sons had killed him, striking the Duke over the head with a piece of statuary, pushing him down the stairs. More likely, Jace had gone off without me, the cash in his pockets. That odd proposal of marriage was only liquor talking, the words of a delusional.
Just after the noon whistle, I was in a state at the press, printing a notice for the UMW, when Jace burst in, looking frantic as a bird does, flying indoors by mistake. “Sylvie!”
My foot stopped on the treadle.
“Is anyone else here?” he said, agitated.
“Miss Redmond’s gone till tomorrow.”
“I’m taking Cal,” he said in a rush of words. “To see a doctor in Ruby. Not sure his eye can be saved. The socket is fractured. Maybe the retina’s detached. Butler here at the clinic—he’s… not hopeful.”
“I’ll find out who did it,” I said. “I’ll ask Kerrigan.”
“Come with us. Caleb’s at the depot already. I don’t want to leave him alone for long. Get your things, will you? Hurry.”
“What things?”
“Whatever you need for—” Jasper turned a shade of red. “We can buy new things, whatever you want, Sylvie, we can—”
“Jasper—”
“Pack up, if you’re coming,” he said. “Train’s in thirty minutes.” His eyes were wild and bloodshot, his hair disheveled. He had not made another mention of marriage. He’d said doctor. He checked his watch. “Sylvie. Let’s elope right out of this. You said you would—” He smiled boyishly. “You said.”
And I had said. It was what I wanted, or so I thought: Ease and elegance. Sink or swim. Flee or fly. “All right,” I said. “Five minutes.”
“Angel!” A smile broke across his nervous face. “We’ll find a judge this very day. Meet me at the depot quick as you can.” He went out in a mad rush. Was somebody after him? His father? I packed too fast. New blue dress stuffed down in a valise with all my misgivings. I wrote a dissembling note to Miss Redmond: “Headed to Ruby to investigate the scab hatchery.” I deceived her as easily as I now deceived myself. That Jace and Sylvie would elope in a pure romance.
If you repeat wishes enough, sometimes you can force them to come true.
* * *
At the depot, I looked around for Jace. In my agitation, I paid no attention to the train’s cargo: a block of marble the size of a whale, chained to the flatbed car and hooked behind the locomotive. There was no reason to question it—not then. Such blocks were ferried out every week on this route. Heavier matters weighed on me. Here was Jace with Caleb Grady.
Cal’s head was wrapped in a fresh white bandage, one eye patched, that elbow in a sling, his hard bright smile like armor. “Congratulations, Miss Sylvie,” he said. “I heard the good news.”
“Let’s hurry.” Jace looked over his shoulder and took my arm to help me up to the passenger car. Cal came next and then Jace after. We found seats near the door, Cal in the last seat with Jace beside him. I sat across the aisle with my bag.
“Keep it. It’s yours.” He ran up the stairs ahead of me. Sick with panic, I stuffed wads of money inside the bosom of my dress and ran after Jace.
In the drawing room was a man covered in blood. Caleb Grady. He held one arm at a distorted angle, like a broken-winged bird. His eye was dripping red, swollen shut.
“Cal!” Jace cried. “What happened? You were gonna stay in Carbondale. I told you be careful! My father—”
“We got turned around. They blocked the track.”
“Jesus, Cal, you’re bleeding. Your eye—” Jace helped Cal to the sofa. He pressed a satin pillow to Cal’s face to stanch the blood. “Jesus. Cal.”
“I’ll get something,” I said. “Bandages. I’ll get a doctor—”
“Use the telephone,” Jasper said.
I went to the foyer and dialed. The switchboard girl answered. “I’m calling from Elkhorne Manor,” I told her. “Mr. Padgett is asking the doctor to come right away. Connect me to the clinic.”
“But Mr. Padgett is right here in the office,” the girl said.
“No, it’s his son, Jace, who’s asking. A man here is hurt. Please send the doctor quick. To Elkhorne.”
From the kitchen, I brought a basin of water and towels. Blood dripped from Cal’s eye. It splashed in dark blooms on the velvet couch. I wrung the cloth and went to clean his face. Cal brushed me away, scrubbing at the stains with his good hand. “Ruined this pillow, now,” he said. His shirt was splashed with crimson.
“Shhh. Cal, don’t mind about that,” Jace said. Fresh springs of blood dripped from Caleb’s eye. Jasper took the cloth and held it to the bloody socket.
“What happened?” I said. “How—”
“He says your union dogs beat the daylights out of him,” Jace said. “Thought he was a scab. Mistook him for one of the replacement workers, a whole lot of colored men over there in that stockade by the mill.”
“Not my union dogs,” I said. And they are not dogs.
“Four, five boys come along, claim I’m a blackleg scab,” Caleb said. “I told them, ‘Nossir, I’m a traveling chef for Mr. Padgett.’ ”
“The name Padgett only made ’em kick you harder,” said Jace.
“Anyway, I did a pretty good number on one of ’em.” Caleb managed half a smile.
“I bet you did, Cal,” Jace said. “They didn’t know what they were getting into when they tangled with you, huh?”
Watching them, I checked for signs of brotherhood and saw the tenderness Jace showed, how gentle he was with Cal.
“Where’s that goddamn doctor?” Jace said. “His elbow’s dislocated.”
“My eye,” Caleb said. “Can’t see.”
“It’s just swollen, Cal. We’ll fix it up. Who did this? Give me a name.”
“Some ’skowski or Houlihan,” said Cal. “I couldn’t hear it—”
“Bastards!” Jace said. “I’ll break their necks.”
“Nah, not a chance,” Cal said, as if he found the idea funny, wincing. “Young lady, you know this man Jasper won’t be breaking any necks. He won’t land a punch, even to save his own neck. Too softhearted.”
“Shh. Don’t go saying that to her, now, Cal, she’s my girl. Get him a glass of whiskey, Sylvie, please, would you?”
I was his girl. Was I? His kitchen girl. I went through the swinging door and considered the back exit. I could leave, get my coat, get out with the money. I breathed against the hard lumps of cash stowed beside my ribs and poured the whiskey. I drank a glass for myself, straight down, so the liquor ran with the Devil’s influence along all the channels in my head.
There was more shouting. “Jasper!”
That voice froze me. The Duke himself had arrived. The thickness of bills burned in my guilty bosom. It was wrong to keep it, wrong all around. Dump the money in a drawer, was my thought. Hide it under the sink. Why didn’t I? Because: You are owed, said the Devil or the truth talking. Blood money. Jasper himself said Padgetts owed us Pelletiers, and who didn’t they owe? Caleb was bleeding. In a split minute I decided. With the cash still stowed in my bodice and the whiskey bottle on a tray, I went back out to the scene on the couch, where Cal sat with the bloody towel pressed to his eye.
Duke Padgett stood over him, shouting, “What the hell! Get up, Caleb! What are you doing there, boy? Get up!”
Cal stood. “Hello, sir.”
“Let him rest. He’s hurt.” Jace stepped in front of his father.
The three men in a row like that. A frieze. Padgett & Sons.
“Take Caleb in the back,” said the Duke. “Look at this mess.”
Duke was looking at the blood on the carpet. Jace was looking at Cal, who stood stoic, his one good eye on the middle distance, some future far away from these people. I was looking for signs and found them. Unmistakable. The ear. Cal had it, the protuberant Padgett ear, same as the grandfather, Brigadier General Padgett of the library portrait. The ear of the Duke himself. Three generations of cup-handle ears.
Cal’s breathing was strained, and Jace put a hand out to steady him.
“Take him out of here,” the Duke said.
“He’s injured, Dad,” Jace said. “Leave him alone.” The liquor had burned through him and colored his flaming cheeks. “I’ll take care of him.”
“He doesn’t belong here,” Duke said.
“Then I don’t belong here either.”
Duke Padgett stared at his son. “You’re sick, Jace. You’re not right in the head. Remember what the doctor said? Not to get excited. Over this—nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense. It’s truth.”
“Please,” Duke faltered. “Son. You had me out of my wits. Those anarchists blocked the track. We had to turn around. When that girl called—I feared that you were killed. She said”—he pointed at me without looking and misquoted my telephone call—“that my son was badly hurt.”
His son. Caleb Grady smiled, bits of grit in his expression. He glanced at me as if he knew that I knew, that I had seen him denied.
Duke was still looking at Jace as if accusing him—of what? I did not want to play a part in this drama, yet I had—had I?—just consented to marry—to join the family. Caleb Grady would be my brother-in-law, outlawed.
“I’ll just be leaving now, Mr. Padgett,” I said.
“You’ll stay,” said Jasper. “Sylvie, stay, please.”
“My son’s had too much liquor,” said the Duke, apologetic. “He’s not well.”
“It’s Caleb! Cal who’s not well!” Jace roared. “Christ! Look at him, Dad. They tried to kill him. They left him for dead.”
“He’s not dead, though, is he?” the Duke shouted. “Didn’t I tell you not to let that union in? Thugs. I told you! But you don’t listen, and this is the result!”
“I told Bowles not to bring those scabs up here—”
“Don’t you lecture me,” the Duke said. “You made a hash of it, and you wanted out. So you’re out. You quit.”
“Come with me, Cal,” Jasper said. “We’ll fix you up.”
“Cal’s fine,” said Duke. “Aren’t you, boy? You’re fine.”
Cal grimaced to show he was fine, just dandy, when obviously, he was gravely hurt. Caleb Grady was a master of a defense tactic that I recognized: silence as shield. “Yessir,” he said. If you looked, you could see the cold superiority in his coiled smile.
“Attaboy,” said Duke Padgett. “Get on over to your place now, Caleb.”
“I’ll take him upstairs,” Jasper said. “He’ll sleep in my room.”
“Damned if he will,” said Duke. “This is my house. I won’t have that boy bleeding in every damn room. Look at the mess he’s made already.”
“The mess he’s made?” Jasper cried. They stood bristling at each other.
“Jace,” Caleb said sharply. He started toward the kitchen door, the distorted elbow propped in his hand, bones at sickening angles. “Let me get out of here.”
The Duke watched the two of them with narrowed eyes.
“All right, Cal, good man,” Jace said. “You’ll be okay. Doc’s on the way.” His voice was full of worry, his hand gentle on Caleb’s shoulder.
I liked him so much in that moment.
Duke went to the sideboard to pour whiskey, the bottle shaking. Did he tremble in remorse? Or in fear—that he might be exposed, condemned to hell for what he’d done to Easter? He blamed Jace, or Caleb Grady, union scum. Anyone but himself.
“The audacity,” Duke said. “To bring that boy in here.” He drained the glass. The bell rang in front. “Get that, will you?”
Go to hell, I did not say, lacking Easter’s nerve.
Doc Butler was at the door with his black bag. “Ah. The young lady of ‘Infirmary Notes.’ Where’s the patient?”
* * *
In the kitchen, Caleb Grady rested his distorted arm on the table. I cleared the plates in a rush, an apron over my dress, watching from the sink as the doctor examined him. Cal breathed in a stutter of pain and drank down a second glass of whiskey. The doctor cut the bloody shirt, peeling it off. Cal’s bare ribs were purpled with bruises and bleeding cuts. Butler pressed his fingers along the wounds. He tipped Cal’s head to the light and parted the lids of the swollen eye. Cal inhaled sharply.
“A bad business here,” the doc said.
“What about the elbow?” Jace asked. “That’s his pitching arm. Nobody gets a hit off Cal Grady.”
“Well, I’ll reset it,” the doctor said. “And he’s gonna yell. After that he’ll wear a sling. And rest these ribs. You cracked a few.”
“He didn’t crack them,” Jasper said. “Goddamn lynch mob did. Lucky those boys didn’t hang him.”
“Two of ’em went for a rope, but I outran ’em,” Cal said. “Done with running.”
The doc rolled up his sleeves. “Gonna yank it good now. You brace him, Jasper.”
“Give him a shot of morphine,” Jace said. “For Chrissake.”
“He had plenty of that whiskey,” said Butler. “They don’t feel pain like we do.”
“Like hell.” Jace was livid. “You go on and give him a goddamn shot.”
“Doc, please,” I said. “Give him something.”
The doctor went to his bag and removed a vial and syringe, muttering, “Waste of a dose, but all right.”
“That’ll dull the pain, Cal,” Jasper said. “You won’t feel it.”
“Hell, it’s you who won’t feel it.” Caleb laughed with some ironic bitterness.
“I should be out of the way now,” I said. “I ought to go—”
Jace did not stop me. He stood with his hand on his brother’s shoulder. I knew it for sure then. Anyone could see it if they looked. He blew me a distracted kiss off his fingertips. “I’ll come for you tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll come for you.”
Would he? I went out the back door with my doubts, my spinning head, and two hundred dollars stuffed behind the buttons of my dress.
Chapter Thirty-One
SAFE IN THE RETREAT OF my closet, the smell of paper and ink like home, I sorted the cataclysms of the evening and wrangled the Devil over the soul of Sylvie Pelletier. The warm lumps of money had left red dents on my skin. I broke the paper strip around the stack and thumbed the bills in a fan, relishing the crisp of new greenbacks. Each twenty was an Aladdin carpet to fly me away—with Jace Padgett? Or not. I could take it and flee alone. My thoughts were a welter in the aftermath of the blood, the whiskey, the wild untethered offer.
If you do not hate me.
A low standard for matrimony, wasn’t it? The absence of hate. And a bribe. This could be yours. He would offer me marriage as payoff, as if he would save me. Was I some penance he must pay? Not a word of love. Perhaps his people did not say it. Or know what it was.
In the tossing darkness, I pondered the Padgetts. The monstrous equation that made Caleb Grady one of them—yet not. I did the math of it, subtracted ages and decades and tracked events backward to when it happened. The year 1883. Easter was a young woman then, the Duke older, neither of them married. After Caleb was born, Duke married Opal and Easter married John Grady, who raised Cal as his own. Marcus Grady was born. Then Jace months later. When Opal died, Easter nursed both those babies, her son and a dead white woman’s child.
Everyone knows, Jace said. Except Jace had not known.
How the mind, my mind, stammered and balked, pondering the shock of it… the secret shames of Padgett history. That the rumors… that the talk… that his father… that Easter. And now she had quit at last. Told him to go to hell.
Duke’s crime was the root of Jasper’s anguish. The father’s sin arising from the original sin, as Dr. Du Bois called it, of slavery. Up until that time, the Confederacy of the South for me was a dusty lesson of boring battles, a sweating swamp of snakes and sausage curls, as exotic as a foreign country. But Jasper had invited me to live in it with him, alongside his monumental obsessions. He was called delusional, as if to care about his brother and the Gradys were a sign of insanity instead of what it was. Just love.
How drawn I was to Jasper’s torment; how romantic it seemed that I alone understood him. And to confess: I was also drawn to those piles of greenbacks.
Oh, money. Two hundred dollars. A pittance to Jasper, with a vault of dragon loot, but a fortune to me, under the mattress. That night I lay awake on it as if it were a dried pea and I were a false princess, tossing in a nightmare of gore and money, Cal’s bloody eye. Alcohol kisses. That question.
I had answered yes but might still say no.
At dawn, before I could be accused of stealing it, I sent a hundred dollars, five twenties, in a letter to my mother. “I was able to secure extra work at the manor,” I wrote, with other fibs of news: “The union will soon resolve the strike. Miss Redmond sends best wishes. The autumn leaves are magnifiques.” Another hundred dollars stayed in my bodice, scratchy and damp. I might need it.
* * *
All morning I was agitated, waiting. Before I lost my nerve, I wanted Jasper to hurry and fetch me, as he’d said he would, to stand in the courthouse and get married. It seemed more likely that the Sheriff would take me to jail, accused as a safecracker. I wished Jace would come before I changed my mind. Before he changed his. We’d run away eloping, and then together we’d give thousands to the families on Dogtooth Flats, as fair compensation, to pay what they were owed, to make things right.
All good judgment was lost in the undertow of events, wishful thinking, and a fatal resolve to prove my worth to this Prince. Did I love J. C. Padgett? His oddness and drinking and erratic affections were marks against him. His jokes and talk about books, his anger and idealism, were marks in his favor. His kindness. Kissing. Also the money. Does it tempt you, sweetheart? What love I felt for him was all tied up with money. I wished he would hurry.
For distraction, I tidied the piles of newsprint, cleaned the press platens, emptied the ash barrel, and struggled to ignore the roar of silence from Elkhorne Manor. Perhaps the Duke had killed his own son (which one?) in a furious fit. Or the sons had killed him, striking the Duke over the head with a piece of statuary, pushing him down the stairs. More likely, Jace had gone off without me, the cash in his pockets. That odd proposal of marriage was only liquor talking, the words of a delusional.
Just after the noon whistle, I was in a state at the press, printing a notice for the UMW, when Jace burst in, looking frantic as a bird does, flying indoors by mistake. “Sylvie!”
My foot stopped on the treadle.
“Is anyone else here?” he said, agitated.
“Miss Redmond’s gone till tomorrow.”
“I’m taking Cal,” he said in a rush of words. “To see a doctor in Ruby. Not sure his eye can be saved. The socket is fractured. Maybe the retina’s detached. Butler here at the clinic—he’s… not hopeful.”
“I’ll find out who did it,” I said. “I’ll ask Kerrigan.”
“Come with us. Caleb’s at the depot already. I don’t want to leave him alone for long. Get your things, will you? Hurry.”
“What things?”
“Whatever you need for—” Jasper turned a shade of red. “We can buy new things, whatever you want, Sylvie, we can—”
“Jasper—”
“Pack up, if you’re coming,” he said. “Train’s in thirty minutes.” His eyes were wild and bloodshot, his hair disheveled. He had not made another mention of marriage. He’d said doctor. He checked his watch. “Sylvie. Let’s elope right out of this. You said you would—” He smiled boyishly. “You said.”
And I had said. It was what I wanted, or so I thought: Ease and elegance. Sink or swim. Flee or fly. “All right,” I said. “Five minutes.”
“Angel!” A smile broke across his nervous face. “We’ll find a judge this very day. Meet me at the depot quick as you can.” He went out in a mad rush. Was somebody after him? His father? I packed too fast. New blue dress stuffed down in a valise with all my misgivings. I wrote a dissembling note to Miss Redmond: “Headed to Ruby to investigate the scab hatchery.” I deceived her as easily as I now deceived myself. That Jace and Sylvie would elope in a pure romance.
If you repeat wishes enough, sometimes you can force them to come true.
* * *
At the depot, I looked around for Jace. In my agitation, I paid no attention to the train’s cargo: a block of marble the size of a whale, chained to the flatbed car and hooked behind the locomotive. There was no reason to question it—not then. Such blocks were ferried out every week on this route. Heavier matters weighed on me. Here was Jace with Caleb Grady.
Cal’s head was wrapped in a fresh white bandage, one eye patched, that elbow in a sling, his hard bright smile like armor. “Congratulations, Miss Sylvie,” he said. “I heard the good news.”
“Let’s hurry.” Jace looked over his shoulder and took my arm to help me up to the passenger car. Cal came next and then Jace after. We found seats near the door, Cal in the last seat with Jace beside him. I sat across the aisle with my bag.
