Full of Eyes, page 11
Almost eight years after the funeral and seven after the case that ushered me into the priesthood, I was supposed to be investigating another death, this time in Charleston under the threat of impending war. Instead, I was off in a fog bank trying to arrange to smuggle a woman home when I should have been sleeping soundly and dreaming of angels on high. I hoped that my impression of Flora was correct, that she held as much charity in her heart as did the late Pierre Toussaint.
CHAPTER 13
O
ur noise was muffled when I drove the rig onto Lagare, a dirt road. The rhythm of the steady walk on soft ground lulled me briefly and a prayer technique I had developed eventually eased out of my mind the awful uncertainties that the Twenty-Sixth Street Pier case occasionally brought to the surface. Betty Lou and I soon arrived at the complex where Flora lived with her sister and other relatives. At least, I thought they were relatives. It occurred to me then, as I peered into the gossamer darkness, that I knew little about Flora’s personal life, despite living in the same house with her six nights a week for longer than two years. I had dropped her off at her quarters on two rainy Sundays, however, so I recognized the place, even in the fog.
It was a dismal, uneven shanty, unpainted, with a roof that was down in the center and surely must have leaked in the frequent Lowcountry rains. Other homes, in similar states of disrepair, tilted and canted on both sides of Flora’s, as if they had been fighting a gale at sea and had been congealed in place.
I could smell decayed wood and mud carried on the mist, along with wet dog and the unmistakable, if faint, odor of a pig pen somewhere off in the darkness.
I reined up and climbed down. No sooner had I turned from the buggy in the suddenly intense silence than a candle flared in the front window of Flora’s house. I waited. The horse blew once and shook the harness. Then it was quiet again.
The door to the house creaked open, and an old man stepped out. He carried a candle in a tin cup to one side of himself, so that I could see part of his face while the other half remained in darkness. He did not speak but looked at me with a question in his eye. His thick neck was bent toward the candle, and his back slumped, as if he was carrying something heavy on his shoulders. He must have anticipated that nothing good could come from a late night visit from a man in a black carriage.
“I’m Father Dockery from the cathedral, sir. I’m very sorry to disturb you at this hour, but I must speak to Flora.”
The old man bobbed his head, saying nothing, and went back into the house. I waited and the enormity of what I was about to do struck me, the imposition I had already made on the woman’s family, waking them hours before they would have to work all day, probably frightening them with the unusual nature of a nighttime visit. Would I have done all this to another friend, or was Flora’s slave status what made my boldness possible? Did I argue against slavery yet take advantage of it at the same time?
Moments later, Flora appeared. She was dressed to travel.
“Flora, I’m so sorry to bother you, especially at this ghastly hour, but I didn’t know where else to turn. You see—”
“Why don’t we get in that there wagon, Father? No sense in wasting time. You can tell me about your problem as we drive.”
So we did, and so I did. Flora made no comment, not even a cluck of disapproval, as I explained what had transpired at the episcopal residence. She didn’t ask why I couldn’t escort the woman home or complain of being called to duty on her night off. She acted as if she saw her Christian duty and was bent on performing it. Her voice was neither begrudging nor obsequious. Always, her temperament was implacably steady, that much I knew. I hadn’t realized before that she wasn’t just accepting my imposition, and many others I imagined, as a burden to be borne because of her lowly status. In her mind, her status was not at all lowly. I could see that clearly now in the black of the night. She held a responsible position in the home of a distinguished prelate, and she performed her duties well. She was willing to help me out of my predicament because she could. She wanted to do good things for people she considered good. I felt blessed.
Flora had a suggestion about the trip to Gretchen’s house and agreed with the general plan I had formulated on the way over so that, by the time we arrived back on Broad Street, we both knew what we were going to do and say on our adventure.
I went in to get Gretchen, who didn’t answer my knock until I identified myself. Then she opened the door so suddenly that I realized she’d been leaning against it waiting to hear who was rapping. Her eyes were wide, but she asked no questions as I led her down the steps and helped her up onto the carriage seat. Flora nodded to her and took up the reins.
As I hunkered down in the back, I could hear the women talking briefly after we’d been underway for a few minutes. I couldn’t understand what they said but assumed they were confirming the plan. I could also detect the comforting tones that Flora used sometimes. She may not have known about Gretchen’s grief over the loss of Jamieson Carter, but she did know intuitively that Gretchen was in some emotional pain because of her husband and the associates he entertained in their home. She consoled this stranger just as easily as she agreed to help me.
Before long, the carriage slowed and tilted backward as we came to the rise that led to the Becknell’s neighborhood. I slipped out of the cloth-covered doorway and let the momentum of the buggy carry me forward until I came to a sizable tree. I stopped myself with my arms, finding that I was now in a small wood that had not been cleared by the builders of the cottages on Partridge Lane. Flora never slowed the horse nor looked back to see how I had done on my moving dismount. In minutes, the buggy had moved out of sight and sound into the thickening mist. I shivered and waited in the dark.
Perhaps twenty minutes passed, and I approximated the time to be about three a.m. Some slight sound up the road reached me, and I strained to hear. At first, it sounded like a horse, until I realized that the clumping of hooves was too quick in succession to be less than three or more horses walking. I pressed myself closer to the backside of the pine tree and waited. Presently, I could make out the sounds of men talking over the sounds of their mounts. As they rode abreast, I could understand snatches of their conversation. Afraid of giving away my hiding place, I didn’t look out to try to identify them, although that would probably have been a useless endeavor in the thickening mist anyhow.
“...damn odd hours to keep, if you ask me.”
“I believe she’d be grateful ol’ Gordon already packed it in, now.”
Laughter. Then the voices were opposite my tree, the nearest not three feet from where I stood. I could smell the oiled leather of their tack, a slight horse smell, and something else wafting along on the heavy night air: liquor.
“You don’t reckon Gretchen or that nigger lady heard nothing?”
“Nah. We was about done by the time they got there.”
“Good thing, too. Wouldn’t do to have Andy’s name bandied about tan town now, would it?”
“Not any more than it is already.”
“Well, them colored folks is so frightened of him as it is, they probably wouldn’t say nothing anyhow.”
More laughter followed and faded as they moved out of earshot. Four men, I made it, judging from the pitch of the voices, but it could have been more or less. Not that it mattered. What was that about an Andy? Andy. Could be the nickname for Andrew Quillery, unlikely as it seemed that a man with such a reputation for sternness would have a diminutive name among friends, or that Reverend Quillery would have friends such as the lot that spent the night drinking and talking politics with Gordon Becknell. Strange bedfellows, it seemed to me. Since the murder of our sacristan in the cathedral was at the forefront of my mind, I also wondered to myself what connection, if any, this revelation might have to one of our suspects, Chief Becknell.
In another five minutes, Flora came driving the buggy down the same road, moving more slowly than the riders had. I slipped out of the woods and into the seat next to her. Neither horse nor slave so much as flicked an ear at my sudden appearance.
“Everything go okay, Flora?”
“Wasn’t no trouble. Master Becknell was already gone off to bed, and them men was just leaving, time we got there.”
“You hear anything about the murder?”
“Nossir. They was speechifying about the Know Nothings or something that sounded like that when we pulled up, but then they heard us and shut up. They was passing around a bottle. They tipped their caps to Miss Becknell but didn’t say nothing to us. As I was driving off, I heard her tell them men that she was visiting someone sick. They must of left right then too, ’cause they passed me ’fore too long.”
“You know what the Know Nothings are, Flora?”
“I know they don’t like Catholics none.”
“Actually, it’s probably more the Irish they don’t like, although for practical purposes, it amounts to the same thing. It’s a sort of defunct political party that tries to keep men from voting unless they’re native-born. That effectively eliminates most Catholics.”
“Say nothing of slaves and women.”
I looked at her rather quickly, but she kept her eyes on the big mare leaning into the harness ahead of the buggy. I thought I saw a flash of teeth in the vaporous air.
“I believe one major difference is that these nativists will probably not be successful, ever, Flora. Socrates once wrote in Plutarch, ‘I know nothing but my own ignorance,’ but these characters got their name from another source. Their political organization, once known as the American Party, was supposed to be a big secret. The members got their nickname by claiming to know nothing of what the party was up to. I thought it was passé, but maybe guys like Becknell and that crowd are keeping it alive.”
I was more or less talking to myself, but the Negress nodded. I believed that she understood all that I ever talked about, and that was why I refused to talk down to her. Her formal education was limited, of course, but Flora had learned how to read and was often a source of information for the diocesan staff. She still used the cadences and accents of the Gullah dialect a good bit in her language, Gullah being a musical creolized mixture of West Indian dialect and Elizabethan English. It didn’t surprise me that she was fluent in it, since she had been raised in that coastal African culture and was probably proud of her upbringing.
We drove for a while in silence. I was trying to decipher who the Becknell guests meant by Andy. I tried not to imagine what was going on in Flora’s mind. God knows what she thought of bigots like those Know Nothings, or of my recent nocturnal activities, for that matter. She must have thought I was up to something devious and immoral, if not downright evil. I’m afraid I supplemented those ideas by recommending, as she reined in near her home. “I was thinking, dear Flora, that it might be better all around if we kept this little...er...midnight sojourn to ourselves. What do you think of that idea?”
“That do seem a prudent thing to do, Father.”
With the flash of a startling white grin, she was off and gone into the night. I drove home slowly, wondering at the marvels of human nature. Wondering also what the adventures of the night meant.
CHAPTER 14
H
aving sworn Flora to secrecy, I wasn’t sure how to handle revelations to Antoine when he visited the next day. I had agreed to confide in him generally when we decided to work together to solve the Jamieson Carter murder following my conversation with the bishop about the Jesuit. The pact between Father Gagnon and me had brought us closer together more quickly than I was sure I was comfortable with, but a commitment made must be observed, in my mind at least. If I expected him to partake of the efforts and potential dangers of the investigation, I would certainly have to be forthright in revealing activities that occurred in his absence. On the other hand, I knew that one of my weaknesses was that I tended to trust people too easily, had tried every so often to tie a little skepticism to my character and pretty much failed in the attempts. I honestly wanted to trust Antoine. So I sat in the episcopal residence undecided.
Bishop Lynch was presumably breaking fast in Folly, so I was alone when the Jesuit found me in the dining room, sipping tea after the morning liturgy. I felt desperately the need to discuss last night’s events with someone, especially with someone who might offer some sort of analysis. For all Flora’s goodness and sense of charity, she could not be expected to know enough about our investigation to help me with it. I had no intention of discussing the ripening intimacy between Gretchen Becknell and myself with anyone other than my regular confessor, to be sure, and maybe not with him either. After all, I had successfully fought off the temptation, hadn’t I? Plus, I swore I would never allow myself to get into anything even resembling a similar situation again.
Forestalling any further self-imposed questions about the temptations of the flesh, as we Catholics so quaintly refer to the natural drive to copulate, I thought instead about how to break the story of the attack on my person most efficaciously to Father Gagnon. Surely it would prove to be germane in our investigation of the murder. I needn’t have bothered. As it turned out, he barely gave me the opportunity for a civilized greeting.
Certainly, he wasted no time on inconsequentials. He started right off engaging my mind with his own eclectic and spirited one. Before I could entice him into an evaluation of the drama of the previous night, he caught me up in a subject he had passed on last time around. It was almost as if his intellect worked in cycles.
“Who is the most famous American bishop thus far, do you think, Thomas?”
“Why, uh, I would imagine that to be our own John England. Possibly John Carroll of Baltimore, since he was the first ever, I mean, and he did some big things. But, no, I think I’ll stick with the first Bishop of Charleston. John England certainly had the most influence. He started the first Catholic newspaper, dined with presidents, addressed congress—”
“To say nothing of writing the first pastoral letter in the country, opening the first southern seminary and—” Father Gagnon paused theatrically. “—he was the first American bishop to ordain a Negro priest.”
Antoine sat there looking smug while I had to admit to myself, and to him, that I was impressed with his knowledge of the arcane. He explained that Bishop England had been in charge of Haiti, as well as being the ordinary of the Carolinas and Georgia, such as the diocese was composed at that time. In the 1830s, England went to Haiti and ordained George Paddington, a colored man and a native of Dublin, remarkable as that sounds. Father Paddington had been evangelized by Pierre Toussaint, whom I knew from his work in New York and my assignment to crowd control at his funeral. That event probably solidified my tendency toward abolitionism, which was now being tested by the persuasive arguments of Bishop Patrick Lynch, so this news from Antoine Gagnon stoked me with energy. My adventures of the night before and the woeful shortage of sleep I enjoyed because of them seemed to suddenly whisk away, like the nocturne mist when the morning breeze blew in from the sea. This was intriguing news to me. But my colleague was not done yet with intrigue.
“Do you also know, Father Dockery, that the good first Bishop of Charleston tried to justify slavery?”
“If you mean his letters to John Forsyth, he was only defending Pope Gregory from the label of abolitionist. I hardly think that qualifies him as an apologist for slavery.”
“I’m afraid you’re wrong again, my well-intentioned friend. Bishop England actually defended slavery on scriptural grounds in those arguments to Forsyth. He set the tone for Catholics in the South,” Antoine went on. “The Irish-born bishop wanted badly to be a true American, you see, and I think he felt obligated to take the side of the people who counted in his society, which was, of course, both Southern and aristocratic. Dr. England’s friends owned plantations and needed slaves to maintain their way of life. And as brilliant as he was supposed to have been, he must have appreciated exactly what he was doing.”
“Antoine, you’re making much of very little. I hope. Bishop England was a great man. Look at all he did for Catholicism in this young nation. His whole attitude about the Church, the notion that she belongs to the people, made him a man who will go down in history as the great prelate of nineteenth century America. And his conciliatory attitude toward Protestants! Why, he spoke of our common humanity and how we should never let what he called `mere religious differences’ separate us all. Can you imagine what courage and foresight that kind of thinking took? How could one reconcile what you’ve told me with his reputation? With his legacy?”
Antoine shrugged eloquently. After a minute, he said. “All humans are complicated children of God, friend.”
“Did Bishop England own slaves himself, do you think?”
“Yes, I believe both he and his successor Bishop Reynolds owned at least one slave each. England was reputedly to have remarked privately that he found the concept of slavery reprehensible. He apparently believed the Catholic theologians who made a sort of fine distinction between what they called chattel slavery, where the slave has no rights, and ameliorated slavery. That’s the kind we’re supposed to tolerate. It’s a benevolent type, and according to Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of my own precious state, there are some Catholic slaveholders who do recognize the rights of their slaves.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.”
“The only problem is that chattel slavery is the kind being practiced most commonly in the South, not ameliorated, although I believe as does Bishop Martin, and pray, that Catholics practice ameliorated slavery on the whole. At least we know that the official Catholic Church does.”
