Full of Eyes, page 13
“Whyever did you want in, in the first place?” Antoine’s voice was drawled out, languid, almost insolent.
Quillery snapped up at that, a brief fire darted through his eyes and died out.
“I—I thought the house were empty. I wanted to see if—er—something had been left there. Accidental like. Didn’t reckon nobody were to home. I’m sorry, lad,” he said to me. “I hope you weren’t hurt when ye toppled off the porch.”
Antoine answered for me.
“Father Dockery is obviously recovered from your unprovoked, and illegal, assault, Reverend Quillery. What were you looking for in the bishop’s house?”
“That I cannot say. It involves an innocent person.”
“Bollocks.”
Quillery sprung out of his slouch at that, betraying the musculature of his core. A flash sparked and snapped in his eyes.
“Don’t ye dare use profane language to a man of God! Yer in me own home, man, have ye no respect for age at least?”
“Your actions hardly encourage respect of any sort, Reverend. One might expect a common thief to attack an innocent person in the dark, not a man of God. Now, what were you hoping to find?”
“I cannot say. I’m sworn to secrecy, for the love of God.”
Quillery slumped back over. Antoine looked at me, and I raised my eyebrows in resignation. The priest spoke again, this time in a low voice. “Who are you trying to protect, Reverend Quillery?”
“I cannot say. I cannot say.”
We were quiet for few moments after that, and the older man seemed to collect himself. I told him we were leaving but had no intention of abandoning our investigation. He stood with us. He stopped working his mouth long enough to crack it in what must have been an attempted smile.
“Before ye go, would ye take some spring onions for yer kitchen? I’ve a lovely crop in the back garden.”
Bishop Lynch was an active listener. He asked a quick question now and then. He grunted, smiled, frowned, and either nodded or shook his head as you talked to him. His pale eyes peered at you, widened when you gesticulated, crinkled when you joked, narrowed when you growled. He sighed at injustices and whistled soundlessly at superlatives. I expect he would take up his pectoral cross by the bottom if you blasphemed. There was never any doubt that he was listening to and hearing what was being said to him. Whether or not he was interested was another question entirely, but the speaker at least thought that he or she had the bishop’s interest piqued.
This time, I was sure of it. He absorbed my tale of Andrew Quillery’s perfidy and my experience with Antoine Gagnon at his house. When it became his turn to tell a tale, he gave as good as he got, for his verbal sketches of the war talk at Folly were fascinating. Young men from Cheraw and the other hometowns of the Lynch clan were already signing up to fight for the Cause. Women were sewing and knitting uniforms, and God help us, bandages. CSA quartermasters were buying and beginning to stockpile grain and salted meats. Army wranglers were inspecting local horses. And flag officers were plotting a Southern strategy.
One dashing Southern gentleman who knew the name of the Revolutionary War champion Francis Marion told guests of the Lynch tribe that he was figuring on evening the odds against the Yankee numerical superiority by hiding his troops and horses in the swamps and striking out like summer lightning when the men in blue least expected it. Just like Marion himself had done in South Carolina when the British held superior numbers and equipment. The bishop grinned hugely when he told of reactions from some of the younger women to the bold talk from the dashing cavalry soldier who wanted to become famous as the Swamp Fox of modern times.
“He’s a wealthy young man, self-made they tell me, the son of a blacksmith or something. His name is Nathan Bedford Forrest,” the bishop said. “His friends called him Bedford.”
“Generally, though,” the bishop said, “the war talk had a sobering effect on the people gathered at Conlaw Lynch’s summer home. There was plenty of emotional patriotism displayed and bravado too, if the truth be told, but there was also enough real strategic blueprinting going on to make the guests, young and old, realize clearly that the South, at least, expected imminent war.
“Plus, Abraham Lincoln, whose election I daresay provoked the secession of this fine state, has issued a call for seventy-five thousand volunteers. Border states are protesting the draft, and that, in itself, will probably lead to further separation between north and south.
“Northerners are insulted, one businessman told my cousin, by our attack on Fort Sumter, if you can believe that effrontery. We have a foreign army garrisoned in our own harbor, and they get insulted when we chase them off. Imagine!”
Then the Bishop of Charleston sat back and sighed aloud. He seemed to let the Lord’s peace enter so that I could see his body visibly relax. We were sitting on the second floor porch or piazza, as Charlestonians called them, as we talked, a light breeze lifting our hair. Our porch overlooked Broad Street so that we could see what are known as single houses fronting the alleys that lead down to the harbor.
The weather had cooled overnight, so the full sun was pleasant on our shoulders and had a salutary effect on our souls, harrowed as they were with threats to peace and the cares of the diocese. A few Negroes were out hawking their wares on the streets below us, thin onions—mine from Reverend Quillery’s garden were even now being chopped by Flora in the kitchen below—and overwintered collards, baskets of oysters, eels and fish.
We could hear their cries and the bursts of stout laughter that seemed to accompany so many purchases or negotiations in the city. Wagons clattered and creaked their way up Broad every so often, scattering pigeons and the occasional brood of chickens.
Off in the near distance, gulls screeched, and a line of elegant pelicans glided low over the water, searching for dinner with studious aplomb. We could smell a tang of salt on the breeze and the bouquet of honeysuckle vines that clung to the brickwork and balustrades all around us. Across the street, the big houses were afloat in yellow ponds of daffodil.
We both felt the need to grab onto brief moments of tranquility in this setting, so our conversation became slow and desultory, despite or perhaps because of, the nature of our news. We paused regularly to let nature’s peace come over us, knowing it would be a precious commodity in the future.
I had to work at accepting peace just then, there seemed to be so much on my plate that needed cleaning up. I knew something had to be done about the murder of Jamieson Carter and about my own inner turmoil, burbling with doubts and questions, as well as I knew that I needed moments of serenity to soothe my soul. At this very time, in a Charleston spring with the guns of division silent for a while, this verandah was as good as the cathedral itself for quieting souls.
After the bishop’s sigh, I knew from the tone of his exhalation and the timing of it that the hour had finally come to get down to business. We both sat up, almost in tandem, and had a hard talk then, discussing the preacher Quillery’s revelations, our options and responsibilities and speculating about the murder. Lynch’s sharp mind probed, uncovered a question or two I wished I’d asked of Quillery or of Gretchen. The sun was behind the house before we finished. We were glad to respond to Flora’s bell, because both the enervating talk and the falling sun had sucked the warmth from us. Her catfish stew, a Negro specialty that we had adopted for ourselves in the bishop’s house, was the perfect antidote to the chill that had taken over. It was peppery and rich, served hot with slabs of cornbread.
That night I heard things I didn’t want to hear and saw things I knew could not exist. I blamed Reverend Quillery’s onions in the soup, but surely my own saturated mind must have had its say to its subconscious.
CHAPTER 16
T
he horror began when a great gust woke me in an alarmed state. It was well after midnight. A cold wind banged the shutters in dissonance as it charged in through the window. Wisps of what seemed to be a red and green miasma slipped into my room with the breeze. Afraid to breathe in the bizarre fog I got up quickly, with a groan of foreboding, and went to block it from my room by locking the shutters. The colors on the breeze, I thought, must be the remnants from some dream or nightmare, or an aftereffect of the spicy stew. I shook my head, rubbed my face, and reached for the shutters. I stopped dead with both hands on the two handles when I saw what lived outside my room in the packed dirt of the path to the stables. A man dug in the soil, grunting and clawing with his hands. Clumps flew from the hole he was digging, and the colored air swirled about him. He stopped suddenly and looked up, directly into my eyes. His own were a certain frightening and empty gray, as if they harbored no life behind them, and his chest heaved with labored breathing. His lips flapped and his cheeks sunk as he blew and sucked air. He continued to lower his vacant stare at me as he sat back on his haunches, shoulders slumped until his breathing eased. Then he jerked his hands out of the hole and raised up what he had been unearthing, a fiendish, almost maniacal grin outlining his black, toothless mouth.
He held aloft a vision so gruesome that I wanted to turn away. I felt gizzard bile rise in my throat and I gagged. But I did not vomit, could not wrench myself from the impossible scene beneath my window.
The man in the dirt was holding the severed head of a Negro. Its eyes showed only white and its tongue dangled from its mouth. The head was muddied but not bloodied, and I could detect no smell on the peculiar green and red air. I could not help but notice the anguished expression on its face, however. It stared at nothing, begged for mercy in silence. Wet dirt slipped off the head with tiny plopping sounds. Neither the monster below nor I moved or uttered a sound of our own. We were frozen in a tableau of horror, him grinning like a brainless maniac and me white-faced with shock. Then he began to laugh.
It was wild laughter, shocking in its inappropriateness, terrifying in its madness. I found myself with a sudden and fierce case of the shivers just then, more from the eerie scene in the street than from the cool night. Only as I pulled my nightshirt closer to my neck did I recognize the face of the severed head beneath the dirt that clumped on its eyebrows and stuffed its nose. It was Uncle Williams.
I knew I had to do more than stare in dread. I reached for my robe on the bedpost behind me. When I turned back to the window, both the man in the dirt and the detached head he carried were gone.
I managed to stuff my wooden feet into a pair of slippers and pull on the robe. I felt absurdly clumsy and stiff. Breathing in quick gulps through my mouth, I hurtled upstairs, and before I knew my destination, I found myself tapping rapidly at Flora’s door.
Maybe the house slave thought that early morning calls in the dark by the associate pastor were destined to become part of her life in the bishop’s service, because she was robed herself and out the door in seconds with a burning oil lamp held in front of her.
Flora wore a flannel nightcap that under saner circumstances might have looked comical to me, but this time I was so glad of the company and her lamp that I hardly noticed the cap.
“There’s something outside you must see.”
She didn’t answer, although her head may have bobbed. It was hard to tell with the lamp flickering as we padded quickly to the front door. There was no one outside. I looked up and down the street for a retreating figure, but there was nothing to see and not a noise to be heard. The breeze had died off, leaving no trace of the red and green air I had seen. It was a clear night and cold. It took with it the atmosphere of my room. I felt awake, alert. The stiffness and sense of unreality seemed to have gone with the colored vapors. I realized I had rousted poor Flora for nothing. I rubbed my forehead with the side of my forefinger and turned to offer an apology. She was staring at the road. I turned back to follow her intense gaze and saw it myself. There was a hole in the path with a pile of dirt next to it.
Flora stoked the embers and made coffee. We shared a cup in the kitchen as our muddied slippers dried near the wood stove. As my shivering got under control, I told her what I had seen. After a minute, she spoke for the first time.
“I expect you’ll see Uncle Williams at church in a couple hours, Father.”
I nodded, staring blankly into the cup. Neither of us mentioned the hole outside the front door.
After a few more minutes, Flora broke the embarrassed silence by telling me about Uncle Williams. He was a proud man, she said, who managed his conversion to Catholicism by turning quiet as he aged.
Most slaves, most Negroes, took a more flexible approach to Christianity than that offered by the universal Catholic Church.
“We like preaching men who can raise our feelings some. This here Catholic Church is too formal, y’know, for most niggers. Though, Lord knows, that bishop can raise some feelings now.”
Uncle Williams, she said, was a farm manager for a large plantation after an early career as a farm hand. He was delegated the duties of arranging for the sale of harvested crops and the purchase of seed. Flora said it was a trusted position that took him a lifetime to obtain, even though he never touched actual money, everything being arranged on credit. The credit system worked because southern gentlemen were scrupulously honest and trustworthy, traits that proved remarkably absent when Uncle Williams grew too old and stiff to function adequately. He was still shy of sixty when that happened, the hard work of a lifetime wearing his body down. First his master gave him an apprentice to learn the trade and assist the older man, according to Flora. Once that apprentice knew the ins and outs of farm management, however, he was promoted and Uncle Williams was set free. Set free when he was too old and decrepit to make a living on his own.
He came to see Flora, because he knew her from both their extended families, extensions that were far too complex and convoluted for outsiders to comprehend. Flora arranged for the old man to do some odd jobs around the chancery and cathedral. In return, she fed him and found him lodgings in her morass of slave quarters up on Legare Street. The arrangement was not approved formally by me or the bishop, nor even by Mrs. Ryan, but everyone gave his or her tacit approval by not commenting on it. We never noticed the difference in our accounts and, before long, Uncle Williams was just another part of our world. He was always around, quiet and self-effacing, doing anything asked of him and never asking anything of us. He rarely came to the house, and never in it, but he became a fixture in church. We were kind to him and sort of accepted him as part of the diocesan establishment. I don’t think any of us ever spoke to him about personal things, although I suspected that Bishop Lynch may have done so. Uncle Williams was particularly fond of him.
Eventually, the old freedman converted to our faith. I never knew if his motivation was sincere or if he was merely responding to earthly salvation by joining the church that provided him a means to grow even older without begging. The bishop had received him into the church before I arrived in Charleston. I made a silent vow, as I listened to Flora’s story of Uncle Williams’ trials and tribulations, to make a point of getting to know the man better.
Flora fell silent and began to move around the kitchen quietly, getting the space ready for another day. I roused myself to action. I knew it would be futile to go back to bed. Dawn was no more than a few feet below the horizon by then. I apologized for waking Flora, but she waved it off, saying that it was near time for her to get up anyways. I went back to my room and dressed. I wrapped a wool scarf around my neck and left the house as quietly as possible. There was no sound from the kitchen.
I looked down at the hole again. It looked fairly shallow in the pre-dawn darkness, and even if I couldn’t see clearly, I imagined that it could scarcely have contained a head. There were signs around it, of digging and footprints. I imagined I could detect lines where fingers had scraped soil away from the insides of it. It was still too dark to see if any of the moisture in the dirt was blood. The hole smelled of damp and worms and death.
I walked quickly down to the Battery. I sat on a bollard and watched the sky turn light. A spray of pink cloud flumed from Sullivan’s Island across to Fort Sumter. A bell tolled from a buoy that rocked when a gull landed on it. Otherwise, the sea was quiet. After a while I imagined a tiny figure raising the Stars and Bars out at the fort. It was too far to see without a glass, and if reveille played, I couldn’t hear it.
I prayed in the silence, in my own outdoor basilica, and began to think about the contrast between the beautiful Catholic cathedrals and the plain churches of our Baptist neighbors. It’s not only the sacramentals and other external trappings that distinguish us from our brothers in Christ who dwell in protest. Some values, rules of behavior and practices are startling in their contrasts. Douglas Deas once told me that he and other Baptists find their religion to be overly serious and humorless, and enjoined on me to tell him a Catholic joke, since “you Catholics don’t seem to mind having a drink or two and enjoying life.” I know that Doug was hoping I’d tell a bishop joke. Baptists cannot imagine how pastors can manage to function as free Americans under the thumb of a local prelate, to say nothing of the authority of the pope.
I told him the story about Father Edison, an upper New York parish priest who was always at loggerheads with his bishop over the administration of his church. It seemed to the priest that the bishop was hidden from reality in his big house on the hill and did not appreciate the many minor and major afflictions that attended to the operation of a small parish. Finally, one sunny summer day, Father Edison screwed up his courage and journeyed to the see city to have it out with the bishop once and for all. They would settle the contentious issues that stood between them, even if it meant reassignment to a rural parish at the Canadian border for the priest.
When Father Edison knocked on the door of the bishop’s residence, he was met by a red-eyed housekeeper who informed him that the dear bishop had passed away in his sleep that very night. The priest bowed his head and walked slowly away.
