Full of Eyes, page 17
Antoine, who seemed perfectly collected and calm in the face of these sensational speculations by the bishop, inexorably found his voice. “And might I suggest, Excellency, that speed is of the essence for us? Once the second ship is unloaded tomorrow night or soon after, the contraband cotton bales will be aboard in another day or so. If they get to sea, we’ve lost, since none of our warships could expect to slip past the federalist blockade of Charleston harbor to give chase to the Carter merchantmen.”
Bishop Lynch and I stared at Antoine for a short second. It was the first time he’d spoken up since greeting the bishop thirty minutes ago. Of course, he was perfectly correct. Merchant ships heading north were one thing. Armed Confederate men of war chasing them would be taken under fire by Union warships almost certainly, even though the blockade was more threat than substance since the shelling of Ft. Sumter.
“You are absolutely right, Father. We must move quickly. I will put this all down in a letter to my friend Davis, while you two find me a runner and a strong mount for the trip to Savannah. I believe that Jefferson Davis is addressing the Southern Baptist Convention there on the weekend.”
I went out on the mare to find Bones—wondering all the while of the ironies wrought by war, not only the greed of two prominent people but of an Episcopalian from Mississippi addressing a Baptist convention in Georgia—while a stable hand made Jasper ready for the run south. It seemed further ironic that Bones, who had caught up Jasper when he broke free from downtown and then tried to extort money for his care, would now be trusting his health to the care taken of that same animal. But Jasper was in fine fettle and ready to travel. Bones had nothing better to do, not surprisingly, and was easily tempted by the prospect of an adventure and a little spending money when he returned. At his age, riding fast across the country held no fear. His aunt Flora made him a packet of foodstuffs for the trip.
He was soon thundering off for Savannah, just more than 100 miles distant, with Bishop Lynch’s letter to Davis in his saddlebag. I felt that things were moving awfully fast.
Antoine had a class to teach and some pastoral duties that would take up the rest of the day and evening, and I was similarly committed. As I made hospital rounds and spoke with parish groups, my mind constantly swerved around to Savannah with a query about Bones and his mission. But, of course, I had no answers. We didn’t expect to hear anything from him until he returned in person.
Bishop Lynch was scheduled to travel to Columbia for a church dedication, but he was anxious also to hear from Jefferson Davis. He was probably as tempted as was I to ride over to The New Town for a peek, but we were both able to restrain our curiosity. Certainly, we didn’t want Becknell or the Carter girl to get wind of our interest.
When I came back from a supper meeting of the Ladies Guild, a trying affair, as usual, with the women seemingly torn between acts of genuine charity and social justice on the one hand and scheming politics on the other. These women were sharp and influential. The layers of southern civility that each could peel away and recover in an instant, as the immediate occasion demanded, rendered a rudimentary analysis of events impossible. It was all I could do to follow their machinations, if only to steer clear of the fireworks when they erupted. Not that the women wanted me involved in their skirmishes. I was at the meeting to offer a prayer at beginning and end and to advise them on needy charities and what other parish organizations were doing. I like to think that the presence of a Roman collar in their midst served to temper their vitriol a bit. All of the women were older than me and much surer of their authority, so I never even thought of censuring any outbreaks.
They kept their own books and, certainly, their own battle plans. Even so, they were able before the evening ended to manage their affairs, settle disputes and learn all the news in town. Their witticisms and knowledge of events amazed me and kept me on my toes all during the meeting, so it was draining, and I was happy to hear the last Amen. I did learn one tidbit, however, that interested me. One of the women heard on the grapevine that the Charleston Police Department considered the murder in the cathedral a robbery, probably by an unknown assailant, and that the case was unofficially closed. This was gossip, not fact, but it made me think when I overheard it that it may, after all, be up to three Catholic priests to solve the crime. I walked home slowly thinking about what we knew and trying to fit the pieces together in my mind. I did not have enough information yet.
In the big house, I met Flora in the dining room. She was putting silverware up in felt-lined drawers. Once, nearly two years ago now, when I came upon her in the market district, she was speaking with a group of Negro women in Gullah. It was lovely to hear, but utterly incomprehensible to anyone who had not grown up with it. It was the language of slaves here in the Lowcountry. When I expressed an interest in learning more about it, Flora diplomatically agreed to pass on the slave gossip instead. Surely they did not want a white priest able to interpret their conversations. So Flora had gotten into the habit of telling me what the slave community was going on about when I asked, a trade of gossip for continued confidentiality.
“Any news from the marketplace these days, Miss Flora?”
She had given me a biscuit and honey for a late snack to go with the buttermilk I’d gotten from the window ledge where we kept it in the cool six months of the year. She hadn’t asked.
When I plunked down with a sigh at the dining room table, she just went back to the kitchen and made up the biscuit. She knew that Ladies Guild suppers were not filling enough for a young man.
“The preacher man’s acting the fool again, I hear tell.”
“What’s the Reverend Quillery on about now?”
“Bad stuff about our church.”
“He cannot stomach Catholics, can he?”
“He told my friend Caroline that the Catholic Church be the whore of Babylon. Got it straight from the Bible, he says.”
“Yeah, Revelation. It’s pretty obvious to anyone with the sense to check out the history of the book that the writer was talking about the Roman empire, but some anti-Catholics insist on interpreting the allusions to Rome as if John meant the Roman Church. At the time, there was only one Christian church. Be awful silly to curse your own church now, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, I do agree, Father Tom. I suspect that some folk listen to the preacher man and don’t know no better, though.”
“Um, yes, I’m sure you’re right about that.”
“He was right wild yesterday, though. More than usual. Yelling about statues, idols he call them, and how they can poison a house and stuff. He sounded crazy enough to scare some of my friends near to death. He looks odd to me.”
“Odd?”
“Yeah. Maybe like he going crazy, `stead of just sounding like it. He’s got this big long coat all buttoned up, even in the sun. When he was hollering about Mary one time he pulled at his hair. Maybe his brain been hurt or something.”
“What was he saying about Mary?”
“He was going on about her craven image, whatever he mean by that.”
I told her that Quillery was either mispronouncing graven, which meant carved, or that he thought the statues in Catholic churches and in some Anglican ones were cowardly ideas because we were afraid to confront Jesus or God directly and had to resort to intermediaries, hence craven. But while I was explaining that to Flora, part of my mind was harking back to the morning we discovered the murder. Chief Becknell had used the same language, calling the statue that had been used to kill Jamieson Carter a craven image.
Quillery was having a problem coping with reality, it seemed. He must have been driven by some obsession to dare break into a Broad Street residence, especially one belonging to a Catholic primate. He had acted in a bizarre manner when Antoine and I visited him at his house. And now he was raving badly enough to frighten slaves. I visited with Flora for a while longer, letting her calm gentleness ease the strain that I had accumulated trying to keep up with the women at their meeting. I told her the news and the gossip, as best I remembered it, from the meeting as she stood polishing silverware with a cloth so old and soft that I could see her dark fingers through it as she worked. It occurred to me that she never sat when I talked with her. She always found work to do, as if she was keeping the separation between our positions clear even as we socialized. Even so, I valued her advice, and so I asked her what she thought of the character of Gretchen Becknell, who could not be entirely eliminated as a suspect in the murder of her illicit lover Jamieson Carter.
Flora took a breath and looked down at me when she spoke. “That woman treat me like some white folk do, like I ain’t there. It prolly don’t mean much, but I think that way of thinking mean the person don’t be good in her heart, know what I mean? I hope I ain’t insulting your friend, Father Tom, but that’s what I think.”
“Please don’t fret about insulting my friends, Flora. When I ask your opinion, I do so because you tell the truth.”
“Well, I don’t know the Becknell woman too much, you heah? I know about her, and I drive her home that night. That’s what I think.”
Flora’s opinion bothered me more than I let on to her. She was perceptive about human nature and naturally charitable. She spoke highly of Mrs. Ryan, for instance, who could not have been an easy person to work with. But then I never witnessed Mrs. Ryan treating Flora as if she didn’t exist. The two women seemed to work the episcopal residence as equals. My soul was in turmoil when I finally left Flora in the dining room, but I managed to sleep soundly nevertheless.
Late the next morning, after Sunday services, I went looking for Andrew Quillery. I wanted to hear his rantings for myself. I found him easily enough. One of his obligations to his God was to proselytize in the public square, unabashedly trying to convert people, any or all people, to his brand of fundamentalism. The tactic irked other ministers, who were concerned more with converting the many unchurched Charlestonians than with members of other congregations. The other ministers were generally quite a bit subtler in their approach to evangelization, as well. None of that bothered Reverend Quillery. He harangued and bellowed out accusations and railed against heretics of all stripes. He did it nearly every Sunday. I admit that my dislike of his tactics and his theology was tempered by an admiration for his courage. It couldn’t be easy trying to evangelize on a street corner.
This day he had chosen the sidewalk in front of the Southern Clothing Emporium on King Street. Since he had set his crate in front of a store owned by two brothers named Levy, I thought his tirade would be directed against Jews. He was brazen that way. Jews had been a part of Charleston since the late seventeenth century, and for a while following the American Revolution, there were more Jews in Charleston than in any other city in the nation. What’s more, they were granted citizenship and voting rights, both, before Catholics. The local nativists have sort of avoided antagonizing them in their efforts to politically castrate Catholics from the old country.
One thing I had absolutely to avoid in observing Quillery was to become embroiled in public argument with him. Not only would that be unseemly and uncharitable in my brand of Christianity, but it would surely result in more embarrassment for the Catholic Church. The fundamentalist was a master debater, and I was hoping to witness some of his skills without becoming victim to them as I spied on his tactics. I stayed in the shade of another storefront, so that I was slightly behind the speaker, facing the crowd obliquely from a distance of twenty feet or so. The Reverend Quillery stepped up on his overturned box without so much as a glance in my direction and raised his hands and eyes to heaven. The Negroes in the crowd, mostly middle-aged women, looked fretful and stood close to one another. The children, of both races, had their eyes opened wide, as if the preacher was about to start telling ghost tales. White men lounged about nudging each other or smiling around their cigars.
Quillery drilled them all with his eyes, and even the men got still there in the street outside a clothing store in the full sun of a coolish April day.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said quietly. Bodies leaned toward him a tad. “Brothers and sisters,” he bellowed. Everyone jumped or started, you couldn’t help it. His voice hammered out at you, and its pitch caused a sharp pain in the cavity behind the eyes for a split second.
“I have come to tell you a tale today that is so sordid, so sinful, so egregious in ere implications, that you will scarce believe it. But it’s all true, brothers and sisters, all too, too true. It’s the story about a man who were struck down by God in the flower of his manhood for the hideous—hideous!—sacrilege he performed. He were not a man of the cloth, but he were a churchman nonetheless, and he paid for his dastardly sins with his very life. “
My throat felt dry and I swallowed hard. I had a horrible feeling that this sermon was going to be more than I wanted to hear.
CHAPTER 20
A
s Quillery spoke, it became immediately and abundantly clear that the preacher had not garnered his reputation and popularity by brimstone alone. He may have gotten their attention that morning in front of Levy’s store by scaring the tar out of his audience, but he soon began to weave a mesmerizing tale of love and betrayal and murder.
It was forbidden love, of course, so we knew the betrayal was bound to come. I certainly knew it, for the man was telling the story of Jamieson Carter. He used no names, called Gretchen the blond woman and Carter the church elder, but he told their story so clearly that I was stupefied. How could Quillery know all that he was telling? When he got to the ultimate sacrilege and the final betrayal, the crowd was staring at him, not a whisper nor a cough to be heard, not a jiggle of impatience nor a shift of weight. His burred accent carried clearly through the morning air.
“Then, my friends, the two who could not control their passions, who had fallen so far in their illicit union, plummeted to the very depths of depravity. They met in a church one night. Yes, in the very sanctuary of God. Even there, in that holy place, their souls were consumed with lust. It were not in one of our own churches where the two met, uh uh. Twas in a foreign, a European church. And if the church leader were a wrongheaded man, an anti-Christ even, the people of this story was not to be blamed for that. They considered their church a holy place, so that when the couple of this tale consummated the lust that truly consumed them—right there, folks, right there in the verra sanctuary of God—they realized that they had done a deed so evil that Christ himself could not forgive them.”
Quillery was fairly bellowing by this time. Spittle flew from his lips, and an unholy rage was etched into the craggy features of his face. The nostrils of his hatchet-sharp nose flared like a horse in full gallop.
“And they reacted to their final depravation according to their characters, friends. The church elder, which were basically a good man except for his uncontrollable desire for the blonde woman, fell to his knees in futile supplication. He become overwhelmed with his sense of guilt and pleaded with his God for mercy. He knelt sobbing at the altar, shamed to his very marrow and begging the forgiveness of the Lord.”
The preacher man stopped suddenly. When he spoke again it was in a quiet voice that had me straining to hear.
“We will never know if his voice were heard. We will never know because the woman acted out her reaction to their heinous, egregious sin. She offered a sacrifice to the God of that there foreign church. She swept up a craven image from the altar and crushed her lover’s skull with it while he knelt in prayer. Right there in front of God, in God’s house.
“And that is how they exist today, my friends, one in hell and one on the way. Even though she still walks among us, a personified evil, looking to do more of the devil’s work, she is damned for eternity.”
After a short stone silence, the people watching Andrew Quillery began to fidget. They wanted desperately, I knew, to ask the identity of the protagonists in his story, for there was never any doubt in our minds but that he was telling a true story.
The preacher man did not produce fabrications for the entertainment of the populace. To his listeners on Sunday afternoons, his stories were real and told to strike the fear of God into his listeners.
A man raised his hand and spoke above the murmuring that had begun to spread through the crowd like the stirring of dead leaves at dark.
“Was that there murder done in a synagogue, Reverend?”
Quillery fixed the hapless soul with his piercing eye, his rising color and sharp inhalation testimony to the wrath that was about to be spewed upon the questioner.
“Jews? Do ye think these evil people was Jews, for God’s sake, man? Do ye think the religion that give us the likes of Mordecai Cohen, our senator and servant of the people of Charleston for all his adult life—do ye think that faith could also produce scum the likes of which I just told thee about? Were ye drinking already before noon, man?”
The people hardly spent any sympathy on the poor excoriated man who had the audacity to speak out. His foolhardy question—or was it brave, do you think?—had answered all their questions in one fell swoop. If the foreign church where the abominations had taken place was not a temple of Judaism, then it perforce had to be Roman Catholic. The people in the street now knew with certainty that Quillery was referring to the murder in the cathedral when he told his story. After all, Carter’s braining was second in gossip value in April of 1861 only to the bombardment of our fort. The preacher man’s sharp attack on the questioner had dispelled all doubts. Some people needed absolute assurance.
A few other men patted the embarrassed man’s shoulder as he reddened furiously, but most were driven to great animation. The only religion considered foreign to Charleston other than Judaism was Catholicism. Many Charlestonians regularly referred to us as the Roman church. More ignorant ones called us papists, as if the appellation was a slur of some kind. It was a time-honored exclusion that was only now beginning to yield to education and familiarity. The British parliament had never allowed Catholics to vote in the New World when they were in charge of the colonies. “Protestants, Jews and Quakers” were naturalized by an act of parliament in 1740, but Catholics were specifically excluded. You can put off that discriminatory action by the English to a lingering apology for Henry VIII and his anti-Catholic sentiments, if you want, but things did not change appreciably in the immediate aftermath of the revolution that drove the heirs to Henry’s concupiscence from our shores. The British may not have beheaded Catholics as Henry did Thomas More, but the discrimination they practiced was live and official. It rubbed off on the colonists. Even after the American victory in the revolution over British rule, Catholics could not hold office.
