Balm (2 page)

“Yes, ma'am.”

She stepped aside. The house looked clean, but an odor like rotting fruit hung in the air.

“Once you get work, you can pay my husband. He at work right now. I take care of things. I'm Mrs. Jenkins.”

He saw a few repairs that needed to be made—a tilted floorboard, a gouged table—and he made up his mind to do things around the house until he found work.

She watched his eyes. “This ain't no fancy place. I provides a roof.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He wondered who had struck her.

A fly landed on his ear. He brushed off the tickle. She showed him the windowless room where he would sleep. Two narrow beds with just enough space to walk sideways between them. Rolled sleeping pallets lay against a wall. The walls were dark planks riddled with holes.

“I expect you hungry.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I cook once a day. In the morning before you go off to work, you and the mens sit down with my husband. You got to fend for your other eats.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Course I don't allow for no loafing. You can't sit round here all day.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Come on eat. It's some hoecakes left. You look hungry as a mule. Then get yourself on out in them streets and get some work.”

“Yes, thank you, ma'am.”

“You don't say much, do you? That's good. Ain't room but for one talker round here. Haw!”

When he was seated at the rough-hewn table, she set a plate and fork in front of him. He mopped the gravy with a finger, picked up the plate and licked it.

She chuckled as she took it from him. “Toilet and a well out back.”

“Ma'am?”

“What you need now?”

“I ain't ate like that since my wife Annie was around.”

She paused. “Well, God rest her soul. I suppose the good Lord taking care of her now.”

“Fact is, she still living. I come up this way hoping to hear word of her.”

“Annie, huh?”

“Got a daughter go by the name Herod. We from Kentucky, south of Danville, worked on a hemp farm owned by a Mr. Harrison.”

“Well, I don't know nothing right off, but I sure will keep an ear on it. Everybody come through here looking for one person or another. Now. What's your name?”

“Hemp Harrison.”

She paused, became serious. “I see. Now don't go getting lost, Mr. Hemp Harrison. If you do, just ask around for the Jenkins house.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Hemp got work loading ships a week later and earned his first wages as a free man. He bought a sack, shoes, pants, but even his first paying job could not help him shake the sadness. He asked everyone he met, but no one knew of a woman fitting Annie's description. He
decided it would be better for him to stay in one place. It did not make sense for both him and Annie to be moving around.

Before the month was out he knew that as nice as Mrs. Jenkins was, he could not go on sleeping in that tight, dark room. It reminded him too much of his cabin in the quarters. He began to think of where he could settle. He pooled his money with a group of men and they found a place. A two-room house with four men was sure better than a narrow sliver of a room with five.

F
OR TWO YEARS
S
ADIE TRIED TO PLAY
the role of grieving widow. She was not familiar with the art, and without female friends to guide her she floundered. She skimmed an article on the subject, the pages of the magazine flat and smooth on her bedside table. Finally, she placed the burden in the hands of the finest couturier in the city.

When the boy delivered a package found in the storehouse containing the train's wreckage, she tore at the paper, expecting to see the likeness produced from the photograph taken on their wedding day. Instead, it was a portrait of her dead husband in a uniform.

“Is there another one?” she asked the courier.

“No, ma'am,” he replied.

She peered at the space above the mantel and knew it was where Samuel had intended to hang his own image.

All of the things he had bought for the house had been imported: the set of wingback chairs, the Queen Anne table, longcase clock,
Oriental rugs. All from another world, even her. She sat beneath his portrait, knowing he'd desired a wife who would dwell amid his collection. She'd promised on their wedding day not to forsake him, so she left the house exactly as he'd furnished it, keeping the same coachman to tend the horses and the same cook to prepare the meals. She was still a wife.

At night, lying alone in the bed where she'd expected to perform her marital duty, Sadie tried to imagine what life would have been like had he lived. She pictured a stage with her on it: moving among society, entertaining, offering the demure smile and downcast eye as coyly as a trained actress. Invitations arrived, but she refused them all in a politely worded hand. She had no doubt many of the social calls were misguided attempts at matchmaking. She wrote lie-filled letters to her mother, astonishing herself with elaborate stories about parties she had never attended.

Had he lived, the city might have been more tolerable. But without him, the bitter cold was as unwelcoming as a house without walls. She was used to winter and the scratch of woolens, but this wind's force surprised her. Sometimes, it shoved her so brutally that she skipped a step. It was like being birthed all over again. She feared walking the streets where men stared at her unabashedly. She was unsure how she would get along without a husband in this dangerous place, and she was besieged by a sudden apprehension of empty things: carriages, doorways, alleys, rooms. The silence of the house when the servants retired startled her, and for the first time she understood what it meant to truly be alone. Despite the taste for solitude she'd craved in her youth, she now longed for someone with whom she could share her impressions. And she knew that, though he had not at all been her choice, the scent of his breath enough to elicit a shiver, she missed him, or at least, his companionship.

Each spring, she waited for the snow to melt, thinking over and
over that once it was gone she would see the city anew. She could not go back to her parents, and, fortunately, the fortune left behind by Samuel afforded her a great deal of choice in that matter. Despite the brevity of the marriage, he had seen to it that a will was in place. A remote cousin in New York sent a threatening letter, but the lawyer, a faithful associate of the deceased, replied sternly enough to fend off the advances.

She sought companionship in books. A bookseller visited the house weekly, and she ordered from him in every subject—astronomy, horticulture, social reform—developing an obsession with the periodicals of the day. She perused
Harper's
,
Putnam's
, and
Graham's
, devouring news of the war. She imagined herself as part of a broad reading public, musing over the same ideas at the same time, and whenever she yearned for company, she thought of those other eyes, as eager as her own. She read until her back ached, took her meals in the upstairs library, napped in the chair with a book on her lap.

But the disapproving frowns of Olga, the cook, finally got to her, and she tried to get out of the house more. It was summer, and the heat rose like a vengeful guest finally arrived. She tried to make sense of the city's battery of noise—its squawking voices and the strident pealing of bells. Whores looked wall-eyed at her, and the sun hid behind a gown of dust that never cleared.

She left the carriage behind, ventured out alone. The hungry hunkered down into rubble, squatting in alleys. She passed a window, caught a glimpse of herself. She was no different from them: war widows. Cast-off dogs. No one to take her arm. No one to warn her before she stepped into a pile of something soft, the fetor rising. She was both newcomer and old settler. She could not go back to York, nor could she stay in her current state. Within that endless grid of city, horror engulfed, and her memory of recoil at Samuel's touch sifted into the benign. The death of her husband had freed her, but it had
also imprisoned her within rows of up-slanted buildings that towered like iron bars.

She felt something open within her, a chill encircling her chest despite the day's heat. She turned to look for her carriage, whirling wildly. The noise rose, fell, sickened her. And she, lost, could not make it home, did not know north from south. A silly idea to tell the driver she would walk. This was, in the end, how Samuel had left her, alone in this teeming city. She stumbled, scanning the fronts of buildings for a safe place. A restaurant, perhaps. But she only saw warehouses, furniture stores, liveries. She fell off the sidewalk, caught herself before she hit the ground, wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her dress, and heard the soft rip of fine cotton. And then, amid it all, she heard him whisper, the sound of a man's throaty tones so close that only she could hear, and she was certain, from the very onset, that this voice was not an illusion. She shook her head. There was no one nearby, yet she clearly heard it again.

That way
, he said.
That way is home
.

“C
ALL A DOCTOR
,” she told the cook.

“Something wrong? Are you sick?”

“Yes, yes, I am.”

The doctor did not come until the next morning, and by that time Sadie's distress was pitch high.

“I'm Dr. Michael Heil,” he said, handing her his card.

“There is a voice,” she said before he could put down his bag. “In my head.”

“Please, be seated.” He pressed a palm to her forehead while Olga looked on.

“He speaks to me. He says he is a dead man.”

“How long have you heard these voices?”

“There is just one. And I've been hearing him for two days now.”

“The war has just ended, and many people are still recovering. You are without family? You lost someone in the war?” The doctor looked at her black dress, thinking of his own ghost.

“I have never had a history of problems. At least, I don't believe I have.”

“Are you taking any medicines?”

“Can you make him stop talking to me?”

“I can give you something to help you sleep at night.”

“He speaks during the day.”

“You must rest,” he said.

“Do you believe in such things?”

“Such things?”

“Yes. The dead speaking.”

Olga coughed.

“I'm afraid I don't,” he responded.

“Of course not. You are a man of science. Surely you have no fears.”

“We all have our fears.” He searched through his bag until he found a small glass bottle. He set it down beside her. “Put a drop in your tea when you are ready to sleep.”

The doctor moved and she pinned his wrist with her thin fingers. He looked at her.

“Help me,” she said.

“There isn't much I can do, I'm afraid.”

Sadie turned as the doctor and Olga moved toward the door, their hushed whispers cornering her within certain madness. She heard him say: “Shall I visit in a week to see if there is anything more I can do?”

I won't hurt you. I told you so. It's just that it has been so long since I talked.

She sipped directly from the medicine bottle before rising to light all of the room's lamps. The faint scent of gas tickled her nostrils.

Listen.

The curtains puffed, and she shut the window. When she turned, Olga stood watching her.

I served in the Fourth Illinois Cavalry. We were mustered into service on the twenty-sixth of September in the year 1861. I died on April 6, 1862, after the battle at Shiloh.

“What's that, Mrs. Walker?”

General Grant was most capable. He earned our respect.

“That will be all, Olga.”

“Do you need anything?”

It was a most gruesome battle. You would not believe.

“No. No, nothing.”

“Well . . .”

Sadie nodded nervously. Good God. Am I going mad?

“Thank you, Olga.”

The woman hesitated, then turned to leave.

E
ACH DAY, HE SPOKE TO
S
ADIE
more often, sometimes so rapidly she could not think. It became difficult to be around people, and she avoided them altogether, sending Olga out for the simplest errands. One day he was not there and the next he was, and it was impossible to remember what true solitude had felt like. The cook suggested that a ride around the neighborhood might do her some good.

The woman was right. When Sadie sank into the green cushions of the carriage, she could quiet him if she chose. He called her darling and she could have sworn he stroked her cheek. It was, in the end, easier if she did not fight. He did not silence her as her father had done or dismiss
her as Samuel had. He listened patiently, delivering to her the rise of the mind she'd always craved.

And he did not come to her with judgment, his voice like a minister's call to the gospel, a merciful flood of acceptance. She had never been particularly religious, but her esteem for the spiritual increased. She fasted out of respect for this gift, refusing food for days. She caused the cook a great deal of worry when she appeared in the drawing room wearing only a chemise. Sadie had desired companionship, and it came in the form of this peculiar voice.

She sat—listening, receiving, awakening to the pleasure of unrivaled attention.

My wife passed a year ago. A heart condition. Now there are just my parents and a brother.

What is your name? she finally asked.

My name
, he said,
is Private James Heil
.

The driver quietly tapped on the window. She was startled to discover that she had been sleeping in the back of the carriage. Her skin was warm, and she felt moisture in her undergarments. When she looked over at the seat beside her, she half-expected to see it compressed with the shape of his body. She believed she had done something unseemly in her stupor, and the thought frightened her.