Coffins (11 page)

Benjamin, who was a year older than handsome Tom, then launched into a tale whose main point seemed to be how the Captain had always favored his third and “prettiest” son, lavishing him with presents that included, on his tenth birthday, an exquisite sloop done up in the finest “Bristol” style. “It was built by Hiram Lowell himself,” Ben said, his eyes twinkling, “of the best white cedar. Frames of oak, and trimmed out with scads of varnished Honduran mahogany. I believe the tiller was carved from the jawbone of a whale, was it not?”

“Right enough,” Nathaniel agreed. “Father brought it back from New Bedford when he sold
Sandpiper
, to be converted into a whaler. I remember that ship, a stout three-master—and I remember the whalebone tiller on Tom's little sloop. A man in New Bedford made a specialty of items like that. Very stylish in those days. Everybody had to have a whalebone tiller.”

“Do you remember how bad it leaked, Tom's little sloop?”

“Oh,” said Nathaniel with a chuckle. “Indeed. What terrible boys we were, Ben, to do a thing like that. And Tom such a good sport about it, despite our cruelty.”

Their “cruelty,” it seemed, was opening up the seams of the birthday present that had made them so envious, causing it to sink at its mooring. Fortunately the little boat was kept in shallow water, and at low tide most of the mast was exposed, and the three elder brothers were eventually able to raise the sunken boat and effect the necessary repairs. In the course of which they came not only to regret their prank, but arrived at an understanding of why their father held young Tom in such high regard. A regard that his brothers shared from that moment on.

For himself, Tom seemed a bit embarrassed by all the kind words. “It was only a boat you sunk, not me,” he said. “And if I didn't run tattling to the Captain, it was only because he'd have boxed my ears. Really, I was a horrid little scab, like most boys.”

The subject of their father having entered the discussion, Benjamin evidently felt compelled to say something about the old man's condition. “I think we all understand why the Captain wasn't able to join us this evening. He's been hit hard. Stove in, you might say. As we all have,” he added, with a glance at Sarah, who wept silently, comforted by her husband. “Sometimes things happen that are so terrible the mind can't rightly comprehend why God has struck us so cruel and hard. In our sorrow, we might even rail against the Lord, and hold him accountable for his mysterious ways. There's only one thing to do when that happens, and that's to pray for the aggrieved. So I ask you all to join hands. Let us bow our heads in prayer, and ask God to relieve the Captain of his terrible burden, and put his mind right.”

We all did as he requested, and I found my right hand linked to Jeb's, and my left to Lucy's supple palm. As I glanced down, I fancied there was a light blush upon her neck, and then like the others I closed my eyes and listened as Benjamin Coffin spoke to his God.

“Our Lord in heaven, look down upon us, and hear us. You have lately taken three of our family to your bosom, and in our weakness we grieve exceedingly. We ask that you relieve our sorrow, and give us a sign of your benevolence.”

Ben took a deep breath and was about to go on when he was interrupted by the startling sound of a glass breaking. My eyes snapped open and I saw Nathaniel glance about with a puzzled expression, trying to locate what glass had tumbled.

Suddenly the whole table began to shake, and more crockery toppled and was smashed upon the floor. A strange gargling noise came from Ben's throat. His eyes had rolled white and his whole body shook, but not so hard that he released the hands in his grasp.

“O Lord!” he cried. “O God, be with us!”

A gust of wind came into the room and the candles guttered and went out, leaving us in the dark, save for the glow of the hearth. And then the hearth fire itself was extinguished and the table ceased to rumble, and all was silent.

Out of the silence came Sarah's voice, thick with rage. “Damn you!” she cried. “Damn every last one of you!”

A chair tipped over, and as the flames flickered back up from the candles, I saw her flee the room, flinging her hands at her husband, who followed most desperately.

When the soft glow light returned to the room. Jebediah stared at the disorder on the long dining table, the floor littered with broken bits of china, and said. “Yes, I suppose we are damned. Every last one of us.”

Beside me Lucy wept quietly into her handkerchief.

Having secured some medicinal brandy from the family stores, I had retired to my room shortly after the disaster in the dining room. But rather than soothing my palsied nerves, the brandy seemed to intensify my sensation of dread. A dread caused not by the quaking table, which might have Sarah shaking it in rage, or the guttered candles—a puff of wind let in by Barky, perhaps—but by the mournful pronouncement of my friend Jebediah.

Damned, every last one of us
.

Said in such a way that I could not doubt he believed it to be true. It is an intolerable burden, to believe oneself doomed. The soul itself seems to go numb, and one so afflicted sleepwalks through life, having already resigned himself to his fate. There are many such victims on the battlefield—whole armies of sleepwalking men—and they do not wake until the bullet strikes.

This I know now, for lately I myself have become a kind of doomed sleepwalker—one who longs for the final awakening—but that night in White Harbor I had no experience with the cursed or the damned, or for that matter the chaos of war, and I searched in vain for a way to bring comfort to my friend. Was there nothing in Emerson that applied? Feverishly I leafed through the sermons and essays, most of which I knew by heart, but the words seemed to blur upon the page. I was struck by the realization that there were situations that could not be rectified by the application of written wisdom or the reading of books.

You think me a fool, no doubt, but until that night—really, until the dead baby cried—it was my firm belief that there was a solution for every problem, if one only knew where to look, who to consult, what to do. Emerson knew, and if not Emerson, Thoreau. If not Thoreau, then Hawthorne. Or the answer lay somewhere in the works of Rousseau, Carlyle, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, or Goethe. Failing the Moderns, there was always Plato and Plotinus. Wiser men than I had puzzled out the answers, had seen the world in a drop of dew, understood the transcendent nature of the Universal Soul and the primitive fears that prey upon the individual mind. If we are all part of the same mechanism, if every man is divine unto himself, then that dreary, Calvinist idea of inescapable Fate ceases to exist, and no man can be cursed or doomed except within his own mind. That is what I had read, studied, memorized. That is what I believed.

Until the dead baby cried.

It began so distantly, so quietly, that it seemed to originate in my imagination. The ghost of an echo of a sound. A kind of pang or reminder of what had transpired, no doubt stimulated by my concern for Jebediah. But rather than dissipate into memory, the sound grew steadily stronger, louder.

It was not my imagination. Somewhere in the house a baby was crying. This time there was no confusion about it being a cat or some other animal. This was, undeniably, an infant human wailing in distress.

My first thought was that to console his wife, Nathaniel had somehow gotten hold of another baby. Taken from some local orphanage, perhaps, where they were glad of a willing parent.

At that moment someone rattled the door to my chamber.

“Davis!” Jebediah hissed. “Come along!”

I hastily drew the sash around my robe, put on my slippers, and opened the door. There was Tom, fully dressed, and beside him, face pinched and eyes like embers, the much smaller form of Jebediah, attired in his cotton sleeping gown.

“The nursery,” said Tom in a quavering voice. “Who can it be? Is there another child in the house?”

“Poor Sarah,” said Jeb.

And at that moment we heard her shriek from a nearby chamber.

“Nate will see to her,” said Tom, sounding not at all convinced, as the three of us made our way more or less resolutely toward the nursery.

My second impression, hurrying toward the unsettling noise, was that some enemy of the family had contrived another horrible prank, different from the defilement of the crypt, but no less repulsive. Someone mean-spirited enough to bring a baby into the house and induce it to cry, as a means of further tormenting the mother.

The mere thought of such miserable behavior made me wish I'd brought along a firearm. Not to murder but to wound, as we had been wounded, as poor Sarah had been wounded.

The impulse gave me pause, actually stopped me in my tracks. Was there really some dark part of me that wanted to stifle that pitiful sound? I had little experience of infants, being an only child, but my instinctive response, in the presence of a baby, had always been to coo and smile. Surely I would not harm this particular infant, who could not be held to blame for the cruel intrusion?

As if in answer, an image came into my mind, sharp as an engraving: myself with pistol in hand, my face distorted by an expression of cold and furious anger.

My hands shook so that it made the lantern cast wild shadows upon the wall.
Dear God
, I thought.
This cannot be me
.

“Davis, are you all right?” asked Jeb, looking up at me with distracted concern.

“Yes,” I lied. “It was nothing.”

We arrived to find the nursery shut up. Behind a locked door the baby wailed, louder and louder. To my horror I saw that Jeb held a pistol at his side, partially obscured by the folds of his sleeping gown. Much like the pistol I'd possessed in my imagination. Possibly I'd caught a glimpse of it, and incorporated it into my thoughts without realizing the source.

“What is your intention?” I demanded, indicating the weapon.

“Never mind my intention,” he replied. “Open the door.”

Tom searched a ring of keys, and as he did so the baby's crying rose to a higher pitch. “Oh, God,” Tom said, fumbling at the lock.

“God has nothing to do with this,” said Jeb, sounding both terrified and furious.

I believe he was preparing to shoot away the lock when Tom finally managed to find the right key. Hastily he opened the door, and at that exact moment the baby ceased crying.

“Hold high the lanterns,” Jeb ordered, and it was done.

In less than a minute we ascertained that the nursery was empty. The crib had been taken away—by Nathaniel, as we later determined—and the room itself was cool and dark, no fire having been lit.

“I d-don't understand,” Tom stammered. “Where can it be?”

A moment later the baby began crying again, from some other, more distant place in the house.

For what seemed an eternity we followed the sound of the crying baby. From room to room we searched, lighting candles as we went, but the pitiful wailing kept moving from chamber to chamber, always just ahead of us. Sometimes it would stop, only to resume at a more desperate pitch. It was all I could do not to stop up my ears with some of the candle wax, for the crying seemed to resonate within my own breast, producing a kind of insufferable anguish, and pains upon the heart.

Finally we came to the kitchen, where we found Barky the cook sound asleep in his hammock, evidently insensible to the din. At my prodding he slowly snorted himself to full wakefulness, and sought to aid us in our search of the premises.

The wailing baby sounded close enough to reach out and touch, but we found nothing. Not in the cupboards, the closets, the pantry, or under the tables, no matter how frantically we searched. Nothing. And yet the crying continued, if anything louder and more distinct.

It was there that Sarah found us. She rushed in with her gown flying, eyes as big as tea saucers.

Tom went to her but she would not be calmed.

“Make it stop!” she screamed when she found her voice. “Make it stop!” and then collapsed to the cold floor in a fit of sobbing that seemed to take her breath away.

When poor Nathaniel finally reached us it was clear that Sarah had raked his face with her fingernails, although he was scarcely aware of the wounds, or the blood that seeped into his beard.

I shouted to make myself heard. “Get her out of the house! Do it! Now, man, now!” He looked at me with an expression of horrified confusion, but slowly seemed to understand, and finally he scooped his wife up in his strong arms and carried her into the night.

He was barely out the door when the crying turned into a wild peal of laughter. Hideous, vengeful. Laughter triumphant.

“Oh, Jeb, no,” said Tom, sounding small and helpless, and much younger than his years.

It was only then I noticed that my friend Jebediah Coffin was holding the pistol to his own head, and that his finger was squeezing hard upon the trigger.

II

THE ABOLITIONIST

Men do not love those who remind them of their sins
.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

1. Thou Seek a Mighty Blade

“I will end this now,” Jeb whispered, gazing at the floor. “I can make it stop.”

Handsome Tom seemed frozen, wanting to seize the pistol from his brother's hand, but afraid to do so. He looked at me, pleading with bewildered, frantic eyes,
Do something!

Jeb remained exactly as he was when he'd surprised us in the galley, with the heavy pistol held against his temple. “Look at me,” he said, indicating his small, distorted body. “Is it not obvious? Was I not an abomination from birth? Cursed in my spine, cursed in my ridiculous legs?”

“Jeb, please.”

“Listen! The voice cries for my death. I'm inclined to oblige.”

By then Barky the cook had become fully aware of the danger Jebediah posed to himself. Moving with a silent grace unusual for a man his size, he took me gently but firmly aside. “It ain't poor Jeb that's at fault,” he squeaked in confidence. “Persuade him to live, won't you?”