Rebels of Babylon (17 page)

The fellow inspected my mouth with the aid of a mirrored lamp. His office was as clean and bright as a Welsh wife’s parlor on Sunday and, although he was almost as short as I am myself, his grip was strong and confident. Even his clothing was of quality and neat, except for a few spots of blood upon his shirtfront. I should have felt myself in good hands. But all I felt was terror.

“We’ll have to rip those stitches out,” he told me, “and do the job properly.”

Mr. Barnaby shook his head, just at the edge of my vision. “’E went to Dr. Fielding, sir. I didn’t ’ave time to stop ’im.”

Dr. Dostle shook his head. “That man should be incarcerated. For the quality of his dentistry, as well as for his political convictions. A born traitor. And a born botch. If that man’s a real dentist, he’s a dentist I wouldn’t let near my horse. Pass me that implement just behind you there, Mr. B. The one with the hook on it. The sharp one. No, the bigger one. It’s the craziest thing—I can’t get my Ulysses to leave that shack of his to help me. After all the training I’ve given him, all the time I’ve spent. He’s so afraid he won’t come out in the daytime. Sometimes I wonder if there’s any hope for them, after all.”

He looked into my mouth again, then straightened in disgust. Lofting an ominous tool.

At least it was not rusted like Dr. Fielding’s appliances.

“I can put you out with ether,” he told me. “Otherwise, it’s going to hurt a parcel.”

I shook my head. Given my recent experiences, I felt an even greater fear of unconsciousness than I did of the dental profession.

“Well,” Dr. Dostle said wistfully, “I can’t force a man to see what’s good for him, can I? Open wide.”

He bent to his work, smelling of cologne water and, faintly but unmistakably, of blood.

Speaking to my companion again, Dr. Dostle returned to his own concerns. “Ulysses has become a disappointment. Hiding under his bed like that. Leaving me without any help in the office.”

I groaned.

“What are we going to do with them now, I wonder?” the dentist asked. “If Uly’s any indication of what to expect? The poor devil’s got the windows barred with planks and his shades drawn tight. Didn’t even want to let
me
in. He said he had to be certain I hadn’t been transformed into some kind of spook. ‘Fixed,’ he called it. Like he was talking about a gelding. Rambling on about how that Marie Venin has loosed the ‘Grand Zombi’ to drag them all off to his kingdom under the earth. They ought to lock that woman up, too. Along with Doc Fielding. Although I’m not sure her voodoo nonsense is any worse than his dentistry.”

I shrieked.

Permitting me a moment’s respite, the dentist said, “Just calm down, now. Great God almighty, man. Jumping up and down only makes it worse.” He shifted his voice, though not his face, back to Mr. Barnaby. “Old Uly’s so scared you’d think he was a drunk dying of the trembles. Swears the Grand Zombi’s going to grab him in the dark and carry him off. Hold still now! That thread’s going to rot your jaw off, if I don’t get it all out.
Mr. B., hand me that rag, will you? No. The one with the blood on it.”

The mopping and slopping did not interrupt the fellow’s narration. “It’s the funniest thing you ever heard, listening to that poor, old darky talk. Me thinking I had him half civilized and nearly trained to be a dentist himself. At least one good enough to work on his own people. Hold still, we’re almost done. He swears that Yankee girl started it all and forced Marie Venin to turn the spirits loose. That girl who wanted to say her piece at the Union meeting, the one the boys shouted down. The one who washed up buck naked on the levee.”

The dentist sighed. “That’s what happens when white women fiddle with voodoo.”

I WAS NOT AT THE TOP OF MY FORM WHEN WE returned to the St. Charles Hotel. Indeed, I felt I had been through a battle and was not confident that my side had won. My head seemed heavier than a stone and, to my shame, I staggered across the lobby like a man debauched by liquor. Stunned by pain I was, and most unhappy.

There was blood on my new clothing, after all, although I hoped a scrub would draw it out.

Mr. Barnaby promptly got the better of Captain Bolt, who was full of questions regarding my activities. A brisk account of my dental adventures, retailed by Mr. Barnaby, soothed the fellow. As long as I was miserable, the captain seemed content. His mental artillery was not of impressive calibre.

Pain wearies a man profoundly. Had I less faith and discipline, I might have indulged in whisky.

Mr. Barnaby led me to my room, only to pause unexpectedly on the threshold. Just for a moment, he stiffened like a dog catching a scent. I bumped into the broad expanse of his coat.

An oath leapt to my lips, although I do not think it was intelligible.

Murmuring excuses for his awkwardness, Mr. Barnaby hastened to the gas fixture and turned up the flame. It shed a merry light that worsened my mood.

I shut the door with needless force. And turned to find my companion weeping bitterly. With his shoulders slumped and his long face hanging down.

It astonished me to see tears stream into his whiskers. Pain makes us selfish, see. When we hurt, we imagine that we are not merely the center, but all the circumference of the world. We do not spare a thought for our brother’s misery. His agony elicits, at most, a grunt.

Something had disarmed poor Mr. Barnaby. Ever a great one for manners and doing things properly, he did not stand on ceremony now. He plumped his bottom down on the bed and the whole contraption creaked. His countenance shimmered with sorrow. An explosion of tears it was. He hid his eyes behind a hand, sobbing like a broken-hearted Samson.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The big fellow shook his head. Weeping so hard that teardrops spotted his waistcoat. He wanted to talk, to explain, for he was ever an obliging sort of man. But his suffering drove his power of speech to mutiny.

He lowered his head still further, straining his shoulders down over his girth, and pressed his face into his fleshy palms.

“I smells her, I does,” he said at last. “I smells my little Marie …”

“IT’S THE SCENT,” he told me between sobs, “the verbena what the
señoritas
wears in old Havana. I took a fondness for it in the days when I lingered amongst ’em. In the wild days of my youth that was, my salad days when I was young and green. Oh, I was an awful rogue, sir, and I doesn’t try to excuse it.” He wiped his big nose with a finger, then dried an eye with the backside of his thumb. “The passionate ladies likes a full-figured man in all ’is vigor, for they knows what’s what, and I doesn’t mind telling it, quiet like. And not only the
señoritas,
but the fair
señoras,
as well, with eyes as dark as chestnuts on the fire.”

He brightened as he wept. “I’m wealthy as a lord in fond remembrance, sir. Almost tarried amongst ’em forever, I did. For I likes a dark girl better than a light one, and a Spanish lady knows ’ow to make things lively. But something pulled me onward to New Orleans.” He lifted his face, revealing eyes aglow. “Fate is what it was, sir, fate and nothing less. I was destined
to meet my little Marie and find my terrible ’appiness with ’er and our little ones.” He clasped his hands together, as if praying. “Do you ’ave any idea, sir, what it means to love so much you feel you’ll perish? That was ’ow I was with my Marie.” He almost smiled, then recalled his sorrow. “Bought ’er that perfume, I did. ’Ad it brought in from Havana. She wore it to break your ’eart, sir. As if it was concocted just for ’er.”

He shook his head, then sniffed the air and shook his head again. “May’aps I’m going mad, though I’d ’ate to think it. But twice today I thought I smelled that scent. In this very room. As if ’er very ghost ’ad passed before me.”

He dropped his eyes and slumped until he seemed hardly more than a jelly. “I’m so lonely, Major Jones. It ain’t the sort of thing a fellow says. But I’m so lonely I sometimes thinks I could fall down and die on the pavings, as if loneliness killed a man deader than the Yellow Jack. Oh, I knows I shouldn’t pest you with my troubles, sir, with all the bothers upon you, left and right.” Tears marched down his cheeks again, but at a slower cadence. “Life takes it all away, don’t it? First Marie and our little ones. Now Master Francis. Who I loves like my own son. It breaks my ’eart to think of the poor lad suffering.”

He managed half a smile. It rendered his features forlorn. “We puts up a good front, sir, and tries our best to be affable. For we likes to seem a jolly sort with our fellows. They expects nothing less of a gent with a generous figure. Like poor, old Mr. Pickwick, may God bless ’im.” He drew a palm across his reddened face. “I’m lonely, sir, and I’ll say it this last time. But I’ll never say it again to trouble your kindness.”

Despite my own discomfort, which did not relent for an instant, I felt for the good fellow. It is our common feeling, see. The loneliness that breaks the bones of the soul. I am most happy in my marriage, blessed with a healthy son and another child coming. There is Fanny, my ward, who has an angel’s voice but a better heart. Yet, I know loneliness. Or knew it, I should say. Perhaps it is the one form of knowledge that comes to us all in time. Even in our rapturous hours, it lurks.

Placing a hand on the big fellow’s shoulder, I found it surprisingly bony. As if his flesh had been tugged down by gravity.

“It will be all right,” I told him.

That is the commonest lie we tell each other.

The good man raised a tear-slopped hand and laid it over mine own. He did not look at me. He could not. He only held onto my hand. As far too many young soldiers have done while dying far from home.

Odd it is how we esteem appearance and think so little of the soul within. The beauty’s sorrow moves our hearts, while the spinster’s despair eludes us. We think a fat fellow merry down to his marrow and cannot imagine that pain cuts through his cushioning. We think he wants his dinner, when he wants a loving heart.

We claim that we are Christians, but we are as hard as Moabites on a Monday.

“I’d give the rest of my life and give it gladly,” Mr. Barnaby said, “to hold my Marie in my arms for a quarter hour.”

Up he jumped, near knocking me off my feet.

In a blink he had his derringer in his paw, with one of the hammers cocked back. Ever remarkably deft for a bulky fellow, he prowled toward the blankness of a wall.

Moving as softly as a mischievous cat, he paused but a second to hush me, then moved on. It was a marvelous skill he had, the gift of stealth. He used it to kill men in Mississippi. But that is another tale.

Halting just before the wall, he sniffed the air again.

His great bulk floated across the planks. At the corner of the wall he began to tap, with the derringer ready.

Easing along the woodwork, rapping high and low, he listened to the uniform responses. He passed the spot where I stood, palm cradling my jaw, and knocked on the next panel.

He got a different answer. There was a hollow spot behind the wall.

Agile as a dancer, he jumped aside and waved me off, as well. In case a concealed person opened fire. I eased away from
the false spot in the wall, even as Mr. Barnaby inched back toward it.

Pistol lowered but ready, he tapped again, outlining the dimensions of the hideaway.

I heard no sign of life and wondered if war had battered my hearing as badly as it had my hope of Heaven.

Mr. Barnaby glanced about impatiently. I understood what he sought. There had to be a hidden release in the room to unlock the panel.

Handsomely fitted the woodwork was. The innocent eye would never have thought it dishonest.

Mr. Barnaby shook his head, more to himself than to me. Then he positioned his figure before the hiding spot, aimed his derringer into the wood at the height of a fellow’s heart and said, “Begging your pardon, we’d like you to come out, sir. For otherwise I shall ’ave to shoot through the wood, which would be upsetting to all of us.”

He repeated his polite demand in a language that was unmistakably French. Then he said his piece again in a tongue I could not label.

None of his little speeches had an effect. The wall remained the wall. As silent as the tomb in which mine enemies had sealed me.