The Styx (2 page)
“Aye, Michael,” Cronin said, taking Michael’s hand. “Heard about yer mum. Sorry.” Cronin was an officer up in midtown, and Michael kept the surprise out of his eyes. He hadn’t seen Cronin since long before Danny disappeared, and even though he and Michael had both been officers back then, they rarely crossed paths. Cronin’s head was lowered, maybe in reverence to the moment, but Michael had a sense that Cronin was hesitant to look him in the eye.
Still, Cronin did the dutiful thing, stepped up to the bed where Michael’s dead mother lay and made the sign of the cross and then knelt and whispered a blessing. Then he stood and turned to Michael and took his hand again, but this time there was an envelope in his palm.
“Sorry again, Michael,” he said. “I should have come sooner.”
Michael looked at him quizzically but only nodded and folded the envelope into his pocket.
Afterward, the women stepped forward again, gathered together the food and then took Michael by the elbow and escorted him down the staircase. Four men with tools in their hands and slats of fresh-hewn pine under their arms passed them going up.
Michael ate out on the stoop, barely tasting the food. The women kept passing plates to him and then reloaded each time he refused more. As he ate he could hear the tapping of nails upstairs and the low voices of the men singing an Irish dirge that he could not place.
At one o’clock an empty wagon pulled by two unmatched horses clattered up to the curb. As if that was their signal, the men from upstairs carried the coffin down the stairs and slid it carefully into the back. Also on that seeming signal, some two dozen people from the neighborhood queued up along either side of the wagon. Jonas Ready stepped up next to Michael and, with the tact of a fine waiter, got him up and positioned behind the jury-rigged hearse. From the inside of his coat pocket Mr. Ready withdrew a flask that he passed to Michael. The whiskey went down like a jolt but could not bring a tear to Michael’s eyes. The long night and morning had done that, and he had nothing left. He took another long swig to be sure, and then Jonas Ready gave the wagon driver a tip of his hat and the entire ragtag procession began, more tactful and reverent, stoic and proud, hopeful and helpful to the memory of Michael Byrne’s mother than its members ever were when she was alive.
S
HE
took the news of it from the night air, in the odor of hot pine sap bubbling as the trees burst into flames and in the smell of dry plank wood charring in fire. She stood on the back porch of the luxurious Palm Beach Breakers overlooking the ocean and turned her face to the north, and the scent on the breeze furrowed her brow.
“What is it, Miss Ida?”
The young woman had picked up on the look in Ida’s face. She was perceptive that way, unlike others of her kind. It was why Ida liked the girl. But though she might be good at detecting emotion in the careful faces of the hired help, the girl did not have a nose for burning wood floating on salt air. The old woman did not turn to the girl’s question and instead kept her head high and her eyes focused on the treetops at the dark northern horizon, searching for a flickering light. She drew in another deep breath for confirmation and then began to move off the painted steps of the hotel.
“Miss Ida?” the young woman said. Her long dress rustled as she hurried down to catch up. “What is it?”
The old woman was still scanning the trees, her eyes showing only a hint of anxiety, but the girl could see moisture welling in them.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Ida May Fleury said without breaking stride, “but I believe they are burning my home.”
The two women walked quickly down the broad walk and around the northern side of the hotel: Ida May Fluery, the head housekeeper at the Breakers, and Marjory McAdams, daughter of a Florida East Coast Railway executive. The one in the lead was a small black woman in a dark work dress with a white apron to mark her employment. Folds of her skirts were in her fists, and her hard leather shoes were flashing across the crushed rock of the service road. Struggling to keep up, Marjory McAdams was also in a dress, but one of considerable fashion and not made for running. Thom Martin, one of the Breakers’ bellmen, was smoking under the hotel’s portico when he took note of them and would have been quite willing to watch the younger woman’s ankles as she hiked her dress to keep pace until he recognized who she was and the direction both were heading.
“Miss McAdams,” he called out as he ditched the cigarette and hustled after them. “Uh, Miss McAdams, ma’am?”
Neither of the women turned to him until he had run to catch up and again called out Marjory’s name.
She finally spun to him and appeared surprised, but turned instantly in control. “Mr. Martin. Fetch us a calash, quickly, please. We need to take Mizz Fluery home.” She kept moving with the older woman.
The bellman stopped jogging but still had to lengthen his walking stride to keep up with them. He hesitated at the request but had to consider it, coming as it was from a superior’s daughter.
“Uh, ma’am, there’s no one down in the Styx tonight, ma’am,” he said, trying to be pleasant and deferential. “They’re all across the lake at the festival, ma’am. I, uh, could get a driver to take you all over the bridge to West Palm.”
The elderly woman had yet to either acknowledge the bellman or slow her stride. But Marjory McAdams snapped her green eyes on the man and sharpened her voice:
“Either get us a calash, Mr. Martin, or I shall fetch one and drive it myself, and you know, sir, that I am quite capable.”
The bellman whispered “shit” as the women continued on, and then he turned and ran back toward the hotel.
They were already onto the dirt road leading through the pines and cabbage palms to the northern end of the island when the thudding sound of horse hooves and the rattle of harness caught up to them. Marjory had to take Miss Fluery by the elbow to pull her to the side as Mr. Martin slowed and stopped next to them. Without a word they both scrambled up into the calash before the bellman had a chance to get out and help. As they settled in the back, he turned in his seat:
“Miss McAdams, please ma’am. All of us was asked to stay out of the Styx tonight. It might be best…”
“Mr. Martin, can you now smell that smoke in the air?” Marjory said, meeting his eyes. Martin turned to look into the darkness, even though the odor of burning timber was now unmistakable.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, without turning back to face them.
“Then go, sir.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and snapped the reins.
The horse balked at the darkness with only the light of a three-quarter moon to guide it, but it moved at the driver’s urging. Miss Fluery kept her eyes high and forward and could see the gobs of smoke that caught in the treetops and hung there like dirty gauze. In less than another quarter-mile, she stood up with a grip on the driver’s seat, and Marjory could see the new set of the woman’s jaw. She too could see flickers of orange light coming through the trees as if from behind the moving blades of a fan. Despite his reluctance, Mr. Martin urged the horse to speed.
“It may only be a wildfire,” Marjory said carefully, but the old woman did not turn to her voice of hope as they pressed on.
Minutes later the carriage slurred in the sandy roadway when they rounded a final curve and came to a full stop at the edge of the clearing. The horse reared up in its traces and wrenched its head to the side as the heat of some two dozen cones of fire met them like a wall, and the white, three-quarter globe of the animal’s terrified eye mocked the moon.
Marjory had been to the Styx before, having talked Miss Fluery into letting her walk the distance to see some new baby the housekeeper had described. Marjory knew she was defying all social rules, but her inquisitiveness had long been a part of her character. The Styx was the community where all the Negro workers—housemaids, bellhops, gardeners and kitchen help—lived during the winter season, when the luxurious Royal Poinciana and the Breakers were filled with moneyed northerners escaping the cold.
Marjory had not been shocked by the simple structures and lack of necessities in the Styx. She was not so naïve and sheltered in her family’s mid-Manhattan enclave not to have witnessed poverty in New York City. She had seen the tenements of the Bowery and had secretly had her father’s driver, Maurice, take her through the infamous intersection of Five Points to witness the sordid and filth-ridden world of the Lower East Side.
The Styx was, by comparison, quaint, she had justified. The shacks of the workers were made of discarded wood from the Poinciana’s construction and slats from furniture crates and shipping cartons. Some were roofed in simple thatch made with indigenous palm fronds, others in sturdier tin. Miss Fluery had told her that two winters ago, one of Flagler’s railcars had jumped the small-gauge tracks to Palm Beach Island and collapsed into splinters as it rolled down the embankment to the lake. Given permission, the black workers had scavenged the debris, and the car’s tin roof ended up covering six new homes in the Styx.
On this night the thatch roofs had become little more than cinders floating up on hot currents into the air. The tin ones were warped and crumpled by the heat like soggy playing cards. As the women and driver watched, the Boston House rooming home fell in on itself, sending up a shower of glowing embers and a billow of dark smoke.
Ida May had not loosened her grip on the driver’s iron seat handle and had not turned her face away even as the heat scorched her old cheeks. Marjory put her hand on the woman’s arm.
“Mr. Martin said everyone has gone across the lake to the fair, Miss Ida. Surely no one was at home. Surely they’re all safe.”
Fluery looked into the flames of her home, which had stood at the prominent crown of the makeshift cul de sac and listened to the sound of clay bowls shattering in the heat and ceramic keepsakes exploding into hot dust. She did not acknowledge the girl’s words. Marjory was a young white lady from the North. She could not discern the smell of linen and Bible parchment burning any more than she could recognize the odor of charred flesh. But Ida May Fluery knew that smell. The news of death was already in the air.
No, they surely are not all safe, Ida thought. And just as surely, she thought, whoever it is, someone has murdered them.
The rest of Ida May’s neighbors would hear the news by word of mouth, and it was as rapid and frightening and as unpredictable as the flames themselves.
Mr. Martin rattled back through the woods at an axle-breaking speed to the hotel as much to report the fire as to pull someone of more importance into the situation. He left Miss McAdams and the old house woman at the edge of the burning shantytown. They had refused to budge when he begged them to come back with him, for there was nothing they could do before daylight. The place was destroyed, the fire had already swallowed everything it wanted and had not made the jump from the clearing to the trees. The old woman had acted as if she hadn’t heard him and just stood there with those damned spooky eyes of hers glowing. Miss McAdams couldn’t convince the old lady either. Finally, in frustration, Martin snatched a kerosene lantern off the left side of the carriage and held it out to her.
“At least take this, ma’am,” he said.
Instinctively, Miss McAdams reached out for the lantern but stopped herself when her eyes lighted on the glow of the flame inside. It was a look, not of fear—Martin doubted that this young woman feared anything—but some deeper angst. The driver himself balked at the look and began to withdraw the offer. Finally it was the old woman who stepped forward and grabbed the lantern from Martin’s hand and then turned without a word.
Christ, he thought. What was a man supposed to do, and he yanked at the reins, turned the carriage round, and then whipped the horse violently into a gallop.
When Martin scrambled off the driver’s seat at the front steps of The Breakers, the head liveryman was already up with his arms crossed and a stern look fixed on his face.
“Jesus glory, Tommy. Hold on, boy. You’re going to shake that rig to pieces.”