They were rainy days that followed in the sleepy town. Concerns sparked over a potential hurricane and flooding from the river. Such tidings were especially bitter in the shadow of the harvest. Citizens of Washington boarded their windows and braced themselves for the coming storms.
Traffic through Washington saw an exponential increase for some time as families near the coast moved north or westward. Where one might have expected the town to close up and quiet down, business actually saw a surge for the next few days. Washington Inn saw peaks in clientele both wealthy and lower class. The cattle trains were perhaps the most pervasive clutter, but the ferry relieved some of that pressure. All in all, it proved a lucrative spike in Mr. Blackwood’s business that he would certainly put to supplies and more expensive preparatory measures.
Ada had been quite shaken since the affair at the Banways. As such, she felt lingering anxiety about being alone. She tried as oft she could to go with her mother on errands, and her mother shared a bed with her at times to soothe her. The following day, Ada had apologized profusely to Mr. Banway, who bade her think nothing of it and was only sorry the visit had been unpleasant at the last.
“Will Malinda not come to see us off, August?” asked Ada’s mother with some concern. “I hope she has not come ill?”
“Merely headaches of late,” replied Mr. Banway with a wave of his hand. “The moist air disagrees with her. I am sure she will be well soon enough.”
After the incident, Ada had struggled to remember particulars of the sound and what had upset her, but it all felt now like a distant dream. Despite this, she was glad to be home. Yet she couldn’t bear to be inside too long, and thus took frequent walks around the estate. She particularly liked to walk through the apple orchard and listen to the birds. Lately she had felt no desire to immerse herself in stories, but rather sought to clear her head.
However, that did not stop her from bringing her notebook and pencils to scrawl away on a stool beneath the shade of the branches. Her father always said he never had a daughter easier to buy for, since she preferred parchment and pencils to frills and dresses. Yet her pencil lazily scrawled broken fragments of disparate thoughts, descriptions, feelings and sensations. She was conscious of the overwhelming desire to write something—to exercise her mental muscles lest she atrophy. Yet her mind was a blank. It was bad enough to feel the itch to put pen to thought, but the urge to write what was not there was intolerable. There was an itch in her nerves she simply could not scratch, and it troubled her deeply.
Some three days following the incident, she leaned back against the trunk of an apple tree and took a bracing whiff of summer air tinged with the scent of salt. She undertook an exercise to write of the sights and sensations of the damp grass, the knotted oaks, and the petrichor of the sodden clay. Yet even this was not enough. She tried to think of images, faces, figures and shapes to carry forth those thoughts that have no words. The vanity of youth—the obsessive desire to capture the fleeting moments of beauty and serenity like fireflies in a jar. She had not yet the patience or perspective of age to consider the lilies of the field.
She listened to the call of a cardinal and the distant, rhythmic chatter of a woodpecker. Her scrawling fingers slurred her words across the page as a gentle breeze bore her drifting thoughts to serene slumber.
The breeze bore the wayward thoughts through rustling leaves and groaning branches. Its lilting sigh, like a distant song, passed over the gnarled oaks and beeches to sharpen through tangled branches like a shrill whistle over sleepy rooftops. The sparse leaves rustled through the soft clay streets where few walked or trotted atop rangy steeds. Spider threads of smoke trailed from red brick chimneys to tickle the ashen sky.
One broke the dreary rhythm of the quiet procession, with inebriate steps like a broken phonograph. Israel Norman, on his morning ambulation, was turning his rudder towards the door of Royal Oak. His steps were slow and steady, and his eyes had that customary vacantness that came with rare periods of sobriety. His somnambulant tread wavered slightly against the wind, and he swayed gradually rightward until he brushed along the sides of the quiet general stores and saddleries.
The rough plank walkways tripped him up repeatedly, and he always threw his swaying body against the side of a building while untangling his feet. Yet otherwise, his passage was as eerily balanced and slow as usual. When at last he reached the door of Royal Oak, his fingers grasped the iron handle, and he leaned forward to keep his pace going in a single, fluid motion. His body stiffened when the door remained fixed. Planting his feet firmly, he ground his shoulder against the door to dislodge what he supposed to be swollen wood. Yet it remained fixed. Bolted from the inside.
Iron suddenly seeped into Israel’s spine as he straightened before the door like a soldier at attention. His eyes had a blank, yet alert gaze of a startled deer. He stared into the aged wood, whose varnish had begun to strip beneath the elements. He noted the brass hinges that stood out clean and glimmering against the fading door. Brass hinges…The balding, sun starched bull couldn’t afford a fancy handle, but brass hinges? He pressed his cheek against it as if to sink into it—to submerge and resurface on the other side like a cave sump.
Passersby darted uncomfortable or amused glances at Israel who remained grafted to the door. A rangy dog sniffed at his jacket and licked at it.
“God smite you,” whispered Israel, rubbing his cheek against the door. Then he knocked his forehead against it and grit his teeth. “Dig it deeper…” He knocked his forehead again. “Go on. Deeper. You think I can’t smell it?” His fingernails dug into the knotted wood, and he ground his face into it. “In My Father’s house are many rooms…How deep…? Oh, how deep…Full fathom five…! Oh, those eyes!” He pounded his head against the door and hissed moans through clenched teeth. “Let me drink…Let me drink…”
“Israel.”
Israel didn’t turn. It was doubtful whether he even heard.
“Israel,” the sheriff’s grumbling baritone sounded again, this time firmer. “Most tenants are moved on by now, Israel. I seen them myself on towards the ferry. Old boy probably went out to restock.”
“Sleeps…? He sleeps deep.”
“What?”
“Deep sleep…six feet…always back—always back…Why can’t he stay—God, why can’t he stay?”
“What’re you on about? You sure you haven’t had yours already? Damn early if ya did!”
“Rooms. So many rooms! Enough for him…” murmured Israel, his arms slack at his side as he slouched with his cheek against the door.
“Yes, yes, Israel. Lots of rooms. It is an inn, after all.” The sheriff’s voice was coaxing, like a young man to his senile father. He leaned down and lifted Israel tremblingly to his feet by both arms. “Now, I know I said most of them hit the trail already, but we can’t have you frightening off prospective clientele. I’ll buy you a bottle at Hoxey’s, eh? Come on, then.” Half-carrying Israel under both arms, the sheriff led him babbling to Hoxey’s Mercantile some fifty paces away from the inn.
The traffic steadily increased until the tumult of business filled the air again. Bells chimed throughout the thoroughfare as doors were unlocked, and the smoke of cooking fires fogged the air once again. Out of towners attended to business, browsed the shops, or hit the trail again. The gusty sigh of a blacksmith’s bellows echoed through the streets, and the clink of hammers chimed with the ringing bells, a lively tune.
Akin’s Butchery rented out a top floor room to a local notary, Francis Sutton. It was a cramped corner room with a desk and bed that took up so much space, one almost had to walk sideways to get between them. Mr. Sutton was currently seated at the desk facing the bed where his one client sat while the other stood with arms folded at the end of the bed.
“It would seem joint ownership of the property is assumed by the terms of the will, Mr. Collins,” he mused with a persistent hum that seemed to creep up at the fore of every phrase.
“Joint ownership of the property, sir. That much is obvious. But the Company is a different matter altogether!” cut in the man at the end of the bed. He was a rather stuffy looking young man in a high collared black frock coat with a black stock around his neck.
“Company stock here is the disputed factor. We are engaged in certain business negotiations of…divergent interests,” spoke the one on the bed, compulsively rubbing his hands together as if lathering them.
“I tell you, Blackwood’s demand for carriage fees is far too exorbitant! We would be better off forging our own route landbound. We have the means and manpower.”
“For God’s sake, Thomas! Think of what you’re saying! Even if we diverted our course landward, we’d still require passage on a ferry,” groaned the other, rubbing his face in exasperation. “And that’s not even factoring in dangers in crossing Tonkawa territory.”
“No risk, no reward,” replied Thomas firmly. “You can’t put a price on freedom, Felix, and I will be indebted to no one where I can help it.”
“Perhaps, gentlemen, it would be better if Mr. Blackwood were also involved in this discussion, as his interests are jointly bound with it,” suggested the notary calmly, trying to lower the temperature in the room.
“I cannot come to Blackwood with the idea of a theoretical arrangement,” insisted Thomas. “This is a prime opportunity for trade with a lucrative partner with extensive connections. If I try to rope him into our troubles with only the vague possibility of an agreement, he won’t waste time with us. He’ll move right on down the line of prospective partners in the sugar trade.”
“Let him.” Felix gave a short, humorless laugh. “That puff-shirted ponce thinks he’s transporting silks for the Queen of Sheba! You honestly want to engage in any agreement where we have no edge?”
“We have the edge in that we are a local provider.”
Below, on the first floor, their bickering was the distant buzzing of flies to Owen Akin. The butcher was busily salting a side of pork while his boy was wrapping goods for customers at the front. The clamor of customers pouring in, the dull thud of the knife, and the crinkle of paper drowned out all else.
Stolen story; please report.
Men and women filed in and out of the butchery like milling ants, the bell ringing over all like the chimes of a sanctuary. The steam from cooking pots over the thoroughfare, like incense, wafted throughout the streets. More and more cast wary glances at the nebulous clouds, ever conscious of the gathering storm. Be it now or later, the waiting was all there was.
On the other side of the town, Gabriel Blackwood was watching the same sky. He leaned against a corner of the ferryman’s office, routinely checking his pocket watch between furtive glances skyward. Quota was an ongoing problem hampered by raids on supply lines along the Brazos. The threat of hurricane season added a problem of time—a problem that could not be ameliorated with more manpower or reconsidering shipping routes.
“O, Shenandoah, I love your daughter, away you rolling river. I'll take her 'cross yon rolling water. Ah-ha, I'm bound away, 'cross the wide Missouri…” he sang barely perceptibly under his breath. While others quarreled over deals and qualms over stock and carriage fees, Gabriel thought only of a hot dinner, a soft chair, and a smiling face waiting. His thoughts turned suddenly to Ada, and he felt the old concern rising. He eased the rising pressure of that thought by squeezing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.
Ada was never one prone to nightmares. She had a reputation for a rather morbid turn of mind offset by a childish sense of wonder that made her quite the object of curiosity in the town. He knew such stories of ghosts and ghouls had never perturbed her before. Nor had she ever been prone to sleepwalking. When pressed on it again the following morning, Ada’s recollection of the event had already begun to fade.
However, there was no object to these concerns, no discernable path to a solution for the moment. He comforted himself that she was home for the time being. So, unable to soothe his anxious thoughts, he distracted himself with other anxieties. The looming threat of the hurricane proved a sufficient impetus for this effect. His eyes trailed along the lazy undulations of the umber waters, which already seemed to swell and throb restlessly. From his place beneath the awning of the office, he watched, and hummed, and sang, and waited.
“O, Shenandoah, I long to hear you, away you rolling river. Across that wide and rolling river. Ah-ha, I'm bound away, 'Cross the wide Missouri…”
Throughout the sleepy town of Washington, hung an opiate haze. The town drudged listlessly about its labors, and all the while the clink of hammers rang, the rhythmic beat of anvils and nails as equipment was forged and repaired and townsfolk shrouded their windows with roughhewn boards. All the while, a kind of apprehension throbbed beneath the thin veneer of drudgery. A gentle breeze bent the boughs of groaning oaks, and folks flinched at the cold drizzle in the air that warningly fanned their cheeks.
Through the muddy streets ground to pulp beneath passing wheels, a woman hiked her skirt and trudged away with a yellowed envelope gripped between three fingers. Her head huddled low, a pair of doe-like green eyes darted around from beneath a milky bonnet. She seemed to recoil from every bump, jostle, or tread of a fellow pedestrian as from a hot iron. She bumped, sidled, and shuffled through milling traffic before reaching a four-room dogtrot cabin a block from the ferry.
A quick knock, and the door opened to reveal a barrel-chested man with a red vest over a white button-up shirt. His sleeves were rolled up over his bulky forearms, and he appeared to have just washed his hands.
The two exchanged hushed words, and the woman shoved the envelope into his hands. She waited while he opened it and inspected the contents. She half-turned to leave with a hurried remark, but the doctor snatched her by the elbow and drew her close. He whispered in her ear, and the woman dipped her chin in a kind of solemn resignation. He led her firmly but gently inside and closed the door behind them.
“Will you walk into my parlor? Said a spider to a fly; ‘Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.” A woman across the street was waiting in a wagon with her little son on her lap. She rested her cheek on his head and read from a small book she held in front of him with both hands. “The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
and I have many pretty things to shew when you are there.
Oh no, no! said the little fly, to ask me is in vain, for who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again.” They waited together outside the tinsmith’s shop, where the husband bartered over wares with the proprietor.
“Any further news come from the bigwigs in Houston?” remarked the husband browsing the wares, picking up cups and pans and inspecting them casually.
“My supplier in Columbia said Lamar’s been pushing further into Mexico,” replied the proprietor, David DeWitt from behind the front counter.
“Damn fool already bungled the Santa Fe affair. He has no focus. He’s got his attention divided with the redskins, trying to do too much at once,” sighed the husband. “What he needs is to focus on bolstering the numbers of the Rangers. They can handle the redskins while the bulk of the army pushes Santa Anna out of the territory.”
“Dammit, DeWitt! Your boy here says my stovepipes still ain’t done yet. That’s nearly a week’s delay. You know I need to fill my orders for that molasses shipment in Velasco,” a voice cut in loudly from the rear of the store.
“Your qualm’s with God and the Hudson Bay Company, Fuller, not me. I can’t make stovepipes without tin, and they’ve got the extra tin. As my daddy told me, it’ll get here when it gets here,” hollered DeWitt over his shoulder. He shook his head and met the sympathetic smile of his conversation companion. “Ya’d think I was Christ a’sleepin’ the way he hollers. Now, was that just the pans and sivs you needed here? I got some nice new snuff boxes fresh off the iron.”
Back at Hoxey’s, Cyrus “Cy” Hoxey was finishing unloading a new wagon shipment of fresh goods. The manager was a lean man with a hawklike nose and black hair slick with pomade. Despite his wiry frame, Cy was no slouch. He heaved a heavy crate over one shoulder and under one arm and led the way to the back of the store. There, he passed through an open door to a narrow hall that opened at the other end into a rear storeroom.
The storeroom was a ten by ten-foot square lined with shelves of jars and canned goods and packed beneath them with barrels and bags of flour, wheat, and corn. The only entrance was a narrow vent near the ceiling through which a shaft of dull sunlight gleamed.
Cy set down his crates as carefully as he could. When one knocked against the wall, a sort of faint clink seemed to emit briefly with the thud of wood. Cy halted and stared for a moment at the wall. A kind of bulging, animal stare passed over his features for a heartbeat. A moment passed in breathless silence, broken swiftly after by a forced, exhaling laugh. “Damn weather,” he chuckled and looked up at the window. “Even the wood’s getting restless.” He fumbled in his pocket and plucked out an envelope, whose seal he inspected before wrapping it in a beaver fur and setting it aside. Then, he took up a small pry bar and pried up the lid of a nearby barrel. Running his fingers through the beans inside, he tested the depth and dampness and then plunged the envelope inside. After knocking the lid back in, he slid the barrel into a corner, took out a pocketknife, and etched a mark into the top of the lid. “As I was a goin’ over the famed Kerry mountains, I met with Captain Farrel and his money he was counting…” he hummed to himself as he pocketed the knife and shoved the barrel back in place. He meandered around the room, arranging cans and jars of peaches. “I first produced my pistol, and then produced my rapier, saying ‘Stand and deliver,’ for he were a bold deceiver…”
Soon enough, his voice faded with his receding steps back up the stairs. The dull thud of the door and clink of the latch sounded briefly, and then silence settled in the darkness. Above the faint footsteps echoed like distant thunder. The faint squeak and scratching of a mouse scurried along a corner behind the canned peaches. In the opposing corner, sacks of barley and corn were piled up. Their weight bent and slid them down gradually like melting snow. The mouse circled it cautiously, twitching its nose in the air before nibbling at a corner. Then it lifted its head at the sound of crinkling burlap. It watched the long, spidery appendages creep between the sacks.
They curled, groped and dug into the rough burlap, and the whole pile trembled and bulged. The mouse skittered away with a squeak as the sacks slid back and tumbled over one another in a succession of dull thuds. There was a movement—a slithering and a spidery tread that plodded slowly out and over the sacks. In the blackness, space swelled and stretched and slithered until it rose cobra-like in the midst of the storeroom. Little could be made of form and figure but of its wan and scraggly shadow like a leaning willow. The soft tread of bare feet sounded faintly in the storeroom.
A sound like wind echoed faintly at first before trembling and deepening like a distant sigh of bellows. A light pattering and dull scraping sounded as the fingers stroked and prodded along the surface and rim of a barrel. The slender digits found a groove and dug, slid and pried methodically around the edge of the lid. All the while, that strained, and gusty sound—that labored breathing—shuddered above. Then a grunt, and a pop, and the lid came free. Thin hands darted into the barrel, plucking handfuls of salted pork and shoving them into a bag. Then, the figure replaced the lid and pressed it in as well as it could without making too much noise. From there, it searched other containers and took potatoes and onions, careful to take only small amounts. Finally, it reached a pale hand to an upper shelf, dug around in a box, and produced a handful of tallow candles. Finally, its bounty secured, the figure slunk over to the window, clambered atop a barrel, and reached to the window with long fingers. Drawing itself roughly up, digging its toes into the wall and hauling through the narrow vent, the thin form darkened the vent like a fleeting eclipse and vanished.
