“I can,” he said, “and will. Well, Toby?”
The cook raised his head, saw York’s eyes, and nodded slowly. “Well, maybe . . . if they seed you wasn’t . . .”
Joshua studied the two black men for a long time. “Very well,” he said at last. “I will dine with you tomorrow afternoon, then. Have a place set for me.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Abner Marsh.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Aboard the Steamer Fevre Dream,
New Orleans,
August 1857
Joshua wore his white suit down to dinner, and Toby outdid himself. Word had gotten around, of course, and virtually the entire crew of the Fevre Dream was on hand. The waiters, neat as pins in their smart white jackets, glided to and fro, bearing Toby’s feast out from the kitchen on big steaming platters and fine china bowls. There was turtle soup and lobster salad, stuffed crabs and larded sweetbreads, oyster pie and mutton chops, terrapin, pan-fried chicken, turnips and stuffed peppers, roast beef and breaded veal cutlets, Irish potatoes and green corn and carrots and artichokes and snap beans, a profusion of rolls and breads, wine and spirits from the bar and fresh milk in from the city, plates of new-churned butter, and for dessert plum pudding and lemon pie and floating islands and sponge cake with chocolate sauce.
Abner Marsh had never had a better meal in his life. “Damn,” he said to York, “I wish you came to dinner more often, so we’d eat like this most every day.”
Joshua barely touched his food, however. In the bright light of day, he seemed a different person; shrunken somehow, less imposing. His fair skin took on an unhealthy pallor beneath the skylights, and Marsh thought there was a chalky grayish tinge to it. York’s movements seemed lethargic, and occasionally jerky, with none of that grace and power that was normally so much a part of him. But the biggest difference was in his eyes. Beneath the shade of the widebrimmed white hat he wore, his eyes appeared tired, infinitely tired. The pupils were shrunken down to tiny black pinpricks, and the gray around them was pale and faded, without the intensity Marsh had seen in them so often.
But he was there, and that seemed to make all the difference in the world. He had come out of his cabin in broad daylight, and walked across the open decks and down the stairs, and set himself down to dine before God, the crew, and everyone. Whatever stories and fears his night hours had given birth to seemed damned silly now, as the good light of day washed down on Joshua York and his fine white suit.
York was quiet through most of the meal, though he gave diffident answers whenever someone asked a question of him, and infrequently tossed a comment of his own into the table talk. When the desserts were served, he pushed his plate aside and put down his knife wearily. “Ask Toby to come out,” he said.
The cook came forward from the kitchen, spotted with flour and cooking oil. “Din’ you like the food, Cap’n York?” he asked. “You hardly et none of it.”
“It was fine, Toby. I’m afraid I don’t have much appetite at this time of day. I am here, however. I trust I’ve proved something.”
“Yessuh,” said Toby. “Won’t be no trouble now.”
“Excellent,” York said. When Toby had returned to his kitchen, York turned to Marsh. “I’ve decided to lay over another day,” he said. “We’ll steam out of here tomorrow at nightfall, not tonight.”
“Well, sure, Joshua,” Marsh said. “Pass me down another piece of that pie, will you?”
York smiled and passed it to him.
“Cap’n, tonight’d be better’n tomorrow,” said Dan Albright, who was cleaning his teeth with a bone toothpick. “I smell a storm comin’ up.”
“Tomorrow,” York said.
Albright shrugged.
“Toby and Jeb can stay behind. In fact,” York continued, “I want to take only the bare complement necessary to man the boat. Any passengers who boarded early are to be put ashore for a few days, until our return. We won’t be taking on any freight, so the roustabouts can be given a few days off as well. We’ll take only one watch with us. Can that be done?”
“I reckon,” Marsh said. He glanced down the long table. The officers were all looking at Joshua curiously.
“Tomorrow at nightfall, then,” York said. “Excuse me. I must rest.” He stood up, and for a brief instant seemed unsteady on his feet. Marsh got up from the table hurriedly, but York waved him away. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll be retiring to my cabin now. See that I am not disturbed until we are ready to leave New Orleans.”
“Won’t you be down for supper tonight?” Marsh asked.
“No,” said York. His eyes moved up and down the cabin. “I do think I prefer it by night,” he said. “Lord Byron was right. Day is far too gaudy.”
“Eh?” Marsh said.
“Don’t you remember?” York said. “The poem I recited to you at the boatyards in New Albany. It fits the Fevre Dream so well. She walks in beauty . . .”
“. . . like the night,” said Jeffers, adjusting his spectacles. Abner Marsh looked at him, flabbergasted. Jeffers was a demon for chess and ciphering and even went to plays, but Marsh had never heard him recite no poetry before.
“You know Byron!” Joshua said, delighted. For an instant, he looked almost like his own self.
“I do,” Jeffers admitted. One eyebrow arched as he regarded York. “Cap’n, are you suggesting that our days are spent in goodness here on the Fevre Dream?” He smiled. “Why, that’ll sure come as news to Hairy Mike and Mister Framm here.”
Hairy Mike guffawed, while Framm protested, “Hey, now, three wives don’t mean I ain’t good, why most every one of ’em ’ud vouch for me!”
“What the hell you talkin’ about?” Abner Marsh put in. Most of the officers and crew looked as confused as he was.
Joshua played with an elusive smile. “Mister Jeffers is reminding me of the final stanza of Byron’s poem,” he said. He recited:
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
“Are we innocent, Cap’n?” Jeffers asked.
“No one is entirely innocent,” Joshua York replied, “but the poem speaks to me nonetheless, Mister Jeffers. The night is beautiful, and we can hope to find peace and nobility in its dark splendor as well. Too many men fear the dark unreasoningly.”
“Perhaps,” said Jeffers. “Sometimes it ought to be feared, though.”
“No,” said Joshua York, and with that he left them, breaking off the verbal fencing match with Jeffers abruptly. As soon as he was gone, others began to leave the table to attend to their duties, but Jonathon Jeffers remained in his place, lost in thought, staring off across the cabin. Marsh sat down to finish his pie. “Mister Jeffers,” he said, “I don’t know what’s goin’ on along this river. Damn poems. What good did all that fancy talk ever do anyhow? If this Byron had somethin’ to say, why didn’t he just out and say it in plain, simple language? Answer me that.”
Jeffers looked over at him, blinking. “Sorry, Cap’n,” he said. “I was trying to remember something. What was it you said?”
Marsh swallowed a forkful of pie, washed it down with some coffee, and repeated his question.
“Well, Cap’n,” Jeffers said, with a wry smile, “the main thing is that poetry is pretty. The way the words fit together, the rhythms, the pictures they paint. Poems are pleasant when said aloud. The rhymes, the inner music, just the way they sound.” He sipped some coffee. “It’s hard to explain if you don’t feel it. But it’s sort of like a steamer, Cap’n.”
“Ain’t never seen no poem pretty as a steamer,” said Marsh gruffly.
Jeffers grinned. “Cap’n, why does the Northern Light have that big picture of the Aurora on her wheelhouse? She don’t need it. The paddles would turn just as smartly without it. Why is our pilot house,
and so many others, all fancied up with curlicues and carvings and trim, why is every steamer worth her name full of fine wood and carpets and oil paintings and jigsaw carpentry? Why do our chimneys have flowered tops? The smoke would come out just as easy if they were plain.”
Marsh burped, and frowned.
“You could make steamers plain and simple,” Jeffers concluded, “but the way they are, that makes them finer to look at, to ride on. It’s the same with poetry, Cap’n. A poet could maybe say something straight out, sure enough, but when he puts it in rhyme and meter it becomes grander.”
“Well, maybe,” Marsh said dubiously.
“I bet I could find a poem even you would like,” Jeffers said. “Byron wrote one, in fact. ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib,’ it’s called.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s a who, not a where,” Jeffers corrected. “A poem about a war, Cap’n. There’s a marvelous rhythm to it. It gallops along as lively as ‘Buffalo Gals.’ ” He stood up and straightened his coat. “Come with me, I’ll show you.”
Marsh finished the dregs of his coffee, pushed off from the table, and followed Jonathon Jeffers aft to the Fevre Dream’s library. He collapsed gratefully in a big overstuffed armchair while the head clerk searched up and down the bookcases that filled the room and rose clear to the high ceiling. “Here it is,” Jeffers said at last, pulling down a fair-sized volume. “I knew we had to have a book of Byron’s poems somewhere.” He leafed through the pages—a few had never been cut, and he sliced them apart with his fingernail—until he found what he was looking for. Then he struck a pose and read “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”
The poem did have quite a rhythm to it, Marsh had to admit, especially with Jeffers reciting it. It wasn’t no “Buffalo Gals,” though. Still, he kind of liked it. “Not bad,” he admitted when Jeffers had finished. “Didn’t care for the end, though. Damn Bible-thumpers got to drag the Lord in most everywhere.”
Jeffers laughed. “Lord Byron was no Bible-thumper, I can assure you,” he said. “He was immoral, in fact, or so it was said.” He took on a thoughtful look and began turning pages again.
“What are you lookin’ for now?”
“The poem I was trying to recollect at the table,” Jeffers said. “Byron wrote another poem about night, quite at odds with—ah, here it is.” He glanced up and down the page, nodded. “Listen to this, Cap’n. The title is ‘Darkness.’ ” He commenced to recite:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream,
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light. . . .
The clerk’s voice had taken on a hollow, sinister tone as he read; the poem went on and on, longer than any of the others. Marsh soon lost track of the words, but they touched him nonetheless, and cast a chill that was somehow frightening over the room. Phrases and bits of lines lingered in his mind; the poem was full of terror, of vain prayer and despair, of madness and great funeral pyres, of war and famine and men like beasts.
. . . —a meal was brought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom; no Love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was Death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d, . . .
and Jeffers read on, evil dancing after evil, until at last he concluded:
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
He closed the book.
“Ravings,” Marsh said. “He sounds like a man taken with fever.”
Jonathon Jeffers smiled wanly. “The Lord didn’t even put in an appearance.” He sighed. “Byron was of two minds about darkness, it seems to me. There’s precious little innocence in that poem. I wonder if Cap’n York is familiar with it?”
“Of course he is,” Marsh said, hoisting himself out of his chair. “Give that here.” He extended his hand.
Jeffers handed him the book. “Taking an interest in poetry, Cap’n?”
“Never you mind about that,” Marsh replied, slipping the book into his pocket. “Ain’t there any business to attend to in your office?”
“Certainly,” said Jeffers. He took his leave.
Abner Marsh stood in the library for three or four minutes, feeling mighty odd; the poem had had a very unsettling effect on him. Maybe there was something to this poetry business after all, he thought. He resolved to look into the book at his leisure and figure it out for himself.
Marsh had his own errands to run, however, and they kept him busy through most of the afternoon and early evening. Afterward he forgot all about the book in his pocket. Karl Framm was going into New Orleans to sup at the St. Charles, and Marsh decided to join him. It was almost midnight when they returned to the Fevre Dream. Undressing up in his cabin, Marsh came upon the book again. He put it carefully on his bedside table, donned his nightshirt, and settled down to read a bit by candlelight.
“Darkness” seemed even more sinister by night, in the dim loneliness of his little steamer cabin, although the words on the page didn’t have quite the cold menace that Jeffers had given them. Still, they disquieted him. He turned pages and read “Sennacherib” and “She Walks in Beauty” and some other poems, but his thoughts kept wandering into “Darkness.” Despite the heat of the night, Abner Marsh had gooseflesh creeping up his arms.
In the front of the book, there was a picture of Byron. Marsh studied it. He looked pretty enough, dark and sensual like a Creole; it was easy to see why the women went for him so, even if he was supposed to be a gimp. Of course, he was a nobleman too. It said so right beneath his picture:
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
1788–1824
Abner Marsh studied Byron’s face for a time, and found himself envying the poet’s features. Beauty was never something he had experienced from within; if he dreamed of grand gorgeous steamers, perhaps it was because he so conspicuously lacked beauty himself. With his bulk, his warts, his flat squashed nose, Marsh had never had to worry over much about women neither. When he’d been younger, rafting and flatboating down the river, and even after he’d worked a spell on steamers, Marsh had frequented places in Natchez-under-the-hill and New Orleans where a riverman could find a night’s fun for a reasonable price. And later, when Fevre River Packets was going strong, there were some women in Galena and Dubuque and St. Paul who would have married him for the asking; good, stout, hard-faced widow women who knew the worth of a sound strong man like him, with all those steamboats. But they had lost interest quick enough after his misfortune, and anyway they had never been what he’d wanted. When Abner Marsh let himself think of such things, which wasn’t often, he dreamed of women like the dark-eyed Creole ladies and dusky free quadroons of New Orleans, lithe and graceful and proud as his steamers.
Marsh snorted and blew out his candle. He tried to sleep. But his dreams were flushed and haunted; words echoed dimly and frighteningly in the darkened alleys of his mind.
. . . Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.
. . . Gorging himself in gloom: no Love was left.
. . . men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation.
/>
. . . a meal was brought,
With blood.
. . . an astounding man.
Abner Marsh sat bolt upright in his bed, wide awake, listening to the thumping of his heart. “Damn,” he muttered. He found a match, lit his bedside candle, and opened the book of poems to the page with Byron’s picture. “Damn,” he repeated.
Marsh dressed quickly. He yearned for company something fierce, for Hairy Mike’s muscles and black iron billet, or Jonathon Jeffers and his sword cane. But this was between him and Joshua alone, and he had given his word not to talk to no one.
He splashed some water on his face, took up his hickory stick, and went out onto the deck, wishing he had a preacher on board, or even a cross. The book of poems was in his pocket. Far down the landing, another steamer was building steam and loading; Marsh could hear her roustabouts singing a slow, melancholy chant as they toted cargo across the planks.
At the door to Joshua’s cabin, Abner Marsh raised his stick to knock, then hesitated, suddenly full of doubts. Joshua had given orders not to be disturbed. Joshua was going to be almighty displeased by what Marsh had to say. The whole thing was tomfoolery, that poem had just plagued him with bad dreams, or maybe it was something he ate. Still, still . . .
He was still standing there, frowning in thought, his stick upraised, when the cabin door swung silently open.
Inside was as dark as the belly of a cow. Moon and stars cast some small light across the door frame, but beyond was hot velvet blackness. Several paces back from the door, a shadowy figure stood. The moon touched bare feet, and the vague shape of the man was dimly felt. “Come in, Abner,” came the voice from the darkness. Joshua spoke in a raspy whisper.
Abner Marsh stepped forward across the threshold.
The shadow moved, and suddenly the door was closed. Marsh heard it lock. It was utterly dark. He couldn’t see a thing. A powerful hand gripped him tightly by the arm and drew him forward. Then he was pushed backward, and he was afraid for an instant until he felt the chair beneath him.
A rustle of motion in the darkness. Marsh looked around, blindly, trying to make sense out of the black. “I didn’t knock,” he heard himself say.