An Acquaintance with Darkness (7 page)

"An hour!" Annie and I both said it at the same time. "But we want to go now!" I told Maude. There was something devious in this, I was sure of it. "What will we do for an hour?"

"You can work on your sewing, for one thing," she suggested. "You said that dress for Mrs. Lincoln had to be finished tonight, didn't you?"

She was right, as usual. She took up her knitting. I ran upstairs and got down Mrs. Lincoln's dress, and Annie took up a needle and helped me finish the hem. The hour went quickly. The hack came, and as we went out the door I was laughing.

"What is it?" Annie asked. "Tell me."

"She didn't offer to make us tea," I said. And I told her how if Maude had offered, I would have known she was up to one of her tricks. "And I wouldn't have gone if she'd made tea, ten dollars or no ten dollars for the hack," I said. "I swear it."

Christ Church looked different at night, looming overhead with its stone architecture. It looked like something from the Brothers Grimm. Eerie candlelight flickered in the windows.

"They're still using part of it as a hospital," I told Annie. "I know your church doesn't do that, but ours does."

"The Protestants live their faith," she said. "We Catholics talk it."

Just then a cart pulled away from the church. We stood watching. The driver waved to us and we waved back.

"Dead soldiers," I told Annie. "They always take them away in the middle of the night, so people can't see. He's taking them to Arlington, the new national cemetery. It's on Robert E. Lee's front lawn, across the Potomac. How would you like to come home from the war and find your front lawn turned into a cemetery?"

"After what Alex told me about Gettysburg, I would think that man's mind is a cemetery," she said.

Annie's astuteness amazed me. I was always learning from her. We went around the corner and in the side gate of the cemetery. What with the candlelight from the church windows and the gas lamps on the street, the cemetery was not dark. Each tombstone stood out, though shadows played about in the slight evening breeze.

Mama had no tombstone yet. But it was light enough to see two people by Mama's grave. They were surrounded by tools, and they were using shaded lanterns.

And they were digging.

I grabbed Annie's arm. "Who could they be?" I whispered.

"Grave robbers," she said.

My heart lurched. I'd heard of grave robbers. At school the girls joked about them. All the girls in school boasted that they knew of someone whose relative's body had been robbed from the grave. But I never believed it. I thought it all talk. "Here?" I croaked. "In Washington?"

Annie gave me a look. "Especially here in Washington," she whispered. "Because of the war. Doctors have just come to realize how much they don't know about the human body."

I nodded, and Annie pulled me behind a tombstone that had an avenging angel on top of it.

"We have to do something," I told her. "We can't let them take my mother!"

"Wait." She got down on the ground and crawled around the tombstone to get a bit closer. I watched and waited. I was trembling, more from anger than fright. I could hear the soft but distinct digging sound coming from Mama's fresh grave, the
plop-plopp
ing of soft earth.

They were trying to dig up my mother!

I gulped back a sob.

"Hush!" Annie ordered fiercely.

I hushed. She was a distance from me now. Then, having satisfied herself that she'd seen enough, she crawled back.

"They look like children," she said. "They can't be grown-ups. They're too small. They must be children out on a lark."

"Children? A lark? What children do such a thing?"

"I don't know, but Washington has changed with the war. Come on, we're going to stop them."

"How?"

She had a plan. I would circle around to the left of them and she to the right. "We'll scare them off," she said. "We'll make them sorry they ever drew breath."

We parted.

No sooner had I taken my first step, with shaking limbs, than a sound pierced the night.

"Whooooo! Whooo! I'm a-coming, Lord, I'm a-coming."

It was a lonely, soul-searing sound, half-animal and half-human. At first I thought Annie had made it. But in the next instant she was back beside me, clutching me so close I thought I'd die.

"Annie, what is it?" Fear ran through me, a cold river of fear, the kind that settles in your lungs and drowns you.

Annie pointed. "Look."

Did I dare? I did, and fair trembled at the sight.

There, in a far corner of Christ Church cemetery, rising above a large granite cross of a tombstone, there was a white figure—rising, rising, from behind the cross.

"Whooo! I'm a-coming, Lord, I'm a-coming." And it did come, out from behind the giant granite cross, with arms, or
whatever they were,
upraised.

"Annie," I whimpered, "it's a ghost."

I must give Annie credit. To my everlasting shame, I really believed it was a spirit unloosed on the world. Annie didn't. She was too practical, too unbelieving, too disdainful of everything to hold with spirits, unloosed or otherwise.

"Ghost, my father's nightshirt," she said. And her voice was so edged with distrust, with anger, that I clung to the wonderful sanity of it.

"What is it, then?"

"Someone who's outflanked us." Annie sometimes talked army talk. She got that from Alex. Usually she annoyed me with it, but now I thought it most reassuring.

Still, we clung together and watched as the "ghost" made its way around the headstones,
whoo-
ing and calling upon the Lord for all it was worth, going right toward the grave robbers. Or children. Or whatever they were.

There was a sudden clattering as they dropped their tools, a screaming and a scrambling as they ran through the cemetery toward the gate, leaping over headstones, running around them, tripping and recovering themselves, the ghost in pursuit.

Annie laughed. Then I did. My laughter was more with relief than anything, I don't mind saying.

"That'll teach the little varlets," she said. "Oh, how I wish I'd thought of it."

At the cemetery gate the "ghost" had taken off its sheet and was waving long arms at the intruders. Its whole angular body agitated as it waved the sheet that had covered it.

"You, Spoon, you, Mole, go elsewhere for your subjects! I'll have you hauled off to county jail if you put in an appearance here again. Go to Potter's Field! Go to Harmony Cemetery. Let decent people rest in peace!"

The voice had familiar clear rich tones.

Uncle Valentine!

"Annie, it's my uncle," I said.

"I know." She sounded less than enamored.

"What do you suppose he's doing here? How did he know those two would be robbing Mama's grave? And who are they?"

"The Spoon and the Mole, didn't you hear him? Grave robbers."

"Children?"

"No," Annie said, "dwarves."

I said my proper good-bye to Mama.

Without a word to either of us, Uncle Valentine took up the long-handled shovel the grave robbers had left and replaced the earth neatly. Then he rearranged the flowers, which, as Maude had promised, were full blooming now in the dark, their lovely white petals giving off pleasant fragrances. I stared at them. I had never seen flowers blooming at night before.

He said a brief silent prayer and gestured to me that I should do what I had come to do. He and Annie walked away.

I knelt. But I could not form my thoughts. They raced through my mind, tumbled together, pulled apart, and ran away, only to scamper back into my mind, a mixture of fear, joy, and confusion, like the light and shadows around me caught up in the night breeze.

I couldn't concentrate. I thought of Merry Andrews asking me to guess his name, of Maude giving me that cup of tea, of Annie telling me her mother was in love with John Wilkes Booth, of the man in the cart hauling his grisly cargo of bodies to Robert E. Lee's front lawn for burial, of stitching Mrs. Lincoln's gown, of the dwarves digging around Mama's grave.

I thought of the way Mama had begged me not to let Uncle Valentine touch her once she died. And how vigilant he had been about chasing away the grave robbers, how respectful and tender. He had replaced the earth around her like one tucking in the blankets of a child, rearranging the flowers like you would for someone in a sickroom.

Had Mama been wrong about him? Why had her mind and her heart been so turned against him?

From the corner of my eye, I saw Annie and Uncle Valentine waiting for me at the cemetery gate. So I gathered my thoughts in like errant children and spoke to Mama.

"You should have seen him chase them, Mama," I told her. "Oh, it would have done your heart good. I don't know who they are, but I'm going to tell the reverend all about them. Oh, Mama, I'm so sorry I didn't cry today at your funeral. But I'm going to grieve, properlike, I promise you. Just like Mrs. Lincoln said we have to do. And, oh yes, I finished her dress tonight. Annie helped me. I'm sending it over to Mrs. Keckley's place first thing in the morning. And tomorrow I'm going to pack my things and move in with the Surratts. And everything will be fine with me, Mama, you'll see."

I stayed a few minutes longer. I said some prayers. But it was no good. I still didn't feel as if I were grieving properly. I still couldn't cry. So I promised Mama I'd be back soon. I couldn't keep Annie and Uncle Valentine waiting any longer.

The driver of the hack Maude had paid ten dollars for had left. We got into Uncle Valentine's chaise.

"What would you have done if I hadn't come along?" Uncle Valentine scolded gently.

"Walked home and been accosted by every vagrant on the streets," I said.

"We most appreciate your coming," Annie told him. "But how ever did you know those two would be here doing their vile work?"

"I'm going to hire guards to watch over your mother," was all he said.

"I'm beholden to you, Uncle Valentine," I told him as his chaise drew up in front of our house.

"Are you?"

"Yes. And I missed you at the funeral."

"I wanted to come, but I didn't want to upset you."

"Oh, Uncle Valentine, I'm so sorry I hurt you."

"Then perhaps we can have a new start," he said. "Perhaps you will do me the honor of coming to my house for a luncheon tomorrow."

I looked up into his warm brown eyes. They were so earnest. They even twinkled. "Yes," I said. It felt good saying it. I was my own person now, making my own decisions. Mama was gone. I had to think for myself. I felt a certain freedom, doing so.

"I'll be there," I said.

U
NCLE
V
ALENTINE
sent a hack for me the next day. I knew what Mama would have said. "It's a grandiose gesture. It has no substance." But I was grateful for it.

I took Mrs. Lincoln's gown with me and asked the driver to stop at Mrs. Keckley's, where I dropped it off. She was out. I was disappointed. I knew she'd just returned from a trip on the James River with the Lincolns. The president had met with his generals to discuss the war's end. The gown was needed, her assistant said. The Lincolns were going to Ford's Theater tonight.

I went on to Uncle Valentine's house. When I
stepped out of the hack at 128 J Street, my spirits lifted. It was Good Friday, a marvelous spring day. I stood looking up at the three-story stone structure. Each floor had its own tower jutting out from the right-hand side. The windows in those towers seemed to sparkle like jewels in the sun.
Why,
I thought,
that top tower could be where the miller's daughter is sitting, crying because she cannot spin her flax into gold.

It reminded me of the Brothers Grimm. Some kind of vine crawled up the wall of the house on the side of the garden. In the middle of the garden I could see a small pond, and behind it a stone shed, which in itself looked like a fairy-tale cottage. The whole place was enclosed by a tall black wrought-iron fence. Brass lanterns on either side of the double-glass front doors gleamed. There was something solid and permanent, yet something forbidding, about it, too.

Mama had always hated the house. "It's the putting on of gold and costly apparel," she'd said. She always went after Uncle Valentine with quotes from the Bible. But I didn't think that described the house. Or Uncle Valentine.

The door opened. A young girl stood there holding a cut-glass bowl of candy, and I thought her the most beautiful and delicate thing I had ever seen.
She was wearing gray bombazine with a white apron and a lace collar. Her hair was tucked under a white kerchief, but wisps of it peeked out. It was a burnished brown.

"Come in, do. We're so glad to have you. Let me take your wrap."

I handed over my light shawl. From the back reaches of the house came the sound of children shrieking and laughing. "Is this the right house?"

She laughed. "They're from the Ebenezer Free School. I'm their teacher. We're pulling taffy today." She held out the bowl of candy. "Have one?"

I took one. They were nougats. Then she thrust out a slender hand. "I'm Marietta."

Her grip was cool, firm. "Your uncle isn't here yet. He's been detained. Come, let me show you the house."

"Are you kin to Uncle Valentine?"

She laughed again, a light, musical sound. "Kin? Hardly. Until last week I lived here. On the third floor. In the tower room."

The miller's daughter,
I thought.

"No, my father wasn't a miller. He owned a plantation below Richmond."

I hadn't said it aloud, I was sure of it. Oh, I must watch myself.

She raised delicate eyebrows, indicating the floors above. "Someone else lives in that room now."

"How did you come to know my uncle?"

"He saved my life."

I stared at her. Nor
another one,
I thought. But how? She was no more than twenty and in charge of herself. "How does someone like you need your life saved?" I asked.

"Come, I'll show you the house." She smiled at me. "I tried to drown myself," she said as she led me through the wide hall. The floors were highly polished, the place smelled of beeswax. There was a grouping of more strange-looking flowers in a bowl on a gateleg table. "Yuccas," she said. "All day the flowers hang down like bells at rest. At dusk they turn up to the evening sky to bloom all night."