Of Grave Concern (7 page)

The epitaphs were colorful, but hardly useful.

No family groups, no birth dates to determine ages, no relative sizes of monument to indicate status. It was all horribly and rustically democratic.

Near the top of the hill was an open grave, having been prepared sometime in the last day or so, judging from the freshness of the sides of the earth, but it had not yet received an occupant. There was a shovel driven into the mound of earth beside the grave.

Were the city fathers anticipating another wild weekend? Or was the Vigilance Committee just sending a warning?

I sat down next to the open grave.

The sun had nearly set and the sky had turned a deepening blue. The evening star blazed brightly in the west, and overhead a few faint stars were emerging.

I leaned back on my elbows to look up at them.

Then I stretched out full beside the open grave and put my hands beneath my head for a pillow.

There was a gentle breeze from the southwest, chasing away the smell of cattle and replacing it with the scent of rain and grass. It was cool, but not cold. Soon I was asleep, or nearly so.

Then I felt something slither near my elbow.

I shot up like a skyrocket.

A rattlesnake the length of my arm was undulating along next to the open grave, following its pink flicking tongue. A cold thrill passed from the center of my chest to the top of my head as I realized it could have bitten me at any time. I took a few steps back as I caught my breath.

Perhaps the snake was merely seeking warmth.

Then again . . .

“Paschal!”

12

It was silly of me to shout Paschal Randolph's name at Boot Hill. I had hardly spoken his name (which rhymes with rascal) in the two years since he had been found dead in Ohio. The coroner ruled his death self-inflicted, because the gun that had delivered the fatal bullet was found beside him.

He was forty-nine.

I was in Chicago when I heard the news, and it sent me into a deep melancholy. For weeks I wore only black and frequented that city's Graceland Cemetery, walking among the deathly mansions of the rich. I hadn't seen Paschal in seven years. When we separated in 1868, in Jackson Square in New Orleans, during a thunderstorm, I felt there was a hole in my chest, where my heart had been. No, I wasn't in love with Paschal, even though it would have been natural for others to assume so.

When I walked away from Paschal, the rain plastering my hair to my face and smearing my dress against my thighs, I knew that any chance I ever had of contacting Jonathan was gone. If anybody could have helped me reach him, it was Paschal—magician, mesmerist, trance medium, medical doctor. He was of mixed blood, had been a fervent abolitionist, was a recanted Spiritualist, and remains the smartest person I've ever known. He was also twenty years my senior and married.

After reading all of his books, especially
Human Love and Dealing with the Dead,
I became determined to seek Paschal out. I found him in New Orleans the summer after the war ended, teaching newly emancipated slaves how to read. He took me on as a pupil as well, and shared with me the secrets of his life's misadventure.

All human beings are spiritual beings, Paschal said. As children, having been recently born of spirit, we are in touch with the spirit world. Children are much better at seeing ghosts (and elves and fairies and all manner of otherworldly beings) than adults. But as we grow older, we give ourselves over to the material.

We doubt our gifts.

And even when as adults we glimpse the world beyond—knowing, for example, when a family member is upon death's bed, or being certain a letter from a friend you haven't seen in a long while is about to arrive, or just having the sensation of having somehow lived through an event or conversation before—we are at first mystified, then confused, and finally frustrated.

The frustration sets, Paschal said, because the revelations are all so damned random. It seems that we should be able to control this marvelous gift, that this spiritual telegraph should be able to serve man as reliably as the electro-mechanical kind. Faced with such frustration, Paschal said, we begin to deny and then to doubt our gifts—or our sanity.

But with careful training, some control could be exerted over these other powers. There were a few important rules to remember: Ghosts always have unfinished business, and the dead never lie, although true ghosts will not usually respond to a direct question. If you want information from a ghost, Paschal said, you had to learn to
listen.
Demons will always respond to a direct question, he said, but will only answer truthfully if asked in the name of Jesus Christ or something else holy.

Once spirit communication was established, Paschal said, it was possible to influence the weather, to change the turn of a card . . . and, with special training, to summon the dead. It was a risky business, he said. If not done properly, it could result in the spiritual ruin of the living parties involved.

For Jonathan, it was a risk I was willing to take.

After three years as Paschal's apprentice, I was finally ready.

We attempted the forty-nine-day magical rite that was required to establish contact with Jonathan. Granted, the rite itself was shocking, but Paschal said such an intense shock was required to break the grip our senses had on illusory reality and to forge a permanent connection with the spirit world. It would work, he said, if our hearts were pure.

The rite failed.

On the dawn of the fiftieth day—April 13, 1874—I found myself shivering on a slab inside one of the plastered and whitewashed tombs in St. Louis Cemetery Number One. In New Orleans, the dead are placed in vaults on top of the ground, to keep them from floating away. I had gone to the cemetery the night before, brushed away the bones of the previous occupants, wrapped myself in winding sheets, and waited for Paschal. By the time he got there, a few hours before dawn, my skin was about as cold as one of the permanent residents of the cemetery.

That's what Paschal wanted.

For the past seven weeks, we had practiced intimacy in increasingly shocking ways: in public, with others, drunk on absinthe, and at midnight in the apse of a church. For the last month, Paschal had allowed me to eat practically nothing. I became pale, cadaverous—and compliant. The final sacrilegious union, he said, on Easter Sunday in the old cemetery, would complete the great rite and summon Jonathan's spirit from the dark beyond.

But in the cold light of that April morning in the old cemetery, there was nothing manifest in the tomb except crumbling plaster and peeling paint. It was raining outside. The lilies Paschal had brought were drooping, but the damned immortelles were as bright as ever. I pulled a sheet stained with sweat and semen around my shoulders, trembling, and watched a water moccasin slither across the wet floor.

I held my head in my hands and thought with shame of Jonathan—and was stricken with terror because I could not remember his face. It was then I knew that I had to get out and leave Paschal behind, no matter how smart or well-meaning he was. While he pleaded with me to stay, I pulled on my dress and fled barefoot in the rain toward the Vieux Carré.

“Ophie!” Paschal called behind me.

I tried to outrun him, but couldn't.

At Chartres Street, he grasped my wrist and spun me around. He was wrapped in a gutta-percha slicker. The hood was down and the rain was streaming down his face, as it was mine, hiding our tears.

“Let me go,” I said, somehow finding the strength to pull away from him.

“Ophie,” he pleaded. “Stay. We can try again—”

“No!”

“Something was wrong. It should have worked.”

“Teach me no more of your evil,” I said.

“I'm not evil,” Paschal said. “I'm just . . . weak.”

“We are done.”

“Stay and we can explore other worlds!”

“I have found this world harrowing enough,” I said.

“The knowledge of the tree of good and evil is within reach,” he whispered. “We can become as the gods.”

At this declaration, the square was bathed in a blinding light and there was a crash, as if heaven itself had fallen. A bolt of lightning had shattered one of the ancient oaks and it fell, not thirty yards from us, amid a shower of orange sparks.

“There is your answer.”

“Don't you see the power we command?”

“We command nothing,” I cried. “Our words are sparrows before the storm. The storm drives us, not the other way around, and all is as it should be. We amuse ourselves with carnal devices and gibberish, as a way to distract us from our boredom or our grief, but in the end the great door of death admits only one at a time, and permanently.”

“Ophie, no!”

“
Putain!
Go back to your wife.”

13

It was after midnight when I returned to my rooms at the Dodge House, and Front Street was going like a fire in a circus tent. I shut the windows against the noise, apologized soothingly to Eddie for being so late, and barely got my clothes off before falling in bed.

After being frightened by the rattlesnake on Boot Hill, I'd still had much business to do that night. But I had arranged to book the opera house for the next night, managed to place a story in the next day's
Ford County Times
announcing the event, and visited several brothels and made some profitable contacts among the city's demimonde.

Then I went to the Saratoga, one of the better gambling joints on North Front. The place was jumping, and Stetsons were clustered at every table. Faro was the most popular card game, and a lot of cowboys were bucking the tiger and losing. There was also a noisy game of chuck-a-luck, a game in which the dealer mixes three dice by turning them in a cagelike contraption shaped like an hourglass, and near the bar a game of keno was in progress, the white balls being deposited one at a time from the keno goose, an egg-shaped wooden hopper. In the very back was a billiard table or two. I couldn't see the tables, but I knew there was one there because over the heads of the crowd I could see a cluster of raised cues.

I played a few simple rounds of three-card monte at a table that was full of cowpunchers just arrived that afternoon. Being Texans, they were drunk; and in a few minutes, I had enough in coin and greenbacks to pay my polite tramp's vagrancy fine, and then some. I stayed just long enough to charm the Texans into forgetting they had lost money, then slid out the door before the management of the Saratoga could take notice and ask for a house share.

My last stop was at the city jail, where I found young Tom still on duty.

“Don't you ever go home?”

“I live in a tent behind the Rath hide lot, near the mercantile, with six other fellows,” he said. “If you had a choice, wouldn't you stay here?”

I gave Tom five dollars to pay to Judge Frost in the morning, along with a dollar for the tramp's breakfast and lunch. Then I asked Tom to deliver a message.

“Please ask our gentleman to see Bartholomew Potete upon his release,” I said. “I believe Potete can help him find work.”

Tom snorted.

“If Potete has work for him, odds are against it bein' legal.”

“Mister Potete has done right by me.”

“I didn't say he was a bad lawyer,” Tom said. “The tramp has a name, you know. He wrote it down for me.” Tom found a slip of paper on the jailer's desk and pushed it over to me. “Timothy Cresswell. He's from Boston. Says he's been mute all his life.”

 

 

By the time I got back to my rooms at the Dodge House, my head was throbbing from noise and the cigar smoke. I needed sleep, because my hearing in district court was scheduled for eight o'clock. My mind needed to be in good working order, without fog or cobwebs. Yet, I could not force myself to sleep. The harder I tried, the more infuriatingly awake I became.

I sat up in bed and, with something approaching panic, thought of Chicago.

No, I told myself. I would deal with that later. For now, I had to concentrate on freeing myself from the clutches of County Attorney Sutton, paying my debt to Potete, and getting clear of Dodge.

With this thought, my mind became considerably calmer. Outside, Front Street seemed to be winding down as well, because the din had subsided from a circus blaze to a campfire.

Still, it took me another hour to get to sleep.

Then I was awakened by a cry of terror from the street below.

“Lawd A'mighty!” a rough male voice shouted with an Ozark twang. “How wondrous strange. The ghost returns!”

“Speak to it, Homer,” another voice urged.

I stumbled out of bed and threw open the window.

The street below was empty, save for two drunken cowboys, arms around one another, staring at a ghostly figure at the edge of the railroad right-of-way.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” I whispered.

As I watched, the dead girl began to walk toward the cowboys, her bloodstained blond hair swaying and her dress rippling in the breeze that comes before dawn.

“She's a-comin' this way,” Homer, the taller one, said.

“Ask it what it wants,” the other said.

“I don't think I will,” Homer said.

“You aren't scared, are you?”

“I'm not afeared of anything, Bertrum.”

But the cowboys were backing up as they talked, and were now close to the steps of the Dodge House.

The ghostly girl continued to approach, and now I could see that she had just one shoe. She was walking in a curious lopsided rhythm, as if to some unheard dirge, but her feet never touched the mud. Her entire body glowed with an unearthly bluish light, and I could clearly see her calm expression, as well as the gaping wound beneath her jaw.

“Oh, my Lord,” Bertrum muttered.

From a pocket, he produced a hidden gun, one of those little two-shot jobs favored by gamblers and pimps, and he pointed it unsteadily at the apparition.

“Don't be foolish,” Homer said. “You can't kill a ghost with a gun.”

Bertrum fell to his knees and covered his eyes with his hands.

Homer cleared his throat, stood his ground, and held up his hand.

“I command you . . . in the name of the Father.”

The ghost stopped.

“And the Son, and the Holy Ghost, what do you want?”

She stood still for a moment.

Then her mouth moved, as if trying to form words, but no sound came out. Her left hand came up to her throat, as if to gesture that her wound rendered speech impossible.

Then her head tilted back. Her eyes had no pupils, only whites. And she was staring straight up at the window where I stood.

The breath caught in my throat.

“I can't take it!” Bertrum cried, and he shoved the little gun forward and fired both barrels in quick succession.

The girl remained, but her blank eyes regarded the cowardly cowboy with a mixture of ghostly pity and disgust. Then a rooster crowed somewhere and the ghost dissolved in a mist that looked like a thousand blue fireflies swirling into the night.