Ollie's Cloud (30 page)

Chapter 18

Ollie cannot speak. Every breath is difficult. He is being choked by his heart, which seems to have expanded monstrously. His body is numb. The room in which he sits has collapsed into a dark tunnel; only the faces of Jonathon and the policeman are clear and bright. He knows that words are being spoken, but they seem scattered and disconnected, devoid of meaning. Since the words “they found Mary’s body,” everything has disintegrated into nothing.

Hell cannot be worse than this.

He should have been ready for this news. He should have known that New York City devours young women and spits them out into early graves. He is to blame, of course, for believing that his love would surround her with protection.

And then it hits him. Mary is gone forever.

The despair is like falling endlessly—heart in his throat, nothing to touch—into a dark and bottomless well. He gasps at the weightlessness. Utterly disoriented, Ollie tries to stand and leave the room but falls backward onto the divan.

He needs to hate someone for this. Hatred is a ledge to hang onto. And
anger
—anger is the lifeline to pull him up from this pit.

Revenge! He needs to feel its healing touch.

But he is dead. Numb. Without the intense pain of Mary’s death he can’t arouse the passion he needs to save himself.

“It can’t be Mary—can’t be her.” The words are a woman’s. Phebe’s. She is crying. “Who did this terrible thing?”

Ollie will not cry. He will get even.

“We don’t know much right now,” the policeman says. “The coroner is still performing his inquest. But he sent these articles with us.”

The policeman and Jonathon spread out the remnants of Mary Rogers on a table. First, a section of dress, then flowers from Mary’s hat, a garter, the bottom of Mary’s pantalette, and a shoe.

Phebe sighs and puts her face in her hands. “Mary’s things. It’s true then, there’s no mistake.” She begins to sob.

“One last thing,” Jonathon says, holding out a curl of Mary’s hair snipped off by the coroner.

Phebe looks at the lock but refuses to take it. “No, no—not my baby’s hair,” she says.

Ollie silently reaches out for the lock and Jonathon hands it to him. As Ollie touches the river-coarsened strands, searing pain breaks through the terrible numbness, shocking him to life. My God,
the pain feels good!
It scorches his heart and lungs, strikes like hot lightning in his gut, stabs at his head. Tears try to burst out but he fights them back into a crampy balloon of grief that is swelling in his throat.

And then he finds himself in bed. The rest of the evening has evaporated. He is alone with his thoughts and the relentless torment of guilt. If he must hate someone for this tragedy, why not hate himself? Had he not damned Mary with his selfish act of physical intimacy? Had he not set in motion God’s punishment for both of them the minute Ollie corrupted Mary’s purity? What greater punishment is there than to lose someone you so deeply love?

So much for the mercy of God!

The words of St. James, which had been so indelibly inscribed in his consciousness, now ring hollow in his ear:
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.

What kind of mercy is this, that God imposes the harshest sentence for an act of tenderness? Is it not the greatest hypocrisy to propagate a message of love and then rebuke its expression? Ollie can see that the angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament has not been transformed into a God of Love as St. John had written, but had remained a spiteful, merciless persecutor of humanity.

Ollie shivers as he recognizes the blasphemy of his thoughts. What possesses him? To blame God for Mary’s death is a fool’s conceit. In the cold grip of loneliness he wrestles with his conscience until sleep overtakes him. And in this world of sleep, Ollie and another boy, each twelve, lay on a blanket of warm Bushruyíh sand, heads nearly touching, eyes fixed on the clouds. Ali Qasím squints as the sun emerges from behind a luminous mountain of nervous vapor, then his eyes widen.

“Do you see it? Right there!” Ali points toward a small pinched cloud near the peak of the white mountain. His friend Jalal, his only true friend, raises his head and tries to follow the aim of that rigid finger.

“It’s Mary Rogers, in the clouds,” Ali exclaims.

But by the time Jalal finds the cloud that is Mary, it is no longer her, but someone else.

“No,” Jalal says, “it’s not Mary. It’s your mother. She’s come to look after you.”

Chapter 19

She is past the quarter-century mark and unmarried. Not that she wouldn’t make any man a fine wife—sturdily built she is, and hard-working, with a god-fearing soul—but she has lacked the opportunity to meet a suitable mate. So busy! Always preparing for the next tent meeting. Praying for the souls of the nation. Studying the scriptures with her father. Helping him with his sermons. And now delivering them as well.

Alice Crenshaw senses the purring of hormones and the ticking of the clock. Until now she has held captive the hormones, wild demons caged by her iron will, though they speak seductively to her, mostly at night, and excite her with outrageous ideas and wicked deceits. There is a heaven, they tell her, right here on earth. A heaven of such exquisite pleasure that one can be plunged into a world of bliss and ecstasy. And there is a natural duty for her to fulfill, too, they say—a responsibility to bring new life into the world. These are the things she dreams of when her conscious mind is numb with sleep and unable to provide reliable discipline.

The ticking of the clock, though, is what panics her whenever she hears its maddening cadence, which is more frequent these days. One clock is exasperating, but now there are two, and the incessant drumbeats overlap and haunt her with their opposing messages. The first one, the clock that has measured most of her years, tells her that she is running out of time to marry and have children. With her strict moral code these events must occur in exactly that order. She is now past her prime—most brides are much younger. Her best child-bearing years are behind her.

She should not even be thinking such wicked things! She is a Bride of Christ. She has dedicated her life and soul to His cause.
Why, then, does she long for the touch of a mere mortal?
It must be the demons whispering in her ear.

The second clock ticks even louder. Each tick brings her and the world of humanity nearer to Christ’s Return. In two years or less He will come again.
She will be united with Him. Nothing else matters.

Will she never, then, experience the rapture of physical intimacy or the joy of motherhood?
Of course not!
Her rapture will be into the arms of Jesus, rescued from physical torments and taken into his enveloping protection.

Because of her calling, Alice’s intimacy with men is limited to the spiritual plane. She sees men kneeling in the sawdust, weeping for their sins, begging for salvation, holding her hand in desperation as she dispenses God’s mercy the way a farmer’s wife dishes out breakfast. She is surrounded by men who are broken, despairing, hungry for forgiveness. And in her they do not see a woman but a saint, an angel, untouchable and somehow sacred. The blessing of her calling is the curse of her physical existence.

It is early morning and as Alice walks down a wooded trail, relishing the pleasure of solitude and self-pity, she feels the heat of the sun on her back like the warm hand of God pushing her along. Even Christ was tempted, she tells herself. Even Jesus had doubts:
“Why hast Thou forsaken me?”
Surely a feeble, sinful creature such as Alice is allowed a moment or two of uncertainty.

She is tired. And so glad there is no sermon to give this evening. Instead, she will be attending a meeting at which her old friend William Miller, the man who deciphered God’s calendar, will be speaking.

Miller’s revelation has spawned scores of evangelists, and they have swarmed like locusts across New York State. Added to an existing army of revivalists of other persuasions, Miller’s followers have found themselves plowing well-tilled soil. The residents of New York have been scorched by the fires of hell and saved by God’s mercy so many times that the upstate region is now comically referred to as the “Burnt-Over District” by the city papers.

Alice has heard the disparaging comments, but to her way of thinking fresh new growth regenerates and purifies every burnt-over field, so let them laugh. Let them mock her work and Miller’s. They won’t be laughing when Christ returns in the clouds to call His faithful to Him.

She lies down in a meadow and looks up at the sky.

In the clouds.

He will come in the clouds.

And then she sees it. The big cloud just now passing in front of the sun.
It is Jesus, in the clouds.
His perfect image, standing with arms held out, inviting her to him.

No, it is not time for Him to come. Not time for her to leave. Not until 1843—God’s timetable.

She stares at this Jesus in the clouds and begins to understand. As the cloud reshapes itself in the wind, Jesus takes on the shape of a face. A man’s face. It’s a sign! Jesus is sending her a man to be with her in the end days.

Oh God, oh merciful God!
Could it be true?

She stares at the cloud, the kind face, the man. The cloud passes and the heat of the revealed sun now embraces her.

She closes her eyes and imagines the man from the cloud cradling her with his warm body.

Thank you Jesus!

Opening her eyes, she searches the sky for the man’s face, but the cloud has transformed itself again. The man is gone.

But she can remember his smile.

Chapter 20

By the early weeks of August 1841, Mary Rogers is the talk of New York. In a city overridden by vice and murder, it is a wonder that the specter of Mary has so captivated the public, but no accident. The darling of the newspaper district has been resurrected in print by the scores of journalists who smoked her segars at Anderson’s and dreamed of secret trysts in the back room.

All scraps of information, every shred of evidence, each sniff of a new suspect is digested and regurgitated in cold type. Coroner’s reports and foggy eyewitness accounts become first-page news. The
Herald
and the
Evening
Post
, having worn out the threadbare facts, freely invent new ones to stir the story and prick the prurience of their readers. The reformist
Tribune
, in the “cause of pursuing justice,” screams a battle cry over Mary’s desecration. The raucous penny press recasts Mary as the temptress in a sordid tale of sex and violence. In the pages of the
Enquirer
she has devolved into a sexual and seductive harlot with “unnatural vivacity.”

Theory is transfigured into reality, fiction transforms into hard news, and journalism—hauled about by the scruff of the neck by James Gordon Bennett—completes its metamorphosis into public entertainment. The urban mystery tale of Mary Rogers has been serialized in the best tradition of Charles Dickens, and the public, panting for more, hangs on for each new installment.

Ollie can no longer read these accounts. The
Sun
has decided that a gang of dark-skinned fiends kidnapped and molested the Beautiful Cigar Girl, performing “countless vile acts” on her body. The
Enquirer
has assured the public that Mary was the victim of the dangers of sexual freedom, her life and death a cautionary morality tale played out on the promiscuous streets. As if Mary were a side of beef on the butcher’s hook, the newsmen probe her most private parts with their imaginations and report on her likely (or unlikely) sexual experience. They publicly violate Mary’s corpse over and over with fabricated descriptions and fictional events.

Ollie has become obsessed with finding Mary’s killer. He has pored over the police reports—not the embroidered versions in the public prints, but the official ones—and pestered the investigators with pointed questions and imaginative speculations. He has woven together his own theory of the crime, and it points inerrantly to William Kiekuk.

How could the police not have seen it?

So obsessed is Ollie with justice—no,
revenge
—that for a week he has followed Kiekuk on the man’s spiflicated rounds, searched the sailor’s seedy room a mile from the boardinghouse, and interrogated the rejected lover’s boozed-up buddies. If Kiekuk is guilty—and Ollie is quite sure he is—the fellow at least exhibits the virtue of remorse. The poor drunkard often breaks into sobbing fits at his watering holes, shamelessly confesses his love for Mary Rogers to anyone with an open ear, and on occasion has threatened to throw himself off the nearest bridge, so extreme is his anguish.

Who but a guilty man would consider suicide?

The police, of course, have investigated everyone who knew Mary, especially the boardinghouse clan of Arthur Crommelin, Daniel Payne and William Kiekuk, but found no one to charge. The unsolved mystery continues to captivate the public, and now there are those who believe that the bloated body found in the harbor was not Mary Rogers at all, but someone else.
The segar girl must have planned to disappear. She was deep in debt, or guilty of some heinous crime, or maybe she had stolen a king’s ransom and needed to vanish fast. Perhaps she murdered the anonymous look-alike victim to throw the authorities off her trail!

By late August Ollie is choked with righteous indignation. Kiekuk remains a free man, uncharged in any crime and preparing now to ship out for parts unknown. The police have arrested a dozen suspects—gang members, Africans, an Irishman, several smalltime hoodlums, a couple of Asians, a Czech. All were released without a charge.
Of course they were! Kiekuk’s the guilty one.

On this particular sultry evening Ollie is more fixated than ever on the despicable William Kiekuk. He follows him from his boardinghouse to a sailor’s dive, the
Open Bow
, just off the harbor, where Kiekuk meets up with a couple of swarthy, sweating compatriots seated with soggy elbows on a beer-sticky table. Ollie enters the tavern and finds a shadowed bench in the corner of the stinking hall. With the sour, putrid breath of a buzzard, the tavern enshrouds him.
Hard to breathe!
Rancid tobacco, the sharp stench of unwashed bodies, the musty smell of cheap perfume dabbed onto the sagging necks of sickly whores—it all mingles into a reeking, nauseating assault on his senses. He almost pukes.
How can these people be laughing so uproariously in this foul atmosphere, and dancing so closely?

So intently does Ollie watch Kiekuk’s self-embalmment that he does not notice that he himself has been followed. Another man at the far end of the splintered-wood bar has slipped into the tavern unseen and now watches Ollie’s every move.

Kiekuk chugs a whiskey, chases it down with a warm beer. Then does it again. His broken-toothed friends copy him, laughing.

Ollie does the same, not to be outdone by the evil Kiekuk. Besides, there is courage in the bottle, and he will need it tonight.

At the other end of the bar another man slowly sips a mug of ale, eyes glued to the Englishman.

The evening deteriorates rapidly. Fists fly at the fireplace end of the cavernous room, and bottles break, but Kiekuk and his party scarcely notice. The glassy-eyed sailor seems now to be swimming in self-pity. Draped by a filthy, ragged sleeve, a fat arm fatherly pats him on the shoulder, an awkward gesture of tenderness from a red-eyed companion. Ollie cannot hear their words over the din, but it appears that William Kiekuk is once again coughing up the phlegm of his misery at the death of Mary Rogers. One of his punishments, it seems—the endless regurgitation of remorse—has been self-imposed.

What more could a vengeful Ollie do to this wretched creature?

Remorse is not nearly enough. Ollie needs blood. An eye for an eye.

With whiskey-fueled courage, Ollie lifts his body from the hard bench and strides purposefully toward Kiekuk and his friends. He lurches once to the left, than again to the right—too much booze, perhaps—but he manages to tack into the harbor of his vile target, stumbling into Kiekuk’s chair.

The sailor turns to see Ollie standing beside him. It takes a moment for him to recognize this man, but when he does the flats of his palms angrily drive into the wobbling table, pushing him from his chair into a bent-over standing position. His quavering body forms a speechless question mark that Ollie answers with a confidential whisper.

The man at the end of the bar decides to make his move. Is he too late? He pushes aside a drunken man and woman, dodges a barmaid, and approaches Kiekuk’s table. With a firm hand he grabs Ollie’s lapel and pulls him away from the sailor.

Ollie turns to the man with a stupid grin. “Jonathon Fury! Can I buy you a drink, mate?”

Jonathon turns to Kiekuk, who is falling into his chair with an ashen face.

It is too late.

Jonathon plucks his drunken employer from the smoky tavern and into the street. “What did you say to him?” he demands.

“What do you say to a murderer?” Ollie responds.

“Kiekuk did not kill Mary. The police have absolutely cleared him.”

“What do they know?” Ollie says, inadvertently leaning again Jonathon. “They’re idiots. All of ‘em, idiots.”

“Ollie, what did you do? Tell me. What did you say to Kiekuk in there?”

Ollie pulls away from Jonathon Fury, straightens his tie—as if this will make him less inebriated—and smugly says, “Frankly, it’s none of your business.”

Jonathon stares at him hotly. Ollie cannot bear the heat of his gaze.

“All right, all right,” Ollie says. “I told him the one thing William Kiekuk could not bear to hear.”

“And what is that?”

“Ahhh—if you understood the man’s passion, you would not have to ask. Could you call a carriage?”

And that is all Jonathon would ever learn.

The next morning, William Kiekuk is found dead on the shore of the Elysian Fields. Clearly a suicide. In his pocket is a smudged note with the words: “To the World—Here I am on the spot where Mary was found. God forgive me for my misfortune and my misspent time.”

By afternoon Jonathon has another picture.

Dead people make the best subjects.

When he hears the news, Ollie smiles and immediately thinks of Reginald Pennick. And Mum.

He learned so much from Mum.