Rebels of Babylon (12 page)

“Juth un,”
I pleaded.

“Well, which one?”

“Bat un.”

“Which one of the bad ones?”

“
Bat
un.”

He shoved a metal instrument into my maw. Its tip collided noisily with a tooth.

I fear I made a sound that was unmanly.

“That one?” He stabbed the appliance into a crevice. Twas then I understood the need of those belts.

“Unh,” I assured him.

“All right. But you’re a damn fool not to take ’em all out and be done with it.”

He removed his thumb and fiddled with his tools. Then he bent to a cabinet and produced a nearly empty bottle of whisky. He held it up to the bit of light that seeped through the dirty window.

“I have taken the Pledge, sir,” I told him, not without a certain regret.

He fortified himself with a swig from the bottle. Then took a second one.

“Open,” he said again, bending over my person. The smell of sweat and whisky was a punishment.

I opened.

He inserted yet another tool and tapped it on my tooth. Had I not been restrained, I might have leapt from the window.

“That one?” he asked, as if he had forgotten.

“Unh,” I agreed.

“Hold on.” He chose a tool that might have done for a blacksmith’s shop. It stretched my cheeks when he forced it into my mouth. I tasted metal. And rust.

He leaned his bulk against my chest, grinding my ribs with his elbow. One paw held my jaw open, while the other applied the tool.

Fastened down, the chair creaked under our weight.

“Think about something happy,” Dr. Fielding said.

Then he yanked.

Now, I am small, but strong in the chest and shoulders. I am no weakling. It remains an amazement to me that I did not topple the fellow over and rip the chair from its moorings.

He turned away to grab a rag, which he held under my mouth. Then he picked up a spittoon from the unswept floor.

“Spit out the blood,” he told me.

“Ith it out?” I gasped. I felt as though a navvy were going at my skull with a ten-pound hammer.

“Part. It broke off. Rotten through. Spit out that blood. I have to dig out the roots.”

“Tomollow,” I told him. “Do it tomollow.”

“Can’t wait. You’ll get blood poisoning, I leave that in there. Maybe gangrene.”

I tried to think of happy things. But my concentration failed me.

“Open,” he commanded. He raised a pair of implements that might as well have been a pick and a shovel.

I did my best to be manly, but did not meet success. I have been shot and stabbed and sliced. My bones have been broken and I have been burned, as well. But I do not think I ever knew such misery as I met in that dentist’s chair.

There is a place in Mr. Shakespeare’s Scottish play where the murderess says, “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” She might have been speaking of Abel Jones, not her victim.

Blood exploded over my clean uniform. Twas the last I had in reserve. Blood splashed over the dentist himself. Blood splashed across the floor.

“Almost done,” he assured me.

I began to feel sick and faint.

“Cut a little deeper,” he said. “Then we’ll have it.”

He did some work down deep that made me wail.

“Thought you didn’t mind pain?” he said disdainfully. “Just another minute. I need to trim away the extra meat.”

“Pleath,” I begged. Tears blurred my eyes. Cold though it was in his rooms, I was soaked with sweat.

He peered into my mouth again. Twisting my neck to find the light from the window.

“Deepest roots I ever saw,” he said.

He bent to his labors. To my shame, I bawled like a baby.

“There now,” the fellow said at last, flicking bone and flesh into a bowl. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Ith all out?”

“Have to charge you double. Complicated operation.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Sure you don’t want to take the rest of ’em out? While you’re here?”

Speech pained me. So I shook my head. Extravagantly.

“Well, all right,” he said. “If your mind’s made up. Just sit there and rest while I put in a few stitches.”

I STAGGERED BACK toward the hotel, drenched with sweat and blood. I must have appeared as wild-eyed as a recruit after his first battle. People stared, but I barely registered their alarm. I was stunned by pain, both present and remembered. My head seemed the size of an observation balloon.

A patrol stopped me, afraid that I had been a victim of crime. It cost me painful speech to assure them that I had merely visited a dentist. The guards at the hotel stared.

But the most alarmed of them all was Mr. Barnaby, who awaited me in an armchair in the lobby. He jumped to his feet and rushed between the loiterers to assist me.

“Dear me!” he cried. “I knew I should have come earlier! Who was it this time?”

“Toof,” I explained. “Dentith.”

At first, he looked relieved. Then his expression darkened.

“
Which
dentist?” he asked quietly, as if fearing the answer.

“Fielthink.”

He winced in sympathy. “Oh, dear. I wished you’d consulted me, I do. You needed to go to Dr. Dostle, on St. Joseph’s Street. ’E’s the Union dentist, Dr. Dostle is. Dr. Fielding’s a terrible Confederate, sir. ’E don’t like Union blue even when ’e’s sober….”

I DID NOT FOREWARN MR. BARNABY OF THE WOMAN who had slipped into my room. My jaw hurt too much when I tried to speak and the side of my face was nearly immobile with swelling. Were the lass still present, the fact would be self-evident and Mr. Barnaby could help me solve her riddle. Had she deserted the premises, report of her could await my jaw’s recovery.

I was not thinking clearly, if at all. That is the truth of it. Pain empties the mind of all that is not immediate. The voodoo devils fled my thoughts, along with the serpents and killers. I hardly cared a fig for the late Miss Peabody. Or even for Mr. Lincoln and the war. I only wanted the misery to stop.

It hurt worse than the cutting I got in the Khyber.

As I dragged myself up the stairs to my room, Mr. Barnaby prattled. “Dr. Fielding’s known as a famous prankster, sir. Especially when we comes up to the Marty Graw. Which ain’t to be this year, it ain’t to be! Oh, ’e’s bound to be in a wicked mood, after your Yankees ’as banned outdoor assemblies. It’s the same as forbidding the carnival itself! Not that there’s money or spirits to do it proper. It wants a certain outlay, for balls and such. But that’s all by the by, sir, by the by. Spilt milk. It’s a glum year, robbed of merriment. But what can a body expect, sir, with more bankrupts than beaver hats between the New Canal and the
Place d’Armes?
”

When I opened the door to my room, the chamber was empty, the young woman gone. But the queerest thing occurred.

Mr. Barnaby lifted his nose like a hound catching a scent. His expression of anxious cheer grew perplexed and wary.

I will report my speech as I intended it, not as it sounded with my mouth all ravaged.

“What is it, Mr. Barnaby?”

He shook his head and said nothing. His eyes stared through the walls as he sniffed and snuffled.

“Smell something, do you?”

He lowered his face and spoke in a tone of bewilderment. “It’s nothing, sir, nothing at all. Only … I thought I detected a fragrance.” He took a last, wistful sniff. “A scent as I ain’t smelled these many years …”

Tucking away his interest in the matter, his face resumed its usual affability. “All’s one, sir, all’s one. But would you like a shave? I’m quite the barber and ain’t ashamed to say it. I used to scrape Master Francis and the senator. I could parse your whiskers in such a way as your poor jaw wouldn’t feel it.”

It was his polite way of saying that I did not look my best. But when I touched my fingers to my cheek, I decided to elude the snares of vanity.

“I will do without shaving, thank you.”

The grand fellow understood me, though I lisped and lagged and slurred like an Irish drunkard.

“Better part of valor, sir, the better part of valor. But I suspects you’ll wish to change your uniform? Before we goes out, sir?”

“Out?”

“To the Garden District,” he told me, “on the American side. To see Mrs. Aubrey, sir. Who don’t take time for just anyone.”

“I do not have another uniform, Mr. Barnaby. This was the last, see. Anyway,” I snarled, having just suffered a knockabout wave of hurt, “I do not recollect asking to be taken anywhere this afternoon. Who, pray tell, is this Mrs. Aubrey of yours?”

“Rich as Croesus!” he exclaimed. “Or Mrs. Croesus, to put a feminine point on it. Even now, sir, even with the war. She could buy and sell us all like a slab of bacon. Oh, they’re clever sorts, them Aubreys. Never put their faith in Secession banknotes, if the world’s report is true. Pounds sterling and Yankee dollars. Golden guineas and London shares, all listed on the ’Change. I believe ’er ’usband made ’is fortune at sea. With the Royal Navy, sir, the politest pirates what ever sailed the waves! But that’s all by the by, sir, by the by. She’s old as the ’ills and rich as a duchess and won’t even offer us tea.” He looked at me pityingly. “Not that you’d be in quite the mood to drink it, sir.”

“But who
is
she, man? Why would I want to squander my time in her company? There’s work to be done!”

My grump was much too harsh. The poor fellow looked crushed.

“I only meant to ’elp, and nothing more, sir. Sorry if I overstepped my bounds. Know better next time, I will. It’s only that I asked about and made inquiries, begging your pardon. Mrs. Aubrey’s said to be the last person in New Orleans to see your poor Miss Peabody alive …”

WE DID NOT go directly to Mrs. Aubrey’s manse, which lay on the far side of the American town, where things were done proper and only the servants spoke French. First, Mr. Barnaby conducted me to a shop where he oversaw my outfitting as a gentleman. With his background in haberdashery and such matters, the fellow was particular about fit and fabric to a degree that would have done credit to my darling wife’s establishment. Although she would have been mortified by the sums Mr. Barnaby challenged me to spend.

“You ’as to
look
a gentleman, sir, or no one in New Orleans will acknowledge you,” he explained. “It don’t ’ardly matter ’ow black your crimes, as long as you looks a gent from top to bottom.”

Now, do not think that the new-gained wealth of my Mary Myfanwy’s inheritance had led me to corruption of the spirit.
Parting with such a sum to a clothier pained my pocket almost as cruelly as dentistry wounded my jaw. But I must admit that after Mr. Barnaby was done fussing and criticizing and generally terrorizing half a dozen anxious clerks and tailors, I was fond of what I saw in the shopkeeper’s mirror. Despite the gross distortion of my cheek.

I will never pass for Edwin Booth, whose visage so impresses all our ladies. But properly fitted out and viewed from a winning angle, I believe that I am a most presentable man.

“It’s all in the cut, sir, all in the cut and the pattern! Vertical stripes on a waistcoat is most lengthening. As is the stripes in the trousers. You almost looks the normal height of a fellow! And there’s nothing like a black frock coat to bring it all together into a parcel. While lessening the disproportion of the chest. Begging your pardon, Major Jones, you looks less like a runty bull and more like a regular person.” He stepped back to admire the result. “You doesn’t look ’alf so queer now. A fellow might think you was president of a bank,” he told me. “And an honest-run bank, at that.”

Mr. Barnaby arranged for my uniform to be cleaned up proper and sent back to the hotel—where my greatcoat, left with the Ursulines, had been delivered. So off we went, with me garbed in my finery and the fellows who had attended us fawning like Mrs. Mickles before the Queen. Yet, for all the crackling green dollars we left behind, I believe the clerks were glad to see us go. For Mr. Barnaby knew their trade too well. A clerk prefers to find himself more knowledgeable than his customer, which guarantees the riddance of poor merchandise, along with a tidy profit.

As we sauntered down Canal Street toward a rank of cabs, Mr. Barnaby sighed and said, “A lovely thing it was to ’ave my own shop, sir. We only carried the best, and nothing less. That’s what I offered the gentlemen, the
crème de la crème
of cloth and cut and finishings! They used to come from Natchez, even Memphis. That’s ’ow I come to know Senator Raines and Master Francis. Before the fever took Marie and the children.” A
tear crowded his eye. “You would’ve ’ad better quality of me, sir, than anything you see in the shops these days. Things ain’t what they used to be, and sometimes I thinks the world’s going to the dogs …”