The Scribe (30 page)

They were all here: Vernon and Maddox, Uncle Solomon,
even Henry Grady. Underwood standing a bit off to the side, his right arm hung in a cotton sling. He'd brought an old Negro woman with him who nodded along with the liturgy, her hands held out with the palms upraised. Mamie O'Donnell seated in the lone chair that had been brought up the mountainside, dressed as demurely as she could manage. Mamie the patroness of this affair, whore's money lavished on the funeral and its crates of flowers, the casket with its glass viewing window, the embalming done by Patterson's downtown, where the undertaker's art had frozen Julia in time.

“‘If I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day.'”

Grady's presence here a surprise. He had called at Vernon's house the day previous, waving a special edition of the
Constitution
on which the ink had barely dried, his old vigor rekindled, to show Canby two of the day's features he had written himself. The first an obituary for Julia that began, “A new star has been added to the firmament over our fair city.” The second a story entitled “Atlanta and Her Friends,” in which Canby's name was mentioned favorably and Underwood—“a credit to his race”—was mincingly praised for an accident narrowly averted at the I.C.E. And more on the exposition's current success, where attendance had surpassed one million and Atlanta was leading the charge into the twentieth century. In between the lines of type, Canby thought he sensed the Ring's epitaph. He hoped that Billingsley's guilt had destroyed it from within, dispatched those men of power and influence into the shame of counting him one of their number. But when he had looked up
into Grady's smiling face, he couldn't be sure. Canby had spread the paper out on Vernon's kitchen table and cut out Julia's obituary with his Case knife. Then he had folded the rest of the paper, neatly, twice, and opened the door of Vernon's woodstove and placed it inside.

“‘In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek succor, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?'”

Mamie had pressed her tear-streaked cheek to Canby's shoulder before the service, and the scent of her perfume yet lingered on him. He looked down the mountainside, past the Negro settlement and the green-shingled roofs of Vinings, saw a locomotive smoking in on the Augusta line, heading toward the roundhouse, there at the center of the teeming city.

“Rest eternal grant to her, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon her,” the priest said, and Canby replied, with the others,
Amen
.

T
HEN THERE HAD
been hands to be shaken, the protracted ceremony of condolences, a haze of faces before him that Canby only half perceived. “Fortitude, Thomas,” Vernon had said in parting, then clapped a hand, very gently, on Canby's shoulder.

He stood over the open grave for a time he could not have determined, could perhaps only have reckoned by the wind. He saw that the Chattahoochee, a mile off to the east, had begun to glow orange with the sunset. Saw Uncle Solomon still standing close by with his head bowed, patient as though he would bide an era here with Thomas before he took up his
shovel for the last thing that there was to be done. And that Underwood and his friend were still there as well, that the old woman's hands were now clasped together at her waist. Canby bent and took up a handful of loose earth and held it over the grave, let the rocky soil sift through his fingers onto the casket. He nodded to Uncle Solomon and turned away.

At the edge of the slope he heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Underwood walking toward him, the old woman hooked on his good arm like a bride with her escort.

“This is a thin place now, isn't it, Mister Canby?”

It took Canby a moment to catch the meaning of the question. “Yes,” he said.

“Even more so now.”

Canby almost smiled, in spite of himself.
My black Celtic friend
, he thought.
Honorary member of the tribe
.

“I suppose it always was.”

The old black woman stepped away from Underwood and took Canby's hands in hers. Old hands, gnarled with rheumatism, trembling with age or nervous energy. She hummed a hymn under her breath and kneaded his hands as she would have, he guessed, a child's. Then she looked up into his eyes and smiled. “She
is
the mountain, now, son,” she said.

C
ANBY AND
U
NDERWOOD
sat on the mountainside watching the dusk deepening down in the valley. All the others were gone, Vernon and the rest back in the city on the W&A by now, Uncle Solomon and Lettie Lee down the mountain. Now the two men sat, passing between them the bottle of Jameson
that Underwood had brought up from the city, watching the lights of Atlanta coming on, and arguing quietly.

“Superstition again, Underwood,” Canby said. “Maddox saw him fall.”

“Maddox saw
something
fall off that trestle. But you don't know it was Johnny Drew.”

“If it wasn't John Drew, what was it?”

“If it was Johnny Drew, how come they haven't found a body? Been dragging the Chattahoochee for days.”

“He'll turn up.”

“You got that right. One way or another.” Underwood stared out to the trestle, miles to the west, where Maddox's pursuit had ended. The boy, Maddox said, had jumped the W&A freight on the tracks that ran past Oglethorpe Park. Maddox just behind him had climbed on and over cars, crawling atop them until he saw the splash in the dark water. Maddox had jumped off on the river's other bank, where the tracks twisted into the woods, and walked across the bridge back into town. Underwood could not admit that was the end of it.

Underwood took a deep drink from the Jameson and passed it to Canby. For a long time, neither of them spoke. Canby studied the valley, marking the increments of night shutting down the day.

He remembered the bottle in his hand and took a pull from it. As he did he saw that Underwood had turned his head to look at the top of the mountain, the Pace Cemetery on its summit.

“If you're thinking to say more about Julia, I'd prefer you didn't,” Canby said, his throat tight. In the fading light,
Underwood saw that his jaw had clenched and the scar on his cheek was dark as a bruise.

“You know, I've been thinking about something I read a while back.”

“Underwood is thinking. Watch out.”

Underwood adjusted his arm in its sling, wincing. “‘Evil exists in the world not to create despair, but activity.'” He watched Canby's profile until Canby, slowly, began to nod.

“Maybe there is something to that. But despair seems to be the order of the day. Where did you find it?”

“It was in Malthus's
Population
book. Right there at the end.”

Canby nodded again. “Activity or despair. I guess that's the choice to make.”

“It's the choice you need to be making.”

Canby cut his eyes to the black man angrily. After a long moment his expression softened, just perceptibly. “Thomas Malthus,” he said. “Better philosophy than superstition.”

“I'd have figured you'd be giving superstition more of a fair shake by now,” Underwood said.

Canby thought of what he had seen emerge from Dixie Light, the transformation of Billingsley in the roundhouse pit. He took another drink. “I'll grant you some of that, Underwood. What took Julia and the others—that was evil.”

“Absolute evil?”

Canby thought a moment before he spoke. “Yes,” he said finally.

“Supernatural evil?”

Canby was slower to answer. “Possibly.”

“Don't that leave it open that there might be absolute good?”

“No. Not in mankind. I cannot see that.”

“I mean supernatural good.”

“I believe the theologians call what you're getting at a Manichean duality, Underwood.”

“Call it what you like. I call it good sense.”

“My quarrel with God is unresolved, Underwood.”

As Canby tipped the bottle up he thought he saw Underwood's teeth flash in the dark. “What is it?” Canby said.

“You said it, not me.”

“Said
what
?”

“God.”

“Underwood,” Canby said with a sigh.

“Just study on it some. All I ask.”

“All right, then. I'll study on it.” Underwood and his perpetual catechism, Canby thought. He sipped from the whiskey again and watched the night gather its shadows over the valley, saw the stars beginning to emerge overhead. It really was beautiful; there was no other word for it. Or other way to see it. He said, before he could quite catch himself, “I'll grant you that there are two kinds of darkness.”

Underwood looked at him. He seemed to be trying to think of what to say, then he nodded solemnly. Canby passed him the bottle.

They sat in silence long enough to watch the valley slip into full night. In the cold clarity of the November air the lights of Atlanta wavered, the gas and the electric, all the way out to the exposition at Oglethorpe Park. And above them the stars shone brightly, like an immense scattering of diamonds cast against the black sky.

“I read somewhere once that we don't see the stars,” Canby said. “Not really. They're out every night and we look right past them, take the sight for granted. That if the stars came out just once in a thousand years, we would call it a miracle and record it for all time. That we'd declare it was the city of God revealed to us. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Do you?”

Underwood looked up at the pinpricks of light in the velvety darkness. “I think there is,” he said.

Canby leaned his head back, trying not to group the stars into constellations, trying not to think of them in any order imposed by man. “Look up, then, and see them.

“There they are.”

F
ROM THE PAPERS OF
T
HOMAS
C
ANBY, DETECTIVE
, Atlanta Police Force (ret.):

What else to do when a man—younger and more sure of himself—calls your hand? I gave my proper notice to the county judge and he and I saw to it that Ringgold had a new sheriff by month's end. A man off the Chattanooga force eager to get himself some land and a better position just over the state line. Nearly ten years' experience; a good man, plodding but conscientious. He will do well there. Handed him the keys yesterday, paid my respects to Anse's grave, and did not look back.

Galling, Underwood's conviction. Not content just to be Atlanta's first Negro detective—better still, decided to be the first Negro detective to resign voluntarily from the force. Turned his badge in to Vernon and headed west when the
Constitution
ran the wire report on the second killing
in Birmingham. Of course, found himself completely shut out of the Birmingham department, as he ought to have known beforehand. Convinced that the Alabama murders are the continuance of what we saw in the fall of '81. Certain that it was not Johnny Drew that fell from the trestle over the Chattahoochee, that the boy got out of Atlanta. Deeply suspicious of Maddox and his testimony. He may be right there.

Got myself on board this train at the Vinings station, a long silent visit to the mountaintop this morning. The marker in place now, paid for with what Mamie loaned me years ago. A ring traded for a stone. Despair is the one unforgivable sin, Angus told me once. But the new Bulldog hung heavy against my chest.

Saw that the sycamores around the cemetery were beginning to bud; dogwoods blooming white in the valley. She'd have pointed that out. I headed down the mountain to the depot.

Birmingham smokes in the distance ahead, iron mills running shifts through the night, steam rising toward a crescent moon. And Johnny Drew there, Underwood says, taking up where his mentor was shut down. The corpse they found in the mine shaft on Red Mountain proof of it, he believes. I'm to meet him at Five Points. More work to be done, he says. We will see.

Even here at the outskirts, one of the Irondale foundries is running a third shift. So close by the tracks that it lights the conductor's face bright as noon as he walks through the car announcing the Birmingham depot. Men laboring
around the mill and its looming stack like ants on a mound aflame. An echoing boom of metal as they drop the chute for a pour and the molten iron sluices down it. Bright as a sun, bright enough to blind a man if he looks at it for long.

A collective gasp from the travelers as the white-hot metal runs down the chute into its cast. Some turn away from the windows. I shut my eyes. But the glare is in them now, red and white motes lingering, lights flaring out of darkness.

Historical Note

W
RITING A HISTORICAL NOVEL
is a bit like a tightrope act—with the wire as story, and the long distance below it studded with razor-sharp errors of fact. With that peril in mind I have attempted to write with careful attention to accuracy in twining fact and fiction together.

Yet I confess to a bit of dancing on the wire. I have deliberately altered two points of Atlanta history, and reworked a third, hoping that the reader will indulge that willfulness in the service of the story.

The first liberty is the presence of electric light at the I.C.E. of 1881. Electric streetlights were not a fixture in Atlanta until 1885, though Mayor James Warren English's home, the first in the city to be equipped with both electricity and a telephone, was completed in 1880. The second is Fulton Tower, which was not built until near the end of the century. Having come across Fulton Tower—with its winding, Gothic stairwell and its grim old cell Spot 12—in Franklin M. Garrett's
Atlanta and Environs
, I could not bring myself to leave it out. And the lynching in
The
Scribe
is of course a reworking of the infamous Leo Frank trial that came years later, in one of Atlanta's very darkest moments. These elements served the story well enough, I believe, to justify some reimagining of history. And certainly the eruption of evil that was the Frank case warrants reiteration as a cautionary tale. I hope the reader will concur.