The Sound of Building Coffins (5 page)

“
How does this Doctor Jack person fit in to this goodwill expedition of yours, sir?” the dealer interrupted, still looking down, still laying cards.

A moment’s pause, then: “I had heard, well, I’d heard stories…”

The dealer laughed. “Stories, eh? Well, don’t believe everything you hear, mister. Lots of superstitious folks in Orleans Parish, y’know. Yes indeed.”

“
Yes, yes, of course—I know that. But today I saw things—that, well, that gave me pause.” He pulled a folded paper from his inner breast pocket, began to unfold it. “That one-year-old boy, a boy who before today could neither speak nor walk, scribbled letters of the alphabet on the floor of his mother’s house. I wrote them down here.” Trumbo held the page up.

“
Lemme see that, mister,” said the dealer.

Trumbo pulled it back. “No. I need to find this Doctor Jack fellow.” Refolding it. “So please, if you would only—”

“
What if I were to tell you that I was this Doctor Jack fellow, mister?” Eyes hard, yellow, streaked with red. Green with black in the middle.

Trumbo turned to Charley the Barber who nodded. Trumbo’s hand lowered, holding the paper out to Doctor Jack, the dealer.

Jack unfolded it and looked hard at the words. “A one-year-old baby wrote these letters?” he asked.

“
Yes. On the floor. With charcoal.”

“
Hmm.” A pause. Beauregard and Marcus were looking over Jack’s shoulder, staring at the sheet with wide eyes.

After about thirty seconds, Doctor Jack refolded the page and attempted to hand it back to Trumbo. Instead of taking it, Trumbo only stared. Jack answered Trumbo’s stare:

“
Means nothing to me, Marshall Trumbo. Ain’t no magic or hoodoo I never heard of. Just gibberish. Sure is strange a little baby wrote it—but it means nothing to me. I’m sorry.”

Trumbo barely had time to open his mouth in protest when Marcus Nobody Special spoke up:

“
Means something to me.”

Doctor Jack’s eyebrows lifted in amusement.

Trumbo: “Excuse me, sir?”

Jack smiled, shaking his head.

Marcus repeated, but this time louder, “I said:
Means something to me
.”

“
Crazy old fool,” said Charley the Barber. “Have another drink for free and knock yer own dumb ass out.”

Marcus bristled at Charley, wrinkling his nose-scar clear up to double-ugly. “Shut yer dumb ol’ face, you poison-peddlin’, bad-hair-cuttin’ good-fer-nothin’…”

Trumbo was getting uncomfortable. “I think it’s time for me to go, gentleman. Thank you for—”

Doctor Jack: “Hold on, Mr. Trumbo.”

“
Yes?”

“
Why don’t you ask him? Can’t hurt. Marcus ain’t pretty but he’s harmless enough.”

Marcus instantly shifted his verbal assault from Charley to Jack, “
Ain’t pretty?
Who you callin’
ain’t pretty?
—you pig-assed, ugly-two-time, stank-nose, witch-doctorin’—”

The room erupted into laughter, even Trumbo managing a smile. Beauregard laughed enough to re-awaken the pain in his head, wincing through a grin.

“
Settle down, old soldier, I was only funnin’ you,” said Jack, patting Marcus on the shoulder. Marcus stopped his deluge of insults long enough to consider the favorable reaction of the card players. After a few seconds, he turned to Trumbo, pointed at the sheet:

“
Civil War code, that.”

Laughter faded from the room.

A beat. Two beats. Trumbo: “I don’t understand.”

“
On yer sheet of paper. It’s Civil War code. I wouldn’t have caught it myself, ’ceptin’ the key is written there at the bottom. The numbers is the key, see. Dass right, mm hmm. Key right there in plain sight. Usually the key is committed ta mem’ry, never writ down. Makes the code tougher to break that way. But someone done give away the code by spellin’ out the key. Means someone don’t want the code to be too good a secret. Civil War stuff. It’s how they delivered messages in the old times. In case the messenger was kilt or captured along the way. Old-timey stuff.”

“
You can read…?—I mean, how do you…”

“
Don’t be so shocked, mister,” Beauregard said in a perturbed tone. “Lots of us dumb niggras can read just fine. And Marcus may be ugly, but he’s sharp as a whip. Old war hero, too.”

“
Why thankee, Beau—” said Marcus before the word “ugly” registered—“You no-good, fat-assed, pecker-lickin’, jail-housin’…”

Another round of laughter.

“
What I mean to say is,” Trumbo continued, “I wasn’t aware that men of color were privy to Confederate ciphers during wartime.”

“
Don’t feel bad, young fella,” Marcus smiled, displaying the absence of two formerly prominent front teeth, “lots of white folk—and black folk, too—have a hard time believin’ there were plenny of proud black Confederates in the South back in them days. I was as free then as I am now, sonny. And happy with my life the way it was—like lots of free black folk was. Didn’t cotton much to that double talkin’ ’mancipation proclamation. Ol’ Abe hadda mind to ship ever’ last one of us back ta Africa—a place I ain’t never been and never cared ta go. Worst yet, when Abe couldn’t get that idear ta fly, he was talkin’ bout sendin’ us all to
Texas
. Lawdy
mine
!”

Trumbo shoved the conversation hard towards its original path:

“
Are you saying you can decipher this, sir?”

The gravedigger looked up at him. “Why, shorely I can. Yes indeed. Hand it over ta here.” He snatched the paper from Trumbo’s hand and flattened it out carefully on the table. “Spare a clean sheeta paper and pencil if you please, sir.” Trumbo pulled a blank page from the notebook in his satchel, found a pencil. Beauregard got up from the table, offering Marcus his chair—Marcus huffed at the big man, but accepted the courtesy.

“
Well. Now. Let’s have a look at this thing. Hmm. All righty now.” The group of men and the young girl gathered close around the old gravedigger. Wide-eyed and curious, like kids at a circus.

Marcus stared at the nonsense words on Trumbo’s original sheet.

U UERI NAD PTEL FUYQ LORD

EAF VULCFOL IYLRLCO AFN

EFEHDS SNUB STGSY ORTET

HSONU ETKDS BCSHE EOAOK

EREH ESRE PEYR EVWE

4X5X4/4X4X1

“
Yes, indeedy,” he began. “See, you gotta put the letters in a square. The key—these numbers down ta here at the bottom—tell you how to make that square. Easy as puddin’ and pie. Like so.”

He drew what looked like a too-tall tic-tac-toe board within a rectangular border:

“
See that? Says four by five by four. Means four times five—which comes to twenty—but four times. You kin tell yer on the right track cause the first four lines have twenty letters a piece in ’em if ya count ’em up right. Go ahead and count ’em. Tell me if I’m wrong, sonny.”

Trumbo did the simple math in his head. Sure enough, the old man was onto something.

“
And the second line of the key—four by four—but one time. Thass right, too,” Marcus went on. “See? One row of sixteen letters right there at the bottom.”

“
Well, I’ll be damned,” said Beauregard. “You crazy, sly old devil…”

Trumbo stared at the nonsense words in wonder, counting letters: “Yes, I can see—but how do you decipher…?”

“
I’m getting’ to that, sonny.” Marcus, slightly irritated, shot Beauregard a stern glance. “Watch and learn.” Trumbo shut up. Beauregard tried in vain to conceal his amusement. Doctor Jack’s expression lacked any trace of amusement at all.

Marcus methodically filled the boxes with letters in the same order as they appeared on the original sheet. “Trick is, you write ’em top to bottom, but read ’em left to right. See? And each individual line gets its own four-by-five box. Folla?”

The first line of letters filled its grid like so:

Marcus’s eyes swung up to meet Trumbo’s:

“
Sir, I gotta ask again to be sure. A little baby wrote these letters?”

Trumbo said nothing. Only stared at the sheet in wonder. Nodded.

Marcus: “Lord, Lord.”

The old gravedigger wrote the letters out in their new order beneath the rectangle:

UNEQUALLEDFORPURITYD

“
Says, ‘Unequalled for purity’. The ‘D’ at the end prob’ly first letter of the first word in the next box.” Marcus drew three more boxes for the remaining lines containing twenty letters apiece, a smaller one—four by four—for the line containing sixteen letters. Then he began filling them with letters from the original sheet; from top to bottom.

By the time he’d finished, there was a dead silence in the room—soon broken by a small voice:

“
It’s an advertisement for coffee. Like this.” Typhus Morningstar held up his multipurpose companion, a burlap bag originally made to hold coffee beans, manufactured and printed by the New Orleans Coffee Company.

Doctor Jack smiled at the boy. “How long you been standing there, Typhus?”

“
Just a little while—but long enough, I guess. Front door wide open.”

Charley the Barber: “Shee-it!” Fishing through his pocket for keys, Charley scrambled towards the front door of the shop, cursing himself along the way for letting Trumbo’s disruption distract him from relocking.

Typhus turned towards the little gal whose arm was still slung around Buddy Bolden’s shoulder. “Daddy find out you in this place, he be mad,” he told her.

The girl flicked the short remnant of her still lit cigar at Typhus with impressive accuracy, her arm arcing wide for greater impact, yanking hard against Buddy’s neck in the process. “You tell Daddy and I’ll whoop you good, you little runt. You shouldn’t be out neither!”

Buddy winced, pulling away from the girl just enough to rub the afflicted side of his neck.

“
I’m out
lookin’
fer Daddy. He gone,” said Typhus, dodging the smoking butt with casual expertise and sounding not the least bit intimidated by his older sister.

Diphtheria Morningstar’s anger instantly melted to worry. “Gone where, Typhus?”

“
It’s why I’m lookin’. Not sure.”

Marshall Trumbo eyed Typhus’ bag and held out a hand, “May I have a look at that, son?”

Typhus hesitated, but obliged: “I need it back so don’t rip it er nothin’, mister.”

“
I’ll be careful.”

Trumbo examined Typhus’ bag. It was cropped at the top and the printing was faded, but the last two lines were clear—and matched the last two lines of Marcus’ deciphering handiwork:

Used by the best cooks

And housekeepers everywhere

The bag smelled of river and fish, and Trumbo’s arms were covered with goosebumps.

Diphtheria spoke, looking at Typhus but pointing at Trumbo. “That man said Daddy went to the place with the sick Sicilian boy today, Typhus.”