Byzantium Page 8

  And then all orders dropped. A committee of army officers in Washington complained of the flavor. Flavor! I made no claims of flavor, only sustenance. Indeed, it is my true belief that a cabal of meat purveyors bribed the committee, for they stood to lose everything to my biscuit. Whatever the cause, it was only the last failure in a long list, ranging from the terraqueous machine to the potato pill and bone bread.

  After the committee’s report, Dr. Smith and I were left with a warehouse full of meat biscuit, twenty thousand pounds packed in barrels, canisters, and bottles. Often we made our nightly meals upon it—I prepared the biscuit in diverse ways, sometimes in puddings, sometimes in broths, sometimes in pies, sometimes simply toasted. Even so, this was more than Dr. Smith and I could eat on our own were we given until Armageddon.

  II

  Death’s Shadow, from Which Rises the Cooling Safe

  It was only in the last season that the fever took my Penelope. I shut myself in the study and turned away from all projects, including the meat biscuit. Overcome by a bleakness of the soul, I spent days tracing the grains of my desk with my fingertips, searching my mind for methods of revivification. I refused food and drink, and after the first night I abandoned hope. I was emptied. She had suffered too many days, and when they took her coffin from the house I could not bear to watch. The sight of her laid out on the bed haunted me so, as did the memory of her constant calling, first for water, then for release. Dr. Smith, who had done his best to ease her pain, managed the affairs of the burial, and I only left the study to follow the black-draped wagon down Avenue P, its horses tired from the many loads forced on them by the fever-ridden island.

  Distraught, when I returned from the cemetery I went once more into isolation, plagued by visions of Penelope’s deathbed agonies. Yet turning my mind to the rescue of others soon became a salve, and thinking of the fever’s coincidence with summer’s heat—a fact well known by all but little acted upon—I drew up plans for a sealed box in which men could pass frozen through the pestilential season, untouched by infection. Driven by those deathbed visions, my labors were unceasing, and when I emerged from the study two days later I erected the box in the side yard, near the fig and the oleander we had planted on our wedding day. The box was three feet tall, ten feet long, and six feet wide, piped with ether and built of wooden double walls that I reinforced with iron and lined with a mixture of cotton and corncobs. Completed, it stood like a long dwarf house between the two twiggy nuptial scrubs. For patent purposes, I named it the Cooling Safe. It would be my monument to Penelope’s memory. If only I had built the box while she yet lived!

  Pleased with the Cooling Safe’s construction, I invited Dr. Smith to come inspect it. I waited as he opened the box’s door and crawled about inside, tapping the ether pipes and checking my calculations. When he finished, he said nothing, but clasped my hand and looked hard into my eyes before riding back to his office.

  The next day I went about the city soliciting volunteers to test the box. The men at the Tremont and on the wharf only shook their heads. They said I had taken “a bad turn.” They could not understand. “You shall not freeze me to death, Dr. Toad!” Captain Briggs shouted, twisting his arm from my grip in the Liberty saloon. “Not death!” I countered. “I shall freeze you to life!” But he only chuckled and took his whiskey, as the others had done. I returned home, sullen at their refusal, and as I considered the box our slave boy John tugged at my sleeve and asked about repairing the chicken coop. My mind seized on the opportunity. I gave John some ham and a blanket and put him in the box, showing him the gutta-percha breathing tube and instructing him to knock soundly on the door if he should feel any deleterious effect. At first he was not obliging, but I swore I’d cuff him (an empty threat) and he crawled inside. I shut the door behind him and waited, sitting on the steps of our porch, my chin in my palm, my other hand holding the mourning ring made of Penelope’s fine golden hair.

  I watched the box for nearly an hour before John banged on the door. I opened it and found him shivering, nearly passed out.

  “John, are you all right?” I asked, my arms around his torso as I pulled him free, and he said, teeth chattering, “Yes, master, just a mite cold.”

  Once I had John clear of the box, I took him into the study, sat him in a chair, and administered a series of tests to his person. His skin was cold to the touch, and I draped a second blanket over his shoulders to stop him shivering.

  “Did you feel any spells come upon you?”

  “I don’t know. It was all dark, and too cold to tell spell from no spell.”

  I felt his head, his chest, his back, his feet. He had been cooling evenly, moving steadily toward the stasis I had predicted.

  “Master,” he said to me then. “Please tell me what it is I done to get punished in that shack.” He gathered the blankets closer about him and looked up to me. “I promise I won’t do it no more.”

  His mouth was open in pleading, his eyes teary. I held his hand, feeling the tips of his fingers. They had warmed faster than I expected.

  III

  The Second Meeting with Timson

  The day after I met Timson in the Strand, I found him waiting for me outside the warehouse. He was sitting at the door, his head leaned against it, his wide hat low over his eyes. His clothes were dusty and rumpled, and I believe he may have slept in the street. I nudged him awake, and he asked if he might now sample the meat biscuit. He told me he had heard intriguing stories of my career. This I ignored—I knew what others said of me. I toasted him a small portion of the biscuit, and when he bit it, he declared its taste satisfactory. “This manna will feed my army,” he said, chewing still as he straightened his coat, “and strengthen its conquering hand.” He made a fist and brought it down on an imaginary Honduran’s head.

  We left the warehouse and walked to the wharves. A steamer was in from Havana, unloading tobacco and bringing news; already the longshoremen were abuzz with talk of a fire that had destroyed much of Matanzas. At the customhouse I fought through a bustling crowd of negroes come to bear away packages for their masters, finally finding the ship’s machinist, from whom I collected sheet music. He and I had a compact. In exchange for jars of potato pills (he was one of their rare admirers), he brought me the latest song sheets from a stall in the Calle Obispo. This business completed, Timson and I left the customhouse and moved down the docks until we came to a gap among the cotton bales awaiting the next brig to Liverpool. The bales were stacked into mountains, and boys climbed over them, their laughing voices mixing with the shrieking of gulls and arguing of sailors. We stood in the gap, our backs to the cotton, and watched the busy harbor glinting in the noonday sun. Water lapped against the dock posts beneath us, and Timson pronounced on the divine inspiration of his plans, of God’s pact with the white man. “He has provided the African for our labor, and in return we are to raise the African, to bring him religion and feed his body.”

  “How do you—”

  Staring down at me with his fiery eyes, he answered before I could finish, “I am in communication with His Presence.”

  Eventually I witnessed it. When God spoke to him, Timson would raise his arms to the heavens and one eye would look this way while the other eye looked that.

  We left the bales and walked as far as the old pirate camp. Timson talked of Honduras, of her principal products, and of his methods for increasing her productivity—among his favorite was the granting of confiscated haciendas to the second sons of leading Southern families, who would each be required to bring fifteen negro slaves. He asked if I had been married (it was too painful, so I shook my head) and confided in me his love for a clubfooted girl in Burwood, whom he planned to send for once peace was established in his new republic. “When I paid court, she sat on the porch, and only after I had declared myself did she stand before me.” Timson rested his foot on a pile of charred brick, the remains of the old camp, and looked out to the gulf, empty an
d blue, as a breeze struck our faces. “The Lord humbled me with that, but I told her I loved her all the same.”

  Our conversation ended, we returned to the city, where Timson excused himself, claiming another appointment, and I retreated to the warehouse to look over the song sheets and hum their tunes. Briefly I worried over Timson’s scheme, and the general furtherance of bondage, and yet for the biscuit I saw no alternative. Its failure plagued me, and success was worth any price, for men of all color would enjoy the biscuit’s benefit. I would back Timson without compunction.

  That evening I opened a new canister and made a gravy for Dr. Smith, pouring it over his meat biscuit hash. For myself I fried some biscuit. I like it often this way, simple.

  IV

  The Cooling Safe Unveiled

  I presented the now-tested box to the men of the city. The fever was still ravaging the island. Twenty more had passed away since I had buried Penelope, almost all work had stopped, and the remaining healthy spent their days drifting between street and saloon. They came now, curious, and gathered in the yard. I had John with me to demonstrate, and showed how I had placed him in the box and piped in the ether. Our bodies would be held in stasis, I explained, telling them of John’s short experience and ensuing good health. “He spent above an hour in the Cooling Safe,” I said, “and returned from it in as fine a fettle as one could hope.” Then I proposed the building of a much larger box, big enough to contain the city’s entire populace. There, together, we would reside frozen from May until October, waking after the first frost to conduct our commerce in the safe, wintry months. Never again would we suffer from the fever that took my Penelope. The men mocked me, jeered, and threw bottles at the Cooling Safe, and when I asked one, Ashby Hays, a cotton factor, to test the model for himself, he laughed in horror. “You’d ask me, a white man, to step in that nigger box?”

  He led the rest away in a grumbling mob, back toward the pestilential city, and I stood in the yard with John, head hung in defeat, bruised where a bottle had struck me on the shoulder, and felt—it was a low moment—that I would not care if the fever took them all.

  V

  On Baptism

  Does one baptism wash away another? I hope not, for I remember when Penelope and I were baptized together before the congregation by Reverend Hall, and if men can claim but one baptism, that is the one I will claim. Afterward, the both of us wet and clean in our white baptismal garments, we sat together in the sun and she smiled and touched my hair as I held her hand, running my fingers over her bare wrist.

  But Timson was keen to baptize me himself, and not wanting to lose favor I walked with him to the gulf, where he took me into the waters, asked me to confess my faith in Jesus and His bond with the white man, and then dropped me under just as a wave approached, the sea foam rushing over his back and my pliant body. He pulled me up again and said, “Praise God!” and the men from his company, watching from the shore, let out a cheer.

  It had been several weeks since I had first met him, and support for the expedition was mounting. Timson was dining in some of the city’s finest homes and lodged now on the third floor of the Tremont. We walked along the beach as our clothing dried, the sun shining down a clear curtain of light, and Timson told me that in a chest he kept plans for his new capital city. He said the streets would be modeled on those of old Jerusalem, and that already he had families from as far away as Boston sending him deposits for plots of land.

  “We’ll use palm tree bark to pave the roads,” he said, “and leaves for fans.” He put some shredded bark in my hand, pressing it to reveal its springiness, then slapped my shoulder and left me in the Strand.

  When I met Dr. Smith at the warehouse for dinner, I showed him the bark. He sniffed it, then set it on the table, considering it for some time. “I pray this will not prove another disappointment,” he said, his eyes sorrowful and heavy, his face softened with doubt. He had too much tact to go further. We rarely talked about the past, and never about the Cooling Safe.

  “It won’t,” I promised.

  That night we ate the biscuit dry, straight from the canister.

  VI

  A New Scheme Brings About Protest

  I decided John and I would use the box. Together we would pass safely through the remaining months of fever, isolated and frozen, and show the city the efficacy of the Cooling Safe. But once my plan became known, I was troubled with complaints from the public. “For a day I would allow a white man and a negro to share common chambers,” Judge Carter said, standing with two aldermen on the porch, “but for perhaps the entire summer?”

  In answer I promised to install a curtain, creating a whites’ side and a negroes’ side. “But do not fret, John,” I assured the boy once the deputation had left. “You and I both shall survive the fever’s cruel menace.”

  He looked at me, silent, his arms ashy from cleaning the fireplace.

  “And just think,” I added. “If my estimates are correct, with annual freezing we shall live two hundred years!”

  VII

  The Deal Is Struck

  I did not see Timson for three weeks. He went about the city in a velvet-trimmed suit and had most of his backers lined up and his company of men filled. But we had yet to draft an agreement. I despaired. Had he found a replacement for the biscuit? I neglected the handbills and spent my days in the warehouse, waiting.

  Fortunately, my uncertainty was not prolonged. At the month’s end Timson moved his lodgings from the Tremont to his steamer, the Maria—payment for its use was being footed by twelve Houston bankers—and sent a messenger to request that I join him. It was night, and I had dined already with Dr. Smith, so I took my coat, locked the warehouse, and followed the messenger, a skinny lad of thirteen, down to the ship. There Timson introduced me to Lyons and Wayhurst, two Louisiana planters who were to provide the expedition with guns. We went aboard and toured the deck, Timson guiding us with a lantern past the paddle wheel and the stack. The harbor was black all around us, here and there lights from boats and dock houses meeting us from across the emptiness like phantom eyes, and the only sound was the chug of the night steamboat returning from the mainland. In the captain’s quarters we sat while Timson led us in prayer, raising his right hand high as he called down Jehovah and beseeched Him to dwell in the cabin. Lyons and Wayhurst exchanged worried looks, but I motioned for them to have no fear, this was all in the normal course of things. Timson stamped his foot, his eyes drifted, and he spoke as if through his nose, hissing his words. “Praise ye! Praise ye! I bless this transaction!” Then he let his hand fall and banged it on the table. “We have an agreement,” he said to the two planters, his voice calm, the red retreating from his face, his eyes settling into their regular tracks.

  The cabin was now very still, none of us knowing what to do next, and we waited in the quiet until Lyons or Wayhurst—I can’t remember which—said, “Excellent!” The silence broken, they arranged for the guns’ delivery, shook hands all around, then went into town seeking whores. I watched them through the porthole, their arms at each other’s backs as they walked up the dock toward the lights of the city. I exhaled, clearing my mind of envy (in my great loneliness I too have been tempted), and looked over at Timson. He had not noticed the planters’ departure; he was busy signing Honduran banknotes for the payment of his men. They were for a hundred reales each, and had been printed four to a sheet.

  “Do you still desire the biscuit?” I asked, watching as Timson cut the notes with great care. I saw before me sailors starving at the antipodes, children in need of precious nutriment. Must they suffer due to the whim of a fickle public? “Please tell me the meat purveyors have not gotten to you with their slanders.”

  The Maria rocked and creaked ever so slightly in the harbor waters. Timson looked up from the notes. “The Lord spoke to me of the biscuit,” he said, and I hung on his words—so much hung on them! “He said I should feed my men by your bread and
none other.”

  I rejoiced, shook Timson’s hand, and bowed several times, not caring if he thought me a madman. Ready to complete the business, we went over the final agreement. Dr. Smith and I would provide Timson’s militia with the remaining meat biscuit, supplying the entire expedition, and in return we asked only two things. I requested that Timson write a testimonial to the biscuit’s goodness, and Dr. Smith wanted a banana plantation. Timson offered no objection, we both signed the contract, and it was done.

  VIII

  The Altar of Discovery

  With my new plan for the box I was exuberant, despite the mocking of the city men. I instructed John to roll up the carpets and prepare the house for our long absence, and hired a reliable man, Hiram Wheelock, to open the Cooling Safe after the first frost, paying him five dollars in gold and promising him five more once he greeted us at the heat’s end. I also retained James Johnson, the cartwright, to do the services in the case of Hiram’s passing, and contracted with Levy the merchant to supply the ether. Twice a week he would deliver a new jug and note for me any variations shown by the gauges. The city was silent, every corner hung with death, and as I went about making my arrangements, I ran into Dr. Smith, with whom I had not spoken since the day I had first shown him the box. He took me aside and asked in hushed tones if I truly meant to go through with the freezing. When I said yes, he shook his head. “I have remained silent too long. Every man mourns in his own way, but this must stop!” I ignored his remonstrance, and he suggested I at least try a pig first. “Hog flesh is sound for experiment,” he said, but I slipped from his grasp and told him I needed no counsel.

  Yet I did fear, briefly, that during our entombment the fever’s toll would mount higher than in seasons past, would take the whole city and leave no one to wake us, or that perhaps another hurricane would cross the island and wash the city along with the box into the bay. Still, enterprise requires risks. The death of one inventor and one slave boy was a small offering to lay at the altar of discovery, should such a misfortune occur.