The Scribe (17 page)

For a few minutes he drowsed with his back pressed to the rocky soil of the mountain. It was, by Appalachian standards, a modest summit, but an elevation fair enough. The air here was cleaner even than down in the little town, and a far cry from the smoking gully of downtown Atlanta. It had seemed at times, in this week of afternoon meetings, that the breezes up here blew not only into his lungs, but through him, with Canby ever hoping that this elevation, given time, might cleanse him of the worm that had been turning in his gut since they'd cut Greenberg down.

“‘Does the road wind uphill all the way? Will the day's journey take the whole long day?'” her voice called.

Canby sat up and looked down the slope. Julia had climbed to nearly a stone's throw of him while he dozed. He smiled as he watched her coming up the trace of a path, holding her skirts up over the rockiest parts.

“I'll guess. Longfellow today?”

Julia settled down next to him, light as a bird, and tucked a wisp of bang behind an ear. “Rossetti,” she said.

“Haven't read him.”

“
Christina
Rossetti, you lout. Do you read at all anymore?” Julia sighed. “No reason a country school can't be as au courant as any other.” She touched his hand and cocked her head so that he could brush her cheek with his lips. She paused a moment to catch her breath. “Though your method of courting is going to wear me down to nothing.”

“I'd be happy to call on your house. If you'd let me farther than the porch.”

“We're not
that
au courant up here. Not yet. I need to maintain appearances on my way to spinsterhood.”

“You're no spinster. Nor will you be.”

She studied his face in the uncomfortable silence. After a time, she said, “Anyway, it's better up here.”

He reached into the basket beside him and pulled out the bottle of Riesling and the glasses. The wine was still cool from where he had stored it, wedged between two rocks in Stillhouse Creek at the base of the mountain. He poured for both of them and she raised her glass. Canby shook his head.

“No toast today.”

Julia touched his face, her fingers tracing the scar down his left cheek.

“What about to new beginnings?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “I'm out of fresh starts, Julia.” He touched his glass to hers. They drank and looked out over the valley. Canby studied the sunlight where it gleamed in the bends of the Chattahoochee, let his eyes wander down the stitching of railroad tracks that ran like seams across the valley. The sun was behind the clouds above them and it cast cloud-shadows on the valley floor, pools of shade that coasted and paused over the topography with the wind.

“The chautauqua is tonight in the pavilion,” Julia said. “See the train coming up from town? There, on the Marietta line?”

“What's the topic?”

“No topic this week. A performance. Something of
Handel's with a string quartet. How wonderful it would be if I had an escort.”

Canby raised his glass. “My honor and pleasure. That, I'll drink to.”

Julia leaned on his shoulder, her head under his chin. They sat and watched the train pull into Vinings Station and the smoke from its stack diminish as it sat idle while the day trippers from Atlanta disembarked. They emerged from beneath the green roof of the station in pairs and groups and mounted into wagons to carry them the short distance to the pavilion. The musicians came last, toting their instrument cases and climbing into the wagons with the black cases in their hands, clutched close as children might be held.

After a time, Canby stretched his arm behind him, slowly, and emptied his glass of the sweet wine onto the ground. And some time later he rose and lifted the basket in one hand and reached for her hand with the other. And they began to make their way, slowly, down the slope.

H
E WATCHED
and listened at once. Watched the departing sun light up the wall of the mountain above the pavilion in a band of gold that mingled with the turning leaves, creeping higher on the mountain with every movement of the string music and drawing behind it a swath of shade that heralded nightfall. And listened to the music, Handel indeed from what the quartet's first violinist had announced. He would not have known it from any other, but it was fine to his ears. Listening, he forgot himself and forgot time as well, forgot all the
bright young set of Atlanta crowded into the pavilion on folding chairs around him, only a few gray heads in their midst, Robert Billingsley's among them. He watched as the players bent to their instruments, coaxing the wood and catgut, the notes springing from the bent bows rising to the eaves of the pavilion as if to find their way back to some higher source. Canby's cheeks burned in the presence of it. The players leaned in toward one another as the music rose to its crescendo, as they held the minor chord, then resolved into the tonic major, faces rapt, then relaxing as the strings shuddered over the last drawn note. In the silence that followed, Canby imagined that they had, for a few measures, bent time itself.

The applause was earnest but diminutive by comparison, little clapping echoes coming back off the mountain as the players nodded over their instruments. The audience began to rise and the scraping of the chairs on the boards of the pavilion brought him fully back. He realized that Julia's hand was still held tight in his own.

“Grand, wasn't it?”

Canby looked up to see Robert Billingsley standing above him, a smile on his face and a hand extended. He pried his fingers away from Julia's and took the hand offered, pressed the cool flesh.

“It certainly was.”

“Ma'am?” Billingsley said. “I don't believe we've met.”

“Of course,” Canby said. “My friend Julia Preston.”

Billingsley bent his head as he took her hand. Canby wondered if he intended to kiss it. Instead, he straightened from his half bow and returned his eyes to Canby.

“I have something of yours, Mister Canby. Given over to me by Vernon Thompson, and to him by one of Hannibal Kimball's men. A rather weighty knapsack that clanks when it is moved, apparently heavy with small arms.”

Canby blushed under his smile. “I did not know when I left Kimball House I wouldn't be returning.”

“No need to explain.”

“I suppose Kimball wants his key back.”

“It's my understanding that he has had the lock changed,” Billingsley said, his face clouding. “But that is neither here nor now. I have your bag on the back of my surrey. I ask only a small fee in exchange for my courier services.”

Billingsley nodded to Julia and placed an arm over Canby's shoulders, guiding him down the pavilion steps. He lowered his voice as they passed a group at the base of the steps and walked toward the edge of the lamplight that shrouded the pavilion.

“I would like for you to be my guest out at my country place hard by Mableton. The quail are in fine fettle this time of year. My hands have harvested the corn but left the back acres cut over. Every fall, the quail feed there by the score. Please be my guest for a hunt. You could bring your lady friend back a few braces of birds—and it would also ease my conscience over the unpleasantness in Atlanta. I offer it by way of apology, Mister Canby.”

“I don't see how I could decline.”

“Excellent. My driver and I will pick you up at Pace's Inn in, say, half an hour?”

“How did you know—?”

But Billingsley was already stepping away. Canby walked back to the pavilion. The musicians were packing up their instruments, strapping down latches on their cases, but the platform was otherwise empty. He scanned the sphere of light around the pavilion, strained his eyes to see past it into the night. But Julia was gone.

October 31

U
NDERWOOD COULD NOT SAY, EXACTLY, WHAT IT
was that had drawn him to this mountain, miles outside of town, or what had compelled him to beg the loan of a horse from Vernon Thompson to get here. Could not say why two telegrams to Canby gone unanswered had raised in him a sense of foreboding. Or rather, would not have said. He trusted it was something beyond his knowing mind that set in when he left the telegraph office on Decatur Street and commenced on this errand.

He sat his borrowed horse outside the little schoolhouse Canby had told him about. Its door was shut. The lady's voice came from inside, running down a list of conjugations that the scholars repeated after her, point and counterpoint. She spoke in that half accent that was the voice of white Atlanta—quicker than the drawl of the other Georgians, but still far south of Yankee diction. Her voice was clear as she and her pupils worked through the verbs he guessed to be Latin. His own schooling, of course, lacked any such exotica and was
truncated at the sixth grade, when the slate board and chalk stick were replaced with shovel, hoe, broom. Better than what his slave parents got, though, forbidden to learn to read. Progress, he supposed. He hoped the New South would do better. Here it seemed to be on its way, but he doubted if any of Miss Julia's students had a face as dark as his own.

He looked around at the little village. All the clapboard buildings whitewashed, all the roofs shingled in green. He looked up the mountain and saw a group of houses set apart from the village proper. These did not match the white and green buildings of the village but were made, he could tell even at a distance, of surplus materials too poor and motley to be worth painting. They dotted the north face of the mountain, most seeming ready to fall in and some looking as though they were barely still clinging to the steep slope. Above a few of the tarpaper roofs, leaning chimneys smoked in the October air. Inside the schoolhouse, the sounds of Latin continued. He tugged at the horse's reins and set off north on the Pace's Ferry Road.

As he neared the settlement he saw little movement outside the houses. He figured that most of the inhabitants were inside, away from the chill and likely preparing their noontime dinner. Or at work elsewhere. On one of the porches an old man sat with a quilt on his lap, a shotgun resting atop it. His garden out front was coming up abundant in beets, peas, mustard greens. Underwood paused in the road and lifted his hat. He had begun to speak when the old man shook his head and raised the shotgun to port arms. Underwood moved on.

The northernmost house in the settlement sat off on its own,
surrounded by a rickety picket fence and its dirt yard adorned with a variety of flotsam such as he'd never seen. He had seen bottle trees, of course, but the yard of this house had a half dozen of them, and the biggest tree, a sycamore, had been festooned with shards of mirror hung from twine. From nearly every limb they glinted in the sunlight, and as they twisted in the breeze threw off hundreds of brilliant flashes. Beneath them, the yard was filled with all manner of artwork fashioned from unlikely sources, around which chickens pecked and strutted. He saw a wagon wheel painted scarlet and half embedded in the dirt, a torn umbrella with its handle stuck in the earth and its canopy scrawled over with drawings, a dented milk can likewise half sunk and sprouting a burst of pansies from its mouth. All of these objects painted with the kinds of bold colors Underwood had read about in Melville's Polynesian novel, or in Robert Louis Stevenson's tales. As if everything broken and cast off had made its way to this place and got itself a new life here.

An old woman sat on the porch, singing low to herself and working on something in her lap. The house behind her was as strange as her yard: its front wall was covered with images painted right onto the boards—crudely drawn cats and crows, giant butterflies pinwheeling across azure patches of sky. Like her neighbor, she had pulled a quilt over her knees. He could see, below the quilt, the hem of a flowered dress, two spindly brown shins, and a broken-down pair of men's brogans. She rocked gently as she worked, and after a moment Underwood realized she was singing
to
the thing in her hands. He pulled up his horse at her gate and bade her a good morning.

“You the police?” she asked. She squinted down at him from the porch. Her eyes were milky white with cataracts. After a moment's surprised silence he told her that he was.

“Come on up to the porch. Horse got to stay in the yard, though.”

He tried to hide his grin as he tied the horse to her fence. Before he had shut the gate behind him a flurry of chickens had gathered around his legs and he walked mincingly up to the house lest he trample one of them.

“You ride down from the Smyrna constable's?”

“No, ma'am,” he said, every one of the porch steps creaking beneath him. “Out of Atlanta.”

The woman leaned forward in her chair, focused the milky eyes on his face. “You
black
,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am. May I sit down?”

“What kind of foolishness you bringing up in here? A black
po
lice man out of Atlanta? That'll be the day.”

He showed her his badge, though he doubted she could read its numerals and lettering. As she took it from him, he saw that what she had been working on was a doll. She was making it by stuffing raw cotton into a length of woman's hosiery. She'd fashioned a head and arms, but cotton trailed out of the doll's unformed bottom end. He saw that one of its hands had six fingers.