Torsade Literary Space The Mirrors (part twenty-seven)
The Mirrors
(part twenty-seven)
The garden went downhill, the mildest of slopes, a few feet of earth once dug from a field and carried by flatboat, wheelbarrowed load by load, packed to bear the weight of the Roback manse. Around the corner, a line of windows showed cellars below ground.
Or half-sunken, enough to serve for cool storage. The door was shut.
It sat speaking invitation.
“I have to tell you,” William said, “how it was with Harold gone. When they said some boys been seen talking to a white woman, and there was all that…all that kind of trouble, everyone left to make up in their heads what they liked believing… Well then, folks got stirred and ran riot, like you know. But after, we started hearing people say it. Maybe Harold, maybe Rance, done what they shouldna. So many houses burnt up, so many killed…”
“William, people do. They blame the one at hand, when they know they can’t touch the others. Harold and Rance weren’t there to tell what happened to them. But they were innocent.”
His eyes filled. “It was hard that way on my mother. She never wanted to say Harold’s name. She took his picture and put the frame away, and put the picture away inside the Bible. She didn’t want any neighbors coming in and seeing it.”
And he had come to feel it himself, that burying the past was safest. From that time on, he worked in earnest, not a boy any longer, free to roam. “You couldn’t be out anyplace on the streets, not unless you had a job, and could tell the police you were out keeping at it. Nobody never talked about Harold again.”
She faced William and looked into his eyes. To say, “I saw him,” would lead to wrong, she was sure. He would fling himself back to the mirrored room. He suddenly put his arms around her.
For a minute or two they stayed this way. He was keeping it tight in his chest, she thought, and wasn’t going to let himself cry. But when he relaxed, he said: “You got a little of the sight…Charmante. So I believe you when you say so. Innocent.”
And by unspoken consent, they turned to the cellar door. William tested the handle; the door swung and caught, with a clink of glass. Daylight fell on a floor where quicklime had been scattered over dirt to harden it.
The shelves had rows of jars—
Whose contents, it became apparent to their eyes, were not pickles and succotash. They were brains. Or larger jars on the lower shelves held brains, drowned in a parchment-colored liquid. The upper shelves held a number of hearts, some intestines, other organs.
“Take a moment.”
The voice, not wholly welcome, of Veronica. “Don’t give way to it. Especially you, William. I don’t mean to be rude.” She crowded in with them. “Look. See how they’re labeled.”
Hashmarks, followed by three neat-handed letters, hyphen, three digits.
“William. In your own way, you did some of this work.”
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“Ma’am. It’s…” He stood arms crossed, wanting, fearing to look. “What is it? What are you saying?”
“When St. Hubert was a quarantine camp, during the flu epidemic. When the poor boys died, and you helped carry them, on a stretcher, to…to those old tennis courts, I think, where they had the morgue tents.”
“Goddamn them.”
“Medical science.” Veronica bent at an enamel-topped table, slid open a narrow drawer, showed them books like ledgers. “The true names are here, the ages, military identification, hometown…” She pulled one and held it at her waist, so they could see. A fingernail lacquered rose pink tapped a column of numbers. Beside this was a quarter-inch column of boxes marked either slash, or Y.
“If there was no family…” She put the book away. “But if there was, they would get permission. All those records are in order too. Why are they here, the specimens? Why didn’t the army go off with them? Well, the army wasn’t supervising the scientific work. They were not even paying for it…they didn’t have the budget. Dumain’s clinic actually paid them. That shouldn’t surprise you. Where do you come up with the resources to even attempt researching a disease so terrible, so contagious? How did it happen, millions infected…why did it kill the young, mainly? Did I say already that Dumain outlived them all? Joseph, Charleton, Wilmer, Godfrey, Elizabeth?”
“It was Dumain collecting these?” Chamante asked. “He wanted to slice open brains…infected brains…and look at them under a microscope?”
“No. He stayed at his house in town. Charleton did this work. Charleton, by the way, killed himself.”
“Did he though? Could he have been killed?”
“Charmante! What do you know?”
A flaw in the public story. An incongruity. William believed Charmante had the sight; she doubted this. For her father’s sake, she would never claim such a thing.
But she could suppose one of them, the mirror people…
Possessed a strength, a ruler’s.
“I saw Charleton lying in the garden where he was found. The bullet hole was under his eye. Would he have shot himself that way? His grandfather was alive still…”
“Yes. The body was released to Grandfather. He told them he would prepare it himself.”
“An end, then. No questions. And…”
“Let’s go out. There’s a little side porch.”
Veronica gave a light pat to each back, and crabwise they escaped the specimen room. What a house, sitting here on its island, dismal and haunted—and no more by ghosts than by human ugliness.
The porch chairs were dry. William had not come with them. But Veronica motioned Charmante down. “And…?”
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The Mirrors
The Mirrors (part twenty-eight)
(2020, Stephanie Foster)