Finding the Bones

By Avery Russell

Finding the Bones is a dark romance set against the youth rebellion and revolutionary violence of the 1910s—an era not unlike 1960s’ America—where idealistic young men and women seek to create a more just society but often fall victim to retribution or disillusionment. Charlie Everett, a journalist on the make, and Olivia St. James, an ardent feminist and journalist in her own right, find themselves caught in a deadly embrace from which neither can escape. “A fine, sophisticated historical novel from author Avery Russell in which she draws from her family history, especially the life of her journalist father who is Charlie Everett in the novel; her father’s first wife portrayed as Olivia St. James; and their mutual friend Maurice Hadley, in real life the early abstract painter Marsden Hartley. Russell’s omniscient narrator moves deftly among her substantial cast of characters, showing us the lives of bohemians and expatriates of pre-World War I and beyond. If there is any symbol of the partially thwarted lives that the central characters endure, it is in Hartley’s poem ‘Finding the Bones,’ which provides the title for the book, where the bones of a dead bird are found with its wings still on and its feathers attached, the last vestiges of a life and an ardor Charlie himself experienced among the bones he hid from everyone. ‘Fixed were the wings,’ Hartley wrote; now they are stiffened, and life has moved on to a ‘fresh history of stifled things.’” — Townsend Ludington, author of Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist (1992) and Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley (1998); Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781645759614

Avery Russell

Avery Russell was a program officer for thirty years and director of publications at Carnegie Corporation of New York, the grant-making foundation, where she produced major reports and articles for the public. The author of a Moroccan memoir and dozens of short stories, this is her first novel. Born in North Carolina, she is the daughter of the journalist, teacher, and biographer, Charles Phillips Russell, and niece of the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, Paul Green.

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Avery Russell (2021)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Russell, Avery

Finding the Bones

ISBN 9781645759607 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781645759591 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645759614 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021904322

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Dedication

TO FRED

Acknowledgments

I offer my most special thanks to my niece, Alice Russell-Shapiro, for lending me the unpublished memoir of her great-grandfather, Memories of a Mid-Victorian. Without this book, which recreated his era and the contemporary practice of journalism, Finding the Bones could not have been written. In addition to Alice, I will be eternally grateful to her cousin, P. T. Black, whose own probing into our family history greatly advanced mine, and my sister-in-law, Cathy Russell, who gave me valuable perspective on her husband’s life. Helpful in the early stages of writing was Loretta Thomas, an Australian lady whose own family connection helped me to piece together a story which, though drawn from facts and memories, remains an act of the imagination. Thanks also to my friend, Suzanne Macauley, whose wise advice bolstered my confidence when I most needed it.

I am entirely indebted to Townsend Ludington, whose great book, Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist (1992), together with Hartley’s autobiographical writings, provided the template for the character of Maurice Hadley. Towny read several versions of the manuscript and made astute comments. His continued support and suggestions gave me the courage to keep going despite the lapse of years when I was not writing.

The role of the editorial, design, and production staff of Austin Macauley Publishers was critical in shepherding me through the mysteries of book publishing, and I thank them profusely.

Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Fred McLaren, who believed in this book and in me.

Finding the bones

with the feathers on,

where had the flesh

and the ardor gone?

Fixed were the wings

as hard as the stones beneath,

some dream had stiffened

their rush of wind,

fresh history of stifled

things.

—  Marsden Hartley

Prologue

Cambridge Hill 1974: Early Morning

O

ld Charlie Everett was not the kind to consult his conscience, though his soul was vexed. He tried to keep his mind free of encumbrances and cultivated steady habits, as befits a solitary man of ninety. Weather and health permitting, his routines hardly varied. Up with the birds at six, he took a cold sponge bath and dressed in his cords to head down to the kitchen for a raw egg and a jigger of lemon juice for cleansing the blood. From there he took a stroll in the woods behind the house with his bird dog Lady, returning home to work on his seventh book, a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lunchtime, he squeezed into his sporty Karmann-Ghia for the long climb up the hill to the Cambridge Cafeteria, grinding the gears to the amusement of the townspeople who smiled on the old man’s habits. Refreshed from an afternoon nap on the living room couch, he turned to his voluminous correspondence with publishers, former students, readers and fans, his two daughters, eleemosynary groups, and one or two remaining confederates from his youth in New York. Toward evening he took a more extended walk with Lady, then tooled down the highway to Brady’s Filling Station for a beer and a respectful ribbing around the wood stove from the farmers and workmen who called him Doc, even though he wasn’t a Ph.D. He supped in town or at the home of friends, careful to present his hosts with a nosegay or cutting from the yard. In bed by nine, he read for an hour or so, usually of Emerson, the guiding spirit of his mental life. Lights were out by ten, when he passed into the fitful sleep of old age.

On this particular morning, the sun rose up with a sharp wind that strafed his lungs. A killing frost had come in the night, and the silvered grass crunched under his Sorel boots. Making his way past the garage, a peeling derelict sunk on its haunches from termites, he arrived at the wood’s edge, stopping before the shrub, Sweet Breath o’ Spring, whose fragrance only yesterday had drenched the air. Today a girdle of tender buds lay shriveled on the ground. This happened every year.

Charlie clucked over the buds as though to say, You never learn, do you? With one hand braced on a gouty knee, the other gripping his walking stick, he lowered himself to the ground. His thick, blunt fingers pawed the nuggets with the concentration of a prospector.

Lady galloped up to snuffle his hand. Finding nothing delectable, she snorted and, wheeling off, trotted down the wooded hill toward the creek below.

Into the forest, Charlie swung the duck’s-head cane with the rhythm of his gait. Once his mother’s, it was as much a companion to his walks as the dog. With its tip he could brush debris off the footpath, poke into clumps of rocks and sticks, upturn heart leaves to expose their waxy tubers, all the while beating out a song from his daughters’ childhood that he would intone in a gruff, cracked voice so low as to be almost inaudible.

Halfway to the creek he spied a large kingsnake athwart the rutted path, lazed by the morning rays. Charlie placed his foot across its neck. Supported by his cane he closed his fist around the head and lifted it up. The snake unfurled itself in mid-air. Charlie caressed its ebony flanks with a shiver of pleasure and slid his forearm along its belly. Instantly the snake coiled itself around his wrist and rested, seemingly content. Smiling to himself, Charlie made his way back to the house intent on showing it off to Caroline, who was just visiting from up north.

Years ago when his daughters were little, Charlie had enacted a similar scene with his second wife, Clarice, who was in the kitchen fixing lunch with their black maid Sally. Tiptoeing into the rear hallway, he eased open the kitchen door, his china-blue eyes bright with excitement. Clarice was bent over the sink emptying boiled rice into a colander. Sally by the stove saw it first and with a shriek clapped her chocolate hands to her cheeks. Half turning, Clarice widened her eyes and screamed. Down went the pot splashing scalding rice water over her bare arm. Sally tore through the dining room and out the front door moaning unh, unh, unh!

Clarice blew on her burning flesh, running cold water on the welts as her husband stood in the doorway paralyzed by the catastrophe he had caused. The snake uncoiled itself and dropped to the floor with a solid whap! Charlie managed to catch it by the tail just as it slithered behind the icebox, whereupon he flung the majestic king out the back door, past the flagstone terrace into the yard. Hearing the upstairs bedroom door slam, Charlie grimaced at its brutal finality. Though his heart was drumming, inwardly he felt contempt for the women of his house. He would teach his children to appreciate the worth of these creatures in nature and to distinguish the benign from the venomous ones.

Clarice’s circle of professors’ wives, without directly criticizing him, agreed among themselves that Charlie’s stunt with the snake had been an awful foolishness, especially knowing his wife was given to nervous spells. They upheld her cause throughout the weeks of alienation and took him to task, but gently, because Charlie was gallant with the ladies, his eyes sparkling in the company of women, his cheeks turning a high pink when they fussed over him. They did not want to jeopardize those light flirtations that were the crackling tinder of faculty parties.

The fiasco left Charlie bewildered and helpless to sort it out. He mollified his wife as best he could, attempting an embrace with a nuzzle of his wiry mustache into her neck, but she shrank from him. Denied absolution, he withdrew into his natural mode of silence. Then, as he reprised the scene in his mind, he began to draw secret pleasure from it, seeing its comic aspect—Sally hollering like a banshee, Clarice hopping up and down like something out of a vaudeville act. Every now and then, he could be heard chuckling to himself. Nobody knew why he was laughing, but the chuckles, low and rumbling in his chest, sounded sinister and strange.

Clarice shuddered, but then her husband had always been a puzzlement. You can’t understand your father! she would remonstrate with the girls when they complained of some eruption of Daddy’s. The opposing poles of emotion showed in his face—the crinkled or the clenched eyes, the blush of pleasure or of rising choler, depending on his mood. Otherwise he held himself apart, beyond the reach of ordinary perception. When Charlie had paid court to her during that summer idyll of 1931, up under the great oaks of Cambridge Hill, Clarice found in her lover’s shy reserve an irresistible charm; and when he touched her, enfolding her in the stillness of his arms, her heart dissolved. His hands were dry and hot, insistent in the uncanny way of the artist, kindling desire. The pungent heat of his body was intoxicating, holding her in thrall. A special sweetness coated his graveled voice. He was older than she by far, a celebrated author and prominent figure on the New York literary scene, before returning down South to teach at the university. It was the Depression, after all, and he was lucky to have a job. Clarice had lost hers as secretary of a music school and was casting about. At a dinner party thrown by their mutual friend Vera Alexander, the guests hailed Charlie as a favorite son of the state. That was back when writers from the South were lauded as heroes. Moreover, he was cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world; he knew more. She was dazzled; she recognized him as the only man she would ever want to marry. Taking along Vera for propriety’s sake, Charlie introduced Clarice to his cabin in Arnold, Maryland. The accommodations were primitive, but she was game. After supper, prepared on the wood stove, Vera washed up with water from a nearby creek. Charlie burst into the kitchen, stealing his arms around her from behind. I declare, Vera, he cried in elated tones, I do believe I love that gal. Two weeks later he and Clarice eloped to their friends’ delighted surprise.

Yet in their very first year together, something collapsed, like the crash of beams in a burning house. No one, certainly not Clarice, had known that Charlie was only recently divorced from a woman who had died mysteriously in New York. Their friends were even more confounded when the purported son from that union, a sixteen-year-old fluent in three languages, arrived from Europe to join his father and stepmother in their new home.

But Charlie’s troubles with women had begun long before this—before the Great War even—when he was a half-grown, reticent youth on his uncertain way to manhood, and he met Olivia.

Greenhorn

Chapter 1

"T

his one’s for you, Charlie."

Angus Greene handed his new hire a note over the ramparts of newspapers barricading his desk. He settled back with a wheeze into his swivel chair. My best crime man’s out sick today, he grumped, so here’s your chance, m’boy.

Charlie read the chief’s blue-penciled scrawl—124a Ashmead Street, fifth floor.

Baby killing, said Angus, jerking his big head northward. Kensington District. Tip says some mill woman snuffed her newborn. Get up there quick before the coppers. Be back by four.

Another assignment, Mr. Greene?

I’ll let you know, came the bristled reply. Go on now.

Charlie backed out of the editorial chamber not turning his head until he’d reached the safety of the city room. Grabbing his cap off the antlered stand, he left the shouts of reporters and trilling telephones, the steady tack tack tack of Underwoods, moving past the copy boys dumping proof sheets on the center table. Down the hall he breathed in the smutty mix of machine oil and printer’s ink wafting up from the floorboards, the smell of old newspapers yellowing in the shafts of light. The thrum and clack of the presses faded as he set his cap and headed out the door.

Taking a shortcut through the alley toward Market Street, he tried not to inhale the fumes of vegetable and animal rot banked up against the brick walls. The weather was unseasonably warm in May, hinting of the dog days to come. The Belgian block pavement burned through the soles of his shoes and shot dagger pains up his shinbones. Sweat trickled from his armpits and spread between his shoulder blades. He took out his handkerchief and lifted his cap to wipe his brow.

Beyond Market, he ducked into the cool relief of City Hall’s shadowed walkway, emerging blind into the noontime glare. The trollies were running again after the workers and the city settled the general strike in March, with no winners. A car pulled up, and he swung nimbly onto the platform. Below, the sidewalks were almost vacant, par for the Center City at this hour. Three working girls in white shirtwaists and long black skirts strolled by arm in arm. How trim and tucked-in they look, Charlie thought—happy in their brief liberty. He turned away inside.

At Ashmead, the main artery leading to the textile mills, he hopped off the trolley into a smelly mire of horse manure and mud. There were an estimated 250,000 horses in Philadelphia in 1910, and the streets were never clean. He threaded among the peddlers and pushcarts and wagons, past a blacksmith’s shop, a livery stable, a carpet-cleaning establishment, a corner bar where rough-clothed men slumped outside and dull-eyed women heckled him as their offspring played among the filth and thrown-out slops.

Presently he came to a five-story tenement with a saloon calling itself Dugan’s Bar & Grill. Overhead, he saw the number 124. At 124a, a crowd had collected at the entrance. Customers from the bar were filing out to gawk and murmur among themselves. Throttled her baby in its crib, Charlie heard one say. Worse’n that, declared another.

He shouldered through the knot. ’Scuse me, folks, beg pardon, let me pass. He pushed open the door. A family of rats scurried out of the garbage cans and vanished down a hole. In the dimness, he made out the curved head of a banister. He seized it and, hauling himself up two at a time, reached the top floor where he steadied himself on the landing. The hallway reeked of gas. Facing the stairs was a frosted paned door standing ajar. He edged toward it and entered on tiptoe. Inside there was a round tub with its tin cover off. Beyond that, the door of a small gas range lay open like a flat, corroded tongue. Next to it a dirty sink by a window overlooked a row of privies in the back. The planked floor was puddled everywhere. He heard the distant garble of voices. Pressing his handkerchief to his nose, he passed through another room and then another until he reached the front…

* * *

Angus Greene had the Scotsman’s fleshy face rimmed by a ginger beard. As editor of a small city newspaper, he was a bulwark against the forces of mechanization in his profession and still wrote his editorials by hand. To hunch over his work, he’d cut down the legs of his desk. Finding he’d overcompensated, he’d built it up again with old Philadelphia Sentinels. The floor around him was ringed with crumpled proof sheets, news clippings, cigar wrappers… Behind him the rows of shelving bowed under stacks of newspapers, reference books, a King James Bible, an outdated 1899 Almanac. Rarely leaving the editorial chamber except to use the toilet, Angus reminded Charlie of a hermit crab in his borrowed shell.

Well, lad? The editor rolled a ten-cent cigar between his teeth.

He eyed the young man standing before him in his high-collared shirt and corduroy vest, his shoulders sloped like a girl’s. The lad didn’t hold out much promise as a cub reporter. Though well up in manhood, his rounded face and uptilted nose made him look adolescent. His trunk was spare from the shoulders to the hips, no power there. It was a body built to parry and deflect, not fight.

Charlie cleared his throat and shook out his handkerchief. He always felt uneasy in the editorial chamber, abashed in Angus’s presence. The smell of cigar overpowered, and he could never bring himself to meet his boss’s frontal gaze.

Uhm, I saw what you sent me for, sir. There was a body all right.

Angus yanked out his cigar. Wa-a-ll, what was it?

You mean—

Human, I suppose.

Oh, yessir. A girl. Charlie wiped his face. I’ve never seen a corpse before, let alone a baby.

Angus lowered his big head. "Now don’t go theatrical on me, boy. Something like it happens every day. It’s the Irish. He paused. The mother really do it?"

Seems so, Charlie said. "There’re four people in that flat. A widow woman with her two daughters and a boy about three. The boy belongs to the older daughter. The two ladies came over from Queenstown, Ireland, around ten years ago. They work at the Beatty’s Mill up the road. The younger one’s about fifteen. She sews coat buttons for a padrone after school and looks after the child. The place was piled high with overcoats."

So which one’s the baby killer?

The younger daughter.

"She’s the mother?"

Yeah, uh, huh.

Coat buttons, eh? Angus banged his podgy hands on the newspapers. Those stinking padrones. Half the children in this city are in the labor pool.

Why, the girl’s no more than a child herself, said Charlie, pawing his palm.

Nothing new there.

Well, I’ve seen some things, Mr. Greene, but nothing like this. Where I come from, the young’uns are put out to the fields where there’s a fresh blowing wind. These places here, they’re not fit for the lowest animal.

Angus sighed. Children are the salvation of the rag trade, laddie. The little fingers, you know. And so expendable, because there’s always more comin’ on.

But why—?

Child labor is pliant. It doesn’t strike. There’re no labor troubles with the young. It’s the parents—the parents force ’em into it, for the money.

Angus searched Charlie’s eyes. It was that limpid blue that got to him. The innocence, the sheer absence of guile in them, was an irritant. They drove him to treat the youth roughly, in order to harden him, or perhaps to ward off an avuncular urge. He leaned forward with a confidential air:

So how’d she do it?

Strangled it with sewing twine.

Same kind used for coat buttons.

What they said.

"They?"

The women.

Well, make sure! Angus drew on his cigar. No man in the picture, I suppose.

None I could see. The women don’t seem to know what the story is, and the girl won’t talk. All the old woman knows, she and her older daughter came home from work and found the girl out cold under the stove. She, uh…she’d just given birth.

So where’s she now?

The police’ve taken her to the free dispensary for examination. If nothing else is wrong with her, she’ll go to the women’s detention center. The older women and the boy are down at the station house. The baby’s in the morgue.

OK. You’ll check all that out. Angus sighed. So ends another day in the Kensington rookeries.

Charlie clenched his fists. These slum lords, they ought to be boiled in oil.

Charlie, Charlie, Angus mocked, "you’re from the genteel South. Whadda you know? Ya’ll just lynch Colored folk down there. You tell me what’s right in this world. I wouldn’t dig any more into this if I were you. Give it two sticks."

The young man made for the door.

Angus glanced up. Make it three sticks. Paddy’s our biggest reader.

Okay, sir.

By the by, the chief called after him. Get yourself cleaned up before nightfall. You’re going to a little society soirée.

Charlie turned back wearily. If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Greene, I’d just as soon call it a day.

Angus flicked live ash onto his newspapers, banging out sparks as they fell. "Well now, son, it ain’t all the same. We’re startin’ here a new society column. The idea is to attract the better sort in this city. We’ll give it a try anyhow, and you—you’re a college kid. You’re all I got that can fit into those high places.

So, pull yourself together, kid. He wagged a horny finger. Remember, you’re a cub reporter till you can cover sixteen assignments a day, and you’re a long way from that right now.

Angus followed Charlie’s slump-shouldered retreat. Greenhorn not gonna last long, he muttered to himself.

Chapter 2

A

t five o’clock, Charlie filed his three sticks on the baby killing and left for home craving solace. To the east a full moon was rising over Cherry Street, big as a washtub and copper bright, but all he could think of was what was left of that baby—shiny, gray, tumescent, recalling the beetle grubs he had dug up as a child. He noted the cleft between the tiny waxen legs.

He hadn’t known what it was at first. Entering the front room, he spied two women in black skirts and shawls sitting erect in ladder-back chairs. Over by the window, a toddler was poking his finger and giggling at a bundle of rags on a trunk. Charlie threw the boy a reproving glance as, cap in hand, he approached the women flashing his press card.

Ma’am? he addressed the matron.

Oh! both women blurted out. They rose up slapping dust from their skirts and adjusting their shawls. The older one took the card and glanced at it uncomprehendingly. Are you—? We thought you were—

From the police? No, ma’am. Charlie offered her a reassuring smile. "I’m from the Sentinel. Everett’s the name. And you are—?" He drew out his notepad and pencil.

Mrs. Seamus McGee, the woman obliged with a strong Irish lilt. My daughter here, she’s Cory. Cory Brennan.

You’ve come about the baby, I ’spect, Cory spoke severely. You wanna see?

And before Charlie could object, she had gone over to the trunk and separated the wrappings, gazing at him with angry, pleading eyes.

Who—where? Charlie croaked, held by the specter of the dead.

Cory pointed to the room Charlie had just passed through unseeing. There’s the one you want! she proclaimed, like an accuser singling out a face in the crowd. My sister Camilla!

Adjusting his eyes, he made out a shakedown bed with a girl in it. Under a wad of damp, matted hair, her face was hidden. A white muslin nightshirt engulfed her to the knees from which her spindled legs and blackened feet stuck out like a pair of matchsticks. At the sight of those feet, Charlie’s heart contracted.

Camilla, dear, Mrs. McGee’s quavery voice entreated, speak to the gentleman.

No stirring or sound came from the bed.

Cory picked up the little boy motioning Charlie to follow her to the kitchen. We come on ‘em right here, she pointed to the floor. "The oven door was wide open pumpin’ out gas. Seems like she put her head in and then fell out. The baby was nearby—already stiff. We thought she was gone too, until she took a breath. When we saw that, we just fell on our knees and thanked the Holy Mother, Holy Father, and Lord Jesus for saving our little Camilla.

"We cleaned her up and put her to bed in a fresh nightie like you see. Not a sound’s escaped her lips ever since, none but the sound of her breathing. We were waiting for the coppers when you walked in." Cory hurled this at Charlie as if, having rehearsed her statement for the authorities, she was not prepared to waste words on a scrubbed reporter who looked barely out of his teens.

My daughter, my daughter! the old woman wailed as the sirens filled the room. I swear it on God’s body, we had no notion she was in the family way. She’s just a silver of a thing. It was her clothes hid us from the deed!

Charlie coughed. Do you know…do you know who could have…?

No! The Lord’s truth, Mrs. McGee came back. We dunno what got to her.

Tell that to your newspaper, if ye’ve got a mind to! Cory spat out.

I’ll do that, ma’am, the young man replied, as the bluecoats barged in.

Chapter 3

C

Charlie’s lodgings stood behind a line of rowhouses, in a rundown section of town. The room had an iron cot, a washstand, a straight chair, and a crude chest of drawers. His jackets hung from pegs. No closet, no telephone, a toilet down the hall. At least there was a toilet; most such places came with an outside privy.

The air inside was redolent of young man’s sweat, as clean and pungent as sunbaked straw. Newspapers and a few dog-eared volumes lay on the floor by his bed, alongside a sketchbook and a box of charcoals. The bureau top held a tray of Indian arrowheads from the plowed fields of home. Against the mirror he had propped up an ambrotype of a youthful Mama, erect in a taffeta dress with white-bordered fichu. She gazed at her only living son across a chasm of time, the look in her fine, honest eyes a mixture of hope and expectation.

Spartan as it was, the room was a world apart, and good enough for what was ailing him.

He fell on the bed like a bird shot from the sky. Ordinarily there was nothing like a twenty-minute nap to refresh the soul. But a restlessness overtook him, and as he tossed, the squalid horrors of the afternoon pushed all random thoughts aside. Women alone, without protection, had an unsettling effect on him, as if he were responsible. Far from gallantry, it brought out an acute sense of helplessness and ineffectuality in him, touching on shame. It was a feeling he tried to resist.

He reviewed the facts. Cory’s husband had been taken away for tuberculosis, and the McGee women were working off a thirty-dollar debt to pay for his funeral in double shifts at the mill. They were both thin and drawn with bony blue-veined hands and sunken chests. The boy’s skin was pasty with dark rings under his eyes. Charlie couldn’t vouch for the girl, but his imagination was already building an image of sacrificial beauty.

After the family and the tiny remains were taken away, he inquired of the barkeeper and landlord, name of Moriarity. A customer allowed he had been in earlier, but left before the police arrived. Moriarity was cutting off services to drive out his tenants, Charlie learned. Aiming to renovate the building to attract a better clientele, supposedly. A bar regular who identified himself as a printing press manufacturer reported that the landlord let the drunks sleep it off in the tenement’s vestibule. There’s times, the man imparted in low tones, when folks living up there can’t even get in the front door. Once the missus and her daughter come into the bar begging Moriarity to roust the sleepers. ‘Aw, that’s just ol’ Barney,’ Moriarity said after taking a look-see. I don’t know where the ladies slep’ that night, with those chil’ren up there all by their selves. Moriarity told ’em if they didn’t get out, he was gonna burn ’em out.

* * *

How Charlie came to feel sympathy for women alone, even as he shied away from them, he could not say. Papa had been a hard man of business, owning most of the stores in that flyspeck town of Billington where Charlie was born, and ruling over its affairs. Mama came from people of letters—generations of teachers and Presbyterian divines who had built up the state university at Cambridge Hill, where she had grown up in cushioned security as the daughter of the college’s sole mathematics professor. That is, until the Dark Times, when General Sherman’s conquering army marched through town, placing the college in alien hands and depriving the faculty of its living. Forced out, the learned professor found a lesser position at Davidson College roughly a hundred miles away, where he took his wife and daughter with two former slaves—Aunt Dilsie and Uncle Amos. After the college reopened in 1874, he moved them all back again to resume his old teaching post. Called one of the large-brained men of his day, with an incessant restless of mind, Ignatius Hamilton Daniels was known as a playful and happy-hearted man, the idol of his daughter’s childhood. The contrast of this gentle soul to the dour merchant Mama had married could not have been more stark. Now here she sat, just three days’ buggy ride from up home when she might as well have been on the moon.

Though as ill-matched as a boot and a slipper, Moses Augustus Everett and Lucy Hamilton Daniels were both rooted in Carolina soil, the viscous red clay that sticks to your feet after the rains and yields nothing but crabgrass and dandelions in the yard, yet makes the fields a growing place, being rich with iron. Whatever their differences, the Everetts were lashed by custom and habit to the immovable conventions of the day, neither of them imagining anything different.

For Charlie, such a fate could never be. He wasn’t cut out for marriage and family, that much he knew. There was scarce enough for himself in his line of work and little chance for material improvement. But then again, mere mention of the holy state of matrimony gave him a wisp of asthma. He shrank from domesticity and felt remote from children. Forest animals and birds affected him more, and he wrote about them with the insight of a born naturalist on the Billington Blade, his first newspaper job out of college.

His thoughts harked back to home. Mama and Sister Sarah were still cooped up in that old clapboard house living off his unlamented father’s legacy, with none but Aunt Dilsie to look after them, and she reaching the end of her service. Its cramped interior was like a moldering stage set, its airlessness intensified by the ticking of clocks: wall clock, table clock, mantel clock, a grandfather clock standing sentinel on the carpeted landing outside the upstairs bedrooms. The recollection of their hourly chimes brought back other ancient assaults on Charlie’s senses: the acrid smell of Papa’s leftover liniments, the heavy overlay of lavender on mildew, the sour leavings of feral cats. Only the pictures hung from the water-stained wallpapers aroused his interest as a boy. There was a reproduction of Landseer’s faithful hound by the door of his kennel and an exciting version of The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur, a gay scene of a sleigh ride in the snow, and a dark rendering of The Last Supper. Most absorbing of all was an engraving of General Robert E. Lee, the glint of high intelligence in his tragic eyes. The physical resemblance of Lee to Charlie’s own father was uncanny, such that the two images became conflated in the boy’s mind. Moses Augustus Everett at fifteen had joined Lee’s army carrying his father’s shotgun into war. His stature as a Civil War veteran was unassailable, akin to a warrior god’s, though one rather more feared than admired. Perhaps Papa had seen things he shouldn’t have and it had scarred him. All Charlie knew was that whenever he was naughty or tempted in that direction, Lee’s hard-bitten image in its frame stopped him cold. He grew into a quiet, compliant child, rarely straying from his mother’s side.

The house belonged to Sister Sarah, from the time the Everett mansion burned down from an electrical fire and Papa died, after which Sarah moved her mother, younger brother Charles, and Aunt Dilsie wholesale into the more modest dwelling Papa had left her. There is no telling what life may bring to Sarah, Papa had written in his will. She may be left a widow early in life and this house may be a God-send to her. And so it was, except that Sarah’s marriage had been sundered by divorce, not widowhood, and she bore no children.

From the fire, Mama lost most of the belongings and mementos of her youth and in their wake the husband who had dominated her life and still bulked large in her imagination. Thus uprooted from the capacious home Moses had built for her in the first year of their marriage, she had aged rapidly. She gave up horseback riding and apart from church grew indifferent to her surroundings. The mantle of reserve she drew about herself proved her salvation, for she lived entirely in her mind, content so long as a few items of value were at hand, things untouched by others. (But if she’d cared, wouldn’t she have found a way out of there, gone back to her birthplace where all was familial and loving? Why this stoic resolve to submit to misfortune? Remember the two bears, she would admonish her son whenever he whimpered about some perceived injustice: Bear and Forebear.)

On good days Miss Lucy stationed herself on the lime-green couch in the front parlor, her diminutive form swathed in a lace-collared print dress, her child-sized feet pushed into black lace-ups that just grazed the worn floral carpet. With her gold-rimmed spectacles planted on her button nose, she would plunge into philosophical books, the King James Bible, often Browning’s poetry. Once a week she prepared a column for young ladies in The Carolinian that went all over the state. Sundays after church she dug into her knitting bag and with her gnarled fingers looping the tiny steel needles created the intricate booties for some new baby in town: blue for boys, pink for girls. There on her lime-green couch, she awaited the knock of visitors. Whenever they came, Sarah would rush to the front door wiping her hands on a dishtowel and with a quick hello and nod to her mother rush back to the kitchen to make tea. Afternoon, Miz Lucy… Howdy, Miz Lucy… Warped and lacking a spring, the screen door clattered like a crazed woodpecker against the loose frame. All his life Charlie would flinch at a slammed door or any other loud, unexpected noise that would disrupt the fragile sanctity of his solitude.

In the corner room, daguerreotypes and sepia prints of family members sat on the spool-turned whatnot. Here was Charlie at age seven in short pants, leaning with his right leg into Papa’s wheelchair as Uncle Amos gripped the handles behind. The crown of Charlie’s touseled head just reached Moses’ shoulder. Though a little boy, he was old enough to be dissatisfied about something. His small round face was squeezed into a petulant frown, for whatever reason he no longer remembered. In his wheelchair, Papa, sporting a Panama hat and double-breasted white linen suit, glared out at the street, his fowling piece lying across his lap with a load of buckshot, useless to him now except as a symbol of authority. He was holding court before a group of fawning townspeople in front of his general store, a big, stern man, bearded and florid of face, energy bursting from his barrel chest, but immobilized below. Charlie never knew his father to be out of a wheelchair. Many days he was bedridden; over time he