Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

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.

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 and blue, as a breeze struck our faces. “The Lord humbled me with that, but I told her I loved her all the same.”