Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.