William Kennedy: Quinn's Book

“Lunacy?” echoed Hillegond.

“Prisoners,” said the stranger, and he doffed his hat, revealing a thick head of hair, white as the snow that spattered about the foyer when he whacked his hat against his leg. “Wrap yourself up, Hilly. Your mansion has been defiled by madness and I need help in coping with it.”

The man who brought us this grim news was Will Canaday, one of Albany’s most powerful citizens, the founder and editor of the Albany Chronicle , a sheet of considerable power and political brash. His newspaper had brought us to this house, for it was in the columns of the Chronicle that Magdalena had placed her notice about crossing the river. And now here appeared the owner of those columns, bringing us news not only of the prisoners he had been tracking but also of the ongoing madness of nature and its consequences to all forms of life.

The cold had descended upon the city so suddenly after the flooding of the riverbanks that men were forced to bring their livestock to high ground. Canaday mentioned one man who brought his horse into his front room, and wisely so, for horses tethered untended in water found their legs frozen in the instantaneous ice that rose ’round their bones. Before the night was out, one man in Greenbush would grow furious at his inability to extricate his horse from deep ice and, in watching the horse dying standing up, the man himself would die of a congested brain. Carriages would become ice-locked, birds would freeze to the limbs of trees, and not only ice but fire would ravage the city wildly and indiscriminately. The bonnet of Bridie Conroy, an Irish washerwoman, would catch fire from sparks on the burning quay and Bridie would run crazed into the night, tumbling headlong into a shed full of hay, and igniting what history would call The Great Fire — six hundred buildings, many of them shops, all burned to cinders: five thousand people without lodging from the blaze that would yield its fury only to the heavy fall of snow that was just now beginning.

None of us, not even Will Canaday, knew of this new curse sent down upon Albany by the maddened gods on this day of hellfire and ice, for Bridie Conroy was not yet aflame when Will cast his glance upon our comfort near the fireplace. He spoke to us with such solemn intent that we were all moved outside of ourselves.

“I would not normally recommend that any man, woman, or child look upon what I am about to show to Hillegond,” he said. “But by all that is holy in this world, I feel that everyone alive should see this sight, so that its vision may endure for as long as we are able to hand it on.”

As if summoned by Mesmer himself, we all slowly arose and wrapped ourselves in heavy garments to fend off the night, and we trekked single file through the new snow into a coppice in what I, from my vantage point at the rear of the column, saw to be the same procession of pilgrims I had witnessed in the once-dead eyeball of Magdalena Colón, even to the presence of Will Canaday’s black dog at my heels.

Carrying a torch, Will led the way to where Amos Staats, adolescent hero of the Revolution, lay buried in his marble mausoleum, and where his Indian mother, Moonlight of the Evening, had spent her final days eating meals off his sarcophagus.

Hillegond entered behind Will and John, and she gave a shriek that bespoke the power of this madness Will had invited us to witness. One by one we entered, Maud again clutching me in her passionate way.

What we first saw when we edged around the sarcophagus was a dance of light and shadow from the torch upon an image I could not discern with certainty. In truth, its abnormal position was such that no man would have understood the sight at first glance. What was clear was the head of the hanging man. The light revealed his crooked neck, and the rope around it suspended from a decorative protrusion of marble. But the top half of the corpse was awry, in a way no hanging man’s logic would recognize, angled unnaturally, as if he were lying asleep on the very air.

In time our eyes perceived that the dead man’s arm was pulled earthward by something unseen, and what lay at the end of that arm proved to be another being in total shadow. Only when Will Canaday moved the torch closer to the tableau did we see the dead arm manacled to the living arm of a Negro, a man in such debilitated condition that he looked more dead than the corpse above him. Yet his eyes were open and staring.

“He’s alive,” said Maud.

“It’s Joshua,” whispered Hillegond, leaning close to the man.

“It is,” said Will. “That’s why I tracked them.”

“But who is the other?”

“A Swede who spoke no English and whose name I don’t know,” said Will, handing me the torch and moving a wooden box to use as a step stool. “He was driven wild when he lost his wife in a throng at New York. Swindlers put him on a boat to Albany to find her, then abandoned him and took his life savings. Once in Albany, realizing he was lost and in penniless despair, he dove headlong into a well to kill himself, and when a good samaritan pulled him out before he drowned, he brained the samaritan with a club. Constables shut him in prison and he grew ever more demented, screaming constantly of his losses.”

“God save us from madness,” said Magdalena, and she blessed herself with the sign of the cross.

“Only a madman could understand what has happened today in this mad city,” said John the Brawn, his first admission in my hearing that he was not equal to all that passed in front of his face. Will clambered atop the tomb of Amos to cut down the Swede and I noted then that the covering slab of marble atop the tomb was already dislodged from its straight angle. As Will stood on tiptoe to cut the rope his foot moved the slab farther and it fell to the floor, marble onto marble, splitting into four irregular pieces as neatly as might a well-cut diamond. For an instant Will dangled in air, his arm around the dead man’s waist. Then, with full awareness of his position, he deftly sliced the rope and, quite agilely for his fifty years, leaped to the floor clutching the corpse, avoiding the violation of Amos’s exposed coffin by either his own or the dead Swede’s heavy feet.

Certainly our priority now was the rescue of Joshua from his torture: removal of the manacle that was still tearing his flesh. With the dead man’s weight it had cut into the bones of Joshua’s wrist and hand, and he had lost such blood as would bestow death on most men.

Will and my master tried ways of carrying him so as not to injure him further, but whichever way they lifted, the Negro’s pain was compounded. And so I spoke up.

“If each of you support one man, I can walk between them and hold up their arms. That way there won’t be any pressure on the wounds of the man called Joshua.”

“That’s good thinking, lad,” said Will.

“He’s a ready one,” said my master.

“We can’t leave the tomb open like that,” Hillegond said. “I’d be afraid some animal would come in.”

“We’ll put boards over it,” said Will.

“I’d be afraid of rodents. No, he’s got to come into the house.”

“You want the coffin in the house?” said Will.

“In the Dood Kamer ,” said Hillegond firmly, and she turned to leave.

“Come, Maudie,” said Magdalena. “Back to the house.”

“I prefer to go with Daniel,” said Maud, the first time she had pronounced my Christian name. “I can come to no harm in the company of three men, and I shall carry the torch to show them the way.”

“She has a mind of her own,” said Hillegond, who then took the arm of Magdalena; and with heads bowed against the billowing snow, the two compatriots in lust strode out into the night toward the mansion.