Byzantium (10 page)

“I hope you are right,” I answered, accepting his toast and his present of a meal of fresh beef. Yet I was unable to enjoy either. The Honduran debacle had left me in a poor state. My soul, abandoned once more to the arid climes of despair and disappointment, had dried and cracked within me, so that it rattled in the hollows of my body like chips of bone. And lately the abolitionist press had begun to mock me. They called me mercenary for my attachment to Timson’s campaign, raising too my experiments with the Cooling Safe. But then I roused myself. Even in my depths I could glimpse the world we were making; it shone like a jewel in the sun.

The next morning, the morning I left Galveston, I dropped the remaining stock of meat biscuit in the water. The canisters broke upon the jetty rocks, and gulls fought over the crumbs afloat on the waves. I stood there, watching for nearly an hour before turning my back on what I was determined would be my last failure.

T
HEY HAD BECOME SOMETHING of a fascination of mine: communes cut out of the interior, new societies where all were equal and either Jesus or Liberty reigned. Some days, after reading an account of a blind prophetess leading her followers to Illinois, or of a mill town where all shared labor and wealth equally, I yearned to give up my life and join them. I felt as if we lived in a hurtling age. It seemed all humanity stood on a precipice, that in the distance, beyond the coal smoke and the tangle of telegraph wires, could be spied a shining metropolis where men would be re-formed. But I spent my days stuck in my father’s shop—at twenty-three I was his peer in making the fiddles and other cheap instruments we sold to travelers embarking from the docks—and my nights in drink with friends. I need only walk the streets of my Baltimore, pass a slave carrying bricks on his crooked back or a rheumy-eyed sailor, ruined by the sea, begging alms and ale, to feel the rottenness in my soul. Men could not be changed, and I, one among millions, would never make it to any dream city.

Even so, the yearning never left me. One night, during yet another of my regular debauches, I rose without a word and left my friends in a steaming oyster house. I had seen notices in the paper of a Hebronite meeting. Their leader and revelator, Josiah Kershaw, was touring the East to summon new followers to the city he was raising on Peaine Island, a wilderness in the far northern reaches of Lake Michigan. All week the papers had mocked Kershaw. To them he was a gross fabricator, the great paradise he promised a myth, the prophecies on which he claimed his authority pure forgeries. But I was intrigued. His talk of harmony, of plain lives lived according to rule, stirred my hopes. I had passed the last weeks in a violent melancholy, pining for a woman who didn’t know me, a ship captain’s young wife. Increasingly I had seen my future, bound by an invisible chain to the worktable just like my father. And so, unsteady on my feet after five whiskeys, I searched for the inn where the meeting was to be held. By the time I found it my heart beat heavily in my chest and sweat dripped from my skin. My nerves were electric with anticipation.

Eyes turned to look at me when I stumbled into the room. The meeting was already under way. At the front a graybeard clutched a Bible and kept his eyes shut as he recited a prayer. I sat in the back and gripped my knees to keep from swaying. The graybeard droned on. People yawned and scratched their noses. After fifteen more minutes of this—the prayer was unending!—I could barely master myself. I was an imbecile. There was nothing for me here. I glanced at the door, but before I could rouse the courage to get back up, the graybeard sat and another man stood.

“Those who walk in the way of the Lord will receive His blessings,” he shouted, and with those words and that marshal’s voice I was seized. My drunkenness lifted from me. My eyes steadied, my mind ceased to yaw, my limbs stiffened with sober life. I recognized Kershaw from the newspaper illustrations. He was tall and spare, with a trimmed auburn beard and a high forehead seemingly shaped for the guarding of truths. His eyes glittered as if catching the wonders of his heavenly Guide. He paced before us, and something in him called to me. Without knowing why, I hungered for his blessing.

Five years earlier, he told us, he had been a coal shoveler in Chautauqua County. There, one black night, angels of the Lord bearing heavenly candles had shown themselves to him and revealed a golden scroll hidden in a cave. On this scroll he found descriptions of Peaine Island. The Lord had chosen it as the site for a holy city, a place where men would live in harmony under new laws and seek pleasure in labor, purity in distance from all the corruptions of the East. Already the city was begun. Kershaw had registered it as Port Hebron, after the ancient city of refuge, but when it reached its ordained population of 144,000 it would take its true name of Zion. Then ambassadors from all the world’s nations would wait upon him and his followers, Kershaw told us, and Jesus would descend to take His golden throne. I felt the island rise inside me: the pines, the clear water, the small bay, the city shining like a diadem in the lake. The Lord was speaking.

The next morning, as I departed, my father damned me for a fool. He stood as I packed my set of Italian tools and forms and enough cured maple and ebony for a dozen violins. At last he called me cruel for abandoning him and refused to give me his hand in farewell. Ever since my mother died I had been his sole companion, though it had been a companionship passed in silence. His words pained me—I had always been a dutiful son, always done as he asked—but I had heard the call.

I TRAVELED BY RAIL TO BUFFALO and there waited a week for the steamer that took me up the lakes. I spent my days onboard watching the shore, which grew wilder once we left Lake Erie and passed Detroit. The stands of birch and pine along Huron seemed unending. Isolated wisps of smoke, from a cabin or a camp of loggers, signaled the only life.

When at last we put in at the Mackinac settlement, surely one of the remotest in our Union, the sailors shoved their way into the pine-board bars that lined the harbor beneath the fort. Such places repulsed me now, and I and my fellow Hebronites—we’d soon found each other on the ship—walked along the beach and talked of our new lives on Peaine Island. It was on this walk that I saw my first whiskey trader. He sat on a shop porch, wrapped in furs. His cheeks were dirt-stained, his eyes as smoldering coals. He watched me and the other Hebronites as we strolled past, and his look made me shiver. Soon I would learn of the hatred the traders felt for us, but as yet I was ignorant. I tried to shake the look from me as I walked to the boat. The next morning the steamer left Mackinac, passed through the Straits, and called a little past noon at Port Hebron.

It was late September. Already a thousand Hebronites had settled the island, and the chosen city was a trim cluster of cabins and cottages spread along the back of the bay. Directly after we stepped onto the dock we were taken to the Temple and brought one by one before the Council of Elders. To them we professed our faith in the Lord and His Revelator, Josiah Kershaw. Our covenant recorded, the elders gave us our tasks. There was no demand for instruments, so I was sent to a stout, red-cheeked cooper named Pickle. I was his only worker. He gave me a corner of his cabin for my quarters and allowed me to hang my violin in the window, in the small hope of attracting customers for my own trade. My first night on the island he told me his story. A widower, he’d left five grown children behind after hearing Josiah’s call in Toledo. He’d been taking part in a Presbyterian synod on hymnals, he said, and had never before thought to stray from his church until, stuck in a crowd on the courthouse lawn, he listened to Josiah tell of a perfect city in the lakes where the Lord spoke and men lived as one.

OVER THE NEXT WEEKS I found Peaine Island just as I had hoped. Our lives were ordered, all were cared for, and each day had its purpose. Sabbaths were set aside for Temple services and rest. After worship I would play my violin or walk into the island’s deep wood. Seventh days, to which all men were subject, were given to the building of the kingdom: mine often found me engaged in road clearing, preparing boulevards for the throngs of newcomers Josiah prophesied. And the other five days were given to our own labor. Within a week Pickle had me trained in all the minor points of splitting and planing barrel staves. In the mornings I rose to work, rested only for lunch, and in the evenings I sat at Pickle’s table, listening as he read from the Bible and
The Book of Truths
—the volume, printed by Josiah, that contained his first revelations and the rules by which we lived. By the light of a single candle we took our supper, corncakes and molasses with the occasional helping of bacon or ham.

The only break in our routine came when we made sorties against the whiskey traders. Every capable man on the island drilled with the militia on two of his seventh days, and we drew lots to decide who would be called on each week in the event of a sortie. I had learned about the whiskey traders soon after my arrival. They had lived on the island before Josiah and the first Hebronites came to take possession, and had kept a store by the bay, sold whiskey to the Indians in breach of the law, and idled away their days in corruption and filth. Josiah drove them out. Their souls were broken, he said. They were nothing more than the tarred stains of what we had left behind, ungoverned men who shut their eyes to the light of the Lord. Now they lived in nomad camps on the islands that surrounded our own, moving between those and the Manitous to the south or Mackinac and the Charlevoix coast to the east. Josiah had consecrated what was once theirs; he had cleansed their cabins and trapping grounds of their sin and given their land and possessions to his first followers to serve the Lord’s purpose. Ever since, the whiskey traders, in their blindness, burned for vengeance. Some nights they came across the lake to steal chickens or a pig, and some nights we sought them out in their camps and put an ax through their whiskey barrels. In this way an uneasy peace was kept.

Under Pickle’s roof I earned a simple happiness through daily toil and praise-giving. Winter came swiftly. Deep snows covered the island, ice locked the lake. Finally the spring. I had found what I had sought and eagerly looked forward to the Day of the 144,000. Then, Josiah told us, all people would be judged and the world would be shaped anew. I trembled at the thought—I prayed for my father and my former companions, that they might be prepared. But I awaited the day with fervor.

So might my life have continued, so might that day have come, had I never known Dorothea.

PICKLE’S WORK YARD FRONTED ON JOSIAH STREET, offering a view of the shops along the harbor, and it was there I first saw her. I was leaned against my ax in rest, and she was stopped in the street to gather up the lengths of patterned fabric that had come loose from her bundle. When she glanced back, her eyes caught mine. That was enough.

This, of course, could not really have been the first time I had seen Dorothea Bainbridge. She came to town once a week with her mother, and so must have walked past me before. No doubt my eyes had chanced upon her in the Temple as well. But only with that met glance did she wake my slumbering heart. I felt a fool. How had I not recognized her earlier, how had I not understood sooner that she was to be the sole repository of my love? To make up for my belated revelation I embarked on a careful study of her person whenever she passed. I discovered that her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, that she most often wore her hair in two looping braids, that she wrote poems about fairies and angels (this when I picked up a scrap of paper she’d left in her pew in the Temple). I suffered when she giggled—wishing I was the one making her laugh—and delighted when she frowned, imagining myself her comforter.

I burned with the very thought of her.

My various secret pinings in Baltimore were nothing to this. I was plunged in turmoil, so much so that Pickle worried for my soul and offered to redouble his prayers. Occasionally Dorothea glanced at me, but always I was too shy to introduce myself. Then, in late spring, as I was leaning once again on my ax and watching her walk past the work yard on her way to Teague’s store, a breeze came up the bay and whisked her bonnet off her head. I ran to it and snatched the bonnet before it could land in a pile of night soil. “William Ames, violin maker,” I said, and, bowing, presented the bonnet to her. I pointed back toward the window in Pickle’s cabin: “My shop.” I did not add that it occupied only a corner of the cabin, and that this corner also served as my home.

Dorothea settled the bonnet on her head and tucked in first one raven braid, then the other. With each movement she made I ached.

“I’m here every day, and I’d be glad to play for you,” I said.

She gave no answer, and I was about to let her walk away when I thought again of what Josiah had said the night of my conversion, that the blessed were those who seized the gifts the Lord put before them.

“May I call on you?” I said, forcing out the words.

She had already gone a few steps, but at that she stopped. “I thank you for my bonnet, Mr. Ames, but my father doesn’t allow callers.”

“I’ll plead with him,” I said.

“That wouldn’t be any use.”

“I’ll wait by your farm, then. I can walk you to town or to the Temple. If you don’t want me, just send me off.” At this her face colored. I had gone too far. “I apologize,” I said. “I did not mean—”

“Come next Wednesday,” she said quickly, her voice pitched at a whisper: her mother had emerged from Teague’s and was calling her. “I make no promises. My father might not let you in.” Then she ran to her mother, and the two of them walked up the street until they disappeared around the other side of the bathhouse.

I COULD NOT BELIEVE MY FORTUNE. I had been bold, and the Lord had blessed me. On the agreed-upon Wednesday I left Pickle’s work yard an hour early and walked to the Bainbridge farm.

Since my meeting with Dorothea I had spent my spare moments carving hands. With the clearest blocks of scrap pine I could find, I sat by my lamp each evening and whittled. I planned to present the best of the lot to Dorothea and had worked out what I would say. “Might I exchange this rude carving, which I have gripped so delicately all week, for its truer, purer model?” The sixth hand came as near to perfect as I could get. I clutched it by its fingers now as I walked, warming it with my flesh.

The Bainbridge farm lay in the remoter, southern quarter of the island, beyond the village of New Nazareth. I found the cabin at the end of a track that led first through a birch wood and then into a clearing planted with potatoes. As I walked I had assured myself of victory, but now that I approached the Bainbridge cabin I grew nervous. What if Dorothea’s father refused me? I considered methods for clandestine courtship. Secret meetings, a hollowed tree for depositing notes.

These imaginings proved unnecessary: though he received me coldly, Bainbridge let me in.