When he had gone I sat up, groaning, and stashed the revolver in the drawer of the taboret.
Mrs. B. brought me breakfast and left it even though I told her I couldn’t eat anything. I slept the morning away. I was wakened by a rap on the door. “Lady to call,” Mrs. B. said, disapproving. An exception to the no-women-in-the-rooms rule had been made in my case.
I was trying to sit up and brush a hand over my hair when Amelia swept inside.
She seemed to provide sunlight in the dim room as she circled around, exclaiming at everything she saw. She stood over the bed with her gloved hands clapped together, gazing down at me from under her considerable bonnet with an expression of dismay.
“My hero has been brought home on his shield!”
“You are not to leave your house without a guardian!” I raised myself to say.
She flapped a hand toward the open door. I could see a helmeted policeman leaning on the stair rail.
“Constable Button is my sentry today!” She seated herself on the end of the bed with a graceful swing of her hips. She held her hands clasped together before her as though to immobilize them.
“Mr. Bierce said it was a Railroad gang who did this.”
“It was a message for me to back off.”
“What does that mean, please?”
“I’ve been writing a piece on Senator Jennings that they don’t want published.”
She sat looking down at her hands with her pretty mouth pursed. I admired the sweet symmetry of her bosom. “And will you back off?” she asked.
“No.”
“Poppa knows Mr. Crocker and Mr. Stanford.”
I laughed, which hurt in my chest and belly. She laughed with me. I thought it must be the irony that amused her.
“What can I bring you, Tom?” she said.
“You’ve already brought me the best thing you could bring me.”
I was astonished to see her blush. It swept up her throat and over her chin into her cheeks like a pink shadow. She clasped a hand to her throat as though to stop it.
“My mother makes a bruise remedy from cucumber cream and arnica,” she said. “I will send you a bottle.”
I asked if she would accompany me to Marin on Sunday, up Mount Tamalpais.
“I would love that!”
She rose swiftly. “I must be going. I don’t know what Constable Button will think!” She swooped toward me. The brim of her hat scraped my forehead, her lips brushed mine, and she was gone.
Late in the afternoon Belinda arrived for a visit. She sat in the chair just inside the door with her feet tucked close together and her hands in her lap. She had on her Sunday dress and a bonnet that made her face look like a china doll’s.
“Miss Brittain came to call on you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Mother doesn’t think she should have been alone in your room with you.”
“She stayed two entire minutes.”
“Ladies aren’t allowed in the boarders’ rooms.”
“You are here,” I said.
“I’m not a lady yet,” she said, looking down at her hands in her lap. “Mother thinks she is very pretty,” she said.
“Well, so are you, Belinda.”
She didn’t look up. “Tom.”
“Yes?”
“That man followed me home from school yesterday.”
“What man?” I knew what man.
“The playing-card man.”
I was breathing hard suddenly. “What did he do?”
“Well, he just followed me home. Then he stood at the gate for awhile after I’d come inside. I watched through the window. Then he went away.”
“Don’t you worry about him,” I said. “I’ll walk you home on Monday.”
When she had gone I lay with my eyes closed and my teeth gritted. My head felt filled with some overheated substance that ached behind my eyes. I had had no idea how vulnerable I was. But now I had an idea how the Railroad pursued its ends. I thought of the revolver in the drawer, and having come to the pass where I must carry it to walk Belinda home from school.
It seemed that when you were in possession of a firearm you began to think in terms of it.
A hackie brought me a green bottle wrapped in white tissue paper. It was Amelia’s mother’s bruise remedy, and I dutifully sloshed the white stuff over my bruises and rubbed it in until I stank like a cucumber stall at the Washington Street market.
Jonas Barnacle carried my supper on a tray up the stairs. “So they gave you a good pummeling, Tom.”
“They did,” I said.
“Those Railroad folks can get away with about anything, I guess.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said.
21
FAITH, n. – Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
I was still aching and shaky on foggy Sunday morning when I presented myself at the early service at the Washington Street Church. I slid into a seat in a pew at the back of the church, which was a hollow box of bricks, with a lectern instead of an altar, a crucifix on the wall, and some numbers chalked on a blackboard, that must be hymns. These Protestants did not go in for decoration.
There were about thirty people present, and I could see Klosters’s bald head in the second row. The preacher, the Reverend Stottlemyer, who had brought Klosters to Jesus, paced behind the lectern. He wore a black suit, a high collar and a four-in-hand tie. He must have been six and a half feet tall and skinny as a post.
I had brought some rage and nervousness to this brick church, together with Bierce’s revolver in my pocket that seemed to weigh ten pounds.
Stottlemyer paced and halted to gaze out at the congregation with saucer eyes in his gaunt face. The eyes seemed to be fixed on me as he spoke.
“ ‘And the fear of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air; with all wherewith the ground teemeth, for into your hand are they delivered.’
“The words of the Lord! For these beasts, these fowls, represent our lower natures, my friends. And this lower nature must be subdued and disciplined by the regenerate Jesus-man.
“The Jesus-man must govern his lower nature, my friends. The ox is strong to labor, but that strength may no longer be expended without direction. Those fierce thoughts, which are as the lions and bears, must be stilled. After man has passed the flood and is regenerate, those very lions may be loosed upon him, the lower nature be slain, the Jesus-man in his higher nature left standing beside his own carcass.
“For as the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air are within our lower natures, so are the twelve apostles in our higher. They correspond to the twelve degrees of the Jesus-man, my friends, brought into perfect harmony and atonement. For in the central place in these harmonies is Adonai himself, Jesus spreading his welcoming arms to the Jesus-man.”
He paced, swung, and paced the other way, big-nosed and narrow-headed, with his eyes that flared like candles as he preached. He did not work himself up into any ferment, as though saving himself for the second service of the day, so it was difficult to understand what had caused Klosters to change his ways, but when he gazed out over his flock it continued to seem as though he stared straight at me. I leaned forward to cross myself and whisper a prayer, for it was like Satan himself in that jackstraw preacher knowing he had a shaky Catholic in his sights.
But after awhile he shifted into the offertory: “Our offering, my friends, is the table of Jesus. It is the food of God. The fire of heaven, which is the holiness of Jesus, consumes this offering, and all in seconds it ascends as sweet incense to Him!”