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.”
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!”