“You goddamn fool,” he said when I woke. “Do you mean to kill yourself?”
I scrabbled toward the safe, but he held me down, and only then, as I spent myself in struggle against him, did I begin to see my madness. The suffering — I so wished to end the suffering!
I spent the next weeks walking the island and dining with Dr. Smith, who had developed the habit of reading aloud from pamphlets on banana cultivation while at table. During the mornings I drafted letters trumpeting the biscuit’s success and our plans for renewed production, which I would post to various government agencies and newspapers of record once I had word from Honduras. Each day, awaiting this word, I twisted in currents of emotion, from hope to dread and back again, my only solace wandering the dunes and feeling the gulf breeze whip over me. At times I thought of slave ships putting in at Trujillo, to supply Timson’s new plantations. My heart fell at the vision, but was swiftly buoyed by another: the biscuit proved before the world.
Then, a month after his leaving to the fanfare of the city, we got news of Timson’s campaign. His men returned in rags, arriving in twos and threes on the ships of charitable captains, and told their stories in the saloons and on the docks. The Honduran army had made quick work of them, and after only a few days of jungle fighting Timson had been captured and hanged in the plaza at Comayagua. I caught one man on the wharf. He had a bandage on his head and would not answer any question, any hello or how are you. I followed him as he walked down to the water and along the beach, poking at the jetsam left by the last tide. Finally I clutched his arm.
“The biscuit?” I asked. “The biscuit?”
He fixed me with his good eye, sunken and glassy. “One half dumped in the bay,” he said, “the other half left in the jungle.”
I fell to my knees. It was the final blow.
After I met Timson’s man, I drifted in a stupor for a week, passing from the city to the wastes and back again. The clouds came in low over the gulf, the rain fell gray and cold, and by the time the sun returned, I knew I could live here no longer, where every effort proved another folly. These streets, these shores offered no succor for the loss of my Penelope, only frustrations to inspire the laughter of my neighbors.
“I am sure,” Dr. Smith said, smiling and raising his glass, “that in Manhattan you will find an environment as nourishing to your creative faculties as the biscuit has been to your corporeal ones.” This was during our last dinner together, on the eve of my departure. Dr. Smith had taken the news of Timson hard, but charged me with no fault. Already he was full of plans for turning the warehouse into a medical college, where he would meet daily with his students to pick over fresh corpses.
“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.
THE TRAITOR OF ZION
THEY 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.