I was not even sure Dirck could still hear me. But if he was alive I knew he’d welcome distraction from his pain and discomfort, and so I talked to him aloud of my meeting with Joseph Moran and of our duet on “Kathleen Mavourneen.” I involved Dirck in my future plans at the newspaper and said I hoped he would tutor me in the writing arts. I told him I was grateful beyond measure for this chance to help him, especially after being allowed to live in his own house with his mother, to whom I was growing very close, and as well to Will Canaday, who, through his newspaper and his tutelage, was opening my eyes to the world in ways not accessible to the being I used to be. I gave thanks to Dirck himself for his revelation to me of the significance of the word, which, I could now see, releases boundless emotion and mystery, even into the lives of such folk as the Plums. I did not mention the fate of the sliced man. I focused on Dirck as someone who could change the world with his writing: a maestro of language, a champion of the heroic sentence. Of course I said these things in my limited way, and Dirck had no choice but to accept them in that form.
I ended my monologue wondering silently whether I should tell Dirck about my love for Maud, and my loss of her, but then we were at Main Street, entering into the most easeful steps of my life: that short walk down the sloping grade to Emmett’s house. I saw Emmett sitting on his front step as I turned the corner. He was smoking his pipe, and when I saw smoke rise from it, I knew salvation.
“We’re here, Dirck,” I said, and I almost broke into laughter, for he raised his head and blinked vitally at me.
Quickly now I sharpen my point. We put Dirck to bed in fresh nightclothes, washed him, made him warm. When Josie saw Dirck’s condition she blessed herself, said a silent prayer, and went to a cupboard for a ball of string. With a length of it she took Dirck’s measure from scalp to toe, cut the string, then went to the yard, dug a hole, and buried it.
“They’ll not now take his soul,” she told us.
Emmett sent Josie for the doctor and gave Dirck a warm spoonful of the chicken soup Josie had made. Dirck ejected it violently, at the same time loosening a ball of coagulated blood and straw that had settled in the front of his mouth. Emmett moved the oil lamp close to Dirck’s face to study his wound, and when he turned to me, his eyes were afloat in tears.
“The cruel, cruel bastards,” he said. “They took his one and only tongue.”
THE Albany Chronicle, as we had known it, failed of business one month after Dirck’s return to the human race. Four attempts to set the premises ablaze were foiled, but nighttime vandals finally overpowered our sentinels and destroyed Will’s press with aggravated sledgings. Within one week Will was printing at the shop that published The Paddle, a penny-awful sheet of scandal and mayhem from around the globe (the terrible fate of eunuchs in a Persian harem, the Mouth Murders by the mad dentist of Baltimore); but by then The Society’s many members had withdrawn their paid notices. Even advertisers loyal to Will, finding themselves threatened, withdrew also. Will pressed on with his waning capital, being but a week from closing when Hillegond bought out The Paddle and installed Will as editor. Will merged the publications, fusing the inherited mayhem with his own politics, and naming the new publication the Chronicle-Paddle, a grotesque and short-lived fusion. Will kept it long enough to ensure an orderly transition of readers, but then diminished the word Paddle to minuscularity and, after a year, banished it altogether.
Dirck recovered his health but found his tongueless words no more than idiot grunts; and so he went silent. Because he believed I had saved his life (actually, he might have survived alone, even in the filthy hay — unlike Maud, who required my intercession to remain among the quick), Dirck made me his intermediary. He would scrawl swift messages with his everpointed pencil, then thrust the scrawls at me to read aloud. He wrote of his ordeals in fragments that belied their own truth: “Held me in wonderful chicken coop. . The gentle Jeremiah Plum took orders from kindly bass-voiced stranger who visited me wearing black veil on his face. . Unfortunate man with partial ear guarded me with kindness. . I nevertheless felt selfish need to loosen ropes to escape and return to work at Chronicle. . Hid in barn, too weak to run. . Surely against his wishes, Aaron Plum smashed my face with plank and severed my tongue while holding it with pincers. . Man with veil cautioned Aaron not to kill me while severing tongue. . My father, wondrous man, saved my life.”
This euphoric response to Plum captivity and torture was peculiar indeed. Will viewed Dirck’s behavior as akin to that of the Christian martyrs who found in all horrors the glorification of that which was greater than themselves: vileness is beauty, punishment is reward, death is life. I saw this equation then, and I see it still, as crackbrained. Dirck’s remark about his father was the most peculiar of all, for Petrus Staats had died in 1835, fifteen years before these events took place.
Petrus entered my life indirectly upon the arrival at the mansion of Lyman Fitzgibbon, the merchant-scientist. He was the godfather of Dirck, the former business partner of Petrus, and an inventor of infinite and ingenious improvements on metal-working machines. He was also the father of Gordon Hamilton Fitzgibbon, who would become one of the most confounding figures in my life, an ambivalent man of prodigious energy and erudition, also a writer of sorts, who on this night was away at law school in Yale College.
I was in the foyer when Lyman rapped with the knocker. I opened the door to see this tall and muscular man with a full white beard, full head of white hair, and beside him his handsome wife, Emily, in a long gown of black satin.
“Who are we here?” the man inquired of me.
“We are Daniel Quinn, sir, and we live here through the kindness of Mrs. Staats. May I announce you to her?”
“A quick tongue on you, boy. I like that. Tell Hillegond Lyman has come back.”
He had returned from Washington, where in recent years he had been serving in an English diplomatic post. London-born, Oxford-educated, Lyman Fitzgibbon had come to America at the age of twenty-six, met and married the wealthy Emily Taylor (her wealth came from shipping), and swiftly joined his wife’s wealth with Petrus in the nailworks that would become an ironworks and then the largest stove-making foundry in the city. Lyman became an investor in banks, insurance, railroads, and assorted commerce as far west as Buffalo and, not least, a land speculator of grand proportion, the speculation generally in service of a commercial enterprise higher than itself. He would, by the mature decades of his life, be Albany’s richest man, his vaunted power, when coupled to nothing more than resolute silence, capable of turning men of perfectly sound ego into cringing and snivelous whelps.
I led the Fitzgibbons to the east parlor to await Hillegond’s appearance. Lyman stopped before Dirck’s portrait on the east wall and spoke toward it.
“How is the boy?”
“He’s recovering, but cannot speak,” I said.
“You were his rescuer,” he said, turning to me.
“I helped him in his trouble,” I said.
“You’re quick, and you’re modest. You will go far in this world, young man.”