Dirck exploded into a furious quilling of counterthrust, then stood beside me and said through the medium of my voice that he considered Lyman “great man, great friend of family and of father, but I will never retract one word, for book cost me eternal voice, and what recanting will return that? Neither apology nor resignation will change Society, an evil needing violent overthrow.” Then Dirck sat down in a swim of silent passion.
Lyman stood and shook his fist at me, saying he could not resign “without history’s awareness that The Society was not always vile, and that all present members are not villainous men.”
Dirck scratched out his reply and I read: “Well enough. Then you put Society in historical niche. Please reveal secret dogmas of yore that have led to crucifying of men and slitting of their gizzards to create pasture for rats. For I do not understand such moral evolution.”
Lyman said that nothing he could say would reveal such progression, and that no matter what he said, “it would not clear the name of Petrus for having founded the local chapter of The Society. The words of Dirck Staats are required for that.”
Dirck, dismissing this remark with a wave of his hand, wrote his conclusion: “Am not dead father’s keeper. Nor yours either.”
The sociality of the evening deteriorated with that remark and before long we took to our beds. All that had passed weighed on my brain, but shining epiphanically through it all was the face of Maud. With her visit to Saratoga approaching within weeks, I knew a decision loomed: one that would also involve my bronze disk, which had been recurring in my dreams. On this burdened and sleepless night the disk’s face spoke to me in a pair of cryptic phrases: “Under the arches of love,” it said, and then “Under the banner of blood,” neither phrase holding intimate meaning for me. Only an intuition persisted that one day I might find the grand significance of this oracular object, as well as how it related to Joey Ryan and his slungshot, to the bumblebees in Maud’s script, to the bleeding wrist of Joshua the fugitive slave, and to the exploding soldier’s melancholy dust. The message emerging from my febrile imagination during these tumultuous days was a single word: “linkage”; and from the moment I was able to read that word I became a man compelled to fuse disparate elements of this life, however improbable the joining, this done in a quest to impose meaning on things whose very existence I could not always verify: a vision, for instance, of a young girl holding a human skull with a sweetly warbling red bird trapped inside, the bird visible through the skull’s eye sockets.
In an earlier day I would have dismissed such a tableau as nightmare. But now I was propelled into an unknown whose dimensions grew ever wider and whose equal in spanning them I knew I was not. But even as I knew this I knew also I might never be their equal, and that remaining as I was, out of deference or timidity, would keep me ever distant from Maud. My life would then, I knew, fall into desuetude, like the lives of so many men of my father’s generation, men who moved through their days sustained only by fragments of failed dreams, and who grew either indolent in despair or bellicose in resentment at such a condition.
And so, on a morning not long after the peaking of these pressures, I rode in silence with Will Canaday and Dirck to the Chronicle-Paddle, and when I saw the pair of them together in editorial conference beside the woodstove, I summoned the courage to present them with my decision, saying, “If you please, sirs, I think I must resign from this job and leave Albany.” They regarded me with silent surprise.
“Leave for where?” Will asked.
“For Saratoga, to the north.”
“I know where Saratoga is. Have we treated you so poorly here?”
“No, sir. I feel very happy here. Nobody is more grateful than I for what I’ve been given, but I have to meet someone.”
“A relative?”
“No,” I said, almost adding, “not yet.”
Will sat down in the chair beside Dirck and stared at me with what I took to be incomprehension compounded. I believe he felt me bereft of common sense. “When does this departure take place?” he asked.
“About two weeks,” I said.
“You’ll stay in Saratoga? Live there?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I really can’t say.”
“Do you plan to look for another job?”
“I was hoping,” I said, “that you would help me figure that out.”
“Ah,” said Will. “So I’m to be an accessory to your flight.”
“I would rather work here for the Chronicle than anywhere else in the world. But I have to help this person.”
Dirck scribbled a note and handed it to me. It read: “Maud?” I nodded and handed the note to Will.
“Then your journey is really a romantic quest,” said Will.
“She asked me to meet her. She seems desperate,” I said.
“Of course you’re fully equipped to solve all the random cares of desperate young women.”
“Probably not any of them,” I said, “but I promised to try.”
Will and Dirck then listened with mock solemnity while I spoke about Maud’s life with La Última and John the Brawn. But the more I talked the more I saw how ignorant I was of everything about Maud except her desire to be stolen by me. I did not say this. I said in summary that I couldn’t be sure when I’d return to Albany. At that moment I saw in Dirck’s face his realization that he was losing his voice yet again. I had become adept as his surrogate, but surely others could replace me; and I couldn’t say the same for Maud’s role in my affection, or mine in hers.
Will raised the question of my disk and I said I’d leave it in his safe, but he said no. What if they burgled the safe? What if the place caught fire? What if he died? No. We needed proof of my ownership, and then safekeeping for the disk in a bank vault, in my name. As usual, Will was thorough.
During subsequent days my departure was much discussed, especially by Hillegond, who couldn’t believe I was going off on my own. She stared me up and down and said, “If you are going to be an adventurer, you must stop looking like a crossing sweeper,” and she summoned a tailor to the mansion to measure me for wool and linen trousers, dress coats (the wool coat had a velvet collar), two silk damask waistcoats to match and contrast with the dress coats, and a long gray frock coat for cold weather. She personally took me to the city for dress shoes and shoeboots, six new shirts, six cravats, two pairs of braces, and an abundance of stockings and undergarments. All this was topped off with a tall black hat that I thought somewhat silly, but that Hillegond insisted was the true mark of a young gentleman.
“I only wish Dirck had been like you,” she said to me.
When we had done with clothing she took me to the stationer’s and fitted me out with a writer’s travel kit that included a writing box, a portable lamp, candles and holder, two everpointed pencils, a dozen pen points with pen, ink, and inkwell, and a roll of writing paper.
“Now you are a writer,” said Hillegond.
“I think I will have to write something first,” I said.
I came back to my room in the mansion, marveling at all my acquisitions. But one may be an acquisitor for only so long, and then the emptiness of it comes to the fore. And so I went down to the kitchen to see Matty and Capricorn, who had become my friends. I always wanted to hear their stories of Negro life in old Albany, and their tales of fugitive slaves, which sometimes were happy stories of escape, sometimes tragic with death and separation. I wanted to know what had happened to Joshua, and so I asked them how he was getting on after his ordeal and where he was. This won me a profound silence and brought our talk of slavery to an abrupt end.