John carried her to where a policeman stood guard over the lengthening row of the congealing dead, while other police pressed cabmen and private carriages into hauling the freezing victims to the city’s clinic. My master lay the dead woman down, straightened her dress over her legs with a show of modesty I would not have predicted, and gently stroked her hair out of her face with two fingers.
“They mean to eat her like wolves,” said my master to the police officer.
“Move along, don’t handle the dead,” the policeman told him.
John tipped his hat and smiled through his light-brown teeth, not one to argue with the law; for indeed John was fugitive from trouble in a dozen towns along the canal, his last excursion with the bottle ending in the destitution of Watervliet’s Black Rag saloon, even to the felling of the four pillars that supported the tavern’s second-story porch.
We went back for the wardrobe trunk, and only when my hands were full did Maud release her grip on me. She had watched the cannibalizing of her aunt without a word and offered nothing but a mute stare at that supine form, one among many. But as we walked from the edge of the quay with the trunk (I knowing nothing of John’s next intentions), Maud halted and said, “We can’t leave my aunt lying there in the cold. It isn’t civilized behavior.”
“We’ll not leave her,” said John, who hailed a close carriage that was moving toward us. As the driver slowed, John grabbed the reins of the horse. “We’re sore in need of your service,” he told the driver.
“I’ve orders to do what the police want, them and none other,” retorted the driver.
“You’ll succor us or I’ll maim your horse and splinter your backbone,” said my master, and the driver grumbled his comprehension of the priorities. With the cabman’s help I put the trunk on his luggage rack and helped Maud into the cab, thinking John would enter with us. But he called to the driver to wait and went back to the quay’s edge, returning with the limp form of Magdalena Colón across his outstretched arms. I had a sudden vision of my sister being so carried in from the street by my father, she then dying from the same cholera that would strike both him and my mother within a week, thus setting me on the road toward my rendezvous with John the Brawn. John was a man I thought I knew after my time on the canal under his heavy hand. I even once thought I was rid of him when his rotted canalboat sank in a storm near Utica, and glad I was of it. But I was not rid of him, and as he walked toward me now with the dead woman in his arms, I realized how little I really knew about him, or about any man. I especially could not find a place for the tenderness he displayed in stroking the hair out of La Última’s eyes with his two callused fingers.
“Is she dead?” the driver asked him.
“Dead as dead ever gets,” said John. “A dead slut with a hole in her face.”
And he thrust La Última into the carriage with us, sat her across from Maud, and flopped into the seat opposite mine, holding the corpse upright with his arm around her shoulder. Had she not been so wet they might have been taken for lovers bound for an escapade. Maud had taken my hand as soon as we sat beside each other, and I’d smiled at her. But she had only fired her eyes and turned her head, keeping hold, nevertheless, of my hand.
“Well, Miss, what shall we do with her? Take her up to Congress Hall and auction her off to the politicians? Put her on view at The Museum? Or is hers a Christian body crying for six feet of holy dirt?”
“Mrs. Staats will know what to do,” Maud said. “My aunt was fond of her.”
Maud looked intently at La Última’s face, then reached over and touched the dead woman’s cheek near where it had been bitten. “It’s so sad,” she said. “She cared about her face above everything.”
“She had a pretty little face,” said John. “We couldn’t let them have it all.” He stroked around the raw wound with a single finger.
“Did you know her?” asked Maud. “I never saw you with her.”
“I knew her,” said John. “Saw her in New York, months ago. She acted, danced, sang. I saw her do her Spider Dance. Now there was a picture. A woman to remember, she was.”
“You would probably want to kiss her. Men always wanted to kiss her.”
“You’re a bright-spoken, savvy child,” said John, and he turned his face to La Última, gripped her jaw between the thumb and first finger of his right hand, and kissed the dead woman long and vigorously on the mouth.
“You’re a wicked man,” said Maud.
“They’ve told me that,” said my master, smiling and settling back into his seat. “But have ye never seen anyone kiss the dead? They all do it.”
We’d ridden two blocks off the quay when the carriage driver stopped and called down to us, “Where do we be goin’?”
We all then looked to Maud, who said staunchly, “To the home of Mrs. Hillegond Staats.”
“Do ye know that place?” John asked the driver.
“There’s none in Albany doesn’t,” came the ready answer, and the driver sped away toward the Staats mansion, a dwelling place of exalted lives, and a safe harbor as well for certain desperate souls who’d been chilled, like ourselves, by the world’s bitter ice.
As we rode, Maud fixed silently on the face of her aunt, occasionally looking to me for solace, or perhaps wisdom of the instant, as if I and not my master were the source of power in this quartet of misfits. Maud took my free hand in her own (we now holding both each other’s hands) and whispered to me, “We must patch her cheek before we bury her, for she’ll have no luck in the next world with her face like that.” And then she added after a pause, “And we must bury her beneath a tree, for she loved trees almost as much as she loved men.”
I nodded my agreement and Maud smiled, the first smile of hers I had ever seen, and I have remembered it all my days. But I knew nothing of patching flesh. With what did you patch it? As to burial, it had not crossed my mind that any portion of the task would ever fall to me. But I had already twice assented to Maud’s will, which, I would come to know, was an element very like Roman cement once it had assumed a shape.
Our driver turned onto the carriageway that led to the Staats mansion and called to us that we’d arrived. Maud and I held silence. John the Brawn grumphed and let Magdalena fall sideways, her head striking the carriage wall with a memorable thump; and he said he’d see who was at home.
“You’re sure she knew this Staats woman?” he asked Maud.
“We were her guests for two evenings,” said Maud.
John opened the carriage door and the encroaching night reached in for us with a profound chill, a blast of northern air that had dropped the temperature perhaps twenty degrees in as many minutes. As John walked off in the half-darkness our eyes played the night’s game and we saw that a half-moon was sending a straying gleam into one of La Última’s eyes, now fully open and staring at us.
“Close her eye,” said Maud, gripping my hand as if she felt herself still in the wild river. “You must never let the dead look at you.”