After Magnus had rowed on a little further and some distance had been put between them and the dark shapes of the houses of Rotbottom, Matthew said, “I don’t know what to make of that. Yes, I suppose you’re right. About the swamp fever. She thinks I’m someone else.”
“Maybe you look like somebody she used to know,” Magnus offered. “Damn shame. Out of her head, for sure.”
They rounded a bend on the serpentine river and found they were catching up to a small group of rowboats and canoes. Torchflames and candlelight flickered on the water. Matthew saw that once again the jugs were being passed around, and rough voices were slurred as they shouted back and forth. Up ahead, a man in one of the boats stood in the bow with a jug in one hand and as he drank from it he slashed his sword from side to side as if fighting invisible foes.
Matthew had a very clear memory of Sarah Kincannon sitting on the boulder beneath the willows, reading her book. How fast a life could be changed, he thought; how fast a life could be extinguished. He recalled how her brightness had clouded over when speaking about the slaves. But, however one might consider the subject of slavery, it was a fact that slaves were necessary on these plantations, for only slaves had the endurance to work in the swampy fields, under the harsh sun and conditions that pale skins could not tolerate. Of course there were many slaves in the town of New York; it was again a fact of life. The difference between the slaveholders of the northern colonies and those of the southern had to do with the land itself. In New York the slaves usually lived in the attic or basement of the main house, whereas the plantation had enough space to create its own slave quarters. Was the work more full of hardship in the south as opposed to the north? Certainly the northern slaves were used as laborers, in the fields or on the docks as well as in the households, and so it was difficult to say. Matthew knew that whips bit flesh the same in the north as they did in the south, depending only upon the mercy and motives of the master.
Magnus’ rowing was smooth and efficient. He was working harder than the rowers in the vessels ahead, and so they were steadily catching up and would soon pass them.
“Sarah seemed like a very fine young woman,” Matthew said. “You certainly impressed her with your artistry.” When Magnus didn’t respond to this, Matthew continued on: “Your glass-blowing,” he explained. “She liked your work.”
At first Matthew thought Magnus was too lost in either his own reverie or the pattern of the rowing to answer, but then Magnus shrugged his massive shoulders and said, “Glad of that. She paid me for ’em, but that wasn’t why I done ’em. Happy to make things she liked. Happy to go visit her and talk for a spell.”
“You spent a lot of time with her?”
“No, not a lot.” He gave Matthew a quick, sharp glance that said he was still proud and determined to continue living in his hermitage. “But when I did go visit her…she was always kind to me. In the summer, offerin’ me a cup of lemon water. Cider in the winter. And she wanted to hear about me. The glass-blowin’…that too…but she wanted to know about me. How I got where I was, and what I was thinkin’. I started makin’ bottles I knew she would most like…usin’ the colors she favored. Greens and purples, they were. When I took her somethin’ I knew she would like…you should’ve seen her face light up. Seen her eyes shine. It made me feel good inside, knowin’ I was bringin’ her somethin’ she thought was pretty. I tried to take some bottles to Pandora once, but Father Prisskitt wouldn’t let me in the door. Said if I came back, he’d have a musketball ready for me.” Magnus stopped rowing and let the boat drift for a moment. “It’s a kind of Hell to think you’re in love with somebody who don’t care if you live or die, ain’t it? Who don’t show you no care a’tall…and yet you keep on ’cause you’re thinkin’ you can make it happen, like knockin’ down a door or breakin’ through a wall. Then it gets to where you have to make it happen, or you think you’re no damn good. It gets to where it’s a thorn in your head, and ain’t no other rose can catch root there.” He began rowing once more, his gaze fixed past Matthew toward the river. “You must think I’m a poor piece a’work. don’t you? To be so tranced by such a woman?”
“I think all men have been tranced, by some woman or another,” Matthew replied. “And women the same. We men don’t hold the only key to that particular vault.”
“Reckon not,” Magnus agreed. “You have a woman?”
“Good question. I’m not quite sure.”
“If you don’t know for sure…then you must not. You livin’ in that big town…maybe you wanted to come see me and give me some advice you oughta be takin’ yourself.”
“Oh?” Matthew’s eyebrows went up. “What would that be?”
“Climbin’ out of the hole you dug for yourself. I know I dug a deep one, ’cause I didn’t have use for people I thought was laughin’ at me and my folks. What hole are you in, and why’d you dig it so deep?”
Matthew had to ponder that one for a moment. “Someone else is digging it for me,” he replied, thinking of the image of the masked Professor Fell working tirelessly in a windblown cemetery, shovelling out a grave meant for a young man from New York. “I don’t intend to be pushed into it before my time,” he said. “Neither do I wish anyone I care for to find themselves in it, and dirt thrown into her face.”
“Her face?” asked Magnus.
“Hey, Sipsey!” shouted one of the men in the boat just ahead. “Play us a tune!”
The voice had been ragged and slurred. Up further along the river, the man with the fiddle obliged by beginning what at first was a slow, sad and gray song that suddenly with a scrape of the bow blazed itself up into a conflagration of notes. The man with the jug and the sword was standing in his boat, twisting his upper torso to the music and slashing at the air; he let go a wild holler that seemed to reverberate across the wilderness and for a moment silence all the night-things that chattered and chittered for a space of their own.
In another boat, someone who was obviously also not only a music-lover but a lover of the jug fired a pistol into the air, and Magnus muttered, “Damn fools.”
Matthew caught sight of something, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
It was something sliding into the water from the righthand thicket.
He thought at first it was another alligator, but it moved so fast and so smoothly he was unable to tell for sure. He caught other quick movements from that direction, maybe three or four dark shapes submerging themselves. Something was definitely in the river that had not been there a moment before. Matthew felt the flesh prickle on his arms and at the back of his neck.
The man with the sword and jug was still cavorting to the fiddle player’s tune. Matthew said, “Magnus?”
Before Magnus could answer or Matthew could determine what he was going to say next, there came a high thrumming sound nearly masked by the fiddle music.
The swordsman suddenly dropped his jug to clutch at his throat, which had just been pierced by an arrow. He fell backwards into the river, his sword now ineffectual and the liquor in his blood not strong enough to overcome a sharpened flint through the windpipe.
In the next instant, the boat from which the swordsman had fallen was overturned by a pair of mud-dark figures that burst up from beneath, spilling the craft’s other two passengers into the water. The same also with a boat to the left of that one, even as a musketball shrieked off into the sky, and two more unfortunates tumbled into the Solstice. A torch hissed as the water drank its flame. Arrows came flying from the thicket on the right, one lodging itself into the shaft of Magnus’ oar on that side and another passing by Matthew’s face so close it nearly shaved his cheek of the day’s whiskers. Up ahead, three more boats were overturned, including the one that carried Sipsey, the fiddler. Pistols flared and swords struck down at the river from those boats still upright, and in answer to those insults more arrows flew from the wilderness to strike wood and flesh alike.