Reverend Talbot was virtuous, always doing right by his neighbors and his congregation. Except there were times when he was perhaps too zealous. Thirty years before, early in his stewardship of the Second Church, he had agreed to recruit men from Germany and the Netherlands to move to Boston with the promise of a place to worship in his congregation and a well-paying job. If Catholics could pour in from Ireland, why not bring some Protestants? Only the job was building the railroads, and scores of his recruits died of overwork and disease, leaving orphans and derelict widows. Talbot had quietly pulled out of the arrangement and then spent years removing any trace of his involvement. But he had accepted “consultation” payments from the railroad builders, and though he had told himself he would return the money, he didn’t. Instead, he locked it out of his mind and made each decision in life with an eye toward thoroughly skewering the wrongheadedness of others.
As Reverend Talbot took drawn-out, skeptical strides in reverse, he stumbled against something hard. He thought for a moment, as he stood transfixed, that he had lost his inner compass and steered into a wall. Elisha Talbot had not been held by another person, or even touched—except for shaking hands—for many years. But there was no doubt now, even to him, that the warmth of the arms wrapping around his chest and removing the lantern belonged to another being. The grasp was alive with passion, with offense.
When Talbot came to consciousness again, he realized, in a brief moment of eternity, that a different, impenetrable blackness surrounded him. The pungent odor of the vault persisted in his lungs, but now a cold, thick moistness brushed against his cheeks and a saltiness he recognized as his own sweat crept into his mouth, and he felt tears streaming from the corners of his eyes onto his forehead. It was cold, cold as an icehouse. His body, deprived of all garments, was shivering. Yet heat ate into his numb flesh and furnished an unbearable sensation never before known. Was it some horrible nightmare? Yes, of course! It was that awful rubbish he was lately reading before bed, of demons and beasts, et cetera. Yet he could not remember climbing out of the vault, could not remember reaching his modest peach-painted clapboard house and fetching water to his washstand. He had never emerged from the world below to the sidewalks of Cambridge. Somehow, he realized, the beating of his heart had moved upward. It was suspended above him, pounding desperately, plunging the blood in his body down into his head. He breathed in faint ejaculations.
The minister felt himself kicking his feet in the air madly and he knew by the heat that this was no dream: He was about to die. It was strange. The emotion most distant from him at this moment was fear. Perhaps he had used it all up in life. Instead, he was filled with a deep and raging anger that this could happen—that our condition could be such that one child of God could die while all others went on unbothered and unchanged.
In his last moment, he tried to pray in a tearful voice, “God, forgive me if I’m wrong,” but instead a piercing yell burst forth from his lips, lost in the merciless thundering of his heart.
V
On Sunday, the twenty-second day of October 1865, the late edition of the Boston Transcript contained on its front page an advertisement offering a reward of ten thousand dollars. Such bewilderment, such halts of clanging carriages at newspaper peddlers’ had not been known in what seemed like a lifetime since Fort Sumter had been attacked, when it was certain that a ninety-day campaign could end the South’s wild rebellion.
Widow Healey had wired Chief Kurtz a simple telegram to reveal her plans. The use of the telegram made her point, for it was known that many eyes in the police station house would see it before the chief’s. She was writing to five Boston newspapers, she told Kurtz, describing the true nature of her husband’s death and announcing a reward for information leading to the capture of his murderer. Because of past corruption in the detective bureau, the aldermen had passed regulations prohibiting policemen from receiving rewards, but members of the public certainly could enrich themselves. Kurtz might not be happy, she admitted, but he had failed in his promise to her. The late edition of the Transcript was first to carry the news.
Ednah Healey now imagined specific machinations by which the villain might suffer and repent. Her favorite brought the murderer to Gallows Hill, but instead of hanging he was stripped bare of clothes and set on fire, then permitted to try (unsuccessfully, of course) to put out the flames. She was thrilled and terrified by these thoughts. They served the additional purpose of distracting her from thinking about her husband and from the rising hate she felt toward him for leaving her.
Mittens were bound to her wrists to prevent her from scratching off more skin. Her mania had become constant, and clothing could no longer cover the scars of her self-mutilation. In the fit of a nightmare one evening, she had rushed from her bedchamber and desperately found a hiding place for the brooch containing the lock of her husband’s hair. In the morning, her servants and sons searched all of Wide Oaks, from under the floorboards and to the skeleton rafters, but couldn’t find anything. It was for the best. With those thoughts dangling from her neck, Widow Healey might never have slept again.
Mercifully, she could not know that during those cataclysmic days, during that autumn heat spell, Chief Justice Healey had slowly mumbled “Gentlemen of the jury…” again and again as hungry maggots bore by the hundreds through the wound into the quivering sponge of his brain, the fertile flies each birthing hundreds more flesh-eating larvae. First, Chief Justice Artemus Prescott Healey couldn’t move one arm. Then he moved his fingers when he thought he was kicking his leg out. After a while his words weren’t coming out right. “Jurors under our gentlemen…” He could hear it was nonsense but could do nothing about it. The portion of the brain that arranged syntax was being tasted by creatures who did not even enjoy their feeding, but needed it nonetheless. When sense returned briefly during the four days, Healey’s anguish made him believe he was dead, and he prayed to die again. “Butterflies and the last bed…” He stared at the shabby flag above him and, with the little sense left to his mind, wondered.
The sexton of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge had been recording the week’s events in the church diary in the late afternoon after Reverend Talbot departed. Talbot had performed a riveting sermon that morning. He spent time in the church afterward, basking in glowing notices from the church deacons. But Sexton Gregg had frowned to himself when Talbot asked him to unlock the heavy stone door at the end of the wing of the church that held their offices.
It seemed as though only a few minutes had passed after that when the sexton heard a rising cry. The noise seemed to come from nowhere and yet was clearly rooted somewhere in the church. Then, almost whimsically, with thoughts of the long buried, Sexton Gregg put his ear to that slate door that led down to the underground burial vaults, the church’s bleak catacombs. Remarkably, the noise, though now gone, did seem from its reverberations to originate from the hollowness behind the door! The sexton, taking his clattering ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the door as he had done for Talbot. He sucked in his breath and stepped down.
Sexton Gregg had worked there for twelve years. He had first heard Reverend Talbot speak in a series of public debates with Bishop Fenwick on the dangers of the rise of the Catholic Church in Boston.