“Here answering the ad?” No response. “Excellent, excellent. Please fill this out. Nobody better in the business to work for than J. T. Fields. The man’s a genius, a guardian angel of all authors, he is.” This man identified himself as Spencer Clark, financial clerk of the firm.
Galvin accepted the paper and pen and stared widely, relocating the bit of paper he always carried in his mouth from one cheek to the other.
“You must give us a name for us to call you, son,” said Clark. “Come on, then. Give us a name or I shall have to send you on your way.”
Clark pointed to a line on the employment form, so Galvin put his pen there and wrote: “D-A-N-T-E-A-L.” He paused. How was Alighieri spelled out? Ala?-Ali? Galvin sat wondering until the ink on his pen had dried. Clark, having been interrupted by someone across the room, cleared his throat loudly and snatched the paper.
“Ah, don’t be shy, what have we got?” Clark squinted. “Dan Teal. Good boy.” Clark sighed disappointedly. He knew the chap couldn’t be a clerk with writing like that, but the house needed every hand it could find during this transition to the massive New Corner mansion. “Now, Daniel my lad, pray just tell us where you live and we can start you tonight as a shop boy, four nights a week. Mr. Osgood, he’s the senior clerk, he’ll show you the ropes before he leaves tonight. Oh, and congratulations, Teal. You’ve just begun your new life at Ticknor and Fields!”
“Dan Teal,” the new employee said, repeating his new name over and over.
Teal thrilled to hear Dante discussed when passing the Authors’ Room on the second floor as he rolled his cart of papers to be delivered from one room to another for the clerks to have when they arrived in the morning. The fragments of discussions he overheard were not like Reverend Greene’s sermons, which spoke of the wonders of Dante’s journey. He didn’t hear many specifics about Dante at the Corner, and most nights Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Fields, and their Dante troop did not meet at all. Still, here at Ticknor & Fields were men somehow allied with Dante’s survival—speaking of how they might go about protecting him.
Teal’s head spun and he ran outside and vomited in the mall at the Common: Dante required protection! Teal listened in on the conversations of Mr. Fields and Longfellow and Lowell and Dr. Holmes and gathered that the Harvard College board was attacking Dante. Teal had heard around town that Harvard, too, was looking for new employees, since many of its regular workers had been killed or disabled in the war. The College handed Teal a day job. After a week of work, Teal managed to change his assignment from yard gardener to daytime caretaker in University Hall, for it was there, Teal learned by asking the other workmen, that the College boards made their all-important decisions.
At the soldiers’-aid home, Reverend Greene shifted from general discussions of Dante to more specific accounts of the pilgrim’s journey. Circles separated his steps through Hell, each leading closer to the punishment of the great Lucifer, the possessor of all evil. In the anteroom of Hell, Greene guided Teal through the land of the Neutrals, where the Great Refuser, the worst offender there, could be found. The name of the Refuser, some pope, did not mean anything to Teal, but his having turned down a great and worthy position that could have ensured justice for millions made Teal burn with anger. Teal had heard through the walls of University Hall that Chief Justice Healey had point-blank refused an assigned position of great importance—a position that asked him to defend Dante.
Teal knew that the bookish adjutant from Company C had collected thousands of insects during their marches through the swampy, sticky states, and had sent them home in specially crafted crates so they would survive the trip to Boston. Teal purchased from him a box of deadly blowflies and maggots, along with a hive full of wasps, and followed Justice Healey from the courthouse to Wide Oaks, where he watched the judge say good-bye to his family.
The next morning, Teal entered the house through the back and cracked Healey’s head open with the butt of his pistol. He removed the judge’s clothes and stacked them neatly, for man’s garments did not belong on this coward. He then carried Healey out back and released the maggots and insects onto the head wound. Teal also speared a blank flag into the sandy ground nearby, for under such a cautionary sign Dante found the Neutrals. He felt at once that he had joined Dante, that he entered the long and dangerous path of salvation among the lost people.
Teal was torn up inside when Greene missed a week at the soldiers’-aid home due to illness. But then Greene returned and preached on the Simoniacs. Teal had already been alarmed and panicked at the arrangement made between the Harvard Corporation and Reverend Talbot, which he had heard discussed on several occasions at University Hall. How could a preacher accept money to bury Dante from the public, sell the power of his office for a rotten one thousand dollars? But there was nothing to be done until he knew how it was to be punished.
Teal had once met a safecracker named Willard Burndy during his nights at back-alley public houses. Teal did not have trouble tracking Burndy down at one of these taverns, and though infuriated by Burndy’s drunkenness, Dan Teal paid the thief to tell him how to steal one thousand dollars from Reverend Elisha Talbot’s safe. Burndy talked and talked about how Langdon Peaslee was taking over all his streets anyway. What harm would it do to teach someone else how to open a simple safe?
Teal used the fugitive-slave tunnels to cross into the Second Unitarian Church, and he watched Reverend Talbot as he excitedly descended each afternoon into the underground vault. He counted Talbot’s steps—one, two, three–to see how long it took him to cross to the stairs. He estimated Talbot’s height and made a mark on the wall with chalk after the minister left. Then Teal dug a hole, precisely measured, so that Talbot’s feet could be free in the air when he was buried headfirst, and he buried Talbot’s dirty money beneath. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he grabbed Talbot, took his lantern away, and poured the kerosene oil on his feet. After he punished Reverend Talbot, Dan Teal had a cloudy certainty that the Dante Club was proud of his work. He wondered when the weekly meetings were held at Mr. Longfellow’s house, the meetings Reverend Greene had mentioned. Sundays, no doubt, Teal thought—the Sabbath.
Teal asked around Cambridge and easily found the big yellow Colonial. But looking into the window on the side of Longfellow’s house, he did not see signs of any meeting taking place. In fact, there was a loud uproar from inside soon after Teal pressed his face against the window, for the moonlight had caught the buttons on his uniform and now glowed. Teal did not want to disturb the Dante Club if it was gathered, did not want to interrupt the guardians of Dante while they were on duty.
How bewildered Teal was when Greene again failed to show at his post at the soldiers’-aid home, this time without forwarding any excuse of illness! Teal asked at the public library where he might take lessons in the Italian language, for Greene’s first suggestion to the other soldier had been to read the original in Italian. The librarian found a newspaper advertisement from a Mr. Pietro Bachi, and Teal called on Bachi to begin lessons. This instructor brought Teal a small armload of grammar books and exercises, mostly ones that he had written himself—these had nothing to do with Dante.
Bachi at one point offered to sell Teal a Venetian century edition of the Divina Commedia. Teal took the volume, bound in hard leather, in his hands, but had no interest in the book, regardless of how Bachi rambled on about its beauty. Again, this was not Dante. Fortunately, soon after this, Greene reappeared at the soldiers’-aid pulpit, and there came Dante’s astounding entrance into the infernal pouch of the Schismatics.