One

The appointment was at ten o'clock on Lafayette Street, on the city's west side, and Elisha stepped from his boardinghouse at six that morning into a gauzy gray mist. Draft horses slapped down the muddy street, hauling drays loaded with potatoes and cabbages. He strolled down the sidewalk to Jefferson Avenue, drank a mug of milk as he listened to a newsboy call out the morning's headlines: White woman elopes with Negro servant to Windsor! Settlers burned alive in Shelby by savage Chippewas! He felt a familiar nervous chill at the city's rush and clamor. The air smelled sweetly foul, like burning trash.

He walked down Jefferson to Woodward Avenue then up to the Military Square, where a group of men were unloading red lacquered trunks from a caravan of weather-worn buggies. A handbill tacked to a message board at the square's entrance read:

As Elisha watched, one of the men unlatched the door of a high-sided wagon and led a frail, shaggy camel by a rope knotted around its neck. The animal stepped gingerly, twisting its long neck to gaze at its surroundings. Elisha drew a notebook from his vest pocket and licked a stub of pencil, sketched the animal's head and oddly humped back. The camel's handler glanced over his shoulder and called, "Hey boyo, no free looks! Come back tonight, you want to see!"

Elisha started up Michigan Avenue into the Irish quarter and its cramped, hustling streets. At Sixth Street a group of women were singing choral tunes around a donation basket. He paused to watch them: two skinny, black-haired sopranos and a squat, sleepy-looking alto. The boy was sixteen years old and his thoughts were almost entirely of women: their hair, their powder smells, their fleeting glances on the sidewalk. Young women in shop windows and ladies in broughams and girls strolling arm in arm down the avenue. The alto cut her gaze to Elisha and he ducked away.

He hurried down Sixth Street toward the river, quickening his pace as he emerged at the wharf. He continued southward past a row of shanties until he came to a stagnant stretch of sedge and driftwood. Elisha pulled off his shoes and sat on a stone at the river's edge, careful not to muddy his trousers. He leaned forward and rested his chin on his knees. From his position he could barely hear the hoofbeats on Woodbridge Avenue, but despite the quiet Elisha could not settle his nerves. Pond skaters tickled among the sedge, their passage visible as faint dimples in the river's surface. A merganser coasted toward the boy then angled upriver. Elisha withdrew his notebook and sketched the scene, his thoughts slowing, the city's noise fading to nothing. He worked long after the bell at St. Anne's had tolled nine o'clock.

He rose feeling wonderfully calm. He started up Seventh until he reached Lafayette, then entered a shop with its window painted to read O. Chocron, Clothier. He purchased a five-cent collar from the frowning proprietor, then stood before a tall mirror and buttoned the collar beneath his chin, the stiff linen chafing his neck. His own figure in the glass annoyed him: the cowlicked hair, the high, pale forehead, the pockmarked cheeks without even a hint of beard. A frightened boy in a man's clothes, certainly not a fellow to be reckoned with, certainly not one to be entrusted with an important task.

He exhaled deeply and attempted a fierce smile, and for a moment the boy in the mirror disappeared.

Thirty-one Lafayette Street was a two-story mansion with broad double doors and a columned porch, an orange-tiled roof topped by a cupola. Elisha stood at the street's edge for some time. He had expected a surveyor's cottage but this was far grander, the home of a judge or senator. At last he straightened his cuffs and set his hat square, then mounted the steps and tugged the bellpull.

A tall Negro girl in a white apron opened the door, glanced at the boy's shoes and hat. "If you here about the expedition you haves to wait. Mr. Brush is busy just now."

Elisha nodded.

"Follow me." She led him into a dim study and motioned toward a velvet wing chair. "Don't you touch anything."

He nodded again. His gaze followed the girl from the room.

Blue linen draperies filtered the morning light and lent the room a petrified quality. A carved walnut desk sat in the corner, covered with books and scrolled maps, a pair of brass rulers. Beside the desk stood an oak bookshelf filled with leather-bound volumes: sets of Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, the spines looking as though they'd never been creased. Bragging books, Elisha thought, for displaying instead of reading. The room smelled of soot and candlewax.

He rose and paced before the marble mantel: three pink conch shells sat beside a rosewood clock; beside the clock was a gleaming brass instrument with a jumble of thumbscrews and vanes and eyepieces projecting from a circular base. Beside the instrument stood an angled block draped with red silk, displaying four gold coins bearing a man's profile in crude relief—Roman, Elisha figured, or Greek. He took up a coin and tilted it toward the window. The face was so worn that the only clear feature was the line of a mouth, which seemed to be etched in a wry smile.

Floorboards squeaked in the hallway and Elisha replaced the coin then perched on the wing chair. A man entered the room and the boy bolted upright.

He was younger than Elisha had expected, with long brown hair combed back from his temples, a clean-shaven jaw, watery blue eyes beneath a sharp brow. Mr. Silas A. Brush, surveyor and landlooker, hero of the Second War for Independence. The man's hand, when Elisha shook it, was rough as a corn husk. Brush said, "Well! You look barely old enough to dress yourself."

"I'm sixteen years old, sir."

Brush squinted at Elisha as if measuring the truth of his claim. He was wearing a black frock coat over a black satin waistcoat, a stiff black cravat. Pinned to the man's lapel was a pear-shaped sapphire. Like a minister with a wealthy wife, Elisha thought. The stone was the precise hue of Brush's eyes.

Copyright © 2008 by Karl Iagnemma.