Of Grave Concern Read Online Free PDF Page A

might give some small comfort.
    My mother was one of the ladies, and she dragged me with her to the Exchange. I had come to dread anything my mother thought was good for me, especially the Sunday-morning command performances at the Wolf River Baptist Church. I hated the suffocating Sunday clothes, I hated the sermons that preached slavery was ordained by God, and eventually I convinced myself that I hated my mother.
    At the Exchange, we passed as quietly as in church among the rows of the men wrapped in cotton gauze soaked in linseed oil. Their breathing was tortured, their fingers and toes curled in pain, every one was cloaked in wicked odors. Many of the victims were deep in the embrace of morphine, silently wrapped in private dreams. Others were shrieking, and some begged for someone, anyone, to put an end to their suffering.
    I was not yet eleven years old.
    Each of the thirty-two men in the hall was a tragedy of unimaginable heartbreak, but there was one I remember with particular vividness. He was a nineteen-year-old mud clerk on the Pennsylvania. As I walked by his bed, a bandaged hand reached out and grasped my arm. He said nothing, but a single bloodshot blue eye blazed from a nest of gauze over his face.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    â€œAnnie!”
    My mother tried to pull me away, but I resisted.
    â€œNo, my name’s Ophelia.”
    â€œOh, my poor Annie! Don’t you recognize me?”
    Stoked by unknown fires, the eye flared.
    My mother knelt, trying gently at first to remove the young man’s hand from my arm, and then with more force.
    â€œPlease,” she said.
    â€œTell me, where is Sam?” the boy asked. “Is he on board?”
    â€œI am here,” answered a slender man only a few years older than the stricken mud clerk. He wore dark clothes that were well-made but disheveled. Some kind of nautical hat, with a short brim, rested atop a crown of dark curls. A pencil and a brace of cigars were tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket. He drew up a chair and sat where the young man could see his face.
    â€œI only stepped out a moment, my dear Henry,” the man said.
    The man’s voice carried the unvarnished rasp of the frontier side of upriver. It was shot with sadness and—at least I like to think now—carried the promise of wisdom. He was a cub pilot, on his way to earning his license. He had been responsible for securing Henry his position as mud clerk, a sort of unpaid apprenticeship.
    â€œI shan’t do it again, little brother, I vow.”
    The blue eye closed in relief. The hand clutching my arm relaxed and the fingers slipped away. At the moment of release, I felt something electric jump from the young man to me, a kind of blue spark that did not burn.
    â€œThank you for staying with Henry until I returned,” the man told me and my mother in a soft voice. “I have sat here for the last forty-eight hours, and there are some things that are beyond the will of man to control. Many things, to my eternal regret.”
    â€œHe called me ‘Annie.’”
    The man smiled.
    â€œOur niece, our pet, the daughter of our sister, Pamela. She is about your age.”
    â€œHe shocked me.”
    â€œI’m sorry, angel. His condition shocks me as well,” the man said, tears flowing. “I have humbled myself to the ground and prayed, as never man prayed before, that the great God would strike me to the earth, but spare my brother. If only He would pour out the fullness of His wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy upon this sinless youth.”
    My mother put a hand on the man’s shoulder.
    â€œGod’s plan is not for us to know.”
    â€œYou do not understand,” the man said. “I will tell you. I left St. Louis on the Pennsylvania, but Mister Brown, the pilot who was killed by the explosion, had quarreled with Henry without cause. He struck him in the face! I was wild from that moment and left the boat to