No Good Deed 31

At closer quarters, Hannibal was no more prepossessing. Oh, it was busy enough; grain and hemp being loaded in no small amount from jetties and wharves. Boats and barges from the north disgorged lumber onto other landing places. The noise was cacophonous in the extreme; there was no music in the shouts and cries, as one might have found in the East India Docks. Foremen exhorted long-shoremen to greater efforts with bale and pulley. Occasionally, a loud crash would advertise the dropping of some cargo - and a louder scream the loss of another livelihood.

I turned my back on the jetty on which I had disembarked and began to make my way toward the clap-board and brick of the town proper. A hand grasped my elbow, I turned rapidly: the derringer shot into my palm but I failed to grasp it. The damned contraption had failed me. A finely dressed figure was bending down in front of me. She handed me the pistol with a smirk,

'Yaws, ah b'lieve. '

'It is indeed mine, one should be careful approaching someone from behind in such a stealthy manner.'

'Indeed, is it? Ah think yore a humbug, mistah,' she seemed about to flounce off, which would have been a pity.

Her eyes narrowed,

'Thet vest yores?'

'Am I not wearing it?'

'Don't fit too good, do it?' She looked me up and down once and then square in the eye.

'Well...?' she said expectantly.

'I do not cut the figure I once did, since returning from England my constitution has been...delicate.'

She stamped her foot.

'That all yuh got to say to me?'

'I should be delighted to engage you in conversation at some more suitable venue...'

A most penetrating screech emerged from this not unattractive young woman,

'Ah'm Winona Shepherd, yuh danged ninny!'

Clearing my throat, I said,

'Ah. And how is my old friend Levi Coffin?'

She grabbed my elbow and dragged me toward the town, muttering something about 'danged fools' and a long tirade which I interpreted as her questioning as to what extent such 'danged fools' should be free to roam on their own cognisance.

The woman finally let go of my arm after two or three blocks. It was all I could do to match her pace. Clearly, she was in need of some relaxation; in my experience a surfeit of vigour in a woman had ever betokened a deficit in the meeting of certain needs. She led me down a street called Center after the peculiar fashion of the Americas. At the 'corner of Center and Eighth' - as she termed it – we stopped in front of a false-fronted clap-board building. A tiny cross stood atop the false front meant to foster the illusion of a second storey. The front itself put one in mind of a triptych, and the three stained glass windows in each of the three lobes did nothing to detract from this. The windows offered no depiction of the suffering of Christ, or any Old Testament fratricide, infanticide or any of the other -cides the ancient Hebrew seemed so fond of. My face must have betrayed a little of the contempt I felt for the humble church. Miss Shepherd, in an accent considerably less flavoured with the corn so beloved of the South, said,

'We'll have a brick built church one day. Good things are done here, Mr Northrup. And good deeds.'

I replied something to the effect that I didn't doubt it, and worried inordinately that it might be true.