Dead Letters: The Guide

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

I found the name before I found the boy.

It was the summer of 1839, the week of the Fourth, and I was in Liverpool stringing waterfront news for a paper in New York that wanted arrivals, cargoes, and the occasional face worth a paragraph. I read the crew articles the way other men read the racing sheets. On the list of the St. Lawrence, down past the able seamen, among the boys and the ordinary hands, someone had signed himself Melville.

The name stopped me. Allan Melvill had imported French dry goods into New York when I was young, a man with a house full of servants and a pew worth having, and then the business failed and the man died, and the two came so near together people spoke of them as one thing. I had heard he ended badly. To find his son on a ship's articles as a common sailor was either a story a paper would run or a name that might still open a door in the right New York parlor. Either was worth the rain.

I found him at a boarding house near the Prince's Dock. Nineteen, narrow through the shoulders, in a shooting jacket that had been cut for a gentleman and was three months from the rag-picker. He had a book on the table in front of him and his thumb inside it, holding a place.

The book was a guide to Liverpool. An old one, older than the boy, its boards soft with handling. On the flyleaf a man's hand had written a name in ink gone the color of tea. Allan Melvill. No final letter. The boy had put the letter onto himself somewhere between his father's death and the ship's articles, and his father had gone into the ground without it. Inside, through the folding map, someone had drawn a line in the same brown ink, street to street, with small dates beside the turns. A dead man's route through a city, marked in the dead man's hand, and the boy meant to walk it.

I told him I knew Liverpool and would take him to his father's places for the company. He held the offer a moment, longer than I expected, then closed the book on his thumb and stood.

We went out into it. The rain in that city does not fall so much as stand in the air and wait for you to walk through it. Down at the pierhead a packet was dressed for the Fourth, a little bunting gone limp on her rigging, and a man on her deck was working through a bottle and calling the date out to no one, to the water, to us as we passed. The boy did not turn his head. He was reading the map.

The first mark was a coffee house his father had noted with a date eleven years gone. We came to the corner and there was a chandler's warehouse, new brick, a crane bolted to its face, men rolling casks across the ground where the door should have been. The boy checked the book against the street and checked it again. I knew it would not match before he opened it. I had walked here a year and the book named streets the docks had already taken. I said none of that. As long as he looked for it, he would keep me.

The second was a lodging house in a court off Chapel Street. We found the court. A board had been nailed across the entry, and below it a man was breaking the last of the door frame loose with a bar, stacking the wood on a barrow. The boy asked him after the house by its name from the book. The man did not stop working. He said the name meant nothing to him, that they had been at this row since Lady Day, and that if the boy wanted the people who had lived here he should ask the ground, because that was where the house was now. He went back to the frame. The boy stood with the book open in the wet until I put my hand on his sleeve and moved him on.

The last mark took us to the river, to a promenade the guide praised for its prospect of the water. There was a wall there now, wet granite, the flank of a new dock, higher than a house and running past where either of us could see. The boy stood at the base of it with the book open in his hands and the rain coming down on the pages and looked up the face of the stone to where the top of it went into the gray.

He said his father had come across many times. He said it once, low, as if it would not bear saying twice. Then something about being no traveler himself, only a pair of hands hired to move another man's cargo over the water, the words coming apart before he finished them.

A man who died as Allan Melvill died left his son a soft book and nothing a New York parlor would answer for. No letter worth carrying home. No paragraph a paper would buy about a bankrupt's boy at a dock wall in the rain. I had walked him the whole way to the foot of that stone and let him keep the book open in front of him the entire time, so I would not lose him before I had it out of him that he was no use to me.

He closed the guide. He did not put it into the water, which is what I waited for, which would have ended it. He dried the boards against his sleeve and opened it again to the next mark on his father's line and read the street aloud and set off to find it.

I went after him. I told myself it was to see him back to his ship. There was nothing at the next turning and he knew it before we reached it and walked it out to the end anyway, and I kept a pace behind him the whole length of the street, my notebook dry and shut in my coat, not stopping him, not leaving, wanting the thing to still be worth something as badly as he did.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.