Together, they stand and stare at the smoldering ruins. The northernmost wall of the theater remains standing, but the rest of the building’s brick facade has been reduced to rubble. Some of the joists are charred, but not gone.
“Looks like they finally got all those little fires put out,” says Joe, and Sally just nods. Earlier this morning, when she had walked past the green on her way to Archie and Margaret’s place, small fires—none of them much bigger than a cook fire—had dotted the site. People were desperate to begin combing the wreckage for clues to their loved ones’ whereabouts, but all they could do was wait impatiently for the flames to extinguish themselves.
Now those same people carry rakes, spades, and shovels—anything that will allow them to sift through the hot ash. A man points to a wheelbarrow and shouts at the folks who have gathered around him, “Valuables go in here. Glasses, chains, keys, anything we might be able to give to the family. No souvenirs.”
Another man interrupts him. “If you think the item will help us identify someone’s remains, leave it where it is until one of us can come check.”
“Where do the remains go?” asks someone in the crowd.
“We’re spreading sheets on the grass,” says a third man, who looks like the type who is used to being put in charge of things. “Put them on the sheets.”
A boy of maybe fifteen or sixteen years, in a pair of britches that aremuch too small for him, raises his hand. “How are we supposed to know if they’re remains?”
The man with the wheelbarrow spits a stream of tobacco juice out of the side of his mouth. “Sometimes the skull’s intact.”
Sally shudders at how close she came to becoming a shovelful of ash on a white sheet, identifiable only by the wedding ring she wears on a thin gold chain around her neck. Robert engraved her ring, not with her initials or his but with the lineMy friend, my goddess, and my guide, which he’d borrowed from the Lady Montagu poem “A Hymn to the Moon.” She tries to remember whether she ever told anyone that, but she can’t be sure, all these years later, that she did. How horrible if her sad little pile of ash went unclaimed, all because no one knew about the inscription.
She turns to Joe. “I can’t watch this.”
They start to move in the direction of Mrs. Cowley’s, but they don’t get far before they hear a great outcry behind them. A man, who has tied bricks to the bottom of his shoes, is standing amid the ruins, near the foot of the stairs—or what was once the stairs. He is shouting about something, but Sally can’t tell what. The crowd begins to murmur, and Sally turns to a woman, who looks as exhausted as she feels, and asks, “What is he going on about?”
“He thinks he’s found the governor.”
The tumult of the theater comes back to Sally in flashes. Margaret waving the tickets in front of her, Mr. Scott looking at his watch, Governor George Smith ruffling the hair of his young son.
“How’s he supposed to know he’s looking at the governor?” Joe asks, and without even realizing she’s done it, Sally raises her hand to her neck. The stock buckle Governor Smith wore to the performance was so big, she was able to see it from the other side of the theater. She watches the man with the bricks tied to his shoes remove a handkerchief from his pocket and stoop to pick something up, and the next thing she knows, he is holding a mound of silver up above his head, where it glints in the sun.
“Is this not his?” the man shouts, but all of the onlookers are too stunned to say anything.
Sally looks for the woman, touches her sleeve. “He had a little boy with him last night.”
“Aye,” she says, as if she’d like to be done with the whole sad business. “The boy got out fine. His father just didn’t know it.”
GILBERT
Once Kemp is gone, thesmithy clears out fast. The men make one excuse or another to put down their tools and go upstairs to bed, and after Ned slips out the back door, it’s just Marcus and Gilbert left alone in the shop.
Gilbert can’t go anywhere until he chokes the fire in his forge, so he shovels the green coal to the far edges of the firebox, then uses a rake to break up the coke at the center. He keeps turning it over until the flames subside. What remains glows a dull red.
Marcus stays behind, pretending to organize the punches and chisels while he waits for Gilbert to finish up. He holds up the stamp with Cameron Kemp’s touchmark. “You want that over here or in the drawer with the others?”
“How about you put that one at the bottom of a deep well?”
Marcus laughs through his nose. “That’s about right.”
Gilbert continues to rake the fire, then gets around to saying what they’re both thinking. “A slave revolt, huh?”
“You don’t believe it, do you?”
“The gallery was packed,” Gilbert says. “What kind of Negro is going to light up a building with fifty or sixty colored folks inside?”
“Don’t make a lick of sense.”
“Nope.”
“What I was hearing last night,” says Marcus, “is that the fire started backstage.”
Gilbert shakes his head. “Who’d you hear that from?”
