Coffins Read Free

a notion the dwarf clearly relished. “You’ll try to hide behind the cannon mounts,” he told one pale-faced youth, “shitting your drawers in terror. But when the shell strikes it blows the rampart to hell, and you with it, a splinter of oak through your shriveled heart.”
    At that moment the prostrate gang leader revived enough to grab the dwarf’s cane, catching him by surprise. The bloody-mouthed youth was attempting to force the smaller man to the ground and beat him with his own cane when I finally intervened.
    Normally a gang of street boys wouldn’t turn tail and run at the sight of a single adversary, even a full-grown specimen as sturdily built as myself. But they’d been shaken by the visions of destruction visited upon them by the dwarf—who, for all they knew, really did have the powers of prophesy—and so they fled, dragging their leader with them, and left me to hand the little man his tall silk hat. A very expensive item, with the label of an exclusive Boston haberdashery, and it was, I noted, somewhat larger in size than my own.
    â€œThank you, sir,” he said, rather gruffly.
    â€œNot at all,” I responded. “You had them well in hand. Or maybe I should say ‘well in mind,’ for you got inside their thick skulls and gave ’em the fright they so richly deserved.”
    â€œYou think so?” he said, studying me, unsure of my intentions.
    â€œDavis Bentwood,” I said, offering my hand. “I’d be most pleased if you’d join me for a brandy. You’ll notice my hand trembling, even if yours is not.”
    Looking up at me were a pair of eyes as bright and filled with light as a wave about to crest in a clear blue sea. Truth-seeking eyes, and they found enough truth in my good intentions to agree that yes, a brandy might be just the thing.
    And so we repaired to my rooms, uncorked a bottle, and raised our glasses eagerly, for by then we both knew, without having to speak of it, that we were well on our way to becoming friends. “I have only one request,” I said before drinking. “Don’t, please, say how or when I will die.”
    Jeb’s face—remarkably well formed, if out of proportion to his body—creased with a smile that made me feel the sun was out, and heaven had come upon the earth.
    â€œThere’s nothing whatever to say upon the subject,” he said. “Because you’re going to live forever.”
    That was but the first of many lies that would be told by my dear friend Jebediah Coffin. Who drew me into a horror he could not comprehend, though in some ways he was the unwitting cause of it. For no man is truly innocent, that much I have learned, even if he lives on the side of angels.

2. Collectors of the Heavenly Spark
    Had I all the time in the world, now would begin a lengthy recollection of how my friendship with Jebediah Coffin shaped itself over the years. How, exactly, our contrasting natures formed a bond, as if two opposite elements, once combined, made an unbreakable mortar, binding flint to granite. Jeb being the flint, of course, and myself the boring, unsparkable granite.
    But as to time—there is none. My hand races ahead of the bullet that will soon make an end of me, and so I must trust the reader to imagine that such a friendship does indeed exist. That is, between a stolid, scientifically trained, philosophically inclined dilettante (myself), a contemplator of Science and Nature and Self (and his own navel, as Jeb would say), and a curiously crippled, intensely focused man of action, who thought little enough about himself, and nothing whatever about the nature of Thought.
    In any event, three years later, on the last day of February 1861, I placed myself upon a train leaving Boston for Portland, Maine, having been summoned by an urgent telegram.
    TWO COFFINS BURIED THIS DAY. THE CAPTAIN INSENSIBLE WITH GRIEF. YOU ARE NEEDED, PLEASE COME AT