The Sound of Building Coffins Read Free Page B

morning edition of The Daily Picayune. Penned by the Mayor of New Orleans himself, the letter was, in essence, a thinly veiled call to arms against the soon-to-be-freed defendants.
    Within hours of the paper’s arrival at newsstands, an initial crowd of five thousand assembled at Clay Statue, where a host of dignified speakers eloquently whipped mild hearts into murderous lather. By noon the mob had made its way to the prison at Congo Square, its eventual number surpassing twenty thousand.
    At Congo Square, a group of seven professional bounty hunters (employed, it was rumored, by the cronies of Mayor Shakespeare himself) enlisted an unfortunate prison guard by the name of Beauregard Church to act as their guide, at gunpoint, through the lightless jail. The vigilantes soon selected eleven victims; eight shot down on prison grounds and three dragged into the square to be hanged for the amusement of the mob. One of the hanged men, Antonio Carolla, appeared already dead—perhaps from fright—when the men placed the noose around his neck.
    In effect, eleven men—whose guilt or innocence was never established—were tried, convicted, and executed by the local press and the Mayor of New Orleans.
     
    *
    Marshall Trumbo, a good man in his heart and by his nature, found himself deeply burdened by his own role in the slaughter of the Sicilians. A reporter for the New Orleans Item , Trumbo knew that to stir racial tensions in the sweltering city would be a reckless act—still, he had forged ahead with the rest and now lived with his guilty heart. But on the day after the massacre, Trumbo believed he’d found potential hope for redemption in the form of a sick child.
    The one-year-old son of the twice-murdered Antonio Carolla had contracted a mysterious illness on the afternoon of his father’s death. Hoping to lighten his conscience by somehow aiding the Carolla family in their darkest hour (and perhaps simultaneously satisfying his employer’s thirst for saleable melodrama), Trumbo took to the home of the boy and his mother with pen and paper in hand.
    Trumbo’s gallant mood sank sharply upon his arrival. The boy was tiny and thin and the color gone from him, his eyes closed tight, an unnerving grin stretching his lips nigh ear to ear. It was explained to Trumbo by the doctor in attendance—who applied leeches to the child’s torso with appalling calm—that the grin was merely a contortion brought on by recent fits of convulsion.
    Due to the child’s apparently dire condition, several men of the cloth had been called to the home since the day before—all staying briefly and leaving abruptly. The man of God currently in residence was one Trumbo knew from a prior assignment, a Baptist minister called Noonday Morningstar.
    As Father Morningstar droned out a verse from his open Bible, the boy’s eyes shot open with fear or rage or a mixture of the two. Trumbo thought he heard the child whisper something angrily at Morningstar. In apparent response, the preacher shut his Bible, crossed himself, then exited quickly, mumbling something about a forgotten prior commitment. While the doctor fiddled diligently on with his collection of leeches, Trumbo followed after Morningstar—supposing the preacher had made some private spiritual diagnosis.
    Moving up quietly from behind, Trumbo placed a hand on Morningstar’s shoulder; the unexpected touch causing the taller man to spin around with a gasp. Trumbo apologized for spooking him, then got right to the point.
    “ Pardon me, Father, but please tell me what you saw in that house that has alarmed you so.” Morningstar at once pulled back, then took a breath and seemed to relax. Before speaking, he looked around to see if anyone else was close enough to hear.
    “ You a newspaper man, sir?” His voice was low and gentle.
    “ Yes, Father Morningstar. Trumbo’s my name—I have interviewed you in the past if you will recall, regarding the sharp increase in cholera deaths last year.