Doctor Jack’s eyebrows lifted in amusement.
Trumbo: “Excuse me, sir?”
Jack smiled, shaking his head.
Marcus repeated, but this time louder, “I said:
“Crazy old fool,” said Charley the Barber. “Have another drink for free and knock yer own dumb ass out.”
Marcus bristled at Charley, wrinkling his nose-scar clear up to double-ugly. “Shut yer dumb ol’ face, you poison-peddlin’, bad-hair-cuttin’ good-fer-nothin’…”
Trumbo was getting uncomfortable. “I think it’s time for me to go, gentleman. Thank you for-”
Doctor Jack: “Hold on, Mr. Trumbo.”
“Yes?”
“Why don’t you ask him? Can’t hurt. Marcus ain’t pretty but he’s harmless enough.”
Marcus instantly shifted his verbal assault from Charley to Jack, “
The room erupted into laughter, even Trumbo managing a smile. Beauregard laughed enough to re-awaken the pain in his head, wincing through a grin.
“Settle down, old soldier, I was only funnin’ you,” said Jack, patting Marcus on the shoulder. Marcus stopped his deluge of insults long enough to consider the favorable reaction of the card players. After a few seconds, he turned to Trumbo, pointed at the sheet:
“Civil War code, that.”
Laughter faded from the room.
A beat. Two beats. Trumbo: “I don’t understand.”
“On yer sheet of paper. It’s Civil War code. I wouldn’t have caught it myself, ’ceptin’ the key is written there at the bottom. The numbers is the key, see. Dass right, mm hmm. Key right there in plain sight. Usually the key is committed ta mem’ry, never writ down. Makes the code tougher to break that way. But someone done give away the code by spellin’ out the key. Means someone don’t want the code to be too good a secret. Civil War stuff. It’s how they delivered messages in the old times. In case the messenger was kilt or captured along the way. Old-timey stuff.”
“You can read…?-I mean, how do you…”
“Don’t be so shocked, mister,” Beauregard said in a perturbed tone. “Lots of us dumb niggras can read just fine. And Marcus may be ugly, but he’s sharp as a whip. Old war hero, too.”
“Why thankee, Beau-” said Marcus before the word “ugly” registered-“You no-good, fat- assed, pecker-lickin’, jail-housin’…”
Another round of laughter.
“What I mean to say is,” Trumbo continued, “I wasn’t aware that men of color were privy to Confederate ciphers during wartime.”
“Don’t feel bad, young fella,” Marcus smiled, displaying the absence of two formerly prominent front teeth, “lots of white folk-and black folk, too-have a hard time believin’ there were plenny of proud black Confederates in the South back in them days. I was as free then as I am now, sonny. And happy with my life the way it was-like lots of free black folk was. Didn’t cotton much to that double talkin’ ’mancipation proclamation. Ol’ Abe hadda mind to ship ever’ last one of us back ta Africa-a place I ain’t never been and never cared ta go. Worst yet, when Abe couldn’t get that idear ta fly, he was talkin’ bout sendin’ us all to
Trumbo shoved the conversation hard towards its original path:
“Are you saying you can decipher this, sir?”
The gravedigger looked up at him. “Why, shorely I can. Yes indeed. Hand it over ta here.” He snatched the paper from Trumbo’s hand and flattened it out carefully on the table. “Spare a clean sheeta paper and pencil if you please, sir.” Trumbo pulled a blank page from the notebook in his satchel, found a pencil. Beauregard got up from the table, offering Marcus his chair-Marcus huffed at the big man, but accepted the courtesy.
“Well. Now. Let’s have a look at this thing. Hmm. All righty now.” The group of men and the young girl gathered close around the old gravedigger. Wide-eyed and curious, like kids at a circus.
Marcus stared at the nonsense words on Trumbo’s original sheet.
“Yes, indeedy,” he began. “See, you gotta put the letters in a square. The key-these numbers down ta here at the bottom-tell you how to make that square. Easy as puddin’ and pie. Like so.”
He drew what looked like a too-tall tic-tac-toe board within a rectangular border:
“See that? Says four by five by four. Means four times five-which comes to twenty-but four times. You kin tell yer on the right track cause the first four lines have twenty letters a piece in ’em if ya count ’em up right. Go ahead and count ’em. Tell me if I’m wrong, sonny.”
Trumbo did the simple math in his head. Sure enough, the old man was onto something.
“And the second line of the key-four by four-but one time. Thass right, too,” Marcus went on. “See? One row of sixteen letters right there at the bottom.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Beauregard. “You crazy, sly old devil…”
Trumbo stared at the nonsense words in wonder, counting letters: “Yes, I can see-but how do you decipher…?”
“I’m getting’ to that, sonny.” Marcus, slightly irritated, shot Beauregard a stern glance. “Watch and learn.” Trumbo shut up. Beauregard tried in vain to conceal his amusement. Doctor Jack’s expression lacked any trace of amusement at all.
Marcus methodically filled the boxes with letters in the same order as they appeared on the original sheet. “Trick is, you write ’em top to bottom, but read ’em left to right. See? And each individual line gets its own four-by-five box. Folla?”
The first line of letters filled its grid like so:
Marcus’s eyes swung up to meet Trumbo’s:
“Sir, I gotta ask again to be sure. A little baby wrote these letters?”
Trumbo said nothing. Only stared at the sheet in wonder. Nodded.
Marcus: “Lord, Lord.”
The old gravedigger wrote the letters out in their new order beneath the rectangle:
UNEQUALLEDFORPURITYD
“Says, ‘Unequalled for purity’. The ‘D’ at the end prob’ly first letter of the first word in the
