The Headsman’s story was part of that seamy side. He’d never known his father, and his mother Madeleine had been a woman of the town. She’d cared for him as best she could until he was ten, when her latest pimp drove him out. He became what Victorians called a street Arab, a ragged homeless boy who survived by cadging tips, committing petty crimes, and renting his body to whoever wanted it. He was a “hobbledehoy” or teenager when he learned that Madeleine had died and was to be buried in Potter’s Field on the marshy edge of the cypriere, the great cypress swamp. Letourneau brought to the burial two ballast stones he’d taken from the levee, and when the pine box was in the ground he set them on it to prevent it floating to the surface, as the coffins of the poor so often did in rainstorms. The sexton then filled the hole, and Letourneau tipped him a dime, which was all he had. The man bit it, looked at him suspiciously, and walked away without a word, carrying his shovel.
The next few years contained nothing but work and sleep, interrupted by rare bouts of drunkenness in barrel-houses or pleasure in cheap brothels. Not life at all, really. One wet afternoon Letourneau walked to the Third District levee to decide if he wanted to drown himself or not. He brought along a bottle of cheap wine and his cane knife, which he’d used that morning, chopping weeds to earn the price of the wine. He sat down on a wooden bollard in the rain, and spent the next hour drinking and looking at the river and wondering if he had the courage to jump in.
“I never thought of killing anybody but myself,” he insisted, and the man seemed so dim and passive and detached from reality that Schulz almost believed him.
Letourneau had a bellyful of wine when, no more than ten feet away, a head bobbed to the surface of the river. Raindrops dimpled the water all around it, as if little fish were feeding. At first he believed the head must belong to a drunk who’d fallen in and drowned. But then it rose above the surface and looked at him avec les yeux blancs d’une statue, with the white eyes of a statue. The head was perfectly bald, lacking even eyebrows and eyelashes, and its skin was the colour of a bruise.
The drowned man stood up and stretched out a hand for help. Letourneau thought, I’ve never been this drunk before, but still he rose and leaned down and took the hand. It was cold and the fingers and palm were wrinkled and white, as if the man had been in water for a long time. The nails curled like fishhooks. When the fellow was safe ashore, he spent some time rearranging his sodden rags of clothing, which smelled like river mud. Then he began to speak “comme Allemand.”
“Like a German?” demanded Schulz indignantly.
Letourneau answered, “Yes, in his throat, you know? And his voice bubbled up, as if he was still full of water.”
At this point the candle flared and went out. Letourneau kept talking, his words distilling out of the darkness, with the muted sounds of the stormy Gulf as background. The drowned man was a Yankee seaman named Morrow, who’d been serving on Farragut’s flagship Hartford when he was blown overboard during a battle upriver at Port Hudson. Like many sailors he couldn’t swim, and for a few minutes threshed his limbs helplessly, like a crab being boiled. Then the cold river water sluiced into his lungs and turned to fire. He was only twenty, and the last thing he felt was an overwhelming rage that he had to perish with his life unlived.
Perhaps his rage was what saved him from dying completely. Anyway, he awoke far down in the murky river, tumbling seaward with the current while an immense shadowy fish – a giant river cat, maybe – nibbled at his bare feet. He kicked it away, and discovered that he didn’t need to breathe any longer. He was a corpse, and yet could move and even think. Could Letourneau, he asked, possibly understand that?
Letourneau could. “I’ve always been like that,” he said.
“You feel alone, do you?”
“Yes.”
“I can help you find a companion. Come with me. And bring your blade.”
They walked together into the riverside slums, where water gushed from clay pipes and the gutters whirled rubbish away like millraces. Soon they spotted a woman, clearly a “hooker” – a streetwalker in the slang of the time – who’d taken refuge in a doorway while waiting for the rain to pass. She was holding a wad of newspapers she’d been using as an umbrella and she peered short-sightedly into the street. Morrow took the cane knife from Letourneau’s hand and backed against the nearest wall.
“Call her over,” he whispered. “She’s hungry, I can feel it, so she’ll come out, rain or no rain.”
Letourneau did as he was told – Letourneau always did as he was told. The woman stared at him, then lifted the newspapers over her head and stepped into the street. Coming up behind her, Morrow swung the blade with his right hand and with his left caught her head before it hit the ground. He picked up the sodden paper, wrapped the head in it, and gave the bundle to Letourneau, along with the cane knife.
“The soul lives in the brain,” he explained. “When you take the head, you take the soul with you. I’ve done it often. Of course the brain doesn’t last long, and when it decays the soul escapes. But then you can always take another.”
The rain began to slacken, and Morrow said he had to go back to the river, explaining that if he dried out he’d die for good. “I wish I could come ashore oftener. I get lonesome down there with nothing but the mud and the fishes. Then I want somebody I can talk to, if only for a little while. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
Letourneau walked home in a dream. In his room he carefully dried the cane knife and oiled it to prevent rust. Then he unwrapped the woman’s head and put it into a cupboard, because he didn’t know what else to do with it. He hung his sodden clothes outside on the rickety gallery that ran past his room, got into bed, and pulled up the tattered coverlet. He was lying there, shivering, when the head began to sing.
The voice was a little weak, but sweet, like his mother’s when he was a young child. Back in those days, when she brought a customer home she’d take Gabriel out of the bed and lay him on the floor, wrapped in a quilt. After the man had finished and gone away, she’d bring him back into the bed, which still smelled of the stranger, and sing him lullabies until he fell asleep.
Letourneau thought the woman in the cupboard must have a nice soul, because instead of bawdy songs she sang sweet old ballads like “Green Grow the Rushes” and “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.” He went to sleep and slept longer and more peacefully than he had in many years. The next night had been the same, and the next. Then the head fell silent. He ought to have buried it, but couldn’t bear to part with it, and that was why he’d been arrested and wound up in Fort Clay. He’d never seen the drowned man again, and hadn’t told the provost marshal about him, because he knew he wouldn’t be believed.
Then, saying he was feeling tired, he told the soldiers good night. He wished them pleasant dreams.
All of this Schulz wrote down, and had Quant sign the record as witness. For a while they drank together, back in their quarters, listening to the rising wind outside, and arguing about their prisoner. Schulz thought him a dangerous lunatic, but believed that sixteen strong and well-armed men had no reason to fear him. But Quant said the Headsman had caught the eye of a devil who would follow him wherever he went. After the corporal fell asleep, Schulz recorded his comment, adding that his roommate also believed in ghosts, witches, and salamanders, and was, all in all, the strangest preacher he’d ever met.
“In my long life,” Corman went on, after a moment of silence, “I’ve often noticed a peculiar tendency of disasters to follow one another, like sheep trailing the bellwether. Next morning, when Schulz checked the barracks, he found that the rest of the flock had begun to arrive.”
Three soldiers complained of fever. At first Schulz diagnosed malaria, a common affliction at the time, distressing but not usually fatal, and dosed them with quinine. That afternoon, just as the storm was arriving in full force, two more fell sick. Schulz and Quant now abandoned the officers’ quarters and moved in with their men. By nightfall the situation had bec
ome truly grim – the old wooden barracks shaking and shuddering in a gale that may have reached a hundred miles an hour, the five patients either burning with fever or shaking with cold, teeth rattling in their heads like dice.
Schulz was also concerned about his prisoner. The man was his responsibility, and he had to save him if only for the gallows. Fighting the wind at every step, the sergeant struggled back down into Casemate Five, accompanied by Quant carrying a lantern. They found Gabriel Letourneau standing to his knees in water that had seeped through the barriers and gazing at them with the dumb supplication of a caged animal. Schulz ordered him to extend his hands between the bars, manacled them, and only then opened the cell door. Bent double, the three men fought their way back to the barracks through horizontal rain that stung like birdshot. When a gust almost bowled Quant over, Letourneau grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upright again.
Once inside, Schulz added leg irons to the prisoner’s manacles, leaving thirty inches of chain between his ankles so that he could shuffle around. He considered cuffing Letourneau’s hands behind his back, but that would have left him helpless, forcing the soldiers to feed him, give him water, and even help him use the so-called honey bucket. Since they already had plenty to do, between nursing their sick comrades and trying to keep the barracks from coming apart, he left the prisoner’s hands in front, manacled but still usable.
Toward midnight the wind dropped suddenly. The eye of the storm was passing overhead. Schulz ventured outside into an eerie dead calm. He climbed the wall by the light of a serene half-moon at the summit of the sky, and gazed with astonishment at the pale encircling clouds of the eyewall. Later on, Île du Sable received a second punch, the wind now rising from the north-west, but this round was much less violent, and by dawn the hurricane had passed inland, where it soon dispersed in gusts of torrential rain.
But as the weather improved, the patients grew worse. Even to the untrained eye of a Yankee artillery sergeant, their disease clearly was not malaria, for instead of coming and going the fever was continuous, unrelenting.
Hoping for sight of a relief ship, he splashed his way back to the wall. The Parade was ankle deep, and the rising sun shone everywhere on water, nothing but water. The storm tide was running high, and for the time being Île du Sable had disappeared under the Gulf, only the walls of Fort Clay standing free. The floating dock had broken its moorings and become a raft, bucking and rolling its way northward toward a shoreline that no longer existed.
Schulz realised that the garrison was stuck for days, maybe a week or longer, until somebody ashore remembered them and sent a rescue boat with an engine powerful enough to make headway against the sea. Until then, they had to survive on what they had – barrels of drinking water, tin canisters of hardtack, sacks of cornmeal, and slabs of salt beef and bacon sealed in casks. Food would have to be cooked on the parapet, using dry wood torn from the barracks’ inner walls.
By the Wednesday following the storm, eight men were sick of the fever, one already moribund, and the others (including Letourneau) were taken up day and night with the tasks of nursing. The Headsman was both strong and gentle with the sick, holding down delirious patients without hurting them, giving water a spoonful at a time to those who could still drink, and cleaning up their filth without complaint. But if men were merciful, nature was not. The storm tide had ripped open the gun ports, and the casemates had flooded to their roofs. Water spurted up from below and covered the Parade to a depth of three feet – foul water too, for the contents of the latrine floated out. The powder magazine was under water, the officers’ quarters had lost its roof, and the other buildings had simply disappeared.
Water entered the first floor of the barracks, forcing the decreasing number of men who were still well to carry everything – sick comrades, bedding, water barrels, food – to the sweltering second floor, which was already crowded with heaps of supplies and racks of weapons. Even after they knocked open all the shutters, the searing tropical heat exhausted the healthy and hastened the sick toward death. At night, some men waded through the stew of salt water, mud, and excrement to the wall and slept up there between the barbette guns. But that was dangerous too, because so many snakes had found refuge in the same place.
Then, just when life had become all but unbearable, the Gulf began to recede. Île du Sable emerged from its bath smaller than before and with its outline changed, but with its dunes largely intact, secured by the roots of the coarse sea grass. The sky clouded up and a breeze blew from the north that was almost cool. Rain pattered down, the temperature dropped twenty degrees in as many minutes, and sick men and well alike breathed deep and gave thanks to God for sending them relief.
“And it’s just at this point,” said Corman, glancing at his watch, “that the sergeant’s log ends. So there are things we’ll never know for sure. We do know that among the weapons stored on the second floor of the barracks were sixteen broad-swords of the type the army traditionally issued to artillerymen – in case, I suppose, they were attacked by a Roman legion. Each sword had a double-edged blade twenty-six inches long. Nobody had ever been able to find a practical use for them, except to carve meat for the mess. Gabriel Letourneau, however, had a use for one of them – or so it seems.
“When a rescue party at last reached the island, two weeks after the storm, only he remained alive. Eight men were dead of fever, dead and stinking. Sergeant Schulz in the barracks, and three men lying on the barbette had all been beheaded. The heads were never found. The last four members of the garrison must have tried to swim ashore, preferring to drown rather than face whatever was happening in Fort Clay. Three bodies were later found entangled in the nets of fishermen and shrimpers. Though badly bitten by sharks, they still had their heads. Perhaps the last man of the sixteen survived. A strong swimmer, if lucky, could have made it to shore. Nobody knows.”
“That corporal – what was his name—?”
“Quant.”
“Yes. Did they find him?”
“They found a headless body wearing a blouse with corporal’s stripes,” said Corman carefully. “On that basis, he was pronounced dead.”
“And Letourneau?”
“He was sitting quietly on a barbette gun – a twenty-four pounder Dahlgren – chewing a hardtack cracker. He absolutely denied having anything to do with the murders, especially that of the sergeant, whom he described as a very nice man – très gentil, très sympathique. He claimed that a drowned man with blue skin and white eyes had come into the barracks during a rainstorm and killed Schulz, but spared him en souvenir du passé – for old times’ sake. When the man left, carrying the head, Letourneau took the keys to his shackles from Schulz’s body and freed himself. He found the other dead men lying on the wall.
“Understandably, he was not believed. The soldiers took the Headsman back to New Orleans in cuffs and leg irons, kicking and pummelling him the whole way because they were angry over their comrades’ deaths. He endured silently, like a beaten animal, but stuck to his tale so tenaciously that the provost marshal, instead of hanging him, committed him to an asylum. Like most such places at that time, the asylum was a pesthouse, and the Headsman soon died of either typhoid or typhus – even good doctors had trouble with differential diagnosis back then.
“Of course,” Corman added apologetically as the whistle of the engineer boat shrilled in the distance, “that’s an unsatisfactory conclusion. But so often history is unsatisfactory, Ms Genève. Sometimes its wildest adventures end in mid-air.”
Now, on this rainy evening in December, a year and a half after their jaunt to Fort Clay, she inhaled the fragrance of the oolong along with the incense of Dr Corman’s praise. Either he loved her book or he was a very good liar.
“It’s a transfiguration,” he told her, shaking his head. “You’ve turned that old heap of decay into a vision of life and lust and war, and how they all pass away, leaving nothing behind but ruins and sand and silence. But these—” he tapped the pictures “�
��also show what art can do to save something from the wreckage. To make transience immortal.”
Saffron almost purred with pleasure. Showing her work always made her feel like some sort of carnival freak, exhibiting the most private parts of her spirit to strangers. Yet until she did, she never really knew whether her work was any good or not – whether it communicated, or just sat there.
“I’m not sure Schulz would have understood,” mused Corman. “Wonderful man – brave, smart, sensitive. But underneath, very much the stolid, conventional Midwesterner. That made him a good soldier, but for a creature of enthusiasm like Quant, sometimes rather a dull companion.”
“You could tell all that from the logbook?” asked Saffron, smiling. “It must read like War and Peace.”
“I’m afraid I fibbed about that. Schulz’s log is actually quite dry – facts, figures, that sort of thing. I only use the copy I made of it at the Archives to refresh my memory.”
Saffron stared at him, sitting there, tall and skinny, the cup invisible in his big workman’s hands. And old. He was very old.
“Souls are fascinating things,” he went on. “I admit that at first I thought you quite a superficial young woman. Watching you at work, I sensed something more. Now I know I was right the second time. There’s more to you than meets the eye, Ms Genève. There are depths in you I want to explore.”
The rain murmured at the window. A soft knock sounded at the door. Saffron didn’t even hear it. Corporal Quant, she thought, who delivered sermons and believed in devils.
The knocking resumed, so loud now that she jumped. Corman finished his tea, set the cup aside, and turned to look at the door.
“The Headsman,” she gabbled, desperate now to distract him. To distract it, whatever it was. “What about Gabriel Letourneau?”
“He was never anything but the – what’s the cant phrase? The ‘fall guy’. Maybe that’s out of date, too. I find it so hard to keep up with slang, the way it’s always changing. Letourneau was just one of les abaissés du monde, the downtrodden of the earth. Morrow liked him, but then Morrow’s rather a primitive character himself. He tried to kill me.”
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