“Of course not, Sammy,” LeBoeuf laughed, a little shrilly. “We are not savages. Not yet, anyway, ha ha…!”
After breakfast, Uncle and I retired to the quay outside the stockade, whilst LeBoeuf changed into his hunting garb. How good it felt to be back aboard our old vessel again, and how I wished we might simply sail away, just Uncle and I back upon our mission. But for a handful of days out of the hundred-odd since we’d left Pittsburgh, almost all had been spent either in the captivity or company of others—Bilbo, the Shannoah, Judge Ravenel, and now LeBoeuf—and it was beginning to dawn on me that what I took to be the normal state of affairs was, in fact, the exceptional, and vice versa.
To be on the safe side, I searched the cabin to make sure no spies were lurking and was rather surprised to find all of our supplies in order. Not so much as a bottle of Judge Ravenel’s Madeira had been filched. If this was reassuring, it also seemed—like everything else about Chateau Félicité—to be highly unnatural. LeBoeuf’s control over his realm and subjects was total, almost godlike. I returned to the deck where Uncle waited impatiently.
“Well, nephew?”
I took out the miniature portrait and handed it to him.
“Do you know who this is?” I said.
Uncle squinted and made a face. “Some gentleman of thy acquaintance?” he ventured with a fillip of sarcasm.
“’Tis the late King of France.”
Uncle examined it again, more closely this time.
“Piffle. It might be anyone. I see no inscription.”
“The robe, Uncle. It is emblazoned with the Bourbon signet, the fleurs-de-lis.”
“All right. What of it.”
“Do you see any resemblance to a person on board this floating palace?”
Uncle squinted at the portrait again.
“Art proposing, Sammy, that LeBoeuf is the King of France escaped somehow to America?”
“No! Look again.”
Bristling with irritation, Uncle applied himself once more without results.
“It is the very spit and image of Lou-Lou,” I finally said. “Observe the weak chin, the hooded eyes, the pointed head.”
“These are common traits of the French race, nephew. Why Lafayette himself had an head like a very acorn.”
“Does LeBoeuf have a pointed head?” I dared to refute him. “I think not. Does Madame? No. But Uncle, I implore you, look. The resemblance is unmistakable!”
He handed it back to me.
“Where did thee get this?”
“What does it matter? I discovered it. That is enough.”
“Thee pilfered it.”
“Very well. I pilfered it. That does not alter the case one whit, sir.”
“It alters the case very much, nephew. We are guests here. And thee hath the impudence to fob off with valuable objects of art! I am scandalized.”
“Uncle,” I replied at once, “you are overlooking the point in question: what if Lou-Lou is really Louis-Charles, the lost Dauphin of France?”
“What if he is?” Uncle retorted.
“Oughtn’t we to rescue him?”
“Rescue him? From what? If this boy is the Dauphin—and I do not for a moment believe it—then I doubt he could be in better hands, nor in a safer place. His parents are dead. Half his own countrymen would wish him dead.”
“But you saw the way LeBoeuf abused him last night.”
“Abuse? I think thee exaggerates. The French are excitable. And thee must admit, the boy behaved like a donkey. Is he not otherwise well cared for, well housed, well fed? I think so. Frankly, nephew, ’twould be impolite to meddle in his domestic arrangements.”
“And what if he is the Dauphin?”
“Then ’tis none of our business, but a matter of French politics.”
“On American soil—”
“And I’m sure he is here on good account, if he is what thee claims, which I wholeheartedly doubt, and let that be an end to it.”
“Very well,” said I, resolved to drop the matter for the time being. “But what about something that is our business, namely, megatherium?”
“What about it?”
“Yesterday, upon the hunting barge, I asked Yago if he had killed many of these beasts and he said he had. Seeking to draw him out, I asked what use his people made of the antlers, and he said they made tools from them.”
“So…?”
“Don’t you see, Uncle? Megatherium has no antlers. Yago lied. He has never seen one.”
“Hast seen one thyself? Perhaps it does have antlers.”
“None were found with the bones, Uncle.”
“Perhaps that specimen of the President’s was of a female.”
“All right! All right!” I cried in exasperation. “It so happens that I asked Madame LeBoeuf if she had seen Gargantua in her riding forays on the mainland. Do you know what she said?”
“Enlighten me.”
“She said she had never heard of such a thing.”
“Perhaps she has no interest in science.”
“Science! She and her husband have dwelt in this part of the world for ten years. Surely in all that time something so large and unusual would have caught her attention.”
Uncle shrugged his shoulders. Evidently the French mannerism was contagious.
“In conclusion, Uncle, I do not think that our quarry is to be found here.”
“Ah!” Uncle interjected, his forefinger held aloft, “Thee saw the pelt with thine own eyes.”
“That pelt was a fraud,” I riposted. “Did you look at it closely?”
“I looked at it,” he said.
“Well, I say it was a counterfeit through and through—an assemblage of dyed buffalo robes. The stitching was in plain sight. Your friend Monsieur LeBoeuf is trying to cozen us.”
“Why? To what end? What have we that he might envy?”
“I don’t know. But I will tell you something else: our first night here I saw Yago leave Madame LeBoeuf’s boudoir.”
“Perhaps he was on some legitimate errand.”
“At half past two in the morning?”
“Obviously, this fellow Yago enjoys the couple’s closest confidence.”
“Enjoys it too much, I’d say.”
“Sammy, they are French, without our scruples in connubial matters. ’Tis none of our business.”
“’Tis my business when a gun is charged so as to blow up in my face. I feel that I am in danger here. I suggest we leave.”
Uncle heaved a sigh and gazed up at the formidable timber stockade that surrounded the chateau.
“We will leave when the Puya sets its seed. No later, and no sooner.”
“But—”
“Tut tut tut, nephew. Now I will tell thee what I think: I confess the pelt did not impress me as authentic. Why did he contrive it? For no more dark and sinister purpose but that he is lonely for intellectual companionship and wished us to tarry here as long as possible. Is that so terrible? I think not. Ah look, here comes Fernand now.”
Indeed, I turned to see LeBoeuf, Yago, and a retinue of Choctaws marching through the stockade gate and out onto the wharf.
“There you are, mes amis,” he called cheerfully. “Are you ready for sport?”
“I think I will fetch my own rifle,” said I, heading below.
The day, which had started fair and warm, grew progressively gloomier as our barge plied upstream. A cool, dank breeze descended out of the north along with a cloud cover that obscured the sun like a leaden curtain. The temperature plunged and I was chilly even in my waistcoat.
As the previous day, we sat in luxurious armchairs upon the platform: LeBoeuf and Uncle in front, myself and Yago behind, whilst a savage trumpeted from the prow.
“’Tis a most novel hunting method,” Uncle commented when we had been under way a while.
“We find that it works superbly,” LeBoeuf said. “The brutes are really remarkably stupid. I tell you what: if by some stroke of ill fortune we do not turn up Gargantu
a, I shall have Lou-Lou stuffed and you may bring him back to Monsieur Jefferson instead, ha ha.”
LeBoeuf’s joke fell decidedly flat, though Uncle feigned a laugh. I did not so much as crack a smile, and I think our host regretted the insensitive gaffe. He hastily changed the subject to botanicals, pointing to a Magnolia grandiflora on the riverbank.
A mile or so past the limit of the cultivated fields, we came upon another herd of bison. LeBoeuf offered Uncle the first shot, and he rose to the occasion, dropping a bull with one ball through the heart. The other bison thundered off toward the distant woods, and LeBoeuf insisted we let them go.
“I kill only enough for the table,” he declared humanely. “These barbarians who decimate the herds just to watch the beasts die—they turn my stomach. I tell you, if we are not careful, it is possible that we may exterminate this valuable species down to the last individual. Quelle catastrophe!”
Uncle turned back to me, his face aglow, to indicate how LeBoeuf’s sentiments warranted admiration.
“A noble proposition, sir,” Uncle lauded him. “Why, before the war, Owl’s Crossing was infested with game. Now one must ride halfway to Bryn Mawr to shoot a common deer. How right thou art, Fernand. We Americans have been reckless with our God-given bounty.”
Uncle’s infatuation was apparently still in full force.
By midafternoon, we had encountered no giant sloths, despite the exertions of our trumpeter.
“What bad luck we are having,” LeBoeuf said after a long, speechless interval.
We plied upstream another hour, to no avail. Uncle and LeBoeuf chattered endlessly about botanicals. I put down my rifle and began sketching on a tablet. For subject matter I chose none other than the stern-visaged Indian in the armchair beside me, and I quite enjoyed the discomfort that Yago evinced at having his portrait taken. I bent no effort at flattery—in fact, just the opposite—and took the liberty of rendering his gaze slightly cross-eyed and turning up the corners of his lips as if he were smiling idiotically in the manner of Lou-Lou.
“Here,” I said, finishing it up, tearing the sheet from the tablet and presenting it to him. “You may keep it. Hang it on the wall of your wigwam, or somesuch.”
“Merci,” he replied with a reptilian smile, and put it under his chair without a second glance.
Eventually, heaving a sigh and lamenting, “C’est la vie,” LeBoeuf called off the day’s hunt and we reversed course.
“You would like to see where the slaves live, no, Sammy?” he asked.
“Indeed, I would,” said I.
“Bon. Then we shall stop on our way back and visit these simple creatures in their habitat.”
Storm clouds boiled over the treetops in the distance. Soon we reached the boundary of LeBoeuf’s hemp fields and he commanded the oarsmen to make for shore, where a small dock had been built against the bank. We followed a little path between a hemp field and a hedgerow. It led to a patch of woods. Yago shouted a command in Choctaw. Up ahead, music struck up.
We entered an airy grove of shortstraw pine (Pinus echinata), within which stood two cabins. Upon one of the porches, three slaves played a fiddle, a banjo, and a flute made out of a hollow gourd. The tune was quick, but in a minor, mournful key. Several black children sat on the porch steps enjoying pink and green slabs of watermelon. A pig was a’roasting over a bed of coals between the two cabins, and a slave woman turned the spit. Upon the porch of the second cabin stood four other slave couples, men and their wives, I supposed, young, healthy, well fed, and strikingly handsome, taken as an aggregate. I recalled Judge Ravenel’s slaves, and it seemed to me that they had come in more shapes and sizes, short ones, fat ones, lean ones, old ones, while these were all in the prime of life, the men muscular and their women shapely. For dress they wore simple cotton trousers and shirts; the women plain cotton shifts. All were remarkably clean, considering their hard duties. But it was the expression they wore on their faces that made the deepest impression: a look of spellbound emptiness, as though they had been deprived of their very souls.
“Here we are, mes amis,” LeBoeuf trilled, in discordant counterpoint to the strange music.
“’Tis most satisfactory,” Uncle declared.
An Indian passed amongst the slaves with a wooden bucket and a gourd ladle, proffering some dark beverage. They eagerly took the gourd and quaffed the liquid by turns.
“What are they drinking?” I asked.
“A sort of ale we brew for them.”
“Made of what, monsieur?”
“Of the hemp leaves. It has—how you say?—a mildly euphoric effect.”
“Really? Might I try some?”
“I don’t’ think you would enjoy it, Sammy,” LeBoeuf said.
“Perhaps. But I’d like to try it all the same.”
“Guzzle, guzzle,” Uncle quipped. “The lad is turning into a regular sot.”
LeBoeuf told Yago to summon the bucketeer. The Indian brought the liquor to us. He looked confused. Yago commanded him again in the savage tongue, and he scooped up a ladle of the brownish liquid. I took it from him and drained the gourd. The brew tasted like extremely strong tea, very acrid, though the bitterness was masked by a heavy lacing of molasses.
“Ah, how refreshing!” I remarked. “I’d like another.”
“I don’t think so, Sammy—”
“Monsieur, I thirst unto a dither. Please.”
LeBoeuf shrugged his shoulders. Yago told the underling to dip another gourdful. He did so, but proffered it reluctantly. I took it and quaffed the contents in four swallows.
“Thank you,” I told the footling. He withdrew back to his duties. LeBoeuf coughed into his sleeve.
“Why don’t we look inside a typical dwelling?” he suggested.
We followed him to the cabin where the musicians were playing and climbed the steps. Here, I realized with a pang of recognition, were the same musicians who had awakened us the past two mornings in our apartment aboard the floating palace; only now they were attired in rustic garb instead of the house livery. If Uncle recognized them, he did not say so. LeBoeuf opened the door and we stepped inside.
It was as neat as a parsonage. In one corner was a wooden bed, furnished with bedclothes of a quality not often enjoyed by common slaves, at least not the slaves I had been acquainted with. Upon the wall hung a straw hat. At the opposite end of the one-room dwelling stood a hearth, equipped with all manner of utensils and conveniences. Either the inhabitants of this cabin were fastidious unto absurdity, or there had never been a stick of wood fired in this particular hearth. It was as clean as a gun barrel—not so much as a fragment of charcoal or a single ash sullied the brick within. I began to feel a warm sensation in my belly, sort of a pleasant glow, so to speak. The hemp ale was taking effect.
“These slaves are certainly tidy,” I observed.
“They are excellent housekeepers,” LeBoeuf replied.
“Superlative, I would say.”
“I confess, we asked them to take special pains on your account.”
“I see. But, tell me, monsieur: this cabin is a dwelling for two persons, correct?”
“Yes. A slave and his wife.”
“There are more than a dozen adults outside, and as many children. Where do they all live?”
“Elsewhere, of course. They are visiting.”
“I see.”
“Their cabins are scattered all about these holdings. They like it better that way.”
“How do they keep them from running away?”
“Running away?” LeBoeuf laughed, as though the idea were nonsensical. “Why would they run away?”
“Why?” I echoed him with equal incredulity. “Because they are slaves. They have no freedom.”
“Bah,” LeBoeuf scowled. “Freedom is an overrated thing. They are happy. Look, what is more important: the freedom to live in misery, or happiness, even if that happiness is imposed. I tell you, Sammy, I have seen many a free European peasant who dwells in the uttermos
t affliction. On the other hand, we are so far away from anywhere here—where would they run to? They have not the slightest knowledge of the world without, nor even of where they are in relation to it. This is their world.”
“Yes,” Uncle entered the discussion, however reluctantly, “but I thought thee was in the custom of letting them earn their freedom.”
“I do follow that practice,” LeBoeuf agreed with mounting annoyance.
“Freedom is very precious to us Americans,” I persisted.
“You Americans make too much of it,” LeBoeuf retorted. “Why, it is you very Americans who have perfected the very business of slavery, no? Who have devised an entire economy based on the exploitation of African human beings! Eh, my young friend?”
Though I took perverse pleasure in provoking the Frenchman’s ire, I could not dispute further without sounding like a spouter of cant.
“Not all of us are slavers,” was all I could manage before letting the subject drop.
The warm feeling in my belly had suffused to my extremities. It was a kind of intoxication, but nothing like the stuporous transports of whiskey. The room seemed to swell with light. LeBoeuf had never looked more like a bird of prey.
“This way, messieurs,” he said dryly, and we followed him outside, thence into the second cabin, which was practically identical to the first. On the way out, I noticed that the three alleged field hands on the porch were none other than the actors who had played Cassio, Roderigo, and Iago on stage the night before. It took me a moment to recognize them without their masks of white paint. One of their wives, moreover, was the very girl who had acted Desdemona. What we were inspecting, I realized, was nothing less than a complete theatrical—the piney grove with its tidy cabins an elaborate stage setting. LeBoeuf’s audacity was boundless. No, diabolical! Furthermore, the sham was so brazenly obvious—to me, at least—that it was as though he were daring us to swallow it.
“Very nice, Fernand,” Uncle said, and I could barely believe my ears. “’Tis a model of liberal management.”
“I am so glad you approve, mon ami William. And you, Sammy?”
“If half the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas were as kind-hearted as you, Monsieur LeBoeuf, then all the Yankees of New England would throw over their farms and chattels and volunteer to become slaves.”
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 20