An Embarrassment of Riches

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Rude fellow,” Uncle remarked. “Hmmm. What’s this?”

  He poked at the food before him. It comprised a gritty-looking flatcake of course-ground maize, a partially burnt segment of a squash, seeds and all, and a boiled hank of some fatty, nondescript meat.

  “Buffalo hump,” the Woodsman declared, fanning its aroma up to his nostrils. “A Choctaw specialty.”

  I waited and waited for the Indian to leave the room, but he merely stood there, behind Uncle’s chair, with his back to the wall.

  “Go on! Away with you!” I shouted at him. He glared at me in an insolent manner and then skulked off.

  “Nephew!” Uncle exclaimed.

  “Uncle,” I whispered, “I have located Lou-Lou. He is down in the bilges in a stinking dungeon.”

  Uncle shrank, visibly discomfited.

  “He must be there on some good account,” he said.

  “He is there because Fernand LeBoeuf no longer has any use for him—”

  “I have sure had a better mess o’punkin set in front o’me,” the Woodsman interjected in a tone of disappointment. “Why this is half burnt to perdition. The hump ain’t bad, though.”

  “Furthermore,” I whispered yet more softly. “I have found proof that Lou-Lou is … who I said he was. And I have uncovered a perfidious scheme on the part of your dear Monsieur LeBoeuf that would make Benedict Arnold’s treachery compare as a mere rigging of thimbles. Here—”

  “These corncakes is plum awful,” the Woodsman said.

  I reached to the rear pocket of my breeches. The letter from Napoleon was gone!

  “Chicane!” I howled in despair and gnashed my teeth. “Damn me!”

  “Nephew! Hast gone mad?”

  “This is some of the worst Injun fixin’s that ever I et,” the deaf and sightless Woodsman declared. “Sumpthin ain’t right here.”

  Endeavoring to beat a hasty path back to Madame LeBoeuf’s studio and reclaim the document by force if necessary, I took a wrong turn in the labyrinthine maze of corridors and found myself climbing yet another unfamiliar staircase, which, I soon ascertained, led to the great tower that loomed over Chateau Félicité.

  Aloft was a small observatory room about ten feet square with windows on all four sides. A worn Chinese rug and a cushioned cherrywood stool were the only furnishings besides a beautiful polished brass telescope mounted upon a tripod.

  The view from that room was spectacular. It must have been an hundred feet above the surface of the lake. Storm clouds boiled out of the sky to the horizon and wind rattled the windowpanes but the view was unobstructed. Beyond the wide lake lay an ocean of dark green foliage—first the orderly rows of the hemp fields, and beyond them forest unending.

  Between the edge of the hemp fields and the forest, to the east, rose a thin column of smoke. Its source was a long, gray horizontal anomaly in the landscape. I climbed upon the stool and trained the telescope at the distant object, then squinted into the eyepiece. All was a blur. I screwed out the drawtube and the image neatly resolved.

  The gray horizontal streak was a timber stockade surrounding a sort of compound. Most of what lay within the compound was obscured by a screen of trees. Of what I could observe there was an assemblage of huts or shacks within the stockade walls. Moving about amidst these rude structures were many little black figures: Negroes. Even with the aide of the glass, it was not immediately possible to tell what they were doing, such was the distance.

  Around the top of the stockade there appeared to be a kind of catwalk, upon which lighter-skinned figures stood: Indians. The column of smoke rose from a point obscured by the trees, but it was very thick smoke, and grayish white like the cloud-clotted sky above. On the outside of the stockade was a silvery band, which I eventually determined to be some kind of moat. It looked inconsequential from this height and distance, but was probably fifty feet across. Outside of this moat was yet another perimeter, vague and insubstantial in the lens. A closer study revealed it to be a barrier of sharpened sticks pointed inward toward the stockade.

  I swung the fine instrument back upon the stockade. The figures in view looked like ants, red and black. Here and there upon the catwalk, little puffs of smoke bloomed in front of the red ants. It took some reflection on my part to understand that this was the smoke of gunfire, and that the red ants were shooting down upon the black ones. Several of the latter crumpled in quick succession. Many of the others fled, but seemingly with no place to go. A few Negroes ran into the flimsy hovels inside the stockade. Others poured out. Some knelt to comfort the wounded, whilst others dragged off their dead beyond my vantage. Little puffs of smoke erupted from their midst now, and I surmised that they had somehow acquired weapons.

  The entire spectacle took place without accompanying sound, so distant was the action, like the combat of a small boy’s tin soldiers played out on a patch of grass on a summer’s day. Yet the conclusion to be drawn was obvious. Somehow, an insurrection had been mounted by the Negroes in the miserable stockade where they were really forced to live, and the Indians were now putting it mercilessly down with superior force. No wonder LeBoeuf had been absent all day. But then again, what had that cad Yago been doing here when he should have been at his seigneur’s side? I realized that I might never learn the answer to that question, for as soon as I had the letter from Bonaparte back in my hand, I would depart this viper’s nest of cruelty and intrigue.

  I had swung the telescope out of the way and resolved to find my way back to Madame’s studio when two figures appeared on the wharf an hundred feet below. One of them clutched an enormous potted plant to his bosom. The other figure clung to him. I realized with a jolt that they were none other than Uncle and the Woodsman!

  They hurried to the end of the wharf. Uncle put the potted plant—the Puya, apparently—upon the foredeck of our keelboat. He then returned to the wharf and helped the Woodsman aboard. The window sash was stuck fast. I could not throw it open. Instead, I swung the telescope through the glass. A blast of wind nearly blew me across the room. I fought my way back.

  “Uncle! Woodsman! Wait!” I shouted to them far below, but Uncle did not hear me in the howling gale and, of course, the Woodsman was deaf. Desperate, I heaved the entire telescope through the glass, hoping to attract attention, but the wind carried it back and the instrument landed upon the third-story roof far short of the wharf. The next thing I knew, Uncle was casting off the mooring lines. They were leaving without me.

  I raced downstairs again at breakneck speed, caring not who saw me. But the corridors of Chateau Félicité seemed wholly deserted. One had the eerie sensation of being aboard an huge floating tinderbox that might, at any second, go up in a hellfire.

  From the courtyard garden I retraced my steps taken earlier that day and found the obscure stairway leading to Madame’s studio. Upon the landing below, I could see that the door was open. I thought I heard singing.

  She was dressed in an ecru gown of silk adorned with seed pearls, and in her hair were woven the lilies she had picked that morning. On her face was a look of the most unequivocal and abject lunacy.

  “Oooo, monsieur,” she giggled. “Do you like my wedding dress?”

  “Where is the letter, madame?”

  “You are wasting your breath, monsieur. I have decided to marry Arlequin. Is that not right, my pet?”

  “Bawk bawk! King and Queen of Louisiana. Bawk pweet!”

  “I warn you, madame. I will turn this place upside down unless you hand it over.”

  “As you wish,” she said and waved a handkerchief in my face. She repaired to the other side of the room, where a large chest stood open. From it she withdrew various oddments of raiment—scarves, hats, cloaks—and tried them on, singing all the while like a little girl playing in the attic. I believe that since our interview that morning, she had gone completely insane.

  I now went about the room myself like a man crazed, flipping over the cushions, rifling every chest of drawers.

  “Bawk bawk
! You will be my little white love slave!” the parrot cried.

  In one drawer lay a lady’s pistol, a small LePage, along with a flask of powder and a pouch of balls. It was not the sort of thing one should leave at the disposal of a lunatic, and besides, I needed the weapon, so I stopped to charge it and stuck it in the back of my waistband.

  “Bawk Bawk! A blood sausage! Mon dieu! Bawk!”

  “Madame! The letter!”

  “Bawk! What a man! What a man!”

  “You glaucous knave!” I cried, near my wits’ end, and lunged for the ridiculous bird, seeking to wring its neck. There, at the bottom of its cage, spattered with droppings, was the document in question. I reached in and seized it.

  “Do you like my trousseau, monsieur?” Madame asked. The poor woman, in her divorce from reality, had donned one costume atop another, as some people confined to an asylum are wont to do.

  “I am truly sorry for you,” I told her, and, preparing to depart this den of wickedness and lunacy, once again pocketed the precious letter. I had barely taken a step toward the doorway when Yago appeared there, his filed teeth glinting in the meager light and a buffalo skinner’s knife in his hand.

  “Bawk bawk! Le roi sauvage! What a man!” cried the parrot, now escaped from its cage and winging around the chamber revealing all of Madame’s vile secrets.

  “Ah, here you are, monsieur,” the Indian observed to me with a look of grim satisfaction. His pantherlike body glistened with sweat, as if it had cost him much exertion to find me, and I noted with alarm that there was blood on the blade of his knife.

  “I was just leaving, Yago—” said I, failing to appear insouciant.

  “Leaving? That is not possible, monsieur.”

  “I assure you it is, Yago. Now, if you will just put down that knife and step out of the way—”

  “But monsieur,” he said with a smile full of wickedness and malice, “you are already dead.”

  He advanced slowly toward me, the blade flashing as he carved the air in anticipation. I felt behind my back for the pistol in my waistband. Across the room, Madame continued to fuss with her petticoats, singing a schoolgirl’s song in French and oblivious to the incipient mayhem. Suddenly, a clamor erupted in the staircase. Yago spun on his heels and crouched in apprehension. Othello now appeared in the doorway, massive and monumental, clothed in the very costume he had worn on stage. Behind him on the staircase lurked several black subordinates, their yellow eyes gleaming in the dimness.

  “Bawk pweet! My black ram! Bawk!” the parrot cried.

  “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,” Othello intoned the bard’s iambics from the final act of the play were indistinguishable from plain life. “Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!” he soliloquized. “It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood, nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow…. Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.”

  “You die, black devil!” Yago cried as he sprang for the blackamoor. Othello plucked him in midleap as he might seize a springing wildcat.

  “Pernicious caitiff!” the Negro roared. He broke the Indian’s wrist as though it were a broomhandle. The knife clattered to the floor. Yago screamed like a very beast of the forest. Othello dropped to one knee and, holding Yago on his back across the other, pressed his jaw downward until the Indian’s spine could be heard to snap. A moment later, Yago’s body rolled lifelessly to the floor. Next, those fierce yellow eyes looked up toward me. “Go thy way to a nunnery,” Othello said.

  “I beg your pardon—”

  “To a nunnery, go!” he insisted fervidly and pointed to the door. I suddenly understood that he was permitting me to escape. His accomplices lowered their pistols and stepped out of my way. With a last glance back to the doomed Madame LeBoeuf—yet complacent in her dementia—I hastened to the exit.

  “Ah, balmy breath, that dost almost persuade justice to break her sword!” I heard Othello intone as I hurried down the stairs. “Out, strumpet!”

  There was a single shriek, then silence. How unlike each other were the worlds of Europe and the American wilderness, where she met her sordid end. Yet madness and murder are the same everywhere. Poor woman, I thought, and without another moment to lose I ran down the deserted corridors of Chateau Félicité to the bilges. Lou-Lou’s cell was empty. I hastened back upstairs and made for the wharf outside the palace gates. Another squall was bearing down rapidly from the northwest, replete with jagged thunderbolts and plangent blasts of wind. The keelboat was nowhere in sight. I at once surmised that the Woodsman, upon his eternal errand of rescuing the unfortunate, had alerted Uncle of the slave insurrection, and that Uncle, in turn, had undertaken to rescue his beloved friend Fernand LeBoeuf!

  Several Indian dugouts lay upturned upon the broad wharf. I lay hold of a paddle, rolled one of the smaller dugouts right side up, and slid her into the water. She was a very crude and unstable craft in a chop, and side-slipped miserably in the gale. My hand ached where the spider had bitten me. An inflammation had spread to all my fingers and below my wrist. It was very painful to wield the paddle. Still, I struggled to make the distant shore.

  The wind drove me swiftly across the choppy lake. By the time I realized that our keelboat was nowhere in sight along the vicinity of the far shore, it was too late to go back. I was exhausted beyond my capacity to battle the elements. In a little while, my hull scraped bottom. I leaped out. It was all I could do to drag the dugout into a canebrake, out of sight.

  I could hear gunfire across the hemp field, a sporadic pop, pop, pop rather than the crackling volleys of a pitched battle. If Uncle had taken Megatherium downstream, then I had no chance of following him in the present gale, with the wind in my teeth. I therefore resolved to make my way to higher ground and wait in concealment until the storm subsided.

  I stole through the canebrake and up the bank. From the edge of the hemp field, the gunshots rang out more sharply. Human cries became audible. I could smell the miserable slave compound before I saw it: an odor of death, animal waste, and fire. In a hedgerow less than a quarter mile from the battlesite grew a large catalpa tree (C. bignonioides). I made my way to it, creeping low to the ground like a four-footed animal, and endeavored to climb it. Its large, heart-shaped leaves gave off a fetor themselves.

  Unlike my prior vantage in the tower, the view from the catalpa was complete. I could see entirely within the compound. Corpses lay everywhere, most of them black, though a number of Indians dangled dead from the parapet above. Much of the compound’s dusty yard was occupied by a hodgepodge of crude shelters, wickiups loosely constructed of sticks and bark, the meanest dwellings imaginable—as far removed from the tidy woodland cabins LeBoeuf had shown us as the lowliest wigwam is from Chateau Félicité. In this filthy pen, the slaves were herded together like livestock.

  These Negroes, of all ages and both genders, now huddled behind their pathetic shelters like so many rabbits in a walled garden hiding behind clumps of lettuce, while the Indians fired down. A number of the slaves returned this fire, fighting valiantly against the withering opposition. Many fired on the run, and when an Indian bullet felled one, another slave would spring out, lay hold of the weapon, and fight on. Yet their bravery and desperation were taking a toll on the Choctaw adversary, who would have exterminated them utterly.

  Lightning crackled over my head, and the answering thunderclap boomed. My fingernails dug into the pithy catalpa trunk as I gazed down upon those poor black wretches and saw how the evil of slavery had culminated in this orgy of death. Did the Virginia gentry wake screaming from their slumbers in such nightmares of bloodletting, I wondered?

  Suddenly a strange thing happened: the Indians ceased firing, quit the ramparts, and began eloping, by ones, twos, and threes, toward the river. In so doing, they passed practically beneath my catalpa. Soon they were streaming past by the dozens. The premature darkness, the thunderbolts, the screams of terror and anguish, all gave this exodus the flavor of a judgment from on high. Such was
the Indian’s panic, in fact, that some were trampled in the mad rush to escape. Meanwhile, I heard a resounding boom echo from the compound, and looked back to see the Negroes battering the gate with a log they had pulled down from the stockade. Other slaves clambered up the walls, whose abandoned parapets admitted no resistance. Once aloft, they reached down for their fellows. In a matter of minutes, these made it across the moat, around the compound to the gate, and threw open the doors. Those struggling within dropped their battering ram. The women and children now ventured timidly out from behind the miserable piles of rubbish that had been their only refuge from the Choctaw rain of death. With shouts of triumph that seemed beyond the strength of a people so starved and brutalized, they came streaming forth from the stockade. Screaming and yammering in their primitive babble, they too now passed below my catalpa tree hard on the heels of their former persecutors, their sunken yellow eyes burning with the fires of vengeance. My personal store of horror was depleted when I spied Fernand LeBoeuf’s blood-smeared head impaled at the end of a twenty-foot-pike, carried by his former servelings like a flag of battle.

  The cacophony of their rallying cries soon faded as they chased the retreating Choctaws to the river, and now all that could be heard amid the peals of rolling thunder were the groans of the dying. I remained aloft for what seemed like an eternity, clinging to that tree’s trunk like a boy to his mother. Darkness gathered, augured by the croaking of frogs. When at last I sought to come down, I lost my footing and tumbled onto the ground. Upon recollecting my senses, it became painfully obvious that I was the proprietor of a sprained ankle. My left arm throbbed terribly from the slow-acting poison of the spider bite.

  The way back to shore was paved with the bodies of the dead, both black and red. The wind had ceased to shriek. Across the water, flambeaux guttered on the wharf of Chateau Félicité. I plunged into the canebrake, searching for my dugout in the ever-increasing gloom of twilight. Imagine my terror when, upon locating the craft, a Choctaw man sprang up in it like jack-in-the-box, a pistol in his hand. I don’t believe he was a day older than myself. And in the long moment that I gazed down the barrel of his gun into his eyes, I could not help but imagine, as in a series of brilliant flashes, what the history of his young life had been, almost as if I had seen a reflection in the mirror.