Later – in that deceptive hour just before dawn, when the eyes cannot tell a cloud from a mountain – I saw him again, dimly through a bank of silver mist. With the mad aim of thanking him for my salvation, I shouted, “Monsieur Felix!” and sprang after him. The shadow turned, and like a razor seen edge-on, instantly disappeared. And later that day I started up in bed, awakened by my own screaming.
Those who never have been haunted can scarcely believe the power of a Phantasm. Soon even the full blaze of noon could not drive him off. Upon a crowded street my eye would fall upon my shadow against a wall, yet ’twas not my shadow but his; and if the shadow raised its arm, I would find my own rising too, as if he mocked me, saying by a gesture: you see which of us is real, after all!
In my dreams he appeared in many forms: as himself, stalking about in his old black suit, the whip over his arm; as the host of a costume ball, where at midnight the dancers all dropped their masks, revealing the faces of wolves, foxes and rats; as an idol carven of wood, to which dim crowds were bowing, myself among them. Awaking sweat-soaked from such visions, I began to comprehend that the Overseer was no mere ghost – no mere echo or reflected image of one who had lived. By giving himself up wholly to the insatiable passion of revenge, Monsieur Felix had become something stranger than that, more powerful and more utterly lost. And it was to this demonic power that I bowed down, for I needed to draw upon it to save myself.
One night in such a dream the idol’s stiff jaw moved, and the well-known voice whispered, Tu, mon p’tit, serais le roi du coton! At which, upon waking, I could not but laugh. For how should a one-armed knuck become King of Cotton? And yet that very day upon the street a Yankee officer with eagles on his shoulder-straps and a great clanking sabre banging at his knees, called out to me, “Old Eli!”
’Twas my benefactor Wharton, now promoted to colonel. He asked if, as a onetime planter, I knew quality in cotton, and when I said yes, he intimated that a friend of his wanted to deal in Confederate cotton smuggled across the lines.
So I acquired a new profession, more rewarding than the old, though not less dangerous. Using my knowledge and my weapon and the wood-craft I had learned as a boy, I guided the dealer – a gross creature named Klegg, with especially foul breath – into the rebel-held regions beyond Lake Pontchartrain. There he bought cotton very cheap, intending (as he told me) to transport it to the city, ship it out and sell it very dear at the North, where the factories were starving for the stuff.
My spectral ally guided us well. Twice I saw him standing stiff as a scarecrow in an overgrown field, pointing a long finger in the direction we must take. Returning from our jaunt, I was poling our heavily laden bateau along the sedgy margins of Lake Maurepas, when I saw him again, this time a deeper shadow in the blue dusk, pointing directly at Klegg, who was seated in the bow with his fat back turned to me. Taking the hint, I silently laid down the pole, drew the Colt from the waistband of my trowsers, and shot the dealer between the shoulder-blades.
This was my first murder, and as the reeking powder-smoke dispersed I was all a-tremble, gazing at the deep round oozing hole in the man’s spine, scarce able to believe what I had done. But then I felt a great surge of power, as if now I could do anything. With some effort, I heaved the carcass into a slough, watched a drowsy alligator wake long enough to play sexton, and then, taking up the pole again, went my silent way.
After selling the cotton, I sought out Colonel Wharton, reported the dealer killed by bandits, and bribed him to select me as manager of a west-bank plantation the government had seized from its rebel owner. With free Negroes as workers and government mules to pull the plows, I was soon making cotton for thirty cents a pound and selling it in New York for a dollar-twenty – all without incurring any danger whatsoever!
Thus I attained the dignity of a war-profiteer, and the golden sun of prosperity began to shine upon me and mine. I freed Rose from her wage-slavery; I freed myself forever from the life of a scavenger. I cut Colonel Wharton a share of my profits, and was rewarded when he brought me – now that I had money to invest – into many a profitable venture. I invited him to the plantation, and visited his home; I came to know his dull wren of a wife, with her deplorable hats and her nasal mid-western twang. For the first time I laid eyes upon his daughter Elmira – then little more than an auburn-haired girl, but already giving promise of voluptuous beauty to come.
At first my mutilation frightened her – she thought me some sort of monster, in which she was more than half right – but in time my ready wit, and the small presents I brought her, made me a great favourite, the more so as she came to pity me. I smiled at her and listened to her chatter, and told her closely cropped versions of my sufferings, for which she pitied me the more.
Elmira, of course, was a project for the future; ’twas pleasant to think that again I had a future. By the winter of 1864 I was back in town for good, and living in fair comfort with Rose in a pleasant cottage in the Third District. And the following spring, peace returned at last.
It had been a fine and busy day – wearying, but the kind of weariness that felt good. A whole new chapter completed, the household running like clockwork, everything normal again, just as it ought to be.
When evening shadows gathered, the old man lay at rest, lapped in clean linen, inhaling the smells of rubbing alcohol, bourbon, and the sour saplike odour of raw opium that lingered in the air. Before sleep took him, he again invited Morse to sit on the foot of the bed, and for a few minutes the two men spoke frankly – or at any rate, one of them did.
“I have no one to be my child save only you, Morse,” Lerner told him, feeling a curious finicky unwillingness to call himself Morse’s father in so many words.
Morse missed the distinction. “Yes. But because of my skin, you use me as a servant, not a son.”
“When I die,” said Lerner, “you will learn how much I view you as a son.”
Morse gazed at him searchingly, as if to read his true thoughts. “Do you encourage me to have hopes, Father?” asked he, almost in a whisper.
“No,” said Lerner. “I encourage you to have expectations.”
Morse turned away, and a dry sob seemed to rack his chest. “I am sorry, Father, for the trouble I give you,” he said humbly, then turned off the lights and left, closing the door to the den noiselessly behind him.
In the dark, Lerner lay back smiling, and played for a time with the thought of actually leaving Morse some substantial sum. How that would outrage the respectable white society of New Orleans! How it would kill them to see a Negro made richer than they could ever hope to be!
But was that really necessary? Lerner’s will, after providing somewhat meagerly for his servants – Morse was down for a hundred dollars and his second-best suit – left most of his millions to found a library. A strange bequest for a man who’d seldom read a book since leaving Yale, but the point (as with the vaster gift made for the same purpose by Andrew Carnegie) was the fact that his name would be chiselled over the building’s door.
Anyway, merely by giving Morse hope, which cost nothing, he’d safeguarded his own comfort. Truly, he thought, in walking with a demon one learns many things, including the fact that faith, hope, and love – those supposed virtues – may become chains with which to bind a spirit.
Still smiling, he fell asleep, and all the dark hours his next chapter wrote itself, ready to be transcribed in the morning by his hand.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
Wherein I Triumph During the Reconstruction
One April evening, as I sat in the little courtyard behind our bouse, sipping a glass of tolerable whiskey and watching sunset streamers unfurl across the sky, the gate hinges creaked and a well-attired coloured man entered and extended his hand. So quietly did Royal re-enter my life.
Smiling at the stranger who once had been my playmate in Eden, I invited him to sit down and called Rose to bring a clean glass. When she saw Royal, she fairly ran from the kitchen, blushing and smiling in her
pleasure. Then she recovered her customary demure ways, and asked him how he did. He said well, and she placed her small hand for an instant in his large one, before returning with a light step to making supper. I poured Royal a whiskey, he offered me a segar, and for a time we sipped and smoked, whilst covertly observing each other to see what changes the years had made.
“Nick, I hear you’ve become a Union man,” he said at length, his voice strong and firm with the habit of command.
“Yes,” I replied dryly. “’Twas conversion by the sword.”
He laughed. “You were smart to make the change. Now me – I’ve been discharged from the army, and mean to enter politics as soon as my people get the vote. They’ll need leadership, and I can supply that.”
I said quietly, “Watch your back.”
He leaned forward and peered at my face. “Nick, I hope you ain’t like the Bourbons, who learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
“You’ve been reading history, I see.”
“Yes. And mean to make some.”
“Royal,” said I, “this city is full of people who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. And most of them know how to shoot.”
Indeed, they were returning every month by the hundreds – beaten soldiers, political exiles – like red-hot pumice stones raining down in the aftermath of an eruption. I saw them every day about the streets, people with pinched faces and missing limbs, the most desperate bending over garbage heaps behind the great hotels.
Royal was unimpressed. “Well, we’ll have to work together to rebuild. I want to offer the former rebels the hand of friendship.”
I smiled a little, thinking what was likely to happen to a hand so extended. But I said diplomatically, “Away with the past! Let us live for the future!”
Rose called out that supper was ready, we emptied our glasses, and Royal departed. When I went inside, I saw that she had laid three places at the table. She said in a disappointed voice, “He didn’t stay to eat?”
“Why should he stay to eat?”
“Well, he was one of our people, after all.”
“No longer,” I answered, “now he belongs only to himself.”
I piled into my food, still smiling at Royal’s notion that Yank and Rebel could work together to rebuild our shattered world. Oh yes, my deals with Colonel Wharton shewed that Blue and Grey could be brought together by the colour Green. But well I knew that the spectrum of the time contained also a deep crimson stripe – the colour of rage, of unburied hate, of blood-vengeance.
As if to confirm my belief, a few days later a strange man with a scarred face limped through our gate at sunset, when as usual I was drinking alone. He introduced himself as Brigadier General Eleazar Hobbs, late of the Confederate Army.
I said quickly, “I am a poor man.”
“I haven’t come to ask for money,” he said with a grim smile. “I’ve heard that you too wore the grey.”
This I acknowledged, and he invited me to join a club he was forming to discuss the current state of affairs in the city, the state, and the South.
For the founder of a debating society, he asked some odd questions. Eyeing dubiously my pinned-up left sleeve, he wanted to know if I were able to handle a weapon. I still went armed, the city being so disturbed; I had long since retired the old 1860 model revolver as a memento of difficult but exciting times, and replaced it with a new-model Remington, a sweet weapon that fired up-to-date brass cartridges in place of loose powder and copper caps.
I drew this gun, cocked it, took aim at a broken flower-pot against the garden wall and blew it to pieces. Hobbs nodded thoughtfully, and for a time we chatted, his preferred topic being the intolerable arrogance of the liberated slaves. When I told him frankly that I had taken the Iron-Clad Oath and knew a number of blue-backs, he was not disturbed.
“We need a friend in the camp of the enemy,” he said, and I began to understand what he wanted of me. A new and secret war was beginning, and I was being invited to serve in it – as matters turned out, to serve on both sides!
I found it an odd sort of struggle. Brigadier Hobbs and his friends let strictly alone the blue-coated soldiers who once had been their enemies, for killing them would only bring down upon the South all the calamities of years past. Instead, they shot presumptuous blacks and Republicans of all hues. The Red River in particular proved to be well named, from the hundreds of bodies that floated down it.
’Twas my old neighbourhood, its byways well known to me, and I had a ready-made reason to go there, for I was attempting to regain control of Mon Repos, or what was left of it. The house had been burnt by one army or the other, or by bandits – I never learned which – but the land, with its alley of great oaks, remained. That summer, on a trip upriver I tracked and killed a man I did not know, nor why he needed killing: my sole motive being to prove my bona fides to General Hobbs.
Need I say that Monsieur Felix accompanied me? I first saw him on the boat, seated near the stern-wheel with sparkles of light gleaming through his shadowy form as he gazed at the frothing tumult of the water. A day later, when I had slain my man in a little wood near the levee, and was turning away, I saw him again, standing amongst the cottonwood trees with arms folded – looking on with great interest, but making no sign, like a wise teacher who lets an apt pupil learn by doing.
The thought struck me then that I was different, not only from the man I had been, but also from the man I might have become without his guidance. I might have been a good man; I might have been a dead man. Most likely I would have been both – good and dead!
In any case, why dream of what had not happened? With my latest victim lying at my feet, my whole being hummed with tigerish joy, for again I had broken the bonds of conscience and felt free to do anything. So I nodded to Monsieur Felix in a comradely way, and passed on.
All that busy morning, with the words flowing from his mind as smoothly as the ink from his reservoir pen, Lerner had nothing to complain of, except that Morse in performing his duties seemed a touch too familiar.
Give a nigger an inch, he thought, and he’ll take an ell. At lunchtime he spoke firmly, saying that discretion was the first thing he would look for in any man who aspired to be his principal heir.
“In short,” said Morse, his voice as pettish as a spoiled child, “despite what you said last night, in the sight of the world I am to go on being your nigger-man.”
Hearing him use the same word, as if they shared a bond of mind as well as blood, gave Lerner an odd feeling. He answered almost defensively:
“I have never treated you so, but as a member of my household and as my right-hand man. Think about it, and see if I do not tell the truth.”
Whether convinced or not, Morse apologised again, and after serving the meal and cutting the meat for him, departed as silently as an Arabian Nights servitor. Smiling, Lerner refilled his pen, set to work, and the tale emerged without a single deletion or correction, like the automatic writing of a seer.
Back in town, I began to find my true role in the Reconstruction. Not as a killer, of whom there were more than enough, but as a peacemaker – a reconciler of differences. Who could be a better go-between than I, who had lost a limb for the Cause, yet had sworn loyalty to the Union? I spoke to each side in their own language, and my tongue moved freely, as if hinged in the middle.
Without undue arrogance, I aver that within a few years I became an indispensable man. Most of my time was spent in the lobby of our statehouse – the pompous, gold-domed, elegantly decaying St Louis Hotel – where blood enemies combined forces to build a new ruling class upon the ruins of the old.
Ah, I can see it now! The walls covered with stained and tattered silk; the floor scattered with spittoons, of which there never were enough, for the Turkey carpet was foul with spittle. I see servants hastening about with tall amber bottles and trays of crystal goblets that ping at the touch. I see the all-male crowd, smell the hazy bitter segar-smoke, hear the whispered conferences, feel between my
fingers the stiff smooth rag paper as drafts of pending bills whisper and slide from hand to hand. And amongst the portly scoundrels with their embroidered vests and gleaming watch-chains, I perceive a rail-thin figure that flickers and comes and goes like a mirage, his one good eye gleaming like a splinter of glass.
One day when I was busy conniving, someone touched my shoulder. I turned to find Royal smiling at me. He was rising fast in the post-war chaos – a former slave who could read and write and knew how to exercise power. The tattered slave-boy had become a soldier, the soldier a state senator and a man to reckon with, through his influence over the Negro legislators.
“Nick,” he said, “I might have known I should find you in a den of thieves.”
“Come, Senator,” I jested. “Governor Wharton would not like to hear a fellow Republican so describe his friends and supporters!”
He shook his head, smile broadening. “Nick, there is something uncanny about you. That a one-armed Rebel should emerge as the governor’s – what’s a polite word for it—”
“Legislative agent, shall we say?”
“Just so. The Master of the Lobby. You know, my constituents are all black folk, and from them I hear whispers that at night you transform into a Klansman – although that I refuse to believe!”
“I hope you disbelieve it, mon vieux, for that is a vile slander put about by the envy and malice of my enemies.”
“I rejoice to hear it. Nick, I wonder . . . can you tell me whether the Governor has decided to sign my bill?”
“The one to legalize marriage between blacks and whites? I think he will swallow it, but only if sweetened with a spoonful of sugar.”
He made a face. “How much?”
We quickly struck a bargain. The governor wished the Legislature to charter a rather improbable railroad, whose stock promised a handsome return from foreign investors ignorant of the fact that it was to run through a fathomless swamp. Royal agreed to swing the necessary votes in the Senate, and I guaranteed him a certain quantity of the stock to pass around.
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