“I designed it to be amazing.”
“Frankly, Rose and I were prepared to defy you, if need be. But how fine it is that you consent to our marriage – and that you intend this land to be Rose’s marriage portion!”
“I could imagine nothing that would please either of you more than to own Mon Repos,” I replied. “It’s the logical dowry.”
I watched covertly as Royal’s natural wariness dissolved in the grip of irresistible emotion. “To own the land where I was once a slave!” he exclaimed, his voice choking midway in the sentence.
He gazed like one transfixed down the long alley of noble oaks, where grey streamers of moss floated on the breeze with the silent grace of shadows. I began to talk about the taxes, the difficulty of getting tenants to work the fields, and the need for a new survey, since most of the old landmarks had disappeared.
“Those were to have been my problems,” I said. “Now I fear they will be yours. And you must be on your guard, my friend. The Klan’s active hereabouts – you’re safe enough in daytime, but a prominent coloured man with a white wife should beware the night.”
He grinned and raised the tail of his fawn-coloured coat to shew a handsome silver-mounted pistol in a holster of tooled leather hanging from a wide cartridge-belt.
“I am prepared for anything,” he said.
I shook my head at his fatal arrogance. How can a man be prepared for anything?
“Ah, look,” I said, pointing, “do you remember that path? It led to our swimming-hole, did it not?”
He turned and craned, and as he did so a figure in robe and hood stepped from behind the chimney and raised a rifle. A shot exploded, and the round buzzed past me.
Frightened, the horse reared and whinnied. The buggy tilted; I grabbed at the reins and struggled one-handed to get the animal under control. Meantime, like a good soldier Royal leaped to the ground and rolled and fired.
His shot killed the idiot in spook attire, and the Klansman’s hand, contracting in death, squeezed off a round that struck the horse in the brain. The animal crashed in the traces, the buggy overturned, and I was flung out and landed with a thump.
Well, the whole thing was a hopeless mess. I scrambled past a wildly spinning wheel, jumped to my feet, and found that I was alone amid the ruins of Mon Repos.
The assassin lay like a heap of soiled bedclothes on the ground. Royal had vanished into a nearby stand of trees, and I heard shouts and shots and the crashing of men plunging through the dense second-growth of pine and sweetgum saplings.
A shotgun boomed. Silence for six or seven heartbeats, then two revolver shots, Blam! Blam!
Desperate to learn what was happening, I drew my pistol and followed the sounds into the trees. The wind seemed to hold its breath; invisible birds were screaming, but the noise of the fire-fight had slain all movement save mine.
I paused and stood listening. The shotgun boomed again close by, followed by a revolver shot and a strangled outcry. I hastened through the blinding tangle, panting, inhaling the reek of sulphur mingled with the wine-cork smell of spring growth.
In a little glen I found a figure weltering in the grass – another hooded man, a big one. I lifted the hood and saw the landlord’s broad face and tiny eyes. He had been shot through the throat, and his sharp little eyes turned to dull pebbles as I watched.
A new fury of shots broke out. A deathly pale young man broke from the thicket and ran past me, his breath rattling like a consumptive’s. He ran like a hare, this way and that, either to make aiming difficult or simply in the madness of fear. Then he was gone, and I was alone with Royal.
I whispered bitterly, “You might have spared me this.”
I had not forgotten all woodcraft, and slipped without a sound past slender pale trunks and rough pine branches, over thorny mats of wild grape and thick dying undergrowth. In the treetops strong sunlight vibrated, but down in the tangle evening colours – blue and bronze – enveloped me. Then I stumbled on a heap of dry wood, something cracked under my feet, and behind me Royal’s voice said, “Hello, Nick.”
I turned and faced him. He levelled his revolver and said, “Your weapon.”
A smile of relief began to cross my lips, and he said more sharply, “Come, come – your weapon! And let me tell you, brother, you have but little to smile about.”
In that he was wrong, for I was watching Monsieur Felix emerge from the ruins of his house. Then that unforgettable voice ground out, Aha, tu p’tit diable!
Royal turned his head, and looked into the one glinting eye and the one oozing pit. That was when I shot him down, and shot him again where he lay.
For a long moment the Overseer and I stood gazing at each other over the body. He smiled, that thin smile I remembered so well, like an arroyo between his blade of a nose and blue hillock of a chin. I hated him then, yet not half so much as I hated myself, for having sold my destiny forever to such a one as he.
Then, like a shadow struck by light, he vanished without a sound.
Strange, very strange, he thought, rereading what he’d written. After all, his tale was a confession. But who was he confessing to? God had long ago departed from his universe, and Royal and Rose already knew his guilt, assuming they knew anything at all.
The slow approach of shuffling footsteps in the hall interrupted his brooding. Hastily he locked up his manuscript and assumed the demeanour of a hanging judge. The door opened, and Cleo and Euphrosyne together helped Morse limp in to face the music.
His face was swollen, one eye was a purple plum, and he winced at every movement from the pain of his ribs, though the doctor had told Lerner that the bones were only cracked, not broken.
The old man greeted him with silence, then waved the women away. For several long minutes Morse stood before him, his one good eye fixed in contemplation of his toes. Finally Lerner spoke in what he hoped were the tones of Fate.
“I suppose you know that you might have been beaten to death.”
Morse nodded.
“I can’t prevent you from embarking on such adventures again. But I can withdraw my protection. Once more, and you’re on your own. Then you’ll either die at the hands of the police or else go to prison where, I promise you, you’ll learn many things, but nothing to make you grateful to your teachers.”
Morse nodded again. He already knew that he would be forgiven one more time. How else to explain the fact that he was here, rather than lying on the oozing brick floor of the prison, watching enormous cockroaches feast on spatters of his own blood? He also knew without being told that he’d reached the end of his rope, that he’d have no more chances, and that his hopes of inheriting a portion of the old man’s wealth were probably over.
What he couldn’t know were the thoughts passing through Lerner’s mind. The old man was looking at Morse but, still full of the story he’d been writing, thinking not of him but of himself and Royal.
Well, we all come to it in time – we are broken down to ground-level, and must construct ourselves anew. If we survive, we become stronger: with few exceptions we do not become better. For most of us, when all else has failed, turn to the demon.
He drew a deep breath, said, “Sit down,” and watched Morse relapse, wincing, into the same chair – now battered and dusty – where Rose had sat so long ago.
Opening the safe, Lerner took out a fist-sized parcel of rice paper. He unwrapped it, revealing a sticky dark mass of opium. The doctor had obtained it for him at a handsome mark-up; he used the drug in his practice, and made sure that it was legally bought.
From the tantalus, Lerner lifted a crystal flask of bourbon and two shot glasses. By now Morse had raised his one good eye and was watching as if mesmerized. Lerner prepared two shots of laudanum and offered one to Morse.
After they had both swallowed their medicine, and the mixture was spreading a slow fiery comfort through their veins, Lerner delivered his verdict: “Hereafter, Morse, you will use the drug with me in these rooms, and nowhere else.”
“Yes,” he mumbled. “Yes, Father.”
“I take that as your word of honour,” said the old man, noting wryly how odd the word honour tasted on his tongue. “If you break it, I will have no mercy on you. Now help me to bed. Tomorrow you’ll do only what is most necessary, and otherwise rest.”
The bedtime ritual that night was even slower than usual, with Morse wincing – sometimes gasping – with pain, and pausing again and again to recover. Lerner had plenty of time to think, and what he thought about was how, in one way or another, he’d lost everyone who had ever been close to him: Elmira, his and Elmira’s children, Papa, Rose, and Royal.
All of them gone. Soon he would be gone too. But it was still within his power to save something from the wreckage, through a man of his blood who would live on after him. He is, after all, the last of our family and, even if adopted, the only son I shall ever have. But if he continues the way he’s going, he will die too, and nobody will be left at all.
Old people have to decide things quickly, having no time for the long thoughts of youth. He resolved to act tomorrow – summon his lawyer and settle everything while Morse lay resting upstairs in bed. Lerner’s old habits of deep suspicion didn’t quite leave him, for he also thought: better not tell the boy. I know what I might do, if one old man stood between me and a great inheritance.
He smiled craftily, thinking what a surprise ending he could now give his confession. Then leave it to be read once he was safely gone. Confession might be good for the soul, but if incautiously made public might be death to the body. After all, he reflected, his veins and Morse’s held much the same blood.
No one instructed me as to how I should conceal my crime (he began to write next day, after the lawyer had come and gone). Nor did anyone need to.
I grasped Royal’s hand, dragged his carcass down into the glen, and pressed my pistol into the hand of the dead innkeeper. Then I set out briskly enough, rehearsing my story as I went, and after disarranging my clothing, staggered into Red River Landing, crying out a shocking tale of ambush and sudden death.
All who saw me that day knew that I truly grieved, though they did not know why. General Hobbs, of course, knew what had happened, but my secret was safe with him. Rose (I think) divined the truth, but could do nothing, having no protector but myself, and needing one more than ever, because she was with child.
’Twas almost miraculous, how all the pieces fell into place. The hue and cry over the murder was great, for Royal had been a rising star of the Republican Party, and his death became a hook upon which President Grant could hang new and stringent measures against the Klan. In the months that followed, I travelled to Washington thrice to testify, and made (I may say without false pride) a good job of it: in lengthy testimony on the Hill, I never made a serious error; never was at a loss for words; most important of all, never told the truth.
Based largely upon my testimony, Congress concluded that two loyal Union men had been attacked by Klansmen, one being killed and other barely escaping with his life. The outrage led directly to passage of the Ku Klux Act, which caused so much trouble to General Hobbs and his friends: ’twas under that law he was later arrested for some trifling murder, tried by military commission, and sent to Fort Leavenworth, where he died.
Thereafter I was a marked man amongst his followers, as I was already a pariah to all who hated the Yankee occupation. Yet isolation was familiar to me, and I was not unhappy to be rid of so impulsive and violent a friend. For great changes were in the air, and a cool head was needed to take advantage of them. In 1873 a depression devastated the Grant administration, which was already falling by the weight of its own corruption. Another three years, and the Democrats seized power in Louisiana; Governor Wharton was impeached, and departed public life with a fortune (said to be in the range of two millions) to comfort his old age.
He paid me a handsome price for my land near Red River, and there built the grand and intricate monstrosity of a house he calls Réunion. He sited his mansion at the end of the great oak alley, clearing away the old chimney in the process, and the ruins of Monsieur Felix’s house as well, which spoiled his view. ’Twas in this house, in rooms that were perfect symphonies of bad taste, that I courted his daughter Elmira, and won her consent to be my bride.
The marriage was sumptuous. Like the great slave-owners he had always secretly admired, the Governor displayed an instinct for magnificence. As the wedding day approached, he imported from South America hundreds of spiders known for the beauty of their webs and turned them loose in the oaks. When their shining orbs had taken form, with his own hand he cast handfuls of gold dust upon the threads.
Up this astounding aisle, more splendid than any cathedral, ’midst golden glitter and dancing sunlight he led Elmira, clad in ashes-of-roses chenille and watered silk and Brussels lace, to where I waited for her beside the soaring staircase of Réunion. There we were wed, and the parson prayed that our marriage might symbolize an end to the strife which had so long bloodied the State and the Nation.
After kissing my bride, I embraced my new father-in-law with one arm, whilst he hugged me with two. Tears leaked into his whiskers as he saw his family joined forever to what he liked to call, in hushed tones, “the old aristocracy”.
Rose’s story was less glorious. Eight months after Royal’s death, she gave birth to an infant which she freely acknowledged to be his.
I was by then a busy man, between my Washington trips and my courting of Elmira, and was at some difficulty to cover things up. In the end I arranged for Rose to visit Natchez in the character of a widow, accompanied by a discreet woman of my acquaintance. There a hale and noisy male infant passed through the gates of life, and entered this world of sin. The final act of the tragedy came when Rose died of a haemorrhage resulting from a difficult labour. Well, she had always been sickly and frail – not a good candidate to bear a large and lusty man-child!
I was somewhat at a loss what to do with this new and (at first) unwelcome kinsman of mine. I expected to have children with Elmira. Along with the Old South had vanished those easygoing days when a large brood of varicoloured youngsters, some slave and some free, some legitimate and some bastards, could all be raised together under one paternal eye. Since then a certain niceness and propriety had come into life, and appearances had to be preserved.
I named the boy Morse, an uncommon name for a black. At the time I knew not why I chose it, though I now believe ’twas a strangled echo of the remorse I felt over his father’s death. I hoped that he might be light in hue and featured like an European, which would have made everything easier. But in a few weeks it became plain that – despite a double infusion of white blood, from his mother and his father’s father – robust Africa was stamped firmly and forever upon his visage.
I put him out to be suckled by a wet-nurse in the Creole quarter, and this woman solved the problem for me. Recently she had lost an infant and been abandoned by her lover; she longed for a child, and she needed work. I took her into my household as a maid, where she remained until her death, representing herself to Morse as his mother. I believe that this woman, spotting a certain ghostly similarity in our features, decided that Morse must be my bastard, and in time passed on this bit of misinformation to her charge.
Yet he was my kinsman, and discreetly I watched over his raising, as in the past Papa had watched over Royal’s. He grew strong and clever, learned to read and write and cipher to the rule of twelve, and in my service was trained to the duties of an upper servant. The walls of my house shielded him from much that was happening to his people in the outside world where, abandoned by the North, they were made into serfs by the South.
All unknowing, I was preparing a caretaker for myself. Ever since I had angered the Klan, a series of events had placed my life in danger: I but narrowly escaped two assassination attempts, and once had my house set on fire (though so incompetently that the blaze was readily extinguished). I hired Pinkertons to protect me, and for a time the
attempts ended. But in ’93, on busy Canal Street at noonday, an empty four-horse dray came careening around a corner and knocked me to the ground. The vehicle swerved around the next corner, and vanished: ’twas later found abandoned in a weedy lot near the river, the horses unbridled and peacefully cropping grass. The driver was never discovered – or so the police reported.
Thus by a spinal injury I became an invalid at the age of fifty, when otherwise still vigorous and in the prime of life. Believing that my former associates had forgotten nothing and forgiven nothing, I turned increasingly into a recluse, dependent upon Morse, the only caregiver I felt that I could trust. And so—
Unnoticed by Lerner, dusk had come, and with it came Morse, barging through the door with a touch of his old insouciance, despite his stiffness and the plum over his eye, carrying the dinner tray in which the old man felt no interest, and the drug he truly needed.
Lerner hastily put away his manuscript and closed the safe. Towards the food he made only a gesture, swallowing a forkful here and there and thrusting the rest away. After he had been settled for the night, Morse sat down beside the bed on a footstool, his head resting against the moss mattress, and they shared the opium.
As usual these days, one dose of laudanum wasn’t enough for Lerner. The second put him into a state like the trance of a medium. He saw the spectres of the past rising up about him, and whispered, “Look, look there.”
“Where?”
“There, in the mirror. Can’t you see him? It’s Monsieur Felix! Look how his one eye gleams!”
“You’re crazy, Father,” Morse said, not unkindly.
“He wants me to come with him to his house. It lies halfway to the quarters, and once there I can never leave. Ah Morse, how can I tell him No, when I have so often told him Yes?”
“Rest, old man,” Morse said, “for the past is dead and gone.”
“No, no, ’tis a phantom limb that aches more than a real one, for there is no way to touch it, to heal it, to give it ease.”
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