“That’s right.” He grinned. “That’s where it started, you bet.”
I smiled before I realized it, because his accent was funny to me. Years of living in the mountains, though punctuated by European travel, had given me an ear for our dialect, but the hard biting, midwestern, quasi-Scandinavian syllables were amusing—even under such dire circumstance. He misunderstood my grin.
“You think you know,” he sneered, “but you don’t.”
“You’ve heard of them,” I suggested.
“Yes, God.” He laughed as if I were the stupidest person he’s ever met. “Proud to say. Chester started our chapter of the SW.”
“The Sons of Wingfield.” I nodded.
“Shut up.”
Good, I thought, he wants to talk now.
“Chester was dedicated,” Albert said proudly. “His whole life was devoted to our work.”
“Tell me about that work.”
“Our work is you!” he snarled. “People like you. You make me sick to my stomach. I mean, the blacks, they can’t help it. If they could all just go on back where they came from, they’d be happy little monkeys in their boom-boom jungle and we’d be shed of them all for good. But people like you, you look like everybody else. Nobody can tell you got a sewer in your blood. Not by looking at you. That’s what my people, and Chester and his mom, that’s what they did to help. They started the library.”
“The library?” I asked before I could think.
“Don’t you play like that,” he snapped. “You was in the library, the local branch they got around here, just today! We know that was you.”
“It was,” I acknowledged. “Would you like to sit down?”
He blinked.
“You could sit in my desk chair,” I went on. “It’s very comfortable.”
“Okay.” He kept the gun trained on me but maneuvered the chair close to the bed and sat.
“So Chester and Eulalie started some sort of library,” I prompted.
“Did you know that Eulalie Echo was not her real name?” he asked me. “She never knew her real name. She was forced into prostitution by the blacks in New Orleans when she was a little girl. I can’t hardly stand to think about that. But she was a strong woman, and she bided her time until she could escape New Orleans and get to Chicago where she’d be safe.” He nodded for emphasis.
“That’s where Chester was born?”
“Yes,” he snapped, irritated. “That’s where Chester was born. This was back in the ancient times, almost a hundred years ago. I know because we’re taught all about it in our church school.”
“Church school?”
“SW is a church, you ignorant Son of a B.” He sighed, exasperated with my lack of common knowledge. “We got Sunday Bible school just like anybody else. We learn about God and Jesus and General George Gordon and Nathan B. Forrest and Chester Echo—all the men who made this country great.”
“I see,” I answered contritely. “So Chester Echo started some sort of library, you were saying.”
“Yes, damn,” he said, shaking his head. “They started the blood library.”
“I see.”
He blinked. “The problem with this country, see, is that the people who started it got off on the wrong foot.”
“How did they do that?”
“They did not keep Captain Edward Wingfield as the first president.”
“The first president of what?”
“Damn it,” he sighed, “I thought you went to college. You don’t know that Wingfield was the first president of America?”
“He was—he was British,” I stammered, remembering the brief history recounted by Andrews.
“Yes, he was born in the area of Huntingdon over in the old country, in 1550, but he was the real founder of the original settlement in America. He was the first elected official in this country, voted president by the men of Jamestown colony. He just wanted hard work and purity. That’s what was going to make this a great country.”
“But something happened,” I urged.
He nodded. “After only four months, he was let go. On September 10. They made him a scapegoat and he was sent back to London.”
He was obviously remembering some kind of rote-learned lesson. His eyes rolled upward when he sought to recall dates and certain phrases.
“Why?” I asked.
“Weather,” he snorted.
“Sorry?”
“That year in Virginia was the worst drought in nearly eight hundred years. Crops failed and they had no food. Lots of people died, either starved to death, got sick and died, or got killed by the naturals.”
“The naturals?”
“These so-called Native Americans,” he sneered. “They tried to kill us, wipe us out of our own land that the king had give us fair and square.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him. “Captain Wingfield was sent back to England because the colony had bad luck?”
“They charged him with being an atheist,” Albert said softly, “just because he didn’t believe in the Catholic gods.”
I struggled not to react physically to that. “The Catholic gods?”
“Wingfield wanted to keep the country pure American,” Albert responded angrily. “No Catholics, no coloreds, no slack-offs!”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think what to say more than that.
“And then that bastard John Smith took over. And you see what he did: took up with that red girl.”
“You mean Pocahontas?”
“Shut up!” He leveled his pistol at me again.
I shut up.
“Suddenly anybody could do anything,” he mumbled, somewhat incoherently.
“But Chester Echo didn’t want that. He and his mother were trying to fix that?”
“They started the blood library,” he said again.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The hell you don’t. You were just in one.” He held his pistol steady, pointed directly at my chest.
I tried to take a calming breath. It wasn’t working. I tried to keep Andrews and Melissa out of my mind, but there they were. I realized that I was clenching my fists, willing Skidmore to come back to my house, to help them—and me.
I forced myself to keep talking, keep my mind on the immediate.
“The blood libraries,” I began tentatively, “are records of people who have mixed heritage.”
It was a guess, but seemed an obvious deduction.
“As we say, these people, these blacks, they can go on back where they came from and leave us be. And us whites, we’re all fine, of course. But it’s mongrels like you that’s the problem. If we let you live, by and by there won’t be any way to tell who’s what.”
“Everybody would be one color.”
“Right,” he said, misunderstanding my argument. “Everyone would be polluted.”
I moved slowly to sit up, trying to ready myself for a sudden move when the time was right. I knew I had to begin my ploy because Albert’s hand was beginning to shake.
“You do understand that this entire enterprise is built on Eulalie Echo’s insanity. She was a cocaine addict and, very likely, suffered from syphilitic dementia. This is all about her strange revenge for imagined abuses.”
That lit the candle. Albert’s face flushed red the color of a stripe on a flag. He stood up so fast that the chair beneath him flew backward and crashed into my desk.
“I will be so happy to kill you dead,” he raved, his hand now wildly twitching. “I took your little tin box before, the one you had on the mantel, so there’d be no physical evidence of Eulalie Echo’s shame. I give the contents to the library. But I knew there was another one. You had another box hid. This one.”
He wriggled his left arm until he had the other tin box in his hand, the red one I’d found in my mother’s room. He held it up close to my face.
“I didn’t have it hidden,” I told him. “My mother did. How did you know about it?”
Suddenly, with a blin
ding flash of insight, I realized why one tin box had been kept in plain sight on the mantel, like the Purloined Letter, and another had been hidden in my mother’s secret place. That had been done to protect the information against someone like Albert. He’d broken into the house, he’d found the tin—it was obvious. He’d thought he had all the information, and that would be that. But unbeknownst to him or anyone, there was another tin hidden. That is, until I unearthed it and left it lying around for anyone to find.
“Right.” He lifted his pistol. “Well, now I’m going to shoot you a whole lot of times so it don’t really matter at this point.”
“Wait!” I shouted. “You have to tell me: how did you know there was another tin box? You just said you knew there was another one.”
He smiled. “I’m happy to tell you that. Your mother. She used to eat over there at Travis’s barbecue place and she would talk, especially once she’d had enough to drink. She used to brag about it. Travis egged her on, said he didn’t believe her. She told him there was proof hidden in a secret place at her former home. She was actually proud of it, proud, she said, of her family history. But we got the truth, all right.”
“What do you mean?”
“One of our brotherhood,” he told me, smiling, “some man named Ramsey—he was sweet on your mother, and she liked him too, I guess. She told him all about your family, all about where to find proof. And then Ramsey, he was all tore up when she died, when your momma died. I say good riddance to trash.”
Out of nowhere, a knot of grief like a cannonball pounded me into silence. It was a strange, baffling sensation: having sudden great sympathy, and great affection, for my mother. I’d never felt anything like it before, and I nearly lost myself in it.
“In fact your whole family’s tainted all to hell,” he rattled on. “Dwarves and carnies and hit men. We’ve had our eye on the whole lot for some time now.”
“There must be a lot of you,” I mumbled, not really thinking, “if you can keep up with everybody in the country who has mixed heritage.”
“You’re talking about question number nine.”
“What? I am? I don’t know what that is.” I tried to focus.
“Question number nine on the census form, numb nuts,” he sighed. “All they got is five races listed, and a box called ‘other.’ Only a little more than two percent of the people in this country say they’re ‘other’—but it’s lots more than that. Our records show that nearly half this country’s a mongrel, one way or another. I can’t hardly stand to walk through the streets of Chicago knowing what a cesspool it is. Anybody you brush up against could be one, you can’t tell just by looking anymore. Take you, for example. Just to look at your face, you’d think you were all right.”
“But I’m not?”
He laughed.
I kept straining my ears for the sound of Skidmore’s car, trying to will him to come back and see what was going on. I had another completely unfamiliar sensation then: I had an impulse to pray. I found that I only wanted Andrews and Melissa to be saved, and didn’t much care what the man with the gun did to me. It would be lovely to report that such a feeling was altruistic, but there was more agony than agape in my thinking.
I couldn’t stand the idea that something terrible might happen to Andrews, or to Melissa. I didn’t care so much about myself because it had already happened to me. I’d been shot, I’d been in a coma, and I knew I wasn’t the same. I had an overwhelming sensation of being on borrowed time—that I’d been revived only to tell one more story, only to say a proper good-bye to the people I loved. And the evidence of that apprehension was standing two feet away from me holding a gun.
Rousing myself in an attempt to stall Albert long enough to be caught, I stabbed at the only thing that I could.
“Who is Earl Hunt?”
“What?” he snapped.
“You mentioned—”
“You damn well know who Earl Hunt is!” He jabbed the barrel of the pistol into my right cheek. “He’s that bastard from New Orleans who got me fired from the hospital. I would have got you then, but he was always around. I even called you in your room, but he was there, watching over you. Always sneaking up behind me. And then when you’d turn around, he’d be gone. He’s got some kind of strangeness about him.”
I managed to concentrate—the gun touching my skin was significantly bracing. I could tell that he was afraid, in a very primal way, of the strangeness he perceived in this other man.
“I don’t know what that sentence means,” I said calmly, “the part about his strangeness.”
“He’s from New Orleans,” Albert said, as if it were a complete explanation.
“The Earl of Huntingdon,” I said, smiling, feeling very stupid for not comprehending that obvious fact before that moment.
“So-called,” Albert sniffed.
“He’s the reason I’m still alive.”
“One of them, yes,” Albert admitted. “We’ll get him eventually. We’ll also get that nurse you’re sweet on. She’s the one.”
I deliberately focused on the facts instead of the emotions of the moment, although the wall I had constructed between the two was thin and tenuous.
“You want to get Lucinda because she’s my fiancée?”
“No.”
“Because she saved my life,” I concluded.
“No. She’s a nurse. That’s her job.”
“Then,” I began haltingly, “why?”
“You know.” He looked down at me the way certain young boys look down at a cat they’re about to torture.
“I honestly don’t,” I fully admitted.
“She’s got so much Cherokee blood in her,” he snorted, “she couldn’t have gotten a drink of liquor anywhere in this state a hundred years ago.”
The full impetus of Albert’s thinking, and the work of the Sons of Wingfield, finally penetrated my brain. They were pursuing a phantasm: the illusion of racial purity. No mixing of any sort was permitted in their pinheaded folly. Their fantasy of pure blood was driving them mad—because the more they did any genuine investigation of any family tree, the more they realized that very few people on the planet could claim the sort of pure blood they were seeking.
For reasons I could not even begin to fathom, I decided to taunt Albert with the facts.
“You have to realize that a subconscious impulse to mix bloodlines is a biological imperative,” I began. “The survival of the human race depends on acquiring the full panoply of genetic attributes, the best that every allegedly separate race has to offer. As we do, we become stronger. Eventually, and it may not even be that far in the future, there will only be one race on the planet.”
“Shut up!” he warned.
“I mean,” I went on, ignoring him, “I’ll admit that something’s lost in completely forgetting ethnicity. Cultures, traditions, folktales, folkways, cuisine, music, art, dance, language—I could go on and on—are all beautiful in their diversity. Astonishing, in fact. But when everything is said and done, I always discover more similarities than differences, and find the similarities more engaging. Take, for example, the fact that almost every culture on the planet has its own variation of what is basically the same creation mythology.”
“I said for you to shut,” Albert insisted, smiling, cocking the pistol.
He moved slowly around the bed, close enough to me that I could smell him: a weird combination of liquor, formaldehyde, and Old Spice. He stood with his back to the door, blocking any hope of a sudden escape, his eyes locked on mine.
I looked into those eyes for the first time, really. He was clearly a stupendously ignorant soul, and one who could be manipulated. I stared deeply, and I brought all the overwhelming energy of my fear and grief and passion to bear in that gaze.
“I don’t care if you kill me,” I told him, and I meant it. “But I do care that you’ve hurt my friends. If anyone else dies, you won’t know a moment’s peace ever again. I’ll see to that from the other side. I’ll crawl up
out of my grave. I’ll marshal a force of every other spirit ever sent to the grave by you and your kind, and we’ll be in your mind, in your heart, in your cells, in your blood, in your sweat every second of every day until you run screaming down the corridor of your own death. And that will just be the beginning. You look into my eyes right now. You’ll see it’s true. Albert.”
Say the demon’s name; it helps to undo its power if you can name it.
His forehead began to glisten. He blinked several times in rapid succession. He tried once or twice to speak before he managed to say, “You got that from Earl, that devil way of talking.”
“Yes,” I said, even though I had no idea what he was talking about.
“You got his powers.” Albert was having a difficult time breathing.
Realizing then what he meant, I launched into the first thing I could remember from my research on gris-gris hexes.
“Ogun Akirun, Ogun Alagbede, Ogun Alara, Ogun Elemona, Ogun Ikole, Ogun Meji, Ogun Oloola, Ogun Onigbajamo, Ogun Onire, Ogun-un.”
My ploy was working; I could see that it was. His eyes glazed, his hands began to quiver, and his mouth went slack. Unfortunately, I could also see that he was about to shoot his gun. I moved ever so slightly to the right, but that seemed to rouse him.
He grinned. “You sure ain’t about to get away this time,” he whispered.
I saw his finger squeeze the trigger. My right hand flew up and batted the gun to one side. It went off like thunder and the bullet cracked into the headboard of my bed. Albert seemed more confused than ever.
Then, out of nowhere, a shadowy form appeared behind Albert. Someone had come into the room from the hall. There was a flash of something shiny, and Albert was stabbed by something in his arm, and then in his throat. He dropped to the floor like a broken elevator. I thought I might have fallen asleep again, and maybe what was happening was part of a dream, because I was watching an exact duplicate of the scene in a nightclub in Paris, long ago, when Lisa Simard moved across the dance floor to stab Chester Echo and keep him from killing the man she loved.
Albert lay on the floor, his throat gurgling.
In the next instant, Lucinda was by my side, out of breath. “Did he hurt you? What happened? What did he do to you?”
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