FSF, March 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  Our lives resembled not at all the silly phantasies I read nowadays of opulent masters and smiling servants. Our plantation was but a large ramshackle farm, its only adornment a long alley of noble oaks that Papa had saved when felling the forest. Our lives were simple and hard; many a day at planting or harvest-time Papa worked in the fields beside the hands, his sweat like theirs running down and moistening the earth.

  In our house Cousin Rose counted for little, for she was but a poor relation whose parents had died in the same outbreak of Yellow-Jack that claimed my mother. Ever pale and fragile as a porcelain cup, she spent most days in her bedroom, more like a ghost than a girl. The slave boy Royal, on the other hand, counted for much—at least in my life.

  How I envied him! He never had to study, and went barefoot nine months of the year. I was beaten often by the schoolmaster, but Royal escaped with a scolding even when he was caught stealing flowers from the garden, or roaming the house above stairs, where only the family and the housemaid were allowed to go. Indeed, Papa so favored him that I came to understand (though nothing was ever said) that he was my half-brother.

  Spirits, too, inhabited our little world. All who dwelt in that benighted region believed in divining rods and seer stones, in ghosts and curses, in prophetick dreams, buried treasure, and magical cures. Royal and I were credulous boys, like those Mark Twain so well describes in Tom Sawyer, and we met often in the bushes near the servants’ graveyard at midnight to whisper home-made incantations, half fearing and half hoping to raise a “sperrit” that might shew us the way to an hoard of gold—though none ever appeared.

  In these expeditions Royal was always bolder than I, as he was also in our daylight adventures. He dove from higher branches of the oak overleaning our swimming-hole than I dared to; he was a better shot than I, often bearing the long-rifle when, as older boys, we fire-hunted for deer. Ah, even now I can see and smell those autumn nights! The flickering of the fire-pan; the frosty crimson and gold leaves crackling under our feet; the sudden green shine of a deer's eyes, the loud shot, the sharp sulphurous smell of burnt powder, and the dogs leaping into the darkness to bring down the wounded animal!

  Are we not all killers at heart? Scenes of death having about them a kind of ecstasy, however we deny it, greater even than the scenes of love.

  * * * *

  Preceded by a clink of china, Morse spun the door handle and backed into the den, hefting a tray with a dish under a silver cover, a folded napkin, and a goblet of red wine.

  "When,” demanded Lerner testily, “will you learn to knock, my boy?"

  "Mr. Nick, I ain't got enough hands to carry the tray, open the door and knock, too."

  A doubtful excuse, thought Lerner; a table stood in the hallway convenient to the door, where Morse could have rested the tray. Frowning, he turned his pages face down on the desk.

  Morse set his lunch on a side table, moved the wheelchair, shook out the stiff linen napkin and tied it around Lerner's neck.

  "Should I cut the meat for you, Mr. Nick?"

  "Yes, yes. Then leave me alone. And don't come back until I ring."

  "You'll be wanting your medicine at the usual time?"

  "Yes, yes. But wait for my ring."

  In leaving, Morse took a long look at the half-open safe, a fact that did not escape the old man. Lerner ate lunch slowly, pondering. His dependence on Morse reminded him all too clearly of how his father had become the servant of his own servant after Monsieur Felix entered Mon Repos. That had been the beginning of many things, all of them bad.

  I will not suffer that to happen again, he thought.

  Lerner had an old man's appetite, ravenous at the beginning but quickly appeased. Without finishing his lunch, he hastily swallowed the wine at a gulp, wheeled back to his desk, took up his manuscript and again began to read.

  * * * *

  The Eden of my childhood did not last long. In the Fifties the world's demand for cotton soared, and Papa began to dream of growing rich.

  He was not alone. The steamboats that huffed and puffed up and down the Mississippi began delivering carven furniture, pier-glasses, and Paris fashions to our community of backwoodsmen. Ladies—it seemed overnight—graduated from sun-bonnets to hoopskirts, and the men were as bad or worse, with their sudden need for blooded horses and silk cravats and silver-mounted pistols and long Cuban segars.

  In this flush atmosphere, Papa borrowed from the banks and cotton factors and bought new acres, though land had become very dear. He made trips to New Orleans to barter for workers in the slave markets at Maspero's Exchange and the St. Charles Hotel, and he rebuilt our comfortable log house as a mansion with six white columns, which—like our prosperity—were hollow and meant only for shew. But he remained a farmer, not a businessman; he overspent for everything, and could not make the new hands work, for he was too soft to wield the whip as a slave-driver must. Soon he was in debt and facing ruin, and so in 1855, during one of his trips to the city, he hired an Overseer to do the driving for him.

  'Tis hard for me to remember Felix Marron as a man of flesh. I see him in my mind's eye as the sort of shadow that looms up in a morning fog, briefly takes human form, then fades again into a luminous dazzle.

  Yet when first we met, he seemed merely freakish. Royal and I were returning from a fishing jaunt when we espied him talking to Papa, and we stared and giggled like the bumpkins we were. I suppose he was then about forty, but seemed ageless, as if he never had been born—a strange creature, very tall and sinewy, his long bony face a kind of living Mardi Gras mask with grotesquely prominent nose and chin. Though ‘twas August, he wore an old musty black suit, and I remember that despite the stifling Delta heat, his gray face shewed not a drop of sweat.

  When Papa introduced us, he ignored Royal but swept off his stovepipe hat to me, loosing a cloud of scent from his pomade, and in a penetrating stage whisper exclaimed, “Bonjour, bonjour, ‘ow be you, young sir?” Shifting an old carpetbag to his left hand, he clasped my right in his cool bony grip, causing a braided whip he carried over that arm to swing and dance. Then Papa led him away to view the quarters, and Royal and I laughed out loud—thereby proving that neither of us was gifted with prophecy.

  Papa hired Monsieur Felix (as he preferred to be called) upon the understanding that he would have a free hand to extract profit from our people and our acres. At first the bargain seemed to be a good one, for the Overseer was restless and tireless, keeping on the move (as the slaves said) from can't-see in the morning to can't-see at dusk. He had a strange way of walking, lunging ahead with long silent strides that ate up the ground, and appearing suddenly and without warning where he was not expected. And woe to any slave he found idling! Not one escaped flogging under his regime, not even Royal, whose days of idleness and indulgence came to an abrupt end. Soon he learned to dread the hoarse whisper, “Aha, tu p'tit diable,” the Overseer's sole warning before the lash fell.

  At first Papa resisted this abuse of his darker son. But the Overseer argued that to favor one slave was to corrupt all by setting them a bad example; further, that Royal (then twelve years of age) was no longer a child, and must be broken in to the duties of his station in life. Finally, that unless he could impose discipline on all our hands, Monsieur Felix would leave Papa's employ, and seek a position on a plantation that was properly run. So Papa yielded, and by so doing began to lose mastery over his own house.

  I watched Royal's first beating with fascination and horror. My own floggings at the schoolmaster's hands were but the gentle flutter of a palmetto fan compared to the savage blows administered by Monsieur Felix. Had I been the victim, I would have raised the whole country with my howls; but Royal remained obstinately silent, which the Overseer rightly saw as a kind of resistance, and added six more to the six blows first proposed, and then six again, leaving Royal scarce able to walk for three or four days.

  Thus began several years of tyranny. Even when he grew older and stronger, Royal could not strike back—for a s
lave to assault a white man, whatever the provocation, meant death—nor could he flee, for the patterollers (as we called the cruel men of the slave patrols) scoured the neighborhood. And so he bore his whippings as the others did, and let his hatred grow. In my innocence I loathed the Overseer, for I was too young to understand that he flogged our people not out of cruelty, nor indeed of any feeling at all, but as an herdsman prods his ox or a plowman lashes his mule—to wring work from them, and wealth from his acres.

  In that he succeeded. With the crops heavy—with the hands hard at work—with prices rising, and dollars rolling in, Papa felt himself no longer the descendent of Westphalian peasants, but rather a great planter and a member of the ruling class. He bought leather-bound books by the linear foot, and installed them in his den, though he did not attempt to read them; he drank from crystal goblets, though his tipple was corn whiskey drawn from his own still. He paid Monsieur Felix well, and built him a substantial house midway between Mon Repos and the slave quarters, which was where the Overseer himself stood, in the southern scheme of things. Papa thought he would be content to live there and receive wages that grew from year to year, and mayhap marry in time some poor-white slattern of the neighborhood. But in this he misjudged the Overseer's ambition.

  Applying still more pomade to his lank black hair, he took to invading our house, supposedly to talk business with Papa, but in reality to ogle my cousin Rose—then fifteen and almost of marriageable age. Though I was but a great clumsy overgrown boy with long skinny shanks and feet like keelboats, I well understood that the Overseer designed to marry into our family as the first step toward gaining control of Mon Repos. In a rage, I summoned up my smattering of French and called him cochon to his face, for his English was so poor I feared he might misunderstand if I called him swine. I ordered him never again to set foot in the house, at which he laughed in his strange soundless way. He would have loved to give me a taste of his whip, but the caste system protected me, for only the schoolmaster was allowed to beat the heir of Mon Repos.

  To get rid of me, Monsieur Felix told Papa I deserved to finish my education in the North, saying how ‘twould honor our family if I won a degree from a famous school. With money weighing down his pockets, Papa agreed, and in the summer of 1860 I was compelled to say goodbye to everyone and everything I knew, and set out for the land of the Puritans, as I imagined it. I wished to take Royal to Yale College as my valet, but Monsieur Felix warned Papa that he would run away, once in the free states. So he was doomed to stay behind, whilst I boarded a Cincinnati-bound steamer at Red River Landing for the first leg of my journey.

  I was seventeen years of age, as fresh and proud as a new ear of corn, and as green. Wearing varnished boots and carrying my shiny first top hat, I stood upon the hurricane deck, gazing down at ragged and dusty Royal, who had come with the family to say farewell. We who had been playmates now were clearly master and slave. Yet we shared a secret plan, devised during many a night-time meeting at the graveyard. If, as I anticipated, Monsieur Felix laid hands upon Rose, Royal was to kill him, and give himself up to the sheriff without resistance. I would return post-haste and testify that he had merely obeyed my orders, as a slave should, to protect my cousin's honor. As his reward, when I inherited him I would set him free. Upon this understanding, I left my rifle in a place only Royal knew—wrapped in oily rags, and tied atop a rafter in the cabin of the slave quarters where he slept.

  I raised my hand to him as one conspirator to another, and he nodded in reply, his face smooth and immobile as a mask of bronze. Rose wept, Papa honked into his handkerchief, and Monsieur Felix vouchsafed a thin arid smile, like an arroyo dividing his blade of a nose from his large blue chin. Then the whistle blew, the bell chimed, the gangplank lifted, and the muddy bank—like my youth—began drifting away from me.

  * * * *

  Siesta time had come. Lerner returned the manuscript to the safe, closed the heavy door and spun the dial. He picked up a little silver bell, rang it briskly, and within ten minutes Morse appeared like a household genie. He removed the lunchtime clutter, spread and adjusted the old man's lap robe, put a pillow behind his head, and vanished again, quietly closing the door.

  Since the back injury that had left him unable to walk, Lerner had needed such coddling to shield him against severe pains that otherwise spread up and down his spine. Yet he understood that his immobility was killing him. He could almost feel the systems of his body rusting in place, shutting down slowly. How tiresome it is, he thought, to die by inches, and with an effort of will concentrated his mind upon his story. He'd come to the end of what he'd already written; tomorrow he must carry the tale forward, weaving fragments of memory into a narrative.

  He dozed until five-thirty, waking when Morse turned on the electric chandelier and set down his dinner tray with a folded evening newspaper beside the plate. Lerner ate while perusing the unexciting developments of the day—the end of the Philippine Insurrection, the galumphing of that damned cowboy in the White House. Then the long ritual of putting him to bed began. Morse worked with the deft expertness of a hospital nurse, and by seven-thirty the old man was resting in bed, propped up on a hillock of cushions and covered with spotless linen. He sniffed the penetrating, somehow frigid smell of grain spirits left by the alcohol rub Morse had given him, then folded his hands and smiled, awaiting the high point of his day.

  "Come, come, Morse,” he whispered.

  The indefatigable one returned with a gleaming salver on which rested a sticky pellet of opium wrapped in rice paper, a crystal flask of amber bourbon, a shot glass, and a silver coffee spoon. Deftly he prepared the laudanum, dissolving the opium in the whiskey with ritualized movements, like a priest mixing water and wine.

  "I need to go and buy more of your medicine, Mr. Nick,” he murmured, presenting the drink.

  "Why not buy it from a drugstore?” Lerner demanded. “Those neighborhoods by the docks are dangerous."

  "Mr. Nick, I can do that, but it'll cost twice as much. The import tax alone is six dollars a pound, and I can buy decent opium from a Chinaman for five."

  Grumbling, the old man extracted a few bills from a drawer in his marble-topped night table and handed them over. Then in three long sips he drank the draught that ended pain and summoned sleep.

  His throat burned, he felt a sharp pain in his gut, then a banked fire that burned low, warming and soothing him. A delicious languor began to spread through his old body. He felt his weight lessen, then almost evaporate. He felt dry and light, like a balsa-wood doll floating high on still water.

  "Ah,” he whispered. “So good, so good."

  * * * *

  Morse lingered, watching him, rearranging his bedclothes to make him even more comfortable and secure. When he felt sure that Lerner was asleep, he leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Father? I need to know the word that opens the safe. Tell me the word, Father. Father? What word opens the safe?"

  Lerner grunted but slept on.

  "Shit,” grumbled Morse. “Old bastard, he don't relax even when he's snoring. I bet he keeps a bag of gold in that iron box of his."

  From the cache of bills in the night table he took a tenner, added it to the five, thrust both into his pocket, and soon afterward left the house. He slipped away into the lengthening blue shadows, his mind perhaps on pleasure, or merely on escaping for a few hours the dull round of servitude to a dying man that defined his daytime life.

  * * * *

  Lerner woke early, tasting ashes. Dun shadows filled the bedroom, but a thin white scar of daylight already ran between the red-plush window drapes, casting the shadows of iron security bars. He seized the silver bell and rang it loudly.

  "Morse—” he began as the door opened. But instead of Morse, the yellow face of the housemaid—Cleo, was that her name?—intruded, anxious beneath a spotted kerchief.

  "Oh, Mr. Nick,” she burst out, “don't nobody know where Mr. Morse is at. I been up to his room to look, and his baid ain't been slep’
in."

  Lerner stared at her. If she'd told him the sun had failed to rise in the east, he could hardly have been more astonished.

  With Cleo's help he wrestled himself painfully into the wheelchair, but there his abilities ended. A one-armed man with a spinal injury was close to helpless. A manservant had to be borrowed from next door to prepare him for the day. Lerner found the process distasteful; he hated to have a stranger see him unclothed or touch him; the fact that the man obviously disliked the work made it no easier to bear. In shaving him, the fellow nicked his face repeatedly, until Lerner sent him away with a miserly tip and a muttered curse. A barber had to be brought from a nearby shop, and he charged a whole dollar for the visit!

  By then Cleo had brought him breakfast, and it was all wrong for a variety of reasons. Yet he failed to complain about the chilly toast, hard egg, and unsugared coffee. As he entered the den a good hour late and dragged out his manuscript, he was worrying over something much more serious: the possibility that Morse might never return.

  As he'd warned last night, rough characters swarmed on the docks; the knife, the revolver, and the slung-shot were common weapons of choice; the Mississippi with its murky water, vast size, and hidden undertows was perfect for disposing of superfluous bodies—as Lerner knew well from certain experiences of his own.

  "And without Morse, how would I live?” Lerner demanded aloud, and there was nobody to answer him.

  From a desk drawer he took out a new gold-banded reservoir pen, uncapped it with fingers and teeth, filled it from his inkwell by pressing down an ivory piston, and tried to fix his mind on his story. From time to time as he wrote, he raised his head and listened. Despite the thick walls of the house, some street sounds intruded—the horn of a motor-car brayed; a seller of vegetables chanted “Ah got ni-ess al-li-gay-tuh pay-uhs"—and the house itself was never totally quiet, doors opening and closing for no good reason, a woman's starched dress (Cleo's?) rustling past in the hall.