Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  “Oh, Nick, why don’t you please go to bed and sleep it off,” Sheri said.

  Casually, Tyler reached across the table and tore one of the beers out of the plastic ring. “Do you mind?”

  “Hell no. I’m happy to share it. There’s more in the kitchen.”

  Lily took one, too, and opened it. She and Tyler drank.

  “Now we’re getting the right start,” Nick said. He turned to Sheri. “Come on, sugar. You have one, too.”

  She took the last one, muttering, “If I have one, it’s one less for you.”

  “The spirit of sacrifice. That’s my sugar cookie. God bless her.” He held his can up as if to toast Sheri, who ignored him, drinking hers. He touched her arm, then folded his hands in his lap and looked at Tyler. “You ever notice, women never forget a thing. Not one single goddamn thing.”

  “No, I never did notice that,” Tyler said.

  “Well, you’ll learn it.” He smiled, and shook his head. “Heh. Boy, you will soon learn that.” He looked at Sheri. “Won’t he learn that, sugar?”

  “Please go sleep it off,” Sheri said.

  “I ain’t got a thing to sleep off, sugar. I’m sober as an elementary school teacher on Monday. How much have you had to drink today?”

  “I knew it when Mama said you and Daddy had gone into town. I knew exactly what this night would be.”

  “Well, you’re something. You’re—what’s the word? Prescient. I believe that is the word. It’s a word, by the way, that I would never use on a customer.”

  Tyler gulped beer from his can, then yawned. “I’m beat.”

  “Shit,” said Nick. “It’s not even nine o’clock. Don’t you people watch television?”

  “We’re both tired,” Lily said.

  “Sheri won’t watch it, either. Will you, Sheri?”

  Sheri didn’t answer.

  “I said, ‘Will you,’ sugar?”

  Lily wanted to scream at him. But then it seemed that the house itself, the walls, contained some form of unspoken mischief; everyone baiting everyone else because of something tainted in the air that seeped through the joists and beams, the cornices and lintels and wainscoting of the place. Nick Green, apparently watching her gaze wander over the walls of the room, now explained that this very old and drafty house had been built by a slave owner way back in 1842. He sat back in his chair and regarded the angles of ceiling and molding, entrance hall and windows, with a sodden, appreciative sigh. “There’s a small crookedness in the fireplace, that you can see if you look for it—the angle of the mantel lists slightly to one side, and we don’t know if it settled this way over time, or if the original builder got it wrong—you know, miscalculated in some way, exactly as he, uh, miscalculated so many other things: the future, for instance, and the inevitable death of the institution through which he, ah, this distant somebody, achieved the wealth to build such a house in the first place. His name—we know—was Thomas Bilbain. He built the house and lived in it until he died, in 1858. Think of it—guy never saw the end of slavery. His son Joshua fought with Forrest, came out unscathed, and then died with Custer, believe that or not. Guy went to observe. Imagine it. He paid a big price for his curiosity. Anyway, his younger brother Percival kept the house into old age, and then sold it in 1903, to a watchmaker named—hell, honey, what was the name of the watchmaker? Shit. Millhausen, or Munchausen, some German guy who died here after about forty years of solitude and letting everything go. Place was empty for almost twenty years. Somebody tried to make a run at it selling antiques, but that didn’t last long. And then Sheri’s daddy bought it for a song the year Sheri was born. This luxury is what Sheri grew up with. And people of my daddy’s generation used to bring girlfriends here when it was empty. Think of that. Hell, I might’ve been conceived here if it’d been anybody else than my daddy.”

  “Nick,” Sheri said. “Please. That’s enough now.”

  He laughed. “Someday I’d like to go into the county offices and find out more about the first guy. Bilbain. If I wasn’t so damn good at selling cars, I might could be a literary figure. Write a book about the slave owner Bilbain. Who came into life and lived it with slaves and went out of it with slaves. We’re all so used to the cataclysm of the Civil War and the dividing line and all that, and thousands of people lived and died in the old system and never really knew they were perpetuating a crime against humanity.”

  “You don’t think they knew?” Lily said.

  “Well, it was Washington who said ‘I tremble to think that God is Just.’”

  “It was Jefferson,” said Lily.

  “No.”

  “I think it was Jefferson,” Tyler said. “It doesn’t sound like Washington.”

  Nick looked at Sheri. “Your vote?”

  “I don’t care,” she said, rising.

  “Hell,” said Nick. “I’m always getting the founding fathers and mothers mixed up. Yesterday I thought Martha Washington was Jefferson.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Sheri said. She looked at Lily and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Galatierre came into the room looking composed, but with effort. One strand of her hair had come loose, and trailed down the left side of her face. She said, “I’m so sorry for all this. I meant us to have a nice welcome-home dinner.” Her expression was impassive, almost serene—but there was the slight disarray of her hair.

  “I’m gonna go watch some television,” Nick said. “If I said or did anything that offended anybody, I apologize.” He left the table. Before he went out of the room he turned. “Sheri, want to join me?”

  She stood, without speaking, and followed him out.

  “I’m sure it’s been a strange evening for you both,” Millicent Galatierre said, without quite looking at either Lily or Tyler. “I know it has been for me. We aren’t usually so close to the surface with our emotions around here.”

  NINE

  1

  November 1878

  Dear—someone,

  A cow wandered into the lane in back this morning. I call this lane “the sporting region” because of what is likely to wander in there—it’s even bandied about here that burglars use it. Mother is slightly less ill these days. Father will be home soon from his American expedition, and so she won’t have to worry about him. I couldn’t get the cow to move. It stared at me and blinked, and looked stubbornly calm.

  —Shoo! I said. I didn’t want to get too close. Shoo! My gamecocks strolled under its hooves and it stood there and tolerated this. Nothing ordinary in life, but that it achieves an exotic cast when set in incongruous circumstances—this bovine, chewing and staring in the lane, blocking egress. Mother saw it from the window and was frantic, worried that it might damage the garden, such as it is. I went inside and took the broom from Mrs. Barrett, who thought it was a sign from God, since the church bells were ringing again—somebody’s wedding. I swatted the cow across the backside with the broom and it lumbered into the fence, almost took it down, then advanced farther into the yard, Mother screaming from the window.

  —It’s just a cow, I said. For God’s sake, darling. Close your window and draw the curtain. There were people stopping in the street. She kept yelling. Then she was laughing, and I laughed, too. Our own hysteria amuses us sometimes. It’s a predicament we share. We look and feel silly to each other and we laugh.

  Finally I convinced our ruminant friend that it wasn’t such a good idea to occupy the Kingsley yard, and off the poor thing went, stupid and round-sided as a very big barrel, and crook-legged and aimless. Mother relaxed into her steadiest self and closed the window, and I was alone in the yard with my weapon, my broomstick, like the witches in all the old stories. There was mud on the hem of my dress, which Mrs. Barrett bothered to point out.

  —Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Barrett.

  Oh, silent friend, if you ever come to read this, I am writing you from a gray day at the end of a cold, rainy fall in a country called Britain, and I am sequestered in my room, looki
ng out over Highgate. I am presently sixteen years old. I do not know where my life will end. I have no sense that it leads anywhere but here, and I have such desires, friend.

  2

  MARY’S FATHER is set to arrive from America, and she and Charley travel by coach, south, through Surrey and Hants, to Southampton, to meet him. They spend the night in an inn at the edge of a small village above Winchester. There are revelers in the tavern below, and their songs rise through the loose floorboards. Mary lies awake, hearing it, and then realizes that for some time she has been listening to silence. She must have slept. She goes to the window and sees that it has snowed in the night. The sky’s clear now, and starry, and there’s a bright moon. The fields are white, pristine. One black horse stands near the crest of the nearest hill. She watches it walk out of view, then reappear farther along, toward where a body of water shimmers with silver light. It takes her breath away. It’s so different from the confines of Highgate.

  In the morning, they have bread-and-butter pudding for breakfast, and Charley drinks a cup of strong coffee. It’s a bright, freezing, early December day, and the sky is a rich, dark, cloudless winter blue. An unreal blue. Where it snowed, last night, and the road was slogged with mud and slush, there are now heavy, dry, frozen ruts in the surface. Even though the wheels of this coach are equipped with springs, the ride is rough. Charley feels sick to his stomach, and sits back against the padded seat with his hat over his face. He wants air. Mary’s cold, but she opens the curtain, and the chilly wind rushes in. They pass Guildford, and ride through the lovely countryside north of Winchester, and Mary takes in the icy air, thinking of the miles gliding away slowly under the wheels, the distance opening from London. She thinks of her father approaching the channel from the vast reaches of the sea, coming home.

  Southampton’s brittle-looking in the sunlight—old, and intricately laced with white borders of snow—snow still on the window frames and doorways, still stacked atop the towers and dormers—and the narrow streets are rutted even more deeply than the country roads. Mary sees the shop fronts, and the signs rattling and swinging in the bright wind. Crooked columns of coal smoke rise from chimneys, above brick buildings so dark with soot they look charred. The houses on the outskirts are tightly surrounded by the winter brown of shrubs and the dark green of pines, and the gray-blue splendor of spruces. The outbuildings look like afterthoughts. They ride through the busy streets, toward land’s end, where the darker line of the ocean makes the sky seem almost pale by comparison. But for this, the town might as well be London.

  The harbor’s a thicket of masts. A thousand smaller boats rock in the tide, up close. Rats scurry among the piles of refuse on the dock. The coachman stops the horses, and Mary gets out alone, even as Charley scolds her for it. He looks really very much the worse for wear, his eyes glazed over, his skin pale, with a greenish cast.

  —Please wait here, Mary says to the coachman, who gets down from his perch and turns his back on them, tending to the horses. The coachman had wanted a half sovereign, and Mary has given him only a crown.

  —Are you about to be sick? Mary asks Charley.

  —Shut it, he says.

  They’re standing in a crowd of others. There’s already a ship at anchor, but it isn’t The Mercury. An old man tells Charley that it’s a merchant vessel, bound for India, The Aria. You can’t quite make out the letters on the bow for the algae attached to it. Some men are slung in ropes, working at it all with rags and brushes. Mary and Charley go into a small dram house, and sit at a table in the window, which looks out at the bustle and confusion of the harbor.

  Charley orders spiced tea, and drinks it down fast, as if worried that the potboy might change his mind and ask for it back.

  —I wonder if Dunraven will come with him to the ’ouse, Mary says.

  Charley gives her a look.

  —Sound your aitches.

  —What’s got into you?

  Charley puts his hands up to his face.

  —I don’t want conversation, now, please, he says.

  She waits a moment. Out the window, she sees a sail on the narrow band of horizon visible through the slowly rocking vessels.

  —Is that The Mercury?

  Charley squints.

  —No.

  Mary stares at one of the docked ships, and then reaches across the table to take his hand.

  —What?

  —It’s already in. Already ’ere. The Mercury. See it? The fourth one down. I can see the letters on the bow.

  Charley stares, then sits back and looks around them.

  —He’s already come in? Then where is he?

  Mary stands, pays the proprietor, and goes back outside. Charley steps up behind her. They cross to the edge of the dock and walk along it, toward the ship.

  —Mary, wait for me, he says.

  There are too many people. They have to jostle and push their way along. When they reach the quay ramp with its docked tug, they see George Kingsley standing with Lord Dunraven and several other passengers, all looking pale and shaken. Mary approaches, hurrying ahead of Charley, who reaches for her arm to detain her. Their father sees them in that instant, and his face changes, becomes more starkly itself. Mary sees the bones of his cheeks, the gray in his hair. He looks played out, spent. Charley shoulders in front of Mary, proud of his new height, and gives their father a manly handshake. Mary, forgetting herself, throws her arms around his neck.

  —Father! It strikes her again, disturbingly, that he’s mortal, and that even if he has escaped slaughter on the savage, faraway plains of America, he will eventually be taken from her. She tries to hold tight, and he takes her wrists, forcing them down to her sides. He gazes at her in obvious disbelief.

  —These, he says to Lord Dunraven, are my children.

  Dunraven bows chivalrously, though there is also about his expression the dim appearance of someone who has discharged a necessary but not altogether pleasant duty. He’s a big, heavy man with dark-red hair and thick red side-whiskers. His face has an odd slung-forward appearance, and Mary realizes after the first few moments that he has an overbite, which he is at some pains to conceal—with his hands, with a sort of forced jutting of his jaw, and with talk. When he talks, the overbite is not so obvious. His teeth are squarish and yellow, and seem too large for his mouth. His eyes are so deep set that he appears to have a permanent squint.

  Mary is quite certain that she has never seen anyone uglier than Lord Dunraven.

  —We had a death onboard, George Kingsley says in a somber voice to Mary. The ship’s captain died of apoplexy. The first mate brought us in. The chap was leading us in the Sunday prayer, and dropped over dead in mid-sentence. He didn’t even look surprised. No expression on his face at all, nothing on the other side of the eyes. They emptied out, reflected light, and he went over like a sack of feed.

  —Look here, Kingsley, let me take you people to London in my carriage, Dunraven says. I have some business to transact there. You can have all your specimens and your artifacts brought up in a wagon, correct? Come along with me, why don’t you.

  George Kingsley turns to him with something of the air of an excited boy. He stammers:

  —Why, that would be wonderful, sir.

  —We’ve already paid for a coach and four, Mary says, low.

  Mr. Kingsley stares at his daughter for a moment.

  —Well, dismiss it. Why didn’t you bring the brougham? We have a perfectly workable carriage, Mary. He faces Lord Dunraven again, and seems ill at ease.

  —We discharged Mr. Bethwaite, Father. And the horses have been sold to pay for Charley’s school.

  —Enough, girl, their father says. Such details are tedious. We shall hire a new hostler and there’s an end of it.

  Mary walks over and dismisses the hired coach, while George Kingsley arranges with the harbormaster to have everything taken up to London in a wagon. This takes some time. Mary joins Charley, and Dunraven, who stands waiting, one hand on his hip, the other i
n the side pocket of his coat. The coat is a shade of reddish brown out of which his hair seems to grow, as if sprung from the cloth of the collar. He sees Mary gazing at him, and turns slightly away, evidently impatient at having to wait. Then he looks back, and sees that she’s still watching him.

  —Look here, he says.

  But then her father walks up, and they all make their way out of the dock area, past the public house and on, to a long line of wagons and carriages at the entrance to the harbor. Dunraven’s black coach is there, attended to by a pair of young men. Mary and Charley climb in first, followed by their father. Dunraven gives some instructions to the two coachmen, then climbs in himself. He and George Kingsley sit across from Mary and her brother.

  —You’ve gotten to be quite a tall girl, Mary’s father says.

  She nods politely, but doesn’t speak. And then she senses Charley’s bruised feelings, not to have been noticed.

  —Charley, too, she says.

  —Yes, I did see that, too.

  Charley prods her surreptitiously with his elbow, and when she turns to him, he gives her a look that expresses his disaffection with her for saying anything.

  The coach seems even more unstable on its springs than the one she hired for the journey down here.

  They ride along in the jarring quiet. Dunraven has a distinct line running across his forehead where a hat had shaded that part of his head from the sun. Below the line, he’s ruddy and healthy-looking; above it he’s paste-white, and the contrast, along with his deep-set eyes, makes him appear to be frowning deeply.