The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  Conrad says that the true virility of man is expressed in action of the conquering kind. So I am that conqueror, and when the young man was through with the poem I felt that other rush, stronger than belonging, stronger than the desire to be a part of something—the need to take and possesses, whether it’s a scrap of land for railroad or a silver mine or a man.

  Before I left León in 1912 for the war, I sat beside the man who’d been the boy who read the poem. We were having coffee and reading the papers, news of the Marines’ landing, and he found an editorial written by a mutual friend that said “the blond pigs of Pennsylvania” had invaded “our garden of beauty.” I rather liked the turn, but he was angry on my behalf, saying, “Well you aren’t a pig.”

  “And I’m not from Pennsylvania,” I said. “Thank God.”

  Our laughter then like New Year’s gunfire, brief and loud and aimed at the sky, and I must remember this moment, his jaw tilted back, throat exposed and Adam’s apple jolting ribbed there under the skin, a horizon of white teeth flashed only for me.

  What do you remember about your man, now that the country has taken him from you? His voice. His hands on you. I’m not asking you to imagine that I feel whatever you’re feeling, that loves are the same, any more than people are. I’m asking you to imagine me feeling, alive.

  _____________________

  The place where I died was first settled by the Chorotega Indians and lost in a long and bloody war with the invading Nicaros, who worshipped a god who wore the skins of his enemies over his own.

  I crawled out of the ruins of the Hotel Ascarate, pulled myself along by broken things, bleeding from everywhere but whole enough to crawl through the smoke and the smashed furniture and into the plaza where the smoke was thick and blowing. I stood, hearing the voice of the Alabaman calling somewhere in the wreck behind. I limped off across the plaza, toward the Church and, I hoped, a way out. Sounds of rifle fire from the east, the beginning of the assault, cracking louder than the ringing in my ears. Seeing the church steps I thought of lying there and sleeping, but that was just loss of blood. I passed the Church and went into an alleyway, where in the thinned smoke and the light of a cart that had caught fire I saw the Alabaman standing there, hands on his knees, panting. Another shell struck in the plaza and I was thrown to the ground. When the chips of stone had stopped falling the Alabaman had me by the arm, pulling me up. He was holding up his hands, shouting, but I couldn’t hear what. He was grinning, and then I knew what he wanted, knew what he would say.

  I may be saner than some in our family, but I was still going to kill him. And it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d heard the man say to hell with everything, that he wanted to get out of this together. I would’ve done the same thing and the space it took in my mind is less than what’s here on the page.

  There in the shadow of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption I fell forward into the man’s chest, and he was trying to hold me up, to help, as I reached with my free hand for the pistol at his side and pulled it loose, cocked the hammer back, and drove the barrel up under his chin and fired once and again.

  My hearing would be gone for days, returning first in a seashell whoosh as I entered occupied León, but in that moment the silence gave me an awful clarity as I let his body, which couldn’t be said to have much of a head, fall to the dirt of the alleyway. I hurried to take the money from my billfold and pocket it, then slipped my billfold with its papers and identification and even poems—the things that told who I was, who I’d been—into the dead man’s jacket, the previous contents of which I took and discarded bit by bit along my way.

  I have been in my life Angel Joseph Woolsack and I have been the man in the cream-colored suit and I have been Phillip Nolan and Arthur Lee and Lucien Cartier and I have been just a nod to a boy paid to watch the gate of a house rented under one of these names and I have been a son and a brother and a lover and I have been the killer of others who were themselves sons and brothers and lovers, and I have been the one who wears his enemy’s skin. It wasn’t that night that I abandoned the name of Angel Woolsack (I’d done that long before), or even on the night with Red and mother and father and you, but this was another, further flight from what that name had meant, and all that was left of it, I imagined, would be in thoughts like yours, our father’s, our mother’s, even Red’s, that poor thing, and, I knew, in the voice of the man I was going back to. Whose name I haven’t written yet, and who I’ve lost now too. To the ’flu, two months back.

  His name was Eduard.

  There, I’ve said it.

  Now I’ll say the harder things and maybe then I can sleep.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Three

  Dusk of a dank September evening Isaac came back from Biloxi later than he should have, nursing a busted hand. He was late because he hadn’t been able to ride the bicycle, couldn’t put any weight on his right hand to hold the handlebars without pain gloving him to the wrist. So he had walked the eleven miles home pushing the bike through the last of the summer heat, in the ditches the irises boiling. When he appeared at the bend in the lane that led to their house Kemper ran to him and he was holding up that injured hand in a gesture oddly like victory though his aspect told otherwise. His shirt, she saw, was torn at the collar, his right shoulder clouded with blood.

  He sat in the kitchen while Kemper chipped at the half-melted block of ice she’d taken out of the box, and he remembered how she’d hacked at the loaf of sugar in the gone house on Deer Island, and he was smiling when she set the bowl of icewater on the table. She took his hand and dipped it in the water and she tried to understand that smile.

  —What are you doing? she said.

  —Thinking of you.

  —Isaac.

  She pulled out a chair and sat beside him. She had never known him to be violent, never known him to fight. The smile left his face and he looked tired and ashamed.

  —Please don’t lie to me, she said.

  He stared at his hand and tried to find the words.

  In the following days one Oscar Evans, a citizen of Biloxi, composed a letter to what was then called the Bureau of Investigation. By day Evans was a salesman for an insurance company, a firm-handshaker who held court in barbershops and diners throughout the county. Having learned recently of socialism he bore a special hate for all reddish behavior and so spent an increasing portion of his off-hours as an employee of the American Protective League, a patriot organization which then counted some four-hundred-thousand members in the United States. The concerns of Oscar Evans, who loved his country, and those of the League to which he belonged, were chiefly hostile immigrants, disloyalty, weak-minded liberalism, and the agitations of socialists. In light of the war, the federal government allowed the League to operate with a certain degree of extra-legal license, and though these defenders of the homeland were sworn only to report suspicious activity, their zeal often carried them further. When not harassing German-Americans or stopping young men in the street and demanding to see their draft cards, the members of the League turned their attention to their neighbors, their communities, where dissent and socialism and unmanly refusal to join those who were taking bullets in defense of your freedom meant that you deserved, they were fond of saying, a bullet yourself. So they would be vigilant listeners and takers of notes, dispatching their reports to the offices of the bureau, and that was what well-liked and firm-handed Oscar Evans did.

  In re: Isaac Patterson (no m.i.)

  Disloyal Criticism of Oklahoma Arrests of Aug. 1917 At Biloxi, Mississippi

  Employee was notified by Postmaster Gwynn that Tom Wilkins and H. R. Ladner reported that subject was overheard in the workshop of B. Patterson & Co. Stoneworks, Biloxi, Miss., saying that the arrests of slackers and draft rioters in Oklahoma was a “G—d D—d disgrace” and that the war was furthermore illegal, the draft unconstitutional, and other equally inflammatory remarks. Wilkins and Ladner, truck drivers visiting the stoneworks, reportedly then questioned subject’s d
raft status, to which subject replied with unprintable remarks about the draft, Wilkins and Ladner, and J. P. Morgan, at which point Wilkins and Ladner report an altercation occurred leaving the subject with a broken jaw and Wilkins and Ladner respectively with a collapsed eyesocket and split nose (these injuries confirmed by Postmaster Gwynn). The subject is of draft age and unregistered, lives in a settlement between Maurepas and Pascagoula, Miss., and works occasionally as a laborer at B. Patterson’s (subj.’s brother) stoneworks. The subject is also a painter of artistic pictures (employee cannot comment on content). Employee proceeded to interview Wilkins and Ladner, as well as B. Patterson, who refused. Employee then attempted to interview subject’s parents, also citizens of Harrison County. Subject is adoptive son. After being invited in by Ida Patterson, employee proceeded with preliminary questioning, which was interrupted by Joel Patterson, who ordered employee to leave premises. When employee explained credentials, Espionage Act, etc., Joel Patterson left and reappeared a short time later with a shotgun. Employee left premises unmolested and will continue investigation of Patterson and others, as mentioned in employee’s last concerning possible demonstrations and rallies, until otherwise notified or given updated orders.

  Yours,

  Oscar V. Evans, Cmdr. A.P.L., Ch. 17.8

  So Oscar Evans and others like him, who loved their country and those who are said to guard us while we sleep, sent their letters and went about their business, sat at tables while their wives brought supper, cast the same smooth looks of paternal approval on wives and children, if these were scrubbed and appropriately dressed, and slapped them with hands or belts or razor strops if they were not, and despite the fact that others were blind to the present crisis, these men felt, in the quiet accord of dinnertable or desk or favorite chair or churchpew, the awesomeness of their responsibility settle on their heads like a crown, and if you looked close you could see the welcome pain of it in their faces, like a man feels at the end of a good day’s work.

  A week later Isaac fled bleeding from a meeting of dissenters held in rural Jackson County, one of the few to escape. There had been no such gathering of white and black men in living memory, and even the old men present would not mention the last such instance, known through grandfathers and uncles, an event that had occurred when a group of freedmen and some whites aimed to vote in the election of 1868 and were likewise ridden down and terrorized into a submission maintained by resentment and fear that held for a century and on.

  But that night men were together who lived near one another and worked alongside one another, smoking, nodding to music, calling back at the speakers, who read from the Jeffersonian, a protest paper run out of Georgia by a man called Tom Watson. From the audience men called out and demanded sheets, and the paper was pieced out and torn to scraps until each man had some shred of it and was a criminal. And others took the stage and described misdeeds across the South, the raids, the arrests, the lamentable accident that befell the guardsmen and federal officers when the bridge they were attempting to cross collapsed into the Chattahoochee River. Cheers then and a blonde-bearded tenant farmer took the stage and sang “Can’t Cut the Mustard” to chide an old man at the front who’d lately taken a young wife. The old man climbed onstage and hollered out that he might couldn’t cut the mustard but he could still lick the jar. The laughter caught in their throats with the sound of engines nearing and the sweep of headlights through the trees. The trucks and cars coming to brake and men dismounting in the dust and the sodium glow with rifles and axehandles. Running then, screaming, gunshots, a riflebutt across Isaac’s forehead. His vision all blood as he veered for the opposite belt of trees, away from the lights and the screaming.

  —I told you, she said. I told you.

  —I know.

  —We’ll leave, she said. We’ll go to Cuba. Mexico …

  —No, he said. I’ll go.

  She fought down a surge of violence at his words, the hollow gesture of them. She was thinking of her brother and what it meant to be alone. She wrung his wrist.

  —You’ll have to outrun me too, she said.

  When they stopped at Isaac’s parents’ house, for a long time no one said a word. What followed was as stark as life itself: they embraced him, his parents, and then they let him go.

  Hours later they were at the terminal of the United Fruit Company, waiting on a bench beneath whirring fans to board the steamer from New Orleans to Tampico, Kemper resting her head on his shoulder, asleep. She’d been that way for a little while when Isaac saw the soldiers and the men in suits, notebooks flapping in their hands, come in.

  He sat up, tilting the brim of his hat over his bandaged forehead, trying to look like what he for all appearances was: a young husband setting off with his wife on a trip. New suit, tired eyes, nerves betrayed around the mouth. He watched the men come streaming through the doors of the terminal and others springing up from behind newspapers and luggage carts, working their way down the rows of benches asking passengers who appeared of draft age for their registration cards. The soldiers stood beside the doors, men hurrying up now and then to shake their hands, thank them for their service. Isaac leaned to get a better look, but there was the weight of Kemper’s head, the warmth of her, and he didn’t want to wake her. The smell of her hair. He couldn’t see her face, and all the better, for he could imagine it peaceful and not ringed beneath the eyes with black and still-smudged makeup from her tears at the sight of his parents. Now, he saw, a pair of young men a few rows ahead being questioned, the idiot litany of names, ages, places of birth. He tried then, as he would not long after when he stood in a line of naked men and boys awaiting inspection, to assume some of the dignity and remove he’d seen in figure models as a student. He tilted his chin and let his eyes go vacant. He hoped he looked wealthy. He felt an awful awareness of detail: Kemper’s cheek warm on his shoulder. Her hat in his lap.

  When they came for him Isaac spoke in a whisper and didn’t move, as if somehow by sheer gentleness he could keep her from seeing him be taken away. But more than her seeing, he hated the thought of her waking alone.

  When the A.P.L. man spoke, asking for his card, Kemper’s nails were in Isaac’s wrist. He couldn’t see her but he knew how her face must look, and she held him as tight as she ever had and then the man wasn’t asking anything anymore.

  Before he was hauled away Kemper pressed into his shoulder the way she did when they were on the porch, looking up at the painted sky. Where she would lie when she returned home in the days following his arrest and many times thereafter, staring at that sky of ghosts, a letter written in a holding cell or an army barracks limp on the boards beside her. She would be there through the years of his imprisonment, under the unchanging blue whose only clouds were nests of dirt daubers and spiders, and she would be there in 1919 when the man appeared who introduced himself as Rule Chandler and said he’d come to kill her.

  PART 5

  Rule

  1918 – 1919

  One

  They’d been waiting for him. Two white men in summer suits, parked outside the house where Rule Chandler rented a room, waiting for him to return from his shift at the Perdido Street warehouse of Gulf Shipping. When he came close, the nearest one, a whippy dark-haired man, either Indian or Cajun, showed Rule the pistol on his hip. Rule stopped, gathering himself, as the other man pared off from the car and circled behind him. Mid-November, the air had lost its density and the men coming for him seemed to float. Rule had just enough time to make a fist before they were upon him. Much as he’d considered that his life would likely end at the hands of a white man with a gun, Rule Chandler couldn’t help but be somewhat shook.

  Once they had him in their car, Rule pressed between them on the front seat as they tore out to the western limits of the city and beyond, the man on the passenger side took out a rice sack and tossed it in Rule’s lap, saying to put it on.

  When Rule didn’t move, the passenger leaned in, saying,

  —Come on, m�
�s negre, don’t be dat way.

  Before Rule could rear back, the passenger had him by the wrist and the driver was holding the pistol to his head.

  —The sack means you won’t see, the driver said. And if we’re worried about you seeing it means we’re worried about you remembering, which means we’re operating under the assumption that you’ll have brains in your head to remember things by when this is through and not all blown out on the side of the road, yeah?

  Rule, breathing hard for the arrested effort, for what it took not to fight, let his arms go slack and, cursing, pulled the rice sack over his own head. Inside the sack smelled of brittle grass and riceflour, and a few grains and hulls stuck to the sweat of his forehead.

  Summer of 1918 he’d been twenty-six years old and lived alone, reading dime pulps to the men he oversaw at the warehouse and, in his time alone, devouring the Tribune and the Crisis when he could get it, even as Du Bois went mad for the war in Europe. In June of that year he’d received his draft deferment as an essential laborer and befriended a white man for the first and only time in his life.

  Looking back Rule couldn’t say when exactly it had happened, on which night or early morning, on which walk from the warehouse to some bar, but Kerry Egan had appeared, hailed him, and joined him in his step. He did remember what the man first said to him: You’re the reader. Rule didn’t recognize him at first—faces having a habit of running together in the fog of work, the sweet reek of ripe fruit pouring out of the ships—and it was only when Egan said he worked the sorting line and named his foreman that Rule relaxed a bit. And a bit more when the man began to talk, walking easy beside him, not about ballgames or fights or actresses but books. Writers. Maybe because of his surprise at this, maybe because he was tired from ten hours of labor, head ringing from the groan of winches and pulleys, the clap of crates, the anxiousness that came from seeing to it that none of his crew were knocked unconscious by a gantry arm or had their own arms torn off or flattened like the thumbed end of a tube of cream (as he’d witnessed once), Rule’s guard slipped such that he didn’t go to the bar he’d originally set out for (where this white man and his running mouth would be an invasion of their respite), heading instead to a place that looked the other way and served both races. He found that he liked this man’s company. Liked the quick incisiveness of Egan’s talk, which was by turns expansive and unguarded and ran through the night as it would for many after. Those times, after work, they would meet at this or that bar and drink cold beers or California grapewine muddled with leaves of coca, which screwed their jaws tight and honed their speech into darts.