The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  When she arrived in town for her father’s funeral in January of 1919, it had been over a year since Kemper last set foot in New Orleans. The day of Isaac’s arrest, the curtain rising on sixteen months of dissolution and despair that saw her rarely leave the property on the coast, speaking to fewer and fewer people as the pandemic reached into the towns and the houses of her neighbors so that there was no one to speak to even if she’d wished.

  In the city many still went about in white paper masks, though the worst was said to be over and across the country quarantines were being lifted. She saw them hurrying by as she made her way from the depot to the streetcar line, old men with their lapels arched, women carrying cakes wrapped for the Epiphany night. Soldiers in their uniforms walking with gallant limps until they were sure no one was looking; hollow-eyed veterans in streetclothes. She tried not to stare but searched their features, their lost faces, imagining how Isaac might be when he came home. She had his letters and the letters from the parole board with her, tucked in the inner pocket of her gray coat like passports to the life she hoped to have again. Now and then as she made her way through the city, she would reach into her coat and finger an edge of the paper. She touched the letters and felt her chest go tight, as it had for days, and at any given moment she couldn’t be sure which moved her, hope or grief.

  She rode into the Garden District, crossing down from St. Charles and heading toward the river. Past the whitewashed walls of the Lafayette Cemetery, where her father’s stone stood ready, as it had for years, in this unfashionable burial ground catty-corner to the stele of the Poydras orphans. She hurried from this place already featured in guidebooks, hating this city that loves the dead more than the living.

  The house she’d grown up in was mazed with flowers sent by admirers and associates, current and former heads of state, whose cards of condolence were displayed with appropriate prominence. She didn’t recognize the servant who let her in, the woman disappearing by the time Kemper was winding through a tunnel of white-throated lilies to the front room where her father’s body was being kept. She’d read stories in the papers of corpses in the no-man’s-lands of Belgium glowing in the night as they rotted, and as she came closer to the coffin the body of her father seemed to give off a faint glow. And there beside it sat her mother.

  Pale hair veiled in black, small, sunken in a wingbacked chair, Marina sat with her eyes downcast so that Kemper couldn’t tell at first whether her mother was awake or if she’d been lulled asleep by the oppressive smell of flowers in the air. Kemper knelt beside her and touched her mother’s hand and, aching, watched the woman’s shawled shoulders lift, her chest expand and ease, just as Marina had watched in pain and awe the first swell of her only daughter’s purple ribcage and had observed this same action for months and years afterwards, just as it was when Marina opened her eyes now and saw her daughter there.

  The night of his father’s wake, Red Woolsack had Rule Chandler brought to his house. Rule hadn’t seen the man in many months but had heard through others in Woolsack’s pay about the old man’s death.

  The man at the door didn’t speak, merely let Rule in and shut the door after him. Rule heading down a narrow hallway, the wall pressing his shoulders close as a slaughterhouse chute. The hall opened on a small room, the offshoot of a kitchen, and there sat Woolsack. Dressed in half-buttoned pajamas, his feet bare on the tile, Woolsack was staring at his hands which lay flat on the table. Just beyond them, a pistol and the stock of what looked to be a shotgun half in shadow.

  —Did you grow up in New Orleans, Rule?

  —I did, he said. But some in Terrebonne Parish, out in Tigerville if you know it.

  —Is that near Cut Off?

  —Near enough.

  —I heard they used to bury people up to their necks out there and wait for the tide to come in.

  Rule laughed, but stopped when he saw Woolsack’s face change.

  —It’s not funny, Woolsack said.

  —No, boss.

  —Well, I grew up here, Woolsack said. And I should’ve left a long time ago. I think a couple hundred years should be plenty for a family to be any one place. Especially here, where everyone you meet can’t stop lying. And why should they? It’s a city that can’t stop lying. It’s built on a fucking lie (he stamped his foot) that this ground can hold. So they have their idiot traditions and bring in idiots to see them and fill guidebooks up with ghosts. Ghosts but not the massacres or the killings that made them. And since ghosts aren’t real, we can love them. Put them in the guidebooks.

  His hands lay flat on the table and he studied them now. The pistol and the shotgun not far away. And he didn’t look back at Rule when he next spoke.

  —What is there about a ghost that could frighten anyone but a child, he said.

  —I don’t know, Rule said.

  —I think I do. And it’s not the ghost itself, it’s that if a ghost exists, then there’s a life after this, and if there’s a life after this then there must be a god who owns it. Right?

  Rule said he understood, though he didn’t. Any time he was in this man’s presence, he tried his best to let most of what he said just burn up on the air like matchheads.

  —My grandfather believed in God, Woolsack said. He started out as a preacher. Not that that makes you a believer, but he was. He wrote his own gospel at the end of his life, and I can’t say whether it’s more or less truthful than the ones bound up in the Book.

  —What kind of preaching did he do?

  —I wasn’t there, I only read him. He came down here before this was a state, when people notched the ears of thieves. Got into revolutions against the Spanish, then against the Americans after the purchase. Do you know who Aaron Burr is?

  —Shot Alexander Hamilton.

  —Well my grandfather ran with him. And when Burr failed he decided to go into business and started slaving. He lived a long time doing that, and when he was old he wrote his gospel, sure as hell the world was coming to an end. Woolsack sighed. When I was little and I read his book I’d get scared, about the end.

  For the first time since Rule had come into the room, Woolsack lifted his hands from the table. Let his hands clasp gingerly, as if they’d been fighting and he’d kept them separate until now.

  —God’s the frightening thing, Woolsack said. Not the shadow, but what throws it.

  Rule nodded.

  —Is there anything, Woolsack asked, that you’d be afraid to do? Woolsack eyed him. Or maybe not afraid, but reluctant.

  —You wouldn’t want somebody who was.

  A clarity came over Woolsack’s eyes. No, he said, he wouldn’t. And that clarity ran straight through to his mind, burning up the voices like a fog. It was in that clarity, in the days after his father’s death, that he’d come to the decision to have his sister killed.

  Do not confuse madness with cruelty; like society itself, whose strength lies often in the weakness of its members, the frailty of his mind’s grasp had kept him from saying what he’d wanted for a long time now. From the moment Kemper turned away from him on her twenty-first birthday, from the moment she took her shares, what should be his, took his parents’ love, what should be his. Siblings have, in the wake of a moneyed death, destroyed each other for less. And when he asked Rule Chandler to kill her when she returned to her place in Mississippi in the days after the funeral, Red Woolsack was utterly sane.

  Kemper kept the vigil with her mother and they spoke that night as they hadn’t in years, or ever. Kemper told her about Isaac, about where they lived, the animals and birds, and the island to which she rowed on cool, calm days, at first to escape the house and the ghost of him everywhere, only to find that the islands held even more of him.

  —No children yet, her mother said flatly.

  —No.

  —Not even any dead?

  —No.

  —Well, it took us a long time too.

  Two days earlier Kemper had been on a nameless spit of sand, crouched before a flock of
curlews brought short of their migration by a front. She’d seen so many things born and hatched, these beings on their thousand-mile journeys driven by the impulse that lit in them like a coil of electric filament, something she herself did not possess. For a moment she was worried to tell her mother this, and yet she did say it.

  Marina raised her thin gloved hands and talked as if she hadn’t heard what her daughter said. Started a story about a lady, an American émigré in Havana who’d started a campaign to end the practice of bullfighting on the island, and had tried to enlist Marina to the cause.

  —I told her it was a bad American habit to take away things that don’t belong to you in the first place. And this woman said to me, But aren’t you American, Mrs. Woolsack? No, I said. I’m what we all are on this side of the ocean, what you are too, I said to her, if you’d admit it. And what is that? We’re like the mist, I said. We blow in, we settle, then we burn off and are gone.

  Kemper looked to her father’s casket, lit now with candles.

  —Where’s Red?

  —He’s at home with his family. Sick.

  —The ’flu?

  —No, thank God. He’s just exhausted.

  —Sorry to hear he’s doing poorly.

  Her mother turned, glaring for a moment.

  —He was the one, her mother said. He was the one who was with your father at the end.

  —He could’ve told me.

  —Could he, dear? Her mother glared at her for an instant before letting her eyes ease. Anyway, she said, it was too sudden.

  They were quiet for a long time. Dawn came, the windows beaded and ran. Kemper had fallen asleep and awoke to her mother’s chair empty, Marina standing over the body of her husband. Hearing Kemper stir, she spoke without turning.

  —I wasn’t with him either. She said this as a matter of fact, without regret. They had, Marina said, been together for too long. Marked each other. There’s no room in all that for regret.

  Kemper smiled at her mother and she thought of marks and what we leave behind, seated simultaneously in love and judgement, as children often are. Now she went to her mother, who was lost deep in her thoughts of a time before she was a mother, before she had been given what the years had steadily taken away.

  When she was sixteen and it was already too late, Marina had learned the secret of women and men. Not the act of lovemaking, with which she was relatively familiar, and its consequence, childbirth, which she’d witnessed a few times from the far corner of a room, but something deeper and more final. The sort of thing a mother tells her daughter. You will love them, be shaped by them, shape them, be ruined by them. And there is nothing you can do unless you choose to destroy yourself.

  Now on the morning of her husband’s burial Marina stands between his corpse and her daughter. Kemper looking as if she is waiting for her mother to say something. What does she want to hear? What is there left to say that hasn’t already been said in the twenty-five years of this child’s life? Marina steps away from the casket as the mourners begin to arrive, coming through the flowers, and she will not speak. She is locked in silence and every moment readying for the greater silence still to come.

  Four

  Ghosts filing through the graveyard gates, that’s what they looked like. But not the ghosts of a single moment in time, as those of a housefire or a trainwreck might be—all bound together by the common circumstance of their deaths—these people seemed like the ghosts of many pasts, moving parallel to one another and all blind.

  Rule at his appointed place, at one end of the side-street entrance to the cemetery, watching them. This family. The oldest ghost, the mother, in a black lace shawl walking under her own power, which seemed considerable, followed closely by the daughter. Broad-backed for a woman and darker than the rest of them, she was the only one who looked up from the pathway and saw him. A tired glance at Rule through the mesh of her veil, and for a moment she seemed to recognize him. Rule nodding gravely, the woman going on with that look still wearing her face. She hadn’t met him yet, though the day was coming when she would. Last the son, whose shoulders were supported by a pair of suited men Rule didn’t recognize but knew by their wagging jowls were not the kind of men he needed fear. No, he caught himself, they’re exactly the kind. The son who paid Rule to watch him, to watch the wife and children who lived increasingly in fear of him, to watch his house and his office. And who knew how many other men like Rule there were; there might be one at every corner of the cemetery, to ensure the safety of the man who was now so nearly destroyed Rule thought a stiff wind might carry him away. Red Woolsack had not left his father’s side for the three weeks it took the old man to die of pneumonia, at first slipping notes out to servants, then having a telephone line (which the old man couldn’t otherwise abide) run into the sickroom. And when he emerged and the old man was dead, Rule heard first then saw for himself, Woolsack was broken. Or broken worse. Whatever there had been of him, that sorry struggle you could see happening behind his eyes was gone.

  That night Augustine came to his room. Past midnight, he was lying beside her in bed, watching how the light that passed through the curtains played over her face, and in one breath told her everything.

  When he was through she sat up, shedding the sheets like water.

  In her eyes, that knife-edge glint.

  —We could leave, she said. Go away.

  He rolled onto his side and put his hand on her smooth calf.

  —It’d have to be pretty damn far.

  —I know a place, she smiled.

  —Don’t you start that island.

  —Why not, Rule? Let’s go. You’ve got the money.

  —I got half the money.

  —Rule, why the hell not?

  —First, I don’t speak French, he said and when Augustine didn’t laugh he turned his words serious to match. Second, he said, you got the United States Marines there. You want to deal with that?

  —We’ve got them here too. You think we’re any less occupied here than there? Here we got ones in uniform and ones who you can’t tell until they’re on you. At least on that island you can see them for what they are.

  —There’s other places, he said. There’s people going north.

  —You don’t get it, she said. Whatever way we go, it’s all South.

  She’d spoken without stirring and he lay before her as you might at the foot of a boulder, something immovable and defiant of the forces that would wear it down. When he shut his eyes Rule thought of rocks turned seaward and lashed with waves. He thought of black voices speaking in another language, let himself imagine them as little pieces of her voice, Augustine’s voice, so that he wouldn’t be a stranger there at all but becoming more a part of her. He saw himself on a green hillside, mist rolling slowly past him and down into a richer valley. Now, curled beside this woman whose country and tongue were not his own, in a small, close room, air stale with sweat and liquor and smoke, in a shabby corner of a city overseen by stone Confederates and monuments to the murderers of men like him, Rule saw his life and what it could be.

  —All right.

  —All right?

  —Yeah, he said. Let’s do it.

  Before he could raise himself to meet her eyes she’d swept over him. She made no effort to hem her voice, and in the morning she was readying her bags and he was buying his ticket to Mississippi.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  One day as he was dying, thoughts of his wife had come swooping hawklike down on Joseph Woolsack and the racing, frightened thing his brain had become; the next day his body suddenly remembered its capacity for desire and he was stricken with want for her for the first time in years. Then he was sapped, weak, and someone had to put him to bed. Hours then of hacking, choked for air. He passed through waves of pain, chips of ice burning like coals on his tongue. And he saw the submarine that had been dredged out of Bayou Saint Jean, which he’d seen scuttled as a child on the day of the invasion, and which he’d brought his own children to see fifte
en years later. This wonder, among the great mysteries of his life. He saw his children rushing ahead of him, trampling the grass and the bursts of white star chickweed on their way to the iron black thing that stood at the edge of the water like a portal to his own childhood. (Now the seas were full of submarines and Joseph had lately taken a rather inordinate and unpatriotic pleasure in this fact.) He woke from this vision and rolled over and asked his son, Red, if he remembered that day. The boy had not been born yet, Joseph realized, but was pleased when he said that he did remember. Of all his children, how strange that this was the most loyal, the most caring. If only, Joseph thought, they’d stop putting coals in my mouth. Another night and his throat was filling with phlegm and he remembered crossing the bar at San Juan del Norte, south of the Miskito in Nicaragua, in a too-small whaleboat with a fool captain who said he’d be damned if some native nigger would pilot him to shore; the boat flipping and Joseph washed to the bar, gasping, trying to stand in the shifting sand as he watched the upturned boat, the captain and his men clinging, carried toward the breakers; the water rising all around him, waves breaking over his head, filling his nose, his throat; he cannot breathe; turning to face the shore and seeing the beachfront and the palms bending in the wind, this giving onto a familiar marshland to his left, almost like home; sure that he would die, and being without children yet, he thought only of Marina. Now, many years later, drowning in his bed, there would be no boat from onshore to come and save him. And with what remained of his breath he shouted for his son, for whoever was there, to give him the pistol.

  This was the other great mystery of his life: his long search for the pistol his father had used to commit suicide. The thing had in fact belonged to Joseph, a gift from father to son, specially made and engraved with his name. That his father had chosen his (of all the old man’s trove of firearms) would mark him all his days, and the pistol, first hidden by his mother, then confiscated along with the other guns by Union troops, would be something he hunted, as if it held the answer. So from the time he was fifteen he’d begun to take long walks into the city and haunted the shops of pawnbrokers and gun dealers, telling no one why he went or what he searched for. When he traveled north he did the same, thinking perhaps a young soldier had brought the pistol home as a prize. And then it became such a habit that there was nowhere Joseph Woolsack visited that he didn’t stop by some dusty shop and peer among the cases. He finally told someone: Angel, his oldest son, then a young man just out of school. He admitted it as you might any addiction, with great reluctance and no small amount of fear. He could see the worry in the boy’s face when he told him, could damn near see the thought burning in his son’s mind: You’ll use it too, won’t you. But Angel had been a good son then and placed advertisements and sought out dealers, chased down leads that proved fruitless. All for nothing and now that son was gone, his daughter gone, and the child beside him didn’t listen but kept putting coals on his tongue.