The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  A pair of men in olive on horseback, the brims of their hats, Montana Peaks, cocked askance their white faces. U.S. Marines on patrol or just wandering in the vagaries of the occupation that had begun in 1915 and would last for twenty years. A quarter mile away and coming up the road. Augustine telling him to be calm, and he had been on the few occasions they’d encountered American soldiers—feigning no English, looking away from them as though they were the sun. Now he saw the Marines had rifles across their laps and they were not clearing the way.

  He halted the mules there on a strip of road not much wider than the wagon itself as the Marines came abreast and, jostling, rode up.

  Rule would not be the first to speak, picked a place beyond the men to look.

  The Marines exchanged a glance and one said, Will, get down and check that cart. The other, Will, scabbarded his rifle and did what the first said.

  —Keep an eye on that gal, Will said over his shoulder.

  The mounted one said he would, then spoke directly to Rule, gesturing around his words.

  —See anybody else on the road today? Hommes étrangers?

  Though it killed him Rule gave his head a doggish tilt, saying, Non, non. As he did he felt the pistol he wore beneath his coat, hard and nudging his hip. Felt its insistence but also saw himself dead by the side of the road, Auga alone. He tried, without moving his head, to watch the Marine who’d gotten down.

  —We’re looking for six men, the mounted one said, counting it out on his fingers. Mal hommes. Très très mal. Bandits, no?

  Rule was shaking his head, feeling the presence of the other solider stirring now in the wagonbed, lifting the tarp, felt the man’s eyes traveling up Augustine’s back, and he’d turned to watch him when he heard the sound like the snapping of a green branch.

  When he looked to the road he saw the Marine still mounted for a moment, eyes huge, a cane knife grown from both ends of his neck. Then olive drab awash with blood and the horse beneath him unmoving as the Marine’s rifle was taken carefully out of his hands and he tilted to one side and slid into the arms of the men who’d appeared from out of the mist. Rule counted five. Black men in loose ragged pants, some shirtless despite the cold, they held the reins of the horses and eased the body of the Marine to the ground. The silent, perfect motion of a moment. Now the shock had broken and the other Marine was shouting No and scrambling down from the wagon reaching for his hip as he ran forward. He fell with Rule’s bullet in his back and lay moaning, legs in the road and his body hanging over the edge as the echo of the shot went the length of the valleys and returned. Rule had flung one hand over Augustine’s chest and he could feel her heart pounding. The men in the road said nothing to him or each other, only moved as if their every motion was agreed upon before, two holding the horses while another pair went to attend the man Rule shot. This left a tall and shirtless man with long brittle hairs trying at his chin and moustache, who strode up to Rule and stared at him with smoking eyes.

  He’d lowered the pistol. The man’s chest and trunk were home to scars of all patterns and his ribs rose and fell without the sound of breath.

  —Americain?

  —Wi.

  The man with the smoking eyes nodded and made a noise at the roof of his mouth and the pair came carrying the shot Marine, who they draped along with his fellow over their saddles, then returned to their leader with the pair of carbines, which he slung each over a shoulder. Then the man gave a last look at Rule before he and his men passed back into the mist. Rule sat trembling with shock and outrage for a moment when a boy appeared with fern frond bundles in his hands and swept the dirt clean in careful strokes as he crossed the road and disappeared.

  Augustine was slapping at his hand.

  —Go, she hissed. Go.

  She didn’t say another word until they were in Pétionville and that was to the postmaster. She would never look at Rule the same again, which is not to say she loved him any less but that this other side of him had come like something that swept out of the sky and she couldn’t forget it. She now imagined it circling out of eyeshot, always.

  They survived that day on the ridge road and would survive the occupation and later incursions and purges, and though only one of their sons would survive the Duvaliers, their grandchildren would be there for the next American invasion in 1993 and their great-grandchildren, born in Liberty City, Miami, would return as missionaries when the earthquake struck almost a century later. And Rule Chandler might have seen it all from that great height on the ridge, his head dizzy with the whirl of time.

  Five

  In the morning they were moving, the Packard steaming and choking over roads whose pavements ended and became long stretches of shell and gravel and then sand. Isaac had brightened some, smiled at her now and then, his hand finding hers on the steering wheel, but at other times, when the road stretched long and vacant save for them, the hollowness returned. She watched, waited, patient with him as you might be with a child. They bought smoked fish from roadside stands and pieces of fruit; parked in empty fields and slept in the open air.

  Down the throat of Florida, winter a brittle, hollow skin filled suddenly with warmth. A ways outside of Gainesville, the roadside lined with shambling men chained about the ankles, prisoners hacking at the grass. When she glanced to him Kemper saw her husband’s eyes tunnel, and he kept quiet for a long time after they’d passed the workgang and were alone again. She turned back to let him be with his thoughts, which were not of imprisonment, in fact, but of times further back, unwitting flashes of his childhood: a man’s voice saying the world would end with falling stars, with the good transported to heaven and the bad left to be shackled and wracked by devils and stung by great scorpions that crawled from smoking holes in the ground. A man’s voice saying this over and over, the sun rising and setting with his voice. Then woods and roads and rain, and chasing the hurt came something he couldn’t place: a woman holding his hand to her mouth, kissing a pain away.

  Kemper came to anticipate Isaac’s lapses into silence and filled them with her voice. Her hand on his thigh. They spent a night in the village of Tarpon Springs, were drawn into a saint’s feast by the Greek people who lived there, urged to dance and in their awkward passes were seen by an old woman who lived nearby, a woman formerly of Cyprus and who raised her glass and drank, knowing something of the strange and errant paths love takes you down. They went to bed drunk and Kemper said something funny as they lay in bed, and he, to her great surprise, added to it and their laughter then was new and wild. The sound of hope. He was, she thought, getting better, though it would be a long time before he resembled the man she’d known, and even then there was the needling feeling that he was something she had recreated from memory. But for now she took what she could and held back her fear and drove.

  They went through Tampa and farther south, into reeking stretches of phosphate pits. The Bone Valley, as it was known. The Florida horizon shouldered by great mounds of clay, enormous clouds of dust rising from the pits where state prisoners mined the makings of fertilizer to feed the depleted soils of the tropics, veins of what had once been beings who swam here when this was the sea.

  When they were in clear air again, they pulled off the road and parked. She laid her head on his shoulder and soon his fingers found her hair.

  —I don’t want to die, she said.

  He put his mouth to her hair, spoke soft as sleep.

  —Do you want to have a baby, he asked.

  The laugh she gave almost broke him. Rising just a little, Kemper pressed his mouth shut.

  —I said I didn’t want to die, not that I want to live forever.

  It was a moment before Isaac understood what she meant, in the same way he understood that they would be together for as long as they could. Then they were driving again, in silence, darting touches as the state that had yet to claim the sunshine as its own sank slowly into the sea. If you are quiet for long enough in a wild place, you come awake to the gigantic movements
of your heart. That stirring you feel, nameless and constant, are the lives that are lost within your own. They are not yours to bring back or reckon with, and in fact never were.

  PART 8

  The Fugitive Quality

  1961

  Once when he was a student at the School of Design a noted painter had come to give a lecture on form. This must have been 1909 or 1910. Early fall, Providence not yet locked in snow. For two hours the painter spoke, his clear Northern voice lancing through the air of the chapel, aimed at hearts not yet awake as the young men seated before him scribbled notes or drowsed. He spoke about the spirit of Art and the true meaning of permanence. Isaac sat far in the back, carving worm-trails with his thumbnail in the wood of the facing pew. The names of the boys he sat beside, and those of his teachers, and that of the man who spoke, would all leave him someday, but at the end of his life, in the middle of the twentieth century, when the birds were dying and the world was deep in its slow, rasping collapse, something the teacher said returned to him.

  The man had been talking about permanence of line and gave the example of a lesser-known master, some Italian, whose self-portrait hung in the Louvre. In three hundred years of storage and display, the portrait had been so mishandled and scarred that the master’s face looked out at you through a web of mauling: smoke-stains and blistering, lines crackling at their edges like scars that were never stitched. And yet, the painter asked, had this destruction, great as it was, ruined the work?

  No, he said. The master’s line, his forms, are so powerful that they carry through the obliterated place.

  Isaac had for many years laid down layers of scarring over his former life. During the latter half of the 1930s he haunted shanty camps and the dead acres of port towns. He drank himself mindless for a time in the company of other desolate men, woke one morning to find a fellow screaming for light though the sun fell full on his face. The night before the man had tapped the fueltank of a Model T and carried back a pan of denatured alcohol to their camp. Blinded now, his eyes rolled wild and pleading. He died soon thereafter and the camp broke up, some gone in pairs like roadside dogs and others, like Isaac, alone.

  Days and nights spent prowling docks and then within the holds of merchant ships. He saw far countries, cities to the north whose machinery had halted as if spellcast, and southward, towns beyond poverty, where the Depression had reigned long before it had a name. He left no mark and all he owned he carried with him.

  Of that period no work of his survives. The last time he touched paint had been the archway mural of a public library on the Mississippi coast, a W.P.A. project given him thanks to the entreaties of a few remaining New Orleans admirers, those who remembered the promise of his early days, and a letter forged by his wife in the guise of an eminent critic. They had, he and Kemper, returned to the United States in February of 1932, their money run thin after years abroad, and she hoped this mural would wake something in him that had been dormant for a long time. The flash of life she’d loved when they first met.

  The library mural, the last of his paid work, had been intended as an ode to the workers of the region, the industry of their land and bodies, but those who came to watch the work saw a few scarce human figures (and one of these a black man, and another a Native) crowded out by patterned forms of animals like waves washing over them, repetitions of crawling, leaping, swimming things. The furtive man on his scaffold answered no questions and his wife was no better, so a band of irritated taxpayers petitioned the Works Progress Administration to have him removed. And he was, or at least he would have been. The local administrator arrived in Biloxi to find the worksite already abandoned, the painter gone, and it took some wandering until the administrator could find a Mississippi taxpayer with an answer, which was that the man had disappeared shortly after the sudden death of his wife.

  In fact, Kemper’s death was anything but sudden. It had been with her, unknown, for all her life. Lived in the orbit of her skull, in the lachrymal arch of her right eye, the place of tears. Nestled in webs of nerve and pressing glands that made her weep sometimes, and, rarer, gave her milk, it started as tissue the size of a pinhead. When it killed her, the tumor had grown to the size of a newborn’s heart. She had in the past complained of dark patches, doubles, blurs. What doctors they visited found nothing. Then one day on the water she pointed out a small sailboat scudding toward them, not fifty feet away. Isaac’s eyes had narrowed and he turned to her bemused. There was no boat, he said, just birds and pilings. When she looked again the boat was still there, firm in form, but had halted, and it set there as though at anchor until she looked away. Lying to herself and to him, she laughed, joked about glasses, but beneath it all Kemper wondered how long she’d been seeing things that weren’t there. She put her fear away and tried to rest while he worked on the mural, until the afternoon when she was beside him in the car, riding home.

  What happened lasted for less than five minutes, but was enlarged by time and guilt to come. The last sunlight racing them down the coast, Isaac tired from the day spent in the library arch, his neck throbbing, so that at first he didn’t notice how she held her head and sighed. Kemper said she had a headache and he said the last thing he could be sure she heard.

  We’ll be home soon.

  And he could be sure because she smiled, pained. He would remember that expression, the last time she owned her features. Then he looked away and a moment later heard her groan and the smell of shit hit him and he turned and saw her slump forward. He threw his arm across her chest and tried to hold her up as he whipped the car onto the shoulder of the road and braked, cracking his head against the wheel in the process. The car came to a halt in a patch of sand at the foot of a pier where, farther out, a crowd of children gathered at the legs of old men fishing. But Isaac didn’t see them, he was trying to keep her up, touching her face, begging her to wake up, to tell him what was wrong, and the people didn’t see him until afterwards, so he was helpless as the movements of her mouth slowed and the noise she made came from deeper and deeper in her body until it was gone.

  At the end of the pier a ray had been brought up on an immense snatchhook and lay encircled by the children and the fishermen, thrashing. The children watching, silently, the death of this strange thing, a progress steady as the sunset on the water beyond them. These lives that live beneath our own, lives we do not recognize until we wrench them up into air they cannot hope to breathe, we know them only in their last great gasps and bursts of energy, which sputter finally out and leave us asking where that life has gone.

  The children hailed a passing motorist who brought Isaac and Kemper to the hospital in Biloxi, where she lived, Isaac was told, for another two hours. He was not there; he had to be restrained. His veins pumped with sedative. Trapped within soft walls of calm. He woke in a sparse white room and gathered his sanity long enough to be unshackled and to oversee the burial of his wife, exactly three days later, at which point he abandoned it altogether.

  He never regained it, not in any firm sense. Not in the decade of abandonment or that of labor or that of solitude. And when, after many years, he did return to the Mississippi coast, Isaac found the islands overtaken by soldiers, some devoted to the development of chemical weapons and others to the destruction of captured munitions. Cat Island, where he’d lain on blankets with Kemper watching night herons stalk out of the reeds, had been given over to training attack dogs. Driven mad by the explosions from neighboring islands, the dogs had been turned loose after V-J Day and came charging in a pack down the beach, snarling and knapping for Isaac when he banked. Later that same day, he watched from his borrowed boat as barges dumped shells and grenades in the passes, drums of mustard gas. And he saw the smoke rising from the redbrick incinerator on Horn Island, where test subjects were burned. If human beings in these latter centuries are charged with staying sane in the face of such affronts, he was not among the blind who could.

  Now at the end of his life he’d taken to drawing the dead.
The birds littering the beaches and the snarled turtles. The rafts of fish bobbing sideways in slicks of their own oils.

  In 1961 he owned a cracker cottage at the end of a shell road on the western rim of Ochlockonee Bay in Florida, not far from where he’d lived as a child with Neda and his mother. An isolated corner of an already disregarded portion of what was slowly becoming a populous state. On his property there was a smaller shack he rented out, whose tenant that summer was a young woman who worked at the Marine Lab in Panacea.

  When he’d come to the Ochlockonee in the midst of the Second World War, the islands in the bay were used for bombing practice by fat, silver B-24s. In his years of living here, he’d gained an eccentric’s reputation among the local oystermen and others. He was known to howl curses at dredging crews and hunters. In 1952 he came to the marina weeping on the day the island of St. George was cut in half to form a shipping channel. From their skiffs the oystermen would see him sometimes: the old man rowing out, filthy hat set against the sun, or wading in the water off some island cut, working furiously at his clipboard, oblivious to the oystermen as if taking all the world and the life that sustained them into some futilely copious account that did not include them or himself. Like any stranger in a small place, there were stories, idle talk. But what obtained in all accounts was that this man had lived a long and unhappy life. So he was treated with deference and given the distance which seemed to be his only wish.

  Between trips he worked in a small room off the back porch of his cottage, head light with the fumes of the housepaint he used in lieu of oils and which would have killed him had his death not lain elsewhere. When he could no longer stand the shore, Isaac rowed out and camped among broken trees and at the edges of blast craters that had over the years become lagoons, and he drew the dying and the dead. The abundance of life that had marked his youth had become an abundance of death, and if he couldn’t accept it, if his mind cried out to know what happened to the life, to the thrash and rush of living when the living was done, he could, he told himself, make use of the forms life left behind.