Homeland

by John Jakes

  The first of the plate-sized crabs sidled into view. More flies were crawling on the dead soldier’s face, a black wriggling mat of them. It was a strange, timeless moment, standing there on the level ground with a dead man at his feet and bullets flying and spending themselves in the dirt. He was shaken by knowledge of his own mortality.

  He pulled off his straw hat and wiped his dripping forehead with his sleeve. The sun was fully up, blinding him. In that moment he changed; entered some new state wholly unfamiliar. He felt a monstrous burden come down. He hated its weight and somehow knew he could never remove it. The transformation was final. The boy Pauli Kroner was gone forever.

  He turned away from the searing light of the sun. The moment of epiphany passed, and time began to run again.

  He rushed the camera to a new position and managed to shoot a few feet of Mr. Marshall, the correspondent, writing with his notebook on his knee while the Rough Riders pressed on across the level area, pouring fire into the buildings. Someone cried, “Brodie’s hit, he’s down!”

  Roosevelt came spurring back from the direction of the road, his polka-dot bandanna flapping at the back of his neck. He’d pinned it to his hat brim to improvise a havelock. He flung himself from the saddle and ran up to men clustering around the fallen squadron commander. Following Roosevelt, Marshall suddenly lurched sideways and dropped to his knees. He fell on top of his notebook, a huge bloodstain showing on the back of his white duster.

  Paul carried the camera forward again. He wondered how long his legs would hold out. He came to a sprawl of four bodies; recognized two. Sergeant Ham Fish and Captain Capron, commander of L Troop. He grieved for all four; brave men who had taken the point, and fallen.

  The Rough Riders were still charging and firing as they closed on the bullet-pocked buildings. Paul stared at the bodies. Professional instinct told him he should crank off some footage while he had a chance.

  Are you stupid? Shadow will hate it. Pflaum won’t show it. Do you seriously think that Illinois storekeepers and Ohio widows will pay so much as one cent to see bloody corpses with flies swarming on them? The evidence of the capacity of civilized men for killing?

  In his head, a second voice began to argue:

  Maybe nobody wants to see it. But it’s the truth.

  Roosevelt waved his hat and shouted encouragement at the front of the line, where he’d taken Brodie’s place. Another Mauser bullet passed close to Paul, its low buzz seeming to mock him, saying it had spared him but the next might not. Wex Rooney loomed gigantically in his mind:

  Tell the truth. Nothing else matters.

  He tilted the camera and turned the crank, filming the dead point men of L Troop.

  Soldiers were spilling from the rear of the red-tiled buildings; men in conical straw hats and uniforms of blue-striped seersucker. Paul cranked furiously as one Spaniard after another burst into the open, threw down his rifle, and fled. A flag bearer dropped the red and yellow banner of Spain. He didn’t run back to pick it up; other men were already trampling it. While the khaki line flowed forward in pursuit, passing its wounded, passing its dead, rifles and pistols shattering the morning, Paul kept cranking.

  The Rough Riders had swarmed into all the buildings. There were a few shots, loud but hollow-sounding. An officer with white bone jutting from a gashed arm came dragging past from the right flank, going toward the rear. Paul stopped cranking. “Sir? What’s happened?”

  The lieutenant grimaced; he was young to have so many teeth replaced with gold. “The Spaniards are holding on to their positions on the road. Wheeler’s dispatched a courier. He wants Lawton to send up an infantry regiment.” He staggered on, toward the trail to the rear. The image of his ghastly smile, all the gold teeth, lingered with Paul. It took him a moment to collect himself.

  As he reached for the crank, he checked the meter. He swore. Five feet left. He’d have to go back, find Jimmy, or the canvas bag if Jimmy had abandoned it. He left the camera and more than two hundred feet of exposed film of the battle, the ghastly corpses, the long grass all beaten down and wet with blood that would look black on a screen.

  He walked a quarter of a mile. He passed a Rough Rider trying to tie his own tourniquet, a stick and a pocket handkerchief, around his left arm. He stopped long enough to help the soldier finish.

  He passed a dead Cuban scout, his ragged white blouse pierced by at least five hits, his face already ravaged and ripped by half a dozen land crabs. Like so many of the insurgents, the scout was a boy; fourteen, fifteen at the most. Paul picked up a stone and hurled it with great force, breaking the orchid and yellow shell of one crab and scattering the rest. As soon as he moved on, they returned.

  He made the mistake of glancing back. He saw a crab use its claw to tear out the boy’s left eyeball and crush it like a pale olive. Paul gagged and bent over and threw up what little food was left in his stomach.

  He heard Jimmy before he saw him. Heard him grunting in a strange way, as though expending effort. Paul ran through a gap in the barbed wire beside the trail. Jimmy was there in the long grass, shirtless, kneeling on a soldier’s body. Beside him lay the canvas bag. The machete in his right hand was bloody.

  Jimmy’s head whipped around. Paul recognized the lieutenant who’d come in from the right flank. The man was dead. Half his gold teeth were missing. They lay winking and sparkling in the grass by the lieutenant’s ear.

  Jimmy saw Paul’s expression and gave him a queer, shamed smile, as though hoping Paul could be mollified that way. Links of his neck chain winked in the sun.

  “Just makin’ a little profit before I go.”

  “You killed him, he only had an arm wound.”

  “Hey, look, why should you care about—”

  Paul flung himself forward on top of Jimmy with a cry of rage.

  103

  Julie

  RAIN FELL ON BELLE MER. It washed the marble terrace and speckled the reflecting pools in the garden. It was a summer rain, late in the afternoon; warm, torpid, melancholy.

  It fit Julie’s mood. Despite her resistance, the darkness was tiptoeing into the corners of her mind. The familiar darkness that brought apathy, and sorrow, and drove her to bed.

  In the music room, she searched through a dozen cylinders for the Victor Gramophone, all purchased by her husband. “Sidewalks of New York.” “Anvil Chorus.” “Home Sweet Home” as a cornet solo. “Alabama Coon,” a Negro novelty with a clog-dance effect. She chose Strauss’s waltz “An der schönen, blauen Donau,” played by the Germania Philharmonie. It reminded her of Paul. He was on her mind almost constantly of late.

  Gazing out through the tall streaming windows, she thought it strange that she should be so sad, crushed by a sense of failure, now that she’d taken her first tottering steps to freedom.

  All winter long in Chicago, she’d brooded about her situation. She had to free herself from Bill; free herself, and then search for Paul. Even if it took years to find him. Even if she devoted her whole life to it, and never succeeded.

  She had laid her plans with great care, and a maximum of secrecy. She told no one, not even her Uncle Ike on Fifth Avenue. She expected that Bill would attend the August race meeting in Saratoga as he usually did, and when he confirmed it two weeks ago, she went into New York City alone. She invented an elaborate lie about needing to consult a medical specialist about a female complaint. Propriety forbade probing questions about such things, even from husbands.

  In the city, with a marked classified column in her trembling hand, she paid for a six-month lease on a furnished flat half a block from Madison Square. Paid in cash. Bill provided her with money of her own, for which she needn’t account. She told the landlord her name was Mrs. Jesse Vernon, recently widowed, and that she would move in as soon as she sold her cottage on rural Long Island.

  Afterward, exhilarated by her daring—the revelation of a bit of the courage Paul and Aunt Willis always said she had—she had sat in Madison Square, rather brazenly, by herself. While
her brow cooled, she planned the next step.

  She would leave Southampton when Bill was away. She wouldn’t say goodbye to him, she’d simply disappear from his life and make no contact with anyone who knew her. She decided she mustn’t see her mother for at least a year, first because it might put Bill on her track, and second because she did not want to give Nell an opportunity to weep and collapse and predict her own imminent demise unless Julie returned to her husband, thereby hushing what would surely be a thunderstorm of scandal.

  Perhaps her scheme wasn’t clever, but it was all she could think of, all she could manage, given the challenge of dragging a little courage from her tortured heart …

  She glanced up with a feeling that she was no longer alone. Someone was walking across the terrace; a woman. She was wearing gloves, a nondescript cape, and a sunbonnet that hid her face. At first Julie thought she might be a servant from another house, on an errand. But servants had no reason to enter the mansion from the Sound side.

  The woman peered through a tall French door, moved to the next one and there spied Julie, who had risen and was standing beside her chair. The woman tapped the wet glass.

  Someone lost and wanting directions, Julie decided. She went to the door, unfastened the latch, turned the handle.

  “Yes, may I help you?”

  The woman thrust forward abruptly, showering Julie with raindrops. Julie was startled but not alarmed. The woman tore at the ribbon tied under her chin and snatched the bonnet off. Julie’s hand flew to her mouth. The woman’s face was a mottled mess of purple and yellow bruises, lacerations, and scar tissue forming under one eye. There was an odor of staleness on her clothes.

  The woman was young, dark-haired; perhaps she’d been attractive in a coarse way before someone beat her. Little alarms resounded in Julie’s head. She remembered the bell pull, on the wall behind her.

  The waltz came to an end. All that issued from the amplifying horn was a rhythmic scratch, repeated endlessly. Before Julie could demand the intruder’s name, she said, “I’m Rose. You’re Bill’s wife?”

  The familiarity worsened her anxiety. “Mrs. Elstree, yes. I really don’t understand your forcing your way in here. Be so good as to tell me—”

  Rose interrupted. “I want to see him.”

  “For what purpose? Who are you?”

  “Who am I? I’m Bill’s friend. He kept me for a while. In New York. Then when he was through with me, he dumped me over. I had a stage career, do you think I can have one now? Some of these marks are scars, they’ll never go away. Do you think he gave a God damn? Not him, he’s the one who did this.”

  Julie stepped back, the angry words landing like blows. She’d grown used to Bill’s philandering, but actually confronting one of his lovers was bizarre and frightening. She didn’t like the wild look in Rose’s eye.

  “I guess you could say I’m his discarded trash, Mrs. Elstree. I’ll tell you one thing I am for certain. I’m the mother of his baby.”

  Julie felt as though a huge knot had been yanked tight in her breast. She couldn’t breathe. Around and around went the Gramophone cylinder, filling the dark room with its amplified scratch.

  “You’re—accusing my husband of getting you with child and then beating you?”

  “Nothing less, Mrs. Elstree. When Bill found out about my condition, he said he was walking out. When I said I wouldn’t have it, he put me down with his fists. It’s lucky he didn’t kill the baby.” She took a firmer grip on a small reticule she was carrying. “Now that’s enough talk, where is he?”

  What does she want? Julie thought. Money? The young woman’s disturbed expression, her violent speech, said it was more than that; something physical, threatening. How easy, then, to surrender Bill. If the woman was even half truthful, he deserved whatever he got. How easy to say, “He’s upstairs, changing for supper,” and then tug the bell pull to ask a servant to fetch him …

  Julie loathed Elstree as she’d never loathed anyone. But she couldn’t do it. She said, “He isn’t home.”

  “Liar,” Rose said. “I saw the carriage come in ten minutes ago. I was hiding in the lane. I paid my last dollar for the ticket from Manhattan, I won’t be turned away. Sit down, we’ll wait for him. He’ll join you for supper, won’t he?”

  “No, he has other plans, a bridge game at his club.” She spoke too fast; the lie was evident.

  “Oh yes? Well, we’ll wait anyway.” Rose opened the reticule and pulled out a derringer pistol with over-and-under barrels. “Shut off that damn talking machine, it gets on my nerves. Walk slowly.”

  Julie obeyed. In a moment the Gramophone was silent.

  “Come back and sit down.”

  They sat on brocaded chairs, on opposite sides of an Oriental carpet. Sun was trying to break through; it cast a moving pattern of rain between them. Rose held her gun out of sight beneath the reticule in her lap.

  Julie felt cold perspiration on her hands. Despite everything Bill had done to her, the way he’d hurt her on their wedding night, threatened her when she asked for a divorce—despite all of his unfaithfulness, abuse—she couldn’t let a man she’d taken as a lawful husband walk into the music room and take a bullet. If she did that, her conscience would flay her until her last breath.

  “Fine place you got here,” Rose said. “He’s told me about it but I never thought I’d see it. My first look will be my last, too.”

  “Rose, be sensible. We can talk. Put the gun away.”

  “Not a chance.” She leaned forward suddenly. “Not a fucking chance, you bitch.”

  “Please, there’s brandy in the next room. A glass will calm you down, help you think twice about—”

  “Shut up, someone’s coming.”

  Julie heard the footsteps. She prayed it was a servant. But she knew Bill’s tread too well. The music room door handle turned and he stepped in.

  “Julie?”

  “Bill, she has a gun!” Julie screamed.

  “Rose,” he said, not intimidated. “What the hell are you doing in my house? You’ve made a grave mistake.”

  He strode to his left, reaching for the fringed bell pull. Julie leaped from the brocaded chair, intending to throw herself on her husband, shield him, in the wild hope that the woman wouldn’t shoot her, only wanting to shoot him. But her slipper caught the edge of another area rug, and she staggered. That misstep put him in the open, by the bell pull. He yanked it. Rose shot him.

  Elstree stared down at the stiff bosom of his shirt. He’d dressed formally for the evening, his custom when he and Julie dined at home. Between the second and third diamond stud a red flower grew. He looked infuriated. He yanked the bell pull three, four, five times, until the tapestry sheath tore off the wire, and plaster dust showered down from above. His hair whitened in a moment.

  Rose ran toward him; she stopped a yard in front of him and whipped up the derringer, steadying it with both hands. Julie screamed, “No!” and threw a small ornamental vase, but it missed. Rose fired the second round. It tore through Elstree’s neck and out the other side, painting the wall with blood.

  “Ah, my God,” Elstree said wearily. He sat down awkwardly against the baseboard. His eyes closed, his head lolled over on his shoulder, then his torso sagged and he fell forward on another Oriental carpet.

  Powder reeked in the damp air. Rose threw the empty derringer to the floor. Julie heard servants coming; she ran to the door. Rose dropped to her knees beside Bill. Incredibly, she was crying. “Bill, Bill, oh darling, Bill.” She fondled Elstree’s hair; kissed his powdered cheek again and again; got his blood all over her sleeves and gloves.

  Julie tore the door open. “In here, hurry.” Rose staggered to her feet and ran out the nearest French door, disappearing along the terrace. Servants crowded into the room, snapped on the electric chandelier, exclaimed and sobbed over the sight of the master bleeding on the carpet.

  “I tried to save him,” Julie said. She was crying too, a huge, remorseful burst of tears, beyond r
ational control. “I tried, I tried, you’ve got to believe me.”

  The town constable apprehended Rose French as she was fleeing the village of Southampton on foot. That night, in the small jail, the turnkey rushed to the cell in answer to Rose’s cry and found her lying in blood. The fetus was lost. William Vann Elstree III had already been removed to a local mortuary for preparation.

  104

  Dutch

  PAUL LANDED HARD ON Jimmy, his knees in Jimmy’s ribs. Jimmy heaved upward, throwing him off. Both were stunned.

  They got up about the same time, standing six feet apart in the trampled grass. Paul held out his hand. “Give me that thing.”

  With both hands on the machete’s hilt, Jimmy said, “Here,” and took a ferocious swipe at Paul’s head.

  Paul jumped away. He heard and felt the end of the blade pass near his cheek. While Jimmy’s momentum was still carrying him through the swing, Paul lunged forward and drove his knee into Jimmy’s groin. Jimmy let out a grunt of pain and dropped the machete.

  Both of them crouched to retrieve the fallen weapon. Paul was faster. He seized the sweat-slippery haft, whirled the machete above his head once and sailed it away into the long grass.

  Throwing the machete left him with his back to Jimmy. Jimmy’s fist slammed the back of his head. Paul staggered; Jimmy grabbed his shoulders from behind and threw him sideways. Off balance, Paul went down.

  His jaw slammed the ground near the bloodstained gold teeth. Jimmy kicked him in the ribs. Paul flopped onto his back, writhing. Jimmy dropped on Paul’s belly with both knees, seized the canvas bag, and jammed it over Paul’s face. Paul clawed at it, suffocating. Jimmy held on. Paul knew he’d die unless he freed himself. He flailed with his fists, hoping to hit Jimmy’s head. He missed repeatedly. Then his left hand made contact; he grabbed Jimmy’s hair and yanked.

  Jimmy tumbled away; the weight of the canvas bag lifted. The tropic sun blinded Paul. He flung an arm over his eyes, sucked air into his lungs. Pain raged in his body where Jimmy had struck and kicked him.