Galilee. Part 48

"Do I indeed?"

"Yes, Mr.-High-and-Mighty-I'm-a-Writer-Maddox, you look very sorry indeed." He grabbed the rotted doorjamb and pulled himself to his feet. "In fact I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't jus'

throw that sorry carca.s.s down on the ground an' beg me to forgive you." He grinned. "But you don't have to do that, brother o' mine. I forgive you your trespa.s.ses."

"That's generous of you. And what about yours?"

"I don't have none."

"Luman, you virtually accused me of killing my own wife."

"I was just telling the simple truth," he said. Then added: "As I saw it. You didn't have to believeme." His goaty face became sly. "Though somethin' tells me you do." He regarded me in silence for a time. "Tell me I'm wrong."

What I really wanted to do was beat that smug smile off his face, but I resisted the temptation. I'd come here to make peace, and peace I was going to make. Besides, as I've admitted in these pages, the guilt for Chiyojo's death does in some measure lie with me. I'd confessed it on paper; now it was time to do the same thing staring my accuser in the face. That shouldn't be so difficult, should it? I knew the words; why was it so much more difficult to speak them than to write them?

I put my umbrella down and turned my face up to the rain. It was warm but it still refreshed me. I stood there for perhaps a minute, while the raindrops broke against my face, and my hair became flattened to my scalp. At last, without looking back at Luman, I said: "You were right. I'm responsible for what happened to Chiyojo. I let Nicodemus have her, just as you said. I wanted..." I began to feel tears rising up in me. They thickened my voice; but I went on with my confession. "I wanted to have his favor. To have him love me." I put my hand up to my face, and wiped the rainwater off. Then, finally, I looked back at Luman. "The thing is, I never really felt as though I was his son. Not the way you were. Or Galilee. I was always the half- breed. So I scampered around the world trying to please him. But it didn't work. He just took me for granted. I didn't know what else to give him. I'd given myself and that wasn't enough..."

Somewhere in the midst of saying all this I'd started to tremble; my hands, my legs, my heart. But nothing short of death would have now stopped me finis.h.i.+ng what I'd begun. "When he set eyes on Chiyojo I felt angry at first.

I was going to leave. I should have left. I should have taken her-just the way you said-taken her away from L'Enfant so we could have had a life of our own. An ordinary life, maybe-a human life. But that wouldn't have been so bad, would it?"

"Compared to this?" Luman said softly. "It would have been paradise."

"But I was afraid to go. I was afraid that after a while I'd regret going but that there'd be no way back."

"Like Galilee?"

"Yes... like poor Galilee. So I ignored my instincts. And when he came after Chiyojo I looked the other way. I suppose, deep down, I hoped she'd love me enough to say no to him."

"Don't blame her," Luman said. "The Virgin Mary would have given up her p.u.s.s.y for Nicodemus."

"I don't blame her. I never blamed her. But I still hoped."

"You poor idiot," Luman said, not without tenderness. "You must have been a mess."

"The worst, Luman. I was torn in half. Part of me wanted her to reject him. To come running tome and tell me he'd tried to violate her. And part of me wanted him to take her from me. Make her his mistress if that made him pay more attention to me."

"How was that going to happen?"

"I don't know. He was going to feel guilty so he was going to be kinder to me. Or we'd simply have shared her. Him at one end and me at the other."

"You'd have done that?"

"I think so."

"Wait. Let me be certain I understand this. You would have had a mlnage a trots with your wife and your own father?" I didn't answer, but I suppose my silence was reply enough. Luman slapped his hand over his eyes with comic gusto. "I thought I was twisted," he said. Then he grinned.

For myself I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. This was more than I'd confessed with pen and paper; this was the dirtiest truth; the most wretched, sickening truth.

"Anyway, it never happened," I said.

"Well that's something," Luman replied. "You're still a pervert, mind."

"He took her and f.u.c.ked her and gave her feelings I guess I never gave her."

"He could do that," Luman said. "He had the gift."

"Was it... physical?" I asked him, voicing a question that had haunted me for years. Luman looked at me blankly. "His gift," I said. "Oh come on, Luman, you know what I'm talking about.

Was that how he made women love him?" I glanced down between my legs. "With that?"

"Are you asking me how big his d.i.c.k was?" Luman said. I nodded. "Well, judging by my own attributes, sizeable. But I think that's only half the story. If you don't know how to wield it..." He sighed. "I never have, you see. That's always been my problem. Plenty of substance, but no style.

I'm hung like a stallion but I f.u.c.k like a one-legged mule." Finally, I laughed, which plainly pleased Luman no end, because he beamed. "Well we certainly know more about one another than we knew five minutes ago," he said. Then, more quietly: "Pervert."

We talked a little longer before I returned here to the study, with him standing in the shelter of his door, and me out in the rain. Only a couple of significant things were said. Luman suggested that in the near future the two of us go down to the stables and visit Nicodemus's grave. I agreed that we should do so, adding that I didn't think we should delay going, in case events overtook us and we were denied the opportunity. Luman's response to this was interesting."Are we at war then?" he said. "Should we expect an invasion any day?"

I told him I didn't know, but that the House of Geary had become unstable of late, which was certainly reason for nervousness.

"If you're nervous then I'm nervous," Luman said. "I'm going to get out my knives tonight. Start polis.h.i.+ng. Have you got yourself a gun?"

"No."

He ducked back inside the house and reemerged a few moments later with an antiquated pistol.

"Take it," he said.

"Where did you get it?" I asked him.

"It belonged to Nub Nickelberry," he said. "He gave it to me when he left. In fact Galilee made him give it to me. He told Nickelberry he wouldn't have any use for it. He had all the protection he'd ever need."

"Meaning himself?"

"I guess so." He proffered the weapon again. "Go on, Eddie, take it. Even if you don't think you'll ever use it. I'll feel better knowing you've got something to wave around 'sides your pen, which will do you no d.a.m.n good when things get nasty."

I took the weapon from his hand. It was a Griswold'and Gunnison revolver, my researches later discovered; plain and heavy.

"It's fully loaded," Luman said. "But that's all the bullets I got for it, so you're going to have to choose your targets. Hey! Point it away from me. How long is it since you handled a revolver?"

"A long time," I admitted. "It feels strange."

"Well don't be afraid of it. Accidents happen when people p.u.s.s.yfoot around a gun. You're in charge of it, not the other way about. Got it?"

"I got it. Thanks, Luman."

"My pleasure. I'll see what else I can dig up. I've got a nice saber in there somewhere, made in Nashville. They had a factory there in the war, turned plowshares into swords."

"How very Biblical."

"You know what else I got?" He was smiling from ear to ear now. "I got a Confederate snare drum.""From Nickelberry?"

"No... Marietta brought it back, just after the war ended. She found it out there in a ditch somewhere. Along with the drummer. He wasn't going to be beating it no more so she pried it out of his hands and brought it back for me. I'm going to have to learn to beat it again. Nice and loud.

Sound the alarm..." His smile had gone again; he was staring at the revolver in my hand.

"Strange," he said. "After all these years, things you never thought you'd need again."

"Maybe we won't."

"Who are you kidding?" he said. "It's just a matter of time."

II.

i I returned to my study thoroughly soaked, but curiously revivified by my conversation with Luman. While I was stripping out of my sodden clothes I looked around the room, and realized that it had deteriorated into chaos: piles of notes everywhere, books and newspapers heaped on every side. It was time to clear the mess away, I thought; time to put things in better order; to gird myself for whatever battles lay ahead. I began right there and then, without even putting on a dry pair of socks. Naked as a babe I set to work, sorting through the stuff I'd accrued over the months I'd been writing. The books were easily collected up and returned to the shelves, the newspapers and magazines I bundled up and set outside the study door for Dwight to collect. The real challenge was my notes, of which there were many hundreds of pages. Some were midnight inspirations, jotted down in darkness when I woke from a dream; some were doodlings I made to break my own silence on a day when the pen refused to move. Some read like the jottings of a dyslexic poet, some like a paranoid's stab at metaphysics; the worst are beyond comprehension.

I've been afraid to throw any of them out, in case there was something here that I was going to need. Even in the foulest of this s.h.i.+t I thought there might be something that illuminated a murky corner of my intentions; offering a glimpse of grandeur where my text was squalid.

Enough of that, I told myself. It all had to go. I need to proceed from here less enc.u.mbered than I've been. I need to travel lightly to keep up with events. Things are getting desperate for everyone, and I need to be right there at their shoulders as they make love, at their lips as they whisper their dying words, in their heads as their sanity curdles. So it all goes. My potted history of the warlord Timur-i-leng, for instance, whose bones lie in Samarkand: I'll never make use of it.

Out it goes. My notes on the genital configurations of the hyena; all very interesting, but wholly irrelevant. Out they go. My pages of meditations on the nature of my endeavor-pretentious stuff most of it, written while I was high-they have to go too. There's no room for that kind of stuff now; not if we're preparing for war.

It took me about seven hours to finish all this tidying, including a thorough scouring of the drawers of my desk. By the time I had finished it was dark, and I was exhausted. It was a pleasant exhaustion, however; I'd achieved something: I could see the rug again. And my desk was clear,except for my single copy of the book, which I'd set in the upper left corner; a pile of paper, along with my pen and ink, set in the middle, and the revolver Luman had given me, which was set on my right, where I could quickly s.n.a.t.c.h it up if occasion demanded.

There remained only one thing to do. The redundant notes I'd collected up needed to be destroyed. I didn't want anyone sifting through them at some later date, finding my sentimental ramblings or my spelling mistakes; nor did I want to be tempted back to them myself, at some moment of weakness. I gathered them all up in my arms and took them out onto the lawn. I was still stark naked, but what the h.e.l.l? n.o.body was going to waste their time spying on my nakedness; it's a singularly unedifying sight. So out I went, and dumped the papers in the gra.s.s.

Then I struck a match, and set fire to them. There was no wind to blow the burning sheets around; they simply blackened and curled where they lay, one after the other. I sat down on the gra.s.s, which was still damp from the rain, and toasted the disappearing words with a gla.s.s of gin. Every now and again I'd catch a phrase as it was burned away, and once-watching something I rather liked eaten up before my eyes-a wave of regret broke over me. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that if these thoughts had flown through my head once then they'd always be there to be recaptured, but I don't entirely believe that. Suppose the mind that's making this book is steadily winding down-the heat-death of its creator reported on its pages in a hundred subtle ways? Then there's no recovering what I've burned; none of the meditations anyway. The facts, yes; the facts I can find again. But the feelings I set down? They've gone, and they've gone forever.

Oh Lord! A few minutes ago I was in a fine old mood about what I did, and now I'm sickened.

What's wrong with me? This b.l.o.o.d.y book, that's what's wrong. It's wearing me out. I'm tired of listening to the b.l.o.o.d.y voices in my head. I'm tired of feeling as though I'm responsible to them.

My father wouldn't have wasted a day of his life, long though it was, writing about Galilee and the Gearys. And the idea that anyone, let alone his son, could sit down day upon day to report the voices that chatter in his head would have struck him as ludicrous.

My only defense would have been to convince him that my book keeps at bay a creeping madness that I owe entirely to him. Though even as I say that I can well imagine what his response would be.

"I was never mad."

How would I reply? "But Poppa," I'd say. "There were months on end when you wouldn't speak to anybody. You let your beard grow to your navel, and you wouldn't wash. You'd go out into the swamp and eat rotted alligator carca.s.ses. Do you remember doing that?"

"Your point?"

"That's the act of a madman."

''By your definition.''

"By anybody's definition, father.""I was not mad. I knew exactly why I was doing what I was doing."

"Tell me, then. Help me understand why half the time you were a loving father, and the rest of the time you were covered in lice and excrement-"

"I made a pair of boots out of excrement. Do you remember those?"

"Yes, I remember."

"And one time I brought back a skull I'd found in the swamp-a human skull-and I told my b.i.t.c.h- wife that I'd been away in Virginia and I'd dug up you know who."

"You told her you had Jefferson's skull?"

"Oh yes." He gives me a sly smile here, remembering with pleasure the pain he caused. "And I reminded her how his narrow lips had looked, and put my fingers in his sockets where his watery eyes had been. I said to her: did you kiss his eyes?Because this is where they lay..."

"Why did you do something so cruel?"

"She did a lot worse to me. Anyway it was good to see her weep and wail once in a while. It reminded me she still had a heart, because sometimes I doubted it. And oh Lord, how she carried on! Screaming at me to give her the skull. It wasn't dignified, she said. Dignified! Ha! As if she ever gave a d.a.m.n about being dignified! She could behave like the filthiest gutter wh.o.r.e when she was in heat. But she came after me, telling me about dignity!" He shook his head, laughing now. "The hypocritical s.l.u.t."

I remembered this now. The walls of L'Enfant literally shaking as husband and wife raged at one another. I hadn't known what was at issue at the time; but in hindsight it's little wonder Cesaria was so distressed.

"Eventually she s.n.a.t.c.hed the thing from me-or tried to-and somehow in the mllee it dropped to the ground and smashed. Pieces flew in every direction and she let out such a shriek and went down on her knees to gather these pieces up so f.u.c.king tenderly you'd have thought he was still in there somewhere..."

"So did you tell her it wasn't Jefferson's skull?"

"Not right then. I watched her for a while, sobbing and moaning. I'd never been completely certain of what went on between them until that minute. I mean I'd had my suspicions-"

"He built L'Enfant for her."

"Ah, that proved nothing. She could make men do anything, if she put her mind to it. The question wasn't: what did he feel for her? The question was: what did she feel for him? And now I had myanswer. Watching her picking up the pieces of what she thought was his bones, I saw how-oh how-she loved him.'' He paused and regarded me with black and turquoise eyes. "How did we get to this?"

"You being mad."

"Oh yes..." He smiled. "My madness... my wonderful madness..." He drew a deep breath; a vast breath. "I was never mad," he said again. "Because the mad don't know what they're doing or why. And I always knew. Always." He exhaled. "Whereas you..." he growled.

"Me?"

"Yes, my son. You. Sitting there day after day, night after night, listening to voices which may or may not be real. That's not the behavior of a sane man. Look at you. You're even writing this down. Just take a moment and think about how preposterous that is: setting down something as if it were the truth, though you know you 're inventing it."

"I don't know that for certain."

"But I've been dead and gone a hundred and forty years, son. I'm as dusty as Jefferson."

I fumbled for an answer to this. The thing is, he was right. It was strange-no, it is strange-to be exchanging words with a dead man the way I am now, not knowing how much of what I'm writing is reportage and how much of it invention; not knowing if my father is speaking to me through my genes, through my pen, through my. imagination, or whether this dialogue is just evidence of some profound insanity in me. Sometimes I hope it's the latter. For if it's the former- if the man is here in me now-then that prospect he said I feared so much is dose; that time when he comes back from his journey into death, leaving the door through which he pa.s.sed open wide.

"Father?"

Writing the word on the page is a kind of summons, sometimes.

"Where are you?"

He was here moments ago, filling my head with his voice. (That story of the skull he showed to Cesaria; I'd never heard it before. When I see her next I'm going to ask her if it's true. If it is, then I'm not inventing his voice, am I? He's here with me.) Or at least he was.

"Father?"