Galilee. Part 54

"Do you know where Galilee is?"

Where he always is: out at sea. She looked back at Rachel. Is he all you care about? Answer me honestly.

"Yes. He's all I care about."

You know that he can't protect you? He's never been good at that.

"I don't need protecting."

We all need protecting sometimes, Cesaria said, with a hint of wistfulness.

"Then let me help him," Rachel said. Cesaria looked at her with a strange gentility. "Let me be with him," Rachel went on, "And take care of him. Let me love him."

The way I should have done, you mean, Cesaria said. Rachel had no opportunity to deny the accusation. Cesaria was up and out of the chair, coming at her. There aren't many people I've met who'd talk to me the way you talk. Not after having seen all that's gone on here tonight.

"I'm not afraid of you," Rachel said.

I see that. But don't imagine being a woman's any protection. If I wanted to harm you- "But you don't. If you hurt me then you hurt Galilee, and that's the last thing you want."

You don't know what that child did to me, Cesaria said. You don't know the hurt he caused. I'd still have a husband if he'd not gone off into the world ... She trailed off, despairing."I'm sorry he gave you so much pain," Rachel said. "But I know he's never forgiven himself."

Cesaria's stare was like light in ice. He told you that? she said.

"Yes he did."

Then why didn't he come back home and tell me? Cesaria said. Why didn 't he just come home and say he was sorry?

"Because he was certain you wouldn't forgive him."

I'd have forgiven him. All he had to do was ask and I'd have forgiven him. The light and ice were melting, and running down her cheeks. d.a.m.n you, woman, she said. Making me weep after all these years. She sniffed hard. So what is it you 're asking me to do? she said.

"Find him for me," Rachel replied. "I'll do the rest. I'll bring him home to you. I swear I will. If I have to drag him myself, I'll bring him home to you."

Cesaria's tears kept coming, but she didn't bother to wipe them away. She just stood there, while they fell, her face as naked as Galilee's had been that first night on the island; all capacity for deception scoured from it. Her unhappiness was there, plain to see; and the rage she'd nurtured against him all these years. But so too was her love for him; her tender love, planted among these griefs.

You should go back to the Garden Island, she said. And wait for him.

Rachel scarcely dared believe what she was hearing. "You'll find him for me?" she said.

If he'll let me, Cesaria said. But you make sure he comes home to me, woman, you understand?

That's our bargain.

"I understand."

Bring him back to L'Enfant, where he belongs. Somebody's going to have to bury me, when all this is over. And I want it to be him.

ii "Are we at war then?"

That was the question Luman had asked me, the day I went down to the Smoke House to make my peace with him. I didn't have an answer for him at the time. Now I do. Yes, we're at war with the Gearys, though I would still be hard-pressed to tell him when that war actually began.

Perhaps, in reflection, that's true of all wars. The war between the states for instance, from the furnace of which the Gearys rose to such wealth and power-when did that begin? Was it themoment that the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter? That's certainly a convenient choice for historians: they can pinpoint the day, the date and even the man-a trigger-happy civilian called Edmund Ruf-fin-who did the firing. But of course by the time this even takes place the grinding work of war had been under way for many years. The enmities which fueled that work in fact go back generations, nurtured and mythologized in the hearts of the people who will bankrupt their economies and sacrifice their sons for that enmity.

So it is with the war between the Gearys and the Barba-rossas: though its first casualty, Margie, may only just be in the ground and the knives have only lately been sharpened, the plots and counterplots that have brought us to this moment go back a long, long way. Back to Charleston, in the early spring of 1865: Charles Holt and Nub Nickelberry stepping into Galilee's strange boudoir in the ruins of the East Battery, and giving themselves over to pleasure. Had they known what they were initiating would they have done otherwise? I suspect not. They were living in the moment of their hunger and their despair; if they'd been told, as they consoled themselves with cake and meat and the comfort of kisses, that the consequences of their sensuality would be very terrible, a hundred and some years hence, they would have said: so what? And who would have blamed them? I would have done the same, in their boots. You can't go through life worrying about what the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of your deeds will be; you have to do what you can with the moment, and let others take care of their moment when it comes.

So I lay no blame with Charles and Nub. They lived their lives, and moved on into the hereafter.

Now we have our lives to live, and they will be marked by a period of war that may undo us all.

It will be, I suspect, a subtle war, at least at the beginning, its significance calculated not in the number of coffins it fills, but in the scale of the structures it finally brings to ruin.-1 don't simply speak of physical structures (though those too will inevitably come down); I speak of the elaborate edifices of influence and power and ambition that both our families have constructed over the years. When this war is over, I doubt any of them will still be standing. There will be no victor: that's my prediction. The two dans will simply cancel one another out.

No great loss, you may say, knowing what you now know about us. There's a certain pettiness in the best of us, and such malice in the worst that their pa.s.sing will probably be something to be celebrated.

My only hope as we move into these darker times is that the war will uncover some quality in one or other of us (I dare not hope all) that will disprove my pessimism. I don't wish to say that war is enn.o.bling, you understand; I don't believe that for a moment. But I do believe it may strip us of some of the pretensions that are the dubious profits of peace-the airs and graces that we've all put on-and return us to our truer selves. To our humanity or our divinity; or both.

So, I'm ready. The pistol lies on one side of my desk, and my pen lies beside it. I intend to sit here and go on writing until the very last, but I can no longer promise you that I'll finish this story before I have to put my pen aside and arm myself. That only everything of mine now seems like the remotest of dreams: one of those pretensions of peace that I was talking about a few paragraphs back.

I will promise you this: that in the chapters to come I won't toy with your affections, as thoughwe had a lifetime together. I'll be as plain as I know how, doing what I can to furnish you with the means to finish this history in your own head should I be stopped by a bullet.

And-while I'm thinking of that-maybe this isn't an inappropriate place to beg mercy from those I've neglected or misrepresented here. You've been reading the work of a man learning his craft word by word, sentence by sentence; I've often stumbled, I've often failed.

Forgive me my frailties. And if I am deserving of that forgiveness, let it be because I am not my father's son, but only human. And let the future be such a time as this is reason enough to be loved.

PART EIGHT.

A House of Women

I.

I was in a fine, maudlin mood when I wrote the last portion of the preceding chapter; with hindsight it seems somewhat premature. The barbarians aren't here yet, after all. Not even a whiff of their cologne. Perhaps I'll never need the gun Luman gave me. Wouldn't that be a fine old ending to my epic? After hundreds of pages of expectation, nothing. The Gearys decide they've had enough; Galilee stays out at sea; Rachel waits on the beach but never sees him again. The din of war drums dwindles, and they finally fall silent.

Clearly Luman doesn't believe there's much likelihood of this happening. A little while ago he brought me two more weapons; one of them a fine cavalry saber, which he'd polished up until it gleamed, the other a short stabbing sword which was owned, and presumably used, by a Confederate artilleryman. He'd worked to polish this also, he told me, but it hadn't been a very rewarding labor: the metal refused to gleam. That said, the weapon possesses a brutal simplicity.

Unlike the sword, which has a patrician elegance, this is a gutting weapon; you can feel its purpose in its heft. It fairly begs to be used.

He stayed an hour or two, chatting about things, and by the time I got back to writing it was dark.

I was making notes toward the scene in which Garrison Geary visits the room where Cadmus died-and was thoroughly immersed in the details-when there was a knock on the door and Zabrina presented herself. She had a summons for me, from Cesaria.

"So Mama's home?" I said.

"Are you being sarcastic?" she said.

"No," I protested. "It was a simple observation. Mama's home. That's good. You should be happy."

"I am," she said, still suspicious that I was mocking her earlier dramas."Well I'm happy that you're happy. There. Happy?"

"Not really," she said.

"Why the h.e.l.l not?"

"She's different, Maddox. She's not the woman she was before she left."

"Maybe that's all to the good," I said. Zabrina didn't remark on this; she just tightened her lips.

"Anyway, why are you so surprised? Of course she's different. She's lost one of her enemies."

Zabrina looked at me blankly. "She didn't tell you?"

"No."

"She killed Cadmus Geary. Or at least she was there when he died. It's hard to know which is true."

"So what does that mean for us?" Zabrina said.

"I've been trying to figure that out myself."

She eyed the three weapons on my desk. "You're ready for the worst," she said.

"They were a gift from Luman. Do you want one?"

"No thank you," she said. "I've got my own ways of dealing with these people if they come here.

Is it going to be Garrison Geary, or the good-looking brother?"

"I didn't realize you were following all this," I said. "It could be both."

"I hope it's the good-looking one," Zabrina said. "I could put him to good use."

"Doing what?"

"You know very well," she said. I was astonished that she was being so forthright, but then why shouldn't she be? Everybody else was showing their true colors. Why not Zabrina?

"I could happily have that man in my bed," she went on. "He has a wonderful head of hair."

"Unlike your Dwight."

"Dwight and I still enjoy one another when the mood takes us," she said.

"So it's true," I said, "you did seduce him when he first came here."

"Of course I seduced him, Maddox," she said. "You think I kept him in my room all that timebecause I was teaching him the alphabet? Marietta's not the only one in the family with a s.e.x drive, you know." She crossed to the desk and picked up the saber. "Are you really going to use this?"

"If I have to."

"When was the last time you killed a man?"

"I never have."

"Really?" she said. "Not even when you were out gallivanting with Papa?"

"Never."

"Oh it's fun," she said, with a gleam in her eye. This was turning into a most revelatory conversation, I thought.

"When did you ever kill anyone?" I asked her.

"I don't know if I want to tell you," she said.

"Zabrina, don't be so silly. I'm not going to write about it." I watched her expression as I said this, and saw a f.u.c.ker of disappointment there. "Unless you want me to," I added.

A tiny smile appeared on her lips. The woman who'd once told me-in no uncertain terms-that she despised the notion of appearing in this book had been overtaken by somebody who found the idea tantalizing. "I suppose if I don't tell you and you don't write it down n.o.body's ever going to know..."

"Know what?" She frowned, nibbling at her lip. I wished I'd had a box of bonbons to offer her, or a slice of pecan pie. But the only seduction I had to hand was my pen.

"I'll tell it exactly as you tell it to me," I said to her. "Whatever it is. I swear."

"Hm..."

Still she stood there, biting her lip. "Now you're just playing with me," I told her. "If you don't want to tell me then don't."

"No, no, no," she said hurriedly. "I want to tell you. It's just strange, after all these years..."

"If you knew the number of times I've thought that very thing, while I was writing. This book's going to be full of things that have never been told but should be. And you're right. It's a strange feeling, admitting to things."

"Have you admitted to things?""Ohhhh yes," I said, sitting back in my chair. "Hard things sometimes. Things that make me look pretty bad."

"Well this doesn't make me look bad, exactly..." I waited, hoping my silence would encourage her to spit it out. The trick worked. "About a year after Dwight came to live with me," she said, "I went out to Sampson County to find his family. He'd told me what they'd done to him, and it was... so horrible. The cruelty of these people. I knew he wasn't lying about it because he had the scars. He had cigarette burns all over his back and on his b.u.t.t. His older brother used to torture him. And from his father, different kinds of scars." She seemed genuinely moved at her recollections of the harm he'd been done. Her tiny eyes glistened. "So I thought I'd pay them a visit. Which I did. I made friends with his mother, which wasn't very difficult. She obviously didn't have anyone to talk to. The family were pariahs. n.o.body wanted anything to do with them.

Anyway, she invited me over one night. I offered to bring over some steak for the menfolk. She said they'd like that. There were five brothers and the father, so I brought six steaks and I fried 'em up, while they all sat in the backyard and drank.

"The mother knew what I was doing, I swear. She could sense it. She kept looking at me while I cooked up the steaks. I was adding a little of this, a little of that. It was a special recipe for the men in her life, I told her. And she looked at me dead in the eye and she said: Good. They deserve it. So she knew what I was going to do.

"She even helped me serve them. We put the steaks out on the plates-big steaks they were, and I'd cooked them so rare and tender, swimming in blood and grease the way she'd said her boys liked them-we put them on the plates and she said: I had another boy, but he ran away. And I told her: I know. And she said: I know you know.

"Then we gave them their steaks. The poison didn't take long. They were dead after half a dozen bites. Terrible waste of good meat, but it did the job. There they were, sitting in the backyard with the stars coming out, their faces black, and their lips curled back from their teeth. It was quite a night..."

She fell silent. The possibility of tears had pa.s.sed.

"What happened to the mother?"

"She packed up and left there and then."