by Farris, John
Then, off in the trees, myriad flickering fires started; we heard a chorus of voices rising to a shout and a procession moved toward us, a long snaking line of lanterns and torches held aloft. Here they were at last, and my heart was seized with joy as we were surrounded by the workmen offering cheers and felicitations on this special day. Edgar raised a hand for silence. "May I introduce to you Laurette, my wife," he said. I could not have prevented my eyes from filling with tears as they responded generously with more shouts of welcome and wishes for my continued happiness. The air is wonderfully fresh here, with a tang of resin, so unlike the sea breezes at Prides Crossing, but, I am sure, equally salubrious. Edgar will rest well these two weeks, I will see to that, and I know he will be much improved by the time we begin our homeward journey.
The architect, Mr. James B. Travers, came aboard before we retired for the night, and had a glass of wine in the parlor car. He is a Virginian, of good family I am told, yet he wore boots that were none too clean. (I must remind myself that we are virtually on the frontier: there is a red Indian reservation not ten miles away!) Mr. Travers is tall, with a fine brown mustache, shoulders that could bear the weight of any responsibility. Although he is not a well-known architect like Mr. Ogden Codman or Stanford White, he enjoys Edgar's full confidence. They talked exclusively of the problems that would be encountered during construction of the cottage. It is to cover an area exceeding twenty acres. Imagine! I had nothing to say, and after a time I found it difficult, in my state of fatigue, to follow their discussion. Once, as Edgar was attending to a portfolio of the architect's plans with his reading glass, I turned my head to find Mr. Travers looking hard at me, perhaps severely. Although I have never encountered such rudeness from a gentleman, I smiled at him; he responded with a slight bow that was properly courteous and after that cast his eyes no more in my direction.
[The journal of James B. Travers: entry for July 5, 1904]
They have arrived, with an ostentatious complement of servants, and servants to wait on the servants. Mr. Langford, who I found reclining on Turkish pillows in an absurd getup, in one of his depressingly ornate parlor cars done in old-fashioned Pompeian reds and chocolates and olivines, did not appear to be in the best of health. Yet we fell to business right away. There are alterations he wishes to make in the plans: his vision changes by the hour now that he is on the site. So far he has proposed nothing that I find objectionable, or impractical, no furbelows borrowed from Second Empire or the Romanesque style I detest. Already I have spent the better part of two years designing the chateau (I cannot accept the current conceit of these damned men of great wealth who so coyly refer to their outlandish and elephantine vacation homes as "cottages"), and more than another twelve years will have passed before I see the chateau completed—my obsession conquered. There will be nothing like it on this continent, and few chateaux in all of Europe to compare. It will stand for a thousand years. Often I think it must be insanity to devote fully one-quarter of my life to such a project. But the challenge is enormous, my reputation will be ensured, and the fee will make me wealthy. Payment is guaranteed by an annuity whether whim or fortune fail my eccentric employer, and only with money can I hope to repair father's disgrace as I repay his crushing debts. Filial obligation, ambition, pride—all these chain me within a wilderness prison.
Mr. Langford's bride—I am told by the garrulous young doctor who has accompanied them on their wedding trip—is of a distinguished Brahmin family. Her father, even as mine, has had business reversals: a fire in one of his stores resulted in costly lawsuits. It cannot be to his disadvantage to claim Edgar Langford as his son-in-law. I thought perhaps it might be a marriage of convenience, her duty to her father outweighing reluctance to marry a man—even a very rich man—of his age, appearance, and reputation, but no: she seems much in love with her new husband. She is little more than nineteen years of age, with a slight presence, sometimes speaking barely above a whisper. She has a mixed sort of beauty, face perhaps too narrow, nose with a pronounced uptilt; but such imperfections fail to diminish her eyes. They are Delft blue, of a quality that transforms her earnest gaze into silent, saintly address. She is like a drawing promising in its early lines but with much to be finished. She is a naive, sentimental, sheltered child. She has been quite cunningly beguiled, I think, and exists for the moment in a febrile dream of romanticism. Perhaps she will never awaken to apprehend that her husband has all the trappings and inclinations of a despot. But life for the vast majority, as I have had ample time to appreciate, is not forgiving of our innocent dreams and capricious errors of judgment.
Chapter Eight
April 1958
Faren Rutledge was dozing in the bathtub, when she heard Arn outside the house putting his hounds into the kennel.
The cantankerous guinea hens that roosted around their property added to the homecoming uproar. She listened carefully, able to distinguish the individual voices of his dogs as well as Arn could. She heard Old Hob and Nolichucky and boisterous, aggressive Bocephus, and finally realized that only three dogs had returned with him. She let out part of the now tepid bathwater and filled the tub again from the hot tap. Arn came into the house by way of the kitchen. She wondered how late it was. She had read at least until midnight. She began to soap herself.
Presently he was leaning in the doorway of the bathroom looking at her. From seven feet away he still smelled strongly of woods and old sweat and recent liquor.
Not looking up at him, washing her slightly convex belly with a cloth, her shoulders slumped, Faren said, "There's supper laid back on the stove for you."
"You didn't need to do that."
"I do every night when you're not here."
"I don't want to eat anyhow."
"Where's Jim Dandy? I didn't hear him."
"He was killed. Guts ripped out. I buried him in the woods."
The tightening in her throat made her lift her head and look at him as she continued washing. "Oh, Arn."
He had a three-day growth of roan beard, pale red flecked with white like grains of salt. His cheeks and high forehead were inflamed. He was smiling his fierce, tight-lipped smile of drunkenness and hostility.
"I know who it was."
"Who? Not a bear or—"
"It was the Jew. Jacob. Wantin' to take over my woods, afraid of what I'll find out. But by God, I found it out long before he did."
He watched as Faren raised her right leg, bar of soap moving slowly and circularly up the smooth inner flesh to her dark curly pudendum.
"Don't be washin' all the good smell off," Arn advised her. "I aim to have me some of that tonight."
She smiled, not encouragingly, but not emphasizing her doubts that he was up to it.
"What are you going to do about Jacob?"
"Time I'm through with him, he might get better but he'll never get well."
"Can you prove he killed Jim Dandy?"
"Proved it to my satisfaction already."
"You'll just get yourself locked up, Arn."
"It ain't your business, so why don't you shut your mouth?"
"Arn, we need money. More than I can bring in. If you don't pay attention to business around here, next thing it'll be the sheriff knocking on our door with a writ of attachment."
"It's almost tourist season. Hell, we always make up the shortfall by end of summer."
"Only if you stay out of the woods and get to work."
"You think I need advice from you tonight, Faren?"
"Are you so skunk-drunk you can't understand plain facts when you're hearing them?"
Arn rubbed his jaw and said with a twist of a grin, his eyes hazing over, "My daddy'd do a flipflop in his grave he knew I let a bastard squaw bitch talk to me that way."
She hurled the bar of soap at the center of his face; it was too slippery to catch even if his reflexes had been normal; he just batted the soap away and it slithered across the wood floor under the raised tub.
"Is it a fuck or a fight you wan
t?" he said.
"I don't want a thing to do with you until you get yourself cleaned up."
"Well, haul ass out of that tub then, woman, and let me in there."
Faren stood up, dripping, crescents of soap film shining on top of her breasts. Her eyes deep, dark, brooding. "My name's Faren Hamilton, not Faren guess-who. And I'll outfuck and outfight you any night of the week. Because you know I'm not afraid to lift your scalp if I have to." She stepped over the side of the high tub and walked four steps to Arn and kissed him, leaning in toward his lips while one of his hands reached back to the patchy place on his head where there was a jagged ridge and his hair had never quite filled the scar gap, resulting from their most violent encounter two years ago. He let his mouth slip from hers gradually and lowered his hands, bringing them up under her soft handful of breasts and lifting the nipples to his chinline.
"Don't get to rubbing, you'll scratch me," she admonished, reaching out to take a pink towel from the peg beside the door. She wrapped it loosely around her and sidestepped past him into their bedroom.
Arn turned leisurely with a yawn and began to undress, leaving his clothes piled in a corner of the bathroom. He couldn't stand on one foot and had to sit on the rim of the tub to pull his socks off, got one off but couldn't continue to balance himself while sitting, fell back with a sudsy splash and lay with his head underwater, his knees up and his balls floating. He began to laugh, bubbles exploding to the surface. Came up choking.
When he could talk he called to Faren, "Who's that stayin' the night in the big cabin?"
"Staying the week," she replied, toweling herself slowly in front of the moonlit window that faced their backyard, aware of her dim reflection and feeling a lonesome twinge of separation, as if what she saw were the image of a twin sister, whose existence she felt in an ache of a sundered rib but whom she would never get to know. Little Faren guess-who. She had always yearned for brothers and sisters, lacking the company of other children on the block in Kingsport, where she had been strictly raised. And, without any actual playmates, like other lonely children she had made them up to keep her company. But this game that only children should play she still played too easily and Faren shuddered, feeling the eyes of the woman of the panes studying her astutely, filled with a morbid knowledge she wanted nothing to do with.
"Faren, you gone to sleep in there?"
"What? No, I heard you. Arn, it's Colonel Bowers from the Eighty-second Airborne, and his son."
"God a'mighty," Arn said after a lag of five seconds. The question that followed denied that he was pleased. "What's he doing here?"
"Oh—the company he works for owns Wildwood; he says he wants to look it over."
"Does he? You invite them to supper tonight, Faren?"
"Yes, they had supper with me. I told them I didn't know when you might get back."
"Why don't you come in here."
She went. He was lazing back with one foot out of the tub. He had long toes and longer fingers and, she assumed, a long dick for a man; at least it was longer by far than those of the two boys she had slept with in college. Arn wasn't a tall man, and he had begun to thicken at the waist despite a strenuous outdoors existence. A couple of ripples under the jawline, but his bones still stood out strongly in his face; his pale gray eyes were frank and fearless. With those eyes he could preach to women, as fine a sermon as any they could hope to hear in church. His message a sympathetic understanding of their eternal predicament, the desires of the flesh struggling against restrictions of chastity or fidelity. First he set them ablaze, then he quenched their fires, and never were they dissatisfied with his ministrations. Unfortunately there had been, after Faren's marriage to Arn, a few holdovers, women who just would not stop showing up on their doorstep or calling on the phone. It had amused Arn no end, even when she was obliged to run a couple of them off at the point of a gun.
"Soap's gone under the tub," Arn said. "Could you reach it for me?"
Faren obligingly went down on her hands and knees, and while she groped for the bar of soap felt his spread hand sliding in a friendly way over her buttocks, and so she spent more time retrieving the soap than she strictly had to; when she stood up tall beside the tub and dropped in the soap, Arn had moved around enough so that his scratchy beard was at the level of her bearded pubes, and there she didn't mind the scratching.
"Today I saw a naked girl with the wings of a butterfly," Am told her: "I took a shot, but I don't know that I hit her. At least I didn't bring her down."
"Shut up," Faren said, her expression anguished. "I don't want to hear about it."
"What do you want, then?"
"Do, do, do more with your tongue."
Her frilly cunt had lipped open like a dogwinkle shell he'd picked up a long time ago on a Carolina beach. And just the same color inside.
"Right here?"
"Oh God yes," she said. "But don't talk!"
"I'm going back after her," Arn vowed. "This time I'll get her, and no Jew, no Walkout'll stop me."
She pried his hands from her flanks and stared down at him for a long moment with eyes as full as lampblack moons, then turned and walked out of the bathroom.
"Where you going, Faren?"
"I want you to come after me!" she shouted. "Hurry up. Don't talk. Do you want me to go crazy again? Just give me some loving, Arn, and don't talk."
Chapter Nine
At the age of six he had mastered the art of the stage guillotine, also secret boxes within lacquered boxes. He rummaged in the air around him as if it were a closet: white doves fluttered from his clever hands. By then he was studying locks and cuffs, too, had made a few "slick" escapes. The magician taught him the principles, everything else was up to him. Although he was very young he had the energy to succeed, the ambition to astonish.
(All of this contained in the dream. So far so good)
In Babylon certain of the adept practiced sorcery, as a part of their religion and for their amusement. Transforming themselves, with the aid of "cosmic" energy stored in machines, to birds and animals and back again. Or to punish their enemies by not bringing them back.
(The magician telling him this also in the dream)
The magician's back was crooked, the boy's straight. He was straight and golden, and loved the magician, who was dark, like the lacquered boxes within boxes. Keeping all of himself to himself in boxes. In one box a diabolical eye, in another a giggle. The magician could put him to "sleep" (dreaming within a dream) by turning a gold coin around and around in his fingers until it fairly spun, flashing, pacifying. Prestidigitation. The magician worshipped lightning. He made lightning in a room that stood the boy's hair on end without harming him. The air sizzling, popping, singeing the nostrils. Sometimes the magician made himself invisible. They heard only his voice. Often when he wasn't speaking to anyone they knew he was there anyway, from the sounds of his breathing and by other signs.
(Coming to the "scary" part)
The magician studied plans he'd found in a buried library that was almost entirely shards and dust, and from the plans he constructed a "machine" using five miles of silver wire thinner than an eyelash. Humpbacked and visible in all of its crossings and recrossings, it filled a large room called "The Lantern," two stories high with glass sides between stone buttresses and a domed glass roof that opened mechanically. By then the magician had a helper, a tall thin man who wore dark suits and whose ears stuck out like a bat's. This man, the magician said, was a "genius." With the two halves of the dome rolled back, the "machine" digested stars night after night without a hum, an eerie thing to do; emptied the sky and gained strength like a storm. When it blew the boy away in a biting gasp of silverdust he fell headdown as a comet falls, framework intact but with ,'liver brains and guts aglow, arms working furiously, screaming finally when it became clear the magician's black box would expand eternally to accommodate his terror.
(aren't you afraid of falling too)
Chapter Ten
At s
even-fifteen in the morning Whit Bowers awoke in his bed with the sheet tangled around him like wet wash, the blankets on the floor. He heard Arn calling him from across the road to come to breakfast.
The dream had been bad enough, but not one of the all-time blood-curdlers; at least whatever disturbance he had made while in the throes of the dream hadn't been violent or vocal enough to awaken Terry. The boy was not visible beneath a mound of yellow blankets and big pillows. Late for him to be lying abed, but they had played chess until after midnight, and by then Terry was so drowsy he couldn't remember the correct sequence of the moves he was trying to establish.
Immediately after sitting up, Whit began to shudder uncontrollably; the air in the cabin was cold. The kerosene heater had run almost out of fuel and the flames sputtered bluishly in semi-darkness. Whit retrieved one of the blankets from the floor. His nose hurt and felt swollen; there was dried blood on his upper lip, he tasted old blood in his throat as if, instead of a pleasant supper, he'd feasted on raw meat in a cave last night. Probably, he thought, he'd accidentally assaulted himself while flailing away with his fists during the dream. Good God. Was Terry safe, sleeping in the same room with him? But it might be a long time between dreams. He could only hope.
