That fall and winter of ’61 I divided my time between Good-children Street and a training camp amongst the farmlands of Metairie, where I drilled men who knew as much about marching as I did, which was nothing. Passing through town one evening, I fell captive to the charms of a fair privateer, and caught the clap. ’Twas a light case that I got over in a week, but it occasioned much merriment in camp, where my fellow officers pounded me on the back and chortled, “Now Nick, when you have killed your first Yankee, you will be a real man at last!”
Whilst I was yet ill and feverish, I again saw the Phantom. Three or four nights in succession he rose in my dreams, fixing his one eye horridly upon me. One bright winter day I saw him gazing at me from the shade of an oak-grove hung with streamers of grey moss. Though daunted by the sight, I hastened toward him, but found nothing there. The figure had been only a compound of light and shadow – or at any rate, so I explained it to myself. Then I grew well again, and dismissed the Phantom as the trick of a sickly mind.
In plain fact I had no time for ghosts. The war was speeding up; we began to break camp and load our equipment. A thrill of excitement touched with fear ran through every man of us, for we knew that the day was nearing when at last we would see the Elephant, meaning combat. The order came in the first days of April, 1862, when the fields were covered with white and red clover. My company boarded a train to Jackson, and marched into Tennessee, where twenty-four thousand men were soon to be laid low in the great battle at Shiloh Church.
On the first day of the fight, I led a scouting party that blundered into an enemy picket. The Yankee sentry (a boy whose white, scared face will forever remain in my memory) instantly threw down his musket and fled; the weapon was on half-cock and discharged by itself, the ball smashing my elbow. Whilst the battle raged, the surgeons chloroformed me and cut off all but about eight inches of my left arm. I was laid in a wagon amongst other mutilated bodies and hauled away to the rail-head, screaming at every lurch and bounce.
So began and ended my acquaintanceship with war: but not with the Spectre, who soon seized upon my state of weakness to manifest himself again.
By the time I reached New Orleans, the stump of my arm had become infected (or mortified, as we said then), smelling foully and oozing unpleasant matter. Nursed by Rose, I lived through feverish days and haunted nights. Again Monsieur Felix ruled the dark hours, smiling horridly from amid great fields of corpses, where not one was whole – some torsos without arms or legs, some bodies without heads, some heads without bodies that glared from white eyes the size of walnuts.
Then my mind cleared, and I became able to understand the scarcely less frightening news that Rose brought me. I heard of the federal fleet appearing off the Passes, and of hard fighting at the downriver forts; of warships riding high on the flood-swollen Mississippi, with guns pointing down at the city’s rooftops; of rioting mobs on the levee, burning warehouses and looting banks; of blue-backs filing ashore and deploying a battery of bronze cannon in front of the plush St Charles Hotel, where Papa used to stay when he was bargaining for slaves.
At home on Goodchildren Street our cousins began to cast bitter looks upon us. Papa had run out of cash, and because the war had severed the connection between city and farm, food had become very dear and hard to come by. Our hosts begrudged us every mouthful we ate, as if we were taking it directly off their plates – as in fact we were. Indeed, we were no longer a promising or even a respectable crew. Papa was customarily drunk, and even when sober, more scatter-brained than ever; Rose was obliged to work as a house servant, but a frail one who never did anything right. As for me, the cousins thought that if I recovered, ’twould be only as a poor cripple who would continue to eat but bring in nothing.
So they moved me out of my comfortable bedchamber, and put me upstairs in a store-room that held a clutter of retired furniture, broken crockery, and dusky mirrors. ’Twas stifling hot under the eaves, and no place for an injured man; but they thought it good enough for me, hoping perhaps that I might die and relieve them of a burden.
One summer morning I woke from a restless sleep. The arm I had lost was aching as no arm of flesh and blood could, every hair upon it like a burning wire. And yet, as the bright hot morning light grew, my eyes shewed me nothing, not even a ghost, lying on the ragged counterpane beside me. Rose slept nearby on a battered chaise, with a fine dew of perspiration upon her pale face, and though the pain of my phantom arm was such that I wished to moan or cry out, I remained silent for fear of waking her.
Restlessly my eyes wandered to an old dim mirror with an irregular dark shadow in the middle of the glass. As I gazed, the shadow began to take shape, like the sort of black paper silhouette that in those days decorated every parlour in the land. ’Twas Monsieur Felix – no, I could not have been mistaken! No man save he ever had such a face. As I watched in fascination, he began to turn slowly toward me, his features emerging like the image on a tintype in its acid bath, until his full face hovered in the glass, picked out in shades of glistening black and bone white.
Unable to bear the empty socket and gleaming eye fixed upon me, I stumbled from bed, my limbs rubbery as those of a new-whelped pup, and in one fierce motion turned the mirror and slammed it against the plaster. The glass shattered and Rose started up and cried out, “Oh Nick, you should be resting, not walking!”
“So should he who roused me,” I answered, and her eyes widened in fear, for she thought that suffering had caused me to go mad.
The first sign that the household on Exposition Boulevard was wobbling back toward normal came when supper appeared at the proper hour.
Cleo carried the tray instead of Morse, but the meal was tasty and hot, with terrapin stew, warm bread, and a glass of elderly pale sherry. Lerner dumped half the sherry into the stew, swallowed the rest, and made a better meal than he’d expected.
After dinner Morse appeared, clean and silent, and went to work at the most intimate duties of a body-servant: setting Lerner upon the commode-chair, giving him an alcohol rub, putting his night-shirt on him and settling him in bed. Watching Morse prepare the laudanum, the old man found himself admiring the performance. Instead of making weak apologies, Morse was seeking to demonstrate how much Lerner needed him – and in that he succeeded, the clever fellow.
After drinking the potion, Lerner ordered him to sit down on the foot of the bed, and said quietly: “You know, my boy, this drug should be taken only to subdue pain and give rest, not for a doubtful pleasure that ends in a horrid slavery.”
“I’m in pain all the time, Mr Nick,” he muttered, looking at the floor. “This stuff gives you ease, so I thought it might do the like for me.”
“You’re in pain? Are you ill, Morse?”
“No. Yes. My anger eats at me.”
“Anger at what?” asked Lerner in surprise, for he’d always thought Morse very comfortably off, for a coloured man.
“At this,” he said, holding up his left hand with the dark back turned toward Lerner, then turning it over to show the white palm. “Wondering why I could not be like this. I have long known you are my father. If I were white, you would have loved and acknowledged me, and I would be a man among men.”
For a moment Lerner was too astonished to speak. Unsteadily he asked, “Who told you that I am your father?”
“My mother.”
It was on the tip of Lerner’s tongue to say, But you never knew your mother. Instead he bit his tongue and said slowly, weighing the words, “I’m glad you’ve spoken out, my boy. Trust me, and I shall yet do you justice.”
He sent Morse away, all his secrets intact. But when he was alone, lying in the dark on clean linen, Lerner found sleep difficult to come by. Maybe the laudanum was losing its effect. Or maybe he was finding it hard to grasp the fact that a Morse existed of whom he knew nothing.
What did the fellow do when he wasn’t being the perfect servant? Did he read books? Practice voodoo? Engage in orgies with Cleo and the cook, improbable as that see
med? And how could he dare to live some other life, when he depended on Lerner for food, shelter, pocket money, everything? Wasn’t that a kind of treason?
In time Lerner fell asleep, the puzzles of reality yielding to gorgeous visions of things that never had existed at all. And as he snored, the next day’s instalment of his memoir composed itself, someplace deep beneath the level of his dreaming.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
Wherein the Demon Saves and Enslaves Me
On that day, the day I saw him in the mirror, I dressed and went forth with sleeve pinned up, in search of work.
I found none. The city had always lived by grace of the river, but now ’twas blocked by warring armies. Everything had ground to a halt; the once-busy levee lay empty, save for a few Union warships and a graveyard of decaying hulks, and no work was to be had by anyone, much less a cripple.
After a week of useless tramping about, I turned the mirror in my garret around, for desperation had conquered fear, and I was ready to receive counsel from whatever source. Alas, the shattered glass shewed only fragments of my own gaunt and yellowed image, which I thought grimly appropriate. Gazing at that shattered countenance, I brought to mind a verse or incantation that Royal and I used to chant in the graveyard at midnight: Come ye, take me, lead me on/Shew me gold, and then begone! Very deliberately, I said it seven times, which was the magic number: but answer there was none.
Yet that very afternoon, I saw – upon Levee Street, about half a square distant, amid waves of heat rising from the cobblestones – a thin, black-dressed figure loping with unmistakable gait through the trembling mirages. And as the strings of a harp will pick up and faintly repeat distant sounds, although no fingers have touched them, my heart-strings thrilled to a sense of hope and fear.
I hastened after him; he turned the corner of Gallatin Street, as did I a moment later: he had vanished, but in his place an amazing sight met my eyes. A file of coloured men wearing blue uniforms were practising the manual of arms. Royal was drilling them, and his strong nature had already asserted itself, for he wore upon each sleeve three broad gold stripes in the shape of spear-heads pointing down.
When the “Stand at ease” was given, I approached and spoke to him. He threw back his head, and laughed so loud that his men stared. We shook hands and spoke briefly of old times; he queried me about my missing arm, and briefly told me how he had enlisted in one of the new coloured regiments. I admitted to needing food, whilst he revealed an ambition to sign the name he had chosen for himself-Royal Sargent – to the muster-roll, in place of an X. We struck a bargain: he promised to get me army rations, if in return I would make him literate.
That same evening he came to the house on Goodchildren Street, but was not invited in. The cousins pointed out that teaching him to read and write was forbidden under the state’s Code Noir; the fact that the black code was already dead they ignored, having no patience with mere reality. So Royal and I sat down on an iron bench in the patio, and for the first of many times bent our heads over a reading-book that some charitable society at the North had sent his regiment. When he went, he left behind army bacon and coffee and hardtack and cornmeal, which the cousins did not disdain to share that night at supper time.
When not working, he and I chatted about the past. I asked him how he felt after killing Monsieur Felix, and he answered solemnly, “I took my first breath when he took his last.”
Hesitantly I asked if he thought the Overseer’s spirit might walk, as those who die by violence are said to do. Royal laughed his loud laugh and said, “So many have died in the war, he’d be lost in the crowd!”
He inquired after Rose, and began to bring her small gifts, oranges and fruit pies and ices that he bought from the sutlers out of his pay of ten dollars a month. She received his gifts in the kitchen, the only room the cousins permitted him to enter. They stood by and glowered as she thanked him, saying how she rejoiced to see him a free man – at which they glowered more.
In this manner we all lived for a time, but had barely grown accustomed to regular eating, when without warning Royal’s unit was sent down-river to garrison the forts at the Head of Passes. Then in quick succession fell two more blows: Papa died from a lethal mixture of whiskey and despair; and our cousins, in an excess of Confederate feeling, refused to take the oath of allegiance as ordered by the commanding general. Straightway they were branded Enemies of the United States and expelled from the city; soldiers seized their house as rebel property, and sold it at auction with all its contents.
Rose and I swore allegiance to the old flag, but it did us no good; we were driven into the street anyway, and a most difficult time began.
Ah, how fortunate are those who have never learned the awful truth taught by hunger: that a man will do anything, to live one single day more!
I tried hauling rubbish, but ’twas a two-handed job; I did poorly at it, and was laid off. I was for a time doorman of a brothel frequented by Union officers. One of them, a Major Wharton, was sufficiently moved by the plight of a Yale man to recommend me to a sutler, who sold food openly and bad whiskey secretly to the troops. I began keeping his account books, whilst Rose plied a needle twelve hours a day, repairing blue uniforms in a sweat-shop run by the Quartermaster.
Yet for all our efforts, we existed rather than lived in three poor rooms near the levee, beset with bugs of many species, but all equally blood-thirsty. I sought everywhere for my private Spectre, but found him not; at times my bizarre longing to behold again such an one as he made me wonder whether madness might soon compound my other troubles. And then, one night in January, 1863 – I remember the rapid, mushy impacts of sleet against the shutters – I heard a shot in the street outside, and feet scampering away.
I tumbled out of bed, lit a stump of candle and hastened to the room’s one window. A fat civilian in flash attire (probably a gambler) lay on the paving-stones amongst glistening pebbles of ice. Superimposed upon this image, I saw my own reflection in the dirty window-pane, and something else besides – a tall, thin, black-dressed man standing just behind me.
I whirled around, almost dropping the candle, and of course no one was there. But as I stood trembling, suddenly my confusion vanished and I knew what I must do. I blew out the candle, ran outside in my night-shirt, bent over the dying man and began rifling his pockets. My fingers slipped into something that felt like warm wet liver – ’twas his wound – then closed upon his fat leather purse. Back inside, I hid the money (good greenbacks, near an hundred dollars!) in a knot-hole in the floor, and moved my bedstead to cover the hiding place.
I washed my bloody hand and went back to bed. Sounds came and went outside – a mounted patrol clip-clopping past halted, there was talk, and later a wagon clattered up to remove the body. Meantime I lay in bed, scratching my bug-bites, and resolved that henceforth I should take what I needed from the world by force. And though I had been law-abiding all my life, I knew exactly how to go about it.
Next day I used twenty dollars of the gambler’s money to acquire an army Colt revolver (the famous model 1860) in the thieves’ market that flourished in the alleyways near the Hospital Street wharf. I taught myself to load the weapon one-handed, clamping the grip under my stump, and using my right hand to tamp in powder and balls and affix copper caps to the nibs. That same night I ventured into the narrow fog-bound streets to try my luck. Guided by the glow of wide-spaced lanterns, listening always for the tramp of the provost marshal’s guard and the clatter and jingle of the mounted patrols, I robbed two drunks. Though neither yielded as rich a haul as the gambler, I garnered enough to hand Rose money that would see us through a few more days.
“Where did this come from, Nick?” she asked, and I answered, “I prayed to Saint Dismas,” meaning the patron saint of thieves.
Night after night I worked to perfect my technique. My method was to come up behind my victims and strike them down, using the heavy pistol as a club; then clamp it under my stump and search their pockets. ’Twas not a
n easy life, for others of my own kind were in the streets; we snarled at each other like dogs eyeing the same scrap, and twice I had to drive off my fellow jackals with bullets.
Yet these scavengers also became my new acquaintances. I met them in the cheap brothels I began to patronize, and the wretched saloons called doggeries, where I warmed my belly against the night air with dime shots of bad whiskey. From the garish crowd of whores, pimps and rogues who shared my perils and my pleasures, I learned that I was a knuck or a sandbagger when I struck my victims down; that when I searched their pockets I was overhauling them; that my pistol was a barking iron; that when I tracked my prey in silence I was padding my hooves. Yale had taught me none of these things.
There was also a Creole argot, of which I understood a few words: the women called me bras-coupé, after a famous one-armed bandit of an hundred years before, or bête-marron, meaning a tame beast gone wild. I was struck by that term, because it reminded me that the Overseer’s half-forgotten surname had also been Marron – as if we had been brothers.
And brothers we might have been, brothers in crime. I saw his shadow often in the streets, slipping past a lantern, or sliding along a wall half lit by a red-shaded coal-oil lamp in the window of a bagnio. I recognized him easily by his strange walk; I envied him his silence of movement, and soon learned to take him as my guide. He was clever at finding the staggering sots who remained my favourite prey, and the shadow of his long arm pointed them out to me. He also led me out of danger. One night, when the cavalry were so close behind me that I saw the sparks their horseshoes struck from the cobblestones, I spotted that angular dark form vanishing into an alleyway, followed it and found safety there.
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