* * * *
No one instructed me as to how I should conceal my crime (he began to write next day, after the lawyer had come and gone). Nor did anyone need to.
I grasped Royal's hand, dragged his carcass down into the glen, and pressed my pistol into the hand of the dead innkeeper. Then I set out briskly enough, rehearsing my story as I went, and after disarranging my clothing, staggered into Red River Landing, crying out a shocking tale of ambush and sudden death.
All who saw me that day knew that I truly grieved, though they did not know why. General Hobbs, of course, knew what had happened, but my secret was safe with him. Rose (I think) divined the truth, but could do nothing, having no protector but myself, and needing one more than ever, because she was with child.
'Twas almost miraculous, how all the pieces fell into place. The hue and cry over the murder was great, for Royal had been a rising star of the Republican Party, and his death became a hook upon which President Grant could hang new and stringent measures against the Klan. In the months that followed, I traveled to Washington thrice to testify, and made (I may say without false pride) a good job of it: in lengthy testimony on the Hill, I never made a serious error; never was at a loss for words; most important of all, never told the truth.
Based largely upon my testimony, Congress concluded that two loyal Union men had been attacked by Klansmen, one being killed and other barely escaping with his life. The outrage led directly to passage of the Ku Klux Act, which caused so much trouble to General Hobbs and his friends: ‘twas under that law he was later arrested for some trifling murder, tried by military commission, and sent to Fort Leavenworth, where he died.
Thereafter I was a marked man amongst his followers, as I was already a pariah to all who hated the Yankee occupation. Yet isolation was familiar to me, and I was not unhappy to be rid of so impulsive and violent a friend. For great changes were in the air, and a cool head was needed to take advantage of them. In 1873 a depression devastated the Grant administration, which was already falling by the weight of its own corruption. Another three years, and the Democrats seized power in Louisiana; Governor Wharton was impeached, and departed public life with a fortune (said to be in the range of two millions) to comfort his old age.
He paid me a handsome price for my land near Red River, and there built the grand and intricate monstrosity of a house he calls Réunion. He sited his mansion at the end of the great oak alley, clearing away the old chimney in the process, and the ruins of Monsieur Felix's house as well, which spoiled his view. ‘Twas in this house, in rooms that were perfect symphonies of bad taste, that I courted his daughter Elmira, and won her consent to be my bride.
The marriage was sumptuous. Like the great slave-owners he had always secretly admired, the Governor displayed an instinct for magnificence. As the wedding day approached, he imported from South America hundreds of spiders known for the beauty of their webs and turned them loose in the oaks. When their shining orbs had taken form, with his own hand he cast handfuls of gold dust upon the threads.
Up this astounding aisle, more splendid than any cathedral, ‘midst golden glitter and dancing sunlight he led Elmira, clad in ashes-of-roses chenille and watered silk and Brussels lace, to where I waited for her beside the soaring staircase of Réunion. There we were wed, and the parson prayed that our marriage might symbolize an end to the strife which had so long bloodied the State and the Nation.
After kissing my bride, I embraced my new father-in-law with one arm, whilst he hugged me with two. Tears leaked into his whiskers as he saw his family joined forever to what he liked to call, in hushed tones, “the old aristocracy."
Rose's story was less glorious. Eight months after Royal's death, she gave birth to an infant which she freely acknowledged to be his.
I was by then a busy man, between my Washington trips and my courting of Elmira, and was at some difficulty to cover things up. In the end I arranged for Rose to visit Natchez in the character of a widow, accompanied by a discreet woman of my acquaintance. There a hale and noisy male infant passed through the gates of life, and entered this world of sin. The final act of the tragedy came when Rose died of a hemorrhage resulting from a difficult labor. Well, she had always been sickly and frail—not a good candidate to bear a large and lusty man-child!
I was somewhat at a loss what to do with this new and (at first) unwelcome kinsman of mine. I expected to have children with Elmira. Along with the Old South had vanished those easygoing days when a large brood of varicolored youngsters, some slave and some free, some legitimate and some bastards, could all be raised together under one paternal eye. Since then a certain niceness and propriety had come into life, and appearances had to be preserved.
I named the boy Morse, an uncommon name for a black. At the time I knew not why I chose it, though I now believe ‘twas a strangled echo of the remorse I felt over his father's death. I hoped that he might be light in hue and featured like an European, which would have made everything easier. But in a few weeks it became plain that—despite a double infusion of white blood, from his mother and his father's father—robust Africa was stamped firmly and forever upon his visage.
I put him out to be suckled by a wet-nurse in the Creole quarter, and this woman solved the problem for me. Recently she had lost an infant and been abandoned by her lover; she longed for a child, and she needed work. I took her into my household as a maid, where she remained until her death, representing herself to Morse as his mother. I believe that this woman, spotting a certain ghostly similarity in our features, decided that Morse must be my bastard, and in time passed on this bit of misinformation to her charge.
Yet he was my kinsman, and discreetly I watched over his raising, as in the past Papa had watched over Royal's. He grew strong and clever, learned to read and write and cipher to the rule of twelve, and in my service was trained to the duties of an upper servant. The walls of my house shielded him from much that was happening to his people in the outside world where, abandoned by the North, they were made into serfs by the South.
All unknowing, I was preparing a caretaker for myself. Ever since I had angered the Klan, a series of events had placed my life in danger: I but narrowly escaped two assassination attempts, and once had my house set on fire (though so incompetently that the blaze was readily extinguished). I hired Pinkertons to protect me, and for a time the attempts ended. But in ‘93, on busy Canal Street at noonday, an empty four-horse dray came careening around a corner and knocked me to the ground. The vehicle swerved around the next corner, and vanished: ‘twas later found abandoned in a weedy lot near the river, the horses unbridled and peacefully cropping grass. The driver was never discovered—or so the police reported.
Thus by a spinal injury I became an invalid at the age of fifty, when otherwise still vigorous and in the prime of life. Believing that my former associates had forgotten nothing and forgiven nothing, I turned increasingly into a recluse, dependent upon Morse, the only caregiver I felt that I could trust. And so—
* * * *
Unnoticed by Lerner, dusk had come, and with it came Morse, barging through the door with a touch of his old insouciance, despite his stiffness and the plum over his eye, carrying the dinner tray in which the old man felt no interest, and the drug he truly needed.
Lerner hastily put away his manuscript and closed the safe. Toward the food he made only a gesture, swallowing a forkful here and there and thrusting the rest away. After he had been settled for the night, Morse sat down beside the bed on a footstool, his head resting against the moss mattress, and they shared the opium.
As usual these days, one dose of laudanum wasn't enough for Lerner. The second put him into a state like the trance of a medium. He saw the specters of the past rising up about him, and whispered, “Look, look there."
"Where?"
"There, in the mirror. Can't you see him? It's Monsieur Felix! Look how his one eye gleams!"
"You're crazy, Father,” Morse said, not unkindly.
; "He wants me to come with him to his house. It lies halfway to the quarters, and once there I can never leave. Ah Morse, how can I tell him No, when I have so often told him Yes?"
"Rest, old man,” Morse said, “for the past is dead and gone."
"No, no, ‘tis a phantom limb that aches more than a real one, for there is no way to touch it, to heal it, to give it ease."
"Sleep,” Morse said, and mixed him yet another dose. Lerner drank it off at a gulp, choked, gasped for a moment, then relaxed against his pillows.
Little by little the shadows of the room turned bronze, then brown. For a time the old man seemed still to be conversing with Morse; he heard voices, one of which sounded like his own, and unless mistaken he heard spoken the word perdu. But the voices became still; he found himself enjoying a brilliant scene of people waltzing at a masked ball. Then nothing.
Next morning he woke with his head, as usual, filled with ashes. For a time he lay in bed, unable even to reach for the bell. When his mind cleared, he rang as usual, but no Morse appeared. Nor anyone else.
After ringing again and again, Lerner, cursing, stretched out a trembling arm, drew the wheelchair beside the bed and despite a shock of pain, wrestled himself into it. Where the devil was everyone? He trundled to the door of his den and flung it open.
The safe door stood ajar. He rolled into the room and put a trembling hand inside. The manuscript was gone. Well, thought Lerner, he was always a clever fellow.
The house was utterly silent. Morse must have sent Cleo and the cook away. Lerner spun the chair this way and that. What to do, what to do? The telephone was out of reach, and anyway Morse might be waiting in the hallway. The old man peered back into the bedroom, but with only the one barred window it was a trap without an exit. He couldn't lock himself into the den, for the key to the hall door had vanished years ago—possibly removed by Morse, so that he could enter at will.
And he'd put his life into the hands of this man! Soon he'd be coming to accuse Lerner of murdering his real father. Coming with the razor, but not to shave him.
He turned to his desk, pulled out a handful of ancient bills that stuffed a pigeonhole, pushed aside a panel at the back and touched a hidden spring. A second panel opened into a dark recess. He thrust in his hand and pulled out the Remington. He clamped it muzzle-first in his left armpit, broke it open and checked the load of six brass cartridges. He snapped the weapon shut again. The hammer was stiff, but he cocked it easily with his one hand accustomed to doing the work of two.
He hid the gun under his lap robe and wheeled himself back into the bedroom. Closing the door to his den behind him, he waited for Morse—an old and crippled wolf, but not a toothless one.
Yet his first visitor appeared, not at the door, but in the mirror. Monsieur Felix couldn't bear to miss out on what was about to happen, and suddenly there he stood in the clouded pier glass—one eye gleaming, thin smile widening like an arroyo between the blue chin and the great blade of a nose. Perhaps he was too eager, for Lerner read his mind.
Why, he wondered, did I ever imagine his vengeance would stop with Royal? Did I not call him swine, connive at his death, supply the weapon that killed him? Did I not write my confession at his command? In an opium dream, did he not cause me to speak the word perdu that let Morse open the safe? Is it not his pleasure now to destroy me and Royal's son at one stroke? For either I'll kill him and perish of my infirmities, or he'll kill me and go to the hangman for murder.
At that moment the door slammed open and Morse entered, razor flickering in his hand. His face was swollen, his eyes drugged to pinpoints, his smile an arid duplicate of the one in the mirror. He whispered, “I've come to scrape your throat, Uncle."
Lerner pulled the revolver from under the lap robe. Morse halted like a man suddenly transmuted into stone. In the fearsome quiet that followed, Lerner spoke to him for the last time.
"Whatever else I've done in a long and mostly foul existence, Morse, remember how at the very end I saved you from the hangman's noose and gave you a new life for my brother's sake."
Two crashes of thunder. The shards of the mirror were still tinkling on the floor when Lerner slumped in his chair, the pistol slipping from his hand.
The smoke was dense, and through it Monsieur Felix, emerging from the shattered mirror, passed like a shadow seen in fog. He stared at Lerner, absolutely baffled. The vatic power he depended upon, the power that enabled him to plan his murders a decade or more in advance—why had it been blind to this possibility?
J'ai perdu son âme, he thought, almost in despair. I've lost his soul.
Then he turned his gaze on Morse. His trademark smile slowly rekindled, as he recalled the deepest secret of the young man's life: how, as a child, he'd entered the nursery in this house, turned Elmira's son over in his crib, and pressed the baby's face into the mattress until he suffocated—all out of fear that the white child would take his own place in Lerner's favor.
Now the poor devil needed help, which Monsieur Felix was always happy to supply.
Gradually Morse recovered from his shock. First he'd forgotten to breathe; then panted like a winded animal, heart thundering. Now his breath evened, his heart slowed to a regular beat. He folded the razor and put it into his trouser pocket, while cool thoughts seemed to rise from some unshaken region of his mind.
I must touch nothing. I must telephone the police. I must report the suicide. His illness and the drug will explain everything. And aren't the police identifying people by their finger-marks these days? Well, his finger-marks are on the pistol's grip.
But there was something else. The police—suppose they decide to bury the evidence and hang me as they've hung other blacks, for the mere pleasure of it?
A thought tickled the back of his mind. There's something in the desk.
He turned back into the den. Took the razor out again and threw it into the safe, so it wouldn't be found on him. He slammed the iron door, spun around, knocked the pile of ancient bills off the desk and reached his arm to the elbow inside the open hidey-hole. What was he touching?
He pulled out a leather purse with a string closure, opened it and grinned at the cylinder of gold double-eagles it contained. Why, the old devil, he thought. Here's his secret cache, and all the time I thought it was in the safe!
A few bribes would enable him to handle the police, and that was all he knew or cared about now. The fact that he would soon be rich—that he would have power beyond the imagining of ordinary people to exercise an appetite for cruelty that had grown up in him during a lifetime of stifled rage—all that remained to be discovered.
The Demon stood behind him, smiling, lending him useful thoughts, mentoring him, delighted as always to be the Overseer of human destiny.
Aha, le p'tit diable! whispered Monsieur Felix. Him I won't lose.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Plumage From Pegasus by Paul Di Filippo
Two CC's of Bestseller, Stat!
* * * *
"Soon, Milwaukee-area book lovers needing to check their blood pressure or just wanting information on the latest health trends will be able to do so while picking up some new reads. Milwaukee's Froedtert Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin will join forces this fall with the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in a unique collaboration to provide health information and resources to consumers. Founded in 2002, Small Stones Health Resource Center ... will move into a 3,800-square-foot space next to the Harry Schwartz Bookshop in Brookfield.... Small Stones will have a full-time nurse and other health educators on hand, as well as a resource library, screenings and classes. A retail area will provide health and wellness books, wellness journals, and other products for the health-minded consumer...."
—Claire Kirch, “Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop Healthy Place to Be,” Publishers Weekly Daily, August 15, 2006.
* * * *
That day at work, I was feeling a little under the weather—just a trace of flu, I hoped and believed, based on my red runny no
se and scratchy throat—so I decided to stop by my local bookstore on the way home. I'd pick up a big fat juicy bestseller to while away any convalesence. And I could also indulge in a hot chocolate from the bookstore's café. That would all certainly make me feel much better.
As I headed to the Brookfield mall, I realized that I didn't go shopping often enough. I couldn't remember the last time I had visited this Harry W. Schwartz branch. Living one's life online had certain advantages, but there was nothing like good old-fashioned mingling with humanity in the flesh!
When I reached the entrance to the familiar store, I encountered something unexpected: an unusual kind of sensor gate on the order of an airport metal detector.
Some new kind of security or anti-theft measure, I thought, and walked on through.
But the gate beeped fiercely at my passage and I prepared for the descent of store guards, already phrasing my excuses and jokes about my innocence of shoplifting and the unwarranted sonic assault.
Instead, I was beset by two nurses! The white-clad, intensely competent-looking women swooped up on either side of me. They wore hygienic facial masks and latex gloves.
"Sir,” said one, “I'm afraid our instruments reveal that you're carrying a communicable disease."
All the other nearby patrons were looking at me and shying away. I felt immediately like a leper.
"Well, perhaps a touch of flu. My throat's a bit raspy...."
"Sir, are you actually unaware of the new Schwarzenegger-Clinton Public Safety Act of 2007, which mandates that anyone wishing to utilize a commonly shared public space must possess a clean bill of health, as determined biometrically? Mutant tuberculosis alone last year accounted for ten fatalities among Harry W. Schwartz customers. If we permit you to infect your fellow booklovers, the annual bottom line of Harry W. Schwartz could be severely impacted."
"I—I hadn't heard anything...."
One nurse handed me a pamphlet. “Here are the details, sir."
I studied the material—inside an invisible bubble of contempt maintained by my fellow book-browsers—before speaking.
FSF, March 2008 Page 11
