The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  Florida.

  *

  Isaac did not find her in Pensacola, where the appearance of bubonic plague had thrown an endtimes pall over the already depleted city. Streets empty, ships in the harbor under quarantine, most businesses closed so that he had to hunt for hours for the manager of the Watkins Hotel, a sour and reluctant little fellow who Isaac begged to open up and look behind the desk for any message that had been left him. The man had been about to shut the door, but Isaac wedged his foot in the jamb and told the manager as gently as he could that this was no fucking joke.

  It was noon and bright when he left with the scrap of stationery scribbled with his wife’s hand, and he was smiling. He hadn’t eaten for a day and a half and he’d gone from lightheaded to giddy. He walked out of the stilled city to the bluffs that overhang the bay, crossed the railroad tracks he’d wait beside for the next train, and went gingerly through the wood and scrub until he came to the edge of the forest where he felt the breath of the wind off the Gulf.

  Angel had driven him to the train station, slipped a wad of money in his hand. Go find her. When Isaac asked wasn’t he coming, before Angel shut the door and drove off, Angel had glanced down at the running boards and said he was going back to New Orleans, that there was something he needed to do.

  Isaac rode into the panhandle through clearcut stretches and the last of the pinewoods he’d traveled as a child on foot. The train halted for water at a small station that years before had been a tavern for railmen, and he walked along the tracks toward the forward cars in the fading light of evening. Passengers dribbling out onto the wooden platform, taking a few first purposeful steps and then stopping, suddenly, having realized they were moving only for the sake of it.

  There was a man with a wagon selling tours to the falls that lay only a mile and a half away, he promised, in the woods. Some passengers haggled the price and asked about how long it would take, as if they could haggle time itself, and soon a clutch of them were seated in the back of the wagon, grinning. Isaac watched them, as they went over the tracks and across the field of stumps and disappeared into the line of trees, without even a vague notion of having been there before.

  It had happened like this: Under the false blue sky and the hovering ghosts, two days before Isaac would arrive home from Leavenworth, Kemper had sat and watched the black man climb down from his car. Seeing her there the man raised his hand. He was of middle height and, she saw when he came closer, heavy. Around his mouth that kind of newfound fat that takes men’s faces back to boyhood. Over his gray suit he wore a coat of camel hair and when he spoke to her he didn’t take off his hat.

  He said his name and asked for hers and, when she answered, said plainly what her brother had paid him to do.

  She froze, as people will. Searched his face, half-shadowed by the brim of his hat, and she didn’t see death there. (Of course, we like to believe that we will be the ones who run, who fight, that we are too smart, too fast, too brave, for death; when in fact most people never lift a finger until it is too late, firm in the delusion that we will go on living because we can’t imagine not.) Nor was it, not for her and not that day and not in the person of Rule Chandler, who had known he wouldn’t kill this woman from the moment he took her brother’s money. Known but had come here anyway, without quite knowing why.

  —Have you ever seen me before? he said.

  After a while her voice crawled out, frightened.

  —I don’t think so, she said.

  —I was at your father’s funeral. Condolences, by the way.

  —Sorry, I—

  —Don’t be sorry to me. Wasn’t my funeral.

  —All right, she said, almost whispering.

  —Don’t worry, I won’t be the one to kill you.

  She sat there, gaping. Not even a thank you, he thought.

  The wind came off the bay and picked up the tails of his overcoat and raised dust at his feet in the yard as he continued:

  —To tell you the truth, Rule said, I don’t know why I’m here. I could’ve just taken the money and gone, left you to find out when the next man comes.

  —The next?

  —Oh, I won’t be the only one. He’ll send another and another, I’m afraid, until the notion leaves him.

  When she was done crying, her shoulders ceasing to jolt, she asked him why her brother was doing this.

  —I couldn’t tell you, and I wouldn’t if I could. Maybe when you’ve got money like y’all have all that matters is wanting. Make a wish—Rule snapped his fingers—and it’s done.

  —What can I do?

  —Run. He shrugged.

  A few of the birds had wandered into the ground between them, stirring and sifting.

  —You raise chickens, Rule said.

  —A few, she said. For eggs.

  —No rooster? What do you do about snakes? Possums?

  She seemed caught off guard by the turn in their talk, struggled to form her words.

  —Roosters are too much trouble, she said. Too mean.

  —They can be that, he said. We had them growing up. Banty roosters, meanest little bastards you ever saw. Rule laughed. But when it matters, he said, you want a mean thing around.

  She kept quiet and he considered asking her if she had a gun, of even leaving his with her, but judged he’d need it soon enough. It came to him that he cared precious little what happened to her once he was gone, providing he was not the one to do it. This was no act of justice, mind you (that fate should strike down one rich white woman didn’t serve to stir his heart overmuch), but he would have his last act as an American be the refusal to do another’s bidding. Somewhere in his time with Augustine he’d been able to see himself again, like an island far off in the mist, and bit by bit he was laying claim.

  —You know what your brother did tell me, Rule said.

  —What’s that.

  —He said y’all—the Woolsacks—were black. A little bit, at least, way back when. And I was looking at you just now, staring. Like it’s something you can find in a face.

  —It’s true, supposedly.

  —Well he certainly thinks so. Got very … you know he can get carried away … when he told it. I don’t know what he thought it was supposed to mean to me, talking about your high-yellow grandmother like this was the secret of the world. As if … what? What does that make you, tragic? Does it make your story mean something?

  —It doesn’t mean a thing, she said.

  —That’s what I told him.

  —What did he say to that?

  —I don’t know, Rule said. I was leaving, just like I’m leaving now.

  Late in the night Angel slipped past the man who stood at the gate of his brother’s house, lifting himself over the spikes and landing in the rear courtyard. He waited a moment, not breathing, to see if he’d been seen. Overhead a cloud-swept sliver of moon. Hearing nothing but his own heart, Angel went along in a crouch over the trimmed and dew-damp lawn and made his way inside.

  Two

  Angel sitting in the dark at his brother’s desk. Behind him the blinds were drawn, wood tabletop stone-smooth to the touch, a pile of papers in one corner and an Emeralite lamp in the other. The house, one of those thick-walled Garden District tombs, was quiet, and while Angel waited he’d been peopling it in his mind. Hard as it was to imagine Red with a family, he’d noticed the signs on his way in. Traces of a childhood as he’d once left in a house not unlike this one. Angel’s eyes had just begun to adjust when Red, or the sound of him, a rush of air, a voice, came into the room.

  —Who’s there?

  When a person asks questions of the dark, there is a part of the asking that is not totally sincere. The default state of our minds says that no one is there. But by the sound of Red’s voice, all his darknesses were densely peopled. This voice, years and octaves back, had begged him, Play with me. Angel’s fingers found the beaded cord of the Emeralite and pulled it. The bulb flashed on and they faced each other in a pale green pool of light.
>
  It took Angel a moment to grasp what he was seeing, what surrounded him. The walls of the room and even the door Red shut were papered in a pattern of overlapping crescents colored green, and gold, and black. Bananas in their stages of ripeness, a massive downpour of fruit.

  While Angel sat blinking, his brother’s eyes went first to Angel’s hands. What the hands were doing, what they held (at the moment, nothing) concerned him more than the face of the brother he’d believed dead for almost a decade. Angel didn’t know whether to be pleased or repulsed.

  —When you were little, you used to steal my cleats. Wear them all over the house. Scratched the hell out of the parquet. Drove Mom and the maid crazy, but you’d clomp around all the same.

  The light was like what happens in the aftermath of a storm, all milky emerald, a light that slows movement. The walls of fruit seemed to ripple and bulge.

  —So, Red said.

  —So I remember you, and before that, when I prayed for a little brother. When they brought you out, all wrapped up, I was proud of myself, like I was responsible. And when you scratched the floor or got blisters on your heels from shoes that were too big, I felt it too. I remember you, Red, and remembering you is the only thing that’s keeping me from doing what I should.

  —Which is what, Angel? Kill me?

  Angel was quiet.

  —Then say it, man. Say it. Say, I’m going to kill you.

  —No.

  —Say I’m going to kill you, Red. I’m going to kill you because I can’t stand who I am, because I’m jealous—

  —That’s what you want, isn’t it? A bloodbath. Fucking Greek tragedy. Prove to everyone just how important and grand the whole thing was.

  As he spoke Angel thought of his brother’s family scattered throughout the house. What was the wife like? Did the children look like her or like their father? Did they love him, the children, or were they terrified of him, this father who, in death, if death were to find him tonight, would become forever barred from them and thus infinitely important.

  A long silence then as he stared at his brother surrounded by the storm of fruit.

  —Okay, Red said. Now what.

  —Now you’re going to sit down, right there, and we’re going to talk, Angel said. And when we’re through, this’ll all be over.

  Three

  Isaac climbing flights of hotel stairs, his breath gone. He’d found her, she was here, in a room, and he couldn’t let himself entirely believe it. Now he stood before the door on which gold room numbers slanted right as if to run, as a part of him wished to do, the part that couldn’t be contained any longer and might bolt down the hallway of the fourth floor of the Leon Hotel or kick down this door, which made to his mind in that moment about as much sense as raising his hand and knocking. Fear and time and loss do strange things to us; so Isaac was given pause.

  The creak of bedsprings and the busying of sheets. The pad of feet over the textures of the floor, hardwood and pile, coming toward him. The door sighed with the weight of a body, leaning. Water thumping through the pipes bringing heat to some other corner of the hotel.

  —Yes, she said.

  Isaac urging out his voice.

  —It’s me, he said.

  And for the first in a long time, he meant it.

  In rising she had wrapped herself in bedclothes and was shawled from head to ankle, allowing only her face to show. She stood before the threshold bound in the sheets and the odors of smoke and other people, so vivid that she felt herself becoming a fraction of the greater whole whose lives had taken them through this place. And this somehow comforted Kemper when she heard her husband’s small and unsure voice.

  She wanted to swallow that weakened voice and feed it back to him, remade, from her tongue. She felt herself all teeth and muscle and wanted to tear him apart—the urge to consume that stalks like a wolf at the edge of love. But for the span of a few seconds, when she opened the door and saw him there, she was still.

  This pale shorn version of her husband, trembling.

  Her face framed in bedsheets; he would not forget this. A Klimt face framed in shabby hotel sheets, though he hadn’t seen a Klimt yet and wouldn’t until years later when his wife’s features were retreating into the dark of forgetting. But now the shadows fled from around her, opening on the glow of her body, as she wrapped the covers like wings around him and drew him in.

  The muted noises of the town outside the window, their window, stirred one then the other awake. On the floor at the foot of the bed his Leavenworth clothes lay crumpled. In a future he couldn’t yet bring himself to imagine he would cut this suit for rags to dab paint and thinner, wipe away mistakes, then, still later, he would throw the rags away. He lay with her, his stomach turning for the strangeness of being touched lovingly. For so long he had been shoved and prodded and elbowed and beaten and so developed that barrier of space around him, crackling like antimatter, and now she’d broken it and he was reeling.

  —Isaac.

  In the window a red curl of neon signage burning dimly.

  —Isaac, she said. Talk to me.

  —Keep your hand there.

  —Okay.

  She pressed at the small of his back, the knob of spine, and held him as he fell asleep again. He’d listened to her tell what was happening, what had come to them, with a kind of abject calm.

  So, he said when she came to the end, where are we going?

  She hadn’t realized until that moment how strong she’d grown in her time alone. Felt her strength there coiling, unsprung power. Sharp awake beside her hollowed husband—he might have been the papery husk left behind by a changing insect—she stroked his hair, saying, Far, far, away.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  When I was a boy our father gave me a book called The Stranger in the Tropics, a guidebook I used to trace his journeys and go vicariously with him. Like many pieces of my life, the book is lost now. But tonight, walking the deck as we came into the heart of the Gulf, I remembered a passage he’d underscored, an aside written in the tone of the manifestly destined, and which I committed to memory:

  No prudent traveler should ever enter upon a journey without making provision of some conveniently portable firearm. Their use may not, and probably will not be required: but the sense of personal security and self-reliance which their possession gives, will often be of far more value than their cost. Our experience induces us also to add, in getting your arms always get the best.

  At first I smiled, remembering, but then I felt the weight of the antique pistol in my pocket. How I came by the gun, finally, is unimportant. The pistol scaled down to fit our father’s hand when he was small, a present from his own father, who put it to another use. I’ve had the thing since before that night in Havana, when I’d been planning to give it to him as a gift. And if any good came of that night maybe it’s the fact that he never got it. He’d spent long enough tending his own small museum of one family’s mauled history. We all have. I tried to fire it myself once, on an unspeakable night, but found the mechanisms frozen fast.

  Midnight, somewhere between Tampico and New Orleans, I was standing at the foredeck rail, the pistol in my hand. The history of any family or nation for that matter belongs to the inheritors, and this was mine whether I wanted it or not. I held it out over the railing, over the Gulf.

  I try to think of what I would’ve said to them, to Eduard, to our father, but it’s like trying to be who you were a moment or a year ago. The more you try the less comes back to you and this goes on until the last time, the one you don’t see coming, when what won’t come back is everything you love. Then I opened my hand and there was nothing there.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Four

  Later that year, in Haiti, on the road that spills and veers down the mountains from Kenscoff to Pétionville (they were headed for Port-au-Prince, some ten miles distant), Rule Chandler and his wife were riding through the clouds. He’d hitched a pair of mules (not bothering to wake his yardboys, who sl
ept on a platform in an open stall) and started out from his house, which felt like, and once was, a fortress built against the poverty of the villages below. Augustine beside him, pale red shawl on her shoulders for the cold. The sun had only partly risen and they wanted to spend the day in town, picking up things she’d ordered for the house and so that Rule could sort out some business, both of which required her French. He had, with money and her help, acquired land to tenant out in the richer valleys to the east and servants who Augustine spoke to in a tone that shocked him when he first heard it, and the big house in the mountains, which had belonged to a now-deposed official of the arrondissement and before that a governor’s brother and before that a black planter and before that a white. (Like soldier crabs, Auga joked, trading their shells.) So Rule had found himself a man of property in another country, but also a man steering mules down a dirt road, something he’d seen his father do so many times.

  Before coming to Haiti, he’d never stood more than twenty feet above sea level, and after four months Rule still felt uneasy on the mountain passes, in the thin air and the crushing sky. The moment you stand at the edge and realize the mist passing over you is someone else’s cloud is like the first time you realize that you are rich. On the night they arrived in Kenscoff his stomach burned and he’d felt the seams in his skull aching. Then thick grassy teas and peppery slaws were forced on him and he recovered. Gained mountain legs if not mountain lungs, but still could be struck lightheaded when rounding a bend, hugging their wagon against the scarp so that the wheels tripped stone.

  Mist heavy in the pines and the drooping, dew-clung juniper, which grew thick in those days before the woods were cut clear to feed the city’s need for charcoal. The way opened on ridged cropland and fields of grass lit gold where low-slung cows stood among the boulders. Rule careful with the reins as they came out of the switchbacks and onto the ridge the road followed like a spine, either side of the path a sloping tumble into cloud. There, in the clearing of the mist, he saw them coming.