by S. T. Joshi
Dwight was a washout when it came to pegging ethnicities, and even at the edge of point-blank range couldn’t tell if angular features were Hispanic or Italian or Syrian. “Mediterranean” struck him as a rational compromise. And the outfit was emphatically generic. White button-down shirt with long sleeves, loose khaki trousers, sandals. If anything, too much coverage for this hothouse climate. Maybe he suffered from poor circulation. “Please, I come back after long, long time away,” he wheezed. “I do not want to steal.” The rutted face peered up at Dwight’s as if in supplication, but also as if Dwight owed him something, an insinuation with which he was less than comfortable. What’s more, the accent contributed nothing toward defining the stranger’s pedigree. Cajun? Portuguese? Mexican? Dwight was starting to feel rudderless. Say something! “Did you work for the people who used to live here?”
“This place was mine! Something of mine is still here!” Oh, shit. Dwight had wounded the catalpa pod’s dignity. He’d also been blindsided by that claim to former ownership, and who was he to brand anyone a liar out of hand? Still, he couldn’t see it, not in this upper-crust Colonial Revival enclave, in what had always been, well, an unapologetically white bastion on the East Side of Providence. Like water into cracked cement, the geezer took advantage of Dwight’s nonplussed state to slip past him and into the house. This turn of events had scarcely registered when Edith’s startled yelp pulled Dwight inside on the double.
How had those decrepit legs carried the unwanted guest to the living room already? Dwight heard him mewl, “Please, I am only Castro. I have come back here for something that is mine.” Edith was still at the window, and this so-called “Castro,” with hands upraised in a medieval-looking gesture of appeasement, had violated her personal space, to judge by her red cheeks and arched eyebrows and incisors biting into lower lip. She was wedged in among the beige velvet drapes, and had backed well beyond arm’s length from the doddering intruder. Dwight could understand why she was aghast, even if it seemed an overreaction. She treated Dwight to a glance that fairly bristled, I meant for you to find out what he wanted, not ask him in! Oh, boy. No smoothing this over till she decided in due course to cool off.
Instead, Dwight aimed for a conciliatory tone toward Castro, who was, after all, merely a feeble and confused, if not senile, old specimen. As if anything of his were really on the premises! “Mr. Castro, why don’t you have a seat? I’m sure we can get this sorted out in a minute.” Castro eyed him as if wary of forked tongues, waddled backward and away from Edith, sized up the furnishings, and planted himself in the leather Deco club chair, their most valuable piece, facing the plasma TV. Dwight perched at one end of the puffy canvas sofa, across the room from the rear picture window, setting his guest in three-quarters profile. Castro swiveled on the squeaky upholstery to confront him head-on, putting Dwight unjustly on the defensive.
Edith, with a valiant post-traumatic smile, was rebounding from the drapes, rising to the occasion, doing her part to defuse the awkwardness. “Can I get you something to drink? It’s so humid out there, isn’t it?” Barely making eye contact, let alone giving Castro a chance to answer, she was off to the kitchen, with that sway in her hips, more pronounced when she was in a hurry, that Dwight had found so provocative in premarital days, before realizing she couldn’t help it, that it wasn’t meant to turn him on. Maybe she was less interested in relieving Castro’s thirst than in jumping at any excuse to absent herself a while.
Castro did watch her departure with what Dwight preferred to regard as appreciation. Yes, the man must have been parched, though no more perspiration shone on his furrowed skin than on petrified wood, as if his sweat glands had worn out over decades. Nor did he proffer her thanks or other nicety, but to Dwight he confided, “She is pretty, your wife.”
Dwight for the life of him couldn’t think up an answer to that. Castro didn’t visibly care, content with an armchair inspection of the room, from Japanese woodblock prints on the wall to Erté bust on Corinthian pedestal to bronze figurines from Benin on the mantel. Casing the place despite protests to the contrary? Dwight wished in vain for something to say, if only to curtail the mental checklist. Jeez, had the sneaky codger noticed the luggage on his way in? Good luck enjoying Costa Rica for two carefree weeks now. And where the hell was Edith with that glass of whatever?
“Here we are!” she lilted, bustling in with a blue plastic tumbler of cola. In her own good time, as usual. Handed it to Castro, who sniffed it with pursed, questioning lips as the fizz subsided. He tasted it and his features crinkled disdainfully.
“Please, can you put nice rum in this?” he demanded. “Nice Cuban rum.”
Dwight and Edith exchanged helpless frowns, far from thrilled at prospects of a drunk, out-of-control foreigner in their den. More disturbing, it was as if Castro knew about that liter of Edmundo Dantes, a gift from Dwight’s boss, who’d smuggled it in through Canada. It was locked in the bottom drawer of Second Empire china cabinet in the dining room. On reserve for special occasions. Was Castro psychic? Or a practical joker in the employ of Dwight’s boss? In either case, refusing him would likely result in an ugly scene sooner rather than later. This Castro, as two minutes with him had demonstrated, was nothing if not irascible.
Another excuse for Edith to duck out, anyway, and she seized upon it without comment. Dwight heard her clattering in the McCoy bowl full of Lindt chocolates where they hid the key to the cabinet, and then the key rattling in the lock. Castro was also listening, head cocked quizzically to one side. More clinking and scraping of glass against glass, across wood. Followed by the squeal and pop of a cork stopper.
Edith tripped back in, with a cheerful demeanor that may have been less transparently phony to Castro than to Dwight. Castro had to hold out his cup to meet Edith’s outstretched arm with the open bottle. Quite admirable, her skill at hovering no closer than absolutely necessary to get the job done. “Say when!” Her smile did become brittle as the level of liquid rose significantly in the cup before Castro gave an understated nod of approval. He sampled the expensive concoction and smacked his arid lips with gusto. Nobody’s fault if it sounded more to Dwight like the click of mandibles.
Dammit, with all that fussing over the drink, Dwight had almost forgotten Castro’s purported reason for worming his way in, and beaming Castro was relaxing and enjoying his rum and coke way too much. Dwight leaned forward from the edge of the sofa and aspired to a stern, authoritative timbre. “Mr. Castro, when we bought this house, the attic was completely empty, the basement was completely empty, and every cupboard and closet was completely empty. Unless we’ve missed a secret crawlspace or trapdoor, anything you mislaid was gone when we moved in.”
“Mislaid?” huffed Castro scornfully. Then he nestled deeper in the maroon leather, sipped his drink, and adopted a more serene air. “Please, Mrs. Nickerson, you sit down too.” Castro extended his free arm toward the sofa and drew circles in the air with his index finger. Edith sighed and played along. Keeping a lid on her impatience, but no longer smiling. Dwight wondered whether guest or hostess would blow up first. Edith had an extensive record of speaking her mind on short notice.
Wait a minute, how had Castro known their last name? Dwight had to rein in his alarm. Let the old guy spook you, and you pass the ball to his court. “Nickerson” was on the mailbox, for God’s sake. Or, assuming Castro’s claim about lost property was sincere, he could have learned by any number of aboveboard means who occupied his former address.
“The houses around us, the streets and the sidewalks, the ground under our feet, they all feel so solid, like they always will be here, like they always have been,” Castro expounded. “But it was not so long ago, things were different, were they not?”
“I don’t see how this enters into your business here.” When had Dwight asked for an oration? Had he already allowed Castro an inch and ceded a mile?
As if affirming that worst fear, Castro took a slow, exasperating slurp from his tumbler. “This ground w
e walk on, for example, with the big houses and the neat yards on top of it. Underneath, for thousands of years, was a swamp here that festered and bred sicknesses and vermin. Even less than a hundred years ago, some swamp was around us. The English who first came, they named it Cat Swamp, and the street you call Olney now, it went to the swamp, and they called it Cat Swamp Trail. That swamp is all buried, but who can say it is gone forever?”
“Whether it is or it isn’t, every word of this is news to me,” Dwight retorted, loath to admit Castro had hit a nerve by reducing his exclusive neighborhood to malarial wetland. “Why should we trust this information?”
Castro shrugged impassively. “No one can be sure of how much history there is, even in one’s own backyard.”
“Well, maybe I see what you mean,” Edith ventured. “I heard there used to be a ravine where Elton Street is. But what does any of this have to do with whatever it is that belongs to you?”
“The ravine? Nothing to do with it, nothing.” Sly Castro winked. Yes, of course he was acting purposely obtuse. Not out to fool anybody. Just his little jest, okay?
“Okay, but why in the world,” asked Dwight despite wishing he could stop himself, despite misgivings that he was somehow chomping on bait, “was it called Cat Swamp?”
Castro raised his index finger and wagged it back and forth, as if to say, All in good time, my child. “It took a little while in front of your house to be sure you still had my thing of value. It will take a little while to relate how that thing of value came to be here.”
Oh God, please, just get on with it, Dwight inwardly fumed, regretting he’d ever peeked out the front window. A like sentiment was all too readable in Edith’s body language.
“In the beginning was a religious persecution, very long ago, but it is the first cause of my being here.” Castro indulged a generous swallow from his tumbler. “In Andalusia, the people had leave to worship as they pleased. But after the Moors were expelled, it became bad, too hard to stay, for those who did not profess the orthodox creed.”
Oh no, Dwight silently quailed, he’s not really dragging us all the way back to 1492, is he? But yes, he plainly was, and Dwight would have been fidgeting with irritation had he not been spacing out amidst Castro’s nonstop babble.
“The Inquisition and the wars about faith were to spread all over Europe. To be safe for the longest time, it was needful to join with the Portuguese, who were sailing to lands with no Christians, with no jealous gods. And what is now New England would be safest, even though the Portuguese had put up a church and a fort where your Newport is today, and sought to convert the Niantic people. But in a few years the soldiers and the priests went away, as anyone could have foretold they would, because the gold and the silver and the trade were elsewhere, and those passengers were soon forgotten who chose to stay and watch hurricanes and lightning hammer away at the fort. Nothing remains from those Portuguese builders except some of the church, visible at sea, and used by mapmakers as a landmark for generations before the Protestant colonies.”
Inexplicably to Dwight, the more Castro drank, the more polished his diction, the more educated and articulate his delivery, above and beyond simply warming to his topic.
“And so where the doctrine of the Catholics did not take root, another did, with precious decades to flourish unmolested, and to attract members from among the native men, and to receive those disciples from the Old World with the cunning to seek and find American refuge. For the sake of avoiding friction with the sachems and the shamans of that region, the newcomers retired to territory shunned as worthless and unlucky, a swamp in fact, north of the bay. There they could practice their rituals and libations in privacy, to curry the favor of divine powers sovereign over earth and sea and stars. Native leadership for the most part left these swamp dwellers in peace, unwilling to risk the displeasure of strange gods.”
Castro emptied the tumbler and set it gently on the parquet beside his chair. He had crossed the line between doddering and delusional, in Dwight’s confident opinion, and where would he go from there? Slipping out of earshot and phoning the police to remove this potential menace might have been the best plan, but then the babble resumed, and Dwight didn’t want to exit in the middle of a monologue and maybe set off their touchy powder keg. Wait till the next pause.
“Throughout this era, the only English to come ashore were fishermen who stayed in summer stations, and who had nothing for recreation but to drink and to seduce the native women. These seasonal visitors, and not the next century’s settlers, gave Cat Swamp its name, which was later thought to be from an abundance of cattails, or because bobcats prowled there, but no, it was because of the fishermen’s own cats that ran off and hid in the swamp, hunting mice and beetles.” Castro silently clapped his palms together, with fingertips leveled at Dwight. “And that is the answer I owed you, Mr. Nickerson, is it not?”
The best Dwight could do was nod helplessly, as if he had to keep his head above treacherous current, to the exclusion of almost everything else. A current of verbiage? Is that all it was? Edith was similarly glassy-eyed.
“The people of the swamp were happy to let the cats breed as they would, for they made acceptable offerings to those exalted, almighty powers, greedy for adoration. Much more pleasing to those powers was the blood of living men, which the fishermen also supplied when drunkenness made them easy marks, or when the furious kinfolk of a ravished native woman delivered them bound and naked. If entire boatloads of fishermen were to disappear, for the most part no one would miss them, and if someone did, where would blame ordinarily fall except upon the Atlantic?”
This crazy old coot, this demented story, it must be a hoax, Dwight reverted to telling himself. Staged by his boss, a send-up in lieu of a send-off, before tomorrow’s flight. Yeah, that’d be just like him. Any minute now, someone somehow, Castro, boss, or third party, would tip his hand.
“Mrs. Nickerson, you look especially upset about these past happenings. Would it help for me to assure you that fishermen and rapists and slavers were often the same people?”
Castro droned on without waiting for Edith’s yes or no. “Those first English colonists came here to escape persecution, even as we did, and those who built the first homes around the bay, and who were sometimes in earshot of our feline sacrifices, pretended deafness to them, in those days when the reputation of the cat was doubtful at best. Again you are upset, Mrs. Nickerson, but you must accept, your ancestors did not care what happened to cats.”
Castro’s hands were still clasping together and seemed to operate with a fidgety, independent volition of their own. They jerked a couple of inches back, forth, up, down at irregular intervals, as if obeying the skittish pull of the four compass points. Ever more annoying. If only Dwight could find the words to make him stop. At least Edith, bless her, had mustered the wherewithal to scoff, “Mr. Castro, do you really expect us to believe that Providence was founded by a coven of witches?”
“No, no, Mrs. Nickerson,” he patiently corrected her. “Witches are friendly to cats, remember? Most of your forebears also made that mistake. Almost none had the learning to perceive the ancient, enormous gulf between my religion and that of superstitious rustics. But those forebears of yours, as their numbers increased over the months and pushed inland, grew violently offended at what they glimpsed and overheard at the end of Cat Swamp Trail, and did oblige the swamp dwellers to quit their refuge of more than a century. In haste those victims of hatred had to scatter into the wilderness or secure passage to far-flung ports where none had knowledge of them or where the roads led to deathless masters who might enlarge their wisdom and impart how men and time might do them no further injury.”
Okay, Dwight pleaded, if there’s a man behind the curtain, it would be really good of him to pop out right now. The shiny black mantel clock ticked impassively on. Nope, nothing.
“Meanwhile, your forefathers, in their ignorant passion, strove to expunge my people not only from the land but from me
mory and the written word. Over the long run, that was also preferable to us, insulting as it was at the moment. Of those self-righteous witnesses, William Blackstone alone preserved a plain-spoken account of us in his journal, which fire destroyed along with the rest of his library, days after his death.”
“And that was never considered suspicious?” Dwight found himself asking.
“William Blackstone’s death was purely natural.” Maybe so, but Castro’s crooked smile was hardly innocent. Truth interposed as a wall of deception? “And Roger Williams, rumor had it, described us in some coded manuscripts, but they have never been deciphered. Perhaps he was libeling other neighbors altogether. Did you know his mortal remains turned into the root of an apple tree?”
What? Dwight was becoming disoriented, numb to the sofa beneath him as if his legs had fallen asleep up to the waist, or he was at the outset of a poor man’s out-of-body experience. “Mr. Castro, do you honestly believe that anything of yours is inside this house?” Dwight managed to ask. “Would you at least do us the courtesy of stating what it’s supposed to be? In one straightforward sentence?”
Castro’s smile had taken on a capricious edge. Or was it patronizing? His copper eyes, in contrast, had gone emotionless, borderline reptilian. “Hidden in the hinterlands of Cathay were the most accomplished teachers of my religion. In three lifetimes, a disciple could not grasp the fullness of wisdom in one of them.”
Castro’s hands, still acting on their own, were performing manipulations, tangentially like a game of cat’s cradle, except the shapes they wove, while fluttering apart and spiraling toward a contact they never quite achieved, induced a queasiness in Dwight, a foreboding, yet he lacked ambition to lower his gaze.
“One master too many in the disciplines of Cathay would have sown deadly, useless conflict, so after my intellect had penetrated to the innermost circle of secret lore, I withdrew, and eventually reached the haven of Louisiana bayou, where I could gather and teach acolytes in the seclusion of another swamp for yet more decades, until small-minded men enforcing human law drove us forth again. They caught me and nearly brought me to grief, but I tricked them by playing the mestizo degenerate they presumed I was, and when their guard was down, I escaped by the grace of my religious resources. Today you would call it ‘playing the race card,’ would you not?” An unpleasantness stole across Castro’s grin, as his hands danced on of their own profane accord.
