For the first time in perhaps three months I decided to leave my room and go outside. For this, I need somebody’s help. Jefferson didn’t design the house anticipating the presence of a crippled occupant (and I doubt that Cesaria ever thought she’d entertain such frailty) so there are four steps in the passageway that leads out to the front hail; steps which are too deep for me to negotiate in a wheelchair even with help. Dwight has to carry me down, like a babe in arms, and then I wait, laid prone on the sofa in the hallway, until he brings down the chair and sets me in it.
Dwight is quite simply the most amiable fellow I have ever known; though he has every reason to hate the God who made him and probably every human being in the state of North Carolina. He was born with some kind of mental defect that made self-expression difficult, and was therefore thought to be an idiot. His childhood and early adolescence were a living hell: denied any real education, he languished, abused by both his parents.
Then, one day in his fourteenth year, he wandered into the swamp, perhaps to kill himself; he says he doesn’t exactly recall the reason. Nor does he know how long he wandered—though it was many days and nights—until Zabrina found him at the perimeters of L’Enfant. He was in a state of complete exhaustion. She brought him back to the house, and for reasons of her own nursed him to health in her rooms without telling anyone. I’ve never pressed Dwight as to the exact nature of his relationship with Zabrina, but I don’t doubt that when he was younger she used him sexually; nor do I doubt that he was quite happy with the arrangement. She wasn’t then quite the scale she is now, but she was still substantial; for Dwight this was no hardship. He has several times mentioned to me in passing his enthusiasm for plentitude in a woman. Whether that taste predated his time with Zabrina, or was formed by it, I don’t know. I can only report that she kept him a secret for almost three years, during which she apparently made it her business to educate him; and well. By the time she introduced him to Marietta and myself, all but the faintest trace of his speech impediment had disappeared, and he had become the fledgling form of the man he was to become. Now, thirty-two years later, he is as much a part of this house as the boards beneath my feet. Though his relationship with Zabrina soured for reasons I’ve never been able to pry out of him, he still speaks of her with a kind of reverence. She is, and will always be, the woman who taught him Herodotus and saved his soul (which services, by the way, are in my opinion intimately connected).
Of course, he’s aging far faster than any of the rest of us. He’s forty-nine now, and crops his thinning hair to a gray stubble (which gives him a rather scholarly look) and his body, which used to be lean, is getting pudgy around the middle. The business of carrying me around has become much more of a chore for him, and I’ve told him several times that he’s soon going to have to go looking for another lost soul out there; someone he can train to take over the heavy duties in the house.
But perhaps now that’s academic. If Marietta’s right, and our days here are indeed numbered, he won’t need to train anyone to follow in his footsteps. They, and he, and we all, will have disappeared from sight forever.
We ate together that day, not in the dining room, which is far too large for just two (I wonder sometimes what kind of guests Mama had intended to invite), but in the kitchen. Jellied chicken loaf, and chives and sesame seed biscuits, followed by Dwight’s dessert specialty, a Hampton polonaise: a cake made with layers of almond and chocolate, which he serves with a sweet whipped cream. (His skills as a cook he got from Zabrina, I’m certain. His repertoire of candies is remarkable: all manner of crystallized fruit, nougat, pralines, and a tooth-rotting wonder he calls divinity fudge.)
“I saw Zabrina yesterday,” he said, serving me another slice of the polonaise.
“Did you speak to her?”
“No. She had that don’t come near me look on her face. You know how she gets.”
“Are you just going to watch me make a hog of myself?”
“I’m so filled up I’ll not stay awake this afternoon as it is.”
“Nothing wrong with a little siesta. Good ol’ Southern tradition. It gets hot, you go snooze till it cools down.” I looked up from my plate to see that Dwight had a glum expression on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like sleep as much as I used to,” he said softly.
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Bad dreams . . .” he said. “No, not bad. Sorrowful. Sorrowful dreams.”
“About what?”
Dwight shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. This and that. People I knew when I was little.” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve been thinkin’ maybe I should go out . . . you know . . . back where I come from.”
“Permanently?”
“Oh Lord, no. I belong here an’ I always will. No, just go out one more time to see if my folks are still alive, an’ if they are, say my goodbyes.”
“They must be getting old.”
“It’s not them that’s goin’, Mr. Maddox, an’ we both know it. It’s us.” He ran his finger through the remaining cream on his plate and put his finger on his tongue. “That’s what I’m dreamin’ about. Us goin’. Everythin’ goin’.”
“Have you been talking to Marietta?”
“Now and again.”
“No, I mean about this.”
He shook his head. “This is the first I’ve told anybody.”
There was an uneasy silence. Then he said: “What do you think?”
“About the dreams?”
“About going to see my folks an’ all.”
“I think you should go.”
ii
Though I attempted to take my own advice and have a siesta that afternoon, my head, despite the melancholy exchange with Dwight—or perhaps because of it—was buzzing like a stirred-up hive. I found myself thinking about certain parallels that existed between families that were in every other way unlike. The family of Dwight Huddle, for instance, living in a trailer park somewhere in Sampson County: did they ever wonder about their child, whom they lost to a place they would never see, never even know existed? Did they think of seeking him out all those years ago, when he was first lost, or was he as good as dead to them, as Galilee was to Cesaria? And then there was the Gearys. That family, for all its fabled clannishness had also in its time cut off some of its children as though they were gangrenous limbs. Again: as good as dead. I was sure that as I went on, I was going to find connections like these throughout this history: ways in which the sorrows and the cruelties of one bloodline were echoed in another.
The question that still lay before me, and I had so far failed to answer, was the way these connections might best be expressed. My mind was filled with possibilities but I had no real sense of how all that I knew was arrayed and dispersed; no sense of the pattern.
To distract myself from anxiety I made a slow exploration of the house. It was many years since I’d gone from room to room as I did now, and everywhere I looked this newly curious gaze of mine was rewarded. Jefferson’s extraordinary taste and passion for detail was in evidence all around me, but married to a wildness of conception that is, I’m certain, my mother’s gift. It’s an extraordinary combination: Jeffersonian restraint and Barbarossian bravura; a constant struggle of wills that creates forms and volumes utterly unlike any I have seen before. The great study, for instance, now fallen into neglect, which seemed the perfect model of an austere place of intellectual inquiry, until the eye drifted to the ceiling, where the Hellenic columns grew sinewy and put forth a harvest of unearthly fruit. The dining room, where the floor was set with such a cunning design of marble tiles that it seemed like a pool of blue-green water. A long gallery of arched alcoves, each of which contained a bas-relief so cunningly lit that the scenes seemed to shed their own luminescence, which spilled out as from a series of windows. There was nothing, it seemed to me, that had been left to chance; every tiny subtlety of form had been planned so as to flatter the greater scheme, just as the great scheme brought the ey
e back to these subtleties. It was all, it seemed to me, one glorious invitation: to pleasure in the seeing, yes; but also to a calm certainty of one’s own place in all of this, not overpowered, simply enjoined to be here in the moment, feeling the way the air flowed through the rooms and brushed your face, or the way the light came to meet you from a wall. More than once I found my eyes filling with tears at the sheer beauty of a chamber, then soothed from my tears by that same beauty, which wanted only my happiness.
All this said, the house was not by any means unspoiled. The years, and the humidity, have taken a terrible toll; scarcely a single room has escaped some measure of decay, and a few—particularly those which lay closest to the swamp—are in such a poor state of disrepair that I was obliged to have Dwight carry me into them, the floors were too rotted for my wheelchair. Even these chambers, I should say, had an undeniable grandeur to them. The creeping rot on the walls resembles the charts of some as yet unnamed world; the small forests of fungi that grow in the sodden boards have a fascination all of their own. Dwight was unpersuaded. “These are bad places,” he said, determined that their deterioration was due to some spiritual malaise that hung about them. “Bad things happened here.”
This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I told him so. If one room had rot in the walls and another didn’t, it was because of some vagary in the water table; it wasn’t evidence of bad karma.
“In this house,” Dwight said, “everything’s connected.”
That was all I could get him to say on the subject, but it was plain enough, I suppose. Just as I had come to appreciate the way the house played back and forth between spirit and sight, so Dwight seemed to be telling me the physical and moral states of the house were connected.
• • •
He was right, of course, though I couldn’t see it at the time. The house wasn’t simply a reflection of Jefferson’s genius and Cesaria’s vision: it was a repository for all that it had ever contained. The past was still present here, in ways my limited senses had yet to grasp.
VI
I encountered Marietta once or twice during these days of reacquaintance with the house (I even glimpsed Zabrina on a few occasions, though she shared no interest in conversing with me; only hurried away). But of Luman, of the man Cesaria had promised could help educate me, I saw not a hair. Had my stepmother decided not to allow me access to her secrets after all? Or perhaps simply forgotten to tell Luman that he was to be my guide? I decided after a couple of days that I’d seek him out for myself, and tell him how badly I wanted to get on with my work, but that I couldn’t do so; not until I knew the stories Cesaria had told me I could not even guess at.
Luman, as I’ve said, does not live in the main house, though Lord knows it has enough rooms, empty rooms, to accommodate several families. He chooses instead to live in what was once the Smoke House; a modest building, which he claims suits him better. I had not until this visit ever come within fifty yards of the building, much less entered it; he has always been fiercely protective of his isolation.
My mounting irritation made me bold, however. So I had Dwight take me to the place, wheeling me down what had once been a pleasant path, but which was now thickly overgrown. The air became steadily danker; in places it swarmed with mosquitoes. I lit up a cigar to keep them at bay, which I doubt worked, but a good cigar always gets me a little high, so I cared rather less that they were making a meal of me.
As we approached the door I saw that it was open a little way, and that somebody was moving around inside. Luman knew I was here; which probably meant he also knew why I called out to him.
“Luman? It’s Maddox! Is it all right if Dwight brings me in? I’d like to have a little talk!”
“We got nothing to talk about,” came the reply out of the murky interior.
“I beg to differ.”
Now Luman’s face appeared at the partially opened door. He looked thoroughly raddled, like a man who’d just stepped away from not one but several excesses. His wide, tawny face was shiny with sweat, his pupils pinpricks, his cornea yellowed. His beard looked as though it hadn’t been trimmed, or indeed even washed, in several weeks.
“Jesus, man,” he growled, “can’t you just let it be?”
“Did you speak to Cesaria?” I asked him.
He ran his hand through his mane and tugged it back from his head so violently it looked like an act of masochism. Those pinprick eyes of his suddenly grew to the size of quarters. This was a parlor trick I’d never seen him perform before; I was so startled I all but cried out. I stifled the yelp, however. I didn’t want him thinking he had the upper hand here. There was too much of the mad dog about him. If he sensed fear in me, I was certain he’d at very least drive me from his door. And at worst? Who knew what a creature like this could do if he set his perverse mind to it? Just about anything, probably.
“Yes,” he said finally, “she spoke to me. But I don’t think you need to be seeing the stuff she wants you to see. It ain’t your business.”
“She thinks it is.”
“Huh.”
“Look, can we at least have this conversation out of the way of the mosquitoes?”
“You don’t like bein’ bit?” he said, with a nasty little grin. “Oh I like to get naked an’ have ’em at me. Gets me goin’.”
Perhaps he hoped he’d repulse me with this, and I’d leave, but I was not about to be so easily removed. I simply stared at him.
“Do you have any more of them cigars?”
I had indeed come prepared. Not only did I have cigars, I had gin, and, by way of more intellectual seduction, a small pamphlet on madhouses from my collection. Many years before Luman had spent some months incarcerated in Utica, an institution in upstate New York. A century later (so Marietta told me) he was still obsessed with the business of how a sane man might be thought mad, and a madman put in charge of Congress. I dug first for the cigar, as he’d requested it.
“Here,” I said.
“Is it Cuban?”
“Of course.”
“Toss it to me.”
“Dwight can bring it.”
“No. Toss it.”
I gently lobbed the cigar in his direction. It fell a foot shy of the threshold. He bent down and picked it up, rolling it between his fingers and sniffing it.
“This is nice,” he said appreciatively. “You keep a humidor?”
“Yes. In this humidity—”
“Got to, got to,” he said, his tone distinctly warming. “Well then,” he said, “you’d better get your sorry ass in here.”
“It’s all right if Dwight carries me in?”
“As long as he leaves,” Luman said. Then to Dwight: “No offense. But this is between my half-brother and me.”
“I understand,” said Dwight, and picking me up out of my wheelchair carried me to the door, which Luman now hauled open. A wave of stinking heat hit me; like the stench of a pigpen in high summer.
“I like it rank,” Luman said by way of explanation. “It reminds me of the old country.”
I didn’t reply to him; I was too—I don’t know quite what the word is—astonished, perhaps appalled, by the state of the interior.
“Sit him down on the ol’ crib there,” Luman said, pointing to a peculiar bed-cum-coffin set close to the hearth. Worse than the crib itself—which looked more like an instrument of torture than a place of repose—was the fact that the hearth was far from cold: a large, smoky fire was burning there. It was little wonder Luman was sweating so profusely.
“Will this be all right?” Dwight said to me, plainly concerned for my well-being.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I could do with losing the weight.”
“That you could,” Luman said. “You need to get fightin’ fit. We all do.”
He had lit a match, and with the care of a true connoisseur, was slowly coaxing his cigar to life. “My,” he said, “this is nice. I surely do appreciate a good bribe, brother. It’s a sign o’ good breedin’, wh
en a man knows how to offer a good bribe.”
“Speaking of which . . .” I said. “Dwight. The gin.”
Dwight set the bottle of gin on the table, which was as thickly strewn with detritus as every other inch of Luman’s hellhole.
“Well that’s mighty kind of you,” Luman said.
“And this—”
“My, my, the presents jus’ keep comin’, don’t they?” I gave him the book. “What’s this now?” He looked at the cover. “Oh, this is interestin’, brother.” He flipped through the book, which was amply illustrated. “I wonder if there’s a picture of my li’l ol’ crib.”
“This came from an asylum?” I said, looking down at the bed on which Dwight had set me.
“It sure did. I was chained up in that for two hundred and fifty-five nights.”
“Inside it?”
“Inside it.”
He came over to where I sat and tugged the filthy blanket out from under me, so I could better see the cruel narrow box in which he had been put. The restraints were still in place.
“Why do you keep it?” I asked him.
“As a reminder,” he said, meeting my gaze head-on for the first time since I’d entered. “I can’t ever let myself forget, ’cause the moment I forget then I’ve as good as forgiven them that did it to me, and I ain’t never going to do that.”
“But—”
“I know what you’re going to say: they’re all dead. And so they are. But that don’t mean I can’t still get my day with ’em, when the Lord calls us all to judgment. I’m going to be sniffin’ after ’em like the mad dog they said I was. I’m going to have their souls, and there ain’t no saint in Heaven’s goin’ to stop me.” His volume and vehemence had steadily escalated through this speech; when it was done I said nothing for a moment or two, so as to let him calm down. Then I said: