Galilee

  “She hasn’t a clue about any of this.”

  “She’s theirs,” Cadmus said flatly. “All the women are. I sometimes think that’s what’s saved us from being wiped out. Galilee likes the Geary women. The Geary women like Galilee.” He pressed his fingers to his pale lips, and wiped away some spittle. “I lost Kitty to him. Long before the cancer got her, she was gone from me. Then I lost Loretta. That’s hard to take. I loved them both, but it wasn’t enough.”

  Mitchell put his head in his hands. “Garrison said they weren’t like us,” he murmured.

  “He’s right and he’s wrong. I think they’re more like us than not. But they’re also more than we could ever be.” The tears began to tumble down his cheeks. “I suppose I should be comforted by that. I didn’t stand a chance against the likes of him. Nothing I could have done for my wives would ever have been enough. He had them the moment he laid eyes on them.”

  “Don’t cry, Pops,” Mitchell said. “Please.”

  “I cry all the time, take no notice.”

  Mitchell moved closer to the bed. “Let me be a part of this,” he said, his voice soft and full. “Please. I know you think I’m a fuck-up . . . but . . . it’s just because nothing’s ever been clear to me. Nobody ever took the time to explain. So I just looked the other way. I pretended I didn’t care. But I do. Pops, I do. I want to know who these people are; I want to make them suffer the way you’ve suffered.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re my grandson and I won’t be responsible for sending you to your death.”

  “Why am you so afraid of them?”

  “Because I’m almost dead, son. And if I’ve got an eternal soul, it’s in a lot of trouble. I don’t want you on my conscience. It’s already heavy enough.”

  Mitchell drew a deep breath. “All right,” he said, rising from the chair. “I don’t know what else to say. You’ve got your agenda, I’ve got mine.”

  “Christ, son, listen to yourself,” Cadmus said softly. “This isn’t a business deal that’s going sour. This is our lives.”

  “You made us that way, Pops,” Mitchell said. “You taught Dad, and Dad taught us: business before pleasure. Business before anything.”

  “I was wrong,” Cadmus said. “You won’t hear me admit that ever again, but I was wrong.” Mitchell stood at the door for a moment, and stared at the stick figure in the bed.

  “Goodnight, Pops.”

  “Wait,” the old man said.

  “What?”

  “Do this for me,” Cadmus said. “Wait until I’m in the ground. You won’t have to wait long, believe me. Just . . . wait until I’m gone. Please.”

  “If I agree to that—”

  “More business?”

  “If I agree to that, you have to tell me where the journal is.”

  Cadmus closed his eyes again, and for several seconds Mitchell was marooned at the door, not knowing whether to leave or stay. At last, the old man drew a creaking breath, and said:

  “All right. Have it your way. I gave the journal to Margie.”

  “That’s what Garrison thought. But he couldn’t find it.”

  “Then ask Loretta. Or your wife. Maybe Margie passed it on. But just you remember . . . I told you to walk away. I warned you, and you didn’t want to hear.”

  “I’m sure that’s got you a place in heaven, Pops,” Mitchell said. “Goodnight.”

  The stick man didn’t answer. He was weeping again, quietly. Mitchell didn’t offer any further words of consolation. As his grandfather had said, old men weep; there was nothing to be done about it.

  XIV

  i

  One by one, all the secrets are coming out, like stars at twilight. Just for the record, Cadmus’s claim about Garrison’s wife having borne him a black child is at least partially true. She indeed became pregnant, but the child didn’t live. She miscarried in the fifth month, and the few people who knew that the infant brought dead from her body was black were paid off handsomely for their silence. Garrison, as Cadmus said, assumed it was Galilee’s child. That was perhaps the profoundest error he ever made; one which goes to the heart of all that he is; and more pertinently, all he must in time become.

  As for Margie, I can’t tell you with any certainty what information she was given when she recovered; though I think it’s more than likely that she was never told that her womb had produced such a heresy. Cadmus certainly didn’t want any disruptions in the equilibrium of the family; he surely kept the knowledge to the smallest possible circle of people. And Garrison had no reason to tell a single soul: all the sight of that dead child did—yes, he saw the corpse; he made a point of going to the morgue and looking at it, all wrapped in its tiny shroud—all that sight did was deepen the divide between himself and his wife. The first stone on the road that led to Margie’s death was laid that day.

  There’s more to tell of this matter, of course; but some stars take longer to show themselves than others. The paradox is this: that the darker it gets, the more of these secrets we can see. Eventually, they’re arrayed in all their glory; and it’s the very things we hid from sight, the things we’re most ashamed of, that we use to steer our course.

  ii

  Three, four, five days went by, and Galilee let The Samarkand go where the tides took it. For thirty-six hours the boat scarcely moved at all, becalmed in silken water. He sat on deck most of the time, sucking his cigar, looking down into the cool depths. A great white shark came by for a while, and circled the vessel several times, but most of the time the sky and sea were deserted, and the only sound came from some part of The Samarkand a board creaking, a knot grinding, as though the boat, like its owner, was starting to doubt its own existence, and was making a noise to remind itself that it was still real.

  It might have been forgiven its doubts, when there was so much that was illusory walking its deck The emptier Galilee’s belly became, the more his delirium grew, and the more his delirium grew, the more visions he saw. He saw his family, in various groupings. I appeared to him more than once, I’m sure, and at one point we entered into a long and convoluted exchange inspired by a quote from Heraclitus which had lodged in his mind—something about rubble making the fairest of worlds. He had an even longer conversation with a vision of Luman, and for a time sat in the company of Marietta and Zabrina singing a filthy sailors’ ballad, tears pouring down his cheeks.

  “Why didn’t you come home?” the hallucination of Zabrina asked him.

  “I couldn’t. Not after what happened. Everybody hated me.”

  “We got over it,” Zabrina said. “At least I did.”

  Marietta said nothing. She was rather less solid than Zabrina and for some reason Galilee felt faintly guilty around her.

  “It seems to me,” Zabrina said, rather formally, “that you’ve played just about every role in the repertoire except the Prodigal. You’ve been a lover. You’ve been a fool. You’ve been a murderer.”

  “Your point?” he said.

  “You could still go home if you wanted to. All you have to do is take command of the boat again.”

  “I have no compass. I have no maps.”

  “You could steer by the stars,” Zabrina said.

  Galilee smiled at his own delusion. “I’ve played this role too,” he said. “The Tempter. I’ve played it over and over again. I know how it works. Don’t waste your breath.”

  “That’s a pity,” Zabrina purred. “I would have liked to have seen you, one last time. We could have gone to the stables together, and said hello to father.”

  “Do you think it’s just a coincidence?” Galilee said. “Christ born in a stable. Dad dying in one.”

  “Pure accident,” Marietta said. “Christ and father have absolutely nothing in common. For one thing, father was quite the cockmeister.”

  “I’ve never heard that before,” Zabrina said.

  “About Dad?”

  “No, the phrase. Cockmeister. I never heard it b
efore.”

  So the hallucinatory conversations went on, seldom elevated above this chatty level, and when they were, only fleetingly so. Others besides family members came and went. Margie lingered for a little time one night, her voice slurred with drink as she told him how much she loved him. Kitty, the exquisite Kitty, drifted in a little later, but would not speak: she only stared at him for a while, with a look of incredulity on her face, as though she couldn’t believe his stupidity. She’d always berated him for his self-pity, and this last time was no exception; she simply chose to do it in silence.

  There were many others who didn’t make it as far as the deck: haunting presences whom he glimpsed beneath the water, looking up at him as they drifted by. Victims of his, mostly; men and women whose lives he’d taken, always as quickly as he could; but what violent death was ever quick enough? Oh, some pitiable creatures there. Many he could not lay name to, thankfully; a few whose accusing looks made him want to hide his head. He didn’t succumb to his cowardice; but met their gazes as best his tears would allow, until at length they drifted out of sight.

  There was one further class of visitation, which did not make itself known until the afternoon of the fifth day. The becalming had long since passed; The Samarkand now in the grip of a powerful current, was moving through a mounting swell, her bows on occasion dipping so deep into the spumy water it seemed she would not rise again; but each time emerging. Galilee had lashed himself to the mainmast so as not to be swept overboard. Lack of nourishment had made him weak; his legs would scarcely bear him up, and his arms would not have had the strength to prevent a wave from taking him. There he sat, the very image of a beleaguered mariner, while the boat rocked and pitched, and his teeth chattered with the cold, and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

  But then, it seemed to him he glimpsed—down a valley between the steep steel waves—a stand of golden trees. For a grim instant he thought the currents had played some wretched trick, and carried him back to Kaua’i, but when the sight came again he saw this was not an island. It was instead the most beautiful and torturous vision of them all. It was home.

  There down an alley of oaks swathed in Spanish moss he saw the house that Jefferson had built; his mother’s house; the place from which he had fled and fled, and never escaped. Cesaria was there, behind one of those windows. She saw him, in his exile. Perhaps she’d always seen him, always had him in the corner of her eye, as a mother will; never let him go entirely, despite all that he’d done to be free of her.

  He watched as the scene came and went—eclipsed by the mounting waves, then revealed again—thinking he might glimpse her there. But the vision contained nothing that breathed: not so much as a squirrel in the grass. Or at least nothing that cared to show itself to him.

  And after a time, this too passed away. Another darkness fell and he remained where he was, tied to the mast, while the sky swung back and forth above him.

  XV

  i

  Rachel had returned into Holt’s journal with the utmost cynicism, determined that this time it would not catch her up in its manipulations. But she failed. After just a few paragraphs she was back in the world the words conjured: the house in the East Battery, filled with the smells of food and sex. And Galilee on the stairs, welcoming Holt into his world. Whether this was a true account or not, she couldn’t resist turning the pages.

  The passages that followed were filled with descriptions of how Holt and Nickelberry lived for the next week or so: an almost obsessive listing of how their palates and their groins were titillated. Holt now seemed to have little trouble confessing his own excesses. Despite the fact that he had once been a devoted family man, he was almost boastful of them, recounting without embarrassment his liaisons with several of the women of the house. It made astonishing reading, especially as all this salacious detail was set down in a journal which he’d been given by his own wife (and whose dedication—I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again—was there on the opening page). Poor Adina; she’d been forgotten, at least for now. Her husband had entered a world whose laws did not allow for sentimental attachments. They were all living too desperately, too hungrily, to care what they’d been before they’d stepped into the house. All reserve, all shame, all common decencies had evaporated. According to the journal they ate, drank and coupled morning, noon and night, inspired to this behavior by three things. One, the fact that everybody in the house was engaged in the same headlong pursuit of pleasure, all spurring one another to new experiments. Two, a steady supply of erotic stimulants from Galilee, most of which Holt (and Rachel) had never heard of. And thirdly, the presence of the lawmaker himself. There was nobody in the house, male or female, young or old, who had not been bedded by Galilee. That fact emerged first in a conversation Holt reportedly had with Nickelberry; a man who’d seemed until now assuredly heterosexual. Not so. He had, in Holt’s words, played the wife to our host, and told me without a blush that he had seldom felt so loved as when he had lain in Galilee’s embrace.

  Rachel was surprised that she could still be shocked after the exhaustive sexual litany that the preceding pages had contained, but shocked she was. Though she believed it preposterous to think that this Galilee was the same man she’d known, her mind’s eye conjured him whenever the name appeared on the page. Then it was her Galilee, in all his beauty, she saw holding Nickelberry in his arms; kissing him, seducing him, making a wife of him.

  She should have anticipated what would come next, but she didn’t. While she was still struggling with her repugnance at what Holt had described, he began a confession much closer to his heart, and no doubt the hardest thing he had written in the book.

  I went to Galilee last night, he wrote, as Nickelberry had. I don’t know why I went particularly; I felt no desire to be with him. At least not the same kind of desire that I feel when I go with a woman. Nor did he ask me for my company; though once I was with him he confessed that he’d wanted my arms about him and my lips on his. I should not be ashamed he said, to take pleasure this way. It was a wasted hope in most men; only the bravest rose to the challenge.

  I told him I did not feel brave. I was afraid of the act before us, I said; afraid of its consequences for my soul; and most of all, afraid of him.

  He didn’t laugh off this confession. Instead he wrapped me up tenderly, as though he held something more precious than flesh and bone. He told me to listen to him, and would tell me a story to calm my fears—

  A story? What was this? Another Galilee who told stories?

  —I felt like a child there in his embrace, and part of me wanted to be free of it. But his presence was so calming to my troubled spirit that this child in me, which had not spoken in so many years, said: lie still. I want to hear the story. And I lay still, obedient to this child and presently all the horrors I had seen, every one, all the death all the pain, became a kind of dream I’d had from which I was waking into this embrace.

  The story he told began like a nursery tale, but by degrees it grew stranger, calling forth all manner of feelings in me. It was a tale of two princes who lived, he said, in a country far from here, where the rich were kind—

  —And the poor had God. Rachel knew that country. The child bride Jerusha had lived there. It was Galilee’s invented land.

  She sat absolutely still, the whine of her blood loud in her ears, while her eyes passed stupidly over the line, as if by study they might change it.

  It was a tale of two princes.

  But no; the words remained the same, however many times she read them. She could not avoid the truth, though it was hard—oh more than hard; nearly impossible—to contemplate. But she had no choice, besides willful self-deception. The sum of evidence was now too persuasive.

  This Galilee, here on the page before her—this man who’d lived a hundred and forty years ago, and more; this man was the same Galilee she loved. Not his father or his grandfather: him. The same flesh and blood and bone; the same
spirit in that flesh and blood and bone; the same soul.

  She accepted it, though it made chaos of all she’d understood about the world. She wouldn’t squirm around any longer, hoping that something easier to believe was true if she could only find it. She was only tormenting herself if she did that; putting off the moment when she accepted the facts and tried to make sense of them.

  It wasn’t as though he’d lied to her. Quite the reverse, in fact. He’d intimated several times that he was not quite the same order of being as she was. He’d talked of being a man without grandparents, for instance. But she hadn’t wanted to know. She’d been too deeply infatuated with him to want to countenance anything that might spoil the romance.

  So much for denial. It was time to accept the truth, in all its strangeness. Two human lifetimes ago he’d been up to the same seductive tricks he’d worked on her, with Captain Holt as the object of his affections. The image of the two men entwined was lodged in her mind’s eye: Holt like a child in his lover’s arms, lulled into a state of passivity by the story Galilee was telling.

  In a country far from here, there lived two princes . . .

  She didn’t care what happened next, neither to the princes nor to the men they represented. Her hunger for the journal had suddenly passed; her eyes were no longer drawn to the page. It had told her all that she needed to know. More, in fact.

  She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand and got up from the table, flipping the journal closed. She felt lightheaded and hot, as though she was catching the flu. She went through to the kitchen, got herself a glass of water, sipped it for a moment, then decided she’d go back to bed. Maybe she’d feel better after a few more hours of sleep. And now, with the journal’s hold on her finally broken, she’d have a better chance of getting the rest she needed.