Clearly Luman doesn’t believe there’s much likelihood of this happening. A little while ago he brought me two more weapons; one of them a fine cavalry saber, which he’d polished up until it gleamed, the other a short stabbing sword which was owned, and presumably used, by a Confederate artilleryman. He’d worked to polish this also, he told me, but it hadn’t been a very rewarding labor: the metal refused to gleam. That said, the weapon possesses a brutal simplicity. Unlike the sword, which has a patrician elegance, this is a gutting weapon; you can feel its purpose in its heft. It fairly begs to be used.
He stayed an hour or two, chatting about things, and by the time I got back to writing it was dark. I was making notes toward the scene in which Garrison Geary visits the room where Cadmus died—and was thoroughly immersed in the details—when there was a knock on the door and Zabrina presented herself. She had a summons for me, from Cesaria.
“So Mama’s home?” I said.
“Are you being sarcastic?” she said.
“No,” I protested. “It was a simple observation. Mama’s home. That’s good. You should be happy.”
“I am,” she said, still suspicious that I was mocking her earlier dramas.
“Well I’m happy that you’re happy. There. Happy?”
“Not really,” she said.
“Why the hell not?”
“She’s different, Maddox. She’s not the woman she was before she left.”
“Maybe that’s all to the good,” I said. Zabrina didn’t remark on this; she just tightened her lips. “Anyway, why are you so surprised? Of course she’s different. She’s lost one of her enemies.” Zabrina looked at me blankly. “She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“She killed Cadmus Geary. Or at least she was there when he died. It’s hard to know which is true.”
“So what does that mean for us?” Zabrina said.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.”
She eyed the three weapons on my desk. “You’re ready for the worst,” she said.
“They were a gift from Luman. Do you want one?”
“No thank you,” she said. “I’ve got my own ways of dealing with these people if they come here. Is it going to be Garrison Geary, or the good-looking brother?”
“I didn’t realize you were following all this,” I said. “It could be both.”
“I hope it’s the good-looking one,” Zabrina said. “I could put him to good use.”
“Doing what?”
“You know very well,” she said. I was astonished that she was being so forthright, but then why shouldn’t she be? Everybody else was showing their true colors. Why not Zabrina?
“I could happily have that man in my bed,” she went on. “He has a wonderful head of hair.”
“Unlike your Dwight.”
“Dwight and I still enjoy one another when the mood takes us,” she said.
“So it’s true,” I said, “you did seduce him when he first came here.”
“Of course I seduced him, Maddox,” she said. “You think I kept him in my room all that time because I was teaching him the alphabet? Marietta’s not the only one in the family with a sex drive, you know.” She crossed to the desk and picked up the saber. “Are you really going to use this?”
“If I have to.”
“When was the last time you killed a man?”
“I never have.”
“Really?” she said. “Not even when you were out gallivanting with Papa?”
“Never.”
“Oh it’s fun,” she said, with a gleam in her eye. This was turning into a most revelatory conversation, I thought.
“When did you ever kill anyone?” I asked her.
“I don’t know if I want to tell you,” she said.
“Zabrina, don’t be so silly. I’m not going to write about it.” I watched her expression as I said this, and saw a flicker of disappointment there. “Unless you want me to,” I added.
A tiny smile appeared on her lips. The woman who’d once told me—in no uncertain terms—that she despised the notion of appearing in this book had been overtaken by somebody who found the idea tantalizing. “I suppose if I don’t tell you and you don’t write it down nobody’s ever going to know . . .”
“Know what?” She frowned, nibbling at her lip. I wished I’d had a box of bonbons to offer her, or a slice of pecan pie. But the only seduction I had to hand was my pen. “I’ll tell it exactly as you tell it to me,” I said to her. “Whatever it is. I swear.”
“Hm . . .”
Still she stood there, biting her lip. “Now you’re just playing with me,” I told her. “If you don’t want to tell me then don’t.”
“No, no, no,” she said hurriedly. “I want to tell you. It’s just strange, after all these years . . .”
“If you knew the number of times I’ve thought that very thing, while I was writing. This book’s going to be full of things that have never been told but should be. And you’re right. It’s a strange feeling, admitting to things.”
“Have you admitted to things?”
“Ohhhh yes,” I said, sitting back in my chair. “Hard things sometimes. Things that make me look pretty bad.”
“Well this doesn’t make me look bad, exactly . . .” I waited, hoping my silence would encourage her to spit it out. The trick worked. “About a year after Dwight came to live with me,” she said, “I went out to Sampson County to find his family. He’d told me what they’d done to him, and it was . . . so horrible. The cruelty of these people. I knew he wasn’t lying about it because he had the scars. He had cigarette burns all over his back and on his butt. His older brother used to torture him. And from his father, different kinds of scars.” She seemed genuinely moved at her recollections of the harm he’d been done. Her tiny eyes glistened. “So I thought I’d pay them a visit. Which I did. I made friends with his mother, which wasn’t very difficult. She obviously didn’t have anyone to talk to. The family were pariahs. Nobody wanted anything to do with them. Anyway, she invited me over one night. I offered to bring over some steak for the menfolk. She said they’d like that. There were five brothers and the father, so I brought six steaks and I fried ’em up, while they all sat in the backyard and drank.
“The mother knew what I was doing, I swear. She could sense it. She kept looking at me while I cooked up the steaks. I was adding a little of this, a little of that. It was a special recipe for the men in her life, I told her. And she looked at me dead in the eye and she said: Good. They deserve it. So she knew what I was going to do.
“She even helped me serve them. We put the steaks out on the plates—big steaks they were, and I’d cooked them so rare and tender, swimming in blood and grease the way she’d said her boys liked them—we put them on the plates and she said: I had another boy, but he ran away. And I told her: I know. And she said: I know you know.
“Then we gave them their steaks. The poison didn’t take long. They were dead after half a dozen bites. Terrible waste of good meat, but it did the job. There they were, sitting in the backyard with the stars coming out, their faces black, and their lips curled back from their teeth. It was quite a night . . .”
She fell silent. The possibility of tears had passed.
“What happened to the mother?”
“She packed up and left there and then.”
“And the bodies?”
“I left them in the yard. I didn’t want to bring them back here. Godless sons of bitches. I hope they rotted where they sat, though I doubt they did. Somebody probably smelled them the next day, once the sun got up.”
A hundred thousand words ago, I thought, I’d wondered in these pages if the family of Dwight Huddie ever wondered about their missing son. Now I had the answer.
“Did you tell Dwight what you did?”
“No,” Zabrina said. “I never did. I never told anybody until now.”
“And did you really enjoy it?” I asked her.
She thought on this a mo
ment. Finally, she said: “Yes I did. I suppose I got that from Mama. But I remember distinctly looking at those bastards dead, and thinking: I have a talent for this. And you know there’s nothing in the world more fun than doing something you’re good at.”
She seemed to realize that she wasn’t going to be able to improve on this as a departure line, because she gave me a crooked little smile, and without another word, she headed for the door, and was gone.
II
Astonishment upon astonishment. I would never have believed Zabrina would be capable of such a thing. And the way it just came out like that, in the most matter-of-fact way; amazing. The truth is, it gives me hope. It makes me think I’ve maybe underestimated our ability as a family to oppose the powers that are going to come our way. At the very least we’ll take a few of the bastards with us when we go. Zabrina can get Mitchell Geary into bed, and when she’s had her wicked way, poison him.
Anyway, I went to see Cesaria.
It wasn’t as oppressive up there as it had been the last time I’d entered her chambers, nor was Cesaria lying inert on her bed. She was sitting in the Jefferson room, which Zabrina told me was an extremely rare thing for her to do. It was a little before dawn; there were candles lit around the room, which flattered it considerably. Their light mellowed Cesaria too. She sat at the table, sipping hot tea and looking resplendent. There was no trace of the vengeful creature I’d seen unleashed in the Geary house. She invited me to sit down, and offered me some tea, which Zelim brought and set before me. Zabrina had already gone. There was just the two of us; and I will admit I was a little nervous. Not that I feared she was going to fly into an uncontrollable fury and tear the house apart. It simply made me anxious to be in the company of someone who contained such power, but who was displaying not a mote of it. It was like taking tea with a man-eating tiger; I couldn’t help but wonder when she was going to show her claws.
“I’m leaving again, very soon,” she explained. “And this time—just so you know—I may not come back. If I don’t return, then the control of this house falls to you.” I asked her where she was off to. “To find Galilee,” she said.
“I see.
“And if I can, to save him from himself.”
“You know he’s out at sea?” I said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I wish I could tell you where. But you probably already know.”
“No. I don’t. That’s one of the reasons why I’m putting you on notice that I may not return. There was a time when I’d have visions of him almost every day, but I put them out of my head—I didn’t want to deal with him—and now he’s invisible to me. I’m sure he worked to make it so.”
“So why do you want to find him now?”
“To persuade him that he’s loved.”
“So you want him to come home?”
Cesaria shook her head. “It’s not me who loves him . . .” she said.
“It’s Rachel.”
“Yes. It’s Rachel.” Cesaria set down her teacup and took out one of her little Egyptian cigarettes. She passed the packet over to me. I took one, and lit up. It was the foulest tasting thing I’ve ever smoked.
“I never thought I’d hear myself say this but what that woman feels for Galilee may be the saving of us all. Do you not like the cigarette?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“I think they taste like camel dung personally, but they have sentimental associations.”
“Yes?”
“Your father and I spent some blissful weeks in Cairo together, just before he met your mother . . .”
“So when you smoke them you remember him?”
“No, when I smoke them I remember an Egyptian boy called Muhammed, who fucked me among the crocodiles on the banks of the Nile.”
I coughed so hard tears came to my eyes, which amused her mightily.
“Oh poor Maddox,” she said when I’d recovered myself somewhat, “you’ve never really known what to make of me, have you?”
“Frankly, no.”
“I suppose I’ve kept you a distance because you’re not mine. I look at you and you remind me of what a philanderer your father was. That hurts. After all these years, that still hurts. You know, you look very like your mother. Around the mouth, especially.”
“How can you say that it hurts you to be reminded that he was a philanderer when you were just telling me about fucking with some Egyptian?”
“I did it to spite your father. My heart was never really in it. No, I take that back. There were occasions when I was in love. Jefferson of course. I was completely besotted with Jefferson. But doing the deed among the crocodiles? That was for spite. I did a lot of things for spite.”
“And he did the same?”
“Of course. Spite begets spite. He used to have women morning, noon and night.”
“And he loved none of them?”
“Are you asking me whether he truly loved your mother?”
I drew a bitter lungful of the cigarette. Of course that was what I wanted to know. But now it came time to ask the question, I was tongue-tied, even a little emotional. And even as I felt the tears pricking my eyes another part of me—the part that’s dispassionately setting this account on the page—was thinking: what’s all the drama about? Why the hell should it matter, after all these years, what your father felt for your mother the day they conceived you? Would you really feel better about yourself if you knew they’d been in love?
“Listen carefully,” Cesaria said. “I’m going to tell you something that may make you a little happier. Or at least, let you understand better how it was between your parents.
“Your mother was illiterate when Nicodemus met her. She was really a sweet woman, I have to say, a very sweet woman, but she couldn’t even write her name. I think your father rather liked her that way, frankly, but she was ambitious for herself, and who can blame her? They were hard times for men and women, but for a woman like her, her beauty was her only advantage, and she knew that wasn’t going to last forever.
“She wanted to be able to read and write—more than anything in the world—and she begged your father to teach her. Over and over she begged him. It was like an obsession with her—”
“So you knew her?”
“I met her a few times only. At the beginning, when he was showing her off to me, and at the very end, I’ll come to that in a moment.
“Anyway, she tormented your father night and day about teaching her to read—teach me, teach me, teach me—until eventually he consented. Of course he didn’t have the patience to do it the way ordinary folks would do it. He didn’t want to waste his precious time with ABCs. He just put his will into her and the knowledge flowed. She learned to read and write overnight. Not just English. Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, Sanskrit—”
“What a gift.”
“So she believed.
“You were about three weeks old when this happened. Such a quiet little baby; with that same frown you have on your face right now. One day you had a mother who couldn’t read a word, and the next day the woman could have made intelligent conversation with Socrates. Let me tell you, it was quite a transformation. And of course she wanted to use what she’d learned. She started to read, anything your father could bring her. She’d be sitting there with you suckling, and a dozen books open on the table, going from one to the other, holding all these ideas in her head at the same time. She kept demanding books and he kept bringing them. Plutarch, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ptolemy, Virgil, Herodotus—there was no end to her appetite.
“Nicodemus was proud as a peacock. ‘Look at my genius girlfriend. She talks dirty in Greek!’ He didn’t know what he’d done. He didn’t have the first clue. Her poor brain, it was cooking in her skull. And all the while she was suckling you . . .”
It was quite an image. My mother, surrounded by books, with me pressed against her breast, and her head so filled with words and ideas her brain was frying in its pan.
“That’s horrib
le . . .” I murmured.
“It gets worse, so prepare yourself. Word started to spread, and in a couple of weeks she’d become a celebrity. Do you have any recollection of this? Of the crowds?” I shook my head. “People started to come from all over England, eventually all over Europe, to see your mother.”
“And what did father do?”
“Oh he got tired of the hoopla very quickly. I’m sure he regretted what he’d done, because he asked me if maybe he should take back what he’d given. I told him I didn’t care what he did. She was his problem, not mine. I regret that now. I should have said something. I could have saved her life. And when I think back, I knew . . .”
“You knew what—?”
“—what it was doing to her. I could see it in her eyes. It was more than her poor, human brain could take.
“Then, one night, she apparently asked your father to bring her pen and paper. He refused her. He said he wasn’t going to let her waste time writing while she should be tending to you. Your mother threw a fit, and she just took herself off, leaving you behind.
“Of course, your father had no idea how to deal with a tiny child, so he handed you over to me.”
“You looked after me?”
“For a little while.”
“And he went to find my mother?”
“That’s right. It took him a few days, but he found her. She’d gone to the house of a man in Blackheath, and exchanged her sexual favors for an endless supply of what Nicodemus had refused her: pen and paper.”
“What did she write?”
“I don’t know. Your father never showed it to me. He said it was incomprehensible. Whatever it was, it must have been very important to your mother, because she’d worked night and day on it, scarcely stopping to eat or sleep. When he brought her back to the house she was a shadow of herself: thin as a stick, her hands and face all stained with ink She didn’t make any sense when she talked. It was a crazy mixture of all the languages she knew, and all the things she’d read. Listening to her was enough to make you crazy yourself: the way she spewed out all these bits and pieces that had nothing to do with one another, all the time looking at you as if to say: please understand me, please, please—