Galilee

  “No,” Rachel said, with a smile of her own. “It’s the same story.” He frowned, not understanding. “You always tell the same story,” she said, “about your invented country . . .”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I recognized it when I heard it again.”

  “Who from? Loretta?”

  “No.”

  “Who, then?”

  “One of your older conquests,” Rachel said. “Captain Holt.”

  “Oh . . .” Galilee said softly. “Where did you find out about Charles?”

  “From his journal.”

  “It still exists, alter all these years?”

  “Yes. Mitchell took it from me. I think his brother’s got it now.,,

  “That’s a pity.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think it probably contains the way into L’Enfant. I told it all to Charles when we were going in there together, and he wrote it down.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I was sick and afraid I’d lose consciousness before we got there. They would have been killed trying to find their way in without my help.”

  “So now Garrison knows how to get to your mother’s house?” Rachel said.

  Galilee nodded. “Ah, well. Nothing to be done about it now. Did you read all the journal?”

  “Most, not all.”

  “But you know how we met? How Nub brought Charles to see me?”

  “Yes. I know all that.” A flurry of snatched pictures passed through her mind’s eye: the battlefield at Bentonville, the phantom child on Holt’s horse, the ruins of Charleston and the grisly sights in the garden of the house on Tradd Street. She’d seen so much through Holt’s eyes. “He wrote well,” she said.

  “He’d wanted to be a poet in his youth,” Galilee said~ “He spoke the way he wrote, believe it or not. The way sentences fell from his lips; it was beautiful to hear.”

  “Did you love him?”

  Galilee looked surprised at the question. But then he said: “I suppose I did, in a way. He was a noble fellow. Or at least he had been. By the time I met him he was so very sad. He’d lost everything.”

  “But he found you.”

  “I wasn’t adequate compensation,” Galilee said, smiling ruefully at his own formality. “I couldn’t be his wife and children and all the good things he’d had before the war. Though . . . maybe I imagined I could. I think that’s always been my big mistake. I want to give gifts. I want to make people happy. But it never ends well.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t give anybody what they really want. I can’t give them life. Sooner or later they die, and dying’s never very good. Nobody dies a good death. People cling on. Even when they’re in agony they want a few more minutes, a few more seconds—”

  “What happened to Holt?”

  “He died at L’Enfant. He’s buried there.” He sighed. “I should never have let them take me back. It was asking for trouble. I’d been away such a long time. But I was wounded. All used up. I needed somewhere I could heal myself.”

  “How did you come to be wounded?”

  “I was careless. I thought I was untouchable . . . and I wasn’t.” His hand went up to his face, his fingers instinctively seeking out the scars on his brow and scalp, touching them delicately as though he were reading something there: the braille of past suffering. “There was a woman called Katherine Morrow,” he said. “She was one of my . . . what’s the word? Concubines? She’d been quite the Southern virgin until she came to be with me. Then she showed her real feelings. This was a woman who had no shame. None. She would do whatever came into her head. But she had two brothers, who had survived the war, and when they returned home to Charleston came looking for her. I was drunk that night. I was drunk most nights, but that night I was so drunk I don’t think I knew what was happening to me until I was out on the street, surrounded by a dozen men—the brothers and their friends—all beating me. It wasn’t just that I’d seduced the girl. I was a nigger, and they were so full of hatred, because that spring all the niggers in America were free men and women, and they didn’t like that. It was the end of their world. So they beat me and beat me, and I was too stupid with drink and my own despair to stop them.”

  “So how was it they didn’t kill you?”

  “Nickelberry shot the brothers dead. He walked up with two pistols—I can still see him now, just parting the crowd around me, and blowing holes in their heads. Bang! Bang! Then Charles was there, threatening to do the same to the next man who tried to land a blow. That made them scatter. And Charles and Nub picked me up and took me away.”

  “Off to L’Enfant.”

  “Eventually.”

  “What happened to the people who’d been with you in your . . .”

  “Pleasure palace? I don’t know. I went back to Charleston a few years later, to look for them. But they’d all gone their separate ways. I heard Miss Morrow went to Europe. But the rest . . . ?” He shrugged. “So many people have come and gone, over the years. So many faces. But I don’t forget them. I never forget them. I see them all still. I dream about them, as though I could open my eyes and they’d be there.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “And maybe they would . . .” he said.

  He halted for a moment, then he got to his feet. “The fire’s too bright,” he said. “Walk with me, will you?”

  iii

  They walked together, down the beach. Not hand in hand, as they’d walked that bright day when he’d taken her to see The Samarkand but a little way from one another. He was so raw, right now; she was afraid that she’d hurt him, if she so much as touched him.

  He continued to talk, but in the darkness he lost the thread of what he’d been telling her, and now he offered only fragments; disconnected observations about how his life had been in those distant days. Something about how his homecoming had unleashed a string of catastrophes; about horses killing his father; about his sister Marietta protecting him from his mother’s rage; about his other sister’s skills with the poultices and pills, which had helped heal him. Rachel didn’t press him with questions about any of this. She just let his mind wander and his lips report.

  Though Galilee made no defense of his actions, I feel that for the sake of veracity I must offer some observations of my own. Though he took the blame upon himself as though every sin committed at L’Enfant in those few grim days were his fault and his alone, this was simply not so. He wasn’t responsible for my giving Chiyojo over to Nicodemus; he wasn’t responsible for Cesaria’s unrepentant rage; he wasn’t responsible for the death of his friend Charles Holt, who died by his own hand.

  He was, however, responsible for something he didn’t mention in his account. When he, Holt and Nickelbeny entered L’Enfant, they were followed. Their pursuers weren’t common marauders; they were a small group of men led by Benjamin Morrow, the father of Katherine, who had lately lost both his sons to Nub’s pistol. He was an old man by the standards of that age, well into his sixties, and perhaps his years made him more cautious and clever than a younger man might have been. Though he and his posse of five God-fearing Charlestonians had several times come close to their quarry as they’d chased them north, Morrow had refrained from attack. He wanted to get to the heart of the unholy power that had so besotted his beloved Katherine that she’d lost every drop of propriety, and gone to be a whore for this nigger Galilee. His caution and his curiosity had saved both his life and the lives of his men. By following in the footsteps of their quarry they’d unknowingly negotiated the traps that would have claimed them had they come into L’Enfant on their own. Once Cesaria realized she had trespassers, of course she descended on them like a fury.

  I saw them in their graves, and I will never forget the expressions on their faces. They would have been better served by fate if they’d misstepped somewhere along the way, and perished in one of the traps. Instead they’d looked as though they’d been mauled by a cageful of hungry tigers. But given that
they’d been killed by Cesaria, I’m certain even that would have been a kindness.

  Anyway, now you know. And I have to say that in some corner of my being I believe the horrors that were visited upon us all soon alter the dispatch of the Charleston Six would not have been so disastrous—indeed might not have happened at all—had they been forgiven their error and allowed to leave. Blood begets blood; cruelty begets cruelty. Once the Six were dead, it was all storms, horses and horrors. Galilee wasn’t the cause of all that. She was; the goddess herself. Though she’d been the one from whom the glories of L’Enfant had come, she was also, in her madness, the architect of its darkest hour.

  II

  Rachel and Galilee didn’t return to the fire. They went instead to sit on the rocks at the end of the beach. The sea was calm, and perhaps its soothing rhythm made it easier for him to confess what he still had to tell.

  “It was Nub got me out of the house,” he began, “just as he’d got me in. I think he probably believed Cesaria was going to kill me—”

  “She wouldn’t have harmed you. Would she?”

  “In one of her furies, anything was possible. She’d made me, after all; I’m sure she believed she was quite within her rights as a mother to unmake me again. But she didn’t get the chance. Marietta distracted her, and Nickelberry spirited me away. I was delirious most of the time but I remember that night—oh my God, how I remember it—stumbling through the swamp, thinking every sound we heard behind us was her coming after us.”

  “What about Nickelberry—the things he’d seen. How did he deal with that?”

  “Oh Nub was a cool one. It was all too much for Charles, but Nub . . . I don’t know, he just took everything in his stride. And he saw power. That was the crux of it. He saw power the like of which he’d never seen before, and he knew that if he had me, he had a piece of that power. He wasn’t helping me out of Christian charity. He’d lived the life of an underdog. He’d been brought up with nothing. He’d come out of the war with nothing. But now he had me. My life was in his hands, and he wasn’t going to let it slip away.”

  “Did you talk about what he’d seen?”

  “Later. But not for many weeks. I was too sick. He’d brought out medicines that my sister Zabrina had given him, and he promised me that he’d stay with me and make me well.”

  “What did he want in exchange?”

  “At the time, nothing. We made our way out to the shore, and we lived there in the dunes for a few weeks. Nobody came there; we were quite safe from discovery. He made a shelter for us, and I lay in it, listening to the sea, slowly getting well. He was my nurse, he was my comforter; he fed me, he bathed me, he listened to me rave in my fevers. He went out and brought back food. God knows where he got it. What he did to get it. His only concern was to make me well. I know it may sound perverse, but when I look back on that time, I think of it more fondly than any of my time in Charleston. I felt this great weight off me. Like I’d been cured of some sickness. I’d had every excess known to man. I’d made love to so many bodies, had so much beauty in my hands. I’d been so high I thought I’d never come down. And now it was all over. I was living out under the stars with nothing to call my own, just the sea, and time to think. That’s when I first began to dream of building myself a boat and sailing away . . .

  “Then one day Nub started talking about his own dreams. And I realized it wasn’t going to be so easy. He had a friend in me; that’s what he believed at least. We were going to work together, when I was well.

  “ ‘This is the perfect time to start over,’ he said to me. ‘If we work together we could make a fortune out there.’ ”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I told him I didn’t want to have anything more to do with people. I’d had my fill of them. I told him about my dream of building a boat and sailing away.

  “I expected him to laugh. But he didn’t. In fact he said he thought it was a very good idea. But then he said: ‘You can’t just sail away and forget what we’ve been through together. You owe me something.’

  “And of course he was right. He’d risked his life for me in Charleston, shooting the Morrow brothers. He’d risked his life getting me out of L’Enfant. Lord knows, he’d seen things that would have driven lesser men mad, because of me. And then, when we’d reached the shore he’d tended to me night and day. Without him and Zabrina’s poultices I would have been disfigured; maybe died. Of course I owed him. There was no question about it.

  “So I asked him what he wanted from me. And he had a very simple answer: he wanted me to help make him rich. The way he saw it there were opportunities to make fortunes out there. Reconstruction was underway. There were roads to lay, cities to rebuild, bellies to feed. And the men who were at the heart of all that—with the wit and the skill to make themselves indispensable—those men were going to be richer than any men in the history of America.”

  “Was he right about all this?”

  “More or less. There were a few oil tycoons and railroad magnates who were already so rich nobody was going to catch up with them. But he’d given the whole business some careful thinking, and he was not a stupid man; not by any means. He knew that as a team—with his pragmatism and my vision, his understanding of what people wanted and my capacity to get the opposition out of the way—we could become very powerful in a very short time. And he was impatient. He’d lived in the gutter for long enough. He wanted a better life. And he didn’t care how he got it, as long as he got it.” He paused, and stared out to sea. “I could still get myself my boat, he said to me, I could still sail away. That was fine and dandy. He’d even help me find a boat; only the best. But he needed me to help him in return. He wanted to have a wife and kids, and he wanted them to live the good life. It seemed like such a small thing when I was agreeing to it. Anyway, how could I refuse, after he’d done all he’d done for me?”

  “We made a kind of pact, right there on the shore. I swore I would never cheat him, or any of his family. I swore on my life that I’d be his friend, and his family’s friend, for as long as I lived.”

  Rachel had a sickening sense of where this was going.

  “I think you begin to understand,” Galilee said.

  “He didn’t keep the same name . . .”

  “No, he didn’t. A couple of days later he came back to the shore in a fine old mood. He’d found a body in a ditch—or what was left of it. A Yankee, who’d died many, many miles from home. In his satchel were all his papers: everything Nickelberry needed to become another man, which in those days was not very much. After that day, he was never “Nub” Nickelberry again. He became a man called Geary.”

  This was not remotely what Rachel had expected, but as she contemplated the information she saw how the pieces fitted. The roots of the family into which she’d married were deep in blood and filth; was it any wonder the dynasty that sprung from this beginning was in every way shameful and hollow?

  “I didn’t know what I’d agreed to,” Galilee went on. “I didn’t realize until a lot later the scale of Nub’s ambition, or what he was prepared to have us do to make it a reality.”

  “If you had known . . . ?”

  “Would I have agreed? Yes, I would have agreed. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would have agreed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because how was I ever going to be free of him otherwise?”

  “You could have just walked away.”

  “I owed him too much. If I’d cheated him, history would have just repeated itself. I would have been pulled into something else—some other piece of human folly—and had to endure that instead. I would have had to pay the price eventually. The only way to be free—at least this was the way I thought of it—was to work with Nub, and help make his dreams come true. Then I’d have earned a dream of my own. I could have my boat, and . . . off I’d go.” Galilee sighed deeply. “It was messy, working for him; very messy. But he was right when he talked about the opportunities. They were everywhere.
Of course, to get ahead of the crowd you needed something extra. He had me. I was the one he sent in if he had trouble with somebody, to make sure he never had trouble again. And I was good at it. Once I was in the rhythm I realized I had quite a skill for terrorizing people.”

  “You get it from Cesaria.”

  “No doubt. And believe me I was in the right mood to do violence. I was an exile now; I felt free to do whatever crossed my mind, however inhumane. I hated the world, and I hated the people in it. So it made me happy to be the spoiler, to be the bloodletter.”

  “And Nub—”

  “Geary, now. Mr. Geary.”

  “Geary. He never got his hands dirty? You did all the intimidation, he did all the business?”

  “No, he’d get involved when he felt like it. He was a cook. He liked knives and carcasses. Sometimes he’d astonish me. I’d see him do something, so cold, so indifferent to the suffering he was causing, and I’d be . . . I’d be in awe of him.”

  “In awe?”

  “Yes. Because I’d always felt things too much. I’d agonized over things I did. My head had always been filled with voices telling me not to do this, not to do that; or to look out for the consequences. That was why I liked to get drunk, and high; it hushed those voices. But when I was with Geary: no voices at all. Nothing. Silence. It was nice.

  “And as the months went by, and I got completely well, and strong again, I began to get a reputation as somebody to be afraid of, and that was nice too. The more of that reputation I got the more I made sure I deserved it. When I needed to make an example of somebody, I was vicious. There was this part of me that was cruel, venomous, and when people saw that in my eyes or heard it in my voice . . . it made them compliant. Often—especially later—I didn’t need to lay a finger on them. They’d just see me coming, and they’d be asking what they could do for us, how they could help us.”

  “And the men who didn’t?”

  “Died. At my hands. Usually quickly. Sometimes not. Sometimes, if Geary thought an example had to be made of a guy, I’d do something so bad—” He stopped. She couldn’t see his face. But she heard the soft sobs that escaped him; and could see his silhouette shake as he was wracked. He took a moment to recover himself and then continued, his voice muted.