American Gothic (3 page)

3

Saints Preserve Us

“W
HAT DID YOU see last night at Yu’s?” Peregrine asked. “You were there, sir. You saw what I saw.”

“The bite marks in their necks—you know Evangeline and the others weren’t strangled?”

O’Rourke gave Peregrine a long look. “No, sir, I saw none o’ that.”

“Forget what Butler told you to tell people. Man-to-man, Seamus, what you saw.”

“Aye, a grim scene it was. There will be more than one nightmare born of that, I’ll wager. But I saw nothing to do with bite marks, sir, not that I looked any harder than I needed to be sure those poor people were dead.”

The saloon keeper came to the end of the bar where Peregrine and O’Rourke were standing, bringing two glasses and a bottle.

“ ’Tis a salutary thing, a glass of whiskey,” O’Rourke said, raising his glass after the bartender had turned away. “It gives strength to the weak, sight to the blind, and comfort to the afflicted, the perfect medicine.”

O’Rourke touched his glass to Peregrine’s and they both drank. Whiskey would take some of the edge off the sickness rising in Peregrine’s belly.

“I haven’t thanked you,” Peregrine said into his glass.

“Not to mention it, sir. As concerns to your safety, it was your interview today with old Spoons that had me worried.”

“General Butler was most accommodating.”

“You deserve accommodations, sir.”

“No, but that doesn’t matter. It isn’t expedient for Butler to cashier me. God save the United States Army from politicians.”

“They have their place, sir.”

“I asked General Butler again to transfer me to Virginia. He said he’d think about it, but he isn’t going to help me. I’m more useful to him if he keeps me around as a symbol of Union fighting spirit.”

“The men do look up to you, sir. If we had more general officers like you, we’d win more fights.”

Peregrine took another swallow and shrugged.

“You’re a hero, sir, like it or not.”

“The only difference between me and any other soldier is that I have learned how pointless it is to fear the inevitable. The things you know about and can see—like some Alabama sharecropper in homespun gray pointing a squirrel rifle at you—aren’t the worst things that can happen to you. The things we ought to be afraid of are the things we never think about until it’s too late.” Peregrine reached for the bottle. “We’re all as good as dead anyway. The sooner it happens, the sooner it’s finished.”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Don’t insult me with that kind of question, Seamus.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a cynic. It’s unbecoming of an officer.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“You sound as if you’ve given up.”

“Maybe I have.”

“Then maybe you aren’t that man I thought you were. Not if you’re going to talk like a coward.”

“Careful, Seamus.”

“You said I could speak plainly.”

“Just be careful.”

O’Rourke grinned at his commander. “I can handle meself with my own two fists.”

“So can I.”

“That’s more like it, sir,” O’Rourke said, and laughed. “Let’s have another drink.”

“Let’s.”

O’Rourke freshened their glasses.

“To tell you the truth, General, I’m concerned. Your grief is eating you alive.”

“I’d rather not discuss personal affairs, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Sometimes it helps to talk, sir.”

“It never helps me.”

“Well, then I’ll do the talking, if it’s all the same.”

Peregrine didn’t look up from his glass.

“The good Lord created us for noble purposes, sir, not to be broken beneath the weight of sorrows. I saw my share of troubles before coming to America. Three brothers put in early graves and many a friend, too. It was hard to leave home, the hardest thing I’d ever have to do, but there was nothing left for me in Erin but the gallows and an English rope.”

“But you didn’t forget.”

“No, sir, forgetting is the one thing I could never do. But time has taken away the sting. We have to move on or our past destroys us. I will never forget, but still I’ve managed to move on.”

“Leave it be, Seamus.”

Peregrine poured another glass. The whiskey made it easier to forget some things, but not the important ones.

“So you saw no wounds in the neck of the woman I was with last night?” he asked, giving it one last try. “Just here,” he said, pointing with two fingers. “You’ve got to tell me the truth, Seamus. I need to know.”

“May the devil take me if I’ve ever been less than completely truthful with you, General Peregrine.”

“There was a beautiful young woman there, tiny of frame, with coal black hair, green eyes, and white skin, like a porcelain doll. She must have passed you as you came in. Young, hardly more than a girl.”

“No, sir.”

“Maybe you saw her on the street outside Yu’s?”

“Sorry, sir, I saw no such female.”

A muscle in Peregrine’s face began to twitch. He turned away from O’Rourke and rubbed it with his fingers to make it stop. “Yu didn’t strangle those people.”

“General Butler hanged him for it right enough.”

“It was the young woman I told you about. She killed them all. She would have killed me next, if you hadn’t come busting in when you did.”

“A wee girl strangled those people?”

“I told you: she bit them in the neck and sucked the lifeblood out of them, the way a spider kills a fly. She’s no ordinary woman. She can’t be. I don’t know what exactly—something monstrous.”

“Listen to yourself. Begging the general’s pardon, but you’re speaking pure madness.”

Peregrine didn’t disagree. He couldn’t.

“You were out of your mind with the opium last night, General. You don’t know what you saw. It must have been a dream.”

“That’s what General Butler said, but I know what I saw.”

“Saints preserve us!” O’Rourke cried.

The bartender looked their way.

“If you continue talking like that,” O’Rourke said in a furious whisper, “they will lock you away in an asylum, and it will be an unpleasant end for you. Maybe you did see something in that hop house. It’s not for me to say, sir. It’s a right queer world God created for us to live in. If there are angels and devils, then maybe there are comely banshees who sup on the blood of the living. But for the love of Mike, General, put this experience behind you, along with your grief for your own poor murdered family. Spoons has his eye on you. Who knows what he’ll do if he senses you turning yourself into a liability to his political career. I’d rather have a division of rebels in front of me than a treacherous old snapping turtle like Ben Butler behind me, staring at my back with his goggle eye. You’re balanced on the surface of a soap bubble, sir. If you aren’t careful, it will burst, and you’ll burst with it.”

The people on the street gave wide berth to Peregrine’s blue uniform with the brigadier general’s gold star on each epaulet. The men, nearly every one a rebel at heart, looked away or stared past Peregrine, as though he were invisible. Butler’s cold-blooded decision to hang William Mumford for taking down the federal flag at the Mint had been brutal, but it had curbed the outward defiance of New Orleans’s conquered men.

An old woman with a bottle green parasol stepped out of a dress shop as Peregrine passed, looking up at him over the top of her pince-nez spectacles with surprise that quickly transformed to disgust.

“Nigger lover,” she yelled after him.

Peregrine considered stopping to advise her about General Order Number 28, but he kept walking. She would find out about it soon enough without his help.

4

The French Quarter

H
OW DO YOU make yourself forget? The subject was on Peregrine’s mind as he walked back to the boardinghouse, exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes, and went out again. He had intended to report to the infirmary, but he made it no farther than the nearest saloon, where he spent most of the afternoon drinking alone. After making a luncheon of pigs’ feet washed down with beer, he decided to pay a visit to the public library to see what wisdom the world had to offer him on the science of forgetting.

Amid the stacks of books made musty by the humid air, Peregrine found no shortage of advice instructing the forgetful on how to remember. An absentminded person could carry a notepad to jot things down, always deposit the house key in the same drawer, and post written reminders in conspicuous places. Unfortunately, the wisdom on the question was entirely one-sided. The learned philosophers of the human intellect had much to say about remembering, but they remained perfectly mute on the subject of teaching oneself to forget.

Peregrine’s own humble experiments in the science had proven disappointing. As soon as he had recovered enough from his wounds to accept official responsibility, he made a conscious effort to bury himself alive in work. He restricted his waking attentions to the unending flow of reports and orders, the great tidal flood of paperwork that fuels an army, which is, away from the battlefield, little more than an elaborate bureaucracy. But this was distraction, not forgetting, and the pain would bite down on his heart the moment he dropped his guard.

He could not bear to look on the few tender mementos he had carried with him to war in a battered steamer trunk. After Antietam, he kept them locked away—the silver-framed photographs of his wife and children, the letters from his wife, the penknife she gave him on his last Christmas at home. Other reminders were harder to escape. A little girl’s laughter; a boy rolling a hoop along the street; even the smell of vanilla, which conjured up the mental picture of his wife in the kitchen—these things and a thousand others afflicted Peregrine like scaldings. There were times when it was all he could do to keep from tearing his hair and screaming.

Seamus O’Rourke had said time would lessen the sting of his loss, but that had not been Peregrine’s experience. The poison was too deep to be drawn out by degrees and discarded along with pages ripped from the calendar. Peregrine woke up every day to realize he remained trapped in a life he loathed, his family doomed to die again in his memories with each unwelcome sun. And worse were the nights. In his nightmares, his family screamed piteously for him to save them. But there was nothing he could do to help them—not then, not now.

Peregrine was covered in vomit when he awoke, unable to recollect much after leaving the library. The drug had made him sick. Laudanum did not agree with him unless he restricted himself to small doses. He peeled off the sticky shirt, struggling to keep from retching at the sour smell. He leaned over the washbasin. The water was cool and felt good against his face.

Maybe he had a fever.

The afternoon had slipped away into night. He found matches and lit a candle. His gold pocket watch was on the nightstand, between an empty flask and a corked bottle of milky liquid labeled
(Laudanum; Contains Narcotics; for Medicinal Use Only)
. He picked up his watch and had trouble opening it, as though he were wearing thick woolen mittens. It was six minutes to seven. Through the lace curtains, the street was a glistening ribbon in the light rain, a halo of mist around the lamp across the street.

Peregrine shuffled through the riotous disorder of his room—he kept it locked and refused to admit the housekeeper to make it up—until he found a gin bottle with something still in it. Three deep swallows steadied him enough to button a shirt without his fingers shaking. After he was dressed, he pulled a cape over his shoulders and went out, locking the door behind him. Laudanum be damned, a pipe of opium was what he needed.

Peregrine walked as if leaning into an invisible wind, traveling not quickly but deliberately through the French Quarter. Past the Ursuline convent to Royal Street, he turned right; two more blocks and he would turn again. Peregrine could have found his way to Yu’s in his sleep. He came around the last corner, saw the golden sparkle of light on brass buttons, and halted, cursing under his breath. There were two sentries stationed outside Yu’s door, bayonets fixed on their rifles. He had not really expected to find the dead man’s establishment still open for business, yet he felt a childish disappointment at having his irrational wish denied. His fallback had been to break in and search until he found a ball of the sticky black tar opium, perhaps scraping residue from the insides of Yu’s pipes to get enough to smoke. The sentries made that impossible, even though Peregrine knew that logically there was little chance that pipes or opium would still be found on the premises.

A woman in a hooded cape entered the street from the opposite end of the block, stopped as Peregrine had, and stared at the sentries. The soldiers noticed her immediately. The woman hesitated, twisting the long cords of her purse in her hands as she looked toward Yu’s house. She stepped backward and was gone so quickly that she seemed to simply disappear.

Peregrine spun on his heel and hurried back the way he had come, turning at the first cross street and breaking into a run. When he came around the corner of the house at the end of the street, he saw her ahead of him in the middle of the next block, a small woman in a long cape with a hem shiny from the wet street even though the rain had stopped.

Peregrine waited until she was a block ahead of him and fell into step behind her, careful to maintain a safe distance. With a little luck, she would lead him to another opium den. It had been a mistake to confine his patronage to Yu. He knew that now, his supplier dead, his joints aching, and nowhere to turn for relief but the wretched laudanum.

At first the woman headed back toward the center of the Quarter, but then she took a seemingly random course up and down the streets. Still, she kept moving swiftly along, as if she knew exactly where she was going, a destination in mind despite her wandering. Perhaps there was some reason to delay her arrival by taking an indirect route.

Or maybe, Peregrine thought, it was to avoid being followed.

No sooner had this idea occurred to Peregrine than the woman stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him.

Peregrine nearly flung himself through the open door of a working-class tavern before their eyes could meet. There were only two customers standing at the bar, a thick man with battered ears and a flattened nose, and a broad-shouldered character in a patched coat with a zigzag scar bisecting his head, the thick welt of white tissue standing out against the pink skin of his bald skull. The bartender was the most reputable-looking member of the low crew, even with one milky blind eye and thin, bony elbows sticking out at angles from his body, as if he were about to dance a jig.

The three of them stopped talking the moment Peregrine entered. They scrutinized him carefully, as if estimating the amount of money he might have upon his person. Peregrine turned and nearly collided with a woman who must have been sitting or standing beside the door when he came in.

“Good evening, monsieur,” she said, her words slurred. He took her in with a single glance—the teeth bad, the face painted garishly in a failed attempt to disguise the ravages of age.

“Would monsieur care to buy a lady a drink?”

But Peregrine was already past her. He expected the whore and the toughs to follow him onto the street, but they must have decided he was not worth the trouble it would take to rob him, at least not at that early hour of the night. Peregrine normally put a pistol in his pocket before going out on the street at night, for New Orleans was dangerous after dark, but when he patted the jacket beneath his cape, all he found was the outline of a glass bottle.

Peregrine’s woman was nearly two blocks away now, walking quickly into the crowd surging out of St. Louis Cathedral at the end of evening Mass. Peregrine tried to hurry, but his progress was blocked by exiting worshipers chattering happily to find the rain had ended.

He stopped and raised himself up on his toes to see over the hats and bonnets, despairing to be denied a glimpse of his quarry’s receding figure. He pushed his way through the crowd as best he could, but it was no good. He had lost her.

Peregrine stood near the side of the great cathedral, chin on chest, arms slack, eyes staring at the wet ground a few feet ahead. He had been so intent upon following the woman in the hooded cape that he had failed to realize that he, too, was being followed.