Galilee (61 page)

Oh, the nights he'd lain awake, wondering about that book! Trying to imagine how it might look, how it might feel in his hands. Was it large or small; were its pages thick or thin? Would he know the moment he read it what wisdom it was imparting, or would it be written in a code which he had to crack? Then there was the most important question of the lot: where did Cadmus keep this book? He would sometimes steal into his grandfather's study—which was a room he was strictly forbid to enter—and stare at the shelves and cupboards (he didn't dare touch anything) wondering where it might be hidden. Was there a safe behind the books, or a secret compartment under the floor? Or was it hidden away in one of the drawers of Cadmus's antique desk, which had seemed so intimidating to him as a child that he'd had an almost superstitious fear of it, as though it had a life of its own and might come after him, snorting like a bull, if he stared at it for too long?

He was never once caught in the study. He was far too clever for that. He knew how to wait and watch and plan; he knew how to lie. The one thing he couldn't do was charm; not even his own grandmother. When, after Cadmus's recovery, he'd asked Kitty to talk about what she'd intimated to him, she bluntly refused to do so, to the point of denying that they'd ever had the conversation. He'd grown sullen, realizing that there was nothing he could say or do that would persuade her to open the subject again, and his sullenness had become thereafter his chief defining feature. In any family photograph he was the one without the smile; the glowering adolescent whom everybody treated gingerly for fear he snap like an ill-tempered dog. He didn't much like the pose, or the response it elicited, but he couldn't compete with Mitchell's effortless charm. If he was patient, he knew, the time would come when he'd have the power to seek these secrets out for himself. Meanwhile
he'd work, and play the loving grandson, watching for any clues that might inadvertently fall from Cadmus's lips; about where he might find the journal, and what it contained.

But Cadmus had let nothing slip. Though he'd encouraged Garrison in his rise to power, and countless times made it clear how much he trusted Garrison's judgment, that trust had never extended to talking about the Barbarossas. Nor had Garrison been able to draw Loretta into his confidence. She'd made her suspicion of him, mingled with a mild distaste, plain from the outset, and nothing he'd said or done had made her warm to him. More irksome still was the knowledge that she, though new to the Geary dynasty, had access to information that he was denied. More than information, of course. She, like Kitty and Margie and Mitchell's wife, had taken herself off to Kaua'i more than once, to be with one of the Barbarossa clan. Why this ritual was sanctioned Garrison had never understood; he only knew that it was a tradition that went back a long way. He'd raised some objections to it when he'd first heard it mooted, but Cadmus had made it unequivocally clear that the matter
was not up for debate. There were some things, he'd said to Garrison, that had to be accepted without challenge, however unpalatable. They were part of the way the world worked.

“Not my world,” Garrison had said, working himself up into a fine fury. “I'm not allowing my wife to go off to some island and play around with a total stranger.”

“Just be quiet,” Cadmus had said. Then, in hushed, even tones he'd explained that Garrison would do exactly as he was told on this matter, or suffer the consequences. “If you can't behave as I wish you to behave, then you have no place in this family,” he'd said.

“You wouldn't throw me out,” Garrison had replied. “Not now.”

“You watch me,” his grandfather had said. “If you argue with me about this, you go. It's as simple as that. It's not as though you're devoted to your wife, after all. You cheat on her, don't you?” Garrison had sulked. “Well don't you?”

“Yes.”

“So let her cheat on you, if it helps the family.”

“I don't see how—”

“It doesn't matter whether you see or not.”

That had been the end of the conversation, and Garrison had left with not the slightest doubt as to his grandfather's sincerity. Cadmus was not a man to make idle threats. Duly warned, Garrison had kept his objections to himself thereafter. And what little faith he'd had in his grandfather's love for him died.

Now, as the first light of dawn crept into the sky, he thought of the old man, sick to death but unwilling to die, and wondered if he should have one more try at getting the truth out of him. No doubt, as Mitchell had said, taking Cadmus's pills off him for half a day would be a torment; but it might make him talk. And even if it didn't, there'd be some satisfaction to be had from making the bastard beg for his painkillers. Picturing the scene, Cadmus yellow-white with agony, sobbing to have his opiates back, brought a smile to Garrison's face. But first he would see how well Mitchell did getting the truth out of Cadmus. If his brother failed, then he'd have no choice but to play the torturer, and be thankful for the chance.

I
nk and water; water and ink.

Last night, I dreamt about Galilee. It wasn't one of the waking dreams—the visions, if you will—in which I witness the matter of these pages. It was a dream that came to me while I was asleep, but which so forcibly impressed itself upon my mind that it was still there when I woke.

This is what I dreamed. I was hovering like a bird above a churning sea, and adrift in that sea, bound to a wretched raft, and naked, was Galilee. He was covered in wounds, and his blood was running off into the water. I couldn't see any sharks, but that's not to say they weren't all around him. The sea was black, however, like the ink in my pen; it concealed its inhabitants.

As I watched, wave after dark wave struck the raft, and one by one its pieces were disengaged and swept away, so that soon Galilee's body was draped over the three or four planks that remained, his head and lower limbs submerged in the water. Now, for the first time, he seemed to realize that he was about to die, and began to struggle to work the knots free. His body glistened with sweat, and sometimes, as the scene grew more frenzied, I couldn't decide what I was seeing. Was that black, shining form broken on the planks still my brother, or was it the breaking wave that had swept him away?

I wanted to wake now; the whole scene distressed me. I had no desire to watch my brother drown. I told myself to
wake up. You don't have to endure this,
I said,
just open your eyes.

I started to feel the dream receding from me. But even as it did so my brother's writhings became more desperate—the wounds on his body gaping as he thrashed—and he pulled a hand free of the ropes. He hauled his head up out of the waves. When he did so the water seemed to cling around his skull, as though it had knitted a spumy crown there; his eyes were wild, his mouth was letting out a soundless scream. He tore at the binding around his other wrist, and then, sitting up on what was left of the raft, reached down into the water to free his legs.

He wasn't quick enough. The planks beneath him were sundered, and swept away. He fell backward into the water, his wounds pouring blood as he did so, and the waterlogged boards to which his feet were still tied dragged him down, down beneath waves.

And now came the most curious event in the sequence. As his dark body sank from sight, the waters into which he was disappearing forsook their negritude, as though in reverence to the flesh they'd claimed. It was not that they became translucent, like any common sea. Rather their concealing darkness become a revelatory light, which blazed so brightly it outshone the sky.

I could see my brother's body, sinking into the bright depths. I could see every living form that swam in the sea around him, all silhouetted against the brightness of the water. Shoals of tiny fish, moving as a single entity; vast squid—vaster than any such creature I'd seen before—watching Galilee descend toward their realm; and of course innumerable sharks, circling him as he sank, describing protective spirals around his body.

And then, as they say in books of cowardly fancy, I woke, and it was all a dream.

I don't discount the possibility that though the images I saw were not real, as I believe my visions are, they were true. That Galilee, if not already drowned, is about to be drowned.

What does that do to the story I thought I was telling? Well, to put it crudely, it pinches it off before it was fully shit out. (I'm sorry, that's not the prettiest of metaphors, but I'm not in the prettiest of moods; and it expresses indecently well how I feel today about what I'm doing. That this whole wretched business has simply been one long, problematic excretion. One day I'm constipated, the next it runs out of me like foul water.)

But now I revolt you. I'll stop.

Back to Rachel for a while. I'll let the dream sit, and revisit it in a few hours. Maybe it'll make a different kind of sense later.

The last we heard of Rachel she was in a cab returning to the apartment on Central Park. In her hands, the journal which Garrison had spent so many hours in his youth wondering about; imagining its size, and its weight; puzzling over what it might contain. And there in its pages she'd discovered a mystery: that there had been a man called Galilee in Charleston, in the spring of 1865. Now Nickelberry was taking Holt to meet him, promising that the encounter would help the captain heal the pain he'd endured here.

I had not witnessed such excess I was about to see,
the captain wrote,
since the early days of the war, when I had occasion to come into a bordello where one of my men had been murdered in a brawl. To be truthful luxury, especially in excess, has never pleased me; only in nature do I find an overabundance delightful; evidence of creation's limitless cup. It was my darling Adina who was the one who liked to have fine things in the house—vases and silks and pretty pictures. For me, as I think for most of my sex fineries are acceptable in moderation, but can quickly come to seem smothering.

    So then, imagine this: two houses in the East Battery, facing the water, and so damaged by enemy fire as to seem from the outside little more than the husks of dwellings, but which, upon entering, are revealed to contain the gleanings from fifty of Charleston's finest houses, every article chosen because it speaks precociously to the senses.

    This was the place into which Nickelberry took me; the place he'd been brought by his guide and advocate Olivia, who was but one of a dozen or so people who occupied this unlikely palace.

    It seems Nub had accepted the bounty of the place without questioning it (such is a cook's nature, perhaps; especially during times of scarcity). I, on the other hand, began to interrogate Olivia immediately. How had all this sickly magnificence been accrued, I demanded to know. The woman was black, and ill-educated (she'd been a slave, though she was now dressed in a gown, and draped in jewelry, that would have been the envy of any fine woman on Meeting Street): she could not answer me coherently. I became frustrated with her, but before my agitation grew too great a white woman, much older than Olivia, appeared at my side. She introduced herself as the widow of General Walter Harris, a man under whose command I had fought in Virginia. She seemed quite happy to answer my questions. None of the luxuries in the midst of which we stood had been pirated or looted, she explained but given freely to the man who lived here, the aforementioned Galilee. I expressed surprise at this,
for besides the great treasure-house of valuables here there was also food and drink in an abundance I think no Charlestonian has seen since the beginning of the siege. I was invited by the ladies to sit and eat, and after so many months in which the best fare available was fried biscuits in bacon fat could not restrain myself. I was not alone at the table. There was a Negro boy, no more than twelve, and a young man from Alabama by the name of Maybank and a fourth woman, very pale and elegant, whom this fellow Maybank fed with his fingers, as though he were enslaved to her. I ate gingerly at first, overwhelmed by what was before me, but my appetite grew rather than diminishing, and I ate enough for ten men; was then sick to my stomach; and having vomited came back to the table quite refreshed and partook again. Sweetbreads with sherry, thick slices of a baked calf s head, oysters and mushrooms, a fine she-crab soup and a brown oyster stew with benne seeds. There was a wine soufflé for dessert, and huckleberry
pie and conserved peaches—what we used to call peach leather when I was young—and fruit candy such as we would have for Christmas. Nickelberry, Olivia and the general's widow ate with me, while the younger woman, one Katherine Morrow, made herself very drunk with brandy, and at last took herself off in search of our host, then promptly passed out on the floor next door. The young man Maybank declared suddenly that he wished to have congress with the woman while she was in this state, and called for the Negro boy Thaddeus to help him undress the woman.

    I protested, but Nickelberry advised me to hold my tongue. They had a perfect right to pleasure themselves with the drunken Miss Morrow if they so chose, he said; such was the law of this place. Olivia confirmed the fact. If I was to intervene, she warned me, and Galilee chanced to hear of it, he would kill me . . .

Rachel had not noticed the journey back to the apartment; nor the trip in the elevator. Now she was sitting at the window, with the glory of New York before her, and she didn't see it. All she saw was the house in the East Battery, its rooms a catalog of excesses; and the captain, sitting at the table, gorging himself—

I asked what manner of man this Galilee was, and Olivia smiled at me. You'll see, she said. And you'll understand when he starts to speak to you, what kind of king he is.

    King? I said, of what country? Of every country, Olivia replied; of every city, of every stone.