Galilee (72 page)

No great loss, you may say, knowing what you now know about us. There's a certain pettiness in the best of us, and such malice in the worst that their passing will probably be something to be celebrated.

My only hope as we move into these darker times is that the war will uncover some quality in one or other of us (I dare not hope all) that will disprove my pessimism. I don't wish to say that war is ennobling, you understand; I don't believe that for a moment. But I do believe it may strip us of some of the pretensions that are the dubious profits of peace—the airs and graces that we've all put on—and return us to our truer selves. To our humanity or our divinity; or both.

So, I'm ready. The pistol lies on one side of my desk, and my pen lies beside it. I intend to sit here and go on writing until the very last, but I can no longer promise you that I'll finish this story before I have to put my pen aside and arm myself. That
only everything
of mine now seems like the remotest of dreams: one of those pretensions of peace that I was talking about a few paragraphs back.

I will promise you this: that in the chapters to come I won't toy with your affections, as though we had a lifetime together. I'll be as plain as I know how, doing what I can to furnish you with the means to finish this history in your own head should I be stopped by a bullet.

And—while I'm thinking of that—maybe this isn't an inappropriate place to beg mercy from those I've neglected or misrepresented here. You've been reading the work of a man learning his craft word by word, sentence by sentence; I've often stumbled, I've often failed.

Forgive me my frailties. And if I am deserving of that forgiveness, let it be because I am not my father's son, but only human. And let the future be such a time as this is reason enough to be loved.

PART EIGHT

A House of
Women

I
was in a fine, maudlin mood when I wrote the last portion of the preceding chapter; with hindsight it seems somewhat premature. The barbarians aren't here yet, after all. Not even a whiff of their cologne. Perhaps I'll never need the gun Luman gave me. Wouldn't that be a fine old ending to my epic? After hundreds of pages of expectation, nothing. The Gearys decide they've had enough; Galilee stays out at sea; Rachel waits on the beach but never sees him again. The din of war drums dwindles, and they finally fall silent.

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 moment. 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.

A
stonishment 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 . . .”