Part 43 (1/2)

”Not everything. n.o.body could handle everything. Just enough to see whether she's ready for the truth.”

”Hm. Would you help me?”

”Like how?”

”Keep Cesaria from scaring her.”

”I can't stop her if she wants to do something. n.o.body could. Not even Dad.”

”But you'd do your best.”

”Yes. I'll be the voice of reason, if that makes any difference.”

”You'd tell Cesaria you suggested it?”

I sighed. ”If I must” I said.

”Then that's settled. I'll go talk to Alice now.”

”Just give me a little warning. So I can organize myself.”

”I'm excited.””Oh Lord. I don't like the sound of that.”

Of course I'm regretting it. Who wouldn't? The best it can be is a fiasco. But what else was I going to do? This obviously isn't some overnight romance. Marietta feels something profound for this woman. I can see it in her eyes. I can hear it in her voice. And it would be hypocritical of me to be writing with such enthusiasm about the grand-if stymied-pa.s.sion between Rachel and Galilee and at the same time turn a blind eye to something that's happening right in front of me.

Anyway, I've agreed. The woman will come to us and we'll see what we'll see.

Meanwhile, I have a story to tell.

ii The Central Park apartment was deserted when Rachel got back from her expedition to the Trump Tower. Even so, she didn't sit down at the dining room table and open the two envelopes she'd found, just in case somebody were to walk in on her. She went to her bedroom, where she locked the door and drew the drapes. Only then did she sit cross-legged on the bed to examine her booty.

In the less bulky of the two envelopes she found the letters and the photographs. Danny was quite the eroticist, to judge by what he'd written. His concern that if these letters had fallen into the wrong hands they might be used to besmirch Margie was well founded. There were dates and times and locations here; there were heated reminiscences of deeds done and boastful promises of how much more intricate it was going to get next time. Nor was any of this put in a roundabout way. ”We're going to have to start f.u.c.king in a soundproof room,” he said in one of the letters, ”the way you like to shout. I'm sitting here hard as a rock thinking about you yelling your head off, and me just sliding in and out, long strokes, the way you like. There isn 't a thing I wouldn 't do for you, you know that? When we 're together I feel as though the rest of the world can just go to h.e.l.l-we don't need anybody but each other. I wish I could have been a baby, sometimes, and drunk the milk from your beautiful t.i.ts. Or been born out of you. f.u.c.k, I know that sounds twisted, but you said we shouldn 't be afraid of any of the things we feel, right? I'd like to f.u.c.k you so deep I get lost inside you, and you 'd carry me around for a while, like I was your baby. Then when you wanted me out and giving you the nasty you 'd just open your legs and out I'd come, all ready to service you.”

The photographs were not as graphic as the letters, by any means, but they were still notably perverse. Danny was obviously proud of his endowment, and quite happy to have it recorded for posterity, while Margie's sense of humor was evident in the way she toyed with him. In one photograph she had drawn on his lower belly and upper thighs with lipstick; flames perhaps, as though his groin was on fire. In another, he was coupling with her while wearing her pantyhose, through which his d.i.c.k stuck, ripe cherry red. All good old-fas.h.i.+oned fun.

Rachel called Danny at home and told him the good news. He was just about to go down to the bar to start his s.h.i.+ft, but he was happy to call in sick and come and pick the letters andphotographs up immediately if that suited Rachel best. She told him not to do anything that would make people even faintly suspicious. The stuff was quite safe in her possession, she said.

They could meet when Danny's s.h.i.+ft was over, at midnight or so, and she could give everything to him then. They agreed on a meeting place, two blocks north of the bar where Danny worked.

That duty done, she turned her attention to the contents of the other envelope. She was expecting to find further evidence of Margie's philanderings; but what she found was something else entirely. It was a journal, clothbound and in an advanced state of disrepair, its cover stained and torn, its spine cracked, its pages loosened from their st.i.tching. A thin brown leather strap had been tied around it to keep its contents together: when she untied it she discovered that several separate sheets of paper had been interleaved with the journal's pages. Their condition varied wildly. There were a few neatly folded, and well preserved, there were others that were little more than sc.r.a.ps. What was written on the sheets similarly ran the gamut: from perfect copperplate to a chaotic scrawl. Some were letters, some seemed to be fragments of a sermon (at least there was much talk of G.o.d and redemption there); some were crudely ill.u.s.trated, their subjects always the same: soldiers, in what looked to be Civil War garb. There was no form of identification at the beginning of the book-indeed it seemed to start in midsentence-but when she flipped on through it she found that the first four or five pages had come loose at some point, and the owner had slipped them into the middle of the book. On the first page was an inscription written in an elegant, feminine hand.

This is for your thoughts, my darling Charles.

Bring it back to me when this horrid war is over, and we'll put it away, and put all the suffering away with it.

I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again.

Your adoring wife, Adina Below this, the date: September the Second, 1863 So they were Civil War soldiers in the sketches, Rachel thought. This journal had belonged to some military man who'd used it to record experiences as he went to battle. She knew little about the war between the states; history had never been a subject she'd warmed to. Especially when it was brutal; and what little she did remember of her lessons about the period concerned the cruelties that had brought the war about and the cruelties that had ended it. There had been nothing to engage her sympathies, so whatever dates and names she'd learned had quickly fled from her head.

But a history book and a journal such as this were very different things. One was filled with facts, to be learned parrot-fas.h.i.+on. The other had a voice, a drama, a sense of the specific. In a short time, she found herself entranced, not by the details of what was being described-much of it was a forlorn catalog of woes and privations: inedible food, dying animals, long, exhausting marches,foot rot and gut ”rot and lice-but the tangible presence of the man who was doing the describing, his self-portrait becoming more detailed, line by line. He loved his wife, he had faith in G.o.d and in the cause of the South, he hated Lincoln (a ”d.a.m.ned hypocrite”) and almost all Northerners (”they pretend righteousness because it suits them”); he liked his horse better than most of the men he commanded, and yet seemed to feel their hards.h.i.+p more than his own.

Isn 't there a better way to settle our differences, he wrote, than to put before the bullet and the bayonet common men such as these, who have no true comprehension of what is at issue here, nor in truth care to, but only want to have this b.l.o.o.d.y business done so that they can return to doing what the Lord made them to do: to plow and drink and die surrounded by their children and their children's children.

When I hear them talking among themselves they don't talk of politics and the greatness of our cause: they talk about clean water and strawberry pie. What is the use of putting such simple souls to death? Better that we chose ten princes of the South, and ten gentlemen of the North, if they could find that number, and set them in a field with swords, to fight until there was only one remaining. Let the victory go to that side then, and spill only the blood of nineteen men, instead of this wholesale slaughter, which so grievously wounds the body of the nation.

Just a few pages later, in a pa.s.sage dated August 22nd, 1864 (”a filthy, clammy night”) he returned to the subject of how the men suffer, but from a different point of view.

I find myself losing patience with the idea that this war is the Lord's work. We were given free will; and we have chosen what? To make one another suffer.

Yesterday we came upon a hill which had apparently been, for a week or a month, who knows now, a place of some strategic importance. There were dead men, or what the foul heat of this season makes of dead men, everywhere. Blue and gray, in what seemed to me equal numbers.

Why had they not been given Christian burials? I can only a.s.sume because there were not enough infantrymen of either side left alive to perform that duty, nor enough compa.s.sion left in their commanders to bring in a brigade and put the dead in the ground. The battle moves on to another hill-which will for a week or a month seem of vital strategic importance-and these hundreds of men, all somebody's sons, left for flies to breed in.

I'm ashamed of myself tonight. I wish I were not a man, if this is what men are.

The more Rachel read, the more questions she had. Who was this fellow, who had poured his feelings onto the page so eloquently she felt as though she could hear him, speaking to her? How had he learned to express himself so powerfully, and what purpose had he turned that power to when the fighting was finished? A preacher? A pacifist politician? Or had he done as his wife intended, and taken the book, with all its rage and its disappointment, back home to be sealed up and never spoken of again?

Then there was another series of questions, that were nothing to do with Charles and Adina. Howhad Margie come by the book? And why had she wrapped it up and hidden it alongside the letters from Danny? This was scarcely scandalous material. Perhaps at the time Charles's views would have been thought radical, but almost a century and a half later, what did it matter what he'd written?

She read on. Every now and then she'd unfold one of the loose notes tucked between the pages, some of which had nothing to do with anything she'd so far read, some of which looked to be thoughts he'd jotted down when he couldn't get to his journal, some of which were letters. There were two, side by side, from Adina, both sad and curiously abrupt. The first said: Dearest husband, I write with the worst of news, and know of no way to sweeten it. Two days ago the Lord took our darling Nathaniel from us, in a fever which came so suddenly that he was gone before Henrietta could bring Dr. Sarris to the house.

He would be four the first Tuesday of next month, and I had promised him you would take him up on your horse as a birthday .treat when you came home. He spoke-of this at the last.

I do not think he much suffered.

The second was shorter still.

I must go to Georgia, if I can, Adina wrote. I have word from Hamilton that the plantation has been brought to ruin, and that our father is in such despair he has twice attempted to end his own life. I will bring him back to Charleston with me, and tend to him there.

The hand that had written these letters was still just recognizably the same that had penned the inscription, but it had deteriorated into a spiky scrawl. Rachel could scarcely imagine what state the woman must have been reduced to: her husband gone, one of her children dead, her family fortune lost; it was a wonder she'd kept her sanity. But then, perhaps she hadn't.

Again, Rachel moved on. In an hour or so she'd have to set out for her meeting with Danny, but she didn't want to leave the journal. It fascinated her; these tragic lives, unraveling before her, like the lives of people in a novel. Except that this book gave her none of the familiar comforts of fiction. No authorial voice to put these events in a larger context; no certainty, even, that she would be shown how their troubles were resolved.

A few pages on, however, about halfway through the journal, she chanced upon a page which would significantly change the direction of all that followed.

Tonight I do not know if I am a sane man, Charles wrote. I have had such a strange experience today, and want to write it down before 1 go to sleep so that I do not dismiss it tomorrow as something my exhausted mind invented. It was not. I'm certain, it was not. I know how the visions that arise from fatigue appear-I've seen some of them-and this was of a different order.We are marching southeast, through North Carolina. It rains constantly, and the ground has turned to mud; the men are so tired they neither sing nor complain, barely having the energy left to put one boot in front of another. I wonder how long it will be before 1 have to join them; my horse is sick, and I believe he only continues to walk out of love of me. Poor thing! I've seen the cook, Nickelberry, eyeing him now and then, wondering if there's any way in the world he can turn such a carca.s.s into edible fare.

So, that was what the day brought, and it was horrible enough. But then, as dusk came, and it was that hour when nothing in the world seems solid and certain, I looked down and saw-oh G.o.d in Heaven, my pen does not want to make these words-I saw my boy, my golden- haired Nathaniel, sitting on the saddle in front of me.

thought ofAdina 's letter: of how she had promised that ride upon the horse, and my heart quickened, for today was Nathaniel's birthday.

I expected the presence to disappear after a time, but it did not. As the night drew on he stayed there, as though to comfort me. Once, in the darkness, I sensed him look round and back at me, and saw his pale face and his dark eyes there before me.

I spoke then. I said: I love you, my son.

He replied to me! As if all this weren't extraordinary enough, he replied. Papa, he said, the horse is tired, and wants me to ride her away.

It was unbearable, to hear that little voice in the darkness telling me that my horse was not long for this world.