"Under de pillow. For de shingle. Dat one."
He shrugged, caught out in a lie, and what was she now, his keeper? "I don"t care," he said, and he was just floating the words out there. "Protection. I keep it for protection."
"From what? Bears?" Her eyes had sharpened. She was on the offensive and he didn"t like it one whit. "De redskin Indian wid dere tomahawk? T"ieves? Or maybe Jesus. Maybe Jesus gone come for you and you gone chop "im up in little pieces." She backed up a step, just out of reach, in her shift still, with her eyes like two coals shining in the stove, two red-hot fiery coals that nothing in this world could extinguish. "Julian," she whispered. "Julian."
"What? What is it? Can"t you see I"ve got work to do-?"
"I heard you. Las" night. Night before dat too. You was sittin" by the window dere, talkin" to dat hatchet you was holdin" in your lap like a baby child, like a hex doll. Dat what it is-dat your hex doll?"
There was no answering that kind of willful stupidity and she knew it before the words were out of her mouth because he"d taught her to know it and he was going to keep on teaching her till she learned it for good and he took two quick steps forward and caught her face in his right hand, pinching it there in the hollows of her jawbone so her mouth was distorted, and then he shoved that lewd hateful cringing black fish face as hard as he could so she fell away from him like one of her rag-and-bone voodoo poppets and that put him in a mood, it surely did.
But here he was in the courtyard, striding along with his head down and the peac.o.c.ks wailing and the sun beating at him like a hammer, as full of pure rage as he"d ever been. One foot in front of the other, the cornfield down there like a tall green stand of cane, the closest thing to cane, and maybe she"d relent, maybe she"d step back and keep him on if he could just get down there into that field and let it all run out of him like the poison from a snakebit wound till his heart slowed and the beating stopped in his head. He was so intent he didn"t see the figure poised there in the shadows of the stable till the figure emerged into the chop of the light in one swift motion-a giant"s step-and took hold of his arm.
Brodelle. Brodelle in jodhpurs and riding boots, narrowing his wet blue eyes and pursing his lips round whatever it was he had to say, and what was it going to be this time? Lick my boots, kiss my a.r.s.e, go f.u.c.k yourself? But no. "Saddle my horse, will you?" That was what it was. Saddle my horse. "I"m in a hurry."
He didn"t have time to be astonished, the sequence of events as swift and sure and unstoppable as a row of dominoes all falling in a line, and he jerked his arm back as if he"d been stung, squared his shoulders under that sun and stared the man in the face, the fool, the interfering white fool who couldn"t have known what he was doing. He stared. Just stared. And here came the change, because Brodelle saw him now, really saw him, one man to another, the tight-jawed look of the deliverer of commands shading to something else, something puerile and powerless, because a command presupposes a response-sc.r.a.pe and bow, Ya.s.suh, Ma.s.sah-and Julian was giving him nothing. "What"s the matter with you-are you deaf? I said saddle the G.o.dd.a.m.n horse."
One more full beat, holding fast to those soft sinking useless wet eyes and not a word needed, not a word to waste, and then he turned his back on him and went down the courtyard to where the green corn sprang up even as Brodelle cursed him-"You black n.i.g.g.e.r son of a b.i.t.c.h!"-knowing even then that there was no help now, not in the fields or anywhere else, because there were two voices speaking in his head, the one that said maybe, maybe I will, maybe she will, maybe, and the one that said never, never again, never, never, never.
She wasn"t much use as a nurse-she didn"t have the sympathy for it or the patience either and the sight of blood made her feel faint-but she bent to Gertrude, helped her to her feet and threw a frantic glance round the kitchen, looking for a sc.r.a.p of cloth, a towel, anything to use as a compress. The pan was on the floor, a blackened slab of meat hissing beside it, the smoke faltering now, bellying and receding till it began to dissolve in transparent wisps. She went to the sink, ran cold water over the washrag she found hanging on a hook there and tried to press it to Gertrude"s eye, but Gertrude shied away. Wouldn"t look at her. "No, no, ma"am," she kept saying. "No, no, don"t you bother. I jus" fine. Julian too. Julian fine. Please, ma"am, please don"t go blamin" Julian, "cause half de time he don"t know what he do."
"Doesn"t know?" She was outraged. How could this woman even begin to defend her husband when she herself had seen him kick her as remorselessly as he might have kicked an animal? "He beat you."
"No, I slip on de wet spot and take a tumble, da.s.s all." The eyes came up now in a sidelong glance. Her hair had fallen loose in a solid kinked wedge that floated over one eyebrow in a glisten of the purest black. She had a blunted look to her, the look of suffering in all its forms and array, but there was something else there too, something distant and calculating.
It took a moment before Mamah realized it wasn"t fear of her husband that was driving her-this pretty young girl who only meant well-but fear of her, of the white woman who"d invaded the kitchen, the mistress of the house who could snap her fingers and hire and fire three times over. It was a shock. She"d seen women cowed by their husbands, living behind them, through them, as if they were mere instruments or tools, but this was sadder still, the saddest thing in the world. "You know I have to let you go," she said. "I"m sorry."
"Give "im one more chance. He de good mon. You say so youself."
But she was shaking her head, awash with emotion, soaked in it, trembling still with the dregs of the fear and rage that had thrown her up against that hateful black beast who"d beaten his wife as if she weren"t even human and was one step from turning on her too. It was impossible, intolerable to have that sort of thing in her own house as if they were in some foreign slum, some shanty crawling with every kind of violence and ignorance and fever. "I"m sorry," she said again. "I know it"s not your fault-you"re a good woman, I"m sure of it, a good dutiful young woman and a first-rate cook . . . but don"t you see? It"s just wrong. Wrong."
She realized then that she still had the wet compress in her hand and she held it out before her with an insistent shake of her wrist till Gertrude stepped forward and took it. Then she went to the door, thinking of Frank because Frank would know what to do, Frank would handle this, and she didn"t care how hectic his work was or how much they needed him because he"d have to come home that very afternoon, on the next train, and she wouldn"t feel safe till he did. She"d get her bag and go right straight out the door and have Billy drive her to the telegraph office, that was what she was thinking, but she paused just a moment in the doorway to look back at Gertrude standing stock-still amidst the wreckage with the dripping rag clenched in one hand while she absently lifted the other to her lip and the dark stain of blood there. "You"ve got two weeks," she said. And once more, one final time: "I"m sorry."
Her first impulse was to go to the drafting room and rouse Brodelle or Herbert Fritz to go find Billy and she"d actually started off in that direction before she reversed herself and went instead to the bedroom for her purse and hat. She barely glanced at herself in the mirror-she was wrought up, her heart in her mouth, and there was no time to waste-and then she was striding through the house, past the kitchen, out the door to the loggia and into the drafting room. Herbert was there, bent over his desk, but Brodelle was nowhere to be seen.
"Herbert, I don"t mean to interrupt," she said, and she could hear the agitation in her own voice, "but I was wondering if you"ve seen Billy-or, I mean, if you could go and fetch him, please. I"ve got to-it"s urgent."
The boy was wearing a loose black satin tie and long trailing smock, in imitation of Frank, though it promised to be another hot day. He"d been deep in his work and he gave her a look of utter bewilderment, as if he"d suddenly lost the capacity to speak, s.n.a.t.c.hing a quick glance at his drawing before he flushed and got to his feet. "He was here earlier, with Brodelle, an hour ago maybe-"
"Where is Emil?"
A duck of the head. "He said he was going to go riding before lunch-and work late, of course, to make up for it-"
She waved a hand in dismissal. "If you"d tell Billy to bring the motorcar round-I need to go into the village and I won"t be gone an hour. It"s very urgent." He was already at the door, a scramble of limbs and the sc.r.a.pe of his shoes, when she called out to him. "I won"t be taking the children." She hesitated a moment, watching his face-he was still fl.u.s.tered but anxious to please, a good boy, malleable, likable. "Would you look in on them-if it"s not too much trouble?"
The sun was already baking the flagstones of the courtyard as Billy held the door for her and she climbed into the car, everything still and peaceful and not the hint of a breeze. Billy was in his work clothes, as clean and precise and neat as he always was, no matter the job or its demands or how grease-stained and mud-caked his fellow workers might have been. He tipped his hat to her as he slid behind the wheel-"Looks to be another scorcher," he said and she answered that it certainly did-and that was the last thing she said until he pulled up in front of the Western Union office and she instructed him to wait there for her. She"d wanted to confide in him, but the thought of the scene in the kitchen was too humiliating, too overwhelming, to confide to anyone. She"d had a shock, that was it. And she wasn"t over it yet.
It took her two minutes to compose the telegram-COME AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE STOP SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED-and then she paid the man, got in the car and had Billy drive her back to Taliesin, trying to stay calm, telling herself that this crisis would pa.s.s as they all invariably did and that Frank would be there to support her, as he"d always been and always would be.174 When Billy turned in off the main road, she watched the house emerge from its frame of trees, a house more precious and exquisite than anything in Tuscany or Umbria or anywhere else-the sky above and Frank"s creation below, every detail spun out of his head and for her, for her-and it made her glad and proud too. And it calmed her, just the sight of it, because there was no place she"d rather be. It was home. She was home. And as Billy shifted gears to climb the hill she felt a stab of nostalgia so powerful the tears came to her eyes, but she was quick to dab them with her handkerchief and avert her face so Billy wouldn"t notice. It was nerves, that was all.
She sent Herbert to tell the cook that she and the children would be taking lunch separately out on the screened-in porch and that the workmen would be served in the dining room, and Herbert bobbed back almost immediately to say that the cook was asking how many they"d be. She was seated at her desk, rereading a paragraph she"d already read twelve times over, feigning normalcy-everything was on an even keel, nothing amiss, and she wanted them all to believe that, even Carleton-and she looked up and counted them off on her fingers. "Well, let"s see," she said, "Brodelle"s here somewhere, isn"t he?"
"He"s back at his desk, yes."
"All right: Emil and you, and Brunker and Lindblom-that makes four. And Billy makes five."
"And Billy"s kid."
"Ernest." She smiled. "He"s busy learning his father"s trade, is he? I hope he"ll keep up his studies when school starts up again in the fall-there"s no subst.i.tute for a good education, wouldn"t you agree?"
He shuffled and stammered a bit, but certainly he agreed-that was the whole point of his being here at Taliesin under the hand of Mr. Wright-and of course, he"d appreciated the gift of The Woman Movement , which he was finding very . . . stimulating.
She thanked him. Told him he was very kind. And thanked him too for acting as go-between for her and the cook-she wasn"t feeling very well and her work had reached a critical stage . . .
He nodded. He was standing at the door, looking only to escape.
"Oh, by the way," she added, "I think we can expect Mr. Wright back this evening." She picked up her pen, idly tracing over a notation in the margin of the page. "I just thought you and Emil might want to know."
Then it was lunch. She"d steeled herself-the thought of seeing Carleton, let alone have him there serving at table, made her stomach turn, but she had to appear as if everything was normal. For everyone"s sake. There was no point in upsetting the children-or the workmen either. Or the Carletons, for that matter. She"d had enough upset for one day and she was determined to get through with the meal without exacerbating the situation.
She led John and Martha out onto the porch-"I want to eat with Ernest," John kept whining. "Why can"t I eat with Ernest?"-seated them at the table and then took her own place. "Not today," was all she said in response, and she didn"t mean to be curt but she saw no need to involve the children in this-she wanted them with her, she needed them there, and that was enough-and so she turned to Martha and said, "You know, Martha, that truly is a pretty dress. And so lightweight too, perfect for this weather. Aren"t you glad now that we picked it out together?"
And then Carleton was there with his face of iron and his inflexible posture and his gaze on the furniture, the floor, the tray he set down with the faintest mockery of his usual flourish, never daring to lift his eyes to hers or the children"s or to utter one single word. There was soup to start, a vegetable broth into which Gertrude had diced red peppers from the garden, along with paper-thin slices of pork she"d rubbed with sage and then marinated in vinegar and lime oil. It was delicious. But John, always a choosy eater, turned up his nose at it. "Mama," he said, pinching his voice, "do I have to eat this?"175 Well, corn wasn"t cane and this place was no island you could walk across in a day from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e but a glowering dark limitless prison he wanted no part of, not anymore, and he came up out of that cornfield where he could smell the hot reek of the earth that was nothing but spilled blood and s.h.i.t and the bone meal of all the men and animals that had ever lived atop it and went into the house and washed his hands and slipped into his white service jacket as if he"d been born to it. Service. He"d show them service. The kind they never expected. Because they didn"t know a thing about him and they didn"t know how he"d squatted over his heels and smelled the raw earth while the cornstalks stabbed all around him like ten thousand spears and he learned and studied and talked to the sky and the voice in his head until he had no choice.
The first thing was the windows to the courtyard where the men would be.
Fifteen minutes to twelve noon and he ghosted round outside, n.o.body in sight, and nailed those windows to the sills with a fistful of two-penny nails and the mallet end of the hatchet he"d found on a shelf in the automobile stall where the roofers had left it behind for him. He recognized it as something he required as soon as he saw it lying there in a whole farrago of forgotten things, a ball of twine, half a dozen rusted cans full of nails and bolts and woodscrews, a dried-up tin of shoe polish and a jar with the talons of a hawk preserved in it and the whole business sprinkled over with bits of straw and a black rice of rat t.u.r.ds. Or mouse. He"d brushed it off with a flick of his hand and then tried it for balance and it was just right, the closest thing to a tomahawk he could find. Brodelle. He thought of Brodelle with the blade of it cleaving his head just the way the naked Indians would have given it to him when they were in possession of the land and whole boatloads of Brodelles came with their whey-faced women to take it away from them and build their big yellow houses and drive down everything and everybody till there was nothing left but hate and want and sickness. It was his. And he kept it under his pillow. For a time like this.
Next was the kitchen and Gertrude with her puffed-up eye and crusted-over lip giving him a wary look and telling him de mistress and her chillun gone take dey refreshment down de screen porch and she already ladling out the soup and the aroma of it rising to his nostrils so that he had to swallow down the saliva, thinking how right they were to separate themselves like that. "Be quick about it, woman," he said, and then the three white china bowls were balanced on the silver tray and he was elevating the tray on the platform of his spread black fingers, all the while imagining the three white faces-the woman movement herself and her pale little grubs-bent over their good Bajan soup. Slurping. Commenting on the weather. The books they were reading. Dolls and horses and the geese by the lake and the peac.o.c.ks caught on the eaves like individual bursts of G.o.d-given flame. And the boy like a grub. And the girl. And her. Get out! she"d screamed. You get out! I"m giving you your notice.
He steeled himself because he had to be hard and this was the hardest part of it, going in there on that screened porch and facing her after what she"d said to him, what she"d done, interfering, meddling, thrusting in her cheap whorish opinions when they weren"t wanted or needed or called for in any way save the devil"s way, but he balanced the tray on one hand all down the corridor and out across the paving stones and pulled open the door with the other and set down the white ceramic bowls without drawing a spare breath and then he went back to the kitchen and balanced six more bowls on the tray and went into the close little twelve-foot-square dining room with its big wooden table and lobster-trap chairs and that was hard too. Because Brodelle was there. Brodelle, who"d called him a black n.i.g.g.e.r son of a b.i.t.c.h to his face and who was ready to laugh at him, who was laughing at him even as he set down the bowls and never looked a one of them in the eye and backed out the door to go see to the mistress for the last and final time.
He wouldn"t be needing the serving tray, not this time, and he let it fall to the flagstones of the loggia with a clapclatter of silver metal and took up the only tool he"d ever need again. Were his thoughts racing? Yes, sure they were, but not in the way of a thinker or mathematician or an architect in the helter-skelter of conception or even a rabbit with the fox at its throat, but in the detached way of a soldier under fire. He saw every detail as if it had been segregated just for him. He saw the cracks between the stones and the weeds struggling there, saw the yellow stucco like the stippled skin of the beast that was the house, saw the screened porch at the end of the pa.s.sage and the three figures held in abeyance there behind the dark grid of the screen even as a hand rose like a dream hand or a head bobbed on the verge of invisibility. He heard their voices, her voice: "There," she was saying, "that wasn"t so awful, was it?" And his: "Was so." And her: "You liked it, John. Admit it-"
And then he came through the door, moving so swiftly he surprised himself, and she looked up this time, this time she saw him, this time her eyes locked on his at the very moment the hatchet came in one savage furious stroke that went in at the hairline and let loose all the red grease of her brains, gray grease and pink grease, and it was on his bleached white jacket like a kind of devil"s rain. The boy was next. Before he could react, before the knowledge of what was happening there in front of him could settle into his eyes, the hatchet came down again, twice, and he was dead and twitching even as the girl jumped up and ran till he hit her just behind the right ear, one time, two, three, until she was down on the stone crawling like a grub and her face turned to him now, grub-pale, with her eyes open so that he had to hit there again with the flat of it to crush the cheekbone and shut them for good.
The gasoline. He had the big canister of it right there, ready to hand-"Mr. Weston," he"d said to the dishwater man not thirty minutes ago, "may I have some of that automobile fuel to work the spots out of the rug in the living room, that one with all the swirls and patterns on it?" and the dishwater man had said yes, go ahead, he didn"t care-and he sloshed that gasoline over the two of them at the table and the one that had made it out the door and was still alive and working, her legs against the stone floor, and dropped a lit match on it and heard the sudden harsh sucking sound it made.
Quick now, quick-make a job of it. He ran as fast as his lungs and legs would take him to where the men were boasting and laughing and sucking the soup his wife had cooked between their teeth and he bolted into the kitchen through the courtyard door and jammed a wedge of wood under it so no man, even Achilles himself, could have pushed it open. Gertrude might have called out his name, but he gave her one look-one look and two words through his clenched teeth: "Save yourself"-and then he let the gasoline flow out under the door, the whole canister of it and the rugs in the hall already soaked through with it and here was the match, cousin to the last one, and he dashing out his door to the courtyard and the single exit he"d already shut and barred against any man or boy with his clothes aflame and trying to escape. Quick. Quick. The second canister propped there beside the door and gone up in an instant. He could hear them inside, cursing, screaming, shouting like the d.a.m.ned in their h.e.l.lfire, hear them pounding at the immovable door-shrieks, raw shrieks as alive as the skin that was blistering off their flaming white faces-and then there was the sharp celebratory explosion of the gla.s.s of the window and the first of them to come hurtling through it to meet the hatchet, which rose high and higher and fell on them each in turn with all the force of his killing arm and the gravity behind it and it was no more troublesome than splitting shingles.
They were dead as they came through the window and now the flaming rectangle of the door, dead or stunned, the stunned ones rolling on the ground with their clothes aflame, as if that would do them the least lick of good, and he struck them again and again as they rolled and dodged and put up their hands to try to protect themselves where they were most vulnerable. There was a method to this. An order. An efficiency. And he wanted, above all, to be efficient. Three blows for the dishwater man, the hatchet spinning so that it was the flat that brought him down and not the blade, and the boy too, but Brodelle-black n.i.g.g.e.r son of a b.i.t.c.h-he split him open like a wiener on the grill, the same as Mamah, and the fat man too and he went after the other boy, Fritz, but Fritz was rolling, rolling, and every board and fiber of the house in an uproaring lit-bright pandemonium of flame.
Later, he was sick. Later, it burst out of both ends of him and he knew they"d be coming for him with their dogs and the noose braided for lynching and if he ran out into the fields he"d have no say in the matter because he would just be their bait. How he got down into the cellar beneath the inferno of the house he couldn"t have said. And he couldn"t have said either why he didn"t just stand there and let the burning joists fall to crush him and the flames to devour him, because he was done now, all the rage purged out of him as if it had never been there at all. He gave a thought for Gertrude-they"d make her pay and she didn"t deserve any part in it-but it was a thought that flitted by and vanished in the instant her sorrowful face materialized in his brain. A flame was as light as air, and yet the frame of that architect"s house couldn"t withstand the weight. Brands fell round him. Everything shrieked and groaned, unholy noise, the structure rattling and striking out against the death that had come to embrace it. He opened the door of the furnace that had boiled the water for the dead of the house. It was cool inside. Or cooler, anyway. He got in there with the thick gla.s.s bottle he"d saved for last, the caustic to kill him before they did, muriatic acid and the triple X and the skull and crossbones to warn them off. He pulled the steel door closed against the roar and the chaos. It was black, purely black, not the thinnest tracery of light to be seen in any direction. They would never find him here.
CHAPTER 8 : ALL FALL DOWN.
Lunch. A sandwich from the restaurant, a moment to relax with the newspaper-umbrage in the Balkans and the guns thundering across the Continent, and what next, the Archduke rising up out of his coffin on angel"s wings?-before he went back to wrangling with Waller over money and Iannelli over the sprites, because the Italian, understandably but maddeningly, was balking at delivering the rest of the statuary without payment in hand or at least guaranteed. The sandwich was good, first-rate-Volgelsang really knew his business, give him credit there-and the newspaper was sufficiently lurid and b.l.o.o.d.y for even the most jaded reader, but Frank couldn"t help keeping one eye on John,176 who was at the far end of the room, up on the scaffolding, applying a wet brush to the polychromatic mural behind the bar. A pretty picture that, and John as precise and unerring a worker as his father himself. Details, details. This room, the tavern, was Waller"s number one priority and never mind the glories of opening night with Max Bendix and his hundred-piece orchestra sawing gloriously away and Pavlova pirouetting across the stage and all the rest, he was bleeding money through his pores till the beer started flowing right here, out of these dry and thirsty taps. ("I don"t give a d.a.m.n about murals or sprites or anything else," Waller kept telling him. "I just want the place finished and the tables full. Beer. I just want beer.") Of course, it was an insult, and he was determined to see the design realized in its every last particular if he was going to draw another breath on this earth, but he could hardly be blamed for the delays at this point. He took another bite of the sandwich. Lifted the gla.s.s of ice water to his lips. It was hot. d.a.m.nably hot. He thought of Taliesin then, of the lake, and how he"d give anything to throw off his shirt, trousers and shoes and plunge into the cool opaque depths of it and maybe give the fish a run for the money. He was thinking of that, of the fish and how Billy Weston"s son had pulled a catfish as long as his arm out of there just a week ago-an amazing thing, really, with its big yellow mouth gaping wide as if to suck in all the air in the valley and the barbels twitching and the tiny dots of its blue-black eyes that hardly seemed sufficient to take in the incandescent world that had loomed up on it so precipitately-when the stenographer from the main office suddenly burst through the door, looking as if she"d had all the blood drained out of her in a scientific experiment. He was going to comment on that, make a joke of it, a quip about the heat and how it was a leading cause of anemia in women under thirty, but her face warned him off. "Mr. Wright," she said, out of breath, running sweat, paler than the stack of paper she kept to hand beside her typewriter, "you"re wanted on the telephone. Long distance. From Spring Green."
Once, when he was young, younger than John was now, he"d seen a building collapse. It was a ma.s.sive brick structure still under construction, men aloft, hod carriers rushing to and fro, the workmen all separately focused on their tasks but communicating as if by some extrasensory intelligence, the whole thing-men, materials and machines alike-a kind of living organism. He"d stopped to watch as he often had over the course of the weeks past, fascinated by the frenzy of activity and the way the building rose in discernable increments-different each day and yet the same too-and he was there watching when all that changed in an instant. More than anything he remembered the sound of it, the explosive snap of the beams buckling and the cannonade of one floor tearing through another, a roar of the inanimate animated, withering, unforgiving. And the screams. The screams that rose up out of a clenched fist of silence and the harsh soughing of the dust. He"d stood there for hours, the dread rising in him with a bitter metallic taste that constricted his throat-one man had been crushed till he was little more than extruded pulp; another had to be sawed, living, from the wreckage, two raw stumps palpitating there in place of his legs-and he"d wanted only to put it all right again, to build it back up so it would never fall. But Taliesin had fallen, was falling now, and it was worse, far worse, because this was fire and fire not only crushed you, it consumed you too.
The roar was in his ears as John pushed him into the cab and the cab hurtled through the streets, and it was there still as they pulled up to the curb and John jerked open the door and led him out of the cramped automotive interior and into the marble vault of Union Station. He held to his son"s arm through the crush of people and across the floor to the ticket window, his throat dry, his legs stripped of muscle and bone alike so that he could barely stand upright. And here were the reporters, their faces rabid and their mouths working-"Mr. Wright! Mr. Wright!"-and John shouldering past them and through the door and onto the platform where the local would haul them over the rails for five agonizing hours before the station in Spring Green rose up like a gravestone beyond the windows. And couldn"t they hurry? Couldn"t they call it an emergency and cancel all the other stops? Rush on through, red flags flapping and whistle shrieking as if the president himself were on board?
He shut his eyes and heard the roar. And it was a merciful thing because the roar drowned out the shouts of the newsboys who were there now and who would change faces and jackets and hats and mob every station stop along the way to hawk the very latest up-to-date special edition: Murder at Taliesin, read all about it!; Taliesin Burning to the Ground, Seven Slain, Seven Slain, Seven Slain! It was John who kept them off and John who took the conductor aside and arranged for a private compartment, John who spotted poor Edwin Cheney standing there stricken in a circle of reporters and spirited him into the compartment before they could work their beaks in him and their talons too. Five hours. Five hours on that train staring at Ed Cheney"s shoes while Ed Cheney stared at his. Five hours. Seven slain.
He didn"t pray. He hadn"t prayed since he was a boy. But each minute of that journey was a slow crawl to Calvary and the moment when they"d stretch him on the Christ tree and drive the nails in, and all the while he imagined the worst and hoped for the best, and maybe this was prayer, maybe this was what prayer was after all. What he didn"t know was that Mamah was dead, her corpse so incinerated as to be unrecognizable. What he didn"t know was that John Cheney was dead too and that Martha, with her graceful limbs and her mother"s ready smile, was writhing under the wet towels they"d laid over her, her hair and eyebrows gone and her skin fried like sidemeat in a pan, or that she would die by the time he got there. He didn"t know that Brunker was dead, didn"t know that Lindblom would soon follow him or that Brodelle was already gone. And he didn"t know that Billy Weston, concussed, burned and bleeding from the scalp, had grappled with the Barbadian and chased him off before running to Reider for help and then come back to unfurl the garden hose and play it on the fire while the victims lay there stretched out on the paving stones of the courtyard like so many sacks of grain. Burned-up grain. Rotten grain. Grain fit only to turn into the earth. Or that Ernest, the very make and model of his father, lay there among them, unconscious and dying from his wounds while one of the neighbor women tended him and Billy struggled with the hose, numb to everything but the infernal scorching heat on his face.
Then it was night. The dead were laid out on the porch at Tan-y-deri, the stink of incineration riding the air till it overwhelmed everything, till there was no use for the organ of smell except to admit it. There were no mosquitoes. No fireflies. Even the lake seemed dead save for the faint traces of movement there where the firemen and the neighbors had formed a bucket brigade to quench the coals. He couldn"t look at Mamah-there was no use in that. It was shock enough to see the form of her, laid out in her twisted sheets, and the blood-color there like rust stains.
People thrust things at him, his sister fussing over him, black coffee, a plate of food, but he didn"t want any of it. He wanted to lash out, wanted revenge, wanted to meet violence with violence. If he could have laid hands on Carleton, he swore he"d tear him apart, just as if he were some beast in the jungle. They"d found the man at five-thirty that evening, hidden in the furnace where the fire wouldn"t touch him and he"d tried to kill himself by swallowing acid, the burns of it there like long pale fingers clawing at his lips and spots of it scorched through his shirt. By then, all of Taliesin was an armed camp, people beating the woods, searching the cornfield stalk by stalk, the sheriff loosing his hounds and shouts and alarums going up everywhere.
They were going to lynch him, that was what Andrew Porter had said, the noose already dangling from the limb of one of the oaks in the courtyard and all the farmers in high color and itching at the triggers of their .22s and shotguns and deer rifles, but the sheriff stood against them, and he and his deputy dragged the Negro out and handcuffed him and spirited him off to the Dodgeville jail, a mob of men chasing the car and cursing him all the way down the hill. He was there now, in a jail cell, unable to speak or to give any reason for what he"d done, for this hate and mayhem and devastation that had laid everything to ruin and grievously injured the souls of so many good people, because his vocal apparatus was destroyed and he wouldn"t take up a pen to write a word though the sheriff stood over him and the reporters cl.u.s.tered three deep on the courthouse steps. Frank never did get to see him, and that was just as well, because it would have been like staring into the face of the devil himself-that sooty abandoned face, that blackness without surface or limit-but at some point they ushered the wife into the room and he looked up from the chair he was sunk in and saw her standing there before him.177 There was a sheriff"s deputy in the hall. Boards creaked. Footsteps echoed on the stairs. The coroner was there, the undertaker, the house alive with comings and goings, doors creaking shut and open again, voices drifting from room to room. They were nervous-Jennie was nervous, Andrew, the servants, the whole community-and they would have a scapegoat, a black scapegoat, and here she was.
What he saw was a very young woman, a girl not much older than his own daughters. If he"d noticed her before, when he"d hired her or glanced up to see her flitting in and out of the kitchen or hurrying across the courtyard with a basketful of tomatoes and greens from the garden, it was only in pa.s.sing. She worked for him. She was doing her job. Mamah praised her. And, of course, he had other things on his mind. She was an employee and you only noticed employees-really looked at them-when they were late to work or drunk or sleeping on the job. When they stole. When they murdered people.
The lamps were low. A moth sailed lazily across the room. But for John-who"d never before laid eyes on Taliesin because his mother, in her jealousy and her rage, wouldn"t hear of it-they were alone. The girl stood just inside the door where the deputy had left her and soon she"d be in the jailhouse too, because she was the Negro"s wife, a Negro herself, and everybody in the county knew they"d plotted this horror together. Her dress was plain. She was thin. And her face, when she lifted her chin to show it to him, was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, smudged with traces of dirt where she"d wiped back the tears, and the socket of her right eye seemed to be bruised, as if someone had taken a poke at her, but for all that she was beautiful. Beautiful in her simplicity and her innocence. He saw that right away-she"d had nothing to do with this. It was the husband, the husband alone.
John had stood when she"d been led into the room. He was leaning against the near wall, his arms folded across his chest, shifting his weight from foot to foot in a spasm of nervous energy. He was his father"s protector now and the tug of that responsibility jerked at him and jerked again. "Well," he said, "what have you got to say for yourself?"
She shook her head, a long slow meditative roll from one shoulder to the other, and she held out her palms, splayed her thin fingers and opened up her face-not to John, but to him. "A judgment," she whispered. "It a judgment. Dat what it is."
He could see John go rigid. His son was about to throw it back at her, bully her, but he cut him off. "Hush, John," he said. "Enough."
Gertrude-that was her name, wasn"t it?-was staring down at her feet, bare feet, the nails neatly trimmed and glowing against the shadow of her skin, canescent almost, and there were traces of wet ash on her ankles and the pale underside of her arches. What she"d said had shocked him and he was struggling to recover himself. A judgment? That was what the press was calling it, the sermonizers and tub-thumpers, and for one hard moment he saw how wrong he"d been, how cruel and selfish. He"d l.u.s.ted after Mamah. Thrown everything over. Ruined Kitty, ruined Edwin, alienated a whole community and spat in their faces. And here was the result of it, seven slain and a scared young black woman going to jail and maybe worse, Taliesin in ashes, Billy"s son dead and gone. And Mamah. And both her children. He wanted to deny it, wanted to call it fate, bad luck, anything, but the words wouldn"t come.
John couldn"t restrain himself any longer. "How dare you say that? " he demanded, his voice fracturing with the rush of his emotions, his father"s protector, the golden walls, the forbidden city. "It was your husband. A maniac. A black-"
"No," she said, and she was shaking her head again, long-faced and slow and mournful. "On me. It a judgment on me." She lifted her eyes to him as if John weren"t even there. "That I should marry wit" such a man-"
There was the sound of voices raised out in the yard, the heavy tramp of feet on the floorboards of the porch. A dog began to bark. He felt himself closing up again, angry suddenly-he was the victim here and it was all these others who were in the wrong because they wouldn"t allow a man to live in peace the way he saw fit. He wasn"t going to let G.o.d or his ministers or this scrawny Negro woman or anybody else dole out guilt because the onus was on them-they were the murderers, not he.
Her voice had broken. Her eyes clawed at him. "He was a good mon, sir, so good to me. We-I jus" seventeen in Bridgetown and he say he love me, all the time he say he love me, and I don"t know what dat is, I don"t know, I still don"t know . . ."
She was sobbing now, her chest heaving and both hands gone to her eyes. "A good mon," she kept saying, "he was a good mon," till John stepped forward to open the door on the deputy"s furious red face and the people crowding in behind him, strangers come to share in the outrage, and all he could think to say, the aggrieved victim, bereft and inconsolable, was "Take her away."178 At some point, his sister was there with something in a cup for him to drink and then she took him upstairs to the bedroom and laid him down on the bed by the darkened window, and for some strange reason, as she turned off the lamp and stood silhouetted in the light of the door, murmuring the sorts of things only women can command in times of heartache and affliction, he called her Kitty. "I"ll be all right, Kitty," he said, though he knew he wouldn"t be, and as he lay there sleepless, listening to the voices in the dark and the breathless haunted groans of the two survivors laid out in the parlor (Fritz, who would recover from his burns and a forearm shattered in his plunge through the window, and Lindblom, who would die by morning), she began to emerge from the shadows, Kitty, not Mamah, and wasn"t that the strangest thing? He saw her whirling away from him in the blue satin gown her mother had made her, Cosette to his Marius, and half the girls there were Cosette while the boys favored Valjean and Javert, Kitty, with the elastic limbs and the red-gold hair that piled up like waves on a beach . . .
In the morning, the sun rose out of the hills in a dark bruise of clouds and the clouds spread over the valley like a stain in water. By noon, it was like dusk. He felt the humidity the moment he rose from his sweated sheets, heavy air bearing him down and his shirt wet before he put it on. He"d fallen into a dreamless sleep sometime in the early hours, listening to a solitary bird-a whip-poor-will-riding up and down the glissando of its liquid notes till he"d gone unconscious along with it. He didn"t know how long he"d slept, but when he woke he was fully and immediately present. He knew where he was and why he"d come and that his loss and misery were continuous and that he wouldn"t taste his breakfast or his lunch or his dinner either.
He tried to comb his hair, but it was a snarl, and when he lifted his arms to smooth it back he was a.s.saulted by his own odor. He smelled of yesterday"s sweat, a deep working stench of fear and uncertainty that no soap or eau de cologne could ever drive down. For a moment he thought of going down to the lake for a swim, but that wouldn"t be right either, not if Mamah couldn"t join him or her John and her Martha-no, he would wear his odor, deepen it with the sweat of digging, the pickaxe riding high over his head as he stabbed at the earth and loosened the teeth of the yellow rock that lay cl.u.s.tered there along the black gums of the soil, because every grave was a mouth that opened and closed and swallowed till there was nothing left.
There was breakfast. A hush of voices, people tiptoeing round the house like ghosts of the departed. He sat for a moment with Fritz-the hair gone, the scalded scalp, gauze pillowed up like a spring snowstorm-but the boy didn"t seem to recognize him. Then he went out into the yard to smell the thin poisonous odor of the smoke that still rose from the ruins across the way, and there were people here as well, too many people, and so he walked down the hill and back up again to Taliesin and into the burned-out courtyard. That was where Billy Weston was, both his hands bandaged and a white surgical strip wrapped round his skull so that he looked like a casualty of the war. Frank saw the blood there, a slow seep of it acc.u.mulating at the temple, a wound that would never heal. "Billy," was all he could say, and Billy, a rake in one hand, the streaming hose in the other, could only nod in return. For a long while they just stood there, side by side, and then they bent forward and began to rake the ashes.
In another place, all the way across the world in Paris, where the talk was of nothing but the war-the insuperability of Plan 17, the fierceness of the French cavalry and the defects of the German character-Maude Miriam Noel was just sitting down to breakfast at the Cafe Lilac. She"d chosen a table under the awning, out of the sun, though the day was lovely, so tranquil and warm you"d never know a war was going on not a hundred and fifty kilometers away. It was her skin. She"d been out for a walk along the Seine the day before, and though she was wearing her hat and carrying a parasol, she hadn"t bothered with gloves because of the heat, and now the backs of her hands were red-or worse, brown. She"d rubbed cold cream on them, but she couldn"t help noticing the faint rippling of the flesh there-wrinkles, they were wrinkles-and that worried her, worried her deeply. Old women had wrinkled hands, parchment hands ("Lizard skin," as Leora used to joke all those years ago when they were both young and could barely conceive of what a wrinkle was, at least in relation to themselves), and she wasn"t an old woman. Not in fact or by any stretch of the imagination. Men stopped to stare at her as she went down the street, and not simply men of middle age, but young men too.
But here was the waiter. A little man-so many of them were little men, not simply among waiters or the French, but men in general, so very pinched in spirit and disappointing when you most needed them. This particular waiter-Jean-Pierre Something-or-Other-had stared into her face on innumerable mornings through all the seasons of the year, at least since she"d moved into her little apartment at 21 rue des Saints-Peres, with the window boxes trailing blood-red geraniums above the antiquites shop so crammed with marble and pictures in gilded frames it could have been a museum itself, and yet each time he presented the menu with a "Bonjour, madame," it was as if it were the first, as if he"d never laid eyes on her before, as if she were a mere tourist and interloper. Which infuriated her. She"d complained about him to the management on more than one occasion, but the management, which consisted of a terminally weary old lady in a stained blue kerchief (yes, with lizard hands and an eternally dripping nose) and her entirely deaf husband, hadn"t seemed moved to do anything about it. And so here he was. And here she was. Because she"d be d.a.m.ned if she"d go even half a block out of her way to the next cafe-this one was hers, her territoire, and she was willing to fight for it. Or at least endure a certain degree of rudeness, day after day, meal after meal.
The waiter handed her the menu as if he"d just found it in the street, and she waved it away-they both knew perfectly well that she"d all but memorized it and wanted only deux oeufs, poached, accompanied by a pair of those little English sausages and the saute of tomatoes, avec cafe noir sans sucre. They both knew, and yet every encounter was played out as if it were the first, as if they were players in an Oscar Wilde farce. Then the waiter was gone and at some point the coffee appeared and she reached beneath the table for her bag and the newspapers Leora had sent her from Chicago. She liked to keep up on events in the States, especially now that the war had broken out, but she always had, because as Frenchified as she"d become she was still an American girl at heart, Maude Miriam Noel, the Belle of Memphis. Just the other night, at a gathering in her flat over a very nice Beaujolais and croquettes of crab she"d produced herself, an Englishman by the name of Noel Rutherford-Noel, and wasn"t that a cozy coincidence?-had told her how utterly charming her accent was. "You"re from the South, I presume," he"d said-"Richmond, perhaps? Or perhaps deeper? Let me guess: Charlotte? Savannah?" And she"d smiled up at him-he was tall, lean, with that constricted muscular energy so many of the English seemed to cultivate, his hair as sleek and dark as an otter"s, and she"d begun to see real possibilities in him-and positively drawled, "Oh, no, honey, you"ve got me awl wrong. I"m a Memphis girl."
She spread the papers out before her. Took a sip of her coffee. Of course, the past year had been hard on her, what with the way she"d been thrown over by Rene and that unfortunate incident with the carving knife-and she would have stabbed him, she really and truly would have and gladly gone to the Sante Prison for it, if he"d only stood still long enough. And there was her cat. Mr. Ribbons-or Monsieur Ribbons, as she liked to call out from the door and watch him scamper across the street, his tail held erect above him. When he"d begun to spit up blood, she immediately suspected the crabbed odious horse-faced woman downstairs of poisoning him, and there"d been another regrettable incident over that, though the veterinarian a.s.sured her that the animal had died of natural causes. Yes. Certainly. Natural causes. What else could it be? At the thought of it she looked up sharply over her reading gla.s.ses, riveting the waiter with a look, which he ignored, and where were her eggs? Had they sent out to the provinces for them? Did it take a Cordon Bleu chef to set a pot of water boiling and dice a few tomatoes over a pan?
She was irritable, and she would have been the first to admit it. It was the war, the uncertainty, the rumors. Everyone said it would be over in six months, but what if it wasn"t? What if the Germans pushed through and marched into Paris? What if there were shortages, rationing? Would the cafes be deserted? Would her landlady raise her rent? She"d thought of going back to Chicago, to Norma, but that was distasteful to her in so many ways she could hardly count them. So many of her friends-the Americans and English, at any rate-had already left, the Belknaps, Clarissa Hodge, the Payne Whitneys. Even her closest friend and confidante, Marie-Therese, had gone away to the country, deserting her when she most needed someone to confide in, and not just over Rene but the creeping fear that started as a kind of upset of her stomach and radiated all the way down to her toes and back up her spine to the nape of her neck, the fear that everything she knew and loved was wearing down and coming to some awful end.
The waiter sauntered up with the heavy ceramic plate and slipped it onto the table as if he were placing a bet at Auteuil before vanishing like a magician, only to reappear in the depths of the cafe, a freshly lit cigarette jutting from his mouth. She spread her napkin across her lap, adjusted the newspaper and her reading gla.s.ses, and cut into one of the sausages. It was then that the headline caught her eye: SEVEN SLAIN AT TALIESIN. And under it: Love Bungalow Murders. She set down the fork and began reading-the story was so horrific, so compelling and awful, she couldn"t help herself; it was like a novel, a romance, and here was the hero of the affair, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, in half-profile, staring out n.o.bly across the continent and the sea too. Her breakfast went cold. The coffee sat untouched. The waiter never so much as glanced at her.
She read through the article twice and then sat for a long while studying the photograph. Very slowly, as if she couldn"t control it, she began to shake her head from side to side even as the tremor crept up her spine one vertebra at a time, as if a series of individual fingertips were poking at her in succession.
The poor man, she was thinking. The poor, poor man.
1.
Wrieto-San in the original.
2.
Unidentified male; perhaps one of his acquaintances from earlier, happier days in Chicago society.
3.
Call him Albert Bleutick for convenience"s sake, a man of median height, median coloring, with a medial swell of paunch and a personality that was neither dominant nor recessive, a companion of the second stripe, one who could be relied upon to pick up the tab at lunch and actively seek out tickets to the ballet, the symphony, the museum. His was the fate of all minor characters in a major life: to perform a function and exit, as colorless as the rain descending on the dreary gray streets on a day that might as well have rinsed itself down the drain for all anyone cared.
4.