Galilee (64 page)

Rachel was surprised that she could still be shocked after the exhaustive sexual litany that the preceding pages had contained, but shocked she was. Though she believed it preposterous to think that this Galilee was the same man she'd known, her mind's eye conjured him whenever the name appeared on the page. Then it was her Galilee, in all his beauty, she saw holding Nickelberry in his arms; kissing him, seducing him, making a wife of him.

She should have anticipated what would come next, but she didn't. While she was still struggling with her repugnance at what Holt had described, he began a confession much closer to his heart, and no doubt the hardest thing he had written in the book.

I went to Galilee last night,
he wrote,
as Nickelberry had. I don't know why I went particularly; I felt no desire to be with him. At least not the same kind of desire that I feel when I go with a woman. Nor did he ask me for my company; though once I was with him he confessed that he'd wanted my arms about him and my lips on his. I should not be ashamed he said, to take pleasure this way. It was a wasted hope in most men; only the bravest rose to the challenge.

    I told him I did not feel brave. I was afraid of the act before us, I said; afraid of its consequences for my soul; and most of all, afraid of him.

    He didn't laugh off this confession. Instead he wrapped me up tenderly, as though he held something more precious than flesh and bone. He told me to listen to him, and would tell me a story to calm my fears—

A story? What was this? Another Galilee who told stories?

—I felt like a child there in his embrace, and part of me wanted to be free of it. But his presence was so calming to my troubled spirit that this child in me, which had not spoken in so many years, said: lie still. I want to hear the story. And I lay still, obedient to this child and presently all the horrors I had seen, every one, all the death all the pain, became a kind of dream I'd had from which I was waking into this embrace.

    The story he told began like a nursery tale, but by degrees it grew stranger, calling forth all manner of feelings in me. It was a tale of two princes who lived, he said, in a country far from here, where the rich were kind—

—And the poor had God. Rachel knew that country. The child bride Jerusha had lived there. It was Galilee's invented land.

She sat absolutely still, the whine of her blood loud in her ears, while her eyes passed stupidly over the line, as if by study they might change it.

It was a tale of two princes.

But no; the words remained the same, however many times she read them. She could not avoid the truth, though it was hard—oh more than hard; nearly impossible—to contemplate. But she had no choice, besides willful self-deception. The sum of evidence was now too persuasive.

This Galilee, here on the page before her—this man who'd lived a hundred and forty years ago, and more; this man was the same Galilee she loved. Not his father or his grandfather:
him.
The same flesh and blood and bone; the same spirit in that flesh and blood and bone; the same soul.

She accepted it, though it made chaos of all she'd understood about the world. She wouldn't squirm around any longer, hoping that something easier to believe was true if she could only find it. She was only tormenting herself if she did that; putting off the moment when she accepted the facts and tried to make sense of them.

It wasn't as though he'd lied to her. Quite the reverse, in fact. He'd intimated several times that he was not quite the same order of being as she was. He'd talked of being a man without grandparents, for instance. But she hadn't wanted to know. She'd been too deeply infatuated with him to want to countenance anything that might spoil the romance.

So much for denial. It was time to accept the truth, in all its strangeness. Two human lifetimes ago he'd been up to the same seductive tricks he'd worked on her, with Captain Holt as the object of his affections. The image of the two men entwined was lodged in her mind's eye: Holt like a child in his lover's arms, lulled into a state of passivity by the story Galilee was telling.

In a country far from here, there lived two princes . . .

She didn't care what happened next, neither to the princes nor to the men they represented. Her hunger for the journal had suddenly passed; her eyes were no longer drawn to the page. It had told her all that she needed to know. More, in fact.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand and got up from the table, flipping the journal closed. She felt lightheaded and hot, as though she was catching the flu. She went through to the kitchen, got herself a glass of water, sipped it for a moment, then decided she'd go back to bed. Maybe she'd feel better after a few more hours of sleep. And now, with the journal's hold on her finally broken, she'd have a better chance of getting the rest she needed.

Glass in hand, she padded back to the bedroom. It was a little after five o'clock She set the glass down, and lay down thinking that if she needed to take half of another sleeping pill she would. But as she was in the process of shaping the thought, exhaustion overtook her.

I settled down to sleep a couple of hours ago believing I'd brought Part Six to an adequate conclusion. But here I am, appending these paragraphs, and effectively spoiling the neatness of my conclusion by so doing. An well; this was never fated to be a book distinguished by its tidiness. I'm sure it's going to get a damn sight less orderly before we get to the final pages.

What was so urgent that I had to get up out of bed and write about it? Only another dream. I offer it here not because I think it's prophetic, like my dream of Galilee on the raft, but because it moved me so strangely.

It was a dream about Luman's children.

That's odd in itself, because I hadn't given any conscious thought to the conversation I'd had about his bastards for several weeks. My unconscious mind was apparently turning the subject over however, and its investigations produced this bizarrity: I dreamed I was a piece of paper, a sheet of tattered paper. And the wind had me. It was blowing me across an immense landscape, flipping me over and over. As so often happens in dreams, I saw more than I could possibly describe, all concentrated into a few seconds of dream time. Sometimes I was lifted high into the air, and I was looking down at towns that were so far below me their inhabitants were tiny dots; sometimes I was skimming a dusty road with all the other windborne trash. I saw canyons and cities; I clung to picket fences and telegraph poles; I was becalmed in the heat of a Louisiana summer, and forked up with the leaves in Vermont, I was frozen to a fence in Nebraska, while the wire whined in the wind; I was in the meltwaters when the
spring warmed the rivers of Wisconsin. By degrees a sense of imminence crept upon me. The landscapes continued to roll on—the peaks of the High Country, a palmy beach, a field of poppies and wild violets—but I knew my journey was moving toward resolution.

My destination was an unpromising place. A grimy neighborhood in a minor city somewhere in Idaho; a wasteland of gutted buildings and rubble and gray grass. But there a man sat in the remnants of a broken-down truck, and when I came to his feet he reached down and picked me up. It was a strange sensation, to be held in those tobacco-stained fingers, but I knew, looking at the man's face, that he was one of Luman's children. There was something of my half-brother's satiric fever there, and something of his piercing curiosity, though both had been dulled by hardship.

He seemed to sense that he had found more than a piece of trash in me, because he tossed his cigarette away, and getting up from his seat in the crippled vehicle he shouted:

“Hey! Hey! Lookee what I got here!”

He didn't wait for those he'd summoned to come to him, but strode with a quickening step to the remains of a garage, its pumps like rusted sentinels guarding a half-demolished building. A black woman in early middle age—her bones marking her indisputably as Cesaria's grandchild—appeared.

“What is it, Tru?” she asked him.

He handed his prize over to her, and the woman studied me.

“That's a sign,” Tru drawled.

“Could be,” the woman said.

“I
told
you, Jessamine.”

The woman called over her shoulder, back into the garage. “Hey, Kenny. Look what Tru's found. Where'd you find it?”

“It just blew my way. And you was saying I was crazy.”

“I didn't say you was crazy,” Jessamine replied.

“No,
I
did,” said a third voice, and a man who was in age and color somewhere between his companions came and snatched me out of Jessamine's hands. His skull was as bald as an egg, but the rest of his face was covered with a thick growth of beard. Again, there was no doubt of his ancestry. He didn't even look at what he had in his hand.

“Ain't nothing but a piece of trash,” Kenny said, and before the other two could protest he'd turned his back on them and was stalking away.

They didn't follow him. At a guess, he intimidated them. But once his back was turned on them, I saw him cast a forlorn look at what he held. His eyes were wet with tears.

“Don't want to hope no more,” he murmured to himself.

Then he turned my face to the flames of a small fire burning among the bricks. There was a moment of sheer panic, as the heat caught hold of me. I felt my body curl up in the flames, and blacken, blacken until I was the color of Galilee. Then I woke, bathed in enough sweat that had I indeed been burning I would have surely extinguished myself.

There; that's the dream, as best I remember it. One of the stranger night visions I've had, I must say. I don't know what to make of it. But now that I've written it down, I withdraw what I said earlier, about it not being prophetic. Perhaps it is. Perhaps somewhere out in the middle of the country three of Luman's bastards are waiting for an omen, even now; knowing that they're more than the world has let them be, but not knowing what. Waiting for someone to come and tell them who they are. Waiting for me.

PART SEVEN

The Wheel of
the Stars

T
oday I made my peace with Luman. It wasn't an easy thing to do, but I knew that I was going to have to do it sooner or later. Just a few hours ago, sitting back from my desk to muse on something, I realized suddenly how sad I'd be if events were somehow to quicken, and L'Enfant fell, and I was to not have reconciled with Luman. So I got up, fetched my umbrella (a pleasant drizzle has been falling for most of the day; perhaps it will clear the air a little) and took myself off to the Smoke House.

Luman was waiting for me, sitting on the threshold, picking his nose and staring down the path along which I approached.

“You took your time,” was his first remark to me.

“I did what?”

“You heard me. Taking all this time to come an' tell me you're sorry.”

“What makes you think I'm going to do that?” I replied.

“You
look
sorry,” Luman replied, flicking something he'd mined from his nostrils into the vegetation.

“Do I indeed?”

“Yes, Mr.-High-and-Mighty-I'm-a-Writer-Maddox, you look very sorry indeed.” He grabbed the rotted doorjamb and pulled himself to his feet. “In fact I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't jus' throw that sorry carcass down on the ground an' beg me to forgive you.” He grinned. “But you don't have to do that, brother o' mine. I forgive you your trespasses.”

“That's generous of you. And what about yours?”

“I don't have none.”

“Luman, you virtually accused me of killing my own wife.”

“I was just telling the simple truth,” he said. Then added: “As I saw it. You didn't have to believe me.” His goaty face became sly. “Though somethin' tells me you do.” He regarded me in silence for a time. “Tell me I'm wrong.”

What I really wanted to do was beat that smug smile off his face, but I resisted the temptation. I'd come here to make peace, and peace I was going to make. Besides, as I've admitted in these pages, the guilt for Chiyojo's death does in some measure lie with me. I'd confessed it on paper; now it was time to do the same thing staring my accuser in the face. That shouldn't be so difficult, should it? I knew the words; why was it so much more difficult to speak them than to write them?

I put my umbrella down and turned my face up to the rain. It was warm but it still refreshed me. I stood there for perhaps a minute, while the raindrops broke against my face, and my hair became flattened to my scalp. At last, without looking back at Luman, I said:

“You were right. I'm responsible for what happened to Chiyojo. I let Nicodemus have her, just as you said. I wanted . . .” I began to feel tears rising up in me. They thickened my voice; but I went on with my confession. “I wanted to have his favor. To have him love me.” I put my hand up to my face, and wiped the rainwater off. Then, finally, I looked back at Luman. “The thing is, I never really felt as though I was his son. Not the way you were. Or Galilee. I was always the half-breed. So I scampered around the world trying to please him. But it didn't work. He just took me for granted. I didn't know what else to give him. I'd given myself and that wasn't enough . . .” Somewhere in the midst of saying all this I'd started to tremble; my hands, my legs, my heart. But nothing short of death would have now stopped me finishing what I'd begun. “When he set eyes on Chiyojo I felt angry at first. I was going to leave. I should have left. I should have taken her—just the way you said—taken her away from L'Enfant so we could have had a life of our own. An ordinary life, maybe—a human life. But that wouldn't have been so bad, would it?”

“Compared to this?” Luman said softly. “It would have been paradise.”