The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (25 page)

That should have signaled to me the coming global, and personal, armageddon.

With Salem a ruin and our lives likewise smoldering, Merle began to retract from me. It was on a fateful mid-July night, the air still bitter of smoke, that she came home tearful with rage, perhaps humiliation, perhaps both, and began pacing about our room, swiping up stray chemise suspenders, gloves, and strings of costume jewelry as if intending to pack them. I panicked; if I could not cement our bond that second, thought I, she would leave me. So I moved rashly, and the rest, I regret to say, is history.

“There is no more time for tarry,” said I. “We must sensibly discuss our future.”

“Our future!” echoed she. “Isn't it bad enough that I, a young woman of marrying age, must live with you in our
present
? In this stinking hovel? Who knows what diseases you carry? Or this whole town carries? It is an open wound, this entire place, and you are but a single, teeny little scab whining to be picked.”

Merle unlatched her portmanteau and stuffed the accessories inside.

The Excelsior against my heart skipped one second. My hands lashed out and took my daughter's slim white wrists. She pulled back from the icy touch but I held firm. To my surprise, she abandoned her struggle and instead fixed me with a taunting sneer.

“So forceful and commanding. I declare.”

“Merle. You cannot leave me!”

“Can't I? And why would you have me stay?”

“Because I am alone!”

The confession, oh, how it flayed me!

“Alone?” Merle laughed. “Is that all?”

“You do not understand! I am more alone than any being who has ever lived!”

“I understand perfectly.
You
have a responsibility to
me
, Papa. Not I to you.”

Though she would not give me the satisfaction of crying out, she winced in pain from my gruff grip.

“Then I will show you,” raved I. “All of it. Every part.”

“You forget, I have seen your insides. What more is there possibly left to show?”

“Much. Look into my eyes, daughter.”

Merle peaked an eyebrow. I yanked her wrists and brought her so close that our noses nudged. She twitched her muzzle like a cat, annoyed but amused, and it frustrated me, this disrespect, this insouciance. What I was about to do I did for her, only her, even though nothing so painfully raked the shreds of my soul than the reckoning of
la silenziosità.

Down it sank, and down she went with it. My wade into the resplendent pool of obliteration was for me, as always, a heartbreaking peek at the nirvana I was not allowed. Every second I spent in
this, my teasing void, was a second Merle spent in hers, but I tried not to worry. In glimpsing her future end, surely she would find the gentle contentment won by a lifetime alongside her doting father.

For one minute I bathed in the sensation, and then indulged one minute more. When I did at last break through the night surf of that blackest of oceans, I found Merle's eyes fastened to my own, her lashes quaking before a burden of trapped tears, her face vacant of color.

I chanced a hopeful smile.

Her features curled like torched newsprint.

“WHY?”

She ripped her wrists from my hands and went sprawling across the table, upsetting dishes and lamps, though she seemed unaware of anything beyond my putrescence and the need to get away from it. Her white cheeks flooded with blood and she flattened herself against the wall, howling for air, her bosom pounding in irregular gasps.

“Why did you show me this? My death?”

“Merle,” stammered I, “please, calm yourself, I only wished—”

“
My horrible, worthless, lonely death? Have you known it all along? What kind of father are you to show it to me? How much you must hate me!”

“No! There is no hate, I didn't mean for—”

Teeth bared, she lurched forward, snatched up the portmanteau, and retreated to her wall. With one hand she dug her fist inside of it, fishing about while keeping her avid eyes upon me. Before I could manage another soothing word, her arm withdrew in a poof of expelled scarves, and from her hand extended a revolver, an old one, though its dents indicated it had seen its share of action. I identified
it by its distinctive trigger and ejector rod as a Colt Lightning, a later cousin to my lovely departed Peacemaker.

Yes,
thought I.
This is my child, all right.

“Stay back! You ghost! You goblin!”

Merle slid across the wall, stomping fallen dishes and clutching the suitcase like an armored chestplate. She rattled her Lightning and I shrank from its explosive promise.

“You see this? This belonged to my mother! And I should have shot you with it the day I found you!”

“I am glad you did not. Instead, you and I, we found—”

“You and I
nothing
! I needed shelter; you had a house! It goes no deeper than that. Now I have no need for you, for you have nothing—nothing but a heart of lies! The same as all men everywhere! I don't need
any
of you!”

Merle had nearly achieved the door. With the portmanteau braced beneath an arm, she patted around for the knob. I reached out for her, a feeble, pathetic gesture. She was as good as gone and it had been I who'd hastened the abandonment. With what stunning speed had I ruined everything!

“If I only had the strength to pull this little trigger. I blame my weakling mother, don't you? Gød, the parents with whom I was cursed.” She kicked open the door, backed into the hall, and, realizing escape was imminent, bore down upon her own body, a savage contraction, before screaming out to anyone close enough to hear.

“MERLE RUBY WATSON WILL HAVE EVERYTHING! WILL
DO
EVERYTHING! NO MAN IS GOING TO STOP HER! DO YOU HEAR ME? THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING!”

II.

S
OOT MARKED MY PASSAGE FROM
the ruins of Salem back into the wilds of America.

I did so cursing Cornelius Leather. 'Twas his actions that had provoked Merle's ugliest urges; 'twas his threat that had sent me running with no destination in sight. With Salem behind me, I felt exposed and shrank from every male voice I heard, certain that it came from behind a metal mask with glass for eyes and a hose for a mouth. Perhaps, thought I, all sons felt their fathers were this omnipresent, this omnipotent, and there was no hope to be had from fleeing what was part of you, too.

That did not stop me from trying. I plunged southward, a solitary monster left once more to muse upon his monstrosity. A vagrant without need of grub can travel at ten times the typical pace, and via forest and footpath and rides stolen in the backs of trucks I made great time in an unspecified general direction, with each stop of my journey commemorated by fresh news of armament across the Atlantic.

That pesky dead archduke? His assassination had caused a bit of a kerfuffle. By August, the Austrian-Serbian conflict had roped in the protective big brothers of Russia and Germany. By September, Britain and France had joined in on the side of the vodka-swillers and Europe was locked into a two-front war. Did I give a hoot? Great balls of fire, Reader, I was an
American
. What did I care of lands I'd
never see, peoples I'd never meet? I cared for one single human upon this Earth and she was gone.

This incessant jawing about war stirred up many an old codger's memories of Civil War glories, which brought to mind thoughts of a certain former cellmate. Without making a rational decision about it (why start now?), I began to drift toward Xenion, Georgia, where I'd been jailed on November 11, 1901, for Ungodly Acts alongside the Negro thief John Quincy and the lunatic known as the General. After Merle, I longed for such straightforward, if lousy, relationships and wondered if I might get a peek at the General, see if he'd clung to the speck of sanity
la silenziosità
had brought him.

Xenion was filthier than my prisoner's recollection, broiled albino by the sun, the dirt from its uncobbled roads coating the skin of the whites and coloreds who shuffled about in two separate, wearied streams. I arrived in October and made a single inquiry, and a discreet one at that, for I worried that someone might recognize, as local villain Sheriff Nelson had put it, “The Astonishing Amazing Dingdonged Aaron Stick.” As it happened, I'd overestimated my fan base. I was directed to Sweetgum, the plantation home of the Hazard family.

Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea had charred and cratered the palatial estate. Nothing grew at Sweetgum aside from rebel patches of wildflowers and a few balls of cotton that pushed through the dirt like pustules. The house, however, remained imposing; the patchwork repairs to the transoms and the gunpowder burns upon the porchway frieze instilled the place with a battleworn courage. I passed beneath a pebbled pergola of ivy, periwinkle, and wisteria and between the Greek columns that toothed the porch. I felt quite small indeed when I knocked upon the gigantic four-paneled door.

From inside came micelike scurrying.

A woman answered the door—just what I did not need. She held a rifle at her side—another thing I did not need. Behind her arrived a second woman. Why vex me in this way, Fate? Then, impossibly, a third woman arrived. Here are my outstretched wrists, Fate; here is a blade! Then came a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth. Certain now that I had lost my mind somewhere back in the Carolinas, I covered my face with a hand and laughed into it.

The first woman looked to be in her mid-sixties; the others were younger by scant degrees. Through owlish spectacles this sextet gave me identical looks of distrust. They were sisters, and not a one of them, I was positive, was a general.

“May I be of some assistance?” asked the eldest. Her elocution was pure Georgian, though pricklier than the peach-mush to which I'd become accustomed.

“Who knows?” groaned I. “I am a great fool on a fool's errand. I was looking for man called the General but I think I might as well add to my list King Arthur's Avalon and the lost city of Atlantis.”

The younger five sisters twittered. The eldest raised a hand and they shushed.

“You must mean General Joseph Thomas Hazard. If you like, you may walk one half mile southeast, where you'll find him buried.”

I fit my fingers into the flutes of the nearmost Roman column and had a laugh at my one thousand miles of folly. It was 1914; of course the crazy old coot was dead. He would have been in his mid-eighties and had hardly been what one would call a model of good health.

The woman scowled at my apparent mirth.

“Excuse my directness, young sir, but here at Sweetgum we don't laugh about so great a man. Do us a kindness and remove yourself
from our portico. I assure you the Hazard sisters can fire a rifle truer than most menfolk.”

Punchdrunk with rue, I nodded and began stumbling down the steps.

“I say! Young man!”

I swiveled upon the middle stair and raised my arm in a sarcastic soldier's salute.

“What is your name?” demanded she. “I wish to report you for dishonoring a Confederate hero.”

“Finch, ma'am!” I executed the salute. “Zebulon Finch.”

It was a handsome wine-colored carbine breechloader rifle that she dropped. No wonder it had been the cornerstone weapon of the Civil War—fifty years later, it did not disassemble or discharge when it hit the floor.

The women swarmed me and with fluttering hands ushered me inside before I could make heads or tails of this startling turn of events. Introductions were rapid: Polly, Lucy, Nelly, Patsy, Peggy, and Susannah—Susannah being the eldest—and within sixty seconds of entry I learned two important facts. One, there was a seventh woman tucked away in a distant room. She was their mother, Patience Hazard, though she preferred to go by her married name: Mrs. Joseph Thomas Hazard. Two, it was not the “Civil War” at Sweetgum; rather, it was “the Late Unpleasantness,” and I needed to remember that unless I wished to throw the aforementioned Mrs. Joseph Thomas Hazard into a furor.

I was brought before the hoary old matriarch straightaway. So old was she that I could not discern where the flaps of her shawl ended and those of her face began. While Susannah introduced me in a voice loud enough to pierce any deafness, Mrs. Joseph Thomas
Hazard smacked her white-haired lips and planted a foot to halt the see-sawing of her rocking chair.

“C'mrr.”

Susannah was discreet in her deciphering.

“Mrs. Joseph Thomas Hazard asks you to come closer.”

It was with some hesitation that I did so. True, the old woman had no teeth with which to bite. But who, I ask you, wished to be gummed?

Her voice was a syrup that slopped together all words.

“Zhuhahchunglezubbalafunch.”

“Terribly sorry,” said I, “but I did not catch all of that.”

“The Archangel Zebulon Finch,” translated Susannah.

“Ah, thank you,” said I. “Wait. The what?”

“As I live and breathe,” sighed Susannah. “You haven't aged a year from the General's description.”

The mummified old broad smiled. Her opalescent eyes disappeared into a vortex of wrinkles.

“Zhuyunka.”

I looked to Susannah, who shrugged an apology before translating.

“‘The Yankee.' But do forgive Mrs. Hazard. We at Sweetgum have had an altercation or two with Yankees in the past.”

There was no doubting this statement, as the rifle she carried bore the handprints of routine usage. I learned later, in fact, that it had been my highfalutin' Northern accent that had nearly gotten my head blown off at the front door. Now Susannah could not stop offering hospitalities. A change of clothes? A bath? A cigar? A brandy? Oh, and I must join them for dinner—would I prefer quail or duck? I took a step away. None of this could do me any good.

“Stop yer grovelin', Susie.” Picking sense from Mrs. Joseph
Thomas Hazard's verbal swamp became easier after inundation. “The Archangel Zebulon Finch is sad. Gravely sad. Cain't you tell? He needs him some time to mourn proper.”

Gnarled claws extended from their place upon her lap; I had no option but to take them. She pulled me close with the strength of old, stubborn sinew. Her lips rippled into a Basset Hound grin and her whisper smelled of pickles.

“The General spoke of you right regular. You brung him peace when there wuddn't nobody else who could. You saved his mind
and
his soul, and cuz a you, my husband died quiet. You are welcome here, good suh, for as long as you require, you hear?”

That is how I became the first, and possibly only, Yankee to stay at Sweetgum Plantation, as good a place as any to tuck myself away from Dr. Leather. Because my angel attribution (the third, if you're counting, after Johnny and Leather) was so crassly unearned, I made an effort to wander the grounds each day, offering short, surface pleasantries to the sisters. My, but they were a peculiar flock of birds! The parlor was filled with chess sets, not such an unusual thing, thought I, until the day I realized that these strange, unmarried women did not, in fact, play chess, but rather unrolled large maps by candlelight and placed the rooks, knights, and kings atop them to represent Union and Confederate soldiers as they restaged the Late Unpleasantness, or the War of Northern Aggression, or Mr. Lincoln's War—whichever bitter euphemism they preferred that night.

“Look, Nelly, General Bragg wins at Perryville if he takes advantage of these train lines.”

“Wonderful, Peggy. And do you see what I have done with Stonewall Jackson's march at Chancellorsville? I think it will be a most decisive victory.”

“It will, Nelly, it will drive out the damned Union Blue!”

Increasingly I kept to the solitude of the second-story guest room, three walls of which were filled with shelves containing, of all things, novels. Reader, I hope you are sitting down, for I, Zebulon Finch, began to read them. Each spine I cracked only to distract from my lingering fear of Dr. Leather as well as my foolish yearning to hold Merle close one more time. How was I to guess that within the gray gutters of ten thousand brittle pages I would discover golden glimmers of enlightenment? Had I not, I cannot say I would have the wherewithal to write these pages you now hold.

It was as though I'd landed back in Abigail Finch's second-floor study and once again my playmates were of the bookish bent: E. M. Forster, L. M. Montgomery, O. Henry, H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and even a few authors bold enough to admit their full Christian names. This time, however, their frivolous fantasies provided insight into the dubious decisions I'd made, particularly concerning the General, his wife, and their six daughters. Thrice a day these women prayed for me with a sincerity that ought to have earned my ridicule. Fiction, though, helped me to understand those whose natures were unfamiliar—a most interesting development.

I might have indefinitely played the disreputable role of “Reader” (no offense, Reader) had not, in May of 1915, a British luxury liner called the
Lusitania
been sunk by a German submarine off the southern end of Ireland. Yes, I know, frightfully boring. But the victims included over one hundred Americans, women and children among them, and their deaths stoked the coals of war in the hearths of those who, thus far, had been content to rock their chairs within a cool quiet.

The Hazard sisters began receiving visitors. The chevrons
upon their shoulders told me that these were military men, and the snatches of conversation I overheard told me that they had come with dual purpose: to pay homage to the General and to consult with the sisters on the conflict in Europe. Little had I suspected that these biddies with their chess sets were encyclopedias of modern warfare and repositories of wisdom when it came to predicting the tides of war.

And their prediction?

America would take up arms and fight.

Thus an audacious notion burrowed into me like a screwworm into a People Garden party-goer. That notion laid its eggs and those eggs began to swell, and the resultant maggots squirmed about my brain until I could think of nothing else. By April of 1917, when our high-minded country at last declared war upon Germany, I'd made my decision. I wrapped a suit around my stiffening body, topped it with a tie, and came downstairs while the women were weighting down their maps for that night's campaign. I cleared my throat.

“I wish to enlist.”

Blame, if you like, the harebrained conviction of all the novels I'd read, that even the weakest of plots deserved a smashing conclusion. War offered what I most desired: extinguishment. My body and, if I was lucky, my brain would be scattered across Europe by some well-placed bomb, and never again need I check over my shoulder for Leather, never again need I grieve the loss of Merle. Dying for my country meant nothing to me, but who knew? It might mean something to that pernicious bean-counter Gød.

Susannah took hold of her skirts and circumnavigated the entire Southeastern United States.

“Mr. Finch, you mustn't.”

“I have not the proper identification. Nor serial number. Nor family who can vouch for me.”

“You're just a boy. Didn't you say you were seventeen?”

“Believe me,” said I. “I am old enough.”

“Sweetgum without its guardian?” cried Nelly.

“War is no place for an angel!” cried Peggy.

I drew strength from the kings and queens bravely leading their platoons of pawns.

“It is what I intend to do, ladies, and my request is that you assist me.”

Until then I had asked for nothing and, in fact, believed that the sisters were waiting to be called to duty. Susannah, though, was distraught and brought me before Mrs. Joseph Thomas Hazard, who, older now than Planet Earth, still held court from her rocking-chair throne. It was she who stayed her eldest daughter's hand.