This is our lives."

"You made us that way, Pops," Mitch.e.l.l said. "You taught Dad, and Dad taught us: business before pleasure. Business before anything."

"I was wrong," Cadmus said. "You won't hear me admit that ever again, but I was wrong."

Mitch.e.l.l stood at the door for a moment, and stared at the stick figure in the bed.

"Goodnight, Pops."

"Wait," the old man said.

"What?"

"Do this for me," Cadmus said. "Wait until I'm in the ground. You won't have to wait long, believe me. Just... wait until I'm gone. Please."

"If I agree to that-"

"More business?"

"If I agree to that, you have to tell me where the journal is."

Cadmus closed his eyes again, and for several seconds Mitch.e.l.l was marooned at the door, not knowing whether to leave or stay. At last, the old man drew a creaking breath, and said: "All right. Have it your way. I gave the journal to Margie."

"That's what Garrison thought. But he couldn't find it."

"Then ask Loretta. Or your wife. Maybe Margie pa.s.sed it on. But just you remember... I told you to walk away. I warned you, and you didn't want to hear."

"I'm sure that's got you a place in heaven. Pops," Mitch.e.l.l said. "Goodnight."

The stick man didn't answer. He was weeping again, quietly. Mitch.e.l.l didn't offer any further words of consolation. As his grandfather had said, old men weep; there was nothing to be done about it.XIV i One by one, all the secrets are coming out like stars at twilight. Just for the record, Cadmus's claim about Garrison's wife having borne him a black child is at least partially true. She indeed became pregnant, but the child didn't live. She miscarried in the fifth month, and the few people who knew that the infant brought dead from her body was black were paid off handsomely for their silence. Garrison, as Cadmus said, a.s.sumed it was Galilee's child. That was perhaps the profoundest error he ever made; one which goes to the heart of all that he is; and more pertinently, all he must in time become.

As for Margie, I can't tell you with any certainty what information she was given when she recovered; though I think it's more than likely that she was never told that her womb had produced such a heresy. Cadmus certainly didn't want any disruptions in the equilibrium of the family; he surely kept the knowledge to the smallest possible circle of people. And Garrison had no reason to tell a single soul: all the sight of that dead child did-yes, he saw the corpse; he made a point of going to the morgue and looking at it, all wrapped in its tiny shroud-all that sight did was deepen the divide between himself and his wife. The first stone on the road that led to Margie's death was laid that day. There's more to tell of this matter, of course; but some stars take longer to show themselves than others. The paradox is this: that the darker it gets, the more of these secrets we can see. Eventually, they're arrayed in all their glory; and it's the very things we hid from sight, the things we're most ashamed of, that we use to steer our course.

ii Three, four, five days went by, and Galilee let The Samarkand go where the tides took it. For thirty-six hours the boat scarcely moved at all, becalmed in silken water. He sat on deck most of the time, sucking his cigar, looking down into the cool depths. A great white shark came by for a while, and cirded the vessel several times, but most of the time the sky and sea were deserted, and the only sound came from some part of The Samarkand, a board creaking, a knot grinding, as though the boat, like its owner, was starting to doubt its own existence, and was making a noise to remind itself that it was still real.

It might have been forgiven its doubts, when there was so much that was illusory walking its deck. The emptier Galilee's belly became, the more his delirium grew, and the more his delirium grew, the more visions he saw. He saw his family, in various groupings. I appeared to him more than once, I'm sure, and at one point we entered into a long and convoluted exchange inspired by a quote from Herac.l.i.tus which had lodged in his mind-something about rubble making the fairest of worlds. He had an even longer conversation with a vision of Luman, and for a time sat in the company of Marietta and Zabrina singing a filthy sailors' ballad, tears pouring down his cheeks.

"Why didn't you come home?" the hallucination of Zabrina asked him.

"I couldn't. Not after what happened. Everybody hated me.""We got over it," Zabrina said. "At least I did."

Marietta said nothing. She was rather less solid than Zabrina and for some reason Galilee felt faintly guilty around her.

"It seems to me," Zabrina said, rather formally, "that you've played just about every role in the repertoire except the Prodigal. You've been a lover. You've been a fool. You've been a murderer."

"Your point?" he said.

"You could still go home if you wanted to. All you have to do is take command of the boat again."

"I have no compa.s.s. I have no maps."

"You could steer by the stars," Zabrina said.

Galilee smiled at his own delusion. "I've played this role too," he said. "The Tempter. I've played it over and over again. I know how it works. Don't waste your breath."

"That's a pity," Zabrina purred. "I would have liked to have seen you, one last time. We could have gone to the stables together, and said h.e.l.lo to father."

"Do you think it's just a coincidence?" Galilee said. "Christ born in a stable. Dad dying in one."

"Pure accident," Marietta said. "Christ and father have absolutely nothing in common. For one thing, father was quite the c.o.c.kmeister."

"I've never heard that before," Zabrina said.

"About Dad?"

"No, the phrase. c.o.c.kmeister. I never heard it before."

So the hallucinatory conversations went on, seldom elevated above this chatty level, and when they were, only fleetingly so. Others besides family members came and went. Margie lingered for a little time one night, her voice slurred with drink as she told him how much she loved him.

Kitty, the exquisite Kitty, drifted in a little later, but would not speak: she only stared at him for a while, with a look of incredulity on her face, as though she couldn't believe his stupidity. She'd always berated him for his self-pity, and this last time was no exception; she simply chose to do it in silence.

There were many others who didn't make it as far as the deck: haunting presences whom he glimpsed beneath the water, looking up at him as they drifted by. Victims of his, mostly; men and women whose lives he'd taken, always as quickly as he could; but what violent death was ever quick enough? Oh, some pitiable creatures there. Many he could not lay name to, thankfully; afew whose accusing looks made him want to hide his head. He didn't succ.u.mb to his cowardice; but met their gazes as best his tears would allow, until at length they drifted out of sight.

There was one further cla.s.s of visitation, which did not make itself known until the afternoon of the fifth day. The becalming had long since pa.s.sed; The Samarkand, now in the grip of a powerful current, was moving through a mounting swell, her bows on occasion clipping so deep into the spumy water it seemed she would not rise again; but each time emerging. Galilee had lashed himself to the mainmast so as not to be swept overboard. Lack of nourishment had made him weak; his legs would scarcely bear him up, and his arms would not have had the strength to prevent a wave from taking him. There he sat, the very image of a beleaguered mariner, while the boat rocked and pitched, and his teeth chattered with the cold, and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

But then, it seemed to him he glimpsed-down a valley between the steep steel waves-a stand of golden trees. For a grim instant he thought the currents had played some wretched trick, and carried him back to Kaua'i, but when the sight came again he saw this was not an island. It was instead the most beautiful and torturous vision of them all. It was home.

There down an alley of oaks swathed in Spanish moss he saw the house that Jefferson had built; his mother's house; the place from which he had fled and fled, and never escaped. Cesaria was there, behind one of those windows. She saw him, in his exile. Perhaps she'd always seen him, always had him in the corner of her eye, as a I.

mother will; never let him go entirely, despite all that he'd done to be free of her.

He watched as the scene came and went-eclipsed by the mounting waves, then revealed again- thinking he might glimpse her there. But the vision contained nothing that breathed: not so much as a squirrel in the gra.s.s. Or at least nothing that cared to show itself to him.

And after a time, this too pa.s.sed away. Another darkness fell and he remained where he was, tied to the mast. While the sky swung back and forth above him.

XV.

i Rachel had returned into Holt's journal with the utmost cynicism, determined that this time it would not catch her up in its manipulations. But she failed. After just a few paragraphs she was back in the world the words conjured: the house in the East Battery, filled with the smells of food and s.e.x. And Galilee on the stairs, welcoming Holt into his world. Whether this was a true account or not, she couldn't resist turning the pages.

The pa.s.sages that followed were filled with descriptions of how Holt and Nickelberry lived for the next week or so: an almost obsessive listing of how their palates and their groins were t.i.tillated. Holt now seemed to have little trouble confessing his own excesses. Despite the factthat he had once been a devoted family man, he was almost boastful of them, recounting without embarra.s.sment his liaisons with several of the women of the house. It made astonishing reading, especially as all this salacious detail was set down in a journal which he'd been given by his own wife (and whose dedication-I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again-was there on the opening page). Poor Adina; she'd been forgotten, at least for now. Her husband had entered a world whose laws did not allow for sentimental attachments. They were all living too desperately, too hungrily, to care what they'd been before they'd stepped into the house. All reserve, all shame, all common decencies had evaporated.

According to the journal they ate, drank and coupled morning, noon and night, inspired to this behavior by three things. One, the fact that everybody in the house was engaged in the same headlong pursuit of pleasure, all spurring one another to new experiments. Two, a steady supply of erotic stimulants from Galilee, most of which Holt (and Rachel) had never heard of. And thirdly, the presence of the lawmaker himself. There was n.o.body in the house, male or female, young or old, who had not been bedded by Galilee. That fact emerged first in a conversation Holt reportedly had with Nickelberry; a man who'd seemed until now a.s.suredly heteros.e.xual. Not so.

He had, in Holt's words, played the wife to our host, and told me without a blush that he had seldom felt so loved as when he had lain in Galilee's embrace.

Rachel was surprised that she could still be shocked after the exhaustive s.e.xual 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 presencewas 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sivity 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 pa.s.sed; 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 light-headed and hot, as though she was catching the flu. She went through to the kitchen, got herself a gla.s.s 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.

Gla.s.s in hand, she padded back to the bedroom. It was a little after five o'clock. She set the gla.s.s 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.

ii 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. Ah well; this was never fated to be a book distinguished by its tidiness. I'm sure it's going to get a d.a.m.n 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 melt.w.a.ters 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 gra.s.s. 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 ringers, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 saidearlier, about it not being prophetic. Perhaps it is. Perhaps somewhere out in the middle of the country three of Luman's b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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

I.

Today 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 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.