LITMIR.BIZ

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      ii

      Though I attempted to take my own advice and have a siesta that afternoon, my head, despite the melancholy exchange with Dwight—or perhaps because of it—was buzzing like a stirred-up hive. I found myself thinking about certain parallels that existed between families that were in every other way unlike. The family of Dwight Huddie, for instance, living in a trailer park somewhere in Sampson County: did they ever wonder about their child, whom they lost to a place they would never see, never even know existed? Did they think of seeking him out all those years ago, when he was first lost, or was he as good as dead to them, as Galilee was to Cesaria? And then there was the Gearys. That family, for all its fabled clannishness had also in its time cut off some of its children as though they were gangrenous limbs. Again: as good as dead. I was sure that as I went on, I was going to find connections like these throughout this history: ways in which the sorrows and the cruelties of one bloodline were echoed in another.

      The question that still lay before me, and I had so far failed to answer, was the way these connections might best be expressed. My mind was filled with possibilities but I had no real sense of how all that I knew was arrayed and dispersed; no sense of the pattern.

      

      To distract myself from anxiety I made a slow exploration of the house. It was many years since I’d gone from room to room as I did now, and everywhere I looked this newly curious gaze of mine was rewarded. Jefferson’s extraordinary taste and passion for detail was in evidence all around me, but married to a wildness of conception that is, I’m certain, my mother’s gift. It’s an extraordinary combination: Jeffersonian restraint and Barbarossian bravura; a constant struggle of wills that creates forms and volumes utterly unlike any I have seen before. The great study, for instance, now fallen into neglect, which seemed the perfect model of an austere place of intellectual inquiry, until the eye drifted to the ceiling, where the Hellenic columns grew sinewy and put forth a harvest of unearthly fruit. The dining room, where the floor was set with such a cunning design of marble tiles that it seemed like a pool of blue-green water. A long gallery of arched alcoves, each of which contained a bas-relief so cunningly lit that the scenes seemed to shed their own luminescence, which spilled out as from a series of windows. There was nothing, it seemed to me, that had been left to chance; every tiny subtlety of form had been planned so as to flatter the greater scheme, just as the great scheme brought the eye back to these subtleties. It was all, it seemed to me, one glorious invitation: to pleasure in the seeing, yes; but also to a calm certainty of one’s own place in all of this, not overpowered, simply enjoined to be here in the moment, feeling the way the air flowed through the rooms and brushed your face, or the way the light came to meet you from a wall. More than once I found my eyes filling with tears at the sheer beauty of a chamber, then soothed from my tears by that same beauty, which wanted only my happiness.

      All this said, the house was not by any means unspoiled. The years, and the humidity, have taken a terrible toll; scarcely a single room has escaped some measure of decay, and a few—particularly those which lay closest to the swamp—are in such a poor state of disrepair that I was obliged to have Dwight carry me into them, the floors were too rotted for my wheelchair. Even these chambers, I should say, had an undeniable grandeur to them. The creeping rot on the walls resembles the charts of some as yet unnamed world; the small forests of fungi that grow in the sodden boards have a fascination all of their own. Dwight was unpersuaded. “These are bad places,” he said, determined that their deterioration was due to some spiritual malaise that hung about them. “Bad things happened here.”

      This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I told him so. If one room had rot in the walls and another didn’t, it was because of some vagary in the water table; it wasn’t evidence of bad karma.

      “In this house,” Dwight said, “everything’s connected.”

      That was all I could get him to say on the subject, but it was plain enough, I suppose. Just as I had come to appreciate the way the house played back and forth between spirit and sight, so Dwight seemed to be telling me the physical and moral states of the house were connected.

      

      He was right, of course, though I couldn’t see it at the time. The house wasn’t simply a reflection of Jefferson’s genius and Cesaria’s vision: it was a repository for all that it had ever contained. The past was still present here, in ways my limited senses had yet to grasp.

       VI

      I encountered Marietta once or twice during these days of reacquaintance with the house (I even glimpsed Zabrina on a few occasions, though she shared no interest in conversing with me; only hurried away). But of Luman, of the man Cesaria had promised could help educate me, I saw not a hair. Had my stepmother decided not to allow me access to her secrets after all? Or perhaps simply forgotten to tell Luman that he was to be my guide? I decided after a couple of days that I’d seek him out for myself, and tell him how badly I wanted to get on with my work, but that I couldn’t do so; not until I knew the stories Cesaria had told me I could not even guess at.

      Luman, as I’ve said, does not live in the main house, though Lord knows it has enough rooms, empty rooms, to accommodate several families. He chooses instead to live in what was once the Smoke House; a modest building, which he claims suits him better. I had not until this visit ever come within fifty yards of the building, much less entered it; he has always been fiercely protective of his isolation.

      My mounting irritation made me bold, however. So I had Dwight take me to the place, wheeling me down what had once been a pleasant path, but which was now thickly overgrown. The air became steadily danker; in places it swarmed with mosquitoes. I lit up a cigar to keep them at bay, which I doubt worked, but a good cigar always gets me a little high, so I cared rather less that they were making a meal of me.

      As we approached the door I saw that it was open a little way, and that somebody was moving around inside. Luman knew I was here; which probably meant he also knew why I called out to him.

      “Luman? It’s Maddox! Is it all right if Dwight brings me in? I’d like to have a little talk!”

      “We got nothing to talk about,” came the reply out of the murky interior.

      “I beg to differ.”

      Now Luman’s face appeared at the partially opened door. He looked thoroughly rattled, like a man who’d just stepped away from not one but several excesses. His wide, tawny face was shiny with sweat, his pupils pinpricks, his cornea yellowed. His beard looked as though it hadn’t been trimmed, or indeed even washed, in several weeks.

      “Jesus, man,” he growled, “can’t you just let it be?”

      “Did you speak to Cesaria?” I asked him.

      He ran his hand through his mane and tugged it back from his head so violently it looked like an act of masochism. Those pinprick eyes of his suddenly grew to the size of quarters. This was a parlor trick I’d never seen him perform before; I was so startled I all but cried out. I stifled the yelp, however. I didn’t want him thinking he had the upper hand here. There was too much of the mad dog about him. If he sensed fear in me, I was certain he’d at very least drive me from his door. And at worst? Who knew what a creature like this could do if he set his perverse mind to it? Just about anything, probably.

      “Yes,” he said finally, “she spoke to me. But I don’t think you need to be seeing the stuff she wants you to see. It ain’t your business.”

      “She thinks it is.”

      “Huh.”

      “Look, can we at least have this conversation out of the way of the mosquitoes?”

      “You don’t like bein’ bit?” he said, with a nasty little grin. “Oh I like to get naked an’ have ‘em at me. Gets me goin’.”

      Perhaps he hoped he’d repulse me with this, and

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