ALBERT E. COWDREY

THE GREAT ANCESTOR

Albert Cowdrey’s last story for us was ‘White Magic”

the March issue, and since

it ran, folks have been clamoring for more from Mr. C. We’re

delighted to

oblige. This dark fantasy takes us again to Mr. Cowdrey’ s home town and lets

us

peek into the history of one of the Big Easy’s most prominent families. I’d

always

thought that the dead in New Orleans were entombed above-ground, but Bert

assures me that’s

not so.

NOT GUILTY!” CRIED THE foreman of the jury that day in 1989, and the courtroom

in

the New Orleans federal court “erupted in pandemonium,” as next morning’s

Times-Picayune

expressed it. My lawyer, who had been nervously fingering some

documents, tossed his papers

into the air and embraced me. Then my family came

swarming out of the spectators’ seats and

piled on. Little Pierrette, my

beautiful little girl, rushed into my arms, crying, “Daddy,

Daddy!” My wife Amy

gazed up at me with limpid blue eyes. My brother Ned pounded me on the

back. My

mother, who was weeping, plucked at my sleeve until I bent and kissed her. Aunts

and uncles and in-laws crowded around me, weeping, laughing, congratulating.

“The luck of

the Carcassonnes!” thundered a hoarse, hollow voice from somewhere

at the back of the

throng.

Yes, it was a party. Pity my Great-Aunt Kate was dead. She would have

appreciated

the verdict more than any of them. Truly, mine had been an ordeal by

law. All those

accusations in civil court regarding my stewardship at

Goldenacres Savings and Loan, and

then that final, dreadful criminal charge—

that I had procured the murder of the

government’s star witness!

The media were waiting like a school of circling sharks just

outside Courtroom

No. 3 that I had gotten to know so well during the long, bitter days of

the

trial. By this time I knew how to handle them. I let the lawyer talk while I

stood

holding Pierrette on one arm and clutching Amy to me with the other. When

it was my turn to

speak I just said:

“This has been a terrible experience for my family, but thank God, the

system

works. I just wish the government had some better things to do than hound honest

businessmen,

that’s all.”

Nothing more than that. You can always give thanks and damn the government

safely.

Anything else wouldn’t have been safe. Above all, you never tell the

media what you

actually think. They’ll use the truth to kill you.

Then it was time for all of us to go to

Mother’s house for the victory banquet,

laid on in advance of the verdict because she, too,

believed in the luck of the

Carcassonnes.

We were all there, over a hundred people of all

ages, filling the house and

overflowing on the lawn and surrounding the pool. The caterers

were working

themselves to death unloading their vans, for Mother’s kitchen couldn’t

possibly

have cooked all the food. Our new puppy, Grits VI, got under everyone’s feet and

barked himself hoarse. The waiters, many of them college kids hired for the day,

ran around

with their trays like ants carrying pieces of dismembered bugs.

The place of honor was the

dining room table where I sat with Amy, Mother, Ned

and his wife, and a few others. All the

inner circle except Great -Aunt Kate,

who was in her grave, and Daddy, who was in New York

arranging to sell some

assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A long, noisy table of us -inlaws and

outlaws, as they say— and all of us, I was aware, somehow sounding and

gesturing

alike even though we were so different. The family.

Even our Founder was there, hanging in

his portrait over the table. While

waiting for the main course to arrive I glanced up at

him— a fiercelooking old

man with a cataract of white whiskers. Under the varnish his suit

was shiny

black, his eyes were glittering black, and his linen gleamed like a mountain of

white ore. The polished brass plate under the portrait said Pierre Carcassonne.

Le

Fondateur, 1868.

He had been there every mealtime while I was growing up. Pierre the Great,

Daddy

like to call him. The Founder. Founder of what? Ned asked once when he was still

little

and dumb. Of our family, said Daddy, reverently, and we were all solemnly

silent for as

much as a minute. Because we all believed in our family. Not in

God, the devil or the flag,

but in our family.

We lived in the same big house with its nineteen rooms and five baths

overlooking Audubon Park in uptown New Orleans. We had formal gardens, tennis

courts, and

an Olympic-sized swimming pool in marble and tile and a bronze

lion-head that gushed cold

green brine from our own artesian well. Money that

Daddy had made by helping the Shah of

Iran to invest a tiny part of his billions

in Louisiana had paid for the well and the pool,

so we called it the Shah’s

Pool. The deal with Teheran was part of the family legend. Other

aspects of the

legend— the important people we had met, the money we had made, the secrets

we

knew— sparkled in the backs of our minds like the paste jewels in the glass

case in Aunt

Kate’s living room on Prytania Street that marked the time she had

been Queen of Astarte,

the best women’s carnival krewe. No Carcassonne had yet

been Rex, King of Carnival, but

surely that would come in time.

Ultimately everything we had derived from Pierre the Great,

who had emigrated

from Toulouse or Marseilles or someplace in the early nineteenth century

and

become a cotton factor and speculator. Though we knew little about him, some of

his

oddities were remembered — for example, the fact, remarkable for those

times, that he had

refused to own slaves. For whatever reason, he had been no

friend of the Confederacy or the

southern war effort. During the Civil War when

others were going bankrupt most of his

wealth had reposed comfortably in the

Bank of England, earning more money that in the

postwar depression had enabled

him to buy up valuable sugar land for a song. His sons and

grandsons made more

money by investing in the brand-new oilfields of the Gulf and Texas.

In Daddy’s generation the Carcassonnes were doctors, lawyers, investment

bankers, and

stockbrokers. They divided the inheritance but also multiplied it.

They called themselves

“the hundred cousins” and together with their spouses

they possessed about nine billion

dollars. My generation generally followed

their parents into business but also did some

offbeat things, producing among

other oddballs an artist who sold bad paintings for

exorbitant prices and a

drug-runner who never wound up in the penitentiary, although he

probably should

have. They too shared the luck of the Careassonnes.

I was a bookworm as a

child and for a long time I was drawn to the study of

history. Daddy was not too happy over

that, pointing out to me that there was no

money in it. He probably thought I lacked the

courage to do more adventurous

things, and in that he may have been right. But when I

persevered, he told me to

go ahead, warning me however that my trust fund would not be a

nickel larger

than Ned’s, whose goal was to become an investment banker.

I think it was the

general air of polite disapproval at home that caused me, in

1970 when I was in my first

year as a graduate student at Tulane, to become

interested in writing a biography of Pierre

the Great. I secretly hoped to

demonstrate to Daddy that my profession could add, however

slightly, to the

luster of the family name.

The first thing I found out was that tracking

down Pierre Careassonne was

surprisingly difficult. For a family as narcissistic as ours,

we turned out to

own little in the way of papers. Interesting papers, anyway. Account

books, yes,

we had those, by the dozen. From ledgers of the 1850’s I could see how Pierre

had shifted his money around, crisscrossing the Atlantic with his interests,

moving cotton

between the New Orleans warehouses and those in Liverpool and

banking the profits on

Threadneedle Street in the City of London and using them

to speculate on the Exchange and

the Bourse.

He obviously had believed that the United States of his day was a great place

to

make money but a very poor place to store it, and a series of panics and

depressions and

bank failures culminating in the disasters of the Civil War

proved him right. At any rate,

he never ended a year without posting a profit,

including even the calamitous year 1862,

when New Orleans fell to the federal

fleet.

But where were the letters and diaries that

alone can make a dead person come to

life? I could find none, except copies of business

letters which were only a bit

less boring than the account books. I had real hopes of Aunt

Kate, but she put

me off, saying that her house was such a mess she could find nothing in

it.

Other relatives came up only with bits and pieces. A letter consisting in its

entirely

of the words “Yours of the 7th inst. rec’d and I thank you for it”

tells you little about

the writer except that he was terse. I finished the

meager materials stored in family safes

and desks knowing little or nothing of

the real Pierre Careassonne except that he had been

shrewd, and I had known that

before I started.

I could not even discover where he was

buried. In Metairie Cemetery the

Carcassonnes had a pompous family vault with walls and

roof of granite and a

green bronze lady in a robe mourning beside the door. But the first

people to be

buried there were Daddy’s grandparents. Some earlier members of our family

reposed

in an uptown cemetery across from Commander’s Palace restaurant — very

convenient, Daddy

liked to say, if their appetites were anything like those of

my brother and myself! But

Pierre the Great was not there, nor did he seem to be

anyplace else.

On my hours off, when I

was neither lecturing at Tulane nor being lectured to, I

poked around in the older

cemeteries, hoping to get lucky. Soon I made a number

of new acquaintances among sextons

and caretakers, and among a curious

collection of people who were victims of genealogical

obsessions. These students

of the past moved in hunched postures from gravestone to

gravestone, copying

names and dates; they made rubbings of interesting epitaphs and the

quaint

carvings — winged hourglasses, weeping willows, sorrowing angels — that

Victorian

stonemasons used to memorialize grief. I liked the genealogists

because they, too, believed

in the importance of family, even if they had to

support their dreams by fantastic efforts

to connect their ancestors to the

Romanoffs or the Borgias.

The genealogists and I would

bring po’boy sandwiches in brown bags and eat lunch

among the tombs, sitting on marble

benches under the big old trees and breathing

deeply in the murmurous summer silence that

reduced the noise of the city to a

distant beelike hum of traffic. One day I was munching

my sandwich in St. Louis

Cemetery No. 3 and talking to a tatty old lady who claimed to be

descended (by

the wrong side of the blanket) from the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The

archduke,

she said, had been on the verge of legitimizing her grandfather when

Ferdinand’s

assassination and the First World War put an end to the project.

“It preyed on Grandpa’s

mind,” she said. “Not that being illegitimate bothers

anybody anymore, but he was of the

old school. He studied French in order to

write his own diplomatic dispatches in case the

Hapsburg throne should ever be

re-established and his claim to it recognized. His last

words on earth were,

Helas! je suis toujours un batard “

That seemed sad to me, being

forever a bastard. Since she had confided in me, I

told her about my search for the grave

of my great-great grandfather, Pierre

Carcassonne, and my fear that he must have died

outside the city, since I could

find no trace of him in New Orleans.

“That’s an unusual

name,” she said thoughtfully. “Now, where have I seen it

before?

I was about to suggest that

our family was locally prominent and often mentioned

in the newspaper. But then she

brightened and exclaimed, “Oh, I’ve seen that

grave!”

“You have!”

“Oh, yes. I often forget

faces, but I never forget a grave. Now let me see…it

was in…it was in …. Oh, I know.

It’s in the St. Dismas cemetery, on the

Basin Street side somewhere. Yes, I’m sure it is.

It’s not in very good

condition, I’m afraid.”

Candidly, I did not believe her. But I wanted

to believe, and a little light had

switched on in my head when she said St. Dismas. This

was indeed a very old

cemetery, once located just outside the ramparts when New Orleans was

still a

fortified town. But it had soon become a burial ground for people of dubious

antecedents,

including some of Jean Lafitte’s pirates. It also held many of the

city’s free blacks. Many

had been people of wealth and education, highly

respectable and much respected. But they,

too, had had their bad apples,

including a couple of voodoo queens buried in marble tombs

that people still

marked with red crosses, hoping to keep the witches inside.

It seemed to

me as I thanked my friend for her help that one of the obscurities

surrounding Pierre the

Great — his refusal to own slaves -might be clarified if

he turned out to have been a

mulatto or quadroon who had married a white woman.

Of course, such a union would have been

illegal at that time, but wealth finds a

way, and the number of local white families with

black ancestors is almost as

large as the number of blacks with white forebears.

As I

reflected on the features of the old patriarch in the portrait, I could

find neither

support nor refutation for my idea. Were the lips hidden in that

cascade of moustache and

beard as thin as Europe or as full as Africa? No

telling — and the painter had probably

adjusted both features and coloring to

accord with the wishes of his model.

Nevertheless, as

I drove to Basin Street I was almost humming with excitement. I

was without conscious

racism myself, and since Daddy had predicted that the next

Mayor of New Orleans would be a

black Creole I could see no reason for anyone to

be ashamed of such a connection any

longer. I particularly relished the thought

of how my more pompous relatives, who scorned

history as a useless pursuit,

would be floored if I turned up clear evidence that the

Founder had been partly

black! I was still young enough to relish the sheer shock value of

such a

revelation.

I will not waste time telling of my slow and somewhat dangerous search

for

Pierre’s tomb. Dangerous because the neighborhood had gone bad and I would not

have

dared to go there alone at any time but the afternoon of a sunny day when

well-guarded

tourist parties could be expected to arrive also. Suffice it to say

that after several

anxious and muddy hours spent mostly on my hands and knees, I

discovered at last what

appeared to be the grave of the Founder.

It was much smaller and in much worse condition

than I had expected —merely a

chamber of very old, weathered and broken brick, cracked by

the roots of trees

that had themselves died and become part of the cemetery earth

generations ago.

There were no remains inside, only a bundle of old newspapers reduced by

damp to

papier mache, which showed that a derelict had been sleeping there at some time

in

the not too remote past, with a wad of newsprint for a pillow. A broken and

dislodged

square of marble lying beside it was much eroded by the rain and the

words cut into it were

only partly legible:

PI.. R. CARCASSONNE

NE LE 2ME

AO..,…8

DE . EDE L. 31RE OC ….. , 18.8

ODER.. T DUM MET . ANT

The French part of the inscription was easy: Pierre Carcassonne/Ne le 2me Aont

….

8/Decede le 31re Octobre, 18.8. In English, he was born the second of

August in a year

ending in 8 and died the thirty-first o1 October, probably in

1868, the year of the

portrait. This suggested to me that he knew the end was

close and had had the picture

painted in order to fix his image in the minds of

his descendants.

The Latin epitaph,

apparently Oderint rum metuant, was a poser. My Latin was

poor, but after digging out a

grammar I had used in high school I decided the

words were Caligula’s famous remark about

the Romans: “Let them hate me, so long

as they fear me.” That struck me as a strange

sentiment to inscribe on a

tombstone.

In any case, I had a good deal more information than I

had possessed before

arriving at St. Dismas. I had brought a polaroid camera with me and I

took the

whole roll of film of the vault and its surroundings. My last happy discovery of

this eventful day was that my car had not been stripped while I was in the

cemetery, though

I did have to pay five dollars tribute to a teenager carrying a

baseball.bat who claimed to

have been guarding it for me. Cheap at the price, I

thought, as I drove off, for I had at

last touched something tangible belonging

to Pierre Carcassonne, even if it was only an

empty grave.

AT HOME I played with Grits IV, recently installed as the family dog following

the tragic death of Grits III under the wheels of a concrete mixer. He was a

young

Schnauzer, with a short beard and a merry bark. He accompanied me to my

bathroom where I

took a much-needed shower and when I had dressed we went down

to the dining room where I

stared possessively at Pierre. Yes, I decided, his

skin was definitely rather dark. I had

to admit that the hue might indicate old

paint or a bad liver rather than what in 1970 we

still called a touch of the

tarbrash; nevertheless, I felt that I had come closer to him

than any of my many

relatives.

Daddy deflated me, however. He was simply not interested in

what I had

discovered.

“That’s not where Pierre was buried,” he said flatly, after glancing

at my

photos. “He wouldn’t be buried in a hole like that. Anyway, why would he be in

Dismas?

Nobody we ever knew is buried there with all those voodoo queens and

pirates and whatnot.”

He even dismissed the evidence of the marble slab, and I had to admit that in

the Polaroid

picture the lettering looked all but meaningless.

The question was how to get more

evidence. I considered going back and stealing

the marble slab, but rejected the idea on

ethical grounds, for in those days I

still had ethics. Instead, I resolved to seek

documentary information, and on my

next free day I went to the French Quarter to work in

the General Ferd Blister

Collection. This choleric retired officer, made rich by oil

discoveries on vast

tracts of inherited swampland, was whiling away his golden years by

buying a

huge volume of memorabilia -pictures, manuscripts, indeed almost anything —that

dealt with New Orleans in what he called “the good years” before the suppression

of

legalized prostitution. I introduced myself and was respectfully received by

General

Blister’s archivist, a translucent young man named Dave who seemed only

half alive, and

hence all the better fitted to preserve and interpret the

records of the dead.

“General

Blister,” Dave muttered, eyeing a point in distant space, “would really

like to get hold of

some Carcassonne family papers.”

“So would I.”

“Surely they must be somewhere.”

“All I can

find is old account books.” I then explained that I hoped to track

down references to

Pierre Carcassonne through mentions in the papers of his

contemporaries.

“I think,” Dave

whispered, “I think…yes…I ran across some mentions when I

was accessing the Dubroville

Papers. And the DeSaye Papers. And the Worthe

Papers. Hm. Hm.” He wandered off muttering to

himself and eventually returned

with half a dozen gray document boxes.

He relieved me of my

pen, issued me foolscap and a short hard pencil to take

notes with, and sat me in a comer

of the dark, somewhat dungeonlike room that

General Blister allotted to researchers in his

collection. In fact, it had once

been a dungeon, for iron rings were still set in the old

brick walls and a

spiked metal slave-collar dangled menacingly from a short length of

chain.

Here I spent the whole of a long day on my self-imposed quest, laboriously

panning

out a few glistening grains of gold from the verbal torrent of 19th-

century letter

writing. The Dubroville Papers were the most revealing, because a

member of their family

had fought a duel with Pierre Carcassonne. Here are some

of my notes:

Honore Dubroville to

his wife Claudette, November 2, 1857:

“Ah, my dear, if only you were here in New Orleans,

to give counsel in this

crisis! My nephew Louis wishes to challenge that accursed wretch

Carcassonne to

a duel. I have earnestly advised him not to do so, for a duel can be held

only

between gentlemen, no others being able to dispute a point of honor. As to the

danger

of fighting such a man, I said nothing: danger would only spur the young

firebrand on.”

Same

to same, December 13, 1857.

“That ill-considered duel! An honorable young man is no more,

while Carcassonne

continues to flourish like the green bay tree and is more insufferable

than

ever. In addition to being a pig and a camel, he is now an assassin, too.”

Various

other comments followed, all uncomplimentary. During the federal

occupation of the city,

the Founder had proclaimed himself a Unionist and worked

hand in glove with the corrupt

General “Beast” Butler, to the great profit of

both, according to the Dubrovilles. The last

reference to Pierre was an almost

fiendish burst of glee when, after the war, my ancestor

died of unspecified

causes.

Claudette Dubroville to “Mon tres chef mari,” AH Saints’ Day

[November 1], 1868.

“How unfortunate that you are away from home at so happy a time! We are

rid of

Carcassonne at last!!! Surely the family will have a closed coffin at the wake.

They

will be lucky if the consecrated earth does not vomit him up!! For his

children I am not

sorry either, they are all limbs of Satan. True, we are

commanded by the good God to

forgive, but surely not the Carcassonnes.”

Such malice was rather daunting. As Dave brought

me more boxes from other

collections of letters, my dismay increased. I had grown up in the

firm

conviction that my family was in every sense honorable and respectable, yet it

seemed

increasingly that the Founder’s contemporaries did not agree.

Reluctantly, I admitted to

myself that fathomless unpopularity had enveloped old

Pierre. He was called everything vile

— a cheat, a blackguard, a swine, a

murderer, a thief, a rascal, a rout, and a Republican.

To add to my discomfort,

in all this catalogue of denunication no reference was ever made

to his race —

and, if he was black, that seemed strange, given the attitudes of the time.

Perhaps my whole theory of a black man on the rise who virtuously refused to own

slaves

because they were members of his own race was wrong.

I returned home from my day in the

Quarter in a thoughtful mood and settled down

with Grits IV and a drink to await the return

of my father from his day’s

occupation. He had successfully managed some intensely

complicated transaction

or other between two banks and was in a relaxed and pleasant mood.

He patted the

dog, praised the martini I mixed for him (he was very exacting about

martinis)

and asked me how my researches on the Founder were coming.

For reply I handed him

the foolscap sheets on which I had jotted my notes and he

read them with the close

attention that a lawyer always gives to a written

document.

“Not widely loved, was he?” he

murmured, handing them back.

“No. Somehow it’s not what I expected. I thought he’d be

respected, at least.”

“Too successful, I suppose,” said Daddy somewhat heavily. “A little

success has

many friends, but a big one has many enemies.”

I couldn’t buy that, even dressed

up in one of Daddy’s instant wise sayings.

Pierre Carcassonne had been hated. I pointed

this out.

“And yet in these documents nobody ever says exactly why. They just heave

insults

at him.”

“That’s because back then everybody knew why. My adviser at Tulane tells me it’s

something historians run into time and again. What everybody knows, nobody ever

bothers to

say. It can be terribly frustrating.”

The next bit of evidence came from a completely

unexpected source.

Jake Touro kept one of the last great junk-shops in New Orleans. A

pleasant,

dumpy man of no special age, he was literally unable to let any object that

could

be physically inserted into his tiny shop escape him. For reasons of space

his collection

contained no antique locomotives or stuffed whales; but he had

everything else, especially

if it concerned New Orleans.

Jake had already marked me down as a potential customer, and I

got a call from

him one morning as I was preparing to leave to take an exam at Tulane.

“Jake,

I don’t have much time.”

“Sure, sure, sure. Just wanted to let you know I’ve got a pitcher

you might want

to see. Carcassonne stuff, middle of the last century. Interested? Ha.

Thought

you might be.”

As a matter of fact, at three that afternoon I was edging into Jake’s

Treasure

Chest on a side street off Esplanade. Edging because the junk was piled so high

and deep and close that I had to go sideways or not at all.

“Let me put on the lights,”

muttered Jake, emerging from a back room. He had ten

or twelve gooseneck lamps scattered

around and with a good deal of ballet-like

twisting and toe-standing he managed to turn

most of them on. Then he sidled

behind a counter and started rummaging in a collection of

shoeboxes.

“Ah,” he said, “system never fails.”

He pulled out a gutta.percha box with an

arcadian scene stamped into the lid,

and flipped it open. Inside was a tintype of Pierre,

so faded that I had to turn

it from side to side under one of the gooseneck lamps before

the image emerged.

But then — .what an image!

Only his face and one hand rose from the

gleaming blackness of the plate. The

hand was huge and gnarled and rested on a cane whose

head was a massive knob of

ivory carved in the shape of a snarling dog. Whenever the image

was taken,

Pierre had been clean-shaven; his nose was a raptor’s beak and his face was set

in a ferocious expression, the eyes fairly starting out of the head as he glared

into the

camera. I found myself wondering if the lens had not cracked under the

intensity of that

look.

The painting at home was formal, modified by all the skills of the artist to

turn this

corsair into a gentleman. The image I was looking at now was, I

believed at once, the real

man himself as he had been in life.

Voodoo queens and pirates! In death, Pierre had gone to

earth among his own kind

in St. Dismas. But his kind had nothing to do with race. For it

was clear to me

from the photograph that Pierre the Great, the Founder of our family, was

white

— the whitest man I ever saw — dead white, in fact.Then (coming back again to

the

old question) why had he refused to own slaves at a time when being a master

was the sign

of wealth and success, the one thing that enabled anyone to exclaim

je suis arrive! I have

arrived! with no danger of being contradicted?

Jake wanted two hundred dollars for the

tintype in its case. I was able to

extract the money from Daddy without trouble, once he

saw the picture.

“A tough bird,” he said. “I’d hate to go up against a man who looked like

that

in court. Brr!” And he actually shivered.

He must have talked about my discovery to

older members of the family, and they

to still others. In any case, a week or so later I

got a very old, spotty card

in the mail with my Great Aunt Kate’s maiden name embossed on

it and a few

spiky, spidery handwritten lines. She had heard about my success in finding

information about the Founder, she wrote, and she had now located something in

her house

that might interest me.

I showed the card to Daddy, and he was downright enthusiastic.

“She’s

so old,” he said, “that she’s a lot closer to the Founder than we are.

This is 1970 and she

was born in 1890. Her father was Pierre’s son; she spent

her childhood among people who had

known the old man intimately.”

The warmth with which he said this made me smile; it was

obvious that Daddy was

finding history a more interesting study than he had expected it to

be, since I

had begun to uncover our family’s place in it.

As I’ve said, Kate lived in a big

old house on Prytania Street. The house was

not on the Uptown Mansion tour; it might have

suited a haunted house tour, if

our local hucksters ever decided to establish one. From the

street the house was

simply an enormous thicket sprouting chimneys. English yew had grown

up

roof-high, and down below aspidistra had taken over all the garden beds. Then on

top of

this basic jungle had grown thick living carpets of vines — honeysuckle,

ivy, cat’s-claw,

Virginia creeper, yellow jasmine. I remember that the place was

startlingly alive in the

bright hot sunlight, clamorous with insects and

brilliant with flashing jays and redbirds.

Aunt Kate was served and cared for by an extraordinarily small woman named

Nelly, who

seemed to have invented her own race, being neither black, white,

Oriental, nor Latin. She

had dry henna-colored tresses, a wrinkled little face

like a marmoset, and a great deal of

superfluous hair on her face and arms. She

opened the front door, peered up at me from not

much above the level of my

belt-buckle, and then turned away.

On my last visit to Aunt Kate

— five or six years earlier — Nelly had

announced me with exactly two words, “He’s here.”

On this occasion she said,

“Well, he’s here,” which was a gain of one word. She didn’t say

them to anybody,

just enunciated in a loud, cracked voice, standing in the dark entry hall

with

its elk-horn hatrack, clouded mirror, and yellow-brown wallpaper. Then she

rustled away

like a departing leaf in autumn and left me to find my own way.

I tried the living room,

which was very dark and smelled like mildew, and the

only light seemed to dwell in the

rhinestone regalia Kate had worn as Queen of

Astarte in 1948. I tried a few other rooms,

and eventually found my great aunt

in a large, jungle-shaded back gallery, lying on a

spotty chaise longue and

reading a battered old book. I knew that she bought second-hand

books by weight,

and in fact brown cardboard boxes stood all around with piles of books in

them,

most with brownish pages and broken spines. The one she was reading was called

L’Abattoir

and she put it aside to lay her hand in mine like a long bony fish.

“So, darling, you’re

interested in Pierre Carcassonne,” she said, fixing me with

two tiny, glittering dark eyes

lying in a nest of bags and wrinkles like gems in

drawstring purses.

I said yes, and told

her what I’d found so far. She made me sit on the end of

the chaise longue while we talked.

She was wearing a long-faded robe trimmed

with rabbit fur that had probably looked better

on the rabbit. Her bony feet

were bare but the nails of her feet and hands were both done

meticulously with

silver varnish. She wore green eyeshadow on her lids and her thin arms

were

noisy with many jingling bracelets made of what looked like steel. With the hard

intelligence

in her eyes and her somewhat predatory air, she fitted my image of

a successful retired

madam.

When I had finished telling my story, she brushed one hand back over her head of

thin,

clean white hair, setting her bracelets jangling, and said thoughtfully,

“Grandpapa must

have been the most fascinating man. Of course he’d been dead

twenty-two years when I was

born, so I never knew him in the flesh.”

“He wasn’t very popular, I’m afraid.”

“I doubt if

he cared. He was rich and he had a big family and provided for them

very well. As you and I

both know. But perhaps you don’t know. Come along,

darling, I’ve got something wonderful to

show you.”

She got rather creakily to her feet and led me into the brown shadows of the

house.

“There are such strange things in this house, darling! Oh, of course

there’s rubbish, too.

Damn all these cookbooks, I never cook anymore, why do I

keep them? But also there are

wonderful, wonderful things, hidden away, just

waiting to be found again.”

She unlocked a

door and we entered a little room that seemed to have no

particular purpose at all. I

helped her clear a path to a big pine cupboard that

stood in a far comer.

“Now, you remember

this place,” said Aunt Kate, “and come back here when I’m

dead. I’ve decided to make you

the executor of my will, because you’re a

historian and because this house —”

She paused to

swing her long, jingling, bony arms in encompassing arcs. “This

house is history!” she

cried in a harsh voice that filled the little room like

the scream of a macaw.

We finally

got the cupboard door open and a cascade of rubbish fell out broken

dolls, pots and pans,

bundled-up papers.

“Shit,” she said.

While she rooted I looked around, wondering how long it

would take me to

catalogue the stuff in this house and how much you earned for being an

executor.

At last she gave a kind of happy squawk and brought out an old leather dispatch

box with a snap lid. Giving me a secret, crafty smile, she led the way back in

silence to

the shaded gallery. She cleared a space on a oncegorgeous marquetry

table and snapped the

lid of the box open.

“Now, darling, you’ll find this truly interesting,” she said, pulling

out with

some difficulty — for her wrists were weak — a thick oblong plate of

greenishly

corroded copper.

“Daddy gave it to me before he died,” she said proudly. “He had five sons,

you

know, but he said to me, ‘Kate, you’ll appreciate this more than any of them.’”

I picked

the metal plate up and stared at it, first in confusion, then in

growing wonder. Kate had

produced something the like of which I had never seen

before and have never seen since,

though I think there must be many others,

scattered around the world. Some sort of writing

had been gouged into the metal.

The work had been done either with a steel stylus or — as

a forensic scientist

suggested, many years later, after viewing it under a strong lens -with the

point of a hard, rough, sharp claw.

Before I locked that curious object away for

good I also showed it to three

alleged experts on the Tulane faculty, who assured me that

the language was

either Ill Amharic, the ancient language of Ethiopia 121 Medieval

Georgian, or

(3) Old Church Slavonic. None of them offered to translate it. Indeed, I can

only compare the handwriting to the very worst sort of doctor’s prescription.

That day in

Aunt Kate’s I wasn’t even sure which way I was supposed to hold the

plate, until I noticed

the signature at the bottom.

The name appeared to have been burned into the metal with some

strong acid and

it was perfectly legible. It said, of course, Pierre Carcassonne, and gave

the

date, le 3Ire Octobre 1848, just twenty years before his death.

I wanted to take the

plate with me, but Aunt Kate was having none of that. I

would get it when she was dead, she

said firmly. And no, I couldn’t have it

photographed. This was something that should exist

only in the original.

“Remember, darling,” she said as Nelly waited to lead me out.

“Grandpapa didn’t

just sign that agreement for himself, for his own benefit. He signed it

for all

of us, for his descendants to the God-knowswhat generation. I just don’t think

it’s

possible for a family to go on for a century and more always making the

right investments

just by accident, do you? And what’s more, avoiding the wrong

investments, like slavery,

which mined so many people after emancipation. We’re

getting good advice, even if we don’t

know it, even if it comes to us only in

our dreams.

“Grandpapa paid the usual price, and I’m

sure he paid it gladly. He didn’t care

much about souls, including his own. He wanted the

glory of the body, even if it

only lasted twenty years. Goodbye, darling. I’ll be dead soon

and I’m leaving

you the most interesting thing I own for the same reason Papa left it to me

—

because it’ll mean more to you than it would to anyone else.”

At home it was dinner time.

Mama was talking about debutantes and my brother Ned

was feeding his face and occasionally,

when his mouth cleared, asking Daddy a

question about debentures. That covered the deb

front, so I could spend my time

eating— our cook, Rawanda, had whipped up one of her

greatest specialties,

shrimp Creole — and slipping an occasional shrimp to Grits IV, who

crouched

under the table, whining softly.

I also studied Pierre Carcassonne’s face. Had he

really done that for all of us,

signed that contract so that we could enjoy the good things

of the world for

centuries or forever, while he paid the price? Even that poor tomb— had

it been

a mere formality? Had there been anything left to bury after the contract fell

due

and the Creditor came to collect what was owed him? How could anybody do

more/or a family

than that?

That afternoon I went swimming in the Shah’s Pool with Grits. It was the first

really hot day. Through a screen of azalea bushes I could see the golfers in

their

superbright clothes moving languidly around the green hummocks of the

course. Horsemen

cantered by on the bridle path, and a wind like a furnace

stirred the huge old branches of

the oak trees. Could it really be that we

Carcassonnes would succeed at whatever we tried,

because we were protected by

the contract that Pierre had signed with the God of This

World? If so, why was I

wasting my time with scholarship?

That night I dreamed about the

tintype. The dark metal turned into a dark pool

and Pierre’s big gnarled hand reached out

of it and gripped mine.

“Join me!” he roared in a voice incredibly hoarse and hollow.

And so

I did.