BALD HORACE HATED THE FIRST job they set him to. While Bernard lolled around at a house job, for the first two weeks Bald Horace filled bags with wet sand then trekked them up to the flat of the levee wherever the river fronted the property. He did it bone cold and in the rain. Sometimes he was told to load the bags onto a truck for sale at neighboring farms where men more flood fearful than Ghost Tree’s owner and without his workforce paid jacked-up prices. The men working side by side with Bald Horace cursed the big man as a greedy Jew.
Who else could profit over a neighbor’s despair? they said.
Bald Horace defended his friend’s race. They not all like that, he said.
How do you know? they asked.
Big man’s not the first I ever met.
That night, he looked for Bernard outside the white men’s barracks.
They’re talkin’ about the boss bein’ a greedy Jew, he said. Better watch out.
Bernard heard his granddaddy’s voice. Don’t forget who you are, son. Alright, he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with this intelligence now that he had it. Watch out, he guessed. Like his friend said.
Sandbag detail was the worst backbreaking job on the farm. Every bone and muscle Bald Horace had ached so much, he could not sleep at night. It got so bad, he thought about leaving Ghost Tree even if he left alone. One morning, he was about to pack up his kit and tell Bernard he quit when the rain stopped and it stayed stopped. Every day, the sun shone, and the sky was a hard, brilliant winter blue.
It didn’t take long before folk stopped caring about sandbags. Fresh opportunity knocked, and Bald Horace answered. Much of the help had been wayfarers working at Ghost Tree as shelter from the deluge. Once the rains stopped, they went back to their homes with a little coin in their pockets and the intent to rebuild what they’d lost. Bald Horace had his pick of the vacancies created. He chose to take care of the farm animals, which meant everything feathered or furred except the horses and hunting dogs. He looked after donkeys, chickens, cows, pigs, and goats. He watched them mate, argue, and play to learn their individual natures and habits. He knew when one of them was footsore or bad in the belly. When feeding time came around, the joyous way they ran to him braying, clucking, lowing, bleating, or grunting filled his heart. He named them, cared for them, and they cared for him, too.
His work was so pleasant, he saw Aurora Mae’s hand in things. Though Aurora Mae was surely dead, he felt that she hadn’t forgotten her brother and his friend, that her spirit was close and blessed them both. How else to explain how they’d wound up at this paradise called Ghost Tree where they paid the help on time and didn’t skimp on the vittles, either? To think he’d been this close to leaving. It was as if Aurora Mae saw his misery and plugged up the hole in the clouds with one hand then grabbed his shirt collar with the other to pull him back. Yessir, he told whoever would listen, Ghost Tree Plantation was a sacred place for all those who mourned someone. His own sister’s soul was set down by the hand of a merciful Lord in the forked arms of one of the willow trees that draped the border of the puzzle garden. He’d seen her there one morning when the fog lifted. Day and night, he could feel her like she was in the next room. This gave him peace. In fact, for the first time since Aurora Mae went missing, he was happy. His friend said that was because he didn’t have much to do with that other Bernard.
Once it was established that Bernard could read and write, he was made a secretary to the big man himself. He didn’t have to wear the Negroes’ livery, but he was given three fresh shirts and two pairs of pants in the plantation colors, crimson red and the near black green of the shutters, a pair of paddock boots and a red-and-green cap with a short visor. He was told to keep these and himself clean. He reported to the big man himself on the front porch every morning. He knew it was not his place to question why he was not allowed over the threshold. Depending on the terrain, the name-twins made inspection rounds together in a truck or on horseback. They were together so much, people all around started calling him Bernard the ugly to differentiate him from the big man. Bernard didn’t like that much, but he understood the joke and tried not to take offense.
Together, the two Bernards inspected the cotton fields, the rice fields, the vegetable fields along with the various stock barns, the tannery, the smithy, the silos, the millhouse, all of which were in the process of rehabilitation. Bernard the ugly wrote down whatever he was told without knowing why because Bernard the handsome didn’t think him important enough to explain things to. He didn’t converse with him at all except to command. Bernard the ugly made lists of mysterious percentages and inexplicable dollar figures, the names of people he did not know and of equipment of indeterminate function, comprehending little. Every two weeks, he rode in the front seat of the big car next to the driver and delivered envelopes to the bank and to the pea-colored house in town. He never questioned what was in them, because he never would have gotten an answer.
Two years before, Bernard the handsome bought Ghost Tree Plantation from a family of blue bloods gone to ruin with war, gambling, and disease, dragging the property down with it. Soon after, he purchased a few hundred acres of abutting land and set about creating the finest plantation Tennessee had known since Grant’s and Sherman’s men destroyed them all. It was his great dream, what he saw as his life’s work. His ambitions were stuck in a vision of the past, when a man might behave like Caesar on his own property and get away with it. Ever since his granddaddy died, leaving him a fortune in the family agricultural supply business, he desired to use that fortune to make himself a mighty lord with the power of life and death over man, beast, and the river. He thought such his birthright because of his good looks and the size of his purse. What’s more, he thought his vision an ideal life, worth resurrecting from the boneyard of history.
Although he had a pretty wife of excellent lineage, he loved nothing so much as his gold, of which he had a great deal since he did not like nor trust greenbacks. He preferred fondling his chests of coin to his wife. This was fine by her, as she didn’t much like him. They argued often about the way he conducted business or the way he treated the help. He told her she was a soft-headed nag, who didn’t understand commerce. She told him he had a tiny soul, small and hard as a pebble, and the heart of a devil. He made his name-twin his secretary to irritate her. When her local friends telephoned with social invitations, it was his delight to send Bernard the ugly over to their farms with handwritten notes of acceptance or regrets and instructions to announce himself by name as he did so. This proved more annoying to his secretary than to the lady of the house, who’d long ago given up caring what her husband did. She was more interested in the work of the young Italian stonecutter who chiseled lions, stags, and cupids for her flower garden. She couldn’t get enough of them. Once the garden was stuffed with more figures than rosebushes, winged cherubs appeared on the lintels of doors all over the big house. Her husband complained that her decor was too funereal. She countered that if a plantation named Ghost Tree was to be her home, it should be festooned in a manner that reflected the death of her innocence. When she ran out of doorways and windows in the big house, winged cherubs appeared over those of the workers’ barracks and even the latrines.
Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly happy, Bald Horace would point at one and tell Bernard, Look, you see? We were led to paradise by our own angel.
And Bernard would answer, No. We have wandered into an asylum for the insane.
Christmas of ’26 came and went. New Year’s followed. Bernard tried to convince Bald Horace it was time to move on, but Bald Horace said it was cold and travel would be arduous. It made more sense to wait ’til spring. Bernard agreed, and they missed their chance. Long before spring, the rains returned. Once the deluge started, it was relentless.
Most days, the rain came in sheets, making work impossible. Every day, the skies were dismal, the hard sparkling blue of December and January was completely bled out. The only relief from the gray, wet canopy overhead were lightning storms that robbed everyone of rest. Buildings too wet to burn were struck by lightning bolts and sputtered smoke. Bald Horace’s critters weren’t so lucky. He lost three chickens and a baby goat to fiery bolts. With great effort, he managed to make a hole in the heavy, sodden earth to lay their poor singed bodies down. Soon as his back was turned, the mud collapsed in on them. Wild dogs feasted at compromised gravesites in the night, scattering feathers and goat hair all over.
Those poor little things, he told Bernard. They never did the world a lick of harm. I think Aurora Mae’s traveled on. She’s not lookin’ out for us no more. No matter, I still feel her as if she was standin’ next to me.
She’s in our hearts, is what it is, Bernard offered. I’ve been telling you, she’s no ghostly presence. She’s still alive. I know that in a way no rain can erase, no run of luck can alter.
Have it your own way, Bernard. I don’t know much anymore.
By the end of February, the wayfarers came back. The Negro barracks were full again. Bernard the handsome had the workers filling up sandbags. He rode out every morning to the levee first thing to satisfy himself all was under control. The river was higher than ever, but his levees looked in good shape, so he sent Carter around again to sell bags for cash money to panicked croppers. The other Bernard went with Carter to collect the money and make out receipts. They took a couple of Negroes along to unload the bags and free up the wheels when the truck got stuck in the mud. It was nasty work. Bernard the ugly had a small measure of influence with Carter. He made sure Bald Horace was never among the conscripted.
The day came when Bernard the handsome went into town alone and came back pale and shaken. He went to his treasure room up in the attic of the big house and stayed there all night. In the morning, he summoned Carter and Bernard to him. Never had they seen him in such a state. He was disheveled. Great chunks of his thick black hair stood on end. Dark rings had formed under his eyes. His clothes stank of sweat and hooch. He looked at them with the fixed, bright stare of a cornered animal. His voice started out soft, but by the time he came to his final avowal, he was nearly shouting.
There’s flood up north, he said. There’s a crest coming. Seven feet high they say. And two behind it. It’s too late to dynamite. In the town, they’re saying we are doomed.
He pounded his desk with a fist and his voice rose.
But I am not giving up. From now on, all hands are on sandbag detail. I will shore up the levees, and I will beat the tide that’s coming. I promise you, I will not be conquered by this goddamn river. Now get out of here both of you and get those lazy bastards to work.
When they left him, Carter and Bernard went directly to the levee. Bernard climbed up its walls, slipping in the earth twice, rolling back down, getting up again, climbing, climbing until he was high up at the flat. He looked upriver. He saw the crest. It wasn’t a wave, but a slow-moving wall of water, from his vantage point, a ribbon maybe two inches tall on the horizon. The sight struck a spear of ice-cold terror through his heart.
That day every worker on the plantation took up a shovel or held open a bag. There wasn’t any sand left anywhere. They shoveled wet Tennessee clay instead, one murderous shovelful after another. It took three men to carry a full bag up the levee. When night fell, not two dozen bags had made it to the flat.
The next dawn when Bernard woke up in the white man’s barracks, all the Italians were gone. So was the big man’s wife.
They needed more workers. Bernard the handsome and Carter drove into town to comb the docks for labor and returned with a truckful of Negroes. Once those were unloaded, Carter went back for three truckfuls more. Where they got them, no one knew. Bald Horace determined they got them from the jailhouse. The workforce was now comprised of a few dozen old hands and one hundred convicts. There were fifteen white men left on the farm. Each carried a rifle everywhere he went with instructions to shoot any able-bodied man trying to run off. They wore yellow slickers and hats to help identify them through the veil of constant, blinding rain. Two ran off themselves. To keep the rest on hand, Bernard the handsome showed them thirteen bags of gold coins, one for each, bags he kept in a strong box he carried around most days under his arm. When the rain was especially thick and the crest crept forward, he’d take one out of the box and shake it at men with rifle butts balanced against their yellow slickers at the hip, their white faces poking out of yellow bonnets.
Stay with me, he’d yell over the roar of the river, his forelock drooping over his eye, his beautiful lips glistening. Stay with me, and I will make you rich men. Leave me, and the river will still rise. Leave me, and you shall surely die.
After one such occasion, Bernard sought out Bald Horace, whose look of pain as he tried to dump yet another shovel of dirt into a bag put him firmly in mind of engravings he’d seen in one of the doctor’s books on the Delilah’s Dream all those years ago. It was not a medical book but one of poetry, poetry Bernard could hardly fathom, except for the engravings, which were startling, exquisite. The look Bald Horace had that day was precisely that of the picture labeled PORTRAIT OF THE DAMNED. The damned had the same hollowed cheeks, the same agonized grimace. It was as if the artist had known Bald Horace personally.
His heart melting with compassion for his dearest, his only friend, Bernard said, At least if we get out of this, we’ll be rich, we’ll have our bags of gold.
Bald Horace responded, I didn’t notice the mister including Negroes in that distribution.
Bernard blushed. Don’t worry, he said, I swear by the head of Aurora Mae that whatever I get from him I will share with you equally, and she, too, should she appear.
Every day the river got higher. It rose well beyond the flat of the levee, lapping at layers of sandbags, when the rains stopped. The first crest was still coming. It was a ways off yet and didn’t look to be the seven feet reported, even if one accounted for the distance, but three feet would swamp them. Everyone feared a crevasse erupting. Meanwhile, the river spit out geysers or twirled around everything from wagon wheels to hogs in its eddies and whirlpools like it was playing a game of ball ’n’ jacks. One of Ghost Tree’s laborers, a man conscripted from the town, fell in the river and got sucked down before any of them had a chance to throw him a line. He shot back out one hundred feet downriver, crashing to his death on the far bank. The only thing Bernard the handsome could do to keep his men on after that was to shoot his guns at random morning, noon, and night and have his armed men do the same. It kept the others more frightened of death in the next minute than death next week. He had tents pitched up at the flat, so men could work around the clock and he could keep them in his sights. They slept in bedrolls laid directly on the cold, wet ground. He never slept himself. He drank out of a leather sleeve he wore around his chest like a bandolier and paced up and down the levee barking orders no one could hear above the river’s screams. He shot off his pistols to get their attention as much as to intimidate them.
The sandbags ran out. Carter was sent into town to acquire more, but he returned within the hour to report that the main road was washed out from the rain. The earth had had so much, it couldn’t take any more. Run-off ditches overflowed. The mud was like tar. Nothing could get through it. He tried alternate routes, and they were in worse shape. He set out again, this time on horseback, and he was gone three hours. While he was gone, everyone at Ghost Tree felt a fresh surge of hope as each hour passed. Men who’d never had much affection before for the King of Prussia man slapped one another on the back and exclaimed, That Carter. He’s a right clever one. He’ll bring the goods on home, and we’ll be saved. But Carter came back on foot without his horse and in such a condition that no one dared ask what had happened.
The crest was two bends of the river away. It moved slowly enough to rouse the workers to the point of rebellion. Everyone knew when a crest moved that pokey it was because the water beneath raged. Without bags to fill, there was no work. Men sat on the levee staring upriver complaining about the goddamn Jew bastard who’d corralled them and kept them there. Bernard the ugly patrolled the levee with a tighter grip on his firearm when he listened to them talk so. He knew if they ever decided to rebel, he’d be floating downriver along with his name-twin.
We’re all dead men, they said. The boss goin’ to get us all killed. Someone chimed in, I’d rather take a goddamn Jew bullet to the gut than drown like a pig. Others cheered him and concurred. When Bernard the handsome paraded his domain with pistols raised, they cowered instead. Bernard the ugly couldn’t help himself. He was glad about that.
One morning, the men woke up in wet beds. The floors of the tents were puddled. The men of Ghost Tree rose as one and staggered like an army of drunken ants out to the levee’s edge to watch the Mississippi raise a great fist to them. Water spilled over the top of the sandbags. The crest was very close, within the day’s reach. The levee could spring a rip any moment. If they were lucky, it’d happen on the opposite bank. Otherwise, the water was sure to wash them away. There was nothing to do but stare, weep, or pray.
Bernard the handsome had other ideas. He called a meeting of his white men, leaving a skeleton crew to guard the labor. He spoke to them from the front veranda of the big house, using a megaphone so they could hear him.
I’ve studied a remedy they used over to Washington County in the flood of 1912, he said. It’ll save our side of the river, I am certain. What I want you to do is order those niggers to lay down. Lash them together if you have to. They’re the best goddamn thing next to sandbags we got. They’re probably better. Now get back there and get to it.
His men stood before him in shock. Carter was the first to speak. They’re not going to do it, Boss.
Then shoot them. A cadaver’s as good.
No one moved. There was a rumble of discontent.
Bernard the handsome roared displeasure. Do I have to show you how it’s done? Alright, I will.
He went to the back of his house to the outbuilding where the dependency was and returned dragging a mammoth black woman behind him. She was barefoot in a huge apron and dress made of odd swatches of material sewn haphazardly together. Her hair, pulled back by a piece of string, sprouted foot-long spikes in all directions behind her. The big man had her in a death grip by the wrist. Her free arm was up over her face protecting it from the rain that coursed over the roof of the veranda and splashed all around her. The sight of her stilled the men. No one had ever seen a woman that tall, that wide.
She’s like a corn-fed ox, Bernard thought, like John Bunyan’s Babe Blue. She must be six and a half feet tall and hundreds of pounds on the hoof. And because the mind comes up with its own considerations without regard to logic, especially in times of imminent disaster, he thought, she’s like the generator up at the house. How does he hide a thing that big?
Bernard the handsome saw the effect his cook had on the assembled and gave them a mad, drunken smile. This one will do to start, he said.
They made a most unwholesome parade. Bernard the handsome dragging that poor confused woman through the yards up to the levee, his raggedy contingent of rifle-toting men in yellow rubber behind him. They trekked up the wooden planks laid for that purpose to the flat where more than a hundred Negroes gathered, most on their knees praying to Jesus. The big man raised the hand of his cook high in the air as if she were a prizefighter. Her head was down, her clothes were plastered against her. Her free arm bent over her breasts in a futile gesture of protection. She might as well have been stark naked. Her posture made clear she was frightened to be on display in such conditions before a hundred men. The men themselves were as wild and mad-eyed as Bernard the handsome. Some of them stared at her and put their hands down their pants. Surely, she was some kind of offering. Surely, they were meant to feast on her before dying.
Lay down, woman. Bernard the handsome shouted. Lay down and marry the goddamn river.
Her head snapped up. She backed away from him. He smacked her head hard with the butt of his handgun. She fell down to one knee.
A voice cried out. Stop! Stop! and then, ’Rora! ’Rora Mae!
It was Bald Horace who recognized his sister beneath the enormous cloak of flesh she’d amassed over herself like a disguise. ’Rora! ’Rora Mae! he shouted, while Bernard opened his mind to see that Bald Horace was right. It was her. His love. His goddess. On the ground being beat by his name-twin. His heart swelled so, it felt it might break through his ribs. His rifle butt found its way to his shoulder. He took aim.
Let her go! Let her go! Let her go! he said, but Bernard the handsome could not hear him or did not want to.
He continued to beat Aurora Mae over the head, on the shoulders, on the back between her shoulder blades. When still she would not lie down, he yelled out, A cadaver is just as good! and shoved his handgun deep between her massive breasts. Before he could pull the trigger, there was what sounded like a crack of thunder, and he crumbled to the dirt with a large bloody hole trailing smoke at the center of his chest.
Bernard the ugly shot his name-twin twice more, a second time to the chest and once in the head. No one tried to stop him. Afterward, everyone, all 125 human beings assembled on the flat of the levee, took off running. Everyone but Bald Horace, Aurora Mae, and Bernard Levy. The two men helped Aurora Mae to her feet. The three stood clinging to one another over the body of Bernard the handsome. Bald Horace kicked him, and he didn’t move. He’s real dead, Bald Horace said. The other two shook their heads. Without speaking, they bent and rolled Bernard the handsome into the river, watched him bob and sink and reappear until he was no more.
They headed for the big house where pandemonium reigned. Convicts and free men, black and white, ransacked the place, tearing whatever looked precious off the walls, the sinks, the banisters. They tossed clothes through the air and threw any container that might hold jewelry onto the floor to break it. Someone upstairs yelled out, That man, that man there, he hit the jackpot!
There was the sound of a first-class scuffle, a banister cracked, and then the air rained gold coins from Bernard the handsome’s strong box. Men scrambled for them on their knees. Ignoring them, Aurora Mae led Bald Horace and Bernard to the pantry, where they filled their arms with canned goods, knives, whatever was cooked and whatever they could eat raw. They went to the attic, stopping first in a bedroom on the second floor to pick up blankets and pillows. They made a camp up there to ride out the crest. In the next hour, they were interrupted a couple of times by men bursting in to see what they could find, but when they saw Bernard the murderer, their liberator, they backed out bowing as if he were the king of Egypt. Then it was quiet. Even the roar of the river seemed subdued. The men were gone.
Aurora Mae wept in her brother’s arms. Bernard wanted to comfort her himself. He longed to hold however much of her he could grasp and never let go. He wanted to tell her he didn’t care if she’d got as ugly as him. He loved her, he’d always loved her, and if he’d been brave enough to declare himself in days gone by, maybe they’d have found a way to avoid all the tragedy that pursued them. He wanted to apologize for letting her down. He wanted to weep a little and be comforted by her, too. He wanted all of that, and he wanted to know exactly what had happened to her.
There was a horrible noise, a noise none of them had ever heard before and hoped never to hear again, a noise that crashed against the eardrums and ran its talons against that tender tissue drawing blood. They screamed and covered their ears with their hands. It was the sound of the levee dying. A crevasse broke through earth and rock to flood the Delta in mere moments. The currents conquered everything in their path, ripping ancient trees from their roots, swamping whatever man-made object lay ahead. But there was luck in the reunion of that strange little family from Missouri, of Woodwitch, her herdsman brother, and their devoted friend. The crevasse had broken on the opposite shore. The pressure on Ghost Tree’s side of the river was released.
They were saved.
Aurora Mae and Bald Horace fell to their knees. Thank you, sweet Jesus, they said, thank you.
Bernard Levy fell to his, also. It was a position he’d not held often in life, and it felt awkward, shaky. He murmured as he recalled his grandmama did years ago on the mornings her daughter returned home in one piece after a night of carousing with her no-good lovers. Baruch Ha-Shem, he said and a warmth, a strength surged through him. He studied his friend and his love where they knelt next to him.
In a flash, he remembered Bernard the handsome’s treasure chests from which the thirteen bags of gold had been but a pittance. He remembered where they were stored, there in an attic corner behind crates of hooch. Visions came to him of the place that money could find for the three of them to live together in as much peace and security as nature would allow. For the first time since the night he and Bald Horace returned home to find Aurora Mae gone, he had hope.