Have you ever eaten monkey? The Cajuns have long considered Louisiana spider monkey a great delicacy. I should know: my husband was a Cajun. They serve it in the traditional manner, heavily spiced with Tabasco. It’s probably for this reason that the creatures move so soundlessly; all you hear is an occasional soft ‘swoosh’ as they swing through the trees, and then the telltale patter of falling water droplets. I was once lucky enough to observe a group of them gathered for the night. What a charming spectacle of domestic tranquility they presented! Clustered along a stout bough, they were engaged in mutual grooming when I came drifting down the bayou. I saw them all huddled together, with their tails twined and dangling beneath the branch in a great thick furry knot. It’s been suggested that tail twining enhances balance, but the primary function, in my opinion, is social. Then they went to sleep, and I shot them – with my camera.
Slavers brought them up from Brazil in the 18th century, is my conjecture. When the ships docked at New Orleans, a few of the creatures slipped off into the wilderness and adapted to conditions there. Nature was bountiful and predators few; in fact, their only real predator is Man, which accounts, as I say, for their shyness today and the infrequency of sightings. But they’re there, all right, way back in the dankest region of the Charenton Swamp, and all you need is a boat, and a great deal of patience, and you’ll find them. I did; I went out to photograph them for a book called Our Endangered Species. It was in the course of this assignment that I first laid eyes on Marmilion.
Marmilion! How sweet the sound — and yet . . . !
I came upon it one warm evening in early September after crossing a blind lake. I had located through my binoculars a wharf on the far shore, and I hoped to find somewhere nearby a fisherman’s shack in which to spend the night. The water was as flat and still as a sheet of glass; behind me the ripples from the boat spread out in long furrows, and only the buzz of the outboard broke the deep silence of the evening. On every side the water was fringed with trees, black against the crimson-streaked sunset.
I reached the far shore. After securing the boat I clambered up the levee and found myself, to my astonishment, at the foot of a great avenue of spreading oaks, from the branches of which hung sheets of fleecy, drifting moss. At the far end, white and shining, stood a pair of pillars flanking the deep-set doorway of what appeared to be a large plantation house. The avenue was thick with shadows and formed a sort of arboreal tunnel. The glimpse of those shining pillars was strangely dramatic, in that lonely place. I shouldered my pack and set off into the obscurity.
It was indeed a plantation house, a massive structure in the Greek Revival style, though in a state of advanced decay. It stood in the center of a patch of cleared ground, and the last light caught it in such a way that the pillars literally glowed against the darkened galleries, with such a lovely soft luminosity that they seemed almost to be immanent with a life of their own. Everything was disintegrating but for a pair of stout brick chimneys, thrusting up through the rafters on either side.
A feeling of great desolation clung to the house, but I decided nonetheless to shelter for the night beneath its roof, such as it was; and coming again to the front, I ascended a short flight of crumbling steps, crossed the lower gallery, and so over the threshold.
I am not a superstitious woman. But as soon as I crossed that threshold I felt something in the house react to my presence, and I stood dead still. But nothing stirred, nothing at all, and after a few moments I went cautiously forward into the gloom.
It was foul with the smell of nesting rodents and rotting plaster. Directly ahead of me, at the far end of the hallway, reared what had once been a grand staircase. I turned off into the front room, which was full of dust and shadows, and in which I found an open fireplace with tall brick pillars on either side. I dared not use it, for fear of setting ablaze the rubbish with which the chimney was undoubtedly clogged. I built a fire on the hearth instead, and cooked a simple supper. Then I leaned my back against the bricks and drank my bourbon in the firelight.
By this time it was completely dark outside. The birdsong of the evening had died away, and the only sounds were those of the insects, a sort of low, steady hiss produced by the rubbing together of thousands of gossamer wings. Nothing else.
The fire burned down, and I must have drifted off. Then suddenly I was wide awake, frozen with fear and with every sense straining into the darkness. The insects had ceased their hissing, and a profound silence lay upon the house. And then I heard it: a scratching sound, close to my head. It lasted for a few seconds, and then fell silent. It was like a nail being scraped by a very feeble hand against a brick. Slowly my terror subsided. The sound persisted, intermittently, for about an hour. By that time I was not so much frightened as perplexed. Was there some sort of creature in the chimney? Was it – absurd question – the creature that had stirred when I crossed the threshold at dusk?
Before I left the house the next morning I crawled into the fireplace and lit a match. The flame threw a brief flickering glow upon blackened bricks crusted with the droppings of birds and bats. A couple of feet above my head the flue sloped away sharply, leaving me only an oblique glimpse of the mouth of the chimney. I crawled out again, still puzzled, and made my way back down the oak alley, where sunlight sifted through the murmuring leaves and splashed in golden puddles on the grass. I was soon upon the water once more, and heading back toward the Charenton Swamp, and its elusive simian residents. I was ill at ease the rest of the day, and had scant success with the monkeys. You see, I had the bizarre impression that something had been trying to communicate with me in the night.
When I got back to New Orleans I spent a morning finding out what I could about the ruined house. Its name, I discovered, was Marmilion, and it was built by a planter called Randolph Belvedere. Randolph had settled the land in 1820 and founded a great fortune on sugar; then in middle age he became a prominent figure in Louisiana politics. A stout man, he was apparently endowed with huge reserves of energy and imagination, and Marmilion proudly reflected his appetite for ostentatious splendor. By the time the house was finished, he had spent six years and $100,000 on it. All the building materials were manufactured on the spot, the bricks baked from local river clay and the great framing timbers cut by slaves from stands of giant cypress in the Charenton Swamp. The furniture was imported from Europe, and was said to have cost as much as the house itself.
Randolph did not have a large family, which struck me as unusual, given the man’s temperament and class. Perhaps the delicacy of his wife, Camille, was the reason. She had been a legendary Creole belle, and apparently retained into old age a petite and fragile beauty. I was intrigued to learn that her correspondence with a sister, Mathilde, in Virginia, had survived, and was stored in the Louisiana State Archives, in Baton Rouge; and I resolved that when I next visited the state capital I would look them up, those letters of the long-dead mistress of Marmilion.
But in the meantime, the publishers of Our Endangered Species were so impressed with the work I had done that they decided it merited a book of its own, to be called The Spider Monkeys of Louisiana. I was delighted, if for no other reason than that it justified another visit to Marmilion. For my casual interest in the old ruin was becoming, I could feel it, somewhat obsessive; you see, I had come upon a very curious fact about Randolph Belvedere’s death – the fact that nobody knew anything about it.
What happened was this: late one afternoon in the summer of 1860 a stranger galloped up to the front door of Marmilion and, without dismounting, announced to a houseboy that he must speak to the master. Randolph was doing plantation accounts in his study; he came to the door in his shirtsleeves, and there the two men whispered together for some minutes. Then Randolph called for his horse, and without a word to anyone, without even taking his coat and hat, he rode away with the stranger. He was never seen again.
It did not take me long to find a pretext for going to Baton Rouge; and once there, it did not take me long to realize that Camille Belvedere was, like the wives of so many planters in the Old South, a deeply unhappy woman. (Perhaps this accounts for my intuitive attraction to her.) ‘These lines,’ she wrote in one of the last letters to Mathilde, ‘are the effusions of a pen directed by the Hand of a Woman whose life has been occupied solely with drudgery.’ Much of the correspondence concerns the unending round of domestic chores that were the lot of the plantation mistress, and with those I need not weary you. What also emerges is that Randolph was away for long periods, and to combat Camille’s ‘disposition to despondency’ the family physician, a man called Oscar de Trot, prescribed laudanum — tincture of opium — the effects of which were little understood at the time. In a letter written several months before her husband’s disappearance, Camille tells Mathilde: ‘I resort nightly to a liberal dose of the black drops. It so relieves my mind, I fear it is impossible for me to exist in tolerable comfort without it.’
My sympathy for the woman was immeasurably strengthened when I read those lines.
Neither of her children, it appears, provided any ‘tolerable comfort’ to Camille. Her daughter, Lydia, was thirty-four and unmarried when Randolph rode away; Camille refers to her always as ‘poor Lydia’. In 1846, at the age of twenty, she had loved a man called Simon Grampus Lamar, whom Randolph, however, forbade her to marry. One night Simon and Lydia eloped. In the course of their flight to Natchez they encountered a flooded stream, and Simon – a gallant fellow, but lacking, unfortunately, both money and land — carried Lydia across in his arms. Six weeks later he was dead of pneumonia, and Lydia never recovered from the shock.
She returned to Marmilion and assumed spinsterhood. It was clear to all that never again would passion touch her, and no suitor ever came calling on Miss Lydia again. She drifted about the plantation like a ghost, entirely immured in her melancholy; and the disappearance of her father had no apparent effect on her at all.
Lydia’s profound lethargy was quite clearly the result of a broken heart; but what are we to think of her brother, William? In the summer of 1860 William was thirty-two years old, a fat, idle, ill-tempered, and dissolute man who seldom left the plantation; and in the face of Camille’s anguish at Randolph’s sudden disappearance he affected a careless nonchalance that ‘grievously vex’d and plagued’ his mother. He rarely appears in the letters, and this in itself is odd. I would hazard that he had been a difficult boy; the task of rearing him would have fallen largely on Camille’s shoulders, and no doubt the relationship of mother and son began to deteriorate at an early stage. (I should know; I’ve had a son of my own.) Southern society has always been rigidly patriarchal, and it must have been clear to young William that his mother’s authority was by no means absolute. He realized that she was merely carrying out Randolph’s orders, and this aroused in him a contemptuous defiance. In fact, it soon becomes clear that William’s personality was a warped and stunted thing, and as he grew older, and became conscious of his moral defects, we can be fairly sure that he lashed out at anyone or anything weaker than himself. The slaves hated him; horses reared and dogs slunk off at his approach. Randolph Belvedere was deeply disappointed in the son upon whom he had hoped to found a dynasty, and no doubt tormented himself with the thought that it was his fault William had turned out as he had. But be that as it may, the upshot was that when her husband disappeared, Camille had no one to turn to but Dr de Trot and his ready supply of ‘black drops’.
And then, in January 1861, Louisiana seceded from the Union. Three months later Fort Sumter was shelled, and the War Between the States began.
I’m what they call in the business a monkey woman. I can photograph anything, but it’s monkeys I’m best at and monkeys I’ve built my reputation on. I owe a lot to monkeys; and helping to publicize the plight of an endangered species like the Louisiana spiders is my attempt to repay some part of that debt. I am, incidentally, utterly opposed to the eating of monkeys.
I am also a Southerner, and like all Southerners I’m obsessed with history. But unlike most, I’m not interested in glory and romance. I’m not interested in resurrecting the Old South in a hazy splendor that far outshines the historical reality. Nor do I cling to the Lost Cause. The Old South is to me an example of a society dedicated to the greatest good for the smallest number. Endorsing such a society I consider the moral equivalent of eating monkeys.
Have you ever noticed, for example, how the slaveowners of the Old South emulated Classical Antiquity? They copied the architecture of ancient Greece and named their slaves after Roman statesmen. Like the Romans they also made sure the women stayed at home and had no control over their own affairs. The Southern gentleman who ‘sheltered’ and ‘protected’ his women – those fragile blossoms, spotless as doves — in fact shackled them; in a very real sense they were slaves, and that young William Belvedere should have detected this, and sought to exploit it, doesn’t surprise me in the least; he was merely imitating his father.
The war changed all that. The war turned everything upside down. Randolph was gone, and William, lacking any inclination to take up arms for the cause, took to his bed with a ‘nervous fatigue’ instead. Lydia Belvedere remained mired in apathetic melancholy, and all the slaves deserted save one, a taciturn fellow called Caesar. Upon his shoulders, and Camille’s, now rested Marmilion’s fate. Many of the great houses had been burned to the ground by the advancing Union army; how could these two, the woman and the slave, hope to turn back such an implacable foe? It is with this tantalizing question that Camille’s correspondence with Mathilde abruptly ceases. No explanation was available; simply, there were no more letters. Imagine my frustration. After three days spent deciphering Camille’s spidery hand in a dusty, subterranean reading room – after immersing myself in the intimate details of her day-to-day existence, and constructing a plausible picture of her unhappy family – just as she faces the major crisis of her life, the letters stop. The source dries up. It was not to be borne. I walked the shady streets of Baton Rouge like a woman demented. One question alone burned in my brain: what happened next?
Late that night, as I sat, by myself, in a little bar on Pinel Street, an idea made its tentative way into the parlor of consciousness. I entertained it; grew warm over it; and went to bed nursing a small flame of hope. The next morning, early, I again presented myself at the Archives and asked, with beating heart, to see the letters of Dr Oscar de Trot. The archivist came back shaking his head. My heart sank. There were no such letters. There were, however, the doctor’s journals; but they were kept in New Orleans.
I left within the hour.
How did Caesar and Camille turn back the Union army? With charm and hospitality – the old Southern virtues. When the inevitable troop of soldiers appeared, Camille was ready for them. The officers were treated as honored guests; they slept in the beds that Randolph had imported from Paris, drank the finest wines in his cellar, dined on wild duck, she-crab, and roast quail. Quite predictably they looted the furniture and plundered the storehouse; but when they rode away Marmilion was still standing, intact but for a few smashed window shutters and a broken pillar by the fireplace. William was in a state of collapse, for he had feared for his life every hour the Northerners were under his roof; and Lydia had been rather roughly handled by a drunken captain from New Jersey one evening. But otherwise there was no damage done. Camille handled the situation superbly, wrote the doctor. ‘She rose to the occasion fully mindful of the responsibility she bore both toward her children and toward her house. She is indeed a plucky little woman, a woman of unsuspected fortitude.’ Patronizing ass.
Marmilion survived the war; but when it ended, the ‘plucky little woman’s’ troubles were far from over. The South lay prostrate, exhausted, a wasteland across which roamed bands of desperate men — landless farmers, liberated slaves, and various shabby remnants of the Confederate army. On several occasions Marmilion was visited by such scavengers. Each time, Camille appeared at the front door and shouted at them to get away, if they valued their lives. Her words at first had no effect; but when she told them that the house had been used by Union forces as a yellow fever hospital, they soon drifted off. Camille went back inside – where Caesar was waiting with a loaded shotgun, as a defense of last resort.
As you see, I wasted no time in getting at de Trot’s journals. I often tell people that the secret to locating monkeys in the wild is to think like a monkey. It was the same with those journals; it was all a question of sympathetic imagination. For to construct a cohesive and plausible chain of events from partial sources like letters and journals requires that numerous small links must be forged – sometimes from the most slender of clues – and each one demands an act of intuition. It’s a project fraught with risk, but it’s the only means we have for constructing a credible representation of historical reality.
Take William. It was for him, now, that Oscar de Trot supplied laudanum, Camille having abandoned the habit soon after Randolph’s disappearance. William, we may be sure, was by this stage little better than a parasite, providing nothing of moral or material value to Marmilion. He was tolerated, I would guess, only because he was Camille’s child, and a Belvedere; precisely the same could be said of Lydia, though she did manage some needlework, and now, it appeared, might even be instrumental in propagating that curious little society inhabiting Marmilion. The one blessing, you see, that Lydia’s apathy had bestowed was that it enabled her to suffer the war less traumatically than others of her class. In fact, apart from the incident with the officer from New Jersey, the war did not touch her at all. Nothing did. It was for this reason that she responded with compliance to the sexual attentions of Caesar.
This development I quickly gleaned from de Trot’s journals. You may imagine the doctor’s emotions as he records the disgraceful information. Imagine, then, his utter horror when Camille subsequently informed him that her daughter was pregnant by Caesar!
As for William, when he heard the news he became hysterical. It was probably the last straw; for I’m sure he was aware, at least to some extent, of just how wide was the gulf between himself and the sort of man his father had been. Perhaps, with the laudanum, he still maintained illusions about himself, rationalized his failure in some manner. But the news that his sister had been impregnated by Caesar — whom William still considered a slave — would have punctured those illusions and revealed to him just how low he had sunk: that he could permit his own sister, under his own roof . . . but I hypothesize. The fact is, William became hysterical and went after Caesar with a bullwhip. It was probably the first time since Randolph’s day that he had attempted to exercise authority in Marmilion; and it was a fiasco. Dr de Trot tells us that William – who was very overweight – came upon Caesar behind the house, and attempted to thrash him there. Without difficulty Caesar took the whip from him, and then lashed him with it three or four times before the fat man went howling like a child back into the house, to his mother, who was the only one who could have persuaded Caesar to desist from inflicting a punishment that had long been deserved. It seems that from then on, William’s pathetic lassitude began to take an increasingly malicious turn, and the object of the new flame of hatred that smoldered in him was, of course, Caesar.
The time came for me to return to the Charenton Swamp and shoot more monkeys. I’ve told you my technique for locating the timorous creatures, and on this occasion I expended more than my usual amount of sympathetic imagination; but for some reason they eluded me completely. Perhaps I expended too much sympathetic imagination, if such a thing is possible. Anyway, I crossed the blind lake and then for hours I drifted through the swamp, but not once did that sudden stirring in the treetops, that soft ‘swoosh’, alert me to their presence. I passed through one of the weird dead forests of Louisiana – the trees turned to gaunt skeletal frames, and the moss hanging from the branches in strips and sheets, all mirrored in the glassy still waters of the aimlessly wandering bayou. By late afternoon the failure to find any monkeys had somewhat dispirited me, and I consoled myself with a few artful shots of dead, moss-draped swamp maples rising from the quiet water. In the Louisiana climate, outdoor exposures have to be relatively heavy, as the high percentage of water vapor in the air acts to absorb and scatter light. It is the same light-absorbing quality that enables the moss effectively to kill off entire forests.
I returned to Marmilion at sunset. In the light of what I had learned about the Belvederes, I was intrigued, as you might imagine, to reenter the theater in which those strange and tragic lives had been enacted. Emerging from the oak alley, however, I was momentarily startled by the sharply defined profiles of the chimneys. How sinister they looked against the darkening sky, rising up quite blackly on either side of the house – which in some subtle way seemed unwelcoming this time, malevolent even – though doubtless my own ill-temper, the weather – which was cloudy and windy – and, in retrospect, the events of the night all conspired to influence my memory of those moments before I entered Marmilion again.
It was the worst night of my life. God alone knows what was up that chimney, but when darkness had fallen, and the wind came up, there was a wailing fit to wake the dead. Not until the first pale gleam of day came creeping through the shutters, which had wheeled and slammed on their hinges all night, did I manage to drift off for an hour or so; the rest of that night I sat up in my sleeping bag, with my back against the pillar, in a state of gradually intensifying unease, as what at first had seemed simply the eerie sounds that the wind always produces in an extensive chimney system slowly turned into a sustained shriek, as of some being in terrible, unending agony; and when it was at its fiercest, and the shutters were banging and from everywhere around me came howls and whimpers and groans – then it was that I seemed to hear, above and beyond it all, the scratching of that infernal nail. That was the worst moment of all. By then the rain had started – I could hear it drumming on the corrugated tin, and dripping through the ceiling – and from somewhere so close that I even began to think it came from inside my own skull, that hideous sound kept grinding and scraping away, on and on through the wildest hours of the night.
When the dawn came the wind died a little and, as I say, I dozed off for an hour or so. I awoke desperately tired, and felt as though I’d barely survived a storm at sea; and I gathered my things and left in haste. I turned to gaze at Marmilion before entering the oak alley; and against the sky of that gray morning, against the driven clouds, the old house heaved and rattled like a thing in pain, like a broken engine, like a ruined heart.
Lydia gave birth to a baby girl in the summer of 1871, on August 24 to be precise; three days later she died. The delivery was long and painful. Dr de Trot had no chloroform with which to ease the mother’s ordeal; nor, one suspects, was he as scrupulous as he could have been about the complete and antiseptic removal of the afterbirth. He was an old man now, and his medical training had been undertaken in the 1820s. In any event, Lydia became infected, and de Trot stood by helplessly a puerperal fever ran its implacable course. Toward the end she apparently began to scream for her dead lover, Simon Grampus Lamar, until the convulsions exhausted her; on several occasions she even saw him at the end of her bed, and rose from her pillow, and beckoned him to come close . . . until, as the doctor records, ‘soul and body could remain together no longer, and she was transplanted to flourish in a more congenial soil.’
In the Old South the aftermath of a death was governed by ritual; both conduct at the death scene and reporting of the death itself reflected strict rules of decorum. Relatives gathered, last words were carefully recorded, and coffin and funeral were chosen to demonstrate the wealth and status of the deceased’s family. That was in the Old South; this was Reconstruction. Lydia died at the center of the bizarre microcosm Marmilion had become, a small world of anguished and embittered individuals, and her funeral was humble indeed. Caesar built the coffin, and an Episcopalian minister rode out to conduct the ceremony. The procession consisted of William and Camille, Caesar, and Oscar de Trot; the doctor’s old nag drew the wagon; and poor Lydia went to her rest beneath a simple wooden cross behind the disused sugar mill in the field beyond the kitchen garden. Her death did nothing to allay the animosity that crackled almost palpably now between the two men in the house – rather, the reverse, for William held Caesar directly responsible for the loss of his sister.
And now the story of Marmilion begins to move toward its grim, inexorable climax. Lydia’s child was christened Emily, and Camille cared for her while Caesar labored in the garden. Almost single-handedly that silent man had brought forth fruit and vegetables from the wilderness Marmilion had been at the end of the war. There were pigs now, and chickens, and a cow; and he planned soon to replant the good field beyond the sugar mill with cane. Perhaps in the closeness of his heart Caesar entertained a vision of Marmilion returned to its former glory — with himself as master. Perhaps he even shared that vision with Camille. The old doctor gives us a picture of the household in this, its last period before the tragedy, with Caesar the devoted father returning each evening from the fields to gaze with mute adoration on the coffee-colored baby Camille tended as if she were her own; while upstairs, soaking in the venom secreted by his own vile heart, William Belvedere bitterly schemed the black man’s destruction. We sometimes forget that the Creole aristocracy was descended from thieves, prostitutes, and lunatics – Parisian scum forcibly recruited to populate the colony in the reign of Louis XIV. We are about to witness the spectacle of one such aristocrat reverting to type.
(May 17, 1872)
The night was no worse than usual. I rose at eight o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek in Thucydides. I said my prayers and ate cake and boiled milk for breakfast. The weather was warm and sunny. I read a sermon and then took a little nap. I ate cowpeas and grits for dinner. In the afternoon I sat upon the necessary chair with scant result. I sat then upon my verandah and read a little Latin. Shortly before five o’clock I saw Caesar the Negroe coming across the fields. He walked like a sleeping man. He carried in his arms a bloody sheet that draped a corpse, and upon his back the swaddled form of his infant daughter. He entered my house without a word, and laid his burden on my table. I was forced to drive off the flies that clustered about it. It was with an exclamation of the deepest sorrow that I lifted the sheet and recognized thereunder the lifeless clay of the mistress of Marmilion. She had been dead some days. The Negroe gazed silently at his mistress for many minutes and though I ardently questioned him as to the circumstances of the tragedy he made no answer. Soon after he left my house, and I was unable to prevent his going. He made off toward the river. God help us all.
Despite the extensive searches that were mounted in the days that followed, Caesar and Emily were never found. Perhaps they got clear away, and started a new life in the North. Perhaps they were swallowed by the Mississippi.
I have no more documentary evidence to offer. What follows is the construction of a sympathetic imagination.
It began, three days earlier, in the big room at the front of the house. Caesar was working there. He was sweeping out the ashes of last night’s fire; or more probably – almost certainly – and this is a leap of the purest intuition – he was working with mortar and trowel, rebuilding the great pillar by the fireplace. William entered from the gallery with the shotgun. He stood in the doorway, and as Caesar went about his work he began to taunt him. I need not go into the precise character of his taunts; white men have been insulting black men in a manner essentially unchanged, I would guess, since – when? – Prince Henry’s African expeditions? The wars between Rome and Carthage? The neolithic revolution of 1250 BC? William Belvedere stood taunting Caesar with a shotgun in the crook of his arm.
Caesar ignored him. William grew excited. Caesar at last rose to his feet, and turned toward his persecutor. It was at this moment that Camille, who had heard William’s cries from upstairs, entered from the hallway. She saw her son pointing the shotgun at Caesar; and she saw Caesar standing by the broken pillar, a big man, physically strong, and unintimidated.
‘Caesar!’ she cried.
This is decisive. This is of crucial importance. For you see, Camille had not cried out to William to desist, to put aside the weapon; she had, instead, seen Caesar as the dangerous man, the dominant man; she had cried out to Caesar to back down, not William – and to that weak, contemptible creature this was the deepest cut of all: that even as he apparently held all the power in the situation, standing under his own roof with a shotgun pointing at a slave, his mother called upon the other to back down.
They both, Camille and Caesar, must have realized her mistake. Caesar stepped forward to take the gun from William; Camille darted between the two men; William, with his eyes closed, fired at his black nemesis – and his mother fell dead at his feet.
Oh, there is irony here, tragic irony; but what happened next? This is a mystery, for William, like his father, like Caesar and Emily, disappeared. They found bloodstains by the fireplace, and a discharged shotgun leaned against the wall. But they never found William.
Randolph Belvedere, in the opinion of Oscar de Trot, was killed in a duel. But what happened to William? I will tell you my conjecture. Consider: Caesar was a black nemesis, an agent of retributive justice; and he saw before him a vicious, despicable wretch, a wretch who stood for all the misery and oppression suffered by his race. That vile creature had just killed his, Caesar’s, only friend and ally; and with her had died his dream of restoring Marmilion to its former glory – with himself as master! Oh, Caesar punished William, of this I have not the slightest doubt, for I’ve had a son of my own. And he made him suffer terribly, I have no doubt of that, either. And he made certain that no one would find him, that the bloodhounds and Klansmen that took up the chase would find no trace of William Belvedere. And William’s spirit would know no rest, this was Caesar’s intention; never would he lie in the soil with his sister, never would his spirit find peace. No. William’s spirit would be trapped, it would be bricked up, to howl in endless torture in some prison of Caesar’s construction – and there, close at hand, lay the tools to do it with! This was my conjecture – that Caesar bricked him up in that pillar by the fireplace, buried him alive, upright and conscious!
Maybe he chained him up in the pillar first, so that William could watch every single brick being fitted into its allotted place. God knows, there were enough chains, and shackles, and manacles, all the grim hardware of slavery, in Marmilion to enchain an army. Or possibly he drugged him first, so that when William emerged from an opiated daze he found himself sealed up tight in his tomb. I am certain he did not kill him first. William died slowly. He deserved to.
And it took three days for the plaster to dry. I am not a superstitious woman, but this was my conjecture. I’d heard him in there, you sec.
The last time I saw Marmilion I came in broad daylight; and as I emerged from the dappled shade of the oak alley, what a quiet glory the old house offered to my eye! The walls were of faded lemon-yellow, and where the plaster had crumbled the exposed brickwork was a beautiful soft red into which, in places, had seeped the grayness of moss. The window shutters and the railings of the galleries were a pale, weathered green; but loveliest of all was the woodwork of the entablature atop the pillars, which had been painted first sky-blue, then pink, then given a final wash of lavender such that it flushed in the sunshine with a delicate, roseate glow. No stone or metal, I now noticed, had been used in the construction of the house; entirely built of brick and timber, and lately touched by the encroaching vegetation, it rose from the soil, so it seemed, organically; and I was awed that despite the heat and damp of the semitropical climate, despite the ravages of neglect, and looting, and war, it yet retained in its decadence such dignity and strength.
I entered. The years had been less kind to Marmilion’s interior. No line was straight; everything sagged and crumbled, and the walls were scabrous with mold, for the rainfall had loosened both plaster and woodwork. I realized, as I picked my way through the ruined rooms, that only the brickwork had resisted the damp. The two great chimneys rose through the structure like a pair of stanchions, or spines.
There were twenty-eight pillars girdling Marmilion, Corinthian pillars with fluted columns of plastered brick and elaborate, leafy capitals. The interior pillars echoed the design, even to the acanthus-leaf motif on the capitals. They were beautiful objects; it was a shame to destroy even one of them.
It was a day’s work with crowbar and hammer to hack and claw that pillar by the fireplace to pieces. But finally I did it, and I found my skeleton. It was beautifully preserved, with not a bone out of place; it was delicate, fragile, white as china; but it was not the skeleton of William Belvedere. Perhaps, once again, I’d exercised too much sympathetic imagination. You see, what I’d found was the tiny, perfect skeleton – of a spider monkey.