The new batch of Royce’s papers was fragmented and semicoherent. There were drafts, illegible hand notations, soliloquies of rage and self-pity, and rapturous encounters with his destiny. There were also a few facts.
Royce’s research traced the origin of the Silent Brotherhood to the Christian Identity movement, which had been rooted in the nineteenth-century British Israelist movement. The British Israelists had been pro-Semites who believed that the Northern Europeans were the lost tribes of Israel and that the Jews were the original tribe of Judah; therefore, the Jews were white and could not be the enemy. But, in the 1920s, the Israelists had evolved into the Christian Identitists, who, caught in a global tide of anti-Semitism, began to declare that Anglo-Saxons were the chosen people, and they devised elaborate theories to account for the existence of the Jews. One biblical hypothesis involved an ongoing fight between the archangel Michael and the fallen angels; a more evolutionary theory postulated that white people emerged from Homo sapiens, but Jews and the dark races emerged from lesser lines of humanoids.
Royce, studying this material, arrived at his peculiar conclusion: the mistake about Jews was the vital flaw in the white supremacist analysis, and anti-Semitism was a disastrous path. Like his mentor, Royce subscribed to the notion that evolution would transform men into gods if the white race could purify itself, but his views about Jews thrust him into open conflict with both Pierce and Mathews.
Each of these three men believed he held the crowbar that would move the rock of history, but Joe Magnus was infuriated that Royce had stepped so rapidly into a leadership position. The most coherent and talented piece in Royce’s papers was his novelistic attempt to imagine his old friend’s point of view:
FOR JOEY
This was how it had always been, Royce in front of him, and Royce knew shit about coons, never sat next to them in school, never faced gooks, never learned that killing could be joyous. He’d only killed Joe’s father.
Joey had despised his father, good riddance, but he hadn’t understood that he would lose his chance to join the Marines and get stuck taking care of his mother and sisters. But then his draft notice came, so he got out of that mess. He loved basic training, loved that it was so hard, and when he felt the thudding of his heart before he slept at night, he felt happy.
Vietnam was stinking and hot and strange, and he learned not to trust anyone. He’d only been in country four months, cited for bravery, made his first kill, when the lieutenant he trusted got wounded. The new lieutenant was a half-breed from West Point, and Joe made one little joke about fragging him and a dishonorable discharge followed. Now he couldn’t ever live in Charleston, but fuck them all, he’d go out West and find the righteous men he’d heard about.
He was a good soldier in the Brotherhood too, until Mathews made him kill a white man. Lonnie mouthed off in a bar about one of the bank robberies, probably so drunk he didn’t even know he was talking. But a few nights later, Joe and another man had to walk Lonnie out into the woods to dig up a cache of arms, but instead they hit him with their shovels and buried him. Not a good feeling.
Then Royce became a star, writing those stupid articles. How could Royce be a leader if he had a gook kid? Something had to be done about Royce’s kid, so Joe started saying that half-breeds needed to be fixed. Not killed, just fixed, so they wouldn’t be able to make more garbage. They clipped the black kid, the one named Stretch, who wasn’t really Jonesie’s, just someone he’d picked up as a pet, and they were going to do Royce’s girl next, but then Royce came in with that fucking snake, and that little doc—he was a veterinarian but righteous—got more scared by the snake than he would have been by a gun. So Royce got to take his kid away.
Mathews decides we have to be separated, so it’s me he sends to Elohim City to meet this Strassmeir guy who knows how to make bombs, and he tells Royce to study poisons and learn to make something called ricin.
Killing Lonnie sounded too detailed to be made up, so I assumed it was an event Royce had actually learned about. His need to understand Magnus was touching but nauseating too, because he could do it with such empathy. I glimpsed once again how difficult it had been for Royce to grapple with his humanity, and to try to extinguish his capacity for personal love.
But this was the most disturbing fragment I found in his papers:
Of course we must breed eugenically. Mixing races dumbs us down and will lead to genetic chaos. How can it be in society’s best interest to make room for the impaired? And the dark races are impaired by definition. Sentimentality is always weakness, Ellen …
Had my brother really written my name in these pages Santane gave to me? Had he addressed me this way, directly? Was it possible that, during all these lost years, my brother and I had remained lodged in each other’s brains like splinters?