In the morning, my head felt as though it were filled with passenger pigeons, and I spent the hour of dawn heaving my guts into a chamber pot. By the time Uncle awoke, I had washed and changed clothes, rediscovering the miniature portrait in the pocket of my breeches. But before I could show it to him, the servants came skulking about, so I decided to wait until our interview aboard the keelboat. We were conducted down to the courtyard garden, where breakfast and Fernand LeBoeuf awaited us. A Negro harp player strummed his instrument beside a whortleberry bush. The gentle music failed to soothe my raw nerves, while the mere shadows of winging warblers made me flinch.
“Ready for another day of the hunt, Sammy?” our host inquired as the Indians filed in with our breakfast.
“My eagerness knows no bounds,” I replied wanly.
“Bon! Today, I shall accompany you. What do you say, William, mon ami?” Shall we all sally forth together in search of Gargantua?”
“Delighted,” Uncle exclaimed.
“On the way back, perhaps we can stop and inspect the slave quarters. You would like that, no?”
“It should be instructive,” I agreed.
“You are very curious how we keep our slaves, no?”
“I am curious about the world in general.”
“I admire your adventurous spirit, Sammy. At 19, I had barely ventured beyond the unknown corners of the world. My heroes were La Salle! Cartier! Champlain! Life is mysterious. Alors! Here I am. Had I an uncle like yours to take me around this wide world back then…. O, well. How do you like your breakfast?”
It was a whitish flesh, bathed in a cream sauce redolent of tarragon, served over a split biscuit.
“Very nice,” I avouched. “What is it? Turtle?”
“Rattlesnake,” LeBoeuf said brightly.
“Excellent,” Uncle declared, missing not a bite. “But ’tis like Chesapeake terrapin. More toothsome, perhaps.”
“The Choctaw cook it in its own venom,” LeBoeuf informed us. I put my fork down gingerly. “It gives the flesh a piquancy like no other seasoning.”
“Has it no ill effect?” I asked.
“Evidently not. The poison must be injected into the bloodstream. Upon the digestion it has no effect but as a carminative.”
“Was this cooked in its own venom?” I asked.
“Of course not, Sammy,” LeBoeuf laughed, a little shrilly. “We are not savages. Not yet, anyway, ha ha…!”
After breakfast, Uncle and I retired to the quay outside the stockade, whilst LeBoeuf changed into his hunting garb. How good it felt to be back aboard our old vessel again, and how I wished we might simply sail away, just Uncle and I back upon our mission. But for a handful of days out of the hundred-odd since we’d left Pittsburgh, almost all had been spent either in the captivity or company of others—Bilbo, the Shannoah, Judge Ravenel, and now LeBoeuf—and it was beginning to dawn on me that what I took to be the normal state of affairs was, in fact, the exceptional, and vice versa.
To be on the safe side, I searched the cabin to make sure no spies were lurking and was rather surprised to find all of our supplies in order. Not so much as a bottle of Judge Ravenel’s Madeira had been filched. If this was reassuring, it also seemed—like everything else about Chateau Félicité—to be highly unnatural. LeBoeuf’s control over his realm and subjects was total, almost godlike. I returned to the deck where Uncle waited impatiently.
“Well, nephew?”
I took out the miniature portrait and handed it to him.
“Do you know who this is?” I said.
Uncle squinted and made a face. “Some gentleman of thy acquaintance?” he ventured with a fillip of sarcasm.
“’Tis the late King of France.”
Uncle examined it again, more closely this time.
“Piffle. It might be anyone. I see no inscription.”
“The robe, Uncle. It is emblazoned with the Bourbon signet, the fleurs-de-lis.”
“All right. What of it.”
“Do you see any resemblance to a person on board this floating palace?”
Uncle squinted at the portrait again.
“Art proposing, Sammy, that LeBoeuf is the King of France escaped somehow to America?”
“No! Look again.”
Bristling with irritation, Uncle applied himself once more without results.
“It is the very spit and image of Lou-Lou,” I finally said. “Observe the weak chin, the hooded eyes, the pointed head.”
“These are common traits of the French race, nephew. Why Lafayette himself had an head like a very acorn.”
“Does LeBoeuf have a pointed head?” I dared to refute him. “I think not. Does Madame? No. But Uncle, I implore you, look. The resemblance is unmistakable!”
He handed it back to me.
“Where did thee get this?”
“What does it matter? I discovered it. That is enough.”
“Thee pilfered it.”
“Very well. I pilfered it. That does not alter the case one whit, sir.”
“It alters the case very much, nephew. We are guests here. And thee hath the impudence to fob off with valuable objects of art! I am scandalized.”
“Uncle,” I replied at once, “you are overlooking the point in question: what if Lou-Lou is really Louis-Charles, the lost Dauphin of France?”
“What if he is?” Uncle retorted.
“Oughtn’t we to rescue him?”
“Rescue him? From what? If this boy is the Dauphin—and I do not for a moment believe it—then I doubt he could be in better hands, nor in a safer place. His parents are dead. Half his own countrymen would wish him dead.”
“But you saw the way LeBoeuf abused him last night.”
“Abuse? I think thee exaggerates. The French are excitable. And thee must admit, the boy behaved like a donkey. Is he not otherwise well cared for, well housed, well fed? I think so. Frankly, nephew, ’twould be impolite to meddle in his domestic arrangements.”
“And what if he is the Dauphin?”
“Then ’tis none of our business, but a matter of French politics.”
“On American soil—”
“And I’m sure he is here on good account, if he is what thee claims, which I wholeheartedly doubt, and let that be an end to it.”
“Very well,” said I, resolved to drop the matter for the time being. “But what about something that is our business, namely, megatherium?”
“What about it?”
“Yesterday, upon the hunting barge, I asked Yago if he had killed many of these beasts and he said he had. Seeking to draw him out, I asked what use his people made of the antlers, and he said they made tools from them.”
“So…?”
“Don’t you see, Uncle? Megatherium has no antlers. Yago lied. He has never seen one.”
“Hast seen one thyself? Perhaps it does have antlers.”
“None were found with the bones, Uncle.”
“Perhaps that specimen of the President’s was of a female.”
“All right! All right!” I cried in exasperation. “It so happens that I asked Madame LeBoeuf if she had seen Gargantua in her riding forays on the mainland. Do you know what she said?”
“Enlighten me.”
“She said she had never heard of such a thing.”
“Perhaps she has no interest in science.”
“Science! She and her husband have dwelt in this part of the world for ten years. Surely in all that time something so large and unusual would have caught her attention.”
Uncle shrugged his shoulders. Evidently the French mannerism was contagious.
“In conclusion, Uncle, I do not think that our quarry is to be found here.”
“Ah!” Uncle interjected, his forefinger held aloft, “Thee saw the pelt with thine own eyes.”
“That pelt was a fraud,” I riposted. “Did you look at it closely?”
“I looked at it,” he said.
“Well, I say it was a counterfeit through and through—an assemblage of dyed buffalo robes. The stitching was in plain sight. Your friend Monsieur LeBoeuf is trying to cozen us.”
“Why? To what end? What have we that he might envy?”
“I don’t know. But I will tell you something else: our first night here I saw Yago leave Madame LeBoeuf’s boudoir.”
“Perhaps he was on some legitimate errand.”
“At half past two in the morning?”
“Obviously, this fellow Yago enjoys the couple’s closest confidence.”
“Enjoys it too much, I’d say.”
“Sammy, they are French, without our scruples in connubial matters. ’Tis none of our business.”
“’Tis my business when a gun is charged so as to blow up in my face. I feel that I am in danger here. I suggest we leave.”
Uncle heaved a sigh and gazed up at the formidable timber stockade that surrounded the chateau.
“We will leave when the Puya sets its seed. No later, and no sooner.”
“But—”
“Tut tut tut, nephew. Now I will tell thee what I think: I confess the pelt did not impress me as authentic. Why did he contrive it? For no more dark and sinister purpose but that he is lonely for intellectual companionship and wished us to tarry here as long as possible. Is that so terrible? I think not. Ah look, here comes Fernand now.”
Indeed, I turned to see LeBoeuf, Yago, and a retinue of Choctaws marching through the stockade gate and out onto the wharf.
“There you are, mes amis,” he called cheerfully. “Are you ready for sport?”
“I think I will fetch my own rifle,” said I, heading below.
The day, which had started fair and warm, grew progressively gloomier as our barge plied upstream. A cool, dank breeze descended out of the north along with a cloud cover that obscured the sun like a leaden curtain. The temperature plunged and I was chilly even in my waistcoat.
As the previous day, we sat in luxurious armchairs upon the platform: LeBoeuf and Uncle in front, myself and Yago behind, whilst a savage trumpeted from the prow.
“’Tis a most novel hunting method,” Uncle commented when we had been under way a while.
“We find that it works superbly,” LeBoeuf said. “The brutes are really remarkably stupid. I tell you what: if by some stroke of ill fortune we do not turn up Gargantua, I shall have Lou-Lou stuffed and you may bring him back to Monsieur Jefferson instead, ha ha.”
LeBoeuf’s joke fell decidedly flat, though Uncle feigned a laugh. I did not so much as crack a smile, and I think our host regretted the insensitive gaffe. He hastily changed the subject to botanicals, pointing to a Magnolia grandiflora on the riverbank.
A mile or so past the limit of the cultivated fields, we came upon another herd of bison. LeBoeuf offered Uncle the first shot, and he rose to the occasion, dropping a bull with one ball through the heart. The other bison thundered off toward the distant woods, and LeBoeuf insisted we let them go.
“I kill only enough for the table,” he declared humanely. “These barbarians who decimate the herds just to watch the beasts die—they turn my stomach. I tell you, if we are not careful, it is possible that we may exterminate this valuable species down to the last individual. Quelle catastrophe!”
Uncle turned back to me, his face aglow, to indicate how LeBoeuf’s sentiments warranted admiration.
“A noble proposition, sir,” Uncle lauded him. “Why, before the war, Owl’s Crossing was infested with game. Now one must ride halfway to Bryn Mawr to shoot a common deer. How right thou art, Fernand. We Americans have been reckless with our God-given bounty.”
Uncle’s infatuation was apparently still in full force.
By midafternoon, we had encountered no giant sloths, despite the exertions of our trumpeter.
“What bad luck we are having,” LeBoeuf said after a long, speechless interval.
We plied upstream another hour, to no avail. Uncle and LeBoeuf chattered endlessly about botanicals. I put down my rifle and began sketching on a tablet. For subject matter I chose none other than the stern-visaged Indian in the armchair beside me, and I quite enjoyed the discomfort that Yago evinced at having his portrait taken. I bent no effort at flattery—in fact, just the opposite—and took the liberty of rendering his gaze slightly cross-eyed and turning up the corners of his lips as if he were smiling idiotically in the manner of Lou-Lou.
“Here,” I said, finishing it up, tearing the sheet from the tablet and presenting it to him. “You may keep it. Hang it on the wall of your wigwam, or somesuch.”
“Merci,” he replied with a reptilian smile, and put it under his chair without a second glance.
Eventually, heaving a sigh and lamenting, “C’est la vie,” LeBoeuf called off the day’s hunt and we reversed course.
“You would like to see where the slaves live, no, Sammy?” he asked.
“Indeed, I would,” said I.
“Bon. Then we shall stop on our way back and visit these simple creatures in their habitat.”
Storm clouds boiled over the treetops in the distance. Soon we reached the boundary of LeBoeuf’s hemp fields and he commanded the oarsmen to make for shore, where a small dock had been built against the bank. We followed a little path between a hemp field and a hedgerow. It led to a patch of woods. Yago shouted a command in Choctaw. Up ahead, music struck up.
We entered an airy grove of shortstraw pine (Pinus echinata), within which stood two cabins. Upon one of the porches, three slaves played a fiddle, a banjo, and a flute made out of a hollow gourd. The tune was quick, but in a minor, mournful key. Several black children sat on the porch steps enjoying pink and green slabs of watermelon. A pig was a’roasting over a bed of coals between the two cabins, and a slave woman turned the spit. Upon the porch of the second cabin stood four other slave couples, men and their wives, I supposed, young, healthy, well fed, and strikingly handsome, taken as an aggregate. I recalled Judge Ravenel’s slaves, and it seemed to me that they had come in more shapes and sizes, short ones, fat ones, lean ones, old ones, while these were all in the prime of life, the men muscular and their women shapely. For dress they wore simple cotton trousers and shirts; the women plain cotton shifts. All were remarkably clean, considering their hard duties. But it was the expression they wore on their faces that made the deepest impression: a look of spellbound emptiness, as though they had been deprived of their very souls.
“Here we are, mes amis,” LeBoeuf trilled, in discordant counterpoint to the strange music.
“’Tis most satisfactory,” Uncle declared.
An Indian passed amongst the slaves with a wooden bucket and a gourd ladle, proffering some dark beverage. They eagerly took the gourd and quaffed the liquid by turns.
“What are they drinking?” I asked.
“A sort of ale we brew for them.”
“Made of what, monsieur?”
“Of the hemp leaves. It has—how you say?—a mildly euphoric effect.”
“Really? Might I try some?”
“I don’t’ think you would enjoy it, Sammy,” LeBoeuf said.
“Perhaps. But I’d like to try it all the same.”
“Guzzle, guzzle,” Uncle quipped. “The lad is turning into a regular sot.”
LeBoeuf told Yago to summon the bucketeer. The Indian brought the liquor to us. He looked confused. Yago commanded him again in the savage tongue, and he scooped up a ladle of the brownish liquid. I took it from him and drained the gourd. The brew tasted like extremely strong tea, very acrid, though the bitterness was masked by a heavy lacing of molasses.
“Ah, how refreshing!” I remarked. “I’d like another.”
“I don’t think so, Sammy—”
“Monsieur, I thirst unto a dither. Please.”
LeBoeuf shrugged his shoulders. Yago told the underling to dip another gourdful. He did so, but proffered it reluctantly. I took it and quaffed the contents in four swallows.
“Thank you,” I told the footling. He withdrew back to his duties. LeBoeuf coughed into his sleeve.
“Why don’t we look inside a typical dwelling?” he suggested.
We followed him to the cabin where the musicians were playing and climbed the steps. Here, I realized with a pang of recognition, were the same musicians who had awakened us the past two mornings in our apartment aboard the floating palace; only now they were attired in rustic garb instead of the house livery. If Uncle recognized them, he did not say so. LeBoeuf opened the door and we stepped inside.
It was as neat as a parsonage. In one corner was a wooden bed, furnished with bedclothes of a quality not often enjoyed by common slaves, at least not the slaves I had been acquainted with. Upon the wall hung a straw hat. At the opposite end of the one-room dwelling stood a hearth, equipped with all manner of utensils and conveniences. Either the inhabitants of this cabin were fastidious unto absurdity, or there had never been a stick of wood fired in this particular hearth. It was as clean as a gun barrel—not so much as a fragment of charcoal or a single ash sullied the brick within. I began to feel a warm sensation in my belly, sort of a pleasant glow, so to speak. The hemp ale was taking effect.
“These slaves are certainly tidy,” I observed.
“They are excellent housekeepers,” LeBoeuf replied.
“Superlative, I would say.”
“I confess, we asked them to take special pains on your account.”
“I see. But, tell me, monsieur: this cabin is a dwelling for two persons, correct?”
“Yes. A slave and his wife.”
“There are more than a dozen adults outside, and as many children. Where do they all live?”
“Elsewhere, of course. They are visiting.”
“I see.”
“Their cabins are scattered all about these holdings. They like it better that way.”
“How do they keep them from running away?”
“Running away?” LeBoeuf laughed, as though the idea were nonsensical. “Why would they run away?”
“Why?” I echoed him with equal incredulity. “Because they are slaves. They have no freedom.”
“Bah,” LeBoeuf scowled. “Freedom is an overrated thing. They are happy. Look, what is more important: the freedom to live in misery, or happiness, even if that happiness is imposed. I tell you, Sammy, I have seen many a free European peasant who dwells in the uttermost affliction. On the other hand, we are so far away from anywhere here—where would they run to? They have not the slightest knowledge of the world without, nor even of where they are in relation to it. This is their world.”
“Yes,” Uncle entered the discussion, however reluctantly, “but I thought thee was in the custom of letting them earn their freedom.”
“I do follow that practice,” LeBoeuf agreed with mounting annoyance.
“Freedom is very precious to us Americans,” I persisted.
“You Americans make too much of it,” LeBoeuf retorted. “Why, it is you very Americans who have perfected the very business of slavery, no? Who have devised an entire economy based on the exploitation of African human beings! Eh, my young friend?”
Though I took perverse pleasure in provoking the Frenchman’s ire, I could not dispute further without sounding like a spouter of cant.
“Not all of us are slavers,” was all I could manage before letting the subject drop.
The warm feeling in my belly had suffused to my extremities. It was a kind of intoxication, but nothing like the stuporous transports of whiskey. The room seemed to swell with light. LeBoeuf had never looked more like a bird of prey.
“This way, messieurs,” he said dryly, and we followed him outside, thence into the second cabin, which was practically identical to the first. On the way out, I noticed that the three alleged field hands on the porch were none other than the actors who had played Cassio, Roderigo, and Iago on stage the night before. It took me a moment to recognize them without their masks of white paint. One of their wives, moreover, was the very girl who had acted Desdemona. What we were inspecting, I realized, was nothing less than a complete theatrical—the piney grove with its tidy cabins an elaborate stage setting. LeBoeuf’s audacity was boundless. No, diabolical! Furthermore, the sham was so brazenly obvious—to me, at least—that it was as though he were daring us to swallow it.
“Very nice, Fernand,” Uncle said, and I could barely believe my ears. “’Tis a model of liberal management.”
“I am so glad you approve, mon ami William. And you, Sammy?”
“If half the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas were as kind-hearted as you, Monsieur LeBoeuf, then all the Yankees of New England would throw over their farms and chattels and volunteer to become slaves.”
“You swell my head,” our host feigned modesty. Far away, thunder grumbled lowly. “To the boat, my dear comrades, and back to the center of the universe!”
The boat trip back to the floating palace was, for me, stupendously strange. By the time we reboarded the hunting barge, the hemp tea was in full force, raging in my brain unlike any tonic, physic, or poison I had ever met with. It quite surpassed those doses of laudanum given me by my dear papa when, at age thirteen, I had tumbled out of an apple tree and broken my arm in two places and the bone had to be set with a fearful yanking.
All objects—trees, Indians, what-have-you—seemed to pulse with the beating of my heart and to emanate an inner light so that each seemed surrounded by a nimbus, like the spars of a ship at sea that glow with Saint Elmo’s fire. Never had I seen colors so vivid. Even in the gloom of the gathering storm, every leaf, every bird glimmered with awful brilliance. I felt as though I were seeing the world with new eyes. Indeed, the very strangeness, the wonder of existence itself, stunned my senses, so that all I could do was exclaim such silly utterances as “O, my…!” and “Gad…!” and “Oooh…!”
“What’s that, nephew?”
“Those flowers on yonder bank.”
“The Pogonias?”
“Yes, those pink things.”
“Well, what about them?”
“They are amazing.”
“I’m glad thee has finally gained an insight on the lure of botany,” Uncle quipped, and LeBoeuf might have laughed too, though the sound I heard emanate from his mouth was a spine-chilling sort of cackle. The two resumed their avid conversation. I could not follow it to save my life. Though part of my brain recognized their sentences as belonging to the English language, they might as well have been two tom turkeys gabbling over nuts.
Every blossom or flitting finch my eye fastened on seemed fraught with the deepest meanings, a contemplation of which was like entering a magical tunnel, but which required strenuous force of mind to escape. It was not altogether pleasurable. There were moments when I feared for my sanity. The wonder is that I did not conjure up the sight of browsing sloths along the way, so distorted and fantastical were all my impressions. But I did not, and shortly we were berthed before Chateau Félicité, which, of all the sights besieging my brain in the preceding hours, was, without a doubt, the strangest vision of all.
“Woodsman! O, Woodsman!” I cried upon entering the dining room.
It was eight o’clock. A nap and a bath had restored my wits considerably, though everything still pulsed and glowed somewhat. Sitting at table now was our late acquaintance—nay, savior—the noble Woodsman, whom we had last seen departing Shannoah-town on a whirlwind.
“What ho, friend!” I greeted him, but he did not respond. Then, stepping closer I saw what terrible misfortune had befallen the gallant nimrod since our last encounter: all around his eyes were frightful scars and scabs, and the eyeballs themselves, though still residing in their sockets, had turned milky white, like a couple of hard-boiled eggs. “O, Woodsman!” I lamented. “What cruel savages have undone you?”
“It is no use,” LeBoeuf put his hand on my shoulder. “He cannot hear.”
“O, no! Gone deaf and blind, both?” I despaired. “Fate, you are a cruel mistress!”
LeBoeuf sighed and nodded ruefully.
“What has happened to the poor fellow?” Uncle asked.
“Wait—”
The Woodsman sniffed the air, his nose twitching like a fox’s reading the forest breeze.
“Why, my two stalwart friends from Shannoah-town!” he exclaimed cheerfully and in robust good voice. “How capital to be back amongst you. LeBoeuf, I tell you these chaps treated me to a ’possum ragout at their campfire that was the equal of your fine victuals any day. You’ll be glad to know that your companions—that tall fellow and his’n—are safe and sound on the Ohio. I come upon ’em some ways above the falls of the Dismal. Sick as dogs they were, but mobile. You’re probably wondering what has happened to my eyes. No, don’t protest. I shall tell you. I had the misfortune to have been attacked by a great horned owl whilst rambling to Blue Jacket’s Town hard by Fort Defiance on the Great Maumee. I believe the owl meant to attack my hat, thinking it a live skunk. There is a lesson in this twist of fate, my friends. Choose your headgear with care. It is a shame that I had to strike upon it the hard way, but that is life, eh? I’ll get around all right. Still got my nose, anyway, which is what a fellow needs more’n eyes when he sojourns at this happy outpost where the victuals are mighty fine.”
His olfactory organ recommenced twitching, this time in a violent manner.
“Why, either a bower o’pokeweed blossoms or the lady o’the house is a’coming this way,” the Woodsman declared.
The door to the dining room was thrown open and in marched Madame LeBoeuf in another stunning gown of the sheerest silk. Her face, however, was flushed with emotion and her manner very agitated. Yago followed close on her heels, his nostrils flaring. At the sight of the Woodsman, he flinched visibly. Madame seemed likewise startled to find the gallant wanderer at table, and equally aghast at his injuries.
LeBoeuf called us to the table and rang a little handbell. The servants brought on the first course along with an ewer of vin rouge. Our host guided the Woodsman’s hand to his goblet so as to inform him it was filled. It nearly broke one’s heart to see the Woodsman so pathetically reduced in circumstances, though he himself evinced no self-pity.
“Where is Lou-Lou tonight, Monsieur LeBoeuf?” I inquired.
“He is ill.”
“How unfortunate. What seems to be the problem?”
“Carbuncles.”
“Perhaps I should stop and visit him after supper?”
“I don’t think so, Sammy. Too much stimulation may hinder his recovery.”
Two little brown morsels were tonged upon our plates and a rich reddish sauce spooned over them. The meat had a nutty flavor, while the sauce was redolent of sassafras.
“Very nice, Fernand,” Uncle pronounced. “What is it?”
“Les chauves-souris en papillote,” LeBoeuf said.
“Bats!” I said, gagging.
“Myotis,” Uncle offered the Latin, examining a morsel at the end of his fork.
“Myotis lucifugus,” LeBoeuf specified. “The little brown variety, cooked in his own wings, à la Chateau Félicité, daubed with sauce du bois, Americain.”
“Why, this is bat,” the Woodsman now declared, munching and inhaling with great relish. “If there’s anything I hanker for after a spell in the territories, it’d be a fine plate o’bat. This is first rate, LeBoeuf.”
“Tonight we play a little game at table, no?” our host took a fresh tack. “Would you enjoy a game, Sammy?”
“Certainly,” I agreed without enthusiasm.
“Good,” he declared. “The object of this game is to describe your vision of the future here in America, what it will be like, what it will look like, how people will organize society, and so forth. Do you follow me?”
“An admirable amusement, Fernand,” Uncle said. “But how far into the future shall we prognosticate?”
“Not so near that it might restrict the imagination,” LeBoeuf said, “nor so distant that the same imagination might run wild. Let us say 150 years. Project your minds to the date 1953, mes amis and mon cher. What will life be like in the time of our great-great-grandchildren?”
“Now, the Wyandot, who love good victuals even more than they like to make war upon their neighbors, the Kaskaskias, will take a silver-haired bat and deep fry him in rendered buffalo lard,” the Woodsman related, sadly oblivious to the actual drift of conversation. “They sauce this crispy bat in a sour jam made out of crushed serviceberries. That is about the best eating a man might find from Virginny to the Big Muddy.”
“Who would like to begin?” LeBoeuf asked. “Sammy?”
I hesitated.
“If you like, I shall start,” LeBoeuf then offered. “Perhaps it will spur your imaginations. What will this place be like in the year 1953? Hmmmmm….”
The Indians brought on another course: terrapin cutlets sautéed in lemon grass and butter.
“I see in my mind a society of perfect brotherhood, whites, blacks, and Indians all coexisting in harmony and mutual respect. All former slaves have worked themselves free, or bought their loved ones out of servitude. The Indians of every nation have been absorbed into the mainstream of society. Great cities have sprung up in these woodland wastes, each city planned and orderly, laid out like a great wheel, with broad avenues rolling forth from the hub—”
“What is at the hub of each city, monsieur?”
“A shining university, a seat of learning,” LeBoeuf elaborated, his eyelids narrowing. “Yes, a veritable cathedral of knowledge! Away with the craven, jealous gods of old Europe, the enslaving theologies and theocracies, doctrines, sects, bishops, popes! Away even with government itself! In the society of learned men, individuals will govern themselves. Crime will be unknown because there will be sufficiency for all. No one will envy his neighbor—”
“Thy future sounds like heaven, Fernand,” Uncle twitted him.
“Just so, William. Humanity can only improve, spreading justice, knowledge, peace, and plenty where yesterday was barbarism, ignorance, strife, and poverty. Who knows, but even death itself will have been conquered and men shall live forever. Is that not the essence of heaven, as we understand it?”
“It was once my pleasure to sojourn with the Otos up Missouri way,” the Woodsman injected nostalgically. “They have a way with bat. They take the critter, skinned and drawn o’course, and stuff him full of sweetwater clams. Next, they daub him in Missouri River clay and bake him in a firepit. An hour later, you take out your bat, crack his hardened clay casket, and there you have an unsurpassed delicacy. This turtle is outstanding, LeBoeuf.”
Our host patted him on the shoulder to express his appreciation.
“Who will be next? Sammy?”
“Very well,” I agreed and drained my wine glass. “By the year 1953, cities will stand in this wilderness, perhaps even upon the site of your hemp fields, monsieur. They will be populated by crude, ignorant, uncultivated boors—”
“Nephew!”
“No, William. It is his vision, for better or worse,” LeBoeuf said. “Continue please, Sammy.”
“Their sole occupation will be vice. Drunkenness will be epidemic. Men will sell their wives’ favors for a pint of whiskey. Outside these cities, a landed gentry will work their holdings in constant fear of confiscation by an oligarchical government of swindlers and lawyers.”
“What of the Indians?” LeBoeuf asked.
“Driven north to Canada.”
“How do you like that, Yago?” the Frenchman asked his adjutant.
“I shall miss these forests of my ancestors,” Yago replied.
“Now, your Sacs and Foxes of the prairie do not esteem bat in the slightest,” the Woodsman injected once again. “In fact, they abhor it as a viand. What they like is grasshoppers. They roast ’em in a pan like groundnuts. The taste is similar, as a matter o’fact. I have et ’em once, my friends, and that was enough. Whatever the flavor, you always know that you are eating a bug. Give me a bat any day, says I.”
The servants removed our turtle plates and brought on the deviled buffalo tongue.
“My dear Marie, it is your turn.”
Madame LeBoeuf sighed morosely.
“The future,” she said in a low, spiritless voice, “is a green hell of endless forest, uncouth savages, dull evenings of useless prattling, and beautiful women pining away of ennui.”
“Ha ha,” LeBoeuf feigned a laugh. “You jest, ma chère!”
Madame shrugged petulantly.
“And you, Yago?” LeBoeuf turned to the Indian, obviously shaken. “What is your vision of the future?”
“We live one day at a time,” he replied.
“You need not spare my feelings, nor those of anyone present. Go ahead. Be frank.”
“I see no future,” he said, adding, “it is a white man’s idea.”
“But surely you can project ahead. When I arrived here a decade ago, and we began to build Chateau Félicité together, you and I—why, that took planning, the ability to envision something where there was previously nothing.”
“This planning was yours. I followed orders.”
“Do you mean to say that you had no more idea of my aims than … than a bird in the tree? I am shocked. What a rats’ nest of pessimism we have here tonight!”
A silence weighed on the table like one of the night miasmas that settle over a southern river. The Indians brought on a course of salad: blanched Florence fennel and chicory dressed in vinegar with chopped egg.
“This nation of ours don’t know it yet,” the Woodsman declared, “but it has got a great gastronomical future ahead of itself. Forget your El Dorados, your dreams of Injun cities paved with gold. Look to your bellies, my countrymen. Look to your tubers and squashes of the field, to your fat sage grouses of the prairie, your buffalo beeves and pronking pronghorns, your giant catfish of the Mis’sippi channel, your wild turkey cocks, your parti-colored trouts, your huckleberries, your spring fiddleheads. There is your futurity! You can’t eat a hunk o’gold like you can have at a nice sautéed bat. No sir.”
LeBoeuf sighed and patted him on the arm. “William, mon ami,” he said wearily. “It is your turn.”
“I see,” Uncle’s brow knitted in concentration, “the rise of a Great Age of Science. A thousand and one practical inventions will improve human life, setting men free from the drudgery of the ages. The nation will stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the frozen north to the jungles of Yucatan. America, with its numberless miles of coastline, its forests, from which come a limitless supply of oak, pine masts, spars, and pitch, will rule the seas. Balloons will traverse the Blue Ridge hourly, and people will think nothing of traveling an hundred miles in a day. Great workshops shall arise in our cities and great smelteries for our native ores—”
“What about Negro slavery, Uncle,” I interrupted his reverie to inquire.
“Perhaps this ‘science’ you speak of so admiringly will find a way to turn them white,” Madame inserted acidly.
“Slavery will be abolished,” Uncle overlooked her remark. “Excuse my frankness, dear friend, but—”
“No apology is necessary, mon ami, for you are right. I agree that the practice is morally insupportable in the long view.”
“Yes,” I now put in, “but, monsieur, who will then till your hemp fields?”
“Perhaps I will no longer be in the business of growing it,” LeBoeuf said.
Dessert arrived: caramelized orange segments tucked into meringue nests and topped with filiments of candied zest. Upon my first forkful of this sweetmeat, I felt the familiar and sickening crrrack of a tooth giving way. Pain cleaved my skull like a bolt of lightning in a peaceful sky. I spit the sugary fruit onto my plate and clutched my jaw.
“O!”
“Etes-vous bien?”
“Oaaah!”
“Speak, nephew!”
“Hmph tmph!” I groaned.
“I think he has broken a tooth,” Madame ventured.
“Quelle douleur,” Yago said.
“If you come with me to the library, I shall examine and treat this tooth,” LeBoeuf declared.
“Aagghh!” I cried in pain and fear.
“This is as toothsome a treat as ever I et,” the Woodsman observed.
“Let us not waste another minute, messieurs,” LeBoeuf said and rose out of his seat. “Vite!”
Uncle and Yago helped me up. Between them, I staggered out of the dining room into the library.
“Sit him there,” LeBoeuf said, directing us to a claw-footed velvet chair into which I was deposited, groaning. Orders were issued in Choctaw. The servants scurried hither and thither. A small round table was brought forth and covered with clean linen. A white chamber pot was placed on the floor beside my chair. “Use this to spit into,” LeBoeuf told me, removing his frock coat and rolling up his sleeves.
“Hast thee also mastered the art of surgery, Fernand?” Uncle exclaimed in the blindest admiration. The mere word “surgery” was like a knife twisted in my belly.
“Iieeyyaahh!” I whimpered.
“Don’t be afraid, Sammy,” LeBoeuf reassured me, a bony hand upon my arm. “Yago, les spiritueux!”
The Indian fetched a bottle of greenish brandy and poured a monstrous large draft in a crystal goblet.
“Drink it all,” LeBoeuf advised me. I took the glass. The liquor within was so powerful that the fumes alone made me dizzy. I quaffed the entire measure. It entered my bowels like lava and left me gasping for breath. “Excellent. You are a model patient. Encore, Yago.”
He poured another. I downed it just as readily. The pain in my jaw seemed to subside a little. Several Indians reentered the library with a rolling wooden cart. Its wheels creaked ominously. Set into the top was a kind of washbasin covered by a silver lid. Steam wafted up from the lip of the basin. On a shelf below were three spirit lamps, so that the whole apparatus was like a great chafing dish.
LeBoeuf tied a clean linen bib around my neck. It smelled of soap and sunshine. A warm glow enveloped me. The pain diminished another degree ’til it was hardly noticeable.
“Les lumières, s’il vous plaît!” LeBoeuf commanded. The servants fetched candlesticks and candelabra from all over the room and stood about my chair holding them. “That’s nice and bright,” LeBoeuf observed and rubbed his hands briskly. He lifted the cover of the chafing basin and a cloud of steam mushroomed toward the ceiling. Using an elegant set of silver tongs, he commenced extracting various surgical instruments and set them, one by one, upon the round table to my left. His seeming expertise was reassuring. The pain in my tooth had just about completely subsided by now, though I dared not suck on it or explore the tender site with my tongue.
“Why dost thee boil thy tools, Fernand?” Uncle inquired.
“It is my belief that infection is caused by what is called ‘bad atoms’—les particules malicieuse—that are invisible to the naked eye, but that, unseen by us, are everywhere present: in the air, the water, the food we eat, upon our clothing and furniture, even on our very bodies and our exposed tissues. The mouth is a veritable sewer in this respect. Boiling the instruments kills these tiny creatures, thus reducing the chances of invasion.”
“Tiny creatures…?”
“Have you not looked at a drop of pond water under a magnifying lens, mon ami? And seen the little water bears?”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you know there are organisms so small that they compare to a water bear as it compares to us?”
“I have not seen them.”
“Nor did anyone see the water bear until that Dutchman invented his microscope. But I tell you they are there, these bad atoms, and—”
“Ahhgghh!”
In the process of gesturing, LeBoeuf had bumped me with his elbow upon the inflamed side of my jaw. I bellowed.
“Quickly! The patient!” LeBoeuf cut short his theorizing and seized a shiny, pointed silver probe off the adjoining table. “William, will you assist?”
“Of course, but—”
“No experience is necessary. Yago!”
“Milord?”
“More spirits.”
The glass was held to my mouth and the liquor virtually poured down my throat.
“Open wide, Sammy. Don’t be afraid. Wider. Come now, young fellow, I’m not going to hurt you. Wider, I say! That is not sufficient. A little more….”
I was terrified, despite the brandy, which had my brain a’reeling. The mere sight of that pointed silver probe in LeBoeuf’s bony hand was like seeing the blade of death in the hands of the exterminating angel.
“This will not do,” LeBoeuf muttered. “Hercule! Cerbère! Plus vite! Saisez son tête!”
Two of the hulking Choctaws stepped forward and grabbed my head, forcing my jaw open. LeBoeuf slipped a small wooden block into the right corner of my mouth.
“Much better,” LeBoeuf observed. “Mon ami, if you will just step behind me and hand me the instruments as I call for them.”
“Whatever thee sayest, Fernand. Courage, Sammy.”
“Achille! Ulysse! Closer!”
The Indians leaned in with the candles. LeBoeuf and his ghastly probe descended. It looked as big as an harpoon. I was too frightened to even close my eyes. Nobody could prevent me from whimpering, however, which I kept up energetically. (I sounded very much like my childhood companion, Ichabod the water spaniel, after his interview with a porcupine.)
“Retractor,” LeBoeuf said. Uncle rummaged indecisively among the implements. “This one,” LeBoeuf turned ’round and grasped it himself. It was a flat silver flange.
“Sorry,” Uncle said.
“You have a tongue like a Smithfield ham, Sammy. See if you can relax the muscle somewhat, eh?”
“Mmmmpphh!”
The probe now entered my mouth. The chink of metal against enamel was audible as LeBoeuf prospected the site gently.
“Aha!” he said. “Here is the rascal. The second molar. Right … here!”
I felt, suddenly, as if someone had driven a tenpenny nail into my tooth, though it was only LeBoeuf inserting the tip of his probe into the offending denticle. Stars wheeled in my brain.
“There is an enormous cavity here, amid the buccal and lingual cusps. Very nasty. The anterior surface is partially collapsed. The pulp is infected. It looks like we shall have to clean it out right down to the roots—”
“Hmmppphhhhh!”
“That’s right, Sammy. It is a delicate procedure. But you are very lucky, you know, that the calamity happened here, at Chateau Félicité, where treatment is available. Yago!”
“Milord…?”
“The treadle, s’il vous plaît.”
Yago went to the steam-wagon and from a cupboard in the rear produced a strange contraption of wooden armatures connected by silken cables and little pulley wheels, and finally to a foot-operated double-treadle. A telescoping metal crane was raised up at a corner of the steam-wagon, and the armature hung from it.
“Do you like my machine, William?”
“’Tis a marvel, Fernand. What does it do?”
“I call it the Excavator. It is a precision drill, designed and built by myself.”
“Elegant,” Uncle pronounced admiringly.
“Oreste! Man the treadle!” Another Indian sat before the foot pedals and commenced pumping. The silken cords began racing squeakily around the silver pulley spools. LeBoeuf took up the armature. The whole fearsome contrivance swung easily off its supporting crane, as articulate as a human arm. He held the tip like a pencil. “You may feel a slight pinch, now, Sammy,” he warned me and leaned forward with the Excavator.
Ye gods, a pinch! It is a good thing that human beings are equipped with amnesia when it comes to pain. We remember in the abstract only that it was either mild or terrible. What I was subjected to in that velvet chair, therefore, defies exact recollection. In a few words, I wished I was dead.
LeBoeuf reamed me for minutes on end. The brandy was of no avail. I was merely wide-eyed drunk. And though I could not describe the pain if I wanted to, I do vividly remember the odor of burning bone as LeBoeuf guided the Excavator deep into my jaw. Finally, he hung up the awful instrument on its crane and peered inside my mouth. Behind him, Oreste, the Indian, panted at his treadles.
“The rattails, William.”
Uncle looked over the assorted implements, baffled.
“These,” LeBoeuf said, pointing to a silver case the size of a pencil box. Uncle opened it. Within was a set of calibrated wires set into little bone handles.
“What are they?” Uncle asked.
“Miniature files,” LeBoeuf told him. “Let me have the number five please. Ah, good. You see, now that we have reached the deep interior of the tooth with the Excavator, I shall use these rattails to enter the roots and pull out the inflamed nerves—”
“Iiyeeeeeh!” I cried.
“Yes, Sammy, this diseased tissue means nothing but trouble. You are correct to be unhappy about it. In a little while it will all be gone. Why go to all this exertion, you want to know? Well, we always try to save a tooth if possible. I am appalled by what passes for treatment these days. Yank, yank, yank! That’s all they think about. Perhaps that is why they call them Yankees, no? Ha ha! Pull a tooth, however, and you invite disaster. All right now, this may pinch a little.”
LeBoeuf descended with his number five rattail. It felt as though someone was driving a red-hot poker through my jaw. How many times he repeated this procedure, I cannot say for certain, but we know from consulting the anatomist’s chart that the molar in question has three roots, and he reamed each canal with successively larger calibrations of rattails until he pronounced the whole thing “proper”—clean.
Some minutes after LeBoeuf put down his last rattail, I finally swooned into the sweet nullity of oblivion. When next I opened my eyes, I was back in my bedchamber, in nightclothes, and the birds were twitting outside my window in a sickly green-gray dawn.