The Scribe (23 page)

“There, I believe, is my old friend the bishop calling. So let us not end on a bad note,” he said. “We should have some proper benediction.”

He picked up the ledger and turned through its pages. “Yes, here it is. Mister Canby, I have finished my testament. All the names of the dead are in it. You can read it all for yourself at your leisure. Your name graces the last page. But now, before I take my leave, I would like for you to read this passage of reminiscence.”

Billingsley leaned forward with the book outheld. Underwood tensed and reached inside his jacket.

“Where is the Drew boy?” Canby asked.

“All in due time,” Billingsley clucked, and urged the book forward. “Please read. Aloud, if you will indulge me.”

Canby took the book and began reading:

“‘The hounds found Saul before sunset. By dusk he was swinging from one of the live oaks that shaded the barnyard. Father insisted that I be present to witness it. I watched in fascination, as only a boy of my sensibilities might, while Saul
swung and his talismans dropped from his pockets and the tips of his old brogans stiffened and then drooped earthward. Father looked over at me and spoke harshly. He had seen that I was in the manly state and he tossed me his riding coat to cover myself. I still remember vividly the look on his face as he turned away.

“‘That night, in my bed on the upper floor of my father's house, I took my manhood in hand for the first time. In the dark, as I held it and worked the flesh, I felt its tip fork, like a serpent's tongue, and I knew that I had been chosen.'”

Canby set the ledger down on the bench, holding it by the edges. He looked at Underwood, registered the revulsion on his face. He looked at Billingsley and Billingsley began to laugh.

Canby rose and struck him across the face with the flat palm of his hand. Still he laughed. Canby backhanded him, hard enough to hear the teeth coming together, but he laughed on. Behind him, he could hear Szabó shouting, the voices of the bishop and Vernon and his deputies joining the din. Canby balled his fist and began to land blows on Billingsley's face while Szabó rattled his keys, calling his name in that guttural accent, as he struggled to open the cell door. Underwood moved to block the cell door but the deputies pushed him aside and began to grab at Canby's flailing arms.

They hauled him off Billingsley and the laughter continued as they dragged Canby and Underwood down the hallway. “You've broke his teeth!” Szabó cried from the cell.

Canby looked back and saw that Billingsley was grinning, his mouth bloody and studded with cracked teeth. He spit out
blood and Canby could hear the broken teeth clattering across the puncheon floor.

Then the laughter resumed, cascaded and pealed through Spot 12, and echoed through the entirety of the tower itself, it seemed.

“Mine, Canby!” Billingsley screamed. “Canby! You are
mine
!”

T
HE WALK
from Spot 12 to the gallows in the prison courtyard was not a long one, but the procession made it at a funereal pace. Szabó led them, a lantern held aloft in one hand and the execution order in the other, reading it as they went. In his broken English he pronounced the court's sentence haltingly.

The bishop, ashen-faced, walked beside his old friend, speaking to him in a murmuring voice too low for Canby to hear the words. Whether he was administering the last rites or beseeching his friend for the whereabouts of his son, Canby could not determine. But he heard in the voice great sorrow.

Henry Grady stood by the gallows, his pencil and notebook held in hands that hung at his sides. For once, his bow tie was unknotted, hanging loose down the front of his shirt. His face was composed in an expression of public solemnity, but beneath it Canby thought he saw embarrassment, perhaps even a bit of shame.

Vernon watched Szabó and the deputies walk Billingsley up the gallows steps and loop the noose around his neck, then checked his pocket watch.

“Once more, Billingsley,” he said. “Where is the boy?”

Billingsley smiled down at him with his broken teeth, but said nothing. Vernon pulled a cigar from his vest and cut it. Still Billingsley did not speak. Vernon put the cigar in his mouth and shrugged his shoulders.

“We're early, boys, but no cause to wait,” he said as he lit his cigar. He nodded to the jailer and the deputy. “Just be sure you drop him gently.”

They draped the pillowcase over Billingsley's head and asked for last words. “Ah, darkness,” he said.

Then he dropped.

November 14

C
ANBY SAT IN THE WHITE ELECTRIC LIGHT OF
Billingsley's study with the calfskin-bound ledger spread open before him. Next to it on the desk was the bottle of fine whiskey, the unknown vintage, from which he poured himself a dram at intervals, when the reading required it of him. Most of the day gone now and he had been over the bulk of the ledger twice, excepting the passages wherein Billingsley detailed what he had done to the girl at Mamie O'Donnell's and, worse, what had been done to Mary Flanagan. Though Canby could weather the obscenities and blasphemies that riddled the account as he combed through it again, he had only been able to read about the outrages committed on the girls once.

He lingered several minutes over the page on which the names of the victims had been written.
MALTHUS
was spelled out in a descending line on the left-hand side of the page, the victims' names or occupations listed in a corresponding column on the right. Billingsley hadn't bothered with Anse's name, or the prostitute's; they were listed as “pig” and
“whore.” But Mary Flanagan's name seemed to Canby to be burned onto the paper like an indictment next to the
H
. Across the page from the
U
, Billingsley had written, “
Drew
”; across from the
S
, “
W. T. Sherman
.” Canby smiled mirthlessly at the entry for General Sherman.
Too late for that, you son of a bitch
, he thought. But he could not dismiss the entry for the Drew boy. He felt a bone-deep certainty that in the coming days they would find the boy's mutilated body, in someone's well or a back alley. He could not gauge whether that conviction aroused in him more dread or more futility, could only be certain that the world was a far sight better off with Billingsley dispatched from it.

He turned one of the heavy pages and read:

The plantation was the apotheosis of the order the High Father had lost, restored here on earth. The peasants lackeys yankees trash envied it. Hated us for it and I reveled in their hatred until at last they won out. Improbably, impossibly, they won out. But for a long while there we had it. Had achieved it: the planter at the top the center the apex of it all. Judge and executioner to the rest, sovereign of all I surveyed. The big white house at the center. White! I wore white in the daytime and moved naked through darkness.

Hence Malthus, Canby thought, at least in Billingsley's version. The white man was ascendant, but there was no paternalism in it, no trace of noblesse oblige, not even feigned. What the philosopher Thomas Malthus saw as anarchy stayed
by order, chaos held at bay, Billingsley saw as purely the exertion of power. He took another sip of the whiskey and turned the page.

That order was not to be recovered. Pissed shat vomited away by rabble. Unable even to rule themselves. The niggers bad enough but those yankee crusaders even worse. We had the carpetbaggers gone soon as we could. But then Grady and the others began to sound just like them. Not just capitulating to the new order but celebrating it! New men with no lineage all around us—one day stepping off the train and a year later stepping into the mayor's office. Grady's “editorials” singing the vapid minstrelry of his New South. A “new” South! There is nothing new under the sun.

They think money is the final currency. Not at all. Their cotton exposition set up like a debutante ball for this new South they laud. Intolerable. As if being forced not only to attend one's own funeral but to dance a jig on the grave.

Canby riffled the pages, scanning lines of Victor Hugo's that Billingsley had transcribed into his book. All of them from a poem about Satan that the Frenchman had apparently been working on over several years of correspondence with Billingsley. The devil Hugo described reminded Canby of his readings in Milton, yet this fallen angel was somehow both more sinister and beguiling than the character Milton had traced. Canby flipped the pages until they went to blank
paper, then turned back to the last page on which Billingsley had written. Read:

Does it seem pedantic to quote my French friend once more, Canby? Victor catches the spirit of it precisely, I believe: “‘So,” cried Satan, ‘so be it! still I can see! He shall have the blue sky, the black sky is mine.'”

The black sky is mine, Canby. I will see you in it.

SSS—MALTHUS

Canby shut the book slowly, then drained the dregs of his glass. For a moment he studied the crystal decanter from which he had poured, from which the black butler had poured him and Billingsley drinks in this room, those bloodied weeks ago. Billingsley gone now—could Canby summon belief in its existence—to that very Hell whose praises he had sung. The black butler gone, too, no one knew where. When Vernon and the others had come to this house they had found the front door unlocked as though in anticipation of their arrival. And the back door still standing ajar, as though the black man had departed in such haste as to leave the door still swinging behind him.

Canby grabbed the decanter by its neck and was rising to leave with it when he heard a sound, furtive, beneath him. He paused stock-still and waited until he heard it again. The slightest of noises coming up through the floorboards, a faint grinding sound. Very slowly, he set the decanter on the desk and sat back down in the chair, mindful to ease his weight into it so as not to make the wood or the chair's heavy spring creak
beneath him. One at a time, he pulled off his boots, then rose in stockinged feet and drew the .32 Bulldog from his chest holster as he crossed the room.

He found the cellar door at the end of a back hallway and eased it open. He studied the electric switch beside the doorframe for a long moment as he heard the sound come from below him again, trying to assess the risk of going down the stairs in full light, announced. He moved past the switch and began to descend the steps in a crouch, eyes wide to acclimate himself to the darkness.

It was no cellar, he saw as his ducked head came clear of the first story's flooring, but a full basement, bricked foursquare along the house's foundation and eight feet down to the red Georgia clay. Spaced at intervals on the four walls were wrought-iron casements through which the afternoon's waning light drifted in. He saw that the household's foodstuffs were stored here, arrayed against the walls. As his eyes adjusted to the weak light, he saw sacks of coffee beans and canned fruits, a metal tin of raisins. All of it neatly ordered, down to the fifty-pound sacks of rice and shucked corn that were set atop wooden-staved barrels on the floor. Some of the barrels' sides marked with the stencil of Morris Rich's store, others branded from locales more exotic. Fish in brine from a San Francisco merchant, two barrels of chowder from Boston, five-gallon kegs of syrup from Vermont. Bricks and loaves of cheeses from abroad stored on high shelves.

He heard the sound again, scraping, and turned to its source at the base of the west wall. There a hogshead had burst open, the grain inside it spilling out through the split staves onto
the floor. He saw movement in the grain, the whisking of a hairless tail and the working of a mottled black and gray rump. The rat had pressed its head into the gap, burrowing. As it dug for more purchase on the sifting grain its back and haunches rubbed against the lower of the two iron bands that encircled the barrel.

“Hanh!” Canby said.

The rat wagged its way out of the grain, making the rubbing sound again as its back pulled clear of the iron band. It raised its head, quizzical, for a second, until Canby grunted again. Then it darted off the little grain pile, claws scrabbling for purchase, and ran across the floor like a swift-moving shadow to a gap in the bricks through which Canby guessed he could not pass three fingers. It flattened itself against the ground as though boneless and squeezed its way through.