On the back steps Grandmother stands, waving, calling soundlessly. She points at the sky and gestures for me to come inside. As I look up, a shadow suddenly covers the garden and the first drops begin to land on my forehead. My legs won’t move. I grab my right thigh with two hands and try to lift it. The rain showers heavier, splattering my khakis with pink spots. The rain is not water. It’s red, warm. Blood. I scream and hear nothing. Looking up, I see Grandmother closing the last storm shutters on the back porch. My clothes and hair are drenched with blood. It fills my eyes faster than I can wipe them with my sleeve. My legs begin to move. Blinded by the blood, I stumble across the field, trip and fall over one of the scalps, which breaks loose and rolls over, revealing the face of a Cherokee warrior a few inches away between my hands. The lids blink open and solid black eyes peer into mine. Something forces my head down. The Cherokee’s mouth, full and feminine, parts slightly, sensuously. His tongue traces his lips, then reaches out and licks blood off my own. Clawing my fingernails in the dirt, I twist away, drag myself across the field toward the lawn and the house. As I pass, each of the scalps pops out of the ground, pushed up by the heads of men, women, and children, young and old, all Cherokee, all watching me, grinning, leering lasciviously. I crawl out of the blood-soaked field onto the dry lawn and am able to stand and walk to the steps of the house. Pausing on the back porch, I force myself to turn and look back. The scalps are gone. I feel the heavy blade of the tomahawk in my pocket. I walk around the old brick house and up the steps to the front veranda and stare out at the four oaks towering a hundred feet overhead and see myself high in the top of a tree, impaled on a limb.
I run from the vision through the French doors. Opening them, I can hear again. My grandmother calls from her sitting room in a high, sweet voice, “Cage, be sure to wash the blood off your feet. Don’t track it on the carpet. Do you hear me, Cage?”
Something puts its hands on my shoulders, tries to pull me backward, calling my name, impersonating my grandmother like a siren. “Cage.” The hands jerk at my shoulders. “Cage.”
I grit my eyes shut and thrash wildly, trying to jerk loose of the hands. When I open them, I find myself stretched out on a leather easy chair.
“Cage, do you hear me?” Grandmother smiles kindly. “It’s just a dream.”
I run my hands down my face and look at them. No blood.
“Just a dream. You’re okay.”
“Just a dream,” I say. “My voice works.”
“Yes, honey. You’re fine. You were talking in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
“The sins of the fathers.” Nanny pats me on the shoulder. “Odd, you sounded just like your grandfather while you were sleep-talking.” She backs away a few steps and lowers herself into a wingback chair. “What were you dreaming?”
“It’s too terrible, Nanny.”
“Morgan had nightmares, too.” Nanny looks up at his photograph over the fireplace. “Oh, the news has started already.”
I hit the remote and Tom Brokaw’s face appears on the screen saying, “Suggestions that Governor Bush used cocaine in his youth and his inability to answer these allegations directly have contributed to his decline in the latest poll.” Brokaw is looking at me. He occupies a position toward the top of the hierarchy of the Order. He smiles and his eyes tell me, Your days are numbered. You can’t hide at your grandmother’s house forever, a grown man, almost forty years old, too weak to work, to give anything back. You take and take and take while the rest of the world is building something useful. You are a weakling, a poor excuse for a man. Look at you, cringing in your grandmother’s house. You’re a parasite. You’re a termite eating away at the foundation of this house, at the foundations of society. Quickly I stand and leave the room. Maybe he’ll forget about me. Maybe it will buy me more time before they send someone to get me.
I’m met by the collective gaze of the portraits of the five Morgan Elijah Cages all staring at me. The first has long flowing hair like Custer’s and wears a blue army uniform with gold buttons. The second has a gray Confederate uniform. The last, Poppy, has short hair and the leather jacket and cap of a World War II bomber pilot. They all have dark, cold eyes which follow me down the hall as they whisper, You are the firstborn of the last generation, the last male to carry our name. We were the pillars of Thebes. We were respected by our peers and the town. We contributed to the community. You are an affront to our legacy. You have drifted, accursed outcast, across our great nation, a wandering jester, a joke. You don’t deserve our name. I run up the hallway, trying to escape their whispers. You are not a man. You have no guts. No grit. No resolve. I leap up the stairs two steps at a time. You are weaker than a woman. Yellower than a Injun. Feckless as a nigger. A traveling circus freak.
The sound of a car crunching on the gravel carries from the driveway. They’re coming. It’s finally time. The ghosts know. I pause on the landing and stare out the window, watch the mail truck circle in front of the house, then pull away. The ghosts laugh. How dare you call yourself Cage? You should change your name to Coward. You cowering worm. You don’t deserve to wipe the dirt off the postman’s boots. He holds a job. He gets up and works. You just lie around your grandmother’s house, eating her food, dirtying her sheets. You’re a burden. Dead weight. Dross. A buffoon. A mockery of man. I put my hands over my ears and dash up the last flight of stairs, trip on the last step, and land in a heap at the top.
I feel my ancestors laughing. You can’t run. Wherever you run, you’re still stuck with yourself. Why run like a deserter? It’s too late to start over again. I stand up and put my hands on my ears. I’m crying now. Accused by my own ancestors. A deserter has only one destiny. There is but a single noble course of action. To remove the burden from your family and eliminate their despair. You must stare down your fear, look deep within yourself for the courage that we bequeathed you in our blood, which flows through your veins. Our blood demands honor. Our blood demands your blood.
A calmness stills my heart as I walk down the hallway toward Poppy’s old study. The floor creaks beneath the long, narrow Turkish carpet. The voices of my ancestors lose their stridence, continue in comforting tones. Only through an irrevocable act of ultimate courage can you redeem yourself. Only then will our blood claim your blood.
The voices cease when I enter the study. On the walls of knotted cypress are hunting and horse racing prints, fading photographs of the Tennessee Senate in the teens and twenties. I don’t look for the fourth Morgan Elijah Cage among the fifty little oval portraits, don’t want to see the contempt in his eyes. I go to the gun case and remove Poppy’s gun, an over-and-under Browning twelve-gauge, and see him carrying it, open at the stock, angled over the crook of his elbow, smiling down at me when I barely reached his chest. I’ll join you, Poppy, in the fields of forever. You and Nick. We’ll be together, like the sunny days when we were boys. I stick my hand under the desk and pat around until I find the deer slug that I found and hid after Nanny threw out all the boxes of shells. I snap the barrels open, slide the shell in the top, click the barrel shut. The singleness of purpose blunts the gnawing shame that has haunted me for weeks, forever really, as even when I’m feeling good it lurks there in the back of my mind. I will attain absolution with an act of courage. I’ll no longer be a source of worry and anguish for my parents, a financial and emotional drain. They will mourn me for a time and then move on, as they did after Nick’s death. Easier than with Nick, for he died with so much promise and they were proud of him. Whereas I represent only disappointment and shame.
Sitting in Poppy’s swivel chair, I write on a piece of his stationery on the leather surface of his desk:
Dearest Nanny,
I’m sorry that my messy life ended up one last mess for you to clean up. But this is the best way. I can’t bear to be a burden any longer. My dark world holds no joy, no light, no peace, no help for pain. I have let us all down, those born and those not born. It is only fitting that I should take my life with honor before they come for me and take with me the congruence of black-sheep blood that spoils our lineage. Know that I love you and all the good ones in our family.
Cage
I set the butt of the gun on the floor and the barrel in my mouth and lean forward, grasping at the trigger, but the barrel is too long, so I lay the gun on the desk and search the shallow center drawer for a length of string, which I tie to the trigger. Just a few feet outside the window, high in an oak, a pileated woodpecker hammers the bark. Poppy’s favorite bird, his spirit come to guide me. I raise the barrel to my lips with my left hand. The cold barrel tastes of oil. My right begins to shake as I take the string. Yes, the ghosts whisper. An honorable death will redeem you. My hand shakes worse than Tom Hanks’s on the bridge at the end of
Saving Private Ryan
. My eyes blink rapidly, squeezing out tears, then I focus at the corner of the desk, a photo of Nick and me, four and five, wearing matching sailor suits. Sorry, Nick, I say. Sorry for what I did. I’m coming to see you. Jerking the string with my trembling hand, I hear his voice saying, Don’t listen to them, then the roar of the gun.
My left eardrum explodes and a ringing fills my head. I stare at the little boys in sailor suits, unsure if I consciously pushed the barrel away at the last instant or inadvertently from the violent trembling. The odor of burned powder fills the study. I can’t hear any ghosts, just the reverberation of the shot between my ears. Suddenly I imagine Nanny downstairs, terrified that I’ve just killed myself. She could never bear the sound of a shotgun. I set the gun on the desk and dash down the hall, yelling, “I’m okay, Nanny! I’m okay!”
Downstairs, when I come into her sitting room, Nanny’s on the floor, trying to pick up the phone. She looks up and says, “Oh, thank God.”
“I’m sorry, Nanny.” I get down on my knees and hug her, help her into an easy chair, and put the phone on the table. “I just thought . . .” I can’t finish the sentence.
“Oh, thank God.” Her eyes are wet. “Oh, you poor, poor boy. My heart’s thumping in my ears. My fingers were shaking too hard to dial 911.”
“I’m sorry, Nanny. I could have given you a heart attack.”
“Curse the damn illness that’s haunted every generation of this family!” Nanny makes a little fist like my mother does when she’s angry. “You promised me, Cage. Oh, you poor boy, you poor, poor boy. Oh, thank the Lord you are alive.”
“It went in a
Reader’s Digest
book of condensed novels,” I say.
Nanny squints, shakes her head. “Beg your pardon?”
“The slug”—I laugh miserably—“lodged in a volume of condensed novels on Poppy’s bookshelf.
Reader’s Digest
.”
Nanny takes a deep breath. “Let’s go into the kitchen and make some tea.” She lifts the remote to turn off the TV just as Tom Brokaw says, “From all of us at NBC News, good night.”
T
hough I’m sitting behind the bulkhead on the aisle, I’m the first on the plane because I have a Northwest Elite card, since I average about forty thousand miles a year. I watch the business cabin fill up and then the coming line of convict class led by a three-hundred-pound Jabba the Hutt in a cowboy hat whose belly is compressed by the seats on either side.
Please don’t sit here, no, no
, I pray. His double chin rotates from side to side like a spectator at a tennis match, checking out the seat numbers. I have to lean away as he passes to avoid getting slimed. Then there is a tall black guy in a tight black T-shirt.
Roll on by, muscleman
. His eyes are cold, look right through me. An anxious sixtyish woman with white eyebrows and jet-black hair creeps tentatively along.
You can do it, granny, one foot in front of the other, just a few more rows
. Behind a Hasid with a thick beard and ringlets dangling from under his fedora, a bleached blonde with a leathery weasel face, and a pimply boy with superwide bell bottoms, my eyes land on a girl in her late twenties with short, spiky red hair. Those in line beyond her are walking statistics, four more of the fifty million American hogs. Sweet Jesus, let her be the one. She’s clutching some magazines and pulling a little wheeled suitcase. She slows down beside me.
Yes.
Looks at her boarding card, then at the empty seat opposite.
No.
She glances over my head, then down at me, and smiles slightly.
“Beg your pardon,” she drawls.
Thanks be to God. Standing up, speculating on her breasts swelling beneath a cream mohair pullover—extra-medium, close together, never easy to guess the diameter of her nipples, probably large given her full lips—I say, “Let me help you with your bag.”
“Thanks.” She’s very pretty when she smiles, not in a conventional Betsy Sloan TV-face sense, but an unusual beauty. Her face is wide, her chin squarish, her nose large and Roman. She’s about five-six, slender. As she squeezes by, I check out her round butt in a pair of brown corduroy jeans.
She settles by the window as I put her bag overhead. I study her profile for a second, the clean line of her nose, wondering what a red bush looks like. Of the hundred-odd girls I’ve slept with, I’ve never lucked into one. God, boy, you’re single-minded. Your imagination is trapped in your glands. She holds a copy of
Modern Photography
with long, slender ringless fingers.
After a few minutes I ask, “Are you a photographer?”
She looks at me with calm greenish eyes. “I come up to New York a couple of times a year to see the exhibitions. I’m a kind of, um—”
“Exhibitionist?”
“Uh, no.” Her full-blown smile transforms her face into something extraordinary. “An amateur.”
“I’m a sort of amateur collector. I’ve got an Eggleston and a couple of Huger Footes and a Herb Ritts.” I don’t say that I bought the photographs to get into the pants of a Danish beauty who worked for a gallery in SoHo.
“Really?” She raises her eyebrows. “Eggleston and Foote—do you live in Memphis?”