The Bookman's Promise (23 page)

There was more in the boxes:
The Prairie Traveler
was a book of advice for hardy souls crossing the vast American continent.
Abeokuta and the Camaroons Mountains
had a striking frontis portrait of Burton, charming despite the posed, formal nature of it.
Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po
and
A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome
continued his fascination with and exploration of the great Dark Continent.
The Nile Basin
was a small work that I was happy to have as a book collector but as his friend found unfortunate in its continuation of his rivalry with Speke, who was then dead by his own hand. Later I would learn that its reception in England confirmed my own judgment: you can’t win an argument with a dead man, and Burton should never have published it. But
Wit and Wisdom from West Africa
was a charming collection of native beliefs, and
The Guide-Book: A Pictorial Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (Including Some of the More Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Mohammed, the Arab Lawgiver)
summarized his most famous journey. In the bottom of the second box was the strangest book he ever wrote: a long poem in the form of a dialogue, titled
Stone Talk
, ostensibly written by a “Frank Baker” but full of Burtonian trademarks. It was a biting attack on religion, embracing Darwin in crude and clever ways, and calling his homeland to account for her hypocrisy and crimes around the world. He penned a tongue-in-cheek inscription and signed it “Frank.”
If it becomes known that I wrote this I will be run out of England and banished to the land of the Mormons forever
.

This remarkable output totals nearly three thousand pages in three years. Burton had become a veritable writing machine. Immediately I wrote him a laudatory letter and asked to hear from him if ever he could find a moment (pun intended) to write.

He did write. I got occasional notes from distant world ports, and once a year, more or less, he wrote long catch-up letters. These always closed with fond memories of the weeks we had spent together and the hope that our paths might someday cross again.

The years passed and his books kept the spirit of our friendship alive and well. I lived in his words, traveling with him in my mind to Brazil, Zanzibar, Iceland, and the gorilla land of the Congo, and when he was no longer the great explorer, I marveled at his philosophical works and translations. I always found it curious that he never wrote about our days traveling in the South. Never a line or a word, but I kept my silent vow not to doubt his motives again. The curiosity would remain, long after his death, and it remains today in my own old age.

I had my one opportunity to josh him into some kind of comment in 1877. Captain Doubleday, then brevetted to major-general, had just published his short memoir of Fort Sumter and I sent a copy to Richard. In my covering note I referred him to page 58.
See how profoundly you affected our history
, I wrote.
Our war was certainly inevitable, but the way it began was yours to tell
.

By Doubleday’s account, he and others had repeatedly urged that the garrison be moved to Fort Sumter as the situation grew more critical. But Anderson had always replied that he was specifically assigned to Fort Moultrie and had no right to vacate it without orders.

At some point he had changed his mind. Either that, or he had hidden his true thoughts, even from his officers, giving them just twenty minutes’ notice on the night they slipped across the harbor in rowboats.

Had Doubleday brought about this change of mind, which had seemed fixed on a very different course?

Did Anderson wrestle with the question of authority, and finally turn it on its head, as Burton had immediately done with the phrase “no orders to the contrary”?

Had Burton been the source of the act that started the war?

Richard never acknowledged it. He never mentioned the Double-day book at all.

Richard’s handwriting, never easy to read, became almost impossible in the last year of his life. I managed to decipher it with the aid of my daughter, the two of us hunched over a thick magnifying glass, sometimes for an hour with a single page. “I have not been feeling well,” he wrote in 1890. “It would be grand to see you again and to laugh over those olden days when we were young and the world was ours to discover.”

Halfheartedly I said, “I should go see him,” and my daughter immediately took up this cause. “You
must
go, Daddy! You will regret it forever if you don’t.”

“It would be an indulgence,” I said. “That’s all been so long ago now.”

But on the spur of that moment I decided to go to England. That afternoon I wrote Richard a long letter asking if I might visit, say in a month or two or perhaps in the spring. I sent it away on the first of October and waited for a reply.

Less than three weeks later I was shocked by the newspaper headline: sir richard f. burton, noted British explorer, dead at 69.

I was inconsolable. I hadn’t seen him in almost thirty years and his sudden death was a deeper wound than even the loss of my younger brother all those same years ago at Gettysburg. I broke down in tears over the paper, shocking my daughter, who had brought it to me. I deplore displays of sentiment, and she had never seen a tear fall from my eyes except at her mother’s graveside. But in that moment I felt I had lost the only friend who had ever mattered in my life, and I cried. She hugged my head and she cried also at my obvious distress.

How do I explain such a reaction? Burton was certainly not my best friend: How could he have been in so short a time? Still, time doesn’t always tell a true story. You can know a man for years and not know him at all, and another man rises up in a brief acquaintance and is closer than a brother.

I thought of him constantly after his death: the young Burton who had come here defeated and renewed himself on a journey down and across this vast continent. I had been part of that. I know what we did and no one can take that away from me. Even today I hear his voice in the night, fascinated by the power and durability of music, humming Negro spirituals that reach across two continents.

In the spring I got a formal note from his widow. She had come across my letter suggesting a trip to London and had written to ask what it meant. She was intrigued by the familiarity in my lines, frankly because she had no idea who I was.

“Now you have your reason to write it all down, Daddy,” my daughter said.

Over the next week I wrote Lady Burton a long reply. I told in detail how I had come to know Richard and most of what we had done together. But when I read it over I felt like a carpetbagger, a charlatan trying to trump up his own importance on the coattails of a far greater man, and instead I sent her a short note.

I never mentioned his journal and I never looked in it. It couldn’t matter then, after his death, but there was something between us, his spirit and mine, that made me keep that trust.

Long after her own death, Isabel’s question rings in my ears.

Who are you?

Richard never told her.

Who was I?

Well, I was one of his greatest admirers: that cannot be disputed.

But he had many great admirers.

Who are you?

I knew him briefly and was deeply saddened when he died.

Many were saddened.

We went on a journey once, deep into the lost kingdom of cotton. There, on a sunny afternoon in May, Burton might well have influenced the beginnings of our great civil war.

Might have, could have, maybe. Never mind that. What is real? What is certain?

I shrug. I never stopped wondering, since he never used any of it, whatever he was writing in that notebook. At some point in my old age I even entertained the fancy that he intended to leave it behind, in my care, as a record of what he thought and did in those crowded weeks.

But
why?

I look at it there on my shelf and it looks unreal.

What is real?

Only Mrs. Burton’s question is real. It is still there in my seventh decade.

Who are you?

I look in my mirror at a withered old man and find one answer.

I am…nobody.

We arrived in Charleston after dark, the ground crew rolled out an air stair, and we climbed down into another world. This was more than just an illusion and it was more than just the heat: the air smelled different—I could taste its salty tang—and the humidity was like a battering ram. As we walked across the runway to the terminal I said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Koko,” and she made a face and a go-away gesture with her hand.

I rented a car while Koko bought a street map, a guidebook, and a pictorial history. A few minutes later she navigated me out to Interstate 26 and turned me south toward the city. “We should stay at the Heart of Charleston,” she said, leafing through pages. “That’s a motel they built in the sixties on the site of the Charleston Hotel, where Burton and Charlie stayed. Won’t that be cool? Maybe their ghosts are still lingering there.”

I thought this unlikely, but if I couldn’t share her view of the afterlife, at least I could agree that it would be cool to stay there.

The highway swerved down the Neck and Koko provided a running commentary. In the Civil War, batteries had been built across the peninsula to fight off an attack from the north. The city limit then was far south of here and this was mostly country. Like all cities, Charleston had spread far from its core and the sprawl was still going on. We passed through a grim industrial area and a few minutes later I saw the harbor, ablaze with lights to my left, and a spectacular pair of bridges spanning the river. I got off on Meeting Street and ten minutes later we reached the motel. We took two rooms on opposite sides of the motel and were lucky to get them. There were three conventions in town and rooms of any kind were hard to come by.

By then it was well after ten. We were tired: we had to be after last night—but we were still in the throes of an artificial high, like a Coke sugar rush after a heart-sapping marathon. We met out on Meeting Street five minutes after check-in and found a pub a block away. Koko surprised me by having a beer. I said, “That’ll put hair on your chest,” and she laughed. “What else can I get in a place like this? One won’t kill me.”

She took her first cautious sip. “So what did you think of the tape?”

“I liked the feel of it. If the old lady was conning us she was a very skilled operator. We have to assume it’s real until we learn otherwise.”

“Wait till you hear the others. My case for real gets much stronger then.”

“How much more do you have?”

“Hours and hours.”

“Can you summarize it?”

“You won’t need to listen to the other age-regression sessions. It’s just duplication, repeated just for consistency. Jo tells it without any errors every time.”

“I’ll take your word for that and pass up the repetition. What about the others?”

“It’s still a lot of tape.”

“I didn’t fly down here to sit in a motel and listen to tape, Koko. Where do we start?”

She shrugged. “We’ve got different goals. I want to prove Jo was authentic, you want to find the books.”

“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. They do have common roots.”

Koko took a big gulp of her beer. I sipped mine and said, “I don’t know why but I feel like my part of the hunt got suddenly warmer.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just a gut feeling. Makes no sense at all. It doesn’t seem logical that the books would be here.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“For one thing there’s the humidity. Humidity like this does terrible things to books. If they were here for any length of time, I’d expect to see some evidence of that on the pages. In a hundred years the paper would’ve become badly foxed unless they’ve been kept in an airtight bookcase all these years. In severe cases, foxing can eat up a book. The ones I bought at auction didn’t have any of that.”

I thought about it some more, then said, “So much for hunches.”

“Don’t lose faith. Please, we haven’t even started yet.”

“I never had much faith to lose. Remember, I just came here on a flyer with you. There never was any reason to think the books might be here, except they’ve got to be somewhere. If they’re in Baltimore, none of those thugs knows where.”

“There you are, then.”

“Where am I? They seem to be divided into two camps: Carl and his gangsters, Archer and Dean. They’re all hunting pretty hard. That must mean none of them knows any more than we do. They’ve got some reason to think they’re in Baltimore, but that may just be because of that book Jo took into Treadwell’s that day.”

“Wouldn’t it be a kick if they were here all along? Right in Archer’s backyard.”

I grinned maliciously. “That would be a real kick, Koko. Hey, your glass is empty. Want another beer?”

We were still up at midnight, fiddling with tapes in her room. She snapped a cassette into the machine and said, “This was done right after that session you heard on the plane.”

Suddenly I heard Josephine say, in her natural voice, “Koko? Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere, dear. I’m right here.”

“I saw him again.”

“Your grandfather?”

“No. I mean yes, I always see him. But that stranger was with them.”

After a long gap, Koko said, “Jo? Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’ve gone pale on us. How are you feeling?”

“What difference does that make? Holy Christmas, I’m almost a hundred years old, how do you think I feel?” A moment later: “I’m sorry. Bad temper doesn’t become me.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” Koko said. “Can I get you something?”

“Not unless you can rig me up so I can see again.”

Koko adjusted the microphone. “Try that. Why don’t you tell me what you remember and I’ll try to be your eyes.”

“That never works.”

“Let’s give it a try. Unless you’d rather not.”

Another gap: forty seconds to a minute. Then: “I saw three of them. They were standing in some kind of fog, talking. Their faces were hidden by the swirling gray. But every so often it would clear up. Just for an instant a breeze would come through and lift the fog, almost enough to make their faces clear. But they were never clear enough.”

“You recognized Charlie, though.”

“By his voice more than anything. He was much younger than I had ever seen him in life. In my childhood, you know, he was always an old man.”

“Did you get any kind of look at him in that awful fog?”

“Just for a few seconds…less than that. But enough to know him, I guess.”

“What did he do?”

“He smiled at me and nodded.”

“You must’ve seen him very clearly, then, at least in that split instant.”

“No, I
felt
him smile.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Yes,” said Josephine, obviously pleased. “He was
so
happy to see me again.”

“I can imagine. Then what?”

“He said something to Burton.”

“Ah. So one of the others was—”

“Richard. Charlie only called him Richard, but of course it was Burton. In a while I could see him, too. A fierce-looking man with mustaches and those awful scars.”

“What did they say to each other?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear.”

But almost at once she said, “They were discussing what to do about the third man. It was fairly severe. Then they all moved back in the fog and that’s all I saw.”

“And you never did see the third man?”

“No.”

“You know nothing about him?”

“I didn’t say that. I know his name.”

“How did you learn that?”

“Richard pushed him away and called him by name.”

Again the tape seemed to finish there. It must have been two minutes later when Koko said, “What was his name, Jo? What did Richard call him?”

“Archer,” Josephine said at once.

I heard her take a deep, shivery breath. “His name was Archer.”