ALBERT E. COWDREY

THE GREAT ANCESTOR

Albert Cowdrey's last story for us was 'White Magic" the March issue, and since
it ran, folks have been clamoring for more from Mr. C. We're delighted to
oblige. This dark fantasy takes us again to Mr. Cowdrey' s home town and lets us
peek into the history of one of the Big Easy's most prominent families. I'd
always thought that the dead in New Orleans were entombed above-ground, but Bert
assures me that's not so.

NOT GUILTY!" CRIED THE foreman of the jury that day in 1989, and the courtroom
in the New Orleans federal court "erupted in pandemonium," as next morning's
Times-Picayune expressed it. My lawyer, who had been nervously fingering some
documents, tossed his papers into the air and embraced me. Then my family came
swarming out of the spectators' seats and piled on. Little Pierrette, my
beautiful little girl, rushed into my arms, crying, "Daddy, Daddy!" My wife Amy
gazed up at me with limpid blue eyes. My brother Ned pounded me on the back. My
mother, who was weeping, plucked at my sleeve until I bent and kissed her. Aunts
and uncles and in-laws crowded around me, weeping, laughing, congratulating.

"The luck of the Carcassonnes!" thundered a hoarse, hollow voice from somewhere
at the back of the throng.

Yes, it was a party. Pity my Great-Aunt Kate was dead. She would have
appreciated the verdict more than any of them. Truly, mine had been an ordeal by
law. All those accusations in civil court regarding my stewardship at
Goldenacres Savings and Loan, and then that final, dreadful criminal charge--
that I had procured the murder of the government's star witness!

The media were waiting like a school of circling sharks just outside Courtroom
No. 3 that I had gotten to know so well during the long, bitter days of the
trial. By this time I knew how to handle them. I let the lawyer talk while I
stood holding Pierrette on one arm and clutching Amy to me with the other. When
it was my turn to speak I just said:

"This has been a terrible experience for my family, but thank God, the system
works. I just wish the government had some better things to do than hound honest
businessmen, that's all."

Nothing more than that. You can always give thanks and damn the government
safely. Anything else wouldn't have been safe. Above all, you never tell the
media what you actually think. They'll use the truth to kill you.

Then it was time for all of us to go to Mother's house for the victory banquet,
laid on in advance of the verdict because she, too, believed in the luck of the
Carcassonnes.

We were all there, over a hundred people of all ages, filling the house and
overflowing on the lawn and surrounding the pool. The caterers were working
themselves to death unloading their vans, for Mother's kitchen couldn't possibly
have cooked all the food. Our new puppy, Grits VI, got under everyone's feet and
barked himself hoarse. The waiters, many of them college kids hired for the day,
ran around with their trays like ants carrying pieces of dismembered bugs.

The place of honor was the dining room table where I sat with Amy, Mother, Ned
and his wife, and a few others. All the inner circle except Great -Aunt Kate,
who was in her grave, and Daddy, who was in New York arranging to sell some
assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A long, noisy table of us -- inlaws and
outlaws, as they say-- and all of us, I was aware, somehow sounding and
gesturing alike even though we were so different. The family.

Even our Founder was there, hanging in his portrait over the table. While
waiting for the main course to arrive I glanced up at him-- a fiercelooking old
man with a cataract of white whiskers. Under the varnish his suit was shiny
black, his eyes were glittering black, and his linen gleamed like a mountain of
white ore. The polished brass plate under the portrait said Pierre Carcassonne.
Le Fondateur, 1868.

He had been there every mealtime while I was growing up. Pierre the Great, Daddy
like to call him. The Founder. Founder of what? Ned asked once when he was still
little and dumb. Of our family, said Daddy, reverently, and we were all solemnly
silent for as much as a minute. Because we all believed in our family. Not in
God, the devil or the flag, but in our family.

We lived in the same big house with its nineteen rooms and five baths
overlooking Audubon Park in uptown New Orleans. We had formal gardens, tennis
courts, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool in marble and tile and a bronze
lion-head that gushed cold green brine from our own artesian well. Money that
Daddy had made by helping the Shah of Iran to invest a tiny part of his billions
in Louisiana had paid for the well and the pool, so we called it the Shah's
Pool. The deal with Teheran was part of the family legend. Other aspects of the
legend-- the important people we had met, the money we had made, the secrets we
knew-- sparkled in the backs of our minds like the paste jewels in the glass
case in Aunt Kate's living room on Prytania Street that marked the time she had
been Queen of Astarte, the best women's carnival krewe. No Carcassonne had yet
been Rex, King of Carnival, but surely that would come in time.

Ultimately everything we had derived from Pierre the Great, who had emigrated
from Toulouse or Marseilles or someplace in the early nineteenth century and
become a cotton factor and speculator. Though we knew little about him, some of
his oddities were remembered -- for example, the fact, remarkable for those
times, that he had refused to own slaves. For whatever reason, he had been no
friend of the Confederacy or the southern war effort. During the Civil War when
others were going bankrupt most of his wealth had reposed comfortably in the
Bank of England, earning more money that in the postwar depression had enabled
him to buy up valuable sugar land for a song. His sons and grandsons made more
money by investing in the brand-new oilfields of the Gulf and Texas.

In Daddy's generation the Carcassonnes were doctors, lawyers, investment
bankers, and stockbrokers. They divided the inheritance but also multiplied it.
They called themselves "the hundred cousins" and together with their spouses
they possessed about nine billion dollars. My generation generally followed
their parents into business but also did some offbeat things, producing among
other oddballs an artist who sold bad paintings for exorbitant prices and a
drug-runner who never wound up in the penitentiary, although he probably should
have. They too shared the luck of the Careassonnes.

I was a bookworm as a child and for a long time I was drawn to the study of
history. Daddy was not too happy over that, pointing out to me that there was no
money in it. He probably thought I lacked the courage to do more adventurous
things, and in that he may have been right. But when I persevered, he told me to
go ahead, warning me however that my trust fund would not be a nickel larger
than Ned's, whose goal was to become an investment banker.

I think it was the general air of polite disapproval at home that caused me, in
1970 when I was in my first year as a graduate student at Tulane, to become
interested in writing a biography of Pierre the Great. I secretly hoped to
demonstrate to Daddy that my profession could add, however slightly, to the
luster of the family name.

The first thing I found out was that tracking down Pierre Careassonne was
surprisingly difficult. For a family as narcissistic as ours, we turned out to
own little in the way of papers. Interesting papers, anyway. Account books, yes,
we had those, by the dozen. From ledgers of the 1850's I could see how Pierre
had shifted his money around, crisscrossing the Atlantic with his interests,
moving cotton between the New Orleans warehouses and those in Liverpool and
banking the profits on Threadneedle Street in the City of London and using them
to speculate on the Exchange and the Bourse.

He obviously had believed that the United States of his day was a great place to
make money but a very poor place to store it, and a series of panics and
depressions and bank failures culminating in the disasters of the Civil War
proved him right. At any rate, he never ended a year without posting a profit,
including even the calamitous year 1862, when New Orleans fell to the federal
fleet.

But where were the letters and diaries that alone can make a dead person come to
life? I could find none, except copies of business letters which were only a bit
less boring than the account books. I had real hopes of Aunt Kate, but she put
me off, saying that her house was such a mess she could find nothing in it.
Other relatives came up only with bits and pieces. A letter consisting in its
entirely of the words "Yours of the 7th inst. rec'd and I thank you for it"
tells you little about the writer except that he was terse. I finished the
meager materials stored in family safes and desks knowing little or nothing of
the real Pierre Careassonne except that he had been shrewd, and I had known that
before I started.

I could not even discover where he was buried. In Metairie Cemetery the
Carcassonnes had a pompous family vault with walls and roof of granite and a
green bronze lady in a robe mourning beside the door. But the first people to be
buried there were Daddy's grandparents. Some earlier members of our family
reposed in an uptown cemetery across from Commander's Palace restaurant -- very
convenient, Daddy liked to say, if their appetites were anything like those of
my brother and myself! But Pierre the Great was not there, nor did he seem to be
anyplace else.

On my hours off, when I was neither lecturing at Tulane nor being lectured to, I
poked around in the older cemeteries, hoping to get lucky. Soon I made a number
of new acquaintances among sextons and caretakers, and among a curious
collection of people who were victims of genealogical obsessions. These students
of the past moved in hunched postures from gravestone to gravestone, copying
names and dates; they made rubbings of interesting epitaphs and the quaint
carvings -- winged hourglasses, weeping willows, sorrowing angels -- that
Victorian stonemasons used to memorialize grief. I liked the genealogists
because they, too, believed in the importance of family, even if they had to
support their dreams by fantastic efforts to connect their ancestors to the
Romanoffs or the Borgias.

The genealogists and I would bring po'boy sandwiches in brown bags and eat lunch
among the tombs, sitting on marble benches under the big old trees and breathing
deeply in the murmurous summer silence that reduced the noise of the city to a
distant beelike hum of traffic. One day I was munching my sandwich in St. Louis
Cemetery No. 3 and talking to a tatty old lady who claimed to be descended (by
the wrong side of the blanket) from the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The
archduke, she said, had been on the verge of legitimizing her grandfather when
Ferdinand's assassination and the First World War put an end to the project.

"It preyed on Grandpa's mind," she said. "Not that being illegitimate bothers
anybody anymore, but he was of the old school. He studied French in order to
write his own diplomatic dispatches in case the Hapsburg throne should ever be
re-established and his claim to it recognized. His last words on earth were,
Helas! je suis toujours un batard "

That seemed sad to me, being forever a bastard. Since she had confided in me, I
told her about my search for the grave of my great-great grandfather, Pierre
Carcassonne, and my fear that he must have died outside the city, since I could
find no trace of him in New Orleans.

"That's an unusual name," she said thoughtfully. "Now, where have I seen it
before?

I was about to suggest that our family was locally prominent and often mentioned
in the newspaper. But then she brightened and exclaimed, "Oh, I've seen that
grave!"

"You have!"

"Oh, yes. I often forget faces, but I never forget a grave. Now let me see...it
was in...it was in .... Oh, I know. It's in the St. Dismas cemetery, on the
Basin Street side somewhere. Yes, I'm sure it is. It's not in very good
condition, I'm afraid."

Candidly, I did not believe her. But I wanted to believe, and a little light had
switched on in my head when she said St. Dismas. This was indeed a very old
cemetery, once located just outside the ramparts when New Orleans was still a
fortified town. But it had soon become a burial ground for people of dubious
antecedents, including some of Jean Lafitte's pirates. It also held many of the
city's free blacks. Many had been people of wealth and education, highly
respectable and much respected. But they, too, had had their bad apples,
including a couple of voodoo queens buried in marble tombs that people still
marked with red crosses, hoping to keep the witches inside.

It seemed to me as I thanked my friend for her help that one of the obscurities
surrounding Pierre the Great -- his refusal to own slaves -might be clarified if
he turned out to have been a mulatto or quadroon who had married a white woman.
Of course, such a union would have been illegal at that time, but wealth finds a
way, and the number of local white families with black ancestors is almost as
large as the number of blacks with white forebears.

As I reflected on the features of the old patriarch in the portrait, I could
find neither support nor refutation for my idea. Were the lips hidden in that
cascade of moustache and beard as thin as Europe or as full as Africa? No
telling -- and the painter had probably adjusted both features and coloring to
accord with the wishes of his model.

Nevertheless, as I drove to Basin Street I was almost humming with excitement. I
was without conscious racism myself, and since Daddy had predicted that the next
Mayor of New Orleans would be a black Creole I could see no reason for anyone to
be ashamed of such a connection any longer. I particularly relished the thought
of how my more pompous relatives, who scorned history as a useless pursuit,
would be floored if I turned up clear evidence that the Founder had been partly
black! I was still young enough to relish the sheer shock value of such a
revelation.

I will not waste time telling of my slow and somewhat dangerous search for
Pierre's tomb. Dangerous because the neighborhood had gone bad and I would not
have dared to go there alone at any time but the afternoon of a sunny day when
well-guarded tourist parties could be expected to arrive also. Suffice it to say
that after several anxious and muddy hours spent mostly on my hands and knees, I
discovered at last what appeared to be the grave of the Founder.

It was much smaller and in much worse condition than I had expected --merely a
chamber of very old, weathered and broken brick, cracked by the roots of trees
that had themselves died and become part of the cemetery earth generations ago.
There were no remains inside, only a bundle of old newspapers reduced by damp to
papier mache, which showed that a derelict had been sleeping there at some time
in the not too remote past, with a wad of newsprint for a pillow. A broken and
dislodged square of marble lying beside it was much eroded by the rain and the
words cut into it were only partly legible:
PI.. R. CARCASSONNE
NE LE 2ME AO..,...8
DE . EDE L. 31RE OC ..... , 18.8
ODER.. T DUM MET . ANT

The French part of the inscription was easy: Pierre Carcassonne/Ne le 2me Aont
.... 8/Decede le 31re Octobre, 18.8. In English, he was born the second of
August in a year ending in 8 and died the thirty-first o1 October, probably in
1868, the year of the portrait. This suggested to me that he knew the end was
close and had had the picture painted in order to fix his image in the minds of
his descendants.

The Latin epitaph, apparently Oderint rum metuant, was a poser. My Latin was
poor, but after digging out a grammar I had used in high school I decided the
words were Caligula's famous remark about the Romans: "Let them hate me, so long
as they fear me." That struck me as a strange sentiment to inscribe on a
tombstone.

In any case, I had a good deal more information than I had possessed before
arriving at St. Dismas. I had brought a polaroid camera with me and I took the
whole roll of film of the vault and its surroundings. My last happy discovery of
this eventful day was that my car had not been stripped while I was in the
cemetery, though I did have to pay five dollars tribute to a teenager carrying a
baseball.bat who claimed to have been guarding it for me. Cheap at the price, I
thought, as I drove off, for I had at last touched something tangible belonging
to Pierre Carcassonne, even if it was only an empty grave.

AT HOME I played with Grits IV, recently installed as the family dog following
the tragic death of Grits III under the wheels of a concrete mixer. He was a
young Schnauzer, with a short beard and a merry bark. He accompanied me to my
bathroom where I took a much-needed shower and when I had dressed we went down
to the dining room where I stared possessively at Pierre. Yes, I decided, his
skin was definitely rather dark. I had to admit that the hue might indicate old
paint or a bad liver rather than what in 1970 we still called a touch of the
tarbrash; nevertheless, I felt that I had come closer to him than any of my many
relatives.

Daddy deflated me, however. He was simply not interested in what I had
discovered.

"That's not where Pierre was buried," he said flatly, after glancing at my
photos. "He wouldn't be buried in a hole like that. Anyway, why would he be in
Dismas? Nobody we ever knew is buried there with all those voodoo queens and
pirates and whatnot."

He even dismissed the evidence of the marble slab, and I had to admit that in
the Polaroid picture the lettering looked all but meaningless.

The question was how to get more evidence. I considered going back and stealing
the marble slab, but rejected the idea on ethical grounds, for in those days I
still had ethics. Instead, I resolved to seek documentary information, and on my
next free day I went to the French Quarter to work in the General Ferd Blister
Collection. This choleric retired officer, made rich by oil discoveries on vast
tracts of inherited swampland, was whiling away his golden years by buying a
huge volume of memorabilia -pictures, manuscripts, indeed almost anything --that
dealt with New Orleans in what he called "the good years" before the suppression
of legalized prostitution. I introduced myself and was respectfully received by
General Blister's archivist, a translucent young man named Dave who seemed only
half alive, and hence all the better fitted to preserve and interpret the
records of the dead.

"General Blister," Dave muttered, eyeing a point in distant space, "would really
like to get hold of some Carcassonne family papers."

"So would I."

"Surely they must be somewhere."

"All I can find is old account books." I then explained that I hoped to track
down references to Pierre Carcassonne through mentions in the papers of his
contemporaries.

"I think," Dave whispered, "I think...yes...I ran across some mentions when I
was accessing the Dubroville Papers. And the DeSaye Papers. And the Worthe
Papers. Hm. Hm." He wandered off muttering to himself and eventually returned
with half a dozen gray document boxes.

He relieved me of my pen, issued me foolscap and a short hard pencil to take
notes with, and sat me in a comer of the dark, somewhat dungeonlike room that
General Blister allotted to researchers in his collection. In fact, it had once
been a dungeon, for iron rings were still set in the old brick walls and a
spiked metal slave-collar dangled menacingly from a short length of chain.

Here I spent the whole of a long day on my self-imposed quest, laboriously
panning out a few glistening grains of gold from the verbal torrent of 19th-
century letter writing. The Dubroville Papers were the most revealing, because a
member of their family had fought a duel with Pierre Carcassonne. Here are some
of my notes:

Honore Dubroville to his wife Claudette, November 2, 1857:

"Ah, my dear, if only you were here in New Orleans, to give counsel in this
crisis! My nephew Louis wishes to challenge that accursed wretch Carcassonne to
a duel. I have earnestly advised him not to do so, for a duel can be held only
between gentlemen, no others being able to dispute a point of honor. As to the
danger of fighting such a man, I said nothing: danger would only spur the young
firebrand on."

Same to same, December 13, 1857.

"That ill-considered duel! An honorable young man is no more, while Carcassonne
continues to flourish like the green bay tree and is more insufferable than
ever. In addition to being a pig and a camel, he is now an assassin, too."

Various other comments followed, all uncomplimentary. During the federal
occupation of the city, the Founder had proclaimed himself a Unionist and worked
hand in glove with the corrupt General "Beast" Butler, to the great profit of
both, according to the Dubrovilles. The last reference to Pierre was an almost
fiendish burst of glee when, after the war, my ancestor died of unspecified
causes.

Claudette Dubroville to "Mon tres chef mari," AH Saints' Day [November 1], 1868.

"How unfortunate that you are away from home at so happy a time! We are rid of
Carcassonne at last!!! Surely the family will have a closed coffin at the wake.
They will be lucky if the consecrated earth does not vomit him up!! For his
children I am not sorry either, they are all limbs of Satan. True, we are
commanded by the good God to forgive, but surely not the Carcassonnes."

Such malice was rather daunting. As Dave brought me more boxes from other
collections of letters, my dismay increased. I had grown up in the firm
conviction that my family was in every sense honorable and respectable, yet it
seemed increasingly that the Founder's contemporaries did not agree.
Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that fathomless unpopularity had enveloped old
Pierre. He was called everything vile -- a cheat, a blackguard, a swine, a
murderer, a thief, a rascal, a rout, and a Republican. To add to my discomfort,
in all this catalogue of denunication no reference was ever made to his race --
and, if he was black, that seemed strange, given the attitudes of the time.
Perhaps my whole theory of a black man on the rise who virtuously refused to own
slaves because they were members of his own race was wrong.

I returned home from my day in the Quarter in a thoughtful mood and settled down
with Grits IV and a drink to await the return of my father from his day's
occupation. He had successfully managed some intensely complicated transaction
or other between two banks and was in a relaxed and pleasant mood. He patted the
dog, praised the martini I mixed for him (he was very exacting about martinis)
and asked me how my researches on the Founder were coming.

For reply I handed him the foolscap sheets on which I had jotted my notes and he
read them with the close attention that a lawyer always gives to a written
document.

"Not widely loved, was he?" he murmured, handing them back.

"No. Somehow it's not what I expected. I thought he'd be respected, at least."

"Too successful, I suppose," said Daddy somewhat heavily. "A little success has
many friends, but a big one has many enemies."

I couldn't buy that, even dressed up in one of Daddy's instant wise sayings.
Pierre Carcassonne had been hated. I pointed this out.

"And yet in these documents nobody ever says exactly why. They just heave
insults at him."

"That's because back then everybody knew why. My adviser at Tulane tells me it's
something historians run into time and again. What everybody knows, nobody ever
bothers to say. It can be terribly frustrating."

The next bit of evidence came from a completely unexpected source.

Jake Touro kept one of the last great junk-shops in New Orleans. A pleasant,
dumpy man of no special age, he was literally unable to let any object that
could be physically inserted into his tiny shop escape him. For reasons of space
his collection contained no antique locomotives or stuffed whales; but he had
everything else, especially if it concerned New Orleans.

Jake had already marked me down as a potential customer, and I got a call from
him one morning as I was preparing to leave to take an exam at Tulane.

"Jake, I don't have much time."

"Sure, sure, sure. Just wanted to let you know I've got a pitcher you might want
to see. Carcassonne stuff, middle of the last century. Interested? Ha. Thought
you might be."

As a matter of fact, at three that afternoon I was edging into Jake's Treasure
Chest on a side street off Esplanade. Edging because the junk was piled so high
and deep and close that I had to go sideways or not at all.

"Let me put on the lights," muttered Jake, emerging from a back room. He had ten
or twelve gooseneck lamps scattered around and with a good deal of ballet-like
twisting and toe-standing he managed to turn most of them on. Then he sidled
behind a counter and started rummaging in a collection of shoeboxes.

"Ah," he said, "system never fails."

He pulled out a gutta.percha box with an arcadian scene stamped into the lid,
and flipped it open. Inside was a tintype of Pierre, so faded that I had to turn
it from side to side under one of the gooseneck lamps before the image emerged.
But then -- .what an image!

Only his face and one hand rose from the gleaming blackness of the plate. The
hand was huge and gnarled and rested on a cane whose head was a massive knob of
ivory carved in the shape of a snarling dog. Whenever the image was taken,
Pierre had been clean-shaven; his nose was a raptor's beak and his face was set
in a ferocious expression, the eyes fairly starting out of the head as he glared
into the camera. I found myself wondering if the lens had not cracked under the
intensity of that look.

The painting at home was formal, modified by all the skills of the artist to
turn this corsair into a gentleman. The image I was looking at now was, I
believed at once, the real man himself as he had been in life.

Voodoo queens and pirates! In death, Pierre had gone to earth among his own kind
in St. Dismas. But his kind had nothing to do with race. For it was clear to me
from the photograph that Pierre the Great, the Founder of our family, was white
-- the whitest man I ever saw -- dead white, in fact.Then (coming back again to
the old question) why had he refused to own slaves at a time when being a master
was the sign of wealth and success, the one thing that enabled anyone to exclaim
je suis arrive! I have arrived! with no danger of being contradicted?

Jake wanted two hundred dollars for the tintype in its case. I was able to
extract the money from Daddy without trouble, once he saw the picture.

"A tough bird," he said. "I'd hate to go up against a man who looked like that
in court. Brr!" And he actually shivered.

He must have talked about my discovery to older members of the family, and they
to still others. In any case, a week or so later I got a very old, spotty card
in the mail with my Great Aunt Kate's maiden name embossed on it and a few
spiky, spidery handwritten lines. She had heard about my success in finding
information about the Founder, she wrote, and she had now located something in
her house that might interest me.

I showed the card to Daddy, and he was downright enthusiastic.

"She's so old," he said, "that she's a lot closer to the Founder than we are.
This is 1970 and she was born in 1890. Her father was Pierre's son; she spent
her childhood among people who had known the old man intimately."

The warmth with which he said this made me smile; it was obvious that Daddy was
finding history a more interesting study than he had expected it to be, since I
had begun to uncover our family's place in it.

As I've said, Kate lived in a big old house on Prytania Street. The house was
not on the Uptown Mansion tour; it might have suited a haunted house tour, if
our local hucksters ever decided to establish one. From the street the house was
simply an enormous thicket sprouting chimneys. English yew had grown up
roof-high, and down below aspidistra had taken over all the garden beds. Then on
top of this basic jungle had grown thick living carpets of vines -- honeysuckle,
ivy, cat's-claw, Virginia creeper, yellow jasmine. I remember that the place was
startlingly alive in the bright hot sunlight, clamorous with insects and
brilliant with flashing jays and redbirds.

Aunt Kate was served and cared for by an extraordinarily small woman named
Nelly, who seemed to have invented her own race, being neither black, white,
Oriental, nor Latin. She had dry henna-colored tresses, a wrinkled little face
like a marmoset, and a great deal of superfluous hair on her face and arms. She
opened the front door, peered up at me from not much above the level of my
belt-buckle, and then turned away.

On my last visit to Aunt Kate -- five or six years earlier -- Nelly had
announced me with exactly two words, "He's here." On this occasion she said,
"Well, he's here," which was a gain of one word. She didn't say them to anybody,
just enunciated in a loud, cracked voice, standing in the dark entry hall with
its elk-horn hatrack, clouded mirror, and yellow-brown wallpaper. Then she
rustled away like a departing leaf in autumn and left me to find my own way.

I tried the living room, which was very dark and smelled like mildew, and the
only light seemed to dwell in the rhinestone regalia Kate had worn as Queen of
Astarte in 1948. I tried a few other rooms, and eventually found my great aunt
in a large, jungle-shaded back gallery, lying on a spotty chaise longue and
reading a battered old book. I knew that she bought second-hand books by weight,
and in fact brown cardboard boxes stood all around with piles of books in them,
most with brownish pages and broken spines. The one she was reading was called
L'Abattoir and she put it aside to lay her hand in mine like a long bony fish.

"So, darling, you're interested in Pierre Carcassonne," she said, fixing me with
two tiny, glittering dark eyes lying in a nest of bags and wrinkles like gems in
drawstring purses.

I said yes, and told her what I'd found so far. She made me sit on the end of
the chaise longue while we talked. She was wearing a long-faded robe trimmed
with rabbit fur that had probably looked better on the rabbit. Her bony feet
were bare but the nails of her feet and hands were both done meticulously with
silver varnish. She wore green eyeshadow on her lids and her thin arms were
noisy with many jingling bracelets made of what looked like steel. With the hard
intelligence in her eyes and her somewhat predatory air, she fitted my image of
a successful retired madam.

When I had finished telling my story, she brushed one hand back over her head of
thin, clean white hair, setting her bracelets jangling, and said thoughtfully,
"Grandpapa must have been the most fascinating man. Of course he'd been dead
twenty-two years when I was born, so I never knew him in the flesh."

"He wasn't very popular, I'm afraid."

"I doubt if he cared. He was rich and he had a big family and provided for them
very well. As you and I both know. But perhaps you don't know. Come along,
darling, I've got something wonderful to show you."

She got rather creakily to her feet and led me into the brown shadows of the
house. "There are such strange things in this house, darling! Oh, of course
there's rubbish, too. Damn all these cookbooks, I never cook anymore, why do I
keep them? But also there are wonderful, wonderful things, hidden away, just
waiting to be found again."

She unlocked a door and we entered a little room that seemed to have no
particular purpose at all. I helped her clear a path to a big pine cupboard that
stood in a far comer.

"Now, you remember this place," said Aunt Kate, "and come back here when I'm
dead. I've decided to make you the executor of my will, because you're a
historian and because this house --"

She paused to swing her long, jingling, bony arms in encompassing arcs. "This
house is history!" she cried in a harsh voice that filled the little room like
the scream of a macaw.

We finally got the cupboard door open and a cascade of rubbish fell out broken
dolls, pots and pans, bundled-up papers.

"Shit," she said.

While she rooted I looked around, wondering how long it would take me to
catalogue the stuff in this house and how much you earned for being an executor.

At last she gave a kind of happy squawk and brought out an old leather dispatch
box with a snap lid. Giving me a secret, crafty smile, she led the way back in
silence to the shaded gallery. She cleared a space on a oncegorgeous marquetry
table and snapped the lid of the box open.

"Now, darling, you'll find this truly interesting," she said, pulling out with
some difficulty -- for her wrists were weak -- a thick oblong plate of
greenishly corroded copper.

"Daddy gave it to me before he died," she said proudly. "He had five sons, you
know, but he said to me, 'Kate, you'll appreciate this more than any of them.'"

I picked the metal plate up and stared at it, first in confusion, then in
growing wonder. Kate had produced something the like of which I had never seen
before and have never seen since, though I think there must be many others,
scattered around the world. Some sort of writing had been gouged into the metal.
The work had been done either with a steel stylus or -- as a forensic scientist
suggested, many years later, after viewing it under a strong lens -- with the
point of a hard, rough, sharp claw.

Before I locked that curious object away for good I also showed it to three
alleged experts on the Tulane faculty, who assured me that the language was
either Ill Amharic, the ancient language of Ethiopia 121 Medieval Georgian, or
(3) Old Church Slavonic. None of them offered to translate it. Indeed, I can
only compare the handwriting to the very worst sort of doctor's prescription.
That day in Aunt Kate's I wasn't even sure which way I was supposed to hold the
plate, until I noticed the signature at the bottom.

The name appeared to have been burned into the metal with some strong acid and
it was perfectly legible. It said, of course, Pierre Carcassonne, and gave the
date, le 3Ire Octobre 1848, just twenty years before his death.

I wanted to take the plate with me, but Aunt Kate was having none of that. I
would get it when she was dead, she said firmly. And no, I couldn't have it
photographed. This was something that should exist only in the original.

"Remember, darling," she said as Nelly waited to lead me out. "Grandpapa didn't
just sign that agreement for himself, for his own benefit. He signed it for all
of us, for his descendants to the God-knowswhat generation. I just don't think
it's possible for a family to go on for a century and more always making the
right investments just by accident, do you? And what's more, avoiding the wrong
investments, like slavery, which mined so many people after emancipation. We're
getting good advice, even if we don't know it, even if it comes to us only in
our dreams.

"Grandpapa paid the usual price, and I'm sure he paid it gladly. He didn't care
much about souls, including his own. He wanted the glory of the body, even if it
only lasted twenty years. Goodbye, darling. I'll be dead soon and I'm leaving
you the most interesting thing I own for the same reason Papa left it to me --
because it'll mean more to you than it would to anyone else."

At home it was dinner time. Mama was talking about debutantes and my brother Ned
was feeding his face and occasionally, when his mouth cleared, asking Daddy a
question about debentures. That covered the deb front, so I could spend my time
eating-- our cook, Rawanda, had whipped up one of her greatest specialties,
shrimp Creole -- and slipping an occasional shrimp to Grits IV, who crouched
under the table, whining softly.

I also studied Pierre Carcassonne's face. Had he really done that for all of us,
signed that contract so that we could enjoy the good things of the world for
centuries or forever, while he paid the price? Even that poor tomb-- had it been
a mere formality? Had there been anything left to bury after the contract fell
due and the Creditor came to collect what was owed him? How could anybody do
more/or a family than that?

That afternoon I went swimming in the Shah's Pool with Grits. It was the first
really hot day. Through a screen of azalea bushes I could see the golfers in
their superbright clothes moving languidly around the green hummocks of the
course. Horsemen cantered by on the bridle path, and a wind like a furnace
stirred the huge old branches of the oak trees. Could it really be that we
Carcassonnes would succeed at whatever we tried, because we were protected by
the contract that Pierre had signed with the God of This World? If so, why was I
wasting my time with scholarship?

That night I dreamed about the tintype. The dark metal turned into a dark pool
and Pierre's big gnarled hand reached out of it and gripped mine.

"Join me!" he roared in a voice incredibly hoarse and hollow.

And so I did.