Complete Short Stories (25 page)

‘George was a serious man, and Jean Lafitte decided to take his offer. He sailed to the Gold Coast with his brother Pierre on the next tide and there, almost at once, as luck would have it, surprised a whole tribe on the march. The Negroes had been
expelled from somewhere in the interior, and being in a pretty poor way, offered no resistance. The Lafittes got two hundred of them aboard, made ingenious arrangements for their welfare on the voyage, and brought across alive one hundred and fifty – smuggled them through Fort Adams and the Bayou St John until Pond came in sight. This constituted, you see, fraudulent evasion of the 1808 Federal
embargo on the importation of slaves; so two hundred dollars a head was not an unreasonable price, considering the risk. But think of it in terms of modern money! Well, Mr Lemnowitz told me, at Pond, that when George Whitaker saw the livestock that the Lafittes had brought back from Africa, and realized they were now his responsibility – though because of their constitution, of no more use as field
workers than the bayou alligators – he turned deathly white. He paid Jean Lafitte without a word; then he went home, made out his will, bequeathing the bulk of his land to the then “Territory of Mississippi” – after which he and his young wife jumped into the River, hand in hand, and were not seen again.

‘Someone took over the plantation, but allowed the Whitakers to remain in a swamp and make
out as best as they could. And they hung on there long after the Whitaker mansion was swallowed up by the jungle. Their “forty” is tax-free and inviolable because the original deed of gift represented taxes paid in perpetuity. About fifteen years ago a Whitaker went crazy – they are none of them very bright – and hit the trail for he didn’t know where. He travelled from swamp to swamp, living off
the land, and eventually reached the town of Woodville which is not very far away as the crow flies, but a thousand miles as the jungle grows. The good people of Woodville, who normally publish an extra of their local paper only when a war is declared or a President assassinated, hurried one through the press with the banner headline: “MAN FROM MARS!” because the poor wretch was half-dead and couldn’t
explain himself, and
all the horses in the town were bolting, and the women screaming their heads off.’

‘And the Choctaw blood?’

‘The Choctaws and Chickasaws were the local Indians, who obligingly moved away from the neighbourhood to make room for cotton. I was told that a few rogue males stayed behind in the swamps, mostly pox-cases, and intermarried with the Whitaker Negroes for want of other
women.’

‘Did your mother find any camellias?’

Will, detecting a hint of irony in the innocent question, answered: ‘Thank you, ma’am. She got a lapful.’

Then he turned to me again. ‘Do you know anyone on
Time
magazine?’

‘Only the editor,’ I said. ‘I happened to rent Tom Matthews a house here in 1931, while he was still a book reviewer.’

‘Then ask him to send you a copy of a piece about Turtle
Folk published that year’

‘I certainly will.’

And in due course of time Tom sent me the medical column of
Time,
December 14th, 1931, and this is what I read:

TURTLE FOLK

At Houston, Miss., A Mrs C. keeps a tub of water in her back yard for an extraordinary purpose. It is a ducking tub for her five-year-old son. Every time he feels uncomfortable he jumps in, clothes and all. Mrs C. does not
scold. For that is the only way the boy can keep comfortable. He lacks sweat glands, which in normal people dissipate two to three quarts of cooling perspiration every day.

Mrs C. has another son, an infant, who likewise lacks sweat glands. He is too young to go ducking himself. So she dowses him from time to time with scuppers of water. Neither child can sleep unless his night clothes and mattress
are wet. They take daytime naps in their damp cellar, with moist sacks for pillows.

Nearby at Vardaman, Miss., are two farmer brothers similarly afflicted. Each works alternate half days. While one plows the other soaks himself in a creek. Every once in a while the worker saunters to the creek for a cool dowsing. The brothers have a sister who dunks herself in the cistern back of their house.

They have a sweatless neighbour woman who must also wet herself for comfort.

At Vicksburg, Miss., there is a seventh of these folk who, like turtles, must periodically submerge themselves. The Vicksburg case is a 12-year-old boy, handled by Dr Guy Jarrett. The others are cases of Dr Ralph Bowen of Memphis.

Dr Bowen last week had on hand a medical report concerning the phenomenon. The seven suffer
from ‘hereditary ectodermal dysplasia
of the anhydrotic type’. That is, they lack sweat glands, and the lack is hereditary. However, the seven Mississippi cases are related only as indicated above. This suggests that the failing is not so uncommon as heretofore believed (only 23 cases have been reported in medical literature). The ailment must often escape medical attention. Along with the lack
of sweat glands goes a lack of teeth. None of the seven Mississippi cases has more than two teeth.

Tom also sent me a typescript from
Time’s
research files:

There are numerous anomalies of the epidermis and appendages due to faulty evolution of the epiblastic layer of the blastoderm. The term ‘ectodermal defect’ has been
limited to those conditions arising from incomplete development of the epidermis or its appendages, or its absence in circumscribed areas, thus excluding the keratodermias and the nevi. Atrichosis congenitalis with or without deformities of the nails and teeth is common, and is accompanied at times by nevi and other congenital anomalies. Congenital absence or malformation of the nails and teeth is
also of frequent occurrence, and in circumscribed areas it is not out of the ordinary to find that the sebaceous and sweat glands are absent or impaired. In restricted areas there may be a complete absence of the epidermis and appendages at birth. It is more rare to encounter cases of extensive deformation or complete absence of all, or nearly all, of the cutaneous structures originating from the
epiderm, to which group the term ‘congenital ectodermal defect’ is given. Guilford, an American dentist, was the first to report a case of this kind. The appearance of these patients is typical and conspicuous, as they have a facies that is suggestive of congenital syphilis. The skin is hairless, dry, white, smooth, and glossy. The teeth are entirely absent or there may be a few present, but the
development is always defective.

There are dystrophic disturbances in the nails. The scalp hair is sparse and of a fine soft texture. The cheek bones are high and wide, whereas the lower half of the face is narrow. The supraorbital ridges are prominent; the nasal bridge is depressed, forming a ‘saddle-back nose’. The tip of the nose is small and upturned, while the nostrils are large and conspicuous.
The eyebrows are scanty, none being present on the outer two thirds. The eyes slant upwards, producing a Mongolian facies. At the buccal commissures radiating furrows, ‘pseudorhagades’, are present, and on the cheeks there are telangiectases and small papules simulating milium and adenoma sebaceum. The lips are thickened, the upper one being particularly protrusive.

The patient studied by Dr
MacKee and myself never sweated. He was uncomfortable during hot weather due to elevation of body temperature and was unable to play baseball and running games with other boys of his age, because of great fatigue induced by such exertions. These symptoms resemble those in other cases reported in the literature, and not uncommonly the subjects find it necessary during the summer to have pails of water
thrown over them if they are to keep comfortable.

The affection is familial, generally affecting males, and seems to be due to an injury during the third month of uterine life. Some of these patients are mentally deficient, but the majority of them have normal mentality because the anlage of the nervous system is distinct from the cutaneous ectoderm long before the injury occurs. MacKay and Davidson
report 4 cases occurring respectively in a woman, aged thirty-four years, and her two sons and one daughter, aged six, eleven, and thirteen years. A comprehensive article with good references on this subject has been written by Gordon and Jamieson.

I was now in a position to review the story from the beginning. In 1919, I had been neurotic, as a result of having spent thirteen months in the trenches
under continuous bombardment, and had begun to ‘see things’ in France even before a fragment of eight-inch shell went clean through my right lung and knocked me out. Limerick was a dead-alive city haunted by family ghosts, and the glass picture focused my morbid fears of the past and future – yes, it must have been the portrait of a turtle-man brought back to Ireland from the Southern States.

Julia and I: because of the unusually close rapport between us, partly explained by her Irish blood, it was not surprising that we should be scared by the same sort of face. Will had testified that the original was highly terrifying to any but a physician who could look coldly at it and characterize it as a
facies
. (‘When am a face not a face, Massa Bones?’ ‘When it’s a
facies
.’) And why should
Julia’s mother not have stumbled across the same old house in New Orleans, and seen the same turtle-man peering through the attic window twelve years previously?

Hank: no natural sympathy existed between him and me, or between him and Julia. But he did have a remarkable receptivity for the emotions of people at a distance, and the trick of converting them into waking visions of his own. Clearly,
he had subjectivized the fright which Julia and I conveyed to each other into something horrible that he had himself seen at Sóller. I need hardly add that Señor Bennasar keeps no tank in his patio for dunking turtle-folk in.

Will Price: he had a keen dramatic sense, but I found him far more accurate than most of my friends about names, dates and facts, and could not disbelieve his story. That
is to say, I could accept what he saw with his
own eyes. And what Mr Lemnowitz told him about George Whitaker and the Lafitte brothers was, Will himself confessed, ‘shrouded in local myth’. On principle I suspect any legend about the Lafittes, as I do any legend about Paul Revere, Paul Jones, or Paul Bunyan. Besides, what connection could there be between the Whitaker Negroes and the white Turtle
Folk who occur spasmodically on the Lower Mississippi? Nobody had suggested that sophisticated white women of Natchez, Vicksburg, Vardaman, Baton Rouge, Yazoo City and New Orleans ever paid clandestine visits to Pond in search of a new sexual
frisson.
It therefore seems probable that if the Lafittes did indeed smuggle a shipload of Negroes to Pond, these were healthy enough when they arrived,
but proved susceptible to the turtle-disease, which is endemic to the Mississippi; and because of inbreeding it became hereditary among them. The families affected were disowned by their masters but permitted to camp on the swampy fringes of the Whitaker estate, after George dragged his wife with him into the River – which he probably did, if at all, for some simple, domestic reason. And because high
cheek-bones and a weak growth of hair are characteristic of the turtle-folk
facies
– which resembles that of the congenital syphilitic – there seems to be no reason for bringing the pox-stricken Choctaws and Chickasaws into the story either.

But what about the numerous coincidences which hold the story together? Julia, her mother, Will, Hank, and myself had all been frightened, directly or indirectly,
by the same rare phenomenon; and we met accidentally in Deyá, a village of four hundred inhabitants commendably unknown to history, which lies three or four thousand miles away from Pond, an even smaller place, to the geographical existence of which only Will among us could testify. Moreover, Tom Matthews who clarified the phenomenon (scientifically at least) for all of us – both Julia and
her mother were immensely relieved to know that it was a real face after all – had also been living at Deyá when the
Time
article appeared. But these coincidences do not amount to much, perhaps, and would never have come to light had not the Whitaker
facies
been so unforgettably frightening. (It occurs to me as I write that the real explanation of the Glamis Monster – the reputedly ‘Undying Thing’
which used to peer out from one of the attic windows at Glamis Castle – may have been hereditary ectodermal dysplasia in the Bowes-Lyon family, hushed up because one of its victims was heir to the earldom.) Finally, I suspect myself of having exaggerated the telepathic sympathy between Julia and myself. Did the face she described so vividly superimpose itself, perhaps, on the fading memory of
the one I had seen in Mr Reilly’s antique shop? My imagination is not that of a natural liar, because my Protestant conscience restrains me from inventing complete fictions; but I am Irishman enough to coax stories into a better shape than I found them.

This is not yet all. In 1954, I broadcast a short summary of the foregoing story for the B.B.C. As a result, a doctor wrote to tell me that he
once had under observation, in a Liverpool hospital, a white child suffering from this rare disease; but that occasional sponging was sufficient relief for its discomfort, except in unusually hot weather. Another letter came from Mrs Otto Lobstein, an Englishwoman who was going off some months later with her husband for a tour of the Southern States, and proposed to check up on the Whitaker Negroes.
‘Where did you say that they lived?’ she wrote.

I provided the necessary map-references, not really expecting to hear from Mrs Lobstein again; but in due process of time she sent me a letter and a photograph. The photograph showed a Mississippi finger-post pointing south to Woodville, north to Pinckneyville, east to Pond and Fort Adams; and the fine condition of the three roads suggested that
prosperity had returned to the neighbourhood since Will Price’s visit there more than twenty years previously. This was the letter, which I have been kindly allowed to print here.