FSF, March-April 2010 (9 page)

Sure now that the storm was heading his way, Schulz set his men to work, blocking the cannon ports with wooden barriers braced by logs wedged against the carriages of the big guns. They covered the muzzles and plugged the firing vents, then went to work on the fort itself—barring the main gate, moving their carbines and swords from the underground magazine to the barracks’ upper floor, closing and nailing the shutters on the windows of the barracks and the officers’ quarters. Since the wooden cistern that supplied them drinking water might be toppled by the wind, Schulz had the men fill barrels with water, muscle them into the barracks, and store them between their bunks. He couldn't have known that
Aedes aegypti,
the mosquito that spreads yellow fever, is a domestic sort of creature and likes nothing better than to breed in artificial containers close to its blood source. For all his forethought and common sense, he'd created a nursery for Yellow Jack right where his men slept.

On the Sunday before the storm, with breakers smashing against the south and southeast walls of the fort, salt spray leaping higher than the parapet, and the wind moaning, Schulz ordered the American flag taken down before it was torn apart, and summoned his fifteen men to a service of prayer and supplication. They met in Casemate Five, with Letourneau watching from his cell. Corporal Quant delivered a rousing sermon asking God to spare them, like Jonah, from the wind and waves—and also (with a glance at Letourneau) from the terror that walketh about in darkness. They sang Old Hundred and the Doxology, and the men's strong voices resounded from the shadowy arches and set echoes careening around the whole circuit of the fort, with the final
Amen
returning in ghostly fashion again and again for a full minute after they fell silent.

Then from his cell, the prisoner in a deep sonorous bass began to chant the
Dies Irae.
Perhaps he'd learned the sounds like a parrot in church, with no idea what the words meant. But the sergeant had had a bit of Latin flogged into him at a Catholic school in Cincinnati, and he admitted that the chant filled him with dread. When his men asked him what the loony was singing, he muttered that he didn't know, fearing to reveal that the words meant
Day of Wrath
.

Saffron sat with the bag of equipment at her feet, the empty Evian bottle in her hand, her mouth half open and her eyes distant.
I have to do the book,
she thought.
This is too good to pass up—I have to do the book.

Schulz (Corman continued) had become fascinated with the Headsman. That night he and Quant went down to Casemate Five, carrying pistols, a lighted candle, and a loaf of bread. Letourneau was pathetically grateful for the extra rations and even more for the company. Schulz sat down on an empty powder keg, Quant leaned against the wall, and in the glow of the candle the three began to talk in a gumbo of languages—French, English, bits of Creole. Quant did much of the translating, for while Schulz knew textbook French, the corporal had a better command of the language of the streets—where learned, the sergeant preferred not to speculate. Bunking with Quant had taught him that his chaplain knew some surprising things about the seamy underside of New Orleans life.

The Headsman's story was part of that seamy side. He'd never known his father, and his mother Madeleine had been a woman of the town. She'd cared for him as best she could until he was ten, when her latest pimp drove him out. He became what Victorians called a street Arab, a ragged homeless boy who survived by cadging tips, committing petty crimes, and renting his body to whoever wanted it. He was a “hobbledehoy” or teenager when he learned that Madeleine had died and was to be buried in Potter's Field on the marshy edge of the
cypriere,
the great cypress swamp. Letourneau brought to the burial two ballast stones he'd taken from the levee, and when the pine box was in the ground he set them on it to prevent it floating to the surface, as the coffins of the poor so often did in rainstorms. The sexton then filled the hole, and Letourneau tipped him a dime, which was all he had. The man bit it, looked at him suspiciously, and walked away without a word, carrying his shovel.

The next few years contained nothing but work and sleep, interrupted by rare bouts of drunkenness in barrel-houses or pleasure in cheap brothels. Not life at all, really. One wet afternoon Letourneau walked to the Third District levee to decide if he wanted to drown himself or not. He brought along a bottle of cheap wine and his cane knife, which he'd used that morning, chopping weeds to earn the price of the wine. He sat down on a wooden bollard in the rain, and spent the next hour drinking and looking at the river and wondering if he had the courage to jump in.

"I never thought of killing anybody but myself,” he insisted, and the man seemed so dim and passive and detached from reality that Schulz almost believed him.

Letourneau had a bellyful of wine when, no more than ten feet away, a head bobbed to the surface of the river. Raindrops dimpled the water all around it, as if little fish were feeding. At first he believed the head must belong to a drunk who'd fallen in and drowned. But then it rose above the surface and looked at him
avec les yeux blancs d'une statue,
with the white eyes of a statue. The head was perfectly bald, lacking even eyebrows and eyelashes, and its skin was the color of a bruise.

The drowned man stood up and stretched out a hand for help. Letourneau thought,
I've never been this drunk before,
but still he rose and leaned down and took the hand. It was cold and the fingers and palm were wrinkled and white, as if the man had been in water for a long time. The nails curled like fishhooks. When the fellow was safe ashore, he spent some time rearranging his sodden rags of clothing, which smelled like river mud. Then he began to speak “
comme Allemand
."

"Like a
German
?” demanded Schulz indignantly.

Letourneau answered, “Yes, in his throat, you know? And his voice bubbled up, as if he was still full of water."

At this point the candle flared and went out. Letourneau kept talking, his words distilling out of the darkness, with the muted sounds of the stormy Gulf as background. The drowned man was a Yankee seaman named Morrow, who'd been serving on Farragut's flagship
Hartford
when he was blown overboard during a battle upriver at Port Hudson. Like many sailors he couldn't swim, and for a few minutes threshed his limbs helplessly, like a crab being boiled. Then the cold river water sluiced into his lungs and turned to fire. He was only twenty, and the last thing he felt was an overwhelming rage that he had to perish with his life unlived.

Perhaps his rage was what saved him from dying completely. Anyway, he awoke far down in the murky river, tumbling seaward with the current while an immense shadowy fish—a giant river cat, maybe—nibbled at his bare feet. He kicked it away, and discovered that he didn't need to breathe any longer. He was a corpse, and yet could move and even think. Could Letourneau, he asked, possibly understand that?

Letourneau could. “I've always been like that,” he said.

"You feel alone, do you?"

"Yes."

"I can help you find a companion. Come with me. And bring your blade."

They walked together into the riverside slums, where water gushed from clay pipes and the gutters whirled rubbish away like millraces. Soon they spotted a woman, clearly a “hooker"—a streetwalker in the slang of the time—who'd taken refuge in a doorway while waiting for the rain to pass. She was holding a wad of newspapers she'd been using as an umbrella and she peered shortsightedly into the street. Morrow took the cane knife from Letourneau's hand and backed against the nearest wall.

"Call her over,” he whispered. “She's hungry, I can feel it, so she'll come out, rain or no rain."

Letourneau did as he was told—Letourneau
always
did as he was told. The woman stared at him, then lifted the newspapers over her head and stepped into the street. Coming up behind her, Morrow swung the blade with his right hand and with his left caught her head before it hit the ground. He picked up the sodden paper, wrapped the head in it, and gave the bundle to Letourneau, along with the cane knife.

"The soul lives in the brain,” he explained. “When you take the head, you take the soul with you. I've done it often. Of course the brain doesn't last long, and when it decays the soul escapes. But then you can always take another."

The rain began to slacken, and Morrow said he had to go back to the river, explaining that if he dried out he'd die for good. “I wish I could come ashore oftener. I get lonesome down there with nothing but the mud and the fishes. Then I want somebody I can talk to, if only for a little while. Maybe I'll see you again."

Letourneau walked home in a dream. In his room he carefully dried the cane knife and oiled it to prevent rust. Then he unwrapped the woman's head and put it into a cupboard, because he didn't know what else to do with it. He hung his sodden clothes outside on the rickety gallery that ran past his room, got into bed, and pulled up the tattered coverlet. He was lying there, shivering, when the head began to sing.

The voice was a little weak, but sweet, like his mother's when he was a young child. Back in those days, when she brought a customer home she'd take Gabriel out of the bed and lay him on the floor, wrapped in a quilt. After the man had finished and gone away, she'd bring him back into the bed, which still smelled of the stranger, and sing him lullabies until he fell sleep.

Letourneau thought the woman in the cupboard must have a nice soul, because instead of bawdy songs she sang sweet old ballads like “Green Grow the Rushes” and “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.” He went to sleep and slept longer and more peacefully than he had in many years. The next night had been the same, and the next. Then the head fell silent. He ought to have buried it, but couldn't bear to part with it, and that was why he'd been arrested and wound up in Fort Clay. He'd never seen the drowned man again, and hadn't told the provost marshal about him, because he knew he wouldn't be believed.

Then, saying he was feeling tired, he told the soldiers good night. He wished them pleasant dreams.

All of this Schulz wrote down, and had Quant sign the record as witness. For a while they drank together, back in their quarters, listening to the rising wind outside, and arguing about their prisoner. Schulz thought him a dangerous lunatic, but believed that sixteen strong and well-armed men had no reason to fear him. But Quant said the Headsman had caught the eye of a devil who would follow him wherever he went. After the corporal fell asleep, Schulz recorded his comment, adding that his roommate also believed in ghosts, witches, and salamanders, and was, all in all, the strangest preacher he'd ever met.

"In my long life,” Corman went on, after a moment of silence, “I've often noticed a peculiar tendency of disasters to follow one another, like sheep trailing the bellwether. Next morning, when Schulz checked the barracks, he found that the rest of the flock had begun to arrive."

Three soldiers complained of fever. At first Schulz diagnosed malaria, a common affliction at the time, distressing but not usually fatal, and dosed them with quinine. That afternoon, just as the storm was arriving in full force, two more fell sick. Schulz and Quant now abandoned the officers’ quarters and moved in with their men. By nightfall the situation had become truly grim—the old wooden barracks shaking and shuddering in a gale that may have reached a hundred miles an hour, the five patients either burning with fever or shaking with cold, teeth rattling in their heads like dice.

Schulz was also concerned about his prisoner. The man was his responsibility, and he had to save him if only for the gallows. Fighting the wind at every step, the sergeant struggled back down into Casemate Five, accompanied by Quant carrying a lantern. They found Gabriel Letourneau standing to his knees in water that had seeped through the barriers and gazing at them with the dumb supplication of a caged animal. Schulz ordered him to extend his hands between the bars, manacled them, and only then opened the cell door. Bent double, the three men fought their way back to the barracks through horizontal rain that stung like birdshot. When a gust almost bowled Quant over, Letourneau grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upright again.

Once inside, Schulz added leg irons to the prisoner's manacles, leaving thirty inches of chain between his ankles so that he could shuffle around. He considered cuffing Letourneau's hands behind his back, but that would have left him helpless, forcing the soldiers to feed him, give him water, and even help him use the so-called honey bucket. Since they already had plenty to do, between nursing their sick comrades and trying to keep the barracks from coming apart, he left the prisoner's hands in front, manacled but still usable.

Toward midnight the wind dropped suddenly. The eye of the storm was passing overhead. Schulz ventured outside into an eerie dead calm. He climbed the wall by the light of a serene half-moon at the summit of the sky, and gazed with astonishment at the pale encircling clouds of the eyewall. Later on, île du Sable received a second punch, the wind now rising from the northwest, but this round was much less violent, and by dawn the hurricane had passed inland, where it soon dispersed in gusts of torrential rain.

But as the weather improved, the patients grew worse. Even to the untrained eye of a Yankee artillery sergeant, their disease clearly was not malaria, for instead of coming and going the fever was continuous, unrelenting.

Hoping for sight of a relief ship, he splashed his way back to the wall. The Parade was ankle deep, and the rising sun shone everywhere on water, nothing but water. The storm tide was running high, and for the time being île du Sable had disappeared under the Gulf, only the walls of Fort Clay standing free. The floating dock had broken its moorings and become a raft, bucking and rolling its way northward toward a shoreline that no longer existed.

Schulz realized that the garrison was stuck for days, maybe a week or longer, until somebody ashore remembered them and sent a rescue boat with an engine powerful enough to make headway against the sea. Until then, they had to survive on what they had—barrels of drinking water, tin canisters of hardtack, sacks of cornmeal, and slabs of salt beef and bacon sealed in casks. Food would have to be cooked on the parapet, using dry wood torn from the barracks’ inner walls.