Other Earths (collection)

A FAMILY HISTORY Paul Park

Sailing to Egypt in the spring of 1798, General Bonaparte and his army passed within two miles of the English fleet, northeast of Malta in the middle of the night. What would have happened if Horatio Nelson had set a different course and had captured his enemy at sea?

Of course everything would have changed, instantly and for the better. Its revolution unchecked, France would have become a paradise on Earth, where free men and women raised their eyes from the dirt and stood up straight as if for the first time. Pigs would have learned to speak, donkeys to fly.

Colors would have been brighter, smells sweeter. The weather would improve. God would smile on France and all the French dominions. In June of 1815, gentle breezes would caress the empty fields of Waterloo. A system of high pressure would extend to the New World, and a midsummer hurricane would not rip apart the small, vulnerable French towns of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

It would not destroy the farmhouse of Fran¸ois and Marie Louise de Fontenelle in Pointe à la Hache, a sliver of land between the swamp and the Mississippi River. It would not orphan their children, Amelie and Lucien, and force them to abandon the only home they knew and ride north along the makeshift levees from which, years before, they had hailed the flotilla of barges carrying General Bonaparte to New Orleans, when he took up his duties there as governor.

Disconsolate, the two orphans would not have found refuge with an aunt and uncle on the Rue des Dryades in the capital of New France. They would not grow up sullen and resentful in the grand house of their relatives, treated like servants’ children. At age sixteen, Lucien would not steal his aunt’s jewels and run away. He would not join the crew of a flatboat heading north, past the indigo and sugar plantations, and then the cotton after that, and then the wilderness. Still shy of his seventeenth birthday, he would not come to rest in the territory of the Omahas, at Fort St. Jean on the west bank of the Missouri River, penniless, his money spent.

Two years later, he would not send the following letter:

“Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the clutches of that madwoman and her nine-times-cuckolded husband. If there is anything that mars my current exultation it is that. But let me tell you what has happened here in this great country that is as fresh as if God made it yesterday—no, as if this is still the first morning of creation.

“I think of it that way even as I lie here on my deathbed, too weak almost to raise my pen.”

(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle would not wonder at the crude, small, unfamiliar printing on the envelope, the cherished hand inside. “Ah, is it true?” she would be spared from thinking.)

“My sister, it is true. I have received a sword’s thrust, but the wound has festered. Yet even so I would change nothing of that glorious afternoon when Colonel Bernadotte broke Jackson’s lines, unless it were to spare you unhappiness or to see my son Logan weaned from his mother’s breast, take his first steps. But like one of Captain Ney’s horse-soldiers at the top of the bluff, or like a Pawnee warrior with his coup stick in his hand, my thoughts have ridden far ahead of my story. “My dear, I beg you to forget your pride and not turn your heart away from my infant son. I assure you, his blood is better than our blood. His grandfather is Big Elk, great chief of the Omahas, and his mother is Bright Sun—Me-um-ban-ne—oh, I would like you to meet her so that you might cherish her as a sister for my sake. Let me explain to you the method of my courtship, for even after everything I can’t believe my luck or regret anything that has occurred. You must imagine me friendless and unhappy, hunting deer along the juncture where the Elkhorn meets the Platte. This was when the corn was small, and I came in through the fields of maize and beans. I left my horse and continued, finding the place deserted, or so I thought, because the tribe was hunting in the Sand Hills. I counted three-score lodges, which were mounds of raised earth, thatched with bluestem grass. I wandered among them. All their doors faced east, and all were blocked with an arrangement of dried sticks, so that the men could see if anyone had entered in their absence—all but one, thank God, and it the largest. I entered a low corridor in the earth and soon found myself in a dark space formed by a circle of wooden posts joined overhead by wooden rafters and a cage of willow wands. Light came from an opening in the grass roof, and I could see her sleeping on a raised platform like the princess in the story. Oh, she is so fair! It was in the afternoon, and the air was hot. I learned later she had hurt her foot, which was why she was sleeping in the middle of the day. She was not with the others in the fields, the old women and young children who kept the village while the tribe was hunting buffalo in the west. In this and everything I see the hand of Providence, for she was scarcely awake before we were man and wife, according to the simple ceremonies of her people. We scarcely had a word in common, but even so she begged me to stay, or else she begged me to leave before her mother returned—I would have pursued either course! But I was anxious to find the black-robe at the mission on Council Bluff and to prepare everything our sainted mother might have asked. And though my wife clung to me, and though she wept, I asked her to be patient, as I would come back the next morning with the priest.

“I wish I had never left her. But even in this tragedy I see Fortune’s hand. I would not have been able to prevent, by my presence, what occurred. That night the village was attacked by the vengeful and blood-thirsty Sioux, led by their chief and an American named Benjamin Burgess, also called ‘the lion of Missouri. ’ ‘The devil’ would have been a better name—Captain Ney had already told me about him, when I saw him at the fort. Burgess was a spy in Jackson’s pay. Always he was searching for a means to bring the tribes to warfare on both sides of the river, an excuse for the Americans to intercede. Life and property meant nothing to him. If he could steal away the favorite daughter of Big Elk while the camp was undefended …

“Once more I have charged ahead. That afternoon, when the shadows were longest, I reached the mission at Council Bluffs. I was looking for the black-robe, Father de Smet, whom I knew. But he had gone to baptize children in the Ponca villages along the valley of the Wolf River. Instead I found another, a Jesuit named Mylecraine.

“He has given me kindness, and with my wife he is tending to me now, and so I will describe him, a small man, even smaller than Governor Bonaparte when I saw him at the fort with Captain Ney. During the time I have known him, I have never seen him shave his beard, and yet his face is soft, his hands childlike and delicate. I say this to emphasize by contrast the courage he has shown. He is from Brittany, and he studied music before turning to God. Even now he takes his wooden flute and flageolets among the tribes, and I have seen the battle-scarred warriors of the Omaha sit round him in a circle, their faces soft with wonder and delight.

“That evening when I came to him, he packed up his flute first of all. He had seen Bright Sun that winter, when he was a guest in her father’s lodge. And though he scolded me for the precipitateness of my wooing, he was smiling as I was, without any notion or thought that at that moment already Bright Sun’s mother lay dead, as well as four of the old braves who had not ridden with the others, and several children also, because of the savagery of the Sioux chieftain, Goes-to-War, as well as Burgess the American, whom later I shot down.

“By that time it was dark, and Father Mylecraine and I stayed in the mission. Early the next morning we set off, as joyful as you please. Because he was fluent in all the tongues of the Indians, I was eager, with his help, to explain my wife future to her, how she would accompany us to Bellevue and take up residence. Alas, I was full of plans. Before noon we reached the site of the catastrophe. All was in chaos, and I spent more than an hour helping Father Mylecraine attend to the wounded, while at the same time searching for Bright Sun. There were no horses at the village, so I let one eight-year-old boy take the pony I had brought for my bride and her possessions; he started off along the Platte to discover Big Elk’s camp, a distance of a hundred leagues. With the priest’s help, another boy told me what I wanted to know, how he had seen Burgess with his fringed coat and beaver hat—the lion, as he called him, but I knew who he was: a huge man with yellow hair down his back, his yellow beard high on his cheeks—there were not two like him in the territory. Even though she could scarcely walk, he had taken Big Elk’s daughter across his saddlebow and ridden north into the land of the Oglala Sioux. Anyone could see where the war party had passed. Furious, I rode out after them, following the track, even though Mylecraine begged me to wait while we fetched the soldiers from the fort—there was no time for that! Nor could the captain have left St. Jean to intervene in a dispute between the tribes, not with General Jackson massing on the other side of the Missouri; beyond question, it was Burgess’ plan to drive a wedge between the French and the Omahas, to force Captain Ney to choose between disappointing his allies and abandoning his post.

“I followed the trail of the Oglala, two or three score, it seemed to me. But when I came to the side of the ravine, where the track led downhill toward Sarpy’s ford, I saw one horse break away. I was looking for the print of its shoes, a larger horse than any Indian’s, and heavily loaded, and shod in the fashion of the United States’ Cavalry—I knew what I saw. I thought Burgess would try to remove my wife across the river for safekeeping, perhaps because he thought the Sioux would murder her or worse or otherwise do damage to his schemes. Or else he wanted her for himself. In both cases it made me wild with rage. I pressed my mare forward, and as darkness fell I saw a campfire along the ridge, still on this side of the river, for which I thanked God.

“I loaded my long musket and crept up through the juniper trees. The moon was high and small. With as much stealth as I had, I crept up the ravine outside the glow of the fire, by whose flickering light I saw my wife among the stones, her head bowed, her hands tied in front of her as if in prayer. I can tell you, my heart boiled in my chest. Ben Burgess sprawled beside her, a chunk of roasted deer-meat on the end of his knife. He kept no ceremony with her—his collar was undone, his sleeves rolled up. His yellow beard merged with the hair of his fat chest and shoulders—truly, he was hairy as an animal! And he was no bashful or tongue-tied lover, but spoke freely in the language of the Omahas, laughing and muttering as if all this were a joke! He threw down his knife and lifted up instead a cup of whiskey, which I could determine from the smell. He thrust it into my wife’s face. And when she raised her head, and when I saw her expression of despair and passive courage, I thought I could contain myself no longer. I must challenge the lion in his lair, even though I could see Burgess’ pistol laid out on the stones, already cocked and primed. But in my rashness I discovered I had climbed into a trap, because no sooner had I stood up and thrust forward into the circle of the light, no sooner had I uttered my first cry, than one of the cursed Indians, his face still painted like a devil’s, rose from beneath my feet and knocked my gun aside. He was a brave in his first season, younger than myself, bare chested despite the cold, with broken feathers in his hair. Burgess had not risen to his feet, as politeness or prudence would have required. ‘Oho!’ he said, still sprawled next to my wife, ‘we have a guest. But if it isn’t Monsieur Fontenelle!’—he spoke in English. ‘What a surprise! But I suppose you’re a regular tear-cat, now!’

“How can I describe the expression on my wife’s face when she saw me—Bright Sun indeed, but streaked with clouds of anguish and despair. The Indian had his knife at my throat, and he dragged me forward into the firelight. I held out my hand as if to reassure her, but at the same time I saw nothing but blackness ahead of us, as if she and I together had been swallowed up in darkness or the shadow of the pit. I felt darkness overwhelm me, and I raised my hand to push it away, push its shadows from my eyes. The sharp steel was at my throat.

“At that moment, as the darkness threatened to surround me, I heard a noise from away down the hill. I heard a few soft, breathy notes, the low murmur of the black-robe’s wooden flute, an air from his native Brittany …”

I have seen a photograph of Amelie de Fontenelle, taken when she was in her sixties after the end of the Civil War. She is dressed in mourning. Gray ringlets hang down underneath a white lace cap.

No photograph or painted portrait still exists of her brother Lucien. He was a famous trapper and mountain man, who established a trading post at Bellevue, Nebraska, in the eighteen twenties. His wife was an Omaha princess named Bright Sun. His only child, Logan, was the chief who bartered the land of the Omahas to the United States government after small-pox had destroyed the tribes. In 1855 he was scalped and murdered by the Dakota Sioux. His father did not live to see it; Lucien Fontenelle was dead from alcohol, or typhus, or suicide by that time, an ugly man, according to letters and journals of various pioneers, with a face like a monkey.

But what if his mother in Pointe à la Hache had not eaten too heavily one evening when she was pregnant, had not dreamed her monkey dream? What if Madame Mercier had been a different kind of woman, one who had taken to heart, perhaps, the great victory off Malta in 1798, when Horatio Nelson’s flagship had sunk with all hands? She would have been just a girl, impressionable and easily influenced, perhaps, by the celebrations in the streets. Later on, she might have been overjoyed to take into her home her brother’s children after the catastrophe. She might have loaded them with kindness. Stuck in a loveless marriage, she might have felt herself responding to the handsome young Lucien despite the difference in their ages. Generous, open hearted, and näve, perhaps she could not guard her nephew from the maniacal and sadistic Dr. Mercier, who would have driven the boy not just from the city but from the entire territory of New France—up the Mississippi and then east up the Ohio to the Kentucky wilderness. Several years later he might have sent his sister the following letter:

“Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the grip of that madman—I do not speak of my aunt. But I must tell you what has happened in case the worst comes to the worst. I lie here wounded, close to death, shot down by Douglas Sharpe and my erstwhile companions …”

(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle might have wondered at the careful, feminine handwriting on the envelope. “Ah, is it true?” she might have thought.)

“Dear heart, it is true. And so I must leave a record of what has happened, for you to join together with your memory of our life together in Pointe à la Hache—ah, such times seem a paradise to me. In this way I might feel that my life has a pattern, however fitful and provisionary, however much it loops upon itself, as if I were a plaything for an arbitrary and erratic God. I also must inform you of what I most believe: that a war is coming, despite the wisdom of the emperor and his well-known sympathy for the rights of his native subjects, the appeal they have made to his own wild nature. The land is too empty on our side of the river. To the east the land fills up like water in a cup, and the time will come when it will burst its bounds.

“I have seen this at first hand, from the day I left the blessed shore of New France to assume my exile among these Americans. I suppose you must imagine me miserable, bedraggled, without funds, alone in an English-speaking land. Never mind how, but I found myself in a country called the Barrens, in the parish of Edmonson, along the banks of the Green River. This was a terrible desolation, as vast and lonely as the desolation in my heart, a sere expanse of hills and limestone knobs, with dark forests of blackjack trees in the crevices between them. Everywhere were fissures in the earth such as could swallow up a man on horseback—remnants of the earthquake that formed that country in the early days and whose instability can still be felt.

“In this dereliction, though, I found a refuge on a little farm, a few dozen acres and a log cabin chinked with mud, a few rooms to let to travelers. And you will understand what I mean when I suggest that the proprietress of this establishment reminded me of our dear aunt in her kindness toward an orphan far from home. Her name was Madame Mylecraine, but I did not think there was a monsieur, despite the presence of a dark-eyed and dark-skinned boy named Logan on the premises. You see I must describe these things as I first perceived them, not as I learned subsequently. She also had come a long way, because her father was a native of the Island of Man, and she spoke in the Manx language with a hired hand about the place. Oh, there is much for me to tell you. One thing at a time. I pray for strength to reach the end.

“She is small, formed like a woman and a child at the same time, although her hair already holds a silver frost—in this she also reminds me of our dear aunt. She has green eyes, I suppose. On my third night in that house, as I lay sobbing on my bed, she came into my room—these are spaces scarcely large enough to let the door open inward. She stood at the threshold carrying a stick, I thought—the light was behind her and I could not make it out. But I imagined the cudgel in my uncle’s hand, as he stood on the landing of the stairs (Oh, I pray that he is dead, and he torments you no longer!), until she moved. Then the light from the hurricane lantern touched her hair and the stick at the same time, revealing it to be a silver flute. She did not blow into it or touch its keys, but she showed it to me only, as if the fact of its existence could be a source of hope. It was outdoors that she played it, as well as a small flageolet or piccolo, a wild, ferocious sound! It was only later that I heard it, after I had revealed to her some news that agitated her in a way I did not understand. In my clumsy English I explained that I had taken employment. I thought she would be pleased! But I was to be a member of the party that would search out and apprehend a highway-man or bandit who preyed on travelers along the road; he always took refuge in one of the huge caves in that area, the largest one, in fact, which stretched many leagues under the earth from the great pit that was its entrance. A Captain Douglas Sharpe had undertaken to search him out.

“This was in the month of October. When I explained it to Madame Mylecraine, in the great room by the fire, I thought she would approve of me, if only because I would be able to pay my way—there were rumors, as always in such places, of buried treasure in the cave. Instead she was angry and distraught and asked me what I knew of this fellow, Leon Benbourgisse—an uncouth name! I answered what I had been told, that he was a mongrel or half-breed of prodigious strength who had robbed a number of rich gentlemen on horseback and murdered one of them, so that travelers now avoided the entire locality. I thought she would be grateful to dispose of such a one! Instead she said nothing and turned away from me. This was in the evening, when the lamps were lit. She put her kerchief over her head and went out.

“I waited for her to return. When she did not, I went in search of her. In time I followed not her foot-steps or the shadow of her passing but a sound at the limit of my hearing, a melody from the Celtic islands, or Brittany, or Acadia, as you and I have heard together from the players in the Place D’Armes. I found her in a seam of sunken rocks below a limestone cliff, a place of evil reputation in that country, if one can judge from the name of Devil’s Twist. It was a place where she went to be alone, and I followed the note of her piccolo, which in that amphitheater swelled among the rocks, even though she played quite softly, as I perceived. She had pulled away her kerchief, undone her long hair. When I kicked some stones to alert her to my presence, she turned suddenly, as if from a guilty secret. The music broke as if snapped off. When she saw who it was, she came to me. She took my hand and begged me to consider the extremities of fate that might drive a good man underground, the injustice that might force him to lash out against his tormenters. ‘I will not go,’ I said. ‘Not if you forbid it.’ But instead she asked me to continue the next morning to the muster at the gulf of Mammoth Cave so that I could be her eyes in that dark place. So small she was! Almost like a child. I reached to wipe away her tears, to comfort her like a child and a woman—you and I both know that is possible!

“The next morning I rendered myself at the top of the pit, at a distance from the farmhouse of two leagues or else some miles—I will give these measurements in the English fashion, as they were explained to me. We crossed over the stile of fence rails that blocked our way and continued down the ravine at a distance of a hundred feet below the surface of the plain. On each side of the dry streambed we found oak trees and chestnuts, as well as elms and maples and a proliferation of vines and brambles, in all a far greater variety than anything to be found up on the flat. When I remarked on this, my companions first explained to me one of the enduring mysteries of this place, which as we sank down appeared more and more dismal and terrible to me, darker and colder, though it was a bright, hot morning when I left Madame Mylecraine’s farm. There is a wind that issues back and forth out of the cave, as if from a bellows or the lips of a stone giant, a breath that is most healthful and bountiful. Consumptive patients, I was told, after all hope was abandoned, could take up residence in the mouth of the Vestibule and be cured in a matter of days. This was first reported in the days of the last war, because the floors of the first galleries are rich in nitre, which is used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Even now we could see the remnants of the abandoned works, while the guides told us stories of their uncles or fathers who had emerged from the pit with their backs straight and their eyes keen, their ponies glossy and well-tempered. I thought at first they were deceiving me.

“But now we stood on a grassy terrace above the entrance, a steep descent to the black arch, choked with planks and timbers, while water dripped down from above. And for the first time I could feel the cold, sepulchral blast, while I watched the swallows dart through the thin water, and at the same time I listened to our commander, Captain Douglas Sharpe, as he explained our tasks. There were twenty-five of us, divided into groups of five.

“Now we also received our iron torches and a bucket of lard among each group. We filled our canteens from the brook and primed our pistols. But we could not light the swinging lanterns in the wind until we had descended beneath the great portal and sixty paces into the cave itself. Here the roof was just a foot above my head. The passage was constricted by a wall built by the miners, leaving only a narrow door. The wind blew like a winter storm, and we must grope forward in the dark. A few feet beyond the wall, the air was calm and still.

“Here we lit our lamps and pressed forward in single file. We stayed in this low, narrow corridor for perhaps a quarter of a mile until it opened out into the Vestibule, a round chamber perhaps two hundred feet across, and the ceiling sixty feet above our heads. Black buttresses of stone jutted from the shadowy walls. Our party of twenty-five had seemed sufficient in the narrow entrance to the cave. But as we pressed forward into the Grand Gallery we seemed small and few. We picked our way among the leaching vats and wooden pipes. We skirted mounds of excavated earth, while for the first time I gave credence to the stories I had heard outside, that the miners in their excavations had disturbed a cemetery of gigantic corpses, ten feet long. It was easy to imagine giants in this place, and to imagine also the ghostly presence of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, specters from the more recent past.

“As it turned out, this was no idle speculation. Because of it, I was able to find our quarry where the rest failed. For by the light of my swinging torch I descried piles of blackened rushes and abandoned canes, which the Cherokees had used to light their way. As we spread out into the side passages—the Haunted Chambers, as they are called, and the Bridges with their gleaming stalactites—I found myself looking always for these traces that, though ephemeral, seemed more trustworthy (I don’t know why!) than the arrows marked in chalk to indicate the correct route or warn me from the brink of some precipice or pit. At the same time it occurred to me what in some fashion I must already have known, that Leon Benbourgisse and his accomplices must have another means of egress from the cave. Else they could not fail to be taken in the Narrows.

“And so as much as I was full of wonder at the dismal choirs of rock, the ghostly chapels with their dripping columns sixty feet above my head, I found myself studying the ground as well, looking for marks of the outlaw’s passage. I remembered the way Madame Mylecraine had leaped to his defense and wondered at the connection between them. At the same time I first noticed a shard of broken pottery such as is often found where Cherokees have camped—a distinctive piece, ridges of black on a dull surface. I swung my lantern over one of these, allowing my companions to go ahead. I thought I had seen several of these shards, broken into rough trapezoids, and resolved to look for them. I passed by the Devil’s Looking Glass, a sheet of fallen rock. And in a chamber called the Snow Room, where any shout or call brings from the ceiling a shower of crystal flakes, I found what I was looking for—away from the path, where the salt dust was undisturbed, a piece of my broken pot, and beyond a naked footprint.

“I let the torches diminish as the men passed into the Deserted Chamber. I did not call them back. To do so would have dusted me as if with snow. Instead I remembered my promise to Madame Mylecraine, or Kate, as she would have had me call her. With my lantern held in front, I took a few steps forward, around a buttress of the rock. There was a twisting corridor, another piece of pottery. Fifty yards on, I found a hole, a round passage perhaps four feet tall, and in front of it, another footprint.

“Like Robinson Crusoe, I crouched over it. My dear sister, I do not know why I continued, except because there are always choices of this nature in the lives of men, to creep forward in the dark or else fall back. I could feel a wind from the round hole, not enough to threaten my flame. I knelt and pushed up an ascending passage until it opened up into a great space. My light could not reach the ceiling. And I found myself at the edge of a cliff. A spar or promontory of rock protruded thirty feet over the black chasm, ending in a rough point. From the cliff I could see no trace of the far wall, or of the bottom, or of the roof. It was a place at the edge of the world, a strip of rock that passed into the darkness at both sides. I crossed it in five paces, shuffling through the half-burned canes that were as thick here as the saline crystals had been back beyond the hole, piles of them.

“I stretched my lamp over the abyss. Now I could hear at a great distance the rushing of a stream, while some wisps of vapor lifted toward the light. And I could see also the remnants of a painted geometric pattern on the limestone promontory, even on the underside, daubed there by some brave or chief’s son as he hung suspended over the depths. On the top I saw three timbers wrapped in bundles of bleached cloth, carved poles or images sacred to the first inhabitants of that place and hidden there, I guessed, from men like me.

“Nor could I keep from my mind the rumors I had heard of buried treasure, purses robbed along the road or the lost gold of these ancient tribes. Even though I understood the foolishness of such tales, I could not stop myself from setting my lantern in a crevice in the rock, carved there, as I saw, for the purpose. On my hands and knees, I climbed out on the base of the promontory, placing my feet in the shallow steps. And I had just promised myself to turn back, to abandon this search or else to call out to my friends, as I still supposed them to be. But then I heard a noise behind me, the chink of an iron chain, while at the same time the light trembled. I turned to see a man against the rock wall behind me, though whether he had followed me out of the hole or had crept toward me from somewhere further on along the ledge, I could not then determine. For a moment I was motionless with horror, because I was convinced that this was Benbourgisse himself, a huge man clad only in leather breeches, with naked legs and a black, naked, hairless chest. He had no beard and no hair on his oiled scalp. He pulled at the swinging torch, and when he turned to me and smiled, his features showed his Cherokee or African parentage. But more horrifying still was what he intended at that moment, as I saw him wrench the iron bar from its crevice in the rocks. Ah, God, he could not leave me here, and so I gathered myself on my stone promontory and leaped at him across the intervening space. In the middle of my jump, he swung the lantern toward me, only high beyond my grasp, launching it out over the abyss, where it fell and was extinguished at once.

“How can I explain to you the terror that I felt, to find myself encased in darkness as I moved? No light, no light at all, darker than night, darker than when you close your eyes, darker, I suppose, than blindness. Every act is an act of faith. I scrambled up toward the wall where I had seen him, guided only by his low chuckle and his soft exhale. But in my desperation I found him and grabbed hold of him, only to feel myself suddenly overpowered, the pistol snatched from my belt, while at the same time I could smell his whiskey-soaked breath and hear his voice muttering as if inside my ear itself, ‘Well, ain’t you a regular tear-cat, sure enough?’

“Then I could feel his arms tighten around my chest, and it occurred to me that he could crush my bones between his hands or that he could cast me over the lip of the abyss, to follow the light downward forever. He could not be resisted, because he had drunk so deeply from the cave’s air. My eyes stared in the darkness, and as I felt the breath crushed out of me, I cried out, ‘Please, I have a message from Mistress Mylecraine!’

“Suddenly I was released, flung a little distance onto the stone ground. I saw nothing, smelled nothing, heard nothing, while at the same time I did not dare to move, because I could not guess how far I cowered from the edge of the precipice, or even which direction it lay. I crouched as if at the bottom of my own grave. I raised my face up to the vault above me, imagining at some moment I might hear the strains of a silver flute, an air or melody from the Isle of Man, guiding me upward, always upward into the light of day.”

In the big house on the Rue de Dryades, Lucien’s lonely and brokenhearted sister might have wiped away a tear.

And though desperate to leave the house of Monsieur and Madame Mercier, still she might not have married at her first opportunity an American lawyer with whom she did not even share a language. Their daughter, Justine Lockett, would not have died in prison waiting for trial after she’d been arrested carrying letters and supplies through the Union lines at Petersburg. A widow, she would not have left young children, one of whom, my great-grandmother, would not have gone north to Virginia to live with her father’s family. She would not have married William R. McKenney, a congressman and judge. Her granddaughter would not have met my father, who himself would never have existed for different but related reasons. Sixty years later, a diminutive universe of speculation would have been snuffed out.