She took her new husband back to New Orleans. Though ostensibly Catholic now, Mary Ellen bore little resemblance these days to the girl who had scampered through the halls of the Ursuline convent in muslin dresses and ribbon-tied sandals—she took up the bloody practice of real voodoo, under the tutelage of the infamous Marie Laveau, who got for Mary Ellen a high-paid position as cook for the household of a planter in nearby Bayou St. John.
Mary Ellen was a sincerely ardent abolitionist, and she used her privileged position to make contacts with negro slaves throughout the New Orleans area; and she managed to spirit away such a number of them to freedom through “the Underground” that the authorities began looking for the light-skinned negro woman who always seemed to attend somehow at the escapes—and this slave-stealing woman was too-accurately described as tall and thin, with mismatched eyes.
And so one night Mary Ellen had fled, leaving behind in her bed a bolster wrapped in her nightdress with a wig on it. Marie Laveau booked steamship passage for her to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn.
Mary Ellen arrived in San Francisco on April 7, 1852—but Agoston Haraszthy himself came to the city only a few months later to establish his kingdom in nearby Sonoma; and of course he had brought with him cuttings of the god’s New World wine, which by this time had already reached the Bay Area and was known, properly at last, as Zinfandel.
The god would still have forgiven her, on some basis—but she fought him.
She quickly got employment as a gourmet cook, serving Cajun pirogis and shrimp remoulade and exotic spicy jambalaya to the bankers and gold-dealers of San Francisco—and she made contact with escaped slaves and was able to find jobs for them in the households of affluent families; and then she used her beneficiaries as spies to garner valuable particulars of scandal…murders, illicit births, embezzlements, abortions. Soon she owned several laundries, but blackmail was her real business.
“My life,” she had told Kootie ruefully this morning at the kitchen table, “was based on the very opposite of any divine pagadebiti.”
In her voodoo procedures she didn’t hesitate to use the power of alcohol, and even of wine, but always in spitefully broken or vitiated forms. The founder of the mercantile firm F. W. Macondray & Company had erected a grapery, a greenhouse-chapel to the god’s holy vine, at the corner of Stockton and Washington—and so in 1866 Mary Ellen Pleasant, as she now called herself, bought the property and sacrilegiously converted it to the boardinghouse whose kitchen she and Kootie were now sitting in; and to the bankers and steamship owners who dined at her boardinghouse she served hot raspberry vinegar, and cowslip wine, and double-distilled elderberry brandies. When in 1892 she finally killed the man who had been her main benefactor in San Francisco, she first hobbled his ghost by serving him wine from which she had boiled off all the alcohol…and then after she had pushed him over a high spiral stair railing she hurried down to where his body lay on the parquet entry-hall floor and pulled the hot brains out of his split skull, so that the ghost would be sure to dissipate in confused fragments.
“A surer trick than those ashtrays with Madam, I’m Adam or some such nonsense written around them,” Mammy Pleasant had told Kootie this morning.
“I bet,” Kootie had said hoarsely.
“But at the turn of the century the god caught up with me,” she had said, taking Kootie’s empty plate to the sink, “and took everything away—my great house on Octavia Street, my servants, my money—until at the last I was a plain homeless charity case, shambling around the Fillmore district like…like a bolster with an old wig on it, in a nightdress. I had only one companion left by then, a negro giant who was actually my captor and guard, known to people as Bacus—” She spelled it out for Kootie. “—because people didn’t ever see it spelled right, which would have been B-A-C-C-H-U-S. He—it—was a sort of idiot fragment of the god’s attention. And finally, on January eleventh of 1904, in the spare room of a mere Good Samaritan acquaintance, I died.”
Kootie looked past her. He thought the strings of garlic and dried red peppers hung in the high corner of the ceiling had lost some of their color in the last few minutes, even become a bit transparent, but he wished forlornly that he could just forget his life and become one of the boarders here.
The old woman went on softly, perhaps talking to herself: “For a while after that I just drifted in the gray daguerreotype-plate ghost-world version of the city, lost, mostly on the beaches by Sutro’s Cliff House and Point Lobos and Land’s End. It was a time of cleansing exile for me, like Ariadne abandoned on Naxos by her false human lover Theseus. At last, three Easters and three days after I died, the god mercifully did come back for my ghost, and he knocked down Yerba Buena when he came.”
She looked up at Kootie, and her mismatched eyes were again sharp. “For me,” she said, “January eleventh is the open door of the revolving year, and on that day I was able to call out to you people, to try to tell you all what you had to do. And I was interceding for you all with the god—he broke your two friends out of the madhouse on that night, and allowed the king’s ghost to be called and drive them right to where you were, where his body was. You had every species of help.”
“I don’t know that we’ve done very well,” said Kootie.
“You’ve all done very badly,” she agreed, “and amassed huge debts.”
From a shelf stacked with old gray cookbooks and account ledgers she now pulled down a jarringly modern oversized paperback book with garish red and green swirls and the word FRACTALS in big red letters on the slick cover. She flipped it open to an inner page and showed Kootie a color picture of flames or ferns or octopus tentacles boiling away from a warty, globular black shape.
“Have you seen this silhouette before?” she asked gently, pointing to a clearer picture of the five-lobed silhouette, which resembled a fat person with a little round head and stumpy arms and round buttocks.
Kootie could only look away from the picture and nod and close his throat against sudden nausea. It was the silhouette that had appeared on the television screen in the motel this morning after Arky had poured beer into the set, and it was, too, the shape he had momentarily seen overlapping the pretty Chinese woman when he had first glimpsed her today in the Street of Gamblers.
Mammy Pleasant sighed and shook her head. “Oh, it’s death, child, the person of the god’s unholy trinity that’s retributive death, and you can testify yourself that it does love to have people enter into its terrible bargain. It was the person of the god that came for me first, on that cold January eleventh morning, demanding payment for chopping down the vine in Macondray’s grapery—dethroning the vine god, killing the vegetation king, beheading the Green Knight. In olden-days history it was called the Quinotaur, and it gave power to the Frankish king Merovee in the Dark Ages—it came to him in the form of a talking bear, and Merovee cut its head off—and it came back under the name of”—she tapped the page—“Pepin the Fat, to kill Merovee’s greatly-greatly-grandson Dagobert, and that ended the Merovingian line of kings in that long-ago time. And it’s been known as Bertilak of the High Desert, the Green Knight, who met Sir Gawain at the Green Chapel on New Year’s Day, a year after Gawain had cut off Bertilak’s head, to collect on that debt. Other folk, meaning to or not, have let the Quinotaur take over themselves to some degree, and always they come back to demand payment-in-kind for their deaths.”