“It’s clean!” the old man said defensively.
Aaron turned his attention to the wooden box. He removed a nail from an ancient hasp and slid the top back, revealing a burgundy velvet-lined interior. He lifted a long black cane from inside and handed it to Paul.
“I remember this. Haven’t seen it since I was a kid.”
Paul couldn’t believe the heft of it. The hand grip was L-shaped and made of hand-carved ivory. The base of the cane was black and shone like dark glass all the way to the fancy filigree sterling tip.
“Take it with you,” Aaron said.
“It’s even more magnificent than I remembered,” Paul said. “Must weigh ten pounds. You reckon I’m that cripple, do you?”
“It’s weighty for a reason, and you don’t have to be cripple to need it. Look at the tip.”
Paul admired the cane. The handle told the story, in bas relief, of a gunfight, with one man standing tall and the other falling wounded. Paul flipped the cane and looked at the tip, where carved silver circled a black hole.
Aaron took the cane from Paul and twisted the handle. It opened, exposing a breech. He dropped in a brass shell and closed the breech. Then he raised the cane and pointed at a large wooden beam, and there was a deafening explosion. Paul stood and put his finger on the new hole in the wood.
“This old cane has an interesting history,” Aaron said. “Can’t recall exactly what it was, but it had to do with a gambler. Made by a famous gunsmith from a design the gambler worked out in a dream or some such. Had the handle carved in Frisco by a Chinese artist in 1880. Rod is ebony from Africa, covers a rifle barrel. Silver tip’s from Mexican mines. I traded some stuff for this cane fifty years ago. In time of dire straits it’ll give you the answer to one final prayer.”
“I never knew it fired.”
“No reason to tell you before. Forty-four forties are expensive rounds, so don’t waste ’em. Open the breech and load it. A half twist back on the handle sets the pin and drops the trigger. I’m giving you six shells, and I just hope it don’t blow up on you.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Don’t shoot your fool foot off.”
“I won’t keep it loaded.”
“Of course you’ll keep it loaded! What the hell good is it gonna do unloaded? Just like your mama. Sayin’ fool stuff.”
Paul shook his head. “Thanks.”
“Worth a fortune, too, I’d wager. I’m just loaning it to you. Give me your word you’ll keep it with you. And that you’ll bring it back to me… personally.”
Paul stood and the two men embraced. “I’ll be back, Uncle Aaron.”
“With the kids? Bring ’em to see me before I die.”
“We’ll see.”
The old man wiped his weathered eyes on the back of his sleeve. “I ever tell you how much you’ve meant to me all these years?”
“No, Uncle Aaron, you never have.”
The old man slapped his nephew’s shoulder. “And I ain’t about to start now. Trim down that fool mustache, you look like a cattle rustler.”
Paul finished his coffee with a swallow and stood. He leaned the cane against the wall. “I’ll pick this up on the way out.”
“Suit yourself,” Aaron said, waving his nephew away with a flick of his ancient wrist. “You always do.”
6
Laura Masterson stood at the far side of the ballroom where couples had once turned in elegant circles beneath a crystal chandelier imported from France. In this very room smooth-faced boys in dress gray bowed to giggling girls in sweeping hoop skirts, and string quartets played sweet waltzes. Meanwhile a nation divided against itself prepared to trade minie balls and cannon shot. This room had served as a hospice where yellow-fever victims had lain on mats, ministered to by a parish priest and women in white linen. Laura was surrounded by old ghosts, but she stared straight through them as she critiqued her latest painting.
She was leaning against the jamb of the tall pocket doors that were open to the home’s wide hallway, called a gallery. From fifty feet away the face on the canvas looked as detailed as a Vermeer, while up close it was all tiny swirls, short slashes, and dots of oil. The face in the painting was partially destroyed, or partially incomplete, the right eye missing, plucked from the angry socket by an all but angelic vulture. She sipped her coffee and contemplated the image. In her mind the face, like all of her images, was a thing of beauty, but as one critic had said, her figures were “disturbing visages that haunt the viewer while seducing them.”
“This one won’t be seducing anyone,” she said to the coffee. She was far from pleased with the image, but that was true of all of her paintings. If she was pleased, she might lose the edge, whatever that was. She had no idea where her gift-though she would never call it that-came from. She had never shown any more talent at art than friends who were involved in painting. She had come to it late, but it had consumed her with a passion that she had never dreamed possible. The brushes seemed to know what they were after. There was a surety of line and, as her mind commanded, her hand followed. Before she had discovered these images trapped inside her mind, she had been another person altogether. She had been called the Anne Rice of oils, and it had less to do with their shared hometown than with their perspective.
She thought of the reviews from her last show, which her daughter had insisted on reading aloud at the breakfast table. “The subjects get in close, mesmerize, and then tear you to pieces,” Roger Wold had written in the Times-Picayune… “They are images of angels… modern martyrs… exciting to some for that very reason. Classically erotic… This is art that may just turn on you as time passes.” Some people wanted art to move them, and if the work could keep moving them as time passed, all the better. That was worth money, and the flow of money allowed Laura to live in a house built in 1840 and paint in a ballroom where Jefferson Davis had once danced and refrain from dipping into her principal.
This particular painting was of Paul Masterson as he existed in her heart. Physically wounded, emotionally terrified, alone and packed to bursting with guilt. A lot of her work centered on Paul because he had left her filled with pain and confusion, and she was trying to resolve the conflicts in her heart on canvas. Even when she had other subjects in mind, when she began a painting he would often invade the work by appearing in part as he did in this large canvas. The set of Paul’s jaw, the line of his ears, the bright blue of his single eye, the angle of the mouth, the attitude of the head, a shape, a frown or a ghost of a smile, might take form. Consciously she thought she had her feelings for him licked; subconsciously, every time she thought about him, it was as though someone stumbling around inside her head had kicked over a bucket of electric eels.
Some of the people who had purchased her early paintings had sold them to get rid of them, possibly because the owners had become irritated with them or had decided to change the style of their art as part of a redecoration. To their delight there had been a ready market for the pieces, and profits were made. The kind of people who enjoyed being bothered, or who wanted their walls to have personality and their collections to appreciate, snapped up Laura Masterson paintings as fast as they became available. She had been forced to hire an agent to compile a waiting list and negotiate prices. The bidding for the privilege of being seduced and disturbed had driven her prices from two thousand dollars for the first canvas, completed five years ago, to forty thousand in four short years. Now Laura showed at prestigious galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and in a few months’ time would launch a show in Berlin. Her work was perfect for the German market, Lily Turner, her agent, had said. “The sausage eaters”-Lily called the Germans that-“will devour them happily at one hundred thou a pop.”
Laura wandered back to the table, dropped a brush into the baby-food jar filled with thinner, and watched as it influenced the turpentine to a cloudy rose. She let the brush become saturated and then cleaned it carefully, squeezing the bristles in folds of soft cloth until the damp spots were clear of hue. After she had cleaned all of the brushes and her hands, she dropped the bits of turpentine-saturated cotton cloth into the lidded rubbish can. She looked at her watch. It was three A.M.