Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Then with the Last Of your Strength you Wiped her mouth, Laid her down to rest (it was past 3 P.M.), and yourself Collapsed Into Sleep beside her. Next day, Wednesday, as the Dow-Jones Industrial Average sank to the year’s low and General Grant died and Senator Kennedy’s driver’s license was suspended and Haile Selassie was born and the Sun entered Leo, Jacob Horner was Scheduled per Wiedertraum to Have Dinner with Joe and Rennie Morgan, his Prospective New Colleagues at Wicomico Teachers College, where he had Just Been Appointed as a Teacher Of Prescriptive Grammar. But schedule or no schedule, you Needed Further Restoration before Resuming Management both of Marsha and of the Mercury. That day, therefore, a bright still one, you Spent In your Room except for three excursions to the now friendly array of vending machines, for breakfast, lunch, dinner. The chambermaid looked at you. There seemed to be no other guests at the Iroquois Motel. Deprived of her Honey Dust, Marsha was vacant but not comatose: it Appeared To you that she understood where she was and with whom, and did not mind. Sometimes she even replied to your Remarks and Queries. Daytime TV. When you Suggested A Shower she even said My my, and as you Soaped Up in there together, she declared almost crossly that she was able to scrub her own tits, thank you. This sharpness you Took For A Sign Of Recovery. Ditto her disinclination, this time, to receive your Ejaculate in her mouth, though she had no objection to collecting it in her other hand, which promptly thereafter she washed with more soap and water.

Skip your Sex Life, Horner. Any more information about that computer?

Only that when you Asked her sometime that night, as David Brinkley reported a.6 % increase in the U.S. cost of living for June, whether in her opinion LILYVAC was a bona fide electronic computer or a monstrous simulacrum, she formed the longest syntactically coherent sentence you had Heard from her since before her disappearance, possibly excepting the one about her tits, to wit: Life is going to be a bitch without Honey Dust.

Next day, then, Th 7/24, as H. “Rap” Brown’s speech in Cambridge, Maryland, inspired some of its black citizens to arson, and Congress established the Internal Revenue Service to raise money for the War of 1812, and President Nixon greeted the Apollo-11 astronauts quarantined aboard the U.S.S. Hornet, happy birthday Dumas père, Lord Dunsany, Amelia Earhart, you Successfully Checked Out of the Iroquois and Made Your Way up through South Buffalo, across the Peace Bridge, through U.S. and Canadian Customs, and back to the Farm! Fetched Marsha to the infirmary (Just rubbed raw is all, Tombo X’s new black nurse reported: She been getting it off with a corncob?)! Et cetera.

Joe allowed that afternoon’s P & A, here reported, to serve in Der Wiedertraum as your Abortive First Interview at Wicomico Teachers on 7/20/53; the subsequent week’s P & A (7/31/69) as your Second Interview (7/21/53), whereat you First Meet Joseph Morgan – though in fact your Dinner With Joe & Rennie Morgan (7/23/53) had been reenacted, inversely, the night before, 7/30/69. 1st tropical storm of season (Anna) reported in Caribbean, Goethe’s “Albert” arrives at Waldheim, Ted Kennedy announces will rerun for Senate but not for presidency in ’72, munitions ship Black Tom blown up at Jersey City docks by German saboteurs. Bibi/“Rennie” having gone off somewhere again, and you and Pocahontas/“Peggy Rankin” (as all save yourself still called your Woman) having Established yourselves at the Farm as a Couple, it was decided that you (O heavy plural!) would Have Morgan To Dinner instead of vice versa: i.e., that he would sit at your Table in the Dining Hall; that Marsha would pass the salt et cetera; that yours would be the awesome Hostly Initiative: Welcome, How are you this evening, Splendid or Beastly Weather we’re having, Like you to meet my Woman, How about a drink, all that. For you were a Couple, though access to Marsha’s vagina was proscribed till Lammas Day, ☽ on Equator, Herman Melville’s birthday: you Personally Monitored her withdrawal symptoms and her schedule of therapies (principally workouts on the Exercycle, meant both to ward off catatonia and to toughen up her crotch); you Slept Together (but see above); you Ignored the smirks and ungenerous comments of Tombo X and others; you Even Went So Far as to Make Clear to M. Casteene that while you Had No Objection to Marsha’s resuming her secretarial activities for him, he was not to expect resumption of additional services, inasmuch as etc. Fortunately he only laughed, wished you good luck, declared his business as prime mover at the Farm was about done in any case, and gave you to understand that the services previously rendered him by Pocahontas he had made shift to secure elsewhere. Even so, your Temerity laid you out for an interval.

What shall we Serve for hors d’oeuvres? you Wondered. Marsha reminded you that the dining hall menu includes neither hors d’oeuvres nor appetizers nor choice of entrée, only the options of coffee (regular or decaffeinated), tea, milk, or water and, in summer, the first two (or three) of these either hot or iced. It did not Take you Very Long To Decide on the coffee, decaffeinated, iced, for yourself. Marsha chose the water. Your guest the milk. You yourself had Selected Marsha’s dress for the occasion from her considerable wardrobe, in which she took less interest than formerly: a short sleeveless cotton print that set off to advantage, you Felt, her excellent arms and legs, her trim figure generally, and was neither Too Dressy nor Too Casual for the circumstances. Exhaustion. Her hair – no longer the meticulous coiffure of pre-Independence Days, but not the rat’s nest of Comalot Farm, either – was Beyond your Competence: at the last moment you Gently Suggested a kerchief, whereupon Marsha asked, rhetorically, Who gave a fuck?

The evening was successful, All Things Considered. You yourself Made Frequent Trips to ice-cube bin, water tap, milk dispenser, to keep everyone’s glasses filled. The meat loaf, in your View, was not up to par, and the mashed potatoes had been too long in the steam table. Too, there were perceptible wrinkles in the Fordhook lima beans, from their having been served the previous evening and reheated. But the chef surprised everyone with orange Jell-O! At table the conversation ranged from Marsha’s chain-smoking (which we Agreed Should Be Indulged For The Present) to Marsha’s worrisome intention, which she spoke of as if it were a contractual commitment, to return to Comalot in mid-August for her Final Fix. You Took The Position that such a return would amount to a relapse, unquestionably antitherapeutic. Marsha wittily shrugged her shoulders. Joe eloquently lighted his pipe. Is it a briefer an extended visit you have in mind? you Asked Her As If Jestingly, and she parried, That depends. Joe regarded you both.

By next afternoon’s P & A, Mariner-6 Mars photos show cratered terrain, Pony-Penning Day on Assateague Island, Va., you were Enough Recovered from the social whirl to Express to Dr. Morgan your Alarm at the prospect of Marsha’s retailing into Bray’s queer clutches. He looked at you. Did it not remind you, he mused, of another woman’s Compulsive Return, should we say, to her seducer, on 9/11, 16, & 25/53? Not greatly, you Retorted, and Seeing Joe’s face darken you Added Sincerely, Except in the hurt: that she should be “intimate” with any other man. He looked at you. It was decided that the Horseback-Riding Lessons of August 1953 (wherein your Relation to Rennie Morgan grew Ambivalently Personal as you Teased her with her husband’s programmatic rationalism and her own apparent self-subjugation), would be echoed most conveniently in Der Wiedertraum, by joint sessions on the Exercycles: you and Bibi every morning that she was present; you and Marsha-as-stand-in-for-Bibi-in-the-role-of-Rennie when (what seemed increasingly the case, to Joe’s annoyance) she wasn’t.

You Admitted To Some Concern that Marsha might disapprove of your Exercycling Privately with Bibi; nor were you yourself Delighted At The Notion of Marsha in the role of Mrs. Joseph Morgan. Your Audacity astonished you. Joe smiled. Do it anyhow. End of interview.

It is not working. Marsha’s progress (till today) was unimpaired by Bibi’s return, which indeed seemed to reinspire some degree of her former bitchery; you are still a Couple; she has permitted you Brief Access To Her Vagina on two separate occasions, Lammas and Transfiguration days, without contraceptives, Tombo X having attested with relish your Surgical Sterilization on 10/25/54. But though you are Pleased To Construe Marsha’s renascent vindictiveness as recuperation from her sojourn at Comalot, it does not make your Relationship more easy. And, as Joe grows ever more disaffected with Bibi’s alcoholism (this morning she fell off the Exercycle), Marsha meaningly insinuates that she herself could play the role of Rennie more ably in all respects. Already you Recall With Nostalgia your Idyll in Room 121, Iroquois Motel, Angola, N.Y., 14006, on Gregor Mendel’s and Coventry Patmore’s birthdays. Minatory Chambermaid! Faithful Vending Machines! Only Slightly Malfocused Color TV!

Then today’s mail, today’s P & A. What Bray has written to smashed Bibi you Would Very Much Like To Know. Marsha won’t tell—can’t, now she’s Honey Dusted. But in their separate oblivions the two women Seem To you to have reached some dark sisterly understanding, just at the approach of fell August’s Ides. And, as if your Woman’s relapse weren’t worry enough, Dr. Morgan all but apprises you that Bibi won’t do. My late wife, Horner, while no teetotaler, was not a drunk. You’ll have to Do Better. Dream Up Something Else. Time is short.

But your Dreams since March have been all of a kind: a large service handgun on a table midway between Joe, Rennie, and yourself, accessible equally to all. Rennie announcing her uncertain pregnancy and certain resolve to abortion or suicide. Rennie drowned in her own vomitus on the Doctor’s operating table. The only innovations are that since 8/1 it has been Marsha Blank on that table: your Woman, for whom you Care. And the pistol, aimed at a point just above a point equidistant between your Eyes, is in Joe Morgan’s hand.

U: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His last Progress and Advice session before “Saint Joseph’s” deadline.

8/28/69

TO:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

FROM:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

U.S.S.R. acknowledges danger of war with China. Slavery abolished in British Empire. Moon on equator. Last of first 25,000 U.S. troops leaves Viet Nam. Kennedy request for cross-examination of inquest witnesses in Chappaquiddick investigation denied. Civil-rights marchers march on D.C. Happy birthday Leo Tolstoy, Wolfgang Goethe, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Boyer.

It is your Wish that by thus Turning Backwards that key of keys, Alphabetical Priority, you could Reverse its fellow principles of arbitrary choice: Sinistrality (never mind Sinistrality) and – back! back! – Antecedence. That Der Wiedertraum might never reach Monday next, 9/1, St. Giles’ Day, but run backwards from Horseback-Riding Lessons With Rennie through First Dinner With The Morgans through First Fucking Peggy Rankin In Ocean City Motel through Arrival At Wicomico Teachers College through Remobilization By Doctor through Rescue By Doctor From First Paralysis In Penn Station, Baltimore, March 16, 1951, to the Sweet Void between that date (28th Birthday of Jacob Horner) and your Birth.

It won’t work, Horner, Joe reminded you this afternoon, in your Last P & A Session before his deadline. You Knew, you Acknowledged: the arrow of time, etc. Only a wish.

Today is Day 41 of our original Hundred Days, he went on inexorably, ticking his pipe stem upon a square of desk calendar. Tomorrow will be Day 42, not Day 40.

You Knew.

And Sunday 8/31 will be Day 44: your and Rennie’s Evening Espial, upon Return From Equitation, of Morgan Irrational: making faces at self in mirror, speaking nonsense aloud to self, springing monkeylike about room, simultaneously picking nose and masturbating.

You Knew; you Knew. Mme de Staël bears son Auguste to lover Narbonne. 14th Sunday after Pentecost. Queen Wilhelmina, Fredric March, Baron von Helmholtz, Theophile Gautier. Stop that. You Stopped.

You and Pocahontas will Espy, Joe either prescribed or presumed.

If that was what he wanted, you Sighed. Though Marsha Blank is not Rennie Morgan. Indeed she is not, agreed your Advisor, unamused. But in default of Bibi, not to mention the original Mrs. Rennie McMahon Morgan, deceased, your Woman will have to do. How is she?

Very near the end of her Honey Dust, you Replied: that final two weeks’ worth she fetched from Lily Dale just prior to the Great Fort Erie Magazine Explosion, as if in payment for delivering Bibi to Comalot Farm. A using up (that of that supply) that you Looked Forward To with very nearly as much apprehension as to Day 45, with which it might well coincide. She was meanwhile, your Woman, you Reported, principally engaged in composition of a Bombshell Letter, her own description, to her former husband: a Bombshell that, while you yourself Did Not Precisely Know its nature, she was pleased to imagine would Knock The Bastard Dead.

Not visibly arrested by this news, Joe lit his pipe and either inquired in declarative fashion, or asserted, or reminded you: Pocahontas is pregnant.

So it would appear, you Painfully Acknowledged. Unless, as is by no means impossible, she is experiencing early menopause. Marsha is 39. Has not menstruated since June. Was “due” in mid-July and again in the first half of August. So. Her (possible) pregnancy, however, you Have Reason To Believe – at least this pregnancy – is not the substance of her Bombshell Letter to Ambrose Mensch.

Joe was not curious about your Woman’s Bombshell Letter.

The father? he inquired. You Chose Not To Speculate. But not yourself? Not yourself; your Bilateral Vasectomy of October 1954 precluded Parenthood. Hum. But you Are Still, in your Phrase, a Couple? So yourself at least Were Pleased Still To Regard yourselves.

Hum. Abortion, Horner? Such recourse is not without precedent, you Know, both historical and literary.

You Knew. You Planned To Discuss that very question with Marsha in September, after Exhaustion Of Honey Dust, Successful Passage Of Deadline, and Unequivocal Determination Of Pregnancy, but before Expiration Of First Trimester Thereof.

You Speak of Successful Passage Of Deadline, Horner.

More Wish than Hope, you Admitted; and yet more Hope than Expectation.

I should say, Joe said. Espial is one thing. You and your Fogged-Out Friend may Dismount from your Exercycles, Finish your Latest Long Conversation about my hyperrationalism and its Pygmalionizing of our marriage, Walk Around to my office window, and Peek through the blind, where you’ll See me behaving as in our novel. Your Pocahontas may then to the best of her limited ability pretend to be Rennie Shocked to the Center of her Soul, whom you will Seductively Comfort with (I believe the script reads) “the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.”

Well.

Espial is one thing, Joe repeated. Play it as you Like; I won’t have to watch. But Successful Passage of my Deadline is quite another. Surely you Don’t Expect – when I demand that you Redream History and Give Me Back, alive and unadulterated, my dead wife – to Palm Off as Rennie Morgan your fucked-up, knocked-up Pocahontas?

Stung as always by his kindless adjectives, but Judging it the part of diplomacy once again to Let Them Pass, you Acknowledged that you Entertained no such expectations. Nor any real hope. Only the wish aforementioned, and that ever more ardently.

Forget it.

Well.

Look here, Horner. You Looked. On September 1, 1953, the day following your original Espial, you Revisited The Doctor at his Remobilization Farm, then in Maryland. Yes. Your Quarterly Visit. Yes. Is the account of that visit in our script a fair approximation of what transpired? Fair. You were “Weatherless.” Mm. But you Tended, in your P & A Session with the Doctor, to a manner more Brisk and Assertive than was your Wont: a manner Imitative, the Doctor immediately guessed, of some New Friend or Colleague of yours at the College. Mm. He chaffed you a bit for the imposture, then spoke at some length of Mythotherapy: the systematic assumption of borrowed or improvised personae to ward off paralysis in cases of ontological vacuity. Mm. He then demanded a response; you Found None To Hand; he demanded more sternly; you Began Slipping Into Catalonia; and he assaulted you, briefly, to bring you to. Pugilistic Therapy, I believe the script calls it.

Yes. Well.

Hum. Joe tapped out his pipe, its charge timelily combusted. We’re done, Horner. Given the calendar and my double role in this travesty, we’ll schedule your next P & A for Monday instead of Thursday. Labor Day. Anniversary of that other one, etc.

You Shrugged your Eyebrows.

I’ll be bringing an old friend of ours, Joe announced neutrally, and To your Horror drew from the Doctor’s desk (he no longer does the facing-chairs, knee-to-knee routine considered by the Doctor to be essential to Progress and Advice) the very pistol so prominently featured in your Recent Dreams, your Last Letter, and the events of autumn 1953. A Colt.45 for Day 45, he mirthlessly remarked. We’ll combine the P & A Scene of September 1 with the Pistol Scene of October 5, 1953.

Look here, Joe, you Expostulated.

You Bring A Friend too, Joe said, not exactly an invitation. My wife. Alive and unfucked by you.

Joe.

Maybe I’ll tell you then what my real grievance against you is, Horner.

You Believed you Could Guess.

It’s not finally that you Betrayed Our “Friendship,” you Know. It’s not even that you Destroyed My Marriage, possibly Impregnated My Wife, and Contributed To Her Untimely Death.

Mm.

Rennie had a hand in all that too. So did I.

You here Assiduously Kept your Own Counsel, even unto facial expression, twitch of hand, and any other controllable body language interpretable as Yes Well.

One more thing, Jake.

That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?

Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?

Bring it, too.

~ ~ ~

D: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The third posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: the Battle of New Orleans and Napoleon’s surrender to Bellerophon.

Aboard S.S. Statendam

Off Bermuda

Wednesday, August 6, 1969

Dear Henry:

Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—

Je ne sais quoi, particularly given my disappointment of the week before, when, having transcribed at so long length for you Andrew IV’s adventures from the birth of his children through his “death” at Fort McHenry, and posted copies of my transcription to you c/o that novelist I had thought my partner (on the off chance it might be he who’d showed you the “prenatal” letters), I receive from him—crossed in the mails – nothing less surprising than a rejection of my acceptance of his own invitation to collaborate with him on a Marylandiad! And he has returned the four prenatals, which I must now assume will be followed by what followed them.

He will be sorry. Not because I plan, at least for now, any particular retaliation, but because he has cut himself off (as have you, Henry; as have you) from much that either a novelist or a 2nd-Revolutionary could make use of: the account of our forebear’s “Second Cycle,” of my own, perhaps even of yours. See how drolly, in despite of rude awakenings, I still dream!

We have, then, you and I, not yet begun to talk. Nevertheless, I shall continue, per program, that series of decipherments and anniversary transcriptions, withholding them from the mails till I shall have your proper address, or find you, or you find me. What’s more, as we are no longer to be monitored by that authorial “third ear,” I shall speak more confidentially: not of Andrew Cook IV, of whom I know only what his wife would have known had she not (like our novelist, but with better reason) declined to read these lettres posthumes, nor – yet – of my own history, but of the circumstances of these transcriptions and what I’ve been up to this past month with my left hand, as it were, while the right transcribed.

As “Andrew Cook VI” (who I “became” in 1953, nel mezzo del cammin etc.), I spent July preparing for my lectureship this fall at Marshyhope State University, where I have advertised a course in The Bonapartes of Fiction & the Fiction of the Bonapartes (did you know that Napoleon’s brothers Joseph, Louis, and Lucien all wrote romantic novels?). In that same capacity – I mean as the person I am – I have served as historical consultant to Mr. Reginald Prinz’s filming of events from the 1812 War, a project I am turning to our own purposes. I have also monitored, to some extent even discreetly managed, a number of our potential allies or adversaries: Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation, for example; the historian Lady Amherst, whom I’ve mentioned before; and the heirs of the late Harrison Mack, Jr.

At the same time, as “Monsieur Casteene”—our archancestor’s name, which I have seen fit to use at our Fort Erie base – I have been preparing an eccentric putative descendant of the American Bonapartes (Jérôme’s line, through Betsy Patterson) for a certain role he himself will be unaware of playing. And I have overseen the movement of our people from that base (which is of use to us only as long as the U.S. continues to draft civilians for military service in Viet Nam – another year or less) to “Barataria,” disguised as extras for upcoming sequences of Prinz’s film. My lodge there is our headquarters for the next academic year.

Finally, as “Baron André Castine”—the man I was until 1953 and in this single capacity am yet – I have been at the most immediately important work of all: the financing of our Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. That is the work that brings me to be “vacationing” here (as of last night, when I flew out from Washington) for a few days with your future stepmother, of whom I also happen to be fond. As we cruise in Netherlandish comfort through the waters where in May of 1814 our forebear – or some ship’s officer – impregnated the hapless Consuelo del Consulado, I make plans with the handsome widow of Harrison Mack for the settlement of his estate, which with certain other sources of revenue should carry us far toward 1976.

You remember the admirable Jane Mack, Henry, to whom (as her distant cousin A. B. Cook VI) I introduced you at her husband’s funeral. Some time before his death, when their alcoholic daughter first sought treatment at the Fort Erie sanatorium, I had arranged Mrs. Mack’s introduction to “Baron André Castine,” who subsequently comforted her, in London and elsewhere, through the terminal stages of her husband’s illness, and consoled her for his death. (I was also, for a certain reason, protecting Harrison Mack’s own comforter, the aforementioned Lady Amherst.) Mrs. Mack has taken it into her head to end her days as a baroness: she frankly suspects me of fortune hunting; I her of title hunting. We agree on the legitimacy of both pursuits when they are not cynical, and believe each of us to esteem in the other more than just the title and the fortune. Jane assumes, wrongly, that I want to enrich myself for the usual reasons, and does not disapprove: indeed, next week I shall take delivery in Annapolis of a large trawler yacht, her gift for my 52nd birthday. I have not apprised her of our cause (or the real reason I want that yacht) because – like her son, like most of our young “Baratarians,” like my own parents – she would mistake the Revolution to be still political in its goals, and would of course be as wrongheadedly its foe as Drew Mack is wrongheadedly its friend.

It is my fiancée’s plan to contest her late husband’s will – which leaves the bulk of his estate to his philanthropic foundation – on the grounds of his madness, and to negotiate distribution half to herself, the other half in equal portions to her two children and the Tidewater Foundation. Inasmuch as Jane’s moiety would be to some extent mine even during her lifetime (she is an astute and frugal manager), and Drew Mack’s would be largely applied – by his lights – to our cause, I acceded to this plan, while privately seeing to it that things will turn out somewhat differently.

Suppose, for example – but never mind! Like Jane’s (that excellent businesswoman’s), my plans are intricate but clear, and best not babbled about. True minds, we shall marry in the new year. If you’ve any objections, Henry – or suggestions for dealing with “A. B. Cook VI” when Jane Mack becomes the Baroness Castine! – speak now…

Our ancestor. The postscript to his second “posthumous” letter found him resurrected from his “death” and bound for New Orleans to meet Jean Lafitte, hoping somehow to forestall the British movement on that city. But it was a postscript penned, like the letter it ended, six months after that fateful battle; Andrew wrote it, with but the merest hint of what he is doing there, from the orlop deck of H.M.S. Bellerophon, off Rochefort in France on July 16, 1815, one day after Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender to the commander of that vessel. Not until this third and central of his lettres posthumes does Andrew’s past overtake his present, and the intricate labor of exposition give way to more immediate drama. The letter (before me) is dated August 6, 1815, and headed, in “Captain Kidd’s code”:

*‡47‡(*))**8008011‡:((82†5849‡;:52

(i.e., NOHPORELLEBFFOYRREBDAEHROTYAB, or Bellerophon, Off Berry Head, Tor Bay: that historic naval anchorage on the east Devon Coast, between the rivers Exe and Dart). He is back aboard that warship, having left it in Rochefort on an errand that fetched him overland through Tours and Rouen to Dieppe, London, and Exeter before the old Bellerophon (no Pegasus) arrived there with its famous passenger. He is about to witness, with relief, a second surrender, of another sort, by that same passenger: Napoleon has at last abandoned all hope of asylum in either America or England and, contrary to his repeated vow, agreed to permit himself and his company to be transferred on the morrow to H.M.S. Northumberland, commanded by our old friend Admiral Sir George Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” for exile to St. Helena. As Andrew writes this letter to Andrée, the ex-emperor, two decks above, is dictating a flurry of memoranda – to Commander Maitland, to Admirals Keith and Cockburn, to History – protesting (falsely) that he has been betrayed: that he was assured sanctuary and has been denied it. It is the first phase of Napoleon’s programmatic self-martyrdom, the living out of a romantic fiction instead of the writing of it. The idea has come to him in part from our ancestor, as shall be seen – for whom, however, the emperor’s exile on St. Helena is itself to be but the first phase of the Second Revolution.

But how is it I am here, he now asks with us, who last was leaving Maryland for Louisiana, newly risen from the dead, with Mr. Key’s anthem ringing in my ears? Why did I not return straightway to Castines Hundred? Why do I not now, instead of back to Galvez-Town & Jean Lafitte?

This last, at least, he finds easy to answer to his satisfaction: his Fort Bowyer postscript to (posthumous) Letter #1 had implored Andrée to come with the twins to New Orleans, where he now professes to hope to find them, under Lafitte’s protection, upon his return. And the other questions?

He reviews his official motives. In William Patterson’s house in Baltimore, where he recuperated, it was believed that the destruction of Washington on the one hand and on the other the British defeats at Plattsburgh, Lake Champlain, and Baltimore would bring the treaty commissioners at Ghent to an understanding, perhaps before 1815 commenced. But the question remained open whether such a treaty would bind the signatories to their status quo ante bellum or uti possidetis—before the fighting started or after it should end. Thus Admiral Cochrane’s race to restore his fortunes by taking New Orleans, and General Jackson’s to reach that city and muster an army in time to defend it.

Now, from Andrew Cook IV’s earlier point of view there would have been everything to be said for a British victory: Thomas Jefferson himself fears that once possessed of Louisiana the British can hold it indefinitely, navigating with impunity from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and effectively bordering the United States at the Mississippi; and radical New England Federalists are maintaining publicly that British possession of Louisiana will signal dissolution of the Union and legitimize a New England Confederation. But our ancestor has become, however qualifiedly, a patriot: if he does not want the Indians driven into the Pacific, neither does he want the Union dissolved. (A French Louisiana would be another story: a third influence, to check both British and American expansion into the West…)

He fears, moreover, that the confrontation will be horrific. Cochrane will reinforce his expedition massively at Jamaica (There are rumors that Wellington himself is being sent to lead the army. In fact, Wellington has advised the British cabinet to relinquish their demand for an Indian free state and settle a treaty: in his view, the loss of Tecumseh and of naval control of the Lakes has lost the war). Andrew is no lover of General Jackson, the butcher of the Creeks, but he knows him to be a formidable officer; if the defense of New Orleans will be made difficult by the shortage of regular troops and armaments and by the ethnic diversity of its defenders – Spanish, Mexicans, Anglo-Saxons, West Indians, free blacks and “coloreds,” Creole French both Bourbon and Bonapartist, even Italians and Choctaws! – its invasion will be also, through a labyrinth of bayous where only the alligators and the Baratarians are at home.