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"I think my back's broken. You have to get help," Ira's father said.
"You gonna be all right, suh?" Uncle Royal asked.
"Don't be long," Ira's father replied.
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Ira watched Uncle Royal climb back up the embankment, the clay shaling over
his bare ankles.
"Come on, son," his mother said, reaching her hand down to Ira. Her eyes
seemed to avoid both him and his father.
"I'm staying," he replied.
"No, you can't be out here by yourself," she said.
"Then you or Uncle Royal stay," he said.
"We have to get axes and saws and chains. We have to bring a whole crew of men
back. Now you do what I say."
He crawled up the embankment, then looked back down at his father.
"We'll hurry," he said.
His father winked at him and tried to hold his smile in place. "I can stay in
if you want, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.
"Get in the carriage," she replied.
Uncle Royal turned the carriage around, then got down from the driver's seat
to help Ira's mother up the step. "Drive to the crossroads," she said.
"To the sto'?" Uncle Royal asked.
"Yes, to the store."
"That's eight miles, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.
"All the workers are in the fields. Drive to the crossroads. We'll find help
there," she said.
"Miz Jamison, the river's going up a couple of inches every hour. It's all
that rainwater."
"Do I have in hit you with the whip?" she said.
Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal and the wagonload of men they put together
did not get back to the river until after dark. When the manager of the
plantation store held a lantern over the water, Ira saw the softly muted
features of his father's face just below the surface, the eyes and mouth open,
one hand frozen in a death grasp on a broken reed he had tried to breathe
through.
AS he matured Ira did not grow in understanding of his father and mother's
jealousies and the lack of love that consumed their lives. Instead, he thought
of his parents with resentment and anger, not only because they had destroyed
his home but also because they had made him the double instrument of his
father's death, first as an informer of his father's adultery, then as an
accomplice in his mother's deception and treachery.
He spent one year at West Point and told others upon his resignation that he
had to return home to run his family's business affairs. But the reality was
he did not like the confines of military life. In fact, he thought anyone who
willingly ate dry bread and unsweetened black coffee and shaved and bathed in
cold water was probably possessed of a secret desire to be used as cannon
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wadding.
At age twenty he was the master of his estate, a dead shot with a dueling
pistol, and a man who did not give quarter in business dealings or spare the
rod with his workers. His parents rested in a plot on a grassy knoll above the
river, but he never visited their graves nor shared his feelings about the
unbearable sense of loss that defined his childhood memories.
He learned not to brood upon the past nor to think analytically about the
events that had caused him to become the hard-edged man he had grown into. The
whirrings in his blood, the heat that would balloon in his chest at a
perceived insult, gave an elan to his manner that made his adversaries walk
cautiously around him. A man he had cuckolded called him out on the street in
New Iberia. The cuckold's hand shook and his ball went wide, striking Ira in
the arm. But Ira's aim didn't waver and he drove a ball through the man's
mouth and out the back of his head, then sipped coffee at a saloon bar while a
physician dressed his wound.
His young wife was at first bemused and intrigued by his insatiable sexual
desires, then finally alienated and frightened by them. In a fit of remorse
and guilt about her participation in what she called her husband's lust, she
confided the intimate details of her marriage to her pastor, a nervous
sycophant with smallpox scars on his cheeks and dandruff on his shoulders.
After Ira learned of his wife's visit to the minister, he rode his horse to
the parsonage and talked to the minister in his garden. The minister boarded a
steamboat in Baton Rouge the next day and was never seen in Louisiana again.
"What did you say to him?" Ira's wife asked.
"I told him he was to denounce both of us every Sunday from his pulpit. If he
didn't, I was going to shoot him."
But there were moments in Ira Jamison's life that made him wonder if, like his
father, more than one person lived inside his skin.
He was cleaning out his attic on a late fall afternoon when he came across the
windup merry-go-round his father had given him on his eleventh birthday. He
inserted the key in the base and twisted the spring tight, then pushed a small
lever and listened to the tune played by the spiked brass cylinder inside.
For no reason he could quite explain he walked into the quarters, in a
tea-colored sunset, among tumbling leaves and the smell of gas in the trees,
and knocked on Uncle Royal's door.
"Yes, suh?" Uncle Royal said, his frosted eyes blinking uncertainly.
"You still have any young grandchildren?" Ira asked.
"No, suh, they grown and in the fields now. But I got a young
great-gran'child."
"Then give him this," Ira said.
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