XV

When I arrived at Bear Track early in the afternoon, Joseph directed me out back to the stables, where Cordell was conferring with a groom. A plump, jowly pink man sat astride his horse.

“You’re just in time,” Cordell said, thumping me on the back, “to join us on a little afternoon shoot. Have you eaten? I can have some sandwiches packed for us. Cobb, this is my young friend Patrick Keane. Patrick, Cobb Hilton. Cobb owns the next piece over. His great-grand-daddy carpetbagged down from Ohio or some damn place after the war and picked it up for ten cents on the dollar. Now he’s got more prime land under cultivation than anybody in the whole damn Delta.”

In response the man grunted and spit, his eyes buried deep in the pink recesses of his cheeks. I would have found him more plausible as a foreman or the proprietor of the feed store than as a planter.

I was relieved to hear that the sport of the day was shooting rather than riding. But when Cordell said, “You take the roan gelding,” I realized I was not to be spared. I should probably have confessed that I’d never ridden anything except a pony at a petting zoo, but I think I wanted to present myself as the kind of guy who could jump right on a horse and take charge. As a direct result of my experience that day, my older daughter now takes riding lessons in Central Park.

The groom helped me up into my saddle and adjusted the stirrups, asking me if they felt right. I managed well enough as we trotted over to a little cabin, where two pointers hurled themselves against the chain-link fence of their kennel, causing my horse to start turning in nervous circles. Cordell had dismounted to talk to a wizened old man with a disintegrating straw hat and gray-black skin. I’m not sure what provoked my horse to take off suddenly at a gallop. I tried to stay upright as I pulled back on the reins, but it didn’t seem to slow the horse, who I later learned had a “hard” mouth and was responding to the pressure of my knees clutching his flanks, which acted as an accelerator. I was maintaining an increasingly precarious balance; the ground was a blur, loud and hard and distant beneath his pounding hooves. Finally a drainage ditch accomplished what I could not, bringing my horse up short and throwing me down against his neck.

When Cordell caught up, I had nearly recovered my composure.

“Wait up for us older folks,” he said. “It’s five months yet to the Kentucky Derby.” Cobb Hilton bounced up like Jell-O on a stick. Noses to the earth, the two dogs traced manic figures in front of us. Cordell introduced me to Solomon, the straw-hatted dog handler, who rode over and slipped a double-barreled shotgun into the scabbard on my saddle.

As we trotted out over the cut winter fields, my fear and unease started to slip away; my horse settled down and I began to feel competent—after all, at least I had managed to stay on the beast—and to see myself as a romantic figure, astride a fine-looking animal with a gun at my side, Nimrod on his steed. The furrowed fields were punctuated by stands of trees, hedgerows and giant rolling sprinkler rigs that looked to me like the vertebrae of some prehistoric creature. The vast Delta landscape with its huge cerulean dome seemed a canvas for heroic horseback deeds.

“This is the richest soil on the planet,” Cordell announced. “Yank on your left rein, Pat, don’t let him walk you sideways like that. Give him a good pull—don’t be shy. He’s got a hard mouth.”

I did as instructed.

“Topsoil’s forty foot deep hereabouts,” he said. “Ever since the last ice age, the big river’s been collecting sediment from a watershed covering some part of thirty-seven states, then flooding its banks with blessed regularity and precipitating the very best soil right about here. Considering all we lost, I think it’s only right and meet that we’ve spirited away millions of tons of Yankee topsoil over the millennia.”

Solomon chuckled, amused by this trope.

“Only thing good ever come down from up north,” drawled Cobb, who seemed to have forgotten his own provenance.

The two pointers appeared to be plowing a patch of tall grass with their noses.

We were riding through a cornfield which had been left standing, the dry husks hissing against the flanks of the horses, when Solomon said, “Point,” in a quiet, urgent tone. One dog was locked in a rigid, quivering pose in front of a patch of scrubby cover; the other stood motionless behind him. We rode up to within some twenty feet, or, rather, most of us stopped at that distance; my horse kept on going, as I nervously squeezed on his belly with my legs, trotting inexorably to where the lead dog crouched.

“What in hell’s he doing?” Cobb hissed behind me. I yanked back hard on the reins just as the covey broke—an eruption of wings, a dozen mad drumrolls launching as many blurred brown projectiles over the field. Although I knew the birds were there I was so startled by the rise that I nearly fell off the gelding. Watching them disappear, I wanted to follow them, to ride off and hide in the high grass and the cotton stalks and the lespedeza, eating bugs and seeds. I sat there staring out into the empty sky, then yanked on the reins again, gratuitously, almost viciously, in an attempt to share the blame.

“Actually, Patrick,” Cordell said as he rode up, “that’s not quite how we do it down here.”

At dinner that evening, I had many reasons to be inconspicuous. I was still stinging from the afternoon’s humiliation in the field, and the conversation was hardly calculated to put me at ease. Cobb Hilton had stayed on, and we were joined by two gentlemen from Arkansas. I gathered that a business deal might be pending. They were a good deal younger than their host, in their early thirties, young men who seemed impatient to rush all things, including their own middle age, even if the rest of the country was joining a cult of youth; proud of their new paunches and the boozy accretion of flesh around their faces, they were relentlessly loud, confident and eager to impress Cordell Savage, vying with each other to damn Washington, Wall Street and, for all I know, the Enlightenment. Cordell remained aloof, though I don’t think either Arkansan realized it.

“What do you think of the wine, Patrick?” he said abruptly. “Mouton Rothschild 1928.”

“Damn good” and “Excellent” opined the Arkansans. Cobb had refused the claret, insisting that bourbon and branch was good enough for him.

“I don’t know much about wines,” I said, looking back into Cordell’s cruel eyes. This was a quiz and it definitely counted toward the final grade.

“I didn’t ask how much you knew about wines, did I? I asked what you think. I don’t know much about wines either, boy, but I know what I like.”

We call this leading the witness. I had my clue. “It tastes a little sour to me, sir.”

“Me too. It’s turned. Joseph, take this shit away and bring me that other I brought up.”

The wine probably was off, though I suspect he would have sent it away even if it wasn’t. This was Cordell’s way of giving me a chance to redeem myself after the hunting debacle.

“Beautiful silver,” said one of the boys from across the river. “I got a venison dish at home that’s the spitting image. Fellow in Savannah told me it used to belong to the Queen Mother of England.”

Cordell directed a skeptical look at his guest in which anyone else would have read chastisement; you only had to look at him to realize that it was terribly common, as his wife might say, to compliment your host’s home furnishings.

But the man from Arkansas was undaunted. “Where’d you pick it up?”

“Well, I picked it up, as you put it, at the home of a friend from Yale. It had been in his family since the end of the war and before that it had been in my family. It’s an interesting story, actually. When I accepted the invitation to my classmate’s home in Boston, Massachusetts”—this last word pronounced, as it so often is in the South, with an overenunciated sarcasm—“I had no idea that on his mother’s side he was a Butler.”

Cobb Hilton broke his corpulent silence with a grunt of distaste.

“You may recall from your history, Patrick, that General Butler occupied New Orleans, among other distinctions. I can’t recall his Christian name just now, but down here we normally call him Beast Butler for reasons we needn’t go into at the table, or sometimes Spoons Butler on account of his tendency to confiscate the silverware and other valuables of prominent Confederate families in the course of duty.”

He paused to examine the wine that Joseph had just poured for him, nodding toward my own glass. Joseph poured some for me, which I tasted and, with some trepidation, pronounced suitable. Cordell smiled and nodded his approval.

“Now, my great-great-uncle was in New Orleans during the war, and eighty-odd years later, when I went home with Toby Farwell for Thanksgiving, I was rather surprised to find myself eating from Savage-family silver. They hadn’t even bothered to remove the family crest. I didn’t say anything then but on the evening we were to return to school I requested an audience with Toby’s father and offered to buy everything back from him. He was quite indignant and sent me on my way. Well, a few years later Mr. Farwell Senior suffered some terrible reversals in business. I was of course deeply saddened to hear of this misfortune, but my distress did not prevent me from picking up the family silver at auction in New York.”

The next morning, over breakfast, Cordell filled me in on the later stages of the evening; I had gone upstairs to read when the poker started. “I apologize for the company,” he said, languidly buttering a piece of cornbread. “Not very stimulating. Those boys hoped to engage me in a business proposition. They were eager to demonstrate they were men of substance and daring, and I was more than happy to take their money at the poker table. Then Tupper, the short one, wanted to cut cards for a hundred dollars. You know, pick a card, high card wins. An idiot’s pastime—if ever there was one. Then he wanted to cut for a thousand. Finally, just to get rid of him I said, ‘Tupper, how much exactly are you worth?’ Well he puffed himself up and started figuring his assets, I was half expecting him to start counting on his fingers any minute, and finally he says to me, with all false modesty, he says, ‘Well, all told about two million, I reckon.’ And I said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll cut you for it.’ Well, that got him out of the damn house, finally.” He inserted a slice of bacon into his mouth and chewed with evident satisfaction. Then, looking away, he said, “How’s Will?”

I offered the usual response, that he was thriving and happy.

“Will? Happy? Now I know you’re bullshitting me, son.”

“Relatively speaking. Happy for Will.”

“I would appreciate it if you don’t tell him I asked.”

I nodded.

“You know he’s writing letters to the attorney general blaming me for everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Chicago Fire.”

“He does tend to take historical events personally,” I said.

“Thinks I’m the damn Antichrist.”

Seeing him across the table looking at me with Will’s eyes, I suddenly arrived at my thesis. Intuitively, I felt I knew what had happened at Bear Track a hundred years before.