Soon we shall arrive at the finer mansion of the two my grandfather is leaving me in his will, and the train has just passed us through our first tunnel of the day, bathing us in our first coat of smoke and obscuring whatever pleasurable views may be experienced in the passing Arabian countryside. My grandfather is napping. I am plotting to murder him.
Some time is still to pass before breakfast, Arabs in white shirts and ties jangling silverware, and I should have time to write.
We have been touring Grandfather’s holdings, what he calls the “drawstrings” of his “empire,” those sources of his wealth. Beginning near the venues of his upbringing in the American west, and then on to parts of South America and Africa. How they hate him everywhere. In Brazil they spit at his feet and curse his name; in Bolivia his burnt effigies still hang from vacated huts. In Africa some ancient and wizened Negroes carry memory of his face and hurl stones at it. Savages. He will not venture into Europe – I suspect because there still exist warrants for his arrest there.
[spoiler]It is no secret that my own father will not speak to the old man at all, and that my uncle has denounced him from the pulpit on several occasions. I am likely all he has. The poor bastard – when he is dead no one will miss him at all. Certainly I will not.
What I have is a few drops of arsenic, procured in Delhi, which I have been assured will mimic the effect of natural heart failure. At his age, will anyone be in a state of wonderment that his heart has suddenly failed? I think not. Most of them will be astonished to find he has a heart.
I have just opened my window to receive some relief from the fog of cigars. Those damned British are everywhere in this train, and their traces linger in the breakfast car like the perfumes of cheap women. Nothing but desert can be seen outside. Grandfather assures me that this mansion is in a city, and quite a large city, and that it puts to shame the less fine one, the one in Chicago. We shall see.
“I recollect,” my grandfather says, his mane of white hair bristling to life, “how first I came to this land, when the Ay-rabs still owned everything around and not a white man could be seen. I impressed them first with my knowledge of their language, and then with the fineness of my fabrics, and soon had opened a stall in their marketplace and employed two turbaned ragamuffins to oversee it while I made deals with princes and ministers.”
There is a faraway bright twinkling in both his eyes and he pauses, no doubt consumed with his own romantic inventions. I believe in Grandfather’s tales the same way I believe those of Mother Goose or Jesus Christ, and presume that they have undergone the same amount of literary refinement over a comparable period of time.
“Boy, let me tell you a story.”
Oh God another story.
“Around here they call me [an indecipherable spout of gobbledygook I take to be authentic Arabic], which means, ah, well, I misremember what it means exactly, but it conveys the connotation of positive associations, I assure you.”
“I am assured,” I say, and I stifle a yawn. You must tell me of all the scandalous music hall goings-on in Chicago I am missing when I return.
“And so they liked me, by which I mean that they derived enjoyment from my presence. You understand this, Archie?”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“Well, but one day, I took on a shipment of clothing. Robes and such, and also blankets and untailored fabrics, and when I received this shipment it came on the backs of dozens of camels, and the seller giggled most gleefully when he unloaded it at my doorstep, and moreso when I dropped the coins into his hand, and then he took all them camels away.”
“All of those camels,” I mutter.
“What? Well, now, it happens there was a storm coming, and I didn’t want to leave all these goods in that tent in the marketplace, and so I resolved to transport them all to my house immediately. Now, all my money was held up in that tent, you know, and in those clothes I’d just bought, and I hadn’t but one horse to my name, poor old Daniel. And I loaded every one of those boxes into a cart and attached it to his bridle and – ha ha! – do you know what happened?”
“The weight was too much and it lifted him off the ground?”
His astonishment blossoms. Maybe he thinks the story has changed since last time.
“Don’t get smart, boy! You can still get yourself disinherited! No doubt there is other useless gadabouts who’d be interested in hearin’ and repeat hearin’ my tales for a reward”
“So what did happen, Grandfather?”
“What you said, it lifted him off the ground, and he hanged there tryin’ to gallop in the air like a fly in a web, and all the Ay-rabs gathered about and laughed, and at first I felt ashamed by this, and then I got to laughin’ too. And that storm was comin’ and I said, to the Devil with it all! And I grabbed boxes and threw them to the crowd, and soon as Daniel’s feet touched the ground we rushed to the house, and just after the storm came and tore everything up all over.”
He stares out the window for a time after that, the desert loitering by, except that for the first time I see a big dot on the horizon, an approaching town.
“Yeah, I was lucky,” he says. “And after that they actually liked me.”
“You said they liked you before,” I say. My pocket watch is broken, or I would check it.
“They didn’t hate me. Like I said, I entertained them some.”
Now he is gazing out the window again, maybe napping.
Honestly, the rubbish he spews. I am sure it settles his mind, the idea that someplace they acknowledge him a hero. Someplace they don’t spit at him. Sentimentality’s his weakness. His only strength was his lack of ethics.
A few drops of the arsenic, maybe tonight, in his turtle soup, or whatever the local savagery’s equivalent. If he dies in his sleep, in the night, and is not discovered until morning, it will be all the better for me. Except for the flies and the mosquitoes. Oh God the flies and the mosquitoes! Never travel, Jeremy.
Breakfast is served. I will continue briefly.
…
Awful. The servants at home could have baked a tablecloth and made it more flavorful.
Suddenly animated Grandfather springs from his chair and goes to the window.
“Here we are,” he says. “This is [a guttural, expletive-like word I take for an Arab place name]. Lovely little town in the days of my youth, the one I told you about.”
The train is slowing only a bit and we will not stop. But a crowd of people has gathered outside the little water tower that passes for a station, dressed in turbans and robes and some waving blankets. Grandfather sticks his head out the window and waves a hand and they cheer. “Swicegood!”
And a smile cracks across the old man’s face, threatening to tear his nose right off and drown it in his whiskers. Those might even be tears in his eyes.
“Ha ha!” he says, and wipes something from his eye, and he sits and the station fades behind us. “They remember.”
The childishness of these people! Playing along with an old man’s vanity! Having never witnessed the frivolity of the colored peoples, and the austerity of their homelands you could never understand my sheer boredom with this entire adventure. Even God cannot know how relieved I will be when the old man is dead and I have returned home to civilization. I do not care how fine this second mansion is.
Tonight. Definitely tonight. I could be returning home by the weekend.
I must now script and rehearse an account to give to whatever passes for the police in these parts. I must be convincing. You will of course be good enough to burn this letter. My best wishes to you and to your sister.
Yours,
A. R. Swicegood III[/spoiler]