John Barth - Letters

Whether or no, this time next week you shall hear again from

Your father

E: A. B. Cook VI to his son.The fifth and final posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: Napoleon “rescued.”

Castines Hundred

Ontario, Canada

August 20, 1969

My dear Henry,

Except that you are not here, all is as it should be (i.e., as it ever has been) at Castines Hundred. A grand hatch of “American soldiers” fills the air — in which already one feels a premonitory autumn chill — as they have done every latter August since the species, and Lake Ontario, evolved. I write this by paraffin lantern in the library, not to attract them to the windows; took dinner by candlelight for the same reason, as our ancestors have done since that species evolved. A fit and pleasing mise en scène for retailing the last of my namesake’s lettres posthumes: dated August 20, 1821, addressed to “My dear, my darling wife,” and delivered here at that year’s close.

Be assured of my proper disappointment not to find you here; a disappointment for which, however, I was prepared. Be even more so of my proper tantalization by the report (from our new caretakers, who seem satisfactory) that you apparently stopped by —even spent a few days here? — in the interval between caretakers! Were here as I was writing to you off Bermuda! Left only upon the Bertrands’ assuming their duties, as I was writing to you from my Baratarian! Indicated that you would “be back,” but did not say when, or whence you came, or whither vanished!

Heartless Henry! True and only son! But so be it: I have been as heartless in my time, as have all our line. I restrained my urge to badger the Bertrands with questions — How does he appear? Did he speak of his father? — lest they think their new employer’s relation with his son as odd as in fact it is. I shall leave sealed copies here, against your return, of both the “prenatal” and the “posthumous” letters of Andrew Cook IV, as well as that one of mine reviewing our history from him to myself. And I shall hope, no longer quite against hope!

But how I wish I could report to you, Henry, confer with you, solicit your opinion now. So many opportunities lie at hand; so many large decisions must be made quite soon, affecting our future and the Revolution’s! Last night, for example, I drove up here from the Fort Erie establishment, where I had stopped to assess Joseph Morgan’s resalvageability. I am satisfied that he is too gone in his “repetition compulsion” to be of future use to us. What I advanced as a kind of lure when I first rescued him for our cause has become an obsession; he is now addicted to his medication, as it were; the only obstacle to disestablishing him altogether is that he happens to be related, through the Patterson line, to Jane Mack. But we must think of something; he is a liability.

So too, I more and more suspect, is Jerome Bray of Lily Dale — more exactly, of “Comalot,” as he has without irony renamed his strange habitation — on whom I paid a call before crossing to Canada. Even to me that man is an enigma: certainly mad, but as certainly not simply mad. His extraordinary machine, or simulacrum of a machine — you really must see it. And his “honey dust,” of whose peculiar narcotic virtue there can be no question…! He is doing us the service, unwittingly, of removing Jane’s daughter from the number of competitors for Harrison Mack’s fortune, while however adding himself to the number of our problems. For him too I have certain plans, and have urged him down to Bloodsworth Island for the “Burning of Washington” four days hence — but how surer I would feel of that strategy if I could review it with you, and you ratify it!

I have, moreover, two further problems of the most intimate and urgent sort, Henry, on which your consultation is of such importance to me that I must, insofar as I can, compel it.

Mrs. Harrison Mack now proposes to become Mrs. André Castine on September 30. (She specified “the end of the month,” leaving the precise date to me. Still amused by the Anniversary View of History, I considered the equinox, when at 9 A.M. in 4004 B.C. the world is said to have begun; but I chose at last the 30th, anniversary of our ancestor Ebenezer Cooke’s inadvertent loss of his Maryland estate in 1694 and, rather earlier, of the legendary loss of another prime piece of real estate: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.) For convenience’ sake, I have in mind to kill off “Andrew Cook VI” by some accident before that date. I am, you know, under that name, also in some second-cousinly relation to my fiancée: I propose therefore— unless as prime beneficiary you appear within 30 days of the date of your father’s death —to bequeath to Jane Mack my properties on Bloodsworth Island and Chautaugua Road. I shall cause obituary notices to be published promptly in the leading Quebec and Ontario newspapers as well as those of Maryland and the District of Columbia: the next move will be yours. “André Castine” looks forward to welcoming you (either here or at “Barataria”) as his own son!

On the other hand — for reasons that I shan’t set forth in writing but will be relieved to share with you at last in person, as they pertain to you intimately indeed — my coming forth publicly as André Castine to marry Jane raises problems of its own concerning that historian I’ve mentioned before: Professor Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, who was to have edited, annotated, and published this series of letters. It will scarcely be enough to see to her reappointment to the post about to be vacated by Andrew Cook’s death; something further is called for. We must discuss it!

And Baratarian, that fleet and sturdy fellow, who when I fetch him from the Annapolis yard this weekend will have tankage enough to run from Bloodsworth Island to Yucatan with but one pit stop, and enough secret stowage in his teak and holly joinery to fetch back a high-profit cargo along with the marlin and wahoo we are officially after. One trip, at current prices, will come near to financing us for half a year, and not even the crew need know (indeed ought not, for it is paid informants, not adroit law officers, who precipitate arrests in this line of work). But I cannot navigate both Baratarian and Barataria, or manage to our cause both Jane and Mary Jane. Come, son, and let us to Isla Mujeres, the Isle of Women!

There Jean Lafitte — alias “Jean Lafflin” or “Laffin”—is reported to have come in November 1821 to la fin du chemin, ambushed by Mexican soldiers not impossibly informed of his coming by Andrew Cook IV. So at least speculated my grandfather, Andrew V, on what grounds he did not say. It is by no means established beyond doubt that Lafitte died then and there; other legends extend his pseudonymous life to 1854. What is known is that in latter 1821, pressed by the U.S. Revenue Marine, he boarded his schooner Pride (possibly the Jean Blanque under alias of its own), abandoned “Galvez-Town,” and disappeared. Moreover, that his connection with Andrew IV, once so brotherly, had long since deteriorated into mutual suspicion and distrust.

What a falling off, between that P.S. to the first of these letters (where his fondest wish is to unite his “darling wife” with his “true brother”) and the opening of this last!

3*64;:(8¶8);*‡76‡;:905:5(;82

GNIHTYREVESTNIOPOTYMLAYARTEB

Everything points to my betrayal

— whether by Lafitte, Joseph Bonaparte, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the U.S. Secret Service, or some combination thereof, he is uncertain. He cannot say for sure even that he is in fact a prisoner in “Beverly,” the King mansion on the Manokin River not far from Bloodsworth Island; perhaps all is going well, but unaccountably slowly! Yet it is August 20, 1821, insufferably hot, damp, and buggy in the Eastern Shore marshes; he has been there above six weeks, since his 45th birthday, under anonymous guard “for his own security”; the owners of Beverly, at the urging of their friend Mme B., are off on an extended visit to Europe, as is Betsy herself; Lafitte has delivered him and is long gone: possibly back to St. Helena to rescue “André Castine” per plan, more likely back to privateering in the Gulf of Mexico. Everything points etc.