Oakley Hall - Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

I said Bierce had figured that Mrs. Hamon had made the mistake of telling him, Senator Jennings, that she was going to see Bierce with certain information, and he had met her to dissuade her from it, which encounter had ended in Morton Street.

Jennings didn’t want to talk about that.

“That is all I hear about in the courtroom, son. George Payne now, that is interesting.”

He closed his eyes, his eyelids fluttering like moths. His lips twitched. “You know, I took that German fella’s painting of High-grade Carrie out of my office in Sacramento and I had it brought down to that saloon me and another chap had on Battery Street. This young fella’d come and sit at the bar half a day staring at it.

“I don’t know when I figured out he was Carrie’s son, my son. I still don’t know how it works about twins. It was maybe my jism and the Englishman’s swapping around inside her, and the fancy twin was his and the crazy one mine.

“He knew that painting was his mother, too. He’d bartend for me Saturday nights. It was a queer sort of coincidence. He was kind of gentle, you’d never consider he was thinking about cutting doves’ guts out. There was something wrong with his peter, I guess. So whores’d made fun of him, that he didn’t forget.”

“Morton Street whores,” I said.

“I told him about the Society of Spades, and how Eddie Macomber and me’d been choused by his mother and McNair, and Al Gorton. I was still hot under the collar‌—‌I don’t deny that. But I never told him he was my son.

“Bierce was wrong about me pushing him to slash those whores, and going after Carrie. But there was maybe somebody else pushing on him, maybe the Missus Payne he’d been farmed out to, who was some kind of invalid. He knew plenty about Carrie and his brother and things in London. Isaiah Pusey’d told me about his brother in some whore-muckery over there.

“It was crazy. He loved that painting, couldn’t stop looking at it, but he hated the lady, his mother. Hated , like Bierce said.

“Hated his brother too. That had everything he’d had took from him.

“He was fixated on that mansion of Nat’s. He’d found a way to break in and he’d pretend it was his, pretend he was one of the aristocrats from up there. Steal flowers out of the vases and bring them to the saloon. I didn’t realize he was even crazier than I was about getting shat on by those people.”

“You and Captain Pusey were old friends,” I said.

“You could call it that,” Jennings said, with the floppy grin.

“I didn’t think much about the boy’s brother coming back and all that, but he was stone-set loony on his dispossession ,” he went on. “I never thought of him being after Carrie‌—‌to kill her. I didn’t think about him being the Morton Street Slasher until the second one, and by that time I had some concern of my own in the matter. And he went after that skinny daughter of Jim Brittain’s, I understand.”

I said that was true, although it had been kept out of the papers.

Senator Jennings shook his head in dismay.

“I guess the Morton Street slashings will never be solved,” I said.

“Won’t be solved because of me, I can promise you. What about Bierce? “

“He made a promise to Lady Caroline.”

“She is good at that,” he said, eyes still closed. “Well, I fucked her before she got to be a grand lady; got her in a family way, she told me. That was something! She wasn’t so much of a fuck, but by God she was surely be-you-tee-full!”

He lay with his eyes closed, cheeks puffed out as he breathed. “The best ,” he said, “was a little Chinee girl, couldn’t’ve been twelve years old.” He held up the first joints of his index and second fingers pressed together in a tight crack. “Like that,” he said. “Just like that! Wonder where that little nonpareil is now?”

“Probably dead,” I said. “When they come down sick they put them away.”

He puffed out his cheeks some more and asked me to prepare another glass of laudanum in water. When he had drunk it, he sat there with his head sunk on his chest and his eyes closed.

“Nobody ever figured out your Daddy was Eddie Macomber,” he said softly.

“No, they didn’t,” I said.

He snored.

The nurse came in to tell me it was time for his nap.

I called on Senator Jennings twice more, to find him lower each time. I tried to find Mrs. Payne, George Payne’s adopted mother. I had no help from Mammy Pleasant, who had nothing to gain from me. I made inquiries around Battery Street, I asked so many people if they knew of her that I got tired of hearing my voice speak her name. I never found her.

Senator Jennings died before there was a judgment in the second trial.

A couple of years later Amelia Sloat telephoned me at the Chronicle . She sounded breathless. I sat in the dusty, noisy cubicle where the telephone was, the earpiece jammed up against one ear and my mouth close to the mechanism’s mouthpiece. I closed my eyes to savor her voice in my ear.

“Will you do me a favor, Tom?”

“Anything.”

“This is very difficult for me,” she rushed on. “Tom, you must understand, I love Marshy very much. And he loves me very much. But I want to have a baby, and he wants me to, but he had an illness when he was a young man that left him unable to‌—‌to father a child. But because he loves me he has given me permission to have a child that will be someone else’s child but that we will raise as our own. Do you understand, Tom?”

I was being summoned instead of Mammy Pleasant.

I didn’t mention old ironies.

We made arrangements to meet in one of the private dining rooms upstairs at the Old Poodle Dog. That was of course an evening I will not forget, no more than Jimmy Fairleigh had been able to forget Caroline LaPlante‌—‌filled with wine and laughter, but more tears than laughter, and seriousness of purpose. Arrangements were made for a second meeting a month hence, if it should be necessary.

It was not necessary, and in January of the following year I received an announcement of the birth of Arthur Brittain Sloat. On it was written in a familiar bold hand, “Thank you,” without a signature.

I saw the notice of Sloat’s death two years later in the obituaries of the Chronicle . He was survived by his widow, the former Amelia Brittain, and his son, Arthur Brittain Sloat. Mr. Brittain died about a month later and I figured that Amelia might have moved to town to be with her mother.

I walked down the steep block of Taylor Street from California Street past 913 three different times before I caught a glimpse of the boy. He was playing on the porch where once the Slasher had attacked his mother, a tow-headed child in a black and white sailor jumper running and banging things together, that I finally saw were pots and their lids. He ran and banged, and was silent and invisible behind the railing for periods, until a nurse in a blue uniform with a white doily on her head came out to bring him back inside the house. I didn’t catch sight of Amelia.

By then I was married myself.

So is time the lock and occasion the key that does not always fit.

In the society columns it was noted when Amelia Brittain Sloat left for New York with her son.

Belinda Barnacle was married in her eighteenth year, but not on her eighteenth birthday, to a young fellow named Haskell Green, who was a boarder at the Barnacles’ establishment. Green had a job as a coal salesman for the Cedar River Coal Company. He was “a real go-getter,” Mr. Barnacle assured me. I sent leather-bound, gilt-edged fine editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as a wedding present.