FSF, March-April 2010 Read online

  * * * *

  Strange now to think that she'd hardly noticed him the first time they met—if you could call it meeting.

  He'd been standing behind the desk in the Chief Ranger's office at Chalmette on the field of the Battle of New Orleans, as silent and almost as thin as the flagstaff. Meanwhile the well-barbered bureaucrat in his uniform, with his Smokey the Bear hat hanging from a rack, gave Saffron her instructions.

  "We're about to lose Fort Clay, Ms. Genève, so we want to document it while it's still here. That's what the contract you've signed is about. We want a thorough pictorial record. We don't want art,” he said, pronouncing the last word as if it soiled his palate.

  She made a noncommittal noise, figuring that once alone on Île du Sable, she'd do what she damn well pleased. Didn't this guy realize that two of her Katrina pictures had appeared in Vanity Fair? Sure, she was young, still struggling, she needed the job and expected to do competent work. But on her own terms. She certainly didn't expect Smokey to send Dr. Corman along to watch her.

  But that was exactly what he did. Under orders, she met Corman at Pilot Town just above the Passes of the Mississippi, and during their two-hour boat trip on a Corps of Engineers lighter he lectured on his specialty. He was a National Park Service historian, an expert on nineteenth-century fortifications, and like most experts wanted to share everything he knew about the old brick forts that ringed the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines—why they'd been built, and when, and by whom.

  Old farts like old forts, thought Saffron sourly, deciding, as they bucked and rolled through choppy brown water between the jetties of Pass à Loutre and headed out into the open Gulf, that Corman knew more about less than anybody she'd ever met. Even after the boat dropped them on the island, he went on and on, like a cricket that gets into your house in autumn. Still chirping, he led her through an impressive arched gateway and up a flight of weedy brick steps.

  "Fort Clay,” he admitted, “had rather an uneventful history. Yet I've made a special study of it."

  Figures, she thought, taking her new Macron ZX-300 digital camera (9 megapixels, 10x Zeiss optical zoom) out of its carrying pouch. While she hungered for fame, Corman seemed to have an inverted lust for celebrity. The less important something was, the better he liked it. He was a moth drawn to obscurity instead of light.

  "In the forty years it was in service,” he nattered on, “the garrison never heard a shot fired in anger. In 1870 it was decommissioned and stood abandoned until a group of enthusiasts (myself included) managed to get it on the National Register. The Park Service restored it, and it became a popular destination for boaters who stopped off to sunbathe and swim and picnic. And, I suppose, to satisfy their morbid curiosity."

  "Can we get started now?” asked Saffron. But the last phrase had caught her ear, and she added unwillingly, “Morbid curiosity about what?"

  "Why, the one truly sensational event of the fort's history—Sergeant Schulz and his men and their sad fate."

  "Sad fate,” she muttered, wondering how many archaic clichés Corman kept in his arsenal.

  "Very sad. Sad and shocking. I wrote the official brochure telling the story. First came the yellow fever, and then the hurricane, and then the poor fellows were beheaded by a madman. Would you like to begin with the casemates, Ms. Genève, or would you rather photograph the gun emplacements en barbette first?"

  * * * *

  Barbette guns turned out to be the ones that stood on the open parapet, nothing above them but empty sky. "So vulnerable to plunging fire,” sighed Corman. “Almost suicide to service them if there'd ever been a heavy bombardment. Many men joined the heavy artillery hoping to stay safe. Some of them got a nasty surprise."

  Unfortunately, the big guns—the Columbiads and Dahlgrens and Parrotts, as Corman called them—had long since been removed and melted down for use in other wars. A few stones and bits of rusty iron were all that remained, so Saffron dutifully documented the lack of anything to document.

  "Maybe we'd better do the casemates,” she suggested. “By the way, what are casemates?"

  "I'll show you."

  He led her down another flight of brick steps ("Be careful, Ms. Genève, even routine maintenance has been discontinued") into a vast chamber he called Casemate One. Instantly all her artistic instincts awakened. Massive brick arches rose and met in a vaulted ceiling from which hung pale finger-long stalactites. Light came in through a wide gun port. She peered through it, and caught her breath.

  The Ranger had told her that the next hurricane would probably sink île du Sable beneath the waves. But that was only knowledge. Now she actually saw the rolling blue Gulf of Mexico lapping at the bricks, while by some trick of perspective the distant horizon already seemed higher than her head.

  "It really is about to go under,” she murmured in awe. “The coast really is washing away."

  Corman nodded soberly. “A crew will be out tomorrow to put up warning signs. The Coast Guard is notifying boaters not to come ashore. Oh—please watch the snake."

  Saffron froze, then looked where he was pointing. Not a yard from her right foot, a water moccasin big enough to fill a washtub lay coiled against one wall, tongue flickering.

  "You should have worn boots,” said Corman reprovingly, looking down at her Nikes. “Well, go ahead—take your pictures. We don't have all day. The engineer boat will pick us up at three."

  Saffron used her flash to shoot Casemate One from every angle she could imagine. Then she followed Corman through a series of low-vaulted passages leading to Casemates Two, Three, Four, and Five. By the time they'd completed a circuit of the pentagonal fort, her irritation had given way to an awestruck sense that maybe, just maybe, this potboiler of a job could turn into something important for her career.

  Even as she worked and watched for snakes, another part of her multi-track mind began to wonder if some of the images she was capturing might be manipulated into art photos, whether the Park Service liked it or not. She began to dream of publishing a coffee-table book, a collection of dramatic black-and-white photographs, something like Clarence John Laughlin's Ghosts Along the Mississippi. Something wildly romantic, befitting an American castle that was also part of a vanishing world.

  Digital technology enabled you to do just about anything with images, she reflected. And what she couldn't do herself with her ImageMaker program, the techs at her favorite photo lab could do for her. If the Park Service threatened to sue her on the grounds that her work belonged to them, she'd argue that only the basic documentary images were theirs. Once transfigured into art, they'd be her own.

  Casemate Five differed from the others in having a kind of anteroom, a dank chamber sunk deep into one wall, with rusty, disintegrating iron bars. “The guardhouse,” explained Corman. “Be sure and document it."

  Normally kept for misbehaving soldiers, it once had held a celebrated captive, the accused murderer Gabriel Letourneau, known as the Headsman. Corman shook his own head and clucked over it.

  "Even back then, the casemates flooded in a hurricane. Sergeant Schulz was too compassionate to let Letourneau drown like a rat. And just look what happened!"

  They were back to Sergeant Schulz and his men and their sad fate. Only now, with her book in mind, Saffron wanted a story to provide a lively text, and asked, “What did happen?"

  "Let's go up to the Parade, and I'll tell you."

  * * * *

  The Parade turned out to be nothing but the weedy open space inside the walls. Saffron could see that buildings once had stood here—brick foundation piers remained—and Corman paced off the outlines of the barracks, the cookhouse, the officers’ quarters, the long-sealed powder magazine, and the latrine ("called a sink by the Victorians. Hence our expression, ‘He has a mind like a sink’”).

  Reluctantly, she was coming to appreciate his scholarship. Love compelled respect, and Corman loved his topic, bizarre and narrow though it might be. They sat down on adjacent piers of the barracks, and he began to
fill her in about Fort Clay's last and most dangerous captive. After New Orleans fell to the federal fleet, he explained, the fort had served as a prison for obstreperous Rebels, male and female. But by 1864 it had lost even that function—either the captives had been set free, shipped off to camps in the North, or expelled into the Confederacy. With soldiers dying like flies in the battles for Atlanta and Richmond, the garrison had been stripped down to a skeleton crew, without even an officer to command them.

  So there they were, two miles from the marshy coastline, sixteen men with little to do but swim, fish, and perform routine maintenance. They rotated the job of cooking; a private who'd worked as a hospital orderly attended to bruises and upset stomachs; a corporal named Quant from upstate New York's Burnt-Over District—once famous for its hellfire religion—acted as part-time chaplain and gave rousing sermons every Sunday.

  The NCO in charge was First Sergeant Abram Schulz. Corman described him as a typical bluecoat, bearded like most, wearing the red chevrons of the artillery on his sleeve and crossed gold cannons on his kepi. He was twenty-six, an Ohio merchant's son and by no means an ignorant man. After his death, copies of Dickens and Thackeray were found in his quarters, as well as a stack of technical manuals and a textbook of basic French reflecting his years on occupation duty in New Orleans.

  Compared to the bloodbaths in Virginia and Georgia, Schulz and his men had lucked into incredibly easy duty. But also tedious. As if to relieve their boredom, in August the monthly supply boat arrived and Letourneau stepped onto the fort's floating dock with shackles jingling, followed by a member of the provost marshal's guard carrying an internment order and a drawn pistol. The garrison crowded around to stare at the big, rangy man with the tangled beard and hair and the unexpectedly gentle, submissive manner. (He even addressed privates as “m'sieu.") After he'd been locked up, they all found reasons to visit Casemate Five to gape and stare at him some more, as if he were a dangerous animal caged in Barnum's circus. In fact, some wit borrowed a phrase from the great showman and posted a hand-lettered sign over his cell that read “The Original Gorilla."

  Month-old copies of the Picayune with details of his crime found a fascinated audience. Decapitated corpses had been showing up for the past two years. With fingerprinting yet to be invented, record-keeping primitive, and a vast drifting population of refugees created by the war, none of them had been firmly identified. Letourneau was arrested after his landlady, noticing a bad smell, checked the slum room he inhabited and found a woman's head in a cupboard. Subsequently, a patrol sent by the provost marshal discovered under the bed a cane knife—a wicked-looking bolo-like tool made for cutting sugarcane.

  At this point the evidence looked so firm that carpenters began bidding for the job of building the gallows. But then the case started to unravel. With the crude forensics of the time, there was no way to determine if the carefully cleaned and oiled cane knife actually was the murder weapon. Letourneau had a good reason for owning it, for he lived by doing odd jobs that included clearing weeds and brush—in fact, he'd been employed for that purpose by the military government itself. As for the head, he claimed he'd found it among the weeds near the levee and brought it home as a curiosity, an alibi so bizarre that it might even be true.

  All his life Letourneau had been known as a “natural,” meaning a half-wit. He was also a pack rat. His room yielded an amazing collection of useless objects—glass beads, ballast stones, dried beetles, a brass telegrapher's key, the skull of a horse, some cypress knees, Indian arrowheads, even a small meteorite—that lent a kind of loony credence to his story. Despite his physical strength and mental problems, he had no police record and no reputation for violence. The few people who knew him treated him with a mixture of compassion and contempt. Worst of all, from the viewpoint of execution buffs who were eagerly awaiting the hanging, another headless body was discovered while Letourneau was locked up in Parish Prison.

  The provost marshal decided to hold him, pending further investigation. Fort Clay was secure and almost empty. And so the disaster began to take form.

  "But now, Ms. Genève,” said Corman, showing a Scheherazade-like ability to interrupt himself at critical moments, “I really think we ought to document the external walls. Work before play, you know, and when it's all done and all the pictures are locked up in the brain of your little camera, I'll finish the story for you."

  * * * *

  Actually, their hour-long hike around the fort's perimeter proved more interesting than Saffron had expected.

  The place was ruinous, and for that reason picturesque. At two spots, sinking foundations had caused huge cracks to open in the walls, and she made sure that her camera caught the crooked daggers of pale sky thrusting down through the bricks. Barbed wire hadn't been invented when the fort was built, so rows of sharp wooden spikes—Corman called them the abatis—still projected from the dunes, dry and gray and worm-eaten like driftwood. She took a series of pictures through the spikes to suggest both the fort's original warlike purpose and its present hopeless decay.

  Meanwhile Corman chattered about life in the 1860s, which he knew in detail. He explained the problems of supplying the fort in bad weather, of securing fresh water for the garrison in the absence of natural springs, of keeping the men healthy so close to the malarial coast. There'd been other problems, he recalled, in the days when Fort Clay was used as a prison both for Rebel sympathizers and common criminals. Along with forty or so men, a dozen women had been jailed, charged with a variety of crimes great and small—spying, prostitution, insulting the flag, emptying chamber pots on the heads of Union soldiers. Keeping them secure from rape among a crowd of unwillingly celibate males had not been easy.

  "Bathing was a problem,” he mused. “The men skinny-dipped by the roster on the Gulf side of the fort, women on the land side. While the ladies were washing, guards were posted with orders to turn their backs and not to peek. I don't think those orders were always obeyed,” he added, with a dry little chuckle.

  That gave Saffron another idea. How about taking some nude photos in her studio, and having the geniuses at the lab transform them into ghostly images against the grim, looming walls of the fort? A little nudity never hurt anything. And how about a bit of softcore porn as well? With all those randy males around, surely the jailed hookers found some way to ply their trade, prison or no prison. She could fabricate some sex scenes, pale forms suggesting the repressed passions of men and women locked up under a discipline that made captives of the soldiers as well as the prisoners.

  Ghosts Along the Mississippi was fine as a model. But her book would be a lot more salable if she put a bit of Robert Mapplethorpe into it as well.

  The afternoon was advancing and the sunlight hot when she and Corman wended back through the vaulted gateway into the Parade. She was tired and sweaty, and the walls shut off the breeze from the Gulf. In her bag, along with two more cameras and some extra lenses and filters, she'd brought a couple of small Evian bottles. She gave one to Corman and downed the other herself. Sharing the water completed their transformation from strangers into companions, even collaborators.

  "You were saying that the men actually welcomed the Headsman's arrival as a break in the routine,” she reminded him.

  "Yes. And just a few days later came another."

  A dot appeared on the southern horizon and turned into a steamship called the Floradora—an old-fashioned side-wheeler that had survived into the age of the screw propeller. It tied up to the floating dock, and the soldiers who were off duty began to swap tobacco and gossip with the crew. Sergeant Schulz politely invited the captain into the officers’ quarters he'd commandeered for himself and Corporal Quant, and poured him a glass of whiskey he'd commandeered too.

  The ship had come from Habana (as it was spelled then) and the captain had a bit of disquieting news to report: when they left the harbor, hurricane flags had been flying on the walls of Moro Castle. Schulz duly noted this information, then asked if yellow fever h
ad broken out in Cuba, as it usually did during the summer. The captain said no, not to his knowledge, then swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and said he must be getting his ship underway. Something furtive in his manner roused the sergeant's suspicion, so he accompanied him to the dock and cast a sharp eye over the Floradora's crewmen. All he could see appeared lively and healthy enough.

  Yet when the ship arrived at the Head of Passes, an army medical inspector descended to the lower deck and found a sailor lying in his hammock, parchment colored, burning with fever and bringing up black vomit—Yellow Jack's classic symptom. The Floradora was immediately quarantined and the sick man removed to an isolation ward. Of course Schulz had no way of knowing about that, or whether a few mosquitoes might have fluttered ashore during the Floradora's brief stay at île du Sable. And wouldn't have cared anyway, for as yet nobody on earth knew how the fever spread.

  Corman based his vivid account of these happenings on a log that Schulz kept, with a meticulous day-to-day and even hour-to-hour record of events at Fort Clay. Wrapped in oilcloth and locked in a metal dispatch box, the log had survived the catastrophe and ended up in the National Archives, along with the other records of the Department of the Gulf. So Corman knew that during the next few days, the weather had been sunlit but oppressively hot and still. And then the Gulf began to change. Long ripples running up from the south slowly grew into waves, then into rollers. By the end of the week, breakers were pounding the dock and chewing at the coarse sea grass that anchored the dunes. The sky to the south turned from the dull sheen of pewter to the blue-black of gunmetal.

  Sure now that the storm was heading his way, Schulz set his men to work, blocking the cannon ports with wooden barriers braced by logs wedged against the carriages of the big guns. They covered the muzzles and plugged the firing vents, then went to work on the fort itself—barring the main gate, moving their carbines and swords from the underground magazine to the barracks’ upper floor, closing and nailing the shutters on the windows of the barracks and the officers’ quarters. Since the wooden cistern that supplied them drinking water might be toppled by the wind, Schulz had the men fill barrels with water, muscle them into the barracks, and store them between their bunks. He couldn't have known that Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads yellow fever, is a domestic sort of creature and likes nothing better than to breed in artificial containers close to its blood source. For all his forethought and common sense, he'd created a nursery for Yellow Jack right where his men slept.