American Gothic Read Online Free Page A
tell me the truth, Seamus. I need to know.”
“May the devil take me if I’ve ever been less than completely truthful with you, General Peregrine.”
“There was a beautiful young woman there, tiny of frame, with coal black hair, green eyes, and white skin, like a porcelain doll. She must have passed you as you came in. Young, hardly more than a girl.”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe you saw her on the street outside Yu’s?”
“Sorry, sir, I saw no such female.”
A muscle in Peregrine’s face began to twitch. He turned away from O’Rourke and rubbed it with his fingers to make it stop. “Yu didn’t strangle those people.”
“General Butler hanged him for it right enough.”
“It was the young woman I told you about. She killed them all. She would have killed me next, if you hadn’t come busting in when you did.”
“A wee girl strangled those people?”
“I told you: she bit them in the neck and sucked the lifeblood out of them, the way a spider kills a fly. She’s no ordinary woman. She can’t be. I don’t know what exactly—something monstrous.”
“Listen to yourself. Begging the general’s pardon, but you’re speaking pure madness.”
Peregrine didn’t disagree. He couldn’t.
“You were out of your mind with the opium last night, General. You don’t know what you saw. It must have been a dream.”
“That’s what General Butler said, but I know what I saw.”
“Saints preserve us!” O’Rourke cried.
The bartender looked their way.
“If you continue talking like that,” O’Rourke said in a furious whisper, “they will lock you away in an asylum, and it will be an unpleasant end for you. Maybe you did see something in that hop house. It’s not for me to say, sir. It’s a right queer world God created for us to live in. If there are angels and devils, then maybe there are comely banshees who sup on the blood of the living. But for the love of Mike, General, put this experience behind you, along with your grief for your own poor murdered family. Spoons has his eye on you. Who knows what he’ll do if he senses you turning yourself into a liability to his political career. I’d rather have a division of rebels in front of me than a treacherous old snapping turtle like Ben Butler behind me, staring at my back with his goggle eye. You’re balanced on the surface of a soap bubble, sir. If you aren’t careful, it will burst, and you’ll burst with it.”
The people on the street gave wide berth to Peregrine’s blue uniform with the brigadier general’s gold star on each epaulet. The men, nearly every one a rebel at heart, looked away or stared past Peregrine, as though he were invisible. Butler’s cold-blooded decision to hang William Mumford for taking down the federal flag at the Mint had been brutal, but it had curbed the outward defiance of New Orleans’s conquered men.
An old woman with a bottle green parasol stepped out of a dress shop as Peregrine passed, looking up at him over the top of her pince-nez spectacles with surprise that quickly transformed to disgust.
“Nigger lover,” she yelled after him.
Peregrine considered stopping to advise her about General Order Number 28, but he kept walking. She would find out about it soon enough without his help.
4
The French Quarter
H OW DO YOU make yourself forget? The subject was on Peregrine’s mind as he walked back to the boardinghouse, exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes, and went out again. He had intended to report to the infirmary, but he made it no farther than the nearest saloon, where he spent most of the afternoon drinking alone. After making a luncheon of pigs’ feet washed down with beer, he decided to pay a visit to the public library to see what wisdom the world had to offer him on the science of forgetting.
Amid the stacks of books made musty by the humid air, Peregrine found no shortage of advice instructing the forgetful on how to remember. An absentminded person could carry a notepad to
“May the devil take me if I’ve ever been less than completely truthful with you, General Peregrine.”
“There was a beautiful young woman there, tiny of frame, with coal black hair, green eyes, and white skin, like a porcelain doll. She must have passed you as you came in. Young, hardly more than a girl.”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe you saw her on the street outside Yu’s?”
“Sorry, sir, I saw no such female.”
A muscle in Peregrine’s face began to twitch. He turned away from O’Rourke and rubbed it with his fingers to make it stop. “Yu didn’t strangle those people.”
“General Butler hanged him for it right enough.”
“It was the young woman I told you about. She killed them all. She would have killed me next, if you hadn’t come busting in when you did.”
“A wee girl strangled those people?”
“I told you: she bit them in the neck and sucked the lifeblood out of them, the way a spider kills a fly. She’s no ordinary woman. She can’t be. I don’t know what exactly—something monstrous.”
“Listen to yourself. Begging the general’s pardon, but you’re speaking pure madness.”
Peregrine didn’t disagree. He couldn’t.
“You were out of your mind with the opium last night, General. You don’t know what you saw. It must have been a dream.”
“That’s what General Butler said, but I know what I saw.”
“Saints preserve us!” O’Rourke cried.
The bartender looked their way.
“If you continue talking like that,” O’Rourke said in a furious whisper, “they will lock you away in an asylum, and it will be an unpleasant end for you. Maybe you did see something in that hop house. It’s not for me to say, sir. It’s a right queer world God created for us to live in. If there are angels and devils, then maybe there are comely banshees who sup on the blood of the living. But for the love of Mike, General, put this experience behind you, along with your grief for your own poor murdered family. Spoons has his eye on you. Who knows what he’ll do if he senses you turning yourself into a liability to his political career. I’d rather have a division of rebels in front of me than a treacherous old snapping turtle like Ben Butler behind me, staring at my back with his goggle eye. You’re balanced on the surface of a soap bubble, sir. If you aren’t careful, it will burst, and you’ll burst with it.”
The people on the street gave wide berth to Peregrine’s blue uniform with the brigadier general’s gold star on each epaulet. The men, nearly every one a rebel at heart, looked away or stared past Peregrine, as though he were invisible. Butler’s cold-blooded decision to hang William Mumford for taking down the federal flag at the Mint had been brutal, but it had curbed the outward defiance of New Orleans’s conquered men.
An old woman with a bottle green parasol stepped out of a dress shop as Peregrine passed, looking up at him over the top of her pince-nez spectacles with surprise that quickly transformed to disgust.
“Nigger lover,” she yelled after him.
Peregrine considered stopping to advise her about General Order Number 28, but he kept walking. She would find out about it soon enough without his help.
4
The French Quarter
H OW DO YOU make yourself forget? The subject was on Peregrine’s mind as he walked back to the boardinghouse, exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes, and went out again. He had intended to report to the infirmary, but he made it no farther than the nearest saloon, where he spent most of the afternoon drinking alone. After making a luncheon of pigs’ feet washed down with beer, he decided to pay a visit to the public library to see what wisdom the world had to offer him on the science of forgetting.
Amid the stacks of books made musty by the humid air, Peregrine found no shortage of advice instructing the forgetful on how to remember. An absentminded person could carry a notepad to
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