Starbuck, even though he disliked his father, felt pressed to defend him. ‘You made your opposition known to my father, sir? Or do you just start quarrels with his son?’
‘Quarrels? Opposition? I hold no opposition to your father’s views! I agree with them, each and every one. Slavery, Starbuck, is a menace to our society. I simply disagree with your father’s contemptible logic! It is not enough to pray for an end to the peculiar institution, we have to propose practical arrangements for its abolition. Are the slaveholders to be recompensed for their pecuniary loss? And if so, by whom? By the Federal government? By a sale of bonds? And what of the Negroes themselves? Are we to repatriate them to Africa? Settle them in South America? Or are we to breed the darkness out of them by forcible miscegenation, a process, I might say, which has been well begun by our slave owners. Your father made no mention of these matters, but merely had recourse to indignation and prayer, as if prayer has ever settled anything!’
‘You do not believe in prayer, sir?’
‘Believe in prayer!’ The thin man was scandalized by the very thought of such a belief. ‘If prayer solved anything there’d be no unhappiness in this world, would there? All the moaning women would be smiling! There would be no more disease, no more hunger, no more appalling children picking their snot-filled nostrils in our schoolrooms, no more sniveling infants brought for my admiration. Why should I admire their mewling, puking, whimpering, filthy-faced offspring? I do not like children! I have been telling Washington Faulconer that simple fact for fourteen years now! Fourteen years! Yet my brother-in-law seems incapable of understanding the simplest sentence of plain-spoken English and insists I run his schoolroom. Yet I do not like children, I have never liked children and I hope that I never shall like children. Is that so very hard to understand?’ The man still clung to his awkward burdens, even as he waited for Starbuck’s response.
Starbuck suddenly understood who this bad-tempered disorganized man was. This was the he-biddy, the poor relation, Faulconer’s brother-in-law. ‘You’re Mister Thaddeus Bird,’ he said.
‘Of course I’m Thaddeus Bird!’ Bird seemed angry that his identity needed confirmation. He glared bright-eyed and bristling at Starbuck. ‘Have you heard a word I said?’
‘You were telling me you do not like children.’
‘Filthy little beasts. In the North, mark you, you raise children differently. There you are not afraid to discipline them. Or beat them, indeed! But here, in the South, we need differentiate our children from our slaves and so we beat the latter and destroy the former with kindness.’
‘Mister Faulconer beats neither, I believe?’
Bird froze, staring at Starbuck as though the younger man had just uttered an extraordinary profanity. ‘My brother-in-law, I perceive, has been advertising his good qualities to you. His good qualities, Starbuck, are dollars. He buys affection, adulation and admiration. Without money he would be as empty as a Tuesday night pulpit. Besides he does not need to beat his servants or children because my sister can beat enough for twenty.’
Starbuck was offended by this ungrateful attack on his patron. ‘Mister Faulconer freed his slaves, did he not?’
‘He freed twenty house slaves, six garden boys and his stable people. He never had field hands because he never needed them. The Faulconer fortune is not based on cotton or tobacco, but upon inheritance, railroads and investment, so it was a painless gesture, Starbuck, and principally done, I suspect, to spite my sister. It is, perhaps, the one good deed Faulconer ever did, and I refer to the exercise of spitefulness rather than to the act of manumission.’ Bird, failing to find anywhere to put down his belongings, simply opened his arms and let them all drop untidily onto the music room’s parquet floor. ‘Faulconer wants you to deliver the uniforms.’
Starbuck was taken aback, but then realized the subject had abruptly been changed to the Colonel’s new finery. ‘He wants me to take them to Faulconer Court House?’
‘Of course he does!’ Bird almost screamed at Starbuck. ‘Must I state the obvious? If I say that Faulconer wishes you to deliver his uniforms, must I first define uniforms? And afterward identify Washington Faulconer? Or the Colonel, as we must all now learn to call him? Good God, Starbuck, and you were at Yale?’
‘At the seminary.’
‘Ah! That explains all. A mind that can credit the bleatings of theology professors can hardly be expected to understand plain English.’ Thaddeus Bird evidently found this insult amusing, for he began to laugh and, at the same time, to jerk his head backward and forward in a motion so like a woodpecker that it was instantly obvious how his nickname had arisen. Yet if Starbuck himself had been asked to christen this thin, angular and unpleasant man with a nickname it would not have been Pecker, but Spider, for there was something about Thaddeus Bird that irresistibly reminded Starbuck of a long-legged, hairy, unpredictable and malevolent spider. ‘The Colonel has sent me to run some errands in Richmond, while you are to go to Faulconer Court House,’ Pecker Bird went on, but in a plump, mocking voice such as he might use to a small and not very clever child. ‘Stop me if your Yale-educated mind finds any of these instructions difficult to understand. You will go to Faulconer Court House where the Colonel’—Bird paused to make a mocking salute—‘wishes for your company, but only if the tailors have finished making his uniforms. You are to be the official conveyor of those uniforms, and of his daughter’s manifold petticoats. Your responsibilities are profound.’
‘Petticoats?’ Starbuck asked.
‘Women’s undergarments,’ Bird said maliciously, then sat at Washington Faulconer’s grand piano where he played a swift and remarkably impressive arpeggio before settling into the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’ to which, without regard to either scansion or tune, he chanted conversationally. ‘Why does Anna want so many petticoats? Especially as my niece already possesses more petticoats than a reasonable man might have thought necessary for a woman’s comfort, but reason and young ladies have never kept close company. But why does she want Ridley? I cannot answer that question either.’ He stopped playing, frowning. ‘Though he is a remarkably talented artist.’
‘Ethan Ridley?’ Starbuck, trying to follow the tortuous changes in Bird’s conversation, asked in surprise.
‘Remarkably talented,’ Bird confirmed rather wistfully, as though he envied Ridley’s skill, ‘but lazy, of course. Natural talent going to waste, Starbuck. Just wasted! He won’t work at his talent. He prefers to marry money rather than make it.’ He accentuated this judgment by playing a gloomy minor chord, then frowned. ‘He is a slave of nature,’ he said, looking expectantly at Starbuck.
‘And a son of hell?’ The second half of the Shakespearean insult slipped gratifyingly into Starbuck’s mind.
‘So you have read something other than your sacred texts.’ Bird seemed disappointed, but then recovered his malevolence as he lowered his voice into a confiding hiss, saying, ‘But I shall tell you, Starbuck, that the slave of nature will marry the Colonel’s daughter! Why does that family contract such marriages? God knows, and he is not saying, though at present, mark my words, young Ridley is in bad odor with the Colonel. He has failed to recruit Truslow! Ah-ha!’ Bird crashed a demonic and celebratory discord on the piano. ‘No Truslow! Ridley had better look to his laurels, had he not? The Colonel is not best pleased.’
‘Who is Truslow?’ Starbuck asked somewhat despairingly.
‘Truslow!’ Bird said portentously, then paused to play a foreboding couplet of bass notes. ‘Truslow, Starbuck, is our county’s murderer! Our outlaw! Our hardscrabble demon from the hills! Our beast, our creature of darkness, our fiend!’ Bird cackled at this fine catalog of mischief, then twisted on the piano bench to face Starbuck. ‘Thomas Truslow is a rogue, and my brother-in-law the Colonel, who lacks common sense, wishes