The Thanatos Syndrome

There are four rooms downstairs and up, divided by a hall as wide as a dogtrot.
    Lucy and her uncle are waiting for me on the lower gallery, Lucy is in shirt-sleeves and jeans, hands in pockets, eyeing me, lip tucked. She reaches up and gives me a hug and, to my surprise, a frank kiss on the mouth. What a splendid, by no means small, woman. Again the smell of her cotton gives me a déjà vu. I know if I choose to know, but don’t of course, what will happen next. And yet I do.
    The uncle shakes hands, giving one pump country-fashion, not meeting my eye, and stands off a ways, snapping his fingers and socking fist into hand. He is silent but agreeable. His face is as narrow and brown as a piece of slab bark. He wears an old duck-hunting cap and a loose bloodstained camouflage army jacket, with special pockets for shells and game. The cap is folded like a little tent on his narrow head.
    We stroll around the front yard and to the back, which contains a tiny graveyard. The sun has reached the trees. It is cooler. Lucy walks like a housewife going abroad, arms folded, stooping with each step. The uncle keeps up, but in a flanking position, some twenty feet away. His old liver-and-white pointer, Maggie, follows at his heel, her nose covered with warts, nuzzling him when he stops, burrowing under his hand. He talks, I think, to us. He speaks of his bird boxes and points them out. “Ain’t been a bluebird in these parts for forty years. I got six pair this summer. I got me twenty pair of wood ducks down in the flats. You want to see them?”
    â€œSure,” I say.
    â€œNot now, Uncle,” says Lucy, stooping over her folded arms as she walks.
    The uncle, flanking, keeps talking, paying no attention to Lucy nor she to him. “Most folks don’t know how the ducklings get out of the boxes twenty feet high. Some say they climb down the bark using a special toenail. Some say mamma duck helps them down. Not so. I saw them. You know what those little sapsuckers do? They climb out of the hole and fall, flat fall out and hit the ground pow, bounce like a rubber ball, and head for the water.”
    The graveyard is a tiny enclosure, fenced by rusty iron spikes and chest-high in weeds. “I can’t cut in there with a tractor, so it doesn’t get cut,” says Lucy.
    â€œI heard they used to cut it with scissors,” says the uncle. “Did you know once there were forty people here not counting field people?” By “they” and “people,” he means slaves.
    Lucy, paying no attention, shows me the grave of our common ancestor, an English army officer on the wrong side of the Revolution. It is a blackened granite block surmounted by an angel holding an urn.
    â€œDo you remember that in his will he left his daughter, who was thirteen, an eleven-year-old mulatto girl named Laura for her personal use.” Lucy jostles me. “I wish somebody would leave me one.”
    â€œYou seem to be doing fine.”
    â€œHe suffered spells of terrible melancholy and harbored the delusion that certain unnamed enemies were after him, all around him, coming down the river and up the river to put an end to the happy life in Feliciana.”
    â€œIt was probably the Americans.”
    â€œWe come from a melancholy family. Are you melancholy?” she asks. “No, you don’t look melancholy; me either.” I notice that her cheeks are flushed. “He married a beautiful American girl half his age, only to have his first, English wife show up. Both women lived here at Pantherburn for a while.” Lucy gives me a sideways look.
    â€œNo wonder he jumped in the river. Which wife are we descended from?” I ask her.
    â€œI’m from the English, the legitimate side; you from the American.”
    â€œThen we’re not close kin.”
    â€œHardly kin at all. I’m glad,” says Lucy.
    We are walking again, the uncle in his outrider position. “I got me a pair of woodies right there,” he says, shaking two loose fingers toward the woods. “You ought to see that little sucker fly into the hole.”
    â€œI’d like to.”
    â€œThey’ve long since left the boxes, Uncle,” says Lucy wearily.
    â€œDo you know how he does that? Some people say he lights on the edge and goes in, but no. He flies in. I saw him. I’m talking about, he flies right in that hole. Do you know how he does it?”
    Lucy, stooping and