Chapter 5 - The Master of the Cistern
I moved the first crate aside, the wood crumbling like charcoal under my fingers. The yellow canvas tape snapped with a sharp crack that sounded like a pistol shot in the small stone room.
The archway behind the crates was low, requiring me to drop to my knees and crawl through the black soot until my hands found the cold, damp flagstones of the central cistern. The chamber was twenty feet wide, the vaulted ceiling held up by four columns of dark Savannah brick that were green with river moss.
In the center of the room sat an old iron army cot, covered in layers of gray wool blankets that looked like horse rugs. A single tallow candle stood on an empty oil drum, its yellow flame burning small and steady in the stagnant air.
Sarah sat on the edge of the cot. She had her shoes off, her bare feet resting on the blue wool blanket she had taken from the wall—the blanket with my name embroidered on the border. She was holding a white porcelain mug between her palms, the steam rising between her fingers just as it had from my mother’s tea the night before.
Across from her, sitting in an old cane-bottom chair that had been missing from the dining room since my seventh birthday, sat an old man.
His hair was white and long, reaching down to his shoulder blades in greasy, uncombed hanks. His beard was a thick, yellowed mass that covered his collarbone, but beneath the hair, his jaw was the long, mathematical line of the Carter men. He wore an old flannel shirt that had been mended fifty times with different colors of sailmaker’s twine, and his eyes—large, dark, and perfectly clear—were fixed on my face with the cold interest of a judge looking at a shoplifter.
“Andrew,” the old man said. The voice was exactly the same as the one from the ramp, but louder now, echoing against the green stone walls of the cistern until the water in the corner pools began to ripple. “You always were a light sleeper when the weather changed.”
“Father?” I said. My knees gave way completely, my palms sinking into the black mud of the floor. The flashlight slipped from my hand, its yellow beam rolling across the stones until it illuminated the old man’s boots—heavy, iron-toed work boots that bore the stamped brand of the port authority. “They told me you died at sea. Mother said... she said the boat came back empty.”
The old man let out a short, dry bark of a laugh that turned into a long, whistling cough. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small tin box, and took out a pinch of dry tobacco that he shoved behind his lower lip.
“The boat did come back empty, son,” Arthur Carter said, leaning forward until the yellow candle light hit the deep, silver scars along his temples—scars that looked exactly like the ones I carried from my own childhood accident on the timber wharf. “Catherine saw to that. She hired the harbor master’s cousin to turn the fuel valves before I left the slip. She wanted the insurance money to pay off the London brokers, and she wanted you where she could keep her fingers around your throat until the trust expired.”
I looked at Sarah. Her face was no longer pale; she looked at me with a cold, clear pity that felt sharper than any knife my mother had ever used.
“She knew about the passage, Andrew,” Sarah said, her voice dropping into the quiet space between us. “She found the old keys in your father’s desk last year. She kept me locked in the house because she was afraid I’d look too closely at the cellar ledgers. But last night, when you turned that key, your father heard the bolt from the other side. He’s been waiting thirty years for a Carter man to be stupid enough to lock his own blood in the dark.”
Behind me, from the narrow mouth of the stone ramp, came the soft, regular click-click of silk slippers against the flagstones.
My mother stood in the archway. She had her lace wrap pulled tight around her chest, her silver hair catching the light of the candle until she looked like an old, white spider sitting in the center of her web. She did not look at me. She did not look at Sarah. She looked straight across the green stone room at the man she had buried in the Atlantic thirty years ago.
“Arthur,” she said, her voice dropping all of its Savannah music, returning to the flat, hard rasp of the country girl who had married into the shipping lines for the sake of the ledger. “You’re still down here. I thought the damp would have finished your lungs by the second winter.”
“The damp is clean, Catherine,” the old man said, standing up from his cane-bottom chair with a slow, grinding movement of his knees that sounded like the lock gates opening at the mouth of the river. He reached out and took Sarah by the hand, lifting her from the cot with the same old-fashioned courtesy I had forgotten how to use. “And the ledger is finally balanced. The girl has the signature now, Catherine. She signed the trust clearance before the candle was lit.”
He looked down at me, his large, calloused thumb pointing toward the white plastic stick that Sarah had left on the floor of the storage room above.
“You’re going to be a father, Andrew,” the old man said, his voice dropping into the deep, final register of the railway lines. “But you’re not going to be a Carter. Not in this house. The girl and the child are coming back to Beaufort with me, and you can stay here with your mother until the lime takes the walls down.”
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They walked past me into the dark passage that led out toward the river wharf—the old man, the wife I had locked away, and the child who carried my name on the back of a plastic stick.
I did not follow them. My legs were too weak to move, my fingers still wrapped around the gold wedding ring that felt as cold as the mud beneath my knees, while behind me, my mother began to weep her regular, silent tears into the dark air of the cistern, waiting for the tea to go cold.
