Letters

Tombo X has played the Ace Up His Sleeve. Using Morgan’s death as his pretext, he has cashiered all white staff members of the Remobilization Farm and is evicting all white patients therefrom without regard to age or degree of mobility. It is his announced intention to turn the place into some other, unspecified, sort of operation. I Disapprove, but Have No Authority to Countermand him. My Wife and I will therefore Take the hearse for Wicomico tomorrow morning, in company with Morgan’s casket. Joe’s statement, that Marsha Understood About Last Night, was, unfortunately, of a character with that about the other blank (ha ha), if you follow me. But I Have Cause to Imagine that he was perhaps correct about my Remobilization, though experience tempers my Optimism. In any case, such things are relative.

I Have some Modest Savings. I Mean to Inquire of Dr. John Schott, whom I Have the Pleasure to Know Personally from 1953, concerning openings in Remedial English at Marshyhope State. My Wife can type many words per minute, when she is Together. I am Urging her to have her baby. It is my Understanding that no one’s permission is required for us to name it Rennie Morgan Blank, or Joseph Morgan Horner, as the case may be. The names Marsha herself proposes for it I Believe to be of a jesting character. On the other hand, I Defend her right to abort the fetus if she so chooses. I Wish she would decide. But when I Bring Up this, or any, subject, she tells me: Bugger off.

I Do Not Expect the road of our New Life to be free of detours, forks, impasses, potholes, rocks. God alone knows where, past Wicomico and (maybe) Marshyhope, it will lead; nor is it my Intention to Record (ever again) our Passage down it. But with tomorrow’s (admittedly tremulous) first step, it will begin.

I Am, sir,

Jacob Horner

JH/jh (7 encl)

~ ~ ~

A: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A summons to Fort McHenry and to the Second 7-Year Plan.

Chautaugua Rd., Md.

Wednesday, Sept. 10, 1969

Dear Henry,

Airmail special delivery should fetch this by Friday to Castines Hundred, where I pray (having heard from our caretakers that you have been there yet again since my last) it may not only find you, but find you ready to respond, if you please, to its summons. Lest someone else find and respond to it instead, I am casting it into “Legrand’s cipher,” or “Captain Kidd’s code” as modified by A.B.C. IV, which I can write (and you will quickly learn to read) as easily as if the words were in no further code than writing itself. Tomorrow I pack off up the road to Baltimore, to the Francis Scott Key Highway, to Fort McHenry, to do a few days’ work with our “film company” (it is Ours now, virtually).

I want you there.

Since my letter of three weeks ago, our Baratarians brought off admirably the Burning of Washington on Bloodsworth Island: our first full-dress drill, so to speak, in using “the media” (in this case Reginald Prinz’s film crew; next time the local and network television news people) as well as our “enemies” (in this case the U.S. Navy; next time the Dept. of the Interior) to our purposes. This is not to say that all went, or goes, perfectly. That lawyer Todd Andrews, executive director of the Tidewater Foundation and thus a principal contender for Harrison Mack’s estate, has grown entirely too curious about the relation of Baron Castine to Andrew Cook VI. He even hired a Buffalo detective to investigate “Monsieur Casteene” of Fort Erie and the Honey Dust operation at Lily Dale! I was obliged to invoke C.I.A. credentials (city detectives have no awe of the F.B.I.) to warn the fellow off, in the process surely making him all the more curious. And Drew Mack’s radicalism, a less sophisticated version of your own, is a growing liability. I shall return to that subject.

Joseph Morgan, on the other hand, my apprehensions concerning whom I voiced in my last, is no longer a problem: we buried him three days since. A pitiful case, that — and a fourteen-year investment (i.e., since I first took an interest in him in 1955, when he was a disillusioned ex-rationalist working for the Maryland Historical Society, and proposed him to Harrison Mack to head up his projected college) down the drain. But at least we need worry about him, indeed about the whole Fort Erie operation, no longer.