Letters

You did, then, after all, receive my letters — so comes the word from Castines Hundred. And by when you read this we shall have been reunited, briefly and fatefully, between Twilight’s Last Gleaming and Dawn’s Early Light. A. B. Cook VI will have regrettably met his end in the Diversion sequence. The Destruction of Barataria will have been successfully reenacted, and Baratarian will be embarked — like Jean Lafhte’s Pride from Galveston in 1821—upon her momentous voyage: the initiation of Year 1 of our 7-Year Plan. At sunrise a week from Friday — American Indian Day and anniversary of our 1917 Welland Canal Plot — there will occur another kind of Diversion sequence at Marshyhope State University: the Algonquins’ Revenge, let us say, for the desecration of their ancient burial ground on Redmans Neck. Drew Mack’s last project, I conceive, and the “ascension” of Jerome Bonaparte Bray to his ancestors.

All this we watch, you and I, from our certain separate distances. It is no longer our affair.

You wonder why, having so diligently searched you out and laboriously urged you mewards, I am not aboardship with you, en route to the Yucatàn. You were promised your father, and anon your mother; you find, instead, yet another letter! Was it not A. B. Cook alone who was to die? Was not Baron André Castine to marry Jane Mack and divert her enterprises to ours? As our forefather Ebenezer Cooke, late in his laureateship, produced a Sot-Weed Redivivus, were we not to make this first trial run together, you and I, in pursuit of another sort of sot-weed?

Yes. And — now that we shall have remet, respoken, been reunited — no. I remind you, again and finally, of A.B.C. IV’s futile effort, on behalf of his unborn child, to undo the first half of his program in the second — an effort more successfully reenacted on your behalf by myself. I shall say only that I died at Fort McHenry. That this morning, three days later, I woke, as it were, half tranced on a point of dry ground between two creeklets, in the steaming shade of loblolly pines, realizing where I was but not, at once, why I was there. As in a dream I reached for my watchpocket, to fetch forth and wind my ancestors’ watch… and, as if vouchsafed a vision, I understood that I must not nor need not reappear publicly in any guise.

You, Henry, if my letters have done their work, are henceforth my disguise. You have the Plan; you have the means (and shall have more: Harrison Mack’s estate is not done with us; claimants thought dead and/or disposed of — also certain missing, shall we say secreted, items — may yet turn up, be heard from, nosed). Even should you “betray” me… but you will not. You must imagine me present in my absence, not dead and gone but merely withdrawn like my ancestor to that aforementioned certain distance: watching from some Castines Hundred or Bloodsworth Island of the imagination, with some “Consuelo del Consulado” of my own to console my latter years and check my perspective. We look on; we nod approval or tisk our tongues. What we see, at the end of these seven years to come, we shall not say: only that should you falter, flounder, fail us, we shall not despair, but look beyond you, to your heirs.

For if your father has not broken the Pattern for you, the Pattern will surely break you for

Your father,

A.B.C. VI

P.S. to J.B. from H.B. VII: The foregoing was not written by A. B. Cook at Barataria Lodge on Wednesday, 17 Sept. 1969: I am adding this postscript to it on Monday, 15 Sept., from that same place, about to reembark aboard Baratarian before the film company return to shoot the “Destruction of Barataria.”

At Fort McHenry, Saturday last, during the “Wedding Scene,” which I attended in sufficient disguise, I heard “my father” mention that the document representing the “Francis Scott Key Letter” was in fact a letter in progress from himself to his son. Cook so declared it, of course, for my benefit, assuming or hoping that I was within earshot (I could have passed for the mayor, the best man, the groom himself if I’d needed to — even as the “father of the bride”). Not long thereafter, to let Cook know I was on hand, I retrieved that letter, without otherwise revealing myself to him.

It was — in cipher — his Second Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution: i.e., a perfectly accurate prospectus (meant precisely therefore, like Cook IV’s warning letter to President Madison, for me to disbelieve it) of the plan he secretly intended to thwart, and now will not. Among other things, it instructed me to rendezvous with him here at Barataria Lodge early tomorrow morning: another deathtrap, as was (I recognised clearly back in February, our last meeting) his whole project to lead me to him.