The New World - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I came back to New Orleans in April of my forty-first year, closing a circle that had opened when I was nineteen. The circle enclosed seven wars, six armies, dozens of battles, a hundred skirmishes, victories, defeats, dead comrades, women loved and abandoned - a life spent in the profession of arms. Not something intended for me either by myself or my family. Lecourt men were expected to get a taste of war, ideally in the service of La Belle France, before settling down at Terra Nova to live a life of agrarian gentility. Of course, as a younger son, that was never to have been Joseph Lecourt’s lot. I was to have made my own way in the world - as indeed I had, from the frozen mud of the Ukraine, across the burning deserts of Persia and Arabia, through the steaming jungles and decaying colonial cities of Africa and South America.

I had left in 1917 on board a troopship, to a roar of cheers from a crowd joyous for war. My studies at Tulane abandoned for the grand adventure - I was off to be blooded, and my father gave his grudging approval, for, although I wore the uniform of the army that had killed his father in 1864 rather than France, I was at least fighting against the evil Germans who had brought our mother country low in 1914, and maimed my brother while doing it.

I came back on a rusting tramp steamer, with nothing to my name but the clothes on my back, a Luger taken from a dead Turkish officer, and the payroll of a Venezuelan infantry battalion. I had been the quartermaster of that battalion, a good post for a foreigner. The Venezuelan officers hadn’t trusted me, although I had proven myself brave and competent in the war with Colombia, because I was not a part of their ancient system of ancestry, class, and caste. They had accordingly not included me in their plot to overthrow Presidente Arellano. Thus, when British gold convinced the battalion to turn its rifles on the Presidential Guard, it became clear to me that I was caught between a rock and a hard place. If General Soto’s plotters succeeded in overthrowing Arellano, they would kill me for not having been with them; whereas, if the loyalists prevailed, I would face a firing squad simply because I belonged to a mutinous battalion. With that in mind, I gathered the fund of gold coins I kept for such situations, blew open the paymaster’s safe with a handy stick of dynamite, and helped myself to the pay of five hundred men. Twenty minutes brisk walk saw me to the docks, where I picked out the most disreputable ship I could find, marched boldly up the plank, and presented myself to the captain. He was a shrewd, weathered Pole, and as I stood in his cabin, with flames rising from the Presidential Palace in the background and rifle shots popping in the dark alleys, he knew me immediately for what I was. With a conspiratorial grin, he named a price for passage that came to slightly more than half the amount I had in my valise. Being in no position to bargain, I paid him and shook his hand. I saw no reason to be miserly with stolen money, and besides, I had gold hidden in the soles of my boots and sewn into my belt.

My largesse had bought me the second mate’s stateroom; a further payment bought me the man’s spare set of clothes, and my uniform went over the side. Just like that, I was a civilian again, and bound for New Orleans. I was going home after twenty-one years away. As I looked at my reflection in the rust-spotted metal mirror in my cabin, I wondered if home had changed as much as I had. My hair, nearly blonde as a boy, had darkened to brown over the years and now showed flecks of silver. My nose, once long and straight, had been bent permanently askew by a German rifle butt in 1919. My forehead had deep lines, and the stubble on my chin was at least half gray. I still had the heavy neck and shoulders I had gotten from boxing and football, but the last time the army had measured my height, I had lost two inches from my original six feet three - all the miles I had marched carrying a rifle and pack had taken their toll.

As for the land of my birth, I knew the broad strokes - it was one country no more, but rather a half dozen smaller ones. I knew as well that I was alone - my family all dead in one of the black rebellions, and our home overrun and forsaken in an abandoned province of the empire.

I might have learned more of the doings of the old United States from the captain, had I dared to dine with him. But the crew of the King of the Belgians was a villainous bunch, and I chose to spend the voyage as much as possible in my cabin while we wallowed our way across the Caribbean. The Algerian steward who brought me my supper on the second day pulled a knife and demanded my bag, but I put to use the boxing lessons my father had paid for thirty years before, and laid him out with a broken jaw. Thereafter, I never left my cabin or answered the door without the Luger in my belt, and passed the rest of the voyage unmolested.

We made New Orleans in just under a week, and I disembarked as quick as I was able. I walked briskly toward the commercial district and entered the first bank I saw to exchange Venezuelan pesos for gray-printed paper bills adorned with portraits of Lee, Davis, and Jackson. I strolled deeper into the French Quarter and took a seat at a wrought iron table outside a cafe; the waiter brought me a cup of coffee laced with chicory. I had not smelled that distinctive aroma since 1917. For the length of time it took me to drink that cup, I allowed myself to give no thought to the future. I had survived the collapse of yet another government, and gotten away with more than my life this time. I was, in fact, in a tolerably good financial position. I had enough to last a few months without the need to find another source of funds.

Moreover, I was home. I had not allowed myself to think of that while aboard ship, lest something go awry, but it was now a fait accompli. Home. How I had ached for it in the trenches, and in the prison camp, and in the open air prison that was the Turkish Army. At first I believed that the American government would surely never leave me and my comrades to die in that hell, and would bring us home with some ransom or amnesty, or that I would be repatriated at war’s end. Later, in East Africa, I pinned my hopes on my father’s wealth and influence, writing letters begging him to send me money for passage home. When no replies ever arrived, I blamed it on the vagaries of transatlantic mail in time of war. When British East Africa came apart I was too busy for a time to think of writing letters. I was in Angola when I finally saw news again, and learned of the troubles with blacks, redskins, and Communists that my homeland was experiencing. A worm of doubt burrowed its way into my mind as I wondered whether such things might have touched my home and family, but I hoped for the best and continued to write, hoping for assistance in getting home, or at least some word of the fortunes of the Lecourt family of Terra Nova Plantation, Caddo Parrish, Louisiana.

I finally received a reply in 1930 while I was in Argentina after fleeing yet another military disaster. I had thought to write to Hamilton Serpas, our family lawyer. He wrote back to tell me of the sorrows that had befallen us. My mother and sisters dead of the influenza, the family fortune lost in the crash of 1923, my father and brother killed by black revolutionaries, and our family home abandoned in a part of Louisiana no longer safe for white men. The promised land that had been my goal for twelve years was lost. There was no one and nothing left waiting for me. After that, I gave up, and let the tempest that was the twentieth century carry me wherever it chose, merely trying to find a place to survive until the next catastrophe set me adrift again.

But now circumstance had brought me back to a place which, while not quite my home, was nonetheless deeply familiar. Terra Nova was our home, up the Red River in the far corner of the state, but we had kept a house in New Orleans, and I had spent my share of summers and holidays there, as well as my short tenure reading law at Tulane. I was there, with money in my pocket and no obligations, and it was hard not to see some purpose or agency in that.

The first cup of coffee had been so pleasant that I asked for another, this time with a splash of brandy in it. The waiter told me ruefully that the brandy would be Chilean rather than French, that nation being now a province of the hostile German Empire. I made no objection and sat sipping while watching the city and the people, trying to gain a sense of how things stood in New Orleans in the year 1938.

It was mid-morning on a weekday in a busy district of the city, and there were plenty of people about. Pedestrians, horse carriages, even the occasional automobile passed me by. At first, the people seemed prosperous enough - well-dressed, well-fed, fairly healthy. But I began to see odd absences and surpluses among them. There seemed to be a lot of gray hair and wrinkles; the average person was middle-aged or older. That was no great surprise - the War had taken many of the men my age, and the influenza had taken more, along with a fair few of the women. The children of those lost men and women were also conspicuously absent. The lion’s share of the young men I saw were in uniforms cut from gray cloth with a brownish-green tinge; the new Confederacy’s attempt to blend historical fashion with the thoroughly modern need to remain unseen on the battlefield.

The city itself also seemed different from my memories. It had always had a certain melancholy air, as though the best times were behind it, a legacy of the war with the Yankees, I suppose. As a boy, I once toured the cities of the Pacific Coast with my father, and saw the optimism, speed, and rawness of those new-built places, bursting with the energy of a nation still charging forward into the future. After that trip, I could see the ghosts that lived in the bricks and mortar of New Orleans - a place whose dreams of grandeur had died in smoke and blood a half century before, and left it in a gentle and dignified decline.

The decline was there now to see for someone looking at it with fresh eyes - missing roof tiles, chunks of white plaster fallen away to reveal the pink brick underneath, brown streaks of rust running down a wall from an iron balcony. It put me in mind of colonial cities in Africa and South America - Leopoldville, Luanda, Caracas, Cartagena - European outposts in a hostile land, beset by historical catastrophe and now slowly melting back into the ground. It had the same whiff of fear that I felt in those places as well - the people did not stroll with the air of confidence, ease, and indolence that I remembered from before the War. All seemed to move with purpose, most particularly the men in uniform. They were armed, too - the occasional officers with holstered pistols, the enlisted men with British Lee-Enfield rifles. In my experience, that was not something to inspire confidence in the health of the body politic.

Such thoughts gradually wore away the good mood that the relief of escape and the sense of homecoming had inspired in me. I began to doubt that I had truly come home. Perhaps this was just another spot for me to perch nervously for a time until some fresh hell set me fleeing again. Perhaps I ought to use my money to take ship again to somewhere more prosperous. But where? I had just come from South America, and knew how it stood down there - the whole continent was the playground of the British, German, and Japanese empires, bubbling with plots, tinpot revolutions, and little brushfire wars. Europe was firmly under the hand of the Kaiser, ruled by an iron-clad bureaucracy and not at all welcoming to stateless former Americans. I’d had my fill of Africa in the first month I’d been there, and counted myself lucky to have escaped. And in every place I might run to, there was always the question of how to make a living for a foreigner of middle age with no trade but war. A country at peace had no use for such a man, and would cheerfully let him starve, if they allowed him in at all. A country at war would see me as a commodity, something to use in place of its own men, and would continue to use me as such until shrapnel, bullet, or bayonet found me. I had learned that truth through bitter experience across three continents.

By the time I finished my second cup, such thoughts had convinced me to try home for a while. The conviction developed in me that there must be a reason as yet unknown to me why I had randomly chosen a ship bound for my home state. Although I had not been a churchgoer for many years, I had been on too many battlefields to want to live in a world that had no God, and he must have had some purpose in mind for placing me there. The purpose, I decided, would be revealed to me when the time was right. All I had to do was wait for it.

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