Your mother is tending to your grandmother now. Your grandmother has not long to live and when the tending is over we shall leave from Veritas, together, quickly. We shall take my son and escape from all our pasts. You will be brought into this world well away from this cursed place. The doctors were wrong, my lungs would not be fine as they had promised. I grow progressively weaker. I spit up specks of bloody tissue with each cough. I am dying. I can feel the force of death upon my face just as Magee felt the force of my pillow upon his. As I granted his last wish in Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples, it was I who was reciting Samson’s last words, “Oh Lord God, remember me, I pray Thee, and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this once.” I may not live long enough to explain all this to you and so I write this letter. I would die now, willingly, were it not for your mother, whose love I cannot bear to leave, or were it not for the joy I receive from my son and from my thoughts of you.

Remember my evil so you won’t mourn for me, my child. Remember my love for your mother and carry it always close to your heart. Remember the man who gave me the power to accept your mother’s love, for he and I will forever be a part of you, the man for whom your mother and I both agreed you would be named, Corporal Nathaniel Magee.

With all our love,

Christian Shaw

On the Macal River, Cayo, Belize

WE PUT INTO THE MACAL RIVER from a dirt landing a few miles south of San Ignacio. We are in a wooden canoe, rough-hewn from a single tree trunk, that Canek rented from a Belizean who lives on the river and who made the canoe himself. “Did he burn it out with coals like the American Indians?” I asked when I first saw it sitting in the water, stark and dark and primitive. Canek shook his head and said simply, “Chain saw.”

The canoe is thick-sided and shallow-bottomed. I sit in front on a rough wooden plank. I am wearing my blue suit with a white shirt, red tie, heavy black shoes. When I step out of the jungle to see my quarry I want to look as if I have just stepped out of court, no matter the discomfort in the heat, and make no mistake, it is uncomfortable, uncomfortable as hell. My collar is undone, my tie is loose, my shirt is already soaked with sweat. As we travel upriver we move through pockets of shade but, with the humidity at eighty-five percent, even the shade is no respite. At my feet is my briefcase and over the briefcase is my suit jacket. A paddle sits across my legs but I’m not doing any of the work. Canek Panti is standing in the back of the canoe, a woven cowboy hat on his head, a long wooden pole in his hands. He presses the end of the pole into the river bottom and pushes us forward against the slight current. He is an imposing figure standing there, poling the canoe ever south, majestic as a gondolier, his ornate machete hanging from a loop in his belt.

Every once in a while the river quickens and Canek is forced to jump out of the canoe and take hold of the front rope and drag the canoe through swift water, the rope digging into his shoulder as he struggles forward. I offer half-heartedly to help but Canek waves me off and shoulders me upstream until the river calms enough for him to jump back in and pick up once again his pole. In those moments, with my suit and dry shoes, with Canek dragging me upriver, I feel every inch the ugly colonialist. Call me Bwana. We have passed women washing clothes on rocks and children swimming. A boy riding bareback on a great black horse crossed the river in front of us a mile or so back, but now we are alone with the water.

The jungle rises about us in walls of dense green, punctuated by the yellow-tipped crimson of lobster claws or star-shaped white blossoms, and the world behind those walls is alive with the sounds of animals scurrying and birds cawing. The trees overhead are thick with hairlike growths in their crooks, which Canek tells me are wild orchids. Little yellow fish leap out of the tropical waters and flat-headed kingfishers, dark blue with bright white collars, skim across the water’s surface. Something oblong and heavy slips into the river before us. Mosquitoes hum around us, as well as other bugs, thicker, hunchbacked, and black. Botlass flies, Canek tells me. One of them tears into my neck, drawing blood. The bite swells immediately.

In my briefcase, wrapped in plastic to protect it from any water that might seep into the case during the course of our journey, is the original of the letter to his child written three quarters of a century ago by Christian Shaw. As I travel through this ancient Mayan jungle I can’t help but wonder if the strange sense of revelation I felt atop El Castillo in the ruins of Xunantunich was somehow similar to what Christian Shaw first experienced at the bedside of the terribly wounded Corporal Magee. Beth, who has lately made a study of these things, said that in Shaw’s letter she saw the beginnings of a spiritual ideology reminiscent of the Vedanta, one of the classic systems of Indian philosophy, which teaches that the multiplicity of objects in the universe is merely illusory and that spiritual liberation comes from stripping the illusion and attaining a knowledge of the self as simply another manifestation of the whole. Beth told me the ideas in the Vedanta are not too far removed from what Jacqueline Shaw was learning from Oleanna at the Church of the New Life. I don’t know Vedanta from Valhalla from Valium but I think it more than a coincidence that Christian Shaw and his granddaughter were both suicidal before finding in a nascent spirituality something to save them. They were both trapped by the materiality and wealth and crimes of the Reddmans and longed for an understanding richer and deeper than that which surrounded them as members of that ill-fated clan. One can’t help but feel that they were on the edge of some sort of solution and Beth continues to pursue a similar path for her answer, though I still can’t figure out what it is an answer to.

But it wasn’t the change effected on Christian Shaw in that hospital in France that was most revelatory about the letter, nor was it his confession of his knowledge and acquiescence in the death of Charity Reddman at the hands of her sister Faith, though that confession answered many question about the fate of the Reddmans. No, the most interesting aspect of the letter was a name, the name of Shaw’s fellow patient at that hospital in France, the name that was to be given to the bastard child of Christian Shaw and Emma Poole, the name that pointed with clean precision to the man who had perpetrated the latter-day massacre of Reddmans. It is this man whom I am hunting, against whom my default judgment was issued, and who is the sole beneficiary of the Wergeld Trust from which I intend to wrest my fortune. Morris found out the meaning of Wergeld for me. We had thought it was a family name, but it was something else entirely, discernible from any dictionary. In feudal times, when a man was killed, a payment was made as recompense to avoid a blood feud that would result only in more killing. This payment was called a Wergeld. Faith Reddman Shaw’s attempt to pay for the crimes of her father and satisfy the blood yearnings of the sole grandson of Elisha Poole had obviously failed.

The river is peaceful now and full of beauty. We pass a tree with bright red and black berries hanging down in loops, like fine coral necklaces. Two white egrets float by; a black vulture sits above us, hunchbacked and deprived. Something like an ungainly arrow, yellow and blue, shoots across the gap in the canopy above us and I realize I have just seen a toucan. The trees here are infested with the parasitic orchids, thick as moss, a few hungry red blooms spilling down, and as I look up at them something drops loudly into the quiet of the river. I turn around, startled.