Ready for adventure, we trooped toward the graveyard, the dirty shovels more alert on our shoulders than our mint-new rifles had been. Baudelaire was in the lead, his spirits undiminished as if we were still marching against Aupick’s mortality. His snub pipe stuck out jauntily from his gripping teeth as he strode along frowning.
“Bonadventure, have we a raspy file among us?”
“Claude may have one.”
“Claude?”
“An hostler who took up with us when we stole cupcakes from his rival’s brother’s royalist bakery. We almost lost him on our side-excursion to the wine shop.”
“These shovels must be sharp–we delve straight down to Hell tonight.”
“They shall be devil’s teeth, chief.”
“They will have to be!”
Baudelaire went back to sucking his pipe ruminatively, a bawdy song exhaling rhythmic smokes from his flared nostrils.
* * * * *
Some time later, we could see the sun, an engorged red bulb, dripping an ichorous blood wax over endless fields of gravestones and haughty tombs. Night was fast arriving, and we turned into a particular graveyard through the stricken screech of a pair of serviceable but rusted iron gates. Down a few alleys, and around the base of a gallows-tree hill, Baudelaire halted, raising his small wan hand in silence and spitting against the flagstones of the pathway. The sound of Claude’s file, singing in Theophile’s hands against the bishop’s-hat edge of his shovel, was the only sound to be heard; even the ravens had quieted at our approach, their black wings held close as solemn cloaks.
Soon, even Claude’s heavy file fell silent. We all looked toward Baudelaire, who stood before us as simply as a child waiting for instructions.
“This is my Father’s hallowed plot.”
With an open palm, Baudelaire indicated an area of hardened earth wild with weeds. It had the uncared-for look of a beggar’s teeth, and indeed the grave-marker was broken and discolored. The poor fellow buried here had been on the losing end of the fight.
“Through who knows how many randy readings of my Mother’s diaries, I have made my deductions and determinations. Here lie the forsaken bones of my Father. Dig! culprits of a kind (my kind); sullen step-children of night and the sourceless void, of a godless existence, a world unknown to men and woman of the daylit life. Dig! For here is buried treasure–the deleted past.”
And so we dug, turning the turf up like ploughmen of yore, looking for Pere Baudelaire’s bones. And sure enough, soon enough, in shallows still yellowy clay, we hit paydirt. It was no ordinary coffin we wantonly uncovered. It was a silver coracle created to surf eternity. Doubled hearts, melded together like romantically poured honeymoon pancakes, stood out still shining–a gravure image achingly unearthed.
Baudelaire himself split the oyster shell with his timid spade. There was the ratty cassock he had so often described, and on his dessicated chest, a gilt crucifix the size of crossed dildoes. Baudelaire, without hesitation, hoisted the corpse up and out of its rotted lair of degraded silks and goose feathers–and sat his father’s remains upright against the deceptively inscribed headstone, which read: “Here lies one… as dull as the other one.”
“Bernard, the candelabra,” panted Charles, resting on one knee, his dandy’s outfit torn and wrenched askew by the labor.
Bernard brought out the grand candelabra nabbed from a looted Knob Hill condominium (a newly innovated real-estate designation popular in the ritzier quarters of gay Paris). Soon enough there was a ghastly light over us all, as if an inverted spider’s legs had been set on fire. We stood before the staved-in hole–quiet and tired before a newly reunited father and son. We waited for Baudelaire to catch his breath.
“This begins the catechism, kids,” he said at last. And thus began the midnight inquisition–an inquisition into all the awkward, makeshift liaisons, lessons and mistakes of fatherhood. An inquest without let, nor, ultimately, redemption.
And there we were, disheveled semi-soldiers heavy with sweat and dejected at the fate of our abandoned rebellion. We had finished with the stolen champagne and with our ragged renditions of the Marseilles hours ago, our shirts untucked and our mangled boots thrown in the cooling grass. Still, we remained with Baudelaire and his crazy cause. Fighters without fealty or ideals, we were still Charles’ Charlatans. Somehow, I think, we knew that war is a matter between fathers and sons. There would be no release from duty until day was done.
* * * * *
Dawn found “Papa” buried again as we had found him, and all of us departed, in separate directions, in solemn silence.
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