The Lake of Forgotten Men

Act I

The Whitfield plantation had not been a plantation for fifty years. What remained of it was an overgrown expanse of oak trees and crumbling brick, the mansion a shell with its roof caved in and its windows like the empty eyes of something that had been dead a long time and was still waiting to be remembered.

Five men arrived separately, each in a car that cost more than the house was worth, because the house was not worth anything and the cars were the only things they had left that belonged entirely to them.

Burke Whitfield arrived first. He was fifty-six and had been drinking since five in the morning, which was not different from any other day, except that today was the day they were scattering Samuel Hayess ashes at the lake, and Burke had spent thirty years running from this property and this family and this history, and today he was here.

Horace Delacroix arrived next, carrying a photograph he had found in the attic of his mothers house, a photograph of a Black man and five white boys standing in front of a one-room schoolhouse, and Horace did not know what to do with it, so he carried it in his pocket and let it press against his thigh like a confession.

Silas Beauregard arrived last, because he could not leave the property. He had never left it, really, not in the way that other men leave home. His body was here, in this decaying house, in these overgrown fields, in this humidity that was more a person than a weather condition.

Act II

They explored the ruined house together. It was the kind of exploration that men do not plan but cannot resist, the way one cannot resist opening a door that says do not enter.

Burke found his great-grandfathers gun, still in the wall behind the pantry, wrapped in oilcloth and still gleaming like the thing it was, which was not a tool but a weapon and a symbol and a burden that had been passed down through five generations of Whitfield men.

Horace found the photograph again, the one of Samuel Hayes, and this time he looked at it more carefully. Samuel was standing in the center, his arm around a white boy who looked like a young Prentice Colleton, and Horace realized with a start that the white boy was his own great-grandfather, and that the man they had all come to honor was the man who had been their shared secret for a century.

Silas found his childhood drawings, pinned to a basement wall that he had forgotten existed, drawings of the lake and the trees and the house, drawn in crayon by a boy who knew, even then, that he would one day return to this place and that it would be the only place he ever truly belonged.

Act III

They went to the lake at dusk, when the light was the color of old gold and the water was black and still as glass. The lake was not large, but it was deep, and it had absorbed everything that had happened on its shores for two hundred years: the laughter of children, the screams of enslaved men, the crack of a shotgun, the silence of a massacre that had been erased from every history book except the one that lived in the land itself.

One by one, they spoke about Samuel. Not eloquently. These were Southern men, and they did not do eloquence. They did roughness. They did the kind of love that sounds like an insult until you realize it is the only language any of them had ever been given.

Burke spoke first, and what he said was: He was the only one of us who was ever free. And the truth settled over them like the humidity, heavy and inescapable and real.

Samuel Hayes had been the son of an enslaved man and a Whitfield daughter, a secret the family had buried deep in the ground where nobody could dig it up and nobody could use it against them. He had become a teacher. He had organized a basketball team from the local Black kids and the poor white kids who had nowhere else to go. He had called it The Fellowship, and in a South that had never fellowshiped anyone who did not look like him, he had built something that was, against all odds, real.

Act IV

They scattered the ashes. The lake did not ripple. It just took them in, the way lakes take everything, the way the South takes everything, the way a man takes his history whether he wants it or not.

The five men sat on the bank as night fell, not speaking, not moving. For the first time in their lives, they were exactly where they belonged. Not because the place was beautiful. Not because the place was safe. But because the place was true, and they were finally ready to be true to it.

Burke reached into his pocket and took out the bottle of whiskey he had been carrying since morning. He took a drink and passed it to Horace, who took a drink and passed it to Silas, who took a drink and passed it to Prentice, who took a drink and passed it to Gus, who took a drink and looked at the lake and thought about freedom for the first time in his life and understood, briefly and completely, that freedom is not something you achieve. It is something you carry.



OTMES_v2 Objective Tensor Codes:
Variant V-05: The Lake of Forgotten Men
Style: Southern Gothic (William Faulkner / Flannery OConner)
Transformation: T8-02 + T6-04 + T10-08
M1(Tragedy)=6.0 M3(Satire)=9.0 M4(Poetry)=6.5
N1(Active)=0.40 N2(Passive)=0.60
K1(Individual)=0.65 K2(Trans-individual)=0.35
Theta=225 degrees (Grotesque)
TI=55.2 (T3 殉情级)
V=0.8 I=0.9 C=0.7 S=0.5 R=0.25

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