The City Care Forgot

The City Care Forgot is a Southern Gothic novella. It is the third story to feature Alexander Gerard Ulysses, after Devil's Crossing and Antietam Marble. It chronologically takes place after Devil's Crossing, between the years 1880-1914, spanning thirty-four years.

Plot
An ageing Alexander G. Ulysses returns home to New Orleans, only to find the city has drastically changed, and is vastly advancing. With his old house demolished, he is forced to lodge with an ailing family, the LaFayettes. Through his tenure with the family, he witnesses several events, most importantly the rape of the LaFayette daughter, Rosalie, by a retired Confederate officer, triggering his memories from the Civil War.

In 1889, following Rosalie's suicide, Ulysses resolves to end all ties to the LaFayettes after blaming himself for not saving her. By 1902 he has taken up board at a boardhouse run by the charming Elwood Saint James, a black musician. This also soon deteriorates when Saint James and several other black citizens are kidnapped and later lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Resolved that his home has gone to hell, Ulysses buys a small lot on the outskirts of town and sets up as a freelance physician. There he suffers from gangrene, a result of improper treatment of his wound sustained in Antietam Marble more than forty years earlier. A woeful Ulysses contemplates suicide, but decides against it after witnessing a street parade. Enthralled by this event, Ulysses attends the yearly parade and by 1910 he is beset in a wheelchair, his leg amputated due to the rot. Four years later, an eighty-two year old Ulysses is being wheeled through the street by Josephine LaFayette, the daughter of Rosalie, now an adult. The novella ends with Josephine visiting Ulysses' grave sometime later, noticing that he's an old man amongst young men, referencing to the soldiers killed in World War I, and that Ulysses, in the end, was just a soldier fighting his own battles.

Characters

 * Ulysses Gerard Alexander: Ulysses is now an ageing man, and returns to New Orleans after leaving Charlton sometime after Devil's Crossing.
 * Oswald LaFayette: The patriarch of the LaFayette family. He dies of tuberculosis in 1892.
 * Francine LaFayette: Oswald's wife, she provides a sardonic wit and often banters with Ulysses during his occupation of her household.
 * Rosalie LaFayette: The LaFayette's daughter, a girl of twenty. She is raped by an unnamed assailant, and shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Josephine, she commits suicide.
 * Elwood Saint James: The black proprietor of the Lucky Times Inn, a boarding house in New Orleans. He is killed by the Klan along with several others.