It whispered my name.
It pulled at me.
I hopped out of the saddle and picketed my mules. Then I worked my way upstream.
*****
It was rough going. The banks were so steep that I was forced to wade. The rocks were slick and I fell a number times. But I kept on pushing against the current. Something told me I had no choice.
I struggled for hours. I was sopping wet. Evening came on, and the canyon was cast over in cold blue shadow. I was shivering so hard I could hardly see. I knew I wasn’t to my destination just yet, but I was beginning to think if I didn’t turn back, I’d never make it out alive.
Well, I told myself, so be it. Freezing to death didn’t seem so terrible compared to other ways of dying.
I sloshed on and on. Until I came to a pool.
The water sound grew soft and murmuring, almost restful.
I grew calm.
I knew someone had guided me here. That was the first time in my life I’d ever really sensed angels in the world. It was a sacred feeling. I couldn’t see them, but they were all around me.
The little pool was littered with gold nuggets. They sparkled in the bottom like lucky stars. The biggest were the size of buckeye nuts. It was like a dream. I reached down and gathered enough to load up my pockets and my bags.
Then I staggered back to my mules down the stream.
I have no idea how I ever found my way back in the dark. And I don’t know how I didn’t die. I figured God and the angels were looking after me. I didn’t know then what their plans were, but they must have picked me out for something and needed me alive.
*****
I went to San Francisco and put my treasure in the bank. I didn’t know what to do next. I wasn’t quite sure how to act. I bought myself some new clothes and checked into a fancy hotel. And then I just wandered around town. The opportunities for a rich man must be endless, I thought. I just didn’t know what they were.
They say gold poisons a man’s brains, and I’m here to tell you it’s true. All my adulthood I had been on the straight and narrow, never wavering from what most people would see as an upright life, even if I didn’t ever go to church or pray or follow any religion. I had always worked hard and kept out of trouble. But I got sort of crazy there in the city. It was like my pa’s life notions had been sleeping inside me for years, and now, with the jangle of the coins in my pocket, that horny beast started waking up. My reason became confused. I got to figuring that since God had made me rich, I must be special somehow. He must like me more than other men. He might just as well want me to enjoy myself, and so on. Anyhow, this form of muddied thinking led way onto way until, soon enough, I found myself skunk drunk in a brothel.
*****
I must have been amusing to watch. I had seen my parents and their cohorts going at it, and I had watched cattle and dogs, but I had no idea how to go about doing it myself. How does a man ever travel that long distance from being alone and unproven to getting himself up inside a naked woman? It seemed an impossible journey. The thought of it made me sweat as I sat there in that parlor awaiting my opportunity.
Lucky for me – depending on how one sees it – those harlots were well skilled at being helpful. An older one of the bunch took pity on my misery and discomfort, and she led me up the stairs to her room.
“Now, sweetness,” she said, “you just let yourself relax. I’ll fix you up just fine.”
She helped me out of my clothes and then told me to lie on the bed. Then she started taking off her dress while I watched. Like I said, she was older than most of the girls working there, and kind of fleshy and sagging and maternal looking compared to how a younger girl might be. But it didn’t seem to matter. My stick stiffened up just watching her. It seemed I didn’t need to know how to do anything for myself because something inside me already knew the business without ever learning.
But while I waited for the woman to peel off her underthings, a queer idea came into my mind. She looked familiar to me. She seemed like someone I already knew. But then I hadn’t spoken to only a handful of women over the years, and didn’t know any of them very close, so my next thought was that all females must share a similarity somehow, and so knowing one must just as well be the same as knowing them all.
She crawled onto the bed with me.
It was a strange sensation when her skin touched mine. It felt confusing. It felt wrong at the same time as feeling right. Considering it since, I have decided it felt like the essence of Sin. But that didn’t mean I wanted her to stop what she was doing. As she climbed on top of me and went about her trade, I sort of drifted into a dream. I lifted out of myself and watched us from above. It’s hard to describe. It was like what it’s like when you have a bad fever, or maybe like before you’re born and are looking down at the world before you join in with it. It was like dying, or being a little boy in your mama’s arms, only completely different than those things all at once.
She moved on top of me.
I was drowning in her depths.
“That’s it, sweetie,” the woman told me. “Any time you want now, you just go ahead and fill ol’ Wilhelmina up with your sugar.”
Her voice washed over me like cold water – her words.
It was like a nightmare being born.
I looked into her face, back through all the time etched there in her wrinkles and beauty powders, back and back, as far as to that morning standing there at our back door with a cup of sugar watching my ma and the neighbor woman holding hands.
And then I pushed her off.
CLOUD ROCKED PERTINACIOUSLY.
Adamiah sat on his bed, swaying, staring at the flames licking up behind the grate of the brazier.
I did not interrupt his reverie but let him relive his awful epiphany with the neighbor girl’s mother.
“She hit the floor with a thump.” He finally said. “It must have rattled her old bones.”
He half laughed, and then continued.
“I ran out of the room without looking back. I was so shook up I didn’t even grab my clothes. I remember the girls and their customers laughing at me running jaybird naked through the parlor and out the front door into the street. An icy rain was pouring down that night and I galloped through the cold all the way back to my hotel. The man at the front desk gave me a hard time showing up like that. He thought I was pretty comical.
“I was robbed,” I told him. “Just give me my damn key!”
Everything was spinning.
“The desk man sniggered and took his sweet time, but he finally did give it to me, and so I ran up the stairs to my room, shutting myself inside, my back against the door, letting my body slide to a heap on the floor. I was wet and shamed and breathing hard. Mud and horse manure was splashed up to my knees. I held my head in my hands, still drunk and disoriented. All my life poured down over me right then in a big wave, all my past – my ma drowning and my pa burning up and the neighbor girl going away. And then all them empty years after. I got sick on the rug, and eventually crawled into the bed, worn out and shaking.
“The rain beat against my window.
“A worried sleep overcame me.
“But then I went into a sunny dream.
“The neighbor girl was there waiting. She was just the same as when I first met her, only now she was all grown up into a woman. Dark hair long flowing. Blue eyes. Skin white as milk. She walked across a wide stretch of sand and waded into the edge of an ocean so calm it looked like a mirror held to the sky. She turned my way.
“‘Find me,’” was all she said. Then she dived into the water.”
*****
Adamiah stopped talking then, reminiscing, I presumed, about his pleasing sunlit dream.
I let him linger there on the beach for a while, watching for her shadow under the water. But my curiosity soon got the better of me and I had to ask – “And so, did you?”
Adamiah raised his gaze my way. He looked surprised to see me there before him. “Did I
what?”
“Well, now.” I held up my palms. “Did you ever find her?”
“Oh.” He tipped his head and scratched at his ribs. “I figured I’d put my new wealth to good use, and so I hired an agent to look for her.”
“And then?”
“I told him about her family’s church in Ohio, and how they had come out west somewhere, but I didn’t tell him about her ma working in that cathouse just right across town. She might could have told us right where her daughter had got to, but bad as I wanted to find her, I just couldn’t make myself have nothing to do with that.” Adamiah looked at me. “You understand?”
I told him I did.
“It took the detective a while – almost a whole year – but he finally located where she was at. I plucked up my nerve and wrote her a letter. I asked if she remembered me, and if she was well, and if she had ever got herself married. I told her I didn’t know for sure how to explain it, but some mysterious things had happened, and I felt like maybe God was trying to tell me I should write her this letter to know her thoughts.
“Her reply was slow in coming. Not because she didn’t want nothing to do with me, as I feared, but because the mail was so irregular in her part of the world.
“She remembered me all right. In fact, she claimed she had been waiting for me to find her and only wondered what had took me so long. No, of course she wasn’t married off, but she was worried about becoming a spinster. She was certain God was behind all the mystery in our lives and was up to something special on our behalf. She told me I needed to write her father and ask for her hand. She would do what she could to convince him it was preordained by God. She said she hoped I had been careful, and that I hadn’t done no sinning.”
Adamiah stood beside his bed. He turned and lifted on his toes, trying to see out the window at the sea.
“I wrote that letter to her pa, just like she told me to. I made it the best I could. I had never wanted anything like I wanted to be with her. But I’ll be honest, something inside me was worried. In all my whole life I could only think of one thing I had ever done that could be called sinning, and that, of all things, was to lie down with the wife of the very man I was writing to. I think that worry somehow got into my letter and weakened it. And maybe my guilt, too. Anyway, I asked him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.” Adamiah turned from the window and frowned. “But he said no.”
Adamiah lifted his pewter cup from the table and stared into it. He wiped the rim with his finger and then licked it clean.
“I was miserable after that. Everything seemed empty and dead. Her father told me in his return letter that he wasn’t about to let his only precious daughter be married off to someone the likes of me. He remembered my parents. It seemed that God had been working in the old man’s dreams, too, and had told him that his future son-in-law was sure to be a pure-at-heart parson who could someday take his place and, as he put it, ‘man his church the way a captain pilots a ship.’”
Adamiah stepped to the table and laid his fingers on the Bible.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “A fellow gets to where he finally wants something out of life.” He lifted his eyes and peered into the mirror. “And there ain’t nothing he won’t risk to get it.
“So, I wrote the man another letter. This time I was more sure of myself. The worry and guilt were all gone. I told him that I understood his doubts and respected his standpoint. But I also added that God had chosen to bless me with a fortune and that I was certain I was meant to put my money into his church. Then I told him how much gold I had. The only problem, I said, was that God had made it clear to me that my money and me should come as a single package. I surely didn’t mean to be so crass as to buy his daughter away from him, but God was leading this whole show, not me or him, and we had best just go along with God’s big plan. And then for good measure, I stretched the truth and told him that I had studied two years in a Bible school back east, and that I was ordained to be a preacher in the church from which his own church was an offshoot. I assured him I agreed with his differences of opinion with that old church and was eager to learn and teach his new doctrine as he directed me.
“He wrote back saying that he had asked God about it, and had talked with is daughter, too. And after giving it some prayerful meditation, God told him that I was welcome to marry his daughter and be a clergyman in his church.” Adamiah laughed. “He also sent me a list of provisions needed for his mission in the southern seas, which is why I commissioned this ship and filled it up.”
“Small price to pay for love,” I said.
Adamiah turned to me and earnestly inquired, “Hoper, do you think what I did was wrong?”
“No,” I frowned, and shook my head. “Such coincidences as the one you were involved in with the girl’s mother surely do not happen unless they are meant to. Of all the Jezebels you could have lain with! Providence is doubtless at work here.” Or, I privately considered, some mischievous naiad. “Your off-white lie was only a way of nudging an inevitable destiny along its path.”
Adamiah’s expression at my debatable reasoning gave me to know he felt significantly relieved.
“But,” I continued, “you, my good fellow, have set yourself up for a considerable difficulty. What do you think will happen when the girl’s father finds you know nothing about the Bible?”
“I was hoping to have it all read through before I got to New Eden. I still have time.”
“Zounds!” I muttered under my breath.
I regarded the black leather-bound tome resting between the milk pail and pot of ink.
I stroked my jaw, weighing the consequences of the various choices before me as this naive chap’s secret sharer.
Hmm, I pondered. And verily, verily hmmm!
Call it my poetic failing, but I have always felt obliged to act irrationally for the sake of Love, even a love in which mine is not an active member. I suppose something in me has always hoped I would – as Love’s most ardent devotee – be someday granted a small measure of its elusive remunerations.
Well, I finally concluded. Fools of like feather do most certainly flock together.
I turned to Adamiah and told him to sit down.
I put my hands on his shoulders and looked into his fretful upturned face.
“Adamiah, I do not know if it is to God’s mysterious plan or not. And I do not honestly know what will come of it in the end. There are foggy stretches when I look ahead of us. Storms and hidden obstacles. But you seem to be a driven man in this affair, and Love, that most formidable of all forces, is indisputably on your side. So here, my friend, is what I believe we should do.”
I then revealed my plan.
To which he enthusiastically agreed.
AND SO, IT CAME to pass that I took on the second of my hallowed callings.
By night I would be protecting Angeline from the anticipatable assaults attempted by mankind’s lowliest exemplars of carnal depravity.
By day I would be tutoring Adamiah Linklater in biblical scholarship.
I offered him as my résumé the many years I had spent in parochial school as a young man. I argued that I was perfectly suited for the task since I myself had been taught the Bible back, upside, and downwards in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and that stilted argot of King James to boot. As the fledgling parson was in a generally desperate situation, he did not take much to convince.
To free me up for my new employment, I suggested that he procure my indenturehood from Cloud. Captain Nilsson was at first reluctant to loose my contractual binds. He claimed he had already been shorthanded when we left San Francisco Bay, only to immediately lose one of his new deckhands to an untimely accident, but when Adamiah offered the Captain a large sum, he conceded.
“Let us waste no time,” I told my pupil. “The days are swiftly passing, and we are most certainly in a race against the calendar.”
Adamiah sat optimistically at his table, paper and pen in hand, waiting like an unwary sponge about to be inun
dated by an ocean of information.
I began with a general overview of the Holy Bible, explaining how it was divided into the two parts of the Old Testament and the New.
“The whole sprawling drama is sandwiched between the opening books of Genesis – in which everything begins – and the Revelation – in which everything comes to a histrionic end.”
I was trying to keep my introductory lesson as simplistic as I could, and by the vague look on my schoolboy’s face, I concluded that my strategy was apt.
“The Old Testament is made up of the Histories, the Poetical Books, and the Prophecies. The New Testament is when Jesus comes in from where he has been patiently twiddling in the wings.”
Adamiah held up his pen for me to stop. “Jesus,” he said proudly. “I’ve heard of him.”
I trusted my dismay did not reveal itself in my overall slouch, but in that moment the hopelessness of my endeavor seemed insuperable. Still, I mustered an approving smile.
“Yes,” I answered. “Jesus Christ. The Redeemer and Son of God. Listen closely now, because by and by he will prove himself to be fairly significant to the overall story.”
*****
That first tutorial passed without what I felt to be any significant transference of knowledge. Adamiah was not dimwitted, but simply did not have much in the way of academic experience. Although his parents had sought to make him learned in the pleasures of Skepticism, they had simultaneously kept him ignorant of one of the Western World’s central pillars. The Bible was a language he had neither spoken nor heard spoken of. That Adamiah Linklater would become even marginally fluent in said language by our arrival at New Eden seemed, at best, impossible.
Still, I sallied forth with my lessons.
There was a prophetic quality in the opportunity that had befallen me, calamitous though it most inevitably would prove. I felt a sensation akin to what Adamiah had mentioned in the angels watching over him. Invisible stars were moving into place above our heads. Some little piece of God’s grandiose scheme seemed to be in motion, and I was a part of it. I felt my own destiny to be intertwining most intricately with the divinely bestowed fortunes of Linklater.
Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 9
