Fortuna and the Scapegrace

by Brian Kindall

  “Well,” I said. “I’m sure it couldn’t be as bad as all that, but you could tell me about it if it would ease your mind.”

  She took a big breath of air. She kicked her toe in the sand. Then she turned to face me. “Oh, Adamiah. I was just so lonesome sometimes! I know it was wrongheaded of me, but I took comfort in the worst of ways. Why, I fairly got myself addicted!”

  “Whatever are you talking about, my flower?”

  She stood there for a moment, plucking at her fingers, a tortured grimace playing out on her lovely face. And then she reached inside the bodice of her dress. “Oh!” she wailed, drawing out a small book. “I do confess, Adamiah. I took to reading these here pages in my bed at night. I’m ashamed as ever a girl could be, but its words and ideas – the way the poet tells it – why, it’s just how I was feeling myself, only from a woman’s side of the story. It took over my thoughts. Oh, Adamiah, I’m so sorry. It caused me to misuse myself in the most sinful ways!”

  I struggled to fight down my laughter. For it amused me greatly that the poor maiden had found herself so tortured by sexual longing. How well I knew that affliction! It was almost as if I enjoyed a vicarious relief through her confession. In that instant, penitent as she was for her secret masturbatory misdeeds, Prudence became all the more dear to me.

  She stood with her head bowed in shame. “Can you ever forgive me, Adamiah?”

  I set the Bible on a log and lifted the lady’s chin so that she was looking into my merciful face. Then I rested my hands on both her shoulders. She was at the edge of tears. I gave her my best Savior smile and dipped my head a single time. “You are forgiven.”

  Her face turned to sunshine. “Oh, Adamiah! You are too kind!”

  I chuckled wisely.

  Prudence held out the book. “We can burn the wicked thing if you think we ought.”

  “Surely,” I said. “If it would make you feel better.”

  She thrust it into my hands.

  I was curious to see if I knew the author. Who was this penman so able to move one of God’s goodest angels to such a passion? For it was just such a talent that I had always (before my poetic aspirations were dashed) wanted most in the world to possess.

  “Or if you don’t want to burn it,” Prudence said, “we could save it to read once we’re married.” She laughed coyly. “It might not seem so evil if we was reading it together in our marriage bed. The poems are real clever. The writer has a real good way with his words. Why, they go right into your heart like little arrows.”

  I turned the book over in my hands. The cover was cheap, not made from leather, but of the pressed brown paper for dreadful books of little literary worth and generally, after a hasty read, destined for the rubbish bin.

  The English title was at the top with its French equivalent stamped in baroque script just underneath.

  Foolish Love it was called. Amour Fou.

  I felt an unexpected convulsion upon hearing those words sounding in my head.

  A general tightening of my skin.

  It seemed I could almost hear a pining young man whispering those very words from some lost time in the past. I saw a candlelit desktop. I heard rain against a window. I heard the frantic scratching of a pen.

  But no.

  Surely not.

  I read again the tawdry little tome’s title and subcaption, attempting to comprehend the déjà vu-ish distress I felt crawling with icy hooked claws up my sweat-slickened spine.

  Foolish Love - Amour Fou

  Poems Dropped at a Heinous Crime of Passion

  Written by One Murderer and Fugitive from Justice –

  Didier Rain

  I FELT AS IF I were falling through the sky.

  Pitched headlong from a cloud.

  With all the gods’ laughter whistling in my ears.

  I stared unbelieving at the book in my hands.

  “Are you all right, Adamiah?”

  I could barely nod.

  “You don’t look none too good.”

  “Whu…?” I muttered. My tongue felt made of gum. “Whu…?”

  Prudence tittered nervously and grabbed hold of my arm to keep me steady.

  My gaze floated from the book to her worried face.

  “Wherever did you get this?” I asked.

  “Oh.” Prudence blushed. “Well, there was a sailor boy on the ship that brung us to Eden.” She let go of my arm and flipped open her fan, beating it at the air until it fairly hummed. “He took quite a shine to me. He kept on wanting to read me these here poems, but of course I wouldn’t let him on account of how I was promised to you and didn’t want to give him no wrong notions.” She wiped her throat and licked her lips. “Anyways, once we got to the island, he gave me the book to remember him by. And then he sailed away.” She frowned. “I put the silly thing away for the longest time, never paying it no mind. But, well, one night – it was just so warm – I was all spread out on top of my sheets – and the moon was so bright shining through my window – why, I just couldn’t sleep. I remembered the book hid under my bed. It was like I could hear it whispering to me with the sound of the waves.” She bit her lip and looked at the ground. “And so, I pulled it out and opened it up.”

  I flipped through the pages, my hands shaking, my fingers clumsy. The poems had been translated from French to English, but yes, I recognized them plain enough. And yet I still could not quite understand what I was looking at.

  “I guess it’s a real famous book over in England,” continued Prudence. “Everybody’s reading it. And all up the East Coast side of America too.”

  “Amour Fou,” I mumbled.

  “It has a real curious and tragical story behind it.” She pointed at the pages. “The first part is by a fellow who knew the poet and tells of how it came to be. It seems the poor boy found his true love in the arms of another man and so he shot him and her both dead, out of jealousy and heartbreak.”

  I nodded, vaguely recalling the feeble Pap! of a pistol.

  “The poems was left all scattered around the bodies. They say some of the papers was even spattered with blood.” Prudence pressed her palm to her chest. “Can you imagine anything more terrible?”

  “No,” I mumbled. “Horrible.”

  “The poems are all writ to the scribbler’s sweetheart before he found out she was untrue. You can tell by his words that he was real, real fond of her. He says the nicest things about her eyes and smile and such. He worshipped her like an angel.” Prudence ticked her teeth and shook her head. “It must have been quite a shock to find out she was two-timing him with that other man.”

  I caught a bygone whiff of gunsmoke.

  The thick and coppery stink of blood.

  The musky scents of death and sex and anguish.

  “It’s a funny thing,” said Prudence, “how some folks just don’t know each other so well. Even the ones they love.” She shook her head, considering. “That’s the reason behind why I wanted to tell you about my wicked acts, Adamiah. So as you can know me through and through, the good and the bad all mixed up together, so as we might know right from the get-go where we stand with each other.”

  I was rather twirling in my head, but somehow, I managed to smile and fix my gaze on the rambling woman before me. It was like I was viewing her face in a locket.

  “That’s surely the only way a couple can get along right.”

  I closed the book and let her speak. I gently ran my fingertips along the paper spine. Prudence kept going on and on about how she and I now knew one another better than most folks who hitch up and how that would make us stronger as a married couple and how honesty was the foundation of any good marriage and twit twit twit, on and on, until her words turned into sparrows and winged away on the wind.

  Amour Fou, was all I could think.

  It kept turning in my head.

  Foolish

  Foolish

  Foolish

  Love

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, MY faith in Coincidence became promptly
reinstated.

  As did my utter awe at cruel Irony.

  Yes, most definitely, there could be no doubt now – I was, indeed, the Chosen One.

  But chosen for what?

  And by whom?

  Torture and humiliation seemed the short answer, at the hands of some mischievous cosmological manipulator. It appeared that Creation’s crafty author, made drunk on His or Her own omnipotence, was jerking me round for the sake of some hilariously elaborate and self-amusing plot.

  “Hardy-har,” I muttered sans mirth. “It is to laugh.”

  And yet, as my mother always taught me, we mortals have no choice but to frame our circumstances as positively as we can, forcing ourselves to examine our darkest days in the most optimistic available light.

  Well perhaps, I told myself, you are finally being exonerated.

  But it was an awkward situation. My work had at last received the notoriety and readership I had always longed for, but how could I ever enjoy its success? Didier Rain, the creator of this widely esteemed volume, was a murderous fugitive. Coming forth to claim credit for the book’s authorship would lead to my sure imprisonment and subsequent appointment with the guillotine.

  And then there was the issue of Prudence. How could I ever tell her my story, let alone convince her that it was true? In her mind I was Adamiah Linklater. And whereas she was an eager believer in God’s mysterious plan, how would I ever be able to persuade the lady that I, in spite of my recent deceits, was truly an honorable sort, and the one with whom Providence had meant her to be?

  “Zounds!”

  Could our love ever survive such a revelation?

  I pondered the different parts of the problem again and again in my room that night. I paced the floor, thinking, thinking. Christ watched me from his vantage on the stormy sea. I found myself so unnerved by his condescending grin that I finally turned the picture to the wall, as it had lost its ability to inspire in me any hope for an outside source of salvation.

  I slumped on the edge of the bed beneath the low light of my lamp, just gazing at the cover of my little book of poems. I will admit, I could not squelch a certain welling pride. Amour Fou was not my own title for the collection, but had been lifted from one of my sonnets, probably chosen by the printer. I liked it well enough, and even thought it fairly clever and apt. Still, the subcaption put me off, as it was doubtless a ploy of advertisement meant to lure lowbrow readers with its promise of the book’s sensationalized side story. Heinous Crime of Passion indeed! Surely a work as lofty, skilled, and inspired as this deserved the same respect as any other literary masterpiece.

  I opened the book to the prologue written by the hapless poet’s acquaintance – one Winston Dirge.

  Yes, I had well known Mister Dirge. I had worked as his assistant and had considered him a mentor in my formative years. We had traveled together across the Mediterranean and the Levant. It was during that time, while far from home, from my mother, and from the gypsy lass for whom I pined, that I had scratched out these very poems.

  I read Dirge’s introduction.

  He got it right, mostly. I especially appreciated where he wrote, “The young Mister Rain was as talented a wordsmith as I have ever had the pleasure to meet. He was full of high ideals and a strict moral restraint that drove his pen to paroxysms of the purest original verse.”

  Alas, I thought to myself, whither had that talent flown? Whither that youthful originality?

  It had all dissolved like ink and blood in cold guilty rain.

  Dirge described in his prologue the events he presumed had happened that night of the killing, leaving out many secret and embarrassing details that would doubtless make the story appear even more sordid than it already was. He did this, I guessed, to spare my mother. He did this out of consideration for me.

  And then he wrote – “The young Rain has fled to Greece, a land for which he feels a great kinship. He is no doubt hiding there now, a forlorn criminal on the run, blending with the natives, drifting from one island to the next in his endless search for escape.”

  I do not know if Dirge honestly believed this. I suspected that my old tutor had probably known the truth about my flight to America and had simply written those lines in order to lead my prosecutors in the opposite direction from the one I had actually traveled.

  I leafed further into the book, to the dedication.

  For Marguerite – My Dark-Eyed Angel

  A pain stabbed in my heart upon reading her name – an old wound’s resurgence.

  I closed my eyes.

  I heard the echo of her deceitful voice.

  “Rain,” she gasped. “Pluie.”

  And then I dove into the poems.

  *****

  They were undeniably rather bastardized versions of the originals. For no matter how conscientious and talented a translator might be, and no matter how vast and common is the oceanic wellspring of all available wordage, one language simply does not cross over into another without some unfortunate misconstruements.

  The poems came out like a Frenchman’s feet squeezed rather painfully into the wrong-sized pair of an Englishman’s shoes.

  The meter suffered an awkward hesitance in some places, a forward toppling of hotfooted post-hastiness in others.

  Rhymes were forced distastefully together like turnips and limes.

  Words were chosen like gooey dobs of tar meant for patching leaky buckets.

  Metaphors and similes generally limped along and suffered throughout.

  And yet somehow a general adherence to the collection’s overall message managed to shine through the verboseful mists of its ornamented hodgepodgery.

  I turned to one dog-eared page and read a poem called “Moon Night” –

  When the moon is at play on the sea in the night

  Your breath damps my cheek in a dream,

  And though I know not to where you’ve took flight,

  I give chase o’er the waves all asheened.

  There is no paradise compares to your bosom.

  Your breasts are twin sea does I so yearn to grope.

  To rip ope your gown and fondly let loose ‘em

  Would fulfill my pent soul’s greatest hope.

  Alas, I now hunch on this ancient dry isle,

  As you plash far out o’er the sea,

  But though the wet space twixt is many a mile,

  On some blue moon together we’ll be.

  That such clumsy verse could move Prudence to fits of self-titillating rapture seemed quaint and endearing from my more experiential perspective. And yet I found that the old poetry, for all its naiveté, was just as able to bring forth a pang from the deepest regions of my own submerged being. The longing that that young poet had felt, in spite of its ham-handed mutations, had somehow traveled more or less intact over the intervening years, and was still able to conjure in a reader a corresponding ache.

  I read into the wee hours. And then I slid the book under my pillow, blew out the lamp, and stood for a while at the window looking out.

  The moon was waxing toward full; a big piece of it tacked low like a sail across the sky.

  The palms rustled on the breeze.

  I cannot summarize accurately all the confusion, elation, and sorrow I was feeling right then. It was as if my entire life had been focused down to the point on which I was, in that exact moment, most perilously teetering.

  The waves rolled in knowingly over the deep.

  A suggestion of death drifted past.

  Moon Night

  EDEN FELT TO BE undergoing a change. An evolution. A renaissance. One could sense it on the restless air. One could feel it in the sands trembling and shifting beneath one’s feet. The overall populace became expectant and a bit off balance. Even the birds had altered their chirp. The dead whale had dried up and quit stinking. A prophecy’s fulfillment was in the offing. The Chosen One, blessed as he was by God’s Grace, was about to take command of the old Ark and steer it in a new direction. And whereas most
everyone seemed delighted at this prospect, at least two people were feeling somewhat disillusioned.

  The first, rather bafflingly, was myself.

  Yes, there could be no doubt that the opportunity before me was the most favorable one to come along in many a year, if not my entire life. That Prudence would be my helpmate seemed as lucky a twist as I had ever known. Add to that my enormous wealth, along with the comfort and contentment afforded by my upcoming position as the little cult’s top man, and an outsider would be hard pressed to find anything lacking in my immediate fortunes. Still, an uneasiness lurked beneath the surface of my thoughts, some nebulous misgiving.

  Perhaps my agitation came from recently realizing myself to be such an unwitting plaything for Coincidence. What else might those rascally Fates have in mind for me? I was supposed to be studying the Shining Redemption’s Bible in preparation for my upcoming sermon, but my general anxiety would not allow me the necessary concentration for that undertaking. Instead, I became preoccupied with the sunder-tossed pieces of my past life’s puzzle. Memories leaked in around the casing of my brain. Of my boyhood. My mother. And Marguerite. As well as myriad other ghosts, torments, and orbital regrets. It was most vexing, but my bygone misfortunes were overshadowing my current bright prospects in the manner of a cloud blotting out the sun.

  “Simply give thanks to God,” I told myself. “Put away what was and wholly embrace what is.”

  But like a man addicted to drink, I found myself slipping away at every chance to furtively take solace from Amour Fou. Oh, how I longed to return to those innocent days of its composition! The little volume offered momentary relief from my otherwise world-weary worries, soothing me by way of its libationary lingualism and loquacious founts of far-flung, fabricated fancy.

  The other person most glaringly disenchanted with my impending status as the clan’s leader was one Force Merriwether.

  His brother, too, seemed mildly miffed at my privileged station in the church, but whereas Will at least made an effort to accommodate my inevitable ascendency, Force blatantly displayed his displeasure anytime I was in his presence. I figured he was not likely going away, and so it would behoove me to somehow get along with the churlish crosspatch, and even, if at all possible, turn him into a friend.