The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “Wait!” they heard Peter cry. “For the love o’ God, don’t shoot!”

  And Wilhelm, to their disappointment, instead of firing at once, asked, “Where is your mother, Peter?”

  “I do not know!”

  “Why were ye standing so,” Wilhelm had demanded then, “with your breeches in one hand and your shame in the other?”

  And it must have been that Wilhelm had come closer as he spoke, and threatened with the pistols, for Peter grunted and then replied, “There ye see, ’twas but to ease nature I came hither!”

  “Willi told me ye were swiving Katy from stump to stump,” Wilhelm had declared.

  “Ah,” said Peter. “But I am not doing what Willi said, as any wight can see.”

  “Then why should Willi send me running hither?” his father wanted to know, and Peter asserted that it was not he but Willi who had designs on Kate and had sent Wilhelm out of the house in order to catch her alone and force her virtue.

  “Ach!” said Wilhelm, and came crashing back along the path.

  All this the two conspirators had clearly heard, and near the end of it, from the direction of the house, had come the voice of Willi calling Katy’s name.

  “What will happen now?” Katy had whispered to Charley.

  “ ’Tis time for Willi to give o’er his search for you,” the Indian replied. “If all goes well he’ll come down the path to murther whoever’s left alive, and Peter will come up to do the same.”

  He could explain no more, for by that time old Wilhelm had come as far as the clump of myrtles, brandishing his pistols and puffing with fatigue. In fact, such toll had his emotions and exertions taken on him, he suddenly stopped still, clutched his heart, and sat down on a gum stump in the middle of the path.

  “ ’Tis his foolish heart hath failed him!” Katy whispered, and Charley clapped his hand over her mouth just in time to prevent their discovery by Willi, who at that moment came running down the path with his musket at the ready.

  “What ails you?” he asked his father.

  Wilhelm clutched his son’s arm and shook his head. “Why did you send me where no trouble was? Your brother was only pissing, nothing more.”

  “Fogh,” sneered Willi. “Why should he walk a mile into the woods to piss, when for years he hath been doing it in the rosebush?”

  “You send me to kill Peter, and Peter to kill you,” Wilhelm went on, “and both have designs on my sweet Kate. Either way I lose a son, and belike my wife as well!”

  “She is a whore, and you a fool,” Willi declared, and let go a musket blast point-blank at his father’s chest.

  “Now I shall do the same to him,” Katy had whispered then, and fetching a loaded pistol from her skirts, had taken aim at Willi. But again Charley had restrained her, for the sound of the shot had brought Peter hurrying from the junipers, and before Willi could get powder and ball into the gun, his brother was upon him with the knife. Over and over they rolled in the dirt, and in a minute Willi lay beside his father with an open throat.

  Peter rose and wiped the knife blade on a leaf. “So,” he said, and said no more, for Katy shot him in the chest where he stood.

  “God be praised!” she had cried aloud when it was done. “I am free of the knaves at last!” And so moved was she by the spectacle of so many dead Dutchmen in the path, she would not leave without mounting the gum stump about which they lay and dancing, for Charley’s benefit, the same dance that had served poor Wilhelm for love-making.

  “So now you have your heart’s desire,” Charley had observed.

  “And so shall you,” Kate had called back from the stump. “Come hither, now, and celebrate our wealth!”

  And not content to profane the dead by her dance alone, Katy had insisted that they do then and there on the gum stump what they were wont to do secluded in the myrtles, and had whooped and yelped throughout, Indian-fashion…

  “Stay!” Ebenezer cried. “You do not mean to tell me—”

  “No less,” Mary declared. “What’s more, he asked her to cry their secret signal-cry when the time came, and he did a thing that he and I had learnt together—a thing we’d vowed no other soul should share…”

  “I say—” the poet protested, much embarrassed, but Mary raised her hand for silence.

  “And when she instantly let out the signal cry, he fetched up his knife…”

  “Nay! He murthered her then and there?”

  Mary nodded. “I’ll say no more than this, that what he did is a famous trick of soldiers the world over, Christian and heathen alike, with women of the enemy.”

  “I shall be ill if you say more,” warned Ebenezer.

  “There is no more to tell,” Mary said. “He walked off and left ’em where they lay, all four together, and for want of heirs the estate passed over to the Crown. The joke of’t was, as Charley had known from the first and not told either Kate or the brothers, ’twas not till the next sitting of the Maryland Council that old Wilhelm’s plea for denizenship was due to be approved.”

  “I do not grasp the point.”

  “That means he died a Dutchman,” Mary explained, “and aliens can’t will property in the first place: the Crown would have got the estate in any event!” She laughed and got up off the stable floor. “ ’Twas his huge enjoyment of this jest that undid Charley. That same night, in all innocence, I proposed to him we do our little secret, and he took such a fit o’ laughing in the midst of’t that I wept like a bride for the first time in my life! He vowed he was sorry, and by way of apology told the entire story just as you’ve heard it from me, laughing all the while, nor left out a single detail of’t. He knew me inside out, did my sweet salvage: he knew ’twould tear my heart to hear he’d played me false, and doubly to hear ’twas Kate he’d done it with, and triply to hear he’d done her to death; yet he knew as well I must and would forgive him all—nay, he knew at bottom I would love him the more for’t when the shock had passed, and he was right! What he didn’t know, by a hundredth part, was how I prized our little trick, not alone that we’d discovered it together, but because ’twixt a man so ill endowed with manly parts and a woman too versed in men to be impressed by any such endowment, this trick of ours was the entire world o’ love. ’Twas as if you and your mistress together had invented swiving, that no soul else on earth had thought of: think how ye’d feel then if she told ye, not that she’d kissed another man, but that she’d taught him all that glorious secret ye’d shared!”

  “Really,” Ebenezer said, “I—”

  “Yes. Thou’rt still a virgin and can’t know.” Mary sighed. “Then bear’t in mind, and one day ye’ll see it clear enough. In the meanwhile ’tis enough to say, my Charley’s error was to tell me he’d shared that thing with Katy. I’God, I could not speak, or weep another tear! I climbed from the wagon and ran down the road, nor stopped till I reached Cambridge, a day and a half later, and told the Sheriff that the Tick family was murthered, and their murtherer was Charley Mattassin!”

  Again the tears coursed down her cheeks.

  “They found him waiting in the wagon, little dreaming what I’d done, and packed him off to jail. I never spoke to him after that, but they say he took it as a farther joke that I had played him false, and laughed whene’er he thought of’t. They say he still was chuckling when they led him to the gallows, and I saw myself that when the noose snapped tight two wondrous things occurred. The first I told ye at the outset, that what was small in life grew uncommon large in death, as sometimes happens; the other is that he died with that monstrous laugh upon his face, and bore it to the grave! That is the tale.”

  “I ne’er have heard its like,” swore Ebenezer. “ ’Tis pathetic and terrible at once, and I am still astonished by the likeness of this Indian to my friend and former tutor! I would venture to say that if your Charley had been born an Englishman he could play this world like a harpsichord, as doth my friend, and that if my friend had been born a salvage Indian, he too could die with just that laugh.”
He shook his head. “What is behind it? Your Charley and my friend, each in his way, came rootless to the world we know; each hath a wondrous gift for grasping it, e’en a lust for’t, and manipulates its folk like puppeteers. My friend hath not yet laughed after Charley’s fashion, and God grant he never shall, but the potential for’t is there; I see it plainly from your tale. A certain shrug he hath, and a particular mirthless smile. ’Tis as though like Jacob he grapples yet with some dark angel in the desert, the which had got the better of your Charley; and ’tis no angel of the Lord whose votaries have this laugh for their stigma, do you think?”

  Mary mused at the stable door: “ ’Twas the whole o’ God’s creation Charley laughed at! I can hear him laugh at Kate when he did our thing to her, and again when she barked, and he put her to the knife; when I ride about my rounds or eat a meal, I hear that laugh, and it colors the world I look at, and sours the food in my belly! Naught remains o’ Wilhelm Tick but his wretched ghost, that some say wanders nightly down Tick’s Path; and naught remains o’ Charley save that laugh. The while I told this tale to you I’ve heard it. Each night I see him laughing in the hangman’s noose, and must needs liquor myself to sleep; yet all in vain, for sleep is but a hot dream of my Charley, and I wake with his voiceless laugh still in my ears. Ah God! Ah God!”

  She could speak no more. Ebenezer accompanied her out to her wagon and helped her up to the seat, thanking her once more for her generosity and for telling him the tale.

  “ ’Twas curiosity alone that pricked me,” he remarked with a rueful smile. “I took an interest in your Charley when first I heard of him from Father Smith in Talbot, and could not have said wherefore; but this tale of yours hath touched me in unexpected ways.”

  Mary picked up the reins and took her whip in hand. “Then ye must pray ’twill touch ye no farther. Master Laureate, for as yet thou’rt still an audience to that laugh.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She leaned toward him, her great face puffed and creased with mirth, and answered in a husky whisper: “Yesterday at court, when ye keelhauled poor Ben Spurdance and signed your whole plantation o’er to that devil William Smith—”

  Ebenezer winced at the memory. “I’God, then you were there to see my folly?”

  “I was there. What’s more, Cooke’s Point was erst a station on my route: Ben Spurdance is an old and honest friend and client o’ mine, and did your father as good a job as any overseer could. I had as great a wish as Ben to see Bill Smith undone…”

  The Laureate was aghast. “You mean you saw what I was doing and knew ’twas done in ignorance? Dear Heav’n, why did you not cry out, or stay me ere I signed Smith’s wretched paper?”

  “I saw the thing coming the instant ye cried out who ye are,” Mary replied. “I saw poor Ben grow pale at your speech, and the knave Bill Smith commence to gloat and rub his hands. I could have checked your folly in a moment.”

  “Withal, I heard no frenzied warnings,” Ebenezer said bitterly, “from you or anyone else save Spurdance, his trollop of a witness, and my friend Henry—I mean Timothy Mitchell, that all had other reasons for alarm. The rest of the crowd only whispered among themselves, and I even heard some heartless devil laugh—” He checked himself and frowned incredulously at his benefactor. “Surely ’twas not you!”

  “ ’Twas my ruin as well as yours I laughed at, as Tim Mitchell might explain if ye should ask him. ’Tis a disease, little poet, like pox or clap! Where Charley took it, God only knows, but yesterday showed me, for the first time, I’ve caught it from him!” She snapped the reins to start her horse, and chuckled unpleasantly. “Stay virgin if ye can, lad; take your maidenhead to the tomb, and haply ye shan’t ever be infected! Hup there!” She whipped up the horse and drove away, her head flung back in mute hilarity.

  30

  Having Agreed That Naught Is in Men Save Perfidy, Though Not Necessarily That Jus est id quod cliens fecit, the Laureate at Last Lays Eyes on His Estate

  MUCH MOVED AND DISCONCERTED, Ebenezer stood for some moments in the courtyard. Disturbing enough had been the insight into Burlingame afforded him by the tale of Mynheer Tick: this final disclosure was almost beyond assimilation!

  “I must seek Henry out at once,” he resolved, “despite what he hath said of himself and Anna.”

  When he recalled Burlingame’s taunting confessions of the night past, his skin broke into heavy perspiration, his legs gave way, and he was obliged to sit for a time in the dust with chattering teeth. In addition he took a short fit of sneezing, for it was not wholly perturbation that afflicted him: he very definitely was feverish, and his night in the corncrib had given him a cold as well. Many hours had passed since his last meal, yet he had no appetite for breakfast, and when he got to his feet in order to seek out Burlingame and lodge a complaint with the innkeeper regarding the theft of his clothes, the ground swayed under him, and his head pounded. He entered the inn and, oblivious to the stares his unusual appearance drew, went straight to the barman—not the same who had served him on the previous evening.

  “By Heav’n!” he cried. “ ’Tis the end of religion, when a man cannot sleep safely e’en in a corncrib! Is’t a den of thieves you keep? Shall the Lord Proprietor learn that such crimes go unredressed in the inns of his province?”

  “Haul in thy sheets, lad,” the barman said. “ ’Tis not wise to go on so of Lords Proprietors in these times.”

  Ebenezer scowled with embarrassment: in his dizziness he had forgotten, as he was increasingly wont to do, that Lord Baltimore had no authority in the Province and that he himself had never met that gentleman.

  “Some wretch hath filched my clothes,” he grumbled. The other patrons at the bar laughed—among them a plump, swarthy little man in a black suit who looked familiar.

  “Ah well,” the barman said, “that’s not uncommon. Belike some wag threw your clothes in the fire for a joke, or took ’em to replace his own as was burnt. No hurt intended.”

  “As a joke! Marry, but you scoundrels have a nice wit!”

  “If’t gripe your bowels so, I’ll not charge ye for last night’s lodging. Fair enough?”

  “You’d charge a man money to sleep in that rat’s nest? You’ll return me my clothes or replace ’em, and that at once, or laureateship be damned, all of Maryland shall feel the sting of my rhymes!”

  The barman’s expression changed: he regarded Ebenezer with new interest. “Thou’rt Mister Cooke, then, the Laureate of Maryland?”

  “No other soul,” Ebenezer said.

  “The same that signed his property away?” He glanced at the black-suited man, who nodded confirmation.

  “Then I have a message for ye, from Timothy Mitchell.”

  “From Timothy? Where is he? What doth he say?”

  The barman fished a folded scrap of paper from his breeches. “He left us late last night, as I understand it, but writ this poem for ye to read.”

  Ebenezer snatched the paper and read with consternation:

  To Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet & Laureate of the Province of Maryland

  When from the Corn thou hiest thy Bum,

  And to the Tavern haply come,

  AII stiff from chill Octobers Breezes,

  Full of Sniffs, and Snots, and Sneezes,

  Go not with many a Sigh and Groan

  To seek out Colt or fragrant Roan;

  For Roan, that seldom us’d to falter,

  Hath fairly this time slipt her Halter,

  And Colts gone with her, and I as well,

  Leaving thee to fry in Hell

  With all thy Poses and Buffoonery.

  Perchance this Piece of fine Poltroonery

  Will teach thee that with mortal Men

  ’Tis Folly to call any Friend;

  For Friendship’s but a fragile Farce

  ’Twixt Man and Man. So kiss my Arse,

  Poor Ebenezer, foolish Bard—

  And henceforth ne’er relax thy Guard!

  Timothy Mitchell, Esq


  For some moments after reading Henry’s parting insults, Ebenezer was dumb struck.

  “Friendship a farce ’twixt man and man!” he cried at last. “ ’Twixt thee and me. Henry, let us say, for ’twixt me and thee it was no farce! Ah God, deliver me from such another friend!”

  The swarthy fellow in the black suit observed these lamentations with amusement and said, “Bad news is’t, Mister Cooke?”

  “Bad news indeed!” the Laureate groaned. “Yesterday my whole estate; today my clothes, my horse, and my friend lost in a single stroke! I see naught for’t but the pistol.” Despite his anguish, he recognized the man as the advocate who had pled for William Smith in court.

  “By Blaise’s wool comb, ’tis a wicked world,” the fellow observed.

  “Thou’rt no stranger to its evils, methinks!” the poet said.

  “Ah now, take no offense at me, friend: St. Windoline’s crook, ’twas yourself that worked your ruin, not I! I merely labored for the interests of my client, as every advocate must. Sowter’s my name—Richard Sowter, from down the county. What I mean, sir, your advocate’s a most pragmatical wight, that looks for justice no farther than his client’s deeds. He tweaks Justinian’s beard and declares that jus est id quod cliens fecit. Besides, the law’s but one amongst my interests. Will ye take an ale with me?”