The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “What must Joan be doing now?” he wondered, and slipped the fishbone ring into his pocket lest it elicit questions from Burlingame.

  Since he carried no other luggage than his ledger-book, it took but a few minutes for Ebenezer to sign on as a passenger aboard the Pilgrim. By the time the sun’s rim edged the flat horizon the ship had left Castlehaven Point to larboard and was standing for the open waters of the Chesapeake. Both to warm himself and to avoid seeing Cooke’s Point again, Ebenezer insisted that they go below, and demanded at once to hear whatever news Burlingame had of Anna.

  “From what you told me in the Cambridge winehouse,” he said tiredly, “she is more twin to Joan Toast than to me. Yet if in sooth she hath crossed the ocean, methinks her quest is not so chaste as Joan’s. What have you learnt of her, Henry?”

  “All in its place,” said Burlingame. “To commence, you really must call me Nicholas Lowe. Your friend and tutor Burlingame is no more, but hath perished by his own hand.”

  “Nay, Henry.” Ebenezer waved his hand wearily. “I am surfeited with poses and intrigues, and care not how or wherefore thou’rt disguised.”

  “This case is different,” his friend persisted. “Nick Lowe’s my legal name, I swear’t. D’you recall what business it was first fetched me to Dorset, other than seeing you to Malden? ’Twas to find a Mr. William Smith, that had in his keepbg some fragment of John Smith’s secret history.”

  “Marry, that seems a decade past! You mean to say you got the papers from your friend the cooper, and they proved your name is Nicholas Lowe?”

  “Slowly, slowly,” Burlingame laughed. “ ’Tis rather knottier than that. I’ve yet to lay my hands upon the papers, but when I first learned they were in Smith’s possession, I asked him as if from simple curiosity what befell Sir Henry Burlingame in that final portion of the history, and in particular whether any mention was made in’t of his issue. His answer was that as best he could recall, naught happened to Burlingame at all: John Smith contrived in some wise to take the salvage doxy’s maidenhead, and both men returned to Jamestown shortly after.”

  Ebenezer frowned. “What’s this of maidenheads? The last I read was the piece you robbed the Jesuit of, that ended with their capture.”

  “That is the pity of’t,” Burlingame replied. “What the cooper hath is not Smith’s history at all, but a piece of The Privie Journall of Sir Henry Burlingame, that tells of Smith’s adventure with Pocahontas. ’Twas the first half of’t you read in the carriage to Plymouth. Can you see the double import of this news?”

  “I see it means your search was fruitless, unless there are more Smiths in Maryland to threaten with castration.”

  Burlingame laughed. “You little dream the relevance of your words! But aye, that is one implication of’t: so far as I know, Smith’s history ends where last we read; the rest either is lost or ne’er was writ, and Sir Henry’s name appears no more in the records. When I learned this I called my search a failure, abandoned hope of proving my identity, and resolved to create one from the outside in. I went to Colonel Henry Lowe of Talbot, that once years ago I saved from Tom Pound’s pirates and, after explaining who I was, prevailed upon him to save my life in turn by owning me as a son. Thus was Nick Lowe born, from nothing and without travail.”

  “I must own I scarcely see the need for’t,” Ebenezer said, “much less how ’twould save your life. But Heav’n knows ’tis not your first mysterious action.”

  “If you think it mysterious, reflect again on the fact that ’tis not Smith’s history the cooper hath, but Sir Henry’s Privie Journall. Do you recall how I came by the first half of that journal? ’Twas when I stole Coode’s letters in England from his courier Ben Ricaud! The Privie Journall was John Coode’s possession, not Baltimore’s!”

  In spite of his disinclination to show any great interest in Burlingame’s affairs, Ebenezer could not conceal his curiosity at this disclosure.

  “At first, after what I’d learned from Ben Spurdance,” Burlingame went on, “it seemed no great wonder to me that Coode should trust Bill Smith with the papers, since Smith was Captain Mitchell’s chief lieutennnt on the Eastern Shore. But the more I reflected on’t, the muddier it grew: why was the cooper’s name included in the list I’d got from Baltimore, if he was one of Coode’s company? And how explain the marvelous coincidence that Coode, as well as Baltimore, entrusted his papers to men of the surname Smith? ’Twas not till some days after your wedding, when I chanced to mention the matter to Spurdance at the Cambridge tavern, I learned that Coode had ne’er given Smith the papers in the first place—the cooper had long since stolen ’em from Ben Spurdance. ’Tis Spurdance is Coode’s lieutenant, and ’twas on the strength of this prize that Bill Smith became Baltimore’s; in fact, ’twas just this coup decided Baltimore to divide his precious Assembly Journal into halves—not thirds, as we supposed—and to entrust it to two other friends of his named Smith. He hath a bent for such theatrics, and the move hath cost him dearly.”

  “Then Smith is Baltimore’s man and Spurdance Coode’s?” Ebenezer asked incredulously. “How can that be, when the one is such a thorough-going varlet and the other, for all his temper, an honest man? And how is’t an agent of Baltimore’s is trafficking in whores and opium for Captain Mitchell—which is to say, for Coode? La, methinks expediency, and not truth, is this tale’s warp, and subterfuge its woof, and you’ve weaved it with the shuttle of intrigue upon the loom of my past credulity! In short, ’tis creatured from the whole cloth, that even I can see doth not hang all in a piece. ’Tis a fabric of contradictories.”

  “It is indeed,” Burlingame conceded, “if approached with the assumptions we both have steered by. But we are like a Swedish navigator I knew once in Barcelona that had dreamed up a clever way of reckoning longitude by the stars and was uncommon accurate in all respects save one: to his dying day he could not remember whether Antares was in Scorpius and Arcturus in the Herdsman, or the reverse. The consequence of’t was, he reckoned his longitude by Antares with azimuths he’d sighted from Arcturus, and ran his ship into the Goodwin Sands! In plain language, I knew Mitchell had support from some powerful outside agency whose motive was more sinister than mere profit and, since his traffic is wicked, I assumed from the first that Coode was at the bottom of’t. ’Twas not till this matter of Spurdance and Bill Smith that alternatives occurred to me—”

  Ebenezer had been slouched wearily in his seat, but now he sat upright. “Surely thou’rt about to tell me Baltimore’s involved in Mitchell’s traffic!”

  Burlingame nodded soberly. “Not merely involved, Eben: he is the heart, brains, and hand of’t! His plan, no less, is so to enervate the English in America with opium, and friendly towns of salvages with the pox, that anon the several governments will fall to the French and the Naked Indians of Monsieur Casteene. Thereupon the Pope hath pledged himself to intervene and unite all the colonies into one great bailiwick of Romanism, and Baltimore, as reward for his services, will be crowned Emperor of America for his lifetime and a holy Catholic saint upon his death!”

  “But ’tis absurd!” Ebenezer protested.

  Burlingame shrugged. “That Baltimore stands behind Mitchell I am certain, and viewed through the lens of this knowledge, the entire history of the Province takes on a different aspect: who knows but what old William Claiborne was a hero, along with Penn and Governor Fendall and the rest, and Baltimore the monster all along? All I know of Coode is that he hath worked counter to every government in Maryland: did it e’er occur to you that they all might have been as corrupt as Baltimore himself, and that Coode, like Milton’s Satan, might more deserve our sympathy than our censure?”

  Ebenezer pressed his palm to his forehead and shuddered. “The prospect staggers me!”

  “ ’Tis not that the facts are absent, after all—I have been Baltimore’s chief intriguer these four years, and am privy to more facts than ever Sallust knew of Catiline. The difficulty is, e’en on the face of ’em the facts are dar
k—doubly so if you grant, as wise men must, that an ill deed can be done with good intent, and a good with ill; and triply if you hold right and wrong to be like windward and leeward, that vary with standpoint, latitude, circumstance, and time. History, in short, is like those waterholes I have heard of in the wilds of Africa: the most various beasts may drink there side by side with equal nourishment.”

  “But what is this,” Ebenezer asked, “except to say the facts avail one naught in making judgments! Is’t not that very notion I affirmed last fall in Cambridge, at the cost of my estate?”

  “Not at all,” Burlingame replied, “for the court judge dons his values with his robe and wig, that are made for him by the legion of the judged, and the jury hath no other office save to rule on facts. Besides which, they see the litigants face to face and hear their testimony, and so can judge their character; but for all his notoriety I ne’er have met the man who hath seen John Coode face to face, nor, despite his fame and influence and the great trust he hath placed in me, have I myself ever seen Lord Baltimore, any more than you have.”

  “How can that be?”

  Burlingame answered that all his communication with the Lord Proprietary had been through messengers, for Baltimore had confined himself to his chambers on the grounds of illness.

  “There is no way to lay eyes upon Baltimore now,” he said, “but I have lately sworn myself a solemn vow: if there lives in fact such a creature as this John Coode—that hath been Catholic priest, Church-of-England minister, sheriff, captain, colonel, general, and Heav’n alone knows what else—I shall confront him face to face and learn once for all what cause he stands for! ’Tis to seek him out, and Anna as well, I am en route to St. Mary’s City.”

  At mention of his sister’s name all thoughts of Maryland politics vanished from the poet’s mind, and he demanded once again to know why she and Andrew had come to the province so long before their scheduled visit.

  “Your father’s cause will be clear,” Burlingame said, “once I’ve told you that they did not make the voyage together. ’Tis to seek her out he’s come, and haply to negotiate with Mitchell. He little dreamt, when last I saw him, that he had no more estate in Maryland—but haply he hath heard the news by now…”

  “Then Spurdance’s charge is true, that my father is in league with Mitchell!”

  “Not yet, to the best of my knowledge, but ’twill be true enough anon. What with the war, the want of foreign markets, the unseasonable weather, the scarcity of ships and hardy plants, the fly, the ground worm, the horn-worm, the house-burn, the frostbite, and the perils of sea and enemies, your sot-weed planter nowadays is in sore straits. Some have sold half their landholdings to clear the rest; some have turned to other crops, scarce worth the work of growing; some have moved to Pennsylvania, where the soil hath not as yet been leached and drained of spirit; and some, that have no love for these alternatives, have turned from planting to more lucrative fields. I have cause to think old Andrew had an audience on this topic with Lord Baltimore ere he sailed, else he’d no reason to come straight from Piscataway to Captain Mitchell’s, where Joan and I caught sight of him two days past. ’Twas then we fled together—she to warn you of his presence, I to make my bargain with Colonel Henry Lowe and meet the twain of you here. I could stay no more with Mitchell, not alone because I’d learned my search was hopeless, but also because the real Tim Mitchell, so I have heard, is en route to the Province. What’s more, the Jesuit priest Thomas Smith, that we called upon near Oxford, hath complained to Lord Baltimore of my abusing him, and on all sides I was looked at with suspicion.”

  “But damn it!” Ebenezer cried. “What of my sister? Where is she now, and why hath she come to Maryland?”

  “You know the cause as well as I,” said Burlingame.

  “That she loves you!” Ebenezer groaned. “Ah God, how pleased that news would once have made me! But now I know you for the very essence of carnality, I feel as Mother Ceres must have felt, when Pluto took Proserpine for his bride. And galled—i’faith, it galls me sore to think how she praised my innocence, joined hers to mine there in the London posthouse, and sealed our virgin vows with her silver ring! And all was guile and cruel deceit: you’d long since had her maidenhead in the summer-house, and swived her behind my back in London, and e’en that very day of my departure, ere my business with Ben Bragg was done, the twain of you had billed and cooed all shameless in the public view. Hypocrisy! What lewd delight she must have taken in swearing to me she would be chaste, when even as she swore she still felt your hands upon her, and yearned for one last tumble on your bed! ’Tis clear now why that last farewell discomfited me, and the matter of the rings: she was so taken with rut for you, that stood disguised not ten yards distant, she fancied ’twas you whose hand she toyed with, and the fancy near made her swoon!”

  “Enough!” Burlingame ordered. “If you believe this rot in sooth, thou’rt not so much innocent as stupid!”

  “You deny it?” the poet cried. “You deny ’twas your lewd connection my father learned of in St. Giles and sacked you for?”

  “Nay, not entirely.”

  “And those foul boasts in the Cambridge tavern!” Ebenezer pressed angrily. “That she hath begged you to have at her, and discovered her secrets to your eyes, and gone mad with joy in your lubricious games—do you deny these now?”

  “They are true enough in substance,” Burlingame sighed, “but what you fail to see—”

  “Then where lies my stupidity, save in esteeming her too much to see ’twas common lust for you that fetched her to our rooms in Thames Street, and that this same monstrous lust hath brought her half round the world to warm your bed?”

  “No more, you fool!” exclaimed Burlingame. “ ’Tis love in sooth hath driven her hither, or lust, if you prefer; but love or lust—i’Christ, Eben!—have you not remarked these many years ’tis you that are its object?”

  2

  A Layman’s Pandect of Geminology Compended by Henry Burlingame, Cosmophilist

  EBENEZER’S FEATURES contorted wondrously. “Dear Heav’nly Father, Henry! What have you said?”

  Burlingame turned his fist in his palm and frowned at the deck as he spoke. “Your sister is a driven and fragmented spirit, friend; the one half of her soul yearns but to fuse itself with yours, whilst the other half recoils at the thought. ’Tis neither love nor lust she feels for you, but a prime and massy urge to coalescence, which is deserving less of censure than of awe. As Aristophanes maintained that male and female are displaced moieties of an ancient whole, and wooing but their vain attempt at union, so Anna, I long since concluded, repines willy-nilly for the dark identity that twins share in the womb, and for the well-nigh fetal closeness of their childhood.”

  “I shudder at the thought!” Ebenezer whispered.

  “As well doth Anna—so much so, that her fancy entertains it only in disguise—yet no other thought than this impelled her to me in the summer-house! ’Twas quite in the middle of a fine May night, the night of your sixteenth birthday, and though the time for’t was some days past, a shower of meteors was flashing from Aquarius. I had lingered late outside to watch these falling stars and plot their courses on a map of my own devising; so engrossed was I in the work that when Anna came up behind—”

  “No more!” cried Ebenezer. “You took her maidenhead, God curse you, and there’s an end on’t!”

  “Quite otherwise,” Burlingame replied. “We spent some hours discussing you, that were asleep in your chamber. Anna likened you to Phosphor, the morning star, and herself to Hesper, the mortal star of evening, and when I told her those twin stars were one and the same, and not a star at all but the planet Venus, the several portents of this fact near made her swoon! We tarried long in the summer-house that night, and long on many a balmy night thereafter; yet always, I will swear’t, I pleased her in no wise save as your proxy.”

  “I’God, and you think this argues to your credit?”

  Burlingame smiled. “There are tw
o facts you’ve got to swallow, Eben. The first is that I love no part of the world, as you might have guessed, but the entire parti-colored whole, with all her poles and contradictories. Coode and Baltimore alike I am enamored of, whate’er the twain might stand for; and you know what various ground hath held my seed. For this same reason ’twas never you I loved, nor yet your sister Anna, but the twain inseparably, and could lust for neither alone. Whence issues the second fact, which is, that de’il the times her blood waxed warm the while she spoke of you, and de’il the times I kissed her as the symbol for you both, and played the sad games of her invention, yet your sister is a virgin still for aught of me!”

  He laughed at Ebenezer’s shock and disbelief. “Aye, now, that wants some chewing, doth is not? Think with what relish, as a child, she would play Helen to your Paris, but ever call you Pollux by mistake! Recall that day in Thames Street when you chided her for lack of suitors and as a tease proposed me for the post—”

  Ebenezer clutched his throat. “Marry!”

  “Her reply,” Burlingame went on, “was that the search for beaux was fruitless, inasmuch as the man she loved most had the bad judgment to be her twin! And reflect, in the light of what I’ve told you, on this matter of your mother’s silver ring, that Anna gave you in the posthouse: did you know she was wont to read the letters ANNE B as ANN and EB conjoined? Can a poet be blind to the meaning of that gift and of the manner of its giving?”

  “To contemplate it is to risk the loss of my supper,” Ebenezer groaned, “yet I must own there is some sense in all you say—” His face hardened. “Save that she’s still a maid! That’s too much!”

  His friend shrugged. “Believe’t or no. We’ll find her anon, I pray, and you may get a physician’s word for’t if you please.”

  “But what you bragged of in the Cambridge tavern!”

  “Many shuffle the cards that do not play. I could as easily have had at you in Bill Mitchell’s barn, but the truth is, as I said before, ’tis not the one nor the other I crave, but the twain as one. Haply the day will come when Anna’s secret lust will get the better of her reason and your own likewise (which, deny’t as you may, is plain to me!): if such a day dawn, why then perchance I’ll come upon you sack a sack as did Catallus on the lovers, and like that nimble poet pin you to your work—nay, skewer you both like twin squabs on a spit!”