The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “I tremble to think of’t,” said Mary Mungummory from her station at the cook-fire. “Don’t forget, Mr. Cooke, what-e’er foul play brought the girl to her present pass, ’tis of her own will she stays there.” Suddenly she gave an irritated sigh and called on an imaginary tribunal to witness the poet’s wrongheadedness. “Marry, sirs, the world’s about to explode, and he concerns himself with one poor slut’s misfortunes!”

  Ebenezer smiled. “Who’s to say which end of the glass is the right to look through? One night when Burlingame and I were watching the stars from St. Giles in the Fields, I remarked that men’s problems, like earth’s mountains, amounted to naught from the aspect of eternity and the boundless heavens and Henry answered, ‘Quite so, Eben: but down here where we live they are mountainous enough, and no mistake!’ In any case, I mean to do what I can for Miss Bromly. I’ve no mind to prosecute Billy Rumbly for rape—’twere a vain ambition in a Maryland court!—and he’ll not object to my solicitude, if I have his case aright from Mr. Russecks.”

  It was still early when they bade the trapper good-bye and set out in Mary’s wagon for Church Creek; though the journey took five hours, the sun was scarcely past the meridian when they arrived at the little settlement.

  “Yonder’s an inn,” McEvoy said; he indicated a neat frame structure some distance ahead.

  “Aye, there we’ll go, like it or not,” Mary said, “ ’tis Sir Harry’s place.” She explained that Harry Russecks flew into a dangerous temper when visitors to the town failed to appear before him and state their business. “He knows mine well enough, and ye twain need say no more than that I’m ferrying ye to Cambridge on business for the Governor.”

  “I say, he is a high-handed rascal!” Ebenezer cried. “What right hath he to pry into everyone’s affairs?”

  “Ah, well,” Mary replied, “for one thing, he can carry five hundred-weight o’ grain upon his back, so they say, and break a man’s neck as ye’d break a barleystraw. For another, he owns the inn, the mill over yonder on the creek, and half the planters hereabouts.” The mill, she went on to say, like most in the Province, had been built originally at Lord Baltimore’s order and financed in part with funds from the provincial treasury; hence the government maintained an interest in its operation. Harry Russecks was aware of this fact, but St. Mary’s City being so far removed from Church Creek, and the Governor’s Council having so many pressing problems to engage its attention and such feeble machinery of enforcement, he did not scruple to exploit his monopoly in every way. What with charging extortionate fees for grinding, and regularly purloining a capful of grain out of each bushel, he had early become a man of means; subsequently he had built the inn and taken to making loans on acreage collateral to the tobacco-planters in the area, so that, regardless of the market, he made large profits every year. If the tobacco price was good, his loans were repaid with interest, his milling fees went up, and his tavern was filled with celebrating planters; if the market fell, he increased his landholdings with forfeited collateral, ground grain as always for his neighbors’ daily bread, and sold the planters rum to drown their sorrows in. It was not surprising, then, that he was presently the wealthiest man in the area and one of the wealthiest in the Province: such was the power of his position in Church Creek that he had secured to be his wife the only truly noble lady for miles around, by what arrangements the townsfolk could only conjecture; one and all were obliged to address him by his false title even as he robbed them at the mill, to leap clear whenever he brandished the sword which he affected, even at the grindstones, as an emblem of his rank, and in general to submit without protest to his poltroonery.

  “Sir Harry respects naught in the world save patents o’ nobility,” she concluded, “nor fears any man in the Province—save a brace o’ commissioners from St. Mary’s, that some folk think have been dispatched to inspect the mills and ferries.”

  Drawing up before the inn they saw upon its sign a curious armorial device in bold colors: on a field azure, between flanches sable with annulets or (or roundlets square-pierced to look like millstones), a fleur-de-lis gules beset from alow and aloft by hard crabs armed natural. Their examination of it was cut short by a great commotion within the place it advertised: there was a crash of crockery, a woman shrieked, “Ow! Ow” a man’s voice cried, and another roared out “I’ll crack thy skull, John Hanker! Arrah! Hold still, dammee, whilst I fetch ye a good one!” From the door burst a young colonial, clutching his bare head in both hands and running for his life. At his heels pumped a shaggy bull of a man, black-haired, open-shirted, squint-eyed and mottled; in his right hand he waved a sword (no gentleman’s rapier, but a Henry Morgan cutlass fit to quarter oxen with) and in his left he clutched by the arm a distraught young woman—the same, they soon heard, whose shriek had announced the scene. Had his pursuer not been thus encumbered, the young man would have lost more than just his periwig; even with this handicap the wild-haired swordsman—whom Ebenezer understood to be the miller Russecks himself—came within an ace of adding homicide to the catalogue of his sins.

  “Yah! Run, Hanker!” he bellowed, giving over his pursuit. “Come to Church Creek again, I grind ye to hogswill!”

  “ ’Twas only in sport, Father!” cried the girl. “Don’t go on so!” Now that the crisis was past she seemed more embarrassed than alarmed.

  “ ’Sheart!” McEvoy murmured to Ebenezer. “There’s a handsome lass!”

  The miller turned on her. “I know thy sports! D’ye think I didn’t see where he laid his drunken paw, and you smiling him farther? All dogs pant after the salt bitch! Dammee if I don’t unsalt ye, and thy quean of a mother into the bargain!” With the flat of his cutlass he caught her a swat upon the rump.

  “Aiee!” she protested. “Thou’rt a devil out o’ Hell!”

  “And thee a goose out o’ Winchester!” Again he swung, and clapped her smartly along the leg. Ebenezer flushed, and McEvoy sprang to his feet as though ready to leap to the damsel’s aid from his perch on the wagon seat. But though the girl protested loudly at her punishment, her complaints were anything but abject.

  “Ow! I swear to Christ I’ll murther ye in your sleep!”

  “Not till I’ve done basting ye, ye shan’t!”

  The third blow was aimed where the first had struck, but by dint of wrenching about and biting the miller’s wrist, the girl caught it on her hip and broke free as well.

  “Hi! Now try and clout me, damn your eyes!” She did not run off at once, but lingered a moment to taunt him from a distance. “Look at him wave his sword, that he bought to beat helpless women with! A great ass is what he is!”

  “And thee a whore!”

  “And thee a cuckold! La, what a time we’ll have, when Billy-Boy takes the scalp off ye!”

  The miller roared and charged towards her, but the girl scampered off and led him in a circle around the wagon. When he gave up after a few moments, apparently resigned from past experience to her nimbleness, she halted as well, bright-eyed and panting. Her nostrils tightened; her chin dimpled with scorn. She spat in his direction.

  “Buffoon!” With a toss of ash-blond curls she turned her back on him and marched down the street towards the mill; her father sashed his weapon with a grunt and trudged after, but in the manner of a skulking bodyguard rather than that of an assailant.

  “Henrietta Russecks,” Mary chuckled. “Ain’t she the lively one, though?”

  But the men were appalled by the scene. It was some moments before Ebenezer could find voice for his indignation, and then he railed at length against the miller’s spectacular ungallantry. McEvoy expressed even greater outrage, and added for good measure a panegyric on the young lady.

  “Mother o’ God, what spirit, Eben! How she gave the great bully as good as she got! Nor quailed for an instant! Nor shed a tear for his bloody bastinadoes! I here swear to Heav’n I’ll see her free o’ that beast, if I must murther him myself!”

  Ebenezer showed some surprise at his companion’
s vehemence, and McEvoy blushed.

  “Think what ye will,” he grumbled, “and be damned t’ye! She hath the face o’ Helen and the soul of Agamemnon, hath that girl! Fire and fancy, what Ben Oliver was wont to call the chiefest female virtues; oh, ’tis a rare, rare thing!”

  “Best not toy with Henrietta,” Mary warned cordially. “Ye saw what befell young Hanker yonder, for no more’n a pat. La, the rector o’ Trinity Church himself couldn’t court Sir Harry’s daughter without a patent out o’ peerage.”

  McEvoy sniffed and furrowed up in thought.

  They decided to go directly to the mill, where, in addition to announcing their presence to Russecks, Mary could consult the miller’s wife for further news of Billy Rumbly and his bride. On the way, for McEvoy’s benefit, she chattered on about Henrietta: the girl was four-and-twenty and of the same lively temper as her mother, who had been a famous beauty in her youth and could still turn the head of any young man with an eye for pulchritude seasoned by experience. It was well past time for the daughter to be wed, but so jealous was the miller of the title he had appropriated from his wife, he would permit Henrietta no husband from among the youth of the place; he held out for a suitor of noble birth. And though with every passing year the task of chaperonage grew more difficult—especially since Mrs. Russecks, so far from sharing her husband’s sympathies, not only allied herself with Henrietta in the cause of love but was prepared to join her daughter in any amorous adventure they could contrive.

  “Yet for all their ingenuity and the wiles of a score of would-be lovers, Sir Harry hath managed to keep his eye on ’em day and night. When he’s at the inn, they are his barmaids, more often than not; when he’s at the mill, they are his grist-girls. They even sleep all in a room, with Sir Harry’s cutlass hanging ready at the bedpost. Only once in all these years have the pair of ’em got free of him—and marry, ’twas a fortnight folk still talk about!”

  When they were still a hundred feet from the mill—which from the look of it served also as the family house—Harry Russecks stepped outside and glared at them, arms akimbo. At the same time they saw in an upstairs window the figures of two women regarding them with interest. Mary Mungummory returned their wave, but Ebenezer shivered.

  “And ye say he fears these mill commissioners like the plague?” McEvoy mused. Suddenly he laid his hand on Mary’s arm. “I say, thou’rt a good sort, Mary; will ye aid me in a little lark? And you as well, Eben? I owe ye my life already; will ye stand me farther credit?” All he wished to do, he explained to his skeptical companions, was give the boorish miller a draught of his own prescription; if he failed, none would be the worse for it, and if he succeeded—

  “I’Christ, but let’s put it to the test!” he said hurriedly, for they were almost within earshot of the miller. “State thy own affairs as always, Mary, and say ye know no more of us than that ye picked us up along the road after the storm. Nay, more: ye suspect there is more to us than meets the eye, inasmuch as we’ve been uncommon secretive from the first, and chary o’ stating our names and business.”

  “ Twill ne’er succeed, lad,” Mary warned, but her eyes twinkled already at prospect of a prank.

  “Prithee, John,” Ebenezer whispered, “we’ve no time for frivolous adventures! Think of Bertrand and Captain Cairn—”

  He could protest no more for fear of being overheard, and McEvoy’s expression was resolute. The Irishman’s sudden interest in the miller’s daughter struck him not only as a conventional impropriety and a breach of their solemn trust, but also as a sort of infidelity to Joan Toast, despite the fact that Joan had clearly abandoned McEvoy for himself, and that he himself had been unfaithful to her in a sense by far less honorable than the sexual. He held his peace and waited miserably to see what would develop.

  “Afternoon, Sir Harry!” Mary called, and clambered down from the wagon. “Just passing through, and came to pay my respect to Roxie.”

  The miller ignored her. “Who are they?”

  “Them?” Mary glanced back in surprise, as if just noticing her passengers. “Ah, them ye mean! They’re two wights I found near Limbo Straits after the storm.” In a voice just audible to the poet she added, “Said they had business in Church Creek, but they’d not say what. Is Roxie in?”

  “Aye, but ye’ll not see her,” the miller declared, still glaring at the two men. “Thou’rt no fit company for a lady, e’en though she be a bitch o’ perdition. Get on with ye!”

  “Just as ye say.” She waited as McEvoy climbed down, followed by Ebenezer. “If ye have any business farther north,” she told them with a wink, “ ’twould be no chore for me to ferry ye. I’ll be yonder by the inn till tomorrow or next day.”

  “Most charitable of ye, madame,” said McEvoy with a short bow. “And I thank ye for service both to ourselves and to His Majesty. ’Twill not be long till we reward ye more tangibly.”

  “Who are ye?” Russecks demanded. “What’s your business in Church Creek?”

  McEvoy turned, and so far from being intimidated, he surveyed the miller from head to toe with exaggerated suspicion.

  “Speak up, dammee!”

  Ebenezer saw the black beard commence to twitch in anger and was tempted to end the hoax before it was irrevocably launched, but before he could muster his courage McEvoy spoke.

  “Did I hear this lady address you as Sir Harry?”

  “Ye did, save ye be deef as well as cock-proud.”

  McEvoy looked accusingly at Mary. “Is’t some strange humor of thine, madame, or a prank betwixt the twain o’ ye, to pretend this glowering oaf is Sir Harry Russecks?”

  From above, where the ladies had opened the casement to listen, came a gasp and a titter; even staunch Mary was taken aback by the Irishman’s daring.

  “How?” shouted the miller. “Doth he say I’m not Sir Harry?” His hand flew to the hilt of his cutlass.

  “Nay, Ben, don’t draw!” McEvoy cried to Ebenezer, who trembled nearby. “What, ye left your short-sword in the wagon?” He threw back his head and laughed; everyone, the miller and his women included, stood dumfounded.

  “ ’Tis well for thee, little miller,” McEvoy said grimly, and went so far as to tweak the fellow’s beard. “My friend Sir Benjamin had pricked thy gizzard in a trice, as he hath pricked two hundred like ye in the service of His Majesty. Now take us to Sir Harry, and no more impertinence, else I’ll bid him flog the flour out o’ thy hide.”

  “If ye please, sir,” Mary broke in, plainly relishing the miller’s discomfiture: “This is Sir Harry Russecks, on my life, sir, flour or no—yonder’s his wife and daughter, sir, that will swear to’t.”

  The ladies at the window merrily confirmed the fact, but McEvoy feigned some lingering doubt.

  “If thou’rt Sir Harry Russecks, how is’t thou’rt got up as a clownish laborer in the mill?”

  “What’s that ye say? Why, don’t ye know, sirs—” He appealed to Mary for aid.

  “Why, ’tis Sir Harry’s little whim, sir,” Mary declared. “ ’Tis the mill first earned his bread, ere he married Mrs. Russecks, and he’s not one to forget his humble birth, is good Sir Harry.”

  “Aye, aye, that’s it; she hath hit the mark fair.” For all his relief at the explanation, Russecks appeared not entirely happy with the reference to his birth. “Did ye—did I hear ye say thou’rt in the King’s employ, sirs?”

  “In a manner o’ speaking, aye,” McEvoy declared. “But I’d as well tell ye plainly at the outset, our commission went down with crew and pinnace in the storm, and till a new one comes from St. Mary’s ye have the right to bar us from the premises an it please ye.”

  The miller’s eyes widened. “Thou’rt Nicholson’s commissioners?”

  McEvoy refused either to affirm or deny the identification, declaring that until his authority was legal he thought the wisest course would be to speak no further of it.

  “In any case,” he said in a tone less stern, “ ’tis not alone on Nicholson’s business I travel. My
name’s McEvoy—Trade and Plantations when I’m home in London—Sir Jonathan at Whitehall is my father.”

  “Ye don’t tell me!” marveled the miller, not yet entirely free of suspicion. “I can’t say I have the pleasure o’ knowing a Sir Jonathan McEvoy at Whitehall.”

  “To our discredit, I’m sure.” McEvoy made a slight bow. “But I shan’t lose hope that Mrs. Russecks may redeem us by acquaintance with the name.”

  This thrust evoked another response from the upstairs window; when McEvoy raised his eyes to the ladies, Mrs. Russecks (who Ebenezer saw was indeed the full-blown beauty Mary claimed her to be) nodded archly, and smiling Henrietta made an eager curtsy.

  McEvoy gestured towards Ebenezer. “This formidable fellow is my friend Sir Benjamin Oliver, that thanks to his wondrous eye and stout right arm is belike the youngest member o’ the peerage. Ladies, I give ye Sir Benjamin: a lion on the battlefield and a lambkin in the drawing-room!”

  Ebenezer blushed both at the imposture and the characterization, but bowed automatically to the ladies.

  “The fact is,” McEvoy went on, “Sir Benjamin’s father is visiting the plantations on business of his own, and I’m showing my bashful friend here the countryside. Needless to say, he hath heard of Mrs. Russecks’s family in England.”

  “Ye do not say!” The miller wiped his nose proudly with a forefinger. “Heard o’ Mrs. Russecks’s family in England! Oh Roxie, did ye hear what the gentleman said? Our family’s the talk o’ the English peerage! Come down here!”

  Mrs. Russecks lost no time in greeting the visitors at the door.

  “This here’s my wife Roxanne,” the miller said proudly. “The noblest damned lady on the Eastern Shore.”

  “Enchanté,” McEvoy said, and to Ebenezer’s horror, embraced the woman in a loverlike fashion and kissed her ardently.

  “Out upon’t!” cried the miller, drawing his sword. “I say, dammee, give o’er! What in thunder d’ye do there, ’pon my soul?”