Feast Day of the Cannibals

by Norman Lock

  My interest in Melville’s novel was not so great that I resented the time when I could not read more of it; neither was it so slight that I was eager to close the book and return it to the Mercantile Library, although I confess to having skipped the “Extracts (Supplied by a Sub-sub-Librarian).” My head was buried in the book, but it was not, as in the case of dull, soporific works, such as collected homilies or histories of the thirteen colonies, pillowed on it. I was picturing myself in New Bedford, sitting in a pew next to Queequeg, the tattooed cannibal, when Melville entered the room. He saw his book and was not pleased.

  “An author is no more grateful to a reader of his failures than a formerly pretty woman to her mirror for reminding her of the pox that left her scarred.”

  “I’m enjoying it, Herman.” I stretched the truth as anyone would to a superior.

  “Then you are in a minority, or what writers like to call an ‘elite readership.’ In the thirty years since Moby-Dick first appeared in America and Great Britain, it has sold fewer than four thousand copies. I don’t expect that Death, whenever he chooses to show himself, will burnish my dulled reputation, but for Lizzie’s sake, I hope I’m wrong. Now kindly put the book away. In any case, the problems of the universe are humbug.”

  With a petulant and resounding thud, I closed it on the page in which Queequeg signs aboard the Pequod. Sublimely indifferent to the glories of our civilization—as if to read and write were well beside the point of existence—the cannibal harpooner makes his mark, identical to one tattooed on his arm:

  Quohog.

  His mark.

  “If you’re excited by exotica, read this,” said Melville, handing me a customs declaration. “A consignment of sugarcane from Suriname awaits your pleasure aboard the Panama. I would like it cleared by six o’clock. The Griswolds want to collect it in the morning.”

  I told him it would be done on time, knowing that in all probability it wouldn’t. The slumgullions of the Customs Service are Whitman’s ideal democratic type: They “lean and loaf at [their] ease observing a spear of summer grass.” To be honest, they are more likely to observe their gobs of spit, as though their future could be scried in them.

  As I was leaving, Melville said, “Your friend Finch had an accident yesterday.”

  “When?”

  “Near to quitting time.”

  I was unaware of it, having been at the New York Custom House to get the surveyor’s signature on a number of documents of title. One of the perquisites of my job in the so-called “outside force” is an occasional visit to Wall Street to “confer” with my superiors, who are legion and barely sensible of my existence. I’m uncomfortable there. I seem always to be made to feel a transient whose genteel shabbiness is conspicuous among those at home in the marbled halls of power. My linen feels unclean. To their refined sense of smell, my clothes must reek of fish and tar.

  “What happened?” I let my voice go where it will.

  “A pallet loaded with barrels of Indian meal fell on him.” He saw my dismay and hurried to assure me that Martin wasn’t dead. “At the last moment, he stepped aside, or he’d be lying stiff on a pair of trestles.”

  “How could such a thing happen?” I said with the casual curiosity that a stray dog run down in the street would arouse. The docks are no place to be maudlin.

  “The break on the steam donkey let go, and Martin’s foot was badly injured.”

  Not so bad as your father’s, Roebling, crushed by a Fulton Ferry steamer.

  “He’s had the doctor to see him and should return to work in three or four weeks, barring complications.”

  Complications—the grit in the gear that frustrates our calculations!

  Melville had paused and would presently spoon out the rest of the medicine for me to swallow. “He lost two toes.”

  I wondered idly how many toes a person could lose and still walk unaided.

  “I’ve known men who’ve lost more than their toes,” said Melville brusquely.

  I laughed as one sometimes will at a particularly vicious or offensive joke. How often do we try to make ourselves out to be brutes?

  “John Gibbs will be your weigher on the Panama.”

  Melville looked at me carefully, knowing, I suppose, how much I hated Gibbs.

  Chance exerts its own influence over the affairs of men. It had brought me into a fateful conjunction with John Gibbs, and with his opposite in temperament, Martin Finch. Had there never been a panic and depression, I could have escaped my end—or more likely not. The wind that blows ill would have found me, bear away though I might. There are cannibals abroad on the island of Manhattan, who never get closer to the South Seas than whale oil and ambergris. They lie in ambush, waiting for us to make our inevitable mistakes.

  I climbed down into the hold of the Panama as one would descend into a pit of vipers. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up while my heart beat to an accompaniment of an odd whistling in my nose. In short, I was afraid. Encountering Gibbs sitting on a barrel, however, I was surprised to hear him greet me pleasantly, as if I’d never drawn a knife on him or bloodied his lip and nose.

  “Hello, Mr. Ross,” he said in his oiliest tone. “Keeping well, I hope?”

  “I am, thank you. And you?”

  “Tolerably.”

  We went on in this genteel way like two acquaintances meeting by chance at the bourse.

  “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” he said. (Had he used the word foot deliberately to make me think of Martin’s accident?)

  “I should not have gone for you. I lost my temper. I never wished anyone harm before.”

  A lie, of course. I had prayed often that a painful end would befall my creditors and especially Jay Gould and “Diamond Jim” Fisk, who happily would be shot dead in the Grand Central Hotel by Edward Stokes, another bankrupt. I’d be delighted if the whole gang of robber barons, crooks, and cutthroat moneymen of the Gilded Age would be torn limb from limb by a god of any persuasion, not excluding pagan, so long as he or she or it were inhumanly cruel and vengeful.

  “What do you say we speak no more of it?” asked a conciliatory Gibbs.

  At that moment, he looked like a perfectly ordinary man, if not a gentleman. You could encounter his like in the park or at the Battery, feeding pigeons. He might have been a genial cabman or a good-natured grocer filling a luckless widow’s reticule with turnips at a penny the pound.

  “Agreed?” he asked, extending a hand, which I took. Relieved and grateful, I could have kissed it.

  We set to work and soon were in fine spirits. I had believed myself to be an excellent judge of character but was happy to have misjudged Gibbs. It would not have done any good to have persisted in our hostility. Our occupation brought us together in dusky holds, in the gloomy scale house, and on the sometimes desolate pier. It would be easy to rip a man with the hook or knife or tip him into the river. My body could have caught the outbound tide and ended in the Atlantic. While it’s true I’d often wished harm upon my fellow men, I had neither the physique nor the sanguinary instinct necessary to kill one of them. I had a short fuse but lacked the lethal charge required to lay waste to my enemies.

  And what had Gibbs done to me? Ridiculed my clothes. Melville had done the same on my first morning in his office. I’d looked ridiculous and was deserving of their scorn. Gibbs had dirtied my boot with a stream of tobacco juice, but I’d been wearing rubber boots. No harm was done. I was the one who had picked up the knife and lunged at him. And Sunday? He’d breathed booze into my face, for which he’d been sorry.

  Having finished our work, Gibbs spiled a cask of Holland gin and filled a bucket with it before pegging the barrel closed. Snobs profess an aversion to gin, looking down their noses or pinching their nostrils in supercilious disgust. But like my father before me, I’ve always relished the drink for its clarity and the fragrance of juniper berries. Like Charles Dickens’s Mr. Jarndyce or Sarah Gamp, who lived on cucumbers and gin, I’d be content to sit by the fi
re on a nippy night and sip “Dutch water” till Morpheus descended or the cows came home.

  Gibbs ladled out gin from the bucket, drank it, and, having drawn another ladleful, gave it to me.

  I hesitated.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked with what might have been a momentary cunning in his eyes. “Whatever was in that old bilge barrel died a happy death in good Dutch gin,” he said. “Or is it that I took the first drink? Are you too refined to put your lips where mine have been?”

  I shivered, as if ice had formed in the hollows of my bones, though the day was mild and I stood within a beam of sunshine, which reached down into the hold.

  “Never fear!” said Gibbs, laughing merrily. “I don’t have ‘bad blood’ or the ‘Spanish disease.’” He gave me a peculiar look and said, “I’m free of what can come of lying with a woman.”

  Something shaped itself in my mind—a nameless, featureless disquiet—but I shook it off and in a moment had downed the ladle’s worth of gin. Instantly, I felt the good of it.

  “There’s a good lad!” shouted Gibbs. To be called a “lad” at my age—I was nearly forty—struck me as comical, and I laughed because of the gin, I suppose, which was already giddying my brain.

  Gibbs?

  I’d say he has ten years on me. He is grayish, unhealthy-looking—his hair and face, both gray. He looks like someone who has spent his years in the boiler rooms of ships and in the barrooms of ports. I’ve seen many men who look so. I wonder if your Irish sandhogs do after their years down inside the caissons. “The fetid stables of nightmares” Melville called them.

  Gibbs drank another ladleful, and at his encouragement, which seemed, now that I recall it, to have centered in his eyes, I followed his example.

  We sat on some fardage. He sang a sailor’s ditty, salty as a kippered herring. I can’t recall the words; I remember thinking it was funny. He chucked me on the chin and called me a “grand fellow.” I leaned my head against a barrel—by now I was drunk—and he spoke in a low voice. I could feel his moist breath against my ear. My eyes closed as though draper’s weights were fastened to the lids. I felt the ship roll under me, though it might have been only my gut that heaved. I was sick on the floor. Gibbs gave me more gin to wash out my sour mouth. I laid down on burlap ticking and felt his hand crawling on me, loathsome as a rat. I swatted it away, spat out my disgust as you would rancid meat, and before I fell into the waters of oblivion, I called him a vile name. The word escapes me. He stood and gave me a savage kick, and that was all I knew.

  Two years have passed since Ross related

  the first part of his story.

  The Brooklyn Bridge is now finished.

  On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum leads

  a troupe of elephants across it.

  On this day, Ross narrates

  the end of his story.

  PART TWO

  BARNUM & THE ELEPHANTS

  Washington Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884

  TWO YEARS HAVE PASSED since we were together in this room. You finished your work and went home to Trenton. I finished mine and went to prison. Much has happened, but I dare say we are much the same as before. The rise and fall—of a man or an empire—takes time to accomplish. Rome wasn’t built—nor did it end—in a day. I expect to go on awhile longer.

  Melville? He goes on as always. He’s the rock on which he dashes himself to pieces.

  In my cell, I read his adventure stories, Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. I’ll read them again on lonely, damp winter nights with the coal stove roaring like Ahab’s own ocean or curses. I’m no Ahab, Roebling, except in the immensity of the hatred I conceived for John Gibbs. It had been simmering for months, but the boiling over seems to have taken hardly any time at all. Three weeks … four. When it did rise up in me, it was scalding.

  Ahab. A man with such a name could never be a cringer, a worrier after his virtue and his purse, a petitioner whose whimper has turned hoarse in supplication, whose trouser knees are worn, whose head is bowed and back is bent, whose element is a slurry of cinders, wet ash, and horses’ stale staining the winter snow through which he tramps resignedly from almshouse to poorhouse until he is carried to his last and smallest house, a plain coffin in a pauper’s grave. Not that I’m any of those things, mind you; I never once begged the judge for mercy. But my fury did not last, and, like a pot taken off the boil, the hatred subsided when the cause was removed.

  What a name is Ahab! To be called thus must sever a boy from dependency, put iron in his marrow, and make a cold forge of the heart. It is a name to blow him out of childhood into the fullness of life, never mind the cost. Only a man of uncommon strength of will can bear the name of the seventh king of Israel and the ruler of Moab, whose corpse was defiled by dogs and swine, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, and whom God hated.

  I shouldn’t mind being hated by Him if I could be in the company of such a man, even if he was laid waste in Gilead and buried in a sty. King Ahab roared his defiance, as I would wish to do mine when the time comes. Melville’s famous captain did the same, although I’d sooner have been in the retinue of the Israelite than aboard the Pequod with its crazed master and crew. Ahab—raised in the Holy Land or in Nantucket—was accursed by God. Sometimes I think I am, as well, although my Christian name would suit an effete poet or a parlor snake.

  We all come at last to our story’s end, and I don’t give a damn if my husk, after the great winnowing, molders in the ground on Ward’s Island or in my father’s crypt at Green-Wood Cemetery—a pleasure park for cast-off flesh soon to be no more. Our bones are none the worse for common dirt, so long as they danced when the body was quick. That was the philosophy of my father, who began life a poor boy and ended it in the handsome tomb of a merchant prince. Having been rich for a time, he’d had the foresight to buy a vault in which he and his heirs could dwell “in perpetuity”—a condition existing nowhere except in the deed to a cemetery allotment.

  In prison, I had two years to ponder the Wheel of Fortune’s having turned against me. In my fancy, I chose to think of them as a sojourn on one of the Heliades, the seven islands in the Ocean Stream, where the people of the sun still live amid grape and fig vines, pear and apple trees. Some good came of my classical education after all! In my story, I owed my escape to Melville, who rowed me across the harbor to a waiting ship, just as the grown Pip had done for Magwitch. He was taken and drowned, but in my daydreams I fared better. I embarked on the Highlander, captained by a saintly man, which carried me, as in a dream, to the ocean between India and Ethiopia, called the Arabian Sea. I know why we tell one another stories. The reason is not, as Martin claimed, to console us for having only one life to call our own; stories help us to endure it.

  You’re a good listener, Roebling, if a laconic one. Your confinement makes you hungry for tales having nothing to do with metallurgy, mathematics, and catenary curves. And what in hell is a catenary curve? Never mind—I’m certain not to understand it. But what a magnificent thing your mind has wrought, my friend! And we both have lived to see it.

  I’m glad you let me visit you again. I was afraid you’d shun me. We’re much alike, I think. We are Isolatos—you, by reason of your sickness, and I, well, because I’m a bankrupt whose tastes are too elevated for his purse, which is too meager for the requirements of polite society. The patricians disdain my penury far more than the fact of my imprisonment. Why, some of the wealthiest men have been crooks: Boss Tweed, Thomas Durant, the rascal behind the Crédit Mobilier scandal and the Union Pacific “con,” Gould and Frick—and your contractor J. Lloyd Haigh, who is now breaking rocks at Sing Sing for having sold you inferior wire for the cables. The whole shebang could have fallen down like “London Bridge” had the fraud not come to light! Crooks, one and all, and yet they were accounted men of eminence and rank.

  I called Durant a “rascal.” The words we use for villainy are, like villain itself, ridiculous to modern ears. Reprobate. Sco
undrel. Ruffian. Roughneck. Rogue. I might just as well have called him a “whoreson dog” or a “jacksauce,” as in Shakespeare’s day—or a memorable phrase by Alexander Pope, which Melville used when he disparaged Collector of Customs Caruthers as a “mere white curd of Ass’s milk!” The wickedness of this century has outrun our vocabulary, and I suppose it will be left to the future to say what we truly were in our time. What will evil mean, I wonder, in the twentieth century? What range, resources, and ruthlessness will it imply?

  In this city, which the world calls “great,” there are those who will not be swayed by sentiment or suffer their purposes to be altered, who recoil at human frailty, and chafe at the restraints imposed by lawmakers and churchmen. They would give the Devil title to their soul and sign all requisite conveyances in their own blood before they’d see their schemes come to naught. They won’t blandish or fawn—no, not even at Doomsday, when, dressed in silken shrouds, they demand to be let in through heaven’s gate. I once fancied myself one of them. I might have been one still had circumstances not humbled me—had not ironed me flat. If only there were a drawing salve we could smear on our breast and be rid of all the poisons that waste us, body and soul! I wish He had made me other than I was.

  I recall reading in the Herald the early stories on the bends, which struck the diggers inside the second caisson. Caisson sickness nearly finished you. Having escaped burning and drowning, you became disabled by the very air you breathed inside that ghastly tomb. Your invalidism could have spelled disaster for the project—in the tabloids at any rate, those stew pots of hearsay and scandal. But the bridge stands, complete and miraculous, and has only to await Barnum’s stunt to allay the public’s fear that it will collapse. If only we could do the same for the airy structures our minds create out of nothing but desire and on which we raise our lives as though on bedrock! How reassuring it would be if Barnum’s elephants could march across our schemes and prove their worthiness, if only to ourselves!