Feast Day of the Cannibals

by Norman Lock

  Two boys were standing at the water’s edge, where exhausted waves—their energy spent by the distance they’d traveled from the ocean—dredged up pebbles and broken shells. Nothing is so interesting to boys as a shipwreck unless it be a house on fire or a dead horse in the street. I supposed that the pair of them was debating the question of how many pirates had drowned and concocting a plan to get aboard the Starr and ransack her for treasure.

  A young woman, most likely their mother, had been raking clams and putting them in a basket lined with seaweed when she noticed the boys. She stood up, straightened her back, and shouted at them, “Max and Drew! Get away from there this instant!”

  Naturally, the boys ignored her, and in a theatrical rage practiced by mothers of young children, she stormed after them. Holding each one by an ear, she dragged them back to the rake and basket while they screamed blue murder.

  Melville laughed good-naturedly and said, “The only thing more vexing than a boy is two of them!”

  Lizzie had borne him two sons. The elder, Malcolm, had shot himself before he reached nineteen in the house on Twenty-sixth Street, where I had dined a month before.

  Melville grew quiet. Perhaps the memory of his dead boy was going through his mind. Or maybe he was transfixed by the glancing light on the water or the shadows of clouds grazing on Staten Island’s far hills. Or was he simply amazed at the way his luck had gone and his life turned out?

  A waterman rowed us out to the Starr in his flat-bottomed boat. We stepped aboard and went down into the hold, where we discovered the illicit cargo and, crushed beneath a crate of machinery intended for a factory in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, a crewman who had not escaped.

  “Leave him be,” said Melville. “It’s not so warm today that he will start to stink. Let’s do what we were sent to do, and then get the hell away from here. The marines will deal with him.”

  I agreed, and we set to work inspecting the cargo, a fair portion of which was the product of the poppy.

  “Strange to think that something natural and pretty should be vicious,” I said naïvely.

  “The man who visited a brothel and came away with the Spanish pox probably said the same thing,” he replied ruefully.

  He unstoppered a flask he sometimes carried in his pocket, and we drank to “dissembling appearances.” By the time we’d finished our work, we had also drunk to “la vida breve,” “Walt Whitman and the ‘procreant urge of the world,’” “Lucy Ann”—whether a woman or a ship, I never discovered—“Hawthorne,” “the fleshpots of the ancient world,” “Guttenberg,” and the “fallibility of Galileo, who got it wrong.”

  “The world doesn’t move around the sun,” said Melville. “It revolves around each and every one of us. We are—every Jack and Jill—the center and fulcrum. And that, Shelby, is the trouble with the world and our damnable kind.”

  Both of us emerged from the stuffy hold with a headache and a brain fuddled by alcohol and fumes. Making a megaphone of his hands, Melville shouted to the waterman, who had been tonging for oysters while we were doing our best not for God or king, but for the United States Customs Service.

  Melville gave a convincing imitation of a drunkard, and I felt that my own two legs could not be trusted. We sat forward of the dripping oyster baskets while the waterman expertly plied the sweep oar. Shortly, the boat scraped up onto the pebbly beach.

  “I need a nap,” said Melville, walking with the exaggerated fastidiousness of the besotted toward a stand of pine trees, where he flopped down, shut his eyes, and began to snore. It would have been a piece of low comedy had I not followed suit.

  We awoke when the sun was setting fire to the western-facing windows of Manhattan, visible, if only to our mind’s eye, whose vision is imperfect. We were parched and famished—words ordinarily applied to draught-stricken landscapes and cattle. Our heads had cleared of vapors, and we left the beach to find an eating house in Keyport. As we rode the omnibus back the way we’d come, I watched the wind darken Raritan Bay and ruffle it to chop.

  We ate at Keebees, at the foot of the Keyport and Holmdel docks, which thrust into the Raritan like two splinters. I searched my mind for something to say that would interest Melville. At such times, I felt out of my depth—a goldfish in the ocean or a plumber arrived at Emerson’s house to fix a leaky pipe during a meeting of the Transcendental Club.

  “It strikes me as odd,” I hazarded to say, “that a place should change its character according to the direction from which it is approached.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Melville, having pierced a fried oyster with his fork.

  “I was thinking of Union Beach. It would appear to exist according to our view of it.”

  He lay the fork on his plate with a clatter, an invitation for me to continue.

  “When we saw it through the open window of the omnibus, it appeared ordinary. But when the waterman rowed us ashore from the Starr, it seemed somehow exotic.”

  On such a beach, Robinson Crusoe began his twenty-eight-year ordeal on the “Island of Despair,” at the mouth of the Oroonoque, visited, according to the timetable governing hunger, by cannibals. On such a beach, Captain Cook came ashore at Tahiti, and by Anna Maria Bay, at Nuku Hiva, Melville entered earth’s erogenous zone, where shame was unknown to the tattooed inhabitants and the lurid colors of the birds and flowers could have brought genteel ladies to a swoon.

  Viewed from land, Union Beach is no more than a cusp of sand lying against a bight of Raritan Bay. Seen from the water, it is anything you want it to be. The bridge rearing up outside the window, Roebling, is not the same one the sandhogs knew, laboring inside the caissons, or the people know who cross it. And the Herman Melville I saw across the oilcloth-covered table in Keyport was not the same man that others did. (And Gibbs? Always my thoughts return to him. I sometimes wonder if he existed apart from me, or I apart from him. Were we also Chang and Eng?)

  “It is naïve to think in terms of absolutes in nature,” replied Melville. “Emerson wrote of a ‘radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts,’ whereby ‘The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.’ The universe exists only in relation to us, and our doom is to look at others and see only ourselves.” His voice and still-handsome face were fretted by regret. “On second thought, there is one absolute in nature.”

  “And what might that be?” I asked.

  “Evil. It is a quality inherent in nature, to which certain men and women resort. In that evil is not evenly distributed throughout living things, there must be a predisposition to it. Moby Dick was an absolute that compelled Ahab to dwell on it because he was predisposed to do so.”

  Abruptly, Melville changed the subject to the excise tax, as though his mind had been caught by a contrary wind. “The tax on goods should be less than the cost of smuggling them,” he said, “or it will behoove a person of greed and recklessness to attempt to circumvent customs.”

  “In an ideal world, there would be no need for an excise tax—or customs inspectors,” I said.

  “Emerson can write about idealism till hell freezes over, but it won’t change the fact that our world is a fallen one. Accordingly, there are those who, unable to control their appetites, necessitate their regulation for the common good. In other words, Shelby, if bad men mean to run opium in ships, there must be a sixty-gunner to blow them to hell out of the water.”

  “Emerson died last month.”

  “I didn’t know. Let’s hope God is not a Calvinist after all.”

  At another table, two men were arguing the dualities of their bayside village life, a tiny Manichaean universe of clams or oysters, flatboats or dories, turnips or parsnips, Baptists or Methodists, lager or stout, draft horses or mules, fat women or thin ones from which to choose—good and evil seemingly having no part in their debate. To stay h
ere, I said to myself, would be to cut the Gordian knot and retire to a life of simplicity. I said as much to Melville.

  “Everywhere there are people, it’s the same,” he replied. “Whether you go to Timbuktu, Tierra del Fuego, or San Francisco, you’ll find little difference among men, except, perhaps, for the color of their skin, their barbering, or tailoring. There is no running away from mankind, Shelby. More’s the pity!”

  In San Francisco, I was bound by probability to find another vicious brute to harry me. But I’d leave my shame behind in New York City.

  We left the two men to debate their contrary faiths and heresies and the village to nurse its spites and grudges. Shortly, we were on board a ferryboat headed for Manhattan as evening began its shy approach.

  What became of the sojourner among cannibals who wore skirts of bright tapa cloth, put bones and feathers in their ears, and scented their brown bodies with aromatic oils? Where was the sailor who had jumped ship in the Marquesas to escape a tyrannical captain, had been locked up for mutiny in the British stockade at the end of white-graveled Broom Road, on the island of Tahiti, had set bowling pins in Honolulu, hunted wild boar and picked breadfruit in the Typee Valley, and caught the spicy scent of citron and cloves from the gardens of Río? Does he exist—this man who once sailed into Valparaíso’s horseshoe bay surrounded by twenty hills, walked through the white city of Lima rotted at the core and saw wild dogs scavenging corpses in an open pit? Does he still live within the aging man—the young one who sailed above the ruins of the former imperial city of Callao, drowned by earthquake and tidal wave a century before?

  Melville was standing beside me in the bow of the ferry as the bay off Manhattan Island turned to gold, as it had for him long ago in Polynesia and in the Sandwich Islands.

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

  They’re coming, Roebling!

  The elephants—all twenty-one of them, with old Jumbo, the African pachyderm, in the rear, and Barnum, the world’s most shameless showman, out in front, waving an enormous hat. They’re parading along Fulton, making for your bridge. I see he’s also brought along camels and dromedaries! The streets are mobbed. You must hate the fuss.

  I never imagined it was your idea! But would you really prefer anonymity to fame, like Grant? I can’t imagine Mark Twain wishing his name could be erased from his books. Melville would be gratified if he could be one of the famous dead and, like Tom Sawyer, able to enjoy the posthumous flapdoodle. Being forgotten grieves and embitters him. The rest of us welcome the forgetfulness of others. It is their gift to us.

  Will you build another bridge or retire to Trenton? You’ve earned a sabbatical.

  Of course, there’s always work to be done and rivers to span! My friend, you look tired. Would you rather I left the rest of my story for another day?

  “Get it over with,” said the patient to the dentist, gritting his teeth.

  The last time I was here, I noticed your rock collection. Did it remind you of the world’s perdurable foundation, or its debris? Life breaks us all into pieces. If only we could be made whole with a dose of castor oil, a moral essay by Emerson, or a sip of wine at the Communion rail! The Almighty could have laid out a less fatiguing road for His creatures to follow than that of obedience. He tested Eve’s with an apple. “Shall I love God and forswear the fruit, or eat it and go my merry way?” She ate it, of course. Must we choose—always and only—between wicked indulgence and bitter renunciation? Must goodness taste like stale bread and sour wine?

  I admit that, in former days, I chose indulgence, though I do not consider its having been wicked. I had a taste for parvenu society; as the son of an upstart, the upper berths of the Gilded Age were closed to me. I envied the perquisites of affluence and the confidence that only wealth can bestow. But I would stoop only so low to enjoy them. My father had been a war profiteer—a pygmy beside avaricious giants, such as Philip Armour, who made his first million by selling pork short, or Thomas Durant, who bilked the federal government by laying tracks in oxbows from Omaha to the hundredth meridian and proved that, in railroad building, the shortest distance to a fortune is not a straight line. It takes guts to climb to the top, as well as a willingness to be less than fastidious in all matters, excepting one’s haberdashery.

  Before the catastrophe, I was summoned to an informal hearing at the New York Custom House. Melville accompanied me as a sort of defense attorney—not for an instant did he believe I was guilty of wrongdoing. It happened shortly after our return from Union Beach. I was accused of having falsified appraisals. Such fiddling was often and easily done. I went before a tribunal presided over by Caruthers, collector of customs. Flanking him were the naval officer and the chief surveyor, both of whom seemed no more concerned than schoolboys would be in deciding the fate of a possum cornered by a dog.

  I suspected John Gibbs of being behind the summons. He could have cast doubt upon my integrity by making a jotting in the ledger; he knows my business as well as his own. Melville also thought it likely. There was nothing to be done, however, and neither Melville nor I would risk a countercharge without evidence. I submitted, therefore, to the tedious examination by the collector, who spoke for all three men.

  The U.S. Custom House at 55 Wall Street, May 12, 1882

  “Mr. Ross, a serious charge has been brought against you,”

  “Brought by whom?”

  “Melville, that is beside the point.”

  “The reliability of an accuser is hardly beside the point.”

  “This is an inquiry, not a trial.”

  “Nevertheless, I insist on knowing the name of Mr. Ross’s accuser.”

  “The charge was made anonymously.”

  Melville sniffed in amusement while I examined a picture above my judges’ heads, commemorating the capture, in 1810, of the brig Chelmers of London by the French privateer Junon. The painting was a gift of General Lafayette during his American visit. At that time, the general also paid his respects to Melville’s Gansevoort relations in Albany. Thus are we caught—the illustrious, as well as the least of us—in history’s coils.

  Caruthers unfolded a sheet of paper and shook it like a dirty rag. “I’ve a letter stating that Mr. Ross has been undervaluing certain shipments in collusion with their receivers in order to reduce the tariff due on them. And for his generous attitude toward some of the merchants of our city, he has been handsomely remunerated.”

  “Nonsense!” said Melville. “Mr. Ross is beyond reproach.”

  “Do I take it that you will vouch for his honesty?”

  “Ross can be a fool, but he is never otherwise than honest. Does a dishonest man become a bankrupt?”

  I thought his argument ill-advised, as did Caruthers.

  “Very often,” he replied drily.

  Melville swept Caruthers’s barb aside as one would a pesky hornet.

  “Ross performs his duties punctiliously. His valuations are subject to my review. If you doubt him, then you must doubt me, as well.”

  “We appreciate your loyalty to a subordinate, Mr. Melville.”

  I hated to be called a subordinate, fool that I am.

  “Not every one of my subordinates deserves my loyalty.”

  “What are you insinuating?”

  Caruthers leaned forward in his chair expectantly; the naval officer played with a piece of string; the chief surveyor yawned.

  “Not everyone under my supervision is honest,” replied Melville matter-of-factly.

  “How so?”

  “By the law of probability. In that ours is an imperfect world and our species given to all manner of temptation and folly, it is likely that for every honest man, there is a dishonest one.”

  “You are uncommonly pessimistic, Melville.”

  “It’s a rare man who can pass through the land of bilk and money and not get his hands dirty.”

  Caruthers cleared his throat in irritation and said, “I can see that nothing will be gained by conti
nuing this discussion.” He cast a jaundiced eye on me. “Mr. Ross.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  I considered standing, as one does in court to hear his sentence passed, but on second thought, I did not think it worth the effort.

  “Consider yourself admonished!”

  I considered myself so.

  “I trust there will be nothing set down against him in the record,” said Melville.

  In the space of five minutes, I had come to love the man.

  “As you have pointed out, there is insufficient evidence. But we will be paying strict attention to the valuations of Mr. Ross and others working on Gansevoort Pier.”

  “And the author of that tattle? What do you intend to do about him?”

  “As I told you, the letter is anonymous.”

  The hearing concluded abruptly, without as much as the rap of a gavel.

  We stood once more in the briny air blowing down Wall Street from the river. Melville said contemptuously, “For a moment, I thought Caruthers was going to put on the black cap and sentence you to hang. The ass!”

  We rode the elevated up Greenwich Street as far as Gansevoort.

  “Looking down upon tarred roofs is neither uplifting nor picturesque,” said Melville gloomily. “There’s no more splendid view of the world than from the topsail yard.”

  Preoccupied by the morning’s unpleasantness, I merely grunted.

  He must have sensed my uneasiness. “Why does Gibbs have it in for you?”

  “We’ve had our differences,” I said, hoping to sound nonchalant. “I bloodied his face on two occasions.” I said nothing about the knife.

  “I never took you for a brawler, Shelby!”

  In spite of myself, I took pleasure in the compliment. What man wouldn’t have?

  “Beginning tomorrow, I’ll make sure you two don’t work together. I thought you’d be gone by now.”