Feast Day of the Cannibals

by Norman Lock

  Melville stood beside me, contemplating the floor. Is it the old trouble with your eyes that makes you downcast? I asked him in my mind. When I could no longer put off what the occasion demanded, I went to Ellen and Franklin and, taking their hands, mumbled condolences. Franklin appeared not to know me. Ellen took her hand away. A fly might have brushed her cheek, I told myself, or an itch have started requiring her hand’s attention. I hoped that she had not recalled the afternoon in the park when, desperate and besotted, I held her wrist much too long and hard. Melville and I each drank a glass of gin punch set out for the mourners and left the house to its sorrow. I felt certain that I would never see her again.

  In this, as in so much else, I was wrong. Ellen visited me in prison one dreary afternoon. She had traveled north on the Hudson River Railroad as far as Sing Sing. She was chilled to the bone by the walk from the depot to the penitentiary in a lightly falling rain. I won’t bore you with the details of her visit, except to recall the sentence with which she left me—one that did more than a governor’s pardon could to lift my spirits: “I’m grateful to you, Shelby.”

  I was certain that Martin had not done away with himself, but had been hoisted aloft on the balance beam by Gibbs, who was more than capable of murder and a grisly, ironic gesture.

  “It was John Gibbs,” I said to Melville when we stopped at the end of Maiden Lane to allow a dray to pass. “He murdered Martin and dressed it as a suicide.” I had spoken abruptly, like a man for whom speaking the truth had been the furthest thing from his mind.

  “What makes you think so?” asked Melville. He might have been asking why I thought the coming winter would be a hard one, he showed so little surprise.

  I told him everything there was to tell: my fight with Gibbs in the Saxony’s hold, the knife, his having followed Martin and me to the Battery, his drunken insinuations, the second blow I landed on his face, the bare-knuckle contest in the Bowery, my degradation at the Slide, his threat to expose me, his visit to Martin’s house, the latter’s terror and my misgivings. I didn’t spare myself, and the odd thing was that Melville didn’t appear the least shocked. I suppose that his youthful experiences had inured him to dismaying revelations.

  “I doubt it can be proved,” he said. “Gibbs is cunning, like all of his kind. There’s no evidence or witness against him. The watchman claims to have seen nothing. No, I’m afraid there’s nothing on which Auguste Dupin could chew.” Melville did as much to his bottom lip and then said with finality, “For your sake, Shelby, let it go. The public will sooner forgive a murderer than a sodomite.”

  The vile word struck me like a blow, and I glared at Melville, who did not appear to notice my disgust.

  “I’ll see to the Leander this afternoon,” he said brusquely. “You go home and compose yourself.”

  With those parting words, he started for Gansevoort Pier.

  I had no intention of composing myself. I wanted to stoke my anger—to bring it to the boil and put it, hot and piping, at the service of revenge.

  Yes, good people of the future, this is one of those old-fashioned stories—a revenger’s tale worthy of Cyril Tourneur. Because I am stubbornly clinging to what is probably a foolish optimism, I’ll suppose that you find such accounts of vicious passion incomprehensible in your enlightened age.

  All that remains is for me to say how it was done, which calls for another story. To tell it, I’ll try to emulate the feverish tone that Melville struck in Moby-Dick. I refer the people of the future (assuming the book survives and there are readers to read it) to the last three chapters, which Melville—in the voice of Ishmael—devoted to “The Chase.”

  May 18, 1882, Gansevoort Pier (related in a heroic style)

  Unseen, I followed Melville to the river, and while he was inspecting coffee bags down in the Leander’s hold, I was taking up the harpoon, which was leaning in the corner of our office. I threw it over my shoulder, as Queequeg would have done, and strode into the street. (This, the heroic chapter of my autobiography, requires a lofty diction.) On the pier, I went in search of Gibbs. To be absent so soon after Martin’s death, I reasoned, would cast suspicion on him.

  “Gibbs is cunning,” Melville had said. Had there been a grain of admiration in those words?

  “Why are you lugging that harpoon, friend?” asked the appraiser Toliver as I boarded the Evangelist, a Quaker ship carrying pineapples from the Caribbean.

  “To kill rats.”

  He laughed and said, “There’s big’uns down below, sitting quiet and waiting for the Holy Spirit to fidget them.”

  “What do you mean by carrying that pigsticker?” asked a merchant sailor leaning over the quarter-deck rail of the Pelikan, in whose hold lay sixty thousand pounds of Friesland pork.

  “I mean to kill an evil whale.”

  The man scratched his head and looked at me as if I were mad.

  I walked among the ships as Satan had among Job’s herds in the land of Uz and the Lord had asked His fallen angel, “Whence comest thou?” And Satan had replied to Him, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

  I may have been touched by the madness of Ahab when I shouted at a sailor chipping rust from a Glasgow collier:

  “‘Hast seen the White Whale?’” It was the same question the Pequod’s crazed captain put to the master of the Delight in Melville’s book.

  The sailor stared but gave no answer. And yet I’d heard a voice reply, “‘Aye, and I never saw its like before.’”

  “‘Hast killed him?’”

  In prison, I would learn whole pages by heart of what I think of now as a demonic book.

  “‘The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever do that!’”

  “‘Not forged! … Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life!’”

  Accursed life!

  I tell you, my as yet unconceived audience, that in my mind, I had grown gigantic, until I was proportioned like the bronze statue of George Washington standing on his plinth in front of the U.S. Custom House.

  Then I saw Gibbs with his back to me at the end of the pier, where it overhangs the river. I rushed toward him, careless of the noise. He spun around. A string of tobacco juice hung from his lower lip, which he’d been about to spit into the river.

  “You!” he said. His tone was derisive, his lips, which he wiped on his sleeve, were curled in a sneer. “Have you come to pick my teeth with that?”

  “You killed my friend!”

  “Your lover, you mean.”

  “You hanged Martin Finch.”

  “The Elizabethans believed that the mandrake, called ‘Little Gallows Man,’ grew from a hanged man’s seed spilled on the ground in a final rapture. I might go and pick some later; it’s said to be a potent aphrodisiac. Your friends at the Palace of Aladdin would pay dearly for it.”

  “Villain! Why did you kill him?” My voice betrayed incredulity, when I’d intended it to be stern.

  “I knew how much he meant to you.”

  He drew a knife. I threw the harpoon. It caught him between the ribs.

  “‘I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!’” Ahab’s words, or Melville’s, but for the moment, they were mine by lordly appropriation and necessity. I had become Ahab smiting the whale. (Or was I the whale avenging itself on an insane antagonist who had harried it night and day? Symbols have a potency felt by readers in their blood and bones; they are more faithful to the mind’s complexity than mere unvarnished truth.)

  A jet of blood fountained from Gibbs’s mouth, turning it to a scarlet grimace. Clutching the shaft, he fell backward into the North River. Briefly, he floated, the harpoon rising from his chest like a mast. His eyes saw nothing more of earth. What they saw of the world to come, I couldn�
�t guess, save that his expression was one of horror. He gazed on hell or on the abyss, into which Ahab and the White Whale had plunged. Gibbs rolled over, and the weight of the harpoon dragged him down beneath the water’s roiling surface until I could see him no longer. In my exultation, I sang an old harpooner’s song:

  So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,

  While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!

  So is evil served, I told myself, and knew that I was lying, because good can never get the upper hand in the contest between righteousness and wickedness.

  I escaped capture on board a ship bound for the Caribbees, where I lived in contentment on a golden beach, eating fish and coconuts, admiring faultless sunsets, and siring a dozen brown children. Let’s hope, Roebling, if you are awake, that the future to which my words are winging will be tolerant of differences and that our descendants will have finally found an all-embracing word for love. And let us hope—although I fear it is too fond a one—that none will abuse or be abused in the new Arcadia and murder will have become as antiquated as the flintlock musket. Well, Roebling, what did you think of my story?

  Fallen fast asleep. You’re worn-out by a madness of your own. It was more madness than malady, the thing that crushed you and from which you’re not likely to recover. We pay a heavy tax to strike out on our own. Whether by ship, mathematical calculations, transcontinental railroad, or the Hudson River Railroad as far as San Francisco or Sing Sing—it scarcely matters. Must the people of the future also pay ambition’s price, or will they be the beneficiaries of humankind’s ancient struggle? Melville, you, Grant, even Sam Clemens ought never to have been allowed to fall into the pit of ruin—an arrears in Melville’s case worse than what is set down in ledgers.

  I hardly matter. I aspired no higher than to imitate wealthy gentlemen who play cards in private clubrooms, dress according to the latest fashion plates, intone doxologies as though they were on familiar terms with God, sitting comfortably in reserved pews inside churches named Trinity or Grace, and marry a handsome woman of their class—or if not inclined to matrimony, to live as gentlemen bachelors, admired for their gentility, sought after for their opinions, and courted by stockbrokers, rich merchants, and young upstarts alike.

  And Martin Finch? He might have mattered had he lived. Or maybe not. Probably not. The mass of men and women don’t matter except in and of themselves. Franklin was stoical in his grief; Ellen wept in hers what men deride as womanish tears. Evidently, Martin mattered to them. Did he to me? Yes, for reasons I have yet to comprehend. Let us hope that people ages hence will weep unashamedly for their dead and for the death of childish hopes.

  The heroic tale of the destruction of an evil man named Gibbs is finished—told, however unsatisfactorily, in the manner of Ahab’s fatal combat with a whale, whose ancestors were Jonah’s great fish and, long before that, the great whales created by the Lord on the fifth day. God made them all, but who, I wonder, made Ahab?

  Herman Melville did, one of the pygmy gods who rule the little world of books.

  May 19, 1882, Gansevoort Pier (related in a prosaic style)

  Now I’ll tell a more plausible conclusion to my tale.

  Like a monomaniac, I hunted Gibbs on the pier and among the ships, in the scale house and sheds. I searched Gansevoort Street high and low. I went to his rooming house on Charlton Street, questioned his landlady, collared and buttonholed pedestrians passing on the pavement outside the ramshackle house. That evening, I went to see General Grant.

  “What brings you here, Mr. Ross?”

  I could see that he was failing. That such a small thing—mere atoms of malignancy—should fell a man who had passed unscathed through the Civil War and endured two clamorous terms of the presidency! Say what you will of Grant, his life has been large and deserves to be extinguished by a leviathan.

  “General, what is the worse sin you can imagine?”

  “One that does not even have a commandment condemning it: betrayal.”

  Yes, I said to myself.

  “Have you betrayed someone, Shelby, or been betrayed?”

  “Both, sir.” I’d betrayed Martin by not standing by him until after he’d been tidied and boxed up in his coffin. John Gibbs had betrayed me and my feelings for Martin, no matter how muddled and troubling they were and continue to be. (In addition, I betrayed that good soul Franklin and, in this effusion, I am betraying Herman Melville, whose soul I have plundered in order to furnish my own tale.)

  “God forgive you the one and console you for the other,” said Grant. His voice seemed to have come from a room other than that in which I stood with my hat in my hands.

  Later that night, I went looking for Gibbs at the boxing ring and the Slide, where disgust nearly overwhelmed me. No one knew of his whereabouts. None cared to know. Thus are even the vicious betrayed by those who share their vice.

  The next morning, I searched the pier and surrounding streets again. At noon, my mouth dry, I stopped at a taproom on Horatio Street, close by the river. There he was—Gibbs, drinking shots of whiskey with another man, a merchant sailor by the look of him, both men bound for stupefaction. Gibbs raised his face and saw me looming in the doorway (standing there—this is the prosaic version of my story). He looked surprised. Without a word—he was not worth the expense of breath—I shot him with an army revolver Melville kept in his office drawer.

  The gun dropped from my hand. A woman screamed. The merchant sailor scratched his bristly chin. I heard heavy beer mugs clatter against one another in the barmaid’s beefy hands. Chairs scraped back on floorboards strewn with peanut shells. I heard a boy run out into the street and call for a policeman. I heard a gurgling sound inside Gibbs’s chest. I walked over to his body—soon to become meat—crouched, and put my ear next to his mouth. I was curious to hear his last words; he said nothing, however. In death, his mouth hung open in a foolish grin, hung open like a gate on broken hinges. His eyes—a lovely hazel—stayed open, and if they saw anything, it was only the sooty ceiling.

  June 2, 1882, Trial and Aftermath

  Melville advised me to accept my sentence, which would, he felt sure, be a clement one because of the notorious personality of John Gibbs, which had emerged in testimony, however much it had been scrubbed clean of gross indecency. He was shown to be a bully who had persecuted Martin for his “inadequacy” until, having reached the limit of his endurance, he hanged himself. Even a steel cable will snap when the load exceeds its tensile strength, and Martin had little steel in him. On hearing of “the unfortunate Mr. Finch’s suicide,” my lawyer argued, I had lost my wits temporarily and taken revenge on “a thoroughly despicable person.” Everyone involved in adjudicating my guilt or innocence was eager to settle the matter. The sultry atmosphere of a hot June day stifled enthusiasm for the entertaining spectacle of a man disgraced and fighting for his life. Had the torrid details of the case been made known, the trial would have dragged on until the reporters’ ink ceased to flow and newspapers to profit by the lurid drama playing in White Street at the Tombs. Melville had counseled me—wisely, I now know—to say nothing of my suspicions concerning Martin’s suicide, since the search for and discovery of evidence would have made a circus of the trial and ruined my reputation—and, more important, Martin’s—beyond any hope of saving or repair.

  So it was that, late in the afternoon, the judge rapped his gavel conclusively, and I was taken in a Black Maria first to the city’s jailhouse and thence to Sing Sing to begin a three-year sentence for manslaughter, which was afterward reduced to two years because of my exemplary behavior and Melville’s persistent advocacy.

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

  By now, the elephants will have all gone home to their chains and narrow stalls. Barnum is feasting with friends. I picture him at a table surrounded by Tom Thumb, resurrected for the occasion, a bearded lady, the Feejee Mermaid, Chang and Eng, and Jenny Lind. They are eating oysters on silver plates. Th
ey are drinking champagne. The sound of corks pulled from bottles is like that made by cannons fired across the water to raise drowned men from their graves. I hear Barnum and the others laughing while the elephants trumpet in sorrow.

  I wonder what Barnum and his fabulous cohort dream. Is it of the American Museum, reduced to ashes, from which it did not rise again? And the elephants—are they dreaming in their hopelessness of a green savanna beneath the African sun? And Melville. Is he dreaming in his bed of a great white whale? And what ancient dream coils like smoke in the brain of a whale? Could it be of Ahab, reckless and implacable? Or does the white whale swim though Ahab’s dream until the earth is finally rid of men?

  We cling to our stories like a mountaineer the rope that separates him from the chasm, or a drowning sailor the lifeboat that is his last resort from the abyss, or a man on trial for his life, knowing that only lies told with fervor and conviction stand between him and the gallows.

  Pray for me, you people of the future—pray that I, who was returned to dust a hundred or a thousand years before your time, am at peace with the world and with myself.