by John Gardner
“More than all the rest, the thing that set my soul atremble was old Flint’s taking that girl back in time, demanding in a voice like a spelling-master’s—as if human history, for all its shocks, was a voyage more or less easily remembered, but dull, so trivial it had slipped our minds—that she tell him whatever the audience demanded of Roman antiquity, or Egypt and Babylon, or the lost gold cities of India. The houselights dimmed. The piano played softly. Her white dress shone like a moonlit cloud, and her face, with its oversized, mournful eyes, was like the moon reflected in the wine-gray sea. She told, in her sweet little tinkling voice, of floods, wars, famines-, of endless destructions in forests and the shadow of temple-domes. The Professors of History, brought to judge, were dumbfounded. I struggled for breath. He took her back still farther. Every word she spoke—solemn as a voice from a Chinese jug—made images rise in my mind more real than the theater walls, the red velvet curtains, the eerie music of Flint’s silver-turbaned piano player. He took her back to the earliest dwellings of man, the dripping caves. She talked of savage anthropophagi, half animal, half human, hunched around bonfires and whispering in terror of snakes. I began to feel something going wrong with my vision. I clung to my parents. Great gabbling birds flew all around me, purest white, darting, dipping, plunging, screeching, their wingtips stretching from wall to wall as they warred, all eyes, steel talons, and beaks, with the writhing serpents on the balcony around me. I screamed. I had seen all my life (I was then about nine) queer shadows at the edge of my bad left eye. Fraud though Lord knows he had to be, Flint had made them solidify a little. I was now convinced those shadows were real as the Parthenon, and a man like Flint, if he ever got his claws on me, could populate my world with such creatures. I’d have none of it! Those endless nightmares in which I confronted my father’s whales—not to mention things worse, such as ghosts and green-haired, golden-eyed mermaids—was bad enough! I became that instant a desperate man, a fanatic. No mystic voyages for Jonathan Upchurch, says I to myself. No fooling around with those secret realms
from whence deep thunders roare,
Must’ring thir rage, and Heav’n resembles Hell!
And so, as I say, I screamed. Flint spun around with his arms flung out and his coattails flaring—so people told me later—his terrible glittering face full of glee at the effect he’d produced, and he stared straight at me to improve on it a little, but then he saw I wasn’t looking at him or at the girl neither, and he turned to stare, like a man alarmed, at where I was staring. The girl did the same, then swung her eyes toward me again, and then she too began to scream. Within three seconds the whole audience was hooting and throwing its hands up and pushing toward the aisles as if the building was on fire, and Flint was yelling with all his might, ‘Gentlemen, I implore you!’ and my father beside me was gleefully beating his fists on his knees, saying, ‘Lunatics!’ smiling like a lunatic himself, my poor mother trying to catch hold of my hands and comfort me. It was Bedlam—on all sides of me the rushing of those birds and the roaring and shoving of the crowd gone berserk—but like Shadrack meeting the eyes of the angel in the fiery furnace, I saw none of that, saw only the eyes of the golden-haired girl and screamed straight into them for mercy, and the girl screamed back.
“What it all meant I had no idea, though for years after that the name Miranda Flint had a dire effect on me, robbed me of my reason, made me sure that in a minute I’d suffocate. I was a cursed man. Whenever I heard Dr. Flint was in town I’d haunt the dark alleys of whatever shabby hall he was playing in, hoping I’d maybe get a glimpse of the two. A thousand times I fancied I saw them, or turned some corner and believed they’d trapped me, and my heart stopped dead as a mackerel. But little by little, of course, the spell weakened. Their pictures on theater bills grew foreign (she grew thicker, less appealing; his mustache grew scraggly) and at last they lost their power to frighten and draw me, suck me out toward unearthly things. Finally, the Flints’ names dropped from the circuit, and I believed I was free of them. Dr. Flint was by now a wanted man, and as for his little Miranda, rumor had it she’d died somewhere in India. I’d escaped by a hair, I was pretty well convinced. That one encounter had proved there are deadly, enslaving attractions that might laugh at even winds and tides, unhinge the swing of planets. Such was my opinion and—because of my father’s tales, no doubt—the old gray sea was involved in it.
“For these reasons, despite the proximity of my home to the port of Boston, despite my father’s scorn and my mother’s grief (she’d misgivings about the whole universe)—despite, even, the silent yet thunderous appeal of those powerful-masted merchantmen, gunboats, and whalers, sails pregnant-bellied as the noise of French horns, banners aflutter like fanfare trumpets—I kept to landside, working like a devil to stir up sufficient capital to go west to Illinois and try out farming.
III
“I had read in books about southern Illinois. It was a violent country— land of Mike Fink and Dan’l Boone and the blaspheming, murdering Harpe brothers—a country of mountains and rivers and endless hardwood forests; in the spring, a place of amazing greens—there’s more kinds of trees there in southern Illinois than in the whole of Europe— and in both spring and fall it’s a great broad highway to floods and tornadoes, the mightiest in the world. Not northern Illinois, you understand—flat and mathematical, staring like an idiot at endless sky and pasture. A whole other kingdom, this southern Illinois, dark with timber and bluffs and the slide of big rivers. I had to go there, that’s all. Let other men hunt the squinting whale, or wait in dark upstairs rooms for spooks, the new age aborning, the exploded mind. Give me a southern Illinois big flood—silent, omnivorous, as unallegorical as butcher’s bones—and give me a safe, high cabin to watch it from, with a woman beside me, some witchly Miranda Flint grown saner. The water swallows up the noise as it does the bottomlands, hurrying yellow. Where the current’s strong there may be a humming, a gurgle now and then, or the hissing of friction by the red mud bank; and up the branches there may be a crashing as the yellow-brown wall comes down the slopes with its cargo of pigs and prairie chickens. But there’s no sound, nothing, where the big flood rolls, the Ohio conjoining with the Mississippi: a burden silent, swollen, sinister—the idea of evil as pure physicality, with animals peeking from their high rock caves and Indians watching, silent as the waters, from the blufftops across from mine. There, no place but there, I would hack out my freedom.
“It was a place and occupation that appealed to me not only for the majesty in it, the liberty it afforded (I had a great-uncle, a bookish old hermit, who farmed in upper New York State), but also because, I may as well confess, it would take me close to wild Indians. Where I got this attraction, Heaven knows. I’ve been all my life a rapacious reader, much to my mother’s and our minister’s consternation. They believed the poor best that could be made of me, given the danger of my turning into a philosopher, was a schoolmaster—which, at age sixteen, I became. Perhaps it was some poem I’d read in my boyhood, or a half-ridiculous, half-mystical picture on a box of cigars. As for flesh and blood (discounting harpooners, who were a separate breed, their eyes cool reflections of the eyes of whales), I’d seen no more than a half-dozen Red Men in all my life—Vermont or York State rural Indians who’d drifted to Boston in deerskins and peculiar shaggy slippers and hats as formal as a Congressman’s. Their eyes stared through you like the eyes of a long-since-beaten Assyrian, or a man brought back from the distant future, who knows your obsessions and’s been told he must not interfere. They were eyes that had seen things that I, for all my books, had not—tornadoes, the tumble of buffalo, the light on forest floors after rain, the mesmerizing eyes of old, sick bear. All God’s gifts we’d wasted, I knew by certain books. Caught up in a destinal vortex somehow of our own mad construction we’d intellected Eden to a soot-dark Foundry, a universal stench of codfish oil. We must check the spiral—‘Haul in, haul in!’ as the whalers say—and no white man I’d talked to (abstract as geometry) knew the t
rick of it. Indians knew things—or anyway so I’d read somewhere—without thinking, without learning. It was my settled conviction that they were, though a threat to my egotism, my spiritual betters, and for better or worse I was determined to make the acquaintance of these strange men, if they were men.
“Hence my project.
“Early mornings and again late evenings, when I’d finished my war on ignorance and returned my scholars to their rested-up homes, I took odd-jobs work of all descriptions. I was strong as a cart-ox but also, at least by reputation, sharp-witted. I hauled trunks and sea-chests, rolled whale-oil ashore, kept accounts for my mother’s younger brother, a pharmacist, and even served, briefly, as odd-jobs man to the Reverend William Dunkel, our minister. His hair was iron-gray, as smooth and sociable as candlewax on top, but on his chin anarchistic with kinks and curls and darker patches. He wore no mustache, being vain for some reason about his long upper lip and the great, fierce English nose that crowned it. He worked me unconscionably, in my opinion, but that was by no means the worst of it. At every excuse, he labored to improve my character.
“ ‘Upchurch, my boy, Discipline is a word full of hardness,’ he said once, bending to catch my eye as, furiously, panting like a prophet, I split chunks of oak beside his cellar chute. He wore, as always, the dusty black suit which he’d got in New York and which inclined me to believe he was richer than he cared to let on to us. ‘Discipline is a word full of hardness, I say, abounding in disagreeables, till we learn to peer beyond its hideous shadows and behold its weighty results.’
“ ‘Yes sir,’ says I. I set up another block and attacked it. He straightened up, slipping his thumbs into his coat pockets and squinting a trifle, protecting his eyes from chips. He made his face still soberer.
“ ‘My earliest ideas of Discipline,’ he said, ‘were that it came through dark closets, half-hours spent in cellarways, a refusal of a mother’s kiss, a teacher’s ferule, a stand on the dunceblock. Later it came through an unwilling obedience to college rules, a binding of the will that took away the “do as I’ve a mind to.” It came through studying lessons with a headache on a hot summer’s day, or a nailing down to duty while green fields, balmy airs, and fleecy clouds all sang aloud for me to join them. After this, Discipline came to me in visions, and I saw her subjects standing in the stocks, with limbs swollen and lacerated, and hands always suppliant, or driven by force into glowing, fiery furnaces, or led against their will to the stake for burning. I shuddered at the word, for it always meant endure, and endure only. Now I speak the word with reverence, for, however it comes, it is wrapped up in glory.’
“ ‘Yes sir,’ I said, and paused to wipe my forehead with my sleeve. Reverend Dunkel could go on in this orotund fashion for days—for all I knew, centuries. His chin, almost hidden in the imposing beard, was less than awesome, but his smile was the sternest I ever saw, except one time in Brazil on the face of a head-hunter. He wouldn’t harm a fly, my mother maintained, and I must grant, in all fairness, I never saw him go out of his way for a kick at a rabid dog. He had, all the same, a devilish streak as bad as Flint’s. He used to send articles on sin and damnation to monthly magazines for young ladies.
“He raised his eyebrows. ‘You understand what I’m saying, boy?’
“ ‘Up to a certain point,’ I said.
“He nodded grimly and lifted his long square hand to his nose. ‘That’s how it is with this life,’ he said. ‘The part we understand is irrelevant.’
“I soon took hire less troublesome.
“My new employer was a butcher, a red-faced Dutchman who rarely spoke. I did so well for him that I was soon transferred from delivery boy to carver. My project was proceeding splendidly—I seemed to have Midas’ golden touch. While others my age were shipping on whalers, breaking their heads on windstruck booms and their hearts on foreign-tongued prostitutes, I (puffing severely on a pipe of clay) was laying up my treasures on earth, as Reverend Dunkel would have it, but from my point of view, my ransom. My luck was uncanny. On two separate occasions, in addition to my wages from the school and the butcher (whose name, by the way, was Hans van Klug), I found money in the street—sixteen dollars the first time, four the next. Though I knew well enough what civilization calls right and wrong, I’d heard sufficient of my father’s tales of pirates and gold-crazy pirate hunters that I made no great effort to return what God had sent me. The very idea would have seemed to me then as mad as the ritual dances of African savages, of which I’d read lurid descriptions. I was not, Heaven knows, a democrat. The man who invented the wheel, I thought—with no little pleasure in my almanack wit—was a hermit on a mountain. Had he consulted the mass before setting to his work, they’d have persuaded him to think up the clothespin.
“Then, quite suddenly, my fortune turned. By an act of spectacular folly I lost all I had. Say it was the draw of the universe—the powers that laugh at winds, tides, planets. Say it was … whatever you please. Truth—what’s known as ‘plain fact’—is profoundly mysterious.
IV
“I had at this time seventy-five dollars, enough, by my pretty-well firm calculation, to reach Illinois and buy thirty to forty good acres. On a clear and cold October night, one of those nights when the sky seems bottomless, falling away from you even as you watch, I decided, on impulse, to have supper out. I’d worked late with van Klug, the two of us carving and packaging meat in the fuliginous silence we both preferred—indifferently lopping off arms and legs, joints, rumps, and shoulders, sorting the martyrdom of nature into piles and putting prices on it—and I knew my mother would be asleep long since. She had despaired a good many years ago of ever making me a gentleman. I’d made no secret of my plan to go West, and what could she do but accept, with some whooping, my abandonment of her? At times she’d play sick to keep me near, but I understood her tricks. Even if, good as her word, she had died of apoplexy, I doubt if I’d have felt much serious remorse. Is it Christian charity to be chained up in other people’s foolishness? We occupied the house as if each of us lived there all alone, like two holy stylites on neighboring pillars—my father consorting with ice-caps and whales, serenaded by ghosts and mermaids, watched by demons, if the tales he told were true—and we seldom spoke, except that now and then she’d whine at me, or cry at her prayers, taking care that I overheard her.
“For convenience’ sake, I decided to stop at the Buried Treasure Inn, on Front Street. It was a grizzly two-storey place with a bad reputation, barbaric with the whalebone-jagged speech of Nantucketers and the misanthrope dealings of ‘privateers,’ but the smells falling out into the crisp night air were persuasive enough that I swallowed my natural distaste for company, especially the company of drunken Long Toms, and pushed through the pitch-black, gable-topped door. The roar of their talk and the wall of smoke from their carved bone pipes crashed over my soul like a breaching wave, and along with the noise and smoke came the stink of their rum, like a whiff from a charnelhouse. The entry-way was crowded from wall to wall with sharp-beaked, red-eyed creatures alarming as rats in a breadbox—whalers: too lean, too garishly maimed, too wrinkled with crowsfeet to be mere pirates, yet more alarming than pirates: giant-killers. I had half a mind to turn homewards and make do with cheese. Yes sir. The walls, what little I could see of them in that thick brine-green, primaeval dark, were hung with outlandish clubs and spears—a thing very strange, it seemed to me, in a place notorious for drunken brawls. But what was life or death to them, those riders of whale-humps? Nevertheless, as I stepped up toward them they crowded together, polite as Presbyterians, and allowed me to pass. I went on up to the public room, equally crowded, and, after I’d gotten a word with the landlord, pressed to the lighted room adjoining, where he’d promised to bring me supper. As I sat on my settle, uncomfortably glancing at the sea-dogs around me—not whalers these, if sulphurous fire in the eye is a sign (so it seemed to me at first), but still not unhumanized cripples neither, and dressed like gentlemen, or at all events like well-to-do gypsi
es—a genial fat old man leaned toward me and sociably called out, ‘Ye don’t drink, do ye, sonny?’
“ ‘The devil in hell I don’t!’ says I.
“The whole long table roared with what sounded like drowned men’s laughter. I was ashamed enough to kick a mule, being young and somewhat priggish (and having blushed bright red), but there was no mule there any sensible man would discomfit. They were tall as trees, and even their parrot, walking back and forth on the shelf above us like a suspicious and hot-tempered ports inspector, looked more than a wise man would tangle with. Their captain, a great, sleek shark of a fellow, at the end of the table, a man his crew called Pious John, slid an empty mug in my direction, and a man seated halfway between us—they called him Lovalie Will—gently pushed me the dented brass pitcher. The genial fat man who’d spoken to me first, a man with an eyepatch and sharp red ears, filled up the mug and slid it to me, a liquid that looked like water but was, I knew the same instant it touched my lips, raw gin, pure fires of torment. I doubt that I made a very noticeable face, but the table laughed, leaning forward, encouraging. It was a laugh just a whit less offensive now. As I gave it some thought, I inclined to believe it was almost downright friendly. ‘Fine lad there,’ says sleek old Pious John to his neighbor. I took a longer sip. For all Reverend Dunkel’s ferocious sermons, the gin seemed to have no particular effect—a warmness, perhaps; a tranquility like that which old Reverend Dunkel, with bony fists clenched, was eternally recommending. I took an even longer sip and they smiled their approval. I saw they intended no evil whatsoever, whatever an ignorant stranger might suppose. I was picking up their society’s ways. The landlord came in then, smiling like a Trojan in a field of Greeks, dished out meat and potatoes, and disembarked. His fear of them surprised me, and when he peeked back with furious button eyes I thought again of righteous Reverend Dunkel, and I very near laughed out loud.
