The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  The fading angel miraculously brightens, and the mariner is suddenly stern and dignified with what might be high purpose and then again might be a careful disguise of glee.

  (The dead pass indifferently, shuffling to the woods, but at sight of the mariner’s eye they hesitate, considering.)

  The guest has grown solider, kingly in his chair. He leans to one side, taps the table with his fingers, like a shrewd man considering. He snaps his eye to the mariner. “Tell on!”

  The angel tips his tankard up, goes immediately light-headed.

  XI

  “Mr. Knight and Wilkins continued to keep an eye on me, and it seemed to me that they kept an eye, too, on my red-headed friend Billy More. Though I kept a sharp, somewhat sulky watch, the whole business had me thoroughly confounded. I could have no doubt that Mr. Knight and Wilkins were somehow in league and that Billy More was extemely uneasy, if not downright petrified, in Wilkins’ presence; yet time and again I saw Mr. Knight and Billy More whispering like conspirators. (The Jerusalem was filled with conspirators, come to that. Such a crowd of eye-rollers, whisperers, and grumblers you never did see.) Moreover, for all his seeming innocence and seeming openness, there were things that greatly puzzled me about Billy. Like Mr. Knight and like Wilkins, he denied any knowledge that a girl was aboard, and when I told him I’d also seen a huge black dog, his face was so incredulous, or at any rate startled, that I wondered if anything I saw with my eyes was trustworthy. “There was another thing puzzled me. He came back again and again to questions about my life in Albany with my grandmother, as if probing to find out if I really came from where I claimed I had. I disappointed him there. Mike Fink himself couldn’t have answered more slyly or circumspectly or supported his contentions with more convincing fabrications. Since I knew very little about Albany, I confessed that really I’d come from Quebec, then later that I hailed from Arkansas. I told of my days as patent-medicine salesman and got so carried away I got an order from both Billy More and Mr. Knight for a case each of Dr. Hodgkins’ Elixir. But mostly my mood was a good deal less cheerful. In fact, mostly I was profoundly depressed. Ever since the night that huge dog knocked me down, I was their laughingstock, in my own mind at least: the stupidest, silliest, most unworthy of men; also the angriest, the most hopelessly in love.

  “It was just about this time—my eighth or ninth day on the Jerusalem’s heights—that I came within a hair of ending all miseries for good by a fatal accident.

  “I was high on the rigging of the mainmast, almost to the beams of the crowsnest, where I was struggling to patch a damaged stay, when for some reason I looked down. I had learned before, at lower levels, what looking down would do to me. One moment I was staring with all my soul at the frayed bit of rope I was working on—I remember recollecting an old, dried braid, from an Indian squaw, that I’d seen one time in the Boston Museum—the next, I found myself thinking of the distance between me and the deck, and the dangerous mutability of rope, my ladder back to safety. In vain I struggled to be rid of such thoughts. The more earnestly I labored not to think, the more busily my mind went spinning toward disaster. In no time, the crisis was solidly upon me—the anticipation of the feeling of falling: the giddiness, the struggle, the headlong descent—and then the mysterious longing to fall, the hunger to sink into the absolute freedom of suicide. I could not, would not confine my gaze to the rope before me. With a wild, indefinite emotion, half-horror, half-relief, I cast my gaze into the abyss. The deck was unaccountably shrunk in size and lay some distance to my right, from the lean of the ship. I felt my hands slipping, my heart going suddenly pancrastical, and I glimpsed, as if out of the corner of my wall-eyed glance, the faintest conceivable shadow of some ultimate idea. I found myself suddenly not afraid. It was as if I had lost identity, become one with the mystic ocean at my feet, image of the deep-blue bottomless soul that pervades all mankind and nature like Cranmer’s ashes. That instant Billy More slammed against me like a veritable lightning bolt, with a banshee yell that more filled me with terror than ever the thought of my fall had done. His stocky legs were clamped around my waist as if to drive out the last mote of oxygen, his bristly red beard pushed hard into my neck, his rough hands closed on the ropework around me like iron hooks that never till the day of dissolution would be pried aloose. “ ‘Whooee!’ he cried, ‘hang on there, mate!’ Whence he came, Heaven knows, but come he did, with the persuasive force of the angel falling on Abraham. I couldn’t speak, for lack of wind. Nor did he have much need of conversation, going down the ropes like a spider with his burden. I was given the rest of that day off, to lie on my back—my ribs on fire, more painful than before—and meditate my stupidity. Billy More, with hardly a word, but wearing a thoughtful look, went back up the rigging.

  “That evening, looking sly, he came over to me, holding two bits of rope. He eased himself down on the bunk beside me, unconsciously tying and untying knots, grinning and awkward as one of my schoolboys, and at length he said, ‘It’s a common thing … up on the masthead … the step to Nowhere. Keep yer bearings, that’s the secret.’ He worked his mouth and screwed up his eyes, hunting for words that would express his thought. After a moment, he said slowly and carefully, ‘Know in the back of yer mind where ye stand, whatever ye happen to think of the place, and banish all thought of Nowhere by keeping yer mind from belief in it. Exactly like a man going over a gorge on a highwire. Throw yer vision to the rim. If ye must think, think of Faith itself. Sing hymns, or tell yerself Bible stories. If ye think of that highwire inch by inch, if ye think with the front of yer mind where yer feet are, why down ye’ll go quicker’n a boulder: whoosh! Faith, that’s the secret! Absolute faith like a seagull’s.’

  “I thanked him earnestly for saving my life and told him I’d keep his advice in mind. He looked at his shoes, thinking about it, then back at me. ‘Ye make terrible knots for a pirate,’ he said. He winked. So he’d been working with them all along, I thought. Yet his face was like a cherub’s. I began to wonder if I was right to fear Wilkins, ugly devil that he was, and feel safe as you would with a baby near Billy More. I’d learned one lesson from old Pious John. A man mustn’t jump to conclusions about what’s real in this world and what’s mere presentation. Just to be on the safe side, I took up the habit of keeping a marlinspike close at hand, and, the first chance I got, I made myself a little hiding place in the bulkhead by my bunk, where I could keep my belongings a bit safer than they were in the foot-locker. It was the neatest hiding place you ever saw, achieved by a foot-long removable board, and no less ingenious for the fact that I had nothing to put in it except my empty purse and my waterlogged watch and gold watch-chain.

  “I went up in the rigging again next morning and remembered Billy More’s advice about Nowhere and focusing on Faith. Silly or not, the trick worked jim-dandy. Never again was I afraid of the highest sail-yard. Within the week I was taking my turn with the others in the crowsnest, on the look-out for whales.

  “That, I might mention, was as mysterious to me as was anything else: Whatever his deeper, secret purpose, Captain Dirge, who’d formerly seemed so indifferent, was suddenly hell-bent on capturing whale. Perhaps it was the universal grumbling of his men, out all this while and still nothing to show for it. But I couldn’t help but think that the turnabout came mighty abruptly, and hard on Billy More’s remark that the Captain had been like a different man on his previous voyage. In any case, again and again, both day and night, we’d hear the Captain shouting to the mastheads—shouting from inside his cabin door, out of sight in the darkness—warning the spotters if they valued their noses to keep a sharp look-out, and not omit singing at even the shadow of a porpoise. The whole crew was visibly relieved that the Captain was himself again, or near to it.

  “Captain Dirge did not need to wait long, it turned out. On the forty-first day, sixteenth day on the Pacific, came a cry out of heaven, ‘There she blows! there! there!’ and the first mate’s stern echo: ‘Where away?’ All the ship was suddenly in
commotion, springing to lower the longboats, shouting. Or all but the Captain, who was deathly sick. ‘There go flukes!’ was now the crowsnest cry.

  “But it isn’t my purpose to tire you with whaling. Suffice it to say they made their catch—a sperm-whale monstrous and cunning of eye. He was long as the ship, with a tail that could’ve sunk us at a single whap, and teeth that would serve as Plato’s form for the fall of civilizations. They made their catch—the Captain still keeping to his cave-dark room—and I, in a manner of speaking, made mine. The slaves I’d sworn to the existence of, despite all scoffing by Wilkins and the others, and despite the silent, implied denial of the first mate, Mr. Knight, now scuttled among us with clanking chains, slicing, hauling, draining, carting, droning their ominous God-own-Moziz. So that’s it, thought I: The old man’s widened his margin of profit by the simplest, most ancient, most devilish device in the universe. It was no great wonder he’d kept them out of sight. They were freedom-lovers, the Yankee officers and sailors on the Jerusalem—even the far-gathered savage harpooners. One glance at Mr. Knight’s troubled eyes or the manifest sorrow of my friend Billy More would be enough to convince Captain Dirge of the wisdom of saying no more about his blacks than need be. Even the evil-eyed second mate, Wolff, a sour little German with hair straight as wheatstraw, and no more compassion in his soul than a witch, had a look about the mouth of disgruntlement. My friend old Jeremiah stood leaning on the starboard rail, gazing with his stone-white eyes at the rest of us. ‘Deadmen,’ he said, with that belladonna smile. I had a premonition as clear and firm as an insight into geometry that his words would prove prophetic. But even with Jeremiah, I was determined to be canny, ruled by Davy Crockett’s dictum, ‘If he don’t know I’m up this tree, he’ll look in Pittsburgh.’ Jaunty as a cynical young barge captain, my fists on my hips and my hat tipped back, I says: ‘It’s a devilish thing, that singing. Yessir! That’s where they bury their hist’ry and keep their schemes alive.’ I gave a crafty laugh. Jeremiah appeared to be thinking mournfully of something else, something only a man with second sight could know. I told him some merry, foolish tale about buying and selling slaves in St. Louis, and how one time I was very near murdered by a nigger that was drunk on fermented molasses down in New Orleans. The old man drifted away and left me talking to myself. I pretended not to notice. I caught the reflection of Wilkins’ red bandanna on the varnished rail, Wilkins watching from the shadow of the longboats, sly as Br’er Fox in the plantation tales. I chatted on, cheery as Br’er Rabbit, to the dreamy air.

  “The next morning Mr. Knight came over to where Billy More and I were patching sail. He stood gazing down at us, neither friendly nor unfriendly, thinking his own lugubrious thoughts. I expected him to speak to Billy More. As I’ve said, I think, I’d frequently see them together, as if plotting. But Mr. Knight turned, instead, to me.

  “ ‘Mr. Upchurch, ye’re wanted in the Captain’s cabin.’

  “I glanced at Billy More. He grinned; his tough, freckled cheek muscles bulged. ‘Turn the conversation to the Occult,’ says he. ‘The Captain’s a true cyclopaedia there.’

  “When I glanced at Mr. Knight, his eyes were as gloomy and distrait as before, his thought honed down fine as a weasel’s. I remembered myself and jumped to. Mr. Knight turned away, still brooding, to lead me to the Captain.

  XII

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if researchers should find out, a hundred or two hundred years from now, that all mortal beings have second sight, a kingdom of the soul as serene and aloof—and as seldom visited, in the usual case—as Lapland. To talk about the ship’s old prophet Jeremiah would be to complicate things unnecessarily, though it’s true enough that not I alone but every man-jack on the Jerusalem would have sworn, if ye’d been there to ask ‘em at the time of the events I’m telling you about, that blind and enfeebled as Jeremiah may have been, he was a man of more value to the Captain than the rest of us together. He knew by second sight, he claimed, where the whales was playing. And he knew more than that, or so I’ve ended up believing. He may have fooled us— there’s always that suspicion. But if all his skills was mere showmanship, mere mirrors and tinsel, so to speak, like some Boston bunko-man’s (he had plenty of bunk in him too, Lord knows), then all I can say is, that man was the slickest impostor that ever was created.

  “But I mean to talk of more ordinary cases of second sight, the kind you encounter in gambling casinos and the kitchens of New England. I make no pretense of understanding these things, but I confess I’ve toggled, together out of string and nails and two mushrooms I had from a harpooner by the name of Kaskiwah, a kind of homespun theory.

  “A hunch is a religious experience, an escape from mere intellect into reality, home of the soul. Put it this way: The mushroom- and root-eating savages of the South Pacific have queer experiences, learning out of conversation with lizards, or from the scent of wildflowers, answers to questions which couldn’t be answered by any means that old scoundrel Locke would countenance. Time and Space became impish, now ingenious and full of wit, like Ariel, now sullen and ill-mannered, like Caliban in a funk. Effect precedes cause, causes and effects which are spatially remote refuse to be sensibly separate in time. The physical world turns crepuscular, like the dreamings of a bat, the spiritual world walks stolid, muttering, or serene and stiff-backed as President Lincoln, emplanting foot-long footsteps. To those who were never attuned to such things—Paris rationalists, or Wall Street brokers busy adding up sums— tales of mystical experience are no more than childish fables, probably hoaxes designed (like their own grand schemes) to bilk the public. There is in all our societies, whether whist-clubs or whalers, a law of sufficiency which begins by dictating what things need not be speculated on, for efficient operation of the business at hand, and ends by outlawing and angrily scorning all thought not directly productive of firm, fat bank accounts. If the whole of the mind is a grocery-store in all its liveliness and flux—ants in the bread-bin, smell of brown paper and new spring onions, string coming down from the spindle above Mr. Primrose’s balding, bespectacled head—then the intellect is a cash-register, and an expressible idea is the clang of its cheap iron bell. By specialization we vivisect reality till all but the head or the left hind leg of the universe is by someone’s definition industrial waste. But move the New York industrialist to Tallahassee, abandon him there to hold forth for three years on right and wrong, or move Stonewall Jackson to a Seneca village, return in six months, and you’ll find them gravely altered men. We stake our lives on nice opinions; the globe makes one half-turn, rolling up the Southern Cross, and we clench our brains against madness.

  “Whether or not there is more in this world than philosophy dreams of, I allow if I’d lived to my present age in the South Pacific, I’d hold conflab with lizards and soberly take down the political opinions of the columbine. If I’d lived in Tibet, I’d sit in my corner, shortly after my death, and I’d thoughtfully reflect on the Book of the Dead being read to my corpse by my survivors. All we think and believe, in short, is foolish prejudice, even if some of it happens to be true (which seems to me unlikely). Or to make it all still more altiloquent: Human consciousness, in the ordinary case, is the artificial wall we build of perceptions and conceptions, a hull of words and accepted opinions that keeps out the vast, consuming sea: It shears my self from all outside business, including the body I walk in but muse on the same as I do on a three-legged dog or an axe-handle, a slippery wild Indian or a king at his game of chess. A mushroom or one raw emotion (such as love) can blast that wall to smithereens. I become a kind of half-wit, a limitless shadow too stupid to work out a mortgage writ, but I am also the path of the stars, rightful monarch of Nowhere. I become, that instant, the King’s Indian: Nothing is waste, nothing unfecund. The future is the past, the past is present to my senses. I gaze at the dark Satanic mills, the sludge-thick streams. I shake my head. They vanish.

  “I had a kind of hunch from the beginning about Captain Dirge. There was something fundam
entally unnatural about him, but whether I ought to be awed or revolted was difficult to say. Now that I’m old and have seen a few things, I’m aware that the world is full of men exactly like him: single-minded, tight-sphinctered, violent and unfeeling as thrashing machines. Extraordinary men. Seducers of megalomaniac youth. (What young man can bring himself down to the opinion that the secret of the universe is commonness, flexibility, plain goodness-of-heart, or that the highest ambition available to mankind is hard work at serious business in the morning, and in the evening a tipple at the public-house? Can all Time and Space have conspired to perfect this magnificent machine for no purpose more pythonic?)

  “As I say, I had from the beginning a kind of hunch about him. I had no doubt that Captain Dirge was in some sense mad (a strange misapprehension, but I was young, inexperienced; I had no notion how brash and outlandish this universe can be), and I had no doubt either that the Captain’s madness, long before they’d hauled me aboard, had already infected a majority of the crew. ‘—But madness, what’s that?’ I asked myself, waving at the sun like an auctioneer when I pondered these matters and others in the crowsnest, the following few weeks. ‘Was Homer mad?—raging against war, bemoaning the very foundations of his world in the name of a vision of life never tried before nor since? Was Tecumseh mad, murdered because he refused to sell Congress the air, the clouds, the sea? What is madness, after all, but overweening pride, the daring assertion, always mistaken, that man is God—a high office otherwise left empty?’

  “At times throughout our voyage (though I’m getting ahead of my story), I would see the Captain standing at the rail in his gentleman’s clothes—Captain Dirge was well-known among whalers as a dandy— gazing out to sea toward whatever it was he had come here for, or studying his Bible, with a stern face, or praying at the bow, oblivious to the world as a propped-up doll, and I’d be overwhelmed by a pair of emotions more fit to be vented on ancient plays. What did they talk about, he and the girl?—his daughter, I presumed. Did they talk at all? Was the girl aware of the plain absurdity of her presence here on a whaling ship?—or was she, too, as crazy as a magpie? If she wasn’t crazy yet, she’d soon become so. She spoke to no one, by all evidence. Never emerged— except that once—from her cabin, unless she crept out at night when the decks were empty. Did she know how many whaling vessels have spiraled down, broken-backed, unmasted, to hang in a limbo of dead green light, inhabited only by bones and prowling jewfish? Did she ever hear, wide awake on her pillow, the ominous hymning of the slaves and, like an echo, that further music, weird crying from the sea?