The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

Of the dead girl

  Returns to earth

  Like autumn light,

  And spades smooth

  The hollows out,

  Memories

  Will turn to rock,

  And carved words

  Become her clock.

  ’Beautiful,’ I said. She smiled, all-knowing, and the faintest possible glow came to her cheeks. She looked down at her pale hands, folded in her lap, and continued smiling. ‘Thank you,’ she said. And that instant my Virgin was transmogrified to the medieval Eve. A love poem, she’d said. An Invitation. I was blushing now. As for Augusta, she sat smiling exactly as before, all innocence, but with eyes gone darkling and lips slightly moist. Her hands rested on her waist in such a way that they tightened the material of her blouse and fiercely called attention to her breasts. ‘Hussy!’ they’d have said in the Ladies’ Repository. But the elderly ladies and Doctors of Divinity who write for such journals would have no great need for their squawking rhetoric were not Eve as mysterious and rare as the Virgin.

  “At her worst, if one can call it that, Augusta’s wicked streak played mocking games with her nobler qualities. We had been reading the poetry of Crashaw one night, seated side by side at her ebony table, the dog’s head inches from our feet. She said suddenly, with bright-eyed innocence, that Crashaw’s devotion, and the humble simplicity of his visual fancies, had inspired her to try a poem in the same sincere and loving manner. I said, ‘Might I read it?’

  “ ‘It’s very short,’ she said.

  “ ‘Do let me see it!’

  “She hesitated. ‘I’d really prefer to read it to you,’ she said. ‘It’s not very good, actually.’

  “I bowed my head, stretched out one arm. ‘Then read away.’

  “By a magnificent exertion of will she made her face—except for the luminous eyes—lambishly sweet. She took a deep breath and put the fingertips of one hand over her heart, then read:

  Full teats of milk that cannot cloy

  He like a nurse will bring,

  And when He draws the promise nigh,

  O, how we suck and sing!

  “As she finished, cheeks bright, she glanced at me, then suddenly laughed, richly and beautifully, at my blushing discomfort. It was the laugh, you’d have thought, of a woman much older, much slyer than Augusta.

  “I wrung my hands a little, wounded to the quick. ‘That’s an interesting rhyme, cloy and nigh,’ I said. Upset or no, I was my father’s son, crafty to the last.

  “ ‘I rather hoped you’d like it.’ She touched my arm, sweetly, childishly, and even as the shock of her touch went through me, I understood that she’d planned that move like a stage actress—had perhaps even written the poem to make it possible. I suppose my eyes widened. She blushed and withdrew her hand, knowing she’d been caught. ‘Forgive me,’ she said—a whisper of alarm. Suddenly she was weeping, and I was convinced, despite my perfect certainty an instant ago, that all my judgments had been shamefully wrong. She was an avid reader of the Bible, after all. Her father was a man as religious as any who ever sailed the seas. She jumped up from the table and fled to the corner of the room where she stood with her back to me. The image of the dunce-block flashed into my mind and I almost guffawed, but then, the next moment, I was on the verge of tears myself. I saw her sorrow as the sorrow and shame of all groping young-womanhood, our comic melodrama ancient and beyond our strength, monstrously unfair, a callous and tasteless joke by a weary universe. I stood up awkwardly, biting my lips, and went a few steps toward her. Five feet from her—the great dog between us— I stopped and reached out to her, over Alastor’s head. ‘Augusta, I can’t tell you how sorry—’ I began.

  “She said nothing, her face in her hands. I leaned a little nearer. ‘My poor, dear child,’ I said, ‘if in any way—’

  “She turned suddenly, with an outraged expression. The dog leaped away in fright. ‘Jonathan Upchurch, don’t you ever call me that again!’ Tears coursed down her cheeks and her small lips trembled.

  “ ‘Call you what?’ I exclaimed.

  “ ‘And I want you to apologize.’

  “ ‘For what?’

  “ ‘For everything!’

  “Instantly, for fear of worse, I did so.

  “ ‘Shake hands on it,’ she said. It struck me that she was not quite so furious as before, and that if I wished to implore her to be reasonable … Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, I held out my hand. She took it and shook it firmly. I had a faint and of course incredible suspicion that however earnest her tears, she was secretly gloating, a murderous, heavy-lidded witch enjoying the electric-storm power of her unreasonableness. When she’d finished shaking my hand, she said, ‘We’re friends again?’

  “ ‘Friends,’ I said, with a smile and a glance at her pet.

  “ ‘Good. Then you may kiss me.’

  “I drew back in astonishment. ‘Augusta!’

  “ ‘Jon-a-than,’ she said.

  “But surely somewhere there have to be limits. ‘Augusta, you’re a child only seventeen years old, and I am your tutor, which vests in me responsibility for your intellectual and moral—’

  “ ‘I will never again ask you anything so improper, I give you my word, Jonathan.’

  “ ‘Mr. Upchurch,’ I corrected.

  “ ‘Mr. Upchurch, then.’ She smiled as if she were the one submitting.

  “I sighed helplessly, then kissed her, aiming for the cheek— but Augusta was tricky. I recalled, as she moved her hands around my shoulders, once reading that kissing is a common cause of heart attack.

  “That night I did not sleep, nor the next.

  “As is, I suppose, the usual case, I was as sick with love and its complications when away from her as I was when I was with her. In her presence I was prisoner to scents and whispers, age-old drives, strange pressures invisible to the poor-fool naked eye. Away from her, I was the victim of my own imaginings, hour on hour of theatrical, deliquious lunacy. I stood at the rail looking down at the steadily rolling sea and tried futilely to understand what was happening to me. I was suddenly, because of one kiss, consumed. I could think and dream of nothing but Augusta, even high on the rigging where there was a certain advantage in keeping one’s mind on one’s position in relation to Nowhere. She was the wind, the sea, the motion of the ship. She was the sweet and unspeakable reality enclosing the narrow opinions of Plato and Plotinus, Locke and Hume and Newton. All my hours away from her were merely a burden I must endure …

  “My mind paused, grapneled, on the word endure. Reverend Dunkel’s word, the dark side of Discipline. I frowned thoughtfully, gazing out at the midnight ocean. The world I must endure in separation from Augusta—stars, dark water—had an aliveness I had not observed in it before. It was her counterpart, her extension. As I’d considered falling from the rigging once, I could now toy, unseriously, with sinking peacefully, even joyfully into the waves, my element, my brother. I had a fleeting memory of old books about Indians moving silent as foxes through moonlit forests, their souls at one with them.

  “Somewhere below me, the slaves were singing. They, too, were her extension, not demonic tonight but merely part of the whole, their anger and weariness an element in Augusta’s complexity, and an element as much to be venerated as the virginal goodness that defined the upper limit of the total gradation. Her most perfect poetry, it came to me, could never be achieved without that darker, more ominous music in the hold. It took, I told myself, abundant leisure to develop the utmost reaches of mind. Without slavery there could have been no Homer, no Pericles, no thousand and one images of the Goddess of Mercy in the temple at Kyoto. What were the pyramids, the books of Aristotle, the three-hundred-eight-ton Buddha of Nara, but hymns to the labor of literal or figurative slaves? Augusta may have been a natural genius; but her writing (thought I) was no mere warbling of woodnotes wild. She’d read—she had been free to read—good poetry all her life. Free Will was not as simple as I had imagined, then. It arched up out of enslavement exac
tly as mind blooms up from befuddled, tormented flesh—poor timorous green, if those experiments at Prague were right. One was, I thought, either a slave of purposeless ebb-tide and stormwind from the south, or the slave of some meaningful human ideal, like the secret purpose, which no one had so far imparted to me, of the whaler Jerusalem. Perhaps, indeed, they were the same in the end, both weathers and the winds of thought stirred up by the same omniscient Mind, archangel finger in the swirl of events. So we must hope, we metaphysicians. Better a bad but universal system than rootless good, occasional, floating like a derelict.

  “The following day I went to her early, before I was expected—the Captain was asleep, lying still as a corpse—and though I could see she was embarrassed and flustered (pretending to be drawing when I was sure she’d been busy at something else when I knocked), I pressed my conversation on her. Leaning over her to look at the drawings she pretended to be working on (imaginary flowers), I was ambushed by a whiff of perfume, and I kissed her. She resisted for an instant, then returned the kiss with all her young soul, rising from her chair to press close to me. I closed my arms around her, frantic. There was a footstep at the door, and in panic—inspired by some angel, no doubt—I snatched up a pile of books, the first that came to hand, and fled.

  “ ‘Jonathan!’ she cried.

  “ ‘Just stopped by for these books,’ I explained to old Jeremiah, at the door.

  “He cocked his head, brows lifted in astonishment, listening with all his ears as I hurried past.

  “The books, I found when I reached my bunk, were of no great interest. One of those fraudulent deLaurence books on Hindoo snake-charming; a petty-form history book; a book of poems (religious); a book, with engravings, called The World’s Great Scoundrels. I tucked them into the little hiding place I’d made (the removable slat in the bulkhead), intending to examine them more closely at my leisure (pore over them, treasure them—because they were hers!); then I hurried back up to the deck, where, drunk on the memory of Augusta’s kiss, I forgot all about them.

  XVII

  “One thing there was about Captain Dirge that was stranger than all the rest. For all his sensitivity to light and noise and stench and excitement, he never let a ship pass by without hailing her and boarding. Even in a healthy whaler captain, that would’ve been mighty peculiar behavior. You gam with fellow leviathan-hunters—for mail, for news of where the schools have been sighted—but you don’t haul in for every casual passer-by. What question it was that the Captain asked I couldn’t surmise, nor why he went over, in every case, with an empty satchel and came back with a full one (a point Billy More first made me take note of); but I knew sure as day that when he hauled up to gunboats, merchantmen, and suchlike, and lowered away with Jeremiah beside him and a crew of black oarsmen—the Captain hunched over and limp from his sickness—he must have some strong motivation.

  “The visits meant as much or more, it seemed to me, to blind Jeremiah. From the time the stranger first appeared on the horizon, long before anyone had told him it was there, the old man commenced acting nervous and peculiar. You’d find him standing alone in odd corners, muttering to himself, and sometimes grinning, ecstatic, as if deep in conversation with the Holy Ghost. When the time came to lower the longboat away to row over for the boarding, the slightest mistake or alteration of procedure and Jeremiah, though all gentleness at other times, would go suddenly zacotic, prepared to take a kick at whoever was standing near-by enough. He looked like an actor in a tragical play just preparing to strike into the stagelights—pulling at his gloves, twitching his lips to get his mustache right. But when they got to the stranger (I knew from watching through the crowsnest spyglass), it was suddenly the Captain, not Jeremiah, that looked like the actor, waving and jabbering, for once hardly leaning on the blind man.

  “To Augusta, too, those visits were important occasions—occasions of terror, it seemed to me, though I couldn’t make out why. All the time they were gone, if I happened to be alone in the cabin with her, she’d chatter nonsense, trying to keep her mind occupied, and sometimes she’d wring her pale fingers or give a great shudder.

  “ ‘Oh, Jonathan, Jonathan,’ she said to me once, ‘what do they do over there? Why are they so long?’ She was clinging to my hand, trembling as if with fever. (Things had by now progressed considerably between us.)

  “ ‘Why, passing the time of day, most likely,’ I answered with a laugh, to reassure her.

  “ ‘It’s criminal, a man in my father’s condition!’ Augusta said. ‘If only I could be a little bird and fly over and spy on them!’

  “I laughed again and kissed her fingertips, though in the back of my mind I suspected there was something I was missing in all this. It was all just a little too finely turned. What presence there was in the hankie she clutched in three fingers of the hand clamped on mine with such abandon! With my cast left eye, I saw that she was watching the mirror, observing our performance like a critic.

  “ ‘Augusta,’ I said. And then, startled, ‘Why, Augusta, you love this!’

  “She clutched her heart, and her tears came gushing. ‘Jonathan, how could you!’

  “That very instant I had a clear intuition that there was something I’d known from the first about Augusta—some horrible truth her paleness, her trembling, her illness masked. But meeting her eyes, I believed I was mistaken and dismissed the matter. ‘Don’t be cross,’ I said. ‘Fear and joyous excitement have a similar look, and I was fooled, I fear.’ I kissed her cheek. After a time, she forgave me.

  “But that night, lying on my bunk in the darkness, no sound around me but the breathing of my fellow sailors, sleeping, I remembered that feeling and all over again got the same icy chill. I tried to pin down the cause of it. I could get very clearly the sensation of fright, but I could conjure up nothing to account for it—certainly nothing that had anything to do with that beautiful, pallid face, those luminous eyes. Nevertheless, my odd fear grew, as if part of a nightmare: a fear of dangers on every hand, all masked, hidden, but inexorably closing in on us.

  “With a jolt I realized, or perhaps dreamed, that someone was there in the darkness beside my bunk, some person or thing reaching slowly toward my face. I cringed back, then impulsively reached toward the shape and, the same instant, shouted. My grip closed on what seemed a hairless monkey’s hand, small, wet, as cold as snow. I released it, not shouting now but screaming; and now my companions were gathered around me, frightened, asking questions. Then it was a dream, I thought, vastly relieved; but then I thought I heard fleeing footsteps. ‘Listen!’ I cried out. The others insisted they heard nothing.

  “It was about this time that the crafty ex-pirate Wilkins said: ‘Curious how the Captain keeps turning, time after time, to the south.’

  “I was manning the pump. We’d sprung a small, insignificant leak which was being repaired by the second mate, Wolff, and his longboat crew, and Wilkins was resting—spraddle-legged, like a demonic frog in a red bandanna, eyes alarming in the lantern light—awaiting his turn to relieve me. His hands twitched and jerked and he kept bouncing his knees. He said: ‘No matter how far north or east or west we ship—put yer mind to this a minute, me pretty—the old man always tacks south again, heads for, if I ain’t mistaken, latitude 52° 37’ 24”, longitude 47° 43’ 15”.’

  “I twisted my neck to look up at him. (I had recently taken to insisting to the crew that what I really was was a grave-digger— Heaven only knows what drives me to these things. Sometimes I dug for churches, I said, and sometimes for physicians—it made no difference. All my former lies, I said, were mere feeble attempts to disguise my involvement with that ghoulish trade. (This with my head bowed, eyes rolled up; the living picture of a poor wretched sinner in an agony of shame.) To make my story seem a little more convincing, I frowned a good deal, and walked bent over, and now and then I’d let out a lachrymal chuckle.) Wilkins was leering, puffing at his pipe, and a great dark crease ran up from the side of his leer to his glittering right ey
e. Two rats in the shadows sat licking their fingers and watching Mr. Wilkins twitch.

  “In point of fact, I had given some thought to the Captain’s periodic returns to what seemed one same stretch of water—though I hadn’t noticed the precision of his returns. I was no longer, I should mention, the innocent who’d looked up, some months ago, and hunted in vain for some recognizable quadrant of the heavens. I’d perched in the crowsnest hour after hour, or hung in the rigging conversing with my red-headed friend Billy More, and thanks to his instruction and the Captain’s books, I was coming to be something of an astronomer. I could pretty well identify every glimmer or blink from the Andromedae to the Pegasi. I’d learned from the books about stars of varying magnitude, dark stars, twins, and the mysterious so-called wandering stars. My head was crammed to the beams with facts, and I carried them up a little higher with me every time I mounted the mast. There they ceased to be facts, became something more lively—singing particles in a sleepy-headed universe. I began to know things people don’t know if they’ve never given up all private identity to a shoreless sea or a forest extending, arch on arch, the breadth of fifteen mountains. I began to comprehend time and space not by mind or will but by a process more mystical, like the process by which old married couples understand each other, or trees in a valley keep minute track of the wanderings of birds and spiders. It all began consciously enough, no doubt. I remember trying to make out exactly what time it was by the stars’ positions, and laboriously adjusting for the whaler’s changing locus. I never could seem to get a firm calculation, and I was stung by how cleverly Billy More could tip his red beard toward heaven and toss off, casual as a glove, our place and time. Then, one night, like a fellow coming out of a dream, I knew I too could do it. The whole universe moving around me, less like a clock than a huge, slow bird, the ship moving gentle and regular below me, my mind at the center of the gentle, seemingly random groping like the mind of God (I don’t mean some judging, providential god but one who eternally rides and smiles)—the whole universe was my soul’s extension, my ultimate temporal-spatial location, so that the roughly six cubic feet of air my fleshy inner shell displaced was as easy to locate in relation to the rest as the placement of my cast left eye in relation to my toenails. All this may seem purest gibberish to some. But it’s a fact, as any crow can tell you, that the mind always knows where it is till it stops and thinks.