The Life of Hope

by Paul Quarrington

  The doing of cocaine kept us in a state of near-silent activity for half an hour or so. Then I went to the kitchen and brought back up a bottle of whiskey and a case of beer, because I wanted to talk. I felt as if my Fairy Godmother had informed me, “Talk. I guarantee that you’ll say something beautiful and true.” As soon as I opened my mouth, I knew there was a catch. “But,” my Fairy Godmother had gone on, “mostly it’s gonna be ca-ca.”

  “Harvard,” I began, feeling in my bones some stellar connection between fish, lunar cycles and beating women with a belt, “ummm …” It was hard to formulate a statement based on those three components. I selected one as the most important. “Fish!” I shouted, taking a sip of beer.

  “Hey,” said Harvey, “what did God say when Eve went swimming?”

  Harvey didn’t want to speak beautiful truisms, he wanted to tell jokes. I was deeply saddened. “Heard it,” I mumbled, which was the truth. Edgar the axe-murderer had told it to me.

  “Of a theocracy, obviously,” Harvey piped up. “A government or state in which God is the sovereign and religion the law.”

  I scowled. “I don’t get it. ’Snot funny.”

  “ ’Snot a joke, asswipe. Didn’t you just ask what theocratic meant?”

  “Right. What does it mean?”

  “What I just fucking said.”

  “God as the sovereign and religion the law,” I repeated. “Do they have a theocracy anywhere?” If they did, I thought, it might be a nice place to visit, maybe even settle down.

  “A succubus, that’s what she is. Sucking the life right out of me.”

  “Oh, shut up, Harvard. All it was was a blow job. Most guys would be glad to get a blow job, but not you.” This reminded me of something. “Hey! There’s a guy in town who’s got a stone boner!”

  “Say what?”

  “He’s a stone guy, that’s why he’s got a stone boner. The town founder, J. B. Hope. Maybe he can find a stone lady to give him a blow job.” I opened another beer. I now had five nearly full beer bottles in a strange configuration around me. The stone lady image made me think of Elspeth. I considered commissioning a marble statue, one that would lock Ellie and I together forever in carnal embrace.

  “Rub it,” commanded Harvey Benson.

  “Rub what?”

  “Rub the stone boner. It’s good luck.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. Ask anybody around here. Why, every year after a farmer plants his tobaccy, he drives into town to rub Joseph’s dick.”

  “Who’s Joseph?”

  “Joseph Benton Hope. J. B. Hope.”

  “Oh, right, yeah, got you.”

  “Or, on the night before her wedding, a girl always goes to the Square to give Joseph’s dick a little rub.”

  “Hey,” I remembered happily, “I did rub it.”

  Harvey dealt me a strange, cruel look. “You didn’t even know it was good luck and you rubbed it anyway? That’s pretty weird!”

  “I just wanted to make sure it was really there.”

  “It’s really there.”

  “He’s the town founder, right? Sara found a book in my room, and it had about Hope in it. Hope the town.”

  Harvey leaned forward and grinned. “You mean you don’t know about this place yet? How Joe Benton Hope and his so-called Perfectionists settled here? How they practiced complex marriage, wilful countenance and stirpiculture?”

  “Fishing, you mean?”

  I had unsuspectingly hit a bull’s-eye, tapped into some motherlode of drug-induced lunacy. Benson jumped on to his feet and let loose with a horrible cry, simultaneously jubilant and inhuman. “Fishing!” bellowed Harvey. “Let’s go the fuck fishing!!”

  I considered it and began to chortle. “Ol’ Mossback,” I whispered lowly. “Let’s go get Ol’ Mossback.”

  And singing the theme music from Jaws all the way (bum-bumbumbum) Harv and I mopedaled to Lookout Lake.

  Leaving the Pale Blue Sky to the Moon

  Hope, Ontario, 1983

  Wherein our Biographer (Drunk as a Boiled Owl!) Entertains a rather Fanciful Muse & makes a New Acquaintance, One of a Piscatorial Nature.

  I was considerably more taken with Lookout Lake on this, my second visit. God seemed to be hard at work, although I suspected Him of drunkenness. The sun had risen, reluctantly and sleepy-eyed, and seemed to be on the verge of saying, “Fuggit,” leaving the pale blue sky to the moon. The moon, by the way, was still floating about the world, looking like a photograph scotch-taped to a bedroom wall. Still, the lake gave the impression of industriousness, infested with hobgoblins and elves making hay while the humans slept, while the humans dreamed their tiny dreams.

  Cocaine is an impish drug, in that while your nose is full of it, your body and sensibilities acquire a magical resistance to alcohol. “Another beer and a shot of Scotch? Sure, send it down, no problem, we won’t even notice!” Then, of course, the cocaine pulls out with a sardonic chuckle, rendering you instantaneously plastered. This is what happened to me out at Lookout Lake, and I sat down on one of the lunar rocks grinning, telling myself that I’d found a fine rock and that there was no earthly reason for me to vacate the rock until sometime around the next Ice Age.

  Harvey Benson was more active. “Paulie!” he said, assembling his tackle with great expertise, “we got to take off all of our clothes!”

  “Why for?”

  “Because Ol’ Mossback, he’s a cagey bastard, he can hear the rustle of material, and then he knows that people is after his ass.” Harvey was already butt-naked, I noticed, and it occurred to me that if Ol’ Mossback could hear clothes rustling he could also certainly hear the breeze whistling through Benson’s body hair. Still, I’m a good sport, ask anybody. I slipped out of my clohes and thought of Elspeth.

  I remembered Ellie and me skinny-dipping in some northern lake, remembered the way the silver water ran between her breasts. Actually, though, this was complete fabrication, because Elspeth would never do it. “Swim in a lake?” Elspeth would shriek. “It’s all full of things!”

  Elspeth has an unnatural fear of “things.” She can always account for specific fears, citing past experiences, all of which have the quality of nightmares suffered by a three-year-old. For example, she wouldn’t go skinny-dipping in a lake because, “Once I got a leech on my leg that was about a foot long!” or, “A cousin of mine had all of his toes bitten off by a huge snapping turtle!”

  “Hey, don’t laugh. Some of those snappers are very nasty!”

  “Say what?”

  Harvey was busy executing the butt-naked overhand cast. He planted the Hoper far out in the middle of the lake and let it sink a bit. Then, retrieving it slowly, he asked, “Huh?”

  “You just say sumpin’?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh.”

  Neither would Elspeth engage in the skinny aspects of the dipping. Even if I convinced her to enter a lake full of “things,” she would dash off into the woods and come back wearing a severe one-piece suit, goggles and a flowered bathing-cap, looking as if she intended to conquer the English Channel.

  I looked down upon my own nakedness and giggled. Something struck me as humorous.

  Harvey walked up to me and demanded the bottle of Scotch. “Haven’t you had enough?” I asked, something I say to my friends when I’m convinced, against all logic and odds, that I haven’t.

  “The thing about it is,” said Harvey, grabbing the bottle out of my hands, “Ol’ Mossback is very sensitive to the presence of human beings.”

  “Unlike some people I know,” Harvey seemed to add under his breath. Benson took a long pull at the whisky. “See,” he continued, “when you drink alcohol quickly, it lowers the body temperature. So this way, Ol’ Mossback won’t even know we’re here!”

  “I’ll bet Red Fisher don’t know about that one,” I said, getting back the bottle. I had a healthy measure of whisky, hoping to lower my body temperature.

  Well, I don’t know about body temperature
, but it sure hammered down my IQ. I lay back on my rock and fell into a sort of sleep.

  So, ah, you married?

  Yes. But she gave me the boot.

  How come?

  Well, she’s got this friend, June. And—hold on, hold on. What am I telling you for?

  I’m interested, that’s all.

  But who the hell are you?

  Bumbumbumbum …

  Ol’ Mossback?

  Right first time out of the box.

  A likely story.

  You think perhaps I am but a figment of your pickled imagination?

  Wouldn’t put it past you.

  So, am I right in assuming that you and this girl June engaged in sex, thereby occasioning said action on the part of your wife?

  Pretty smart, for a fish.

  Why’d you do it?

  I was drunk.

  Hey, buck, come off it! I wasn’t born yesterday.

  I don’t know why I did it. June’s got great tits.

  And your wife doesn’t?

  Sure she does.

  As you may know, fish don’t have tits. But I’m doing my best to understand. I’ve seen a few in my time. Those lumps of fat that women have on their chests, right?

  Right.

  And you’re saying that some are better than others?

  I suppose.

  Well, gosh, it’s hard for me to relate to this. The tits I’ve seen looked by and large the same. I mean, all my wives have dorsal fins, but I don’t go around saying one’s got a great set of dorsals and another’s are only so-so.

  Well, aren’t some of your wives prettier than the others?

  Hell, no. They’re all fish! Excuse me.

  Where’d you go?

  Just popped off to chomp a fingerling.

  Ah.

  Are June’s tits prettier than your wife’s?

  They’re different.

  How so?

  Mostly because they’re on June’s chest.

  Now we’re getting somewhere. Look out! What the hell is that?

  What?

  What’s that gizmo your buddy is fishing with?

  It’s called the Hoper.

  Mostly because you got to hope that I’m either crazy or blind if you think I’m going to go for it.

  Well, Gregory Opdycke says it works.

  That putz! Him and those crazy stirpicults.

  Speaking of that …

  Hey! I’m going to give your buddy the thrill of his lifetime.

  What are you gonna do?

  “Whoa!”

  Harvey’s cry made me sit up on my rock, just in time to watch him execute what looked like a triple half-gainer before he disappeared into Lookout Lake.

  The Boston Letter

  Boston, Massachusetts, 1849

  Regarding the popular image of Hope, we know the following: that it was tarnished early on.

  The trouble all began this way. Joseph Benton Hope had seen Polyphilia Drinkwater Davies on the street one day, in the company of her new, fat husband, Buford Scrope Davies. If Davies had simply been fat, Hope reflected, he would have been grotesque enough—but Davies added to this quality those of shortness (like his father-in-law, he approached dwarfdom) and facial unsightliness. Then Hope saw the painful catch to Buford Scrope Davies’s gait. Davies had a clubbed foot—it met the ground sideways and was pulled behind rather than propelled forward in any sort of perambulatory manner. The sight of Polyphilia had turned Hope’s root to stone; the sight of Scrope Davies had the same effect on his heart.

  That night, alone and by candlelight, Joseph wrote a letter. He addressed it to Adam De-la-Noy, for no particular reason, other than the fact that Adam was a worldly man and not likely to be shocked by what Joseph had to say.

  Hope spent the first three pages reviewing the doctrine of Perfectionism.

  And now [Joseph wrote], I am going to speak my heart to you on a certain subject. I trust you to hold this in the most sacred of confidences.

  When the will of God is done on earth, the marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. Exclusiveness, jealousy and quarreling have no place there, for the same reason as that which forbids the guests at a Thanksgiving dinner to claim each his separate dish and quarrel with the rest for his rights. In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be —and there is as little occasion for shame in the one as in the other.

  Adam De-la-Noy read this in his bedroom, by candlelight.

  He had just finished making love to Mary.

  Mary lay on the rumpled bedsheets, naked and dead to the world. Adam spent a long time staring at his wife’s body. Even in slumber her bosom was pitching, a subtle heave with each whispered breath. Mary’s legs were spread-eagled, her cunnicle glistening. Adam realized what J. B. Hope was getting at. It did not anger him in any real way. Adam refolded the letter and replaced it in its envelope. Then he crossed over to the bed and woke up Mary. They made love once more, consecutive sex for the first time in their marriage.

  The following day George Quinton showed up at the De-la-Noy household to fix a door. George wasn’t much good at these household repairs, but somehow he always ended up doing them, even for handy, practical men like Abram Skinner. George didn’t manage to truly fix the door at the De-la-Noys’, which refused to shut tightly, but after hours of beating on it George convinced the door to remain shut, at least as long as he was around. As George was leaving, Adam met him at the door, and handed him an opened letter.

  “Take this back to Reverend Hope,” Adam instructed quietly.

  George stared at the envelope, recognized his master’s handwriting. “What is it?”

  “It is the philosophy of Perfectionism,” said De-la-Noy. “He sent it to me because I was unsure on a few accounts. But now I am satisfied and I’m sending it back to him to illustrate that fact.”

  George grinned heartily. This made him very happy.

  George headed for the harbor and the Free Church, but he absentmindedly crossed two streets over to the west before descending to the docks. There he found The Sailor’s Wife.

  “Ho!” George was startled, even astounded, to have stumbled across the tavern. “Heah’s the gwoghouse,” he commented aloud. “I think I’ll just pop inside.”

  In Boston, that season, the favorite topics of barroom conversation were the uppity South, the alleged liaison between Senator Archibald Guy Tollery and a twice-divorced woman, and Theophilius Drinkwater’s attempted expedition to the moon.

  George entered The Sailor’s Wife, taking the cap off his head and crumpling it humbly in his massive hands. He nodded to the men in a very general way, for quite a few were staring at him. George took two steps over to the bar; the clutch of men beside him laughed, and George found himself grinning from ear to ear.

  “Yes, George?” asked the barkeep.

  George was astonished to hear his own name. For a long moment he forgot what he’d intended to drink. Then it came to him. “Ale, please.” George Quinton held a coin up, and as the publican drew the draft, George polished the piece on his shirtfront.

  The men beside him laughed again.

  “And they’re all at St. Mary’s!” one roared.

  “All of them?”

  “All except Theophilius, ’cause he never jumped!”

  George knew what they were discussing. Theophilius Drinkwater and seven of his most devoted followers (Abigal Skinner’s mother among them) had tried to go to the moon. They’d all donned huge wings, wooden frames covered with chicken and goose feathers, and they’d jumped from the roof of Drinkwater’s tiny house.

  “They was naked as the day they was born!” one man added, evoking another great howl of laughter.

  It didn’t seem funny to George that the people would be naked, if only because he couldn’t think of what attire would be most suitable. George briefly imagined that Polyphilia and Jezreel were among the moon-voyager
s. (They weren’t—Polyphilia was pregnant and Jezreel thought the whole thing stupid.) George had no clear concept of the naked female form, but he knew basically where and what the lumps should be, knew there should be a triangular patch of hair where a man would have a peter. George had, of course, seen Martha naked, because she had no concept, or need, of modesty. When she bathed, Martha often ordered George to scrub her back, and while he did that Martha would methodically scrub away at various protuberances and orifices. But George had no way of extrapolating Martha’s huge, muscular nudity to Polyphilia and Jezreel. So he made do with a little knowledge, and memories of a William Blake illustration he’d once seen and of a statue in a museum.

  “Mostly they have cuts and bruises,” another man went on, “but the old lady broke both her legs.”

  George’s ale came in a pewter tankard. He picked it up, placed it to his lips and in a few seconds the mug was empty. George scowled, then politely asked for another. He hadn’t been concentrating; he’d been distracted by the talk of Drinkwater’s moon voyage.

  Fortunately for the lunar travelers, Drinkwater’s roof was only seven feet from the ground, because by and large, a neighbor reported, they plummeted earthward like great sacks of rocks. The exception was old Mrs. Chandler (Abigal’s mother), who managed, perhaps because of her aged frailty, to sail some twenty feet away from the house. According to some observers, Mrs. Chandler even managed to execute an aerial maneuver, the Loop-de-loop—although they didn’t describe it that way because no one had ever done a Loop-de-loop before (or, for that matter, any aerial maneuver). Then Mrs. Chandler had fallen from the sky, mostly because of the weight of the Mason jars she had harnessed to her back. The air-filled Mason jars, Theophilius Drinkwater acknowledged, had been a mistake. He recorded in The Battle-Axe that his error had been one of scientific oversight, in that, “air, although lacking material substance, still has weight. Although I had made the appropriate arithmetical allowances for the jars per se, the added poundage of the air prevented our escape from the atmosphere.” Theophilius Drinkwater was in no way discouraged. His new thought was to transport the air in balloons, which would even assist the actual flying process. Theophilius optimistically set a date for the new expedition, some two months hence. Abigal’s mother, unfortunately, would not be able to participate. She died of pneumonia a few weeks after the accident.