The Life of Hope

by Paul Quarrington

  The Head Librarian seemed relieved, and one palsied hand went to her breast. “Thank Christ,” she said.

  “This is the Library?” I asked, for it was possible that I’d made a mistake and wandered into someone’s home.

  “Is it ever!” said the Head Librarian. “Look at all the books.”

  There were admittedly a lot of books, but even a cursory glance informed me that few had been published since 1930. Moreover, the books were placed randomly on the shelves so that Walden sat between Nana and Treasure Island.

  “I am Miss Dierdra Violet Cumbridge,” said the Head Librarian. “Call me Deedee.” Deedee had polished off her cigarette, even though it was one of those hundred millimeter jobs. Near the sofa was an enormous ceramic ashtray, about the size and shape of a toilet bowl, and Deedee flipped her butt into it.

  The quizmaster was back on the TV. “What is the state bird of California?” he demanded.

  “Oh, for gosh sakes. The valley quail.”

  “Who was Sennacherib?”

  Deedee sputtered a bit, the answer getting lodged in her dentures. Finally she spit out, “The King of Assyria!”

  “What branch of science deals with the study of cells?”

  “Oh, come on, now! Cytology, what else!”

  “I’m doing some research,” I said politely. “I am researching this town and its founder, Joseph Ben …”

  “You are?” Deedee Cumbridge crossed her arms and nodded vigorously. “Good for you, Patrick. I think more people should be doing research on just that very thing! My gracious, it’s a fascinating story. There’s nothing like a good murder, that’s what I always say.”

  I’ve no doubt that my eyes lit up like headlamps. “A good what?”

  “Murder,” repeated Ms. Cumbridge.

  “Yippee!” I clapped my hands and gave a thumbs-up to the Fates. “And who, pray tell, was murdered?”

  “Well, who the hickory do you think?” demanded Deedee. “Let’s go to the special Hope Room and do some research.”

  “Okay! Let’s go.”

  Deedee reached down beside the sofa and picked up two thick canes. She laboriously raised herself to her feet, taking about four minutes. Then she stared at me. “Peter,” she said, “you’re a nice big boy. I don’t say porky, I say big.”

  I nodded thanks for this sensitivity.

  “Even though we’ve only known each other ten minutes, I’m not embarrassed to ask. Would you please carry me into the Hope Room?”

  “Sure.”

  I picked up Deedee Cumbridge, cradling her in my arms. She weighed sixty pounds, tops.

  “Thank you, Phillip,” she said.

  The Hope Room was near the back of the house. Books lined the walls, but the room also contained a bed and another television set. Deedee had me turn it on. There was another quizmaster.

  “What was the name of the first professional baseball team?”

  (It was “That’s A Sport,” my Waterloo.)

  As I laid Deedee down on the bed she yelled, “The Cincinnati Red Stockings!”

  “Right!” I said adamantly. Then I looked through the books as Deedee screamed out answers to questions on quiz shows. She didn’t miss a single one.

  To my astonishment, there were a great number of books written about J. B. Hope and his Perfectionist followers. Without going into my process of selection, which was a little fluky, let me simply state my bibliography right here and now.

  For the history of the community at Hope, Ontario, I used The History of the Community at Hope, Ontario, written by Parker T. Sullivan in fulfillment of his doctoral program in Sociology, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958. The best biography of Hope I found was written by Edgar Muncie, entitled The Perfectionist, published by Kinlow-Clark, Ill., 1944. Mind you, Muncie tends to be sympathetic toward Hope, so for a more balanced perspective I found it necessary to dig into the past a bit, coming up with a masterpiece of abusive literature, The Lecher (Copp & Sons, N.Y., N.Y., 1883), by the Reverend Doctor Ian John Robert McDougall, Barrister & Solicitor. A much nicer book, invaluable for its portrayal of the other important Perfectionists, is O, But the Days Were Sweet (Mester & Beatty, 1894), which are the memoirs of Cairine McDiarmid. Also invaluable in this regard are my old standby, Fishing for Ol’ Mossback, by Gregory Opdycke, and a two-penny pulp novel, The Fish, by Isaiah Hope. Two books that I used sparingly, and that are only of a scholastic interest, are: Sexual Practices of the Hope Community, a monograph written by Prof. Sterling Mycroft of Chiliast University (I lacked interest in this work only because I couldn’t understand any of it) and a scuzzy little paperback, Hook, Line and Sinker: The Updike Empire.

  The Hope Library Hope Room also contained a great number of old periodicals, journals and newspapers. It had bound editions of The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War, The Theocratic Watchman and McDougall’s Journal. The newspapers were all The Kingston Whig-Standard, and they chronicled a week in 1889, a week during which one man was murdered, another hanged for the heinous deed.

  “There is nothing about Hope that I don’t know,” Deedee Cumbridge said during a commercial break. (Then again, there was nothing about anything that Deedee didn’t know.) She lit a cigarette and waved the lighted match in the air, without any dowsing effect.

  Being the sort of fellow I am, I eschewed all of the scholarly, erudite works and went straight for The Fish, by Isaiah Hope. (A quick cross-reference with The Perfectionist informed me that Isaiah was, indeed, Joseph Benton’s own son; but at the same time Deedee started clucking her tongue disapprovingly.) The cover of The Fish announced that it was AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, COMPLETE AND UNEXPURGATED and a CLASSIC OF SUPERNATURAL HORROR. This pocket version from the Hope Library was published some time in the forties (and was astonishingly well preserved, as if Deedee had dusted and fussed over it daily) but the book was originally written in 1891. It had then been issued in a cheap nickel magazine format (all this information was supplied by Deedee Cumbridge during commercial breaks) and everyone ignored it, so Isaiah used his life savings to publish it in hardcover, and everyone read it and was appropriately disgusted and revolted by it. The Fish was banned everywhere, and Isaiah was arrested for obscenity, and while they were at it the authorities threw in a couple of buggery charges and one of corrupting the morals of a minor. Isaiah was thrown into the Kingston Pen., and there he died, still a young man, thirty-seven years of age. According to Deedee Cumbridge, Isaiah Hope died of “an overdeveloped sense of drama.”

  The cover painting of The Fish shows a lake, lit silver by the moon. A naked girl, obviously fearful for her life, stands frozen in a strange and awkward position, branches in the foreground covering her nipples and pubic hairs. From the water rises a fish, a huge thing, mouth full of cruel teeth, round red eyes possessed of the devil. On some level of my being I felt a slight outrage, intuiting that the fish on the cover was a caricature of Ol’ Mossback, not that I’d ever acknowledge having chatted with him, but Ol’ Mossback struck me as a fairly decent sort, for a fish.

  On the first page there was a quotation from Thoreau serving as a proem. It read:

  Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed.

  H.D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

  The book featured a ‘John Lockhart’ of ’Lockhart, Ontario.” Subtlety was not Isaiah’s strong suit. I sat down on the edge of Deedee’s bed and read.

  I will relate with utter candor the strange events occurring that summer so very long ago. Only a courageous fidelity to the truth will spare me accusations of mendacity. All I request is anonymity; suffice it to say that I am a townman, that town being Lockhart, Ontario; that I labor at a trade, that being the manufacture of fishing and angling tackle. As to my personal life, know of me what you would know of any other citizen;
that I am happily espoused, that the union has resulted in three fine children, and that of a Sunday I take no greater pleasure than in attending the Service and honoring my Maker. I am no better a man than many others, and I devoutly pray no worse.

  Our town is named Lockhart because we were founded by one John Lockhart. The history of our founding is too long for inclusion in these pages, too complicated by the vagaries of fate and the Capriccios of the human nature. When first he settled, John Lockhart was a man whose most readily apparent trait was nobility, a man, as they say, with a Vision. But years had clouded that vision, and nobility was somehow transmitted into depravity, and John Lockhart, that summer so very long ago, had become an evil old man.

  It is time to point the finger of shame at the true villain of the tale, Hanging Johnny, also known by the names of Doctor Johnson, Uncle Dick, Jacques, Old Hornington, my man Thomas and Blind Bob, for it was this mischievous fellow who precipitated the horrendous events that are to follow.

  Gretel Dekeyser was, the summer of which I speak, a virgin, fourteen years of age. There is no need to proffer evidence of her purity; indeed, one had only but to look upon her, to see the alabaster whiteness of her flesh, the soft swellings of her breasts (not yet blossom’d with the fullness of womanhood), her slender hips, as slim as a boy’s, and her pearly feet …

  “ ’Her pearly feet?” I read aloud.

  Deedee was lighting another cigarette. She certainly smoked a lot for a hundred-and-four-year-old woman. Again she had difficulty snuffing the flame, huffing and puffing at it uselessly, dropping the match on to the floor (with the mild oath, “Fiddlysticks!”) when it began to burn her fingers. “Isaiah Hope,” Deedee informed me, “liked feet.”

  … to know that she had never known dark lust. Perhaps it is this very heavenborn virtuousness that drove John Lockhart to distraction, that reared Hanging Johnny’s ugly head. The facts are known to us from Gretel Dekeyser’s own mouth; although having divested herself of them, Gretel spoke no more and never again. She had been walking by the lake, on a hot summer’s day, and decided, as all children will when sweat stickles their youthful bodies and cool water laps at their toes, to throw off her clothes and plunge therein. There was no licentiousness here, her body not “nude” but simply “naked,” her breasts too small to joggle provocatively, her bottom as small as a boy’s …

  “Isaiah was weird,” I mumbled.

  “Was he ever!” agreed Deedee, adding, in answer to a TV quiz show poser, “Benjamin Franklin.”

  … and her pearly feet churning the water, propelling her forward.

  John Lockhart was also at the water’s edge, for he was by way of being a Nimrod, and he was in pursuit of the Fish. A word of explanation; it had long been said, although hitherto dismissed by many as foolish prattle, that the waters of our environs contained a prodigious being, an aquatic beast of monstrous proportion. John Lockhart was obsessed with this mythical colossus and angled for it daily, to the exclusion of all else, including any intercourse with his family or only son. Under normal circumstances, nothing could dissuade him from his efforts to take the Behemoth, except on this day, when he espied Gretel Dekeyser’s boyish bottom moving about in the water.

  Then the devil Wagstaff whispered, “We must have her!”

  The having of Gretel Dekeyser was no Herculean endeavor, for she was a petite girl. John Lockhart merely waited by her abandoned petticoats. When she quitted the water, droplets flowing over her as-yet unwomanly breasts, through the sparse thicket of her boyish loins, ultimately arriving at her pearly feet, John Lockhart reared up. “Eek!” exclaimed Gretel Dekeyser. And quickly the deed was done, John Lockhart holding her arms and girdling her boyish frame while Rupert Ramrod did the vile business.

  “Pretty spicey, eh?” demanded Deedee.

  Karl Dekeyser, Gretel’s father, was like many of the Dutch who had emigrated to Canada in order to forge a new life. Karl was a simple man, although by this I allude not to a dullheadedness on his part, rather to a way of viewing the world with a childlike artlessness. When Gretel came home, disheveled and flushed with the crimson of shame and humiliation, Karl knew he had to exact a revenge; moreover, Karl saw that justice must be meted out, not to a single villain, rather to a pair of scoundrels.

  “Oh-oh,” I mumbled, and my rapidly shriveling groin voiced a request that I read no further.

  The moon that night was full and radiant, eager to light the darker deeds of men. There were some thirty men in all; good men, most, certainly none devoid of virtue. I will admit to being in their midst, mute and faceless.

  We transported John Lockhart to the scene of his transgression, perhaps thinking that our justice would be more certain there. Few of us, I think, knew what justice we would mete, perhaps not even Karl Dekeyser, although an electricity in the air whispered that blood would be let.

  John Lockhart did not protest his innocence; indeed, his manner implied that his culpability was none of our concern, that we were all small, petty things with no business in his affairs. He stared at us with his queer eyes, vicious and defiant as a goshawk. Lockhart’s eyes were in and of themselves disquieting; he’d lost one, the left, while fighting valiantly in the American Civil War, and it had been replaced by a pale, blue marble. The superstitious of nature, by which I refer to virtually all who inhabited our town, had it that this small glass sphere was capable of demonological entrancement; and if, as Lockhart claimed, Gretel Dekeyser had denuded herself with full knowledge that he lurked nearby, her behavior was due to this thaumaturgy.

  “Do you want,” Deedee asked politely, “a beer?”

  “No, thanks.” I was engrossed in the little paperback, and besides, I was in one of my moods whereby I had quit drinking forever. These moods come upon me quite frequently, though they never stick around too long.

  “I do,” she said.

  I realized that Deedee was asking me to fetch her one, so I searched out the kitchen and went to her fridge. Her fridge was full of beer, row upon row of brown buddies standing shoulder to shoulder. That wondrous sight melted my nondrinking resolve instantly, and I pulled out two bottles. They were perfectly chilled, the fridge’s thermostat set with an eye to the ale alone. Of course, aside from the beer, the only inhabitants of the fridge were six Mr. Big chocolate bars and a rockhard quarter pound of butter. I opened the beers pouring them into two tall pilsner glasses that I got out of the freezer, beautiful glasses clouded with frost. When I got back to the bedroom Deedee and I toasted each other.

  It was decided, when or by whom I can’t recall, that John Lockhart should remove his clothing. Lockhart affected the vesture of clergy in a haughty, arrogant manner, no more ordained than a common mongrel, and these garments were torn angrily from him. Lockhart’s underclothes were removed so that he might be further humiliated.

  His accomplice was rigid, as if standing at attention. Lock-hart himself was small in stature; it was enormous, fat and superposed with thick veins. The One-Eyed Snake stared at us, more insolent than its master, swollen with vainglory, bloated with pomposity. I then realized that the relationship was reversed; John Lockhart was subservient to the purple piccolo, a Nubian to his own Nebuchadnezzar.

  Suddenly Karl Dekeyser moved forward, and before we knew what had happened, he (incidentally a butcher by profession) was holding the razor-sharp tool of his trade in one hand, and the huge, quivering quimstake of John Lockhart in the other. We looked on in horror as blood poured from John Lockhart, a thick red stream as if he were a fountaining statue. Karl Dekeyser held Long Tom Lovestaff high in the air and walked to the lake’s lapping edge. He held the Hairsplitter over the water and gently released it.

  It was then that we first saw the Fish. It rose out of the water, revealing itself to be a length of some six feet. The Fish’s eyes were large orbs that held the moonlight within. The Fish opened its mouth, huge and full of tiny, needle-sharp teeth, and then closed it around Lockhart’s bloody Dingle-Dangle.

  I’ll give you a s
ynopsis of the rest of the book. The fish spends the next few moments chewing on the “Goose’s Neck,” a few moments that John Lockhart spends dying, something I would certainly do if I were him. And the thing is, at the exact second that Lockhart dies, the fish swallows the “bald-headed mouse.” There is then some magical transference of spirit and John Lock-hart and the fish commingle on an astral plane somewhere in the cosmos. THE FISH is created, a monster that swims around waiting for townsmen to come near the lake, waiting for them to —for whatever reason—remove their “pondsnipes,” “spindles,” “downlegs” or whatever they happen to have, whereupon The Fish, exacting John Lockhart’s monomaniacal revenge, leaps out of the water and chomps off their dicks. The town is finally saved by a woman, hitherto a scorned and laughed-at woman by virtue of her physiognomy, which was huge and bearlike. This woman (named Marta in the tale) dresses up in masculine garb and fishes from the water’s edge. After a while, she nonchalantly removes what appears to be an enormous “tallywhacker” from her trousers. The Fish naturally emerges from the water and bites it off. Of course, it wasn’t a “flappdoodle” at all, it was a sausage laced with arsenic. The Fish dies (for some reason The Fish’s death scene is by far the longest passage in the novel, about fifteen pages’ worth), and Marta becomes a heroine, and our anonymous narrator learns not to judge by even freakish appearances. This is, of course, a nice lesson to learn, although the anonymous narrator never mentions that it might also be poor form to lop off somebody’s penis. (The word penis, by the way, is not employed in The Fish.)

  At any rate, the book was a smallish thing, 128 pages in all, and being a speedy reader I managed to complete it that afternoon. Deedee Cumbridge and I also managed to make a fair dent in the Frigidaire full of beer. When I was finished reading we watched television together. The game shows were all over but “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” was on. Deedee and I drank beer and cheered for the predators: “Come on, lion! You can catch that gazelle.” “Go you Golden Eagle, you! It’s only a bunny rabbit!” The only reason we rooted for the predators is because, due to the four-to-one betting odds and the fact that the show is for family viewing, they never catch anything on “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” and if you watch the show often enough you get the impression that everything in the wild kingdom is slowly starving to death. As Deedee Cumbridge put it during a commercial break (advertisers were sure wasting their money on Dierdra Violet Cumbridge; she had countless ways of occupying herself during commercial pauses, and not one of them was learning about the product in question), “If you don’t go for the dogs,” (by which she meant “underdogs”) “you’ll go to the dogs.”