Louis had maneuvered himself into a sitting position, his legs splayed out awkwardly. I deposited the food in this crook, and Louis began to eat.
Louis was quite naked, and every so often (if he had a free hand) Louis would reach down into his crotch and toy idly with his tiny dink. Louis Hope also kept one or the other of his eyes trained on me, ever wary. I needn’t go into detail about Louis’s eating habits, except to say that he got one point out of several thousand for table manners, and that one point was looking vaguely sheepish after producing a belch that registered on the Richter scale.
While Louis ate, I reset the needle of the phonograph, for the music seemed to tie things together, connect it all in some convoluted sense. Louis started to rock, slowly and almost in tempo with the “Vocalise”; he also produced quiet moaning noises that sounded as if animals were being butchered many miles away—this was meant to be singing.
After two or three repetitions of the piece, Louis was done eating. Most of his huge and off-putting body gleamed with chicken fat.
“Now what do we do?” I wondered aloud.
Louis considered the question. He cocked his head slightly to the left, then to the right, back and forth a couple of times, and then he threw his crooked shoulders heavenward. “Eat?” Louis suggested.
“No more food,” I told him.
Louis Hope was saddened. He pulled a smear of grease from his belly with his forefinger and sucked on it petulantly.
“How old are you, Louis?” I asked him.
“Twenty-two,” Louis answered succinctly—but then he kept going, and over the course of the next few moments claimed to be “3,” “107,” “54” and “406.”
“I’m thirty,” I told Louis Hope. He didn’t appear to care. The two of us simply stared at each other.
There is, in The History of the Community at Hope, Ontario, a daguerreotype that pictures most of the original Perfectionists all posed together on some lawn. It is an unremarkable photograph—many of the subjects had become fidgety, and their images are slightly blurred—except for the fact that in the background, ducking down so that his massive head manages to get crammed within the frame, is George Quinton. This is the only known representation of George. Martha, on the other hand, managed to bully herself into all sorts of pictures, even into a posed painted portrait of Adam and Mary De-la-Noy. Of course, Louis bore an uncanny resemblance to George, you probably aren’t surprised to find out, as if someone had taken George’s face and simply rearranged the features a bit. But even I, demented and looking for black holes in the universe, didn’t conjecture that Louis was in any way the same person. This was because George Quinton’s death was the most thoroughly documented of any of the Perfectionists’, written up in countless newspapers, lavishly described in Rev. Dr. McDougall’s book The Lecher (wherein George Quinton is portrayed as a martyr in the name of all that is decent) and medically confirmed and validated by a court-appointed physician. I may not have known much, back in my early Hope days, but I sure knew that George Quinton was dead; he’d been hanged for the murder of Joseph Benton Hope.
Stirpiculture
Ontario, 1879
Regarding the theories and practices of Hope, we know the following: that in 1879 he embarked on systematic experimentations in stirpiculture. The result of these experiments is known to the modern scholar—they produced, in time, one hell of a women’s Softball team.
From THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNITY AT HOPE, ONTARIO
By 1879, the community was inhabited by approximately one hundred sexually active adults. In the Free Love system at Hope, a man wishing to have sex with a woman would first submit a written application to Joseph Benton Hope. Hope would in turn consult the woman (who ostensibly had the right of refusal) and, more often than not, sanction the act. Strict records were kept (Daisy Cumbridge was the self-appointed secretary) which show that the average woman had two to four lovers a week, whilst some of the younger girls had as many as seven.
With the continued financial success of both the fishing-gear manufacturing and the tobacco plantations, Hope realized that it was economically feasible to abandon the practice of “wilful countenance” and to propagate. It was J. B. Hope’s vision that from the small community at Hope should arise a “Glorious People.” Hope asked for female volunteers who would lend their bodies to the procreative program, and made it clear that he would influence the choice of each sire.
Hope received some forty-five applications; he rejected eleven due to the person’s physical condition (they were, one assumes, too old). The thirty-four left had an average age of nineteen, and were mostly virgins.
The man most favored by Hope to impregnate these women was Hope himself.
Thus began the experiments in stirpiculture.
Joseph Benton Hope was fifty-five years old. His fingers, for all his life fine and delicate, as white as ivory, had, over the last year, twisted and gnarled like tree roots. The knuckles had exploded and were as big as walnuts; the skin that covered them was red and flaky. Joseph Hope himself found the hand ugly, even as he laid it on Rachel’s breast.
Rachel shivered.
Rachel’s nipples were a shade of golden brown that Joseph Hope had never seen before. He was intrigued by this, after having seen so many nipples. Hope flipped his thumb across it two or three times, wondering if excitement to the amative mammary site might alter the pigmentation. It didn’t seem to; the nipple merely stiffened, tiny and resolute.
Rachel was seventeen, a small girl with auburn hair. Rachel’s nose was slightly crooked, which Joseph Hope found very attractive. Hope had lately found such small imperfections to be sexually stimulating.
Rachel had been one of the first volunteers to the stirpiculture program, and there had been many applicants for sire—among them Mr. Opdycke, Erastus Hamilton, both Samuel and Lemuel McDiarmid, and Isaiah Hope.
Isaiah Hope, twenty-one years of age but still as small as a teenager (as Joseph himself had been at that age) had submitted an application (his first and only) in his beautiful, flowery handwriting. Under the heading “Reason I Should Be Elected as Mate,” Isaiah had written a long, finely wrought statement, which included such phrases as “mutual affection,” “common areas of interest” and “intense reciprocal corporeal attraction.” Having read all that, J. B. Hope had laughed his queer, birdlike laugh. Isaiah was in love with this little bit of fluff. Joseph had crumpled the application savagely, and later he publicly berated Isaiah for these “special feelings” and “exclusive attachments.” Then, in a whisper, he’d told him something else. Isaiah realized that he would never be allowed to procreate. Isaiah Hope had, of course, begun to weep.
Rachel had looked away, during this humiliation of Isaiah, folding her hands into her lap and studying them with great interest. Joseph Hope gazed at her for a while, and noticed that her nose curved almost imperceptibly to the right. “I shall father the stirpicult!” Hope announced.
And now Rachel was naked, or almost so. She was wearing a pair of sheer stockings, and Hope would insist that she wear them throughout their amorous congress. Hope pulled his horny hand over her tanned body, still slightly more interested in his own paw than Rachel’s youthful nakedness. Where had he seen a hand like that before? Joseph Hope watched as it traveled over Rachel’s small belly, and it struck him that his hand somehow resembled a hawk’s claw.
Rachel shivered again, was in fact shivering constantly.
“Are you cold?” J. B. Hope demanded. His voice was worse the older he got, and sometimes sounded like a chorus of bullfrogs at the bottom of a dried-out well.
Rachel shook her head.
Rachel’s hands were timidly covering her thistle—Joseph Hope pulled them away. The coloring of her fleece was the same golden brown as her nipples, the shade that Hope had never seen before.
Joseph Hope felt the Holy Spirit enter his body, and the front of his nightdress pushed out toward the young girl. Hope pushed her backward on to the bed and hiked up the hem
of his gown.
And as Joseph Hope drove the Holy Spirit from his own body and into Rachel’s, Isaiah Hope sat by the edge of Lake Look Out, apparently talking to himself.
Mona Left the Sentence in the Air
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our Hero (let Us give him the Benefit of the Doubt) is given some Distressing News and Frolics Adamatically.
I suppose I fell asleep there in the living room, lullabyed by the music and finally overtaken by the drugs and alcohol in my system. When I awoke, I was knotted up on the hardwood floor. Someone, presumably Louis Hope, had covered me with whatever could serve as blankets; dishtowels, rugs, even the filthy WELCOME doormat from the flagstone patio. Still, I was goose-pimpled and shivering. My teeth chattered so hard that I could feel my brain bouncing around in my skull.
The sun was coming up hesitantly, peeking over the edge of the world to make sure the coast was clear.
I lay on the floor for a long while—despite an awesome exhaustion I knew I didn’t stand a chance of falling back to sleep. I wished that Elspeth was lying there beside me (Elspeth, who clocked eight hours of slumber time nightly, regardless of the circumstances) so that I could look at her body. Elspeth wore a full-length flannel nightgown to bed, but through guile and sneaky material tugging I could usually expose enough of her nakedness to satisfy my voyeuristic tendencies.
I twisted my body to a position in which my head hurt fractionally less for a quarter of a second. A piece of paper tumbled off my chest. I picked it up and read:
WHAT THE HELL DID YOU GET UP TO LAST NIGHT? WE HAVE TO GO BACK TO THE CITY. SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO WORK FOR A LIVING! REMEMBER WHAT I SUGGESTED. ESTHER THINKS YOU’RE A NICE GUY! NYUK, NYUK! H.
From outside came a horrible sound, which I recognized after a moment as the horn from Esmerelda, Mona’s pickup truck. The sound was still distant—Mona had yet to turn up the laneway. When the turn was made, it was accompanied by a tire-screeching and further horn-blaring. I climbed to my feet, vacant and nauseous, wondering what the hell was going on. Then came a brake-screaming, a metallic door-slamming, and finally a heartrending “Paul!!”
I made haste to get outside.
Mona stood beside the black pickup truck and shook. She was trying to light a smoke, but her enormous hands trembled so that the match waved back and forth underneath the cigarette and wouldn’t even set it smouldering. Mona’s eyes were an odd mixture of red and black, red from tears, black from sleeplessness and the gravity of being.
“So, um,” said Mona—she drew her forearm underneath her nose, pulling off a string of mucus—“like, Jonathon’s in hospital.”
“He is?”
“ ’Cause he got beaten up,” Mona explained. “Bad.”
I began to suspect that my theories of witchcraft were misguided. I opened my arms and Mona came to me. She leaked all over my body for a good long while, leaked and trembled and whispered curses.
Finally Mona was collected enough to demand, “What’s with you, anyways?”
“Huh?”
“Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
“Research,” I admitted.
“Dumbfuck research,” Mona muttered, burying her face into my chest. “Like about Joseph Hope and what happened and all that shit.”
“Correct.”
“Ever’one knows what happened.” Mona broke from me, turned away and wandered down toward my pond. It was breakfast time at the water, and Mona and I stood side by side and watched the activity. We slipped our arms around each others’ waists.
Mona said, “Go figure, eh? Jonathon, he’s the nicest guy in the world, and ever’one aroun’ here knows it. So who would beat him up so bad? He may not …” Mona left the sentence in the air. It was astoundingly awkward up there, like a hippopotamus trying to walk a tightwire.
A kingfisher swept across the sky, and both Mona and I lifted our eyes to watch him. The bird cruised over the water, and then in an instant buckled and plummeted. The kingfisher barely made a splash as it entered the water, and it seemed like the same moment that it ripped back through the surface, going the other way. The bird now held a chubby little trout in its beak.
Mona wiped her nose again. “I called the hospital,” she told me, turning and walking back up the gentle hill. “They said that visitin’ hours weren’t ’til like two in the afternoon. You wanna go visit Jonathon?”
“Yes. I want to go visit Jonathon.”
“ ’Kay. But …” Mona tossed her shoulders up and down. “What are we gonna do ’til then?”
“Technically speaking,” I answered, “I haven’t been to bed yet.”
“Yeah, but …” Mona eyed the little homestead darkly. “That’s the old Quinton place.”
“You don’t like that?”
“It makes me feel weird,” she admitted. “This is where J. B. Hope got wasted.”
“A long time ago.”
“You know what they say? Eh? You know what?” Mona said this rather eagerly, as if it was after midnight, and the moon was out, and she and I were five years old and trying to scare each other silly. “Louis—you know Louis, right?—he’s like a ghost, or a spirit or sumpin’, right, who can’t find any peace! And he has to walk the earth …”
“Waddle the earth,” I amended.
“… until someone finds out the secret! And then he can find peace.”
“What secret?”
“I dunno! There’s gotta be a secret somewheres!”
“Maybe about the, you know, penile amputation.”
“You know, for a smart guy, a writer and a researcher, you’re a stupit shit. You read one book—by Isaiah Hope, no less, who ever’one knows was loony-tunes from the word go—and you get all worked up about it.”
“You mean …?”
“That’s right, peabrain, J. B. Hope never got his dick chopped off.”
“I have to admit, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing George would do.”
“George? What’s any of this got to do with George?”
“He killed Hope!”
“Yeah, sure, but …” Mona stared at me with exasperation. “You really been reading and shit?”
“Yeah!”
“ ’Cause you know, like, mice-turds! For fuck’s sake, if you’re gonna research, research!”
She had a point there. I had gotten rather sidetracked somewhere along the line.
“Let’s drive out to Lookout Lake,” I decided suddenly, “and go skinny-dipping!”
“I dunno. Maybe.” I guessed that Mona felt it was indecorous to go skinny-dipping while Jonathon Whitecrow lay in the hospital near death. But I knew that Jonathon would have thought it a wonderful idea, and what’s more, something deep within me was monomaniacal about driving out to Lookout. I took Mona by the hand and dragged her toward Esmerelda. “You don’t have to go skinny-dipping,” I told her. “You can keep your bra and panties on.”
“Oh, yeah, right, sure,” Mona mumbled. “As if I wear that shit.”
I pushed Mona into the passenger’s side of the cab and then climbed in behind the wheel. I was struck by a thought as I fired up the ignition. “Hey, Mona. You call your dog Joe.”
“Right.”
“I thought you named him after Joseph Hope.”
“Nope.” Mona lit up another cigarette as I backed down the laneway. “Named him after my husband. Not really my husband. My common-law husband. Joe. Joe Gom.”
“Oh, and that’s why …”
“That’s why what?”
I changed the subject, not wanting to mention the fact that Mona had whispered “Joseph” in the throes of orgasm. “So where’s Joseph?”
“Joseph is el morto,” Mona replied. “He had a little air bubble in his brain or sumpin’, and one day it ‘sploded. He never even knew he had the bubble. Least it was quick,” Mona continued. “We were watchin’ TV—“The Waltons”—and Joseph says will I get him a sandwich? Get your own effin’ sandwich, I say, and he says, okay, and sta
nds up. Ka-boom.” Mona was quiet for some long moments. “Guess I should have got him the sandwich, huh?”
After a silence, Mona said, “Let’s go skinny-dipping.”
Soon Lookout Lake came into view.
Mona pulled down her bluejeans slowly and, true to her word, was wearing no underwear. I stood behind her and watched with wonder as she revealed her bottom. Mona turned around, caught me ogling, and smiled. Then she unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it off. Mona, majestically naked, nodded toward the water. “Strip, boy. We’s goin’ skinny-dippin’.”
“Right.” I awkwardly divested myself of apparel.
Lookout Lake was icy cold. As soon as we were kneedeep Mona’s nipples puckered and my privates shriveled. This was worth a giggle or two. Then, hand in hand, we raced forward.
We made love in the water, Mona and I, which was something I’d seen in movies, always in slow motion, but never suspected was possible in “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” Then we climbed back on to the bank, enveloped each other in the other’s body, and Mona and I went swiftly to sleep.
Well, that was highly educational.
Huh?
I’ve heard a lot about it, but I’ve never actually seen sex performed before.
Ol’ Mossback?
Whom else?
Oh, right. Another of those silly dreams I have.
Whatever you say. Anyway, that human sexual intercourse is some hard work. We fishies have an easier time of it. The female lays the eggs, I cruise over, slow and easy-like, and zap ’em with the milt. Easy. Mind you, it’s not an awful lot of fun, but it is easy!
How’s come all you ever want to talk about is sex?
I’ll talk about other things. Like, for instance, perhaps it would interest you to know that the water dropped about 6 degrees Centigrade overnight.
It doesn’t.
Oh. Well, what do you suggest we talk about?
Let me ask you about something. There’s a book called The Fish …
The Life of Hope Page 26
