by Leon Rooke
Oh, I can make light of it now. Now that I am ten thousand miles removed from those shores and am beginning to breathe the sweet moisture of home. Usumbura we passed yesterday. Ruana-Urundi tomorrow. They can’t fool me. It is something in the blood.
My husband, pursued by these Chair forces through the Dakotas over the span of three summers and winters, repeatedly had sent word to Yale’s tireless posse that he had no interest in their Chair, or in the wealth that accompanied this appointment, as Jeffersonian democracy was neither his specialty nor a concept in total arrangement with his liking.
I would not recommend acceptance of this Chair, should the offer come your way.
I would be wary of any invitation to show yourself upon New Haven’s public green.
Avoid the whole of this uneasy state, if you are able.
My husband told the Chair’s emissaries that he under no circumstances could accept the Chair, even a Roving Chair, or ambassadorship, and in reaction to this sentiment we were ordered out of the Dakotas, advised that we must not set foot into any adjacent state or territory, nor think that we might take leave by water for that ocean was under sovereign jurisdiction as well.
So all right, I lie. I veer from strict truth.
But we were on the lam through the Dakotas for some many seasons, the Chair’s supporters in hot pursuit and our tribe decimated and factions arising at every turn, since none of us knew that much about why it was that such hoards of influential and moneyed people were willing to sacrifice so many lives or effect such widespread deprivation all in order to bring about One Foot’s ensconcement in the deplorable Chair.
A council of elders was called and in one voice, after but a few minute’s deliberation, they summoned us before them and said, “One Foot in the Water, take the Chair.”
Take it before all our people are dead and only our bones are left to rattle through these Dakotas.
Off we went to Yale for receipt of this honour.
Until our arrival that rain-soggy day, we had not known even of the existence of violent and powerful forces simultaneously at work to prevent just this occurrence.
Yet also at Yale, in the president’s house where we were lodged in the initial days, some kind and consummately patient person sewed score upon score of roses onto the lining of my princess dress. These were of the old York variety, with each thorn carefully removed and fine invisible mending done on the hem, where my heels back in the Dakotas had time and time again caught the beaded and boned fringe.
Every bead polished, every bone wiped, our bedcovers folded back, and the pillows bestrewn with further displays of these blossoms.
Two bleached antelope shinbones crossed over my pillows, which sign made me tremble, for they spoke of home. Decades in the flow since and me but a nippling when uprooted.
I wore these petals next to my skin and wept, for it had been a long time since we had enjoyed privilege or mercy of any kind.
One Foot cried, to see me bathe, these lovely petals at float on the scented water.
Our bed and the floor about that bed ablaze with York blossoms, and the air afire with the airy petals as we loved. Us little expecting these times to be our last hours of bliss in each other’s embrace.
At five the butler’s bell rang and we passed down the stairs to a gay reception and dinner.
“Perhaps you will get accustomed to sitting in this Chair,” I said to my husband.
“Good bed,” he said. “I like beds.” And went on to explain his view that the entire westward expansion owed everything to the presence of these eastern beds.
So I saw he was putting a good face on this Chair issue, and thinking better of Jeffersonian principles in the aftermath of our couplings.
A stone occasionally strikes the deck of this boat, and skids off into water. We are told black infidels are ashore in the bush, tracking our passage, and to be watchful for poisoned arrows, though I have yet to see any proof of this menace. Only these small bouncing stones or harmless splats of mud which a child might mindlessly fling.
A crew member sent by the captain stands solemnly beside me and after a long interval presses a warm glass in my hands. I drink its contents without inquiry, and return the glass to him. He does not quit my side.
“What was in the glass?” I ask.
He cocks his head indifferently, standing close by on spread legs.
“A soporific,” he says.
“It had the taste of rum.”
“A soporific, princess. With rum, to settle the stomach.”
He smells of monkey. I have seen any number of these animated creatures at swing in the wheelhouse or scampering along the deck. But I will not satisfy him by stirring even one inch, and my little knife as always is at the ready. I have stuck it through tougher beings than this one man.
“The captain wishes I should report to you that your trunk is secured.”
Although he smiles, I am not deceived. He would pitch me overboard and be done with me, without the smallest qualm.
“It is in the wheelhouse?”
“Yes, princess. Padlocked under heaviest chain.” He bows witlessly and tosses the glass my lips have touched into the Nile.
“Then how am I to have ready bargain with my clothes?”
He does not reply.
I thank him and at last, reluctantly, he goes.
I hang over the deck again, retching into black water, as night-birds thrash and squawk in the trees.
Curiously, our train car had palest-blue balloons in danglement from every inch of ceiling, these aloft at a level equal to the heads of those men and women standing in tight press along the aisles. Each few seconds a smoker’s cigar would burst one or another of these, and each man in the vicinity grabbed for his blade or handgun. One Foot could not remove his gaze from this display of dancing blue balloons, the presence of which puzzled him greatly and elicited endless whispered commentary into my ear. He sought to find messages in this armada of balloons as he did in the night’s sing of stars, and was vexed by his inability to conjure same, although he laughed mightily each time a balloon popped from the ceiling and on its own accord shot at dazzling speed its wild orbit above our heads.
The child was coming; I was in considerable torment and retained my composure, I hope, although One Foot was sorely incensed that no one in the packed car would surrender his seat or even squirm so much as an inch to right or left. But he was already hobbled in one leg from the fray on the public green at Yale, plus suffering a dog bite which now was festering, plus carrying in addition deep wounds in his side from his youthful wars.
He could do little to right the matter beyond arranging some little rope’s length of comfort for me in that space on the cold floor beneath the gentlemen’s feet. I lay on this slab of grit and boots and food spat from the travellers’ mouth, shuddering with the clickety-clack of iron against iron and in the grip of deepest anxiety and pain, for this child was my first and coming early and my attendants all scattered in result of the fray at Yale.
Pity me, to have been so senseless as to wear my princess dress.
It worried me that my dress should not survive the ordeal, or that my child might not, and between bursts of pain and the dizziness of balloons, I had mind to consider my great wardrobe of seven steamer trunks long since reduced to the one, and One Foot’s worry that he could no longer provide for me. It is a pitiful thing to see this recognition sap a prideful man, and I wept bitter tears for his misery and for my own and my labouring child.
These gentlemen pressed their boots about my head and chest and limbs through the entire birthing process, their cigars in ceremonious toil and their ash in steady cascade about my face. Their boots kicked and prodded my flesh at every turn, some perhaps unconsciously, to render them that justice. My floorspace smelt of pigshit and piss and the eastern civilizations enough to make me gag. Soldiers in attendance to see to our safety were at cards, or bent with drink and frivolity, or such obscenity as betokens handshake with the u
niform. They lifted not the one hand, but instead inflamed the matter, which did not in the least surprise us, given the discord in surround of the Jefferson Chair.
Oddly, a gentleman sharing our cramped compartment sat in study of an Eastern paper through near the whole of my birthing throes, often kicking his boots against my head and body in his excitement as he discoursed upon the rights and wrongs of the Jefferson Chair, and its rich endowment, which investment seemed to his mind to exist in contrary fashion to the democratic ideals the Chair’s very creation was meant to promulgate.
Mr. Jefferson had never been a piece of God’s creation that he could champion, he said, and had Mr. Hamilton shot the rascal, as so often had been his desire, the country would have been saved much grief.
There was something cunning underway with this business, he said, and it was his guess that European monarchists were behind the whole of it; they had put up the coin, no doubt about that, he said, and duped the intelligentsia at Yale, which institution had sorely declined since its removal from old Saybrook. But what could you expect, given the tenor of these times. A great debauchment of the people’s trust was in the wind now that the laws of entail and primogeniture were at lapse. Much claptrap, he said, was being put about with regard to the requirements of education for the poor and uncivil, with slave and redman and pickpocket rising to assail one at every turn. Women strutted in secret, arrogant rule up and down every corridor of power from the Potomac to Yale, and the country would suffer calamitously if the citizenry did not soon come to its senses and cast off the foreign yoke. Hang the scoundrels at home, who knew not where their bread and butter did come. Cast off this puerile exercise in free thinking, which rewarded only freeloading rodent, chimney-sweep, and slubberdegullion. The country must forsake its restless clamouring for art and the snooty ideal and the luxurious life for every upstart or field hand with tongue to flap or arsehole to fart it out of.
A great boomswell of “ayes” sounded in aftermath of this speech, and heavy trampling of boot where I lay in dire sweat, huffing and puffing, with thrusting pelvis, my water sloshing beneath me and the flesh of poor One Foot’s palm between my teeth chewed into rag.
“Aye!” they said. “All the evils of this nation’s business can be seen in this episode of the Chair!”
“Aye, the Chair, heaven help us!”
But now my husband forced some little extraction of space between my legs and slung my limbs high upon his shoulders, for he took news from my shrieks and thrusts that the child was in its daylight chamber and he must be my woman and my midwife now.
The gentlemen through some precious moment or two fell silent, and stayed their feet.
I shrieked anew to see my heels at lock about my lover’s neck and to glimpse his bloodied hands at work between my naked legs. Sweat roiled upon our skins and the jolting pain now was without surcease. I closed my eyes and locked my teeth on whatever came between them, as for instance the toe of the talkative gentleman’s boot. But he grappled this away from me, with a show of bad humour which found release in a stream of lurid comment upon the vileness of travel in this ignorant age.
With each new siege my feet thrashed against my husband’s face and chest, my great belly heaving and my buttocks at slushy romp, until at last he was made to force them into the grip or brace of whatever man of quality would consent.
The men at crowd upon us, by and large, seemed bored with our activity, or assumed attitudes in antipathy with our goals, and soon went on again with their scholarly perquisites.
“Women should not ride the train,” one of these said, “and there’s the proof.”
Another chorus of “Ayes” sounded, and much toasting to this chap.
The man with the newspaper announced that he held exalted status with the Halls of Transport and Railroads, and that he normally would be found riding in the owner’s caboose, with mugs of hard cider in each hand and comely Chinee wenches in slit red dresses showing ample ankle or even garter belt to see to his every need. There followed a great tipping of hats and a flood of inquiries about the availability within that office of other exalted jobs.
On this occasion, the man said, the caboose had been turned over to that Chair savage from the Dakotas who had incited the riot at Yale and trampled innocent children underfoot. Yes, thanks to government intervention and outright laxitude, lawless, irreligious hoards could usurp a fine man’s seat anywhere in the land, and it was high time a Cotton Whig took hold of the realm and hung this low-life from a tree, wherever they be found.
Yes, yes, the savage was riding this very train, he said, and likely coupling this very minute on the owner’s divan with his black princess who, as was well known, had cavorted shamelessly with a thousand men away there in the Egyptland she hailed from.
“Aye, aye!” the others said. “’Tis well known.”
There’s some as should hold the line, he said, as to which raw whore they’ll take aboard a good slave ship.
“Aye!”
Profit or not, there’s principles at stake here!
“Aye! We ought to go ourselves and plug the bitch!”
But at this moment the vulgarian’s attention was drawn to One Foot, as if he had but just noticed my husband’s presence for the first time. He offered his fatted hand for shaking, and for some protracted seconds that hand hung at mean jiggle above my eyes, One Foot’s own hands being at busy engagement between my legs.
“And what is your opinion on these matters, sir?” this magpie asked One Foot. “Do you have views, I mean, as a redman and savage, on this treasonable business with the Chair?”
At this very moment my child’s head slipped loose of all encumbrances, sorely irritating this unsavoury clown. I strained and huffed, certain I was being torn apart limb by limb. One Foot planted his legs anew, forcing my legs wider yet; a snarl was fixed upon his lips and glitter showed in his eyes and for an instant his sight locked with mine. “Push, bitch,” I heard someone growl; One Foot’s fingers probed inside me deep as a barge pole; he spat and yanked as I howled; I was aware of a great sucking, slurpish sound which seemed to arise from the entire car, and my guts ripping, then a swoosh, and then a great vacuum or hole suddenly opened inside my womb; this emptiness swept onwards and in the instant took hold upon my brain. My very bones seemed to have been scoured. Heaven help me, yes. My eyes opened and I saw the newborn gliding smoothly upwards, flowing like a skein of syrup between my bloodied legs into One Foot’s nimble, fraught, embrace.
“Aye, duckie!” someone said. And henhouse cackles all around.
My husband held the child high in the one hand, smacking rump.
“Sir?”
One Foot’s hand at last shot out and shook Big Mouth’s lingering paw.
“Indeed, sir,” One Foot said to him. “Indeed I have views.”
I arose – “You will move the buttocks, sir,” – and took back my seat.
But that our child was a beauty to behold and born in perfect health despite the setting I have described, I leave to more proper and learned annals in our history to chronicalize in detail.
We named her Oryxes II, in my tongue, and Foot of the Dogs, in our shared language, with more than a few exchanges between ourselves of the mirthful code.
Some little aftermath of tranquillity must have followed this birthing, for I do recall I was asleep when this Luther person disconnected himself from that throng of travellers occupying each dot and parcel of seat and aisle. My eyes blinked, I mean to say, and in the next moment I felt the crush of One Foot’s body slung across mine and our child’s, though not before I saw the flaming torch in arched flight upon our very selves. And every man and woman screaming and trampling away from the fire’s orbit, without regard for neighbour or friend.
From this attack I suffered a few unremarkable burns, together with nose bleed from one or another wild elbow, plus tintinnabulation, plus gore everywhere, and nothing to do with that dress except fling it at the first bush. But later I gave this de
cision second thinking and coerced myself into reclaiming the garment with a good wash, plus tincture of lye, plus needle and thread. Oryxes was unharmed, and One Foot’s diminishment only the little greater, though the nature of his disfigurations in body and spirit did have weight upon me wearisome unto my depths. His mind was in deep cogitation of these Jeffersonian principles thrust upon him, and this study tired him mightily. What had seemed obvious now seemed arguable, he told me, and the viceversa. Each simple issue or statement of plain truth now arrived in his mind with interminable codicil, or long-winded preface, with gazette and appendices, or contrary council and allegation, and footnotes that went on into eternity. He feared his new scholar’s mind was now in session with the full academic committee, and it tired him, it tired him, it lays me low, my darling.
Through the oily, coal-dusted windows could be seen vultures at glide with our traffic. They gobbled flesh as they sailed. When morsels fell from their beaks, crows swooped in from nowhere, with raucous chatter, to claim what was theirs.
At Yale, a woman wearing a scarlet bonnet had asked my husband which of these many eastern inventions he was witness to had most impressed him.
“The hammock,” he said.
The president of that institution had taken us aside and said how sad he was that Meriwether could not be with us to celebrate my husband’s ascension to the Chair. “Villains struck him down, you know. Years ago. On the Natchez Trace.”
“Yes. My princess and I were much enriched by our association with him during the Expedition, as with our correspondence through the years.”
“I understand you were most helpful to him during those difficult Louisiana years.”
“Princess was.”
The president bowed and kissed my hand. “We have much to learn,” he said. “I understand your lineage can be traced as far back as the Middle Empire’s Amenemhet.” I bowed to him, fluttering an impervious hand.
