Archipelago

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Not on mine.”

  “ — that appear only on Fridays.”

  “I'll wear gloves.”

  “When you were baptized, the salt flamed when it touched you. It does that when it touches real brimstone. And the font cracked.”

  “It could have been any of a dozen witches who cracked that font. Don't get crocked before supper, John. Oh well, give me one too and we'll be sad together. God bless this wine!”

  “It is good, Teresa. We needn't have talked of this at all; but if we hadn't, someday I might have thought it was only a dream, how things might have been.

  “Oh no, it's no dream. We'd both have known. I'll love you till the stars grow cold. Then, in a better place, we'll all be together and these things are resolved there. It isn't as though we weren't sure of that. John, did you hear me?”

  “I heard you, Teresa.”

  “You won't let a few glasses get you lost, will you, John?”

  “No. I'll be there. I may have to use trickery but I'll be there. It won't be too long before those stars grow cold. Some nights they seem pretty chilly.”

  “Come see us all the time. And if I'm ever a widow, we'll fix that.”

  “Dio! Don't say it. Maybe I would hope it.”

  8.

  Patrick Stranahan talked with Papa Piccone and Father McGuigan and his brother-in-law Charley Murray late one night. “A little Latin and a little Law is enough,” said Patrick. “Any further scholarship is vanity. Livy gives enough of Latin; and enough of History, with Cobbett of course. There are those who read Belloc, but he has too much French in him and they are not to be trusted to write history.

  “Augustine should be read, but only once, and that in youth. It is good to have read several books in youth as this gives a man background. The danger is in continuing the reading habit into manhood as it is time-consuming. Novels should be left to the old Russians who were supreme. But to read them takes away days of a limited life. The novel that man lives himself should be enough.

  “What music a man needs, let him make. He should fiddle a little for his own edification once or twice a year; that is often enough. If he cannot even play the fiddle, then what has he to do with music anyhow?

  “If one has to have pictures, there are Watteau and Dürer and Hogarth. I cannot think of any others. One minor original and a dozen fine copies are all that an honest man will ever be able to afford. Since the Georgics, there has been no real poetry.

  “Once in five years is enough for the theater. It is more of a hope than a promise. For four hundred years we have gone to the theater in the hope of a worthy play, and it has not appeared; and this without even an authoritative promise that it will come, as we have for the larger things like redemption and salvation. And yet can no person watch a curtain rise without the hope of great things. There is no art from which so much is expected after so many disappointments.

  “As for travel, once in his lifetime, for the saving of his soul, a man should go, not to Mecca, but to Dublin and London, to Paris and Rome. There is no need to go further; these are all that are required of a Christian man.

  “We should know the gracious cities of our own land, San Antonio, San Francisco, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and the Capital (as it were) New York. If a man would be perfect he must select one of these for his home.

  “The horse we have already lost in America, but we still have the rod and the gun of the good things the Lord made. One whisky is enough, and four brews, an American, a Danish, a Bohemian, and of course Guinness. One red wine and one white wine, one brandy, one rum. Seafood and wife should be chosen early in life. If a man's philosophy cannot be written on one sheet of paper there is still fat to be fried out of it.

  “In the Church, the age of giants has just closed, and the age of pygmies comes. The illumination is occluded: we come to the common, which is Hell. The secular-liberal uncleanliness is upon us, a sick parasite devouring entrails in the holy places. Ah, you've always been one of them, Father. Did you ever consider becoming a Catholic in fact?”

  “You go too far, Patrick,” Father McGuigan protested angrily. “There is no difference between you Pharisees of the Right and the Sadducees of the Left.”

  “They are not so ranged, but the difference endures,” Patrick insisted. “The Sadducees did not believe in the Resurrection, nor do their modern counterparts, you. It is you in your dullness who are the alien things, even though you have won the world. We are the world, however much such norm be reduced.

  “But how are we of the old line run out of giants? I am Patrick (the Roman, not the Irish one) and my wife is the first Monica returned. But if I have sired an Augustine, I cannot see him in any of my sons.”

  “But Patrick, from the poets you left out Dante,” Papa Piccone howled his way in.

  “A rimester, Papa, a rimester,” Patrick said.

  “Petrarcho.”

  “A sonnet writer. Young boys and even women have written sonnets.”

  “You have forgotten Buonorroti, Sancho, Cellini.”

  “Stone-cutters, bronze-casters, scratchers, egg-white mixers. They were good, but they should have remained anonymous like their betters in the real Middle Ages. We clutter our minds with them. For myself, if I am given final grace, then I will have everything that counts.”

  The four of them talked that night of several things.

  The next day, Patrick talked to Finnegan.

  “There is a seaman and riverman named Doppio di Pinne,” he said. “I defended him for homicide recently. He is the same man that you are, but how can that be?”

  “I don't know,” said Finnegan. “I don't know him. I have hard of him, though: that he and I resemble.”

  “No, you don't particularly resemble, but you are the same man,” Patrick said. “But I defended him in St. Louis while you were in service with my son around the world.”

  9.

  Vincent was scared the night before. “I don't want to get married. I never got married before. Let's you and me catch a freight train, Finnegan, and go away.” “You catch the train, Vince. I'll stay and marry Show Boat.”

  “Would you, Finn? That'd solve everything. Wait a minute! It'd kill me if anyone else married her. I'm in love with her. I thought you were my friend.”

  “You never know, Vincent, you just never know.”

  “I have three thousand dollars besides my mustering-out. We could go a long way. We could sail to places like Venice and Prague.”

  “The sea-coast of Bohemia, it always attracted me too.”

  “I love her but I'm afraid of her. When she looks at me sometimes I don't know what she means. She's a ghost. I mean it literally. She's just like you are sometimes. Let's go to Frisco. Let's go back to Australia for some good beer.”

  “When I go I'll drink for you also, Vincent. You stay and marry Teresa.”

  “I wonder if I'd go to Hell if I killed myself. I have a pistol. It'd only take a minute. You could tell people I was irrational.”

  “I couldn't tell the Lord that, Vincent. He'd say ‘Finnegan, you know better than that. You know he was just scared.’ ”

  “If it wasn't for that I'd do it. Why don't you get married?”

  “I can't, Vincent. You saw her first. She's your girl.”

  “God! I don't mean Teresa I mean your girl, Dotty. Why don't you marry her. She's wonderful.”

  “I don't know. She is, isn't she? I tell you, Vincent, we're all of us wonderful. Who ever saw such a bunch of wonderful people?”

  “Don't you want to marry her?”

  “My God, Vince, if I only knew what I wanted!”

  “I wish it was about a week from now. I bet I'd have a lot of fun then. I wonder why I love Teresa. She isn't beautiful.”

  “Allettamente, incantevole, ricciuta.”

  “Yea, all kinds of things like that. Say, we could go down to Mexico.”

  “You and Teresa?”

  “No. You and me, it'd be funny if I really did stay and m
arry her.”

  But it wasn't so much Vincent who was scared of the marriage. It was Finnegan. One by one the props had collapsed around him and he would soon have to stand alone in the world. This he had always before avoided by trickery. Now he was running out of tricks.

  10.

  “Uxor tua sicut vitis abundans in lateribus domus tuae.” “Filii tui sicut novellae olivarum in circuitu mensae tuae.”

  Vincent found the words of the Gradual comical and pointed them out to Show Boat — ‘Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine on the sides of thy house — Thy children as olive plants about thy table.’ She seemed to appreciate the phrase about the little olive-knockers.

  Vincent was surprised when Father McGuigan said ‘Wilt thou take Teresa here present?’ He had almost expected ‘Wilt thou take Show Boat here present.’ Father had never called her anything else.

  Vincent heard mass with rare good humor. It should be heard with joy. Joy is everywhere mentioned. Long ago he had noticed that Teresa always smiled at prayer or when coming from communion.

  There was the wedding. And the reception. People will not be saying two thousand years from now that Papa Piccone let them run out of wine.

  “It is the amateur drunks who blossom at receptions,” Finnegan said, “and I become an amateur myself for the occasion, doing it for the sheer love of it.”

  Finnegan always had a lot of fun when there was plenty of wine and whisky and accordion music. He sat on the bride's lap, on the bride's mother's lap, and on mama Monica's. But do not believe all the other stories they tell about him at that reception.

  It's true that when Mary Catherine Carruthers got the hiccups, Finnegan told her to lie down on the floor: and he stood on her stomach. This cured her hiccups but it gave her giggles. And it's true that he romped a bit on Mary Schaeffer and Dotty and Marie and Maurine, but they were all quite good friends of his.

  And a little after noon, after the wedding couple had left in Teresa's old car, and after the Irish and Italians had really begun to warm up to each other at the reception, Finnegan, Henry, Duffey, Dotty, and Mary Schaeffer all got in Mary's Ford to drive down to New Orleans.

  Chapter Five

  Henry the Barque

  1.

  In New Orleans on a Sunday evening they all checked into the Jung Hotel. “What is more apt?” asked Dotty. “If we are not all Jungian Archetypes, then I just don't know what we are.”

  Then Finnegan and Dotty went down to the Quarter to look up old friends. They caroused a bit, they talked a bit, they went to various places. They evaded the foamier and noisier shoals (Finnegan hated that New Orleans jazz). They went to where Dotty used to work, and they found old friends of both of them. Some were eerie. Finnegan was a high-minded boy with remarkably low friends.

  “It's as though the party's over,” Finnegan said. He didn't know what he'd expected.

  “Finn, dear, the party is perpetual, or it is nothing. We must make every moment of our lives a party.”

  “I don't know how.” They were in shortly after midnight.

  And Monday morning, Mary Schaeffer and Henry drove to Morgan City. Henry said he'd be back within a week. Meanwhile, they were to find a place and write him the address.

  “Did you know that St. Jude was the patron of printers and little magazines?” Dotty said. “He was the only Apostle who was a printer.”

  “Same thing. Now we must steal a print shop and get started.”

  “We aren't going to work yet, are we, Dotty?”

  “We sure are, Finn dear. They couldn't do it without us. I was raised in a print shop. They will need me. They is Duffey. And you, If you will go in with us, lover. And Henry, of course, who holds patent on the idea but can't be in on it too directly. Maybe Mary Schaeffer. And Mrs. Duffey when she comes down from Chicago. And one more which will blow your top when you hear so I will not tell you now.”

  “What will you need?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars. We'll spend that so fast that we never will know what happened to it. How much do you have, Finnegan?”

  “Four hundred dollars.”

  “Give me three hundred of it right now.”

  “I don't want to.”

  “I know you don't, Honey. But I have to have it, right now. If it was for anybody but myself I wouldn't ask for it. Thank you, dear. Now go get a job and go to work. I'll meet you tonight or leave you a note.”

  This was Monday morning. Finnegan went to work on the docks and pulled a nine hour shift. Back at the café that night Dotty had left a note for him with an address. He went there. It was a cluttered shop-like building. Dotty was standing in the doorway. They had taken over an old print shop and set up cots and a cook stove in the back for living quarters. Finnegan found that all his things had been moved there. There was work to do and money to raise. Finnegan couldn't see it.

  “Roma no era edificate n’un giorno,” he said.

  “It was too built in one day,” Dotty contradicted. “It's the only town that was; I don't know why they got the proverb backwards. Two brothers built it in one day. There's more than that many of us.”

  Dotty went away then and left Finnegan with a list of things to do. He had worked nine hours and he didn't want to do them. Later he thought that, had it not been for the list, things might have been different. Later he was always thinking that, had it not been for this or that, things would have been different.

  At this time he was still engaged to Dotty. As a matter of fact he was engaged to her till the day he died. And he loved her. This is not an empty phrase. So he went to work and worked all night with Duffey in the print shop.

  Just what was Duffey doing there anyhow? No one thought to ask. It might have been supposed that he had come to St. Louis as friend of Casey (though it happened that they were enemies by then), or as a friend of Casey's girl Mary Catherine Carruthers (though her own reasons for being there were very tenuous). Actually he had come to St. Louis to meet Henry who had written to him, and he had come to New Orleans now to put Henry's ideas into effect. And Stein had been in St. Louis to see Henry.

  “Duff, is there a moral defect in a person who doesn't like jazz?” Finnegan asked.

  “There is, Finnegan, but it need not be mortal. Salvation is possible for one who is not a devotee, else what of the generations of good people who lived and died before jazz was born? There must have been a limbo for them before the blast of the soprano saxophone announced a new Heaven and a new Earth.

  “Of those since that time who have rejected it, there may also be hope. If they were born physically without ears they can be saved. If they were born with ears indeed but stone deaf, they may still be saved. Otherwise no. You don't like jazz, Finnegan?”

  “No. I've never told anyone. I've been afraid. The tyranny of conformity is too great. I was born in the same block where jazz was born. I'm of the generation that never heard anything else. But I don't like it.”

  “It looks dark for you, boy. There are traitors in Heaven. There are sycophants and socialists there. Actually we do not know that there are no Drys in Heaven; there is such a thing as deathbed repentance. Even Dives could have been saved had he asked Lazarus for a cool Mint Julep or a Tom Collins instead of water. That was the test and he failed. That is the meaning of the parable. But perhaps all do not fail. In your terrible negligence you may be given a final chance.

  “When you're in your coffin and the sequence reaches ‘Tuba mirum spargan sonam’, all you have to do is rise up and say ‘Yes, dad, blow that horn!’ But it's better not to take chances or wait till you're already dead.

  “Are you sure you're on sound ground though, Finn. Is your own position irreproachable? You haven't a tin ear?”

  “No, no. That isn't it at all.”

  “You will have to tolerate jazz. We are going to job print a jazz magazine.”

  “You and Dotty might. I am not going to print a jazz magazine.”

  “We need you for the illustrations. And to proofread m
usic.”

  “I might draw them but they'll have a bit to them. And cacophony doesn't need proofreading. How many magazines are there? I don't think you people know what you're doing.”

  “We'll have to do a lot of printing to come out. The jazz paper will be on Friday. The Seamen's paper comes out on Monday. We bring out the Union sheet on Tuesday and the Sporting News on Wednesday. That's all we have lined up yet.”

  “When is your crusading magazine?”

  “That is our work of love. What we make on the rest of them we will lose on that; and after our working day, we will work on it. It will cost a lot. We figure there are twenty-five thousand people we have to get it to, and not twenty-five of the twenty-five thousand would subscribe to it.”

  “Are there that many people who have to do with molding opinions?”

  “Yes. About twenty-five thousand out of the hundred and sixty million in the country. Our list is pretty close. We won't miss a thousand of those who have any effect.”

  “And how many of those will you be able to have effect on?”

  “Quite a few. Those whose business it is to mold opinion are themselves easily molded. Really there are only a few primary influences. We intend to be one of them.”

  “Who's idea is all this?”

  “The merry monk Henry. Then Dotty. Then me. And then another. You must stay with us. It can be as interesting as bar-crawling for a career, and more worthy of you. You have a talent for rapid illustration in all mediums, and we would like to have your services free.”

  The week went fast. Mrs. Duffey phoned from Chicago that she had sold the house and furniture and everything else they had. She was coming with the car, one suitcase, and eighteen hundred books of Duffey's. Duffey was throwing in all he had.

  Henry would be back Saturday. And Dotty was the boss, for she knew more about printing than even Duffey did.