“There we go, my lambs,” Bilbo ignored Uncle’s remark and stood back from the hearth, where a cheerful fire now blazed. He excused himself momentarily and retired to his loft above to change his own wet clothes. Bessie rummaged through an old trunk across the parlor. Neddy sat upon his haunches by the fire and growled evilly.
“For Godsake, play along, Uncle!” I implored him. “Think of the plan!”
“Thy plan is a farrago,” Uncle whispered back.
The ladder creaked and Bilbo descended from above. He was caparisoned now in a tattered but elaborate red silk dressing robe complete with mink collar and cuffs. Upon the lapels were embroidered two snorting griffons. Bessie soon returned with a pair of kersey nightshirts and two robes, one of bearskin, the other of buffalo. Bilbo suddenly produced a bone-handled carving knife. Uncle and I both gasped, but the hulking pirate merely leaned forward and cut our bonds at the wrists and ankles.
“Go on,” the brute said. “Out of your wet things!”
We changed into the scratchy woolens without further protest. Bessie could be heard gurgling and whistling behind our backs.
“There now, isn’t that better?” Bilbo said when we were done, and held out the pewter cup to Uncle. “Take it,” he said genially. Uncle pursed his lips and refused. “Take it!” Bilbo roared. Uncle seized the cup and imbibed the whiskey.
“Satisfied?” he asked Bilbo.
“Never,” Bilbo replied with a wry grin. “But life is too short to be squandered in carping, right Neddy?”
“Yap yap,” the dwarf agreed.
“Why don’t you go out and procure us a supper worthy of this splendid company, my boy,” Bilbo swatted the little mongrel on the hindquarters and he scampered eagerly out the door. Our cups were refilled and we were adjured to join our host at the fireside, Uncle and I in a wooden settle and Bilbo in a scuffed, padded armchair. Twilight gathered at the windows. The fire was comforting, even in this untoward circumstance. Bilbo offered us some of the tobacco he had pilfered out of our effects. I took a pipe. Soon, even Uncle’s stony demeanor began to soften under the influence of the crackling hearth and the Monongahela.
“So,” Bilbo leaned forward avidly in his chair. “Tell me the news of the day.”
Soon you wouldn’t have known our little gathering from that of a public room in any country inn. I touched on some particulars of New York politics. Bilbo seemed especially interested in these, and starved, in general, for information about the civilized world. The rumor of our Louisiana purchase astounded him.
“That scoundrel Hamilton is behind it,” Bilbo commented. “Wants to become the American Bonaparte himself, if you ask me.”
“Bosh,” said I, emboldened by the whiskey. “Hamilton is completely shut out of national affairs. Jefferson is the mastermind behind Louisiana. And as for scoundrels, is this not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, eh, Captain?” I toasted him.
“He’s a spunky lad, ain’t he?” Bilbo quipped to Uncle, who shrugged his shoulders. Just then, Neddy returned from his twilight hunting foray. Around his neck was a small deer, while from his belt hung several partridges. “Well done, my boy!” Bilbo arose to greet the panting hobgoblin.
“That’s odd,” I said. “I didn’t hear a single gunshot.”
“Neddy doesn’t need a gun,” Bilbo informed us without elaborating, and a chill ran down my spine.
“I see,” was my reply.
In a little while we were enjoying the roasted wildfowls with fresh-baked biscuits while Bessie turned a haunch of venison on a spit in the hearth, its juices sizzling aromatically in the glowing embers. It had been so long since our last hot meal that I was as giddy from hunger as I was from the whiskey. Uncle too feasted with single-minded concentration. Bilbo, meanwhile, commenced to spin out the rueful account of those tribulations that had led him to such a low estate as piracy.
“How I miss my dear little city of New York,” Bilbo lamented with all the affectation of a Park Theatre Polonius. I sensed that he had told the story before. “You see before you the mere shadow of he who was Melancton Bilbo, Esquire, soldier in the Great Fight, up-and-coming broker, husband and father, caught between those twin scoundrels, the Castor and Pollux of infamy, General Hamilton and Colonel Aaron Burr. ’Twas my misfortune to marry a beautiful woman, Hester Broadbent, minx, and to be born with a trusting nature…”
A tear fell into his plate.
“How happy was my little family in the house on Cherry Street—or so I thought. The brokerage was a rising concern in the city, with a reputation for probity and an eye for the winning venture. In the spring of ’97, Hamilton approached me, on behalf of a certain Mr. Voorhees, with a scheme for erecting a magnificent silk manufactury at the falls of the Passaic River. Everything was arranged, Hamilton assured me. All that was needed now were backers. It was projected that once in operation, the factory could supply all domestic needs in America and that within five years its output should eclipse the great silk mills of the Manchoo princes! Shareholders would realize an incredible bonanza. I invested the bulk of my personal fortune: forty thousand dollars. Needless to say, the scheme fell awry.
“The silkworms procured by this Voorhees (supposedly imported out of Pekin itself) turned out to be no such things. The so-called silk they produced was nothing of the kind, but a luminescent spittle that, once dried, compared with the lowliest doghair as a textile.”
“Sounds like Trichobaris trinotata,” Uncle inserted, “the potato stalk borer.”
“Plucked from the very garden rows of Bergen County!” Bilbo avouched with a sob. “Naturally, the venture soon foundered. But not before I was, perforce, constrained to spend more and more of my time at the factory across the river in New Jersey. Unbeknownst to me, Colonel Burr, that notorious lecher, and also, by happenstance, our attorney in the silkworks matter, used my absences as an opportunity to seduce my wife. I became the laughingstock of Manhattan. Finally, Voorhees eloped to England with the entire funds of the Passaic Silkworks Company. Burr abandoned my wife when it became obvious that a planned divorce would leave her penniless. I was ruined and disgraced!”
Bilbo broke down again, but soon recollected himself.
“For a time,” he continued, “I wandered the wharves of South Street seeking a yardarm from which to hang myself. But what, I fretted, would become of little Bessie, the apple of her father’s eye. We slipped away westward. Ah, the West, gentlemen, that fabled wilderness of opportunity, mother of El Dorados and Hy-Brasils! Our flatboat got as far as the head of this island. Yes, friends, that derelict upon the shoal was our pretty craft, the Yet Hopeful. We ran aground in a raging storm, much as you might had we not (ahem) signaled you—”
“Accosted us,” I corrected him.
“I am not finished.”
“By all means.”
“Where was I?”
“You were stranded here, on this island.”
“Yes. And here we remained. Weeks, months went by. The game was plentiful. Soon it occurred to me: why leave? Why go anywhere? The fact is, gentlemen, I had found in this solitude that elusive peace of mind that all men seek. Fortune blows many a strange wind in this wide world. Here we remain in our happy snug harbor.”
Bilbo dandled a turkey leg and smiled ruefully.
“That story is the most preposterous balderdash I ever heard,” was my commentary.
Uncle coughed into the sleeve of his buffalo robe.
“Why, ’tis the sheerest twaddle,” I persisted.
“You didn’t find it moving?” Bilbo asked, dismayed.
“I do not believe a word of it,” I told him frankly.
He looked into his plate for a moment, visibly absorbing his disappointment.
“Very well,” he finally said. “Perhaps this will suit you better.” He cleared his throat so as to give it a fresh attack. “How well I recall those carefree days of boyhood under the tulip trees on the lawn of dear old Mount Vernon, playing with my little cousins under the
watchful eye of my father, His Excellency George Washington—”
“Bilbo,” said I, “you are a most arrant and contemptible fraud.”
“Do you say I represent falsely?”
“I do sir; you are an humbug through and through.”
“I will meet you like a gentleman.”
“I am ready to get your pistols,” said I.
Bilbo glared at me across the succulent viands. His eyes flickered with malice. I did my best to return his gaze, as though my face were a mirror. The clock ticked loudly on the mantle. Neddy growled. Finally, Bilbo blinked. It was like seeing a pair of live coals extinguished under two wet rags. An ominous chortling rose from deep in his throat.
“By Gad, if you ain’t a saucy boy!” he said and erupted in laughter. A great gob of spittle ran down his chin and he farted with abandon, such was his merriment. The dwarf and Bessie also erupted, the one barking and the other honking with glee.
“He is a rude puppy,” Uncle inserted.
“Puppy!” said I. “Mind how you talk, baby brother!”
“Baby brother…?” Bilbo said quizzically. “What is this nonsense? All day long you have been calling this old goat brother.”
“So? What of it?” I retorted, thanking God that he had finally taken the bait. “How could he possibly be your ‘baby brother?’” the villain asked.
“’Tis none of your business,” I said.
“Wait. I see. Madness descends on the poor lad as his hour draws nigh. I’ve seen it before, sad to say.” Then to Uncle: “They go to pieces.”
I kicked Uncle’s foot under the table. He seemed dazed.
“No, ’tis true,” he finally joined in the ruse, to my relief. “What appears to thee a mere saucy stripling of a boy is, in fact, my older brother.”
Bilbo recoiled. “Why, I may be a fraud, but do you take me for numskull as well?”
“Not at all,” Uncle rejoined. “For we bear a secret so strange and marvelous that logic herself trembles at its utterance.”
“A secret? What secret?”
“’Twouldn’t be a secret anymore if we told you, now would it?” I set the hook.
“Let’s have it, by the blistering Jesus!” Bilbo pounded the table with his fist and the entire house shook.
Uncle furrowed his brow, chewed upon his lip, coughed, cleared his throat, and finally gestured to me in deference.
“Well…?” Bilbo pressed me. He brandished his knife. “Speak if you wish to continue breathing!”
“Er … you have heard, I’m sure, the old Spanish legend of the enchanted spring whence—”
“I knew it!” Bilbo cried triumphantly. “The fountain! The fountain of youth!”
“Well, yes, actually—”
“Where? Where!” Bilbo lunged across the table, clutching desperately the folds of my bearskin robe.
“It is hard to describe—”
“You must have a map!”
“There is a map, but—”
“Hand it over this instant!”
“It is in here.” I pointed to my head. “The map is graven only upon my memory.”
“You have been there yourself, though?”
“Why, manifestly so, Bilbo,” I affirmed.
Uncle could not resist muttering, “Thou dunce….”
“You slaver on my supper, Captain.”
Bilbo let go of my robe and sat primly in his own chair. “I am all ears,” he declared.
“Where shall I start?”
“We have … all night.”
“Some years ago,” I began prevaricating, “whilst on a botanical ramble down Zane’s Trace in the Ohio country, I came upon an humble springhole amid a shady grove of ancient beeches—”
“Beeches, you say?”
“Fagus grandifolia,” Uncle inserted.
“I drank of it. Its water was pure, sweet, most of all refreshing to the weary, aged traveler—but no more so than that of a thousand other wilderness springholes tasted in a lifetime of sojourning—”
“Er, just how long in the tooth were you?” Bilbo asked.
“How old was I? Three score and twelve, sir. And this was back in ’96, mind you.”
Bilbo rolled his eyes in calculation.
I beat him to it. “I shall be eighty on the first of October next.”
“By Jehovah’s short hairs!” Bilbo exclaimed. “Ain’t it a marvel, though! Go on, lad.”
“Yes. Well, the effect was almost instantaneous. I experienced it as a fugue of bodily sensations, not altogether pleasant. Frankly, I thought myself at first in the grip of an apoplexy, a coupe de sang as it were. I seized a trunk of a young box elder”—
“Acer negundo,” Uncle said.
—“and the attack passed. I climbed back upon Old Tom, my horse, and went my way.”
“This was on Zane’s Trace?” Bilbo inquired avidly.
“This was off the Trace,” I replied.
“Hard by the Trace, perhaps?”
“Some distance from it. A day’s march, at least.”
“Dear me,” Bilbo shrank back into his seat. “Well, what happened next?”
“I became aware, in a very vivid degree, of the aroma of sassafras, of wild roses, of bear dung—all the scents of the woods—and realized it had been long since I had enjoyed such olfactory delights. Years. Decades! I was near besotted with it. That is no exaggeration, sir. Soon, I began to feel a tingling in every joint in my body. My eyes were assaulted by a clarity, a brightness of vision—”
“Like the effect of phrensyweed,” Uncle inserted. “Furor muscaetoxicus.”
“Thank you, brother. Ahem. It was then that I chanced to look down at my hands, gripping the pommel of my saddle, and damn me if all the gnarls of gout, all the deformities of arthritis, all the liver spots and blue veins of dotage had vanished! Suddenly, I gasped for my very breath, and realized that my cravat was like to choke the life out of me. I reached for my throat and ripped the collar open. But all my clothes were now tight beyond endurance. My frock coat bit into my shoulders as if it had suddenly shrunk two full sizes. My breeches went slack at the waist. Without that premeditation of movement that is a hallmark of old age, I leaped from Old Tom to the ground and landed on legs that had the spring of a young roebuck’s, then at once cast off my clothing. Had this occurred on any civilized highway or city street, I would have been trundled off to the nearest lunatics’ asylum, no doubt. But I looked down upon myself and, by heaven, I was a youth again! Gone were the sagging gut, the teatlike bosoms, the broomhandle arms and spindly legs. I reached for my face and ran my fingers across it like a blind man feeling the face of a long-gone loved one. The dewlaps and wattles had vanished! I was transfigured!”
“By Jupiter’s thundering bungchute!”
“Indeed, sir, my very sentiments—”
“Sammy!”
“I must be candid, brother, though it pollute your morals. But, there I was: a new man. Being of a lifelong skeptical bent, I puzzled my brains to discover what might be the cause of this momentous transformation. For breakfast I had consumed the ham of a bear and a cupful of mulberries—nothing more. It had to be something in that spring, thought I. I hastened to retrace my steps to it, and this time brought up Old Tom to sip from its modest pool. In a matter of moments he too began to submit to the most startling transformation. Where his coat had been dull and listless, it suddenly shone like waxed mahogany. Where his old spine had swayed under two decades of saddlery, it became as straight as an oak beam. Where mane and tail had hung in graying tatters was suddenly luxurious black hair, as stiff as that of a hussar’s charger—”
“By God’s flaming gorget!”
“My thoughts exactly, sir. But Old Tom’s throes did not end there, for he was seized by such a thirst that he would not stop guzzling of the spring, and in a matter of minutes he was reduced to a spindle-legged colt. He collapsed under the weight of the saddle and fell a’bawling and a’neighing beside the pool; and luckily so, Bilbo, for had he
continued, no doubt he would have departed this world by retroactive birth, rather than merely gained a new lease on the life he already owned. Damn me, sir, if I didn’t have to carry all my own necessaries for weeks afterward—not to mention the trouble of milking a she-deer twice a day for the little brute’s sustenance.”
Uncle rolled his eyes at this outlandish embroidery. I confess I was carried away.
“Had I not the stamina of a youth, Bilbo, I would have had to abandon my dear companion to the wolves.”
“You’ve a heart o’gold, by the Lamb o’Nazareth,” our captor said.
“In conclusion, Bilbo, those jars you plundered from our boat were intended for that marvelous fountain of the wilderness. We were going to bottle the stuff, return with it to Philadelphia, and make a fortune, not to mention the dividend of enjoying eternal life—but since you plan instead to blow out our brains, then I suppose it is just another promising business scheme gone up in a vapor—”
“Just a moment there, friend,” Bilbo stopped me. “Has it ever occurred to you to take on a partner? Someone with a good business head?”
And so did Captain Melancton Bilbo et famille become our partners in a venture calculated only to gain us freedom from the clutches of said Bilbo and his brood of freaks.
“Gentlemen,” Bilbo stood up at his place, “or should I say partners? A toast to our consociation!” He hoisted his cup and grinned malefically, revealing a mouth full of green and black teeth as mossy as so many timeworn stumps in an old river bottom. We clanked cups. Bilbo belched. “Let’s to our slumbers, for tomorrow we embark on the trail to riches and life everlasting!”
Uncle was tethered by means of a length of rope to the vigilant Neddy, who lay curled upon a rug at the hearthside like one of Father’s water spaniels, one hooded eye glinting ever-watchfully. Of course, Uncle did not submit to this indignity without protest.
“If this is how thee treats a partner, then thee deserved all thy misfortunes in the silkworm debacle.”
“Sir,” Bilbo riposted in a pedantic tone, “is trust founded on such shifting sands as would tempt you, after only minutes of formal consociation, to speak in such spiteful and censorious terms to he who bears only your best interests in his bosom?”
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 5
