Fiddler's Green, Or a Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

by Van Reid

  Melanie’s mind was on several things, it seemed, for she looked at Sundry and said, “You’re in the Moosepath League?”

  Sundry Moss had never thought of himself as an actual member of the Grand Society, though the charter members always spoke of six Moosepa-thians in those days. Perhaps he did not trust that he loved good deeds more than adventure, or perhaps it was his unusual relationship with Mister Walton—part employee and all friend—but in his mind he had always kept himself a little aside from the rest of the club. For the purposes of the little girl before him, however, it seemed meet to avoid splitting hairs. He nodded and said, “Yes, I am a member.”

  “Oh, my,” said Maven.

  The little girl seemed satisfied, and she even smiled sofdy. She and Timothy equated the Moosepath League with adventure and grand exploit, and having one of their number with her and her father on this journey lifted it above sad farewell and propelled it into the realm of dangerous and desirable possibility. She could look ahead instead of back, though she did turn in her seat to peer past her father to see the only place she had ever known as it disappeared beyond the groves of the old Mariners’ Hospital. Watching her, Sundry realized that she had a cap in her lap and that she had taken it off, like a polite young boy, when she came into the car.

  31. Setting Course

  Robin Oig stood outside the smithy and looked east, the direction in which Mr. Moss had disappeared. There had been something capable and right about that young man (Robin himself was bearing down on thirty and perhaps had weathered to the appearance of something a little further), and meeting Mr. Moss on the busy sidewalk was the sort of seemingly chance business to which the sailor believed a body should pay sharp attention.

  One of the idlers outside the forge watched Robin gaze down the length of the wharf district and said, “I suppose you’ll miss the salt air.”

  “Not a bit of it,” said Robin.

  “The feel of the deck rolling beneath you,” chanted the idler as if he were reading a poem from a column of newspaper. (In those days there wasn’t a journal that went to press without at least one stab at verse.)

  “It doesn’t make me sick, but it doesn’t make me hanker for more.”

  “You don’t say,” said the idler, visibly disappointed of his romantic woolgathering. Two of his fellows came out of the smithy to consider the waterfront as if they had not seen it before.

  “Where’s Edgecomb?” asked Robin.

  “That’s near Portsmouth,” said one fellow.

  “Is it?” said another.

  “New Hampshire or England?” said still another.

  “I don’t know which,” said the informant. “Maybe both.”

  Another fellow joined them, and they looked around, shuffling their feet and craning their necks; it seemed that Edgecomb might be in sight if they looked hard enough. Robin saw that there wasn’t a page of geography among them. “It can’t be near New Hampshire,” he said. “It’s east of here.”

  “I guess I knew that,” said one of the idlers, and his fellows watched him for further intelligence.

  “It’s across the river from Wiscasset,” said the blacksmith.

  “I know Wiscasset,” said Robin.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” said one of the idlers, though it wasn’t clear to whom he was speaking.

  When the blacksmith had the oar restored, more or less, to its former glory, the sailor and the hangers-on stood around and appraised the art that had gone into mending it. There was a mortise and tenon a carpenter would have admired, and an iron sleeve with two pins.

  The sailor tipped his beard back and looked over the work. He turned the device in his hands, nodding his approval. “That’ll answer,” he said, which was all the blacksmith wanted to hear. They settled up over money, and the sailor said, “Across from Wiscasset.”

  “There’s a bridge, I think,” said the blacksmith.

  “Yes, I’ve seen it,” said Robin, and without much more than a backward wave he shipped the oar over his shoulder and proceeded to march east.

  It was pretty fine along the water and about all that June can offer. Gulls banked in an almost cloudless sky, and there was enough of a sea breeze to temper the heat of the sun. The wharves were crowded with business, and everything known to man seemed to exchange hands from ship to shore and back again, carted in wagons and drays up the cobblestone avenue. Peddlers and vendors lined the street, and ladies in bright dresses and elaborate headgear strolled the sidewalk with men of important appearance and shadowed the sidewalks with their frilly parasols.

  Robin counted a dozen dogs, eight parrots, and a monkey, and he stopped to look over a monstrous lobster occupying a tub before the fish market by Union Wharf. Slowly he read the sign above: I FOOT, 9 AND ONE QUATR. INCHES, AND A SMIDGEN. 3 I POUNDS, 4 OUNCES. NAMED MCKINLEY AFTER THE BIG MAN IN WASHINGTON. DON’T TOUCH. MCKINLEY IS NOT PEGGED. WATER NOT FOR HORSES. Robin thought the lobster looked like a great peevish insect. He had eaten lobsters when he was young as they were considered poor man’s food (and, before that, good for little more than fertilizing the fields), but he was more fond of a good chunk of salt pork or fried beefsteak.

  With his oar shouldered like a battle standard, Robin garnered his own share of interested stares, and people only looked more inquisitive as he neared the Grand Trunk Railway Station. Mr. Moss had said that he was heading for Edgecomb, and the blacksmith had said that Edgecomb was due east, so Robin thought he might find Mr. Moss on an eastbound train. He was hardly surprised when, with a sailor’s sharp sight for the proper landmark, he distinguished the very man stepping from a cab before the station fifty yards away. Robin didn’t even shout but only followed Mr. Moss, he was that confident of affairs as they were playing out.

  “I want a ticket for that train,” said Robin to the ticket man inside the Grand Trunk Station.

  “That’s all well and good,” said the fellow, “but where are you going?”

  “Where does the train go?” asked Robin.

  The ticket man considered the great long oar on the sailor’s shoulder, then the large, blond-bearded face. He looked round to his schedules and said, after a moment, “It switches engines in Brunswick, then by way of the Springfield Terminal heads for Bangor and Mattawamkeag. You’ll have to board the Eastern Maine if you want to go any further from there.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Robin.

  The ticket man only shook his head. “You could have left that outside,” he said, frowning at the enormous sweep.

  “I wouldn’t leave it outside,” he said. “I just got it mended, and who’s to say I won’t cross paths with the person I’m looking for if I let it out of my hands for a minute?”

  The ticket man didn’t know what Robin was talking about and didn’t ask. He had seen people attempt to board trains with all manner of objects; there had been the drummer with several boxes of rum bottled and disguised as Auntie Tisrod’s Dauntless Nerve Tonic and a fellow from Prospect Harbor who had bought his ticket with his coat pockets fidgeting with a dozen high-strung rabbits. “You’ll want a receipt,” said the ticket seller as he prepared a baggage claim tag with a length of string.

  Robin watched the man without any signal of understanding. Soon the sailor was sizing up the entrance to the first passenger car and holding the blade of the oar in front of him like the barrel of a rifle when a platform worker in railroad livery came up and asked him what he thought he was doing.

  “I’m trying to see how to get this inside without clunking someone on the head,” said Robin thoughtfully. He had backed away from the steps of the car several times to let others pass, and now he set the grip of the oar on the platform and held it like a flagpole. “Take one end of it, would you, and help me guide it in.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said the platform man. “What made you think you could take that thing aboard?”

  “What’s this, Mr. Heath?” said the approaching conductor.

  “He’s trying to get
aboard with this mile of lumber,” came the reply.

  “I don’t know if the car is long enough,” said the conductor with more humor than Mr. Heath had thus far displayed.

  Robin looked more puzzled than daunted. “Where can I ride then?” he asked.

  “You can ride where you want,” said Mr. Heath, “but the oar goes in with the baggage.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said the sailor. “I told the fellow inside I wouldn’t part with it,” and he proceeded to explain why.

  The engine let out a gust of steam, and so did Mr. Heath; but the conductor liked the whole business. “I suppose you could dangle your legs off the back porch,” he said offhandedly, meaning the landing at the end of the caboose. “Set that boom over your knee and snag the mail when we go by.”

  Mr. Heath was one of those people who often recognize dry wit half a beat after they have reacted to it. He had already snapped, “He can’t ride there!” before wondering if the conductor had been serious when he offered the “back porch” to the sailor. Befuddled, he added, “It’s not regulation.”

  “It’s not your train,” said the conductor mildly.

  “It doesn’t matter a lick,” said Mr. Heath.

  “I think it probably does,” drawled the conductor.

  “You’re not letting him ride that back porch,” said Mr. Heath, who was not above telling the conductor his business.

  “Who’s captain here?” said the conductor. Indeed, men of his profession were often called captains and enjoyed a similar omnipotence upon their craft. He was, aside from his present pique, a pleasant enough appearing fellow—short and gray-haired with thick muttonchops. This colloquium did much to attract the attention of boarding passengers and people who otherwise had business on the platform, but Robin paid little heed.

  “You head right back to the end of the train if you want to carry that oar of yours,” the conductor told the sailor with a defiant jab of a forefinger past Mr. Heath’s nose.

  “What?” said Mr. Heath. “It’s not regulation!”

  “Go frighten someone else,” said the conductor.

  Robin shrugged and nodded and walked off in the direction indicated.

  It was a moment before the platform man understood that the conductor had exercised his dry wit once again, and then it was too late to respond. The captain called the all aboard as he walked the length of the train, his watch in hand. Mr. Heath did wish people would smile when they were joking. “Frighten someone!” he growled. A little boy was walking by, and Mr. Heath gave the kid a stare. The little boy was undaunted, however, hanging close to his mother’s skirts, and he turned back to Mr. Heath as they walked to the nearest car and stuck his tongue out at the platform man.

  32. Mr. Normell

  It was at Brunswick, where the train changed engines before heading north, that the portly, bespectacled man with an amiable smile and thinning hair came aboard, catching Sundry’s attention immediately. Having excused himself to each passenger as he went, the newcomer meekly inquired if the seat across the aisle was taken; then, with a nod, hat in hand, and a bow, he settled himself with a small sigh.

  The conductor walked past Sundry’s window, calling the all aboard. Several track switches, up ahead, would alter the train’s course from its eastward bent and send them north through towns that Sundry had recently visited and past people whose tales he had briefly observed.

  Sundry had been telling Melanie and Maven about some of these, specifically about Hercules, the heroic pig that lived at Fern Farm and had recently suffered a mysterious bout of melancholy. Mr. Ring said nothing during the story. His head lay against the window; his eyes were sometimes closed. Often he seemed to be shivering. Otherwise, Sundry’s audience was quite taken with his portrait of the porcine Hercules, the pig’s strange ailment affecting the little girl and the openmouthed Maven Flyce with all the potency and sentiment of a Greek tragedy.

  Sundry’s description of the eccentric farm and its denizens, once the shadow of trouble had been driven off, sounded to the little girl like paradise. “Is he still there?” she asked.

  “Hercules?” said Sundry. “He was a week or so ago.”

  “My word!” said Maven. Melanie looked startled. The tale had contained all the elements of an historic event and Sundry had made no mention of himself, so that the little girl could be forgiven for imagining that it had taken place during some epic period and that George Washington or Daniel Boone might have ridden through at any moment.

  “That was some business!” said the little girl. “I’d like to see that pig.”

  “You’d grow fond of him,” promised Sundry. Melanie watched him watching her father. Burne let out a series of low grunts, and Sundry was put in mind of a dog chasing rabbits in its sleep. “You could climb his back and ride him like a horse,” said Sundry.

  “I’d like to see him. That must be some farm.”

  “It is. I grew up on a farm, so I can be trusted, I guess.”

  “Did you? Did you have pigs?”

  Sundry nodded.

  Maven shook his head in amazement.

  Melanie seemed taken with the whole idea of a farm. “Did you have cows? Did you milk the cows?” she asked, so Sundry described Moss Farm in Edgecomb, and he perhaps did not spare any gold leaf on the oaks or sapphire in the brook that ran past the house. It all sparkled like a dream, and he talked about his mother’s apple pie and his father’s funny way of stating the obvious and his brothers and sisters (and his twin brother, Varáis) and the dogs that slept in the barn.

  It was in the midst of this description that the portly, bespectacled gentleman arrived, and when Sundry was finished with his encomium of home, the newcomer beamed with great happiness; he might have been sitting by old Crispin Moss’s stone wall with his feet in the brook or on the rock ledge below the present Mr. Moss’s woodlot, basking in the summer sun.

  “It is an idyll, no doubt,” said the newcomer, still smiling.

  The young man felt awkward, now that he had gone on at such length and with such apparent feeling. “Home, you know,” he said. “I suppose everyone thinks he comes from some wonderful place.”

  “On the contrary,” said the man. “I have known those who are sure they have not. It is what drives so many beyond the horizon and across seas and over mountains. Forgive me, please, for eavesdropping.”

  “Not at all. That’s not eavesdropping.”

  “You’re very kind,” said the man with frank admission, “but I was listening with complete intent and enjoying myself, too.”

  “You’re right, though,” said Sundry, turning the conversation away from the man’s apology. “About what drives people to new places, I mean. I met a sailor the other day—and met him again this morning—who was quite seriously in search of Fiddler’s Green.”

  “Ah!” said the portly man. “The sailor’s bliss.” Then he sang in a respectable baritone.

  “I think that is it exactly,” said Sundry. Melanie was looking from one to the other of them with those wide eyes, and Sundry said to her, “You saw the fellow carrying a great long oar on his shoulder before we left Portland,” and he explained to her about Robin Oig and how the man only needed to find someone who didn’t know what the oar was and he would follow that person till they came to the sailors’ paradise known as Fiddler’s Green.

  “Won’t everyone know what an oar is?” she asked innocently.

  “I do believe, my lad, that is why the task evades most applicants,” said the stranger across the aisle.

  “Oh,” said Melanie, with almost as much understanding as syllables. The gentleman addressing her as “my lad” hardly seemed to register.

  “I expect,” said the portly fellow with a broad smile, “that he is wanting some young elf-child to come out of the woods and take his hand. I do beg your pardon again,” he said suddenly. “I am Jeffrey Normell.”

  “Mr. Normell,” said Sundry, trying the name out. “Sundry Moss.”

  “Really?” said
the fellow as they shook hands. “That’s quite likable.”

  “It’s gotten me this far,” said Sundry with a smile.

  “Normell itself is something one must work to live up to.”

  “This is—” Sundry did not like speaking an untruth to a complete stranger, particularly to one who seemed so amiable and so very reminiscent of a good friend, but neither did he relish the thought of having to explain Melanie’s situation in front of her, as if she were the attraction at a sideshow. All this was weighed in an instant, and he said, “Mailon Ring.”

  “Mailon,” said Mr. Normell.

  The little girl did not flinch, and she said, “Good morning.”

  Mr. Normell’s smile broadened further.

  “And Mailon’s father,” said Sundry, “Burne Ring, who has not been well.”

  “I am sorry.”

  Beneath the ailing man’s pale lids there was an almost baleful glimmer reflecting the light from Mr. Normell’s window. Sundry wondered if the man was awake or just dreaming with his eyes partly open and, if he was awake, whether there was any real emotion in that stare or the brilliance of day simply caught his dissipated features in a harsh and hateful light. It was a pity to dislike someone so ill. Sundry felt guilty for it. He turned back to Mr. Normell and was comforted to see a look of pity and understanding on the pleasant face. Mr. Normell met Sundry’s eyes and nodded solemnly.

  “And Maven Flyce,” finished Sundry, who suddenly realized that he had not heard any astounded outbursts for the last few minutes.

  Mr. Normell looked amused. Maven Flyce’s superior cowlick was horizontal, his nose raised to the ceiling, and his mouth gaping open. Even as Sundry turned his attention to the man beside him, a Herculean sound rose from Maven’s throat.