The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  “I inquired as to the people who had lived here and he said they were all gone, that even the survivors who had come down to the sea were dead or gone to America, and that was the sum and total of what he or anyone else alive on the island knew about the village. It was a measure of how deep the sadness was, he said, that there were now no stories whatsoever of the people there and their lives, their joys and works, their particular heroes and saints and sinners; and his advice to me was that I was better off leaving the dead place in peace, for the mountain to reclaim in its own time. The mountain was patient and would eventually reach for its stone children, and erase all sign and memory of men in that place.

  “But somehow I found that rather than be discouraged from going there, I was twice as eager as before; and off I went before dawn, climbing through mist and first light, pausing here and there only to marvel at the vistas that opened before me, and be glad that there was no rain and only small winds. In the afternoon I finally came to the village.

  “I suppose there were a hundred or more stone cottages there, and they were of all sizes and shapes, although most of them were small. Most of them, too, it seemed to me, had arrangements by which animals could be sheltered both inside and out, and many had their larger entrance on the east side, which I speculated must have been the quieter side for the wind. All of them, or all of the ones I examined carefully, were wonderfully constructed with stones of every conceivable size placed exactly so as to support and strengthen each other. Indeed I was so fascinated by the stone-mastery that I almost missed the crucial detail that is the essence of my story.

  “I was particularly absorbed by the smallest of the cabins, those with no windows and apparently no recesses for fireplaces or sleeping-quarters; I wondered if these had been set aside for certain people, or used simply for storing goods and tools against the weather. I was examining the interior stonework of one of these at the west end of the village, near a stream, when I found, behind a loose rock in a niche, a pot and a small knife. For a moment I thought these someone’s lost treasures, hidden and then forgotten in the leaving; but then I noticed that the pot was not at all old, and the knife was razor-sharp. Could it be that the village had one last resident, or that someone had come upon it, as I had, and decided to stay?

  “By now it was full dark, and the prospect of climbing back down the mountain was uninviting, and also I wondered if the mysterious resident was necessarily friendly; so I slipped out of the hut and hid myself, resolving to watch and wait, and see if I might glimpse whoever it was who used the cabin, and perhaps returned there every night. Here my years at sea served me well, for I had learned long ago how to stay awake for hours at a time, alone and quiet, alert to any change, and it was no hardship for me to sit still—and at least here there was no chance of being swept overboard by a sudden gale.

  “I waited a very long time, it seemed to me, and then finally my vigilance was rewarded, perhaps an hour before dawn. I saw a slight movement, something that was no owl or prowling fox; and then the something dimly became a person, though I could not discern anything of age or sex. Whatever person this was slipped silently into the hut with the pot and knife, and did not immediately return.

  “This put me in a pretty position—I could surprise the inhabitant, and perhaps receive that knife amidships, or I could slip away, trusting my own stealth; but now I was powerfully curious, and I decided to announce myself. You must remember here, Mr Stevenson, that I was all of twenty-two years of age then, and as full of undue confidence in my own strength as any preening stripling is; not until we have been in a few battles do we begin to suspect that we are rarely the cock of the walk, and far more often the sacrificial fowl.

  “Neither was I a fool, though, and my time at sea and in Sarawak had taught me some caution and care in moments like this. So I armed myself with some stones, and took a deep breath, and slid out of my hut and toward the other, as silently as I could go. The sun had just risen behind the shoulder of the mountain, and there was the faintest new light among the huts; I remember that detail in particular, for I did not want to be silhouetted in the doorway, and so be made an easier target for assault. I hesitated an instant, there by the door of the other hut, with my arm cocked to deliver David’s pebble against Goliath of Gath—when, to my absolute astonishment out of the hut walked … a girl!”

  Just as John Carson uttered that word, and I startled with surprise, Mrs Carson called from the kitchen that dinner was served, and no delay whatsoever would be tolerated this evening, for tonight we were granted her rabbit stew, on which she had lavished hours of effort, and it should be eaten steaming from the pot, and it would most certainly be eaten steaming from the pot, with steaming hunks of her extraordinary bread also, or we would henceforth be shifting for ourselves in the kitchen, God save us all from such a tragedy. And in we went to the kitchen, John Carson and me, prompt as can be, though I had a hundred questions in my mouth about the girl; but it says something of our affection and respect for Mrs Carson, and for her incredible culinary skills, that neither of us even considered anything but seating ourselves as swiftly as possible at that lovely old kitchen table, and partaking of Mary Carson’s legendary rabbit stew.

  * * *

  Again the press of personal matters kept me from the fireplace at Mrs Carson’s for a couple of days, though many was the moment, as I walked the hills with Fanny, planning our lives together if Providence was merciful and fate conspired to allow our joy, that I went over that fraught scene in my mind, and saw John Carson gaping, as out of the round stone hut on that wild mountainside came a girl.… Who was she? What was she doing there, where no other human soul lived for miles? What was the fabric of her being, the tenor of her soul, how did she earn her bread? It was curious, how much I found myself thinking of a girl in a story that was not mine; how ironic, to be furiously writing stories myself (and I cannot now emphasize enough how dire the financial situation was, and how energetically I composed, for the wolf was past the door and breathing savagely at my neck, could I not hurriedly and instantly write stories both true and invented, as if there is much difference, if any, between the two), but be actively yearning to hear the end of another man’s story!

  But the chance did come, and it came at a happy hour for me, for I had enjoyed a rare productive burst lasting most of a day, and nearly finished my book about my travels across America. I had come to a natural stopping point, and stepped out onto Bush Street to stretch my legs with a walk before dinner, when coming up the hill at a brisk clip I found Mr John Carson, with the selfsame idea; so off we went together, on a route he much enjoyed for the array of maritime vistas it provided—up Kearny Street to Telegraph Hill, and then west along Filbert Street to Russian Hill, from which you can see and smell all the great waters that cup and assault the city, and have done so since long before there was a being of our kind here, and it was all the province of deer and hawks and bears.

  Mr Carson was, I should say, a relentless walker, and though we walked long that day, up and down the long sinewy streets and finally back down Hyde Street toward a much-anticipated dinner, to him it was a jaunt, who had many times, so he said, walked from one side of the city to another—usually down Geary to the sea, to which he was still unconsciously drawn, though his seafaring days were behind him. Indeed, he said, more than once he had gone for a walk before breakfast, just to savor the bracing air, and seemingly a moment later found himself on the beach, a clear four miles from his home; but Mrs Carson knew and understood his inevitable tides, and only smiled when he reappeared just in time for lunch.

  But our long walk that day is memorable to me also for this: that Mr Carson resumed his tale of the stone village on the wild Irish mountainside, as we walked, and I will relate what I remember of it here, asking only that you must imagine hearing it told on the move, the late-afternoon winds growing stronger as we go, until they blew as strong and salty as the winds on Sliabh Mór, many years ago when John Carson was a tall boy at the
door of a hut, and out walked a girl whose face, he said, he saw in his dreams even today.

  “She did have the knife in her hand,” he began, “and I thanked my stars that I had not leapt through that doorway, for there is no question she would have plunged it into my neck, quick as a hawk impales a rabbit, and that would have been the end of the very short story of my life. But she held her hand, and I held mine—partly from a mutual astonishment, I think, but partly also from sheer curiosity; each of us wondering how on earth the other had arrived at this moment in this remote place.

  “By some mysterious agency we established a truce, and agreed to parley; and so imagine this, if you can: a young man and a young woman sitting cross-legged amid the pale worn stones at dawn, gesturing and gesticulating the stories of their lives to each other, for neither of us had a word of the other’s tongue, and there is no common ground between languages hatched on different islands. She spoke the Gaelic of her people, and me a sort of English, I suppose, although it was English shaped to a Scottish mouth, which has no love for the place where that imperial and imperious tongue was born.

  “But, as you know, there is much that can be communicated without words, and we had a wonderful conversation of the hands and fingers, and even arms and legs. At one point I told her of my shipping experiences by imitating a tilting deck, and roaring a storm in my throat; similarly she told me of burying her people by digging their graves in the air, and kneeling over their stony tombs, and weeping until she was dry. I told her of pursuing Adil through the jungles of Sarawak, brushing aside creepers and fronds with my arms, and myself being a leopard slipping away silently through the understory; her fingers set snares for hares, and her hand was the throttled coney, headed for the pot, and both her hands picked imaginary bilberries, and bearberries for medicine, and snapped the necks of the occasional unwary goose or duck; she even showed me how she would occasionally catch and roast the tiny brown lizards among the rocks, although she also was silently eloquent about how poorly they tasted, and how hungry you must be to eat such bits of bitter meat.

  “In another man’s story,” continued John Carson, “there would be mention of her name, and her age, and her beauty or lack thereof, and her lissome appearance, or not, but I have nothing to say of these things, for what struck me most powerfully was the force of her personality, and what I could only assume was indeed her remarkable character; for as far as I could tell from her stories, she had lived alone in the abandoned village for something like three years, hiding easily from the occasional visitor, as anyone climbing to the village could be seen approaching long before he arrived. She knew the mountain better than any eagle or fox, and knew every nest, every den, every berry bush, every secret cave; indeed, from what I understood, she had secret bolt-holes in several places on the mountain, and could move from one to another like a wraith if necessary; twice it seemed that official parties had searched through the village, either police or soldiers, for she remembered their uniforms, although she knew nothing of their origin, or purpose.

  “We sat there by the doorway of the hut from dawn to noon, conversing with our hands, not even essaying words at all after a few awkward early tries, and believe me when I say that I never had a more riveting morning in all my life. Part of it, I suppose, was the sheer oddity of the scene—among the pale stone cabins long shorn of their residents, high on the shoulder of a remote mountain, far beyond the reach or sight or sound of any other human being for many miles around. The occasional cry or song of a bird, and once the slash of a fox against a straggle of bushes, probably headlong after a hare; once I thought I heard an otter at work in the creek that divided the village into two parts; several times the piercing whistle of a hawk overhead; but otherwise only the wind, and very faintly the murmur of the sea to the east, the west, the north; and all those small sounds themselves the faintest background to the astonishing theater of the girl sitting among the stones.

  “It was about noon when our silent conversation came to an end, as I say; she indicated that she must be up and about on business, and you will understand something of her clarion will when I say that it did not occur to me to disagree, or insist that she accompany me back down to the flatlands, or invite myself to accompany her on her rounds. And too I felt very much that this was her ground, her home, her place and not mine, and she had been wonderfully generous to me with her time, and had not assaulted me, or fled from me, or called down the wrath of the mountainous spirits on an outlander, but instead had been clear and confident in her discourse. Indeed her calm sense of herself was what appealed to me most about the girl; however strange her circumstance, living there alone among the whispering stones, and however haunting and horrifying her past, during which everyone she loved had withered and died in the most awful manner imaginable, still she lived, and lived with a certain brass and brio. Not for her the slough of despond, the swamp of despair; nor did she, that I noticed then or after, feel the slightest sorrow for herself, that such trial and terror had been her lot. She lived, do you know what I mean? She was alive, and eager, and vibrant, and vigorous, and cared not a fig for what the world thought, or ostensibly owed her; her whole being was bent to being alive, with no time left over for philosophy; and I will say that I found this refreshing, as if she was a trickle of clear delicious water in a place where no such thing seemed at all possible.

  “So off she went, up into the crags of Sliabh Mór, where the eagles for whom the island is named had their unreachable nests, and down I went, back down to the sea, and a few days later back on the sea, in yet another ship. I had made her one promise, that I would tell no soul of her presence in the abandoned village, and neither speak nor write of her life, which she preferred to live unheeded; and I kept that promise too, until now, though I found myself thinking of her often, and wondering if she was well. But here we are at home, Mr Stevenson!, and if I am not mistaken we have timed our arrival perfectly, for that, my friend, is the irresistible scent of roasted ducks, and there are no hands on this earth as deft with ducks as those of Mrs Carson. To the table as fast as we can go, and you will see that there is a meal even more delicious than her rabbit, and that is her duck, with sauces and drippings that London will never know, and Paris only imagine, and no man explain, not even such an author as you, sir, for the words for such extraordinary tastes and flavors have not yet been coined.”

  And so to dinner we went, and it was every bit as savory as he had claimed; and it was much later, when I was abed and just beginning to dream, that I realized again that he had not answered my question about how he met Mrs Carson … or had he?

  4

  BY THE END OF JANUARY my own affairs were in slightly better order—essays were off to editors, stories away to publishers, my health somewhat improved, Fanny’s annual winter illness in decline, her two children—my two children!—well, and here and there the wet winter relieved by a sunny afternoon, as bracing as a brandy on Sunday; and one afternoon I found myself in the kitchen of the house, listening to the admirable Mrs Carson herself, who has not, in this poor chronicle, been given a single lonely page on which to speak on her own; so let us redress this oversight, and hear from her.

  I had asked her the same question I had asked Mr Carson, how they met, and as her hands whirled and swirled to create our dinner (that night it was fresh herring, caught by Mr Carson that morning), she told me tales. And here I must interject, that in the same way no man could accurately describe her appearance, so no man could explain her voice, or the manner of her delivery; as close as I could come would be to say that when she spoke you were instantly inside the story she was telling, so that if she was speaking of the sea, you felt it seethe beneath your feet, and felt the whip of salt wind, and heard the ache of the ship’s timber, always under assault; if she told of a desert, you were immediately parched and dessicated; did she speak of a garden, you were amid nodding and redolent vegetation; of hunger, you were pinched and starved, no matter how recent your corporeal meal in this
world.

  Indeed to try to catch her voice on paper is to miss most of the music of it in the air; and while I do not think I want for some small talent, I am not fool enough to think I have sufficient art to re-create it here; so I will simply report, as journalist, that she spoke of being at sea, for many weeks, crossing the “eastern ocean,” as she said, which could mean any of many, but I took to be the Atlantic; how she slipped aboard a fishing boat, and then a tramp steamer, hiding in the wet darkness of the nether reaches, and stealing food when she could find it, which was seldom; terrified of being found out, and thrown overboard, or worse; being curled and huddled in the same position for hours and even days, and being so stiff and sore that she many times thought she would never move again, and end her young days a rigid corpse, to be gnawed by rats and reduced to gobbets of bone and buttons; twice catching and eating rats herself, driven to the extreme by hunger, and leaving nothing but their skulls and tails, which she could for some reason not stomach; enduring the savage roll and roil of a ship in storm, when the battering of the waves went on for days, and the very idea of the storm abating lost all possibility; the sort of shivering madness that comes from being sleepless, and wet, and ravenous, for weeks and weeks; her escape from the ship finally when it achieved port, in a city where she did not know the language, and walked between walls of snow higher than her head; her slow and complicated journey across a continent, city to city, village to farm, town to train, walking through a forest here, along a river there, stopping to cook or clean for someone, to work as a maid, to help with harvest, to serve beer and fend off the amorous intentions of men, and twice a woman; moving west without a destination in mind, but only an idea—something to do with the angle of light, and the smell of the sea, and houses made of wood and not stone; something to do with valleys of farms and crops, and waters filled with fish, and hills and mountains where there were more trees and animals than you could count in a lifetime. “A certain profligacy of creation,” she said at one point, a phrase I never forgot. It wasn’t that she ever expected to find a place where you didn’t have to work to survive, where many people would be amicable, where the weather did not constantly measure your endurance, where the landscape conspired not to starve and winnow and frighten off its inhabitants but offer them such sustenance as they could find with suitable effort; she never dreamed of such a place, and whosoever does dream of that place is not suited for this world, which is both a gift and a trial, the latter somehow a condition of the former. But having arrived finally in San Francisco, by roads and paths too byzantine to recount, she had thought, one fine morning atop Blue Mountain, in the very center of the city, this is my place; and so it had been ever since.