The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  Down Bush Street we went now, blessed with oysters—the long slow swell and sweep of Bush Street, from its peak south of the old Presidio fort, down to where it ends at the bay, and sometimes in it—I have seen barrels and casks roll rattling from the street and plop into the bay, followed by shouting men and laughing boys, and wondered sometimes if the bay does not somehow exact tribute from the city, and require a daily tot of wine and beer, delivered by nominal accident, each street taxed according to its volume of traffic.

  On our way back down the hill I asked Mrs Carson about her voyage across Canada with Mr Harrison, but she had grown somewhat reticent, and would only say that it was a long while in the traveling. She fell silent for a moment, and I wondered if I would ever hear the last part of her story; but then she said quietly that sometimes even now she dreamed of that journey, dreamed that she was once again walking and canoeing and riding boats and trains and wagons, and when she awoke she was actively startled to find herself in a bed, in a room, in a house, with a husband she loved dearly, in a city, and not high in the mountains on wintry trails, or jostling across the sprawling plains of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in a battered old wagon, with Mr Harrison taciturn beside her.

  “I suppose Canada to me will always be partly a dream,” she said, as we crossed Polk Street. “I was often weary, and sometimes ill, and what I remember best is plodding along behind Mr Harrison. He was not much for talk then and there were days at a time when he said not a word. In the first weeks of our journey I did my best to elicit from him his relationship to our Montreal friend, and how they had come to have such close dealings, and where we might be headed, and something, anything, of his own life; but not until we reached the mountains of Alberta did he seem to relax. Later he told me he disliked and distrusted flat land, ‘oppressed land,’ as he called it; it was a fixed idea of his that flat open land was dangerous, there being no place to hide, and ‘no place never trod upon,’ as he said. Whereas the mountains and forests, or so he thought, were endlessly mysterious, and never would be fully explored or enslaved to do the work of man; just as soon as you have mapped them, and set out your trails, and marked what is where, the woods pays no attention to you and your puny map, and shifts things here and there as it pleases, and moves its creeks and rivers, and fills in your trails with its relentless green hands, and there’s not much you can do about it, except cut down all the forests, which someday might well happen, as there’s people would do such a thing, unthinkable evil though it be.

  “This was how he talked,” said Mrs Carson, as we crossed Jones Street, “sort of biblical and pantheist and free-form imaginative all at once, and he grew ever more talkative and even garrulous as we got deeper into the forest of British Columbia, headed always west to the sea. Late one night he told me that we were headed finally to Vancouver Island, to a place he knew that had power, as he said, and that him bringing me there was the payment of a debt, as it were, too complicated to explain; but that when I got to that place, a thing would be concluded that entailed several people’s threads coming together. ‘Putting the threads together is the work,’ he said, an explanation that I still do not understand, though it is unlikely I will ever forget the phrase.

  “Also the deeper we went into the woods the faster and thicker his hair and beard grew,” said Mrs Carson, “which sounds preposterous, but I did witness this curious fact; so that by the time we came to the coast finally, my companion looked more like a bear than a man, though no one else we met remarked this at all, which I found curious. At a place called Broughton Island there were two young men waiting with a boat, though how they had known where to be and why was a mystery. They ferried us across to the bigger island, and after quite a long walk I found myself on a little rocky beach huddled between vast cliffs and pillars of rock.

  “To my astonishment, Mr Harrison sat down here, and announced that we had arrived where we were headed, and that his task was done, and then, to my amazement, he leapt up and actually capered and danced on the beach! I confess I laughed aloud—you never saw a rougher man in your life, and I had seen him many times grim and threatening and rough to those he thought would harm or hinder us, on our journey across the country. But here he was, the famous hunter, the fearless mountain man, jigging and giggling like a child; indeed he whirled so haphazardly that he fell down in the surf, and crawled back up onto the beach dripping and laughing.

  “I quizzed him as to what I was to do here in the wilderness, certainly I did, but he had no answer, and kept repeating that I would know when I knew, and that his task had been to get me here, and what happened after that was none of his business and not in his sack of knowledge, as he said; but then he grew thoughtful, and said, Now, miss, I see that you have to write the message, you have to write it with whatever tools are to hand, that be why you are in this place, miss, and he waved his hands at all the uncountable rocks and pebbles on the beach. I was taken aback, but now he was sure of himself, and his merriment bubbled back up again as he kept talking incomprehensibly about the message, the message.

  “Finally he told me to gather as many small stones as I could carry, and bring them to a clearing at the head of the beach, and he would do the same, and this we did, again and again, so that there were thousands of stones there, a cairn as tall as me. I think I will always remember that little clearing—it was tucked out of the wind, and lined by trees and ferns in a perfect circle, and the floor of it was sand. I suppose it was an accident of geology, but it felt very much like a refuge, a place of peace, that the forest and the sea had agreed to leave between them, for mysterious reasons.

  “Mr Harrison had now regained his usual calm, and he said that I had best set to work, and that he had to go conduct a little business, but that I would be safe, and he would not be far away, but that I ought to get to work on the message, for the time had come. I was flummoxed, and tired, and I suppose a part of me was frightened too, for I was somewhat rude, and taxed him with mysterious muddle, and what could he possibly mean about a message? What message was I to write, and to whom?

  “He stood there thinking for a moment—I can see him yet, with his beard bristling out from his face like a small animal, and the salt water still dripping from parts of his body—and then he said that he would ask me a question, and then he would go about his business, and I should think hard about the answer, and then write the message, and when I was done he would know, and he would come back. And his question was: where is your home?

  “And with that he was gone,” said Mrs Carson, “and you can imagine, from what I have told you about his woods craft, that when he wished to vanish, vanish he did, instantly and silently. I stood there awhile annoyed, and then I began to think, where was my home? What was home for me who had lost my family, my country, even my name? For when I lived in the stone village, no one spoke to me for a year at a time, no one called my name, no one had the word that meant me in their mouths, and there were long periods then when I had no word for me either.

  “The village, the stone village, the empty stone huts, the wind-whipped mountain; that was my home, and that is what I built in the clearing. Even now I am amazed that I did that, but I did, first slowly, trying to remember which hut was where, and which were half-destroyed, and then faster and faster, my hands surer with the stones, whole lines of huts coming to life in minutes; and fastest and surest of all I built my own little hut, in which I had lived when I was no one, just a girl on a mountain, unremembered, unknown, unmourned, a child without a name.

  “It was a frenzy, an ecstasy; as Mr Carson says, sometimes we do what must be done without knowing at all why we do so. And just as I finished I heard Gérard returning; but now there was someone with him. I jumped up and would have fled, I think, except that just then the two men came into the clearing, and stopped with surprise when they saw the stone village. As they stared at it I stared too, and it was as if I had new eyes, for now I could see how intricate and faithful it was, the entire tiny village of Sliabh Mó
r rebuilt exactly in miniature in a clearing in Canada, by another ocean on another side of the world.

  “Gérard said nothing, although he was smiling so that I thought he would begin capering again, and the other man said nothing for a moment, as he stared at the stones; and then he slowly looked up, and … why, Mr Stevenson, here we are at home! And I have been prattling away, without the slightest consideration for your time and your work!”

  “No, no, Mrs Carson,” I said, still completely caught up in the story, “my work can wait—the man, Mrs Carson, the man! Who was the man?”

  And just then, as if we were in a theatrical production, in a scene designed to draw gasps from the audience, the door to 680 Bush Street swung open, and there was Mr Carson smiling at us. I cannot remember if I gasped, but I do remember that a shiver ran up my spine, as I realized that, amazingly and unbelievably, that was how Mary and John had met again, twenty years after meeting each other for the first time at the door of the hut on Sliabh Mór.

  March 30, 1880, Oakland, California

  Dear Louis,

  I will be brief—I have a moment to snatch from this and that, Isobel and Joe are here, and Lloyd has a terrible cold which worries me—I just wanted to say that I yearn for you—I crave your kiss and your hands on my skin and your eyes like coals burning into me—and your laugh, your quip, your banter—I crave it, I say, and I use the word deliberately. So long have I been a desert and you make me bloom. So long have I huddled around my children, an adamant wall between them and their wastrel father, and the travails that followed him like vultures, that I became a wall myself, and never knew it—and I would have stayed that way all my life, Louis, but for you—but for you sweeping into that hotel in France, and bowing, and staring at me with those merry eyes—O, Louis, never leave me, never betray me, never never never! I could not bear it, you know—I couldn’t. Everything that is good in me still reaches for you and yearns for you and drinks you in like light and water granted an old gnarled tree that never thought to blossom again; but I am blossoming, I feel it every hour, every day, I grow and laugh and Lloyd asks me if I feel well, for he has not seen me so lighthearted and free in his whole life, poor lamb. He is calling and I must go and I tell you every day that passes without you in it is an eternity—but one day closer to the day we shall be married and after that never parted not for a day or a night—that we found each other is a miracle, my love, a miracle! All my kisses and tears,

  Your loving

  Fanny

  It was Mr Carson who told me the rest of the story—by the fire, of course, this time after an oyster supper; and we had a bottle of fine wine between us, and for once his story did not end magically an instant or two before Mrs Carson called us in to dine, and I was not left hanging, and I did not conclude that night that he was a master of timing and pace in storytelling, gauging each segment of his story to a fine point, so as to leave me thirsty for it on a nightly basis. No, for once he was expansive, and the story stretched and wandered like a river, always forward, but happy to eddy and slack, as well as rapid and pool; and even now, long after that evening, I remember it with deep affection, as well as sadness; for it was, in a sense, the last night, the final chapter, the end of a time I had come to love. I think I did not know until that evening how deeply I had come to like Mr and Mrs Carson; in part because that evening was when I knew my time with them was coming to an end. Always it is thus, I suppose, that the sharpest savor is the last, and we finally understand what we have, when we no longer have it. A deep delight, married to a deep throb of sadness—perhaps that is the quintessential human condition.

  His voice grainy and amused in the flicker of the firelight; the excellent wine vanishing gently in our glinting glasses; his story moving from the clearing to a boat, and to Vancouver city, and eventually to San Francisco; his tone warm and reverential as he spoke of her courage, her many adventures in Ireland after he had met her that morning by the hut—“whole volumes and sets of volumes might be written, Mr Stevenson, whole shelves about her travels, her companions, her enemies, her escapes and rescues, her endurance, her visions and times of darkness, her travails and her subtlety, what she lost and what she gained; she is a remarkable soul, a woman of parts, one whose passage through the freighted air creates ripples that do not subside, I think; but those are her stories to tell, to shape and share as she likes; and you will be a lucky man if you hear a hundredth of them.…”

  How they stepped off a ship at Mission Street Wharf, and walked hand-in-hand through the city, marveling at its scents and breezes, the billow of its topography, the dozens of languages, the welter of voices, the crisp bronze light unlike that in any city they had ever seen; how they rode to Blue Mountain, the highest point in the city, and there promised themselves to each other, for every day of the rest of their lives, with the hope of going together into whatever is next after death; how they knocked at 680 Bush Street, and met a friend of Mr Harrison’s, who was eager to sell the house, and more eager still to sell it in such a way that he was free to vanish from the city, off to Alaska, with payments made not to him but to many citizens young and old over the course of many years, according to an intricate plan which he entrusted to Mrs Carson, in whom he reposed complete faith; how they were married at Notre Dame des Victoires on Bush Street, their wedding celebrated by Mr Carson’s companion from the war, and guests coming from far and wide, guests from several nations speaking several languages, all united in esteem and joy; and how their first wedding anniversary was approaching, on the second day of May, and he, Mr Carson, had hatched a conspiracy for two, which entailed a picnic on Blue Mountain, at the very spot where troth had been plighted, with the most savory oysters in California, and wines from a vineyard in Napa that he particularly respected and recommended to me if and when I was planning a honeymoon after my own wedding; and just when, Mr Stevenson, is your wedding?

  Answer: sometime in May, probably around the ides, when all financial and legal matters were settled, Lloyd released from school, and the weather bucolic. Fanny was of the opinion that we should be married at the cottage in Oakland, in the yard, amid a crush of May flowers, so that we could begin our married life together in the free air and bright sun, beneath no stern ceiling or authoritative roof, confined by no chapel or church, joined finally to each other by each other, with hearts as open as the wedding venue; but for once I could not agree with her, for while I admired her impulse and agreed wholeheartedly with her vision, I wanted nothing whatsoever of Lieutenant Samuel Osbourne in the air that day—not his name, not his former presence, not the fact that the property on which we would stand had once been his. Nor, I found, did I want to be married in Oakland, after my residence in San Francisco; something in me loved this old salty city, and wanted to begin my marital voyage here, in this port, and in no other. Something of the city’s music and flavor, its character and characters, its scents and sounds, its bones and sinews, had become a part of me, in ways I could not explain, though my profession be tacking sentences to emotions, as a man papers a wordless wall with garrulous handbills.

  Fanny was not pleased, I will report, but her mind is quick and deep, and she realized the depth of my feeling, though I could not articulate it; and so she arranged for us to be married on Post Street, at the home of a minister, the Reverend Doctor Scott, a wry gentleman with a beard like an Icelandic epic, endless and prickly with detail. Her friend Dora Williams, wife of the painter Virgil Williams, would attend her, and I would stand alone, as the two men I might have chosen as my best men were both across the Atlantic, Sidney Colvin in England and my cousin Bob Stevenson in Scotland; I thought for a moment of asking Fanny’s son Lloyd to stand with me, but he was so young, and hard enough for him to watch his mother marry, that I determined to stand alone.

  But of course I did not stand alone, on the day; and there is a story in who it was who stood by me as best man and witness. Of course there is a story. There is a story in every thing, and every being, and every moment,
were we alert to catch it, were we ready with our tender nets; indeed there are a hundred, a thousand stories, uncountable stories, could they only be lured out and appreciated; and more and more now I realize that what I thought was a skill only for authors and pastors and doctors and dream-diviners is the greatest of all human skills, the one that allows us into the heart and soul and deepest layers of our companions on the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses. We are here to witness, to apprehend, to see and hear, to plumb, with patience and humility, the shy stories of others; and in some cases, like mine, then shape and share them; so that they might sometimes, like inky arrows, sink into the depths of other men and women and children, and cause pleasure, or empathy, or a sort of delicious pain, as you realize that someone somewhere else, even perhaps in a time long ago, felt just as you did. Stories, among their many virtues, are messages from friends you did not know you had; and while you may well never meet the friend, you feel the better, with one more companion by your side, than you thought you knew.

  April 14, 1880, 680 Bush Street, San Francisco

  My dear Colvin,

  The briefest of notes to convey the greatest of news; I am finally, happily, thoroughly, astoundingly, to be married, on May 19, in this lovely city by the sea, to the lovely Miss Frances, who is now free of her previous marital tumult and prison, and willingly accepts my proposal of marriage, and consents to accept me in holy wedlock, to be joined thereunto by a cheerful and jocular Reverend Scott, whom I have met, and whom, I report with peals of laughter, said to me “Stevenson? Now I have read the essays of a young R. L. Stevenson of Edinburgh,” specifically On Falling in Love, and Crabbed Age and Youth, and An Apology for Idlers, and Child’s Play, and Walking Tours, and A Plea for Gas Lamps, and my study of Rabbie Burns, which he told me, in all seriousness, he collectively found arch, and mannered, and somewhat brittle with self-consciousness, though he had the inchoate idea, he confided, that this young fellow might, just might, you understand, with some seasoning and experience, become a decent essayist, could he learn to not be quite so aware of himself, but just blurt down thought and feeling on the page, without undue consideration of the product until after it had been allowed to emerge from the heart, without detour through the head. He told me this with such genuine generosity of spirit, such unadorned respect for literature and its possibilities, such compassion for poor young Mr R. L. Stevenson of Edinburgh and his overartful capering, that I hesitated long to tell him who I was; but you cannot ask a reverend minister to celebrate your marriage without admitting your name. I informed him gently that I was that very man, young Mr R. L. Stevenson of Edinburgh, the larval essayist, and you should have seen his face, Colvin! Such a rapid series of expressions, such a swift and humorous parade of emotions written as clear as day! But again to his credit, for he seems a most wonderfully honest and forthright soul, he apologized with a great shout of laughter, and called himself names, and hoped that I would glean a nugget of use amid the flood of his foolishness, and then we went over the order of service with Fanny. A most interesting and entertaining man, and I will take to heart what he had to say about a certain author’s brittle self-consciousness!