“You did?” I said.
“He wasn’t a real musician anyway.”
“Just rich,” I said. I brought Arthur a bowl of stew and he started eating.
“Katherine,” he said, “you haven’t said much about Travis.”
“There’s not much to say.”
“I don’t want you to keep things from me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because of my good news. You might be waiting for another time.”
“Don’t be crazy,” I said. “Your food’s getting cold.”
Arthur took another mouthful and looked me straight in the eyes. “Are you happy here, with me?” he asked.
“You are the one thing that makes me happy,” I said.
“Good stew,” he said.
I shrugged. “It needs those little onions and more tomato.”
Arthur ate quickly. I watched him. I’d already eaten and I was trying to finish the bottle of wine.
“What is this anyway?” he asked.
“Veal.”
“Good stuff,” said Arthur. “Come here, Kevin. I even saved you a piece.” Kevin came over and sniffed the meat, but he refused to eat it. “Don’t you like veal?” Arthur asked.
“Maybe he’s too P.C.,” I said, “to eat the milk-fed stuff.”
Sunday was the day Arthur had the gig in Boston. It was an evening wedding and he didn’t have to be in Boston until eight. The band was leaving Portland at 4:30, but at around ten A.M. the sky turned gray, the temperature dropped, and the first of the snowflakes began to fall. I got a phone call from someone named Eamon telling Arthur to be in town in the next two hours so they could leave. The worst of the storm was supposed to hit at around two. Arthur hadn’t laundered his one good shirt, so it went straight into the wash.
Arthur carefully packed up his violin. He had four extras for every string, as he had a tendency to break them when he was excited. “The weather’s turning to shit. What if I get stuck in Boston?”
“I have food, candles. There’s even firewood.”
“It’s not the storm I’m worried about.”
“You’re still thinking about Johnny.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But what are you going to do? Stay?” I rested my hands on Arthur’s shoulders. “I have Kevin to keep me company and if I hear something, I’ll call the police right away.”
I was reading Typee. I’d enjoyed Moby-Dick a great deal in a few places (and been tortured in many others) so I’d decided to give Melville another try. Besides, the tropical climate—despite its privations—was an indulgence, given the darkening skies and arctic temperatures. Arthur was waiting to put his shirt in the dryer. He was hovering around the washing machine, when it finally shuddered to a halt. I heard the lid to the washer clang open and the door to the dryer slam shut. Then nothing. Then Arthur was standing in the living room and he looked concerned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Travis’s clothes. They’re in the dryer.”
“We’ll have to send them to him,” I said, and looked back at my book.
“Katherine, don’t you find this a little strange?”
I pushed my reading glasses up my nose and shrugged. “He left in a hurry.”
“Katherine there are four shirts in there and two pairs of jeans.” Arthur made it sound like a question.
“Why do I feel like I’m in an episode of Scooby Doo?”
Arthur cocked his head to one side. “Travis only had five shirts and three pairs of jeans. That’s all he had with him.”
“How do you know that?”
“He made such of production of washing and ironing everything. How could you miss it?”
Arthur was right. I did know all of Travis’s clothes—his five shirts, his two pairs of blue jeans, one dark indigo, one slightly more faded with a noticeable crease line, one black pair.
“His underwear and socks are in the dryer too.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that he left with only the clothes he was wearing. Did he bring his suitcase?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder what he had in it?”
“His manuscript?”
“And no clothes?” Arthur scratched his head. “Did he take the typewriter with him?”
“I’m pretty sure he did,” I said. “It’s not in the room anymore.”
“Do you have a phone number for him?”
“Somewhere.” I took off my reading glasses, resigned and having lost my place. “When you get back, we’ll call him.” I looked out the window where the snow was just beginning to stick to the branches of the trees. “You’re going to have to get going pretty soon.”
“I’m still waiting for my shirt to dry. Do you have Travis’s number handy?”
“I’m sure I could find it,” I said. “But he’s going all the way to Texas. He’s probably still on the road.”
Arthur nodded.
“I wouldn’t want to get his mother on the phone.” I got up from the couch and gave Arthur a big hug. “When did you become such a worrywart?”
“Maybe when Johnny was killed on the back deck?”
“I think you’re just nervous about performing with a new band. And all that new material. You’ll do great. If it wasn’t somebody’s wedding, I’d go with you.”
Arthur seemed to accept this, but a part of him was still bothered. I was worried about him, really. I’m not usually one to buy into this stuff, but I thought his artistic temperament left him less able to deal with Johnny’s death. I ironed Arthur’s shirt for him. I wished him luck. I waved through the thickening snow as his van sputtered down the drive and disappeared at the bend in the road, where a clump of dead bittersweet was turning a beautiful, crystallized blue.
Winter had been cold until then, but that snowstorm marked the beginning of a season of such ferocious temperatures and obscene precipitation that soon all the land around was blunted and smoothed into sugary mounds. The roads and pathways became tunnels. Kevin would leap into the snow and find himself submerged, his nose poking above the surface like a periscope. He was startled everyday by this, and I was too. I began to think the snow would never melt. Shackleton must have felt this way, and Franklin. Sometimes I’d take a wrong turn and find myself, after negotiating the drive, at someone else’s house. The very sameness of the landscape was disturbing. Christmas came and went. And we celebrated, burrowed in our little bungalow like merry chipmunks. Arthur’s band had a following now. In this meat locker of a winter, sitting in a bar listening to Pogue’s covers and drinking thick, bloody Guinness was the only soothing activity. When he wasn’t at the bars, Arthur played at parties. This new band liked its beer, but they were drug-free and hard-working. Busy, busy. And as with all people who have known the ache of an impoverished life, Arthur never said no to work. For New Year’s, I went to New York to visit Boris.
Boris and I were married in the courthouse. Ann, out of some masochistic need, was there to witness, as was Boris’s lawyer, the mountain-climbing Rand Randley. To celebrate, the four of us went out for dinner, then back to Boris’s apartment for drinks. Rand had some papers for me to look over. Apparently, Silvano had left me everything, which had been contested, successfully, by his family. I could have fought them, but felt that it would have been in bad taste. Boris and I fought, passionately, over that. But I stood my ground. Still, there was some paperwork. I would take some jewelry, I decided, and his family—represented by his sister Laura—thought it was fair (or maybe unfair) that I should get it (a necklace worked in gold with blue diamonds and matching earrings; a heavy gold cuff; an amusing, neck-wrenching tiara) so that I wouldn’t start going after the other stuff: the house in the Oltrano, the leather business, a set of apartments in Sesto Fiorentino, and a villa in Fiesole that had been rented to the University of Oregon for the last thirty years. It was my wedding day, but I thought that as long as Rand was there, it was a good time to go over
the papers. We sat at the dining room table, while Ann and Boris argued in the living room. I think they were arguing over whether or not her manager was doing a good job of selling her work. She thought he was. And Boris was telling her that she should expect more from her agent, from life in general. She needed to start standing her ground.
Rand brought out his briefcase all the same and with a smile and look of determination (indicative of the same attitude that allowed him to scale numerous mountains) he clicked it open and began handing me papers—some in Italian—which I was supposed to read and sign.
I spent a minute looking over each of the papers, understanding nothing, then signed and handed them back. When I was done Rand shuffled the papers together, then with a neat tap on the table, got them into a perfect stack. This stack, the last of my love with Silvano, was then put into an envelope to be sent back to Italy, which is where the love had flourished in the first place.
“Whatever happened to Cosimo?” I asked, a little sad to be losing my last ties to Italy.
“Cosimo?”
“Silvano’s dog, that little Italian greyhound. Remember?”
“The dog?”
“Remember Silvano’s neck?”
“Oh. That dog.” Rand raised his eyebrows and nodded a couple of times. “Laura Falconi wanted to take it. She had some affection for the animal. She said it was as if Silvano lived on, a part of the dog. But in the end they had to put it down.”
“Really?”
“The dog, Cosimo, had gone a bit nutty. It attacked her.”
“Cosimo?”
“In fact, it attacked several people.”
This was humorous, because Cosimo couldn’t have weighed more than seven pounds. I imagined Cosimo flying at people’s necks, their round-eyed surprise, their desperate flailing. “I guess once he tasted the forbidden flesh, there was no stopping him.”
I meant that as a joke, but Rand didn’t laugh. He nodded in a sincere way and I was forced to look around the corners of the room.
“The odd thing is that he only went after women. One of the police officers. Laura Falconi. Ann.” Rand raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Cosimo hated women.”
“Really. So they put him down.” I lit a cigarette. Poor Cosimo. The world was a dangerous place. “He would never have eaten Silvano if he wasn’t really hungry. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just put him down because he made them uncomfortable, the cannibalism and all.”
Rand gave it some thought. “Not that the dog really was a cannibal, because Silvano wasn’t his species. Besides, there’s no law against cannibalism in New York.”
“How strange.”
“In fact, the only state with a law against cannibalism is Idaho, and that was only passed in 1990.”
“Really.”
“The last person to be tried for cannibalism was Alfred Packer.”
“Alfred Packer. Wasn’t he a guide or something?”
“Yes. Something. He was originally convicted of five counts of murder, but this was eventually reduced to one count of manslaughter. He died a free man.”
“Is that what they teach you in law school?”
“In part. Cannibalism horrifies people. In law school, we are taught to apply reason—the law—to a variety of unsavory things. The Speluncean Explorers, for example, is an invention of law school, where you look at the moral implications of cannibalism and survival.”
“In what way?”
“If, hypothetically, explorers are lost in a cave and there only hope for survival is cannibalism ... How does the law view that?”
“But it’s all hypothetical, of course.”
“Not necessarily. In maritime law, you have the Custom of the Sea. You’re in a boat adrift in the Pacific. You draw lots. The loser gets to be dinner. That sort of thing.”
“And that’s legal?”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“Really.” The needs of appetite justified everything.
“There’s a famous case. Regina versus Dudley and Stephens. Captain Dudley was a cannibal. They ate the cabin boy, Richard Parker. Poe even wrote a story about it.”
25
Rand Randley’s assertion that Poe was inspired by the events of the Mignonette is not quite true. I read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a child, a book that I devoured along with all the other writings of Poe. Edgar Allan Poe’s horror appealed to me, and as I’ve grown older, I’ve reached a deeper appreciation of his torments. Poe does write of four men in a boat set adrift in the Pacific as the result of a cruel storm. The men draw lots and the loser is the cabin boy, Richard Parker. But the Poe novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was written in 1838, whereas the sinking of the Mignonette (the yacht on which Captain Dudley and the unlucky Richard Parker were crew) did not happen until 1884. The fictional account precedes the reality by forty-six years—a shocking coincidence—the stuff of a Poe story itself. But, as with most things, the reality was more shocking than its fictional counterpart. Reality never has to contend, as art does, with beauty.
My mother told me the story of Thomas Dudley. He had been trying to make it to Sydney, Australia, from Falmouth on the southwest tip of England. His goal had been 120 miles a day, 120 days for the journey. A yacht was small for the distance—the feat the first of its kind. Dudley had difficulty assembling a crew and the yacht had to be refitted for racing since it had once been a fishing vessel. The Mignonette was twenty years old. Her timbers were suspect, although a shipwright had decided that—with a few repairs—they were adequate for the journey. An Australian, Jack Want, had paid for the Mignonette and her transportation. A lawyer, a politician, and now a yachtsman, Want had already angered the gentlemen yachters with his disregard for the more traditional aspects of the sport. Maybe they had conspired to have him purchase an inferior craft. Dudley was a working man who admired the audacity of Want and hoped that the Mignonette would win Want many prizes when it was outfitted once more in Sydney. Outfitted for speedily hugging the coastline and winning trophies, not for carving a path across the Pacific.
Ned Brooks and Edwin Stephens were not his first choices for the crew. Others had quit because of the state of the boat, but Brooks and Stephens had committed because Dudley was a fair man. Their rations were not to be the typical salt horse floating in brine, dubious food rejected by the Royal Navy, occasional meat that concealed hoofs and often an equine eyeball. No. Dudley had suffered among the lower ranks before acquiring his captain’s certificate and was determined to feed his men better. Pork until it ran out, and after that tinned beef. The only privation on his boat was the absence of spirits which, in his opinion, made men wild and undermined discipline. Spirits reduced men to animals in thrall to appetite.
Richard Parker had not needed the added lure of good provisioning. He was only seventeen, although he claimed to be a year older, and found adventure enough to sign him on. He would be the cabin boy. A cabin boy on a boat so small with a crew of only four seemed a luxury or an encumbrance, depending on how you felt. But to maintain discipline Dudley believed that a hierarchy was necessary. A cabin boy gave a tautness to the pecking order. And Dudley believed in order, an order that was based on character, knowledge, and hard work, an order that once he was in Australia would serve him well. Then he would send for Phillippa and the children. Phillippa would be freed from the classroom, where the wealthy children learned their letters and numbers. Dudley had taught himself how to read. This process was such a torture that he had no admiration for it. Maybe he would teach Richard Parker to read, save him the indignity of illiteracy, save him the pain of figuring out the letters on his own. The boy reminded him of himself, growing up on the seas, filled with hunger for the unknown.
Dudley would offer the boy a job in Sydney. His heart was that generous.
Dudley was sailing not only from Falmouth to Sydney, but also out of the working class—with poverty lurking between every job, in every trough, the spirit crying out on the battering, deadly waves—and i
nto the mercantile class.
Thomas Dudley did make it to Australia, the pioneer of plague victims. I wonder if he thought about Richard Parker when the bloody phlegm burst from his nose. Blood, precious fluid, because that’s what they’d been after. And Dudley would have seen the look on the doctor’s face, the face of the living looking at the damned. Dudley recognized that look.
He had seen it in Ned Stephens’s face as he gazed at the pitiful Parker while he did his best to sharpen his knife on the oar housings of the boat. Parker would have been dead within the day but they needed his blood, uncongealed, to slake their thirst. They couldn’t wait for this leisurely wasting—although it seemed to be God’s intention. Did God really intend for Dudley’s children to go to the workhouse, because if he died Phillippa’s meager earnings would not be enough to save them from this fate. Stropping the knife, Dudley watched the horizon and hoped for the blurring that would alert him to a ship, but there was none. Is this how Abraham felt as he prepared his sacrifice? Or maybe ... Who was to say that Parker was Isaac and not the lamb sent in his place? Parker was the lamb and with his sacrifice Dudley would save his children from the workhouse.
Rhetoric of a weak mind, yes, but Dudley was starved and his brain, that gorgeous wrinkled mass of reason, was shrunk to a peach pit. He could almost hear it rattling in his skull with the boat’s every rise and fall.
And then his resolve had faltered. “We should draw lots.”
“Draw lots?” Brooks said. “And risk murdering a man? Because surely as I am sitting here, that boy is more in death than life. Save him the suffering and save us others.”
Dudley turned to Stephens. “What are your thoughts?”
“I wish to live,” he said. His voice was a whisper because his tongue had fisted in his mouth.
Dudley too wished to live. Parker was somewhere in the pale. He had been drinking sea water and was now insensible. Was that a bad thing on this hour on this day? The task had fallen to Dudley, because one journey long ago had left him an experienced butcher of pigs.
A Carnivore's Inquiry Page 25
