Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  Now, however, there was, at least on the parts of the people of Chapel County, Governor White, and Maurdon Legurney, White’s political guru and hand-picked emissary from Chapel County to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, a reaction to the reaction to the reaction. If America wanted sequentiality again, some apostolic succession of convention and right reason, Chapel County, on the very verge of The Thicket, that then still one thousand square miles of all waivered, rebuffed, exempt, and repudiate Nature’s lush and pointless, extended bramble, wanted, yearned for, and actually demanded the return of the random, even if they had to invent a legitimate, legal, due-processed pandect of de jure and prescribed code under the fiction of a rigged Constitutional Convention.

  Here’s what happened:

  The people of Chapel County got to Maurdon Legurney, Maurdon Legurney got to Lamar White, and Governor White got a Constitutional Convention for his commonwealth, which was in all respects (save for that first cause like a wicked itch that convened it in the first place), splendid, making Pennsylvania a paradigm of justice and good sense that became a model of high democracy. With this exception—the little legalistic eye-teaser buried in the middle of chapter VII, article 42, section 12, subsection 9, paragraph 19, line 5: “All territory south of 79°, 30' longitude, 39°, 45' latitude, and north of 80°, 30' longitude, 40°, 45' latitude, and all peoples residing within said territory, shall henceforth, to the contrary notwithstanding, upon receipt of a vote of the majority in any constitutionally convened poll or public plebiscite as defined in chapter III, article 18, section 34, paragraph 1, line 1, not to be interpreted as incorporating the provisions of chapter IV, article 9, paragraph 1, line 16, in accordance with the doctrine, ‘inclusio unuis est exclusio alterius,’ have the right to designate itself, and themselves citizens of, in perpetuity, subject to no contingent remainders or to conditional limitations or any other encumbrances, the State of Pennsylvania.”

  What, quite simply, this did was permit Norbiton, Pennsylvania, and all of Chapel County, and only Norbiton and only Chapel County, since only Norbiton and Chapel County were to the south and north of all those degrees like a temperate zone, and all those minutes like many conveniently bunched quarters of an hour, all that mathematical, seaborne geography of that inland commonwealth, to (once the plebiscite passed) unsubjugate themselves to all the laws then on the books, and all the laws that might henceforth be written to join them, of that only Commonwealth of Pennsylvania!

  I’ve already told you. The soil was alkaline. They were only local merchants, only small businessmen. But what Maurdon Legurney, Governor White, and the people of Chapel County had given themselves up to was the return of the random, permission to wallow in muddle and romp in their carefully legislated labyrinthine, skimble-skamble, higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, harum-scarum anarchy.

  They opened whorehouses and nobody came.

  They beat their horse stables into gaming casinos, and their horses stood in the rain while the local merchants stood high and dry inside, forlorn at the craps tables, which, despite all the spit, polish, elbow grease, and good honest effort that the remaining house niggers now emancipate-proclamated into ordinary domestics at the stroke of the presidential pen could put into them, still smelled faintly of crap. And nobody came.

  “I tell you, boys,” Legurney, back from all he’d accomplished for them at the Constitutional Convention at the capital in Harrisburg, told them, “the world’s our oyster. Norbiton, Pennsylvania, could be a regular Sin City, U.S.A. It’s just too bad we’re so far off the beaten track.”

  “Think of it, boys,” said Oldham Broom, a pretty fair country tailor in his time, but now the kingpin numbers runner for all Chapel County, or, more precisely, numbers walker, or, yet more precisely still, not numbers runner, or walker, or any kind of numbers mover at all, or even just any common, ordinary, garden-variety arithmetician, but full-fledged Theoretical Mathematician, each day drawing the lottery and picking what would have been the winning combinations if only somebody had put down the two, four, six bits or buck other side of the ante, and solemnly contemplating the mysterious and elegant laws of chance, “double sixes three days running. What do you suppose the odds against something like that are?”

  “Its just too bad we’re so far off the beaten track,” Maurdon Legurney said.

  And at first moved their stills out from their old hole-and-corner hiding places into direct sunlight, and then—advertising was coming into its own about then—out onto the public sidewalks, and then, if they were tipsy enough from sampling their own brew, or maybe even just still sober enough to manage it, might carry a few bottles over to the empty Norbiton jail and offer to put them up against the sheriff’s own, going from tipsy to cockeyed, cockeyed to maudlin, and maudlin to philosophical over the course of another slow, businessless, lazy afternoon.

  “Folks in this part of the state couldn’t get themselves arrested if they tried,” Ed Flail, former operator of Norbiton’s leading dry-goods store and now one of the town’s most prominent dealers in stolen goods, remarked to Sheriff Leon Edgers.

  “That’s a fact,” agreed Billy Slipper, poacher, sports fisherman, and hunter out-of-season of other people’s trout and game.

  And got an Amen from the county’s rustlers, pimps, pickpockets, and other scoundrels.

  Because it was true, Crime didn’t pay. Not in Norbiton, not in Chapel County.

  They were sitting on the porch of the Norbiton Inn. Maurdon Legurney, now a broken and melancholy man, nominal lame-duck Mayor, and County Supervisor with just a scant five-and-a-half years left to run on one or the other of his overlapping terms, started to say, “I tell you, boys, it’s just too bad we’re so . . .” But they didn’t want to hear it.

  “Again with the beaten track,” Ed Flail said.

  “Yeah, shut up about that damn beaten track already,” Sheriff Edgers told His Honor.

  But it was true. They were. And who knew this better than Legurney himself, who had not only been to the capital in Harrisburg within the year but had come back from it as well, making not the giant but expeditious swing from Norbiton at the bottom, western limits of Pennsylvania, the one hundred miles up to Pittsburgh, and then, by rail, from Pittsburgh on a more or less straight easterly shot to Harrisburg two-thirds across the commonwealth, but the long, piecemeal, switch-backed, drawn out, up-hill-and-down-dale, down-hill-and-up-dale, zigzag journey through woodland and across farms where there were no roads, an honest-to-God, on-foot trespasser slash poacher far from the beaten and unbeaten tack either when he wasn’t an out-and-out, horsebackride-hitchhiking beggar? Practically slaloming himself the length and breadth of the all-but-Commonwealth-of-Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania that, near where he was still only this fits-and-starts civilization, borrowing even its place-names from all the tamed cities and myths of place, towns, and villages tinier than towns, tinier than villages, calling themselves Paris, Rome, London, Vienna, calling themselves Athens, Cairo, Istanbul, even Chicago. The better part of two entire weeks until he even got to the part where the spur started where you waited for the freight train that brought you to the whistle stop that took you to the place where if you managed to get there by a Tuesday you had only to wait till Thursday or Friday till you could catch the train to Harrisburg.

  So it was true. Off the beaten track. Off the beaten path. Off, for all practical purposes, the goddamn compass itself. So they knew that, who were only these local merchants and small businessmen and gentlemen alkaline farmers. Whose feathered, attenuate world had been shaped, though they’d forgotten this, were too close to it, who couldn’t see the forest for the trees or any of those one thousand or so thorny square miles of difficult bramble that somebody on the Norbiton side had once thought to call The Thicket. (Which hadn’t been surveyed, hadn’t been mapped, and which, for all any of them knew, might contain, somewhere within its tough terrains, lost, fabled cities of the Indians, tall mountains, vast deserts, gritty sand dunes, deep inland seas.) Su
ddenly reminded only then, by Legurney’s lugubrious account of his long and epic but boring odyssey, despondent, failed, and failing criminals manque on the porch of the Norbiton Inn. And who (the fellow who suddenly reminded them lost, too) mentioned that he’d heard tell that, speaking of Pittsburgh, it was an oddity of geographical history that though they was off the beaten track now, in the old days a right smart of folks had come down all the way from Philadelphia and Harrisburg and the Poconos and just all over, even from out of state, to see it.

  “Speaking of Pittsburgh?”

  “Well from all over except Pittsburgh.”

  “Except Pittsburgh.”

  Well they had their own half. Where’d they get any call to go traipsing all over hell and gone if all they wanted to look at The Woody was to—”

  “The Woody?”

  “Well ain’t that what they call it up there? I thought they called it by a different name. I thought they called it The Woody.”

  “Yeah? Well?”

  “Well, all I was going to say was that if they wanted to see it, all they ever had to do was just turn their heads back over their shoulders and there she’d be.”

  And someone else remembered that Norbiton had been practically a boom town in those days, and that wasn’t it funny the way things changed, that why even this porch we’re standing on wasn’t always the porch of just any old country inn but was part of a regular hotel.

  “The Hotel Norbiton?”

  “Thicket House,” said Oldham Broom, who till now hadn’t opened his mouth.

  “Oh yeah, Thicket House. I recollect hearing talk of that now.”

  And then all of them began to pitch in with their memories. And collectively remembered that The Thicket had been a sight, even a tourist attraction, years before there was a railroad in Pennsylvania, let alone national or state parks.

  “Commonwealth parks,” Billy Slipper said.

  “Yeah,” said Ed Flail, “commonwealth parks.”

  Somebody remembered reading somewhere that the first picture postcard was of The Thicket and someone else that the first hotel in America named for its view, or proximity to a point-of-interest was in 1792 when Thicket House was built. They recalled all manner of things.

  It was Maurdon Legurney himself who recalled all the old talk about slaves in The Thicket.

  “Maurdon!” Sheriff Edgers said.

  “Gettysburg’s only the largest and most famous of Pennsylvania’s battlefields,” Legurney said.

  “Maurdon!” the sheriff said.

  “Shit,” Legurney said, “if the citizens of a community ain’t entitled to the use of their own legatee’d and birthrighted natural resources, I’d like to know who is then?”

  “Maurdon, damn it to hell, shut up.”

  “Well who? Who is?”

  “I’m warning you, Maurdon,” the sheriff told his mayor. “Maurdon, I’m warning you.”

  “Why’d God put it here then? Can somebody tell me that? Why’d the good Lord give us a sense of humor to appreciate it in the first place? Why’d—

  “Maurdon, I’m not telling you again!”

  “—He teach folks to plant and farm or dig up all the precious metals deep down in the mines? Why’d He stock the rivers and seas with fish and give us our rifles and our shells and our abiding, manly instinct to hunt?”

  “Maurdon—”

  “He makes some good points there, Leon,” Ed Flail said.

  “It’s briars, goddamn it!” Legurney went on. “It’s all pins-and-needled, barbed-wired, saw-toothed, razor’s edgery. It’s all spiked, prickly and pointy, stinging bristliosity. And what don’t bite, nail, and sharp you to death would rash your skin clear off your bones. Because what ain’t briars is all itchweed, poison oak and poison ivy, poison sumac allergens!

  “Why’d He inspire us to come up with chapter VII, article 42, section 12, subsection 9, paragraph 19, line 5, and all the godgiven, goddamn, chickenshit, loophole rest of it?”

  “What? the sheriff asked. “What’s that?”

  “What if it is tacky? What if it is? Because if we ain’t subject to the strict letters of the laws of the Commonwealth, we ain’t liable to being sued neither, Leon.”

  “Aw, Maurdon,” the sheriff said. “Maurdon, aww.”

  So the whorehouses came down, and the stills were silenced, and all the energies of the people of Chapel County were redirected into beating the old Norbiton Inn back into its original avatar. It became Thicket House again.

  The Thicket opened for business in the spring of 1881. It had taken two-and-a-half years to build the thirty-seven miles of great wooden wall, the wide, tall-planked platform, accessible by ladder, that rose around the perimeter of The Thicket and sent off cantilevered shoots deep into that queer and lifeless jungle.

  They came from all over the Commonwealth, from Ohio and West Virginia and Maryland and up and down the entire eastern seaboard, from Kentucky and the border states and the states of the Confederacy that was, and from the west and even from foreign lands, and it became, you might say, America’s first theme park.

  The people of Chapel County were famous for their sense of humor, those gag-gift slaves they had once exchanged with each other, the “house niggers” whose trust they’d patiently cultivated in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the abolitionist sympathies they faked, the underground railroad mythology they perpetuated.

  “Follow,” they’d said, drawing a slave aside and whispering to him, pointing to The Thicket and seducing him with the dream of freedom, “the drinking gourd!” And steer or lead him in the direction of the infrequent, illusory clearing or occasional false trail.

  Or I say they’d say. As I’ve attributed to Legurney and Slipper and Oldham Broom and Sheriff Leon Edgers and the others most of the dialogue I’ve put down here. Because, except for Audubon’s journal entries and Phil and Pembler Roberts’s remarks, which are documented, we’ll never really know who actually said what. The beginnings of a conspiracy are often smoky and seldom known, and all this was over one hundred years ago. But we know who was there and, because of the attendant publicity, have a pretty good idea of their personalities. The New York, Wheeling, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and even Pittsburgh papers tell us what happened. So it had to be something like the way I’ve put it down. It had to be.

  The rest is quickly told.

  After the sawmill went up and the logging teams arrived, after the estimated million trees had been cut down, and the two-and-a-half years of construction was completed, and The Thicket officially opened, and the public came to climb the ladders that led to the exalted overview atop the high planks set on a wooden scaffolding like the jerrybuilt crisscrosses of condemnation, the thirty-seven miles of braided grid like a rough cat’s cradle of loosely crocheted timber, after the first tentative, trepidatious, dread weight they put on the reinforced railing, after their first rubberneck gawk, after the first remains of the runaways had been spotted—remember: There were no signposts to lead them to them, no plaques; the carpenters who were the first to walk these planks, or get any sort of view at all from them, never told what they’d seen, and anyway it was advertised in the newspapers as a sort of “treasure hunt” even though there was no treasure, no prize, and all it really ever was was only this crazy sort of bird-watching—not clumps of the skeletal dead—or at least not ordinarily—although there is the odd photograph of dead slaves huddled together for warmth or comfort or solace, embracing each other in loving, awful, open death, their twining elbows and ulnas, their backbones and collarbones, their flanges and humeruses, their scapulas, their sternums, their rib cages, their carpals and frontals, their cheekbones just touching—home at last the house niggers—after all this, they waited for more than two years—this would have been the summer of 1883—letting word of mouth do its job, the reports in the press, suckering them in, building the tip, specific about the summer—timing was everything—because they had to choose a season not just when the park was sure to be cr
owded—the idea of the two-week paid vacation had begun to catch on at about the same time that work was begun on the great wooden wall—but a time when the weather was dependable, when they could rely upon the long spells of hot, dry weather, when the rain, if it came, was likely to be the sort of fierce, brief deluge of which all traces are gone one or two hours after it has ceased.

  They kept their counsel and agreed on July 18, 1883, which fell on a Saturday that year, not just a time when a lot of folks—there was a railroad in Norbiton now—would be enjoying their summer vacations but part of a weekend, too—timing was everything—so that even those folks not on vacation would be in town to take advantage of the generous weekend discounts offered by Thicket House. They were quite lucky. The weather had been splendid for upwards of three weeks, no rain—they weren’t farmers in Chapel County; the soil was too alkaline; no corn was ruined, no soybeans or tomatoes or greens—the temperatures hot but bearable, and the wall filled with holiday makers along its great, winding wooden length. Pelgas and the others were ready. The wall was a tinderbox. When Louis Paul and the other domestics, after first preparing the most strategic struts, pilings, and braces with oil, finally ignited it, it went off like a firework. Two hundred-and-fourteen tourists and holiday makers either burned or fell to their deaths on the thorns and briars, the burning brambles and bushes, incinerated and drowned in the lake of blazing liquors of the primed, fermenting fruits forty feet below them.