Cummings, ducking low to avoid disarranging the sparse hairs of his meticulously groomed head on the rough stones of the low door, found Rat Badger sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor of the bedroom. Rat did not acknowledge his presence.
Cummings cleared his throat meaningfully.
The Occupant did not stir. His gaze was fixed on an oft-used pewter tankard that rested on the floor before him like a miniature shrine.
“Sir?” said the butler, placing the silver tray on the crude bedstead. He was tempted to place a reassuring hand on Rat’s shoulder, but this would be a liberty his training did not allow. He spoke a little louder. “Mr. Jackson?”
Rat Badger exhaled. He had evidently been holding his breath a long time. Cummings took comfort in the meager display of vital signs. He lifted a glass of juice from the tray and held it out. “Drink this, sir. You’ll feel better.”
Without taking his eyes from the pewter tankard, Rat took the glass and drank. Much of the liquid, finding the designated cavity incommodious, spilled from his mouth, soaking his pajama front. Still his attention did not stray from the tankard. “Monks,” he said.
“Monks, sir?” said Cummings. He began removing lice from Rat’s hair with a pair of silver tweezers and depositing them in a small bronze reliquary, the surface of which was decorated with an ornate frieze in which similar insects cavorted playfully.
“They’re all gone.”
“Indeed, sir? You find this disturbing?”
“I miss them.”
Cummings, sensing a private moment, refrained from comment.
“I was alone,” said Rat, tears welling in his eyes. “All alone. On an island in the North Sea.”
If the remark awoke in Cummings’ breast thoughts of the island of his own nativity, also in the North Sea, they were manifest nowhere upon his person. “Islands have their part to play, sir.”
“How long was I gone?”
“Just one night, sir,” said Cummings. He fixed a porcelain lid to the reliquary.
“It seemed like years. Just one night?”
“Yes, sir. Each of your . . . sojourns . . . lasts a night.”
“The Dickens you say.” It was an uncustomary epithet, and felt so strange on his tongue that Rat was shaken from his trance. “What made me say that?”
“‘The spirits have done it all in just one night’, sir. It is a quote from A Christmas Carol.”
“Which one?”
“Sir?”
“Which Christmas carol?” He ransacked his musical inventory from Jingle Bell Rock to I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, but couldn’t find the phrase.
Cummings was ignorant of seasonal ditties of the last century. “It is a book by Charles Dickens, sir. Written as a present to his children on the occasion of Christmas, 1843.”
“Words are important,” noted Rat, who had yet to raise his eyes from his reflection in the tankard.
“Yes, sir. A trustworthy poet informs us they ‘are the emanations of angels and devils, with the power to heal or destroy.’”
Rat nodded. “Heal or destroy,” he echoed.
Cummings warmed to the subject. “I have read elsewhere that they are ‘traitorous emissaries of the tongue, giving witness to the soul.’” He sliced a pineapple into exact sixteenths that he placed in regimental array on a china dish. These he fed to Rat one at a time, clockwise.
Rat stared and chewed and thought and spoke with his mouth full. “That means they’re like little paint brushes that paint pictures of what we are inside.”
Cummings had not expected so piquant an analogy. “Well stated, sir. Yes. They reveal the inner man.”
“I’m crap,” said Rat.
Cummings was not conversant with the term but inferred from the tone of its delivery that it was not self-complimentary. “Indeed, sir?”
“You remember the song I wrote. The one I sang you that first day?”
There was little chance that Cummings could forget. Try as he might. Periodically in the intervening period he had found himself removing singed hairs from his eyebrows. “Yes, sir. Most . . . expressive.”
Rat at last raised his eyes and looked meaningfully at the butler.
“Ah!” said Cummings. “I see. You feel the lyrics of your . . . your song . . . create an unflattering portrait of your inner man.”
“I’ve got seven albums on the market,” Rat said. “Seventy songs, just like that. Worse.”
The assertion stretched the outermost membrane of credulity. Cummings shuddered inwardly.
Rat stared again at the tankard. “That’s what that thing is,” he said, indicating his reflection, “my portrait.”
“Yes, sir.” Cummings hesitated. “Do you note an improvement after your most recent experience?”
However self-flagellant Rat’s present mood, he couldn’t deny a significant alteration in the quaking, cowering gremlin of his soul. The scraggly Fu-Manchu mustache seemed to have been trimmed by someone with sharp scissors. There was a more rounded arch to the eyebrows, a sort of wretched nobility in the carriage of its shoulders. “Maybe.”
Once again, in keeping with recent tradition, Cummings was tucking Rat into bed, this one a comfortable twin with a canopy. Rat took in his surroundings. The room was littered with frilliness, as if Martha Stewart had exploded nearby. There was no mirror. No tankard. No bit of broken glass in which he might see himself. Only the myopic eye of a large-screen TV that reflected Rat, his head buried in a sea of pillows, his chin covered by a dusty sea-foam green duvet of Egyptian cotton with 2600 thread count. Gradually the image morphed into that of a white man, somewhat toward middle age.
Cummings and all else evaporated. As his consciousness was subsumed by this new individual, Rat knew the man had recently moved, with his wife and two daughters, to Parson’s Pride, a small hamlet in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains. A queer, quaint, storybook town that, despite an outward calm, had fallen victim to . . .
The Tyranny of the Flea Market TV
The sixth night
The little bell over the door announced his arrival. This was his second Saturday as a resident of Parson’s Pride—the first he had spent moving his family in to the old house by the common—and he felt it was time to insert himself into the ebb and flow of village life. What better place than the local diner on a Saturday morning? As expected, he found a number of locals, mostly men, occupying various booths, and half the stools at the counter were full. All conversation stopped as the door closed behind him. He had anticipated this. Parson’s Pride was a small town and he’d read enough Stephen King novels to know that new arrivals engendered a good deal of interest on the part of the locals. He took them all in with a broad, speculative smile. Several people nodded, then returned their attention to their bacon and eggs, or to the television that hung high on the wall in the corner.
He sat at the counter, two seats from his nearest neighbor. He didn’t wish to appear pushy. “Coffee?” said the waitress, a robust young woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had vivid eyes, a prodigious chest, and a delicate silver nose-ring.
“Decaf, please.”
She took a white ceramic mug from the shelf behind her, filled it from the orange-rimmed carafe in the Bunn coffee maker and slid it across the well-worn linoleum counter. “You the fella that bought the Hempsted place?” She knew he was. They all knew.
“Yes,” he said. “My name’s Bill Porter.”
“Where you from?” said the waitress, whose name tag introduced her as Charlie.
“Boston.”
“Oh,” she said, raising her eyebrows as if this was news to her, which it wasn’t. “What brings you to Parson’s Pride?”
“Just looking for a change of pace, I guess,” he replied. “Tired of commuting, you know. Tired of the congestion and traffic.”
“Well, you come to the right place to get away from that,” said Charlie with an odd smile. She tossed a glance at the television. “We’ve only got one stop sign and that blinkin�
�� yellow light out by the turn-off. You retired?”
“Sort of. I’m a teacher, a professor. I’ve been wanting to write a book for a long time. So I took early retirement and we moved up here so I can get it out of my system.”
“What kind of teacher?”
He knew that his responses to the interrogation would be common knowledge by noon. He answered carefully. He wanted them to take him seriously, but he didn’t want to be dismissed as an egg-head. “I taught ancient middle eastern history at Harvard.”
“Harvard?” she was impressed. “You must know your stuff pretty good.”
“As much as anyone can know anything about that part of the world.”
The middle east—past, present, or future—held no interest for Charlie. She put a dog-eared, plastic-covered menu in front of him. “What kind of book you writin’?”
There was a large mirror on the wall opposite him and a quick glance revealed that all eyes were on him. He pretended not to notice. “It’s about the culture of the Levant prior to the arrival of the Sea Peoples.”
Charlie’s eyes glazed over, as did those of most people when he told them. “Not likely to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, I’m afraid.”
“Sea Peoples,” said Charlie, blankly.
The eyes in the mirror turned away. He suspected that his feeble attempt to fit in would be aided by the introduction of a less esoteric topic. “I noticed the library is closed for repairs. When is it expected to open, do you know?”
Once again all eyes were on him and on Charlie. She looked down and wiped the counter. “Nope. Been closed a long time. This menu’s ’bout the only thing gets read ’round here. What’ll you have?”
He glanced at the menu. “Oatmeal, I guess. With a little cinnamon and raisins?”
“OJ?”
“Sure. A small one.”
While Charlie went to fill the order he tried not to notice that everyone was watching, but it was impossible not to sense their eyes boring into the back of his head, studying his reflection in the mirror. He pretended to study the menu distractedly. It was ominously quiet. He was perplexed. It had been his experience that people in small towns were avid readers. While he didn’t imagine he’d find much of the intellectual pyrotechnics commonly encountered in the teachers’ lounges at Harvard—where scholars argued their pet dogmas with the ardor and narrow-mindedness of fundamentalists everywhere—at least, he thought, he’d be able to enjoy good, well-informed common sense.
Charlie returned with the juice.
“Too bad,” he said, picking up the somewhat frayed thread of the conversation. “I’ve got lots of research to do.” He shrugged. “I guess I’ll just have to use the Internet.”
“Not here, you won’t,” said Charlie, her eyes skipped from face to face around the room. “No connection.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“Clarence!” said Charlie, lobbing the question to a booth against the far wall, “what’s the story about the Internet?”
“Can’t make it work in Parson’s Pride,” Clarence replied warily. “Phone lines won’t handle it.”
Bill swiveled around on his stool and looked at the speaker. “But you don’t need phone lines. There are towers . . .”
“No line-of-sight,” said Clarence flatly. “Too many hills around here. And not ’nough business to make it worthwhile.”
“I find that hard to . . .” realizing he might be about to make an irredeemable comment, he edited himself, “imagine. I guess I can go to Dartmouth. They’ll have everything I need.”
“Prob’ly should have moved there in the first place,” said Clarence, adding to those around him. “Too late now.”
An old man across the table nodded into his coffee cup.
Porter decided it would be wise to drop the subject. He turned to face Charlie as she placed the steaming bowl of oatmeal before him. “What do folks do around here for entertainment?”
“We watch TV,” she said without hesitation. “All the time.”
It was true. When they weren’t looking at him, all eyes were trained on the television in the corner.
He persisted. “What newspapers to do get up here? The Globe?”
Charlie swiped the counter with a damp rag. “No papers. Like Clarence said, there ain’t enough business in Parson’s Pride for ’em to deliver all the way up here.”
He was flabbergasted. “No newspapers? How do you know what’s going on in the world?”
“TV tells us all we need to know.” She nodded toward the television set.
He cringed inwardly. In his opinion, television in general, and TV news in particular, was of little value. He couldn’t conceive of a whole community drawing intellectual sustenance from such a shallow, stagnant pool. He looked at the TV set, which was tuned to Teletubbies, and noted that everyone was watching with rapt interest. As if what they were watching mattered.
“What kind of TV you got?” Charlie inquired.
“We don’t have one,” he said. Someone dropped a fork. Once again everyone was staring at him. “I hate the things.”
“Don’t say that!” said Charlie, fear flashing in her eyes. Her cleavage tensed.
A disapproving murmur swept from booth to booth. The man and woman nearest him at the counter got up and, taking their dishes, moved to a vacant booth.
“Don’t say what?” He laughed. “That I don’t like television?”
Charlie fumbled the sugar shaker nervously. “You’re new here. You don’t know what you’re saying.” She tried to regain her composure. “I’m pretty sure there’s one at the flea market, down in the parking lot by the town hall. Tables open at 10:00.”
“A television?”
Charlie nodded meaningfully and, leaning forward, whispered. “If you want to fit in around here, you’d best get it . . . ’fore someone else does.”
There was a short, ironic burst of laughter behind him.
Charlie straightened up. “Anything else I can get for ya?”
He looked down at the oatmeal, of which he’d only taken a spoonful or two. “No,” he said, more than a little flustered. “I’m fine. Thanks.” He put some money on the counter. “Keep the change.”
His brief conversation with the waitress had been troubling enough but, more than that, it was the look in her eyes—in everyone’s eyes—when he had declared himself anti-television. While no one in academia would confess to watching television on a regular basis, here was a whole town, apparently, that professed to do nothing else. The fear in their eyes, when an alternative was suggested, was palpable.
But Teletubbies?
Passing the flea market on the way home, he slowed down. The sight—so emblematic of small New England towns in the gold-dipped days of early autumn—was oddly comforting: mostly women manning booths and tables offering a wide array of items ranging from clothes and shoes, to kitchen utensils, small appliances and the usual jetsam of household economies.
Flea market book tables had always been one of his favorite recreational haunts, yet here he searched in vain. Not a single book. No stacks of outdated National Geographic or Reader’s Digest. No piles of magazines. As far as he could tell in quick, staccato glimpses, there was no printed material whatever.
But there was a large-screen TV. It faced the highway and someone had taken the trouble to connect it and turn it on. Teletubbies.
It immediately struck him as strange that the television was set apart from the rest of the displays, on a lace-draped table all its own. In an evident attempt to bolster its appeal, someone had surrounded the unit with fresh flowers, neatly arranged in vases of cut crystal and porcelain, as well as wreaths festooned with multicolored ribbons and bits of paper. He slowed further and made out an intersprinkling of small votive candles. A perfectly-lettered sign stood next to the display, set in an ornate gold frame. “Free.”
The tableau was too idiosyncratic, too shrine-like to resist. He turned into the school yard, parked, and began a
mbling from table to table. Now and then he’d pick up an item and ask a question about it, but all along he was being drawn—perhaps by the inborn Yankee inability to resist a deal that seemed too good to be true, perhaps by intellectual curiosity—toward the great mesmerizing eye. The closer he got to it, the more attention he seemed to draw to himself, as waiting eyes covertly marked his progress. He feigned disinterest as he approached the display. Someone was behind him.
“Fine one, ain’t it?” said a woman’s voice. He turned to confront a smiling, rotund woman with bluish hair. She was wiping popcorn butter from her fingers with a corner of her flowered apron. “Maximatrix VmX. That’s SUNY,” she offered knowingly. “Best there is.”
“What’s all this?” he asked, indicating the array. “Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to make sure it’s noticed.”
“We take pride in our TVs around here,” said the woman. “We love ’em.” A couple more women had gathered in the wings. They nodded. “That’s genuine faux walnut cabinetry,” she continued, caressing the sides of the television in perfect imitation of a Price Is Right model. “Fifty-seven inches, measured diagonally.”
Thoroughly unsettled now, he took the remote control the woman offered and pointed it at the unit. He pressed the volume button and the set responded accordingly. He pressed “Mute” and the sound went off. He pressed the channel select, but nothing happened.
“It doesn’t seem to work,” he observed. “I guess that’s why it’s free.”
“Oh, it works fine!” said the woman quickly. “It works the best of any TV you ever saw.”
“But . . .” he said, pressing the channel select button exaggeratedly, “the channel doesn’t change.”
“Don’t need to,” said another of the women. “It’s just fine the way it is.”
“Folks around here seem to like the Teletubbies,” he said, placing the remote on top of the set.
“Best program there ever was,” said the first woman. Everyone else agreed with disconcerting enthusiasm. “We’ll help you load it into your car. Where you parked?”
“Oh, no. No thanks. I don’t want it, I was just . . .”
Storyteller Page 10
