In time he was able to retire to Stratford, most of which he now owned. Kudos for his plays arrived by morning, mid-day, and evening post, of course, from around the world. But these he consigned to the fire. They were of no interest. The jingle was the thing. For thirty years, closeted in his rooms in London, he had ransacked his brain, his heart, his soul for the ideal combination of words—the perfect concatenation of vowels and consonants—with which to express the desirability of Shakespeare gloves. He had failed.
This is the thought that rankled as he sauntered the High Street in his golden years in the company of his remarkably ugly, unflaggingly faithful dog who, it seemed, simply refused to die. No amount of pats on the back by passersby, no number of busloads of tourists seeking autographs, no hoard of Japanese inscrutably awaiting the invention of the camera in order to have their picture taken with him could remotely assuage the overarching conviction that his life had been a waste. It mattered not that the family glove business had died with his father. Nor that Frank Bacon had gone on to do impersonations, leaving that family business, too, only a memory.
It was of no consequence that no one sang the Bacon’s bakery jingle any more. It resounded still in Shakespeare’s soul, and would be expunged by nothing but another superior to it.
It came to him at last, in the middle of the night. He’d been unable to sleep because Annie, as usual, was babbling plays. Nobody wrote them down anymore. Why bother? He was sitting by the fire, smoking his pipe, ignoring the incessant off-stage drone of her voice, when he was struck by the inspiration he had chased for so long.
“Shakespeare’s the brand and you’ll love ’em
When your fingers are cold and you shove ’em
Into warm woolen fleece
That surrounds ’em with ease
There’s no other glove that’s above ’em!”
That was April 22, 1616. Shakespeare died the next day, a smile on his face.
Scholars speculate, which I expect they use as an excuse when asked by their wives to take out the trash—“Can’t now, honey. I’m speculating!”—why Shakespeare ceased to write after his return to Stratford-upon-Avon, though he lived several healthy years following retirement. ’Tis a simple question to satisfy. One does not continue coming home when one has arrived. One does not keep climbing when the summit is reached. The parachutist does not continue falling when he has landed. One does not, in short, toss one’s marshmallow into the flames. From that day forward, Shakespeare’s jingle was on the lips of every native on the High Street. What prize had the world to add to this? What crown could compare? What accolade would not turn to dust on the tongue? His wife’s plays, nice enough in their way, would pale before this jingle . . . The Jingle . . . in which he would live forever.
There is some truth to this. Even today, the attentive visitor to Stratford-upon-Avon will hear from the lips of some careless shopkeeper, some unconscious waitress in a tearoom, or tour guide enjoying her break time, those treasured words in which the Bard found such peace:
“Shakespeare’s the brand and you’ll love ’em
When your fingers are cold and you shove ’em . . .”
Annie’s stuff, however, hasn’t fared as badly as he’d projected, especially the one about the two kids from Verona. And the creepy Danish guy who saw dead people. Who ever thought those would get off the ground?
As for the dog—formerly Abedegdod, now Spotteth—it would seem he benefited from the residue of immortality, and finished his days in peace as Shakespeare’s close companion. No less ugly but no longer unloved, he became a sort of town mascot and, as such, was universally adored. This chronicler must confess, however, in the interest of reportorial integrity, that the animal produced very little literature of consequence in his declining years; mostly doggerel.
In one night Rat Badger had been a dog for several hundred years. A poetic dog. A dog with a burden. A dog with a message. A frustrated and unattractive mongrel of uncertain parentage and, in the light of day, the experience was telling. Though he was once again a black male Alabaman indistinguishable in many respects from other black male Alabamans he had, in that wandering, interminable night, acquired not only a web of lines about the eyes, but habits that were hard to break. Habits that, in polite society, would have engendered remark, that would, in point of fact, have breached even prison yard and preschool etiquette.
When he regained his senses, he discovered himself about to engage in one such practice, one to which his physiology was not naturally suited. Immediately he caught sight of his reflection in the dog’s water dish, however, he refrained. Not without effort. He settled, instead, for a satisfying scratch behind the ear with his left foot. He was hoping Cummings wouldn’t come in at that particular moment, but the hope was vain for, at that precise moment, the erstwhile butler did just that, filtering into the familiar and comfortable bedchamber not the least ruffled to find the master on the floor in a position that other company might have regarded as solicitous of comment.
“A special treat this morning,” he said, placing the delicately-wrought silver tray on the floor in front of Rat. “Ham and eggs!”
“Non?” said Rat, harkening back to a phrase he’d heard recently.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“It’s French,” Rat explained. “Means ‘no.’”
“To be sure, sir,” said Cummings. “So it does. Your fluency does you credit. You passed the night equably?” He poured steaming coffee into a white porcelain cup and handed it to his charge. “Sip, sir. Don’t lick.”
Another habit it would be hard to break. Rat’s brows arched like those of a basset hound as he looked around the room, the same room he, as the poet-dog Abedegdod, had shared for many years with the famous jinglist William Shakespeare and his wife, Annie, the playwright. It was familiar and comfortable; the cream-colored daub and wattle walls, the thick oaken beams and the wide-board floor, polished to an eggshell sheen by years of use. All the furniture, all the odds and ends, knick-knack and bric-a-brac he knew as much by smell as by sight. His sense of smell was fading, though. What information seeped into his brain came through his eyes. It was curious to see the room in color. Only Cummings was still black and white.
“I was a dog,” he said.
“So I gathered,” Cummings replied.
“Shakespeare’s dog.”
“Ah! The immortal Bard! How I envy you, sir,” said Cummings with undisguised enthusiasm. “How sad a world and bereft of exquisite expression ’twould be if not for the Sweet Swan of Avon.”
Rat Badger deliberated the wisdom of informing Cummings that it hadn’t been Shakespeare who had written all the works for which he’d been mentioned prominently in the opening credits—nor even Francis Bacon—but Abedegdod, the Irish dog. What good could come of such a revelation?
“‘Bereft of exquisite expression,’” he echoed. “I like that. Your own, or did you get it from the back of a cereal box?”
Cummings inclined his head modestly. “It is a phrase of my own invention, sir. Thank you.”
“Keep at it, old boy, and you’ll make an impression.”
“Good of you to say, sir. May I help you to your feet?”
The action was performed and, at its conclusion, Cummings was settling Rat amongst the sheets and fluffing the pillow about his head. Rat hardly noticed. He was tired. It had been a long, exhausting day—though he remembered nothing of it, it being the custom of the island that, contrary to life elsewhere, daylight events evaporated like dreams, while those of the night were remembered.
There was an ornate oval mirror above the genuine Louis XIV vanity opposite the bed. There Rat witnessed the reflection of his soul. For once, it wasn’t staring back at him. Rather it seemed to be writing. Its attitude, at least—bent over a dog-eared parchment that, for want of a desk, rested on its knees—was one of concentration and effort. Quill in hand, it was scratching figures on the page with keen and undivided absorption.
“I wond
er what it’s trying to say.”
“Sir?” said Cummings distractedly. He was arranging an assortment of baubles and beads asymmetrically on the bedside table.
Rat nodded toward the mirror. “It’s writing something. I wonder what.”
“Perhaps it is one of those questions to which the answer will ripen in time, sir,” said Cummings, emboldened by previous experience to attempt more florid expression than that to which Rat had earlier taken exception. “Is it much improved?”
“Yes,” said Rat, without deliberation. It was true. For the first time he could say unequivocally there was an overall improvement. The creature’s skull was less pointed at the apex. Its very posture, though stooped in its labors, was distinctly more human and less bestial. Its concentration was human-ish, though it might simply be mimicking Shakespeare who had assumed much the same attitude when frantically transcribing the immortal words that escaped from his wife’s lips as she slept. But he didn’t think so. It was making some attempt at original thought. Somehow he knew this. “Yes. It’s getting better.”
“We are encouraged, sir.”
Rat lapsed into thought. “You know, Cummings,” he said after a seemingly soporific hiatus, “the guy was good.”
“Guy, sir? You mean Shakespeare?”
He meant Abedegdod, but it would be pointless, perhaps even upsetting to Cummings’ world-view, to draw him into the conversation. “Those things he wrote—you’re right, they’re immortal.”
“It has been observed that ‘the artist lives on in his art, sir,” said Cummings.
This thought was troubling to Rat. He shuddered at the possibility of taking up eternal residence amidst the images of his own creation; to face the rabid perversion of natural feeling, the percussive distortion of wholesome instinct hammered perpetually into the brain with pneumatic instruments. His art was the absence of beauty comprised not of heroic and revolutionary acts, but anemic little farts of anti-creativity done up in the costume of controversy. Upon the heels of this notion came a tiny, burp-like epiphany, the realization that all art is nothing more than a cry for recognition, a quest for validation, a pinprick in the balloon of immortality. It is not, after all, the burden of some over-demanding muse. Not divine election. Simply the erratic surging upward through the brine of commonness of a bubble of self, seeking identity in its own destruction.
Whether these thoughts were valid or not was beside the point. That they were occurring in the brain of Harold Erasmus Jackson as a result of introspection was headline news.
“Good stuff,” he said distractedly. “You know that gag from Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be . . .’ The guy was thinking about suicide. That’s what that was about.”
“Your observation affirms that I have been correct in my own assumptions, sir. Yes. A tragical figure, the young prince.”
“Pithy, that.” Rat let the word roll around his mouth. He liked it. “Pithy in the extreme.”
“It has been remarked that Shakespeare was not without depth, sir. Is there anything you require before I retire?”
“Require, retire. Rhymes,” Rat said sleepily.
“If you wish to correctly retire
Do so in proper attire
For anything less
One might as well dress
In anything one can acquire.
“Rats. I couldn’t bung ‘require’ in there anywhere.” He was beginning to nod.
“This in no way diminishes the effort, sir. Goodnight,” said Cummings, and he was no more.
Scarcely able to keep his eyes open, Rat looked at the mirror and saw, in place of his own reflection, that of a man with a pointed beard, somewhere about thirty. As his consciousness gave way, he acquired the terrible knowledge that the man had just come through a terrible fire. Yet, not all the way through, for the dead, Harold was about to learn, often return . . .
Sometimes As Ghosts
The eighth and ninth nights
He was French, judging by his costume. Probably 17th century. Recently deceased. He was young and appeared in good health, apart from the startled expression on his face, an expression common to every first-time visitor to the tavern. His clothing smoldered and the smell of smoke clung to his flesh and hair. He’d stumbled in and sat down at a quiet table in the shadows just about the time Judge Crater tottered off to bed, three sheets to the wind, as was his habit.
She’d given him an hour or so to absorb the new reality of his surroundings. It was her father’s policy at the tavern. “Always give ’em an hour or so. Give ’em time to get used to it.”
The hour was up. She approached him cautiously. There was no telling how he might react. Everyone was different. “What’ll you have?” she asked in French, assuming, correctly, that was his language.
He had been cradling his head in his hands. He raised sharp, frantic eyes to her that now, in addition to being startled, were overlain with a deep, penetrating patina of fear. “You speak to me?” he said.
“No one else at this table, Jacques,” she said offhandedly. “Wine?” She prided herself on being able to guess what her customers would want. She had brought both wine and ale, though. Once in a great while she was wrong.
His forehead crinkled in perplexity and his eyebrows twitched. “What is this place?”
“The Tavern.” The wine was in a jam jar, festooned with decals of cartoon characters, circa 20th Century America. She placed it on the table.
“It is not a natural place,” he said, quaffing the wine at a toss. It dribbled from the corners of his mouth and saturated his beard.
“Been in a fire?” she asked conversationally, nodding at his attire and the faint wraiths of smoke that issued from the folds of his garments.
Dazed, he held his hands in front of his face, turning the palms toward him as if they were strange, foreign appendages. “I saw my flesh burn away,” he said, more to himself than to her. “I saw it blister and boil and fall from my bones.”
“Must’ve been dreadful.” She never knew what to say. “More wine?” She poured automatically. Of course he’d want more. Most of them did, though she knew they’d never have enough to numb the shock.
He looked at her again, mixing bewilderment and suspicion with all the other emotions. “I was dead.”
“You don’t need to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”
“You don’t understand!” he said, half rising from the table, upsetting his chair. A few people at nearby tables looked up briefly, then smirking at one another and shaking their heads, resumed their conversations. He darted glances at them and, reaching down, righted the chair. “You don’t understand,” he repeated, lowering his voice, the desperation in his eyes drawing her toward him. “I was dead. Burned alive!”
“Nasty way to go, I should imagine,” she said. She knew that compassion could give way to all kinds of complications, but her heart went out to him. Long practice had taught her that a little kindness, in moderation, could go a long way. The Frenchman reminded her of her dog Arbuthnot. She put her tray on the table and, glancing quickly at the ship’s clock on the wall behind him, sat down. She’d give him five minutes. “Worst of it’s over now, though,” she added cheerfully.
He ran his fingers through his long, matted hair. “I am dead, then?”
Some realized it straight away. Others took time. “They all are,” she said, gesturing around the room. “Seems to be the price of admission. Would you like some cheese?”
The Frenchman scanned his fellow patrons; some he was able to place by their attire, others—with skin of varying shades, eyes at odd angles, clothing of unknown fabric and impossible weave—were utterly strange. He leaned across the table and whispered. “This is heaven?”
She shrugged. “That’s what some seem to think. Others call it hell. Depends on your point of view, I guess. All I know is it’s the Tavern.”
He studied the room with a curious, horrible interest. It was not well-defined. The walls and ceiling seemed at once to reflect
all the imaginings of man’s construction, from Gothic, to primitive, to ornate, to princely, to other styles and architectures he couldn’t name. The harder he stared at any detail, the less substantial it seemed. The entire structure was in constant flux, though at no time was the transition jarring, or even noticeable unless he concentrated very hard. “This is not heaven,” he said. “Where is God?”
“If you mean any god in particular, I can’t say I’ve seen one,” she said. She leaned a little closer and, with a twinkle in her eyes, added: “Though there’s several think they are.” She laughed.
“Then it must be hell,” he reasoned. “And that must be the Devil.”
She followed his gaze toward the bar, where her father was now and then eyeing her with parental concern. “Oh, no. That’s my father. He can be a little gruff sometimes, but he’s good at heart.”
The Frenchman’s hands were shaking as he downed the second glass. “This is not right.”
“Hasn’t gone off, has it?” She sniffed the bottle.
“Not the wine!” He gestured widely. “All this! It is heathen! It is given unto man once to die. Dead and buried. Yet these . . . you say they are dead, yet they are alive!”
It was time to broach the subject, he’d brought it up himself. “Oh, well . . . there’s the thing, you see. They, none of ’em, had the distinct advantage of dying properly.”
The question was in his eyes.
“Well, I’m no expert in these things, you understand, I only know from speculation, but it seems these are people who disappear. Seems they’re never found—the bodies—you know? This place is for them.” She regarded her surroundings with all the pride of a proprietress. “We’ve got ’em all. That man who just went up to his room, he was a judge. Judge Crater. They tell him he just disappeared one day, and . . .”
Storyteller Page 13
