“Oh yes, yes,” said the aunt, And she came back into the house calling “Melky, Melky!” But Melchisedech Duffey was out of the opposite attic window and he swung by his vine-covered rope to a corner down-spout, and then down it to the ground like a hot-footed squirrel. He was out through the squash rows and the corn rows of the garden, and off into Mayfield's Meadow. And he stayed there for a couple of hours.
“There were three nice little boys here while you were gone. They wanted you to play with them but I couldn't find you,” the aunt said when he returned.
“Oh nice little boys you nanny goat! “ Melchisedech howled. “They're mean ones. They came to kill me.”
“Oh Melky, what an imagination you have,” the aunt exclaimed.
It was about two months later that Melchisedech saw the same slant-faced boys again. He had been for a morning walk, and he came back to the house. He looked up, and there were the three of them, inside the house, looking out of the Prisoner John Window. It was called the Prisoner John Window by Duffey if by no one else, because Prisoner John had once been held captive for twenty years in that little closet. He used to look out of that window all day. That was back in the Civil War days. But now these three boys were inside the house itself, looking out of that high window and waiting for Duffey to come so that they might kill him.
“He sees us,” one of the boys said.
“No. The sun's in his eyes. He can't see us,” the second one said. “We'll wait for him here, and we'll kill him when he comes up,” the third boy mouthed. Melchisedech was still some distance off, but he could read mouth. In fear and trembling he came up to the house. They'd kill him of course, but it was better to be killed than to let any of the big people know that you were afraid of anything.
“Melky, where were you?” the aunt asked suddenly from somewhere. “Your trunk is already in the buggy. You didn't forget that you were going to the country this morning, did you? It's time to get in the buggy now.”
“I forgot it for just a little while,” Melchisedech said.
“Is there anything you want to get from the attic before you leave?”
“No, there sure isn't anything I want to go up there for,” he said. He got in the buggy to go and spend three months in the country, and he was chortling inside. He laughed at those boys spending all day and all night there for three months waiting for him to come back so they could kill him.
It was two months later that they heard in the country that the house in town had burned down. Everybody had gotten out of it all right, and nobody knew what had caused the fire.
“They knocked over the old wobbly lamp up there, that's what caused the fire,” Melchisedech said, “and I hope that they didn't get out all right. If they rake the ashes good, they ought to find three strings of bones in them.” But he was wrong.
Melchisedech hoped that he was rid of his three slant-faced enemies. And he thought that he was — for five years.
When Melchisedech was eight years old, he was living one winter in a middle-sized Iowa town with people who pretended to be his relations. He was one of the boys who served 6:30 mass every morning. The pretended relations lived right across the road from the church, so Melchisedech was able to get there no matter how deep the snow might be or how severe the storm. The church had an old rope-operated bell. When pulled with sufficient force or weight, the rope would rock the bell into movement to send its heavy booming voice out over the whole town. This would be heard with a wakening delight by all persons except some of the Protestants.
But if the rope was pulled with insufficient force, there was no way that the bell could be set into motion. It would not stir or move at all to a light pull. It followed a quantum law. Too little was nothing at all to it.
So the institution of the ‘fat altar boy’ had come about. One of the four young boys who served every morning had to be heavy enough to set the bell into motion when he swung on the rope.
But there came a day when the fat altar boy was sick with pneumonia, and there was consternation among the other three of them. None of them was heavy enough to set the bell into motion when he swung on the rope. The other two cowards pointed at Melchisedech. So he had to be the ‘fat altar boy’ and he weighed only sixty-three pounds. The genuine fat altar boy had weighed a hundred and twenty pounds before he got the pneumonia.
Melchisedech said silent prayers. Then he made a mighty leap and caught the end of the rope. He dangled there and was unable to budge the mighty bell an inch. He dangled there, and he was impassioned with a golden fury. Was he a magician for nothing?
“I am the golden boy! I am the boy king!” he roared. He roared it not in sound but in some other medium. “It is mine to order. It is mine to command. I command that the hand of an invisible giant come down and help me to pull the rope.”
It happened. The giant hand came down and seized the rope. The bell was rocked three times, higher and deeper each time, and then it broke into its beautiful and roaring sound. The people all over town woke with the secure feeling that it was a giant hand on the rope, and that it was the hand of a sanctioned giant. The giant was invisible, but the hand was visible. It was seen clearly by the other three boys.
“Who does the hand belong to?” they asked Duffey. “How could a hand be that big?”
“It belongs to one of my giants,” Duffey told them. “They have to do anything I command them, but I'm always reasonable.”
“How many of them are there?” the boys asked.
“There's about a dozen that I've used. I think there will always be as many as I need.”
Well, Melchisedech was a boy magician and a boy-king, and he proved it several times. Many who saw his proofs have since died, or have forgotten about them. But several still remember.
Melchisedech was shunted from place to place quite a bit. Did he really have three separate and discrete childhoods at the same time, one of them mostly in Iowa, one of them in St. Louis, and one of them in Boston? This does not seem possible, but doubting it or denying it is not a real impediment to its having happened. There is one explanation: that Melchisedech did have (in some context or other) a brother one year younger than himself and a sister or step-sister two years older than himself. These were living, in those years, with other kindred in other places. And the children were taken a great distance to visit each other almost every year. Some of the pretended kindred worked for railroads, and they and their families could travel free on all the lines so that there was no great expense involved on the trips.
Now the fact was that Melchisedech was an invader and ransacker and pirate of minds. He would visit with brother or sister for a week, and he could appropriate and keep every experience that brother or sister (step-sister) had had for a whole year, every touch and seeing and feeling and smell and notion and daydream. Or at least one of the three young persons could do such things, could be such a pirate as to steal all the experiences of the other two. And this one of them, whichever he was, bore the group name of Melchisedech.
This may explain some of the anomalies about the St. Louis childhood. This is the most intricate of all of them and it is wrapped in baffling symbolism and allegories. This was mainly the childhood of the sister-person, which doesn't prevent it being the authentic childhood. Everything seems to have a second meaning here: it is one rich tangle. When, in later years, Melchisedech had himself analyzed, this particular rich tangle became a prime target for the analyst. There was concatenated strangeness in it. There were motifs of high artistry running all through it. There was sublimity of concept, and something new in transference and understanding. Yes, and there was a slightly bovine element in it that was not in Melchisedech Prime. Then, under the forceful pursuit of the analyst, the tangle quacked once, laid an addled egg, and expired.
“I do not know how it came about,” the analyst said, “but at one period of your life, for half a dozen of the early years, you were a girl. I mean it. You were a girl physically and mentally and psychically. Ca
n you fill me in on that?”
“Nah,” Duffey had said. He had asked for his bill, paid it, left the analyst without another word. But he laughed a lot about it privately.
But it was true that Melchisedech was an invader and ransacker and pirate of minds. There could be forty Melchisedech-aged children in a small town, and Melchisedech would have entered the minds of all of them and appropriated the contents. He would know every detail of the insides of every one of their families, and in great fullness and feeling. He knew so much about people and places that both people and places came to fear him. Oh how he had the details!
There was a shingle-block that served as a back step for one house. There was a wooden ‘crossing’ on a street that he did not use (the ‘crossings’ bridged the mud gutters from dirt paths to dirt roads) that was of wood a little different from its fellows, and Melchisedech would remember details of grain and color of that crossing for more than fifty years. There was a notched ear on one of the big coach horses in the livery stable; there was box-elder wood in the wood box of one of the houses, and elm wood in the wood box of the next house. Some of these things were known by acute observation and memory, and some of them were robbed from other minds. But it was all one realm to Melchisedech.
There were sacks of hazel nuts on the back porches of some houses, and sacks of walnuts on the back porches of others. But in St. Louis, sometimes, they had gunny sacks full of pecans. There were red squirrels in Iowa and gray squirrels in St. Louis. But in Boston they didn't even know what a squirrel was.
And there were the iron words of household things, many of the words stolen out of minds. There were pump handles with the iron words ‘Acme Pump Company’ on them, and pump handles with the words ‘Rock Island Pump Company’. There were other iron letters on other handles and bodies: ‘Binghampton’ or ‘Wisconsin’ or ‘Burn’ or ‘Cheese Factory’ on covers of milk cans, ‘Peerless’ or ‘Sears’ on the handles of cream separators, 'Sturgis' or ‘Curtis Improved’ or ‘Star Barrel’ on churns, ‘Armstrong's’ on cheese presses, ‘S.R. & Co.’ or ‘Peter Wright’ on anvils, ‘Schofields’ or ‘Auto Ball Bearing’ on grindstones, ‘Red Ridge’ or ‘Hubbard's’ or ‘Jamestown’ on axe heads. Melchiscdech loved stolen iron words that really belonged to other households than his own. He loved everything that was noticed by anyone else, and he appropriated it to himself. In McGuire's house, they had a potty that came all the way from Philadelphia. Melchisedech could see it plainly, with the scrolled porcelain words on it. And he had never been in McGuire's house. But enough of that.
Behind all these flimsy things in the temporal world, there was a more genuine childhood in which Melchisedech was the Boy King, in which he had been the Boy King for thousands of years. This was the solid base behind all the lives. The other and later things are the shadows of it. The Boy King with the golden hands was real. His dromedary hide tents were real. His flocks and his green pastures and his silver rivers were genuine. His groves of figs and dates and olives and apricots and pomegranates were more real than were the apple trees of Iowa or the plum and peach trees of Missouri. His fields of sesame and millet were more real than the wheat and cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska. His tobacco bushes and incense bushes and coffee bushes were living reality. His grape vines were authentic, and his silk worms were valid. His silk from camel and ass and ewe and gazelle and cow and India buffalo was milk in actuality. He had meat from all these animals, and from all harts and stags, from the swift pigs of Persia, and from a hundred sorts of fowl. He was the Boy King with the golden hands. He set out bread and wine for all visitors, sometimes more than a million of them a day, and he performed miracles without seeming to do so. Mostly he called up giants, both visible and invisible, to effect his miracles. They could break up rocks and boulders and permit springs and rivers to flow. They also could bring about the ‘Slaughter of the Kings’, of rival kings. For cures of blindness and lameness, Melchisedech would place his own golden hands on the ailing parts, and the physician could then effect cures. Melchisedech could turn stones into birds and set them to flying. The world would long since have run out of birds if it had not been for this.
Mostly Melchisedech kept his powers hidden. He was always there in his full powers, but one of his powers was invisibility. Melchisedech kept his person as the Boy King invisible most of the time. The body he wore was known as the ‘urchin disguise’.
And Melchisedech had talismans: nobody knows how many of them. Every time he gave one away, he somehow received or made another one to take its place. He had given the first one away when he was no more than three years old, to an Italian man who was selling little cakes out of a hokey-pokey pushcart. And this was to bring about or create the first of the persons who would make up the Duffey Nation. These talismans, which represented special gifts or blessings or graces or formations, especially to one not yet born, cannot be easily described.
“He got the first of them out of a box of crackerjacks,” said Aunt Mary Ellen Hart (one of the pretended kindred), “but it's much bigger now than it was when he got it out of the box, and I just don't know how that came about. I don't know what he made all the others out of, but he made them to look quite a bit like the first one. And he keeps other things, Charles. He keeps jars full of blood and such things.”
“I used to do that too,” said Charles Hart, one of the pretended uncles. “There's no harm in having jars of blood. You can catch weasels if you have blood around. They'll come to it. There's no harm at all in that boy.”
Melchisedech gave these talismans to various persons, mostly on sudden impulse to persons he had never seen before. They were always to powerful effect, working their way on unborn kindred of these people. This was part of the process by which Duffey actually manufactured people.
Here is a bit when Duffey was about eleven years old. For several weeks he had been visiting kindred on a farm where he had never been before. It was early summer and early morning. Melchisedech had gone out through orchards to a field of timothy hay. He lay down there, just about a rod from a fence corner and within the hay. The timothy was tall, and Melchisedech was completely hidden. He heard several sounds. Two sounds were from the bush-grown fence-rows. One was from the extent of timothy hay toward the center of the field. These three sounds were intended to be muffled.
Then there was another sound so soft that it needed no muffling at all. It was followed by a little yelping bark that was rusty from disuse. It was a fox bark. Melchisedech knew foxes, but this one he knew in a different way from the regular foxes of the field. The yelping bark came again, more insistently.
Melchisedech sat up. Then he leapt to his feet and was running.
A person may live all his life in kit-fox country and see none or maybe one of these smallest foxes. And he would have to live ten lives in kit-fox country before he heard the rusty yap of one of them. But Melchisedech saw and heard the kit-fox now. He knew what it was, for it was his totem animal. And he knew that it had come to warn him.
The kit-fox was as sorrel of hair as was Duffey. He was as grinning of month and as apprehensive of eye as Duffey was. “But for size, we look about the same,” Duffey took time to think as he ran and as he weighed other things with his own apprehensive eyes. Two of the slack-mouthed, slanted-faced boys were coming over the two corner jags of the fence. Another of them was coming out of the deep timothy ahead of Duffey, and Duffey was surrounded. Melchisedech Duffey had grown since he had seen these boys before, but they had grown faster. They were still quite a bit older and quite a bit bigger than he was. They intended to kill him, and they had caught him cold. Which way to go? Duffey was already going. He was going the way the kit-fox went.
The kit-fox, which avoids humans more than does any other of North America, made for one of the boys who was clearing the fence. So Duffey made for him too. Any way that Duffey should veer off, the boys would have the interceptors' angle on him, and they would hav his back or flank undefended to their knives.
The kit-fox took the slant-faced boy low to make him suitable, and Duffey took him high to bowl him over. Then Duffey cleared the fence with a leap as high as his own head, and he had all three of the boys behind him. They'd not catch him now if he could outrun his own blood loss. What blood loss? Duffey was startled to find how badly he was bleeding.
That slant-faced boy had knifed Duffey deeply, and he knew how to use a knife. He'd have killed Duffey if the kit-fox hadn't slashed him as sharply as to make him stumble and to give Duffey the edge to bowl him over.
Duffey very nearly bled to death from that one, but his fortune held. He was staunched and saved, and in ten days he was well. It had been a providential kit-fox that Duffey had seen, of course. No other kind is ever seen.
4
But childhoods, even gold or sorrel-colored childhoods, are quickly lived through. (This doesn't apply to the basic childhood which goes on for thousands of years.) There are simply not very many years to a regular childhood. When he was twelve years old, Melchiscdech Duffey was sent away to the first of his boarding schools. So, by his own count at least, his young manhood had begun. Other things being equal, it is only the difficult child-people who are sent away to boarding schools for their early high school years. And when the difficult child-people go, there is always an odd sound behind them, the sound of hands being washed. The hands are being washed, by parents, by guardians, by kindred, by (in a special case here) well-meaning pretended kindred.
The more difficult children, of course, are those who are sent away even before they reach the high school years, so Melchisedech had not been one of the outrageously difficult ones. He had never given people trouble. He had only given them unease, as being something out of the cuckoo's nest and not out of their own.
More Than Melchisedech Page 2
