“Not all of them,” Duffey said, “not at first, but all of them are now.”
Among the things that Duffey had to show for the seven dark years or lost years of his life were Seven Christs. He had found them in strange places of the world and dispatched them to himself back in the more ordinary world. And now they had all arrived from the various places. Now they had all been assembled together like seven thunders; some of them joyful, some of them agonizing.
There was the Danish-bread Christ. Yes, it had been baked out of wheat and rye flour mixed. It had been made into a dough, formed into a Christ-head, baked, and then varnished. It was the case of someone making a better loaf than he knew. In some parts of Denmark such Christ-heads were baked for Corpus Christi Day. But how had this one happened to be such an astonishing work of art, and how had it been recognized and saved?
There was a tavern sign Christ from Hungary of the time of Béla Kun. Hungary had been communist then briefly for the first time, and Christ things were hated. But there was no hatred in this picture, only total hartiness. The Christ was drinking off a huge mug of beer, and the mug was ornamented with spinning worlds. It was a powerful and pleasant face, and it was unmistakably Christ.
There was a Christ figurehead from an old Goanese ship that had used to sail on the Indian Ocean. There was no other figurehead art that could stand beside it.
There was a cigar store Christ from the island of St. Kitts. Yes, that's right. It was like a cigar store Indian of the United States of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the fingers of the right hand formed into a cone or cup to hold cigars. Some negro artist of the island had done it in imitation of that convention. It was Indian-colored. But it was bare-headed, and it had Christ's face. The artist had known that face without knowing what person it belonged to.
There was a staghorn Christ from Mesa Negra that was done in hard stone nine thousand years before Christ was born. It was of a man impaled on the antlers of a giant stag. The posture was that of a crucified man, and that man was Christ.
There was a negroid Christ from Bahr El Ghazal in the Sudan. It was of a tall person with a cattle herder's crooked rod in his hand, and it was Christ without any doubt. It was a freestanding, life-sized statue in tufa stone, and it couldn't have represented anyone else.
There was a turbaned and laughing Christ from Turkish Anatolia. It was done in monumental marble, reused from some earlier thing. It was fresh painted not fifty years before, but it had been carved a thousand years before. There was something so intricate about that laughing figure that it could be studied and laughed with for a lifetime. It was a thunder piece. All seven of them were.
All were representations of the same person, there was no doubt at all about that. And all seven of them were once-in-a-lifetime discoveries. Together they were stunning, and there was no way that a price could be put on any of them.
The Christ of August Koch was set with the others. It was the once-in-a-lifetime discovery of August. It had cost much more than any of the others. And possibly it had less thunder in it. But it was outstanding. Let it be there with the others for a few years. Then we will judge it. Nobody can judge such a thing immediately.
August Koch had a yacht on Lake Michigan. It was named The Argo.
“What a coincidence!” Duffey howled when he heard the name. Then he was puzzled at himself. What was Koch's yacht's name coincident with?
There was a small bridge or viaduct on the near-north side. It didn't look a lot like the bridge that August Koch had said was an allegory to Duffey. It ran above streetcar tracks or perhaps train tracks, and it also ran above a trafficway that carried heavy trucks. It was wide, to carry the traffic of a busy street; but it was not much longer than it was wide. The little bridge even had a name. It was the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle. Someone knocked out a minor support of it only a week after Duffey began to notice it and to tie himself in with it. A heavy truck going at high speed had hit it during the night. This support was not repaired or replaced. An engineer told Duffey that it was merely ornamental, that it hadn't been a weight-carrying support. They disguised its appearance with a little bit of stone gimcrackery. And yet that support had carried weight, with Duffey anyhow.
It was five years before the next underpinning was knocked out of that bridge.
6
Giulio the Monster came to Chicago. Duffey had known Giulio for the first time on the night of Duffey's going into business in St. Louis. He had seen him several times since, at intervals of a year or several years. But how did Giulio find them in Chicago? Giulio was not particularly literate and might not have been able to follow the most simple directions. He did not know Duffey's name: he paid very little attention to names. But he and Duffey were weirdly in accord, and Duffey had once given him a talisman.
First off, Duffey heard a roaring on the stairway.
“Oh my God!” he cried out. “I'd know that roaring anywhere!”
It was late, about three in the morning. Duffey and Letitia had been in bed, but she was not in bed now. Where was she? And what would she make of the monster? The Monster Giulio would take some explaining, even to a person as good as Letitia was.
Duffey rose to prevent what clash there might be, though he recognized Giulio's roaring as more joyful than agonized. It was a greeting really. He also heard the yelping of a mean and demented dog receding outside. And Letitia's glad voice was heard on the stairs also:
“Giulio, is it really you? Oh, you are welcome! I've wanted so much to see you all the time. I knew you would be in town sometime and I couldn't think of any way of letting you know where we were.”
Duffey, coming to the head of the stairs, saw Letitia throw her arms wide in that gesture that all the Koch ladies have, and then hug the Monster Giulio heartily and give him the biggest kiss in town. Why had Duffey worried? How could there possibly be a clash between Letitia and any good person anywhere? “Giulio, how did you get in?” Duffey called from above them.
“By the door. Only when I'm in a savage mood do I come through the walls.”
“But I'd locked the door carefully. There have been three burglaries of shops in this block this week, and I made sure I locked the door.”
“Nah, man, nah, the door was not locked. Doors are not locked to Giulio when he comes to see you. It would bring on all my sickness if I found the door locked.”
“Your dog, Giulio, bring your dog in,” Letitia said. “We want to meet him too, and we will feed him. And we will feed you.”
“Nah, woman, nah,” Giulio said. “I haven't any dog. What you heard howling and growling was a devil that afflicts me. He knows that he cannot come into a house where good people live. But he growls and grumbles about it.”
“Oh, Giulio, you haven't any devil,” Letitia told him. They were in the kitchen now and she set out everything: coffee, whisky, cheese, bread, sausage, beef, beer and wine and pie. “Why, you couldn't afford a devil, Giulio.”
“Nah, this is a poor guy's devil,” he said, “and I haven't even got clear title to him. I'm a Gadarene Swine, as Duffey's brother used to say. It's a devil who comes to live with me when he no other place to stay. He eats my soul up, and now there are only crumbs left to me. Whenever I do throw him out, he comes back with those seven devils worse than himself. Oh, there is howling then.”
“I have heard it,” Duffey said. Ah, it was good to have the big fellow come and visit them, however he had found them. Duffey was whistling a tune that Bagby used to whistle every time Giulio showed up in their neighborhood in St. Louis. Bagby, as a fact, had used to call it the Gadarene Swine Song. The tune of it was cruel and comical at the same and funny. Oh yes, there was a devil associated with big Guilio.
Giulio stiyed with the Duffeys a week that first time he came to them in Chicago. All the friends accepted him and all of them knew what he was. Mona Greatheart did him again and again in clay. Groben did Doré-like engravings of him. Elena O'Higgins came to talk to him. She said that she woul
d do a feature story on him in the Chicago Herald and Examiner.
Sebastian and his countess came to see Giulio, and they gave him their respect. They made it seem that, if he were a monster, he was a royal monster at least. There must have been at least one of his kindred in the cellar of every castle in Transylvania, the Countess said. There was one, anyhow, in the castle in which she was raised. But the Countess said that Giulio was not a Troll, that he was a Teras.
“Yes, I am a Teras,” Giulio confirmed it.
Sebastian and the Countess Margaret and Letitia and Melchisedech sang the ballad ‘Hi, Ho! The Gadarene Swine!’ that was based partly on Bagby's old tune and partly on a Transylvanian stringed melody that the Countess remembered. They sang it in four voices and Giulio, who could not sing, howled a basso accompanamento to it.
“Oh Giulio is a Teras weird.
Hi, Ho!
He raises possums in his beard. Hi, Ho!
He works the rivers and the brine.
The way he gobbles joints of kine
I'd never have him in to dine
Except he is a friend of mine
Hi, Ho! The Gadarene Swine!”
“Have you wife or children yet?” Letitia asked him.
“We don't even know your full name, do we?” the Countess Margaret said.
“Giulio Solli is my full name,” the Monster said. “Yah, I have a wife and two sons and a daughter. And I gave the talisman, Duffey, the talisman that you gave me to give. I held it to my wife's belly at the proper times. And I put it in the son's hands at the moment of his birth, and he would not let go of it for a month.”
“Which son, Giulio?” Melchisedech asked him.
“The dago son, of course. You wouldn't give a thing like that to an Irish son, would you? Ah, it's a dark and lonesome road he'll have to travel, he has so much of me in him. And who will hold a lantern for him on that road?”
“I will, Teras,” the Countess Margaret said.
“I will, Giulio,” Sebastian Hilton said.
They sang another stanza with chorus of the Gadarene Swine Song then, and Giulio himself roared out the invention of the tenth line of it.
“The Teras had a mane and crine.
Hi, Ho!
His back is like a porcupine. Hi, Ho
His eyes have got the runny blears.
He has such awful hairy ears
They drive me all the way to tears.
Hi, Ho!
His brow it has a low incline.
His instrument's of knotty pine.
Hi, Ho! The Gadarene Swine!”
Then Sebastian and the Countess Margaret left the Duffeys and Giulio with an all-persons embrace.
Late one night, Giulio rose suddenly and burst out of the house. There was a defiant roaring outside in the street when he stood there. And then there was the cry of rending agony as Giulio's devil came back into him again. Then he was gone.
Book Four
Tales of Chicago
“The Lord has sworn and he will not repent: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech.”
Psalms 109:4
Chicago is a lot like purgatory. Well, that is better than many cities that are a lot like hell. There is usually blessed salvation at the end of the Chicago ordeal.
Duffey lost his facility for making money. It was the first of his major facilities that he lost, and he would miss it the least. The magic of making money is, after all, a boyish trick. It hardly becomes a grown man.
Duffey's virtue had become a little bit scrappy before this, but he had never lost it. Duffey had wakened one morning knowing that he had lost his extraordinary talent for making money. He would never get it back to the full. The riddle of the camel and the needle's eye was solved. Duffey had always wondered how he was going to get to Heaven. That he might not always be rich hadn't occurred to him.
On that early morning, he walked to the Pont du Sable Traffic Trestle. It was still an hour before sunrise. Lanterns were blinking around the tracks and the trafficway below the bridge. An underpinning had been knocked out by a heavy and berserk truck during the night. So the bridge was weakened. And the golden touch was gone.
Duffey's loss-of-the-gold-touch feeling had been preceded by a dream of worms getting into his gold and eating it out, leaving the coins and bars as no more than empty shells. There had not been in the dream, and there would not be in reality, any sharp sense of loss over the devoured gold.
In the world generally, the worms had been getting into the gold pretty badly. Duffey's dream of lost gold had been illuminated by an actual mass of gold in Duffey's place several years before this. His father-in-law, August Koch, had asked if he might store a quantity of gold at Duffey's place. Duffey had reinforced the upstairs floors to take the weight of it. This had been at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the year 1929. August Koch had put something more than twenty tons of gold in Duffey's place, about twelve million dollars worth of it. Of course August Koch had other storage places. He sold pretty much everything he had and put it into gold. It would be immune to bank collapse and to the depredations of rust and moth. And, when he decided to spend it again, he would be able to buy a lot more with it. Twenty tons of gold will not take up nearly the space of twenty tons of wood or steel or even lead, but it made the Duffey quarters a little crowded for a while.
Of course Duffey and Letitia had known what was going to happen, and Sebastian and his brother and his countess, and Charlotte Garfield the mendacious midget, and Mary Regina Toast and Irene Temple and Vincent Finnerty had known. These people were all mentalists as far as money was concerned. The Duffeys made a good thing out of the tricky years, and they would still have a good thing. That was why it was not too serious for Melchisedech to lose the particular facility for making money. He already had plenty of money.
As to Duffey's virtue having become scruffy, he was still as scrupulously and even offensively honest as ever. His man's courage was still strong. His charity had holes in it, but he hadn't really lost too much ground there. He had really gained a little bit in charity and understanding from his natural state. He wasn't a boozer nor a vaunter to excess. He did not even belong to those most sinful of people, the bores. He would still do things for strangers that he would not even undertake to do for himself. He was a firm friend to all good men and a gallant partisan of all good women. And that may have been the trouble.
Duffey loved his wife Letitia and her sister Lily and her mother Elinore. He loved them seriously and he loved them clownishly, and he may even have loved them illicitly, even Letitia. He loved his sister in St. Louis, and his old girl Beth Keegan, and Olga Sanchez of the torchy shoulders who still worked at his Rounders' Club, and Evelyn London. He still loved a younger girl there, Gretchen Sisler, though she wrote him that she wasn't as young as all that now. And he got to St. Louis at least once a year, to take care of business with his St. Louis partner Charley Murray, but also to see the ladies.
He loved many ladies from the seven hidden years of his life also, but there was no way he could return to visit them.
He loved the Countess Margaret Hochfelsen and the mendacious midget Charlotte Garfield. And Mona Greatheart and Shirley Israel (“Duffey, how could you!” the words about Shirley rang out of the future and had to do with a photograph), and Josephine McSorley and Catherine Quick and Elena O'Higgins and Beverly Boyd and Mary Lightfoot and Jenny Reid.
He also loved several younger girls, especially from that bunch who used to come into his bookstore. They came in from the time they were eight or nine years old: Mary Frances Rattigan, Mary Catherine Carruthers, Mary Jean (what was her name anyhow before she married Sebastian's nephew Hilary Hilton?), Margaret Stone. Ethyl Ellenberger. It was all hearty fun with the little girls, of course (hell is made out of such hearty fun), and Duffey played the funny uncle with them. There was an old, black leather sofa in the bookstore, and Duffey would wrestle the little girls on it. Mary Frances and Ethyl were usually in the store togeth
er, and what Duffey did to one of them he did to the other. In their double number was safety. Really, it was all right with them, but maybe it wasn't all right when Mary Francis was there by herself.
And it probably wasn't all right with Mary Jean (she was a hot little vixen from her childhood) and with Mary Catherine Carruthers who was in love with Duffey. They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old.
He felt that he was watched with them, when he could not be. In particular he felt that he was watched by that fat-faced, four-eyed little boy Hugo Stone (Damn that kid anyhow!). “Duffey, baby, how are you?” Hugo would say from the time he was a nine year old freak. Hugo often carried a camera slung around his neck. What? Was there a threat in that? Maybe, but not an immediate threat. We leave the little girls for a while.
Was this Hugo Stone the same person who turned up later as Absalom Stein? Once it was settled without doubt that he was. But later a doubt returned.
“There wasn't any Hugo Stone,” Margaret Stone sad just the other day. “That was just a joke name.”
“There was a Hugo Stone,” Melchisedech Duffey insisted. “He used to come into my bookstore in Chicago from the time he was eight years old. I know him. And he was the same person as Absalom Stein who walked out of here only five minutes ago.”
“No, no, Duffey, he was hardly ever the same person,” Margaret said. “I don't believe that he was ever the same person at all. That branch of the family always used the name of Stein, though Absalom ran around quite a bit with one group of his Stone cousins. I will tell you what Stone boys there were. They were David, Hershel, Jacob, Samuel, Max, Nathan, Avram, Yosef, Stuart, Isaac, Myron, Efram, Barnard, Sidney, Joel, Robert, Milton, another David, another Nathan, another Robert, twenty boys in four families of first cousins. They all lived within three blocks of your old bookstore. I was first cousin once removed from all of them. Absalom Stein who lived half a dozen miles north was a second cousin of them all. I'm sure he was never in your place.”
More Than Melchisedech Page 13
