“You can check on this,” Papa said. “I'm not lying. There was such a person. He's in the St. Louis phone book for 1939: Oscar Oliver Omygosh. Go down to the main telephone office tomorrow and look in a 1939 directory. You will find that Omygosh is listed.”
“I remember him,” said Bagby. “He ran a little novelty shop just — why, it was just two doors from your own Star and Garter, Papa. It was a novelty business with the unusual name ‘The O-O-O What Fun Novelty Store’. Old triple O had glandular conditions and dizzy spells. He suffered a lot of pain and melancholy. He stumbled and fell down a lot, and he cried a lot. Papa Piccone, you are a fraud. He was true. But you didn't make him.”
“No, no, nessuno! My whole story was true,” Piccone assured the group. “If I hadn't made him for the burlesque set, then he wouldn't have been. I made the man by accident. But I made him, so I know that persons can be made.”
“As to the release of the Devil,” Duffey said, “there is another sense in which he may be released. Casey does not believe that the Devil should be eternally damned. He believes that he should have his release from damnation after a time, and he is working for that sort of release. If fact, he had made an offer to God to trade souls with the Devil and suffer damnation in his place.”
“Casey has since lowered his sights and negotiated a lesser trade,” Absalom Stein said. “He has traded souls with me. Really, it was just an old soul of mine that I traded to him — the soul of Hugo Stone the Chicago red. And I believe that it was an old soul of his that he traded to me. He has kept his later and muddled soul.”
“Is Casey a red now?” Bagby asked.
“He is a red,” Stein said. “And now I am white — white as a Gary snow after the furnaces have coughed on it for a few days.”
“The enemy, in this century, was wearing a red stocking cap on one of his seven heads,” Bagby said. “The heads of that old enemy change names; but the names of the seven present heads are Dialectic Materialism, Artistic Degradation, Judas Priestism, Secular Liberalism, Panaceic Pentecostalism, Murderous Molochism, Atheistic Communism.”
“Do you believe that Bill O'Shivaree will hang, Stranahan?” Father McGuigan asked to try to divert the conversation. He was a progressive priest and he was angry at this pointing out of so many of the things that he supported. And Bagby could whip him in this combat.
“I'm defending O'Shivaree, am I not?” Patrick Stranahan asked pompously.
“I know you're defending him. I asked whether he would hang.”
“No. Not unless I lose the case,” Patrick said.
“And just what context are your Animated Marvels to be considered in, Duffey?” Stranahan asked a moment later to get Duffey out of a brooding spell he had fallen into.
“Oh, they are mostly in the context of the Argo Legend,” Duffey said. “And, of course, that was intersected by the Finnegan Cycle. Finnegan is the original Finn McCool.”
“And to just what species do these Marvels belong?” Patrick asked. “Since you are the father of one of them, and Piccone here was the father of another, I might be tempted to say ‘The Human Species’. But that is too narrow. They all have something of the Teras species in them too.”
“I have heard that hinted of, but just what is it?”
“Oh, Gargoyles, Neanderthals, Boogers, Vagaries, Variants. We all have some of that variant blood. I put more than ordinary amounts into my creations.”
But Duffey was still brooding.
“All right, I will prove it!” he cried suddenly, banging his hands together and going back to an earlier subject. He rubbed his hands, then they sparked blue and gold sparks.
“I can produce anything on the table here. Who wants me to produce a live baby dinosaur right now? I'll pour it out right here on the library table, and it'll be alive.”
“There is great danger to you at your age, Duffey,” Father McGuigan said. “Irishmen in particular are in danger of letting their genie be imprisoned in a bottle when they come to about your age, and the imprisonment can well go on forever. You know what kind of bottle I'm talking about. You had better forego it.”
“What? Forego my last lonesome vice?” Duffey asked. “Who will challenge me to produce a live baby dinosaur right here and now on this table?”
And, for some reason, none of the men challenged him. Duffey seemed a bit relieved that they didn't. He wasn't absolutely certain that he could have done that thing, but he could do kindred things.
“A baby pterodactyl then?” he asked. “Or an emu, or a dodo bird? What? Do none of you want to see wonders? A baby llama, a porcupine? a new-hatched duck with pieces of the shell still on it? Dammit, how about a living mouse?”
“A mouse is always nice,” Papa Piccone said with a touch of compassion, whether for Melchisedech or for the mouse none could say.
Duffey sighed. And he poured out his hands.
It was a young, live mouse that he poured out on the table, and they all laughed a bit. Duffey, crocked or uncrocked, had always been pretty good at these little pieces of magic.
“You call that a dinosaur?” Patrick Stranahan asked with typical lawyer's illogic.
“No, I call it a mouse,” Duffey said. “But if any of you had challenged me to do it, then it would have been a dinosaur.”
“You could have had the mouse already in your pocket,” Stranahan said.
“So? But I did not reach to my pocket. I could have had a baby dinosaur already in my pocket; or a baby horse. I have big pockets.”
So the men talked that evening, several evenings really, on weighty subjects.
3
Here was an explanation of some of the happenings and some of the people who took places in St. Louis in that last week of May in the year 1946. Vincent Stranahan, the son of Patrick and Monica, and a talisman child, was marrying Teresa Piccone that Saturday. She was a talisman child also. Vincent didn't know anything about the talisman business. Teresa likely knew all about it.
Vincent had been in the army in the same battery with John Schultz (who was Hans), with Kasmir Szymansky (who was Casey), with Henri Salvatore who was a Fat Frenchman from the Cajun swamps, and with John Solli who was Finnegan. Duffey had wondered by what means his various talismanic creations would meet each other. The U.S. Army was the answer. And the new question was ‘Would there have been a U.S. Army if it hadn't been required to bring Duffey's creations together?’
The five boys had been good friends in the army, and had been known as the Dirty Five. All of them, out of the army less than three months and not very heavily settled into anything yet, were in town for the wedding. And Teresa the bride had an Italian nose on her that had to be into everybody's business. She found out about the girlfriends or spouses of all of them and contacted them to invite them to the wedding also. And they came, that the scripture might be fulfilled.
Teresa already knew Marie Monaghan the wife of Hans. Hans and Marie were already living in St. Louis, so of course, they would come. Mary Catherine Carruthers, Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Dotty Yekouris were also procured. These were all people of the Argo Legend also. It was the first and only time that they would all be together this side of the legend.
Absalom Stein also knew everything and everybody. He had known all five of the boys in the same army battery where he had been a sort of special-services person. He hadn't been of the inner intimacy. It wasn't sure whether he had been one of the Argo crewmen. He went under different names sometimes. He didn't tell anyone why he had come from Chicago to St. Louis. The truth was that Henri Salvatore had written to this Absalom, as he had also written to Melchisedech Duffey, to tell him to come to St. Louis to receive the assignment for the rest of his life.
So it was only by a coincidence of incredibly long arms that eleven of the twelve persons whom Melchisedech Duffey had created would be together in St. Louis, Missouri that last week of May.
“Whomever the joke is on,” Duffey said out loud in a seafood place, “it isn't on me. I will have
the bunch of them today, even my central creation.”
“The joke, Duffey, is that your central creation is a hollow one,” the big-nosed kid said, “and the joke is on me. That's the irony of all the cryptic stuff. I have some good scrimshaw here, and some good paintings. And oysters.”
“Don't say that,” Duffey growled. “If my central creation were a hollow one, that would reflect on me.”
“And on me,” the big-nosed kid said. “Oh how it does reflect on me!” They were in the Broadway Oyster House, and the big-nosed kid had ordered one hundred oysters. What epic hero was it who ate one hundred huge oysters? That's right, one hundred oysters. And the one hundred oysters had been served to him on quite a large platter. Oysterman Charleroi who commanded the Oyster House didn't even blink at orders like that, but maybe he blinked inside. The big-nosed kid had motioned to Duffey to join him at eating the hundred oysters, and he had called Duffey by name. So the Duff had joined him. And the kid sent oysters from his platter, a dozen here, a dozen yonder, to other diners. But some of the diners refused the oysters in surly fashion.
“They are the ones who will go to Hell, Duffey,” the big-nosed kid said. “This was the test, and they fail it. Mark their names out of the Book of Life.”
“All right. I've marked them out,” Duffey said.
And some of the diners accepted the oysters and waved appreciation. “Those have a chance, they have a chance,” the kid said. “It isn't sure yet. There may be other tests for them. But they are, for the moment at least, on the road to salvation.”
These were good and well-done oysters, with plenty of butter and sand. This kid was very lean. He pulled thick bulky packages out of hidden pockets and remained neither more nor less lean. “Just have a look at these Duffey. You may as well take possession of them. You can remit to me somewhere if you ever sell any of them. I have heard that, of all undiscerning art dealers, you are the most undiscerning. My kind of dealer.”
“My God!” Duffey cried as he unrolled a big 4x8 foot picture (how could the kid have had so long a roll in one of his pockets anyhow?) “This is an original Van Ghi.”
“Oh, I'm Van Ghi,” the kid said, “but I don't know whether I'll paint under that name again. I'm getting about good enough to use my own name.”
“My God, this is worth thousands,” Duffey said.
“Yeah, it's pretty good,” the kid agreed. “But these scrimshaw pieces are at least as good and you won't be able to get more than three or four dollars for each of them. The only ones you can sell them to are sea men. But the sea men collectors will recognize them as carvings of Count Finnegan. My immediate aim and aspiration was to go to St. Kitts or Basse Terre and be a beach bum. The lack of money was all that prevents. It takes a fortune of at least half a million dollars.”
“When I was last a beach bum, back in the seven hidden years of my life, it didn't take hardly any money at all,” Duffey said, handling the scrimshaw carvings with excited hands.
“A good beach bum has to have the air of big money about him,” the kid insisted. “Of money impounded, or of money reserved, of money abrogated or refused perhaps, but of money that has left its aroma and green stain on him. Unless people will whisper of a beach bum, ‘He has millions whenever he wants them’, or ‘He poured out millions as if they were water’, unless people spin such legends about him, then he isn't the highest sort of bum. There is no way it can be faked. Nobody ever attained the status of top bum without deserving it.”
Duffey was shaking so hard that he could hardly eat his oysters. For the paintings, yes (there were a dozen truly magnificent), and for the carvings, yes, but mostly for the person here. Did not Fingal the Hero, and in another version it was Finn McCool, once eat one hundred oysters and each of them bigger than a wagon wheel? Was this kid, no bigger than Duffey in appearance, an incognito hero or giant? Who was it who had lived all those lives underground? Which high hero had been the son of a Teras? But Duffey's shaking soon turned into delighted laughter.
Why should he be overpowered by one of his own creations? This kid was seven famous underground artistic geniuses in one, but he wouldn't have been any of them if it hadn't been for Duffey. Why should he be overwhelmed by the son of a Teras when he had been a close personal friend of that very Teras, the Monster Giulio? Why should”¦ ?
The big-nosed kid was John Solli (Finnegan), the son of the Monster Giulio, of course, the central creation of Duffey himself.
“My father Giulio once said that he found only seven or eight friends in this world, and all of them were somehow related to you,” Finnegan said. “He didn't really love a city; he loved the swamps. He took me down to the Cajun swamps several times, and he made ‘calls’ for me that I would call with when we drifted along in a flat boat with ‘ceiling three feet’ over us, of swamp fronds. Other fathers made duck calls for their sons, or coon calls, or swamp deer calls.
“My father Giulio made panther calls and alligator calls, and devil-fish calls, and swamp-boa calls, and hairy man calls, and white shark calls. I never knew what I'd call up from the water or down from the vined trees when I put one of those calls to my mouth. He whittled them out of the wood of the tupelo-gum tree. There was no wood like it.”
“What will you do now, Finnegan?”
“I'll break my hands and my head for a little while on the customed things. Then I'll throw it ill over and wander. Wander and paint, and paint and wander.
“I wandered for seven years once,” Duffey said. “And now I can go back, almost at will, and wander still more in those same years.”
“And I will wander for seven years,” Finnegan said. “Then they will bury me on the Marianao Coast of Cuba. Whether they can keep me buried I don't know. Someday there will come to your hands a great painting ‘The Resurrection of Count Finnegan’. The story in this painting will indicate that they are not able to keep me buried.
“I will go back to New Orleans. So will you go there, by the way. But I will stay there only a few months or weeks. Then I will wander. I haven't any scenario to follow. Neither God nor Henri Salvatore had provided me with one. For impediments I am given my own thorn in the flesh and my own monsterness. But there are certain documents that I can carry in my mind. These, and the things that I paint wherever I find a good painting surface in the world, are the closest things to a guide or scenario I have.”
Finnegan shook hands with Duffey in that peculiar six-fingered grip that a Teras will use with a friend who was not a Teras. They joined in dark and lean laughter, and they sat together for a while longer. Duffey looked closely at this one of the creatures he had made. Whether it was good or bad, he liked it.
4
It is necessary to introduce a number of original documents here. They are all essential to this account. Some of them were beloved by Finnegan, some of them by Duffey, some of them by everybody we know.
‘Be calm and vigilant, because your enemy the devil is prowling like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Stand up to him…’
[Dotty O’Toole. Sonnet.]
‘I want you to be happy, always happy in the Lord: I repeat, what I want is your happiness. Let your tolerance be evident to everyone: the Lord is very near. There is no need to worry; but if there is anything you need, pray for it, asking God for it with prayer and thanksgiving, and that peace of God, which is so much greater than we understand, will guard our hearts and thoughts, in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, fill your minds with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, everything that we love and honor, and everything that can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise. Keep doing all the things that you learned from me and have been taught by me and have heard or seen that I do. Then the God of peace will be with you.’
[Paul. Philippians 4:4-9]
‘…for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, against the shapers of darkness in this world and against the spiritual army of evil in high stations.’
[Paul. Ephesians 6:12-13]
‘It is they who are the spiritual army of evil in high stations, the sneering and deforming devils of the word-mills. And the high stations that they occupy are sometimes stations inside the Church itself.’
[Miles O’Connel. Handbook of Treasons.]
”˜We find in it the ground for the most cheering hope of the future; provided that the associations we have described continue to grow and spread, and are well and wisely administered. Let the State watch over these societies of citizens united together in the exercise of their right; but let it not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns and their organizations, for things move and live by the soul within them, and they may be killed by the grasp of a hand from without…
‘Prejudice, it was true, was mighty, and so was the love of money; but if the sense of what is just and right be not destroyed by depravity of heart, their fellow citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly feeling towards men whom they see to be so industrious and so modest, who so unmistakably prefer honesty to lucre, and the sacredness of duty to all other considerations.’
[Leo XIII. The Condition of Labor.]
‘I have said that the prime product of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul. That truth contains, in its development, very much more than its mere statement might promise.
‘The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the sane balance produced by common experience, a public certainty, and the general will. The isolation of the soul was the very definition of its unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than merely complete and confirm human misery.
More Than Melchisedech Page 21
