More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  And there was Dotty Yekouris, a beautiful bonus forever. Where Dotty was, there did the eagles gather. Dotty had suitors, and they were swift, high-flying, and fast-swooping suitors. Dotty would love no one but Finnegan in her life, but he was almost always gone, and she very much liked all the fine fellows. She had her pick, and they were the best. They made the bright place even brighter.

  Well, some of the suitors, the best and the brightest of them, were connected with those papers, other than The Bark, that Dotty and Duffey brought out on the Pelican Press. The Seaman's Paper came out on Monday, the Union Sheet on Tuesday, and the Sporting News on Wednesday, and the Jazz Magazine on Friday. There were usually two others, but they varied during the years. A print shop has to do a lot of printing to come out, particularly if it has to go in the hole for a paper like The Bark.

  There was Gabrielovitch who worked for all the sheets and even for The Bark. And he also worked for the Slavic language press, a thing that was going to get him killed. There was a succession of suitors connected with the Jazz Magazine, and Dotty named them successively Benny B. Flat. So if you find Benny B. Flat described as one sort of person one time and as another sort of person at another time, it is because they are not the same people. All of them were nice and swinging young men, though all of them were a trifle deaf. Jazz people really don't know that they play as loud as they do.

  There was Bello Belonki of the Sporting News. He was the Prince of the Cauliflowers. There were half a dozen of the fellows who were involved in the Union Sheet, whole committees of them. Nobody had ever seen one of them alone. Take them out of committee and they will die the death.

  And there were the seamen. They brought news of the world, almost the only accurate news of the world; and many incredible bits that they brought turned out to be true. Terry Cork, one of the forty scribbling seamen, did a column ‘The Plimsoll Line’ for The Bark. And he did about half of the Seaman's Paper when he was around town for a few months. Then another Terry (Terry Anderson, Terry Jamil, Terry Renier, Terry Bannon) would take over the task. All of the ‘Forty Scribbling Seamen’ (that was the name of a song that Dotty had composed) were named Terry.

  All of these persons loved Dotty, and many of them wanted to marry her. Dotty herself was a journalist of immense talent. Stein was a professional in the field, but he bowed to her superiority. Duffey was a reckless amateur in the field, and he admitted that she was the best journalist he had ever made. The Bark under Dotty's editorship could whip those rival sheets put out by the Devil and his cohorts because it was livelier, was more intelligent, was better printed, had better writers, had finer and more far-ranging features, offered more intricate and more interesting battle, and was right where the rivals were wrong.

  And Dotty herself was (“Dotty, go to your advertising writers and borrow adjectives from them.” “No, no, they need all of theirs. We will have to borrow them some place else.” ) (Ah, here's some adjectives for the thing)  —  Dotty was  —

  Graceful, ever-blooming, magic, dazzling, attractive, miracle-new, floriferous, gorgeous, velvety, popular, fragrant, glossy, handsome, exquisite, luscious, thrilling, superb, exotic, bell-like, sweet, tropical, juicy, showy, unsurpassed, delicious, enchanting, flashy, stunning, succulent, hardy and disease-resistant.

  Certainly those adjectives are out of a Nursery Plant catalog. Where do you get better adjectives? But even they will not adequately describe Dotty. Nor are the poets able to do it, though Finnegan rimed her once as —

  “More beautiful than birds that fly,

  More deeper than a doe-ses eyes.”

  And the scribbling seaman Terry Cork did her with:

  “Was this the face that launched a dozen tugs,

  Nine tramps, a brig, a coracle, The Bark?

  Was this the form that drove all Frenchtown bugs

  And blew the lights and left the Quarter dark?”

  And Dotty, like Finnegan, was a native of New Orleans so she didn't have to learn the New Orleans trade or talk. In the words of Absalom Stein she was “The most gracious French lady in New Orleans, and she turns out to be a Lithuanian.”

  Mary Virginia Schaeffer was a bonus beyond price. Many of the fellows who said they wanted to marry Dotty really wanted to marry Mary Virginia. Even in the ‘sweet blackberry ads’ of the Nursery Plant catalogs there were not the right adjectives to describe her. Dotty called her the Saccharine Kid, partly in affection and partly in jealousy. Mary V. had been the affianced lady of Henri Salvatore and the Emperor Henry always had the best of everything in the world. He had given her up only for God, and he said that he wasn't sure that God was good enough for her. Well, she was an ornament and a joy. She was a very valuable working ornament.

  Salvation Sally was a bonus too. Just barely though, as it seemed sometimes. Even her guitar had a Australian accent. There were a lot of poor sinners who saw the light just to stop her from playing that damned thing. “Sure I'll be saved, yes, right now. Just stop that twanging racket.” Well, what does it matter what brings them to the light?

  Actually, the Seven Pillars of Righteousness, the true bonifacients, were Henri Salvatore, Melchisedech Duffey, Absalom Stein, Dotty Yekouris, Hans Schultz, Draja Gabrielovitch, and John Solli (Finnegan). These were the trustees of The Bark and the members of the board of directors. There would be some replacements as these died or were killed, but they were the founding originals. But Hans had gone into the construction business in St. Louis. Finnegan was almost always on the other side of the world somewhere. Henry the Merry Monk was in the seminary for some years, and then he was assigned to a church so deep in the swamps that he numbered the musk rats among his parishioners.

  Well Dotty and Duffey and Stein, and Mary Virginia Schaeffer (who was not a designated pillar of Righteousness) ran The Bark. And The Bark was quite cardinal to the power struggle going on in the world.

  But the members and associates in willing exile sometimes came on pilgrimage. Some of these were from Chicago and St. Louis, but others from all parts of the world. Most of the visitors, of course, had been to New Orleans before. But showing the City to close friends is a pleasant ritual that must not be abridged because of any previous acquaintance with it. And it wasn't a thing to be hurried through in just a few days. It should take weeks and weeks. In one case, it took more than twenty years.

  “These ten blocks square of the old town,” said Lily Koch who had come down with Sebastian Hilton and the Countess Margaret, “I believe that I could sell it all in one lot. Other art dealers have handled larger and more mixed lots. It would all be trash if split up, but together the hundred square blocks have an arty sort of coherence. It is poor-boy Esplanade Spanish mixed with poor-boy Place de Grace French. It's not really antique, but it would make a good period set. I will finger a buyer and see what can be done with it.”

  “Oh, I guess that I could buy it,” the Countess Margaret said. “It would be more to throw you a commission than anything. It would have to be moved to Transylvania, but I don't see any real difficulty there. There are about thirty shabby properties to each square block, and they shouldn't be worth more than about thirty thousand dollars each. Say a million dollars a square, and a hundred squares of it. Yes, see if you can get it for me, Lily.”

  “You couldn't get it for twice that,” Duffey said.

  “And some of us simply wouldn't want to move out of the Quarter,” Dotty stated.

  “Move out of it? Who said anything about moving out of it?” Lily asked. “If the moving is done well, you'd hardly have any sense of motion. Oh, naturally I intended to buy it complete with people. It wouldn't be any good to us otherwise. It wouldn't even be a work of art without the people.”

  It was nice to have them all here. Sebastian and the Countess and Lily all knew about the talismanic children, Duffey's Animated Marvels, and they found them and others really marvelous. After all, the Countess was an Animation of someone. It was never quite clear of whom she was an animation, but there were q
uite a few sorcerers in that field.

  There was a lot of fun had and a lot of old songs sung while those three visitors were in town. They sang ‘The Gadarene Swine Song’. And Finnegan, who was in town that week, knew that the song had been inspired by his father.

  “This is the last time, Melchisedech,” Sebastian said as it came up to departure time, “that we meet in the unsanctified flesh. Next time, in the Kingdom!”

  “Oh him and his not-long-for-this-world-look,” The Countess jibed. “He has had that look and that talk for forty years that I know of. I'll not let him die till he marries me first. He owes me that much.”

  “Oh, you two had better hurry then,” Letitia said. “You have so very little time left. I'm not sure that we will get up to Chicago for it, having had you here now. Will it be next month?”

  “Yes, it will be next month,” Sebastian said. The Countess opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again.

  One month after they went back to Chicago, Sebastian and the Countess Margaret married.

  And one month after that, Sebastian died. Really, he was killed. Charlotte Garfield came to town. She came to attend “The Royal Rogues' And Graceful Swindlers’ Ninth Annual Convention and Confidence-Men's Congress” , which was held at the Royal Orleans Hotel and had about five hundred confidence people and thieves in attendance. It was supposed to be a fun thing, but there were seminars by experts for experts in recondite fields. Charlotte visited the Duffey Nation in cowgirls' boots and seven-and-a-half gallon hat, and not much between. And she still looked like a nine year old girl.

  Now wait a minute. Charlotte had said that she was thirty-eight years old when she had met Duffey on the train in 1925. So she was about thirteen years older than the century, and the century was now a little more than half gone. This was getting out of hand.

  “You had better repent, little girl,” Salvation Sally worried over her. “There is something the matter with you. I think you have been consorting with the Devil. And it isn't nice for little girls to smoke cigars. I will just — ”

  “Watch it, Sister Sal,” Charlotte cautioned in a very snappish voice. “The last lady who tried to take a cigar from this little girl is now called ‘Lefty’.”

  “Oh, Charlotte, you little monkey-faced monster!” Margaret Stone railed at her. “Your jokes are old and tired, and so are you. You've got your toes curled over the brink itself, and you're too dumb to know it. There is something somewhere that shows just how old you really are.”

  “Oh, my ‘Mendacious Midget Doll’, is that what you mean, Maggie? How did you know I had it? It works better than that picture of Dorian Gray of which Duffey has the original in his Walk-In Art Bijou and doesn't know what it is. Maggie, that doll looks two hundred years old now. And that's really about what I am. Oh, I lied to Duffey that first time I met him about how old I was. I was a lot older than that. I haven't actually consorted with the Devil though. I've turned him down again and again. He made an appearance at our Convention in Baltimore two years ago. He isn't really an expert on the details of the trade; he'll put money into almost any spiel just like the veriest Rube would. I never saw a fellow who could be taken so easy. But he does have a lot of ‘overthought’ as he calls it. He believes in fraud for the sake of fraud, and for the character formation that it brings about. And he suggests that we give up this pretense about going easy on widows and orphans and those who can't afford to be fleeced. He says that what we really have in us is the lust to pillage those who are clear down and out of their last coin and credit. It is easier to grind the faces in the mud, he says, if they are already brought pretty low. And he's right. It makes me uneasy to have somebody like that in the ‘Royal Rogues and Graceful Swindlers’. He isn't graceful, but he is royal. Ah, Maggy, yes, I do know that my toes are curled over. Do you think I'll beat the rap in the end?”

  “No. No chance at all of that,” said Margaret Stone who disliked being called Maggie by that damned runt. “It's like playing ‘Nine Dollar Dog’. You really win the game or lose it nine plays before the end. There isn't any way you can change it after you're into the last nine plays.”

  “That's not fair. There should be a two-minute warning called before the end.”

  “There isn't, Midge. But you chose the game, Baby Face.”

  “But I won't know when I'm into the nine last plays.”

  “No. You sure won't. But you chose the game.”

  Bagby and Mary Louise came down from St. Louis. At the moment they walked in, about eight o’clock in the morning, Duffey had just got his weekly letter from Bagby. “Wait a while, folks,” he said. “This is more important. It's the high point of my week.” Duffey got these letters early every Monday morning, before the postman came “whereat there is some small mystery” Duffey said out loud this day. But he disregarded his two cherished visitors and set about opening and reading the letter of one of them.

  “Melky, aren't you going to greet us?” Mary Louise sulked in a strong voice. “My brother and my passion, we are here ourselves.”

  “I'm not sure that you are,” Duffey mumbled as he began to read. “This is equally yourselves that I hold in my hand, and it's in a more efficient form. Why should I see you when I can read about you from you? I always preferred books to the movies made out of them. And I've come to distrust Animations, even my own. Make yourself at home, good people, and I will be with that version of you as soon as I finish with this one.”

  Letitia was there then, and she embraced the Bagbys with her hot sincerity. And the whole bunch of dazzlers was soon there, Transcendent Dotty and Sugar Cane Schaeffer and Glorious Stein and Midnight Margaret and Salvation Sally with her aggressive bony face and her pewter heart.

  But Duffey (“He always looks like a bear who's just learning to read whenever he has something to pore over,” Letitia said of him) was still busy with the Bagby letter when they were all starting out for Breakfast at Brennan's.

  “One should always leave good reading for good company,” Salvation Sally quoted. “The Lord of Chesterfield said that.” Bagby kissed Sally in delight. He already knew her a little. Marie Monaghan had known Sally in Australia and had sent her fare to come to America. Then she had shipped her to New Orleans as a unique contribution to the enterprise.

  “Come along, Duff, right now,” Letitia insisted. “Stop running into things. We're going to breakfast.”

  “Yes, yes, Oh Bloody Heart, we will do that thing right now,” Duffey said. But he banged only one hand together, and he continued with the letter in his other hand while they walked to Brennan's. (It was only two blocks. In the Quarter, if you belong to the Blessed, everything is always only two blocks.)

  “Duffey simply cannot begin a week without reading your letter, Bascom,” Letitia said. “You are the most faithful correspondent in the world.”

  “Bagby is?” Mary Louise asked bewildered. “He never writes a letter. This whole thing is as fishy as the Gascinade River.”

  “These are letters of another context, Mary Louise,” Bagby said, “and they are outside of the daily time. Should I not have a time stasis as well as Duffey? No, of course I never write letters, Mary Louise. This is a separate thing.”

  So they passed it off for then, but could it be passed off forever? Really there was something of an exterior state about those letters from Bagby. It was as if they were written by Bagby's unconscious to Duffey's unconscious. And they didn't come by any regular delivery. They simply appeared on Duffey's table every Monday morning.

  (“What does he say this time?” Margaret Stone later reported that Bagby had asked Duffey in a very low voice. Nobody else heard this, but Margaret Stone had the sharpest ears of anyone around there, regular lynx-ears. Possibly she misunderstood the words. If she did, it was the first time that she ever misunderstood anything. But she had to have misunderstood, or this would open up a whole new area of mystification.)

  The stamps on the letters were curious also. They looked very much like United
States Stamps unless one looked at them from a very close range, five inches or less. But then one had to remember that Bagby was engraver and spoofer for two of his trades, for those were ‘otherwhere’ stamps, the rarest aberrations that collectors ever come upon. But they were good enough to fool the U.S. Post Office Department, for all of them were post-marked correctly. No, they weren't either. For this, one must look at them even closer, from a distance of three inches or less. It wouldn't be fair to say that they were post-marked wrongly, but they were marked with ‘otherwhere’ post-marks that were very like a valid St. Louis post-mark.

  Maybe Duffey should have taken them to a stamp and post-mark expert. But he did. Duffey was a stamp and post-mark expert. He was a dealer in such things. Maybe he should have asked Bagby what it was all about. Well, he did, in a way. And Bagby answered in a way. Duffey may have been satisfied. Others of the curious people would always remain curious.

  There was one blessed thing about New Orleans on the River. It was not a slave to the small hours of the night. A party could go directly from Breakfast at Brennan's to a barrel house or a night club and find something going on. Why should the hours after the sun has come up be slighted?

  “But there will not be anything here like the Rounders' Club in St. Louis,” Mary Louise bragged, just as if the New Orleans-proud Duffey hadn't invented the Rounders' Club in St. Louis.

  “Not quite like,” Duffey said, “but on the same high order. Let's go to ‘Good Guy's’.”

  They went to ‘Good Guy's’, and a band was playing Monumental Jazz. It was playing it loudly and solidly and with a good foundation.

  “How would Lord Chesterfield decide between good jazz and good conversation, Sally?” Bagby asked Salvation Sally. “How would Solomon decide?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “I don't think they had very good jazz then.”