More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “The kicking to death of an effigy is a legitimate procedure. And all members of the crypto-fascist establishment are effigies. Kicking one of them to death is no more than kicking a sack of potatoes to death. Yes, we do it in the press and on the air and by posters and slogans. No, we are not surprised when gangs of young people do it literally. Popular solidarity demands that we be furnished with such effigies to kick to death. And it demands that the effigies be in human form, however repellent to all progressive people they should be. They are not human, of course, in the charismatic sense that we are human. Yes, I believe that the literal act is the new dimension of it that we have been seeking. This is both bread and circuses to us and we will not be denied it.”

  “I long ago gave up the belief in the Historical Christ. I can see Christ in the dope addict, in the thief, in the hooker, in the pimp, in the poor man masturbating openly beside a public wall, in the cheat, in the rapist. These are my neighbors, and I see the a-Historical Christ in them. But I do not see him in the man next door. The man next door is always the stereotype of a fascist fink and is no neighbor of mine.”

  “My door is always open, always. Anyone can come to see me. I am the president of the Popular Revolutionary Priests' Senate, not to be confused with the Social Revolutionary Priests' Senate. By my position I am the highest ranking dignitary in the diocese.

  “But I am charitable to defeated opponents. If the bishop should come here he would be admitted. He'd be kicked out pretty quick, but he'd be admitted first. If the president of the nation should come he'd be admitted. He would immediately be placed under citizen's arrest, but he would be admitted first. If the Pope of Rome came to this door, he would be allowed to come in. Yeah, if he crawled, he would.”

  “Sister Mary Merhione, the topless nun, was interviewed today in the topless bar where she works. Sister spoke without bitterness of the phariseeism of those who have spoken against her mission. ‘I say that anyone who objects to it is prurient as hell,” she said in her gentle and forgiving voice. ‘I say, if they have them, they ought to show them too. This is the most rewarding place I've ever worked in. I can actually feel the human heart here sometimes. This is my dedication and my service. The reprint articles are fifty cents a copy. Buy a dozen and pass them out to your friends. It's a reprint of my article ‘Topless Before God’ from the ‘Paralplegic Church Today’.”

  The scraps in the scrapbook were really kind of funny. All of them were genuine, and most of them were dated, representing a naïve phase that was about finished, being replaced by a more frightening movement. But if they were funny, why then was Melchisedech Duffey crying and snuffling as he turned through them, fumbling and almost unseeing?

  Letitia Duffey had just died. They had taken her away not a quarter of an hour ago. The funeral parlor men had told Duffey not to come around down there for at least an hour. He couldn't be with her. He was lost. He handled distractedly this last thing that she had handled as she was stricken there, and it happened to be the old scrapbook.

  There had been a bitter moment right after her death.

  “I do not accept this,” Melchisedech had said heavily. “This must be explained immediately, immediately.”

  There was a large plant or bush called “The Elephant Ear” growing right outside the opened window there, and its huge leaves came in through that window. The bush flamed with light and heat. It burned. Duffey talked with the bush for a while and listened to it. Nobody else could understand the words either, of Melchisedech or of the bush. They respected it as a private agony and communication.

  “Fiat voluntas tuas,” Duffey said after a bit, grudgingly, and yet accepting the explanation. Then the flame went out of the bush and left only a permeating odor, something like holly.

  Somewhere in the building, Margaret Stone was singing in her whisper-toned voice, ‘Viena la sera’, ‘Evening is falling’, from one of the dumber operas. It was not evening: it was about eleven o’clock in the morning. Somewhere, in another room, Absalom Stein was blowing that big, elegant nose of his, but he blew it with sincerity and compassion and a muted orchestration of deep feelings. In the press room, Mary Virginia was saying the Glorious Mysteries of the rosary with neighbors and with people from the Seaman's Paper and the Jazz Sheet and the Sporting News. Zabotski came in.

  “I've got a good coffin,” he said. “I took it in for down payment on a lot once. Letitia would look good in it. Shall I take it around to the funeral house?”

  “It doesn't matter, Zabotski,” Duffey said, “Just so it doesn't cause trouble there or here or anywhere.”

  “It's never been used,” Zabotski said. “I'll just take it over there and tell them to use it. Letitia saw it at my place once and patted it. ‘Hey, that's class,’ she said. ‘It'd be fun to go in something like that.’ She liked class.”

  “Yes, she did,” Duffey said. “Let her go in it in class then, if you're willing.”

  Bagby's yesterday's letter had talked about it. “I am sure that you have made appointment to meet later,” he had written. “Such appointments have legal standing in the further context. They are honored.” Bagby had known about it, of course. They had all known about it for several years, that she would be going soon, and suddenly. But Melchisedech hadn't been disposed for it to be quite so sudden when it came.

  “You leave her eyes open,” Margaret Stone had told those men who came to take her. “She likes to have her eyes open. They always follow one, her eyes. Every person in a room always thinks that her eyes are following him.” So Letitia had gone with her eyes open and seeming to look at everybody with individual recognition.

  The doctor had something for Duffey to sign. So, apparently, had the priest. And also an insurance man who came there. There was a rough hour or so, and Duffey played on his flute to pass it.

  It was all right after he got to see her at the funeral home; and later in the afternoon they brought her back home for her wake. Lily came in on the afternoon plane from Chicago, though Duffey had forgotten to phone her. Mary Louise flew in from St. Louis, though she hadn't been notified either, unless Bagby had notified her.

  They had a good, old fashioned wake. Letitia's smiling eyes were open and sparkling and seemed to follow every person in the room with love and amusement. That had been a likeable quality about Letitia, her individual concern for each person.

  4

  “What you need is a long summer in Transylvania,” the Countess Margaret told Duffey three days after the burial of Letitia. “There are so many of the Dracula-slept-here castles in Transylvania, and I own several of them. We could have His and Hers castles on facing crags, and a pleasure pavilion in the valley between them. All this I will give you, Duffey, and it's only a slight and token falling-down act you'll have to show for them.”

  “Countess, the Greeks have a saying ‘Beware the Transylvanians bearing gifts.’”

  “I know they do, and they're right. But everything that's good in the Greeks is better in us. People have supposed that we're an eastern version of the Latin peoples, that we are analogues of the French and Italians and Spanish and Portuguese. Oh, I suppose that a Transylvanian wolf is the analogue to a Mexican Hairless Dog, but it isn't a close analogue. It's said that we're related to the Slavs and the Greeks and the Albanians and the Armenians, and even that we are a piece that fell off the moving Gothic Nation. No, we aren't those things really. We are people on a land-locked or mountain-locked island who escaped most of the permutations that other people suffered. We have remained what other people should be and aren't.”

  “Nah, Countess, nah,” Duffey said. “I read a book of Transylvanian Witch-and-Fairy Tales recently. You are toying with some of their themes.”

  “Come and see. I am some of those themes. Do you know why our estates are not to be found on the maps or the tax rolls? The Reds sent in Estate-Hunters to locate our estates and those of ten thousand other families. But the Estate-Hunters cannot find them, and the country is not that rough. It is a g
ently rolling country for a thousand leagues or more.”

  “Nah, Countess, nah. There are no such distances in Transylvania.”

  “Are there not? Come and see. And the Reds have sent out castle-hunters to locate the castles and get them on the tax rolls. But there are thirty thousand castles that they cannot find.”

  “Countess Margaret, you make it all up. There should be a tome, ‘Tales of the Skinny Countess’ to be set on the book shelves with that true and incredible tome, ‘Tales of Sebastian’. An expert has told me about the Sebastian Tales, ‘If it isn't printed on human skin, it sure is a good imitation’. No wonder it's so expensive. Thirty thousand is a lot of castles, Countess Margaret.”

  “Come and see. Do you know, Melchisedech, that there are nineteen generations of my family still living in Transylvania? And they are long generations, Melky.”

  “Nineteen generations still living would reach back a ways, Margaret.”

  “And I said that they were long generations, Duff. You have one way of reaching back, apparently. We have another. Do you know that we never reach puberty till we are more than fifty years old? And we — ”

  “These are tall old tales, Countess.”

  “Are they not? Don't you just love them? Come with me to Transylvania. You may have wondered why Sebastian and I did not marry until the end. He understood my case. Oh, and I understood his! I loved him, and he is dead. There is another piece to the tale. We are not ready to marry until after our mid-century, but we can love no one new that we did not love when we were quite young. I had mind encounters with you when I was very young. I loved Sebastian. I loved several others. I loved you. The others are all gone, but you still endure. Come with me to Transylvania, Duff. It extends all the way to Colchis.”

  “No, it does not, Countess. Meg, I wonder what you will look like in a hundred years?”

  “Come and see. Your own ‘creatures’ will hardly last another lifetime. They are pitchers who have been to the spring no more than three or four times, and already their clay begins to crack. Who will you look to for companionship when they are all dead and gone? You'll be as mopey as one of those last-of-the-line dragons who have no kindred left in the world. But you and I could make genetic music together for a long time.”

  “You are a witch who would suck my blood.”

  “Of course I would, and you mine. It's one of our most amorous delights. What do you think it is that keeps me so skinny? Do you know what ‘sanguine’ really means? Do you know what ‘blood cousin’ really means? Do you know what the Dracula legend really means? Come with me? Is it the Devil that you're worried about these last few years? Melky, there are certain wolves who have served my family for many generations. These wolves are larger than horses, and the Devil is afraid of them. He'll not come around to bother us. Could we not have a fine life in the centuries ahead? Marry me, Duffey, and come to Transylvania with me.”

  “Ah, not right now, Countess. Ask me again in fifty years.”

  “You think that's a joke. I will.”

  The Countess Margaret went back to Chicago that day. She had come down to New Orleans with the elder Kochs to Letitia's funeral, those parents really being elderly now, and Lily having gone down a day earlier than they had, and staying several weeks later; and the Countess being very close to all the family.

  So Duffey did not marry and go to Transylvania with the Countess, not at that particular time anyhow, not in that particular context.

  And then there was the gilded Lily herself.

  “You can have it both ways, Duff my luff,” Lily told Melchisedech. “Marry me for fifty years or so, and we will set up our own Transylvania just anywhere you want to. Then, ‘when I am dead, my love, and all the world is green’, you can marry the Countess and go to Transylvania and live on wolf stew and blood. Yes, they're nubile at fifty, but they're not into it right till after they're a hundred.

  “And I will tell you something else, Duff. That million dollar dowry that has been on my head so long, it's tripled now. It's the cost of living adjustment and all, you know. Besides, Letitia had phoned me not too long ago and made me promise that I would see that you had everything that you ever needed. Do you need me, dear?”

  “I need you, yes, Lily. It seems that I need everyone, everyone in this whole wobbly world.”

  “Oh well then, I'll get them all for you if you really need them. I do love you, dear, and I will do anything for you. Let me know. Come up several times a year, and I'll come down here more often. Civilized people do travel one week out of every month, you know. Oh, why do people never realize how much I love them!”

  Lily decided, by what calculation she did not say, that it was Melchisedech Duffey's four thousandth birthday just about then. Zabotski took her to a baker who did cakes for every sort of birthday. She told the baker what she wanted.”

  “It will have to be big enough to hold four thousand candles,” she said.

  “No problem,” the baker told her. “If I make the cake sixty-four by sixty-three inches, it will hold four thousand and thirty-two candles, figuring one per square inch. I had better make it sixty-four by sixty-four inches, That would give room for forty-one hundred and ninety-six candles, but there is always some caveage along the edge of a cake. I'll make the cake about three feet high. That'll be about nine hundred pounds of cake. Serve half pound servings, that's two times nine hundred  —  hum, I wish I had a pencil  —  that's eighteen hundred servings. Does he have eighteen hundred friends?”

  “Yes.”

  So the cake was made and the birthday party was held. Four persons at once had to light the candles with tapers, one thousand for each of them, and they had to hurry so that the first candles would not burn out before the last ones were lit. Then, could Melchisedech Duffey blow them all out in one breath? He could and he did. He had not been blowing the flute all those years to run short of breath now. Besides, there may have been big-mouthed and big-lunged giants adding their blowing to him. There was, for a moment there, a certain gustiness in the place that was almost unnatural.

  Zabotski had two heavy steers barbecued whole for the party. It was a good birthday party. People around there still talk about it sometimes.

  “Are we out from under the shadow of Chicago yet?” Margaret Stone asked their little world the day after Lily had gone back North.

  “No, not yet,” Mary Virginia said. “The barometer is falling, and so is the hygrometer and other instruments. I feel another wind coming from the north.”

  “I hope it won't be a cold one.”

  “No. It won't be.”

  Charlotte Garfield came down from Chicago again. No, she didn't look any older. Just meaner and prettier. She looked like the rottenest damned nine year old kid in the world, and the most expensively-gowned delinquent in any of the worlds.

  “This stole I am wearing cost me thirty thousand dollars,” she told Mary Virginia. Charlotte was in New Orleans in June, and wearing a fur stole that would set anybody's eyes wobbling. Nah, it wasn't hot wearing it, not for Charlotte.

  “Oh Midget, it couldn't have,” Mary Virginia protested. “Oh, it's elegant beyond anything, but it's small, I know something about prices and mark-ups. I know something about you: I know that you wouldn't pay such a steep mark-up on anything. There isn't any way that could have cost thirty thousand dollars.”

  “I'd have bet that there wasn't any way either,” Charlotte said. “But they caught me so cold that they had me there with mink hair growing out of the palms of my hands. I was using, in my act, a mother who was a personal dazzler and was also a knowledgeable faker of fur talk. She seemed to be a discerning hot-money customer, and that nine year old girl of hers was always skipping around the shop. I got a few fine small pieces out of the doors of a few of those emporia. But then I was caught by the hardest-eyed fur man in Chicago. He brought me to one of those everything-proof vaults to deal with me after he had caught me fur-lifting.

  “ ‘This is the pay-off, mid
get,’ ” he said. “ ‘I am going to kill you. And there isn't much of you to take a lot of disposing of.’ ”

  “ ‘I have wrong use of words, Angelo,’ ” I told him. “ ‘If you kill me outright like that, where is the pay-off? All right, how much is the tab? I've only tagged three of your shops.’ ”

  “ ‘That's all, midget? I can never be sure who does the tagging. I kind of had my heart set on killing you, but business comes first. Thirty thousand dollars within thirty minutes, midge, or it's sixty-one pounds of cat meat you will be.’ ”

  “ ‘What are you, a man or a peanut-pusher?’ I asked to make him feel cheap. ‘All right, I'll get it!’ I got it and paid him off. Then as he was getting a little bit sweet on me by that time, he gave me this little stole to remove all enmity from the transaction. And it is fun to be able to say truthfully ‘This little stole that I am wearing, it cost me thirty thousand dollars.’ ”

  Charlotte was looking for a new family and a new situation. She thought that she might possibly go southern for a while. She was now operating under the name of Carrollton rather than Garfield, but names are made to be changed. She put an ad in the Picayune, and also the same ad in The Bark:

  “Charlotte wishes new family and new connections. Mother must be dazzler about thirty-nine years old. Son-father-husband to be about nineteen years old but look older. Professionalism in ‘The Profession’ is required. Must be willing to assume the name of Darnley. If you don't know who Charlotte is, then forget it!”

  Both the street number and the box number of the Pelican Press were given for answering, and several pairs of the better confidence people came around to talk to Charlotte. But Charlotte didn't seem to be too anxious to make a new tie-up just yet.