Duffey, like the good host he was, had rolled in several barrels of hard cider and had brought out his collection of three hundred cider mugs and put them to service. The Royal Pop People and walk-ins who had joined them appreciated it. It was good cider from Arkansas apples.
“Well, we will give that stone a tongue now,” the speaker said in cider-smacking accept. “That stone remembers the underbellies of thousands of horses and carriages that stomped and rushed over it. Ah, what great horse vehicles those were! Who now living, except possibly our host Duffey, remembers them all? The Acme Top and the Acme Open, the Southern Beauty, the Fulton Road Cart, the Livery Special, the Farmers’ Canopy-Top Surrey, the Johnson's Jump-Seat Buggy, the Imperial Carriage, Dempster's Three-Spring Handy Wagon (it was a ‘wagon’ that even swells and dudes drove to the Opera in), Drexel's Eight-Horse, Dray, Pontiac's Special Milk Wagon, Hallock's Grocery Cart, the Sears Famous, the Road Runner. Ah, I see brimming eyes at the memory of these things. The fragrance of old road apples will always be a primary part of nostalgia.”
“What is the purpose of these rhapsodies, Countess?” Duffey asked the girl.
“Actually, we're so new that we don't have much detailed history of our own,” she said, “and we sure don't want to borrow any history from the second-rate humans. But we can steal some of their memories and things, and we can claim them for our own. And there was at least a handful of pop people around here during the old horse carriage days. I'm on a nostalgia kick myself. Ah, the fragrance of road apples! I wonder what they were like?”
“That stone on Decatur Street remembers the quickening snap and bang of whips,” the speaker said, “and their airy swishing. Ah, the Cowles Buggy Whip, we shan't see its like again! The Jacksonville Drover, the S.R. and Co's Australian, the Western Mule Skinner, the Milford Quirt, Hodson's Superior Horse Whip, the San Antonio, the Fancy, the Never-Break Dog Whip, the Elko. What days do these not bring back! The cursing of wagoners, the rattling of whipple trees, the jangle of even chains! Some of these things still live in the blessed place, and others of them have been cut down by the weed hacker.”
The speaker had a new mellowness in his voice that only a couple of mugs of good Arkansas cider will give.
“That stone remembers the undersides of old street cars,” the speaker said. “It even remembers the round punchings of old street car transfers wafting down on the easy breeze, blessed confetti! And the odor of trolley ozone! It remembers the underside of every automobile that ever went down Decatur Street, and I dare not roll their names off my tongue lest nostalgic riots might ensue.”
What, if the Royal Pop People had a weakness for nostalgia, Duffey saw a good thing for himself. In the back rooms of his Walk-In Art Bijou, he had tons and tons of forgotten nostalgic items.
“The stone recalls faithfully every two-legged and four-legged walker of the street,” the turbaned speaker said. “And it remembers, from the underside also, the jeweled sky of eighty thousand nights. It's a very talkative old stone, and it is talking to our experts and their instruments at this instant.”
The speaker had two large and complex shining blue eyes. They may have had special, small, remembering stones set into their irises. Many of the Royal Pop people had this double-irised look to their eyes. “What about the stones that look in the other direction?” asked a person who was not a full member of the Royal Pop Historians and Flesh Weeders. “Are there any stones whose patinas have recorded future events?”
“There are stones whose living surfaces and depths reveal events in every direction,” the speaker said. “There are not any ‘future’ events. ‘Future’ is only the name of a putative direction so designated by those who have lost their directions. Oh certainly, it is quite easy to lift transparencies and tracings and reproductions of what are commonly called future events. All common stones will serve for all purposes, but exceptional stones are needed to give fine and minute service. Those that record the best from all directions are the half gem or gim crack stones, the spars, the garnets, the imperfect crystals. But those that focus more aptly on the direction misnamed ‘future’ are the hard prismatic crystals. The small and resonant crystals of the early-day radio had part of this directional secret. The quartzes and natural rock crystals, the sphere-formed crystals, all real crystals can see quite clearly into the future direction. These sphere-formed rock crystals that are tuned to the historical future direction are known commercially as ‘crystal balls’.”
“Can patinas be peeled from anything besides stones?” a non-Pop asked.
“Yes, certainly,” the speaker said. “Wood, as a short term storehouse of historical treasures (for no more than four or five centuries), is often superior to stone. Finished and furnitured woods in particular will project these recalls at unexpected moments. These are the ghosts of the last seven centuries, the ghosts of old houses. And the term ‘table talk’ sometimes has the special meaning of talking tables. Planchette and ouija are dull forgeries of such talking tables, but they are made out of genuine remembering and projecting wood. And old tables become accepted members of old families. What child, playing under an old wooden table, has not heard old family secrets whispered by the familiar (which is to say ‘long in the family’) wood?
“But still better, and more recording, than either stone or wood, for very short periods (a couple of decades), is undisturbed leaf mold.”
“Hey, Duff, let's slip off for a while,” a small group of young and talented members of the Royal Pop People propositioned Melchisedech Duffey. “They'll not miss you for the host for a while, and they'll not miss us either.”
2
“The most dedicated rationalist, if he is honest, must admit that there are intervals that go against the grain, that go against reason. There are happenings, usually of quite short duration, that simply are not acceptable in the rationalist framework. I myself have experienced several such unaccountable if unbelievable intervals. Two were of such very short duration that they did not take up any discernable time; they were like flashes. Of the longer states, one was of three minutes, and one was of five minutes.
“And the Most Puzzling of them was for twenty-four hours.”
[Absalom Stein. Notes on the Argo Cycle.]
“Quick thunder wounds the fatted town
That copiously bleeds:
And fruitless growths come tumbling down
And even human weeds.”
[Finnegan. Road Songs.]
“Done” , said Duffey to the Younger Pop People. “I always said that if I could find a better place than mine or better company than my own, I would join it for as long as I was accepted. You look just like the young people who could show me wonders in my own town.”
They were out of the buildings and into the streets. And right next to Duffey's establishments was Bayougoula Park, and it hadn't been there yesterday. Hell, it hadn't been there an hour ago. There had previously been some buildings there, but they wouldn't now be called to mind. Zabotski half-believed that the missing buildings had belonged to him, but he couldn't say for sure. Well, there was a new park there now. It was like a blessing.
“But it isn't a new park, Duffey,” said Absalom Stein who had been pacing there in edgy thought. “I've just been checking the records, and it's been here for more than a hundred years. That's what the people at the park department tell me. There's something nervous about those people. They act like zombies, and they say things as though somebody were making them say them. And there's something contrived about the park itself.”
“Don't look a gift colt in the mouth, Absalom,” the hoyden told him.
“Or it'll crop you like a weed,” the child hero said. “The thunder colts can crop the weeds that are too tough for the weed hackers to cut. Are you a tough one, Duffey?”
There couldn't ever have been more than two or three narrow buildings in that place, but the park was not narrow in any sense. It remembered all the things that a park should remember and it made room for them.
There were graceful benches made out of redwood, or perhaps out of red plum wood. There were tables and standing sideboards, and little barbecue ovens for the people to use. There were the big trees, live oaks, gum tupelos, royal walnuts, red cedar, pop elm trees. There were several dead and dying animals there, their flesh turning into rubber or plastic or styrofoam as they expired. There were several dead and dying people there also, but they lacked conviction and reality.
“Duffey, Duffey, help me,” one of the dying people said. “I'm Moriarty. Help me.”
“You look a bit like the Moriarty I knew,” Duffey admitted, “but you look more like a bad joke than like a person. Young people, are the broken-up animals and the broken-up people on the same order?”
“Oh yes. The broken-up people often collapse into their own interiors when they die,” the child-hero said. “But often they collapse into their animal totem forms first. So when one of the animals, or one of the persons, tells you that he is someone you used to know, he is probably telling you right. But you will notice that none of them has real flesh, except for a hunk here and there. Most such people were never real, not authentic or meaningful. They are the first ones that the weed choppers chop down. We wonder that your city has kept so many of them so long. Every place else in the world has gotten rid of all of theirs several weeks ago.”
There was a tumbling and noisy fountain in the middle of the park. It was full of green turtles and bull frogs, whistling blue fish, and carp. There were conches and oysters. There were alligators that would snap up alive any child or dog that came too near and had reactions too slow. The park policed its own. There were horned cattle there. And there were some of the crazy and splendid thunder colts.
But natural beauties are not enough for a park. It must have the amenities also. Some of the new pop persons had the amenities, but most of the old people were frightened and skittish and had no amenities at all. But then there came three old (and ever-new) people who were the amenities themselves: Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally. They came to see what was all this talk about there being a new park right around the corner from them. These were the ladies from the Pelican Press.
Also in the park, there were the inanimate or only partly animate amenities. There were arcades there, gazebos and kiboshes and kiosks, taverns and tabernacles and all other sorts of tents and pavilions. There were shops there, news-stands and confectioner's stands, open-air cafés, a little bandstand where some fellows drummed and tootled and tinkled.
“There is a sort of show being staged here,” Mary Virginia said. This is ‘Act Two, Scene 1’, a Park. People coming and going. Remnants of people and animals dying. A fountain playing in the sun, laughter and pleasure everywhere. It is all contrived and set up. I like it, of course. I like almost all theatrical scenes. It has a bright and flashy face. I don't understand it, but I know that it isn't quite real.”
“Yes, it is real,” the child hero insisted. Really, it was time for the child hero to leave off being a child. He was old enough to be a man. “But many things that you thought were real, Mary Virginia, they aren't,” he said. “You're wide open yourself, and it isn't so easy to change your apperceptions. And your town, here in its old and historic part, was never quite real. Haven't you ever seen the gaps in its reality?”
“Not very many gaps, not very big ones,” Mary Virginia said. “It's all real except for these new morning parks, and you new morning people. Are you real, or will you melt away like the dew in another hour of sunlight?”
“We are real,” the hoyden said. “it is the old people who are melting away in the sun. You can see remnants of them scattered around. We are real. You're still on trial.”
“What do you think of these new-old parks and people, Duffey?” Mary Virginia asked.
“Oh, they represent the bright and shining obverse side of the Fortean coin or the Fortean universe,” he said. “I've always known that the coin had two sides. The reverse, the best known side of the Fortean medallion, was always dingy and dim, poltergeistic and irregular, cheesy, aye, and stupid. But this new side of it is fine and exciting. If things must be Fortean, let them be bright and shining Fortean. The parks are misplaced, of course. They do not belong here at all. But let us enjoy them.”
“Forget about the morning parks,” the child hero said. “We've told you that they're real. Think about this art of your town that is several hundred years old. Is it real, or has it always been a fraud? Will it stand the test of historical evidence? Have you ever wondered where the people got all that iron for the wrought iron work here? They were very prodigal with it. But this was a pretty primitive Louisiana at the time ascribed for the constructions… And the workmanship of the old iron balconies is no way primitive. It's decadent rather. But there was no iron available here. Hardly any stone; nothing except wood. It isn't real iron.”
“Oh bedamned with this jabber!” Mary Virginia exploded. “It's real enough.”
“Have you ever wondered where they got all the stones for the stone buildings?” the Countess asked. That countess was pert with many generations of pertness in her. She was quite young. Likely she was still a teenager. She had the easy cruelty of a member of a very old and very civilized family. “Really, there was never any stone on these mud flats, and there was not a quarry within sixteen hundred miles. The stones of these old buildings around here, they aren't real stones.”
Mary Virginia and the others had to laugh at this line of nonsense that these Royal Pop People were pushing on them. All of them were drinking Shining Mountain Beer now. The brewery was right across the street from the park, but it hadn't been there yesterday. Or, if it had been, it had been passing itself off as some other kind of building.
“They've kept the taste,” Margaret Stone said. “I recognize the taste. But maybe they've changed the name of it. Does anybody remember what the name of it was yesterday? Not Shining Mountain, no.”
“There are two further proofs that your town is mostly unreal,” the hoyden was saying. Zabotski joined them about then. He had a puzzled look, but he still felt that he was supposed to own the land that Bayougoula Park was reposing on. “Have you heard about the Black Sea Disasters?” he asked. He was wearing one of those new badges ‘It's a question of your survival: are you splendid enough?’
“It has no mountains, and it almost hasn't any thunder,” the hoyden was continuing despite the Zabotski interruption, “and these are two of the things by which the validity of a locale and a history can be checked. A place must have mountains and it must have thunder, or it isn't real.”
“Certain tropic lands have no thunder at all,” said the learned Stein who had arrived to the park and the party of them.
“Those same tropic lands have no history at all either,” the hoyden said.
“Who is that very young man who looks so much like Finnegan?” Salvation Sally asked them as she pointed to a bugle-nosed young man who was coming dangerously close to the alligators in the fountain. “I'm spooked, I tell you. I thought that he was Finnegan indeed. I think it is his ghost.”
“It does look like Finnegan, when he was a very young man,” Duffey said. “He is the young painter who paints very like Finnegan in his orange period. Yes, he could almost be a younger ghost or fetch of Finnegan.”
“Finnegan always did have a lot of fetches,” Margaret Stone remembered.
“Mountains and thunder, they are the test,” the hoyden was insisting. “Oh, the newness of mountains! Mountains are the most astonishing happenings in recent history. There weren't any mountains at all until quite recently. And we hadn't full dimensions on this world until they were raised up.”
“What are you New Young Royal Pop girls talking about?” Melchisedech Duffey demanded. “There were always mountains. How would there not be mountains?”
“Duffey, you are so old that you have to remember when there weren't any mountains,” the hoyden challenged. “Or maybe there was just one. But it was
n't a very high mountain, whatever you may have heard to the contrary. That's why there wasn't really very much water required for the water epic. It was all a flatlander world then.”
“Are not all of you young people, the hoyden, the countess, are you not all in the big Horse Opera at the Street Opera House tonight?” Mary Virginia said. “The play bills have been up for a month, but I just recognized you as the people shown on them now.”
“Why, of course,” the young countess said. “We are the splendor and the interest of the horse opera. We are spectacular in it right up till the slaughter starts. Then we let other people be spectacular for a while.”
“And this mountains-and-thunder nonsense that you're talking, that's part of the presentation, isn't it? This is just advertising talk, yes?”
“Come to the show, lady, come to the show,” the child hero said. “The Horse Opera celebrates the wiping out of a last stronghold of the old and human way. It represents it, and it is it. But we will not tell it now. Come to the show. We give away lots of free things here, but we don't give away everything.”
Black people of the town strode by wearing the new badges ‘Are You Splendid Enough?’ They looked more splendid than they usually did, but they also looked doubtful. Intercoastal Canal People were also wearing the badges, and splendid people they are not. There were other people of unspecified sorts, all trying to get behind the badges before it was too late.
The dying people and the dying animals were about gone. As the life left their members, their flesh turned into plastic or plywood or papier-mâché, and then they might be regarded as no more than leftover carnival debris.
“How does it happen?” Margaret Stone asked.
“They lost faith in themselves and in their flesh,” the countess said. “That dragon there had the most faith. It was a human, and then it collapsed into the dragon totem as it died. Most of its flesh is turned now, but not all.”
More Than Melchisedech Page 42
