“Right!”
For a second Chauntecleer felt satisfied that he had won the argument. Then he lost confidence and wasn’t so sure anymore, wasn’t even sure what the argument had been about. Something, it seemed, was bothering Pertelote. But she had been a patient saint ever since the disappearance of the Dog; so it was a sudden something. The Dog. In a rush the memory of Mundo Cani filled Chauntecleer’s mind, and he was humbled.
“Pertelote?”
“What?”
“I miss him.” Chauntecleer was speaking the truth. “Oh, Pertelote, I miss him terribly.”
“I know that, Chauntecleer.”
All at once her voice was gentle and comforting. Yet she said no more than that. Much more than that she wanted to hear from the Rooster, so she was letting his thoughts work inside him for a while.
Chauntecleer was wide awake, now; and Mundo Cani was a living, eating thing in his soul. Again and again against the night he saw the Dog raising the horn over Wyrm’s eye to plunge it in. Again and again, in rhythm, he heard the last words of the Dun Cow: Modicae fidei—it is all for you.
Finally: “That should have been me,” he said. “I should have gone down into the pit, not Mundo Cani. I should have died instead of him.”
“So,” Pertelote said. Then she probed deeper—still gently, but with a cold pressure: “And what else?”
“Why, I am the leader. It was my duty to see such a thing and to do it, not the Dog’s. This is not right. Today is wrong; tonight, now is wrong! I’m living a stupid, extended existence. I have no right to this life. It’s his. It’s Mundo Cani’s!”
“And that’s why you work so hard during the day.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“To busy yourself. To pay him back by breaking yourself. That’s one thing. But what else, Chauntecleer?”
“What else? There is nothing else. A leader lost and a Dog took over. A leader lived to be sick of his life. You’ve heard it. What do you mean, ‘What else’?”
“What else do you owe Mundo Cani?”
“My life! Dammit, Pertelote—what else is there to give?”
“Penance.”
“What?”
“Penance. It is more than your life. It is that scrubbing of the past which you want so much, because it is confession. It is the new birth of the present, which you want so much, because it prepares for deliverance. The one is separated from the other by forgiveness. It is the honoring, Chauntecleer, of the worth in his life. Penance. You can tell him you are sorry. He will forgive you.”
“For what! He went down and it should have been me. So! I’ve said so. For what else?”
“Oh, Chauntecleer. He knew he had to go down. Don’t you understand that? There was never any question about who would make the sacrifice. Leader or not, it just wasn’t your place to go. Cockatrice was yours; but Wyrm’s eye was his. So it was from the beginning. So it had to be. And so he told me when you were raving in the Coop strange things about a Cow. With neither fear nor hesitation he told me this thing, the last thing left to do. He accepted it as destiny. This is not your sin, Proud Chauntecleer; and if you keep saying that it is, you protect yourself against the greater. You are blinding yourself. Penance for what else?”
“Pertelote,” Chauntecleer said. “Stop.”
“Say it!”
“I can’t.”
“You know it?”
“Yes.”
“Then say it!”
Chauntecleer shivered all over as the thing pushed its way into his throat. He could say it, perhaps, into a hole in the ground. He could give it word, perhaps, when no one else was around. But to say it to Pertelote—his wife, the one who spoke with Mundo Cani when no one else was speaking to him, and when Chauntecleer himself—
“I despised him,” Chauntecleer said.
“So,” said Pertelote. “This was your wickedness.”
“He was making ready to die for us, and I didn’t understand that. I judged him a traitor. I made his last moments lonely, and I despised him.”
“Did you think that this was a secret, that you should hide it so long?”
“No.”
“But this, Chauntecleer—this is your sin?”
“Yes.”
The Rooster was very meek right now. And a Weasel below these two had developed, in the recent minutes, a very big ear.
“But now you have said it,” Pertelote said, “and that is good. That is the beginning of your life now, because it is the ending of something. Chauntecleer, maybe one day you will say the same to Mundo Cani, and then he will be able to speak his forgiveness in your hearing, and that will complete the matter. Then you will be free of it. Chauntecleer,” she said full quietly on the maple limb. She waited until his attention had been turned from his sin unto her. “I love you.”
“Thank you,” he said foolishly.
Something else was trying to click in his mind. Something she had said, not quite right or real.
“Whoa! Say it to Mundo Cani? Pertelote, are you crazy? I saw him closed up underneath the earth!”
“He was that. Mundo Cani was closed deep in the earth. The Netherworld Scar is a fearsome closing.”
“So then the poor Dog is dead.”
“No, he is alive. Under the earth, but alive. Dreadfully close to Wyrm, but alive. There was much Mundo Cani told me while you lay in your darkness and would not listen to him. He had a nose for intuition. He is alive, and only the bravest will go to him. Only the bravest will see him again. Perhaps you will, Chauntecleer. I doubt, though, that John Wesley Weasel will have the opportunity—”
“What?” This little word from the smelly burrow below.
“—because that one has given up.”
“What?”
“He has gone into a little hole. He will never find the larger one from there, the hole that goes down to the Dog. But I understand that a Weasel who has lost an ear should mourn his loss and feel an invalid thereafter.”
“What?”
“There are no more adventures, and very little courage left, for a Weasel with half a head. Surely, there is no use in it if an ear is gone—”
“Double-u’s is not Double-u’s on account of their ears. Is a Mouse John mourns, you cut-cackle! John can go to the Netherworld as any Rooster can—and he a sinner. Ha! And ha, ha! to you!”
“Because Mundo Cani was never anything to John Wesley but a carriage to carry him about. No friendship—”
“Ha!” cried the Weasel. “Ha, ha, ha! How about that?”
“One more ‘Ha,’ John,” Chauntecleer began to shout at him, “and I’ll have your other ear for my pocketbook!”
“A Weasel is a Dog’s friend, too! Is more love in a Weasel than in a Rooster—proud, silly bird!” John Wesley was fully out of his burrow, now, and bounding around the base of the maple tree, while Chauntecleer leaned dangerously forward to spit his opinions at the Weasel.
“You lost no love for him when he saved you from Cockatrice,” roared the Rooster, “when he carried you in his mouth then. I saw. And I didn’t hear a ‘Thank you’ come out of your mouth then, John Wesley Weasel.”
“Speaks a Rooster, ha! A Rooster once in the Dog’s mouth, too, ha! Ha, ha, to you, Rooster! Is Double-u’s what dig; but Roosters only flutter-gut about. Go find the Netherworld without a digger Double-u!”
“Just wait, you slow mope. I’ll see that Dog before you do. I’ll find the hole into Wyrm’s caverns before you scratch surface!”
“Ha!”
As it happened, then, Pertelote fell asleep before either of these adversaries did. Far into the night they held lively conversation with one another, pointing out absurdities in each other’s character and promising mighty promises, each to be fulfilled at an early date.
&nbs
p; But the sound of their brave chatter was good in Pertelote’s ears. She had been successful. She slept peacefully.
Here ends the twenty-eighth and final chapter of the story about Chauntecleer and the keeping of Wyrm.
Afterword
Authors resist the categorization of their works. It’s too much like shaving the river: causing a narrower and narrower flow of meaning and thereby a swifter rush of contemplative thought. The many currents of a good novel are lost when only one or two are accounted the whole of the motion, and a reader’s response can’t help but be made the more shallow.
Since its publication twenty-five years ago, The Book of the Dun Cow has been grouped among works and types with which it shares certain literary characteristics but from which it diverges too much to share the same category completely.
For those who might hereafter study the novel, allow me to offer a brief listing of the sources and influences that directed my writing.
Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” was my immediate entrance into the “beast fable” genre, whence the basic characteristics of Chauntecleer and Lord Russel the Fox. But those are types, and the beast fable has ever been a moralizing thing, an instructing thing, since Hesiod’s poem about the hawk and the nightingale, through Aesop, Phaedrus, John Gay in England, and Joel Chandler Harris in America. Chaucer exaggerated these elements. The modern novel requires greater complexity and less overt moralizing.
The “Beast Epic,” though it often parodied serious epics while Dun Cow takes the serious epic seriously, gave a broader scope to my work. Too, this genre developed a sharply realistic observation, comparable to my own use of the actual habits of animals which might capture and intensify the actual behaviors of human beings. I did, in fact, raise chickens, fought rats, knew dogs—and did zoological research into these creatures as well as study zoology’s unrecognized cousin, the bestiaries of the Middle Ages (the Physiologus in its many imitations; the Exeter Book).
Early church fathers produced series of sermons called De Hexameroi, “On the Six Days” of creation, in which theological reasons for the physical details of God’s handiwork are explained: the human brow is to protect the eye-beams as they seek truth in the world. This material, assuming that the mind and the purposes of the Creator might be read in creation itself, gave context to my own attitudes in writing a book about animals in a raining creation.
Medieval cosmologies did more than give me a well-constructed metaphor for the world of my novel; they established a weltanschauung, a thematic vision of elemental relationships spiritual, communal, natural: a cosmic order to things.
As Milton chose epic to frame the grand drama of humankind, so I used elements of that genre for Dun Cow (councils, bees, battles) as well as his elevated themes of good and evil; but the tone could not have imitated his noble sonority, his earnest sobriety. Our times call for humor, for a sort of self-deprecating use of the genre that once upon a time defined whole peoples and their cultures. Presently we are too diverse to think a single story defines us.
Romance (especially as exemplified by the language and the final battles in Mallory’s Morte Darthur) shaped my own conceptions and developments of physical warfare in the three battle sequences of the book. At the same time I drew insights and images from the book Face of Battle, by John Keegan.
Biblical patterns, narratives, types scarcely need mentioning.
From its first conception, I knew the novel’s general protagonist would be the “Community of the Meek,” Chauntecleer’s Coop and all things related to it. I knew, too, that there must be a terrible antagonist set against this, in order that I might, in the process of writing the book, investigate how such communities are affected by—and do respond to—external evils of overwhelming force.
But what the evil should be took some time to decide. I discarded an evil made up of natural animals (as the Coop is “natural”) since (1) that kind of trouble would arise within the Coop anyway, and since (2) I sought an evil outside our common living conditions. Likewise, I thought about and discarded introducing humans as the evil (as in Watership Down), since readers should have nothing else to identify with than the Coop. Finally, I chose certain mythological figures of evil which already were based upon fanaticized—but nonetheless believed—characterizations of beasts, snakes, basilisks, the cockatrice. This had the authenticity and the tight complexity produced by countless generations of human attention, imagination, retelling; it was greater than anything I could myself invent—and so, for example, the birth of Cockatrice as described in the novel is taken from a medieval description of the births of such creatures. But Wyrm (that name taken from the Old English, its word for something like a dragon in Beowulf) is modeled on the Loki Monster and shaped according to my own designs.
What The Book of the Dun Cow is not—nor was ever intended to be—is an allegory. Allegories ask an intellectual analysis: “This means that,” “This detail in the story is equivalent to that fact, that doctrine, that idea outside the story.” The Book of the Dun Cow invites experience. Allegories are reductive of meanings; they bear a riddling quality; they demand the question, “What does this mean?” But a good novel is first of all an event; as distinguished from the continuous rush of many sensations and the messy overlapping experiences of our daily lives, it is a composed experience in which all sensations are tightly related, for which there is a beginning and an ending, within which the reader’s perceivings and interpretations are shaped for a while by the internal integrity of all the elements of the narrative. Meaning devolves from (and must follow) the reader’s experience. Meaning, therefore, springs from the relationship between the reader and the writing. Should I, the author, ever state in uncertain terms what my book means, it would cease to be a living thing; it would cease to be the novel it might have been, and would rather become an illustration of some defining, delimiting concept. Sermons do that well and right properly. Novels in which themes demand an intellectual attention can only be novels in spite of these didactic interruptions.
The Pilgrim’s Progress works best as a novel when we ignore its allegorical nature until first we have experienced wholly its romantic nature.
Having, in The Book of the Dun Cow, investigated evils external to human systems I turned next, in its sequel, to the evils internally present within communities and their individuals. The Book of Sorrows pays close attention to the motives of society’s leaders and the effects of their behaviors upon the societies they lead.
It is never enough merely to know and discuss the evils to ourselves. The Chauntecleer who leads his Coop against Wyrm, if he does not examine and know his own character, shall become the evil within the Coop.
If Dun Cow drove me to a sacrifice for the saving of a community, then Sorrows brought me to another act, more personal, for the solving of our own internal sinnings: forgiveness.
Walter Wangerin, Jr.
June 4, 2003
More from Walter Wangerin Jr.
The Second Book of the Dun Cow:
Lamentations
PART ONE
Russel, the Fox of Good Sense
[One] In which the Fox Strives to Talk
Russel had fought as bravely as any other Creature in the battle against Wyrm and all his evil Basilisks. Serpents were the Basilisks, three feet long, as black as licorice, thick and dimpled when they writhed. They crawled the ground like little kings with their heads raised up on the loops of their necks. Their eyes were fiery and their flesh moist with poisons. Russel had dashed among them, cutting sharp corners with the snap of his bushy tail, talking, talking, challenging the enemies with a babble of well-constructed sentences. The Fox had rolled in the oils of the rue plant whose stench caused the Basilisks to tighten into helpless balls.
“I route, not to say route you by the tens and the twenties, for I am clever and hearty and vulpine, am I!”
But then he bit a fat Basilisk. His canaines burst the serpent, and the se
rpent wrapped itself round the Fox’s snout, and though the Fox dispatched it altogether, its poisons burned him, mouth and tongue and lips and his pointy nose back to the eyeballs—and that was that for Russel’s hostilities.
He rubbed his snout with the joints in his forepaws, but only succeeded in smearing the poisons deeper and deeper into his fur, down to the flesh, and then it was that all the flesh of his face stung and, because of his furious rubbing, began to bleed.
“No pity,” Russel managed to say. “No cause to pity a Fox, because his wounds, O dear Lord Chauntecleer, they are the wounds of his own folly.” Blood scored the gaps between the Fox’s teeth. But he could not stop talking. His words sprayed mists of blood. His sentences stretched and wracked his lips. But his love of talk was greater than his pain. For Russel, to talk was to be alive—was to be. By talk he had taught tricks to Pertelote’s three little Chicks. By talk he had instructed Mice in the ways of Coop-life. Russel was ever a charming orator.
“Fight on,” he called to the warrior Creatures of the Coop. “Glorify the day, and triumph by the moonlight!”
Then, when the war had indeed been won, the beautiful Hen Pertelote found the Fox lying inert in the grass, his jaws and his mouth and his muzzle swollen and hardening. Puss and a watery blood seeped through the scabs.
“Russel,” Pertelote said with genuine compassion. “What did they do to you?”
The Fox rolled his eyes up to the Hen. He said, “Umph,” and “Pumffel.”
“Don’t talk,” she said. “I’ll get some salve for—“
Russel said, “No pity, not to say pity, for a Fox who lost good sense.”
When he spoke the scabs cracked and the blood gushed.
“Please!” Pertelote begged, wiping the blood with her white wings. “Don’t talk! You’ll infect yourself.”
“All is well,” Russel said. “Everything is well. The victory, why, the victory—“
Chauntecleer crowed, “Shut up, you idiot! What’s the matter with you?” He leaped into the air, beat his wings, and alighted directly in front of Russel’s nose. “Do you want to die?”
The Book of the Dun Cow Page 22
