Death of the Fox

by George Garrett

  Filling and spilling over the wall and across the ditch. Overflowing like your countless wells and springs (some clear and clean, some foul as streams of hell) to spread in a slow tide ever outward into fields, suburbs, and villages.

  Slow, sure, with timber and brick and stone, mortar and plaster, with conduit and cobblestone, seizing and choking the last life of the fields and spaces within and without the walls.

  But your half-hidden gardens are splendid. Your trees, now bloody or minted in autumn gold, stand high and tall. In April and early May they toss fair heads of brightest green. Cast ponds and pools of shade in midsummer.

  Slow, sure, houses growing taller over narrow, thronged, clamorous streets, as if to join hands and shut out the sky. Like the old houses of merchants up on London Bridge.

  Noisy, bustling, crying, laughing, boldest city in the world. Proud of your savage music. Deafening noise of thousands of voices speaking all at once, from the muttering of lawyers at St. Paul’s to the hundred musical cries of the street vendors. Cartwheels straining, crying for grease. Carriages nudging for space. Crack of whip and shouts to make way. Clatter of hooves, ringing of bells, clear ring of hammer, song of saws. Bells and the cling and clang of coins like a multitude of little bells.

  Rude and clamorous beyond believing. Rich and busy beyond believing too.

  A strange many-colored flower, but flower of English towns. Let others bloom and prosper, dry and wither, London is blooming, ever growing. Foremost of cities, set down in glory and beauty beside and now astride the still clear-flowing waters of the Thames with its snowflake clusters of swans proudly riding.

  Phoenix of cities, forever consuming itself in fire and energy, forever from ashes rising again, newborn. Even before the ashes cool.

  London the largest and finest jewel in the Crown. Yet unpolished, uncut, flawed, as if rudely ripped from bowels of earth. And still, all that said, shining always and always more precious than perfect stones. Its fire not a gift of art and stolen light, but the glow cast by an excess of inner burning. Not a diamond, but what the diamond aspires to be: a thing made of light as if light were frozen.

  Came here first a boy. Half-man, bigger than most men.

  Westcountry proud and poor. All overgrown, hands and feet and heavy muscles, and awkward. Disguising this behind a slow, thoughtful way he hoped might be misconstrued as lazy gracefulness.

  His head cram-full of the family stories and the chronicles of Devon. Yet eager and most willing to be rid of that baggage. Hall and chambers of his brain all bedecked and decorated with loot, imaginary trophies from books and, richer and stranger by far, the painted cloths and tapestries wrought from the echoing tales of Devon seamen. Who, having seen the ends, the nooks and corners and closets of the world and lived to come home, were not shy or loath to share some news of that with a lad who would listen.

  Came to London happy to be away from all he had seen and known and been. Glad to be eased of a burden. And yet sad to be far from the familiar places, all shapes and sounds, odors and colors, the feelings of home. Glad to be young and free, yet within himself ashamed to feel so blithe. Sad and yet ashamed of that feeling too. For it seemed so childish. For once, he hoped, he had left the child he had been behind him.

  Came then inwardly trembling with the shock and clash of opposing feelings. Believing that life would always be this way. Not knowing then that he was in the midst of the war any boy must wage within himself if he is to become a man.

  Not able to comprehend that the power of change is absolute.

  But it was more than the war a boy must wage to seek the triumph of manhood. Was one particular battle as well. For even his pride of family, his love for the place of his birth, were confused and paradoxical.

  Proud of his father, his name, and the names of kin. His hive of kinfolk in Devon. Yet also ashamed; for why were they now left clinging to memories or dreaming of other futures? Proud and ashamed and ashamed of being so. Love for the Westcountry, its places and people. Yet hating them, too, knowing them too well. Their passionate factions in religion. Cutting each other cruelly and, even more so, those who stood quiet in faith, sharing passions of neither the old or the new. His father, before he was born, had been abused, during the Rising and other broils, first by one faith, then the other.

  Young Ralegh contemptuous of both even as he might lump them in one pudding. Resentful of the rich, rising merchants his family must deal with; yet already knowing their prosperity was close-linked to his own. Loving the lay of the land; yet his heart with his family and friends, the seamen, who shook dust of Devon from their feet for love of something else. Despising the placid villagers, the farmers content to be chained to acres as to a plow. Admiring most the seafarer, who would brawl in the taverns with the landsmen between voyages. And then, if Fortune allowed this mariner an old age, forced to chop wood, feed the hogs, and empty jakes for some yeoman to whom he must raise his cap as if to a trueborn gentleman.

  Came to London first with all this and more bubbling inside. Like a blackened pot of beggars’ soup. Boiling above a dry crackling of sticks and thorns.

  In the solitude of being young, he was unable to know that the boiling within him was as nothing compared to the cauldron of the city. That his little fires would go unnoticed amid the flames and heat and blinking coals of that continual forge.

  Came to London, suffering more in youth and health than he ever would in age and sickness. And partly out of pride and part for shame, determined to keep his secret to himself with the lofty demeanor, the frozen composure of a card-playing tavern man.

  Prepared to be unimpressed by London. Or Jerusalem either if that had been the city. His attitude reflecting what he deemed the truth: that nothing he would see, then or ever, could come to equal the secret glory of his imagining. Compared to which all life must be a shrugging disappointment. He would have denied this even on the rack called “Little Ease,” lest he be taken for what he thought he was and wished most not to be: an ignorant, unpolished, untested, untried, unfinished, uneasy, discontented inexperienced boy.

  Came first time along the old Roman road to Canterbury from Canterbury he would have said then, walking tall and proud and slow as he could.

  Though Hayes Barton, Budleigh, meant nothing to these people, they would know Exeter. Which was close and familiar to him.

  London could claim no more history. Exeter, Citadel of the West, knew Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman as well. Athelstan, first king of all the English, built the walls and tower.

  London’s Tower? Let them come and see Rougemont Castle.

  Churches? Exeter has so many of those that half are never used. And speak to me nothing of bells if you have never heard the bell of St. Pancras.

  Your Guildhall? Exeter has the oldest standing in England, its gilt beams resting upon carved bears with staffs. And the roll call of our lord mayors is longer than London’s. Ask anyone who knows.

  Brag of the riches of London, the baubles and bubbles, pouring into your shops as from a conduit in ceaseless flow. Then hear me when I tell you we of Devon are makers as well as takers. And you must take from us and pay for it too. The stuffs we grow in our fields. Best husbandry in England, for our wool and hides, our stout English cloth. Our tin—together with that out of Cornwall—and other metals. Jangle your purses and talk of the plenitude. And I’ll not answer in kind with the bells of silver crowns and half crowns, half groats, and pennies, but try that trick in Exeter city and such a response in golden sovereigns, ryals, and angels you’ll receive as will ring a curfew upon arrogance.

  London may well bloom bright, like fruit trees in springtime. But Exeter blooms lofty like the ancient English oak.

  Prate no more of your merchants’ houses. Let me show you High Street, Exeter.

  You have Thames. We have the Exe, with ships and cargoes, some diverted from their intended destinations, it is true, from all over the world.

  Don’t move me to pity and terror with tales o
f martyrs of Smithfield. We burned many a good heretic in Southernhay. And I’ll wager among all your cornucopia of heresies and sects and atheisms you never saw the like of the one called The Family of Love. And I’ll wager there’s nothing in all of London to equal the Bishop’s Brass Clock in Exeter. It is said—do you doubt it?—to be the oldest clock in all England, as old as time, and it keeps good time. With a wondrous dial which shows the movements of the earth and the sun and the moon.

  Cathedrals … See Exeter Cathedral and let your eyes pop and your jaw fall slack. Such carving work and stonework as you have never dreamed. And all of it, sir, first stone to last, done by Devon men. Strangers came to learn the craft from us.

  For palaces and gardens, you shall have to show me anything as fine as the Bishop’s in Exeter. For number of books, I doubt you can equal his library, and nothing so rare and fine here as the Codex Exonienis, all written out in the language of the Saxons. While London, no doubt, was a ford and a watering place for scruffy, sour-milked cows.

  Before he was halfway across London Bridge, forever twilight from the high houses coming together overhead, hearing the rush and thunder of waters, unseen, beneath the piers, Ralegh forgot all of this and more.

  And tossed away his posture of pride, like a moth-eaten old cape, without a tremor of regret. Thinking, in that moment, like love at first look and the arrow of Cupid in the old romances, that he was surrendering nothing at all.

  When he crossed and before he was near half over the span, he knew he was a perfect exemplum of the country clown in his modest-cut, well-made clothing of Devon broadcloth and kersey. Why, here even a common prentice lad looked fine as a gentleman with bright buttons to decorate his blue and a smart hat worn like a tilted halo, half shading the eyes, the smirk of the lips. No need to imagine he could conceal country ways. Might as well have been naked.

  No occasion to plead for the honor of Devonshire when these folk could not have cared a groatsworth.

  Feeling he might as well have fallen from the moon. Which they, these citizens and such of London, would think of, if at all, as London’s lantern.

  Halfway across the Bridge he was content to forget even that and gape at everything. Let them think whatever they pleased. If they pleased to notice him at all.

  Thinking he had renounced forever the old and embraced forever the shining new.

  Not knowing or imagining it was all new only to his eyes.

  As, for example, a lusty lad, out of a lusty imagination and small experience, might embrace and fondle a widow old enough to be his mother, but by dress and style, diversions of jewels, invitation of perfumes and concealment of cosmetics, seeming to him as young and fair as a maid.

  And the wisdom of this widow woman being the wisdom of all womanhood. She knowing that so long as fancy burns and fantasy is not glutted, he will honor fancy first. So long as he is caught in the net of lecher, poor fish, he will call that net love.

  No use blaming woman. Eve may have been deceitful, but Adam allowed himself to be deceived.

  How the wheel comes around. How, beyond reason, the design of things works as it will.

  Paradox lies here. Much that a man may imagine he chooses has been long chosen for him. And much that seems no more choice than sailing downwind in a gale wind, seeing he cannot sail against it, blown away from intended landfall, nevertheless does lead straight toward that haven. So a man may conclude that either the harbor or the wind, and the compass needle, sun and stars, charts and cross-staff, either one or all were fantasy. Or may consider the possibility that all were, are, ever shall be equal fantasies. To live is to stand parceled out in innumerable fantasies as a man in a room wainscoted all around with mirror glass.

  Yet this is incomplete. Consider that by some mathematic rule, the sum of equal fantasies becomes the truth.

  There is a pattern and design in any man’s actions, in the chronicle of his words, thoughts and deeds, which is an image, apelike, of the larger sum and total of the acts, the thoughts and deeds of all men. Which we call history. What was, is, will be. And its secret design is Providence. Which we can come to know only by and through contraries and paradoxes.

  Intricate beyond comprehending, it speaks of a beautiful simplicity.

  Nothing we touch that we do not decorate in this age. We paint and plaster. We carve and shape wood and stone. We beat and twist metal, until it seems that all are as one, subject and servant to imagination and whims, of man, the maker. Imagining we imitate Creation in our manifold creations. And thereby do seem to celebrate the Imagination of God.

  But with this difference. Though we may take a raw limb of walnut and round it and polish it smooth and convert it, by carving, into a wonder of living emblems and faces, flowers and dolphins and nymphs and satyrs, still and withal it shall serve as a mere post to hold up a bed. And still and withal, whatever our art and ingenuity shall work upon it, it remains a piece of a walnut tree.

  Though a goldsmith takes gold and fashions it into stem and leaf and petal of flowers and with enamel so paints this bouquet that bees may come buzzing to bruise against it, still it is gold of such-and-such a purity and weight. Which selfsame qualities it possessed as a rock in the earth.

  Take another figure. Clothed in all his finery, a naked king is invisible. Even unto himself. Clothed only in bare flesh and hair, the anatomy of bones is unknown. But the body beneath clothes and the bones beneath flesh are always there. And after clothing has rotted and flesh in corruption has shredded away, there, intricate enough, yet simple, stands the design of the man who lived. And no robes he wears, royal or rogue’s, no form of flesh, clean or filthy, healthy or sick, can work a change upon that in most architecture.

  Just so, the layers of a man’s thought and deeds. Bodied forth, clothed as the times permit and require.

  See this as a satirical paradox of myself: how, youthful, I cast aside the contraries of my past like a pair of worn boots. Loved London (thus my life) for the newness and strangeness of it. For which reason and later for my own politic interests at Court, that is, for advancement and for the sake of the new, I became a patron of the old.

  All, merchants and great men alike, who were able, were building new with old stones torn up from their proper places to make the new.

  Against the grain of fashion was the scholarship of antiquarians. Those who, out of old bones and coins and broken pots and memory, would erect and so preserve, even as it vanished, a timeless edifice, the chronicles, surveys, and descriptions of this kingdom.

  In truth this was a new thing to be doing. Expedient also, for it served the policy of the Queen: to make a troubled kingdom see itself anew, one nation and not without pride.

  And therefore, surprising even myself, one day, years later, I found myself joining with old Bishop Parker in patronage of the new-formed society of fellowship among antiquarians. To meet with such as William Camden, Sir Robert Cotton, good John Stow and many others. To advance their cause.

  Even then, later, as I imagined myself a lover of all things new, here because the enterprise was new, I was bound over to the recovery and preservation of the old.

  And thus, paradoxically, returning in a disguise so clever and subtle I could not recognize myself in a mirror.

  To become again the same boy from Devon.

  Who, as he crossed London Bridge, imagined he discarded all past things for the new. A lightening that seemed no loss. Cast aside like the sack of a rag-and-bone man.

  That same sack becoming later a bag of gold.

  Now mark another turning, a new paradox:

  In the Tower of London, I myself became a proper explorer of history. To what purpose? Why, man, among others, to find keys to freedom, the freedom to make ventures, to set forth on new voyages, to restore my fortunes.

  Now see how the turning of the wheel may work. See how the design of a garden maze may be contrived to return a man where he began.

  Sailing to find El Dorado, I found my haven in Plymouth Harbor, f
irst port of farewell.

  And now voyages and ventures are of no more value to me than that sack of rags and bones. Myself rags and bones. And all the gold I looked for became a handful of dust.

  But now the dust of old books and manuscripts was—I see it clear and bitter now—dust of finest gold.…

  The boy on London Bridge, he saved a penny.

  For they had not yet been moved to the southern gatehouse tower, so that the first welcome would be, as it is now, a savage bouquet of shriveled, peeling, pickled, eyeless, shrinking heads, skulls of traitors and felons on the points of rusty pikes staring south at nothing. Saved himself the penny it would cost him now to rent the use of a spyglass and look closer.

  Slept light, waiting for daylight to come, in an inn called the Mitre, in Cheapside. Heard Bow Bells toll nine o’clock. Heard bells from St. Martin’s-le-Grand call curfew and the shutting of the city gates. Listened to music and singing, laughter and voices, and one wretch puking in the night, from below. Then hearing the calls of the watch, and bells, some near, some far and faint, marking the hours. Two giants came out of the clock at St. Dunstan’s and would waken any but a native-born citizen of London. And from far off in Westminster, from the clock tower of Edward I, Great Tom boomed royal solemnity.

  Rose early, ate a countryman’s breakfast, and waited, impatient, until the morning was half gone, for his kinsman, a scholar at the Inns of Court, to come and show the sights of London. His cousin elegantly dressed beneath a loose gown. And he more ashamed than before in his country-plain and -sturdy doublet and hose, his old-fashioned flat cap, his walking boots heavy as Irish brogues.

  Paid a warder too many pennies to see the sights of the Tower. Not imagining the leisure to see those things again.

  Next a walk along the thronging of Tower Street, East Cheap, Watling, west toward Ludgate and the loom of St. Paul’s. Walking brisk as they could in the crowds; for his cousin had small time to spend on this idleness. Pausing near the church of St. Swithin’s to show him the London Stone. From which stone, set by Romans, all distances from London are measured. The center, hub of the wheel of roads those Romans built.