Letters

by John Barth

  That is to say, there were three explosions: a tremendous one on the back road south from Port Robinson, where the truck carrying THE QUICK BROW group toward Port Colborne was about to discharge its first passenger (Comrade W) near Welland; a similarly tremendous one on the road north from Port Robinson, where the truck carrying FX JMPD V LAZY G toward St. Catherines was about to drop off Comrade F near Allanburg; and a third, only one-twelfth as great but sufficient nonetheless to distribute Andrew Cook V over a considerable radius, within sight of the locks at Port Robinson itself.

  And there are at least three explanations, (a) The detonation was an accident, caused by the coincidental transmission at 125 kc. of either an SOS from some distressed vessel in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, or any other message containing either an S or letters from each of the three groups (i.e., THEQUICKBROW, N, and FXJMPDVLAZYG). But there is no record of ships in distress in the canal area on that pleasant Thursday night or Friday morning. Coincidental transmission remains a possibility: a wireless operator just coming on watch, say, aboard any vessel near or in the canal, waking up his fingers with THE QUICK etc. My Tuscarora grandmother preferred this explanation.

  (b) The saboteurs were sabotaged, suicidally, by one of their number. This was my father’s theory: that by a fatal patriotic rebroadcast of Marconi’s first transatlantic message, say, or some sufficient three-letter combination, A.B.C. V martyred himself to the Allied war effort, whether because his anarchism recoiled at the mounting totalitarianism of the Bolsheviks (the Romanovs had been murdered just two months earlier), or because his anarchism had all along been a cover for infiltrating subversive groups. To the objection that suicide was unnecessary to foil the plot (one letter from each of the truck-borne groups—a T and a G, say—would have done the trick), my father would reply either that not to have blown himself up would have blown my grandfather’s cover, or, more seriously, that inasmuch as it had been necessary to sacrifice his wife’s brother Gadfly, Andrew V had felt morally constrained to sacrifice himself as well. In support of his argument he adduced the fact that his father had handed him, at the last moment, “for safekeeping” while he mined the lock, the old Breguet pocketwatch passed on to him by his mother Henrietta.

  But contemporary accounts of the event (I have read them all, especially since 1953, the “midpoint” of my own life, by when, alas, my father was eight years dead and unable to defend his theory against my new objections) maintain that the three explosions were separate not only in space but, slightly, in time, and while opinion on their exact sequence is less than unanimous, most auditors agree that the two big blasts preceded the smaller one by a little interval—boom boom, bang—and that the southerly boom was the earlier of the two. An ex-artillery officer at Port Robinson reported feeling “bracketed” by the booms and hit directly by the bang.

  I have thought about this, and conclude that we may rule out the SOS theory, coincidental or otherwise, except possibly as the third signal. Likewise the theory of self-sabotage by any member of the group except, I reluctantly admit, my grandfather. Not impossibly he did destroy his comrades and thus himself: the quickest signal would have been a simple dot (E) to wipe out the southbound twelve, followed by a dot-dash (A) to detonate the northbounders, and either the N (dash-dot) or the S (dot-dot-dot) to do for himself. Or he could have tapped out any of at least seven English words: BAN, CAN, HAS, RAN, TAN, WAN, WAS, etc.

  But I am struck by the reminiscence of an old Port Robinson telegrapher whom I interviewed on the subject some ten years ago. A religious man, he had been awakened by those blasts from dreams of a telegram from God, whose sender he recognized by the thunderous subscription of His initial. Awake, he forgot the text of the heavenly message (he was to spend the rest of his life vainly endeavoring to recover it, as I have tried in vain to recover the signal that blew my grandfather and his company to kingdom come), but he understood in immediate retrospect that the coded initial had been the blasts themselves. Boom boom bang: dash dash dot.

  In my late adolescence and early manhood, when I too underwent the filial rebellion our line is doomed to, I did not agree with what I took to be my father’s politics. Of this, more in a later letter, my last, which I shall write on the eve of the 51st anniversary of this catastrophe and the dawn of our Second 7-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. I am less certain now than I was in those brash days that both of the foregoing theories or classes of theories about the Port Robinson explosions were wrong: that the truth was (c) that my father, a U.S. Secret Service undercover agent, either sabotaged the whole Welland Canal plot himself from his station at the master transmitter (the only one known to be both tuned to the proper frequency and positioned unequivocally within range) or—as my son Henry Burlingame VII firmly believes and gently suggests—that when H.B. VI heard the first two explosions and realized or imagined that A.C. V had blown up both truckloads of bombers, including his beloved Uncle Gadfly Junior, in outraged grief he sent the parricidal letter.

  In whichever case, alone or between them, my father and grandfather monogrammed the Niagara Frontier visually with the apocalyptic Morse-code S: an aerial photograph would have shown the two large craters and the central smaller one as three dots, or suspension points… And acoustically they shook the heavens with the initial echoed down to me 35 years later by the Ontarian telegrapher’s recollection: the big G, not for God Almighty (with whom no Cook or Burlingame, whatever his other illusions, has ever troubled his head), but for the man who was to my father what Tecumseh and Pontiac were to my remoter ancestors: well-named Tuscarora, boom boom bang, Great-uncle Gadfly!

  We approach the end of the line, lengthy as our letters. The Tuscaroras were “originally” a North Carolinian tribe so preyed upon by the white settlers (who stole and enslaved their children) that after losing a war with them in 1711-13 the survivors fled north to Iroquois territory, and the Five Nations became Six. The Tuscarora War coincided with the great slave revolt of 1712 in New York, mentioned in Andrew Cook IV’s third letter and by him attributed to the instigation of Henry Burlingame III, the Bloodsworth Island conspirator. Many white colonials feared a general rising of confederated Indians and Negroes, who might at that juncture still have driven them back into the sea. This ancient dream or nightmare, which so haunts our Sot-Weed Factor, was my Great-uncle Gadfly Junior’s obsession (His Christian name was Gerald Bray; he was early given his father’s nickname after his agitations, in the remnants of Iroquois longhouse culture, for the cause of Indian nationalism generally and Iroquoian in particular; he later took the name officially and passed it on to his own son). A better student of history than my father, he argued for example that the Joseph Brant who signed away the ancient Mohawk territory in the Treaty of 1798 was either an impostor or a traitor, and that thus the treaty was as invalid as the one signed by Tecumseh’s rivals with William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, and countless others. The Mohawks should reclaim their valleys; the Oneidas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas their respective lands, from the Catskills and Adirondacks through the Finger Lakes to Erie and Ontario. Bridges, highways, and railroads should be obstructed. The moves in Congress to confer U.S. citizenship on reservation Indians should be resisted as co-option. Common cause should be made with W. E. B. Du Bois’s NAACP (conceived at Niagara Falls, Canada), with the Quebec separatists, with American anarchists, Bolsheviks, et cetera, to the end of establishing a sovereign free state for the oppressed and disaffected in white capitalist industrialist economic-royalist America.

  My grandfather admired and distrusted him; thought him a bit cracked, I believe, but valued him all the same both as Kyuhaha’s brother and thus his own, and as rallier of the apathetic Indians: his relation to Gadfly Junior was like Pontiac’s to the Delaware Prophet, or Tecumseh’s to his brother Tenskwatawa. What made Andrew most uneasy was exactly what most impressed my father as a youth: Gadfly’s extreme, even mystical totemism, or animal fetishism. In 1910, for example—the same year that the NAACP and the Boy Scouts of Ameri
ca were incorporated—Gadfly claimed to have conceived a child upon a wild Appaloosa mare in Cattaraugas Indian territory around Lake Cassadaga, near your Chautauqua. The following year he brought to the Grand Island Reservation a strange piebald infant whom he called his son by that union (a disturbed, unearthly boy, more like a bird or bat or bumblebee than a centaur colt, this “Gadfly III” was the queer older companion of my early youth when, after his orphaning, my parents took him in. His own child—whom they also briefly raised—was queerer yet.)

  My parents! With those fond, ineffectual, endearing intrigants I end this letter. My ancestors since the 17th Century have burdened their children with the confusion of alternate surnames from generation to generation: I was the first to be given two at once. Henry Cook Burlingame VI and Andrée Castine III, though utterly faithful and devoted to each other till the former’s death in July 1945, never got around to marriage: my father duly named me Andrew Burlingame Cook VI; my mother, as nonchalant about the famous Pattern as about other conventions, blithely christened me (in the French Catholic chapel at Castines Hundred) André Castine, and maintained that inasmuch as she was the sole surviving member of that branch of the family, I was the 5th baron of that name. I grew up bilingual as well as binomian, and peripatetic. Now we were in Germany, protesting with the Spartacus partisans the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; now in Massachusetts demonstrating on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti; now in England for the great general strike of May 1926; now in Maryland’s Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, “communizing” the CCC (the only pastoral interval in my youth: I was awakening to sex, literature, and history together, and to this day associate all three with marsh grass, wild geese, tidewater, the hum of mosquitoes); now hiding out back at Castines Hundred. They were not poor: the Cooks and Burlingames were never men of business, but the placid Barons Castine had invested prudently over the years in firms like Du Pont de Nemours; there was money for our traveling, for my educating—and for their organizing Communist party cells in the Canadian and U.S. heartland during the depression; for infiltrating the Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA Writers Project; for supporting the Lincoln Brigade and other Loyalist organizations during the Spanish Civil War…

  At least for ostensibly so organizing, infiltrating, supporting. For while it is clear that they played the Game of Governments, however ineffectively, to the top of their bent, it is less clear which side they were on. By the time I learned—at least decided, in 1953, after Mother’s death—that they had in fact been sly counterrevolutionaries all along, the revelation made no real difference to me, for I had also come to understand that the Second American Revolution was to be a matter, not of vulgar armed overthrow—by Minutemen, Sansculottes, Bolsheviki, or whatever—but of something quite different, more subtle, less melodramatic, more… revolutionary.

  But that, of course, is for another letter, which I will happily indite once I have provided you, in weeks to come, with the bones of my Marylandiad: the further adventures of Andrew Cook IV in and after the War of 1812. Till when, I have, sir, the honor of regarding myself as

  Your eager collaborator,

  A. B. Cook VI

  (dictated but not reread)

  P.S.: As to the orthographical proximity of your Chautauqua and my Chautaugua: The Algonkin language was spoken in its sundry dialects by Indians from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi and as far south as Tennessee and Cape Hatteras, and like all the Indian languages it was very approximately spelled by our forefathers. The word in question is said to mean “bag (or pack) tied in the middle.” Chautauqua Lake was so named obviously from its division into upper and lower moieties at the narrows now traversed by the Bemus Point—Stow Ferry, which I hope it will be your good fortune never to see replaced by a bridge. Chautaugua Road, where this will be typed for immediate posting to you at Chautauqua Lake, is near the similar narrows of Chesapeake Bay (now regrettably spanned at the old ferry-crossing, as you know, and about to be second-spanned, alas), which divides this noble water into an Upper and a Lower Chesapeake. The scale is larger, but the geographical state of affairs is similar enough for the metaphor-loving Algonquins, wouldn’t you say?

  ABC/mb: 4 encl

  E: Jerome Bray to his parents and foster parents. His betrayal by Merope Bernstein. His revenge and despair.

  Jerome Bonaparte Bray

  General Delivery

  Lily Dale NY 14752

  June 17 1969

  Mr & Mrs Gerald Bray a.k.a. Gadblank III

  c/o Ranger & Mme H C Burlingame VI

  Backwater National Wildlife Refuge

  Dorchester County Maryland

  Dearest Parents & Foster Parents

  Every RESET has a RESET Back where we started All shall be ill Jack shant have Jill the man shant have his mare again and naught will be well Not bad how about a spot of punctuation, that’s better. Continue to delete all references to blank, very good, the mails aren’t safe, but don’t reset every time you see a pattern, or these letters will be a meaningless jumble of you-know-whats, here we go.

  Dear Mother and Father and Foster Ditto it is not easy to write this letter. Are having a terrible time. Wish you were here. Why have you forsaken us, you too, like H.M. II a.k.a. G. III, Todd Andrews, Andrews Mack, and bad Merope Bernstein a.k.a. Margana y Fael, anti-Bonapartists all? Old Ranger B., dear Madame: Are you still at sweet Backwater or flown to your reward? Do you recall this orphan of the storm, that you rescued from his bulrush basket and raised up in the marsh as though he were yours despite his bad foot? Whose mother was a royal virgin whose father RESET Whose maternal grandfather RESET Please forward. Have you learned in the evening of your lives what you never knew in the morn of ours: where our true Mommy & Daddy are, and why they don’t write clearer letters? Please forward.

  Dear parents: It is not easy to RESET Your long message to us of April 1 was duly printed out and delivered by LILYVAC, but we cannot find the key to that treasure, and we despair. Numbed by your numbers, stung like fallen Bellerophon, we wander far from the paths of men, devouring our own soul. The midpoint of our life approaches, unhappy birthday, ditto the Phi-point of our 5-Year Plan, .618 etc., and we are nowhere. The Tidewater Foundation has rejected us; they shall pay. Our letters go unanswered; our enemies rejoice. Year T (a.k.a. V) ends; soon it will be time to mate. With whom, Ma? NOT will not come to ES! Our business will go unfinished ha RESET Oh stop.

  Themurah a.k.a. anagrammatical transposition is all humblank. Everything comes out scrambled after MARGANAYFAEL, leafy anagram for bad Margana y Flae, who bit us bye-bye on May 18, she shall RESET It was the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation, 1st Sunday after Ascension, mild & cloudy, ☿ stationary in Right Ascension, ☍♆☉, hear the buzzing of the blanks in the apple trees, Apollo-10 launched, will land on USS Blank, etc. The bad news had just arrived from the Tidewater Foundation; we were RESET Drove down to Chautauqua in our VW Blank to share our sorrow with Margana y Rodriguez y Thelma y Irving, loyal comrades so we thought, with the weariness that only true revolutionary lovers Forget it. We did not knock; strode into their pad in the old St. Elret Hotel on the institution grounds for the comradely consolation that only RESET It was but May, Ma, and they were mating! In hemp smoke so thick it brought tears to our eye of newt! Irving with Thelma! Rodriguez with my Margana!

  Look who here, said Thelma: it old Numbers. I can explain, Jer, said Margana. What’s to explain? Rodriguez asked rhetorically: Everybody must make the revolution in his/her et cetera heh heh. We’re like practicing up for the Mating Flight, joshed Irving; pull up some smoke and join us. He not joining me, declared Thelma; he give me the heeb-jeebs. Jerome, Margana said, it’s time I told you. Tell shmell, sniffed Rodriguez; he’s got eyes. What big ones, Irving chaffed. Cool it, hombres, urged Margana; remember what I said. Now look here, Jer, these spray guns aren’t what you think, okay? she went on (for while numbly regarding them we had not failed to notice the hideous weapons deployed about their quarters); we ripped off some herbicide f
rom the county agent’s office, right? Our plan is to defoliate the Ivy League during their commencement exercises. Think what you please, Jerry; it’s the truth. And Roddy and I, well, we’re lovers: true revolutionary RESET Quick Henry, cried Thelma as we angrily opened our cape, the Flit! Jesus H. Keerist, expostulated Irv, put that thing away, man!

  They flew for the exits: perfidious Margana alone stood her ground, spray gun in hand. Wicked, beautiful le Fay! Abdomen we so prized, that was to have taken our seed come August to hatch a brood of Conquerors! We hefted our barb; her courage failed, with a squeal she flung the spray gun at us and turned to flee, that’s F-L-E-RESET She deserved to die, Da, but we but numbed her: little shot in the tail to teach her a lesson and keep Rodriguez out of there till after mating season. Her friends abandoned her as she’d abandoned us, afraid either to come to her aid or to call the police lest they be burst for Illegal Possession. We ourself telephoned the Chautauqua Infirmary, gave the St. Elret number, reported a young female apparently O.D.‘d on some narcotic.

  Faithless Merope! Margana y Blank! We kissed her numb face; we covered her numb and swiftly swelling shame; we retracted our number, rearranged ourself, waited with her till we heard the ambulance before slipping out through the screen and making a blankline home. All the way weeping and wondering, Now who’ll unscramble things? Who’ll feed the goats for fudge and slaughter? Who’ll take delivery in the rear, as wanton Merope was wont, come mating season? Perfidious M y F, would thou wert a blank preserved in amber! Yet never return to Lily Dale: we will not so spare you a 2nd time.

  That was last month. Alone since with these senseless numbers, as Maimonides says that YHWH RESET We see now the scale of our betrayal. Agents of you-know-whom, the lot of them, and Merope Bernstein was their tool! The foundation was their creature; they supported us only to learn and steal and neutralize our plans; they put the blanks in LILYVAC’s program, saw to it our spring work period was wasted in vain unscrambling. This is no leafy anagram at all!