Читать книгу An Embarrassment of Riches - James Howard Kunstler - Страница 10

On April 13, 1803, Uncle and I set out across the budding Maryland countryside north to Pennsylvania; there struck the Lancaster Pike, traversed the Allegheny Mountains by coach and upon foot, and arrived in the booming town of Pittsburgh astride its three rivers on April 19.

There we set about procuring all the necessaries for our long trip, beginning with the most important item: a boat. The crafts typical of the great inland rivers of that day were quite different from the graceful sailing ships and boats of my coastal home. In general, these river craft comprised a class of clumsy arks. One type was the ubiquitous flatboat, a sort of floating box of great cargo capacity, built in a slapdash manner—for these were strictly one-way vessels, meant to drift downstream only and then be broken apart at the final destination. But they were cheap and much favored by settlers headed down the Ohio Valley. Larger flatboats, called broadhorns or Kentucky or New Orleans boats, carried commercial loads, and we saw some behemoths as long as 125 feet, with sweeps, or steering oars, cut from entire trees.

The boat we required, and engaged to be built, was another popular craft, called a keelboat. With a curving hull and pointed bow and stern, the keelboat could be poled upstream in a slow current or hauled from the bank by means of a rope or cordelle. It was more maneuverable than any kind of flatboat—though no match for the crudest Long Island fisherman’s dory—but its term of service was expected to exceed a mere one-way float.

Now there were many persons at Pittsburgh whose business was the accommodation of strangers descending the river. Uncle and I spent two full days haunting the boatyards. The prices, we learned, were uniform, being $1.25 per running foot for a flatboat and $3.00 PRF for a keelboat. The smallest keelboat any builder would undertake was a twenty-five-footer. While such a sized boat answered our needs, simple arithmetic shows that the cost would run to $75, or three quarters of our entire expeditionary budget. (It had already cost us $12 in coach fares to reach Pittsburgh, while our lodging and board ran 25 cents each per day). Uncle was not a rich man, but nor was he a poor one, and it became clear that he would have to underwrite himself the partial cost of this expedition. It galled him, but to dispose of the matter he made up his mind that it were the same as his previous botanical excursions, paid out of his own pocket, and that would be the end of it. In fact, he had brought another $100 in gold of his personal funds, whilst I had $7.12 of my own—or should I say of Papa’s.

This decision reached, we ordered just such a keelboat as I have described at the yard of Charles Axley & Sons; and in the five days required for its construction, we set about procuring all the other necessaries for our journey: biscuit, flour, meal, bacon, sugar, molasses, two Pennsylvania rifles, two muskets, a fowling gun, four pistols, a cask of Monongahela whiskey, blankets, boots, specimen jars (Uncle had a standing contract with Cheatham, the London apothecary, to supply them specimens of herbs, roots, berries, et cetera), and last we laid in an assortment of gewgaws to mollify the savages we expected to meet upon our unknown way.

The great day of our departure came. (For some reason, I was surprised that all the inhabitants of Pittsburgh did not drop their business, declare the occasion a holiday, and see us off from the quay with trumpets and waving handkerchiefs.) We shoved off into the current with no more audience than Charles Axley, Boatwright, and his two assistants. Even so, my heart, like the magnificent river, was full to o’erflowing.

With both Uncle and I at the sweeps, our solid little craft bobbed on the swollen Ohio past the small whitewashed towns downstream and a teeming of other river craft, including many small skiffs and gundalows. Collisions threatened at every turn, and learning to maneuver the bulky keelboat was an adventure in itself. Yet everyone we passed, even those we almost plowed over or banged into, was filled with the same bursting exuberance as we, and not a man failed to cry out, “where are ye bound for, friends?” to which we replied, with equal zest, “the Unknown!”

Our rate of speed averaged three miles to the hour. Toward afternoon, the river towns grew sparser, giving way to desultory farmsteads, some of them very handsome and prosperous. It was, we quickly learned, a task of infernal vigilance keeping to the channel and avoiding snags. For with the spring flood, dangerous debris littered the water like bones in a chowder. Monstrous tree trunks rolled up from the roiling depths like sea serpents of the vasty deep. Almost everywhere, smaller limbs stuck out of the water like the spars of a thousand sunken yawls. Often they denoted submerged islands that would rise above water in midsummer and bloom with wild flowers. Frequently we felt our hull scrape ominously against them. Uncle and I would glance anxiously across the cabin roof from our posts at the sweeps, expecting imminent calamity. Other times we heard a sinister musical creaking as a submerged snag bent and gave way under the force of our heavy keel.

By sunset that first day, we rounded the wan little hamlet of Monaca at the first big bend of the Ohio, and hove to shore off the northern bank in a quiet eddy below the outlet of the Beaver River. Here we anchored, waded to shore, and made fast our craft between two stout chestnut trees. Uncle remained ashore to botanize, whilst I set about securing us a supper. Not less than a minute after I had flung a salt-pork-baited hook over the side did my line tauten with such a jerk as almost fetched me headlong over the gunwale. I had caught many a sea bass in the waters off my home, and even sharks, but none fought like the monster here on my line. For half an hour the combat was joined, I running all around our little deck as the invisible brute sounded ’neath the hull. My palms, already a mass of blisters from a day at the sweeps, ran red with blood. At last my opponent gave up his struggle and I hauled him up from the muddy netherworld like a great sodden timber. So affrighted was I to see his gaping, bewhiskered jaws that I quick snatched a pistol and beat him about the head as we would club a shark back home to ensure his subjugation. I was another quarter hour hoisting him aboard. He proved to be not any ravening shark, of course, but a superlative catfish (Ictalurus furcatus) as big as a calf. I soon had him skinned and filleted—flinging the offals to a flotilla of honking grebes (Podilymbus podiceps). I fired the iron brazier on our foredeck, and by the time Uncle returned with his pouchful of specimens, our supper was aromatically roasting.

“Look, Sammy!” he exclaimed, producing in one hand a little yellow blossom, and in the other a pink. “A new species of Potentilla! And Corydalis too!”

“Hurrah!” I congratulated him. My zest for things botanical never was the equal of Uncle’s, but I was happy for his jubilation. To him, the most trifling weed took on heroic grandeur, particularly when he thought himself to be its discoverer.

“Barely one full day outbound, and already are we two species richer. Why, I feel like a man at large in El Dorado, gold everywhere underfoot! Does thee realize, nephew, that at this rate we might find virtually hundreds of new species? What—halloo! Why, hurrah for thee, boy! What succulent is this a’roasting?”

“’Tis a catfish, Uncle.”

“And where didst thee get him?”

“Not at market, I assure you, sir.”

“O, Sammy, ’tis a fine delicacy! And a mild evening, and a glorious end on our first day abroad. Let’s to the trenchers, eh? My backbone is a’touching my belly!”

And so did we pass our first night aboard the keelboat, by mutual consent named Megatherium (for its massive, lumbering beauty as much as its being the raison d’être of our expedition). Picking our teeth after the feast, we listened to the evening song of the Ohio: waterfowls quacking in the reeds, the millionfold chorus of peeping froglets, the horned owl hooting in the nearby forest, and the plangent cries of wolves ranging distantly in the hills beyond the river valley. Beyond the embers of our little brazier teemed a billion beings, proclaiming themselves in as many notes and tunes. In a little while, the moon rose above the eastering hills, lustrous, lucent with mystery. Nighthawks swerved against the glowing disc.

“Well,” said I to hear a human voice amid all these animal croakings, quacking, howlings, wingings, and hootings, “’tisn’t like home, is it, Uncle?”

“Thee will get used to it, Sammy,” Uncle said. “Hear that wolf pack yonder?”

“Yes.” I drew my blanket up beneath my chin. My head rested upon a sack of Pennsylvania cornmeal. “Do you think we shall find him, Uncle?”

“Him…?”

“Megatherium.”

He chortled and sighed. “Perhaps. ’Tis a big, empty continent, my boy.”

“It does not sound empty to me, Uncle,” I shuddered. He remained silent. “How long do you think our search shall require?”

“’Tis hard to say. When we reach Indian country we shall inquire of the savages thereabouts and perhaps employ a gang to get our specimen. Why, ’pon my ramble to the Niagara, I found the Tuscaroras very helpful at the price of a few trinkets.”

“Are you not afraid in a wild country, Uncle?”

“’Tis an acquired taste, I suppose—but O how savory when once acquired. Some of the happiest days of my life were those summer weeks in Labrador, alone amongst the puffins and the bears.”

“I would have gone mad with loneliness.”

“I was never idle for a moment; I never stopped to think about it.”

“It is a thing beyond my power to comprehend.”

“Perhaps thee will learn to comprehend it in the weeks ahead.”

My belly tightened. A shooting star etched a trail across the blue-black dome of sky.

“Look,” he said.

“Another angel, fallen from grace” said I. “How is it we never find them lying where they fall, Uncle? Broken-winged like sparrows in the road.”

“They fall through the earth, Sammy,” Uncle replied in all earnestness. “To the bad place.”

“Through the earth? Clear through to the other side?”

“Of course not.”

“To the center then? Is that where hell is located?”

“’Tis an ether of the spirit. Of mind.”

“And heaven?”

“Likewise.”

“And God?”

“Yes …?”

“Where does he dwell?”

“Why, everywhere.”

“I was taught that he dwelt in heaven.”

“Had thy father kept his Quaker faith, thee would have learned where God doth dwell and how.”

“Perhaps the earth is an ether of spirit. How do you know you are not dreaming right now?”

“Because I hear thy lips flapping.”

“How do you know you’re not dreaming it?”

“Enough, thou atheist clod. Goodnight.”

Soon he was snoring. I lay beneath my blanket long into that fiercely beautiful night, listening to the cries of beasts and the water gently laving our boat. At length I too succumbed to slumber and dreamed of home; but someone in the dream called it heaven, and I believed it was.

For the next week, we floated downstream in perfect weather, pausing where we pleased to make botanical forays on shore, as carefree as two runaway boys off on a lark. We soon “got the hang” of steering our boat with the sweeps, though practice did not improve its inherent clumsiness as a craft. My blisters became calluses. My face and hands turned brown in the sunshine. My back grew strong.

The settlements were sparse after Wheeling, but it was exciting to think that the far bank was the half-wild state of Ohio, and we landed on its shore so I could say I had been there. The individual farmsteads along the shore grew likewise fewer and farther between, while the houses took on a more rough-hewn character and their fields were still full of stumps. Many long stretches of the river now contained no signs of settlement at all, but pale columns of smoke rose here and there from the forest’s depth, and who could say whether they issued from a pioneer’s cabin or an Indian’s wigwam?

As the days wore on, the sun’s strong rays brought forth all the furled foliage of the hardwoods and many a bright spring blossom. Deer disported along the banks, heron and other great fisher-birds skimmed the silvery surface for glittering fish. Often we saw bears grubbing at the water’s edge. Sometimes the strange illusion struck me that our boat was still while all the world went by in slow and stately motion. Time itself no longer reigned as tyrant to a workaday world. It became water, light, wing, and fin, an ether of the spirit, of mind.

I awoke on deck one morning to the unpleasing sensation of raindrops pelting my face. A chill gripped the air, my breath issued in steamy huffs, while a dreary mist blanketed the river, obscuring the shore not twenty yards from our anchorage. Even the ever-teeming creatures of the riparian world lay silent and concealed in their holes, nests, or dens. I set about kindling a fire in our brazier, hoping to make a pot of cornmeal porridge. But as soon as I arranged my tinder and struck my flint, the main deluge commenced as though a million water buckets were overturned at once. We rushed down the companionway into the hold. It was less a cabin than a mere cargo bin. For the rest of the day, we stayed inside, I writing in my journal and reading from our copy of The Navigator, that indispensable guidebook of the Ohio River traveler, while Uncle made botanical notes and snoozed. Night turned mere gloom to oppression. We supped on soggy biscuits. I prayed for a return to sunshine and fell asleep.

In the morning it was still raining.

“That’s it. I’ll not spend another day in here,” quoth Uncle, at his rope’s end. We cut an extra blanket in half, poked holes in the center of each half, rubbed them with lard, and thus contrived two foul-weather capes. Then we went outside, cast off from the mooring, and hove out into the current. The rain persisted hour after hour. By noon I was numb. We were about to give up for the day and find another place to tie up when we were accosted from the gray distance by a family signaling distress off the tip of an island up ahead. As we closed on them, we descried three figures. A man in a dark coat stood waving a lantern that shone brightly in the gloom. A woman stood at his side in wind-blown skirts and bonnet. Clutched to her leg was a small figure, their child. Soon we could see that they were all clinging to the slanted poop deck of a wrecked flatboat lodge [O1]on a sand shoal far enough off the island’s head as to place in peril someone ignorant of the art of swimming. We made straight for these stranded unfortunates, their cries of “help!” ringing in our ears above the wind.

It was not until our own boat lodged upon that same shoal with a groan of creaking timbers that I noted the true condition of their craft: it was, in fact, an ancient derelict, its half-swamped hull bereft of paint, its gunwales moss-encrusted, and even a few saplings sprouting from its roofless cabin. It was as riddled with worm holes as a Switzer cheese. Thus, it had lain upon this shoal for several years at least.

“Heave out the anchor, Sammy!” Uncle cried through the rising gale.

“We are already aground,” I cried back.

Just then, Megatherium lurched forward and struck the hull of the derelict. Trembling with cold and terror, I heaved out the anchor. The three figures remained in view. Moments later they made for our abutting boat, and with an avidity strange in ones seeming to have suffered long exposure to the elements. The “father” seized Uncle by his greasy rain-cloak. The man was a colossus, looming two feet in height above Uncle. He wore an old cocked hat secured to his head with a filthy scarf tied under his great knob of a chin. The two others made for me, the “wife” seizing my throat and the “child” my ankles. I hurtled backward down the companionway into the hold and struck my head on something hard.

When I regained consciousness minutes later, Uncle and I were being bound by our attackers. It was then I saw, in the obscurity of the place, that the “child” was no such thing, but an odious black-eyed dwarf with a nose so flat and oft-broken that it resembled an ape’s. Upon his head was a battered tin hat of the sort worn by drummer boys in the War of Independence. The “wife” finished her knots and looked up ’neath her soiled bonnet. She was the proprietress of an harelip so frightful that she might have been described by a zoologist as being a species distinct from humankind. To make matters worse, she smiled and then attempted speech. But whatever she said it is lost to posterity, for I heard only a resonant honk punctuated by whistling, flapping noises—the sound a goose might make if it could play upon a pennywhistle. The dwarf laughed, howling like a fyce.

“Sammy,” Uncle said in a calm tone while the storm shrieked outside and the three horrible faces pressed in upon us like so many ghouls in a midnight churchyard, “I am afraid we have fallen into the company of villains.”

Goliath untied the filthy rag of a scarf and doffed his tricorn with a flourish.

“Captain Melancton Bilbo et famille at your service, gentlemen,” he said.

His breath was so foul, like unto the rectified essence of all the swine yards ever in creation, that I fell into a swoon.

When I returned once again to lucidity, Uncle was hurling objurgations at our captors whilst they rifled our supplies.

“Mongrels! Caitiffs! Execrable filth! Thou stools of Pluto …!”

“’Tis one of the blind bargains of our honorable profession, Neddy,” Captain Bilbo observed to the dwarf, “that we excite the poetical in those with whom, however briefly, we form an acquaintance.”

“… carrion beetles! Blowflies!”

“I like a man who ain’t afraid to hoist an opinion,” Bilbo went on. “We are become already a nation of suck-ups and sycophants.”

“Worthless dregs—!”

“Yes, even that, sir. But I have high hopes, as I know we all do, for the future of democracy and our national character. What have you found there, Neddy?”

The repulsive dwarf was emitting sharp cries of excitement, not unlike those of a barking spaniel. Bilbo reached for the wretch’s shirtcollar with his skillet-sized hands and spun him ’round.

“Why, you lucky little fellow! If it ain’t a box of chocolate filberts!”

“Villain, those are mine!” I exclaimed.

“You would begrudge the poor, misbegotten lad an instant of happiness in a life fraught with heartache and tribulation?” Bilbo rebuked me, then slapped the mongrel resoundingly beside the head, knocking his tin hat askew. “Share them with Bessie, now. Don’t be a little piggy.”

The harelip plunged both hands into the box and crammed the hideous aperture in the center of her face with the sweetmeats. Outside, the gale howled like a chorus of demons. Bilbo resumed his ransacking of the forward compartment.

“What are these?” he asked, shoving backward the crate of cork-stoppered glass jars.

“Specimen containers, thou plundering maggot. Careful!”

“Hmmmm. What a fine chest—hold! Why, split my windpipe! What’s this? A cask!”

Bilbo seized the oak barrel and dislodged it from its niche among the other stores. So prodigious was his physical strength that he lifted the thing—which must have weighed upward of an hundred pounds—as easily as a normal man might take up a firkin of butter. Then, using his dagger and pistol butt as the bungstarter, he pounded a hole in the barrel end.

“By the great horn spoon!” he cried. “Whiskey!”

At this juncture, the brigandage of these scum was at once suspended whilst all three attended to the providential cask, Bilbo sipping with great sighs of satisfaction from a specimen jar, held as a jigger, daintily, between thumb and forefinger. So intent were they upon their guzzling that in less than half an hour the trio was dead drunk and asleep at our bound ankles. Struggle as we might, though, we did not succeed in escaping our bonds, and night soon engulfed us like a very mantle of doom. The darkness, the wailing storm, the drunken snores and stink of our captors, the creaking and groaning of our stranded hull straining against the relentless current of the storm-swollen river, all combined to produce the direst anxiety.

“O, Uncle,” I sobbed. “They will murder us! We are dead men! O, God—”

“Stop thy blubbering, Sammy,” he replied firmly, and I tried to stop. “When they come to their senses, I shall explain to this miscreant Bilbo—who shows signs of being a Republican ardent—that we are agents of President Jefferson.”

“These are pirates, Uncle. They don’t give a damn about Mr. Jefferson.”

“I don’t know—he sounded patriotic to me. At worst, I think, we shall be robbed of our expeditionary necessaries.”

“How could we continue without rifles? Without powder, blankets, or food?”

“Sammy, in my sojourn to Labrador misfortune also deprived me of….” And Uncle began a long, harrowing tale of miraculous reprieve from the jaws of death. Meanwhile, one of the loose specimen jars rolled back and forth across the cabin floor as the hull rocked in the current. As the best ideas often do, one now flared in my imagination like a rocket in the dark night above a storm-tossed sea.

“Uncle … Uncle!” I interrupted him, growing more excited by the second. “I have a plan!”

I woke with a start. Sunlight blazed down the hatch like the yellow-hot tip of a torturer’s brand. I remembered at once where I was, and our predicament. Uncle’s eyes were bloodshot with sleeplessness. At our feet snored the contemptible scoundrel Bilbo and his odious accomplices.

“Pssst, Sammy,” Uncle whispered and presented his back to me. “Try if thee can gnaw through these bindings.”

No sooner had I leaned forward than our oppressor-in-chief stirred, issuing first a belch, then a fart, each in its own way so noxiously fetid that they called to mind the everlasting miasmas of hell. It also had the effect of rousing from his stupor the dwarf, Neddy. The harelip, Bessie, lay upon her back against a mealsack, her unique mouth parts issuing a not unmusical whistle with every exhalation.

“Don’t forget the plan!” I reminded Uncle of the scheme I had proposed before dawn. “From now on I shall address you as ‘brother.’ You shall answer only to ‘brother.’”

The villainous trio verged upon awakening.

“Sshhh. He rises….”

Bilbo’s left eyelid rolled up like a shade jerked open in the window of a ruined, vermin-infested house. The white of that organ was jaundiced and reticulated with angry red veins. The pupil within the mud-colored iris dilated and contracted as though it were utterly unable to adjust to the light. Bilbo lifted his massive, grizzled head. A terrible groan rumbled out of his powdery, cracked lips and resounded in the cramped cabin. Moments later he was crawling up the steps of the companionway out onto the deck, and we could hear a vertiable Niagara as he urinated over the gunwale. He returned soon after, staggered back into the cabin and poured himself a specimen jar of the Monongahela. This he consumed, tremblingly, with the reverence of a long-sick sufferer for a potent curative. He settled briefly upon his haunches while the medicine took effect, then looked up at us, smiled dreamily, and heaved a great sigh of relief.

“Gentlemen,” he growled. “I am my gay old self again.” And so saying, he fetched the dwarf a powerful slap on the hindquarters. “Up Neddy! Up my boy! A glorious new day beckons. There is work to be done, guests to entertain. Up, I say!”

The dwarf sat up and rubbed his eyes.

“That’s a good lad,” Bilbo trilled and shook the harelip’s leg. “Wake to the lark’s song, my darling daughter,” he roused her musically.

“Daughter…?” muttered I.

“Ain’t she a prize, though?” Bilbo declared, not facetiously but with the true, blind admiration of a parent for its offspring. “She shall make some lucky fellow very happy, my Bess will. Don’t be misled, young fellow. Though our manner of living has, perforce, fallen upon the impecunious, we were not always so, will not always be. The day will come when I shall see my Bessie dressed in Paris silks. Later I shall have her recite for us.”

“She recites?” said I in disbelief.

“Most winningly, I assure you, sir. But we fall a’prattling, my hearties. Up, up, I say,” Bilbo enjoined us, unsheathing his dagger and cutting, at last, our painful bonds. “For we must get the boat ’round the back of the island ’fore someone else chances along—”

“Thou abominable bandit,” Uncle spat.

“Must we have these maledictions?”

“Thou consummate, worthless scum!”

At this, Bilbo rapped Uncle smartly upon the crown with a heavy ring of Spanish silver.

“Ooooooch!” cried Uncle and kicked Bilbo soundly upon the shin.

“Aiyeee!” howled Bilbo, and the next thing I knew, Neddy was upon Uncle, all flashing teeth and slaver. Bilbo importuned the dwarf to stop while Bessie honked shrilly in the general melee. At last, all combatants ceased as Bilbo bellowed out the command to desist. Afterward, he held the two sides of his head as though they might split apart.

“A dram, my little apple,” he murmured. The harelip poured him a jar and he downed it, then groaned. “That’s better.” He squinched his eyes in obvious pain. “We get to [O2]little news of the day here in … the country. Please do not force me to take measures that you would (ahem) … not live to see me regret,” he concluded, and his meaning was inescapable.

For the next several hours we were kept busy transferring our vital supplies from the keelboat to shore. To obviate any question of escape, Bilbo had Uncle (“Brother,” I called him) and I bound to each other, my right wrist to his left and ditto our ankles, which permitted us to labor in an awkward manner.

When we had unloaded Megatherium, she was light enough to raise off her shoal. Bilbo ran lines off her bow and stern and secured them to a pair of sturdy oaks ashore. Then, working the trunk of a young beech tree into the plaint sand beneath her keel, Bilbo managed to lever her off the shoal. It was a procedure with which he clearly enjoyed prior experience.

Finally, all five of us manned the lines and hauled the boat through the silty shallows around the head of the Island and down the lee shore to a small cove. It was the dwarf’s misfortune to have to labor in water up to his neck. To my shame, I could not help noticing the full figure of the otherwise frightful Bessie. From the neck up she was a monster; but from the shoulders down she was an outstanding specimen of the young female of her species. My eyes were hopelessly riveted to the sight of those fleshy orbs clingingly revealed inside the wet fabric of her shabby calico dress.

Our craft was anchored in the little cove alongside a flatboat of recent vintage. We were forced to return to the head of the island and commence portaging our supplies and equipments, their booty, that is to say, down a quarter-mile-long path to the pirate’s lair, this lair being a most singular habitation.

The little cottage in its sunny glade of oak and walnut was constructed entirely from the timbers and planks of abducted river craft. Here, for instance, in place of a shutter, was the transom of a flatboat, its very name, Plain Jane, visible in faded yellow paint. In place of posts supporting the modest portico were the lateen masts of an half dozen scuttled gundalows, the cleats and running tackle brazenly in place as though they were objects of decoration. The motley clapboards, some red, some green, some white-washed, others varnished or weathered gray, were salvaged from the bulwarks of captured prizes and bore the appellations of their plundered namesakes: the Goforth, the Livonia, the Westering Star, and the pathetic Child of Destiny. The vision of a plank inscribed Megatherium nailed up amongst them filled me with gall.

But I was also struck by the undeniably charming aspect of this dwelling in the wilderness. Whatever their barbarity, swinishness, or habits of turpitude, one could not help but admire the domestic art evinced by the little cottage. In its dooryard grew a profusion of wild flowers—yellow trout lilies (Erythronium americanum), little white spring-beauties (Claytonia virginica), lovely wood sorrel (Oxalis montana), trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens), red lousewort (Pedicularis canadensis), scarlet columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), cranesbill (Geranium maculatum), while three kinds of phlox (glaberrima, pilosa, maculate) bloomed in the window boxes. Violet-green bank swallows (Riparia riparia) swerved in the afternoon sunlight. Deep in the island’s woods, the solitary thrush (Hylocichla guttata) lifted his flutelike song. The path to the door was cobbled with flat rocks. Altogether the habitation seemed hardly the den of murderous rascals it was, but the abode of any earnest and humble folk as might be found in the countryside of Suffolk County, New York.

“Look, brother,” said I to Uncle, “a new species of larkspur.”

“Hmmmph,” Uncle replied.

We followed Bilbo up the path. He approached the front door gingerly, then crept to the side, stooped down, and peeked around the paneless window casement.

“Indians,” he explained with a rueful grin. “One can never be too careful in this neck o’the woods. I always fasten a blade of grass twixt the door and jamb. If it’s broke, one had better be ready for jack-in-the-box.”

“When were you last molested by redskins?” I inquired, more to ingratiate ourselves with this ruffian than gain an answer.

“One invasion per week is the usual. We are dispatching the brutes like so many wasps in the pantry. Ain’t that right, Neddy?”

“Rowf, rowf,” the dwarf said.

“Gentlemen,” Bilbo said, removing his hat and holding open the door, “welcome to our snug harbor.”

We entered. The cottage was as pleasant inside as it was charming without. The furnishings were of surprising gentility, though all stolen, no doubt. The plank floor was covered by an handsome Baghdad rug. A cherrywood breakfront was well stocked with Delft and pewter wares. A stuffed lynx, mounted upon a birch log, snarled beside a ticking clock on the mantelpiece. On the walls were several paintings of the pastoral kind (cows, windmills, et cetera), and a portrait of a lady in dress fashionable before the revolution. There was even a library of an half dozen books on a sidetable; among them, Tristram Shandy, Robinson Crusoe, and The Annual Report of Litchfield County, Connecticut; these also, doubtless, the purloined effects of hapless settlers. At each end of the cottage’s interior was a sleeping loft, a bedstead of mahogany visible in one and of brass in the other.

Of our own pilfered valuables, Captain Bilbo brought in the whiskey cask first, set it in the log bin to the left of the hearth, and stood back admiringly.

“Looks just like the old Fraunces Tavern,” he observed, then filled three pewter cups with whiskey and placed them on the cherrywood dining table. “Have a drink, my hearties. It’ll drive the chill off.”

I was, indeed, shivering, and reached for a cup.

“Sammy!” Uncle remonstrated me.

“No point in catching pneumonia … brother,” I replied and downed the liquor.

“That’s the spirit, lad,” Bilbo toasted me and then stooped to charge the fireplace. “Go on, get out of those wet clothes. Bessie shall find you something warm and dry.”

I glanced over at Bilbo’s daughter. She smiled, and a smile on such a face as hers is a thing one does not soon forget.

“If thee intends to put a bullet ’twixt mine ears, then thee might as well deliver it now,” Uncle declared.

“There we go, my lambs,” Bilbo ignored Uncle’s remark and stood back from the hearth, where a cheerful fire now blazed. He excused himself momentarily and retired to his loft above to change his own wet clothes. Bessie rummaged through an old trunk across the parlor. Neddy sat upon his haunches by the fire and growled evilly.

“For Godsake, play along, Uncle!” I implored him. “Think of the plan!”

“Thy plan is a farrago,” Uncle whispered back.

The ladder creaked and Bilbo descended from above. He was caparisoned now in a tattered but elaborate red silk dressing robe complete with mink collar and cuffs. Upon the lapels were embroidered two snorting griffons. Bessie soon returned with a pair of kersey nightshirts and two robes, one of bearskin, the other of buffalo. Bilbo suddenly produced a bone-handled carving knife. Uncle and I both gasped, but the hulking pirate merely leaned forward and cut our bonds at the wrists and ankles.

“Go on,” the brute said. “Out of your wet things!”

We changed into the scratchy woolens without further protest. Bessie could be heard gurgling and whistling behind our backs.

“There now, isn’t that better?” Bilbo said when we were done, and held out the pewter cup to Uncle. “Take it,” he said genially. Uncle pursed his lips and refused. “Take it!” Bilbo roared. Uncle seized the cup and imbibed the whiskey.

“Satisfied?” he asked Bilbo.

“Never,” Bilbo replied with a wry grin. “But life is too short to be squandered in carping, right Neddy?”

“Yap yap,” the dwarf agreed.

“Why don’t you go out and procure us a supper worthy of this splendid company, my boy,” Bilbo swatted the little mongrel on the hindquarters and he scampered eagerly out the door. Our cups were refilled and we were adjured to join our host at the fireside, Uncle and I in a wooden settle and Bilbo in a scuffed, padded armchair. Twilight gathered at the windows. The fire was comforting, even in this untoward circumstance. Bilbo offered us some of the tobacco he had pilfered out of our effects. I took a pipe. Soon, even Uncle’s stony demeanor began to soften under the influence of the crackling hearth and the Monongahela.

“So,” Bilbo leaned forward avidly in his chair. “Tell me the news of the day.”

Soon you wouldn’t have known our little gathering from that of a public room in any country inn. I touched on some particulars of New York politics. Bilbo seemed especially interested in these, and starved, in general, for information about the civilized world. The rumor of our Louisiana purchase astounded him.

“That scoundrel Hamilton is behind it,” Bilbo commented. “Wants to become the American Bonaparte himself, if you ask me.”

“Bosh,” said I, emboldened by the whiskey. “Hamilton is completely shut out of national affairs. Jefferson is the mastermind behind Louisiana. And as for scoundrels, is this not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, eh, Captain?” I toasted him.

“He’s a spunky lad, ain’t he?” Bilbo quipped to Uncle, who shrugged his shoulders. Just then, Neddy returned from his twilight hunting foray. Around his neck was a small deer, while from his belt hung several partridges. “Well done, my boy!” Bilbo arose to greet the panting hobgoblin.

“That’s odd,” I said. “I didn’t hear a single gunshot.”

“Neddy doesn’t need a gun,” Bilbo informed us without elaborating, and a chill ran down my spine.

“I see,” was my reply.

In a little while we were enjoying the roasted wildfowls with fresh-baked biscuits while Bessie turned a haunch of venison on a spit in the hearth, its juices sizzling aromatically in the glowing embers. It had been so long since our last hot meal that I was as giddy from hunger as I was from the whiskey. Uncle too feasted with single-minded concentration. Bilbo, meanwhile, commenced to spin out the rueful account of those tribulations that had led him to such a low estate as piracy.

“How I miss my dear little city of New York,” Bilbo lamented with all the affectation of a Park Theatre Polonius. I sensed that he had told the story before. “You see before you the mere shadow of he who was Melancton Bilbo, Esquire, soldier in the Great Fight, up-and-coming broker, husband and father, caught between those twin scoundrels, the Castor and Pollux of infamy, General Hamilton and Colonel Aaron Burr. ’Twas my misfortune to marry a beautiful woman, Hester Broadbent, minx, and to be born with a trusting nature…”

A tear fell into his plate.

“How happy was my little family in the house on Cherry Street—or so I thought. The brokerage was a rising concern in the city, with a reputation for probity and an eye for the winning venture. In the spring of ’97, Hamilton approached me, on behalf of a certain Mr. Voorhees, with a scheme for erecting a magnificent silk manufactury at the falls of the Passaic River. Everything was arranged, Hamilton assured me. All that was needed now were backers. It was projected that once in operation, the factory could supply all domestic needs in America and that within five years its output should eclipse the great silk mills of the Manchoo princes! Shareholders would realize an incredible bonanza. I invested the bulk of my personal fortune: forty thousand dollars. Needless to say, the scheme fell awry.

“The silkworms procured by this Voorhees (supposedly imported out of Pekin itself) turned out to be no such things. The so-called silk they produced was nothing of the kind, but a luminescent spittle that, once dried, compared with the lowliest doghair as a textile.”

“Sounds like Trichobaris trinotata,” Uncle inserted, “the potato stalk borer.”

“Plucked from the very garden rows of Bergen County!” Bilbo avouched with a sob. “Naturally, the venture soon foundered. But not before I was, perforce, constrained to spend more and more of my time at the factory across the river in New Jersey. Unbeknownst to me, Colonel Burr, that notorious lecher, and also, by happenstance, our attorney in the silkworks matter, used my absences as an opportunity to seduce my wife. I became the laughingstock of Manhattan. Finally, Voorhees eloped to England with the entire funds of the Passaic Silkworks Company. Burr abandoned my wife when it became obvious that a planned divorce would leave her penniless. I was ruined and disgraced!”

Bilbo broke down again, but soon recollected himself.

“For a time,” he continued, “I wandered the wharves of South Street seeking a yardarm from which to hang myself. But what, I fretted, would become of little Bessie, the apple of her father’s eye. We slipped away westward. Ah, the West, gentlemen, that fabled wilderness of opportunity, mother of El Dorados and Hy-Brasils! Our flatboat got as far as the head of this island. Yes, friends, that derelict upon the shoal was our pretty craft, the Yet Hopeful. We ran aground in a raging storm, much as you might had we not (ahem) signaled you—”

“Accosted us,” I corrected him.

“I am not finished.”

“By all means.”

“Where was I?”

“You were stranded here, on this island.”

“Yes. And here we remained. Weeks, months went by. The game was plentiful. Soon it occurred to me: why leave? Why go anywhere? The fact is, gentlemen, I had found in this solitude that elusive peace of mind that all men seek. Fortune blows many a strange wind in this wide world. Here we remain in our happy snug harbor.”

Bilbo dandled a turkey leg and smiled ruefully.

“That story is the most preposterous balderdash I ever heard,” was my commentary.

Uncle coughed into the sleeve of his buffalo robe.

“Why, ’tis the sheerest twaddle,” I persisted.

“You didn’t find it moving?” Bilbo asked, dismayed.

“I do not believe a word of it,” I told him frankly.

He looked into his plate for a moment, visibly absorbing his disappointment.

“Very well,” he finally said. “Perhaps this will suit you better.” He cleared his throat so as to give it a fresh attack. “How well I recall those carefree days of boyhood under the tulip trees on the lawn of dear old Mount Vernon, playing with my little cousins under the watchful eye of my father, His Excellency George Washington—”

“Bilbo,” said I, “you are a most arrant and contemptible fraud.”

“Do you say I represent falsely?”

“I do sir; you are an humbug through and through.”

“I will meet you like a gentleman.”

“I am ready to get your pistols,” said I.

Bilbo glared at me across the succulent viands. His eyes flickered with malice. I did my best to return his gaze, as though my face were a mirror. The clock ticked loudly on the mantle. Neddy growled. Finally, Bilbo blinked. It was like seeing a pair of live coals extinguished under two wet rags. An ominous chortling rose from deep in his throat.

“By Gad, if you ain’t a saucy boy!” he said and erupted in laughter. A great gob of spittle ran down his chin and he farted with abandon, such was his merriment. The dwarf and Bessie also erupted, the one barking and the other honking with glee.

“He is a rude puppy,” Uncle inserted.

“Puppy!” said I. “Mind how you talk, baby brother!”

“Baby brother…?” Bilbo said quizzically. “What is this nonsense? All day long you have been calling this old goat brother.”

“So? What of it?” I retorted, thanking God that he had finally taken the bait. “How could he possibly be your ‘baby brother?’” the villain asked.

“’Tis none of your business,” I said.

“Wait. I see. Madness descends on the poor lad as his hour draws nigh. I’ve seen it before, sad to say.” Then to Uncle: “They go to pieces.”

I kicked Uncle’s foot under the table. He seemed dazed.

“No, ’tis true,” he finally joined in the ruse, to my relief. “What appears to thee a mere saucy stripling of a boy is, in fact, my older brother.”

Bilbo recoiled. “Why, I may be a fraud, but do you take me for numskull as well?”

“Not at all,” Uncle rejoined. “For we bear a secret so strange and marvelous that logic herself trembles at its utterance.”

“A secret? What secret?”

“’Twouldn’t be a secret anymore if we told you, now would it?” I set the hook.

“Let’s have it, by the blistering Jesus!” Bilbo pounded the table with his fist and the entire house shook.

Uncle furrowed his brow, chewed upon his lip, coughed, cleared his throat, and finally gestured to me in deference.

“Well…?” Bilbo pressed me. He brandished his knife. “Speak if you wish to continue breathing!”

“Er … you have heard, I’m sure, the old Spanish legend of the enchanted spring whence—”

“I knew it!” Bilbo cried triumphantly. “The fountain! The fountain of youth!”

“Well, yes, actually—”

“Where? Where!” Bilbo lunged across the table, clutching desperately the folds of my bearskin robe.

“It is hard to describe—”

“You must have a map!”

“There is a map, but—”

“Hand it over this instant!”

“It is in here.” I pointed to my head. “The map is graven only upon my memory.”

“You have been there yourself, though?”

“Why, manifestly so, Bilbo,” I affirmed.

Uncle could not resist muttering, “Thou dunce….”

“You slaver on my supper, Captain.”

Bilbo let go of my robe and sat primly in his own chair. “I am all ears,” he declared.

“Where shall I start?”

“We have … all night.”

“Some years ago,” I began prevaricating, “whilst on a botanical ramble down Zane’s Trace in the Ohio country, I came upon an humble springhole amid a shady grove of ancient beeches—”

“Beeches, you say?”

“Fagus grandifolia,” Uncle inserted.

“I drank of it. Its water was pure, sweet, most of all refreshing to the weary, aged traveler—but no more so than that of a thousand other wilderness springholes tasted in a lifetime of sojourning—”

“Er, just how long in the tooth were you?” Bilbo asked.

“How old was I? Three score and twelve, sir. And this was back in ’96, mind you.”

Bilbo rolled his eyes in calculation.

I beat him to it. “I shall be eighty on the first of October next.”

“By Jehovah’s short hairs!” Bilbo exclaimed. “Ain’t it a marvel, though! Go on, lad.”

“Yes. Well, the effect was almost instantaneous. I experienced it as a fugue of bodily sensations, not altogether pleasant. Frankly, I thought myself at first in the grip of an apoplexy, a coupe de sang as it were. I seized a trunk of a young box elder”—

“Acer negundo,” Uncle said.

—“and the attack passed. I climbed back upon Old Tom, my horse, and went my way.”

“This was on Zane’s Trace?” Bilbo inquired avidly.

“This was off the Trace,” I replied.

“Hard by the Trace, perhaps?”

“Some distance from it. A day’s march, at least.”

“Dear me,” Bilbo shrank back into his seat. “Well, what happened next?”

“I became aware, in a very vivid degree, of the aroma of sassafras, of wild roses, of bear dung—all the scents of the woods—and realized it had been long since I had enjoyed such olfactory delights. Years. Decades! I was near besotted with it. That is no exaggeration, sir. Soon, I began to feel a tingling in every joint in my body. My eyes were assaulted by a clarity, a brightness of vision—”

“Like the effect of phrensyweed,” Uncle inserted. “Furor muscaetoxicus.”

“Thank you, brother. Ahem. It was then that I chanced to look down at my hands, gripping the pommel of my saddle, and damn me if all the gnarls of gout, all the deformities of arthritis, all the liver spots and blue veins of dotage had vanished! Suddenly, I gasped for my very breath, and realized that my cravat was like to choke the life out of me. I reached for my throat and ripped the collar open. But all my clothes were now tight beyond endurance. My frock coat bit into my shoulders as if it had suddenly shrunk two full sizes. My breeches went slack at the waist. Without that premeditation of movement that is a hallmark of old age, I leaped from Old Tom to the ground and landed on legs that had the spring of a young roebuck’s, then at once cast off my clothing. Had this occurred on any civilized highway or city street, I would have been trundled off to the nearest lunatics’ asylum, no doubt. But I looked down upon myself and, by heaven, I was a youth again! Gone were the sagging gut, the teatlike bosoms, the broomhandle arms and spindly legs. I reached for my face and ran my fingers across it like a blind man feeling the face of a long-gone loved one. The dewlaps and wattles had vanished! I was transfigured!”

“By Jupiter’s thundering bungchute!”

“Indeed, sir, my very sentiments—”

“Sammy!”

“I must be candid, brother, though it pollute your morals. But, there I was: a new man. Being of a lifelong skeptical bent, I puzzled my brains to discover what might be the cause of this momentous transformation. For breakfast I had consumed the ham of a bear and a cupful of mulberries—nothing more. It had to be something in that spring, thought I. I hastened to retrace my steps to it, and this time brought up Old Tom to sip from its modest pool. In a matter of moments he too began to submit to the most startling transformation. Where his coat had been dull and listless, it suddenly shone like waxed mahogany. Where his old spine had swayed under two decades of saddlery, it became as straight as an oak beam. Where mane and tail had hung in graying tatters was suddenly luxurious black hair, as stiff as that of a hussar’s charger—”

“By God’s flaming gorget!”

“My thoughts exactly, sir. But Old Tom’s throes did not end there, for he was seized by such a thirst that he would not stop guzzling of the spring, and in a matter of minutes he was reduced to a spindle-legged colt. He collapsed under the weight of the saddle and fell a’bawling and a’neighing beside the pool; and luckily so, Bilbo, for had he continued, no doubt he would have departed this world by retroactive birth, rather than merely gained a new lease on the life he already owned. Damn me, sir, if I didn’t have to carry all my own necessaries for weeks afterward—not to mention the trouble of milking a she-deer twice a day for the little brute’s sustenance.”

Uncle rolled his eyes at this outlandish embroidery. I confess I was carried away.

“Had I not the stamina of a youth, Bilbo, I would have had to abandon my dear companion to the wolves.”

“You’ve a heart o’gold, by the Lamb o’Nazareth,” our captor said.

“In conclusion, Bilbo, those jars you plundered from our boat were intended for that marvelous fountain of the wilderness. We were going to bottle the stuff, return with it to Philadelphia, and make a fortune, not to mention the dividend of enjoying eternal life—but since you plan instead to blow out our brains, then I suppose it is just another promising business scheme gone up in a vapor—”

“Just a moment there, friend,” Bilbo stopped me. “Has it ever occurred to you to take on a partner? Someone with a good business head?”

And so did Captain Melancton Bilbo et famille become our partners in a venture calculated only to gain us freedom from the clutches of said Bilbo and his brood of freaks.

“Gentlemen,” Bilbo stood up at his place, “or should I say partners? A toast to our consociation!” He hoisted his cup and grinned malefically, revealing a mouth full of green and black teeth as mossy as so many timeworn stumps in an old river bottom. We clanked cups. Bilbo belched. “Let’s to our slumbers, for tomorrow we embark on the trail to riches and life everlasting!”

Uncle was tethered by means of a length of rope to the vigilant Neddy, who lay curled upon a rug at the hearthside like one of Father’s water spaniels, one hooded eye glinting ever-watchfully. Of course, Uncle did not submit to this indignity without protest.

“If this is how thee treats a partner, then thee deserved all thy misfortunes in the silkworm debacle.”

“Sir,” Bilbo riposted in a pedantic tone, “is trust founded on such shifting sands as would tempt you, after only minutes of formal consociation, to speak in such spiteful and censorious terms to he who bears only your best interests in his bosom?”

“And is partnership founded on so mushy a soil that thee would treat thine associate as a mere captive?”

“You object to your bedding?” Bilbo laughed. “Let me remind you, sir, that this is the frontier and that you are lucky to have a roof over your head, let alone a hearth to warm your feet, not to mention the protection of this vigilant stalwart.”

“Grrrrr,” Neddy said.

“I am as familiar with the ways of the wild woodland as thou art acquainted with the habits of perfidy and crime,” Uncle countered. “It is the bonds I object to.”

“A most regrettable but necessary precaution,” Bilbo said with a sigh. “Had I only a strand of potato stalk borer thread securing me to that rascal Voorhees in the silkworks fiasco … well, gentlemen, why prate on about what might have been, for ’tis the vision of what will be that drives the venture at hand. Come now, old fellow,” Bilbo took me by the elbow and guided me up the ladder to the sleeping loft at the far end of the cottage. Once upstairs, he bid me lie down on the wooden bed.

“Am I to sleep in your daughter’s bed?”

“Nothing is too good for such a worthy gentleman as yourself,” Bilbo said, binding my wrists and ankles to the four posts. “Sweet dreams.”

He climbed downstairs, taking the candle with him. Soon the house was dark, save the flickering glow of the hearth. Despite my bindings, sleep quickly overwhelmed me. I don’t know how much later it was that I awoke to the sensation of hands creeping across my breast, opening my shirt buttons, then foraging in my breeches.

“O, no!” I cried before the monster stuffed a rag in my mouth. I next felt her soft, warm, feminine flesh bear its weight upon me, while her mouth issued the telltale whistling exhalations.

But her face was not visible to me in that near-total darkness, and I would be less than candid to aver that I was not seized by a most shameful and uncontrollable priapism, the climax of which was a taste of the life everlasting that makes us all links in the Great Chain of Being.