An Embarrassment of Riches Read online

  “What…?” he said, placing a hand behind his ear.

  “I say, we have been for almost a month the captives of this pirate scum—”

  “I cannot hear you,” the Woodsman said. Bilbo clasped me ’round the arm with one gigantic hand. I reiterated my plea, tears streaming down my face, but the Woodsman merely shook his head helplessly and pointed to his ear. It was then that I realized that in the weeks since our first encounter, along the Ohio, he had somehow the misfortune of being struck deaf. Bilbo dragged me off.

  In the third dwelling that we entered, we located Bessie. To her father’s mild annoyance, and my utter disgust, we found her asleep upon a heap of buffalo robes, musically a’snoring away as though enjoying a midday nap on any idle spring noontide. She stretched languorously as he shook her toe.

  “Up, my little apple,” he urged her sweetly.

  “Slut,” I muttered.

  She arose off the primitive bedstead, not entirely sure afoot and evidently somewhat sore of gait as we followed her back outside.

  The sky had grown lighter, the eclipse returning from its climax and a second dawn redeeming the stolen day. The Woodsman remained where we had left him, lecturing and rebuking the tribe in a very spirited tone of voice. At the far end of town Neddy and Uncle trundled the specimen jar chest. The Woodsman concluded his harangue.

  “Tsooka thoo ah ka nee! Tsooka thoo ah ka nee!” he told them, gesturing broadly with outstretched hands. He looked down in the dust and shook his head. “Go to your wigwams,” he muttered disgustedly.

  They had already arisen from the ground like sullen yet obedient children and skulked back to their dwellings, until the dusty street was empty of all save a few of their ragtag dogs.

  The Woodsman sighed like a college master who had just sent an entire class to their lodgings without supper for having turned a solemn holiday observance into a drunken spree.

  “Ah me …” he said, but the utterance had barely rolled off his tongue when he lifted his head and began to sniff the air. His delicate nostrils quavered while his eyes narrowed in concentration. “Why, durn me, if those Kickapoos aren’t up to more mischief! Gentlemen, I must say adieu—”

  “Wait!” I cried, but he did not heed my call. The wind once again whipped into a sudden gale. The treetops banked and dust once more filled the air. In a few moments it dissipated, and our savior had vanished. The dust settled. A mangy Indian mutt howled. None of the savages dared to so much as peek outside its wigwam, however, and we hurried out of Shannoah-town as though we were leaving a city of the dead.

  We backtracked swiftly, wasting not a moment in idle halts, despite our exhaustion and injuries, so zealous were we to escape the Shannoah stamping ground. By late afternoon we had traversed that burnt-over district of beargrass prairie, and by sunset we reentered the daunting woods, tripping over logs and roots along the trail, and finally arriving at a little meadow surrounded by chestnut trees, where the springy ground cover beckoned us like a gigantic featherbed. So fatigued were we that getting a supper was too much of an effort. Bilbo bound Uncle and me back to back, in the old customary way. Soon the others were deep in slumber.

  “O, Uncle, I’m afraid he’ll murder us if we don’t lead him to the fountain tomorrow.”

  “To the fountain?” Uncle replied in a whisper.

  “The fountain of youth.”

  “Hast lost thy mind? There is no fountain.”

  “O … goodness….” I said. A pang of fear ran through me; for in a way I had lost my mind and forgot that the fountain of youth was made up, fantastical, and did not exist. “There is no fountain?” I added confusedly.

  “There is no fountain,” Uncle affirmed.

  “Then he will blast our brains to atoms.”

  “Stouten thy heart. Our salvation lies all about thee, is thy very bed, thy pillow.”

  “What…?” said I, wholly flummoxed. Bessie, her father, and the dwarf snored like a little chamber orchestra yards away.

  “Look about thee, Sammy.”

  I did, in utter puzzlement, seeing nothing but the same loathsome verdure that had been our constant element since Pittsburgh, six weeks earlier. “’Tis nothing but vegetation. Vile, damnable leaf and wood!”

  “The ground cover, Sammy, the ground cover!”

  I plucked a sprig and hold [O7]it up against the moon. Hope yet flooded my heart. For pinched ’twixt my thumb and forefinger was that timid herb characterized by compound treble leaves, irregularly toothed or lobed, cordate, slightly reddish, and hairless. The entire meadow was carpeted with the same humble plant.

  “Furor muscaetoxicus!” I breathed as though a prayer.

  “Correct,” Uncle said. “Phrensyweed! The great [O8]single patch of it that ever I saw!”

  Though he had shown us as many dark sides of a human nature as might be possessed by one individual, Bilbo awoke the next morning in a mood so black and murderous that a brute like Fisheater would compare to him as an affable gentleman from a police [O9]society.

  “By hell’s stinking shit pits, I ache all over,” he groaned. “O that I have given up the peace and serenity of my happy islet for this evil swindling! O my throbbing bones, my smarting flesh, my ringing ears. By Christ’s cankerous crank I have been hornswoggled, cozened, maimed! And who, by Old Bogey’s bungchute, have I to thank? Eh …?”

  He had no further to look than Uncle and me, yet bound together. He hoisted up his pistol, cocked the hammer, knocked a little powder into the flashpan, and dandled it at us, squinting along the barrel with one blood-shot, jaundiced eye.

  “You may feel a bit under the weather now, but just wait ’til you have a draught or two from the fountain,” I tried diverting his mind from murder.

  “Fountain of youth,” he sneered. “O that I ever believed you! What are you but another Voorhees, purveyor of counterfeit silkworms! Homewrecker! Inveigling pettifogger! Humbug! Picaroon!”

  “If those Indians hadn’t guzzled all your whiskey, you’d be a [O10]cheerful and gay as ever,” I tried to mollify the villain.

  The while this colloquy took place, Bessie woke up and looked upon the scene with rising emotion. Her experiences at Shannoah-town had apparently put a certain starch in her character, for she began remonstrating with her father hotly.

  “Hwong honk hwanga huh, hoo hawng pwee hwonk!” she railed at him.

  “Yes, my little—”

  “Hwank hwanga pwee!” she went on and slapped the very pistol in his hand. It discharged and the bullet flew into a nearby treetop. Three partridges, two oppossums, and a squirrel all tumbled dead to the ground, slain by a single ball.

  “What a shot!” Bilbo stopped to marvel.

  “Perhaps it is your lucky day,” I desperately proposed.

  Bessie continued to admonish the old scalawag, and he shrank visibly under the onslaught, though I could not make out a word of her obloquy.

  “All right, all right, all right!” he finally gave in to whatever she was demanding. I wondered what our fate would be.

  “Well, thou blackguard?” Uncle forced the issue.

  “’Tis your lucky day, after all,” Bilbo informed us. “For my little sweetmeat has sued on your behalf for twenty-four hours’ more life, which time you have to lead us to that damnable fountain, or I shall feel free to make a pudding of your brains. Is that right, my dove?”

  Bessie nodded her head, shrugged her shoulders, and honked in the affirmative.

  “Be a good boy and fetch those viands, Neddy,” he told the dwarf, who scampered off to fetch the birds, oppossums, and squirrel.

  Soon, Uncle and I were at work helping Bessie to pluck the partridges while Neddy built a fire and Bilbo reconnoitered the woods for a water source.

  “Here, watch me,” Uncle said, grasping a fistful of phrensyweed and showing Bessie how to stuff the body cavities of the fowls with the leaves. “’Tis a most aromatic and epicurean herb,” he assured her. “A nice substitute for sweet sage, thyme, and other treasures of
the kitchen garden. Believe me.”

  Bessie plucked a sprig or two herself, sniffed them through that unfortunate aperture that was her nasal opening, and honked to show her appreciation. She stuffed the fowls, skewered them upon a green stick and began roasting them over the fire. Uncle and I skinned the oppossums and the squirrel, stuffed them likewise, and placed them on the fire. Meanwhile, Bilbo returned with several jars of water from a springhole he’d located nearby.

  “I am so hungry I could eat an herd of buffalo,” he declared. “By Jove’s celestial diddlehorn, those redskins don’t treat a fellow right, now do they?” He hung his great blade of a nose over the roasting birds and fanned the fragrant air to his nostrils with a gigantic paw. “Partridge is the nonpareil of wildfowls, don’t you agree, Neddy?”

  “Arf, arf!”

  “Others may have their toothsome turkeys, their quotidian quails, their dainty doves, squabs, what-have-you; but give me partridge every time, I say.”

  “Rowf, rowf!”

  “Succulent and never dry, with a flavor like sweet sage and thyme! Ah, there is partridge: jack o’diamonds among the avian kingdom! I would say they are done now, wouldn’t you, my little sugarplum?”

  “Hwonk!” Bessie affirmed.

  Bilbo lifted the skewer off the fire and gingerly removed the birds, giving one each to Neddy and his daughter. I reached for an opossum. Bilbo thwacked me upon the knuckles as I did so.

  “Tut-tut,” he chided me. “I said I would let you live another day, not that I would feed you.”

  I hung my head stoically. Uncle sighed. Bilbo et famille made short work of the partridges, devouring with squeals of delectation their herbal stuffing, and then turned their appetites loose on the oppossums and squirrel. In a little while their gluttony was dissipated. Bilbo washed down the repast with a jar of springwater, then reclined in the weeds, picking his teeth with a squirrel’s rib, while Bessie belched and the dwarf scratched his fleas. Uncle and I sat across the fire looking woebegone and starved.

  In a few minutes, the company began to show the first signs of intoxication. Bilbo’s eyes widened. The pupils contracted and dilated violently. A noticeable tremor began to shake Bessie’s whole body. The dwarf also trembled and blinked. Soon a kind of foaming spittle began to gather at the corners of Bilbo’s mouth. Bessie was vibrating like a child’s mechanical toy. Wisps of hot vapor steamed from the flanges of Neddy’s flattened nose. The next moment Bilbo sat bolt upright, looked down at his hands, felt about his face, and fairly exploded with exaltation. He seized one of the water-filled specimen jars, held it out as though he were gripping the Holy Grail itself, and cried, “The fountain! The fountain! I have found it, by the suckling Nazarene! The fountain of youth!”

  He rose unsteadily to his feet, the phrensyweed rapidly reaching full effect.

  “Come! Come, my lambs,” Bilbo entreated his daughter and the dwarf. The three of them lurched off into the woods, a’quivering and a’slathering like victims of snakebite. In his toxic transport, Bilbo had even left his pistol and shot pouch behind, and I now seized them with the passion of a true believer finally grasping hold of a crucifix in a land of barbarous infidels. We followed the trio’s tracks into the verdure at a prudent distance.

  There, an hundred feet away, the pirate, his misbegotten slut of a daughter, and the dwarf lay upon their backs amid the coruscating water of a little woodland brook, splashing, giggling, and bawling like infants under the complete deliriant dominion of the herb. And there, in the howling wilds of Ohio, we at last stole away from that nonpareil of vice, corruption, and depravity to enter the sunny vale of freedom.

  6

  We lost no time retracing our steps to the falls of the Dismal and found Megatherium just where we had left her, and how happy we were to be back aboard our craft with no masters but ourselves.

  We cast off at once and floated downstream, making in a few hours what had taken days of tortuous poling. Before nightfall, we passed the scrofulous swathe of the passenger pigeons’ flight, the trees still streaked with their excrements and the air so foul with decay that we breathed through cloths. In five days we made the junction of the Ohio and would have celebrated but for the grim spectre of Bottomley’s Station on its melancholy peninsula, pink fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) already blooming in the ashes.

  Two more days, or twenty leagues, down the Ohio we sighted the frontier settlement of Babylon on the Kentucky side of the river. At a distance in the midday sun, she seemed a very shining metropolis; but as we drew closer, she revealed herself to be a hodgepodge of a few dozen rude houses, only some of them whitewashed. We hove to shore and engaged a Negro—otherwise unoccupied—to keep an eye on our boat, whilst we set out to locate some citizen of standing in the community to avouch us cash against our letter of commission signed by President Jefferson, that we might replace some of those necessaries filched by Bilbo.

  We were directed to the town’s main boulevard, called Broadway by the proud inhabitants, and what a picture it made. Here was a stunning agglomeration of human dregs, misfits, riffraff, and flotsam that had drifted down the Ohio in flight from creditors, the bailiff, or, by the looks of many, from the hangman. Imagine a town populated by Bilbos of every size, age, and gender, and you have it to a T. In some cases it was hard to tell the human inhabitants from the numerous swine that rooted freely in the street.

  It was evidently some sort of holiday, for Broadway was crowded with townsmen and rustics engaged in the most barbaric amusements. One of the first sights we blundered upon, for instance, was that of a stallion serving at stud at the major (really the sole) intersection of streets in town. Around this sordid spectacle was an appreciative crowd of several dozen people, including not a few women and children, all enjoying the performance without a trace of modesty. I was further amazed to see a boy and girl, each about eight years old, engaged upon a playful mimicry of the horses, as a kind of sideshow, to the approval and laughter of the watching adults.

  The next thing that was apparent was the number of brawls in progress up and down this Broadway. By brawls I do not mean mere fisticuffs, but a savage, murderous type of combat that admitted no limit of decorum or even of mercy. In one case, a pair of battling boatmen had succeeded in biting off pieces of each other’s ears, lips, and noses, while blood squirted a throng of onlookers. The two had been bosom comrades off the same commercial broadhorn, we were told, and the struggle was begat when one of the combatants insisted upon buying a drink of whiskey for the other, who insisted likewise, and so on, and upward, to the present bloody fracas. At last the dispute was settled when one brawler gouged out the left eyeball of the other with his thumb and ate it, to the delight of the gathered crowd.

  Not fifty paces up the street a second battle erupted, this of a more free-for-all nature, involving five individuals, whether allied in teams or singly engaged it was never clear. A little way past this donnybrook, an obviously drunken oaf shot at caterpillars on a chestnut tree (Castanea dentata), with no regard for what lay beyond his target, which happened to be the village stockyard, in which two steers already lay wounded and a’bellowing from this bonehead’s errant shots. Luckily, he collapsed drunkenly into the fetid mud with his pistol and jug, and lay there inert as we passed by.

  As we glanced at the faces of these yeomen about town, it was the exceptional man indeed whose features were intact, and one got the notion of a frontier life so harsh and devouring that it consumed its denizens bit by bit, in angry nips, like a hungry wolf worrying a spavined deer.

  At the extreme western end of town loomed its most imposing structure, a three-story whitewashed log building the size of a military blockhouse—it had once served as such—but that was now the Lewis County courthouse. A crowd of several score men was also gathered here, at the foot of the stairway that led to the building’s second floor entrance. They conducted themselves in a more orderly manner than the battling louts down the street, but appeared to be persons of no better class or refi
nement, and many sipped from jugs as they palavered. Here Uncle and I learned that today had convened the quarterly session of the circuit court, and that this event, coupled with it being Sunday, had occasioned the riotous saturnalia in town. Uncle, of course, was scandalized that the townspeople would comport themselves so rudely on the Sabbath. But when he voiced his outrage to our informant—a raw-boned, sunken-eyed farmer awaiting his turn before the bench over a boundary dispute with a neighbor—he was told simply that the populace had “left the durned Sabbath on t’other side of the Cumberland Gap.” We later learned that there was not a single house of worship in the town of Babylon, though there were already four taverns and a so-called disorderly house.

  Uncle and I went upstairs, where the proceedings of the court were open to public view. The courtroom itself was a good-sized chamber, some forty feet long by thirty wide, and was filled to near capacity with rough-looking men. They were following the goings-on very intently and even laughing like an audience at a play—this court being the frontier equivalent of the theatre. The lawyers were playing to this gallery like Park Theatre hams.

  “Why, bless me if that isn’t Felix Ravenel!” Uncle exclaimed, pointing up at the judge’s bench, a plain oaken table upon a dais, where an handsome white-haired gentleman of Uncle’s age presided. “We fought side by side at the Battle of Brandywine!”

  This Judge Ravenel squinted at the bills placed before him, then glanced at the bailiff over the rectangular lenses of his spectacles.

  “Randolf Rudge versus Jonas Lusk!” the bailiff cried out. A hawk-faced, slender man about forty, better dressed by far than most present in a brown frock coat and clean shirt, took his place at the defendant’s table. “State your name, occupation, and place o’residence,” the bailiff said mechanically.

  “Sheriff Jonas Lusk,” the defendant said. “Babylon.” He glanced around behind his table at the gallery. Cheers and sniggers erupted. Rudge, a swarthy, younger man, took his place at the plaintiff’s table.