An Embarrassment of Riches Read online

  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 thr
ough 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 genti
lity, 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.