Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

by Angela Carter

  Their captive they brought back lashed to the powder barrel and taunted him, how they would set their torches to a slow fuse, left him there in the middle of the village and abused him in their drunkenness for they were devils when they’d got a bit of drink inside ‘em, I must admit it.

  “Now, my dear,” says my husband, who was stone-cold sober because he’d a mortal terror of the edge of my tongue. “I must ask you to talk to this fellow in your own language, that we might know if his fellow-countrymen will at last remember certain pledges and treaties formerly made between us or do indeed mean to drive us into the arms of the Rechacrians, with whom we are on no friendly terms, so it will be the worse for us, trapped between the two.”

  At first I would not do it because I felt some pity for this Englishman, they were very stern with their captives and made a cruel festival out of this one, what with the drink and all. Then I recall how I saw this fellow riding his high horse along the dock at Annestown when the convicts were unloaded in chains from the holds of the ship and all pity left me.

  When he hears my English, “Praise the Lord!” he cries, and tells me straightaway how I must give over my tribes to the whites in the name of God, the King of England, and a free pardon thrown in when he sees my brand. But I shows him the babby and he calls me all kind of foul names, to whore among the heathen, so I shoves a sharp stick in his belly to teach him manners. He squawks at that but will say nothing of the soldiers or where they might be but only: that the damned seed shall be driven from the land. They took him off the barrel, for they did not want to waste good gunpowder on him, and hoist him up over the fire. Soon he was dead.

  When I went through his pockets, they were stuffed full of coin and all the children come to play ducks and drakes with gold pieces on the river. But his gold watch I wound up and give my husband in remembrance of the one I robbed the alderman of.

  “What’s this?” he says in his innocence. Just then it rang the hours of twelve, it being noon, and he screetches out, drops it, it breaks apart, the wheels and springs scatter on the ground, and my husband, poor, superstitious savage that he was for all he was the best man in the world, my husband fell a-shaking and a-trembling and said the watch was “bad medicine” and boded ill.

  So he went off and got drunk with the rest. I go through the papers in the gentleman’s pockets and find out we’ve put an end to the governor of all Virginia and I tells ‘em so, full of misgiving at it, but they was all so far gone in liquor no sense to be had out of any of ‘em until they slept it off but just before sun-up next day the soldiers came on horseback.

  They burned the ripe cornfields and set light to the stockade so it burned and our lodge burned when the powder went up so I saw the massacre bright as day. They put a bullet through my husband’s head, he on his feet and all bewildered, I got him out of the lodge when I first heard the fire crackle but he was a big man, couldn’t miss him. And the poor drunk, sleepy savages all mown down. I got the baby in my arms and went and hid in the bird-scare in the cornfield, which was a platform on legs with hide over it, and so escaped.

  But the soldiers caught hold of my mother as she was running to the river with her hair on fire and she shouts to me, seeing me fleeing: “You, unkind daughter!” For she thought I was hastening to cast my lot in with the English, which was not so, by any means. Then they violated her, then they slit her throat. So all over quickly, by daybreak nowt left but ashes, corpses, the widow mourning her dead children, soldiers leaning on their guns well pleased with their night’s work and the courageous manner in which they had revenged the governor.

  The babby bust out crying. One of these brutes, hearing him, came beating among the scorched corn and pushes at the bird-scare, knocks it down so I fell out, flat on my back, the baby tumbles out of my arms and cracks his head open on a stone, sets up a terrible shrieking, even the hardest heart would have run directly to him. But this soldier puts his knee on my belly, unfastens his britches intending to rape me, he’d need the strength often to hold me down but all at once leaves off his horrid fumbling, amazed.

  “Captain!” he says. “Look here! Here’s a squaw with blue eyes, such as I’ve never seen before!”

  He takes a good handful of my hair and hales me to where the captain of these good soldiers is washing his bloody hands in a basin of water cool as you please while his men pick over the wampun and the robes for trophies of war. He asks me, what is my name and whether I speak English; then Dutch; then French; and tries me in Spanish but I will say nothing except, in the Algonkian language: “I am the widow of Tall Hickory.” But he cannot understand that.

  They found out I was not indeed a woman of the Indian blood at last by a trick for one of ‘em fetched my baby from where they’d left him bawling in the cornfield and showed him his knife, making as if he would stick the sharp blade into my little one.

  “Thou shalt not!” I cried out while the others held me back from him or I should have torn out his eyes with my bare hands. How they laughed, when the squaw with feathers in her hair shouted out in broad Lancashire. Then the captain sees my burned hand and calls me a “runaway” and says there will be a price on my head over and above the bounty on the Indians. And teases me, how they will brand my cheek with “R” for “runaway” when we gets to Annestown so I cannot whore among the Indians no more, nor amongst nobody else. But all I want is the loan of his handkerchief, dipped in water, to wipe the cut on the babby’s forehead and this he’s kind enough to give me, at last.

  When I got my babby back and put him to nurse, for he was hungry, then I went along with the soldiers, since I had no choice, my mother and my husband dead and, truth to tell, my spirit broken. And what squaws were left living, that I used to call “sister”, trailed along behind us, for the soldiers wanted women and the women wanted bread and not one brave left living in that part of the New World that now you might call a “fair garden blasted of folk”. And the river watering this earthly paradise running blood.

  The squaws blamed me, how I had brought bad luck on them and; cruelly repaid their kindness to me. But, as for me, my grief is mixed with fear over the memory of the overseer I had the ears off of, that all this will end in a downward drop, once I am back where the justice is.

  We gets to a place with a few houses and they had just finished building a church and: “Here is a morsel plucked from Satan,” says the one that widowed me to the Minister, who tells me to thank God that I have been rescued from the savage and beg the Good Lord’s forgiveness for straying from His ways. Taking my cue from his, I fall to my knees, for I see that repentance is the fashion in these parts and the more of it I show, the better it will be for me. And when they ask my name, I give ‘em the name of my old Lancashire lady, which is Mary, and stick by it, so I live on as if I were her ghost, and all her prophecies come true, except it turns out I was Our Lady of the Massacre and I do think my half-breed child will bear the mark of Cain, for the scar above his left eye never fades.

  The Minister’s wife come out of the kitchen with an old gown of hers and tells me to cover up my breasts, for shame, but the child cries and will not be pacified. Yet she is decent, and the Minister, also, as their acts now prove for they would not let the soldiers take me to Annestown with them but offered the captain a good sum of money to leave me with them, for the sake of my innocent baby. The captain hums and haws, the Minister adds another guinea, the fine soldier pockets the gold and all ride off and the Minister would give my child some Bible name, Isaac or Ishmael or some such name. “Hasn’t he got a good enough name already?” says I. But the Minister says: “Little Shooting Star is no name for a Christian,” and a baptised Christian my boy must be if his soul may be admitted to the congregation of the blessed though the poor thing will never find his daddy there. And when shall these dead rise up and be avenged? But, as for me, I will not call him by the name the Minister gave him; nor do I talk to him in any but the Indian language when nobody else is there.

  After a while
, the tale comes how, two years or more before, the Indians came by stealth to a plantation to the north, murdered an overseer and stole away a bonded servant girl. The gardener saw them drag her off by her yellow hair. I think to meself, how the gardener must have settled a score on his own account, good luck to him, and if they choose to think I was forced into captivity, then they have my leave to do so, if it makes them happy, as long as they leave me be. Which, because the Minister has a powerful desire to save my soul, and his wife fond of the little one, having none of her own, they do, for they’ve paid out good money to keep us from the law. And don’t I earn my keep, do all the rough work, carry water, hew wood.

  So I scrubbed the Minister’s floor, cooked the dinner, washed the clothes and for all the Minister swears they’ve come to build the City of God in the New World, I was the same skivvy as I’d been in Lancashire and no openings for a whore in the Community of the Saints, either, if I could have found in my heart the least desire to take up my old trade again. But that I could not; the Indians had damned me for a good woman once and for all.

  By and by the missus comes to me and says: “You are still a young woman, Mary, and Jabez Mather says he will have you for a wife since his own died of the flux but he will not take the child so I shall keep him.” But she will never have my little lad for her son, nor will I have Jabez Mather for my husband, nor any man living, but sit and weep by the waters of Babylon.

  The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe

  Imagine Poe in the Republic! when he possesses none of its virtues; no Spartan, he. Each time he tilts the jug to greet the austere morning, his sober friends reluctantly concur: “No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.” Where is the black star of melancholy? Elsewhere; not here. Here it is always morning; stern, democratic light scrubs apparitions off the streets down which his dangerous feet must go.

  Perhaps … perhaps the black star of melancholy was hiding in the dark at the bottom of the jug all the time … it might be the whole thing is a little secret between the jug and himself …

  He turns back to go and look; and the pitiless light of common day hits him full in the face like a blow from the eye of God. Struck, he reels. Where can he hide, where there are no shadows? They split the Republic in two, they halved the apple of knowledge, white light strikes the top half and leaves the rest in shadow; up here, up north, in the levelling latitudes, a man must make his own penumbra if he wants concealment because the massive, heroic light of the Republic admits of no ambiguities. Either you are a saint; or a stranger. He is a stranger, here, a gentleman up from Virginia somewhat down on his luck, and, alas, he may not invoke the Prince of Darkness (always a perfect gentleman) in his cause since, of the absolute night which is the antithesis to these days of rectitude, there is no aristocracy.

  Poe staggers under the weight of the Declaration of Independence. People think he is drunk.

  He is drunk.

  The prince in exile lurches through the new-found land.

  So you say he overacts? Very well; he overacts. There is a past history of histrionics in his family. His mother was, as they say, born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream, and made her first appearance on any stage in her ninth summer in a hiss-the-villain melodrama entitled Mysteries of the Castle. On she skipped to sing a ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy.

  It was the evening of the eighteenth century.

  At this hour, this very hour, far away in Paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, onto the prison floor … aaaagh! He seeds dragons’ teeth. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi. Everything is about to succumb to delirium.

  Heedless of all this, Poe’s future mother skipped on to a stage in the fresh-hatched American republic to sing an old-world ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy. Her dancer’s grace, piping treble, dark curls, rosy cheeks—cute kid! And eyes with something innocent, something appealing in them that struck directly to the heart so that the smoky auditorium broke out in raucous sentimental cheers for her and clapped its leather palms together with a will. A star was born that night in the rude firmament of fit-ups and candle-footlights, but she was to be a shooting star; she flickered briefly in the void, she continued the inevitable trajectory of the meteor, downward. She hit the boards and trod them.

  But, well after puberty, she was still able, thanks to her low stature and slim build, to continue to personate children, clever little ducks and prattlers of both sexes. Yet she was versatility personified; she could do you Ophelia, too.

  She had a low, melodious voice of singular sweetness, an excellent thing in a woman. When crazed Ophelia handed round the rosemary and rue and sang: “He is dead and gone, lady,” not a dry eye in the house, I assure you. She also tried her hand at Juliet and Cordelia and, if necessary, could personate the merriest soubrette; even when racked by the nauseas of her pregnancies, still she would smile, would smile and oh! the dazzling candour of her teeth!

  Out popped her firstborn, Henry; her second, Edgar, came jostling after to share her knee with her scripts and suckle at her bosom while she learned her lines, yet she was always word-perfect even when she played two parts in the one night, Ophelia or Juliet and then, say, Little Pickle, the cute kid in the afterpiece, for the audiences of those days refused to leave the theatre after a tragedy unless the players changed costumes and came back to give them a little something extra to cheer them up again.

  Little Pickle was a trousers’ role. She ran back to the green-room and undid the top buttons of her waistcoat to let out a sore, milky breast to pacify little Edgar who, wakened by the hoots and catcalls that had greeted her too voluptuous imitation of a boy, likewise howled and screamed.

  A mug of porter or a bottle of whisky stood on the dressing-table all the time. She dipped a plug of cotton in whisky and gave it to Edgar to suck when he would not stop crying.

  The father of her children was a bad actor and only ever carried a spear in the many companies in which she worked. He often stayed behind in the green-room to look after the little ones. David Poe tipped a tumbler of neat gin to Edgar’s lips to keep him quiet. The red-eyed Angel of Intemperance hopped out of the bottle of ardent spirits and snuggled down in little Edgar’s longclothes. Meanwhile, on stage, her final child, in utero, stitched its flesh and bones together as best it could under the corset that preserved the theatrical illusion of Mrs Elizabeth Poe’s eighteen-inch waist until the eleventh hour, the tenth month.

  Applause rocked round the wooden O. Loving mother that she was—for we have no reason to believe that she was not—Mrs Poe exited the painted scene to cram her jewels on her knee while tired tears ran rivers through her rouge and splashed upon their peaky faces. The monotonous clamour of their parents’ argument sent them at last to sleep but the unborn one in the womb pressed its transparent hands over its vestigial ears in terror.

  (To be born at all might be the worst thing.)

  However, born at last this last child was, one July afternoon in a cheap theatrical boarding-house in New York City after many hours on a rented bed while flies buzzed at the windowpanes. Edgar and Henry, on a pallet on the floor, held hands. The midwife had to use a pair of blunt iron tongs to scoop out the reluctant wee thing; the sheet was tented up over Mrs Poe’s lower half for modesty so the toddlers saw nothing except the midwife brandishing her dreadful instrument and then they heard the shrill cry of the new-born in the exhausted silence, like the sound of the blade of a skate on ice, and something bloody as a fresh-pulled tooth twitched between the midwife’s pincers.

  It was a girl.

  David Poe spent his wife’s confinement in a nearby tavern, wetting the baby’s head. When he came back and saw the mess he vomited.

  Then, before his sons’ bewildered eyes, their father began to grow insubstantial. He unbecame. All at once he lost his outlines and began to waver on the air. It was twilit evening. Mama slept on the bed with a fre
sh mauve bud of flesh in a basket on the chair beside her. The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.

  He said not one word to his boys but went on evaporating until he melted clean away, leaving behind him in the room as proof he had been there only a puddle of puke on the splintered floorboards.

  As soon as the deserted wife got out of bed, she posted down to Virginia with her howling brats because she was booked for a tour of the South and she had no money put away so all the babies got to eat was her sweat. She dragged them with her in a trunk to Charleston; to Norfolk; then back to Richmond.

  Down there, it is the foetid height of summer.

  Stripped to her chemise in the airless dressing-room, she milks her sore breast into a glass; this latest baby must be weaned before its mother dies.

  She coughed. She slapped more, yet more rouge on her now haggard cheekbones. “My children! what will become of my children?” Her eyes glittered and soon acquired a febrile brilliance that was not of this world. Soon she needed no rouge at all; red spots brighter than rouge appeared of their own accord on her cheeks while veins as blue as those in Stilton cheese but muscular, palpitating, prominent, lithe, stood out of her forehead. In Little Pickle’s vest and breeches it was not now possible for her to create the least suspension of disbelief and something desperate, something fatal in her distracted playing both fascinated and appalled the witnesses, who could have thought they saw the living features of death itself upon her face. Her mirror, the actress’s friend, the magic mirror in which she sees whom she has become, no longer acknowledged any but a death’s head.