Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  Will turned and walked off the porch. I saw Jeremiah reach to his right and come up with a shotgun, which he almost pointed until he saw the pistol in Will’s hand.

  “Howdy, Jeremiah,” Will said as he walked toward the barn.

  “Didn’t know you carried a pistol, Will.”

  “Only when I go into the forest,” Will said. “Like to protect myself from the wild animals.”

  “What brings you all the way out here?” said Jeremiah. Peaches wrapped his arms around Jeremiah’s midsection and peered out at Will.

  “Just lookin’ for my good friend Dirck Staats.”

  Jeremiah said nothing.

  “Also came by to pick up that spade your boy Peaches borrowed from my young friend here. You know this boy, don’t you, Peaches?” Will said, pointing to me. Peaches didn’t answer.

  “You’re right talky today, Will,” said Jeremiah. “Carryin’ a pistol, yappin’ like a magpie, lookin’ for shovels.”

  “A spade, Jeremiah, a spade is what I’m looking for.”

  Will half turned to glance at the spade, then turned back to Jeremiah. Without looking at the spade Will fired a shot from belt level that put a hole in the center of its blade.

  “That your spade, Daniel?” Will asked, his back to me.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “That spade ain’t worth a whole lot,” Will said. “It’s got a hole in it. But I guess we’ll take it along just for old times’ sake. You know there’s folks in this world’ll do anything to get back an old spade they feel sentimental about. Sentiment’s a powerful thing, Jeremiah, and you ought to take stock of what I’m sayin’ because, well, you take this barn here. I know you love barns and I know how many you’ve burned. I raise this issue because I want you to know how anxious I am for news of Dirck Staats, and how if I don’t hear about him by tomorrow, I’ll be comin’ back out here with more than a boy and a horse. And Jeremiah, if I find somebody’s hurt Dirck, then I’ll start doing things to people the way I did when I was ridin’ with Big Thunder in the Rent War, and I know you remember those days, and how I was one barn-burnin’, tar-and-featherin’ son of a bitch, and not a bad shot either, Jeremiah,” and Will let go another shot from the hip that went into that spade no more than a cat’s whisker distant from the previous bullet hole, the sweetest shooting I ever saw. Then Will said to me without turning, “Daniel, come and get your spade.”

  I didn’t want to move. Against all logic I felt protected in the wagon. But I climbed down and walked across the yard toward the spade, which was no longer worthless now that it had those two bullet holes of Will’s in it. I saved that spade for years to remind myself that courage is a worthy commodity, but that courage alone wouldn’t have gotten me back what was mine. I looked in at Peaches when I picked up the spade.

  “Hey, Peaches,” I said. “I ain’t gonna let nobody take this spade no more, so don’t come askin’.”

  Peaches stuck his tongue out at me and then ducked back behind Jeremiah. I went back to the wagon and Will backed toward it also.

  “We’ll be moseyin’ now, Jeremiah,” said Will. “Can’t socialize like this or I’ll never get my newspaper out,” and he climbed up onto the wagon, still holding his pistol. He turned to Priss in the doorway and said, “I’ll say so long to you, too, Mrs. Plum, so long for now anyway.” He took the reins from me with his free hand and whacked the horse, and then we moved slowly, much too slowly for my internal fluids, down the wagon path to the road.

  DIRCK’S BOOK WAS PUBLISHED in an extraordinary edition of Will Canaday’s Chronicle two weeks after our visit to the Plums’. Will did not publish a paper for three days running, offering no public explanation for the uncommon lapse, then came forth with a twenty-page issue carrying all he possessed of Dirck’s manuscript. I am pleased to report that it was my adroitness in snatching up the paper that fell from behind Hillegond’s ear during her talk with the phrenomagnetist that led to the breaking of Dirck’s code.

  The paper had on it two carefully inked lines of Dirck’s runic designs. Will’s unavailing scrutiny of them led him to think of the lines as a code and he took the paper to a scholar at Columbia College in Manhattan. The scholar saw instantly that the designs came from more than one language: ancient Teutonic runes and Hebrew and Arabic characters forming most of the consonants, and signs of the zodiac serving as vowels. Dirck wrote words in normal sequence but also spelled them backward. Knowing this, a translation became possible; and the opening sentences had this to say:

  Maleficence flowers, malevolence reigns in the ranks of The Society, a secret organization that dominates many thousands of American lives. Evidence has accrued that leaders of The Society are often the same men who hold leadership positions in this community, this state, this nation, in commerce, finance, politics, industry, and invention, and that as a way of preserving power over what they consider lesser beings, they are, in seriate accumulation, as guilty of fratricide as was Cain, as guilty of ritual murder as are the disciples of Kali, as devout in their myriad hatreds as any demon from the caverns of hell.

  Whom do they hate?

  Thee and me.

  Which brothers do they kill?

  Thine and mine.

  Dirck carried on throughout with such shameless rhetorical flourishes, also interposing an appalling study of clandestine conspiracy to defraud, destroy, debase, and eliminate not only men but families and entire organizations that obstructed the aims of The Society, and to ostracize foreigners from public office, power, and lofty social position. Sudden death on a dark pier, legal theft of an iron foundry’s ownership, burning of barns, poisoning of livestock, terrorizing of immigrant and religious gatherings—all such events had been reported in the newspapers, and Dirck cited dates and places. Taken discretely, the events reflected a randomly base quality to much of human behavior. But linked by Dirck’s genius for correlation, they coalesced as the scheme of a ruthless and invisible oligarchy.

  Dirck’s writing went well beyond summary of the plotted web. It also named beneficiaries and heretofore untouchable agents of the vile deeds. Even when his proof was firm but unsubstantiable, he described his targets with a partial fidelity that ensured identification; for instance: “The corrupt magistrate D— van E— of the nearby village of C—.”

  The recklessness of this attack (Will was sued numerous times for libel) was a calculation that placed Will’s and Dirck’s moral positions above anything purporting to be a fair-minded rendering of reality. Damn fair-mindedness! We are in possession of dastardly truth!

  The community response was swift. Committees assembled to confront The Society’s suddenly visible leaders with a cascade of shame and alarm that such secrecy had been so powerfully loosed upon the land. A spate of resignations from the order also followed in protest against the criminal revelation. Many of the accused denied The Society even existed, but sudden departures from the city by certain bankers, politicians, artisans became known, and a few notorious members of the lower classes also vanished, men known to have been available for hired thuggery. Dirck’s book was widely reprinted, or paraphrased by cautious editors, elsewhere in the nation, and Dirck, in absentia, became a hero, as did Will for publishing him.

  Two known deaths ensued from what Dirck wrote. A magistrate renowned as a temperance advocate shot himself through the right eye after Dirck revealed him as the actual owner of a brothel and four grogshops; and an actors’ dresser, one Abner Green, was found hanging from a crossbeam backstage at The Museum. The City Physician rendered a report of suicide on Green, but Will believed it to be murder, for he knew Green had been one of Dirck’s informants. Green’s death convinced Will that Dirck also had been killed, for Abner Green had given Dirck certain data on the oath that members took to gain entry to The Order of the Cross, the elite group responsible for discipline within The Society. Dirck wrote:

  Deprived of clothing, food, light, and the right to speak, naked in the darkness for as much as twenty-four hours, the can
didates for this Order are at last given food to eat, then are told it has been befouled by human waste. The food has not been befouled, only tainted with certain odors. Yet believing it excrementalized, the candidates dutifully devour it. If they retch they must devour a new portion.

  Of the oath, Dirck quoted this cautionary segment:

  I will defend The Society with my life, not only its known aims, but those yet to be defined. I will punish its enemies without fear of reprisal by any man, any law. If ever I betray this oath, I agree that my stomach should be opened by a blade, and my organs and entrails exposed to the tooth and fang of ravenous rats.

  Since Abner Green had not died in this manner, Will was not sure it had been a ritual murder. He distrusted all official information from the city, and so called me into his office.

  “How would you like to become an actor?” he asked me.

  “I would not like it at all,” I said. “I’ve never set foot in a theater. Just thinking about being onstage gives me chilblains.”

  “Nonsense,” said Will. “All actors are terrified. But they overcome that and find something of themselves worth presenting to public view.”

  “Not me,” said I.

  “Frankly,” said Will in his forbearing tone, “I’m not interested in your lack of dramatic ambition. I only want you to go to The Museum to audition for the new show, and to keep alert for talk of Abner Green and Dirck. They won’t suspect anything of a boy your age. Tell them you can act. Tell them you can sing.”

  “You want me to do this all by myself?”

  “I do.”

  “But I’m afraid,” I said.

  “You are not afraid,” said Will.

  “Oh yes I am.”

  “Oh no you are not.”

  “Then why do I think I am?”

  “Because you are a boy who still believes in fear, and it’s time you grew out of that.”

  And so, browbeaten by my elder, I took myself to The Museum, which had begun its existence more than twenty years earlier as a showplace of curiosities—a rhinoceros purportedly shot by Benjamin Franklin, a living Chinese torso without arms or legs, a wax effigy of the last man legally hanged in Albany, the unique one-hundred-and-forty-pound Amazonian rat (stuffed). The Museum, in the ’40s, had turned to melodrama, but also had seen Edwin Forrest incarnate Hamlet, Lear, and Othello on its boards. Several live-horse dramas gained popularity on its huge stage, but all were eclipsed by the success of Magdalena Colón’s sensational dancing. Since Magdalena, the audiences had been a thin gruel, and theater manager Waldorf (Dorf) Miller now hoped to woo people back with a production bridging two genres: the minstrel show and the Irish frolic. Its title: Tambo and Paddy Go to Town.

  A dozen workers were in assorted forms of frenzy—sweeping, painting, doing carpentry work—as I entered. One man was sawing a huge, decrepit rhinoceros into thirds to get it out the door (its skin had been stuffed years earlier inside the theater), and onstage a cadaverous white man was shuffling to the music of two banjos and singing:

  Dere’s music in de wells,

  Dere’s music in de air

  Dere’s music in a nigger’s

  knee When de banjo’s dere.

  When the singer finished, Dorf Miller, a somewhat round man in a silver leather vest, with sprouts of hair behind his ears but nowhere else on his head, told him he was hired and asked did he have a costume for the show. The man said he did not, and so Dorf nodded and pulled aside a curtain onstage, revealing people fitting costumes on performers. I went to the manager and gave my name and said I would like a role in his new show.

  “A role, you say, Master Quinn?”

  “Yes, sir, a role.”

  “Are you an actor, Master Quinn?”

  “I hope to be,” I said, a great lie that slid so easily off my tongue that I realized I must be very close to damnation. “And I sing. My mother said I had quite a good voice,” another lie that amused Dorf Miller, and he announced to all present, “Hear, hear. This boy says his mother likes his singing,” and all laughed. “What brought you to our door?” he asked me.

  “My mother was a close friend of Mrs. Hillegond Staats and my father knew Abner Green. Both of them spoke often of The Museum, and Mr. Green told my father to send me here if I needed work. Are you Mr. Green?”

  “No,” said the manager, “my name is Miller. Who is your father and how did he know Abner Green?”

  “Davey Quinn was his name, and he’s dead and buried, God rest his soul. He and Mr. Green were members of the same organization.”

  “Organization,” said Dorf, growing somber, and I noted two carpenters within earshot looked at me and then at each other. They nodded their heads knowingly and then kept nodding long after any meaning had been conveyed.

  “The Society, I think they called it,” I said.

  “Your father was in The Society? I didn’t think they allowed the Irish in.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what they allowed,” I said. “All I know is what was said.”

  One carpenter whispered to the other, both of them nodding furiously. Then one of them went out of the theater.

  “Abner Green,” said Dorf reflectively.

  “My father said he was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was all of that. It’s a shame what they—” and he caught himself. “It’s a shame he died.”

  “Oh, is he dead?”

  “He is. But I’ll attend to you myself in his absence, young sir, and if you’ve a mind to, let us hear this voice that your mother loves so well.”

  “Oh indeed, sir. But my mother is dead and buried too, God rest her soul. And sir, if my voice fails to please you, is there another sort of job here for me?”

  “Let us have first things first. What song will you sing?”

  “ ‘Kathleen Mavourneen.’ It was my father’s favorite.”

  “A lovely song, but very difficult,” said Dorf, and he sat on a chair while I faced the banjo players and others. I then sang, a capella, and very badly indeed, the only song whose words I knew to the end, pounded into my memorious brain by my relentlessly lyrical father. I could see from Dorf’s face that my talent lay in a direction other than music. He was about to tell me as much when a young man in a plug hat and galluses, and only slightly older than myself, joined me in my progress toward a high note I knew I would never hit. His voice overpowered mine with such mellifluity that all in the theater were thrown into a fit of awe. It was the purest voice I could imagine, and what’s more he also knew the words.

  Oh hast thou forgotten

  How soon we must sever,

  Oh hast thou forgotten

  This day we must part.

  It may be for years,

  And it may be forever,

  Oh why art thou silent,

  Thou voice of my heart . . .

  I desisted from singing when he began, but continued humming along somewhat unobtrusively, reluctant to abandon my own song entirely. When the song ended, all in the theater (myself included) burst into applause, so obviously grand and crystalline was the fellow’s talent. He had not been in the theater when I arrived, but must have come in behind me to unite with my song like a usurper. But his usurpation was justified: he talented, I without a shred. He extended his hand to me.

  “I apologize for interfering with your song,” he said. “But I saw you were in difficulties. Perhaps if you did a different song . . .”

  “I don’t know a different song,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “That is a pity, then. I’ve ruined it for you.”

  “You’ve ruined nothing,” said Dorf, coming between us. “I believe it’s a wonderful act. This lad here with a very small voice, terrified of performing and quite sympathetic for all that, and then you, rising from the audience like the deus ex machina himself and booming out your splendid tenor’s gift. And then, yes . . . yes, yes, you climb onto the stage, singing all the while, and the two of you finish together in grand elevation. The lad is rescued, the teno
r triumphant. Oh, I’m fond of it, very fond. How do you call yourself, young sir?”

  “Joseph K. Moran,” said the usurper.

  We all exchanged names and Dorf told us to come for rehearsal tomorrow at ten. He then busied himself with the next aspirants, a pair of twins who had been dancing in the wings to the jangle of their own tambourines when I came in. I discovered that Joseph Moran had just arrived from Utica after visiting his ailing mother. I quizzed him on La Última and he said she’d sold out the theater there for two weeks, as she had here. I inquired after Maud and he vaguely recalled hearing of a young girl who appeared on stage with La Última, but doing precisely what, he could not say. I liked Joseph Moran in spite of his usurping ways. He was only a year older than I, though he looked to be near the age of twenty, and carried himself with a sophisticated swagger I mistrusted without knowing why.

  A man entered as we talked and said to Dorf, “I’m looking for a young fellow called Daniel Quinn.” Dorf pointed me out and the man came over to me.

  “I’ve a message,” he said in a whisper. “Mr. Staats awaits your visit.”

  “Mr. Staats?” I said. “Mr. Dirck Staats?”

  “I wouldn’t know that,” said the man. “Staats is all they told me.”

  “Who is they?”

  “Mr. Staats. He was with others.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Out the road north. I’m to take you. You’re not likely to find it alone.”

  “Is he all right?”