The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

“Why, what else but strive with might and main to leap in again?” Andrew replied. “At last it occurred to me to invite her to join my house, since she looked to lighten but a week ere poor Anne; I agreed to keep her well and provide for her confinement on condition she suckle our babe, if it should live, with her own. She agreed, we drafted the indenture-papers, and I fetched her back to Malden.

  “Now your mother, God rest her, grew worse all the time. She was a wondrous Protestant, much giv’n to Bible-reading, and whene’er I showed her pity she was wont to reply, ‘Fear not, husband: the Lord will help us.’ ”

  “Bless her!” said Ebenezer.

  “ ’Twas her conceit,” Andrew went on, “to regard her several infirmities as an enemy host, and late and soon she was after me to read her from the Old Testament of God’s military intercessions in behalf of the Israelites. Hence when her ague passed off without killing her (albeit it left her pitifully weak), she was proud as any general who sees a flank of the enemy turned, and she declared like the prophet Samuel upon the rout of the Philistines, ‘Thus far hath the Lord helped us!’ At length her time arrived, and after frightful labor she brought forth Anna, eight pounds and a half. She named her after her own mother, and said again to me, ‘Thus far hath the good Lord helped us!’ Not a soul then but thought her trials were done, and even I, who was no Catholic saint nor Protestant either, thanked God for her delivery. But not an hour after bearing Anna her travail commenced again, and after much clamor and hollowing she brought you to light, nigh as big as your sister. Seventeen pounds of child she dropped in all, from a—well, from a frame so delicate, simple flatulence gave her pain. ’Twas no wonder she passed into a coma ere your shoulders cleared, and ne’er recovered from it! That same night she died, and the weather being unseasonably hot for May, I fetched her down next day and buried her ’neath a great loblolly pine tree on the Bay side of the point, where she lies yet.”

  “God help me!” Ebenezer wept. “I am not worthy of’t!”

  “ ’Twould be dishonest not to own,” Andrew said, “that such exactly were my sentiments at the time, God forgive me. E’en as the burial service was read I could hear the twain of you a-squalling up in the house, and when I placed a boulder atop the sandy grave, against the time our mason could letter a headstone, it recalled to me those verses in the Book of Samuel where God smites the Philistines and Samuel dedicates the token of His aid—the stone the Hebrews called Ebenezer. ’Twas then, boy, in bitterness and sacrilege, I gave ye that name: I baptized ye myself, ere Roxanne could stay me, with the dregs of a flagon of perry, and declared to the company of Malden, ‘Thus far hath the Lord helped us!’ “

  “Ah, dear Father, berate thyself no more for’t,” Ebenezer begged—though Andrew had displayed no particular emotion. “I understand and forgive!”

  Andrew tapped out his pipe in a spittoon beside the bed and, after resting a moment, resumed his story.

  “In any case,” he said calmly, “you and your sister ne’er wanted mothering. The girl Roxanne had borne her own child, a daughter, eight days before, but the babe had strangled ere its first cry with the navel-cord round its neck; so that maugre the fact there were two of ye, instead of one, she had no more mouths to feed than breasts to feed ’em with, and there was milk aplenty for all. She was e’er a healthy wench once on her feed again—ruddy-faced, full-breasted, and spirited as a dairymaid for all her fine blood. For the four years of her indenture she raised ye as her own. Mrs. Twigg declared no good could come of mixing French pap and English blood, but ye grew fat and merry as any babes in Dorset.

  “In 1670, the last year of Roxanne’s service, I resolved to leave Malden for London. I was weary of factoring, for one thing; I saw no chance to improve my tobacco-holdings, for another; and though Cooke’s Point is of all places on earth dearest to my heart, and my first and largest property, yet ’twas e’er a heartache to live a widower in the house I’d raised for my bride. Moreover, I must own my position with regard to Roxanne had got somewhat delicate since poor Anne’s death. That she thought no ill o’ me I took for granted, for she was bound to me by gratitude as well as legal instrument. I in turn was more than a little obliged to her, in that she’d not only suckled twice as many of my children as she was legally bound to, but done it with a mother’s love, and had taken on most of Mrs. Twigg’s duties as governess as well, out of pure affection for ye. I’ve said already she was an uncommon pretty piece, and I at that time was a strapping wight of thirty-three, prosperous and it may be not unhandsome, who by reason of poor Anne’s affliction and death had perforce slept alone and uncomforted since my arrival in the province. Hence, ’tis not surprising some small-minded busy-bodies should have it Roxanne was filling Anne’s place in the bedchamber as well as the nursery—more especially since they themselves had lechered after her. ’Tis e’er the way of men, I’ve learned, to credit others with the sins themselves want either the courage or the means to commit.”

  “But marry, what vicious gossip!”

  “Aye,” Andrew said, “but As well be a sinner as known for one. What a man is in the eyes of God means little to the world of men. All things considered, I thought it well to release her; yet I could by no means send her back to death or harlotry, and so ’twas a pleasant surprise when, one day on that selfsame landing where I’d met her, I was approached by a man who introduced himself as Roxanne’s uncle, and asked most solicitously after his niece.”

  “I pray the fellow had tempered his wrath by then.”

  “He had,” Andrew said, “to the point where the very thought of his former unkindness started him to tears, and when I told him of Roxanne’s subsequent straits and of the death of her infant, he near tore his hair in remorse. There was no end to his expressions of gratitude for my having saved and cared for her; he declared himself eager to make amends for his severity, and entreated me to prevail upon Roxanne to return to his house. I reminded him that it was his unreasonableness in the matter of suitors for his niece that had driven her to her former disgrace, and he replied that so far from persisting in that unreasonableness, he had in mind at that very moment an excellent match for her with a wealthy fellow of the neighborhood, who had e’er looked kindly upon her.

  “You can imagine Roxanne’s surprise when she learned of all this. She was pleased to hear of her uncle’s change of heart, and yet ’twas like giving up two of her own to let you and Anna go. She wept and wailed, as women will at any great change in their circumstances, and pleaded with me to take her to London, but it seemed to me ’twould be a disservice to the twain of us to maintain any longer our connection, more especially since her uncle had a substantial match arranged for her. Thus was it that on the same day when I gave Roxanne my half of her indenture-bond, signifying the end of her service, her uncle drove out to Malden in a buckboard and fetched her away, and that was that. Not a fortnight later I too made my last farewells to Malden, and left Maryland forever. Think not ’twas an easy matter to go: ’tis a rarity indeed when Life presents ye with a clean choice, i’faith! ’Tis more her wont to arrange things in such fashion that de’il the course ye choose, ’twill give ye pain. Eheu! I’ve rambled and digressed till I’m near out of wind! Here now,” he said, handing Ebenezer the document he’d been toying and gesturing with throughout his narration. “Read this whilst I catch my breath.”

  Ebenezer took the paper, curious and uneasy, and read, among other things:

  Andrew Cooke of the parish of St. Giles in the Fields in the County of Middlesex, Gentleman doe make this my last will and Testament as followeth… Imprimus I give to my Son Ebenezer Cooke and Anna Cooke my daughter all my Right and Title of and to… all my Land called Cookes Poynt lyng at the mouth of great Choptank River lyng in Dorchester County in Maryland… share and share alike…

  “Dost see’t, boy?” Andrew demanded. “Dost grasp it, damn ye? ’Tis Cooke’s Point; ’tis my dear sweet Malden, where the twain of ye saw daylight and your mother lies yet! There’s this house too, and t
he place on Plumtree Street, but Cooke’s Point’s where my heart lies; Malden’s my darling, that I raised out o’ the wilderness. ’Tis your legacy, Eben, your inheritance; ’tis your personal piece o’ the great wide world to husband and to fructify—and a noble legacy ’tis, b’m’faith! ‘Share and share alike,’ but the job of managing an estate is man’s work, not woman’s. ’Twas for this I got, reared, and schooled ye, and ’tis for this ye must work and gird yourself, damn ye, to make ye worthy of’t, and play no more at shill I, shall I!”

  Ebenezer blushed. “I am sensible I have been remiss, and I’ve naught to say in my defense, save that ’twas not stupidity undid me at Cambridge, but feckless indirection. Would God I’d had dear Henry Burlingame to steer and prod me!”

  “Burlingame!” cried Andrew. “Fogh! He came no nearer the baccalaureate than yourself. Nay, ’twas your dear rascal Burlingame ruined ye, methinks, in not teaching ye how to work.” He waved the draft of his will. “Think ye your Burlingame will ever have a Malden to bequeath? Fie on that scoundrel! Mention his name no more to me, an’t please ye, lest I suffer a stroke!”

  “I am sorry,” said Ebenezer, who had mentioned Burlingame’s name intentionally to observe his father’s reaction: he now concluded it would be impolitic to describe in any detail his sojourn in London. “I know no way to show you how your magnanimity shames me for my failure. Send me back to Cambridge, if you will, and I swear on oath I’ll not repeat my former errors.”

  Andrew reddened. “Cambridge my arse! ’Tis Maryland shall be your Cambridge, and a field of sot-weed your library! And for diploma, if ye apply yourself, haply you’ll frame a bill of exchange for ten thousandweight of Oronoco!”

  “You mean to send me to Maryland, then?” Ebenezer asked uncomfortably.

  “Aye, to till the ground that spawned ye, but thou’rt by no means fit for’t yet; I fear the University hath so addled and debilitated ye, you’ve not the head to manage an estate nor the back to till it. ’Twill take some doing to sweat Burlingame and the college out o’ ye, but A man must walk ere he runs. What ye want’s but an honest apprenticeship: I mean to send ye forthwith to London, to clerk for the merchant Peter Paggen. Study the ins and outs of the plantation trade, as did I and my father before me, and I swear ’twill stand ye in better stead than aught ye heard at Cambridge, when time comes for ye to take your place at Malden!”

  Now this course of life was not one that Ebenezer would have chosen for himself—but then neither was any other. Moreover, when he reflected upon it, he was not blind to a certain attractiveness about the planter’s life as he envisioned it: he could see himself inspecting the labor of the fields from the back of his favorite riding-horse; smoking the tobacco that made him wealthy; drinking quince or perry from his own distillery with a few refined companions; whiling away the idle evenings on the gallery of his manor-house, remarking the mallards out on the river, and perhaps composing occasional verses of ease and dignity. He was, alas, not blind to the attractiveness of any kind of life. And more immediately, the prospect of returning to London with a clear conscience pleased him.

  Therefore he said, halfheartedly but not cheerlessly, “Just as you wish, Father. I shall try to do well.”

  “Why, thank Heav’n for that!” Andrew declared, and even contrived a thin smile. “ ‘Thus far hath the Lord helped us!’ Leave me now for the nonce, ere I collapse from very weariness.”

  Andrew settled back in bed, turned his face to the wall, and said no more.

  5

  Ebenezer Commences His Second Sojourn in London, and Fares Unspectacularly

  BECAUSE OF THE great unrest in the nation at this time, occasioned by the conflict between James II and William of Orange, Ebenezer, at his father’s advice, did not return to London until the winter of 1688, by which time William and Mary were securely established on the throne of England. The idle year at St. Giles was, although he had no way of realizing it at the time, perhaps Ebenezer’s nearest approach to happiness. He had nothing at all to do except read, walk about the countryside or London-without-the-walls, and talk at length with his sister. Although he could not look to his future with enthusiasm, at least he had not to bear the responsibility of having chosen it himself. In the spring and summer, when the weather turned fine, he grew too restless even to read. He felt full to bursting with ill-defined potentialities. Often he would sit a whole morning in the shade of a pear tree behind the house playing airs on the tenor recorder, whose secret he had learned from Burlingame. He cared for no sports; he wished not even to see anyone, except Anna. The air, drenched with sun and clover, made him volatile. On several occasions he was so full of feeling as to fear he’d swoon if he could not empty himself of it. But often as he tried to set down verses, he could not begin: his fancy would not settle on stances and conceits. He spent the warm months in a kind of nervous exaltation which, while more upsetting than pleasurable at the moment, left a sweet taste in his mouth at day’s end. In the evenings, often as not, would watch meteors slide down the sky till he grew dizzy.

  And though again he could not know it at the time, this idle season afforded him what was to be his last real communion with his sister for many a year. Even so, it was for the most part inarticulate; somewhere they’d lost the knack of talking closely to each other. Of the things doubtless most important to each they spoke not at all—Ebenezer’s failure at Cambridge and his impending journey; Anna’s uncertain past connection with Burlingame and her present isolation from and lack of interest in suitors of any sort. But they walked together a great deal, and one hot forenoon in August, as they sat under a sycamore near a rocky little steam-branch that ran through the property, Anna clutched his right arm, pressed her forehead to it, and wept for several minutes. Ebenezer comforted her as best he could without inquiring the reason for her tears: he assumed it was some feeling about their maturity that grieved her. At this time, in their twenty-second year of life, Anna looked somewhat older than her brother.

  Andrew, once his son’s affairs seemed secure, grew gradually stronger, and by autumn was apparently in excellent health again, though for the rest of his life he looked older than his years. In early November he declared the political situation stable enough to warrant the boy’s departure; a week later Ebenezer bade the household good-bye and set out for London.

  The first thing he did, after finding lodging for himself in a Pudding Lane boardinghouse, was visit Burlingame’s address, to see how his old friend fared. But to his surprise he found the premises occupied by new tenants—a draper and his family—and none of the neighbors knew anything of Henry’s whereabouts. That evening, therefore, when he’d seen to the arrangement of his belongings, he went to Locket’s, hoping to find there, if not Burlingame himself, at least some of their mutual acquaintances who might have news of him.

  He found three of the group to which Burlingame had introduced him. One was Ben Oliver, a great fat poet with beady eyes and black curly hair, a very rakehell, who some said was a Jew. Another was Tom Trent, a short sallow boy from Christ’s College, also a poet: he’d been sent to prepare for the ministry, but had so loathed the idea that he caught French pox from a doxy he kept in his quarters by way of contempt for his calling, and was finally dismissed upon his spreading the contagion to his tutor and at least two professors who had befriended him. Since then he’d come to take a great interest in religion: he liked no poets save Dante and Milton, maintained a virtual celibacy, and in his cups was wont to shout verses of Scripture at the company in his great bass voice. The third, Dick Merriweather, was despite his surname a pessimist, ever contemplating suicide, who wrote only elegiac verse on the subject of his own demise. Whatever the disparity in their temperaments, however, the three men lived in the same house and were almost always found together.

  “I’God, ’tis Eben Cooke the scholar!” cried Ben upon seeing him. “Have a bottle with us, fellow, and teach us the Truth!”

  “We thought you dead,” said Dick.

  T
om Trent said nothing: he was unmoved by greetings and farewells.

  Ebenezer returned their greetings, drank a drink with them, and, after explaining his return to London, inquired after Burlingame.

  “We’ve seen none of him for a year,” Ben said. “He left us shortly after you did, and I’d have said the twain of you were off together on some lark.”

  “I recall hearing he’d gone to sea again,” Dick Merriweather said. “Belike he’s at the bottom of’t now, or swimming in the belly of a whale.”

  “Stay,” said Ben. “Now I think on’t, didn’t I have it from Tom here ’twas Trinity College Henry went back to, to earn his baccalaureate?”

  “ ’Twas what I had from Joan Toast, that had it from Henry the last night ere he left,” Tom said indifferently. “I’ll own I pay scant heed to gossip of goings and comings, and ’tis not impossible I misheard her.”

  “Who is this Joan Toast then, pray, and where might I find her?” asked Ebenezer.

  “No need to seek her,” Ben laughed; “she’s but a merry whore of the place, and you may ask what you will of her anon, when she comes in to find a bedfellow.”

  Ebenezer waited until the girl arrived, and learned only that Burlingame had spoken of his intention to ransack the libraries of Cambridge for a fortnight—for what purpose she did not know, nor did any amount of inquiry around the winehouse shed more light on his intentions or present whereabouts. During the next week Ebenezer lost no opportunity to ask after his friend, but when it became clear that no clues were to be found, he reluctantly abandoned his efforts, wrote Anna a distressed note informing her of the news, and in the following months and years came almost to forget Henry’s existence—though to be sure, he felt the loss acutely whenever the name occurred to him.

  Meanwhile, he presented himself at the establishment of the merchant Peter Paggen, and, on producing letters from his father, was set to totting up accounts with the junior apprentices at a little desk among many others in a large room. It was understood that if he applied himself diligently and showed some ability in his work, he would be promoted after a week or so to a post from which he could observe to better advantage the workings of the plantation trade (Mr. Paggen had extensive dealings in Maryland and Virginia). Unfortunately, this promotion was never granted him. For one thing, no matter how hard he tried, Ebenezer could not concentrate his attention on the accounts. He would begin to add a column of totally meaningless figures and realize five minutes later that he’d been staring at a wen on the neck of the boy in front of him, or rehearsing in his mind a real or imaginary conversation between himself and Burlingame, or drawing mazes on a bit of scratch-paper. For the same reason, though he had by no means the troublemaker’s temperament, his untamable fancy more than once led him to be charged with irresponsibility: one day, for example, scarcely conscious of what he was about, he involved himself entirely in a game with a small black ant that had wandered across the page. The rule of the game, which he invested with the inexorability of natural law, was that every time the ant trod unwittingly upon a 3 or a 9, Ebenezer would close his eyes and tap the page thrice, smartly and randomly, with the point of his quill. Although his role of Deus civi Natura precluded mercy, his sentiments were unequivocally on the side of the ant: with an effort that brought sweat to his brow he tried by force of thought to steer the hapless creature from dangerous numbers; he opened his eyes after every series of taps, half afraid to look at the paper. The game was profoundly exciting. After some ten or fifteen minutes the ant had the bad luck to be struck by a drop of ink not a half inch from the 9 that had triggered the bombardment: flailing blindly, he inked a tiny trail straight back to the 9 again, and this time, after being bracketed by the first two taps, he was smitten squarely with the third. Ebenezer looked down to find him curled and dying in the loop of the digit. Tears of compassion, tempered with vast understanding and acceptance of the totality of life and the unalterable laws of the universe, welled in his eyes; his genital stiffened. At last the ant expired. Suddenly self-conscious, Ebenezer glanced around to see whether anyone had noticed him, and everyone in the room laughed aloud: they had witnessed the whole performance. From that day on they regarded him as more or less mad instead of simply odd; luckily for Ebenezer, however, they believed him to have some special connection with their employer Mr. Paggen, and so made little of the incident except among themselves.