The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “But I had not long to wonder. When Billy had drunk his fill he went to the creek and washed his body from top to toe, for the tree-bark had cut him as raw as a keelhauled sailor, and he was dirty and a-sweat besides. E’en now the rules he’d set himself were in force; he would have none o’ my skinning-knife, but commenced to flay the carcass with an oyster-shell from the creek, and albeit he allowed me to make a fire, he stayed naked as Adam till his work was done. ’Twere a half-day’s labor to flay out such a beast with a wretched shell, and I feared he’d catch his death ere the chore was done; but he made me a gift o’ both hide and meat, declaring he craved nor the one nor the other, and flayed no more o’ the carcass than was required to lay back a deal o’ fat. This he gouged by the gobbet onto a foot-square piece o’ the pelt, the which he had reserved for himself, and then skewered o’er the fire till it commenced to render. His object, I saw, was to lard himself with bear-grease from heel to hair, as is the wont of salvages from time to time, and as he worked I began to fear that betwixt this bear-hunt and the happenings of the day before, there was a certain dark connection. Nor was I wide o’ the mark, for when he was greased as a griskin and reeking like Old Ned’s lamp, he gorged himself on the balance o’ the fat and then took up his oystershell and gelded the bear—”

  Ebenezer and McEvoy expressed their bewilderment, but Mary, who had been so withdrawn throughout that one wondered whether she was entranced or asleep, now opened her eyes and sighed a knowing, compassionate sigh. “ ’Twas what I expected, and less than I hoped for, Harvey. And Roxie is mistaken—’twere a waste o’ time for me to see her, don’t ye think? Ah well, in any case the story’s clear.”

  “Haply ’tis clear to you,” complained the poet, “but I grasp naught of’t.”

  “ ’Tis no deep mystery,” the trapper declared. “What the bull hath always signed to civil folk, the male bear signifies to the salvage Indian. But not only do they look on him as the emblem o’ virility; they hold farther that his carcass is great medicine in matters o’ love. Hence the manner of his killing, that Billy had explained before, and hence that larding with his hibernation-fat, the which they say feeds the fires o’ love as it warms the bear in winter months. As for the other, ’tis widely believed in the salvage nations that if a man lay hold of a buck-bear’s privates, bind ’em up in a pouch o’ the uncured pelt, and belt ’em so with a bearhide thong that they hang before his own, then his potency will be multiplied by the bear’s, and Heav’n help the first poor wench that crosses his path! I asked him, ‘Is’t the Church Creek girl thou’rt bound for?’ And albeit he would not answer me directly, he smiled a dev’lish smile and said ’twould please him if I’d pay him a call some day or two hence, when he and Mrs. Rumbly had found my cabin on Tobacco Stick Bay and set up housekeeping! By’s speech ye’d take him for a merry English gentleman; yet there he stood like the living spirit o’ salvage lust! Much as I feared for the poor girl’s honor, I pled with Billy Rumbly to move with caution, inasmuch as I supposed she’d be on her guard to shoot him dead. But he said, ‘No English pistol e’er killed a bear,’ and went his way.”

  “Now ’tis plain,” McEvoy said. “He carried her off and keeps her hid in the cabin ye spoke of! How is’t the sheriff hath made no move to find her?”

  “ ’Tis also plain thou’rt innocent of provincial justice,” Ebenezer put in bitterly. “Only the virtuous run afoul of Maryland law.”

  “Nay, now, ye put your case too strongly,” said the trapper. “Our courts are sound as England’s in principle; but ’tis a wild and lawless bailiwick they deal with—frauds and pirates and whores and adventurers, jailbirds and the spawn of jailbirds. I don’t wonder the courts go wrong, or a judge or two sells justice o’er the bar; at least the judges and courts are there, and we’ll make their judgments honest when we’ve the power to make ’em stick—which is to say, when the spirit o’ the folk at large is curbed and snaffled.”

  Ebenezer’s cheeks tingled, not alone because he felt that he had in fact overstated his indictment: his day in the Cambridge court still rankled in his memory, and the price of it drew sweat from all his pores; but his wholesale rancor had got to be something of a disposition, and he had been alarmed to recognize, as the trapper spoke, that he fell into it of late, on mention of certain subjects, more from habit than from honest wrath. So grossly had Maryland used him, he had vowed to smirch her name in verse to his children’s children’s children; could such outrages dwindle to the like of actors’ cues? It was by no progress of reason that he reached this question, but by a kind of insight that glowed in his mind as the blush glowed in his face. By its troubled light, in no more time than was required for him to murmur, “I daresay” to Harvey Russecks, he beheld the homeless ghosts of a thousand joys and sorrows meant to live in the public heart till the end of time: feast days, fast days, monuments and rites, all dedicated to glories and disasters of a magnitude that dwarfed his own, and all forgotten, or rotely observed by a gentry numb to the emotions that established them. A disquieting vision, and no less so to the poet was his response to it. Not long since, he would have gnashed his spiritual teeth at the futility of endeavor in such a world. Not improbably he would have railed at human fickleness in allegorical couplets: the Heart, he would have declared, is a faithless Widow: at the deathbed of her noble Spouse (whether Triumph or Tragedy) she pledges herself forever to his memory, but scarcely has she donned her Weeds before some importuning Problem has his way with her; and in the years that follow, for all her ceremonious visits to the tomb, she shares her bed with a parade of mean Vicissitudes, not one of them worthy even of her notice. Now, however, though such fickleness still stung his sensibilities (which is to say his vanity, since he identified himself with the late Husband), he was not sure but what it had about it a double Tightness: “Time passes for the living,” it seemed to say, “and alters things. Only for the dead do circumstances never change.” And this observation implied a judgment on the past, its relation to and importance in the present; a judgment to which he currently half assented. But only half!

  The trapper resumed. “ ’Twas just a few days later I saw Billy again, coming out of Trinity Church—aye, I swear’t, just a Sunday since! He was knee-hosed and periwigged like any gentleman, not a trace o’ bear-grease on him, and for all some folk misdoubted what to make of him, the rector and he shook hands at the door and spoke their little pleasantries cordial as ye please! When I drew nigh I heard him chatting with a brace o’ sot-weed planters in better English periods than ye’ll hear in the Governor’s Council. His companions were two of the same that had tricked him before, but ye’d ne’er have guessed it from their manner: the one was inviting him to join the church, and the other was arguing with him about next year’s sot-weed market.

  “ ‘This here’s Mr. Rumbly,’ they said to me, ‘as decent a Christian gentleman as ever shat on sot-weed.’ At sight o’ me Billy smiled and bowed, and said, ‘I’ve already had the honor, thankee, gentlemen: Mr. Russecks was generous enough to lend me one of his cabins against the day I raise a house of my own.’ We twain shook hands most warmly, and, do ye know, I was the envy of no fewer than half a dozen souls round about, so jealous were they grown already of his favor! Billy declared he had a call or two to pay, after which he wished I’d take dinner at his cabin, and when he’d strolled off, his courtiers gathered round me like fops round a new-dubbed knight. From them I learned that the Church Creek Virgin had set out one day from Roxanne’s house and disappeared, nor was heard from after till the day Billy Rumbly came to town, dressed in English clothes, and declared she was his bride. Some said he had made a prisoner of her, and told stories of seeing him torture her over the hearth fire, but others that had spied on him declared she could leave the cabin when she pleased and stayed with him of her own will. To them that took the liberty of calling for a proper Christian wedding, he replied that naught would please him more, but his wife was content with the Indian ceremony he’d performed himself and would
have no other, nor would he oblige her against her will.

  “In any case, albeit ’twas but a short time since that first appearance, and there was still some talk against him here and there, Billy seemed to have won the heart of every woman in Church Creek and the respect of nearly all the men. He hath great plans for improving everything from the sot-weed market to the penal code, as I hear’t, and albeit no man would speak out and say’t—me being a Russecks, ye know—’twas clear they looked to Billy to stand up to my brother Harry soon or late. They have changed allegiance well-nigh to a man; Billy’s too strong and full o’ plans, and Sir Harry too jealous of his power, for the twain not to come to grips. What’s more, rumor hath it ’twas Harry drove Miss Bromly to run off, from trying to have his way with her, and everyone reasoned Billy would have satisfaction of the wretch when the right time came.

  “On our way to the cabin—I forgot to tell ye I was the first wight he’d invited into his house and was envied the more for’t—on the way out there I told Billy frankly what I’d heard of him and asked him to sort out fact from fancy, but he was so full of his own questions about everything under the sun, he made me no proper answer. Why could not the tobacco-planters form a guild, he wanted to know, to bargain with the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations? Who was Palestrina, and did I think a man of forty was too old to learn the harpischord? Why did Copernicus suppose the sun stood still, when it and its planets might be moving together through space? If a Christian ascetic comes to take pleasure in mortifying the appetites, must he not gratify them to mortify them, and mortify them to gratify them, and did this not fetch him to a standstill?”

  Mary Mungummory shook her head. “So like my Charley, rest his soul! Had the De’il’s own packsack o’ questions, and no man’s answers pleased him!”

  Ebenezer pressed the trapper for tidings of Miss Bromly. “ ’Tis e’er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion! Innocence is like youth,” he declared sadly, “which is given us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss.”

  “ ’Tis that makes it precious, is’t not?” asked McEvoy with a smile.

  “Nay,” Mary countered, “ ’tis that proves its vanity, to my way o’ thinking.”

  “ ’Tis beyond me what it proves,” Ebenezer said. “I know only that the case is so.”

  Russecks then went on to say that he had found the cabin (which already he had ceased to think of as his own) in excellent repair, its windows newly equipped with real glass panes and the grounds around it clear of brush. In the dooryard stood a recently constructed sundial, perhaps the only one in the area, and atop one gable was a platform used by its builder for readier observation of the stars and planets.

  “He’d mentioned along the way that he’d shot a young buck the night before and was waiting till Monday, like a proper Christian, to butcher it, but when we rode around the cabin I spied a salvage woman up to her elbows in the bloody carcass, cleaving off steaks and rump-roasts. She was dressed in dirty deerskin like the old squaws wear; her hair was coarse and tangled, and her brown skin greasy as a bacon-flitch. Her back was turned to us as we rode in, and she paid us no heed at all. ’Twas on my mind to twit Billy for her industry—tell him ’twas a merry bit o’ Jesuitry, don’t ye know, setting heathens to break the Sabbath for him—but ere ever I got the words out he addressed her in the salvage tongue, and I saw when she faced round ’twas no Indian woman at all. I could only gather, she was the famous Church Creek Virgin!”

  Ebenezer and McEvoy registered their astonishment.

  “I’faith, sirs,” Russecks proceeded, “it doth give a civil man pause when first he lays eyes upon a salvage, for’t carries him back to view the low origin of his history: yet by how much rarer is the spectacle of one of his kind fallen back to the salvage condition, by so much more confounding is’t to behold, for it must drive home to him how strait and treacherous is the climb to politeness and refinement—so much so, that one breath of inattention, as’t were, may send the climber a-plummet to his former state. And in the civillest among us, don’t ye know—in Mister Cooke the poet there, or who ye will—this precious cultivation—’sheart, sirs, on sight of one like Billy Rumbly’s wife… !” He paused and started over. “What I mean, sirs, ’tis like the cultivation of our fields, so’t seems to me: ’tis all order and purpose—and wondrous fruits doth it bring forth!—yet ’tis but a scratch, is’t not, on the face of unplumbable deeps? Two turns o’ the spade cuts through’t to the untouched earth, and under that lies a thousand miles o’ changeless rock, and deeper yet lie the raging fires at the core o’ the world!

  “The sensible man, I say, is bound to reflect on these things when he sees one of his own gone salvage like the Church Creek Virgin. She was dressed in Indian garb, as I said before, and pig-dirty from head to foot. She’d browned her skin with dye, so’t appeared, and basted it with bear-fat, which with the dirt and deer-blood gave her a splendid salvage stink, e’en in the cold out-o’-doors. Never a glance did she cast to me, but stared always at Billy like a good retriever, and at his command she gave o’er hacking the buck and plodded off with two steaks to broil for dinner.”

  The interior of the cabin, Russecks went on to say, he had found as clean as the housekeeper was not, who in the heat from the fireplace grew redolent as a tan yard; throughout the afternoon, when dinner was done, she had sat stolidly on the hearthrug, Indian fashion, grinding meal in an earthenware mortar, and had spoken only in grunts and monosyllables when Billy addressed her. Yet though her manner and condition were slavelike, at no time had the trapper observed anything suggestive of coercion or intimidation.

  “In sum,” he said, “she was an English lass no longer, but a simple salvage squaw. ’Tis my guess he sought her out in his bear-grease and magical loin-pouch and did such deeds o’ salvage love and ravishment that she gave o’er the reins of her mind for good and all.”

  “Thou’rt off the mark,” Mary said flatly. “ ’Tis that he made such a conquest with his amorous lore, the girl renounced her Englishness on the spot for ever and aye. I know ’tis thus.”

  “Ah, but I loathe the monster nonetheless!” Ebenezer said. “E’en granting our innocence was given us to lose, still and all—any, rather therefore—its whole meaning is in the terms of its surrender, is’t not? To have it wrested will-ye, nill-ye, ravished away—” He tried to envision the struggle: he fancied himself in the position of Miss Bromly, forced upon her back among the cold briars of the forest; the knife was at his neck, his coats were flung high, the wind bit his thighs and private parts; and over him, naked and greased, hung a swart, ferocious savage with the face and herpetonic eyes of Henry Burlingame. “God damn him for’t! How the wretch must gloat in his victory!”

  “How’s that?” Russecks showed some surprise. “Gloat, ye say? Ah, well, now, he didn’t gloat, ye know. Nay, friend, ye forget Billy Rumbly hath climbed a far greater distance than the lass hath sunk; aye, e’en higher by far than the station she left, I’ll wager! Such a civil, proper gentleman as he could ne’er take pleasure in such a victory; yet ’twas the conquest, as I see’t, that raised him up. The fact is, sirs, his wife is a constant shame to him: he entreats her to clean herself and dress like an English lady; he yearns to join the Church and have a Christian wedding; naught would please him more than to set sail tonight for Rome, or an English university. But she will none of’t; she wallows in her filth and salvage ways, and poor Billy is too much the man of honor now either to desert her or to force her against her will!”

  Mary Mungummory shook her head. “How well I know her heart and his as well! I wonder again what I wonder nightly as I watch the circus in my wagon: is man a salvage at heart, skinned o’er with Manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man’s gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel’s arse?”

  For Ebenezer, at least, absorbed in recollection of certain violences in his past, the question was by no means witho
ut pertinence and interest; neither he nor the other men, however, ventured a response.

  12

  The Travelers Having Proceeded Northward to Church Creek, McEvoy Out-Nobles a Nobleman, and the Poet Finds Himself Knighted Willy-Nilly

  SOON AFTER HARVEY RUSSECKS had concluded his story the company retired for the night on corn-husk mattresses provided by the host, which, with a plentiful supply of blankets from Mary’s wagon, afforded Ebenezer and McEvoy the most comfortable night’s lodging they had enjoyed for some time. The poet, however, was kept sleepless for hours by thoughts of Miss Bromly, his sister, the gravity of his mission, and the story he had just heard. Next morning as they breakfasted on platters of fried eggs and muskrat—a dish they found more pleasing to the tongue than to the eye—he declared, “I had cause enough before to find this Cohunkowprets, or Billy Rumbly, for he may be the means of sparing my conscience the burthen of two English lives; but now I’ve heard what state Miss Bromly hath fallen to, purely out of loyalty to my sister, ’tis more urgent than ever I seek the fellow out and try to save her. One ruined life the more on my account, and I’ll go mad with responsibility!”

  “Nay, friend,” McEvoy urged, “I respect your sentiments, Heav’n knows, but think better of’t! Thou’rt bound to save our hostages from Chicamec at any cost to yourself, so ye declared, and ye’ve shamed me into the same tomfoolish honor: d’ye think this Rumbly fellow’s likely to oblige us if he sees thou’rt after wooing his wife away? And if he turns his back on us—i’faith!—’twill not be two, but two hundred thousand lives ye may answer for; with Dick Parker and that other wight to general ’em, not all the militia in America can put down the slaves and Indians!”