The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “Dear Heav’n!” Mary whispered. “Is that true?” Anna and Henrietta clasped hands and regarded each other with astonishment.

  Ebenezer nodded. “Aye, ’tis true, and haply it sheds some light upon Mrs. Russecks’s shifting attitudes toward us. Father told me the story just before I left: Roxanne’s uncle—that is to say, this rascal Jacques—must have been a man of Sir Harry’s temper, inasmuch as he guarded her in the way Henrietta hath been guarded, and when Nature slipped through his defenses, as is her wont, he turned Roxanne out to starve.” He related quickly what Andrew had told him of the rescue and Roxanne’s unusual indenture-terms. “There were some lying rumors after Mother died that Roxanne had become his mistress,” he concluded. “In part, ’twas to give these slanders the lie he left Cooke’s Point for London. I recall his saying that Roxanne’s ‘uncle’ had approached him with apologies and begged for her to come back to him; he was supposed to have arranged a good match for her.”

  Henrietta winced. “With Papa!” Mary shook her head and sighed.

  “Aye,” the poet affirmed. “This Jacques, evidently, was indebted to Harry Russecks and hoped thus to settle his obligations. To be sure, Roxanne had no need to consent; but she told me not long since that she had come to loathe all men, and wed Sir Harry in effect to mortify her sex and gratify this loathing. She was much attached to Anna and me, and I daresay she felt abandoned, in a sense…”

  “In every sense.” Mrs. Russecks’s voice came from the hallway stairs and was followed by the lady herself. Ebenezer rose quickly from his chair and apologized for speaking indiscreetly.

  “Thou’rt guilty of nothing,” Mrs. Russecks said, looking past him to her daughter. “ ’Tis you that have been naughty, Henrietta, to tell tales out of school—” She got no farther, for Henrietta ran weeping to embrace her mother and beg forgiveness; yet it was clear that the girl’s emotion was not contrition for any misdemeanor, but sympathy and love inspired by what she had learned. Mrs. Russecks kissed her forehead and turned her eyes for the first time, eager and yet pained, to the twins; she managed to control her feelings until Anna too was moved to embrace her, whereupon she cried “Sweet babes!” and surrendered to her tears.

  There ensued a general chorus of weeping that for some minutes no other sound was heard in the millhouse. Everyone embraced everyone else in the spirit summed up by Ebenezer, the first to speak when the crest of the flood had passed and everyone was sniffling privately.

  “Sunt lacrimae rerum,” he declared, wiping his eyes.

  But the day’s surprises were not done. As soon as Mrs. Russecks had satisfied, for the moment, her hunger to embrace the twins and beg pardon for her previous aloofness—refraining, as did Ebenezer, from any illusion to her innocent attempt to seduce him, as well as to her own seduction by Anna’s supposed lover Burlingame, either of which in itself could account for her distress—she joined them at the tea table and said to Ebenezer, “You made good your vow to surpass Henrietta’s story with a postscript, Eben (I’God, how can my babies have grown so! And what trials have they not suffered!); but I believe I may yet snatch back the prize with a postscript of my own. To begin with, that ‘vicious lying gossip’ about your father and myself—’twas gossip in sooth, and vicious, but it was no lie. For three years after poor Anne’s death—that was their mother, Henrietta—Andrew and I mourned her together. But in the fourth year—i’faith, I loved him then, and hinted vainly at betrothal!—in the fourth year I was in sooth his mistress. Prithee forgive me for’t!”

  Both twins embraced her again and declared there was nothing to forgive. “On the contrary,” Ebenezer said grimly, “ ’tis my father needs forgiving. I see now what you meant by saying you were abandoned in every sense.”

  “Nay,” Mrs. Russecks said, “there is more…” She raised her eyes painfully to Mary, whose face suddenly changed from deep-frowned reflection to understanding. “Ah, God, Roxie!”

  Mrs. Russecks nodded. “You have guessed it, my dear.” She sniffed, took both of Henrietta’s hands in hers across the table, and looked unfalteringly at her daughter as she spoke. “Twice in my life I’ve loved a man. The first was Benjy Long, a pretty farmer-boy that lived near Uncle Jacques: he it was I gave my maidenhead to, when I was sixteen, and anon conceived his child; he it was ran off to sea when I would not cross my guardian’s wishes, nor have I heard of him from that day to this; and he it is, methinks, that still hath letters-patent to my heart—though I daresay he’s either long since fat and married or long since dead!” She laughed briefly and then grew sad again. “Shall I prove to you that time is no cure for folly? Often and often, when Andrew left me and when Harry would abuse me, I’d pray to little Benjy as to God, and to this hour my poor heart falters when a stranger comes to call—” She smiled at Ebenezer. “Especially if he calls himself Sir Benjamin!”

  “Ah, Christ, forgive me!” Ebenezer pleaded. Mrs. Russecks indicated with a gesture that there was nothing to pardon and returned her attention to Henrietta. “That was my first love. Andrew was the other, and far the greater, but merely to think of him drives me near to madness…” She paused to recompose herself. “Let me put it thus, my dears: this second love affair was in essence the first, save for two important differences. One, as you know already, is that my lover abandoned me…” She squeezed her daughter’s hands. “The other is that this time the baby lived.”

  18

  The Poet Wonders Whether the Course of Human History Is a Progress, a Drama, a Retrogression, a Cycle, an Undulation, a Vortex, a Right- or Left-Handed Spiral, a Mere Continuum, or What Have You. Certain Evidence Is Brought Forward, but of an Ambiguous and Inconclusive Nature

  THE IMPORT OF Mrs. Russecks’s last remark occasioned a new round of joyful and sympathetic embraces. Mrs. Russecks apologized to Ebenezer and Anna for having transferred her resentment to them, and they apologized in turn for their father’s ungentlemanly behavior of two dozen years earlier; Henrietta begged her mother’s retroactive forgiveness for all the times she had inveighed against her for marrying Russecks, and Roxanne begged reciprocal forgiveness for having conceived her out of wedlock as well as for the double injury of subjecting her to Sir Harry’s maltreatment and obliging her to believe she was his daughter. Even Mary was included, for the well-kept secret had caused occasional misunderstandings on both sides during her long friendship with the miller’s wife. There being no wine on the premises, when all were shriven and embraced, a new pot of tea was boiled for celebratory use, and, alternately shy and demonstrative, the new relatives talked long into the evening. For all her avowed hatred of Andrew Cooke, Roxanne was exceedingly curious about his life in England and his present highly questionable position; that night, moreover, Anna and Henrietta, who slept together, must each have taken the other completely into her confidence, for Ebenezer was surprised to observe next morning that they spoke freely of Henry Burlingame. At breakfast the three young people were in almost hilarious spirits: Ebenezer traded Hudibrastics with Henrietta, whom he found to have a real gift for satire, and Anna declared herself totally unconcerned about the future—as far as she was concerned, Roxanne was her mother too, and she would be content if she never saw Malden or her father again. Roxanne and Mary looked on joyfully, wiping their eyes on an apron-hem from time to time.

  By midmorning it had been decided that the Russeckses would travel with the Cookes to Anne Arundel Town as soon as McEvoy returned from Bloodsworth Island; there Roxanne and Henrietta would remain until the miller’s estate was sold, whereupon they (and, Henrietta hinted demurely, perhaps McEvoy) would sail for England and a new life. Ebenezer would carry his urgent message to Governor Nicholson and, if the situation warranted, plead for gubernatorial restitution of his estate on grounds that it was being used for activities subversive to the welfare of the Province; if his appeal bore no fruit or his father proved unrelenting, he and Anna would leave Maryland also as members of Roxanne’s family, and he would endeavor to find employment in London. Henry Bur
lingame and Joan Toast, though they weighed heavily on the twins’ minds, were provisionally excluded from their plans, since the whereabouts of the former and the attitude of the latter were uncertain.

  Their spirits were lifted even higher by the appearance, shortly after noontime, of McEvoy and Bertrand, who announced that Captain Cairn was waiting with his sloop in the creek to ferry them anywhere in the world. McEvoy kissed Henrietta ardently, and her mother as well, and Bertrand embraced his master with speechless gratitude.

  “Would ye fancy it?” McEvoy laughed. “Those wretches thought we’d left ’em stranded! When they saw me ride in with old Bill-o’-the-Goose they reckoned I’d been captured again, and commenced to give ye whatfor!” His face darkened for a moment, and while Bertrand professed his delight at seeing Miss Anna safe and sound, he confided to Ebenezer, “ ’Twas all Dick Parker and the others could manage to get us out alive. Our friend Billy Rumbly hath gone salvage altogether, and would have had us murthered on the spot!”

  Ebenezer sighed. “I feared as much. I suppose he’ll inflame the Ahatchwhoops farther.”

  “Aye.” McEvoy displayed a new fishbone ring of the sort that had saved Ebenezer. “Chicamec gave me this for retrieving his son, and Dick Parker gave another to Bertrand, but I’d not give a farthing for its protection when the war comes—and ’twill come sooner now than before, with Master Cohunkowprets at the helm. I mean to sail out o’ this miserable province the minute I have my freight, and Henrietta’s going with me if I have to kidnap her.” He blushed, for his last remark had chanced to fall into a pause in the general conversation and was heard by all.

  “I hope you shan’t need such measures.” Ebenezer laughed. “Nor is’t likely I’d permit you to treat my sister so unchivalrously!” He proceeded to dumfound his companion with the news of his relationship to Henrietta and the party’s plans for the immediate future.

  “I vow and declare, Eben, ye frighten me!” He looked at Henrietta with awe. “Nay, methinks I should steal her away all the sooner, ere ye discover me for your brother as well!”

  As soon as all the salutation had been got over. Mrs. Russecks suggested that Bertrand be dispatched to summon the Captain for dinner as well as for protection from the pirates, against whose rumored presence the village had taken such a posture of defense. The valet was much alarmed by this last disclosure, but McEvoy scoffed at the idea.

  “If there were any pirates about, they’d have taken us ere now; we were the only ship in sight from Limbo Straits to Church Creek! In any case, the Captain’s not likely to be aboard; he wanted to recruit himself a crew that knows more about crewing than Bertrand and myself.”

  Everyone except Bertrand and Mrs. Russecks joined McEvoy in minimizing the threat of piracy, and upon Mary’s offering, at dinner, to oversee the closing of the millhouse and the sale of the inn (which latter property she herself expressed some interest in), the party resolved to set sail for Anne Arundel Town that same afternoon if possible.

  “The sooner I leave Church Creek behind, the better,” Henrietta said, and McEvoy, perhaps less than altruistically, observed that Billy Rumbly’s defection made it even more urgent to apprise Nicholson of the situation at once.

  “Nonetheless,” Roxanne declared, “I can’t help trembling at the thought of pirates. All of us here, save Mary, have been captured once before and cruelly used, and escaped by the skin of our teeth: ’tis not likely we’ll be so lucky a second time.”

  “Aye,” the poet agreed. “But by the same token ’tis less than likely such a catastrophe could befall the same party twice in’s life.” He went on, partly in good-natured irony and partly to divert the woman from her fears, to speak of sundry theories of history—the retrogressive, held by Dante and Hesiod; the dramatic, held by the Hebrews and the Christian fathers; the progressive, held by Virgil; the cyclical, held by Plato and Ecclesiasticus; the undulatory, and even the vortical hypothesis entertained, according to Henry Burlingame, by a gloomy neo-Platonist of Christ’s College, who believed that the cyclic periods of history were growing ever shorter and thus that at some non-unpredictable moment in the future the universe would go rigid and explode, just as the legendary bird called Ouida (so said Burlingame) was reputed to fly in ever-diminishing circles until at the end he disappeared into his own fundament. “The true and proper cyclist,” he averred, “ought not to fear being taken again by pirates, inasmuch as his theory will loose him from their clutches as before; if you fear we’ll be recaptured and done to death, ’tis plain you believe the course of things to be a sort of downward spiral—whether right- or left-handed I can’t determine without farther enquiry.”

  By dint of these and like sophistical cajolements Mrs. Russecks was quieted; after dinner the women’s trunks and chests were loaded onto Mary’s wagon and drawn by Aphrodite through the desolate little village to a landing down on the creek, where Captain Cairn’s sloop was moored.

  “Hallo, where is the Captain?” Ebenezer asked.

  “He said we were to wait aboard for him if he had trouble finding a crew,” McEvoy said. “Methinks he’ll have trouble finding anyone in yonder village!”

  When they had transferred their gear from the wagon to the deck, Mary Mungummory declared with a wink at Ebenezer that, her errand in Church Creek having failed in its object, she too must needs address herself to the task of finding a crew. If she was successful, she said, her regular circuit of the county would bring her to Cooke’s Point a few days hence, where she promised to plead the poet’s case to Joan Toast, inquire as to the whereabouts of Henry Burlingame, and relay any news to Anne Arundel Town. She wished them all success in their embassy to the Governor, for her own sake as well as theirs, and after an exchange of the most affectionate farewells—especially with Roxanne, Henrietta, and Ebenezer—she returned up the path towards the settlement.

  Ebenezer surveyed the familiar deck. “Thank Heav’n the weather’s fine; my last voyage on this ship was a harrowing one!” He noticed that Bertrand, who had been unusually subdued throughout the day, now looked quite downcast, and asked him teasingly whether he had seen the Moor Boabdil in the myrtle bushes.

  “ ’Sheart, sir,” the valet complained, “I had almost as lief be back with old Tom Pound as travel about in Maryland.”

  “Why, how is that?”

  Bertrand replied that though he was eternally obliged to his master for, among other things, effecting his release from Bloodsworth Island, it was really a matter of frying-pan into fire, for old Colonel Robotham would surely do him to death upon discovering that Miss Lucy was wed not to the Poet Laureate at all, but to a servingman, whose astrolabe had already taken the alnicanter of her constellation.

  “You’ve done the lass a great injustice,” Ebenezer admitted, “but I’m scarcely the man to reprove you for’t, and the Colonel is far from blameless in the matter himself. Methinks a marriage under such false pretense can be annulled e’en after consummation, and I’ve no great fear of Lucy’s claim to Malden; but I pity the poor tart for being twice deceived with a babe in her belly. ’Tis your affair, of course; yet I could wish—God’s body!”

  From the stern of the sloop, where McEvoy had taken the ladies to wait for the Captain’s return, came a tumult of shrieks, squeals, and curses. Ebenezer hastened aft to investigate and found himself confronted by a man whose appearance from the tiny cabin set his knees a-tremble and prostrated Bertrand upon the deck: a stout little man dressed in black from beard to boots, with a pistol in one hand and an ebony stick in the other

  “Well, marry come up!” the fellow marveled. “Will ye look who’s here, Captain Scurry?”

  His counterpart emerged onto the stern sheets, also brandishing a pistol and supporting himself on a stick. “I’cod, Captain Slye, we’ve a bloody crew to go with our pilot!” He drew closer and smiled evilly at Ebenezer. “I say, Captain Slye, ’tis the very wretch that fouled his drawers in the King o’ the Seas!”

  “The same,” said Slye. “And that craven
puppy yonder is our friend the false laureate, that bilked us for a carriage-ride to Plymouth!”

  The two rejoiced in the most unpleasant manner imaginable at having accidentally caught up with three old acquaintances—they had already recognized McEvoy as the redemptioner who had so plagued them on their last crossing. Captain Cairn, his countenance stricken, appeared on deck at their order, and the party was assembled in the waist of the vessel.

  “God forgive me!” the Captain cried to Ebenezer. “I went to sign me a crew, and these rogues set upon me!”

  “Now, now,” Captain Scurry admonished, “there’s no way to speak o’ thy shipmates, sir! Our friend Captain Avery lies yonder in the lee o’ James Island and wants a pilot up the Bay, and inasmuch as Captain Slye and myself was steering southwards, we promised to find him one.”

  “What do you mean to do with us?” Ebenezer asked.

  “What do?” echoed Captain Slye. “Ah well, sir, as thou’rt the Laureate o’ Maryland—ah, ye thought your friend John Coode would not betray ye, eh? What would ye say if I told ye he weren’t John Coode at all, but merely one o’ Coode’s lieutenants? D’ye think I’d not know my own wife’s father? Mark the man’s trembling! Methinks he’ll smirch his drawers anon! What shall we do with the merry lot, Captain Scurry?”

  His partner chuckled. “Now, we might eat ’em alive for supper, Captain Slye, or we might put a ball in each jack’s belly…”

  “Set the women ashore,” the poet said. “You’ve no quarrel with them.”

  Captain Scurry admitted that he had neither quarrel with nor appetite for any female on the planet, but that he would not impose his personal tastes upon Captain Avery and his crew, who having made a lengthy ocean crossing would not likely refuse the blandishments of three so toothsome ladies. He proposed to Captain Slye that the entire party, excluding Captain Cairn, be cargoed into the hold and their final disposition left to the pirates.