The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “Thou’rt not John Coode thyself?” Anna asked half seriously.

  Henry shrugged. “I have been, now and again; for that matter, I was once Francis Nicholson for half a day, and three Mattawoman tarts were ne’er the wiser. But this I’ll swear: albeit ’tis hard for me to think such famous wights are pure and total fictions, to this, hour I’ve not laid eyes on either Baltimore or Coode. It may be they are all that rumor swears: devils and demigods, whichever’s which; or it may be they’re simple clotpolls like ourselves, that have been legend’d out of reasonable dimension; or it may be they’re naught but the rumors and tales themselves.”

  “If that last is so,” Ebenezer said, “Heav’n knows ’twere a potent life enough! When I reflect on the weight and power of such fictions beside my own poor shade of a self, that hath been so much disguised and counterfeited, methinks they have tenfold my substance!”

  Burlingame smiled approval. “My lad hath gone to school with a better tutor than his old one! In any case, Francis Nicholson exists, that is neither a Coode nor a Calvert, and he counts Nick Lowe as the cleverest spy he knows. ’Twere indiscreet to press me farther.”

  There were still a number of questions on Ebenezer’s mind, but at this point the cook—whom he recognized as the old Parisian trollop who had wept at his wedding—brought up his beef broth, and Burlingame took the opportunity to excuse himself.

  “I must see to’t the Governor’s not murthered on your property, my dears.” He kissed Anna lightly and unabashedly on the mouth, as husband kisses wife, and then, to the poet’s surprise, kissed him also, but discreetly, upon the forehead, more as father might kiss son or, in more demonstrative latitudes, brother brother. “Thank almighty Zeus thou’rt back amongst the living!” he murmured. “Did I not once say there’d be great commotion at thy fall?”

  Ebenezer protested with a smile that, ruined and spent though he was indubitably, as yet he was not officially among the fallen, nor did it appear likely that he would ever join their number. Burlingame responded with a characteristic shrug and departed.

  “Heav’n knows our other problems are far more grave,” Anna sighed, “but I cannot give o’er my concern for that man and for the three of us!”

  “Will you marry him?” asked her brother.

  Anna too shrugged her shoulders. “What is the use of’t? As well go off with him, as I did with his brother, and live in sin.” So peculiarly inapposite was the phrase, under the circumstances, that both twins had to smile. But then Anna shook her head. “What I most fear is that he’ll not return from Bloodsworth Island.”

  This notion surprised Ebenezer. “You fear Billy Rumbly might do him in from jealousy? I’d not thought of that.”

  “Nay,” said Anna. “Formidable as Billy may be, he is no match for Henry, and there’s the danger.”

  Ebenezer saw her point and shivered: how slight and qualified were Henry’s ties to the cause of Western Civilization (to say nothing of English colonialism!), than which his mind and interests were so enormously more complex that it seemed parochial by comparison! Had he not already been a pirate and perhaps an agent for Heaven knew what Satanic conspiracy? Had he not extolled the virtues of every sort of perversity, and pointed out to Ebenezer man’s perennial fascination with violence, destruction, and rapine? It was by no means unthinkable that, whatever his present intention, Burlingame would remain on Bloodsworth Island to ally his wits with those of Drepacca and Quassapelagh; and with three so canny, potent adversaries—not to mention John Coode and the shadowy Monsieur Casteene—God help the English colonies in America!

  The broth did wonders for his strength; when he had finished it he sent Anna to express his contrition to Joan Toast and beg her to allow him an interview.

  “She refuses,” Anna reported a minute later. “She says she hath no quarrel with me, but wishes to die without having to endure the sight of another man. Not e’en Dr. Sowter may come near her anymore.”

  As always upon hearing news of her, Ebenezer was stung to the heart with shame. Nevertheless he took it as a good sign that Joan had at least not sunk into apathy: where belligerence lingered, he declared to Anna, life lingered also, and while his wife lived he did not abandon the hope, not of winning her forgiveness, to which he felt no title, but of demonstrating in her presence the extent of his wretchedness at having deserted her. In the meantime he summoned McEvoy, who after commiserating with him for Joan’s condition, shaking his head at the miraculous coincidence of Long Ben Avery’s identity (which he said quite substantiated Ebenezer’s charge that Life is a shameless playwright), and rejoicing at the ladies’ safety, assisted the poet down the hall to the chamber he shared with Bertrand Burton.

  “The poor wretch bolted, don’t ye know, for fear Colonel Robotham and your father would have his arse, and what with Joan swooned away in the vestibule, and yourself froze up like marble, and all the stir and commotion, they ne’er found him till morning, near dead of cold. E’en so they meant to put him with the servants, but Mister Lowe and I persuaded ’em to bed him with me. I fear the cold hath got to him, poor devil.”

  They found the valet awake, but far from healthy. His cheeks, though fanned with fever to an unnatural red, were pinched and drawn; his nose was more sharp than ever, and angled like a Semite’s at the bridge; his eyes, round as always, and protruding, looked lusterless past his beak like a sick owl’s eyes. Just as Burlingame had hurried forward to Ebenezer’s bedside, so now the poet hastened to his valet’s.

  “Poor fellow! You ought ne’er to have left us!”

  Bertrand smiled wryly. “I ought ne’er to have left Pudding Lane, sir,” he said, his voice half croak and half whisper. “Your servingman had better face his Ralph Birdsalls than play at Laureates and Advisers, whate’er his gifts. Hadn’t we a lark, though, the day we were Drakepecker’s gods and thought we’d found the golden city?”

  Ebenezer wanted to protest that his servant was talking like a doomed man, but he checked himself lest the figure be read for a prophecy.

  “Indeed, that was a splendid day,” he agreed. “And we shall have many another, Bertrand, you and I.” He assured his man that neither Andrew nor himself felt anything but solicitude for his infirmity, from which they all prayed for his swift recovery. “As for the Colonel, he hath cause enough to be wrathful, and Lucy’s case is pitiful enough, but Heaven knows they brought it upon themselves! In any case, they shan’t lay a hand upon you. Get you well, man, and advise me, or let me freight you back to Betsy Birdsall!”

  But the valet was not to be drawn from his mood: he sighed and, rendered incoherent by his fever, spoke unintelligibly of ratafia, Great Bears, and women’s wiles. He would express lucidly his chagrin at not having guessed Betsy Birdsall’s scheme to save him by unmanning her husband, and almost in the same breath begin to rave about Cibola, the Fortunate Islands, and the Sunken Land of Buss.

  “Ye must own,” he said slyly at one point, “I had some knack for playing poet…”

  “No knack, i’faith,” Ebenezer wept. “A very genius!”

  Bertrand lapsed once more into mild delirium, and at Anna’s suggestion the two men left him to be attended by her and Mrs. Russecks. Ebenezer returned to his own room for a short nap, after which, and a heartier refection than his first, he declared himself ready to report if need be to God Himself.

  “Then I shall send for Governor Nicholson to come up,” replied Burlingame. “He arrived while you slept and hath given everyone the vapors by refusing to hear a word about the estate ere he speaks with you. But I resolved to make him wait till you had done eating.”

  Despite his apprehension at meeting the Governor, Ebenezer had to smile. “Did I tell you that your brother hath that same maddening habit?”

  “Nay, that’s marvelous! I cannot wait to end this tiresome business and fly to him!”

  On this ambiguous note Henry went belowstairs; he returned very shortly afterwards in the wake of Francis Nicholson, Royal Governor of the Province of Ma
ryland, a man of Burlingame’s brief height and robust frame, though a dozen years older and somewhat gone to stomach. He had the plum-velvet breeches, the great French periwig, the fastidious manicure, and the baby-pink face of a dandy; but his great jaw and waspish eyes, the snap of his voice and the brusqueness of his manner, belied all foppery. He strode into the room without asking leave, leaned heavily upon his silver-headed stick, and peered at the patient through his glasses with a mixture of eagerness, curiosity, and skepticism, as if Ebenezer were one of those stranded whales to which his royal commission gave him title, and he was not certain whether the oil would be worth the flensing. Burlingame stood by, amused; Sir Thomas Lawrence, catching up breathlessly to the others, closed the door behind him.

  “Good evening to you, Your Excellency,” Ebenezer ventured. “I am Ebenezer Cooke.”

  “ ’Sheart, ye had better be!” cried the Governor. His air was curt but not unkind, and he laughed along with the others. “So this is Charles Calvert’s laureate, that we hear such a deal about!”

  “Nay, Your Excellency, ’twas ne’er an honest title—”

  “The Governor will have his jest,” interposed Sir Thomas. “Mister Lowe hath apprised us already of the circumstances of your commission, Mister Cooke, and the sundry trials and impostures wherewith it burthened you.”

  “ ’Tis not a bad idea at that,” declared Nicholson, “albeit I’ll wager old Baltimore did it merely to play at being king. Only give me time to found myself a college in Annapolis—that’s what I call Anna Arundel Town—just grant me a year to build a school there, and whether these penny-pinching clotpolls like it or no, we’ll have ourselves a book or two in Maryland! Aye, and belike a poet may find somewhat to sing about then, eh, Nick?”

  “I daresay,” Burlingame replied, and added, upon the Governor’s further inquiring, that he had established communication with a certain Virginia printer and, in accordance with Nicholson’s directive, was endeavoring to hire the fellow away from Governor Andros to set up shop in Maryland. For a time it looked as if Ebenezer had been forgotten, but without transition the Governor turned to him—indeed, turned on him. so formidable was the man’s usual expression—and demanded to hear without ado the details of “this fantastical story of slaves and salvages.” His apparent skepticism put the poet off at first—he commenced the story falteringly and with misgivings, almost doubting its truth himself—but he soon discovered that the Governor’s incredulity was only a mannerism. “Absurd!” Nicholson would scoff on being told that Drepacca was in communication with the northern chiefs, but his pink brow would darken with concern; by the time he called the story of Burlingame’s true name and parentage “a bold-arsed fraud and turdsome lie,” Ebenezer was able to translate the obscenities accurately to read “the damn’dest miracle I e’er heard tell of!” In short, though he protested his utter disbelief at every pause in the poet’s relation, Ebenezer felt confident, as did Burlingame, that he accepted every word of it: not only the grand perils of the Negro-Indian conspiracy and the traffic in whores and narcotics, but also such details as the illicit trade in redemptioners practised by Slye and Scurry, the depredations of Andros’s “coast guard” Thomas Pound (upon learning of which he rubbed his hands in delighted anticipation of embarrassing his rival), and the duplicity of the Poseidon’s Captain Meech—whom, ironically, Nicholson had recently hired to cruise against illegal traders in the provincial sloop Speedwell.

  “Sweet Mother o’ Christ!” he swore at the end. “What a nest o’ wolves and vipers I’m sent to govern!” He turned to his lieutenants. “What say ye, gentlemen: shall we make for Barbados and leave this scurfy province to the heathen? And you, you wretch!” He aimed his stick at Burlingame. “You go about posing as a proper Talbot gentleman, and all the while thou’rt a bloody salvage prince! Marry come up! Marry come up!”

  Burlingame winked at Ebenezer. For some moments Governor Nicholson paced about the bedroom, stabbing at the floorboards with his stick. At length he stopped and glared at his Council President.

  “Well, damn it, Tom, can we prosecute this Coode or not? ’Twill be one rascal the less to deal with, and then we can look to arming the militia.” Aside to Ebenezer he confessed, “If the truth is known, we’ve more balls in our breeches than we have in the bloody armory.”

  Sir Thomas appealed to Burlingame for a reply and received a tongue-lashing from His Excellency for having to get his answers from “a red-skinned spy.”

  “We can prosecute whene’er we find him, sir,” Burlingame declared, “but we’ll need to choose our judges with care, and e’en so there’s a chance he’ll get off lightly.” One portion of the 1691 Assembly Journal, the Province’s most damning evidence against Coode and the “Protestant Associators,” had yet to be retrieved, he explained; though its relevance to the tale of his own ancestry was presumably slight (it was that portion of Sir Henry Burlingame’s Privie Journall which dealt, so William Smith had vaguely averred, with the Englishmen’s escape from the Emperor Powhatan), its importance as evidence might be very great indeed. “ ’Tis in the possession of that loutish cooper belowstairs,” he concluded, “who will not part with’t for love nor money. Howbeit, we may threaten it loose from him yet, and once I’ve seen it we shall look for the Reverend General Coode.”

  “We shall have it, right enough,” Nicholson muttered, “ere this day is done. If I’m to be massacred by the heathen, I want to see that rascal Coode in Hell before me.”

  “There’s a more worrisome business,” said Burlingame. “You know as well as I that if the Negroes and salvages take a mind to, they can murther every white man in America by spring—more especially with three or four good generals.” It was his intention, he said, to go in any case to Bloodsworth Island as soon as possible and present himself to the Tayac Chicamec and Cohunkowprets; there was every chance that they would doubt his identity, as he had no proof of it, but if by some miracle they should believe him, he would endeavor to depose his brother and set Quassapelagh and Drepacca against each other. Faction and intrigue, he was convinced, were the only weapons that could save the English until their position was stronger in America.

  “Ye’ll not live past your preamble,” Nicholson scoffed. “The brutes are slow, but they’re not stupid enough to bow to any Englishman that strolls in and declares he’s their king.”

  “Ah, well, ’tis not a role that any Englishman could play. Not that I claim any special talent, sir—on the contrary, this role wants a most particular shortcoming, doth it not, Eben?”

  He proceeded to describe quite candidly the congenital infirmity which he had inherited from Sir Henry Burlingame, his grandfather, and which he meant to employ by way of credentials on Bloodsworth Island. The Governor was astonished, sympathetic, and vulgarly amused by turns: he declared that the stratagem would surely fail nonetheless if the Indians had even one self-respecting skeptic in their number—“D’ye think old Ulysses would have scrupled to eunuch Sinon if he’d judged it to his purpose?” he demanded—but for the present, at least, he could offer no better proposal. He turned to Ebenezer, all the surliness gone for once from his face and manner, and asked, “Have ye aught else to tell me now, my boy? Ye have not? God bless ye, then, for your courage and reward ye for your trials: if thou’rt half as much a poet as thou’rt a man, ye deserve a better laureateship than Maryland’s.”

  And having extended himself so vulnerably into sentiment, he retreated into character before the poet could find words to express his gratitude. “Now then, Tom, I want every wight and trollop on the premises assembled in the parlor, saving only that one poor devil that’s mad with his fever. We’ll hold us a fine court-baron here and now, as Charlie Calvert was wont to do when things grew tame, and rule on the patent to this estate ere moonrise.”

  “Very well, sir!” replied Sir Thomas. “But I must remind you what Judge Hammaker—”

  “My arse to Hammaker, let him take a toast in’t!” cried the Governor, and Ebenezer could not help
recalling a certain libelous story once told him by Bertrand. “Stir thy stumps, there, Nicholas me lad—nay, what is’t, now? Henry? I’Christ, a fit name for a codless Machiavell Ring in the parishioners to be judged, Henry Burlingame: Tom here shall play old Minos, and I’ll be Rhadamanthus!”

  20

  The Poet Commences His Day in Court

  INASMUCH AS THE QUESTION of Malden’s ownership had been uppermost in everyone’s mind for several days at least, it was not long before Governor Nicholson was able to call his extraordinary court to order in the front parlor. All the interested parties were present, including at least one who seemed to wish he was somewhere else: two troopers of the Dorchester County Militia, it was made known, had intercepted William Smith on the beach not far from the house, and the discomfort in his face belied his avowal that he had sought only a breath of fresh air. The two judges established themselves at the green baize table with their backs to the hearth and arranged the others in a large half circle about them; Henry Burlingame was equipped with paper and quill and stationed on Nicholson’s left, opposite Sir Thomas, whence he surveyed the assembled company with amusement.

  Ebenezer, who had taken the trouble to dress himself for the occasion, sat upon the arm of Anna’s chair on the extreme right of the semicircle (as viewed from the judges’ position); though he naturally desired that the title of Cooke’s Point should be returned to his father, all this past anxiety had been washed out of him by the events and revelations of his recent past: his excitement was that of mere anticipation. In keeping with her new tranquility, Anna had brought a piece of needlework with her, which seemed to absorb her whole attention; one would have thought her altogether uninterested in the disposition of the estate. On her right sat Andrew Cooke, smoking his pipe so fiercely and steadily that the wreathing smoke seemed to come not from his mouth but through his pores. From time to time he cast great frowning glances at his children, as if afraid they might vanish before his eyes or change into someone else; for the rest, he stared impatiently ahead at the table and sipped at a glass of the rum that Nicholson had ordered served around.