The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  Andrew Cooke’s conviction (which he voiced innumerable times in the course of that night’s rundlet and next morning’s wedding breakfast) that the sun had set on their troubles forever and would rise thenceforth not only on a happy and prosperous family, but on a happier and nobler Province as well, was—alas!—by no means entirely borne out by history. Indeed, with the possible exception of William Smith the cooper and Captain Mitchell the opium merchant—both of whom disappeared from Clio’s stage not long afterwards, never to be heard from to this day—it cannot be said that the life of any of our characters was markedly blissful; some, to be sure, were rather more serene, but others took more or less turns for the worse, and a few were terminated far before their time.

  Tom Tayloe, for example, the corpulent dealer in indentured servants, was released from his own servitude at Malden immediately upon promising to press no charges against McEvoy; one hoped his experience would lead him into a less unsavory trade, but within the week he was peddling redemptioners again all over Talbot County, and a few years later he was throttled to death on Tilghman’s Island by one of his investments—a giant Scot with all of McEvoy’s passion for liberty and none of his resourcefulness. No more fortunate was Benjamin Spurdance, “the man who had naught to lose”: Andrew discovered him in the jail in Annapolis, serving a sentence for petty thievery, and restored him to his former position as overseer of the tobacco-fields on Cooke’s Point, but vagrancy and despair had so debilitated him that, the very next winter, an ague robbed him forever of the only thing he had not previously lost.

  It may be said of Colonel Robotham, who succumbed to a like infirmity in April of 1698, that Life owned him no more years; but who will not regret that his journey ended, not in disgrace—which, when complete, can be as refreshing as success—but in embarrassment? A collaborator in the revolution of ‘89 and a Councilman under both royal governors of Maryland, he and four similarly flexible statesmen fled cravenly to England in 1696, when Nicholson opened his prosecution of their former leader. To add to his humiliation, Lucy never found a husband. Her child, a girl, was born as it had been conceived, out of wedlock, and raised on the Colonel’s estate by his widow. Lucy herself fell farther and farther from respectability: abandoning her child, she lived openly in Port Tobacco as the mistress of her seducer, the Reverend Mr. Tubman, until that gentleman and his colleague, the Reverend Peregrine Cony, were suspended by their bishop in 1698 on charges of drunkenness, gambling, and bigamy. Of her life thereafter nothing positive is known, but one is distressed to hear of a young prostitute in Russecks’s Tavern (which Mary Mungummory purchased from Roxanne’s estate and operated jointly with Harvey Russecks) who achieved some fame among the lower-Dorset trappers by reason of “a Beare upon her bumm”—could it have been a freckled Ursa Major?

  At least the Colonel was spared the chore of arranging a second annulment for his daughter, inasmuch as she became a widow before she was a mother. Poor Bertrand, after that final lucid hour with Ebenezer, lapsed first into prolonged delirium, in the course of which he accepted the worship of “Good Saint Drakepecker,” held forth as Poet Laureate of Brandon’s Isle, and deflowered harems of Betsy Birdsalls and Lucy Robothams; then he sank into a coma, from which Burlingame and a physician strove in vain to rouse him, and three days later died in his bed at Malden. Ebenezer was greatly saddened by his death, not only because he felt some measure of responsibility for it, but also because the ordeals they had survived together had given him a genuine affection for his “adviser”; yet just as scarlet fever may cure a man of the vapors, so his distress as losing Bertrand was eclipsed by the far more grievous loss that followed on its heels: Joan Toast, as everyone expected, succumbed before the year was out—on the second night in November 1695, to be exact—but it was neither her opium nor her pox that carried her off. Without them, to be sure, she would have survived; they felled and disarmed her; but the coup de grâce —by one of those monstrous ironies that earlier had moved Ebenezer to call Life a shameless playwright—was administered by childbirth! Hear the story:

  After that evening which regained Cooke’s Point for Ebenezer (and ended our plot) there was a general exodus from Malden. Governor Nicholson, Sir Thomas Lawrence, William Smith, and Richard Sowter sailed for Anne Arundel Town the next day, and the militiamen went their separate ways; Burlingame tarried until he could do no more for Bertrand and then struck out alone on his perilous embassy to Bloodsworth Island, promising to return in the spring and marry Anna—to which match her father had consented. John McEvoy and Henrietta, on whom Andrew also bestowed his blessing, were married soon after in the parlor at Malden (to the tearful joy of the Parisienne in the kitchen) and sailed for England as soon as Sir Harry’s will was probated; moreover, contrary to the general expectation, Roxanne went with them, whether because her old love for Andrew had not got the better of her grievance, or because she deemed herself too old for further involvements or too scarred by her life with the brutish miller, or for some other, less evident reason. Andrew followed them, leaving Malden to the care of his son and Ben Spurdance, and it pleased the twins to conjecture that Roxanne meant to marry their father after all, but not before repaying him in his own coin. However, if Andrew entertained hopes of winning her by siege, they were never realized: on the income from her estate she toured Europe with her daughter and son-in-law. McEvoy went through the motions of studying music with Lotti in Venice, but apparently lost interest in composition; he and Henrietta lived a childless, leisurely life until September of 1715, when they and Roxanne, along with fifty other souls, set out from Piraeus in the ship Duldoon, bound for Cadiz, and were never heard from again.

  By spring, then, everyone had left except the twins and Joan Toast, and life at Malden settled into a tranquil routine. Ebenezer did indeed contract his wife’s malady, which, though virtually incurable, he contrived to hold in check by means of certain herbs and other pharmaceuticals provided him earlier by Burlingame, so that for the time at least he suffered only a mild discomfort; and after the first two weeks Joan’s health grew too delicate to permit further physical relations with her husband. The three devoted most of their time to reading, music, and other gentle pursuits. The twins were as close as they had ever been at St. Giles, with the difference that their bond was inarticulate: those dark, unorthodox aspects of their affection which had so alarmed them in the recent past were ignored as if they had never existed; indeed, the simple spectator of their current life might well have inferred that the whole thing was but a creation of Burlingame’s fancy, but a more sophisticated observer—or cynical, if you will—would raise an eyebrow at the relish with which Ebenezer confessed his earlier doubts of Henry’s good will, and the zeal with which he now declared that Burlingame was “more than a friend; more e’en than a brother-in-law-to-be: he is my brother, Anna—aye, and hath been from the first!” And would this same cynic not smile at Anna’s timid devotion to the invalid Joan, whom every morning she helped to wash and dress?

  The equinox passed. In April, true to his word, Burlingame appeared at Malden, for all the world an Ahatchwhoop in dress and coiffure, and announced that, thanks to the spectacular effect of the Magic Aubergine (for which, owing to the season, he had substituted an Indian gourd), his expedition had achieved a large measure of success: he was positively enamored of his new-found family and much impressed by Quassapelagh and the able Drepacca—whose relations, he added, had deteriorated gratifyingly. He felt confident that he could get the better of them, but of his brother he was not so sure: Cohunkowprets, thirsty for blood, had the advantage of copper-colored skin, and the problem of deposing him was complicated by Burlingame’s great love for him. His work there, Henry concluded, was not done; he had planted the seeds of faction, but after marrying Anna he would be obliged to return to the Island for the summer, to cultivate them properly.

  His appearance disrupted the placid tenor of life at Malden. Anna had grown increasingly nervous with the coming spring, and now she seemed p
ositively on the verge of hysteria: she could not sit still or permit a moment’s lull in conversation; her moods were various as the faces of the Chesapeake, and changed more frequently and less predictably; a risque remark—such as Ebenezer’s, that he had seen dried Indian gourds in Spurdance’s cabin on the property—was enough to send her weeping from the room, but on occasion she would tease her brother most unkindly about his infection and speculate, with deplorable bad taste, what effect the eggplant-plaster might have on it. Burlingame observed her behavior with great interest.

  “You do want to wed me, Anna?” he asked at last.

  “Of course!” she insisted. “But I’ll own I’d rather wait till the fall, when thou’rt done with the Salvages for ever and aye

  Henry smiled at Ebenezer. “As you wish, my love. Then methinks I’ll leave tomorrow—The sooner departed, the sooner returned, as they say.”

  To what happened in the interval between this conversation, which took place at breakfast, and Burlingame’s departure twenty-four hours later, Ebenezer could scarcely have been oblivious: the very resoluteness with which he banished the thought from his mind (only to have it recur more vividly each time) argues his awareness of the possibility; his sudden need to help Spurdance oversee the afternoon’s planting argues his approval of the prospect; and his inability to sleep that night, even with cotton in his ears and the pillow over his head, argues his suspicion of the fact. Anna kept to her room next morning, and the poet was obliged to bid his friend good-bye for the two of them.

  “The fall seems terribly distant,” he observed at the last.

  Henry smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Not to the fallen,” he replied. “Adieu, my friend: methinks that prophecy of Pope Clement’s will come to pass.”

  These were his final words to the poet, not only for the day and season, but forever. Later that day Anna declared her fear that Burlingame would remain with the Ahatchwhoops all his life, and much later—in 1724—she confessed that she had sent him away herself in order to be, literally and exclusively, her brother’s keeper. In any event, unless a certain fancy of Ebenezer’s later years was actually the truth, they never saw or heard from their friend again. Whether owing to his efforts or not, the great insurrection did not materialize, though by 1696 it seemed so imminent that Nicholson raised the penalties for sedition almost monthly: even the loyal Piscataways, who had fed the very first settlers in 1634, were so inflamed—some said by Governor Andros of Virginia—that they abandoned their towns in southern Maryland, removed to the western mountains with their emperor (Ochotomaquath), and either starved, they being farmers rather than hunters, or were assimilated into northern groups. The great Five Nations, thanks to the efforts of Monsieur Casteene, General Frontenac, and perhaps Drepacca as well, were wooed away entirely from the English to the French, and the massacres of Schenectady and Albany would almost surely have been multiplied throughout the English provinces had the grand conspirators on Bloodsworth Island not been divided. The fact that Nicholson never mustered a force to attack the Island itself suggests both communication with and great faith in Henry Burlingame; by the end of the century the place was an uninhabited marsh, as it is today. One supposes that the Ahatchwhoops, under whatever leadership, migrated northward into Pennsylvania like the Nanticokes, and were in time subsumed into the Five Nations. On the ultimate fate of Quassapelagh, Drepacca, Cohunkowprets, and Burlingame, History is silent.

  But though the twins’ extraordinary friend departed, life at Malden never regained its former serenity. Anna remained in a highly nervous state; then in May it became apparent that during their brief cohabitation three months previously, Joan Toast had been impregnated by her husband. Here was a grave matter indeed, for if she carried the fetus to term, the labor of bearing it would surely kill her, and in any event the child would be born diseased; thus despite his sudden passionate desire for fatherhood, which he felt with an intensity that frightened him, Ebenezer was obliged to pray for a spontaneous early abortion. But not only were his prayers unanswered: as if in punishment for his having made them, Anna confessed in midsummer that she too was in a family way, and it took all the resources of the poet’s rhetoric to dissuade her from ending her life!

  “I—I’m a fallen woman!” she would lament, fascinated by the term. “Wholly disgraced!”

  “Wholly,” Ebenezer would agree: “as I have been since ever I came to Maryland! You must wed thy shame to mine or see me follow you to the grave!”

  So it was that Anna remained at Malden, in relative seclusion, while among the servants and neighboring planters the most scandalous stories ran rife. Once Ebenezer returned ashen-faced from Cambridge and declared: “They’re saying ’twas I got the twain of you with child!”

  “What did you expect?” Anna replied. “They know naught of Henry, and ’tis unlikely I’d take Mister Spurdance for my lover.”

  “But why me?” Ebenezer cried. “Are people so evil-minded by nature? Or is’t God’s punishment to shame us as if we did in sooth what—”

  Anna smiled grimly at his discomposure. “What ever and aye we’ve blushed to dream of? Haply it is, Eben; but if so, His sentence hath many a precedent. ’Tis the universal doubt of salvages and peasants, whether twins of different sexes have not sinned together in the womb; is’t likely they’d think us guiltless now?”

  But there is, it would appear, no shame so monstrous that one cannot learn to live with it in time: no visitors called at Malden, and Ebenezer’s relations with his domestic staff and field hands grew cold and formal, but neither he nor Anna spoke again of suicide, even when it began to be clear that Burlingame was not going to return. In November Joan Toast died, and her infant daughter as well, from a breech-birth that would have carried off a much stronger woman; grief-stricken, Ebenezer buried the two of them down by the shore, beside his mother. The following January was Anna’s term: her brief labor commenced late at night, and in the absence of professional assistance she was delivered of a healthy male child by Grace the cook (who had some experience of midwifery) and the poet himself. There being little likelihood that Andrew Cooke would ever return to Maryland or hear the scandal from a third party, Ebenezer thought it best not to cloud his father’s old age with the truth: instead, he wrote that although Joan had expired in childbirth, their baby—a son christened Andrew III—had lived, and was being cared for by Anna. The old man, needless to say, was overjoyed.

  This fiction, once established, had a marked effect on Ebenezer and his sister. Despite her shame, Anna seemed eminently suited in body and mind for motherhood: she had bloomed during pregnancy; her delivery had been easy; now her breasts were rich with milk, and lament as she might, she feasted upon her child as did he upon her, and grew plump and ruddy from the nursing. They did in fact name the child Andrew, and began to consider removing from Malden altogether as soon as feasible, “for the boy’s sake…”

  But this brings us near the end of the history, and it will be necessary to digress for a moment before reaching it if we are to learn the fate of that arch-mischiefmaker John Coode, of the saucy Governor who prosecuted him, and of Lord Baltimore’s grand crusade to recover his charter to Maryland, which had been confiscated by King William.

  Of Coode, then, whom Nicholson was wont to call “a diminutive Ferguson in point of Government; a Hobbist in point of Religion”: already in November of 1694, while Ebenezer was ill and languishing at Malden, the Governor had demanded an account of Coode’s disbursement of public revenue and had charged him with, among other misdemeanors, accepting an illegal award of four thousand pounds of tobacco from the Lower House for his services to the Rebellion, stealing the records of his criminal courts for 1691, embezzling public funds in the amount of five hundred thirty-two pounds two shillings and nine-pence as chief of the Protestant Associators (not to mention four hundred more as Receiver General for the Potomac and yet another seven hundred in bills of exchange as Collector for Wicomico River), impersonating a Papist priest and an Angl
ican rector, conspiring against Governor and King alike, and blaspheming against the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In July of 1696, on the strength of his new evidence, Nicholson instituted proceedings against him and took depositions from divers officials and citizens on the several charges, whereupon his quarry fled to the protection of Andros in Virginia. From there (so went the rumors, for few people claimed ever to have seen him with their own eyes) he communicated secretly with his agents, particularly Gerrard Slye and Sam Scurry—the former of whom he prompted to publish “Articles of Charge” against Nicholson to the Lords Justices in London, accusing the Governor of everything from Papism and unnatural practices to the murder of one Henry Denton, Clerk of the Council and “material witness to his misdeeds.” Despite his problems with privateers in the Bay, Frenchmen on the border, Indians all about the Province, and various murrains and epidemics, Nicholson contrived during this period to found a college in Anne Arundel Town (whose name had become Annapolis), defend himself against Slye’s charges, and finally, in the summer of 1698, order two sloops and a hundred men to capture Coode and Slye on the Potomac River. The lesser man was apprehended and brought to justice, whereupon he immediately pled coercion by his superior; but Coode himself eluded the trap.

  One is pained to learn that at this point matters were removed from the doughty Governor’s hands. In an action calculated to solve a number of problems at once, His Majesty commissioned Nicholson to replace his old rival, Sir Edmund Andros, in Virginia, who, having fallen out of royal favor by his attacks on Dr. Blair of William and Mary’s College, was demoted to a minor governorship in the West Indies. In January of 1699 (1698 by the old calendar) the transfer was effected, and almost at once Coode was reported to have returned triumphantly to St. Mary’s County. Some said he misjudged Nathaniel Blackiston, Nicholson’s successor and a nephew of Coode’s own brother-in-law, inasmuch as Blackiston actually arrested him in May of the same year; others maintained that such naïveté was unthinkable in so shrewd an intriguer. It was simple collusion, they claimed, and their cynicism seems justified when one learns that in July of the following year Coode was pardoned and released at his own request, and by 1708 was actually licensed to practice law in the St. Mary’s County Court! But another view, less cynical and more subtle, was advanced by Ebenezer Cooke to his sister at the time: no trace had ever been found or mention made of Captain Scurry, he pointed out, since early in the trial of Captain Slye. Was it not entirely within the scope of possibility that the man arrested and pardoned under Coode’s name was this same Scurry, either in collusion with Blackiston or otherwise? Ebenezer thought it was, and thus returned to the more basic question: did the “real” John Coode exist at all independently of his several impersonators, or was he merely a fiction created by his supposed collaborators for the purpose of shedding their responsibilities, just as businessmen incorporate limited-liability companies to answer for their adventures?