Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

  “I trust that in a subsequent Letter, my Husband will explain what this means.”

  There is a Post-Script in Emerson’s self-school’d hand, exclamatory, ending upon a long Quill-crunching Stop. “Time is the Space that may not be seen.— ”

  (‘Pon which the Revd cannot refrain from commenting, “He means, that out of Mercy, we are blind as to Time,— for we could not bear to contemplate what lies at its heart.”)

  33

  “Hope to have your Company at the Bridge . . . ,” writes Benjamin Chew, to the Surveyors. He means Mary Janvier’s, at Christiana Bridge,— where the Line Commissioners find merry Pretext to gather, gossip, swap quids and quos, play Whist, drink Madeira, sing Catches, sleep late, or else stay up till the north-bound Mail-coach wheels in at seven A.M., and the Passengers all come piling out for Breakfast at The Indian Queen. Never know whom you’ll run into. An hour’s pause in the journey, wherein early Risers may practise, each day, upon a diff’rent set of Travelers. Flirting? Cards? Coffee and Chatter? the Hope is for a productive, when not amusing, Hour.

  At this pleasant waterside Resort, gulls sit as if permanently upon Posts, Ducks enjoy respite from the Attentions of Fowlers, the mild haze thins and thickens, Sandwiches and Ale arrive in a relax’d and contingent way, official business is taken care of quickly, to make available more time for Drink, Smoak, and Jollification. Yet whilst the Marylanders, attun’d to Leisure, take the time as it comes, the Gentlemen from Philadelphia, their Watches either striking together with eerie Precision ev’ry Quarter-hour or, when silent, forever being consulted and re-pocketed, must examine for Productivity each of their waking Moments, as closely as some do their Consciences, unable quite to leave behind them the Species of Time peculiar to that City, best express’d in the Almanackal Sayings of Dr. Franklin.

  In the Summer, toward Evening, Thunder-Gusts come slashing down off the Allegheny Front, all the way riding close above the trees flaring either side in wet and bright Waves upon each arrival of the Lightning, over Juniata then Susquehanna, tapping at the Windows of Harris’s Ferry, skidding across the shake roofs of Lancaster and soaking the Town,— and on to Chesapeake and a thousand Tributaries each in its humid, stippl’d Turmoil, and the Inn, and the Gentlemen indoors at their Merriment, whilst Ducks of all sorts, lounging in the Weather as if ’twere sun-shine, fly into a Frenzy at each blast of Lightning and Thunder, then, immediately forgetting, settle back into their pluvial Comforts.

  Tho’ all are welcome here, Janvier’s, like certain counterparts in Philadelphia, has ever provided a venue for the exercise of Proprietarian politics, by a curious assortment of City Anglicans and Presbyterians, with renegade Germans or Quakers appearing from time to time. Especially upon nights before and after Voting, the Rooms contain a great Ridotto of hopeful Cupidity. Strangers are view’d suspiciously. Mr. Franklin’s confusion is toasted more than once. Rumors circulate that the Anti-Proprietarians have a Jesuit Device for seeing and hearing thro’ Walls.

  The Bar seems to vanish in the Distance. Hewn from some gigantick Tropical Tree, of a vivid deep brown wood all thro’, further carv’d and wax’d to an arm-pleasing Smoothness, comfortable as a Bed,— no one has yet counted how many it can accommodate, tho’ some have sworn to over an hundred. Environ’d by immoderately colored Colonial wallpaper, tropickal Blooms with Vermilion Petals and long, writhing Stamens and Pistils of Indigo, against a Field of Duck-Green, not to mention reliable Magenta, the Pulse of the Province ever reciprocates, a quid for a quo, a round for a Round, and ever another chance to win back the bundle one has wager’d away. And somewhere sure, the raising of Voices in debate politickal.

  “Observe no further than the walls of London,— ‘A harsh winter,— a cold spring,— a dry summer,— and no King.’ Not Boston, Sir, but London. Your precious Teutonical dispensation,— Damme!— means even less upon these shores, Sir! I would say, the D—— l take it, were he not already quite in possession.”

  “Treason, Sir!”

  Mr. Dixon, cordially, “Now then, Sir!”

  “Peace, Astrologer,— ”

  “Astronomer, if it please you,” corrects Mr. Mason, without quite considering.

  “At least I am about my business in the honest light of God’s day,— what is to be said, of men who so regularly find themselves abroad at midnight?” The pious gentleman has worked himself into a state of heedless anger. Is it the innocent roasted Berry, that has put them all in such surly humor? No one else in the room is paying much notice, being each preoccupied by his own no less compelling drama. Smoke from their bright pale pipes hangs like indoor fog, through which, a-glimmering, the heavy crockery and silverware claps and rings. Servant lads in constant motion carry up from the cellar coffee sacks upon their shoulders, or crank the handles of gigantic coffee grinders, as the Assembly clamors for cup after cup of the invigorating Liquid. By the end of each day, finely divided coffee-dust will have found its way by the poundful up the nostrils and into the brains of these by then alert youths, lending a feverish edge to all they speak and do.

  Conversing about politics, under such a stimulus, would have prov’d animated enough, without reckoning in as well the effects of drink, tobacco,— whose smoke one inhales here willy-nilly with every breath,— and sugar, to be found at every hand in lucent brown cones great and little, Ic’d Cupcakes by the platter-ful, all manner of punches and flips, pies of the locality, crullers, muffins, and custards,— no table that does not hold some sweet memento, for those it matters to, of the cane thickets, the chains, the cruel Sugar-Islands.

  “A sweetness of immorality and corruption,” pronounces a Quaker gentleman of Philadelphia, “bought as it is with the lives of African slaves, untallied black lives broken upon the greedy engines of the Barbadoes.”

  “Sir, we wish no one ill,— we are middling folk, our toil is as great as anyone’s, and some days it helps to have a lick of molasses to look forward to, at the end of it.”

  “If we may refuse to write upon stamped paper, and for the tea of the East India Company find a tolerable Succedaneum in New-Jersey red root, might Philosophy not as well discover some Patriotic alternative to these vile crystals that eat into our souls as horribly as our teeth?”

  Every day the room, for hours together, sways at the verge of riot. May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new sort of European? less respectful of the forms that have previously held Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he chooses, and to defend his position as violently as need be? Two youths of the Macaronic profession are indeed greatly preoccupied upon the boards of the floor, in seeking to kick and pummel, each into the other, some Enlightenment regarding the Topick of Virtual Representation. An individual in expensive attire, impersonating a gentleman, stands upon a table freely urging sodomitical offenses against the body of the Sovereign, being cheered on by a circle of Mechanics, who are not reluctant with their own suggestions. Wenches emerge from scullery dimnesses to seat themselves at the tables of disputants, and in brogues thick as oatmeal recite their own lists of British sins.

  The attempt to relieve Fort Pitt continues, as do reverberations from the massacres at Conestoga and Lancaster. All to the West is a-surge and aflame. Waggons from over Susquehanna appear at all hours of Day and Night, Pots and Kettles, sacks of Corn, the Babies and the Pig riding inside. ’Tis the year ’55 all over, and the Panick’d Era just after Brad-dock’s Defeat. The Smell of a burn’d Cabin grows familiar again, the smell of things that are not suppos’d to be burn’d. Women’s things. House things. Detecting it, if one’s approach happens to be from downwind, is ever the first order of business.

  The Star-Gazers are well away from Events. On the eighth of January, thirty-one miles more or less due West of the southernmost point of Philadelphia, they begin setting up thei
r observatory at John Harland’s farm.

  “Ye’ll not wreck my Vegetable Patch,” Mrs. Harland informs them.

  “We are forbidden, good Woman, as a term of our Contract and Commission, to harm Gardens and Orchards. We’ll set up in a safe place,— pay ye fair rent, of course.”

  “Welcome one and all,” cries Mr. Harland. “Ye fancy the Vegetable Patch, why ye shall have it too! We’ll buy our Vegetables!”

  Playfully swinging at her Husband with the Spade she holds, “Why here, Sirs?”

  “Because your farm lies exactly as far south from the Pole as the southernmost point in Philadelphia,” Mason informs them.

  “ ’Tis the same Latitude, ’s what you mean. Then so’s a great Line of farms, east and west,— why choose mine? Why not my neighbor Tumbling’s, who has more land than he knows what to do with anyway?”

  “Exactly fifteen miles due south of here,” Dixon gently, “we’ll want to set up another Post. ’Twill mark the Zero Point, or Beginning, of the West Line. The Point here in your Field, will tell what its Longitude is, as well as the Latitude of the south Edge of Philadelphia. It ties those two Facts together, you see.”

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  “Mr. Tumbling fir’d his Rifle at us,” says Dixon.

  “And what made you think I wouldn’t?”

  “We gambl’d,” suppose Mason and Dixon.

  “I’ll just fetch down the Rifle,” offers Mrs. Harland.

  Harland is frowning. “Wait. Why didn’t you Lads measure south from Philadelphia first, and then come West?”

  “Going south first, we should have had to cross the Delaware, into New-Jersey,” Mason explains, “and when ’twas time to turn West, fifteen miles down, the same River by then become much enlarg’d, to cross back over it, would have presented a Task too perilous for the Instruments, if not to the lives of this Party,— all avoided by keeping to dry land. Hence, first West, and then South.”

  “And at the end of your last Chain,” says Mrs. Harland, “here we are.” She goes off waving her hands in the air, and her Husband will be getting an Ear-load soon.

  Overnight, in John Harland’s Field, appears an organiz’d Company of men, performing unfamiliar Rituals with Machinery that may as well have been brought from some other inhabited World. (“Aye,” Dixon agrees, “the Planet London. And its principal Moon,” nodding at Mason, “Greenwich.”) The farmer can hear them at midnight, when a whisper will carry a mile, as in the Day-time, conversing like ship-captains through Speaking-Trumpets. Numbers. Words that sound like English but make no sense. Of course he starts finding reasons to go back there and look about. He comes upon the Astronomers scribbling by beeswax light, before a tent pitch’d beneath a wavelike slope in the Earth, a good sledding hill, part field, part woods, this being a region of such mariform grades. They have been bringing the Instrument into the Meridian. “Because of the way Earth spins,” Mason explains, “the Stars travel in Arcs upon the Sky. When each arrives at the highest point of its Arc, so are you, observing it in the Instant, looking perfectly Northward along your Meridian.”

  “So the Trick would be knowing when it gets to that highest Point.”

  “And for that we have the equal-Altitude Method. . . . We are waiting just at the Moment upon Capella. Have a look?”

  Harland slouches down beneath the Eye-piece. “Thought this was meant to bring ’em nearer?”

  “The Moon,” says Dixon, “Planets . . . ? Not the Stars . . . ?”

  “Of a Star,” Mason adds, “we wish to know but where it is, and when it passes some Reference.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, of course, one must manipulate the various Screw-Settings precisely, read the Nonius, and an hundred details besides I’d but bore you with,— ”

  “Seems fairly straightforward. This moves it up and down . . .”

  “Bring Capella to the Horizontal Wire,” suggests Dixon.

  “Hey!” Mason in a tone not as vex’d as it might be, “who’s the certified Astronomer, here?”

  “Child’s Play,” murmurs Mr. Harland, handling the Adjusting Screws and Levers with a Respect both Mason and Dixon immediately note.

  “Tha take the Time it crosses the Wire rising, and then the Time it crosses, when setting. The Time exactly half-way between, is the Time it cross’d the Meridian.”

  “This one’s not rising,— ’deed, ’tis gone below the Line,— ”

  “ ’Tis the Lens. Ev’rything in the image we see is inverted.”

  “The Sky, turn’d upside down? Wondrous! You are allow’d to do this?”

  “We’re paid to do this,” declares Dixon.

  “Kings pay us to do this,” adds Mason.

  “ ’Tis like a Job where you work standing upon your Head,” marvels John Harland. He steps back, gazing upward, comparing the Creation as seen by the Naked Eye, with its Telescopick Counter-part. “I am unsteady with this.”

  “Knowing the time of Culmination, allowing for how fast or slow the Clock’s going, we may compute the Time of the next such Culmination, be out There the next Night, and upon the Tick, turn the Instrument down to the Horizon, direct an Assistant bearing a Lanthorn till the Flame be bisected by the Vertical Wire, have him drop a Bob-Line there, and Mark the Place. And that’s North.”

  “That’s what you were roaring about, thro’ those horns all night?”

  “Why, what else . . . ?”

  “Are you looking into Futurity?”

  “Is it what your Neighbors believe?”

  “What they hope, aye.”

  “Would that we were.”

  Yet this is when he grows shy of regarding them directly,— as if it might be dangerous to risk more than sidelong Glances.

  By February they have learn’d their Latitude closely enough to know that the Sector is set up 356.8 yards south of the Parallel that passes thro’ the southernmost point of Philadelphia, putting them about ten and a half seconds of Arc off.

  “Ye’ll be moving the Observatory, I collect?” says Mr. Harland.

  “No need to,— we’ll merely remember to reckon in the Off-sett.”

  In March a Company of Axmen, using Polaris to keep their Meridian, clear a Visto from John Harland’s farm fifteen Miles true south, to Alexander Bryant’s farm. How can Harland not go along? The Wife is less enchanted,— “John, are you crazy? All this Moon-beaming about, and it’s past time to be planting,— over at Tumbling’s they’ve got it till’d already.”

  “You plant it, Bets,” Harland replies, “and rent out what you don’t. This means five shillings ev’ry day I work,— silver,— British, real as any Spade. You do it. You know how, you do fine, I’ve seen you, just don’t put in too many ’them damn’ flowers, is all.” He will come north again to find she’s taken a neat square Acre and planted it to Sun-flowers, soon spread without shame upon the hill-slope, a disreputable yellow that people will see for miles. In its re-reflected glow in the corner of the Field in back, a newly-set chunk of Rose Quartz is shining strangely. At certain times of the day, the sun will catch the pink grain just right and ah! you might be transported beneath the Sea, under the Northern Ice. . . . Here is Harland, among the Sunflowers, having Romantic thoughts for the first time. Bets notices it. He is chang’d,— he has been out running Lines, into the distance, when once Brandywine was far enough,— and now he wants the West. The meaning of Home is therefore chang’d for them as well. As if their own Fields had begun, with tremendous smooth indifference, to move, in a swell of Possibility.

  In April Mason and Dixon, using fir Rods and Spirit Levels, measure exactly the fifteen miles southward, allowing for the ten and a half Seconds off at the north end. In May they find their new Latitude in Mr. Alexander Bryant’s field, then remeasure the Line northward again,— “Think of it,” Dixon s
uggests, “as a Chainman’s version of turning the Sector.” By June, having found at last the Latitude of their East-West Line,— 39°43′17.4″,— they are instructed to proceed to the Middle Point of the Peninsula between Chesapeake and the Ocean, to begin work upon the Tangent Line. By the end of the Month, they have chain’d north from the Middle Point to the Banks of the Nanticoke.

  One reason given for bringing Mason and Dixon into the Boundary Dispute was that nobody in America seem’d to’ve had any luck with this fiendish Problem of the Tangent Line, which had absorb’d the energies of the best Geometers in the Colonies, for more Years than would remain to some, their lives to the Great Cypress Swamp a Forfeit claim’d. Field parties had gone out in ’50, ’60, and ’61, ending up east and west of previous Tangent Points by as much as four tenths of a mile. ’Twas infuriating. ’Twas like tickling a Fly under its wing-pit, with a long and wobbly Object such as a fishing-pole.

  The idea was to start from the exact middle of the Delaware Peninsula,— defin’d, quite early in the Dispute, as the “Middle Point,”— and run a line north till it just touch’d the arc of a circle of twelve miles’ radius, centered upon the Spire of the Court House in New Castle, swung from the shore of Delaware, around counter-clockwise, westward, till it met its Tangent Line. That’s presuming there was a Tangent Line there to meet it, and so far there wasn’t. The problem seem’d intractable. From the Middle Point, you wanted to somehow project a Line about eighty miles northward, through swamp and swamp inhabitants, that would at the far end just kiss, at a single Tangent Point, the Twelve-mile Arc,— making a ninety-degree Angle with the radius, drawn from the Court House Spire, out to that point. Somebody must have imagin’d the Tangent as some perfect north-south line, some piece of Meridian, that would pass through the Middle Point and be exactly twelve miles from New Castle at the same time. But it couldn’t do that and run true North, too,— ’twas more Royal Geometry, fanciful as ever. Any Line from the Middle Point one wish’d to end up tangent to the Twelve-Mile Arc, would have to be aimed about three and a half degrees west of true North. Not only did this Arc pass too far West, but it also fail’d to reach far enough North to touch 40° latitude,— which was the northern boundary of the Baltimores’ grant from Charles II,— thus making of the Lower Counties an exclave of Pennsylvania, inside Maryland. Yet how could either King have foretold that the younger William Penn might wish the Lower Counties one day contiguous with upper Pennsylvania?