Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

As e’er, ’mongst Wax, and Wigs, and Printer’s Ink

  Seepeth the creeping sly Suborner’s Stink.—’ ”

  “There he goes!”

  “So do ye summon it, Tim, we’re on to that by now?”

  “It will protect me, as it will protect them it sets free.”

  “ ’Twas ne’er your Creature to command, Tim.”

  “Just so. It is our Guardian.”

  Mason and Dixon, each revisiting The Rabbi of Prague for his distinct Reasons, attend this Discussion closely. Dixon has already propos’d offering Mr. Tox the Protection of the Party as far as Newark, near the Tangent Point.

  “So long as he doesn’t bring the Golem,” stipulates Mason. “He brings the Golem,— well,— what do they eat, for example? What are their sanitary Requirements? How shall Mo McClean, who’s already striking himself daily upon the Pate with his own Ledgers, find the additional Resources?”

  “Yet, mightn’t we turn the Creature to some useful work,— say upon the Visto? Pulling up the Trees by their Roots,— clearing out all those unsightly Stumps?”

  “The Axmen would never hear of it. Next two-story House we came to, we’d both be taken upstairs and defenestrated. Nay,— I know what you seek,— the Neighborhood of Prodigy,— the Mobility Awe-struck,— Entry to Saloons you have previously been unwelcome in,—” Whilst Mason himself, of course, is angling quite a different Stream. Here is a Creature made of Water and Earth,— Clay, that is, and Minerals,— as if an Indian Mound of the West, struck by Lightning, had risen, stood, and, newly awaken’d, with the Vis Fulgoris surging among. all its precisely fashion’d Laminæ, begun, purposefully, to walk. An American Wonder, one’s own witness of which might even be brought back across the cold Sea, to the true, terminable World again. Mason can think of no way to ask the obvious Question, as he did of the Learnèd Dog, and has been reluctant to of the Frenchman’s Duck. Now, withal, Time for this grows short,— just outside, in the Forest, articulate as Drumming, can be heard the rhythmick approach of the Kabbalistick Colossus Mr. Tox has summon’d. Mason and Dixon place their Heads upon the Table, and regard each other solemnly, in joint awareness of how much Effort will be needed, this time, to believe Mr. Tox’s Testimony, as to whatever is about to appear. . . .

  As ’twill prove, the closer they escort Mr. Tox to the Metropolis, the less Evidence for his Creature’s existence will they be given, till at length they must believe that the Poet has either pass’d, like some Indian Youth at the Onset of Manhood, under the Protection of a potent tho’ invisible Spirit,— or gone mad. They leave him upon the New Castle Road, standing among the late purple Loosestrife by the Ditch, glancing upward from time to time, waving his Arm,— then growing still, appearing to listen. Just before he has dwindl’d around the last bend in their own Road, Mason and Dixon see a Conestoga Waggon, with an exceptionally bright Canopy, and drawn by match’d white Horses, stop beside him. Timothy Tox without hesitation goes around to the Tail-Gate, and climbs up under the luminous Canvas, vanishing within, as if confident that the Golem, whose Strides are at least as long as a Team and Waggon, will contrive to stay close to him, wherever he is taken, and whatever may befall him there.

  71

  Back again, Tavern-crawling near the Wharves upon Delaware, Ale-stuporous, the Surveyors enter The Crook’d Finger Inn,— “We both know what it is, Dixon,” Mason is instructing his Partner, “— your hour is come, your Innings, for Retributive Poultrification,— at last, you must prepare, mustn’t you, for all that Expression of Jesuit Interest so long-deferr’d,— this next Commission being, after all, the one they were engineering all along, isn’t it, yes, another Degree of Latitude to put with the others they’ve appropriated, this is what it all’s been leading to, correct? Wondrous! Now shall you,— at least,— finally learn, perhaps even via the Jesuit Telegraph, why you are here,— a Blessing extended to how few. Anything I can do to help, of course.— ”

  “Eeh, but whah’s the use, the fuckin’ use?” Dixon resting his head briefly tho’ audibly upon the Table. “It’s over . . . ? Nought left to us but Paper-work . . . ?” Their task has shifted, from Direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain’d thro’ twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dixon at the Drafting Table, and Mason, seconding now, reading from Entries in the Field-Book, as Dixon once minded the Clock for him. Finally, one day, Dixon announces, “Well,— won’t thee at least have a look . . . ?”

  Mason eagerly rushes to inspect the Map of the Boundaries, almost instantly boggling, for there bold as a Pirate’s Flag is an eight-pointed Star, surmounted by a Fleur-de-Lis.

  “What’s this thing here? pointing North? Wasn’t the l’Grand flying one of these? Doth it not signify, England’s most inveterately hated Rival? France?”

  “All respect, Mason,— among Brother and Sister Needle-folk in ev’ry Land, ’tis known universally, as the ‘Flower-de-Luce.’ A Magnetickal Term.”

  “ ‘Flower of Light’? Light, hey? Sounds Encyclopedistick to me, perhaps even Masonick,” says Mason.

  A Surveyor’s North-Point, Dixon explains, by long Tradition, is his own, which he may draw, and embellish, in any way he pleases, so it point where North be. It becomes his Hall-Mark, personal as a Silver-Smith’s, representative of his Honesty and Good Name. Further, as with many Glyphs, ’tis important ever to keep Faith with it,— for an often enormous Investment of Faith, and Will, lies condens’d within, giving it a Potency in the World that the Agents of Reason care little for.

  “ ’Tis an ancient Shape, said to go back to the earliest Italian Wind-Roses,” says Dixon, “— originally, at the North, they put the Letter T, for Tramontane, the Wind that blew down from the Alps . . . ? Over the years, as ever befalls such frail Bric-a-Brack as Letters of the Alphabet, it was beaten into a kind of Spear-head,— tho’ the kinder-hearted will aver it a Lily, and clash thy Face, do tha deny it.”

  “Yet some, finding it upon a new Map, might also take it as a reassertion of French claims to Ohio,” Mason pretends to remind him.

  “Aye, tha’ve found me out, I confess,— ’tis a secret Message to all who conspire in the Dark! Eeh! The old Jesuit Canard again!”

  At which Armand runs in looking anxious. “The Duck is doing something . . . autoerotique, now?” They re-phrase,— unconsol’d, Armand wanders away. Becoming reaccustom’d to this City’s Angular Momentum is costing him daily Struggle. He appears to miss the West Line, and the Duck it has captur’d and denied him.

  “Perhaps, for this Map alone,” it occurs to Mason, “as East and West are of the Essence, North need hardly be indicated at all, need it? Or, suppose you were to sketch in something . . . less politickal?”

  “This has been my North Point,” Dixon declares, “since the first Map I ever drew. I cannot very readily forswear it, now, Sir, for some temporary Tradesman’s Sign. It does not generally benefit the Surveyor to debase the Value of his North Point, by lending it to ends Politickal. ’Twould be to betray my Allegiance to Earth’s Magnetism, Earth Herself if tha like, which my Flower-de-Luce stands faithfully as the Emblem of . . . ?”

  Making no more sense of this than he ever may, Mason shrugs. “It may sit less comfortably with the Proprietors, than with me.”

  “Oh, they’re as happy to twit a King, when they may, as the next Lad— ”

  “Hahr! So that is it!”

  “Thy uncritical Worship of Kings, with my inflexible Hatred of ’em,— taken together, we equal one latter-day English Subject.”

  “Much more likely Twins, ever in Dispute,— as the Indians once told us the Beginning of the World.”

  “Huz? I’m far too jolly a soul ever to fight with thee for long . . . ?”

  “Because you know how your Shins would suffer. . . .�
�� Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch’d with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev’ry place they ran it, ev’ry House pass’d by, Road cross’d, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev’ry-where, and the Dragon nearly visible. “So,— so. This is the Line as all shall see it after its Copper-Plate ’Morphosis,— and all History remember? This is what ye expect me to sign off on?”

  “Not the worst I’ve handed in. And had they wish’d to pay for Coloring? Why, tha’d scarcely knaah the Place . . . ?”

  “This is beauteous Work. Emerson was right, Jeremiah. You were flying, all the time.”

  Dixon, his face darken’d by the Years of Weather, may be allowing himself to blush in safety. “Could have us’d a spot of Orpiment, all the same. Some Lapis . . . ?”

  “It is possible,” here comments the Revd Cherrycoke, “that for some couples, however close, Love is simply not in the cards. So must they pursue other projects, instead,— sometimes together, sometimes apart. I believe now, that their Third Interdiction came when, at the end of the eight-Year Traverse, Mason and Dixon could not cross the perilous Boundaries between themselves.”

  Whatever happen’d at the Warrior-Path, the Partners are to remain amicably together, among the cheerless Bogs of Delaware, thro’ nearly another Year, busy with the Royal Society’s Degree of Latitude, chaining a Meridian over the same ground as the Tangent Line, shivering in the Damp of Morning after Morning, both fending off the Ague with the miraculous willow-bark powder discover’d by the Revd Mr. Edmund Stone, of Chipping Norton,— return’d to the vegetational Horizons, the Sumach whose Touch brings misery, the deadly water-snakes coil’d together like the Rugæ of a single great Brain, the gray and even illumination from the Sky.

  Their Agreement to un-couple may easily have come, not after all during the crisis of the Year before, at the Warrior-Path, but rather here, somewhere upon this Peninsula, wrapp’d in the lambent Passing of any forgotten day of mild Winds, the Day as ever, little to distinguish it from others before and after but the values enter’d for Miles, Chains, and Links,— and why not here, especially with leisure and opportunity at last to talk of Plans for the second Transit, the possibility of return to America . . . ?

  The Story among Dixon’s Descendants will be that Uncle Jeremiah wish’d to emigrate and settle here, and that his Partner did not,— tho’ in the Field-Book, as late as June 9, Mason is to be found rhapsodizing in writing about Mr. Twiford’s seat upon Nanticoke, as he does thro’out the Book as to other Homes, other Rivers, or Towns upon them. To Dixon,— “Aye how pleasing in all ways. Yet address any of it too intently, and like Dreams just at the Crepuscule, ’twill all vanish, unrecoverably.”

  “Shakespearean, correct?”

  “Nay, Transcendence,— ’twas but Masonick.”

  Dixon gazes at the River, the gentle points and Coves in the mist, the willows and Loblolly Pines, desiring, whilst humiliated at how impossible it is to desire any Terrain in its interminable unfolding, ev’ry last Pebble, dip, and rain-path. For Mason, the Year of Delaware is all passing like a Dream. He can believe in this Degree they are measuring but in the way he believes in Ghosts,— for all its massless Suggestion, Number is yet more sensible to him, than this America that haunts his Progress. “Stay? Here? Christ, no, Dixon.— ’Twas an Odyssey,— now must I return to the Destiny ever waiting for me,— faithfully,— her Loom now mine to sit and toil at, to the end of days, whilst she’s out, no doubt, with any number of Suitors, roaring and merry.”

  (“Well,” suggests Uncle Lomax, “It’s Pope and Lady Montague all over again, isn’t it? A touchy race, the Brits, unfathomable, apt to take offense at anything, disputes can go on for years.”

  “Yet ’twas never that cold,” declares the Revd.) Each seem’d to be content in postponing a return to England, and thereby to what others there expected. Measuring the Degree, they may have intended to hide somehow, inside the Work-day,— surrendering, as openly as they ever could, into a desire to transcend their differently discomforted lives, through what, at the end of the Day, would be but Ranks and Files of Numerals, ever in the Darkness of Pages unopen’d and unturn’d, Ink already begun to fade, from Type since melted and re-cast numberless times,— all but Oblivion,— The Delaware country their Refuge,— no steep grades,— “as level for 82 Miles,” they wrote to the Royal Society, “as if it had been formed by Art,” a phrase later to be found in Maskelyne’s introduction to their publish’d Observations (1769),— no hostile Indians, fresh food, Cities in easy reach, Obs themselves straight-forward and not even all that many,— to the World’s Eye, two veteran Wise-Men, coasting along between Transits of Venus, soon to be off again for more glamorous foreign duty where the Seeing’s perfect and the Food never less than exquisite, and Adventures ever ahead and unforeseen, Boscovich and Maire all over again,— a Godly pursuit, and profitable withal, if only in the Value of Commissions to come.

  Yet at the same time, silently parallel to the Pleasantries of teamwork, runs their effort to convince themselves that whatever they have left upon the last ridge-top, just above the last stone cairn, as if left burning, as if left exhibited in chains before the contempt of all who pass, will find an end to its torment, and fragment by fragment across the seasons be taken back into the Tales preserv’d in Memory, among Wind-gusts, subterranean Fires, Over-Creatures of the Wild, Floods and Freezes . . . until one day ’twill all be gone, re-assum’d, only its silence left there to be clamor’d into by something else, something younger, without memory of, or respect for, what was once, across the third Turning of Dunkard Creek, brought to a halt. . . .

  But it does not die. It comes out at nightfall and visits, singly obsess’d with a task left undone. Newcomers choose other Ridge-lines to settle in the Shadows of, Indian Priests proclaim it forbidden Ground, even unto the Lead-Mines beneath,— Smugglers of Tobacco, Dye-stuffs, and edg’d Implements flee their Storage-Cabins in the middle of the night, leaving behind Inventories whose odd scavengers prove as little able to withstand the disconsolate spirit prevailing here, as if ’twere the Point upon which was being daily projected, some great linear summing of Human Incompletion,— fail’d Arrivals, Departures too soon, mis-stated Intentions, truncations of Desire. Even the uncommonly stolid Stig feels it, in his Perplexity resorting more and more often to the Handle of his Ax for Re-assurance,— Captain Zhang each night in his Tent, shivering, continues to express concern as to the Sha Situation. “Returning from here will be not much better. In Sha there is no up- nor down-Stream,— rather a Flow at all points sensible, equally harmful, east or west. Our Sorrows shall persist and obsess for as long as we continue upon this illomen’d Line.”

  Too often, back here, they find themselves chaining through wetlands, the water usually a foot and a half to two feet deep,— Daylight somewhere above them, indifferent, the Gloom in here forcing them to shorter sights, more set-ups, closer Quarters. As they stand in the muck of the Cypress Swamp, black and thinly crusted, each Step breaking through to release a Smell of Generations of Deaths, something in it, some principle of untaught Mechanicks, tugging at their ankles, voiceless, importunate,— a moment arrives, when one of them smacks his Pate for something other than a Mosquitoe.

  “Ev’rywhere they’ve sent us,— the Cape, St. Helena, America,— what’s the Element common to all?”

  “Long Voyages by Sea,” replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by now chronick. “Was there anything else?”

  “Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,— more of it at St. Helena,— and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this public Secret, this shameful Core. . . . Pretending it to be ever somewhere else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies, down there, down where it smells like warm Brine and Gunpowder fumes, they’re mu
rdering and dispossessing thousands untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers, but oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools . . . ? Christ, Mason.”

  “Christ, what? What did I do?”

  “Huz. Didn’t we take the King’s money, as here we’re taking it again? whilst Slaves waited upon us, and we neither one objected, as little as we have here, in certain houses south of the Line,— Where does it end? No matter where in it we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one place we should not have found them.”

  “Yet we’re not Slaves, after all,— we’re Hirelings.”

  “I don’t trust this King, Mason. I don’t think anybody else does, either. Tha saw Lord Ferrers take the Drop at Tyburn. They execute their own. What may they be willing to do to huz?”

  72

  First they have to mark a Meridian Line, then clear a Visto, then measure straight up the middle of it, using “Levels,” great wooden Rectangles twenty feet long by four feet high, and an inch thick, mostly of Pine Boards, with iron and Brass securing the reinforcing Bands,— which would have serv’d handsomely in many of these Fens as Duck-Boards or Rafts, but must instead be carried carefully upright, being compar’d most dutifully ev’ry day with how close to eight times a five-foot Brass Standard might be fit in the length of the two Levels set end to end,— and into the Daily corrections needed, the Temperature reckon’d and enter’d as well. Each Plumb-line is protected from the Wind by a three-foot Tube. When tilted until the Plumb-line bisects a certain Point drawn at the bottom, the Level is level. ’Tis then necessary only to set it with its Mate, together in a forty-foot Line easily kept true by sighting down its Length toward the farthest point of the Visto they can see, on the assumption the Visto has been truly made.

  “Back in Durham we style this a Squire’s Line,— using the Equipment of the Gentleman who hires thee, easy Terrain, careful work, turning the Telescope over and over, bit of fancy artwork upon the Plane-Table Drafts. Careful and slow.”